The Kingdom of Gods

  Deka wore black now.

  I had been surprised by this, but that was not the only shock. I stole little looks up at him — he was much taller than me now — as we walked through a brightly lit, carpeted corridor lined with the busts of dead scriveners. His stride was easy, unhurried, confident. He did not look at me, though he must have noticed me watching him. I tried to read his expression and could not. Despite his exile from Sky, he had still mastered the classic Arameri detachment. Blood told.

  Oh, yes, it did. He looked like Ahad.

  Demonshitting, hells-spawned, Yeine-loving ratbastard Ahad.

  So many things made sense now; so many more did not. The resemblance was so strong as to be undeniable. Deka was an inch or two shorter than Ahad, leaner and somewhat unfinished in the manner of young men. He wore his hair short and plain, where Ahad’s was long and elaborate. Deka looked more Amn, too; Ahad’s features leaned more toward the High Norther template. But in every other way, and particularly in this new aura of easy, dangerous strength, Deka might as well have been made as Ahad had: sprung to life full grown from his progenitor, with no mother in the way to gum things up.

  Yet that could not be. Because if Ahad was some recent ancestor of Dekarta’s, then that meant Dekarta, and Shahar, and whichever of their parents carried Ahad’s blood, were demons. Demons’ blood should have killed me the day we’d made the oath of friendship.

  And not like this, slowly, cruelly. I had seen what demons’ blood did to gods. It should have snuffed out the light of my soul like water on a candleflame. Why was I still alive at all, much less in this hobbled form?

  I groaned softly, and at last Deka glanced over at me. “Nothing,” I said, rubbing my forehead, which felt as though it should ache. “Just … nothing.”

  He uttered a low chuckle of amusement. My sweet little Deka was a baritone now, and not at all little anymore. Was he still sweet? That was something only time could tell.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “My laboratory.”

  “Oh, so they let you use one by yourself?”

  He had not stopped smiling; now he developed a smug air. “Of course. All teachers have their own.”

  I slowed, frowning up at him. “You mean you’re a full scrivener? Already?”

  “Shouldn’t I be? The course of study isn’t that difficult. I finished it a few years back.”

  I remembered the wistful, shy child he had been — so unsure of himself, so quick to let his sister take the lead. Could it be that here, beyond the shadow of his family’s disapproval, he had unleashed that wild cleverness of his? I smiled. “Still the arrogant Arameri, in spite of everything.”

  Deka glanced at me, his smile fading just a little. “I’m not Arameri, Sieh. They threw me out, remember?”

  I shook my head. “The only way to truly leave the Arameri is to die. They’ll always come back for you, otherwise — if not for you, for your children.”

  “Hmm. True enough.”

  We had turned a corner in the meantime and headed down another carpeted corridor, and now Deka led me up a wide, banistered stairwell. Three girls carrying reed pens and scrolls bobbed in polite greeting as they came down the stairs and passed us. All three blushed or batted their eyes at Deka. He nodded back regally. As soon as they were out of sight around the corner, I heard their burst of excited giggling and felt a flicker of my old nature respond. Crushes: like butterfly wings against the soul.

  At the top of the stairs, Deka unlocked and opened a pair of handsome wooden doors. Inside, the room was not what I expected. I had seen the First Scrivener’s laboratory in Sky: a stark, forbidding place of white gleaming surfaces that held only ephemeral touches of color, like black ink or red blood. Deka’s lab was Darrwood, deep and brown, and gold Chellin marble. Octagonal in shape, four of its walls were nothing but books — floor-to-ceiling shelves, each stacked two or three deep with tomes and scrolls and even a few stone or wooden tablets. Wide flat worktables dominated the center of the room, and something odd, a sort of glass-enclosed booth, stood on the room’s edge at the juncture of two walls. Yet there were no tools or implements in sight, other than those used for writing. No cages along the wall, filled with specimens for experiments. No lingering scent of pain.

  I looked around the room in wonder and confusion. “What the hells kind of scrivener are you?”

