The Godless (2 page)

Yet, his father's decisions had proved worse than Ciron had originally thought. The raids by Leera against Mireea and its outlying villages had begun to escalate into a war by the time he rode up to the Spine of Ger, and whatever safe, easy position he had hoped to find had been stolen from him in the first week. The sword he had been given was too heavy in his hands, the armor he wore had bruised his shoulders, and the rank his father had purchased one step up from a squire. Before the first week was out he saw his first fight, felt sick during it, was sick after it, and managed to stay alive only because of those in his unit. To further insult him, on the trail back to Mireea, his unit had met the mercenary group Steel, a replacement for an earlier group, Mirin, which had left under a controversy he had never had explained to him. Yet, in Steel's ranks were fighters as young as he, boys and girls already veterans, each one a rising star of a cheap fiction where he would be placed, in contrast, as a boy in need of rescue.

Rocks skittered before him as Ira's horse slipped, but the soldier was a decent rider, and his stocky body kept it under control. Ciron, only slightly more inept a rider than he was a swordsman, let his horse navigate the short drop, stroking her neck and murmuring his thanks when they emerged without stumble. She was an older horse, brown and white, a sturdy child's horse. He had sighed when the sergeant had led her out for him, but the tall man—who had seen and anticipated the response—had said, “She knows the mountains as well as any of the men and women you're with. If you get lost, she will return here. When you're a little firmer on the land up here and a little better with the horses, I'll find you a new mount, but until then, she will keep you alive.” Since then, Ciron had been thankful with the choice. He had gotten lost twice already, only to have the horse lead him back to the unit. After the second time, Corporal Jennis had threatened to tie him to Ira's saddle if it happened again, and he had flushed beneath her anger, impotent to respond.

“Boy?” Ira said. “You still with me?”

“Yes.”

“You didn't answer my question.”

Ciron caught a bug on his neck, wiped the bloody smear away. He did not remember hearing a question, though to do so would mean admitting that he had been daydreaming, again … “Sorry, I did not hear.” He began to say something else, but stopped and shrugged. “Sorry.”

“Don't apologize so much.” Ira spat to his right this time. “I was asking if you'd been to Leera.”

“No.”

“Travel is hard there during the wet season, but that'll be over, soon.” Above the pair, the green tinted canopy began to lighten. “We've been seeing their raiders coming up here more and more as the season draws to a close. Things are going to get worse than what we just left.”

Ciron could hardly imagine anything worse. With half the week gone and the other half to come, his unit had found the burned-out village midway through their patrol, the morning's sun a solitary dot high in the sky. Following trails of smoke, they had found the remains of twenty-seven men and women laid out around a huge cooking pit, one woman on a spit above it. Ciron had been sick at the sight and smell, and though he had seen it before, he felt no shame—for even now, he could see the looks of revulsion on the faces of the others around him, and knew they were close to vomiting as well. It had also got him sent out of the village: the Corporal had sent him out with Ira to follow a trail two hours old, a trail that all knew would end in nothing.

The sound of a waterfall emerged and Ira slowed his horse at the edge of the canopy. When Ciron drew next to him, he saw the clearing the other man was examining. There, the green light gave way to the bright heat of the midday's sun, leaving it looking briefly washed out and sun faded. In the center of the opening waited a decaying wooden cover over an old tunnel, but the tracks went around it to the edge where the drop there led to the river and the waterfall that began it. After what felt like an hour, Ira slipped from his horse and, with one hand on his sword, entered the clearing.

Ciron followed, stopping at the cover. “You don't think they went into the tunnels, do you?” he asked.

“It's flooded, boy.”

“But—”

“Look if you want.”

Carefully, he reached for the cover. The wood cracked beneath his fingers, but it shifted, and the sun's light caught on the murky water.

