by John Ruch
“Coooooooooooooooooooooo.”
The sound was almost painfully sweet. In unison, most of the people in the room automatically huddled even closer to their pets, rubbing their forefingers and thumbs together and whispering, “Widdee-widdee” in baby-talk. Rinka did it to Mieux, patting soft kisses on her cheeks; and Mieux did it to the baby drakes on Rinka’s armored chest.
Ashton was not immune. His attention snapped onto the bird. The plump curve of its forehead and breast. The blunted tips of its wings. Its bright blinking eyes. It was excruciatingly endearing.
“Adore the adorable,” muttered the barkeep, her crossed eyes welling with tears, just as his did.
The cooing faded with a last faint echo off the mountains. The crowd went back into motion, such as it was. One woman plucked up a bunny and placed it inside a cart big enough to haul ore out of a mine, placing the animal within a nest of dried grass. On the way out, she banged the cart into barstools, chairs, and Ashton’s shin, shooting him a scowl. Muttering to himself, Ashton made his way back to Elsbeth and the flask in her pocket.
Ashton imagined that legates were like older versions of Lain: bullnecked thugs with campaign medals for hearts; maybe with better manners, but on balance, still someone you’d prefer to have dead in the woods. But when he finally granted them an audience the next evening, Archand Clavileno, the leader of Falcon’s Nest, proved to be barely out of his teens and looked like he belonged in diapers. Thin to the point of frailty and his head shaved bald, he had the aspect of an infant—but not the innocence. There was something sinister about the round glasses with smoked lenses that hid his eyes, and the way the tip of his nose seemed to have been clipped with shears. Then he smiled in greeting, revealing a mouth whose teeth had been pulled and replaced with the rounded nub-fangs from a baby otter, perhaps. Something bristled in Ashton, but quelled as fast as it came.
Archand lived atop the most elaborately carved house, with his office within one of its fanciful turrets. It was more library than military command post, its walls lined with heavy bookshelves and time-browned etchings of fantasy castles and mother-and-cub bestiary illustrations. Wielding an old children’s book rather than a scepter, Archand toured the large group around the smallish chamber as best he could. Only the increasingly sickly Alfie and the petting-addicted Mieux stayed behind. On the other side, Archand had his desk flanked by two guards with nicked-up ancient swords and two old guys in white robes sporting the same strange sunglasses. A couple of long-haired cats wandered the tops of the bookcases.
Finally, Archand lowered himself into the chair behind the desk and looked at them, stroking the cover of his book like a lapdog. Behind him, through a glassless window screened in lattice, Ashton could see a towering structure on the mountainside, a scaffolding of wood surrounding a metal tube that glinted in the sparkling light of Atel’s Trail.
“Visitors are such a rare pleasure,” Archand began in his high-pitched voice, his old-fashioned accent rendered stranger by the wheeze of air through his little fangs. “Though a remarkable new priestess did arrive just a tenday ago. A Blue Weàlae prodigy named Pwyll Wavebrand. Perhaps you met her on the road.”
Rinka cocked her head and pursed her eyebrows a moment, then shrugged like everyone else did.
“What are you doing living in the middle of nowhere anyhow?” Ashton asked a bit sharply as he felt his emotions start to itch as if they were muffled by a wool sweater.
“Ah, but this is a special place,” Archand said, leaning back as one of the cats hopped onto the desk and flopped all over his book. “Generations ago, our ancestors built Falcon’s Nest to guard the site of a dangerous event—the fall of a god. The work of a warband known as the Godkillers.”
“That rings a bell,” Ashton said, reaching out to pet the cat as something continued to gnaw inside him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Elsbeth clench her fists, though her face remained slack.
“We have protected the Godkillers site so well from the outside world that the outside world has forgotten us—the Empire included.”
“Being forgotten is a terrible thing for a soldier,” Ninebarrow said sympathetically. “You keep their honor by keeping their memory.”
“We are not soldiers anymore,” Archand said, as if he weren’t flanked by swordsmen. He looked at a spot over the group’s heads and smiled wistfully. “We are the lost children of soldiers. And sometimes, being remembered is far worse than being forgotten.”
