The Godless (46 page)

“The push is to draw more of us in.” Meina had explained it to a fanned-out Steel before the runner had left. “You all know how it works: hit a section hard, force them to reinforce and make a better target. This target will even have fire on the wall. Not that it matters, because the result will be the same: you thin out the rest of the defensive positions for a second push or you thin out the strongpoint with the catapults. The downside for those attacking is the risk that it runs to their own soldiers—but if they don't care about that we will take heavy casualties if we don't fight smart.”

There: on the edge of the cleared kill zone.

She lost sight of it quickly as another wave of Leeran attackers came over the edge of the Spine. Standing next to a Mireean Guard, Ayae parried and dodged and slashed and found herself before a tall woman who pulled a long, two-handed sword off her back after clearing the wall and, seeing Ayae, swung it in a straight arc. The guard beside her tumbled to the ground, catching the blade in his chest. A second swing of the now bloody blade saw Ayae back up a second step, the length of her sword not enough to press a hard counterattack.

Behind the woman another two, then three Leerans appeared.

“Incoming!”

She heard the shout as the boulder hit the ground, too far from the Spine to damage it.

The woman's sword swung again and Ayae rocked back, but only slightly. Pushing herself forward, she caught the return sweep of the sword with her left blade, her arm shuddering from the impact. Her right blade thrust forward quickly, pushing the woman backward and forcing her to raise her blade above her head—only to find Ayae's sword slashing messily across her throat. And easily. How easy it had become, how easy and
—

“Incoming!”

This time she recognized Meina's voice, and saw the dark arc of solid rock bearing down on the Spine.

It crashed solidly into it.

The debris sprayed harshly and she turned her head, feeling whips of rock stinging across her cheek even though she was a good ten lengths away from the impact. At the point of impact, she could see two of the guards had caught chunks of stone and lay on the ground. A Leeran soldier lay between them, his body crushed by the rock. To her horror, Ayae watched the top of a ladder hit the wall and a trio of Leerans filled the gap that had been made.

They were not retreating. That was clear. The Leerans were going to fight through—

The ground shook.

At first she thought it was another boulder, that it had come down where she could not see. But then the ground shook again, her balance wavered, her arms going wide to keep upright, even as the soldiers before her and around her did—and as she managed that, a third shock cost her her stance, saw her fall to her knees as the Spine itself shifted, tilted and—

—and—

—straightened, just as the killing ground burst open, showering dirt, mud and rock into the night sky as the ground gave way, as it buckled and crumbled and the siege engines that had come onto it sank forward, devoured by the hungry, angry ground.

“
Steel!
” In the silence, Queila Meina's voice rang out. “No one leaves alive!”

 

7.

 

“Are you sure he will die?”

“It was the faintest pulse, Bau. A death rattle, nothing more. But I can return to cut his throat if that would please you.”

“You know it would not.”

“It would please me. It was all I could do to stop myself, but I did.” The scarred Keeper sat himself down. “But you must control yourself. It has been long believed that he would never abide by the laws, and Aelyn will not punish us for his death.”

“If he is dead. You said the disease had burned itself out. If he isn't dead, that means he is now the vaccine to your prized creation.”

“There is enough in him that he will not survive.”

“Reila will be at him now.”

“You believe she can do anything?”

“Do not underestimate her.”

“Do not underestimate
me
,” Fo replied. “Now, sit. You're making me miss the battle.”

Zaifyr heard Bau grunt, but the white-robed man did sit next to the other and face the Spine. From the second floor of the tower it was lit by fire, the smoke blowing away from their gaze. The Keepers had retreated to the tower after leaving the hospital, unconcerned by the sparseness of it, the emptiness. The Healer had asked Fo three times if Zaifyr was truly dead, until the Keeper began to suggest snappishly that the only way to be sure was to take a knife to Zaifyr's throat. All three knew it was a hollow idea: regardless of where he died, or what he believed, his brothers and sisters would demand to see his body. Despite his bravado, if Fo was found to be responsible, the response from Jae'le at the least would be terrifying.

But I am not dead.

He might as well be.

He had suppressed the haunt of the mercenary he found himself in, turned the voice of the young man into a tiny whisper, and had put aside the pain he had felt when he died. He could move, also, much further than any other haunt he had seen. He suspected that if he wanted, he could walk the haunt into Leera, and feel nothing of the pull that the dead felt to their bodies. Still, there would be no reason to do that, for he could touch nothing, and a creeping cold had begun to settle into him that he did not belong to the mercenary.

“Look at their numbers,” Fo said, leaning forward. “How much of their nation has emerged from the darkness for this war?”

After a moment of study, Bau said, “More than we estimated.”

“It does appear that way.” He pointed out a part of the Spine where, as if it were a thick, flat snake made from stone, it crawled out into the dark of trees and bush. “They will push that edge soon, I believe. Work the edges to weaken the middle.”

“Will they come into contact with your plague?”

“Soon enough. Those that Saet infected during her travels will show soon enough.”

Zaifyr had followed the Keeper in the hope of learning more of what had happened to him, but he had heard nothing. Fo did not discuss the details of his poison, how it affected the body, and he left Zaifyr with no idea of how he could cure his body—a body that, like Fo, he believed would not survive the poison inside it.

Approaching the window, he gazed down at the box-like shape of the hospital and focused on the tether of his own body. He had felt it since he left the building, as if it were an echo through a tunnel. He had felt an ache inside him at the call, but it was sickly and he was reluctant to focus on it without knowing how to cure the last of what was in him.

But it was all that would lead him back to his body.

Like a cord
, he thought.
A deathly trail by which I can return. What choice do I have?

