by Ben Peek
9.
His eyes adjusted to the dark, easier now that the haunt had drifted into the temple behind him. She had pushed through the shattered remains of the shell that she had broken apart against earlier, but he knew that she would not appreciate the feat. Zaifyr wondered if the sight of the decay, the crumbling remains of everything that had been enclosed, was a shock to her—but this, he did not ask. He wanted to keep her glow as light, so that he was not forced to resort to using the haunts that were trapped inside.
He could feel them brushing against his skin, dozens, hundreds. Yet the strength of Ger remained the same.
Thousands of years ago, in the twilight of the Five Kingdoms, the God of Truth, Wehwe, had inspired a cult. Blame—the name his followers had adopted after his fall—had come to the edges of Asila and tried to move the slim, brown-skinned god from where he knelt, but had discovered that Wehwe’s skin burned at their touch. It scalded them, but did more: it created a heat without fire beneath their skin, a heat that consumed them. In response, they had purged the land of settlements a hundred miles in every direction around him.
By the time Zaifyr walked into the dense forest, Blame was long dead, torn apart by Aela Ren, the Innocent. It had been that act that had finally drawn Zaifyr to investigate, for Ren had been a man who had spent the years after the gods’ deaths without a single death being attributed to him. Zaifyr had never met him—the Innocent had gone to some lengths to avoid the Five Kingdoms—but in the rare moments that he heard about the man, he heard stories that were more myth than reality. He heard of scars, of wounds that wept, of one man, and of half a dozen men with one name. What was consistent was that he claimed to be the inheritor of Wehwe’s power. But until Blame, he’d shown nothing of it. Zaifyr had returned to his brothers and sisters with the story of how the cult had been murdered, having laid down arms first. Since it had been so isolated, and Aela Ren such a notoriously difficult figure to find, they had agreed to do nothing, to watch, to wait. Perhaps they had been wrong to do that, since later, Zaifyr learned that the Innocent had begun his war in Sooia shortly after he had been locked in his crooked tower for three hundred years.
But on the day he had approached Wehwe, as he walked the rough road to his still form, Zaifyr had felt the god’s awareness, the primal acknowledgment.
It was difficult to explain just what the dying god felt toward him. When Zaifyr reached out to touch him there was pain, but there was always pain. In that, all the gods were the same, though he had yet to reach any understanding as to why that was. He did not understand how it was that time could move differently for them and him. He knew only that there did not exist behind the pain a series of rational thought. What existed was animosity and hatred, a bitter venom that he would not have thought to ascribe to the God of Truth, if he had not already felt it before.
It was such a powerful hatred that by the time Zaifyr stepped into the empty, sun-drenched clearing where the slender god knelt, he could barely stand.
But with Ger, it was different.
With the giant god, Zaifyr felt the presence, but it was faint, nothing more than a whisper of disquiet or resentment. At first, he had been unsure what to make of it. Was it because of his time in the tower? Had that changed him? If so, how did Fo and Bau feel? But then he had met Ayae and listened as she told him that she felt nothing; for a time, he had not known what to think. But now, as he moved to the front of the church, past the still skeletons and paintings that held nothing but the smear of faded color, he wondered if it was just that there was not much of Ger left.
That the god was almost dead.
He stopped at the dais and looked across the ruined temple. At the broken entrance the faint outline of Oyia stood. He could hear faint murmurs, but the words were indistinct and it was clear that she would not be following him.
Closing his eyes, a part of him shifted. When he lifted his eyelids, the light in the room had grown, the haunts of children appearing between broken pews, walls and around the fallen armor. They were all boys, not one of them older than fourteen, most young and each of them wearing old robes that dragged across the floor. They had been sealed inside, Zaifyr knew. Sealed with the men he saw at the edges of the room and in the doorways.
Behind one middle-aged man was a set of stairs. Leaving the dais, Zaifyr made his way to the rotting door and began walking down the narrow, slippery steps. The wooden railing on the left crumbled as his hand touched it, but the light was strong enough that he did not need it.
At the end of the stairs, the mud stopped, though he was well below the lake. Zaifyr’s feet left wet tracks across the dusty corridor. There were cells on either side of him, and inside the haunts of men and young boys stood individually. Halfway along the short passage he closed his eyes and focused again, to see if he could add a layer to those who had been sealed in, and how strongly the generations ran. But when he opened his eyes nothing had changed.
Another set of stairs took him downward.
A crude red light filled the room, revealing skeletons around a dirty glass dome in the center where another skeleton lay.
On the floor, among the bones, were stones and dusty cups, the latter mostly intact. They had not been knocked over by falling bodies, however, but by earthquakes and explosions from miners. Neither of whom would have known or cared about the sanctity of the quiet chamber at the bottom of the Temple of Ger, where men and boys had taken their own lives—and where one man had stood in the center on a large glass dome and brought the stone walls up, until the temple was sealed from the soldiers who were destroying the cities throughout the mountains.
“And that,” Zaifyr whispered, “is how they sealed the temple, with their blood to fuel what power can be stolen from the dead.”
