Aching God

by Mike Shel

  “I recommend teaching your clerics a bit more of the natural world before sending them out the church doors,” said Auric with an amiable smile to another priest standing with them, loud enough so that Sira would hear it as they carried her deeper into the temple complex.

  “Belu’s blessings on you, Sister Sira,” called Belech. She lifted a hand in farewell before she and her escorts disappeared.

  The other priest, a narrow-featured fellow with soft brown eyes, thin lips, and sallow skin, escorted them into a comfortable chamber off the courtyard. He thanked them for aiding Sira and offered food, wine, and lodgings for the night.

  “Thank you, but no,” said Auric. “We must reach the Citadel as quickly as possible.”

  The priest’s smile vanished. “I wonder if you would wait but a few moments while I inform my superior of your service to us. She would want to speak with you before you leave.”

  Auric pretended not to notice the cleric’s sudden change in demeanor and nodded. “Of course, brother. We will speak briefly with your prelate.”

  Auric and Belech sat down at a long table as the priest gave a curt smile and left. They barely had time to exchange a look of concern about the priest’s abrupt seriousness before a tall woman in pale blue robes entered, a circlet of laurel leaves crowning her head. The man who had fetched her stood behind her at a respectful distance. She had an angular face that seemed young, despite the streaks of gray in her hair, prominent crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes and laugh lines around her mouth. She touched two fingers to forehead and lips in a blessing and held up a hand when the two visitors made to stand.

  “No need, gentlemen,” she said, her voice kind and sonorous. “You’ve been on the road and through an ordeal. My name is Hanadis. I am Archbishop of Belu in Boudun.”

  Belech stood up, despite her leave, and dropped to one knee. She laughed and put a hand on his shoulder. “Rise, my brother. You are a devotee of the All-Mother, I presume? We require no such abasement here. We are all Belu’s children, beloved in her eyes. I understand that you are bound for the Citadel?”

  Belech steadied himself with a hand on the table as he rose, his head still bowed, puzzlement on his face. Father Borim, their rather officious priest of Belu in Daurhim, did expect such abasement at a private audience. Auric would have been amused were he not also taken aback that the highest cleric of Belu in Boudun—and therefore the entire empire—was taking the time to meet with them.

  “Yes, Excellency,” Auric said with proper diffidence. He presented Rae’s letter. “A matter of some urgency, I’m afraid, though I don’t know the details.” After reading the brief correspondence, Hanadis handed it back.

  “Unfortunately, I do have some of the details, Sir Auric. And I think it would be best if you let me enlighten you before proceeding any further.” Without turning toward the priest standing behind her or waiting for a response from the two travelers, the archbishop directed the priest to fetch the wine they had just refused. The man made a quick exit and the archbishop sat at the table, directing the still standing Belech to do the same.

  “As you know, the Syraeic League has many dealings with the Church of Belu. I’ve only been archbishop here for two years. I spent most of my life in Bennybrooke before that, the last ten as Bishop of Marburand. I assume your departure from the League was before that, Sir Auric, else I would have met you. I have, however, met your daughter, Agnes.”

  Auric stiffened.

  “She is a delightful and fierce young woman. You must be filled with pride at her accomplishments as an agent of the League.”

  “She has never disappointed me, Excellency,” he answered, shaken but not certain why. “I wish I could say I had never disappointed her.”

  “Agnes has spoken to me of you. She chafes at your natural parental caution.” She paused, seeming to consider what she should or shouldn’t say before finally continuing. “There is no gentle way to say this, Sir Auric: a strange plague has afflicted the Citadel, and your daughter is among the sick.”

  “What? What plague?”

  “It’s complicated, and Lictor Rae will tell you all she knows when you meet with her. But before you go, you must know that all but a handful of the Citadel’s residents are in makeshift infirmaries. Some who contracted the illness died quickly, within hours, while others lingered for weeks before finally succumbing. Still others lie unconscious, hovering in some limbo we do not understand. Only two have recovered fully. Pallas Rae is one of them. Spread of the contagion is arrested for now. It hasn’t escaped the Citadel.”

