As A God

by T. G. Shepherd

  Her training with the Iron Guard had become more friendly and thus more useful. She recovered old skills that made her a better climber, tumbler, Runner. The gray man—Krif she sometimes remembered—nearly always lurked nearby watching her intently, visibly altering his fighting style to adapt to hers. The slight guard she had met next to the smoldering corpse had shown up more than once and proved himself a swift and wily fighter. She had heard others call him “X’san”, no inland name and she did not know its provenance. He never went unveiled or bare-skinned in front of her. His voice though—pure Ressen, the blended slur of a thousand accents that had turned into the sound of the city.

  Sequa lost the occasional bout now, though more from luck and fatigue than from being actually overmatched. It had become a sort of prestige moment, to make her pant and falter. The night before, she had run with only the two of them for most of the darkness, and it had been a good night. There had been smooth, flying changes of lead and direction, the same choices made in the same instant. It reminded her of everything that had been best and brightest about being a Child of Home; it reminded her of the only thing that had made her Runner training bearable.

  It reminded her not to be alone.

  They had seen nothing untoward, and she had gone to her bed peacefully and woken in peace with the God newly risen. She made her way slowly to a nearby tavern, ate some bread and stew and sat contemplating nothing when she began to hear the conversations around her.

  Another man, a Noble. Dead by fire, his wrecked body nearly impaled on the framework of a lavish addition he was building onto his already enormous house at the edge of the high-class section of the city.

  Sequa left the remains of her food on the table, the taste ashes and dust in her mouth.

  Anem and Parri stood near the body when she arrived… well, as close as they could get since the wooden structure still burned, flames wreathing the form of a large-framed man hanging from one arm. The remnants of his clothing, scant but richly colored, had blackened in the heat. A big man, nearly as tall as Cur and as heavily muscled as Parri. His remaining hair was iron grey; she could not see his face from where he hung.

  White bone peeked through the flesh on the torso, impaled on a charred length of wood from the half-demolished building next to the mansion. From the shape and size, it had housed a few Merchant-class families, doubtlessly thrown out on their ears when the Noble wanted to expand. The spike of wood went through his lower belly; it would not have killed him.

  Sequa, so busy studying the body, didn’t see who Parri interrogated for many moments. She noticed the hysterical woman, face fully veiled, because her voice rose to a sharp, shrieking wail.

  “Here I tell you! I saw him, tall and thin and wearing some strange cloak. I swear, I saw him!”

  “He is in a prison cell, good wife. He could not have been here,” Parri said in the tone of a man repeating something said many times before. “You did not see him.”

  “I saw him! He killed the master, would have killed me! I saw him!”

  “You were safe,” Anem said sharply. “I believe you saw a man, yes, but not Curran the Runner. He has not left his cell. Now tell us what you did see.”

  The woman gaped like a landed fish for a moment, then threw up her hands. “I’ve told you and told you and told you!”

  Anem met Sequa’s eyes over the woman’s shoulder. “Tell us again.” All of us, she meant.

  Sequa crept closer, still mostly studying the flaming body, idly wondering when it would crisp and fall off its spit.

  “I went to wake the master, bring him his medicine. Since his wife died, he’s been tired and complaining of pains. When I opened the door, I heard him shouting from the second floor. I ran up and he was there! In the great hall with the master, holding him like a lover! And the master screaming and crying, and he looked at me and screamed help and then… the… man… he threw the master off the balcony, and he wouldn’t stop screaming. He wouldn’t stop!”

  The woman worked herself again into a frenzy. “I ran down the stairs before he could murder me too! And then you all came!”

  Anem looked at Sequa again. “A patrol not two blocks from here came running with the screaming started. Found him like that—” she gestured at the body “—but still alive. Found her shrieking in the street. Did not find any attacker.”

  The woman whipped around to see who Anem addressed. When she saw Sequa she threw out a warding gesture and screamed dramatically. “What is that freak doing here? You are all in league! Goddess preserve us.”

