Gorel and the Pot Bellied God (11 page)

I want to return! Gorel shouted, though his voice had no substance here, no existence. I dedicated my life to returning, to revenge.

Revenge… the figure on the throne, his old self, laughed, and it was a horrible sound, dead and dry like a brook that no longer ran. You wander in ignorance, wasting away your time, your mind addled by the stupor of gods and your body’s needs. You fuck, Gorel. You fuck, and you kill, and you suffocate yourself with the gods’ drug. What makes you different to an animal, Gorel of Goliris? What separates you from the lizard and the snake, who crawl on their belly, and fuck, and kill, and die?

Faith, Gorel said, staring up at the wizened old man on the throne. Outside the wind picked up and its howl was like the final baying of a dying dog.

Faith in the gods? The figure on the throne laughed.

No, Gorel said. Faith that things will always get worse.

That they will, the old man who was himself said, and he was no longer laughing. And that is the proper attitude of a son of Goliris.

You failed, Gorel said. The old man nodded. Things will always get worse, he said.

For you, at any rate, Gorel said, and then the gun was in his hand and he pressed the trigger, and the old man, Gorel’s own face yet wizened beyond recall, exploded in a cloud of dust.

He blinked and the surface of the pool resolved itself, a smooth calm blue, and he knew then that he had at last found the Mirror of Falang-Et, and he cursed it, for it had shown him only himself.

Beside him, the girl Tonar stirred. She looked up at him, and there was something in her eyes, an alien, inscrutable look that had not been there before. ‘You come too late,’ she said, and her voice, too, was different, older somehow, and though pleasant there was a dark undercurrent to it, like the cold currents of a river that run below the warm surface. ‘Can you do it still, I wonder?’

‘Do what?’ Gorel said.

‘What you were meant to do,’ Tonar said. He stared into her eyes and suppressed a chill. He did not at that moment recognise her. Tonar said, ‘Time is short. It is too late, and you have been used without mercy, Gorel of Goliris. Look into my eyes.’

He tried to tear away then and his eyes left her face and returned to the placid pool of water, this Mirror of Falang-Et, and as he stared at the surface it seemed to shift and change, the water darkening, and the outline of something dark rising from the surface, muddying the water, and he could not tear himself away, could only watch as the water churned.

Two large, pale eyes surfaced from the water and regarded him, and he tried to take a step back and couldn’t. The rest of her came into view then, and he again tried to turn away, revolted, but he was held fast.

She had the body of a human woman but her skin was like blue glass, her eyes like ancient marbles that had lost their sheen, and her belly was a bloated mass, her hair straggly and woven with weeds. She was a corpse, a drowned corpse, and this was her watery grave.

‘Look at me, Gorel of Goliris,’ the corpse in the water said, and her eyes held his, and she spoke with the voice Tonar had used, it had been her voice speaking through the falang girl. ‘Tell me, what do you see?’

‘An abomination,’ he said, and would have spat, but she laughed, and her voice was like reeds as they choke a man.

‘You look into my eyes and you see what I, too, see,’ she said. ‘But perhaps it is too late do to what is needed. I waited for you, Gorel of Goliris. But soon the storm will break, the river will rise, and the shadow from the west will fall upon Falang-Et. He would keep me still, just as my husband did. Only you can free me.’

‘You are the mirror?’

‘She is the Mother of Us All,’ said a voice by his side. Tonar, almost in her own voice. Almost.

‘Not my mother,’ Gorel said. He stared at the woman in the water. The blotchy skin, the horrid belly, the blue-veined marble shape… ‘Who are you?’ he said.

‘She is the Mother –’ Tonar began beside him. Gorel said, ‘No.’

The woman in the water said, ‘Once I was a princess.’

And Gorel thought back to an old story, about a girl who fell in love with a frog, and he said, ‘No.’

‘I played by the banks of great Tharat when I saw a nyaka toying with a frog. A most beautiful frog. I rescued it, and carried it with me, and played with it by the river bank, until…’

‘No,’ Gorel said again.

