Panthoen: An excerpt from To Bury Their Parents

The notion was not so foreign, not so alien. Kuzan was not a person. People did not live in imaginary spaces under the world. Monsters from stories came from those places. Or gods.
Chess used to tell about a queen who, to save her people, battled hoards of monsters trying to erupt out from under the ice at the top of the world. She fought them with a sword made from the tusk of a walrus that was itself a god.
So what was Kuzan, if not a person? A spirit? A monster? A god?
Seta returned, interrupting his thoughts. “I had your clothes cleaned. And I picked some leaves to make a tincture. But your fever might be made of myths and magic, in which case no leaves dissolved in spirits will avail you.” She set down a bundle on the table next to Guarl’s cooling breakfast. “You should eat.”
“I thought I was eating.”
“You are from far away, so maybe your customs are different. Here, when we eat, we do so by putting food into our mouths and chewing it. Perhaps in Hitai you eat by sitting still and exuding weird blue lights. Let me feel your forehead. Hm. No need for medicine, after all.”
“But I could use the beer. If it isn’t too much an intrusion on your hospitality.”
“For a consort of women from Sheol, I will extend however much hospitality keeps my skin on my back.”
Guarl raised his eyebrows. He could only guess what Sheol might be. “I wouldn’t hurt you.”
“Not afraid of you, boy. Heh. We spent the night together, after all. That thing you came in with, though…”
“Thing?”
“Made of fire and darkness. Evil. There are three powers in the world: madness, rule, and evil. That’s a dark one you truck with.”
He thought some more. Tried to match those ideas up with what he already knew. Seta went into the back room and came back with his pack. She stuffed his clothes into it, then poured him a horn of beer from a gourd over her mantle.
Guarl said, “I know about chaos and order. The blue light you saw is the lake spirit from my home. It rides me like a man might ride an ass. It likes fire and water.”
“Things that boil, that can’t be foretold.”
“Yes. And opposite that spirit, we might imagine there is another kind of spirit. It lives in stone and steel, in things that are hard to change. Things that endure.”
“More than a supposition.” She sat on her low stool next to him. “Long ago and miles away… well, the god that fell into your lands wasn’t the first.”
He stared at her until he was sure she wasn’t going to say anything more. “Now you imagine that the worst impulses of people are a spirit of their own.”
“Imagined it until last night. Then I met the spirit.”
“She would want murder.”
“Stillborn children and curdled milk, fear, slavery.”
He took a deep breath. “Why would a thing like that want to rescue someone like me from under the world?”
“Drink your beer, boy.”
He sipped, then did more than sip. The taste was musty and good. “Is there a fourth spirit? One of virtue and kindness to stand across from evil?”
Seta laughed and spat.
“I should go.”
“I wish you would.” Then, seeing his hurt look: “Sorry, boy. But Hitaians know this thing: when gods walk about on the world, the little people get crushed underfoot. With all the love I can muster, I just want you to go walk someplace else.”