The Kingdom of Gods (34 page)

Remember what?

forget

Forget what?

Kahl staggered suddenly, bracing himself against the door and sighing. “Enough. We’ll finish this later. In the meantime, a word of advice, Sieh: find Itempas. Only his power can save you; you know this. Find him, and live for as long as you can.” When he pushed himself upright, his teeth were a carnivore’s, needle-sharp. “Then if you must die, die like a god. At my hands, in battle.”

Then he vanished. And I was alone, helpless, being churned to pieces by the mask’s power. My flesh tried, again, to fragment;
it
hurt
, the way disintegration should. I screamed, reaching out for someone, anyone, to save me. Nahadoth — No, I didn’t want him or Yeine anywhere near that mask, no telling what it would do to them. But I was so afraid. I did not want to die, not yet.

The world twisted around me. I slid through it, gasping —

Rough hands grasped me, hauled me over onto my back. Above me, Ahad’s face. Not Nahadoth but close enough. He was frowning, examining me with hands and other senses, actually looking concerned.

“You care,” I said dizzily, and stopped thinking for a while.

W
HEN
I
WOKE,
I
TOLD
A
HAD WHAT
I had seen in Darr, and he got a very odd look on his face. “That was not at all what we suspected,” he muttered to himself. He looked over at Glee, who stood by the window, her hands clasped behind her back, as she gazed out over the quiet streets. It was nearly dawn in this part of the world. The end of the working day for the Arms of Night.

“Call the others,” she said. “We’ll meet tomorrow night.”

So Ahad dismissed me for the day, ordering the servants to give me food and money and new clothing, because the old set no longer fit well. I had aged again, you see — perhaps five years this time, passing through my final growth spurt in the process. I was two inches taller and even thinner than before, unpleasantly close to skeletal. My body had reconfigured its existing substance to forge my new shape, and I hadn’t had much substance to go around. I was well into my twenties now, with no hint of childhood remaining. Nothing but human left.

I went back to Hymn’s house. Her family ran an inn, after all, and I had money now, so it made sense. Hymn was relieved to see me, though she puzzled over my changed appearance and pretended to be annoyed. Her parents were not at all pleased,
but I promised to perform no impossible feats on their premises, which was easy because I couldn’t. They put me in the attic room.

There, I ate the entire basket of food Ahad’s servants had packed for me. I was still hungry when the food was gone — though the basket had been generously packed — but had sated myself enough that I could attend to other needs. So I curled up on the bed, which was hard but clean, and watched the sun rise beyond my lone window. Eventually I considered the topic of death.

I could kill myself now, probably. This was not normally an easy thing for any god to do, as we are remarkably resilient beings. Even willing ourselves into nonexistence did not work for long; eventually we would forget that we were supposed to be dead and start thinking again. Yeine could kill me, but I would never ask it of her. Some of my siblings, and Naha, could and would do it, because they understood that sometimes life is too much to bear. But I did not need them anymore. The past two nights’ events had verified what I’d already suspected: those things that had once merely weakened me before could kill me now. So if I could steel myself to the pain of it, I could die whenever I wished simply by continuing to contemplate antithetical thoughts until I became an old man, and then a corpse.

And perhaps it was even simpler than that. I needed to eat and drink and pass waste now. That meant I could starve and thirst, and that my intestines and other organs were actually necessary. If I damaged them, they might not grow back.

What would be the most exciting way to commit suicide?

Because I did not want to die an old man. Kahl had gotten
that much right. If I had to die, I would die as myself — as Sieh, the Trickster, if not the child. I had blazed bright in my life. What was wrong with blazing in death, too?

Before I reached middle age, I decided. Surely I could think of something interesting by then.

On that heartening note, I finally slept.

I stood on a cliff outside the city, gazing upon the wonder that was Sky-in-Shadow and the looming, spreading green of the World Tree.

“Hello, Brother.”

I turned, blinking, though I was not really surprised. When the first mortal creatures grew the first brains that did more than pump hearts and think of meat, my brother Nsana had found fulfillment in the random, spitting interstices of their sleeping thoughts. He had been a wanderer before that, my closest playmate, wild and free like me. But sad, somehow. Empty. Until the dreams of mortals filled his soul.

I smiled at him, understanding at last the sorrow he must have felt in those long empty years before the settling of his nature.

“So this is the proof of it,” I said. I had pockets for the moment, so I slipped my hands into them. My voice was higher pitched; I was a boy again. In dreams, at least, I was still myself.

Nsana smiled, strolling toward me along a path of flowers that stirred without wind. For a moment his truest shape flickered before me: faceless, the color of glass, reflecting our surroundings through the distorting lenses of limbs and belly and the gentle featureless curve of his face. Then he filled in with
detail and colors, though not those of a mortal. He did nothing like mortals if he could help it. So he had chosen skin like fine fabric, unbleached damask in swirling raised patterns, with hair like the darkest of red wine frozen in midsplash. His irises were the banded amber of polished, petrified wood — beautiful, but unnerving, like the eyes of a serpent.

“The proof of what?” he asked, stopping before me. His voice was light, teasing, as if it had been only a day since we’d seen each other and not an aeon.

“My mortality,” I said. “I wouldn’t have seen you otherwise.” I smiled, but I knew he would hear the truth in my voice. He had abandoned me for mortalkind, after all. I’d gotten over it; I was a big boy. But I would not pretend it hadn’t happened.

