Lost Gods

by Micah Yongo

  “Very well,” he said coldly. “We will make a bargain, then.” He lowered his blade. “I will not lift my sword against you. Not now. But if this is to be the path you choose, to take the boy, know this: you will be like Neythan and Arianna now, and they will hunt you, the Shedaím shall hunt you… and after this day, I shall hunt you too. You are my blood. And for that I do not lift my blade now. But when we meet again, if we should meet again, you will have no such guarantee… brother.”

  Daneel’s lips parted to speak but didn’t. He just nodded once, and then pulled at the boy’s shoulder and stepped back, watching his brother and then turning to walk the child up along the low bluff above the riverside. He kept walking, his back to his brother, tugging the orphaned, blank-faced child along by the sleeve and feeling in himself, in his every step away from his silent watching sibling behind, something leaking out of him, like the child had watching his father die, something like life, something like blood.

  Forty-Two

  T R U T H S

  It was like that time as a child when her brother, Zaqeem, held her by the arms, grinning up as he tossed her high into the air. Yasmin had felt the world within her then, its deep heavy yaw rushing up from inside, pushing through her guts and stomach and into her throat as she swung up from his arms into the fresh summer breeze and hung there, for just a moment, before the inevitable fall into his waiting arms beneath. Part of her wanted to smile at that, because she thought she’d no memories of him. She’d tried before to think of him and couldn’t. But here, now, as she sank into the cold, deep black and watched the sun’s glow wink down through the water, she could feel that same slip in her guts she’d felt as a child, that same taut suspense, but this time drawn out, stretched across moments into dread as the river’s chill swam around her.

  And so then she thought of Noah. Smart, sulky Noah. The way he’d sit beyond the city walls, lingering in the lemon light of the lowering sun with his pigeons as the air cooled and the farmers and herdsmen came in from their roams. And Hassan, buried in his books, his endless quests for lost old things in obscure places he wanted to discover and bring back to the library. And she could see it all falling away, shrinking out like the blurred watery light of the sun above her, leaving her behind, swept away by the icy current. And beneath it all the intolerable certainty that this was her fault. Because it was, wasn’t it? She’d done this, brought the fear they’d felt as they were chased from the road by the two horsemen. The terror on little Noah’s face. Her beautiful Noah. It was all her fault. Why hadn’t she listened to old Yaram? Why hadn’t she left Zaqeem’s secrets in the grave? Why had she persisted in digging and digging until those dangerous questions of hers had yanked the peril from her dead brother into the lives of her husband and son?

  She didn’t want to die. But she knew now that she would. She could feel the air in her lungs thinning as she sank deeper into the water, a blackness crowding the edges of her vision. It was all she could do not to sob as the last bubbles slipped from her mouth. And she knew then it didn’t matter what she wanted. It had never mattered. She was small, and life was big, as big and broad as the current snatching her further from the shore and down into the river’s murk and algae-green gloom. The rocks ran beneath her, isles of sharp stone prodding from the riverbed. Gusts of silt kicked up from around them as though tossed by the wind. Idly, Yasmin wondered which would take her first, the air she couldn’t breathe, or the jagged granite lining the riverbed, or even the throbbing wound on her head where her skull had smacked against the bed of the cart as it crashed down from the road into the river’s embankment. And then after a while it didn’t seem to matter. None of it mattered. Not the questions. Not Zaqeem. Nothing. So she let go, stopped fighting. Let the cold in. Let it slip into her limbs and spine. Let it fill her nostrils, her throat, her chest, pressing its weight in on her until she couldn’t feel her fingers, or arms, or even the blink of her eyelids. Until she couldn’t see. Until the icy darkness began to sweep over and through her and suck away everything else, leaving only the cold and…

