The Kingdom of Gods (38 page)

If the day hadn’t already been so strange, I would have marveled at his praise, laced with insults as it was. Instead I merely nodded and slipped the pouch into my shirt, where pickpockets wouldn’t be able to get at it easily.

“Well, get out, then,” he said, and I left.

I was five years older, several centuries chastened, and more hated than ever by my siblings, including the one I’d apparently forgotten. As first days on the job went … well. I was still alive. It remained to be seen whether this was a good thing.

I
DRIFT THROUGH
dreaming. Since I am not mortal, there are no nightmares. I never find myself naked in front of a crowd, because that would never bother me. (I would waggle my genitals at them, just to see the shock on their faces.) Most of what I dream is memory, probably because I have so many of them.

Images of parents and children. Nahadoth, shaped like some sort of great star-flecked beast, lies curled in a nest of ebon sparks. This is in the days before mortals. I am a tiny thing half hidden in the nest’s glimmers. An infant. I huddle against her for comfort and protection, mewling like a new kitten, and she strokes me and whispers my name possessively —

Shahar again. The Matriarch, not the girl I know. She is younger than in my last dream, in her twenties perhaps, and she sits in a window with an infant at her breast. Her chin is propped on her fist; she pays little attention to the babe as it sucks. Mortal, this child. Fully human. Another human child sits in a basket behind her — twins — tended by a girl in priest’s robes. Shahar wears robes, too, though hers are finer. She is high ranking. She has borne children as her faith demands, but soon she will abandon them, when her lord needs her. Her eyes are ever on the horizon, waiting for dawn —

Enefa, in the fullest glory of her power. All her experiments, all the tests and failures, have reached the pinnacle of success at last. Merging life and death, light and dark, order and chaos, she brings mortal life to the universe, transforming it forever. She has been giving birth for the past billion years. Her belly is an earth of endless vastness and fecundity, rippling as it churns forth life after life after life. We who have already been born gaze upon this geysering wonder in worshipful adoration. I come to her, bringing an offering of love, because life needs that to thrive. She devours it greedily and arches, crying out in agony and triumph as another species bursts forth. Magnificent. She gropes for my hand because her brothers have gone off somewhere, probably together, but that’s all right. I am the oldest of her god-children, a man grown. I am there for her when she needs me. Even if she does not need me very often —

Myself. How strange. I sit on a bed in the first Sky, in mortal flesh, confined to it by mad Itempas and my dead mother’s power. This is in the early years, I can tell, when I fought my chains at every turn. My flesh still bears the red weals of a whip, and I am older than I like, weakened by the damage. A young man. Yet I sit beside a longer, larger form whose back is to me. Male, adult, naked. Mortal: black hair a tangled mass. Sickly white skin. Ahad, who had no name back then. He is weeping, I know the way shoulders shake during sobs, and I — I do not remember what I have done to him, but there is guilt as well as despair in my eyes —

Yeine. Who has never borne a child as mortal or goddess, yet who became my mother the instant she met me. She has the nurturing instincts of a predator: choose the most brutal of mates, destroy anything that threatens the young, raise them to be good killers. Yet compared to Enefa, she is a fountain of tenderness, and I drink her
love so thirstily that I worry she will run out. (She never has.) In mortal flesh we curl on the floor of the Wind Harp chamber, laughing, terrified of the dawn and the doom that seems inevitable, yet which is, in fact, only the beginning —

Enefa, again. The great quickening is long done. These days she makes few new children, preferring to observe and prune and transplant the ones she already has, on the nonillion worlds where they grow. She turns to me and I shiver and become a man by her will, though by this point I have realized that
child
is the most fundamental manifestation of my nature. “Don’t be afraid,” she says when I dare to protest. She comes to me, touches me gently; my body yields and my heart soars. I have yearned for this, so long, but —

I am dying, this love will kill me, get it away oh gods I have never been so afraid —

Forget.

One for sorrow

Two for joy

Three for a girl

Four for a boy

Five for silver

Six for gold

Seven for a secret

Never to be told.

Mortal life is cycles. Day and night. Seasons. Waking and sleep. This cyclical nature was built into all mortal creatures by Enefa, and the humans have refined it further by building their cultures to suit. Work, home. Months become years, years shift from past to future. They count endlessly, these creatures. It is this which marks the difference between them and us, I think, far more than magic and death.

For two years, three months, and six days, I lived as ordinary a life as I could. I ate. I slept. I grew healthier, taking pains to make myself sleek and strong, and dressed better. I contemplated asking Glee Shoth to arrange a meeting between myself and
Itempas. I chose not to, because I hated him and would rather die. Perfectly ordinary.

