Aching God

by Mike Shel

  “I am Brother Greeter of St. Qoterine of the Vine, Sir Auric,” responded the man with a gummy grin. “Alas, most of us shed our names when we come here. We are known only by our purpose. I know no one named Gower Morz.”

  “He would be well into his sixties, and resident here for thirty years or more. He has a deformity, a curvature of the spine that—”

  “Ah, it must be Brother Watcher you seek,” interjected the monk. “You will find him at his post. Inquire with Brother Porter when you arrive at the monastery.” He pointed to the low mountain, vineyards stretching before it like a fruited quilt. “Follow the main path through our grapes. It leads to the rocky track up the mountain. It is not an easy climb. But then, this is true of so many things of lasting value.”

  Auric swallowed a sarcastic quip that came to mind, telling himself he had no need to play Gnaeus’s role in the lad’s absence. He thanked the monk, offered a casual wave of farewell, and the four of them turned toward the dirt road that led through long, regimented rows of cultivated vines.

  “Brother Watcher?” questioned Belech after they were out of the monk’s earshot. “Gower Morz is supposed to be blind.”

  “That may have been a useful descriptor to provide Brother Greeter,” Lumari added unhelpfully.

  “We’ll start with this Brother Watcher and make additional inquiries if it isn’t Morz,” answered Auric, failing to mask his irritation.

  They saw many monks, men and women, attired like Brother Greeter. They worked the vines, hoods up to shield them from the early afternoon rays. The slope of the land grew steeper, so that by the time they cleared the vineyards and neared the trail up the mountain their muscles felt the strain.

  At the edge of the rocky path they found another monk, a red-haired woman who dug gingerly around a cluster of weedy growth beside the gravel-strewn track. The rest of the party stopped with Lumari, who engaged the woman as she worked. “Excuse me, sister,” she began. “I assume you are aware those are weeds you are tending?”

  The woman turned, smiled, returned to her work.

  “Sister, can you explain to me why you are nurturing weeds?”

  The monk had a piece of black slate hung around her neck on a leather strap. She turned it to her face and wrote on it with a stubby piece of chalk drawn from her robe, her strokes slow and deliberate. At last she turned the slate back over so the alchemist could read what was written.

  VOW OF SILENCE.

  Lumari repeated her question. “Why are you tending weeds? Is it some form of penance?”

  The monk turned the slate toward her again, erased what she had written with the sleeve of her robe, and began scribbling again with painful exactness.

  ALL CHAERES’S CHILDREN DESERVE CARE, FRIEND.

  Lumari smirked. “You may wish to exercise caution,” the alchemist quipped. “That child there, to your left, with the fleshy stalks? That’s called Goatherd’s Bane. If you brush the leaves in the wrong direction, you’ll blow up like one of the queen’s Revival balloons.”

  The monk tilted her slate, erased, and drew a single line.

  ALL CHAERES’S CHILDREN.

  The monk smiled and bowed her head slightly before returning to her labors. Lumari stood nonplussed for a moment, but finally turned back toward the mountain path, muttering to herself.

  “Let’s all pray Gower Morz hasn’t also taken a vow of silence,” remarked Del as the rest followed Lumari up the unkempt trail. “Conversing by chalk could grow tiresome.”

  The sun was nearly overhead by the time they finally reached the monastery. The path wound steeply back and forth along the mountain’s face, covered with loose gravel and stones, inconvenient outcroppings of rock and stubborn growths of tough shrubbery and vines. Del caught Belech once, sparing the big man a fall that would have spelled broken bones or worse.

  “Would that this path was one of Chaeres’s children, we might be having an easier time of it,” puffed Lumari when they were halfway up the mountain.

