Aching God

by Mike Shel

  “I am no monster who takes pleasure in the lash, Sir Auric,” replied Hraea, priggish. “It was obvious the seventh blow would have been superfluous—the debt was satisfied at six. Nonetheless, allowing your priest to call on Belu’s healing contradicts the lesson the Manticore is meant to teach. No, I forbid it. My medicus is well-versed in tending such wounds. Neither Mr. Carrick nor Miss Mercele will succumb to their injuries, I assure you. Discipline on Her Majesty’s fighting ships must be brutal, Sir Auric. Indeed, I wonder that my laxity was not driven in part by allowing your Miss Ogara a seat at my dinner table. Think on that, if you wish to apportion blame, sir. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must supervise the repair and replacement of our sails.”

  Auric looked back at Sira, who still stood near the mainmast, and shook his head sadly.

  Let’s pray we’ll have no need of those ‘spell-sellers’ for the rest of this voyage, he thought to himself as two sailors mopped up the lake of blood spilled about the mainmast. He doubted they could weather another of Marcator’s tantrums, but he feared the captain’s casual cruelty nearly as much as the god’s.

  “Remind me never to pursue a career in the Royal Navy,” requested Gnaeus when the Syraeics had returned to their cabin.

  “Barbaric,” muttered Lumari, pattering together a pair of empty vials.

  “The man is a sadist,” Del quipped, her face pinched and angry.

  “I’ve seen worse,” said Belech, almost in apology. “When I was in the infantry, centurions used a normal scourge when necessary. But the Royal Navy, they would ferry us from one position to another in the north. When a sailor broke discipline, even a little, out would come the Manticore. I’ve seen that whip flay a man to death, for a lesser offense, on more than one occasion. What happened to those two people was bloody awful, but at least they’ll live. Remember there are three sailors asleep in the Cradle who might be alive otherwise. The captain could have done worse to the sorcerers and still been within his authority.”

  “Calling it within the captain’s authority doesn’t make it right,” countered Del. “They’ll both be scarred for life.”

  “At least the Syraeic League doesn’t practice such brutalities,” added Lumari, finally putting her empty vials back in a bandolier.

  “We were interrupted last night,” said Auric, suppressing his own emotions and shifting the discussion. “I left all of you with the rather, well…demoralizing message that we are potentially facing a powerful incarnation of evil. This was not the end of what I wished to say. But before I continue, does anyone want to comment on what I revealed of my own experiences yesterday?”

  After a long silence, Sira spoke up. “I consider the act of sharing your own painful experience courageous, friend Auric. We must have no illusions about what we face in the Barrowlands.”

  “Nonetheless,” said Gnaeus, sitting on their cabin table with his feet on a chair, looking at his knees, “it does not inspire…confidence.”

  “In what or whom?” growled Belech.

  Auric held up a hand. “Gnaeus speaks honestly, Belech, and if I were in his shoes, I’d have the same concerns. I am fifty years old, a time when most field agents have transitioned to less perilous roles. My last foray into the Barrowlands shook me to the core. It left…scars, and led me to surrender my commission with the League. These things are all true. But I am leading this expedition, the only member of our party, save Sira, who has spent any time in that part of the world. I have been wounded, yes, but I hope my experience has also brought some measure of wisdom. You all must be ready to follow my directives, because there is no warning if it may involve life or death. I ask you this plainly: can I count on your willingness to let me fulfill the role of expeditionary lead?”

  “Aye,” said Belech immediately.

  “Yes,” said Sira.

  “You are the expeditionary lead, Sir Auric,” said Gnaeus, still looking at his knees.

  “Aye, yes. You’ve managed us well this far, in my opinion,” said Del.

  Lumari said nothing for a moment. Then she took a deep breath. “Yes. Yes, yes. You are the only one with the experience to lead the team. However, I fear your reaction when we’re in the earth below St. Besh. If it is so like that place where your friends were killed, what prevents you from…losing your reason again?”

