And beyond them, the maskers had begun to move. Slowly, silently, they walked toward the soldiers that we could see. I could only assume that beyond the image, the scene was being repeated throughout Shadow. All of the masks that we could see, in every color, were tilted upward, paying no attention to the soldiers before them. Fixed on Sky.
“How does she command them?” Deka murmured, frowning as he peered at the image. “We were never able to determine …”
His musings were drowned out by noise from both images. Out of view, someone shouted to the soldiers, and the battle began as volleys of crossbow bolts shot toward the masked ranks. Already we could see that the bolts did almost nothing. The maskers continued forward with arrows jutting from chests, legs, abdomens. A handful went down as their masks were split or cracked, but not enough. Not nearly enough.
In the higher image, Remath barked orders to the soldiers in her audience chamber. We saw hurried movement, chaos. Amid this, however, Remath rose from her throne and turned to face it. She leaned forward and touched something we could not see.
“Shahar.” Shahar started, coming forward. “Mother? You must come here, of course. We are ready to accommodate —”
“No.” Her quiet negative struck Shahar silent, but Remath smiled. She was calmer than I had ever seen her. “I have had dreams,” she said, speaking softly. “I’ve always had them, for whatever reason, and they have always, always, come true. I have dreamt this day.”
I frowned in confusion. Dreams that came true? Was that even possible for mortals? Remath was a godling’s granddaughter …
In the image below her face, the maskers charged forward, running now. The sphere’s range was too small to capture more than a segment of chaos. For brief stretches there was nothing to see, interspersed with blurring glimpses of shouting men and still, inhuman faces. We barely noticed. Shahar stared at her mother, her face written with anguish as if there were no one else in the room, nothing else that she cared about. I put a hand on her shoulder because for a moment it looked as though she might climb onto the table to reach Remath. Her shoulder, beneath my hand, was taut and trembling with suppressed tension.
“You must come here, Mother,” she said tightly. “No matter what you’ve seen in some dream—”
“I have seen Sky fall,” said Remath, and Shahar jerked beneath my hand. “And I have seen myself die with it.”
In the other image, the one in the large sphere, there were screams. A sudden loud concussion that I thought might have been an explosion. And suddenly the sphere was jostled from its place, falling toward the Salon steps. We heard the crunch as it broke, and then the image vanished. The other image — Remath’s image — shuddered a moment later, and she looked around as people exclaimed in alarm behind her. They had felt the explosion, too.
“Why did you have the Lady build Echo, if not to come here?” Shahar was shaking her head as she spoke, wordless negation despite her effort to speak reasonably. “Why would you do this, Mother?”
“I have dreamt of more than Sky.” Remath suddenly looked away from Shahar, her gaze settling on me and Deka. “I have seen all existence fall, Lord Sieh. Sky is merely the harbinger. Only you can stop it. You and Shahar and you, my son. All three of you are the key. I built Echo to keep you safe.”
“Mother,” said Deka in a strained voice. “This —”
She shook her head. “There’s no time.” She paused suddenly, looking away as a soldier came close and murmured to her. At her nod, he hurried away, and she looked at us again, smiling. “They are climbing the Tree.”
Someone in the Marble Hall cried out. Ramina, his face taut, stepped forward. “Remath, gods damn it, there’s no reason for you to stay if —”
Remath sighed, with a hint of her usual temper. “I told you, I have seen how this must go. If I die with Sky, there is hope. My death becomes a catalyst for transformation. There is a future beyond it. If I flee, it all ends! The Arameri fall. The world falls. The decision is quite simple, Ramina.” Her voice softened again. “But … will you tell her …?”
I wondered at this as Ramina’s jaw flexed. Then I remembered: Morad. She wasn’t present, no doubt trying to assist Wrath in preparing for the possibility of an attack. I hadn’t realized Ramina knew about them, but then, I supposed, he was the only one Remath could have trusted with the secret. No doubt Morad knew about Ramina fathering Remath’s children, too. The three of them were bound together by love and secrets.
