I fall to my knees.
The Rod of Wadjet clutched is in my hands before me.
I must look like a supplicant, kneeling in reverence or prayer. But I stare in horror at the jade serpent as it shifts on the wood which feels like it fell from its tree yesterday – turning its head in all the slow-motion horror of the impossible proving all-too possible.
Nothing is impossible. Only improbable.
It levels its beady onyx eyes on me and grins its all-knowing grin. Her tail flicks across my wrist, and
I fling the Rod to the ground.
“Get up. You are out of time.” The Master's voice is distant and muted, like the reverb of The Serpent's voice in off the confines of my skull.
“Out of time,” I mutter to the ground, my vision blurred.
My awareness feels dull, dim, like too weak a light shining through too narrow a hole. Like I am the smallest doll, alone in the largest nesting doll, shut away under bucktooth floorboards.
“Out of what time? I'm in this time?”
“Um,” Peitho says behind me. “Rob, this isn't the time.”
Something tugs my awareness. I lift my head, tearing my eyes from the serpent and its subtily swaying head, and try to turn to Peitho to see what she's so worried about.
“Robert!”
Three voices call my name in harmony. Peitho and the Master I hear and am reminded where I am – in a barn on a hill in the Alps north and east of Susa. But it is the third which captures my attention – and fills my soul with dread.
S – Oh! That's what she's so worried about.
S – We're about to die.
Metus has come.
“Son, you have run out of time.”
I'm looking the way I entered from, now. The doors are, effectively, closed. Only a triangle of light, less than the width of my shoulders at the shortest side, slashes between them.
I turn to look up at the man I once beheld as something approaching surpassing a father. The Master towers over me. He must see me as I feel: broken; crushed and scattered like the blocks of a building which has collapsed under the strain of what is asked of it. His face does not soften. He and his ibis nose are sternness itself – his eyes are disappointment.
“Get up. Pick up the Rod.” There is no chide in his tone.
I do as I am told, and I realize that Peitho is obediently, even deferentially behind and at his left side. Pepin cowers in his stall.
I offer the Rod to the Master. “Take it. You can—“
“No. This is for you to decide. The days of the Master are over. This world no longer wants me – no longer trusts – no longer believes. It is your turn to guide them.”
I feel something pass between us – between our eyes: his gray irises and mine. And then his naked hand is grasping mine. I don't remember taking it from the Rod. His other clasps around it. My heart stops beating.
This is the closest thing I have ever had to an embrace from him.
Is this— Is this what I wanted seven years ago?
He gives me his blessing now? After the School has fractured? I could have—
No.
“Robert, we know you're in there. Don't make us burn it down.”
The Master releases me. Turns to Peitho. I read a look exchanged between the two of them. She nods. He takes a step.
“Hey!” I say. “Where are you—?”
He looks at me over his shoulder. “I keep telling you, my son: I can't help you any more. I have already done all that I can.” Then he turns and starts walking away.
I step toward him, reach for the hood of his robes – and Peitho is suddenly between us. Her body firmly impeding mine. Craning my head around her hair, I can only watch as the Master traces a line in the air from just above his head to just past his waist.
Then, anachronistically, as though he were pulling a Looney Tunes and he had just unzipped some seam in the background of the scene, he pulls apart a perfectly black oval with neither depth nor apparently occupying any space. A hole in reality. And if I think that I see hints of blinding white light and dizzying, impossible geometries at the infinitesimal space around the hole's edges, I tell myself it is only my imagination.
As suddenly as the portal of Void has assumed a size large enough to easily accommodate him, the Master steps inside.
And is gone.
As gone as had he never been there.
“What did you see?” Peitho's breath is cool on my ear.
Images of war never ending – of men dressed like Metus, but in armor – and crosses in all their kinds emblazoned upon standards not of black, but of nearly every color besides. And some of them – men and women alike – dressed in robes and vestments of station which I do not recognize but which I know from their richness and finery are of the highest archies of religions unfamiliar to me. Wielding rods and great staves and other implements, hurling fire and cause great pillars of ice to fall from the skies. Bolts of lightning course through whole formations of men armed and armored in gleaming metal. Great winged beasts soar through the skies. Women with the bodies of monstrous serpents crash into armies of men with animal parts with fury and unnameable magicks. And I, standing among them, the Rod in my hand.
I step back from Peitho.
“Robert Longshore!” Metus calls from a step closer, now, behind me. “We lose our patience! Face us! Face the judgment of your sins.”
If I think I hear a dreadful delight in the way Metus lingers on this last command, I must imagine it. They are apparently incapable of emotion, let alone of delight. I have to believe that, it's the only way I don't run from the back of the barn, screaming, as mad and as lost to the world as Pepin the Great and Terrible.
“We don't have time,” is what I say. What I think is: That's not what I saw.
The Rod is hot in my hands. I look down at it. The serpent is warily looking at Peitho – its head and body subtly moving. More like there's something on my eye, blurring or bending the light to give the impression of movement. But only around her.
When I look back to Peitho, she is eyeing the triangle of light between us and judgment. Her face is fixed. Her determination is unshaken by the last few moments.
“What happened while I was gone?”
She doesn't say anything. Just looks at me like she's waiting for me to say some command word.
I don't love it.
Pepin is cowering in the dark.
“Well?” I ask him, kind of proud of myself that the word doesn't come out as a choked cough, but the kind of firm expectation al'Shamshir would use with his men. “You started this. Are you going to help us get out of it?”
Pepin makes a strangled noise in his throat and tries to push himself into the wall at the rear of his stall. “I am out of it. You have the Rod now!” he stammers.
“He will kill you too – once he is done with us.” Peitho spits toward him without tearing her eyes from me – or maybe from the triangle of light. “Did you not bring a sword?”
