Chapter 72: Name Your Price

For a long time, nobody in the cellar spoke. The golden light glowed softly around them in a slow, steady pulse, and the pale man sat at his table with a rock in his hand, smiling his empty smile and waiting.

Kai didn’t answer the voice, because Syraphim had told him not to, and because every con man’s instinct he had picked up on Earth was telling him to keep his mouth shut. He knew this feeling far too well. It was the same feeling he used to get when he sat across a table from someone who smiled too much and offered too much, someone who already knew exactly what he was going to say before he said it.

So he did what he had always done whenever someone tried to sell him something, and he asked a question instead.

"What’s it cost?" Kai asked.

The voice chuckled, and it sounded like money jingling in a pouch.

"There is no cost, little god," the voice said. "There is only a price. Everything has a price. Bread has a price, and a sword has a price, and a blessing has a price. Even a hundred believers have a price." The golden light grew brighter, and every rock in the cellar began to sparkle. "Tell me what you are willing to pay, and I will give you what you need, and you will never have to beg in the market square again."

"They won’t be real if they’re bought," Kai said. "Syraphim already told me that."

"They will not be real for her," the voice said softly. "But that is the trouble with the old gods. They will only eat what is given to them freely, and so they starve. I do not have that problem. I will take anything."

[Kai]

"I know," Kai whispered. "I’m not buying."

"You have not even heard my offer yet," the voice said, sounding slightly offended.

"I don’t need to hear it," Kai said. "I used to do this for a living. You never tell the mark what it costs until after he’s already said yes. That’s how it works." He looked around at the piles of river rocks sparkling in the golden light. "But I’ll guess what it costs anyway. I bet you want her."

The light flickered for a brief second, and Kai felt Syraphim press closer against the inside of his ribs.

"She’s the last piece of the Mother’s light," Kai said. "Once the Mother wakes up, all of her children wake up too, and people start believing in the gods again without paying for it. Which means you won’t have anybody left to collect from." Kai shrugged as casually as he could manage with his heart pounding. "If I were you, I’d want to own her too. It’s just good business."

The voice didn’t chuckle this time, and when it spoke again, it sounded much less friendly.

"You are smarter than Lord Draven told me you would be," the voice said.

"Everyone always says that," Kai said. "It’s starting to annoy me."

Behind him, Garrick snorted, and Mira let out a small, breathless laugh.

Kai turned back to the pale man at the table, and he noticed something he hadn’t seen before. Hanging around the man’s neck, on a chain so thin that it was almost invisible, was a single gold coin. It glowed with the same golden light as the rest of the room, and every time the light in the cellar pulsed, the coin pulsed with it, and the pale man’s face twitched as if it caused him pain.

"Elowen," Kai said. "What’s that on his neck?"

Elowen turned her blindfolded face towards the pale man and pursed her lips.

"That is where his light is going," Elowen said. "All of it. It is draining into that coin little by little, like water seeping out of a cracked jug. I do not think he has very much left."

"He made a contract with you," Kai said slowly, as he realized what he was looking at. "He bought something from you, and he’s still paying for it."

"Everything has a price, little god," the voice said. "He wanted something a very long time ago, and he got it. Now he pays."

Kai looked at the pale man’s cracked fingernails, and the stale food sitting untouched at the end of his table, and his unblinking eyes. He thought about all the people who had ever paid the Radiant Church for a blessing, and the ones who had knelt in the market square begging for coins that turned to stone.

He raised his hand, pointed his finger at the lantern on the table, and took aim.

[Kai, what are you doing?]

"Shooting where I think I need to shoot," Kai whispered. "We’ll see if I’m right."

"Minor Smite," Kai said.

A small beam of golden light shot out of Kai’s finger and headed straight for the lantern. Just before it got there, it curved, missing the lantern by a few inches, and struck the coin hanging around the pale man’s neck.

The coin shattered with a loud, ringing sound, like a bell cracking in two.

The golden light flared through the room so blindingly bright that Kai had to cover his eyes with his arm. Then it disappeared as quickly as it had come, and the only light left in the cellar was the ordinary yellow flame of the lantern.

The voice was gone, and the room was silent except for the sound of the river running somewhere beyond the cellar walls.

The pale man gasped like someone coming up from the bottom of a lake, and then he began to blink. After he had blinked a few times, tears began to well up in his eyes, and Kai saw that they weren’t the color of gold coins anymore. They were a dull, faded brown, the eyes of a very tired old man.

"Oh," the pale man whispered. "It’s so quiet."

Then he slid sideways out of his chair, and Sunny caught him before he hit the ground.

[You were right]

"Yeah, for once," Kai whispered.

[No, Kai. You shot at the lantern. You were wrong, and I went where I was needed. But I think you knew that I would]

The pale man’s name was Aldous, and he told them so while he lay on the cellar floor with Sunny holding him up. He had been a priest of the Radiant Church once, more than forty years ago, and he had been put in charge of selling blessings at the front doors of the Cathedral because he had always been good with numbers.

"The Mother never spoke to me," Aldous whispered. "Not once, in all the years I spent selling her blessings during the day and praying to her at night. She never spoke to me. Then, one night, something else did." He closed his eyes, as if the memory was too heavy to look at. "It told me that it had been listening to every prayer I sold, and that it could give me anything I wanted, if I would only name my price."

"What did you ask for?" Mira asked quietly.

"To never be poor again," Aldous said, with a sad little chuckle. "That was all I asked for, and I never was poor again. I have been sitting at this table with gold pouring through my hands for as long as I can remember, and I have not eaten a meal that I could taste in almost forty years."

No one spoke for a while. Mira sat down beside Aldous and held one of his cracked, dusty hands in hers without saying anything, the same way she had once held Celestine’s, and Garrick turned away and wiped his eyes.

Kai thought about the Radiant priests he had seen standing in the Cathedral on the morning the Mother was freed, with no light left to give and nothing in their hands. Aldous had been one of those priests once, before he found a different god to pray to, and the only difference between him and the rest of them was that something had actually answered his prayers.

"Does it have a name?" Kai asked.

"No," Aldous said, looking up at Kai with tired eyes. "No one has ever believed in it, so no one has ever given it a name. All it knows is being paid. That is why it is so hungry, God of Failure. It has been paid for forty years, and it has never once been loved."

Then Aldous went limp in Sunny’s arms, and for one terrible moment, Kai thought he was dead. But Elowen placed her hand on the old man’s chest and let out a slow breath.

"He is only sleeping," Elowen said. "He has very little light left, but it is his own again."

Sunny looked down at the frail old man sleeping in his arms, and his jaw tightened. He had grown up in the Radiant Church, and Kai realized that somewhere in that Cathedral, Sunny had probably walked past the blessing table by the front doors a hundred times without ever wondering who had been the first to sit there.

"I will carry him back to Hale’s," Sunny said quietly. "He should not wake up alone in this place."

Kai sat down on a pile of river rocks and stared at the broken chain lying on the floor. All around him, the rocks were just rocks again, gray and muddy, and the whole cellar smelled like the river.

[Kai, it is not gone. It has only left this room]

"I know," Kai whispered. "And it’s going to be pissed at me."

[It will not be angry with you. Things like that do not get angry. They just send you a bill]

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