The Godless (24 page)

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.”

At the open window, the smell was barely noticeable. Easing into the chair, she said, “Is that what I've done?”

“Perhaps.”

“Perhaps?”

“The Keepers have their own way of doing things.” Zaifyr sat on the edge of his bed and, from the table next to it, took a copper chain and began to wind it around his wrist. “The evolutionary path of a god is not one that you can find in a book, after all.”

“Do you believe that?”

“That I can find it in a book?”

“That you're a god.”

His thumb pressed against the end of the chain. “No.”

She leaned back in the chair, her fingers lacing together in her lap. “I don't know what to think,” she admitted. “I have been told so many things—about curses, about gods, about life. Even you. They told me your name was Qian.”

“Once.”

“And that you were mad.”

He picked up a long copper chain and repeated, “Once.”

“Should I discount what they say?”

“If you want.” The chain wrapped around his knuckles. “I don't have any answers either, if that is what you're looking for. I don't know why you're cursed. I don't know why the man at the front desk isn't. All I know is what time taught me: I will live a long time, which I am thankful for. As for the rest, well, I was once Qian, I once ruled one of the Five Kingdoms, and at the end of it, my brothers and sisters locked me in a madhouse for a thousand years. After that—”

“You will tell me there are no answers?”

“No, there are answers.” His green eyes met her own. “But you come by them by removing every other choice, until there is only this choice for this moment.”

“Will you help me?”

She saw his hesitation, as if the bluntness of her question and the unadorned way she presented it surprised him. It surprised her as well. He was not the opposite of Bau: he was no more sure of his creation or his purpose than the Healer was. But neither was he Bau. When she met his gaze she saw her youth, her innocence and potential, and her promises that lingered like the smoldering beneath her skin. But she saw too his age, that length of a life that was so long that she could not begin to understand what he had seen, the changes he had lived through and the tiredness it had born. As she held his gaze and felt on the verge of knowing a small, vital part of the man who, having once been a god, now wrapped himself in the ancient charms of the long dead, he smiled his half smile and the sly, cynic's humor returned, leaving her with but a glimpse of him.

“Yes,” he said.

 

IN A TOWN CALLED DIRTWATER

For a long time, there was nothing; nothing but the fading religions, the old rituals, the empty words. Nothing, until Jae'le, until myself—

Nothing until the first of the “children.”

—Qian,
The Godless

 

1.

 

For a week, Zaifyr did not leave
Red Moon
.

It had not been his plan to stay. He had meant to return to the foul-watered shaft and, with a long-handled hammer, begin breaking through the stone around the Temple of Ger.

Instead, he allowed Ayae to keep his attention. Her presence in the beer garden at the back of the hotel became a world that he and she occupied beneath the rise and fall of the three suns. At night, when she was gone, he would return to his room and note the progression of thick boards being erected across shopfront windows and doors. Slowly, Mireea was becoming uniform: a city of shut buildings and empty lanes, the divisions of economy washed away and falling into memory like the sprawl of markets. Each new building shut up was a part of Mireea lost, and soon he would also be gone. If he was not, he ran the risk of being drawn into the units that the Mireean Guard were making from citizens. That he had no desire for. He awoke to see their painful morning jog through the empty, cobbled streets, struggling beneath the weight of mismatched armor and swords they had been given, with either a bucket of water in each hand or a stretcher full of bricks between two. They followed the streets throughout the city all day, passing beneath all the wooden gates and crude wooden walls that divided the city, carrying out mock exercises that Heast issued from his position on the roof of
The Pale House.

He might have stayed longer in the garden and forgotten his responsibilities were it not for the explosions that began to punctuate the day. Neither he nor Ayae knew what they were, but after she had left, he saw First—or was it Second?—carrying an empty pack covered in dirt walking along the streets. The small man squinted at him as he crossed the road, grunted a greeting and told him that Heast had ordered the tunnels down the mountain caved in and road broken up. There appeared to be no immediate threat to Zaifyr's foul tunnel—it was too close to the city to be a defensive weakness, except to anyone who fell in—but still, before the first light of the morning's sun, he walked through the city gates with the weight of the hammer over his back, leaving his charms inside his hotel room.

The night before, he had told Ayae he would be gone for a few days. They had sat at the back of her house at a small wooden table, the light from the night sky piercing strongly through the cut-back trees.

“You should probably prepare yourself,” he said. “I know you won't leave, but your preparations—”

“I have tidied my garden,” she said. “I washed my walls down. I don't need to shut my windows up, lock myself away.”

“You've not fought in a war before.”

“But you have?”

“Many,” he admitted. “After the gods had died, we had our own wars to divide up what they had left.”