Gods of Earth (53 page)

Slowly, slowly, the makina seemed less good, less interesting, less deserving of her love.

Wadjet stood weakly, wobbling on her feet. Yggdrasil rose, monstrously huge, before her. She was close. She could not see the airship, but it could not be far. Ahead, less than half an hour’s run, stood some low buildings that appeared to surround the foot of Yggdrasil.

She let the pain return, slowly. Her shoulder stabbed at her with a sharp ache. Her head throbbed. It would be hard to run, and harder to fight, with such aches.

She could leave the boy. Leave him to his fate. The makina was not going to kill him, but rather send him into the Well and make a useful tool of him. What concern of hers was that?

She hesitated a long time, standing in the tall grass, her bruised body throbbing.

If the makina were going to kill Chance, Wadjet might turn her back and start walking to the shore. She might start looking for a way to find passage to Lethebion, and back to her ship, leaving all this behind.

But it was the idea that the makina was building a cage for the boy that Wadjet could not bear. She hated cages. Especially the cages made by these ancient, lost beings. They would bind everything, everyone, into their plans, if they had their way. They would strangle the world into their own shape, killing it in the act.

No, she could not bear it.

She set off running, toward Yggdrasil and the fallen towers at its root.

Wadjet was almost to the scarred and pitted buildings that stretched across flat grounds that surrounded Yggdrasil, where hardy grasses cracked through bleached and ancient stone, when the modghast saw her.

Something dark flitted between two mounds to her left. She saw it in the corner of her eye, as she ran at her full stride. She was exhausted, spent from the effort of fixing her bones and of cleaning herself of the makina’s machines, and now from the added effort of running between the mounds in a long zigzagging dash across the whispering grass.

She did not slow or stop, but ran straight up, instead of around, the next barrow, to get the view from the top.

And there it was, running along not far behind. She took the sight in a flash, before she was over the top of the mound.

The modghast looked like a spider, nearly twice as tall as her, hacked together from odd bits of iron and old machines and, unmistakably, some parts of animals. She could not smell it yet—the wind was in her face—but as she pressed on harder, she began to hear it, a dull but rapid clanking as it chased behind.

It was big for a modghast, or so she gathered from the stories she had been told and the things she had read in the Traveler’s Library of the Stewards. That was very bad. It meant the modghast was one of the hungry ones that had grown skilled at possessing other forms. It would be hard to fight, hard to flee, hard to fool.

The clanking grew louder, closer.

She came around another barrow, and there before her she could see the top of a low stone building. She had come to the center of the grassland and of the modbarrows, where Yggdrasil rose up. A long slope reached to the flat concrete ground that stretched around Yggdrasil.

Her breathing came in dizzying gasps now. She needed food and more air. She cut the pain and raced as quickly up the slope as she could, her long strides pounding at the grass.

She risked a look back. The modghast ran at her from just a hundred paces away, but was still to her left, starting up the beginning of the slope. She saw that three deer heads had been affixed on top, facing in different directions. The eyes in one of the heads blinked. Another flicked its ear. The eight rusted legs of the modghast gouged at the ground, tearing up clods of earth and grass.

Wadjet’s legs were rubbery, distant, starting to feel useless. She might pass out, she realized, from the low sugar and insufficient air. That was the danger of cutting off pain—you could not tell when you were finished, when your body could take no more.

Her last step off the grassy slope sent her leaping over the hard white ground. She skidded but continued on, faster on the stone.

Would the modghast stop at the end of the grass? She knew they could not venture far from their barrows.

A sharp metallic hammering behind answered her question. The modghast was speeding up also now that they were on the concrete, its legs cracking loudly against the hard ground.

Before Wadjet, a two-story building stood. There was no door on this side, but a low narrow window gaped in the pitted and stained wall. She raced for it, using the last of her strength, and leapt.

She just cleared the bottom of the window: her upper body sailed through, but her legs scraped the frame as she passed over. She touched ground on the other side with her hands first, sending jabs of distant pain through her sprained wrists, and then she rolled, twice, before coming to her feet, gasping for air.

The building was a large, empty room, with an empty doorway in the far wall letting in the bright daylight.

The modghast collided with the window. Three of its twisted, skeletal metal legs shot through the gap, but the body struck the frame of the window and crashed to a halt. Metal screamed and twisted. One deer head thrust through the window. The others were bent back.

The modghast was stuck. It flailed its legs, smashing at the floor. Chips of stone sparked off where its spiked feet scraped. Dust fell from the ceiling as the building shook.

Wadjet could see the modghast would get free soon. But she needed to slow. She let the pain return and nearly fell to the ground when it overwhelmed her. In a moment she adjusted to it, and then stood straight, and walked quickly away, not running, saving her energy. She dug out of her pocket a bit of dried fish that she had saved, struggling with thumb and forefinger because she could not bear the pain of pushing her whole hand with its sprained wrist into the tight-fitting pants. She chewed the fragments of fish as she hurried from the room.

Once outside, Wadjet looked back. The modghast was still stuck, flailing its limbs.

