The Godless (45 page)

The climb down the jagged wall had been just as difficult for Bueralan. His fingers, without the strength to hold his weight, slipped multiple times. For all but the last, he was able to judge where he landed, ending on a narrow ledge or a small path. For the last of these falls, he misjudged the direction and ended in a two-foot drop that saw him arrive at the base in a dirty, injured mess, his knuckles skinned, his shoulder bruised and a mix of both on the left side of his head.

“It is difficult to find many people who hold this awareness of the world, now. There are a few, the surviving servants of the gods, and one of the new immortals.” Mother Estalia stood beside the decaying corpse of the Quor'lo as if it were a talisman, a truth. “The latter theorized that the gods were dying, that they had been dying for thousands of years while they fought, while they were alive and while they were dead. He offered a frightening vision of gods who saw multiple strands of time, who were always dying, always alive, always in war, always at peace.

“But he did not know about the child.”

She paused as, across the lake, the four silent priests rose from the water like strange newborns to the fissure that ran down the temple.

“Very few outside the gods knew about the child. She was the creation of the Goddess of Fertility, of Linae. It was perhaps fitting that a god who fashioned herself as a woman gave birth, but she did not do it in the way that you or I understand. Rather than use her own form, she dug into the earth and created a womb from soil, from mineral, from blood, from bone, and infused it with part of her life. She gave a part of her divinity to the ground, so that it would pulse, breathe and incubate the child she had created, though she would be unable to explain why. Perhaps the reason for it is as simple as her death, for she made the womb as she experienced her death at the hands of the Sun God, Sei. Or, perhaps the reason is different, and if so it is lost to us now.

“For Sei, who would be called the Murderer by us, the reasons were written down. He told his priests that he struck Linae because that was what he had always done. Everything existed as one and once the child was born—and the child always existed—he killed Linae. He had always done so. He would always do so. There had never been a time when he did not kill Linae. It was, he said, a truth.”

She turned to Bueralan, but there was no kindness in her gaze, only dedication, commitment and an obvious, belief.

“It was fate, a single, unalterable fate,” she said. “With the child, all other time was lost. No more would there be multiple strands, multiple outcomes, and with it, the gods lost their self-determination, their freedom. They no longer saw possibilities, they saw facts, and the gods feared it.”

 

4.

 

“Runner, find Lieutenant Mills and have her report to me.” On the roof of The Pale House,
a boy and a girl stood attentively behind the Captain of the Spine. Heast's copper-and-silver eyepiece ran along the wall, pausing like a scavenger on debris, on oil that lay slick on the stonework, on the dead. “Runner, inform Captain Meina that Steel will be reinforcing the Sixth. She will also be taking command from the fallen Sergeant Pael. Then find Sergeant Eran from the Eighth and inform him that he is to support Steel and the Sixth if the fighting continues. Also—”

He stopped, his mirrored gaze falling from the Spine, and into the dark that pooled around the fighting. He could not say why he ran his gaze to the edge of the trees and had stopped speaking, other than instinct. There was nothing but languid darkness. Nothing until— “Runner, my previous order is altered. Inform Captain Meina that she will need to prepare for catapults.”

 

5.

 

“That story.” Bueralan stopped speaking as he stretched his back, attempting to ease the cramped muscles and only partly succeeding. “The witches from my home bottle the souls of the dead, for a price. You sound just like them when they say that the family will want to pay a prosperous pregnant woman to drink it, to ensure that their kin's next life is good.”

“Are you accusing me of lying?” Mother Estalia did not appear bothered. “I have just explained to you one of the great mysteries of the world. I explained to you why the gods went to war, as explained to me—”

“—by a child,” he finished.

