Gods of Earth (13 page)

Seth came and sat next to him and put one paw over Chance’s shoulders. The stunted coyote fingers gripped him gently. The Guardian stepped behind the coyote, silently watching.

“Sta-sta-stay, Chance. Not safe outside. Stay.”

“Oh God,” Chance panted. “Oh God have mercy, I want to be saved, God. I want to stay in the Valley. I want to be a vinmaster and to marry Sarah. Don’t let it be, God. I don’t want to be forsaken.”

He stood and went to the wall. He turned and leaned back, and rolled his head against the hard stone. “The witches said I was true. As pure as any of the Valley, they said. As pure as any of the Valley of the Walking Man. But I’m the witch boy, aren’t I? My brother was right.” He gasped as if he had run a long distance. “All those boys who hated me were right. The witches lied.”

He threw his head back. “Liars!” His voice echoed on and on, up into the impossible hidden heights of the abandoned accomplishments of the Theogenics Guild.
Liars, liars, liars, liars.…

“They didn’t lie,” Thetis said. The three of them, surprised to hear her soft voice, turned to look at her where she stood now a few steps above. Seeing Chance in distress seemed to have calmed her. Her hands were at her sides. Her hair was pulled behind her ears. On the landing above, Mimir watched silently, her face inscrutably placid.

“There is no person left on Earth,” Thetis said softly, “who does not have ancestors that… remade themselves, as the Purimen call it. You are no more remade than any others of the Purimen, either in the Usin Valley or among the Forest Lakes. Less so, most likely.”

Chance stared at her as if he did not comprehend what she had said. And in part he did not. He did not know what he felt, but what she said was no comfort. Nothing was pure—that much he understood of her words. But how could he face the Elders, how could he ask to be confirmed, with such an argument in his heart?

He looked around again, seeking an exit, something made by human hands, or some green tree or leaf.…

“Breathe slo-slowly,” Seth said. He stood on his hind legs uneasily, and put one paw on Chance’s shoulder again. “Slow.”

“God has forsaken me,” Chance whispered. “God must forsake me. For I am a vain forgery of a man. I’ll be cast out.”

Bright tears fell from his eyes.

“I am not a Puriman.”

CHAPTER

13

“P
uriman?” The Guardian stood in the doorway. Chance had insisted they leave him alone in the room in which he slept the night before, and he had stared out the window at the alien city, feeling empty of all thoughts or feelings but bitterness. Finally, he had wept, lying on the bed. He wept for his father and his mother and the death of all of his dreams of being a Puriman—because even if no one would know in the Valley of the Walking Man, he could not himself accept confirmation and baptism now. That meant all his hopes were ashes. He had been unable to pray, other than to repeat again and again, “Help me God, help Sarah, help Paul, help me.” Finally he fell asleep.

He woke in the early afternoon to a hard prodding between his shoulder blades. The gold band he wore on the string around his neck had slipped behind his back, and he lay with it pressing into his spine. It was as if Sarah were behind him, pushing him.

No more self-pity, he told himself. He rose and washed, then knelt and prayed for Sarah’s safety and for Paul’s. He had only just stood when the Guardian came in.

“Puriman?” the Guardian asked again.

Chance cringed at the title, but instead of protesting, he demanded, “How do we end it?” He looked up at the Guardian. “How do we get Sarah and Paul back, and stop the false god? How do I avenge my parents?”

“We must go to Uroboros, Guild Hall of the Dark Engineers. They have the Numin Jars, last binding glasses forged by Threkor. With one of these we can use you as bait, and trap the god, and I can lock it away.”

“Let’s go.”

Seth, Thetis, and Mimir waited in the hall. They said nothing, but Seth rubbed against his leg, and Chance touched the coyote’s head. Then they descended the stairs in the dim light, the dark abyss gaping ominously above them, and walked across the great hall in silence, the click of Mimir’s hard black boots echoing in the emptiness.