  “As She preserved your master?” Sequa grated, stung and annoyed.

  Parri snarled at her then took the woman by the arm and led her away, still howling insults at Sequa.

  The Commander and the Champion stared after her then jumped as the wooden spar holding the body finally shattered under the dead weight and dropped him in a swell of ashes and sparks into the burning embers of the building. A fire crew had already made a break around the flames and doused them. In this area, the buildings were mainly stone. Little wind meant little danger of a flare up catching anything else.

  Sequa looked through the doorless entry to the mound of smoldering flesh and fat.

  “He attacked a Noble in his home? At first Godslight? And he was seen?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is… this is not right.” Sequa spoke slowly, feeling her way into some truth revealed by the noisome scene.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He struck in the middle of the day, in the middle of the city, invisibly. But here he was seen? How? Why?” She shook her head. “Anyone else, anything else, I would say it a hurried attack, unplanned. A mistake.”

  Nodding, Anem took a few steps closer to the building then backed away, the heat still too great to approach. “Perhaps it was.”

  “Perhaps. But why?”

  “There must be a reason?”

  “Yes.” Sequa shook her head again. “Yes, A reason for even a mistake. A thread in the pattern, a pass in the dance. Something… I need to explore this place. Something about the man? The building? That odious woman?”

  “Don’t steal anything,” Anem said in a sardonic tone then walked away to the fire brigade, complimenting them on their work.

  “Assassin is not thief,” Sequa muttered sourly at Anem’s back before entering the front door of a dead man’s house.

  Her heart jerked to a stop in her chest, memory striking her hard and fast. This might have been the entrance hall of her home in the capitol. White marble floors, a grand, stone staircase to the second floor, doors to a formal dining room flung open to the right. Under the overhang and the stairs, several other doors and corridors peeked from the shadows. A home too large for one man already and he needed to expand? Her teeth ground a little.

  The rest of the household servants had clearly been moved out of the building by Parri and Anem. An unsettling calm lay heavy in the air, the stillness of rot and decay, not peace. Sequa stalked up the staircase, elegantly shallow. The second floor almost mirrored the first, a lone corridor in stone with well-spaced wooden doors. At the far end, a double set had been flung open onto a chaotic scene of tumbled furniture. Sequa opened each door as she passed them, revealing unused bedrooms, a dust-covered nursery, a bathing chamber and garderobe. The private quarters of what had been a substantial family, now scattered to the winds. Why the expansion?

  The main bedroom at the back stretched the whole width of the building, with multiple shuttered windows and doors to a bright porch flung open. The room was a wreck, chairs and tables smashed, pillows ripped open in a storm of feathers, spatters of blood on the floor and walls… and yes, even the ceiling. Whatever had happened, there had been a fight.

  He had thrown people to their deaths, lit them on fire, and never struck more than a single blow. This field of debris spoke either of desire for combat or lack of surprise. As though he had struck at an imperfect moment, when he had always been perfect before.

&
nbsp; Sequa stood in the center of the room and tried to piece together order from chaos. He would have come in from the windows, the porch. Every other time he struck from the open, that wouldn’t change. The God would have been just cresting the horizon, the Lady bowing to Her Lord as She sank. The porch faced the God, piously proper.

  The Nobleman would have been newly risen from his bed—the sheets lay turned back, rumpled. A spilt basin of water stood on an end table, pinkish with blood. A half-full chamber pot lay tipped on one side nearby, adding to the stench. She looked into the basin, saw a gleam of white.

  Teeth, knocked from the man’s mouth. And a splotch of blood against the marble of the dresser nearby.

  Looking back to the porch, a thin clear path showed itself.

  He had entered through the open doors as the God rose, moving swiftly into the room; bad to be framed with light behind you when you came in stealth to kill. The dead man had been washing his face, his hands.

