The Godless (14 page)

Gilan and the others believed that he was in shock and left him alone once he returned to the village. Freed from the cart, he found himself drifting along the hard, rocky ground until he reached the pelt-covered hut of his parents. It was his now, but in two years he had not made any changes. He slept in the same room as always, letting dust collect in others. As he drew closer to the cloth door, the haunt of Meihir paused and regarded not just him, but those that trailed behind him in a dull murmur of language neither could understand.

“Zaifyr,” she said.

His hand touched the heavy cloth.

“What have you done?” she asked, approaching him.

“I don't know.” His voice was barely a whisper. “They are the spirits of men we killed down the mountain. I don't know why they are here.”

The murmur of the merchant and guards grew, the words unidentifiable.

“The God of Death is no more.” Meihir's attention wavered, the constant cold and hunger in her demanding. For the first time, Zaifyr watched her fight it. “The Wanderer is gone,” she said again.

He had no response.

“What else can you see?”

Their words, he suspected, were complaints against hunger, cold and him. Zaifyr said, “Nothing.”

“No birds, no animals?”

Around him, others in the village were gathering. “There's nothing but you and them,” he said. “Nothing but the dead.”

“Look for them!”

“There's nothing!”

She spoke again, but he shook his head, pulled back the cloth door and stepped inside, letting the heavy fabric fall behind him, though it did not muffle their voices.

Meihir's question lingered. Aided by the sight of the new dead patrolling between the village and the ravine where their bodies lay, the question was not allowed to slip his mind. He grew withdrawn from the others, spending more and more time in Meihir's small, dirty hut, reading what he could find. It was not much. She owned a handful of books, kept no diary. There were many times where he sat and listened to her telling him how unfair her punishment was, how she did not deserve this curse. But he did learn. He learned about the Wanderer, about how he had stumbled onto the rocky shore of Kakar with the Leviathan's help, an injured figure reliant on the giant god's friendship, left crippled from an early battle that saw the destruction of his pantheon, with the gods Maika, Maita and Maina, the gods of ascension, rebirth and finality, being destroyed. Meihir did not know why anyone would want to attack the Wanderer's pantheon, did not know why in the years after the first god fell he became a target, but she feared much, even if she could not explain it. Yet, what she did know in detail was the moments of the Wanderer as he was struck down by Heinka, as the Feral God had drawn on the lives of his believers to kill the other, in a seemingly suicidal attack before the might of the Leviathan. He learned about the gods, about the flow of magic and power that the witch had believed in, about how each power had been tethered by a god and how it would run wild through the world without them.

Finally, on a cold morning, he took one of the metal traps from the village and entered the snow fields to the north, with his white bearskin cloak around him. The stripped-bare trees watched him bury the trap at the edge of the Hoewa River, where the water did not entirely freeze no matter how cold. He settled back into the snow and waited.

It was a long wait. The empty, cold sky lit with the orange of the afternoon's sun and the cold set into his bones and he told himself he was a fool. Yet he stayed. Snow blanketed him. The ice in the river broke, the sound harsh and primitive. More than once he told himself to stand, to walk back to Kakar, but he never moved.

And then, finally, a stag stepped into the trap.

The metal crunched through bone, the animal cried out. It was young, its antlers not yet fully grown, and it thrashed against the trap, drawing on the chain spike that held it to the ground. Raising his crossbow, Zaifyr sank a bolt into its neck and saw it stagger and sag. Rising, his cloak dislodging thick snow as he did, the charm-laced man approached the dying animal and watched. He longed to shoot the stag again, to end his misery, but he had laid the trap for a reason and he would not weaken now.

The stag's breathing rasped, its dark eyes at first staring wildly at Zaifyr then blankly past him. He focused his attention on the animal's chest, watching the final rise of it with such attention that he saw a faint outline at the edges of the body, saw the shape of the stag rising. The sunlight broke through it as if it were smoldering and Zaifyr could sense the animal's confusion, hunger and cold.

