The Brass God

by K. M. McKinley

  “I’ll bet they say worse about me than that.”

  The porter looked ashamed, and stared at the floor.

  “You’re not from here, are you?”

  “No, goodlady. I hail from Avimouth on the south coast. See all the way to Girarsa on a clear day.”

  She nodded. Her father had given permission for the railway company to build their station in the village, and cut tracks across their land. She received a nominal rent for it and certain benefits, such as free tickets to the city, but the assets of the railway, and its staff, were among the few things in Mogawn-On-Land that did not belong to her.

  “That would explain your honesty,” she said, more coldly than she intended.

  “I am sorry, goodlady,” said the young man.

  ‘No, no.” She rested a hand on his arm. “I did not mean that to come out the way it did. You provide a timely reminder of my responsibilities. I shall act upon your words, and visit the village more often. I thank you.”

  The porter gave an unsure smile, and bobbed his head. Carriage wheels rattled on cobbles. Four fine drays came into view and pulled up outside the station’s entrance.

  “There. My ride home,” she said. “If you would help my coachman with my bags?”

  The porter nodded. His jovial nature returned a little at the provision of a generous tip.

  “And tell him he is late,” Lucinia finished.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Death’s Calling

  A TOUCH ON Aarin’s back disturbed his scribing. He looked up from the manuscript into the cowl of a Guider. His face was swathed in black bandages. Aarin recognised him easily enough, there was no mistaking the apologetic air of Brother Harma.

  “It is time,” Harma said. “I am sorry.”

  Without replying, Aarin scraped the golden ink from his pen nib back into the pot, screwed on the lid, laid the pen quietly on the wooden ledge at the base of the desk and got down from his high stool. He was forced to rely solely on his right hand for these tasks. Harma winced at the bandage on Aarin’s left hand, for he had been there when the damage had been done.

  Harma was Aarin’s most sympathetic gaoler. When Prior Seutreneause had Aarin hurt, Harma blanched. When Uguin, the prior’s steward, taunted Aarin, Harma cast down his eyes. He did not excuse himself, or protest, but he was not happy with what the Guiders were doing to one of their own. Aarin veered between being grateful and despising Harma for being weak. Harma had not stepped in to stop Seutreneause’s thugs breaking the rest of his fingers, for all the guilt he showed.

  Harma stood back to allow Aarin out through the scriptorium. The other Guiders worked on without looking up, bandaged faces close to their work. Pens scratched over vellum, magnifying glasses glinted in the light of tallow sticks. They worked in shifts, never stopping. The New Book of the Dead took shape under their pens. More than a record of every person who had died in the Karsan isles since the driving of the gods, it was a desperate attempt to save the souls of the ghostless dead.

  If he ever got out of the monastery, Aarin would not miss the tallow’s smell. The monks rendered the fat from the corpses of sea dragons washed up on the Final Isle’s shores. It reeked of fish and death.

  At the end of the scriptorium was the entrance to the underworld. A carving of the Dead God’s crucifixion filled most of the wooden door closing the way. From his cross Tallimastus stared at Aarin dolefully. An idealised depiction, Aarin thought. The real god was far less noble.

  Harma unlocked the door and the two of them descended winding stairs into the Room of Names. They passed through an archway too grand for the staircase into a huge stone vault. On walls and ceiling carved from the living rock, monks worked night and day to engrave the names of those who had died since the god driving. This was also part of their efforts to save the souls of the people of Karsa. Their aim was noble. Whether it worked or not was another matter.

  The dead aided the living in their labours. Pasquanty, Aarin’s murdered deacon, was among them. Aarin searched out the animate corpse of his companion, and was glad to see they had finally stitched up Pasquanty’s torn throat. Though his dead man’s eyes had curdled to a dull white, and the treatments to preserve his skin had rendered it taut and yellowish, the corpse was still recognisable as the mortal shell of his former companion. If only Pasquanty’s soul were in a better place, Aarin would have felt little guilt.

  Harma and Aarin walked under the wheeled scaffold the dead and the living worked from. It had moved only a fraction of an inch down the hall during Aarin’s time as prisoner there. The vault was large, and could take many names, but the space was finite.

