The Godless

by Ben Peek

  At the open window, the smell was barely noticeable. Easing into the chair, she said, “Is that what I’ve done?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Perhaps?”

  “The Keepers have their own way of doing things.” Zaifyr sat on the edge of his bed and, from the table next to it, took a copper chain and began to wind it around his wrist. “The evolutionary path of a god is not one that you can find in a book, after all.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “That I can find it in a book?”

  “That you’re a god.”

  His thumb pressed against the end of the chain. “No.”

  She leaned back in the chair, her fingers lacing together in her lap. “I don’t know what to think,” she admitted. “I have been told so many things—about curses, about gods, about life. Even you. They told me your name was Qian.”

  “Once.”

  “And that you were mad.”

  He picked up a long copper chain and repeated, “Once.”

  “Should I discount what they say?”

  “If you want.” The chain wrapped around his knuckles. “I don’t have any answers either, if that is what you’re looking for. I don’t know why you’re cursed. I don’t know why the man at the front desk isn’t. All I know is what time taught me: I will live a long time, which I am thankful for. As for the rest, well, I was once Qian, I once ruled one of the Five Kingdoms, and at the end of it, my brothers and sisters locked me in a madhouse for a thousand years. After that—”

  “You will tell me there are no answers?”

  “No, there are answers.” His green eyes met her own. “But you come by them by removing every other choice, until there is only this choice for this moment.”

  “Will you help me?”

  She saw his hesitation, as if the bluntness of her question and the unadorned way she presented it surprised him. It surprised her as well. He was not the opposite of Bau: he was no more sure of his creation or his purpose than the Healer was. But neither was he Bau. When she met his gaze she saw her youth, her innocence and potential, and her promises that lingered like the smoldering beneath her skin. But she saw too his age, that length of a life that was so long that she could not begin to understand what he had seen, the changes he had lived through and the tiredness it had born. As she held his gaze and felt on the verge of knowing a small, vital part of the man who, having once been a god, now wrapped himself in the ancient charms of the long dead, he smiled his half smile and the sly, cynic’s humor returned, leaving her with but a glimpse of him.

  “Yes,” he said.

  IN A TOWN CALLED DIRTWATER

  For a long time, there was nothing; nothing but the fading religions, the old rituals, the empty words. Nothing, until Jae’le, until myself—

  Nothing until the first of the “children.”

  —Qian, The Godless

  1.

  For a week, Zaifyr did not leave Red Moon.

  It had not been his plan to stay. He had meant to return to the foul-watered shaft and, with a long-handled hammer, begin breaking through the stone around the Temple of Ger.

  Instead, he allowed Ayae to keep his attention. Her presence in the beer garden at the back of the hotel became a world that he and she occupied beneath the rise and fall of the three suns. At night, when she was gone, he would return to his room and note the progression of thick boards being erected across shopfront windows and doors. Slowly, Mireea was becoming uniform: a city of shut buildings and empty lanes, the divisions of economy washed away and falling into memory like the sprawl of markets. Each new building shut up was a part of Mireea lost, and soon he would also be gone. If he was not, he ran the risk of being drawn into the units that the Mireean Guard were making from citizens. That he had no desire for. He awoke to see their painful morning jog through the empty, cobbled streets, struggling beneath the weight of mismatched armor and swords they had been given, with either a bucket of water in each hand or a stretcher full of bricks between two. They followed the streets throughout the city all day, passing beneath all the wooden gates and crude wooden walls that divided the city, carrying out mock exercises that Heast issued from his position on the roof of The Pale House.

  He might have stayed longer in the garden and forgotten his responsibilities were it not for the explosions that began to punctuate the day. Neither he nor Ayae knew what they were, but after she had left, he saw First—or was it Second?—carrying an empty pack covered in dirt walking along the streets. The small man squinted at him as he crossed the road, grunted a greeting and told him that Heast had ordered the tunnels down the mountain caved in and road broken up. There appeared to be no immediate threat to Zaifyr’s foul tunnel—it was too close to the city to be a defensive weakness, except to anyone who fell in—but still, before the first light of the morning’s sun, he walked through the city gates with the weight of the hammer over his back, leaving his charms inside his hotel room.

  The night before, he had told Ayae he would be gone for a few days. They had sat at the back of her house at a small wooden table, the light from the night sky piercing strongly through the cut-back trees.

  “You should probably prepare yourself,” he said. “I know you won’t leave, but your preparations—”

  “I have tidied my garden,” she said. “I washed my walls down. I don’t need to shut my windows up, lock myself away.”

  “You’ve not fought in a war before.”

  “But you have?”

  “Many,” he admitted. “After the gods had died, we had our own wars to divide up what they had left.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Eventually, it was terrible.”

  “Eventually?”

  He placed the empty glass he held on the table, the juice pulp a dark pattern to the lip. “The first war I fought in was about survival. We were the Children of the Gods before we were anything else, and there were many who contested us. We fought for five hundred years, if you include the standoffs that were not peace. It mostly felt like years of survival, of making sure the people around me did not starve, had homes and weren’t killed in streets or in fields.”

