The Godless

by Ben Peek

  You are a fighter, his father said when, with tears in his eyes, he had asked what he could be. Keep your sword straight and make sure it doesn’t drop. Fight until you cannot fight no more.

  As the afternoon’s sun sank, liquid orange and melting over the Spine of Ger, Zaifyr saw all three of the new suns rising over Kakar eclipse, hidden behind a huge and terrifying darkness. Over ten thousand years ago, but he could still remember it. The town of his birth had organized the charmed children to walk to Hienka’s cave hours after the midday darkness, fearing that the decade of famine that had etched across the world would return to them, only this time without the protection of a slumbering god. A god that they had never seen awake, that had never strode among them, but which had left its guardians to ensure that it was worshipped.

  The thin figure of Meihir led them up a narrow trail, her bent figure a frail question none behind her could ask.

  There were more questions when they found the stone bears, thirty-seven in number, sitting in rows before the cave.

  Zaifyr and the other children had moved cautiously through their ranks after she entered the dark, empty mouth of the cave. He knew the bears, just as everyone did, for they padded paths from village to village, impossibly alive and unpredictable; but now their violent mouths were closed and they were still, returned to their original stone. Tentatively, he reached out, not the first to do so, but not the last, a skinny youth that neither set the lead nor followed. When he touched the side of one he jumped back immediately, thinking that it would turn its solid bulk toward him, but nothing happened. Zaifyr’s thin hands reached out again, and again the stone bear did not move.

  Inside the cave Hienka, his slumbering god, was gone.

  2.

  Axes strapped to his waist and leather jerkin chafing from damp, Bueralan knocked and pushed open the door to Heast’s office. He found the gray-haired Captain of the Spine inside, seated before Sergeant Illaan Alahn, the weak light of the afternoon a shroud around each. “I was told you would be here later.” Heast sniffed. “Promised actually.”

  “I didn’t want to deprive you.” Humor exhausted, Bueralan was silent while he pulled a seat into place, easing himself down next to Illaan. “My men and I will leave in the morning. The only question is: do we head down to Yeflam or to Leera?”

  Heast’s pale gaze did not waver, but it was Illaan who spoke. “I was just explaining the city you found. We didn’t think you could access it from there.”

  “You already had,” Bueralan said.

  “Yes,” Heast replied before his sergeant. “However, we don’t want too many people to know about it. I’m sure you can understand why.”

  “What else don’t you want to know?”

  Heast’s smile was thin. “You mean, what else don’t I want you to know?”

  “An army with a warlock general, a Quor’lo, Keepers. Next there will be a god standing in this city.”

  “It would be in keeping with the way my cards have been dealt,” the captain said dryly. “Am I keeping much from you? Probably. But anything relevant to your work? No. I really don’t know anything about the army approaching us outside what you have already been told. Now, how did the Keeper react to the Quor’lo?”

  “Showed a lot of interest.”

  Heast grunted, unimpressed.

  “He did heal your soldier,” Bueralan said.

  “First decent thing he’s done since he got here.” The captain’s fingers steepled in front of him. “For the most part he and Fo spend their time locked in a tower, having animals delivered to them. They have the staff in the Keep buy them from the market. The same staff collect the corpses a few days later.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “Playing, would be my guess.” Heast’s hands parted, his left hand touching a collection of organized reports on his desk. “In Yeflam, they were known for certain incidents relating to diseases. The latest was a small outbreak of a skin disease in one of the cities, Xeq, I believe. From what I understand, Fo released the initial carrier in the body of a rat, trying to see just how toxic a mix that the rodent could carry that would affect the human population. After the disease had spread enough to cause a panic, a quarantine was placed while Bau worked to heal those within. They were not subtle about the situation reportedly, and there was a lot of backlash. Times are changing in Yeflam. People aren’t looking for gods any more. No one wants an infallible, almost god-like figure to rule them. The Traders Union has recognized that, and they are using Fo and Bau’s exploits against the other Keepers. When Lady Wagan’s request for help with the situation here arrived, it was, sadly, at the wrong time. None of us expected a Keeper to be sent, but politics have graced us.”

  “They know Zaifyr,” the saboteur said, ignoring the sharp movement from Illaan beside him. “That surprise you?”

  “No.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Who he says he is.” Behind Heast, shafts of light faded from the window. “But when I first met him, he was as he is right now.”

  “A Keeper?” Illaan asked.

  The captain’s gaze pinned his sergeant to the chair, a silent reprimand for his outburst. “No,” he said finally. “But the Keepers are not the first or the last group of men and women with a touch of power in them to walk this world of ours. We may have no interest in the gods, but we would be naive to believe in a world where the sun is shattered, the sea dark, and our mountain a giant cairn, that the outcome of their deaths is not far and widely felt. But you should both know that I only hired Zaifyr after he arrived in the city, after I heard he was in hospital.”

  “After he found the girl,” Bueralan added.

  “I doubt it’s a coincidence.”

  “We should remove him.” Illaan rose from his seat. “He has no place in this city. None of their kind—”

  “Sergeant.”

