The Kingdom of Gods

  “This will do more than kill,” I murmured. “These people have forgotten what humanity can be like at its worst. Redis-covering this will shock them; it will wound their souls. I have seen it happen before, here and on other worlds.” I met Ahad’s eyes, and he frowned, just a little, at the look on my face. “They’ll burn their histories and slaughter their artists. They’ll enslave their women and devour their children, and they’ll do it in the gods’ names. Shahar was right; the end of the Arameri means the end of the Bright.”

  Ahad spoke with brutal softness. “It will be worse if we get involved.”

  He was right. I hated him more than ever for that.

  In the silence that fell, Glee sighed. “I’ve stayed too long.” She rose to leave. “Keep me informed of anything else you discover or decide.”

  I waited for one of the gods at the table to chastise her for giving them orders. Then I realized none of them were planning to. Lil had begun to lean toward the platter, her eyes gleaming. Kitr had taken the small paring knife and was spinning it on her fingertip, an old habit that meant she was thinking. Nemmer rose to leave as well, nodding casually to Ahad, and suddenly I couldn’t stand it anymore. I shoved back my chair and marched around the table and got to the door just as Glee started to open it. I slammed it shut.

  “Who in the suppurating bright hells are you?” I demanded.

  Ahad groaned. “Sieh, gods damn it —”

  “No, I need to know this. I swore I’d never take orders from a mortal again.” I glared up at Glee, who didn’t look nearly as alarmed by my tantrum as I wanted her to be. What ignominy; I couldn’t even make mortals fear me anymore. “This doesn’t make sense! Why are all of you listening to her?”

  The woman lifted an eyebrow, then let out a long, heavy sigh. “My full name is Glee Shoth. I speak for, and assist, Itempas.”

  The words struck me like a slap — as did the name, and the odd familiarity of her manner, and her Maroneh heritage, and the way my siblings all seemed uneasy in her presence. I should have seen it at once. Kitr was right; I really was losing my touch.

  “You’re his daughter.” I whispered it. I could barely make my mouth form the words. Glee Shoth — daughter of Oree Shoth, the first and, as far as I knew, only mortal friend Itempas had ever had. Clearly they had gone beyond friendship. “His … dear gods, his demon daughter.”

  Glee did not smile, but her eyes warmed in amusement — and now that I knew, all those tiny niggling familiarities were as obvious as slaps to the face. She didn’t look like him; in features, she’d taken more after her mother. But her mannerisms, the air of stillness that she wore like a cloak … It was all there, as plain as the risen sun.

  Then I registered the implications of her existence. A demon. A demon made by Itempas — he who had declared the demons forbidden in the first place and led the hunt to wipe them out. A daughter, allied to him, helping him.

  I considered what it meant, that he loved her.

  I considered his reconciliation with Yeine.

  I considered the terms of his imprisonment.

  “It’s him,” I whispered. I nearly staggered, and would have if I had not leaned on the door for support. I focused on Ahad to marshal my shaken thoughts. “He’s the leader of this crazy group of yours. Itempas.”

  Ahad opened his mouth, then closed it. “‘You will right all the wrongs inflicted in your name,’” he said at last, and I twitched as I remembered the words. I had been there, the first time they’d been spoken, and Ahad’s voice was deep enough, had just the right timbre, to imitate the original speaker perfectly. He shrugged at my stare and finally flashed his usual humorless smile. “I’d say the Arameri, and all they’ve done to the world, count as one great whopping wrong, wouldn’t you?”

  “And it is his nature.” Glee threw Ahad an arch look before returning her attention to me. “Even without magic, he will fight the encroachment of disorder in whatever way he can. Is that so surprising?”

  I resisted out of stubbornness. “Yeine said she couldn’t find him lately.”

  Glee’s smile was paper-thin. “I regret concealing him from Lady Yeine, but it’s necessary. For his protection.”

  I shook my head. “Protection? From — Gods, this makes no sense. A mortal can’t hide from a god.”