  When the killer had smashed his face into the marble top of the dresser, he’d had the presence, the constitution to spit out smashed teeth, blood, turn to fight. One demolished chair on the ground in the middle of the room had a twin next to the table. The victim had broken it over the killer before arms strong enough to hurl a boy across the length of a roof had grabbed, held, thrown.

  He would have landed…there. That delicate end table lay smashed outward in all directions, as though a heavy weight had landed on its center. One battered leg lay several body lengths away, near the porch doors. He’d picked up the first thing to hand as a weapon, half blinded, no doubt, by his own blood. The pain would have been muzzily distant for a few more moments. The ringing in his ears, the violent spinning of the room from the head injury would have slowed him down.

  Walking out onto the porch, threading with careful treads around the wreckage, Sequa pulled up her veils and stepped into the Godslight.

  “Anem, Commander?” she called.

  From the other side of the burning building, now little more than a smoldering heap of charred wood and blackened stone, Anem’s voice rang.

  “What?”

  “This Noble, he was a warrior, yes?”

  “He had been my chief General, Sequa, till one of his knees gave out on him.”

  “He fought. He might even have—”

  As she yelled over the smoke, Sequa idly studied the scene outside. The man had landed quite a way from the balcony, in the place where the fire had burned hottest. Had the killer started the fire and thrown the Noble into it, or thrown the man and then lit the fire, using him like a wick?

  The building site would have provided more than enough fuel, wood, paints and tints, oil for the lamps that burned brighter and stronger than coldlights. Just behind the building site in the opposite direction from the body a pile of tools and sundries lay scattered, next to what had once been some sort of raised garden. Just bare, turned earth and grey stone, shreds of green clinging half-heartedly to the broken edges.

  Her breath clogged in her throat as the wind shifted hard, filling her mouth with sweet, greasy smoke. Sequa choked, pulled down her veils, choked again, spat saliva mixed with blood over the railing. Her stomach cramped around the food she had eaten and the vile smell of the room behind her slammed into her for the first time.

  Leaning over the railing, half sobbing, her eyes caught the mound of newly turned dirt at a new angle.

  Oh. That shade of grey was not stone.

  Without thinking, Sequa vaulted the railing onto the crumbling remnants of a thick, exterior wall and flew three steps to jump down next to the mound of dirt.

  She watched her own bare hands dart out, dig and twist in the freshly turned dirt, nails splitting on rocks, brushing against unclean things squirming away from the light. It did not take long to find the thing she had seen peeking out of its cover, and then she fell to her knees, hands wiping uselessly at each other.

  It must once have been buried deeper, the workers on the expansion stripping away the dirt to fill parts of the new construction. Inching closer and closer. A mercy in many ways that some innocent man would be spared finding it with the turn of a spade.

  Next to a man dead by fire lay a child dead by earth.

  And there, bare for the first time, the pattern she had been teasing at these many Turns. It glittered, clear and bright like a well-marked path of stepping stones in a river of blood.

  She wanted to get Anem, needed a witness, but could not step away. Could not leave her.

  Instead she yelled, crying out the commander’s name until her voice failed in blood and coughing, crying out again when her throat cleared. In an eternity, Ressen’s brevet queen appeared at Sequa’s back, reunited with a harried Parri.

  “Blood and bone, Sequa, what are you caterwauling about?” Anem snarled as she stepped closer.

  Sequa straightened up from her knees and moved to one side.

  Pulled into the Godslight, they saw the half-decayed body of a child, small and forlorn. Insects writhed in what flesh remained, fat and sleek. Bone peeked out, yellowish grey; one arm had detached and partially sunk into the soft dirt, mostly a framework held together by strips of cloth. The corpse lay with its hands out stretched, face down, as though clawing at the mud to dig in deeper. The flesh and scraps of cloth still hanging from the grim structure were high with rot, the stink of corruption overpowering the smell of smoke.

  “Name of the Goddess. What is that?” Parri gulped.

  “The reason the Noble died,” Sequa said.

