The Godless (28 page)

Until he was led into a small opening. It was dominated by a large, solid-oak map table, the size of it suggesting that it would take four or more people to move it, and not the tall, middle-aged man who stood over it.

In appearance, he was not a distinctive man. Much like Dural, the man at the table was a white man with brown eyes and brown hair; his face was neither blessed nor cursed with a trait that left it memorable in either grace or ugliness. There was no sense, either, that the man was a warlock, that blood had ever stained his hands. There was a quality about the men and women who used such power, a blemish in their gaze, as if each had seen a part of the world that those who did not draw from the dying could not possibly begin to understand, and there was no such look in the eyes of the man before him. If anything, his was the face of a clear and honest man.

Dural stepped from his mount. “My General.”

“Lieutenant.” The man wore a white shirt and brown leather trousers, with no weapon in sight. “What do you have there?”

“A mercenary—” Bueralan's hands refused to release the reins “—who has bought us Samuel Orlan.”

The general's smile was faint. “Is that true, Samuel?”

Behind him, Bueralan heard Orlan slide from his saddle. On either side of him, the horses of Dural's soldiers shifted and the weight of their riders, followed by their steel grasps, closed in on his still limbs. “I am afraid my hand has been played early,” the cartographer said, walking up to the man before him. “For that I do apologize.”

“You are unharmed?”

“But for my pride.” Orlan turned, his cold blue eyes meeting Bueralan's. “The cost of it does present a small gift though. Perhaps you have heard of Captain Bueralan Le, of the saboteur group Dark?”

 

8.

 

He pushed the stone, felt it give and heard it hit the water. A cascade of smaller stones followed, sounding in hollow splashes that tore a jagged line down the side of the Temple of Ger.

The building was rotten, both in appearance and smell. Made from brick and wood, the latter having turned black, decay leaving its grasp like a handprint on the stone where the two met. In a crack not wide enough for him to drop through, Zaifyr saw that the tall windows had broken inward, the discolored glass shattering across the ground on impact.

“You are about to violate something very holy, Qian.”

“A haunt does not learn.” Zaifyr settled his gaze on her. “Once, I wanted to explain to the dead what was happening to them. I thought it would be easier to do so. But the truth is your kind will take in no more after you have died. Every idea, every belief, every moral is trapped in you, like a bug caught in amber. You will not remember this conversation, just as you will not remember the one before.”

“I remember all that is important.”

He hooked his hand around a sharp edge of stone. “Look inside and tell me that Ger is alive.”

She did not move. “Your kind has always lied.”

“If you were capable of learning you would ask why it is that you barely felt Ger, why he was so faint, here in his mountain.” The stone broke, fell into the water. “You have more ability now to know that than you ever did in life.”

“I have faith.”

“Faith is a very subjective emotion.”

Standing, Zaifyr picked up the hammer. It felt heavy in his hands. He was tired, but he brought the end down on the weakening edge of the stone. After another two blows enough of the rotting window was revealed that he could carefully drop into the building, a prospect that did not excite him. He felt no threat from within, either from Ger or from anything else that might live within the darkness, and it was exactly that absence which troubled him.

He lowered himself from the ledge slowly, using his wedges as handholds as his bare feet searched for a perch on the window and finding none until his toes touched glass-covered stone. Wet, slippery. He dislodged the shards before letting it take his weight, his tired arms trembling from the effort.

The haunt drew closer to him, the red from her chest rising and diminishing as she stepped out of the ceiling's crude light. She did not make a move to speak and Zaifyr, his hands searching for holds that were not crumbling, did not try. Once he had secured himself, he used her light to stare into the darkness of the temple.

There were rotting pews and, to the left, a broken dais. He could make out only the edges of other items, shapes hinted at in the dark that teased the imagination.

Pushing himself forward, Zaifyr dropped to the ground, the momentum carrying him to his knees. His hands pressed deep into cold, slippery mud.

