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by Jaymin Eve
“I will fetch a cup, Sacred One.”
I caught her before she could disappear again. “Hold up. It’s a specific cup. Is there someone here called D.O.D.? It’s his cup.”
Jeffrey shook her head. Her waxy face was twisting in a particular way. I thought it was concern.
“Well are there any special damn cups up here?”
“Sacred Abil has a cup. The Trophy of Staviti.”
That name. Staviti. It was familiar to me, but I had no idea why. I also didn’t particularly care. “Okay, great. Where’s that?”
“Sacred Abil always has it with him, always by his side.”
“And Sacred Abil is where?”
“Eating.” Jeffrey pointed off to the side, through a maze of columns leading further into the centre of the platform.
I took off, weaving through the sky-high columns, toward the sound of tinkling music and conversation. There were mini-columns set beneath the taller ones, acting as plant-stands to cradle vine-like things that were snaking out to try and smother everything in their path. They had even spilled from the columns to spread over the marble beneath my feet. Eventually, I began to see other people: robot-servers in similar, bare coverings, and then …
Gods.
They all seemed so big, wrapped in robes that dragged along the marble. Even the females seemed larger-than-life, with tall and willowy frames, their hair left free and flowing, dragging down their backs in a shining display of immaculate colour. Hopefully Coen hadn’t lied to me, because there was only one man wearing purple that I could see. He stood right beside a massive buffet table, every dish of food imaginable spread over it, the purple robes draping over his massive shoulders to pool on the marble. There was a cord around his waist, and there was a cup hanging off the cord. It looked more like a trophy, complete with a golden sheen and everything. I made my way over to him, grabbing a knife from the buffet table as I passed, and then up-ending a basket of bread and pulling out the little cloth sack that the bread had been sitting in.
“Excuse me, Sacred One,” I muttered, bumping into D.O.D., slicing the knife through the cord and catching the falling cup into my sack, which I quickly hid behind my back.
“Watch yourself,” he growled, spinning around. “Or I’ll push you off the damn platform, useless thing.”
Wow. Rude much?
“Apologies, Sacred One,” I muttered, bowing just like Jeffrey had, backing a few steps away.
I should have known better. ‘Backing away without looking’ was never a thing that had worked for me before. I backed right into one of the willowy god-women, who fell forward, also knocking over the man who had been standing next to her. I toppled toward the woman and she pushed me away, sending me sprawling onto the man, instead.
I tossed out my hands to catch myself, forgetting that I was holding the knife …
And that was how I stabbed a God in Topia.
The man looked down at the knife protruding from his stomach, his eyes wide. I also stared at the knife protruding from his stomach, my own eyes wide. Nobody said anything. The whole platform had fallen into a heavy, shocked silence. Someone grabbed me by the back of my measly covering, hauling me to my feet and spinning me around.
D.O.D.
And he was pissed.
“Another faulty server,” he muttered, planting a hand into the centre of my chest and pushing, hard.
The air closed in around me, the whole world turning black. I landed on my back, softly-packed soil breaking my fall. The darkness didn’t lift, and it took me a moment to realise that I was in another cave. I pulled myself up onto my elbows, seeking out the light of the entrance. There were some splotchy shapes blocking out most of the light, but I could still see it, so I forced myself to my feet and began to struggle in that direction. I pulled my prize-trophy out of the bag, leaving the cloth behind in the cave while I ran my hands over the smooth metal surface.
This better be worth it.
Ahead of me, the shapes began to shift, forming into silhouettes.
Five silhouettes, to be exact.
“She’s back.” I recognised Rome’s voice as I finally made it closer to the entrance of the cave. It hadn’t been the same cave, but a new cave altogether. “You were right, Trickery. She did get sent to the banishment cave.”
“I’m always right.” Siret sounded like he was laughing, but it tapered off when I stepped out into the light and tossed my trophy into the dirt in front of them.
“What’s with the blood?” Coen asked, his eyes on my left hand.
