The Kingdom of Gods

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, Daybringer, 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.

9

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.

I leaned in to peer over her shoulder. “What will you do with it?”

She whipped about and I froze, as she had placed the tip of a long and wickedly sharp glass dagger at my throat.

“This,” she said. “Back off.”

I did so quickly, raising my hands to make it clear that I meant no harm, and she put the knife away, resuming her work.

“Glass,” she said. “Grind it down for knives, use the leftovers to grind other things. Get it?”

I was fascinated by her manner of speaking. Shadow dwellers’ Senmite was rougher than that of the people in Sky, and quicker spoken. They had less patience for long, flowery verbal constructions, and their new, briefer constructions contained additional layers of attitude. I began adjusting my own speech to suit.

“Got it,” I said. “Then?”

She shrugged. “I sell them at the Sun Market. Or give ’em away, if people can’t pay.” She glanced at me, looking me up and down, and then snorted. “You could pay.”

I looked down at myself. The black clothing I had manifested back in Sky was filthy and stank, but it was made of fine-quality cloth, and the shirt and pants and shoes all matched, unlike her clothes. I supposed I did look wealthy. “But I don’t have any money.”

“So get a job,” she replied, and resumed work.

I sighed and moved to sit down on a closed muckbin, which squelched when my weight bore down on it. “Guess I’ll have to. Know anyone who might need”—I considered what skills I had that might be valuable to mortals. “Hmm. A thief, a juggler, or a killer?”

The girl stopped again, looking hard at me, and then folded her arms. “You a godling?”

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

“Only they ask those kinds of crazy questions.”

“Oh. Have you met many godlings?”

She shrugged. “A few. You going to eat me?”

I frowned, blinking. “Of course not.”

“Fight me? Steal something? Turn me into something else? Torture me to death?”

“Dear gods, why would I—” But then it occurred to me that some of my siblings were capable of all that and worse. We were not the gentlest of families. “None of those things are my nature, don’t worry.”

“All right.” She turned back to examine something she’d found, which I thought might be an old roof shingle. With an annoyed sigh, she tossed it aside. “You’re not going to get many worshippers, though, just sitting there like that. You should do something more interesting.”

I sighed and drew my legs up, wrapping arms around them. “I don’t have a lot of interesting left in me.”

“Hmm.” Straightening, the girl pulled off her stupid hat and mopped her brow. Without it, I saw that she was Amn, her white-blonde curls cropped short and held back with cheap-looking barrettes. She looked ten or eleven, though I saw more years than that in her eyes. Fourteen, maybe. She hadn’t eaten enough in those years, and it showed, but I could still feel the childhood in her.

“Hymn,” she said. A name. My skepticism must have shown, because she rolled her eyes. “Short for Hymnesamina.”

“I like the longer name, actually.”

“I don’t.” She looked me up and down perfunctorily. “You’re not bad-looking, you know. Skinny, but you can fix that.”

I blinked again, wondering if this was some sort of flirtation. “Yes, I know.”

“Then you’ve got another skill besides thieving, juggling, and killing.”

I sighed, feeling very tired. “No whoring.”

“You sure? You’d make a lot more money than with the rest, except killing, and you don’t look very tough.”

“Looks mean nothing for a god.”

“But they do mean something to mortals. You want to make money as a killer, you need to look like one.” She folded her arms. “I know a place where they’d let you pick your clients, you being what you are. If you can make yourself look Amn, you’d make even more.” She cocked her head, considering this. “Or maybe the foreign look is better. I don’t know. Not my thing.”

“I just need enough to buy food.” But I would need more mortal things as I grew older, wouldn’t I? There would come a time—soon, probably—when I would no longer be able to conjure clothing or necessities, and someday shelter would be more than just a pleasant accessory. Winters in central Senm could kill mortals. I sighed again, resting my cheek on my knees.

Hymn sighed, too. “Whatever. Well… see you.” She turned and headed toward the mouth of the alley—then froze, her gaze going sharp and alarmed. Her tension thickened the already-ripe air further when she stepped back, out of the alley’s entrance and into the shadows.

This was just enough to pull me out of my mood. I uncurled and watched her. “Muggers, bullies, or parents?”

“Muckrakers,” she said, so softly that no mortal would have heard her, but she knew I could.

By the way she said it, I realized she expected me to know what muckrakers were. I could guess, though. There was money to be made from any city’s refuse, from charging to get rid of it to selling its useful bits. Curious, I hopped up and came over to where she was standing, out of the slanting light from the torchlamps. When I peeked around her at the street beyond, I saw a group of men near an old mulecart, on the other side of the potholed street. Two of them were laughing and hefting muckbins, dumping them into the cart; two more stood idle, talking, while a fifth was in the cart with a pitchfork and a mask over his face, stirring something that steamed.

I glanced down at the junk in Hymn’s bag. “Would they really begrudge you a few small things?”

She glared at me. “The muckrakers don’t care if it’s just a little bit; it’s theirs. They pay the Order for the rights, and they don’t like it when anybody messes with what’s theirs. They warned me once already.” Despite her show of anger, I could smell the fear underneath. She looked past me, around the alley, but there was no way out. It stood at the intersection of three buildings, and the nearest window was twenty feet up. She could try to sneak out of the alley, and there was a chance the men wouldn’t see her. They were preoccupied with their work and chatter. But if they spotted her, she would not get far with her misshapen foot.

The men were a rough-smelling crew, even without the stench of refuse, and had the unmistakable look of people who have no qualms against harming a child. I bared my teeth at them, for I had always hated such mortals.

At this stirring of my old self, I began to grin.

“Hey!” I shouted. Beside me, Hymn jumped and gasped, whirling to try and escape. I caught her arm and held her in place so they would see her. Sure enough, when the muckrakers looked around, they spotted me—but it was the sight of Hymn that made them scowl.

“What the hells are you doing?” she cried, trying to jerk free.

“It’s all right,” I murmured. “I won’t let them hurt you.” The men near the wagon were turning now, heading toward us with purposeful strides and dire intent. Only three of them, though; the two who’d been working had stopped to watch. I grinned at them and raised my voice again. “Hey, you like shit, right? Have some!” And I turned and yanked my pants down to flash my backside. Hymn moaned.

The muckrakers shouted, and even the two who’d been watching ran around the wagons, the whole lot charging toward our little alley. Laughing, I pulled my pants up and grabbed Hymn’s arm again. “Come on!” I said, and hauled her toward the back of the alley.

“Where—” She couldn’t get out more than that, stumbling over a pile of fungus-covered firewood that someone had dumped between the muckbins. I helped her stay upright, then hauled her back until we were pressed against the alley’s rear wall. A moment later, the alley, already dim, went darker still as the men’s silhouettes blocked the torchlamps.

“What the hells is this?” one of the men asked Hymn. “We warn you not to steal our stuff, and you not only come back but also bring a friend? Huh?” He stepped over the funguswood, clenching his fists; the others closed in behind him.

“I didn’t mean…” Hymn’s voice trembled as she started to speak to the men.

“This girl is under my protection,” I said, stepping in front of her. I was grinning like a madman; I felt power around me like a wafting shroud. Mischief is a heady thing, sweeter than any wine. “Never touch her again.”

The lead man stopped, staring at me in disbelief. “And who in demons are you, brat?”

I closed my eyes and inhaled in pleasure. How long had it been since anyone had called me a brat? I laughed and let go of Hymn and spread my arms, and at the touch of my will, the lids blasted off every bin and crate in the alley. The men cried out, but it was too late; they were mine to toy with.

“I am the son of chaos and death,” I said. They all heard me, as intimately as if I’d spoken into their ears, despite the noise of their startled cries and the falling lids. A brisk wind had begun to blow through the alley, stirring the looser refuse and blowing dust into all our eyes. I squinted and grinned. “I know all the rules in the games of pain. But I will be merciful now, because it pleases me. Consider this a warning.”

And I curled my fingers into claws. The bins exploded, the refuse contained in each rising into the air and swirling and churning in a circle, a hurricane of debris and foulness that surrounded the five men and herded them together. When I brought my hands together in a clap, all of it sucked inward—plastering them from head to toe with every disgusting substance mortalkind has ever produced. I made sure a bit of my own ordure was in there, too.

I could have been truly cruel. They’d meant to hurt Hymn, after all. I could have shattered the fungus log and speared them with spore-covered splinters. I could have broken their bodies into pieces and stuffed the whole mess back into the bins, muck and all. But I was having fun. I let them live.

They screamed—though some of them had the wit to keep their mouths closed for fear of what the scream would let in—and flailed at themselves with remarkable vigor given what their jobs entailed. But I supposed it was one thing to shovel and haul shit; quite another to bathe in it. I had made certain the stuff went into their clothes and various crevices of their bodies. A good trick is all about the details.

“Remember,” I said, stalking forward. Those who could see me, because they had managed to get the muck out of their eyes, yelled and grabbed their still-blind companions and stumbled back. I let them go and grinned, and made a chunk of wood spin like a top on one of my fingertips. A waste of magic, yes, but I wanted to enjoy being strong for however long it lasted. “Never touch her again, or I will find you. Now go!” I stomped at them, mock-threatening, but they were horrified and wise enough to scream and turn and run out of the alley, some of them tripping and slipping in the slime. They fled down the street, leaving behind their wagon and mule. I heard them yelling in the distance.

I fell to the ground—we were still at the back of the alley, where the ground was relatively clean—and laughed and laughed, until my sides ached. Hymn, however, began picking her way over the tumbled debris, trying to find a way out of the alley that would not require her to walk through a layer of filth.

Surprised at being abandoned, I stopped laughing and sat up on one elbow to watch her. “Where are you going?”

“Away from you,” she said. Only then did I realize she was furious.

Blinking, I got to my feet and went to her. Strong as I was feeling after that trick, it was nothing to grab her about the waist and leap over the front half of the alley, landing in the brighter-lit, fresher air of the street. There were a few people about, standing and murmuring in the wake of the muckrakers’ spectacle, but there was a collective gasp as I landed on the cobblestones. Quickly—hurriedly, in some cases—all of the onlookers turned and left, some of them glancing back as if in fear that I would follow.

Puzzled by this, I set Hymn down, whereupon she immediately began hurrying away, too. “Hey!”

She stopped, and turned back to me with a look of such wariness that I flinched. “What?”

I put my hands on my hips. “I saved you. What, not even a thanks?”

“Thank you,” she said tightly, “though I wouldn’t have been in danger if you hadn’t called out to them.”

This was true. But…“They won’t bother you again,” I said. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“What I wanted,” she said, turning red in the face now, “was to do my business in peace. Should’ve left when I figured out you were a godling! And you’re worse somehow. You seemed so sad, I thought for a moment that you were more”—she spluttered, too apoplectic to speak for a moment—“ human. But you’re just like the rest of them, screwing up mortal lives and thinking you’re doing us a favor.” She turned away, walking briskly enough that the limp made her gait into an ugly sort of half hop. I’d been wrong; the bad foot didn’t slow her down at all.

I stared in the direction she had gone until it became clear she would not stop, and then finally I sighed and trotted after her.

I had nearly caught up when Hymn heard my footsteps and stopped, rounding on me. “What?”

I stopped, too, putting my hands in my pockets and trying not to hunch my shoulders. “I need to make it up to you.” I sighed, wishing I could just leave. “Is there something you want? I can’t fix your foot, but… I don’t know. Whatever.”

I could almost hear her teeth grinding together, though she did not speak for a moment. Perhaps she needed to master her rage before she started shouting at a god.

“I don’t want my foot fixed,” she said with remarkable calm. “I don’t want anything from you. But if it’s your nature that you’re trying to serve, and you won’t leave me alone until you’ve done it, then here’s what I need: money.”

I blinked. “Money? But—”

“You’re a god. You should be able to make money.”

I tried to think of a game or toy that might allow me to produce money. Gambling was an adult game; it did not suit my nature at all. Perhaps I could act out a children’s tale or lullaby, that one about the golden ropes and the pearl lanterns…“Would you take jewelry instead?”

She made a sound of utter disgust and turned to leave. I groaned and trotted after her. “Listen, I said I could make things that are valuable, and you can sell them! What’s wrong with that?”

“I can’t sell them,” she snapped, still walking. I hurried to keep up. “Trying to sell something valuable would get me killed. If I took it to a pawnbroker, everyone in South Root would know I had money before I left the shop. My house would get robbed, or my relatives would be kidnapped, or something. I don’t know anyone in the merchant cartels who could fence it for me, and even if I did, they’d take half or more in ‘fees.’ And I don’t have the status to impress the Order of Itempas, so they’d take the rest in tithes. I could go to one of the godlings around town, maybe, but then I’d have to deal with more of you.” She threw me a scathing look. “My parents are old, and I’m the only child. What I need is money for food and rent and to get the roof fixed and maybe to buy my father a bottle of wine now and again so he can stop worrying so much about how we’re going to survive. Can you give me any of that?”

I stumbled after this litany, a little stunned. “I… no.”

Hymn stared at me for a long moment, then sighed and stopped, reaching up to rub her forehead as if it pained her. “Look, which one are you?”

“Sieh.”

She looked surprised, which was a welcome change from contempt and exasperation. “I don’t recognize your name.”

“No. I used to live here”—I hesitated—“a long time ago. But I only came back to the mortal realm a few days ago.”

“Gods, no wonder you’re such a horror. You’re new in town.” This seemed to ease some of her anger, and she looked me up and down. “All right, what’s your nature?”

“Tricks. Mischief.” These were always easier to explain to mortals. They found “childhood” difficult to grasp as a specific concept. Hymn nodded, though, so I took a chance and added, “Innocence.”

She looked thoughtful. “You must be one of the older ones. The younger ones are simpler.”

“They’re not simpler. Their natures are just more attuned to mortal life, since they were born after mortals were created—”

“I know that,” she said, looking annoyed again. “Look, people in this city have lived with your kind for a long time now. We get how you work; you don’t need to lecture.” She sighed again and shook her head. “I know you need to serve your nature, all right? But I don’t need tricks; I need money. If you want to conjure something, sell it yourself, and bring me that later, that would be fine. Just try and be discreet, will you? And leave me alone until then. Please.”

With this, Hymn turned to walk away, slower this time as she had calmed somewhat. I watched her go, feeling altogether out of sorts and wondering how in the infinite hells I was going to get money for her. Because she was right; playing fair was as fundamental to my nature as being a child, and if I allowed the wrong I had done her to stand, it would erode a little more of whatever childhood she had remaining. Doing that prior to my transformation would’ve made me ill. Doing it now? I had no idea what would happen, but it would not be pleasant.

I would have to obtain money by mortal means, then. But if there were jobs to be had, would Hymn have been digging through muckbins and making knives from broken crockery? Worse, I had no knowledge of the city in its current incarnation, and no inkling of where to begin my search for employment.

So I began walking after Hymn again.

The streets were quiet and empty as I walked, taking on a dim, twilightish aspect as the morning progressed. Dawn had come and gone while I tormented the muckrakers, and all around me I could feel the city awakening, its pulse quickening with the start of day. Ghostly white buildings, long unpainted but soundly made and still beautiful in a run-down way, loomed out of the dark on either side of the street. I saw faces peering through the windows, half hidden by the curtains. Through gaps in the buildings I could see the mountainous black silhouette of a Tree root. Roots hemmed in this part of the city, while the Tree itself loomed above all to the north. There would be no sunlight here, no matter how bright the day grew.

Then I turned another corner and stopped, for Hymn stood there glaring at me.

I sighed. “I’m sorry. I really am! But I need your help.”

We sat in the small common room of her family’s home. An old inn, she explained, though they hardly ever had travelers through anymore and survived by taking in long-term boarders when they could. For the time being, there were none.

“It’s the only way,” I said, having reached this conclusion by my second cup of tea. Hymn’s mother had served it to me, her hand shaking as she poured, though I’d tried my best to put her at ease. When Hymn murmured something to her, she’d withdrawn into another room, though I could hear her still lurking near the door, listening. Her heartbeat was very loud.