  She struggled with his age, with the breadth of it. He knew that and tried to imagine it from her point of view, but couldn’t. “How did you manage with your—your—”

  “Curse?” he finished.

  “I am trying not to use the word,” she admitted, flushing.

  He shrugged. “Describe it how you want. Eventually you’ll stop thinking of it as a different part of you. It changes you, yeah: and some more than others. For some, it kills them before they can experience it. For others, it makes them immortal. No one has known why, or why not, in either case. It’s fickle. Random. And no matter what it does to you, you’re left to manage it like everything else in your life.”

  “Discipline.” She said the word slowly, as if tasting it. “Everything is about discipline to you. You rely on nobody but yourself, do you realize that?”

  At the mining shaft, Zaifyr lifted the wooden seal and dropped into the foul water. It was cool, not yet warmed by the three suns. The wooden shaft of the hammer caught on the ceiling of the tunnel twice, forcing himself to push his fingers through the muddy silt to pull himself down.

  “You’re responsible for yourself,” he had replied, turning the pulp-splattered glass around in his hand. “You tell me I speak of discipline and I tell you that I try, but fail regularly. That is how I ended up in a madhouse, because I failed at that. I thought I could do something for the dead, that I could bring them peace, but that was not what I could do for them. What I could do was to bear witness, to acknowledge their pain, and to acknowledge that I could do nothing. Why would I be given power for that? I struggled with that question for a long time, until I realized that the question itself was one that was flawed. I was not chosen. None of us are, and that is the hardest thing to accept. But it is what we must do, what I especially must do. That is the sacrifice that the world
has demanded from me.”

  Half a smile crossed her face. “You speak as if the world was alive.”

  “It is.” He leaned back, looked up at the sky. “Look at everything around us, everything that is sustained without a god. We live on a giant living creature, so old it makes me feel young.”

  “Could it not be a god itself?”

  “It could.”

  “But?” The other half of her smile emerged. “There’s always a but.”

  He laughed, enjoying himself. “But if so, why did it not take its place in the war?”

  “I don’t know.” She too looked up at the sky. “Are there more worlds alive out there, do you think?”

  “Not that I can feel.”

  She turned her gaze to him.

  “I can see it in the moon.” He touched the charm beneath his wrist, once, twice. “The moon is what remains of Sei. The shattered suns are his kingdom, but the moon, the moon is his form, huge and curled into a ball. If I focus on it, I can feel his pain and his anger. He is caught in a slow death, like all the gods—while, at the same time, being dead. What I sense is the haunt and the last parts of his life, merged together. At least, that is what I think. I know there is nothing left of his mind, just as there is nothing left of the others. Constant pain has destroyed any consciousness. They lash out at the only thing they can, the sense of another god, of another power—that being us.”

  “I don’t feel anything.”

  “Sei is too far for any but me.”

  “I don’t feel Ger.”

  One of the rungs in the ladder crumbled beneath his grasp, plunging him back into the water. Slowly, spitting out the foul liquid, Zaifyr pulled himself onto the stones and ran a hand through his hair, shaking it out. Ahead, the green light shone through the sliver in the wall, a hint that would grow until it illuminated the entire forgotten, haunted city.

  “Bau said my senses were just overloaded. That he wasn’t surprised, but—well, it makes me believe that you are all wrong.” Ayae let out a low breath after her words. “That I am something else, something more or less.”

  “The elements were not considered gods,” he replied. “But in this, Bau has a point. The changes that you’ve gone through, that we all go through, do not happen in an empty space. He is overlooking the fact that you’ve lived here for so long that you simply may have grown used to the sensation of Ger around you. For most of us, we live with our power before we’re aware of it. The lucky ones have it dawn on them, slowly. The unlucky ones—well, they’re more like you. In a moment of danger, they emerge, and they lash out. That is why so many people fear the curses. But if you cannot feel another god, later, then your questions will be important and perhaps the answer will reveal more about Ger than we thought.”

  “Like?”

  “Understanding. With it, awareness.”

  “But you just said—”

  He smiled. “I know.”

  She shook her head, her smile rueful, and said, “Would others think that? Is that why a Quor’lo would want to kill me?”

  He told her he had no answer and the subject had changed, though this time it did so with his help. He had a lot to talk to her about: ideas, rules, stories. He told her what he knew of the others who had come before her. He did not hold back as he told them, nor encounter any of the cynicism and tiredness that he felt when conversing with his brothers and sisters. But he was conscious of the choice he made, the chill he felt and the questions that it opened up.

  Questions that in the depths of the old, crumbling city, the haunt of a woman who was a new priest might know the answers for.

  2.

  The bread was two days old and it would be another three before she received a ration card to buy a new loaf, but despite that Ayae was content, if not yet happy.

  A large part of it was due to Zaifyr. He had not been able to explain her curse—no, not her curse, her, it was her now—and said it was more than likely that Bau was right, that inside her was the remains of Fire, the elemental charge of Ger. “What literature I have read said that he was considered the Warden of the Elements,” the charm-laced man said. “He did not create them, but before him, the elements were wild. There were storms of fire and wind and water, all of which would hammer the land, and earthquakes that swallowed nations. After his death, there was some of that, but mostly, the elements continued as they had before, and the mystery of what exactly Ger did was born.” The ease with which he answered her questions, the honesty he spoke with—in relation not just to her, but to the gods, the Keepers, and all other immortals—had left her with her first sense of normality since Orlan’s shop had caught fire.

