Gods of Earth (52 page)

“I don’t know. I never understood. It scared me. So I never told a soul about that. Though I made the mistake of telling everyone I’d seen the Lucenfolk. But this year, when you took the Ranger apprenticeship, I thought, maybe—maybe it means you’ll get your swords.”

Her mother looked back out the window at the hills.

“Lying here now, dying, those Lucenfolk are what I think of. Isn’t that strange? I long to think of God, but I’m tired, and thinking pious thoughts is hard work, sure. And I don’t really know how to think about God. I try picturing things like they talk about at church, but that isn’t much to picture, really. It’s a struggle.

“So, when my mind wanders, it wanders into that dark fall forest and the Lucenfolk singing, singing, and their shining skin, and their shining eyes.”

She squeezed Sarah’s hand. “Oh, Sarah, why didn’t God make the world more like they are—the whole world? Why’d God make our world so hard and painful? Instead of beautiful and shining like the Lucenfolk?”

Sarah had looked out at the hills and had not answered, because she did not know.

CHAPTER

47

I
nside the airship, Sar grew lightheaded. She well knew this was a mortal loss of blood, and that the last of her life was spilling out onto the floor.

“Threkor’s heir,” a distant, hollow voice called out. She lifted her drooping eyelids. A Sidhe floated there, glowing.

“I know you,” Sar said. “No poetry for this old Engineer, Sidhe. I know you. I’ve read Threkor’s Apocrypha. And in my family, some things are passed down, mouth to ear. ‘Ants in the walls,’ Threkor called you. ‘Ants in the walls of the world.’”

She coughed blood. A crowd of Sidhe glittered in the cabin now. They whispered all around her. A faint smell of ozone cut through the odor of oil and blood.

“Would you join us, Threkor’s heir?”

The old woman smiled. She had never expected that. Never.

“Join us join, join, us join us,” the other Sidhe whispered all around her.

Sar fixed one of the shimmering figures in her fading gaze. “Tell me this,” she said. “Tell me this first.”

The shimmering form bent forward, attentive to her question.

“Do you make anything there,” Sar asked. “In the little cracks between, the cracks between the walls of the world? Do you make things there?”

The Guardian stood in the front of the airship, gray hands on the controls. He stared out over the sea. Nothing lay before him but the distant black line of land and the tossing caps of sea waves stretching to every other horizon. No airships!

He felt the god slipping farther and farther ahead. Hexus sped closer to Chance, somehow speeding the airship faster, driving it forward. Each minute the Guardian fell farther behind.

He had one opportunity he could foresee. He watched the land approach. The black edge of the coast grew, resolving first into an uneven line, then into gray surf with black mountains rising beyond, seeming pale and flat in the humid air.

He would be faster on foot.

The Guardian waited impatiently for the line of breaking surf to approach. When the airship was nearly over the shore, the Guardian gripped Threkor’s Hammer and let his power grow. His eyes began to blaze. Light leaked from his mouth. He swung the hammer at the door, smashing it off its hinges. Wind roared through the gaping entrance. The blue-green sea beneath crashed on white reefs before tumbling onto black sands, too far below to be audible. He heard only the wind ripping through the door, and the hum of the engines.

The airship flew over the beach.

The Guardian leapt.

When he hit the ground the beach exploded, and everything went black, as his raging momentum broke his body and crushed it down into the sand.

In a few moments his senses returned. He bit down, grinding a mouthful of shells and sand, gnashing through the agony of his body reassembling and twisting together again through the hard sand, his limbs scraping against the razor teeth of the buried black rocks.

When he felt whole enough, he reached up, for the sky. His hand broke through heavy sand into the inconsequential air. He gripped at the surface, then pulled down against the earth. He dug out of the black beach, dragged himself up into the broad crater he had formed, and lay a moment in the hot sun. His reformed body throbbed in pain.

Threkor’s Hammer stood nearby, the handle stabbed down through a black volcanic stone. The Guardian stood and wrenched it free, cracking the rock.

Then the air exploded as he ran, faster than he had ever run, toward Yggdrasil.

Sarah stopped and waited for Thetis, who looked back toward the wreckage of their airship, no longer visible behind the dozens of barrows covered with tall green grass that they had crossed.

“I liked her,” Thetis said. “She was one of the greatest of her kind. Did you know that she was descended from Threkor himself? She was of the line of the demigod.” Thetis turned toward Sarah. “But I guess that means nothing to you.”

Sarah squinted angrily. After they had passed the last of the Lucenfolk, they had run a long while, the loose bag banging hard under her arm. They ran until pains bit their sides and they had to spit thick saliva. It was easy to keep on course, with Yggdrasil cutting the whole horizon in half before them, but after a long run it appeared no closer. Finally they stopped on the peak of a mound, hands on knees, catching their breath.

“Here’s what means something to me,” Sarah said. “She gave her life for us. She was kind and good. She saw, after only a few hours, that Chance was good and deserved her allegiance, and she gave it freely. That is what matters. That is what needs to be said.”

And, to Sarah’s surprise, Thetis nodded sadly. “You are right, Puriman Ranger. What matters is what she did. And she did well.”

Sarah looked around. In each direction, there was only softly waving grass rising and falling from one mound to the next, seeming to stretch on forever.

“Mimir sent them? Those bird things?” Sarah asked.

“Who else?”

“Chance is in danger.”

Thetis nodded. “And yet,” she said. “I think Mimir wants him for some reason. Otherwise she could just kill him and let us hurry on, our quest hopeless. To try to kill us, she must fear us, and that means we can interfere, and that means that she has some plan for Chance.”

