God Stalk

by P. C. Hodgell

  Jame walked on along the far bank, listening, looking, catching delight like a heady perfume borne on the air. It was a long island. At its point the walls rose in a jutting prow set with the figurehead of a woman triumphantly brandishing a severed head in either hand. Their stone beards curled down her arms and the swift waters of the Tone creamed about her bare feet as though the island were surging onward into the heart of the city.

  A block beyond that Jame crossed a bridge and turned back. She had gone down the other side of the island almost as far as the stern when out of the corner of her eye she saw something pale falling. There was a loud splash below, closely followed by another, as a young man on the opposite bank dove into the river, fully clothed. She saw him surface, his arm wrapped around something, and begin to struggle across the current toward her side. The racing water would have borne him away if a man on the quay below had not thrown out a line and several others run down the steps to help pull him in.

  "Is it another one, Tob?" a latecomer called as he darted past her.

  None of the straining figures below had time to answer: they were hauling first the pale object and then the young man up onto the dock. Jame saw that the former was the naked body of a boy. His white skin was oddly marked as though someone had drawn the diamonds of a game board on it and blackened every other one. Then she saw that the dark areas were not skin at all but rather the lack of it.

  "Aye," said a bitter voice from the midst of the group bending over it. "Another one." And they all looked up at the Sirdan's palace.

  Upstream, the shadowy form of a man stood at the railing of a balcony suspended over the water. He was looking down at them.

  The swimmer stood, white shirt plastered to his ribs, and stared back. For a moment the tableau held. Then one of the men coughed and began to struggle out of his coat. They carried the draped corpse up the steps and away, leaving the young man to glare upward a moment longer before he turned to follow them. He passed Jame without noticing her, blinded with anger. She saw him cross one of the catwalks back to the island, then turned away and walked on.

  The music died away behind her, and the lights grew dim. A chill wind was blowing off the mountains, pushing at her back. She suddenly felt very cold and tired.

  * * *

  THE REST OF the night was spent in following first the Tone and then the Old Wall away from slums and mansions alike and in several hours of sleep snatched on someone's second story balcony.

  Hovering near the wall a few feet from where Jame had taken shelter was one of the strange light spheres, which she had first seen in the puzzle-box district. She woke in the gray dawn at the sound of a voice and saw the globe darken. Below, a black-robed man paused under the next light and extinguished it too by murmuring "Blessed-Ardwyn-day-has-come" in a bored monotone. He disappeared into the morning mist, banishing the puffs of light as he went,

  Jame breakfasted on the cheese and bread that Cleppetty had provided, then swung down to the street.

  She had decided not to return to the Lower Town. Even though the violent reactions of the people there had convinced her that the temple of her god lay somewhere nearby, she no longer trusted herself to find it blindly. Better to retrace the wanderings of that first night. . . if she could. Consequently, Jame now followed the Old Wall northward to the Sun Gate. From there, a two-hour's walk along the curving streets of the Rim District brought her to the Warrior Gate, now standing firmly shut against the Haunted Lands, the Feast of Dead Gods being long past.

  Like all Kencyrs, Jame had received extensive memory training as a child. She knew the lengthy epics of her people by heart and could recite genealogies of leaders and important people stretching back thousands of years. This, however, did not help her greatly with visual images. It was mid-afternoon before she found the little square with the fountain and only recognized it because of the network of deep cracks that ran through it. Jame followed these westward until they ended suddenly before a familiar gate.

  Now she had a choice. Before her lay the puzzle-box, more properly known as the Temple District, which she had previously entered and left by the same route. In that respect, it was a dead-end. Still, she felt drawn by it and curious to know if her earlier impression had been correct. Perhaps she had overreacted. Perhaps these so-called gods were not the threat that she had at first believed. At any rate, it now occurred to her that, to the best of her knowledge, none of the people she had questioned so far about her own god had been priests. That was excuse enough. Bracing herself, she stepped through the gate into the Temple District.

  Moments later as Jame walked through cross-currents of incense, hearing the drone of chants on all sides and seeing the tangle of buildings that stretched out of sight at each crossroad, she reluctantly faced the truth. Although the feverish beat of power had now sunk to a steady pulse, it was still undeniably there. The threat was real after all. Damn.

  The sound of loud voices nearby broke in on her thoughts. On the steps of a small temple, a round little man in hieratic garb was arguing vehemently with a plump old woman.

  "What do you mean, 'No'?" he was saying angrily. "What sort of answer is that?"

  "An honest one," the woman retorted, brandishing a fistful of delicate bat bones inlaid with silver under his nose.

  "Now see here: I don't read these things for the fun of it You ask me 'Will all be well'; the bones tell me that all won't. There the message ends. But as a far-seer I can tell you this much more: a deadly force is all too near you even now and will come nearer still. You will provoke it; and what it begins, you will finish. There, priest. You wanted your fortune told. Now I wish you the joy of it." With that, she turned and flounced down the steps.