  The monastery was huge, but its architecture was simple. Mostly windowless, large square blocks of rough-hewn limestone were piled in workmanlike fashion atop one another, without any of the artful touches such houses of contemplation often boasted. Its doors were ten feet tall, made of dark-stained oak, with six black rings of iron on a chain mounted across each of the portals. Lumari rattled a chain impatiently before Auric could recommend how they might proceed, her annoyance with the weed-tending monk still apparent in her expression and movements. Soon the left door creaked open, revealing a squat man with tousled, sandy-blond hair. His freckled face was disfigured, the nose lopped off and a cluster of scars marring the flesh around the hole. He smiled at the party, revealing that he was missing most of the teeth in his upper jaw.

  “Brother Porter?” asked Auric in a pleasant tone. “We are members of the Syraeic League. We seek Brother Watcher. Could you guide us to him?”

  Brother Porter nodded, an affable expression making his cicatrix more unsettling.

  The interior was poorly lit. Brother Porter retrieved a lantern sitting next to a stool by the monastery doors, lit the fat candle inside it, and closed its cover.

  “Follow me,” he said with geniality. One of his legs was apparently shorter than the other, giving him a slow, loping gait as he led them through a confusing labyrinth of narrow halls, up sets of winding stairs, and finally to a large chamber from which projected a broad terrace.

  The terrace overlooked the sea, waves beating against the mountain’s eastern face below in a soothing rhythm. Wind whistled through a series of intricately carved poles set in the floor at the balcony’s edge. Sitting on the ground near one of those poles and inches from the balcony’s unguarded edge was a white-haired man in a brown robe. His thick beard was threaded through with colored beads, and an unmistakable lump protruded from his back. The man turned to face them, though he couldn’t have heard their approach, given the opus of wind and waves.

  “Brother Watcher,” said Brother Porter in a loud voice. “You have visitors from the Syraeic League who wish to speak with you.”

  The old man’s eyebrows perched on his brow like a pair of albino caterpillars. There were deep marks on his cheeks that looked as though he had wept scars. His sightless eyes were milky white.

  “I’ve been expecting you for many years,” said Gower Morz in a deep, rumbling voice. “But Ariellum told me in a dream last night that you would arrive today.”

  13

  The Hunchback

  Brother Porter left them with Brother Watcher, bowing low before limping into the monastery’s interior.

  “Let me stay here just a few moments longer,” said Morz, who turned back to the sea. He closed his unseeing eyes and lifted his head, as though he could feel the salty spray from the waves hundreds of feet below. Auric and his companions honored the old man’s request, stepping back a respectful distance from the terrace precipice.

  After several long minutes, Morz finally started to stand, reaching for one of the whistling totems. Del rushed to his side to aid him. As he rose, there were a few audible cracks from his aged joints. He had a walking stick of lacquered wood, still partially sheathed in bark, but seemed not to need it to navigate his way back to the chamber from which the balcony projected. The space was mostly bare, save for a few age-battered pews sitting before a lectern carved with the sign of the goddess of harvests and childbirth: Chaeres’s acorn.

  “We can sit here,” Morz said. “You can gather them round, if you’d like.” He sat at the center of the front pew, hands perched on the walking stick he planted between his feet. Belech followed his suggestion, moving two of the benches so they flanked the one on which the blind monk sat. Auric, Del, and Belech took seats. Lumari remained standing behind a pew, holding the seatback with both hands, watching Morz with a keen scrutiny.

  “You say Ariellum told you we’d be here tod
ay,” began Auric. “You mean Ariellum Brisk, once alchemist of the Syraeic League, dead these thirty-three years?”

  “Of course,” he answered. “She’s been visiting me nightly now for nearly two months.”

  “And what else has she had to say?”

  The old man grimaced, his lips tensed. He made to brush away a tear that didn’t appear and chuckled. “My tear ducts haven’t worked for thirty years, but I still wait for them to turn themselves back on. I’ve decades of weeping to catch up on. To answer your question, she has said just a little. Will you tell me your names first?”

  Auric introduced himself and the others. Morz frowned.

  “Ariellum said there would be five of you.”

  “Six, actually,” said Lumari, a touch of displeasure in her tone. “Two remain aboard our ship.”

  “To safeguard the gem,” said Morz—a statement, not a question.

