Bad Gods Read online

  “How’d you get yours again?” I said, casually. “Previous?”

  She gave a snort. “Oh, you’ll have to get me a lot drunker before I tell you that.”

  Damn. I’d been trying to get it out of her for years. I shook the flask invitingly but she just laughed and waved it away. I made a face at her, then headed down to the river.

  The city had that silvery-blue, glamorous feel it gets on an autumn evening like this; a little mist rising off the river, lights dancing in the water, the eye-twisting greeny-pink glow in the sky over one of the portals. There’s always music from a dozen different taverns and street-musicians, the rumble of wheels, barrels rolling, laughter and yells and the crackle of magic. Little plaster faces watched me from the walls. They’re something of a feature in Scalentine; it’s as though every race that’s ever passed through, someone has decided to commemorate a few of them. They’re on almost every building, sometimes one or two, sometimes a frontage so covered it’s like a crowd caught in time. I like them. They feel friendly.

  I leant on the bridge parapet for a moment and watched the river.

  Tiresana

  The gods, or the shadows of them, were everywhere. The mistress taking Philla to the temple of Meisheté before her marriage, to offer up gold for fertility and easy births.

  One of the servants burning a black feather to Aka-Tete, asking vengeance and swift passage to the Far Lands for his brother, murdered in some brawl.

  Even in the tarot pack there were the Sun, the Moon, and Death.

  The gods were in everyone’s lives, referred to every day. Of course, they hadn’t manifested on our plane for generations, but we still prayed to them. Gods don’t just cease to be because they’re somewhere else. Besides, their temples and their priests were very much here. The temples were everywhere, and so were the priests: they were government and law and militia. The master paid his temple taxes and didn’t dare grumble, in case the gods overheard and decided to let his caravans get raided or his ships wrecked. And of course, for fear of the Avatars.

  We all knew about the Avatars, even if we never saw them; beings of wondrous and terrible power, created by the Gods to take their place on this plane, to rule their priesthoods and govern their people in their name.

  Shoved off on whoever had work that needed doing and time to teach me, I learned a bit of everything; picked up the habits of worship along with everything else. I never was much good in the kitchen, but by the time I was twelve, I knew how to scrub and stitch; by fourteen I could dig a garden or empty a privy or mend a stable door, and make a garland of moonflower to lay on Shakanti’s altar, in the hopes she’d help me preserve my virginity.

  Because the master had started looking at me with a certain eye. I knew enough by then to know what he was thinking about, and to know I didn’t want it. Firstly, he was three times my age, greasily fat, and had a liking for drenching his hair with heavy-scented oil. Secondly, it would have caused trouble and I’d have been blamed.

  Shakanti having shown no interest in helping me out, I was still chewing over what to do when the trade caravan came back, to load up for the next trip. The family traded in spices, and it was always a bit of a celebration when the caravan came in; gifts all around, and a feast – or as much of one as could be had.

  The head cook prodded the haunch of goat provided for us with a dissatisfied look. “Used to be when the caravans came in, back in my father’s day, a whole ox for the servants. And the best beer, not this thin stuff.”

  “Beer’s not what it was anywhere,” the mulemaster said. “Well, can’t expect it, with the harvests so poor.”

  One of the kitchen girls leant over and whispered to me, “And the ears of grain used to be big as your hand, the harvest carts came in piled so high the beasts could barely pull them...”

  “...twice as much good growing land, forests full of deer so fat and lazy they’d walk onto your spear...” I whispered back. We heard these stories all the time.

  Others, too. About how there had been fewer of what they called ‘shadowed births.’ Babies born... not right, one way or the other. But we were young, the world around us was all we knew.

  After the feast, the master handed the gifts out and gave me a length of crimson cloth for a gown – a pretty colour, but hardly subtle, especially with his hand on my leg and his wife glaring like a hen disturbed on the nest.

  Poor woman. She was welcome to him. I decided then and there that I’d always choose who I bedded. Given the chance, that was.

