Brathis Burns

The gods did not answer, for the gods were not there. What answered wore their voice the way a footprint wears a foot — faithful to the shape of them, empty of all that made the shape. Ask such an echo why it left, and it will tell you, honestly, that it never did.

They had not left the wood. Talis closed over the company still — the faerie forest on the shore where the Celsian Athenaeum's paintings had set them down — and after the contest with Moonshadow it had given them a grudging peace. Draz slept the sleep of the drugged fruit and did not stir. The others took the long night in the dark, among the pale motes that drifted and bobbed at the edge of the firelight, and set what they could of themselves in order before morning.

Sylvie kept reading. She had carried books out of the Forbidden Library and would not put them down, and the more she read the plainer the hard answer became: she could not herself be the source the world had lost. The gods had been to Splendor what the sun is to the deep; a single soul, however brimming, was a bright brief burst and no more — to stand in their place she would have to become not a candle but a furnace, and even a furnace would fall short. She read on anyway. The last writ of the God-King gave commands for the raising of the Sacred Pyres and an apology for leaving, and much conspiracy besides that she set aside; and of Kreth the moon-god she read that his moon had never been a lamp hung in one place but a membrane drawn over the whole sky, that thinned in its seasons until something looked through.

In the pitch of the night she woke. All was black but the motes, and she went to one where it hung a man's height in the air and tried to wake an answer from it. She spoke to it and it did not answer; she drew designs of light in the air before it and it only bobbed. So she used the Voice of Dread — not as a weapon but as a way of speaking — and turned it on the mote; and behind her came a lurching, lumbering weight, and Speaker laid its stone hand on her shoulder. It did not lean its weight on her. It only held there, and spoke — not as itself, but as a memory of the one whose eyes it now wore. I am but a memory, it said, but I can speak as one. I have to go away, but I intend to be back soon. I will be crossing my threshold. You will be well here with your brothers and sisters. I will leave my eyes for you — if you are in doubt, or if you have fear, use them. When would he come back, she asked. I do not know how long this matter will take to attend to, it said, and was gone. Whoever the memory believed it spoke to, it was not her; but the leaving had been sincere. A god does not leave his eyes behind unless he means to come back for them.

Morning came grey and slow, and Draz woke into it groggy and displaced, the fruit still heavy in him. A small faerie stood on his chest and poked at him with one finger, teddy-bear sized and clumsy; a leg dropped off it, and it gathered the leg up and screwed it back on and went on poking. When he told it to stop it sat down on its rump and stared, then reached into its own chest and drew out an apple bigger than the chest it came from, and held the thing up to him — the same soft fruit that had put him under. He did not take it. It scuttled off over Pinchie's shell and out of sight. The others caught him up on what he had slept through: that the fae here saw a bright and bountiful wood and saw the company as monsters in it, while the company saw only the twisted and the dark. He kept, too, the faint bond he now carried toward the Runt God, a thread felt more than understood.

This was a place of Splendor — one of the beacons the paintings had promised — and Draz, who alone could see it, put the seeing to use. At Heyou's urging he climbed a tree and cast his sight out past the near motes, and it went through the trunks like an eye through water: away to the west, perhaps an hour and a half off, a great figure burned in the ground, a sigil broad as an infield and so intricate he could never have drawn it. The fae themselves stayed hidden; they were not creatures of the morning, and a coaxing failed to draw any out. While they took stock Draz set upon one of the larger orbs, a thing twice a beach-ball wide with a drowned faerie kept whole inside it — the kind whose touch had once filled Sylvie's lungs with water. He pierced it; the wound sealed itself as he drew the point back, and the liquid on it smelled and tasted of sweet nectar, close kin to a gin he had drunk once. He scooped a measure into a leaf and set it in his pan for later.

