Gods of Earth (10 page)

“What is it?” Chance asked Seth again.

“Too quiet,” the coyote answered. “To-to-too few.” He sniffed at the ground and said nothing more.

Chance craned his neck and looked up at the buildings soaring above them. “Who lives in the higher floors?” he asked. In the tall buildings, the first three or four floors of windows were bright and clean, with white curtains behind them or even occasionally a person sitting at a windowsill and looking out at those who passed by. But the higher windows were everywhere dim, or broken, or covered over with stone or wood.

“No one,” Seth said. “Too high, high. Plenty of room down in the bottom.”

“A significant portion of the buildings are uninhabitable in the higher floors,” Mimir added. “Many of the buildings cannot function without lost guild expertise. Therefore, people live in the bottom floors, where they do not require unavailable powers and technologies. As the Seth has observed, there is more than sufficient room for the entire population of the city in the lower floors of the functioning buildings. There is insufficient commerce with the farms on the Usin River to sustain a substantial population. And the nearly annual flooding also inhibits many settlers.”

Chance looked back at the Crystal Wall uneasily. Its height reminded him that a mountain of water stood above them. “It leaks?”

“The wall does not leak, though the ground allows natural percolation. Furthermore, periodic storms project waves over its pinnacle. Ancient machines are required to pump the water out.”

“Ta-takes long time,” Seth said.

“Why is the wall dark?” Chance wondered aloud.

“Ocean flora multiply upon the surface of the crystal,” Mimir explained, “exploiting the opportunity for additional solar radiation.”

Chance stopped and stared, his mouth open.

“Plants on glass,” Seth growled. “More sun.”

“Oh.”

Chance looked back again. He thought something huge surged through the ominous dismal sea beyond, a pale gray irregular form, coming close to the wall and then receding. But when he turned to ask Mimir or Seth what it was, he saw that they had continued, following the Guardian. He ran ahead to catch up with them.

They crossed many streets, and no one talked to them until they came to a place where a row of seven men stood in the road before them, each holding a long staff. The men spread out and barred the way. A group of young women in robes stood nearby, gawking, curious to see what lay beyond.

“City ga-guard,” Seth said.

“Keep them back, coyote,” the Guardian told Seth. Seth ran ahead. Chance watched as he sat on his haunches before one of the guards and talked. To Chance, all of this started to seem like a dream, or as though it happened to someone else. He could barely wonder at this huge city; he could barely wonder at his always-shy coyote talking now with brusque guards.

Two of the other guards came to listen. The Guardian walked on, neither speeding nor slowing his pace. When he reached the line, one of the guards held up his hand and stood in their path. There was a snap and blur, and the Guardian stood on the other side of this man, still walking.

“Halt!” the guard shouted, turning.

“Wait,” one of those who had talked with Seth called to this guard. Mimir and Chance joined Seth and waited now uneasily as the Guardian continued on ahead of them. The guards talked in hushed voices, looking after the Guardian and frowning. Finally
one came to them, a thin man with dark skin who stared at each of them a second, as if to memorize their appearance, before saying to Seth, “We shall let you follow.”

“Tell the City Councilors!” Seth told the man. He trotted ahead.

Chance looked back as he hurried to follow Seth and saw that one of the guards had dashed off down the street, leaving his staff behind. The others huddled together and stared after them, frowning in worry.

The Broken Hand that Reaches thrust up before them now out of a dark nest of smaller towers. A wall of gray-black metal, twice as high as a man, surrounded it. The wall was folded and bent forward and back, in an organic form, as if the hard metal of it had once been cloth that hung here and blew in the wind. They hurried along the side of this gray wall to its far corner. Along the next stretch of wall, they saw the Guardian. He waited before a tall archway. More guards stood at the far end of the street, looking warily at the Guardian.

