The Godless Page 18

  “I don’t—”

  “Please, just listen,” he said. “Tell me, are you uncomfortable in this city?”

  She hesitated. “You mean, am I comfortable now?”

  “Not with me.” His tone held a trace of contempt, a hint, nothing more. “In general, are you uncomfortable in the city?”

  “No.”

  “I am,” he admitted, leaning against the wooden beam opposite her. “I feel as if something is standing beside me, trying to shape my thoughts. What I feel is Ger, the last of Ger, struggling to announce himself and to continue the war that the gods were involved in. At least, that is my belief.”

  “Your belief?”

  “Our belief, I should say.” The contempt was gone, replaced with a serious yet excited tone. “Before the fall of the Five Kingdoms, Qian wrote a book that argued the gods were not dead, but dying. The presence that we felt when around one of their corpses was allowable because time moved differently there—but while we felt that, the gods, having experienced time in a different fashion, were already dead. They could not interact with us, even if they so desired. It was very controversial among us, though the publication of it in cities for mortals to read was more of one, and a great deal of what it said went unremarked for years. It is generally considered now that Qian was right, that our ability to feel the gods in their fashion revealed a connection between them and us, an unseen cord that tied us together. Qian argued it differently, of course—he argued that the power that bled from them was undefined, random, unpredictable, but his own state of mind refused to acknowledge anything but the most unhealthy conclusion.”

  “I don’t feel Ger at all.” Ayae stepped away from the coal, the flames fading through no work of her own. “Maybe that means I am not what you think I am?”

  “No, you are. You have fire in you, I am sure of it. But as to feeling…” He shrugged. “To be honest, I would be surprised if you could. With everything you have experienced in the last few days, and the changes you are going through, your senses are probably in overload as we speak. I know I was.”

  “Maybe I’m not like you. No one ever talks about the elements bound to Ger,” she argued. “They’re not even on the pyres.”

  “The elements were not worshipped individually.” He glanced at the cooling coals. “They were not considered gods by most people. Some old images show that Ger had them chained, as if they were animals. I suspect that they were more than that, that they were talismans, really, a way to focus and trap the wildness of the elements. It would explain why he broke his chains upon his death, freeing them.”

  “Doesn’t that make me right?”

  His hands fell open before him. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No.” His smile was humorless. “And neither do you.”

  Over the next hour, Ayae endured Bau talking about the elements, about Ger and about what he felt in Mireea. She was increasingly aware of his verbal slights, his comments that became more personal, more direct in trying to control her emotions and make her angry. She likened it to his attempt to get her to hold a hot coal in her hand: blatant, pointless and easy to ignore. Eventually she grew tired of him. After he tried to bring Illaan up, she said, “What happened to the people working here?”

  “I told them I needed it for the day,” he said.

  He had known she would come back. “I think they can have it back.”

  “You do?”

  She met his gaze.

  “Your eyes flashed,” he said, quietly. “Like they were on fire.”

  The gate was warm beneath her touch, and she looked down at her boots, half expecting to see sooty footprints left in the grass.

  By the time Ayae entered the overrun gardens of the Keep’s courtyard, she had regained her composure, though that earlier, frightened part of her that had stared at the empty leather pack threatened to return. She quietened the urge, though, focusing instead on the fact that she had walked away, that she could be in control, and the fact that he knew nothing. It was becoming clear that she would never get simple answers from Bau. To a degree, he was making it up as he went along, throwing out ideas to see what would stick. Bau would not be able to help her any more than Lady Wagan and Reila had been able to help Jaerc’s brother.

  There was only one person who could help her.

  9.

  Zaifyr was dry by the time the haunt rose from the water. With her gaze upon him, she drew closer, the splotches of red throughout her shrinking, diminishing to tiny points. “What is your name?” he said to her.

  “What happened to me?” the haunt asked, instead.

  He did not reply.

  “Tell me,” she insisted.

  For a moment he was silent, uncomfortable. He could not reply. He could stand and leave. It would be what Jae’le would want. It would— “You cannot leave here. This is where you died—where the Quor’lo died. Before today, I might have said that you would be where your body lay, but I would have been wrong. Your soul died here. This is where you will remain until the world is no more. As to what happened to you when you hit that wall?” He shrugged. “You can’t pass through walls.”

  “I’m cold,” she whispered.

  “I know.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  She was not fully restored. It would take days, not hours, for every part of herself to thread back into her soul. It was as if parts of her immortal being was seeking a way to pass on to another existence, to find what the gods had promised at the creation of the world. “What is your name?” he asked.

  The haunt hesitated, a troubled look stealing across her face. “Oyia,” she said finally.

  Zaifyr had thought that her appearance would change as she pulled herself together, that the modest, dated dress she wore would disappear. His cynicism prompted an image of wealth, of a modernity that opposed the ideals of equality and humility that he knew priests spoke of with a rhetorical joy. He found instead that the dress remained reminiscent of an older culture, that its simple cut and modest angles were a truth.

  “I feel as if I should not have said that,” the haunt said, her voice confused with regret. “My name is power to the likes of you.”

