The Kingdom of Gods

  “And if Mother stints me on an appropriate guard compliment, that’s precisely what will happen.” He shrugged. “As head, she must be seen to at least try to protect the Central Family, the Matriarch’s bloodline. To do any less would make her unfit to lead. So she’ll likely send a whole legion to escort me — thus the two months of travel.”

  “Caught in your own trap. Poor Deka.” He smiled, and I grinned back. Yet I found myself sobering. “What if there is an attack, though? Assassins, regardless who sends them? A legion of enemy soldiers?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  There was arrogance, and there was stupidity. “You should be afraid, Deka, no matter how powerful you’ve become. I’ve seen this mask magic. It’s like nothing the Litaria has prepared you for.”

  “I’ve seen Shevir’s notes, and the Litaria has been closely involved in the investigation into this new magical form. The masks are like scrivening, like the gods’ language: merely a symbolic representation of a concept. Once one understands this, it is possible to develop a countermeasure.” He shrugged. “And these mask makers don’t know anything about my new magical form. No one does but me. And now you.”

  “Um. Oh.” I fell silent again, awkwardly.

  Abruptly, Deka smiled. “I like this,” he said, nodding toward me. “You’re different now, not just physically. Not so much the brat. Now you’re more …” He thought a moment.

  “Heartless bastard?” I smiled. “Obnoxious ass?”

  “Tired,” he said, and I sobered. “Unsure of yourself. The old you is still there, but it’s almost buried under other things. Fear, most noticeably.”

  Inexplicably, the words stung. I stared back at him, wondering why.

  His expression softened, a tacit apology. “It must be hard for you. Facing death, when you’re a creature of so much life.”

  I looked away. “If mortals can do it, I can.”

  “Not all mortals do, Sieh. You haven’t drunk yourself to death yet, or flung yourself into dangerous situations, or killed yourself in any of a hundred other ways. Considering that death is a new reality for you, you’re handling it remarkably well.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, his eyes boring into my own. “But the biggest change is that you’re not happy anymore. You were always lonely; I saw that even as a child. But the loneliness wasn’t destroying you back then. It is now.”

  I flinched back from him, my thoughts moving from stunned toward affronted, but they lacked the strength to go all the way there, instead flopping somewhere in between. A lie came to my lips, and died. All that remained was silence.

  A hint of the old self-deprecation crossed Deka’s face; he smiled ruefully. “I still want to help you, but I’m not sure if I can. You aren’t sure you like me anymore, for one thing.”

  “I —” I blurted. Then I got up and walked away from him, over to one of the windows. I had to. I didn’t know what to say or how to act, and I didn’t want him to say anything else. If I’d still had my power, I would have simply left the Litaria. Maybe the mortal realm entirely. As it was, the best I could do was flee across the room.

  His sigh followed me, but he said nothing for a long while. In that silence, I began to calm down. Why was I so agitated? I felt like a child again, one with jittery buttons dancing on his skin, like in an old Teman tale I’d heard. By the time Deka spoke, I was almost myself again. Well, not myself. But human, at least.

  “You came to us all those years ago because you needed something, Sieh.”

  “Not two little mortal brats,” I snapped.

  “Maybe not. But we gave you something that you needed, and you came back for it twice more. And in the end, I was right. You did want our friendship. I’ve never forgotten what you said that day: ‘Friendships can transcend childhood, if the friends continue to trust each other as they grow older and change.’” I heard him shift in his chair, facing my back. “It was a warning.”

  I sighed, rubbing my eyes. The meat and bread sat uneasily in my belly. “It was sentimental rambling.”

  “Sieh.” How could he know so much, so young? “You were planning to kill us. If we became the kind of Arameri who once made your life hell — if we betrayed your trust — you knew you would have to kill us. The oath, and your nature, would have required it. You told us that because you didn’t want to. You wanted real friends. Friends who would last.”

  Had that been it? I laughed hopelessly. “And now I’m the one who won’t last much longer.”