Hymn shrugged, toying with the plate of dry cheese and stale bread her mother had insisted upon serving. She ate only a little of it, and I ate none, for it was easy to see this family had almost nothing. Fortunately this behavior was considered polite for a godling, since most of us didn’t need to eat.

“Your choice, of course,” she said.

I did not like the choices laid before me. Hymn had confirmed my guess that there was little in the way of work, as the city’s economy had lost ground in recent years to innovations coming out of the north. (In the old days, the Arameri would have unleashed a plague or two to kill off commoners and increase the demand for labor. Unemployment, frustrating as it was, represented progress.) There was still money to be made from serving the mortals who came to the city on pilgrimage, to pray for one of any dozen gods’ blessing, but not many employers would be pleased to hire a godling. “Bad for business,” Hymn explained. “Too easy to offend someone by your existence.”

“Of course,” I sighed.

Since the city’s legitimate business was closed to me, my only hope was its illegitimate side. For that, at least, I had a possible way in: Nemmer. I was to meet her in three more days, according to our agreement. I no longer cared that some sibling of ours was targeting the Arameri. Let them all die, except perhaps Deka, whom I would geld and put on a leash to keep him sweet. But the conspiracy against our parents meant I should still see her. I could ask her help in finding work then.

If I could stomach the shame. Which I could not. So I had decided to try another way into the city’s shadier side. Hymn’s way: the Arms of Night. The brothel she had already tried to convince me to join.

“A friend of mine went to work there a couple of years ago,” she said. “Not as a prostitute! She’s not their type. But they need servants and such, and they pay a good wage.” She shrugged. “If you don’t want to do the one thing, you could always do the other. Especially if you can cook and clean.”

I was not fond of that idea, either. Enough of my mortal years in Sky had been spent serving one way or another. “I don’t suppose any of their customers would like a nice game of tag?” Hymn only looked at me. I sighed. “Right.”

“We should go now, if you want to talk to them,” she said. “They get busy at night.” She spoke with remarkable compassion given how tired she already was of me. I supposed the misery in my expression had managed to penetrate even her cynical armor. Which might have been why she tried again to dissuade me. “I don’t care, you know. If you make up for nearly getting me killed. I told you that.”

I nodded heavily. “I know. This isn’t really about you, though.”

She sighed. “I know, I know. You must be what you are.” I looked up in surprise, and she smiled. “I told you. Everyone here understands gods.”

So we left the inn and headed up the street, which was bustling now that I’d been out of sight for a while. Carters rattled past with their rickety old wagons while vendors pushed along rolling stands to sell their fruit and fried meat. An old man sat on a blanket on one corner, calling out that he could repair shoes. A middle-aged man in stained laborer’s clothes went over to him, and they crouched to dicker.

Hymn limped easily through this chaos, waving cheerfully to this or that person as we passed, altogether more comfortable amid her fellow mortals than she’d been in my company. I watched her as we walked, fascinated. I could taste a solid core of innocence underneath her cynical pragmatism, and just the faintest dollop of wonder, because not even the most jaded mortal could spend time in a god’s presence without feeling something. And she was amused by me, despite her apparent annoyance. That made me grin—which she caught when she looked around and caught a glimpse of my face. “What?” she asked.

“You,” I said, grinning.

“What about me?”

“You’re one of mine. Or you could be, if you wanted.” That thought made me cock my head in consideration. “Unless you’ve pledged yourself to another god?”

She shook her head, though she said nothing, and I thought that I sensed tension in her. Not fear. Something else. Embarrassment?

I remembered Shevir’s term. “Are you a primortalist?”

She rolled her eyes. “Do you ever stop talking?”

“It’s very hard for me to be quiet and well behaved,” I said honestly, and she snorted.

The road we were on went uphill for a ways. I guessed there might be a root of the Tree underground somewhere, close to the surface. As we went up, we passed gradually into a zone of relative brightness, which would probably receive direct sunlight at least once a day, whenever the sun sank below the Tree’s canopy. The buildings grew taller and better maintained; the streets grew busier, too, possibly because we were traveling inward toward the city’s heart. Hymn and I now had to shift to the sidewalk to avoid coaches and the occasional finely made palanquin borne along by sweating men.

At last we reached a large house that occupied the majority of a bizarrely triangular block, near the intersection of two brisk-moving streets. The house was triangular as well, a stately six-story wedge, but that was not what made it so striking. What made me stop, half in the street, and stare was the fact that someone had had the audacity to paint it black. Aside from wooden lintels and white accents, the whole structure from roof edge to foundation was stark, unrelenting, unabashed blackness.

Hymn grinned at my openmouthed expression and pulled me forward so I wouldn’t get run over by a human-drawn carriage. “Amazing, isn’t it? I don’t know how they get away with breaking the White Law. My papa says the Order-Keepers used to kill homeowners as heretics if they refused to paint their houses white. They still issue fines sometimes—but nobody bothers the Arms of Night.” She poked me in the shoulder, making me look at her in surprise. “You be polite, if you really care about making it up to me. These people are into more than whorehouses. No one crosses them.”

I smiled weakly, though my stomach had tightened in unease. Had I fled Sky only to put myself in the hands of other mortals with power? But I owed Hymn, so I sighed and said, “I’ll be good.”

She nodded, then led me through the house’s gate and up to its wide, plain double doors.

A servant—conservatively dressed—opened the door at her knock. “Hello,” said Hymn, inclining her head in a polite bow. (She glared at me, and I hastily did the same.) “My friend here has business with the proprietor.”

The servant, a stocky Amn woman, swept a quick assessing glance over me and apparently decided I was worthy of further attention. Given that I wore three days’ worth of alley filth, this made me feel quite proud of my looks. “Your name?”

I considered half a dozen, then decided there was no point in hiding. “Sieh.”

She nodded and glanced at Hymn, who introduced herself as well. “I’ll let him know you’re here,” the woman said. “Please, wait in the parlor.”

She led us to a small, stuffy little room with wood-paneled walls and an elaborately patterned Mencheyev carpet on the floor. It had no chairs, so we stood while the woman closed the door behind us and left.

“This place doesn’t feel much like a whorehouse,” I said, going to the window to peer out at the bustling street. I tasted the air and found nothing I would have expected—no lust, though that could only have been because there were no clients present. No misery either, though, or bitterness or pain. I could smell women, and men, and sex, but also incense and paper and ink, and fine food. Far more businesslike than sordid.

“They don’t like that word,” Hymn murmured, coming near so that we could speak. “And I told you, the people who work here aren’t whores—not people who will do anything for money, I mean. Some of the ones here don’t work for money at all.”

“What?”

“That’s what I’ve heard. And more, the people who run this place are taking over all the brothels in the city and making them work the same way. I hear that’s why the Order-Keepers give them so much leeway. Darkwalker tithe money is just as shiny as anyone else’s, when it comes down to it.”

“Darkwalkers?” My mouth fell open. “I don’t believe it. These people—the proprietors or whatever—they worship Nahadoth?” I could not help thinking of Naha’s worshippers of old, in the days before the Gods’ War. They had been revelers and dreamers and rebels, as resistant to the idea of organization as cats to obedience. But times had changed, and two thousand years of Itempas’s influence had left a mark. Now the followers of Nahadoth opened businesses and paid taxes.

“Yes, they worship Nahadoth,” said Hymn, throwing me a look of such challenge that I instantly understood. “Does that bother you?”

I put my hand on her bony shoulder. If I could have, I would have blessed her, now that I knew who she belonged to. “Why would it? He’s my father.”

She blinked but remained wary, her tension shifting from one shoulder to the other. “He’s the father of most godlings, isn’t he? But not all of them seem to like him.”

I shrugged. “He’s hard to like sometimes. I get that from him.” I grinned, which pulled a smile from her, too. “But anyone who honors him is a friend of mine.”

“That’s good to know,” said a voice behind me, and I went stiff because it was a voice that I had never, ever expected to hear again. Male, baritone-deep, careless, cruel. The cruelty was most prominent now, mingled with amusement, because here I was in his parlor, helpless, mortal, and that made him the spider to my fly.

I turned slowly, my hands clenching into fists. He smiled with almost-perfect lips and gazed at me with eyes that weren’t quite dark enough. “You,” I breathed.

My father’s living prison. My tormentor. My victim.

“Hello, Sieh,” he said. “Nice to see you again.”

10

It should never have happened.

Itempas’s madness, Enefa’s death, Nahadoth’s defeat. The War. The sundering of our family.

But it had, and I had been chained within a sack of meat that slurped and leaked and thumped about, clumsy as a cudgel, more helpless than I had been even as a newborn. Because newborn gods were free, and I? I was nothing. Less than nothing. A slave.

We had sworn from the beginning to look out for one another, as slaves must. The first few weeks were the worst. Our new masters worked us to the bone repairing their broken world—which, in all honesty, we had helped to break. Zhakkarn went forth and rescued all the survivors, even the ones buried under rubble or half crisped by lava or lightning. I, better than anyone at clearing up messes, rebuilt one village in every land for the survivors’ housing. Meanwhile, Kurue made the seas live and the soils fruitful again.

(They had ripped off her wings to force her to do it. It was too complex a task to be commanded, and she was too wise; she could easily find the loopholes in it. The wings grew back and they tore them away again, but she bore the pain in cold silence. Only when they’d driven heated spikes into her skull, threatening to damage her now-vulnerable brain, had she capitulated. She could not bear to be without her thoughts, for those were all she had left.)

Nahadoth, that awful first year, was left alone. This was partly necessity, as Itempas’s betrayal had left him silent and broken. Nothing stirred him; not words, not whippings. When the Arameri commanded, he would move and do as he was told—no more, no less. Then he would sit back down. This stillness was not his nature, you understand. There was something so obviously wrong with it that even the Arameri let him be.

But the other problem was Naha’s unreliability. By night he had power, but send him to the other side of the world, past the dawnline of the sun, and he turned to drooling, senseless meat. He had no power at all in that form—could not even manifest his own personality. The meat’s mind was as empty as a newborn babe’s. Still dangerous, though, especially when sunset came.

Because it was, in its own way, a child, I was given charge of it.

From the first I hated this. It shat itself every day, sometimes more than once. (One of the mortal women tried to show me how to use a diaper; I never bothered. Just left the creature on the ground to do its business.) It moaned and grunted and screamed, incessantly. It bit me bloody when I tried to feed it—newborn or not, it had a man’s flesh, and that man had a full set of strong, sharp teeth. The first time it did this, I knocked several of those teeth out. They grew back the next night. It didn’t bite me again.

Gradually, though, I came to be more accepting of my duty, and as I warmed toward the meat, so it regarded me with its own simple species of affection. When it began to walk, it followed me everywhere. Once Zhakka and Rue and I had built the first White Hall—the Arameri still pretended to be priests back then—the creature filled the shining corridors with jabbering as it learned to talk. Its first word was my name. When I grew weak and lapsed into the horrifying state that mortals called sleep, the meat creature snuggled against me. I tolerated this because sometimes, when dusk fell and it became my father again, I could snuggle back and close my eyes and imagine that the War had never happened. That all was as it should be.

But those dreams never lasted. The thin, lifeless dawn, and my mindless charge, always returned.

If only it had stayed mindless. But it did not; it began to think. When the others and I probed inside it, we found that it had begun, like any thinking, feeling being, to grow a soul. Worst of all, it—he—began to love me.

And I, as I should never, ever have done, began to love him back.

Hymn and I stood now in the creature’s large, handsomely furnished office, wreathed in disgusting smoke.

“I’d ask you to sit,” he said, pausing to take another long drag on the burning thing in his mouth, exhaling the smoke with a languid air, “but I doubt you would.” He gestured at the equally handsome leather chairs that faced his desk. He sat in a fine chair across from these.

Hymn, who had been glancing uneasily at me since we’d come upstairs from the parlor, sat. I did not.

“My lord—” she began.

“Lord?” I spat this, folding my arms.

He looked at me with amusement. “Nobility these days has less to do with bloodlines and friendships with the Arameri, and more to do with money. I have plenty of that, so yes, that makes me a lord.” He paused. “And I go by the name ‘Ahad’ now. Do you like it?”

I sneered. “You can’t even bother to be original.”

“I have only the name you gave me, lovely Sieh.” He hadn’t changed. His words were still velvet over razors. I ground my teeth, bracing for cuts. “Speaking of loveliness, though, you’re rather lacking at the moment. Did you piss off Zhakkarn again? How is she, by the way? Always liked her.”

“What in the fifty million hells are you doing alive?” I demanded. This earned a little gasp from Hymn, but I ignored her.

Ahad’s smile never flagged. “You know precisely why I’m alive, Sieh. You were there, remember? At the moment of my birth.” I stiffened at this. There was too much knowing in his eyes. He saw my fear. “ ‘Live,’ she said. She was newborn herself; maybe she didn’t know a goddess’s word is law. But I suspect she did.”

I relaxed, realizing that he referred to his rebirth as a whole and separate being. But how many years had passed since then? Ahad should have grown old and died years before, yet here he was, as hale and healthy as he’d been on that day. Better, in fact. He was smug and well dressed now, his fingers heavy with silver rings, his hair long and straight and partially braided like a barbarian’s. I blinked. No, like a Darre’s, which was what he looked like now: a mortal, Darren man. Yeine had remade him to suit her then-tastes.

Remade him. “What are you?” I asked, suspicious.

He shrugged, setting that shining black hair a-ripple over his shoulders. (Something about this movement nagged me with its familiarity.) Then he lifted a hand, casually, and turned it into black mist. My mouth fell open; his smile widened just a touch. His hand returned, still holding the smelly cheroot, which he raised for another long inhalation.

I went forward so swiftly and intently that he rose to face me. An instant later, I stopped against a radiant cushion of his power. It was not a shield; nothing so specific. Just his will given force. He did not want me near him and this became reality. Along with the scent that I’d drawn near him to try and detect, this confirmed my suspicions. To my horror.

“You’re a godling,” I whispered. “She made you a godling.”

Ahad, no longer smiling, said nothing, and I realized I was still closer than he wanted me. His distaste washed against me in little sour-tasting tides. I stepped back, and he relaxed.

I did not understand, you see. What it meant to be mortal—relentlessly, constantly, without recourse to the soothing aethers and rarefied dimensions that are the proper housing for my kind. Years passed before I realized that to be bound to mortal flesh is more than just magical or physical weakness; it is a degradation of the mind and soul. And I did not handle it well, those first few centuries.

So easy to endure pain and pass on in turn to those weaker than oneself. So easy to look into the eyes of someone who trusted me to protect him—and hate him, because I could not.

What he has become is my fault. I have sinned against myself, and there is no redeeming that.

“So it appears,” Ahad said. “I have such peculiar abilities now. And as you’ve noticed, I grow no older.” He paused, looking me up and down. “Which is more than I can say for you. You smell like Sky, Sieh, and you look like some Arameri have been torturing you again. But”—he paused, his eyes narrowing—“it’s more than that, isn’t it? You feel… wrong.”

Even if he had not become a god, he was the last person to whom I would have willingly revealed my condition. Yet there was no hiding it, now that he’d seen me. He knew me better than anyone else in this realm, and he would be that much more vicious if I tried to hide it.

I sighed and waved a hand to clear some of the drifting smoke from my vicinity. It came right back. “Something has happened,” I said. “I was in Sky, yes, for a few days. The Arameri heir—” No. I didn’t want to talk about that. Better to get to the worst of it. “I seem to be”—I shifted, put my hands into my pockets, and tried to seem nonchalant—“dying.”

Hymn’s eyes widened. Ahad—I hated that stupid name of his already—looked skeptical.

“Nothing can kill a godling but demons and gods,” he said, “and the world’s fresh out of demons, last I heard. Has Naha finally grown tired of his little favorite?”

I clenched my fists. “He will love me until time ends.”

“Yeine, then.” To my surprise, the skepticism cleared from Ahad’s face. “Yes, she is wise and good-hearted, but she didn’t know you back then; you played the innocent boy so well. She could make you mortal, couldn’t she? If so, I commend her for giving you a slow, cruel death.”