There was glass beneath his feet and he tried to avoid it, but did not succeed. Within two steps, his left foot had two shallow cuts. Ignoring the wounds he stared ahead at the dark that, with the faint light of the haunt no longer being blocked by his body, revealed more to him than it had previously done.

“You are not welcome.”

From the dark: guttural, barely understandable.

“You are not welcome.”

He approached the voice, the mud sliding between his toes, the edges of glass threatening to cut him again. He passed the outline of a rotting pew. Before him, a figure began to take shape. He saw a bestial head that could have once belonged to any canine creature, but which was defined by the length of a wolf's nose and the dull, bared teeth of the same animal. It was made from steel, however, a suit of armor cast for a figure much larger than human.

“You are not—”

Zaifyr's hand touch the cold metal mid-sentence and the helmet toppled, landing to his left with a clatter. The suit followed, sprawling across the ground. Whoever—whatever—had owned the ancient armor was gone, dead. Perhaps. Perhaps it had fled, leaving once it realized that Ger had no power over it, that the binds that once held it in place as a guardian were broken, that after servitude for millions of years it was free.

 

9.

 

His eyes adjusted to the dark, easier now that the haunt had drifted into the temple behind him. She had pushed through the shattered remains of the shell that she had broken apart against earlier, but he knew that she would not appreciate the feat. Zaifyr wondered if the sight of the decay, the crumbling remains of everything that had been enclosed, was a shock to her—but this, he did not ask. He wanted to keep her glow as light, so that he was not forced to resort to using the haunts that were trapped inside.

He could feel them brushing against his skin, dozens, hundreds. Yet the strength of Ger remained the same.

Thousands of years ago, in the twilight of the Five Kingdoms, the God of Truth, Wehwe, had inspired a cult. Blame—the name his followers had adopted after his fall—had come to the edges of Asila and tried to move the slim, brown-skinned god from where he knelt, but had discovered that Wehwe's skin burned at their touch. It scalded them, but did more: it created a heat without fire beneath their skin, a heat that consumed them. In response, they had purged the land of settlements a hundred miles in every direction around him.

By the time Zaifyr walked into the dense forest, Blame was long dead, torn apart by Aela Ren, the Innocent. It had been that act that had finally drawn Zaifyr to investigate, for Ren had been a man who had spent the years after the gods' deaths without a single death being attributed to him. Zaifyr had never met him—the Innocent had gone to some lengths to avoid the Five Kingdoms—but in the rare moments that he heard about the man, he heard stories that were more myth than reality. He heard of scars, of wounds that wept, of one man, and of half a dozen men with one name. What was consistent was that he claimed to be the inheritor of Wehwe's power. But until Blame, he'd shown nothing of it. Zaifyr had returned to his brothers and sisters with the story of how the cult had been murdered, having laid down arms first. Since it had been so isolated, and Aela Ren such a notoriously difficult figure to find, they had agreed to do nothing, to watch, to wait. Perhaps they had been wrong to do that, since later, Zaifyr learned that the Innocent had begun his war in Sooia shortly after he had been locked in his crooked tower for three hundred years.

But on the day he had approached Wehwe, as he walked the rough road to his still form, Zaifyr had felt the god's awareness, the primal acknowledgment.

It was difficult to explain just what the dying god felt toward him. When Zaifyr reached out to touch him there was pain, but there was always pain. In that, all the gods were the same, though he had yet to reach any understanding as to why that was. He did not understand how it was that time could move differently for them and him. He knew only that there did not exist behind the pain a series of rational thought. What existed was animosity and hatred, a bitter venom that he would not have thought to ascribe to the God of Truth, if he had not already felt it before.

It was such a powerful hatred that by the time Zaifyr stepped into the empty, sun-drenched clearing where the slender god knelt, he could barely stand.

But with Ger, it was different.

