Gods of Earth (58 page)

Chance touched the top. After fumbling for a moment, he found many small handles along the edge. He seized one in his fist,
and it turned easily. He turned each, one after another, working from bottom to top. Then the massive lid slid aside.

He reached in, and grabbed the sleeping child by the arm, and pulled on him. Slowly, reluctantly, the body came out. He pulled harder. Some of the white cords, like retreating worms, began to pull away and slip back into tiny orifices in the casket.

He dragged the boy into the room, and the last of the lines separated, retreating.

Chance let go of him.

The boy opened his eyes. He reached out, clawing at Chance, a look of panic on his face. Like a drowning man, he scratched at Chance’s face and arm, trying to grip on to him, to grip into him.

“Stop!” Chance howled.

The boy clawed at him, in panic screaming words that Chance could not understand.

And Chance thought: this was Hexus. Murderer of Seth. Murderer of my parents. Torturer of Sarah.

He grabbed the boy by the throat and smashed him against the wall. The motion started slow but gained momentum, his strength leveraged because his feet were planted firmly between two corners of the panels in the floor. The boy’s head connected hard. The boy stopped clawing. He shouted in anger, a guttural growl.

“God damn you,” Chance cried. Tears pooled in his eyes, but having nowhere to fall they gathered on his lashes, to be pressed out when he blinked. He smashed the boy against the wall each time he cursed him. “Damn you, damn you, damn you, damn you, damn you.”

The boy was still. Crimson blood leaked from the back of his head. It stained the gray wall, stained Chance’s hands, and floated in thick globs in the air. Shaking with weeping, still holding the boy’s throat, Chance pushed him away and through the Aussersein membrane.

“Oh, God, I’ve lost my way,” Chance whispered. “Please help me.”

Chance pulled off his shoes. His socks. His pants and underclothes. He pushed these through the membrane also, not wanting them floating about in the little space, clotting the close air. He tore his shirt open, not bothering with the buttons, and pulled it over his good arm. Then he carefully worked the splints off his broken arm and pulled the shirt after them.

He stood naked, filthy, bruised blue all over, thin from hunger, head pounding from the makina’s metal poisons and the assault of the god and from lack of water and loss of blood. And he was about to spend eternity like this.

“Dear God, One True God,” he whispered, pressing his hands together. “Take me and make of me an Erthengle, an instrument of your divine will on Earth. I do not mean to tempt thee God but rather beg thy mercy when I plead: speak to me, now, please. Give me some sign. That I might not become a thing of evil. Give me the power to become a thing of your will.”

There was no answer. But he was not surprised. He had not expected one.

He climbed into the coffin.

CHAPTER

54

T
he door closed over Chance. White snakes sought their way into his flesh. He would have screamed, but in seconds he was asleep.

And then awake.

He opened his eyes. He was looking at the bloody, broken body of Hexus—of the true boy that had become Hexus—floating before him, in the gray hall. Chance’s own clothes, looking like trash falling from some terrible height, floated around the naked, hairless corpse of the ancient boy.

Chance had done it. He felt different, but only a small bit different. He did not feel powerful. He was clean, naked, but his arm felt still broken, his head still ached, though it ached less.

Chance turned. The Aussersein membrane was behind him. In its silver he saw himself: a shape he recognized but also did not. His face, his form. But his skin was nearly silver. It pulsed, changing to a human shade as he watched.

“Is this me?” he whispered. “Am I Chance?”
Or something else? Something that only dreams it is Chance, and may awake some day as something else, and forget Chance as one forgets a dream?

He reached out to touch his reflection and touched the membrane. It was hard, unyielding.

Sarah waited. Sarah was dying. He had no time.

The door between worlds was still open, at the end of the hall. Still open.

“Please God. Forgive me. Make me your instrument.”

Now the hard part. Now the real struggle. Now he must split the vine, must plant each of twin cuttings in separate soil. One cutting would grow strong in shelter, and feed its strength to the other. The other cutting would face hardship.

Thetis had said it was impossible. That no one, not even a god, could bear the pain. But the ancient Puriman prophets, the great martyrs, had borne pains like no others had known, and had done so because they had the strength given them by their faith in the One True God.

Chance could not save Sarah if he could not survive the Guardian, who would attack instantly. He must be able to face the Guardian.
You would have to be a god for five hundred years before you had the power to face me, even to flee me
, the Guardian had said. So Chance would take a thousand years.

He would not hesitate. He had taken too long already. He pulled himself down the hall and then lay in the open doorway between Bifrost and the Numin Well. He reached back and touched the red button that controlled the door. The infinitely thin edge between spaces slid forward, and cut him evenly, precisely, in two.

In the Numin Well, long decades passed in which a formless half of a man screamed in pain, howling and writhing, learning, with impossible slowness, how to think first a single thought, then another, in a grinding agony.

