As A God

by T. G. Shepherd

  She looked at each of them in turn. “What lies uncertain is the purpose itself, and that we cannot discover this night. I say we will cease to worry this like a dog with a rag in the darkness. We can decide nothing. When the Goddess is Full again, we shall see if your vile theory is correct, Sequa. Until then, we go on as we have in the past.”

  Anem also rose. “I swear Curran’s safety on my own life. I do believe that he is innocent, Sequa, and I will not stand and allow an innocent man to die if I can prevent it.”

  The Voice opened his hands as he too stood. “I can offer little but prayer, on the moment. The God listens but does not speak; I have no truths to give. May that change soon.”

  They all looked at the small woman still sitting. She reached up to touch her own face, running her fingers over the scars as though she had forgotten them. Then she nodded and flipped her cloak out behind her. Sequa rose to her feet…and her knees gave out with a lurch into the Voice’s chest hard enough to knock him back a step.

  “I’m… forgive me, Holy. I am…weary. I will walk back to my lodgings on the ground I think,” she said quietly.

  “You will stay here tonight,” he said firmly.

  She wobbled again when he let her go and didn’t argue after that.

  ~*~

  The upper floors of the Great Temple were mostly deserted; containing only the Shadow’s quarters and the rooms set aside for the Voice; none of the acolytes, clerics, or servants would have reason to be there past the daily cleaning. The discussion and its revelations had taken much longer than she thought; the empty halls almost echoed with that special late-night loneliness.

  No one saw the Voice of the God half-carrying Sequa’s small form into his own suite, a smaller mirror to the Shadow’s lair. When he let her go, she stumbled to the nearest resting place—a quaint wicker-weave chair with a thick cushion—and curled up like some exotic pet. She huddled in an exhaustion so profound it resisted rest.

  From the creaking, the Voice was opening a chest in his sleeping chamber and made a happy noise. It sounded like some stringed instrument, his voice, when her mind scampered this far removed from reality. “I thought I’d seen spare bedding in there. I will rest out on the veranda—the hammock is comfortable.”

  Sequa popped her head up over the back of the chair. “Why,” she dragged out painfully, “am I even here? I will go to the Shadow’s rooms or an acolyte’s chamber and fall upon the floor.” Her hands at the arms of the chair seemed bloodless and limp as wet cloth. It took three tries before she could push herself to something resembling standing.

  The Voice of the God laughed, summer birds and rushing water, warm wind on her face, and advanced upon her. He reached out and gripped her shoulders fearlessly, pulling her off her feet to swing her into his arms.

  “You would not make it out the door. I will take you to my bed—” he stopped in sudden realization of what he’d just said.

  Sequa kissed him, her eyes closed, brushing her scarred cheek against his face. The contrast between her bloodless, insensate scars and the warm softness of his lips felt intriguing. She had not lain with a man since she had been maimed, had lain with no man but Jesan her whole life.

  The Voice tasted different, less salt and more sweet, his lips fuller and chin more prominent. After a sharp intake of breath, he returned her caress with practiced ease. She had not been imaging his interest in her, then.

  The kiss lasted the time it took him to walk into his sleeping chamber carrying her and drop her gently onto the bed. Sequa turned away from him and burrowed down into sleep.

  ~ * ~

  She tried and failed to sneak out when she awoke. Bright Lordslight pouring through many windows made for bad shadows. He lay in wait for her, watching from his veranda, bathed in the light of his God, arms stretched wide.

  Sequa made it all the way to the door, studiously ignoring him, before he cleared his throat and greeted her. “Come, speak with me, Champion.”

  For a moment she imagined running from the room, from the building, from the city. From herself. Instead she walked to the edge of the light and dropped to one knee, looking up at him bright in the benediction of his god.

  He smiled at her and closed his eyes. She rose to her feet.

  “Please don’t leave, Champion.”

  Foolish to challenge him here, at the height of his powers. She settled back in the shade. Since he seemed to be waiting for her to speak, the silence stretched until it frayed on the edge. She fidgeted a little, trying not to breath too deeply. Trying not to draw his scent and aura into her lungs till it permeated her flesh. Tried to forget the flavor of his mouth.