“What god did they kill?” Elsbeth asked bluntly, still squeezing her fists, her shoulders tight.
“They strangled it in its crib. Who can say what it might have been?” Archand replied airily, getting up from the chair and floating to a bookcase. He selected a tome from the shelf and flicked it open, gazing into its pages. The spine said it was Faenwyie, the famous ancient epic left unfinished by its anonymous author. “It was destroyed not for its actions, but for the blood and fire that came with its birth. As if all the other gods were not born in violence.”
Archand turned to the window and looked out at the moonlit tower. “Today, we have another new god; new to us, that is. Ironically, fortifying the site of these Godkillers has made it an extraordinarily safe place for a temple.”
“A god of what?” Rinka asked without her typical snap.
“Those ancient stirrings of parental instinct, the cornerstone of devotion, the blissful loss of the self to the promise of contining our strain for all eternity,” Archand muttered, his breath steaming in the cool air filtered through the lattice like temple incense. “We worship Cuteness.”
“No one worships Cuteness,” Rinka replied flatly. “It has no priests.”
“That’s because we all worship Cuteness. We always have,” Archand said with a self-amused simper. He replaced the book on its shelf.
“You mean you don’t just have a temple, but the god itself? A living, breathing god?” Ashton asked as the legate nodded. “What does it look like? How did it get here?”
The old guy to the right coughed theatrically and began what sounded like a well-rehearsed speech in awkward old Corcorid lingo.
“Some say it was found far in the mountains across the northern sea by men who stalk the snow with clubs, their land and hearts frozen, crushing things of cuteness for pelts to warm their feet in daylong nights. In the mountain-man’s long winter shadow, it tilted its face, shedding tears that froze to crystalline gems before tinkling on the the snows. Unprepared for such poignancy, those men of the north. It wracked him, convulsed him with unfamiliar glamor. He turned his club on himself, methodically cracking his bones, marrow seeping in crimson icicles from punctured flesh, his glacial eyes never leaving its warm jet ones until he collapsed before it in a worshipful heap. Hearing its coos echoing down the valley brought the northman’s fellows, the beseeching face compelling them to lift it on the shoulders, bear it to a longboat, and oar it southward. Long and perilous, that journey. As rations expired, they competed to feed it earlobes and fingers sliced off, finally starving and bleeding until they were no more, the god gently nosing their bodies into the sea. It trailed a flipper in the waters so that porpoises arrived. They, too, were compelled by the pressure of the blinking eyes. Taking the anchor rope in their snouts, they drew the boat with long, arching leaps to a Weàlae port….”
“Wrong, all wrong!” interrupted the other old man. “It came from the south, where men sprinkle gold dust as a condiment and employ long broad crystals of emerald as lumber, enthroning themselves under glittering porches, bathed in the filtered aquamarine light and fanned with bundled peacock feathers, looking like the slow-moving denizens of a sunken reef. The teeming forests around them provided their only listless trade—exotic beasts peddled to the caravans. Northerners gave up their drab hens and gray mousers for apes trained to talk and self-immolating songbirds that rose again from ashen eggs. The god was young then; they found it nesting, curled, tiny limbs tucked, plump from the giblets of its siblings. Northward it traveled in a gil
ded cage on the great post-road. Each carrier succumbed in time, some forgetting to eat or crushed by wagons as they gazed upon its cuteness. But always another traveler would find it and bear it on towards the next tollhouse, and finally to Falcon’s Nest. So fat and plush it grew on begged treats, its owner committed the faith’s only known sin. Thinking he could no longer care for so large a cuteness, and amid his neighbors’ whispers about stolen chicks and missing infants, he slid the god gently down a pipe into the sewers to fend for itself. Chirps and mewlings drifted up from the grates and privies, drawing scores of new followers underground to retrieve the god. With slime-streaked, rat-bitten arms they raised it through an oubliette into the old temple. There, its tearful eyes gleamed, its soft-bristled paws glowed, in the light of the dome’s great oculus. In the sewers they remained, discarding themselves as penance, growing pale and blurry-eyed as the god flopped and rolled in the sun.”
