Chapter Five The Villainess Calls Gods from the Machine #2
In Time of Iron, no god but Key could walk the earth as mortals did.
The gods could only make brief appearances, peering from clouds and trees and mirrors, speaking through oracles or through wind and fire.
The Great Goddess, Key’s mother, appeared that way several times in later books, trying to help her son.
Reading the books, Rae was glad gods didn’t show up much.
Gods in stories were tricky. Sometimes gods came to save mortals, sometimes to doom them.
There was always the worry the writer might try making a heavy-handed point about real-world religion.
Rae accepted the divine backstory as the reason Key had magic powers, and moved on.
Fine, gods, but Rae would have been equally happy if Key was a cruel faerie prince, a heart-eating enchanter, a gentleman demon or a vampire.
Now Rae lived in the story, now she knew the Cobra and others had walked into the story and changed it, Rae finally understood why, for this series, it had to be gods.
A collection of holy books considered so sacred they transformed a religion was called the canon.
A collection of books or plays or poems considered so important they changed what literature meant was called the literary canon.
When an audience loved a fictional world, they discussed what happened on the page and screen as canon.
When Alice said some victory of the Emperor’s seemed unlikely, Rae could smugly tell her, “It’s canon.
” What writers said about their own books was “the word of God”.
Time of Iron was a tale of destiny and doom, prophecies as stories you couldn’t escape, and the fear your fate was already written. The gods must show up.
The books were written by an anonymous author. Rae and the Cobra were both offered the chance to walk into this world by a woman who never told them her name. The Cobra once said, “Do writers have universe-travelling superpowers?”
What if one did?
Rae kept knocking on the mirror, praying for a way out. She kept demanding an answer.
If the writer was the Great Goddess, she would want to help Key. Rae always liked the Great Goddess, the Emperor’s mother.
With certain characters, you wanted them to be loved so much, you ended up loving them twice as hard to make up for everybody who never did.
Rae and Alice used to fight about whether the Emperor deserved love.
Honestly, Rae didn’t care if the Emperor deserved love or not.
She wanted to read that something hurt and monstrous and furious and strange and lonely could be loved.
She wanted that for Key before she ever met him. Now she wanted it a thousand times more.
In later books, the Great Goddess would raise an army to fight for her son.
The Great Goddess was the only one in all the books to ever say she loved the Emperor.
If she loved him, she would come. This was no time to be a deadbeat parent.
Key was never meant to get his throat cut.
Key was meant to go down into the abyss of his own free will, and kill the Great God his father, not the king.
His goddess mother once rocked Key’s cradle and sung him lullabies.
Until his father sacrificed the God-Child for power, Key’s blood pouring down and opening the abyss, changing this country into a place of dark divine magic.
The Great Goddess had torn out her husband’s eyes and departed the world.
The Goddess’s Oracle had prophesied that one day the God-Child would be reborn.
For centuries the god’s country and the god’s mother waited.
When the Emperor finally came, Rae ruined everything.
What was ruined could be fixed. Somebody had sent Rae to this world. Before Rae, she sent others. Somebody had written books about Key in Rae’s world. Rae had only one guess who.
Nothing came free. The woman – the Great Goddess, if it was her – must have sent Rae here for a reason.
Rae called for divine intervention until her voice broke.
She beat at the bronze until the skin on her knuckles bruised and split.
All she saw in the mirror was the face of a villain.
Beneath her tower window, clouds lay as close and grey as the smoke of war across the city.
Themesvar, her brilliant dreamed-of and longed-for fantastical city.
Its shining gates and tall walls breached, the glimmering silver threads of the rivers darkened and choked by the dead.
Even the flames in the dread ravine that yawned far below, blazing with the Emperor’s fury throughout this long night, were subsiding into a sullen glow like coals in a grate at evening’s end.
Rae raged against the dying of the light. “Answer me! How could you let this happen? Tell me! Fix this! Help him!”
There was no answer save the faraway hiss of eternal fire, the moans of the dead, and the silence of the gods.
