by Paula Guran
One neat package . . . the preacher procured dust, somewhere in the cemetery. Where had it come from? What gods were there, in a . . .
Dead gods, he thought. He could taste the drug in the air all around him, enchantment raw and powerful. He could run it around his mouth with his tongue, could drink it, eat it, smoke it, fuck it. He could no more pull away from it than a night creature could pull away from the lure of bright light. He came closer to the shore and stared ahead into the darkness.
A glint of light. Something rose out of the middle of the lake. At first he thought it was an island, but it wasn’t. It was . . .
Light glinted on metal and he thought he heard a scream, turning halfway into a quiet moan, of such intense misery that, for a moment, he froze. He bent down and ran his fingers through the dark water of the lake. They felt warm at the top, colder below, as if two separate currents were running simultaneously.
There was dust in the water. He did not need anything but his senses to tell him that his entire mind was enveloped in the feel of the drug, and it was overwhelming him. He bent down and cupped water in his hands, and drank and drank and drank.
How long he lay on that subterranean shore he did not know. It could have been hours, or days. He had no need for nourishment, for talk, for love. His only need was for the black kiss and it had been sated, at last, here, beside this tomb of an unknown god.
His senses were both dulled and made keen. He could not see the world around him, but could see the world beyond the world, could see through the membrane that separates the worlds of gods and men. He saw the lake as a whirlpool made not of water but of the remnants of the dead, flotsam and jetsam of lives, composed of memories, of dreams, of recollections and reflections and nightmares, all ebbing and eddying in the water, turning and turning around—
A great metal structure, greater than the space that held it—for it opened into that other, wider world—a rising moving spiral with great engines at the base that took in the death water and churned it and processed it and sent it up in jets through massive tubes, an enormous, terrible factory. Gorel, sitting up at last, stared at the geysers of death water, rising and disappearing beyond the steam, beyond the membrane of the world. Grave-robbing, he thought, and giggled.
The colors captivated him for a while. He exhaled, and watched and thought he saw mirages rising over the waters, anguished faces reaching out insubstantial hands in a plea for help. He stood at last and staggered, bewildered by the enormity of the place, by his eyes which could no longer see the world of physicality, that were focused now entirely into the world beyond. He stumbled into the water and waded, as if in a dream, toward the great metal edifice.
The water rose above his feet, over his ankles. Soon he was chest-deep with the water was rising still as he plodded forward, not thinking, his entire being dominated by this factory of gods’ dust. The water came to his chin, his nose, his eyes. He giggled and bubbles rose to the surface, and then he breathed and there was no air; the death water came flooding into his mouth and nose and lungs and the world became a solid dark silence like a black stone.
He came to on cold hard ground. He was in darkness, the only sound that of the waves meeting the shore. He was himself again, though the dust was still in him, the drug still coursing through his body. It had reached some equilibrium inside of him, but he knew he could slip either way of it, into oblivion or reality, at any moment. Come to think of it, he wondered why he wasn’t dead.
“You should be dead,” a voice said, close by. The voice was raspy and weak, full of pain like fine threads of black through a worn cloth. It seemed familiar, as if someone he’d briefly known had spoken that way.
Gorel peered into the darkness. “Not the first one to say it,” he mumbled. His tongue felt thick with disuse. Words were unfamiliar concepts. He heard a groan and came closer and said, suddenly shocked, “It’s you.”
The preacher was planted into the metal ground. A hollow tube rose up from the ground and traveled to his head, pinning him at the back. Another, horizontal tube held his arms spread out and away from him. This tube, too, was transparent. Gorel examined the apparatus. He had seen similar things, long ago, in the underground workshops of Goliris . . .
Blood ran through the tubes, the preacher’s blood, but mixed. A grayish-green substance, a viscous liquid, ran through the tubes, and there were things inside the stream that seemed alive, strange globular clusters like mollusks or crabs. The liquid glowed as it moved sluggishly through the tubes. “What does it do?” Gorel said.