The stag moved, but not far. It appeared to be waiting, but there was nothing, Zaifyr knew, that would be coming for it.

There were no more gods of death, no more gods to take the souls of the living and lead them to paradise, to rebirth, to oblivion. There was only him to bear witness, only he that could see what happened to the souls of the living, only him, who had, despite the charms he wore, the charms that had protected him from his god, found himself changed by the Wanderer's death.

Zaifyr turned and began walking back through the bare trees without the carcass, unable to bring himself to take it.

 

8.

 

“I thought I smelled something foul.”

“It's a delight, admit it.” The door closed solidly behind Bueralan. “I found this perfume just for you.”

Across from him, Aerala wrinkled her nose in distaste. Wearing a long, thin green skirt and a brown singlet, the dark-haired, olive-skinned archer lay in a hammock, swaying slightly as her foot pushed against the rope pegged in the wall. In her lap was a half-filled parchment and as he entered she placed a quill into a small well at her side. “It's no wonder your romances never end well.”

Bueralan chuckled and placed his axes on the weapon rack, noting with satisfaction that the weapons there had been clean and sharpened already. “Where the others at?”

“Dinner.”

“I hope they don't come back drunk.”

“Mercenaries don't drink in this town,” Aerala said. “Though your smell would make me risk the gibbet of Lady Wagan.”

He lifted an arm, sniffed. “It's that bad?”

“You have no idea.”

Grimacing, the saboteur continued through the barracks, picking up a cake of rough, yellow soap and a towel as he reached the end. A small room built upon a cement block with a claw-footed bath awaited him. The water he poured into the basin came from pipes in the floor, which were connected to a series of tanks beneath the city. The huge, bronze containers had originally been put in so that the city would not have their water supplies cut off in a siege, though they had since then been adapted to use the heavy summer rain falls more industriously. There were coals beneath the bath, but after thrusting his arm beneath the cold running water and feeling the freshness against his skin, he sank in straight away.

Once he had finished bathing, he drained the tub and refilled it, lighting the coals this time. As he lay in the clean, warm water, his mind drifted. He thought about the Quor'lo, the Lady Wagan, the money and the mystery that lay in Leera. That, he had to admit, he still did not like: the mystery was not one he cared to solve with the lives of Dark. But Heast had surprised him, in the last moments of their meeting.

“Samuel Orlan will be traveling with you,” the Captain of the Spine had said.

Hand on the door to his office, slants of lamp light cracking through the opening, Bueralan paused. “That's quite an honor,” he said, finally.

“It is,” the other replied. “He visited me this morning to tell me just that.”

The door closed. “He told you?”

Heast was silent. When Bueralan turned, he found that the old soldier's pale gaze was not focused on him. “In Mireea,” he said, finally, “I watch everyone of consequence. For the most part, it is a little bit of history, investment in politics. My knowledge comes from contacts, spies and simple intuition. No one is beyond me in this city, not even Keepers. But Orlan … Samuel Orlan I know very little beyond his considerable reputation. Sometimes I know when he leaves the city. I know the hours he keeps when he is here and they are erratic and I do not know what changes them. I do not know who tries to win his favor or influence him. A part of me even believes he is making a game out of this knowledge, a test between two old men. If that's so, it is not a game between equals.”

“I would rather he not ride with us,” he said.

“I could not say no.” Heast's pale, cold gaze met his. “Do you understand, Bueralan? As he stood before me, I saw a small, fat man with no military training whatsoever. I saw a man who I know intellectually will be not only be deadweight to you in any fight, but who will also slow you down and put you in a greater danger. Even his knowledge of the land does not compensate for this. Yet, I could not tell him no. I hinted at it, suggested that it might not be wise of him, but he looked me in the eye and told me that he was not asking, he was telling me. I was nothing but a pause in thought. A curiosity. A kindness.”

