God Stalk

by P. C. Hodgell

  "Wait a minute," said Dally, startled out of his suspicious silence. "I thought Bane was Theocandi's chosen successor. After all, he's the old man's only pupil."

  "Normally, that would be true, but he was forced on Grandfather by his father, Abbotir of the Gold Court, just before the Guild Council meeting six years ago in return for political support. The funny thing is that I don't think Bane wants to be a thief either. He has his own interests, his own . . . amusements. Three weeks ago, on Grandfather's name-day, his followers made me watch while he mutilated that child. The things they did to him before he died—and after. . ." He shuddered, then suddenly looked up. "I would have come sooner if Grandfather hadn't wanted me to, but to spy, to betray . . . that can't be what friendship is for. . . can it?"

  Dally, who had been listening first with suspicion, then with embarrassment, now looked at that young, pleading face and said warmly, "Of course, it isn't."

  At that moment Cleppetty appeared at the hall door. She stopped short, staring first at the half-empty pastry tin and then at the sticky mess on the floor at Canden's feet. In the midst of this explosive pause, Dally stepped up to her and gravely kissed the tip of her sharp nose. Then with one accord he and Jame bolted out the street door, dragging Canden with them.

  "Well," said Jame several blocks later when they had stopped running, "now that you gentlemen have arranged things so that I can't go home for a few hours—or maybe a few days—how do you suggest we spend the rest of the afternoon?"

  "I hear that the Askebathes' temple has been desanctified for repairs," said Canden eagerly. "They might let us in to have a look around. . . if there isn't something you'd rather do."

  "Why not?" said Dally, smiling at the boy. "We're free until this evening and can pay our respects to my father while we're in the district."

  "Is he a priest?"

  "No. He's Dalis-sar, the sun god of the New Pantheon."

  Jame grinned, remembering how she reacted the first time he had sprung this bit of information on her. All she could think of to say, in a tone of profound confusion, had been, "How did that happen?"

  "Oh, the usual way," Dally had said lightly. "My mother was a handmaiden in his temple in Tai-abendra. Actually, I wasn't born until after she'd left to marry a local tradesman, but she arranged for my adoption so I and Mendy, who's a true god's son, would be full brothers."

  "Handmaiden" was the usual clerical euphemism for a temple prostitute.

  So they visited the house of the Askebathes and then that of Dally's father. Jame was unable to see much of anything in the latter because of the blinding light cast by the wheels of Dalis-sar's war chariot. Today it was especially bad, Dally told her, because the god himself was standing in the golden vehicle.

  "It would be even worse," he added, "if he were facing us directly. Instead, yes, he's still glaring back over his own shoulder. That's been going on for a good six years now. No one knows why."

  Jame herself could see neither god nor chariot because of the glare. When she held up her hands to blot out the heart of the fire, however, it seemed to her that behind it was not the rear of the temple but the city itself, as though seen from a great height, with the details of the Lower Town preternaturally distinct.

  But the sanctuary was alive with more than radiance. Anger shook the air like the steady, immense rumble of a volcano, penetrating flesh, jarring bone, yet unheard. It was the darkness at the heart of the light. Once Dally had proudly told Jame that, like all the deities of the New Pantheon, Dalis-sar had once been a man, and that man, a Kencyr. She had smiled at the idea of a monotheist being drafted as a god. Now, however, the cold darkness of that rage, so like her own the day the beam had fallen, left no room for doubt. Shaken, she left the temple, her fingertips on Dally's arm, for the brightness had left her temporarily blind.

  Outside, all was enemy territory. She had never felt it so much as now, walking sightless and vulnerable between the two young men. The gods of Tai-tastigon were all around her. The shadow of their power brushed her mind in the red-shot darkness. If any of them, even Dalis-sar, proved to be real in the same way that her own god was, she would have to admit that the entire culture and history of her people— thirty millennia of hardship, sacrifice, and honor—were built on self-delusion. But how did one go about proving the entire populace of a large city wrong; and if she failed to do so, how could her faith in her own heritage, in herself, remain intact?

  They were passing the temple of Gorgo the Lugubrious. Speculatively, Jame looked at it, blinking away the last of her blindness.

  Canden left them at the district gate, and Jame and Dally walked on, discussing their new acquaintance. Dally clearly wanted to take the Sirdan's grandson at his word, but felt he owed it to his brother to keep some suspicions alive. Jame, who as yet had no stake in Guild politics, smiled at her friend's reluctant caution.

  They arrived early that evening at the headquarters of the New Faction, a fortress like house near the Sun Gate in the Gold Ringing District.

  "One has to make a good impression," said Dally as he escorted her through the richly appointed corridors. "It isn't easy, though, competing with a man who has the whole Guild treasury as his privy purse."

  Men-dalis received them in his private study. It was the first time the leader of the New Faction and Master Penari's apprentice had met. Dally watched them both eagerly, noting the graceful formality with which they exchanged greetings. All was going well, he thought.

