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Part of me was pleased by this turn of events. Someone was building. Making jobs for those who had none. Electricians, plumbers, specialty skills were still in demand. But builders, men that cut lumber and hung drywall, metal workers, men who tiled and framed, simply weren’t needed anymore. No one was building anything new and probably wouldn’t for a long time.
It wasn’t as if these men could get additional training to learn a more useful skill. We were back to low- or no-wage apprenticing, a long way from staffing universities again. There was too much unrest, a deep unease about the future. We were a society fractured in countless ways. Those gainfully employed filled essential positions: food production, crucial technology, law enforcement, news. Jobs were hard to find, hence the high rate of crime in our city. And it got a lot worse the farther out you went.
“Who’s funding the project?” a newcomer to the conversation said.
“What’s-his-name…bugger, it’s right on the tip of my tongue. Weird name. Riordan? Same guy that turned things around a few years back, when those black holes were everywhere and we were running out of food. Got the papers out. Put the city back on track. He’s been gone awhile. Glad to hear he’s back. We could use more men like him around this city.”
I scowled. A bigger part of me was distinctly not pleased.
I’d been here, humping the grind every day for the past two years, working tirelessly to save my city. And what did I get? Scowled at and run away from, merely for asking a polite question. My hands fisted and my frown deepened.
I was willing to bet half the money I’d stolen from Ryodan that these ebullient, newly employed men were headed for Chester’s.
And if my suspicion was correct, that person in the premier spot on my shit-list this morning, that pain in my ass who hadn’t been doing a bloody thing to help Dublin for the past two years, was about to get sainted by my city again.
COCKROACHES SLITHERED IN STONE-DUSTED crevices, under and over rocks, reassembling beyond a jagged outcropping, deep in shadow, into a squat, gelatinous body with two legs, six arms, and a small head with a beaklike mouth.
His fragile, uncertain form disgusted the roach-god. He craved a solid existence among men, or at the least, a return to the lofty position he’d once enjoyed.
When Titans warred, it wasn’t the giants that survived. It was those who made themselves small and inconspicuous that passed beyond their enemies’ regard.
At this the one called “Papa Roach” by mortals excelled. He’d been the insects beneath humans’ feet, reviled, assaulted merely for poaching small morsels of food for longer than he cared to recall. Modern man found him grotesque and, with caustic, corrosive chemicals, drove him from their bright world, into the darkness of foundations, walls, caves, and sewers. Turned him into a creature of furtive stealth and petty displays of scratching his back on their toothbrushes while they slept, spitting into their glasses, smearing small crusts of feces along the rims, dropping more in their utensil drawers. His beggarly amusements: they shared their world with him whether they wanted to or not, whether they knew it or not. The darkness was his; his exploits began when theirs ended in sleep.
In his venerable prime, his countless bodies, their enviable enduranc
e, agility, and ability to penetrate the most secret places, had been much acclaimed and sought after. He’d been respected, feared, admired, his counsel deemed invaluable. Women had put out food for him at each meal, beseeching his presence beneath their table, preparing tempting dishes to entice him near so they might importune his aid. There’d been a time he’d benevolently assisted them. Enjoyed them. Cared.
No more.
By the blood of the sidhe, what did they expect? When you treated things badly, things behaved badly. Who was inclined to seize moments of persecution to demonstrate their finest nature? Idiots. Fools. He’d been there from the first, long before the Faerie, had watched humans make their first slithering passage onto solid ground. Had applauded them as they’d evolved, become more.
Now they were so much less.
Glistening mandibles ground together as he rubbed shiny, black carapace against carapace to grate in a hiss, “My name is Gustaine.”
It had been thousands of years since he’d said the words. Since he’d called himself anything but “roach.”
The Titans had fallen, most forever slain, the rare few, the impossible to kill, perhaps a hundred of them, imprisoned in the earth. The handful of gods who’d both survived the catastrophic wars and escaped imprisonment had, like him, found a way to hide.
Gustaine enjoyed an intimacy with the planet few gods knew. He, who’d once dined on the finest the world had to offer, now subsisted on its refuse, burrowed deep into its septic waste, had come to relish the diverse flavors of shit, for the knowledge it afforded him. He could taste the sickness in human offal; knew what disease was killing them. In days of yore he might have fetched them the right herb, root, or oil to correct the imbalance. Rot faster, he cursed them now. Blow yourselves up, kill your race off and get out of my way.
He’d even burrowed of late, beneath human skin, dining on the succulent fat of their bodies, nestled within them, privy to many of their thoughts and feelings. He crept anywhere and everywhere, knew all their secrets yet lacked the power to do a damn thing with it. Merely shaping himself into a form that could communicate was taxing. His arms and legs tended to crumble into individual segments if overexerted.
Yet…the timeless melody had been sung and it had changed the world, waking some things, killing others, but most dazzling of all, giving rise to the possibility of a new order that might restore the position he’d once enjoyed. Elevate him from the gutters and sewers and endless attacks that were his existence. The Earth felt the same as it once had to him, over a million years ago.
The ancient Song had not, however, improved or altered him in any way. The imperviousness of the cockroach ran deep into his insectile core. Virtually indestructible, he alone remained unchanged by the relentless march of time, by the magic that waxed, waned, and waxed anew. He was, as far as he knew, the sole exception: the obdurate Gustaine.
He’d pledged his allegiance to a few during his darkest times: a half-mad witch from the Caspian mountains, a dead man who’d risen to hunt the night, an ancient, primal beast that was neither god nor Faerie but possessed the Lanndubh, the hated black blade that could destroy him; and finally, recently allying himself with a prince of the very race that had corrupted and crushed his. With his brothers and sisters gone, he no longer cared who held power, so long as he had a share.
But now one of his own was back and strong enough to merit attention. Powerful enough to reclaim the Lanndubh and free him. And from what he’d witnessed thus far, quite possibly capable of becoming deadly enough to eradicate the Faerie from their world.
Gustaine dispersed his many bodies, reclaiming and molding them into a misshapen head atop one of the many corpses littering the stifling cavern, with its glowing rocks and bonfires, and watched the great god command his legion of worshippers.
The great Soulstealer, Balor, had returned.
The gods had been tricked by their Faerie enemies; deceived, manipulated, and crushed. But they’d lacked advantages they now possessed, assets Balor had already begun to exploit, as evidenced by a recent acquisition: a dozen women, many of them badly beaten, chained to a column near his altar.
Even now a slim dark aperture rippled near the towering dark god who’d once been worshipped more devoutly, and with more terror, than any of the others, as he stripped still more human souls from their bodies, increasing in power with each one he claimed.
