God Stalk

by P. C. Hodgell

  Jame backed up rapidly. She neither knew what would happen if one of those cracks opened under her feet nor particularly wanted to find out. Turning, she fled westward.

  The quick footsteps followed her, and after them came the crack of cloven stone.

  She took refuge in a doorway. There were the eyes staring at her from across the street, and the lintel over her head split in two. She fled again. The labyrinth should have been her ally, but turn and twist as she would, she could not lose her pursuer.

  Then, suddenly, the eyes were ahead of her.

  Jame darted down a side street and skidded to a stop. Before her, in the shadow of an ornate gateway, lay a broad, inky pool of water that stretched from wall to wall. She was about to splash across it when something huge surfaced with an oily gurgle. For a second, moonlight glistened on a broad, leathery back, and then it was gone again.

  From behind came the sound of splitting rock. It had almost overtaken her. Swallowing hard, Jame stepped back and waited. A moment later, as the water again broke open, she sprang forward, one foot coming down on the sleek back, the other on the far shore. The fissures, however, plunged straight into the pool. For a heartbeat nothing happened, and then the waters went mad. Spray lashed the walls, soaked Jame as she shrank back into the archway. For an instant, she thought she saw a huge, blind head rearing up, gape-jawed against the moon, and then it was gone. The water gurgled down into the cracks. The pool, it seemed, had been all of an inch deep.

  Across the wet cobbles, Jame once again met the yellow stare. For a moment their eyes locked, then the thing turned and rapidly pattered away. It ran not on paws but on small fat hands like an infant's, and no shadow kept pace with it on the moon-washed pavement.

  When it was out of sight, Jame turned to regard the gateway. It was set in a high wall, which extended a considerable distance in both directions and appeared to set off an entire district from the rest of the city. Beyond the gate, the shadows cast by overhanging buildings lay black and unbroken across the way until far ahead faint lights appeared suspended in the gloom. The air that breathed in Jame's face was heavy with incense. She hesitated, then drawn by those distant lights went warily forward into the shadows.

  It was not as dark inside as she had expected. Here the buildings fit together like a gigantic puzzle-box, interlocking in the oddest ways and yet each standing by itself with no shared walls. Moonlight filtered down from above. This, in addition to her excellent night vision—the racial legacy of far dimmer worlds than Rathillien—brought Jame forward until she came to a street where light spheres hovered at intervals by the walls.

  She had had to force herself to get this far. Out in the city, her sixth sense had merely tingled with the presence of those odd beings that had stalked her. Here, she flinched under waves of raw force that gained strength with each step that she took into the district. All around her, a hundred, a thousand hearts of power were beating feverishly in the night. Anger, defiance, and fear—gigantic, inhuman— crashed down on her rapidly weakening defenses. The ground and air seemed to shake. I'm a mouse caught in an earthquake, she thought in sudden panic, shying back against a wall. It vibrated under her hand. Those beings whose home this was had no thoughts to spare an uninvited guest. They could crush her flat and never know that they had killed. She must get out.

  Jame fled back the way she had come, blindly, headlong. Just when she felt that she must stop or die, the gate to the district appeared before her. Gasping, she threw herself down on the damp pavement beyond it. After a moment, she sat up unsteadily and leaned back against the wall, cradling her injured arm.

  Fool, fool, fool, to spend her dwindling strength so recklessly. Soon she might call on it in need and none would come. Already she had forfeited her sixth sense, temporarily deafened by the unheard cacophony that she had just escaped. Was this the way she always behaved, rushing about like a total lack-wit? What a cursed nuisance to have mislaid so much of her past. . . or to have had it taken from her.

  "Damn," she said suddenly, lowering her head onto her arm.

  She must be mad to joke about that. Lost, lost, all those years, her home, her family, almost herself. It wasn't the frightened child she remembered who must cope with this night-stricken city but the stranger that child had become. All she had now were shreds of her Kencyr heritage. Very well. She would cling to them and, idiot that she apparently was, force herself to be wise, to conserve her strength. She got carefully to her feet, then froze.

  The wind was turning. Fitful gusts of it, foul with the breath of the Haunted Lands, brushed past her face, toyed with her hair. The gate to the north was open. Through it had come the outriders of the storm, but who could say what might follow in their wake? Jame shivered and turned away. Stepping over the still quiescent fissures, she walked hastily southward along the wall with the wind catching at her heels. She did not look back.

  At length, the winding roads brought her to the edge of a vast open area where every street in the city seemed to meet. Jame walked out into it toward the large marble throne at its center, glad for such freedom after so many dark ways, glad even for the boisterous wind, which here had still more of the clean western mountains about it than the northern wastes. A flash of white caught her eye. A flurry of papers was bounding toward her across the pavement before the wind. All whirled past except one that plastered itself against her boot and refused to be shaken free. She peeled it off. It was covered with marks that she recognized as Kessic, the common-script of Rathillien. It read:

  Nurk Lurks In Doorways.

  Who or what, Jame asked herself, is a nurk?

