Chapter 14
It’s so loud, so close, so unexpected, that for a second, I feel like I’m dying, like my breath won’t come, like my heart has just stopped and my stomach has fallen down a bottomless pit.
The god is back.
“No,” I hear Max whisper.
Pop and the Sky are already striding to the front door, Mom close behind them.
“Don’t go and look!” Max cries out.
But I can’t help it either. I follow as they push out to the front porch. There’s nothing to see yet, but the scream clearly came from the forest. We all stand there, Max, too, waiting close behind me.
It screams again.
And before it comes out of the woods, we see its burning head rise above the treetops.
It’s bigger this time.
It’s still skinless, still burning, still looks like a horror you’d never think of, lighting the trees on fire around it.
“What the hell is it?” Mom says.
It breaks from the tree line like it did at the lake, smashing two huge trunks that have probably been growing there for a hundred years. They break off like twigs and bounce, burning, to the ground. The god screams again, and all of us aside from the Sky put our hands to our ears.
The Sky is too busy sending Noise to his guards, members of the Land who travel with him everywhere and who’ve waited outside. He must trust us, because there are only five instead of the usual twelve when he deals with humans.
They already have their weapons ready, great curved arcs of bone, which you think are going to be like a bow and arrow.
They sort of are, but there’s no string, just a little floating whirl of fire.
The Sky makes a signal in his Noise, and his guards release the weapons, sending spirals of flame rocketing across our front yard toward the god.
They hit it, the fire erupting up its front.
It screams again.
But it doesn’t stop.
It turns right for us.
Run, says the Sky.
We hare across the front yard, taking an angle to get out of the god’s way. The Sky’s guards are still firing at it, even though the shots don’t seem to be doing anything except making it madder. Then I see they’re trying to direct it away from us, or from the Sky anyway, and away from the house.
The first part is working. The second part is not.
We leap over the low pasture fence where many, many sheep are now bleating frightfully in a far corner. The god charges across the upper part of the field, away from us all at least, fending off the weapon attacks but still heading for the house.
“No,” Pop says.
The god goes crashing across the chook paddock, sending terrified chooks everywhere–I hear a whimper from Max–and absolutely smashes into our house. The roof flies off in pieces, and the walls explode in fire, covering all of us in burning toothpicks.
“It’s going to the river!” Max says.
We watch through the wreckage that was our house just two seconds ago as the god seems to flee down to the riverbank past a very upset Angharrad and throw itself in the river.
The water sloshes high, but it’s a fast and deep river, and before you can even think about it, there’s no sign of any god at all.
And then, among the crackle and roar of the fires, we hear it:
Noise.