Edging past the skeletons, he approached the glass dome. He pushed the remains of the lead priest away—he could see him, a large, pale, bearded man—and bent down beside the glass, his hand reaching out to scratch away the dried blood and dust.
Beneath it, he saw dark wounded flesh, though just what part of Ger it was, Zaifyr could not tell. But it was flesh, just a hint of it. If he broke through the glass, he would be able to lower himself through the hole, his entire body, but the flesh he stood upon would be only the smallest patch of the entire being, the skin weeping blood, the wounds inflamed and infected, how much pain there must be spread out for miles beneath the city above.
And then he was touched. A faint, frail, light touch, akin to how he could reach out to the dead. A faint touch that was there for but a moment and then gone, a touch that looked at him and then moved on, dismissing him.
Zaifyr was not left with a feeling of hatred or animosity; nor was he left with kindness or love. He was left with indifference, of not mattering. He felt the barest acknowledgment of his existence, a brief glance from the figure whose huge form he stood over, the god who was moving in the opposite direction from him, the god that knew he was not moving toward life but to oblivion, to nothing.
And who was looking not for salvation, but for someone.
THE GENERAL
When I first knew Jae’le, the Animal Lord, he did not have a church, a priest, a home.
He would, eventually: a sprawling, intricate city built around rivers, a beacon of warmth and light after the wars, a city of safety, of beauty, of nature. He would have brothers and sisters as well, their relationships like the rivers and light he created.
But when I first met him, he was a killer, a murderer, a man who ate only the flesh of those he killed.
—Qian, The Godless
1.
“If you don’t mind a piece of advice,” Queila Meina said with easy humor, “a man is only as good as the coin you put down for him. Put down nothing, you’ll get nothing.”
The three mercenaries led Ayae alongside the Spine, the work on top forcing each to raise and lower their voices accordingly. As they passed a steel barrier being bolted into the wall, Meina had raised her voice and asked Ayae ho
w long she had lived in Mireea. When they had walked around a group of men and women hauling barrels of oil up by rope, the captain had asked quietly how long she and Illaan had been together.
“I wouldn’t listen to my niece if I were you.” Behind them, the large man with the axe spoke; his name was Bael. “She hasn’t met a man she hasn’t paid for in over a decade.”
“You make it sound like a terrible thing, Uncle.”
“Your father would be horrified.”
“My father?” Meina turned to face him, her dark, leather boots moving backward without a hint of doubt. “My father did the exact same thing with men, as you well know.”
“He didn’t try to carry out meaningful relationships with them.”
“Neither do I.”
Her second uncle—Maalen—chuckled. “The entire company waits for the day you meet a fine man. We bet on it.”
“That never happened to my father.”
“No, he met a woman.”
“And did that make him happy?”
Maalen made a face. “It was a poor choice.”
“But a choice still.” Meina spread her hands. “If he had kept to his rules and simply paid for her, he would have been much happier.”
Laughter stole into the air with an ease that surprised and shamed Ayae. She had left Illaan lying on the ground, the elderly corporal bending over him. He had been hurt, by her, but not ten minutes later she was laughing as she walked down the street, aware that the words of Queila Meina were for her benefit. She—even she, who knew nothing of mercenaries—knew the reputation of the former Captain of Steel, Wayan Meina. He had built the mercenary unit up from the remains of others, a young man with a vision that saw the group gain fame as quickly as they had contracts. He had been one of the first mercenary captains to really embrace the use of cheap fictions, which until then had been used mostly by retired soldiers to supplement their income. Wayan Meina had been the first captain to bring bards and authors into his unit, with the express desire that they produce the fictions that would make heroes out of his soldiers. He had wrapped the truth of a mercenary’s life in a lie and, when news of his death on a small farm emerged, it was followed by a slim novel detailing his exploits of defending it for four days against a band of twenty-three raiders, the woman he stood beside the mother of his only daughter.
Meina and her two uncles stopped outside The Pale House. One of the tallest buildings in the city, it was constructed from large, white bricks that the original owner had brought in at great expense from across the Leviathan’s Throat. When Captain Heast had taken its roof as his command post, Ayae had heard that the current owner had closed down the rest of the hotel and told his staff that they were now, in an unofficial capacity, the servants of the city.
“You’ll find Heast on the roof with his table,” Meina said. “He’s expecting you. He has been expecting you for days, but don’t let him push you around. Once you are done there, come by Steel and share a meal.”
Ayae grasped the other woman’s hand, her palms warm. “Thank you.”
Then she was alone.
She had been inside The Pale House twice before. The hotel—despite its current use by Captain Heast—was an establishment for the wealthy. The first time she had entered with Faise, and the two of them had promptly learned that a pair of girls from an orphanage neither had the money nor the contacts to be treated properly in the open, ashwood bar that dominated the ground floor after reception. On the following occasion, she had accompanied Illaan, and met two of his brothers and their wives in the elaborate, second-floor dining room, where she had sat quietly and awkwardly throughout the evening. On her third visit, she crossed the empty, pale-stained floor and approached one of the staff, asking for Captain Heast. She was directed to one of the narrow, spiraling staircases that were like tubes throughout the building, and climbed four flights of stairs with only the echo of her steps for company.