The work was ordinary, too, in its way. Each week I traveled wherever Ahad chose to send me, observing what I could, interfering where I was bidden. Compared to the life of a god … well. It was not boring, at least. It kept me busy. When I worked hard, I thought less. That was a good and necessary thing.

The world was not ordinary, either. Six months after I’d met her, and three months after the birth of her latest lamented son, Usein Darr’s father died of the lingering illness that had incapacitated him for some while. Immediately afterward, Usein Darr got herself elected as one of the High North delegates. She traveled to Shadow in time for the Consortium’s voting season, whereupon her first act was to give a fiery speech openly challenging the existence of Shadow’s delegate. No other single city had a delegate on the Consortium. “And everyone knows why,” Usein declared, then dramatically (according to the news scrolls) turned to glare into the eyes of Remath Arameri, who sat in the family box above the Consortium floor. Remath said nothing in reply — probably because everyone
did
know why, and there was no point in her confirming the obvious. Shadow’s delegate was in fact Sky’s delegate, little more than another mouthpiece through which the Arameri could make their wishes known. This was nothing new.

What
was
new was that Usein’s protest was not struck down by the Consortium Overseer; and that several other nobles —
not
all northerners — rose to voice agreement with her; and that in the subsequent secret vote, nearly a third of the Consortium
agreed that Shadow’s delegate should be abolished. A loss, and yet a victory. Once upon a time, such a proposal would never have even made it to vote.

It was not a victory so much as a shot across the bow. Yet the Arameri did not respond in kind, as the whispers predicted in the Arms of Night’s parlor and the back of the bakery and even at the dinner table with Hymn’s family each evening. No one tried to kill Usein Darr. No mysterious plagues swept through the stone-maze streets of Arrebaia. Darren blackwood and herbal rarities continued to fetch high prices on the open and smugglers’ markets.

I knew what this meant, of course. Remath had drawn a line somewhere, and Usein simply had yet to cross it. When she did, Remath would bring such horrors to Darr as the land had never seen. Unless Usein’s mysterious plans reached fruition first.

Politics would never be interesting enough to occupy the whole of my attention, however, and as the days became months and years, I felt ever more the weight of unfinished, childishly avoided business upon my soul. Eventually one particular urge became overwhelming, and on a slow day, I begged a favor of Ahad. Surprisingly, he obliged me.

Deka was still at the Litaria. That I hadn’t expected. After Shahar’s betrayal, I had braced myself to find him in Sky somewhere. She had done it to get him back, hadn’t she? Yet when Ahad’s magic settled, I found myself in the middle of a classroom. The chamber was circular — a remnant of the Litaria’s time as part of the Order of Itempas — and the walls were lined
by slate covered in chalk renderings: pieces of sigils with each stroke carefully numbered, whole sigils lacking only a stroke or two, and strange numerical calculations that apparently had something to do with how scriveners learned our tongue.

I turned and blinked as I realized I was surrounded by white-clad children. Most were Amn, ten or eleven years old; all sat cross-legged on the floor, with their own slates or pieces of reed paper in their laps. All of them gaped at me.

I put my hands on my hips and grinned back. “What? Your teacher didn’t tell you a godling was dropping by?”

An adult voice made me turn, and then I, too, gaped as the children did.

“No,” drawled Dekarta from the lectern. “We’re doing show-and-tell
next
week. Hello, Sieh.”

Deka wore black now.

I had been surprised by this, but that was not the only shock. I stole little looks up at him — he was much taller than me now — as we walked through a brightly lit, carpeted corridor lined with the busts of dead scriveners. His stride was easy, unhurried, confident. He did not look at me, though he must have noticed me watching him. I tried to read his expression and could not. Despite his exile from Sky, he had still mastered the classic Arameri detachment. Blood told.

Oh, yes, it did. He looked like Ahad.

Demonshitting, hells-spawned, Yeine-loving ratbastard
Ahad
.

So many things made sense now; so many more did not. The resemblance was so strong as to be undeniable. Deka was an
inch or two shorter than Ahad, leaner and somewhat unfinished in the manner of young men. He wore his hair short and plain, where Ahad’s was long and elaborate. Deka looked more Amn, too; Ahad’s features leaned more toward the High Norther template. But in every other way, and particularly in this new aura of easy, dangerous strength, Deka might as well have been made as Ahad had: sprung to life full grown from his progenitor, with no mother in the way to gum things up.