  “Are you saying Auric should be on his knees at St. Kenther?” asked Del with a scowl. The tattooed sorcerer referenced a small isle south of Falmuthe, a sanitarium for the hopelessly insane, tended by a sect of Belu’s priests. The League sent agents whose minds were beyond repair to that place, leading to sour euphemisms such as “summering on Kenther.”

  Auric wasn’t sure how to answer the alchemist’s question, filled with his own doubts, wondering if... when he might experience another episode of paralysis. At Del’s mention of the asylum isle, he was reminded of his own single visit to Kenther several years ago, on behalf of the League. A Syraeic agent had returned from an expedition into the Barrowlands, raving mad after staring into the facets of some accursed jewel found in a now-forbidden ruin called Vah’da’ghena—God Hope Lost was the most direct translation. Two other members of the expedition who had looked into the thing were dead within minutes. Attempts to heal the man when he was brought back to the Citadel, babbling incoherently, were fruitless. The decision to commit him to the sanitarium was reached quickly, the hopelessness of his case apparent to all. After six or seven months, a lictor—Auric forgot which one—asked him to visit the man. A report received from St. Kenther raised hopes that the man was perhaps coming to his senses. Auric was asked to assess his state, to determine if he had any useful information for the League about what he had seen in that infernal jewel. Auric still remembered reaching the island, walking the path of crushed seashells to the monastery, and knocking on a great oak door. Ushered into the sunlit, orange-bricked courtyard where the agent convalesced, the soothing sounds of waves wafted over the walls, and the air was redolent with the scent of lemon trees.

  He sat on a wooden stool. The device the man wore looked like an instrument of torture: a spherical cage of blackened iron bars encompassing his head, with a series of projections like a spider’s legs sprouting from the collar around his neck and pressing down on his shoulders. His haunted, sleepless eyes opened and closed in irregular spasms; his mouth was locked in an ugly rictus. His mind was broken, like a porcelain vase thrown against a wall. This travesty was the “progress” gained from months of holy ministrations and prayers. His mind was broken, Auric concluded, and no one would ever piece that shattered vessel together again.

  “What are those?” asked Auric, pointing to the web of ragged scratches and welts on the man’s shaven pate.

  “Self-inflicted,” answered a serene, pallid priest. “He seemed docile enough for several days, so his restraints were loosened for the first time in weeks. He sat quietly in the atrium all day, under the sun. But when it started to set, and a shadow crossed his face, ah…he exploded. Five of us were needed to subdue him. It’s why he wears the Spider now.”

  Auric smiled without humor. The Spider. Of course that’s what they call it.

  “How long will he be confined by this contraption?”

  “Belu knows,” said the priest, his tone so placid in the face of this tragedy it stirred Auric’s anger.

  “Has Belu seen fit to tell you?”

  The priest prickled at Auric’s irreverence, replying in a voice thin and petulant. “We pray for him hourly, sir, and perform the Ritual of Calm and Cleansing every morning. If and when Belu wills it, your colleague shall be healed.”

  Auric felt the rebuke and used it to subdue his emotion. “Of course you do. And the League is grateful for St. Kenther’s devotion to him, and to our other brothers and sisters…ensconced here.” The word warehoused came first to his mind, along with an image of gibbering madmen and women, stacked up like cordwood in an ill-lit, cave
rnous hall. All casualties of curiosity, he thought. Casualties of the Djao.

  The priest’s tone was placid again, placated by Auric’s apology. “It’s difficult to see friends so unkindly afflicted, Sir Auric. When one witnesses the world’s cruelties, it can hamper faith—if we allow it.”

  I am forgiven, thought Auric, offering a perfunctory smile and nod. “May I speak to him, then? Privately?”

  “Certainly,” responded the priest. “But I ask that you keep your conversation brief. I shall watch from a distance, should the talk agitate him.”

  Auric mumbled his thanks and the pale priest retreated across the courtyard, sitting on a low wall shaded by a fragrant lemon tree. Auric looked at his pathetic colleague now as though for the first time, taking in the strain on his face, the unnatural aging, the horror beaming from his blinking eyes. He said nothing for a moment, trying to determine if those eyes really saw him at all. Uncertain, he finally spoke the man’s name.

