The Broken God Machine

by Christopher Buecheler

  Nani nodded and sat up, glancing backward toward their village. Soon they would need to wade back; the sun rose early, and it was nearly time to sleep.

  “That is all you can give me,” she agreed. “And that is all I need. I believe you, Pehr. I trust you. If harm comes looking for any of us, and you can prevent it … I know you will.”

  With these words, Nani stood and made her way into the shallow lagoon, heading toward home, confident that Pehr would follow her. She didn’t look back and didn’t need to. He was there, ready to protect her, as he was ready to protect all those whom he loved.

  In ten days’ time his strength would be tested, and any question of Pehr’s survival as a hunter would be rendered moot.

  Chapter 3

  Somewhere, past the thick jungle that spread wide across the eastern border of Pehr’s land, the metal thing stood, keeping its sad and lonely watch. Long since exposed by the ravages of time, its skeleton-like understructure – once sheathed in material cunningly designed to mimic the smoothness and elasticity of human skin – was now covered with a grey-green coating of moss and lichen. This substance had built up in microscopic layers over eons to form what seemed at first glance almost a furry, organic musculature, though in truth it was still the underlying handiwork of the original designers that lent weight and shape to the metal thing’s appearance. The overall impression it gave, now, was of a thin and wasted corpse left leaning against a canyon wall, long abandoned. Forgotten.

  At its feet and in a ring some seventy strides around it lay countless bones, some so ancient that they had become nothing more than dust that mixed with the soil to form a kind of chalky grey paste. No plants grew within this circle, and no living thing made its home there; no beetle crawled, no earthworm slid, no rodent scurried or ant clambered, no creature moved within the ring of bone. The earth there was poisoned by the actions of some long-forgotten civilization, in some long-forgotten past, for some long-forgotten reason. The effects of this toxic exercise lived on, like the metal thing, even ages after the land it had been set to guard had become home to little more than the wind that screeched through its ruins like the wailing of ghosts.

  Still, the metal thing was not completely forgotten, not completely abandoned. There were those who knew of its existence, and the majority of those typically gave it a wide berth. When the blessings of the gods were required, however, the metal thing would entertain visitors, and it would extract its payment in the blood of their chosen sacrifices. These offerings were not made lightly, and the metal thing had never yet failed to take what was given to it. The bones that formed the blasted, shattered perimeter of its arc of influence lay in testament to this fact.

  Others, too, sometimes stumbled into the place the metal thing had made its home, and this was one such occurrence. One of the wild boars that Pehr’s people so prized had wandered deeper and further than its brethren usually ventured. Driven by a mad desire for the delicious fungus that grew sometimes below the roots of trees, the boar had moved ever inward and upward, its keen senses guiding it toward its prize. Now, at last, had come its moment of triumph.

  There was nothing within this poisoned garden for the boar, of course. Nothing edible could grow within the metal thing’s circle, but on the far side from where it now stood, the creature could discern that most subtle of aromas, the delicious prize that it sought. It had only to cross, and while this land smelled foul to the boar, it was not so toxic as to be worth circumventing. The boar trotted into the field of bones at a brisk pace, intent on the delicacy that awaited it just around the bend.

  The metal thing’s response was instantaneous. Moss-covered and derelict though it might have been, its internal workings still functioned, and it jerked alive with the screech of metal on metal, moving from its leaning position to full standing, its arms thrown back. Tiny motors located below what had once been its cheeks whirred and spun, attempting to contract simulated skin and muscle that was no longer there.

  “W-LC-M- FR--ND!” it howled at the boar, its voice a grinding, buzzing warble that might once have sounded human.

  The boar stopped dead in its tracks, hunkering low to the ground in fear, preparing to flee. It could not have known, even had it been gifted with any such capability of thought, that it was, for all intents and purposes, already dead. It couldn't understand that the metal thing’s sensors and motors and inner workings allowed it to react – even now, after millennia of disrepair – at speeds far beyond those of which the boar was capable.

