The Godless (51 page)

She broke through the glass with both men.

 

8.

 

The Captain of the Spine saw the fire before it was reported to him. He saw it spill out of the tower, its flames pale fingers beneath the afternoon's sun, raised on cinders and char. He did not have a smile, not even a grim one to match his dark thoughts, his hope for success; rather, he spoke to the runner beside him, conveying orders not for the fire to be put out, but to be left to burn for the moment; he added that another order be taken to the Spine, to strengthen the guard there, and these words he spoke as he shifted his eyepiece to the broken killing field.

“Sir!”

He turned to the speaker, the young soldier who had interrupted him.

“Sir.” He was breathless, catching it between words. “Sir. The man. The man you sent me to watch in the hospital.”

“Is he awake?”

“Yes, sir. He is heading toward the Keep, sir!”

 

9.

 

The fall did not kill her.

The glass shattered and, with both Fo and Bau in her grasp, the tower fell behind her fast, impossibly fast; she panicked and lost both Keepers, aware that they were drifting away from her and that Bau was reaching for Fo. She told herself that she had to catch them, to hold them—but the thoughts came too late as the rush of air deafened her, as the heat in her body was lost to the wind around her. The wind that tore through her, stealing her strength and resolve, threatening her consciousness that was lost when she hit the ground moments later.

It was a weak touch on her shoulder that brought her back.

“Ayae.” The voice that belonged to that touch was soft, raspy. “Ayae, please. You have to get up. They're not dead. I can't, I can't—Ayae, please.”

A body slumped to the ground beside her.

“Ayae.”

Meina.

The words were not said aloud: she could not speak them, so horrified was she at the sight of Queila Meina. The tall mercenary was on her knees, hunched over, her skin blistered with sores and open wounds that she had sustained not from a sword, but from when her sword had struck Fo's. Ayae could see the mercenary's weapon behind her, a twisted, distorted shape so similar to its owner that their entwined nature could not be denied.

Meina's hand—the hand that had held that sword so strongly—had no strength when Ayae took it.

Still, she had made her way from the tower. Meina must have left after the fall, for it burned fully now. She would not have left alone, either. Half of the ten members of Steel who had come with them had been alive when she went out of the window, a quarter of the Mireean Guard: but none were in sight of the captain, none had made it out of the Spine's Keep. Ayae had the grisly vision of their bodies lining the halls, having fallen to similar ailments, their flesh breaking down until only one was left, only one could limp, slowly, agonizingly, to her.

And she could do nothing.

“Only you left now.” Fo's voice was even, monstrous in its lack of acknowledgment of what he had done. “But that is how it should be.”

She released Meina's limp hand.

“The gods did not fight with mortals,” he continued. “They knew they were too frail for any battle, any true test, not that it stopped those who had faith fighting in their name. Every part of our history is filled with men and women who raised a weapon, a fist or a voice, in the name of their own god. They did it regardless of whether their god demanded it or not. They did it because they wanted to do so, because they
had
to do it, because they were the image of their god, the divine creation. But the truth of it is, they never needed to go to war: in the fullness of their power, the gods were terrifying beings, just as we are.”

Her first sword lay to her right. She picked it up as she rose. The second, not far from that, followed.

She met Fo's gaze as fire ran the length of both.

She had no words, no thoughts. Yet, when her swords lashed out, it was as if she screamed. It came from deep in her, deep from within her grief not just for Meina behind her, or for Illaan, but for her city, her home, her life. Unable to open her mouth, her weapons contained her rage, held the burning distillation of everything that she had known two months ago and been sure in. Everything she had derived her happiness from. Everything that she had lost.

She wanted nothing more than to feel her swords hack through Fo, to slam—not cut, but
slam—
through his flesh, to beat him down, to tear through him as if she were the basest, most rabid animal to reach the man behind him, the man she knew she would have to kill first.

