More gravel, chuffing rhythmically as he came over to me. His warm hands took hold of mine where they gripped the stick. I was so surprised by this that I let him pry me loose and pull me up to stand. He did nothing then, for several moments. Just looked at me. I became aware, belatedly, that I wore nothing but a silk robe. The winter had been mild this year, and spring was coming early, but the night had begun to turn cold. Goose bumps prickled my skin, and my nipples tented the silk. I had worn as little in my own house—or less. Nudity meant nothing to me as titillation, and Shiny had never shown the slightest interest. Now, however, I was very aware of his gaze, and… it bothered me. I had never experienced this particular flavor of discomfort with him before.
He leaned closer, his hands sliding up to my arms. His hands were very warm, almost comforting. I didn’t know what he meant to do until his lips brushed mine. Startled, I tried to pull away, and his hands tightened sharply—not enough to hurt, but it was a warning. I froze. He drew near again and kissed me.
I didn’t know what to think. But as his mouth coaxed mine open with a skill I had never imagined he possessed, and his tongue flickered at my lips, I could not help relaxing against him. If he had forced the kiss, I would have hated it. I would have fought. Instead he was gentle—unnaturally, too-perfectly gentle. His mouth tasted of nothing, which was strange and somehow emphasized his inhumanity. It was not like kissing Madding. There was no flavor of Shiny’s inner self. But when his tongue touched my own, I jumped a little, because it felt good. I had not expected that. His hands slid down to my waist, then my hips, pulling me closer. I breathed his peculiar, hot-spice smell. The heat and strength of his body—it was wholly different from Madding. Disturbing. Interesting. His teeth grazed my lower lip and I shivered, this time not wholly in fear.
He had not closed his eyes. I could feel them watching me, evaluating me, cold despite the heat of his mouth.
When he pulled back, he drew in a breath. Let it out slowly. Said, still in a terrible, soft voice, “You don’t love Madding.”
I stiffened.
“Even now, you want me.” There was such contempt in his voice; each word dripped with venom. I had never before heard such emotion from him, and all of it hate. “His power intrigues you. The prestige of having a god for a lover. Perhaps you’re even devoted to him in your small way—though I doubt that, since it seems any god will do.” He let out a small sigh. “I know well the dangers of trusting your kind. I warned my children, kept them away while I could, but Madding is stubborn. I mourn the pain it will cause him when he finally realizes just how unworthy of his love you are.”
I stood there, shocked to numbness. Believing him, for a long, horrifying moment. Shiny had been—still was, diminished or not—the god I had revered all my life. Of course he was right. Had I not hesitated at Madding’s offer? My god had judged me and found me wanting, and it hurt.
Then sense reasserted itself, and with it came pure fury.
I was still backed against the cistern strut, which gave me perfect leverage as I planted my hands on Shiny’s chest and shoved him back with all my strength. He stumbled back, making a sound of surprise. I followed, all my fear and confusion forgotten amid red-hot rage.
“That’s your proof?” My hands found his chest and I shoved him again, throwing all my weight into it just for the satisfaction of hearing him grunt as I did so. “That’s what makes you think I don’t love Mad? You’re a damned good kisser, Shiny, but do you honestly think you hold a candle to Madding in my heart?” I laughed, my own voice echoing harshly in my ears. “My gods, he was right! You really don’t know anything about love.”
I turned, muttering to myself, and began making my way back to the roof door.
“Wait,” Shiny said.
I ignored him, sweeping my stick in a tight angry arc ahead of me. His hand caught my arm again, and this time I tried to shake him off, cursing.
“Wait,” he said, not letting go. He turned away from me, barely noticing my rage. “Someone’s here.”
“What are you—” But I heard it, too, now, and froze. Footsteps, chuffing on the rooftop gravel, beside the door hatch.
“Oree Shoth?” The voice was male, cool and dark like the late-winter night. Familiar, though I could not place it.