“Bring a sword? Why would I—“
For a moment, it is as though time stops. I feel like I'm dreaming. I can see that Peitho and Pepin are alive. It's like they're surrounded in a faint light, like dust motes in a sunbeam dancing faintly in a halo around them. Pepin's is much fainter, but I see it – and around my own hand. Peitho's is a vaguely different color – or a different shape – or of a different kind – because she's female?
I notice strings, between their auras and the head of the Rod.
“Why would he kill me?” Pepin practically shrieks, and time is moving the way it should be.
My stomach twists with the vertigo of suddenly resumed motion.
“You know too much, you fool—!” Peitho turns to Pepin, and—
“Enough!” Metus shouts, their voice a boom of thunder, shaking the barn to its foundations. “If he will not join you, he will not.”
The Rod is hot in my hands. It feels as though it will soon burn me, melting my skin and the fat of my hands to the wood, to join the serpent in calcified effigy. I remember the Master covering his hand, and think of the glove in my pocket.
“Show yourselves. You should have prepared your strategy for our arrival before our arrival.”
“He speaks truth.” Peitho's eyes are back on the doors like they'd never left. Her voice is bored. The lazy ease of a hunting dog before the leash is removed.
I am unsettled by this.
I look down at the Rod like the serpent will offer me the counsel that Peitho and Pepin so desperately need me to give – like it will offer me the power to lead them to safety. Why has that become my responsibility?
She has twisted her neck back to look up at me upside down. There are no answers there. She is only teasing me – taunting me. I look at the doors. Swallowing, and hoping I don't need to clear my throat first, I ask, “Shall we then?”
Evidently we shall.
Peitho doesn't wait for my ironic gesture toward the doors to start moving.
I can't let her emerge without me.
With her help – actually, she did just about all of it; I sure did struggle with it on the way in – the door may as well have been weightless.
And then I am once more blinded by the light.
When once more I can see, pulling the brim of my hat low on my brow and flicking my thumb across my nostrils, I know that we are dead.
My coat flutters at my knees in a wind that does less to cool the noonday sun beating down on us than the cold sweat trickling down my neck. High noon, the hottest day yet, of the hottest summer anyone alive could remember. The Christian God or another of his cohorts roasting us alive in a Brazen Bull. And here I am, facing off against Metus like this continent isn't big enough for the two of us.
Millennial prophets have said that the world is coming to an end since recorded time began. Since the moment of its conception, it is true that it must end. As it is every living being's fate to die. It is fitting that Man should create time; in so doing, he is led to comprehend its ending as well as his own. The most graphic of them have warned of blood and fire.
I can frankly say outright that I did not believe.
Not before Peitho showed up in my office on the first day of this dreadful summer.
I believe now.
Metus alone was enough to make me a believer.
Metus is not alone.
There are others. Not Iustitiarii like him.
“Canum Sanctum,” Peitho breathes at my back, audibly as awed as I am afraid.
Four of them flank Metus, two to a side: Men armored from head to foot in overlapping plates of the same gleaming metal as the chain and crucifix hanging from Metus's neck.
I have never seen anything like this. The world has not seen anything like this. Not even the heavily-armored cataphract, in his bands and chains of steel, is anything like this. Nothing will be like this for 500 years – for 1000! Not until artists of this modern era begin to imagine ideal versions of High Medieval plate suits in their Fantasy – not until the concept art for triple-A video games.
Scale armor I knew.
But this – this impenetrable golem of metal – this no one could have expected.
The moment I see them I know all of this. In the next I am able to take in their particulars.
Over their shoulders to their knees they wear a tabard: a black rectangle of cloth with a white Saint Peter's Cross from hem to hem. Their heads are encased in helmets, each sculpted with the snarling face, bared teeth, and drooling muzzle of a cane corso mastiff – the feared Roman wardog. On their right arms is a black shield, enameled all in black and bearing the same standard. The shields themselves are like tapered scutum, the Roman tower shield; like much larger versions of the kite shields which will begin to emerge with the Normans in a century. They are visibly rounded, with a pronounced and beautifully reflective bevel creasing their centers. Rather than being held by a single handle, they are evidently strapped to the men's forearms.
S – These are the soldiers that won Constantine's war?
“It is about time,” Metus announces, clapping their hands and stepping toward us with a broad sweeping of their voluminous sleeves. “Good. The time has come.”
Metus's hood is down. Their smile is sinister, the rotted teeth contrasting the delight in the Judge's eyes.
“Where is the lamia? We had so wanted to meet with her.” Metus's unnaturally amplified stage whisper sends another bead of cold sweat running down my back. “She cannot think to flee. Does the Devil's Harlot think that you will defend her honor?” Their head tilts on their neck in a puppeteer's exaggerated curiosity. “Do you?”
I sense her presence by me as much by the non-sensation of her as by her movement. But not her appearance. My eyes drift to the motion, to my left, and I see that Peitho is standing beside me – and undoing the system of nearly-invisible eye-hooks that keep her black leather vest closed.
“You will want no longer, priest.”
I watch, stunned, as the garment falls to the ground at her feet. Then, a moment later, her skirts and apron. Stepping forward, fully nude, head held high and proud, she presents herself to Metus and his holy dogs.
“Judge me as you like.”
Metus's blank features darken, pinching in the merest hint of rage. The air is suddenly still and stale. The Iustitiarius nods.
The Canum Sanctum expose their weapons. As one, in a motion so fluid and practiced they appear to be one organism, the Dogs lift their shields and present their shining longswords – again, a weapon convention which would not emerge for hundreds of years: four-foot double-edged blades, the last nine inches of which are unedged, with a double-long hilt and heavy pommel, clearly designed to be wielded with both hands in the style of the larger swords of the Near and Far-Easts. Their points aimed at the sky, the gleaming weapons themselves resemble bladed St. Peter's crucifixes.
