The Godless Page 6

  The Keeper’s eyes blinked, slowly, then shook his head. “I see I will have a lot of work to do with you.”

  “You’ll have nothing to do with me.”

  His hairless eyebrows rose at her tone. “You emerged from a burning building without a mark on you, child. You survived an attack from a Quor’lo—”

  “A what?”

  The large man rose, a frown added to his list of expressions. “A Quor’lo. Moves, acts, smells just like it would alive, but its body is given life by a living person elsewhere.”

  “Does the captain know? If this has—”

  “He knows.” At the front of her bed, he met her eyes. “Bau already informed Heast what it was, though I imagine that the captain’s meticulous mind would have found it quickly enough. You needn’t worry about the Quor’lo. Right now I am sure they are discussing it, wondering where it is hiding, and if they can capture it. I can only imagine that the man who pulled you out of the fire is helping them greatly.”

  “Zaifyr?”

  “That’s his name, is it?” The Keeper’s tone suggested familiarity, though not friendly in nature.

  “Who is he?” Ayae asked.

  “At this moment, I am sure he is nothing more than a man employed by Captain Heast.” Fo’s scarred fingers laced together. “However, you have changed the subject. I am here to talk about you. You emerged from a fire without a burn today, but should I hold your hand again I would feel it smolder.”

  Her hands slipped under the blankets, falling warmly against her legs. “I was just lucky.”

  “There’s no such thing.” She met his strange gaze, but said nothing. “I imagine, since you live on this mountain, you think anybody with a touch of power in them is cursed by the gods.”

  “I don’t want any of that,” she said, quietly. “I just want to be able to tell my partner that I am just who I am. I just—I don’t want this.”

  “You think you can give up what is inside you?” Fo’s scarred hands dropped to the metal end of the bed. “What remains of the gods finds us. In wombs, in childhood, in the summers and winters of our lives. Once it has found us, only death can drive it out. If that two-bit copper healer told you she could do that, she has done nothing but lie to you.” His long fingers curled, one at a time, over the bed frame. “But you have nothing to fear, child. Not from this. Trust me. Trust us. My brothers and sisters and I study the remains of the gods. They lay around us as they lived: on our land, in our oceans, and in our skies, the power that made us originally still there, wishing to create.”

  “Wishing to create?” Ayae met Fo’s disease-scarred eyes. “What is it that you’re implying? That I have been infected by a god?”

  “Possession is not infection.” His smile was faint. “I can tell you that on a number of levels, child.”

  “Then what?”

  “We are being recreated, reborn. The power in the gods does not wish to die with its host. It is searching for escape, for a new home, and it has found you, just as it found me. With it, you and I are in evolution to take back what was once ours.”

  A laugh escaped her mouth at the ridiculousness of the statement, but a second did not follow. The bar beneath Fo’s hands had bent and she waited for him to lash out. What did he expect? She had grown up hearing stories of men and women who were cursed, stories of wives taking children away from fathers who melted, of lovers devoured by their partner with teeth made from stone, and of blindness and deformity that resulted in abuse. In the orphanage, children had teased others with the term, used it to suggest that the newest among them might harbor such a power, that it might be the reason they had no family, no home, and could not be trusted.

  “You’ll see in time,” was Fo’s soft reply. “Tomorrow, I expect you at the Spine’s Keep. You have a lot to learn, Ayae. It may be that you are no more than a copper healer, but I doubt that. A Quor’lo does not brave Samuel Orlan’s shop for the cheapest of coin.”

  Turning, he stalked away, and for a moment, Ayae wanted to call out to him, to demand an explanation of his last words, but her attention was drawn to the bar that Fo’s hands had curled around. There, dented with a strength she did not have—did not know anyone to have—was the perfect impression of his fingers.

  THE CITY BENEATH

  As I grew older, none of the symbols I was taught as a child retained meaning. After death, the talismans of a god neither contained truth or moral lesson, neither comforted or protected. Instead, they became objects, relics that counted the existence of seventy-eight beings of divinity. Seventy-eight corpses.

  —Qian, The Godless

  1.

