The Gods and their Machines (8 page)

Fourteen

I
n the chilly darkness before dawn, Riadni rinsed the sleepiness from her face with cool water from the well bucket. She was sure she had packed everything she needed, but was reluctant to leave in case she had forgotten something. She had never run away before and she was not about to leave now and come back because she had gone without her water bottle or a spare pair of shoes. This had to be for good. A sudden thought occurred to her and she crept back into the house, running her fingers along the familiar adobe walls as she climbed the stairs to her room. She would bring the new dress her mother had laid out on the bed for her. The thought of her mother nearly made her cry. Mama would be heartbroken. Riadni held the dress up and admired the fine fabric and her mother’s delicate
needlework
once more. She wanted Benyan to see her in that dress. Folding it carefully, she put it in her satchel, and then slipped out of the room and down the stairs.

At the bottom of the stairs was the cupboard where her father kept the family’s guns. In a moment of sheer nerve, Riadni found the hidden key, opened the locked doors and
pulled a flintlock pistol from its mountings. There was a bag of ammunition and a horn full of powder with the gun and she put all three in her bag. If she were to join the Hadram Cassal, she would need her own weapon.

Rumbler was waiting for her outside, his saddlebags already full to bursting. She tied her satchel on top of the bags and looked around her, wondering if there was
anything
else she had forgotten. The horse stood watching her, his breathing and the shifting of his hooves against the ground the only sounds in the quiet yard. Riadni hesitated, half wishing someone would come out and catch her before she could go, persuade her that there was still something worth staying for. Then she remembered her father’s last words to her and she took hold of Rumbler’s reins and led him as silently as she could from the yard, out and down the road, until she was sure nobody would hear.

Bringing Rumbler to a halt, she put her foot in its stirrup, vaulted into the saddle and set him off down the road at a steady trot. Her father and brothers would track her, she was sure of that, and they would expect her to make straight for the Hadram Cassal camp. Instead, she headed west, the opposite direction, and lost the horse’s tracks in the dust of the busy main road. Where the road forded the river, she turned into the shallow water and waded upstream, coming out into the grassland that swept up towards the mountains and the flat, square shape of Sleeping Hill. She would take a route that would lead her far from her family’s farm. It was still dark in the early morning, but she would make sure it took her most of the day to reach the camp that was to be her new home.

The five elders led Benyan Akhna up the face of a steep slope in almost total darkness. It was a hard climb. He was the youngest by decades, and yet he found it hard to keep up. Sometimes he could only follow by listening when they disappeared into the darkness above him. Eventually, he came out on the top of the hill and found them waiting, standing in a semicircle to receive him. Lakrem Elbeth held a mask in his hands, carved entirely from a single piece of stone. There were no holes for nose or mouth, but in the place of eyes, there were two purple pieces of crystal, glinting in the dim light of the half-moon.

‘Pray with us, Benyan,’ Elbeth said, and they all turned towards the east.

All six knelt, bowed their heads and covered their eyes, each becoming deeply immersed in his own prayer. They stayed that way until the sky brightened with the dawn and the first glimpse of the sun showed over the ragged edge of the horizon.

‘Now we will begin,’ the Hadram Cassal leader told the boy. ‘The ceremony will take some time and there will be times when you will feel fear and doubt. Put these from your mind and welcome the power of the martyrs into your soul. These are your personal belongings?’

Benyan nodded and handed over his bag.

‘You will change your clothes too. Take off your old things and Jasker here will give you a new set.’

Undressing while the old men turned away to respect his modesty, he pulled on the Altiman-style underwear, vest, slacks and shoes that they gave him. Jasker, the smallest of
the elders, had started a fire with some kindling and
sacrificial
oil and now he threw Benyan’s things on it one by one. His mother’s silk scarf, his father’s prized wristwatch, even his Shanneyan books, Benyan watched numbly as all his most precious possessions were tossed into the flames. It was as if his whole life were being wiped away. While the fire burned, the other men sat him down and groomed him for the task ahead. They trimmed his hair, cleaned and clipped his nails and scrubbed the exposed skin of his neck and hands with a pumice stone. The cloth used to wipe off the rubbed skin was thrown into the fire along with the hair and nail clippings. Then, he was handed a shirt, which he pulled on and buttoned up with trembling fingers. Elbeth looked him up and down and nodded to himself.

‘You are ready.’

