Gods of Earth (36 page)

Hexus turned so that all the other soulburdened nearby could hear him. He shouted over the thundering water. “I save the city! Everything depends upon getting the Potentiate, and taking him to the Well. There is no time to wait here. The city must be taken, and troops then gathered for pursuit. I will stop this flood when the city has surrendered. Go to the other pumping stations, like this one, and open the pipes!”

Hexus turned to the Engineer. Her eyes flitted over the torrent of water pooling and slipping down the street, but her face showed no emotion. The guild elder saw then that the god was about to dismiss her, and spoke before he could.

“I am descended from the very line of Threkor, whom you knew and respected, godling. I am one of the true Engineers—not one of these rusted uncreatives with fumbling fingers. Nor am I one of these fools—” she glanced at Vark, “who does not know what was, and what is, and what might be. You and I—we understand each other. Kill me now, or let me begin to rebuild this ancient city that was once your namesake.” She pointed at the foaming water the sluiced down the street. “And there is more now for me to do. Who is a god to stand in the way of an Engineer and Threkor’s Heir?”

Apostola snatched up her spear, ready to run the guild Elder through. But Hexus brayed with Paul’s loud laugh.

“It is good to hear the pride of the Penultimate Age.” He turned to Apostola. “Give her a guard and let her ready the way to repair the city. But not till the humans are flooded out and have surrendered all.”

Apostola bowed. Mist from the shooting water started to fall over all of them. It made her armor shine and her black fur glisten.

“And prepare airships. And our best warriors. We must follow the boy.”

Hexus turned to the leader of the Hieroni.

“Vark, I have a task for you. You shall bring me now one of the Numin Jars. And then you shall come with us, over the sea.”

Vark flinched.

“Come, come,” Hexus shouted over the bright water spray’s roar. “You do not seem to appreciate the honor of being chosen to accompany the god.”

Hexus laughed bitterly.

CHAPTER

32

C
hance looked at Wadjet expectantly. A monotonous day had passed, the boat making steady progress sailing north while they waited for the whales to mount an attack that never came. Now they sat in a circle and ate a meal of more fish and dried breads. The sun set into a darkening red glow. It was time, if they were to follow their restored ritual, for either Wadjet or Thetis or even Seth to tell his story. A long silence settled over them, the only sound the lapping of short waves against the boat. Finally, Wadjet spoke.

“The boy waits on my tongue. But the one tale we could use,” she said, a bit of petulance in her tone, “the tale we need to hear, the one tale that might tell us something that could save our lives, would be the tale of the god.”

Seth snorted in agreement.

Thetis nodded. “I do wonder, why now? Where has he been until now? It’s been thousands of years since the Theomachia. And what does he really want? He wants Chance, yes, but then what?”

Wadjet added, “And how did he get the soulburdened on his side?”

The Guardian leaned forward slightly, as if he too wished that he could hear such a story.

Chance considered a moment. He wondered,
Will I endanger myself if I speak now? Will the Guardian consider me polluted?
But, as happened to Chance all too often, he was surprised to hear his voice before he’d settled on an answer to those questions.

“I know the false god’s tale,” Chance said.

They all looked at him.

“He… he forced it into me. In Uroboros. Before I could drive him into the binding cube. Hexus lay his hand against my head and, in a minute, in a few seconds, I saw it, felt it all. I can tell it as he thinks it. As he sees it. Though I don’t understand it all. Or even much of it.”

The Guardian’s eyes narrowed to slits under his dark brows. But Thetis spoke in a whisper then. “Tell it to us, Chance. It could be important. It could save lives.”

Chance nodded.

Nightmares plagued Hexus. Nightmares that had lasted an eternity. Hexus dreamed that he crossed Bifrost, the bridge of stars, to a timeless land beyond the mortal world. There he climbed into the sarcophagus of his mortal death, so that he might be reborn as a god on Earth. He was Hexus, sixth of the seven Prime Potentiates, culmination of the human race and all that it hoped to inherit, and he was soon to be sixth of the seven Younger Gods. But instead, in this nightmare, an interminable emptiness and night followed his death, before he was reborn in hell as a tortured fragment of a divinity—

Before he looked up into the savage face of the Stalker.

The Stalker had been a scavenger of ancient places. He wandered the edge of the Filthealm, seeking guild machines of the lost
ages to sell to other savage men. It was a dangerous occupation, chosen by men and women driven more by curiosity than greed. The Stalker, grizzled and canny, wandered farther than others. He did not just search the edge of the Filthealm, but dared to journey into it, so that he might forage in those polluted places that had not yet been looted, risking a slow death from poisoned air and water.

He walked alone where buildings still stood, though no men had entered them in centuries. He followed the fragmentary trails of ancient roads. He dug up strange dwellings and machines buried under dunes of blowing, toxic sand. He understood nothing of the things he found, but chose what he could carry, what was shiny or bright, what appeared beautiful or obviously useful.

And in his wanderings, he heard many times the legend of Voolmount, the mountain where gods and a demigod were said to have fought and died, at the beginning of the War of the Gods. The myths took on a plausible consistency in his mind, and he began to search. He began to long to find it, to possess the tools of a demigod that he hoped remained there.

