Chapter 69: The God Who Pays

After the Conclave, Kai slept for fourteen hours straight, and he would have slept for another fourteen if Bors hadn’t woken him up the next morning by banging on the front gate of Hale’s house and shouting his name loudly enough to wake half the street.

When Kai finally dragged himself downstairs with his hair sticking up and only one boot on, Hale’s cook had already let Bors into the kitchen and handed him a bowl of porridge. The big guard was sitting at the end of the table eating it as if he lived there. He didn’t look like a man who had come to celebrate anything, though, and he looked more like a man who had brought bad news and was hoping that the porridge would soften it.

"Morning, God," Bors said. "You should sit down."

[It is the middle of the morning, and you have been asleep since yesterday afternoon. I allowed it, because you earned it]

"Thanks," Kai whispered, and he sat down.

Bors took a gold coin out of his coat pocket and placed it on the table in front of him. It was shiny and heavy and looked completely real, and stamped on one side of it, right where the King’s face was supposed to be, was a little picture of a man pointing his finger at something and missing it.

"There are men in the market square giving these out," Bors said. "At least five of them that I counted. They’re standing on crates and yelling that the God of Failure pays, and that anyone who kneels down and prays to him gets a gold coin for their trouble." He scratched at his thick brown beard. "There’s a line, God. It goes all the way around the fountain, twice."

Kai stared at the coin on the table in front of him, and for a long moment, he couldn’t say anything at all.

"Draven," Mira said from the doorway behind him. She was already dressed, and her face had gone pale with worry.

"No one’s saying his name," Bors said. "But the men handing out the gold all have very nice shoes."

Kai, Mira, Garrick and Elowen made their way down to the market square together, with Bors leading the way and clearing people out of their path with his big shoulders. They could hear the crowd from a long way off, the sound of hundreds of people talking and laughing all at once, and underneath all the noise was a faint, steady chant that made the hair on the back of Kai’s neck stand up.

"God of Failure! God of Failure! God of Failure!"

There were hundreds of people packed into the market square. Five men in plain brown coats stood on top of wooden crates spread out around the fountain, each with a heavy sack of coins at his feet, and in front of every crate was a long, winding line of people waiting for their turn. When someone reached the front of the line, they knelt down on the cobblestones and said a quick prayer to the God of Failure, and the man on the crate reached into his sack and tossed them a gold coin. Then they got up, laughing and clutching their coin, and went right back to the end of the line to do it again.

Kai could see people he knew from the lower half of the city kneeling on the ground, including a baker from the soup line street and two of the fishermen who had once carried buckets for him. There was even a little boy, no older than seven, praying as hard as he could with his eyes squeezed shut.

[Kai]

"I know," Kai whispered. "I can see it."

[No. You do not understand. I can feel every one of them]

Kai stopped walking so suddenly that Mira walked right into his back.

[Each time one of them prays, I feel it, and it is wrong. It is like drinking water out of a copper pot. It tastes of metal, and it does not count. Not one of those people counts, Kai]

"Does it hurt you?" Kai whispered.

[Not yet. But once someone has been paid to believe, it is very hard for them to believe for free ever again. Every one of those people may never be able to truly believe in us]

Kai looked out at the sea of people kneeling in the dirt and praying to the God of Failure, and he felt sick to his stomach. Draven wasn’t just stealing Kai’s followers, because he was doing something much worse than that. He was poisoning the well before Kai could ever drink from it.

Kai pushed his way through the crowd and up to the nearest crate before anyone could stop him. The man standing on top of it was young and looked bored, and he wore a pair of black leather shoes that were probably worth more than everything else he owned. When he looked down and saw Kai, a slow grin spread across his face.

"Well, look at that," the man on the crate said loudly, so the whole line could hear him. "It’s the God of Failure himself! Here, God, have a gold coin for yourself." He pulled a coin out of the sack and flicked it at Kai.

The coin bounced off Kai’s chest and fell into the dirt, and everyone in the line laughed and cheered, as if it was all part of the same wonderful joke. As she walked past him, a woman with a big smile on her face reached out and squeezed Kai’s arm, holding her brand-new gold coin tightly against her chest.

