City of Miracles

9. Too Much Night, Not Enough Moon

Alone. Again.

All his old sea training comes back to him as Sigrud pilots the little ketch east along the Continental shore. For hours at a time it is only him, the ache in his side, the wind, and the beastly squalls on the horizon, battlements of dark, curling storms, dragging behind a hazy veil of thick rain. He says not a word for these travels, not to himself. He lost much use for words over the years alone in the wilderness. As civilization fades on the horizon behind him, that deep, thoughtless silence returns to him.

His side hurts, but not as much as he expected. Ivanya provided him with some painkillers, but not the opiate sort, so he can still do his duties while sailing. It’s not easy, but he manages.

He drops anchor only twice, first in the tiny Shuri Islands. Some nomadic Saypuri tribe has set up on the eastern rim of the largest one, and since they cannot build on the land they build on the sea, little huts and piers set on stilts. He pays them a small fee for fresh water and some salted fish. They pore over the handful of drekels as if it were a fortune.

The next time, he drops anchor at the edge of the Sartoshan. He has his nautical maps now, so he’s able to use the code Mulaghesh gave him to target a much more specific area.

A tiny lagoon, right at the top of the Sartoshan. International waters, almost—that subject, like so many things relating to territory and sovereignty, is always dreadfully tricky on the Continent. But if he were going to hide anything, it’d be in a place like that.

He folds up the map and stares out at the horizon. He hopes there’s something there. He hopes he didn’t endanger Taty and Ivanya over nothing. He hopes that, come a few days, he will no longer be moving in blind desperation.

It’s at times like this that he misses her the most. She always knew what to do. Where to go. Who to see.

Shara, he thinks, am I a fool to try this? Would you do this? Or is this what got you killed?

Two days later Sigrud sails along the Jukoshtan coast, watching as the cliffs climb and climb north of him, climbing until they become the Mashevs, the tallest mountains in the known world, much taller than the Tarsils. This tiny isthmus of land, hardly five hundred miles wide, is all that connects the Continent to Saypur, yet with the Mashevs in the way it might as well be an ocean in between the two.

The Mashev River (if Sigrud recalls what Shara once said, all of this region is named after some Jukoshtani saint who died out here after a particularly wild party) is a narrow thread of water that must become a raging torrent in spring, when the snowpack melts. He finds the first of the long, thin islands that cluster around its delta and steers around them, mindful of the lagoon’s shallow waters.

Then he sees it.

It looks like a building in the distance, perhaps a long, low, slumping bunker built atop the fattest of the isles. Then he gets closer, and closer.

It’s a massive ship, over a thousand feet long. Sigrud never had much to do with the Saypuri Navy—his maritime experiences as a Dreyling in the North Sea were with far more primitive vessels—so even he’s a bit taken aback by the size of the wrecked dreadnought. Its wreckage is obscene, tangles of metal and debris lodged in the delicate white sands of the lagoon. The beaches glitter with metal, yet most of the debris is rusted over, devoured by the sea spray and the elements.

He pilots his ketch over to an appealing side of the island, then drops anchor. Ivanya’s man provided him with a canvas inflatable raft—a new innovation he’s not sure he can bring himself to trust—but he manages to inflate it, set it in the waves, and climb aboard, rowing to shore with the two measly little oars.

He drags the raft up onto the beach and tries to find something to tie it to, as the winds here are fierce. There’s a beaten, bitter-looking tree sprouting from the soil a bit beyond the beach. He lashes the raft up, taking care to avoid the jagged, rusted shards of metal on the ground, then steps back to review his work.

On the second step back, something crunches unpleasantly under his bootheel. He looks down. A sliver of something gray-white has surfaced from the sands.

He steps aside, kneels, and pushes the sand away. He recognizes what’s below almost immediately. He’s dug things like this up before, after all.

Vertebrae, scattered through the sand. Neck vertebrae, from their width. And just next to them, a skull with two iron teeth.

He digs more. Though the corpse is old, he finds fragments of their clothing. Buttons and medals and pins. He holds one button up and blows the sand off of it. He’s seen such buttons before, many times, running down the pert, handsome blue uniforms of the Saypuri Navy.

He drops the button and sits back on his haunches, staring in the direction of the wrecked dreadnought. Its hull is split and torn, forming something like ribs, gray light slanting through the gaps. He stands and squints and shields his eyes, looking at the beach leading up to the ruined ship.

He spies lumps in the sand. Calcified forms that he now suspects are certainly not seashells.

Sigrud grabs a torch, his lockpicks, a pistol, and his knife. Then he walks toward the wreck of the SS Salim, stepping around the bones lying in the sand, the jumbled, skeletal remains of the several hundred souls who surely once served aboard that behemoth.

Some of the skulls have been crushed. And though he can’t be certain, one such skull has been crushed in a manner that’s highly reminiscent of fingers, as if it was destroyed by human hands.

He approaches the bow of the ship, which has mostly held together. The Salim is about four or five stories tall, a massive construction, though it’s tipped very slightly toward the west, so it’s hard for him to get perspective on its size.

He comes to the starboard side of the bow and looks up along its hull. The ship has bowed slightly as it’s laid for however many years on the curving surface of the island, causing its sides to split and separate like someone bending a piece of soft cheese. The hull is ragged and gaping at the seams, with rivets sticking out as though a drunk tried to put the thing together. Though Sigrud’s a skilled climber, even this gives him pause.

Still, he thinks. Nothing else to do.

Grimacing, he pulls on a pair of thick leather gloves and approaches one seam that runs all the way up the hull. He should be able to hold on to either side of the seam, wedge himself inside to bridge the gap, and slowly climb up using his hands and feet on either side.

Provided everything holds together, of course. Which is by no means a guarantee.

He starts up. The hull is incredibly thick, especially along the armored belt—the portion of the ship’s sides that would be just above the waterline, where a shell could strike it—so it’s quite sturdy. He could even crawl through the bulkhead to the inner decks, but he’s unwilling to try this. To enter where the ship is terribly damaged would be suicidal.

But he can tell something’s different about the Salim, from the sliver of the interior he can see as he climbs. Most dreadnoughts would have what’s called a citadel, a heavily armored “box” beneath the four main gun turrets, protecting their ammunition and the ship’s coal bunkers from being penetrated by an enemy shell. He’s trafficked in naval intelligence, so he’s aware of such an engineering feat—yet what he glimpses through the cracks of the ship’s hull is…unusual.

He pauses about midway up, makes sure his feet are tightly wedged into the seam, pulls out a torch, and flicks it on.