S – They look like living statues—
S – Like living metal.
My eyes are drawn to that sickle-moon holy symbol at Metus's waist. Then the two outermost Canum begin marching toward me.
And Metus starts chanting.
I look to Peitho. She glances casually at me – then at the two Canum to the left. I already know what she means when the outer Canum come in line with the interior pair and they fall into step. What I don't know is what she expects me to do about my two – or what we're going to do if Metus starts whipping that crucifix around the way I think they can.
And I don't have time to think about it.
Until I do.
Everything stops, goes gray. I feel the Rod in my hand. It's hot. The serpent looks back at me – and I see something which I do not understand but which I immediately comprehend: The light which I dreamed I saw in the people Pepin watched while he hunted— These five beings have no such light inside them. But the swords and the crucifix – they glow brightly enough to hurt. And there are gossamer-thin strings reaching from my visual field to those lights.
I can feel the strings in my mind. I could pull on them and—
No.
It's like I blinked and fell into a dream: everything is moving again, but sluggishly, like a record spun at the wrong RPM. And colors are too dim, like a shadow covers the sun.
Metus stands at the center of the Canum as they march on Peitho and me. The priests' legs are flung wide apart, at the extent of their robes, arms thrusting their inverted, gleaming and wickedly sharp crucifix in the air. And unless I am very much mistaken, their feet are not touching the ground. Their words are shouted and terrible and either in a tongue I do not know or so weirdly distorted I cannot make them out.
W – Let me help you.
I look down at the Rod, at the serpent doing its mischievous dance at its head.
S – I can't believe I'm about to— My eyes shoot to the Canum approaching me. Twenty yards. Why?
W – Because I need you alive.
S – Why?
The serpent rolls its head with petulant impatience. Because I do not want that... she looks at Metus, abomination to touch me. That's why. Not yet. Not before I can make sure she is truly destroyed.
She? Truly destroyed?
I can't react to that. Not any of it. Not now. Not here.
Fifteen yards.
S – How?
W – Robert....
S – No. Tell me what I am agreeing to.
W – You will live. Peitho will live.
S – And if I refuse?
It's impossible to say a serpent shrugs, but this one does.
Ten yards.
I reach into my jacket, awkwardly fumbling with the Rod for my bagh nakh. I thought about the glove and ether, but Wadjet strongly disapproves.
W – Their helmets, idiot. You will breathe more of it than they. The explosives!
S - Explosives? Oh. Right.
The other case I brought. My fireballs.
The only weapon I brought I can't be sure won't injure me more effectively than them.
W – Now is not the time for the chakram. They will be wasted against all that metal armor.
When I look up, they're only twenty feet away and beginning to converge on me. Then they stop.
My heart is pounding in my ears. I steal a glance at Peitho. My vision is normal once more. Her eyes are closed. Is she meditating? No. Her lips are moving. She's praying – her palms are even pressed together between her breasts.
The sudden silence and stillness are deafening.
S – Are the Canum and Metus watching her too? Do they know something I don't? Do you?
If I was asking Wadjet, she doesn't answer, and I don't look at the serpent for hers.
I have just enough time left to think, incredulous, They're casting spells – I'm caught in the middle of a magick duel! before Metus speaks and everything is motion and battle frenzy.
Their ankles together, only their pointe-ed toes touching the tips of the blades of grass, arms spread wide with voluminous sleeves trailing like the reflection of the moon melting into water, the gleaming metal crucifix suspended in the air just beneath the priest's chin – in eerie imitation of their Savior and Messiah upon His return with sword exposed from his mouth to reap the harvest of wicked souls – Metus speaks:
“Canum: We find these heretics, these sinners, these Conspirators with the Watchers and their condemned Nephilim offspring guilty before God the One, the Almighty, the Beginning and the End, the Maker and the Overseer, for crimes against His Holy Order.”
I can feel in the dramatist's pause the stagnant air: pregnant with mortal conflict.
“Destroy them. With extreme prejudice.”
Two things happen simultaneously: The shining metal dog faces like shaped mercury of the Canum's helmets pull back their slobbering jowls in grins of evil delight, snapping and slavering like living, half-starved dogs with mens' bodies. And unless I am very mistaken, there are only tongues and throats behind those gnashing, teeth— And Peitho shoots forward at a sprint toward her pair.
I don't know why I'm looking at Peitho and not the two armored giants who are responsible for killing me in this moment.
But two steps into her sprint, and she's not her anymore.
I'm not being glib, either. Like— I don't mean that she is metaphorically no longer herself, as in her character has changed in the combat scenario. I expected something like that. I didn't expect this:
All of a sudden, Peitho's not even human anymore.
Her uniformly sun- and Mediterranean-dark skin and head of curled black hair are now mottled brown scales all the shades of sand. A wide cobra's hood flares from her brow, and twenty feet or more of serpent's tail extend from her waist behind her in a rapidly unspooling coil – as though this half-serpent monster – a monster which in the back of my mind I feel like I remember someone warning me I would meet... but I can't remember who or when and I can't be thinking about this right now— like this claw-fingered and venom-drooling, fang-mouthed lamia were how Peitho sees and knows herself and is how she truly exists, and the human woman with soft flesh and legs – legs I had myself been tangled up in and between – were just an illusion – a trick of my mind, a deceit as deep as the nature of reality itself.
I watch, frozen, stunned, unable to believe even that I could conceive of this impossible thing, as she shoots across the twenty foot span to her closest Canum. Too fast, impossibly.
The Dog adjusts his shield, raises his sword overhead.
Peitho drops low to the ground, her torso parallel with it, breasts brushing the grass. Like she's going for his legs. He steps back with one foot, chops his blade down at her, his shield lifting into defensive position...
