The Broken God Machine (11 page)

The Lagos made them watch. Not only the four who had been in their initial
group, but all of the other prisoners. Thirty-seven children, ranging in age
from four to just under twelve, were sacrificed to the metal thing. Their
smoldering bodies lay in heaps within the circle of bone, their wails of terror
and pain seeming to echo still from the rocky cliffs. Pehr felt numb, unable
even to process all the death that he'd been made to witness. He was astounded
by the metal thing’s sheer efficiency; none of the children had made it more
than three steps.

By the end, he was able to recognize the patterns in whatever it was that
the thing was screaming at its victims. Jace was actually following along with
it, repeating the words back in time with the metal thing even though he didn’t
know what it was saying. There were tear tracks on the younger boy’s face, and
Pehr thought there might be tracks on his own, though he couldn't remember
weeping. The whole ceremony seemed to him a horrific, deranged nightmare
from which he could not wake.

“What horrible things their gods must be,” Jace croaked at the end, when it
was done and only he and Pehr remained. “What awful, evil, terrible
things.”

Pehr nodded. His throat was parched, and his first attempt to speak came out
as nothing more than a dry rattle. He swallowed a few times and tried
again.

“Did you … have you learned anything?” he asked, knowing the answer but
going through the motions anyway. Jace made a noise that might once, in some
other universe, have been a laugh.

“No. No, I did not.”

“I won’t let them hurl me in there,” Pehr said. “I … if I'm to go to my
death, I will do it on my feet.”

“I would do the same,” Jace said. “Together, Pehr. Let us go together.”

“How can we tell them this?”

The chanting was about to begin again, Pehr was sure of it, and there was
little time in which to act. He took the initiative, stepping forward and
pointing to the priest.

“You!” he cried. “You, Lagos … look at me, you filthy thing.”

The creature turned, an expression of mild curiosity on its face. Pehr
pointed at Jace, and then at himself, and then to the circle. He turned his
hands up in a questioning gesture, and the priest nodded.

“Very well,” Pehr said. “We’ll go. Yes, see? Me, him … go there. Yes? Do you
understand me, you stinking pile of fur?”

He gestured at the warriors and made a shooing gesture, then pointed again
at himself, and Jace, and at the circle of bone.

“We will go on our own. Do you understand?”

The priest looked at the two Lagos warriors, and then back at Pehr,
considering this. After a moment he smiled – a more genuine expression than the
one he’d flashed to Pehr at the beginning of this massacre – and nodded,
gesturing with his hand to wait.

“Yes, yes,” Pehr said, feeling weary, full of disgust. “Do your song and
dance, you miserable, murdering pile of shit. Just do it, already.”

“There must be a way out,” Jace said.

Pehr shrugged. He could feel desperation tightening its grip around his
throat, making it difficult to breathe. “I am truly open to suggestions.”

The chanting began again, and Pehr forced himself to breathe, forced himself
to remain calm and rational. He'd seen the worst that the Lagos could give to a
man, knew that now was his time; he must make peace with it and go to his death
as a hunter would.

“Pehr,” Jace said, his voice a sort of croak that made Pehr understand that
the boy was feeling every bit of the same tension that coursed through his own
body.

“Yes.”

“I will see you in the land of the stars, cousin.”

“Brother. Let us be brothers, Jace. Have we not grown up as such?”

The boy nodded. “We have. My brother … our time has been short, but it has
been good to know you.”

Pehr had no words. He stared at his cousin for a moment, and then he pulled
himself suddenly into a stiff, upright stance. He brought his clenched right
fist up against the center of his chest and held it there over his heart. It
was a sign of respect between hunters and a gesture that neither boy was
supposed to make before taking their Test, but it seemed more than appropriate
now. It seemed necessary.

Jace smiled a little and returned the gesture. Only a moment later the
chanting stopped, and the Lagos priest turned to them, grinning its wicked
grin. Pehr steeled himself, knowing what was coming next, ready for it. He
began to step forward.

