The Godless

by Ben Peek

  Behind the Keeper Ayae climbed to her feet, the flame from her swords gone.

  “There is a child, Fo. A true child of the gods,” Zaifyr said. “It was here, but you didn’t feel it. You felt only Ger’s death and exalted in that. You did not see what he freed himself from. But you will. You will see things power can do. You will see what the war has done to us.

  “I will show you.”

  Aelyn would not forgive Zaifyr for what he had done.

  She would call a trial in Yeflam, to hear and judge, but in the moment his will flushed through the dead in Mireea, he knew that it would be a farce. His death would be decided for him, and he accepted that. It was necessary to show them what was at stake: to show them that a god, a true god, did exist and what it had done to generations of souls, to over ten thousand years’ worth of dead. Dead that he alone had seen and heard, a horror that he had thought his own, a weight he must carry forever.

  He had been wrong. It was not his punishment. He ran his power though the cobbled streets of Mireea, flushed it through the haunts that rose from beneath the rough, wooden gates dividing the city; to the generations who had lived in brick houses and hotels; to those who stood on the Spine of Ger beside soldiers; and to those who lived in the fallen cities beneath. With his power, Zaifyr made clear the horror that he had lived with for thousands and thousands of years: that the souls of the dead did not move on, that they were trapped, their personalities dwindling into a desire for warmth and food.

  For a moment, for just one, single moment as his consciousness was connected to so many, Zaifyr was tempted by the dead.

  He thought of giving them warmth and sating their hunger, of doing as he had done in Asila. But, it was just for a moment, for when his eyes opened he saw Ayae. On her face was a look of horror, born by the dawning realization of the tragedy unfolding around her. He had seen it earlier, when she learned what he had done in Asila and had stepped away from him. It struck him at his very core, a recognition of what he had felt for so long, the horror he had tried to become immune to in the crooked tower. And as the needs of the dead assailed him, he retained his control. He closed his eyes to the vision of Ayae, but his sight did not leave her and he kept his will strong, directing the dead to the one crime he had known he was going to commit, the one act that was intended to change everything. With it, he would ensure that his brothers and sisters would no longer sit idle.

  Fo screamed first, a cry for Bau as his scarred flesh was torn from his body, his bones revealed to be black and brittle. But his cry went unanswered as Bau, unable to stand, found his flesh stripped, cold hands and mouths plunging into him, opening his stomach even as he thought to heal the wounds. Wounds that healed over the haunts, over the forms that had a sudden tangibility, though not of a kind to be trapped in the knitting wounds. And as more of the dead came to him, more and more of his power was tested until it gave way. His body, all its flesh and blood torn apart in a frenzy, was consumed, just as Fo’s disease-ridden body was.

  Once they were done, Zaifyr left his power in the dead—not as haunts that only he could see, but as ghosts, for all.

  EPILOGUE

  You and I are the godless. You and I live in a world where there is no divine judgment. You and I decide what is right, what is wrong. You and I decide our rules, our yokes, our morals and our authorities. You and I celebrate. You and I punish.

  —Qian, the Godless

  1.

  He entered the ruins of Ranan, the capital of Leera, as the afternoon’s sun sank over the horizon.

  Bueralan had ridden hard. He had pushed both horses to the limits of their endurance, just as he had done to himself. As a consequence all three entered the city exhausted. It was a mistake, he knew, for he would be unable to help Dark if they required it. But a certain fatalism had overcome him in the final days of his journey, one of which he was desperate to rid himself.

  In the week since he’d left the Spine, Bueralan had not seen a single person alive. The humid, sweating towns he passed through were all the same: populated by swamp crows, stripped of material for siege engines and war and surrounded by empty fields. Outside the towns, marsh and bogs and unplowed acres of shallow, mean farmland lay like old wounds. The dotted remains of scarecrows and field hand equipment, both in equal states of decay and rust, were his companions until he discovered the cattle. The bulls had gone wild and now made their homes in gullies and ravines, watching him intently as he rode past, drawing ever closer to the city.

  He had been to Ranan a decade ago and was surprised, not just by the emptiness of the roads and silence of the buildings, but by the disrepair that he found it in now. Then, the city had been defined by its use of wood for building, by the natural look that allowed a visitor to believe that it had been part of the land for thousands of years, that its vintage appeal came from generations of vines that wrapped around the structures. That sensibility had never extended to any of the towns around Ranan, but it did not change the fact that the first experience a person had when he or she stepped into the city was to gaze upon a green-tinged, sprawling city; one that felt as if it had been drawn from the swamps so prevalent in Leera, a lost artifact restored.

  His return to Ranan, however, saw him to return to ruins. Beyond the stone archway, none of the wooden houses remained whole: there were but the markers for blocks, the opening of cellars and the litter of furniture and clothing. He was tempted to correct himself: in the first few blocks it was not ruins that he saw, but rather emptiness; Ranan had been stripped to its base by the Faithful as they prepared for war, leaving nothing behind. But slowly, as he and his tired horses made their way along the dirt road, half-formed buildings did emerge. Broken wooden frames stood open to the sky, while shattered window frames lay between choking vines and moss and trees that had been felled. Clothing and toys and cutlery lay scattered around, a story between each.

