As A God

by T. G. Shepherd

  … reaching back calmly, no steel, the threat would not register for the crucial moment, Anem tucked up against the desk, an arm’s length of wood ending in cracked skull… for the second time that day glistening red and white and…

  She found herself kneeling on the floor, hands pressed over her eyes, forehead beating the planks. Anem loomed over her but still blessedly on the other side of the desk. If she had touched her…

  Sequa forced her body still, concentrated on the beat of her heart, one breath in, one breath out, till the murderous impulse had passed. When she stood, crabbed and bent as an old woman, a tendril of blood stuck her face veil to her skin. It spread into a sticky blot against her scarred cheek.

  Across the wood surface, Anem had armed herself. Good. Though they both knew perfectly well that even with her sword skill she would not be able to stop the Runner if Sequa wanted her dead.

  “What just happened?”

  “I nearly k-k-k-killed you,” Sequa said baldly. Something tried to stop her tongue but she hammered out the words, fighting the compulsion to lie as she had fought the God’s truth. This needed to be known. She needed someone else to know what had been happening to her. Perhaps this sudden revelation would move Anem to give her what she wanted.

  “Let me out.” She whispered it. To whom? Anem here before her or another… the one who lurked and spun just outside of her vision?

  “Leave on the moment then, Sequa. Leave from this room. But you leave him to die.”

  “You should not be obstructing me,” Sequa yelled and paid the price for it as her scarred throat coughed more blood to join that already dripping from her chin. Her veil went clammy and slick again, as it always seemed to be these days. Her injuries used those scraps of cloth hard, never meant to absorb as much blood as she gave them to drink.

  “For the love of the Goddess, Anem, give him to me. Give him over in darkness, and let us be free of this place. Let me go somewhere safe.” Safe from her stayed unspoken. She straightened her spine, shaking as though fevered, hands out and away from her body.

  She could kill Anem as swiftly now as she could with any weapon, flesh twisting and bone snapping under the correct pressure. An eye-blink and nearly no effort. From the bleak expression in the older woman’s eyes, she knew it too. Youth, speed, and sheer viciousness would win the contest between them.

  “I want quit of you as much as you want it, Champion. Death and blood and chaos follow you like a faithful pack of dogs. Or so they do now.”

  At the beating edge of madness, Sequa heard the words like silver coins dropping against a metal bowl.

  Now. Not then. Not always. Now.

  Now. When the stones of the earth reached out to her like a warm, soft bed. Now. When she huddled on rooftops without sleep, bathed in sweat and tears. Now. When the blood of a child seemed nothing more to her than a stain on her shoes.

  Now. When the fire on the altar of Great Temple twisted and turned against the breezes.

  The wood slats of the wall struck her back.

  Anem had wisely remained still.

  Sequa spoke very softly, her throat raw and aching, but never doubted she would be heard. “Commander, I am not mad. There is influence behind this. So I thought when I saw the child’s body. Someone threw that boy and the whore and I would think two others from a great height to their deaths. They do not care that by doing so they reveal themselves. Do you see?”

  Anem sat back down and laid her hands out on the table. “I…do see. If these…murders…were done for a usual purpose, the killer would have seen Cur as a savior, the perfect sin eater. Instead, another death, in a manner that can simply not be accident.”

  “Can you convince the city of that?”

  “No.”

  “When another dies?”

  “Are you sure?”

  Sequa heard it then, under the words.

  Was it you? Did you kill this child just to throw us off the scent of your lap dog?

  “You flatter me,” she rasped. “Go, look yourself. Even I could not have scaled that tree in full Godslight without being seen.”

  Annoyance warred with fear in Anem’s eyes.

  Sequa wrapped her arms around herself, still trembling. “I am sure there is more death coming. And I am sure, somehow…” She trailed off, coughing roughly, then ripped her veil from her face. It hung limp and damp from her fists. She stretched the fabric taut, fighting not to give into the hacking convulsions in her throat. Her arms ached with the strain, vision narrowing to a patch of floor at her feet.

