The Kingdom of Gods

  It didn’t kill me. Didn’t even hurt much, compared to the agony that Kahl’s revelation had caused. The blast threw me upside down against the window; a passing squid seemed fascinated by my shoelaces on the glass. What amused me, even as I lay there dazed and struggling to right myself, was that Shahar’s sigil had only treated me as a threat now, in my useless mortal form. She had never truly feared me when I was a god.

  Deka pulled me up. “Tell me you’re all right.”

  “Fine,” I said muzzily. My knees hurt more, and my back was killing me, but I refused to admit that. I blinked and managed to focus on Shahar. She hovered, half standing, above her seat. Her eyes were wide and stricken. That made me feel better, at least. She hadn’t meant it.

  Deka meant it, however, as he let me go and got to his feet. I felt the black pulse of his magic, heavy as a god’s, and thought for a moment that I heard the echoing sibilance of the air as he turned to face his sister.

  “Deka,” she began.

  He spoke a word that cracked the air, and thunder roiled in its wake. She cried out, arching backward and clapping both hands over her forehead, half falling over her seat. When she struggled upright a moment later, there was blood on her fingers and streaking her face. She lowered her trembling hand, and I saw the raw, scorched wound where her semisigil had been.

  “Mother is a fool,” Deka said, his voice echoing and cold. “I love you, and she thinks that keeps you safe from me. But I would rather kill you myself than watch you become the kind of monster this family is infamous for producing.” His right arm levered away from his side, stick-straight, though his hand hung loose, the backs of his fingers caressing the air like a lover. I remembered the meaning of the markings on that arm and realized he really was going to kill her.

  “Deka …” Shahar shook her head, trying to clear blood from her eyes. She looked like the victim of some disaster, though the disaster had not yet struck. “I didn’t … Sieh, is he all … I can’t see.”

  I touched Deka’s other arm and found the muscles as tight as woven rope. Power tingled against my fingers, through his shirt. “Deka. Don’t.”

  “You would do the same, if you still could,” he snapped.

  I considered this. He knew me so well. “True. But it would be wrong for you.”

  That caused his head to whip toward me. “What?”

  I sighed and stepped in front of him, though the power that coiled around him pressed warningly against my skin. Scriveners were not gods. But Deka was not just a scrivener, and it was as a brother-god that I touched his arm and gently, firmly, guided it back to his side. Gestures were a form of communication. Mine said, Listen to me, and his power withdrew to consider my suggestion. I saw his eyes widen as he realized what I had done.

  “She is your sister,” I said. “You’re strong, Deka, so strong, and they are fools to forget that you’re Arameri, too. Murder is in your blood. But I know you, and if you kill her, it will destroy you. I can’t let you do that.”

  He stared at me, trembling with warring urges. I have never before seen such deadly rage mingled with loving sorrow, but I think it must have been what Itempas felt when he killed Enefa. A kind of madness that only time and reflection can cure — though by then, usually, it is too late.

  But he listened to me and let the magic go.

  I turned to Shahar, who had finally gotten the blood out of her eyes. By the look on her face, she had only just begun to realize how close she’d come to death.

  “We’re leaving,” I said. “I am, anyway, and I’m going to ask Deka to come with me. If you’ve decided that we’re your enemies, we can’t stay here. If you’re wise, you’ll leave us be.” I sighed. “You haven’t been very wise today, but I suspect that’s a onetime aberration. I know you’ll come to your senses eventually. I just don’t feel like waiting around for it to happen.”

  Then I took Deka’s hand, looking up at him. His expression had gone bleak; he knew I was right. But I would not press him. He’d spent ten years trying to get back to his sister, and she’d undone that in ten minutes. Such things were not easy for any mortal to bear. Or any god, for that matter.

  Deka’s hand squeezed mine, and he nodded. We turned to leave the audience chamber. Shahar stood behind us. “Wait,” she said, but we ignored her.

  When I opened the door, however, everything changed.

