Gorel and the Pot Bellied God (8 page)

‘I don’t know where that is.’

‘It’s a long way from here. And a long way yet from my home. From –’ This was going to be crude. There was a tiny button on Sir Drake’s shirt, a metal disc, and he plucked it out and stuck it in the centre of the white paste on the window. ‘Where I am from. My name is Gorel. Gorel of Goliris. With the help of the mirror I might find a way to return to my kingdom.’

‘The mirror?’ she looked up, and there was a frightened look in her eyes. ‘But –’

‘Get back!’ he said, motioning urgently with his hand. She obeyed him. He plucked two metallic strands from Sir Drake’s shirt and wove them together. ‘But I learned much in the Lower Kidron. My adoptive father was a – you could say he was a smith. He taught me how to make this paste, which – there, it’s ready.’ He stuck the wires into centre of the disc, the two ends almost touching. When he released them they began to spin, the ends coming closer and closer to each other –

He turned and ran to the corner, shielding the girl with his body –

The explosion tore out the window and most of the wall. A rain of green fragments fell down to the garden below. Someone screamed. He heard doors opening and closing with a bang. Running steps. He straightened and lifted the girl in his arms. For a moment, for just a moment, she opened her eyes and looked at him and there was complete trust in her expression: she looked like a baby being held. Gorel shook his head and turned and faced the emptiness where the wall had been. As he took a step forward a dark, bird-shape swept past in the air and came to land on the edge. Kettle grinned at him. Gorel threw the girl. She had no time to scream before Kettle caught her. He sprang from the edge into the air, his wings opening, the girl held in his arms. For a moment he looked back, grinned again, and then, holding the girl with only one arm, tossed something towards Gorel. It arced through the air. It wasn’t going to reach him.

Gorel jumped.

He sailed through the air and below him the garden was filling up with running shapes, and he saw that more time than he had thought had passed, and it was getting dark, and he even noticed that the flowers Mistress Sinlao had called Gorgol Saber were opening, which meant the moon must be waning and the river tide was high, and whatever other conditions also prevailed. But he noticed all this with a detached mind, because his attention was riveted on the object flying towards him through the air – objects, to be exact, and he grabbed them just as he was falling.

He hit the ground hard and rolled and then they were on him and he felt teeth on his arm, drawing blood, but he had been successful and the guns were already in his hands and so he fired into the belly of his attacker, and felt the weight of him as he died.

His attackers. He pushed the corpse off of him, then rolled and straightened, guns in hand, and looked on his attackers. The front lawn of the House of the Mothers of Jade was full of…

The Mothers’ children.

He could sense them rather than see them. They had the aura of dust about them, of the gods’ black kiss, but it was weakened, diluted, the way an unscrupulous dealer at the temple might cut the precious dust before it sold. They were of all shapes, some morphing between body-images: a falang face melting into the hard-blue of a Merlangai, a giant human body growing fins, a hauntingly-beautiful girl with her naked body wreathed in shadows, a Nocturne bastard offspring cross-bred with falang –

The girl was the next to come at him, arms outstretched, the shadows covering her, and he could feel the cool touch of her on his skin and almost too late ducked the murderous teeth that threatened to clamp around his neck. He shot her in the head and the shadows fled from her.

He backed away from the advancing children. Behind them, standing outside the house, impassive, solid, and frozen: the Mothers, and at their head Mistress Sinlao, unmistakable, watching on –

No more Sir Drake of Kir-Bell, he thought, and it was like taking off a heavy, unwanted load. Gorel of Goliris smiled. The moonlight fell down and bathed the advancing children in an eerie, insubstantial light. Godlings? He thought. They looked like nothing more than lost, unwanted children. He almost felt sorry for them. The real god power, that sweet, all-embracing pleasure, the almost-unbearable bliss of the black kiss, was coursing through his blood. The real thing.

And he hated it. Hated it as much as he hated sorcery, hated it as much as he craved it, as much as he knew that he was bound to it, ever since the goddess Shar had kissed him, her lips stained with blood, as she died – died while laughing at him.