  A patch suddenly obscured by Anem’s boots. Sequa jerked upright. “Get…away,” she gasped.

  “You stopped yourself once. Do it again if it comes on you,” Anem snapped roughly. “Here. Drink.”

  A wooden cup of what looked like wine thrust into her vision. She dropped the veil, snatched it, and drank it in a gulp. Her throat burned as the spirits hit the split scars, but it soothed the rest of her.

  “Talking too much of late,” she whispered softly.

  “You cannot stand wrapped in silence and mystery anymore, Squirrel. You have been pushed out in the open.”

  “Make that known to my throat.”

  “Then just listen to me. You cannot be surprised that I, that anyone, would think you capable of atrocity to get what you want. But I concede, I know you well enough now, to see you would not waste a child’s life like this. You would frame this deception if you thought Cur guilty, and I do believe you think him innocent. But the thoughts will continue to spring. You have been nearby for at least one death; you are more than capable of entering and haunting the city unnoticed. You say there will be another death, and there is another. I give the Goddess thanks you have said these things in front of only me and Parri.”

  Blinking back tears of effort and pain, Sequa nodded. “Then I wait.”

  “For what?”

  “The next corpse. I will lurk, and watch, and visit Cur each day to make sure he is safe. I will train here during Godslight and Run the roof under the Goddess. I will stay in this forsaken, wretched place where everyone hates me and let it eat my mind a little more each day. I will stay. I will watch.

  “It will all get so much worse.”

  ~ * ~

  The rest of the Turn passed in a quickening rhythm, like the last moments before a birth. Sequa did as she promised and ghosted Under Roof in her anonymous veils, listening, watching, waiting. No one seemed to connect the death of the Noble boy to the deaths Cur stood accused of, and it passed out of daily speech swiftly.

  Her own name she heard both vilified and defended. Strange conspiracies swirled around herself, Anem, and the avatars. The carnal ones were the most entertaining.

  She ran the roofs of the city in the company of Krif and the other once-Children; she sparred with them and re-honed skills lain fallow while she labored out of the kingdom. It all became oddly companionable once they stopped trying to kill her. Good partners, as a group, if out of practice.

  She spent time with Cur in his new cell, a windowless room on the same level as Anem’s office. Once or twice they pushed the few battered furnishings to the side and sparred with empty hands; he defeated her each time. The strange, unnatural speed and precision that had come upon her at the End of the Road did not return, and they both came to believe that he had imagined it.

  The Turn ran its course and the Goddess swelled to fullness again.

  ~ * ~

  Stretched full out on a hidden ledge on the side of the Temple roof, Sequa prayed silently as she watched the Feathers fade out one by one. Just below her the balcony of the Shadow’s chambers lay still and peaceful. The air felt chilly as the Measure slid toward winter with a skip in its step. She had been lying there for quite some time, long enough the outer layers of her clothing grew heavy with dew. She had taken to wearing her other set of armor, the chain and leather of the Run, under her draperies. Save where the damp soaked the coverings on her arms and legs she felt little cold. She had fou
nd this little outcropping on a trip to visit her swords; it had felt like they needed reassurance she had not left them forever. The sensation that her weapons were coming slowly to something like a living presence had been growing since the end of her Run. They seemed less tools and more faithful pets these last Measures. Lying here near them her prayers felt easier in her mouth. Even the God rising did not still her benedictions as it might once have.

  For all her public stance of irreverence, the Gods still held her heart in their fingers. Their rampant gifting made her wary but always thankful. They had taken flesh and blood, bone and breath already. Pared her down to her core and left little they could take, at least on this day.

  So she rolled onto her back and raised her hands to the Father of All as He took His place in the sky. Stern and remote though He might be to one raised to love the darkness, He had not stinted her when she needed Him. She prayed to the Goddess and the Great Hawk with her body, in dance and in death. Prayers to the God? She had not been a singer even before the wreck of her throat. So she whispered her words to him, broken mutterings of supplication and abasement.

