Lost Gods Read online

  MICAH YONGO

  Lost Gods

  For the dreamers…

  “How last unfold

  The secrets of another world, perhaps

  Not lawful to reveal?”

  John Milton, Paradise Lost

  One

  B R O T H E R H O O D

  “Look,” Josef whispered. “There.”

  Neythan looked to where he pointed. The camp was less than a mile away. He could see the evening fires winking through the trees of the forested valley beneath them like light through a basket.

  “I see it,” Neythan said.

  “Good. Good… I’ll circle round for a way down. You stay here. Patience is the way.”

  “Patience is the way.”

  Neythan watched Josef go, the mist rolling up ghostlike from the basin below. It was still warm, quiet but for the croaking of insects and the murmur of the stream. A night like any other, save that he was to kill a man. The price of Brotherhood.

  In truth, it had been just as Master Johann had said – no chance to plan, barely time to get ready, scrambling from their beds at news from Arianna and tumbling the same hour into the forest’s knotted dark to find her. Should be grateful, Neythan supposed. They could be skulking about a cave by night, or down a canyon with only the moon for help. He’d heard tales of such from Tutor Hamir and Yulaan back at Ilysia, of boys his age on their first outing not making it back. But then with Hamir you never knew when he was telling the truth. The only thing he’d said before they left that Neythan knew he meant was, “The first time is always hardest.”

  “There’s a way down.”

  Neythan looked up as Josef came trotting back toward him along the ridge. “Where?”

  “Along the cliff, a half-mile. Steep though.”

  “How steep?”

  “It’ll do.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “It’ll do, Neythan.”

  Neythan looked back along the ridge. There wouldn’t be much time. The others were probably already in place. “Alright.” He looked back to Josef, saw the calmness there, and nodded to himself. “Alright… Let’s go.”

  By the time they made their way down the escarpment the campfires were dampening. The sounds of the camp itself – the ribald laughing, the chatter, the faint noise of bells and strings – continued to roll on as Neythan and Josef worked their way through the forest.

  By the third watch they’d reached the settlement’s edge and sat watching the camp from the long grass, Neythan fingering his crossbow nervously, two quarrels lodged taut against the whipcord. He glanced up at the half moon peeping from the clouds. Sweat prickled along his hooded brow, trailing down the groove of his spine. He felt Josef’s hand on his shoulder.

  “It’s time, Neythan.”

  Neythan breathed deep and slid the crossbow up against his armpit beneath his smock. He removed his hood and stood, leaving Josef in the bushes, and began to walk, alone, toward the camp’s clearing.

  The space was a brief and grassless glade as wide as a tanner’s yard. Gatherers had set a shelter on either side by the trees, no more than a shack’s wood-roofing propped on log poles roughly a man’s height, and between the two a sort of platform, overlaid with wool and what looked like bearskin and cowhides. Probably the altar. Neythan came slowly alongside the shelter nearest and leant against the beam, peering in at the crowd. One or two peered back.

  “You have lingerweed?” a young woman called to him, slurring. “You have more wine?”

  Neythan shook his head.

  The woman frowned and waved him off.

  Neythan scanned the gathering. There’d likely be guardsmen among them, armed soldiers, perhaps even a prince or two from the crown city, all for Governor Zaqeem, a king by any other name, or so it was said. Since there were no true kings save those in scribes’ tales Neythan had never much liked the saying, but here, now, with the clamour of flesh and wine and finery, he was beginning to see its meaning.

  Men and women wore armlets of brass and held silver goblets, dancing and laughing. The tart smell of wine filled the air like incense, mingling with the smoke of damp logs. There were no servants here, only rich men without their aides, just as Master Johann had said.

  Neythan continued to watch the crowd and saw two young girls, neither one above seven years old, by the altar, studying the women as they danced. He finally spotted Arianna standing as part of the throng, dressed in fine linen, and began to walk toward her. He approached the altar where a turbaned old woman in scarlet was chanting with arms lifted to the sky. He saw Arianna’s eyes meet his, saw her acknowledge him with her stillness. Then he saw her reach up, cupping the jaw of a silver-haired man beside her and drawing his lips onto her own.

  He was the one.

