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Save Point: The Death Of Gods

The First Casualty of War is Truth

"You need do nothing," says the god persuasively. "Only stand aside. Some of my fellows, in their mingling with human-kind, have become corrupt."

These people, so primitive, so gullible. I do not even need to lie, I just tell them things that are true and make of it my weapon to have them do my will.

"I have seen Anubisya, with my own eyes, cut the very heart from one of his own fellow-kind, and weigh it upon scales looking for a truth he could not find."

This is true. Admittedly it was during an autopsy and he was determining the cause of death, and it was a primary aortic pneuma, and there were a whole bunch of other organs, but still.

"I witnessed him removing organs, placing them in jars, making light of how he would save them for a snack for later on. He has done the same with the dead of your human-kind too."

Also true. It makes for a grim sort of humour, during a proceeding like that, to keep you sane, with every mortal component to be weighed and measured.

"He is no longer obeying the orders of our leader Sorakar, who has stated that we the gods must soon leave this place, to avoid being further corrupted by the material."

The integrity of our mission is under threat and Sorakar acts responsibly, considering possibilities of an exit and a retreat to other, more meaningful worlds, but they don't know that.

"And this is but one of many examples. Sethkill stands against his brother, conspiring, starting a whisper against him in the evening silences, betraying his integrity."

Just like I am doing now, but none of you will even catch that. The whispers are true, the betrayal is ours, and yet not a word I have said here is other than the truth.

"They have bought amongst us a slayer, a killer, an assassin of the gods who has slain hundreds or even thousands, who smiles with the bared and blood-stained teeth of a lioness."

So true. Cleo was one of the primary weapons of the Azatlani war-machine, the point of their spear, slaying hundreds of insurrectionists. It's a matter of public record.

"Only her endless appetites, her limitless indulgence in beer and wine dyed red as the blood she craves, keeps her from falling upon you like the ravening lioness that she is."

That I had from her own mouth. She loves to party so hard she's afraid it might scare them, so she gets drunk and fetchingly tipsy before she tries it on, trying to be a big kitten, not a terrifying lioness.

"Even Ysis, great one, mistress of magics, has been tempted to betray her fellow-kind for the love of power, questioning whether it is right that our leader Sorakar have more power then she."

Too true. She says that whenever her latest folder of requisitions is rejected on the basis that all our relations with the locals are currently peaceful.

"But we do not ask you to act, to take mortal danger upon yourselves," the god reassures. "This is a matter for gods, and it will be settled by gods. We ask only that you stand aside."

~*~

The room full of workmen mutter and murmur amongst themselves after the gods amazing and eloquent speech, their own language put to uses none of them have ever thought of, to insinuate and imply, commanding respect whilst asking nothing in return. No-one seems to be certain who organized this gathering, it might even have been one of the gods themselves rather than a fellow traveler, and yet the magnificence of this call to inaction is stupefying.

There are even free snacks, little portions of unique never-before-seen god-food that you can feel making you stronger and healthier as you eat them. It seems to be some sort of cake, made with a creamy ingredient faintly resembling cheese that melts in your mouth.

The collective consensus, not that it ever gets put to anything so formal as a vote, is inevitable.

Who, after all, could ever refuse an offer not to act, and stay safely out of harms way, gaining any rewards with no risk thereby? Why, no thought is even required.

Which means it works well on those who have no thoughts, thinks the child Khaibit cynically, as he infiltrates the back of the room, stuffs a cheesecake thing in his mouth, then waits until no-one is looking to carry off an entire tray. If anyone asks any questions, he is helping the gods with the arrangements and it should be taken up with them.

Following gods around has proven profitable to him. They are casual with their stuff, since they have so much of, and all of it is better than anyone else's stuff. It's a situation that he's aspiring to, and so he's working on it by shadowing them about the place, observing what they are and how they do it. Foolish people beg for gifts and blessings directly, getting bread or small coin or having something purchased from a stall for them, or try to enroll themselves as priests and servants for gods who do not need them because they are right here, right now.