And then, the creak of the door behind her.
Rae didn’t even turn her head. She glimpsed the dim reflection of a blue dress and a white apron in the bronze mirror.
A maid’s uniform. Rae smiled cynically at her own reflection.
Lady Rahela was a noblewoman of the court.
Rae might be a liar and a murderer, but she wouldn’t have to do her own hair.
In the mirror, the new maid wielded a pearl-handled brush. Lia would have sweetly sent her away.
“Brush out the tangles,” Rae ordered. “Then fetch water for my bath.”
The maid laid a hand on Rae’s bare shoulder. It was heavier than a hand should be. Her touch was cold.
The maid’s voice grated like broken stones on a grave. “I must have been mistaken. I thought I heard you call for a god.”
Rae grasped the edge of the dressing table so hard splinters bit into her fingertips. In the bronze mirror, the maid’s eyes shone like milk under the moon. Dead eyes. This was a ghoul.
When Key commanded the dead, they said Rae’s name, but nothing else. Key was a young god. This was no young god’s work.
The Great Goddess was his mother. It made sense they might have the same powers. Rae felt a rush of pure, sweet relief. The goddess had come. They were saved.
“Are you the one who sent me through the door to this world?”
A pause like a stone, followed by a word like a stone. “Yes.”
“And are you the one who wrote the books – about this world, or to create this world, or however it works?”
A breath like cold wind. “I am the one who made it all. Yes.”
“I’m sorry,” Rae breathed back. “I lied that I was a prophet of the gods, which I now realize was the worst cover story I could have told. I pulled Key into my plots. I lied to him, I lied to everyone. I did worse than that.”
She hid her face in her hands.
At her despair, the dead maid said: “Did you wish only to confess? Are you finished, little storyteller?”
Rae straightened her spine. “I’m not finished. I know Key is the hero, that he should be the hero. I didn’t realize it was him, but now I do. Will you help him?”
The divine voice echoed strangely from between dead lips. “I waited centuries to see my son again. I am not the one who needs to prove my devotion.”
Rae remembered, as she often did, the sight of the knife opening Key’s throat. “I never wanted him to get hurt!”
“Want,” whispered the dead, “has nothing to do with it.”
The ghoul said nothing more. If it weren’t for the dead hand, so cold the chill seeped through her skin to lace her blood with ice, Rae would have thought the Great Goddess had departed.
Gods didn’t care what you wanted.
She knew what the goddess cared for. “Tell me what I can do to help him. I’ll do anything.”
“You called him a hero,” the dead voice responded. “Tell me. What is a hero’s reward?”
“Uh.” Rae thought it over. “A happy ending. Enemies defeated, and – true love?”
In the bronze lake of the mirror, Rae saw the dead woman’s head nod with a jerk, the movement of a puppet on a string carelessly pulled.
Rae gave a shaky, disbelieving laugh. “You sent me through a portal to meet your son and see if we hit it off? Divine magic reinvents online dating?”
The dead voice rang like a slammed stone door. “Do not dare to dream. You are not his true love. One day, my son will love somebody truly. It could never be you.”
Rae bit her lip. “Obviously. I know I’m not heroine material.”
Ridiculous of her to think otherwise, even for a moment.
When she got sick, people were sympathetic at first. Until the amount of help she needed became inconvenient, so they wanted to leave.
Until pain and exhaustion left her short-tempered, so they blamed her as they went.
Her old boyfriend left. So did every one of her friends.
Even her father left. Nothing about Rae inspired devotion.
The goddess must have seen Rae betray Key. The goddess must hate her.
Rae took a deep breath. “I’m a villain. But here’s the thing about villains. We’re useful.”
Nothing about her past let Rae imagine being truly loved. Everything about her past meant she could imagine enduring any pain, to get shit done.
“Are you?”
The question sounded contemptuous. Rae rushed ahead anyway. She wanted to help Key, but like most villains she was selfish. She wanted to get hers, too.
“If I prove myself, will you send me home?”