  In the morning sun’s light, Mireea smoldered. From the edges of the Spine, from the closed yards of carpenters and smiths, from the empty mills, from the wide cobbled roads of industry that flourished so much before the markets had closed and left them silent and boarded up, mist rose. It was as if, buried deep within his tomb, Ger’s corpse had caught alight, and the flames were rising. It was a morbid thought and the exiled Baron of Kein tried to shake it off as he followed Sergeant Illaan Alahn and his squad of Mireean Guards along the street. The thought had too much potency this morning—especially with the charm-laced man, Zaifyr, beside him.

  They were headed toward the graveyard outside the city on Heast’s orders. As light began to flare in the morning, the Captain of the Spine, his hand held over his thigh where metal and flesh were welded painfully together, said, “With its throat cut and half its face burned away, it’ll be hard for whoever is controlling it to keep it upright. Whoever is possessing it has to draw from his or herself and lend it a little life so that it can function, and the worse condition that it is in, the more that is required to keep it alive.”

  “Why won’t whoever’s in control just have dumped it?” Queila Meina asked.

  “It takes time. You have to withdraw every little bit of yourself, or you’ll risk losing a part.”

  “Part?”

  “Your voice, your ability to move your left hand,” Zaifyr explained quietly. “Think of all the things you do. You have to pull each conscious awareness out, one by one.”

  “You know a lot,” Essa muttered, thick hand scratching his stubble. “Ain’t no one curious to how a man learns this kind of thing?”

  Bueralan was, but he waited and watched as the other man shrugged. “Same way your captain does, I’d imagine,” he said.

  “Fifteen years ago,” Heast answered, “I watched a witch in Faaisha possess a child that had died during the night. The body had been sold to her in the morning, a trade she was well known for among the poor. The noble who I was employed by at the time wanted to know what his rival was doing, and so he employed her. She had me walk half a mile with that thing in my grasp, listening to it—to her—whisper to me the entire time as I knocked, pretending to look for its parents. Finally, I begged with the lady of the rival house to look after the child while I went to work for the day. The next morning, I collected the child and the information. That witch was buried deep in the corpse for another day, getting herself out.” He looked intently at the man in half-burned clothing. “I remember that right?”

  “You were there?” Queila asked, incredulous. “Were you the child he carried?”

  “No, but you’ve missed the point,” Zaifyr said. “We saw it done, like bread baked.”

  “How did she do it, then?”

  “With blood and death,” the Captain of the Spine replied. “We have a limited time to find the Quor’lo if we wish to know before Bau or Fo arrive. They’re showing some interest because, like us, they think it has been sent from Leera, and if it has, then we want to catch it before they do.”

  Bueralan did not think the last likely to happen and, given the speed with which Heast commanded his waiting sergeant and soldiers, the captain did not either. Of the four mercenaries only Bueralan and Zaifyr were instructed to assist in the search, the two mercenary commanders being dismissed. The evening had been an education for them, a
glimpse into the kind of enemy that they would be fighting. Even should the Quor’lo prove not to have been sent by the Leerans—an unlikely prospect, given what Bueralan had already been told—the point had been made that they would not just be fighting with swords and muscle.

  There would be blood.

  The graveyard was a gamble, Bueralan thought as they made their way down the road, a roughly built wooden gate looming above them. A gamble, but an educated one. The safest place for a Quor’lo whose throat had been cut, whose hands were blackened and face burned, was a yard full of men and women who would look no different.

  Outside the city, thin trails of mist swept into a wide road leading down a gentle decline. On either side stood silent trees, their canopies woven thickly together to throw a queer light, a mix of green and orange, upon the path they walked. Further along it widened, turning into a large opening with old, cut-back canopies that the dawn shone through.

  There stood intricate funeral pyres made from iron. Numbering eight lines of ten, the pyres were twice Bueralan’s height and bolted to the ground, each with a god designed into the frame. The first he saw was Ger: the tall god looked introspective with his head bowed and hands over the hilt of his great axe; the Wanderer, who had walked the roads of mortal men and women, stood beside him, his hood lowered and his arms folded; next to him was the Goddess Maita, once goddess of his homeland, whose wings dissolved every morning as the sun rose. It continued, each pyre holding an intricate design, from the obscure gods like Hienka to those like the Leviathan, whose memory lingered in the ocean, until each of the seventy-eight Gods were replicated.

