Gods of Earth (12 page)

This meant nothing to Chance, but he knew better than to ask for an explanation. There was a bed in a small cubicle connected to the room. The Guardian showed him how to turn the light on and off—a forbidden guild machine, he noticed with disappointment. Chance took off most of his filthy clothes. As he turned off the light, he felt an oppressive anxiety, sure that the building was not yet right, that it was haunted by those murdered here and polluted by the evil craft of the false god. He knelt at the bedside and prayed for guidance in this forbidden place, and he prayed for the safety of Sarah and Paul, and for the souls of his father and mother. Then he left the door open and stretched out on the strangely soft mattress. He was reassured that from where he lay he could see the Guardian
in the next room, immobile before the window, brooding over the night on the Sunken City of Disthea.

Chance awoke when Seth’s soft paw pressed his shoulder.

“Chance.”

He sat up. For a moment he was disoriented, unsure of where he was: white walls, a tall window letting in sunlight, black towers outside. Seth had closed the door. Then Chance slowly remembered.

“Ah,” Chance said softly. “I had hoped, for a moment, that it was all just a bad dream.”

Seth nodded and sighed. The coyote sat on his haunches by the bedside. He looked clean, his fur glossy. He wore a kind of gray collar. Chance noticed then that clothes were piled at the foot of the bed: a coarse shirt of white wool, coarse pants dyed so dark blue they were nearly black, a coat of dark leather with rough stitches made by an awl, and brown leather shoes.

“Some, some in the city buy Purimen clothes. From up-up-upriver. They admire the work.”

“Thank you,” Chance whispered. A lump rose in his throat, so grateful he felt that the coyote respected him enough to do this. “Thank you.”

“Welcome.” Seth pointed a bent wrist at the door to the bath. “Wash first.”

Chance hesitated. “Should I call you… Psuche?”

“No. Al-always to you Se-seth.”

Chance touched the collar.

“Hek-Heka-Hekademon student collar,” Seth explained. “That is my guild. For which I am ap-pa-pa-prentice.”

Chance nodded. He wanted to say something more, and to ask questions. Why had Seth been there at the Walking Man watching him? Had it been hard to leave the city where he had a life, it
seemed, and go where he was hated and even in danger? What did he do here, in the city? How had he come to live in Disthea? What did the Guardian mean, to call him a “philosopher”? But Chance felt awkward, embarrassed, to learn the pet that he had shared secrets with was no pet but somehow a—what? Scholar? Traveler? Spy? Elder?

He went into the bath.

When Chance returned, shirtless, Seth pointed with his nose at the gold band that Chance wore on a string around his neck.

“I-I-I-I’m glad you didn’t lose it,” Seth said.

Chance nodded. He clutched the gold ring. “Me too.”

Chance had found this ring with Seth. Though the eldest Puriman son in each family should receive his mother’s wedding ring for his own proposal, his mother had long ago said that her ring would go to Paul. But last year, after the Elders spoke on a Sunday, Chance had used a hunt for wild blueberries as an excuse to his father and wandered far into the black hills east of the Walking Man Lake. Seth followed silently at his heels.

In those hills, long-abandoned farms from the later ages rotted into damp loam under crowding maples. Chance had a favorite ruin there, not far from the simple hut where Elder Sirach had lived alone: a dark octagonal farmhouse with no roof behind which leaned two rows of gravestones with unreadable pitted faces. Inside the shell of that home, lying in the dim beams of light that filtered green through the trees and the skeleton of the roof, he had found a rotted box. It sat face down, close to one wall. Rotten clothes, almost indistinguishable from soil, covered it. He would have missed it but that it had cracked loudly when he stepped on it.

He had uncovered the box and pulled it into a shred of sunlight for a close look. The lid crumbled as he lifted it. Inside were heaped the ashes of old pictures and solid slugs of metal that had once been guild machines, and also, stuck into a layer of gummy black fungus,
a band of gold. Old words, some guild language, inscribed the inner surface of the ring. Chance could not read them.