  Neythan let the crossbow slide from the crook of his armpit until he could feel the axel touch his fingertips, its coiled length against his forearm. He could hear himself breathing now, could hear the steady dull underwater chug of his own heart. The man Arianna had kissed – and thereby revealed as the governor of Qadesh, Zaqeem son of Tishbi – was gesturing behind to one of the young girls. The scarlet-clad priestess brought her forward, then made signs over her as others came to lift her, limp and without struggle, onto the altar, laying her on the cowhides like an upended doll.

  The gatherers were shouting now, all of them on their feet. The governor smiled as the drumbeat doubled. The dancers and crowd whipped into a frenzy, staring at the child on the altar as the scarlet priestess approached with a flaming stave in her hand.

  The crossbow fell fully into Neythan’s hand. He lifted it level with the governor as the axel rolled and snapped into place, the whipcord flexing, the arrow ready. The sharp flinthead peeped above the sightline like a curious onlooker as he squinted along the quarrel’s shaft. There was a slight tremor to his elbow, but that was alright – the first time’s always hardest. Just breathe through it. Be still, the way you’ve been taught.

  He heard the splash of oil as the priestess doused the child on the altar. Around him, the congregants were shouting and screaming even louder. Be still. Breathe. Patience is the way. The priestess was coming forward, ready to light the sacrifice, the din of the crowd growing louder, deafening, wordless. Be still. Be still.

  And then… Arianna.

  Neythan watched as she stepped in front to obstruct his view. She turned again to the governor, reaching up slowly, gently, as though to touch him – and then, as he dipped his head toward her, she drew her hand across his throat from side to front with a thumb-blade.

  The man’s head lolled violently as his blood leapt over the heads of those nearby. He went down gagging, pulling at the cloaks of those closest. The screams were immediate, distracting even the priestess, who paused with stave raised above the child on the altar. Neythan saw Josef’s arrow thud into the meat of her breast as she turned toward the commotion, snapping her shoulder back as she fell into the mob.

  And then everyone was running. Pot-bellied men scampering half-naked into the bushes, others rushing back from the altar to the shelter’s corners for refuge, women squealing, bodies bumping, feet trampling as the gathering scattered. Cinders gusted upwards, luminous dust glinting red-gold against the night as a beefy man tumbled headlong into the campfire. Neythan went wading in, shoving his way through the fleeing crowd to find the girl. By the time he reached the altar the camp was almost empty, abandoned, the gatherers now scattered into the forest. A middle-aged man squatted in the corner of the far shelter, trembling in a thin cloak. The rest were gone, running through the moonlit undergrowth where Daneel and Yannick would be waiting.

  He found the girl sitting behind the altar, rocking on her seat and humming tunelessly to herself whilst Arianna stroked her hair. The girl’s eye
s were still and empty, her expression as slack as a corpse. She wouldn’t stop rocking.

  “No need to thank me,” Arianna said, looking up at him. “Had you waited any longer she’d be no more than roasted beef.”

  “I was about to do it.”

  Arianna rose to her feet, feigning a frown, before stepping toward him and smiling sourly. “Of course you were.” She patted Neythan twice on the cheek and winked before walking away.

  It was probably the thing Neythan found most annoying about her, how smug and dismissive she could be. As though the world owed her a kiss on the toes. Neythan was about to tell her that when out of the corner of his eye he saw the trembling man under the shelter rise to his feet, swaying and staggering as he did so. Maybe it was the anger from Arianna’s barb, maybe it was something else, but by the time Neythan turned to see what the man was holding, he had, with barely a thought, levelled and loosed his crossbow, and in almost that same instant, watched the quarrel split the man’s neck and lodge in his throat.

  A perfect mark.

  The dagger the man had been readying to hurl in Arianna’s direction slid from his hand and clanked in the dust. The man took a step, pawed impotently at the shaft in his throat, and then collapsed.

  Arianna turned and looked at Neythan.

  Neythan stared at the man he’d felled.

  No one spoke.

