No more Sir Drake of Kir-Bell, he thought, and it was like taking off a heavy, unwanted load. Gorel of Goliris smiled. The moonlight fell down and bathed the advancing children in an eerie, insubstantial light. Godlings? He thought. They looked like nothing more than lost, unwanted children. He almost felt sorry for them. The real god power, that sweet, all-embracing pleasure, the almost-unbearable bliss of the black kiss, was coursing through his blood. The real thing.
And he hated it. Hated it as much as he hated sorcery, hated it as much as he craved it, as much as he knew that he was bound to it, ever since the goddess Shar had kissed him, her lips stained with blood, as she died – died while laughing at him.
They were close to him now, these children born of carefully-plotted charts, of matching lineages, of linked blood-lines. The nearest was less falang than frog, and as he hopped one final time towards Gorel his large eyes seemed sorrowful, the eyes of an animal about to be taken out of its prison-basket and skewered for the grill. Gorel shot him between the eyes and had the satisfaction of seeing them close, at last. The heavy body flopped to the ground and was still, but the children continued to come.
The moonlight fell down on their faces, revealing extraordinary shapes, children with too many eyes or none at all; children with elongated skulls or giant, misshapen ones, children with two or three or four arms, with tails and with wings and with fins and with claws and with suckers – he fired again and dropped another girl to the ground. They never made a sound. And they continued to advance.
Behind him was the high wall of the house. He could not jump over it. Under his feet the ground was muddy and water covered his feet. The moonlight fell on the marshy grounds.
Water, Gorel thought. He stared at the scene before him. The water continued to rise. He thought – the river!
He glanced sideways. The water was rising. He looked back. Two of the children had disappeared. He swore, but quietly. Water-creatures. He glanced away again. Something was worrying at him, telling him he had forgotten something, or wasn’t paying attention…
A shack on stilts above the water at sunset: lanterns hanging overhead and the air thick with mosquitoes and incense, the water a calm dark-green below… he had seen the merchant there, for the first time, and Kettle… but there was something else, someone else, in the shadows, who he had paid almost no attention to…
Carnival. Laughter and shouts and the drinks flowing faster than Tharat himself, the spilled liquors themselves offerings to the river-god, and there, in another corner, a solitary figure shrank like the fungus growing from the roots of a wizened tree, not human, exactly, but of what nature, what species, even Gorel couldn’t say, but he knew the merchandise. Gods’ dust.
The dope merchant. What of him? Something was whispering in his ear, a sound trickling smoke, like rising water…
Something jumped on his back then and tried to claw his head off his shoulders, and he turned in a circle, furious, and fell back, and his attacker cushioned his fall and he freed himself, turned, and put a bullet into a chest where sores grew like fungus.
Fungus, he thought. He shook his head and tried to clear it. How many bullets left? There had been a fight, back in that bar on the river. He remembered Kettle flying away from it, and he himself left before any shots were fired. But before that… he glanced away again. There! He almost saw it this time. A shape at the far end of the garden, a shape like water given substance, watching him –
In a corner, the dust merchant, solitary, inhuman, indistinct. Gorel watched him. No one else paid the dope-peddler attention. The atmosphere in the place was of the kind one could cut with a knife – or shatter with a bullet. And so it was only Gorel who saw the figure moving unobtrusively onto the wooden platform that hung above the water, open to the sky, and there it turned a face – smooth, indistinct, like water – back and smiled, and dropped down into the river below, like water, falling, and melted into the river’s darkness.
The water was up to his knees now, and rising. And something darted underwater and bit him and he kicked, and lost his balance, and then he was fighting underwater, not with guns but with his hands, and the thing attacking him was slippery and smooth like a Merlangai female, and a fin rose through the water like a blade and sliced a line of blood on his cheek. He reached for her throat, blindly, and her teeth closed on his fingers, cutting down to the bones and almost breaking them and he screamed.
Something in the water laughed. And Gorel knew, and almost despaired.
