The Kingdom of Gods (41 page)

Darkness and damnation and eighth-blooded unknowing Arameri
demons
.

Deka blinked twice, licked his lips, then flashed me the sort
of elated, look-what-I-did grin I’d once been famous for. “That went better than expected.”

I nodded beyond him. “You were expecting this?”

He turned, and his eyes widened at the fallen shelf, the now-smoldering lanterns. One lay on the floor, its glass shattered. As he stared, a scroll that had not dropped with the others fluttered to the shelf below, forlorn.

I touched his shoulder. “You need to send me back to Shadow.” This made him turn around, a protest already on his lips. I gripped his shoulder to make him listen. “No. I won’t do this again, Deka. I can’t. You were right about Shahar. But that’s why … I, with you, I —” I sighed, inexpressibly weary. Why did mortal troubles never wait for convenient times? “Gods, I can’t do this right now.”

I saw Deka struggle for a mature response, which heartened me because it meant that he had not somehow outgrown me at a mere eighteen years. He took a deep breath and moved away from me, running a hand through his hair. Finally he turned to one of the tables in the room and pulled out a large sheet of the thick, bleached paper that scriveners used for their work. He took a brush, inkstone and stick, and reservoir from a nearby table, and said with his back to me, “The way you appeared was gods’ magic.”

“One of my siblings.”
Your great-grandfather.
Ahad was going to love this.

“Ah.” He prepared the ink, his fingers grinding the sigil-marked inkstone back and forth slowly, meditatively. “Do you think, next time, I’ll be able to summon you to me the way Shahar did?”

He was too tense to even attempt subtlety. I sighed and gave him what he wanted. “There’s only one way to find out, I suppose.”

“May I attempt it? At an appropriate time, of course.”

I leaned against the window again. “Yes.”

“Good.” The tension in his broad shoulders eased, just a touch. He began to sketch the sigil for a gate with quick, decisive movements — stunningly fast, compared to most scriveners I had seen. Every line was perfect. I felt the power of it the instant he drew the final line.

“I may be able to help you.” He said this briskly, with a scrivener’s matter-of-fact detachment. “I can’t promise anything, of course, but the magic I’ve been designing — my body-marking — accesses the potential hidden within an individual. Whatever’s happening to you, you’re still a god. That should give me something to work with.”

“Fine.”

Deka set the sigil on the floor and stepped back. When I went to stand beside it, his expression was as carefully blank as if he stood before Remath. I could not leave things that way between us.

So I took his hand, the one I’d held ten years before, when his demon blood had mingled with mine and failed to kill me. His palm was unmarked, but I remembered where the cut had been. I traced a line across it with a fingertip, and his hand twitched in response.

“I’m glad I came to see you,” I said.

He did not smile. But he did fold his hand around mine for a moment.

“I’m not Shahar, Sieh,” he said. “Don’t punish me for what she did.”

I nodded wearily. Then I let go of him, stepped onto the sigil, and thought of South Root. The world blurred around me, leaping to obey Deka’s command and my will. I savored the momentary illusion of control. Then, when the walls of my room at Hymn’s snapped into place around me, I lay down on the bed, threw an arm over my eyes, and thought of nothing but Deka’s kiss for the rest of the night.

I
T FELT GOOD TO RUN UP SAND DUNES
. I put my head down and took care to churn the sand behind me and scuff up the perfect wave patterns the wind had etched around the sparse grasses. By the time I reached the top of the dune, I was out of breath, and my heart was pumping steadily within its cage of bones and muscle. I stopped there, putting my hands on my hips, and grinned at the beach and the spreading expanse of the Repentance Sea. I felt young and strong and invincible, even though I really wasn’t any of those things. I didn’t care. It was just nice to feel good.

“Hello, Sieh!” cried my sister Spider. She was down at the water’s edge, dancing in the surf. Her voice carried up to me on the salty ocean breeze, as clear as if I stood beside her.

