The Godless (34 page)

Before she could think of anything, Fo spoke:

“You have met me, Madman,” he said quietly, intensely. “Though I doubt that you remember the day. I was born in a city you once ruled and, as part of the tradition there, I took my first son to the Temples of Night. You were said to visit them, though I had never seen you, only your priests. The men and women who wore black and tattooed their faces with ink made from your blood. It was those men that gave the first drink to my son, a drink from a cup of poison that would kill him. It was an honor that every parent gave, a blessing that their firstborn would speak to you of their love and their honor of their family when they were dead. I trained my son to say the most beautiful words.

“My son did not die beautifully, though. He died in pain, screaming, and I could not forget the sight, or the sound. In desperation, I sought to make amends, and took a poison to be with my son. My wife and second child did as well, and while they died, I did not. My hair fell out and my eyes were damaged and, after your priests came for my family, I was left in my house, and then in the street. My last sight of everything I cared for were their bodies being carried away.
Your
priests told me that my death was being forbidden for my failure of faith.” The hairless man's scarred hands came together tightly. “
My
failure.”

“I was a different man, then,” Zaifyr replied, meeting his gaze. “I have no desire to return to him.”

“And I do not forgive shadows.”

Ayae began to speak, but Fo shook his head and spoke over her. “Take your bird and leave. I will do nothing for either of you.”

 

4.

 

Bueralan gripped the bars of his cage tightly as the cart moved unevenly along the rough road, his eyes closed, his breathing steady.

The mother's voice had returned. For the last hour, her voice had come to him unbidden in snatches of conversation, brief responses to a prayer by a soldier, a comfort she gave before she fell back into silence, only to return again minutes later. Her voice came loud and small and she drifted in and out of his hearing with the beat of his heart. To hear it, he believed, was an outcome from the night's ritual. To be comforted and assured, to be personally spoken to each time you needed to be, to ensure that the Leeran Army was not a force of individuals, but a nation: that had been the reason for the ritual with the horse. But the power—the brutal, undisciplined power—had hooked into the blood of his meal, into the near raw meat he had eaten, and included him. It was accidental, he was sure, and would not last.

He came to this conclusion gradually over the hour. He watched as the voices of the army returned around him, at first in half conversations, as if they spoke internally and externally, and then only with the latter. When they finally did speak only with their voices, they were calm, serene, in complete opposition to how Bueralan felt. To a certain extent, his pain was self-inflicted: at one point, the cramps in the saboteur's stomach became so painful that the urge to turn his head and vomit out the side of the cage was overpowering. It had been during one such moment that he had felt bile rise in his throat while the mother spoke and as he turned, ready to be sick, her voice had cut off in mid-sentence. Instinctively, part of him had swallowed and the sharp, acidic taste of his stomach had left a hot trail down his throat as the mother's voice returned to him, still in mid-sentence.

Bueralan did not know what would come from hearing the mother's voice. She said nothing of military value, either in tactics of chains of command, offered no insight into the general, but yet he nursed the illness in his stomach, nursed it long after the voices of the soldiers returned, despite the mother's continued conversation, and ensured that the blood he had swallowed—the catalyst to what he heard—did not leave his stomach. At the very least, he hoped, she would reveal a soldier he could draw into his confidence.

What he did not expect was to hear a voice that he recognized.

“I have no desire to follow you into Ranan, Orlan.” Zean sounded as if he was next to him, as if he stood outside the cage, but only the stained plate lodged in the diaries waited when he opened his eyes. His blood brother said, “None of us do. In fact, if I was to be honest, it's only your casual admission of betrayal that keeps you alive at this moment.”

Another voice spoke—it did not
feel
like the mother, in fact, he could not sense her presence at all—but the words were a murmur, too indistinct for him to hear clearly.

“My response is always the knife,” Zean said, coldly. “I have no problem with the blood of men on my hands, even very famous men.”