  She felt hands on her. Aggressive fingers yanking at her shoulders, pulling her up and out. And then there was a new weight to everything, and hands pressing down on her. But she felt so cold. Like she herself had become the cold. Colder even than the time Hassan had taken her north to the Reach, where Calapaar’s borders met the snowcapped mountain ranges beyond the Wetlands and tipped into the barren Kivite territories. The way Hassan’s ears had reddened that day, as though the blood inside was suddenly aglow. And his hands too. Those hands. There were hands on her chest now, pushing down on her in an angry hard rhythm. But it didn’t matter, she could hardly feel it, as though her body was some distant thing those hands were gently thumping. She would sleep now. Just for a little while. Just to rest. Until she felt better. She could feel it coming on, that gentle tipping into welcome slumber, and she felt sure she was about to finally let go, when another distant thump hammered on her breastbone and the icy cold that had become her began to swell up from inside until it was rushing up like vomit into her throat and mouth and nostrils and…

  Yasmin coughed and spluttered. Then she heaved, vomiting up water on the gravelly embankment beneath her.

  She was no longer in the river. She could feel the gritty dig of shale and pebbles and the cold sodden weight of her clothes. Her mouth was salty. The vague sound of one or two others nearby, the crunch of feet on grit. She tried to open her eyes but they were stinging, like her lids had been rubbed raw. She blinked through it and opened them anyway. Sunny blue sky. A slight breeze. The noise of water.

  “No, little dove. You are not dead.”

  Yasmin recognized the voice. She blinked again and saw its owner, squatting in front of her. That same sleek dark skin. That same cool speculative gaze, looking at Yasmin as though she was a child, despite Yasmin being her elder by at least ten years.

  “What…” Yasmin coughed again. “Imaru?”

  The queen of Súnam’s daughter inclined her head in acknowledgment. She was dressed in the pale hooded cloak of a nomad. Two tall Súnamites stood on either side, dressed similarly in hooded garb that hung down to their ankles.

  “Where am I?” The barren pebbled plain of the West Road lay on one side, all pallid dirt and shallow slopes and the odd dry weed sprouting through the rocks and stones. Behind her the slow drift of the Crescent ambled on. It began to come back to her. The road out from Hanesda. The hooded horsemen. The river.

  “Hassan. Noah… Where are they?” She started to get up. Imaru reached out and stopped her, resting a palm on her shoulder. The look on the Súnamite’s face. Yasmin’s gut went cold. She felt her insides clench. “No.”

  “I’m sorry, Yasmin.”

  Abruptly Yasmin retched, but nothing would come out. Nothing left to vomit. She was empty. So empty. “No,” she whispered. “No.”

  “Listen to me, Yasmin.”

  But she couldn’t. Her eyes were stinging again; the tears felt like sand. Imaru let her weep for a while before speaking again, softly. So softly.

  “We found Hassan by the shore on the far side.” Imaru leaned in, took hold of Yasmin’s other shoulder. “But the boy… We have not found him. There are tracks. We think he is alive, Yasmin. We think he can be found. We can find him together. We can help you. We want to help you.”

  Yasmin pushed Imaru’s hands away and shuffled back. “Help me?” Her husband was gone. Her son was gone. She could feel the floor of herself falling away, crumbling, tipping into some horror-filled void beyond grief, beyond pain. And now this woman was talking of help. This woman who’d met her but once, and mocked her with her gaze when doing so. Help? “What are you even doing here?” Yasmin said.

  Imaru seemed about to answer, but then stopped. She glanced up at the two men with her, and then to the river. The current was slower here, not like how it was a quarter mile to the west where they’d spotted her being pulled along beneath the water and then dived in to fish her out. “
I’m going to show you something, Yasmin. Something you need to see… Perhaps you will understand it, perhaps you will not. But the truth is we’re here because of your brother, Zaqeem… I suppose you could say he has sent us here to you.”

  “What are you talking about? My brother is dead.”

  “Yes. He is.” Imaru lifted both hands to remove her hood, then reached into her cloak. She withdrew a small flute of snowcane. “Here. Take it.”

  “What is it?”

  Imaru didn’t answer.

