The Call of Eternity

57 | SIX HUNDRED DAYS

"I should have destroyed the portals sooner," Teshub said, stricken. He looked away, the muscles of his jaw clenching, his chest rising and falling. "The fault for your suffering is mine, Arinna. All of it."

"No," Thoth said, firm, "it is mine. If I had never created the portals in the first place just to satisfy my curiosity--"

"Still," Arinna murmured, "I should not have gone out unguarded. How many times have I relived that day, that foolish decision--" She fell silent for several beats, before taking a tremulous breath and continuing, "Once he was immortal, it was not long before Marduk was able to capture all of our brothers and sisters. He forced us to serve him, and often humiliated us before his guests for his entertainment." She looked at Baalat. "Horus he made suffer more than any other.

"For a million years we endured, seeking a way to free ourselves whilst he remade the world to his liking, filling it with weapons and wonders; controlling everyone with fear and lies; granting his chosen few the use of his regeneration device--those men and women would do anything for him to keep using that thing." She shuddered. "Anything."

"But Marduk made one mistake," Thoth said into the silence in the wake of Arinna's words. "It amused him to make me pilot his pleasure ships. To fly them I had to learn a portion of his language to be able to read the instrument panel. From that small selection of symbols, I was eventually able to decipher his language. I found the flight manuals to all the other ships and memorized them. All of them.

"The night we escaped," Thoth continued, "Marduk commanded me to fetch Arinna and bring her to him." Thoth cut a wary look at Teshub, whose grip on Arinna's hand tightened. She bit her lip and looked away, her cheeks darkening. "I went to get her, but I didn't take the ship I usually used. I took the fastest one, collected Arinna, and made for Surru, our last hope."

He lifted an eyebrow. "I feared Marduk might have destroyed it to prevent others from becoming immortal, but it still stood within its beautiful, verdant glade, untouched and forgotten." He sighed. "Surru was my greatest triumph. My other portals only crossed the distances between the stars, but Surru crossed the boundary between universes. The energy required to keep it open was phenomenal, but I managed to extract exotic matter found in--" he stopped, catching the uncomprehending looks of his listeners. He cleared his throat. "Never mind. What matters is unlike the other portals--which by then only led to dead worlds--Surru led to a young, beautiful world, burgeoning with life. It was the perfect place to begin again. We hid, expecting Marduk to come looking for us, but he never arrived. Instead of destroying the portal and saving ourselves, we decided to go back and attempt to liberate as many of the other gods as we could." Thoth looked around the suite, rueful. "But as you can see, things didn't quite work out the way we planned."

Teshub opened his mouth to speak but Thoth held up his hand, cutting him off. "Wait." He went to the side table, and collected two cups and the wine pitcher. "A demonstration might help," he said as he came back and placed the pitcher on the table, setting the cups before it, side by side. He gestured at the pitcher. "This is Surru portal viewed from the other universe where Arinna and I took refuge. It leads back to this universe, but because our universe had been split into two, there are two exits." He pointed at the left hand cup. "This exit leads to where Marduk is immortal: the place Arinna and I escaped from." He moved to point at the right hand cup. "And this leads here: where Marduk is still mortal. Where we are now. Where I should not be."

"The split," Teshub breathed, staring at the cups. "So instead of going back to your world, you emerged in ours."

"Yes," Thoth said setting the pitcher and cups aside. "A very unfortunate turn of events, considering the harm my presence is doing to the threads holding this one together."