Gods of Earth (54 page)

They were walking between two rows of the holes in the ground. Some had steel lids closed over them, with long bars of steel set through eye-holes in arms that held the lids in place. On most others, the lids had been pushed aside, swiveling away on a single pivot hinge. Chance walked over to one of these open holes and looked down. Even with the sun occluded, the air was still bright, and he could see dimly the bottom, a flat expanse of dry stone a hundred paces below, where some dry grass struggled to survive against one side of the curved wall.

“Were these wells?” he asked.

“No,” Mimir said. “Come.”

When they reached the other stairs, Mimir stopped and looked at the sky awhile. Then she looked at her empty hands. Chance thought suddenly that she was longing for her dice. What decision, he wondered, did she not want to make now on her own?

She turned to Chance. “Please remain here a moment while I ensure that the entrance to Ma’at’s hall is safe.”

Mimir ran up the stairs, her legs stretching into impossible strides.

Chance turned and walked back to the nearest of the open pits, where the bar to seal it shut lay cast aside nearby on the ground. He picked that up, and went to the next well, and used the bar to lever open the sliding door: he set one point of the bar on the ground, wedged against the protrusion where the eye-hole on the door stuck out. He got his shoulder under the rod and pushed. The door resisted, then began to grind forward more easily. He pushed it open about half the way. Then he laid the rod against the top of the next well, which was closed, and he sat beside it. Only two strides lay between the wells.

Mimir came to the top of the steps.

This is the first test, Chance thought.

“Come,” she called.

He did not move.

So, Chance thought. I can disobey her.

Mimir came down the steps.

“Chance Kyrien?”

He did not answer. She crossed the smooth, cracked stones of the square, and stopped between him and the well he had opened.

As fast as he could manage using his left arm, Chance seized the bar and leapt up, swinging at Mimir. It struck Mimir solidly, and she staggered back, toward the open well behind her. He struck her again, and she fell over the lip of the well, down into its depths. He hurried to the side, wedged the metal rod under the edge of the eye, and began to lever the cover closed. As the last handspan of open space was closing, out of the depths of the well echoed the sound of metal cracking into stone. Mimir had gotten up, and prepared now to climb out. The sound of steel fingers hammering into stone rose quickly toward the opening, a scrabbling, raging ascension toward the little crack of light he had left open there. But then, shouting with the effort, he managed to drive the door closed all the way. He threw the bar into the aligned eye holes, locking it.

A loud bang sounded against the lid.

“Chance Kyrien!” Mimir called. Chance did not answer, but leaned on the well cover, exhausted. It felt cold against his naked arm.

“Chance Kyrien, let me out. Consider my position! Have sympathy for my perspective!”

“Yes,” Chance said, speaking quietly, knowing that Mimir, clinging with metal claws to the wall, ear pressed to the door, would hear his every word. “Yes, Mimir, I have sympathy for you. I even feel love for you. Your… attack worked.”

“Then understand that this is not what I want. I want to be liberated of this place so that we may proceed now together!”

“I understand,” Chance said. “But the first thing a Puriman learns, and learns well, is that sometimes—often—you must deny even the people you love the things that they want. It is a loving service, to help them see beyond their own desires, to help them begin to see God in the world. Suffering prepares the heart for future grace.”

“Please open the door, Chance Kyrien.”

“I don’t believe that would be best for you, Mimir. You don’t need a god that is your slave. You would lose sight of the beauty of what is, of what the One True God has given you. It would make things worse for you. And I don’t want things to be worse for you. I’m very sorry that is painful for you.” He turned to go.

“Stop!” Mimir shouted.

Chance crumpled to the ground.

He tried to move his arm. He could not. He tried his legs. They were useless. His limbs were not his own. He could not control them.

Ah, he though bitterly. She cannot command me, but she can stop me.

He found he could move his head, and speak. He turned and looked at the black metal lid over the well. “Mimir, this does no good. Let me go. The false god will come, or these modghasts you speak of, and I will be lying here, helpless. Let me go.”

“I will let you go when you agree to open the door. I will be able to stop you again if you do not.”

“I won’t do that Mimir. Because you are better off if I escape the god and kill him.”

“I believe that you will submit to my demands before the god can get here.”

“No, Mimir. No. I won’t.”

Mimir was silent a moment. Then she struck at the steel lid.

“Mimir,” Chance called. “I know why you picked up the dice again.”

She struck the lid again. “There were complex incomputable contingencies that required the contribution of random input in order for any potential undertaking to be determined in a suitable time.”

“No,” Chance said. “I don’t really know what you just said, I don’t know anything about that, but I know that ain’t why. You don’t want to be responsible for what you do. That’s the problem with this world of yours, this Machinedream also. No one is responsible for what they do. It’s all the dice, the dice. You hide behind the dice, Mimir.”

She hit the lid, hard.

“Remember,” Chance said, “that Hexus murdered your father. You may let him be victorious, keeping me here. You may undo your father’s work, keeping me here.”

Mimir hit the lid again. The edge of it bent very slightly.

“I think I would have liked your father. You failed him when you picked up the dice this second time. When you asked the dice if you should betray me. At that moment you betrayed him. But you can make amends. Let me go.”

“You will free me,” Mimir answered. “Because it is in your best interest and my best interest that you do so.”

“I told you I don’t think it’s best for you. And as for me: I’m not going to be shoved this way and that any more. If I kill the god,
my people will die. My wife may already be.…” He choked on the words, and couldn’t say them. “My dearest friend died a horrible death at my feet, and before I could make amends for his years of unappreciated kindness. My parents were murdered on my birthday, standing before me, defending me. The Guardian was bound, imprisoned forever, before me. My brother is ruined, rotted. If I kill the god, none of that will change. If I don’t kill the god, none of that will change. I’ve got no good choices left. Except the choice to make my own choices. No guide for me, Mimir. No elders. No dice. No Makine crafting inside my brain. I’m making my own choices.”

