Brann rubbed at her back, lethargic, despondent. It had cost her, this scheme the godthing imposed on her, muscle tissue going with her energy to feed the reshaping of the man; there were some small lives in the trees and the undergrowth surrounding the glade, but they weren’t worth the effort to chase them down, so, she thought, let him/it pay its share of the cost out of its own stores of godfire. She closed her eyes, her mouth twisting into a quick wry smile. He/it wasn’t hovering over her, volunteering. Shuh! Amortis wasn’t volunteering either, but she gave to this small charity want to or not. What’s good for her is good for him/it. On hands and knees, Brann crawled to the children, worked her way between them so she could hold a hand of each.
*Jaril. Yaril. Can you hear me?*
*We hear.* Odd double voice in her head, charming harmonies that made her smile again, a softer wider smile this time.
*Remember Amortis and the bridge. Do you think you could make the bridge again? I do hope so, otherwise I don’t know how we’re going to replace what’s gone.*
*Can you feed us something? Just a little?*
She looked at the skin hanging loosely about her forearms, then over her shoulder at Danny Blue. *Might be able to steal a bit from him. Let me take a sniff at him and see.* She dropped the hands, moved back to sleeping Danny, touched his arm. A lot of what she’d put into him had been eaten up by the drain of the alterations, but she could pull back a small trickle without damaging what she’d made.
When she’d fed the children, she frowned down at them. There was a faint flush of color in their bodies, but the grass was still visible through them. *That be enough?*
Jaril wrinkled his nose. Enough to tell us how much more we need.*
Yaril drew her knees up, shook her head, not in denial, more to show her unhappiness with the way things were. *Brann, we’d better draw hard and fast, this isn’t really like with Amortis. He’ll hit back soon as he understands what’s happening and we don’t have Ahzurdan to stand ward for us.* A swift ghost of a smile. *All right, I admit I was wrong about him.*
*I hear. Hard and fast.* A pause. Brann drew her tongue along her lips. *When I give the word.* She pulled her hands from the children, folded her arms, hugged them tight against her. She closed her eyes, squeezed them shut, memories of pain scratching along her nerves; it can’t feel pain twice, but the body winces anyway when it knows that more is coming: For several breaths she couldn’t make herself say the word that would bring that agony down on her. Finally she straightened her back, her shoulders, lifted her head, set her hands on her thighs. “Do it.”
The children were glimmerglobes, paler than usual, drifting upward.
The children touched.
The children merged.
The children whipped into a thin arc, one end deep into the heart of the Chained God, the other sunk into Brann’s torso, she heard the shouted YES and pulled.
Godfire seared into her until she was burning, the grass under her was burning, the air round her was burning. She pulled until she was so filled with godfire an ounce more would spill from her control and turn her to ash and char.
The children sensed this and broke, tumbled to the grass before her, pale glass forms again. They reached for her, drew the godfire into themselves, drew and drew until she could think again, breath again, move again.
The god raged, but Yaril and Jaril threw a sphere of force about her until he/it calmed enough to reacquire reason. “What are you doing?” he/it thundered at them, the echoes of the multiple voices clashing and interfering until the words were garbled to the point of enigma. “What are you doing? What are you doing?
The children dropped to the grass a short distance from the sleeping body of Danny Blue; they sat leaning against each other, looking into a vague sort of distance, displaying an exaggerated indifference to what was happening around them. No. Not children any more. Young folk in that uncertain gap between childhood and maturity, doing what such folk often do best, irritatingly ignoring the crotchets of their elders, the questions, demands, rodomontades of those who thought they deserved respectful attention.
Brann rubbed her grilled palms on the cool grass, glanced at the changers, wrinkled her nose. Due to the convoluted workings of her fate, she’d skipped most of that phase of her development; at the moment she was rather pleased that she had. And rather shaken at the thought she had to cope with it in Yaril and Jaril. She pushed the thought aside and concentrated on the god who was still hooming unintelligibly. “If you’ll turn the volume down,” she said mildly, “perhaps I could understand what you’re saying and give you the answers you want.”
Silence for several minutes. When the god spoke, his/ its boom was considerably diminished. “What were you doing?”
“Taking recompense,” she said. “You asked me to do a thing, I did it. I spent my resources doing it, I nearly killed myself and the…” she looked at the changers, decided that children was no longer a suitable description, “… Yaril and Jaril. I simply took back what I used up.”
More silence (not exactly utter silence, it was filled with some strange small anonymous creaks and fizzes, punctuated with odd smells). Finally, the god said, “I’ll let it go this time, don’t try that again.”
“I hear,” she said, letting him hear in her tone (if he wanted to hear it) that she was making, no promises.
A pause, again filled with small sounds and loud smells. Lines of phosphor thin as her smallest finger spiderwalked about them, began passing through and through the sleeper, began brushing against her (she started the first time but relaxed when she felt nothing not even a tingle), began brushing against Yaril and Jaril who refused to notice them.
“When is Danny Blue going to wake?” The god’s multiple voice, sounded edgy. One of the phosphor lines was running fretfully (insofar as a featurless rod of light can have emotional content) around and around Danny Blue; it reminded Brann of a spoiled child stamping his feet because he couldn’t have something he wanted.
“I don’t know.” Brann watched the phosphor quiver and suppressed a smile. “When he’s ready, I suppose.”
“Wake him.”
“No.”
“What?”
“You heard me. You’ve waited for eons, wait a few hours more. If you wake his body now, you could lose everything else.”
“How do you know that?-
-I don’t. Know it, I mean. It’s a feeling. I’m not going against it, push or shove.”
The air went still. She had a sense of a huge brooding. The god needed her to deal with problems that might arise after Danny Blue eventually woke, she was safe until then. Afterwards? She felt malice held in check, a lot of the Admiral left in him/it, if what he said about the Admiral was anything like the truth.
“You are fighting me every way you can. Why?”
“If you do or say stupid things, you expect me to endorse them? Think again. It’s my life you’re playing with, the lives of my friends. You want an echo, get a parrot.” She scratched at her knee, sniffed at the stinking humid air, wrinkled her nose with disgust. “I’m hungry and he will be when he wakes. What you brought us here for is finished. Any reason we have to stay?”
The god thought that over for a while. Spiderlegs of phosphor flickered about Danny Blue, wove him into a cocoon with threads of light and took him away. Jaril shimmersphere darted after him, slipped through the walls with him. Yaril sighed, stretched. “Took him to Daniel’s bedroom, dumped him in the bed.”
Before Brann had a chance to say anything, the phosphor lines snapped back, wove a tight web about her and hauled her away, dumping her seconds later on the bed she’d slept in the night before. By the time she got herself together and sat up, Yaril was standing across the small room, watching her from enigmatic crystal eyes. She smiled at Brann and slid away through the doorfog. Brann grimaced, pushed off the bed onto her feet. She felt grubby, grimy. Good thing I can’t smell myself. Hmm. Start the teawater boiling, if I can remember which whatsits I should push, then a bath. She rubbed a fold of her shirt between thumb and forefinger. Wonder how they did their washing? Maybe the kids know. Hmm. I’m going to have to figure some other way of thinking about them. Wonder if that godstuff’s good for them, they’re growing so fast… I’d better take a look at Danny Blue. Ah ah the things that keep happening…