I would have gotten angrier, if my own cruel streak hadn’t come to the fore. “What’s this? Have you got a baby-god crush on Yeine? It’s hopeless, you know. Nahadoth’s the one she loves; you’re just his leftovers.”

Ahad kept smiling, but his eyes went black and cold. He had more than a little of my father still in him; that much was obvious.

“You’re just mad neither of them wants you,” he said.

The room went gray and red. With a wordless cry of rage, I went for him—meaning, I think, to rip him open with my claws, and forgetting for the moment that I had none. And forgetting, far more stupidly, that he was a god and I was not.

He could have killed me. He could have done it by accident; newborn godlings don’t know their own strength. Instead he simply caught me by the throat, lifted me bodily, and slammed me onto the top of his desk so hard that the wood cracked.

While I groaned, dazed by the blow and the agony of landing on two paperweights, he sighed and sucked more smoke from the cheroot with his free hand. He kept me pinned, easily, with the other.

“What does he want?” he asked Hymn.

As my vision cleared, I saw she had gotten to her feet and was half ducked behind her chair. At his question, she straightened warily.

“Money,” she said. “He got me into trouble earlier today. Said he needed to make it up to me, but I don’t need any of his tricks.”

Ahad laughed, in the humorless way he had done for the last dozen centuries. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt true amusement from him. “Isn’t that just like him?” He smiled down at me, then lifted a hand. A purse appeared in it; I heard heavy coins jingle within. Without looking at Hymn, he tossed it. Without blinking she caught it.

“That enough?” he asked when she tugged open the pouch’s string to look inside. Her eyes widened, and she nodded. “Good. You can go now.”

She swallowed. “Am I in trouble for this?” She glanced at me as I struggled to breathe around Ahad’s tightening hand.

“No, of course not. How could you have known I knew him?” He threw her a significant look. “Though you still don’t know anything, you understand. About me being what I am, him being what he is. You never met him, and you never came here. Spend your money slowly if you want to keep it.”

“I know that.” Scowling, Hymn made the pouch disappear. Then to my surprise, she glanced at me again. “What are you going to do with him?”

I had begun to wonder that myself. His hand was tight enough to feel the pounding of my pulse. I reached up and scrabbled at his wrist, trying to loosen it, but it was like trying to loosen the roots of the Tree.

Ahad watched my efforts with lazy cruelty. “I haven’t decided yet,” he said. “Does it matter?”

Hymn licked her lips. “I don’t do blood money.”

He looked up at her and let the silence grow long and still before he finally spoke. His words were kinder than his eyes. “Don’t worry,” he said. “This one is a favorite of two of the Three. I’m not stupid enough to kill him.”

Hymn took a quick, deep breath—for strength, I thought. “Look, I don’t know what’s happened between you two, and I don’t care. I never would have… I didn’t mean to—” She stopped, took a deep breath. “I’ll give you back the money. Just let him come with me.”

Ahad’s hand tightened until I saw stars at the edges of my vision. “Don’t,” he said, sounding far too much like my father in that instant, “ever command me.”

Hymn looked confused, but of course mortals do not realize how often they speak in imperatives—that is, ordinary mortals do not. Arameri long ago learned that lesson when we killed them for forgetting.

I fought back fear so that I could concentrate. Leave her alone, damn you! Play your games with me, not her!

Ahad actually started, throwing a sharp glance at me. I had no idea why—until I remembered just how young he was, in our terms. And that reminded me of my one advantage over him.

Closing my eyes, I fixed my thoughts on Hymn. She was a hot bright point on the darkening map of my awareness. I had found the power to protect her when the muckrakers came. Could I now protect her from one of my own?

Wind shot through the hollows of my soul, cold and electric. Not much; not nearly as much as there should have been. But enough. I smiled.

And reached up to grip Ahad’s hand. “Brother,” I murmured in our tongue, and he blinked, surprised that I could talk. “Share yourself with me.”

Then I took him into my self. We blazed, white green gold, through a firmament of purest ebony, down, down, down. This was not the core of me, for I would never trust him in that sweet, sharp place, but it was close enough. I felt him struggle, frightened, as all that I was—a torrent, a current—threatened to devour him. But that was not my intention. As we swirled downward, I dragged him closer to me. Here without flesh, I was the elder and the stronger. He did not know himself and I overpowered him easily. Gripping the front of his shirt, I grinned into his wide, panicked eyes.

“Let’s see you now,” I said, and thrust my hand into his mouth.

He screamed—a stupid thing to do under the circumstances. That just made it easier. I compacted myself into a single curved claw and plunged into the core of him. There was an instant of resistance, and pain for both of us, because he was not me and all gods are antithetical to each other on some level. Then there was the briefest plume of strangeness as I tasted his nature, dark but not, rich in memory yet raw with his newness, craving, desperate for something that he did not want and did not know that he needed—but it latched on to me with a ferocity I had not expected. Young gods are not usually so savage. Then I was the one being devoured—

I came out of him with a cry and twisted away, curling in on myself in agony while Ahad stumbled and fell across the empty chair. I heard him utter a sound like a sob, once. Then he drew deep breaths, controlling himself.

Yes, I had forgotten. He was not truly new. He wasn’t even young, like Yeine. As a mortal, he had seen thousands of years before his effective rebirth. And he had endured hells in that time that would have broken most mortals. It had broken him, but he’d put himself back together, stronger. I laughed to myself as the pain of nearly becoming something else finally began to recede.

“You never change, do you?” My voice was a rasp. He’d left finger marks in the flesh of my neck. “Always so difficult.”

His reply was a curse in a dead language, though I was gratified to hear weariness in his voice as well.

I pushed myself up, slowly. Every muscle in my body ached, along with the bump to the back of the head I’d taken. At the corner of my vision there was movement: Hymn. Coming back into the room, after quite sensibly vacating it while two godlings fought. I was surprised, given her knowledge of us, that she hadn’t vacated the house and neighborhood, too.

“You done?” she asked.

“Very,” I said, pulling myself to sit on the edge of the desk. I would need to sleep again soon. But first I had to make my peace with Ahad, if he would allow that.

He was glaring at me now, from the chair. Nearly recovered already, though his hair was mussed and he had lost his cheroot. I hated him more for a moment, and then sighed and let that go. Let it all go. Mortal life was too short.

“We are no longer slaves,” I said softly. “We need no longer be enemies.”

“We weren’t enemies because of the Arameri,” he snapped.

“Yes, we were.” I smiled, which made him blink. “You wouldn’t have even existed if not for them. And I—” If I allowed it, the shame would come. I had never allowed it before, but so much had changed since those days. Our positions had reversed: he was a god; I wasn’t. I needed him; he didn’t need me. “I would have at least… would have tried to be a better…”

But then he surprised me. He had always been good at that.

“Shut up, you fool,” he said, getting to his feet with a sigh. “Don’t be any more of an ass than you usually are.”

I blinked. “What?”

Ahad stalked over to me, surprising me further. He hadn’t liked being near me for centuries. Planting his hands on the desk on either side of my hips, he leaned down to glare into my face. “Do you really think me so petty that I would still be angry after all this time? Ah, no—that isn’t it at all.” His smile flickered, and perhaps it was my imagination that his teeth grew sharper for a moment. I hoped it was, because the last thing he needed was an animal nature. “No, I think you’re just so gods-damned certain of your own importance that you haven’t figured it out. So let me make this clear: I don’t care about you. You’re irrelevant. It’s a waste of my energy even to hate you!”

I stared back at him, stunned by his vehemence and, I will admit, hurt. And yet.

“I don’t believe you,” I murmured. He blinked.

Then he pushed away from the desk with such force that it scooched back a little, nearly jostling me off. I stared as he went over to Hymn, grabbed her by the scruff of her shirt, and half dragged her to the door, opening it.

“I’m not going to kill him,” he said, shoving her through hard enough that she stumbled when he let her go. “I’m not going to do a damned thing other than gloat over his prolonged, humiliating death, which I have no reason whatsoever to hasten. So your money’s clean and you can wash your hands of him in good conscience. Be glad you escaped before he could ruin your life. Now get out!” And he slammed the door in her face.

I stared at him as he turned to regard me, taking a long, slow breath to compose himself. Because I knew his soul, I felt the moment that he made a decision. Perhaps he had already guessed at mine.

“Would you like a drink?” he asked at last, with brittle politeness.

“Children shouldn’t drink,” I said automatically.

“How fortunate that you’re not a child anymore.”

I winced. “I, ah, haven’t had alcohol in a few centuries.” I said it carefully, testing this new, fragile peace beneath us. It was as thin as the tension on a puddle’s surface, but if we tread delicately, we might manage. “Do you have anything, er…”

“For the pathetic?” He snorted and went over to a handsome wood cabinet, which turned out to hold a dozen or so bottles. All of them were full of strong, richly colored liquids. Stuff for men, not boys. “No. You’ll have to sink or swim, I’m afraid.”

Most likely I would sink. I looked at the bottles and committed myself to the path of truce with a heavy sigh.

“Pour on, then,” I said, and he did.

Some while later, after I had unfortunately remembered too late that vomiting is far, far more unpleasant than defecating, I sat on the floor where Ahad had left me and took a long, hard look at him. “You want something from me,” I said. I believe I said it clearly, though my thoughts were slurred.

He lifted an eyebrow in genteel fashion, not even tipsy. A servant had already taken away the wastebasket splattered with my folly. Even with the windows open, the stench of Ahad’s cheroot was better than the alternative, so I did not mind it this time.

“So do you,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, “but my wants are always simple things. In this case I want money, and since I really wanted it for Hymn and you’ve already given it to her, that essentially solves the problem. Your wants are never simple.”

“Hmm.” I didn’t think this statement pleased him. “And yet you’re still here, which implies you want something more.”

“Care during my feeble senescence. It will take me another fifty or sixty years to die, during which I will require increasing amounts of food and shelter and”—I looked at the bottle on the desk between us, considering—“and other things. Mortals use money to obtain these things; I am becoming mortal; therefore, I will need a regular source of money.”

“A job.” Ahad laughed. “My housekeeper thought you might make a good courtesan, if you cleaned up a little.”

Affront penetrated the alcohol haze. “I’m a god!”

“Nearly a third of our courtesans are godlings, Sieh. Didn’t you feel the presence of family when you came in?” He gestured around the building, his hand settling on himself, and I flushed because in fact, I had not sensed him or anyone else. More evidence of my weakness. “A goodly number of our clients are, too—godlings who are curious about mortals but afraid or too proud to admit it. Or who simply want the release of meaningless, undemanding intercourse. We aren’t so different from them, you know, when it comes to that sort of thing.”

I reached out to touch the world around me as best I could, my senses numbed and unsteady as they were. I could feel a few of my siblings then. Mostly the very youngest. I remembered the days when I had been fascinated by mortalkind—especially children, with whom I had loved to play. But some of my kind were drawn to adults, and with that came adult cravings.

Like the taste of Shahar’s skin.

I shook my head—a mistake, as the nausea was not quite done with me. I said something to distract myself. “We’ve never needed such things, Ahad. If we want a mortal, we appear somewhere and point at one, and the mortal gives us what we want.”

“You know, Sieh, it’s all right that you haven’t paid attention to the world. But you really shouldn’t talk as though you have.”

“What?”

“Times have changed.” Ahad paused to sip from a square glass of fiery red liquid. I had stopped drinking that one after the first taste because mortals could die of alcohol poisoning. Ahad held it in his mouth a moment, savoring the burn, before continuing. “Mortalkind, heretics excepted, spent centuries believing in Itempas and nothing else. They don’t know what happened to him—the Arameri keep a tight grip on that information, and so do we godlings—but they know something has changed. They aren’t gods, but they can still see the new colors of existence. And now they understand that our kind are powerful, admirable, but fallible.” He shrugged. “A godling who wants to be worshipped can still find adherents, of course. But not many—and really, Sieh, most of us don’t want to be worshipped. Do you?”

I blinked in surprise, and considered it. “I don’t know.”

“You could be, you know. The street children swear by you when they speak any god’s name at all. Some of them even pray to you.”

Yes, I had heard them, though I’d never done anything to encourage their interest. I’d had thousands of followers once, but these days it always surprised me that they remembered. I drew up my knees and wrapped my arms around them, understanding finally what Ahad meant.

Nodding as if I’d spoken my thoughts aloud, Ahad continued. “The rest of our clients are nobles, wealthy merchants, very lucky commoners—anyone who’s ever yearned to visit the heavens before death. Even our mortal courtesans have been with gods enough to have acquired a certain ethereal technique.” He smiled a salesman’s smile, though it never once touched his eyes.

“That’s what you’re selling. Not sex, but divinity.” I frowned. “Gods, Ahad, at least worship is free.”

“It was never free.” His smile vanished. It hadn’t been real, anyway. “Every mortal who offered a god devotion wanted something in exchange for it—blessings, a guaranteed place in the heavens, status. And every god who demanded worship expected loyalty and more, in exchange. So why shouldn’t we be honest about what we’re doing? At least here, no god lies.”

I flinched, as he had meant me to. Razors. Then he went on.

“As for our residents, as we call them, there is no rape here, no coercion. No pain, unless that’s mutually agreed upon by both client and resident. No judgments, either.” He paused, looking me up and down. “The housekeeper usually has a good eye for new talent. It will be a shame to tell her that she was so far off in your case.”

It was not entirely due to the alcohol that I straightened in wounded pride. “I could be a marvelous whore.” Gods knew I had enough practice.

“Ah, but I think you would be unable to keep yourself from contemplating the violent murder of any client who claimed you. Which, given your nature and the unpredictability of magic, might actually cause such death to occur. That’s not good for business.” He paused, and I did not imagine the cold edge to his smile. “I have the same problem, as I discovered quite by accident.”

There was a long silence that fell between us. This was not recriminating. It was simply that such statements stirred up sediment of the past, and it was natural to wait for that to settle before we moved on.

Changing the subject helped, too. “We can discuss the matter of my employment later.” Because I was almost certain he would hire me. Unreasoning optimism is a fundamental element of childishness. “So what is it, then, that you want?”

Ahad steepled his fingers, propping his elbows on the arms of the handsome leather chair. I wondered whether this was a sign of nerves. “I should think you’d have guessed. Considering how easily you defeated me in—” He paused, frowning, and then I finally did catch on.

“No mortal tongue has words for it,” I said softly. I would have to speak diplomatically, and that was never easy for me. “In our realm there is no need for words. Naturally you will have picked up some of our tongue over the centuries….” I let the question ask itself, and he grimaced.

“Not much of it. I couldn’t hear… feel…” He struggled to say it in Senmite, probably out of stubbornness. “I was like any other mortal before Yeine did this to me. I tried speaking your words a few times, died a few times, and stopped trying.”

“Your words now.” I watched Ahad absorb this, his expression going unreadably blank. “I can teach you the language, if you want.”

“There are several dozen godlings living in Shadow,” he replied stiffly. “If and when I deem it valuable, I can learn from them.”

Idiot, I thought, but kept it behind my teeth, nodding as if I thought deliberate ignorance was a good idea. “You have a bigger problem, anyway.”

He said nothing, watching me. He could do that for hours, I knew; something he’d learned during his years in Sky. I had no idea whether he knew what I was about to say.

“You don’t know your nature.” That was how I’d known I could best him, or at least get him off me, in the contest of our wills. His reaction to the touch of my thoughts had given it away: I had seen mortal newborns do the same at the brush of a fingertip. A quick, startled jerk, a flailing look to determine what and how and why, and will it hurt me? Only learning oneself better, and understanding one’s place in the world, made the touch of another mundane.

After a moment, Ahad nodded. This, too, was a gesture of trust between us. In the old days he would never have revealed so much weakness to me.

I sighed and got up, swaying only a little as I gained my feet, and went over to his chair. He did not rise this time, but he grew palpably less relaxed as I got closer, until I stopped.

“I will do you no harm,” I said, scowling at his skittishness. Why couldn’t he just be a coldhearted bastard all the time? I could never truly hate him, for pity. “The Arameri hurt you worse than I ever did.”

Very, very quietly he replied, “You let them.”

There was nothing I could say to that, because it was true. So I just stood there. This would never work if we began to rehash old hurts. He knew it, too. Finally he relaxed, and I stepped closer.