“What game is he playing at?” he said. “Is it vengeance? The Quor'lo did come into his shop and attack his apprentice. He lost years of work, maps of importance never to be returned to history.”

“I do not believe Samuel Orlan is a man of vengeance.”

Bueralan let the memory drift away. Heast could add no more, and it became clear that the Captain of the Spine did not want to keep him in Mireea. The awareness sat poorly, if Bueralan was honest. The exiled Baron of Kein had once been a man of some importance, both in title and reputation. He had watched politics, taken part in it, enjoyed it. He had lost his nerve at the end when the stakes were at their highest, when a queen could have fallen, but he had never left the world of politics. He was a shadow in it, a politician made into a soldier, a saboteur who stood on the sides of other people's plans.

Before Elar, he had not lost a man or woman in seven years. He had forgotten how much it could hurt, all of Dark had, and it was part of why they had agreed to Heast's offer. The decision had not been made on facts, on money, on success: it was about forgiveness and the memory of the man they had lost. Now, however, he felt as if he had agreed to something that was verging on being large, violent and costly.

He had no doubt who would be asked, first, to pay the price.

 

9.

 

As the years progressed, Zaifyr became isolated in Kakar. His companions—once men and women of flesh and blood adorned with charms—became spectral figures, their bodies broken apart by cold light.

He recognized the change but could do nothing to stop it. In the home of his parents, haunts of the merchant and his guards walked through the walls, followed him in his chores and stood over him while he slept, murmuring in a language that he did not understand. Exhausted, he would fall asleep and awaken to their nonsensical whispers, with no beat skipped. They were angry at him, vengeful, but he could say nothing that they would understand. They left him alone only when he approached Meihir. In her lucid moments, she admitted to not knowing why they treated her so, but those moments were fleeting as the seasons changed, increasingly so.

He felt, as he stood apart from the living in the village staring up at the piles of snow around the edges of the houses, that he ought to be able to do more for the dead. He could not explain why he felt that other than a part of him, watching the reflected light pierce through their shambling bodies, felt more than his share of responsibility for what had happened. He had killed only one but had been responsible for the deaths of the others.

He discovered early that the haunts would not follow him out of the village. They were tied to the bodies that had been brought back and buried, or so he theorized. Each haunt had a range, and though it was not consistent, he knew that after a mile or two of travel, he would see none of them. Eager to find solitude, he began keeping to the caves that dotted the bases of the mountains. Lighting torches, he discovered that they were unoccupied, and he began to store dry wood and blankets there so that he could read the limited library that he owned. In the summer, he told himself he would ensure that the library grew in the hope that his intellect would one day equal the position he found himself in. He would have to leave Kakar and learn a new language to do it. Wrapped in his cloak, he felt the limitations of the world he had been born into and experienced both its inadequacies and his own. He could not explain what was happening. As he stared out of the cave and watched the faint, broken shapes of animals picking their way through the snow, he felt overwhelmed by what he was experiencing.

In the evenings, he would return to Kakar where, joined with the haunts of a witch, a merchant and the guards of the latter, that horror continued. From the moment that food was prepared, be it stag, pig, fish or whatever meat was cooked in the blackened pits of the village, he was stalked by the haunt of the beasts. Within a week, he had taken to eating his meals away from the others, pulling what he ate from the gardens that they kept. As Zaifyr trudged through the snow back to the village, he knew that unless he discovered a way soon to control what he saw and retreat to the ignorance he had only a short time ago, he would stop returning every night.

As he continued, the sound of breaking snow soon merged with words. It took a moment for him to recognize that those words were not ones that he recognized—and that they spoke loudly, commands being issued and obeyed. Stopping, he dropped into a crouch and focused, noticing for the first time that the trails of smoke that rose through the winter-stripped trees were thicker, blacker than they were, fueled by a tartness in the air. It took another moment for him to realize what it was that he smelt, and by then he could see the broken forms of those he lived with, around the snow mounds and outlines of huts.