  Deka closed the door behind me. “My specialty is godling lore,” he said. “I wrote my concluding thesis on you.”

  I turned to him. He stood against the closed doors, watching me. For an instant, in his stillness, he reminded me of Nahadoth as much as Ahad. All three had that same habit of unblinking intensity, which in Ahad covered nihilism and in Nahadoth covered madness. In Deka, I had no idea what it meant. Yet.

  “You don’t think I tried to kill you, then,” I said.

  “No. It was obvious something went wrong with the oath.”

  One knot of tension eased inside me; the rest stayed taut. “You don’t seem surprised to see me.”

  He shrugged, ducking his eyes, and for a moment I saw a hint of the boy he’d been. “I still have friends in Sky. They keep me informed of events that matter.”

  Very much still the Arameri, whatever his protestations to the contrary. “You knew I would be coming, then.”

  “I guessed. Especially when I heard about your leaving, two years ago. I expected you then, actually.” He looked up, his expression suddenly unreadable. “You killed First Scrivener Shevir.”

  I shifted from one foot to another, slipping my hands into my pockets. “I didn’t mean to. He was just in the way.”

  “Yes. You do that a lot, I’ve realized from studying your history. Typical of a child, to act first and deal with the consequences later. You’re careful to do that — act impulsively — even though you’re experienced and wise enough to know better. This is what it means to live true to your nature.”

  I stared at him, flummoxed.

  “My contacts told me you were angry with Shahar,” he said. “Why?”

  I set my jaw. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You didn’t kill her, I see.”

  I scowled. “What do you care? You haven’t spoken to her for years.”

  Deka shook his head. “I still love her. But I’ve been used as a weapon against her once already. I will not let that happen again.” He pushed away from the door abruptly and came toward me, and so flustered was I by his manner that I took a step back before I caught myself.

  “I will be her weapon instead,” he said.

  It took me a shamefully long time, all things considered, to realize that he had spoken to me in the First Tongue.

  “What the hells are you doing?” I demanded, clenching my fists to keep from clapping a hand over his mouth. “Shut up before you kill us both!”

  To my shock, he smiled and began to unfasten his overshirt. “I’ve been speaking magic for years, Sieh,” he said. “I can hear the world and the stars as gods do. I know when reality listens closest, when even the softest word will awaken its wrath or coax it into obedience. I don’t know how I know these things, but I do.”

  Because you are one of us, I almost said, but how could I be sure of that? His blood hadn’t killed me. I tried to understand even as he continued undressing in front of me.

  Then he got his overshirt open. I knew before he’d unlaced the white shirt underneath; the characters glowed dark through the fabric. Black markings, dozens of them, marched along most of his upper torso and shoulders, beginning to make their way down the flat planes of his abdomen. I stared, confused. Scriveners marked themselves whenever they mastered a new activation; it was the way of their art. They put our powerful words on their fragile mortal skin, using will and skill alone to keep the magic from devouring them. But they used ordinary ink to do it, and they washed the marks off once the ritual was done. Deka’s marks, I saw at once, were like Arameri blood sigils. Permanent. Deadly.

  And they were not
scrivening marks. The style was all wrong. These lines had none of the spidery jaggedness I was used to seeing in scrivener work: ugly, but effective. These marks were smooth and almost geometric in their cleanliness. I had never seen anything like them. Yet they had power, whatever they were; I could read that in the swirling interstices of their shapes. There was meaning in this, as multilayered as poetry and as clear as metaphor. Magic is merely communication, after all.

  Communication, and conduits.

  This is something we have never told mortals. Paper and ink are weak structures on which to build the framework of magic. Breath and sound aren’t much better, yet we godlings willingly confine ourselves to those methods because the mortal realm is such a fragile place. And because mortals are such dangerously fast learners.

