11.

 

Once, Zaifyr had fasted for seventy-two days. It began as a whim drawn from self-reflection born of lonely travel. In the middle of the dense Gogair Forest, he stripped down, sat and waited. He estimated that he was over seventy years old, though he had not physically aged a day. Yet, he knew men and women who had died not from weapon or disease, but from age, an age he had watched creep over them from their birth until their spirits rose from their broken bodies. As the morning sun rose and fell, and then the midday sun, and the afternoon sun, he realized that it was the experience of exactly that which saw him stop, literally, his life until the gnawing hunger and exhaustion of boredom drove him to his feet, two and a half months later. He could die, he had watched gods die and knew that anything could, but his death would be a difficult one. Lack of food and water would simply not kill him. The immortality and power Jae’le had said was within him was slowly becoming something that he could rationalize in a post-god—

There was a knock at the door, soft but insistent.

Zaifyr lifted the brown bottle but found it empty and dry. Outside, the sky was dark but for the stars and the moon. The latter was no more than a thin, broken line. The knocking sounded again and he pushed himself up, shaking off the maudlin emotion that had come across him, the feeling of cobwebs that had fallen over his mind as he had watched the afternoon fade away with his memories. It was not the first time, though it was the first in some time and, as he reached the door, he hoped that it would be the last for a long time. There was a small, gray bearded man lit by a lantern in the doorway.

“I am Samuel Orlan,” the man said, extending his hand.

“I know who you are,” Zaifyr replied, accepting the hand. “Is your apprentice fine?”

“For the moment.” Orlan’s gaze held his, the small man’s blue eyes weathered and ancient. “I must thank you for helping her, though it will perhaps not be the last time you do so. May I come in?”

Zaifyr stepped back, allowing the cartographer to enter, his lamp illuminating the single bed, small pack and smoke- and ash-stained clothes that marked his room. Closing the door, he watched Orlan hang the lamp on the wall and, without a backward glance, turn around the chair by the window, facing it to the bed before sitting down.

“What am I to call you these days?” he asked, finally.

A small smile creased his lips. “Zaifyr.”

“An old name, that.”

“Better than others I have been known by,” he said. “But perhaps the old names are the best, wouldn’t you say?”

Orlan’s smile deepened. “You knew the Seventy-First, yes?”

He was talking about his ancestors, the other men and women who had shared his name over the centuries. “And another, much earlier. I don’t know which one she was.”

“The Forty-Third,” Orlan replied easily. “But it was briefly, unlike the Seventy-First, who lived in Asila.”

“I was a different man, then.” Zaifyr perched on the edge of the bed. “Whatever memories you have, I wouldn’t put much stock in them now.”

“I don’t have memories of you,” Orlan said. “We share a name, but that is all, and I am glad for that. I doubt I could keep so many lives straight. I would be caught in them all the time and new experiences would pass me by. But, no, I know about you and the Seventy-First because I have studied history and read the books that have been written, either by ourselves or by others.”

Zaifyr refused to rise to the bait that, given the flood of his own memories, was a fair critique. “I don’t read as much as I used to.”

“Or write, either. It has been a long time since The Godless.”

“I thought all copies had been destroyed?”

“It is hard to destroy everything,” the other man said, shrugging. “This is especially true of books written by a man who once said he was a god.”

“I don’t believe that now.”

“Others do.”

“That has nothing to do with me.”

“Even when there is an army coming up this mountain in search of gods?”

“In search of the remains of gods,” Zaifyr corrected. “I talked to the Quor’lo. It was not much of a conversation, I grant you, but the force coming here appears to believe that a part of the gods still exist in the remains. Since you have read the book that I wrote, then you know my thoughts on the subject.”

“Can these gods be reborn like they want?”

“You know it’s nonsense, Orlan.” Zaifyr pulled his feet onto the bed, crossing them beneath him. “Why are you here?”

“My apprentice…”

“Ayae?”

“Yes…” For a moment he hesitated, as if he knew he was crossing a boundary, and that his next words would change a part in him. “She is a very angry young woman right now.”

“I’ve helped her enough.”

“With the wrong people whispering in her ear, she could believe that she is a god.”

Zaifyr’s fingers touched a charm beneath his wrist. “She would not be the first,” he said.

“No, she would not.”

Against the wall, the lamp sputtered, the fire rising for just a moment. “She seemed like a smart girl. I don’t think she needs me to watch her.”

“Oh, that I will not disagree with,” Orlan said. “However, I would like to think that her introduction to whatever touch of god is inside her is not done by men who are borderline sociopaths who believe they are reborn gods, or by the priests who ride up this mountain in search of something to make into an idol.”

“Why not you?”

The small man’s smile was faint. “I have other plans.”

“Then why me?”

“The Seventy-First wrote that you were a man haunted by every man and woman you met, but yet you were a man who believed that the universe was infinite, that fate was our own, that redemption was available to us all. That is why.”

“I killed him,” Zaifyr said quietly. “He and his family and everyone who lived in Asila. You know that.”

“As you say, you are a different man, now.”