The Guild Hall of the Dark Engineers, Uroboros, coiled in the center of the city, not far from the Broken Hand that Reaches. It was formed of black metal scales, each as large as a man, bent over long rows of tall arches of steel, so that the building seemed a vast black serpent that circled around a hidden center court. The entrance resembled a snake’s head, consuming the tail of the building, with just enough space for people to enter from one side. This entrance faced a square that topped a long, broad street that ran south to the Crystal Wall at the farthest edge of the city.

Looking down this street was like peering down a dark glen, Chance thought, with a black wall of water frozen at the end. It seemed at any moment that water might let loose and tumble toward them, drowning them all.

They went in, stepping into darkness as if being swallowed by a snake. A man and woman stood in an anteroom of black stone
and black steel, dressed in clothes like shining black leather. A thin covering of hair shadowed their shaven heads. They bowed.

“Take me to the Grand Creator,” the Guardian commanded.

The pair hesitated, staring off in space, as if listening to a distant sound. Then the man bowed, and the woman turned to lead them back into the gloom of Uroboros.

They walked in silence down a long corridor that bent slowly to the right, wrapping around the inside of the building. Seth stayed close to Chance’s side, head up, ears perked proudly. They passed many closed doors, gray and streaked with black oil. A few doors stood ajar, opening onto deep gray rooms where dark machines twisted and turned, performing inexplicable tasks, while Engineers looked on with attentive awe, like supplicants.

Chance felt a growing despair looking at these demonic forms that seemed to him to writhe in pain. As an unman, would he now have to spend the rest of his life in ghastly, infernal places like this one? Would he come to accept these hateful things, even learn to like them? To need them? He missed the touch and smell of soil, the silence of the vineyard, the task of trimming vines.

The few Engineers or apprentices in the hall slipped silently aside as they approached, bowed and eyed the Guardian with nervous glances, and remained bent over until the group was well past and out of sight.

The hall began to widen and grow brighter. Then the passage opened through a great, iron archway. They stopped below it, on the threshold of a vast chamber that stretched off into darkness. Overhead the gray metal ribs of the building were exposed, fretted with black and gray pipes and wires, the veins and arteries of the mysterious workings of Uroboros. Engineers gathered into shadows along the walls, dwarfed by the great sweep of the room. Dim, ugly whinings of stretched metal, thundering sheets of hammered tin, and a dull thumping on lead echoed through the hall: music of the Dark Engineers. And with it, the smell of
boiling oil greased the very air around them, and made the walls black.

“Threkor’s Hall,” Seth whispered to Chance. “And there, there are-ra-are the Oil Pits of Threkor.” Two black pools bubbled in the center of the room.

To each side of the doorway, tall statues of roughly human form stood. Their surfaces looked to be metal and stone, hewn in sharp facets. Their arms ended not in hands but in spikes. Their eyes were red stones. Chance had never seen statues like this, of abstracted human form, looming rough and dangerous.

“Ah!” Chance gasped, as one statue turned its head and looked at them.

“Threkor’s Engles,” Seth explained, his ears flat and his tail curling under. “Ancient de-de-defenders of Uroboros.”

Chance and Seth and Mimir followed the Guardian into the room.

Beyond the two oil pits, a throne of grey steel stood on a raised stone floor. A man sat on the throne, with a shaved head and wrinkled dark skin. He wore lenses of black glass that glinted in the pool of blue light shed down from a bulb mounted high above him, where two soaring ribs of steel met perpendicular to a rail that ran the length of the hall, like the spine inside a dead, hollow chest.

Three men and three women stood to each side of the throne, Elders of the guild. Chance noted then that the strange woman of the Fricandor Lands stood behind one of the Elders, her green cat eyes and her white fangs flashing in the dark of the room.

By the throne, a tall hammer stood in an onyx plinth. The hammer’s black haft rose as tall as Chance. The hammer’s head was burnished silver, with a face as wide as two fists and a back that trailed away into a flat blade. Beneath this head, a collar of spiky crystals surrounded the top of the shaft.

