“Kill her,” Shiny said.
I flinched and stared at his profile. He glanced at me. “If she is dead, her secrets no longer matter. No one will look for her. No one can use her.”
I understood then, though the idea made me shiver. T’vril turned to look at us over his shoulder. “A false death? Interesting.” He thought for a moment. “It would have to be thorough. She could never speak to her friends again, or even her mother. She could no longer be Oree Shoth at all. I can arrange for her to be sent elsewhere, with resources and a concocted past. Perhaps even hold a magnificent funeral for the brave woman who gave her life to expose a plot against the gods.” He glanced at me. “But if my spies hear any rumor, any hint of your survival, then the game ends, Eru Shoth. I will do whatever is necessary to prevent you from falling into the wrong hands again. Is that understood?”
I stared at him, and at Shiny, and then at myself. At the body that I could see, as a shadowy outline against the constant glow of Sky’s light. Breasts, gently rolling. Hands, fascinatingly complex as I lifted them, turned them, flexed the fingers. The tips of my feet. A spiraling curl of hair at the edge of my vision. I had never seen myself so completely before.
To die, even in this false way, would be terrible. My friends would mourn me, and I would mourn even more the life I’d already lost. My poor mother: first my father and now this. But it was the magic, the strangeness of Shadow, all the beautiful and frightening things that I had learned and experienced and seen, that would hurt most to leave behind.
I had once wanted to die. This would be worse. But if I did it, I would be free.
I must have stayed silent too long. Shiny turned to me, his heavy gaze more compassionate than I had ever imagined it could be. He understood; of course he did. It was a hard thing, sometimes, to live.
“I understand,” I said to the Lord Arameri.
He nodded. “Then it shall be done. Remain here another day. That should be sufficient time for me to make the arrangements.” He turned back to the window, another wordless dismissal.
I stood there unmoving, hardly daring to believe it. I was free. Free, like old times.
Shiny turned to leave, then turned back to me, radiating irritation at my failure to follow. Like old times.
Except that he had fought for me. And won.
I trotted after him and took his arm, and if it bothered him that I pressed my face against his shoulder as we walked back to my room, he did not complain.
19
“The Demons’ War” (charcoal and chalk on black paper)
IT SHOULD HAVE ENDED THERE. That would have been best, wouldn’t it? A fallen god, a “dead” demon, two broken souls limping back toward life. That would have been the end that this tale deserved, I think. Quiet. Ordinary.
But that wouldn’t have been good for you, would it? Too lacking in closure. Not dramatic enough. I will tell myself, then, that what happened next was a fortunate thing, though even now it feels anything but.
* * *
I slept deeply that night, despite my fear of what was to come, despite my worry about Paitya and the others, despite my cynical suspicion that the Lord Arameri would find some other way to keep me under his graceful, kindly thumb. My arm had healed completely, so I stripped off the bandages and the sling and the sigil-script, took a long, deep bath to celebrate the absence of pain, and curled up against Shiny’s warmth. He shifted on the bed to make room for me, and I felt him watching me as I fell asleep.
Sometime after midnight, I woke with a start, blinking in disorientation as I rolled over. The room was quiet and still; Sky’s magical walls were too thick to let me hear movement in the halls beyond, or even the sound of the wind that must surely be fierce outside, up so high. In that, I preferred the House of the Risen Sun, where at least there had been small sounds of life all around me—people walking through the corridors, chanting and songs, the occasional creaking and groaning of the Tree as it swayed. I would not miss the House, or its people, but being there had not been wholly unpleasant.
Here there was only the quiet, bright-glowing stillness. Shiny was asleep beside me, his breathing deep and slow. I tried to remember if I’d had a nightmare but could recall nothing. Pushing myself up, I looked around the room because I could. There would be things I’d miss about Sky, too. I saw nothing, but my nerves still jumped and my skin still tingled, as if something had touched me.
Then I heard a sound behind me like tearing air.
