As A God

by T. G. Shepherd

  More frightened.

  The hours of the God lengthened, the air mellowed and grew warm with promise. Ressen waited out the falling Turn in breathless terror.

  The second woman who died in water had no choice about where and when she would be about the city. Despite the fact that Ressen had no city-bound slaves in law, in practice many people were as chained to their positions as any chattel.

  She had been a street cleaner, one of the furtive creatures who darted about the Noble’s Quarter removing dung from the streets, trash from the storefronts, debris from the parks.

  Some Noble had demanded the public fountain in his courtyard be cleaned of moss and slime before the guests arrived for his son’s wedding, the festivities beginning with Godrise. What greeted them instead was a woman’s body draped over the low stone lip, the swirling water under the graceful stone figure of the Dancing Goddess tinged pink with her blood. Her back and arms were slashed to the bone—but the water had killed her, sprayed from her mouth when they lifted her free.

  Again, the Shadow appeared when the hysterical Noble and his coldly angry wife would have come to blows. She soothed them, gave the usual blessing…and as the Godlight spilled over the outer wall to touch her head collapsed frothing and trembling to the ground.

  She should have been growing to her most powerful now, at Fullness, only two Turns from Goddess High. She should have been youthful and sparkling with life.

  She looked pale and fleshless, a thousand Measures old, when Anem carefully lifted her onto a horse litter, skin drawn down to the bones of her face and hands. Her eyes cushioned by black rings, her hair brittle and thin.

  She died along with the city.

  The third death by water was as simple and brutal as the other two. A foreign merchant, found dead in the river, her back scratched and bleeding. She might not even have understood the conditions in the city. Newly arrived, she spoke almost nothing but Athari. Her family, wailing and desolate, removed her body for their own rites before Anem could do more than look at it.

  Since the Shadow did not come out of the Temple for the third death, Anem went to her.

  They met and spoke at the door of the Shadow’s rooms, the older woman standing just out of the hallway light, and Anem struggling to pierce the gloom to see her face. The wide, bright windows and doors to the outside had been shuttered and covered, locked down from the inside. Even as she had commanded it, Anem had feared the consequences of locking the avatar of the Goddess away into darkness. Now she knew she was right to fear.

  The Shadow grew smaller and smaller with each bald statement from the Commander, her shoulders bowing and spine curving as though she wished only to lie upon the ground and weep.

  With the recitation of the most recent horror completed, Anem stood in silence in the doorway for what felt like a full turn of the glass, listening to the Shadow’s shallow breath catch and stutter as she tried to control herself.

  “Thank you, Commander,” the Shadow finally ground out and made as though to retreat. Anem jerked forward and slapped her hand onto the door.

  “No. As I told…someone else once, you will not cower in darkness without speaking to me. You are the Shadow of the Great Good Goddess on this earth. You must do something other than hide.”

  The Shadow of the Goddess stepped into the light and Anem gasped. As bad as she had looked the Turn before, now she looked truly like a walking corpse, her skin grey with fatigue, her eyes black-pouched and her mouth thinned to a bloodless line.

  She was dying, Anem realized. As the city fails, so fails the Shadow.

  “I pray, Commander. I beg my patron to show me some sign, something I can do. And She does not speak to me. I have borne up under Her touch for the most trivial matters and now, as the city Her first Shadow fought to bring into being lies drying and curling up under this evil, She is silent. Her people are slaughtered, culled like sheep by some monster, and She gallivants about the sky like some careless, intransigent girl.”

  The Shadow staggered back from the door, choking on her own vehemence. Anem moved to support her. Another beat her to it.

  Out of the darkness of the room, Curran appeared and gently caught the Shadow by the shoulders, guiding her with careful solicitude to a high-backed chair, moving with eerie silence for so large a man. Anem gaped at him in shock and surprise. He had been living here since he moved out of the Iron Quarters, just after Sequa’s death?

  She’d assumed he’d left the city, to wander the kingdom till he drank himself to uselessness. Somehow, he seemed unlikely to survive long without the small, scarred woman to trail around behind.