A dark shadow passed over. The air all around grew dim. Wadjet looked up, expecting some thick storm cloud. But instead, the sun seemed to be shrouded somewhere beyond even the blue sky.

The shadow of Yggdrasil, she realized, or some part of Yggdrasil, fell now over this place.

But there was no time to wonder at it. She raised her head, and sniffed.

Yes: there. She could smell Chance. A weak, sweet scent of the boy hung in the wind. He’d been through here. Or he stood some distance not far upwind.

She followed the scent, ears twitching as she listened for the sound of the modghast, when it should break free.

CHAPTER

49

“W
hat have you done to me?” Chance asked.

He had awoken sitting in a flat, white expanse of stone ground. Scarred and empty shells of buildings surrounded them. Mimir stood beside him. Chance got to his feet and looked about. The ground was cracked and here and there tufts of green grass had broken through the pale stone. Clouds of tiny gnats swirled over the ground, but no other life was visible. The air was warm, but a soft wind blew. And before them, seeming to bend the sky over them, stood Yggdrasil. It was terrifying to see the World Ash this close. The deep, featureless black of it now stretched wider than any building here, and it rose, piercing the sky, up to infinity. Chance bent his head back, stared up, and then turned away, head reeling. How awesome, what the guilds had wrought!

“What have you done to me?” he repeated.

“I have altered you to make your emotional perspective more favorable to my goals and my interpretation of our situation.”

Chance thought about that. The words were strange but he could grasp their meaning well enough. It was a bad thing to do,
he didn’t approve, but he understood why Mimir had done it. She only wanted to be understood. Who could blame her for that?

“We should be expeditious,” Mimir said. She looked at the sky. “I receive information from other Makine. There are modghasts in pursuit of us. I have carried you this far but we can move more quickly if you walk also. Should the modghasts capture us, they will cut you to pieces, after they do the same to me.”

He felt glad that she was so concerned about him. And he knew, following this thought, that whatever she had done to him caused this feeling of good will. But this made it no less strong. He understood how Mimir thought and planned reasonably, how she cared properly. She strove for a noble goal: to rise among the stars. Even if he had been forced to see these things, he now saw them. Making him see them was a reasonable thing for her to do.

“Why would they do that?” he asked.

“They would seek to make use of us, by harvesting and integrating our components.” She began to walk.

Chance followed.

They crossed long stretches of barren stonework, winding a path between many great empty shells of buildings where black birds nested and squawked in surprise when they passed. It struck Chance that this abandoned place was like the modbarrows: an empty expanse, with buildings instead of barrows, and the dead more present than the living. Yggdrasil now seemed to rise vertically above them, dominating the sky, hiding the horizon. It was oddly terrible, a black spire without human ornament and beyond human scale, rising beyond everything.

They walked quickly, but without running. After some minutes Chance asked, “Are we still being followed? I can go faster.”

“The modghasts that stalked us have turned back. It appears that easier prey has their attention.”

“What? What prey?”

Mimir did not answer.

They came around the shattered corner of a leaning building, to see before them a broad stair, hundreds of paces wide. They climbed up. Atop was a great square, marked with a grid of holes, each about twice Chance’s height in diameter. Beyond these, another stair rose again, thirty or so steps, and Chance could just see the top of a building there, at the very foot of Yggdrasil.

Chance looked back. Behind lay the long wasteland of shattered buildings, and beyond, the green barrows stretching off to distant mountains. The waxing crescent moon glared over the mountains, squinting at them in cold analysis.

Then a shadow fell over them. Chance saw the edge of it race across the ground away from them. The air grew dark.

“What?” he cried out.

“It is only the shadow of Yggdrasil. Yggdrasil has great light gatherers high above the Earth. At noon, they cast a shadow here.”

Chance looked up at the dark ring of the eclipsed sun. “It has leaves. Like a true tree, it has leaves. And we are in their shade now.”

“Yes,” Mimir said. “This is an appropriate analogy. These artificial leaves gather the power of the sun, as do the leaves of living trees. Though now only the modbarrows, and their modghast bodies, utilize this bounty of power.”

Chance looked back toward the barrows.

“It’s like we are at the center of the world,” he whispered. Yggdrasil, the world ash, shot down into Earth like an axis, and around it this broken city, a land of the forgotten and lost accomplishments, was ringed by the land of those who cannot forget, the trapped dead. And encircling that: the suffering, confused, aimless globe of men and the many living things that thrived after men. He stood nearly in the center of it all. “I wanted only to return to my
farm. But all the world is our vineyard, isn’t it? We’re always at the center of it, and must tend or neglect the vines.”

“There is insightful meaning in this simile,” Mimir said.

Chance smiled at Mimir, pleased that she approved. And he knew, again, that she had put something in him that made him pleased by her. But that was just her way of trying to be understood. And she deserved to be understood.

They started across the square.

“What will happen when we reach the Well?” he asked.

“You will eliminate the god, and then you will take his place. Airships of the Makine are hurrying here now. Makine of my syndicate will take us away. Then we can save your village, and you can help us escape the confinement the Old Gods have set upon our globe.”