The Kingdom of Gods

  Despite Glee’s needling, I was not, in fact, too inebriated to think. The Arameri were not given to public spectacle — or at least they hadn’t been during my time of servitude — mainly because it hadn’t been necessary. What could top the glory of their unstated, rarely seen, utterly devastating power? And Sky was symbol enough of who they were. But times had changed, and their power now derived at least partially from their ability to awe the masses who had once been beneath their notice.

  And … I shivered as I realized it. What better opportunity could there be for the Arameri’s enemies to strike?

  Glee nodded as she saw that I understood at last. “We will need everyone in the city, to watch for trouble.”

  I licked my lips, which were suddenly dry. “I don’t have any magic left,” I said. “Not a drop. I can do a few tricks, things maybe scriveners can do, but that’s nothing much. I’m just a mortal now.”

  “Mortals have their uses.” She said this with such delicate irony that I grimaced. “And you love them, don’t you? Shahar and Dekarta.”

  I remembered the mask-decayed bodies I had seen two years before, during my disastrous few days in Sky. I tried to imagine Shahar’s and Dekarta’s corpses laid out in the same way, their faces obscured by burned masks and their flesh too destroyed even to rot.

  “Take me there,” I said softly. “Wherever you’re going. I want to help.”

  She inclined her head and extended a hand to me. I took it before it occurred to me to wonder what she could do. She wasn’t a godling, just a demon. A mortal.

  Then her power clamped down on the world around us, taking us in and out of reality with a god’s deft strength. I could not help admiration; she had our father’s touch.

  Glee had rented an inn room in the northern Easha section of Shadow, a thriving business district near the city’s center. I realized at once that it was one of the nicer inns — the kind of place I couldn’t afford even on the salary Ahad gave me, and especially not before a major event in the city. It sounded as though there was a large and raucous crowd in the common room downstairs. Every inn in the city was probably filling up as people from the surrounding lands poured in to see the spectacle. Even Hymn’s place would be getting some business amid this; I was glad, if so. Though hopefully they wouldn’t be so crass as to rent out my room.

  Glee went to the window and opened the shutters, revealing the reason she’d brought us here. I went to stand beside her and saw that the window overlooked the Avenue of Nobles, at the distant end of which stood the imposing white bulk of the Salon. We had a good view: I could see the tiny figures of people milling about the avenue near the Salon’s wide steps and Order-Keepers in their conspicuously white uniforms setting up barriers to keep the onlookers back. Arameri did not appear in public often, though their faces were known thanks to the Order’s news scrolls and the currency. Everyone in a hundred-mile radius had probably traveled to the city, or was on their way, to catch a once-in-a-lifetime glimpse.

  Glee pointed along the avenue in the opposite direction, since it ran past the building we were in. “Dekarta’s procession will enter the city from there. The route hasn’t been published, but it will be in the news scrolls tomorrow morning. That makes it difficult for assassins to plan. But the procession will have to travel along the avenue this far; there’s no other way for a large party to reach the Salon.”

  “Which means they might strike anywhere along this street?” I shook my head, incredulous. Even if I’d still had magic, it was an impossible scenario to try and plan for. In the morning, the dozens of mortals around the Salon would have grown to hundreds; by afternoon, when the event was to take place, there would be thousands. How to find just one amid the morass? “Do you know how the assassins get their victims to don the masks?”

  “No.” She sighed, and for an instant her stoic face slipped. I realized she was very tired, and troubled. Was Itempas doing nothing, fobbing all the work of protecting the world off on her? Bastard.

  Turning from the window, Glee went to the room’s handsome leather chair and sat down. I turned to sit on the windowsill, because I have always been more comfortable on such perches than in any conventional seat.

  “So, we stay here until tomorrow, and then … what?” I asked.

  “Nemmer has a plan in place,” she said. “Her people have done such things before. She knows how best to utilize the strengths of both godlings and mortals. But since you and I are neither, she’s suggested that perhaps we could contribute most usefully by circulating through the crowd and keeping watch for anything unusual.”

  I shifted to prop one leg against the window frame, sighing at her characterization of me. “I still think like a godling, you know. I’ve tried to adjust, be more mortal, but —” I spread my hands. “I have been the Trickster for more years than most mortals know how to count. I’m not sure I’ll live long enough to become anything else, in my head.”

  She rested her head on the chair back and closed her eyes, evidently planning to sleep there. “Even gods have limits; yours are just different. Do what you can within them.”

  Silence fell between us, but for the soft stir of a night breeze through the open window and the mortals in the common room below, who were singing some sort of song in lusty and off-beat cadence. I listened to them for a while, smiling as I recognized the song as a variation on one I’d taught their ancestors. I hummed the tune along with them until I grew bored, and then I glanced at Glee to see if she was asleep — to find her eyes open, watching me.

  So I sighed and decided to address the matter directly. “So, little sister.” She lifted an eyebrow at this, and I smiled. “How old are you?”

  “Older than I look, like you.”