‘I am the mother of a race,’ the thing in the water said. ‘Countless cycles of birth, and death, and birth again, and I am tired, so tired, Gorel of Goliris. We were not meant to live this long. Once I was a princess, and I was young, and in love. And now I am… a mother. Over and over. A vessel to be used, to be filled and emptied, and filled again. Over and over. Please, Gorel of Goliris, before it is too late. If it is not too late. Kill me.’

‘What of Goliris?’ Gorel said, demanded, speaking to the drowned creature in the pool. The sun shone overhead. The brook tinkled gently nearby. He could smell jasmine, and the flower they call samtora. ‘Tell me.’

‘What can I tell you that you haven’t already seen, Gorel of Goliris?’ the woman in the pool said. ‘You seek home. For some of us, for many of us, home is where you can never go back to.’

‘I will go back.’

‘So did I say, once upon a time,’ the woman said. ‘As my parents died, and their kingdom disappeared, and the sun rose and fell and the river flowed, and the children came, and the World changed beyond recognition. Kill me.’

His hand was on the butt of the gun. He stared at the thing in the water. How long? He thought. How long to exist like so, as falangs came, grew, made villages, built a city, this temple, how long for a story to become a legend? Without realising it the gun was in his hand, and pointing.

‘Kill me,’ the woman said. Her eyes never left him. ‘Please.’

His finger tightened on the trigger. And a soft, familiar voice behind him said, quietly, ‘Don’t.’

Gorel turned and saw Kettle. The Avian was standing erect, his wings folded. There was something different about him: the same quiet of his, the stillness of the hunter, was there still, but now it was overlaid with something else, stronger, perhaps: an air of command, of authority. Gorel said, ‘It took you long enough.’

The hint of a smile touched the corners of the Avian’s lips. ‘I’ve been busy.’

‘Doing what, exactly?’

The Avian shrugged. He came and stood beside Gorel and looked down at the pool. ‘So this is the Mirror of Falang-Et,’ he said. He nodded at the drowned woman. ‘Madam.’

‘You,’ the woman said. Her eyes moved, for the first time. She looked to Gorel and back to Kettle. ‘Get away from me.’ Her voice rose. ‘Tell him to get away from me!’

Kettle? Gorel turned and looked at his friend. ‘I need you,’ Kettle said to the woman. ‘Alive.’

‘I will not serve you!’

‘Oh, but I rather think you will,’ Kettle said. ‘Even as you are. I can give you a semblance of life, for a while at least. Enough for you to appear to your people.’

‘I will not do it.’

‘No? I could give you to the Mothers, to study. I expect they would be delighted. They are most dedicated students of reproduction…’

‘You wouldn’t dare!’

‘But you know better than that,’ Kettle said, and his voice was soft, like the barely-perceptible tread of a hunter’s foot in the forest. ‘You can see what I am. You know what I am. You are the Mirror of Falang-Et, after all. The Mother of All Falang.’ He laughed, and it was a shocking sound in the silence. ‘Not to mention their god.’

‘Kettle?’ Gorel said. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I look at you,’ the woman said, ‘and I see, yes, I see. But where you are I see only shadows! The beat of wings and a black and empty land, and flames growing, and a shadow, falling over me, over us, a shadow falling from the west…’

‘Your master,’ Gorel said, realisation dawning. ‘Your master sent you here? To capture the mirror? You knew what she is?’

‘No,’ Kettle said, ‘and yes, and yes.’

What? And where was Sereli? He turned to look and saw her. She was lying on the ground, unmoving. Unconscious, dead – what had happened? He started to go towards her and couldn’t. His feet wouldn’t obey.

‘Yes,’ Kettle said, ‘I came here to secure the princess, and yes, I knew – or rather suspected – what she was. I studied the old stories for a long time, and listened to the rumours, and interrogated who I could – better than you, Gorel, if you recall.’ And he laughed again, but there was nothing warm in that laugh. ‘And no, my master didn’t send me here. I came myself.’

‘I don’t –’ Gorel began to say, and the thing in the water cackled and said, ‘You fool! This one’s no servant!’

‘You –’ Gorel said, and didn’t finish, and Kettle smiled and bowed, and said, ‘I.’

