The God Eaters

by Jesse Hajicek

He heard a whimper: Ash, hurt -- dying hurt, from the sound of it. Kieran was charging for the source of that whimper before he even saw where he was going, tearing out dead rosebushes by the roots to get at the pale shape huddled under the corner of the porch. He didn't feel the thorns lacerating his hands. He wrapped those bleeding hands around Ash's bowed head and raised it to look into his eyes. Blank eyes, like blue paper; he'd seen those before.

  "Look at me! Where'd they get you, Ashes? Show me!"

  Ash replied by fainting.

  Only then did Kieran see that there wasn't a mark on him.

  The only blood was smeared on his face from Kieran's hands. His light-colored clothing would have showed any injury, and though Kieran searched for something hidden, a graze across his back or on his inner thigh, felt his boots for holes and checked through his hair for bumps or soft spots on his skull, there was nothing. Terror peaked, tightening Kieran's chest, and then all at once let go. Panic wasn't helping. There was something wrong; Kieran knew the difference between some girly swoon and a real loss of consciousness, and this was the latter. He hauled Ash out into the yard and checked him over again.

  Ash was pale, his pulse slow and hard, as if his heart were laboring. His skin felt clammy. His white shirt was half translucent from sweat, and more still poured from his skin, chill and reeking of fear. Something had happened to him, but damned if Kieran knew what it was. He wished there was someone left to kill.

  Well, there will be, if I hang around here any longer. The cops'll take their time, they don't care what happens on this end of town, but Kinter's not going to give up. Dumbshit doesn't know when he's beat. It was hard to leave Ash lying there, but dragging him inside didn't make sense, not when Kieran would just have to drag him out again a minute later. He dashed in, jumping the bodies again, to gather his spent magazines.

  Shou-Shou was coming down the stairs as he finished. "You're getting sloppy, hon," she said.

  "Was a time you wouldn't have let them get a single shot off."

  "I oughta charge you full price for every one of these assholes," he growled. "Would, too, if I thought you had the money." He bent over the meat that used to be an enemy, digging through its pockets. Cash; ammunition; running out of time.

  "You're not good enough anymore to charge what you used to. But I guess you'll get plenty of practice in the next few days, won't you?"

  "Do it yourself, Shou-Shou." He stuffed the best of the dead men's guns into the deep pockets of his new coat and stood up. "I'm out of this game. I'm out of this town."

  She didn't look as if she believed him. "Kai, honey --"

  "I told you not to fucking call me that. You are not my mother, Shou-Shou. You're just a crook like the rest of these guys, and I'm done. Thanks for everything." Turning away, he gave a wave that was more dismissal than farewell. He heard her sigh annoyance as he left. She would go on expecting him to come back as long as she thought he might be alive. He'd always come back before. But this time she was wrong. This fight had reminded him how easy killing was, how much he hated how easy it was, like putting your hand through a rotten board. These men had barely been able to fight him, and it made him sick how soft they were. How thoroughly he'd destroyed them. The whole shootout had lasted fifteen seconds, tops.

  Still strong with his anger, he lifted Ash easily, settling the northerner over his shoulder. He left the brothel without looking back.

  The street was deserted now; people had fled inside the worker barracks at the sound of gunfire.

  Faces peeked through windows, around the edges of open doors, and there was a current of muttering coming out of the gray clapboard shacks, the occasional child's squalling quickly hushed. Here and there, evidence of a task interrupted sat out on a doorstep; baskets of tobacco leaves, bags of calico squares. The wives and children of factory workers made a few extra moons a day doing piecework, rolling cigarettes or sewing patchwork, and they were waiting to see whether it was safe to return to their tasks. They'd talk about him to anyone who would listen. They'd exaggerate, they'd change things, but he would still be recognized. He had to get out of town.