  “Sieh —”

  “If it was like you say, I would have killed Shahar, Deka. Because she betrayed me. She knew I loved her, and she used me. She …” I paused, then looked up at the reflection in the window. My own face in the foreground, pinched and tired, too big as always, shaped wrong, old. I had never understood why so many mortals found me attractive in this shape. In the background, watching me from the couch on which he sat, Deka. His eyes met mine in the glass.

  “I slept with her,” I said, to hurt him. To shut him up. “I was her first, in fact. Little Lady Shar, so perfect, so cute. You should have heard her moan, Deka; it was like hearing the Maelstrom itself sing.”

  Deka only smiled, though it seemed forced. “I heard about Mother’s plan.” He paused. “Is that why you didn’t kill Shahar? Because it was Mother’s plan and not hers?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know why I didn’t kill her. There was no why. I do what feels good.” I rubbed my temples, where a headache had begun.

  “And you didn’t feel like murdering the girl you loved.”

  “Gods, Deka!” I rounded on him, clenching my fists. “Why are we talking about this?”

  “So it was just lust? The god of childhood leaps on the first half-grown woman he meets who’s willing?”

  “No, of course not!”

  He sighed and got to his feet. “She was just another Arameri, then, forcing you into her bed?” The look on his face showed that he didn’t remotely believe that. “You wanted her. You loved her. She broke your heart. And you didn’t kill her because you love her still. Why does that trouble you so?”

  “It doesn’t,” I said. But it did. It shouldn’t have. Why did it matter to me that some mortal had done precisely what I’d expected her to do? A god should not care about such things. A god …

  …should not need a mortal to be happy.

  Gods. Gods. What was wrong with me? Gods.

  Deka sighed and came over to me. There were many things in his eyes: compassion. Sorrow. Anger, though not at me. Exasperation. And something more. He stopped in front of me, and I was not as surprised as I should have been that he lifted a hand to cup my cheek. I did not pull away, either. As I should have.

  “I will not betray you,” he murmured, much too softly. This was not the way a friend spoke to a friend. His fingertips rasped along the edge of my jaw. This was not the touch of a friend. But — I did not think — Oh, gods, was he …

  “I’m not going anywhere, either. I have waited so long for you, Sieh.”

  I started, confused, remembering. “Wait, where did you hear —”

  Then he kissed me, and I fell.

  Into him. Or he enveloped me. There are no words for such things, not in any mortal language, but I will try, I will try to encapsulate it, confine it, define it, because my mind does not work the way it once did and I want to understand, too. I want to remember. I want to taste again his mouth, spicy and meaty and a little sweet. He had always been sweet, especially that first day, when he’d looked into my eyes and begged me to help them. I craved his sweetness. His mouth opened and I delved into it, meeting him halfway. I had blessed him that day, hadn’t I? Perhaps that was why, now, the purest of magic surged through him and down my throat, flooding my belly, overflowing my nerves until I gasped and tried to cry out, but he would not let my mouth go. I tried to back away but the window was there. We could not travel to other realms safely. My only choice was to release the magic or be destroyed. So I opened my eyes.


  Every lantern in the room flared like a bonfire, then burst in a cloud of sparks. The walls shook, the floor heaved. One of the shelves on a nearby bookcase collapsed, spilling thick tomes to the floor. I heard the window frame rattle ominously at my back, and someone on the floor above cried out in alarm. Then Deka ended the kiss, and the world was still again.

  Darkness and damnation and eighth-blooded unknowing Arameri demons.

  Deka blinked twice, licked his lips, then flashed me the sort of elated, look-what-I-did grin I’d once been famous for. “That went better than expected.”

  I nodded beyond him. “You were expecting this?”

  He turned, and his eyes widened at the fallen shelf, the now-smoldering lanterns. One lay on the floor, its glass shattered. As he stared, a scroll that had not dropped with the others fluttered to the shelf below, forlorn.

  I touched his shoulder. “You need to send me back to Shadow.” This made him turn around, a protest already on his lips. I gripped his shoulder to make him listen. “No. I won’t do this again, Deka. I can’t. You were right about Shahar. But that’s why … I, with you, I —” I sighed, inexpressibly weary. Why did mortal troubles never wait for convenient times? “Gods, I can’t do this right now.”