  But flesh makes for an excellent conduit. This was something the Arameri had learned by trial and error, though they’d never fully understood it. They wrote contracts with us onto their foreheads for protection, calling them blood sigils as if that was all they were, and we could not kill them, no matter how badly worded they were. Now Deka had written demands for power into his own skin, and his flesh gave the words meaning. He had written it in a script of his own devising, more flexible and beautiful than the rough speech of his fellow scriveners, and the universe would not deny him.

  He had made himself not quite as powerful as a god — his flesh was still mortal, and the marks had only limited meaning — but surely more powerful than any scrivener who had ever lived. I had an inkling that his markings would be more effective than even the northerners’ masks; those were only wood and gods-blood, after all. Deka was more than that.

  My mouth fell open, and Deka smiled. Then he closed his undershirt.

  “H-how …?” I asked. But I could guess. Demon and scrivener. A combination we had already learned to fear, channeled here toward a new purpose. “Why?”

  “You,” he said, very softly. “I was planning to go find you.”

  There was, fortunately, a small couch nearby. I sat down on it, dazed.

  We exchanged stories. This was what Deka told me.

  Shahar had been the one to suggest his exile. In the tense days after our oath and the children’s injury, the clamors for Deka’s execution had run loud in the halls of Sky. There were still a dozen or so fullbloods and twenty or thirty highbloods altogether. In the old days, they had not mattered because the family head’s rule had been absolute. These days, however, the highbloods had power of their own. Some of them had their own pet scriveners, their own pet assassins. A few had their own pet armies. If enough of them banded together and acted against Remath, she could be overthrown. This had never happened in all the two-millennia history of the Arameri, but it could happen now.

  But when they had demanded Deka’s death, Shahar had spoken for him, as soon as she was well enough to talk. She had gone toe-to-toe with Remath — an epic debate, Deka called it, all the more impressive because one of its combatants was eight years old — and gotten her to acknowledge that exile was a more suitable punishment than death. Deka could never win enough support to become heir now, even if his looks could somehow be overcome. He would be forever branded by the stigma of failure. And Shahar needed him alive, she had argued, so as to have one advisor whose prospects were so truncated, so hopeless, that he would have no choice but to serve her faithfully in order to survive. Remath had agreed.

  “I imagine dear Sister will fill this in when I go back,” Deka said then, touching his semisigil with a soft sigh. I nodded slowly. He was probably right.

  So Deka had left Sky for the Litaria. The first few months of his exile had been misery, for with a child’s eyes, he had seen only his mother’s rejection and his sister’s betrayal. He had not reckoned, however, on one crucial thing.

  “I am happy here,” he said simply. “It isn’t perfect; there are cliques and bullies, politics, unfairness, like anywhere. But compared to Sky, this is the gentlest of heavens.”

  I nodded again. Happiness has healing power. Between that and the wisdom brought by maturity, Deka had come to realize what Shahar had done for him, and why. By then, however, several years had passed during which he’d returned all her letters, until she’d finally stopped sending them. It would have been dangerous in the extreme to resume communication at that point, because any of Shahar’s rivals — who were surely watching her mailings — would know that Deka was once again her weakness. There was strength in the fact that she could pretend not to love him and point to her hand in his exile as proof. And as long as Deka pretended not to love her back, they were both safe.

  I shook my head slowly, though, troubled by his plan. Love could not be conditional. I had seen the danger of that too often. Conditions created a chink in otherwise unbreakable armor, left a fatal flaw in the perfect weapon. Then the armor broke, at precisely the wrong time. The weapon turned against its wielder. Deka and Shahar’s game could so easily turn real.

  But it was not my place to say that, because they were still children enough to learn best through experience. I could only pray to Nahadoth and Yeine that they would not learn this lesson in the most painful way.

  After our talk, Deka rose. An hour or so had passed. Beyond the laboratory windows, the sun had moved through noon into afternoon. I was hungry again, damn it, but no one had brought food. Perhaps there were no servants in this place where learning created its own hierarchy.

  As if guessing my thought (though my stomach had also rumbled loudly), Deka went to a cabinet and opened a drawer, taking out several flat loaves of bread and a chub of dry sausage. He began slicing this on a board. “So why have you come? It can’t just have been to see an old friend.”

