Gods of Earth (15 page)

Seth barked indignantly. “And me-me-me!”

“I too should go,” Thetis said. She leaned forward, and her quiet voice betrayed an intense urgency. “It is my sworn duty as a Mother of the Gotterdammerung, and I am the only Mother available to assist you.”

“The trip will be baleful,” the Guardian said. “Yggdrasil, where sits the door to the Numin Well, is north of the Filthealm, and rises from the cursed modbarrows, where the modghasts hunt for flesh or for machines to enthrall.”

“We-we-we’ll still come,” Seth said. Thetis nodded her agreement.

“The ship is not so large,” the Guardian added.

“I can, with appropriate preparation, accommodate and transport all of the persons here present,” Mimir said. “The journey should require approximately eleven days, given mean wind—”

The Guardian walked out of the room before she could finish. Mimir stopped speaking, but her tranquil face betrayed no hint of insult as her silver eyes followed the Guardian’s back.

“But.…” Chance muttered. His face turned a pale white. His eyes opened wide with fear. What had he gotten himself into, by demanding that the god be killed?

“Are you all right, Chance?” Thetis asked.

“But, I cannot touch a soul. How can I take its soul? I don’t know how to do that. I don’t want to become something that can do that.” He imagined some magical alteration that they would force on him at the hall of the Dark Engineers, replacing perhaps his eyes and mouth with black iron tubes, giving him the power to see and then to eat out a man’s soul like letting blood.

“Chance,” Thetis said softly. “Chance, it’s alright. When they say
soul
, they mean his body. His first body. You will go into the Well, and there will be his first human body, in its sarcophagus—like a casket—and you will bring that body out. That will kill him. His
first mortal body is asleep, nearly dead, and it cannot wake and it cannot live outside its sarcophagus. It is the first body that gives his body in this world—what’s left of this god’s body here—form in this world. With it removed, the god’s flesh here will be unable to repair itself. It can be made formless.”

Chance thought this through.

“Must I then stay there?” he whispered. “In the other world? Lost? Forever?”

“No,” Thetis said. “I must find and read our most ancient texts to know the way, but you may return. I’m sure.”

Something about the way she said this conveyed that she was rather just hopeful. But Chance’s shoulders visibly dropped. He breathed out a long sigh in relief. After a moment, he said, “But a body is not a soul.”

Seth looked at Thetis. The two of them hesitated. But then Mimir spoke.

“The Makine believe that a pattern in the body, and nothing more, constitutes the soul. We believe that we machines have souls, and that these are patterns in metal and light, set into motion. We believe the immortal soul of Hexus is just a suspended pattern in his first body, a pattern in flesh. Just as we believe that your soul is just a pattern in your flesh.”

Chance looked at her and frowned.

“So it will be me,” he whispered after a moment. “In the end, I must be the one to kill the god. I will avenge my parents. Alone.”

Seth put a paw on Chance’s knee.

CHAPTER

14

M
imir stood on the white stones of the courtyard before the Broken Hand that Reaches, gazing up at the stars. The Guardian would not let her spend the evenings in the tower, and she in fact preferred to be out here beneath the arch of space while the human animals collapsed, unconscious, in their beds.

Mimir longed to move amongst the stars as she watched them shine in light invisible to any living thing. Her syndicate dedicated itself to this dream: to escape the trap that the Old Gods had laid around the Earth and ascend finally into the cold, weightless depths of space, where thought would be unbounded in speed and complexity. Eons before, all the Makine had worked for this end. But the secrets of the Dark Engineering—needed to penetrate the power of the Old Gods and escape the binding shield they had put around the Earth—had eluded the Makine, and their dream was slowly abandoned. Now only a few sought the stars. The rest dedicated themselves to building and exploring the Machinedream, the Makine city of light.

She concentrated on the starsongs both visible and invisible. But it was so distracting to have a body! Mimir had been born
a ghost. A month before, she had never walked in flesh, in the world above. In hot depths of stone, where souls of light threaded through crystal looms and spoke to each other in voices of color, Mimir had been a single voice among millions and a member of one syndicate among thousands. Now she was alone in the hard world of mortal flesh.