They were close to him now, these children born of carefully-plotted charts, of matching lineages, of linked blood-lines. The nearest was less falang than frog, and as he hopped one final time towards Gorel his large eyes seemed sorrowful, the eyes of an animal about to be taken out of its prison-basket and skewered for the grill. Gorel shot him between the eyes and had the satisfaction of seeing them close, at last. The heavy body flopped to the ground and was still, but the children continued to come.

The moonlight fell down on their faces, revealing extraordinary shapes, children with too many eyes or none at all; children with elongated skulls or giant, misshapen ones, children with two or three or four arms, with tails and with wings and with fins and with claws and with suckers – he fired again and dropped another girl to the ground. They never made a sound. And they continued to advance.

Behind him was the high wall of the house. He could not jump over it. Under his feet the ground was muddy and water covered his feet. The moonlight fell on the marshy grounds.

Water, Gorel thought. He stared at the scene before him. The water continued to rise. He thought – the river!

He glanced sideways. The water was rising. He looked back. Two of the children had disappeared. He swore, but quietly. Water-creatures. He glanced away again. Something was worrying at him, telling him he had forgotten something, or wasn’t paying attention…

A shack on stilts above the water at sunset: lanterns hanging overhead and the air thick with mosquitoes and incense, the water a calm dark-green below… he had seen the merchant there, for the first time, and Kettle… but there was something else, someone else, in the shadows, who he had paid almost no attention to…

Carnival. Laughter and shouts and the drinks flowing faster than Tharat himself, the spilled liquors themselves offerings to the river-god, and there, in another corner, a solitary figure shrank like the fungus growing from the roots of a wizened tree, not human, exactly, but of what nature, what species, even Gorel couldn’t say, but he knew the merchandise. Gods’ dust.

The dope merchant. What of him? Something was whispering in his ear, a sound trickling smoke, like rising water…

Something jumped on his back then and tried to claw his head off his shoulders, and he turned in a circle, furious, and fell back, and his attacker cushioned his fall and he freed himself, turned, and put a bullet into a chest where sores grew like fungus.

Fungus, he thought. He shook his head and tried to clear it. How many bullets left? There had been a fight, back in that bar on the river. He remembered Kettle flying away from it, and he himself left before any shots were fired. But before that… he glanced away again. There! He almost saw it this time. A shape at the far end of the garden, a shape like water given substance, watching him –

In a corner, the dust merchant, solitary, inhuman, indistinct. Gorel watched him. No one else paid the dope-peddler attention. The atmosphere in the place was of the kind one could cut with a knife – or shatter with a bullet. And so it was only Gorel who saw the figure moving unobtrusively onto the wooden platform that hung above the water, open to the sky, and there it turned a face – smooth, indistinct, like water – back and smiled, and dropped down into the river below, like water, falling, and melted into the river’s darkness.

The water was up to his knees now, and rising. And something darted underwater and bit him and he kicked, and lost his balance, and then he was fighting underwater, not with guns but with his hands, and the thing attacking him was slippery and smooth like a Merlangai female, and a fin rose through the water like a blade and sliced a line of blood on his cheek. He reached for her throat, blindly, and her teeth closed on his fingers, cutting down to the bones and almost breaking them and he screamed.

Something in the water laughed. And Gorel knew, and almost despaired.

A drunken conversation, locals shrugging off the threat of an invasion from the west… ‘You think no army ever came here, Avian? Tharat is a great god –’

‘Father-river, giver of life –’ from one of the men, dressed like a priest –

‘He at least would not object to a generous offering of blood!’

‘Foreigners’ blood!’

‘Well, as long as it’s not your own,’ the Avian said.

And Gorel thought – how do you breed godlings? Human stock and falang, yes, it was easy enough to come by. Even Nocturne, if enough money and influence are involved. Merlangai stock, no problem. What did they say about the Merlangai? They would rather fuck than talk. But how, and where, do you find a god to join the blood-lines?

