Gods of Earth by Craig DeLancey Page A

tomorrow.” He trotted to the door, then added, “I promised the-the-the guards I would talk with the City Councilors. And I’ll, I’ll, I will return with clothes for Chance.”
    The Guardian watched him go. “Leave the makina outside!” he called.
    Seth yelped.
    “A philosophy student,” the Guardian growled.

    Thetis appeared terrified to be left alone with Chance and the Guardian. She divided her glances between the Guardian’s ominous gray form and Chance’s face. Chance was surprised that she paid him any heed, and he became uncomfortable as she seemed more and more to inspect him with a hungry curiosity.
    Soon after Seth left, she slipped out of the room, and Chance imagined she had fled, but she returned with snow-white bandages, some towels, and a glass bottle of clear liquid. She pointed at Chance’s arm, where the bear had cut him.
    “I cannot use guild works,” Chance said.
    “This is cotton. This is alcohol. I do not think they break your creed.”
    Chance nodded. He began to strip off his filthy bandages, but she stopped him.
    “Let me.”
    She reached out and touched his bare arm with trembling, cool fingertips. For a moment she stood like that, just touching him. Chance felt that she seemed almost to believe he wasn’t real—or perhaps that she had expected him and now could not believe he had arrived. When he looked at her pointedly, she blushed and began to slowly peel his bandages off. They had dried into his scabs, and the wide scrapes of the bear claw tore open again as she pulled the brown scraps of cloth away. He cringed but said nothing. She poured on the stinging alcohol, and Chance breathed deeply the sharp smell of it as he bit back a gasp of pain. She wiped the cut clean, poured more alcohol on, and then wrapped the arm in the gauze.
    “We can change it again tomorrow,” she whispered.
    “Thank you,” he said.
    She nodded. She went away again and returned with a tray of food: walnuts, crisp apples, several wedges of hard cheese, and a loaf of stale bread. They sat at the table then and ate. Cool water that tasted of metal came from a tap in the wall.
    “What will happen to Mimir?” Chance asked the Guardian.
    “The makina will wait outside,” the Guardian said. “It is no hardship for a machine to wait a day or a year.”
    Thetis looked at Chance and then the Guardian with wide eyes, as if surprised that Chance would talk with this dread being in the Common tongue.
    A discomfort grew in Chance over the fear and awe the woman felt for the Guardian. He had treated the Guardian as a man—a frightening, powerful unman, but still a kind of man. The woman instead could barely breathe in the Guardian’s presence.
    Should he speak differently to the Guardian? Should he not speak to him at all? And yet, looking at him, where he stood by the window, Chance could not muster any of the terror and reverence that the woman felt. The Guardian was scary, even awesome, but to Chance he seemed now, ever since their time by the river after thefight with the bear, a man for all that. He was quiet, stoic, like fierce old Elder Isai of the Purimen Council. But not unfathomable, not otherworldly.
    Seemingly torn between wanting to be away from the Guardian and not wanting to be away from Chance or alone, Thetis finally whispered something inaudible and slipped through the door. The Guardian watched her go, and then turned back to the window, looking out at the few lights of city towers as dusk turned to night.
    “She called you Atheos,” Chance said.
    “That is an idle name. Do not speak it again.”
    “But there is such a… in the
Theopolemein
.”
    The Guardian turned his head to look at Chance. “What does a Puriman know of unholy odes?”
    “Some of the Trumen read the poem. They talk of it. I have heard tell of its story. I’m not completely ignorant.”
    The Guardian said nothing.
    “Are you the Atheos, the Anti-god of the poem?”
    “There is no Atheos. I am the Guardian. That