The Godless (47 page)

At his feet, the chalk lines had lifted from the ground and wrapped, in thick, fleshy tentacles around his legs. His own tattoos were a faded white in comparison. After a moment, he began to feel tiny bites on his skin, as if the tentacles possessed thousands of tiny, suckling mouths that were trying to draw blood from his flesh, but were unable to do so.

“Enough from you, Captain.” Mother Estalia held his gaze. “I have heard these protestations from others previously, as the cry of the faithless. It is not just the Mireeans who have left behind the keeping of their souls and chosen to abandon what in their heart they know is right—it is all of us. That is why what we do is so very important, why the remains of Ger must be taken back to his child—my God. It is why she must be allowed to grow. In a fashion, you are going to be part of that. The four who have come with us will be the containers of what remains of Ger, and they will bear him back to our god. It is a great honor that they will do, but it is not an easy task. You have seen what the power of a god can do to those who are weak, who are flesh, and to take it this way is no easy feat. It must be done at such a moment that our time and Ger's experience of it meet, where death is imminent for him. It must be done right and it requires an entire body's worth of blood to do so—and for that, you are being given that honor, and though you do not wish to do it, I thank you for what you will give to make our world whole again.”

No.

He would not die here, he would not be used for her ritual. He would head to Leera. He would find Dark. He tried to repeat no, aware that the first had not emerged from his throat. He realized that he could not move or speak, and his breath was shallow and struggling, resulting in a light-headedness. He protested against it, but he was aware that he was losing consciousness. The red light around him faltered. The floor shook. He heard a loud, splitting crack, as if something had broken open. He felt the floor move, sure that it was rising to him—

—and his chained hands snapped up, grabbed Estalia's head, and twisted with a suddenness that surprised even him.

The elderly woman fell in a crumbling heap. She made a solid sound as she hit the ground, her neck bent at a strange angle. He felt detached from that for a moment, as if he were watching it from a distance. Then he felt a surge of energy as the chalky bindings released his legs, leaving him without pain, without fatigue as he turned to both Ugly and Handsome.

He ducked the first's swing, sidestepped the second's thrust. The saboteur moved fluidly, feeling twenty years younger. He drove his foot into the back of Handsome's leg, brought him to his knees to crash his manacled hands against the side of his head. He wrenched the sword from the man's grasp, bringing it up to block Ugly's slash. He felt euphoric, nothing but pure adrenaline, and he knew,
knew
, that it was not his, that his body was too tired, too tortured and beaten to perform any of what he did.

He knew that even as he parried a second slash from Ugly. He used the momentum to bring his new sword up in a two-handed grip and hack into the man's chest. It was as if he had felled a tree: the blade dug deep, through leather armor, bone and skin, forcing him to wrench the notched blade out. He had just freed it when Handsome barreled into him from behind; but he twisted out of the fall, slamming the hilt down on the side of the man's head to break the grasp, to step out of his reach.

In response, the soldier growled and came to his feet. Around him, Bueralan felt a streak of pleasure, of appreciation in the tenacity and fighting spirit that Handsome showed. Yet there was more pleasure—a bloodthirsty joy—as the saboteur brought his two-handed sword down in a vicious arc when Handsome leaped for Ugly's sword. The cut took off the lower half of his left arm, which dropped to the floor in a clutching, bloody mess, while the second swing buried the large blade into the man's face, caving it in with a strength that Bueralan knew he did not possess.

Lifting the bloody blade up, he turned to the four priests.

He had no need. They lay on the floor, their bodies impaled on sharp shafts of earth that had spiked out of the temple floor, breaking through the chalk lines the priests had drawn.

They had died as silently as they had lived—though he was not sure that the other priests in the Leeran Army would have agreed.

It was then that Bueralan felt the presence of another being, the same being that had watched him when he stepped into the temple, the same being who had lowered his gaze onto him when he had followed the Quor'lo to the rocky shore. It was a presence that could not be explained, that had no emotion he could easily understand, that was alien.