Her smile was benign, condescending in its every curve. “Follow me, Captain.” Her first step took her to the edge of the still lake, where a small knife appeared in her hand. She sliced the tip of a finger, letting the blood fall—and took a second step onto the water as it did, where her feet found a hard surface, similar to board. “It is not difficult for me to understand your skepticism,” she said. “I was young, myself, when we found our god. So young that the two men behind you were not yet born, nor were their parents. They find it difficult to stomach your words, but only because they do not remember a time without the gaze of a god in their heart. But I remember the emptiness of my youth. The fear I had when I heard stories of cursed men and women. The terror when I saw them.

“I watched a childhood friend of mine die as her skin shed itself daily, similar to a snake, but without the grace of nature. My friend was five at the time, and the shedding left her bloody and raw and in constant pain. She cried out to a god, any god, but there were only the cures promised by witches and shamans, cures that dulled pain and nothing else. To watch that was to understand not just that there were no gods, but why no man or woman desired to hear of divinity again.”

Beneath his feet, the water was cold but solid. A display of power she had not shown to those beneath her, who had swum the length.

“But then, I also remember the visions of my childhood. They began a week after the death of my friend, dreams of such vitality and strength that were impossible to ignore. We were called like the prophets of the old in our dreams, given tasks to attend, bent to obedience. Once we had accepted that, we joined each other in travel to the Eakar Mountains in search of our God. There, they found a forgotten valley that lay between the broken crown of a range. In it, the remains of empty villages and white bones were threaded by poisonous rivers and toxic soil.

“Of the twenty who made the journey only half reached the middle of the valley. Three died while crossing the ocean, in fights, in sickness, but the greatest toll were the seven who died in the valley. Three men and four women fell to the toxicity there as they made their way to the center, their skin drying and their breath fading until they crumbled into dust. My mother was one of these women and, even though I mourned her passing for years, I eventually came to understand that she perished because she did not have the faith to continue. She had followed my father and me in our journey, having had the same vision as us, but I believe now that the longer it took—and I had aged two years since we left Leera—the more the vision diluted, turned watery for her. She had lost her faith by the time we stepped into the valley and wasted away, while the faithful among us remained strong.

“If she had not lost her faith, my mother would have been witness to the sight of her vision, to the spherical husk of soil that floated in the middle of the valley. I can still remember how it felt as we approached it. It was a power unlike anything I had felt before, yet it was not complete. What was in the soil was both perfect and flawed and as we stood before that, we were humbled.

“We broke through the soil slowly, each crack revealing a warmth, a soft inside of roots that encircled the arms, legs and body of a girl. Gazing upon her, we saw only divinity, though she was not yet awake. My father, who carried her from the earthen womb, said she at first weighed nothing—but as we returned to Leera that changed. She became a solid weight, too heavy for arms at first, then for a single donkey to carry. It was a team of bulls who pulled her into our country after four years of travel, still asleep. My father said she gathered the weight of the world about her as we went.”

Ahead was the broken opening of the Temple of Ger. To Bueralan's gaze, the shadows within were a dark stain that could not be removed.

“He never did see her awake. My father died at the age of sixty-seven, the proud caretaker of the church he had placed his God within. With the aid of the King Anann, he designed and built the huge structure upon his return, ensuring that a chamber was built deep into the ground beneath it, and it was there that he laid her sleeping body. He claimed that she needed to be near to the soil, to be nurtured by the earth itself. He harbored a belief that Linae had infused the very ground with her power, but it was twenty-three years after his death before we could ask such a question, before we could hear her agree, in part. There, she taught us about how the gods saw time, how even as they died they were alive, how with her creation, an infinite number of possibilities had collapsed and that they struggled with that, still. She could herself, however, only see one future, could experience time in only one fashion.”

“And then she told you that you would have to change that.” Before Bueralan, Estalia drifted through the opening, leaving him with his cold toes to navigate the stone and broken glass along the edge of the temple. “How long before she said you would have to go to war?”

“War is a certainty in life.”

“Death and taxes are a certainty. War is something we create, we strive for.”

“So are taxes,” she replied dryly. “But to answer your question, Captain, we knew from the start.”

After a small jab from behind, the saboteur eased himself through the broken frame and to the cold, slippery floor. “Why is that?”