The window darkened so Rae couldn’t see the city beyond, or anything but a grey haze; the goddess had wrapped a cloud around the tower top as she thought Rae’s proposition over.
In the dark, the bargain was struck. “If I decide you have been useful enough, I will send you home.”
“And Key will be all right?”
“If you fulfil the terms of the bargain,” stipulated the goddess. “Victory over the enemy. True love. Escaping his doom.”
In the books, the Emperor never was really happy.
His queen died, without ever saying she loved him.
Knowing Lia as she did now – good, beautiful, clever and very uninterested in men – Rae suspected Lia never had.
The Emperor tried to bring his queen back from death, but never succeeded.
The Emperor conquered the world, at the cost of many deaths.
The final book wasn’t out yet, but Rae feared the story was going nowhere good.
The end of the latest book haunted Rae, it seemed so utterly hopeless.
The Emperor, sitting on his throne beneath the broken moon. The fulfilment of the last prophecy.
If she changed the Emperor’s fate, she might make up for everything she’d done wrong.
Rae promised, “I won’t fail you. Or him.”
“If you fail me, you will never go home. If you fail him, the last prophecy comes true. You don’t want that, do you?”
The goddess’s promises in return sounded more like threats. This, Rae thought, must be what they meant by divine retribution.
The first prophecy predicted Key’s coming. The last prophecy predicted Key’s fate. Rae didn’t even like to think about it. Rae shook her head.
The goddess laughed without breath. “Don’t fail, storyteller.”
The cold hands lifted. The door closed. The divine presence and the dead vanished away, leaving Rae alone in the dark.
Rae stood and hurled herself down on the bed without closing the curtains or drawing back the bed covers. Gold and silver pollen still clung to her long midnight hair from when the Flower of Life and Death bloomed bright above her head.
She’d almost got away, if it hadn’t been for those meddling villains and how she’d ended up caring about them.
She could still escape, and save Key too. She had made a new bargain. All Rae needed to do right now was sleep. Tomorrow was another scheme.
Lightning cut across the pale sky, like wickedly long knife strokes striking sparks across an alabaster surface. Rae lay with her hands folded over her breast, like a beauty in a coffin, her fingers linked in with the chain of the Abandon All Hope Diamond.
Until cool coils of a different kind looped around her hand and wrist. Rae sobbed out a scream.
Lady Rahela, a woman with every possible evil accessory, had owned a pet snake.
When Rae took over Rahela’s body, she adopted the viper as her mascot and named her Victoria Broccoli, in homage to a woman in the history of her own world who owned a snake called Emily Spinach and coined the phrase “If you can’t say anything nice, sit down next to me. ”
Her snake lashed out at the king when he came for Rae. The king ended Victoria Broccoli’s life beneath his shining boot.
Now, Rae saw with horror creeping as cold as the snake, the Emperor had given her pet back.
Victoria Broccoli twined around Rae’s hand as of old, moving slower than she had when alive.
Rae remembered a dark pattern on Victoria’s head, almost like a black heart, but the heart had been crushed along with Victoria’s skull under the king’s heel.
Key had mended the skull for her, in his way.
A black jewel was set in Victoria’s head now, between her once-sharp black eyes.
Back and forth Victoria looped, around Rae’s wrist and between her fingers, in the familiar soothing patterns. Perhaps she knew no other way. Perhaps she was sent to please Rae, to terrify her, or both.
Sweet nightmares, my lady.
The ceiling in the room at the top of the tower ended in a point, as if Rae was a rabbit trapped beneath a witch’s hat.
Mirrored lightning on the vaulted white ceiling refracted in her vision, a kaleidoscope of amethyst and diamond, a hatful of stars she couldn’t reach.
Rae curled up to sleep with her dead snake, cursed necklace cold upon her breast.
The last thing she saw before she slept were red eyes, as cold as rubies lost underwater. The last thing she thought was that surely her stepsister and her maid were in the mountains by now. She had sent Lia and Emer to safety. She had done at least one good thing.