The Brass God

by K. M. McKinley

  Rel squatted in the sand and poked about for a while, unearthing a few fragments of rustless Morfaan steel. There was little else to find, so he dusted his hands off and clambered up onto one of the taller wall remnants to look around the area. From his new vantage he realised the mounds were the remains of a massive building that had at its centre a square two hundred yards across. The layout fitted Shkarauthir’s explanation that this was a barracks, with a parade ground surrounded by armouries, sleeping quarters and stables, only it was far bigger than that of the Third Karsan Dragoons back home. Humps in the sand were the lower parts of rooms. In a few places outcrops of sandblasted building glass poked free of their shrouds. An almost complete archway stood over a roadway of sand to the east. Hummocks suggested three further gates at the other cardinal points of the compass. Very little taller than Rel survived.

  Beyond the barracks the setting sun cast deep shadows on the desert. The layout of the streets was easy to see when the sun’s rays shone nearly parallel to the ground, but without the sunset the city had been virtually invisible. It would be easy to see it as an accident of geology.

  Rel surveyed the city awhile from the mound. The anonymous lumps of the vast ruins spread out for miles. Their camp was on the edge, outside a thick band Rel took to be a city wall.

  The Red Moon fled over the horizon and the sun lowered itself after. The White Moon went from the orange of sunset to its pallid, nighttime hue. The Twin became ever more solid, turning from an ethereal vagueness into a circular hole in the sky, neat as a coin and dark as a threat, sparkling with its ominous fires.

  With the draining of the light the temperature dropped rapidly. They were far north, closer to the equator, so the nights should have been getting warmer, not colder. He supposed they must be gradually gaining altitude as they approached the mountains of the High Spine, slowly enough that the slope in the land wasn’t noticeable. Either that or some magical effect altered the climate. That was perfectly feasible, and would not be the strangest thing he had encountered in the Black Sands.

  He shivered, drawing his scarves tight against the chill.

  Behind him was thousands of miles of desert. Not all of the Black Sands was covered in the black, glimmer-rich sand, but there was sufficient for the desert to deserve its name. They had crossed thirty leagues of sand as black as the night sky in three days. The broad dark line of the High Spine at the northern horizon grew a little taller with every mile. A ragged line of snow glowed softly across the tops, separating mountains from sky. The rest of their details remained indistinct.

  “Hey! Small!” bellowed Drauthek. Drauthek spoke terrible Maceriyan, but he knew enough to make unwelcome comments about eating Rel, and Rel wasn’t entirely sure he was joking. “Food time. Come eat. Do not be skinny!”

  He flashed a frightening white smile at Rel.

  “Wouldn’t want to be skinny now, would I?” said Rel. “I would make a poor meal.”

  “Ha! Yes!” said Drauthek. “No good. Make modalman hungry.”

  Rel slid down the side of the wall to join Drauthek. The modalman made no effort to shorten his stride, forcing Rel to jog. On the way back to the camp they crossed places where the sand had blown away, uncovering mosaics of roughened glass.

  Modalmen went about their business quickly. Garaus snorted and lowed, collapsing to their knees once unladen and rolling gratefully onto their sides. The warriors spoke in their bone-shaking voices quietly, as their rumbling speech carried far over the empty lands. They travelled light, and wore little, although the newcomers were better provisioned than Shkarauthir’s hunting band. Over the shoulders of the newcomers’ six-limbed mounts were huge water skins big enough for Rel to bathe in. Bedrolls cushioned the back of their saddles. Pouches and baskets held a surprising variety of dried fruits and meat. Shkarauthir said the modalmen spent most of their time in the east where the conditions were kinder. The new band brought pack garau with more comprehensive supplies, notably fodder for the beasts that they freely shared out. Even so, compared to a Kingdoms man’s kit they carried little.

  One thing they did have in abundance was weaponry. Bows taller than a man, swords Rel could not lift, spears longer than Olbish pikes, arrows like javelins. And though they did not wear it while travelling, all of the modalmen carried armour bundled up in linen behind their saddles.