Chance and Mimir followed as Seth ran to the Guardian’s side. The arch opened onto a vast square at the front of the tower. The square was strewn with white stones, so that at another time it would have stretched before them empty and serene. But not today: the air above the stones shimmered and twisted. Dust kicked up and fell in one corner of the square, then another, stirring the heavy gravel, as if something invisible walked here and there. After a moment, a sound like a distant scream leaked from the shimmering air, faint and unreal. It stopped abruptly, leaving a relentless metallic echo of shrieking children. The air dimmed inexplicably then, as if a cloud passed over. Dozens of black fists, spotted green, appeared floating in the air; they cracked open sickeningly, each revealing an eye that glared, and then just as quickly they disappeared. A smell of roses and then a bitter taste of copper came over Chance.

In the middle of the chaos, a single vague human form seemed to twist and flicker into existence. It turned in place but did not move from its spot.

Chance took a step backwards. In this square the world had gone mad. It was like a vision of hell from some Puriman prophecy. He felt dizzy, and felt also as if he were slowly being withdrawn from the scene. He would have backed up farther, but the dizziness rooted him, a hint of the feeling he had experienced in the barn when the god had fouled his mind.

“What is it?” Chance jumped as his voice echoed back at him out of the square, distorted and loud.

“Wounded worldbeing,” Seth growled, inscrutably. The hair on his back stood tall, and his tail curled tight under his legs.

“Worldwrack,” the Guardian added.

Then the Guardian slowly raised his arms, so that they stretched out wide to each side, filling the gateway.

“Cover your ears,” he said.

Without hesitation Seth leapt down and put his paws on his head, pulling the folds of his ears down. Mimir did not move. Chance hesitated, not quite understanding. The Guardian tilted his head back and screamed.

Too late Chance clapped his palms over his ears. He heard the full force of the first second of the deafening howl of the Guardian. It echoed out into the city and cracked, and cracked again, as it rebounded down cavernous streets and off long black cliffs of deserted towers.

As the echo faded, the unreal darkness in the square before them shattered and collapsed into pools of black shadow that lay on the ground like some kind of thin oil, where they slowly dissolved and evaporated. The distortions of vision retreated into distant points and vanished. The uncanny sounds whimpered away into silence. The smell of roses and copper burned away, replaced by the salty sea air.

Standing in the center of the square was a woman.

They stared a moment, unsure whether she was some remnant of the evil that the god had left. But she remained, solid and
attentive. She was tall with very dark skin and wore a long shirt of bright black and red that hung to her knees; under it were pants of the same color.

She turned and looked at them. Finally she said, “Who are you?” Chance could barely hear her, though the motion of her lips was unmistakable and easy to read. His ears still rang from the Guardian’s shout.

She walked toward them, planting one foot precisely before the other, like a cat. She stopped a pace away and stared at each of them in turn, defiantly.

“I am Wadjet, of the Fricandor lands, from the tribe of the Stewards.” Chance found her accent strange: the sounds were long, different, but clear and articulate.

The Guardian said nothing. Chance stared. The woman had a broad nose and eyes with vertical slit pupils like the eyes of a cat. Her black hair was knotted in thick brown cords that hung behind her head. There was something strange about her mouth. Then she smiled at the Guardian, an expression that seemed almost a challenge, and Chance saw it: behind full, red lips, her teeth flashed white, revealing fangs. The eye teeth and the matching bottom teeth were long and sharp.

Seth, who had just stood and shaken his head, getting his bearings after the Guardian’s cry, lay down again and stretched out in a coyote bow. “Greetings and, and, and honor to you, Steward. I, I am Psuche, also called Seth.”

Chance was surprised. He had not known Seth had another name. But of course he must, if he had had some other life before his time in the Valley: the name of Seth had been given him by Chance.

The woman seemed to consider this for a while.

Chance shifted uneasily. He had seen now several unmen, but this one disturbed him. His eyes wandered over her, against his better will, noticing the high cheekbones, the green of the
eyes, the smooth dark skin, the full athletic shape of her body, the curves of it visible in the tight-fitting shirt and pants, the fascinating flash of her white teeth. She was—he realized with unease—very beautiful. He felt also a painful shame to recall what he looked like: dressed in torn and dirty clothes, his shoes tied together with rags, left arm bound with a dirty rag crusted with blood, his hair stiff with dust and dirt. He looked at the ground, his cheeks burning.

I must resist these thoughts, he told himself. It would be wrong to be attracted to an unman. All Purimen know that unmen are mutilated, unclean things.

