The Godless

by Ben Peek

  “You talk about the years as if they mean nothing,” she said. “The Five Kingdoms fell apart a thousand years ago and the Innocent began killing nearly seven hundred years ago.”

  “I am the eighty-second Samuel Orlan.” The short man grinned. “My perspective may be slightly askew.”

  Shaking her head, Ayae lowered herself onto a chair. “The Keeper said I was to go to him tomorrow.”

  Dawn lit the edges of the cartographer again. “Demanding sort, but perhaps for the best. The Keepers do understand their curses well. And—”

  “And?”

  “I am afraid,” he said, the light enveloping him, “the only way to understand something is to ask the people who have experienced it.”

  3.

  Flies burst from the closest pyre as a Mireean Guard examined the body that lay there. It had taken him, Bueralan thought, ten minutes to mount the wooden ramp and check beneath the white linen. He could understand their reluctance, but he cursed them for it since it left him standing next to the Keeper, Bau. So far he had been nothing but polite company, but since he had said to Illaan that he was, “nothing but an adviser, a helper if you need one,” a tension had crept into the air, growing further when the Healer said, “Do you know how long it has been since anyone saw a Quor’lo in our world?”

  Zaifyr replied, “No more than twenty-one hours, I imagine.”

  Ahead, the first line of pyres had been cleared and soldiers were working through the second. Bueralan wondered what the two men beside him would do if the Quor’lo was not found, if it had gone to ground elsewhere or the body had already been abandoned—to his mind, the most likely—when movement on the fifth pyre caught his eye. A moment later, a soldier cried out and the three men ran toward the sound.

  On the pyre, a dead man held a young, blond-haired soldier in his grasp. “Another step,” it hissed at Bau. “That’s all it takes for this man to die.”

  “You’ve nowhere to go,” Illaan said, stepping forward. “Release him. Release him and I’ll—”

  The soldier’s throat burst.

  It happened quickly: a thin, bloodless smile spread across the ruined face of the Quor’lo, its burned fingers tightened, a strangled cry caught in the soldier as his throat was torn out … and, as the soldiers around Bueralan moved forward, the body was flung off the ledge into them and the Quor’lo leaped from its perch.

  Bueralan was a step behind Zaifyr. He burst through the soldiers who had run not at the creature, but to the body of their comrade. He heard Illaan call for Bau and glanced back to see the Keeper staring intently after them. For a moment it looked as if he would ignore the call for help, but then, with a snarl, the neat man turned. Doing likewise, Bueralan focused on weaving through the pyres, the dirt crunching beneath his boots as he chased the Quor’lo into the tree line.

  The saboteur did not stop. At full speed, he left flat ground and began running downward, his feet slipping as he skirted thick roots and potholes, not slowing himself even as he was forced to navigate the sloping terrain of the mountain. In front of him, Zaifyr cleared a ditch and the saboteur zigged, crossing the shallow end of the same indent, before clearing a dead branch and gaining on the Quor’lo, who had stopped to stamp its foot heavily.

  Bueralan pulled one of his axes from his waist and launched it, head over handle, through the air. It cut deeply into a tree directly beside the creature.

  Raising its burned head, it snarled at him and reached for the buried axe just as Zaifyr crashed into it.

  Bueralan followed, yanking the axe from the tree as he did. Drawing the second, he fell into a defensive position as the Quor’lo tossed its attacker to the side and rose to its full height. It looked awful: decay had set in around the wounds on its head, the body looked tired, bones showing through skin as if it were being eaten away. The Quor’lo’s eyes focused on Bueralan. Holding the other’s gaze, he watched Zaifyr rise slowly. With a sudden shift the saboteur darted forward, his axes coming in from the right side.

  The Quor’lo spun, dodging Bueralan’s attack and using the momentum to evade Zaifyr as he lunged. Scoring a brief moment of respite, it stamped its foot again and again, furious as Zaifyr rose with a knife in his hands to thrust—

  The Quor’lo disappeared.

  4.

  Ayae sat quietly beneath the open window, the morning’s sun filtering over her. She had spent her time since Orlan left searching herself, trying to find the seed of warmth Reila had mentioned, the burning ember that she could quench. So far she could find nothing. No, that was not true: as the minutes passed she became angrier at Illaan’s behavior, furious at the defacing of her house and bitter at the loneliness she felt. But that, she admitted to herself as the sun lazily made its way down her light brown arms, was not her “curse.” That was just her, as Faise had said.

  Faise.

  How would she react to the news? Her friend, with such a quick and ferocious intelligence, had left Mireea eight months ago. She had married Zineer, who owned a small accounting business in one of the cities of Yeflam, and who did work for the Traders Union. She wrote weekly, telling Ayae everything, asking for the same in return, but how could Ayae write that she could still taste smoke in her mouth such that even drinking three glasses of orange juice did not rid her of the taste? How could she explain that if she relaxed her internal search, the memory of the burning shop returned and panic set in? How could she explain how she stared at her arms looking for scars she did not have?

