What I Wrote Yesterday For "The Judgment of London"

 

WORD COUNT: 28,302

(Hey, not bad for two hours of intense focus at a write-in! -- David)

 

“Let us get one thing straight: you … are a betalife.”

Something got lost in that between Mortimer – wait a second, it was Hermes now (or was it still Mortimer?) – saying it and Parisi hearing it. Sounded mushy. “I’m a WHAT?”

“Okay,” the messenger god who had flown them both twenty blocks away from the erstwhile editorial and printing offices of The Horse evoked, “do you know what an alpha male is?” Hermes sat her down, almost punch drunk, and faced her squarely.

Parisi: I’m a mover and shaker, and … um, [PARISI rises and emphasizes her curves by running her hands along her body] definitely not a male. “Alpha woman”, don’t you mean?

Mortimer/Hermes: [to PARISI] Keep your voice and your butt down! [HERMES accents this by applying his hands to her shoulders and PARISI quickly falls to her knees, then rises to a crouch again.]

Parisi: [to HERMES, angrily] Okay, okay. You don’t have to push me through the roof!

Hermes: [to PARISI, attempting tenderness as he lifts her hands from her shoulders] Sorry about that, forgot my own strength there. [HERMES explains with a tone indicating he does not suffer fools gladly] A betalife is someone the Fates do not have a thread for, yet he or she lives.

PARISI: [looks incredulous at HERMES] The Fates?
HERMES: Of course the Fates! Clotho who spins the thread of each person’s life, Lachesis who measures the thread of each person’s life, and Atropos who cuts the thread.

PARISI: And?

HERMES: And? What do you mean, and?

PARISI: What happens when Atropos cuts the thread of my … [PARISI shivers even though there is no breeze] life.

HERMES: You’re dead. But here’s the kicker … there is no thread for you.

“Enough with the playwriting!” Parisi took Hermes’ hand, the one grasping a just appearing staff with two winding serpents. “So if the Fates have no thread … for me, does that mean I am not alive?”

Hermes drilled her eyes into her as he began to glow a faint blue. Parisi slapped him on the hand and popped out, “Will you STOP doing that? If we want those goons to find us, all they have to do is look up!” Parisi Gates did not remember herself when she arrived at the offices of The Horse, but from the look of the sky surrounding them it was a gentle dusk. A dangerous one, for you could still make out abnormal lights above, and who knows what equipment those who assaulted the office of The Horse had to detect things out of the ordinary?

Hermes turned away and pondered, “I knew Rebekah was a believer, but this is not like the Laoconics at all. If they want to shut down a press organ, they typically go through a burning of their offices and papers, not a systematic raid.”

“OK,” Parisi figuratively stood up and called to Hermes, “it is not polite to talk with your back turned – in fact, it is just rude! What have the Laoconics got to do with this?”

Hermes paused before offering out loud, “A great deal. What do you know about them – the Laoconics, I mean.”

“What most everyone knows, unless they’re serious scholars,” Parisi began to parrot, “Descended from a Trojan priest and his two sons, their symbol is a pair of swirling snakes,” and then Hermes opened his hands to reveal his staff, a copper shaft surrounded by the sterling representations of two mirror scaled serpents. Parisi continued, “Just like that one you have in your hand! Just.” Then the staff or the snakes – maybe it was Parisi’s eyes playing tricks on her past four and a quarter hourglasses – began to move, gingerly and almost imperceptibly.

“Just. Like. That. One.”
If anyone had asked many hourglasses later why Parisi Gates’ frustration had been replaced with fear, she could not have answered them except for protesting, one word at a time, that she was confronted with something she could not. quite. understand.

“This … just is not your lifetime, is it?” Lady Cerriwin Farthingsworth indwelt by Eris the goddess of discord crouched down to sneer into her fallen adversary’s ear. “hanging upside down from a chandelier, escaping that; having your dance studio trashed, and escaping that; meeting up with the heroes of our little drama and their not even wanting your help – and now you are coming to me!”

“Exactly,” Jennifer Terpsichore spat out through a straining jaw and spitting out some teeth after this … Lady would have been a polite word for the indwelling muse (though where the muse of dance and the lady of the studio respectively began and ended was a scientific question better reserved for another day) to use to describe She Who Had Ordered her drawn and quartered … but softened up first. “Exactly why … I need to prove,” Jennifer Terpsichore coughed before she could gasp out the rest of her sentence.

Then she sprawled out her six foot form upon the grassy knoll and said no more.

“OH NO! I am not letting a little thing like you being dead keep me from knowing all I need to.” Lady Cerriwin rose and with a wave of her hand used a modicum of Eris’ power to animate the dancer. Slowly she rose – with Cerriwin’s eyes Eris could see the dancer and the muse rising … and then falling.

“What?” She looked at the ring of acolytes around her and was annoyed at this apparent failure of her power to resurrect a simply constructed woman. Undeterred, Lady Cerriwin put her fingers to the neck of Jennifer Terpsichore to feel her pulse to ensure she was not faking. Just as she prepared to, Lady Cerriwin felt a tap on her shoulder in Golden Apple Park.

“Who dares?” That’s as far as she – that and whirling her head about in a blur – got before Parisi Gates’ right hook connected with her square left jaw. Which turned out to be a glass jaw.