‘I heard a new dark mage is raising an army to the north and west of here, in the No Man’s Lands’, Jericho Moon had said.

And later: ‘I flew from Der Danang to Ankhar’, the avian had said. ‘There is an army growing in the No Man’s Lands, and it won’t stay there forever’.

The Ebong mercenaries suddenly still. ‘I was shot at over Black Tor –’ the Avian again.

‘Too bad they missed.’

And later still, Gorel repeating the same recollection to Kettle, and Kettle saying, ‘You have a good memory, friend.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ Gorel had said, ‘but I can recognise shit when I smell it, and call it by its name.’

‘I’m not sure I get your meaning…’

‘If you came from anywhere, Avian, it would be from the Black Tor, I would say. An agent of this mysterious new mage I keep hearing about?’

Somehow, Kettle had contrived to look both bored and amused. ‘It’s a possibility,’ he agreed.

‘You, a
sorcerer
?’

‘It’s a living,’ Kettle said, and he shrugged. ‘I’m good at it.’

‘A dark mage?’ it seemed preposterous. Kettle shrugged again. ‘Mages come in all colours. Or shapes. What were you expecting, a whiteskin human with purple stars on his robe and a long big staff in his hand?’

There was something lewd in his smile. Gorel tried to shake the feeling stirring inside him. He said, ‘So that’s how come you talked to Jericho?’

Kettle smiled. ‘He mentioned you, and where you were going. Spoke of you in glowing terms. Also, thanks for the load of Buried Eyes. They made taking Ankhar a little easier.’

‘You sacked Ankhar?’ How long had it been since he left there? He had heard no news, but then…

‘My forces did, yes. They’ve been travelling up-river steadily. Most of Tharat is in my hands. And now I will take Falang-Et.’

‘But what about the falang god? The frog god?’ Who was he asking these questions of? And what did he care, he, Gorel of Goliris, whether a sorcerer, whoever he was, should sack this god-awful city?

Yet somehow he did. He looked down at the girl Tonar, still motionless, crouching before the Mirror. He cared for her, he realised. She had been damaged by the city, yes, but she was not yet lost, she could have a future yet. And perhaps they were all like her in the end, damaged things but not yet broken, not yet so useless as to be thrown away.

Kettle said, ‘Tell him.’ He was speaking to the Mirror.

The woman in the water said, ‘He will rise and fight you.’

Kettle laughed. ‘I think not,’ he said. ‘Tell him.’

‘He is asleep. He will rise again.’

Kettle made a gesture with his hands, and the face in the water twisted in pain. ‘I am the god,’ the woman in the water said. ‘He is in me. I am his, and I am him, and he is me.’

Gorel stared, horrified, at the woman’s bloated stomach, and for a moment thought that he could see the cold pale skin growing translucent, and a grotesque round figure peeping from inside the stomach, a fat, frog-like foetus, and he almost gagged.

‘You are mine now,’ Kettle said, and he made a gesture again, a small one, and the woman spasmed in pain and said, ‘I am yours,’ and Kettle smiled and said, ‘That is good, because, though you may not realise it now, you will help prevent the unnecessary bloodshed of your people –’ and the woman began to echo his words, and Tonar collapsed beside Gorel, no longer in the Mirror’s spell, and Gorel stared again at the, the thing, the god inside the woman’s womb and without conscious thought his gun was out of its holster and in his hand and he aimed and pressed the trigger once, twice, and again, until there were no bullets left and the hammer kept hitting an empty chamber. The thing in the water splashed and the water churned and turned a dark green colour, like embers and jade, and someone shouted, ‘You idiot!’ and something hit him in the kidneys and he fell to his knees and heard the sound of wings beating. He gasped for air. Raindrops began to fall. He saw a dark graceful shape sailing on the winds high above and felt nothing. Somewhere in the distance voices were shouting. At first he could not understand the words. He crawled to Tonar and held her in his arms. He put his fingers against her throat and felt her pulse, and it was there but very weak. He looked back for Sereli but she had gone. He held the girl Tonar in his arms and rocked her against his chest, while the shouting grew louder in the distance, and at last he could tell they were saying: ‘The river. The river is flooding.’