Chapter 21 of 35 · Book 4, The Gate of the Feral Gods

Chapter 21 — Ghazi

Book: The Gate of the Feral Gods · Previous: Chapter 20 — Gwendolyn Duet · Next: Chapter 22 — Mrs. Ghazi · Floor: Floor 5 — The Bubbles · Series: the series

Opening

Donut, Mongo, and I scrambled to follow Katia through the electrified doorway and into the

Summary

Inside the sandcastle everything is glass. In a fountain room stands a singing half-naiad, very like Tsarina Signet, the third-floor elite whose show, Vengeance of the Daughter, Carl is contracted to join on the next floor, above a plaque of obsessive love addressed to Lika; Mongo topples her and Carl keeps the glass head. Tran finds the redundant cable fits both the drain wheel and the tower's contact; Carl has him hook it to the wheel only. In the basement they find a sand-floored hoarder's den where Ghazi, a level-43 Glass Mage, watches television. His card: a Larracos College mage who claimed to seek the Gate for teleportation research but really wanted controlled access to the Nothing to bargain with Yarilo, the banished god of Lust, to make Lika — a fictional celibate bard from Larracos stage plays — fall in love with him. The thing he summoned was not Yarilo.

The sand is a mob. It oozes under the door; Protective Shell blows the door, Donut's Wall of Fire traps the mage on their side, and Carl bluffs that the college needs the winding box to save the world. Ghazi believes him; Carl punches him out and takes his satchel: the Mysterious Winding Box, a humidor with two watch-shaped cutouts, and a council letter. The creature, the council writes, is Psamathe, a banished lesser deity with an ooze familiar, who duped Ghazi, is not fully across, and has likely taken the strongest half-present mind in reach — Queen Quetzalcoatlus, the ghost; if the ghost gains flesh Psamathe is resurrected and 'the true gods would be forced to react'. Ghazi was to use the box to banish himself and the whole necropolis into the Nothing, and his name is struck from the Tome of Scholars. Beneath it Tish tells him that his lust has cost them the artifact they needed against Scolopendra, and that she was there the whole time.

Awake, Ghazi explains: the ooze is Psamathe's familiar, reborn from a single grain of sand, and cannot die while her master is in the tomb. It is also his wife — the false Yarilo married them on the spot, and after the consummation he found the real Lika still crystallised and his bride made of sand. She eats him every day while he is sand; 'That's how oozes tell you they love you.' He is human only during the storm, when his workroom and the fountain room return. Lika herself was a personal companion device with a soul trapped in it — a sex doll — who told him to come here; she lies in pieces in the fountain room, and Carl has her head. An hour before the halls turn back to sand, Carl asks: 'Tell me how you killed your wife the last time you did it.'

Characters

• Carl — 'The college needs it'; a punch; the winding box; a sex doll's head in his inventory.
• Princess Donut — Torch too bright; Astral Paw on a magazine pile; Wall of Fire; Tish's champion.
• Katia Grim — Sees the sand climb the door; catches the mage.
• Mongo — Breaks Lika; sniffs the dark.
• Ghazi — A neckbeard in a bathrobe married to an ooze; the Tome of Scholars; Inuyasha.
• Lika — A companion device with a soul; a fictional trobairitz; 'It's sticky.'
• Tish — 'I was here the whole time.'
• Samantha — A banished lesser deity the council believes rides Quetzalcoatlus.
• Quetzalcoatlus — Possessed, the council believes; must not gain flesh.
• Tsarina Signet — A half-naiad like Lika; the sixth-floor contract remembered.
• Scolopendra — 'Will never be defeated now,' says Tish.
• Gwendolyn Duet — 'You are a crazy fucker.'
• Tran — The cable reaches the wheel.

Locations

• The sandcastle — Glass halls; a fountain; a basement den on a living floor; the stairwell beyond.
• Larracos — The College of Magecraft; the theatre district; the Tome of Scholars.

Motifs

• The Gate of the Feral Gods — The winding box taken; the council's order to banish the tomb.
• The gods — Yarilo, Psamathe, 'the true gods'; things from the Nothing lie about who they are.
• The sand ooze — Psamathe's familiar; a wife of sand; unkillable while she lives.
• Elites — Tsarina Signet recalled; Scolopendra named in a letter.
• The mobs are victims — A mage who does not age, eaten daily, watching cartoons.
• Quests — 'the hint of a spell being cast'; interrogation over a ticking storm.