  The indignation went out of her gait before she reached the bottom, however, and Jame suddenly found herself looking down into a pair of worried eyes. "Foolish as he is sometimes, he's not a bad man," the old woman said to her in an undertone. "Spare him if you can." Then she scurried away.

  Jame stared at her for a moment in amazement, then shrugged. Far-seers had no great reputation for sanity. On impulse, remembering her errand, she went up the steps.

  "Excuse me, sir," she said to the priest, who had turned back to his sanctuary and already had one step over the threshold. "Can you tell me where to find the temple of the Three-Faced God?"

  The little man spun about. Jame had just time to note the desperate unhappiness in his face before he shrieked "Heretic!" and struck out wildly at her. As she swayed to avoid the blow, her half-healed ankle twinged in warning. Without thinking, she followed the path of least resistance, which happened to be over the guard rail, down five feet, and over backward into a puddle. A burst of laughter greeted this performance and one of the men who had stopped to listen to the previous altercation shouted "Well done, Loogan!" after the priest, who had already disappeared. "All hail Gorgo the Lugubrious God!"

  "Loogan, huh?" said Jame under her breath as she got to her feet, flushed with anger. Then she limped back the way she had come, ignoring the jeering spectators.

  Her temper had cooled somewhat by the time she reached Judgment Square, that vast open area with the Mercy Seat at its center. On this visit, Jame found it full of people. As she threaded her way through the crowd, fending off peddlers, she marveled at how different everything was from the first time she had seen this place. Then, as she approached the Mercy Seat, she saw that it too was no longer empty. At first Jame thought that the figure lolling on it was an effigy of some sort, then that it was a sleeping man clad in a tight black garment which, oddly, seemed to be moving. It wasn't until she was quite close that she saw the darkness was not cloth at all but dried blood and flies. The man's skin, still attached at the neck, hung over the back of the Seat like a strangely shaped cloak. Under the dangling right hand, someone had scrawled in chalk:

  Steal a peach, steal a plum,

  See to what your carcass comes.

  Greatly sobered but undeterred, Jame continued on. After all, t
hat would never happen to her, although it gave her a jolt to think that the thief in the stone chair had probably once said as much to himself.

  On the far side of the square, she found what looked like the right street and soon confirmed this by coming to the crowned crossroads. Not far beyond that was the River Tone and the bridge by which she had crossed it. On the opposite side her troubles began again, for this was the area through which she had raced so blindly and one street was no different from any other to her. Dusk was falling too, bringing the prospect of another cheerless night in the open. Discouraged and footsore, she sat down on the edge of a small fountain in a dirty little square to eat the last of her food. Without provisions or money she would soon have to start home, perhaps to mount another expedition later—although it was clear to her now that she might spend the rest of her life bumbling around these streets without coming any closer to her goal. Perhaps it was time to admit that the labyrinth had defeated her and her plans.

  To the west, the sun had slipped behind the Ebonbane, kindling veins of fire in its snow-locked passes. Jame was gazing up at the mountain peaks dejectedly when she suddenly remembered the Res aB'tyrr's loft with its fine view of the city. That was what she needed now: height. She jumped up and eagerly scanned the surrounding roof lines. There were several tall buildings visible above the houses bordering the square, but one soared above the rest, its upper stories still flooded with light above the growing sea of shadows. That was the one.

  Moments later, Jame stared up at its crumbling façade. The door was bricked shut. She swung herself up onto the portico roof and pulled the rotting boards away from a second story window. Inside, light filtered through cracks and down the stairwell revealing a wilderness of dust and decay. She went up the steps quickly but with care, for many of them were rotten, until a collapsed flight some seven stories up blocked her way. From there, she went out a window and up the side of the building for the last twenty feet, gouging finger holds through the sour plaster to the lath.

  When her hand finally closed on the eave trough, she pulled herself onto the roof. She was climbing up the steep slope, eyes fixed on the tiles before her for rotten spots, when a foot suddenly appeared almost under her nose. Something gave her shoulder a strong push, and she found herself slithering down the incline, nails scrabbling for a grip. Then her foot came up against the gutter and the descent stopped. Heart hammering, she looked up. A young man clad all in white was smoothly crab-stepping down the roof toward her. Two other men watched from the ridge.

  "If you do that again," she heard herself say in a remarkably conversational tone, "I shall fall off."

  "That's the idea," said the descending man with an angelic smile, and he reached out toward her again.

  Jame seized his wrist and pulled. Over-balanced, he pitched forward past her into space. She released her first hold and grabbed for his jacket as he shot past. They both went over the edge. Jame's free hand caught the gutter and then nearly lost it again as the other's suddenly arrested weight wrenched at her muscles. She hadn't come up here to kill or be killed, Jame thought savagely, wondering which shoulder would dislocate first, and damned if she would let either happen through some stupid accident—although from the way her companion was dangling, it wouldn't surprise her if she had inadvertently hanged him with his own collar.