"Bless you, God," the woman said. "My son is going to have meat for dinner tonight."

Kai wanted to tell her the truth, but he knew that if he did, it would take that meal right off her son’s plate. So he just turned and walked back to the others with his head hanging low and his face burning.

"That’s not the only thing that’s wrong," Garrick said grimly, and he pointed to the other side of the market square.

Someone had nailed a long painted sign across the front of the auction stage, in big red letters that anyone in the market could read from a hundred paces away: THE GOD OF FAILURE PAYS. THE RADIANT CHURCH NEVER DID.

Kai read the sign a couple of times, and then he started to laugh, because it was the best con he had ever seen in his whole life, and he was standing right in the middle of it.

"Why are you laughing?" Mira asked.

"Because it’s genius," Kai said, wiping his eyes. "Everything he’s saying is true. I am a god now, and these people really are being paid. He’s making me look exactly like the Radiant Church, only more generous. In a week, half of Veyrath will think I’m buying their worship, and the other half will be standing in line trying to get paid."

"Then just go up there and tell them it isn’t you," Garrick said.

"And say what?" Kai asked. "Don’t take the free gold? I’ve seen what happens when you tell a hungry crowd to give back money they were just handed. It never ends well, and the guy who tries it usually doesn’t have a Garrick."

Elowen had been standing very still beside Kai the whole time, with her blindfolded face turned towards one of the crates, and now she tilted her head slightly.

"There is something wrong with the coins," Elowen said quietly.

"Other than the fact that Draven’s men are handing them out?" Kai asked.

"I do not know what it is," Elowen said. "But there is light inside of them, very faint and very thin, like a veil drawn over something else. I have only felt that kind of light once before." She turned her face towards Kai. "On the day Lord Draven left you a coin behind the cabbage cart."

For a moment, Kai’s mind went completely blank.

He pulled the coin Bors had given him out of his pocket and turned it over in his hand. It looked like gold and felt like gold, and it had the same comfortable weight as every real gold coin he had ever held. He remembered the handful of rocks he had glamoured to look like gold and poured onto the salesman’s table on his very first day, and he remembered the coin Draven had left behind the cabbage cart, and how it had turned into a rock the moment he picked it up.

Kai put the coin between his teeth and bit down on it hard.

There was a tiny crack and a small flicker of golden light that disappeared almost before he saw it, and suddenly there was a lump of gray river stone in Kai’s mouth that tasted like dirt.

He spat the rock out into his palm, and Mira let out a horrified little gasp.

"It’s a rock," Kai said slowly. "He’s paying them in rocks."

"But I saw them biting the coins," Garrick said, staring at the line. "I watched a man at the front bite one, and it stayed gold."

Kai looked down at the rock in his hand for a long moment, and then he understood, because it was exactly what he would have done himself.

"Because some of the people at the front of the line are Draven’s men," Kai said. "They’re probably barely touching the coins with their teeth when they bite them, so everyone behind them sees the gold hold up." He closed his hand around the rock. "And nobody else is going to bother biting a coin that somebody just handed them for free."

"How long will the glamour last?" Mira asked quietly.

[Mine only lasts for an hour. Whoever cast these is far more powerful than I am, but no glamour lasts forever. A day, perhaps. Two at the very most]

Kai told the others what Syraphim had said, and for a long while, nobody spoke.

"So in two days, all of those coins will turn into rocks," Mira said slowly. "All at once, in every purse and pocket in the city."

"And every one of those people will remember whose name was on them," Kai said.

He looked up at the sign over the auction stage, at the big red letters, and he remembered the salesman on his very first day in Veyrath, biting into what he thought was gold and spitting out a stone. That was how this whole thing had started, with a con man paying for something with rocks and walking away before anyone noticed.

[He is turning you back into who you used to be, Kai]

"I know," Kai whispered, looking down at the rock in his hand. "And he’s using my own trick to do it."

[340 days. Ninety-eight true believers to go]