The Last God

by Michael McClung

  “I’m too old, girl,” is all I said.

  She knelt and held my face in her small, cool hands. Her expression was suddenly grave. “You don’t have to be.” And just like that, all the aches and pains of my decrepit frame vanished.

  “My god sees no reason for suffering, and abolishes it in his presence,” she whispered, her eyes looking deep into mine.

  “Is he here with us now, then? I thought we were alone.” I gently pulled her hands away, and the infirmity of age returned. “I’m too old. I’m also a priest.”

  “Priests of Lagna swear no oath of celibacy, only never to marry. Luckily, I have no interest in a husband.”

  She had me there.

  I stood, with difficulty, and began to undo the togs at the neck of my robe. She moved to help me and I glared at her.

  “Stay right there,” I growled, and she subsided. When the togs were unfastened, I let the robe slip down around my ankles and stood before her naked. I pointed to the huge keloid scar that covered my hip, and ran down a goodly portion of my thigh.

  “Here’s my souvenir from the Deadlands, girl. A ghrol bigger than both of us put together stuck his spear in and started stirring. Shattered my hip bone. After I killed it, I had the joy of crawling back to the ship through ruins and burning sands.”

  “How did you kill it?” she asked mildly.

  “With great difficulty. Take a good look. Fuck the rest of this aged ruin; we both know you feel no desire for it, or me. Look at the scar, and understand what it means. I’ll not give you false hope that you can survive if you go there. This is all the knowledge you need. This is what lucky looks like.”

  “We have a saying in Chagul. ‘Knowledge is useless until put into practice.’”

  “We have a saying here in Lucernis: ‘People who go to the Deadlands die, because going there is stupid.’”

  “Lhiewyn.”

  “What?”

  “Would you like to put your robe back on?’

  “Very much, yes.”

  She scooped up my robe and helped me back into it, then put on her own clothes. Then she helped me to sit once more and passed me a glass of wine.

  “Let me speak frankly, as if I were a westerner, as you suggested.”

  “Oh gods yes, please do.”

  “I will go to Dat Chet. That is what my lord bids me to do, and so it must be done. Once there I will search for the Source, because it is my duty to do so. You are the only person who has been there and survived. You are the only person who can help me to survive it as well. I hope that you feel enough affection for me, brief though our association may be, to want me to survive.”

  I put the wine glass down and rubbed my eyes, suddenly tired.

  “Girl, I wouldn’t see a hair on your head harmed, which is why I’m doing everything I can to convince you not to go. Or do you think I flash my hairy old balls at every pretty face I see? If you want to go, go. The southern continent isn’t hard to find. I’ll light a candle for you at the temple of the departed.”

  “You can do more for me than that.”

  “No, I really can’t.”

  “Please tell me the location of the Source, and what you know of it.”

  “I can’t, girl.”

  “Can’t, or wont?”

  “Both. I’m truly sorry.”

  “So am I, dear Lhiewyn. I had hoped I could persuade you, but I see that persuasion is not enough.”

  Here come the torturers, I thought, but all I said was “Eh?”

  “Where persuasion fails, coercion must suffice. I deeply regret the necessity.” She made no signal that I could see, but two grim looking fellows with swords entered the room nonetheless. They didn’t look in the least friendly.

  “And here I thought they’d be hiding behind a curtain.”

  “What do you mean?” Chang Ying asked.

  “It’s not important. Just be careful when you start beating on me. I’m quite frail and likely to kark it of a sudden, and then where will you be?”

  “I doubt you are quite as frail as you appear, Sage Lhiewyn. The journal I acquired is no forgery, which means you are at least two hundred years old.”

  “If you believe that, you’re mad, girl.”

  “Perhaps. But it doesn’t matter. I have no intention of harming you, or having you harmed. My respect for you is genuine and deep.”

  “So how do you intend to coerce me, then?”

  “Your temple.”

  “What about it?”