  Jame would have agreed—at first. As fair as his brother was dark, blessed with sapphire blue eyes and movements a dancer might envy, Men-dalis was without doubt the handsomest man she had ever seen. The very room with its rich furnishings of blue and silver seemed to take on an added luster from him. No one would ever doubt that this indeed was a true son of Dalis-sar, Lord of the Golden Chariot.

  He began to speak of his plans for the Guild after the Grand Council awarded him the sirdanate that coming winter. Jame had heard them all before from Dally, but never so glowingly described. The eloquence of the speaker first tugged at her imagination, then swept it forward into a bright, nebulous future compared to which Theocandi's forty year regime seemed the merest dross.

  Then, abruptly, something brought her back to the present with a start. A face was peering over Men-dalis's shoulder. Far back in the shadows of the room, perched on the edge of a table like an escaped gargoyle, was a tiny, skull-faced man. His hands, more bone than flesh, lay twisted together on bony knees under a sharp chin. His expression, which only her Kencyr eyes could have seen in the dark, was one of unalloyed malignity.

  Soon after that, Men-dalis's monologue ended and they were graciously dismissed. Jame, glancing back from the doorway, saw the New Faction leader already deep in conference with the man from the shadows, who, she suddenly realized, must be the head of his spy network, a man known in the streets of Tai-tastigon only as the Creeper.

  "Dally . . ." she said as they left the house. "Would you say that I frighten easily?"

  "Gods, no. Why?"

  "Your brother scares me. I think he might be capable of anything."

  Dally looked startled, then said, "Of course he is!" and launched into an enthusiastic description of all the glorious things that Men-dalis would do when he had power. Jame tried to listen, but her mind only saw that radiant, preternaturally handsome face, cheek to cheek with a living death's head, whose eyes, pools of hatred and envy, had not once left Dally's face.

  * * *

  MEN-DALIS did not request that Jame visit him again. Clearly, he did not attach much importance to her and was content to win her loyalty, if at all, through Dally.

  Theocandi also kept his distance, but with less indifference. Through Canden, Jame learned of the life-long rivalry between the Sirdan and her new master. Theocandi had always been jealous of Penari's reputation and raged at his older brother's refusal to envy him his own position and power. All his life, the younger brother had tried to excel the elder—in skill, arcane s
tudies, renown—and always he had failed. Now in the evening of his days, nothing was more important to him than mastering the secrets that had always made Penari his superior in all things that had ever really mattered to either of them. In the end, however, Theocandi could not believe that Penari would give what he considered to be family secrets to an outsider. Consequently Jame was left alone, for the time being at least.

  Meanwhile, she, Canden, and Dally were getting on splendidly together. Dally, too good-natured to hold his suspicions for long, had taken an almost fraternal interest in the younger boy, while Jame responded to his loneliness, so reminiscent of her own at an earlier age. She also discovered that Canden had in him a spirit of inquiry not unlike her own and a fascination with the past that if anything surpassed his mistrust of the present.

  "Do you know what the oldest building in Tai-tastigon is?" he asked Jame one day. "That temple of yours. As far as I can tell, it was here before the city walls went up, before the Old Empire was established, before the Kencyrath itself even arrived. How is that possible?"

  "Maybe the scrollsmen and Arrin-ken know who built it," said Jame. "I don't. Every time we've had to shift worlds, though, the temples have always been waiting for us. The one here is probably as old as Rathillien itself. The other Tastigon priests don't even like to acknowledge its existence."

  "Maybe that's why they chose a different part of the city for the Temple District," said Canden thoughtfully. "I've heard that there's another even larger Kencyr temple to the south, in the ruins of Tai-than."

  He talked a great deal about this lost city, the great southern capital of the Old Empire, who's decaying towers no man had seen in half a millennium. An expedition was currently being organized to search for it, and Canden desperately wanted to be part of it. It was an announcement of these preparations that he had brought to show his grandfather the night he had interrupted the old man's attempts to bribe Jame. Theocandi would probably never have let him go anyway, but now he was too incensed by the boy's failure in the alley even to consider it. Jame felt responsible for all this. Trying to make it up to the boy, she gave him her friendship and, in an attempt to placate Theocandi for his sake, passed on to him some of the things that Master Penari taught her.

  None of these could be classified as a secret. In fact, nothing she had learned so far seemed to fit into that category, and Jame was beginning to wonder if the old man meant to keep his own council after all. This disappointed her, of course, but on the other hand the training he was prepared to give her left neither time nor grounds for dissatisfaction.

  Eventually, Penari introduced an intense course on the rules of Jame's new profession, however, which gave her hope that her lessons were about to move in new directions. She learned that everything an apprentice stole over a certain value became the property of his master, whose duty it was to send the booty to one of the five Guild courts, each one of which specialized in a different kind of merchandise. There it was assessed and the length of time determined for which its possession was punishable by law. This crucial time, called the period of jeopardy, began as soon as the object came into the apprentice's hands. In Tai-tastigon, possession was the sole proof of guilt. Complicity was sometimes punished as well, but only if the accused had been in physical contact with the stolen article. Penalties ranged from fines to the loss of a finger, hand, or the whole of one's skin, for robberies involving undue violence or the injuring of a guardsman. The worst punishment of all—public flaying preceded by whatever mutilations a mob of concerned citizens could inflict—was reserved for anyone who tried to assassinate one of the Five or a Guild-lord.