It was Sylvie the wood was working on. A pull had begun in her body — not a thought but a weight, the whole of her leaning up and out, the way one wakes too late for something and the body starts to run before the mind has caught the reason. She watched it come with a strange detachment, saw her own flesh begin its stress and, like letting go of a thought in meditation, redirected the whole of it into nothing. When she went looking for the source she found none outside her: no magic worked it, nothing pulled from the sky or the ground. It rose from within. She climbed a tree to test whether going up would ease it, and near the top, with Sister Moon to steady her, she reproduced the feeling on purpose — a gravity, psychosomatic and real at once, her body certain of a direction while it never moved, and a counter-gravity in her holding it, only just. She pressed it back down to an ember she could raise again at will, and climbed down to tell them.

Heyou asked Draz to bring out his compass, and the needle sat pointed the very way the pull had leaned. It was the compass that would keep no earthly north, that Ygva had once read as aimed at Ossa somewhere in the sky. Where had he come by it? He did not truly know — only that at his coming-of-age one of the village elders had put it in his hands and told him his family had left it to him, that no one knew what it did or why, and that they had been bound to pass it on. Heyou, who had listened at the memory in the night while feigning sleep, offered a theory: that Kreth had moved because he had reached some capacity and had to move on with it — and that Sylvie, gorging on Splendor these past weeks, might be filling toward the same edge, feeling the same summons that had emptied the world of its gods.

They struck west toward the burning figure. Sylvie laid Invisibility on Jamal — the loudest of them through the brush, and so the best to hide — and the company went into the trees.

The sigil, when they reached it, was scorched into an open glade: a vast, exact figure of coal and charcoal and dead vegetation, gradations of black raked and kept with terrible care, giving off heat but no light to any eye but Draz's, who saw it blaze with Splendor. Jamal, invisible, nudged the top layer aside and understood at once what he was standing on — a buried fire, banked and waiting, deep enough to swallow the whole wood if ever it were let up for air. And Sylvie, reading the shape of the thing, felt it tug at a memory: of all the marks she had ever seen, the one it most resembled was the sigil pressed into Heyou's chest. Draz, pushing at his own arcane sense to see what the figure would do, woke it — a great soundless thrum ran through the sigil, and a wash of relief and energy poured through Heyou and mended him whole, hurt and strain both.

There was someone tending it. On a flight of stone steps at the glade's edge sat an old woman, calm, watching Draz work — human, or the nearest thing to it, with a beaten but lived-in hut set back on a raised stone shelf behind the brambles. Heyou came at her sidelong, the way he came at anything that might be bait. She turned and gave him a toothless smile. I don't get visitors very often, she said, and tapped him on the chest. I see why you've come. You've been called, haven't you. You wish to know the secret. She looked about her and asked which body he would like to occupy — told him to fix his mind on the best of them and let his natural attunement come forth. He played the fool and let the power fail to come, and pressed her instead for what she knew.

She had been in the wood a hundred years or more, she said. She had got lost in it and been all but doomed when the fae found her and pulled her out; they had not mixed well, so she built her own house and they let her be, and kept the truly horrible things off her. She had no Sacred Pyre and, she said, no need of one — the fae were her congregation — and so she had made this her service instead: to keep the buried figure, to rake it even, to see that beasts stole nothing from it and that it never caught. It made her home feel like a place with a people in it. She did not remember her name; the company gave her one, and called her Retta. Jamal, who can feel a lie land, felt none in any of it. She could not change her own body, she told them — she was stuck in this one as long as it cared to keep her — but he could make his own; she had never met another who had, only heard them in her dreams, and sometimes asked to come along. Once she had ridden with a mushroom-person in a towering body forty feet tall, striding across a great land and its creeks among a mass of other giants locked in some wordless wrestling, until it all broke off and everyone went their way. It had seemed, she said, a happy thing. Of all of it Jamal knew only that mushroom-folk were real; the rest touched nothing he had ever seen.

