Chapter 24
“Daze! I can feel my power building up properly this month. We have had too many setbacks, we need to do something positive.”
“And what had you thought of, m’dear? Note, I will follow you if it’s reasonable, but with you blaming me for your failures, I’m chary.”
“Your failures, you mean; you and your cunning plans. But I intend, on the night of the solstice, when the sun is weakest, and when I will also coincidentally be at full power, to kill Rogaz and absorb the blue moon to me.”
“Ambitious,” said Daze.
“Well, are you with me, or not?” snapped Selen.
“Oh, I’m with you, my dear,” said Daze. “I lost some of my enlightened recently, though, and it hurt to lose them, as well as losing the power from their... worship.” Daze did not share the ways he had of gaining power from those he had in thrall.
“And I’ve lost my own priests and priestesses to rebels. Thanus has lost control of my soldiery and they are all misbehaving, and it’s all wrong.”
“One day, my dear, we will have Alethos at our mercy,” said Daze. “And his wife, whoever she is. She has a trógling slave, I think.”
“At least I can be certain by the timing it is not my former Heroine,” said Selen. “I think it may be the one-time celestial virgin.”
“Oooh, she would be fun to break,” murmured Daze.
Selen glared at him.
But she knew he had proclivities which went too far for her tastes, and it was better that he have them satisfied with others.
oOoOo
“The Red Moon knows something is up, I’m sure of it,” said Kaz. “She’s busy preparing for something, I can feel it in my bones.”
“I’ll warn Rogaz,” said Hraazaz. “We’ll be waiting for you to handle Daze, and join us.”
“I’ll be there,” said Kaz.
“I know,” said Hraazaz.
“Selen is the more powerful of the two, and if need be, you may have to keep her occupied,” said Kaz. “You know what you are doing?”
“Latrika and I are putting Rogaz into a crystal sphere such as she uses for raising darklings to be high toróg,” said Hraazaz, patiently. “I’ve had it done myself, and did the modified form with Alcmene. Whilst we fight Selen we trickle off Selen’s power into Rogaz in her sphere, and completely destroy the red moon to add to the blue moon. And you will prevent Daze from interfering and twisting the form of the egg.”
“We can do it,” said Kaz.
The women involved, for it was a women’s task, embraced warmly. Kaz gulped; and took herself to Daze’s mound to begin her quest.
oOoOo
“Are you ready, Daze? Soon it will be moonrise, and we can finish off the blue moon once and for all. I’ll need you to confuse her as I tear her apart, as we are without much of Thanus.”
“I still think you should just have made him into a bound spirit..”
“He can regenerate a body, eventually,” said Selen. “It may not be as good or as strong as before but it will do.”
oOoOo
Hraazaz drew out the moon runes and started chanting in the rolling, ritual tongue of the High Toróg, after clothing her goddess in wreaths of the white star flower, one wreath made by trógling female children, one by darkling female children, and one by the six sub-adult high toróg young females whom Rogaz had found and ordered to aid the endeavour. Mycota drew on her husband’s powers with rock to aid Hraazaz, and the rest sang and danced to Hraazaz’s command. This pinched the lunarsphere to make a narrow bridge to the red moon across which to draw power.
“I hope Kaz is doing well,” muttered Rynn.
“Kaz will do fine,” said Lelyn.
oOoOo
Kaz stood on the hill where she had stood before, looking at the unwelcoming entrance between the vicious hedges.
“Nobody tending them,” Kaz muttered. “Nobody tending the hedges, nobody weeding between the flagstones, nobody cleaning off chalk-marks; because chalkmarks didn’t remain long anyway. Because nothing I do will alter the maze because it’s not real. It’s all an illusion. Now I just have to find the thread of magic and unravel it.”
The image of the maze shimmered slightly, and she could almost see through it.
Kaz searched for the shape of the magical construction, to see where a thread might be found, to unravel its form.
“He didn’t!” she muttered to herself, in disbelief. “He did, too! Alethos, love! One end is at the start of the maze! Still, it must be one of his earliest constructs, and perhaps less sophisticated... I can reel it up into a ball of pure magic as I move forward.”
“Steady, love, don’t suppose there are no traps in it.”
“No, I won’t assume. You’re right. If I couch my findings as a prayer, though, I can let you know what I am doing in case Rynn has to take over.”
“Understood. I love you.”
“I love you. I am winding it up now. It feels harsh to touch but not jagged.”
oOoOo
Daze shifted, uncomfortably. He could feel something which felt like an itch deep inside his head.
“Daze! Pay attention!” snapped Selen. “What is your part?”
“Confuse and bemuse Rogaz,” said Daze, obediently.
“And had you thought how to do that?” demanded Selen.