The tunnels were mineshafts, sunk deep for gold, the gold that had given rise to Mireea and its first fortune. They were empty, now, but when they had given out gold, the mines had killed as many as they had made rich; now they just killed when people—children mostly—fell into the abandoned and flooded holes. People still believed that there was gold in the mountain, and there was, Ciron knew, if you knew where to look. In the second week of his time in the Mireean Guard he had heard that the Captain of the Spine was going to send divers into the flooded tunnels, and he had tried to get assigned to that duty to look for his gold, but the sergeant had shaken his head. He said that most ended in dirt and cave-ins, and that there was only the possibility of raiders, not gold, but he had misunderstood why Ciron had wanted to go. Some of the mines broke into the old cities beneath Mireea, the cave cities that men and women had built to honor Ger in the years after his fall. They were dark, haunted relics, boxed in by intentional cave-ins from the last days of those people, but it was rumored that if you went deep enough, you could find the remains of Ger himself.

Leaving the broken openings, Ira walked the edge of the clearing. “No, they went to the edge and then their tracks stop. It looks like they leaped over.”

Ciron approached, timid in his approach to look out and over at the waterfall, at the massive drop. “They didn't, though,” he said. “There's a few scuffs here, where they went to the left.”

“Yeah.” The other man sounded pleased. “Tell how many there are?”

“Two?”

“Three, at most. Not the fifteen we've been following.”

“That's no different than before.”

“No, it's not,” Ira said. “Come on, the Corporal will want us back before the afternoon's sun is up.”

The fact that he had been right did not give Ciron pleasure. At school, proving himself had been important—necessary, even. He had needed excellent marks to prove to his father that he was dedicated to an academic pursuit, needed them to break down his resistance to the Enclave and the teaching that took place there. He saw the men and women who made up the ruling body of Yeflam as abominations. “Cursed,” he said, once, when Ciron had been younger. “That's the name we ought to give them officially. They're not Keepers of the Divine. They're cursed. They are the shattered sun and the black ocean of people, the burden that ordinary people have to carry.”

An older Ciron had examples to counter him, had arguments to make, but his younger self had sat at the dinner table and stared at his plate. “I know you think I'm stupid,” his father had said, the silence of his family an awfully familiar one in the face of his rages. “But when you're older and you step out of the Floating Cities, you will talk to witches and warlocks and you'll hear a different story about the gods. You'll hear that they aren't dead like you and me, but that they're both dead and alive, that they have been dying for over fifteen thousand years, with their blood spilling into the ground, into the water, and into the air; spilling so that we breathe it and drink it and wade through it daily. That's how the cursed get their powers—that's why they're such a danger to us. Outside Yeflam, people aren't confused about that.”

The silence between Ciron and Ira stretched out for the ride back to the village, the former thankful that the latter had not asked him any questions. Yet, soon, the younger solider noticed that the silence between the two of them had extended, that it had now come to take the air, drowning out the susurration of insects and animals, the sound of mountain's breath. The leaves on the trees did not shake, did not drop, and the green-tinted light showed the thick, damp patches on Ciron's jerkin, the sweat of fear.

It was only when the horses began to hesitate in their steps that Ira finally stopped.

Cast in a shadowed green, the soldier ran his thick fingers through his hair and flicked out the moisture. Slowly, he slid from the saddle. “Tie the horses here.”

“Are you—” Ciron stumbled, cleared his throat. “Are you sure?”

The man's hand hooked the bridle of his horse. “This is no time to be weak, boy. What lives on this mountain is telling us our friends are in trouble.”

They weren't his
friends.
He didn't have friends. Yet Ciron shifted and lifted his leg, his new boots touching the ground with caution. Ahead, Ira was strapping his short sword around his waist and Ciron followed suit, fumbling with the long sword that the sergeant had given him on his first day. He then pulled out his bow. He was awful with both, he knew, and he felt that failing as he had in the first fight he had been in, the memory of it sharpening as Ira slipped through the trees ahead, his boots avoiding twigs and mulch, leaving no sound. Desperate to do the same, Ciron followed in an awkward, hesitant mirror of Ira's steps that alleviated his noise only slightly.