“It keeps me alive,” the preacher said.
Gorel stared at him. The preacher’s face was a map of pain. His single eye stared up at Gorel. Gorel said, “So this is where you get the dust from?”
“Help me out of this thing!” the preacher said.
Gorel said, “Don’t shout. My head hurts.” The preacher stared at him. Gorel came close, stroked the man’s face. The preacher flinched. “Hush,” Gorel said.
He remembered the workshops and labs below the palace of Goliris. There had been a room where a cluster of pipes trapped inside it two human shapes. The pipes led directly into their bodies. They seemed suspended in mid-air, but it was the tubes that held them there. Although they screamed there was no sound. The bodies only seemed human part of the time. Sometimes they would flicker and change, become snakes, dragons, water creatures, birds. But the device held them whatever shape they assumed. “What does it do?” he had asked his father, just as he had asked the preacher now. “It keeps them alive,” his father had said. “But that is the least significant of its functions.”
There had been experiments done constantly in Goliris. Had there not been treachery, had he not been sent across the World into his exile, he would have inherited the throne and learned the secrets. There were gods down there, he had once heard one of his tutors say. Captive gods, all but forgotten. “They are assisting the palace in its investigations,” his tutor had said.
“What investigations?” the young Gorel had asked.
The tutor smirked. “Your father wants to know what makes a god,” he said.
The preacher was breathing hard. “Please,” he said.
Gorel looked at him, knowing he was a part of the treachery, and yet . . . he came closer, closed his lips on the preacher’s mouth, kissed him. He did not taste of dust any more: he tasted of blood.
Gorel pulled away.
“Who built this?” he said.
“Release me and I’ll tell you.”
“If I release you, you’ll die,” Gorel said.
“Then kill me.”
“I might still do that.” He stared at the preacher. “Did you kill them?”
“I . . . ” the preacher’s mouth opened and closed, but no sound came.
“The first one,” Gorel said. “Kelini Pashtill.”
“Was that her name?”
“Did you take her face?”
“What would I want with a woman’s face?”
“That,” Gorel said patiently, “is what I would quite like to know.”
“Kill me. Before he comes back.”
“Your god?”
There was no answer. Something moved through the liquid in the tubes and the preacher screamed. Gorel looked up.
A factory of dust, he thought. A dead god—wanting to come back to life? No. There was more to it than that. “Who’s the god?” he said.
The preacher tried to laugh, dribbled blood instead. “I don’t know,” he said. “Nobody does, not even him.”
“What does he want, then?” Gorel said.
“Kill me?”
“Tell me,” Gorel said.
The preacher shook his head—wildly, from side to side. Gorel had had enough. He took out his gun and put it to the preacher’s head. “Kill me,” the preacher said. “Do it now.”
“Tell me,” Gorel said, his finger on the trigger like a promise. “What does he want?”
“He wants her!” the preacher said
, and before Gorel could pull the trigger the liquid in the tubes began to seethe and boil and the preacher screamed. Gorel took a step back and holstered his gun. He watched as the liquid seemed to pour into the preacher’s body, the tubes emptying, the little scuttling creatures disappearing through holes into the preacher’s body—the whole while the man’s single eye was open and his mouth open in a scream.
Gorel took another step back. Realization hit him, and with it fear. He whispered, “What are you?”
“I . . . ” the preacher tried to form words, couldn’t. “I . . . ”
Then he was gone. Gorel waited. The single eye grew empty, dead. It closed . . .
When it opened again it was no longer the preacher staring out. The tubes slid without sound back into the ground, and the body of the preacher stood up. “He was my avatar,” the thing inside the preacher’s body said. “But now it’s time to deal with matters . . . personally.”
Gorel stared at the god. The beat-up body of the preacher quivered, as if being held together with some effort. There was no longer anything handsome, anything attractive about the preacher’s body. It was no longer a body, but a corpse.
