7.

 

Zaifyr did not remember how he returned to Kakar. Later, much later, as the pale moonlight filtered through his window, he believed that the others had laid him in the back of the wagon next to the dead merchant and his guards—they would not leave them by the road this time—and led all three and their oxen up the narrow track to the village. If they had spoken to him, he did not know. They must have. He doubted that they would have been silent. They would have probed, touched, followed his gaze and then talked quietly among themselves. Gilan, a thick-necked, hulking, brown-haired man, his charms tied to his hair and beard, would have taken control. He would have told the others in his quiet voice to place the bodies on the wagons next to his, would have made sure they were buried away from the highway. But for Zaifyr, there was no memory of that. There was only the merchant following him up to the camp, his drivers and guards strung out behind in pale, shadowed forms broken by sunlight.

Gilan and the others believed that he was in shock and left him alone once he returned to the village. Freed from the cart, he found himself drifting along the hard, rocky ground until he reached the pelt-covered hut of his parents. It was his now, but in two years he had not made any changes. He slept in the same room as always, letting dust collect in others. As he drew closer to the cloth door, the haunt of Meihir paused and regarded not just him, but those that trailed behind him in a dull murmur of language neither could understand.

“Zaifyr,” she said.

His hand touched the heavy cloth.

“What have you done?” she asked, approaching him.

“I don’t know.” His voice was barely a whisper. “They are the spirits of men we killed down the mountain. I don’t know why they are here.”

The murmur of the merchant and guards grew, the words unidentifiable.

“The God of Death is no more.” Meihir’s attention wavered, the constant cold and hunger in her demanding. For the first time, Zaifyr watched her fight it. “The Wanderer is gone,” she said again.

He had no response.

“What else can you see?”

Their words, he suspected, were complaints against hunger, cold and him. Zaifyr said, “Nothing.”

“No birds, no animals?”

Around him, others in the village were gathering. “There’s nothing but you and them,” he said. “Nothing but the dead.”

“Look for them!”

“There’s nothing!”

She spoke again, but he shook his head, pulled back the cloth door and stepped inside, letting the heavy fabric fall behind him, though it did not muffle their voices.

Meihir’s question lingered. Aided by the sight of the new dead patrolling between the village and the ravine where their bodies lay, the question was not allowed to slip his mind. He grew withdrawn from the others, spending more and more time in Meihir’s small, dirty hut, reading what he could find. It was not much. She owned a handful of books, kept no diary. There were many times where he sat and listened to her telling him how unfair her punishment was, how she did not deserve this curse. But he did learn. He learned about the Wanderer, about how he had stumbled onto the rocky shore of Kakar with the Leviathan’s help, an injured figure reliant on the giant god’s friendship, left crippled from an early battle that saw the destruction of his pantheon, with the gods Maika, Maita and Maina, the gods of ascension, rebirth and finality, being destroyed. Meihir did not know why anyone would want to attack the Wanderer’s pantheon, did not know why in the years after the first god fell he became a target, but she feared much, even if she could not explain it. Yet, what she did know in detail was the moments of the Wanderer as he was struck down by Heinka, as the Feral God had drawn on the lives of his believers to kill the other, in a seemingly suicidal attack before the might of the Leviathan. He learned about the gods, about the flow of magic and power that the witch had believed in, about how each power had been tethered by a god and how it would run wild through the world without them.

Finally, on a cold morning, he took one of the metal traps from the village and entered the snow fields to the north, with his white bearskin cloak around him. The stripped-bare trees watched him bury the trap at the edge of the Hoewa River, where the water did not entirely freeze no matter how cold. He settled back into the snow and waited.

It was a long wait. The empty, cold sky lit with the orange of the afternoon’s sun and the cold set into his bones and he told himself he was a fool. Yet he stayed. Snow blanketed him. The ice in the river broke, the sound harsh and primitive. More than once he told himself to stand, to walk back to Kakar, but he never moved.

And then, finally, a stag stepped into the trap.

The metal crunched through bone, the animal cried out. It was young, its antlers not yet fully grown, and it thrashed against the trap, drawing on the chain spike that held it to the ground. Raising his crossbow, Zaifyr sank a bolt into its neck and saw it stagger and sag. Rising, his cloak dislodging thick snow as he did, the charm-laced man approached the dying animal and watched. He longed to shoot the stag again, to end his misery, but he had laid the trap for a reason and he would not weaken now.

The stag’s breathing rasped, its dark eyes at first staring wildly at Zaifyr then blankly past him. He focused his attention on the animal’s chest, watching the final rise of it with such attention that he saw a faint outline at the edges of the body, saw the shape of the stag rising. The sunlight broke through it as if it were smoldering and Zaifyr could sense the animal’s confusion, hunger and cold.

The stag moved, but not far. It appeared to be waiting, but there was nothing, Zaifyr knew, that would be coming for it.

There were no more gods of death, no more gods to take the souls of the living and lead them to paradise, to rebirth, to oblivion. There was only him to bear witness, only he that could see what happened to the souls of the living, only him, who had, despite the charms he wore, the charms that had protected him from his god, found himself changed by the Wanderer’s death.

Zaifyr turned and began walking back through the bare trees without the carcass, unable to bring himself to take it.