  “A demon can,” she said. I blinked, surprised, but I shouldn’t have been. I’d already known that some demons had survived their holocaust. Now I knew how. Glee continued. “And fortunately, some of us can hide others when we need to. Now, if you’ll excuse me …” She looked pointedly at my hand on the door, which I let fall.

  Ahad had taken out a cheroot and was rummaging absently in his pockets. He threw a lazy glance at Glee, and there was a hint of the old evil in his eyes. “Tell the old man I said hi.”

  “I will not,” she replied promptly. “He hates you.”

  Ahad laughed, then finally remembered he was a god and lit the cheroot with a moment’s concentration. Sitting back in his chair, he regarded Glee with steady lasciviousness as she opened the door. “But you don’t, at least?”

  Glee paused on the threshold, and the look in her eyes was suddenly as familiar as her not-quite-smile had been a moment before. Of course it was. I had seen that same easy, possessive arrogance all my life. The absolute assurance that all was as it should be in the universe, because all of it was hers — if not now, then eventually.

  “Not yet,” she said, and not-smiled again before leaving the room.

  Ahad sat forward as soon as the door shut, his eyes fixed on the door in such obvious interest that Lil began staring at him, finally distracted from the food. Kitr made a sound of exasperation and reached for the platter, probably out of irritation rather than any actual hunger.

  “I’ll see if I can get one of my people into Darr,” said Nemmer, getting to her feet. “They’re suspicious of strangers, though … might have to do it myself. Busy, busy, busy.”

  “I will listen harder to the sailors’ and traders’ talk,” said Eyem-sutah. He was the god of commerce, to whom the Ken had once dedicated their magnificent sailing vessels. “War means shipments of steel and leather and march-bread, back and forth and back and forth …” His eyelids fluttered shut; he let out a soft sigh. “Such things have their own music.”

  Ahad nodded. “I’ll see all of you next week, then.” With that, Nemmer, Kitr, and Eyem-sutah disappeared. Lil rose and leaned over the table for a moment; the platter of food vanished. So did the platter, though Ahad’s table remained untouched. Ahad sighed.

  “You have become interesting, Sieh,” Lil said to me, grinning beneath her swirling, mottled eyes. “You want so many things, so badly. Usually you taste only of the one endless, unfulfillable longing.”

  I sighed and wished she would go away, though that was pointless. Lil came and went as she pleased, and nothing short of a war could dislodge her when she took an interest in something. “What are you doing here?” I asked. “I didn’t think you cared about anything but food, Lil.”

  She shrugged with one painfully bony shoulder, her ragged hair brushing the cloth of her gown with a sound like dry grass. “This realm changed while we were away. Its taste has grown richer, its flavors more complex. I find myself changing to suit.” Then to my surprise, she came around the table and put her hand on mine. “You were always kind to me, Sieh. Be well, if you can.”

  She vanished as well, leaving me even more perplexed than before. I shook my head to myself, not really noticing that I was alone with Ahad until he spoke.

  “Questions?” he asked. The cheroot hung between his fingers, on the brink of dropping a column of ash onto the carpet.

  I considered all the swirling winds that blew around me and shook my head.

  “Good,” he said, and waved a hand. (This flung ash everywhere.) Another pouch appeared on the table. Frowning, I picked it up and found it heavy with coins.

  “You gave me money yesterday.”

  He shrugged. “Funny thing, e
mployment. If you keep doing it, you keep getting paid.”

  I glowered at him. “I take it I passed Glee’s test, then.”

  “Yes. So pay that mortal girl’s family for room and board, buy some decent clothing, and for demons’ sake, eat and sleep so you stop looking like all hells. I need you to be able to blend in, or at least not frighten people.” He paused, leaning back in his chair and taking a deep draw from the cheroot. “Given the quality of your work today, I can see that I’ll be making good use of you in the future. That is, by the way, the standard salary we offer to the Arms of Night’s top performers.” He gave me a small, malicious smile.

