The Kingdom of Gods (24 page)

I sighed and pushed her aside as gently as I could. This made her stumble off the steps, and she fell into the blood of some cousin or another of hers. I could smell the Arameri in him. Or not
in
him, not anymore; I laughed at my own joke.

As I stopped in front of Remath — who remained where she was, calm as death loomed — Shahar appeared again, this time flinging herself directly in front of her mother’s throne. Her gold satin robe was drenched with blood down one side of her body, and somehow she’d gotten it on the side of her face as well. Half her hair hung limp and dripping with it. I laughed again and tried to think up a rhyme that would properly make fun of her. But what rhymed with
horror
? I would ponder it later.

I stopped, however, because Shahar was in the way. “Move,” I said.

“No.”

“You wanted her dead, anyway.”

“Not like
this
, damn you!”

“Poor Shahar.” I made a singsong of it.
“Poor little princess, how is she to see? With her fingers and her toes, once her eyes are with me.”
I held the needle forward so that she could see it. “You have betrayed me, sweet Shahar. It is nothing to me to kill you, too.”

Her jaw tightened. “I thought you loved me.”

“I thought you loved
me
.”

“You swore not to harm me!”

She was right. Her failure to keep her word did not mean I should stoop to the same level. “Very well. I won’t kill you — just her.”

“She’s my mother,” she snapped. “How much do you think it will harm me if you kill her right before my eyes?”

As much as she’d harmed me by betraying my trust. Maybe a bit more. “I’m not interested in bargains right now, Shahar. Move, or I’ll move you. I won’t be gentle this time.”

“Please,” she said, which ordinarily would only have goaded me further — bully — but this time it did not. This time, to my own great surprise, the churning vortex of my rage slowed, then went still. In the sudden storm-calm, I gazed at her and realized another truth that she had hidden from me all this time. And perhaps not just from me. I glanced at Remath, who was staring at Shahar, surprised into an expression of astonishment at last. Yes.

“You love her,” I said.

And because Shahar was Arameri, she flinched as if struck and looked away in shame. But she did not move out of my way.

I let out a long, heavy sigh, and with it my power began to fade. I couldn’t have kept it up much longer anyhow; I was too old for tantrums.

Shaking my head, I let the needles drop to the floor. They scattered over the steps with tinny metal sounds, loud in the chamber’s silence. Listening to the nearby world, I could hear shouts and running feet — Captain Wrath and his men racing to save Remath and die in the trying because they were not sensible like Darre. Even the scriveners were marshaling, bringing their most powerful scripts, though they were disorganized
because Shevir was here, his corpse cooling among the others I’d killed. I turned and looked at him, his face frozen in a look of surprise beneath the gaping hole in his forehead, and felt regret. He hadn’t been a bad man as First Scriveners went. And I had been a very bad boy.

On the strength of that, I took myself away from Sky, not really caring where I went instead, just wanting comfort and silence and a place to be miserable in peace.

I would not see Shahar again for two years.

I
AM A
fly on the wall, or a spider in a bush. Same difference, except that the spider is a predator and suits my nature better.

I sit in a web that would give me away in an instant if he saw it, because I have woven a smiling face into the tiny dewdrop-beaded strands. It has never been his nature to notice the minutia of his surroundings, however, and the web is half hidden by leaves anyhow. With my many eyes, I observe as Itempas, the Bright Sky, Day-bringer, sits on a whitebaked clay rooftop waiting for the sun to rise. It surprises me that he sits to observe this, but then many things have surprised me today. Like the fact that the rooftop is part of a mortal dwelling, and inside it are the mortal woman he loves and the mortal — but half-god — child she has borne him.

I knew something was wrong. There had been a day of change in the gods’ realm not long before. The hurricane that was Nahadoth met the earthquake that was Enefa, and they found stillness in each other. A beautiful, holy thing — I know, I watched. But in the distance, the immovable white-capped mountain that was Itempas shimmered and went away. He has been gone ever since.

Ten years, in mortal reckoning. An eyeblink for us, but still unusual for him. He does not sulk. More commonly he confronts a
source of disruption, attacks it, destroys it if he can, or settles into some equilibrium with it if he cannot — but he has done neither this time. Instead he has fled to this realm with its fragile creatures and tried to hide himself among them, as if a sun can fit in among match flames. Except he isn’t hiding, not exactly. He’s just … living. Being ordinary. And not coming home.

The rooftop door opens, and the child comes out. Strange-looking creature, disproportionate with his big head and long legs. (Do I look like that in my mortal form? I resolve to make my head smaller.) He is brown-skinned and blond, freckled. From here, I can see his eyes, as green as the leaves that hide me. He is eight or nine years old now — a good age, my favorite age, old enough to know the world yet young enough to still delight in it. I have heard his name, Shinda, whispered by the other children of this dusty little village; they are frightened of him. They can tell, as I can with just a glance, that he might be mortal, but he will never be one of them.

He comes to stand behind Itempas and wraps his arms around Itempas’s shoulders, resting his cheek against his father’s densely curled hair. Itempas does not turn to him, but I see him reach up to touch the boy’s arms. They watch the sun rise together, never saying a word.

