No gods for drowning, p.1
No Gods For Drowning, page 1
NO
GODS
FOR
DROWNING
Hailey Piper
The following is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in an entirely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2022 by Hailey Piiper
Cover and jacket design by Mimi Bark
ISBN 978-1-951709-80-8
eISBN: 978-1-957957-11-1
Library of Congress Control Number: available upon request
First trade paperback edition September 2022 by Agora Books
An imprint of Polis Books, LLC
62 Ottowa Road South
Marlboro, NJ 07746
www.PolisBooks.com
Also by Hailey Piper
Queen of Teeth
Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy
Your Mind Is a Terrible Thing
Benny Rose, the Cannibal King
The Possession of Natalie Glasgow
The Worm and His Kings
For J, forever.
PART ONE
A
NINE-POINTED STAR
Chapter 1
I
n the beginning, men were prey, and in the end, they would be prey again.
Lilac Antonis couldn’t wait that long. She had listened for the approaching pair from her corner, hidden behind barnacle-crusted crates, their wood stinking of old seawater. The dark shack hugged her while minutes crawled, as if in this forgotten pocket of Oldtown, she would go forgotten, too.
“You sure this is the place?” a shrill voice asked, as a reedy chicken of a man—Flip?— shoved open the shack’s door. “Don’t see Vince.”
A sturdy shadow followed, had to be Marko. “It’s the place,” he said, and then raised his voice. “Barton, where you’d get?”
Lilac had never hurt anyone before, not on purpose. Not the way she would today. Minutes scurried now, impatient. She couldn’t let the men get their bearings straight, let their eyes adjust, let them realize there was no Vince Barton here like they thought.
Pale outside light curled at the edges of their silhouettes as Lilac crept out, painting Flip in a ratty old suit and tattered derby. Beside him, Marko wore more practical clothes for the coming rainy season, a wool coat and thick brown fisherman’s pants tucked into galoshes. He tugged a pocket watch from his coat, its chain clinking, and Flip leaned over to check it too.
They were ordinary men. Flesh and bone. Mortal.
Lilac swept in as quiet as poison and slammed a smooth stone into the back of each man’s skull in turn. Marko went down first; Flip next. Too hard a blow, and they would never wake up. Lilac would’ve counted that as mercy.
But there was no goddess of mercy, and Lilac had no time to waste on made-up gods when she needed the real thing. At least one of these men should hear and understand.
Flip smelled off in a way Lilac couldn’t put her finger on as she bound him in a discarded fishing net. Marko smelled sharp, like he’d been drinking, and that explained a few things. He would sober up once he woke. Lilac bound his wrists and ankles in thick rope. Everything in the shack once belonged to fishers, and when she finished tying the knots, she could only smell saltwater.
The beach rushed in from the back of her mind, the sunstruck sea twinkling in memory, but Lilac shook it away. She refused to dredge up the past, as if she had organized and prepared for nothing. Her plan would work. Life would go back to normal—no, better. Her life would know miracles again.
She took deep breaths as her nerves reminded her how wrong this might have gone had she been slower, or louder, or had either man carried a gun. Better to focus on the work ahead. She had never done this before, but she would have to do it again and again until her task was finished.
Marko stirred, grumbled, and raised his head off the floor. He spotted Flip ahead of him, wrapped tight in the net, and tried to reach out. The ropes held firm. He started to fuss, and the bindings chewed at his wrists, a waste of blood. Lilac couldn’t stall any longer.
A solitary candle lit the patch of wood floor where Flip’s net slumped against a wall. Marko struggled beside him. Lilac slipped into the light on tender steps, the floorboards rough on her bare feet. These days, a priestess of the old covenants was more likely to be a homeless beggar than sustenance for any long-gone bloodthirsty god. Some were even thieves, smugglers, and black market merchants like these two men.
“Vince, that you?” Marko asked. “Why you dressed like them robes?”
A featureless black robe covered Lilac’s naked body, so shapeless and flowing that it made her figure hard to see, especially in the dim shack. She turned her head in slow inches toward Marko. The soft candlelight outlined her harsh nose, curls of auburn hair, and skin too olive for Vince’s pallor.
“A priestess?” Marko strained at his bindings again. “Where’s Vince? Did you kill him?”
Lilac froze mid-step—they cared about each other. Honor among thieves. Her idea that one of the men should hear her reasons had been naïve. She should have finished this before they woke up, before she heard them care. Best to end it before they showed themselves as any more human. She breathed in the shack’s sea-stink and thought of the beach, and a sickness in the waves, and the reason she had to hurt these people today.
“In the beginning, men were prey,” she said, and her voice came stronger than she’d expected. She was no stranger to the holy Verses of Aeg, and maybe her throat knew scripture enough to ignore her quaking muscles and jittery nerves. Was she really going through with this?
“Can’t you hear me?” Marko asked.
“We scurried over small islands,” Lilac went on. “Simple beasts without voice or thought, food for the glories of the seas, and those hungry seas surrounded us.” She sidled toward Flip, his derby lying a few feet away. “But then came the blessing. The heavens opened, and the Dawn Gods descended on the world to save us.”
