She was waiting for me, she had to be, or we’d already have a vengeful god on our hands. But we didn’t. Because two bottles of potion were enough to allow her the luxury of time—all the time in the world. To play her games. To bring him through. And to deal with me.
I, on the other hand, had a seriously depleted power supply and an unknown time frame. Jonas would find Adra, of that I had no doubt, and he would send his people. But while they could take out almost any other adversary around, what could they do against the power of a god? Because that was what she was wielding.
And it looked like she was wielding a lot of it.
There was a row of bodies ahead, half skeletonized, where a time spell had eaten its way through a crowd. Some had died instantly, heads and torsos aged back to bone, or in a few cases to dust. Others . . . hadn’t been so lucky.
I put an arm over my face and tried to block out the pervasive stench of blood, so much blood, from people unfortunate enough to get only a glancing blow from the spell. One man still moved, slowly, helplessly, sticklike legs protruding from a normal torso. I wanted to help him, but even I could tell he was too far gone. And I didn’t have the strength to spare.
I left him there.
The next hallway was even worse, although in a different way. The walls looked like trucks had been driven through them. One explosion had been suspended in the moment it burst out of the walls, the jagged edges leaping out at me like a cluster of knives as I passed. While another, farther down, was exploding over and over again, caught in a time loop like an endlessly running replay, and shaking the floor underneath my feet every few seconds.
It looked like she’d just thrown spells everywhere, with many serving no purpose I could see. A painting on a nearby wall stripped itself back to blank canvas, then repainted itself again and again. A broken water main flooded through a fissure in the floor above, the shimmering veil hanging suspended in midair, like a curtain. A couple of spells had fallen on the same potted plant, causing it to wither and then burst back to life, flowering all over again. And draping the little table on which it sat in flowers, a decade’s worth or more, that fell onto the blood-strewn floor below like a funeral spill.
I passed through the glistening strands of the waterfall, only to stop abruptly at the sight of what had to be a hundred spell bolts, all converging on a single spot—mine. It looked like the people in the hall had finally realized they had a common problem, but too late.
The bolts were far too thick to find a way through, so I ducked into a hole someone had thoughtfully blasted in the wall. And into a small set of dimly lit rooms. Where a slow-motion battle was taking place between half a dozen fighting couples as a time spell slowly unraveled.
They looked almost like they were dancing, a dim haze of light from somewhere up ahead setting their shadows to moving on the remaining walls and floor. I threaded my way through, and finally realized why I could see them so clearly. The whole back wall of the last room was missing, allowing me to step out into a wide-open space where the collapse of the upper floor had included a good deal of the ceiling, leaving an area open to the moonlight.
It looked almost like a stadium, only instead of spectators, there were only more combatants, busy killing or dying or both.
And a wild-eyed girl in the center, helping them along and laughing joyously.
“Is this what it’s like to be a god?” she called to me from across the field of rubble. “Is this how they feel all the time?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have to know! Your mother was Artemis—didn’t she ever tell you?”
“We don’t talk much.”
“Why not? You can go back and see her whenever you like. You can do whatever you like!”
She threw out a hand, and the flesh of a nearby mage all but flew off his bones. The time spell stripped him of everything in seconds, leaving behind a skeleton in tattered leather that nonetheless continued to menace a leaping vampire. But which would fall apart into the dried-up bones it was as soon as the spell failed.
He was one of her own, one of the dark mages on her side, but she didn’t seem to notice. Or to care. The life-or-death battle going on around her had become her playground, the people her toys, the whole bloody mess there for her amusement.
Yes, I thought. That is probably exactly what the gods had felt like.
“Is that what he promised you?” I asked, picking my way through the rubble. “To give you the power of a god? To make you Pythia?”
She laughed again, a genuinely delighted sound. “Pythia. You know, I used to dream of that? Used to lie awake at night, in my narrow little bed, and plan for the day when I’d be in control. Of my life. Of my future. Of everything. I’d have the money and the fame and the title, and all those richly dressed people would be coming to see me.”
“But that didn’t happen.”
“No. It went to Myra. When the only good idea she ever had was how to get rid of the Lady! I was always better at using the power than her. It came to me easily, when she had to struggle. It liked me, wanted me—but Agnes said I was too ambitious. Ambitious!” She laughed again. “What the hell did she think Myra was? What did she think any of us were? What else was there?”
“What else? You’re true clairvoyants, from wealthy and powerful families—”
“Who don’t give a damn about them unless they get the top spot!” she said viciously. “Nobody gives a damn. My parents told me that, right before I left. It’s one of my earliest memories. There I was, all of five and clinging to my mother’s leg in fear. Before she pulled me off and crouched down, and gave me my first life lesson. ‘Do whatever it takes, but become Pythia. There’s nothing here for you if you don’t.’”
“Your mother was cruel.”
“My mother was honest! She knew how the world works. Get power, keep power, or grovel your whole life to those who have it. Like they did to me, when I was named an acolyte. There were only a handful of us, and one of us was going to get it, one of us was going to be it. And, oh, how everything changed!”
She flung a spell—at me this time—and she hadn’t been wrong. She was fast and deadly. I shifted barely in time, as a wall collapsed into rubble behind me, materializing on her other side—