The Kingdom of Gods

  I turned slowly, my hands clenching into fists. He smiled with almost-perfect lips and gazed at me with eyes that weren’t quite dark enough. “You,” I breathed.

  My father’s living prison. My tormentor. My victim.

  “Hello, Sieh,” he said. “Nice to see you again.”

  10

  IT SHOULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED.

  Itempas’s madness, Enefa’s death, Nahadoth’s defeat. The War. The sundering of our family.

  But it had, and I had been chained within a sack of meat that slurped and leaked and thumped about, clumsy as a cudgel, more helpless than I had been even as a newborn. Because newborn gods were free, and I? I was nothing. Less than nothing. A slave.

  We had sworn from the beginning to look out for one another, as slaves must. The first few weeks were the worst. Our new masters worked us to the bone repairing their broken world — which, in all honesty, we had helped to break. Zhakkarn went forth and rescued all the survivors, even the ones buried under rubble or half crisped by lava or lightning. I, better than anyone at clearing up messes, rebuilt one village in every land for the survivors’ housing. Meanwhile, Kurue made the seas live and the soils fruitful again.

  (They had ripped off her wings to force her to do it. It was too complex a task to be commanded, and she was too wise; she could easily find the loopholes in it. The wings grew back and they tore them away again, but she bore the pain in cold silence. Only when they’d driven heated spikes into her skull, threatening to damage her now-vulnerable brain, had she capitulated. She could not bear to be without her thoughts, for those were all she had left.)

  Nahadoth, that awful first year, was left alone. This was partly necessity, as Itempas’s betrayal had left him silent and broken. Nothing stirred him; not words, not whippings. When the Arameri commanded, he would move and do as he was told — no more, no less. Then he would sit back down. This stillness was not his nature, you understand. There was something so obviously wrong with it that even the Arameri let him be.

  But the other problem was Naha’s unreliability. By night he had power, but send him to the other side of the world, past the dawnline of the sun, and he turned to drooling, senseless meat. He had no power at all in that form — could not even manifest his own personality. The meat’s mind was as empty as a newborn babe’s. Still dangerous, though, especially when sunset came.

  Because it was, in its own way, a child, I was given charge of it.

  From the first I hated this. It shat itself every day, sometimes more than once. (One of the mortal women tried to show me how to use a diaper; I never bothered. Just left the creature on the ground to do its business.) It moaned and grunted and screamed, incessantly. It bit me bloody when I tried to feed it — newborn or not, it had a man’s flesh, and that man had a full set of strong, sharp teeth. The first time it did this, I knocked several of those teeth out. They grew back the next night. It didn’t bite me again.

  Gradually, though, I came to be more accepting of my duty, and as I warmed toward the meat, so it regarded me with its own simple species of affection. When it began to walk, it followed me everywhere. Once Zhakka and Rue and I had built the first White Hall — the Arameri still pretended to be priests back then — the creature filled the shining corridors with jabbering as it learned to talk. Its first word was my name. When I grew weak and lapsed into the horrifying state that mortals called sleep, the meat creature snuggled against me. I tolerated this because sometimes, when dusk fell and it became my father again, I could snuggle back and close my eyes and imagine that the War had never happened. That all was as it should be.

  But those dreams never lasted. The thin, lifeless dawn, and my mindless charge, always returned.

  If only it had stayed mindless. But it did not; it began to think. When the others and I probed inside it, we found that it had begun, like any thinking, feeling being, to grow a soul. Worst of all, it — he — began to love me.

  And I, as I should never, ever have done, began to love him back.

  Hymn and I stood now in the creature’s large, handsomely furnished office, wreathed in disgusting smoke.

  “I’d ask you to sit,” he said, pausing to take another long drag on the burning thing in his mouth, exhaling the smoke with a languid air, “but I doubt you would.” He gestured at the equally handsome leather chairs that faced his desk. He sat in a fine chair across from these.

  Hymn, who had been glancing uneasily at me since we’d come upstairs from the parlor, sat. I did not.

  “My lord —” she began.