  Anem shot her a hard look over her veil. Sequa knelt down abruptly, clutching at her torso and heaving a few moments. They waited her out in grim silence.

  “He died because the men working on his house would have found this today or perhaps tomorrow. The killer struck to distract from within his greater purpose, the method in the mistake. If he had not been interrupted, he would have removed this body when he left. No one would have noticed. I suppose he hoped he could come back tonight and get it without being seen.”

  Parri stepped closer and studied the pathetic form. “He killed this boy—”

  “Girl. It’s a girl child, look at the bracelets,” Sequa snapped. Wooden bangles slimy with black mold lay by each spray of tiny finger bones poking through the scattered dirt. Such things were a traditional gift in Merchant families, one for each Measure till the girl married. Seven of them clung to her half-decayed body.

  Anem breathed a soft prayer of mourning.

  Sequa’s mouth opened, and she wondered that words tumbled from her lips and not pus and slime, so foul did she sound in her own ears. She pulled up her veils as though she could conceal the truths she knew with the same motion.

  “He killed her with dirt, when this flower bed would have been bare for the winter. Dug down and dropped her in, heaved more dirt on top. Held her down till her lungs filled with mud, drowned her in earth. Buried her and left.” She half-choked again and went still, hearing tiny fingers scraping against the roots of flowers as they twined around, stabbing greedily into the flesh to suckle the life rotting beneath them.

  That spring this garden must have been unusually fertile. She hoped no one had been growing vegetables.

  Parri cursed and spoke to Anem in an urgent tone. To Sequa, their voices sounded like a musical buzz, wordless and senseless. Against the vibrant, vile thing she could see so clearly now, the rest of the world dissolved into shades of grey and brown, as though she lay buried in dirt herself.

  “You missed three.” Sequa mumbled the words from her knees with no conscious volition. Anem and Parri, deep in their intense discussion apparently did not hear her voice, soft through the veils she had replaced. Sequa looked up at the buildings to either side of the narrow corridor, up past the new construction. Both multi-storied and blank-faced. No watching eyes to peer from windows. In her head, the shadowy, incomplete map of Ressen she had been building wavered and shifted. Where in relation to the other bodies? To the temple, to the guard quarters? She
would have to go and look down at that remarkable carved, wooden city above Anem’s sanctum to place it accurately. She rose, knees damp with mud, and stepped closer to them.

  “There are three more bodies.” She stated it baldly in a voice so sad and tired even she almost did not recognize it herself. The Commander and her captain stopped, started as though they had forgotten she was there, and stared. Sequa ran a finger under the edge of her veils, her skin feeling greasy and slick with filth. She could still smell burnt flesh, taste it on her tongue.

  They still stared at her, two sets of wary and appalled eyes over men’s veils. “What,” said Anem very precisely, as though testing the shape of each word in her mouth, “do you mean by that?”

  Sequa looked back at the plaintive bones, so eloquent of suffering, then met Anem’s eyes squarely.

  “There is a pattern to this dance of extermination. We have missed some steps, which is why it made no sense. But I see it now.” She wanted to sleep more than anything in the world, more than she wanted to return to Jesan, more than she wanted the Prince’s head in her hands, more than she wanted Cur’s name cleared. To be clean and then sleep till this blood-drenched city fell down around her ears. Alone, peacefully.

  Anem held her silence and Parri seemed reluctant to speak without her leave.

  “Think” Sequa continued. “There have been four boys dead by air.” Her arms spasmed, miming flailing of a man falling to his death. “There have been three men dead by fire,” and now her hands clenched against the sickening agony of being burnt alive. “This child—this girl-child, from the bracelets, and the size of the bones—died by earth, drowned in it. There will be three others, three girls, also dead by earth. You will not find two of the bodies without a repeat of this extraordinary luck or extraordinary foolishness, I don’t know what rules here. But I know where the third is. Well,” she stopped and rubbed her fingers along her jaw again. “The first actually,” she muttered again, as though talking to herself.