  But he couldn't carry Ash much farther. Now that he was no longer in a huff, he was starting to feel the white boy's weight. Checking up and down the street, he ran through a mental list of hiding places. It was a long list. It seemed, when he thought about it, that he'd spent ninety percent of his life hiding from something or other. Not all of those places would still be there, though, and some that had been ideal for a solitary child made no sense for two grown men.

  Two boys the size of grown men, Kieran thought with a sudden pang of self-pity. I wish Shou-Shou hadn't called me by that name. It's weakened me, going home. I should probably never go home again.

  Turning down a narrow alley between sets of row houses, Kieran began to take random turnings among the maze of shacks and dumps and wire-fenced machine yards that occupied the backside of the factory row. Police trying to find him by asking witnesses would be scattered and slowed by the complexity of the route, most of which was unobserved. If they had Watchmen with them, though, the deserted alleys would show his trail to their magical senses as if it were written in ink on white paper. He knew three ways to shake off a Watch tracker: running water, railroad tracks, or heavy traffic. None of them were absolutely certain. The riverbank was probably his best bet for now. He'd have to get out of town pretty quick though.

  Breathing hard now, he hitched Ash's limp form higher on his shoulder as he went. It was something like three quarters of a mile from Shou-Shou's to the river. He came out just upstream of a coal-oil plant -- upstream and downwind. The eye-watering chemical reek should have awakened Ash, if anything could have, but the redhead just went on hanging useless over Kieran's shoulder. Kieran even dropped him once, skidding down a weed-choked bank, but Ash only flopped like a doll. Kieran swore, sighed, rolled his shoulders to ease the ache, and scooped him up again.

  He emerged onto the riverbank beside a rocky backwater, divided from the main stream by a whitehead, a spit covered with wild cotton plants. The shore here was flat, pebbled, pocked with muddy sinks -- and occupied by bums. He hadn't smelled their cookfire, masked as it was by the oil plant's stink. There were four vagrants staring at him as he trudged toward the flat ground.

  One held a half-tame coyote by a leash made of braided twine. They were all Iavaian, or else he supposed they would have run when they got a look at him. Law-abiding natives might not have been doing well under the Commonwealth, but it was the whites who didn't last long down on the riverbank. These folks weren't scared of him, though maybe they should have been.

  One of the bums, the biggest one, stood up as Kieran arrived. "This is our spot," he said in Iavaian. From among the grayish layers of his many coats, he produced a kitchen knife sharpened to a sliver.

  Kieran ignored him. He knelt to lay Ash gently on the pebbled strand, with the sheepskin coat rolled up for a pillow. Still pale and clammy, still out cold.

  "Did you hear me, stranger?"

  "Yeah." Kieran glanced up, judging whether the man would be stupid enough to attack. The bum was a little pudgy, probably stayed that way by extorting food from the others. Casting an eye over the rest, Kieran decided that one of the remaining two adults might also be considering starting something. The other adult was clearly too bombed to care. And the little one, an adolescent of unguessable gender, was grinning a gaptoothed, lackwit grin. Shifting his attention back to the standing one, Kieran took his gun out from the back of his waistband and stuck it in the front. "Pretend I'm a bear," he said. "Ignore me, and I won't have to kill you."

  Kitchen-knife stared a moment longer, then made his blade disappear and sat back down. None of them sat with their back to Kieran, of course, and they all watched him in their ways, but that didn't matter.

  Slapping Ash's cheeks didn't do anything. Kieran hadn't expected it to, but it made him feel a little better. "Wake up, you chickenshit. I can't believe you made me carry you all th
is way." He checked again for injuries, reassured himself that Ash's heart was still beating, slapped him again for good measure. Supposed there'd be a better chance of that working if he could bring himself to slap hard enough to sting. Took off his headscarf and soaked it in the river to bathe the pale boy's clammy face.

  While he was doing this, the smallest of the bums blurted out something incomprehensible. The middle grownup reached across the fire to smack the creature upside the head, but it just burbled and started in again.

  "I know you," the child said brightly. "You're Death."