  Soon after, he discovered stone blocks in orderly lines across the road, as if they had been dragged from a quarry and set, ready to be used in building. It was impossible, of course: there was no quarry in sight, and the blocks were as tall as he was. They easily weighed such an amount that they could not be settled upon each other without teams of animals and people, all of which were clearly not in sight.

  Then he saw the man.

  He was a stout figure, naked from the waist up. His pale skin was deeply tanned and his hair, short and brown, was as unremarkable as the rest of his face. But the man had strapped ropes across his thick chest, ropes that connected to the huge stone block that he pulled across the ground. The effort strained him, but not unduly. He himself was clearly not unremarkable.

  When his saw Bueralan, he let the ropes fall and approached him. “Another for the cathedral?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “You will find it soon enough on this road. You are expected, I believe.”

  “The others that came, do you remember them?”

  He shrugged. “Men, women. I have my task, they have theirs.”

  “And yours?”

  “To rebuild the city.”

  “Did you…” Bueralan hesitated. “Did you speak with the people who came before me?”

  “They did not want to be spoken with.” He returned to the huge block. “But they were expected, just as you are.”

  The earlier fatalism returned to him strongly. They were … No, he refused to say it. There was still time. He was not too late. He was not.

  Following the road, Bueralan picked his way through the ruins of Ranan, to the cathedral, the only complete building in the entire city.

  2.

  The Floating Cities of Yeflam shimmered in the distance, an elegant construction on the edge of the Leviathan’s Blood, a beacon that promised rest, security and heartbreak.

  Ayae knew the last to be true, though it was entirely possible that she was the only one of the men and women on the road who did. Four days behind them, Mireea remained on the back of Ger’s Spine, its cobbled streets
alive with ghosts—both the dead who were known and those who were not.

  It had been a horrific event for all, her included. The Mireeans did not share a single belief about the afterlife; and what belief they did share was agnostic, a fatalism borne out of the fact that they all knew and accepted that death was part of life. For some, death was the end and you no longer existed after you died; others thought that you moved on, to a better world, a new world, that your soul endured; while others still, believing in the same endurance, said that you returned. But the sight of the dead, of men and women and children who were friends and family, had shown to all that they had all been wrong, that something much, much worse happened to you when you died.

  Ayae had experienced it just as everyone else had. As the flesh of Fo and Bau was stripped beneath invisible hands, the dead began to appear around her and the first she had seen was Queila Meina.

  The mercenary captain was not as she had been in death, and for that Ayae was thankful. But there was a terrible sadness in her spirit, and her mouth moved wordlessly to convey words, all of which failed to emerge. It was the same with all the ghosts that had appeared; despite their sudden density none could speak or be felt. They moved to do both, but the result was only that a sense of futility was emphasized, and the sense that they—that all the dead—were trapped, grew.

  By the evening, all the living in Mireea had fled, beginning a march down the mountain, as the first of the earthquakes began.

  The Mountains of Ger had begun to move.

  To those around her—who gave her a wide berth—the answer for the sudden quakes was a mystery. But the result was that, in combination with the city of ghosts, a wedge was driven between them and the Leeran Army. As the morning’s sun rose there was no sign of the opposing force, and according to the whispers among those on the road they were in prayer, even as the ground around them shuddered.

  As for herself, Ayae had been mostly silent as they made their way down the great road to Yeflam. Oh, she had spoken: she was invited to the meetings Lady Wagan held, and said her piece there as she saw fit, but her topics were limited to Zaifyr, the Keepers and what she had witnessed.

  She had spoken to Bael and Maalen as well. Meina’s two uncles had taken the news of her death stoically, as if they had expected nothing less.

  When she had pointed this out quietly, Bael turned to reply.

  “This is a business of mortality,” he said. “War is paid for in blood and tears, no matter what side you are on. If you do not expect that, the grief will only be harder.”

  “What will you do now?”

  “Finish this business, see you to Yeflam.” Behind, the line of refugees had begun to stretch out, and a pair of Mireean Guards rode past, to bring it up. “After, we will disband. There is no Steel without Queila Meina.”

  “She has a child,” Maalen said. “We will tell her.”

  She could not imagine the conversation, but both appeared to be burdened under the weight of the words they would need to speak as they left her.

  Her silence was not dissimilar. As Yeflam drew closer, as the smell of blood and salt—the smell of the black ocean—reached her, Ayae felt her ability to form words dry up so much so that she attended meetings mutely, while within her mind her words tumbled effortlessly and disorganized. When she entered the city, she knew she would have to speak. First to Aelyn Meah, to the leader of the Keepers, and then to those around her; and then at the trial, for there would surely be a trial, a huge and public one where Zaifyr would stand at the front in chains, a villain, a man who deserved to die.

  He had told her that, in the Spine’s Keep.

  “Leave!” She stood apart from him, confused, horrified, driven away by what she had just seen, drawn by the sad knowledge in his eyes. “We can go down the other side, through the Leerans, to— to—”

  “To nowhere.” His empty hands showed themselves to her, an offer she could take. “Yeflam is the only place to go.”

