The God Engines (9 page)

Power and grace,
Tephe thought.
There is a need for both.

Tephe nodded to the headman, and turned back to Ysta. “Of course,” he said. “Our healers will do all Our Lord allows them.” Ysta translated, quietly. The headman bowed his head, and then turned to speak to the village leaders.

Tephe himself turned back to see Andso and Eric, both dissatisfied with this agreement for their own reasons. Tephe briefly wished that Forn and Shalle had been there instead of the Bishop’s Man and the priest; it would have been nice if someone had appreciated the effort required to bring the Cthicxians into the fold without having to kill any of them. His Lord needed every soul, or so Tephe had been told. The captain intended to provide Him with every soul he could.

“Sir,” Ysta was suddenly at Tephe’s side, with the headman. “Headman Tscha says he wishes to ask a question of you alone, away from your priest and general.”

“Very well,” Tephe said, and nodded to the headman. The two of them walked some small distance away with Ysta in tow. When they stopped, the headman began a stream of clicks and sounds.

“Headman Tscha says that he wants you to know that he knows that you could have conquered Cthicx with little effort,” Ysta said. “He appreciates your restraint.”

“He is most welcome,” Tephe said. But the headman had continued talking.

“He says he appreciates the restraint, but he also knows that restraint comes from you, sir,” Ysta said. “He says both your priest and your general would have been satisfied to make his people obey Our Lord at the point of a spear. The headman suggests that to him this means that force may be the way such obeisance is usually made.”

“I am not sure I understand the question, or if there is a question here,” Tephe said.

The headman spoke again. “Headman Tscha says that ruler who compels allegiance is not always the good ruler, just the strongest, the most able to make others fear him,” Ysta said. “He says that the way you have approached the Cthicxians shows you are a man of honor. And as a man of honor, he wants to know whether you believe that Our Lord is good. Whether He is a good lord, or merely a strong one. He and his people are pledged to follow either way. But he wants to know for himself.”

Tephe smiled in understanding and opened his mouth to respond. Nothing came out.

The headman cocked his head slightly and Tephe for no reason he could place found the movement extremely upsetting. He closed his mouth.

“Sir?” Ysta said.

“The Lord is my Lord,” Tephe said, too suddenly. “Tell the headman that I am a reflection of My Lord. That which He is perfectly, I am imperfectly so.”

Ysta translated while Tephe calmed his internal agitation. The headman nodded and turned, clicked loudly. A young man came forward out of the assembled mass and stood next to the headman.

“Headman Tscha says that this is his son, Tschanu,” Ysta said. “He says his son has asked to be the one to carry the Talent through which Our Lord will find His way here to appear. He is eager to show his loyalty and faith to his new Lord, and to help his people welcome Him as their god. He says he is not afraid.”

Tephe smiled at the boy. “Nor should he be,” he said. “Tell him he shall indeed have this honor.”

The thin chain which held the Talent slipped over Tschanu’s head, catching slightly in his hair. Tephe pulled it gently and it came to rest around the young man’s neck, the Talent itself hanging mid-abdomen. The youth and the captain stood in a small clearing in the center of the gathering field, surrounded by the Cthicxians, all of them waiting for their new lord.

“Tell the boy that using a Talent is often tiring and that he should not be surprised if it saps him,” Tephe said to Ysta, who stood nearby. “Tell him to be strong; it will call Our Lord sooner.” Ysta translated; Tschanu smiled at the captain, who smiled back, and then turned to the priest Andso.

“You know the rite,” Tephe asked the priest.

“I have it here,” Andso said, placing one hand on the heavy codex he carried in the other arm. “The words are simple.”

“How will Our Lord manifest?” Tephe said. “I imagine you have seen this done before.”

“I have not,” Andso said. “Nor do I know of any alive who have. There is not much call to make Our Lord appear to newly faithful. This is an
old
rite, captain.” Andso said the words with a sort of joy. Tephe recognized the priest’s excitement in performing a ceremony none in memory had performed, as well as the awe in calling forth Their Lord, who was so rarely bidden, and never by a priest of Andso’s rank. Andso’s faith was at its peak, Tephe observed, combined as it was with a near-certain assurance of his own personal advancement.

“Do the rite well, priest,” Tephe said.

Andso looked at Tephe. “Captain, this is
my
part in our task,” he said. “As you bid me let you do your part, I bid you allow me do mine.” He turned away from the captain and opened the codex.

The captain said nothing to this but motioned to Ysta. The two of them stepped out of the clearing, to the edge of the assembled mass. Headman Tscha stood a small distance away, watching his son with an expression Tephe found unreadable. Tephe turned his attention away from the headman and back toward the priest, who had found the rite and was reading it silently to himself. Eventually the priest nodded to himself, looked at the headman’s son, and began to speak.