I whirled, my thoughts frozen, and it was behind me: a hole the height of my body, like a great, open mouth. Stupid, stupid. I had known he was still out there but thought myself safe in the stronghold of the Arameri. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I was halfway across the bed, dragged by the hole’s power, before I could open my mouth to cry out. Convulsively, my hands locked on the sheets, but I knew it was futile. In my mind’s eye, I saw the sheets simply pull free of the bed, fluttering uselessly as I disappeared into whatever hell Dateh had built to hold me.
There was a jerk, so hard that friction heat burned my knuckles. The sheets had caught on something. A hand wrapped around my wrist. Shiny.
I shot backward into the terrible metal roar, and he came with me. I felt his presence even as I screamed and flailed, even as the feel of his hand on my wrist faded into cold numbness. We tumbled through trembling darkness, falling sideways into—
Sensation and solidity. I struck the ground—ground?—first, hard enough to jar the breath from my body. I felt the breath. Shiny landed nearby, uttering a grunt of pain, but at once he rolled to his feet, pulling me up, too. I caught my breath and looked around wildly, though I could see only darkness.
Then my eyes caught on something: a faint, blurry form, curled and fetal, hovering amid the dark. Dateh? But it did not move, and then I saw the shimmer of something between me and the form. Like glass. I turned again, trying to comprehend, and saw another murky form, hovering in the dark beyond the glass. This one I recognized by her brown skin: Kitr. She did not move. I reached for her, but when my hands encountered the glassy dark, they stopped. It was solid, enclosing us entirely above and around, a bubble of normality carved out of the Empty’s hellish substance.
I turned again, and there was Dateh.
He was closer to us than the blurry forms, on the other side of the wide room that the bubble formed. I wasn’t sure he knew we were there (though his will had brought us here), because his back was to us, and he crouched amid sprawled bodies. I could not see the bodies, except where their dimness occluded my view of Dateh, but I could taste blood in the air, thick and sickly and fresh. I heard the sounds I had hoped never to hear again: tearing flesh. Chewing teeth.
I stiffened and felt Shiny’s hand tighten on my wrist. So he, too, could see Dateh, which meant there was light in this empty world. And it meant Shiny could see which of his children lay around us, sprawled and desecrated, the magic of their lives long gone.
Tears of helpless rage pricked my eyes. Not again. Not again. “Gods damn you, Dateh,” I whispered.
Dateh paused in whatever he was doing. He turned to us, still in a crouch, moving in an odd, scuttling manner. His mouth, robes, and hands were stained dark, and his left hand was closed around a dripping lump. He blinked at us like a man coming out of a fugue. I could not see the demarcation between pupil and iris in his eyes; they looked like a single dark pit, too large, carved into the white.
He seemed to recall himself slowly. “Where is Serymn?” he asked.
“Dead,” I snapped.
He frowned at this, as if confused. Slowly he rose to his feet. He drew a breath to speak again, then paused as he noticed the heart in his hand. Frowning, he tossed it aside and stepped closer to us. “Where is my wife?” he asked again.
I scowled, but behind my bravado, I was terrified. I could feel power sluicing off him like water, pressing against my skin, making it crawl. It shimmered around him, making the whole chamber flicker unsteadily. He had been missing since t
he Arameri raid on the House of the Risen Sun. Had he spent all that time hiding here, killing and eating godlings, making himself stronger? And madder?
“Serymn is dead, you monster,” I said. “Didn’t you hear me? The gods took her to their realm for punishment, and she deserved it. They’ll find you, too, soon.”
Dateh stopped. His frown deepened, and he shook his head. “She isn’t dead. I would know.”
I shuddered. So the Nightlord had been in a creative mood after all. “Then she will be. Unless you mean to challenge the Three now?”
“I have always meant to challenge them, Lady Oree.” Dateh shook his head again, then smiled with bloody teeth. It was the first hint of his old self I had seen, but it chilled me nevertheless. He had eaten the godlings in hope of stealing their power, and it seemed he had managed to do so. But something else had gone very, very wrong. That was plain in his smile and in the emptiness of his eyes.