“She is an incomplete god.” Mother Estalia followed the tracks left by the priests, light blooming in her every footstep, illuminating faded murals, creeping mold, broken pews and rusted, broken armor. Soon, a stairwell appeared before her. “The war ensured that, Captain. As the gods died, their bodies broke. Their power spilled from them, and spills still. It is responsible for every cursed person you have ever seen, from those who function to those who do not. It is a power seeking its owner, its rightful place—a power that our god is here to reclaim, first from the bodies of her parents.”

“Why not the cursed first? You would even find support in this part of the world.”

“We tried.” The stairwell was long and slippery, but Mother Estalia did not take the rail. “We found one of the youngest in Mireea but it was beyond us. It was chance, truly, nothing more. The Quor'lo had been sent to find the temples of Ger, but when that girl's power awoke, we sent it after her. We thought to kill her and bring the body to our god. The power was hers by right, after all, but we learned quickly that a single cursed is a difficult enemy for us, and that to find one isolated is impossible.”

 

6.

 

When Steel moved to reinforce the Sixth Division of the Mireean Guard, Ayae was with them.

She had not been assigned a place on the Spine, had not been given a place to stand in the defense and, as the horn's call had faded into the night's cooling air, she was without direction. She wanted to go into the hospital: inside was both Zaifyr and Illaan, and despite all that had happened with the latter, she felt an unexpected grief opening inside her, made by the memories of the good times and of their loss. Yet she could not go into the hospital. As the horn faded, Reila ordered the guards to erect a makeshift tent for the injured and then gave one final order—an order for no one else to follow—before she walked through the hospital doors.

Meina's hand fell on her shoulder, breaking her thoughts as the dark-haired mercenary inclined her head to the right. The horn let its deep bellow out again and Ayae nodded. Without words, she accepted the invitation, following Meina and her uncles to Steel's new camp.

After Lady Wagan had praised their escape, their bravery, their survival, Heast had ordered the mercenary unit into a reinforcement position, settling them on the western side of Mireea. For the surviving members of Steel, it had felt like a judgment on the battle they had fought, the losses they had taken and the real measure of their success. They had gone from a large and spacious compound with bunks, cooking fires and storage sheds for arms, to weathered tents stretched across a narrow lane, their weapons kept within. Forced to sleep on bedrolls over hard stone with no fires, the men and women of Steel felt as if they had been judged to have failed, to have not met the challenge given to them.

“Survival,” Queila Meina explained later, “is not victory.”

Having been part of that survival herself, Ayae felt the verdict unnecessary and harsh, but she remained silent.

In part she did so because she acknowledged that the criticism had little to do with Heast—who she did not believe had a similar complaint—and more with how Steel viewed themselves after the battle.

Slowly, Ayae began to distinguish the sounds of fighting on the wall before her. Swords and axes rang out against steel, against flesh, against stone, against wood. She heard orders shouted. She heard screams. She heard sobbing as well. Among the bodies she could see fire that had sprung up from spilled oil, but so far it lined the edges of the wall, hindering those climbing more than those defending. As she drew closer, she could also see the dead and the injured, and with each step her muscles knitted tight together, threatening to render her motionless in their tension.

Then Steel was on the wall.

They did not charge, yell or announce their arrival. They fanned out and moved beside the Mireean Guards, reinforcing their position to help to push back the Leeran soldiers who had climbed to the top of the wall. Ayae found herself lunging forward, her short swords thrusting at the face of a young man, a man whose face she did not remember, not even after he had fallen. That would only come later, in her dreams: she would remember the smoothness of his white skin, the brown of his eyes, the shaven head, and she would dream of his name, a name she would make up. She would awake after her time on the Spine, surprised at the detail she did remember, at the clarity of it, and would wonder if it was a trick of her subconscious. But at the time, he fell, her blade hacking up through his jaw, and after she, drawing her breath, feeling the rapid beat of her pulse, tried to spy the catapults from her position.