  “It is.” His fingers touched the skin beneath his wrist, seeking out the absent charm as he reached out for her, not physically, but with a touch that, while unseen, was still tangible. Oyia would feel the weight in her mind, as if a solid object had pressed against her skull and was looking into her following the trail of memories back to her origins.

  At first, he saw a room no larger than a cell: a bed stood along the left side with a table to the right. A basin of water sat on it, books next to it.

  Applying pressure took him outside the room. A long hallway greeted him, rooms lining both sides. The doors made from white ash wood. Inside, the spartan living standards of the first room were repeated and men and women, each wearing simple robes of brown, were within. They knelt, stood, prayed, their faces turned away from the door and hidden from him. Zaifyr did not push against her resolve.

  Yet, the stone hallway felt like it never ended and Zaifyr briefly considered turning around, returning to the rooms he had passed. But a sense of anticipation had begun to fill him, the emotion drawn from the haunt. He had loosened his pressure and she was lost in her memories, unaware that he was there, unaware that he felt not just her love but her respect for the person who stood in a long, high-roofed auditorium, surrounded by rows of benches.

  A man. A single man, militarily attired.

  He wore not leather, nor chain, but a uniform of white and red, the former color dominating while the latter ran in lines down the chest and connected to a long, flowing cloak. A peace knot was looped around the long sword at his side. He wore the weapon uneasily, as if he were unaccustomed to its weight. His bearing, the way his hands clasped behind his back and the tilt of his head, spoke neither of a military background nor a religious one. Yet he commanded the kind of respect that Zaifyr h
ad connected with leaders, with kings and generals—but even as he thought that, he realized that while the man was respected he was not the object of love that Zaifyr had felt upon entering the room.

  The true object of the haunt’s love lay behind him, in a small room made from brick and empty of anything else.

  A child. A girl, no older than seven.

  She was pale-haired and pale-skinned and wore a robe of purest white. Her eyes were green, like his, but they held nothing of importance, nothing to suggest that the child was anything more than that—until she lifted her gaze and met his.

  Zaifyr blinked.

  In front of him, the haunt whispered, “Cold.”

  There was a chill in him as well, born from what he had seen, what he had done. From the recognition that both, he knew, would have to be confessed to his brother.

  “Can you…” She hesitated. “Can you stop the cold?”

  “No,” he lied.

  10.

  After Bueralan organized for Elar’s ashes to be shipped back to his children—he could not bear to send them his body—the job took another two months. As the morning’s sun rose nearly five months after Bueralan had first ridden across the border, Dark rode out of Ille, leaving one hundred and twenty-three men and women to be executed, their pound of flesh bitter black.

  Deanic had not ridden to the coast with them. He had parted from them two days after they left Ille, and the rest headed, tired and broke, to the small town of Asli. There, they would spend a single night in a cheap inn before finding a ship to take them to Yeflam. After that, they would ride up to Mireea, where the work offered by Captain Heast waited. The job had come in the final days of the revolution against Lord Alden and there was no mention of his cousin in the short note, but Bueralan had not expected there to be: Heast’s letter alone said that he knew.

  Now, one night out from Mireea, one night and seven months after Ille, the camp Dark made was a quiet affair, Bueralan the somber heart of it.

  “You have been quiet all day, Baron.” Samuel Orlan was seated across from him, on the other side of the smoldering campfire, an old man who had missed nothing. “Does something about this work bother you?”

  “I told you not to call me that.”

  “So you did.”

  A thin trail of smoke rose between the two, the smell of cooked meat clinging to it. “Why are you here, Samuel?” Bueralan asked, after a moment. “Why are you not back in Mireea?”

  “My shop has been burned down,” he replied. “My apprentice attacked. I would like to know why.”

  “Revenge?”

  “Don’t you feel as if something is not quite right in these mountains, Baron?” Between the two men, the rest of Dark watched silently. Bueralan saw Zean shift slightly, so that his body was turned toward the cartographer. Kae’s three-fingered hand placed the plate he had been eating off on the ground, near the hilt of his sword. Aerala fed a long stick into the ash, heating the embers, while Liaya’s hand dropped slightly to the outstretched body of Ruk, whose steady breathing altered to her touch. Without concern, Samuel Orlan continued, “You have been beneath the city, you have seen the temple, you know what I know.”

  “Which is?”

  Orlan’s smile was faint in reply.

  Bueralan thought of the presence he had felt before the temple. He picked a piece of fat from the plate beside him, cut from the meat provided by Lady Wagan, the first and last of the fresh meat they had been given. He flicked it onto the dying fire, and said, “Do you know what happened to the last man who thought he could play us?”

  “I heard that the Lord of Ille was hanged on the gallows his grandfather and father made,” the small man replied. “I had heard that you were employed by him.”

  “We were,” Bueralan admitted. “He had an armed revolution building, one that he believed we were not motivated enough to stop. He did not doubt our loyalty to our word. We have earned that in our work. But he did doubt our dedication to our word, and he thought he could motivate us if something personal was at stake. He killed one of us and it did motivate us all, but not in the way he had hoped. See, he overplayed his hand. Lord Alden was a man who loved detail. He kept records of stock, land ownership, taxes, population, all of which fell under his control—including the details of life and death. He reveled in the details a little too much.”