She's no longer there. She whips around him, around his shield.
Her hand grabs his greaved calf as she passes. Her momentum wheels her around him like a comet caught in a planet's gravity well. Her nails punch through the armor. It crumbles, no more protection against her terrible strength than a cosplayer's aluminum foil costume.
Peitho's other hand seizes the back of his sword arm as it raises, the dying man reacting to her too slowly. She breaks it, crushing the bone in a scream of gleaming metal, just below the shoulder – easily – pulling herself up his body. She has his shoulder now, ripping into the pauldron and tossing it away like so much trash.
And then her shoulders are above his head and her tail has completely enveloped the man. I can hear the sound of his armor crumpling in the coils of her tail.
But not the man within screaming.
The person screaming is me, I realize.
R – So that's what your worst nightmares look like.
I'm trying to warn her—
She rips the Dog's helmet off his head. Revealing not a grizzled man's face, the head broad and piggish and scarred like a Space Marine – but that of a nine year-old boy. And he's smiling as her fingers curl around his jaw, the claws digging into the flesh – into the mouth and through his tongue. And I can see it – because he's laughing maniacally – like the most tormented soul in Hell is about to be granted his Redemption.
S – How is there so little blood?
Peitho pulls, and the teeth slam together. The neck strains, stretches—
S – She's wrenching his fucking head off!
There's a crack, a hideous pop, and the boy smiles at me, winks – his eyes as dead and full of spiteful hate as all the vengeful souls in Hades.
Now I'm screaming in horror.
Because the man's head tears away like they're made to do that. And Peitho doesn't see the other Dog.
The edge of his sword bites deep into her side.
She screams her rage and hate and agony, a hissing, unnatural sound that makes my mind want to retreat into madness.
And then all I can hear is Metus's laughter, booming like thunder in a dead sky.
W – Robert!
Wadjet shouts in my head, and I turn just in time to remember my own pair of Canum Sanctum.
My hands numb, eyes stuck on the armored killers before me, their dog's-head helmets grinning and eager to hack me to defenseless gore confetti, the fingers of my right hand pinch around something solid and I hear the tiniest clink of glass against steel.
W – Robert, What are you doing?
al'Shamshir said it would be like this – that I might have to look my death in the eye and choose to face it. I thought I was ready. I was wrong.
Revelation and understanding do not come to us when we want. There will be time to dwell on this later, but—
There is a freedom in being wrong. Even if what it means to be free is to be, as Tom Petty puts it, free falling.
The Canum are only ten feet away, and nearly shoulder to shoulder in a loose two-man shieldwall – a completely unnecessary show of overwhelming force – when I hurl the phial.
There is no decision, no thought. There certainly is not the judgment that I may as well do something – even if it's wrong. I'm about to be dead soon. There is only motion and action.
The phial flies from my fingertips and I watch it, mystified.
It's one thing to “invent” a new weapon – to take the idea behind the naptha grenade and attempt to improve it with a significantly more volatile agent. It's another thing entirely to watch as a tube of diethyl-ether which has been carefully and precisely allowed to form hydroperoxide crystals from exposure to the atmosphere flies through the air – after throwing it at another living being.
I cannot say that the left Dog reacted whatever. Until the phial shatters upon its muzzle and a second later its head and shoulders are engulfed in a sudden fireball. An experienced DnD player will tell you: a sudden Fireball changes everything.
The left Canum is howling with agony. The right falters. As he is raising his shield and dipping his knees to hide behind it, the left has abandoned any pretense: having throw his sword to the ground, he bats furiously at his head to kill flames which are long gone.
So I oblige him with a second throw.
This one hits him right in the mouth.
The tinkle of glass and the fa-WHOOSH of flame are much more rewarding than the grunts of the festival guys when I'd win their throwing games.
Left is on the ground, rolling around to fight an actual fire, now – it seems his gambeson and tabard caught with that one. But right has figured my gambit out by the time I lob a third at left.
I consider trying a forth at right, but—
S – I only have seven left. If I'd had—
R – If you'd taken—
S – the time to develop these further—
R – Or even to test them—
S – I would have tried to figure a way to keep them burning.
R – Like the naptha part of the naptha grenade. Alas.
S – They aren't going to do anything, even if I throw them at his feet.
I eye Right. He has his shield lifted to just beneath his eyes, his sword arm protected behind it.
R – His defenses are effectively impenetrable.
S – I can see that. Thank you. I look down at the fireballs. I have to get rid of these.
I drop into a crouch, the Rod and fireballs balanced still in my left hand. Careful with the claws of the bagh nakh still poking through my fingers, I close the leather case and offer a silent prayer—
S – Please don't let these explode—
I toss them low over the grass so they skip to a safe distance several yards away – safely.
And just in time for me to take a metal shin to the gut.
I'm lifted from the ground. But it's the shield to the face and chest that sends me flying.
I land hard on my back. I see nothing of my surroundings as I skid across the grass on my check and shoulders – I don't even see stars. All I see is black, and before I feel nothing at all, I feel maybe the most intense agony of my life. Significantly worse than the first time al'Shamshir actually struck me.
al – Get up, boy. I didn't hit you that hard.
S – It sure felt like you did.
I climb up onto my hands and knees, wiping the blood from my lips. Spit a wad of it out of my mouth.
al – You can't go down that hard after only one punch. The pain is only a part of the process, son. Ignore it. Fight.
When I've come to a sliding stop and opened my eyes again, the Rod is still in my hand and lying on my chest. Wadjet eyes me with that all-knowing grin.
W – Your nose seems badly broken. She flicks her tongues across her own, wincing in the way only a snake that thinks it's a human can. I would fix that – if you'd let me.
