The Godgame (The Godgame, Book 1) (2 page)

Despite its grim homogeny, however, Eli found the city of Talos a wondrous sight, its grunge eclipsed by its vibrancy of light. If people could worship the Machine as it clanked on and on beneath the relentless rains of the Maelstrom, he reasoned, surely they must also deify Talos beneath the light of the comet that blazed in the sky above.

He had arrived. The ancient letter he carried in his breast pocket had not lied to him. This was the place where he was supposed to go. Somewhere, on one of those narrow streets, in one of those structures, he would find the man to whom he must deliver his message:
The Flood is coming…

He had only his blunderblast, the wooden box with the trinkets it contained, and the name of the man he must find: Marrow.

TERRITORY OF NOVA

ASH

On a cool summer day in the month of Flayon in the year 214 of the Meridian calendar, a boy named Ashley Roth Alexander stood where the sand met a wavering sea of grass, an exaggerated frown creasing his face, his throat forming the gravelly words of the enemy—spouted mindlessly at his friend, who laughed and rolled in the sand. He was twelve years old. He’d found a Talosian helmet—with its slightly lifted crest of plain, uncolored metal, dented and unkempt—and was now wearing it on his head. His friend, Brent, fell to all fours and began to bark like a dog, turning in place. The sky was clear and blue and filled with cometlight that warmed the sand and the backs of their necks in equal measure.

“Listen,” Ash said to Brent, mimicking the voice he’d heard recently spewing from the News Carts that travelled constantly along the greatroad and sometimes through his village. “All roads lead to Talos or death! Just as the Comet rises in the north and sets in the south, just as it has always been, so must we never stray from our duty!”

Brent looked at him, pushed his tongue out, panting. He barked.

Ash laughed, his face instantly a boy’s again. He cast the helmet from his head—it was too heavy and gave him a headache anyway—and then took it up and began once more to dig in the sand with it. He shoveled the sand out from beneath a clump of foliage until it was dark and heavy and wet.

“Maybe there’s more,” Brent said.

“Yeah, maybe,” Ash said, continuing to dig.

He dug the helmet in deep. He hit something hard with the helmet and his heart leapt.

“Did you find something?” Brent said.

“No. It’s just a root. You wanna help or just sit there and be a dog?”

“Oh. Okay.” Brent looked around, grabbed a stick, and started scratching at the beach with it.

Ash hit something else, tore it from the ground. He dropped the helmet and brushed the sand away with his hands. He held it up. “Here, boy,” he said, waving it through the air. “Here, boy. Here you are. Come on, boy.”

Brent dropped his stick and fell to all fours again. He hung his tongue out, his mouth open.

“Come on, boy. Come on.”

Ash threw the bone and Brent dived after it, lumbering across the sand pit. Ash laughed.

He continued to dig. He struck something. He dropped to his knees and began to scoop the sand away with his hands. He uncovered a wooden section, smooth and polished.
Is that what I think it is?
He pulled. The sand began to fall away in clumps. He pulled the rifle free, laid it in his lap, and stared at it, awestruck.

Brent came bounding up to the edge of the hole, the bone clutched in his mouth. He growled. When he saw what Ash had, the bone dropped, his mouth hanging open. “What’s that?” he asked, knowing the answer.

“It’s a… A…”

“One of those flute rifle things.”

“Yeah,” Ash breathed. “A Talosian fluted rifle.” He held it up. The rifle’s barrel came to a wicked spear-point, lined with holes that made a terrible wailing sound when it was fired. “Do you think it’s loaded?”

“Maybe we should just leave it,” Brent said.

Ash looked up at his friend. “No way. It’s—”

A scream shattered the air.

Silence. His ears were ringing.

His friend was gone. Brent had disappeared from the edge of the hole.

“Brent?” Ash lifted himself, his legs numb beneath him.

For a moment, his eyes wouldn’t focus and he stared out over the blurry sand. He could hear the wind rushing through the grass, making him sick. The bone he’d dug up sat on the edge of the hole, looking old and disgusting. The comet glared, the sky a flat blue.