  “Thank you, Curran,” the Shadow said faintly, accepting a wooden mug of what smelled like wine to Anem. The Commander advanced further into the dark room full of musty and dead air.

  Cur gave an embarrassed flinch and moved away from the Shadow. Anem waved her hand at him, Calm, it is well. Her own mouth twisted a little. To Sequa, that would have meant I’ll see about you later. She supposed she would have to, when she had a moment to spare from trying to resuscitate the trade that kept Ressen free and her its master. He would have to be encouraged to move along, to dissipation or death or the void for all she cared. Even now she didn’t blame him for her city’s tragedies but it would be best to have him gone.

  Anem dropped to her knees in front of the Shadow and took the older woman’s trembling hands into her own, feeling the hard curve of the cup through the gossamer thin flesh.

  “You need a physician, Shadow. If prayer has not brought answers, perhaps one of my healers can. Let them visit you.” She smiled as gently, through the void howling in her heart.

  If we lose the Shadow in the same Measure as the Voice, the whole kingdom will fall into disarray. Death and chaos. War loomed on the horizon. Every sign, mundane and divine, pointed to it. Somewhere out in the world, a young man of fighting age started to dream of battle and the cry of a hawk. She could only hope he would never know how close his divinity lay upon him. The avatar of the Great Hawk courted only war.

  The Shadow shook her off, gently, and then sipped at the wine. Behind them, Cur faded into the shadows near the bedroom wall, making little restless rustling noises.

  “Prayer has answered me, though, my friend. Though the Goddess will not speak these last four nights have I dreamed of her…”

  The Shadow paused and looked over at the bedroom wall almost convulsively. Cur went very still.

  “I dreamed of her dancing. He called her his dancer aflame. I dreamed of her calling the Balance in fire and blood, of her turn as the Summer Dancer those Measures ago, when the dancers across the kingdom conjoined. The Voice and I first became aware then of some power bending divinity to earth not of our making.”

  She spoke, Anem realized, not about the Goddess but about Sequa. She remembered that Goddess High, now almost four Measures gone; she remembered the shock of horror and potential that twisted the will of the young clerics who had danced the Goddess in the center of the city. All three of them had danced the same, one after the other through the night, unplanned steps so wild and violent she had wondered if someone had drugged them. They had all looked terrified by the ordeal; all of them had left the Temple service since then. No comfort for the soul, to be taken by the Gods as a plaything.

  “And so shall I dance the Goddess the next Turn,” The Shadow continued, the beginning of her declaration lost to Anem’s memories.

  Anem leaped to her feet. “You will not! You must not!” To have the Shadow out in the open for the last Fullness of this deadly game, on indefensible ground, caught in a trance of prayer?

  Her words reverberated in the close, stuffy room. Just on the edge of the light, the Shadow smiled and Anem felt her soul contract. “I am the avatar of the Great Good Goddess, Commander. I bear the weight of the Mother of All on my soul. I do not think you can say must to me.”

  Her mouth opening and closing like the door of a busy shop, Anem reflected on the aura of pure power now
flowing from the small, half-broken woman. She’d never felt it that strongly when the Shadow stood alone before. Normally it took more than one avatar in the room to draw the swirling potency down from the heavens.

  “Forgive me, Shadow,” Anem said stiffly. “But I cannot keep you safe out there, not in the open. The Iron Quarters are stretched thin, most of my people working until they collapse with fatigue and then dragging themselves out again. Even with all of my people fit and ready… he will come, Shadow. He will come for you.”

  Again came that blighted smile, the only expression on the Shadow’s face. Her eyes looked cold and deadly, a chilling expression on so gentle a face.

  “I know Commander. Let this monster come. Let him feel the true power of the Goddess. Let him pay for his crimes, the lives stolen from me, from you, from us all.”

  She rose, graceful again, her eyes glowing a faint, pearly silver, her voice taking on a timbre not entirely human for the first time since the Voice’s hideous death.

