8.

 

Bueralan had struggled to reach the bottom of the temple stairs without falling but managed to do so twice. In this he was not alone, as both Handsome and Ugly, gripping the rotting railing tightly, caused it to break. It was possible that none of them would have fallen if they had not tried to keep pace with the sure steps of Mother Estalia and her light.

He had decided that his best chance of escape would be when they were leaving. When they had done what they wanted and were distracted by their success, he was confident that was when his opportunity would come.

“It is an incredibly sad place, this,” Estalia said, speaking to the battered three who limped along the dry corridor behind her. “I had thought that it would not be so, at least not for me. When I was told that there was a temple here I longed to see inside it, to experience the sanctity of it. Imagine the secrets we could learn, I said. The artifacts we could find! I was like a child, at first. But now—now I know why I was cautioned: the temple is like a rotten egg, with nothing of sustenance on the inside.”

The rooms on either side were empty cells, small squares dominated by narrow bunks that were covered by threadbare blankets. Small tables sat next to each in ancient contemplation.

In contrast to Mother Estalia, Bueralan felt the earlier sense of being watched, that he had fallen beneath a gaze so complete and utter that a chill began to seep into his bones. He was aware of his skin contracting, of goosebumps emerging. He could take nothing friendly, or reassuring from the gaze. Instead, he felt a strange lack of passion, as if the gaze watching him had seen it before, as if the hobbled steps he made had been done so a thousand times, not by a person like him, but by him.

Another set of stairs emerged. At the bottom of the steps, a red light washed out the glow by Mother Estalia.

“And here,” she said, “here is the saddest part of all.”

Bones littered the floor, chalk symbols surrounding them, patterns that had been made by the four priests who had entered before them. They stood now in positions that were spaced evenly around the room, their cardinal locations protected by circles they had drawn, patterns that extended into loops and arcs, each directed to the center of the room, where the dirty, bloodstained glass sat like a dead eye.

“Do you feel it?” she asked, following Bueralan’s gaze.

He did.

He could sense the presence of another standing next to him.

“It is Ger.”

He knew before she spoke. He moved up to the glass, and through the streaked grime, he saw the wounds, the burns, the breaks, the trauma healing itself only to break open a moment later.

“The people who live on this mountain have forgotten that a god lies dying beneath them.” Quietly, she approached the dome beside him. “I do not blame them. It is easy to forget, when your day-to-day life has no need for a deity. When you believe only in commerce. Eventually, when you look up from your ledgers, all you see are the rocks and the rough way that they have welded themselves together over the centuries. You see the trees stretching out to form that thick canopy. You travel that winding, steep road, where animals move around you. You see that life every day beneath our fractured suns and you forget that beneath your every step there lies a giant, a figure of such immense size that the mountain is his cairn, fitted to his divine being.”

It was the first time he had seen the remains of a god. It did not strike him as strange that such was the case, or that he had been brought there in chains.

“You’re mistaken,” he said, finally. “You think people have forgotten, but that is not the truth of it.”

Behind Estalia and the faint condescending smile that she wore once again, the chalk began to glow in faint, phosphorescent lines.

“What you will not admit,” he continued, “is that Ger is no longer relevant. No god is. They neither have the power to alter the world we live in, nor the presence to issue commands. Where you believe that people have simply forgotten them—that they have somehow let their modern life ignore the corpses beneath them, the shattered suns above, or the black seas and countless other ways in which the gods have changed the world—I see people who have simply moved on. People who have adapted. People who have grown. There was grief—the city we have just walked through is evidence of that. But it was grief from thousands of years ago and we have ended now in independence—we are children who have outgrown the need for parents. The gods are no longer wanted or needed—”

His voice stopped suddenly.

At his feet, the chalk lines had lifted from the ground and wrapped, in thick, fleshy tentacles around his legs. His own tattoos were a faded white in comparison. After a moment, he began to feel tiny bites on his skin, as if the tentacles possessed thousands of tiny, suckling mouths that were trying to draw blood from his flesh, but were unable to do so.