Eris felt Lady Cerriwin’s painful bruise developing on her face and started to snicker, then laugh, then guffaw before laughing out loud.

“You … Idiot!” Parisi was startled by the surprising composure and outright amusement – of course, now Parisi Gates the betalife now knew why she was bolstered so superbly – of Lady Cerriwin Farthingsworth. But only for a moment.

She sat sprawled with one leg stretched to her right and then her left leg inward as though ready for a pleasant picnic, yet the smoldering fire in her eyes communicated anything BUT pleasantry. “Oh, you don’t know who you’re dealing with, do you, betalife?”

Parisi lamented, “Oh I know. Someone who used to be a great person in the world, but now she is a spoiled brat because the high priestess’ vestment went to someone else, someone better --,”

That clinched it. “Angeline was NOT better!” A black bolt from her eyes sent Parisi sprawling and would have most likely fried her except for the Gate power that shunted off the brunt of the blast. “I am ten times the servant, ten times the mistress, ten times the,”

“You forgot ‘ten times as obnoxious’,” came Jennifer Terpsichore’s voice as she stretched her legs up and wrapped them around Lady Cerriwin’s neck. It was a comical sight, three women in the park fighting over the fortunes of a god. How history does repeat itself …

Her face surrounded by Jennifer Terpsichore’s thighs and her hands held down by Jennifer Terpsichore’s own, Lady Cerriwin heard the voice call behind her – even though she couldn’t use her magic on her because she was not in her direct line of sight, “Messenger, use cables, rocks – anything under her to bind her in place!”

Despite the shaking of earthquake (though it is still undetermined to this day whether they came because of godly whim or natural cause) the ground beneath and around Lady Cerriwin pulsated blue and varied objects to jump over her body and tie her down. Hermes could not see Lady Cerriwin/Eris due to the perpetual masking spell Eris had used when recreating him after their last encounter, but he could see who she possessed and thereby affect her.

Would this hold the Goddess of Discord? Judging from her laugh and Parisi’s own inability to focus on Lady Cerriwin’s body and beam her … say, to the center of the earth,

“Do you remember how we first met, Mateo?”

“My Lady?” the man referred to, unused for quite some time at the speaker upon her triumph and leopard skin draped couch not referring to him as “Mine”, said as he bowed before her born Cerriwin Farthingsworth with a tray of skewered and sweet meats. Used to her often capricious moods that were not uncommonly dispatching slower servants to Hades before their threads would normally be cut, Mateo proceeded with caution, remaining bent on one knee with the tray.

“Not how we first MET in the temple service,” she elaborated, for like nearly all who had hitched their wagons to the raven haired Lady Cerriwin’s rising star, Mateo Echevarria too was once a member of the Laoconic priesthood – every one, no matter what they actually did, was a priest – “but how,” she spoke between bites of skewered shellfish, “you came to serve,” and here Lady Cerriwin stretched her right leg to the left of Mateo’s profile, and her left leg began to join it there (oh how handsome he was, prostrate with his white mane of hair facing HER), “to serve … closer to Me.”

To his Lady and long ago friend, Mateo was an open book. In fact, his deed had been recorded (and in fact was part of the reason the best of the handlers of the serpents among the priestly order documented in close to a millennium had faked her own death – one only left the Laoconic Order, or the Falsettos, or any other large scale faith she herself was aware of, that way – and thereby left the service of the Laoconics) and would have been lost in a musty archive on some perhaps crumbling scrollHor but for a king who could not sleep one night.

One of the office assailants turned at the sound of their passage and her hood fell back, revealing a head of blond hair. Though the sackcloth typical of adherents to the Laoconic Order made distinguishing gender well nigh impossible, in the next instant hearing her voice made Mortimer certain who it was – Rebekah Renee Randash, who worked with him in the office after her “real world” job.

It was the first time Parisi Gates had ever seen Mortimer freeze or be uncertain as she jimmied the catch to the surprisingly spacious ventilator shaft often, finishing his job with a nail file. She jabbed his shoulder, “Hey, Mort – hey Golden Boy!” It took three jabs, each more forceful than the last and the third almost making him keel over, to get his attention. “Let’s go, unless you want to be part of this wreckage!”
Mortimer in his stocking cap adorned with the pattern of wings and a sob hiding itself behind his beard, nodded affirmatively. “Oh. Yeah, right.” Ignoring any decorum, he jumped ahead of Parisi and began to wiggle his way into the passage leading to another shaft that would hopefully lead somewhere outside of their current situation.

Parisi snorted as the patterns of torches waving were coming closer to making her and where Mortimer had stood visible. The mystery of Rebekah had to wait, but as least they would both know how the Laoconics knew where to go and did not just torch the place with local authorities looking the other way.

“If you ever choose to cross me – JUST ONCE – it is the last thing you will ever do!” Eris though an unseen body conveyed to Her own disciple. “If I can find the thread that cannot be cut, then there is nothing I can not do! Discord reigns.”

The chant came from a soldier who loved her. “Discord reigns.”

Eris slapped him across the face. “Eris reigns, spawn!”

“Yes, forgive me Holiness … Eris reigns.”

“When the Alliance marched upon Olympus, Who kept the gods fighting each other and not the plundering hordes of Agamemnon and Hector?” She walked back and forth in shimmering silver, her face concealed