  Kieran replied, just to pass the time, "That doesn't scare you?"

  "Not anymore." The child giggled.

  The big bum explained, with the back of his hand, what had happened to the rest of the kid's teeth. Knocked over backwards, the creature started bawling, which started the tame coyote yapping in excitement.

  Ash twitched and whimpered.

  Kieran put a hand to the redhead's chest and found his heart racing. He was still unconscious, but the occurrence of violence near him had gotten a reaction anyway. Of course -- he was an empath. What if his state was the result of the deaths of Kinter's men? It would make a kind of sense. Which meant that if he was going to come out of it, he wasn't going to do it while there was any hostility near him. It was a little like the thing Kieran did sometimes, that vacating of himself, except that Kieran walked and talked and killed while he was blacked out, and Ash just sweated and whimpered.

  The little bum was babbling while he bawled, and though Kieran couldn't understand much of it, what he did get sounded like bits of old myth-poems. How the kid had come across enough of the stuff to quote, when any mention of the native gods was punishable by death, was a mystery Kieran didn't feel like delving into just now. He said, "You folks need to settle down. You're bothering my friend here."

  "Yeah, shut up," said the big guy, raising his hand again.

  "Stop!" Kieran ordered. "No hitting."

  "You telling me how to raise my own kid, mister?"

  "I don't give a shit what you do, but don't do it here. Let the kid talk. Just settle down. If you can't relax, leave."

  The kitchen knife came out again. "I don't like your attitude, boy. You think you're some kinda badass cuz you got a gun, I'm sposedta be scared a you? We ain't scared a you. We're Tama, boy, we ain't scared a nothing, specially not some clean-hand whitey-loving punk gangster."

  Kieran stared for a moment, then laughed. "You're Tama?"

  "That funny?" the man growled.

  "Yeah. Sick funny. What clan?"

  "Konoku." He named the largest of the Tama clans, the one that was usually translated as Standtall, though the word actually meant lodgepole pine. In the war, the Konoku had led a few other clans, like the Sweetcloud and the Speakingwater, deep into the mountains to hide, believing that the gods would send disasters to punish the foreigners who violated the holy land.

  Which the gods had indeed sent -- in the form of the Suneater clan. Kieran gave another chilly laugh. "Your idiot knows who I am. Stand down, buddy."

  A growl from the knife man was swallowed in the babbling of the child, who made a sudden emergence into clear-voiced song, among his tears and snot. "He is coming down from the high places today, the death you asked for, the one you called to, he is coming down. His body is a black cloud, his hair is a black cloud, his eyes are poisonous to look upon, he is coming down --"

  Knife man made half a move to shut the kid up, but stopped at the click of Kieran's pistol cocking. "Lemme listen," Kieran muttered. He'd heard fragments of this before, enough to recognize it as a battle song from the war. Even whistling the tune of it would get a man killed these days, but there were always those who would sing anyway when they thought they were about to die. Kieran had never let anyone finish. Now he was curious.

  The child went on singing, oblivious. "We are in the mood to kill today, our rifles are hungry, our swords are hungry, today there will be blood. His madness fills us like green wine, he is black and green, he is full of death power, he is full of storm power! Above us in the wind, Ka'an! In the smoke of our guns, Ka'an! Dark angry god, it is your time now!" The battle hymn trailed off into giggles.

  The three adults were studying Kieran now, with odd expressions. The big one still seemed a little angry. The drunkard, or opium-eater or whatever he was, simply gazed, his look almost adoring. It was the middle adult who spoke up. "These days, that wouldn't surprise me at all."

  "What wouldn't, Vei?" the big man said warily.

  "If the gods came back. And Ka'an came first."

  Big man clenched a fist. "Shut up. Somebody'll hear."

  "Well, look at him." The one called Vei stood up, slapping sand from his tattered trousers. He stepped across the fire toward Kieran, who moved the gun to cover him but didn't bother standing. "Looks just like I figured the Prince of Pain would look. What do you say, son? You got a god in you?"