The two fore ammunition stores have been heavily altered. He can see no feeds running up to the two fore gun turrets above, meaning the guns wouldn’t have been battle-ready. The ammunition chambers are still there, but they’ve been merged into one chamber, and it’s been closed off, and has been heavily, heavily armored, to the point where the chamber is nearly as armored as the belt running along the sides of the ship.

Which makes him wonder—what could they have been keeping in there, if not ammunition?

He grunts, puts the torch away, and continues up.

Finally he comes to the main deck. The gap in the hull is getting wider and wider as he goes up, until he realizes he won’t be able to bridge the gap anymore. Sighing, he swivels so he’s clinging to one side of the seam, pinching it between his feet and palms, and slowly, slowly hauls himself up.

The main deck of the ship is tilting, so while he very badly wishes to roll onto the top and catch his breath, he’s aware that this would send him rolling down the deck until he tumbled off the port side. So instead he crawls over and holds on to the railing, breathing hard and wishing he’d brought kneepads with him, as some of the torn plates snagged his legs.

Then he sits up and freezes. “What in the hells…?”

The deck of the Salim has been…decorated. Specifically, they appear to have removed the two fore gun turrets and, in their place, they have used some kind of welding torch to melt a sigil or glyph of some kind into the deck—a mark referring to one of the Continental Divinities.

Sigrud stares at this, unable to comprehend it. The idea of a piece of equipment belonging to the Saypuri Military essentially being blessed by one of the Continental Divinities is unthinkable. He stands, wobbling a little on the slanted surface, and tries to get a better view of it.

The sigil is familiar, he finds: the jagged top, sloping swoop below, and curling sash….He remembers Shara making something like that once in Taalvashtan, burning the symbol into a big wooden board with a match, and then they both had to hold the piece of wood above their heads as they walked over ground that had been cursed.

What was it she said? It comes swimming up to him, slowly: Kolkan’s Sanctuary, she told him. It dampens the effects of any Divine activity occurring below or above it—except Kolkan’s, of course. Story has it Kolkan created it specifically because Jukov and his followers kept trying to break into Kolkan’s monasteries to debauch his virginal followers, and he got quite sick of it. He burned this symbol into the entrances and exits of his monasteries so no one could miraculously penetrate the grounds….

Sigrud cocks his head, looking at it. He gauges that the refurbished ammunition chamber he saw through the split hull is directly below the sigil.

He considers where to begin. Whatever was happening on the SS Salim, it seems it was approved by the Saypuri government in some form or fashion: one doesn’t do massive internal refurbishments to the interior of a dreadnought without considerable resources and skilled labor.

So start with the officers, he thinks, and command. He looks back at the ship’s bridge, then down at the main deck between it and where he currently stands. The deck is split in many places, like a roadway that’s just been through an earthquake. Some of the armor plating has collapsed entirely. One wrong step and he’ll tumble into a ragged chasm of torn metal.

He sighs and stretches his quadriceps. Let’s hope I haven’t gained too much weight.

He has to jump only twice to cross the splintering deck. Both times he hangs above a dark, rusty gorge for one instant, the torn decks yawning below him, before his boots slam down on the plating on the other side. Both times he’s convinced the ruined metal won’t hold him, and it will bend and buckle beneath his heels, sending him spilling down to be shredded to death. Both times he’s wrong.

Lucky, he thinks. Very lucky.

He approaches the bridge ladder and finds a ruined door lying at the bottom. It’s the door that would normally lead into the bridge, and from the look of its pulverized deadbolts it was locked when it was ripped out of its doorway. He touches the metal, noting how it’s been nearly ripped in two. He touches one rent, and can’t help but feel that they match human digits, as if someone had grabbed the metal in one hand like a piece of wet clay and given it a mighty tug.

He climbs the ladder bridge and looks in. The controls have been destroyed, and the floor is littered with bones and refuse and bird droppings. Whatever took place here happened long ago, as the only smells he can catch are salt and rust.

He looks to the aft of the ship. The main deck there is rent and ravaged in a very strange fashion. The force of the damage seems to have come from below, as if someone fired a shell up through the ship.

Or perhaps something else. Maybe something clawed its way through the various decks and burst out like a bird of prey breaking through a forest canopy.

He hops back down the ladder and rounds the platform until he finds the entrance to the captain’s stateroom.

The door is locked, but it’s in some state of decay, so with a few stout kicks Sigrud’s able to cave it in. He switches on his torch and climbs in. Like most staterooms, this one is or at least once was quite fancy, considering the environs, with a leather sofa, several paintings, and—most important—a private head. The room must have flooded at one point, though, based on the water marks on the walls.

Sigrud walks over to the desk and pulls out the drawers, which scream and squawk. The bottom one has a bunch of moldering files in it, stained beyond legibility. The second one has a revolving pistol and a box of ammunition, though he doubts if the bullets are any good after the flood. The top drawer is locked.

Sigrud looks around and finds a piece of iron plating that has fallen off the wall. He picks it up, shoves it into the gap above the drawer, and gives it a kick.

The drawer pops open with a crunch. Inside is a leather-bound journal. It seems to have escaped most of the water.

He pulls it out and flips through the pages. Some have sustained water damage, causing the ink to run, but a few at the middle are readable. He holds it up to the light and reads:

The words begin bleeding again there. The rest of the pages are legible only in spots.

Sigrud stands there, thinking. Then he tosses the book aside and walks back out.

This is all Vinya’s doing, he thinks. All of it, all of it. Before Bulikov, before Voortyashtan, before everything.

He finds the ladder belowdecks and starts down.

This was her project, her plot, off the books and far out in disputed waters.

Belowdecks is a reeking warren, dark corners flooded with sediment and teeming with sea creatures.

What did she trap here?

Sometimes a splinter of bone with gleam in the dark mud, or a button or piece of brass will shine bright in the light of his torch.

What did she torture and question?

Yet he thinks he knows what. Or, more likely, whom.

He feels as if he’s in the innards of a great sleeping creature, the dark surfaces dripping or creaking, the wind whipping through the rents in the hull.

Down, down. Down, down, down.

And as he climbs down, Sigrud remembers.

He remembers Slondheim, the prison he was held in for more than seven years. A monstrous fortification built into a gash in the tall cliffsides, a black crack swirling with sea. The dark walls of rock, riddled with cellblocks and chambers, the lapping waters below. The jail boats trundling from side to side, lanterns swinging, their iron cages filled with screaming, filthy people.

He remembers his first journey in such a cage. The creaking, ancient boat. The cliffs stretching above him, echoing with howls, glimmering with torchlight. And how he bellowed for freedom.