“I’ll tell her,” Ramina said at last, and Remath relaxed.
“I will, too,” I said, and she started. Then, slowly, she smiled at me.
“Lord Sieh, are you beginning to like me?”
“No,” I said, folding my arms. It was Morad whom I liked. “But I’m not a complete ass.”
She nodded. “You love my son.”
It was my turn to flinch. Very carefully I avoided looking at Deka. What the hells was she doing? If any of us got through this, the whole family would find some way to use my relationship with Deka against him. Perhaps she simply thought he could handle it.
“Yes,” I said.
“Good.” She glanced at Deka, then away, as if she could not bear to look at him. From the corner of my eye, I saw his fists clench. “I could protect only one of them, Lord Sieh. I had to make a choice. Do you understand? But I … I did what I could. Perhaps someday, you …” She faltered silent, throwing another of those darting glances at her son. I looked away so that I wouldn’t see what passed between them, and saw others doing the same around the room. This was too intimate. The Arameri had changed indeed since the old days; they no longer liked to see pain.
Then Remath sighed and faced me again, saying nothing. But she knew, I felt certain. I nodded, minutely. Yes, I love Shahar, too. For whatever good that did.
It seemed to satisfy Remath. She nodded back. As she did this, there was another shudder in Sky, and the image began to flicker. Deka muttered something in gods’ language and the image stilled, but I could see the instability of the message. Color and clarity wisped away from the image’s edges like smoke.
“Enough.” Remath rubbed her eyes, and I felt sudden sympathy for her. When she lifted her head again, her expression held its usual briskness. “The family and the world are yours now, Shahar. I have no doubt that you will do well by both.”
The image vanished, and silence fell.
“No,” Shahar whispered. Her knuckles, where her hands gripped the chair, were a sickly white. “No.”
Deka relented at last and came over. “Shahar —”
She rounded on him, her eyes wild. My first thought was, She’s gone mad.
My second thought, when she grabbed Deka’s hand, then mine, and I realized her intent in the same instant that magic washed through me like the arc of light that heralds a star’s birth —
— was demonshit, not again.
We became We.
As one, We reached forth with Our hand, unseen and yet vast, and picked up the bobbing, lonely mote that was Echo. And it was as one that We sent that mote west, hurtling across the world so rapidly that it should have killed everything inside. But part of Us (Deka) was smart enough to know that such speed was fatal for mortals, and We shaped the forces of motion around the mote accordingly. And another part of Us (me) was wise in the ways of magic, and that part murmured soothingly to the forces so they would be appeased, or else they would have backlashed violently against such abuse. But it was the will — Shahar, Shahar, O my magnificent Shahar — who drove us forward, her soul fixed on a singular intent.
Mother.
We all thought this — even I, who hated Remath, and even Deka, whose feelings toward her were such a morass that no mortal language could encompass it. (The First Tongue could: maelstrom.) And for all of Us, mother meant different things. For me it was a soft breast, cold fingers, the voice of a god with two faces — Naha, Yeine — whispering words of love. For Shahar it was fear and hope and cold eyes warming, fleetingly, with app
roval, and a single hug that would reverberate within her soul for the rest of her life. For Deka — ah, my Deka. For Deka, mother meant Shahar, a fierce little girl standing between him and the world. It meant a child-godling with old, tired eyes, who had nevertheless taken the trouble to smile kindly at him, and stroke his hair, and help him be strong.
For this, We kept control.
