The Broken God Machine (9 page)

“Damn you,” she was muttering. “Damn you, damn you.”

“I promised you, Nani. You asked this of me.”

She had trapped him with his love, and she couldn't ask him to go back on
the oath she had made him swear to her. Any hunter worthy of the title would
choose death over the breaking of a sworn oath, especially to one he loved.

“I
will
come back,” he said, and she laughed, a sound that was
bitter and without humor.

“No doubt. You will come riding in upon the edge of a rainbow, with Jace and
my father at your heels,” she said, and then she let him go, stepping back
toward the door.

“It’s too late for me to do anything for Uncle Truff,” Pehr told her. “It is
not yet too late for Jace. I will bring him back if I can.”

She nodded, resigned, saying nothing. After a moment more, Pehr turned and
began to jog toward the jungle, focusing on nothing more than preventing
himself from looking back. He was almost at the edge of sight when she called
his name and came running after him. He considered for a moment simply
outrunning her but couldn’t make himself do it, and came instead to a stop,
turning to meet her.

Nani came into his arms at a run, nearly bowling him over. Twisting her
fingers into his hair, she pressed her lips to his, pressed her tongue to his,
kissed him long and deep with a ferocity that bordered on painful. Overwhelmed,
Pehr put his hands in her hair and kissed back. They stood like that for some
short, too short, impossibly short time – a period that could never have been
long enough for Pehr even had it lasted until the very breaking of the world –
and then she pulled away from him.

“I will never see you again,” she told him. “I will never, ever see you
again, and I will
not
let you leave me without the truth. May the Gods
damn you, and me, and the Lagos, and everything else in this miserable place. I
love you. I
love
you, though I cannot have you, and it’s tearing my
soul apart to watch you leave.”

Pehr allowed himself just the smallest moment to savor these words, which he
had thought he’d never hear. Then he kissed her once more and stepped away from
her. Nani was looking into his eyes, and when Pehr realized what he was about
to do, it seemed he could feel his heart splitting in two. Still, he forced
himself to say the words that had come unbidden to his head, because he knew
that they must be said.

“Make certain that he lives,” he told this girl that he loved. “I want you
to do everything in your power to bring Josep back to health, and then I want
you to marry him as soon as he is able to stand at the shrine. Give him lots of
sons, strong like their father, and lots of daughters, strong like you.”

Nani’s face crumbled and she covered it with her hands, beginning to sob.
Pehr fought down the urge to go to her and said instead, “Goodbye, my
cousin.”

Then he acted as a hunter should, and as he knew he must. He turned his back
to her, and he ran for the jungle, and he didn’t look back.

Dawn was breaking as Pehr came to the great jungle that spanned the entire
eastern border of the land upon which his people had settled. It was here that
he would have hunted wild boar with his fellow men had the Lagos not chosen his
village as their target. The rain had stopped for the moment, and steam drifted
in tendrils off the tops of the wide, tall trees that dominated the jungle
canopy. The underbrush was not so foreboding this close to its edge, but he
knew it would soon grow dark and dense. He could hear the calls of monkeys and
birds in the treetops.

He’d expected at first to find a great many trails blazed by the departing
Lagos, but all seemed to converge on a single entrance into the thick greenery.
Pehr was not, and would never be, a master tracker, but a blind man could have
followed the trail of destruction the Lagos left behind them. Not content
simply with burning and pillaging, it seemed that the creatures went out of
their way to damage their surroundings even when there was no gain to be had in
it. All around him, Pehr saw broken branches and trampled greenery. Even the
earth itself had been gouged and torn by the passing of their clawed feet.
There was no question of which direction to head.

Pehr knew that this undertaking was foolish, bordering on insane, but he
couldn't bring himself to abandon Jace. He knew that his village needed him,
but still he raged against the idea of breaking his oath and leaving the boy to
his fate. In the end, he couldn't bring himself to do it, and resolved to press
on.

There was no chance for victory in a frontal assault. His goal was to catch
up with the Lagos, not to overtake them. Then, maybe, he could locate Jace and
begin to formulate a plan for escape. The Lagos, for all their ferocity and
strength, would have to rest at some point. Unless they truly were magic
creations of the Gods, they would stop to sleep, and though Pehr had no doubt
that there would be guards, there might also be some window of opportunity for
him there.

Two years earlier, Pehr and Jace had gone on an expedition with Truff to the
jungle’s edge. They had spent three days exploring the boundary and the
immediate depths, as Truff provided valuable education and insight into the
flora and fauna they would find there. The wild boars that the hunters so
prized, Truff had told them, were most likely to be found living in groups
around a central water source. The monkeys in the trees were no danger during
the day, but during the night they loved to raid campsites. The jungle was also
home to a wide variety of poisons; there were scorpions and spiders, snakes,
stinging insects, and even a kind of lizard whose mouth was so filled with vile
substances that anything it bit would become infected and begin to rot within
days.

