Gods of Earth (46 page)

“I won’t lose Sarah,” Chance hissed. “I—” And he could not bring himself to say, I already lost Seth. I lost the Guardian—the Guardian! He felt a wave of despair sweep over him. How weak they were, without the immortal to defend them.

But first, he reminded himself, find Sarah.

“She will go to the ship,” Wadjet told him. “Where else can she go?”

“Looking for me.”

“When she sees you are free, she’ll go to the ship. She probably already knows. That opening was easy to see from many places. I watched the whole battle. She likely did also.”

“And the Guardian?” Chance asked.

“In that thing,” she said. “Swallowed by the blue light.”

Chance rubbed a dirty hand over his cut face, smearing soil into his tears. He saw the fierce determination drain out of Wadjet’s expression, as her lips covered her fangs. Chance found her look of pity worse to bear than her chastisement.

“Let’s go,” he said, roughly. “But keep watch out for Sarah.”

“Aye, Puriman.”

CHAPTER

40

“S
arah!”

The voice was distant. Annoying.

“Sarah!”

A dull ache hammered at the back of Sarah’s head. She put her hand to her face, and felt it wet with blood: one of her scars lay torn open. She opened her eyes. Thetis stared down at her.

“Chance!” she shouted, sitting up. They were on a hillside. With one hand she felt the leaves and dirt mixed into her hair. “What…?”

“I saw the god throw you up here,” Thetis whispered. She backed fearfully into a low bush blooming with purple flowers. “And I came to you.”

Sarah looked around, and found that, amazingly, her swords lay nearby. So, she had not let go of them as she sailed through the air. Good.

She bent her knees and sat forward. None of her bones seemed to be broken. But all of them were sore.

“Chance?” she croaked again.

“I stopped at that peak, over there.” Thetis pointed. “When I realized you weren’t behind me. I could see the clearing from
there. Chance escaped, Sarah, he escaped. Seth and the Guardian fought, they gave him—”

“You said Seth was dead.”

“I thought he was, but.…”

Sarah finished the thought. “But now he is.” She slowly stood and retrieved her sword. She sheathed them carefully. “Which way did Chance and the Guardian go?”

“Just Chance.”

She looked down the hill, wondering why there was silence. “The Guardian still fights?”

“No. The Guardian was… trapped. They had one of the lost Numin Jars.”

“What is that?”

“A thing—ancient—made to trap a god. With it they trapped the Guardian.”

Sarah’s shoulder’s fell. She closed her eyes. “We lost the Guardian?”

“Yes.”

“How will we fight it now? How?”

“Sarah, we have to go. There are bears and wolves. They’re chasing Chance.”

“Where is he?”

“Get down.” Thetis motioned for Sarah to crouch like herself. “Get down. Chance ran that way.” She pointed higher in the hills. “He’ll be running to the airship, surely.”

“To the airship,” Sarah said. “Let’s go.”

“But the bears… we should.…”

“We’ll climb up, first. High on the hill.” Sarah pointed straight up the steep slope. “Then cut around. We’ll avoid the bears, most likely, if they are following Chance’s scent. But we’ll be able to run down on them in a hurry if they catch up with Chance.”

“So be it,” Thetis said. She got to her feet, though she still crouched over in caution. Sarah frowned at her.

“Come,” Sarah said. “Be strong. We’ll die if we are not.”

Thetis did not answer, but rather set off immediately, leading the way, her robe catching noisily at low branches.

“No back up,” Sar mumbled bitterly. “No alternative. No choice but to die, food for bears, if the plan doesn’t work.”

A good engineer never puts herself in such a situation, but Sar had not had the time to be a good engineer.

She had watched carefully as the airships began to drop. She peered down through the vent, seeing the white Sæwall, the black tower Ymbringhen, the twin mountain peaks and the plateau beyond. She knew this place, by fame: this was Lethebion, the cursed and abandoned island of the cursed and destroyed guild. Then she saw the boat, anchored in shallow clear sparkling water. The boy was here.

