The Scarred God Read online

  ‘W-w-why am I here?’ stammers the man.

  I reply in words I do not understand. My tone is unsympathetic. The knife does not leave my hand.

  ‘I don’t … I … Please … let me go … I will say nothing … go far away … do anything … Just let me go …’

  I step forward, raising my free hand and talking to him in a calm, slow voice. The man cannot understand. I cannot understand. He steps back. He is pushed forward again by someone behind the curtain. A few of the crowd laugh, but I do not. I grip the blade tighter. I try to hold back my own arm, but I am familiar with this dance by now and know I cannot stop the beat.

  The man notices the knife. His pupils grow as wide as blossoming flowers as he tries to draw back from the weapon. I move forward swiftly, draping my free hand down the man’s face, my words coming quiet under my breath. The man’s eyes glass over at the incantation, and there is a cheer from the crowd. The noise prompts me to raise my hand in a gesture for them to be silent.

  I look carefully at the man: a beautiful creature with the ivory skin of the nomads who live on the ice, with jet-black hair and large, unblinking brown eyes. I feel my hand close round the back of the man’s neck. He struggles briefly. I stare deep into his eyes, and his attempts at freedom stumble into a horrified daze. I lead him to the stone depression in the centre of the dais. He is left mesmerised and standing in the concave curve of the stone. I can feel power ebbing up from the room.

  At first I don’t know what the sound is. Only when I turn do I realise the audience is chanting softly, that at the front of them stands the man with the purple cloak. I begin to dance in time to the chant, as if drawing energy from the words. This is a strange movement. My limbs move in time to the beat of the chant as I slide, spin, drop and weave, representing the soft words of the crowd as movement. I have never done the like; this feels unnatural, wrong, as if someone else is operating my body, and yet it is oddly right, like I was born to conduct this power.

  A bad act is about to happen.

  I cut the throat of the Shaanti with a sudden strike. The man’s blood sprays, his head lolling briefly back before his whole body crumples into the dip in the dais as if I had also cut whatever strings held him upright. His blood pours into the carved channels, leading from where he fell to the absent hollow that seems to denote a sacred place by its shadowy void. The crowd looks on in silence as their sacrifice bleeds out, but they are not in shock – it is rapture that holds their voices.

  The room feels like it is spinning as would a toy I played with as a child, wobbling as it reaches the end of its turn, and yet I’m as steady as a rock as I bend to the crimson river running down the channels by my feet. When I rise once more, my hands are coated in blood, and as I lift them, the congregation answers as one with two words that even I understand: ‘Praise be.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Anya cursed.

  She sat up with a lurch. This made her head feel like it had been beaten with the flat of her sword. She was on the bank of the slow pool, and Vedic stood a few feet away, also covered in mud and dirt. His pack was laid out on the rock next to him. Anya spat the mud in her mouth out. Disorientated and frightened, she lifted her sword, blade pointing at Vedic. In that briefest of moments, she was uncertain if she were dead or alive – she could feel herself breathing, and yet the sun was wrong; the landscape looked like it had been drawn from one of her grandfather’s books, and from there memories seeped back as if with the air filling her lungs.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ asked Vedic.

  Anya looked down. She was still pointing her sword at the woodsman, and after recent events, she wasn’t sure lowering the weapon was wise. She glanced around for Akyar. There was no sign of the Tream anywhere she looked, nor was there any sign of him in the slow pool. Nor would there be if he’d drowned.

  ‘I don’t know where he is,’ said Vedic. ‘He wasn’t in there. You were the only other person I could find.’

  ‘You pulled me out of the pool?’

  Vedic nodded.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘You were drowning,’ replied Vedic, pointing. ‘I pulled you out.’

  The woodsman was covered in the same lumpy liquid mud as Anya. It dripped from his matted beard, and his eyes were the only thing that stood out from his face, their pale blue looking like marble in the ur-light. He looked hurt, weary and on edge. He was the picture of a mad prophet.

  ‘What about the slow pool? I thought we were dead.’

  ‘There’s a technique to moving through them. This wasn’t my first time in one of those accursed things.’ The forestal scratched at the mud on what remaining hair he had.