With the giant god, Zaifyr felt the presence, but it was faint, nothing more than a whisper of disquiet or resentment. At first, he had been unsure what to make of it. Was it because of his time in the tower? Had that changed him? If so, how did Fo and Bau feel? But then he had met Ayae and listened as she told him that she felt nothing; for a time, he had not known what to think. But now, as he moved to the front of the church, past the still skeletons and paintings that held nothing but the smear of faded color, he wondered if it was just that there was not much of Ger left.

That the god was almost dead.

He stopped at the dais and looked across the ruined temple. At the broken entrance the faint outline of Oyia stood. He could hear faint murmurs, but the words were indistinct and it was clear that she would not be following him.

Closing his eyes, a part of him shifted. When he lifted his eyelids, the light in the room had grown, the haunts of children appearing between broken pews, walls and around the fallen armor. They were all boys, not one of them older than fourteen, most young and each of them wearing old robes that dragged across the floor. They had been sealed inside, Zaifyr knew. Sealed with the men he saw at the edges of the room and in the doorways.

Behind one middle-aged man was a set of stairs. Leaving the dais, Zaifyr made his way to the rotting door and began walking down the narrow, slippery steps. The wooden railing on the left crumbled as his hand touched it, but the light was strong enough that he did not need it.

At the end of the stairs, the mud stopped, though he was well below the lake. Zaifyr's feet left wet tracks across the dusty corridor. There were cells on either side of him, and inside the haunts of men and young boys stood individually. Halfway along the short passage he closed his eyes and focused again, to see if he could add a layer to those who had been sealed in, and how strongly the generations ran. But when he opened his eyes nothing had changed.

Another set of stairs took him downward.

A crude red light filled the room, revealing skeletons around a dirty glass dome in the center where another skeleton lay.

On the floor, among the bones, were stones and dusty cups, the latter mostly intact. They had not been knocked over by falling bodies, however, but by earthquakes and explosions from miners. Neither of whom would have known or cared about the sanctity of the quiet chamber at the bottom of the Temple of Ger, where men and boys had taken their own lives—and where one man had stood in the center on a large glass dome and brought the stone walls up, until the temple was sealed from the soldiers who were destroying the cities throughout the mountains.

“And that,” Zaifyr whispered, “is how they sealed the temple, with their blood to fuel what power can be stolen from the dead.”

Edging past the skeletons, he approached the glass dome. He pushed the remains of the lead priest away—he could see him, a large, pale, bearded man—and bent down beside the glass, his hand reaching out to scratch away the dried blood and dust.

Beneath it, he saw dark wounded flesh, though just what part of Ger it was, Zaifyr could not tell. But it was flesh, just a hint of it. If he broke through the glass, he would be able to lower himself through the hole, his entire body, but the flesh he stood upon would be only the smallest patch of the entire being, the skin weeping blood, the wounds inflamed and infected, how much pain there must be spread out for miles beneath the city above.

And then he was touched. A faint, frail, light touch, akin to how he could reach out to the dead. A faint touch that was there for but a moment and then gone, a touch that looked at him and then moved on, dismissing him.

Zaifyr was not left with a feeling of hatred or animosity; nor was he left with kindness or love. He was left with indifference, of not mattering. He felt the barest acknowledgment of his existence, a brief glance from the figure whose huge form he stood over, the god who was moving in the opposite direction from him, the god that knew he was not moving toward life but to oblivion, to nothing.

And who was looking not for salvation, but for
someone
.

 

THE GENERAL

When I first knew Jae'le, the Animal Lord, he did not have a church, a priest, a home.

He would, eventually: a sprawling, intricate city built around rivers, a beacon of warmth and light after the wars, a city of safety, of beauty, of nature. He would have brothers and sisters as well, their relationships like the rivers and light he created.

But when I first met him, he was a killer, a murderer, a man who ate only the flesh of those he killed.

—Qian,
The Godless

 

1.

 

“If you don't mind a piece of advice,” Queila Meina said with easy humor, “a man is only as good as the coin you put down for him. Put down nothing, you'll get nothing.”