City of the Plague God: Chapters 16–24

There were crude charcoal sketches on pieces of whitewashed plaster, carefully transplanted into a frame.

"Why do you do it?" I asked. "Take them in, knowing you'll outlive them?"
"I am the goddess of love. How can I not?"
And the goddess of war. Was this her way of making amends for that role?

Beside it was a photo of the same spot, though the paper had turned ocher with age, with a boy hanging upside down from those same branches while Ishtar laughed at his antics.

I realized the old man and the boy were the same person—it was all in the eyes, the vitality undiminished despite the many decades.

Behind them were another dozen or so monstrous creatures, no two alike. One even had the head of a fly and a stunted pair of semi-transparent wings.

He'd swapped his old, flabby shape for that of a lion the size of a rhino, fangs the length of cutlasses, and claws that could tear through tanks as if they were tin.

She moved with a feline, predatory grace, and I understood why the lion was her sacred animal: It was all about languid power.

I'd seen her on the corpse-littered battlefields, filled with rapture. Part of her wanted to enjoy the bloodshed, even now.

Black bile oozed out of its sliced body.

The nearest fashion boutique suddenly cracked in half as Ishtar smashed Nergal through the glazed facade and most of its support columns.

The hind legs scrabbled wildly in the air for a few seconds before the message got through: It was dead.

Demons were perched all around me on derelict equipment and abandoned train cars like the audience of a gladiatorial match.

"I am glorious still! Do you not know who raised humanity out of the quagmire of the Dark Ages?"

"Indeed! With my plague! Half of Europe was decimated by the Black Death, forcing society to evolve! If not for that, you would still be digging for roots, a serf forever bound to your master."

As he clambered stiffly off his perch, his pain was obvious.

The dense iron of the locomotive rusted from his mere presence, and the paltry patches of grass shriveled and died under his feet.

"A plague, my lord. One that boils his spleen and rots his lungs."

It took me a few seconds to appraise my situation.

My chance of survival was bleak, verging on nonexistent.

If I got this wrong, it wasn't just a one-star review on Yelp; it was a fast trip down Nergal's feather-lined gullet.

He threw out a wave of pestilence and decay. The air turned thick and foul, as if I'd been dipped into a cesspit. The vegetation, feeble as it was, died, and the earth cracked open.

"I'm feeling faint." He sank into his chair, his pallor turning gray. Which was not a good color on him.

Then Belet had taken me straight to a discreet boutique hotel called Nineveh, whose manager had been great friends with Ishtar. We went up to the penthouse suite, no questions asked.

It was decorated in the goddess's flawless style, with elegant furniture, tables from Versailles, linens from Egypt, lacquered cabinets out of Beijing, and masterpieces covering the lapis-lazuli-tiled walls, including a portrait of Ishtar by a guy named Matisse.

The baklava roiled in my stomach.

Belet blanched, and I was too stunned to say anything.

The paths lead this way and that through a labyrinth of foliage, and one tree looks pretty much like any other to me.

The plague dog bayed.

I knew she craved a glorious final stand. To go out battling against massive odds before, inevitably, being killed, just like her mother had.

He wore a pair of stained olive-green overalls without a shirt underneath, and he had a broad utility belt holding pruning shears, twine, a hand rake, and a trowel.

"All that time I spent in palaces, clad in silks and gold, not realizing that true riches come from the soil," he said.

She glowered at her tower of treats as though it had insulted her.

"I've renounced all weapons."

How many sacrifices had Gilgamesh witnessed before realizing how futile they all were?

Gilgamesh pulled out a stinging nettle.

"So, this seed settles in the soil of Mesopotamia, and it grows and blossoms into a flower. The strain flourishes in some lonely place in the desert until, one day, thousands of years later, a keen botanist stumbles upon it."

I could picture his excitement at finding a flower he couldn't categorize, growing in some lonely, desolate part of Iraq.

You've cheated death, and that has consequences. There will be an...urge within you, and around you, to redress the imbalance of being alive when you shouldn't be.

"The plague boy!" someone shouted. "He's got leprosy!"

"Look! You can see the black boils! He's gone bubonic!"