by Martin Davey
Which reminded him. He turned and looked back the way he had come, the clouds thin now, barely seen as they wisped about the ground. He had other business to attend to.
He slipped the dagger back into his belt, clutching the bloodied cloth in his hand as he hurried away from the blood baths and the fallen god. Already the Keepers had told him where they wanted him to go next, but first he had the Mahrata to attend to.
It was cold here on top of the world, the air thin, and he couldn’t help remembering old gods he had slaughtered in warmer climes where the women had dusky thighs and the sun bled red as a tangerine. Even the Paramin’s own home where they had danced before his temples and sacrificed to his name thousands of years ago, was far to the south where the sun rose high and the houses had white walls and black windows. Why had he had to come all this way to be born? Trying to escape the gaze of the Keepers? The Keepers saw all, saw into the hearts and minds of all men, and even the old gods couldn’t escape their watchful gaze.
Retaj clutched the cloth tighter in his hand, the blood of the god still warm and sticky. He kept his head low and his shoulders high as he walked back through the town. People still milled about, looking around and admiring the peaks of the mountains all around them just beginning to show through the thinning cloud as though the murk and the taint of the god’s presence was gone and the world was becoming clear and clean once more.
Nobody recognized him as he passed. He had stayed clear of talking to any of those that would betray the Keepers, just being around them made it hard to breathe in the stink of their presence. The few women he had used on the long road, nobody had missed the bodies he had left in the shallow graves. People disappeared on the road all the time. Fenner had been a worry; Retaj stopped now to look down the cliff face, worried that the thinning cloud might reveal the body. But no, no sign of Fenner down there in the swirling mists. Luck was on his side. On the side of the Keepers. He’d had no idea how deep the cliff was when he slung the body down into the clouds. Deep enough. All he needed was another hour, maybe less, and then if they saw the body or realized Fenner was gone, then Retaj would be gone, gone to somewhere warmer, somewhere with beds and whorehouses and inns. He walked quicker, his shoulders hunched around his ears, the bloodied cloth still in his hand.
Nearly there now, he passed the stone fountain, two young children throwing stones at the head of the giant bird that decorated it. The basin of the fountain was dry; the people who lived here as gone and forgotten as the winged god they had worshipped. Retaj walked past, breathing slowly through his nose, willing his heart to slow and not to rush too much. Walk slowly, casually, normally, then the people around him wouldn’t pay any attention. The sensation of eyes watching his every move was only his imagination. Calm. Breathe slowly. Don’t fail now, not when he was so close, when he only had this last thing to attend to.
He could see it now. The Mahrata’s house. He fixed his eyes ahead, brushed a thumb casually over the hilt of the dagger in his belt and tried not to look at the black windows of the stone house. The cloth in his hand stuck to the skin on his palm as he walked. Soldiers with swords in hands, strapped to backs, and in scabbards at their hips passed between Retaj and the house. Men and women with dark skin and white skin, in clothes with as many colours as a man could imagine. Truly an Army of Nations the Mahrata had assembled in her brief journey.
The door was cold and damp from the cloud when he pushed it open. Only as it opened did Retaj worry that she wouldn’t be there. She should be there. She had to be there. And she was there, her back slender and her neck long. Her dress was red and shimmered even in the cool dimness of the house. Her arms were bare and her neck was bare and Retaj could see why the men had fought for her, fought with the Mahrata in their hearts. The army would have followed her to the lair of the Nameless One himself if she had willed it, and they would have been satisfied with a smile from the Mahrata for their efforts.
She hadn’t heard him enter and Retaj smiled. He was a man who had slain more gods than he had fingers. Chosen by the Keepers to keep the world free of the taint of the old gods and their sick lusts. Chosen when he was little more than a child to slay the priest who had raised him. A priest of a god known as Argothor, a creature who had walked the valleys of his home country, a god who had sung songs and played music for the shepherds who had once roamed there. Not really a god at all, and now forgotten once Retaj had slain the last priest. More Dreams, and more priests had fallen under his blade until finally Keeper Jerohim had Visited him and told him of a god being reborn in the sweat-stained jungles of Karan.