“Yeah,” I groan, my eyes rolling in my head, arms only sort of still fully attached to my spine. Distantly I'm aware that Peitho is still dueling her Canum – but in my mind, all I can see is the cobra I once saw fighting a mongoose – and I don't want to remember how that went – and that Metus is unmoving, head rolled back on their—
W – Her.
shoulders as though in a trance.
“And I'm obviously concussed.”
W – You don't even know that word – or the concept – yet.
I blink, and my right Canum is bearing down on me again.
W – The only thing saving you is this thing's desire to gloat before destroying the Fulcrum of Human Fate once and for all.
I roll to the side, narrowly avoiding the shield chopping for my knees.
“Well, it's a good thing I counted on that after injuring its friends,” I mutter, trying to crab-walk some kind of distance between me and the mountain of metal and murder trying to fall on me.
W – These creatures cannot have friends.
I get my feet under me and back on them, dancing away from a questing stab from a glowing-white longsword.
Just in time to see Peitho tear her Dog's shield off his arm and hurl it away. Her Dod takes his sword in both hands, his stance shifting accordingly.
My eyes dance across Metus on their way back to my Dog. Still unmoving, I see my left Canum picking himself off the ground. With a look at Metus and a nod, he begins moving to flank Peitho.
Which means we're officially running out of time.
I look down at the bagh nakh in my hand. Then at the Rod in my other.
There's no way to know what the brain behind those empty dog's eyes is thinking – or even if it's capable of the act. But there is one thing he could never expect. Spitting the blood filling my mouth, I apologize to Wadjet.
W – For what?
al – Fight.
And charge the Canum.
He sets his feet, his shield, and stabs for my chest.
With all my strength, gripping it in both hands, I swing the Rod, knocking the blade wide of our bodies.
S – I need to get behind that shield.
The shield punches for my head – and I go to the ground. Sliding on my hip and ass, my jacket flapping behind me, I arrive, on my back, between his legs, inside his defenses – with no idea what to do now. If I'd anticipated finding a gap in his armor at the knees and groin, I am disappointed – and have no time to second guess this choice.
W – What the fuck did you do that for?
The sword drops to the ground.
S - Too close – too awkward. He'll have to kill me with his hands.
I throw my weight back, rocking myself onto my shoulders and tucking my knees back through his. As his hand reaches for my throat, I catch it by the thumb and wrist, wrapping my legs around the arm up the shoulder.
I learned this trick studying koshti pahlavani (or varzesh-e bastani, if you'd like) in Baghdad – and this is what always happens with this move: An unexpecting attacker, no matter his level of training or talent, when his arm is trapped like this, will try to get it back. Especially when the other is strapped to an unwieldy, oversized shield and their enemy is inside easy crushing distance. This Canum is no exception.
I am lifted from the ground when he recoils – effortlessly, as though I weigh no more to him than his sword.
I don't know how I planned for this to go, but it wasn't like this.
My left leg kicks out, catching the helmeted head in the crook of my knee. For lack of better word, I sit up, and find myself straddling the dog's muzzle – before he can try to shake me off, before, too, I even know really what I'm doing, I punch my tiger-clawed fist into the eye socket.
I'm pretty sure I've broken my hand. But—
The screech of metal and the squelch of a blade piercing an eye, the indescribable sound of steel biting through bone, are drowned out by the Canum's howl of agony.
With difficulty, I try to withdraw my weapon from my enemy's skull; but with one gauntleted hand to my chest, I am shoved from his shoulders and to the ground in a fountain of cold blood.
I land, the dog-head helmet caught in my legs – the boy's eye still attached to my claw. I shake it away.
The Canum glares down at me with his nine year-old boy's face contorted with an unholy hatred. A freakish thing on a body so huge, a monster made to slaughter an entire battlefield of men. No blood oozes from its empty socket. Its one good eye stares at me disbelievingly, the way I might a dog who has nipped my hand.
S – That was my one chance, I think in the brief pause. He'll never let me inside his defenses. And there's no way he underestimates me again.
I roll out of the way of a half-hearted stomp for my head.
S – I could go for his head with my chakram.
And that's when I see it.
His sword.
Just behind him. He's walking past it!
W – I could make this so easy for you.
I see the string attaching him to the light of his sword, and the string reaching from his sword to me. I could pull on it. It would be so easy to disconnect them—
I drop the Rod.
The sword isn't glowing anymore.
Without looking at him, I dive past the Canum.
There is a moment sometime between initiating this move and accomplishing it wherein I remind myself that I don't use swords. The sword is the tool of the killer.
S – Live by the sword, die the the sword!
...It would have been so cool if I'd landed the roll, caught the sword, the shouted that as I spun 180-degrees and delivered the killing blow.
Alas.
I do catch the sword with both hands by its unusually long hilt, spin, and swing the exceptionally heavy blade with all the strength and momentum I can muster. But that isn't all that happens.
Agony fills every fiber of my hands and arms up to the elbows. I scream.
The blade is too heavy. My swing catches the Canum in the legs, at an upward angle, just above the knees – and passes through him as though he were as substantial as the air.
The pain is too great. I open my hands and the sword flies, pinwheeling hilt over tip, away.
The Canum is turning to me.
I can only watch, horrified, as his torso – a torso no longer exo-skeletoned in gleaming, mercurial armor, but instead in the plain robes of a monk, a tabard, and a simple padded-cloth gambeson between – careens wildly on lower legs that are falling akimbo from the upper portion like hewn columns beneath him. His child's face is so confused as he reaches to me, then falls in three pieces.
Metus makes a pained noise.
I look to him and feel something – some energy passing between the Canum and the priest – some wind passing through some indescribable atmosphere. And I am glad that I am not holding the Rod.
Though why I cannot say why.