He walked slowly to the glass dome.

Beneath was the flesh of Ger, the devastated and inhuman, dark-red flesh that, when he had looked upon it before, had been healing itself, caught in a constant battle against its wounds. But now, as he sunk down to his haunches, as he laid the sword on the ground, Bueralan saw the wounds expand, the flesh give way beneath the damage and the fatality that had been part of them for so long.

Alone now, the pain of his body returned.

 

9.

 

It was a slow, dark crawl from the bottom of the temple.

Bueralan moved in pitch dark navigating up the dark stairwell; the faint light from fissures in the temple was like the midday's sun. The strength that he had felt before was gone and the returning pain had almost made him sink to the floor among the dead. He had fallen to his knees before the images of Dark came to him, before the sight of them in Ranan came to him—real or imagined, he did not know. He had groaned as he rose, but had not stopped as he began to walk. His feet touched cold mud before the second set of stairs and he smeared it over his wrists. Scraping his hands and wrists, he pulled himself free from the cuffs that he had worn, cuffs that he wished he had broken when the strength flushed through his body. Slowly, his feet shifting through the glass-ridden mud, he found a broken pew and took a seat. It groaned from his weight, but held. It was not until a moment later that he noticed—thanks to the position of the seat—that the temple had sunk. As he grew accustomed to the light, he saw that faded paintings had fallen, bones shifted and rusted, broken armor had rolled down to the wall. Only the pews, bolted to the floor, had resisted the call and remained perfect in the broken lines.

“Should I thank you, Ger?” His ragged voice echoed, its own answer. “I don't understand any of what just happened, but I don't like it. I feel like I was used, that you thrust yourself inside me, that you saw everything about me, everything I've done and will do. But I have my freedom and I don't know that I would have it without you. So I'll thank you for that, and will be glad that this is the only time a god showed interest in me.”

The temple groaned and sank, the movement startling him.

It was not until he pulled himself out of the temple that he saw the damage around him. The once-placid lake was riddled with stalagmites, the red-lit ceiling having fractured and fallen, leaving lurid lights in the water. The destruction had broken open other parts of the temple, threatening to reveal the rotten wood and cracked brick building, its glass windows broken eyes throughout. But the real damage had been done not to it, but to the floor of the lake beneath. Gazing down as he swam, Bueralan saw the wide, thick fractures in the ground and felt the faint pull of the water as it seeped downward around the building, as the weight of the lake threatened to take both the temple and river downward—down to Ger's body itself.

There was nothing divine about the destruction. As the saboteur pulled himself up, he saw the top of the cave threaded with cracks and breaks, could smell the powder of explosives: the work of Heast and the two midgets he'd had prepare a series of explosions in the killing ground.

The path he had followed to the temple was impossible now. It had been difficult to climb the first time, but now, with the ceiling fallen over it, Bueralan knew that he would not be able to make his way to the river. Not that he was confident that that was the way he should leave; following the river took him back through the city, through the mining tunnel and to the shaft. If there had been no major damage done to any of those steps before, as there was with the wall he had to climb, there still remained one important fact. Dural had drawn the rope up.

That left him with following the caves out. In the opposite direction he had entered, a dark exit was his only choice.

“I'm keen not to do that swim again,” he had said weeks ago, while standing beside Zaifyr. “But I have no idea where on the mountain this will leave us. It could be anywhere.”

“It could be nowhere,” the other man had replied.

No choice now.

The walk was slow, dark. The only light to guide him came from the carapaces of bugs and stones that glowed red, then green, and which lost their luminosity shortly after he lifted them. It was a barely lit trail, revealing nothing to him of his surroundings, resulting in sharp stones cutting his bare feet, his toes stubbing on rises. But worse were the ditches, the sudden impacts on his spine that he could not avoid. Two ditches dropped him so suddenly that for a moment he thought he was in free fall …

Only to land, hard.

