Aching God

by Mike Shel

  “We live here,” she said.

  “No!” he answered, hysteria in his voice. “You are dead, Lenda, and I dream!”

  “Perhaps,” he heard Brenten say behind him.

  He turned to face the alchemist, whose flesh was a theater of ruinous wounds, toothy bites torn from him, tunic sopping wet with his blood. The man pointed at him with the stub of a finger, bone protruding from eagerly chewed skin.

  “Or perhaps what you believe is your waking life is the dream. Perhaps you never left the temple. None of us did.”

  “Or maybe we play metaphor,” said Ursula, suddenly standing to his left, her intestines hanging like a gory garland from the rent in her abdomen. “We certainly never left this place. Your body may have escaped. But your soul remains with us here. In the Yellow Hells.”

  There was a grotesque gurgling to his right and he jerked his head around to the sound. Meric’s headless body stood only a foot from him, blood welling up from the column of fleshy hanging ribbons that was his neck, as though the gaping hole was trying to speak. Auric staggered back in horror.

  His dead colleagues stood shoulder to shoulder now, advancing on him with slow determination. Lenda’s head, still held at her side, spoke in soothing, hypnotic tones. “Surrender to the truth of it, Auric Manteo, son of a drunken tanner, father of a son moldering in his grave, husband of a wife murdered by his own neglect. Your daughter hates you. She cannot forgive you for her mother’s suicide, rightly blames you for it. What remains for you in that other dream you inhabit? Servants? They mock you to your face, see you for the fraud you are. Lady Hannah, too, sees you for what you are: Sir Auric the Short—jumped up, piss-stinking peasant with pretentions of nobility, a joke told at court to amuse aristocrats. Who have you left to embrace but us? Our embrace is cold, yes, but our embrace lasts forever.”

  Auric matched their pace, stepping backward to keep distance between himself and his former friends. He was desperate their dead flesh not touch him, fearing that even the lightest contact would drain him entirely of his will to resist, to live. Then a deep, rumbling voice from behind him spoke, causing his heart to tremble in his chest.

  “Closer,” It said.

  He turned. The corpses in the pit were gone. In their place was a fleshy membrane the color of a days-old bruise, covering the pit’s opening like the skin of a drum. Something distended the membrane at its center: the outline of an enormous mouth, slowly opening itself. Words came from the widening orifice, though the lips did nothing but part further, because it was hungry. Eternally hungry.

  “Closer, mortal. You are here, finally, to feed the Aching God.”

  He felt the hands of his former companions grab hold of him from behind and force him forward, into that maw, the membrane around it pulsating like a heartbeat, at the end of it a bottomless belly waiting for him. The Aching God. It did not require adoration. It did not seek golden baubles laid before an altar. It wanted nothing more than another meal. It wanted to consume him utterly, body and soul. The fleshy orifice exhaled something that smelled like the grave, the membrane warm and wet as it closed over his head.

  And then Auric Manteo screamed.

  Auric shot up from his raised pallet, crying out in his sleep, feeling a hot, stabbing pain at his throat as he did so. His hand came away from his neck slick with blood. His eyes, adjusting to the dim light in the cubicle, saw the outline of a figure standing beside his bed, frozen. When the form made an abrupt leap forward, Auric caught sight of the knife blade. He shifted to dodge the lethal thrust while swinging a fist at the figure’s head, but the form jerked back, held by a larger, looming shape behind it.

  Belech. The old soldier held Auric’s foe by the neck with a big hand and reached to grab the arm wielding the weapon with the other. The attacker managed to twist his hand around and lay a bloody seam along Belech’s cheek. Belech abandoned his attempt to subdue the robed aggressor and slammed the assailant’s head against the adjacent wall with brutal force. The knife wielder crumpled to the floor.

  “Auric!” cried Belech. “Are you injured?”

  A breathless priest arrived at the doorway of their cubicle, bearing a large oil lamp, lighting the sleeping space. Auric’s hand was wet with his own blood, but he determined the wound on his neck superficial and waved for Belech to attend his own injury, which was bleeding profusely. Three more priests reached their cubicle, Sister Teelu among them.