A drunken conversation, locals shrugging off the threat of an invasion from the west… ‘You think no army ever came here, Avian? Tharat is a great god –’
‘Father-river, giver of life –’ from one of the men, dressed like a priest –
‘He at least would not object to a generous offering of blood!’
‘Foreigners’ blood!’
‘Well, as long as it’s not your own,’ the Avian said.
And Gorel thought – how do you breed godlings? Human stock and falang, yes, it was easy enough to come by. Even Nocturne, if enough money and influence are involved. Merlangai stock, no problem. What did they say about the Merlangai? They would rather fuck than talk. But how, and where, do you find a god to join the blood-lines?
Then his unseen attacker, this child in the water was on him, fastening on to him, teeth digging into his breast, hurting him, but Gorel stilled himself; and slowly, carefully, Gorel of Goliris reached an arm, tracing the flesh of the child in the water, almost lovingly, until he found the throat and his fingers closed on it and pressed, and his other hand followed and found the child’s eyes and his thumb pressed into the one on the left, burrowing into the cavity in the skull, and the child shuddered once in the water, and a second time, and was then still.
He rose from the water. It was almost up to his neck. He blinked away water, or tried to. But the water was in his eyes now, and inside him, and he could see the watcher, and he was closer now, and smiling out of that same smooth, featureless face he had last seen in the place by the water.
Tharat.
The children were still there, still focused on him. Had they ever been children, he wondered, or were they merely bodies, animated at the will of their creator, bred to be… what? An army? And the Mothers, did they even know this, when they decided to ask for a god’s help in affairs to which neither mortal nor god should have had right to engage in? Fools, he thought. He could no longer see the Mothers. Had they gone inside? Were they even now watching, studying the children, planning new lineages, new mixes, procuring more –
And he thought of the merchant he had tortured but not killed. Master Procurator, he had said he was, and Gorel thought him mere merchant. But what if –
He turned and half-walked, half-swam, trying to get away from the children. He did not want to kill any more of them, but still they came at him, and all the while the smooth smiling figure was watching him from the corner of the garden, and where it stood it stank of dust. The smell of it was in the water, the touch of it was on Gorel’s skin. Gods’ dust, and there in the corner its source, its purveyor, and Gorel ignored the children and made for the god Tharat.
The water was rising. His guns were holstered. He took a deep breath – and dove. When he opened his eyes the moon filtered through the surface and cast the world in a pale glow. Shapes moved underwater. He thought he saw a group of Merlangai, dancing, their bodies moving in time to an unheard beat. He swam and had the sense of a vast world opening before him, like a river spreading wide as it reaches the distant ocean. He felt rather than saw a large body moving below him, had the sense of a great depth underneath. None of it was real, he thought. Or rather…
He had been to this place before. It was the space between the world of men and gods. He had received the black kiss at such a place… but this was not the world of some itinerant god, a little hole in the membrane between realities. This was the god Tharat’s place, a god fed and made strong with the belief of his countless peoples, f
alang and human and Merlangai, all along his banks. He could not fight such a god.
He swam and there was air in the water – or perhaps there wasn’t, and it simply didn’t matter in such a place. He could no longer see his attackers, and he was glad. Deep down below he saw lights, and as he dove further he saw structures taking shape, and a giant palace rose from the riverbed.
He dove towards it. What choice did he have? And it was pleasant down here, under the water… it felt like flying. His body tingled with the power of the god in the water, his mind felt restful, at ease, the black kiss satisfied at last. He could remain there forever, he thought, in that perpetual, unthinking bliss… he swam slowly down, and the palace grew before him. Ethereal Merlangai women swam towards him, smiling, reaching out their hands. Priestesses in a trance? Dead spirits summoned to their lord’s domain to be his servants? He didn’t know, nor cared. They escorted him through high, arching gates, and into an immense hall. Light streamed in through windows high above, a water-light, pale and fractured. In the middle of the hall sat the god Tharat.
Here, he was not of one shape. Like water, he flowed, and the shapes melted and ran through him, assuming aspects of fish, of nyaka, of human, of falang and Merlangai, of Ebong and Duraali and Nocturne and a hundred others, and Gorel knew they were the shapes of all the things that had ever died inside Tharat.