“You killed my favorite Dog, Robert. I don't realize I am breathing hard until I hear myself panting in the weird silence. I glance behind me. The Canum is dead. Very dead. “But that is fine. He underestimated you – he will not make that mistake twice.”
I would ask how so quickly and why isn't there more blood, but I don't want to know the answers.
“We killed two of your Holy Dogs,” I spit, turning my attention back to Peitho – gripping my bagh nakh and feeling unarmed without the Rod.
“Yes. Two more than we anticipated. But only two – no more.”
I steal a glance at Peitho. She's having no luck – the two Canum are flanking her, in total control of the fight,obviously – Wearing her down until she's tired so they can—
I don't have a witty retort.
Metus looks distracted, anyway – like he's thinking about something else.
There is a strain to the priest's eyes I've seen somewhere—
S – Musicians. Players of stringed instruments trying to talk while they play.
S – What is Metus concentrating on so hard? I ask Wadjet – then remember she's not in my hand when I look at it for an answer.
“We will make sure of that.”
With apparently only the merest touch of the chain, it comes undone from around Metus's neck. The crucifix dangles from one end while Metus holds the rest of its length in their hands and I am brought painfully to mind of a chain whip – or, maybe more of a meteor hammer with an unusually short rope.
Then the chain extends as though growing, the crucifix falling to stand just barely off the ground. No unlike its wielder, if I'm being honest with myself.
S – I'm going to die, is my last thought before Metus starts turning the crucifix in a slow circle beside them with a casual flicking of their wrist.
There are still about thirty feet separating us. But that is only going to remain true forever if I run – right now. But that would mean leaving Peitho to die.
“We warned you, Robert.” Metus is walking toward me, their small body hugely intimidating now that its spinning that damned crucifix. “We didn't want to kill you. Well – that's not true. We haven't always agreed that killing you is necessary.”
“Metus, who is we?”
I'd never seen a Saturday Morning Cartoon or handled a hostage situation; but it doesn't take these things to know – or believe – that your only hope when dealing with the violently insane is getting and keeping them talking.
“We are we. I and my Angel.”
I see it then, for the briefest second; and this time I believe my eyes, because they are unaffected by whatever the Rod was doing to them: A giant cumulonimbus torso of shadow flexes powerful arms and gnashes a hungry maw, deep in the throat of which is a twinkling light like that gleaming in the crucifix – and in the armors and swords of those Canum still trying to corral and kill the woman – the... – that I love.
“Metus... I don't think that's an angel.” And I don't think that was the right thing to say.
“What do you know?” Metus sneers, and I realize I'm backpedaling at their pace, maintaining fifteen feet between us. “You have poisoned your mind and your spirit with the lies of the Serpent, the Empress of Chaos and her eldest daughter and heir!”
Metus, I think you're confused.” What am I doing? Why am I provoking them? I need to be calming them.
S – There it is! The Rod is between us and a handful of steps to my right. I need to get to it before Metus does. But Metus is going to focus on trying to kill me – and on preventing me from getting to it.
“No!” Metus shouts. I stop, as though rooted by the words in fear. “We are of one mind, one spirit – one being.”
“Do you even know what you are? Do you not remember your making?”
For one moment, Metus's face blanks. There is the merest flash of a frown. A single link of slack in the chain.
I know that I need to dash for the Rod right now. There's no way to guess how long that chain is not when right now it is impossibly twice as long as it was when around the priest's neck. But the closer they get, the surer they are to reach me.
I need a plan. Where are the fireballs?
There they are. Another twenty feet further away from me and Metus. If I can— And then—
“I am a Iustitiarius of the Venatores Maleficarum!” Metus stops. And unless I am very mistaken, refers to themselves in the first person – for the first time since I have known them. “I am among the Highest of the High – those most blessed of God's power. The Word courses through my spirit, and I am its Judge. I have seen, Robert. Seen as you can only imagine. The past – the future— I have seen this Reality as it truly is. And I know what you are going to do to this world if I allow you to get that Rod.”
Well— There's no arguing with that.
Without another word, I reach into my jacket – and whip out one of the chakram, flinging it like a bladed Frisbee at the mad priest. That is, perhaps, the only thing that saved me.
Metus has to hold off from launching the crucifix just one second longer – to use the chain in their grasp to send the chakram careening away. I'm already running by then. I duck, sliding after I snatch up the Rod. The right move, as it turns out: the bladed edges of the crucifix ax through the air where my head was with an audible whistle and bite into the dirt with a sickening thud where I would have been if I'd slid even half a step sooner.
The sound of a me dying in an alternate timeline.
Then I'm back on my feet and sprinting for the fireballs.
I'm running with Metus diagonally to my left. They're stepping toward me, but they'll be at least ten yards away from the fireballs by the time I reach them.
I – Can't slide again. If Metus can reach—
Suddenly I'm sliding for the fireballs and there's a wet whumpf and a sudden pain in my middle. I look down and the Franciska ax arm of the inverted cross is buried to its central beam in my belly. Blood oozes hot and vital from my mortal wound.
W – That's not going to work. Watch out!
I turn my head just in time. Maybe I heard the whistle. Maybe Wadjet really is talking to me. Whatever the case, the crucifix flashes in the air at the same angle it killed me a second ago.
My hand reacts like I'd expected this all along – like I'd already tried this and failed once before. The crucifix connects with my swing. Remembering how heavy the sword was, I put everything I have into and more.
The crucifix clangs harmlessly away.
W – I am nearly fifty-thousand years old, you son of a bitch, and I have never been so roughly used!
S – Are you in any danger?
W – Why I never—!
S – Shut up, please – I'm trying not to get killed, here!
I lean to scoop up the fireballs; but I'm distracted. That's my excuse. My feet fly out from under me; I fall cradling the fireballs safely. Rolling away, having no idea how long it could take Metus to launch another strike – and luckily so, as the cross appears where my heart was.