After a while, the need to drink drove him to small recesses of water. He drank from those he could see in the pale light, avoided those he could not. Still, some of what he consumed was fresh, others not. His thirst, his hunger and his muscles kept time, but it was imperfect. He knew he had slept twice, but had no idea for how long. A third time was interrupted by ants crawling over him, biting him. As with the previous times he had slept, he had only sat to gather his strength before rising and continuing onward.

He did not know which sun he saw when he emerged from a cave. Nor did he know where he was. The brightness of the sun blinded him at first, left his sight washed out in gray and white and black, as he adjusted. But when color returned with the heat, there was nothing to indicate how far along the mountain he had gone, or how far down. He assumed he'd come some way, and not just because of the strain on his body. Around him the trees and grass dropped downward, falling in a series of declines that were lost in the thickness of the forest around him.

“You will need shoes to rescue Samuel Orlan.”

He spun to his left, aware that he did not have the strength to fight—

“You should have chased me more.” The old, ragged man from Dirtwater grinned, revealing a mouth of missing teeth. “I would never have led you deep into Ger's tomb, I promise. But on the other hand, you would not have been touched by a god, and how unique a thing is that now? And by a dead god! A dead god's touch!”

Dry, raspy, Bueralan muttered, “What are you doing here?”

“I bought you shoes.” The worn but good boots sat next to the old man's dirty bare feet. “Though I do wonder why I didn't steal a second pair—I took two horses, after all.” He pushed himself off the fallen tree that he had been sitting on and beckoned for Bueralan to follow. “But maybe there is a system to all of this. One pair of shoes is really two shoes, and two horses are eight legs, and two swords are many deaths. The math really does make complete and utter sense.”

The saboteur said nothing, followed the old man as he rose, holding the boots and leading him through the trees.

“The important thing, however, is that you can now rescue Samuel.” Ahead of the ragged old man, a small clearing appeared. Two horses were staked to the ground, near a saddle, a bedroll, and a bag of supplies. “It's really against my better nature to do this. I warned him, you know. I told him that we could not engage her. That we had to step away. She was inevitable, of course, the last bit of fate, but he—he said enough of that—”

“Enough of him.” Bueralan opened the pack, found it full of food, water. “He can live or die, it's of no interest to me. I care only for my own.”

“Your own? Well, I suppose you might save them, as well. But.” The old man shrugged and dropped to the ground, cross-legged. “But unlikely.”

He ate a piece of dried meat, slowly. “How'd you get here?”

“Oh, you know. Here, there. The wind whispered.” He gave Bueralan a benign smile. “He said to me, after Linae died, he said that I should be here. He said I would meet the last of the god-touched here. He promised to deliver unto us a man by whom we could be free.”

“Ger.”

“And so here I am, one last task. But that's life, is it not? You work for one business faithfully and get a satisfying retirement and suddenly you have to do a favor.”

“Is that second horse for you?”

“Oh, no.” The old man's smile faded and his gaze grew troubled and frightened. “I will not go near her, no matter who orders it.”

 

THE DEAD

I will demand that my brothers and sisters admit that they are not gods …

—Qian,
The Godless

 

1.

 

After two days of fighting, a sense of loss had grown in Ayae.

It was difficult to explain. In the lull between attacks on the Spine, she tried to reason it through. She stared across the broken ground from the stone wall, the shattered soil littered with bodies and, at the end, three huge catapults, half sunk into the ground. It was not a scene she felt was familiar with her home: it felt like an obscenity, an artist's work intended to frighten and a horrifying warning for a choice she had to make in life. Every day a new element emerged. On the first day, unable to bring their remaining siege engines onto the field, the Leeran general had ordered boulders thrown to litter the approach and provide solid cover for his soldiers. It had proved a mixed success, and those who made it to the stone wall did so with heavy casualties, only to be driven back into the field.