Pehr did not fear these creatures, exactly; he knew how to deal with the
boars and monkeys, and even the rare jungle cats that existed as much in rumor
as memory. If he was bitten by a snake, spider, or lizard, then that was fate.
He hadn’t seen much in recent days that made him believe he could control the
whims of the Gods.

Pehr was exhausted, but he knew that the Lagos would not camp so close to
the jungle’s edge. They would be moving all day, and they would gain much
distance on him if he stopped to sleep. He knew he must press on even though he
hadn't slept since the night before the attack, when he’d had that bizarre
dream. What had it meant? Who had the girl been, and why had she been searching
for him? Why could he not now remember her face though he had stared directly
into her eyes?

Pehr’s typical nocturnal imagery consisted of things related to life in his
village, his training for the hunt, and more increasingly of the various girls
that had caught his eye. This new girl, though … she was unlike any he'd ever
known, tall and thin, lithe and graceful, and by her silhouette he'd seen that
she kept her hair cropped short, something he had never seen before.

Pehr managed to piece all of this together as he made his way through the
jungle, returning to the images again and again in his mind, but when he tried
to go any deeper, or get any closer, the dream faded and blurred, becoming
inscrutable. This grew ever more frustrating as the day went on, and eventually
Pehr gave up, angry that he could not coax the girl’s face from his reticent
brain.

He was tired, hot and sweaty, and ravenously hungry. There had been no time
to search for food, and he had stopped only once to fill his water skin, which
was now nearly empty again. Pehr looked up at the sky through a rare break in
the canopy and saw that it was now a few hours past noon. His body couldn't go
much further.

He slowed his pace and began to pay more attention to his surroundings. The
jungle here was riddled with fast-moving streams and his land rarely
experienced drought – often the time between rains was measured in hours, not
days. Pehr was not afraid of running out of water, but food was something more
of a concern. Lush though the jungle was, most of its plants were inedible, and
Pehr did not have the necessary time to forage for the few green things that
his stomach might tolerate. He had his knife and club, but had left his bow
behind, having no arrows with which to use it. It was possible that he might
catch something, but Pehr thought it likely that he would have to call on his
training and his strength to live without much food for a time.

After a few more minutes of walking, he came to the edge of a small, rushing
stream. Its pools were deep enough to harbor fish, small freshwater lobsters,
and snails. Perhaps a meal could be had here after all, and in any case he now
had his opportunity to rest and collect water. There would be no more traveling
this day, even if it meant losing ground to the Lagos.

Pulling his knife from his belt, Pehr set about making for himself a simple
shelter.

* * *

The Lagos were driving forward through the jungle at a relentless pace, and
it took Pehr four days of near-constant travel to finally catch up with them.
After the first night he slept only in brief stints, climbing into the
low-lying branches of the jungle trees and fashioning a type of nest from their
fronds. He encountered no snakes or scorpions and only a few spiders, but the
sounds of the jungle made his nights hell, and by the end of that fourth day he
could think of little more than how much he missed his bed. He was
concentrating so hard on this thought, in fact, that he nearly stumbled into an
outlying Lagos campsite before realizing it was there.

It was half-dark and the jungle had grown fuzzy and indistinct. At the last
moment he became aware of the glowing fire only yards away, and he came to a
dead stop, feeling suddenly open and exposed, standing as he was in the very
middle of the Lagos’s trail of destruction. He dropped quickly to his belly,
scanning warily for enemies. When he saw none in the immediate area, he pulled
himself as quietly as he could into the dense underbrush that surrounded
him.

His first goal was to determine the size of the group by scouting its entire
perimeter. If he was lucky, he might locate Jace during this process. Pehr
assumed that all of the prisoners were being kept together, and he wondered for
a moment if it would be possible to free more than one. If not, how could he
explain to them that he was there to save his cousin but leave them to their
fate?

What
was
their fate? He didn’t know any better than they did, and
part of him was tremendously curious about what the Lagos might have in store
for the children whom they had stolen away. Pehr could barely remember the
stories from his youth, but he thought that the Lagos had no use for the very
young – those who had seen fewer than four years – or for any child who had
passed much further than their fourteenth year. Had Jace been even a few months
older, Pehr thought it was likely that his whole family would be lying dead at
the edge of Nethalanhal.

The going was slow, but not difficult; it took Pehr two hours to circle the
camp, staying at the edges of the rough circle formed by the individual fires
and trying his best to remain absolutely silent. He had at first attempted to
stay downwind of the Lagos as well, but had failed in this endeavor multiple
times. It seemed that the Lagos, beast-like though they were, did not have a
highly developed sense of smell. They hadn't even so much as scented Pehr’s
presence, let alone his exact location.

