A mask.
I was moving before I opened my eyes. Glee was beside me, both of us rudely shoving our way through the crowd as needed. She had taken out the small messaging sphere again, and this time it glowed red instead of white, sending some wordless signal. For an instant my god-senses actually worked, and in that span, I felt the faint tremor of my siblings’ movements, folding and unfolding the world as they converged on the area.
Through the eyes of my boy, I saw the busker’s face go suddenly slack, as though a brain fit had seized him. Instead of
twitching or slumping, however, he moved the mask forward, like a man moving in a dream. He put it over his face. As he tied it at the back, I caught a glimpse of white lacquer and starkly drawn shade lines. The suggestion of an entirely different face: implacable, serene, frightening. I had no idea what archetype it had been meant to symbolize. Through the eyeholes of this, the busker blinked once, sudden awareness and confusion coming into them as though he couldn’t fathom why he’d put the demon-shitting thing on. He reached up to pull it off.
The designs of the mask flickered, as if they’d caught the light for a moment. A breath later, the man’s eyes went dead. Not closed, not dazed. I am a son of Enefa; I know death when I see it.
Yet the busker got to his feet and looked around, pausing as his white-masked face oriented on the top of the Salon steps. I expected him to begin walking in that direction. Instead he charged toward the steps, running faster than any mortal should have been able, plowing down or flinging aside —
far
aside — anyone unfortunate enough to get in his way.
I also did not expect the cobblestones that edged the Salon steps to suddenly flare white, revealing themselves to be bricks of daystone that someone had painted gray to match the surrounding granite. Through this translucent layer of paint, I could see the darker, starker lines of an etched sigil, the characters on each stone together commanding immobility in the harshest gods’ pidgin and addressed to any living thing that tried to cross it. A shield, of sorts, and it should have worked. The Arameri on the steps had no fear of knives or arrows; their blood sigils could deflect such things easily. All they needed to fear were the mask-wielding assassins, whose strange magic could somehow
circumvent their sigils. Keep them out of reach and the Arameri would be safe — so the scrivener corps had reasoned.
The busker staggered, then stopped as he reached the ring of stones. The mask swung from side to side, not in negation, and not with any movement that could be interpreted as human. I had seen gravel lizards do the same, swaying back and forth over a carcass.
Too late I remembered the simplistic literalness of scrivening magic. Any
living
thing, the stones commanded. But even if the busker’s heart still beat and his limbs still moved, that alone did not qualify as life. The mask had dimmed his soul to nothingness.
The busker stopped swaying, the rounded eyeholes fixed on a target. I followed its gaze and saw Shahar frozen at the top of the steps, her eyes wide and her expression still.
“Oh, demons,” I groaned, and ran for the steps as fast as I could.
The busker stepped closer to the sigil-stones.
“There!” cried Glee, pointing.
She could not have been talking to me. As the crowd’s cheers turned to screams and stamping became stampeding, Kitr appeared at the foot of the steps, just in front of the Arameri guard. A line of twelve glowing red knives appeared in the air before her, hovering and ready. I had seen her fling those knives through armies, leaving fallen mortals like scythed wheat. She could have done that here, risking the crowd to get her target, but like most of the godlings of the city, she would not. They had all taken an oath to respect mortal life. So she waited for the fleeing mortals to scatter more, giving her a clear shot.
I saw the danger before she did, for she had ignored the Arameri’s guards behind her. Faced with a strange godling and a mad mortal, they reacted to both. Half of them fired crossbows at the masked man; the other half fired at Kitr. This could not do her any lasting harm, but it did throw her off balance as her body jerked with the impact of the bolts. She recovered in an instant, shouting at them in fury — and as she did so, the masked man pushed past the barrier, as if the air had turned fleetingly to butter. Slowed, but not stopped.
I thought Kitr would miss her chance, distracted by the mortals. Instead she hissed, her form flickering for just an instant. In her place curled an enormous red-brown snake, its cobralike hood flared. Then she was a woman again, and the knives streaked at the man with the speed of spat poison, all twelve of them thudding into his body with such force that he should have been flung halfway to the city limits.