It is bad, very bad, for a mortal to eat one of us, Lil had said.
He turned, surveying his handiwork. The bodies seemed to please him, because he laughed, the sound echoing within the space of his bubble. “We demons are the gods’ children, too, are we not? Yet they have hunted us nearly to extinction. How is that right?” I jumped at the last, because he shouted it. But when he spoke again, he laughed. “I say that if they fear us so, we should give them something to fear: their despised, persecuted children, coming to take their place.”
“Don’t be absurd,” said Shiny. He still gripped my wrist; through this I felt the tension in his body. He was afraid—but along with the fear, he was angry. “No mortal can wield a god’s power. Even if you could defeat the Three, the very universe would unravel under your feet.”
“I can create a new one!” Dateh cried, delighted, demented. “You hid yourself within my Emptiness, didn’t you, Oree Shoth? Untrained, in terror, with nothing but instinct, you carved out a safer realm for yourself.” To my horror, he held his hand out as if he actually expected me to take it. “It is why Serymn hoped to win you to our cause. I can create only this one realm, but you’ve already built dozens. You can help me build a world where mortals need never live in fear of their gods. Where you and I will be gods, in our own right, as we should be.”
I stumbled back from his outstretched hand and stopped as I felt the solid curve of Dateh’s barrier behind me. Nowhere to run.
“Your gift has existed before among our kind,” said Dateh. He gave up reaching for me but watched me around Shiny’s shoulder with a hunger that was almost sexual. “It was rare, though—even when there were hundreds of us. Only Enefa’s children possessed it. I need that magic, Lady Oree.”
“What in the Maelstrom are you talking about?” I demanded. I frantically groped along the hard surface behind me, half hoping to find a doorknob. “You’ve already made me kill for you. What, you expect me to eat godling flesh and go mad with you, too?”
He blinked, startled. “Oh… no. No. You were a godling’s lover. I never believed you could be trusted. But your magic need not be lost. I can consume your heart and then wield your power myself.”
I froze, my blood turning to ice. Shiny, however, stepped forward, in front of me.
“Oree,” he said softly. “Use your magic to leave this place.”
I started out of horror and fumbled for him, finding his shoulder. To my confusion, he was not tense at all, unafraid. “I… I don’t—”
He ignored my babbling. “You’ve broken his power before. Open a door back to Sky. I will make certain he doesn’t follow.”
I could see him, I realized. He had begun to glow, god-power rising as he committed himself to protecting me.
Dateh bared his teeth and spread his arms. “Get out of my way,” he snarled.
I blinked, squinted, flinched. He had begun to glow as well, but with a jarring, sickening clash of colors, more than I could name. It made my stomach churn to look at him. The colors were bright, though, so bright. He was more powerful than I had ever dreamt.
I did not understand why until I blinked and my eyes made that strange, involuntary adjustment that hurt so much—and suddenly I saw Dateh, through whatever veil he’d cast around himself with his scrivening skills.
And I screamed. Because what stood there, enormous and heaving, rocking on twenty legs and flailing with as many arms—and oh gods, oh gods, his FACE—was too hideous for me to take without some outlet for my horror.
Shiny rounded on me. “Do as I say! Now!”
And then he charged forward, blazing, to meet Dateh’s challenge.
“No,” I whispered, shaking my head. I could not take my eyes from the great gabbling thing Dateh had become. I wanted to deny what I had seen in Dateh’s face: Paitya’s gentle smile, Dump’s square teeth, Madding’s eyes. And many others. There was almost nothing left of Dateh himself—nothing but will and hate. How many godlings had he consumed? Enough to overwhelm his humanity and grant him unimaginable power.
No one could fight such a creature and hope to survive. Not even Shiny. Dateh would kill him and then come eat my heart. I would be trapped within him, my very soul enslaved, forever.
“No!” I ran for the wall of the bubble, slapping its cold shimmering surface with my hands. I could not think through my terror. My breath came in gasps. I wanted nothing more than to escape.
My hands suddenly became visible. And between my hands, something new flickered into view.