Again, the murmur—Bueralan squeezed his eyes shut and his hand tightened around the bar as he strained to focus on it: “… is regrettable, I know,” Samuel Orlan said, his tone as confident and easy as it had always been. “But I assure you that your captain is the safest of us all, right now. What concerns us is—”

“Ranan,” the other man finished. “As you said before.”

He heard the cartographer sigh.

In that breath, a breath that curled around in Bueralan's mind, a scene began to build itself. He could see a series of buildings with incomplete walls, standing on overgrown, empty grass. The walls of the buildings had not been torn off, nor had they been damaged by a storm; instead they had been pulled off with care, a ritual that spoke of a town in Leera, though how far from the chain-wire border it was, the saboteur had no idea. The town's people who had taken the buildings apart had, however, left long strips still in place, and the buildings had the look of a broken shell, as if a series of giant children had been birthed inside, only to break out through the walls and roof like a bird's egg. It was in those empty walls that he saw Dark seated: Ruk had his hands wrapped around the edges of the floor tightly, his gaze intently on Zean and Orlan, while the sisters, Aerala and Liaya, sat beside each other with somber look upon both their faces. Only Kae, standing behind them, a shadowed figure with a hand on his sword, was not watching—though Bueralan knew he was listening.

“Much is at stake here,” Orlan continued, his voice sounding quiet and far away. “Much more than you could possibly imagine.”

“There is always something at stake,” Zean replied. “Everyone who has ever hired us has said that.”

“We are not talking of the simple power struggles that you are paid to intervene in.”

“Of course we're talking of them.” The coldness in his voice was like a wall of ice, thick and impenetrable, and with an indistinct, ugly shape on the other side. “Men and women like you are always talking of power. You gnaw on it, as if to do so would let the juices of it soak into your very being, so that it could never be taken from you. You ignore that it is a construct that we make. A set of rules we adhere to, an order to give meaning to ourselves.”

“I am talking of power that does not exist any more. Look at our history, Zean—look at it all of you!” Orlan's voice pitched up, appealing to the rest of Dark. “There is a certain power that has shaped the world you and I live in, a power that we are largely free of, but which now threatens to return.”

“In Ranan?”

“In a cathedral in Ranan.”

“There are no cathedrals in Ranan,” Zean said.

“There is now,” the cartographer replied. “One was built for a girl, a child that must be—”

His voice choked off, brought to an abrupt end by Zean slamming his foot between Orlan's legs. Yet, the final word, the proclamation of what Orlan wanted—
killed
was what he had meant to say—was spoken. It was a dark desire, the cause of his betrayal of Bueralan. Gripping the bars tighter as his stomach and emotions rebelled, he watched as Zean turned in cold fury, leaving the old man sagging to the ground, clutching his genitals, the old pony bending its head in concern, the cartographer's only doctor.

Ahead of him, Dark emerged from the broken shell of the building.

“We'll stay with the plan that we had before,” Zean said as he drew closer. “It does not change except that the job will be over for us. We'll find the general and we'll pay his ransom for Bueralan and then we'll leave this continent. The Leerans have maybe half a day on us, but we can make up that time.”

“What about Orlan?” Kae asked evenly.

“Liaya will dope him up,” the other replied. “Ruk can stay here with him.”

“I'd rather go.” He spat. “Fuck the old man, let's just bleed him and leave him.”

“Yeah, that is the temptation,” Zean began. “I'd rather still have him alive though, just in case he is part of the ransom.”

“General Waalstan will not accept a ransom.” Raggedly, Orlan had pulled himself to his feet. “I have known this man for two years. It has taken me that long to earn his trust, to learn what is at the heart of the Leeran rising.” He paused and took a deep breath. “I know you do not like what I have done. I wish that I had not had to do it, but the blood has already been spilled, and I will not see it spilled again. Ranan cannot be ignored.”

“I don't fight god-touched people, old man.” Zean stalked toward the cartographer. “Let the Keepers of Yeflam do that blood work.”