  We stopped in surprise at the noise of many voices, raised and angry. Beyond the main corridor, I glimpsed soldiers running and heard shouts. Immediately before us was Morad, her face red with fury. She was shouting at the guards, who’d crossed pikes in front of the chamber’s entrance. When the door opened, the guards started, and Morad grabbed at one of the pikes, half yanking it away before the guard cursed and tightened his grip.

  “Where is Shahar?” she demanded. “I will see her.”

  Shahar came up behind us. It was a measure of Morad’s agitation that she did not blink at the sight of the heir’s bloody face. “What has happened, Morad?” I heard the thinness of the calm veneer on Shahar’s voice. She had composed herself, just.

  “Maskers have attacked Shadow,” Morad said.

  We stood there, stunned into silence. Behind her, a troop of soldiers came tearing around the corner, running toward us. Wrath was behind them, walking with the ominous deliberation of a general preparing for war. All around us I could feel a hollow thrum as whatever protective magics Deka’s scriveners had put into place came alive. Seals for the gates, invisible walls to keep out foreign magics, who knew what else.

  “How many maskers?” asked Shahar. She spoke more briskly now, all business.

  After the worst had passed, I would remember this moment. I would see the false calm on Morad’s face, and hear the real anguish in her voice, and pity her all the more. A servant and a queen were as doomed as a mortal and a god. Some things could not be helped.

  “All of them,” Morad said.

  20

  Ashes, ashes, we all fall DOWN!

  It was the stillness that made them so frightening.

  It was not easy to view city streets and crowds via a seeing sphere. The spheres were made to display nearby faces, not vast scenes. And what Wrath’s lieutenant in Shadow had to show us, by slowly panning his sphere in a circle, was vast.

  There were dozens of maskers.

  Hundreds.

  They filled the streets. In the Promenade, where normally pilgrims jostled with street performers and artists for space, there were only maskers. Along the Avenue of Nobles, right up to the steps of the Salon: maskers. Just visible amid the trees and flowers of Gateway Park: maskers. Approaching from South Root, their shoes stained by street muck: maskers.

  We could see many fleeting forms that were not maskers, most of them hurrying in the opposite direction, some of them carrying whatever they could on horses or wheelbarrows or their own hunched backs. The people of Shadow were no strangers to magic, having lived among godlings for decades and in the shadow of Sky for centuries. They knew trouble when they smelled it, and they knew the appropriate response: run.

  The maskers did not molest the unmasked. They moved in silence and unison, when they moved. Most of them stopped moving when they reached the center of Shadow, then just stood there, utterly still. Men and women, a few children — not many, thank me — a few elders. No two masks were alike: they came in white and black; some were marbled like Echo’s substance; some were red and cobalt blue and stony gray. Some were painted porcelain, some clay and straw. Many were in the High Northern style, but quite a few displayed the aesthetics and archetypes of other lands. The variation was astonishing.

  And they were all looking up at Sky.

  We — Shahar and Dekarta and I, and a good number of the highbloods and servants — stood in what would doubtless come to be called the Marble Hall, given the usual Amn naming conventions. For some reason known only to Yeine, the walls of the chamber were streaked with a deep rust color, interspersing white and gray, which made the whole
room look washed in blood. There was some wry symbolism in this, I suspected; some element of Yeine’s morbid sense of humor. I was apparently too mortal to get the joke.

  Wrath was gone, though his soldiers were present, guarding the doors and the balcony. It had been his suggestion to gather all the highbloods together; easier to guard. While we waited for him to say when we could leave — no time soon, I gathered — some servant had brought the large seeing sphere from the scriveners’ storage, setting it up on the room’s single long table. Through this, we were able to behold the ominous stillness in the streets of Shadow.

  “Are they waiting for something?” asked a woman who bore a halfblood mark. She stood near Ramina. He put a comforting hand on her back while she stared at the hovering image.