And then the Lagos priest pointed not at him but at Jace, and it signaled
that he must move into the center of the ring.

“No!” Pehr shouted, and he strode forward. “Together! We go together!”

The priest roared something and Pehr felt strong arms grab him, hauling him
back. He could hear Jace also shouting, insisting as well that they go into the
ring together. Pehr struggled with all his body would give him, lent a sort of
lunatic strength by his rage and desperation, until at last one of Lagos rammed
the butt of its weapon into his stomach. As he doubled over, the creature
grabbed him by the hair and pulled backward, exposing his neck and pressing the
blade to it.

Pehr went silent, and Jace did as well, the two boys looking at each other
in desperate horror. The Lagos priest strode up to Jace and let forth a string
of growling invective, stabbing his finger first at Jace, then at the circle.
The words meant nothing to either boy, but the message was clear: enter the
circle by himself, ahead of Pehr, or watch them cut Pehr’s throat. Jace
struggled with his own captors once, and the priest turned as if to instruct
the warrior that held the blade against Pehr’s skin to finish the job.

“No!” Jace shouted. “Wait … no, I … very well. I shall go. Yes, me, in
there. By myself. I will go.”

“You murderous, vile …” Pehr began, and Jace shouted for him to be
quiet.

“Don’t make me go into the circle alone,” he said, and in his voice Pehr
heard the tremendous fear that Jace had been straining to keep in check all of
this time. “Be here for me, if you cannot be there with me.”

Pehr stared at him for a moment longer, still straining against the Lagos
that held him, uncaring of the blade that still pressed against his throat.

“Please,” Jace said, his voice broken, and he began to weep. Pehr felt the
strength leaving his muscles, the urge to fight passing as acceptance washed
through him. They were to be made sacrifice to this metal thing, and there was
nothing that would stop it from happening. If he could ease Jace’s passing,
then he must do so.

“All right, Jace. I will be here for you,” he said, and he closed his eyes
against the tears that threatened to overwhelm him.

“Thank you,” Jace said. After a moment more, the priest, sensing that an
agreement had been reached, barked an order at the Lagos that held the boy, and
they released him. The blade was removed from Pehr’s neck, but the grip on his
arms remained tight.

Head bowed, Jace turned toward the circle. Pehr couldn't stop his brain from
its furious, frantic search for a way out, a way to cheat this death that would
rob him of all he'd lived for. There must be a way. There must—

Jace crossed through the edge of the ring of bone and continued on. The
metal thing sprang to life as it had for the others and Jace kept moving, arms
out as if to embrace the twin beams of fire that were to come. After a moment,
Pehr realized that the thing had finished its opening speech, but had paused at
the moment where, previously, it had simply dispensed death. Its head was
tilted as if in confusion, and when it spoke again, the words that it gave were
not any that Pehr had heard before. Jace took a few hesitant steps forward,
unsure what to do.

The metal thing repeated its last query and then held out its hand,
obviously expecting Jace to relinquish something. The Lagos that surrounded
Pehr had gone deathly silent. It was apparent that none had ever seen this
before, and they had no idea how to react. Even the head priest was staring in
undisguised awe, jaw hanging, eyes wide.

Jace stopped, turned, and glanced back at Pehr, raising his shoulders in a
shrug of confusion and saying, “I think it likes me …”

Then the metal thing dropped down into its customary stance of attack, and
even as Pehr screamed the boy’s name in warning, he knew he was too late. The
red beams spewed forth from the metal thing’s eyes and bored into his cousin’s
back. Jace’s eyes went wide and his mouth opened as if to scream, but instead
of sound a great jet of blood and steam came boiling forth.

Jace was taller than the other children that had died underneath the metal
thing’s gaze, and he had gotten much closer to it; the beams were angled
differently. They blasted out from his chest and traveled forward as if to
infinity, only three feet to Pehr’s right. Several howling Lagos warriors were
killed or maimed by the inadvertent attack. Pehr could smell burning hair and
cooking flesh, and for one grotesque moment the scent brought images of kampri
barbecues to his mind and made his stomach rumble with greedy enthusiasm.