  When Neythan eventually went to stand over him the man was already gone, his blood a dark puddle to one side of his slackened face. The eyes were half-open, everything they’d ever known or hoped now irrevocably expunged. Null. Forgotten. Although that wasn’t really what unsettled Neythan. It was like the time he’d feared crane flies as a child, something about the way they’d fly, their legs dangling, like tiny drunken ghouls – until one night Yulaan had taken one, put it down the back of his smock and held him down. He’d screamed and kicked and wriggled until slowly realizing he couldn’t feel it, not its dangly legs scrambling against his skin, nor its wings fluttering, nor any pain. Nothing. And that was what puzzled him now, this absence of feeling he’d expected to feel. His first time killing a man and he felt nothing. No fear. No joy. Nothing.

  When Daneel and Yannick came wandering out from the forest’s shadows an hour later the numbness was still there. Daneel, breathing hard, glanced at Neythan and then studied the slumped body of the governor first.

  “So, this is him…” He then looked over at the dead priestess by the altar. “This one… I saw another just like her in the forest.” He craned his neck for a better look. “No… Slightly younger maybe. Sister perhaps. Ran like a gazelle.”

  “So says the slug of the snail,” Josef said, wiping his sword on the oil-drenched cowhides whilst Yannick stood off to the side, watching Neythan. Yannick flicked his hand and frowned, signing to him. Neythan nodded and shrugged back. He was fine.

  “I mean it,” Daneel said. “The woman was as quick as the wind. I had to use my sling to slow her.” He turned to Neythan, glanced again at the governor’s body, and smiled. “But what does it matter now? What matters is you got him, eh, Neythan? Your first. Governor Zaqeem.”

  “Actually, Arianna did that,” Josef said as he came and stood next to Neythan.

  Daneel’s smile flattened. “Oh.”

  “Yes. Oh.”

  “But he did kill another,” Arianna said. She gestured to the body slumped by the corner of the shelter, her gaze still on Neythan.

  “That so?” Daneel put his hand on Neythan’s shoulder. “So then you have done your first. Good. Finally. Well done. The first is always hardest.”

  Two

  I L Y S I A

  A week later Neythan stood in the Forest of Silences staring up at the dry, fruitless boughs of his bloodtree, remembering the day he’d planted it, the same day he arrived here in Ilysia as a six year-old boy. “The Shedaím say a thing’s life, its essence, is its blood,” Tutor Maresh had told him then. Then he had taken a flint knife, drawn it across Neythan’s palm, and spilled Neythan’s blood over a dull grey orb the size of a chestnut.

  Welcome to the Shedaím.

  To Neythan, the orb had resembled a decrepit eye. It wasn’t until Maresh had marched him into the Forest and up its lush green slope to plant it here that Neythan had realized it was a seed. That was a whole sharím ago, eleven long years, and yet here the tree remained, barren as it had always been.

  “I know what you are thinking.”

  Neythan turned from his bloodtree to find the short, thin-limbed frame of Master Johann behind him, his eyes black as onyx, glinting in the dawn light. The old man stood, as always, with his hands clasped loosely behind his back, the beginnings of a smirk in his eyes, observing Neythan.

  “You’re thinking if the outing had gone as planned,” the master continued, “your tree would have its first leaf.”

  Which, Neythan felt, was a reasonable enough thing to expect. It had been three days since he and the other disciples had returned, after all. It hardly seemed fair that his tree still remained the only one yet to bud.

  Yannick’s had gained its first buds years ago and was now thick with leaves. Josef’s had grown to a long strong oak whilst Daneel’s was one of the strangest in the Forest, with a slight kink midway up its trunk and sharp hot-coloured leaves pluming from it like fire. Even Arianna’s was a spectacle, with its tiny blossoms that changed colour every month. Yet here Neythan’s tree remained, the same as always. Bare, despite his having made his first kill.

  “Your father’s was the same, you know,” Johann said.

  “It was?”

  “Well… Perhaps not quite as long in budding as yours, but longer than the others.”

  “But why? Why did it take so long?”