It took years, but at last he discovered Voolmount, in the mountains that edge the southern tier of the Filthealm. Dwarfed by the surrounding peaks, it rose with sheer gray cliffs to a single, flat, snowcapped summit. The Stalker first beheld it as he rounded the bend of a thin goat trail that cut through the valley of two taller mountains, just minutes after breaking his solitary camp and striking out. He knew at first sight that it was the famed mountain. For there, out of the dark western face of it, just as legend told, a huge cavernous hole gaped, a single violent gouge in the hard rock, said to be from an explosion caused by some god or by the demigod, Wervool, who had dwelt there. The chamber glowed with trapped golden sunlight of the dawn, and called to him as a door to inconceivable riches.

The Stalker climbed until dusk and then camped on a thin precipice in howling wind. Nothing lived up there but lichen. In his small tent he melted snow for a drink, and then slept fitfully, shivering. He had harrowing dreams he could not remember when he woke with the dawn. He quickly broke camp and continued his climb. By the late morning of the next day, he put one arm, then the other, over the sharp corner of the cut, and pulled his head up into the chamber.

It was vast and round. The flat bottom of it lay smooth and even, clearly an act of artifice. Some parts of the walls stood square to the floor, or to another fragment of wall. There had been some kind of dwelling of stone here, carved behind the cliff face, but long exploded away. Breathless with hope, the Stalker heaved himself up onto the floor, dropped his pack, and without resting a moment began to search.

He found nothing. Flinty shards of gray stone covered the floor, but as he kicked them about or turned them over he found only more stones, or the smooth, featureless floor beneath. He climbed two walls, clinging perilously with his cold-numbed fingertips to inadequate cracks in the smooth rock, seeking some hidden recess. He found none. He scrutinized the floor again, this time dividing it in his mind into areas, which he searched individually, turning over every stone, before moving on to the next. It grew dark as the sun went behind the mountain.

The place proved bereft of all but stone and dirt. It was silent but for the screech of the wind, and inanimate but for the occasional eagle that soared past the cavern mouth.

He made camp in a corner and struggled with unpleasant dreams that again, in the morning, he could not remember. With the dawn, he ate the last of his food—some dried meat and two mouthfuls of water—and packed his things. He approached the cliff edge of the cave mouth, about to descend, when he felt compelled to make one last search.

That’s when he saw it, in a dark corner that had been the first place he’d inspected the day before. Something glistening and white lay among the sharp scattered chips of stone. It was strange that he would have missed it. He reached out and prodded it. It gave slightly, elastic like a boiled egg. Some cords or strings came out of it, giving it the shape of a small turnip. He picked it up and turned it over in his hand.

The Stalker gasped: it was an eye.

He did not have time to wonder that it was not rotten. He did not have time to wonder that the pupil
dilated
, as it focused upon him, from where it lay on the palm of his right hand. He jerked his hand, reflexively, to shake it off. But it was too late.

He screamed as it sank down into his flesh.

It took days for the god’s memories to bleed into the Stalker’s mind. While those long hours passed, the Stalker raged at his own body. He broke several bones in his hand, smashing at it with a skull-sized rock held in his left. He stabbed at the eye with his pitted dagger, but the eerie unreal flesh closed, unharmed, after he withdrew the blade, and more often the point slipped aside, guided by some malevolent force, and jabbed agonizingly into the soft skin between his fingers or at the base of his thumb. Then he ruined the fingers of his hand by holding the palm in a fire, screaming in anguish as he tried to burn the eye away. The flames did not harm the orb, but blackened and destroyed the meat of his digits.

And while he wrecked himself, visions crowded into his head: unbelievably beautiful children smiling imperiously at each other; towering rooms of white and gold; dignified men and women in black robes; a dark place where stars spun by so close it seemed you could touch them; a building with fingers that reached for the sky as if to grab the moon.…

And then the voice spoke.

“Who are you?”

The Stalker howled at the wind.

Hexus recalled these things as his own memories now. He had bonded to the Stalker out of some innate impulse. His mind was gone. There remained nothing of him but a potential for power, and a potential for reclaiming the memories of his mortal life, his life before his death and transformation. And these took root in the Stalker’s mind. He became first a joint, mixed being, confused together with the brutal incomprehension of the Stalker.

What he saw in the Stalker’s mind was all darkness: cruel memories of a nasty, painful life, drowned in ignorance. Hexus could not have imagined that anywhere on Earth there could be such ignorance. The Stalker knew nothing of the world, of its history, of the fate of its cities and people. He thought that the Earth was only as old as ten score generations of men; that the universe was tiny, the stars few and near; that the seasons were caused by the sun coming close or withdrawing; that every disease or accident that harmed someone was the judgment of a god; that all the organisms of Earth were made as they were now, perfect for some use, always a human use; and that human women were also made, as they were now, for the uses of men (this made Hexus laugh, a choking guttural sound in the Stalker’s throat that the Stalker resisted, but that Hexus could not suppress, as he imagined his sisters, impossibly beautiful, standing in the air, their night-black hair streaming behind, their black eyes looking down with divine contempt on this stupid savage). Chief of the Stalker’s mad beliefs was that reality itself was a simple stage drama for his own straggling, half-perished tribe, so that ultimately he need not be concerned about the far future or the consequences of his actions,
since the outcome was soon to be the destruction of the world and the re-creation of some kind of happy family gathering strewn with virgins. It was a dream that only an adolescent or idiot could have desired.