  Nearly a century, she’d said. “You’re Oree Shoth’s daughter.” I vaguely remembered her. A beautiful mortal girl, blind and brave. She had loved one of my younger brothers, who’d died. And she’d loved Itempas, too, apparently. I couldn’t see him coupling with her otherwise. Ephemeral intimacy offended him.

  “Yes.”

  “She still call him ‘Shiny’?”

  “Oree Shoth is dead.”

  “Oh.” I frowned. Something about her phrasing was odd, but I couldn’t figure out what. “I’m sorry.”

  Glee was silent for a moment, her gaze disconcertingly direct. Another thing she’d gotten from him. “Are you really?”

  “What?”

  She crossed her legs primly. “I was always told that you were one of mortalkind’s champions, in the old days. But now you don’t seem to like mortals much.” She shrugged as I scowled. “Understandably. But given that, I can’t see you getting especially upset about one more death.”

  “Well, that would mean you don’t know me very well, wouldn’t it?”

  To my surprise, she nodded. “That’s precisely what it means. Which is why I asked: are you sorry for my mother’s death? Honestly.”

  Surprised, I closed my mouth and considered my answer. “I am,” I said at last. “I liked her. She had the kind of personality that I think I could’ve gotten along with, if she hadn’t been so devoted to Itempas.” I paused, considering. “Even so, I never would’ve expected him to respond to that devotion. Oree Shoth must’ve been pretty special to make him take a chance on a mortal woman again …”

  “He left my mother before I was born.”

  “He —” Now I stared at her, flummoxed, because that was not at all like him. His heart did not change. But then I remembered another mortal lover and child he’d left behind, centuries ago. It was not his nature to leave, but he could be persuaded to do so, if it was in the best interests of those he cared for.

  “Lord Nahadoth and Lady Enefa demanded it,” Glee said, reading my face. “He left only to save her — our — lives. So, later, when I was old enough, I went looking for him. Eventually I found him. I’ve traveled with him ever since.”

  “I see.” A tale worthy of the gods, though she wasn’t one of us. And then, because it
was in my mind and she knew it was there and there was no point in my trying to conceal the obvious, I asked the question that had hovered between us for the whole two years since we’d met. “What is he like now?”

  She took her time answering, appearing to consider her words carefully. “I don’t know what he was like before the War,” she said, “or even during the years of your … incarceration. I don’t know if he’s the same as he was then, or different.”

  “He doesn’t change.”

  Another of those odd silences. “I think he may have.”

  “He can’t change. It’s anathema to him.”

  She shook her head, with familiar stubbornness. “He can. He did when he killed Enefa, and I believe he’s changed again since. He’s always been able to change, and he’s always done it, however slowly or reluctantly, because he’s a living being and change is part of life. Enefa didn’t make it that way; she just took the common qualities her brothers already possessed and put those into the godlings and mortals she created.”

  I wondered if she’d had this conversation with Itempas. “Except she made mortalkind complete, unlike us.”

  She shook her head again, the soft curls of her hair wafting gently as if in a breeze. “Gods are just as complete as mortals. Nahadoth isn’t wholly dark. Father isn’t wholly light.” She paused, her eyes narrowing at me. “You haven’t been a true child since the universe was young. And for that matter, the War in part began because Enefa — the preserver of balance — lost her balance. She loved one of her brothers more than the other, and that broke them all.”

  I stiffened. “How dare you blame her! You don’t know anything about it —”

  “I know what he told me. I know what I’ve learned, from books and legends and conversations with godlings who were there when the whole mess began, who watched from the sidelines and tried to think how to stop it, and wept as they realized they could not. You were too close, Sieh; you were hip-deep in the carnage. You decided Itempas was to blame without ever asking why.”

  “He killed my mother! Who cares why?”

  “His siblings abandoned him. Only for a brief time, but solitude is his antithesis; it weakened him. Then Shahar Arameri murdered his son, and that drove him over the edge. In this case, the ‘why’ matters a great deal, I think.”

  I laughed, bitter, sick with guilt and trying to hide my shock. Solitude? Solitude? I had never known that — No, none of that mattered. It could not matter. “A mortal! Why in the Maelstrom’s name would he mourn a single mortal so powerfully?”

  “Because he loves his children.” I flinched. Glee was glaring at me, her eyes plainly visible in the dim room. Neither of us had bothered to put on a light, because the light from the street lanterns was more than enough to see by. “Because he’s a good father, and good fathers do not stop loving if their children are merely mortal. Or if those children hate them.”

  I stared at her and found myself trembling. “He didn’t love us when he fought us in the War.”

  Glee folded her hands in front of her, steepling her fingers. She’d been spending too much time with Ahad. “From what I understand, your side was winning until Shahar Arameri used the Stone of Earth. Weren’t you?”

  “What the hells does that matter?”

  “You tell me.”

  And of course I thought back to the worst days of my life. Shahar had not been the first to use the Stone. I had sensed a godling’s controlling hand first, sending searing power — the power of life and death itself — in a terrible wave across the battlefield of earth. Dozens of my siblings had fallen in that attack. It had nearly caught me, too. That had been the first warning that the tide was turning. Until then, the taste of triumph had been thick in my mouth. Who had that godling been? One of Tempa’s loyalists; he’d had his own, same as Nahadoth. Whoever it was had died trying to wield the power of Enefa.

