His god, to date, had not explained the rapid loss of his hair and nails, nor the way his immortal skin lacerated and sloughed away after any minor injury. His arms were a patchwork of weeping sores; his shoulders throbbed with pain; his face — which he had last seen reflected in a pool of icy water — seemed to be coming apart along its fractured seams. His clothes were stiff with dried fluids. He stank, a piercing chemical reek.
Vale climbed a wooden ridge, leaving his pink worm-trail in the dry soil, his excitement flaring to a crescendo. Close now, his god whispered, and as he crested the hill he saw the city of redemption, the sacred city glittering darkly in its hidden valley, vast and imperial and ancient, long uninhabited but alive now with god-ridden men. The city’s heart, the Well of Creation, still beat beneath a fractured dome. Even at this distance Vale could smell the city, a mineral fragrance of steam and sunlight on cold granite, and he wanted to weep with gratitude, humility, exaltation. I am home, he thought, home after too many years in too many lightless slums and dark alleys, home at last.
He ran gladly down the wooded slope, breathless but agile, until he reached the barbed-wire perimeter where men like himself, half gods seeping pink-stained plasma, greeted him wordlessly.
Wordlessly because there was no need to speak, and because some of these men might not have been able to speak even if they had wanted to, considering the way their skin drooled from the faces like rotten papier-mâché. But they were his brothers and Vale was immensely pleased to see them.
They gave him an automatic rifle and a box of ammunition, showed him how to sling these things over his blistered shoulder and how to arm and fire the rifle, and when the sun began to set they took him to a ruin where a dormitory had been installed. There was a thin mattress for Vale to sleep on, deep in the stony darkness, wrapped in the organic stench of dying flesh and acetone and ammonia and the subtler odor of the city itself. Somewhere, water dripped from stone to stone. The music of erosion.
Sleep was elusive, and, when he did sleep, he dreamed. The dreams were nightmares of powerlessness, of being trapped and slowly suffocated in his own body, smothered and submerged in the effluvia of his flesh. In his dreams Vale longed for a different home, not the sacred city but some abandoned home that had slipped from his grasp long ago.
He woke to find his body covered in delicate green pustules, like pebbled leather.
He spent a day on a makeshift firing range with those among his mute companions who could still hold and operate a rifle.
Those who could not — whose hands had become ragged claws, whose bodies were racked with convulsions, who had budded new appendages from their enlarged spines — made their war plans elsewhere.
And Vale understood, by way of his god’s silent communication, some of the truth of the situation. These changes were natural but had come too soon, had been provoked by sabotage in the realm of the gods.
His gods were powerful, but not all-powerful; knowing, but not all-knowing.
That was why they needed his help.
And it was a pleasure to serve, even if some fraction of himself cried out against his captivity, even if he felt, from time to time, a painful nostalgia for the part of him that was merely human.
No one spoke in the sacred city, though a few men still cried out in their sleep. It was as if they had left language in the forests behind the barbed-wire barricades. All of these men were god-ridden and all of the gods were ultimately one god, so what need was there for conversation?
But the part of Elias Vale that longed for his lost humanity similarly longed for the sound of human speech. The stutter of gunfire and the slap of footsteps echoed down these stone avenues into melancholy silence, and even the soundless voice of his own thoughts began to grow faint and incoherent.
He woke, a day later, with a new skin, green as the forest and bright as shellac, though it still leaked a pale whitish fluid at the joints.
He discarded the last of his reeking clothes. There was no need for modesty in the sacred city.
Hunger, too, became a thing of the past.
He would need to eat, eventually to eat a great deal, to compensate for the lean times. But not right away.
He did need to drink copious amounts of water. Pipe had been laid from the river, and a steady flow emerged from the crude pipe end at the perimeter of the sacred city, to trickle away down the broken streets into the alpine soil. This water was cold and tasted of stone and copper. Vale drank buckets of it, and so did the other men.
If he should call them men. They were becoming, quite obviously, something else. Their bodies were changing radically. Some of them had grown a second set of arms, stubby nodules emerging from the altered musculature of their ribs, with tiny fingers that grasped blindly at the air.
He drank but didn’t feel the need to urinate. His new body used liquid more efficiently, which was just as well; he had lost his penis sometime during the night. It lay on his mattress like a gangrenous thumb.
But Vale preferred not to think too hard about that. It interfered with his euphoria.
The autumn air was fine and cool.
Elias Vale had foreseen many futures, true and false. He had looked into human souls as if through sparkling glass and seen the things that swim and hover there. The gods had found that capacity quite useful. But the future he could not foresee was his own.
Did that matter?
Once his god had promised him riches, eternal life, the dominion of the Earth. All that seemed terribly intangible to him now, blandishments offered to a child.
We serve because we serve, Vale thought, a logic both circular and true.
He felt the Well of Creation beating like a heart at the heart of the sacred city.
The skin of his face had peeled away like the rind of an orange. Vale could only guess what he looked like now. There were no mirrors here.
His god took him deeper into the city, made him a part of the trusted circle of guardians arrayed around the dome of the well.
Elias Vale was honored to assume the duty.
He slept in the chill shadow of the dome that night, his head cradled on a pillow of stone. He woke to the sound of mortar fire.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Guilford Law moved up the ridge under the concussion of artillery.
The sound reminded him of tunnel-blasting on the Alpine railway line. All it lacked was the concussion of falling rock. Unlike tunnel-blasting, it didn’t stop. It went on with a maddening irregularity, like the pulse of a panicked heart.
It reminded him of Belleau Wood and the German cannon.
“They must have known we were coming.”
“They did,” Tom Compton said. The two men crouched behind a rockfall. “Just not how many of us.” He buttoned the collar of his ragged brown overcoat. “The devil’s an optimist.”
“They might bring in reinforcements.”
“Doubt it. We have people at every rail station and airstrip east of Tilson.”
“How much time does that buy us?”
The frontiersman shrugged.
Did it matter? No, of course it didn’t matter. Everything was in motion now; nothing could be stopped or withheld.
A muted daylight touched the ridge tops. Cresting the hill, Guilford beheld chaos. The valley was still in shadow, the streets white with trails of fog. A body of men including the venerable Erasmus had managed to set up trench emplacements within artillery range of at least the nearest buildings, and a predawn bombardment from their motley collection of heavy guns, howitzers and mortars had taken the demon encampment by surprise.
Now, however, the enemy had rallied; the western flank was taking vicious punishment.
Simultaneously, Guilford and a couple of hundred other longtimers began to move downslope from the north. There was pathetically little cover among the clinging reed grass and tumbled rock of the steep valley wall. Their sole advantage was that this terrain had also made difficult the emplacement of fortifications and barbed wire.