She tamped down her shame. “This is for my daughter. She… she is sick.”
“I thought you had doctors in the City for that.” The word doctors was soaked in loathing.
“The doctors can’t help her. There’s a wasting disease in her bones. She grows weak, she vomits, she will not suckle. She’ll be dead in days.”
The god ran his fingers through the coins. “The City drove me out because it prefers medicine to miracles. It’s not my concern if your medicine fails, now.”
“Please, sir. I have no more…”
“Get out.” He flicked the coins back across the table to her.
She seized his hand and pressed it to her chest. “Please. Please. Have mercy. Please. Isn’t that what they used to call you? The Merciful One? When I heard that the old god still lurked in the slums I thought there might be hope in miracles, if medicine has failed.”
Ahaud jerked his hand away. Hamast hid her eyes and suppressed a sob. A moment passed in silence.
“Who is your husband?” the god asked.
Hamast didn’t dare look up. “Sed Denai. A foreman at the steel mill.”
“He belongs to the College of Engineers.” It wasn’t a question. She understood its relevance: four generations ago the Council of Engineers had thrust the god out. “This is what you must do. You shall kill your husband. When he is dead, you shall bring the child to me. I will touch her, and she shall live.”
She kneaded the silk purse in her hands. Her heart trembled on the precipice of a vast chasm. “You want… I thought you didn’t take human sacrifice.”
“The gods choose for themselves which sacrifices they accept. Today I demand this.”
The silk tore in her hands. Her fingers trembled as she smoothed the ruined pouch on the table. She couldn’t do it. It was impossible. She had not the resolve, nor the weapon, nor the opportunity… but she lied. It was possible. Which meant that it was inevitable. She said quietly, “When it is done, is there anything I need to bring you?”
“Bring yourself and your daughter. That’s all.”
***
I am a slum god, a low god, a god of pickpockets and whores. The City bars me from its doors, shrugs me off like the refuse of the shantytown. We crouch here in the City’s shadow, beneath the smoke of its factories, amidst the offal of its mills. But I am lower than even these dregs. They go to the City gates and beg to work its industries. They crouch in the City’s gutter and sell their labor, handicrafts, bodies or children. But if the gatekeepers see me, they will bar the door and drive me away with curses and gunshots. There are no gods allowed in the City.
The City used to be called Ahaud, and I was Ahaud of Ahaud. Now it is the City of No God.
***
The floor of Sed Denai’s office vibrated with the crashing of the machines below. The sound was calming to him. The steady noise of hammers on steel meant efficiency and profit. The sound was the heartbeat of Industry, and he was proud to call himself her servant.
Above his head the City’s motto was burned into a plank of pine with block capitals: NO GOD BUT KNOWLEDGE, NO SACRIFICE BUT INDUSTRY. Aside from this spartan decoration, the room was empty save Sed, his ledger, an inkwell, and a calculation engine. The engine clacked in precise rhythms and displayed the current sum in the wheels on its face. Lines of neat black figures marched like soldiers down the ledger’s page. Sed lost himself in the rhythm of the hammering outside and the ivory engine keys and tried to forget what he left behind at home.
Someone knocked at the door. Sed looked up in irritation. The door was closed. This meant he was not to be disturbed. He had looked forward to some hours of solitude and precise accounting. With a grunt he pushed his chair back and opened the door.
It was his wife, cowering in the roar of the mill’s engines. Sed’s curse withered on his lips. “Hamast,” he said. He was too stunned to say more.
She brushed past him and slammed the door shut. “It’s about Iliss.”
Her face was flushed, and she trembled as if she nearing a faint. A whorl of dread passed through him. There was little reason for Hamast to come in person. If the child’s condition was very grave, his beloved Hamast wouldn’t dare leave Iliss’s side. But if she was here, then… then there was no more reason for her to stay with the child. He put his hands to his eyes and suppressed the shudder of grief. This is why he had fled to the foreman’s office. He had been sick with sadness for so many days, and he craved respite, a few hours of normalcy and problems he know how to solve. He mumbled, “Is she… ?”