Then his unseen attacker, this child in the water was on him, fastening on to him, teeth digging into his breast, hurting him, but Gorel stilled himself; and slowly, carefully, Gorel of Goliris reached an arm, tracing the flesh of the child in the water, almost lovingly, until he found the throat and his fingers closed on it and pressed, and his other hand followed and found the child’s eyes and his thumb pressed into the one on the left, burrowing into the cavity in the skull, and the child shuddered once in the water, and a second time, and was then still.

He rose from the water. It was almost up to his neck. He blinked away water, or tried to. But the water was in his eyes now, and inside him, and he could see the watcher, and he was closer now, and smiling out of that same smooth, featureless face he had last seen in the place by the water.

Tharat.

The children were still there, still focused on him. Had they ever been children, he wondered, or were they merely bodies, animated at the will of their creator, bred to be… what? An army? And the Mothers, did they even know this, when they decided to ask for a god’s help in affairs to which neither mortal nor god should have had right to engage in? Fools, he thought. He could no longer see the Mothers. Had they gone inside? Were they even now watching, studying the children, planning new lineages, new mixes, procuring more –

And he thought of the merchant he had tortured but not killed. Master Procurator, he had said he was, and Gorel thought him mere merchant. But what if –

He turned and half-walked, half-swam, trying to get away from the children. He did not want to kill any more of them, but still they came at him, and all the while the smooth smiling figure was watching him from the corner of the garden, and where it stood it stank of dust. The smell of it was in the water, the touch of it was on Gorel’s skin. Gods’ dust, and there in the corner its source, its purveyor, and Gorel ignored the children and made for the god Tharat.

The water was rising. His guns were holstered. He took a deep breath – and dove. When he opened his eyes the moon filtered through the surface and cast the world in a pale glow. Shapes moved underwater. He thought he saw a group of Merlangai, dancing, their bodies moving in time to an unheard beat. He swam and had the sense of a vast world opening before him, like a river spreading wide as it reaches the distant ocean. He felt rather than saw a large body moving below him, had the sense of a great depth underneath. None of it was real, he thought. Or rather…

He had been to this place before. It was the space between the world of men and gods. He had received the black kiss at such a place… but this was not the world of some itinerant god, a little hole in the membrane between realities. This was the god Tharat’s place, a god fed and made strong with the belief of his countless peoples, falang and human and Merlangai, all along his banks. He could not fight such a god.

He swam and there was air in the water – or perhaps there wasn’t, and it simply didn’t matter in such a place. He could no longer see his attackers, and he was glad. Deep down below he saw lights, and as he dove further he saw structures taking shape, and a giant palace rose from the riverbed.

He dove towards it. What choice did he have? And it was pleasant down here, under the water… it felt like flying. His body tingled with the power of the god in the water, his mind felt restful, at ease, the black kiss satisfied at last. He could remain there forever, he thought, in that perpetual, unthinking bliss… he swam slowly down, and the palace grew before him. Ethereal Merlangai women swam towards him, smiling, reaching out their hands. Priestesses in a trance? Dead spirits summoned to their lord’s domain to be his servants? He didn’t know, nor cared. They escorted him through high, arching gates, and into an immense hall. Light streamed in through windows high above, a water-light, pale and fractured. In the middle of the hall sat the god Tharat.

Here, he was not of one shape. Like water, he flowed, and the shapes melted and ran through him, assuming aspects of fish, of nyaka, of human, of falang and Merlangai, of Ebong and Duraali and Nocturne and a hundred others, and Gorel knew they were the shapes of all the things that had ever died inside Tharat.

Gorel floated in the water before Tharat. ‘You,’ the god said. Gorel’s hand sought the butt of his gun. The god chuckled. ‘I’ve watched you,’ the god said. ‘We have been close so many times, you and I…’

‘My mistake,’ Gorel said. Tharat laughed. ‘I think not,’ he said. ‘We can help each other.’

‘I doubt that,’ Gorel said. The god inched his head in an oddly-human gesture. Around him, shapes materialised like ink pouring into water, and Gorel saw it was the children he had killed. The god chuckled again. The children stared at Gorel with unblinking eyes.

‘Here, they would be harder to kill,’ the god said. Gorel shrugged. ‘The dead should have the decency of staying that way,’ he said.