“Eh? Oh, place her thoughts into a confused fugue state, and form a bridge between pleasure and pain, so she dies in sexual rapture as you rip her apart.”
“That’s what you did to make people go willingly to bloodsuckers,” said Selen.
“Aima was my daughter too,” said Daze. “Hey! What’s going on?” he screamed a long, agonised scream, and fell back on the cushions beside his sister, a look of horror on his face.
“Daze! Stop it! This is not the time for joking!” cried Selen, slapping him. Daze whimpered.
oOoOo
“A sharp wrench should bring the lot down,” said Kaz. “I wonder if any of his creature are tied in it, if you will need to go and collect them,” she added.
“Hush, do not worry, I wait on the place of souls,” said Alethos.
“One good yank.... yes! Yes, it all falls apart!” Kaz felt, rather than heard, the primal scream of Daze, as she unravelled a spell thousands of years old.
“That had to smart,” murmured Alethos.
Kaz found herself on a featureless domed hill, save for what appeared to be some separate slabs at the top. Kaz was not fond of windwalking, but Thyella had shown her how; and she examined the slabs from above. There were eight of them, but arranged three by three, with one missing.
“I think I have to move them around until the pattern is correct; I suppose then the space will be... I don’t know, over a way in?” said Kaz.
“Be careful,” said Alethos. “There may be a right way to do this, can you see what the pattern is? I think I can through your eyes.”
“It looks like the red moon glyph and the chaos glyph,” said Kaz. “I suspect I need to get the puzzle moved so that the last move completes both, in the central square, and anything else... I don’t know, but I don’t like the thought of what might happen.”
Alethos left her to ponder, reflecting that on the whole, gods did not like puzzles, and were no good at them. Perhaps the reasons prophecies made them nervous, being often couched in riddling language. The whole nature of Daze frightened deities, even without his insalubrious pastimes. If Kaz could make puzzling more wholesome, it would lead to mortals not being afraid to ask difficult questions, and solving problems for themselves, not merely asking the gods. One day, mortals might no longer need them. But that was a long way in the future, and not worth worrying the others over.
Kaz hardened her nails and dug out eight pieces of rock on a smaller scale, scratching the designs into them, and spent some time pushing them around to see if she could find the way in which to avoid completing one glyph but not the other; and finally she grunted in satisfaction, and went to move the full-size stones, quickly and surely.
And with a startled cry, she was sucked into a roiling mass of imagery.
oOoOo
Selen was beyond irritated. Just when she needed her brother to back her up, he decided to have some kind of fit, or existential crisis, or something equally unhelpful.
“Get yourself together, Daze!” she shrieked at him. “What’s wrong with you?”
“My hill! Someone destroyed all my pretty maze!” said Daze. “They took away my maze and my haze, and all that was crazed, right under my gaze, I am ablaze!”
Selen shook him.
“Never mind your stupid rhymes! Snap out of it and help me! Rogaz has some idea that she should expect an attack, she has altered the moonway to make a narrow bridge!”
“Maybe attacking her is a bad idea,” said Daze, who had a headache.
“No, it isn’t! Now do your part!” demanded Selen.
She started off across the bridge, and Daze took the opportunity to escape to see what was happening inside his own domain within the hill, which was also partly within his own brain.
oOoOo
“Looks like the red bitch is on to us,” said Rynn, pointing at the bridge.
“I wonder...” said Thyella. “It looks to me as if she is attacking; she has the spirit of Thanus as well as Klerus, Librax, and Hippona.”
“Hippona is a warrior,” said Hraazaz. “If I am to be the new goddess of toróg merchants, then Klerus is mine.”
“I’ll finish Thanus,” said Sjurgi.
“I’ll handle Hippona,” said Thyella. “She mocks my late brother as Skyhorse in giving her skills to the red one.”
“Leaves me with Librax,” said Rynn.
“He’s mine,” snarled Errilaz. “Mine for the many subtle jibes about primitive toróg, beast-breasted, horse-faced, and so on. Kaz should be here to face Selen, however, with you as her aide!”
“Then, I guess if Kaz isn’t going to make it, I’ll keep Selen occupied whilst you ladies kill your targets as it has to be a trógling,” said Rynn. I hope I survive to get back to Phaedros; if not, at least I will be safe with Alethos, she thought.
oOoOo
Kaz was trying to make sense of the uncoordinated mess that was Daze’s mindscape, the maze within wavering after the removal of the maze without. Here was the centre of his being, and a glyph she did not know, which shimmered and changed; his own glyph of illusion, she thought. Was this the magical mirror to be destroyed? No, it was but a glyph; the mirror was not here. But there would be illusions.
And then, he was there. Daze himself, wearing his guise of a handsome man. He gazed on Kaz in disgust.
