Gods of Earth (16 page)

She shared with the bird what she had learned of Thetis and in Uroboros, and what she planned, and then sent it flapping off into the night, on a journey halfway across the continent to the dwellings of the Makine and her syndicate.

Mimir stretched out as long and thin as a lizard and then started her slow descent, climbing down head first. She tried to plan while managing the distractions of the body. She would have to be sure to retake a human form when she returned to the Broken Hand that Reaches—the soft form she had adopted to appear pleasing and trustworthy to Chance, after their first meeting.

She could tell the Guardian then what she had seen, and the Mother would be killed. But the Guardian and the Hexus presented two different obstacles to her, both formidable. It would be best to wait and allow the Hieroni to operate. They would balance the two immortals against each other. It was possible that the two immortals would destroy each other, and she would be left alone with the human boy.

She reached the street and flipped onto her feet. In long, silent leaps she hurried back to the Broken Hand that Reaches, while throughout the Earth’s last great city only the innocent slept.

When Thetis returned to the Broken Hand that Reaches, she ascended the hidden stair by which she had left and went not to
her room but to the dining hall on the floor below their quarters. She turned on a few dim lights, filling the room with a pale glow, and sat at the long table. There she had eaten many meals with the other Mothers of the Gotterdammerung, women she had known and loved all her life. She could have sat at the head of the table, being the only Mother in Disthea and one of the last on Earth, but she took instead her usual seat, near the center of the table, so close to one of the table’s legs that she had frequently banged her knee when pulling up to their meal. She ran her fingers over the deep, familiar scratches in the tabletop, gouges in the wood that were as old as her guild.

Thetis fought back tears—she had cried enough in these days—but a great wave of despair tried to crowd her mind. The god had killed her sisters. It had killed them all. It had killed Chance’s parents and many others. It was mad, evil. How could she serve it?

If she could believe that serving the god might also save Chance—then she could willingly serve it. But she had only to imagine how Chance would feel about becoming part of the god to see the lie in that hope. The boy would consider it worse than death.

“Mother Thetis.”

“Ah!” Thetis shouted, starting up. The Guardian stood before her, seeming to fill the room, Threkor’s Hammer held in one hand and planted by his side. He had made no sound in entering.

“Anti.… Guardian.” Her heart began to pound wildly. A rush of blood to her head made her skin flush red. Involuntarily, she pressed her hand against her robe, feeling in the pocket the device that Vark had given her.

“I frightened you.”

She nodded, unable to speak.

What did he know? she wondered. He must suspect, to come to her alone like this. She stopped breathing. He would kill her in an instant if he suspected—no, he would question her first. He might have some skill that let him reach into her brain, and rend truth
from the soft secretive gray folds. Or he might use cruder methods and begin to crush her limbs, one by one.

She struggled to appear calm, clinging to the hope that he had not watched her go meet the Hieroni. She pressed her shaking hands against her sides to still them.

“You have much to sorrow for,” the Guardian said.

She exhaled. “Yes. I.…”

They stared at each other in silence awhile.

Was this, she suddenly wondered, the Atheos’s attempt at sympathy, this recognition and silence?

Another moment of silence passed. Then the Guardian said, “You will not tell the boy.”

“Tell him?”

“We understand each other. You will not tell the boy about his life. About how few are the years left to him. You’ll speak of it to no one.”

Thetis clasped her hands together. “But shouldn’t we?”

“No.”

“It’s not fair,” she whispered. She sat down again, collapsing back into the chair. “He would want to know, so that he can make new plans. He has hopes. Dreams. Things he wants to do with his life. He deserves to know how little time he has left. Seth says that he’s even in love.”

“That is why he must not know. So great a spur it would be, in the Numin Well, to do the wrong thing. Tell him, if you must, after the god is dead and after the boy has returned from the Well. If you tell him before, I must kill him.”

As her fear for herself dissolved, tears for Chance came to her. They began to fall down her flushed cheeks. The Guardian watched, unmoving.

“It’s not fair,” she whispered again. “It’s all so unfair.”

“Yes. Too much of this world is ugly and unfair.” The Guardian slowly nodded his great gray head. “I tell you this, Mother of the
Gotterdammerung: if there were a greatest god, as the boy believes, I would kill it next. After Hexus dies, I would find where this greatest god, this father of all woe, hides from us in cowardice, and I would drag it into the light, and I would smite it dead with this hammer.” He leaned the shimmering head of Threkor’s weapon forward. “And with this fist.” He held up his left hand and wrapped his fingers tightly, making a sound of grinding stone.

“And then I would crush his bones to paste, and sow the meal into the Filthealm, that his dead flesh might rot in the filth of his failed works.”

The Guardian strode from the room.

Thetis looked at the empty place where he had stood. The smell of wet slate remained in the Guardian’s wake. A dark scratch had been gouged in the floor where the spike on the end of the haft of Threkor’s Hammer had rested on the wood.

CHAPTER

15

C
hance learned the blasphemous secrets required to activate the Engineer’s trap. Each day for the next four days, the Guardian led Chance back to Uroboros. The old Engineering Master Sar walked them from a door in the side of the building, through a single straight hall spotted with irregularly shaped doors, and then down the winding, wet stair to the binding cube. Chance learned the way so that he could find the room alone. He grew accustomed to the smell of burning oil that had before faintly sickened him. The halls and sounds and sights of Uroboros grew to seem less strange, less fearful.

