“Now make your offering to the god,” Slyur said.
“What—what do I offer?” the farmer asked.
“Your daughter is worth what to you?”
The farmer looked back at him with pleading eyes. “She is my life.”
“Then you should offer—” No! He would not say it, knowing how Chagri would delight in taking the poor simpleton’s life in exchange—especially if he could goad Slyur ever after with the knowledge that he, in his priestly role, had actually recommended it. Damned be his white empty soul! “Offer up a calf. Promise to gut it. Bring the blood here for Chagri to drink. Your
best
calf it should be.” The farmer continued to goggle at him. “Well, go on, man. Every moment, your daughter falls deeper in death’s well.”
He pointed up the stairs and the farmer steeled himself to approach the statue. He started up. Hespet Slyur thought he heard a deep deep moan, as if something far beneath the floor had begun to awaken. Above him, the statue’s smooth eyes watched the farmer bend over the shield and place his hands in the water. Slyur heard the whispers of his prayer. The farmer quickly descended.
Slyur said, “All right. Bring her to me now.”
The farmer went out and, after a moment, returned with his daughter held in his still dripping hands. Her head hung back. She might have been dead for all Slyur could tell. The smell of her was awful, like a piece of raw meat that had been forgotten for days in the sun. Her father’s face was seamed with misery and despair.
He doesn’t dare to hope, thought Slyur, and questioned himself if Chagri intended to make good his promise.
Without getting any closer than necessary, the Hespet reached out with stiff fingers and began unlacing the girl’s dress. The farmer had to assist him in removing it, but she weighed practically nothing and he could support her with one hand. Slyur looked askance at her protruding ribs and the hollowness below them. She did breathe, he saw—she was no more than the length of a finger from death, but she did breathe. The Hespet reached out and carefully took the girl from her father. The man immediately turned away and fled through the archway to be with his wife and family. The girl’s life no longer belonged to him. For a moment, Slyur was overwhelmed with pity.
He turned toward the altar. Torchlight fell across the girl, allowing Slyur to see her wound more clearly. He scowled at it. White maggots crawled within the purple gash. He looked away, and he could feel the worms wriggle onto his arms and move toward his elbows. He bounded up the stairs and nearly hurled the child into the shield before reaching the top. The tickling on his arms became unbearable. He leaned over the rim of the shield and dropped the naked, squalid body into the black water. Then he flapped his arms wildly, but saw even as he did that there was nothing clinging to them: the sensation of maggots had been in his imagination.
The water in the shield grew turgid with the girl’s filth. One leg stuck out—the wounded one—and Slyur pushed down her knee, submerging it. The water was cold. The girl had not reacted at all to its chill. Her head lay to one side, a string of drool spilling from between her lips.
From the other room came the echoes of a sudden sob.
Slyur turned. He knew the girl was dead now, but he would refrain from saying so. Let them have a little hope and hold it for awhile before easing them into the inevitable outcome.
He went down the stairs and into the antechamber. Everyone scuffled away from him. Could they read what he knew on his face? He ignored the painful stones underfoot and tried to pretend that everything was fine. The little twin sister stared up at him, reprehending him silently; he could not lie to her, so he concentrated on her father, opened his hands as if revealing that he was free of deceit.
From behind Slyur came a noise. His head snapped around. His breath stopped as he listened. In the altar room, someone spluttered and splashed in water.
Slyur turned and dashed back into the room, kicking up pebbles, ignoring how they bruised his soles. As he took the first of the steps, the child’s head appeared above the edge of the shield.
Slyur drew up in awe. The girl looked at him, then at her parents and brothers and sister. She began to cry. Her mother and father edged past the Hespet, who had become like a statue, part of the altar itself. The farmer lifted his daughter out of the water, handed her to her mother. Her shivering body was pink and shiny with water. The thighs of both her legs were smooth; not even a scar remained to show where the wound had been. They hugged her and rubbed warmth into her as they descended. The farmer lingered on the step beside the priest. “Hespet, I—I…oh
thank
you, Hespet. I’ll bring the calf this afternoon and bleed it here on the steps. I swear I will. Thank you.” He saw his daughter below and hurried to be with her.