“All gods must learn who and what they are for themselves,” I said. As gently as I could—my hands were rough and dirty from my days in the alley—I cupped his face and held it. “Only you can define the meaning and limit of your existence. But sometimes, those of us who have already found ourselves can give the new ones a clue.”

I had already gained that clue during our brief metaphysical struggle. That fierce, devouring need of his. For what? I looked into his strangely mortalish eyes—strange because he had never really been mortal, yet mortality was all he knew—and tried to understand him. Which I should have been able to do because I had been there at the moment of his birth. I had seen his first steps and heard his first words. I had loved him, even if—

The nausea struck faster than ever before, because the alcohol had already made me ill. I barely managed to whirl away and collapse onto the floor before I was retching, screaming through the heaves, wobbling because my legs were trying to jerk and my spine was trying to bow backward even as my stomach sought to cast out the poison I had taken in. But this poison was not physical.

“Still a child after all.” Ahad sighed into my ear, his voice a low murmur that easily got through my strangled cries. “Shall I call you big brother or little brother? I suppose it doesn’t matter. You will never grow up fully, no matter how old you look. Brother.”

Brother. Brother. Not child, not

forget

Ahad was not my son, not even figuratively, because

forget

Because a god of childhood could not be a father, not if he wanted to be at all, and

forgetforgetforget

Brother. Ahad was my brother. My new little brother, Yeine’s first child. Nahadoth would be… well, not proud, probably. But amused.

My body unknotted. The agony receded enough that I stopped screaming, stopped spasming. There was nothing in my stomach anyhow. I lay there, returning gradually to myself as the horror faded, then drew one cautious breath. Then another.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

Ahad, crouching over me, sighed. He did not say you’re welcome, because I was not welcome and we both knew it. But he had done me a kindness when he hadn’t had to, and that deserved acknowledgment.

“You smell,” he said, “and you’re filthy, and you look like horseshit. Since you’re too useless to take yourself out of here as you should, I have no choice but to put you up for the night. But don’t get used to it; I want you living somewhere else after this.” He got up and went away, I assume to find a servant and make arrangements for my stay.

When he came back, I had managed—barely—to sit on my knees. I was still shaky. Insanely, my stomach now insisted that it needed to be filled again. In or out, I told it, but it did not listen.

Ahad crouched in front of me again. “Interesting.”

I managed to lift my eyes to him. His expression betrayed nothing, but he lifted a hand and conjured a small hand mirror. I was too tired even for envy. He lifted the mirror to show me my face.

I had grown older. The face that gazed back at me was longer, leaner, with a stronger jawline. The hair on my chin was no longer downy and barely visible; it had grown darker, longer, the wispy precursors of a beard. Late adolescence, rather than the middling stage of it I’d been in. Two years of my life gone? Three? Gone, regardless.

“I should be flattered, perhaps,” Ahad said. “That you remember the old days with such fondness.” His words skirted the edge of danger, but I was too tired for true fear. He could kill me anytime he wanted, and would’ve done it by now if he’d really meant to. He just liked flaunting his power.

Suddenly this seemed monumentally unfair. “I hate this,” I whispered, not caring if he heard me. “I hate that I’m nothing now.”

Ahad shook his head, less annoyed than unsurprised. His hand seized the back of my shirt and pulled me to my feet. “You’re not ‘nothing.’ You’re mortal, which is far from nothing. The sooner you accept that, the better off you’ll be.” He took one of my arms, holding it up, and made a sound of disgust. “You need to eat. Start taking care of your body if you want it to last for the few years you have left. Or would you rather die now?”

I closed my eyes, letting myself dangle from his grasp. “I don’t want to be mortal.” I was whining. It felt good to realize I still could, however much I’d grown up. “Mortals lie when they say they love you. They wait until you trust them, then shove the knife in, and then they work it around to make sure it kills you.”

There was a moment of silence, during which I closed my eyes and honestly contemplated having a good cry. It ended when the office door opened and two servants came in, and when Ahad gave me a slap on the cheek that was not quite gently chiding.

“Gods do that, too,” he snapped, “so you’re damned whichever way you turn. Shut up and deal with it.”

Then he shoved me into the servants’ waiting arms and they hauled me away.

11

The servants took me to a large sumptuous bathchamber with lovely benches that reeked of sex despite their freshly laundered cushions. They stripped me, throwing my old clothes into a pile to be burned, and scrubbed me with careless efficiency, rinsing me in perfumed water. Then they put me into a robe and took me to a room and let me sleep the whole day and well into the night. I did not dream.

I woke up thinking that my sister Zhakkarn was using my head as a pike target, though she would never do such a thing. When I managed to sit upright, which took doing, I contemplated nausea again. A long-cold meal and a pitcher of room-temperature water sat on a sideboard of the room, so I decided on ingestion rather than ejection and applied myself grimly. It helped that the food tasted good. Beside this sat a small dish holding a dab of thick white paste and a paper card, on which elegant blocky letters had been written: EAT IT. The hand was familiar, so I sighed and tasted the paste. The alley rat had been more rancid but not by much. Still, as I was a guest in Ahad’s home, I held my breath and gulped the rest down, then quickly ate more food in an attempt to disguise the bitter taste. This did not work. However, I began to feel better, so I was pleased to confirm it was medicine, not poison.

Fresh clothing had been set out for me, too. Pleasantly nondescript: loose gray pants, a beige shirt, a brown jacket, brown boots. Servant attire, most likely, since I suspected that would suit Ahad’s sense of cruelty. Thus arrayed, I opened the door of the room.

And promptly stopped, as the sounds of laughter and music drifted up from downstairs. Nighttime. For a moment the urge to play a dozen bawdy, vicious tricks was almost overwhelming, and I felt a tickle of power at the thought. It would be so easy to change all the house’s sensual oils into hot chili oil or make the beds smell of mildew rather than lust and perfume. But I was older now, more mature, and the urge passed. I felt a fleeting sadness in its wake.

Before I could close the door, however, two people came up the steps, giggling together with the careless intimacy of old friends or new lovers. One of them turned her head, and I froze as our eyes met. Egan, one of my sisters—with her arm around the waist of some mortal. I assessed and dismissed him in a glance: richly dressed, middle-aged, drunk. I turned back to meet Egan’s frowning gaze.

“Sieh.” She looked me up and down and smirked. “So the rumors are true; you’re back. Two thousand years wasn’t enough mortal flesh to satisfy you?”

Once upon a time, Egan had been worshipped by a desert tribe in eastern Senm. She had taught them to play music that could bring rain, and they had sculpted a mountain face to make a statue of her in return. Those people were gone now, absorbed into the Amn during one of that tribe’s endless campaigns of conquest before the War. After the War, I had destroyed Egan’s statue myself, under orders from the Arameri to eliminate anything that blasphemed against Itempas, no matter how beautiful. And here stood the original in mortal flesh, with an Amn man’s hand on her breast.

“I’m here by accident,” I said. “What’s your excuse?”

She lifted a graceful eyebrow, set into a beautiful Amn face. It was a new face, of course. Before the War, she had looked more like the people of the desert tribe. Both of us ignored the mortal, who had by now begun trying to nibble at her neck.

“Boredom,” she said. “Experience. The usual. During the War, it was the ones who’d spent the most time among mortalkind, defining their natures, who survived best.” Her eyes narrowed. “Not that you helped.”

“I fought the madman who destroyed our family,” I said wearily. “And yes, I fought anyone who helped him. I don’t understand why everyone acts like I did a horrible thing.”

“Because you—all of you who fought for Naha—lost yourselves in it,” Egan snapped, her body tensing so with fury that her paramour lifted his head to blink at her in surprise. “He infected you with his fury. You didn’t just kill those who fought; you killed anyone who tried to stop you. Anyone who pleaded for calm, if you thought they should’ve been fighting. Mortals, if they had the temerity to ask you for help. In the Maelstrom’s name, you act like Tempa was the only one who went mad that day!”

I stared at her, fury ratcheting higher in me, and then, suddenly, it died. I couldn’t sustain it. Not while I stood there with my head still aching from alcohol and Ahad’s beating the day before, and my skin crawling as infinitesimal flecks of it died—some renewed, some lost forever, all of it slowly becoming dryer and less elastic until one day it would be nothing but wrinkles and liver spots. Egan’s lover touched her shoulder to try and soothe her, a pathetic gesture, but it seemed to have some effect, because she relaxed just a little and smiled ruefully at him, as if to apologize for destroying the mood. That made me think of Shahar, and how lonely I was, and how lonely I would be for the rest of my mercilessly brief life.

It is very, very hard to sustain a two-thousand-year-old grudge amid all that.

I shook my head and turned to go back into my room. But just before I could close the door, I heard Egan. “Sieh. Wait.”

Warily I opened the door again. She was frowning at me. “Something’s different about you. What is it?”

I shook my head again. “Nothing that should matter to you. Look…” It occurred to me suddenly that I would never have a chance to say this to her or to any of my siblings. I would die with so much unfinished business. It wasn’t fair. “I’m sorry, Egan. I know that means nothing after everything that’s happened. I wish…” So many wishes. I laughed a little. “Never mind.”

“Are you going to be working here?” She smoothed a hand over her mortal man’s back; he sighed and leaned against her, happy again.

“No.” Then I remembered Ahad’s plans. “Not… like this.” I gestured toward her with my chin. “No offense, but I’m not overly fond of mortals right now.”

“Understandable, after all you’ve been through.” I blinked in surprise, and she smiled thinly. “None of us liked what Itempas did, Sieh. But by then, imprisoning you seemed the only sane choice he’d made, after so much insanity.” She sighed. “We all had a long time to think about how wrong that decision was. And then… well, you know how he is about changing his mind.”

By which she meant he didn’t. “I know.”

Egan glanced at her mortal, thoughtful, and then at me. Then at the mortal again. “What do you think?”

The man looked surprised but pleased. He looked at me, and abruptly I realized what they were considering. I couldn’t help blushing, which made the man smile. “I think it would be nice,” he said.

“No,” I said quickly. “I—er—thank you. I can see you mean well… but no.”

Egan smiled then, surprising me, because there was more compassion in it than I’d ever expected to see. “How long since you’ve been with your own?” she asked, and it threw me. I couldn’t answer, because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d made love to another god. Nahadoth, but that was not the same. He’d been diminished, stuffed into mortal flesh, desperate in his loneliness. That hadn’t been lovemaking; it had been pity. Before that, I thought it might have been—

forget

Zhakka, maybe? Selforine? Elishad—no, that had been ages ago, back when he’d still liked me. Gwn?

It would be good, perhaps, to lose myself in another for a while. To let one of my kind take my soul where she would and give it comfort. Wouldn’t it?

As I had done for Shahar.

“No,” I said again, more softly. “Not now… not yet. Thank you.”

She eyed me for a long moment, perhaps seeing more than I wanted her to see. Could she tell I was becoming mortal? Another reason not to accept her offer; she would know then. But I thought maybe that wasn’t the reason for her look. I wondered if maybe, just maybe, she still cared.

“The offer stands for whenever you change your mind,” she said, and then flashed me a smile. “You might have to share, though.” Turning her smile on the mortal, she and he moved on, heading up to the next floor.

My stirrings had been noticed. When I turned from watching Egan leave, the servant man who had quietly come upstairs bowed to me. “Lord Sieh? Lord Ahad has asked that you come to his office, when you’re ready.”

I put a hand on my hip. “I know full well he didn’t ask.”

The servant paused, then looked amused. “You probably don’t want to know the word he actually used in place of your name, either.”

I followed the servant downstairs. During these evening hours, he explained quietly, only the courtesans were to be visible; this was necessary to maintain the illusion that the house contained nothing but beautiful creatures offering guiltless pleasure. The sight of servants reminded the clientele that the Arms of Night was a business. The sight of people like me—servants of a different kind, he did not say, but I could guess—reminded them that the business was one of many, whose collective owners had fingers in many pots.

So he took me into what looked like a closet, which proved to lead into a dimly lit, wide back stairwell. Other servants and the occasional mortal courtesan moved back and forth along this, all of them smiling or greeting each other amiably in passing. (So different from servants in Sky.) When we reached the ground floor, the servant led me through a short convoluted passage that reminded me a bit of my dead spaces, and then opened a door that appeared to have been cut from the bare wooden wall. “In here, Lord Sieh.” Unsurprisingly, we were back in Ahad’s office. Surprisingly, he was not alone.

The young woman who sat in the chair across from him would have been striking even if she hadn’t been beautiful. This was partly because she was Maroneh and partly because she was very tall for a woman, even sitting down. The roiling nimbus of black hair about her head only added to the inches by which she topped the chair’s high back. But she was also elegant of form and bearing, her presence accented by the faint fragrance of hiras-flower perfume. She had dressed herself like a nobody, in a nondescript long skirt and jacket with worn old boots, but she carried herself like a queen.

She had been smiling at something Ahad said when I entered. As I stepped into the room, her eyes settled on me with a disconcertingly intent gaze, and her smile faded to something cooler and more guarded. I had the sudden acute feeling of being sized up, and found wanting.

The servant bowed and closed the door behind me. I folded my arms and watched her, waiting. I was not so far gone that I didn’t know power when I smelled it.

“What are you?” I asked. “Arameri by-blow? Scrivener? Noblewoman in disguise so you can visit a brothel in peace?”

She did not respond. Ahad sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Glee is part of the group that owns and supports the Arms of Night, Sieh,” he said. “She’s come to see you, in fact—to make certain you won’t jeopardize the investment she and her partners have already made. If she doesn’t like you, you ridiculous ass, you don’t stay.”

This made me frown in confusion. “Since when does a godling do a mortal’s bidding? Willingly, that is.”

“Since godlings and mortals began to have mutual goals,” said the woman. Her voice was low and rolling, like warm ocean waves, yet her words were so precisely enunciated that I could have cut paper with them. Her smile was just as sharp when I turned to her. “I imagine such arrangements were quite common before the Gods’ War. In this case, the relationship is less supervisory and more… partnership.” She glanced at Ahad. “Partners should agree on important decisions.”

He nodded back, with only a hint of his usual sardonic smile. Did she know he would gut-knife her in a moment if it benefitted him more than cooperation did? I hoped so and held out my hands to let her get a good look at me. “Well? Do you like me?”

“If it were a matter of looks, the answer would be no.” I dropped my arms in annoyance and she smiled, though I didn’t think she’d been kidding. “You don’t suit my tastes at all. Fortunately, looks are not the means by which I judge value.”

“She has a job for you,” Ahad said. He swiveled in his chair to face me and leaned back, propping one foot on the desk. “A test, of sorts. To see if your unique talents can be put to some use.”

“What the hells kind of test?” I was affronted by the very idea.

The woman—Glee? oddly cheerful for a Maroneh woman’s name—lifted one perfectly arched eyebrow in a way that felt inexplicably familiar. “I would like to send you to meet Usein Darr, scion of the current baron. Are you, perhaps, familiar with recent political events in the North?”

I tried to remember the things I’d overheard or been told while in Sky. But then, the image of Nevra and Criscina Arameri’s bodies came to mind.

“You want me to find out what this new magic is all about,” I said. “These masks.”

“No. We know what they are.”

“You do?”

Glee folded her hands, and the sense of familiarity grew. I had never met her before; I was certain of it. Very strange.

“The masks are art,” she said. “Specifically derived from a Mencheyev-Darren method of prayer that long predates the Bright, which they kept up in secret to avoid persecution. Once, they danced their exhortations to and praises of the gods, with each dancer donning a mask in order to act out specific, contextualized roles. Each dance required certain interactions of these roles and a common understanding of the archetypes represented. The Mother, for example, symbolized love, but also justice; it was actually a representation of death. The Sorrowful was worn by an angry, prideful person, who would eventually commit great wrongs and come to regret what they had done. Do you understand?”

I fought to stifle a yawn. “Yeah, I get the idea. Someone takes an archetype, mixes it with common symbology, carves it out of wood from the World Tree using the blood of a slaughtered infant or something—”

“The blood of a godling, actually.”

