Gods of Earth (8 page)

A hundred paces away, two ferns parted, and someone pushed through. Chance could not at first discern whether it was a woman or man. The skin of the person had a strange golden color, almost
seeming to glow. Gold hair hung at shoulder length. As the person drew closer, Chance could see the delicate, symmetrical features of the face. He decided this was a woman, though not a Truman.

“What do you want with us, makina?” the Guardian called when she had closed half the distance.

She did not answer at first, but continued and stopped only two paces before them. She looked with pale silver eyes at Chance, then the Guardian. She wore black pants, black boots, a white shirt with small black buttons and a thin black band around the collar, all under a black jacket with long tails—to Chance this dress resembled the kind of rich formal suit he had once observed Trumen wearing to church in the city by the Freshsea. It looked strange, even ridiculous, here in the forest.

“I have searched for you, Guardian.”

Again Chance was confused. Her voice rang with a clear, beautiful bell tone that could be male or female. But the complete placidity of her face unsettled Chance more than the unnatural symmetry of the androgynous features, or the strangely bright skin.

They stared at each other awhile before the Guardian spoke.

“What do you want?”

“I endeavor to offer assistance.”

The Guardian frowned. “Don’t waste our time with wieldless words. What do you know of the splinter of the god?”

“It is part of the Hexus,” she said. “The sixth of the seven Thei.”

“Ah.” The Guardian yielded a slight smile. “So the Makine do know something.”

“We have observed him for some weeks, watching from the skies. It was here that we recognized you.”

“The metal bird!” Chance said.

The strange woman looked at him. “Yes.” Her silver eyes shifted back to the Guardian. “That was a sentient being that you destroyed.”

Seth slipped around behind Chance, and began to circle their clearing, sniffing the air.

“Wolves,” Seth growled. “Nearby. Upwind.”

“How did you find us?” the Guardian asked.

“I conversed with several of the.…” She hesitated over the word, looking at Chance as if determining how best to continue. “Soulburdened.”

Chance wondered why the wolves would offer to help her. Or had she paid them somehow?

“What care do the Makine have in this?” the Guardian asked. “Why do you skulk about the skies above my head? You would not fight in the Theomachia. Always have the machines left the living to their own doom, while you hived like ants beneath the skin of the Earth, sworn to break forth one day and spurn this world to seek the stars.”

“You,” the woman replied, “interest a diminutive portion of the Makine. I am empowered to represent this syndicate. We infer there is significant probability of costly consequences if you fail. I therefore will assist you, reducing that probability.”

“I will not fail.”

The woman merely looked at them, her expression not changing.

“If you have some way to get us to Disthea,” the Guardian said, “then you may offer it. Else leave us, makina.”

She bowed slightly. “I was transported here in an airship. It is tethered downriver. I did not consider it advisable to arrive in it directly.”

Without another word, the Guardian turned and tromped toward the river. Chance scurried to keep up. He looked over his shoulder at the woman, who kept a respectful distance.

“Who are the Makina?”

“Makine. You call a single one of them a makina.”

“Who are the Makine?”

The Guardian jumped down the berm.

“They are ancient machines.”

Chance jumped down to stand beside him. The loud stream smelled strongly in the damp morning air. Mist clung along the banks.

“She works for… machines?” Chance whispered. “Underground machines?”

“It is a machine.” The Guardian started toward the water.

Chance stopped in place. He looked at the woman. She had not moved, but gazed at him peacefully. He hurried to the Guardian’s side and whispered, “I don’t understand.”

The Guardian strode out into the water. Without looking back he said, “Do not bother to whisper. The machine can hear you blink an eye.”

Chance stopped at the water’s edge. The makina stood now at the top of the berm. Seth ran a short way downstream along the bank, sniffing and peering cautiously about, before turning back.

“I am one of the Makine,” she said.

Chance shook his head. “You are an unman,” he whispered.

As if confronting a small, frightened animal, the makina moved slowly, folding her hands before herself.

“I understand your application of this terminology. Please address me in this way if it is conceptually reassuring. But I have no human ancestors. Not in the usual meaning of the term, ‘ancestor’.”

