The Scarred God Read online

  Vedic smiled. ‘Well played. After you, little one. If we’re going to die, let’s get on with it.’

  The way was steep and hard. At points, Anya had to almost crawl up the mountainside as the trees became sparse and the incline harsher. All the time the rain poured down. They slipped and slid their way up to the rock-strewn plateau from which the mountain got its name.

  ‘We’re exposed!’ shouted Vedic.

  Pan shook his head, lifting his hand. His fingers appeared grey and slick in the light. Anya could see that Vedic also looked greyer and darker than he normally appeared, and looking down at her own hands, she nearly missed them in the storm-light. Pan was straining with the effort of the spell. Vedic looked back across the valley, and Anya followed his gaze. At this elevation, the Kurah force were visible beyond the forest: a vast array of warriors swarming out across the plains everyone called the Barrens.

  ‘More than last time,’ said Vedic. His face was a rain-worn mask.

  Pan did not reply. Anya could not look away. The wind howled around them like a trapped banshee. Vedic dragged her across the top of the mountain after Pan until they were looking down at the Cordon. The valley opened into a chasm that was so dark at its base, no light escaped. However, the rock that had been split apart millennia ago gave way to a different material before the shadows took it. The substance was like opaque crystal. The surface gleamed in the right light but was dull, translucent and glassy the rest of the time. It would not be climbable.

  The rock either side had been carved into two figures that were neither god nor human – they were older than both. The statues were three times the height of a man, humanoid, but with elongated skulls and oversized eyes. Not many of their fingers remained, but they were longer, proportionately, than they would have been for man or god. The one on the west side had what looked like a weapon or stick in its right hand.

  ‘Tream?’ asked Anya.

  Pan shook his head. ‘The gods do not know what they were. We do not remember them, and the Tream have never told us what they believe.’

  ‘But Danu birthed the world. How can you not know?’ asked Anya, her stomach churning as it did when she saw the ghosts of her grandfather and Fin.

  Pan looked haunted himself. ‘Not now. We must get down from here.’

  ‘I thought you said they would not follow,’ said Vedic, his fists clenching.

  ‘They will not,’ said Pan. ‘But who knows what Cernubus will do?’

  Lightning flashed across the sky, lighting them up as if daytime had arrived. Thunder rumbled a few moments later.

  ‘We need to move,’ agreed Anya.

  ‘This way,’ said Pan, gesturing to a small waterway that the rainwater was pouring down. The gully looked almost like the start of an aqueduct that had been worn nearly entirely away by time. ‘We’ll make for the western statue and scale along its side until we get to the other side of the valley.’

  ‘We’ll need to stop soon for rest,’ said Vedic. Anya did not like the way he looked at her when he said this, but she didn’t see how she could argue. She had been drilled that a warrior needed to take rest when they could, and she had been operating on no sleep for far too long. Her still-healing wounds, although much improved by the woodsman’s poultices, were aching, and she could have slept right there. The rain was slowing as the storm moved higher up the mountain range.

  ‘Where are you going, little goat?’

  The voice was low and deep, vibrating the base of their spines as if the words might actually be coming from inside each of them. None of them could be certain the voice wasn’t. They looked up at the top of Ragged Top Mountain, but no one was there.

  ‘You’ve disappeared from my view,’ said the voice. ‘Where are you hiding, little goat?’

  Pan winced. He did not reply.

  ‘You should be with me, little cousin,’ said Cernubus. ‘Are you not an echo of me?’

  Pan clung tight to the rock. The rain had stopped entirely now. All was quiet save for the voice of the once-god.

  ‘I will find you,’ said Cernubus. ‘You cannot hide in the forbidden places forever. Soon you will not be able to hide at all.’

  Vedic tilted his head at Pan. Pan put his head to the rock briefly before nodding them on. They walked for another hour or so before they found a series of caves that looked like they had once been used by travellers before this part of the world had been abandoned.

  ‘We should rest here,’ said Vedic.

  Pan looked reluctant but he nodded. Anya caught Vedic staring at her shivering.