  Eventually he opened his eyes again. “Impressive. Most people break in a few heartbeats.”

  “I am growing accustomed to—”

  “Denying the God?”

  “When you say it that way, it sounds…unwise.”

  “It is unwise. I am learning swiftly that wisdom is not your greatest asset.”

  “Wisdom would have me now a dull, complacent whore in the Michelian house.”

  “Measures and Measures since your life ripped apart, Champion. Do you think nothing would have changed by now?”

  “My family is still exiled. I am still hunted. What will change, when powerful men hate me?”

  He looked at her in silence for a long time. The wind kicked, fitful as a cranky child, bringing the scents of hot stone, dirt, and refuse from the city. From the Temple itself mixed in flowers and cooking meat.

  “They do not only hate you. They fear you also.”

  Sequa jerked slightly and hated herself. “I am a landless, mutilated, wandering ex-slave. What do they fear?”

  He laughed, and she grew dumb and mindless from the beauty. “I could not say for I do not know their minds. I do know that I fear you. It is not so much to think I cannot be alone.”

  “In the name of your God, how can you say that?”

  “Stop being coy, Champion. You know yourself as well as any other. He is your God too.”

  She jerked under the power of the man’s divinity thrown full into her face, her throat working on words that it took every ounce of will she possessed not to blurt out. She sagged back from the deadly purity of His light and held her breath again. The words snapped and howled behind her teeth.

  I know I have two gifts, and you called on one when you called me Dancer. I know I should be ashamed of the other, the Killer.

  I know I have no shame in it at all.

  Her eyes had closed on their own; when she opened them he still stared at her. Near perfect, absolute control, his face gave nothing away. “How do you do that?”

  She laughed ruefully. “I swear I have no idea. But I am not one to give over any advantage, even one unfairly gained.”

  “Ah. That explains Curran then.”

  Her heart stuttered with shock. He smiled in sly triumph. Point gained.

  “O Voice of the Great Good God, I have never lied to Curran about my feelings for him. I have never promised him anything.” Sequa spoke slowly and carefully and truthfully

  “He will never hear those words, which you well know. And so you use him as any tool in your hand.”

  She nodded. “Yes. You have had speech with him then?”

  “More than once. He is a devout man, in his way. I offered him the comfort of his God in his current dilemma.”

  “Ask him then, when next you speak, of how we met.”

  Cur and two others, deeply resentful of a woman being allowed to train as a Runner had lurked outside her sleeping chamber to assault her the first morning she woke as a Runner. They had failed but she had never forgotten it.

  He nodded. “I know already. Impressive that you overlooked such a thing, and then I realized why.”

  They stared each other down. Sequa faded back and back into the shadows, contracting herself into a tight ball of darkness. The Voice of the God expanded into the Godslight, his very breath music in the air.

  “I a
m faithful to my husband," Sequa ground out, her fingers twitching toward absent weapons.

  “The Gods favor fidelity. But they favor the truth as well.”

  “The God favors the truth. The Goddess cares less, the Empty not at all.”

  “You would debate theology with me now? A landless, mutilated, wandering ex-slave?”

  She bowed, granting him the point.

  “And,” he continued, “what of the Hawk’s stance on honesty?”

  For that, she had an answer. “The Hawk speaks in blood, Holy. True or not, it answers to the victor first.”

  “That is your curse, child, isn’t it? Victory or death?” His voice went very soft, gentle as the wind on her face.

  Sequa turned and fled the room before he could see any further into her soul.

  Chapter 7

  The Goddess rose a day past Her next Fullness when Sequa’s conjecture proved correct.

  Anem had her people on high alert from a few days before Her fullness, and when nothing occurred even Sequa hoped their precautions had scared the monster away. For her own part, she roamed the roofs and the inner wall ceaselessly just before dawn and Godset, sleeping fitfully in the middle of the day and for a few nighttime hours at Her height.