  The newcomers stared at Rel with open curiosity. They had no concept of human manners, being shockingly unbothered by nakedness and bodily functions, often openly toileting right in front of him. Drauthek especially asked Rel questions that were breathtakingly rude. In the Isles Rel counted himself as a man with little time for social convention, and brazenly offended it for his own entertainment; it turned out he was far more prudish than he thought.

  The modalmen were not what he expected in many ways, but they were every bit as savage as the stories told, and far stranger.

  There was their affinity for one another, for example. When Drauthek, Ger and Shkarauthir spoke with the newcomers, the spirals carved into their flesh pulsed patterns back and forth. Though Rel knew only a few words of the modalmen speech, he could infer a lot from their body language; for all their anatomical differences it was similar to a human’s. But in the lights there was another layer of communication that Rel had no insight to at all.

  The new group swelled Shkarauthir’s band to twenty-seven. Familiarity with the three modalmen did not prepare Rel for being among so many.

  “When I was very young,” said Rel. “My father took me to Karsa City fair. It’s the big agricultural show out on the high moors between Karsa and the Mesus river valley. You won’t know it.”

  Drauthek looked at him quizzically, but did not interrupt.

  “I became separated from my nurse while my father admired the livestock; big bull dracons, almost as large as garau.”

  “Garau big,” said Drauthek. Rel doubted he understood more than half of what he was saying, but he needed to talk.

  “I spent several minutes in a panic amid them. They did me no harm, but watched me with sad, green eyes. They were a sorry sight, with their horns sawn down, their legs hobbled and necks yoked. They could not move much, but I was terrified.”

  “Scared?” said Drauthek.

  “Very scared. It is how I feel now.” He looked around the camp. “You people don’t bother me, nor your garau, but I don’t like your hounds.”

  The hounds watched him with hungry eyes set deep over their beaklike mouths. Shkarauthir had had a half dozen with him. There were three times as many now. Rel felt no safer around them than he would have in a stable full of starving dracons.

  “At the fair, once my nurse had found me, father scolded me for fear,” said Rel, eyeing them warily. “‘A goodfellow never shows weakness,’ he said. I always try to keep that in mind.”

  “Weakness bad,” said Drauthek. He patted Rel’s head with a heavy hand. “You weak. I protect.”

  Shkarauthir was speaking with several modalmen. By their deference, Rel saw that Shkarauthir was no simple warrior, but a man of high station. The modalman had no badges, markings or anything of that sort to indicate their social degree, at least not so a Kingdoms man could tell, but the others obeyed Shkarauthir unquestioningly, and were actively seeking his counsel.

  There were six campfires in the camp. Shkarauthir’s small original group had been given the central one, another indication of his standing. Ger greeted Rel and motioned for him to sit down and get warm. He said something incomprehensible. Ger spoke no language Rel knew. They got by on nods and smiles.

  The fires burned garau dung. What little moisture there was in the dung dried quickly in the desert, and it smelled a lot better than it should.

  Shkarauthir finished his conversation and took his place at the fire. Once he sat, no other modalman would approach him. Ger served up the same evening meal they ate every day: a spicy stew made from dried fruits and meat. Rel had grown to like it, and no longer felt self-conscious eating out of the sa
lt container the modalmen had spared him. Their own bowls were the size of basins.

  The modalmen sat cross-legged by their fires to rest, but squatted to eat, and would not start their meal until everyone was in their set place. They had a particular way of doing for every activity. Now there were more of them, their rituals became more apparent. Shkarauthir and his warriors waited until all the modalmen in the camp were ready before commencing their supper, the pulsing of their markings signalling the others to do the same.

  When they were done, Shkarauthir wiped his bowl clean with his fingers, licked them, and set the bowl aside.

  “Now small person, I tell you why we come north. I have a story for you, for all.” He said something to Ger.