“What we do agree on,” Archand said, “is that Cuteness is very cute. Too much for untrained mortals to survive gazing upon.”
Ashton’s churning emotions began to firm up into a recognizable form, like scrambled eggs taking heat. The shape they took was a familiar instinct to hate someone at first sight, then go out of his way to tell them so, preferably while flipping over a dinner table or something.
“I don’t like you,” he blurted to Archand.
“What’s that?” Archand said uncertainly, but still smiling, with a nasty little hiss of air through his weird teeth.
“The man said he doesn’t like you, Captain,” Trath said in his playfully menacing lilt, taking a step forward.
A few tense heartbeats passed, during which Ashton regretted their handing over their weapons to guards as a polite gesture. Then Archand waved a hand toward the top of the nearby bookshelf.
“Have you petted my other cat?” he asked.
That seemed like a splendid idea. They took turns chucking it under the chin and scratching between its ears until it jumped away, sick of them. Archand seemed sick of them, too. He ushered them outside while bidding them welcome with sincere hopes they would become permanent residents and the advice that they should pay respects at the temple.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
In the morning, the group strolled the streets of Falcon’s Nest, which were poor in sidewalks and cobblestones, but rich in extremely cute pets to fuss over. At the caravan, they had found Alfie nearly bed-ridden with his illness, and Mieux and the cat gone on some exploration of their own. None of them expressed much concern. This was Falcon’s Nest. Everything here worked out for the best.
The northern air had a bracing wine-cellar chill even as the bright sun made the blue and red wildflowers along the paths glow like torches. They said little to each other, instead making baby sounds at passing animals domesticated and wild. Inevitably, they followed fellow strollers up a mountain trail toward the great Temple of Cuteness.
It appeared to be a natural cave with an entrance improved by worshipful hands. The great doors formed the mouth of a seal-like creature with a pleasingly blunt snout and huge happy eyes hewn from sparkling opal. The whole surface was planted with a curious yellow mountain grass, lending the appearance of fur. Hewn into the stone above the doors in bubbly Corcorid letters was the phrase, “Adore The Adorable.”
While some worshipers headed straight inside, many more formed long lines at booths next to the doors, trading river-polished crystals or odd eye-shaped coins for goslings, owlets, and puppies. Here and there, weeping mothers clutching swaddled infants skipped the lines and shuffled into the cute maw. A semblance of curiosity stirred within Ashton. But they had none such local currency, so they headed inside alongside the typical crowd of Falcon’s Nest-ers with their blackened irises and clipped noses and similar attempts at retroactive cuteness.
Inside, the temple sanctuary was rendered freakishly quiet and suffocatingly warm by white furs covering every inch of wall and ceiling. A heavy sweet odor thickened the air. Several curtain-covered doorways pierced the walls; above each hung a painting of a wide-eyed animal declaring, “Adore the adorable!” in cartoon fashion. The nearest to Ashton depicted a smiling baby monkey atop a frolicking lamb.
Dominating the chamber was an enormous nest of woven grass and fur dyed an eye-burning pink. It stood a yard high and stretched at least twenty feet wide. A complex array of silver tubes sprouted from the floor around the nest, curling and intertwined in playful fashion, faintly suggesting tree branches or vines. Each tube terminated above the nest in a smooth funnel with a well-worn mouth. Hovering near these tubes and herding the lines of supplicants were a score of priest types in overstuffed robes with hoods bearing enormous bulgy false eyes on the sides. They wore spectacles of smoked glass, though the lantern light was not particularly bright.
When his group got its turn at the nest’s edge, Ashton was disappointed to see no Cute God, nor even a falcon. Like any nest, this one was full of eggs—only they were made of metal. Scores of the silver ovals, each almost comically oversized at two feet long, lay scattered on a bed of fresh rose blossoms picked from Night knew where. The eggs were decorated with chased designs to suggest a doe-eyed, blunt-snouted baby animal, much like the temple entrance.