  Yasmin glanced at the guard standing behind Imaru. Dark skinned, flecks of grey salting his coarse beard. He’d been scanning the horizon but instinctively looked back at Yasmin as she watched him. He stared at her for a moment, expressionless – his eyes a strange pearlescent grey – and then turned his gaze back to the landscape behind her. Yasmin brought her attention back to Imaru and took the snowcane. It had been sealed with her brother’s signet, his full name and the emblem of her father’s house – the familiar image of a balanced scale beside a sun half-submerged beneath the sea’s horizon. Yasmin remembered asking her father about that emblem, whether the sun was rising or setting, and how he’d jokingly give her a different answer each time she asked. She tugged the lid free from the seal and tipped the flute, patting it against her palm. A small and tightly rolled scroll slipped out.

  “What is this?”

  “A gift your brother hoped he’d never have to give.”

  Yasmin frowned and unrolled the scroll to find there were multiple pages. She began with the first.

  The witness of Zaqeem son of Tishbi, governor of Qadesh, for the one he has chosen to bear it. These words written in the second year of our king.

  So then, sister, we finally say goodbye. It will be strange to you. But it is the custom of those I have come to belong to. Although even if it wasn’t, it would still remain something I would want to do. Perhaps that will be strange to you too. You will think such a thing could not matter to me, that I have seldom thought of you. If you think on these things at all you will perhaps even believe I left our home in anger, or mystery, or whatever story Father gave to explain my not being there. I want you to understand these things could hardly be further from the truth. What is true is I have thought of you every day, sister. And whatever lie Father may have told to have you believe otherwise has come from fear. Fear of the future. But fear also of the past. It is for this fear I was sent away. And it is because of this I have left these words for you. So that you will know the truth. Truth Father kept from you. Truth I, in the end, also kept from you. In the hope you would not need to learn it. But now you must. That you are reading this letter will mean that you must. It will mean that your safety, perhaps even your very survival, will depend on you learning these long-hidden truths.

  You will have perhaps been taught that I was exiled from our family, my home, for my interest in ancient practices. And perhaps this is almost true. But I shall now ask you to ponder where this interest began. What writings might have first stirred my appetite for these forbidden traditions? Where did they come from? Where did I find them? Think, sister. Where is it you first came upon collections of texts? Before you were a wife, or mother. Before you migrated all that way to the west and that magnificent library in Dumea. Was it not our father’s scribing table? Was it not among his histories and genealogies? Was it not by that table he taught you of the tales every well-born child learns, how the things now counted common came to be? The history of the Five Lands? The Battle of the Banners? The founding of the crown city? The line of the Sovereigns?

  What if among those many genealogies of his I discovered a scroll he did not intend me to see? A scroll in which our own bloodline was recorded? What if I learned there a secret? A powerful and magnificent secret, that we – you and I – are descended not merely from a line of scribes and clerics, but belong to one of the few priestly bloodlines to survive the Cull? What if our forebears carried power in their blood we’ve never been told of? Perhaps even great power. And what if, dear sister, I discovered that these forebears covenanted with Sharíf Karel long ago for their survival, and vowed to abstain from practicing their arts as long as his line remained? These would be curious things to learn, no? Even more so when considered in light of my other great discovery – that the sovereign line has been broken, that there is illegitimacy on the throne. Perhaps the very kind of illegitimacy to free our line from the vows that have bound it.

  You will think this all fanciful, of course. But you must understand, if I were to tell you all these things it would be because they are true, and that my death has been brought about because of them. You would say, of course, it is a lie, yes? Zaqeem, so terrible, even from his grave reaches out to torment our family with his deceits. I understand, sister. I do. I can imagine what Father has said of me. And in truth, I thought these revelations a lie too. But then I wondered why Father might call us scribes, why he might cover a lie with a lie. I was confused, and desired answers from him he proved unwilling to give. When he forbade me to ask for them, I became all the more desirous to know what they were. So, he exiled me. Banished me from my home.