  Nothing would come of this, Ayae knew. It was a self-designed trap of smoke and flames, a hunt for a cause that she could not identify in the ruin of her life. She could not sit here and stop her life. Orlan had already shown her that not everyone in Mireea was like the people who had damaged her house.

  Slowly, pushing herself up from the floor, she opened her neat and orderly closet and chose clothes that did not smell of smoke.

  Outside, the sky showed empty through the cut branches and the defacing of her house was clearer. Under the morning’s sun it appeared both more violent and more pathetic: the words on her walls were misspelt, her garden only half destroyed and salvageable. It would take a day, but she would be able to clean up both—but her footsteps along the narrow cobbled path did not take her to a shop, but to the Spine of Ger. It was not habit that saw her make her way to the morning’s training, but rather a desire to do something, to be active; a self-conscious doubt began to seed in her, but that only strengthened her resolve. She would not let the words of a Keeper, or the rejection of her partner, stop her from taking part in an exercise that she enjoyed.

  The thought strengthened her as she climbed the last step of the Spine and saw the heads of men and women turn to her. She knew they were not her friends but they were normally civil to her, as she was to them: they nodded and smiled and said hello. It would be no different, she persuaded herself, walking through them as the Captain of the Spine began his torturous climb up the stairs. By the time Heast reached the podium, Ayae had made it to her position, behind Jaerc, ignoring how the baker’s apprentice shifted forward slightly.

  Next to her, Keallis, the tall city planner, whispered harshly, “Are you witless?”

  Ayae whispered, “Nothing has chan—”

  “You’re scaring him,” she said.

  She stared at Jaerc’s hunched shoulders.

  “You’re cursed!” the woman whispered. “We all know that!”

  She could not reply.

  “Do you want to burn us alive?” the woman hissed again. Around her, others began the first of their stretches. “We have all heard how your skin splits beneath fire! You destroyed the shop of Samuel Orlan!”

  “I did not!” Her voice was raw, struggling for composure. “There was another man there. He set it on fire…”

  “Don’t you understand?” Around her, men and women turned, their attention drawn by Keallis’s raising voice. On the podium, Ayae saw the captain staring at her. In his usually stern face, she thought she saw sy
mpathy there. “We are meant to die,” she continued, not bothering to whisper now. “That’s what the gods taught us.”

  Through the disordered people, a Mireean Guard was making his way toward Ayae, the order given from a slight nod by Heast. Closing her eyes, squeezing them tight, she said softly, “I wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

  “Leave!”

  And without another word she fled, aware that their eyes followed her every step.

  5.

  Beneath the shattered wooden covering was only darkness. There was water, though Bueralan could see but the faintest reflection of the morning’s light off it. The rankness of the hole was not so shy, and with his hands on the rotten wooden edge that led to a frail, broken ladder he stared into the inky black, trying to gauge its depth between breaths.

  He did not want to go into the flooded mineshaft, which he considered a reasonable state of mind to be in. The two men Illaan had sent to bring sealed bladders and pitch globes, brothers who rescued trapped miners in flash floods, had agreed with him. They arrived in an old, crumbling wagon pulled by an older, gray-haired horse. After one look at the shaft, they had laughed. Both men were white, diminutive and scrawny with dark hair and deep-set, squinting eyes.

  Without turning to the sergeant, the First said, “You don’t have enough booze in this city to convince us to go down there. It’s two decades—”

  “Four,” interrupted the Second. “Maybe five.”

  “Six to seven decades old, rotten in its core, and flooded,” continued the First. “In addition, there is a man down there who has not come up for air in a good hour.”

  “We’re not doing it,” concluded the Second.

  Around them, the Mireean Guard searched for the openings of other mineshafts. When one was found, a soldier would pull back the covering, releasing a foul odor that he or she would then stand guard over. So far they had found five, unsurprising in a mountain riddled with wounds left from centuries of digging.

  “You’re not expected to go down there,” Illaan said evenly. “I just want you to help these two men get ready.”

  “You should have that Keeper down here,” muttered the First.

  Bueralan did not disagree. Bau had not left the funeral pyres. Lost in concentration, the saboteur had been told that he was knitting the soldier’s throat back together.

  Rising, he met Zaifyr’s gaze from across the hole and the charm-laced man grimaced, liking the decision no more. Yet both would swim down the shaft until they hit the bottom. There, the silt would be disturbed, and in water turning darker and murkier, they would swim down a tunnel with nothing but trapped air in their grasp. In theory, the tunnel would end in a low pit that had been designed to avoid flooding by being cut in higher than the tunnel to it.

  “You’re both just real unlucky,” the First said, he and his brother returning with shapeless, inflated animal bladders and two thick, glass orbs. “This whole area has been scheduled for filling for the last year, if I remember.”

  “Last two,” the Second corrected.

  “Three then, probably.”

  “Why wasn’t it?” Bueralan asked.

  “Why do a lot of civil projects not get done?” The First placed the glass orb he had been holding on the ground, the pitch inside it rolling sluggishly.

  “Paperwork,” the Second answered.

  “And a war,” Sergeant Illaan Alahn said, approaching the group. “Let us not forget that, either.”