Retaj drew his dagger and slipped further into the room. Still the Mahrata didn’t turn, she was looking at something, a map or some other roll of paper on the table before her. She leaned with both hands on the table, her shoulders high and narrow and her hair falling loose about her face and neck. He breathed through his mouth, his heart racing but his breathing slow. Only a woman. A woman who could turn a man to bloody pulp in his armour, but only a young woman all the same. He was Retaj, slayer of the gods. No woman would hear his approach.
She lifted her head, looking away from the table as though she had heard something. He saw her profile, a smooth pale cheek, soft hair falling about it. Retaj stopped. He didn’t breathe as he watched her. Then she turned back to the map and he waited ten heartbeats before moving again, his hand tightening about his dagger.
“It is done, then?” The Mahrata said without turning around, still leaning her hands on the table.
Retaj’s mouth felt dry with need as he looked at her leaning over the table. He knew that was the effect she desired so he didn’t move any closer. “Yes. We need to go.”
No expression on her face as she turned around, sitting back on the table, her breasts pushing against the shimmering fabric of her dress. “Just like that? It’s done and we leave?”
“What more did you want?” He threw the bloodied cloth at her and she watched it arc through the air, making no move to catch it before it landed on the table. The god’s blood had been thin and dried quickly. He squeezed his hand around his dagger before he pushed it back into his belt and wiped a hand across his forehead sweeping his hair away from his eyes. “How did you hear me coming?” Only a young woman. He had killed gods, sneaked into the lair of trained assassins and killed their gods and their priests, how could this young woman hear him coming every time he tried to sneak in on her? The only answer made his mouth dry, and not with need this time.
Rebekah smiled and slipped off the table, her hair falling about her shoulders and her dress creasing about her hips. “Does that frighten you?” She walked toward him, her shoulders loose and her hands by her side, her smile the same as the one that had made Marin grimace with need. “But you’re so careful, Retaj.” She looked up at him, still smiling, trailed a sharp finger down his cheek and he grabbed her wrist hard. He wanted to pull her to him, crush her in his arms, taste her red lips. He wanted it so badly that he almost gasped. But he knew that was what she wanted. No woman had been able to manipulate him like that. He pushed her away and she laughed, light and high and sexual beyond his imagining.
“For a godslayer, you might not be as careful as you think.” She lifted a hand to the strap of her dress, opened her hand like a street conjurer and held out a short pin to him. “Remember, that is all it would take, Retaj. When you sleep next to me, when I run my hands over your body, all it would take is a touch of this, so light you wouldn’t even wake, and I would have all I need.”
“Or you could just slit my throat and have bowls full of it.”
“Or that.” This made her smile and she turned away, rolled up the map and put it back on a shelf. Retaj could tell by the set of her shoulders that she was thinking. Rebekah wasn’t the only one who could read people. “So did he have any last words?”
“Marin?” Retaj shrugged. He knew she would know exactly what happened by the bleeding stones, but decided to play along with her pretence of ignorance. �
��He was worried about you mostly, I think.” He remembered crippling Marin, so easy in the end. Remembered killing the god; the repugnance of it, the foul flesh breaking so easily, and stinking. Remembered going back and killing Marin, chopping his neck and making it quick so he could get away from the smell of the god. “I made it quick.”
“No worries at the last moment? No guilt?” Rebekah raised an eyebrow at him, her smile almost mocking.
“Guilt? Guilt about what? He wasn’t a man at all. You didn’t see his face, Rebekah. Shit, it looked like he’d already been dead for the Keepers know how long. I was putting the thing out of its misery.”
“So what was he if not a man?”
“Shouldn’t I be asking you that seeing as you were the one to slit his throat and taste his blood?” Retaj hated himself for the jealousy in his voice. He spent his days and nights fearing that this woman would claim his blood, and yet the intimacy of it made him jealous as a boy.