  “Lalu’s sweet mercy, what happened?” she cried.

  “Attacked,” said Auric simply, hand held to his wound to staunch the bleeding. “By this one here, on the floor. Shine your light on him.”

  The figure’s robe was the inky black of the priests of Marcator. Belech reached down to turn the body over. Sub-Prior Narlen’s lifeless eyes stared back at them, his bald pate mashed bloody by his violent encounter with the cubicle wall.

  “Yellow Hells,” whispered Belech.

  Sister Teelu handed Belech a strip of cloth torn from her white robe for his laceration and instructed one of the other clerics in the doorway to fetch a priest of Belu. Sira herself arrived shortly thereafter, mousy brown hair in disarray from her own disturbed sleep. She moved toward Auric, who shook his head.

  “Tend Belech first. Mine looks worse than it is.” Auric reflected at that moment that this night the nightmare had saved his life. If he had not been startled awake…

  A woman’s scream raised the hair on Auric’s neck. He drew his Djao sword from its scabbard hung beside his bed and ran in the direction of the cry, followed closely by Belech and the others. The scream had come from the direction of the cubicle occupied by Del and Lumari.

  When they reached the room, there were already a half-dozen priests of St. Besh at the doorway. Auric shoved the clerics aside, filled with dread at what he would find. Lumari’s corner of the room was already lit by a lamp held by a priest at the door. She was sitting upright on her pallet, back against the wall, head hanging, breathing heavily.

  “Were you attacked?” shouted Belech, coming up behind Auric.

  Lumari shook her head, unable to speak, and pointed at the darkened corner of the room.

  “Light!” Auric yelled, heart sinking.

  Belech grabbed the lamp from the priest and shone it at the unlit end of the cubicle. Del lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling, her eyes wide. The sorcerer’s mouth was opened slightly, as though readying to speak. Her throat yawned open obscenely with a deep red cut that parted her dark, intricate tattoos, blood soaking her bedsheet.

  “Murder,” said Belech, voice catching in his throat.

  Sira walked over to Del’s corpse, touched her pale cheek, and closed the dead woman’s eyes with gentle care. “She’s still quite warm,” she said with preternatural calm, staying at Del’s side. “Lumari, tell us what happened.”

  “I was startled awake—thought I heard someone scream, somewhere down the hall. It’s then I saw a figure approaching my bed. I grabbed my sword and swung it in front of me. Whoever it was fled the room. I called out to Del, she didn’t answer, so I stumbled over to her in the dark and came away with…this.”

  She held up her hands, palms painted crimson with Del’s lifeblood.

  “Someone needs to check on Gnaeus and Eubrin,” said Belech, turning for the door.

  As if on cue, another commotion erupted down the hall, the sound of scuffling and curses. From around the corner came Eubrin, his nose bloody, his cheek scraped raw, hair disheveled. Smears of blood stained his brown tunic and chainmail shirt. Gnaeus followed him, spouting a furious fountain of profanities, one hand gripping the man’s collar roughly, the other jamming the point of his sword into his back to motivate him down the hall. When Gnaeus saw Auric and Belech in the corridor, he shoved Eubrin forward, spilling him unceremoniously to the ground. “Fucking cunt tried to kill me!” the blond swordsman shouted, holding his side, the cloth of his tunic disco
lored by blood.

  “Sira!” called Auric, his eyes fixed on the prone hireling who had gathered himself and sat up against the corridor wall. “Gnaeus requires your aid.”

  Auric looked to Eubrin, who stared down at the floor. The man began to chuckle. “You’ll all have need of Belu before long,” he tittered, his small, even teeth red from a split lip. “Fat lot of good it will do you.”

  Auric felt a shot of pain from the cut on his throat, put his free hand to it again to staunch the flow of blood. Sira emerged from Del and Lumari’s cubicle, went to Gnaeus, laid a hand on his wound and began her prayer. After a moment, she turned to Eubrin, pain in her eyes. “Why?”

  Eubrin looked up. He was smiling. “You ask why? I know not why. I never know why. I only know the great god commands.”

  “What great god?” demanded Belech.