  ‘I think I passed out …’ she said, confused. ‘I never pass out.’

  ‘You were under a long time,’ he said, not unkindly. ‘It’s a miracle you’re alive at all.’

  Anya moved quickly, jumping up a rocky outcrop. She bounced up and flipped over the woodsman, landing behind him with her blade at his throat. ‘Where is he? Where is Akyar?’

  ‘What?’ asked Vedic. His irritation was palpable.

  Anya whispered in his ear once more. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Akyar?’

  She nodded. He seemed calmer again. She was ready for whatever trick he had planned next.

  ‘We both know you’re not going to use that now, little one. You’re not going to watch the life drain out of me like that guard – you don’t want my death following you round.’

  Anya smirked. She pushed the blade hard enough against his throat to hurt but not enough to do anything other than make it bleed a little. ‘Try me.’

  ‘Anya.’ The woodsman raised his hands. ‘I don’t know where Akyar is. I lost him in the tunnel and only saw you falling behind me. Now put the sword down before one of us gets hurt.’

  ‘That isn’t going to be me.’ She maintained the pressure on the blade. ‘Even you aren’t quicker than this.’

  There was a yell.

  Anya glanced up at the sound, and it was enough time for the woodsman to twist around the blade, pulling her sword-arm and throwing her onto the ground. He rolled for his sword, coming to his feet even as Akyar fell from the roof of Golgotha, a stream of Tream curses trailing after him. Anya couldn’t understand how he had managed to hang there as long as he must have done. Tream were legendary climbers, but everyone had their limits. The crushing impact silenced Akyar and folded the Tream over like a broken doll.

  Anya and Vedic stared at each other, swords drawn. Anya touched a bleeding lip, courtesy of the blow that had flung her away from Vedic. She noted Vedic favoured his scarred arm as he wiped away the blood that had beaded on his chest from his grazed throat.

  ‘See,’ said Vedic, gesturing at where Akyar had landed.

  Anya looked over at the fallen Tream. A cloud of dust hung suspended in the air around where he’d struck, and it was hard to imagine anything surviving that kind of fall, let alone a slight Tream.

  Vedic shrugged and sheathed his sword. ‘I have no interest in harming Akyar. I just have an obligation to Danu. The Tream are not my problem.’

  Anya ignored him and ran to where the Tream lay unmoving, neck bent at an awful angle. Anya was about to close Akyar’s open eyes when he sat up swearing. The Tream’s spine gave an almighty crack as he pulled his body straight. This was followed by yet more Tream curses as he twisted his head, crunching round to the right angle, and Anya felt her gorge rising. What magic was this?

  ‘But you …’ she said, confused. ‘And your neck … Are you immortal?’

  Akyar smiled, tiredly. ‘If only.’

  ‘Tream are a bit tougher than humans, particularly with regard to falls,’ said Vedic, amused. ‘If they died from every little drop, they’d never make adulthood. You can kill them though, if you’re good enough, and eventually, they do grow old. Although this one won’t if he tries to attack me like he did on the surface again.’

  ‘I won’t need to,’ said Akyar, rising. ‘You’re
here.’

  ‘He does have a point,’ said Anya, turning to look at the woodsman. ‘You’re here now. You might as well help us.’

  Vedic did not answer. Anya watched him look back at the rocks surrounding the slow pool before returning his gaze to the roof of the cavern in which Golgotha sat. The rock, ceiling and all, was dull grey with ribbed veins of amber, which gave off a lot of the orange-tinged ur-light that Anya had noticed in the slow pool. There was no way to reach the aperture through which they had fallen: the roof was too far away. Vedic would need to find another way out of the underworld, and Anya knew as well as he did that the only option was to go through the heart of the Morrigan’s domain, where the boy was most likely being held.

  ‘Our paths lie together again,’ said Vedic. ‘We all have to return to the surface eventually, and as long as our trails converge, I see no reason not to travel together. Do you?’

  Anya shook her head, but Akyar pressed home the point. ‘But if they diverge?’