Instead he merely stopped for a moment, rocking back on his heels. That was the first evidence that the mask had its own protective magic. I saw a glimmer around the edges of his mask, against his skin, underneath. What was it doing? Strengthening his flesh, certainly, or Kitr’s knives would’ve torn it apart. Displacing the force of the blows. Before I could fathom it, the busker started forward again, running slower because of the knives in his thighs. But running.
And in that instant, a second masked man, this one bigger and heavier, raced out of the crowd and plowed into the guards from the side.
Two of them.
Two
of them.
Glee cursed. We were too far from the madness, going too
slow as we fought our way through the panicked crowd. She grabbed my shoulder. “Get them to Sky!” she said, and flung me through the ether. Startled, I materialized atop the Salon steps, in front of an equally stunned cluster of Arameri and soon-to-be-Arameri eyes.
“Sieh,” said Shahar. She stared at me, oblivious to the chaos twenty steps away, and I knew in that instant that she still loved me.
“Get the hells out of here,” I snapped at her, stifling my fury at Glee. Why in heavens had she sent me? What could I do, with no useful magic? “Why are you just standing here? Go back to Sky, damn it!”
There was a crackle, and lightning arced up from somewhere within the crowd, twisting back down to strike the second masker and a handful of guards, who were flung away screaming. Idiot scriveners. Like the first masker, this one stumbled. Stopped. A moment later he lurched forward, his hands scrabbling for purchase on the steps until he could manage to run upright again.
The guards had had enough time to recoup, however. Wrath Arameri, a naked sword in his hand, swept past us at the head of twin lines of soldiers. One line split and converged around us to protect Remath and the rest of us. The other line Wrath directed to assist the guards at the foot of the steps. Wrath fell in at Remath’s side, daring to put a hand on her shoulder as he urged her back toward the daystone steps. Both maskers ran right into a thicket of pikes and swords. From the men’s reactions, however — or lack thereof — it was already clear the blows would only slow them down, not stop them or kill them. They were already dead.
“What in demons?” murmured Datennay Canru. I followed his gaze, and my mouth went dry: a third masker had appeared, this one on the steps of the nearby Itempan White Hall. He wore the uniform of an Order-Keeper, but unlike the first two, his mask was the deep splashy crimson of blood, with stylized white and gold designs and an open mouth that suggested a roar of vengeful fury. This man, too, began to run toward us — and with the crowd thinning and the guards occupied, nothing stood in his way.
Nothing but me.
“Oh gods, no,” I whispered. What could I do? En pulsed hot against the skin of my chest. I grabbed for it; then I remembered. En’s power was mine; when I was strong, so was it. But I was only mortal now. If I used En, drained the last of its strength …
No. I would not kill my oldest friend, not for this. And I would not let my new friends, even if one of them had betrayed me, die. I was still a god, damn it, even without magic. I was still the wind and caprice, even bound into dying flesh. I would fear no mere mortal, no matter how powerful.
So I bared my teeth and lashed the tail I no longer possessed. Shouting a challenge, I ran down the steps to meet the crimson masker.
My words had been in the First Tongue, a command, though I hadn’t expected the man to listen. But to my shock, the crimson masker stopped and turned toward me.
This mask was beautiful and horrid, the runnels and paint suggesting fouled rivers, the strange-angled eyes like crooked mountains. Its mouth — a stylized thing of lips and teeth with a
dark pit of an opening beyond which I could not see its wearer’s face — was twisted, a wail of utmost despair.
Murderer
, its markings whispered to me, and suddenly I thought of all the evils I’d done during the Gods’ War. I thought of the evils I’d done since — sometimes at the Arameri’s bidding, sometimes out of my own rage or cruelty. Forgetting my own challenge amid crushing guilt, I stumbled to a halt.
I felt a jolt. Sudden restriction and pain. Blinking, I looked down and found that the man had made a blade of his hand and had thrust it into my body at the midriff, nearly up to the wrist.