“Yes,” Hamast said. She would not look at him. She was shaking and she touched something hidden beneath her shawl.
He put his hand on her shoulder. It was good she had come herself rather than sending a courier. “Shall I come back to the house?”
“What? Oh, no. That won’t be necessary.” Her hand moved beneath her shawl again.
“But you’ll need someone to help you.” Poor Hamast hadn’t the presence of mind to see to the funerary necessities herself.
“I’m sure. But you… you won’t come back to the house.” She turned away from him. The thunder of the mill underlined her silence. Sed reached for her.
She turned, and a smoky blast tore through her shawl.
Sed froze, stunned. His mind seized on trivialities. The gun in Hamast’s hand… a fine, wood-handled piece, a gift he had received from his uncle and kept unused above the mantle. It was a terrible weapon, really, too old to shoot straight. Useful only as a decoration. The muffled shriek of machines outside continued unabated. Of course no one had heard the gunshot. You couldn’t hear a thing over the din.
Then the realization arose out of the muck of his mind and struck him like a steam piston. She had shot at him. And she had missed.
He lunged at her, pointlessly, because she screamed and dropped the pistol. In a swift movement he scooped it up and shoved it in his pocket, then charged to his shrinking wife and caught her by the wrists. “What are you doing? What was that? Are you mad?” She sobbed and collapsed to the floor. He shook her shoulders. “What’s the meaning of this? Speak, woman!”
“Ahaud!” she screamed.
“What are you talking about?”
“Ahaud told me to do this. Ahaud demanded it!”
“Ahaud?” It took a moment for him to understand. “The old god? You talked to him?”
“Yes, yes. He said he could save our daughter!”
“You sought help from the old god?” A new horror washed over him. This wasn’t just an inept murder attempt. This was worse. “How could you?”
“How could I not!” She straightened suddenly and accused him with teary eyes. “Iliss is dying! She has but a few days. Was I supposed to sit by? Was I supposed to wait while you hid yourself in your ledger so you wouldn’t have to look at her?”
Sed shuddered and stepped away. That Hamast would kill him for Iliss’s sake was not so shocking as the fact she did it at a god’s request. The old vulgarities bubbled to the top of his mind. It meant she had prayed. She was trying to perform a sacrifice. The very words tasted oily and evil on his tongue. And he on the College of Engineers. They would unseat him if they knew his wife had even spoken to a priest, to say nothing of making a petition directly to the god. “You have to leave.”
“What?”
“I said get out! Don’t you know that attempting to sacrifice inside the City is a hanging crime?”
“So is murder.”
“Yes, but you proved no good at that. Here, take these.” He emptied his pockets of loose shillings and crowns and pushed them into Hamast’s hands. “All of the gates are watched, but if you wait for a shift change, you can probably leave with the crowd.”
“Why do I have to leave?”
“Because they’ll find out! Some shiftless Memetian doubtlessly spied your coming and going, and it’s only a matter of time before they rat you out and ruin us both. And because…” He faltered now that he had to say it aloud. But he served Kno
wledge and Industry. He was a man of principle. “Because I am going to report you to the Council.”
“Sed! Our daughter…”
“Our daughter is as good as dead, and you know it! I could be charged just for letting you leave. Hamast, listen. You have enough to buy passage to Memet. This way I may escape reproach, and I’ll be able to help you later. Please. This is the most that I can possibly do for you.”
Hamast’s glare struck him as hard as a slap. “I’m sorry I missed.” The door slammed behind her and she was gone.
Sed collapsed over the open book. The quivering of the door dissipated into the clangor of the mill. “Damn,” he said. His tears ran onto the page and ruined the ledger’s lines.
***
Sulsara warned me. I demanded few sacrifices and was liberal with miracles. I favored my city’s merchants, blessed her University, and protected her walls. City Ahaud was wealthy and secure, her markets alive with commerce, her libraries rich with words. And what did I gain? In the pride of peace Ahaud’s teachers professed blasphemies and turned to abominable machines. They abhorred the yoke of sacrifice and yearned to bless themselves with the profits of Industry. So I banned their engines and burnt their heresies, and in return I reaped the City’s wrath.