  Sequa sat up and grasped the edge of the bulwark, preparing to vault over and make her way down the shadow side of the building. The usual flocks of garbage-eating birds shifted and drifted on drafts rising from the city as the God rose. One of them, larger than the others, swooped down toward the perimeter wall on the far side of the Temple space from the Godrise, striking for something. Sequa readied herself for the drop down the side of the building, preparing a path in her head.

  Sickness twisted her guts like a noose. The pale blue of the sky turned black.

  On the wall, a man burst into flames.

  His scream started softly and rose like a flash flood until the song of his agony echoed across the entire Temple close. Sequa looked up to see a confused swirl of flame and burning cloth and whirling debris as the figure spun in an obscene homage to the Goddess. The sound choked off and the burning body tipped over the edge of the inner wall on its long stately journey toward the ground.

  The scream continued, heard with the heart and not the ears.

  Once, many Measures ago, she had been standing near an old building as it collapsed perhaps half a block away. A cloud of dust and debris had filled the alley, driving the lucky residents who had escaped before it, trampling each other. Sequa had pressed herself into a doorway and pulled her veils tight across mouth and nose. She could remember distinctly the feeling of the air rushing around her, clear for a moment then choked with dust and dirt, the foul reek of ancient, rotted timbers.

  The sound had been the pure air flashing past; the scream came with the wave of corruption that roiled behind it.

  Her mouth filled with the taste of rotted fruit, her nostrils with the stench of decay.

  Sequa rolled off her perch and landed on the Shadow’s balcony on silent but unsteady feet. Rising up against the backdrop of the white wall, she faced the living Avatars of the Great Gods as she had known she would. They did not look shocked to see her, half arrested in their rise from their chairs.

  “You felt that?” The Voice of the God snapped, driving truth down her throat with a divine fist.

  “Like a brand on the skin,” Sequa said. “A man, dying by fire…and radiating more power than stands in this room.”

  “Go.” The Shadow of the Goddess brooked no argument. “Go to the body. Now, before it is all lost. Go.”

  “Hold,” snapped the Voice. Still flush with the power of his God, the weight of his words Sequa checked in mid turn. She turned her head in time to see him throw something at her like an angry goodwife hurling a plate. Her mask and helmet. She caught them one handed, juggled for a moment and pulled off her veils. The straps caught on her first try. No more ragged, damp peasant. Champion again. Encased in leather and metal, her scars ceased to exist. Her spine straightened, and she raised a fist to him in tribute.

  Sequa leaped from the stone balustrade like a bird. The Shadow’s balcony stood square before the statue of the Goddess; how trite. Sequa touched down on the Great Mother’s outstretched hand and slide down the gentle curve of her stone back to free fall a few body lengths to the ground. Her marvelous new footwear made her feel as though she ran on the air itself.

  Rooted firmly to the ground again, Sequa put her head down and sprinted for where the body had landed, exultant.

  This would be the end of doubt, the end of questions. Her unseen enemy struck again, in the open. There would be no way to argue against her words now. If this went well, she and Cur could be on their way from the city before the Goddess rose again.

  The body had already drawn a crowd, servants and slaves on early morning errands, two flustered guards trying to edge people back from the mangled heap of flesh. The stench filled the air, already so strong Sequa saw two people spin on their heels and rip veils aside to vomit noisily. She slowed to a stately walk as she neared. Despite running a dead heat from the center of the close to the far wall her, breath remained steady and slow.

  Still a Runner.

  With the first lungful of that sweet, rich, repellent smoke, Sequa remembered an isolated waystation, a woman’s mutilated body, a man scrabbling out his life in the dirt at her feet. The intensity of the images checked her back for a moment. They had waited there to kill her, three killers in ambush, amusing themselves in rape and murder to while away the time.

  They had died in blood and in pieces, and she had laid fire to the buildings to cleanse it all. It had set her feet on the wilderness path that led to a fight she could not win, her own lingering death, and a miracle.