I was still staring down at this when Dekarta reached me. He grabbed my arm and spoke without words, whipping his head in a wide, vicious arc. Sound and force flooded from his throat, a roar of denial powered by the living energy of his skin and blood and bone. Better than many gods could have done. Where the power struck the crimson-masked man, I saw it cancel the mask’s message. The mask split down the center with a faint crack, and an instant later he flew backward a good fifty feet, vanishing amid the fleeing crowd. I could not see precisely where he landed because then Deka’s power struck the steps of the Salon, which erupted, shattering into rubble and bursting upward in an arcing spray.
There could be no precision to such a strike. Guards and soldiers went flying, screaming, along with the enemy. Through all this I saw another white-masked man, one I hadn’t noticed, run into the barrier of broken, flying stone and tumble back. But as the dust and rubble returned to earth, he sat up.
Nemmer appeared swathed in shadows, facing me. I saw her
eyes widen at the sight of my wound. Beyond her, I saw the fallen white-masked man get to his feet and come charging again, this time leaping with godlike strength over the channel of rubble that Deka had created. I willed a warning, since I could not muster the breath, and to my astonishment Nemmer seemed to hear me. She turned and met the man as he struck.
Then I was in Deka’s arms, being carried like a child,
bump te bump te bump
. It was nice that he was so much bigger than me. He ran up the steps to the rest of the Arameri party, who had finally — finally! — begun to hurry up the curving steps toward the nearer gate. From Deka’s embrace, I tried to shout at them to go faster, but I couldn’t lift my head. So strange. It was like my first day as a mortal, when Shahar had summoned me to this realm as the cat, or the day two thousand years before that, when Itempas had thrown me down in chains of flesh and given my leash to a woman, one of Shahar’s daughters, who looked equal parts horrified and elated at the power she held.
Then we reached the top of the steps, and the world folded into a blur, and I passed out in its rippling crease.
I
SEE SOMETHING I SHOULD NOT
.
I see as gods do, absorbing all the world around us whether we have eyes to see it or ears to hear it or a body at all present. I know things because they happen. This is not a mortal thing, and it should not happen while I am in the mortal realm, but I suppose it is proof that I am not completely mortal yet.
We have reached Sky. The forecourt is chaos. The captain of the guard is shouting and gesturing at a gaggle of men who crossed the gate with us. Soldiers and scriveners are running, the former to surround the Vertical Gate with spears and swords in case the maskers follow, the latter bringing brushes and inkpots so that they can seal it off before that happens. While this occurs, Wrath and Ramina try to pull Remath into the palace, but she shakes them off. “I will not retreat in my own home,” she says, so the soldiers and scriveners make ready to defend her with their lives.
Amid all this running and shouting, I flop about in Deka’s arms, dying. Dying faster, that is, instead of the decades-long death that aging has imposed on me. The crimson masker has punched a hole through many of my organs and a good chunk of my spine. If I somehow survive, which is highly unlikely, I will never walk again. Yet
my heart still beats, and my brain still fires sparks within its wrinkled meat, and as long as those things continue, there is an anchor for my soul to hold on to.
I’m glad it will be like this. I died protecting those I cared for, facing an enemy, like a god.
Deka has carried me off the Vertical Gate, onto the unblemished white daystone of Sky’s forecourt. He falls to his knees, shouting for someone to hold me, he can save me if he has help, help him, damn it.
It is Shahar who comes to her brother’s call. She kneels at my other side, and their long-awaited reunion is a quick and panicked meeting of eyes across the gore of my open belly. “Get his clothes open,” he commands, though she is the heir and he is nothing, just a fancy servant. (I am useless, aside from the part of me that watches. My eyes have rolled back in my head, and my mouth hangs open, ugly and inelegant. Some god.) While she struggles to lift my shirt — she tried to tear it first, thinking that would disturb the wound less, but the cheap material is surprisingly strong — Deka pulls a square of paper and a capped brush from wherever scriveners keep such things, and sketches a mark that means
hold.
He means for it to hold in my blood, hold back the filth that is already poisoning my body. That will give him time to write more sigils, which might actually heal me. (Has he only painted offensive magic into his skin? Silly boy.)