  “Even if it is in chains?”

  “I must look harmless.”

  She looked around her, looked at the ghosts that pulled themselves from the ground and drifted through walls. “You could not ever be, Zaifyr.”

  His smile was sad. “War is coming to us, Ayae.”

  “You don’t have to be part of it.”

  Behind her the tower cracked and began to crumble, the flames destroying its support.

  “I do. We do. We all must, for it is a war between us and a god,” he said. “Look around us. You see the dead. I have lived with this for a life longer than nearly all others. I thought it my own fault for the longest time that they suffered, a failing of my own to help them, but it is not true. They are held here by a god who needs power, by a being who has not enough to do what she wants, and so draws on the souls of the dead just as a witch and a warlock do. Imagine that. A being of such power that she can keep the dead here, trapped, but even that power is not enough. I have been witness to that for thousands of years and I will be witness no more. I will go to war, and the men and women of Yeflam will know that I do so, with or without their consent.”

  She glanced behind her at the Spine of Ger in the distance. It ran like a thick, stone vertebrae along the mountain, broken only where Mireea was and the tallest parts of the Spine’s Keep were visible. She could no longer see smoke, the remains of the fire that had died the evening they left the city, a sudden rain quenching it. But what would it matter if it had? Her home was defined by the ghosts in it, by the dead that had slowly dissipated along the road.

  Except that they had not, and no one in the train to Yeflam believed that to be so. The dead were with them, invisible, silent, unseen to all but the man who had asked Heast to put chains on him.

  Zaifyr had said to her once that she would be sad on the day that she learned the true power of her peers. He had not been wrong. It had cost her deeply, in terms of friendship and of her home. But more than that, it terrified her, not just because of him, but also for herself and what she was capable of, what her potential was. She had already begun to dream of her fall from the tower, her subconscious mind reinforcing what she knew: that she had survived not because of fire, but because of wind and earth, an acknowledgment that only deepened her connection to the men and women who could create atrocities.

  It seemed to her that there was now no longer any respite from that. Not even, she admitted, in death.

  3.

  A quarry lay near to the cathedral: a huge, rectangular pit twisting down in a pair of narrow ledges that a single man, the Builder, could follow. Without the huge man there, all that lay in the lonely pit was a single, dented shovel.

  Further up, Bueralan saw the cathedral sitting in front of the marshland of Leera. In the afternoon’s final, melting orange-red light, the building looked as if it had emerged from fire and destruction. The twisted limbs of trees behind it were like giant fallen bodies, the hands held up in supplication, in forgiveness to the god who lived inside the tall, imposing building they had fallen behind. If such a god had paid attention, the saboteur did not know: but the cathedral was big enough, sprawling enough and tall enough that it spoke of an institution of belief, of an institution of care and neglect to the people around it, and not a single individual, though he knew it was a single individual who resided inside, and no more.

  No more, unless …

  There were no horses outside, nothing to suggest the passing of Dark. He would have taken comfort in that if he could not turn and look over the ruined city behind him and know that there was simply nowhere else for them to be.

  The cathedral door opened easily.

  Inside, the light from thousands of half-melted candles greeted him, a faint, still air of smoke falling like a curtain, and limiting his vision.

  Bueralan stepped inside, his hands dropping to the hilt of his swords, the blades the old man had given him. The candles lined the walls and the edges of the alcove, the smoke thick from the sheer number of them, but it was not u
ntil he stepped into the next room that he fully appreciated what the half-melted white stumps obscured. Through their smoke, he could barely make out the thick, new pews and the windows against the wall. Likewise, he struggled to know the full size of the impossibly huge, blank roof that the smoke swirled around—just as it obscured the length of the cathedral, the path he slowly followed. All that he could make out clearly was the shadows of flames along the ceiling and walls, dark fingers that beckoned him to come further, to walk deeper.

  It was not long until he came across disturbed candles and the fatalism that he had felt earlier was realized.

  Kae sat on one of the long pews, snuffed candles around him. With his eyes closed and his back straight, it looked as if the swordsman had stopped to pray, had found peace. Until Bueralan noticed the first of his broken swords at his feet. The second lay next to it, also broken. What both had broken against was unclear. What was worse, however, was the darkness around his stomach, and the realization that it was not a failure of the candles to complete him, but of flesh.

  Bueralan continued down the aisle, pressing through the smoke, the taste of the unreal in it growing, suggesting more and more unworldly a presence.

  Ahead, the pews became a jumbled collection, strewn across the floor with the candles.

  There, he found Ruk and Liaya close to each other. The first’s legs had been stripped to bone, as if acid, or worse, had consumed the flesh, while the latter had died behind him, her hands on his back, her intent to help him clear, the contents of her pack strewn across the floor, a dark pool of blood and chemicals that reinforced the act. On her, however, the marks of death were not cannibalistic, but it was clear that what had struck her had done so from above, coming down through her face, her throat, her chest. Ruk’s sword lay just beyond him, in the darkness, torn from his grasp but with no blood, nothing to suggest, as with Kae, that he had wounded anything.