  “Lord?” I spat this, folding my arms.

  He looked at me with amusement. “Nobility these days has less to do with bloodlines and friendships with the Arameri, and more to do with money. I have plenty of that, so yes, that makes me a lord.” He paused. “And I go by the name ‘Ahad’ now. Do you like it?”

  I sneered. “You can’t even bother to be original.”

  “I have only the name you gave me, lovely Sieh.” He hadn’t changed. His words were still velvet over razors. I ground my teeth, bracing for cuts. “Speaking of loveliness, though, you’re rather lacking at the moment. Did you piss off Zhakkarn again? How is she, by the way? Always liked her.”

  “What in the fifty million hells are you doing alive?” I demanded. This earned a little gasp from Hymn, but I ignored her.

  Ahad’s smile never flagged. “You know precisely why I’m alive, Sieh. You were there, remember? At the moment of my birth.” I stiffened at this. There was too much knowing in his eyes. He saw my fear. “ ‘Live,’ she said. She was newborn herself; maybe she didn’t know a goddess’s word is law. But I suspect she did.”

  I relaxed, realizing that he referred to his rebirth as a whole and separate being. But how many years had passed since then? Ahad should have grown old and died years before, yet here he was, as hale and healthy as he’d been on that day. Better, in fact. He was smug and well dressed now, his fingers heavy with silver rings, his hair long and straight and partially braided like a barbarian’s. I blinked. No, like a Darre’s, which was what he looked like now: a mortal, Darren man. Yeine had remade him to suit her then-tastes.

  Remade him. “What are you?” I asked, suspicious.

  He shrugged, setting that shining black hair a-ripple over his shoulders. (Something about this movement nagged me with its familiarity.) Then he lifted a hand, casually, and turned it into black mist. My mouth fell open; his smile widened just a touch. His hand returned, still holding the smelly cheroot, which he raised for another long inhalation.

  I went forward so swiftly and intently that he rose to face me. An instant later, I stopped against a radiant cushion of his power. It was not a shield; nothing so specific. Just his will given force. He did not want me near him and this became reality. Along with the scent that I’d drawn near him to try and detect, this confirmed my suspicions. To my horror.

  “You’re a godling,” I whispered. “She made you a godling.”

  Ahad, no longer smiling, said nothing, and I realized I was still closer than he wanted me. His distaste washed against me in little sour-tasting tides. I stepped back, and he relaxed.

  I did not understand, you see. What it meant to be mortal — relentlessly, constantly, without recourse to the soothing aethers and rarefied dimensions that are the proper housing for my kind. Years passed before I realized that to be bound to mortal flesh is more than just magical or physical weakness; it is a degradation of the mind and soul. And I did not handle it well, those first few centuries. So easy to endure pain and pass on in turn to those weaker than oneself. So easy to look into the eyes of someone who trusted me to protect him — and hate him, because I could not.

  What he has become is my fault. I have sinned against myself, and there is no redeeming that.

  “So it appears,” Ahad said. “I have such peculiar abilities now. And as you’ve noticed, I grow no older.” He paused, looking me up and down. “Which is more than I can say for you. You smell like Sky, Sieh,
and you look like some Arameri have been torturing you again. But” — he paused, his eyes narrowing —“it’s more than that, isn’t it? You feel … wrong.”

  Even if he had not become a god, he was the last person to whom I would have willingly revealed my condition. Yet there was no hiding it, now that he’d seen me. He knew me better than anyone else in this realm, and he would be that much more vicious if I tried to hide it.

  I sighed and waved a hand to clear some of the drifting smoke from my vicinity. It came right back. “Something has happened,” I said. “I was in Sky, yes, for a few days. The Arameri heir —” No. I didn’t want to talk about that. Better to get to the worst of it. “I seem to be” — I shifted, put my hands into my pockets, and tried to seem nonchalant —“dying.”

  Hymn’s eyes widened. Ahad — I hated that stupid name of his already — looked skeptical.