  Ger translated loudly. Heads came up at that. The modalmen set down their empty bowls and came to Shkarauthir’s fire.

  Before Shkarauthir began his story, he slipped fluidly into a kneel and prostrated himself toward the fire. The others followed suit. They rose together, then knelt again, all facing Shkarauthir’s fire in silence.

  A gust of wind tugged the flames into streamers. It was dark, and the million stars of the desert shone in the sky. The luminous ribbon of the God’s Road cut the heavens in half.

  The modalmen sat up, then crossed their legs, all of them with the left under the right.

  “So,” began Shkarauthir, “let us start with the beginning.”

  Rel settled in to listen. He had liked the modalman’s stories the few times Shkarauthir had told them in Maceriyan, though he had no faith in his promise of revelation whatsoever.

  CHAPTER SIX

  In The Beginning

  “THIS IS THE Story of the One and the Void, and how it came to be that the world was begun, and the first thinking beings were made,” Shkarauthir said.

  “In the beginning, there was only the One. It was he who made this world,” Shkarauthir gestured to the ground, then pointed at the Twin, “and the dark world as well, he made them both. He made the stars and the moons, and the other worlds around our sun, and all other things that can be seen, and many things that cannot be seen. Where he came from will never be known. We do not speculate, it is not the modalman way.”

  Rel suspected this interjection was for his benefit, although it could as easily have been a part of the ritual of the story.

  “Among the Forgetful, the small people who think themselves true men but are not,” continued Shkarauthir, “are those who follow the One, our supreme god, and their priests say many different things about the One. They say perhaps the One came here to see what was underneath his own world, or that he fled a war, or that he was young among his people and recently come into his power, or that he was a being alone, and made the worlds to be his friends. Who knows? The Forgetful do not. We true men do not. Only this is known, and this is true, that the One came into this place in a blaze of light and a fire that rocked all things, bringing something out of nothing.

  “The something was the void,” said Shkarauthir. “Now, a void is a nothing, but before the void the nothingness was absolute. The void has potential, it can be made and changed. The void was the One’s first creation.”

  The modalmen listened intently. Rel had no idea how many spoke Maceriyan. He thought only a few, if Ger and Drauthek were typical, but they nodded in parts, and hooted in others, and made other signs of understanding with their four hands that confounded Rel. Did they, after all, understand? Or was the story so ingrained in their culture that they knew it no matter the tongue it was told in? Shkarauthir’s clan marks moved differently while he told his stories, turning to a bright pulse that ran quick then slow, or chased itself over his arms and body. Maybe they could read that. He wished his brothers were there; Guis, or perhaps Aarin. They had a better intuition of how such things worked. Rel had never been particularly academic.

  “The One desired to fill the void. So he made the twin worlds,” Shkarauthir went on. “One world was of Form, a perfect unchanging paradise of stone and still fire. The other was of Will, the mutable, thinking spirit that energises all life, and so was always in flux. Because it never stayed the same, sometimes it was a heaven, and sometimes it was a hell.

  “The One delighted in their opposition, in the changelessness of Form and the chaotic impermanence of Will. For a time, he was happy, going from one world to the next, marvelling at his cleverness. He would rejoice at the infinite changes of Will for a while, returning to the certainty of Form when he tired of it, and then back and forth, until one day, the One became confused. The void had grown around the worlds, so that their dance about one another no longer filled it. He was shocked! Desiring to fill this emptiness also, he planted a garden of stars to prettify his worlds. Such a difference this setting made, that for a time again he was delighted, and he forgot his worry at the growing of the void. After a time, his delight turned again to despair. The void grew again. So, he made more stars. But again the void grew. For no matter how many stars he made, still they did not fill the oceans of the sky, for as the void was filled it grew again. It grew so quickly that the One’s own light was no longer enough to drive away the dark, and Form and Will grew cold. They had voices then, and they cried to their father, so he made the sun to shine on the worlds so that they might enjoy the day and stay warm, and the nights when they might sleep, and he set the other worlds to dance around the sun, and the moons to herald the twin worlds’ coming as they swam the void.

