As A God Read online

  AS A GOD

  By

  T. J. SHEPHERD

  Copyright 2016 T. J. Shepherd

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover Artist: Suzannah Safi

  Suzannah Safi

  Graphic Designer

  http://www.suziedesigns.net/

  email: [email protected]

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any format or by any means without express written consent from the publisher. This book in electronic format may not be re-sold or re-distributed in any manner without express written permission from the publisher

  ISBN: 9781942391500

  First Publication

  Published in the United States of America

  Published by: eTreasures Publishing, LLC

  4442 Lafayette St

  Marianna, FL 32446

  http://www.etreasurespublishing.com

  This eBook is entirely fiction and bears no resemblance to anyone alive or dead, in content or cover art. Any instances are purely coincidental. This eBook is based solely on the Author’s vivid imagination

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this eBook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please return to the retailer or eTreasurespublishing.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this Author

  Dedication

  For Dee.

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Chapter 1

  Ressen’s killing grounds lay to the northeast of the city, near the least used trade road and far from the river that buried its head under the city. In regimented ranks rose the slaughter pens for cows, pigs, sheep, goats, and fowl. As the God rose above the rim of the thick forest that extended all the way east to Seahome and the coast, the still air grew ever more rank with excrement and dirt, fear and blood, the necessities of life and trade for the great city.

  Anem hated this place. Every time she arrived here it meant she had failed in her duty to keep the peace in the Holy City. Coming here she always had death riding pillion. She did not relish the slaughter of beasts, and it was worse when men and women died by her order at this parasitic village dredged up from the muck. Along the far edge of fields—long since trampled to bare waste—rose the gallows, stark in their own wide, empty space, butted by fences and one flimsy open structure that served as a tavern for the crowds that came to watch criminals strangle under their own helpless, dead weight.

  The stocks for those convicted of sartorial crimes ranged to one side of the gallows, empty, as they nearly always were in Ressen.

  People went to the hangings as to any public entertainment. If she could, she would outlaw it. Children she had barred from the killing fields when she first came to power many Measures ago. As for the rest, she made the trip as uncomfortable and inconvenient as possible in this reeking mess of feathers and flesh, unlike the public square where they had once been, and never the same phase of the Goddess or the same time within her Turning.

  Somehow the day and time of the execution had become known. She suspected some of those in her closest councils for letting the information get out. Despite the early hour, the God barely stretching His arms to wake this morning, the crowd in the square had already swelled to several times what it would normally be, and they still streamed from the city gates. Drovers looked on nervously from behind the barriers of their livestock fences.

  Mostly peasants, in their long veils and muffled flesh, the men showing their eyes. Many women still covered their whole face with blank swathes of thin fabric though leaving their eyes uncovered no longer perturbed the clerics. The teeming masses made way for a few men on horseback, merchants with their arms and legs uncovered, the slave-borne litter of a bare-skinned noblewoman. She wore bands of cloth across her throat, breasts, waist. They glittered with precious metal inlay and depending strings of glittering beads. The rest of her lay bare to the eyes of the God, her right by Noble blood.

  And the Iron Quarters, of course, all identically dressed in hard-worn leather armor, marching in patient time with the shambling figure in their midst, weighted down with chains till his broad shoulders bowed to a more manageable height. The crowd grumbled and whined like a huge beast, denied their chance to pelt the monster with stones and manure as they had been denied the spectacle of a slave’s death by the whip. More so because only the very eldest in the crowd could even remember when that punishment had been enacted in the city.

  In justice it should have been that long and torturous end for him, so said the citizens of Ressen. And not just because he had been a Runner, a gladiatorial slave, and therefore as humble born as they. He might carry the tokens that proclaimed him a free man, but he was still a slave in their eyes.

  For his crimes, they tried to claim, for the innocent blood spilt so recklessly across the city. To show that our children are not prey for any hunter to take like a wild bird or bounty wolf.

  Anem, The Commander of the Iron Quarters, ruler of Ressen in all but title, batted aside those arguments as easily as she batted aside those who attempted to usurp her control of the city. That he had to die was given, but he would die the same as any free man. Backed quietly by the word of the Shadow of the Goddess, the Commander’s will was law, and Ressen was a lawful city.

  The commander herself rode with the prisoner’s escort, on her ugly, expensive gelding. She watched the crowd with eyes that never stilled. The mood of the great beast grew uglier by the moment, voices harsh and strident on every side. Only one who knew her well would have realized she wore her full-faced helm and mask not in deference to the Holy laws about who might bare their face to the Gods, but so that she might better conceal her anxiety. Best done quickly, as quickly as the law allowed. She chivvied her mount in a slow circle around the guards and their prisoner, watching the crowd intently, watching for that one person braver than the others. One man became a riot in the flash of a stone through the air.