  ‘Can we risk a fire?’ asked the forestal.

  Pan looked at the woodsman. ‘Where would we find dry-enough wood? If I use too much magic, we will be found.’

  Vedic nodded. He pointed. ‘Dead wood, piled up by one of the caves, no owner and kept dry by the rock.’

  Pan shrugged. ‘I don’t think a fire will do any harm this far down.’

  Anya was relieved. She did not like the cold. It seemed like an age since she had lain in Vedic’s bed, wrapped up against the first of the storms, and woken unsure as to where she was. In reality, only a few days had passed. Only a little longer since the Kurah had thundered into her village. No. Don’t think of that. Too late. Fin stared at her from across the cairn in which they had made their camp. She looked at her shaking hands and clenched them. This is ridiculous, she berated herself. I am the granddaughter of Gobaith and Thrace. I am stronger than this. She looked over at Pan, who was watching Vedic’s efforts, lost in his own thoughts.

  ‘Did you know my grandmother?’

  The air smelt faintly of sulphur, as if Ragged Top’s brother, Dragon Mountain, was active once more.

  ‘I did,’ said Pan, absent-mindedly. ‘Your grandfather too.’

  ‘What was she like?’

  Pan seemed to notice Anya was there again. To truly see her. She wiped her forehead. She was still drenched from the storm. Pan moved over to sit next to her, embracing her and allowing her to rest her head on his shoulder. The closeness did not feel strange. She felt like she was resting on her grandfather.

  ‘I see her in you. They were both part of the thain’s forces when she led her army into the forest.’

  ‘That was when they were young, before my mother was born,’ said Anya. ‘The war was fifty-odd years ago.’

  Pan nodded. ‘Do you remember your mother at all?’

  Anya thought of the voice in her head that she knew was both her mother and not her mother.

  ‘I hear her from time to time,’ said Anya, shifting. ‘But I cannot picture her face.’

  ‘It is often the case when you are so young. I myself cannot remember anything from the first few hundred years of my life. My memories start up here, near the Cordon, during the first war with the Tream.’

  Anya blinked. ‘Why did you fight the Tream?’

  Pan shrugged. ‘We needed room to survive, and they did not want to move …’

  Anya did not understand. ‘You said this before, but you are gods. Weren’t you here first?’

  Pan glanced at her. He looked worried again, as if he feared his words might bring the wolves down on them at any moment.

  ‘You can see we exist. You can see that we are real beings, but we aren’t your creators. You were already here when our memories started, as were the Tream. We came here from another place, but none of us remember when or where. It is too long ago. Just as your kind were once somewhere else, somewhere where you evolved like the trees did here or the animals Vedic was hunting the day we met.’

  Anya felt light-headed. Who created us if not the gods? ‘What is “evolved”?’

  Pan smiled. ‘Every time the living reproduces, they never quite manage it properly. The process introduces minor mistakes – you have a glint of gold in your left eye that none of your line had, for example – and some of those tiny changes allow some of your kind to live long enough to reproduce in greater numbers than others, which offers an advantage. Those changes then g
et passed on.’

  ‘How do you know such things?’ asked Anya. ‘I never heard or read anything like this.’

  ‘I have been trying to understand where we came from for a very long time. Some of the gods remembered fragments, although they are not … they were not sure where from. Some of the trees have memories of the early times, the older ones, the ones who saw the creatures that came before us …’

  ‘The mad ones,’ said Vedic. He was bashing two pieces of rock together to try to get a spark to kindle the unlit fire.

  ‘Sounds like nonsense. Are you sure Danu didn’t breathe life into the world and you’re just attributing bad luck to her absence? What would we have evolved from?’

  Vedic looked up from the smouldering fire, a grin on his face. ‘He means monkeys. He’s convinced that we once swung through the trees.’

  Anya looked at Pan.

  The god smiled. ‘It’s just a theory.’

  ‘How can you be sure you didn’t create the world if you don’t remember?’

