Glory smiled. She hadn't missed the expression on Charane's face when Dylan had interrupted her, the moment when the mask of smiling serenity had slipped to reveal a flash of pure fury. Anybody who could get angry that fast wasn't quite as smug about things as they were putting about.
"But tell me what I can do to entertain you. I'd hate to think you'd come all this way just to be bored," Charane cooed with poisonous sweetness.
Glory stared at her blankly. As far as Glory could tell, the Warmother was the original Bad Hat, but there didn't seem to be any dignity about her evilness. Even supposing you said she was so powerful and so inhuman that she didn't care about the human suffering that she caused—why was she so interested in causing it? If she was that inhuman, how could she calculate the grief she caused to a tax accountant's nicety, killing the Allimir off by inches?
She couldn't.
And if she did know precisely what she was doing, and how much it hurt—and she must—all this pretending she didn't, and making them pretend along with her, was the mark of a particularly nasty, low-minded, undignified bully.
Glory hated bullies. They all knew Charane could kill her, and it was hard to get excited about anything less. And as a matter of fact, this part of things always did bore her, in books and movies and the like—the part where the villain paraded his or her superior might and boasted about his or her plans, showed off whatever Doomsday Machine might be knocking about the shop, and attempted to impress the onlookers with a sense of their vast futility and unimportance.
"Look," Glory said, a little desperately, "could we just skip all the stuff where you explain about how invincible you are and how nobody can stand against you and just get to the part where you try to kill us? Because if you really—"
" 'Try' to kill you?" Charane said, standing up. "Do you think that I cannot? I am War, and Darkness, and the fear that comes for a man in the lonely places. Do you think that I cannot destroy you if I please? I have destroyed the Allimir—"
"Not yet," Glory heard herself say.
Charane stared at Glory as if she'd slapped her.
"They aren't all dead yet," Glory explained reasonably, still hoping they could skip the villain-talk. "So either you can't destroy them, or you can, and you're just toying with them when you know they don't have any way of fighting back. And that isn't exactly the sort of thing they write songs about, you know. It's petty. Lilith Kane doesn't do things like that."
Dylan winced and said something under his breath.
"I will scour the Allimir from the plains of the Serenthodial," Charane said conversationally. She straightened to her full height and spoke to the room at large. "You see here beside me the last hope of the Allimir—the hero their precious Oracle has delivered to them! You know what I am, as she does not: No warrior born of woman, no weapon forged in the world, can unmake my form, yet their Slayer has come here to slay me!"
The room exploded with laughter—nervous and fearful, it was true, but laced with enough mockery to make Glory think that whatever the truth might be, those here in this room believed Charane's words.
And that meant they might be true.
Had Belegir known this, or suspected it? Was this a part of the dream the Oracle had given him? That no matter how many fancy swords Glory had, she'd fail?
And would she have acted any differently if she'd known that?
"But she shall be slain instead, and you, my chosen people, I shall turn loose upon this pleasant realm to reap my red harvest. I shall populate this world with my legions, until all the world runs crimson with War once more!"
There were wild cheers from the creatures assembled below.
"And then what?" Glory asked, getting to her feet as well.
The cheering for Charane continued, banging off the walls and filling the room. It was so loud Glory couldn't hear herself speak, but somehow Charane heard her. The Warmother's head whipped around; she stared at Glory with her blue, blue eyes.
Glory stared stubbornly back. "So the whole world runs red with War. What then? It's just one world."
"Many things," Charane said, though for the first time she sounded ever so faintly uncertain. Glory could hear her plainly, as though the two of them were the only people in the room. "But you will not live to see them, Vixen the Slayer."
Glory sighed, and wondered why it was that nobody here could keep her straight from her character. She'd given it her best shot, but they'd had the threats and exposition part of things after all. She guessed there was a Villains Handbook to go right along with the Heroes one. Someday she'd like to get her hands on the loon who'd written both of them. At least she knew what came next.