The Godless

by Ben Peek

  “—by a child,” he finished.

  Her smile was benign, condescending in its every curve. “Follow me, Captain.” Her first step took her to the edge of the still lake, where a small knife appeared in her hand. She sliced the tip of a finger, letting the blood fall—and took a second step onto the water as it did, where her feet found a hard surface, similar to board. “It is not difficult for me to understand your skepticism,” she said. “I was young, myself, when we found our god. So young that the two men behind you were not yet born, nor were their parents. They find it difficult to stomach your words, but only because they do not remember a time without the gaze of a god in their heart. But I remember the emptiness of my youth. The fear I had when I heard stories of cursed men and women. The terror when I saw them.

  “I watched a childhood friend of mine die as her skin shed itself daily, similar to a snake, but without the grace of nature. My friend was five at the time, and the shedding left her bloody and raw and in constant pain. She cried out to a god, any god, but there were only the cures promised by witches and shamans, cures that dulled pain and nothing else. To watch that was to understand not just that there were no gods, but why no man or woman desired to hear of divinity again.”

  Beneath his feet, the water was cold but solid. A display of power she had not shown to those beneath her, who had swum the length.

  “But then, I also remember the visions of my childhood. They began a week after the death of my friend, dreams of such vitality and strength that were impossible to ignore. We were called like the prophets of the old in our dreams, given tasks to attend, bent to obedience. Once we had accepted that, we joined each other in travel to the Eakar Mountains in search of our God. There, they found a forgotten valley that lay between the broken crown of a range. In it, the remains of empty villages and white bones were threaded by poisonous rivers and toxic soil.

  “Of the twenty who made the journey only half reached the middle of the valley. Three died while crossing the ocean, in fights, in sickness, but the greatest toll were the seven who died in the valley. Three men and four women fell to the toxicity there as they made their way to the center, their skin drying and their breath fading until they crumbled into dust. My mother was one of these women and, even though I mourned her passing for years, I eventually came to understand that she perished because she did not have the faith to continue. She had followed my father and me in our journey, having had the same vision as us, but I believe now that the longer it took—and I had aged two years since we left Leera—the more the vision diluted, turned watery for her. She had lost her faith by the time we stepped into the valley and wasted away, while the faithful among us remained strong.

  “If she had not lost her faith, my mother would have been witness to the sight of her vision, to the spherical husk of soil that floated in the middle of the valley. I can still remember how it felt as we approached it. It was a power unlike anything I had felt before, yet it was not complete. What was in the soil was both perfect and flawed and as we stood before that, we were humbled.

  “We broke through the soil slowly, each crack revealing a warmth, a soft inside of roots that encircled the arms, legs and body of a girl. Gazing upon her, we saw only divinity, though she was not yet awake. My father, who carried her from the earthen womb, said she at first weighed nothing—but as we returned to Leera that changed. She became a solid weight, too heavy for arms at first, then for a single donkey to carry. It was a team of bulls who pulled her into our country after four years of travel, still asleep. My father said she gathered the weight of the world about her as we went.”

  Ahead was the broken opening of the Temple of Ger. To Bueralan’s gaze, the shadows within were a dark stain that could not be removed.

  “He never did see her awake. My father died at the age of sixty-seven, the proud caretaker of the church he had placed his God within. With the aid of the King Anann, he designed and built the huge structure upon his return, ensuring that a chamber was built deep into the ground beneath it, and it was there that he laid her sleeping body. He claimed that she needed to be near to the soil, to be nurtured by the earth itself. He harbored a belief that Linae had infused the very ground with her power, but it was twenty-three years after his death before we could ask such a question, before we could hear her agree, in part. There, she taught us about how the gods saw time, how even as they died they were alive, how with her creation, an infinite number of possibilities had collapsed and that they struggled with that, still. She could herself, however, only see one future, could experience time in only one fashion.”

  “And then she told you that you would have to change that.” Before Bueralan, Estalia drifted through the opening, leaving him with his cold toes to navigate the stone and broken glass along the edge of the temple. “How long before she said you would have to go to war?”

  “War is a certainty in life.”

  “Death and taxes are a certainty. War is something we create, we strive for.”