  Kieran shrugged, amused by this turn in the conversation. "Not that I know of. But if I did, I guess it would be that one, wouldn't it? Least, my mom always said Tama'ankan was his special favorite." Kieran raised an eyebrow. "You look real impressed by that. What, are all of you Tama'konoku? Still waiting for the world to end?"

  "It will," the drunk chimed in cheerfully. "You gonna make it happen. Kid says so. Kid's a harai."

  Kieran nodded. That would explain the babbling, and the fact that it was impossible to guess the kid's sex, if it was a real harai. A holy androgyne, one who lived on the borders. Of gender, sanity, life and death. Only among the vagrants and squatters of Burn River's banks could such a creature still exist. Probably had some congenital defect from its mother drinking river water, but that didn't make it any less creepy. Though he doubted its prophesies really had anything to do with him, he still felt a little uneasy. He lifted Ash's head into his lap and began dragging his fingers through the sweat-damp curls. "So," he said. "What are you doing with this harai of yours? Besides smacking him around whenever he starts to prophesy."

  Big man cringed at the rebuke. "Kid thinks everybody's a god. Sees 'em everywhere."

  Vei put in, "You're the best bet so far, though. Only I can't figure why you're dragging around a sharn." At least, that was what the word sounded like.

  "A what?"

  "A sharn. It's something the kid talks about. The kid likes to talk about foreigners when he ain't seeing gods. He says in Yelorre they got these ghosts, kinda like our bear-people only they come outta the water instead of caves. They call 'em sharn. And that --" he pointed at Ash -- "is just what they look like. Right, kid?"

  On cue, the harai chirped out, in Eskaran, off key, "O daughters of the Nerrin, don't go walking by the sea, when the wind is high and the moon is high and the land too dark to see, for the siorin boys will come for you and pull you to the deep, to dwell beneath the greeny waves in Medur's briny keep! O their skin is as white as the foam on the sand, but don't go following down the strand, o their hair is bright as the reddest gold, and they'll say if you go that you'll never grow old, but all they'll do is drown you deep, and bury your bones at Medur's keep!"

  That song went on for a while, but it was drowned in the chugging of a barge passing on the river. That reminded Kieran that he had to get moving pretty soon, whether Ash woke up or not.

  It would be easier if Ash woke, though. The theory that it was empathy that had knocked him out was the best one so far, so he'd operate on the expectation that Ash would come around when things felt safe. He hitched the lolling body higher, so that Ash's head rolled on his shoulder, and wrapped the pale boy tightly in his arms. "Come on out, Ashes," he whispered, knowing that the barge's engine covered it. "I've got you. You're safe now. I'll keep you safe. I won't let anyone hurt you."

  After the chugging engine had faded away upriver, the child's song rambled to a close.

  Something about falling for that Medur character and being turned into one of those sharn things.

  It wasn't clear whether Me
dur was supposed to be a goddess or a monster or what, but the water ghost things were the souls of handsome men she'd taken with her into the sea. It was kind of funny that the bum thought Ash looked like one of those. Sure, he was pale and red-haired, but the song didn't say anything about being covered with freckles, and his hair was more rust-colored than 'bright as reddest gold' -- and as for handsome, well, most people wouldn't call Ash good-looking.

  Sure, which is why you've got a hard-on from cuddling him like this, right? You're a sick critter, Kai. It's easier for you to kill six men in fifteen seconds than fuck a boy who's gagging for it.

  Like it's going to hurt any less to watch him leave or die if you stay frustrated.

  Not that there was any reason to expect that Ash would still want him, after he went back in the house and left the kid as a hostage. An empath would know that Kieran hadn't been the least bit torn up about it. He didn't think Ash would understand how he'd gone away and left the reptile in charge.

  "Whatcha doing?" The bum named Vei talked into the silence that had fallen after the end of the harai's song. "Looks like you might be a bit harai yourself."