  Curious to see if the other blowing papers carried the same message, she caught as many as she could. Some did, but most were as different as the languages in which they were written. After five minutes, Jame had collected specimens of Nessing, Globvenish, Skyrr-mir, and several other even more exotic tongues. She had also been warned away from streets, alleys, squares, rooftops, and even window ledges each with its own peculiar occupant. It seemed that no place out-of-doors was considered safe, although from what exactly she had no idea until one paper, covered with lines that looked like an incredibly complex knot hacked apart at random, announced quite simply:

  Beware The Dead Gods.

  The wind snatched the paper away and sent it tumbling off after the others. Jame let it go. Gods? Caught in the grip of the Kencyrath's own deity, it had never occurred to her that other people might think there was more than one.

  Gods? Was that what these Tastigons called such creatures as the baby-handed beast and the puddle-dwelling leviathan, for surely there was nothing else half so odd loose in the streets tonight. She began to laugh at their foolishness, and then stopped abruptly, catching her breath.

  Another voice had cut across her own. For a moment Jame thought she had imagined it, but there it was again, faint with distance, screaming. Before the second cry died away, she was running toward the mouth of the street from which it had come. In her haste, she did not see the small dust devil that had momentarily caught up the last of the loose papers and was now traveling slowly after her across the flagstones, against the wind.

  The narrow ways closed about her again. She paused at a crossroads under a hollow crown of arches, unsure of which way to turn, then plunged into the right-hand street as the shriek sounded again, much closer this time. Broad ribbons floated from the upper windows here, silently braiding and unbraiding themselves in the air, masking the entrance to the alley until Jame was almost on top of it.

  Inside, an old man was backed into a doorway, gripping his staff and snarling toothlessly at two young men who stalked him. As Jame entered the narrow lane, he shrieked again. There was no fear in that sound, only pure, frustrated rage, reinforced by the heavy stick, which he swung with unexpected vigor, causing his assailants to leap back. Youth and endurance, however, were on their side, as would be the final victory if only they were patient. Their aged prey knew this all too well, as his impoten
t fury showed. So did Jame.

  Without thinking, she darted forward and, with a Senethar fire-leaping kick, neatly dropped the attacker on the old man's right. The second man spun about to find his friend crumpling to the ground. He didn't see Jame, who was already parallel to him in the shadows, poised to strike again. The blow never fell. As Jame paused in surprise, the man stared wildly past her, apparently at nothing, then turned and bolted. Another figure detached itself from a doorway farther down and fled after him, glancing back with a pale, horror-stricken face. Then both disappeared around the far corner.

  Jame had actually started after them when a wave of dizziness struck her so suddenly that she thought the cobbles had lurched beneath her feet. When her mind steadied, she found herself clinging to a doorpost for support, with the old man gleefully hammering on her shoulder and repeatedly shrieking, "Run, you buggers, run!" almost in her ear.

  "Eh, that was smart work," he said, turning to Jame at last, his cloudy eyes almost luminous with delight. "They'll think twice before bothering old Penari again. But who are you, boy? What's your name?

  "Jame . . . Jame Talissen," she stammered, automatically giving a name that, up to that moment, she had not remembered she possessed. "But I'm not a—"

  "Talisman . . . Talisman," the old man repeated querulously. "Odd name, but then you Kennies are odd people. You are Kencyr, aren't you? Ah, you can't fool me, boy, not with that accent; but then it would never occur to you to try, would it?" All his wrinkles suddenly slid into an expression of extreme craftiness. "You're a Kencyr, and that means you're so honest it probably hurts. Come see me later, boy. I may have a job for you." And with that he scurried off down the alley, leaving Jame half-collapsed on the doorstep, weakly finishing the protest he had not waited to hear.

  The effort brought dizziness surging back. Jame fought it desperately, feeling control begin to slip away. Images flashed through her mind: the darkened keep, faceless figures in the gloom, the snap of. . . twigs? no, of fingers breaking.

  "No!"

  It was her own voice, echoing sharply back from the opposite wall. Once again she huddled on a doorstep in a silent city, near the body of the man she had just struck down, far from the northern wastes and their vengeful ghosts. Trinity, another slip like that and she would be gone for good. Forget the past, she told herself; it could no longer hurt her without her consent, but the present, ah, the present could kill.

  Somewhere, something was burning.

  Jame's head jerked up. The alley was clouded with smoke. Ten feet away, the body of the fallen man had begun to burn.

  Numb with shock, she watched as tongues of thin blue flame licked up around the still form. The skin on the back of the out flung hands blackened and fell away. The hair went up in a sudden blaze, revealing for a moment a beautiful heliotrope tattoo behind the left ear blooming in the heart of the flames. Garments, skin, muscle, and bone, each crumbled in turn as the black, greasy smoke rolled upward, teased a few feet above the body by the sudden presence of a small whirlwind in the passageway.

  Then Jame saw that a large, indistinct form was taking shape before her, and without consciously willing it, she found herself on her feet again, pressing back into the shadow of the doorway. A vague head-shape on top of a long column of smoke swayed back and forth at the level of the shuttered second story windows. There was also the hint of a very long tail, defined only by a small cloud of soot that swept from one wall to the other, leaving dust devils in its wake. The creature fed slowly, sensuously, then belched and wandered off down the alley, leaving behind only ashes and a greasy spot on the cobbles.