  “And why aren’t an army of priests healing the afflicted, Excellency?” Auric said, his voice rising. “Why haven’t the agents of Belu ended this plague, especially if it’s contained within the Citadel?”

  Hanadis’s calm expression didn’t waver in the face of Auric’s pique. “I have twenty clerics and acolytes there now, doing what they can to assuage the suffering, but all our prayers and rituals have cured not a single patient. I’ve conducted healing ceremonies, consulted Belu’s Liturgies of Peace and Health, made sacrifices in our tabernacle, but nothing has dispelled the plague afflicting these people.”

  “You said you had halted the spread. How?”

  “I did not halt it, Sir Auric, Agnes did. The disease seems to have its origin in a Djao artifact from the Citadel’s Hall of Glories. Agnes was the one who risked her own welfare to place the relic in a specially fashioned container, reinforced with powerful protective sorcery and divine rituals. This was a week ago. Agnes fell ill immediately afterward, yet lives. Lictor Rae was afflicted for a full four weeks before she shook off the disease’s hold. Agnes is strong. It is my fervent prayer that she can survive this as well.”

  The priest arrived with wine. Belech drank deeply, while Auric waved it away, his mind reeling with this dreadful news. “I must speak to my daughter,” Auric said finally, making to get up from the table.

  “You can’t,” responded the archbishop, holding up a staying hand. “Like all who have hung on, she is unresponsive. We give her water, feed her broth, bathe her, but it’s as though she sleeps. She cannot speak, doesn’t respond in any way. None of them do. I ask that you stay the night here at the cathedral. There’s nothing you can do for Agnes tonight and you need rest. Lictor Rae herself can tell you all she knows in the morning.”

  “Will we be vulnerable to the disease if we enter the Citadel?” asked Belech.

  “As far as we can tell, no,” Hanadis answered with a slow shake of her head. “There have been no new cases since Agnes placed the relic in the ensorcelled receptacle.”

  Auric refused with all the politeness he could command. The archbishop nodded. She reached across the table in a motherly gesture that would have felt invasive and presumptuous if anyone else had attempted it: she held his chin with one hand, and with her other she touched his forehead, his lips, then blew a gentle puff of air above his head. Auric froze for a moment.

  “The All-Mother’s blessings be upon you, Auric Manteo. I will continue to pray for Agnes, and all who suffer from this plague.”

  “And I pray that your entreaties meet with better results than they have thus far, Excellency,” he said, feeling a tickling at his heart and rising anger. Belech rose and gave an awkward bow to Hanadis as an apology.

  “Auric,” Belech said, catching him before he walked out the great doors of the cathedral and into the shadowy streets of Boudun, lit now by flickering lamplight. “Let’s accept the archbishop’s kind offer. There’s nothing to be done tonight and we both need rest. Better that we enter the Citadel in the morning, refreshed and ready for whatever we might face.”

  Auric stood silent for a moment, then lifted a hand to his forehead and saw that he was trembling again.

  “Auric, please.”

  The full weight of his fatigue washed over Auric, making the thought of a warm bed immeasurably alluring.
Tears welled in his eyes and he looked up at the much taller man, worry written on Belech’s plain, square face.

  “Very well,” he answered finally, surrendering to his weariness. “Sleep, and then to the Citadel at the crack of dawn. Yes…sleep will do me good.”

  4

  Citadel

  He nearly lost his footing twice in the darkening hall after turning from the now-hopeless fight, the sounds of the animated dead scrabbling behind him in renewed pursuit. The image of a voracious, rampaging corpse dining on Lenda’s flesh was locked in his mind’s eye as he fled down the corridor toward the sunken temple’s entry chamber. His eyes refused to adjust to the faint illumination trickling from his intended goal at the end of the hall, and there was no sign of Brenten, who had continued running in fear when he and Lenda had stopped to face the necrotic onslaught together. But now she was dead, and Auric ran for his life, liquid terror pumping through his veins. Her mangled body would lie there to rot, unburied by those who loved her. Or maybe the things would continue feasting on her flesh until nothing remained but tooth-scarred bones.