The bush turned thick ahead, but even as he pushed back branches and began to make way up the rocky incline, the silence of the trail only grew. Each bent branch echoed loudly. Each step a clear signal to anyone on guard. Yet nothing responded. Passing one thick root striking darkly from the soil, Ciron saw a brown snake, thick and mean, as if it had been pulled from the ground itself. It was still, its tongue not even flickering as he passed. It watched him as it lay unmoving, a creature known to strike swiftly and deadly that was seemingly—impossibly—trying to draw as little attention to itself as it could.

At the top of the rise, the village appeared, and further behind it, the green mottled stone of Ger's Spine. The village was a collection of buildings and tents, a half-built village unofficially named Jand's, after one of the dead they had found, Ciron had been told. Its small population was the reason for the attack, the Corporal had said after they had taken the woman's body off the fire, and it was bad luck that the squad was there now, rather than a week earlier. The Captain of the Spine had planned to draw in all the villages around Mireea as the raids grew, but a storm had kicked up and left them in Mireea for a week longer than planned.

Gazing upon the village for the second time that day, Ciron did not at first notice any difference. The smell of smoke was in the air, the odor of cooked flesh and vomit mixed with it, the men, women and children lying across the ground …

Only, there were more.

Beside him, Ira stepped from the bush and into the village, the pressure of his boots on sticks and mud resounding loudly. His sword was drawn and he held it tightly in his hand. Caught off guard, Ciron scrambled after him, desperate not to be left alone, his imagination alive with horrors, his stomach starting to rebel against what he had seen and what he had not, images piecing themselves together in a slowly dawning horror. Side by side, he and Ira closed in on the bodies, the still form of the Corporal becoming clearer and clearer. Blood pooled around her chest, but the flow had stilled long before.

An arrow hit the ground between them.

The two dived to opposite sides. Dirt flew into Ciron's eyes and the hilt of his sword jammed in to his waist. He dropped his bow in a desperate attempt to clean his eyes. He heard Ira cry out and, through his blurred gaze, saw the other man hobble, a metal bolt sticking from his left calf. Horrified, Ciron watched Ira drop his sword, grab the bolt and, as he went to yank it out, topple to the side, a pair of bolts hitting his back and shoulder.

Fumbling with his sword, Ciron began to run to his aid, but tripped. Stumbling, he glanced at his leg, but saw no bolt. But he could not see where the injury had come from, could not … and then,
from the trees—the very trees he had stepped out of—emerged men and women, thin and pale beneath their leather armor, as if their muscle was being burned away.
Raiders
.
Scrambling to his feet, ignoring the sharp pain, Ciron turned to run, to run as fast and as far as he could, only to feel a hard object punch into his stomach, piercing him as if he were fruit. His heavy sword hit the ground and, in shock, Ciron followed the line of its trajectory. There, a dark-haired man finished cranking his crossbow, and lifted it.

His last thought was of how much he hated his father.

 

BENEATH THE SKIN

We do not know how the world was created. We do not know
why
it was created.

Yet, there have always been stories, myths, ideals. Each one of these was a symbol in which meaning was encoded, an attempt to answer the question of how and why.

As a child, a witch told me, just as she told all the children, that one by one, the gods had torn a piece of flesh from their body to form the world. When the gods took back what they gave, she said, the world would end.

—Qian,
The Godless

 

1.

 

“Your eyes,” Illaan said to her, before the sun rose. “Your eyes are made from fire.”

At the edge of sleep, tangled in their sheets and shaken by his rough hands, a deep fear was awoken again in Ayae. It took her back to the age of five, a month after her arrival in Mireea, when the matron of the orphanage said that rooms were warmer when she was in them. The large, red-faced woman had died days later when the oil lamp in her room overturned and, with a child's logic, Ayae had blamed herself for her death. For years she feared she would awake surrounded by flames or suffocating in smoke, the cause igniting from her own skin. Such an offhand comment that had resulted in years of paranoia. She had never forgiven the unfortunate matron her ill-timed words. Life was hard enough without thinking you were a freak: she was small, brown-skinned and black-haired, born in Sooia and a minority among the tall, mountain whites who lived and traded in Mireea. Her dark brown eyes were a map of hardships that only a child from a continent torn apart by war could carry.