He forced himself to lift his head and fix his eyes on the cool gray stone face of the Guardian.

Mimir raised a hand but the Guardian spoke before she could. “We have no call with you, Wadjet, Steward of the Fricandor Lands. Go with good luck. We seek closed hearing with the Mothers of the Gotterdammerung. Our path is fearsome, and we do not wish our sorrows on you.”

The woman looked at the Guardian’s face, then his huge hands and his broad shoulders. “I also seek the Mothers. My mission is pressing. A plague has struck my land. Who are you to claim greater need?”

Seth whined in sympathy, but the others were silent. Seeing that the Guardian was unmoved, she stepped aside, and added, “I will return later. Even the lion leaves the watering hole when the rhinoceros comes to drink.”

Chance did not know what a rhinoceros was, but he understood the point.

The Guardian walked on without another word, his pale eyes fixed straight ahead, his heavy feet grinding the white stones of the courtyard. Chance looked at the Steward. The feline eyes dismayed him. It seemed almost, the way she looked at him, that she might eat him. And yet, he felt a sweet pang low in his chest when she
smiled. He turned away, put a hand on Seth, and hurried to catch up with the Guardian. Mimir watched all this without expression.

“What happened here?” Chance asked the Guardian, as he came to his side.

“The god was here. He scarred space before he left for your home.”

The Guardian stopped before huge double doors of burnished gold, more than twice his height. Above the doors was an inscription, formed of shining white fragments of some material Chance did not at first recognize.

Men anthropos aneu hodon, de pinakon poiomen,

Men anthropos aneu telon, de telon poiomen,

Men aneu athanaton psuchen anthropou, de athanton psuchen poiomen.

“What does it say?” Chance asked.

“Man was lost,” the Guardian explained, “and we made a map. Man had no end—no purpose—so we made a purpose. Man had no soul, so we made a soul.”

“The blasphemy of the lost men! That is from the New Psalms of the Purimen!”

“Those words were writ here, above the door to the Hand that Reaches, when the Guild within was the Theogenics Guild, and the gods were not yet born. The words were scratched away after the Theomachia. They were scraped off the very day that the fingers of the Hand that Reaches were sheared down.”

“The false god put it back.”

The Guardian nodded. “Those bones are likely the bones of most of the Mothers who were left.”

Chance realized then with a shock that this was what formed the inscription: splintered shards of bone, somehow gathered into letters and set above the gate. With a rush of nausea he feared he could smell now, mixed into the damp and salt sea, the human marrow.

The Guardian pushed open the doors. They swung wide without a sound. The four of them stepped forward. Inside stretched a great hall with a distant ceiling. The walls were all formed of huge irregular facets of stone and metal, so that the long hall seemed to be the interior of a randomly cut crystal. The walls rose, leaning in at a slight angle, so that they closed together high above. The facets high over them shone in different bright colors, and the lights mixed, forming a pale golden glow on the floor before them.

At the far end of the room crouched a statue of a man, in gold, holding out his hands as if offering some gift, palms up and held together. Fire raged from the cup formed of his fingers.

“The fire of Prometheus is l-l-lit,” Seth barked. “Bad omen.”

The Guardian turned to Mimir. “You will wait outside, makina.”

The makina did not respond. The Guardian pushed one door closed, and then put his hand on the other, waiting. Mimir looked at each of them, and then walked out. The Guardian closed the other door and turned back to the hall.

CHAPTER

11

T
he Guardian eyed the hall with distaste. Four thousand years had perished since he had stood here last, during that final battle of the War Against the Gods. Then, hundreds had died throughout this tower, and the white stones outside had been coated red and black with blood.

“Who is here?” he called. His voice echoed tightly in the space. He waited silently for a reply. After a moment, footsteps sounded out, approaching in a rush from somewhere in the back of the hall. The Guardian strode toward them. Chance and Seth followed.

A woman ran out of a small door to the left of the statue. She had raven-black hair, very straight and shoulder length, and very dark eyes, and seemed little past a girl in her age. She wore the red-bordered black robes of a Mother of the Gotterdammerung. She hurried toward them, an expression of relief on her face.