  He still thought of me as a friend. I tried not to let him see how this affected me. “I did just want to see you, believe it or not. I wondered how you’d turned out.”

  “You can’t have wondered all that hard, since it took you two years to come.”

  I winced. “After Shahar, what happened with her, I mean … I didn’t want to see you, because I was afraid that you would be … like her.” Deka said nothing, still working on the food. “I thought you would be back in Sky by now, though.”

  “Why?”

  “Shahar. She made a deal with your mother to bring you home.”

  “And you thought I would go as soon as my sister snapped her fingers?”

  I faltered silent, confused. As I sat there, Deka turned back to me and brought the sausage and bread over, setting it before me as if he were a servant and not an Arameri. No poor man’s gristle-and-scraps here, I found when I took a slice. The sausage was sweet and redolent of cinnamon, bright yellow in color per the local style. The Litaria might make Remath Arameri’s son serve his own food, but the food was at least suited to his station. He’d brought a flask of wine, too, light and strong, of equal quality.

  “Mother sent a letter shortly after you left Sky, inquiring as to when I might return,” Deka said, sitting in the chair across from me and taking a slice of meat for himself. He swallowed and uttered a short, sour laugh. “I responded with a letter of my own, explaining that I intended to remain until I’d completed my research.”

  I burst out laughing at his audacity. “You told her you’d come back when you were good and ready, is that it? And she didn’t force you home?”

  “No.” Deka’s expression darkened further. “But she had Shahar write to me, asking the same question.”

  “And you said?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  He sat back in his chair, crossing his legs and toying with the glass of wine in his fingers. I didn’t like that pose for him; it reminded me too much of Ahad. “There was no need. It was a warning. Shahar’s letter said, ‘I am told the standard course of study at the Litaria is ten years. Surely you can finish your research within that time?’”

  “A deadline.”

  He nodded. “Two years to wrap up my affairs here and go back to Sky — or, no
doubt, Mother’s willingness to let me return would expire.” He spread his hands. “This is my tenth year.”

  I thought of what he’d told me and shown me. The strange new magic he’d developed, his vow to become Shahar’s weapon. “You’re going back, then.”

  “I leave in a month.” He shrugged. “I should arrive by midsummer.”

  “Two months’ traveling time?” I frowned. The Litaria was a sovereign territory within the sleepy agrarian land of Wiru, in southern Senm. (That way only a few farmers would die if the place ever blew to the heavens.) Sky was not that far. “You’re a scrivener. Draw a gate sigil.”

  “I don’t actually need to; the Litaria has a permanent gate that can be configured to Sky’s. But to travel that way would make it seem as though I was afraid of assault. There is the family pride to consider. And more importantly, I will not slink to Sky quietly, like a bad dog finally allowed back into the house.” He sipped from his glass of wine. Over the rim, his eyes were dark and colder than I’d ever expected to see. “Let Mother and the rest of them see what they have chosen to create by sending me here. If they will not love me, fear is an acceptable substitute.”

  For a moment I was stunned. This was not at all the Deka I remembered, but then, he was no longer a child, and he had never been a fool. He knew as well as I did what he was going back to in Sky. I could not blame him for hardening himself to prepare for it. But I did mourn, just a little, for the sweet boy I’d first known.

  At least he had not become what I’d feared, though: a monster, worthy only of death.

  Yet.

  At my silence, Deka glanced up, gazing at me just a moment too long. Did he sense my unease? Did he want me to feel uneasy?

  “So … what will you do?” I asked. I fought the urge to stammer.

  He shrugged. “I informed Mother that I would be traveling overland and made note of the route. Then I sent it by standard courier, with only the usual privacy sigils in the seal.”

  I whistled with a lightheartedness that I didn’t feel. “Every highblood in Sky will have seen it, then.” I frowned. “These mask-wielding assassins, though … And gods, Deka, if any of your relatives want you dead, you’ve given them a map for the best places to ambush you!”