As a worshiper clutching a baby bird or puppy arrived at the nest, one of the priests hefted an egg and flicked a latch to open it up like a clam. The worshiper tucked the creature inside, and closed the lid coffin-style. Then the priest slid the gently rocking egg full of muffled scratches and squeals into one of the silver tubes. As the egg slid away with a metal-on-metal scratch, like some reverse birth, worshiper and priest alike murmured, “Heresy down the hatch.”
One of the red-eyed mothers performed the same ritual with her squirming infant. She choked on the formulaic words as the egg entered the tube, and fellow worshipers caught her as she fell to her knees. Ashton watched impassively, only dimly aware of his toes curling in his boots.
As they had no heresies to place in the hatch, Ashton and his group wandered around the nest, admiring the animal paintings. Still, Ashton had one instinct even more basic and primitive than the urge to cuddle cuteness: the penchant for criminality. Out of sheer habit, he found himself slipping a hand behind the curtains and trying the latches on the hidden doors. He had learned long ago that someone always left even the stoutest door unlocked eventually, and it was always worth seeing what waited behind.
In this case, the third door was unlocked. Ashton shrugged and slipped through. He found himself in a short hallway with carpets woven in designs of a dark-eyed calf plodding it way down a cavern. The image seemed familiar, but Ashton was too busy following a similar path, as the hall ended in stairs leading downward into the temple bowels.
Poking his head through another curtain in another doorway, Ashton looked into a small stone chamber where two more priests sat with their backs to him on padded stools, each decorated with a fluffy tail dangling from the back. One priest was stationed next to the outlets of those pipes, catching the silver eggs as they emerged. Between them on a huge platter was a pile of animal corpses, from which the other priest methodically plucked up birds and puppies and tossed them down a large chute. Weird faint chewing noises emanated from far below. Protruding limply from the pile was a cat that looked an awful lot like Mr. Pudgymouth.
Ashton blinked as he watched the egg-catcher pop open one of the metal shells and remove one of the sacrificial human infants. It cried out as he dangled it by a foot and then pounded it firmly on the skull with a silver mallet. He tossed the lifeless form onto the pile.
A frigid chill ran over Ashton like fresh spring water cleaning a filth-blackened window. His grip on the curtains shivered so strongly he tore them down. The priests jumped up and spun around at the noise.
“Motherfuckers!” was the only coherent comment Ashton could summon. In a mad impulse, he charged the mallet-wielding one, catching him around the waist and driving a knee into his gut as they toppled.
He could feel stony
muscles under the kids’-party mascot uniform and knew he was dealing with hardcore killers. That judgement was rapidly affirmed by the other guy expertly kicking Ashton in the face, exploding his nose in a spray of blood like a sling-shot shattering a glass of water.
Ashton was happy to have the pain. It helped yank off the blanket from his sleeping mind. It all came back to him—Regulus’s orders, Elsbeth’s child, the death-cults springing up hither and yon. Massive events that had somehow slipped his mind.
They’d all been distracted, brainwashed, pacified by cuteness. Here and radiating all the way to Cor Cordum, with its great “forgetting” of old lore and the Old Ways. In the shape of pets and My Bitey Kitty dolls and calf-worshiping cults.
Ashton grabbed one of the metal eggs and flattened it on the face of the priest he was struggling with.
But the one remaining foe turned into five who came out of nowhere and beat the shit out of him. Desperately, he grabbed the corpse of the infant as irrefutable evidence and tucked it under his cloak before the gang could notice. They dragged him back up the steps into the temple.
He immediately understood that they’d dragged off his companions, too. Elsbeth, Rinka, Trelleck, Ninebarrow—all gone. The crowd of worshipers remained, but instead of lining up, they wandered around dazedly like bubbles in the wake of a rudderless ship slicing their calm waters.
Sensing possible favors from his old mistresses, Luck and Chaos, Ashton squirmed through a gap between his captors and laid the infant corpse on the nest’s furry edge. The pink went red with leaking blood.
“You think this is cute!?” Ashton shouted at the crowd. “This is what happens to your shiny eggs! They’re killing babies and eating…”
A hard tug on his cloak choked him off and slammed him to the floor. But some damage was done. Cries and gasps passed through the crowd. It wasn’t instant rebellion, but some of the stupor was wearing off, just like Ashton had experienced personally.