Gorel and the Pot Bellied God by Lavie Tidhar Page A

dust between his fingers and brought it up to his nose. Then he looked back at Kettle.
    ‘Where have you been?’
    ‘Keeping my ears open. You’re a wanted man.’
    Gorel nodded, the dust making him alert and yet strangely calm. ‘I’ve been told that before.’
    Kettle didn’t laugh. ‘And this place isn’t safe any more. We need to make our move. Now.’
    Gorel nodded again. He thought again of Tharat and felt hatred of the god rise in him. All gods, he thought. This was beyond wanting the mirror now, beyond, even, his eternal quest for his home. He was being played, he knew it. And he did not like that. ‘I’m ready,’ he said.
    Before he fell asleep he had cleaned his guns, over and over, until they shone, and he had gone through his effects, choosing with care his weapons. He knew he would need all of them, when the time came. Now he dressed, unhurriedly, and strapped the gun-belt around his waist, and looked down at the seated Kettle and grinned, and said, ‘Let’s go on a treasure hunt.’
    They roused the girls. Tonar was willing to show them the way. Kettle, it was agreed, would keep watch from outside. The way in, Tonar said, was through a hidden tunnel opening outside the temple walls. They departed as the air was still cool and the last of the Sorcerer’s Head clientele were snoring on cushions in the long corridors. No one saw them depart. They walked through the city streets as the sun rose overhead. Kettle, without words, spread his wings and with a gust of wind that stirred the dust on the road took to the skies.
    The entrance to the tunnels was covered in a round metal disc. Gorel loosened it and lifted it up with difficulty. Below it looked dark and the smell wasn’t good. Tonar went in first. He followed her. Sereli came last.
    They walked through the tunnels.

    There was a whisper ahead, and Sereli reappeared. She motioned with her hand, not speaking. Gorel followed her, the girl Tonar by his side. They came to the dark opening, and stepped through.
    The space beyond was indeed a cavern. The darkness here was broken by lines of faint light, and it took Gorel a moment to realise that the lichen on the walls was glowing. In the weak light he had the sense of an immense space, much larger than perhaps should have been there, as if the darkness beyond reached farther and farther away, never quite ending. The girl Tonar took his hand again, and he felt her shiver. He stepped forward and hit a low wall, and almost keeled over. Pain flared, and he pressed it down. He stood still. His eyes fought to absorb what light there was. Gradually, the place they were in resolved itself around him, a ghostly outline, and he involuntarily drew back.
    The thing before him was not a wall, but a sarcophagus.
    A long, stone coffin, rising out of the ground, and to its sides, ahead of him, spreading out in all directions, identical objects, the stone chipped and ancient, a whole mausoleum hidden underground, a maze within the maze of the temple’s tunnels. Gorel bent over the nearest sarcophagus, saw the transparent cover, and through it – the thing inside.
    It was… he could not quite define it, even to himself. His eyes seemed tricked by the faint light, by the play of darkness over the creature. It was no skeleton, no corpse: something living, something hideously deformed, terribly alive, but caught, in restless sleep: there was the aura about this place, Gorel realised, as of the place between the worlds, the thin membrane that separates the living from the gods. Someone – some thing – had trapped these creatures here in an eternal sleep. He moved to the next coffin, and the next, and each time his eyes shied away, the creatures within too horrible, too terrible to comprehend. They were to the Mothers’ children what great trees were to seedlings. There was the sense of awesome, terrible power in those sleepers in the earth, and it frightened Gorel.
    He felt Tonar shaking beside him, and held her close