  “No,” answered Auric, disturbed by the man’s prescience. “They’re recovering from injuries in one case, exertion in the other.”

  “Strange. Ariellum told me only five would enter the temple.” The monk spoke as though it was an earlier conversation with a friend who wasn’t in the room, rather than someone three decades dead.

  “Sir,” Lumari said, the edge in her voice more pronounced, “I am a woman of science and have little patience for this kind of supernatural game playing.”

  “You do not believe in the supernatural, then?” asked Morz with amusement, turning toward the sound of her voice.

  “No, I said that I simply have little patience for it. We need you to speak plainly, not in cryptic bits and pieces. You seem to know where we’re headed and what we carry. I assume you know what it is we want to know as well?”

  Morz smiled a broad, closed-mouth grin. “It’s ever thus with alchemists. Forgive me. I have lived in darkness for many years and have spent much of that time contemplating this conversation. Still, I have started it poorly.”

  He banged his walking stick twice on the stone floor.

  “My name was Gower Morz and I was a member of the Syraeic League expedition into the Djao temple beneath St. Besh in the year 745. Of the six of us, only three came out alive, and I’ve been blind ever since that day.”

  Lumari walked around the bench and took a seat.

  “The League only became aware of the site a few months before. There’d been a small tremor as the priory’s priests and monks worked to expand their crypts. A false wall was discovered, and behind it the entryway to the temple. It was a disk of dark iron, ‘bout four feet in diameter, recessed into the wall, its perimeter comprised of colored glass bricks. Every visible inch of the disk was covered with etchings, most of it in Higher Djao pictograms we’ve never been able to decipher. Of course, it was that Higher Djao that told us we were probably looking at a temple entrance—it’s mostly their holy places where the Djao used that form of their language in such quantity.

  “We were actually brought into this by the prior himself: an old fart named Jonathon, priest of Marcator. Galadayem had us mopping up some nasty tombs west of Szuur’ah’caat—dark spirits, ja-hao’rae, a nest of hollow men. We got pulled away from that mess by the presiding lictor in Serekirk to inspect this new find. Galadayem Pela had a gift for persuasion. She ended up talking old Prior Jonathon into letting us explore the place.

  “It took me a full day to figure out how to open that goddamned disk. It involved a series of barely detectable depressions in the metal, pressing them in a carefully timed sequence; damn near broke my brain figuring it out. Anyway, when the disk rolled aside for us to enter, it let out a gust of foul-smelling air, worse than a dead man’s belch. Started a coughing fit in Cosus, and Quintus vomited right onto that pretty colored glass.”

  Morz frowned, as though recalling the stink.

  “Ariellum tested the air, said she couldn’t detect anything poisonous, so we entered. First room was an antechamber with stair-like shelves, three on each wall, about a foot and a half wide, fat candles covering ‘em. Dark colors, greens, reds, blacks, and mixed pools of hardened wax where other candles had melted before. You know that smell right after you snuff out a candle, and that little wisp of smoke spins off? Well, you could smell that, like the candles had been lit recently.”

  Auric’s pulse quickened. A sickening lump rose in his chest.

  “From there, we found a straight corridor of the usual construction for Djao temples, eight feet wide and tall, fitted stones with roots and other growth poking their way between them. Every seven feet or so were stone heads sticking out of the walls on either side, no two alike: fangs, horns, features distorted, ugly. Hadn’t seen their like in any of the temples I’d been to.”

  Belech, sitting next to Auric, put a hand on his shoulder.

  “What is it, Auric?” he whispered. Morz stopped speaking and all eyes turned to their leader. “You look like you’re going to be sick.”

  Auric cleared his throat, ran his hand through his hair. His mouth was dry. He drew in a quick snort of air through his nose. “Nothing. Continue, sir.”