  Pan shrugged. ‘Because we are of it, just like you. We cannot leave this place or view ourselves from outside it. If we were truly creators, we would be able to, wouldn’t we? And because of how we die.’

  Anya had no answer.

  Vedic tilted his head. ‘Well, that information would seem to be important.’

  Pan looked sad. ‘It will not help with Cernubus. He has become chimera, a demon, and all I am referring to is our equivalent of old age. When belief dies, we become mortal and age and pass on to Golgotha, just like you.’

  Anya thought of the god in the cave. He had not lost his belief. What had been done to him was violent and rage-induced.

  ‘What of the gods Cernubus killed?’

  Pan winced. ‘Our belief has been waning for a while, but it is true that dismemberment, particularly removal of the heart and head, can kill us. The older, better-established gods may return. But that is an age away.’

  ‘What of the Morrigan?’ said Vedic. ‘Has she not claimed them?’

  Pan ignored him. ‘But you asked about your grandmother …’

  Anya leant forward. ‘Yes.’

  Pan looked at the now-burning fire. ‘She was like the flame: people were drawn to her, but those who flew too close were scorched.’

  ‘Like my grandfather,’ whispered Anya.

  Pan nodded. ‘She did not mean to. She could not help it. Hope is like that. I suspect that is why she left in the end. Who knows where she is now?’

  Anya flushed and shook her head. ‘No. My grandmother died. She was killed by a Kurah assassin. She did not get further than the mountains.’

  Pan blinked. ‘Yes, sorry. I get mixed up with your mother. It’s so hard to keep things straight.’ He tapped his head. ‘My mind is a maelstrom of yesterday, today and tomorrow. You miss your mother?’

  ‘Every day,’ she replied, bitter bile in the back of her throat. ‘My grandfather always said she would return when she found what she was looking for, but I suspect she never did, or she would have returned by now. No?’

  Pan shrugged. ‘If we lose hope, what does that leave us?’

  ‘Rage,’ said Vedic.

  Pan frowned.

  ‘Your grandmother was the finest blade I ever saw. On any field.’

  Anya looked at Vedic. ‘You met her?’

  Vedic shook his head. ‘I saw her. Not the same thing.’

  ‘You were a warrior, then?’

  Vedic raised an eyebrow. ‘Or a nosy forestal?’

  Pan laughed. ‘Our woodsman doesn’t want to give up his secrets, and who is to blame him? What is life without somewhere we can hide? Now, we should all rest.’

  Darkness.

  There is no colour. No light. No detail. Nothing. At first it feels as if I am in a void – a total loss of awareness, of up and down, of left and right. I want to try to move my arms, but I can’t.

  Perhaps I am dead.

  Perhaps this is an in-between place.

  No. I can feel the ground through my feet. I seem to be shifting from one foot to the other, but it is not me controlling my actions. Another dream? I can smell incense. Can you smell in a dream? The incense is made of pine oil – I recognise the scent from the forest. Someone has taken my arm. I am not in a void, and yet I cannot see. There is nothing covering my eyes, I am sure of that, but I cannot open them. There is a sound that makes my ears ring. I am unsure what. I shift my weight – I did not decide to do this. My body has just moved of its own accord and feels different … like someone else’s … I have broken free of my guide, and I am running in the darkness. Somehow my feet pick a perfect path and do not falter. I feel the texture of the ground change before I realise I’ve entered a large room where the floor is made of stone. The thought, that this is a temple, comes unbidden as if there is another mind in here with me.

  I still cannot see. Someone has started speaking. I can’t understand what is being said as the speaker draws closer to me. I flinch when someone touches my face, pawing at me with hot, dry hands. I cannot tell if I moved my body or if someone else did. The contact is so unwelcome; I imagine both of us want to escape. This is worse than anything I have ever experienced. I’m not able to move, or see, or understand the purpose of the touching. Only that a paste is now being smeared over my eyes, wet and cold.