He trails them at one remove instead, and has learned all sorts of amazing things. Every day is an adventure as he picks one out of the crowd and follows them about, witnessing the many jobs and tasks they do, everything from aquaculture to strange forms of exotic dancing. There's always one more thing to look at, and food is always about, and they don't care if he takes it because they can always get some more by mysterious god-means of whatever kind.

That being said, he's learned a lot, and so the practical and pragmatically stupid response of the tradesmen fails to move him. Plenty is not being said, and what is being said seems to be a special form of true similar to the truth that once said he couldn't have any food, and was worthless, and should be kicked if he was caught trying to steal a crust. He does not like that truth.

Also, he remembers watching the lioness lady do her strange stretch or morning dance above the prow of the ship of millions of years. She was amazing and magnificent, not terrifying, and there was no stain on her teeth or fangs, they were very shiny and clean. If that was her hung-over after a vast indulgence of wine and barley beer, then these idiot tradesmen should only wish that they could handle their mornings so well. They're dimwits.

So, some of the gods are lying. That is troubling. But he well knows, that it's the ones calling their friends the liars, who are doing the lying themselves. No, it wasn't me, it was entirely his idea, he took all the bread and shared it out but I never ate any, even though I was starving. Lies.

Well, he probably can't persuade anyone influential, but he might be able to persuade everyone else who isn't. At the very least, he can get other children like himself, the younger ones, to keep their heads down and watch from safety, try to figure it out. Each and every snack will buy him an attention span, and the tray will secure their shelter from the storm.

~*~

Kebechet is innocently eating some sort of filled roll, a flat-bread thing rolled up thin with lightly cooked vegetables and fine traces of unidentifiable meat inside, when the traitors attack. The very first thrust catches her in the gut, and she spits out a half eaten piece, staggers sideways, and then manages to crawl behind cover.

She never knew anything could hurt so much, even the weave simulations she played on full only when the parental units weren't looking. Clearly her capacity for pain is actually exceeded by her ability to feel it for real. She tries to throw up but something tears inside her belly and it hurts so very much that everything goes black and she passes out before she can actually do it.

When consciousness briefly returns she's been dragged up onto one of the plinths and is looking at the ceiling and through the glass panels to the sunlit sky beyond.

She seems to have been stabbed a lot more after she went down. Things hurt, very distinctly, in a penetrating path through various parts of her body, where nothing has ever been or touched and never should. Her father is leaning over her, desperately extemporizing with rolls and rolls of not so fresh anymore bandages, and she feels cold and light, like most of her blood has already exited but an icy fire is burning through her from something else.

He's frantically wrapping her arms and legs and torso with more and more layers, and they're the good stuff, impregnated with tissue repair and healing agents, but it's way too late for that. Each and every attempt to staunch another wound only makes it hurt more, until it's like she's looking at herself from the outside, from somewhere else, an infinitely dispassionate position of vast and terrible remote understanding.

Her father is talking to her, trying to keep her awake and alive, but though she can see his mouth moving, she can't hear the words. Yet, she can feel something gripped tightly in the fixed clench of her cramped fingers, in her left hand, and because there's no reason not to, she exerts a vast effort and manages to roll her head sideways, muzzle slapping against synthetic self-cleaning stone in a cracking impact that would give her a swollen lip later if there was a later, as teeth grind against the inside of her cheek. She doesn't even feel it.

She's expecting to see the sad remains of the vegetable flat-bread crushed into an infinitely dense thin nothing between her fingers, but much to her surprise she's holding a knife, a peculiar single edged blade curved like a kitchen knife, with a strangely purpled metal blade that casts a rainbow diffraction pattern off the edge of the crescent in a manner that is clearly intentional.

There's something home-crafted about the blade, the way the hilt isn't quite wrapped all the way up to the top, leaving a tiny, too-narrow gap between the grip and the blade visible just above her bloodless fingers. The blade is stained, but somehow she knows it's not hers.

Oh, she thinks. Looks like those weave games came in handy after all. Must have kept doing more stuff after I mostly blacked out, and then taken one or two of them with me.