  “Some signal, perhaps,” he replied. For once, he was not smiling. But long minutes passed, and there was no movement on the part of the maskers. The person panning the sphere stood atop the Salon’s steps. On either end of the arc swing we could glimpse Arameri soldiers, clad in the white armor of the Hundred Thousand Legions, hastily setting up barricades and preparing for a defensive battle. Even in such brief glimpses, however, we saw enough to despair. The bulk of the Arameri army was outside the city, in a vast complex of permanent barracks and bases stationed a half day’s ride away. Everyone had assumed that the attack, when it came, would be from beyond the city. The army was no doubt marching and riding and gating into the city as fast as it could now, but those of us who had seen the maskers in action knew that it would take more than soldiers to stop them.

  I turned to Shahar, who stood on one of the elevated tiers around the chamber’s edge. She had wrapped her arms around herself as if cold; her expression was too blank to be intentional. In the whole room, where her relatives clustered in twos and threes and comforted each other, she stood alone.

  I considered for a moment, then stepped away from Deka and went to her. Her head turned sharply toward me as I approached. She was not at all in shock. A subtle shift transformed her posture from the lost girl of a moment before to the cold queen who had tried to enslave her brother. But I saw the wariness in her. She had lost that battle.

  Deka watched me go to her but did not join us.

  “Shouldn’t you contact Remath?” I asked. I kept my tone neutral.

  She relaxed fractionally, acknowledging my unspoken offer of truce. “I’ve tried. Mother hasn’t answered.” She looked away, through the translucent walls, at the lowering sun. West, toward Sky. “There’s no point, in any case. The army is there and under Mother’s command as it should be, along with the bulk of the scrivener and assassin corps and the nobles’ private forces. Echo is barely functional and understaffed as it is. We have no help to offer.”

  “Not all support must be material, Shahar.” It still felt strange to remember that Remath and Shahar loved each other. I would never get used to Arameri behaving like normal people.

  She glanced at me again, not so sharply this time. Considering. Then Ramina said, “Something’s happening,” and we all grew tense.

  There was a blur in the air, a few feet above and to one side of the image we’d been watching. The soldiers reached for their weapons. The highbloods gasped and one cried out. Deka and the other scriveners tensed, some pulling out premade, partially drawn sigils.

  Then the image resolved, and we saw Remath. The image was angled oddly — over her shoulder and slightly behind her. The sphere must have been set into her stone seat.

  Facing her, in Sky’s audience chamber, was Usein Darr.

  Shahar caught her breath and moved down the steps, as if she meant to step through the image and aid her mother. The soldiers in Sky’s audience chamber had drawn their weapons, swords and pikes and crossbows. They did not attack, however. Remath must have warned them off, though two of her guards, Darre women, had moved to stand between Remath and Usein, crouching with hands on their knives. Usein stood proud and fearless at the center of the room, ignoring the guards. She had come unarmed, though she did wear traditional Darre battle dress: a leather-wrapped waist, a heavy fur mantle that marked her as a battlefield commander, and armor made of thin plates of flakespar — a light, strong material the Darre had invented a few decades back. She looked taller when she wasn’t pregnant.

  “I take it we have you to thank for the spectacle below,” said Remath. She drawled the words, sounding amused.

  Usein inclined her head. I thought she would speak in Darre, given her nationalism, but she used clear, ringing Senmite instead. “It is not our preferred way of doing battle, we in the north. To use magic, even our own, feels cowardly.” She shrugged. “But you Arameri do not fight fair.”

  “True,” said Remath. “Well, then. I expect you have demands?”

  “Simple ones, Arameri.” Family name only was the way Darre addressed formidable opponents, a mark of respect by her terms. To Amn, of course, it was blatant disrespect. “I — and my allies, who would be here if it had not taken all our dimmers and magicians to get even one person through your barriers — demand that your family give up its power and all trappings thereof. Your treasury: fifty percent of it is to be given to the Nobles’ Consortium, to be distributed equally among the nations of the world. Thirty percent will go to the Order of Itempas and all established faiths that offer public services. You may retain twenty percent. You may no longer address the Nobles’ Consortium. It is for them to say whether Sky-in-Shadow can retain its representative. Disband your army and distribute its generals among the kingdoms; relinquish your scriveners and spies and assassins and all your other little toys.” Her eyes flicked toward the Darre guards, full of contempt. I did not see whether the women reacted to this or not. “Send your son back to the Litaria; you don’t want him anyway.” (Nearby, Deka’s jaw flexed.) “Send your daughter to foster in some other kingdom for ten years so that she can learn the ways of some people other than you murderous, high-handed Amn. I will leave the choice of kingdom to you.” She smiled thinly. “But Darr would welcome her and treat her with such respect as she is capable of earning.”