  The chained man’s head turned to track her. Only his brown eyes, almost as dark as hers were pale green, remained fully visible. They had given him a set of men’s veils, since it was harder to hang a man wearing a helmet and mask. She could feel his eyes on each pass. She half expected him to call out to her. Cry out for mercy, in accusation, in despair.

  But he stood silent and calm, his head down and gaze fixed on the dirt in front of him. She made sure her second, Parri, watched him carefully. Not that he would get far if he bolted—but he could hurt more than one of her people in the process. Not to mention the mess when the crowd tore him limb from limb.

  At the gallows, Anem ordered her guards to push the circle of watchers a body length farther back than they would normally—it had little effect. Each foot-length won out, pushed back in at least by half. In the end, she ordered them to hold with far less space than she wanted.

  Beside the platform, the executioner spoke softly to Curran from behind her full-face woman’s veil. A woman’s hand on the lever was held to be the will of the Goddess and ensured justice. Executioner was an honorable profession, passed down from mother to daughter as a holy duty. She touched his shoulder lightly, reaching up and up. With her touch, he knelt without care for his chains—knowing how much those weighed. Ane
m was impressed by his power; he had been one of the favorites to win the last Run. Only the gentle, teasing hints of the Shadow of the Goddess had led Anem to bet elsewhere, but she had a new suit of armor out of risking that impossible bet.

  Seeing the monster kneel, the crowd’s frantic baying grew a little louder.

  “On his knees!” A male voice screamed from far back in the crowd. “That’s how he should die.”

  The body of humanity rippled and bulged like water against a dam, pushing the guard ring back nearly a step.

  Parri cursed vilely from behind her back, on the other side of the gallows. The crowd kept growing, and people now stood on the rickety fences of the livestock pens; one of them cracked with a sound like breaking pottery, spilling a half-dozen young men into a cattle enclosure. The owner screamed in frustration and began laying about herself with her staff until the youths had fled and the cows clustered fearfully at the far side of the pen. A great cloud of dust rose off to one side. At least one drover hurried his livelihood from what increasingly looked to become a battleground.

  “Thank the Great, Good God you’re here,” Parri panted from behind her.” They’d risk coming at the rest of us.”

  Anem had ordered her guards to cut down more than one riot in the early Measures of her power when each cycle through the seasons has seemed more precarious than the last. More than one crossbow volley had ended more than one attempt to wrest her city from her. In return for that bloodletting, as though in sacrifice, Ressen was now the only free city-state in the kingdom—rich, comfortable, and cosmopolitan.

  She was grimly aware she did not have enough guards to stop this crowd without killing them all; there would be at least some agitators who knew that.

  The executioner had finished adjusting the rope over Curran’s broad neck and now led him up onto the gallows platform. Anem had not given permission to remove his chains; she wondered if the added weight would rip his head right off.

  Peripherally, Anem heard a commotion at the far end of the open space. Pickpocket probably, or one of those cows had escaped into the mass of humanity. She looked over quickly to make sure it wasn’t spreading through the crowd.

  It wasn’t spreading through at all. It was going over.

  Someone was walking on the shoulders of the people below. Deftly as a river man traversing the logs coming down from the high mountains, the figure picked a level path across the space using humans as cobblestone. Small, lithe, dressed in leather and mail, wearing a dulled helmet and an intricately molded mask that revealed only its eyes. The hilts of two sword rose up over its shoulders.

  Anem swore loudly, abruptly, then snapped at Parri. “Contract around him before she gets here!”

  “She? She who?” Parri’s confusion faltered when he saw the apparition dancing lightly across the crowd. Then he cursed too, just as vehemently. Snapped commands had the desired affects. Half the guards pulled in sharply to make a dense, bristling mass around Curran, while the other half pushed out to widen the ring around the gallows, heedless now for the crowd’s sensibilities.

  The little figure quickened its pace, skipping like a child now, till it almost ran. It was close enough that Anem could hear the individual oofs and exclamations as booted feet pushed off from shoulder to shoulder.

  Rage was the most useless emotion she could be having, but it filled Anem’s heart anyway. How dare she make this into a mockery? She stared, breathless with anger and honestly, admiration for the skill and sheer bravado of this unexpected entrance.

  Her tormentor paused at the edge of the crowd. Anem stared straight at the eyes, pale-green to silver-blue, bringing one hand close to her face in a sharp gesture that would mean nothing to most of the people watching them. Negation, denial. Do not do this.

  Of course it happened anyway.

  The final push off came from the shoulders of one of the guards just to make the whole thing a little bit worse. The little figure flew in a graceful arc, tucking knees to chest to spin across the empty air.

  And landed next to the chained man, right over ring of guards.

  Two slim, perfect swords appeared in a quick draw, sparking silver fire into the air. The crowd went silent in a sharp wave, radiating out from the center. Those blades—and their wielder—were known by the whole city. The whole kingdom.

  A harsh, croaking voice still recognizably female wafted through the still air, sardonic and cold. “All this just to get my attention, Cur?”