Beneath her bare feet, she could feel broken, diseased black dirt, an emanation that Fo left with every step he took backward, every cut he sustained. She did not let that bother her, did not allow the weakness to take hold as it had before. She burned whatever felt alien against her, whatever felt wrong inside her own body: an awareness she had never had so fully, so completely as what she did now. One that, in another time, would have resulted in her immense curiosity, and perhaps a satisfaction, but which now, left her feet and legs feeling as if they were made from liquid, as if they were not truly flesh, and allowed her to push her attacks quicker, harder, scoring cut after cut on Fo's shoulders and hands, edging closer to his neck, his face, knowing that she would soon overpower him.

Then, suddenly, the Keeper dropped his guard.

Her sword pierced his shoulder as he drove into her. A quick step back and she slashed her blade across his abdomen; but there was no return stroke. Instead, he smashed his head into her own. She reeled, crying out in shock not from the hit, but from the sudden blindness, the loss of her sight, the complete and utter blackness that surrounded her.

It returned in a flash of pain to show his healing wounds, but so startled, so unprepared for the move was she that she had no time to counter Fo's head a second time. No time to counter his hand as it closed around her throat.

Her sight came back again, blinkering, a series of still moments that revealed a figure at the gate of the Keep, a figure behind Bau who was deep in concentration, deep in knitting the wounds Fo had taken, keeping the strength in his body as his fingers tightened around Ayae's throat.

The knife that came around his neck cut deep and straight as it had across the throat of a dead man, weeks before.

And like that time, it saved her again.

 

10.

 

The deep wound across Bau's throat began knitting shut the moment Zaifyr's blade left his skin, but he did not bother to keep hold of the man. He had gained Fo's attention, had stopped the Keeper as his hand tightened on Ayae. It did not matter if Bau, clutching his throat, was scampering out of his reach. Oh, Zaifyr knew that if he wanted to kill Fo, he would have to kill the Healer first. That was obvious to him, just as it was to Ayae. But her tactic to drive the Keeper back to the other, to cut one down to reach the other, had been brutal and fueled by rage, and had failed.

He would not make the same mistake.

“They have gone to take them into custody.”

Reila, earlier.

Her cold hands pressed against his throat, probed behind his ears, and stopped only when he brushed her hands away a second time. “Fo has been releasing diseases into the city.” Her voice was soft, for him alone. “Both he and Bau are trying to stop us from going to Yeflam. Ayae and others are going to stop them, put both in chains. But you know neither will be arrested. Neither will agree with that. They will fight. They will—”

He did not need to hear the rest of the words, to hear,
they will kill
. He had staggered to his feet, his mouth dry, an awful taste in it that he could not identify. He found water, but it didn't help. The last of Fo's poison, he decided annoyed, spitting on the cobbled stones. By then, he was out from beneath the tents, leaving the white wave of their shape behind, heading toward the Keep.

Movement felt good. Each step made him feel better, undid the sensation of not feeling right in his skin, of feeling as if he was both too big and too small for the tangible frame he felt thrust into. The charms in his grasp helped a little, reassured his panic. Each step did the same. And each step did more: it helped him adjust to the haunts he could see, the dead that milled in the street, that were moving slowly, as if they were also coming awake, that their awareness—limited as it was—returned to them.

Slowly, he came up to the Spine's Keep, the burning tower a beacon that drew only him and no soldiers. He was surprised by that—
Heast
, he thought, spitting again—but had little time to think of the intent behind it.

Ayae and Fo were fighting.

And Bau.

Bau stood behind both, his stillness revealing his focus, his burned clothes an indication of the fight so far, the broken ground likewise.

He did not make a sound when Zaifyr grasped his head and wrenched it back.

“I have waited for this a long time, Qian.” Before him, the scarred Keeper approached in a measured stride, his heavy sword easily held in his right hand. “I knew it would come. If I were to create fate, if I were to truly be a god, then this moment would happen. It simply must. There was no other way for it. Others urged me not to want it so. Aelyn warned me against it, specifically. She said I was too young. She said that I had not understood what age meant, but she was wrong. She came to Asila after it had fallen, after
you
had fallen. But I was in it when it fell, an ageless, blind beggar, a man without a family.