The palace slowed as We approached Sky-in-Shadow. We saw everything, everywhere within the scope of Our interest. On the ground just outside the city: a small force of warriors, northerners from many nations. Usein Darr was among these, sitting on the back of a small, swift horse, watching the city through a long contraption of lenses that made the distant seem closer. Like a nautilus spiral, We cycled inward, seeing all the sane folk of the city evacuating, bottlenecks of traffic on every major street. Further in: a dead masker. Beside his body crouched a woman, alone, weeping. (Mother.) In. Godlings in the streets, helping their chosen, helping any who asked, doing what they could, not doing enough. We have always been far better at destroying than protecting. Further in. Maskers now, the ones whose bodies had been old or infirm; they straggled behind their more able comrades, hobbling toward the Tree. In, in. Dead soldiers here, in the sigil-marked white of the Hundred Thousand Legions. They littered the Salon steps, lay disemboweled on the Promenade stones, hung from the windows of nearby buildings — one with a crossbow still in his hand, though his head was gone. In.
The World Tree.
Its trunk was infested with tiny, crawling mites that had once been thinking mortals. The maskers climbed with a strength that mortal flesh should not have possessed — and indeed, a few of them did not. We saw them fall, the magic burning out their bodies. But more of them clung securely to the thick, rough bark, and more still made the climb, steadily. It was only a half-mile to Sky, straight up. Some of the maskers were more than halfway there.
Shahar saw this and screamed DIE and We screamed with her. We swept Our infinite hand over the Tree, knocking the insects away: dozens, hundreds. Because they were already dead, some got up and began climbing again. We crushed them. Then We turned outward again, rushing, raging, toward Usein and her warriors. We were greedy for the taste of their fear.
They were afraid, We saw when We reached them, but not of Us.
We whirled and saw what they saw: Kahl. He stood in the air over the city, gazing down at what his machinations had wrought. He looked displeased.
We were much stronger. Exulting, We raised Our hand to destroy —
— my son —
— and stopped, frozen. Indecisive, for the first time, because of me.
We had no flesh, so Kahl did not see Us. His lips tightened at the scene below. In one hand, We saw, was the strange mask. It was complete now — and yet not. Kahl could hold it with no apparent discomfort, but the thing had no power. Certainly nothing that could forge a new god.
He raised a hand, and it is my fault, not Ours, mine, for I am a god and I should have known what he was about to do. But I did not think it, and the lives lost will haunt my eternal soul.
He sent forth power as a hundred whipcord serpents. Each wove through buildings and stone and sought its lair: a tiny, barely visible notch in all of the masks, so small as to be subliminal. (We knew across time. We saw Kahl doing a god’s work, whispering into the dreams of the sleeping dimyi artists, inspiring them, influencing them. We saw Nsana the Guide turn, sensing the intrusion upon his realm, but Kahl was subtle, subtle. He was not discovered.)
We saw all of the masks glow blue-white —
— and then explode.
Too many. Too close to the base of the Tree, where We had swept the bodies. We screamed as We understood and rushed back, but even gods are not omnipotent.
Roiling fire blossomed at the World Tree’s roots. The shock wave came later, like thunder, echoing. (Echo, Echo.) The great, shuddering groan of the Tree rose slowly, so gradually that We could deny it. We could pretend that it was not too late right up until the World Tree’s trunk split, sending splinters like missiles in every direction. Buildings collapsed, streets erupted. The screams of dying mortals mingled with the Tree’s mournful cry, then were drowned out as the Tree listed slowly, gracefully, monstrously. It fell away from Shadow, which We thought was a blessing — until the Tree’s crown, massive as mountains, struck the earth.
The concussion rippled outward in a wave that destroyed the land in every direction as far as mortal eyes could see.
We saw Sky shatter into a hundred thousand pieces.
And high above Us, his face a mask of savage triumph to contrast the mask in his hands: Kahl. He raised the mask over his head, closing his eyes. It shone now, glimmering and shivering and changing — replete, at last, with the million or more mortal lives he had just fed it. Its ornamentation and shape flared to form a new archetype — one suggesting implacability and fathomless knowledge and magnificence and quintessential power. Like Nahadoth and Itempas and Yeine, if one could somehow strip away their personalities and superficialities to leave only the distilled meaning of them. That meaning was God: the mask’s ultimate form and name.