Back on my feet, my eyes track the cross on its path returning to Metus.
I am reminded of the time I watched a Shaolin monk demonstrate a meteor hammer.
S – Sure wish all those exhibitions hadn't been scripted for the meteor hammer to win, right about now!
Metus does not catch the crucifix, nor do they wind the chain in their arms and around their body to return all thirty feet of length back under their control. The chain just absorbs the length, as though it were as elastic as one of those sticky hands you can get in a quarter machine.
Which is impossible.
S – These weapons— They're magick— Like in the stories.
W – Did you think I was the only one? the serpent asks.
S – I didn't think magick was real until about ten minutes ago!
I would be amazed, fascinated, to watch Metus's skeletal body suddenly effortlessly dancing the steps of a Kung Fu master – if it weren't me this martial artist mean to work his skill on.
And then Metus catches the chain on an upraised ankle, pirouettes, and launches it directly at me in a thirty-foot extension of a kick I would not have believed ten seconds ago the priest was capable of. And I'm running like my life depends on it – because it does, this time – in a wide arc around them. The crucifix flies through space I filled only a short time before, then retreats, parallel to the ground and with blinding speed. I can't not watch Metus whip the chain around them in a dizzying blur – a frankly intimidating display of martial mastery – absolutely showing off their occult athleticism.
“You cannot help her, Robert.” The priest's voice booms so loud it may as well be inside my skull. My hands vibrate with it, hurt enough that I want to drop the Rod and the bagh nakh and the fireballs and fall to my knees to beg forgiveness for anything the priest wants. “We will not let you. You will both die on this hill. Then the world will be ours to shape in our image.”
W – Right, like being the Fulcrum of Fate is some kind of Highlander situation.
S – Highlander?
W – There can be only one of you, Robert. If she kills you, she does not get your power. She does not in any way become you.
I'm standing in the desolation of a great city.
Fires raged here hot enough that rivulets of stone and metal are cooling in the streets like the pyroclastic flow after a volcano's eruption. I didn't need Wadjet to show me this to know what Metus's world would look like: dreadful – empty, dead, and damned.
W – Watch out!
I look right just in time to see my left Canum approaching me. I don't know what command from Metus or impetus of its own turned it from Peitho to me; but I know it as much from him still having his shield as from the scorches which mar its armor and tabard. I take a running step toward him, then plant like I'm going to turn—
W – Don't!
Then pivot a full 360-degrees.
Using the momentum of the turn, I throw a vial high over my head, like a basketball hookshot, across my body to the left. The thud of the crucifix behind me vibrates through the bottoms of my shoes.
I'm angled and sprinting hard, now, at the Canum when I hear the muffled fa-whoosh and a surprised shriek – and notice the left Canum falter for a very long series of moments – long enough for me to decide to turn away to find Peitho— Only to see her dart between the legs of her Canum as it recovers from a similar faltering.
Peitho emerges once more above and behind her constricted victim. The Canum has his sword over his head, in that pose made so iconic by Luke Skywalker 1177 years later.
And then she tears his arms off at the shoulder – and I have better things to be looking at – like for my hat.
My eyes scan the battlefield, my body occasionally dodging one of Metus's attacks like I know they're coming – until I find my hat.
S - We're going to have to get out of here soon. It won't take Peitho long to finish the last Canum.
Which is an unarticulated assumption the realization my making of which will keep me awake for many, many centuries of nights to come.
S – But there's no way either of us is getting close enough to Metus to hurt the priest.
R – Not here. Not on a battlefield that so suits their weapon.
S – But— I'm not leaving without my hat. Not if I'm running away.
And that's when I look at Metus again.
The hem of their alb is singed, and some of the tracery of the chasuble. Close. Not too bad for not looking. And their normally emotionless face is a rictus of righteous fury. They're whipping the chain in preparation of another strike.
I brought 10 chakram. Nine left. Oh, what the Hell – let's see what we can make happen.
Tucking the Rod under my left arm, I balance all nine chakram on the fingertips of that hand. Have to be careful – these motherfuckers are sharp! And with my right, I whip them at Metus as I run.
The first six clang harmlessly off their chain. But they seem to have bought me some time.
Three left. Shame I can't collect them. These were expensive— Well, valuable – when am I going to make friends with a Sikh again? I'll have to pay for them next time.
I dive for my hat. Roll over it, collect it as I pass. Land, turn on one knee – locate the cross descending in a long arc for my head, and throw – three times.
I smirk as the first careens off the crucifix, changing its angle just enough to miss me. Then watch as the last two fly at Metus.
The priest, to my astonishment, jerks the chain down, halting any hope at hitting me by attempting to block the chakram. Metus misses them – only just, but enough. The first bites half through their forearm, the second deep in the shoulder. Then something impossible happens.
Actually.... That's when the truly unthinkable started happening. None of this has been possible for a long time, now, I'm starting to realize.
The chain ripples down its length – and the crucifix course corrects as though under its own direction – right for my neck – too close for me to react.
And then it stops.
Everything goes grayscale.
S – What is this?
“Last chance, Robert,” Wadjet says from my hand. I look down, and She is not the Rod, but Her resplendent winged-serpent form. My eyes are stung by her – the only color anywhere to behold. “Accept my help or die.”
I look at the ax, literally waiting to drop on my neck. I thought I was.
“Accept it. Agree. Bind yourself to my help.”
S – What does that mean?
“Or die.”
“What does that mean?
“ACCEPT OR DIE. DO IT NOW.”
“I accept.”
Tucking the Rod under my left arm, I balance all nine chakram on the fingertips of that hand. Have to be careful. These motherfuckers are sharp! And with my right, I whip them at Metus as I run. The first six clang harmlessly off the chain. But they seem to have bought me some time.