  Then Shahar had gotten the Stone, and she hadn’t bothered attacking mere godlings. She went straight for Nahadoth, whom she hated most because he had taken Itempas from her. I remembered watching him fall. I had screamed and wept and known then that it was my fault. All of it.

  “He … didn’t have to …” I whispered. “Itempas. If he was so sorry, he could have just —”

  “That isn’t his nature. Order is cause and effect, action and reaction. When attacked, he fights back.”

  I heard her shift to get comfortable in the chair. I heard this, because I could not look at her anymore, with her fine dark skin and too-keen eyes. She was not as obviously alien as Shinda had been, all those centuries ago. She could hide among mortalkind more easily because her peculiar heritage did not immediately announce itself and because the last thing anyone noticed about a six-foot-tall black woman was the aura of magic. There was something about her that made me think she was quite capable of defending herself, too — and I sensed Itempas’s hand in that. Action and reaction. This mortal child would not die so easily; her father had made sure of that.

  Our father.

  “Many things triggered the War,” said Glee, speaking softly. “Shahar Arameri’s madness, Itempas’s grief, Enefa’s jealousy, Nahadoth’s carelessness. No one person is to blame.” She lifted her chin belligerently. “However much you might like to believe otherwise.”

  I stayed silent.

  Itempas had never been like Nahadoth. Naha plucked lovers from the mass of mortality like flowers from a meadow, and he discarded them as easily when they wilted or a more interesting flower came along. Oh, he loved them, in his own erratic way, but steadfastness was not his nature.

  Not so Itempas. He did not love easily — but when he did, he loved forever. He had turned to Shahar Arameri, his high priestess, when Nahadoth and Enefa stopped wanting him. They’d never stopped loving him, of course; they’d just loved each other a little more. But to Itempas, it must have felt like the darkest of hells. Shahar had offered her love, and he had accepted it, because he was a creature of logic, and something was better than nothing. And because he had chosen to love her and please her, he had bent his own rules enough to give her a son. Then he’d loved that son and stayed with his mortal family for ten years. He could have easily been content with them for the remainder of their mortal lives. An eyeblink in a god’s eternity. No great matter.

  He had left them only because Naha and Nefa had convinced him that the mortals would be better off without him. And Naha and Nefa had done that only because someone had lied to them.

  Just a harmless trick, I had thought then. It harmed only the mortals, and then only a little. Shahar had status and wealth, and mortals were adaptable. They did not need him.

  Just a harmless trick.

  No one person is to blame, Itempas’s daughter had said.

  I closed my mouth against the taste of old, ground-in guilt.

  In my silence, Glee spoke again. “As for what kind of man he is now …” I thought she shrugged. “He’s stubborn, and proud, and infuriating. The kind of man who will move the earth and skies to get what he wants. Or to protect those he cares for.”

  Yes. I remembered that man. How minute of a change was sanity to insanity and back? Not much, across the expanse of time.

  “I want to see him,” I whispered.

  She was silent for a moment. “I will not allow you to harm him.”

  “I don’t want to harm him, damn it —” Though I had, I remembered, on one of the last occasions I’d seen him. She must have heard about that. I grimaced. “I won’t do anything this time, I promise.”

  “The promise of a trickster.”

  I forced myself to take a deep breath against my own temper, releasing that held breath rather than the furious words in my thoughts. It was not right, the way I thought of her. Mortal. Inferior. It was not right that I struggled to respect her. She was as much a child of the Three as I.

  “There’s no promise I can offer that you’ll trust,” I said, and was relieved that my voice stayed soft. “You shouldn’t, really. I only have to ke
ep promises to children. And honestly, I don’t know if even that applies anymore. Everything I am has changed.” I leaned my head back on the window and gazed out at the night-lit city below.

  Nahadoth could hear any words spoken at night, if he wanted.

  “Please let me see him,” I said again.

  She watched me steadily. “You should know that his magic works only in certain circumstances. It’s not powerful enough to stop whatever’s happened to you — not in his current form.”

  “I know. And I know you have to keep him safe. Do what you have to do. But if it’s possible …”

  I could see her, very faintly, beyond my reflection. She nodded to herself slowly, as if I’d passed some sort of test. “It’s possible. I can’t promise anything, of course; he may not want to see you. But I’ll speak to him.” She paused. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell Ahad.”

  Surprised, I glanced at her. My senses were not so dull that I couldn’t still distinguish scents, and the faint whiff of Ahad — cheroots and bitterness and emotions like long-clotted blood — clung to her like stale perfume. It was a few days old, but she had been in his presence, close to him, touching him. “I thought you had a thing with him.”

  She had the grace to look abashed. “I find him attractive, I suppose. That’s not ‘a thing.’

  ” I shook my head, bemused. “I’m still amazed that he had enough of a soul to be made into a complete and separate being. I don’t know what you see in him.”