When the day is well begun, there is another movement at the rooftop door; a woman comes to stand there. She is Remath’s age, similarly blonde, similarly beautiful. In two thousand years, I will join hands with her descendant and namesake and become mortal. They look much alike, this Shahar, that Shahar, except for the eyes. This Shahar watches Itempas with an unblinking steadiness that I would find frightening if I had not seen it in the eyes of my own worshippers. When her son straightens and comes over to greet her, she
does not look at him, though she absently touches his shoulder and says something. He goes inside and she remains there, watching her lover with a high priestess’s fanaticism. But he does not turn to her.

I leave, and report back to Nahadoth and Enefa as I have been bidden. Parents often send children as spies and peacemakers when there is trouble between them. I tell them that Itempas is not angry, if anything he seems sad and a bit lonely, and, yes, they should go and bring him home because he has been away too long. And if I do not tell them of his mortal woman, his mortal son, what of it? Why should it matter that the woman loves him, needs him, will probably go mad without him? Why should we care that his return means the destruction of that family and the peace he seems to have found with them? We are gods and they are nothing. I am a far better son than some half-breed demon boy. I will show him, as soon as he comes home.

I
FELL
.

It happens like that sometimes, when one travels through life without a plan. In this case I was traveling through space, motion, conceptualization — same difference, except that mortals cannot survive it. Half mortal that I was, I shouldn’t have. But I did, possibly because I did not care.

So it was that I drifted through Sky’s white layers, passing through some of the Tree’s wooden flesh in the process, down, down, down. Past the lowest layer of clouds, damp and cold. Because I was incorporeal, I saw the city with both mortal and godly eyes: humped silhouettes of buildings and streets aglow with flickers of mortal light, interspersed now and again by the brighter, colored plumes of my brothers and sisters. They could not see me because I had not lost all sense of self-preservation and because even when I am not sulking, my soul’s colors are shadowy. That is my father’s legacy and a bit of my mother’s as well. I am good at sneaking about because of it. Or hiding, when I do not wish to be found.

Down. Past a ring of mansions attached to the World Tree’s trunk, devastatingly expensive tree houses, these, without even
ladders or
GIRLZ KEEP OWT
signs to make them interesting. Below this was another layer of city, this one new: houses and workshops and businesses built atop the Tree’s very roots, perched precariously on wildly sloping streets and braced platforms. Ah, of course; the esteemed personages of the mansions above could not be left without servants and chefs and nannies and tailors, could they? I witnessed bizarre contraptions, gouting steam and smoke and metallic groans, connecting this halfway city to the elegant platforms above. People rode up and down in them, trusting these dangerous-looking things to convey them safely. For a moment, admiration for mortal ingenuity nearly distracted me from my misery. But I kept going, because this place did not suit me. I had heard Shahar refer to it, and understood its name now: the Gray. Halfway between the bright of Sky and the darkness below.

Down. And now I blended with the shadows, because there were so many here between the Tree’s roots and beneath its vast green canopy. Yes, this suited me better: Shadow, the city that had once been called Sky, before the Tree grew and made a joke of that name. It was here at last that I felt some sense of belonging — though only a little. I did not belong anywhere in the mortal realm, really.

I should have remembered that
, I thought in bitterness as I came to rest and turned to flesh again.
I should never have tried to live in Sky.

Well. Adolescence is all about making mistakes.

I landed in a stinking, debris-strewn alley, in what I would later learn was South Root, considered to be the most violent and depraved part of the city. Because it was so violent and
depraved, no one bothered me for the better part of three days while I sat amid the trash. This was good, because I wouldn’t have had the strength to defend myself. My paroxysm of rage in Sky and subsequent magical transit had left me too weak to do much but lie there. As I’d been hungry before leaving Sky, I ate: there were some moldy fruit rinds in the bin nearest me, and a rat came near to offer me its flesh. It was an old creature, blind and dying, and its meat was rank, but I have never been so churlish as to disrespect a sacred act.

It rained, and I drank, tilting my head back for hours to get a few mouthfuls. And then, adding the ultimate insult to injury, my bowels moved for the first time in a century. I had enough strength to get my pants down, but not enough to move away from the resulting mess, so I sat there beside it and wept awhile, and just generally hated everything.

Then on the third day, because three is a number of power, things finally changed.

“Get up,” said the girl who’d entered the alley. She kicked me to get my attention. “You’re in the way.”

I blinked up at her to see a small figure, clad in bulky, ugly clothing and a truly stupid hat, glaring down at me. The hat was a thing of beauty. It looked like a drunken cone on top of her head and had long flaps to cover her ears. The flaps could be buttoned under her chin, though she hadn’t done so, perhaps because it was late spring and as hot as the Dayfather’s temper, even in this city of noontime shadows.

With a sigh, I pulled myself laboriously to my feet, then stepped aside. The girl nodded too curtly for thanks, then
brushed past me and began rummaging through the pile of garbage I’d sat beside. I started to warn her about my small addition to the refuse, but she avoided it without looking. Deftly plucking two halves of a broken plate out of the trash, she made a sound of pleasure and stuck them into the satchel hanging off her shoulder, then moved on. As she shuffled away, I saw one of her feet scrape the ground even though she’d lifted it; it was larger than the other and misshapen, and she’d made it larger still by bundling rags about the ankle.

I followed her down the alley as she poked through the piles, picking up the oddest of items: a handleless clay pot, a rusted metal canister, a chunk of broken windowpane. This last seemed to please her the most, by the look of delight on her face.