Do I get a bonus for that?

Her father turns, seemingly having heard a sound behind him, looks back at her, and then makes what must be the agonizing decision to turn away and fight back, against whoever he's seen there. His armored mask like the face of a jackal slides down over his features, but she is already drifting away, hatching from her body in a way she can't describe, the cold burning buoying her up, and it all suddenly seems so very unimportant compared with whatever she's becoming.

~*~

Running, vertically centered, down the chest plates of Anubisya's combat armour are a series of broad, flat discs, each overlapping onto the next like a row of braided coins, with a circular hole in the middle and a wedge cut out so they can be slotted into matching hardpoints.

In a future culture, these will be known as phalerae, made of solid gold or silver and awarded for deeds of purely heroic bravery. No single individual will be allowed to collect more than nine.

The sethura are far more pragmatic about these matters, and use a different numerical system, so they limit themselves to a total of six and the discs are made of shiny black carbon, engraved with a system of branching gold lines in engraved grooves that represent the tree of life, diversity of all species on the sethura homeworld radiating outward from a central point. They'd wanted a really intricate looking pattern that actually meant something a century or two ago, and it won.

Anubisya has six. He gave up trying to collect them after seven.

He tries to avoid ever wearing his dress armour if he possibly can, strapping on the lighter frame of standard issue the same as any other security personnel whenever he has to. The elaborate mix of solid black plates and golden inlaid hard lines is embarrassingly showy, and the memory of the deeds that earned him the discs now fills him with shame, rather than pride.

What was he thinking, back when he was young and stupid, doing things like that? He could have been killed. Other people could have been killed. And then he'd never have met Anput, or watched their daughter grow up, even for the short time that he had with them, which is now ended.

Kebechet took after him more than he ever thought, more than he would ever have guessed, after seeing her mother in her all this time. She'd risen up and taken her killers with her, on the edge of a bloodied rainbow blade, and lasted just long enough to look at him one last time.

Because the armour, of which he was once so proud, now strikes him as nothing but boasting and vainglory for deeds that would be better never to have happened, he keeps it in the small storage garage with the lockable keypad and swing-up door behind their house in the city, rather than in the armory looming unused and arrogantly over a corner. Intended purely for overflow, not even large enough for a vehicle useless in a city where all transportation is by foot and only a few of the larger thoroughfares are suitable for carts, these storage lockers are the last place anyone would look for anything valuable.

But today the armories are inaccessible, their caches of weapons and ammunition not beyond the physical reach of those nearby, but somehow erased from the weave entirely. There is no way for the members of the expedition to find them or know where they are, establish interfaces to open the doors and break the seals, or entangle with those tools to gain direct knowledge of what they are and how to use them. He thinks he might know who is responsible for this.

So when he realized that Kebechet was missing, and that the familiar icons always present in the far corners of his vision saying how far and in which direction were missing, he entered through the hidden door that he had made to the storage locker, in a moment of careful paranoia, and took up his armour from back when he was Judge and Guardian of the Dead.

Gaudy as it may be, it is a splendid guard. There's a solid-state gold oval gorget around the neck, a feature which allows you to slide the chest-plates outward and forward over themselves, venting the sealed internal layer without exposing any weak points like in the standard-issue gear.

~*~

The layered _nemes-_styleheaddress of overlapping gilded plates, positioned at a perfect diagonal, which rises from this very feature constrains the range of motion as his head snaps back, using the internal padding to distribute the hit instead.

Instead of breaking his neck like it was supposed to, the hit merely staggers him and he returns fire blindly through the door. It looks as though he engaged the stylized sliding jackal-mask that covers his face and ears just in time, and he draws in a harsh breath through the integrated power respirators either side of the muzzle, which pull in and process atmosphere automatically as part of reducing the strain on the user. The mask has two transparent and damn-near indestructible plates over the eye sockets on either side, another feature neglected in the standard issue models, which eschew full environmentals for a leaner profile and more compact fit, with lenses more like sunglasses which can be retracted to allow fresh air onto your face.