The airship set down on the beach roughly, digging hard into the sand. The bears roared for their lives, terrified. She heard the other two airships crash down on either side, scraping the soft beach with a hard crunching sound so brittle it seemed they had crashed onto stone.

Instantly the bears tumbled out onto the sand. Wolves howled and barked nearby. Silence fell when the god shouted—a voice she recognized well now. Sar waited and heard distinctly a shout from farther down the beach, the guttural growl of a bear.

“The boat is empty!” the bear called.

“Up the hill!” Hexus commanded. “We must find them as soon as we can and bring them here. The boy must not be harmed. Do not hesitate to kill any of the others.”

There was talking then, but Sar could not hear it. After a while, the howls and barks retreated up the hill. She listened as they diminished into silence. Then just two bears trudged noisily back onto the airship, their nails clicking on the hard floor.

“Might be food here,” one bear growled, just above where Sar lay. “Food to find.”

“Two with each ship,” the other bear answered. “You leave, only one with this ship.”

“I leave and come back with food. Two and food in this ship.”

“Shut up,” the other bear growled.

“Two on each ship,” Sar mumbled. “Six total on the beach. Not bad.”

She crawled forward under the hatch to the cabin, pushing a tall cone of paper before her. The steps of the bears were loud now. They were a handspan above her.

“You smell that,” one of the bears growled, as she positioned the cone below the door. “Human. Human. Right here now. Smell it!”

She had found in the ship’s cargo stores: matches, paper, and short rods of wood. She had arranged these into a cone of fuel, filled with a loose pile of the old stuffing of a life jacket. She had set it on a crate lid for a base. It was enough. She lit a match now, and put it to the top of the cone.

“Here,” the bear growled. “I smell it. I smell it. Human meat! Through this!”

She heard the fumbling of claws at the hatch. She was not a moment too soon. The cone exploded into billowing hot smoke, shooting up through the hatch as it opened.

“Step one,” Sar mumbled to herself. “Fumigate bears.”

The bears roared, stumbling and rolling about the cabin. They ran to the back of the ship, to the front again, tumbling noisily over seats, and then again to the back and out of the cabin. Sar heard their paws thud down on the sand. She had breathed with her face pressed to a small side vent, and now took a deep breath and crawled forward as quickly as she could. She ignored the pain as she planted a hand on hot embers from her smoke bomb and crawled out of the hatch. She slapped it closed. The cabin was filled with smoke, opaque with it. She stumbled toward the door, slammed
it shut, and threw the deadbolt. She ran to the controls and threw open the window, and then she could hold her breath no longer.

She fell to the ground, breathing the tiny handspan of clean air that was there. Two breaths. She sat up, eyes blind with tears, and opened the cover on the emergency tether release.

“Step two,” she said aloud. “Free the airship.” She threw the switch.

She fell back to the floor, gasping. The airship lifted, then jerked against its tethers for only a second before it pulled free. Using the emergency tether release was dangerous, given her plan to ditch the anchor: it meant the ship would have no way to anchor, and they would have to ground the ship at their destination. But Sar could think of no other choice.

The air in the cabin began to clear. Her smoke bomb had been made to be short lived. She leapt up, hurried to the back of the cabin, opened another window, creating a cross breeze, and crawled to the controls again.

“Step three,” she said. “Disable the other ships.”

The ship drifted toward the trees, a huge green wall rising before her. She turned on the engines and jerked down on the control that set them in full reverse. The ship shuddered and then reluctantly began to slow. The shift was enough to drive the smoke back, billowing into her face. She got a lungful of it, and dizziness swept over her, then passed as the air cleared again.

“I’m too old, too old, too old,” she protested, coughing with harsh bursts that scraped her throat raw. The ship listed sideways, not slowing quickly enough. It slammed into the forest canopy. Colorful birds, green and black and yellow and blue, screamed in outrage and took flight, abandoning their nests before the onrush of the airship. A tree branch creaked and broke, then another snapped. Slowly the ship backed away, turning, as it bounced off the trees.