  “Desric?” A question. As though he knocked at a door to inquire if the man stood behind it. “Desric, can you hear me? It’s Auric Manteo, your Syraeic brother.”

  There was nothing at first, and Auric was about to say what he had come to say, without regard for Desric’s apparent psychic absence. But then the man’s eyes shifted subtly, and Auric felt a sudden icy focus as they locked on his own. He fought an impulse to flee those eyes.

  “Desric, I come on behalf of our brothers and sisters, to inquire after your welfare, to see if there is anything you desire. Or if there is anything you wish us to know.”

  Desric’s cold stare remained locked on Auric, unbroken by the spasmodic blinking. At the end of a long silence, the man expelled air in a hoarse staccato, a gurgle of saliva at the back of his throat. Was that a laugh? Auric wondered to himself, his brow furrowing.

  Desric’s lips quivered and air escaped between clenched teeth, as though attempting speech. Auric leaned forward.

  “Again, Desric. Try to speak up. I am listening.”

  The man’s eyes closed. He took a deep, purposeful breath, and tried again, managing to emit what sounded like two words.

  “Again, Desric, please.” Auric leaned in closer, so that his forehead nearly touched the spherical cage’s cold bars.

  “Th-th-they’re eating…p-pain.”

  “What?” said Auric, squinting, confused. “You are in pain? Hungry?”

  The man in the black iron contraption tilted his head away, ground his teeth together with apparent emotion, his eyes widening. And then he screeched out the words again as he brought the metal down onto Auric’s face with sudden violence, spilling him to the ground.

  “THEY’RE EATING MY PAIN!”

  The priest across the courtyard sprang from his perch, running toward them as he rang a hand bell that had been concealed in the sleeve of his robe. Auric skittered backward, cradling his broken and bleeding nose with one hand. Desric sat motionless now, breathing hard and heavy, making no further threatening movements toward Auric or anyone. More robed priests flooded the courtyard, circling the madman and bringing him gently to the ground from his stool with their combined strength, though he offered them no resistance.

  The pale priest knelt beside Auric, wiping away the blood with the sleeve of his light blue robe and closing a quivering palm over his broken nose, which was now throbbing with incandescent pain. After a few moments, the priest whispering prayers to the Blue Mother, the pain began to fade.

  “What did you say to him?” the priest asked, more in astonishment than accusation.

  “Nothing to provoke that,” answered Auric, allowing the priest to help him rise from the flagstones of the courtyard. The cleric took Auric firmly by the arm and began leading him from the patio. As they passed Desric, prone beneath a choir of priests singing a soft litany, the man’s arm shot out from the sacred huddle and a hand grabbed hold of Auric’s ankle with manic fingers.

  “Gods, Auric,” the pathetic man moaned, his eyes plaintive and despairing. And again, like a plea, “Gods…”

  Gods indeed, thought Auric, shaking his head as if that might dispel the memory from his mind. He looked up from his reverie at the faces of the young Syraeic agents gathered round him in the cabin, last at Sira and Belech, both of whom wore concern on their features.

  Auric nodded and looked from face to face as he spoke. “If it is the consensus of the team that I am no longer fit to lead it, at any time…I will submit to your judgment.”

  Lumari nodded.

  “Now that we have addressed that matter,” Auric said, “we should discuss the meaning of Gower Morz’s nightly encounters with dead Ariellum.”

  “First,” said Gnaeus, irritated, “can someone explain to me why a blind monk is called ‘Brother Watcher?’”

  “More supernatural claptrap, I imagine,” offered a wry Lumari, rolling her eyes. “Isn’t it just resplendent with mystical irony?”

  Auric continued, ignoring the alchemist’s annoyance. “Morz said he’d been speaking with Ariellum in his dreams for about the last two months. That coincides with the advent of the plague at the Citadel, when the novice cut himself on the Besh Artifact. This is more than just ‘claptrap.’ He said she told him we would arrive on the day we actually showed up on his terrace.”