  I saw Deka struggle for a mature response, which heartened me because it meant that he had not somehow outgrown me at a mere eighteen years. He took a deep breath and moved away from me, running a hand through his hair. Finally he turned to one of the tables in the room and pulled out a large sheet of the thick, bleached paper that scriveners used for their work. He took a brush, inkstone and stick, and reservoir from a nearby table, and said with his back to me, “The way you appeared was gods’ magic.”

  “One of my siblings.” Your great-grandfather. Ahad was going to love this.

  “Ah.” He prepared the ink, his fingers grinding the sigil-marked inkstone back and forth slowly, meditatively. “Do you think, next time, I’ll be able to summon you to me the way Shahar did?”

  He was too tense to even attempt subtlety. I sighed and gave him what he wanted. “There’s only one way to find out, I suppose.”

  “May I attempt it? At an appropriate time, of course.”

  I leaned against the window again. “Yes.”

  “Good.” The tension in his broad shoulders eased, just a touch. He began to sketch the sigil for a gate with quick, decisive movements — stunningly fast, compared to most scriveners I had seen. Every line was perfect. I felt the power of it the instant he drew the final line.

  “I may be able to help you.” He said this briskly, with a scrivener’s matter-of-fact detachment. “I can’t promise anything, of course, but the magic I’ve been designing — my body-marking — accesses the potential hidden within an individual. Whatever’s happening to you, you’re still a god. That should give me something to work with.”

  “Fine.”

  Deka set the sigil on the floor and stepped back. When I went to stand beside it, his expression was as carefully blank as if he stood before Remath. I could not leave things that way between us.

  So I took his hand, the one I’d held ten years before, when his demon blood had mingled with mine and failed to kill me. His palm was unmarked, but I remembered where the cut had been. I traced a line across it with a fingertip, and his hand twitched in response.

  “I’m glad I came to see you,” I said.

  He did not smile. But he did fold his hand around mine for a moment.

  “I’m not Shahar, Sieh,” he said. “Don’t punish me for what she did.”

  I nodded wearily. Then I let go of him, stepped onto the sigil, and thought of South Root. The world blurred around me, leaping to obey Deka’s command and my will. I savored the momentary illusion of control. Then, when the walls of my room at Hymn’s snapped into place around me, I lay down on the bed, threw an arm over my eyes, and thought of nothing but Deka’s kiss for the rest of the night.

  14

  IT FELT GOOD TO RUN UP SAND DUNES. I put my head down and took care to churn the sand behind me and scuff up the perfect wave patterns the wind had etched around the sparse grasses. By the time I reached the top of the dune, I was out of breath, and my heart was pumping steadily within its cage of bones and muscle. I stopped there, putting my hands on my hips, and grinned at the beach and the spreading expanse of the Repentance Sea. I felt young and strong and invincible, even though I really wasn’t any of those things. I didn’t care. It was just nice to feel good.

  “Hello, Sieh!” cried my sister Spider. She was down at the water’s edge, dancing in the surf. Her voice carried up to me on the salty ocean breeze, as clear as if I stood beside her.

  “Hello, there.” I grinned at her, too, and spread my arms. “All the oceans in the world, and you had to pick the boiled one?” One of my siblings, the Fireling, had fought a legendary battle here during the Gods’ War. She’d won, but not before the Repentance was a bubbling stewpot filled with the corpses of a billion sea creatures.

  “It has nice rhythms.” She was doing something strange in her dance, squatting and hopping from one foot to another with no recognizable semblance of rhythm. But that was Spider; she made her own music if she needed to. So many of Nahadoth’s children were like her, just a little mad but beautiful in their madness. Such a proud legacy our father had given us.

  “All the dead things here scream in time with each other,” she said. “Can’t you hear them?”

  “No, alas.” It almost didn’t hurt anymore, acknowledging that my childhood was gone and would never return. Mortals are resilient creatures.