Sigrud slips down another deck, flexing his knuckles. Passionate is the love, he thinks, that a nation has for its prisons.

Finally he comes to it, the massive chamber he glimpsed as he scaled the hull. From this angle there is no doubt at all that its primary purpose was a prison.

The tremendous metal door, covered in locks. The thick glass portholes, like staring eyes. And mounted in the sides, huge electrical lights, lights bright enough to illuminate a city square.

The port side of the chamber sports a magnificent hole, a tangled, blooming flower of torn metal, petals of steel unfolding out like some strange sculpture. Sigrud walks over to it and shines the light inside the chamber.

Bare metal interior. Almost airtight. But every surface of the metal is riddled with dents in the same pattern, over and over and over again, four small divots, all in a line.

The knuckles of a hand, a small one. A boy’s hand.

How long did they keep you here? How long did they keep you down here in the dark?

He shines his torch on the tangled metal around the hole in the chamber’s side. Like the door to the bridge above, like the skulls he found on the beach, there are finger marks in the metal, as if someone unfathomably strong took it and warped it as though it were no more than soft sand.

And how did you break out?

He steps back from the chamber and looks up. He can see it from this angle: he can see the tunnel carved upward through the layers of steel, a passage made as whatever was held in that chamber clawed its way to freedom.

Do we ever truly escape? Am I still battering against the walls of Slondheim, somewhere in my mind?

For a moment, he feels a glimmer of sympathy for the creature that was once bound here. He does his best to smother it.

Do not pity him. Remember what he took from you. Remember Shara. Remember what you’ve lost.

Down in the dark, Sigrud je Harkvaldsson tries to rekindle his many grievances, hoping they will keep him warm enough to keep moving—a mental exercise he is deeply familiar with.

He sighs. The ship creaks around him with the wind.

But one creak seems to last…a little too long. Longer than the breeze lasted, surely. As if something besides the wind was pushing at the metal.

Sigrud pauses. Listens.

Another creak.

He whirls and snaps the beam of the torch up into the tattered decks behind him.

He sees her only briefly, half-hidden behind a girder: the pale face, the upturned nose, the mouth twisted in distrust.

The girl from the slaughterhouse. Malwina Gogacz.

His jaw drops. “What?”

She makes a gesture with one hand. And then things…blur.

The wind beats against him. Sigrud bends low, trudges up across the sand, and lashes the inflatable raft to the little tree, taking care to avoid the jagged, rusted shards of metal on the ground. He’s surprised the little raft survived so well, he’s never tried an inflatable vessel before. Then he steps back to review his work.

On the second step back, something crunches unpleasantly under his bootheel. He looks down. A sliver of something gray-white has surfaced from the sands.

It looks like bones. The bones of a person, buried here on the beach.

He bends low to dig in the sand at his feet, but then stops as he realizes…

“Wait a minute,” he says aloud. “I’ve done this before.”

He looks around. He’s back on the beach outside the Salim. He looks down, bewildered. He examines his knee and sees it isn’t cut—though didn’t he snag his right knee on the jagged hull? And his boots aren’t covered with the black mud he waded through to get to the prison chamber.

He remembers her. Malwina Gogacz, watching him from the decks above.

He scratches his head. “What is going on?”

He walks back to the hull of the Salim. He has no desire to try to scale it again. Instead he sticks his face into one of the gaps and bellows, “Malwina Gogacz!”

Silence. Nothing but the wind.

He tries again. “Malwina Gogacz! Are you in there? Can you hear me?”

More silence.

He takes another breath and shouts: “You saved my life in the slaughterhouse! If we were to meet again, you said you’d tell me more!”

Silence. At least, for a bit.

Then a voice from above, speaking with a mixture of astonishment and outrage, “How the fuck do you remember me?”

Sigrud looks up. He can see her just barely through the crack in the hull, but she’s there, standing on the second platform above the hold.

“Remember you?” he says.

“I reset time!” she says. “You shouldn’t remember me! Everything should have been reset.”

“I…don’t really know what you mean,” he says. “But why don’t you come down so we can talk about it more?”

She refuses to come all the way out to him, and instead speaks to him through the crack in the hull, like an old woman reluctant to open her door for a salesman.

“You survived,” she says.

“I did.”

“You look terrible.”

“Thank you.”

“How did you find me?”

“I wasn’t looking for you,” he says. “I was looking for this ship.”

“Why?”

“Because Shara Komayd was looking for it, once.”

Malwina’s mouth twists, as if she’s struggling not to say more.

“You knew her, didn’t you?” asks Sigrud. “Worked with her? She caught up to you at an orphanage on the Continent and recruited you. Was she the one who told you about this ship, that it was here?”

“Yes,” she says reluctantly.

“And this ship started everything, didn’t it? Once she found it, it started her efforts to locate some very…special Continental orphans. But what happened here started more than that, didn’t it?”

“You’re a damned clever creature, aren’t you.”

“Sometimes. If I recall, you said you would tell me more if we met again. So why don’t you come outside to me?”

“It’s safer in here.”

“Why?”

“You’ve seen what’s chasing me,” says Malwina. “You’ve seen what’s out there, how powerful he is. I’ve survived because I’ve learned not to trust people unless I have the advantages on them. And right now, sir, you seem to have a lot of advantages on me.”

“Yet one would think,” says Sigrud, “that the past would be more powerful than an old Dreyling.”

Malwina’s eyes grow wide. “How…How did you…?”

“Am I right?” he asks. “That’s your—what is the word—your domain, isn’t it? That’s where you are, or were?”

She draws back a little from the crack in the hull.

“You are a Divine child, are you not?” he says. “Your domain is the past, the world of things that were. That is how you were able to project a bubble of the past around yourself back in the slaughterhouse. And that’s how you just…sent me back through time? Is that what you did?”

“I reset things,” says Malwina.

“You…reset things?”

“Yes. Just a bit. You can’t change the past—or at least, you shouldn’t be able to—but you can reset things before the present becomes the past. I make the past replay itself all over again, but the present of that instance—the present at which I reset the past—is different. Got me?”

“No,” says Sigrud with total honesty.

“Whatever. The past should have played out again as it did. You should have gone back inside the ship, dug through the files, gone to see the prison. Only this time I wouldn’t let you see me. I’d have stayed hidden. It would have been a redo.” She looks him over. “But it didn’t. How did you remember? Your memory should have been reset too.”

“I don’t know.” He makes a fist with his left hand, his fingertips feeling the scar there. “But…I have some ideas.”

“This is all a tremendous violation, you know. Right now, what’s happening right now. This is a problem for me, and a fucking big one. You shouldn’t be able to change the past. You’re running amok in my personal, Divine domain! How the hells did you do that?”