“Enough from you, Captain.” Mother Estalia held his gaze. “I have heard these protestations from others previously, as the cry of the faithless. It is not just the Mireeans who have left behind the keeping of their souls and chosen to abandon what in their heart they know is right—it is all of us. That is why what we do is so very important, why the remains of Ger must be taken back to his child—my God. It is why she must be allowed to grow. In a fashion, you are going to be part of that. The four who have come with us will be the containers of what remains of Ger, and they will bear him back to our god. It is a great honor that they will do, but it is not an easy task. You have seen what the power of a god can do to those who are weak, who are flesh, and to take it this way is no easy feat. It must be done at such a moment that our time and Ger’s experience of it meet, where death is imminent for him. It must be done right and it requires an entire body’s worth of blood to do so—and for that, you are being given that honor, and though you do not wish to do it, I thank you for what you will give to make our world whole again.”

No.

He would not die here, he would not be used for her ritual. He would head to Leera. He would find Dark. He tried to repeat no, aware that the first had not emerged from his throat. He realized that he could not move or speak, and his breath was shallow and struggling, resulting in a light-headedness. He protested against it, but he was aware that he was losing consciousness. The red light around him faltered. The floor shook. He heard a loud, splitting crack, as if something had broken open. He felt the floor move, sure that it was rising to him—

—and his chained hands snapped up, grabbed Estalia’s head, and twisted with a suddenness that surprised even him.

The elderly woman fell in a crumbling heap. She made a solid sound as she hit the ground, her neck bent at a strange angle. He felt detached from that for a moment, as if he were watching it from a distance. Then he felt a surge of energy as the chalky bindings released his legs, leaving him without pain, without fatigue as he turned to both Ugly and Handsome.

He ducked the first’s swing, sidestepped the second’s thrust. The saboteur moved fluidly, feeling twenty years younger. He drove his foot into the back of Handsome’s leg, brought him to his knees to crash his manacled hands against the side of his head. He wrenched the sword from the man’s grasp, bringing it up to block Ugly’s slash. He felt euphoric, nothing but pure adrenaline, and he knew, knew, that it was not his, that his body was too tired, too tortured and beaten to perform any of what he did.

He knew that even as he parried a second slash from Ugly. He used the momentum to bring his new sword up in a two-handed grip and hack into the man’s chest. It was as if he had felled a tree: the blade dug deep, through leather armor, bone and skin, forcing him to wrench the notched blade out. He had just freed it when Handsome barreled into him from behind; but he twisted out of the fall, slamming the hilt down on the side of the man’s head to break the grasp, to step out of his reach.

In response, the soldier growled and came to his feet. Around him, Bueralan felt a streak of pleasure, of appreciation in the tenacity and fighting spirit that Handsome showed. Yet there was more pleasure—a bloodthirsty joy—as the saboteur brought his two-handed sword down in a vicious arc when Handsome leaped for Ugly’s sword. The cut took off the lower half of his left arm, which dropped to the floor in a clutching, bloody mess, while the second swing buried the large blade into the man’s face, caving it in with a strength that Bueralan knew he did not possess.

Lifting the bloody blade up, he turned to the four priests.

He had no need. They lay on the floor, their bodies impaled on sharp shafts of earth that had spiked out of the temple floor, breaking through the chalk lines the priests had drawn.

They had died as silently as they had lived—though he was not sure that the other priests in the Leeran Army would have agreed.

It was then that Bueralan felt the presence of another being, the same being that had watched him when he stepped into the temple, the same being who had lowered his gaze onto him when he had followed the Quor’lo to the rocky shore. It was a presence that could not be explained, that had no emotion he could easily understand, that was alien.

He walked slowly to the glass dome.

Beneath was the flesh of Ger, the devastated and inhuman, dark-red flesh that, when he had looked upon it before, had been healing itself, caught in a constant battle against its wounds. But now, as he sunk down to his haunches, as he laid the sword on the ground, Bueralan saw the wounds expand, the flesh give way beneath the damage and the fatality that had been part of them for so long.

Alone now, the pain of his body returned.