  “The last two,” Zaifyr murmured beside him, “are empty of any design. Whoever is executed by the rule of the land lies there.”

  Grunting, the saboteur said, “Why would someone build this?”

  “Because the gods did exist.” Sergeant Illaan turned to the two men. “Is it so surprising that we pay homage to what they once were? The Third Lord of the Spine believed that we should. He had these pyres built by the blacksmith Juen Methal. It took him thirty years to build them all.”

  “If I die, bury me in the dirt,” Bueralan said. “I don’t need the ceremony.”

  “Our ceremony is an important part of our culture. A remembrance.”

  The saboteur shook his head. “Where I was born, people believe that you could capture a soul and hold it in a bottle. The bottle is very dark and made from a specially blown glass. Once your soul is caught, a couple will make an offer to your family, the amount depending on what kind of life the dead has lived. Once an agreement is reached, the woman drinks from the bottle shortly after she conceives.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Plenty of children are conceived without a bottle being drunk.”

  Illaan looked as if he were to speak again, but pressed his lips tightly together and his gaze focused behind Bueralan. Turning, the saboteur saw a man of medium height, white-skinned and wearing a simple white robe, with soft leather boots. As he drew closer, his gaze ran across the sergeant, his squad, and lingered on Bueralan but for a moment before settling on Zaifyr.

  The charm-laced man said quietly, “The Healer, Bau.”

  2.

  Ayae could not sleep. She tried, pushing herself down on the hard mattress, willing herself to let go, to just drift … but each time she opened her eyes there was no light, and she opened her eyes so often that she lost count well before the morning sun’s dawn soaked through the tiny windows of the hospital. By then she’d had enough. She had stayed too long, wanted no more and, running a hand through her hair, she rose and pulled on her smoke-stained clothing.

  At the door, the two guards created a human wall of worn chain mail and professionalism. She met the gaze of both. “I just want to sleep in my own bed.”

  The left part of the wall shrugged. “We have orders.”

  “I’m not going to be kept here.”

  “I—”

  “Gentlemen, let her pass.” A small hand parted the chain mail and revealed Reila, who took Ayae’s arm and drew her past the two-man blockage. “Have we lost so much kindness already, just because of a Keeper?”

  “Our orders—” the right part of the wall began.

  She raised a hand. “Think before you speak, Voren.”

  The soldier’s lips pursed, but he nodded, once, and retreated as Ayae was led down the pale, morning lit corridor. As she stepped into the morning light, Reila told Ayae that she should rest for a few days, drink plenty of water and find her immediately if she began to feel hot. “We will take care of you, child,” the healer said, the wet cobbles beneath their feet like drying tears. “All is not lost.”

  By the time Ayae had returned to her home, she felt that all was indeed lost. Her hope that no one would have heard what happened in Orlan’s shop was gone and she felt a hollow pit form in her stomach. She saw the damage from afar, as if whoever had damaged the building had damaged her. As if the broken and trampled garden was her, beaten, as if the scrawled obscenities on the door were dug into her skin, as if the broken windows were wounds upon her and not her house.

  Her house.

  She had paid for the house entirely a year ago, after she had been awarded an apprenticeship with Samuel Orlan.

  The day had been one that she could still remember with shock. Samuel Orlan took on one apprentice every five years, and men and women came from around the world to apply for it, with the competition becoming more and more fierce the older the cartographer became. To be the last apprentice of Samuel Orlan was to be the inheritor of not just wealth, but a fame that took you to any court in any part of the world. On the day that the apprenticeship had been announced, Ayae had not even gone to the ceremony to hear, believing that a choice had already been made, that the event of the day was, like many of its kind, a planned spontaneity. But at the time of the announcement she had heard a knock on the apartment door that she and Faise had shared, and her friend had gotten up to answer it, only to return in silence, the small old man following her, looking entirely too pleased to be missing his own ceremony.