  The First shrugged. The Second, his back to the soldier, rolled his deep-set eyes. Holding up the large globe, he said, “These burn for half a candle in the water. Down there, these are your life. They’ll tell you which way is up, which is down. They’ll also stop you from being in the cold for too long—you go numb after a while, which is warning enough, really. You can move it if you need and you should. There’s only a little bit of pitch in these, and we do that ’cause we like to move them. Once the first one is done on its time, we’ll drop a second to guide you home in two hours. After that, one every hour until tonight. We’ll assume you’re not coming up, if you’re not back by then.”

  “You’re filling me with confidence,” Bueralan said.

  “At least it’s not doubt and fear. That’s a killer.” The small man grinned through his discolored, crooked teeth. “Once you’re ready, I’ll drop it down.”

  With a nod the saboteur unstrapped his axes, pulled off his boots and his shirt. A long series of scars, a lash’s touch, ran across his back. They were old, but deep, and the ends of his tattoos entwined in them, his old life, his new. If any of those around him had any thought about it, the splash of the dropping orb was the only statement made. Following its descent, Bueralan watched the burning glow get swallowed quickly. “You sure we can’t send the midgets down?” he muttered dryly.

  Zaifyr moved to the edge. “Just pray that whoever has possessed the Quor’lo hasn’t had time to pull themselves out yet.”

  “Pray?”

  The man dropped into the water.

  “Time like this,” he said, rising from the black and cold water for but a moment, “even a dead god is important.”

  Then he plunged downward.

  6.

  At first, Bueralan’s trouble with the descent had been the cold. It seeped well into his bones before the light was gone and he thought about returning to the stench outside, to the smell that made his eyes water. It only got worse once the sunlight was left behind and the cold stillness of the water pressed in close. Coupled with the inky darkness, it became a psychological weight that combined with the tug of the bladder in his grasp and the saboteur felt a panic set in. Pushing it from his mind and using the physical act of swimming downward as a focus, he moved quickly, the light of the orb guiding him. Soon, Zaifyr appeared next to it, his narrow face gazing upward. Seeing Bueralan, he picked up the orb and moved to his left, swimming into a narrow cut shaft.

  A few meters into the shaft, claustrophobia set in. There was nothing but stone and water, the two elements mixing together. Bueralan was soon crawling more than swimming, and the sense of a crushing weight above sent a chill deep into his bones. Again, he pushed the thought from his mind, focused instead on taking a second breath from the bladder in his grasp. The valve had been easy to learn outside but it fumbled in his waterlogged fingers, a second of air bubbling out in a joyful escape. He closed it quickly, moved to catch up to the rolling orb and the shadow of Zaifyr, pushing ahead of him.

  Suddenly the man stopped and released the orb, pushing upward, his feet kicking out in an explosion of dirty water. Biting back a panicked curse Bueralan followed, pushing into a new shaft with a rotten ladder on the side. The light lasted but moments, and it went black. With panic threatening Bueralan almost turned around, but a pale green light bloomed around him as he burst from the water. Taking a deep breath and gagging on the stench as he did, he grabbed the edge of the hole and pulled himself out to stand in a small, dug out room reinforced with rotting beams.

  A bolt-hole: a miner would sleep, eat, live here for weeks, before the need for fresh air drove him or her up top.

  The green light was cast by a seam of stone in the wall, a jagged line that highlighted a tunnel, and without speaking, Zaifyr crawled through it. The saboteur followed and found himself after no more than a dozen movements in a yawning cavern, the roof webbed with lines of crystal that emitted a pale glow. Beneath it were houses built into the walls, built from stone that had long lost its original color to dripping water and were now cast sickly green beneath the light.

  “A City of Ger,” Bueralan whispered, pushing himself up.

  “Not nearly as empty as it should be,” the other man said, pointing up.

  Recent beams had been put into place on the ceiling, the wood large enough that it would have had to be brought in by half a dozen men, and high enough that ladders would have been required. At the top of the beams were small, drilled tunnels pushing deep into the rock, back the way that they had come.

 
“Two midgets lied.” Bueralan’s voice was still quiet, hushed. “Someone has been down here in the last seventy years.”

  “The last seven days, even,” Zaifyr said. “Where do you think the holes go?”

  “Beneath the roads.” He shrugged. “To the killing ground outside the Spine. They probably dug it out to collapse under weight, making it difficult to move through but easier to kill on.”

  The other man nodded. Then, turning, he pointed down through the city. “The Quor’lo went this way.”

  A single pair of footsteps were marked between worn stones, the edges of a street long gone. Following them, Bueralan wondered how they would be able to bring the Quor’lo back. The swim would not be viable, but if there was a second entrance, such as the one used by those who had set up the trap above them …

  The rough dwellings gave way to extravagant houses, rising into two-story buildings with blunted, crumbling balconies that peered over the street they walked upon. Broken lamp posts rose no higher than Bueralan’s chest, the remains now part of the ground, lying next to the broken blades and hacked skeletons, a grisly reminder of the purging that had taken place once the gold diggers had settled on their state.