I stopped, startled out of panic. The new thing rotated before me, flickering faintly, a bauble of silvery light. As I stared at it, I realized there was a face in its surface. I blinked, and the face blinked, too. It was me. The image—a mirror reflection, I realized, something else I had heard of but never seen—was distorted by the bubble’s shape, but I could make out the curve of cheekbones, lips open in a sob, white teeth.
But most clearly, I could see my eyes.
They were not what I expected. Where my irises should have been, dull disks of twisted gray, I saw instead brilliance: tiny winking, wavering lights. My malformed corneas had withdrawn, opening like a flower, to reveal something even stranger inside.
What—?
There was a cry behind me and the sound of a blow. As I turned, something streaked across my vision like a comet. But this comet screamed as it fell, trailing fire like blood. Shiny.
Dateh uttered a rattling hiss, raising two of his stolen arms. Light, sickly mottled, dripped from his hands like oil and splattered the floor of the Empty realm. Where it fell, I heard hissing.
The small bubble winked out of existence between my hands.
Escape and strange magic forgotten, I ran to where Shiny lay, not so shiny now, and not moving. He was alive, I found as I pulled him onto his back; breathing, at least, though raggedly. But crossing his chest from shoulder to hip was a streak of darkness, an obscene obliteration of his light. I touched it, my hand trembling, but there was no wound. No magic, either.
Then I understood: whatever it was that made demon blood negate the magic of a god’s life-essence, Dateh had found a way to channel it—or perhaps this was simply the culmination of what he had become. Not just a demon but a god whose very nature was mortality. He was turning Shiny back into an ordinary man, piece by piece. And once that was done, he would tear Shiny apart.
“Lady Oree,” breathed the thing that had been Dateh. I could no longer think of it as a man. Its voice overlapped upon itself: I heard him echo in female registers, other males, older, younger. It wheezed as it lumbered toward me. Perhaps it had developed multiple lungs, or whatever godlings shaped within their bodies to simulate breath.
It said, “We are the last of our kind, you and I. I was wrong, wrong, wrong to threaten you.” It paused, shook its massive head as if to clear it. “But I need your power. Join me, use it for me, and I’ll do you no harm.” It took a step closer, six feet shuffling at once.
I did not, dared not, trust the Dateh creature. Even if I agreed to its plan, its sanity was as distorted as the
rest of its form; it might still kill me on a whim. It would kill Shiny regardless, I was certain—permanently, irreversibly. What would happen to the universe if one of the Three died? Would this god-eating madman even care?
Unthinking, I clutched at Shiny, a bulwark against fear. He stirred under my hands, semiconscious, no protection at all. Even his light had begun to fade. But he was not dead. Perhaps if I stalled for time, he could recover.
“J-join you?” I asked.
Dateh’s form shivered, then resolved again into the ordinary, mortal shape that I had known in the House of the Risen Sun. It was an illusion. I could feel the warped reality still present, even if it had found a way to fool my eyes. Dateh was like Lil, safe on the surface, horror underneath.
“Yes,” it said, and this time it spoke in a single voice. It gestured behind itself, toward the corpses I knew were there. “I could train you. Make you st-st-strong.” The Dateh-creature paused then, eyes unfocusing for a moment, and there was that curious blurring again, the outward mask cracking for an instant. The effort needed to hold that mask in place was a taut, palpable thing. No wonder the Dateh-creature hesitated to devour me; one more heart, one more stolen soul, might be too much to contain.
Shiny groaned, and the creature’s face hardened. “But you must do something for me.” Its voice had changed. I choked back a sob. It spoke with Madding’s voice, gentle and persuasive. Its hands flexed from fists to claws and back. “That creature in your lap. I thought he had no true magic, but now I see I underestimated him.”
My vision blurred with tears as I shook my head, and I reached across Shiny’s body as if I could somehow protect him. “No,” I blurted. “I won’t let you kill him, too. No.”
“I want you to kill him, Oree. Kill him, and take his heart.”
I froze, staring at Dateh, my mouth falling open.