The words came in an older version of the common tongue, recognizable but inflected strangely, repetitious and lulling. The priest settled into an iambic rhythm, and over the long minutes the Captain Tephe felt his attention drift despite his own excitement in bringing these souls to His Lord, and having His Lord come to receive them.

The headman’s son screamed.

Tephe snapped out of his reverie to see the young man contorted, back arched and tendons strapping themselves out of alignment, bending the body back as if they were being cranked by a torturer. The youth’s body should have toppled over but it balanced on one twitching foot as if dangling from a string.

Tephe’s gaze turned to the priest. The codex had slipped from Andso’s hands, but the priest still mouthed the words to the rite, eyes wide at the youth before him. Neither the priest nor the captain could seem to move from their place.

The youth’s scream strangled itself as his jaw pushed unnaturally forward. The muscles that attached the boy’s jaw to his skull bunched and pulled downward, snapping the bone and sending a spray of blood into the face of priest Andso. Tephe heard the crack as the headman’s son twisted and then folded backward, as if on a hinge. A second font of blood arced up and out of his mouth. The scream that had been choked out of the boy was taken up by his father.

The body formed an arch, stomach to the sky, fingers and toes snapping like sapling branches as they drove themselves hard into the ground. The skin on the youth’s body went taut, as if being pulled hard from below. The boy’s forehead touched the ground, tendons and muscles in his neck contracting in spasms, twisting the young man’s face toward Tephe as they did so. The captain could see Tschanu’s eyes. They were terribly aware.

The air was a storm of screams and howls, Tephe’s own slipping into the gyre. No one moved. What power was folding the boy into himself pinned every soul into immobility. No one could run or turn away.

Red lines bisected every limb of Tschanu’s body; Tephe realized the boy’s skin was flaying itself. Beneath the skin red muscles uncoiled like fraying cable and then stayed themselves into the ground, pulling off impossibly stiff bone. In seconds, the arch of the headman’s son’s body was an x-shaped spine over a space tented by skin and sinew. With the small strength left to him, Tschanu forced breath past his ruined jaw, offering up a final scream.

A hand surfaced from the rope of Tschanu’s intestines, spilling them to the ground. It held for a moment, as if scenting the air around it and then grasped for body’s edge, where the tented skin met the abdominal wall. A second hand rose and made for the other side.

A creature in the shape of man pulled itself up and out of the ruined youth, its shape stained by the youth’s blood, lymph and bile. Tephe stared at the beautiful, streaked form, delicately setting its feet to avoid the visceral coils trailing on the ground.

My god,
thought Tephe.

Tschanu’s body, released from its gateway spell, collapsed softly. The eyes that had been so aware stared, mercifully blank. Tephe’s god seemed not to notice the pile through which He had traveled, choosing instead to gaze with dispassion at the now silent assembly. Tephe watched His Lord grow and brighten. The stink of the boy’s body steamed off Him, until He was clean and fine and twice the height of a man.

The god blinked and looked around Him at the mute and immobile mass of people, those who would be His worshippers, head angling down as He was then three and now four times their height and size.

Tephe saw His Lord reach down, take a woman from crowd, and draw her to His chest. He crushed her into Him.

Her body dissolved into His like a spun sugar poppet dropped into water.

Without looking He reached down and picked another of His newly-faithful, and consumed him as he consumed the woman before.

Consuming their souls,
Tephe thought, and despaired. His Lord never intended these souls for worship. He needed their allegiance to feed from them, and from the purity and power of their brief new faith.

His Lord reached down and picked up Tscha, headman of Cthicx.

I am a reflection of My Lord. That which he is perfectly, I am imperfectly so.

Tephe saw the headman staring at him as His Lord consumed his soul. A cry slipped from the captain.

His Lord turned, His beautiful, perfect face staring directly into Tephe, then slowly moving to the priest, the Gavril, and the head of the Bishop’s Men, each in turn struck by the terrible countenance of Their Lord.

LEAVE—said Tephe’s Lord, and splayed a hand toward Tephe as the other pressed another woman into Himself.

Tephe was on the
Righteous
, with ringing in his ears that was not ringing, but priest Andso screaming, high and aspirated and mad.

It took Captain Tephe a moment to realize that someone was speaking to him. He looked up from his walk. Neal Forn was pacing him, waiting for acknowledgment.

“My apologies, Neal,” Tephe said, and kept walking. He had been walking the length and breadth of the
Righteous
since he and the landing party had been returned from Cthicx. “I did not hear what you said.”

“I said I spoke to the healer Garder and he tells me there is nothing he can do for the priest Andso,” Forn said. “He says there is no physical damage to heal. What has happened to him is in his mind, which is beyond the healer’s Talent.”

“Yes,” Tephe said. He ducked under a low portal.

“The priest is no longer in the healer’s care,” Forn said, ducking as well. “He has returned to his quarters and will not leave them. His acolytes say he is poring through books and speaking to himself. When they speak to him he screams and throws things at them until they leave. When they leave he screams at them and calls them back.”