  “PL--S- PR-S-NT Y--R P-SS,” the metal thing screeched, and the boar turned to begin its lumbering attempt at escape, unleashing a terrified squeal in the process.

  The metal thing lurched, knee joints howling in protest as it dropped into a crouching posture, its arms swung low toward the ground for added stability. Its eyes were covered with a series of moss-coated, interlocking plates, and they opened now to reveal centers that burned red like the embers thrown forth by a volcano. Death poured from those eyes, even as it screeched its last words to the creature so desperately attempting to escape.

  “P-SS N-T PR-S-NT-D. -C-SS D-N--D. PL--S- L-C-T- TH- V-S-T-R C-NT-R T- -BT--N PR-P-R CR-D-NT--LS.”

  The boar was a sizzling lump of meat, its bristly hair smoldering, twin smoking craters bored through its side, long before this sentence was finished. The metal thing cocked its head as if studying this scene and then, after a moment, returned to a standing position. It leaned against the canyon wall, eye covers sliding shut, and its skeletal shoulders slumped.

  “TH-NK Y-- F-R V-S-T-NG,” it said, and then it was silent, as it sometimes went for months or even years between encounters of this type.

  At a safe distance, yellow-green eyes took all of this in. The sacred circle remained unspoiled. The boar had passed into the arc of death and had paid the price all that trod upon the ground there must pay. Everything was as it had ever been, since first the watch had begun.

  Above the metal thing, past the canyon, the wind wailed its banshee’s dirge. A tiny bug came to the edge of the metal thing’s domain and stopped, sensing the polluted soil in front of it. Turning around, it trundled off the way it had come, and so was spared the boar’s fate, and the fate of all those whose bones littered that tainted ground.

  * * *

  They existed for Pehr and Jace, and even Truff, only as rumor and legend; there was only one in the village old enough to remember a coming of the Lagos horde. So it was that only the old woman Luce, wrinkled and wretched and bent over her washing, knew what the sound meant when first the drums began to thud from somewhere deep within the jungle.

  Her mind associated death with those drums, and in great amounts, but also things worse than death. There was fire, blazing still in those distant memories, and torture – the vicious mutilation, over and over, as if the Gods themselves had ordered it of the creatures. Luce remembered the pain, searing through her body, as if the things had coated their wicked talons in some kind of liquid fire. She remembered the horror of it, all these years later, just as she remembered the overwhelming relief that had come when at last she had opened her eyes, and found she was still able to see. The others had not been so lucky; the Lagos had left most dead, and the rot that soon spread to many of the survivors was even more merciless. At the savage beast men’s hands or from the infection that followed, most had died in agony.

  It had been forty-six years since she had last heard those drums, and Luce had thought herself prepared for their inevitable return. She was the last alive among this village who knew the sound, and she had risen every morning preparing herself for the eventuality that she would hear it again. How and when the Lagos chose to prey on a given village was a mystery to her and to all who had come before her, but that they someday would return, somewhere along the great length of the jungle’s edge, was certain. Now that day had arrived and when the noise first came to her, Luce shot to her feet as if her knees had not seen nearly six decades of wear.

  She mana
ged three steps before her heart failed and, with a croaking noise that was some combination of despair and relief, she pitched forward, crashing to the ground. She was dead even before her impact with the hard, oiled, earthen floor of her dwelling, and perhaps this was for the best. Luce would be spared the horrors to come. She had lived through the coming of the Lagos once, and once was enough for anyone.

  There would be no more warning for the village than the drums, but it mattered little; what was coming would come regardless, and there was nowhere to go. There was only their tiny strip of land between the jungle and the sea, the place where her people made their home. If they went north, to the next village, the Lagos would come there, and to the next, and to the next after that. They would come until there was no place left to go, until those who fled them were boxed in by the baking desert of the north, and the swirling sea to the west, and the horde that descended upon them. All choices would mean death. Death and worse.