  “Why, Timilis, of course.” The man pulled up his right tunic sleeve, revealing a tattoo of the trickster god’s emblem: a wheel with eight curved spokes radiating from its hub.

  “How long had you planned on betraying us, Eubrin?” asked Auric, rage boiling up inside him.

  “Plan?” He let out a loud guffaw. “I’ve never crafted a plan in my fucking wretched life! Timilis has plans. I am simply an instrument of his divine will. The god said, ‘Join this lot,’ so I joined you. The god said, ‘kill these women and this man,’ and I did so. Or such was my aim. A scream woke the alchemist before I could make the sour bitch smile red.” He looked Auric in the eye, still smiling, pointing pinky and forefinger at the people massed around him in a mocking sign against evil. “It seems Timilis has had a great joke on me as well.”

  “You killed Del?” asked Auric, incredulous.

  “I did. I decided she had to be first. After all, sorcerers who can’t speak can’t cast spells. When the alchemist woke, waving a sword at me, I ran to Gnaeus. The man sleeps like the dead. Figured I could make it two out of three.”

  “Del saved your miserable life, you bloody bastard! With the manticores!” yelled Gnaeus.

  “Yes,” he responded, eyes closing as his bloody grin widened. “The irony is like honey on my tongue.”

  Auric felt the fury within him growing. An image leapt before his mind’s eye, of the man’s lifeblood oozing from a stab wound in his belly, pooling on the corridor flagstones.

  “You colluded with Narlen, then,” said Belech.

  “What?” The man spat on the floor, laughing again. “The god said kill the sorcerer, the alchemist, the pretty boy. I have no allies. I ‘collude’ with the Lord God Timilis alone.”

  At that moment Sister Teelu came down the hall with a lamp, leading Prior Colette. “I’m told Narlen tried to assassinate you, Sir Auric,” said the prelate, her normally calm voice tinged with anger. “And what’s this?”

  “Our hireling,” he began, emotion threatening to overwhelm him. “He took it upon himself to murder Del Ogara in her sleep, and tried to murder Gnaeus and Lumari as well. He says he was guided by Timilis.”

  “Blessed be the god of wit,” said Eubrin, holding up reverent hands.

  “Gouric and Messine, back in Serekirk,” asked Belech, looking down at the man with contempt. “Did they really leave on that ship?”

  “Of course they did, Belech, you mountainous old fart,” sneered Eubrin, giving the square-jawed soldier a sardonic salute. “In the ship’s hold, just as the manifest said. However, they were cargo, not passengers. They sailed in the pine boxes I planted them in. Timilis willed that they mustn’t accompany us into the Barrowlands.”

  “Two more murders on your gods-cursed soul,” Belech said through gritted teeth.

  “I would murder my own children for the great god, if I had any,” the man responded with his maddening, toothy smirk. That grin vanished suddenly with a surprised grunt. His eyes drifted down to his belly, a bewildered expression on his face. Auric followed the man’s gaze and saw his Djao blade protruding from Eubrin’s abdomen, blood pulsing heavily from the wound, pooling around him on the floor. Auric’s fingertips were barely in contact with the weapon’s pommel.

  “Auric!” cried Sira in shock.

  The priest jumped to the bleeding man, cutting herself as she yanked the blade out of his gut. Dropping the weapon on the floor as though it was a live viper, she plunged fingers into the hole poked in Eubrin’s chainmail shirt. She began to pray, but Eubrin pushed her away feebly, speaking in a fading gasp.

  “I reject your g-god and her bounty, p-priest of Belu,” the man stuttered. “Let my death be a final sacrament unto the laughing god. He laughs at us all, you know…as you…go about your lives and make your…f-futile plans. His will shall—”

  Eubrin’s last breath left his lungs before he could finish his words.

  An hour later, clothing changed, blood washed away, and Sira having healed their wounds, the surviving members of the expedition sat in the prior’s study along with Colette and Sister Teelu. The priests of Marcator had judged Narlen’s killing justified. They had also agreed that the sentence for Eubrin would have been death, for a certainty, though because his killing had not been sanctioned beforehand, Auric would need to atone at the altar of the god of justice by the next full moon.