Slyur continued to stare at the altar. Slowly he climbed the last two steps and dared to look into the shield. The water was dark but clear. Ready for the next supplicant.
Someone crept into the room. Slyur turned to find the twin sister at the base of the steps, her large cloud-pale eyes upon him as if he were all the world encapsulated. Her worship made him sick. He wanted to slap her face. He started down. His legs had become weak and his knees barely held him. The burden of her adoration dragged on him. He wanted to sit, but with great effort descended the remaining steps.
The child bowed her head at his nearness and the pressure of her worship lifted.
The Hespet shook his head. “Stop it.” He meant to command her, but the words came out in a weak rasp. He cleared his throat, massaged it at the same time. “Don’t honor me. Do not.” He grabbed her shoulders with trembling hands. “And I don’t want your family honoring me, either. It’s not me, do you understand. Not
me!
” He pushed her away, toward the arch. She stumbled in the stones, and looked back at him, eyes brimming with tears of confusion. She ran away.
Slyur listened to her retreat. He could not tell if she had begun to cry. She could not possibly understand why he had grown angry and rebuked her.
He still did not believe. A child had been healed miraculously, as promised. The fact made him hate himself. Why? he asked. Why? “She was dying, she’s been saved,” he whispered and raised his head to the statue again. “But why, when none were saved before?”
*****
If the Hespet doubted Chagri’s powers, he was alone in all the kingdom. The word spread faster than a fire through Atlarma. By the time the evening torches had been lighted, every crippled or afflicted person in or near the city was on his way to the temple of Chagri. They camped outside the gates and, when the yard had been filled up, spilled out across the road, clogging it for coaches and other normal traffic. Soldiers came but could not make the people leave. At first they did not know why these people were here, but word quickly came to them as it was spreading across the kingdom like ripples across a pond.
“A little girl was brought back to life here.”
“No, it was a woman and she had her severed leg reattached by drinking the altar water.
“She was ugly, too, and it made her beautiful.”
“Not so! It was her head that was severed and replaced.”
“Then how did she drink?”
“It’s a miracle.”
“Yes, a miracle.”
When they found the aspect on which they could agree, and had quieted down, no one went away. Whatever the truth might be, something miraculous
had
happened. They would not leave. The soldiers finally gave up and went off to re-route traffic onto other roads. In the morning the poor deluded fools would find out that there were no miracles to be had, and then they would go home. A few would discover that their pockets had been picked, but as far as the soldiers were concerned that was just punishment for harboring such notions.
In the morning when Slyur arrived at the temple, he would have jumped from his coach and escaped into the alleys if the crowd had not seen him first and rushed out to surround the coach. He pressed back against the cushions as dozens of dirty hands, some of them deformed or maimed, reached in through the windows on both sides and a hundred voices shouted prayers and supplications and promises of absurdly fantastic rewards if he would let them accompany him into Chagri’s temple. The hands stretched in further as people climbed onto the coach. They wanted to touch the Hespet, to make contact with his magic and have it act on them. Slyur slid down and curled up on the floor.
He was fortunate, though he did not think so, that so many had climbed up: otherwise, they would have pulled open the doors and dragged him out, whatever their good intentions, to his death.
Above him, the driver beat at the twisted mob with his whip. The roar of the derelict crowd grew louder as people shouted above each other to be heard. The panicked horses worked their way through the crowd, and the screams and shouts rose up like a flock of mad birds.
Yet, above the din, the Hespet heard the crackling laughter of the white-armored god, whose cruel jape he had just begun to see.
*****
Had Slyur been granted an unprecedented look into Chagri’s City Celestial, he would not have recognized his god. If he could have gained some slight insight into the arcane plot in which he served as a pawn, Slyur would have realized that all his greatest fears and doubts were true: that the smoldering white, fire-eyed being who called itself Chagri was not the god at all.