“A trógling,” he sneered. “So, your mistress dispelled the illusion and made you move the pieces tp be the one sucked in. Clever of her, but she got too clever; I can only be harmed from within, and now I know to keep her out. I have won! I have defeated the so-called Daykaz! She has no chance now, because the time has come and gone, but you, I will make you suffer forever, and let her know what she has subjected you to.”
“You’re so sure, aren’t you, you nasty little man?” said Kaz.
“I misread something,” said Daze, airily. “I thought that Death’s daughter would be the Daykaz, but looking again, it could be Death’s beloved, and you must be her servant.”
“I admit, it’s been to our advantage that you are so stupid,” said Kaz.
“Stupid? You, a dirty, stupid little trógling dare call me stupid?”
“Well, as you haven’t got much correct so far, what else am I to call you?” said Kaz. All the time she kept him talking, she was making sense of the patterns in this apparently chaotic mess. “I could say you were inane, asinine, puerile, idiotic, foolish, and as thick as slurry.”
“How dare you!” Daze screeched. “You’re the stupid one! You’re a trógling! You’re nothing! Nothing! A parasite!”
Kaz laughed.
“Rattled, are you?” said Kaz. “This is the second time we have met, Daze, and I won that time, too.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Last time we met, you used me as a model to make trógling, and cursed me that I would live forever and desire Death,” said Kaz.
“Well, I hope you do long for death, because I will keep you alive for eternity, suffering!” cried Daze. “And I will let your mistress know!”
“You are a fool,” said Kaz, laughing. “My only mistress is Moraia, Fate; mother to my beloved Alethos. Your curse is my blessing.”
Daze stared, his mouth hanging open foolishly.
“You are Death’s beloved?” he asked, incredulously. “A trógling?”
“And mother of the trógling,” said Kaz, and suddenly, her voice was hard and sharp. “And I have come for those poor souls you have stolen and preyed on for so long. If you give them all up freely, I will let you live.”
She did not expect him to do so; so she was not disappointed when he attacked her. His attack took the form of a hideous monster with tentacles, ready to rend her limb from limb; and Kaz looked at the truth which was but an addition to Daze’s form, and laughed until it disappeared.
As this place was Daze’s construct, and appeared physical, albeit distorted, Kaz attacked back, with her swords, having been working hard on using one in each hand, which seemed to confuse Daze.
“No, you cannot use iron! I made trógling to be little, and weak, and pathetic!”
“But to survive, we have to have a will of adamant,” said Kaz. “I have been tested in fire, and I am forged and tempered to be Fate’s weapon against you and against your sister. I understand your riddles and your illusions and how you use them to build a world about yourself which is hollow and insubstantial.” She brushed aside a roaring, fire-breathing monster which he threw at her, ignoring what she knew to be unreal, even as she ignored the long claws Daze grew to attack her. It was a little more effort to walk through the thorny tentrils which grew around her legs, having once cut her feet on what she now knew as illusory hedges, but she pushed those aside with her mind as well, advancing on him.
Daze fled. His illusion of physical beauty fell apart, revealing him with his grotesque, fish-belly white skin, with a scarlet gash of a mouth, and a liver-coloured mark over his forehead, eyelid and onto the cheek on one side. Kaz suddenly realised that he had once been as beautiful as he could appear, but the depravity of his nature had manifested through his skin, pallid for his fear of the sun, his body soft from his innate laziness; his mouth marred by aiding Aima suck blood, and the mask over one eye a warning of his double nature. And worst of all, the face settled in lines of cruelty.
Kaz pursued him relentlessly, absently assembling his chaotic surroundings into logical structures, a solid pathway; and seized one of his illusion glyphs to shape his own unreality into a construct facing him. She did not make a monster or anything hideous and imaginary; what she imagined into being was Alethos, grim and stern, with his sword upheld.
And Daze believed in it.
He fell under the sword which existed only in his own imagination.
And then it was a matter of finishing him, and ripping apart the shifting, confusing place to discover it was no more than a pocket universe in a vast, spherical space; the inside of the hill, where thousands of trógling and a few humans were chained in eternal torment, under a throne on a dais with a mirror over it. Spirits attacked her.
“This ends now,” growled Kaz, throwing her vial at the mirror. The glass vial shattered, and the acid steamed as it burned into the polished bronze of the mirror. The devices of torture dissolved with the mirror’s surface. The spirits wavered, and fled
“Alethos! I make this thy temple by right of conquest!” cried Kaz. “Come to me, and receive these battered souls into gentle death, within the halls thou hast prepared for my people!”
Alethos appeared.
“I will lead them; things started a little early in the lunarsphere,” he said. “Rynn is facing off against Selen.”
“Oh, crap,” said Kaz.