“I heard you walking through the streets, heard your conversations with the dead, heard your urges and your tears.”

“I am sorry you experienced it, Fo.”

“I am not.” He stopped, the dirt black, the bloody stain of those who died by his hand. “I held what you did against you for many years. For much of my youth I wanted to break open your tower. I sought it out once, and stood before the door. I could not open it, no matter how I tried. Was it luck? I do not know, but I have come to accept what happened there and in Asila. I have peace in terms of emotion and of event. In hindsight, I believe that is what stopped me from opening the door, and it is what has brought us here today. Today, I will show the hypocrisy of our lives to be true, I will return us to our natural form, to where we fought for our dominance, where our power decided the fate of the world.”

“You're a fool.”

Fo's lips curled into a snarl and he took a step forward, only to find that he could not.

The hands that emerged from the ground to grasp the Keeper's ankles came from a haunt, but it was not the haunt that drew itself out of the ground in an agonizingly slow set of movements after the first set of hands. The second haunt, an old miner, wrapped his cold hands around Fo's to stop him raising his arm.

“The War of the Gods was terrible.” To his left, Bau, his throat a heavy red line, struggled to his feet only to find that he was held down by another pair of haunts. “It was not that the gods fought that was the horror. Those battles were barely witnessed, except for their aftermaths. That was the true tragedy. It turned the weather extreme. It made for decades of drought. Decades of flood. We lost the sun. We had famine. We had plague. We had war. Species were killed entirely. Entire civilizations were destroyed.”

“They can be remade!”

“By who?” A hint of anger entered Zaifyr's controlled voice. “By you? You want to start a war but cannot even realize that you are a victim of one! You lack the simple self-awareness to realize that the War of the Gods never ended, that we have been living in its carnage for thousands of years.”

Behind the Keeper Ayae climbed to her feet, the flame from her swords gone.

“There is a child, Fo. A true child of the gods,” Zaifyr said. “It was here, but you didn't feel it. You felt only Ger's death and exalted in that. You did not see what he freed himself from. But you will. You will see things power can do. You will see what the war has done to us.

“I will show you.”

Aelyn would not forgive Zaifyr for what he had done.

She would call a trial in Yeflam, to hear and judge, but in the moment his will flushed through the dead in Mireea, he knew that it would be a farce. His death would be decided for him, and he accepted that. It was necessary to show them what was at stake: to show them that a god, a true god, did exist and what it had done to generations of souls, to over ten thousand years' worth of dead. Dead that he alone had seen and heard, a horror that he had thought his own, a weight he must carry forever.

He had been wrong. It was not his punishment. He ran his power though the cobbled streets of Mireea, flushed it through the haunts that rose from beneath the rough, wooden gates dividing the city; to the generations who had lived in brick houses and hotels; to those who stood on the Spine of Ger beside soldiers; and to those who lived in the fallen cities beneath. With his power, Zaifyr made clear the horror that he had lived with for thousands and thousands of years: that the souls of the dead did not move on, that they were trapped, their personalities dwindling into a desire for warmth and food.

For a moment, for just one, single moment as his consciousness was connected to so many, Zaifyr was tempted by the dead.

He thought of giving them warmth and sating their hunger, of doing as he had done in Asila. But, it was just for a moment, for when his eyes opened he saw Ayae. On her face was a look of horror, born by the dawning realization of the tragedy unfolding around her. He had seen it earlier, when she learned what he had done in Asila and had stepped away from him. It struck him at his very core, a recognition of what he had felt for so long, the horror he had tried to become immune to in the crooked tower. And as the needs of the dead assailed him, he retained his control. He closed his eyes to the vision of Ayae, but his sight did not leave her and he kept his will strong, directing the dead to the one crime he had known he was going to commit, the one act that was intended to change everything. With it, he would ensure that his brothers and sisters would no longer sit idle.