  “Let him come. We will be ready for him this time.”

  ~ * ~

  In the soft, summer twilight, the Goddess edged over Ressen’s wall like a shy child peeking out from behind her mother’s skirts. The Shadow swirled, gorgeous under her Lady’s bright gaze, slowly preparing herself for her first Summer Dance in Measures. Her bare feet stepped firm and even, her jaw set stiff as stone.

  Anem looked around, holding her despair deep in her heart. They risked all on this last throw, the life the Gods granted them against the death-magic even now making the air feel leaden and heavy in her lungs. She had ringed the Temple close with all her best fighters, the armored squads led by Parri, her archer corps scattered around the space, the slim, light former Children moving in ones and twos on the fringes of the crowd. The most heavily armed Summer Dance in history. She spared a thought for Curran, whom she’d ordered out of the city a few days before. Even if this desperate gambit succeeded, he could not stay without his protector. He’d left protesting, but she’d seen him out the gates herself. He’d been carrying an awkward bundle that clinked; Sequa’s armor and weapons she assumed.

  The crowd itself seemed pitifully small. The last time the Shadow had danced the Goddess there had been almost no room for her to move.

  Today, the city cowered, hopeless and still, waiting for the final blow to land.

  The God touched the horizon and the Shadow danced.

  From the first beat, the Gods had taken her; her face instantly transfixed in ecstasy. She danced as a much younger woman, inspired. She danced, Anem thought, like Sequa.

  The crowd gathered in the space before the temple, tense and afraid, calmed with each lovely, loving pass. The great beast of the city murmured and settled into a more comfortable posture. The air grew easier to draw into the lungs.

  Dread and faceless terror slid away with the turn of the world, as the Lord and the Lady joined hands to dance the pivot of the seasons. Ressen shrugged off its hovering cloak of doom. The crowd in the square breathed in unison with the Shadow as she danced her city to peace.

  On their next intake of breath, horror fell from the sky, swift as lightening, silent as death.

  In the open space where the Shadow had danced alone a man straightened up as from a hard landing. Or something formed like a man, tall, clad in light breeches with bare torso and legs. His limbs seemed strangely jointed, bending a little wrong in each direction. He shone in the light of the Goddess like some ethereal bonfire. He wore a cloak of bright, white feathers.

  Then he raised his arms above his head—his unnaturally long arms—and all could see he wore no cloak.

  He had wings.

  The Shadow froze in her progress, gaping at the apparition in shock, her own hands raised to the sky in mimicry.

  With a cruel, guttural sound of triumph, he stepped forward to fold her in his eager embrace.

  On the top of the statue of the Hawk, Sequa threw off the mottled cloth that had camouflaged her prone form and rose to her feet.

  When Cur had laid her burned and broken body down on the Shadow’s bed, Sequa had been almost but not quite dead, held to the world by the Shadow’s invocation of the Goddess. The avatar and Cur had lied because her only safety lay now in being a corpse. The Shadow had pulled as much of her power to the earth as she could, to mask the still beating heart of his nemesis from their adversary; so much power spilled so recklessly she had grown weak, sickly.

  The avatar had spent blood and pain to heal the little warrior as best she could, and they all thought that perhaps the Voice had invoked some extra power of his own before he died for her burns healed unnaturally fast, leaving few scars.

  Cur had ventured out at Sequa’s order, when she could speak again, slipping into the Iron Quarters and talked to her compatriots of the nightly Runs, bringing them to the Temple so the Shadow could lay incantations of concealment on them, swearing them to silence and laying out their roles for this day, this moment. He had carried her armor out of the city when he left, circling around and slouching in another gate to return them to their owner. There he had remained, guarding Sequa and the Shadow each night as they wrangled though the details of this desperate plan.

  Now it began.

  In the blackest part of the night, Sequa had climbed to the top of the statue in her armor, her swords strapped to her back, a single canteen of water on her belt. At the top, she settled into a curve of the stone, covered herself with cloth and fell into the waiting trance of a Child of Home.