“Stabbed a god,” I told him.
His expression went blank very quickly, but I was sure that he was hiding a laugh. “Don’t go drowning in guilt or anything.”
“Well he can’t die from it; he’s already dead, right?”
Coen smiled: a wide, crazy-disarming smile that caught my breath and wiped every thought out of my head. He was looking at me as though he’d only just seen me, but then his brows drew together and he flicked his eyes up to the cap on my head, and then down to my borrowed ‘outfit’.
I tore my gaze away, almost immediately wishing that I hadn’t, because four more sets of eyes were staring in the exact same way.
“Uh …” I tried to drag an explanation out of my still-blank mind when Aros shook his head, drawing my full attention.
“What the fuck are you wearing?” he growled, the usual smoothness of his silken voice disappearing altogether.
Eight
My first instinct was to hide.
To try my best with stupidly tiny hands to cover my nakedness. Nakedness which was probably tinted a nice shade of pink right about now. But as five sets of eyes continued to bore into me—eyes belonging to the sol-shits who had dragged me into Topia to steal from the gods—I realised something. I realised that I didn’t care. They could just deal with it.
I dropped my hands to my hips, and with a voice as firm as possible, I said, “Would have thought you boys would have seen more than your fair share of boobs and vag—”
A snort of laughter from Siret cut me off mid-sentence, but they got the point. Before anyone said another word, Aros whipped his far-too-valuable-for-me-to-ever-dream-of-owning shirt over his head. He then reached out a hand and curved it around my shoulder, pulling me across to stand before him. In a blink, the warm length of material was being pulled over my head, falling past my thighs. It had clearly been hand-made for someone his size.
I would have spent some time enjoying the soft material—it was woven from magic, or at least some form of special, extra-silky blend reserved for extra-special sols—but I couldn’t enjoy it. I couldn’t because Aros was now shirtless. Holy dweller babies. Could I have his dweller-sol babies?
Wait … no. Not what I meant. What I meant to say was put your damn shirt back on. All of that golden sunshine skin, draped tightly over hard muscle was horrible to look at. I was not going to spend any more than the next thirty to forty clicks staring at him. Before my tongue could actually fall out of my mouth, Siret swept me up, throwing me with ease over his shoulder.
“Come on, Rocks,” he said, as he started to move. What the crap? Why did they keep doing that? I struggled against his hold, and even though I knew it was a bad idea, I kicked out as hard as I could at him. Aiming to hurt.
Of course, he didn’t even seem to care, his strong arms tightened across me, halting my kicks. “Stop fighting me. You know you can’t leave without touching one of us, and frankly I don’t trust you to make it without a concussion or more of your ass showing.”
I knew I was bright red, partly from the blood rushing to my upside-down head as it hung down his back, but also from his words. When did this become my life? Upside down and naked, except for some weird skin-suit and a borrowed shirt. Once she heard about my escapades, Emmy would either have a heart attack and become the first person to die from the simple act of me speaking, or most probably would refuse to believe any of it.
The journey back from the banishment
cave was a little rockier than the initial journey into Topia. Apparently, they didn’t like their rejected beings having an easy escape route. A few times I thought I caught sight of something in the darkness—at least from what I could make out by lifting my head up from its hard resting place.
“Can you let me down now?” I asked, my demand the twelfth since we’d entered the cave. “I can’t feel my fingertips; they’re going to fall off, and then who will make your beds? Seriously, making beds without fingers is pretty difficult. Not that making beds with fingers isn’t difficult either, because it is. You guys should really try it some time.”
The screechy tone of my voice should have gone a long way to endearing me to the five sols. Surely they loved a screechy woman. Didn’t all men?
I was just opening my mouth again when a hand wrapped around it. It was Coen. “If you think you can manage it, shut up for a little bit and we’ll be out of this cave. The only reason they aren’t attacking us is because we hold this cup.” From the corner of my eye, I could see him brandishing the stolen cup.
