The Betrayed (44 page)

“What about you?”

Elia stretched her hand. A sparrow landed on her palm. “Everyone thought Damian had killed me, gods and men alike. I was mourned and forgotten. My faith died with my body. But immortal souls cannot be killed. After Damian was banished, his deed became undone.

“I came back, but no one remembered me anymore. My followers had long died off, for the war stretched for many generations of human life. Even some of my kin had a difficult time remembering me.”

The bird flew off in a flutter of wings. “I have become sort of an outcast. I am still immortal, but I have no power in this world anymore. The lives and deaths of men no longer affect me.”

“What about Simon?” Ayrton asked.

Her smile faded. “He forgot me, too. I don’t blame him. He thought I was lost. No one believed that gods or goddesses could be remade until after the war was over and they forced Damian’s followers to convert. So he found himself another love, a human girl.”

She looked up at the sky. “I used to be the goddess of poetry and song. I have not written or sung ever since.”

Ayrton felt really sorry for Elia. “Didn’t they try to…bring you back like the others?”

“I don’t know. I believe they did try, but my death was not an act of faith, so it didn’t work. No one knew what murder was until Damian invented it. He invented so many terrible things. He took the mankind we had created and perverted it into something horrible, sinister, wicked, and utterly, utterly clever.”

She stood up and began pacing, leading him toward a small lake of crystal-pure water.

“After the war was over, the gods believed that things could go back to what they used to be a thousand years before. But the world was changed beyond recognition. Humans changed. The Second Age of Mankind had begun, the age of Damian’s men.

“We were afraid. We could not learn fast enough to adjust to the changes. We found ourselves being ridiculed by the very thing we had created. People lied to us, led us astray. Our Special Children turned against us. Our champions became tyrants and demigods. Prophets used their knowledge of the future to twist events to their needs.”

She sat by the pool and dipped her bare feet in the water. Ripples spread over the surface. “We were very weak after the war. We had very little power. We could only make small changes, affect insignificant events.

“Fortunately, there were still some good men, people of virtue, who still believed in the grace of their creators. They feared and worshipped us. So we ordered them to cleanse the world of Special Children, to remove the seedlings of chaos and strife from among men.

“It was a war that never got written down in the books. Our knights fell upon the world and purged it. They cleansed the lands of those evil, decadent, and unfaithful. When the horrible battle was over, there were very few people left in the world. But they were now under the stern yoke of believers. In our honor, they marked a holy land and built temples all over it so that people would never forget the world belonged to the gods.”

“How did you win that war? You said you were weak.”

Elia hesitated for a moment. “Some of the gods gave away their essence to create terrible weapons. We used them to…kill the enemy. Hundreds of thousands of souls.”

“What happened after the war?”

“The world was ours again. But we did not want it. We were disgusted and disappointed. Our dreams were shattered. We decided to abandon mankind for good.

“We built ourselves our little valley of peace and perfection and shielded it with powers to prevent impure souls from entering. Only people who possessed the grace of the first man could pass through the barrier and survive. Like you. Unholy people perished trying.”

She paused for a moment. “It was our parting gift to the few good souls that still remained. Whenever they needed a respite from the burdens of the ugly world, they could come to our valley to rest, to rejuvenate their hearts.”

Ayrton scooped icy water into his palm.

“After several centuries, by human reckoning, our anger faded somewhat. We thought the world was healed and tried to return to it. But we were still hesitant and afraid of what we might learn. It was Tanid who braved the feat.

“He left the city and ventured into the world of men.” She shook her head. “It was too late. Too much time passed from the last time a god had walked among men. People no longer recognized their creators.

“Confused and hurt, Tanid came to a group of people and introduced himself. Instead of fearing him, those humans laughed at him. They scorned him, calling him a madman. No one believed him any longer. Tanid returned to the city and vowed never again to deal with the world of men, whatever happened. Most of the other gods followed his suit. It has been so ever since.”

Ayrton nodded to himself. Tanid, the god of weather. The gods were petty children.

“With time, most gods forgot who they were. Without a purpose to bind them, and time to urge them, they drifted away, becoming recluses. They mostly do the things they love, like fish or paint or tend to deer.”

“Or carve in wood,” Ayrton added.

“Others are just meditating, lost in their thoughts. Very few still bother to talk to one another.”

“You seem not to have been affected like them,” he said.

“Neither was Selena. I don’t know why.”

Ayrton plucked a stem of grass and placed it between his teeth. The gods were no different than the men they so vehemently scorned. The majority were just empty-headed fools.

Elia got up, leading him away again. Ayrton followed her. It was a sort of an unconscious ritual of hers that she repeated every few hours. She would follow an invisible trail that marked some sort of a private queendom, checking on little things.

“How am I supposed to save them if they won’t even acknowledge their own existence?”

Elia shrugged. “You must find a way.”

Ayrton looked at her. “If the barrier collapses, the Caytoreans will be able to come here and kill your bodies. Aren’t you afraid to die…again?”

She shook her head. “No. I have died already once and come back to a world that no longer remembers me. There’s more to life than just being alive.”

“Is there anything that might make a difference?”

Elia did not seem very optimistic. “Even his return did not seem to stir them up.”

That vague reference again. “Him? Who is this…person that you talk about?”

She looked at him as if the answer was the most obvious and logical thing possible. “Damian.”

Ayrton blinked. “Damian managed to escape the Abyss? How?”

“We don’t know. But we all felt it. Selena was terrified.”

“How’s that possible?”

