9.

 

His eyes adjusted to the dark, easier now that the haunt had drifted into the temple behind him. She had pushed through the shattered remains of the shell that she had broken apart against earlier, but he knew that she would not appreciate the feat. Zaifyr wondered if the sight of the decay, the crumbling remains of everything that had been enclosed, was a shock to her—but this, he did not ask. He wanted to keep her glow as light, so that he was not forced to resort to using the haunts that were trapped inside.

He could feel them brushing against his skin, dozens, hundreds. Yet the strength of Ger remained the same.

Thousands of years ago, in the twilight of the Five Kingdoms, the God of Truth, Wehwe, had inspired a cult. Blame—the name his followers had adopted after his fall—had come to the edges of Asila and tried to move the slim, brown-skinned god from where he knelt, but had discovered that Wehwe’s skin burned at their touch. It scalded them, but did more: it created a heat without fire beneath their skin, a heat that consumed them. In response, they had purged the land of settlements a hundred miles in every direction around him.

By the time Zaifyr walked into the dense forest, Blame was long dead, torn apart by Aela Ren, the Innocent. It had been that act that had finally drawn Zaifyr to investigate, for Ren had been a man who had spent the years after the gods’ deaths without a single death being attributed to him. Zaifyr had never met him—the Innocent had gone to some lengths to avoid the Five Kingdoms—but in the rare moments that he heard about the man, he heard stories that were more myth than reality. He heard of scars, of wounds that wept, of one man, and of half a dozen men with one name. What was consistent was that he claimed to be the inheritor of Wehwe’s power. But until Blame, he’d shown nothing of it. Zaifyr had returned to his brothers and sisters with the story of how the cult had been murdered, having laid down arms first. Since it had been so isolated, and Aela Ren such a notoriously difficult figure to find, they had agreed to do nothing, to watch, to wait. Perhaps they had been wrong to do that, since later, Zaifyr learned that the Innocent had begun his war in Sooia shortly after he had been locked in his crooked tower for three hundred years.

But on the day he had approached Wehwe, as he walked the rough road to his still form, Zaifyr had felt the god’s awareness, the primal acknowledgment.

It was difficult to explain just what the dying god felt toward him. When Zaifyr reached out to touch him there was pain, but there was always pain. In that, all the gods were the same, though he had yet to reach any understanding as to why that was. He did not understand how it was that time could move differently for them and him. He knew only that there did not exist behind the pain a series of rational thought. What existed was animosity and hatred, a bitter venom that he would not have thought to ascribe to the God of Truth, if he had not already felt it before.

It was such a powerful hatred that by the time Zaifyr stepped into the empty, sun-drenched clearing where the slender god knelt, he could barely stand.

But with Ger, it was different.

With the giant god, Zaifyr felt the presence, but it was faint, nothing more than a whisper of disquiet or resentment. At first, he had been unsure what to make of it. Was it because of his time in the tower? Had that changed him? If so, how did Fo and Bau feel? But then he had met Ayae and listened as she told him that she felt nothing; for a time, he had not known what to think. But now, as he moved to the front of the church, past the still skeletons and paintings that held nothing but the smear of faded color, he wondered if it was just that there was not much of Ger left.

That the god was almost dead.

He stopped at the dais and looked across the ruined temple. At the broken entrance the faint outline of Oyia stood. He could hear faint murmurs, but the words were indistinct and it was clear that she would not be following him.

Closing his eyes, a part of him shifted. When he lifted his eyelids, the light in the room had grown, the haunts of children appearing between broken pews, walls and around the fallen armor. They were all boys, not one of them older than fourteen, most young and each of them wearing old robes that dragged across the floor. They had been sealed inside, Zaifyr knew. Sealed with the men he saw at the edges of the room and in the doorways.

Behind one middle-aged man was a set of stairs. Leaving the dais, Zaifyr made his way to the rotting door and began walking down the narrow, slippery steps. The wooden railing on the left crumbled as his hand touched it, but the light was strong enough that he did not need it.

At the end of the stairs, the mud stopped, though he was well below the lake. Zaifyr’s feet left wet tracks across the dusty corridor. There were cells on either side of him, and inside the haunts of men and young boys stood individually. Halfway along the short passage he closed his eyes and focused again, to see if he could add a layer to those who had been sealed in, and how strongly the generations ran. But when he opened his eyes nothing had changed.

Another set of stairs took him downward.

A crude red light filled the room, revealing skeletons around a dirty glass dome in the center where another skeleton lay.

On the floor, among the bones, were stones and dusty cups, the latter mostly intact. They had not been knocked over by falling bodies, however, but by earthquakes and explosions from miners. Neither of whom would have known or cared about the sanctity of the quiet chamber at the bottom of the Temple of Ger, where men and boys had taken their own lives—and where one man had stood in the center on a large glass dome and brought the stone walls up, until the temple was sealed from the soldiers who were destroying the cities throughout the mountains.

“And that,” Zaifyr whispered, “is how they sealed the temple, with their blood to fuel what power can be stolen from the dead.”

Edging past the skeletons, he approached the glass dome. He pushed the remains of the lead priest away—he could see him, a large, pale, bearded man—and bent down beside the glass, his hand reaching out to scratch away the dried blood and dust.

Beneath it, he saw dark wounded flesh, though just what part of Ger it was, Zaifyr could not tell. But it was flesh, just a hint of it. If he broke through the glass, he would be able to lower himself through the hole, his entire body, but the flesh he stood upon would be only the smallest patch of the entire being, the skin weeping blood, the wounds inflamed and infected, how much pain there must be spread out for miles beneath the city above.

And then he was touched. A faint, frail, light touch, akin to how he could reach out to the dead. A faint touch that was there for but a moment and then gone, a touch that looked at him and then moved on, dismissing him.

Zaifyr was not left with a feeling of hatred or animosity; nor was he left with kindness or love. He was left with indifference, of not mattering. He felt the barest acknowledgment of his existence, a brief glance from the figure whose huge form he stood over, the god who was moving in the opposite direction from him, the god that knew he was not moving toward life but to oblivion, to nothing.

And who was looking not for salvation, but for someone.