Sigrud frowns and looks away. She is not the first Divine thing whose power you’ve defied, he thinks. That cannot be accidental. “Never mind that,” he says. “What was here? What happened here? What did Vinya Komayd trap inside this ship?”

“Don’t you know?” she asks.

He remembers the boy in the dark outside of Shara’s estate: I will visit every pain and every torture upon your head that was visited upon mine….

“I suspect,” he says. “But I want you to tell me.”

“The night,” she whispers. “They held the night itself here for years and years….That’s why I chose to hide here, after all. This is one place he’ll never, ever want to return to. It’s the one place I can be safe.”

They sit on the beach, staring out at the gray skies hanging low over the dark ocean.

“He is…the night?” asks Sigrud.

“Yes,” she says. “The night itself. The purest idea of it, the first night.”

“What do you mean?”

“The first night humanity experienced. Before light, before civilization, before your kind named the stars. That’s what he is, that’s how he works. He is darkness, he is shadows, he is the primeval manifestation of what’s outside your windows, what’s beyond the fence gate, what lives under the light of the cold, distant moon….All darknesses are one to him. All shadows are one to him. That was his function, as a child of the Divine.”

“How…How are you all alive?” asks Sigrud. “How did you survive?”

“Most of us didn’t,” says Malwina. “Most of us the Kaj got to. He executed them as if they were no more than sickly livestock. But not all of us. What would you do if your lands were being invaded, and people were specifically seeking out your heirs to kill?”

“I’d send them away.”

“Let’s say you can’t. You can’t leave your home, and neither can your kids. They’re bound to it. So what do you do?”

Sigrud nods. “I hide them.”

“Right. And which Divinity was the trickiest, cleverest one of them all?”

He lets out a slow sigh. “Jukov.”

“Correct.”

“By the seas…How many plots and plans did he put in place before he hid himself away?”

“I don’t know. But it’s not unreasonable. He’d have been a real shit to have saved himself but not his children.” She grows solemn. “Though what he did to us…I’m not sure if it counts as saving.”

“Why? How did it work?”

She appears to struggle with it for a moment. “You didn’t…You didn’t even really know it was happening,” she says. “That’s what it’s like, living with a Divinity. They point a finger, and reality changes.” She looks away. “He came to you. And suddenly your memories started…shifting. They grew hazy. Suddenly, you didn’t even think you were Divine. You thought you were mortal. Just a little mortal child, a little lost orphan. And then…Then you were that thing. And maybe, if you were lucky, you got adopted by a common mortal family, and they loved you, and they cared for you, and you lived with them. Grew up with them. And maybe, for a while, you were happy. Ignorant, sure, but happy.”

She swallows. “But then…Then one day people started getting suspicious. You got older for a while, but then you just…stopped. They started wondering, when was this child going to grow up? When was this child going to become an adult? Why does this child stay adolescent? Why was this child still here? And when people started asking these questions and getting suspicious, then Jukov’s miracle took care of you.

“It hid you away again. Made you a child again. It bent reality around you, ever so slowly, ever so slightly. And without ever being aware that you were doing so, you left that family, just walked away from it, and went back to being alone again. It reset everything. You forgot all about them, and they forgot too. It was as if you’d never come to live with the family. And to them, it was as if they’d never adopted that sweet little girl. Both of you totally forgot one another. Because you have to be kept safe, free from suspicion. And for you, a blessed child of the Divine, this happened over and over and over again. And over and over and over again. A sleepwalking child, repeating your youth over and over again, drifting from family to family. Without even leaving a memory behind.”

Malwina shuts her eyes, as if trying to forget something. She picks up a handful of sand, works at it, lets the grains filter through her fingers. “Later, after you awoke from the spell, you’d wonder—would you and your old family sometimes see each other on the streets? The mother and father that took you in for months, maybe years, maybe longer? And you wouldn’t have even recognized each other. You’d have forgotten all about it. The miracle would have wiped your mind, returned you to your sleepwalking state. Except maybe a little bit. Maybe just a ghost of love would stir in your heart. Like feeling an amputated limb that isn’t there anymore. But you wouldn’t have known. You wouldn’t have known why your heart ached to see these strangers.” She shakes her head. “The…The awful choices we make to survive.” She laughs. “Is it even worth it?”

“Why?” asks Sigrud. “What end goal did Jukov have in mind? Why put you through this?”

“He thought he’d survive, and come back, and wake us all up,” says Malwina. “I think. He wasn’t a big explainer. He did as he pleased.” She smiles bitterly. “One day, we’d all be together again, one big family again—and then, perhaps, we’d start our war, and retake the Continent.”

“But you woke up before then?” says Sigrud.

“Yes,” says Malwina. “Bad luck. It happened to some. You’d be living with your adopted family, and something would happen. An accident. A fire. Something. And you’d lose them. And when that happened, that memory you had trapped in yourself of your Divine family dying, of Taalhavras and Voortya and all the rest dying, that came shooting back up in your mind. One trauma releases another. That intense, emotional experience would break open the dams inside you. And then you remembered…everything. Who you were, and what you could do. Some things even a miracle can’t suppress, I guess. Sometimes I wonder if we’re little more than walking patchworks of traumas, all stitched together.”

They sit in silence for a moment, watching the waves churn and roil under the overcast skies.

“He got the worst of it,” says Malwina. “Our…enemy. I don’t like him. I hate him. But he had worse luck than we did.”

“What happened to him?”

“At first, the same thing that happened to all of us who are awake now,” she says. “An accident. A family, tragically lost. A child awoken. But then he…did something unwise. When he was in yet another orphanage, he did…shadow tricks. Someone noticed. And word got through to the Ministry. And then on to old Vinya Komayd.”

“How did she trap him?”

She shrugs. “She was a brilliant old bitch. She must have duped him somehow. She came to him, maybe threatened to do to him what the Kaj had done to everyone else. He was still traumatized, having just lost his adopted parents. He probably didn’t know which way was up. She put him on a boat, drove him far out here where he’s away from the land that powers him, from those that believe in him, shape and influence him—and that made him weak.”

“Then she put Kolkan’s sigil atop him,” says Sigrud. “And that made him still weaker.”

“Yes. And then she interrogated and tortured him. Day and night. Hit him with lights. He hates those, being what he is.”

“And when Shara killed Kolkan, and Jukov…That’s when this happened, isn’t it?” He waves at the Salim. “That’s when what was trapped here escaped. Because the protections faded.”

