Harry Turtledove - Tale of the Fox

He looked up at the timbers of the ceiling. "If I had a choice, I wouldn't be doing this," he told them. They didn't answer. He suspected that was because they already knew.

Along with Selatre and Duren, Van, and Geroge and Tharma, Gerin squelched through the mud of the courtyard toward the shack that doubled as his sorcerous laboratory. Cold rain still fell, stubbornly, steadily, out of a leaden sky, as if it had looked around, decided it liked the country, and settled in to stay.

Gerin patted his chest. He was carrying inside his undertunic the spells he'd written, to make sure-or as sure as he could-the rain didn't land on them and soak them into illegibility. The roof of the shack leaked. Normally, he didn't worry about such things. Today, they were liable to matter.

He'd been out there before, getting everything ready for the conjurations he would attempt: barley, ale, and porridge for summoning Baivers, and other things for summoning the monsters' gods. One of the other things, a billy goat, bleated as he and his comrades came in. He'd tied it to a post, with a rope so short it couldn't chew itself free. Its gaze was fixed on the barley on the worktable, which it could see and smell but could not reach.

"Sorry, old fellow," he told the goat. It bleated again, indignantly. He ignored it, pouring ale for himself and for Geroge and Tharma. After they'd drunk it, he got to work summoning Baivers. "Come forth!" he called when the spell was done. "Come forth, lord Baivers, come forth, come forth, come forth!"

For a moment, he wondered if he would have the same difficulty making the god notice him as he'd known the time before. But then the shack seemed to get bigger inside without enlarging on the outside: the sure mark of a god's presence. "I am here," Baivers said, and the stalks of barley that did duty for his hair rustled softly. His green, green eyes took in the interior of the shack. They rested on the billy goat: none too kindly, Gerin thought, for a goat could wreak havoc in the fields. "You have all in readiness to summon the other powers, the powers from under the ground?"

"Lord Baivers, I hope I do," Gerin answered, a statement true on several different levels.

"Begin, then," Baivers said. "We have little time to lose. The Gradi gods are reaching out, greedy as grasshoppers. Can you feel them?"

"Yes," Gerin said. He reached under his tunic and drew out the spells he had hastily devised. He started to shield the parchment from drips from the roof with his hand, then realized it hadn't leaked since Baivers came forth: an unexpected advantage of the god's presence.

Now he wished he'd drunk no ale. A slip in the spells summoning Baivers might well not have been fatal. A slip in the spells he was trying now surely would be. Geroge and Tharma watched him, their deep-set eyes wide, as he incanted. What were they thinking? They'd said little on the way up from Ikos by which he could judge how they'd taken their first meeting with the gods who ruled their own kind.

He shook his head, though the motion had nothing to do with the magic he was working. Even the monsters' gods had said Geroge and Tharma were neither fully of their kind nor of mankind. He wondered how those gods would have responded to his overtures had he slain the two monsters as cubs, as he'd been sorely tempted to do. He was glad he didn't have to find out.

Maybe that relief helped steady him. Whatever the reason, he managed to get through the chants and intricate passes of the spells unscathed. Nothing in those hastily adapted chants had either loosed the monsters' gods on the northlands or provoked them to eat them up. He reckoned that a triumph. The powers, though, still remained unsummoned.

"Let the blood bring them hither," he said, at the same time thinking, Now we find out what sort of fool I am, meddling with things beyond my power . He knelt beside the billy goat. Up till his last trip out to the shack, he'd intended to slit its throat with a bronze knife. Since then, he'd had what he hoped was a better idea. From a pouch on his belt, he drew the severed finger of the monster the powers had given him in exchange for taking Geroge's fang. The finger had not decayed to any discernible extent, which made him think some power still lingered in it.

He used the claw to tear the goat's flesh. Though it did not feel unusually sharp to him, it might have been the keenest dagger he'd ever handled. Blood fountained from the goat's throat and drowned the animal's terrified, anguished bleat. "Let the blood bring them hither!" Gerin cried again, as it made a great red steaming pool that slowly began to sink into the ground.

The interior of the shack seemed to… expand again. For a moment, it seemed to go dark, too. Gerin wondered if the monsters' gods could stand the light of day. But then that light returned, and for the first time he saw the gods he had summoned.

As mankind's gods mostly partook of and modified the manlike shape, so the monsters' powers resembled the mortal creatures whose patrons they were. They too modified the basic pattern. One of them glowed. One had eyes bigger and rounder than an owl's, another great, batlike ears. One seemed nothing but muscle and fur and fangs and talons: if he didn't do duty as a war god, the Fox would have been mightily surprised.

"Blood brings us," they said all together, their voices dinning in his mind. "We have kept the bargain. Now it is for you to keep it as well. Show us the way to battle and slaughter."

"I'll do that," Gerin told them. Fighting was all they wanted, he realized; had he set them against Biton or against the Elabonian gods, they would have entered that fray with as much ferocity as this one. He shivered. If this fight should be won, he'd do what he could either to restore those wards under Biton's shrine or to form some arrangement between the monsters' gods and those who lived on the surface of the earth.

This is the way to the Gradi gods : he cast his thought toward Baivers. As Mavrix had, the Elabonian god picked up his mind and carried it along with his own over a plane of being no mortal could reach without divine aid. From his place as a small cyst on Baivers' vaster consciousness, the Fox sensed the underground powers following where the god of ale and barley led.

The route felt different this time: no sea of wine, no equally turbulent sea of sensuality. Gerin wondered if he was perceiving the same «places» through a different god's sensorium, or if Baivers had simply chosen a different path. Amber waves of grain were certainly more sedate than wine and polymorphous fornication.

Whatever the truth, whatever the route, in the end they reached the snow-covered forest of conifers to which Mavrix had brought him. "Too bleak for barley," Baivers said, in a tone of condemnation and abhorrence. "This is what they want to make my land into, is it?" The monsters' gods said nothing at all. They stared, hungrily, every which way at once, as if looking for rivals to massacre.

A path led through the woods, as it had before. Baivers started down it, the underground powers at his heels. The wolves of the divine Gradihome stared out from the trees at the strange gods who dared walk it. A couple of monsters sprang at the wolves. Maybe that was blood on the snow when they were done, maybe ichor. It looked like blood to Gerin.

"Who comes to Gradihome?" As he had during Gerin's visit with Mavrix, the fierce god named Lavtrig stood in a clearing as Voldar's first sentinel against attack.

Baivers pointed a finger. Through the snow under Lavtrig's feet burst shoots of green. The Gradi god stared at them in something like horror. Mavrix had joked by setting flowers blooming in this grim land. Baivers used fertility as a weapon.

Lavtrig thundered toward him, stamping the shoots flat as he came. He raised a great club, plainly intending to smash the Elabonian god out of existence. Baivers pointed at the club. It turned into leaves and blew away on a sudden warm breeze. Lavtrig roared with rage. He drew from a sheath a bronze sword with a gleaming edge. Over metal Baivers had no power.