  Leaden and exhausted, making her way by the Peasant’s Road from her rooms to the Temple, the scream of Fire! Fire! rose ahead of her. The mass of people on the street paused and moved as one toward the cry.

  Sequa found the tallest building on the street with an exterior ladder and made its roof in a heartbeat. Her blood tingled and sparked in the backwash of what she knew now must be wild magic. From three streets over thick, black smoke pillared. Gulls and carrion birds swooped and dove in a shrieking frenzy over the space created by four long blocks not quite meeting. The space inside their square, unusually, had not been covered over.

  Quick as thought, Sequa crossed the rooftops in a few leaps to stare over the edge of the building. In the center of a small space a few hopeful pots of flowers clustered; the God would smile upon them for at least a little time each day.

  The shattered mess of pottery and bruised petals spilled like drops of paint across the grey dirt. People in hastily wound veils entered the space and retreated abruptly.

  That same greasy, sweet black smoke rose from the wreck of what had been a man on his back across the wreckage of the flowerpots. What Sequa could see of his clothes looked cheap and poor, but mostly just a charred mess. Even three stories above him she could make out bone shining through burnt flesh. The interior of the space had no windows and only one door.

  The stones of the roof near the edge of the drop bore marks of fire, a black smear stretching to the edge.

  Sequa vaulted over and rebounded off the walls of the space like a ball, dropping down to land in front of the door. The most recent people attempting to gain entry had pushed inside; screams of shock echoed around her ears.

  Reaching up behind her head, she drew her sticks from their holder and brandished them.

  “Back. And stay out till the Commander is here.”

  One figure in woman’s veils remained braver than the rest. She stepped forward and held out her gloved hands in an imperious gesture. “Who are you to command honest citizens… you… monstrosity?” Her voice, thin but not frail, revealed a matron of middle Measures.

  Sequa stepped forward aggressively and the woman flinched back. “The person who could have killed you three times before you finished insulting me. Get out, woman. Keep the rest of the rabble out. This is beyond you.”

  The woman backed up a step then another. “Why do you think the Commander will come?” she quavered.

  “She will when you and yours tell her I am here."

  They left her undisturbed till Anem arrived, though Sequa heard angry muttering from the other side of the door. She paced the rim of the small space, threading carefully between shards of pottery, scraps of litter, feathers, bits of roofing tile.

  In a few passes around the space her veils felt so permeated with soot and stench she didn’t bother to avoid it anymore. If she stood motionless long enough, she imagined the stuttering smoke would twist and cling to cover her like a shroud. Automatically she noted where she would go up the walls to escape attack or apprehension, but most of her mind bent to this riddle before her.

  His work; she knew it. The second death by fire.

  But how?

  As close to a secret place as anything could be in Ressen, this hidden courtyard. The residents of the building would know and likely almost never speak of their open space—were it widely broadcast it would have to be covered over. Under Roof they had no right to the eyes of the God.

  The only other way an outsider could have learned of this sheer dead end would be to Run the roofs. Known from below or seen from above.

  Anem came with Parri and a handful of Iron Guards—and two Clerics bearing the colors of the God and the Goddess. Both of them made it to the threshold of the space, checked, and would go no further. The woman of the Goddess made miserable retching noises before turning away. The guards mostly stayed out as well, but for one slim figure; Sequa might have run the Roof with that one a few nights ago.

  “Champion,” sighed Anem. “It might be better if you were not always the first person to stand next to these bodies.”

  Sequa shrugged elaborately. “I think it best that the normal, good folk of the city do not touch or disturb them. I wonder which of us is right?”

  Parri glared at her tone through his eye slit then squinted around the small space. He twisted and jinked, trying to stay out of the miasma of filthy smoke. The body still smoldered sullenly, unnaturally.

  Anem tossed a hand gesture at her minions, and they closed the outer door behind them. The four of them, for the slight guard had remained, took up position around the corpse. Sequa stood as far away from the door as she could, her shoulders twitching after she sheathed her weapons.