He felt it, as if it were in his hands. Around him the haunt—the mercenary who sent his pay to his mother, to his sister, to his family who lived in a small town—dropped from him as he began to follow it. His senses changed and he felt a chill about him.

His very being was suddenly assaulted. Hundreds of haunts lifted into the air about him, each of them launched from the ground in a pale-gray haze, bursting from the battle that was taking place. The haunts came straight to him, drawn to the cord of his life. They saw in it a way to return to life, to end their suffering. They did not fear him, nor consider that—rightly or wrongly—the body he was returning to was his own. They were driven only by their fear, their horror at being dead and their need to return.

Unable to do anything else, Zaifyr released his grip.

The haunts crashed into his being, hit him with a shock so profound and deep that he lost himself.

Zaifyr did not know for how long he drifted, but when he felt his own being again it was not alone. The echo of the earth closing in on him was strong, and for a moment he felt that he was buried—though he knew that this could not possibly be true, for the people of Mireea did not bury their dead, but burned them. Shortly, it became clear to him that, in his loss of awareness, his subconscious had gone in search of another haunt, one whose body also lay in the mountains, who had been lost, and found himself buried alive. He had a vision of rising in one of the narrow caves that the Cities of Ger threaded through, a lost gold digger, his ancient bones the force by which Zaifyr would have to return to the hospital that held his body.

But as his consciousness took more shape and he regained more and more of himself, he realized that he was wrong. He was not solid, not in terms of bone or flesh. Instead, a freezing crush began to emerge across his chest, as if his ribs had been shattered, and he began to become aware of another presence, that of a woman, no older than the mercenary whose haunt he had inhabited before. This woman was not from the Mireean Guard, nor the mercenaries, but rather from the Leeran Army. Memories of a march up the mountain reached him, a woman in search of conquest, a soldier directed by her god.

She searches for that being now
. The realization saddened him.
She searches for a god that will deliver her to paradise and care for her immortal soul and she thinks she has found her.

But she was wrong.

There was only him.

 

8.

 

Bueralan had struggled to reach the bottom of the temple stairs without falling but managed to do so twice. In this he was not alone, as both Handsome and Ugly, gripping the rotting railing tightly, caused it to break. It was possible that none of them would have fallen if they had not tried to keep pace with the sure steps of Mother Estalia and her light.

He had decided that his best chance of escape would be when they were leaving. When they had done what they wanted and were distracted by their success, he was confident that was when his opportunity would come.

“It is an incredibly sad place, this,” Estalia said, speaking to the battered three who limped along the dry corridor behind her. “I had thought that it would not be so, at least not for me. When I was told that there was a temple here I longed to see inside it, to experience the sanctity of it. Imagine the secrets we could learn, I said. The artifacts we could find! I was like a child, at first. But now—now I know why I was cautioned: the temple is like a rotten egg, with nothing of sustenance on the inside.”

The rooms on either side were empty cells, small squares dominated by narrow bunks that were covered by threadbare blankets. Small tables sat next to each in ancient contemplation.

In contrast to Mother Estalia, Bueralan felt the earlier sense of being watched, that he had fallen beneath a gaze so complete and utter that a chill began to seep into his bones. He was aware of his skin contracting, of goosebumps emerging. He could take nothing friendly, or reassuring from the gaze. Instead, he felt a strange lack of passion, as if the gaze watching him had seen it before, as if the hobbled steps he made had been done so a thousand times, not by a person like him, but by him.

Another set of stairs emerged. At the bottom of the steps, a red light washed out the glow by Mother Estalia.

“And here,” she said, “here is the saddest part of all.”

Bones littered the floor, chalk symbols surrounding them, patterns that had been made by the four priests who had entered before them. They stood now in positions that were spaced evenly around the room, their cardinal locations protected by circles they had drawn, patterns that extended into loops and arcs, each directed to the center of the room, where the dirty, bloodstained glass sat like a dead eye.

“Do you feel it?” she asked, following Bueralan's gaze.

He did.

He could sense the presence of another standing next to him.

“It is Ger.”

He knew before she spoke. He moved up to the glass, and through the streaked grime, he saw the wounds, the burns, the breaks, the trauma healing itself only to break open a moment later.

“The people who live on this mountain have forgotten that a god lies dying beneath them.” Quietly, she approached the dome beside him. “I do not blame them. It is easy to forget, when your day-to-day life has no need for a deity. When you believe only in commerce. Eventually, when you look up from your ledgers, all you see are the rocks and the rough way that they have welded themselves together over the centuries. You see the trees stretching out to form that thick canopy. You travel that winding, steep road, where animals move around you. You see that life every day beneath our fractured suns and you forget that beneath your every step there lies a giant, a figure of such immense size that the mountain is his cairn, fitted to his divine being.”

It was the first time he had seen the remains of a god. It did not strike him as strange that such was the case, or that he had been brought there in chains.

“You're mistaken,” he said, finally. “You think people have forgotten, but that is not the truth of it.”

Behind Estalia and the faint condescending smile that she wore once again, the chalk began to glow in faint, phosphorescent lines.

“What you will not admit,” he continued, “is that Ger is no longer relevant. No god is. They neither have the power to alter the world we live in, nor the presence to issue commands. Where you believe that people have simply forgotten them—that they have somehow let their modern life ignore the corpses beneath them, the shattered suns above, or the black seas and countless other ways in which the gods have changed the world—I see people who have simply moved on. People who have adapted. People who have grown. There was grief—the city we have just walked through is evidence of that. But it was grief from thousands of years ago and we have ended now in independence—we are children who have outgrown the need for parents. The gods are no longer wanted or
needed
—”

His voice stopped suddenly.