Miradomon had dispensed with the war-god disguise. It was for Slyur alone. All that remained of it was the intense whiteness, which was the color of Miradomon’s molten robes. This, his chosen appearance in this new universe, had been taken from a simple priest he’d slain upon arrival, just as images of Chagri and other gods had been ripped from the humble priest’s brain at the point of death. The priest had dwelled in a place called Trufege that Miradomon had found perfectly suited to his plans. The people there were like insects; he had only to put his foot in their path and they angled off in the direction he wanted, blind to his trap, oblivious to the moment when that foot came down again and crushed them to jelly.
Miradomon moved. He did not walk, but floated along in the blackness of his castle. Beneath the hood of his robe his face remained a mystery—the interior of the cowl was as dark as if night had fallen forever upon his face, and no living soul had yet come close enough to see the faint points of blue radiance like distant stars embedded within it.
He continued along, passing through walls when corridors ended, although both he and the walls were real. But he had gained enough power through previous campaigns to make matter behave as he liked. He entered the chamber where the source of his power was kept.
The chamber was huge, as dark and cold as the bottom of an ocean. Inhabiting it or, more precisely, positioned in it—was his army: beings Miradomon had created, things without minds, their form transmutable to his whim. At present they towered above him, twice his height, like statues of monstrous brown slugs. They were monsters from the legends of a people on another continent—a southern continent. This past night while all of Secamelan slept, that race had annihilated itself. By Miradomon s arrangement, they had waged war against a neighboring country that had been an ally only a few months before. As the last few members of that ancient race had fought and died, his army of hideous slugs had cracked open the bodies of the slain to feast on their flesh while he feasted on their death-essence. As had become his method, he’d descended from the skies in the form of a god, and fomented superstitions and prejudices until he’d achieved madness in the warriors on both sides of the fray; madness produced chaos, and chaos was Miradomon’s method, his life. It was almost time to change the shape of his army again—to make them into creatures relevant to Secamelan and Novalok. But he decided that could wait awhile. First he wanted to see how much his source had grown from last night’s carnage. He floated across the chamber to where the floor ended and the pit began.
Below him was a void. Out of it light poured over him, making his robe glow like hot metal. Far down within the void, a single small star hung like a blind white eye shot through with blood. Strings of plasma exploded from it, falling out into the blackness, slowing, then falling back into the bloodshot core. The energy of each death absorbed by the fireball set off a chain of fusion events, releasing more energy in iridescent spouts. Each single death made him a little stronger and the core a little greater. Then, when all life had been extinguished, he would obliterate the planet and add the death of another world to all the other minuscule deaths.
Here was his whole existence. He had severed the last connection with life long ago; death now sustained him; chaos was his lover, his twin, his heartbeat.
He no longer relied on his
crex
to live. That mutable membrane that had once been the boundary of his life now served as the boundary of his world. He’d used it as raw material, creating his castle and his world from it, expanding it, adding to it in order to enclose his domain within it—a vast silver globe clinging parasitically to the world of Secamelan. With the membranous
crex
, the point of contact remained eternally open, like the maw of some leviathan jellyfish, hungry and ready to consume.
Gazing down upon the death-energy he had stored, Miradomon dreamed of the day when all the void in that pit was filled with pulsing, infinite energy. One by one, he would open all the corridors between this string of parallel worlds and release his chaos into all of them. A billion worlds all drained dry, a forever looping corridor of space and time through which he would travel, filling the emptiness with new worlds of his own design, launching death into every universe. Death in a form that would feed and replenish him. It would take an eternity to complete, but time meant nothing. The source made him immortal in the truest sense. Nothing could harm him. No other being even suspected his existence. Save for Elystroya. Only she. But she was his prisoner and posed no danger. He wondered then as he had many times before why he had let her of all of them live.