At the end of the stairs, a guard held the door open for her. The light that followed was so bright that she squinted at the empty sky first, before noticing the cut-back branches and trunks that ringed the roof of The Pale House. It was at the far end of the roof that she saw Captain Heast, standing with a small, heavily scarred man before a large, heavy table. On the top of it she could make out a detailed, miniature model of Mireea, the Spine of Ger and the surrounding land.
“I have company,” she heard Heast say, “but I think that should cover us for the time being.”
The other man nodded and said, “I’ll make sure that it’s done,” but it was not until his heavy steps had faded from the stairwell that Heast spoke to her.
“Drink?”
“No,” she replied. “But thank you.”
“I asked for you two days ago.” His voice was even, controlled, with no hint of emotion. “I am to take it that my sergeant did not pass on that information?”
She started to apologize, but the Captain of the Spine held up his hand. “Please, it isn’t necessary. I was hoping for a different response from him.”
“He is a good soldier.”
“In peace, yes.” Heast’s hand touched the table before him. “Now? He is like brittle metal, continually cracking beneath the surface. It is not just the situation that he finds difficult, but the news that comes from Yeflam and his father. It appears that a power shift in the Traders Union has left him uncertain of his father’s future. But the question I am faced with is one that any smith faces in the same situation.”
“To reforge or to abandon,” she said softly. “What did you want to see me for?”
“To discuss what I am to do with you.”
On the table before her, the Spine of Ger ran from end to end of the map, the cartographer using the form of a giant to give shape and depth to the mountains around it. She was not surprised to see Orlan’s signature at the bottom, as the brushwork and modeling were without doubt his—but what did surprise her was how the signature repeated, echoing an earlier one, suggesting that the table she stood before was much, much older than she would otherwise have thought.
“I don’t believe in calling it a curse,” Heast continued. “Maybe here in the heat, on the Spine, it can only be that—but not with me.”
There was nothing friendly or unfriendly in Heast’s gaze. It felt calculated. There was an honesty in that, she realized.
She had not met Heast before in any personal capacity. He did not attend the functions that the soldiers organized. She had heard stories of him when he arrived—even young as she had been, then—but the hope that he would be of as much interest as the stories of Meina’s father had fled within weeks. What books there were about him were about strategies, about the details of battles that, Ayae had heard, were dry and humorless. He was a man, the Mireean Guard said, who only worked—and though this single-mindedness had more than won their loyalty, it had not won him the adoration of the city.
“In a tower above the Keep, there are two men who are a curse to me,” he continued. “If asked, they will say that laws keep them bound, that their neutrality is fundamental to them, but it is not to be believed. With them, I could heal an army, poison another. I could end the war before it began. Instead, I am left to fight—to watch not just my soldiers die, but those of a nation I have traded with and fought before. Fo and Bau think nothing of that, which is why their neutrality is but lip service.”
“I have little skill to fight either, if that is what you’re asking me,” she said. “All I can offer is the talents I do have. I can tell you your map is off.”
He turned, slightly. “Where?”
“The western edge.” She ran her finger down the hard edge of the mountain. “Here. That was cleared of bush for six new settlements over a year ago. Miners, if I remember right.”
“Thank you,” he murmured.
A loud knocking broke their conversation, followed by a sweating, young guard.
“Sir—Sergeant Illaan!” He caught his breath in gasps. “The healer wants
you to know that you’re needed, that you should come and see the sergeant immediately!”
2.
He had introduced himself as Ekar Waalstan, any title unspoken, his authority unquestioned. “If I had been asked what I thought of you, Baron Le, I believe I would have said that you were a man moments away from panic.” He spoke conversationally, friendly, as if an army did not lie behind him. “But now I have the unpleasant experience of feeling the opposite: that you are exactly where you want to be, that you planned this and knew Samuel would betray you. I commend you on that.”
“That’s very civilized of you.” The saboteur raised his chained wrists in a salute. “Thank you.”
The general’s brown eyes held a faint amusement. He sat across from Bueralan, right foot folded gently across his left knee, a gentleman in his chair with his long fingers laced before him. He was calm and relaxed, his body language one of control. Despite the general’s words, Bueralan was caught flat-footed. He had not suspected Orlan’s betrayal: he had believed in the fire of his shop, had not considered that Samuel Orlan—the famously neutral Samuel Orlan—might have been involved. Not that he had much time to ponder the betrayal. The saboteur knew keenly that his life could end before he rose from the hard wooden chair he sat on, that his body could be left on the dark green grass to be trampled over by thousands of soldiers, his wrists still chained tightly. Lieutenant Dural stood on the edge of the conversation, attentive and still, his hand never far from his sword. Waiting for the moment that he could provide this service.
“I have heard of you, of course,” General Waalstan continued. “There is one particular story that interests me, a most recent one where you were hired by a man known as Lord Alden. From what I understand, you and Dark were hired to root out civil war beginning in his own yard. It is said that you spent six months eating his stale bread to compile a list of one hundred and twenty-three men that you did not even send to the gallows.”