The Kingdom of Gods (10 page)

“No.” She didn’t look at me and her expression didn’t change, but her voice went sharp and contemptuous of my assumption. “He’s at the Litaria. The scriveners’ college? In training.”

I raised both eyebrows. “I didn’t know he wanted to become a scrivener.”

“He didn’t.”

Then I understood. Arameri, yes. When there was more than one potential heir, the family head did not
have
to pit them against one another in a battle to the death. She could keep both alive if she put one in a clearly subordinate position. “He’s meant to be your First Scrivener, then.”

She shrugged. “If he’s good enough. There’s no guarantee. He’ll prove himself if he can, when he comes back.
If
he comes back.”

There was something more here, I realized. It intrigued me enough to forget my own troubles for a moment, so I turned to her, frowning. “Scrivener training lasts years,” I said. “Ten or fifteen, usually.” She turned to face me, and I flinched at the look in her eyes. “Yes. Deka has been in training for the past eight years.”

Oh, no. “Eight years ago …”

“Eight years ago,” she said in that same clipped, edged tone, “you and I and Deka took an oath of friendship. Immediately upon which you unleashed a flare of magic so powerful that it destroyed the Nowhere Stair and much of the underpalace —
and then you vanished, leaving Deka and me buried in the rubble with more bones broken than whole.”

I stared at her, horrified. She narrowed her eyes, searching my face, and a flicker of consternation diluted her anger. “You didn’t know.”

“No.”

“How could you not know?”

I shook my head. “I don’t remember anything after we joined hands, Shahar. But … you and Deka were wise to ask for my friendship; it should have made you safe from me for all time. I don’t understand what happened.”

She nodded slowly. “They pulled us out of the debris and patched us up, good as new. But I had to tell Mother about you. She was furious that we’d concealed something so important. And the heir’s life had been threatened, which meant someone had to be held accountable.” She folded her arms, holding her shoulders ever-so-slightly stiff. “Deka had fewer injuries than I. Our fullblood relatives started to hint that Deka — only Deka, never me — might have done something to antagonize you. They didn’t come right out and accuse him of plotting to use a godling as a murder weapon, but …”

I closed my eyes, understanding at last why she had cursed my name. I had stolen her innocence first and then her brother. She would never trust me again.

“I’m sorry,” I said, knowing it was wholly inadequate.

She shrugged again. “Not your fault. I see now that what happened was an accident.”

She turned away then, pacing across her room to the door
that adjoined her suite to the one that had been Dekarta’s. Opening it, she turned back to look at me, expectant.

I stayed by the window, seeing the signs clearly now. Her face was impassive, cool, but she had not completely mastered herself yet. Fury smoldered in her, banked for now, but slow burning. She was patient. Focused. I would think this a good thing, if I hadn’t seen it before.

“You don’t blame me,” I said, “though I’ll wager you did, until tonight. But you still blame
someone
. Who?”

I expected her to dissemble. “My mother,” she said.

“You said she was pressured into sending Deka away.”

Shahar shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.” She said nothing for a moment more, then lowered her eyes. “Deka … I haven’t heard from him since he left. He returns my letters unopened.”

Even with my senses as muddled as they were, I could feel the raw wound in her soul where a twin brother had been. A wound like that demanded redress.

She sighed. “Come on.”

I took a step toward her and stopped, startled as I realized something. Arameri heads and heirs had loathed one another since the Bright’s dawning. Unavoidable, given circumstances: two souls with the strength to rule the world were rarely good at sharing or even cohabitating, for that matter. That was why the family’s heads had been as ruthless about controlling their heirs as they were about controlling the world.

My eyes flicked to Shahar’s odd, incomplete blood sigil. None of the controlling words were there. She was free to act against her mother, even plot to kill her, if she wanted.

She saw my look and smiled. “My old friend,” she said. “You were right about me, you know, all those years ago. Some things are my nature. Inescapable.”

I crossed the room to stand beside her on the threshold. I was surprised to find myself uncertain as I considered her. I should have felt vindicated to hear her plans of vengeance. I should have said, and meant it,
You’ll do worse before you’re done
.

But I had tasted her childish soul, and there had been something in it that did not fit the cold avenger she seemed to have become. She had loved her brother, enough to sacrifice herself for him. She had sincerely yearned to be a good person.

“No,” I said. She blinked. “You’re different from the rest of them. I don’t know why. You shouldn’t be. But you are.”

Her jaw flexed. “Your influence, maybe. As gods go, you’ve had a greater impact on my life than Bright Itempas ever could.”

“That should’ve made you worse, actually.” I smiled a little, though I did not feel like it. “I’m selfish and cruel and capricious, Shahar. I’ve never been a good boy.”

She lifted an eyebrow, and her eyes flicked down. I wore nothing but my ridiculously long hair, which fell to my ankles now that I was standing. (My nails, however, had kept to my preferred length. Partial mortality, partial growth? I would live in dread of my first manicure.) I thought Shahar was looking at my chest, but my body was longer now, taller. Belatedly I realized her gaze had settled lower.

“You’re not a
boy
at all anymore,” she said.

My face went hot, though I did not know why. Bodies were just bodies, penises were just penises, yet she had somehow
made me feel keenly uncomfortable with mine. I could think of nothing to say in reply.