Marko kicked at the floor, and a growl tinged his voice. “You need to answer up, lady. Vince. Barton. Where’s he at?”
Lilac knelt over Flip’s net—no stirring—and stroked her fingertips across the corded rope. “The Dawn Gods pushed back the seas with their heavenly might. The many islands of the archipelago joined in the united Holy Land of Aeg, and so did the many peoples become one.”
“Will you stop reciting the fucking scripture and answer me?” Marko kicked again.
Lilac’s fingers wove through the netting and into Flip’s hair. He looked at peace as she yanked his head from the floor. Sticky blood matted his neck.
“Not content to merely preserve us in those dawn days, the Dawn Gods taught us to better ourselves, and so came the gifts, one from each of the seven. They taught us to build fire and grow food. They taught us to speak, heal, construct, create.” Lilac’s eyes at last slid toward Marko. “They taught us law.”
Marko shouted now. “Let him go! Vince is expecting us. Don’t you understand?”
“But we can’t all learn law.” Time was up—either Lilac went through with it, or she surrendered to the end of everything. She shook her right arm, and a silvery dagger slid down her sleeve, into her palm. Its blade curved into a sharp teardrop.
“Gods,” Marko whispered. “Wait one minute.”
Listening to him would be easy. Lilac could drop the sacrificial dagger, untie these men, and walk away. She could catch a bus to the coast and watch the frothing tide roll in, and wait for the rains to drown the city, and hope there was still a god somewhere across Aeg who cared about mortal life, blood or no blood to offer. Everyone she loved could vanish upon the beach in her thoughts and turn to twinkling seawater. No faces, no voices, only empty funeral pyres washed out by rainfall.
If she didn’t call the gods, who would? If she walked away now, she would accept the end. Maybe not in thought, but in action. As if she consented to that terrible day four years ago.
She couldn’t accept that. Ever.
Her dagger’s tip chewed down Flip’s neck, carved his chest, and drove into his heart. Red rivers spat across the wooden floor, staining his fallen derby. The shack’s saltwater stink drowned in a bitter copper odor. No more scents of beach and ocean, only blood.
The shack smelled of a goddess’s temple.
Marko hammered his booted heels against the floor. His ropes held. He began tossing his head back and forth, teeth gritted, drool slinging down his stubbly chin. “No,” he grunted. “Gods, please—”
“Yes, call to the gods.” Lilac dragged her free hand’s fingers through Flip’s blood. The coppery stink thickened, and she thought of priestesses, daggers, and a nine-headed holiness filling the temple. “All for the gods. All for Logoi.”
Marko leaned his face toward his knees. His words rushed out. “Listen, there’s been a misunderstanding. Clearly Vince sent us to the wrong house, or we messed up the address.”
Lilac stood from Flip’s body and crossed him on tiptoe. His growing puddle of blood dogged her heels. She reached her free hand to the wall above and smeared a red shape across the dingy planks. A dot, a line, a point, a curve, another, another. She’d drawn this sign a thousand times since her childhood in the temple of Logos.
“Listen,” Marko said again. Drool struck his fisherman’s pants. “You were in the middle of something important, and we intruded. We were wrong, I see that now. We’re—I
Lilac’s hand slid from the wall, but no blood dripped from her fingers. She almost felt her pores dilate, her skin acting with countless mouths to drink up the red fluid. She didn’t mean to, never meant to. Couldn’t be helped as a matter of birth.
“Gods, you’re one of them? A descendant?” Marko leaned back, wide-eyed. His mouth hung dark, and sweat dotted his skin.
Lilac couldn’t prolong this. Suffering was not the point. “In Logos, beneath the eyes of Many-Headed Logoi, to break the law in her city is to surrender your life to her.”
“A mistake!” Marko snapped. “You got Flip; you don’t need me. I won’t tell.”
He was right. He wouldn’t.
Lilac lunged across his knees and drove her teardrop dagger into his chest. And again, to make sure. Suffering was not the point. He quit thrashing and shouting, quit everything, and slumped to the floor.
Sticky redness again soaked Lilac’s fingers. “Wheel of resolve, turn for me, all which I’ve done and said. Bring it home and hearth to be, for all the living and the dead.”
Quickly now, her skin was thirsty. Both men dead, one having heard his sacrificial purpose, no more feeling to them, she went for the harsher work of cutting open their torsos and spilling tubes and lumps onto the floorboards. She used Marko’s coat to shove the pieces into an offering mound, and—
Why was she crying? In Logos, these men would have been killed long ago.
But Logos was far away, and Logoi was gone. That was the point of sacrifice. Lilac didn’t have the luxury of caring that Marko had worn his coat because the rainy season made it cold outside, and he felt cold, he’d been a person who felt things, and now his soul had walked away.
If she walked, too, she would have to accept a damned future, where men would be prey in the end. She would have to accept that day at the beach.
Her robe slid from her body, smoother than a snake shedding its skin. She had watched Logoi’s priestesses bare themselves for the goddess countless times. When they painted red dots along their bellies, chests, chins, they had all the time in the world.