“Let’s interfere, then,” Sarah said. She stood erect, squaring her shoulders.

Thetis looked around. “Yes. We’d best hurry on. If a modghast sees us, we’ll be in great danger.”

They began to walk.

“What do the Lucenfolk have to do with all this?” Sarah asked.

Thetis shook her head. “They just appear sometimes. No one really knows why, or what they want.”

Sarah frowned. “I swore to my brother I’d head out to get him the minute I saw Lucenfolk, and take him to see. That’s an oath I must break.”

“Yes,” Thetis said. “Maybe some other day you’ll.…”

“Maybe.”

They walked in silence a while. The wind in the grass smelled fresh and green. It reminded Sarah of the smell of a hay field at home, ready for mowing. A good smell. Ironic given the horror
that lay beneath the grass. Sarah pictured corpses, wrapped in some strange guild cloth, buried just below the reach of the knotted roots of the grasses. She shivered.

Thetis sighed. “Things are in one way better. When the Guardian lived, there was no hope. No hope for Chance.”

“How can you say that?” Sarah spat. “The Guardian would have protected Chance.”

“Yes, and sent him into the Well and waited while he returned, to ensure he returned a mortal.”

Sarah stopped in place, and planted her hands on her sword pommels. “I warned you! Chance wants to be a mortal. He wants to go home, and tend his vineyard, and make his wine, and father my children. Do you hear me? If you try to convince Chance he must change in this hell beyond Earth, I’ll kill you, witch.”

There was a long pause, while the two women stared at each other. And then Thetis stepped forward, wading through the tall grasses, stopped close to Sarah, reached far back, and slapped Sarah hard across her unscarred cheek. Sarah’s head snapped aside, and she stumbled back.

“I am a Mother of the Gotterdammerung.” Thetis’s hands shook, but her jaw clenched hard when she paused in her speaking. She seemed a mix of the frantic fearfulness Sarah had seen before now and a grim determination. “I am one of the last Mothers. My guild is ancient. You will address me as Mother, or Junior Mother.”

Sarah unsheathed her swords. “And I am a Ranger of the Purimen and I am tired of your disrespect, witch! And—”

Thetis stepped forward again. Sarah, holding her swords but unwilling to cut Thetis, was helpless as Thetis slapped her a second time.

“You are a child. I never treated you with disrespect. I only treated you as my junior. I don’t accuse you of ignorance or incivility—I accuse you of being a girl—”

“I’m no younger than you!”

“I am sixty-seven years old, Sarah Michael.”

Sarah stumbled back, stunned, the points of her swords drifting far apart.

“Your face,” Sarah whispered. “But your face.” She thought of her own grandmother, who was more than one hundred years old. Even the stoutest, long-lived Purimen grew wrinkled and gray. But Thetis had the smooth face and raven hair of a young girl. She appeared younger than Sarah.

“You may be a Ranger of the Purimen,” Thetis continued, “but you are to me a child. A little girl. Now listen to your elder. Chance cannot live another ten years—probably not another five years—as a mortal.”

“You lie!” Sarah held her swords up and crossed them, as if to ward off a falsehood.

Thetis spoke slowly and clearly. “The changes that make a Potentiate are small, and they serve only one purpose: they allow the sarcophagus in the Numin Well to capture and freeze a moment of the Potentiate’s life—the moment when he enters the sarcophagus. Without this change, the body rebels and resists and dies before the soul, the form of it, is captured. But this thing that makes someone a Potentiate—it also alters how that person ages. It allows him to grow but not to stay as he was. As soon as Chance stops growing, stops maturing, he will begin to die. And when will that be? Twenty-three? Twenty-four? He must become a god or perish.”

“You lie,” Sarah gasped.

“That is why the Guardian feared Chance so,” Thetis said. “He feared that Chance would discover the truth, and then—”

“No,” Sarah’s swords slowly drooped in her hands, until their points lay in the grass. “You lie! You lie because you want Chance for your own plans. You’re one of the Hieroni! Or you love him and you want him for yourself!”

Sarah fell to her knees.

For a long moment, there was only the sound of the wind in the grass, whispering as Sarah wept. Finally Thetis spoke.

“Yes,” she said, very softly, “I am one of the Hieroni.

“And yes, I love Chance and I want him for myself.

“For I am Chance’s mother. He is my son.”

CHAPTER

48

T
his is going to take all my strength, Wadjet thought.

She lay in the tall grass, just where she had landed after her tumble from the airship, face down, unable to see anything but the green blades waving before her. She cut the pain—there was no use to feeling that, she knew she was hurt: her left shoulder was dislocated, two ribs were broken, both wrists were sprained.

She gripped her left arm as well as she could with her right hand and, driving her shoulder into the ground while pulling at it, yanked the arm back into its socket. She felt the pain only distantly, but knew it would be overwhelming, enormous, if she were not suppressing it.

She rolled over. The ribs next. She closed her eyes and concentrated. They were in place, not separated, and not fully cracked through. She made the two ribs begin forming bone at an accelerated rate, working to bind them as quickly as possible.

Now the makina’s invasion.

Thinking of the makina made her feel a rush of pleasure. They were such good creatures, with such good goals. Creatures of light, wanting only knowledge and the freedom of the stars!

“Then they won’t care if I clean their machines out of my skull,” she whispered. It took a long time, but she taught some cells within her to attack the tiny machines that were knitting themselves into the weave of her brain. She let those cells spread through her body, where they could breed before attacking.