He took another step back. The corpse moved toward him, the dead hand of the preacher reaching out for him, for his throat, caught him. He was being strangled, the air caught in his lungs, the dead hand forcing down to the ground. “I won’t kill you,” the unnamed god whispered, his face close to Gorel’s. “Not yet. Not while I still need—”
Gorel kneed him between the legs. The hand slackened and he pushed and rolled away, both guns materializing in his hands. The god laughed. “You think you can kill me?”
The first two bullets caught the god’s body in the head. The next two hit his torso. There was no blood. The god roared again, staggered back, regained his balance. “Guns,” the god said, and spat. Where his spit hit the ground the metal hissed and dissolved. Gorel took a step back, and another, and found himself at the edge of the dark lake. “I need eyes,” the god said. “She wants yours, but yours disgust me, man of Goliris. No.” The god shook his head. “I would like a woman’s eyes to stare at, a woman’s eyes, fresh like morning dew.” For a moment, strangely, he seemed lost. “Do they still have morning dew?” he said. “Does the sun still rise every day?”
“Not in the Garden,” Gorel said.
“Bring me eyes. I need eyes. It is a simple enough request,” the god said.
“And in exchange?”
“Besides keeping you alive?”
Gorel nodded.
The god said, “Dust. As much dust as you would ever crave, human.”
Dust. “Any particular color?”
The god seemed to think about the question. “Blue,” he said at last. “Blue like a sea at noon. Blue like . . . ” but he could not, it seem, put it into words. “Blue. Do they still have blue?”
“They still have blue,” Gorel said, holstering his guns. “What sort of god were you?”
“I was a great god!” the god said. “Countless people prayed to me! Countless temples worshipped in my name! Countless sacrifices were made—”
He fell silent. “You don’t remember,” Gorel said.
The god turned away his head. Gorel could see where the bullets had hit, opening bloodless passageways through the skull.
“No,” the god said.
Part Five: Blud & Deth
In his whole life, both as a prince of Goliris and later as an exile, mercenary, hired killer, thief, and what he liked to think of as odd jobs man, Gorel of Goliris had been asked to perform many strange deeds. Never, though, had he been given the task of obtaining a pair of living blue eyes for a nameless, dead, and quite possibly deranged god. He had to admit it made a change.
He wants her, the preacher had said before he—died? Ceased to exist? Had he existed at all to begin with? Gorel didn’t know—but who was she? He had thought the events that had taken place due to the arrival in the Garden of Seraph Gadashtill. But, what if that were not the case? What if what had happened—what was happening now—were the result of something begun long ago?
He felt like hitting something. Someone. In fact, he had in mind two such someones. There was a conspiracy of sorts in the Garden of Statues, perhaps more than one. The living and the dead both seemed tangled in plans that made no sense. Perhaps it was a function of death, he thought. It confused the mind.
He made his way cautiously through silent tombstones. He wasn’t sure where he was going, where they would be, but he knew that, sooner or later, he would find them.
But why bother? She was there then, gliding beside him, and the moon shone through her, and her face was that of a dead woman, and her heart belonged to someone else, and she was blind. He knew that now. He had thought her a specter, a thing of no substance conjured from his dreams. He knew better now. He stopped. “Not even death,” he said, and it seemed to him she nodded, there beside him. Yes, she agreed. Not even death . . .
“Princess,” he said, and it seemed to him she laughed, though the sound was like that of rattling bones. Perhaps, she said. I no longer remember . . .
This angered him, and he said, “So now you are a whore? The dead whore of a dead god?”
Careful, Gorel of Goliris, the voice that was only in his mind said. Her image shivered in the moonlight. You have the eyes of Goliris, she said. Yes, though your manners are those of a barnyard animal, such as you were raised amongst in your exile, no doubt. Yes . . . your eyes might fit. There was a kind of laughter in the voice. Shall I take them from you?