But they had been ordinary mortals. Lilac’s skin was thirsty, and she had to hurry. Dots, streaks, crossing everything until her skin echoed the nine-pointed star she’d painted on the shack’s wall.
The star on her skin would vanish in moments. Lilac hoped its fleeting nature echoed life’s brevity, or made some other sacrificial meaning. She had only pantomimed it in the past.
She crossed her ankles and aimed her feet at each other. She then raised her arms overhead, crossed her wrists, and steepled her fingers. Crimson trails forked, merged, and webbed down her body.
“I call to Logoi the Many-Headed!” she shouted. “I call to Logoi, Goddess of Reason.”
The blood began to fade. Every sip eased her exhaustion, but the narrow window for ritual rattled her nerves. Her body needed sustenance; her skin would take it. Faster now.
“I call to Mother Logoi, find these offerings worthy of your attention and your return. Look upon this symbol of the bounty we would feed you. Accept this sacrifice, and wipe clean these men’s souls. Accept their deaths, their blood, and come to feed upon them. Return to us, and save us.”
Lilac’s trembling arms slid down her sides as the prayer broke from dutiful to personal.
“We need the gods’ help, like a daughter needs her mother,” Lilac whispered. “I love you.”
No blood stained her skin. The floor’s puddle would congeal around the offering mound of innards, Marko’s coat, and Flip’s derby. Wherever Lilac stepped, bare floor would show through in the shape of her footprints. And what about her soul? No one would see the blood on her hands, but she would know.
Too far a fate to worry about. She hurried into underwear and threw the covenant robe over her body again.
Had it worked? Not right away, and she couldn’t pretend two men’s deaths were enough. No use crying for gods unless she was willing to slit a few throats. And if her sacrifices didn’t work, she couldn’t be caught either.
She dragged a small drum of oil from the shack’s corner, placed here before the men arrived, and splashed the walls and bodies and floor. She then drew an oily line from the shack’s center to its door, where she set the candle.
Best to leave the sacrifice for as long as possible in case the nine-pointed star drew Logoi’s eyes. Best to hope she saw it at all.
Chapter 2
I
n the beginning, men were prey. The first line of holy writ floated unbidden into Captain Arcadia Myrn’s thoughts each time she went knocking on doors in Oldtown, like a sinister good morning. The Dawn Gods promised mankind would never be prey again, and yet the later Verses of Aeg promised they would.
The line echoed again as Arcadia climbed from Oldtown’s dirt street up short stone steps toward a tired wooden door, hoping to give the former prophecy power over the latter as best she could.
After a few knocks, a gaunt young woman answered with an exhausted scowl. She wore a gray button-down and slacks, her hair tied in a blue kerchief.
Arcadia tried a smile. “Arcadia Myrn. I’m captain to the evacuation team, or you might better know us as your local flood fighters.”
Five agents in loose sea-green uniforms stood behind her. She made sure to be first in the line of fire, whether the resident who answered the door greeted the evacuation team with an unkind word or a snub nose revolver. Every knock was a sales pitch. Arcadia sold the promise that she had each Valentine citizen’s best interests at heart in exchange for a little trust and cooperation. Her smile shined eternal.
“We’re here to help,” Arcadia said.
The woman in the dim doorway chewed at her words. “More Logos than local. I thought you people were supposed to be rougher around the edges. For baby-snatchers.”
Arcadia ran a hand through the bristles of her buzzed-cut hair. People in the city of Valentine had been skittish about the presence of officials from Logos since Commander Thale led them north ten months ago. Especially in Oldtown. Arcadia wanted to soften those concerns, but she cut an imposing figure, tall and muscled, and there was little her gentle smile could do about that.
Sell it, she told herself.
“We’re not here to snatch babies, ma’am,” Arcadia said. “We’re here to evacuate the neighborhood before the rains, buffer the sea-facing barricades, and defend against the glories if necessary. We’ve only taken children, along with their families, to the refugee housing on the city’s east side. Will you let us help you?”
“You have knives somewhere in those pretty uniforms?” the woman asked.
“Yes.” On the left side of Arcadia’s utility belt, beside her two-way radio.
The woman tugged her kerchief. “And guns?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Arcadia said. On the right, a black six-round revolver across the line of pouches, but never meant for people, only to stop glories. Arcadia had quit the Logos police force and their cruelty going on a decade now. Flood fighters, the evac team—their job was to help people out of Oldtown and then beat back the rising tide. To call on Commander Thale and the occupying police from Logos would only make matters worse. But to Oldtown residents, flood fighters and police officers came cut from the same Logos cloth.
“Can’t really do anything to stop you then, can I?” the woman asked, and let the agents inside.
Seeing one of these Oldtown homes meant seeing them all. Worn stone walls, aged wooden doors, cramped damp rooms, a grimy kitchen, barely passing the fire code—less a concern during the rainy season. Bread and wild greens would make up the brunt of most meals. Holes in the outside walls, left gaping for the summer dry season, would be plugged with wool and wooden boards by week’s end. The rains were almost here.
There was only one bedroom, where parent and baby slept together. The crib sat beside a window, as it often did in these houses. Today, Arcadia found a baby inside.