  “The first question that raises,” interjected Lumari, “is if this was the first and only time Ariellum ‘told him’ we were coming ‘that day.’ Many claim to experience prophetic dreams, but forget how many alleged nighttime prophecies fail to transpire, or misremember the order of dreams and earthly events. Still others unwittingly distort memories of dreams to fit with actual events after the fact. It needn’t be deliberate sham. In fact, it can be even more convincing when the teller is himself duped.”

  “Fair enough,” responded Auric. “But do you deny the wholly arbitrary nature of the plague, who it affects, who does and doesn’t recover? Or a mystical cause for events such as the defacing of the mural? Destruction of records pertaining to the first expedition?”

  Lumari paused, a thin-lipped frown on her face. “No. I don’t deny it. I’ve tried to explain to my own satisfaction the capricious spread of the plague with our scientific understanding of disease—it simply doesn’t fit what’s understood of natural illness. And if a condition is resistant to the healing of Belu, it often points to divine rather than terrestrial origin. If this ‘Aching God’ is some sort of deity, it would explain why victims are oddly chosen and Belu’s bounty offers no benefit. The mural and records, though? I can still see a potential human hand behind those acts. But no, I wouldn’t rule out supernatural intelligences.”

  The sound of foot traffic on the ceiling above them increased for a moment, the conversation of sailors muted by the heavy oak beams.

  “I agree,” said Sira, her tone firm. “Sometimes it’s the will of Blessed Belu that an illness run its course, even if the end is tragedy. But the way this disease has resisted her bounty… another divinity interferes.”

  “Having some form of spiritual protection, blessed talismans, would be advisable then,” said Auric. “Does anyone already possess such charms?”

  Belech pulled out a simple talisman of Belu that hung on a thin chain around his neck. Del pulled down the neckline of her shirt a few inches, revealing a colorful tattoo of Belu’s blossoming blue rose, surrounded by a gyre of artfully rendered religious sigils. Gnaeus pointed to the guard of his rapier.

  “Those aren’t just pretty etchings,” he said. “They’re protective wards of Lalu and Vanic.”

  “Gods of love and war?” grinned Del. “Oh, Gnaeus, you are a hopeless cliché, whether you like it or not.”

  Gnaeus ignored her.

  Lumari shook her head. “No. I have no patron. I haven’t thought it necessary. Until now. I admit it’s a wise precaution.”

  “Like Lumari, I have no such talisman,” said Auric. “Sira,
we need you to bless some items for the two of us, and bolster the talismans the others have, including Del’s tattoo. I also want you to ritually bless at least a dozen vials of water. We need all the spiritual protection we can muster. And from here on out, other than those tasks, you are in meditation, readying yourself for the demands that might come your way.”

  Sira gave Auric her heartbreaking Lenda smile and nodded in agreement.

  There was a sudden commotion on the foredeck above: urgent, muffled shouts, and the sounds of booted feet tromping across the wooden floorboards. They heard what sounded like Hobesson howl out a phrase, followed by the heart-thumping roll of martial drums.

  “Beat to quarters!”

  “What does ‘beat to quarters’ mean?” asked Del.

  “It means,” said Auric evenly, reaching for the leather cuirass stowed under the bunk, “that we are under attack.”

  16

  Discord

  Suited for a fight, Auric and his Syraeic companions stood on the foredeck with Captain Hraea and Lieutenants Hobesson and Polor, watching as yet another vessel emerged from the bank of fog in the southern distance. The captain peered through a spyglass as the drums continued their warlike drone and the Duke Yaryx’s crew scurried about, preparing for battle.

  “Three against one?” quipped Gnaeus. “Piece of cake.” A fourth ship cleared the fog. “Lalu wept,” he said.

  “Pirates then, sir?” asked Lieutenant Polor, all nervous energy and grin.

  The captain kept his spyglass trained on the approaching vessels. “Of course, lieutenant. It’s why these waters are called the Corsair’s Run: filthy buccaneers are thick as flies on a week-old corpse in these seas. Not to worry. They’re no different than those we’ve dealt with in the east, save that they appear to prowl in packs. Mr. Hobesson, order up my ballistae, if you would.”

  “Ballistae fore!” Hobesson called.