Ben Peek - The Godless: Children: Book One

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For my grandparents, Clifford and Muriel Mamwell

Acknowledgments

A novel is not just a collection of words. It is a collection of people, as well. My partner, Nikilyn Nevins, read this book in parts, in sections, in wholes. She listened to my worries and complaints. I would have left me, but she stuck it out and bought me beer. Tessa Kum (the Book Whisperer) and Kyla Ward (the Occult Expert) were the first readers, and both, I cannot thank enough. My agent, John Jarrold, was surely as surprised as I was by the receptiona piece of string is at least this long, I believebut truly, none of it would have happened without him.

Lastly, a thank-you to my editor, Julie Crisp, and her American bad cop to her British good copit might have been the other way around on different days of the weekPete Wolverton, without whom the book would have been a lesser creature. It would not, I feel the need to add, have had a decapitated head without either.

Contents

Let us start at the beginning, shall we?

With the start that was the end.

Qian, The Godless

Prologue

The Spine of Ger had been made from stone, by hand. It ran across the Mountains of Mireea, along its peaks and valleys, an uninterrupted length that followed the vertebrae of the dead god, Ger, who lay beneath the mountains. The being who had been known once as the Warden of the Elements had been a giant whose head cleared the clouds, a figure that had been stationary until the final decades of his long life. His dark, scarred hands had held long, spiked chains with collars that, upon his fall, tore apart the land and created the crevasse that his long body would lie in. For hundreds of years after, his voice was heard in the rustle of leaves around him, in the storms above, in the floods of rivers and the crackle of fire that began by lightning. It continued long after Ger had finished building the mountain range around himself, a tomb wormed with mineral rich excesses to hide his ravaged body, but died long before the last brick of the Spine had been laid. In the eleven thousand years since that final stone had been placed, only the roots of ancient trees had caused the Spine to alter its shapelarge roots lifting stone, or hollowing earth beneaththough none had broken its flow and it stood now, old and weathered, its construction as subject to fiction as the god beneath it, the stone patterned green by mold and moss when covered and bleached by the suns exposure where the old, thick canopy fell away.

Bleached by Seis cracked palace, the young soldier, Ciron, corrected himself as he looked up through the branches, at the second of the three suns that rose as the first set. The middays sun rises, the mornings sun sets, but it is just the remains of the Seis home orbiting the bones of the God of Light himself. His horse walked beneath a thick, low branch, and he shifted around it. Sei had been the first god to kill another, though it had not been Ger, but rather Linae, the Goddess of Fertility. That act had begun the War of the Gods, though no one knew why he had done so, not even after so many generations. In class, the teachera young man who wore narrow, thick glasses that Ciron himself had enviedhad argued that it had been a lovers fight. Why should the gods be so different from them, he said, and the class had agreed, much to Cirons distress. Even at the age of five and ten, he had known that such a simplistic answer was inherently flawed, based as it was in the desire of the individual to see him or herself in the divine. He had spent a lot of time reading about the gods, spending hours in Yeflams public libraries, and he knew that the gods had not been like them, knew that they had not been human, and that the reasons for their war were so difficult to understand because their very experience of life was so alien to that of any dreamed by humanity.

Boy, youre daydreaming again.

Im sorry.

His voice sounded young, nasal and strained, and he heard a grunt from the older man ahead of him. Dont apologize, just pay attention, Ira said. The trail is leading to the flooded shafts.

Then its leading nowhere?

Dont be smart, boy. The other spat a stream of tobacco to his left. What do you think will happen at the end of this trail if the raiders are standing there?

Nothing.

No one would be standing there. Ciron knew that, so did Ira, but the young soldier was being paid to pretend otherwise. The thought made him angry, but he had not been in the Mireean Guard long enough to say that, especially to someone as senior as Ira. Besides, since Ciron had arrived, he had felt like he had been carrying a black mark because of how he had come to Mireea, the large city state that had formed itself behind one part of the Spine of Ger. Unlike the other new recruits who were drawn from the city, he had arrived from the Floating Cities of Yeflam, a letter in his hand, a week after his sixteenth birthday, a week after his father had told him that he had purchased a rank in the Mireean Guard for his eldest son. On the day that he had said it, Ciron had thought that his father had meant it as a joke. Surely, his father was not going to send him to a city where all talk of the gods was based on fear, and would instead send him to the Universities in Yeflam, to study theology beneath the Keepers from the Enclave, to become the scholar that he dreamed of. But no, in a humbling moment, Ciron realized that his father had no desire to send him there, did not have the political will to admit to his peers that his son was a scholar, not a soldier, and so had done what others had done, and purchased him a rank in Mireea.

Remember, his barely literate father had said, the day after his birthday, that you are our ambassador to Mireea, our hope and our future. Everything you do reflects upon us.

For the first time in his life, he had almost agreed with his father and told him exactly how it did reflect on him, but his mother had stood beside the short man and one pleading look from her had seen him swallow his bitter words.

Yet, his fathers decisions had proved worse than Ciron had originally thought. The raids by Leera against Mireea and its outlying villages had begun to escalate into a war by the time he rode up to the Spine of Ger, and whatever safe, easy position he had hoped to find had been stolen from him in the first week. The sword he had been given was too heavy in his hands, the armor he wore had bruised his shoulders, and the rank his father had purchased one step up from a squire. Before the first week was out he saw his first fight, felt sick during it, was sick after it, and managed to stay alive only because of those in his unit. To further insult him, on the trail back to Mireea, his unit had met the mercenary group Steel, a replacement for an earlier group, Mirin, which had left under a controversy he had never had explained to him. Yet, in Steels ranks were fighters as young as he, boys and girls already veterans, each one a rising star of a cheap fiction where he would be placed, in contrast, as a boy in need of rescue.