These always get left open until it's far too late by their inexperienced users, and he reckons that not being able to do so has probably just saved his life. Unfortunately he doesn't have very much in the way of ammunition or expendable mass to retaliate with, which leaves only one unexpected option to run with - an immediate and direct frontal attack.

The armour has built-in slots on the outer arms, upper and lower, and he's plugged in everything he could find, which consists mostly of various assorted stray ammo left over from shooting trips to the white stone quarry that got cut short, as well as a range of household power cells and a few other potentially misuseable everyday items that might potentially provide a surprise. The judges have extensive experience of such items being repurposed by the deranged and the cunning, so he knows a few tricks that whoever he's fighting might not.

The integrated weapons system is another feature that makes the dress armour bigger and more bulky and more showy, and was rejected from the standard-issue with an often-cited justification that it simply increases the size of the target and makes it harder to take cover. The sethura who quote this explanation have probably never found themselves being shot at whilst carrying a full satchel of scavenged reloads, none of which match what they're currently carrying.

He's never been one for collecting guns, much less keeping them at home with the matching clips lying about nearby fully loaded. That's the recipe for a sort of tragedy he's seen all too often, and in his experience, when you need a gun, generally one can be found nearby, usually in the hands of someone who is trying to shoot you with it.

Ignoring the sharp pain in his neck, he charges directly out through the door, expending most of the better ammo in the first fraction of the second, and collides directly with Ysis.

She's as surprised as he is, and he wastes a significant moment pausing to identify the matching rainbow knives strapped into inverted holsters beneath the underhang of her breasts, then keeps going with the momentum and slams them both bodily through a nearby mud-brick wall forming the side of a building. No-one's at home, but beautifully painted ceramics, dishes and a ewer, go flying as the low wooden table they were resting on, designed for a meal whilst sitting on the dry packed earth, shatters underfoot. A decorative cloak drying on a peg narrowly escapes becoming caught up in the carnage as it snags momentarily on her elbow plate.

The inner wall is stone, part of some older structure that now supports the wall and roof of other lesser buildings around it, and he slams her into it as hard as he possibly can, driven by a fury that his friend would collude with whatever in Wolfmothers name is going on here.

His armour is bigger and heavier than hers, and he gets a feeling she wasn't expecting to meet up with anyone who might outclass her today, for some reason. She probably has power and ammo to spare, but he can take more hits and is stronger in the short run, meaning he has to end this as quickly as possible before she can try and wear him down. Going straight to hand-to-hand is mad, but he can't see another way to win this, not yet. He only hopes the instincts which have never let him down in the past will, one last time, let him know the moment to strike.

Six of one, half a dozen of the other. This isn't for any fucking shiny golden discs.

Sensibly, Ysis doesn't go for the knives, though they might possibly be a one-shot kill, because all that shiny gold-and-black plate is going to spoil anything that doesn't punch perfectly through a joint or some sort of weak point. Instead, she twists like a snake in his arms, reaches behind her own lower back and pulls out a pair of matched burst pistols, then fires at short range either side of the six _phalerae_down his chest, trying to hit the weakest points instead and yet unable to keep a momentary look of surprise out of her eyes as she does so.

She knew he had these, it's a matter of public record. He even told her that he had them. Maybe she didn't believe it, or it's just the surprise of seeing it in person. She was expecting weakness, to hunt her prey, and now it hasn't worked out at all as she's hoped.

Still, it's a sensible choice. The short muzzle burst pistols are something she can work into melee combat, even if he goes at her close up, unlike the standard rail-gun strapped to her back, which she'd be likely to lose quite quickly, the greater length letting him use it as a lever to force it from her grasp or knock aside the barrel. She's denying him a weapon for now, but if he lets her get far enough away from him to actually pull and aim it, she can beat him senseless with hyper-velocity rounds until he's driven down into the dirt.