  Past the scaffolding smooth walls awaited, while at the far end of the vault was a hinged iron grille big enough for a single person to pass through. The rough character of the gateway was at odds with the precise engineering of the vault, and a sickening, unvarying wind blew through the grille, warm as breath.

  Harma unlocked the gate. A short tunnel led onto a stairway cut into rotten rock. It looked like fat rather than stone. The more often Aarin saw it, the more he believed that was exactly what it was, and the stair was carved into the carcass of some celestial being.

  He had walked this route three times before. Harma took a lantern from a store at the top. He lit it, and they descended into a place that existed outside of the world and of time. A steep, greasy stair, full of snags to trap unwary feet, led down an open-sided tunnel. Harma’s lamp shone on glistening rock to their left. To their right there was nothing but blackness and the stinking wind.

  At the bottom of the stairs was a platform of slabs supported on rusting iron girders projecting into the void. Three piers extended out into the dark beyond the platform’s edge. Aarin’s eyes were drawn to the leftmost, and he saw the spray of blood and heard the hopeless gurgle of Pasquanty as if it were happening again.

  Prior Seutreneause awaited him, his wounding hands buried in his sleeves. Four other monks stood around a fifth whose outer habit had been removed, though his face was still bandaged. The young monk’s hands were free. He offered his life freely to the Dead God.

  “Guider Aarin,” said Seutreneause, “are you ready?”

  Monks grabbed him and bound his hands behind his back. Aarin grimaced at the pain in his fingers.

  “Careful!” he hissed. “Thanks to your prior, they are broken, remember?”

  Seutreneause made an equivocal face and shrugged.

  “Then you should tell truth about your conversations with the Dead God, Guider.”

  “I am,” said Aarin. He remained defiant as the Guiders slipped a noose over his head and seated it about his neck.

  “I’m afraid I don’t believe you. Your family has a certain reputation for bloody mindedness.”

  “What would I have to hide?” spat Aarin. A monk pushed him toward the rightmost pier. The young monk walked, head lowered, to the end of the left pier, where he stared at the black fanatically.

  “Tallimastus raves at me. He is more interested in keeping me as part of his collection of souls, which you will soon be joining!” Aarin shouted at the young monk. The monk glanced at him before returning to his contemplation of the void. “How many times must I tell you, Seutreneause? The god is mad. He will not tell me anything. There is no point to this.”

  “Nevertheless, you shall continue to go until you bring me the information I desire,” said the prior. “Find out how to solve the problem of the dead. Think beyond yourself, you selfish creature. There is more than your life at stake here. The afterlives of all the peoples of Ruthnia hang in the balance. If the Lands of the Dead are closed to us, what then? You took an oath. Fulfil it. Brother Marcel here is willing to die for the truth.” He indicated the younger monk who was now lost in prayer, eyes closed and lips whispering.

  “As am I,” said Aarin. “But my answer remains the same. The god has told me nothing.”

  “Then that is too bad for you.” Seutreneause lifted his hand and waved two more monks for
ward. One stood behind Brother Marcel. A third went to the central pier, a piece of vellum in one hand, a torch in the other. Upon the vellum was the detailed life story of a man recently dead, richly illuminated with precious gold ink. The monk behind Aarin placed his hand in the small of Aarin’s back.

  “A dead soul for the Dead God,” said the central monk. He held the vellum into the fire, until it blackened and curled, then tossed it off the pier. As darkness swallowed the flame a desperate shriek blasted from the deeps.

  “The first gate is open,” a monstrous voice moaned on the wind.

  “A living soul for the Dead God,” said the monk behind Marcel. Marcel prayed harder as the older monk produced a dagger and slit his throat. Marcel toppled off the pier into the void. When Aarin returned, there would be a new animate working in the vault. How they retrieved the bodies he did not know.

  “The second gate is open,” said the voice.

  “Now your turn, Aarin,” said Seutreneause unpleasantly.

  “A soul neither dead nor alive for the Dead God,” said the monk behind Aarin.

