Seduction (Curse of the Gods #3)

No! I couldn’t let the Chaos take over right now. I wrangled with my focus, trying to direct it back to my mother, but the swarm of bodies spilling into the arena was growing larger with every passing moment, until I was forced to turn and confront the scene. Tears were spilling into my vision but I swiped them away, and suddenly the bodies weren’t just bodies, but servers. And they weren’t just swarming, they were charging. Most of them were armed with weapons: not the rudimentary kind that you would expect them to have, but the fancy, ornate kind that you would expect the gods to have.

I stumbled back a step and grabbed onto the arm of my mother—Donald—the server. She glanced to my hand on her arm, as though surprised, but then seemed to forget about me as the other Abcurses appeared, slowly forming a shield around us.

“You need to get out of here!” Coen yelled over his shoulder. “The gods want to punish us, and they’ve finally figured out how. You need to leave—” He paused to wrestle an axe from the hands of a server that had tried to swing in the general direction of his torso. He threw the axe aside, raised his fist, and brought it crashing down on the server’s head. I watched as the poor man dropped immediately to the ground, and then as Coen took down another four of them.

“You need to leave because these servers aren’t going to stop.” Yael was shouting this time, throwing aside a spear. “They’ll attack all the sols and dwellers at Blesswood until they can get to you. We can’t protect everyone here unless you’re already safe.”

I considered arguing, but they were right about one thing. The others needed protection, and that included my mother and Emmy.

“I’ll get carriages and pull them up outside the arena!” I grabbed my mother’s arm and pulled her toward the entrance of the arena, almost surprised to see that the path was clear ahead of me. The gods had thought that I would stay and fight … and they were partly right. I had every intention of coming back and fighting, but I needed to take care of Emmy first.

“You need to obey me, right?” I asked my mother, pulling her up to the first row of seats at the very back of the arena.

All of the students were staring, almost climbing over each other to see into the arena, but some had taken their attention away to watch my progress.

“Yes, Sacred One. Of course. Anything you des—”

“Good.” I pointed at the stand before us. “I need you to help evacuate all these people.”

“Where should I evacuate them to, Sacred One?”

“Back to their dorm rooms.”

She nodded, and then began to walk off, shouting out orders to evacuate. I watched her for a click; I was frozen, unable to continue in my task. She was shouting, but her voice was still cold and ineffectual. It didn’t sound like my mother’s. And my mother certainly wouldn’t have been able to follow such a simple task without falling over herself or being bribed to do it in the first place.

It’s still her, a voice tried to whisper in the back of my mind. You can’t think away the reality. That’s your mother. They’ve done something to her. She’s a server now. That means … that means … she must have …

“Everyone needs to evacuate!” I yelled, as loudly as I could. I needed to drown out the voice of reason in my head. “Evacuate back to your dorm rooms! It’s for your own safety! Everyone please evacuate!”

Only a few of the sols followed my order, but once people began to move from the stands, more followed their lead, and soon everyone was standing and shuffling toward the exits. After a few clicks, they started running, a panicked rush of noise swelling around me. I could see some of the servers climbing the walls on the other side of the arena, knives between their teeth as though they were specially-designed assassins sneaking into a building full of tokens. I had no idea what a group of servers would do with a building full of tokens, though. They would probably just end up cleaning them all and then stacking them neatly, before sneaking right back out the way they had come.

I turned to the barrier behind me and placed my hands against it, leaning over a little to see the wall beneath. Sure enough, the servers had started to swarm there as well. They still looked so cold, so inhuman, but there was something frightening about them now. A being created for the sole purpose of blindly following the orders of the narcissistic gods really shouldn’t have been allowed to handle knives. There were two right beneath me: one of them had a wicked-looking spear that he poked up in my direction, while the other had what used to be a spear, but was now a broken-off, wooden staff. She must have lost the pointy end in the fighting down below.

I swiped out haphazardly for the spear that was still intact, but one of the sols behind me knocked into my back, sending me further over the barrier than I had intended to lean, and I was so busy scrambling for balance that I simply grabbed onto the only thing my fingers could reach, and yanked it back up over the barrier with me. There was a little resistance at first—the server was having enough trouble as it was trying to climb the wall—but they eventually gave up their war with the spear and I jumped back from the barrier. I spun around, turned the spear in my hands, and aimed the pointy end at the hand that had just slapped against the surface of the barrier. A face soon followed: female, expressionless, bald.

“You have taken my designated Order Stick,” she told me.

“Your Order-what-now?” I replied, glancing down at the tip of the spear. It was the broken one. Of course it was a broken one. It looked like a splintered broom-handle.

The server pulled her torso over the barrier, and then swung herself up, swinging her legs around and dropping to her feet in front of me.

“Order,” she said, making a stabbing motion as though she still held the spear. “Order. Order. Order. It is an Order Stick.”

“Ohh …” I drew out the word, trying to tell myself that I wasn’t stalling.

I really didn’t want to hurt any of the servers, even though it looked like the Abcurses were taking them down by the dozen in the arena. It wasn’t the servers’ fault. The gods were using them to punish … us? The Abcurses? Me? Every gods-dammed being in Blesswood?

“What do you call those?” I asked, using my broken spear to point at the axe that had just appeared over the top of the barrier, a server’s hand gripping it as he lifted himself up.

“Those are the Silencing Sticks, Sacred One.”

And then I realised that she wasn’t trying to attack me just as much as I wasn’t trying to attack her. I watched in confusion as the server with the axe cleared the barrier, looked right at me, and then jumped up over the first row of seats without so much as pausing. Two more armed servers cleared the barrier, and still nobody attacked me. I watched the man with the spear land next to the female server whose weapon I had stolen, and I wondered if we had somehow gotten all of this wrong. Maybe this wasn’t what it looked like. Maybe they weren’t trying to hurt us. Maybe they were trying to escape—

“Oh my gods!” I yelled, as the man with the spear reached around me, stabbing one of the sols running past right through the shoulder. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Order,” the woman-server reminded me, making another imaginary stabbing motion.