Gods of Earth (49 page)

After it seemed that Wadjet was asleep, Chance knelt in the very back of the cabin and prayed.

“Dear God, please protect Sarah. Please give grace unto Seth, first known as Psuche.

“I know that Purimen say no soulburdened will dwell in Heaven, but that’s one of the things they said in the Valley I’m going to have to just give up on, God. I hope that doesn’t mean I’m picking and
choosing scripture. I just can’t believe you’d let Seth suffer for me and battle the wicked and earn no grace. I just can’t believe Seth had no proper soul. No, Lord, I’ve got to give up on that one.

“And by the by I’m giving up on the one about all unmen being wicked. And the one about the Barren being the work of the False Gods. And a few others. No need to go into those now.”

He sighed and looked at Mimir’s silhouette before the window, visible against the stars. “So. This is the worst of it, God. I thought my father dying was the worst, but it wasn’t. This is the worst. Can’t get any worse now. And I’m trying hard not to be angry at your silence. Your absence. With a powerful effort, I can almost see how I should feel joy: I did my best, and maybe you notice that worth thinking on. Soon I’ll succeed and then most certainly die, or die trying to succeed—I’m not going to let this machine stop me from trying. And then Sarah and Seth and I will be together with our parents in some place closer to you. I can hope on that.

“So I’ll keep on. Just a little way now. But it’s hard, God. Hard. Suffering prepares the heart for future grace; it says so in the Book. Well, suffering has prepared me for a while now, but it seems the grace just stays in the future. Always over the edge of this huge, tired Earth.

“I’ll stop here. I know it’s petulant of me to ask again for an answer to my prayers. So I’ll think it but not say it.

“Amen.”

He stood and paced in the narrow width of the back of the cabin for an hour, before he finally sat on a box and propped himself against the side of the cabin, and then very deliberately stared out the windows at the stars, trying to keep his eyes open without resting them on Wadjet, who lay stretched out like a cat at his feet. In a short while the first fingers of dawn reached pink and purple out of the west. He watched the colors grow as they lit the white fog that lay over the dark green forest below them. It was a beautiful sight.

What if, he wondered, as Wadjet claims, all this wonder were just there, without a beginning, without a beginner? Would that be so evil, so hopeless, so bad?

Looking at the purple sky, the swirling, glowing mists in the trees, he could no longer believe that it would be. Seth dying horribly, before he lived a full life—that was horrible. Sarah alone in a dangerous place, Sarah maybe dead—that was horrible. Paul denied his body, his life, his chance to be a man—that was horrible. But if all this beauty were alone, all of it without design—that was not horrible.

Still. All this, all this beauty… it could be the truest sign of the love of The One True God.

He sighed. How strange these days. How beyond the understanding of any mortal man. He looked down at Wadjet. She lay on her back, arms stretched over her head. He let his eyes follow her lines, along her legs, the fine shape of her hips, her breasts. Then he saw that her eyes were open, that she stared up at him. Neither of them smiled; they gazed fiercely, almost hungrily, at each other.

I should turn away, Chance thought. I should turn my back. But he did not.

Wadjet lifted her chin slightly.

“So, Puriman?” she said.

Chance stared at her a long time. He swallowed. “Sarah,” he said. “My wife.”

He stood. He turned his back.

CHAPTER

44

T
here should be no time, the Guardian thought.

But for long hours he howled, holding to Threkor’s Hammer as it shuddered and turned white-hot in his hand, searing his stony flesh, driving blinding bolts of burning lightning into his body, his face, his eyes.

He saw in a flash, in a memory, great Threkor, bent over his monstrous anvil, affixing the lid to the last Numin Jar. Sweat beaded on Threkor’s dark, bald head. His black eyes squinted in concentration. A crack of blue light poured from the jar and diminished to a bright band, like a crack in the world, as Threkor pressed on the lid. He forced the lid down and the glare shrank to a single beam, then a glimmer—then darkness. The massive demigod’s profound voice echoed through the great hall of Uroboros as he stood over his finished creation. “Inside,” Threkor had told him. “They will be trapped beyond time, in no time. No pain, no suffering, no true existence. Just waiting, for the end of our sun and world.” There had been pity in his voice. Threkor had had doubts. The Guardian, taking the Jar from his hand, had had none.

But there was pain. There was suffering. There was time: a long, slow existence in agony.

How could that be? Threkor had not made mistakes of this kind, mistakes of engineering.

Lightning shot again from the hammer into his eyes. The Guardian howled.

It is the hammer, the Guardian realized. Threkor’s Hammer harmed him, and hindered the binding of the Numin Jar. The Guardian could not let go of it—lightning fused it to his hand. But he would not have let go if he were able.

What had Sar told him? The hammer is both here and elsewhere. The hammer must not touch the shield of the binding. The Hammer hindered the shield, it burned through it. And it was the shield of binding that formed the other place inside the Numin Jar.

The Guardian swung Threkor’s Hammer.

It struck at nothing, at something, and thundering bolts of power blasted through the tiny no-place where he floated. The bolts cracked his hard flesh.

He swung again. Smoke rose from his eyes, his mouth, from the splits in his scorched and blackening skin.

He swung again. Through the blue light, a yellow glow shone for a second, before being swallowed in blue again. The Guardian fixed on that place and struck again. And again. And again.

He lost his hearing, as his ears were blasted away.