  “So are taxes,” she replied dryly. “But to answer your question, Captain, we knew from the start.”

  After a small jab from behind, the saboteur eased himself through the broken frame and to the cold, slippery floor. “Why is that?”

  “She is an incomplete god.” Mother Estalia followed the tracks left by the priests, light blooming in her every footstep, illuminating faded murals, creeping mold, broken pews and rusted, broken armor. Soon, a stairwell appeared before her. “The war ensured that, Captain. As the gods died, their bodies broke. Their power spilled from them, and spills still. It is responsible for every cursed person you have ever seen, from those who function to those who do not. It is a power seeking its owner, its rightful place—a power that our god is here to reclaim, first from the bodies of her parents.”

  “Why not the cursed first? You would even find support in this part of the world.”

  “We tried.” The stairwell was long and slippery, but Mother Estalia did not take the rail. “We found one of the youngest in Mireea but it was beyond us. It was chance, truly, nothing more. The Quor’lo had been sent to find the temples of Ger, but when that girl’s power awoke, we sent it after her. We thought to kill her and bring the body to our god. The power was hers by right, after all, but we learned quickly that a single cursed is a difficult enemy for us, and that to find one isolated is impossible.”

  6.

  When Steel moved to reinforce the Sixth Division of the Mireean Guard, Ayae was with them.

  She had not been assigned a place on the Spine, had not been given a place to stand in the defense and, as the horn’s call had faded into the night’s cooling air, she was without direction. She wanted to go into the hospital: inside was both Zaifyr and Illaan, and despite all that had happened with the latter, she felt an unexpected grief opening inside her, made by the memories of the good times and of their loss. Yet she could not go into the hospital. As the horn faded, Reila ordered the guards to erect a makeshift tent for the injured and then gave one final order—an order for no one else to follow—before she walked through the hospital doors.

  Meina’s hand fell on her shoulder, breaking her thoughts as the dark-haired mercenary inclined her head to the right. The horn let its deep bellow out again and Ayae nodded. Without words, she accepted the invitation, following Meina and her uncles to Steel’s new camp.

  After Lady Wagan had praised their escape, their bravery, their survival, Heast had ordered the mercenary unit into a reinforcement position, settling them on the western side of Mireea. For the surviving members of Steel, it had felt like a judgment on the battle they had fought, the losses they had taken and the real measure of their success. They had gone from a large and spacious compound with bunks, cooking fires and storage sheds for arms, to weathered tents stretched across a narrow lane, their weapons kept within. Forced to sleep on bedrolls over hard stone with no fires, the men and women of Steel felt as if they had been judged to have failed, to have not met the challeng
e given to them.

  “Survival,” Queila Meina explained later, “is not victory.”

  Having been part of that survival herself, Ayae felt the verdict unnecessary and harsh, but she remained silent.

  In part she did so because she acknowledged that the criticism had little to do with Heast—who she did not believe had a similar complaint—and more with how Steel viewed themselves after the battle.

  Slowly, Ayae began to distinguish the sounds of fighting on the wall before her. Swords and axes rang out against steel, against flesh, against stone, against wood. She heard orders shouted. She heard screams. She heard sobbing as well. Among the bodies she could see fire that had sprung up from spilled oil, but so far it lined the edges of the wall, hindering those climbing more than those defending. As she drew closer, she could also see the dead and the injured, and with each step her muscles knitted tight together, threatening to render her motionless in their tension.

  Then Steel was on the wall.

  They did not charge, yell or announce their arrival. They fanned out and moved beside the Mireean Guards, reinforcing their position to help to push back the Leeran soldiers who had climbed to the top of the wall. Ayae found herself lunging forward, her short swords thrusting at the face of a young man, a man whose face she did not remember, not even after he had fallen. That would only come later, in her dreams: she would remember the smoothness of his white skin, the brown of his eyes, the shaven head, and she would dream of his name, a name she would make up. She would awake after her time on the Spine, surprised at the detail she did remember, at the clarity of it, and would wonder if it was a trick of her subconscious. But at the time, he fell, her blade hacking up through his jaw, and after she, drawing her breath, feeling the rapid beat of her pulse, tried to spy the catapults from her position.

  “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.