  The young soldier’s words faltered, stopped. “I—”

  “Sergeant.” Heast’s voice did not raise itself, but its tone, its cold authority, allowed for no opposition. “Sergeant, you will put aside such opinions. You have not distinguished yourself with your behavior recently and outbreaks like this are entirely unacceptable. You will leave this room now and reflect on that. Dismissed.”

  Illaan’s hands bunched tightly together, the tension so strong that it could snap his bones. His teeth chewed his bottom lip into his mouth and for a moment it appeared that he was going to argue, though he must have known—as Bueralan did—the futility of such an action. With an abrupt salute he turned, pulled the door open and left with the sound of his boots ringing loudly down the hall.

  As they faded, Heast pushed himself out of his seat. Moving slowly, he limped to the open door of his office and closed it. “We are out of time, aren’t we?” he said softly, without turning.

  “Can’t be sure.”

  “But?”

  “That Quor’lo was looking for something and I don’t think it chose the cursed girl by some mistake.”

  Heast turned and for the first time that Bueralan could remember, looked old, his age etched into the lines around his mouth and beneath his pale eyes. “But why attack her, of all the powerful figures here? And what will Fo and Bau do when this general arrives? That is the question. Not what will happen when Leera lays siege to us. I know what will happen: we will cease to exist as an independent city if we stay and fight. The question remains to be asked, though: are we being used to send a statement to the rest of the world?”

  “What about Zaifyr?” Bueralan got to his feet. “You mentioned the others, but not him. Can we expect something of him?”

  “We can expect nothing.”

  The mercenary frowned.

  “I know him,” Heast continued. “He is a competent fighter, but he is not here because of money. He accepted a quarter of what I should have offered him—and did not even try for more. No, there is an interest that brings him here, and while I do not believe it is for Leera, it is not for us either. When the d
ying starts he will leave, as I suspect will Fo and Bau. They will leave us to fight with muscle and steel and to suffer the losses that we will.”

  “You paint a bleak picture,” Bueralan said.

  “Elar is dead and my city will soon be under siege. There is no other picture to paint.” Around them, the last of the afternoon’s light died. In the deepening darkness, Bueralan heard the captain strike a match. The single flame lifted to one of the lamps, lighting it. “Fortunately for you, that’s when I am at my best.”

  3.

  Zaifyr’s memory was fragmented, broken by a life so long that he could not recall it perfectly. Years, decades, centuries were lost to him. But he remembered hearing Meihir tell the village that Hienka’s hibernation had been undertaken to avoid the War of the Gods. Thinking of survival only, the Feral God had plunged its land and its people into a brittle winter, forcing them to endure a cold harshness that hid it from its kin. “We made a mistake,” she whispered, a week after the return from the cave. “We thought we followed a god that honored community, loyalty and strength, but we do not. It is primitive and feral and knows not of these things. It created winter not to protect us, but to protect itself. To hide, to kill all around it. We have worshipped an image that is false and now that it is awake, we find ourselves slaves to it.”

  Thousands of years later, Zaifyr lifted the slick bottle to his lips, the dampness seeping through his fingers. As snow melted in the mountains, Meihir’s new, intimate knowledge of Hienka brought a deepening despair to her eyes. It was she who first stopped calling upon the god for help, she who stopped calling the Feral God a him, and referred to the god as an it. “We have taken from the sleeping,” she said, “but it was not a gift offered to us. We have not understood the conditions of our worship. Our ignorance has blinded us to the bonds that we have created, the sacrifice that can be made without our consent.” Yet, she alone stopped calling on the god and life in the village, Zaifyr remembered, continued much as it had before Hienka had awoken, with only the weather changing. It did not take long for the people of Kakar to forget her words, to believe them a sign of her failings, of the god’s rejection of her.

  And then, months later, he awoke in silence.

  “Mother?”

  It was an eerie silence that stretched out from the bare room he slept in.

  “Father?”

  Pushing back his furs, and with the lower half of the chain around his wrist in the palm of his hand, he rose and drew aside the cloth door. Nothing stirred. The dirt was cold beneath his feet, the air still. Even the dogs were quiet. He repeated his call, though the sense of wrong that had compelled him to raise his voice saw him only call for his mother. Moving through the house, he pulled aside the door to their own room. There, he found them lying together in their furs, both still. No breath arose from them, no shift or twitch shifted the coverings and, as he bent over each and his fingers touched their skin, he found it cold.

  In the hearth room he found the dogs, large black-and-gray beasts, lying still around the cold, black pit. Out the back, his steps directing him without thought, he stepped onto fresh snow and saw the animals in the pens. They too were dead. It was there, while staring at the bodies of ducks and rabbits, animals they planned to kill themselves for food, that the enormity of the situation hit him and he stumbled.

  They were dead.

  They were all dead.

  His eyes blinked rapidly as the tears seeped down his cheeks, the silence broken by the sound of his bare feet walking across fresh snow.