Sulsara warned me. She is greedy for blood and stingy with favor, quick to unleash famine and plague. Her priests are grim and stringent. Her people never blaspheme. She laughed when the City first forced me out, and shook her own lands with an earthquake in warning. She was right. I was too merciful. No one fears a merciful god.
Still, at every dark of the moon, a few poor families leave Sulsara, cross the withered hills, and come to seek their fortune in the City of No God. In the slums they become my charge.
***
Hamast huddled in the midst of the crowd and clutched her daughter to her chest. She had demanded a gray worker’s outfit from her maid and wrapped the child in a heavy blanket disfigured with ash. She got a few stares from the mingled laborers leaving the factories, but they passed under the arch of the City’s walls without incident. She glanced back once at the soot-blackened brick. A sob quavered in her throat.
Iliss shifted in her blankets and whimpered. “Hush,” Hamast said.
“Hey,” a voice cawed in the slum creole. A scrawny, blunt-featured boy wagged his finger at her.
“Excuse me,” she said, and took a quick step away from him. Her heartbeat quickened. She was too close to the gate. If someone decided to turn her in for a bounty, it would be quick work.
“Hey,” the boy repeated. He fell into step beside Hamast. “You got something there.”
“Nothing. None of your business.”
“You taking City babies away, you gonna get us all in trouble. Now what you got?”
“Just leave me alone, please.”
“You done him in, then?”
She froze. “What are you talking about?”
“That your baby, no?” He peered under Hamast’s hood, and stole a glimpse of the sickly infant. “Ah, ah! You the one.”
He knew. These sly, mean Sulsarans… they had spied on her at the temple, and now meant to trap her. “Please, I just need to get to Memet.” She let a few tears fall. Maybe the boy would have pity.
“Caravan to Memet don’t leave until tomorrow. But don’t you want to… ?” The boy nodded towards the middle of the slum.
“Ahaud?” She was confused.
“Ah!” the boy hissed. “Careful how you talk! Listen. I help you. My uncle, he’s a, a…” He stopped and knotted his brow. “A god-man. A song-man.”
“A priest,” Hamast said, her tongue tripping over the vulgarity.
“Yes, that! He live by the temple. They send me to watch the gate for a lady like you. My uncle and Ahaud, they help you. We go there now.”
“Oh.” So the boy meant to help her? She couldn’t let herself trust him, but she had no better ideas. Iliss whimpered. Hamast put her hand into the blanket and felt the child’s skin: hot, damp, and limp. She hadn’t suckled in a day, and had grown too weak to cry. She would probably die by the morrow anyway, so she might as well see the god again. “We could go to… to him.”
“All good! You follow me, I bring you to Ahaud. I’m Jener,” the boy added with a proud grin.
He pulled at Hamast’s elbow and led her out of the plodding crowd of workers and into the winding alleys. They took a path of narrow dirt, between moldering shanties and mud-brick hovels, over creeks of sludge and refuse. Hamast breathed through her mouth and tried to remember she had been here before. She recognized nothing… but she was approaching from the opposite direction. Here and there Jener called out to friends and acquaintances, trading rough barbs in slum creole or the murmurs of Sulsaran. She pulled her hood closer over her face. Here she felt strange, an outsider. She barely felt the breathing of her child. She was afraid.
Jener stopped to interrogate an old man sipping tea from a chipped cup. After a moment he let out an “ah!” of alarm and pulled Hamast into a hidden alcove.
“We gotta go real careful now,” he whispered to her. “Soldiers come out of the City. They looking for you?”
“Soldiers?” Hamast said. “I don’t know…”
“Don’t worry. We help you out. We meet them at temple.”
A few minutes later the temple appeared before them, a dark doorway opening on a few steps cut into the clay. “In,” Jener said. Hamast ducked into the smoky darkness, her head brushing against the bone charms. Jener said a few words in Sulsaran. A chorus of muttering responded to him. Then she heard a familiar voice.
“You’ve come back,” Ahaud said.