Then years passed as he learned how to create the image of his whole body, hollowing out his own form to make the other
half of himself. More years passed as he learned to see, to hear, to move again. Then more years as he learned to think clear thoughts through the blaze of pain.

Trembling between form and formlessness, barely able to withstand the thought of the nine hundred years still before him, he opened the door to Bifrost, stepped into the tunnel of stars, and gazed out at the Earth and the universe.…

And he set about now to begin to discover his powers, in that narrow column of air, floating above the world. He would spend nearly a whole millennium here, exploring possibilities, finding what the universe could reveal to his new potency, and communing with his past and his present and his future. Alone wresting from ignorance the vast powers of a god.

Chance screamed. And screamed. And screamed. The pain was impossible. It consumed everything. He reached for the door—it was not possible to survive without the rest of himself—he would open the door and reunite. But he could not form himself enough even to touch the switch. His body—trying to find its shape while at the same time curling into a shapeless rebellion against its division—seethed and twisted, more formless than formed.

But then Chance heard, or felt, the voice—his voice, his own voice—reach out to him. From this very column of air, this Bifrost. From a future impossibly far away. He cried out even more fiercely then, unable to hear it, horrified at the impossibility of waiting so long before he could reunite his halves.

But he did hear it. It spoke of power. It spoke of how to be as if whole, and how to move through space and time.

Chance began to learn.

Chance stepped out of the shimmering door into the Hall of Ma’at and accelerated to a hummingbird’s pace. He shot past the shattered brains clumped wetly on the floor and into the hall beyond.

Sarah lay there, frozen in slower time. He could see the warmth of her body and the motion of her heart: she still lived. Relief flooded him.

The Guardian stood, clutching Paul’s broken body in one hand. The power of Hexus’s god flesh was fading, Chance could feel. The Aussersein fragment of Hexus was losing its shape, losing a little bit of itself with each blow from the Guardian, and there was no soul in the Well linked to it, informing it so that it could reshape itself. In seconds it would be formless matter. Paul’s legs were twisted impossibly, his chest pulpy and torn and red. His blood stained the dark walls of the hall. The Guardian held the hammer over Paul’s face, ready to smash the skull. The hand with the god’s eye was rising, but at a human speed, too slow to intervene.

But Hexus looked at him. And somehow, Chance realized, Paul looked upon him also. Time stopped. Hexus and Paul reached for him, and Chance reached for them too. Between them they folded a moment of space, clasped a bubble of shared time together, hidden for an instant from the Guardian.

Chance saw the many hidden folds of space and time. He reached out and cleaved two folds, and then Hexus floated before him, turned mostly out of Paul, a diaphanous cloud in human form wrought of thin shimmering veins of Aussersein, a single eye in the palm of one ghostly supplicant hand held high.

And Hexus said, shaking the very air, in a call of joy, “All praise to my victory! Behold! Hexus is triumphant, and a new god is born! Now humankind can be redeemed! I have won!”

Chance stared, horrified, but then he felt the thunderous approach of the Guardian and he pushed Hexus aside, folded that
space away, and Paul stood before him, one arm thrust in darkness trailing after Hexus—but the rest of his brother still there.

And Paul said softly, his voice pleading and intimate, full of regret and sorrow, “Chance, Chance, let me be free. Let me.…”

Chance reached his hand out. “Paul—perhaps I can—I can.…”

Paul did not take his hand. “Let me be free,” he moaned.

Chance’s mouth twisted in despair. But after a moment he nodded.

“I love you, Paul,” he whispered.

“Tell Sarah,” Paul said, “tell the folks back home, tell them I died like a Puriman.” He drew his broken body erect. Unable to tug on the cuff of his one torn sleeve with only one hand, he shook it out, then pulled at it with a bend of the wrist, his fingers catching the cloth against his palm. He straightened as best he could the ripped collar of his white shirt. He smoothed back his dust-thickened hair.

And then the Hammer of Threkor smashed through Chance’s folded glade of space and time, and Hexus collapsed into Paul, snapping together again, as the otherworldly metal tore into their intertwined flesh.

Paul’s heart stopped.

Suddenly Chance was back in the hallway, Sarah at his feet, Paul dead in the Guardian’s grasp. Chance still moved at a hummingbird’s speed. But the Guardian, holding Paul’s body as the world crawled around them, raised his head to look at Chance. His expression of unbridled rage collapsed. He gazed at Chance with weariness and, it seemed to Chance, something like misery.

“Oh, Chance,” he said, his quick voice a buzz in their fast motion. “Why?”

Chance did not let his own despair, nor the Guardian’s despair, take hold of his heart. He stepped forward, bent space, and raced out of that world and time. The instant fell away. He chased the past.