Though he would not have admitted it, Chance enjoyed mastering the pattern of touches of the colored spots on the dais that were needed to make the cube slowly form its mirrored walls. There was something pleasing, something that made him feel swelled with accomplishment, to touch the brightly colorful buttons in the correct pattern at one place, and see their miraculous effect a few paces away. He found himself quietly, secretly sneaking longer and longer looks through the doors of Uroboros, wondering what the machines in those rooms did, what touching the bright switches on
the different panels would accomplish. But he did not share these thoughts.

In the Broken Hand that Reaches, Thetis opened a hall in the floor below their sleeping quarters, where they could eat together at a long table.

“I am the only Mother here,” she told Chance. “There are many other Mothers, but they are away, traveling, and the first due to return will not be here for weeks. They do not know what happened here. I will have to manage things now.” She took possession of the store of the Guild’s money, and soon strangers appeared in the building—cooks and attendants. At Thetis’s command, they served only Puriman food, bought at market in the south of the city. Chance and Seth feasted hungrily, while the Guardian and Mimir looked on.

Chance also grew interested in the happenings of the city. He noticed families in the streets—mothers, fathers, their children—and people eating at inns where they sat out in the street, laughing and talking loudly. They were so like Trumen—but then here or there among them walked a soulburdened raccoon, or a man with goat’s eyes, or some other unman. It remained mysterious to Chance how people could live so far from any farms, though he understood that one could take many fish from the sea. But otherwise the people of Disthea had a kind of life in most ways like a Puriman’s. They did not glow for him any more with the sinister sheen that he had first perceived in the seemingly infernal activities of the Dark Engineers. He even grew accustomed, as the other city dwellers surely already had, to the endless vistas of bereft towers, darkly crowding the sky above.

One morning returning from Uroboros, Chance heard a group of children singing in a narrow alley by a building that Seth had told him held a school. He stopped by the corner, half hidden, and watched them. There were boys and girls, the oldest of them not
more than ten. They held hands and turned in a circle, chanting the same doggerel rhyme over and over. Chance’s smiled died when he began to understand the words:

Although we know no natural death,

The world grows old grows old grows old.

Blue light, blue light,

The ashes of dead suns.

The mortals say they made me me,

I say I made me me myself.

Blue light, blue light,

The ashes of dead suns.

A heavy hand lay down on Chance’s shoulder. Chance started, and looked up. The Guardian.

“It is an old rhyme,” the Guardian said.

They returned in silence to the Broken Hand that Reaches.

As they crossed the vast entrance hall, Chance heard two voices coming from a small room to the side of the gigantic statue. The Guardian continued on, but Chance hesitated, curious because one voice was clearly Thetis, and the other voice sounded familiar. In a moment, the woman from the Fricandor Lands came out of the room, with Thetis following. She bowed deeply to Thetis, and then turned to leave. But when she saw Chance standing alone, as if waiting, she walked to him. Chance felt a slight flush, but was glad to be clean and dressed in proper clothes.

She wore bright pants and a long shirt, colored over with bright angular patterns of green, black, yellow, and red. She bowed before him. Her green cat eyes seemed to glow.

“I am Wadjet.”

Chance began to experience even more intensely the discomfort he had felt the last time he saw the steward, seeing now how she inspected him. He couldn’t look into her disconcerting eyes, with their slit irises, for more than a moment. His eyes wandered over her athletic form: her high cheeks, her fangs, her long dark hands with their smooth and pale palms, the high outline of her breasts. He noticed also something now for the first time: her smell. The aroma of some heady herb or oil rose from her, mixed with a smell he recognized with a shock. His neighbor, Elder John’s wife Mary, had a gray tabby that on hot days lay languidly along the side of the road by her house. Chance had stopped to pet it each time he passed, and often pressed his nose on the top of its head, between the ears, and smelled the rich, clean smell of cat fur. Wadjet smelled of that. The aroma lay thickly in his head. He flushed.

“I am Chance Kyrien.” He bowed awkwardly, uncertain of whether this was proper etiquette, but having seen it in others of the city. “Was Thetis able to help you with your need?” The Mother of the Gotterdammerung still stood in the doorway, watching them closely.

“No. She will help you first.”

Chance shifted uncomfortably. Must he also bear the guilt of a plague?

“You are a Puriman?” Wadjet asked. Her tone was challenging.

He nodded, furrowing his brow. It was frustrating to think that here was yet another person who knew something of him when he knew nothing of her.

“I can tell by the clothes,” she explained. Her fangs flashed in a brief, defiant smile. “So, you think I’m not a person. You say I am a monster.”

“Uh.…” He almost started to say, no, of course not. But then, he did, didn’t he? Or, just a week before he would have said so.

She laughed at him. That too sounded challenging. “The Puriman interest the Stewards.”

He frowned. “Why is that?”

“We are similar, in a way.”

“I thought—from what Thetis said to me earlier—I thought you were like the Leafwage.…”