Puriman code forbade the use of such a thing. But gold, Chance reasoned, was pure, a thing of the Earth, and so he had kept it, and in secret he had used the smithing tools in the barn to hammer and reshape the ring himself, forging something clean of it. Chance had then strung the band on a loop of clean twine and had worn it round his neck ever since, a single purpose in mind for it.

Now he held the band up, a kind of salute to Seth, and then reached for the clothes that lay on the bed.

They fit well, the shirt and pants loose but not too large, and the shoes sturdy and soft within. As Chance pulled on the jacket, he followed Seth into the other room. Thetis sat at the table, cleaned up also, in new black robes. Seth climbed onto a chair by her and began eating greedily. Mimir stood in the middle of the room, silent. Chance noticed that she looked different. She wore the same, faintly ridiculous, black and white formal clothes, as if dressed for Church or a fine dinner and dance. But her skin was less golden, and her hair more brown, than he had remembered. Only her silver eyes looked like a machine’s. She smiled at him with a genuinely human expression. It was obvious also now that the form of her body was more feminine than he had thought yesterday. It seemed foolish that he had doubted her sex when first seeing her.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Greetings to you, Puriman Chance Kyrien,” she said.

The Guardian stood at the window, brooding still over the city. Chance went to him and handed him the gray cloak he had worn.

“Thank you,” he said.

The Guardian nodded and pulled the cloak over his huge shoulders.

Chance sat with the others as they ate the remnants of the food from the evening before.

Then the Guardian and Seth began talking in the guild language that Chance called Leafwage. Thetis looked nervously at the floor but said nothing. Chance watched them for only a few seconds before he shouted, “No! If you are talking of me you must talk in Common. I deserve to know what is being decided.”

The Guardian stared at him, considering. Then he said, “I say the makina should not be here now, when we speak of this. And I say that it would be better for you if you did not know everything, Puriman. The coyote says otherwise. He thinks the makina might be useful. That’s why he brought the machine in here. And, the leaders of this city want to trust the makina. The coyote also thinks you should know the worst of all.”

“Can she help?” Chance asked, looking at Mimir.

“Perhaps,” the Guardian said. “Or it could turn on us. It does not care for human beings, or other living things. The makina have their own goals, first of which is to leave the Earth far behind. And all that this makina knows, all it learns from us, it will tell all the Makine.”

“Common in-interest,” Seth protested.

“Let her stay,” Chance said. “If Mimir can help save Sarah, then I ask for her help. And I want to know everything. I cannot help Sarah or Paul if I’m kept ignorant.”

The Guardian nodded. “So be it.” He turned to Thetis and spoke in Common. “Tell us what the god wants.”

“I don’t know. It arrived here—I don’t know when, the time has been strange after.…” She looked around nervously. “But it started one day when all the Mothers disappeared from their regular duties. For a long time, for weeks, I did not know why. The Mothers were running back and forth, whispering, but not telling me or the younger Mothers what had arrived. They must have tried… I don’t know… to talk with it. Sometimes I was not allowed to leave this hall—they didn’t want me to see it. I think it went away several times, and for those times duties were as usual. But then one
morning it returned, and I was confined to my quarters, and after hours of waiting I heard screams, and unreal sounds. I disobeyed my orders, and went down to the great hall. I saw it there, half god, half madman, bending things, screaming. A soulburdened ape was there too, covered in gold. I think the god was making the Mothers tell him their secrets.”

A single tear slipped down her cheek. She glanced at Chance before looking back at the table. “A Mother ordered me to hide, and I did. Some of the Mothers unlocked the ancient weapons. I hid in the basement library. I heard their screams, and the sounds of the weapons, and other… impossible sounds. I hid for a long time, days I think, but then finally I climbed up. I could find no one alive. I couldn’t leave. I wandered. Till you called.”

She rubbed her cheek. Her hands were shaking again. She had cleaned them, and Chance saw that her nails were frayed and broken, as if she had been clawing at stone.