Sylvie asked Speaker what the figure looked like to it, and Speaker came out into the middle of the glade and did a thing it had never done. It raised its arms to the sky, gripped its hands down at its chest, and hauled upward as though pulling something up out of the ground — and three great stones erupted from the earth, one centred and two canted off to either side: the sign of Brathis, three fallen stalactites set in a triangle, the god of feral survival and the loss of the self. The sigil did not grow or change; but to Draz's sight a current ran alive through it, as though Speaker had reached down and switched it on. Sylvie hailed the stone by the god's name, and it answered that it did not know her; she gave her own; and Speaker fell silent, looked around, lifted its hand to Retta, and said, It is time.

A gravity dragged toward Speaker, and a rush of wind — and two things happened at once. Retta's mind went out of her, and she looked at Heyou without knowing him. And Heyou himself was seized up and set down behind the stone eyes of Speaker, looking out at his own abandoned body through borrowed sight, the wood all round him gone bright and beautiful. His body, emptied, lurched up and swung at Draz of its own accord and missed, and Draz scrambled back off his feet with a curse.

What followed was ugly and fast. Retta, mindless now and moving on all fours, turned feral; near her, the fear pressed in unnaturally, her presence lending its weight to every blow that might fall wrong. Jamal tried to break the draw off her — got the suppression amulet onto her over her snarling — but it changed nothing in her, and she recoiled and bared her teeth and ran, in the general direction of Sylvie, and fastened onto her back to gum and claw at her neck. Sylvie called out to Heyou and got through — a clear word back, confusion and all, enough to be sure the mind in the stone was his and the body on the loose was not — and put a Power Push into the empty body to knock it off Draz. And Draz, mounted high on Pinchie with the advantage of the crab's back, found his fury and put a single mounted stroke through Retta's throat; she dropped in a spray of blood, and as she died she turned and spat a gout of water over Sylvie — the drowning that ran through all this wood, spent at the last.

Still behind Speaker's eyes, Heyou stared into the woken sigil and did the thing the old woman had named. The figure opened for him like a city seen from above at night, every soul a light in it — there Sylvie, there Draz — and his own old body an absence among the lights, empty and beckoning, ready to be filled; and he understood he could displace any light he chose. He passed over the turning mirror and reached instead for the great shadow — the same gentle dark that had swallowed and spared him the night before — and poured himself into it. He came to inhabit a thing eighteen or twenty feet tall, amorphous, a hand passing half through its own body; and it carried Kreth's eyes. Through them the glade was a sacred garden: the coal was no coal but pebble-work in a dozen colours, Sylvie stood strong and glowing, Draz wore an aura, Jamal read as inert — neither foul nor luminous — and Retta's corpse and Heyou's own cast-off body alike lacked the inner light that everything else in the wood carried. Sylvie time-locked the emptied body where it stood; Heyou took it apart, limb from limb, to be sure of it, and wound his scarf about his new and towering dark. Speaker came back to itself, and stood as it had always stood — a conduit, plainly, and one worth remembering.

Sylvie was not done with the god. She turned to Speaker and called on Brathis — are you still there? — and got an answer, and the answer was a wall. This world is alive, it said. I am not here, but when I was here everything was alive. I have not left. She argued it — the world was dying, the Splendor thinning by the day, people dying for want of it — and the voice only repeated its serene impossibilities, until she understood what she was speaking to. It was no living goddess but a residue, a recording of Brathis laid on the land as she had been the last time she stood on it, giving true answers out of a moment that was gone. It had been so with the memory of Kreth in the night; it was so here. She was arguing with an echo, and the echo did not know it had ever left.

Her patience broke. She turned and threw Fireball into the old woman's cabin — and the buried fire took the invitation. The house went up, and the flames found the banked coals beneath the whole garden, and the sigil detonated and burned itself out of the world in one great gout, catching everyone in the glade and threatening, past that, the whole dry island they stood on. Through Heyou's new eyes the four of them stood suffused in gold at the heart of it. The thing they had come to see was gone, one way of putting it done; and whether they had also set a shore alight was a question for a company with a door they could open elsewhere. Mission failed, Draz observed, successfully.