“Hello, there.” I grinned at her, too, and spread my arms. “All the oceans in the world, and you had to pick the
boiled
one?” One of my siblings, the Fireling, had fought a legendary battle here during the Gods’ War. She’d won, but not before the Repentance was a bubbling stewpot filled with the corpses of a billion sea creatures.

“It has nice rhythms.” She was doing something strange in
her dance, squatting and hopping from one foot to another with no recognizable semblance of rhythm. But that was Spider; she made her own music if she needed to. So many of Nahadoth’s children were like her, just a little mad but beautiful in their madness. Such a proud legacy our father had given us.

“All the dead things here scream in time with each other,” she said. “Can’t you hear them?”

“No, alas.” It almost didn’t hurt anymore, acknowledging that my childhood was gone and would never return. Mortals are resilient creatures.

“A shame. Can you still dance?”

In answer, I ran down the dune, side-sliding so that I wouldn’t overbalance. When I reached level ground, I altered my steps into a side-to-side sort of hop that had been popular in upper Rue once, centuries before the Gods’ War. Spider giggled and immediately came out of the water to join my dance, her steps alternating to complement mine. We met at the tideline, where dry sand turned to hard-packed wet. There she grabbed my hands and pulled me into a new dance, formal and revolving and slow. Something Amn, or possibly just something she’d made up on the spot. It never mattered with her.

I grinned, taking the lead and turning us in a looping circle, toward the water and away. “I can always dance for you.”

“Not so well anymore. You have no rhythm.” We were in northern Tema, the land whose people we had both watched over long ago. She had taken the shape of a local girl, small and lithe, though her hair was bound up in a bun at the back of her head as no self-respecting Teman would have done. “You can’t hear the music at all?”

“Not a note.” I pulled her hand close and kissed the back of it. “But I can hear my heart beating, and the waves coming in, and the wind blowing. I may not be exactly on the beat, but you know, I don’t have to be a
good
dancer to love dancing.”

She beamed, delighted, and then spun us both, taking control of the dance so deftly that I could not mind. “I’ve missed you, Sieh. None of the others ever loved to move like you do.”

I twirled her once more so that my arms could settle around her from behind. She smelled of sweat and salt and joy. I pressed my face into her soft hair and felt a whisper of the old magic. She was not a child, but she had never forgotten how to play.

“Oh —” She stopped, her whole body going taut with attention, and I looked up to see what had interested her so. A few dozen feet away on the beach, lurking near a dune as if ready to duck back behind it: a young man, slim and brown and handsome, fascinating in his shy eagerness. He wore no shirt or shoes, and his pants were rolled up to his knees. In one hand he carried a bucket full of sandy clams.

“One of your worshippers?” I murmured in her ear, and then I kissed it.

Spider giggled, though her expression was greedy. “Perhaps. Move away from me, Brother. He’s shy enough as it is, and you’re not a little boy anymore.”

“They’re so beautiful when they love us,” I whispered. I pressed against her, hungry, and thought for the umpteenth time of Deka.

“Yes,” she said, reaching back to cup my cheek. “But I don’t share, Sieh, and I’m not the one you want anyway. Let go now.”

Reluctantly I did so and stepped back, bowing extravagantly
to the young man so that he would know he was welcome. He blushed and ducked his head, the long cabled locks of his hair falling forward. Because he was poor, he had wrapped the locks with some sort of threadlike seaweed and ornamented them with seashells and bits of bright coral, rather than the metal bands and gemstones most Temans preferred. He did begin to walk closer at our tacit invitation, holding the bucket in both hands with an air of offering. His whole day’s income, most likely — a sincere mark of devotion.

While he approached, Spider glanced back at me, her eyes gleaming. “You want to know about Kahl, don’t you?”

I blinked in surprise. “How did you know?”

She smiled. “
I
can hear the world just fine, Brother. The wind says you’re playing errand boy for Ahad, the new one. Everyone knows who
he
works for.”

“I didn’t.” I could not keep the sourness out of my voice.