Narrowing my gaze on him, I was about to let him know exactly what I thought about being handled like that, when his words registered. Who were they? In that moment, the flickering shadows I’d been noticing around us started to become clear. Well … clear enough for me to see what was surrounding us.
Creatures.
Living creatures.
Hundreds of them. Grotesque, ghost-like, wraith-figures. Coen must have seen the wide-eyed fear I was suddenly channelling, because he slowly removed his hand, and leaned in closer to whisper to me.
“When you are rejected by the gods, there is no escaping. You remain here until your physical form fades away, and then only the shadow creature is left.”
I swallowed hard, trying not to either throw up or cry. Damn the gods. They sentenced the very beings who had already spent their sun-cycles serving them to this kind of eternal torture.
“Can we free them?” My voice was very low; I was afraid to draw their attention. There were so many of them, and even with this magic-cup-deterrent, it was scary.
Rome slipped in next to his twin, and even though Siret was walking pretty fast, none of them looked uncomfortable walking and whispering to me like this.
“There’s nothing left but anger and vengeance,” the most giant of the Abcurse brothers said. “If we free the spirits, they will wreak destruction across Minatsol, destroying the nine rings in no time. They can never be freed.”
I shut up after that, trying my best not to stare at the scary surrounding us. Scary and sad. I wished that I could un-see them, but no such luck. Thankfully, Coen hadn’t been lying about us being close to the exit; the brightness we’d been moving toward was increasing, and I sucked in a deep breath at the junction between cave and outside. The blood rushed through my body as Siret dropped me to my feet, keeping a tight hold on my shoulder, which was helpful against the weakness in my body. I was barely keeping myself up, but after all my carry on, I needed to prove that I could stand on my own two legs. The other Abcurses stepped in beside us, forming a single line of sols.
Their expressions varied from grim to stoic. I wasn’t sure what to expect judging by that, but something told me it was going to be a bit of a rough journey to get out of this banishment cave.
“Just take a deep breath, Willa,” Aros instructed from my right side, and then the six of us stepped through to the other side.
Well, sort of. The actual transition between the worlds, this time, was akin to having my skin torn from my body by means of grating it off. The cave did not want to let us go, and right now I was biting my lip hard enough to taste blood so that I wouldn’t scream out in pain. The agony felt like it lasted entire sun-cycles, and when we finally found ourselves outside, with tall, thick trees surrounding us, I all but collapsed to my stomach.
My hands ripped into soft, green grass, my breathing ragged as I fought against the last tendril of pain. I pushed myself partly up so that I could run my hands from my shoulders to wrists, obsessively checking to make sure that my skin was still intact.
Fancy shoes appeared in my line of sight, a shadow blocking the light above me. “You doing okay, Rocks? It’s a real bitch getting in and out of the banishment zone.”
I knew it was Coen. The pain-gifted sol had predictably been the first to recover. Hands fitted in under my arms and lifted me to my feet. I found myself staring into his dark green eyes, a storm of darkness hovering just around the edges. He was smiling, right until he focused on my face. The darkness in his eyes expanded outward then, shading over his features like a roiling storm cloud.
Reaching up, I tried to figure out what had happened to bring on that expression. Knowing me, it could have been anything. There could have even been a sleeper on my head. Those bugs hung above you, hidden in sticky white nets, and then when you were least prepared, they dropped into your hair. Most of the time you didn’t know about it, so they were able to burrow in and create a nest. They lived in your head, had their babies, and then when all their young were born, they would bite and kill you. Just so you wouldn’t be able to tell anyone that they were there.
My hands started frantically patting now. I’d seen a few sleeper-deaths in the seventh ring, and I was not going out that way. Not a freaking chance in hell. Coen’s eyebrows slowly drew together as he watched me jump around, shaking my hair out, flipping my head upside down and everything.
“Is it out?” I was shouting. Panic had me in its hold.