  If the day hadn’t already been so strange, I would have marveled at his praise, laced with insults as it was. Instead I merely nodded and slipped the pouch into my shirt, where pickpockets wouldn’t be able to get at it easily.

  “Well, get out, then,” he said, and I left.

  I was five years older, several centuries chastened, and more hated than ever by my siblings, including the one I’d apparently forgotten. As first days on the job went … well. I was still alive. It remained to be seen whether this was a good thing.

  BOOK THREE

  Three Legs in the Afternoon

  I DRIFT THROUGH dreaming. Since I am not mortal, there are no nightmares. I never find myself naked in front of a crowd, because that would never bother me. (I would waggle my genitals at them, just to see the shock on their faces.) Most of what I dream is memory, probably because I have so many of them.

  Images of parents and children. Nahadoth, shaped like some sort of great star-flecked beast, lies curled in a nest of ebon sparks. This is in the days before mortals. I am a tiny thing half hidden in the nest’s glimmers. An infant. I huddle against her for comfort and protection, mewling like a new kitten, and she strokes me and whispers my name possessively —

  Shahar again. The Matriarch, not the girl I know. She is younger than in my last dream, in her twenties perhaps, and she sits in a window with an infant at her breast. Her chin is propped on her fist; she pays little attention to the babe as it sucks. Mortal, this child. Fully human. Another human child sits in a basket behind her — twins — tended by a girl in priest’s robes. Shahar wears robes, too, though hers are finer. She is high ranking. She has borne children as her faith demands, but soon she will abandon them, when her lord needs her. Her eyes are ever on the horizon, waiting for dawn —

  Enefa, in the fullest glory of her power. All her experiments, all the tests and failures, have reached the pinnacle of success at last. Merging life and death, light and dark, order and chaos, she brings mortal life to the universe, transforming it forever. She has been giving birth for the past billion years. Her belly is an earth of endless vastness and fecundity, rippling as it churns forth life after life after life. We who have already been born gaze upon this geysering wonder in worshipful adoration. I come to her, bringing an offering of love, because life needs that to thrive. She devours it greedily and arches, crying out in agony and triumph as another species bursts forth. Magnificent. She gropes for my hand because her brothers have gone off somewhere, probably together, but that’s all right. I am the oldest of her god-children, a man grown. I am there for her when she needs me. Even if she does not need me very often —

  Myself. How strange. I sit on a bed in the first Sky, in mortal flesh, confined to it by mad Itempas and my dead mother’s power. This is in the early years, I can tell, when I fought my chains at every turn. My flesh still bears the red weals of a whip, and I am older than I like, weakened by the damage. A young man. Yet I sit beside a longer, larger form whose back is to me. Male, adult, naked. Mortal: black hair a tangled mass. Sickly white skin. Ahad, who had no name back then. He is weeping, I know the way shoulders shake during sobs, and I — I do not remember what I have done to him, but there is guilt as well as despair in my eyes —

  Yeine. Who has never borne a child as mortal or goddess, yet who became my mother the instant she met me. She has the nurturing instincts of a predator: choose the most brutal of mates, destroy anything that threatens the young, raise them to be good killers. Yet compared to Enefa, she is a fountain of tenderness, and I drink her love so thirstily that I worry she will run out. (She never has.) In mortal flesh we curl on the floor of the Wind Harp chamber, laughing, terrified of the dawn and the doom that seems inevitable, yet which is, in fact, only the beginning —

  Enefa, again. The great quickening is long done. These days she makes few new children, preferring to observe and prune and transplant the ones she already has, on the nonillion worlds where they grow. She turns to me and I shiver and become a man by her will, though by this point I have realized that child is the most fundamental manifestation of my nature. “Don’t be afraid,” she says when I dare to protest. She comes to me, touches me gently; my body yields and my heart soars. I have yearned for this, so long, but —

  I am dying, this love will kill me, get it away oh gods I have never been so afraid —

  Forget.

  13

  One for sorrow

  Two for joy

  Three for a girl

  Four for a boy

  Five for silver

  Six for gold

  Seven for a secret

  Never to be told.