“That’s because you’re selfish and flighty. Anyhow, of course that’s why you came. There’s nothing else in Tema that could be of interest to you.”

“Maybe I just wanted to see you.”

She laughed, high and bright, and I grinned, too. We had always understood each other, she and I.

“For the past, then,” she said. “Only for you, Sieh.”

Then, turning a little pirouette that marked a strange and powerful pattern into the sand, Spider stopped on one toe and dipped toward me, her other leg extending gracefully above her in a perfect arabesque. Her eyes, which had been brown and ordinary until then, suddenly glimmered and became different. Six additional tiny-pupilled irises swirled out of nowhere and
settled into place around her existing irises, which shrank a bit to make room for them. The clam boy stopped where he was a few feet away, his eyes widening at the sight. I didn’t blame him; she was magnificent.

“Time has never been as straightforward as Itempas wished,” she said, stroking my cheek. “It is a web, and we all dance along its threads. You know that.”

I nodded, settling cross-legged in front of her. “No one dances like you, Sister. Tell me what you can.”

She nodded and fell silent for a moment. “A plains fire has been lit.” For an instant as she spoke, I glimpsed fingerlike palps wiggling behind her human teeth. She used magic to speak when she was in this state, or else she would have lisped badly. She had always been vain.

“A fire?” I prompted when she fell silent. Her eyes flickered, searching realms I had never been able to visit, even as a god. This was what I had come for. It was difficult to convince Spider to scry the past or future, because she didn’t like dancing those paths. They made her strange and dangerous, when all she really wanted to do was spin and mate and eat. She was like me; once, we had both had other shapes and explored our natures in other ways. We liked the new ways better, but one could never leave the past entirely behind.

“The Darre’s new ennu, I think, is the kindling. But this fire will burn far, far beyond this realm.”

I frowned at this. “How can mortal machinations affect anything more than mortal life?” But that was a foolish question. I had spent two thousand years suffering because of one mortal’s evil.

She shivered, her eyes glazing, though she never once lost her balance on that single toe. The clam boy frowned from where he knelt on the sand, his bucket set before him. When this was done, I knew, Spider would demand a dance with him. If he pleased her, and was lucky, she would make love with him for a few hours and then send him on his way. If he was not lucky … well. The clams would make a fine appetizer. Those mortals who choose to love us know the risks.

“A seashell.” Her voice dropped to a murmur, flat and inflectionless. “It floats on green wood and shining white bones. Inside is betrayal, love, years, and more betrayal. Ah, Sieh. All your old mistakes are coming back to haunt you.”

I sighed, thinking of Shahar and Deka and Itempas, to name a few. “I know.”

“No. You don’t. Or rather, you do, but the knowledge is buried deep. Or rather, it was.” She cocked her head, and all her dozen pupils expanded at once. Her eyes, speckled with holes, pulled at me. I looked into them and glimpsed deep chasms bridged by gossamer webs. Quickly I leaned back, averting my eyes. Anyone drawn into Spider’s world became hers, and she did not always let them go. Not even if she loved them.

“The wind blows louder by the moment,” she whispered. “
Sieh, Sieh, Sieh
, it whispers, in the halls of the unknowable. Something stirs in those halls, for the first time since Enefa’s birth.
It is alive. It thinks. It considers you.
”

This nonsense was not at all what I had expected, and not really what I wanted to hear. I frowned and licked my lips, wondering how to steer her back toward the knowledge I needed. “What of Kahl, Sister? The Arameri’s enemy?”

She shook her head suddenly, vehemently, closing her eyes. “He is
your
enemy, Sieh, not theirs. They are irrelevant. Innocent — ha! — bystanders.” She shuddered, and to my surprise she abruptly tottered on her toe, nearly losing her balance. The clam boy looked up suddenly, his face taut with fervor; I heard him utter a low, intent prayer. We have never needed prayers, but we do like them. They feel much like … hmm. Like a push, or a supporting hand on the back. Even gods need encouragement sometimes. After a moment, Spider steadied.