Rebekah shrugged, a narrow shoulder moving against the strap of her dress. Everything about the woman reeked of sex and it had killed him having to stay away from her these past days. Seeing her before her men, seeing her with Marin. The way the creature had looked at her had made Retaj long for the day when he could kill him and tell him of the nights he had spent with his Mahrata. But then when the time came and he had seen the pain in Marin’s eyes, sympathy had taken hold of his tongue. No matter. The Paramin was dead. Marin was dead, or even deader than he had already been, and it was time to leave.
“All I saw was a woman,” Rebekah said. “A woman on a riverbank with the sun high in the sky and the flowers nodding in a warm breeze.”
Retaj couldn’t help but laugh and it was loud in the cool quiet of the house with the thin clouds stirring at the windows. “You’re telling me Marin was a woman?”
Rebekah looked at him and his laughter died. It was a look that reminded him that, despite her sexy playfulness and her teases, she was still a woman of power, a woman to be feared. The reminder only made him want her all the more.
“No, he wasn’t a woman.” She walked over to the window and Retaj noticed a small bowl on the table where the map had been. He fought the urge to run his hands over his own skin to make sure there were no tiny cuts and pricks there. Rebekah turned back to him, “But this woman was there, in that small part of him that was his true self, she was there with a young man by her side. Somebody hid the real Marin well, somebody didn’t want us to know who or what he was.”
“And what did she say, this woman?”
Rebekah shrugged another slender shoulder. Sometimes she looked younger than she had any right to. “She said nothing, she was only,” here she paused, chewing on a red lip. “There? She was only there, empty as though hidden from me. I used her to try and get to Marin, to find out who he was or where he came from. But even there he was hidden from us as well as himself.”
Retaj nodded, remembering Marin’s look of furtive fear after the fight with the Canaristi. His face had been rotting, flesh white and putrid hanging from broken white bone, and eye sockets empty save the things writhing and squirming within the skull. And then afterward, the look of almost innocent fear. “He thought you had done something to him,” he said.
Rebekah shrugged again. She was shrugging too much. It was a casual, careless gesture that wasn’t casual or careless at all. Did she feel sympathy for Marin, or was she mourning the death of the god she had sworn to serve when she was a girl? The fact he didn’t know the answers to those questions were why he could shake with need of her, but also why he had to watch her, study her, and put an end to her if he ever thought she might interfere with his work. With the gods’ work.
“You look at me as though you’re thinking how many different ways you could kill me,” she said. She walked over to him, her dress tight about her hips and swaying about her ankles. She rested both hands on his chest and looked up into his eyes. She raised her head as though about to kiss him, her lips full and blood red, and Retaj couldn’t help but lean down to meet them. Rebekah smiled and turned away at the last moment so his lips only brushed her cheeks. “Remember, all it would take,” she met his eyes and slid her arms from around his neck, he’d barely even noticed she’d put them there. “All it would take.” She showed him the pin, close to his eye and held between thumb and finger. She traced the pin down his cheek, hard enough to scratch through his stubble, not hard enough to draw blood. She smiled, her teeth showing white as she drew the pin slowly down his face. “My godslayer,” she breathed.
Retaj fought it as long as he could before grabbing a fistful of her hair in his hand, soft and strong and he pulled her to him, kissing her hard and greedily. He pushed her back and back until he felt her fall against the table and he had his hands in her hair, on her back, their tongues touching, lips hard and the table scraping under the weight of their bodies.
“Rebekah?” The voice was angry, bereft and questioning. Jermatoah. They should have left when they had the chance. Retaj could feel Rebekah’s breath on his lips, hot and sweet. He gave her one last kiss, hard, before he pulled himself away. “Rebekah?” There were tears in the voice, and a burning fury, too. They had found their god so soon.
The door was pushed open as Retaj adjusted his shirt and his breeches, wiped the back of his hand across his lips and pushed his hair away from his eyes. He stood away from Rebekah as Jermatoah limped into the room, leaning on her staff , her ankles swollen beneath the rippling green of her rough dress. “Rebekah, our lord is gone. The god has been murdered. All is lost.”
