5.

 

“That story.” Bueralan stopped speaking as he stretched his back, attempting to ease the cramped muscles and only partly succeeding. “The witches from my home bottle the souls of the dead, for a price. You sound just like them when they say that the family will want to pay a prosperous pregnant woman to drink it, to ensure that their kin’s next life is good.”

“Are you accusing me of lying?” Mother Estalia did not appear bothered. “I have just explained to you one of the great mysteries of the world. I explained to you why the gods went to war, as explained to me—”

“—by a child,” he finished.

Her smile was benign, condescending in its every curve. “Follow me, Captain.” Her first step took her to the edge of the still lake, where a small knife appeared in her hand. She sliced the tip of a finger, letting the blood fall—and took a second step onto the water as it did, where her feet found a hard surface, similar to board. “It is not difficult for me to understand your skepticism,” she said. “I was young, myself, when we found our god. So young that the two men behind you were not yet born, nor were their parents. They find it difficult to stomach your words, but only because they do not remember a time without the gaze of a god in their heart. But I remember the emptiness of my youth. The fear I had when I heard stories of cursed men and women. The terror when I saw them.

“I watched a childhood friend of mine die as her skin shed itself daily, similar to a snake, but without the grace of nature. My friend was five at the time, and the shedding left her bloody and raw and in constant pain. She cried out to a god, any god, but there were only the cures promised by witches and shamans, cures that dulled pain and nothing else. To watch that was to understand not just that there were no gods, but why no man or woman desired to hear of divinity again.”

Beneath his feet, the water was cold but solid. A display of power she had not shown to those beneath her, who had swum the length.

“But then, I also remember the visions of my childhood. They began a week after the death of my friend, dreams of such vitality and strength that were impossible to ignore. We were called like the prophets of the old in our dreams, given tasks to attend, bent to obedience. Once we had accepted that, we joined each other in travel to the Eakar Mountains in search of our God. There, they found a forgotten valley that lay between the broken crown of a range. In it, the remains of empty villages and white bones were threaded by poisonous rivers and toxic soil.

“Of the twenty who made the journey only half reached the middle of the valley. Three died while crossing the ocean, in fights, in sickness, but the greatest toll were the seven who died in the valley. Three men and four women fell to the toxicity there as they made their way to the center, their skin drying and their breath fading until they crumbled into dust. My mother was one of these women and, even though I mourned her passing for years, I eventually came to understand that she perished because she did not have the faith to continue. She had followed my father and me in our journey, having had the same vision as us, but I believe now that the longer it took—and I had aged two years since we left Leera—the more the vision diluted, turned watery for her. She had lost her faith by the time we stepped into the valley and wasted away, while the faithful among us remained strong.

“If she had not lost her faith, my mother would have been witness to the sight of her vision, to the spherical husk of soil that floated in the middle of the valley. I can still remember how it felt as we approached it. It was a power unlike anything I had felt before, yet it was not complete. What was in the soil was both perfect and flawed and as we stood before that, we were humbled.

“We broke through the soil slowly, each crack revealing a warmth, a soft inside of roots that encircled the arms, legs and body of a girl. Gazing upon her, we saw only divinity, though she was not yet awake. My father, who carried her from the earthen womb, said she at first weighed nothing—but as we returned to Leera that changed. She became a solid weight, too heavy for arms at first, then for a single donkey to carry. It was a team of bulls who pulled her into our country after four years of travel, still asleep. My father said she gathered the weight of the world about her as we went.”

Ahead was the broken opening of the Temple of Ger. To Bueralan’s gaze, the shadows within were a dark stain that could not be removed.

“He never did see her awake. My father died at the age of sixty-seven, the proud caretaker of the church he had placed his God within. With the aid of the King Anann, he designed and built the huge structure upon his return, ensuring that a chamber was built deep into the ground beneath it, and it was there that he laid her sleeping body. He claimed that she needed to be near to the soil, to be nurtured by the earth itself. He harbored a belief that Linae had infused the very ground with her power, but it was twenty-three years after his death before we could ask such a question, before we could hear her agree, in part. There, she taught us about how the gods saw time, how even as they died they were alive, how with her creation, an infinite number of possibilities had collapsed and that they struggled with that, still. She could herself, however, only see one future, could experience time in only one fashion.”

“And then she told you that you would have to change that.” Before Bueralan, Estalia drifted through the opening, leaving him with his cold toes to navigate the stone and broken glass along the edge of the temple. “How long before she said you would have to go to war?”

“War is a certainty in life.”

“Death and taxes are a certainty. War is something we create, we strive for.”

“So are taxes,” she replied dryly. “But to answer your question, Captain, we knew from the start.”

After a small jab from behind, the saboteur eased himself through the broken frame and to the cold, slippery floor. “Why is that?”

“She is an incomplete god.” Mother Estalia followed the tracks left by the priests, light blooming in her every footstep, illuminating faded murals, creeping mold, broken pews and rusted, broken armor. Soon, a stairwell appeared before her. “The war ensured that, Captain. As the gods died, their bodies broke. Their power spilled from them, and spills still. It is responsible for every cursed person you have ever seen, from those who function to those who do not. It is a power seeking its owner, its rightful place—a power that our god is here to reclaim, first from the bodies of her parents.”

“Why not the cursed first? You would even find support in this part of the world.”

“We tried.” The stairwell was long and slippery, but Mother Estalia did not take the rail. “We found one of the youngest in Mireea but it was beyond us. It was chance, truly, nothing more. The Quor’lo had been sent to find the temples of Ger, but when that girl’s power awoke, we sent it after her. We thought to kill her and bring the body to our god. The power was hers by right, after all, but we learned quickly that a single cursed is a difficult enemy for us, and that to find one isolated is impossible.”