Gorel floated in the water before Tharat. ‘You,’ the god said. Gorel’s hand sought the butt of his gun. The god chuckled. ‘I’ve watched you,’ the god said. ‘We have been close so many times, you and I…’
‘My mistake,’ Gorel said. Tharat laughed. ‘I think not,’ he said. ‘We can help each other.’
‘I doubt that,’ Gorel said. The god inched his head in an oddly-human gesture. Around him, shapes materialised like ink pouring into water, and Gorel saw it was the children he had killed. The god chuckled again. The children stared at Gorel with unblinking eyes.
‘Here, they would be harder to kill,’ the god said. Gorel shrugged. ‘The dead should have the decency of staying that way,’ he said.
‘You are not afraid?’
Gorel sighed, expelling bubbles. ‘If you wanted me dead,’ he said, ‘it would have been done by now, I expect.’
‘You don’t like gods, do you?’ Tharat said. Gorel shrugged.
‘But you like what we can give,’ Tharat said.
Gorel remained impassive. He was aware of the god’s power, in the water, on his skin, in his mind. The black kiss, the ultimate bliss from which there was no escape… Tharat said, ‘What we give, so we can take away.’
The pain was not physical. It was the opposite of that, an absence rather than a presence, but it was terrifying, a sucking great vacuum that had engulfed Gorel, emptied him, took away from him everything but need, until his whole being had been reduced to a desperate want, a single desire, that hurt and hurt and would not be fulfilled. He had no language, no thought. If he had, he might have whispered, ‘Stop…’
‘My predecessor did well with you,’ Tharat said, though the words were meaningless slivers of pain as they trickled through the thing that was Gorel, the thing that was burning, desperate need. ‘Very well indeed. Here –’ and something let go, went loose, and inside Gorel sanity dribbled back, like smoke, and he gasped. ‘Almost too well,’ Tharat said. ‘Perhaps you are not as useful to me as I thought.’
I should kill him, Gorel thought. But he could not move. He was bound by the god’s dark drug. More, his mind, his body, wanted to shout. Give me more.
‘Still, you fight well,’ the god said. ‘And you’re tenacious. It’s a shame you had to spoil so many of my children. A shame, too, that you did not accede to Mistress Sinlao’s request… it would have been good to have your blood-line added to the –’ the god shuddered and his shape flowed again and he was a mimic of Gorel: a smiling one. ‘Gorel of Goliris,’ he said. ‘I have heard stories of your home. You hope the Mirror will help you return there?’
‘Yes,’ Gorel said. The black kiss had him bound, but he fought it. His hand inched its way to the gun by his side.
‘I will help you,’ the god said. That took Gorel by surprise.
‘Why?’
‘Mysterious are the ways of the gods,’ Tharat said.
Fuck you, Gorel thought but didn’t say. The truth was that gods were nothing more or less than a concentration of their followers’ own forces, primeval and raw. Gods were hunger and pain, orgasm and beauty, cruelty and fear and love. They were a drug, potent and enticing, a constant temptation that fed you just as they, in their turn, were fed. ‘What do you want?’ Gorel said.
‘I want you to find the mirror,’ Tharat said.
‘Why?’
And then – ‘You want it, and you can’t get to it.’
The god roared. The pain of withdrawal was inside Gorel again but this time he fought it, and the gun was in his hand and he pointed it not at the god but at himself. The pain stopped. ‘Find the mirror,’ the god said. It bore now the shape of an enormous frog. ‘I will not interfere. Now go.’
The water exploded. A maelstrom pulled at Gorel. He was sucked into a tunnel of water, and the colours of the world were washed away.