  Johann shrugged. “There can be many reasons why. A seed, as with anything, needs for that which surrounds it to be just so. The right soil. Rain. Nourishment. The light of the sun, the heat or cool of the day. It needs help to become what it ought…” He nodded at Neythan. “Just like the one to whom it is bound.” The master gestured to the other trees, nearly thirty of them in all, each belonging to a member of the Shedaím. Most of them died with their owners, withering to a brittle mass before crumbling altogether. But some, belonging to Brothers whose sha was greater, endured, living beyond the lifetimes of those to whom they’d been bound, and continuing to grow and plume regardless. Of these, none was greater than the tree of Qoh’leth. The First. A giant willow at the Forest’s very centre, cresting the mountain’s highest point. Qoh’leth’s tree was the oldest of them all.

  “Your problem, Neythan,” Master Johann said, “is sometimes you can do this…” The old man smiled gently and tapped a finger against his temple, “…a little too much. It is as much a weakness as it is a gift. You must learn to still it. Once you are sworn and made a Brother, and then finally leave this place, you will understand.”

  “And what if I am not sworn?” Neythan said.

  To which Master Johann cocked an eyebrow and paused. “You have spent almost every hour since you were six years old here in Ilysia, being taught to become what you now are. Do you think because you failed to fulfil a decree you’ll be kept from taking the covenant?”

  “My tree is barren.”

  “As are all things before their season, Neythan. Whatever the elders decide, your time shall come. But you must not lose sight of what matters most. It’s true, you have been taught to wield a variety of weapons, and you do so skilfully, but all you have learned is for but one purpose – to save and protect life. It is this, above all else, that remains the goal of the Shedaím. The very goal you accomplished on your outing…” The master turned to face Neythan’s tree, examining the branches. “The purity of our purpose, Neythan, and our devotion to it – this is what separates the Order of the Shedaím from the institutions of men. It is what makes one a Brother of the Shedaím, or not.”

  The master looked at Neythan to see he understood.

  “Yes, Master.”

  “Good… yo
u should go now. The gathering will begin soon, and you must join the others for breakfast.”

  So Neythan left Johann there and turned to walk down the mount, thinking, against the master’s advice, about it all. His first day here when Uncle Sol brought him as a child, journeying halfway across the Sovereignty from the sunny shores of their fishing village in Eram, far to the south beyond the sands of the Havilah. Neythan couldn’t remember much about the place now, only the countless stories Uncle Sol would tell of Watchers and lost gods and a thousand other things Mother didn’t like him to hear. It was by Sol’s tales that Neythan first learned of the Shedaím. The Brotherhood. The Faceless. Everyone had a different name for them but to most they were no more than idle rumour, a myth half-whispered by evening fires to keep children from misbehaving. It had been strange when Sol first told him that the Brotherhood was real, and that both he and Neythan’s father had once been of their number. But even stranger was the sudden month-long journey Uncle Sol took him on when Mother and Father died, all the way here, to Ilysia, so that Neythan could become one of their number too.

  “Ravenous as monkeys, all of you!” Yulaan said as Neythan arrived. The others were already eating. Neythan took a seat next to Yannick and grabbed a bowl.

  “You always say monkeys,” Arianna answered between mouthfuls. “Why monkeys? Why not lions, or wolves? Or a bear. Ravenous as a bear.”

  “You’ve never seen hungry monkeys,” Yulaan said as she ladled the muddy broth into their wooden dishes. “And that is what you are all like.”

  It was still early. The village flocks were bleating loudly by the yard wall as they went out to pasture whilst Yulaan cooked.

  “Back home, in Livia,” she said, her Low Eastern accent turning her voice to a song, “we have monkeys everywhere. In the markets, in the streets, in palaces. And there is nothing so wild as a hungry monkey.”

  Yulaan was mother-aged and full-bodied, with copper skin, crinkled eyes and a stout, fleshy neck. She’d come to Ilysia while they were children. She’d even told Neythan the story of it once, as reward for a quickly emptied plate, of how she had once been a harlot heading a brothel in the strait streets of Hanesda. Not a crime in itself. It was the secrets she’d learnt from those who frequented her house and then peddled to other interested parties that had brought about her exile to this high, hidden mountain village. It was the same for almost every villager here: Ghandry, the hot-tempered butcher from the High East; Jaleem, the woodworker, with his deep bronzed skin and still eyes, and that long scar down the side of his face he refused to talk about. Each were fugitives of some kind, rescued by the Brotherhood and brought to Ilysia to build, or shepherd, or cook.