We felt the mask call out, and We felt something answer, before Kahl vanished.
We dissolved then. Shahar’s grief, Deka’s anguish, my horror — all the same emotion, but the respective reverberations were too powerful individually to meld into the whole of Us. With what remained of Us, We (I) remembered belatedly that We were in a flying palace that had been built as a floating palace, and either way it would not do well as a falling palace. So We (I) looked around and spied the Eyeglass Lake, a boring little body of water in the middle of even more boring farmland. It would do. Into this, carefully, We deposited the delicate shell that was Echo. Usein would be pleased, at least: the Eyeglass was small and unassuming, nothing compared to the ocean’s vast grandeur. Only a mile of distance would now separate the palace from the shore; people could swim to it if they wanted. Remath’s plan to isolate the Arameri had backfired. The Arameri, such as remained, would be henceforth more accessible than ever, and far, far closer to the earth.
Then We were gone, leaving only Deka and Shahar and I, who stared at one another as the power drained away. We fell as one and sought solace in the void together.
21
THINGS CHANGED.
Deka and Shahar woke a day later. I, for reasons I can only guess at, slept for a week. I was reinstalled in Deka’s quarters and reintroduced to my old friend the feeding tube. I had aged again. Not much this time; just ten years or so. This put me in my early to mid-sixties, by my guess. Not that a few years really mattered, at that age.
In the week that I slept through, the war ended. Usein sent a message to Echo the day after Skyfall. She did not surrender, but in light of the tragedy, she and her allies were willing to offer a truce. It was not difficult to read between the lines of this. Her faction had intended the deaths of the Arameri and their soldiers, and perhaps some abstract deaths in the future as mortalkind devolved to its endless warring. No one, not even a hardened Darre warrior, had been prepared for the fallen Tree, the shattered city, or the wasteland that was now central Senm. I am told that the northerners joined in the rescue operations, and they were welcome — even though they’d inadvertently caused the disaster. Everyone who could help was welcome, in those first few days.
The city’s godlings did what they could. They had saved many by transporting them out of the area when the first explosions began. They had saved more by mitigating the damage. The Tree’s roots had nearly torn free of the earth when it fell. If the stump had uprooted, there would have been no rubble from which to rescue survivors, only a city-sized freshly turned grave. The godlings worked tirelessly thereafter, entering the most damaged parts of the city and sniffing out the fading scents of life, holding up sagging buildings, teaching the scriveners and bonebenders magic that would save many lives in the days to follow. Godlings from other lands came to help, and even a few from the gods’ realm.
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Despite this, of all the mortals who had once populated Sky-in-Shadow, only a few thousand survived.
Shahar, in her first act as the family head, did something at once stupid and brilliant: she ordered that Echo be opened to the survivors. Wrath protested this vehemently and finally prevailed in getting Shahar and the rest of the highbloods to relocate to the center of the palace — the Whorl and its surrounding buildings, which could be guarded by Wrath’s men and the handful of remaining soldiers who had come with the survivors. The rest of Echo was ceded to wounded, heart-lost mortals, many of them still covered in dust and blood, who gratefully slept in beds that made themselves and ate food that appeared whenever they wished for it. These were small comforts, and no consolation, given what they had suffered.
In the days that followed, Shahar convened an emergency session of the Nobles’ Consortium and blatantly asked for help. The people of Shadow could rebuild, she said, with time to heal and sufficient assistance. But more than goods and food, they would need something the Arameri could not provide: peace. So she asked the assembled nobles to put aside their differences with each other and the Arameri and to remember the best principles of the Bright. It was, I am told, an amazing, stirring speech. The proof of this lies in the fact that they listened to her. Caravans of supplies and troops of volunteers began arriving within the week. There was no more talk of rebellion — only for the time being, but even that was a significant concession.
They may have been motivated by more than Shahar’s words, however. There was a new object in the sky, and it was drawing closer.