  After a month, the old man had advanced her the money for the house, telling her that neither she nor Faise could remain in that awful apartment they shared. The act had lodged such affection and loyalty within her that the sight of her house reminded her what would happen when Samuel heard about her. The thought was a cold one, dousing the anger that nestled in her stomach.

  At the door, a hand fell once, twice, and finally, a third time.

  If it was Illaan, he had a key and could let himself in; but even as the thought occurred to her, she knew it was not him. His betrayal, his rejection of her in the hospital, struck deeply and she would not forgive him for it. He would know that, as well. When the knocking sounded again, she swallowed a sudden lump of tears and opened the door.

  Backlit against the morning’s sunlight, the small, portly figure of Samuel Orlan stood, waiting for her. Dressed in fine but simple clothes of blue and gray, the elderly man’s white beard and hair looked as if they were touched by fire. If his blue eyes had not been filled with obvious concern and had he not immediately embraced her, Ayae would have thought that such lighting was a sign of anger.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered into his shoulder.

  “Don’t you say another word,” he replied. “That shop was old. Outdated. I was going to burn it down for insurance money next week, anyway.”

  A short laugh escaped the mouth she pressed against him.

  “Besides, I need a new project. I keep dating older women who want me for my money,” the small man continued. “Do you know the look on their faces when I tell them that I have no personal wealth? That the money is part of the Orlan Estate, and not mine? Oh, but it reminds me of when I was a teenager and my first love rejected me. But you are Samuel Orlan, they say. I am forced to admit that, while that is true, I am also a fat old man born to equally fat parents who had no money. I find myself saying the exact words that
dear old love said to me when I presented her with a flower. No, it has to stop. I need a new hobby. Also, I fear that word will soon be out on the street, and these women will no longer make me home-cooked meals and take—well, let us be delicate about that, yes?”

  “Of course. They have reputations.”

  “Awful ones, awful.” Slipping his arm around her waist, he stepped through the door and closed it gently behind him. “Now, let’s get you something cold to drink, and you can tell me who has ruined your garden and I can tell you about our new shop.”

  Wiping wet eyes, Ayae said, “You still want me to come back?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  Struggling—his flippant tone suggested that he didn’t know about Fo’s visit, though she did not believe such knowledge would remain secret for long—Ayae told him about the fire, her own reaction and the Keeper’s visit. It was when she brought up the latter that, with the blind half opened to let in the morning’s light, the old cartographer paused and said, “And where was Illaan through all this?”

  “Gone.”

  He grunted. “Useless man.”

  “What the Keeper said doesn’t bother you?”

  “No.” He made a dismissive wave. “In this part of the world the Enclave offers a rare moment of sanity in the debate about cursed men and women.”

  A frown creased Ayae’s lips.

  Open now, the blind revealed motes of dust in the light. “The Enclave is, relatively speaking, a new organization,” Orlan explained. “A thousand years ago, the maps say that Yeflam was nothing more than a small crop of islands on the edge of Kuinia, the first of the Five Kingdoms. The area was mostly known for the cult that lived in the Spine of Ger, who built their cities in the mountains to be closer to the remains of the god himself. The gold rushes that brought men and women of a less virtuous mind to their peaks after the fall of the Five Kingdoms eventually saw the cult—which had become inbred and largely isolated—killed, and left the area open for anyone with a strong sword. In that vacuum, six men and women took control of the islands and began to build the Floating Cities of Yeflam, that huge artificial stone empire that covers the black ocean like a tomb. The people responsible for it are all long lived—immortal, if you take their word for it—but only Aelyn Meah, their leader, has any real power. You’ll find it rarely spoken of in Yeflam, but she was one of the five who ruled before. Her kingdom was Maewe, the third kingdom, after Asila, but before Mahga and Salar. She is one of the oldest beings on the planet. Those with her in the Enclave are much, much younger than her and could not compete with her in terms of power or violence, not in the way one such as the Innocent, Aela Ren, does, but they do attempt to stop the needless fear of the cursed.”