  “Nothing can kill a godling but demons and gods,” he said, “and the world’s fresh out of demons, last I heard. Has Naha finally grown tired of his little favorite?” I clenched my fists. “He will love me until time ends.”

  “Yeine, then.” To my surprise, the skepticism cleared from Ahad’s face. “Yes, she is wise and good-hearted, but she didn’t know you back then; you played the innocent boy so well. She could make you mortal, couldn’t she? If so, I commend her for giving you a slow, cruel death.”

  I would have gotten angrier, if my own cruel streak hadn’t come to the fore. “What’s this? Have you got a baby-god crush on Yeine? It’s hopeless, you know. Nahadoth’s the one she loves; you’re just his leftovers.”

  Ahad kept smiling, but his eyes went black and cold. He had more than a little of my father still in him; that much was obvious.

  “You’re just mad neither of them wants you,” he said.

  The room went gray and red. With a wordless cry of rage, I went for him — meaning, I think, to rip him open with my claws, and forgetting for the moment that I had none. And forgetting, far more stupidly, that he was a god and I was not.

  He could have killed me. He could have done it by accident; newborn godlings don’t know their own strength. Instead he simply caught me by the throat, lifted me bodily, and slammed me onto the top of his desk so hard that the wood cracked.

  While I groaned, dazed by the blow and the agony of landing on two paperweights, he sighed and sucked more smoke from the cheroot with his free hand. He kept me pinned, easily, with the other.

  “What does he want?” he asked Hymn.

  As my vision cleared, I saw she had gotten to her feet and was half ducked behind her chair. At his question, she straightened warily.

  “Money,” she said. “He got me into trouble earlier today. Said he needed to make it up to me, but I don’t need any of his tricks.”

  Ahad laughed, in the humorless way he had done for the last dozen centuries. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt true amusement from him. “Isn’t that just like him?” He smiled down at me, then lifted a hand. A purse appeared in it; I heard heavy coins jingle within. Without looking at Hymn, he tossed it. Without blinking she caught it.

  “That enough?” he asked when she tugged open the pouch’s string to look inside. Her eyes widened, and she nodded. “Good. You can go now.”

  She swallowed. “Am I in trouble for this?” She glanced at me as I struggled to breathe around Ahad’s tightening hand.

  “No, of course not. How could you have known I knew him?” He threw her a significant look. “Though you still don’t know anything, you understand. About me being what I am, him being what he is. You never met him, and you never came here. Spend your money slowly if you want to keep it.”

  “I know that.” Scowling, Hymn made the pouch disappear. Then to my surprise, she glanced at me again. “What are you going to do with him?”

  I had begun to wonder that myself. His hand was tight enough to feel the pounding of my pulse. I reached up and scrabbled at his wrist, trying to loosen it, but it was like trying to loosen the roots of the Tree.

  Ahad watched my efforts with lazy cruelty. “I haven’t decided yet,” he said. “Does it matter?”

  Hymn licked her lips. “I don’t do blood money.”

  He looked up at her and let the silence grow long and still before he finally spoke. His words were kinder than his eyes. “Don’t worry,” he said. “This one is a favorite of two of the Three. I’m not stupid enough to kill him.”

  Hymn took a quick, deep breath — for strength, I thought. “Look, I don’t know what’s happened between you two, and I don’t care. I never would have … I didn’t mean to —” She stopped, took a deep breath. “I’ll give you back the money. Just let him come with me.”

  Ahad’s hand tightened until I saw stars at the edges of my vision. “Don’t,” he said, sounding far too much like my father in that instant, “ever command me.”

  Hymn looked confused, but of course mortals do not realize how often they speak in imperatives — that is, ordinary mortals do not. Arameri long ago learned that lesson when we killed them for forgetting.

  I fought back fear so that I could concentrate. Leave her alone, damn you! Play your games with me, not her!

  Ahad actually started, throwing a sharp glance at me. I had no idea why — until I remembered just how young he was, in our terms. And that reminded me of my one advantage over him.

  Closing my eyes, I fixed my thoughts on Hymn. She was a hot bright point on the darkening map of my awareness. I had found the power to protect her when the muckrakers came. Could I now protect her from one of my own?