Part Three
The Shadow from the West
They were deep into the maze of Wat Falang and the silence was oppressive. The only sound that could be heard was of water dripping slowly down the moss-covered walls. Gorel stalked ahead, hand on the butt of his gun. Sereli walked behind. The girl Tonar, who he had rescued from the Mothers, was by Gorel’s side. He reached out to her, held her hand, and she smiled at him, though there was tension in her eyes. Behind them Sereli snorted. Gorel ignored her. They were inside a tunnel, and there seemed to be no way out. They had been walking through the tunnels for what seemed like hours. ‘Does she know where we are?’ Sereli said. Gorel, not turning around, said, ‘She has a name. Ask her yourself.’
Sereli snorted again.
‘It’s not far,’ the girl, Tonar, said, but she sounded less than convinced. ‘When I served we did not use the tunnels much. We moved above-ground. This place –’ Gorel felt her fingers tighten around his – ‘it is the realm of the underworld, it does not belong to Her, nor entirely to Him.’
‘Looks like disused sewers to me,’ Sereli said. ‘Smells like it, too.’
Gorel didn’t agree, but kept his own counsel. The place smelled empty, disused, and yet not abandoned. Something lived down here, he could feel it, sense it in the air currents and the dripping water. Something bad. He thought again about the Mother’s children, those half-breed creatures he had reluctantly killed, and of the god Tharat. His old friend, the wizard Champol, had warned him once: Never put yourself between two gods for, like two walls, they would close in on you until they crush you. Well, here he was, against advice, with the elusive pot-bellied god on the one side, and the river god on the other, and his choices reduced to none. He did not like gods. Once, he had killed one, and been cursed by her forever. The need of the black kiss was in him, never fully satiated, but he ignored it, or tried to. The silence was oppressive. The tunnel forked ahead. Tonar said, ‘Left,’ and they followed the path without comment, even Sereli, as it descended further, going down, down, down into the bowels of the earth.
Kettle was not there. Kettle was to fly above, provide aerial support if the need arose. He had already flown over the temple, but could not, he said, come close to the inner court, what Tonar, like Mistress Sinlao, had called the sanctum sanctorum, the holiest place. Winds had buffeted the Avian, set him off-course. It was there they needed to arrive: a small, secluded garden in the heart of the temple complex, beyond walls upon walls and guards upon guards, and with a hunting party already set out after them – after Gorel, at least.
He had come back to the World from the place of gods, rising out of water in the dank canal that lay beside the Sorcerer’s Head, and when he pulled himself out of the water faeces had clung to his hair and his clothes, a little farewel
l message from Tharat. He found Kettle with the girl, Tonar, in the second room from the left which they had made their temporary home. Sereli was sitting by the window, scowling. When Gorel came through the door she looked up and said, ‘You stink.’
Without comment he stripped, and went to the tub of water that sat by the wall, and doused himself. ‘Need a hand?’ Sereli said, materialising behind him. Then soapy hands were on his taut stomach, rubbing up to his chest, the soap foaming, and her hand slipped down and held him there, between his legs, and he hardened. ‘Let me clean that for you,’ Sereli murmured. Her breath was against his back and he could feel her small breasts pressing against him. He doused himself with more water and turned. The girl Tonar was staring at him, her eyes large in her face, and he grinned.
Sereli continued to massage his cock. All the while he was looking into the girl’s eyes and she sat there, looking back at him, her expression – he could not quite read her expression.
He came in Sereli’s hand. The falang girl never moved. Sereli said, ‘Feeling better, gunslinger?’ and there was laughter in her voice.
He didn’t answer; turned; and washed himself clean at last.
‘Where’s Kettle?’ he heard Sereli say, and when he turned around again, drying himself on a dirty-brown towel, realised the Avian had gone from the room.
‘What’s this?’ Sereli speaking, the tunnel magnifying her words. He let go of Tonar’s hand and drew his gun, slowly. Ahead of them the tunnel seemed to open into a space, but it was dark. He had the sense of something moving there, of things watching, waiting. ‘Does she know?’ Sereli said.
There was, Gorel noticed, a strange sign carved into the wall. He looked at it. ‘What does it mean?’ he asked. The falang girl looked at it, her long green fingers studying the ancient design.
Gorel and the Pot Bellied God Page 6