A dim oil lamp flickered in a circle of grease-streaked, serious men. Their faces were Sulsaran and Memetian, save one that seemed to be the product of some strange miscegenation. His face was creased in displeasure.
Hamast fell to her knees. “I brought my daughter.”
“You didn’t perform the sacrifice.”
“I tried. I took a gun into my husband’s study. I would have done it, had not my hand shaken!”
Ahaud shook his head in contempt. Hamast crawled forward. “Oh, please, I meant to. Won’t you accept my intent? My faith in place of my offering? I’ve been exiled because of you!”
“Don’t you understand how a god’s power works? Your faith has no power. The blood of sacrifice is my strength.”
“But… Don’t these your… your priests bring you sacrifice?”
“Pigeons and chickens. Enough to keep the workers from falling into the gears of the factories. Your child is already far too near to Death’s gate.”
The girl shifted and mewled, then stilled. Hamast put her hand on the baby’s frail ribs. She breathed, but barely. “Quiet, love,” she whispered.
Ahaud watched them intently. He said a few words in Sulsaran to the attending priests. One of them came forward and touched Hamast’s shoulder. “We keep you safe while the baby live,” he said in an accent so thick with creole that Hamast could barely understand. “Then we get you to Memet.”
Hamast looked back at Ahaud. His gaze was intent but unreadable. “Come,” the priest repeated. Someone appeared at the door and shouted. Ahaud and the priests scrambled up. Jener pulled Hamast to her feet.
“Soldiers are coming,” he said. “We have to go.”
***
The gods resemble those who serve them. They say the forest bows to a mighty fir whose branches drip with sacred fragrances, a tree god who remembers a thousand centuries. Sailors swear on the whale gods who raise sea-waves with their songs. But I am a god of men. When I was Ahaud of Ahaud my skin was dusty bronze, my jaw elegant and angled, my eyes narrow, noble.
Now do you see me? The fine lines of my face are rounded in Sulsaran and Memetian shapes, my hands grow rough and scarred like those of a mill-worker. The laborers and beggars press their hands against mine, kiss my rings and clasp my feet, and leave the imprint of their skin in mine. I will soon be one of them.
***
“They just left,” the commandant said.
Sed mumbled a reply. A squadron of soldiery trailed them, beardless boys trying to look fierce with their brass buttons and starched blue coats. The commandant misunderstood his anxiety and said, “Don’t worry, they won’t shoot a citizen of the City. Even one accused of religion and kidnapping.”
“Oh.” At least there was that. But his thoughts were with his daughter. If Hamast had just left the girl alone, he wouldn’t have called the constabulary. He had hoped to let her go into a comfortable exile. But his dear daughter deserved a rational burial in the City, not whatever religious abomination she would get in the slums.
The commandant gave a blast on his whistle and began shouting orders. The soldiers and their rifles spread out though the miry alleyways, ducking heads into doorways and barking inquiries. The commandant tugged at his cap and said, “It’ll only be a while, now. The other squadron has cut off the road to the east, so we’ll hound them out in no time.”
“So long as my wife and daughter are recovered intact.”
“Who knows what indignities they endured among this filth? Especially if they were with the god.” He sniffed and grimaced.
“Ah.” Sed barely heard what the commandant said. He glanced nervously at the temple with its crude emblem and worried his hands together. Shouts followed the soldiers searching roughshod through the slum. This whole thing was a mistake. He should have overlooked Hamast’s indiscretion from the beginning.
Rifle shots crackled through the air. The commandant pointed like a hound after its prey. “They found something. Let’s go.”
Sed followed the commandant at a run. Ahead of them, another gunshot. He heard someone shout halt. The commandant stopped at the edge of a ring of soldiers, but Sed stumbled past him into the standoff.
He stood in the middle. Sed had never laid eyes on a god before, but the man in the center was unmistakable. He had a haughty, proud look, and even in the dust of the slum he shone as if he stood alone in a shaft of sunlight. A semicircle of greasy foreigners surrounded him. At his knees crouched Hamast with the girl in her arms. A boy held her hand. Both of them had frozen under the steel of the encircling rifles. Gunpowder incensed the air.
Ruined Cities Page 23