I fell silent in surprise. Glee smiled.

“We don’t know whose. Perhaps just godsblood bought off the street; the specific originator of the blood may not matter, just its inherent power. We’re looking into that as well. And I don’t know about wood from the Tree, but I wouldn’t be surprised.” She sobered. “Finding out how the masks work isn’t what I want you to do in Darr. We’re less concerned with the tool, more concerned with the wielder. I would like you to approach Usein Darr with an offer from our group.”

I could not help perking up. There was great potential for mischief in any negotiation. “You want their magic?”

“No. We want peace.”

I started. “Peace?”

“Peace serves the interests of both mortals and gods,” Ahad said when I looked at him to see if this Glee was a madwoman.

“I have to agree.” I frowned at him. “But I didn’t think you did.”

“I have always done whatever makes my life easier, Sieh.” He folded his hands calmly. “I am not Nahadoth, as you’re so fond of pointing out. I’m rather fond of predictability and routine.”

“Yes. Well.” I shook my head and sighed. “But mortals are part Nahadoth, and it sounds like the ones up north would rather live in chaos than endure the Arameri’s world order any longer. It’s not our place to tell this woman she’s wrong, if she’s the head of it.”

“Usein Darr is not the sole force behind the northern rebellion,” Glee said. “And it must be called a rebellion at this point. Darr is now one of five northern nations that have ceased to tithe to the White Halls within its borders, though they instead offer schooling, care for the elderly, and so forth to their citizens directly. That keeps the Nobles’ Consortium from censuring them for failure to govern—though since no High Northern noble has attended a Consortium session in over a year, it hardly matters. The whole of High North has, effectively, refused to recognize the Consortium’s authority.” She sighed. “The only thing they haven’t done is raise an army, probably because that would bring the Arameri’s wrath down on them. Everything but open defiance—but still, defiance. And Darr is, if not its head, most certainly its heart.”

“So what am I to offer this Darre, then, if her heart’s set on freeing the world from Arameri tyranny? A goal I don’t at all disagree with, mind you.” I considered. “I suppose I could kill her.”

“No, you could not.” Glee did not raise her voice, but then she didn’t have to. Those paper-cutting words suddenly became knives, sharp enough to flense. “As I said, Usein Darr is not the sole motivator of these rebels. Killing her would only martyr her and encourage the rest.”

“Besides that,” said Ahad, “those godlings who dwell in the mortal realm do so on the sufferance of Lady Yeine. She has made it clear that she values mortal independence and is watching closely to see whether our presence proves detrimental. And please remember that she was once Darre. For all we know, Usein is some relative of hers.”

I shook my head. “She’s not mortal anymore. Such considerations are meaningless to her now.”

“Are you sure?”

I paused, suddenly uncertain.

“Well, then.” Ahad steepled his fingers. “Let’s kill Usein and see. Should be a delight, pissing off someone who had an infamous temper before she became the goddess of death.”

I rolled my eyes at him but did not protest. “Fine, then,” I said. “What is my goal in Darr?”

Glee shrugged, which obliquely surprised me because she hadn’t seemed like the kind to be that casual. “Find out what Usein wants. If it’s within our power, offer it.”

“How the hells do I know what’s within you people’s power?”

Ahad made a sound of exasperation. “Just assume anything and promise nothing. And lie, if you must. You’re good at that, aren’t you?”

Mortalfucking son of a demon. “Fine,” I said, slipping my hands into my pockets. “When do I go?”

I should have known better than to say that, because Ahad sat a little straighter, and his eyes turned completely black. Then he smiled with more than a bit of his old cruelty and said, “You realize I’ve never done this before.”

I tried not to show my alarm. “It’s not much different from any other magic. A matter of will.” But if his will faltered…

“Ah, but, Sieh, I would so happily will you out of existence.”

Better to let him see my fear. He had always cultivated that in the old days; he liked to feel powerful. So I licked my lips and met his eyes. “I thought you didn’t care about me. Didn’t hate me, didn’t love me.”

“Which compounds the problem. Perhaps I don’t care enough to make sure I do this right.”

I took a deep breath, glancing at Glee. See what you’re dealing with? But she showed no reaction, her beautiful face as serene as before. She would have made a good Arameri.

“Perhaps not,” I said, “but if you do care at all about… craftsmanship, or whatever, then could you please be sure to just wipe me out of existence? And not, instead, spread my innards thinly across the face of reality? I’ve seen that happen before; it looks painful.”

Ahad laughed, but a feeling that had been in the air—an extra measure of heaviness and danger that had been thickening around us—eased. “I’ll take care, then. I do like being neat.”

There was a flicker. I felt myself disassembled and pushed out of the world. Despite Ahad’s threats, he was actually quite gentle about it. Then a new setting melted together around me.

Arrebaia, the largest city amid the collection of squabbling tribes that had grown together and decided to fight others instead of each other. I could remember when they had not been Darre, just Somem and Lapri and Ztoric, and even further back when they had been families, and before that when they had been wandering bands lacking names of any kind. No more, however. I stood atop a wall near the city’s heart and privately marveled at how much they’d grown. The immense, tangled jungle that dominated this part of High North shone on the distant horizon, as green as the dragons that flew through other realms and the color of my mother’s eyes when she was angry. I could smell its humidity and violent, fragile life on the wind. Around me spread a maze of streets and temples and statues and gardens, all rising in stony tiers toward the city’s center, all carpeted in the paler green of the ornamental grass that the Darre cultivated. It made their city glow like an emerald in the slanting afternoon light.

Before me, in the near distance, loomed the hulking, squared-off pyramid of Sar-enna-nem. My destination, I guessed, since Ahad did not strike me as the subtle type.

My arrival had not gone unnoticed, however. I glanced down from the wall on which I stood to find an old woman and a boychild of four or five years staring up at me. Amid the crowded street, they alone had stopped; between them was a rickety-looking cart bearing a few tired-looking vegetables and fruits. Ah, yes, the end of the market day. I sat down on the wall, dangling my feet over it and wondering how the hell I was supposed to get down, since it was a good ten feet high and I now had to worry about breaking bones. Damn Ahad.

“Hey, there,” I said in Senmite. “You know whether this wall runs all the way to Sar-enna-nem?”

The boy frowned, but the old woman merely looked thoughtful. “All things in Arrebaia lead to Sar-enna-nem,” she said. “But you may have trouble getting in. Foreigners are more welcome in the city than they used to be, but they are barred from the temple by declaration of our ennu.”

“Temple?”

“Sar-enna-nem,” said the boy, his expression suddenly scornful. “You don’t know anything, do you?”

He spoke with the thickest accent I’d heard in centuries, his Senmite inflected by the gulping river flow of the Darren tongue. The woman’s Senmite bore only a trace of this. She had learned Senmite early, probably before she’d learned Darre. The boy had done it the other way around. I glanced up as a pack of children near the boy’s age ran past, shrieking as children always seem to. They were shrieking in Darre.

“I know a lot of things,” I said to the boy, “but not everything. I know Sar-enna-nem used to be a temple, long ago, back before the Arameri made the world over. So it’s a temple again?” I grinned, delighted. “Whose?”

“All the gods’, of course!” The boy put his hands on his hips, having clearly decided I was an idiot. “If you don’t like that, you can leave!”

The old woman sighed. “Hush, boy. I didn’t raise you to be rude to guests.”

“He’s a Teman, Beba! Wigyi from school says you can’t trust those eyes of theirs.”

Before I could retort, the old woman’s hand shot out and cuffed the boy. I winced in sympathy at his yelp, but really, a smart child would’ve known better.

“We will discuss proper comportment for a young man when we get home,” she added, and the boy looked chastened at last. Then she focused on me again. “If you didn’t know the temple is a temple again, then I doubt you’ve come looking to pray. What is it that you really want here, stranger?”

“Well, I was looking for your ennu—or his daughter Usein, rather.” I had vague memories of someone mentioning a Baron Darr. “Where might she be found?”

The old woman narrowed her eyes at me for a long moment before answering. There was an attentiveness in her posture, and I noted the way she shifted her stance back, just a little. She moved her right hand to her hip, too, for easy access to the knife that was almost surely sheathed at the small of her back. Not all of Darr’s women were warriors, but this one had been, no doubt about it.

I flashed her my broadest, most innocent smile, hoping she would dismiss me as harmless. She didn’t relax—my smile didn’t work as well as it had when I’d been a boy—but her lips did twitch in an almost-smile.

“You want the Raringa,” she said, nodding westward. The word meant something like “seat of warriors” in one of the older High Northern trade tongues. Where the warriors’ council met, no doubt, to advise the young ennu-to-be on her dangerous course of action. I looked around and spotted a low, dome-shaped building not far from Sar-enna-nem. Not nearly so majestic, but then the Darre were not much like the Amn. They judged their leaders by standards other than appearance.

“Anything else?” the old woman asked. “The size and armament of her guard contingent, maybe?”

I rolled my eyes at this, but then paused as a new thought occurred to me. “Yes,” I said. “Say something in Darre for me.”

Her eyebrows shot toward her hairline, but she said in that tongue, “It’s a shame you’re mad, pretty foreign boy, because otherwise you might sire interesting daughters. Though perhaps you’re just a very stupid assassin, in which case it’s better if someone kills you before you breed.”

I grinned, climbing to my feet and dusting grass off my pants. “Thanks much, Auntie,” I said in Darre, which made both her and the boy gape. The language had changed some since I’d last spoken it; it sounded more like Mencheyev now, and they’d lengthened their vowels and fricatives. I probably still sounded a little strange to them, and I would definitely have to watch my slang, but already I could do a passable imitation of a native speaker. I gave them both a flourishing bow that was probably long out of fashion, then winked and sauntered off toward the Raringa.

I was not the only foreigner about, I saw as I came onto the wide paved plaza that led into the building. Knots of people milled about the area: some locals, others wearing fancy attire from their own lands. Diplomats, perhaps—ah, yes, come a-courting the new power in the region, feeling out the woman who would soon hold its reins. Maybe they were even coming to probe the possibility of an alliance—discreetly, of course. Darr was still very small, and the Arameri were still the Arameri. But it had escaped no one’s notice that the world was changing, and this was one of the epicenters of transformation.

Luck favored me as I approached the gates, for the guards there were men. Doubtless because so many of the foreigners hailed from lands ruled by men; a bit of unspoken diplomacy to make them more comfortable. But in Darr, men became guards if they were not handsome enough to marry well or clever enough to serve in some more respected profession, like hunting or forestry. So the pair who watched the Raringa’s gates did not notice what smarter men might have, such as my Teman face but lack of Teman hair cabling or the fact that I wore plain clothing. They simply looked me over to be certain I had no obvious weapons, then nodded me onward.

Mortals notice that which stands out, so I didn’t. It was simple enough to match my gait and posture to that of other foreigners heading toward this or that meeting, or aides moving in and out of the Raringa’s vaulted main doors. The place was not large and had clearly been designed in days when Darr had been a simpler society and its people could just walk in and talk to their leaders. So I found the main council chamber through the biggest set of doors. And I figured out which one of the women seated on the council dais was Usein Darr by the simple fact that her presence practically filled the building.

Not that she was a large woman, even by Darren standards. She sat cross-legged on a low, unadorned divan at the farthest end of the council circle, her head above theirs as they all slouched or reclined on piles of cushioning. If not for that, she would not have been visible at all, hidden by their taller frames. Several feet of long, defiantly straight hair draped her shoulders, night-black, some of it gathered atop her head in an elaborate series of looped and knotted braids; the rest hung free. Her face was a thing of high umber planes and glacial, unadorned slopes: beautiful by any standard, though no Amn would ever have admitted it. And strong, which meant that she was beautiful by Darren standards as well.

The council dais had a gallery of curved benches around it, for the comfort of any spectators who chose to sit through the proceedings. A handful of others, mostly Darre, sat here. I chose an unoccupied bench and settled onto it, watching for a while. Usein said little but nodded now and again as the members of the council each took their turn to talk. She’d propped her hands on her knees in such a way that her elbows jutted out, which I thought was an overly aggressive posture until I belatedly noticed the swell of her belly above her folded legs: she was well into a pregnancy.

I quickly grew bored as I realized that the matter Usein and her councillors were discussing so intently was whether to clear a section of forest to allow coffee growing. Thrilling. I supposed it had been too much to hope that they would discuss their war plans in public. Since I was still tired and just a little hungover, I fell asleep.

Someone shook me an uncountable time later, pulling me from a hazy dream dominated by a woman’s bulging belly. Naturally I thought I was still dreaming when I opened my eyes to find another belly hovering in front of me, and naturally I put out a hand to stroke it. I have always found pregnancy fascinating. When mortal women permit, I hover near them, listening for the moment when the child’s soul ignites out of nothingness and begins to resonate with mine. The creation of souls is a mystery that we gods endlessly debate. When Nahadoth was born, his soul was fully formed even though no mother ever carried him within her body. Did the Maelstrom give it to him? But only things with souls can bestow souls, or so we have come to believe over the aeons. Does this mean It has a soul? And if so, where did Its soul come from?

All irrelevant questions, because an instant after my hand touched Usein Darr’s belly, her knife touched the skin beneath my eye. I came very much awake.

“My apologies, Usein-ennu,” I said, lifting my hand very carefully. I tried to lift my eyes, too, to focus on her, but it was the knife that dominated my attention. She had been much faster than Hymn, which I supposed was not surprising. I seemed to attract women who were good with a blade.

“Just Usein,” she said in Darre. A rude thing to do to an obvious foreigner, and unnecessary, since her knife made its own silent point. “My father is in poor health, but he may live years more, despite the ill wishes of others.” Her eyes narrowed. “I imagine women in Tema are no happier to have strangers pawing them, so I see no reason to excuse your behavior.”

Swallowing, I finally forced my gaze upward to her face. “My apologies,” I said again, also in Darre. One of her eyebrows lifted. “Would you excuse me if I said I’d been dreaming about a woman like you?”

Her lips twitched, considering a smile. “Are you a father already, little boy? You should be at home knitting blankets to warm your babies, if so.”

“Not a father and never a father, actually, not that any woman would want children who took after me.” (My own smile faltered as I remembered Shahar; then I pushed her out of my mind.) “Congratulations on your conception. May your delivery be swift and your daughter strong.”

She shrugged, after a moment taking her knife from my skin. She did not sheathe it, however—a warning. “This babe will be what it is. Probably another son, given that my husband seems to produce nothing else.” With a sigh, she put her free hand on her hip. “I noticed you during our council session, pretty boy, and came over to find out more about you. Especially as Temans don’t bother coming here anymore; they’ve made their allegiance to the Arameri clear. So, are you a spy?”

Casting an uneasy glance at her still-naked blade, I considered several lies—then decided the truth was so outrageous that she might believe it more readily. “I’m a godling, sent by an organization of godlings based in Shadow. We think you might be trying to destroy the world. Could you, perhaps, stop?”

She did not react quite as I’d expected. Instead of gaping at me, or laughing, she gazed at me in solemn silence for a long, taut moment. I couldn’t read her face at all.

Then she sheathed her knife. “Come with me.”

We went to Sar-enna-nem.

Night had fallen while I napped, the moon rising high and full over the branching stone streets. I had only a few moments to glimpse this before Usein Darr and I—accompanied by two sharp-eyed women and a handsome young man who’d greeted Usein with a kiss and me with a threatening look—stepped inside the temple. One of the guardswomen was pregnant, too, though not overtly so because she was stocky and heavyset. Her child’s soul had grown, though, so I knew.

The instant I crossed the threshold, I knew why Usein had brought me here. Magic and faith danced along my skin like raindrops on a pond’s surface. I closed my eyes and reveled in it, soaking it in as I walked over the glimmering mosaic stones, letting my reawakened sense of the world steer my feet. It had been months since I’d last felt the world fully. Listening now, I heard songs that had last been sung before the Gods’ War, echoing from Sar-enna-nem’s ceiling arches. I licked my lips and tasted the spiced wine that had once been used for offerings, tinged with occasional drops of blood. I put out my hands, stroking the air of the place, and shivered as it returned the caress.