I didn’t fear much, but the creepy, multi-legged, weird-looking bug was high on my list. Almost right at the top. Only a few rungs below the recurring dream I sometimes had about someone dying and making me queen. Luckily, we no longer had monarchies, because it pissed the gods off too much to see us worshipping anyone other than them. So yeah, it was an irrational fear … but I still couldn’t seem to shake it.
“What is the dweller doing?” Siret stood next to his brother, both of them staring at me. “Has she lost her tiny mind? That was fast.”
Aros joined them on the other side and the slightest of smiles was visible at the corners of his full lips. “Pretty sure she’s trying to get a bug off her, I’ve seen this before in Blesswood.”
“Help me!” I shouted. What was wrong with them? Were they hoping I’d die from sneak-sleeper-attack?
Coen grabbed me then, huge hands wrapping around my biceps as he held me in place. I struggled for a click, before realising that it was fruitless. I was never escaping his grip.
“There is no bug on you,” he said slowly, like he was speaking to an idiot.
“Well …” I spluttered out. “Why were you staring at me like that? You went all dark and gloomy and I thought it was a sleeper.”
The corner of his mouth twitched, which felt like amusement, although the corner of his eye did the same, and that was more like anger. Before I could try to salvage the relationship I thought I’d been building with these sols, Coen freed my right bicep and traced a thumb over my lip. “You have blood on your face,” he said. “Were you hurt in the crossing?”
I stared at him as his thumb shifted, rubbing back and forth along the slope of my bottom lip. If there really was blood on my face, he was only spreading it around—which was hardly surprising, because he wasn’t watching what he was doing. He was staring right into my eyes, an intensely focussed look in his.
Before I could answer, Aros was in my face. “How could she get hurt? We were assured it was the same for dwellers and us to cross. And we were touching her!”
I found myself reaching out to comfort him, before deciding at the last moment that it was a bad idea. “I bit my lip, that’s all. I’m fine.”
I heard a snort from someone behind. Fair point. Fine might have been an exaggeration, but I wasn’t hurt from the crossing to Minatsol. I should have been more specific.
Yael, who’d been silent and distant, didn’t hang around any longer. He turned and started pushing his way through the t
hicker growth to the east. The rest of the Abcurses gave me one more look over, before following their brother. Siret nudged me, indicating I should go in front of him. Pretty sure I heard him mutter something about stopping me from breaking my neck, but I could have been wrong.
As soon as I stumbled free of the alcove of trees and bushes we’d been in, I realised that nothing in the hilly area we were in was familiar. Siret nudged me again; his brothers were already quite a few feet in front of us, so I picked up the pace.
“Where are we?” I asked, leaves and debris kicking up under my feet as I jogged to keep up with their pace. “This isn’t where we entered Topia from.”
He didn’t answer at first, and I wondered if he was just going to completely ignore me. Seriously? I was here because of their need to procure an item which probably did not originally belong to them, no matter what their story had been. Why would the gods care about anything a sol had? Instinct told me it had been stolen from the gods by the Abcurses in the first place, and the gods had wanted it back. I was the only sucker they could rope into helping them and now I was going to face a certain, painful death-by-angry-deity.
“The banishment cave is across the other side of Minatsol.” Siret’s voice was lazily drawled, like he could barely be bothered to answer. “We have a couple of sun-cycles walk to get home.”
“What?” I screeched, grinding to a halt. “But I was in Topia for like one rotation. I was with the Gods for like half a rotation. How could you five get to the cave in half a rotation if it’s going to take us a couple of sun-cycles to walk back?”
Siret nudged me again, clearly not liking my refusal to walk. “Those sun-cycles are going to turn into moon-cycles if you don’t start walking, dweller. Don’t make me carry you again, it’ll be far less pleasant this time.”
A red haze kind of washed over my eyes. I was so furious that when I opened my mouth, it actually surprised me that steam didn’t emerge. “You dragged me into this, how the hell am I going to explain being away from Blesswood for this long?”