  Anem shoved her way into the space, vaulted onto the platform and almost, almost grabbed the other woman by the shoulders. Not only, or even chiefly, the naked steel stopped her. When they had last met, it had been as Ressen’s brevet queen in all but name and a ragged slave-gladiator forced to Run from one side of the kingdom to the other; things were different now.

  “Champion,” Anem snapped, giving her the Runner title she had earned, along with her freedom.

  Her ragged voice with the mocking edge growled. “Call me Sequa, if you will, Commander.”

  Looking the taut figure over in quick appraisal, Anem had to acknowledge the change. No longer a gaunt slave in mismatched leather armor and soiled draperies. The armor was still mostly leather, but gorgeously molded to her body, tight without constricting motion; the joints at the shoulders and elbows were particularly clever. Extra panels had been added to inseam and waist, for even more freedom of movement. The banded-mail overcoat was bright and clean and nothing this woman would wear to fight. A show piece. Any cloth showed a dark and mottled pattern that blended invisibly with the leathers. It gave her the sleek appearance of predatory animal, enhanced by the mask that covered her face.

  If the leathers seemed the work of a master armorer, Sequa’s helmet and mask were the work of a genius. The full helmet looked like black leather—likely a leather and steel sandwich from its ridged shape. Cutaways at the ears, covered in light mesh, held with the laws of religious propriety without muffling sound. Her faceplate of black leather was slightly under-hung from the rest of the helmet. It had been shaped into the flattened visage of a wolf. Above the snarling mouth, Sequa’s silver eyes with their shadowed irises gleamed wickedly.

  The swords overshadowed everything, three-quarter length and flat backed like the blades men used to cut down jungle growth. They shone like flame under the Godslight.

  The whole ensemble undoubtedly cost more than all the goods that Anem owned.

  Oh, by the Great, Good Goddess, the world had changed.

  Her entire appraisal had taken only heartbeats. The crowd had barely reacted to the intruder. On the other side of the circle of guards, Parri bobbed back and forth, hands raised in a questioning posture.

  Flipping her head, Sequa poked the tip of a sword at the executioner. “Off, off. Go away.” The other woman hopped down with alacrity and lurked at the farthest edge of the barrier of steel and men around the gallows.

  Anem glared at Sequa. “You come down too, then. I would have speech with you. Now.” She stepped heavily off the platform, armor clashing.

  Before she jumped down, Sequa moved into Cur and said something low and fast that brought his head up. He sank back into himself when she stepped away from him, like a turtle contracting into its shell.

  Then light as a feather and somehow silent despite the metal, Sequa hopped off the gallows and landed next to Anem.

  Again, the sense of unreality hit. It was a shock to stand next to this woman and remember that she was so tiny, barely up to Anem’s own shoulder. The force of her presence meant she could almost loom even when you had to look down into her eyes.

  The swords helped. Rumors could be chancy things to believe at the best of times, but common knowledge had it that her blades had been gifted to her by the Son of the Sky, the Great Hawk, the patron of war. Shadowy tales had trailed in from the capitol after the Run of impossible feats performed by the blades and their wielder. Those stories she believed. They had all come from escaped Children of Home, the shadowy society based in the
capitol, the birthplace of thieves, assassins, and agitators.

  The Rat, the Master of Home, had sent killers chasing Sequa at the beginning of the Run, knowing some would not return by choice. Some would flee the kingdom, some would—had—come to her city. In Ressen they knew respect, a measure of freedom, and more honest work than thieving and death. Anem took them into the Iron Quarters without questions. If they kept to her rules, no one ever asked at all. She would listen to their words and give them what tasks suited their particular talents. Who better to stymie an assassin than one of the same trade? She had trusted her life to them more than once.

  Anem flipped up her mask to reveal her long, pale face. She had a noble’s facial control; only someone standing so close could have seen the muscles of her jaw jumping as she stared Sequa down. “By all rights, I should just leave you both to the mob.”

  Sequa nodded. “Yes. But you won’t.” She had to jerk back abruptly at another swift surge of the bodies outside the ring of leather armor and too few pikes.

  “I may have to," Anem hissed as she snapped her mask back into place. She turned to scan the crowd again. “I will not risk my men for a murderer and a Runner.”

  “How so for the Shadow of the Goddess, then?” interjected a third woman’s voice, dry and calm. She had somehow walked up behind them while they argued, the guards parting around her and then reforming to clasp her into the little circle of women and the condemned man in the center of their ring.

  The newcomer was slight, average height, and considerably older than either of the others from the timbre of her voice. She covered herself as a peasant did from head to foot, but wore a man’s half-veil so her eyes shone clear.

  She had not been anywhere nearby a few moments before.

  Sequa tilted her head in Cur’s direction, and now something like wet laughter echoed from that wolf’s face. “Three women fighting over you, Cur. It must seem like a dream.”