  “Time rushed by as time does. The void grew ever bigger. The One spent more time away from the worlds of Form and of Will. Into the growing spaces of being he desired to set other spheres, for he could not abide the void’s emptiness, although it was his first child, and so he took up grains of sand from his twin planets, and from them made other worlds, and from the diamonds of the stars he grew other suns, and other wondrous things.

  “But despite his toil, the One could not fill everything. He worked and he worked and the void continued to grow. No matter how many things he put into the sky, still there was more space to fill, and he came no more to these worlds. His struggle with the void absorbed him. The void had grown so huge and hungry he feared if he ever stopped, it would devour all he had built. The void never spoke, and never showed any sign of thought, but it became a thing in the One’s mind of cold will that desired to grow forever, and swamp what little the One had made in unending chill. And so, as he thought it, it came to be. The One’s desire to fill the void grew to a hard hatred of his first child, and his struggle took on the nature of a war.

  “After many long ages he realised he was not there to love his Twins. Their spirits cried out to him at his inattention. His struggles with the void had made a universe filled with many wonders, but glorious as his creation was, it was nothing without someone to love it. None felt this more keenly than the world of Will and the world of Form.

  “‘Who will admire our beauty?’ they said. ‘You are away so often,’ and they wept.

  “Although the One’s heart ached to hear such wailing, he could not love the worlds as he had. He realised his work would never end, and he had many children that distracted him from his Twins. So he promised Form and Will other things to love them in his stead. To accomplish this, he made life, creating first the plants and then the creatures and all things that move and breed. For each world he made a different kind. Life on the dark world of Form was never changing. Life on the light world of Will scarcely could hold its shape before it took on a new form. Both these types were true to the characters of each child. He was well pleased.

  “For the Twins, it was not enough. Life was astonishing, that rock and dust and fire could become things that breathed, but as life did not think it could not love. Life did not see the glory around it, it simply was. Life did not worship the Twins as they desired, so again they called for their father, and again the One returned.

  “‘These things that walk upon us, their feet tickle, they drink our rivers, they sleep on our faces and they piss on us. They make our skin
itch, and they do not love us! Please come home forever,’ they said. ‘Love us, our father.’

  “The One thought long and hard. He could not stay to love his worlds. Remaining was impossible but he could not abandon his children either. The void would forever grow. It would not be fair to have his children face eternity with only his new creations flashing into being far away to comfort them.

  “So the One set upon his greatest task.” Shkarauthir leaned over the fire. The light dancing on his skin cast shadows dark as midnight. “He made things that could think. Before, he had exerted his mind, and so things had been. This great power would not be enough, not this time. Taking up a sharp stone knife, he cut strips from his celestial flesh. The pain was so intense his agonies rocked the sky. His blood was light and it flashed across the heavens, and rained as glowing waters on many worlds. The Twins cried anew to see their father bleed for them, their tears and blood mingled. In this way the thunder, the lightning and the rain were born.

  “When at last the agony was done, the One chewed his flesh until it was soft, and moulded it into beings like himself. They were perfect images of him, but he could not give them his power, and though he used the smallest element of his being to make their souls, even this shard of his essence was too much for one body, so the portion of his soul he intended to animate them he split, and made one to be female, and the other to be male. To we modalmen, this is the greatest mystery, but it was so. He breathed these fragments of his spirit into the creatures, diminishing himself forever.

  “When the creatures opened their eyes and looked back at him, he felt the most profound love he ever had. He was pleased with his latest endeavour. And so were Form and Will, for his new children looked upon the beauty of the Twins and adored them. Form and Will talked, and after much discussion it was decided the One would set the First Born upon the world of Form, for Will was frightened she might hurt them with her ceaseless changing, these delicate creatures with the power to love and to dream like the One.