His friend lay rolled in a heap by the edge of the sand pit. His friend wasn’t moving.

Slowly, Ash crawled from the hole. He still held the rifle, dragging it beside him with one hand. The sand was warm and scratchy under his bare feet. He padded downhill to the lowest point of the sand pit, where the sand darkened and solidified. He approached his friend.

“Brent? Hey. Come on.”

Brent was turned away from him, facing the grasslands. His head was slumped beneath his shoulders, his legs flopped awkwardly. There were dark stains on his clothes.
Blood? Is that blood?

Ash lifted a foot and tentatively prodded his friend. “Brent?”

He dropped to his knees and reached his hand out and shook his friend. There was a cut on his finger where the rifle had scratched him somehow. He touched Brent’s hair, his friend’s cometburned neck.

His hand came away bloodier than before.

“Brent?”

Brent shuddered, his body trembling. He turned over, his eyes were blank, then began to fill with awareness once again. “Ash?”

Ash looked at his friend. His heart was thudding in his throat, making it hard to speak. He helped his friend to sit up. “You okay?”

Brent dabbed at the back of his head with his hand and it came away bloody. “That’s strange,” he said.

Ash helped Brent to his feet. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

“Okay.”

Ash dropped the Talosian rifle in the sand, kicked it into the hole, and he and Brent ascended the sand pit, returning to their village.

~

His family ate in silence, sitting around the little table in the kitchen.

Ash watched his dad wolf down his meal, a chunky stew made from blanch root, which gave it a purplish hue, or so his mom said. But his mom hadn’t made it. His mom was sick in bed; he could hear her coughing in the back bedroom even now, even with the door closed. His dad thought Ash didn’t notice his twitches of concern. He watched his dad’s large and hairy fingers push a wad of bread through the slop, taking large bites that left crumbs in the bristles around his mouth.

Blanch root stew was the only dish his father seemed able to make. It was the only thing they’d eaten all week.

Ash’s little sister Kya sat next to him, slurping noisily but not talking.

His other two sisters, Terry and Alex, sat on the floor in the corner, playing quietly with their toys.

Ash kept thinking about the rifle. He didn’t dare tell his dad about it. They were supposed to be safe from the Talosians: “They’ll never get this far,” he’d heard his father say on numerous occasions. Where had the rifle come from?

Maybe it’s really old
, he thought. But it hadn’t appeared rotten or damaged in any way. It seemed more likely that it had fallen from the sky, from one of the aerials, and become buried in the sand.

What if someone finds it? His heart leapt in his chest. If one of the adults found it, they’d have it destroyed. If it had been a Novan iron rifle, he would have brought it home proudly for his dad to see, taken it out into the woods and practiced firing it. He needed to learn to shoot. He needed to be able to defend himself and his family.

But the rifle he’d found was Talosian. It belonged to the enemy.

Still… if he took it far enough into the woods where no one could hear him, he could learn to shoot. Besides, it might be valuable later to know something about the enemy’s weapons.

“May I be excused?” he asked his father.

His father grunted assent.

Ash ran his bowl to the sink and dumped it, ran back to the living room, thinking about how there was still an hour of cometlight. If he left now, he could run to the sand pits for the rifle, hide it somewhere safe, and make it back before bedtime.

“One minute,” his father said, stopping Ash in his tracks. “I need you to pick up something. From Mother Marlena.”

“But, Dad…”

“Ash!” his dad said.

Ash jumped, shocked by the seriousness of his dad’s tone.

His dad sighed, scrubbed a hand through his greasy hair. “It’s for your mother,” he said. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Mother Marlena knows you’re coming. Get the medicine and hurry back.”

“Okay.”

~

He’d heard stories from the other kids at school about Mother Marlena. They said she was a witch. They said she could create flame without a striker and bread without flour.