“Princess,” he said, and bowed his head, though his hand was on the butt of his gun. A princess of Goliris, he thought. So the old story was true.
She laughed again. Blud and Deth are by the Lake of the Drowned God, she said.
“I’ve lost all desire to go near lakes,” Gorel said, but she was already gone, and he was alone and speaking to himself. “Or any large body of water,” he added as an afterthought. He trudged his way through the cemetery, encountering no one and nothing, heading for the watery graveyard of the Merlangai folk.
The clouds had gathered over the Garden and the closer he came to the Lake of the Drowned God the thicker the air became with fog and there was a hint of rain. Somewhere nearby lightning cracked. Gorel made his way blindly, groping through the soup of elements, fearing a fall into the water. Perhaps it would have been easier, he thought, to merely find a pair of eyes, blue or not, and get out of the Garden as quickly as was possible.
Perhaps.
Instinct made him follow the flash of lightning. Thunder broke periodically, shaking the ground. The sound came closer and closer, in great rapidity, and he knew he was getting close. Earlier, he had furtively slipped to where, when he had first taken the job, he had buried some of his arsenal. It was, naturally, an unused grave. Now, equipped with some of the material he thought he might need, he felt better, more himself.
At last, he heard voices through the fog, and stopped.
“They said I was unstable! A necrophile! And for what? For standing up for the rights of the dead? I will show them, I will—”
“Oh, shut up,” another voice said.
Gorel recognized them: Blud and Deth, as promised by a dead princess. What were they really up to?
“You do go on, Blud. Let’s just finish setting up the equipment.”
“I really find this sort of work rather distasteful,” said the voice of Dr. Blud. “I mean, what does he need with the Merlangai?”
“You just said—” Professor Deth, then sighed. “You keep changing your bloody mind.”
“I’m just saying,” Dr. Blud said.
“Shut up and let’s get on with it.”
“Let’s.”
Gorel crept closer. They were by the water. As he came closer the air seemed to clear a little, and through patches of fog he watched the two men.
They stood on the shore of the lake. A machine of sorts mounted on a metal tripod, stood with its legs in the water
. Its bulbous upper body, made of a greenish metal, began to rotate, slowly at first, then growing faster, and the water of the lake began to churn.
“The parameters of control—” said Dr. Blud.
“Are within acceptable limits,” said Professor Deth.
“There can be no full reincarnation in a semi-solid state—”
“That’s not our concern.”
“Still. Water zombies? Distasteful.”
“Incidentally, do you think there is something buried in the lake?”
“Yes, corpses.”
They both laughed.
“Nevertheless. She—”
“Yes, she—”
“She wants us to—”
“But what about—”
“Him? Yes, it is a concern—”
“A worry—”
“Are we in over our heads?”
“Always, my dear friend.”
“Indeed.”
And they laughed again.
Gorel stepped through the fog. His guns were pointed at the two men and their contraption. “Step away from the machine, gentlemen.”
“Sheriff!”
“Man of Goliris?” Professor Deth looked confused. “Why are you hindering our progress? We are doing this on the behest of—”
“Yes, indeed—”
“Step away!”
The two men paid him no attention. “It’s too late,” Dr. Blud said cheerfully. “The machine is running—”
“Emitting the death-sounds of Greater Pond—”
“A rare and, until recently, thought of as lost—”
“Yet wasn’t—”
“Was given to us—”
“To study and analyze—”
“To record—”
“To make use of—”
“The ancient ritual—”
“Automated—”
“Embedded within a machine construct—”
“Wonderful, isn’t she?”
“Look.”
Gorel looked.
The lightning fell over the water now, sparks flying where the surface boiled. Steam began to rise from the water, and with it . . .
First a skull, rising slowly out of the waves that began to slap against the shore. In its empty eye sockets an intelligence could still, perhaps, be discerned. The skull moved, this way and that, scanning the above-surface world. The rest of its skeletal body emerged slowly from the waters, and it began to advance toward the shore,