  I put the cloth aside (when I was supposed to have time to make it into a gown, I don’t know) and went to listen to the caravan guards tell their stories. They usually saved the best ones for when the master was out of earshot. One of them, Kyrl, had started teaching me dice last time they were home; I saw her grinning at me across the fire, flushed with wine, and shaking the dice-box invitingly. I went over, accepted a sip from her bottle and told her what was going on.

  She wasn’t too drunk to listen. She looked at the master, who was congratulating himself on his profits, his big red face greasy as his hair in the heat of the torches, and swore. “The older they get, the more some of ’em want young flesh,” she said. “You want to come out with us? I reckon I can swing it, if you’re up for it. You’ll have to pull your weight, loading and looking to the beasts, but you’re used to work. You just have to stay out of his way for ten days or so ’til we’re out again – and he should be busy getting the new loads arranged for most of that.”

  “Yes, please,” I said.

  Ten days later, the pack boy who’d been hired got called home at the last minute. How Kyrl had managed it, she wouldn’t say. I asked permission from the Mistress to go instead, which she was more than happy to give, and set out in the mood for the highest adventure.

  Most of the time it was nothing but sitting and swaying and a sore backside; poor food, bad inns and learning to deal with the damned sandmules, one of the ugliest, orneriest beasts that’ll ever try to kick your guts through your backbone.

  Still, I loved it. I realised the world was a good deal bigger than I’d had any idea of. How big a universe lay beyond it was another thing again. I heard of a portal, in a town called Mantek; apparently some of our spices went through it to places of strangeness and magic, but we never travelled so far. Even the caravan guards, adventurous as they seemed to me, never speculated about going beyond the portal. Our goods got taken on by others – strange, mad people, travellers.

  It wasn’t until later I realised just how provincial, how closed off Tiresana was. It’s a small plane, the habitable part barely larger than some countries. It was bigger, once, or so the rumour goes.

  But we didn’t think, or look, beyond it. We were Tiresans. Tiresans didn’t look outwards. And Tiresans didn’t leave.

  As well as Kyrl, there were two other guards. Radan was fiftyish, stocky and quiet. Had a wife he didn’t get on so well with, but still cared for; him travelling suited them both. Then there was Sesh. He was in his twenties, rangy and restless. A real storyteller; he could have made a living in the marketplace if he fancied. I fell for him, of course, but he wasn’t having any of it. He treated me like a younger sister – teased me half to death and threatened to bloody the nose of any man who looked at me in a way he didn’t like.

  Kyrl was a little over fond of those dice. Ten days after she got her wages they were gone, though sometimes she won, then she’d buy everyone treats. It wasn’t the money she wanted, it was the game. Had a tongue sharper than her blade when the mood took her, but she always watched your back. Funny, too, in an acid sort of way. “If you need a six, you’ll probably get a three. Life’s mostly threes, but you got to play, or what’s the point?” She was always going to have her tarot read, but if she didn’t like what she heard – and she often didn’t – she’d ignore it.

  They were my first real family.

  Cold early morning, running through a rocky pass, raiders skittering out of the rocks like crab
s. The guards up and cursing, a raider trying to crawl onto the wagon. I hit him with the kettle, hard as I could. Smashed his nose; I was startled at the blood, so much. But there was a satisfaction in it. Not in the blood, but because I’d helped. He toppled off the wagon and it gave the others time to deal with him.

  Radan slapping me on the back and saying that if I was that good with a kettle maybe I should try a sword.

  And, again, I said, “Yes, please.”

  Radan tried to take it back at first; he was afraid I’d get hurt. But once he saw I wasn’t going to give up, he made it his business to teach me properly. I got used to being hauled out of the wagon in the cool of the day, given rags to wrap around my hands and worked until I could hardly stand. He was patient, Radan, but he wasn’t beyond slapping me with the flat of his blade if I did something stupid. The first time he did it I was shocked, because I thought he was my friend; I stared at him with tears starting in my eyes.

  “You know why I did that, Ebi?” he said.

  I shook my head.