He lost his breath, his mouth, as his face was blasted away.

He lost finally his eyes, cooked away in white heat.

But still he struck, and struck, and struck at a wall that stood invisible, seemingly impenetrable, between two worlds.

And then came the explosion. It rent the Guardian into a hundred parts, and cast these, with the fragments of the bursting Numin Jar, through the dark grass of the jungle clearing. The mind-destroying pain died, as the Guardian died.

Wind rustled dry blades of grass. A bird cried in the distance. Hearing returned to the Guardian.

Next came his sight. He looked at the sky. Round white clouds passed. They seemed to him beautiful. Timeless. Clouds like this had passed over Lethebion when he had walked there as a man, as Treow. Clouds like this had passed over the island before the Age of Guilds. Clouds like this had passed over the island when its stones were young, and humans did not exist, and not a single flower had ever opened its petals.

After a while an airship passed over too. A wide, red airship. One of those airships he had seen on the beach. He should throw a stone at it, fell it from the sky. The god was on that airship. He could ken the foul thing, hurting space.

But he had no arms to lift a stone.

He had no legs to stand and carry him to find a stone.

And his own reasoning, his own voice telling him what to do, seemed so far away. He could hardly hear it. His reason was like his pain of being broken into parts: it goaded him, but it also felt so far away that it harmed him little.

The airship passed. The sound of its engine receded, like the passing clouds.

The Guardian closed his eyes.

The Guardian put his fingers against his face.

And leapt up. He was awake. And whole. His body had slowly managed to reassemble itself, and reforge what had been blazed away in the Numin Jar and the violence of Threkor’s Hammer. He stood, naked and gray, in the blasted clearing.

In a great circle, four paces in radius, the ground was black and scorched. Shards of crystal, fragments of the Numin Jar, lay scattered all around—some were driven into the face of the stone wall
nearby, as if they were spikes of steel hammered into the rock. A scorched black cinder of a human body lay beside him. No one he knew, by the shape of it and by the clothes. It must be the man who had wielded the Jar. Just deserts for a Hieroni.

Then he saw Seth. The coyote lay crushed, half torn away, eyes open. The Guardian froze, almost stumbled. He remembered now this death, and felt it as a harsh new hurt. No carrion eater had taken the corpse away—larger animals had kept away from the Numin Jar in fear, no doubt. But ants covered the body.

The Guardian knelt and brushed the insects from Seth’s face, and then closed the coyote’s eyes as gently as his hard gray fingers of stone could manage.

“Psuche, known as Seth, Apprentice of the Hekademon, you undertook great deeds from love and from faithful oaths. Child of Wealtheow, and so in part a child of mine own, I am sorry I failed and let you die. But I shall make it so that your name is sung. Not forgotten will be the greatness of your soul.”

He thrust his hands into the dirt and turned dark handfuls of sandy earth over on the coyote. In moments he made a funeral mound.

Then he stood. Nearby lay Threkor’s Hammer, whole but scorched all over as black and gray as ashes. He lifted it. Then he ran in a blur up the hill, into the valley.

His airship was gone. The chipped shards of gray slate that covered the ground were not blemished with blood, but many footprints and bear prints had been set with tracked mud on the pale flakes. It might well be as he hoped: Chance could have escaped, with the god in pursuit.

How could the Guardian follow the airships? He could not cross the sea bottom on foot. Wending the thick water would be far too slow. And there was no other airship that he knew of secreted on Lethebion.

It would have to be Wadjet’s ship. He lifted the abandoned machinery that they had scavenged from Wadjet’s engine onto his
shoulders, and shot back as he had come, and beyond, toward the beach.

But when Aegweard first came into view, he saw, through small gaps in the tree cover, the red of an airship. He stopped and set the parts of Wadjet’s engine on the trail. Then he moved more slowly, more quietly, down the slope.

There was a single ship tethered to the sand. Bears milled about it. They had a machine making lifting gas and were feeding it sea water in buckets dragged up from the surf. A large blue patch covered the side of the airship: the ship’s hull had been torn and mended.

The bears roared as the Guardian strode out from the trees. There were four of them. And a wolf.

“Where is the Potentiate?” he asked. “Where is the boy that the god seeks?”

The bears, as he expected, attacked. He killed them in a flash and tossed their broken bodies into the shallow surf, for crabs to pick their bones.

The wolf, too wise to fight or to run, waited, front legs askew, back legs bent, tail between her legs, ears flat.

“I would rather not harm you, woodwarden. I am the Guardian, once Treow, once husband to the mother of many of your kind. You do ill to fight me, and wrong in serving the god.”

The ears of the wolf twitched, but she said nothing.

“Tell me where the boy is, and then I shall take this airship, and you shall have your life, and you shall have leave of this island.”

After a moment’s hesitation, the wolf rolled onto her back, a show of submission.

“Rise,” the Guardian said.

She got up and told the Guardian what she knew.

CHAPTER

45

T
he ship skimmed but a hundred paces above the tree line. Chance saw now how fast they were moving, with the trees as reference. During the night they had finished crossing the mountains and most of the forest beyond. Shortly after dawn, they passed the edge of the forest and sailed out over a great plateau of small hills, one after another, covered with tall grasses. Something moved among them. Herds of deer, it seemed, but Chance also thought he saw several times the steely glint of a machine twisting through the grasses.