He motioned to Benyan to lie down on a short slope facing the sunrise and the men crouched around him. Jasker had taken some ashes from the fire and mixed them in a small bowl with some of the sacrificial oil. Elbeth knelt by his head, taking some of the mixture on his fingers, drew lines on Benyan’s face, each line tracing a path from the edges of his face in towards his eyes. When this was done, Elbeth wiped his hands and picked up the stone mask, which he laid over Benyan’s face. Benyan suffered a moment of claustrophobia as he felt his face covered. Then the first rays of the sun shone through the purple crystals into his eyes. He could hear the men chanting a prayer in a language he did not understand, but one he recognised from the ancient teachings his father had practised. It was comforting to hear the old sounds again.

Then something streamed down the path of the sunlight and into his eyes. He went rigid with shock as shrieks filled his head. He tried to pull the mask away, but the elders were holding his arms and legs, and Elbeth was pressing the cold stone ever harder against his face, gripping the sides of his head. Memories of pain and torture that were not his swept through him. He screamed and thrashed, but the men were strong and held him fast. As fear crushed the breath out of him, he thought of Riadni and how she had made him think of a life beyond the Hadram Cassal and the shrieks grew louder and the pain more intense. The purple light was carrying something with it, as if it were pulling something alive from the bright sky and injecting it into his being.
Suddenly
he had a feeling of falling backwards, and of other minds filling the space between himself and his senses. They flooded into him and around him and embraced him and it felt good to be part of them. Shanna was offering him glory and heaven the spirits told him. He could join them in
paradise
once he had completed one small task. He laughed and welcomed them, throwing off the cares that had weighed heavy on him all his life. He was ready to do whatever they asked. No price was too great for the chance to serve Shanna. Nothing would stop him from joining her in paradise.

Benyan was sprawled on the ground and the sun was high in the sky when he awoke. He squinted up at it, realising the mask was gone from his face. Stretching his limbs, he found an energy and strength that he had never known before. There were other minds entwined with his and he felt them
move in time with him, as if his body and that of another shared the same space. Elbeth sat cross-legged before him. Benyan sprang to his feet and stood to attention. Elbeth smiled up at him.

‘You have the Blessing of the Martyrs upon you,’ he said softly. ‘Now it is time for you to begin your task. You have memorised the photograph of Thomex Aranson. You will go to his home in Victovia. You will wait until his son and grandson are there with him and you will kill them all. There are men at the bottom of the hill, waiting to take you to the border of Altima. They have all the other things that you will need. Are you ready Benyan Akhna?’

‘Yes, Master.’

Elbeth stood up and clasped the boy’s hands between his. Benyan felt caught in the man’s gaze like prey that had locked eyes with its hunter. His eyes dropped submissively as he bowed to his leader. In the silence between them, he could hear the voices of the dead, whispering promises and prayers and uttering curses on their enemies…and he knew he would be their servant until he took his place with them in paradise.

Chamus sat in the back of the car, gazing out at the barges on the canal, their diesel motors farting smoke out of their sterns, the exhausts puffing in time with the water spat from the engines’ cooling systems. It was half-past five on a Saturday, the sun had barely risen, and yet they were stuck in traffic. They were on their way to the airfield where Aranson Air had its base, his mother accompanying his
father out to a test flight, Chamus on his way to do some flying in his own plane. He was itching to get to the airfield, but the traffic jam wasn’t going anywhere. They had caught up on a column of military vehicles going in the same
direction
along the canal road and there seemed to be a glut of traffic all the way to the aerodrome. The airfield was situated near one of the major ramps down off the Victovia plateau into Bartokhrin, and Chamus was willing to bet that this was where they were all heading.

‘Honestly,’ his mother griped, ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. What can they be doing with all these trucks?’

‘Something to do with tackling the Hadram Cassal, I’d wager,’ Kellen replied, his elbow leaning on the sill of his open window. ‘Can’t see them moving all this lot into the Fringelands without causing a fuss, though.’

Chamus rolled his eyes. Typical of his father to refer to a possible war as ‘a fuss’. It often seemed to Chamus that his father lived in slow motion when he wasn’t flying. He was unhurried and infuriatingly careful in everything he did. He was not impatient as they waited for the traffic to get moving, because he had left an hour spare to reach the
airfield
and get ready. The prototype, high-altitude
reconnaissance
plane would be prepped and waiting for him when he got there; it certainly wasn’t going anywhere without him. To his son’s amazement, Kellen turned off the ignition and leaned back in his seat, arms behind his head. His wife, Nita, opened her bag and took out a book on gardening, turning the pages slowly as she enjoyed the practical tips on how to deal with greenfly. Chamus flopped back in the seat and moaned. Nita peered round at him, giving him that look that
she had, over the top of her glasses.