Illusions and memories; all I had left. I savored them as best I could.

There had been only a few people in the temple when we’d entered: a man in priest garb, a portly woman carrying two fretting babes, a few worshippers kneeling in a prayer area, and a few unobtrusive guards. I navigated around these and between the small marble statues that stood on plinths all about the chamber, letting resonance guide me. When I opened my eyes, the statue at which I’d stopped gazed back at me with uncharacteristic solemnity on its finely wrought features. I reached up to touch its small, cheeky face, and sighed for my lost beauty.

There was no surprise in Usein Darr’s voice. “I thought so. Welcome to Darr, Lord Sieh. Though I heard you stopped involving yourself in mortal affairs after T’vril Arameri’s death.”

“I had, yes.” I turned away from the statue of myself and put one hand on my hip, adopting the same pose. “Circumstances have forced my hand, however.”

“And now you help the Arameri who once enslaved you?” She did not, to her credit, laugh.

“No. I’m not doing this for them.”

“For the Dark Lord, then? Or my exalted predecessor, Yeine-ennu?”

I shook my head and sighed. “No, just me. And a few other godlings and mortals who would rather not see a return to the chaos of the time before the Gods’ War.”

“Some would call that time ‘freedom.’ I would think you would call it so, given what happened after.”

I nodded slowly and sighed. This was a mistake. Glee should never have sent me on a mission like this. I wasn’t going to be able to do a very good job of negotiating with Usein, because I didn’t really disagree with her goals. I didn’t care if the mortal realm descended back into strife and struggle. All I cared about was—

Shahar, her eyes soft and full of a tenderness I’d never expected to see as I taught her everything I knew of pleasure. Deka, still a child, blushing shyly and moving close to me whenever he could—

Distraction. A reminder. I had sworn an oath.

“I remember what your world was like then,” I said softly. “I remember when Darre infants starved in their cribs because enemies burned your forests. I remember rivers with water tinted red, fields that bloomed greener and richer because the soil had soaked up so much blood. Is that really what you want to return to?”

She came over, gazing up at the statue’s face rather than at me. “Were you the one who made the Walking Death?”

I twitched in surprise and sudden unease.

“It seems like the sort of disease you would create,” she said with brutal softness. “Tricksy. There hasn’t been an outbreak since Yeine-ennu’s day, but I’ve read the accounts. It lurks for weeks before the symptoms appear, spreading far and wide in the meantime. At its height, the victims of the disease seem more alive than ever, but their minds are dead, burned away by the fever. They walk, but only to carry death to new victims.”

I could not look at her, for shame. But when she spoke again, I was surprised to hear compassion in her voice.

“No mortals should have as much power as the Arameri had when they owned you,” she said. “No mortals should have as much power as they have now: the laws, the scriveners, their army, all their pet nobles, the wealth they’ve claimed from peoples destroyed or exploited. Even the history taught to our children in the White Hall schools glorifies them and denigrates everyone else. All civilization, every bit of it, is made to keep the Arameri strong. That is how they’ve survived after losing you. That is why the only solution is to destroy everything they’ve built. Good and bad, all of it is tainted. Only by starting fresh can we truly be free again.”

At this, however, I could only smile.

“Start fresh?” I asked. I looked up at the statue of myself. Its blank eyes. I imagined them green, like my own. Like those of Shinda, Itempas’s dead demon son.

“For that,” I said, “you would have to go further back than the Bright. Remember what caused it, after all—the Gods’ War, which was what put me and the other Enefadeh under the Arameri’s control in the first place. And remember what caused that: our bickering. Our love affairs gone horribly, horribly wrong.” Usein grew silent behind me, in surprise. “To really start fresh, you need to get rid of the gods, not just the Arameri. Then burn every book that mentions us. Smash every statue, including this pretty one here. Raise your children to be ignorant of the world’s creation or our existence; let them come up with stories of their own to explain it all. For that matter, kill any child who even thinks about magic—because that is how deeply we have tainted mortalkind, Usein Darr.” I turned to her and reached out. This time when I put my hand on her swollen belly, she did not draw her knife; she flinched. I smiled. “We’re in your blood. Because of us, you know all the wonders and horrors of possibility. And someday, if you don’t kill yourselves, if we don’t kill you, you might become us. So how fresh of a start do you really want?”

Her jaw twitched, the muscles flexing once. I felt her fight for something—courage, maybe. Resolve. Beneath my fingers, her child shifted, pressing briefly against my hand. I felt its shiny new soul thrum in concert with my own for a moment. His soul, alas for her poor husband.

After a moment, Usein drew a deep breath. “You wish to know our plans.”

“Among other things, yes.”

She nodded. “Come, then. I’ll show you.”

Sar-enna-nem is a pyramid; only the topmost hall of it held prayer space and statues. The next levels down held much more interesting things.

Like masks.

We stood in a gallery of sorts. Our escort had left us at Usein’s unseen signal, though her glowering husband had brought an oddly shaped stool so that she could sit. She watched while I strolled about, looking at each mask in turn. The masks lined every shelf; they were set into the walls between the shelves; they were artfully positioned on display tables in front of the shelves. I even glimpsed a few attached to the ceiling. Dozens of them, maybe hundreds, every size and color and configuration, though they had some commonalities. All of them were oval shaped, as a base. All had open eyeholes and sealed mouths. All of them were beautiful, and powerful in ways that had nothing to do with magic.

I stopped at one of the tables, gazing down at a mask that made something inside me sing in response. There, on the table, was Childhood: smooth, fat cheeks; a mischievously grinning mouth; great wide eyes; broad forehead waiting to be filled with knowledge. Subtle inlays and painting around the mouth had been applied, some of it realistic and some pure abstraction. Geometric designs and laugh lines. Somehow, it hinted that the mask’s grin could have been simple joy or sadistic cruelty, or joy in cruelty. The eyes could have been alight with the pleasure of learning or aghast at all the evils mortals inflict on their young. I touched its stiff lips. Just wood and paint. And yet.

“Your artist is a master,” I said.

“Artists. The art of making these masks isn’t purely a Darre thing. The Mencheyev make them, too, and the Tok—and all of our lands got the seed of it from a race called the Ginij. You may remember them.”

I did. It had been a standard Arameri extermination. Zhakkarn, via her many selves, had hunted down every last mortal of the race. Kurue erased all mention of them from books, scrolls, stories, and songs, attributing their accomplishments to others. And I? I had set the whole thing in motion by tricking the Ginij king into offending the Arameri so that they had a pretext to attack.

She nodded. “They called this art dimyi. I don’t know what the word means in their tongue. We call it dimming.” She shifted to Senmite to make the pun. The word was meaningless in itself, though its root suggested the mask’s purpose: to diminish its wearer, reduce them to nothing more than the archetype that the mask represented.

And if that archetype was Death… I thought of Nevra and Criscina Arameri, and understood.

“It started as a joke,” she continued, “but over time the word has stuck. We lost many of the Ginij techniques when they were destroyed, but I think our dimmers—the artists who make the masks—have done a good job of making up the difference.”

I nodded, still staring at Childhood. “There are many of these artists?”

“Enough.” She shrugged. Not wholly forthcoming, then.

“Perhaps you should call these artists assassins instead.” I turned to look at Usein as I said this.

Usein regarded me steadily. “If I wanted to kill Arameri,” she said, slowly and precisely, “I wouldn’t kill just one, or even a few. And I wouldn’t take my time about it.”

She wasn’t lying. I lowered my hands and frowned, trying to understand. How could she not be lying? “But you can do magic with these things.” I nodded toward Childhood. “Somehow.”

She lifted an eyebrow. “I don’t know these people you work for, Lord Sieh. I don’t know your aims. Why should I share my secrets with you?”

“We can make it worth your while.”

The look she threw me was scornful. I had to admit, it had been a bit clichéd.

“There is nothing you can offer me,” she said, getting to her feet with pregnant-woman awkwardness. “Nothing I want or need from anyone, god or mortal—”

“Usein.”

A man’s voice. I turned, startled. The gallery’s open doorway framed a man, standing between the flickering torch sconces. How long had he been there? My sense of the world was fading already. I thought at first it was a trick of the light that he seemed to waver; then I realized what I was seeing: a godling, in the last stages of configuring his form for the mortal realm. But when his face had taken its final shape—

I blinked. Frowned.

He stepped farther into the light. The features he’d chosen certainly hadn’t been meant to help him blend in. He was short, about my height. Brown skin, brown eyes, deep brown lips—these were the only things about him that fit any mortal mold. The rest was a jumble. Teman sharpfolds with orangey red islander hair and high, angular High Northern cheekbones. Was he an idiot? None of those things fit together. Just because we could look like anything didn’t mean we should.

But that was not the biggest problem.

“Hail, Brother,” I said uncertainly.

“Do you know me?” He stopped, slipping his hands into his pockets.

“No…” I licked my lips, confused by the niggling sense that I did know him, somehow. His face was unfamiliar, but that meant nothing; none of us took our true shape in the mortal realm. His stance, though, and his voice…

Then I remembered. The dream I’d had a few nights before. I’d forgotten it thanks to Shahar’s betrayal. Are you afraid? he’d asked me.

“Yes,” I amended, and he inclined his head.

Usein folded her arms. “Why are you here, Kahl?”

Kahl. The name wasn’t familiar, either.

“I won’t be staying long, Usein. I came only to suggest that you show Sieh the most interesting of your masks, since he’s so curious.” His eyes never left mine as he spoke to her.

From the corner of my eye, I saw a muscle in Usein’s jaw flex. “That mask isn’t complete.”

“He asked you how far you were willing to go. Let him see.”

She shook her head sharply. “How far you are willing to go, Kahl. We have nothing to do with your schemes.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t call it nothing, Usein. Your people were eager enough for my help when I offered it, and some of you likely guessed what that help would cost. I never deceived you. You were the one who chose to renege on our agreement.”

There was a curious shiver to the air, and something about Kahl wavered again, not quite visibly. Some aspect of his nature? Ah, but of course; if Usein had indeed reneged on some deal with him, he would consider her a target for vengeance, too. I looked at her, wondering if she knew just how dangerous it was to cultivate a godly enemy. Her lips were tight and her face sheened lightly with sweat as she watched him, her knife hand twitching. Yes. She knew.

“You used us,” she said.

“As you used me.” He lifted his chin, still watching me. “But that’s beside the point. Don’t you want your gods to see how powerful you’ve become, Usein? Show him.”

Usein made a frustrated sound, part fear and part annoyance. But she went to one of the wall shelves and pushed aside a book, exposing a previously hidden hole. She reached into it and pulled something. There was a low clack from somewhere behind the shelves, as of an unseen latch opening, and then the whole wall swung outward.

The power that flooded forth staggered me. I gasped and tried to stumble back from it, but I had forgotten the new size of my feet. I tripped and fell against a nearby table, which was the only thing that kept me upright. The radiating waves felt like… like Nahadoth at his worst. No, worse. Like all the weight of every realm pressing down, not on my flesh but on my mind.

And as I panted there, sweat dropping onto my forearms where they trembled on the table, I realized: I had felt this horror before.

There is a resonance, Nahadoth had said.

I managed to force my head upright. My flesh wanted to let go of itself. I fought to remain corporeal, since I wasn’t sure I’d be able to re-form if I didn’t. Across the room I saw that Kahl had stepped back, too, bracing his hand against the door frame; his expression was unsurprised, grimly enduring. But elated, too.

“What…?” I tried to focus on Usein, but my sight blurred. “What is…”

She stepped into the hidden alcove that had been revealed by the opened wall. There, on a darkwood plinth, sat another mask—one that was nothing like the others. It seemed to be made of frosted glass. Its shape was more elaborate than an oval, the edges fluted and geometric. I thought it might hurt the face of whoever donned it. It was larger than a standard mask, too, bearing flanges and extensions at jawline and forehead that reminded me, somehow, of wings. Of flight. Of falling, down, down, through a vortex whose walls churned with a roar that could shatter the mortal realm—

Usein picked it up, apparently heedless of its power. Couldn’t she feel it? How could she bring her child near something so terrible? There were no torches in the alcove; the thing glowed with its own soft, shifting light. Where Usein’s fingers touched it, I saw a hint of movement, just for an instant. The glass turned to smooth brown flesh like the hand that held it, then faded back to glass.

“This mask—or so Kahl tells me—has a special power,” she said, glancing at me. Then she narrowed her eyes at Kahl, who nodded in return, though he was looking decidedly uncomfortable, too. Hard to tell anything, looking at that stoic face of his. “When it’s complete, if it works as predicted, it will confer godhood upon its wearer.”

I stiffened. Looked at Kahl, who merely smiled at me. “That’s not possible.”

“Of course it is,” he said. “Yeine is the proof of that.”

I shook my head. “She was special. Unique. Her soul—”

“Yes, I know.” His gaze was glacially cold, and I remembered the moment he’d committed himself to being my enemy. Had the same expression been on his face then? If so, I would have tried harder to earn his forgiveness. “The conjunction of many elements, all in just the right proportion and strength, all at just the right time. Of such a recipe is divinity made.” He gestured toward the mask; his hand shook and grew blurry before he lowered it. “Godsblood and mortal life, magic and art and the vagaries of chance. And more, all bound into that mask, all to impress upon those who view it, an idea.”

Usein set the thing down on the carved wooden face that served as its stand. “Yes. And the first mortal who put it on burned to death from the inside out. It took three days; she screamed the whole time. The fire was so hot that we couldn’t get near enough to end her misery.” She turned a hard look on Kahl. “That thing is evil.”

“Merely incomplete. The raw energy of creation is neither good nor evil. But when that mask is ready, it will churn forth something new… and wondrous.” He paused, his expression turning inward for a moment; he spoke softer, as if to himself, but I realized that his words were actually aimed at me. “I will not be a slave to fate. I will embrace it, control it. I will be what I wish to be.”

“You’re mad.” Usein shook her head. “You expect us to put this kind of power into your hands, for demons know what purpose? No. Leave this place, Kahl. We’ve had enough of your kind of help.”

I hurt. The incomplete mask. It was like the Maelstrom: potential gone mad, creation feeding upon itself. I was not mortal enough to be immune to it. Yet that was not the sole source of my discomfort; something else beat against me like an oncoming tide, trying to drive me to my knees. The mask had heightened my god-senses, allowing me to feel it, but my flesh was only mortal, too weak to endure so much power in one place.

“What are you?” I asked Kahl in our words, between gasps. “Elontid? Imbalance…” That was the only explanation for the seesaw flux I felt from him. Resolve and sorrow, hatred and longing, ambition and loneliness. But how could there be another elontid in the world? He could not have been born during the time of my incarceration, not with Enefa dead and all gods rendered sterile for that time. And who were his parents? Itempas was the only one of the Three who could have made him, but Itempas did not mate with godlings.

Kahl smiled. To my surprise, there was no hint of cruelty in it—only that curious, resolute sorrow I’d heard in my dream.

“Enefa is dead, Sieh.” His voice was soft now. “Not all her works vanished with her, but some did. I remembered. You will, too, eventually.”

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.

12

When I woke, I told Ahad 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—”

He looked hard at me. “You have childish secrets and adult ones, Sieh, because you have never been as simple as you claim or wish to be. And this one—” He slapped the tower, making a sound that echoed from the empty streets around us. “This one is something you’ve kept even from yourself.”

I laughed, but it was uneasy. “I can’t keep a secret from myself. That doesn’t make any sense.”

“When have you ever made sense? It’s something you’ve forgotten.”

“But I—”

forget

I faltered, silent. It was cold all of a sudden. I began shivering, though Nsana—who wore only his hair—was fine. But his eyes had narrowed suddenly, and abruptly I realized he’d heard that odd little burp of my thoughts.

“That was Enefa’s voice,” he said.

“I don’t…” But it had been. It had always been Mother whispering in my soul, nudging my thoughts away from this place when they got too close. Her voice: forget.

“Something you’ve forgotten,” Nsana said softly, “but perhaps not by your own will.”

I frowned, torn between confusion and alarm and fear. And above us, in the white tower, the dark thing shifted with a low rumbling groan. There was the faintest sound of stone shifting, and when I looked up at the tower, I spied a series of fine, barely noticeable cracks in its daystone surface.

