Gods of Earth (34 page)

The mountain forest where Hroth tower stood was empty of any men, thick with trees, and far—for that time—from the nearest city. It stood in a guarded forest, one of the first deeds of our guild. Wulfanga had planned ahead. There was a greenhouse in a small clearing. Power cells, food stores, weapons, all the things we needed to live there.

I am no airship pilot. We searched for days to find it, and then spent an afternoon trying to moor. Finally I slid down a docking rope, and Wealtheow steered so that she swung me, smacking painfully hard, against the tower’s roof. I climbed down and moored the ship. We emptied, then deflated the ship, and folded it away as best we could.

In the year that followed we lived a simple life, growing food, hunting, schooling our children. We named the monkeys and birds that lived nearby, and learned their ways as you learn the ways of your neighbors. We sang, and filled the forest with our calls, like birds. At first, the children sorely missed their friends and home. Their lemur’s gripes about missed cakes soon became a joke and a vent for their sorrow. They moved on. They grew strong.

Wealtheow and I were frightened, and worried, but even at the end of the world two lovers can defy time, and be happy for a while.

We brought no tool with us to call to the world beyond, knowing that such a thing could betray us. But we did have tools to listen to what was happening outside. We learned of the murdering of our guildmates, of the hunt for our family. We heard nothing of
Lethebion or the soulburdened. We learned of the doings of Dark Engineers and the Mothers of the Theogenics Guild—you could hear in the voice of those who spoke of it the fear, near terror, when the gods were shown forth.

I began to hope that we would be forgotten in this terrible new age. I began to steal more moments of peace, seeing my son and daughter race in climbing a tree, their lemur far ahead of them; hearing them gossip about the sex of the monkeys; feeling them grow strong and lithe.

The rainy spring was just ending, the clouds breaking to let through a few cracks of sun, when it happened.

Wealtheow and I stood in the kitchen. The children played upstairs, in their room in the top of the tower. Then, from high in the tower, a strange crackling sounded out.

“What was that?” Wealtheow asked.

“I don’t know. They broke a chair? Something wood?”

“I’ll go look.” She headed up the stairs, quick but not panicked. I set down the knife I held and listened. And then I heard it—unmistakable: Wealtheow gave out a stifled scream.

I ran up the winding tower stair, three steps at a time. I heard then, in the distance, the fan of an airship, somewhere near but not so close that you could see it from the windows I ran past. They meant to keep it out of hearing range, and mayhap it had drifted too close to us in the sharp winds.

The door to the children’s bedroom was closed. The air on the landing outside smelled of ozone. A sickly light spiked out from beneath the door, like white knives stabbing into our world from some rotten other place. I pushed against the door and pushed again, but it would not open. So I stood back and kicked the door so hard it burst off the hinges and clattered onto the floor.

The room was wrecked, the children’s beds overturned, their toys strewn on the hard stone floor. The window was burst inwards,
and bright shards of glass crunched under my feet. The children were not there. Their lemur was not there.

And in the center of this dreadful sight drifted Primus, first of the Younger Gods. We had seen his image, as had all the world. He was wrapped in a white cloth, and his skin glowed as he floated there, his toes just touching the floor. He held my wife by her throat.

“Put her down!” I shouted. I ran at him but with a thought he threw me onto my back by the window. I clambered to my feet, shards of glass clinging to my palms where they cut into my skin.

“Oh, what have you done? What have you done?” I looked over the room again for my children and did not see them, did not see any place where they could have hidden themselves. I looked out the window, but they were not on the ground below. “Where are my son and daughter? What have you done? Let my wife go! You’ll kill her.”

“What have
you
done, Treow?” the foul child asked me. “What forces have you attempted to direct? What alliances have you made?”

I ran at him but he waved a hand and this time I was knocked to my knees and then bound there, at the feet of my wife, locked in some kind of tightly wrapped space. I understood then that she was dead. Her head was bent limp, to the side. Her eyes lay open but looked neither on the young god nor on me. The god dropped her, and the body crumpled before me, into a lifeless heap.

I moaned and began to weep. “She was the best of her age, Primus. You have done a thing that shall be known for its foulness ages hence. Oh, where are my son and daughter?”

“You tell me, Treow,” it mocked.

“Where are they?” I screamed.

“They are not here.” His voice was calm, indifferent. So little my life, the life of Wealtheow, the life of my children meant to it. “Out of sight, out of mind… out of being, perhaps. I come on an errand for the Mothers of the Theogenics Guild.”

This was the short time after the birth of the gods but before the war, when the Younger Gods still did with half-hearts the bidding of the Mothers.

“How can they combat this plague?” Primus demanded. “And, given what I have seen here, I must ask you, who helped your guild to engineer it? To what otherworldly powers have you betrayed our age?”

“There are no others!” I shrieked. “We told the truth. Some few once in my guild, already banished, made it. You have killed them already. This is madness, to kill the guiltless.”

“How do we stop it?”

“I do not know how to stop it. I know nothing of it. None who served me had knowledge of this thing. Doom and hurt me, but let my children thrive.”

“I came not to punish but to find a cure.”

“If there were one in the world that had a hope of curing this, you just killed her,” I spat. “Now give me my children.”

The god shrugged, indifferent. He looked at my wife’s body, and then at me. I felt a sickening squeeze within my skull as he gazed into me. Then he said, “I see that you believe what you say.”

That was it. He was done. He had no use left for us.

“Where are they? Now tell me. Where are my children?” I strained, hissing with effort, against the bonds of bent space.