  Hearing this, Jame's eyes darkened with memory. Not long before, an embittered young journeyman had attacked the Sirdan in the Guild Hall itself. It would be a long time before she forgot that pitiful figure, already blind, tongue-less, and castrated, writhing under the knife and cauterizing irons on the Mercy Seat.

  Realizing that he had lost her attention, Penari ended his lecture with a snarl. Scooping a handful of gems out of a desk drawer (along with several marbles and a mouse's skull), he threw them down on the floor before her, then immediately swept them up again and demanded to know exactly what she had seen. This was an old exercise between them, and Jame usually did very well at it. Today, however, she could only name eighteen out of thirty or so stones. Various things were distracting her, not the least of which was Monster, who had fallen asleep with his head balanced precariously on her shoulder.

  Penari, thoroughly exasperated by now, snatched up the large translucent rock he used for paperweight and threw it, nearly braining them both. Upon extricating herself from the python's sleepy coils and recovering this stone, Jame suddenly realized that it was not the piece of quartz she had always taken it for. She was in fact holding an enormous uncut diamond, the Eye of Abarraden itself.

  That day's lesson ended with Penari sending her out into the Maze with instructions to find her way from one point to another and, on returning, to describe to him turn for turn where she had been. She went, knowing that the old man would detect any mistake in her eventual recitation instantly. The same was true when he had her go out to memorize sections of the city. He would name a street and ask her how she would get from it to another, sometimes insisting that her route lay over the rooftops or even through the houses themselves as if she were escaping from a very determined pursuer. In the course of these games, she had suddenly realized something very odd: for her master, Tai-tastigon was the same, structure by structure, as it had been when he had first gone into seclusion over fifty years before and nothing would convince him otherwise. This knowledge cleared up some of her confusion. It didn't help much, however, when he made her describe routes through areas long since reduced to rabble by one of the city's numerous disasters and subsequently rebuilt. Today, she was happy enough to contend only with the Maze and did so well in it that Penari, mollified, let her go early.

  Standing on the threshold, turning up the collar of her d'hen against the cool evening air, Jame reflected that she was receiving an education every bit as eccentric in some ways as it was excellent in others.

  A tall figure passed by the end of the street, instantly recognizable by his cream-velvet d'hen. Jame called after him to wait, and a few minutes later she was walking westward beside Darinby, a journeyman of Master Galishan. Darinby was one of the Guild's finest, a true craftsman with family tradition behind him and glory ahead according to most savants, who predicted that he would soon become the Guild's youngest master. Jame had always admired his skill, style, and integrity. He was the sort of thief she hoped to become if the length of her stay in Tai-tastigon permitted it; and it pleased her very much that he in turn seemed to like her. They walked on together, discussing the upcoming Guild elections.

  "No, I haven't chosen a side," said Darinby, "and probably won't either. Theocandi's too corrupt for my taste, and Men-dalis is too ambitious. My master will probably support the latter—if he can get his mind off M'lady Melissand long enough—but you and I, Talisman, should be glad we've no voice in the matter."

  "Huh. Sometimes I wonder if anyone else realizes that."

  "Your position is rather peculiar, isn't it?" he said, smiling. "Strictly speaking, Penari has no more power than Galishan, just one vote out of a hundred among the landed masters for their two representatives; but others will be swayed by his decision, and you're the only person in the city close enough to him to influence it. Bad times are coming. I don't envy you, Talisman, no, not at all."

  They parted at the Serpent Fountain.

  "Oh, by the way," the journeyman said, stopping suddenly and turning back toward her. "There's a rumor that since you enrolled at the Guild Hall, Bane has given up young boys. I should walk wary if I were you, Talisman."

  She watched him go, his d'hen glimmering in the dusk.

  Wind devils whirled about the fountain, mixing its spray with the thin rain that had begun to fall. Jame spun about.

  Surely s
omeone was watching her. Often over the last few weeks she had felt the sudden chill of eyes but never seen the face behind them. No more so now. Darinby's words, however, had unlocked a memory. The first time her flesh had crept this way had been in the Sirdan's Palace, walking down a corridor with the whisper of footsteps behind her. Names of God, but her nerves must be raw. The square was empty, its shadows tenantless. She set out for home briskly, not deigning to look back.

  * * *

  IT WAS MID-EVENING when Jame reached the Res aB'tyrr after a breathless game of Follow-my-lead across the rain-slick rooftops with a trio of Cloudie friends. The first thing that struck her as she opened the kitchen door was the uproar within; the second was a large, half-roasted goose. Her immediate impression was that someone had thrown the fowl at her. Then she realized that the headless creature was in fact under its own power and making a very credible attempt to escape. After several hectic moments of being hauled about the courtyard, frequently off her feet, she finally pinioned the greasy, squirming carcass and marched it back to the door.