The short-range explosion from the burst pistols loosens his grip, and she manages to get free for a second before he lunges after her and crashes into her again, this time picking her up bodily and sprinting back across the street, intending to simply throw her head-first into whatever might be handy and slam her repeatedly against it until the cumulative impacts bounce her brain and other internal organs against her own insides so hard she passes out. It is entirely possible to shake a fully grown adult sethura to death, he's seen it, as well as a grief-stricken aftermath involving the responsible party, who hadn't realized that such a thing could even happen.

As they hurtle across the street she shoots him a couple more times, and he catches a very brief glimpse of sethura fighting, the unarmed and innocent mostly losing, the human locals fleeing and hiding or sitting there panicking and crying hysterically. A burst of slashing blue light somewhere in the nearby blocks suggests that someone has remembered the potential emergency use of the officially mission-issued survival torch, but one sethura isn't going to make much of a difference if comparing sheer weight of numbers, especially since the torch won't last for long at overload and one penetrating cut with the daggers may be enough to kill.

Oh yeah, he knows all about the daggers. He knows all that stuff. Every nanofacturing system on Sethuramandraki is hard-coded to report anyone who tries to extract the required materials for a blade like that, and all of the viable mineral deposits that would allow someone to hand-forge a copy from raw materials are monitored. But this world is different, and the geologic history is not quite the same, so they must have found a deposit and hammered out some freshly cursed blades. There's a layer of meteoric material here at sixty-five million years, where the local version of the dinosaurs went extinct, that is rich is iridium and got flagged in his reports as possibly containing other exotic substances. Unfortunately the distribution could very well be global.

They crash through another wall, and Ysis shoots him some more. He's going to have to mix it up if he wants to have a hope at winning.

Dirty tricks time.

(Text Missing)

The suit seems to have gone into a state of overheat, unable to dissipate itself in the pressing heat of the delta, and Ysis crudely and too roughly pops the main front seam, baring the glowing optic fibers of the inner underlayer and a not inconsiderable amount of her upper pair of breasts.

Hot tendrils of pale sweat-steam rise coiling from the absorbent padding.

"Who's lazy now?" she snarls. "Does this count as holding off until absolutely necessary..?"

She flips the oily-sheened blade with an unnecessary flourish and gets ready to finish him off.

Suddenly out of nowhere Amuut appears, pure deus ex machina, and streaks low across the dust and rubble before launching into the air and flinging himself at Ysis's throat. Forgetting that she's entirely out, she tries to shoot at him, but gets nothing, not even a click, before he savagely latches onto her neck and begins twisting and ripping in sprays of horror, something he would never do in any other circumstances.

Ysis is dragged down to her knees by his weight, unable to close the seam in the front of the suit with his feathered muzzle in the way, her boasts silenced into terrible gurgling sounds of struggle. The more she tries to pull him off, the worse damage his teeth do and heavy red fluids splatter all over the place to either side, landing in the dust.

She stabs him repeatedly and he still holds on, clawing and biting as his belly is opened in a swift fanged display of pure ferocity and determination. He's been tracking them since this started, all the smells of death and violence, unable to decide what to do, but is now implacable in defense of his pack against these others, because other is what they must be! Something that is not us!

They are defilers against pack and must be bited! And so he hangs on grimly and ignores the pain of the Ysis's sharp claws, which are like nothing he has ever felt

Amuut finally lets go, and looks almost confused, then lowers his blood-stained muzzle, afraid of his masters judgment for being bad.

"You're a good boy," Anubisya tells him, trying to comfort him, to pet his ears with hands that are rapidly going numb. The black-gold ceremonial armor, despite its hardiness, can only do so much to keep him alive. Looks like he'll never get that seventh phalerae after all.

He thinks about it only for a second, then clumsily pulls Ysis into their embrace as well. Although she's still warm, he can't tell if she's still alive, but they were friends. Maybe she'll be able to feel it.

He can do this much for his friend.

He's not sure where Anput is, he won't see her again in this life, but he has a very accurate idea of how long that's likely to be. He knows these wounds, and they belong on the dead.

They all end up holding each other, as he imagines Kith-Rhiannon and the Blackside leader would have if they'd had longer than a moment, rocking each other gently with grief as it all fades away.