  Leaving the house of his parents, he continued into the center of Kakar. He found the nineteen men and women he knew intimately. Each was wrapped in the charms of their family, the charms that would protect them at the age of twenty-nine, not at the age of nineteen; yet they had done that, the charms saving each of them. Half dressed like him, and with looks of shock and loss upon their faces, they were silent. Their voices had been stolen by the growing realization that everyone but them was dead. He did not know how long he stood there with them, surrounded by their dead in houses of silence, but it was until a soft voice spoke:

  “Hienka is dead.”

  Meihir.

  She made her way toward Zaifyr, thin, bent, her skin so frail that the light appeared to shine through it.

  “How?” he whispered.

  “The Wanderer and Leviathan.” The witch stood in the large firepit of the village, her feet black. “Hienka took back what we borrowed to fight them both—to fight the God of Death and the Goddess of the Ocean. It killed the first. The Wanderer was weak from previous battles and Hienka struck so swiftly, a hunter to its prey, using our blood and our life to empower itself.”

  “Why did he not take us?”

  “The charms. They tied you to a different fate, hid you from it. It could not take you then, for it had agreed to take you elsewhere.”

  “Why not you?” he asked, a hint of anger in his voice. “Why not you?”

  Yet, even as he spoke, he realized that the fragility of Meihir’s skin was not due to her age, and that the light really did pierce her form.

  4.

  He was the only one that could see her, though the importance of that was not yet clear to him. In the cold morning he and the others agreed that it was a sign of Meihir’s power, though the haunt of the elderly witch did not agree. As the nineteen charmed men and women talked, Zaifyr watched her frown, shift and look at herself, the harsh cold light of the morning breaking her body apart.

  “This is not what I wanted,” she said, though only he could hear her. “Who would ask not to be able to touch, to eat, to drink … and only to feel weariness, hunger and thirst?”

  She followed Zaifyr into the house of his parents, where he lifted the fur-wrapped body of his mother first. She was a deadweight and he bore her body outside, his still-bare feet turning numb beneath the cold as he placed her in the pit. They had agreed to put all the dead there, to create a pyre so high that it would reach up through the mountains, a measure of their grief. Yet, as he eased his mother’s body into the pit, placing it next to Soeran, he was aware of Meihir telling him that she had not planned her survival, that she had not wished for what she was, now.

  “Maybe Hienka cursed you?”

  The witch flinched, as if struck.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

  “No,” she interrupted. “No, do not apologize. You are right. I turned away from Hienka and it knew when it called to me. It saw what I believed and it denied paradise in death. It punished me for my rebellion, cursed me.”

  It would be years before he heard the word applied to himself, centuries even. The cool bottle pressed against his skin in a wet, welcome kiss of cold that Kakar never had. Cursed. Cursed. That was a new term, arising out of changes that had emerged as generations were born without the kind or indifferent stare of a god over them. Attitudes changed, words changed, that was the nature of the world. When he had learned of his “curse” he had been told he was special, different, that he was Chosen. The first Immortal, Jae’le, the Animal Lord, had told him to remember the morning in the village he had found his parents, to remember the smoke and the tart smell of burning flesh.

  “How high did the fire burn?” Jae’le asked, the tall, brown-skinned man adorned in leather and a cloak of green feathers. “High enough to make the mountains weep?”

  “Yes,” Zaifyr replied softly.

  “And your anger?”

  He shook his head.

  “You should have been angry.” The man’s filed teeth showed in defiance. “It was the failure of the gods, a lesson to us, their children.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We have been shown their failure, my brother, and we must learn from it if we are to replace them.”

  5.

  “I don’t understand,” Ayae said, hating the sound of the words for the weakness they implied.

  “It’s human nature, really.” Bau sat across from her in a plush chair, his le
gs pushed out into the fading afternoon’s sunlight before him. They were in a small den divided by an empty table and dominated by an open window on the left. The strongest light in the room came from a single lamp burning over the stairwell, beneath which stood Fo, consumed by the now-still snake and his work. Unconcerned by the sounds of knives being moved, liquid bubbling and the hairless man’s undecipherable words, Bau continued: “After the gods killed each other, there were two reactions. The first was to create temples around the fallen bodies, believing that the gods had not died. There were seventy-eight gods and it was believed they would be back. The second was to look for new gods. Children, as it were. A century later, five had begun to establish themselves. Those we named the Immortals. Back then, Zaifyr was known as Qian, the name I assume he was born with.”

  “That’s why I don’t understand.” She focused on the man before her, ignoring the sounds from beneath her feet. “Zaifyr must be over ten thousand years old.”

  “Eleven, actually,” Bau said. “Jae’le, the First of the Immortals, claims that he was born a hundred and five years before the current calendar. Qian is said to be about the same age. The other three Immortals were born after the calendar began. That includes my lady, Aelyn Meah, who sits at the head of the Enclave.”

  “Why don’t people know about the others? Most of us know about Aelyn Meah, after all.”

  In response to her frustration, the Healer shrugged, his movement barely visible in the weak light. “Because they do not wish to be known. The first of us—those five—are the most pure, the closest to being gods at the outset. You and I, born and possessed by whatever way the remnants of the gods moves now, are shadows to them in terms of power. We have much further to go and our roads are much longer to walk than those.