“Why do you believe I have them?” He waited then, mocking me, as if he expected some answer. Then he continued. “For that matter, how do you even know you had children? Perhaps I created that memory in you just to torment you for your crimes.”

And then he disappeared. Like that. Into a snap of dry air and the bitter stench of ozone. And I was alone, with the body of my wife, and with the black empty lack of my children. In the distance, I heard the airship begin to drive away.

Can you ken the cruelty of this? To have taken my beloved children, and not to let me know how they died, and, worst of all, to have set that sick seed of doubt within my heart that perhaps they
never were at all? I crawled to my wife’s body, already growing cold, and wrapped her arms around my head, and wept bitterly, with heaving gasps, until I could weep no more and it seemed I would choke on my own despair.

After a long time—all of the day, or perhaps it was two days—I rose onto my knees, and looked out the window of my children’s room, and howled at the darkening sky.

“I will avenge you!” I screamed. “I will kill them all!” I do not know if I spoke for my wife or my children or all three. Or myself. But I believe that in all the world there was no being more aflame with anger than I at that moment. I burned with fury. I scorched a hole in space with my rage. I screamed, and screamed, and screamed, till my voice broke, and I could not see for the pounding blood in my eyes.

And then light poured through the little broken window of my children’s bedroom, as if in answer to my howls. For a second, I hoped against dread that somehow my children were being returned. But instead a voice as cold and soft as wind-blown snow came out of the light.

“Would you pledge yourself to destroy the gods?”

And I knew, somehow, that this that spoke to me was something other, wholly other, than the Younger Gods, or the Demigods, or any Earthly thing. Out of the blinding light came now air so cold that my tears froze to my face and my breath came in bursting puffs of white. At my knees, the dead eyes of my fallen wife turned gray with frost.

“Will you return my children?”

“They are beyond us. They are lost to us.”

I screamed again.

“Will you pledge yourself to avenge your wife and kill the gods?”

I did not back away from this doom.

“Yes,” I told this otherworldly voice. “Yes. I bind myself to this doom and their death.”

And I was gathered into the cold, cold light.

CHAPTER

30

C
hance frowned and leaned forward when the Guardian fell silent, expecting more. But the ancient being was quiet.

“That’s all?” Sarah finally asked.

“I cannot tell you what happened when I was taken among the Old Gods.”

“Cannot, or will-will-will not?” Seth asked.

The Guardian brooded silently.

“But you told us nothing,” Chance protested. “What are these other… things, these older false gods? What do they want? Where are they now? Why do you serve them?”

“Should you sa-serve them?” Seth growled.

The Guardian shook his head. “I told you why I am here. Why I hunt Hexus now. As for the Old Gods, I will say again only what is known to the Mothers and to all others who keep the lore: the Old Gods fear that the evil of the human gods may stretch beyond the Earth. For this, they have bound to the Earth men and all that men have created. And for this, should we fail to bind the human gods, they swear to kill the Earth. I am nothing to them, they will
not hear my urgings—but this Earth-doom I may ward away by killing the Younger God.”

“You have given Chance no reason to trust you,” Sarah said.

The Guardian did not answer. He rose, in the dark, and walked to the prow of the ship, where he stood looking out over the black sea and the star-strewn sky that embraced it.

Sarah huffed in impatience and disgust. She rose to her feet and clomped off noisily toward the back of the boat. Thetis, Mimir, and Wadjet remained on the deck, all three silent, each lost in her own thoughts of family or loss or betrayal.

Chance stood to follow Sarah, then hesitated a moment, looking to the Guardian. He felt strangely sorry for this ancient creature. The Guardian’s story had revealed how little his path resembled what he had wanted from his life, from the world. It was a story like Chance’s own now.

Chance went to him. Seth watched, saying nothing.

“Perhaps,” Chance said to the Guardian, “when we’ve killed the god, you can… do something like your wife, or friend, or you yourself once longed to do.”

The Guardian looked at him but said nothing.

In the dark beyond, a whale blew a loud spume.

Chance nodded and turned away.

When Chance opened the door to the quarters he shared with Sarah, he found her standing in the dim light cast by the small bulb above their beds. She was wearing her sword belt and had her hands on the hilts.

How unlike herself she looked! So beautiful and fierce in these tight black clothes that betrayed every curve of her strong body, and with her hair shorn to a finger’s width. One could not have seen her in her dress of the spring dance, with its low red and white
hem, spinning on the Church floor, and recognized also this steely beauty.

“What…” Chance began, meaning to ask why she had put on the swords. But Sarah’s look made him fall silent. There she stood, proud and dangerous and beautiful, looking at him over her shoulder.

The first night on the ship, when they had stepped down below the deck, Chance had hesitated after they entered the room and Sarah had pushed the door closed. They had stood a long time in awkward silence. He had wanted to ask if they could sleep together again, like they had that night in Disthea, but it was different now; she was not weak and needing him, and it would have meant something other. So he had hesitated, and though Sarah had seemed to be waiting, she finally gave him her uneven smile, nodded, and climbed into the top bunk. The same had happened on all the following evenings.

Now she furrowed her brow in something like angry determination. The black scars on her cheek seemed even more pronounced in the dim light. Chance pressed the door closed and stepped forward.

“Sarah?”

She turned and reached up and grabbed him by the collar, and pulled him to her and kissed him. It was the first time they had kissed. Chance closed his eyes. He grabbed onto her tightly with his left arm, pressing her painfully against his broken right arm.

Sarah pushed him away, then pushed him again, down onto his bunk bed. She dropped to her knees before him and began to unbutton his shirt. She stopped a moment to unbuckle her belt, and the swords clattered to the floor. She kissed him again.