It took a long minute to cross the silent black room. The hard steps of Mimir echoed into the distance. Before the throne Seth
stretched out, and Mimir and Thetis bowed. Chance stood in a daze, sweating in the heat. The smell of oil oppressed him, thickening the air, stifling his breath. The Guardian peered proudly at each of the elders, causing them to shift uncomfortably, until he finally looked straight into the black lenses of the man on the throne.

“Grand Creator,” he called. He used his otherworldly voice, loud but somehow soft. It sent through everyone a chill of fear. “Leader of the Dark Engineers. I am the Guardian.”

He let that echo into the room, and then ripen in their minds a moment.

“Last I stood in this hall on the cheerless dawn of our win in the Theomachia. We bound the fifth god. Then great Threkor, truest of the demigods, lay dying here between the oil pits, his hammer at his side. After your gravesongs I left you, but in the care of your guild, two Numin Jars were trusted, to be guarded until such time as the lost Thei, foul twins, might return. That dread day has come. Yield now the binding glasses.”

The Creator sighed and pushed his shoulders back. The other elders shuffled uneasily.

“Guardian,” the Creator spoke in a thin tone, like metal scraping on metal. “Four thousand years have passed. Much has changed. There have been other wars, and sometimes even the threat of the return of gods. The Numin Jars were lost. Stolen, from this very hall. Not in many years have the Dark Engineers had them.”

The air dimmed around the Guardian. He seemed to grow taller, and wider, holding in his speech as if fettering an explosion. Finally he spoke in a low rumble.

“You foul the name of Threkor, to say these words.”

“Guardian, we battled the Theon just days ago. Many of our sisters and brothers are dead. Many others are worse than dead. And two of Threkor’s Engles it destroyed, so that but five remain. If we had known where the Jars rest, we would have used one. And, had we failed, the Jars would be possessed now by that rotting god.”

The Guardian was unmoved. He held out his hands, palms up, and peered down at them, as if they were something alien to him.

“These hands broke and bound five gods, and stied them in five Numin Jars. Five.” His voice was even more otherworldly and fierce—just as when Chance had first heard it speaking to Hexus. Chance felt a rush of fear. Thetis, standing next to him, shrank: she dropped her head, knotted her fingers together, and bent her shoulders, trying to disappear. Seth cringed, back knees bent and his tail between his legs. Mimir looked at Chance, her face expressionless.

“Threkor forged seven Jars,” the Guardian continued, his voice growing loud. “Where is the last pair of binding glasses?”

The hall was silent, but for the humming of the black ribs above them and the bubbling of the oil pits. Finally the Creator said again, nearly in a whisper, “Lost.”

“You will have well earned the scourging wrath of the Old Gods, you wastes of men.” The Guardian turned to leave.

“Wait,” a voice called out. It echoed into the long silence of the great hall.

And Chance realized it was his voice. Everyone looked at him in surprise, but none was more surprised than he. “Wait,” he said again, nearly a whisper. He looked at the Guardian, then up at the expectant faces of the watching Engineers. The Guardian had said that the answer would be found here, with these people. Chance could not let the ancient man’s anger spoil their hope. Sarah’s life, Paul’s life, might rest on this.

“Is there… is there no other way to…?” He faltered.

“There is,” called out one of the elders of the guild, a wizened woman far more ancient than the others, with a bald head wrinkled and lined like a map. The Fricandor woman stood behind her, her predatory eyes watching Chance.

The Guardian looked over his shoulder at this old Engineer, still with his back to the throne.

“I am Sar, eldest of the Engineers,” she said. She bowed slightly. Her dark, quick eyes shifted from Chance to the Guardian, and back again. “There is another way. One hope remains.”

The Guardian considered this a while before he said, “Show it to me.”

The elder looked to the Grand Creator. The leader of the Dark Engineers frowned, then nodded. “Sar will take you. But the others stay here,” he said. He pointed at Mimir. “It is already blasphemous to have a makina enter the halls of Uroboros.”