  The person applying the mixture pulls me about like I am an errant child refusing to scrub my face and hands. The examination stops just as suddenly as it began, and I feel the calloused hand slide round to rest on the back of my neck. Someone new is shouting at me as I am propelled forward to another part of the temple, somewhere equally black and devoid of detail in my veil of blindness. Standing still, I can start to orientate myself, and by the smell of one of them, I know this is the person who brought me into this place. I cannot tell who has the staff that is clicking down on the stone flags as they pace. The clicking draws close until the owner stops in front of me, and I am able to conclude they are not my guide.

  The tone of the question the man asks is hard to ascertain because he speaks so fast. The person who I am a passenger in responds. I, Anya, scream inside their head, but my host speaks with a brash enthusiasm. They cannot hear me. The words my host speaks are not in a language I understand.

  The man with the staff begins to sing. A croaked, ancient singing voice that is soporific. He places his hand on my forehead. His palm is hot on my skin as he continues in a half chant, and the chanting is starting to hurt my ears as he rises in volume. My skull feels like someone is levering it up with an axe-head and pushing their fingers down behind my nose. A curious sensation that seems to grow with each passing line until only the people who have moved either side behind me keep me standing, their hands digging into my arms. The singer’s left hand is wrapped around the top front of my skull, and his other is round my back as he reaches a crescendo. I can smell his breath, acrid and stale. I feel the world shift as whatever the man has done drops me to the ground like a puppet whose strings have been cut. I narrowly avoid splitting my skull on the stone floor.

  For a moment, I am as disorientated as when I realised I was blind. A flicker. There, on the periphery of my vision: a small bead of light smears across the black, but when I try to look straight at it, all is dark. I try to stand. Pain drives me to my knees. A slamming, stabbing sensation in my skull has me calling out, and I do not need to understand myself to know I am asking for mercy.

  Moments later I realise that my vision is altering from the endless void. Light bleeds into my eyes and explodes in fractal reflections as my vision returns. The light, the colour, is painful to eyes shut up in the dark for so long and makes me blink and squint as I take in my surroundings.

  I see the temple. A vast chamber made of stone carved into bizarre curves and bends, rather like a collection of tree roots. There is nothing else like this temple in my memory. The two men with me do not look particularly large, certainly not as big as I thought when I could not see them. One is as old as sin,
and the other is barely a man, his eyes uncertain as they flick from his companion to me and back again. Both are clad in white robes.

  I whisper.

  The older man asks a question, and I reply with the same two words, but louder. The younger man asks a different question, and I move my gaze right to him before replying and sending his face crimson.

  I’m not listening to them. My attention has fallen on a large statue that sits on one corner of the dais and reaches to the ceiling of the chamber. My eyes shift to the construction of a raised platform. There are channels criss-crossing the surface in a seemingly pointless pattern. I step closer to the statue, close enough to put my hand on the smooth stone of the leg.

  I am moving again now, striding down the chamber back towards the door. My host pauses occasionally to touch surfaces that, until now, we only had texture memories for. The afternoon sun is painfully bright as I emerge into the light of day, and I cover my eyes from the glare. My eyesight takes a good few minutes to adjust, and then, from my vantage point on the hill, I can see the lower districts of the stone city spread out below me. I gasp. I wave the other men closer and speak so quickly they struggle to keep up with my outburst.

  Hooves strike the ground like rain; a group of riders comes at speed up the hill. There are eight bodyguards in the group, and one king. The king is gnarled with age, swathed in purple. He slides from his horse and approaches the old man at my side. The conversation is quick and harsh but ends with the king slapping the old man on the back with what looks like relief. Only then does the ruler notice me and ask a question that has to mean ‘Who is this?’

  I reply before either of my companions gets a word out. The man’s eyebrows go up at my host’s words, and his eyes flick to the elder man by my side. The king turns back to my host, taking in my appearance in more detail this time, feeling my arms and legs for muscle. Satisfied with what he finds, the king steps back with a smile before turning to the others and remounting his horse. He issues what sound like instructions before turning his horse down the hill. I find myself led back into the church towards the dais. I do not resist.