According to the stories, long before Ash had been born, Fallowvane, their village, had been struck by a horrible sickness. People had been confined to their homes, not coughing or sneezing, but overtaken by a horrible heat, a fever that burned and burned inside their bodies, until it drove people into delirium and psychosis, and then grew so hot it boiled their brains in their skulls.

More than half the village had been dead when Mother Marlena had appeared from the woods. It had been her cures, her strange remedies involving herbs and blood, which had saved the village. According to the stories, she had laughed when she’d seen the state of the village, made a thick tea and ordered everyone to drink as much as she or he could. Within a matter of days, people were better, and so the sickness had passed.

Ash skipped along the main road. To get to Mother Marlena’s he had to pass through most of the village. The old woman’s house was on the edge of the forest.

The light had dimmed by the time he reached it. He still had close to half an hour before the end of the day, but the comet had now fallen behind the flatness of the grasslands to the south, leaching the color from the world. He ran up the wooden steps and rapped on the door with his fist.

Almost instantly, the door opened, as if the old woman had been standing on the other side waiting for him. Ash took a step back.

Mother Marlena looked at him, her large and watery eyes nearly level with his. She wore a succession of layered shawls, cascading from her shoulders and down the length of her body, joined by nappy strands of hair.

She smiled at him, her lips large and moist, wreathed with lines in the grayness of her ancient skin. She waited for him to speak.

Ash gaped. Mother Marlena was the oldest woman he’d ever seen, and her features were too large, her eyes, her nose, her mouth; his heart thudded with fear. He’d forgotten everything he was supposed to say.

“Come in, child,” Mother Marlena said finally, and her words were soothing.

Ash took a deep breath. He was brave, he told himself. He didn’t believe the little kid stories. Real witches didn’t eat children.

Mother Marlena stepped aside and, holding out her hand, beckoned Ash to enter.

Inside, the house was warm and smelled smoky and strange. Something cooked over the fire and everywhere there were shelves lined with jars and trinkets of all sorts. Movement caught the corner of his eye and he turned in time to see the old woman whisking across the room, the tassels of her shawls wriggling out behind her with such detail his eyes seemed unable to fully perceive what he saw, tracers of color that faded reluctantly from the air.

“I know who you are,” Mother Marlena said. “I’ve seen you.”

Ash stood where he was, shuffling his feet nervously, still unable to speak.

The old woman’s eyes narrowed, she leaned on a small table positioned between herself and Ash, her bottom lip drooping on its surface. She sniffed loudly. “You have an interesting smell. What are you?”

Ash swallowed dryly and could hear the click in his throat.

“Your dad sent you? You’re here for your mother?”

Ash nodded his head.

Mother Marlena laughed, her jowls bouncing. “I’m sorry, child. I don’t mean to scare you. What’s your name?”

“Ash.”

Mother Marlena smacked her lips. “Ash,” she said. “Okay. Hm.”

Something brushed Ash’s leg and he jumped, barely able to stop himself from crying out.

When he looked down, he saw only a spiked tail disappearing into the shadows beneath the table.

“Oh, don’t worry about him,” Mother Marlena said. “That’s Bergman, the kylix. I’m afraid he shares the pugnacious disposition of the man he’s named after. But nothing to worry about. He’s harmless. Just relax. Although they say if you stare into the eyes of a kylix for too long it will steal your soul, it’s not really true. Nothing to worry about.”

Ash shuffled his feet, took a deep breath, and looked up at the old woman. “My mother is sick,” he said.

Mother Marlena’s eyes melted. “Oh, poor child. I’m sorry.” For a few seconds, she stared at Ash, studying him intensely, and then, finally, she turned away and began searching her shelves. “I’ve prepared something for your mother,” she said, her back turned to Ash. “I believe it may help.”

Ash took another breath; his heart was beginning to slow.

“It’s funny,” Mother Marlena said, continuing to rummage. “There are cures for all sorts of obscure afflictions, yet it is fever that persists and remains the most difficult to treat.” Something rattled and fell from the shelf, but Mother Marlena moved on without bothering to pick it up. “Did you know you can heal hives, rashes, and anything that itches with blanch root?”