  The Iron Guard spoke softly from a crouch near the body, revealing itself to be a man. “Peasant. Old clothes, worn and ragged. No shoes. Bones broken in the legs—he fell before he burned.”

  Sequa looked up, squinting adjacent the bright blue of the sky. The chimney walls seemed composed of old wood, lathed with mud. Across the surface, deep, fresh scratches peeled back decades of dirt, smoke, and weathering. She could see the smudges she had made with her feet and hands on the way down; more profound marks did not come at her making.

  “Was he on the roof and jumped?” Parri asked.

  “And lit himself on fire on the way down?” Sequa muttered without looking at him, still studying the marks on the walls. She heard rather than saw his frustrated motion.

  Anem leaned over to murmur something at her guard, who rose and left through the door.

  Sequa pulled her hood down off her face.

  “He lived here, I would think. Or had lived here. Someone will be missing a father, son, brother in a few turns of the glass.”

  Nodding, Anem dropped to one knee, carefully avoiding the broken shards of pottery. She drew her sword and used it to slip the corpse’s veils off his face. Unlike the first man, his face was mostly undamaged. An older man, skin slack and loose above his neat, grey beard but properly pale. The burns on his throat extended down his whole chest. Lifting the cloth added the stink of burned hair to the smoke. The charred skin looked bloody and raw; the fall had not killed him. When she pulled back the cloth, there came as well the heavy scent of unburned tallow and dark stains became visible on his undamaged clothing.

  “How did you come to be here, then?” Parri asked Sequa sharply.

  “I heard a cry of fire and followed the smoke from the Roof. Thick, black smoke, flames newly born. He was dead when I arrived.”

  “So, what? He was on the roof, seized, doused in oil, lit aflame and thrown to the ground?” Parri sounded angry and accusatory, but Sequa gave him a sharp glance.

  “I …think so,” she lied swiftly. “This place is the special secret o
f everyone who lives here. There would be no way to be sure he would be undisturbed. I think our quarry did exactly that. A man could be thrown from this height and not die from the fall.”

  He was on the ground, tending the plants. Someone came down from above, hauled him up, lit him aflame, and threw him down again. Then went back up, leaving those marks.

  Impossible, of course.

  “Why would that matter?” Anem rose, wiping her blade on her breeches.

  Sequa spread her hands open, her breath faltering in her throat. Suddenly the sick sweetness of the smoke made her gag. “Dead by fire,” she choked out.

  “No, but…why?” Parri asked in a choked voice.

  Her frayed temper snapped. “If I knew why, I would know who. Two men are dead by fire. There is some pattern, and I almost see it, but it is incomplete. I don’t know.”

  The door opened, and the slight guard returned. He saluted Anem and spoke quickly. “Forty families in this building, all but one Peasant and that last foreign traders who married into the city. One of them a widower who loved the flowers here. No one has seen him since the cry went up.”

  Anem sighed. “You brought some strong-stomached member of his family?”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  “Escort them in, then.”

  Sequa shrugged her hood back up. “I will go.”

  “Yes, you will.” Anem sounded more than usually exasperated. “Do try not to be standing beside the next person to immolate themselves.”

  “It might be time to announce something about all this, Commander. It might be time to broach the idea that Cur is falsely accused, if only to alert the citizens that their lives are still in danger. In other words, it might be time to admit that I was right.”

  She turned and went up the stone and beam exterior wall as though she walked on a paved road, crossing the space in midair twice to find better holds. She could not bring herself to touch those parallel scratches, bright and fresh against the old wood. Anem and Parri both watched her in silence, and in silence, she disappeared over the lip of the roof again.

  ~ * ~

  The third death by fire came at the end of the first night of the Lady’s next Fullness. Nearly a relief after that full Turn of weightless waiting, watching the Goddess wane and grow again. Sequa slept when the man died, deep in dreamless slumber. Since running herself to rag and bone the last Fullness had amounted to nothing, she had taken up a more reasonable schedule, sparring with the Iron Guard each day when she visited Cur, a simple meal, then a few patrols at different times of the night.