  “I imagine even a small fire would spread quickly. My servants have been instructed to set a very large fire, if they are given the signal. Having toured the temple, I can say that the loss of knowledge due to such a conflagration would be, without exaggeration, catastrophic. Irreplaceable texts and histories turned to smoke and ash.”

  And Jessep along with them, most like. “I don’t like you very much anymore, girl.”

  “I regret that most of all,” she replied, looking down.

  “There’s just one problem with your plan,” I said. “If you burn the temple, you also burn what you’re looking for. There’s no way I could redraw the map from memory.”

  “Map?”

  “The map of Godhead, of course. What you call the Source. The place is a maze, and it’s peppered with deadly traps. I could give you the location, but that wouldn’t be enough. Even if you found it on your own, you’d never survive it. Not without the map.”

  “Let us go and collect the map, then, Revered.”

  “Are we going by palanquin again? Because you just said you weren’t going to torture me.”

  WE DID GO BY PALANQUIN again. It wasn’t any more fun the second time. When we got to the temple, Chang Ying, her four porters and two armsmen followed me in. Jessep gawped.

  “We’ve got guests, lad. They’re not really welcome, so they don’t get anything to drink. But I could use a jug of grog. Be a good lad and run to the shop.”

  “I’m afraid your acolyte will have to remain here,” Chang Ying said.

  “I’m liking you less and less,” I replied.

  “The more quickly you produce the map, the more quickly your servant can procure your ‘grog,’ whatever that might be.”

  “Fine. Come with me then.” I hobbled back to the restricted section, dug out my key ring and unlocked the gate. Then I went in, Chang Ying at my side and one of her armsmen at our backs. I flipped through the keys on the ring until I got to the right one, pulled out the tome that hid the keyhole to the wall safe, and inserted it. The whole shelf swung out, exposing the dusty cavity behind it. I reached in and grabbed the journal with the map.

  “I will require all the journals, Revered.”

  I grunted, and grabbed the other three.

  “Now let us take a look at this map.”

  “What, you don’t trust me?”

  A smile was her only response.

  “Hold these others, then,” I said, thrusting them at her.

  “Please do not try anything untoward, revered,” she said.

  “I’m giving you what you want, girl. It’ll kill you, but I’m giving it to you. I don’t need to do anything ‘untoward.’”

  She took the other journals, and I opened the one with the map. It brought back a whole host of memories, all of them awful. There was the complex we called Godhead, laid out on the yellowing, stained pages of the book. The Eye crouched in the center, picked out in blue. The maze of corridors radiated outwards from it. Every trap we had found and disarmed – or triggered – was indicated in red, with a note. They were all both physical and magical, and had to be dealt with every time we wanted to pass them.

  “It’s all there. Everything we discovered. It won’t be enough.”

  “My thanks all the same, Lhiewyn.”

  “So is this where you kill me?”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “So I won’t talk about how a Chagan representative threatened to burn down a Lucernan temple.”

  Sh
e smiled. “I very much doubt I could kill you, revered, even if I wished to. I most emphatically do not wish to do so. If you choose to remain silent about tonight, I will remain silent about your extraordinary longevity, which is something you seem to be at pains to hide.”

  “That sounds like a deal. I still don’t like you anymore, but I will regret your death in the Deadlands.”

  She stroked my cheek, then bowed low, hands hidden in her sleeves. Then she and all the rest of the Chagans departed, leaving Jessep and I alone.

  “Um, master?” Jessep said.

  “Yes, lad?”

  “What was that about?”

  I sighed. “That was about a girl with a death wish, who wouldn’t take no for an answer. I’m tired, lad. I’m going to bed. Lock up, please.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked after a moment.

  “What the hells makes you think I’d want to do that?”

  “Because you actually used the word please just now. You’re definitely out of sorts.”

  “Well I don’t want to talk about it. I want to sleep and forget this day ever happened. Goodnight, Jessep.”

  “Goodnight then, master.”