  Two heads appeared above, silhouetted against the sky.

  "Well?" she snapped.

  A minute later all four of them were sitting on the roof, feet braced against the gutter, panting. The two rescuers seemed the most shaken of the lot, and Jame's erstwhile assailant the least. The latter was in fact still staring down into the void like a man entranced.

  "That's the closest I've ever come to going over," he said at last in an awed voice. "I almost wish you'd let me fall."

  "I suppose we could try again," said Jame, anger giving way to curiosity. "Do you often go around pushing people off roofs?"

  "Oh, all the time. Only citizens of the Cloud Kingdom are welcome up here and, of course, their guests. Incredible . . . just incredible . . ." He leaned forward, causing Jame and the man on his other side to grab his flowing sleeves simultaneously. "I've seen a hundred, a thousand fall, and each time it seems to take longer. Seconds, minutes, hours . . . twisting, turning, dancing in the air . . . marvelous!"

  "Messy too, I should think, when they hit the ground."

  "Oh, I never watch that long." He sat back and looked at her with wide, admiring eyes. "No one has ever come so close to sending me over before. You must be an unusual person. You're sure you won't let me push you off? Well, in that case no one else shall have the pleasure. Come to court someday soon and I shall have Uncle grant you the freedom of the skies."

  With that, he bowed to her, rose, and seemed to float up the incline. All three men had just disappeared over the ridge when Jame remembered her mission. Eagerly she examined the patterns of the city below, but nowhere in the deepening shadows was there a sign of that desolate circle, those cold white walls.

  "Hey!" she called after the trio, and the fair head popped back into sight over the ridge, looking disembodied.

  "Yes?" it said, hopefully.

  "I'm looking for the temple of the Three-Faced God. Do you know where it is?"

  "Oh." Disappointment washed over the features. "Sparrow will show you." And it vanished again.

  "Hey! When I come to court, who shall I say invited me?"

  "Why, Prince Dandello, of course," the voice drifted back. "The Cloud King's nephew."

  * * *

  "NO, I DON'T know why the groundlings won't discuss your god or, for that matter, the priest Ishtier," said Sparrow, waiting on the crest of a gambrel roof for Jame to scramble up to him. "They're a fat-headed lot from what I've seen; though mind, I've never had much to do with them. Born in the clouds, I was, and here I'll die—barring accidents—without ever touching the ground."

  Without warning, the wiry little Cloudie launched himself down the far side of the roof toward a projecting cornice, bounced off the top of it, and easily cleared the eight-foot gap across to the opposite roof. Steeling herself, Jame followed him. They had come quite a distance across the labyrinth by now with comparative ease. Obviously, this was the way to travel for anyone with good nerves, although not even these saved Jame from a quick spasm of fear as the street flashed past beneath her, some forty feet below.

  "Two things, though," said Sparrow as she caught up with him several houses later. "They do tend to treat anything they don't like as if it doesn't exist, and I think the Townies blame your god for whatever it was—no, is, that's happening to them. We Cloudies haven't been overjoyed either, what with the way these roofs have disintegrated. You'd never believe it, but this was a flourishing neighborhood six years ago. Now watch your step. We're getting close."

  The warning was necessary. They had reached the edge of the temple's greatest influence, as the condition underfoot clearly showed. Jame went first now, picking her way carefully, hearing plaster rattle down inside as boards groaned under her weight. Then there the temple was, tall, stark, ghost-pale under the new moon. The power that flowed continually out of it buffeted her, but at the same time she felt the attraction of that monolithic structure, the sure, arrogant claim of the force that dwelt within its walls on her, body and soul, as a Kencyr. For a moment, Jame hesitated. Then, "Damnation," she said and, with a gesture as foolhardy as it was defiant, threw down all her mental shields. The power claimed her instantly. She forgot her guide, her resentment, everything as it drew her down from the rooftop, across the graveyard of dust, and into the dark doorway.

  The moment Jame crossed the threshold, the maelstrom seized her. It seemed to her dazed mind that two currents flowed through the twisting corridors, the greater bound outward, the lesser on either side of it whirling inward along the walls toward the temple's heart. She was spun forward, whipped around faster and faster until her shoulder crashed into a door and it gave way, spilling her sideways onto a
tessellated floor.

  Her senses ringing in the sudden lull, she stared numbly at the patterns beneath her hand. They spiraled in toward the center of the chamber. Her eyes followed their curve to the foot of the statue there on its raised dais, then up that towering, black granite form to the three faces of her god. The aspect of Regonereth, That-Which-Destroys, was turned toward her, its features obscured with marble carved veil-thin. Lower down, one hand reached out and upward through a fissure in the masonry as though beckoning. Each long, scythe-curved finger was tipped in ivory, honed and gleaming.