  For Pehr, the drums were little more than a fairy tale, a threat the elders scared children with in order to keep them obedient. Perhaps he had believed in the Lagos, once, but he had long since put those stories behind him, and when first the drums started up, they were a background noise, something far in the distance and not so pressing as thoughts of Sili, and the ministrations of his hand.

  He sat now on his bed, breathing hard, and a groan escaped him. He’d discovered this activity some years ago, but only recently had it become so pressing a part of his life. It seemed that he could barely go a day, and sometimes not even that, without entertaining these needs. In his mind, he was with Sili again, drunk on stolen wine, and this time she was not only opening her legs to show him, but inviting him to touch as well …

  There was a crash, and then another; it was Jace, banging on the thatched wooden door of Pehr’s room, bringing him out of his reverie. He grunted, instinctively covering himself with one hand while pushing against the door with the other, ensuring that Jace did not burst in on him.

  “What?!” he snarled. “What is it?”

  “Don’t you hear? Gods, Pehr, it’s the drums! Do you hear them?”

  “No. What drums? Jace, leave me alone!”

  “It’s the Lagos, Pehr! They’re coming. They’re coming for us!”

  Despite his annoyance with the younger boy, something about Jace’s tone made Pehr bite back the curses that wanted to leap from his mouth. With an effort, he pushed the thoughts of Sili from his mind and forced himself to focus on what Jace was saying. At last, his mind registered the noises in the distance as something out of the ordinary.

  “Pehr, from the stories … the Lagos! You can’t have forgotten!”

  Jace was still pounding on the door, as if acquiring entrance would somehow stop the drums. Pehr rose to his feet, hiking his leather breeches up as he did so.

  “I remember. Jace, stop. I’ll be out in a moment. Stop hitting the door or, Gods help me, I will break your legs off and beat you to death with them!”

  When Pehr emerged from their hut a few minutes later, Jace was sitting on a nearby boulder, staring east toward the distant jungle’s edge. The expression on his face was unlike any Pehr had ever seen there before, a mixture of near-religious awe and abject terror.

  “I knew they were real,” he said in a breathless voice, not turning to look at Pehr even as he came to stand next to the boulder.

  “They’re not real. Jace, those drums could be anything.”

  Jace shook his head. “No, it’s the Lagos. Don’t you remember the stories, Pehr? Someone has made the Gods angry, and now they’ve sent the horde.”

  Pehr remembered only wisps. It was said that the Lagos were beast-creatures that walked on two legs like men, but were stronger, faster, and infinitely more bloodthirsty. The denizens of Uru believed that the Gods held them deep in the jungle, many days’ journey beyond where even the most seasoned hunters ever tread. The Lagos would be unleashed on any village unlucky enough to earn the Gods’ wrath, though how exactly one incurred such anger had never been clearly explained to Pehr. He knew only that it took some action worse than any petty sins that he or Jace might have committed.

  “Luce has seen them,” Jace said. “She was there when they came, when they murdered the hunters, held down the farmers and the merchants and the women, cut their faces to ribbons, left them for dead.”

  “Kampri shit.”

  “No, it’s true! How do you think she lost her ear? She tells the best Lagos stories because it was her old village they last attacked. You can see it in the way her eyes look, like she’s traveling back in time.”

  “She’s a storyteller and she’s taken you in. Jace, no one has ever seen a Lagos, just as no one’s ever seen the giant dragon-fish that lives at the center of the Everstorm. It’s a stupid story made up to frighten babies.”

  Jace finally took his eyes away from the jungle and glared angrily at Pehr. “I’m not a baby.”

  “Then stop acting like one.”

  Jace’s reaction surprised him. The blonde-haired boy leapt to his feet, eyes blazing, and snarled out a word so foul it was nearly blasphemous: “Baptista!”

  Had Pehr not been so taken aback by the use of the word, he would have hit Jace. No one among the village knew the origin of this term, but its use was kept only for the most base and vile of men, baby-killers and cannibals, the type of man who would murder his own brother or take his sister by force.