  ‘Then I am gone,’ said Vedic, shrugging. ‘I must return to Danu. I swore an oath, and I will live up to this one.’

  ‘You pick your moments to find your honour,’ said Akyar, his face knotted with anger. ‘Careful, old man. Yours is a trinket that is tarnished.’

  ‘And you are on thin ice,’ said Vedic, hand on his sword hilt. To Anya: ‘Don’t you want Danu’s help? Are you really going to help the Tream over her?’

  Anya sighed. Vedic seemed determined to antagonise the Tream into killing him. ‘I told you, Danu would want me to help a child. I’ll not go in front of her having condemned one to death, human or otherwise.’

  ‘You’re guessing. You’ve never met her. What if you’re wrong? What if your own kind die because of this?’ asked Vedic.

  Anya shrugged. It was not like she hadn’t considered that possibility. She had not started this war. The invasion wasn’t her fault. She was just trying to save some of the captured, to give the deaths of those who had already fallen meaning. The woodsman was a strange one, a forestal, appointed by Danu herself, a former Shaanti warrior, and yet he did not seem to understand what the goddess stood for. This was all academic to him. She was a figurehead.

  ‘This is the right thing to do. I do not need a god to tell me that.’

  ‘See,’ said Akyar, turning back to the woodsman. ‘A girl of seventeen knows more than you.’

  Vedic drew his sword.

  ‘Stop bickering, you two,’ said Anya, striding past them. ‘We will all be safer if we stay together.’

  Akyar nodded.

  Vedic interjected. ‘More importantly, where are we?’

  The area in which they had landed was pockmarked with slow pools, but most of the wider landscape was a dry and dusty desert. There was not much of anything around them save for a ribbon of water some way in the distance, a river that brought the dunes to an end. The far side of the cavern ate light in a line of void where the rock became a volcanic jet-black that above ground would have looked like the sky had not quite been finished. It smelt of overheated, stale air and overcooked meat.

  ‘Golgotha,’ said Anya, her voice somewhere between awe and fear.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Vedic, folding his arms. ‘I thought we’d landed in Kurah.’

  Anya rubbed her arms against the cold and gusting wind that buffeted them. Here, imagination may have been playing tricks on her, but she was sure the sickly orange glow from above was beginning to fade as she tried to orientate herself. She pulled at the memories of what she had read in her grandfather’s books, at the lilting poetry she had been made to memorise as a girl. There would be little time if this place kept a form of night. She did not want to be out in the open, with the dead, when darkness fell.

  ‘Seven rivers …’ she said. ‘Seven, and the first of these is …?’

  ‘What are you blathering on about?’ asked Vedic.

  ‘There are seven rivers in Golgotha,’ she said, pointing at the distant river. ‘And that’s one over there. That must be Acheron, because I think we’re in the Fields of Asphodel.’

  ‘There’s no grass here, just sand,’ said Akyar, picking up a handful of dust. There was a flash of white below the surface of the sand.

  ‘It’s not that kind of field,’ said Anya, aware of the smell coming from the ground. ‘And it’s you that made me think we were there … When you landed, you broke the ground. There’s an easy way to find out.’

  Anya bent down, pawing sand away from the small indentation Akyar had made in the ground. The thing she sought stared back at her with empty eyes. Carefully she lifted a skull from the ground. She placed the bone to one side and continued shifting the sand to reveal yet more skulls, densely packed. The bones appeared to run under the surface in all directions.

  ‘What’s this?’ asked Vedic. He was as pale as Anya had ever seen him look.

  ‘A field of skulls,’ she replied, placing her hand on Vedic’s shoulder. ‘In Shaanti legend, the souls of the dead gather here before making the onward journey to the land beyond. This is a place of preparation, of acceptance of your fate. Some wander for several lifetimes before crossing the Acheron. Time is relative here.’

  ‘Then where are they?’ asked Akyar, holding one of the skulls up against the dull light.

  ‘Here,’ said Anya, reaching for the skull. ‘I fancy the light is fading.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Vedic, his pupils gleaming black and wide.