  His father’s voice rolled down the corridor of the ancient Djao temple, a pulsating wave of poison and hate. “You failed her! Failed her! She’d be safe with her roots and herbs at the Citadel if you hadn’t enticed her with tales of adventure and glory. How gloriously you run now, boy!”

  And then the floor was gone and Auric was tumbling through space, arms and legs flailing. Before he struck the hard-packed earth of the pit floor he lost hold of his long sword, which tumbled into the darkness. The landing was brutal, but somehow he was spared broken bones—nothing short of a miracle. He slammed into another figure in the darkness when he rose from the ground. The man cried out like a frightened child.

  “Auric? Lenda? Is that you?” Brenten’s voice was infected with craven panic.

  “Lenda’s dead,” whispered Auric, hearing the fear in his own voice.

  At that moment, Brenten managed to strike one of his glow-rods against a pit wall, revealing the alchemist’s terror-stricken face bathed in unnatural greenish light. He, too, had been spared any broken bones from the fall, but his front teeth were knocked out and his nose was a bloody ruin. He wiped some of the blood from his nostrils with the sleeve of his shirt in an agitated motion, throwing green light across the pit.

  What was that?

  Something on the hard-packed earth…crawling toward them? Auric jerked the glow-rod from Brenten’s grasp and spun its chemical radiance back to the floor behind the alchemist. Lying face down and motionless, limbs splayed out, was a human figure, a quarterstaff still grasped in a decrepit hand.

  “Vanic’s balls!” screamed Brenten when he swung around to look at what Auric had illuminated with the glow-rod. “Another one’s down here with us!” He almost knocked Auric over, fleeing to the far side of the pit away from the corpse. Auric scanned the rest of the ground with the glow-stick, located his lost sword, and retrieved it. He then approached the still figure to examine it more closely, his blade held out to check any sudden movement.

  “It’s a desiccated corpse, Brenten,” said Auric to the alchemist, who had struck another of his glow-rods to life. “It’s still clothed. No more than twenty or thirty years old, not like those ancient things we woke.” He guessed it was an unfortunate predecessor, someone else who had tried to loot this accursed place.

  Auric felt some of the terror leaving him, as though it was a malevolent cloak someone lifted off his body. Sorcery? Had the intensity of his fear been magically induced, a terrible enchantment? He’d seen frightening things before; seen his colleagues cut down by the dead, by demons, or golems made of stone. But he never felt a fear like that: bottomless, enveloping, terrible. Why the impulse to cower, to flee like children?

  Auric shook away his questions and turned his attention back to the mummified body, which bore a satchel of rough canvas on its back. He was reaching for the backpack when he heard chittering and scraping from above, followed by another of Brenten’s piteous cries. Auric looked up. Fifteen feet above, standing at the lip of the pit, was a row of the undead creatures—their hungry pursuers. Some jerked from side to side with impatience. Others opened and closed their jaws, a sick yellow light in the sockets of skulls where eyes had rotted away long ago.

  “What are you waiting for, you bloody abominations?” Auric shouted at the hateful creatures, shaking his blade at them. “I’m ready to die! The false terror is gone! The enchantment is broken!” The ragged line of animated dead seemed not to hear or comprehend Auric’s defiant challenge.

  Mindless, he thought. They’re nothing but automatons; no will, no malice, just unthinking puppets.

  As if answering his assessment, one of the cadavers cast an object into the pit. It sailed over their heads and struck the far wall with a sloppy chunk. Every ounce of the fear that had compelled Auric to flee the domed chamber returned, as though the malignant cloak had been draped over him again. The object rolled out in front of them. Brenten began retching. Auric bit his curled fist to stifle a scream, hard enough to draw blood.

  Staring up at them, smeared with dirt and gore, eyes and mouth opened wide in a silent shriek of horror, was the severed head of Lenda Hathspry.