Seth slipped to Chance’s side, legs dripping water, ears rigid with attention.

“What.…” Chance hesitated. “What do you want me to call you?”

“If it pleases you, I will adopt the appellation
the Mimir
.”

“Come,” the Guardian shouted. “Call your ship here.”

The makina, still on the top of the berm, nodded. She did not move, but after a moment Chance heard a dull humming. Downstream, the river bent around a steeply sided hill. Stunted maples clung perilously to the broken earth of the bluff. Slowly, the nose of an airship appeared around the bend, as if emerging from the trees. It was dark blue, almost black, longer and thinner than the airships Chance had seen sometimes pass near his farm. Below it hung a black cabin.

The airship slipped out into the valley, the tail turning slightly too far in the wind, and then it straightened and lowered. A heavy rope dropped down from the front. The ship descended toward the Guardian until he grabbed the rope. The cluster of seven fans at the back of the cabin blared loudly and rippled the surface of the river with tiny white rills. The ship hovered uncertainly, bobbing, as it paid rope out while the Guardian walked to the shore.

Chance frowned. The cabin beneath was lined with windows but he could see no one inside.

The makina leapt down to the ground beside Chance. The motion was smooth and nearly silent. She walked out into the water, directly to the cabin. A door folded out and down, laying itself on the stream. She stopped before it, the water rushing around her legs, and gestured inside.

“I cannot enter that,” Chance said. “It was not made by human hands, nor made of earths using fire.”

The makina looked at him but her expressionless face betrayed nothing. Seth stood in the shallows, looking back at the forest with impatient wariness. The Guardian held the rope and peered at Chance. Finally the Guardian said, “I understand.” He dropped the rope, strode directly to Chance’s side, and grabbed him in both hands, lifting him as one lifts a child. He took great splashing steps to the airship and tossed Chance through the door, onto the soft carpeted deck within.

“You did not choose to ride this ship, Puriman. I forced you.”

Chance climbed to his feet, indignant. “It’s not that easy! I cannot ride this.” He quoted scripture as he stepped toward the door. “Thou shalt turn thy back on the machines of unmen that shroud the wonders of creation.”

He was about to step into the stream when Seth barked a loud yelp of fear and splashed toward the door. Behind the coyote, a cacophony exploded out of the dark forest. Mimir, Chance, and the Guardian all froze and looked up the hill. The canopy was dense
and they could see little in the shadows, but a roar poured down, the sound of hundreds of beasts cresting the hilltop at a run. Here and there through breaks in the trees, Chance could see a flash of black fur or brown fur, as wolves, bears, dogs, and other soulburdened creatures raced toward the bank.

Seth swam the last few paces to the airship, then climbed the bobbing ramp, his back feet scratching in panic on its edge. The Guardian followed with a single great step that made the airship rock. He pushed Chance inside as he ducked under the low doorway. The makina came last, and the ramp lifted silently behind her. Chance stood, uncertain and silent, as the door closed.

There was a window on the door, streaked now with river water. Chance peered through it. As the airship started to lift, the first of the soulburdened, a group of wild dogs, climbed over Elder James’s overturned boat and then splashed down into the stream where Chance had stood just seconds before. Behind them came more dogs and then bears. A seething mass of fur and claws, of snapping white teeth and bulging furious eyes, crowded onto the bank.

As the airship lifted away, in his last view of the river bank, Chance caught a glimpse of sparkling gold. A creature like he had never seen before, larger than a man, and shaped like a man, but covered with black fur, strode out into the river on two legs, head held high. It was dressed in gold armor that sparkled in the sunlight, and in the center of the snarling mass of beasts, it stood with quiet dignity, looking up at him as the airship escaped. Chance’s eyes met the black eyes of the creature, before a bough parted his view and the airship ascended with a dull low humming, scraping a few times at tough branches as it drifted up and out of the narrow valley.

CHAPTER

9

T
he river below shrank to a blue ribbon. Rolling green hills stretched off in every direction. Chance tottered uneasily to the windows facing south so that he could search the most distant green hills. Seth turned uneasily around him, still trembling after their perilous escape from the pack of soulburdened beasts.