“Y-yes,” I said, wondering if this was some customer of Madding’s, and what he was doing on the roof if that was the case. And how did he know my name? Maybe he’d overheard some of Madding’s people gossiping. “Were you looking for me?”
“Yes. Though I had hoped you’d be alone.”
Shiny shifted suddenly, moving in front of me, and I found myself trying to hear the man through his rather intimidating bulk. I opened my mouth to shout at him, too angry for politeness or respect—and then I stopped.
It was faint. I had to squint. But Shiny had begun to glow.
“Oree,” he said. Calm, as always. “Go into the house.”
Fear stopped anything else I might have said. “H-he’s between me and the door.”
“I will remove him.”
“I wouldn’t advise that,” said the man, unruffled. “You aren’t a godling.”
Shiny sighed, and under other circumstances, I would have been amused by his annoyance. “No,” he snapped, “I’m not.”
And before I could speak again, he was gone, the space in front of me cold in his absence. There was a glimmer of magic—something occluded by the hazy shimmer of Shiny’s body. Then a flurry of movement, cloth tearing, the struggle of flesh against flesh. A spray of wetness across my face, making me flinch.
And then silence.
I held still for a moment, my own breath loud and fast in my ears as I strained to hear the sound that I knew and feared would come: bodies, hitting the cobblestones of the street three stories below. But there was only that terrible silence.
My nerves snapped. I ran to the roof door, clawed it open, and flung myself into the house, screaming.
6
“A Window Opens” (chalk on concrete)
THERE ARE THINGS he told me about himself. Not all of it, of course—some things I heard from other gods or remember from old stories of my childhood. But mostly he just told me. It was not his nature to lie.
In the time of the Three, things were very different. There were many temples but few holy texts, and no persecution of those with differing beliefs. Mortals loved whatever gods they wished—often several at once—and it was not called heresy. If there were disputes about a particular bit of lore or magic, it was simple enough to call on a local godling and ask about it. No point in getting possessive about one god or another when there were plenty to go around.
It was during this time that the first demons were born: offspring of mortal humans and immortal gods, neither one nor the other, possessing the greatest gifts of both. One of those gifts was mortality—a strange thing to call a gift, by my thinking, but people back then thought differently. Anyhow, all the demons possessed it.
But consider what this means: all the demons died. Doesn’t make sense, does it? Children rarely take after just one of their parents. Shouldn’t a few of the demons have inherited immortality? They certainly got the magic, in plenty—so much that they passed it on to us, when they mated with us. Scrivening and bonebending and prophecy and shadow-sending, all of this came to mortalkind through the demons. But even when the demons took godly lovers and had children with them, those children grew old and died, too.
For us, the divine inheritance was a blessing. For the gods, one drop of mortal blood doomed their offspring to death.
Apparently, no one realized what this meant for a very long time.
* * *
I scrambled downstairs much faster than I should have, given that I’d never gotten around to memorizing Madding’s stairs. Behind me trailed Paitya; the middle-aged godling; Kitr, who had come out of nowhere at my shout and was visible for once; and Madding. As we reached the room of pools, two more people joined us: a tall mortal woman
who shone with nearly as many godwords as Previt Rimarn, and a sleek racing dog who glowed white in my sight. As I reached the house’s front door, I heard other calls upstairs; I’d woken the whole house.
I might have felt bad if my thoughts had not been filled with that awful silence.
“Oree!” Hands caught me before I got three steps out the door; I fought them. A blur of blue resolved into Madding. “You shouldn’t leave the house, damn it.”
“I have to—” I twisted to get around Madding. “He—”
“He who? Oree—” Madding abruptly went still. “Why is there blood on your face?”
That stopped my panic, though the hand that I lifted to my face shook badly. Wetness had splattered my face up on the roof; I’d forgotten.
“Boss?” Paitya had crouched to peer at something on the ground. I could not see what, but the grim expression on his face was unmistakable. “There’s a lot more blood here.”