Nsana let out a little sigh and walked past me, stopping on the edge of a cliff. “Gods can dream, too, Sieh. You could have found me here anytime.”

“I hate dreaming.” I scuffed the ground with a foot.

“I know.” He put his hands on his hips, his expression frankly admiring as he gazed over the dreamscape I’d created. This one was not merely a memory, as my dream of the gods’ realm had been. “A shame, too. You do it so well.”

“I don’t
do
anything. It’s a dream.”

“Of course you do. It comes from you, after all. All of this” — he gestured expansively around us, and the dreamscape rippled with the passage of his hands —“is you. Even the fact that you let me come here is your doing, because you certainly never allowed it before.” He lowered his arms and looked at me. “Not even during the years you spent as an Arameri slave.”

I sighed, tired, even asleep. “I don’t want to think right now, Nsa. Please.”

“You never want to think, you silly boy.” Nsana came over, wrapping an arm around my shoulders and pulling me close. I put up a token resistance, but he knew it was token, and after a moment I sighed and let my head rest on his chest. Then it was not his chest — it was his shoulder — because suddenly I was taller than him and not a child anymore. When I lifted my head in surprise, Nsana let out a long sigh and cupped my face in his hands so that he could kiss me. He did not share himself with me that way because there was no point; I already stood encompassed within him, and he within me. But I did remember other kisses, and other existences, when innocence and dreams had been two halves of the same coin. Back then, I’d thought we would spend the rest of eternity together.

The dreamscape changed around us. When we parted, Nsana sighed, the fabric patterns of his face shifting into new lines. They hinted at words, but meant nothing.

“You’re not a child anymore, Sieh,” he said. “Time to grow up now.”

We stood on the streets of the First City. Everything that mortals will or might become is foreshadowed in the gods’ realm, where time is an accessory rather than a given, and the essences of the Three mingle in a different balance depending on their whims and moods. Because Itempas had been banished and diminished, only the barest remnant of his order held sway now. The city, which had been recognizable just a few years before, was only barely so now, and it shifted every few moments
in some cycle we could not fathom. Or perhaps that was because this was a dream? With Nsana, there was no telling.

So he and I walked along cobblestoned streets that turned into smoothly paved sidewalks, stepping onto moving metal pathways now and again as they grew from the cobblestones and then melted away, as if tired. Pathways of mushrooms grew and withered in our wake. Each block, some of which were circular, held squat buildings of painted wood, and stately domes of hewn marble, and the occasional thatched hut. Curious, I peered into one of these buildings through its slanted window. It was dim, full of hulking shapes too distorted and uncomfortable-looking to be furniture, its walls decorated with blank paintings. Something within moved toward the window, and I backed up quickly. I wasn’t a god anymore. Had to be careful.

We were shadowed now and again by great towers of glass and steel that floated, cloudlike, a few meters off the ground. One of them followed us for two blocks, like a lonely puppy, before it finally turned with a foggy groan and drifted down another avenue. No one walked with us, though we felt the presence of others of our brethren, some watching, some uncaring. The City attracted them because it was beautiful, but I could not understand how they endured it. What was a city without inhabitants? It was like life without breathing, or friendship without love; what was the point?

But there was something in the distance that caught my attention, and Nsana’s, too. Deep in the City’s heart, taller and more still than the floating skyscrapers: a smooth, shining white tower without windows or doors. Even amid the jumbled, clashing
architecture of that place, it was clear: this tower did not belong.

I stopped and frowned up at it, as a mushroom taller than Nsa spread its ribbed canopy over our heads. “What is that?”

Nsana willed us closer, folding the city until we stood at the tower’s feet. This confirmed there were no doors, and I curled my lip as I realized the thing was made of daystone. A little piece of Sky amid the dreams of gods: an abomination.

“You have brought this here,” said Nsana.

“The hells I did.”

“Who else would have, Sieh? I touch the mortal realm only through its dreams, and it does not touch me. It has never marked me.”

I threw a sharp look at him. “Marked? Is that how you think of me?”

“Of course, Sieh. You
are
.” I stared at him, wondering whether to feel hurt or angry or something else entirely, and Nsana sighed. “As I am marked by your abandonment. As we are all marked by the War. Did you think the horrors you’ve endured would simply slough away when you became a free god? They have become part of you.” But before I could muster a furious retort, Nsana frowned up at the tower again. “There is more to this, though, than just bad experiences.”

“What?”

Nsana reached out, laying a hand on the surface of the white tower. It glowed like Sky at night beneath his touch, becoming translucent — and within the tower, suddenly, I could see the shadow of some vast, twisting shape. It filled the tower, brown and indistinct, like ordure. Or a cancer.

“There’s a secret here,” said Nsana.

“What, in my dreams?”

“In your soul.” He looked at me, thoughtful. “It must be old, to have grown so powerful. Important.”

I shook my head, but even as I did so, I doubted.

“My secrets are small, silly things,” I said, trying to ignore that worm of doubt. “I kept the bones of the Arameri I killed in a stash beneath the family head’s bedroom. I piss in the punch bowl at weddings. I change directions on maps so they make no sense. I stole some of Nahadoth’s hair once, just to see if I could, and it almost ate me alive —”