Chance had never been higher than the roof of his own home. Airships, helmed by Trumen from the city of the Freshsea, sometimes came to Walking Man Lake and carried back the Purimen wines. Chance loved the ships, as did most young Purimen, although like the others he had watched without speaking of his interest, and he would not before have betrayed his creed and climbed aboard one if offered. Though he had once been delivering barrels of Kyrien Caffran wine to a ship, and saw Jeremiah Green standing inside, not for a ride but to spy around, to feel the bounce of the cabin as the airship fought its tethers to the Earth. Green had blushed when he looked up and found Chance standing outside by his cart. The heavy boy had pushed angrily past him, saying, “Keep your mouth shut, witch boy.”

Seth finally calmed enough to sit at Chance’s side.

“I… I hoped to see something of the Lakes,” Chance explained. It was in vain: to the south and east there lay only unbroken forest covering alien hills.

“Too far-far,” Seth said. “Over horizon.”

“Over the horizon,” Chance repeated. So this is it, he thought. The realm of the Purimen was beyond the horizon, and new horizons surrounded him. He was without the guidance of Elders, without the counsel of another Puriman, without a map, without any familiar path. It seemed that every choice would require him to violate his creed, to move a step farther not only from home but from his faith. Everything here was wrong: to be above the trees, ready to fall to the Earth; the dull inanimate sounds of engines; the strange smells of the room; the white light that bled from the ceiling. He was uprooted, lifted from the Earth and set adrift.

And all this while, Sarah was in danger, Sarah might be suffering something horrible, and he was, most likely, flying away from her.

Gone suddenly was the conviction that came upon him the night before, that he was doing the right thing to accept the Guardian’s guidance. He looked uneasily toward the ominous gray figure, hulking over the landscape in the front of the ship. Who was he? What did he really want?

“What may I call you?” Mimir asked. She had walked up behind him. Chance turned and looked at her frankly now. She still betrayed no emotion. Her silver eyes looked like ice in the reflected sunlight.

“Chance. Chance Kyrien. Of the Purimen.”

“This is an unusual nomination for a Puriman, is it not, Chance Kyrien? My limited understanding was that all Purimen took Biblical names.”

Chance looked back in the direction of Walking Man Lake. “It is traditional for adopted children. An unsought child is a lucky chance, the Elders say.”

“And you, sir?” She faced Seth.

“Seth.” He lay on the deck, making a coyote bow.

Mimir bowed and smiled in response, the first human gesture that Chance had seen her use.

She pointed at Chance’s feet. “Your shoes appear to be in disrepair. This ship could mend them.”

Chance looked around, confused. How could a ship fix shoes? It was a strange place. Nothing in it looked to be made by hand. It smelled unnatural. The feel of the seats lining the cabin unnerved him: soft but firm, made of neither metal nor wood nor anything he had ever touched. One corner of the cabin was walled off by white panels, but windows lined the rest of the cabin. And outside, when they stood by the river, the sound of the great fans that propelled the ship had roared, but inside he could hear only a distant, quiet hum. A dull vibration that he felt in his teeth made the whole place throb. Suddenly, the cabin seemed small and close.

He frowned. “Unless you have leather cord and a hand-made awl, I cannot accept your help.”

Mimir said nothing. But then Chance’s hands began to shake. His legs felt suddenly weak, and trembled. He turned and uneasily sat on the low bench before the window.

“Hungry,” Seth barked.

Mimir looked at the coyote, then turned her expressionless silver eyes back on Chance. “The Seth is observant. You are manifesting symptoms resulting from dehydration and inadequate nutrition. I have sustenance. It was manufactured by Makine, but I would advise you to consume it.”

Chance nodded. It had been more than a day since he had eaten, and eating their food seemed somehow less of a sacrifice, food not being a machine itself. He imagined the sources and making of food could not be much different from Puriman strictures, no matter from whom it came.

Mimir went to the back of the cabin and returned with four brown bricks of what looked to him like beeswax. She handed two to Chance and placed the others in Seth’s mouth.