“Damian was always the one to think of something new, something the world had never witnessed before. He must have thought of some way to retain his presence in this world and bide his time until he could return.”

A vengeful, clever god on the loose, against a bunch of pathetic, self-defeated juvenile deities. It sounded like a very bleak scenario. And he had to save the gods, save the world.

Ayrton realized these gods could never defeat the evil they faced by themselves. They were too stupid to do that. Immortality was their greatest undoing. Unfettered by time, they felt no urgency to evolve. On the other hand, humans fought like rabid dogs for their scrap of knowledge and status in the short span of their lives. It was always the hungriest who made the best hunting tools.

With rising dread, Ayrton realized that many things Elia had told him were probably a twisted, naive interpretation of a much grimmer, darker reality. Take the Special Children. They had massacred half the world to get rid of their foul, gifted offspring, only to be defeated by miracles of birth dozens of generations later. Hidden in the blood of commoners, the gift traveled from one soul to another until it manifested in an age when neither god nor man could do anything about it. The memory of the mad girl in Jaruka haunted him.

There were monsters walking the world, Ayrton realized, and no one could tell them apart from ordinary humans. A few sorry souls served the houses of the gods, but what about those wizards and prophets who got born far from the influence of the patriarchs and matriarchs?

If he’d been a god, Ayrton thought in a moment of mad glee, he would have done it very differently. If he’d been a god, he realized, he would have made sure simple death of his followers would not have been enough to defeat him. He swallowed. If a common man like himself could think of such simple ruses, there was no reckoning what a god like Damian might conceive.

“When did this happen?”

She shrugged. “About a year ago, by human count. We felt a terrible blast of power. He tore a hole in the fabric of the Abyss and fled.”

Ayrton stared at the valley locked in never-ending spring. He knew Damian would not have forgotten his kin throwing him into the Abyss. Time was meaningless in the Abyss, from what stories told. Damian was coming after the City of Gods, with no one the wiser to stop him.

Ayrton felt time slipping between his fingers even as the perfect world around him stood still, frozen in a bubble of eternal beauty. He had to evacuate the city, take the gods and goddesses to safety. There was very little time left.

And he didn’t have the slightest idea how to do it.

CHAPTER 42

F
ar from civilization, at the mercy of cruel nature, strange souls tended to band together. There were no secrets aboard a crowded ship.

Out of loneliness, or maybe curiosity, Ewan came to see Armin often, a polite, humble, withdrawn boy with lots of questions. Ever an investigator, Armin dug for information, slowly peeling layers of secrecy off the boy’s soul.

Their bonding was interrupted during the second week of their voyage. Ewan fell sick, to the great dismay and alarm of the superstitious crew. Disease aboard the ship was one of the greatest perils, save maybe fire and storms. The boy would drift about aimlessly, lost in some inner trance, impervious to the caress of the stinging sleet and howling wind, burning hot to the touch. The sight of him wandering around the deck, steam rising off his shoulders as snowflakes hissed, melting against his skin, made the stalwart and veteran crew of the
Tenacious
turn grim and dangerous.

Luckily, Captain Horace was a man of vision, a man who valued gold more than anything else, it seemed, and he made sure the discipline and morale remained high, even when the ship’s doctor’s attempts to cure Ewan failed miserably. Not even the leeching of his blood helped much.

Armin saw the week of fever as a test of his own endurance and negotiation skills. Using the best social tactics he could spin, he tried to assuage the sailors, wielding his knowledge against their primal fears.

The tense situation reached an apex after Ewan failed to show on deck one day, staying below and murmuring in some strange language. That day, Armin learned two things: that Captain Horace had some of his men flogged and that Ewan could speak Keutan when semicomatose.

Armin’s resolve almost faltered soon thereafter. He began to worry about a mutiny. Some of the sailors would be more than satisfied with half the payment he had already given their captain. The prospect of a violent, bloody rebellion became a palpable danger. The weather deteriorated, adding to their misery. They were all alone, with not a speck of land in sight.

Fortunately, Ewan came out of his delirium the very next day, slightly pale and thin, but no different than he had been just a few weeks earlier. His almost nonchalant demeanor unnerved even the most ferocious would-be mutineers. The sailors started to fear him, avoiding him, even so much as eye contact. Only Horace would talk to the boy.

Ewan’s isolation strengthened his relationship with Armin. The investigator took pity on the boy and gave him some of his books, after being pleasantly, if not really, surprised that the boy was literate. Cuddling in the dark, narrow cabin they shared, Ewan wasted candle fat reading the rare scripts. He never said anything, but his face spoke volumes.

The turn of the year was only days away. On the ship, the sense of time eroded, becoming a dull monotony between shifts. Horace gripped Armin’s maps like a sacred artifact, navigating toward the unfriendly destination. By all estimates, Ichebor’s treacherous waters were only leagues away.

Ewan and Armin shared each other’s company on the deck. The boy was dressed in a light, salt-eaten jacket, oblivious of the ravaging chill. Armin wore layers of fur and wool, his teeth chattering. A native of mild, rainy winters in Sirtai, he found the open-sea desolation a torment for his bones.

“I think I’m a monster,” the boy blurted.

Armin looked at him, but Ewan evaded eye contact. “I would not say so.”

Ewan closed his eyes. “What else? I hardly feel the cold. I do not sleep at night. Sometimes, I even forget to eat. The only thing that reminds me to is seeing you do all those things.”

Armin patted the boy on the shoulder. “Don’t despair. You are not a monster.”

“I have read the books, sir. I know what you think. But I’m not a Special Child.”