Then the fire stopped, and the metal thing slumped back against its wall.
Jace stood rigid for a moment longer, still staring up into the heavens with
wide, frozen eyes, blood pouring forth from the holes in his chest. Then he
pitched forward, falling flat on his face, and his body went limp. Jace was
dead, and Pehr steeled himself against the wave of grief and pain that came
washing over him. This was not the time to mourn; it was the time to stay
strong and die as a hunter. Any less would only bring dishonor to the boy lying
face down on the poisoned ground before him.

All around him, the Lagos were roaring with approval at Jace’s death. When
the priest that was conducting the ceremony turned to Pehr, he could read
obvious relief in the creature’s expression.

That wasn’t supposed to happen
, Pehr thought.
They’ve never
seen it do anything like that before
.

Any lingering doubt that Pehr might have had was now extinguished; whatever
this being that lived inside the circle of bone was, it was not the Lagos’s
thing. They worshipped it, but it was not made by them, and they did not truly
understand it.

He wished that he knew the metal thing’s language. He was certain that the
device had asked Jace for something, and if Jace had been able to provide it,
the boy might still be alive. Pehr wondered whether he would be offered any
such chance, or whether he would be killed immediately like all the others. He
had already decided one thing: he would not stop moving as Jace had done. He
would meet his death head on, racing toward it. Should the metal thing pause
again, Pehr thought he could reach it in time – and if he could reach it, he
would kill it if he could.

The chanting had begun again, and the Lagos priest grinned at Pehr. To the
creature’s obvious surprise, Pehr grinned back, an angry, toothy smile born
from the knowledge that he and the priest were now equals. Pehr now knew as
much about their god as the Lagos did, and if his own Gods were willing, he
would soon do battle with it.

Pehr waited for the priest to make his signal, waited for the Lagos to
finish their song, waited for his chance to enter the circle of bones.

* * *

The metal thing’s sensors had performed their duties for thousands of years,
and might perhaps continue on with them for thousands more. It guarded the
borders of its land as it always had, though in some distant past – before its
subroutines had become corrupted and confused – its primary function had been
greeting rather than defense. There was a time when the land whose entrance it
protected had been a glowing beacon of hope and promise to those who came
seeking entrance. Even in instances when the metal thing had been forced to
turn such pilgrims away, it had done so with utmost courtesy. Very rarely had
its lasers been required, and it had used them sparingly during the time when
the place hidden away in the mountains above had still been whole and
thriving.

The metal thing knew nothing more of the Lagos than they knew of it. Not a
thinking machine, it had rather been built with great cunning to give the
impression of thought. The metal thing did not know that those who made it were
long dead. It knew only that its job was to guard the pass.

When Jace had stepped forward into the circle of bone, his presence had
tripped the metal thing’s sensors and begun its greeting subroutine. The metal
thing was equipped with a powerful processing unit capable of performing
thousands of operations in parallel, and while the greeting was running, it had
also begun analyzing the boy’s chemical makeup. It was able to do this at the
genetic level even without obtaining a direct sample, and the analysis of the
data it had collected fired off a long-unused routine so important that it
suspended all other non-vital processes until it was complete. This sequence of
code was capable of modifying the behavior of existing processes, or halting
them, or firing new routines entirely.

Triggered by the detection of certain DNA sequences in the boy’s body, the
program had been added to the metal thing in secret by certain members of its
design board. Here was a security protocol that couldn't be circumvented. It
required no pass or code, no key, no voice recognition. It couldn't be faked or
fooled.

In the end, the metal thing determined that not enough of the DNA in this
boy matched the patterns hard-coded as acceptable, and it had resumed running
its other routines as normal. Unfortunately for Jace, a minor mathematical
error made by a junior programmer millennia before was responsible for his
death. An integer had been divided by zero somewhere between four and six
thousand years earlier, and the resulting slow cascade of errors had eaten away
at the metal thing’s functionality ever since.