  Aarin took a breath that was cut short by a shove in his back. His feet slipped off the end of the pier, and he was lowered over the edge by his noose. He kicked helplessly. Although he knew he would not die, his body disagreed, and fought furiously for the air denied it.

  Once more, his vision filled with spots. His back banged against rusting iron. From somewhere above, Seutreneause shouted at his underlings. Once more, Aarin choked out his last.

  Dying was becoming tiresome.

  FOR THE FOURTH time, Aarin sped away from his own body. The wall of fatty rock vanished into infinite black. For an age he sped through nothingness, until a bright point winked into being far ahead, and grew rapidly into a sphere of silver. The prison of Tallimastus, the Dead God.

  Aarin’s soul alighted gently upon the sphere. It was a tiny ball of a world, with horizons only a few hundred yards away. Quickly, he came to the Dead God’s throne, and the impoverished court of ghosts he surrounded himself with. Green ghost light lit the scene in sickly shades. The newly-sacrificed Marcel stood closest to Tallimastus, his eyes full of hate.

  “I told you so,” said Aarin to the ghost.

  Brother Marcel shouted back, his neck straining, lips gaping, but the dead cannot speak, and his words went unheard.

  “Ah, Guider Aarin,” said Tallimastus.

  When viewed with Aarin’s good eye, Tallimastus was a figure of two halves. His left side was that of a heavily-muscled man, vital looking. The other was wizened flesh, a mummified figure with an empty eye socket and shrunken skin. It was the dead half that spoke to him. Aarin squeezed shut his good eye, and looked upon Tallimastus with his blind eye, whose sight had been stolen when he was young. Through that, Tallimastus was an old man with milky white eyes dressed in a threadbare robe. The marks of crucifixion were the only commonality between the two. Neither aspect was a true vision, but Aarin found the living god easier to relate to, and so he kept his good eye closed.

  “Have you come to ask me unanswerable questions? Have you come to be chased from my cell again?” said Tallimastus. “It amused me the first time, I grow bored of it now.”

  “Enjoy it while you can,” said Aarin. His soul’s voice was his original, not the husky whisper repeated stranglings had forced on his living body. “I will not survive many more trips into your domain. I will soon lose the use of this hand if this continues. He will not let the fingers heal, but breaks them every time when I convey the message that you will not talk to me.”

  “Why would you do that?” said Tallimastus, genuinely perplexed. “I did not intend for you to escape, but you did. I told you everything I could the first time we met. The route to the Lands of the Dead is weakening because magic is consumed faster than it is replenished. Your kind suck this world dry of magic with your machines. Weaker souls dissipate to nothing, those strong enough to resist will become difficult for a time. Eventually, there will be insufficient energy left to the World Spirit to allow the stronger souls to manifest as well. You doom yourselves to oblivion. There, I told you again.” He laced his fingers over his stomach. “Tell them that.”

  Aarin lowered himself to the ground and crossed his legs. He was insubstantial as the Dead God’s glaring ghosts, and drifted upward. His spirit tether floated behind him, a red line snaking off from his chest back to his corporeal body.

  “Go on,” said Tallimastus sarcastically, “make yourself comfortable.”

  “For a god, you are unwise to the nature of humanity,” said Aarin. “If I tell them that, they will probably kill me. Or they will demand a solution, and send me back anyway. Either way, my prospects are poor. I do not know how many more times I can undergo this closeness to death.”

  “Your soul is thinning,” said the Dead God. “Ah well,” he sighed. “I will be sorry to see you go. Your success in reaching me has proved a diversion. My anger at your escapes help enliven this endless night.”

  “You are bored.”

  “What prisoner is not?” said the god. “You are imprisoned. I doubt your evenings are full of pleasant diversions.”

  “Do you want to be free?”

  “What do you think, mortal?”

  “Then help me get away from the Final Isle. I can aid you.”

  “I think not!” Tallimastus snorted. “Perhaps you could help me, but I doubt you will. If I did help you escape, I would not have the pleasure of watching you suffer. It is all that gives me joy. This cell is so dreary, and I say that having ruled the Lands of the Dead. Terrible place.”