  “Like hells will I live among those tree-swinging barbarians,” snapped Shahar, and the other highbloods murmured in angry agreement.

  Usein went on. “In short, we demand that the Arameri become just another family and leave the world to rule itself.” She paused, looking around. “Oh. And leave this palace. Sky’s presence profanes the Lady’s Tree — and frankly, the rest of us are tired of looking up at you. You will henceforth dwell on the ground, where mortals belong.”

  Remath waited a moment after Usein fell silent. “Is that all?”

  “For now.”

  “May I ask a question?”

  Usein lifted an eyebrow. “You may.”

  “Are you responsible for the murders of my family members?” Remath spoke lightly, but only a fool would not have heard the threat underneath. “You in the plural, obviously.”

  For the first time, Usein looked unhappy. “That was not our doing. Wars of assassination are not our way.” Left unspoken was that wars of assassination were very much the Amn way.

  “Whose, then?”

  “Kahl.” Usein smiled, but it was bleak. “Kahl Avenger, we call him — a godling. He has been of great help to us, me and my forbears and our allies, but it has since become clear that this served his own agenda. He merely used us. We have broken ways with him, but I’m afraid the damage is done.” She paused, her jaw tightening briefly. “He has killed my husband and numerous members of our Warriors’ Council. Perhaps that will seem a consolation to you.”

  Remath shook her head. “Murder is never a thing to be celebrated.”

  “Indeed.” Usein regarded Remath for a long moment, then bowed to her. It was not a deep bow, but the respect in the gesture was plain. An apology, unspoken. “Kahl has been declared an enemy by the peoples of the north. But that does not negate our quarrel with you.”

  “Naturally.” Remath paused, then inclined her head, a show of grea
t respect in Amn terms, since the ruler of the Amn had no need to bow to anyone. By Darre standards, it was probably an insult.

  “Thank you for your honesty,” Remath added. “Now, as to the rest, your demands regarding my family: no.”

  Usein raised her eyebrows. “That’s all? ‘No’?”

  “Were you expecting anything else?” I could not see Remath’s face well, but I guessed that she smiled.

  Usein did, too. “Not really, no. But I must warn you, Arameri: I speak for the people of this world. Not all of them would agree with me, I will admit, as they have spent too many centuries under your family’s control. You have all but crushed the spirit of mortalkind. It is for their sake that I and my allies will now fight to revive it — and we will not be merciful.”

  “Are you certain that’s what you want?” Remath sat back, crossing her legs. “The spirit of mortalkind is contentious, Usein-ennu. Violent, selfish. Without a strong hand to guide it, this world will not know peace again for many, many centuries. Perhaps ever.”

  Usein nodded, slowly. “Peace is meaningless without freedom.”

  “I doubt the children who starved to death, before the Bright, would agree.”

  Usein smiled again. “And I doubt the races and heretics your family have destroyed would consider the Bright peace.” She made a small gesture of negation with her hand. “Enough. I have your answer, and you will soon have mine.” She lifted a small stone that bore a familiar mark. A gate sigil. She closed her eyes, and a flicker later she was gone.

  The lower image — of Shadow and the silent maskers — jolted abruptly, drawing our eyes. There was a brief blur of motion, which grew still as the soldier who held the sphere set it down. We saw him then, a young man in heavy armor marked with seven sigils: one on each limb, one on his helmet, one on his torso, and one on his back. Simple magic of protection. He held a pike at the ready, as did the other men — all in the same armor — that we could see. Their armor was white. I suppose Remath hadn’t gotten around to reequipping her army to symbolize the family’s new divine allegiance.