  Anya shifted. ‘I think we should keep moving. We need to find shelter – some of the legends say that souls walk Asphodel at night.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Vedic, too quickly. ‘If we are engulfed with ghosts, then the Morrigan will realise and come after us.’

  The last of the light disappeared.

  ‘Damn,’ said Anya. ‘How are we supposed to see?’

  ‘I can see,’ answered Akyar.

  ‘Lead on, then,’ said Vedic, his voice cracked like the bones beneath them.

  Anya frowned. This was beyond normal fear of the unknown, and Vedic was no coward.

  ‘Happy to,’ said Akyar, stepping forward. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Towards the river. Into Golgotha,’ said Anya, confident. ‘We must cross the Acheron and find the Trivium if we are to have any hope of returning to the surface or finding the boy. It’s the only way I know.’

  ‘I was afraid you were going to say that was the path ahead,’ said Vedic, sighing as he drew his blade.

  There was a cry that sounded like neither wolf nor human. They didn’t want to meet the thing that had spewed such noise into the rank air. They gathered their tattered cloaks, along with what remained of their packs, and strode off towards the river. Akyar led their night-time hike. Anya came next and Vedic went last. In this way, arm-in-arm, they marched all the way to the river without stopping. They saw no ghosts, but as the wind grew, they all fancied they could hear voices in its screams.

  ‘Perhaps we can go another way,’ said Akyar, looking round.

  They stood on the edge of a riverbank. They were all exhausted from their long night-time march as the dull ur-light of the false dawn began to lift the black. In that strange rusty light, they could see the river, crimson dark with the blood that flowed through it, slapping rocks and skulls with its fury as it rushed to whatever delta marked its end. The river flowed far too fast, was much too wide for anyone to cross on foot or to swim.

  ‘There is no other way,’ said Vedic, kicking the ground in frustration. ‘Unless you want to kill yourself and travel the spirit road.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Anya, too tired to move. ‘I don’t know any other way but the Trivium, and that itself is based on a very old myth that I was told as a child. We may be stuck here after all – there’s supposed to be a ferry.’

  ‘We are lost, then,’ said Akyar, poking the ground with his sword. ‘What of Meyr?’

  Vedic grunted. It was unclear if he was sympathetic.

  ‘There’s no one been here in some time,’ said Anya, lookin
g along the bank for any sign of a boat or other people. ‘If there ever has been.’

  Someone had to have been here before, because the river was just where it should have been in legend, and so someone had to have made their way out to tell of it. Unless … Could the Morrigan have planted the legend? How much did gods seek the belief that seemed to fuel them?

  Anya turned her back to the water, rubbing the back of her neck to try to assuage the tension she felt she had been carrying since she’d been pulled out of the slow pool. There was a growing sense of foreboding in her. She had missed some vital aspect of the events in which she had been caught up, but she could not put her finger on what. Her stomach churned, but whether it was with worry or hunger, she could not tell, and she forced the sensation from the front of her mind.

  Focus. She couldn’t remember the exact wording of the legends of Golgotha, but she’d been certain she wasn’t wrong about this river.

  ‘What is the legend?’ asked Akyar, tired.

  ‘There should be a ferryman,’ said Anya, waving her hand at the river like it was a person who had betrayed her. ‘He takes the dead across the river, and he can be bribed. According to the legend. It’s the only way to the other side – you can’t cross the Acheron by fording or swimming. Arawn used him.’

  ‘Perhaps whoever the ferryman is only comes for the dead,’ suggested Akyar, his eyes flicking around as if he expected to see a ghost slipping from the murk. ‘We haven’t seen any yet.’

  Vedic’s eyes caught Anya’s: Shall you tell him, or shall I?

  ‘That doesn’t mean they’re not here,’ said the woodsman, softly.

  Anya thought she saw Fin on the other side of the river, playing hopscotch in the dust. She forced herself back to the matter at hand.

  ‘Perhaps the ferryman was killed or removed after Arawn,’ she speculated.

  Vedic sat down. ‘No. The ferryman remained. More likely he has wandered off somewhere.’

  Son of a whore, thought Anya. ‘He remained? Have you been here before?’