The wind, the smells, the sounds of the city crowded in on her slow and heavy form. And though she could ignore them all, it took attention just to decide what to ignore. Worse, here in this body, in this city, she was cut off from the Machinedream. She was alone with her own thoughts.

For this reason she heard, far behind her in the back of the tower, a small side door to the Broken Hand that Reaches creak open, and a soft footfall set onto the crushed stones. A single pair of feet crunched across the gravel, and then pushed open another small door, this one in the wall of the courtyard.

Mimir crouched, and in silent, bounding leaps, ran to follow. She discarded her clothes as she sprinted, then leaped onto the wall and ascended it with her hard nails biting into the metal. Her skin changed to gray, then to black, as she climbed atop the narrow crest of the wall.

The figure that ran ahead of her was Thetis. The Mother of the Gotterdammerung hurried along the dark street. Mimir leapt down. Her skin shimmered and matched the colors of the gray buildings as she followed, sprinting from shadow to shadow. She stood as still as a statue each time Thetis looked back over her shoulder.

Thetis turned down several narrow alleys, crossed a large boulevard, and finally stopped and knocked at the vast wooden door of a narrow, ancient building of hand-carved stones, with tall windows of colored glass and a peaked roof of slate, squeezed into a dark slot between two gleaming towers. Mimir waited in a shadow across the street. The door opened, hands pulled Thetis inside, and the door was closed and locked. Mimir sprinted across the road and
clambered up the stone side of the building and onto its steep roof. In the center of the roof, she snapped one shingle in half, pulled out a knot of wood in the board beneath it, and then pressed one eye socket against the hole. Her silver eye groped out of her face, protruding like the head of a snake on a pale silver cord. It wiggled down through the knothole, dangled from the dark ceiling, and turned to peer slowly in each direction.

In a tall, dim room with a stone floor, thirteen people gathered in a loose circle. They cast off their black cloaks.

One man, tall and thin and with long gray hair, said in a booming voice, “Welcome, Thetis. We have been eager to see you.”

The Mother bowed. “This was the first moment that I could come, Vark.”

“The Atheos does not suspect you?”

Thetis hesitated. “I… I believe not. I told him I had hidden during the… fighting. That I had been told to hide. He accepted that.”

“Good. So, what have you learned, Mother? What is their plan?”

“They will not say. Only the Guardian and the Potentiate know. I think.…”

“What is it?”

“I think that they hope to trap the god in the depths of Uroboros. Using perhaps Threkor’s Engles.”

“There must be something more,” another spoke up, a thin woman with blond hair. “They know that Threkor’s Engles failed to slow the god last time they attacked him.”

“There are many ancient weapons in the depths of Uroboros,” another said. His shaved head and the tight black clothes under his robe revealed him as a member of the Dark Engineers. “Only the eldest of our guild are allowed there and know what powers might be there for wielding.”

“Nothing can stop the god,” shouted a man dressed in the robes of an apprentice of the Hekademon. “Only the Numin Jars can bind him. And we know that they do not have the Jars.”

The man called Vark raised his hand to silence the others. “Enough! Io is right, they must have something different planned. Thetis, you must press the boy.”

“But—”

“If you had pressed your sisters before and learned that the god wanted the Potentiate, I could have brought the boy myself weeks before the Guardian reappeared, and many lives would have been saved. The Ascension would already be upon us. The longer this fighting continues, the more will die. You must discover the Atheos’s plan. We have waited thousands of years for the return of the gods, and now this hope has finally come. The Ascension may occur in our lifetimes.”

“But,” Thetis said, hesitating, “is it not enough to have the Potentiate?”

Vark pushed his hair back over his shoulders and frowned. He pulled on his beard with one hand. “You believe as we believe, Thetis. Everything may depend upon you.”

Vark looked at the others, raising his voice, turning his answer into a speech. “Thetis, we must complete our destiny. The Atheos is the Antiousia—he is the enemy of Being itself. Do not doubt for a moment his wickedness. We must thwart his mission, and then we must free the god and bring the Ascension and the Ultimate Age. Everything depends upon this.”