He estimated the group at around four hundred Lagos, of which the vast
majority was made up of warriors. There seemed to be about one female for every
three males. There was only one encampment of priests, and it took only a few
minutes of observation to obtain an exact count of their numbers: fifteen
creatures dressed in feathers and beads led this group. All of them were male
and uniformly smaller than their warrior counterparts.

He saw no sign of Jace or any of the other prisoners, and he guessed that
they were being held nearer to the center of the circle. Periodically, during
his observation of the priests, one or two of them had moved in that direction,
only to come back a few moments later. It seemed likely that they were checking
on something, and Pehr could only assume it was the collection of human
children that they had amassed.

At last Pehr made his way out from the encampment and climbed a tall, rocky
hill, upon which stood a massive tree, its huge green leaves seeming to stretch
so high above him that they must surely touch the stars. Pehr climbed into a
low-lying branch and sat with his back against the trunk. From here he could
see several of the campfires, now tiny, dotting the landscape below him. He
could smell the roasting meat, hear the occasional burst of laughter or
fighting, and sometimes see forms moving around the fire.

The tree gave access to a gentle breeze that was a true mercy after the heat
and wet of the jungle below. It minimized the number of insects, too; for this,
perhaps more than anything else, Pehr was thankful. He watched the valley
below, illuminated by the full and bloated moon rising over the mountains in
the far distance, tracking the progress of the occasional bat as it swooped
through the clouds of insects gathered in the valley below.

His plan was simple but dangerous; he would wait for a few more hours,
dozing if the need took him, until the fires of the Lagos had burned low and
most of them were asleep. Then he would return to the valley and make his way
slowly and quietly into the interior. He did not expect to free Jace tonight,
but he hoped to locate the boy and begin devising a plan for their escape.

He had every reason to believe that the Lagos would catch him and his quest
would end here in the jungle, his blood spilled by an enemy blade. Yet Pehr
could neither think of a better plan nor bring himself to abandon the idea of
rescuing Jace. The Lagos were disorganized and did not expect any sort of
infiltration. The plan would work, it
had
to work, and he endeavored
to put any thoughts of its failure out of his mind.

Pehr leaned back against the tree trunk, put his hands behind him, and tried
to relax, staring up at the stars that dotted the heavens above him.

* * *

The blonde-haired boy was lying on his side in the dirt, breathing easily in
sleep. He was disheveled and filthy, but Pehr recognized him from thirty paces
nonetheless. His cousin was lying there with at least three dozen other
children of varying ages, all of whom slept, though many shifted, whimpering,
as if their dreams were dark.

There was a collar of metal around Jace’s neck, and a chain of the same
material that led to a nearby tree, around which it had been fastened with a
sort of device that Pehr had never seen before. The same was true of every
child; each had been tethered to a tree by thick loops of linked metal that no
human could hope to break. Pehr wondered how he might free Jace from the chain
and decided that the answer must lie in the device at its end. Break that and
the links would slide easily through the collar, and the boy would be free.

Pehr had seen only four Lagos awake in his dangerous journey into their
ranks. Two warriors were aimlessly wandering from campsite to campsite, clearly
on watch but not very involved in their duties. He'd come upon the other two, a
male and a female, noisily rutting in the underbrush not far from a guttering
campfire and easily avoided. The interior seemed completely unguarded, and Pehr
made his way slowly inward until he'd come upon the prisoners. Now he was on
his belly, crawling slowly toward Jace. He came to a stop no more than ten feet
from his cousin.

“Jace!” he hissed, but the boy only muttered and rolled over in his sleep.
Pehr grimaced in frustration and searched for a rock that would be large enough
to wake the boy without braining him in the process. Finally he found one and,
taking careful aim, threw it at the boy’s prone form.

His aim was true, and the stone bounced off the boy’s arm, leaving a
painful-looking red mark in its passing. Jace gasped, sitting bolt upright and
swiveling his head back and forth, trying to determine where this unexpected
attack had come from.

Pehr half-whispered the boy’s name and, when Jace still couldn't locate him,
said, “To your left, wet-head.”

Jace glanced over at the underbrush and seemed to discern his cousin’s
presence, his eyes widening. “Gods … is that you, Pehr?”

“Keep your voice down! Work your way over here and then lie down as if
you’re asleep.”

Jace did as he was told, moving slowly along the ground until he was lying
only a foot or two from Pehr’s prone form. The chain at his neck was stretched
to its furthest extent.

“You’re insane,” Jace hissed, his eyelids slit, trying his best to give the
illusion that he was still asleep.

“Probably,” Pehr said, and shrugged. “But I’m here.”