Madding turned to look, and his eyes widened. He turned back to me, frowning. “What happened? Where were you, up on the roof?” Suddenly his frown deepened. “Did Father do something to you? So help me—”
Kitr, who had been scanning the street for danger, looked at us both sharply. “You told her?”
Madding ignored her, though I caught his wince of consternation. He turned me from one side to the other, checking for injuries. “I’m fine,” I said, holding my stick to my chest as I grew calmer. “I’m fine. But, yes, I was on the roof, with… with Shiny. There was someone… a man. I couldn’t see him; he must’ve been mortal. He knew my name, said he’d been looking for me—”
Paitya cursed and stood up, narrowing his eyes as he scanned the area. “Since when do Order-Keepers come by way of the damned roof? They usually have sense enough not to piss us off.”
Madding muttered something in gods’ language; it curled and spiked, a curse. “What happened?”
“Shiny,” I said. “He fought with the man. There was magic…” I clutched at Madding’s arms, my fingers tightening on the cloth of his shirt. “Mad, the man hit him with magic somehow, I think that’s what caused the blood, I think Shiny grabbed him and pulled him off the roof, but I didn’t hear them hit the ground…”
Madding had already begun gesturing at his companions, directing them to search around the house and nearby streets. Kitr stayed nearby, as did Paitya. Madding had no real need of bodyguards, but I did, and he had probably directed one of them to spirit me away if it came down to any sort of fight.
“I’m going to raze that White Hall to the ground,” he snarled, his human shape flickering blue as he pushed me back toward the front door. “If they’ve dared to attack my house, my people—”
“He wasn’t after Shiny,” I murmured, realizing it belatedly. I stopped, clutching Madding’s arm to get his attention. “Mad, that man wasn’t after Shiny at all! If he was an Order-Keeper, he would’ve wanted Shiny, wouldn’t he? They know he killed the ones in South Root.” The more I thought about it, the more certain I became. “I don’t think that man was an Order-Keeper at all.”
I didn’t mistake the swift, startled look that crossed Madding’s face. He exchanged a glance with Kitr, who looked equally alarmed. Kitr then turned to look at one of the mortals, the scrivener. She nodded and knelt, taking a pad of paper out of her jacket and uncapping a thin ink-brush.
“I’ll go see, too,” said the middle-aged godling, vanishing. Madding pulled me against him, holding me firm with one arm and keeping the other free, in case of trouble. I tried to feel safe there, in the arms of one god and protected by half a dozen others, but all my nerves were a-jangle, and the panic would not fade. I could not push aside the feeling that something was wrong, very wrong, that someone was watching, that something was going to happen. I felt it with every ounce of intuition that I possessed.
“There’s no body,” said Paitya, coming over to us. Beyond him, I could see other godlings winking in and out of sight about the street, on nearby windowsills, on the edge of a roof. “Enough blood that there should be, but nothing. Not even, er, parts.”
“Is it—” I had to struggle to be heard, half muffled against Madding’s shoulder.
“It’s his.” Paitya glanced back at the racing dog, who was sniffing at the spot now; the dog looked up and nodded in solemn confirmation. “No doubt about it. The blood’s just splattered about; it fell from above. But he didn’t land here.”
Madding muttered something in his own tongue, then switched to Senmite so I would understand. “There must have been a weapon. Or magic, as you said.” He looked down at me, scowling in irritation. “He’s powerless now. He must have known he couldn’t take a scrivener, if that’s what the man was. On the roof of a house full of godlings—why didn’t he just call for help? Stubborn bastard.”
I closed my eyes and leaned against Madding, suddenly weary. I could have called for help, too, I realized belatedly, though I’d been too frightened to think of doing so. Shiny, however, hadn’t been afraid at all. He hadn’t wanted help. He’d done it again—charged into a dangerous situation, spent his life like currency, all so he could have a taste of his old power. It had been for my benefit this time, but did that really make it better? Godlings respected life, including their own. They were just as immortal, but they at least tried to defend themselves or evade blows when attacked. When they fought, they tried not to kill. While Shiny slaughtered even his own kin.