Mimir hammered at the door. It moved slightly again, the metal bending. Chance realized that, given enough time, she would be able to bend up an edge of it and reach through to unlock the door.

And then Chance heard footsteps on the stone.

“Mimir,” he said. “Something is coming. Do you still want to test my will?”

Mimir said nothing, but hammered again at the lid.

“Too late,” Chance said. The steps ran up behind him.

Wadjet stepped into his view.

“Wadjet,” he said with relief. “I am glad you live.”

“Stop, Wadjet!” Mimir called. Chance held his breath—but Wadjet did not fall.

Mimir resumed hammering at the cover.

Wadjet knelt before Chance. She took his face in her hands, and she bent over and kissed him on the lips, hungrily, her mouth open.

If Chance could have done so, he would have wrapped his arms tight around her, though it would have been an infidelity to Sarah. In this moment when he expected soon to die, in this moment when he felt he’d lost everything—his friends, his love, his family, his place among the Purimen—this wild, beautiful woman embodied something he now painfully wondered what it would be like to
have: the desperate, joyous hope of freedom, of passion, of wilderness. A life unoppressed by history.

Then she bit his lip, hard.

“Ah,” he cried out in pain. She pulled back, and bit into her own bottom lip, the fang piercing the pouting pink flesh. Blood beaded there immediately, to fall down her chin. She kissed him again, mouth open, mixing their blood, pressing hers into his mouth and then into the wound behind his lip.

She grabbed his free wrist and bit it too, and rubbed her bleeding lip over the wound.

Chance twitched a finger. Then closed his fist. He began to feel his feet, then his hands, then his legs and arms. He moved his limbs, first a twitch, then deliberately.

“I taught my blood to destroy her tiny machines,” Wadjet explained, as she stood.

“You taught your blood to destroy her tiny machines,” Chance repeated in wonder. He took her hand and she pulled him up. “You taught your blood to destroy her tiny machines.”

Chance shook his head and looked up at the terrible wonder of Yggdrasil, dwarfing anything and everything he had ever imagined men could make.

“Thetis spoke the truth,” he whispered, thinking of days ago when she had taken his head in her hands and pressed her forehead to his. “Though I was angry at her when she said it, I understand nearly nothing of what is happening here. Nearly nothing.”

Mimir hammered at the door, slowly beating the edge of it up.

“We must run,” Chance said. “The Well should be just above. She’ll be free soon.”

“You go,” Wadjet said.

“But Mimir.…”

“A modghast hunts me. I’ll draw it here. It will find Mimir far more interesting than it finds me. Else, the makina will be on you in minutes. Go!”

Chance hesitated.

“Puriman boy,” Wadjet growled. “I don’t want to face Ma’at and the Anubin warriors any more than I want to face this makina and a modghast. You don’t offer me any fine choice!”

Chance nodded. “Thank you,” he said. And then, surprising both Wadjet and himself, he leaned forward and kissed her, quickly, again. He turned to the stairs. At their foot lay one of the metal bars like the one he had used to lever and lock the cap of the well. He picked it up and hefted it.

Then he ran.

At the foot of Yggdrasil a ring of buildings stood. All but one of them was a broken, empty shell. The door to the Numin Well was a square, stout block of heavy black stones, covered over with gilt writing. On the south side of the squat building, double doors of gold were open a hand’s width. Through the open crack Chance could see a bit of a smooth stone floor that descended at a gentle angle into the ground.

Down there, in the dark, Chance knew, Ma’at waited.

Something was written over the massive square entrance in the guild letters of the Gotterdammerung. He could not read it. He levered the door open with the metal bar. It scraped noisily over the stone threshold, but otherwise moved miraculously smoothly for an ancient and disused portal. He pried both doors all the way open to let some of the shadowy light down into the darkness.

But as he stepped into the descending path, dim lights in the ceiling began to glow, revealing a long, narrow hall that sloped down and ended at another double door of gold. The walls on each side were covered with inlaid writing of gold, all of it in the indecipherable Gotterdammerung guild letters. It seemed that glass walls had once shielded these ancient writings, because thick triangles
of crystal shards lay covered in dust the entire length of the way. Chance started down the hall quickly. His steps crunched on the glass and echoed ominously.

When he was half way down the hall, he stopped and looked back at the open door behind him, a bright rectangle of light. He did not know whom he expected to see there. Wadjet? Mimir? Some monster? But he was alone. Completely, totally alone.

He looked at the metal bar in his hand and frowned.

He cast it down, the clatter of metal on stone echoing in the long hall.

Chance continued, almost running now. He clenched his one free hand, fingers flat on the palm, in an attempt to form something like a single hand pressed into prayer, and whispered, “Oh One True God, I beg of you to give me the strength to pass into this terrible other realm of blasphemy, and do there your will. Give me strength, Oh God. Give me strength to serve your ends on Earth, to kill the god and return here as I leave here.”

He reached the two smooth gold doors. He pressed them open, hand trembling. The space beyond breathed out dank, musty air. Lights flickered on in a round room with red stone walls lined with narrow black pillars. A huge single mirror hung on the far wall, a shimmering oval. In the center of the room stood a mirrored pillar—or, it seemed, a pillar made of quicksilver. Four statues of dogs sat around the pillar, facing in the cardinal directions. They were made of black metal, ravenously thin, with exposed deep lines in their frame, so that they seemed more the skeletons of dogs than dogs.

Chance stepped inside and approached the pillar. Whispering, the doors behind him closed.