Something I had forgotten. Something Enefa had made me forget. But Enefa was gone now, and whatever she had done to me was beginning to wear off.

“Gods and mortals and demons in between.” I rubbed my face. “I don’t want to deal with this, Nsa. My life is hard enough right now.”

Nsana sighed, and his sigh transformed the City into a playground of delights and horrors. A high, steep slide ended in a pit of chewing, flensing, disembodied teeth. The chains on a nearby swing set were wet with oil and blood. I could not see the trap in the seesaw, but I was certain there was one. It was too innocent-looking—like me, when I am up to something.

“Time for you to grow up,” he said again. “You ran away from me rather than do it before. Now you have no choice.”

“I had no choice before!” I rounded on him. “Growing old will kill me!”

“I didn’t say grow old, you fool. I said grow up.” Nsana leaned close, his breath redolent of honey and poisonous flowers. “Just because you’re a child doesn’t mean you have to be immature, for the Maelstrom’s sake! I have known you long and well, my brother, and there’s another secret you hide from yourself, only you do a terrible job so everyone knows: you’re lonely. You’re always lonely, even though you’ve left more lovers in your wake than you can count. You never want what you have, only what you can’t!”

“That’s not—”

He cut me off ruthlessly. “You loved me before I learned my nature. While I needed you. Then when I found my strength and became whole, when I no longer needed you but still wanted you—” He paused suddenly, his jaw flexing as he choked back words too painful to speak. I stared back at him, rendered speechless. Had he really felt this way, all this time? Was that how he’d seen it? I had always thought he had left me. I shook my head in wonder, in denial.

“You cannot be one of the Three,” he whispered. I flinched. “It’s long past time you accepted that. You want someone you can never leave behind. But think, Sieh. Not even the Three are like that. Itempas betrayed all of us and himself. Enefa grew selfish, and Nahadoth has always been fickle. This new one, Yeine, she’ll break your heart, too. Because you want something that she can never give you. You want perfection.”

“Not perfection,” I blurted, and then felt ill as I realized I had confirmed everything else he’d said. “Not… perfection. Just…” I licked my lips, ran my hands through my hair. “I want someone who is mine. I… I don’t even know…” I sighed. “The Three, Nsana, they are the Three. Three facets of the same diamond, whole even when separate. No matter how far apart they drift, they always, always, come back together eventually. That closeness…”

It was what Shahar had with Deka, I realized: a closeness that few outsiders would ever comprehend or penetrate. More than blood-deep—soul-deep. She hadn’t seen him for half her life and she’d still betrayed me for him.

What would it be like to have that kind of love for myself?

I wanted it, yes. Gods, yes. And I did not really want it from Yeine or Nahadoth or Itempas, because they had each other and it would have been wrong to interfere with that. But I wanted something like it.

Nsana sighed. Here in my dream, he was supreme; he could know my every thought and whim if he wanted, without even trying. So of course he knew now that he had never been enough for me.

“I’m sorry,” I said, very softly.

“You certainly are.” Looking sour, Nsana turned away for a moment, contemplating his own thoughts. Then he sighed and faced me again.

“Fine,” he said. “You need help, and I’m not so churlish that I’d ignore your need. So I’ll try to find out more about this secret of yours. At the rate you’re going, you’ll be dead before you figure it out.”

I lowered my eyes. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me, Sieh.” He gestured, and I followed this movement to see a little patch of flowers on one side of the playground. Amid dozens of black daisies that bobbed and swayed in the cool breeze, a single white-petaled flower stood utterly still. It was not a daisy. I had seen such a flower before: an altarskirt rose, one of a rare variety bred in High North. The white tower of my secret, repeating itself across theme and form.

“This secret will hurt when it is finally revealed,” he said.

I nodded slowly, my eyes on that single frightening flower. “Yes. I can see that.”

The hand on my shoulder caught me by surprise, and I turned to see that Nsana’s mood had changed again: he was no longer exasperated with me, but something closer to pitying. “So many troubles,” he said. “Impending death, our parents’ madness, and I see someone has broken your heart recently, too.”

I looked away at this. “It’s no one. Just a mortal.”

“Love levels the ground between us and them. When they break our hearts, it hurts the same as if the deed were done by one of our own.” He cupped the back of my head, ruffling my hair companionably, and I smiled weakly and tried not to show how much I really wanted a kiss instead. “Ah, my brother. Do stop being stupid, will you?”

“Nsana, I—”

He put a finger over my lips, and I fell silent.

“Hush,” he murmured, then leaned close. I closed my eyes, waiting for the touch of his lips, but they came where I had not been expecting them: on my forehead. When I blinked at him, he smiled, and it was full of sorrow.

“I’m a god, not a stone,” he said. I flushed in shame. He stroked my cheek. “But I will love you always, Sieh.”

I woke in the dark and cried myself back to sleep. If I dreamt again before morning, I did not remember it. Nsa was kind like that.

My hair had grown again, though not as much as before. Only a couple of feet. Nails, too, this time; the longest was four inches, jagged and beginning to curl. I begged scissors from Hymn and chopped off both as best I could. I had to get Hymn’s father to teach me how to shave. This so amused him that he forgot to be afraid of me for a few minutes, and we actually shared a laugh when I cut myself and yelled out a very bad word. Then he started to worry that I would cut myself and blow up the house someday. We don’t read minds, but some things are easy for anyone to guess. I excused myself then and went off to work.

I offended the Arms of Night’s housemistress immediately by coming in through the main door. She took me back out and showed me the servants’ door, an unobtrusive entrance at the house’s side, leading to its basement level. It was a better door, quite frankly; I have always preferred back entrances. Good for sneaking. But my pride was stung enough that I complained, anyway. “What, I’m not good enough to come in the front?”

“Not if you’re not paying,” she snapped.

Inside, another servant greeted me and let me know that Ahad had left instructions in case of my arrival. So I followed him through the basement into what appeared to be a rather mundane meeting room. There were stiff-backed chairs that looked as though they had absorbed years’ worth of boredom, and a wide, square table on which sat an untouched platter of meats and fruits. I barely noticed all this, however, for I had stopped, my blood going cold as I registered who sat at the room’s wide table with Ahad. Nemmer.

And Kitr. And Eyem-sutah. And Glee, the only mortal. And, of all the insanities, Lil.

Five of my siblings, sitting about a meeting table as though they had never spun through the vortices of the outermost cosmos as laughing sparkles. Three of the five hated me. The fourth might; no way of knowing with Eyem-sutah. The fifth had tried to eat me more than once. She would very likely try again, now that I was mortal.

If there’s anything edible left when the others get done with me, that is. I set my jaw to hide my fear, which probably telegraphed it clearly.

“About time,” said Ahad. He nodded to the servant, who closed the door to leave us alone. “Please, Sieh, sit down.”

I did not move, hating him more than ever. I should have known better than to trust him.

With a sigh of mild annoyance, Ahad added, “None of us are stupid, Sieh. Harming you means incurring Yeine’s and Nahadoth’s displeasure. Do you honestly think we would do that?”

“I don’t know, Ahad,” said Kitr, who was smiling viciously at me. “I might.”

Ahad rolled his eyes. “You won’t, so be silent. Sieh, sit down. We have business to discuss.”

I was so startled by Ahad’s shutdown of Kitr that I forgot my fear. Kitr, too, looked more astonished than affronted. Any fool could tell that Ahad was the youngest of us, and inexperience meant weakness among our kind. He was weak, lacking the crucial means of making himself stronger. Yet there was no hint of fear in his eyes as he met her glare, and to my amazement—and everyone else’s, to judge by their expressions—Kitr said nothing in reply.

Feeling vaguely unimportant in the wake of this, I came to the table and sat down.

“So what the hells is this?” I asked, choosing a chair with no one on either side of me. “The weekly meeting of the Godlings’ Auxiliary, Lower Shadow Chapter?”

They all glowered. Except Lil, who laughed. Good old Lil. I had always liked her, when she wasn’t asking for my limbs as snacks. She leaned forward. “We are conspiring,” she said. Her raspy voice was filled with such childlike glee that I grinned back.

“This is about Darr, then.” I looked at Ahad, wondering if he had told them about the mask already.

“This is about many things,” he replied. He alone had a comfortable chair; someone had carted in the big leather chair from his office. “All of which may fit into a larger picture.”

“Not just the pieces you’ve discovered.” Nemmer smiled sweetly. “Isn’t that why you contacted me, Brother? You’re turning mortal, and it’s making you pay attention to more than your own ass for a change. But I thought you were staying in Sky. Did the Arameri throw you out?”

Kitr laughed hard enough to make the hairs on the back of my neck bristle. “Gods, Ahad, you said he was powerless, but I never dreamt it would be this bad. You’re mortal, Sieh. What good can you do in all this? Nothing but run to Daddy and Mommy—who aren’t here now to protect you.” Her eyes fixed on me, her smile fading, and I knew she was remembering the War. I was remembering it, too. Beneath the table, my hands clenched into fists and I wished I had my claws.

Eyem-sutah, who had not fought because he’d loved a mortal and had nearly killed himself protecting her, let out a long, weary sigh. “Please,” he said. “Please. This helps nothing.”

“Indeed, it does not,” said Ahad, looking at all of us with contempt. “So if we are agreed that no one is a child here, not even the one who should be, can we then please focus on events of this millennium?”

“I don’t like your tone—” began Kitr, but then to my greater surprise, Glee cut her off.

“I have limited time,” she said. She seemed so completely at ease in a room full of godlings that I wondered again if she might be Arameri. It was far back in her lineage if so; she looked to be pure-blooded Maroneh.

To my surprise, all my siblings fell silent at her words, looking at her with a combination of consternation and unease. This made me even more curious—so Ahad was not the only one who deferred to her?—but that curiosity would have to remain unsatisfied for the moment.

“All right, then,” I said, addressing Ahad because he seemed to be at least trying to stay focused. “Who’s going to go take that mask and destroy it?”

“No one.” Ahad steepled his fingers.

“Excuse me?” Kitr spoke before I could. “Based on what you’ve told us, Ahad, nothing so powerful should be left in mortal hands.”

“And what better hands are there for it?” He looked around the table, and I flinched as I realized what he meant. Nemmer, too, sighed and sat back. “One of us? Nahadoth? Yeine?”

“It would make more sense—” Kitr began.

“No,” said Nemmer. “No. Remember what happened the last time a god got hold of a powerful mortal weapon.” At this, Eyem-sutah, who had chosen to resemble an Amn, went pale.

Kitr’s face tightened. “You don’t know that this mask is even dangerous to us. It hurt him.” She jabbed a thumb at me, her lip curling. “But harsh language could hurt him now.”

“It hurt Kahl, too,” I said, scowling. “The thing is broken, incomplete. Whatever it’s supposed to do, it’s doing it wrong. But as powerful as it is now, I see no reason why we should wait for the mortals to complete it before we act.” I glared at Ahad, and at Glee, too. “You know what mortals are capable of.”

“Yes, the same things as gods, on a smaller scale,” Ahad replied, his voice bland.

Glee glanced at him, but I could not read the look on her face before she turned to me. “There is more to this than you know.”

“So tell me!” Ahad I was used to. He kept secrets like I kept toys, and he did it mostly out of spite. Glee hadn’t seemed the type, however.

“You aren’t a child anymore, Sieh. You should learn patience,” Ahad drawled. His smirk faded. “But you’re right; an explanation may be in order since you’re new, both to our organization and to Shadow. This group’s original purpose was merely to police our own behavior and prevent another Interdiction. To a degree, that is still our purpose. Things changed, however, when a few mortals used demons’ blood to express their displeasure at our arrival.” He sighed, crossing his legs and leaning back in his chair. “This was a few years back. You may recall the time.”

Of course I did. A handful of my siblings had been killed, and Nahadoth had come very close to turning Sky-in-Shadow into a large smoking crater. “Hard to forget.”

He nodded. “This group had already organized in order to protect them from us. After that incident, it became clear that we should also work to protect us from them as well.”

“That’s stupid,” I said, frowning around the table. Glee lifted an eyebrow, and I grimaced but ignored her. “The demon was taken care of; the menace has ended. What is there to fear? Any one of you could smash this city, melt down the surrounding mountains, make the Eyeglass’s water burn—”

“No,” said Eyem-sutah. “We cannot. If we do, Yeine will revoke our right to dwell here. You don’t understand, Sieh; you didn’t want to come back after your incarceration ended. I don’t blame you, given circumstances. But would you truly prefer never to visit the mortal realm again?”

“That’s beside the—”

Eyem-sutah shook his head and leaned forward, cutting me off. “Tell me you have never nestled into some mortal woman’s breast to be held, Sieh, and loved unconditionally. Or felt adoration when some mortal man tousles your hair. Tell me they mean nothing to you. Look into my eyes and say it, and I will believe you.”

I could have done it. I am a trickster. I can look into anyone’s eyes and say anything I need to say and be completely believable in the process. Only Nahadoth, who knows me better than any other, and Itempas, who always knows falsehood, have ever been able to catch me out when I truly want to lie.

But even tricksters are not without honor, as Eyem-sutah well knew. He was right, and it would have been wrong of me not to acknowledge that. So I lowered my eyes, and he sat back.

“Out of such debate was this organization born,” Ahad said, with only a hint of dryness. “Not all godlings have chosen to participate, but most adhere to the rules we set, out of mutual self-interest.” He shrugged. “Those who do not, we deal with.”

I propped my chin on my fist, pretending boredom to hide the unease Eyem-sutah’s questions had left in me. “Fine. But how’d you end up in charge? You’re an infant.”

Ahad smiled by curling his upper lip. “No one else wanted the task, after Madding died. Lately, however, our structure has changed. Now I’m merely the organizer, at least until such time as our actual leader chooses to take a more active role.”

“And your leader is…?” Not that I thought he’d tell me.

“Does it matter?”

I considered. “I guess not. But this is all awfully… mortal, don’t you think?” I gestured around at the meeting room, the table and chairs, the tray of bland finger foods. (I restrained my urge to reach for a piece of cheese, out of pride.) “Why not come up with some sinister-sounding name, too, if you’re going to go this far? ‘The Organization’ or something original like that. Whatever, if we’re going to act like a bunch of mortals.”

“We have no need of a name.” Ahad shrugged, then glanced pointedly at Glee. “And our group consists of more than just gods, which requires some concession to mortal convention.” Glee inclined her head to him in silent thanks. “In any case, we dwell in the mortal realm. Should we not at least attempt to think like mortals from time to time, in order to anticipate our adversaries more easily?”

“And then do nothing when we actually discover a threat?” Kitr clenched a fist on the table.

Ahad’s expression went Arameri-neutral. “What, precisely, would you have us do, Kitr? Go and take this mask? We don’t know who created it, or how; they could simply make another. We don’t know what it does. Sieh said this Kahl seemed to be using the Darre to create it. Doesn’t that imply it’s something mortals can touch but that might strike a god dead?”

I frowned, unwilling to concede the point. “We have to do something. The thing is dangerous.”

“Very well. Shall we capture Usein Darr, torture her to learn her secrets? We could threaten to give her unborn child to Lil, perhaps.” Lil, who had been staring at the plate of food, smiled and said “Mmmmm” without taking her eyes away from it. “Or shall we dispense with subtlety and smite Darr with fire and pestilence and erasure, until its cities are in ruins and its people forgotten? Does that sound at all familiar to you, Enefadeh?”

Every voluntary muscle in my body locked in fury. En pulsed once, questioningly, against my chest—did I want it to kill someone again? It was still tired from my rage at Remath, but it would try.

That, and that alone, calmed me. I put my hand over En, stroking it through my shirt. No more killing now, but it was a good little star for wanting to help. With another pulse of pleasure, En cooled back into sleep.

“We are not the Arameri,” Ahad said, speaking softly, though his eyes stayed on me. Demanding my acknowledgment. “We are not Itempas. We cannot repeat the mistakes of the past. Again and again our kind have tried to dominate mortalkind and have harmed ourselves in the doing. This time, if we choose to dwell among mortals, then we must share the risks of mortality. We must live in this world, not merely visit it. Do you understand?”