Retaj shifted in the room to find a dark corner, watching Jermatoah all the time. He had thought there were tears in her voice, but those strange youthful eyes of hers were dry. Her back was humped and her hair was white and dry as burnt straw, but the eyes...Retaj watched her from his dark corner, his hard cock shrivelling as he focussed on the crone. The eyes were dry, and though she leaned on her staff, her grip was loose and her hand was steadier than he’d seen it on the road up the mountain. This woman might look older than she was; she might look older than any woman he’d seen in his life, but he didn’t think she was as weak as she might look. She might play on her appearance of age to make people think she was weak.
Dead men walking around in old men’s bodies; young women walking around in old women’s bodies. Life had been much simpler when people were who they appeared to be. Though he supposed he couldn’t complain about deceptions and false appearances when he could barely remember his own birth name.
“Attend me, child. There is work for us to do; we must avenge our lord.” The crone turned back to the door, leaning on her staff, though her eyes were bright and her hand loose on the wood.
“I am no child.” Rebekah stood straight, her shoulders back. Difficult to believe that she had been lost in the throes of passion moments ago. Or had she been? Was her passion for Retaj another of her games? Now she concentrated only on Jermatoah, her eyes bright and her back straight and her hands by her side. Standing like that, her breasts looked bigger, pushing against the thin fabric of her red dress.
The old woman turned, her staff still in her hand and her brittle white hair falling about her shoulders and her back. Despite her words, despite the death of her god, she looked thoughtful as she looked at Rebekah. “So, it has come to this, has it?”
Bowls lined the shelves and the walls and the cabinets and Rebekah faced Jermatoah with her eyes bright and her back straight. “I am no longer the child you beat in Terofir,” she said. “The dreams made you old and twisted in your soul, not just your shrivelled face and wasted body.”
Jermatoah looked to Retaj and back to Rebekah, her eyes widening in her wrinkled face, but she made no move to step back. “Your Garanin is dead as well, Rebekah. Dead once more. Something dark and foul stalks these mountains, an agent of the Keepers come to put an end to our plans. I told you it was wrong, to bring that thing to the presence of your god.” Three, perhaps four bowls rattled on their shelves befor
e stilling once more. “What now for our people, besieged by the Burned King? What now for them without their Paramin?”
“The Garanin had served its purpose and its time had come.” Rebekah looked and sounded different, her chin higher as she spoke, her hair spilling about her face, she reached out a hand and beckoned Retaj to come to her. Without a thought he obeyed. Compelled to obey? The thought sent him cold with horror. He looked at her, his eyes wide. Had she? Had she claimed his blood? The thought filled him with fear, but Rebekah’s eyes were fixed only on Jermatoah. Anybody else would think she was at ease, proud but at ease, but Retaj knew Rebekah and saw the tightness around her eyes.
Jermatoah looked at them both, her white hair bright in the dimness of the room. She leaned on her staff and her wrinkled mouth pursed. “The friend of the Garanin,” she nodded and Retaj wondered what she was thinking, what she knew of him. He was a man who hated anybody knowing about his true self. Even Rebekah didn’t know his true name or where he was from. Even she didn’t know the true names of the gods he had slain before he began the hunt for the Paramin. “You come to me seeking my help and you bring the walking dead to my town, bring death to our god, and end to the hope of our people. And you call yourself the Mahrata?!” Jermatoah’s voice rose with each word as though she was passing judgement on Rebekah. Gone was the tremulous voice of the old crone and now she spoke with the strong, level voice of a young woman and it was a hideous thing coming from that aged, thin-lipped mouth with the broken teeth.
“I call myself nothing,” Rebekah said, her voice low, barely controlled. “Areen and Darl followed me from the city when I was banished. They named me what they named me and followed me here, brought my army to me. People name me what they wish, I came only to find the woman who stripped me and beat me when I was a child.” Now she smiled and Retaj thought his very heart would stop if she ever smiled at him in such a way.
Jermatoah stood straight now, her humped back straightening. She seemed taller, almost as tall as Retaj himself and there seemed something unnatural about a crone standing in such a way. She raised a staff at the both of them, “You always were a poor student, Rebekah. If you had paid more attention in your lessons, then I might not have had to beat you so. You betray your god, betray your people because of your own folly?”