  “A shame. Can you still dance?”

  In answer, I ran down the dune, side-sliding so that I wouldn’t overbalance. When I reached level ground, I altered my steps into a side-to-side sort of hop that had been popular in upper Rue once, centuries before the Gods’ War. Spider giggled and immediately came out of the water to join my dance, her steps alternating to complement mine. We met at the tideline, where dry sand turned to hard-packed wet. There she grabbed my hands and pulled me into a new dance, formal and revolving and slow. Something Amn, or possibly just something she’d made up on the spot. It never mattered with her.

  I grinned, taking the lead and turning us in a looping circle, toward the water and away. “I can always dance for you.”

  “Not so well anymore. You have no rhythm.” We were in northern Tema, the land whose people we had both watched over long ago. She had taken the shape of a local girl, small and lithe, though her hair was bound up in a bun at the back of her head as no self-respecting Teman would have done. “You can’t hear the music at all?”

  “Not a note.” I pulled her hand close and kissed the back of it. “But I can hear my heart beating, and the waves coming in, and the wind blowing. I may not be exactly on the beat, but you know, I don’t have to be a good dancer to love dancing.”

  She beamed, delighted, and then spun us both, taking control of the dance so deftly that I could not mind. “I’ve missed you, Sieh. None of the others ever loved to move like you do.”

  I twirled her once more so that my arms could settle around her from behind. She smelled of sweat and salt and joy. I pressed my face into her soft hair and felt a whisper of the old magic. She was not a child, but she had never forgotten how to play.

  “Oh —” She stopped, her whole body going taut with attention, and I looked up to see what had interested her so. A few dozen feet away on the beach, lurking near a dune as if ready to duck back behind it: a young man, slim and brown and handsome, fascinating in his shy eagerness. He wore no shirt or shoes, and his pants were rolled up to his knees. In one hand he carried a bucket full of sandy clams.

  “One of your worshippers?” I murmured in her ear, and then I kissed it.

  Spider giggled, though her expression was greedy. “Perhaps. Move away from me, Brother. He’s shy enough as it is, and you’re not a little boy anymore.”

  “They’re so beautiful when they love us,” I whispered. I pressed
against her, hungry, and thought for the umpteenth time of Deka.

  “Yes,” she said, reaching back to cup my cheek. “But I don’t share, Sieh, and I’m not the one you want anyway. Let go now.”

  Reluctantly I did so and stepped back, bowing extravagantly to the young man so that he would know he was welcome. He blushed and ducked his head, the long cabled locks of his hair falling forward. Because he was poor, he had wrapped the locks with some sort of threadlike seaweed and ornamented them with seashells and bits of bright coral, rather than the metal bands and gemstones most Temans preferred. He did begin to walk closer at our tacit invitation, holding the bucket in both hands with an air of offering. His whole day’s income, most likely — a sincere mark of devotion.

  While he approached, Spider glanced back at me, her eyes gleaming. “You want to know about Kahl, don’t you?”

  I blinked in surprise. “How did you know?”

  She smiled. “I can hear the world just fine, Brother. The wind says you’re playing errand boy for Ahad, the new one. Everyone knows who he works for.”

  “I didn’t.” I could not keep the sourness out of my voice.

  “That’s because you’re selfish and flighty. Anyhow, of course that’s why you came. There’s nothing else in Tema that could be of interest to you.”

  “Maybe I just wanted to see you.”

  She laughed, high and bright, and I grinned, too. We had always understood each other, she and I.

  “For the past, then,” she said. “Only for you, Sieh.”

  Then, turning a little pirouette that marked a strange and powerful pattern into the sand, Spider stopped on one toe and dipped toward me, her other leg extending gracefully above her in a perfect arabesque. Her eyes, which had been brown and ordinary until then, suddenly glimmered and became different. Six additional tiny-pupilled irises swirled out of nowhere and settled into place around her existing irises, which shrank a bit to make room for them. The clam boy stopped where he was a few feet away, his eyes widening at the sight. I didn’t blame him; she was magnificent.