Read Online Gorel and the Pot Bellied God by Lavie Tidhar - Free Book Online Page B

The water was rising. He looked back. Two of the children had disappeared. He swore, but quietly. Water-creatures. He glanced away again. Something was worrying at him, telling him he had forgotten something, or wasn’t paying attention…
    A shack on stilts above the water at sunset: lanterns hanging overhead and the air thick with mosquitoes and incense, the water a calm dark-green below… he had seen the merchant there, for the first time, and Kettle… but there was something else, someone else, in the shadows, who he had paid almost no attention to…
    Carnival. Laughter and shouts and the drinks flowing faster than Tharat himself, the spilled liquors themselves offerings to the river-god, and there, in another corner, a solitary figure shrank like the fungus growing from the roots of a wizened tree, not human, exactly, but of what nature, what species, even Gorel couldn’t say, but he knew the merchandise. Gods’ dust.
    The dope merchant. What of him? Something was whispering in his ear, a sound trickling smoke, like rising water…
    Something jumped on his back then and tried to claw his head off his shoulders, and he turned in a circle, furious, and fell back, and his attacker cushioned his fall and he freed himself, turned, and put a bullet into a chest where sores grew like fungus.
    Fungus, he thought. He shook his head and tried to clear it. How many bullets left? There had been a fight, back in that bar on the river. He remembered Kettle flying away from it, and he himself left before any shots were fired. But before that… he glanced away again. There! He almost saw it this time. A shape at the far end of the garden, a shape like water given substance, watching him –
    In a corner, the dust merchant, solitary, inhuman, indistinct. Gorel watched him. No one else paid the dope-peddler attention. The atmosphere in the place was of the kind one could cut with a knife – or shatter with a bullet. And so it was only Gorel who saw the figure moving unobtrusively onto the wooden platform that hung above the water, open to the sky, and there it turned a face – smooth, indistinct, like water – back and smiled, and dropped down into the river below, like water, falling, and melted into the river’s darkness.
    The water was up to his knees now, and rising. And something darted underwater and bit him and he kicked, and lost his balance, and then he was fighting underwater, not with guns but with his hands, and the thing attacking him was slippery and smooth like a Merlangai female, and a fin rose through the water like a blade and sliced a line of blood on his cheek. He reached for her throat, blindly, and her teeth closed on his fingers, cutting down to the bones and almost breaking them and he screamed.
    Something in the water laughed. And Gorel knew, and almost despaired.
    A drunken conversation, locals shrugging off the threat of an invasion from the west… ‘You think no army ever came here, Avian? Tharat is a great god –’
    ‘Father-river, giver of life –’ from one of the men, dressed like a priest –
    ‘He at least would not object to a generous offering of blood!’
    ‘Foreigners’ blood!’
    ‘Well, as long as it’s not your own,’ the Avian said.
    And Gorel thought – how do you breed godlings? Human stock and falang, yes, it was easy enough to come by. Even Nocturne, if enough money and influence are involved. Merlangai stock, no problem. What did they say about the Merlangai? They would rather fuck than talk. But how, and where, do you find a god to join the blood-lines?
    Then his unseen attacker, this child in the water was on him, fastening on to him, teeth digging into his breast, hurting him, but Gorel stilled himself; and slowly, carefully, Gorel of Goliris reached an arm, tracing the flesh of the child in the water, almost lovingly, until he found the throat and his fingers closed on it and pressed, and his other hand followed and found the child’s eyes and his thumb pressed