Of course I did. Mortals are as much Enefa’s creations as we ourselves. I had argued this with my fellow prisoners a century ago as we contemplated using a mortal girl’s life to achieve our freedom. We’d done it anyway, and the plan had been successful—more in spite of our efforts than because of them—but I had felt the guilt keenly back then. And the fear: for if we did as Itempas and his pet Arameri had done, did we not risk becoming just like them?

“I understand,” I said, very softly.

Ahad watched me a moment longer, then nodded.

Glee sighed. “I’m more concerned about this Kahl than any mortal magic. No godling by that name is on any city registry. What do the rest of you know of him?” She looked around the table.

No one responded. Kitr and Nemmer looked at each other, and at Eyem-sutah, who shrugged. Then they all looked at me. My mouth fell open. “None of you knows him?”

“We thought you would,” Eyem-sutah said. “You’re the only one who was around when all of us were born.”

“No.” I chewed my lip in consternation. “I could swear I’ve heard the name before, but…” The memory danced on the edge of my consciousness, closer than ever before.

forget, whispered Enefa’s voice. I sighed in frustration.

“He’s elontid,” I said, staring at my own clenched fist. “I’m sure of that. And he’s young—I think. Maybe a little older than the War.” But Madding had been the last godling born before the War. Even before him, Enefa had made few children in the last aeon or so—certainly no elontid. She had lost the heart for childbearing after seeing so many of her sons and daughters murdered in the battle against the demons.

Would that you were a true child, she would say to me sometimes while stroking my hair. I lived for such moments. She was not much given to affection. Would that you could stay with me forever.

But I can, I would always point out, and the look in her eyes would turn inward and sad in a way that I did not understand. I will never grow old, never grow up. I can be your little boy forever.

Would that this were true, she would say.

I blinked, frowning. I had forgotten that conversation. What had she meant by—

“Elontid,” said Ahad, almost to himself. “The ones borne of god and godling, or Nahadoth and Itempas.” He turned a speculative look on Lil. She had begun to stroke one of the strawberries on the platter, her bony, jagged-nailed finger trailing back and forth over its curve in a way that would have been sensual in anyone else. She finally looked away from the platter but kept fingering the strawberry.

“I do not know a Kahl,” she said, and smiled. “But we do not always wish to be known.”

Glee frowned. “What?”

Lil shrugged. “We elontid are feared by mortals and gods alike. Not without reason.” She threw me a glance that was pure lasciviousness. “You smell delicious now, Sieh.”

I flushed and deliberately took something off the platter. Cucumber slathered with maash paste and comry eggs. I made a show of stuffing it into my mouth and swallowing it barely chewed. She pouted; I ignored her and turned to Glee.

“What Lil means,” I said, “is that the elontid are different. They aren’t quite godlings, aren’t quite gods. They’re”—I thought a moment—“more like the Maelstrom than the rest of us. They flux and wane, create and devour, each in their own way. It makes them… hard to grasp.” I glanced at Lil, and when I did, she scooped up a cucumber slice and downed it in a blur, then stuck her tongue out at me. I laughed in spite of myself. “If any god could conceal his presence in the world, it would be an elontid.”

Glee tapped a finger on the table, thoughtful. “Could they hide even from the Three?”

“No. Not if they united. But the Three have had their own problems to worry about for some time now. They are incomplete.” I blinked then, as something new occurred to me. “And the Three could be why none of us remembers this Kahl. Enefa, I mean. She might have made all of us—”

forget

Shut up, Mother, I thought irritably.

“—forget.”

“Why would she do that?” Eyem-sutah looked around, his eyes widening. “That makes no sense.”

“No,” said Nemmer softly. She met my eyes, and I nodded. She was one of the older ones among us—nowhere near my age, but she had been around to see the war against the demons. She knew the many strange configurations that could result among the children of the Three. “It makes perfect sense. Enefa—” She grimaced. “She had no problem killing us. And she would do it, if any of her children were a threat to the rest. After the demons, she wasn’t willing to take more risks. But if a child could survive without harming others, and if that child’s survival depended for some reason on others not knowing of its existence…” She shook her head. “It’s possible. She might have even created some new realm to house him, apart from the rest of us. And when she died, she took the knowledge of that child with her.”

I thought of Kahl’s intimation. Enefa is dead now. I remembered. Nemmer’s theory fit, but for one thing.

“Where’s this elontid’s other parent? Most of us wouldn’t just leave a child to rot in some heaven or hell forever. New life among our kind is too precious.”

“It has to be a godling,” Ahad mused. “If it were Itempas or Nahadoth, this Kahl would just be”—his mouth began to shape the word normal, but then Lil turned a glare on him to make Itempas proud, and he amended himself—“niwwah, like the rest of you.”

“I am mnasat,” Kitr snapped, glaring herself.

“Whatever,” Ahad replied, and I was suddenly glad the platter’s paring knife was out of Kitr’s reach. Hopefully Ahad would find his nature soon; he wasn’t going to last long among us otherwise.

“Many godlings died in the War,” said Glee, and we all sobered as we realized what she meant.

“Gods,” murmured Kitr, looking horrified. “To be raised in exile, forgotten, orphaned… Did this Kahl even know how to find us? How long was he alone? I can’t imagine it.”

I could. The universe had been much emptier once. There had been no word for loneliness back then, in my true childhood, but all three of my parents—Nahadoth in particular—had worked hard to protect me from it. If Kahl had lacked the same… I could not help but pity him.

“This complicates things to an unpleasant degree,” said Ahad, sighing and rubbing his eyes. I felt the same. “From what you reported, Sieh, it sounds as though the High Northers and Kahl are working at cross-purposes. He’s using their dimmers to create a mask that turns mortals into gods, for some reason I can’t fathom. And they are using the same art to create masks that somehow kill Arameri.”

“Or else Kahl has been killing the Arameri, using the masks, and doing it to cast suspicion on the northerners,” I said, remembering the dream conversation I’d had with him. I have already begun, he had said then. It was the oldest of tricks, to sow dissension between groups that had common interests. Good for deflecting attention from greater mischief, too. I contemplated it more and scowled. “And there’s another thing. The Arameri destroy any land that injures them—which guarantees that their enemies will strike decisively, if and when they ever do.” I thought of Usein Darr, proudly stating that she would never kill just a few Arameri. “The High Northers wouldn’t bother with assassins and a lowblood here, a highblood there. They’d bring an army and try to destroy the whole family at once.”

“There’s no evidence that they’re building an army at all,” said Nemmer.

There was, but it was subtle. I thought of Usein Darr’s pregnancy and that of her guardswoman, and the woman in Sar-enna-nem who’d had two babies with her, both too young to be eating solid food yet. I thought of the children I’d seen there—belligerent, xenophobic, barely multilingual, and every one of them four or five years old at the most. Darr was famous for its contraceptive arts. Even before scrivening, the women there had long ago learned to time childbearing to suit their constant raiding and intertribal wars. Their war crop, they called it, making a joke of other lands’ reliance on agriculture. In the years preceding a war, every woman under thirty tried her best to make a child or two. The warriors would nurse the babes for a few days, then hand them over to the nonwarriors in the family—who, having also recently borne children, would simply nurse two or three, until all the children could be weaned and handed over to grandmothers or menfolk. Thus the warriors could go off to fight knowing that their replacements were growing up safe, should they fall in battle.

It was a bad sign to see so many Darre breeding. It was a worse sign that the children hated foreigners and weren’t even trying to ape Senmite customs. They certainly weren’t preparing those children for peace.

“Even if they were building an army,” said Ahad, “there would be no reason for us to interfere. What mortals do to each other is their business. Our concern lies solely with this godling Kahl and the strange mask Sieh saw.”

At this, Glee’s already-grim look grew positively forbidding. “So you will do nothing if war breaks out?”

“Mortals have warred with one another since their creation,” Eyem-sutah said with a soft sigh. “The best we can do is try to prevent it… and protect the ones we love, if we fail. It is their nature.”

“Because it is our nature,” snapped Nemmer. “And because of us, they now have magic as a weapon for their warring. They’ll use soldiers and swords like before the Gods’ War, but also scriveners and these masks, and demons know what else. Do you have any idea how many could die?”

It would be worse than that, I knew. Most of mortalkind had no idea what war really meant anymore. They could not imagine the famine and rapine and disease, not on such a scale. Oh, they feared it of old, and the memory of the ultimate war—our War—had burned itself into the souls of every race. But that would not stop them from unleashing its full fury again and learning too late what they had done.

“This will do more than kill,” I murmured. “These people have forgotten what humanity can be like at its worst. Rediscovering this will shock them; it will wound their souls. I have seen it happen before, here and on other worlds.” I met Ahad’s eyes, and he frowned, just a little, at the look on my face. “They’ll burn their histories and slaughter their artists. They’ll enslave their women and devour their children, and they’ll do it in the gods’ names. Shahar was right; the end of the Arameri means the end of the Bright.”

Ahad spoke with brutal softness. “It will be worse if we get involved.”

He was right. I hated him more than ever for that.

In the silence that fell, Glee sighed. “I’ve stayed too long.” She rose to leave. “Keep me informed of anything else you discover or decide.”

I waited for one of the gods at the table to chastise her for giving them orders. Then I realized none of them were planning to. Lil had begun to lean toward the platter, her eyes gleaming. Kitr had taken the small paring knife and was spinning it on her fingertip, an old habit that meant she was thinking. Nemmer rose to leave as well, nodding casually to Ahad, and suddenly I couldn’t stand it anymore. I shoved back my chair and marched around the table and got to the door just as Glee started to open it. I slammed it shut.

“Who in the suppurating bright hells are you?” I demanded.

Ahad groaned. “Sieh, gods damn it—”

“No, I need to know this. I swore I’d never take orders from a mortal again.” I glared up at Glee, who didn’t look nearly as alarmed by my tantrum as I wanted her to be. What ignominy; I couldn’t even make mortals fear me anymore. “This doesn’t make sense! Why are all of you listening to her?”

The woman lifted an eyebrow, then let out a long, heavy sigh. “My full name is Glee Shoth. I speak for, and assist, Itempas.”

The words struck me like a slap—as did the name, and the odd familiarity of her manner, and her Maroneh heritage, and the way my siblings all seemed uneasy in her presence. I should have seen it at once. Kitr was right; I really was losing my touch.

“You’re his daughter.” I whispered it. I could barely make my mouth form the words. Glee Shoth—daughter of Oree Shoth, the first and, as far as I knew, only mortal friend Itempas had ever had. Clearly they had gone beyond friendship. “His… dear gods, his demon daughter.”

Glee did not smile, but her eyes warmed in amusement—and now that I knew, all those tiny niggling familiarities were as obvious as slaps to the face. She didn’t look like him; in features, she’d taken more after her mother. But her mannerisms, the air of stillness that she wore like a cloak… It was all there, as plain as the risen sun.

Then I registered the implications of her existence. A demon. A demon made by Itempas—he who had declared the demons forbidden in the first place and led the hunt to wipe them out. A daughter, allied to him, helping him.

I considered what it meant, that he loved her.

I considered his reconciliation with Yeine.

I considered the terms of his imprisonment.

“It’s him,” I whispered. I nearly staggered, and would have if I had not leaned on the door for support. I focused on Ahad to marshal my shaken thoughts. “He’s the leader of this crazy group of yours. Itempas.”

Ahad opened his mouth, then closed it. “ ‘You will right all the wrongs inflicted in your name,’ ” he said at last, and I twitched as I remembered the words. I had been there, the first time they’d been spoken, and Ahad’s voice was deep enough, had just the right timbre, to imitate the original speaker perfectly. He shrugged at my stare and finally flashed his usual humorless smile. “I’d say the Arameri, and all they’ve done to the world, count as one great whopping wrong, wouldn’t you?”

“And it is his nature.” Glee threw Ahad an arch look before returning her attention to me. “Even without magic, he will fight the encroachment of disorder in whatever way he can. Is that so surprising?”

I resisted out of stubbornness. “Yeine said she couldn’t find him lately.”

Glee’s smile was paper-thin. “I regret concealing him from Lady Yeine, but it’s necessary. For his protection.”

I shook my head. “Protection? From—Gods, this makes no sense. A mortal can’t hide from a god.”

“A demon can,” she said. I blinked, surprised, but I shouldn’t have been. I’d already known that some demons had survived their holocaust. Now I knew how. Glee continued. “And fortunately, some of us can hide others when we need to. Now, if you’ll excuse me…” She looked pointedly at my hand on the door, which I let fall.

Ahad had taken out a cheroot and was rummaging absently in his pockets. He threw a lazy glance at Glee, and there was a hint of the old evil in his eyes. “Tell the old man I said hi.”

“I will not,” she replied promptly. “He hates you.”

Ahad laughed, then finally remembered he was a god and lit the cheroot with a moment’s concentration. Sitting back in his chair, he regarded Glee with steady lasciviousness as she opened the door. “But you don’t, at least?”

Glee paused on the threshold, and the look in her eyes was suddenly as familiar as her not-quite-smile had been a moment before. Of course it was. I had seen that same easy, possessive arrogance all my life. The absolute assurance that all was as it should be in the universe, because all of it was hers—if not now, then eventually.

“Not yet,” she said, and not-smiled again before leaving the room.

Ahad sat forward as soon as the door shut, his eyes fixed on the door in such obvious interest that Lil began staring at him, finally distracted from the food. Kitr made a sound of exasperation and reached for the platter, probably out of irritation rather than any actual hunger.

“I’ll see if I can get one of my people into Darr,” said Nemmer, getting to her feet. “They’re suspicious of strangers, though… might have to do it myself. Busy, busy, busy.”

“I will listen harder to the sailors’ and traders’ talk,” said Eyem-sutah. He was the god of commerce, to whom the Ken had once dedicated their magnificent sailing vessels. “War means shipments of steel and leather and march-bread, back and forth and back and forth…” His eyelids fluttered shut; he let out a soft sigh. “Such things have their own music.”

Ahad nodded. “I’ll see all of you next week, then.” With that, Nemmer, Kitr, and Eyem-sutah disappeared. Lil rose and leaned over the table for a moment; the platter of food vanished. So did the platter, though Ahad’s table remained untouched. Ahad sighed.

“You have become interesting, Sieh,” Lil said to me, grinning beneath her swirling, mottled eyes. “You want so many things, so badly. Usually you taste only of the one endless, unfulfillable longing.”

I sighed and wished she would go away, though that was pointless. Lil came and went as she pleased, and nothing short of a war could dislodge her when she took an interest in something. “What are you doing here?” I asked. “I didn’t think you cared about anything but food, Lil.”

She shrugged with one painfully bony shoulder, her ragged hair brushing the cloth of her gown with a sound like dry grass. “This realm changed while we were away. Its taste has grown richer, its flavors more complex. I find myself changing to suit.” Then to my surprise, she came around the table and put her hand on mine. “You were always kind to me, Sieh. Be well, if you can.”

She vanished as well, leaving me even more perplexed than before. I shook my head to myself, not really noticing that I was alone with Ahad until he spoke.

“Questions?” he asked. The cheroot hung between his fingers, on the brink of dropping a column of ash onto the carpet.

I considered all the swirling winds that blew around me and shook my head.

“Good,” he said, and waved a hand. (This flung ash everywhere.) Another pouch appeared on the table. Frowning, I picked it up and found it heavy with coins.

“You gave me money yesterday.”

He shrugged. “Funny thing, employment. If you keep doing it, you keep getting paid.”

I glowered at him. “I take it I passed Glee’s test, then.”

“Yes. So pay that mortal girl’s family for room and board, buy some decent clothing, and for demons’ sake, eat and sleep so you stop looking like all hells. I need you to be able to blend in, or at least not frighten people.” He paused, leaning back in his chair and taking a deep draw from the cheroot. “Given the quality of your work today, I can see that I’ll be making good use of you in the future. That is, by the way, the standard salary we offer to the Arms of Night’s top performers.” He gave me a small, malicious smile.

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.