  Mortal life is cycles. Day and night. Seasons. Waking and sleep. This cyclical nature was built into all mortal creatures by Enefa, and the humans have refined it further by building their cultures to suit. Work, home. Months become years, years shift from past to future. They count endlessly, these creatures. It is this which marks the difference between them and us, I think, far more than magic and death.

  For two years, three months, and six days, I lived as ordinary a life as I could. I ate. I slept. I grew healthier, taking pains to make myself sleek and strong, and dressed better. I contemplated asking Glee Shoth to arrange a meeting between myself and Itempas. I chose not to, because I hated him and would rather die. Perfectly ordinary.

  The work was ordinary, too, in its way. Each week I traveled wherever Ahad chose to send me, observing what I could, interfering where I was bidden. Compared to the life of a god … well. It was not boring, at least. It kept me busy. When I worked hard, I thought less. That was a good and necessary thing.

  The world was not ordinary, either. Six months after I’d met her, and three months after the birth of her latest lamented son, Usein Darr’s father died of the lingering illness that had incapacitated him for some while. Immediately afterward, Usein Darr got herself elected as one of the High North delegates. She traveled to Shadow in time for the Consortium’s voting season, whereupon her first act was to give a fiery speech openly challenging the existence of Shadow’s delegate. No other single city had a delegate on the Consortium. “And everyone knows why,” Usein declared, then dramatically (according to the news scrolls) turned to glare into the eyes of Remath Arameri, who sat in the family box above the Consortium floor. Remath said nothing in reply — probably because everyone did know why, and there was no point in her confirming the obvious. Shadow’s delegate was in fact Sky’s delegate, little more than another mouthpiece through which the Arameri could make their wishes known. This was nothing new.

  What was new was that Usein’s protest was not struck down by the Consortium Overseer; and that several other nobles — not all northerners — rose to voice agreement with her; and that in the subsequent secret vote, nearly a third of the Consortium agreed that Shadow’s delegate should be abolished. A loss, and yet a victory. Once upon a time, such a proposal would never have even made it to vote.

  It was not a victory so much as a shot across the bow. Yet the Arameri did not respond in kind, as the whispers predicted in the Arms of Night’s parlor and the back of the bakery and even at the dinner table with Hymn’s family each evening. No one tried to kill Usein Darr. No mysterious plagues swept through the stone-maze streets of Arrebaia. Darren blackwood and herbal rarities continued to fetch high prices on the open and smugglers’
markets.

  I knew what this meant, of course. Remath had drawn a line somewhere, and Usein simply had yet to cross it. When she did, Remath would bring such horrors to Darr as the land had never seen. Unless Usein’s mysterious plans reached fruition first.

  Politics would never be interesting enough to occupy the whole of my attention, however, and as the days became months and years, I felt ever more the weight of unfinished, childishly avoided business upon my soul. Eventually one particular urge became overwhelming, and on a slow day, I begged a favor of Ahad. Surprisingly, he obliged me.

  Deka was still at the Litaria. That I hadn’t expected. After Shahar’s betrayal, I had braced myself to find him in Sky somewhere. She had done it to get him back, hadn’t she? Yet when Ahad’s magic settled, I found myself in the middle of a classroom. The chamber was circular — a remnant of the Litaria’s time as part of the Order of Itempas — and the walls were lined by slate covered in chalk renderings: pieces of sigils with each stroke carefully numbered, whole sigils lacking only a stroke or two, and strange numerical calculations that apparently had something to do with how scriveners learned our tongue.

  I turned and blinked as I realized I was surrounded by white-clad children. Most were Amn, ten or eleven years old; all sat cross-legged on the floor, with their own slates or pieces of reed paper in their laps. All of them gaped at me.

  I put my hands on my hips and grinned back. “What? Your teacher didn’t tell you a godling was dropping by?”

  An adult voice made me turn, and then I, too, gaped as the children did.

  “No,” drawled Dekarta from the lectern. “We’re doing show-and-tell next week. Hello, Sieh.”