  I made my slow way back to my cell, and lay down on my pallet, too tired to bother to change or wash. I lay there in the dark and willed sleep to come, but sleep sent its regrets. Instead, a parade of images and memories proceeded across my mind’s stage. Godhead. The Eye. Chang Ying, naked and tattooed. The sigil of the Emperor’s personal concubine nestled amongst all the other characters of that tattoo. Truly, she had no choice but to follow her master’s orders. No one bearing such a sigil could ever defy or betray the Chagan emperor. It ensured utter loyalty.

  The Chagan emperor was old. Very old. It was rumored, even here in the distant west, that he sought the secret of immortality.

  She would never make it to the Eye. The map I’d given her detailed every trap we had discovered, and how to defeat them. But it did not show all the traps I had laid after the Eye had had its way with me.

  The next day I walked down to the end of the Street of the Gods, the opposite end from the Necropolis, to the temple of the departed. It was a secular place, dedicated not to any deity, but to all that was lost in the Cataclysm, and loss in general. A place of mourning.

  I lit a candle, and sat on the stone bench until it guttered out.

  There is a Chagan poem, barely a scrap, as many of them are:

  A stone in a pond makes ripples,

  The ripples are gone,

  Nothing remains.

  Beautiful in its way, but wrong. The stone remains.

  The God of Forgetting

  “HELLS NO. THREATEN all you want, but I'm not hunting down a killer. You are out of your fucking mind.” Scowling, I smacked my cane down on the temple’s marble floor for emphasis. Morno was not impressed.

  “You forget who it is you're speaking to, Lhiewyn.”

  “Oh, sorry. You're out of your fucking mind, Lord Governor. I'm so old that having a proper piss is the greatest accomplishment of my week, and you want me to catch a murderer? No, no, hells no, and fuck your horse for bringing you here to suggest it no. Don't you have hundreds of uniformed idiots for this sort of thing? Or did you finally disband the city watch for gross incompetence?”

  Morno stared at me for what seemed forever, face impassive. Shifted in the creaky old petitioner’s chair. Finally, he spoke.

  “Gods, you must have been a deadly swordsman when you were younger.”

  “Come again?”

  “It's the only possible explanation for how you made it to a ripe old age. With a mouth such as yours, surely people have been trying to kill you since you were old enough to duel. And yet you're still here.”

  “I was fair with a blade. I was better with my brain.”

  “Which is why I am here, you cantankerous pustule. I don't expect you to hunt down the murderer yourself. Just look at what evidence has been gathered. See if you can pick out anything the watch might have missed. Then, when you're finished, apologize to my horse.”

  “Your horse can lick my scrawny ass, Hartreid. I keep doing all these favors for you, and they keep almost killing me. Now you want me to catch a gods-damned murderer!”

  “They aren’t favors. They’re your civic duty. Whether you like it or not – hells, whether I like it or not – you are the high priest of one of the recognized religions in the kingdom. The position comes with certain responsibilities, including offering advice and assistance to your king and his duly authorized representatives when requested. It just so happens that I am duly authorized. Lord governors usually are, you know.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “You just pulled that out of your ass.”

  “Do you think so? I wager you didn’t read the fine print in the last grant of renewal for the temple’s tax exemption, then.” He smiled that small ‘fuck you’ smile he has when he’s got you by the balls, and I knew he wasn’t bluffing.

  “My ‘advice’ is to go and bugger yourself, Hartreid. Sadly, that would preclude me ‘assisting’ you.”

  “Lhiewyn, I know you’ve got a long, long lifetime’s experience in people hating you, but that’s been a face-to-face affair. I, on the other hand, am hated by most of the largest city on the Dragonsea, and have been for decades. And do you know why?”

  “I don’t give a runny shit.”

  “Because I make people do what’s best for the greater good, and I don’t accept excuses. You’re old enough to remember what Lucernis was like before I came.”

  “As a matter of fact, I do remember those halcyon days. Not a single person asking me to fight shit demons, get kidnapped by Chagans, or hunt down murderers. Good times, those.”

