1.

 

For a week, Zaifyr did not leave Red Moon.

It had not been his plan to stay. He had meant to return to the foul-watered shaft and, with a long-handled hammer, begin breaking through the stone around the Temple of Ger.

Instead, he allowed Ayae to keep his attention. Her presence in the beer garden at the back of the hotel became a world that he and she occupied beneath the rise and fall of the three suns. At night, when she was gone, he would return to his room and note the progression of thick boards being erected across shopfront windows and doors. Slowly, Mireea was becoming uniform: a city of shut buildings and empty lanes, the divisions of economy washed away and falling into memory like the sprawl of markets. Each new building shut up was a part of Mireea lost, and soon he would also be gone. If he was not, he ran the risk of being drawn into the units that the Mireean Guard were making from citizens. That he had no desire for. He awoke to see their painful morning jog through the empty, cobbled streets, struggling beneath the weight of mismatched armor and swords they had been given, with either a bucket of water in each hand or a stretcher full of bricks between two. They followed the streets throughout the city all day, passing beneath all the wooden gates and crude wooden walls that divided the city, carrying out mock exercises that Heast issued from his position on the roof of The Pale House.

He might have stayed longer in the garden and forgotten his responsibilities were it not for the explosions that began to punctuate the day. Neither he nor Ayae knew what they were, but after she had left, he saw First—or was it Second?—carrying an empty pack covered in dirt walking along the streets. The small man squinted at him as he crossed the road, grunted a greeting and told him that Heast had ordered the tunnels down the mountain caved in and road broken up. There appeared to be no immediate threat to Zaifyr’s foul tunnel—it was too close to the city to be a defensive weakness, except to anyone who fell in—but still, before the first light of the morning’s sun, he walked through the city gates with the weight of the hammer over his back, leaving his charms inside his hotel room.

The night before, he had told Ayae he would be gone for a few days. They had sat at the back of her house at a small wooden table, the light from the night sky piercing strongly through the cut-back trees.

“You should probably prepare yourself,” he said. “I know you won’t leave, but your preparations—”

“I have tidied my garden,” she said. “I washed my walls down. I don’t need to shut my windows up, lock myself away.”

“You’ve not fought in a war before.”

“But you have?”

“Many,” he admitted. “After the gods had died, we had our own wars to divide up what they had left.”

“What was it like?”

“Eventually, it was terrible.”

“Eventually?”

He placed the empty glass he held on the table, the juice pulp a dark pattern to the lip. “The first war I fought in was about survival. We were the Children of the Gods before we were anything else, and there were many who contested us. We fought for five hundred years, if you include the standoffs that were not peace. It mostly felt like years of survival, of making sure the people around me did not starve, had homes and weren’t killed in streets or in fields.”

She struggled with his age, with the breadth of it. He knew that and tried to imagine it from her point of view, but couldn’t. “How did you manage with your—your—”

“Curse?” he finished.

“I am trying not to use the word,” she admitted, flushing.

He shrugged. “Describe it how you want. Eventually you’ll stop thinking of it as a different part of you. It changes you, yeah: and some more than others. For some, it kills them before they can experience it. For others, it makes them immortal. No one has known why, or why not, in either case. It’s fickle. Random. And no matter what it does to you, you’re left to manage it like everything else in your life.”

“Discipline.” She said the word slowly, as if tasting it. “Everything is about discipline to you. You rely on nobody but yourself, do you realize that?”

At the mining shaft, Zaifyr lifted the wooden seal and dropped into the foul water. It was cool, not yet warmed by the three suns. The wooden shaft of the hammer caught on the ceiling of the tunnel twice, forcing himself to push his fingers through the muddy silt to pull himself down.

“You’re responsible for yourself,” he had replied, turning the pulp-splattered glass around in his hand. “You tell me I speak of discipline and I tell you that I try, but fail regularly. That is how I ended up in a madhouse, because I failed at that. I thought I could do something for the dead, that I could bring them peace, but that was not what I could do for them. What I could do was to bear witness, to acknowledge their pain, and to acknowledge that I could do nothing. Why would I be given power for that? I struggled with that question for a long time, until I realized that the question itself was one that was flawed. I was not chosen. None of us are, and that is the hardest thing to accept. But it is what we must do, what I especially must do. That is the sacrifice that the world has demanded from me.”

Half a smile crossed her face. “You speak as if the world was alive.”

“It is.” He leaned back, looked up at the sky. “Look at everything around us, everything that is sustained without a god. We live on a giant living creature, so old it makes me feel young.”

“Could it not be a god itself?”

“It could.”

“But?” The other half of her smile emerged. “There’s always a but.”

He laughed, enjoying himself. “But if so, why did it not take its place in the war?”

“I don’t know.” She too looked up at the sky. “Are there more worlds alive out there, do you think?”

“Not that I can feel.”

She turned her gaze to him.

“I can see it in the moon.” He touched the charm beneath his wrist, once, twice. “The moon is what remains of Sei. The shattered suns are his kingdom, but the moon, the moon is his form, huge and curled into a ball. If I focus on it, I can feel his pain and his anger. He is caught in a slow death, like all the gods—while, at the same time, being dead. What I sense is the haunt and the last parts of his life, merged together. At least, that is what I think. I know there is nothing left of his mind, just as there is nothing left of the others. Constant pain has destroyed any consciousness. They lash out at the only thing they can, the sense of another god, of another power—that being us.”

“I don’t feel anything.”

“Sei is too far for any but me.”

“I don’t feel Ger.”

One of the rungs in the ladder crumbled beneath his grasp, plunging him back into the water. Slowly, spitting out the foul liquid, Zaifyr pulled himself onto the stones and ran a hand through his hair, shaking it out. Ahead, the green light shone through the sliver in the wall, a hint that would grow until it illuminated the entire forgotten, haunted city.

“Bau said my senses were just overloaded. That he wasn’t surprised, but—well, it makes me believe that you are all wrong.” Ayae let out a low breath after her words. “That I am something else, something more or less.”

“The elements were not considered gods,” he replied. “But in this, Bau has a point. The changes that you’ve gone through, that we all go through, do not happen in an empty space. He is overlooking the fact that you’ve lived here for so long that you simply may have grown used to the sensation of Ger around you. For most of us, we live with our power before we’re aware of it. The lucky ones have it dawn on them, slowly. The unlucky ones—well, they’re more like you. In a moment of danger, they emerge, and they lash out. That is why so many people fear the curses. But if you cannot feel another god, later, then your questions will be important and perhaps the answer will reveal more about Ger than we thought.”

“Like?”

“Understanding. With it, awareness.”

“But you just said—”

He smiled. “I know.”

She shook her head, her smile rueful, and said, “Would others think that? Is that why a Quor’lo would want to kill me?”

He told her he had no answer and the subject had changed, though this time it did so with his help. He had a lot to talk to her about: ideas, rules, stories. He told her what he knew of the others who had come before her. He did not hold back as he told them, nor encounter any of the cynicism and tiredness that he felt when conversing with his brothers and sisters. But he was conscious of the choice he made, the chill he felt and the questions that it opened up.

Questions that in the depths of the old, crumbling city, the haunt of a woman who was a new priest might know the answers for.