S – Three left. I remember this.
I dive for my hat, over it, but six inches to the left of last time. This time when I throw the chakram, the first hits the cross at the chain and sends it diving into the ground. Metus misses blocking the chakram. They hit. The chain ripples, but when it self-corrects, it whips up and back and Metus allows it to whap into the ground beside them.
The look on their face is unmasked astonishment. “How did you...” You could not have deflected my cruciform in that way. I saw you.... I rememb....” Astonishment slowly gives way to raw stupefaction. Then the priest almost seems to fall asleep. From this modern vantage, it is almost as though they have suddenly rebooted. The change which comes over Metus's face in the next moment – from revelation to realization – is revolting to my soul even to report of – let alone to again experience.
Greed – Envy – of the highest sort, unlike any I have ever seen—
W - It's a sickness in this thing. It will go to any lengths whatsoever to get my Rod. It will destroy you both if only so you do not have my magick if it cannot.
“We don't know how you did what you did. But—“ Its promise to kill me is interrupted by a wet and gurgling howl of agony. Both of us look over to see Peitho discarding handfuls of what used to be the upper body of a Canum Sanctum. I don't even want to know how she destroyed this one – more than to say she tore him apart with her bare hands.
Emphases here on bare.
Metus and I both nakedly marvel as she slithers toward us, shoulders and head held high like a tall and especially proud woman, the blood of three Canum Sanctum staining her scaled chest and belly and the hood descending from her head.
S – That's not her ribs, like a cobra, right? I can't help but wonder.
W – Do not be overconfident in yourselves. You have your hat. Flee, now.
“Sso, thesse are the Cannum Ssanctumm about which I have heard ssoo much,” Peitho says, her voice largely unchanged except for her decided reptillian timbre and forked tongue. She speaks in an arch and regal Greek we both understand.
Metus's knees seem to weaken, but strangely they go up on knee-bent tip-toe.
“Only a few of those are enough to change the outcome of a war among Men,” Peitho continues, making her deliberate way toward the priest, taunting him. “You do not know what it is to engage with a Higher Power, priest.” She spits the title as actual venom.
W – You need to leave. She is only more powerful, now.
S – What?
And then the battle truly begins.
Watching Peitho and Metus fight is like something out of the Titanomachy. Indeed, I did not so much watch as catch glimpses while keeping myself from being hacked to death and staying well out of Peitho's way.
Under a cloud of shining metal, Peitho is a river of scales and death.
And the two are evenly matched.
W – They are not evenly matched, you bastard fool! Peitho, even as she is, is material. Finite. She will slow. She will tire. And then she will die.
I watch as just that happens. She slows. She tires. She falters. And Metus's chain tangles around her. She screams. I open my mouth to scream and—
W – But the Metus will not. Those Dogs diminished her power. Run. Run now or die.
S – You said you would help me.
W – I said you would live. Now—
I see the entire case of phials flying through the air. Then I look down at them in my hand. How long had those been there? Doesn't really matter at this point, does it?
Taking a running start, I hurl the phials at the priest.
“Peitho,” I shout. “We have to go. Now!”
I do not know whether Metus had forgotten about me – though for all the ducking and dodging I was doing, I doubt it very much – or what. But my shout halts them both so they can look at me.
And then the open mouth of the padded phial case impacts with Metus's left shoulder.
The FA-WHOOSH! Is seven times as intense as the others.
When the flare and the smoke have cleared, Metus's chain and cross fall to the ground and there is a stunned silence. Half of Metus is unrecognizably burned – the left half, from scalp to hip. The robes and skin have vaporized – except for the hand and a hideous scarification in the form of a Seal of Solomon which takes up most of the chest.
S – What magick that must be to survive such ruination.
I'm not sure where that thought comes from – which me, when – or to what exactly it is referring.
Peitho is shooting in for the kill.
Lamiya – NO! She will kill my child!
Metus flicks their wrists, the chain whips, and a second later they're catching the crucifix in their right hand and shoving it at Peitho like a ward against evil.
And then tongues of purple lightning lick out of it and into Peitho. She is lifted high off the ground, her tail dangling beneath her. Her screams are drowned out only by Metus's maniacal and unnaturally amplified cackling, howled laughter.
“Now you die, Serpent!”
My feet fly out from under me. I hit the ground hard, ankles already bound in the chain and dragged toward Metus. I roll over on my back. I will at least face my defeat. Hideous as it is.
W – You gods damned fool of a man.
S – At least I will die having been called a man by one of you gods for once. Not a boy. Not a child. A man.
W – You'll die a fool, and a fool you'll die all the same.
Metus is standing over me, gloating. Straight backed and holding a Canum Sanctum sword.
Metus is not laughing anymore. Peitho's not screaming anymore.
Wait. What's going on?
Metus isn't holding that sword. And they have great reason not to be laughing anymore – someone else is holding that sword. And has thrust it through Metus's back and out the priest's chest.
Right through the heart, if I'm not mistaken.
Pepin!
Metus looks down at the sword sticking out of their chest with much the same shock and horror I felt at having their crucifix in my guts. Or did I dream that? Then the priest wheels around, seizing Pepin by either side of his head, the crazy little man having frozen with the panic – or the pain – of the thing he'd just done.
And Peitho is picking me up off the ground.
“We need to go. I underestimated what he is. We need to go.”
W – Told you.
I'm scrabbling, speechless, to get free of the chain – which is suddenly loose around my ankles – half dragged backward by Peitho and transfixed by what's happening before me: Pepin is screaming – Metus is laughing, and new flesh is growing to replace that vaporized by my fireballs. And at an impossible speed.
Then Peitho turns me and I run like if I don't I'm going to learn that after all that we didn't even slow Metus down.
It takes a very long time for Pepin to finally go quiet.
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