“The Nightlord should’ve just killed him,” I said, filled with sudden bitterness. Madding raised his eyebrows in surprise, but I shook my head. “There’s something wrong with him, Mad. I always suspected it, but tonight…”
I remembered the little break in Shiny’s voice when he’d admitted his role in the Gods’ War. Just an instant of instability, a crack in the bedrock of his stoicism. But it went deeper than that, didn’t it? His carelessness with his flesh—how had he ended up dead in my muckbin, all those months ago? That vicious kiss he’d given me. His even more vicious words afterward, blaming me for all the duplicity of the human race.
He was—or had been—the god of order, the living embodiment of stability, peace, and rationality. The man he had become, here in the mortal realm, didn’t make sense. Shiny did not feel like Itempas because Shiny wasn’t Itempas, and no part of my proper Maro upbringing would let me accept him as such.
Madding sighed. “Nahadoth wanted to kill him, Oree. A lot of my siblings did, too, after what he’d done. But the Three created this universe; if any one of them dies, it all ends. So he was sent here, where he can do the least damage. And maybe…” He paused, and again I heard that hint of longing in his voice. Hope, not quite stifled. “Maybe, somehow, he can… get better. See the error of his ways. I don’t know.”
“He said he was trying to apologize. Up on the roof. To… to…” I shuddered. We did not forget his name, but we didn’t say it, either, not if we could help it. “The Nightlord.”
Madding blinked in surprise. “Did he? That’s more than I ever thought he’d do.” He sobered. “But I doubt that will do any good. He killed my mother, Oree. Murdered her with poison, mutilated her body. Then spent the next few millennia killing or imprisoning any of us who dared to protest. It takes a little more than an apology to atone for that.”
I reached up to touch Madding’s face, reading his expression with my fingers. This helped me catch what I had missed. “You’re still angry about it.”
His brow furrowed. “Of course I am. I loved her! But”—he sighed heavily, leaning down to press his forehead against mine—“I loved him, too, once.”
I cupped his face in my hands, wishing I knew how to comfort him. This was family business, though, between father and son. It was Shiny’s problem to solve, if we ever found him.
There was one thing I could do, though.
“I’ll stay,” I said.
He started, pulling back to stare at me. Of course he knew what I meant. After a long moment, he said, “Are you sure?”
I a
lmost laughed. I was shaky inside, not just from leftover panic. “No. But I don’t think I ever will be. I just… I know what’s most important to me.” I did laugh then, as I realized that Shiny had helped me decide, with that horrid kiss and the challenge in his words. I did, too, love Madding. And I wanted to be with him, even though it meant the end of the life I’d worked so hard to build and the end of my independence. Love meant compromise, after all—something I suspected Shiny did not understand.
Madding’s face was solemn as he nodded, accepting my decision. I liked that he did not smile. I think he knew what the decision cost me.
Instead, after a moment, he sighed and glanced at Kitr, who had carefully paid more attention to the street than to us for the past few minutes.
“I’m calling everyone in,” he said. “I don’t like this. No mere scrivener should be able to hide from us.” He glanced back, in the direction of the splashes of blood. “And I can’t sense Father anywhere. I especially don’t like that.”
“Nor can I,” said Kitr. “There are some of us with the power to hide him, but why would they? Unless…” She glanced at me, assessing and dismissing in a single sweep of her eyes. “You think this has something to do with Role? Your mortal there did find the body, but what’s that got to do with anything?”
“I don’t know, but—”
“Wait. There’s something…” This came from the other side of the street. I followed the voice and saw the sigil-etched outline of Madding’s scrivener. She stood looking up at the buildings nearby, holding a sheet of paper in her hands. A series of individual sigils had been drawn at the corners, with three rows of godwords in the middle. As I watched, one of the godwords and a sigil in the upper right corner began to glow more brightly. The scrivener, who apparently knew what this meant, gasped and took several steps back. I could not see her face, for she had no godwords written there, but terror filled her voice. “Oh, gods, I knew it! Look out! All of you, look—”