  He stood up from the battered petitioner’s table and pulled his riding gloves out from where he’d tucked them in his belt. “I’ll send Kluge to see you about the situation. And Lhiewyn, if you don’t start reading and responding to my letters, I’m going to invent new ordinances, taxes and fines that mysteriously, in practice, apply only to Lagna’s temple until you do. I’m not coming here every time I have something to discuss.”

  “Dead gods, what an asshole you are, Hartreid.”

  He smiled. “Indeed. It’s worth keeping in mind.” The bastard was actually whistling as he walked out into what passes for a Lucernan winter’s morning.

  “Master Lhiewyn?” Jessep called from the stacks.

  “What do you want, youngling?”

  “Is it really wise to talk to the lord governor the way you do?”

  “Start as you mean to continue, and continue as you mean to finish. That’s my advice, lad.”

  “You know he has people hanged. It’s a weekly occurrence.”

  “Yes, well, I’ve been told more than once that hanging is too good for me, so I’ll take my chances.”

  “INSPECTOR KLUGE. I’D say it’s nice to see you, but I’m too old to bother with transparent lies.” Less than an hour had passed since Morno’d darkened the temple’s door. Kluge really must be desperate, I thought.

  “Revered, unpleasant to see you as always. But I haven’t been an inspector for almost two years.”

  “Finally got that demotion you’ve been bucking for, eh?”

  Kluge has quite deep-set eyes. He got damn-near his whole thumb into the orbit of his right eye, trying to rub away the headache that is me. He probably would have used his left hand too, but that was taken up with holding a sheaf of papers bound in a black ribbon.

  Of course I knew he was watch commander now. But I was intent on making him tell me, for no other reason than he seemed to expect me to know and acknowledge it. It really was a no-win situation for him. If he insisted on the correct title, he looked petty. If he didn’t, well, he got what he was getting now.

  After a few seconds of trying to gouge his own eye out, he dropped the sheaf of papers on the nearest petitioner’s table and undid the ribbon. We both sat. As he started spreading papers out, it became painfully o
bvious that whoever had written them had only a passing familiarity with penmanship. Or spelling.

  “Before I subject my aged eyes to that scrawl, why don’t you just sum up what it is that has the watch coming to me for assistance?”

  “Not that it was my idea to see you, but as you wish. First, there’s a killer loose, as you already know. Second, the victims at each crime scene had nothing to do with the victims at the other locations. Third, they were all found posed, clasping a night lily in their hands.”

  “Night lilies aren’t exactly common,” I observed.

  “You don’t say,” he drawled. “Perhaps that might even be a clue?”

  “Don’t be pissy, Kluge. It wasn’t my idea to get involved in this any more than it was yours.”

  He let out a small sigh. “As you say, revered. Fourth, we’ve managed to put together a timeline of sorts. The first killing was on the night of the new moon, almost five months ago. A cobbler, murdered in bed. The second event was a double murder, two washerwomen right in the wash-yard they worked in, also on a new moon. The next was four stumbling-drunk dockmen in a back alley. Again, new moon. The latest was, you will not be surprised to hear, also on a new moon, the last one. Eight theater-goers, in a carriage, leaving the Clarion. Young dandies all packed in to the hack, boisterous and gay by all accounts. They were all minor nobility or sons of merchant houses.”

  “And it wasn’t the driver that did it.”

  “Impossible. He’s almost as old as you, and crabbed up with arthritis. They got in the carriage at the Clarion, giving directions to the Promenade, and somewhere between thither and hence they were all murdered without the driver hearing a thing. He’s half-deaf, though.” He gave a small shrug.

  “I imagine those eight deaths were what set the investigation rolling.”

  “Now what makes you say that?”

  “The death of cobblers, washerwomen and dockmen don’t excite the same level of attention as scions of the wealthy and powerful, now do they?”

  He gave me a hard look. “You can think what you like, Lhiewyn, but the fact is, sadly, the murder of a single cobbler is not such an unusual thing, nor that of a pair of washerwomen, nor even a double-brace of dockmen. That’s just the sort of world we live in. Beyond the night-lilies, there was nothing terribly unusual about their deaths. Eight people murdered in a carriage without attracting any attention is unusual.”