  Pehr stood, mouth agape, processing what Jace had just called him. The younger boy gave him little time to react, leaping from the rock with his hands outstretched. He connected solidly with his older cousin and the two went sprawling, Jace rolling nimbly away while Pehr landed flat on his back, the wind knocked out of him by the hard-packed earth. Jace knelt over him, eyes wide and feral, two red blotches at his cheeks standing out like burns against his pallid skin.

  “I am not a baby!” Jace cried. “I will not sit here while you let the Lagos take us by surprise, because I was listening. All my life, while you were busy fighting and stealing and acting the kampri’s ass, I have been listening!”

  Pehr, still trying to catch his breath and struggling to process this sudden change in a boy who had only ever been good humored, made no reply.

  “The Lagos will come, and because of fools like you, we will not be ready. They will murder us like livestock and drink our blood and put our heads on pikes. They will take Nani and Sili and even my mother, and hold them down, and carve them like meat! They will blind them, take their ears and tongues, and leave them lying in the dirt.

  “You can sit here and call it nothing if you want, laugh those drums off as tales meant to scare babies. Go ahead, Pehr. Go ahead and die. Go ahead and laugh, and then die like a baptista.”

  Pehr lost what little temper he had been able to retain. He surged forward, grabbing Jace’s scrawny neck and twisting his own broad shoulders. Jace made a squawking noise, falling sideways, and within moments Pehr had him pinned. Jace struggled for a moment, but Pehr’s grip proved too strong, and after a moment he gave up.

  “Hit me if you must,” he said. “I deserve it.”

  “I’m not going to hit you, wet-head. Get up.”

  Pehr let go of the boy and stood up, stretching out his hand to Jace. For a very long moment there was nothing to be found in Jace’s eyes but abject despair.

  “I’m frightened, Pehr,” he said.

  “I know you are. ”

  “Will you fight with me, if it comes to that? Will you … I don’t want to be alone.”

  “I will go to my death defending our home. Just like you, and just like Truff, and every other hunter. If these drums herald the coming of terrible beast-men of giant size, all filled with black hatred, then so be it. I will fight on regardless.”

  At this, Pehr saw some of the terror leave his cousin’s eyes, and Jace reached his hand out, taking Pehr’s and allowing himself to be helped up.

  “How many arrows do we have in store?” he asked.

  �
��I’m not sure,” Pehr said. “Six bundles? Perhaps seven. At least sixty in all …”

  Jace paused, his eyes turned up and to the right, as if reading his thoughts from the empty sky above. After a moment he frowned, and sighed, and shook his head.

  “It will not be enough,” he said, and without further elaboration he began to walk toward the village center.

  Chapter 4

  The drums played through the night. It was a time of sparse sleep for Pehr’s village. In the ever-increasing gloom of dusk, it had become difficult to drive the old childhood stories of the Lagos out of their minds.

  There was talk of flight, at first, but the hunters had quickly put such thoughts to rest. None among them would willingly abandon their homes, and so anyone else who left would go without protection. Alone and scattered across the fields and small forests that lay between their village and the next along the coast, a place many moons away that few besides the merchantmen had ever visited, they would surely be easy prey for whatever enemy now threatened them.

  Some of the merchants left anyway, trusting the road and its rigors more than these gruff warriors whose disdain they were willing to endure only for so long as it was profitable. There was no market now for shells or linen, or for the sweet cactus harvested by the nomadic tribes that lived on the edge of the great northern desert. The only need now was for the merchants’ weapons, of which every last one had been bought, and information, of which the merchants had none. Some stayed, others went; to the hunters, the farmers, and their families, it was of little concern.

  Drawn together by the drums, the village families had gathered in its center without needing to be called, and so it was that the news of Luce’s death spread quickly among them. She had no family to tend to her body, and her worthless merchant master had refused the responsibility and fled, so the hunters had jointly agreed to lead the ceremony of fire. Luce’s body was tightly wrapped and placed in the dark crypt below the central shrine. There it would wait for two days, as was their custom, before the burning.