  “I did it because you make that mistake in a real fight and you’re likely to die. I’d rather have you bruised and alive. Yes?”

  I got it.

  I wondered, later, if I meant something to him – not as a lover, but as a child. He didn’t talk about his family much, but the little I heard, he’d only the one son, who he saw even less than he saw his wife. But at the time, I just took whatever training he was willing to give me, feeling ready to leap mountains whenever he said I’d done well.

  Being on the road, we were seldom at a temple in time for the major ceremonies. But Kyrl always muttered a prayer to Hap-Canae before she shook the dice; the sun-god had jurisdiction over gold, and profit. Sesh had a fondness for Babaska, inevitably, since he spent a lot of time visiting whores, and Radan would stop now and then at one of Meisheté’s shrines, to leave a gift, and ask that she watch over his family.

  I laid some of my few coins on Shakanti’s altar. Though it was Kyrl who’d got me away from the master, I thought I had better lay tribute, in case the goddess had had a hand in it too.

  As we travelled I became a little, a very little, less ignorant, and discovered I had, for some things, a good memory. I heard a storyteller in one of the towns, telling some gaudy old tale of tricksy genies, of burning gems and green-haired crones and princesses locked in towers. (We had no princesses anymore – the last of the old royal line had died out years ago, perhaps of ruined pride, as the temples took control.)

  The next day, Sesh was muttering to himself, trying to remember the story, to impress some girl, I’ve no doubt – I corrected him, and found I could remember it almost word for word.

  It was the rhythm and the weft of the speech that did it. Conversations I could keep in my head only a little better than most; but anything with rhyme or rhythm, given it was short, I could recall pretty well after one hearing. Not that it aided me much with music; I sang like a frog.

  One night we met up at an oasis with another caravan, and pooled food and stories. I ended up sitting at a fire with some men who teased and flattered and kept topping up my goblet with drink, and it was only because Kyrl had lost early that she wandered over and spotted them manoeuvring me away from the firelight, and me, drunk as all-get-out, innocently going with them.

  She got me away, and next day explained, while I groaned and held my head, why it was a bad idea for a fifteen-year-old girl to get drunk with strangers. I was ready for experience, but no-one needs that sort of introduction.

  The next trip out I was able to return the favour, when someone took badly to losing to Kyrl and decided to wait in an alley with a knife. I was the sober one, this time. I didn’t kill him, but I put him off.

  I learned how to tell a slimy merchant from an honest one, at least some of the time, how to replace a broken wheel and how to doctor a sandmule. They’re mostly tough as boiled leather, but those great folding ears that they wrap around their heads during sandstorms are prone to mites and rips, and they’ll eat anything. Sometimes to their regret, not to mention that of the poor sod who has to try and get a potion down the bloody animal to cleanse its stomach.

  We saw some sights. The whistling desert where the wind sings in the dunes like a lost soul, melancholy but not frightening; at night, lying in the wagon and listening, you could almost swear you heard words in the sound. The Ghata Mai, a huddle of pillars of pinkish sandstone. Kyrl told me they were said to be the ghosts of some desert tribesmen who’d raped one of Shakanti’s priestesses and been turned to stone by Shakanti in vengeance.

  Once we were waiting for a ferry when we saw a boat attacked by two messehwhy, the great river-dwelling lizards that are one of Tiresana’s less appealing features. One of the two men aboard, wearing nothing but short linen trousers, got pitched into the river; we thought he was done, but he came up riding one beast’s neck, his arms clamped around its jaw. The other, sweating in his armour, was still trying to turn the boat, and fell, and the other beast bit right through him, armour and all. I wondered, after, what it made of such a thing; like trying to eat a thick-skinned fruit, I suppose.

  I spoke with the survivor – he’d been hauled off the beast and onto the ferry, which was too big even for them to bite. He was fairly drunk by then, half celebrating that he’d survived, and half mourning for his friend, but he told me how to jab at a messeh’s eyes, and how their jaws, although they could crush stone when closing, were weak the other way – if you could hold them shut, they couldn’t have you. “Mind you,” he said, grinning, “once you’ve grabbed its jaw, come there’s no help to hand, you have to work out what to do after that, unless you’re going to ride the thing until you both die of old age. And they live a long time.” Then he remembered his friend, and got melancholy again.