“Yes. Kolkan’s sigil, which had suppressed the power of the night for so long…When Kolkan died, the sigil lost all meaning, all influence, just like everything else Kolkan had made. And the boy trapped here was free to go. Though he is not a boy any longer.”

“Why?” asks Sigrud. “Why do this to him? Why meddle in such things?”

Malwina looks at him, smirking. “Ah, sir. What is the one thing Saypur fears more than anything?”

“The Divine, of course.”

“Yes. Against which the Saypuris have no defense. Back then the Kaj’s black lead was still lost, remember. And what’s the only thing anyone had any historical record of that could stop a god?”

“I don’t know. Nothing, I thought. Except…another god?” He looks at her, astonished. “Wait. You are saying Vinya Komayd wanted to make her own god?”

“Rules of warfare,” says Malwina grimly. “Always escalate. If your opponent has a weapon or technology beyond you, do everything you can to develop one of your own.”

“But…But how could that have worked?”

“Well, she wasn’t sure, but she was game to try. She had a child Divinity on her hands. Maybe she wanted to torture him, break his mind, reprogram him. And she was willing to break a lot of rules to do more research. Anything that might give her a clue as to how to remake him.” Malwina glances sideways at Sigrud. “And she’d look anywhere for ideas. Open up any door, any crypt, any warehouse, no matter how old or cursed or unmentionable it was….”

Sigrud sits in silence for a while. Then his mouth opens. “Wait…Are you trying to tell me that…that that was the true reason Vinya Komayd sent Efrem Pangyui to Bulikov so many years ago? To try to find a way to take that child and make him into a god of Saypur?”

“I think so, yes,” says Malwina. “Wouldn’t you? She wanted to find out more about the origins of the Divinities. She told the world it was a mission of understanding, a way for these two nations to bridge the gap. Then she told the Ministry and those in power that Pangyui’s mission was a secret, preventative measure, meant to keep another god from developing. But she really just wanted to know how the Divinities worked. Like a science student trying to open up a monkey. Maybe Pangyui would find some musty old tome that would tell her how to take that boy apart.” Malwina grins cruelly. “But then Efrem discovers the wrong secret. He finds out something nasty about Vinya Komayd’s family. She has him murdered to keep his mouth shut. This makes little Shara Komayd go to Bulikov and start sniffing around….And you know the rest.”

“Shara discovers that Jukov and Kolkan are still alive,” says Sigrud. “She kills them in the Battle of Bulikov. She learns a secret that can depose Vinya. And by killing Kolkan, she accidentally frees the boy trapped here.”

“You ever wonder why Vinya Komayd gave up power so easy?” asks Malwina. “Maybe Shara did a good job of threatening her, sure. Or maybe Vinya got a report that the SS Salim had been torn apart from the inside out, and whatever was being held there had not only killed a couple hundred soldiers with his bare hands, but he’s now free to walk the world. Maybe Vinya knew that something extremely powerful now had a damned good reason to kill her very nastily. And maybe she didn’t want to stay so public anymore. Maybe that’s why she went into hiding. And then, in 1722…he catches up to her.”

He sits up. “Are you really telling me that N—”

She whirls on him, terrified.

Sigrud freezes, slaps himself in the face, and holds his hands up. “Sorry, sorry. I was not thinking.”

Malwina lets out a sigh. “Okay…Just…Just watch it, all right?”

“All right. You are saying that this boy killed Vinya Komayd?”

“I am.”

“How? She died in Saypur! Naturally too. I thought the boy had no power on foreign soil. He had to have someone spread Continental soil on the ground in Ghaladesh in order to manifest and attack me.”

She looks at him quizzically. “Wait. What? When did this happen?”

“I will tell you later. Just…Vinya. How did he do it?”

“Well…He is night, you know? All shadows are one to him. In his mind, they all interconnect.” She draws a line in the sand with her finger, then makes three other lines, forming a box. “And where do people like to keep their wealth? Why, in cupboards. In closets. In drawers. Big, thick ones. In the dark, in other words. Places where he can access it.”

“So…he just paid people? He stole money and contracted out the work?”

“He has the entire Continent’s fortunes at his disposal. All of them. You were in the intelligence game. Sometimes that’s all it takes, right?”

“Everyone has their price, I suppose….”

“After decades of war, the Continent is awash with old spies,” says Malwina. “Old murderers, old contractors, old crooks. Like you. Pay a dozen of them a boatload of someone else’s money and tell them you want Vinya Komayd dead, just make it look all natural-like so no one gets suspicious. One of them is bound to succeed, given the odds. I’m surprised it took as long as it did.”

“Then years later, Shara catches wind of Operation Rebirth and finds out about this ship. She goes hunting for the Divine children, then found you and recruited you. Is that right? You and she worked against the night, in this war?”

“War?” says Malwina. “You think Shara was leading us in the war? No. No, no. She was protecting us. She just wanted to keep us safe, not send us to war against him.” She bows her head. “She was our mother, in a way. Our last mother. But now she’s gone. And now there’s a war.”

“How many of you are there?”

She hugs her knees to her chest and rests her chin on their tops. Then she says in a very small voice, “Far less than there used to be.”

“Where are the survivors?”

She shakes her head, as if she cannot or will not speak of such things, and stands and walks back along the beach.

They trudge back toward the Salim. It’s getting late, and fog is creeping up the island’s banks. Malwina walks with her hands stuffed in her pockets and her chin pulled low in the green scarf around her neck. Sigrud is reminded of an old man reviewing all his grudges and failures on a long evening walk.

“The Continent has seen decades of death,” Sigrud says. “Decades of warfare and slaughter. It’s getting rarer, sure, but…Bulikov, and Voortyashtan…Thousands of people died.”

“Yes.”

“So dozens are awake,” he says. “Dozens of Divine children remember, after violence robbed them of their parents, making them re-experience this trauma.”

She turns on him, eyes blazing with fury. “Maybe. However many there were, there are a lot less now. He’s killing us, you see. Brutally. Horribly. He eats us up, like a shark swimming in the depths of the sea. He has to make us remember that we’re Divine first, otherwise he gains nothing, but that’s not hard for him to do. Kill a family, wait for the child to remember, then pounce. He devours us, takes us into the depths of the night, into himself, where we can’t ever escape. And then we’re gone. Forever. The only thing that can kill the Divine is the Divine, Sigrud. And he’s gotten very good at it. Each time he gets a little stronger and a little better. Whatever power we have over reality, he takes it and adds it to his own.”

“That’s why he does this? Just to grow stronger?”

