The Crippled God

Would you seek it out?

If peace was at hand

Would you reach for it?

And on this road stand thousands

Weeping for all that is past

The journey’s at an end

We are done with our old ways

But they are not done with us

There is no air left

In this closed fist

The last breath has been taken

And now awaits release

Where the children sit waiting

For the legacy of waste

Buried in the gifts we made

I have seen a better place

I have known peace like sleep

It lies at road’s end

Where the silts have gathered

And voices moan like music

In this moment of reaching

The stone took my flesh

And held me fast

With eyes unseeing

Breath bound within

A fist closed on darkness

A hand outstretched

And now you march past

Tossing coins at my feet

In my story I sought a better place

And yearned so for peace

But it is a tale untold

And a life unfinished

Wood-Cutters

Tablet IV

Hethra of Aren

CHAPTER ELEVEN

On that day I watched them lift high

In the tallness of being they shouldered years

And stood as who they would become

There was sweat on their arms and mad jackals

Went slinking from their bright eyes

I see a knowledge sliding beneath this door

Where I lean barred and gasping in horror

And for all that I have flung my back against it

They are the milling proofs of revelation

Crowding the street beyond like roosting prophets

And as the children wandered off in the way of gods

The small shape was unmoving at suffering’s end

On this day I watched them lift high

Tomorrow’s wretched pantheon around stains

On the stone where a lame dog had been trapped

In a forest of thin legs and the sticks and bricks

Went up and down like builders of monuments

Where the bowls are bronze and overflowing

And marble statues brood like pigeons

Have you seen all these faces of God?

Lifted so high to show us the perfection

Of our own holy faces but their hands are empty

Of bricks and sticks now that they’re grown

Is there no faith to scour away the cruelty of children?

Will no god shield the crying dog on the stone

From his lesser versions caging the helpless

And the lame? If we are made as we would be

Then the makers are us. And if there stands

A god moulding all he is in what we are

Then we are that god and the children

Beating to death a small dog outside my door

Are the small measures of his will considered

And in tasting either spat out or consumed

In the ecstasy of the omnipotent

Children Like Gods

Fisher kel Tath

The ramps had been laid out, the crews singing as they heaved on the ropes. Columns of black marble, rising in a ring around the glittering mound. The dust in Spindle’s mouth tasted like hope, the ache in his shoulders and lower back felt like the promise of salvation.

He had seen her this day and she had been … better. Still a child, really, a sorely used one, and only a bastard would say it had all been for the good. That the finding of faith could only come from terrible suffering. That wisdom was borne on scars. Just a child, dammit, scoured clean of foul addictions, but that look remained, there in her ancient eyes. Knowledge of deadly flavours, a recognition of the self, lying trapped in chains of weakness and desire.

She was the Redeemer’s High Priestess. He had taken her in his embrace, and she was the last ever to have known that gift.

The digging around the mound had scurried up offerings by the bucketload. T’lan Imass, mostly. Bits of polished bone, shells and amber beads had a way of wandering down the sides of the barrow. The great plaster friezes they were working on in Coral now held those quaint, curious gifts, there in the elaborate borders surrounding the Nine Sacred Scenes.

Spindle leaned against the water wagon, awaiting his turn with a battered tin cup in one cracked, calloused hand.

He’d been a marine once. A Bridgeburner. He’d trained in military engineering, as much as any