  “The Twin draws near,” said Aarin. “I have seen fires on its face. The Earth shakes at its approach. Tell me, if something ill befalls the Earth, or even just this monastery, will you not be trapped here forever?”

  Tallimastus looked away, his mouth twisted.

  “I thought as much,” said Aarin. “Here I am. Here you are. I have a proposal for you, my lord god.”

  “Then Tallimastus is listening,” said the god grudgingly.

  “I swore an oath to guide the dead to their next life. I will keep it. Res Iapetus’ driving of the gods has had unforeseen results for the living and the dead. You need to be free.”

  “I agree with you, Guider, if I were free then the problem might be solved. But then I would say that. How would releasing you help me?”

  “Aid me. I have formulated a plan for escape, but I cannot do it alone. I will hold the way open as best I can. You will have time to oppose our captors.”

  “I believe you are selling me the same fish twice,” said the god. “The door will swing shut, and how would that help me, I repeat? Only Res Iapetus knows the secrets of this place, and he is as much a prisoner as I am. I made sure of that.”

  “It is to Res Iapetus I will go,” said Aarin. “Once free of this isle, I will seek out the King of the Drowned. I believe that I can reach him.”

  “You want to set the Goddriver free?” Tallimastus laughed. “It cannot be done.”

  “I can reach him though.”

  Tallimastus shrugged. “Perhaps. He is lost between life and death. Perhaps you have enough skill to circumventnt my enchantment, and speak with him.”

  “Then if he knows of the way to set you free, and I can speak with him, then I will find it.”

  “Yes, yes, very good,” said the god tersely, as if he could not wait for the conversation to be done with. “That still does not guarantee my release.”

  “Whatever he intended to do, it had unforeseen consequences. He will see that. He will release you.”

  “How can you say that?” said Tallimastus angrily. “You never knew him. He was an arrogant little prick; he thought he knew everything. He did not!” He slapped his hand on the arm of his throne. “He will never release me. Never. He loathed us all. There is no getting around such hatred.” He shook his head. “If you did release me, then fate would demand the return of the other gods, and I would be forced into union with my living aspe
ct. He is mad. I have no desire to experience that again.”

  “That will definitely happen?”

  “Let’s say it is narratively appropriate that I be insane,” said the god. “Eliturion dealt with all that nonsense, but fate does so love a good story. That is how I am seen, so that is the way I will be.” He tugged at his beard. “Confound it! In a sense, my imprisonment makes me free. Insanity or gaol. It is no choice.”

  “We can deal with that when it comes to it.”

  Tallimastus laughed. “You know nothing you speak of. I am fucked, to use your expression.”

  “Then you prefer to remain here for eternity or death, whichever is to come soonest?”

  Tallimastus grumbled in his throat. “I cannot say I do.”

  “Then let me put it another way. Do you have a better idea?” Aarin opened his good eye.

  The divided form of Tallimastus looked down at him. His living expression was blank, only the dead side of his face moved, and the expression it wore was terrifying. “I do not have a better idea,” he said eventually.

  Aarin waited while the god of the dead regarded him.

  “Keeping the door ajar will not be enough. I must ride with you. Hold out your arm,” said Tallimastus. Dried sinews creaked as the god extended his forefinger. A sharp yellow nail glinted on the end.

  Aarin obeyed.

  “Hold still. For I must cut your soul.” The dry flesh of the god’s face creaked into a horrible smile. “I will not lie. This will hurt. A lot.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Escape from the Final Isle

  AARIN RETURNED TO his body in the same manner as before: a swift tug upon his soul’s tether, and he raced back to his mortal shell. This time, however, he was bloated with power, so heavy with souls he felt like an anchor snarled with weed being dragged through cold water. The distance from the sphere to the living world was further than ever. His arm pulsed with the insult done it by Tallimastus’ talon. The thread of his life grew thinner and more frayed as he progressed, straining under the burdens placed upon it. A god rode with him, a burden the mortal spirit was never meant to bear.