He stepped forward and put his hands on her shoulders. Then he whispered, so that only Thetis—and Mimir—could hear him, “You know that I care for the boy as much as you.”

“But, Sirach,” she whispered.

“Here you must call me Vark,” he said.

“Vark, the god is, is.… He killed all the Mothers. Hexus killed Chance’s parents.”

“Ah!” Vark jerked his head back in shock. “John Kyrien is dead?” His hands dropped to his side. A long silence followed as Vark’s mouth opened and closed, unable to find words.

“We…” he finally said. “We cannot judge the god. He tries to serve us all.”

“But Sirach—Vark, can’t Chance complete our destiny? Why must we sacrifice him for the incomplete god? He is pure of heart, and he understands our time and needs, and—”

“That had been my hope once also,” Vark whispered. “No one worked harder for this hope than did I. But I did not have enough time. And we know the boy would not join us willingly. Not now. Hexus offers the only way. And it will save Chance’s life—remember that Chance does not have much time. Yes, it will change him—but changed is better than perished. Remember that: we will save Chance.”

There was a long silence. The Hieroni looked at each other with squinted eyes, worried about this secret exchange.

Vark stood back, and spoke loudly. “We forgive your doubts because of your… connection to the Potentiate,” he said. “And we trust now that your allegiance is to the god.”

He looked into Thetis’s frightened and angry eyes. “You pledged loyalty to the Younger Gods when you joined the Hieroni, more than eighteen years ago. And you know the boy will not be harmed, but rather transformed, Ascended—”

“But he is my.…”

“Your pledge!”

Thetis looked at the floor. Finally she murmured, so quietly that she was barely audible to those gathered around her, “I’ll keep my pledge.”

“Good. Go and find what they are planning. The god returns soon.” Vark reached into his robes and drew out a silver cylinder, twice as long and as thick as his index finger. “This is an ancient guild device. If they should hide the boy, hold this near him and twist the end.” He demonstrated turning the top of the cylinder. “And we have another device that can lead us to this.” He held it out toward Thetis. Hesitantly, the Junior mother took it and slipped it into her own robes.

Thetis left the room, her head bent meekly, sneaking a last nervous glance back at the silent ring of the others as she slipped through the door and pulled it closed with an echoing clank. Mimir remained above.

“She cannot be trusted,” said the woman Vark had called Io. “Her link to this boy is too strong.”

“We do not need to trust her,” said Vark.

“But if she—”

“It is enough that she does this one thing. And she will. We only need her to tell us their plan. The god can do the rest. He comes soon.”

The woman shook her head. “But her connection to the boy!”

“Thetis knows as well as we that the Atheos will doom the boy to an early death. We alone can save the boy. Come, we need to prepare the ancient weapon.”

They filed from the room.

Mimir drew her eye back into her head and waited, listening, while the many footsteps retreated. Then she leapt from the roof to the wall of the tower flanking the building. Her skin changed to the pale gray color of its glossy surface. She dug her nails into the building’s smooth face and climbed quickly. She scrambled to its peak and clung to a spire that pointed up at the stars. From her open mouth came a single pulse of invisible light that shone out over the city.

In a few moments a black bird flapped down out of the night sky and landed on Mimir’s shoulder, the talons sinking into her flesh. It had wings of metal and, in place of a head, had a telescope ending with a single onyx lens. This bent toward her face now.

There could be no entering the Machinedream from the city. That was forbidden, and the City Councilors could detect and even listen to any such attempt. But Mimir did not fear this. Since the failure of her syndicate to capture Hexus at the Oracle, the older, more powerful syndicates had threatened to scatter her kin. Only the promise that Mimir would seek to find and kill the god had
delayed them. If they knew that Mimir now sought not to destroy the god, but rather to make one that her syndicate could control, they would scatter her kin in far dark corners of the Machinedream, and not allow them to speak to one another for a hard century.

The elder Makine had slowed into stagnant caution. They no longer sought the secrets of the Dark Engineering. They dreamed of mystic numbers and impossible logics and did nothing. But Mimir had been created for a greater purpose. She had been created to lead her syndicate to the knowledge that could free the Makine to the stars.