  At that point, it didn't matter to Jame if this was a god, an hallucination, or the local form of street sanitation; she was out of the alley the way she had come before the creature had turned the far corner.

  Beyond, the wind stopped her. It had risen again and now came in sharp blasts that lifted the ribbon like banners away from the walls and set them to warring in midair, one side of the street against the other. Ruby and amethyst veined with gold burned in the cold moonlight; silver flashed against emerald and turquoise. Then all colors dimmed. Tattered clouds, forerunners of the storm, had crossed the moon's bright disc. Behind them, rolling down from the north, from the keep, came the mighty storm-rack.

  Jame stood shivering in the blast. She tasted ashes, felt them gray on her face, her lips, a death-mask for the living; but Nothing stays dead forever, whispered a thin voice in her mind. She dragged a jacket sleeve over her face, as though to wipe off the skin itself, and felt suddenly naked. Without her sixth sense, numbed as it still was, how could she know what even now might be searching the darkness for her? The gate to the north was open. Beyond the city, beyond the hills, among the toppled towers shadows were stirring, crawling, snuffling along the trail of blood and guilt. He would follow, for there were things he would want back from her, things he would come great distances to reclaim. Even now she thought she heard his tread. It shook the ground.

  Dreams, all fever dreams, Jame told herself desperately, making one last effort to break free.

  But the ground still shook.

  It was as if something very heavy had been dropped some distance away. There was another vibration, and another and another, evenly timed, forming a slow, ponderous beat of increasing strength. It was getting closer. Then Jame saw a strange sight: all the banners down the street were tearing loose and coming toward her. They seemed, by the shape they had assumed, to be plastered against a huge form, but she could see nothing behind them. A fourth story balcony crumpled against the wall. Ribbons caught in the wreckage. Then, briefly, moonlight flooded the street once more, and Jame saw dust mushroom up around a large, circular patch on the ground. The stones beneath her lurched again. When the next footprint appeared, twenty feet closer, she saw the cobbles at its center sink a good three inches into the earth.

  She was just thinking in a numb sort of way that whatever else this thing was, it was damned heavy, and wondering what, if anything, she should do about it, when the bone-jarring beat suddenly picked up speed and the dust surged toward her, leaving a trail of crushed stone in its wake.

  "Oh no," said Jame out loud, and bolted.

  She turned left at the crowned crossroads and raced on into the city through streets that echoed with her passing, around corners, under walkways, and finally over the river by a stone bridge, which gave a fleeting glimpse of steel gray water and boomed behind her as the other swept over it.

  All too soon, the air began to burn in her lungs and her eyes to blur. She was running quite blindly, near the end of her strength, when her foot struck something and she fell. Training made her roll over outstretched arm and back rather than sprawl, but the pack jolted her spine cruelly, and as she came up again, her legs gave way. The thing must be almost on top of her. She scrambled to her feet, gasping and half sick, but driven by the pride of her warrior race to meet death honorably.

  To her amazement, nothing happened.

  The pursuer was indeed there, hardly five paces away, sweeping first one way and then the other as piles of debris, boards, and fragments of masonry all turned to powder under the heavy tread. It seemed to be pacing rapidly back and forth before her, turning with an abruptness that suggested bafflement rather than some elephantine attempt at cat-and-mouse, almost as if it had run into a barrier even more invisible than itself. Then, without warning, the huge pug marks turned and stalked back the way they had come.

  Jame found herself face down on the pavement without distinctly remembering how she had gotten there. There were bits of broken cobblestones pressing into her cheek, and her knees hurt badly. That was it: the ground had seemed to leap up at her, and she had gone to meet it—knees first, by some miracle, not straight down like a diver. As her heart slowed, she sat up unsteadily and rested her forehead on her aching knees for a long moment. Then she looked up.

  The street about her was strewn with rubble and lined by empty, half-collapsed buildings. Moreove
r, the farther ahead she looked, the worse the general decay became, until the roadway itself at last wholly disappeared under the debris that had flaked away, scab like, from the rotting façades that overlooked it. It was like standing on the edge of some great urban sore, born of an unknown and unmentionable disease whose symptoms were ruin and desolation. Not only that, but the source of infection itself was close by . . . and it was still very, very active. Jame had thought her sixth sense numb, and perhaps it still was to such small teasings as she had experienced before, but this was altogether a different matter. She could feel the power flowing about her—cold, deep, impersonal—like a mighty river that wears the rocks in its bed to pebbles and eats away its banks. Now it began to find channels through her own mind. Unable to run, she turned at bay, at last drawing fully on that core of resistance bred into all her kind by long exposure to powers beyond their control. One by one, her mental barriers went up.

  The effort left her spent, almost stripped of her will. As if in a dream, she felt herself rise and walk, drawn toward the source of the power even as its currents buffeted her. The mounds of earth and debris loomed before her. She began to climb, sneezing at the dust from boards that disintegrated under the weight of her hand. Splintered wood, chunks of plaster, a broken clay doll, and then she was on the crest, staring down at the temple.