“What’s better than being a Divinity?” says Malwina. “Being the only Divinity. Without a check against your power, you could do…anything. Anything at all. Bend the world around your finger, or make it disappear with but a thought. He began as the first night—but gods change. If he succeeds, and grows strong enough, then he will be the last night. And all of reality will be a plaything to him.”

“That…” Sigrud pauses. “Actually, that makes sense. The second time I saw him he said that he wished to kill a god. That all that he did was but a means to that one end.”

“Like, a true Divinity?” she says. “So, since there’s only one left…He must mean Olvos.”

“That was my conclusion as well.”

“How the hells could he do that? None of the rest of us could even find Olvos, and we tried damned hard to do it! She’s walled herself off from the world. She could crush him if she wanted to!”

“I’m not sure why. But I read something in Shara’s home…” He walks ahead, stopping her, so she has to face him. “There was once a Divine child that even the Divinities themselves feared, for its domain was too large and too vast. Big enough to challenge even them. So they mutilated this child, crippled it. I think the boy was this child. And this might be why he hates Olvos especially. She must have been one of the ones that did this to him.”

Malwina shakes her head. “I’ve never heard that story. It sounds like bullshit to me.”

“Shara never mentioned it?”

“Never. And I’ve been awake enough that I remember a lot of the old days. I don’t remember that story from them either.”

“You remember the Divine days?”

She nods, eyes hard and thin.

“What were they like?”

She smiles humorlessly. “Better than this.”

“Who from those old days have survived so far?”

“Very few.” She spits into the dune grasses. “Listen, Mr. Sigrud, there are some things I can’t talk to you about. Not because I won’t, but because I can’t. I am miraculously prevented from doing so. I can’t say those certain things unless I’m in a certain place—and we are not in that place now. It’s a safety protocol, you see. It’s the only way to be sure, with him out there.”

“Would Shara’s operations be one such thing?”

Malwina is silent.

“The number of Divine children, as well?”

Still silence.

“And the place where you are hiding all these children away—that too?”

She looks away, off into the seas.

“One last thing,” says Sigrud. “Do you know of Tatyana Komayd?”

“What, Shara’s daughter? Yeah, I know about her. Who doesn’t? Why?”

“Do you think that…that she could be one such Divine child?”

She stares at Sigrud, bug-eyed. “What! No! Shara and I worked our asses off to track down the others; she would have told me if she had one right under her nose!”

“Have you ever seen Tatyana Komayd?” he asks.

“No. Why?”

“I was just with her. You and she…Well. I find you look very alike.”

Malwina laughs. “You’re out of your depth,” she says. “I know my siblings. I know who they are, what they are, what they look like. She isn’t one of them.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m positive,” she says. “Besides, if she was a Divine child, wouldn’t she have awoken and remembered who she was after her mother died?”

“I suppose,” says Sigrud. “But that might have been why Rahul Khadse chose to kill Shara in such a public fashion. Rather than cutting her throat, he did something splashy, something that would be noticed.”

“So?”

“So, since the boy thought Tatyana was Divine, such a public murder would have been a good way to make sure the news got to her, and that it would be as devastating and traumatic as possible. Enough to break the miracle holding back her memories.”

“What makes you think the boy thought Tatyana was Divine?” asks Malwina.

“Well, he told me so.”

She gapes at him. “W-What! When? Do you just have chats with him over tea?”

Sigrud relates what happened to him at Shara’s estate. As he talks, Malwina’s mouth opens in horror.

“So, wait,” she says. She holds up her hands. “You…You fell into his domain?”

“I suppose so? He did not exactly give me a tour.”

“But…Even I can’t go there. That’s the place where he is, a place that is him. Do you understand?”

“Not at all.”

She looks him over, her face twisted in suspicion and no small amount of revulsion. “How did you survive? How did you live?”

“I almost didn’t,” says Sigrud. “I very nearly died. It was like a fever….”

“Like a fever!” she says, incredulous. “You should have died instantaneously, not gotten the sniffles! You are a damned odd bird, sir. I don’t like it. You resist what I do to the past, you manage to injure our enemy, and then you survive a trip through his damned domain. Have you done anything else strange?”

Sigrud remembers Urav, coiling and whipping through the dark waters of the Solda—how the beast swallowed him, yet could not consume him, not truly. He thinks of his own face—queerly unaged after all these years.

“Yes,” he says quietly.

“Anything I need to be worried about?”

He thinks for a long time. “I don’t know.”

She looks at him hard. “I want you to know—I’ll kill you if I have to. I know you were close to Komayd, but if you threaten what we’re doing here, I—”

“I understand,” says Sigrud. “And I hope it will not be so.”

Malwina rubs her lips with one knuckle, a nervous tic. “You said you have Komayd’s daughter?”

“Yes. In Dhorenave, with Ivanya Restroyka.”

She gasps. “She’s still there? I thought you would have had the mind to move her by now! Our enemy can bypass all of our defenses, it’s unbelievable he hasn’t gotten to her already!”

“Move her where?” asks Sigrud. “I knew nothing about what was going on. Where is a safe place for us?”

“Bulikov,” says Malwina instantly. “Get her to Bulikov. As quickly as you can. If you think our enemy’s looking for her, that’s where you need to take her. That’s where we’re strongest. I wish you’d come here a few days ago; we could have taken care of you quickly then….But you didn’t. So you have to get there within a week. Do you hear me?”

“Why a week?”

“Our movements are carefully controlled. It’s like a high-security bank vault: it doesn’t open when you want it to, it opens on a schedule. That way no one can manipulate it.”

“What is this it?”

She shakes her head. “I can’t tell you that. I can’t tell you what it is unless I’m in it. And the only way you can get in it is if you’re there at the right time.”

“But…it will take me a week alone to sail back,” says Sigrud.

“Shit,” she says. “You’re sure?”

“At least that, if the weather is forgiving.”

“Damn it all. Then you can’t get there in time. How in the hells are we going to get around this?” She grunts. “Here. Let me think real quick.”

She steps back and looks away. Her eyes appear to grow faintly silver, as if a dense fog is rubbing itself along their backsides, inside her skull. It’s an incredibly disturbing sight. “When did you leave Dhorenave?” she asks.

“Nine days ago.” He cringes. “What are you…doing?”

“Looking at the past. So that would be…Ah. Huh. All right.” She blinks and the fog drains from her eyes. She takes a deep breath with the air of someone about to try to jump over a wide gorge. “Okay. I am about to try something, ah—how should I put this?—completely crazy.”

“All…right?”

“You survived me sending you back, what, two or three hours?” she says. “You kept all your memories. That should be wildly impossible. I mean, it’s an offense to me, personally, that you can do that.”

“I apologize.”