  Afterward, I was lost, sister. For a great many years I gave myself to wine and harlots and whatever the silver Father had sent me away with would buy. I gained for myself a reputation, and vices I never saw how to free myself from. But the questions would never leave me, sister. I could not forget them, no matter how many skins of wine I emptied, or women I lay with. The questions would not let me rest. So I gave myself to study, to discovering their answers. With the same vigour and urgency with which I’d delighted my flesh I furnished my mind. I became a learned man, a cleric, and then, eventually, even a governor. I was respected, sister. I was admired. Having been exiled from my father’s house, I became one of the most learned and esteemed men in the Sovereignty. But even then the questions did not leave me. Were these ancient arts in my blood? What were they? How to wield them? And so I continued to seek for the answers and in my search came to know people. A certain group of people who could help me find the things I was looking for. The Fellowship of Truths, they called themselves. They were able to bring to me hidden writings on the priesthoods, scrolls they’d obtained from catacombs and ruins. They even brought me copies of some of the writings from your library of Hophir in Dumea. Through these many writings I learned unnatural skills, sister. Rudimentary, but skills nonetheless. I came to see that what Father’s genealogies had claimed lay in our blood is no lie. But I have arrived at this discovery too late to truly exploit it. I was too old to further my learning in these arts as one with our blood might if they were to begin as a child. If they were to begin, perhaps, at Noah’s age. Perhaps such a one could master the practices I could be no more than a novice in or only read of. Perhaps such a one, if they learned to wield such arts, could change things.

  Yes, sister. I know what you are thinking. Why should Noah be brought into all this? Shouldn’t I do as Father did, and keep it from him? Protect him from these truths? But these thoughts are an illusion, sister. The blood cannot be denied, it is the thing that holds what has been, what is, and what shall be. And what shall be cannot be denied, or hidden, any more than the sun can be hidden from the sky. Even if the seasons hide it, or the clouds, in the end it will show itself, and what then? Should dawn be, for Noah, a thing that comes upon him, that he seeks to escape but cannot? Shall men learn of him? Hunt him? As they did our forebears? And he be unable to defend himself, because he was not taught what and who he is? Yes. You will think that ignorance is safety, as Father did. But there is no safety. There is only what is. I have learned that now.

  So, what lies before you is a choice, sister. But if you are reading this, then you will know there is no choice without consequence, and there is no consequence without change, and there is no change without loss. But you need not fear that, just as Noah need not fear the dawn, if he is ready for it. If he is made ready for it.

  Yasmin put down the page. The pages be
hind it were rolled one inside the other into a scroll almost an inch thick.

  “Notations.” It was the man’s voice. The tall, dark guard who’d been staring at the horizon beyond Yasmin. “The sum of Zaqeem’s studies. For your son to learn from.”

  “You know all this.” Yasmin nodded at the page in her hand, the letter Zaqeem had written her, looking at Imaru. “You know what is written here.”

  “I can guess.”

  “Then you are one of them, this Fellowship of Truths.”

  “I am.”

  Yasmin shook her head. She looked down again at the roll of pages. So many.

  “Your son is alive, Yasmin,” the man said. “We can help you find him.”

  “And in return?”

  “You will persuade him to study the pages, and learn the practices written in them.”

  Yasmin laughed bitterly. She’d never been able to persuade Noah to study. That had always been Hassan’s job. “I want to see my husband. You said you found him… found his…”

  Imaru placed her hand on Yasmin’s and, for a moment, just gazed back at her without moving, perhaps allowing Yasmin time to change her mind. When Yasmin said nothing, Imaru, eventually, nodded. “Very well.” The black woman rose to her feet. “Come.”

  Yasmin got up and followed as Imaru led her back along the embankment of the river, against its current, to a low sharp rise that sloped down toward a narrow, pebbled shoreline. She saw him from a short distance. Prone and face down in the dirt, still wearing the deep blue tunic she’d given him last year. The only extravagant thing he owned. That he was wearing it now had been a gesture to her, she knew. They’d argued before she left Dumea. It would be his way of letting her know it didn’t matter. He’d come only to bring her home. Home. The word seemed like a mockery now, a tattered ruin of something that once was, just like the lifeless sodden body of her husband, lying there as the river’s tide brushed against his arm.