After a moment, she sighed. “Do you want food?”

“No …” I began, but then my belly churned in that odd, clenching way that I had not felt in several mortal generations. I had not forgotten what it meant. I sighed. “But I will by morning.”

“I’ll have a double tray brought up. Will you sleep?”

I shook my head. “Too much on my mind, even if I was exhausted. Which I’m not.” Yet.

She sighed. “I see.”

Suddenly I realized
she
was exhausted, her face lined and paler than usual. My time sense was returning — murky, sluggish, but functional — so I understood it had been well past midnight when she’d summoned me. Cursed me. Had she been pacing the floor herself, her mind cluttered with troubles? What had caused her to remember me, however hatefully, after all this time? Did I want to know?

“Does our oath stand, Shahar?” I asked softly. “I didn’t mean to harm you.”

She frowned. “Do you want it to stand? I seem to recall you were less than thrilled by the idea of two mortal friends.”

I licked my lips, wondering why I was so uneasy.
Nervous.
She made me nervous. “I think perhaps … I could use friends, under the circumstances.”

She blinked, then smiled with one side of her mouth. Unlike her earlier smiles, this one was genuine and free of bitterness. It made me see how lonely she was without her brother — and
how young. Not so far removed, after all, from the child she had been.

Then she stepped forward, putting her hands on my chest, and kissed me. It was light, friendly, just a warm press of her lips for an instant, but it rang through me like a crystal bell. She stepped back and I stared at her. I couldn’t help it.

“Friends, then,” she said. “Good night.”

I nodded mutely, then went into Deka’s room. She shut the door behind me, and I slumped back against it, feeling alone and very strange.

Sleep, little little one

Here is a world

With hate on every continent

And sorrow in the fold.

Wish for a better life

Far, far from here

Don’t listen while I talk of it

Just go there.

I didn’t sleep that night, though I could have. The urge was there, itchy. I imagined the craving for sleep as a parasite feeding on my strength, just waiting for me to grow weak so that it could take over my body. I had liked sleep, once, before it became a threat.

But I did not like boredom, either, and there was a great deal of that in the hours after I left Shahar. I could only ponder my troubling condition for so long. The only way to vent my frustration was to do something, anything, so I got up from the chair and wandered about Deka’s room, peering into the drawers and under the bed. His books were too simple to interest me,
except one of riddles that actually contained a few I hadn’t heard before. But I read it in half an hour and then was bored again.

There is nothing more dangerous than a bored child — and though I had become a bored adolescent, that old mortal adage still rang true. So as the small hours stretched into slightly longer hours, I finally got up and opened a wall. That much, at least, I could do without expending any of my remaining strength; all it took was a word. When the daystone had finished rolling aside to make room for me, I went through the resulting opening into the dead spaces beyond.

Roaming my old territory put me in a better mood. Not everything was the same as it had been, of course. The World Tree had grown both around and through Sky, filling some of its old corridors and dead spaces with branchwood and forcing me to make frequent detours. This, I knew, had been Yeine’s intent, for without the Enefadeh, and more importantly without the constant empowering presence of the Stone of Earth, Sky needed the Tree’s support. Its architecture broke too many of Itempas’s laws for the mortal realm; only magic kept it in the sky and not smashed on the ground.

So down seventeen levels, around a swirling rise of linked globules that only resembled a tunnel in dreams, and underneath an arched branch spur, I found what I’d sought: my orrery. I moved carefully between the protective traps I’d set, out of habit stepping around the patches of moonstone that lined the floor. It looked like daystone— mortals had never been able to tell the difference — but on cloudy, new-moon nights, the pieces of moonstone transformed, opening into one of Nahadoth’s
favorite hells. I had made it as a little treat for our masters, to remind them of the price to be paid for enslaving their gods, and we had all seeded it through the palace. They had blamed — and punished —Nahadoth for it, but he’d thanked me afterward, assuring me the pain was worth it.

But when I spoke
atadie
and the orrery opened, I stopped on its threshold, my mouth falling open.

Where there should have been more than forty globes floating through the air, all turning around the bright yellow sphere at the orrery’s center, there were only four still floating.
Four
, counting the sun sphere. The rest lay scattered about the floor and against the walls, corpses in the aftermath of a systemic carnage. The Seven Sisters, identical small goldenworlds I had collected after searching billions of stars, lay strewn about the edges of the room. And the rest — Zispe, Lakruam, Amanaiasenre, the Scales, Motherspinner with its six child moons linked by a web of rings, and oh, Vaz, my handsome giant. That one, once a massive stark-white sphere I had barely been able to get my arms around, had hit the floor hard, splitting down the middle. I went to the nearer of the shattered halves and picked it up, moaning as I knelt. Its core was exposed, cold, still. Planets were resilient things, far more than most mortal creatures, but there was no way I could repair this. Even if I’d had the magic left to spare.

“No,” I whispered, clutching the hemisphere to myself and rocking over it. I couldn’t even weep. I felt as dead as Vaz inside. Nahadoth’s words had not driven home the horror of my condition, but this? This I could not deny.

A hand touched my shoulder, and so great was my misery that I did not care who it was.