  The God rose, striving hard in the last hours of His ascendancy. The porous, white stone beneath her absorbed sweat and urine invisibly throughout the long day. Her mind grew still as stagnant water, with barely a thought bubbling up to break the surface. Then the God bowed to His Lady, and the Summer Dance began. Motion and movement below her had touched her empty meditations; there had been just enough time to stretch gently under the cloth to wake her limbs.

  She had to admit in her heart that it had not been the people below who had woken her. It had been him. She had felt him circling above, spiraling down to strike at his prey from the high winds. There had been more than a little deliberate irony that she had chosen the Hawk’s back to shelter upon.

  Below, the crowd froze, breathless in horror and surprise as the apparition engulfed the Shadow in his feathered arms. They stood entangled for a moment then separated a small space. He gathered himself, spreading his feathers wide—and oh, but how beautiful they were in the silver light of the Lady—and leaped into the air.

  Somehow, he took the Shadow with him.

  He looked up as the strong sweep of his wings took the two of them into the air. He looked up, barefaced, and so he must have seen Sequa rise from her concealment and dive smoothly off the top of the statue of the Great Hawk. The look of stunned surprise on his fierce, feral features felt like a balm to her wounded pride and still-burning shame.

  If he had not somehow bound the Shadow to him in his flight, she would simply have hammered him out of the sky with her own body. But Sequa would not be responsible for the death of both of the living avatars of the Gods; she twisted in midair and rather than striking him chest high she hooked his shoulder and let her own weight pivot her onto his back.

  A long, confused tumble in midair cast feathers and curses freely from them both. The Shadow shrieked one long ululating howl as they fell. Clutching the winged man’s neck, Sequa could feel the thick muscles of his arms flexing and pulsing as he tried instinctively to right them in the air. Apparently strong enough to fly while yoked to another person (though the thin body of The Shadow would be little impediment to any strong man) yet not strong enough to resist her strike. She tore him from the sky, his refuge, as he had torn her from what little virtue remained in her heart.

  Impact with the ground, bone crunching. Sequa tasted blood from a newly gashed lip, choking on stunned, empty lungs. For a long, desperate moment, she couldn’t even tell which of the flailing limbs belonged to her or how serious her i
njuries might be. Bodies writhed on top of her, pinning her to the ground. She had to be free.

  Clutching at the closest body, hard muscle bunched under her fingers.

  Snarling, Sequa dug her nails as deeply into the flesh as she could and twisted. Her reward his scream, like the hunting cry of a hawk. Big, strong hands came down on her own shoulders and yanked her out from the press of limbs, set her on her feet.

  Cur. She had not been the only one lurking behind in disguise. Cur dressed in a guardsman’s armor and mask, his long sword on his back, unmistakable by his height and the care he took for her. Cur, risking his life for her yet again.

  Rounding on the winged man and his erstwhile captive, Sequa darted forward to grab at the Shadow’s slim form. The holy woman had managed to take one knee and now the loop of rope that had been slung around her chest and under her arms became visible, mostly because one end of it had come unraveled in the painful comic fall. Sequa grabbed the trailing end to rip it away, the Shadow’s head buried for a moment against her chest.

  He reared up above them, looking taller even than Cur, hands slashing. The ends of his fingers tipped with wicked dark claws, shining black in the sliver light. A thin line of pain scored across Sequa’s forehead, terrifyingly close to her eyes. The skin parted with no sense of impact; she only knew when her vision suddenly obscured with blood.

  Cur’s hands came down on her shoulders again. She sensed anew his fearsome strength as he, in one swift motion, hauled the two women out of the creature’s long reach. No time for gentleness. Thrusting the Shadow roughly behind her, Sequa swiped the blood from her eyes in time to see the winged man look about him and finally realize he was exposed, outnumbered, and surprised. His eyes whipped around to meet hers again, both of them barefaced under the Goddess, and he nodded sharply in acknowledgment.