  As we travelled, I realised that not all the stories about the old days were people gilding the past. The desert had grown. Sometimes we passed a place with roof peaks showing forlorn above the sand, where a village had been swallowed alive. Sesh told me that there were whole towns buried under the dunes; his parents had lived in one, clinging on until the desert was knocking on their doors. Such places always left me cold, thinking of rooms that had been full of people and voices, choked now with silent sand.

  I ended up staying with the caravans for two years.

  Chapter Three

  The evening lost its grey-blue sheen and turned into a carnival of lights. The soft glow of the streetlights, a flare of witchfire, the distinctive lanterns of every kind of shop, chop-house, tavern, theatre... even in the less lively areas, what with two moons on a clear night and the portals lighting up the horizon, the city rarely gets truly dark.

  I couldn’t get Fain out of my head. If I didn’t know better I’d think he had a charisma glamour on him, but he didn’t need one.

  I’d encountered charisma glamours – actors use them a lot if they can afford it, and so do some of the more expensive whores – and to me they always have that slight artificiality, a sort of tang of metal. I don’t like them. I think they distance you from whoever you’re with, and that’s not what my business is about.

  Though, of course, for some in my profession, anything that helps them keep their distance, whether it’s glamours, drink, or narcotics like cloud, is the only way to survive. They’re in the wrong job, of course, but they don’t always have a choice about it. Some have to do it for money, some get dragged in. That was only one of the things that might happen to Enthemmerlee.

  I just hoped she was brighter than I’d been at her age.

  Near the square, the city is at its most beautiful. Great sweeping boulevards, surrounded by tiny winding streets barely wide enough for two riders to pass each other. The old Church of the Glorification, deep green picked out in gold and bronze; the Sleeping Garden with its statues and pale, night-scented flowers, glowing moths dipping and fluttering among them; expensive little shops like dragons’ caves of treasure; jewellery and fine weaponry, gowns and crystal and a
lchemical instruments gleaming in the lamplight.

  But as I moved south into the district called King of Stone, I left all that behind. Fewer lamps, the streets even more narrow, rats and worse than rats shuffling and scratching in the alleys. I kept a hand on my hilt and my eyes open.

  From the dank mouth of an alley I caught a glimmer of light. Something in the darkness was breathing heavily. I turned fast, and caught a powerful whiff of perfume mixed with alcohol fumes.

  “Babylon-baba! Where you been to?”

  “Glinchen?”

  Glinchen swayed out of the shadows, clapping one set of hands and reaching out with the other pair, jangling a dozen bangles. Several embroidered silk shawls draped massive shoulders, thick black and scarlet curls tumbled, vast cleavage acted as a display shelf for row upon row of glittering beads.

  Glinchen is one of the freelancers, and a Barraklé. Not unlike a human above the waist, not dissimilar to a sort of giant furry caterpillar below, with four arms, four breasts and more than enough of other things as well, apparently. Barraklé are hermaphroditic.

  Which in Glinchen’s case is the least of hir problems.

  I allowed myself to be drawn into a squashy hug.

  “Glinchen, what are you doing down here? This isn’t a good beat.”

  Glinchen shrugged, causing a cleavage earthquake. “Girl needs a change of scene, sometimes.”

  “No-one needs this scene,” I said, hopping out of the way of a trickle of sewage that chose that moment to appear from a side street and aim for my boots.

  “So what you down here for, honeysweet? Not your beat, neither.”

  “I need to talk to some people. There’s a girl who’s disappeared.” I got the picture out and moved under a guttering lantern some shopkeeper had hung out. “She was at the Hall of Mirrors, with her family. Ask around, will you?”

  Glinchen peered at the picture. “Sounds like she in trouble, poor little honeychick. Hokay, I ask.”