  “It was still bloody foolish,” complained Gnaeus. “With Narlen dead, who can tell us if more were involved in the plot?”

  “Eubrin said that he was only in league with his bloody god,” offered Lumari.

  “And you believed him?” Gnaeus sneered. “The man was full of fucking lies! He was a murdering, lying prick. I’d like to see what he would have said if a priest of Tolwe put him to the fucking Question.”

  Auric sat silent, absorbed in his own musings.

  “We have no way of knowing for certain,” said Prior Colette. “As much as it pains me, I recommend that all of you bar your doors tonight to prevent any unwanted intrusions.”

  “You’re withdrawing your permission for us to enter the Djao temple?” Gnaeus asked, voice rising.

  “No, young man,” said the prior, working to maintain her calm. “I am postponing your descent for a day, so that we might properly lay our deceased prior and Miss Ogara to rest.”

  Chastened, Gnaeus sat back in his chair. Auric felt sick. Another blasted delay. Despite the guilt he felt about putting aside a ceremony to appease Del’s soul, he decided he must press the prior to allow their immediate entry. Then Belech spoke.

  “I feel an ass for raising the subject at a time like this, but having lost Del, well, she was the one who memorized the magical commands to open the locks on the Golden Egg. What will we do without her?”

  “Pronunciation is key with Middle Djao,” said Lumari. “I don’t think any of us could manage to speak the key words properly, even with them written out.”

  “Any other ideas?” asked Belech.

  “Brute force?” Gnaeus offered.

  “That’s exactly what the ensorcelled locks were designed to thwart,” responded Sira.

  “It’s possible I could concoct a solvent that would dissolve the locks, bypassing their sorcery,” suggested Lumari. “Enchanted brass…yes, I think I could do it, though its preparation is a painstaking process. I suspect it will take me a day to brew the solvent.”

  Auric grimaced. A delay couldn’t be avoided regardless. He wondered how many had died at the Citadel while they inched their way to their goal. Is Agnes still among the living?

  “Prior,” said Sira, “I think we must speak with Venerable Benlau, if you would permit it.”

  “You suspect he goaded Narlen to act as he did?” Colette asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Very well. You and Sir Auric may attend the penitent in his cubicle, but wait until after sunset. By then our priest of Ussi will be done with her daylight seclusion and at your disposal. I think that man needs a sin eater now more than ever.”

  “Yes, Prio
r,” Sira responded. “An excellent idea.”

  “Sir Auric,” queried the prior, “you’ve been uncharacteristically quiet. Do you have anything you wish to say?”

  Auric began to speak, but decided against it, shook his head. “No. Thank you, no.”

  “Very well,” said Prior Colette, looking away from Auric with a frown of displeasure. “We will conduct our burial of Prior Quintus at break of dawn tomorrow, at the proper hour. Do any of you know what Miss Ogara’s preferences would have been?”

  “Not to be murdered in her fucking sleep,” muttered Gnaeus, squeezing away tears.

  “She was a devotee of the Blue Mother,” said Sira, “but as a sorcerer she must be cremated, both her ashes and her binding gemstone returned to the Royal College of Sorcerers in Boudun.”

  “Of course,” the prior responded. “So it shall be done. Our priest of Mictilin will make the necessary preparations. I would recommend prayer for all of you. For Miss Ogara’s soul and your own, and for the eventual success of your expedition. Now I must bid you farewell. I’ll be sequestered in prayer myself until nightfall. Bring any concerns you might have in the meantime to the attention of Sub-Prior Teelu.”

  The prior stood. Belech had to nudge Auric to do the same. When he did stand, he bowed formally to the prelate and began walking out of her study with the stiff gait of an automaton. His companions followed close behind. As he reached the door, Prior Colette said something more in parting, the formality in her voice as stiff as Auric’s gait: “Sir Auric, I would appreciate it if you would leave your weapon with Belech when you meet with Brother Benlau.”

  Auric nodded, shamed by the implied rebuke, and shuffled down the hallway without a word.

  “What is it you wouldn’t say in there?” asked Belech when he, Auric and Sira neared their cubicles.