  “Well, the hall narrowed some and we came upon a gate. It was a fancy thing, old bronze covered in verdigris, lots of artistic flourishes, curlicues, you know the sort of thing. The lock looked standard enough, but the bars of the gate…they were covered with a kind of clear…mucus. Ariellum scraped some into a vial and did tests on it; said it was ‘highly acidic,’ recommended we avoid all contact with it. I put on my rubber gloves—I mean, there was no way I was going to be able to pick this lock and not touch the stuff. Got out my toolkit and went to work. Took me damn near an hour to unlock the cursed thing. Anyway, everyone passed through and I turned to jam up the lock permanently, so the thing wouldn’t re-lock behind us and make me repeat the whole irksome exercise. That’s when we heard a low hum.”

  Morz paused, reached up to touch his milky eyes with quaking fingertips, inhaled deeply, exhaled. He continued.

  “The hum turned into a rumble. It felt like a tremor. The gate started to vibrate, I mean, visibly vibrate, violently. We all braced ourselves, because the ground was shaking good. We worried about a collapse. Suddenly, the shaking stopped, instant-like. We all were thrown to the ground, the gate slammed shut, and the muck on those bars splashed out. Luckily for the others, I was the only one near the gate. Some of it got into my eyes…worst pain I’ve ever felt. Ariellum rushed over, tried to flush them out, but it didn’t help—they were ruined. She gave me some concoction of herbs for the pain when Quintus could do nothing with Belu’s aid. They spent about an hour trying to re-open the gate, but they didn’t have my skill. I was useless, of course. Couldn’t do anything, the state I was in. So Galadayem suggested they continue deeper into the temple. As you know, some of these temples have two, three entrances. Maybe they’d find another way out and come back for me.”

  “And nothing brought back your vision, obviously,” commented Lumari, “including more elaborate entreaties to Belu after you returned to Boudun. Did they recover your alchemist’s sample vial when they left the temple?”

  “No. There was little thought of that when Wallach and Quintus came back. They were running from the Aching God by then.”

  “The what?” asked Auric.

  “The Aching God. It’s what they called the idol they found.”

  “No one at the Citadel recalled anything about this ‘Aching God,’” said Auric, puzzled. “Seems a rather important detail to forget.”

  “They were running from it?” asked Del, her excitement growing. “A stone golem, perhaps?”

  The white-haired old man shook his head, frowned. “No, nothing like that. Of course, you must understand that anything I tell you about after the tremor is what I heard, either while I sat blind in the temple waiting for my friends to return and guide me out, or afterward from Wallach and Quintus.”

  “Understood, sir,” said
Auric, working hard to contain his unease. “Continue from the point at which they left you, if you please.”

  “Well, I didn’t relish them leaving me there to sit alone in that place, but there was really no other option. I bit down my fear and gave them a salute and a smile, propped against the stone wall, near—but not too near—that cursed gate. Not far down the corridor where they left me, there was an open pit, about ten feet across. Wallach called down to me, described it. There was a ledge about a foot wide along one wall, none of the stone heads blocking the way. They couldn’t see the bottom. When Cosus dropped a penny in, they never heard it hit.”

  “Bottomless,” whispered Belech.

  “Yes. Wallach told me it looked like you could walk clear across that ledge to the other side and on down the corridor. Of course, my first thought was of some nasty Djao trap. I was always the most agile of our group, despite the funny turn this spine of mine takes. I would have checked for traps, then gone across myself with ropes anchoring me. I said as much to them. Ariellum tossed some of her powders around the ledge, said it revealed no trip wires, pressure plates, or the like.”

  “Magna Revelantis,” offered Lumari.

  “I think that’s what she called it,” responded the old man. “They tied a rope around Ariellum’s waist and she walked across. No problem. The rest did it. Galadayem was last. She was wearing plate, had to get out of that armor first. Tied the rope round her waist, carried her gear while she edged across. Then it hit.”

  “Another tremor,” said Lumari, her tone reverent.

  “‘Tremor’ is a gentle word for it,” quipped the blind man. “Of course, Galadayem fell. Wallach and Cosus were holding the rope on the far side of the pit. Both were knocked to the ground by the quake, lost hold of the rope. Wallach almost fell in himself—just managed to catch the edge, and Ariellum caught hold of him. But Galadayem was gone.”