“Shut up,” says Malwina. “But…I mean, if you can do it with a two-hour jump, then…why not a nine-day one?”

Sigrud frowns for a moment, then stares at her when he realizes what she’s intending. “You mean to…to send me back through time?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Basically.”

“To before I ever left to come here?”

“Yes.”

“But then…will what just happened now…will that have happened?”

She seesaws a hand in the air. “Ehh. Kind of. It gets squishy. We’re basically manipulating a loophole in the rules here, one that only affects your time. I can see how it all adds up, and I’ll retain these memories, but explaining it to you…I mean, it’s not like you’ve understood anything else I’ve said when I’ve talked about this, right? The main thing here is that there’s a previous instance where we can receive you in Bulikov—but it’ll be four days ago, meaning five days from when I send you back. Five days to get to Bulikov—do you hear me?”

“But…could this go wrong?”

“Oh, absolutely,” says Malwina. “It’s a violation of the universal order to rewrite the past, even slightly. I can’t do it. No one can, theoretically. It’s bad enough that we just did a couple of hours—so nine days could, perhaps, have some giant universal ramifications.” She shrugs. “But then, if we’re talking about our enemy killing the last living Divinity, we’re already kind of dealing with giant universal ramifications—aren’t we?”

“Could I die?” asks Sigrud.

“Normally I’d say you’d certainly die,” she says. She looks him over again like she’s not at all pleased with what she’s seeing. “But you seem preternaturally talented at survival, Mr. Sigrud. You’ve survived our enemy not once, but twice. You entered his domain and walked away with but a fever. And you’ve resisted all the manipulations I’ve done. I think you’ll survive. And if you do survive, meet me on the Solda Bridge five evenings from when I send you back. I’ll have more to say to you there.” She steps toward him. “Are you ready?”

He steps back, wary. “You’re going to do it now?”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“Do…Do I need to get anything from my boat?” he asks.

“No, because you won’t have ever had your boat when I send you back. Do I need to write this all down for you?”

“Wait—why not just send me back to a time when I could…I don’t know, kill our enemy, or save Shara?”

“What, send you back weeks, months, or years? Listen, I’m already screwing with the fundamentals of reality enough with this little trick. I’ll have to package all these aborted moments into a sort of temporal side loop that can…Well. Suffice to say, I’m unwilling to push it that far, okay?”

Sigrud scowls. “Fine. Just do it already, whatever it is you’re going to do!”

“All right. I’ve never done this before, so you might…see some things, or re-experience them.”

“What kind of things?”

“Things that have already happened. It shouldn’t be a problem. It’s likely they’ll be from a past so long ago even you can’t alter them. Now…”—her eyes turn fogged and silvery again—“hold on.”

She reaches out and touches his brow, and then…

Things…

Blur.

Sigrud was in an automobile wreck once, long ago, during his operational days. A Continental hood ferreted him out and plowed a truck into Sigrud’s auto, sending it rolling down a riverbank with Sigrud inside. This particular hood had intended to kill Sigrud, but succeeded only in dislocating his shoulder—an injury Sigrud would later pay back, and then some.

But what Sigrud remembers of that moment—the world spinning around him, gravity losing all meaning, the lights and structure of the world churning outside the shattered windows—is a lot like what he experiences now, as Malwina Gogacz warps his past for him, pushing him out of the present and into a handful of seconds nine days ago….

Sigrud sees images flashing—but like the outside world during the auto wreck, they’re muddy and swirling.

He sees himself as a child, himself as a young man, himself sobbing in Slondheim. Snow and ice and the ruins of Bulikov. They’re all there, floating in the murky past, distant but unchanging. He can’t access them. They are beyond him. He knows, in some deep, wordless fashion, that they have already happened.

We float upon a sea of moments, he thinks. And never are we truly free of them.

Then one moment seems to stretch. Then blur. Then it…

Water. Mist. A woman walking across a pier.

Sigrud recognizes this moment instantly.

No, no, he thinks. No, I don’t wish to see this.

The woman is walking over to a man, who sits fishing on the pier.

Not this. Not this….

He tries to shut his eyes, but he cannot.

Eighteen years ago. After Bulikov, but before Voortyashtan. During the days when he’d first returned home and met his family in the Dreyling Republics. The first time he’d seen them in more than twenty years.

Sitting on the little pier, holding a thin, reedy fishing pole, his line drifting in the water. There was bait on the hook, a single sardine, but he didn’t need it, really. Sigrud hadn’t actually come there to fish, but rather to be alone. He hadn’t even brought a bucket for his catches.

She walked up the pier behind him. He didn’t turn to look, but he smelled the oil in her hair, and the scent of the horse she rode down the hill. She did not smell as he remembered her, so many years ago, and for some reason that wounded him.

“Sigrud,” said Hild quietly. “How long have you been out here?”

He looked over his shoulder at his wife. He’d seen her since he returned, of course, but each time they met it had been stifling and muted. They’d slept in different beds, and had not even mentioned the idea of sharing one again. But she was still beautiful. Somewhat plumper, and older, and more care-worn, but still the woman he first met in the marshes that day many years ago, her blue eyes crinkled with concentration, muddy fingers gripping the frog-spear in her hand with all the artistry of a conductor holding a baton. Frog hunting was an art, and Hild had always been a virtuoso at it.

“A while,” he told her. He turned back to look at the waters. “No catches yet.”

She walked to stand behind him, looking down on him. “This is the fourth day you’ve spent fishing. And yet you’ve caught very little.”

“Perhaps my skills have faded.”

“If so, you’re not making much progress in relearning them.”

Sigrud pulled his line back in, looked at the sardine, and tossed it back out into the waters.

“Carin has been asking about you,” Hild said. “She saw you only the one time. She wants to see you again. She doesn’t say so, but I can tell. Will you please come up to the house?”

Sigrud said nothing.

“It’s her right, Sigrud. It’s her right to see her father.”

“Is it?” he said. “Could I be said to be her father?”

“What do you mean?”

He was silent.

“Please,” she said. “Please, say something.”

“I…I feel that when she looks at me, she is seeing something that I am not,” said Sigrud. “Something I perhaps cannot be anymore.”

“That’s not true. You’ve changed, of course you’ve changed, but you’re still you.”

Sigrud glowered into the water, watching his line rise and fall.

“Signe will be coming back from Ghaladesh in three days,” said Hild. “She remembers you even more than Carin does. And she has had a hard time of it. Will you be there to greet her, at least? Will you be there for her?”

“I…will try,” he said reluctantly.

Hild was quiet. Then she walked around to his side, and she crouched and leaned forward so he could not avoid looking at her. He warily met her gaze, feeling as if she were reading in his scars all the secret doubts he’d had since his return.

