Harry Turtledove - Tale of the Fox

Mavrix, though, was no horse, but a god, with a god's abilities and strength. Gerin said, "If you doubt me, look into my mind. See for yourself my dealings with the Gradi and with Voldar. With your divine wisdom, you will know whether I lie or not."

"I do not need your permission, little man; I can do that any time I choose," Mavrix said. A moment later, he added, "I do think better of you-a bit better-for the invitation."

And then, all at once, Gerin's world turned inside out. It did not feel as if Mavrix entered his mind, but more as if his mind suddenly became a small fragment of the god's. He'd expected Mavrix to grub for facts like a man opening drawers in a cabinet. Instead, the power of the god's intellect simply poured through him, as if he were air and Mavrix rain. The search was far quicker, far more thorough, and far more awesome than he'd expected.

When Mavrix spoke to him again, it was almost as if he listened to, almost as if he were a part of, the god's thoughts, which echoed all through his own mind: "What you say is true. These Gradi are indeed nasty and vicious men, and their gods nasty and vicious deities. That they should infest their own homeland is quite bad enough, that they should seek to spread to this relatively temperate and tolerant district intolerable. And, being intolerable, it shall not be tolerated. I commence."

Mavrix set out on a journey across the plane the gods customarily inhabited, a plane that impinged on the mundane world of men and crops and weather but was not really a part of it. He had not released the Fox's mind from its place, if that was the right word, as part of his own, and so Gerin, willy-nilly, accompanied him on his travels.

Afterwards, Gerin was never quite sure how far to trust his sensory impressions. Eyes and ears and skin were not made to take in the essence of the divine plane, nor was he really along in the flesh, but only as a sort of fleabite, or at most a wart, on Mavrix's psyche. Did the god truly drink his way through an ocean of wine? Did he really fornicate his way through…? If he did, why on earth-or not on earth-would Fulda have drawn the least part of his notice? Even the dim part-understanding of what might have just happened left the Fox's sensorium spinning.

Then the going got more difficult ( not harder , Gerin thought, being unable at the moment to imagine anything harder than…). Gerin felt Mavrix's surprise, discomfort, and displeasure as if they were his own. They were, in fact, his own, and more than his own.

Pettishly, Mavrix snapped, "I should never have let you entice me into this predicament." The Sithonian god did not take well to discomfort of any sort, that being a negation of everything he stood for. In the little mental cyst inside Mavrix' mind that remained his own, Gerin had all he could do to keep from bursting into laughter that would surely anger the god. Enticing Mavrix was just what he'd hoped to do. And Mavrix would have to endure more unpleasantness if he reversed his metaphysical route… wouldn't he?

Gerin wondered about that. For all he knew, Mavrix could break free of where he was and be somewhere else without bothering to traverse the space in between. And even if he couldn't do that, the combination of overwhelming wine and even more overwhelming satiety might be plenty to counteract whatever lack of pleasure the god knew now.

And then, without warning, Mavrix found himself in a place, or a sort of a place, Gerin recognized from his dreams: the chilly forest to which Voldar had summoned him during his dream. "How bleak," Mavrix murmured, moving along a track in it.

This is the domain of the Gradi gods , Gerin thought, not knowing whether Mavrix was paying any attention to his small separate fragment of consciousness.

"Really?" the god replied as he came to a snow-filled clearing. "And here all the while I thought I was back in my native Sithonia. The grapes and olives are looking particularly fine this time of year, aren't they?"

Had Gerin been there corporeally, he would have turned red. Having Mavrix flay him with sarcasm wasn't what he'd had in mind when he summoned the god. Of course, when you did summon a god, what you got wasn't always what you had in mind, for gods had minds of their own.

He tried to pitch his thoughts so they would carry to Mavrix, forming them as much like speech as he could: "Voldar summoned me to this place in a dream."

"A nightmare, it must have been," the Sithonian god replied. Maybe he shuddered, maybe he didn't: Gerin's view of this plane shook back and forth. Mavrix went on, "Why any self-respecting deity would choose to inhabit-or I might better say, infest-such a place when so many better are there for the taking must remain eternally beyond me."

"We like it here."

Had that actually been a voice, it would have been deep and rumbling, like an outsized version of Van's. Gerin didn't truly hear it; it was more as if an earthquake with meanings attached had shaken the center of his mind. A great form reared up out of the snow. Gerin sensed it as being half man, half great white bear, now the one predominating, now the other.

"This ugly thing cannot possibly be Voldar," Mavrix said with a distinct sniff in his voice. Sniff or not, Gerin thought he was right: the Gradi god, whether in human or ursine form, was emphatically male. Mavrix directed his attention toward the god rather than the Fox. "Who or what are you, ugly thing?"

Given a choice, Gerin would not have antagonized anything as ferocious looking as that white, looming apparition. He was not given a choice; that was one of the risks you took in dealing with gods. The half-bear, half-man shape roared and bellowed out its reply: "I am Lavtrig, mighty hunter. Who are you, little mincing, puling wretch, to come spreading the stink of perfume over this, the home of the grand gods?"

"Grand compared to what?" Mavrix said. He waved his left hand, the one in which he carried his thyrsus, an ivy-tipped wand more powerful than any spear would have been in the hands of a mere man. "Stand aside, before I rid the plane of the gods of an odious presence. I have no quarrel with underlings, not unless they seek to trouble their betters. Since, in your case, anything this side of a horse turd would be an improvement, I suggest you leave off the business of troubling altogether."

Lavtrig roared with rage and rushed forward. He had more claws and teeth and thews than Gerin cared to contemplate. The Fox had hoped Mavrix would fight the Gradi gods. He hadn't intended to get stuck, absolutely helpless, in the middle of such a fight. Mavrix didn't care what he intended.

Wand notwithstanding, the Sithonian god's semblance was as nothing when measured against Lavtrig's fearsome aspect. But, as Gerin should have realized, appearances among gods were apt to be even more deceiving than among mankind. When Lavtrig's hideous jaws closed, they closed on nothingness. But when Mavrix tapped the Gradi god with his thyrsus, the howl of pain he evoked might have been heard in distant Mabalal, by the deities there if not by the men.

"Run along now, noisy thing," Mavrix said. "If you force me to become truly vexed, the barbarians who worship you will have to invent something else more hideous than themselves, for you will be gone for good."

Lavtrig bellowed again, this time more with rage than with pain, and tried to keep fighting. He scratched, he clawed, he snapped-all to no effect. Sighing, Mavrix lashed out with a sandal-shod foot. Lavtrig spun through the air-if the gods' plane had air-and crashed against a pine. Its burden of snow fell on him. He writhed once or twice, feebly, but did not get up to resume the struggle.

Mavrix let him lie and strode on. "Could you really have destroyed him?" Gerin asked.

"Oh, are you still here?" the Sithonian god said, as if he'd forgotten all about the Fox. "A god can do anything he imagines he can do." The answer did not strike Gerin as altogether responsive, but he could hardly have been in a worse position to demand more detail from Mavrix.