  “So you took him to his family gallows?”

  Aerala’s stick snapped, sending up a cloud of dying cinders.

  “No,” Bueralan said. “The people of Ille did that. We found the head of his revolution a week after Elar died. The young woman responsible had made a mistake earlier, and that led to her. She was quite an intelligent individual and, after introducing ourselves, we made sure that within the next two months, all of Lord Alden’s finances were directed to her, from his investments, to the land that he owned. More important, we made sure the neighboring kingdoms recognized her and her new government. Then we helped organize the night that she and her friends could enter Ille and take Lord Alden and his remaining loyalists, including, you will be surprised to learn, his gardener. In the morning, they were all led onto the floorboards of the gallows that his father had laid.”

  “If the moral of that story, Baron, is that you are not to be trifled with—” Orlan held up his empty hands “—rest assured, it never crossed my mind.”

  “Take your mule back to Mireea, Samuel.”

  “He is a pony.”

  “I could have my soldiers stake you down in the dirt, leave you here until the morning.” Bueralan saw Zean shift straighter, the movement mirrored by Kae; in his periphery, he saw the remains of Aerala’s stick drop, saw Ruk’s legs shift slightly and heard Liaya’s bag clink, once, but loudly through the silence of the camp, as if it were a bell, announcing the start of a race. “You should not doubt it.”

  “I do not. Nor should you doubt that after I freed myself, I would ruin you,” the cartographer said with no trace of anger in his voice. “All of you. In many ways, I am similar to all of you, and I can do what you did so well in Ille. But I would do it in all the cities you have been to, in the places where your reputation matters, where you ply your trade. I would do it where you were born, and where you lived now, and I would be able to do it because, my dear, exiled Baron of Kein, I am the eighty-second Samuel Orlan and I am not a common man, nor even a lowly lord like the late Alden of Ille. I am something else entirely.”

  Across the dying fire, the saboteur met the other man’s gaze and held it for such a time that when he blinked, his eyes stung.

  “I once had trouble imagining what Heast thought when you stood in his office,” Bueralan said quietly. “Once.”

  “I do like you, Captain,” Samuel Orlan said, smiling as he did. “I do hope, sincerely, that you do not die any time soon.”

  11.

  Two days after she left Bau, Ayae walked up the three creaking steps at the front of Red Moon, the hotel where Zaifyr was living.

  The information had been delivered to her the evening before by a thin, neatly attired sandy-haired man who had knocked upon her door. He held an envelope in his hand and, after handing it to her, said, “Compliments of Lady Wagan through Captain Heast.” Inside, in neat handwriting, was all the information she needed. She had not spoken with the Lady Wagan directly, but it appeared that no conversation—no apology—was necessary.

  Inside the hotel, a large man sat behind a long desk. A painting of a naked, dancing white woman was on the wall above him, reds and blacks swirling around her. As Ayae drew closer, the man placed down a block of wood, a carving knife following it, and smiled, revealing the empty left side of his mouth. “Welcome,” he said, pleasantly. “We have rooms to rent, at discount prices if you are hired under Captain Heast and if you are part of the mercenary units here to defend the city.”

  “I’m not here for a room,” she said. “I’m here for the man in room nine.”

  “That’s a man who smells of awful things, if I may say so.”
The man picked up his shapeless block of wood, revealing knife cuts across his hand. “If you’re looking for him at this moment, you’ll find down in the public bathroom, but I cannot promise that he is alone there.”

  She smiled despite herself. “That’s very subtle of you.”

  “We get all kinds here.” His unharmed hand picked up the carving knife. “I take it you’re not here on business?”

  “Not that kind.”

  He nodded to the hall to his left. “There’s a sofa on the second floor. He’ll pass it on the way to his room.”

  She thanked him and began climbing the stairs.

  She did not have to wait long. Zaifyr appeared after she had found the old leather sofa and sank into its dented cushions. He was wearing black linen trousers and his bare feet moved lightly on the wooden floor. A faint half smile creased his lips as he approached her, towel and soap in hand. “This is a surprise,” he said.

  “Is it?” she counted.

  “It has been a while since a woman called upon me.”

  “Do you remember your manners, then, and are you going to invite me in?”

  He held out his hand.

  Ignoring it, she pushed herself up. After a brief walk down the hall, she stepped into his room. There was a bed, a table next to it, a chair, and an open window. There was a smell, also, a ripe one that was a blend of rotten garbage and burned clothing. It was strong enough that she glanced at him with an upraised eyebrow. With his faint smile turning embarrassed, he said, “I was wondering if there was a smell.”

  “It’s why women don’t call on you often.”

  “Thank you,” he said dryly. “The last few days have been rough on my clothing.”

  “Have you been rolling around in garbage?”

  “To a degree.” He motioned to the chair before the window, the moon’s pale light held back by the lamp hanging there. “You’re best to sit here while we discuss why you’re willing to make enemies out of Fo and Bau so quickly.”