  She had even gained a small semblance of control over her curse—over herself—and the burning sensation beneath her skin.

  “I can’t make a flame,” she said to him the day before he left as they sat in the garden behind his hotel, the midday’s sun shining through the cut-back branches. “But I can heat myself up. I can change my body temperature without changing my emotions. That’s all, though. I feel like I should be able to do more, that I should have more control. It’s frustrating. I feel like I could prove something to myself, to everyone, if I could just say for certain what I could do.”

  “It takes time.” He used his lazy, mocking smile. “But maybe you could ask Bau for some of his special help? I’m sure he’d do it, if you used that charm of yours.”

  To demonstrate her charm, Ayae made a rude gesture.

  Yet for all that she enjoyed his company, there were times when she felt out of her depth, as if she were standing beside an object so large that she could not view it all at once. She felt that way when he talked of his incarceration, his madness, and when he talked of the gods. Zaifyr had told her that Ger had sunk to his knees and began building the mountain, his cairn, after he had suffered a dying blow. She was struck not by how melancholy he sounded, but how the green of his gaze showed tiny lines across his iris like the fractures of a giant jigsaw puzzle; pieces of such a diverse set of experiences, lives and moments that she felt no more than a child.

  “Ger spoke for fifty-seven years as he built his burial mound. Priests gathered in tent cities around him and recorded every word he spoke. They wrote and rewrote and translated his words for hundreds of years, turning them into prophecies and morals,” he told her. “The Temples of Ger came later, during the Five Kingdoms. There were always the remains of the gods, and always the remains of their belief, and no matter how hard we fought to stamp it out, to remove it, it would remain. Eventually, we learned to turn a blind eye to the edges of it, and that is when the Cities of Ger were built. The priests and their followers cut through the rock, down to his body, to listen for his voice again, to wait for when he arose. He had said that he would speak once more, before the end, apparently.”

  “But he hasn’t?”

  “None have.”

  There was a knocking on the door behind her. Bread knife in hand, she crossed the floor and found Reila standing in the morning’s sun. “May I come in?” the healer said.

  She stepped back. “Of course.”

  “Do you mind if I sit?” The healer was pale outside the sun. “I am afraid that all this running around lately has worn me out.”

  “You don’t look well,” Ayae said.

  “Just late nights and early mornings.” The small woman settled herself in Ayae’s chair. “But you, my dear, look positively lovely—and I am pleased to see that your house has been repaired as well. Have you had any troubles?”

  She had not. At best, her neighbors were withdrawn, silent to her where they had once not been, but given the preparations going on in the city she was not surprised, and said so as she returned the bread knife to the kitchen. She opened her ice chute and pulled out a bottle of water, the cold drifting off her hand as she poured a glass. The faint wisps still trailed off her as she handed it to Reila.

  “I have been meaning to come and see both you and Lady Wagan,” Ayae said. “I want
ed to both thank you and apologize for my behavior the other week.”

  Taking the glass, Reila waved her free hand. “You were going through a lot.”

  “Still.”

  “Still,” the healer repeated, “I do hear that you have made friends with another in the city, since then.”

  “Thank you for the letter.”

  “It was Captain Heast.” The kindness in Reila’s tone remained, though with her words a slow awareness began to dawn in Ayae that she wanted something from her. “The captain speaks well of him, though he claims he is not much of a fighter.”

  “His name is Zaifyr.”

  “The captain has wanted to speak to you for two days about your friendship with him,” she continued. “Heast says that Zaifyr often leaves before a battle, that it is near impossible to make him stay, but we would like him to do so. I know it puts you in a difficult position, however. I understand that. So does Lady Wagan. But we wanted to help you, and he—I fear he is the best for that at the moment, and he is helping, yes?”

  She hesitated. “Yes.”

  “Good, for we all need help.”

  Caught off guard and surprised by the naked need in Reila’s voice, Ayae did not know how to respond. She had assumed that the Mireean Army and the mercenaries would be able to wait out the siege, would be able to wear down the force that was coming. It would be difficult: the memories of her childhood had broken walls scattered across Sooia, broken by the Innocent, left with the corpses, left with the desecration of land and flesh that could be attributed only to him, and she knew what those memories did to people behind the walls, to those fighting to stay alive.

  The glass in Reila’s hand began to tremble. Raising her free hand, she wrapped it round the glass. “Do you know,” she said, finally, “that Fo and Bau refer to him as Qian?”

  “Yes,” Ayae said softly.

  “It is an old name,” the other woman continued. “I have only the smallest knowledge of it myself, but once it was said he was powerful. So powerful that he outlawed the use of blood magic and killed those who practiced it—for a brief time, at any rate. Since then the practice has grown stronger, though there are some who refuse to kill any creature to use it.”