She grabbed the controls and found the ship responded to her now. She turned it. Below, on the beach, six bears clustered between
the two remaining ships, waving claws and looking up at her. She drifted over them, waited till she was just above one of the ships, then pushed the engines to full down thrust, and reached for the emergency anchor hook control. She took careful aim—she had only one shot—letting the airship sink slowly down until the other airship took up the entire view of the front windows.

She fired the hook. The dull explosion and the hissing of rope paying out were followed by an audible tear as the spiked anchor hook punctured the other ship.

She cut the engines and dropped ballast. Seawater splashed down on the roaring bears. The ship rose, then jerked and bounced when the tether in the ship below caught and twisted into the balloon fabric. She put the engines into full reverse. It worked: the ship below rocked, turned, came free. It had lost most of its lifting gas from the anchor cutting the balloon, and so it dragged now across the sand as her airship pulled it along, scraping loudly as it shuddered and jumped over small dunes. The bears chased it, uncertain what else to do but roar at her.

Sar dragged the ship into the other parked ship. Her ship jerked, making the anchor cable ping and vibrate. Once, twice, three times she bounced the ship against the tension. Finally the hook cut through the parked ship’s fabric and tore into the other ship. She pressed down on the engine control, but they were already in full reverse. Back and forth the ship tossed, straining at the anchor cable. Then the cable broke, and she shot into the air.

Below, she saw the two airships, laying on their sides in mangled heaps, deflating.

“Step four,” she said. “Save the boy.”

The god and his warriors had run up the trail on this side of the mountain. Best to avoid Hexus. She would circle around the mountain’s other side and hope to catch the boy and the Guardian in retreat.

Sar turned the ship toward the west.

CHAPTER

41

H
exus tore the dead coyote from his throat and tossed him aside, drew the great spear from his ribs, and slowly reassembled his body. He was getting fast at this, his power growing, but his skill could not slow the decay of this host, nor did it reduce the agony he felt, the sharp mortal pain, each time he was hurt.

He turned and looked over the clearing. The Potentiate was gone. Apostola, her head smoking, her black eyes inscrutable, pulled on her helmet. The bears lay broken around the clearing. Vark sat in the trees, arms wide and gaze fixed on the Numin Jar as if he had only just been thrown back by it.

And there, on the edge of the clearing, the Numin Jar shook. A blue-green glow spread out thickly through the crystal sides. It hummed, vibrated, and a spark here, then there, sprang from the metal that bound the crystal sides together.

Hexus frowned. Was it meant to do that, to tremble and cast bolts like that? Something seemed wrong. The Jars were made to hold the gods for eons. This one seemed to be shaking apart as he watched.

But it didn’t matter, he reminded himself. The Jar need only hold the Guardian a few days while they captured the Potentiate and took him to the Numin Well.

Hexus smiled. There was nothing now that could stop him. Without the Guardian, the Potentiate was helpless. He had no defenders left except for a few mortals with no weapons other than swords.

Three more bears and a wolf ran up out of the woods. The last of his forest group. They skidded to a stop in the clearing, looking and sniffing about in panic, eyes wide at the sight of their dead fellows.

“Fear not,” Hexus told them. “The Antigod killed your brothers, but the Antigod is bound now and cannot harm us.”

He pointed at the quaking Numin Jar. The soulburdened beasts looked at it uncertainly.

“You,” Hexus called to Vark. “Bring that down to the ships. The rest of us will follow the Potentiate. The wolf will show the way.”

“My god,” Vark said, stepping forward. “I do not think that I can—”

“Do as I say!” Hexus commanded. He was not pleased that the Hieroni had proven unable to sway the Potentiate, though he had claimed a special influence over the boy. “The old books tell that the other jars were carried by Engineers, to be secreted away throughout the Earth. You can carry it.”