“Do you remember how we met, my husband?” Hild demanded. “Do you remember what I said to you, that first thing I ever said to you?”

Sigrud looked into her face for a moment. Then he dropped his eyes and started pulling the line back in.

“No,” he said.

Hild sat next to him for a few seconds longer. Then she stood and walked away, and she was gone.

It was a lie, of course. Of course he remembered what she’d said to him when they’d first met—he barging into the marshes to ask her what she was doing, and she barking at him, “You’re going to scare all the fucking frogs away, you damned fool!” And he, of course, having still been something of a prince in those days, had never been spoken to like that, and was awestruck by this muddy, fierce creature with the long, slender spear.

Why had he lied? Why had he told her he’d forgotten? It had been a mystery at the time—but as the past whirls about him, Sigrud thinks he knows.

It’s the same as the reason why he did not go to meet Signe when she first came to see him, why he let her wait for him in the house for hours and hours while he hunted for elk outside, why he evaded her and the rest of his family with furtive desperation.

Because he was afraid. He was afraid to try to be decent, because he felt sure that he would fail.

The moment falls away from him. The world turns, more and more.

And then…

Air strikes him. Hard.

Sigrud gasps. He feels like he’s plummeting down, but he’s not—he’s walking along the side of a road, the ground sloping away to his left, and he’s wearing a very heavy pack on his back. He tries to reorient himself, tries to deal with this sudden change in…well, everything. But he can’t, and he topples sideways into the brush, branches scratching at his face and hands before he crashes to the ground.

He lies there for a moment, looking up at the pale morning sky. He takes a breath in—apparently he forgot to breathe at some point during the whole ordeal—and then he slowly sits up.

He looks around himself. He’s back in the southern Continent, he can tell that just by glancing around. But the abruptness of the change is so powerful, so impossibly strange, that it makes him nauseous.

All the world could be rewritten in a moment, he thinks. All of it. All of…

He turns sideways and vomits into the brush. It’s porridge, mostly, and the convulsions make his ribs hurt—his side isn’t nearly as healed up as when he met Malwina. From these two things, he can guess where he is—and when he is.

He stands, staggers back down the road, and sees the white gate to Ivanya’s ranch just ahead.

I am where I was when I went to go get the auto, he thinks. I was going to get the auto and drive it to Ahanashtan, where I would meet Ivanya’s man….But I remember the sea, and the ship, and Malwina.

He rubs his eyes, presses the heels of his palms to his forehead. “Did it really happen?” he asks, his voice hoarse. “Did it really ever happen?”

It feels like it was real. It feels realer than real, if that could even make sense. He can remember the crunch of bones under his feet, the drip of water in the Salim, and Malwina’s fogged, silvery eyes….

Sigrud walks toward the white gates. How will I explain this to Ivanya and Taty? I’m not even sure if I can explain it to myself.

As he walks through the gates, that moment of the past he saw burns in his mind. The woman and the girl, alone in the house, waiting for him. A queer shame floods his belly as he walks back toward Ivanya’s ranch house, where another woman and another girl await him.

Will I fail you as well?

Somewhere in the dark—in the darkness behind all things, under all things—the boy feels things shift.

The world flexes, stretches, and snaps back into place, just for an instant. Someone has just moved things, bent things, and now is trying to quickly put it all back in order.

When he is in his purest state, Nokov has no face, and certainly no mouth—but if he did, he would be frowning with his right now.

What was that?

He probes at the edges of the world, feeling the distortions.

Dilations. Contractions. Dangling tumefactions drifting through reality. Distended veins running through space and time. He closes in on the disturbance….

The east, in the physical realm. Far to the east. Very far, in fact. There’s been movement there. No, not just movement—a tremendous, tremendous violation: the past has been reset, and a gap hangs in the air—as if a mortal was ripped out of reality and stuffed into somewhere else.

But why would one of his siblings go there? To wander so far from the Continent that birthed them would diminish their influence, make them close to mortal. And there’s nothing out there except…

Nokov freezes.

No.

No, no, no, no…

Panicking, he searches for any unexpected apparition, the abrupt manifestation of a mortal mind or body. He finds these are much easier to track than the movements of his siblings, as they, being just as Divine as he is, can slip through the walls and crawlspaces in reality with hardly a ripple. But mortals and other things of the physical realm…Well, that’s like trying to stuff a mango down the sink.

It’s easy to locate the destination in his mind. Another rippling in Ahanashtan, of course—right under his nose. Right where the Dreyling almost certainly went when he slipped out of Nokov’s own domain.

He’s moving.

He focuses, speaks to the darkness, forces it to calcify into windows and avenues and channels, cutting it up like a cheesemonger does curds, until the vast blackness has coalesced into tiny little windows into reality.

He finds her shadow rapidly. He’s been there so often, to her rooms in Ahanashtan. Sometimes to watch her sleep, though she doesn’t know it—at least, he thinks she doesn’t.

Kavitha Mishra. The one mortal who’s ever helped him willingly.

He stares down at her, watching her quietly breathe in her slumber.

He wonders, sometimes—if she had been his sister, his Divine sibling, would she have sought him out? Would she have saved him? Perhaps not if she’d been his sister—his siblings, he knows, were as weak and ignorant as he was—but what if she’d been some other part of his family?

What if she’d been his mother? Would she have come to his rescue? Would she have saved him, as no one else did?

He watches her as she sleeps. He’s acted as her commander for so long that it’s become harder and harder to maintain his detachment from her. She is, after all, the only other person he really has in this world.

And he does not wish to do what he knows he’s about to do. He does not wish to ask her to do this.

Then a sudden, stabbing memory.

Trapped in that ship, trapped for years in that tiny box. And in the window, a face: Vinya Komayd, smiling wickedly.

You will come to love me, child, she said. You will have to, eventually. For I will be the only thing you know. For years and years.

He shudders. It’s not the same. I don’t just care for Mishra because she’s the only person I have. I don’t.

He doesn’t want to say that he’s alone. To acknowledge that you are alone is to be truly alone. And he’s stronger than that now. He’s evolved beyond those miserable, terrified days of his childhood, abandoned and forgotten.

We must all become stronger. He swallows, lifts his hand, and plunges it into his dark chest. He shuts his eyes, feeling for it. We must all become more than we are. I must…He feels it, and pulls it out. And she must as well.

In his hand is a black pearl, a tiny, perfect piece of himself. A piece that, if ingested by a mortal, will make them something…more.

They will be a piece of him. His seneschal.

He takes a breath and says, “Mishra.”