And, before Orlan could reply, his fist smashed into the man's temple.

 

5.

 

On top of The Pale House
,
Heast stood on the edge of the roof and listened to reports. He was told the early numbers of the force approaching, about the Spine's preparation, Steel, the Brotherhood and his own guard. He heard from the hospital and from the Keep. Flares were delivered, supplies counted. As the day wore on, it felt as if his visitors and their reports were one endless shape, but he knew their names and worth.

All but one.

 

6.

 

Zaifyr had stood outside the Spine's Keep with Ayae and, when he realized that she was not speaking to him, he said, “I'm sorry. My mind is all over the place.” He did not have to explain why: he did not have to repeat Fo's words, or recreate the horror of his worship again.

“It's okay.” She was distant, both physically and emotionally. “I can find you tomorrow, if you would like?”

“Yes,” he replied. “Please.”

As he walked away, he chided himself internally. It had never occurred to him that Fo could have been born in Asila. It could be no other city for the Keeper was not, as Zaifyr understood, that old. It was said that he was twelve hundred at most, which meant it had been during the time that Zaifyr had become reclusive. He spent centuries lurking in the towers of his castle, attended by a handful of servants and a host of haunts. He traveled down the steep incline of his home only when the Ritual of Child had taken place and he did so with trepidation. He could still remember the final century of walks, the spiraling staircases and the dark nights, the roads lined by torches and the temples that were now nocturnal.

And the children.

He remembered the children most of all.

It was difficult for Zaifyr to reconcile the actions that had been done in his name with the person he was, but it was not impossible. For all that he had changed, he could still see the man he had been, the man who had become lost in the demands of the dead. The ritual was all that had brought him down to his people in the last centuries. He could not remember the living, the men and women who worked in his name, the families that had sought to gain his favor. He remembered only the dead and he had reached out and pushed his hands through the haunts that had been created—and in so doing, blessed the ritual.

“Jae'le.”

The door to his hotel room closed gently behind him.

“Brother,” the raven said from the window seal. “How did your meeting with Fo go?”

“You saw?”

“Not inside.”

“He was born in Asila, if that's an answer,” he said. “Did our sister tell you that?”

“No. We speak very little and even then, it is only if I visit her Enclave.”

“I have not spoken to her…” He hesitated. “In a long time.”

“She knew you were to come here.”

“You told her?”

“I thought it best to not further upset her.”

“I knew we had our difficulties,” said Zaifyr as he sat. “Out of respect, I did not enter Yeflam, but now…”

“Aelyn did not take the loss of her godhood well. She knew it was not true, as we all did. But to stand outside Asila and tell the thousands who gathered that she was just mortal was damaging to her pride.” The raven's feathers ruffled sourly. “She never thought the tower sufficient punishment.”

Her remembered her hard, blunt hands and how she reached for his neck, intent on using her strength in that final moment. Shaking his head, he said, “That is why her law is a farce.”

“It was born in the final moments of Asila, brother. The actual decree came a decade later, but I assure you, it was born then, in her rage.”

“Was Yeflam born then, as well?”

“The Enclave was a long time in birth,” the Animal Lord said. “She disagreed with a lot of what we thought, what we proposed, and others joined her. They all thought it a mistake telling our followers we were not gods. Aelyn argued that since we would be, eventually, there was no need. When her opinion was not shared, the split was inevitable. You had no real influence on that other than to hasten it. But the presence of Fo? I cannot assume it is a coincidence. He may believe that it is—and I have heard her warn him against you, but she cannot have sent him innocently.”

“Which means she still wants to—”

He meant to say, kill me. But instead he lashed out with his arm, slamming Jae'le off the windowsill a moment before an arrow punched into it.

Squawking and turning in mid-air, the raven rose high. As Zaifyr spotted a glint of light through a window off a street, so did the Animal Lord. Stepping out of the window frame for safety and thinking to follow the bird, he did not at first hear the heavy steps to his door. But he heard and saw the kick that splintered the lock.