  Auric was flat on his belly in a dark place, a sliver of light on the stone floor before him. With sudden fury, the pale gray arms of a dead thing shot forth from the light, grasping for him. He could retreat no further in this hiding place. Where was his sword? Why wasn’t he in his armor? He tried to fend off the cadaverous hands with frantic desperation, pushing, scratching, smacking, but the fingers of one clamped down on his wrist with an appalling iron strength.

  He cried out in protest as he was dragged into the light. It was no animated corpse that had hold of his wrist, but Belech. Auric blinked, his eyes adjusting to the morning light. He had been cowering under his bed in the sleeping cubicle at the Blue Cathedral.

  Two wide-eyed, breathless priests appeared in the doorway, drawn no doubt by Auric’s cries as Belech extricated him from beneath the bed. The big man helped him stand and dusted him off. Auric began to stutter an apology, which Belech interrupted, speaking to the priests at the door. “No worries, lads. Just startled awake by a nightmare. Nothing to concern you.”

  The priests, brows knitted, exchanged looks of concern before nodding and leaving the two men alone.

  “I’m sorry,” said Auric, smoothing his shirt. “I don’t know how—”

  “No need for an apology, Sir Auric,” answered Belech, perhaps using the honorific to aid him in regaining some dignity. “Twenty-four years a legionary, I’m well acquainted with nocturnal visits of unpleasant memory. It happens to us all. Every one of us. Myself included.” Belech turned to his own bed, packing up the few personal things he had set on the nightstand.

  Auric felt his heart swell with gratitude at the man’s compassion and tact, but had trouble imagining big, affable Belech ever cowering beneath a bedsheet.

  They reached the Citadel soon after the sun rose. There was no sign of the usual flurry of traffic coming to and from the Syraeic League’s headquarters: field agents returning from expeditions or departing for one, scholars borrowing and returning ancient texts from the Citadel’s legendary library, impatient would-be novices waiting to plead their cases to preceptors. Instead, the marble portico was empty. A trio of bleached rat skulls woven into a black cloth hung from the structure’s tall doors of ancient, darkened oak—a warning of contagion.

  Auric and Belech had left Glutton and Lugo at the stables of the Blue Cathedral, knowing they’d have less trouble making the trek through Boudun’s crowded streets on foot with all the cart traffic early on a market day. Archbishop Hanadis had seen the two men off, laying a blessing of health and protection on them both. She had handed Belech her laurel wreath crown from the day before. Auric was surprised to see tears form in the man’s eyes. The old soldier clutched th
is token of faith tightly in his hand during their walk to the Citadel, as though it was bejeweled and made of gold.

  Belech’s silence allowed Auric to contemplate the nightmare that had marred his sleep. They’re nothing but automatons; no will, no malice, just unthinking puppets. Wrong. Very wrong. Had they read his mind and cast poor Lenda’s brutalized head into the pit to mock his foolish misapprehension? He had confronted evil more than once during his days with the League, not only in the Barrowlands but in the tombs and crumbling monuments of the Busker kings that dotted the eastern half of the empire. But none of those other malignant beings had any personal animus for Auric Manteo. He was just another human to be toyed with or devoured; the malice was impersonal. But the dead horde they woke in the bowels of that Djao temple…their hate had felt very personal.

  It’s as though they took a bite out of my soul. The thought made him shudder and his mind turned to the humiliating nature of his waking and subsequent rescue by Belech. It was no small mercy when the old soldier broke this gloomy reverie as they reached the Citadel portico.

  “I can’t read the inscription above the doors,” he said, pointing at the curling alien characters carved into the marble arch.

  “No reason you should be able to. It’s written in a language that’s been dead for ten thousand years. It says, ‘The past is buried and is patient.’”

  “Meaning?”

  “It’s first on the Syraeic League’s forever expanding list of mottos. I’ve always taken it to mean that the history of the ancients waits to be uncovered by those with the initiative to seek it out. Personally, after my career I think it requires an addendum. Something like, ‘The past is also very hungry and has many sharp teeth.’”