  Wind shot through the hollows of my soul, cold and electric. Not much; not nearly as much as there should have been. But enough. I smiled.

  And reached up to grip Ahad’s hand. “Brother,” I murmured in our tongue, and he blinked, surprised that I could talk. “Share yourself with me.”

  Then I took him into my self. We blazed, white green gold, through a firmament of purest ebony, down, down, down. This was not the core of me, for I would never trust him in that sweet, sharp place, but it was close enough. I felt him struggle, frightened, as all that I was — a torrent, a current — threatened to devour him. But that was not my intention. As we swirled downward, I dragged him closer to me. Here without flesh, I was the elder and the stronger. He did not know himself and I over-powered him easily. Gripping the front of his shirt, I grinned into his wide, panicked eyes.

  “Let’s see you now,” I said, and thrust my hand into his mouth.

  He screamed — a stupid thing to do under the circumstances. That just made it easier. I compacted myself into a single curved claw and plunged into the core of him. There was an instant of resistance, and pain for both of us, because he was not me and all gods are antithetical to each other on some level. Then there was the briefest plume of strangeness as I tasted his nature, dark but not, rich in memory yet raw with his newness, craving, desperate for something that he did not want and did not know that he needed — but it latched on to me with a ferocity I had not expected. Young gods are not usually so savage. Then I was the one being devoured —

  I came out of him with a cry and twisted away, curling in on myself in agony while Ahad stumbled and fell across the empty chair. I heard him utter a sound like a sob, once. Then he drew deep breaths, controlling himself.

  Yes, I had forgotten. He was not truly new. He wasn’t even young, like Yeine. As a mortal, he had seen thousands of years before his effective rebirth. And he had endured hells in that time that would have broken most mortals. It had broken him, but he’d put himself back together, stronger. I laughed to myself as the pain of nearly becoming something else finally began to recede.

  “You never change, do you?” My voice was a rasp. He’d left finger marks in the flesh of my neck. “Always so difficult.”

  His reply was a curse in a dead language, though I was gratified to hear weariness in his voice as well.

  I pushed myself up, slowly. Every muscle in my body ached, along with the bump to the
back of the head I’d taken. At the corner of my vision there was movement: Hymn. Coming back into the room, after quite sensibly vacating it while two godlings fought. I was surprised, given her knowledge of us, that she hadn’t vacated the house and neighborhood, too.

  “You done?” she asked.

  “Very,” I said, pulling myself to sit on the edge of the desk. I would need to sleep again soon. But first I had to make my peace with Ahad, if he would allow that.

  He was glaring at me now, from the chair. Nearly recovered already, though his hair was mussed and he had lost his cheroot. I hated him more for a moment, and then sighed and let that go. Let it all go. Mortal life was too short.

  “We are no longer slaves,” I said softly. “We need no longer be enemies.”

  “We weren’t enemies because of the Arameri,” he snapped.

  “Yes, we were.” I smiled, which made him blink. “You wouldn’t have even existed if not for them. And I —” If I allowed it, the shame would come. I had never allowed it before, but so much had changed since those days. Our positions had reversed: he was a god; I wasn’t. I needed him; he didn’t need me. “I would have at least … would have tried to be a better …”

  But then he surprised me. He had always been good at that.

  “Shut up, you fool,” he said, getting to his feet with a sigh. “Don’t be any more of an ass than you usually are.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  Ahad stalked over to me, surprising me further. He hadn’t liked being near me for centuries. Planting his hands on the desk on either side of my hips, he leaned down to glare into my face. “Do you really think me so petty that I would still be angry after all this time? Ah, no — that isn’t it at all.” His smile flickered, and perhaps it was my imagination that his teeth grew sharper for a moment. I hoped it was, because the last thing he needed was an animal nature. “No, I think you’re just so gods-damned certain of your own importance that you haven’t figured it out. So let me make this clear: I don’t care about you. You’re irrelevant. It’s a waste of my energy even to hate you!”