“Why does the god want Chance?”

She shook her head. But then she said, “I think it wants to be whole. Somehow a Potentiate.…”

“The Chance is a Potentiate?” Mimir asked.

A long silence settled in the room as everyone looked at Chance, and then Mimir.

“Tread with care now, machine,” the Guardian said, in an ominous low voice that made the air in the room shake. He took a step toward the makina and stood with his knees bent. “Should you not heed me, should you try to act against my will and without my say, I’ll crush you to dust, and then I’ll dig every last one of your kin out of the earth and crush their tiny little gears to dust. Do not think the Makine are safe from me. I can move mountains and then eat the light out of your hearts.” And, for a moment, his eyes flashed two bright piercing white beams onto Mimir.

Mimir betrayed nothing. She looked placidly at the Guardian, then back at Chance.

“What is a Potentiate?” Chance asked.

Seth, who had been quietly licking morsels of food from the table while the others talked, stopped chewing and glanced at Thetis uneasily.

“Tell me,” Chance insisted.

“One who can pass through Ma’at’s gate,” the Guardian told him. “And cross the bridge Bifrost to the Numin Well, and die there, and return a god.”

Chance frowned, puzzling out these blasphemous concepts.

“The first gods killed all the Potentiates,” Thetis said, “here in the Hand that Reaches, when the war first began. Potentiates must have mattered somehow.”

“Yes.” The Guardian looked up and past them, as if staring back through time at the memory. “The gods feared the Potentiates could be used to harm them in those dread spaces beyond the Numin Well. Ma’at, gatekeeper of Bifrost, will let only a Potentiate pass. The Younger Gods were safe, when all the Potentiates were dead. There was no one left who could cross Bifrost and threaten their souls.”

“So maybe it fears Chance,” Thetis said. “It wants to kill him?”

“No,” the Guardian said. “It could have killed him before, with ease. But it did not.”

“Could it… use his, his body?” Seth asked.

“But the flesh of the god should no better bond with a Potentiate than with the body it now has,” the Guardian said.

“There is an alternate possibility,” Mimir said. “The current corpus of the deity is distinct from the corpus that we observed at the Oracle. This entails that the god portion changed its habitation or host. Yet, the Hexus did not appear to change his direction or plans. Ergo, it was able to transfer also the memories and emotions it had formed. We conclude that the Hexus can move its.…” Mimir looked at Chance, seeking a word suitable for him. “Soul. It could have as a goal moving its memories and plans and all of its person
into this adolescent. Then it would send him into the Numin Well, to replace its body there. The god would be reborn.”

There was a long silence. Seth looked at the floor when Chance met his eyes. Thetis did the same. The Guardian and Mimir stood still as statues, thinking.

“But,” Chance finally said, “but the witches made the false gods. They were unmen.”

Seth’s ears lay down flat.

Then it dawned on Chance. “Oh no,” he said. He looked at Seth and then Thetis, imploring each for some word of denial, but they were silent.

“That’s false,” he said. “A lie. Look at me. Look at me. I don’t have cat eyes, or fur on my skin, or fangs. That false god is wrong. It made a mistake. I’m a man. A true man. A Truman.”

Thetis put the fingertips of both hands over her mouth, and bowed her head so that her hair fell over her face.

“No. No.” Chance stood abruptly. His chair fell back on the floor. “They swore. The witches swore. They swore I was pure.” He started breathing heavily, turning in place. He’d had enough. This was madness, this was everything that a Puriman must deny, must flee.

He went to the door and pushed it open and ran into the hall, looking for some way out, away from the white walls and glowing evil ceiling and unholy machines in the floors and the lies and these unmen. His breath came in gasps now. Where were the stairs? He turned in place till he remembered, then staggered to the end of the hall and pushed the door open. He stumbled to the railing and looked up, then down the reeling stair well. He took first one step, then another. He descended a dozen steps before he fell back and sat.