  She clenched her fists and the thick, ridged scars on her palms flexed.

  Death, blood, and fire even inside her own mind.

  Without speaking, she approached the body as close as she dared, shifting upwind to get away from the greasy, black smoke. Flames still licked at the fabric and a heat shimmer rose, clearly visible in the cool morning air. One of the guards made an aborted gesture of refusal then stepped away and left her alone.

  Human flesh does not take fire easily, but wool and spun fiber do. The veils that would have wrapped the man’s head were mostly consumed with only a few scraps hanging from cheek and shoulder. His face, thus revealed, had burned to bone in a few places, under the chin, against the ears where the fabric would have been drawn tight; his hair entirely gone. The damage grew less as the eye travelled downward with the lower leg and feet almost entirely unconsumed. Like the boy from a Turn ago, the man’s head split open, revealing a graying, gelatinous mass, but unlike the boy there was no blood pool.

  Dead before he hit the ground.

  Fire struck great fear in the city-born. Peasants learned young what to do with spilt flame: smother it, cover it, splash it. Flames needed air to grow, as the God needed air for His Voice to be heard. They stole air as well. Sequa had seen the result once. Three children lying dead in a closed room, unburnt, peaceful, and still. The burning veils would have robbed him of breath long before the fire touched his flesh.

  Dead by fire as he fell through the air.

  The first to die by fire.

  There again it showed itself, the thread, the line, the flash of silver in the darkness. There, there the shape of her enemy, of this weave of time and space and…

  Raw power, untutored, untrained, fierce as a winter wind. At least as deadly as her own humble self. It disturbed the soul as had the residue of the heat disturbed the air.

  Not even the Voice of the God when he bent his will and his divinity to bring truth to her mouth had matched it.

  The last of the flames flickered out, and she moved closer, still upwind, crouching now in a slow shuffle.

  Children like her who took to the roofs and walls of the world learned what happened when people fell.

  Sequa scuttled a little closer. This man had been fully veiled and wearing no armor, so a worker maintaining the walls, the Noble’s Way. Another half-crawling step—there. The incongruity
she knew would show itself.

  The same marks as those on the Noble boy, just visible across the shoulders. Deeper, and wider, partially obscured by the burnt flesh but the same.

  She dropped her head to her knee, the elation gone, drained like blood from a wound.

  The crowd split as though run through with two pikes.

  The living avatars of the Gods came, trailed by Commander Anem and her shadow, Parri.

  Sequa rose to her feet but bowed her head in respect. They joined her upwind of the still-reeking body. Both the avatars made the holy symbol in the air above the body. Anem and Parri stepped back; out of the corner of her eye, Sequa caught twinned glares. It had been a calm Turn since she dropped out of sight.

  The Voice of the God stepped close to the body, reached out…and recoiled. Just a flinch of the hand. Just a moment’s hesitation before he began the prayers for the newly dead.

  To Sequa, the Shadow, and Anem he might as well have screamed in agony.

  Sequa stood by silently until the quick ceremony ran its course. The guards finally rolled up the body in someone’s cloak and carted it off to be returned to the man’s family. The Shadow walked the crowd giving gentle comfort the whole time, but wound up next to Sequa and the other avatar by the time the body had been carried away.

  “It would be best, Holies, if we could have the needed discussion on sanctified ground,” the runner said softly.

  “Agreed,” murmured the Shadow without looking at her. “But not now. I—cannot bear it now.” Her face, wan and drawn, emphasized the slight droop of her left eye. Hearing the voice of a God directly did little good for the human body. Every Shadow and Voice paid penalties of flesh and soul.

  Anem broke in, also soft and without looking. “Does it matter if we delay?”

  “No.” Sequa swallowed convulsively as a stray breath of wind wafted the stink of the body back one last time. Whatever elation this death had brought her, looking at the body had drained it all away. “We have some time before… well, before something happens.”

  The Voice of the God shook like a wet dog under the same breeze. “Fine then,” he snapped. “I need to pray.”