The Kingdom of Gods

Here is what happened.

In the beginning there were three gods. Nahadoth and Itempas came first, enemies and then lovers, and they were happy for all the endless aeons of their existence.

Enefa’s coming shattered the universe they had built. They recovered, and welcomed her, and built it again—newer, better. They grew strong together. But for most of that time, Nahadoth and Itempas remained closer to each other than to their younger sister. And she, in the way of gods, grew lonely.

So she tried to love me. But because she was a god and I merely a godling, our first lovemaking nearly destroyed me. I tried again—I have always been hardheaded, as the Maro say—and would have kept trying if Enefa, in her wisdom, had not finally realized the truth: a godling cannot be a god. I was not enough for her. If she was ever to have something of her own, she would have to win one of her brothers away from the other.

She succeeded, many centuries later, with Nahadoth. This was one of the events that led to the Gods’ War.

But in the meantime, she did not wholly spurn me. She was not a sentimental lover, but a practical one, and I was the best of the god-children she had yet produced. I would have been honored, when she decided to make a child from my seed—

—if the existence of that child had not almost killed me.

So she took steps to save both of us. First she tended to me, as I lay disintegrating within the conflagration of my own unwanted maturity. A touch, a reweaving of memory, a whisper: forget. As the knowledge that I was a father vanished, so, too, did the danger, and I was cured.

Then she took the child away. I do not know where; some other realm. She sealed the child into this place so that it—he—Kahl—could grow up in safety and health. But he could not escape, and he was alone there, because keeping the secret from me meant keeping Kahl unknown to the other gods.

Perhaps Enefa visited him to prevent the madness that comes of isolation. Or perhaps she ignored and observed him while he cried for her, one of her endless experiments. Or perhaps she took him as a new lover. No way to know, now that she is dead. I am just father enough to wonder.

Still, because the fact of Kahl’s existence did not change, this has led to our current problem. Her delicate chains in my mind, the heavy bars on Kahl’s prison: both were loosened when Enefa died in Tempa’s trembling hands. Those protections held, however, until Yeine claimed the remnant of Enefa’s body and soul for her own. This “killed” Enefa at last. The chains were broken, the bars snapped. Then Kahl, son of death and mischief, Lord of Retribution, was loosed upon the realms to do as he would. And it was only a matter of time before my memory returned.

Just as well, I suppose, that I am already dying.

19

I did not feel at all well when I woke.

I lay in a bed, somewhere in the new palace. It was nighttime, and the walls glowed, though far more strangely than they had in Sky. Here the dark swirls in the stone reduced the light, though the flecks of white within each indeed gleamed like tiny stars. Beautiful, but dim. Someone had hung lanterns from looping protrusions on the walls, which seemed to have been created for that purpose. I almost laughed at this, because it meant that after two thousand years, the Arameri would now have to use candles to see by, like everyone else.

I didn’t laugh because something had been shoved down my throat. With some effort I groped about my face and found some sort of tube in my mouth, held in place with bandages. I tried to tug it loose and gagged quite unpleasantly.

“Stop that.” Deka’s hand came into my view, pushing mine away. “Be still, and I’ll remove it.”

I will not describe what the removal felt like. Suffice it to say that if I had still been a god, I would have cursed Deka to three hells for putting that thing in me. Though only the nicer hells, since he’d meant well.

Afterward, as I sat panting and trying to forget the fear that I might die choking on my own vomit, Deka moved to the edge of the bed beside me. He rubbed my back gently and slowly. A warning. “Feel better?”

“Yes.” My voice was rough, and my throat dry and sore, but that would fade. I was more troubled by the awful weakness in every limb and joint. I looked at one of my hands and was stunned: the skin was dry and loose, more wrinkled than smooth. “What…”

“You needed nourishment.” He sounded very tired. “Your body had begun to devour itself. One of my scriveners came up with this. I think it saved your life.”

“Saved—”

And then I remembered. Kahl. My—

forget

My mind shied away from both the thought and my mother’s warning, though it was too late for either. The knowledge was free, the damage done.

“Mirror.” I whispered it, hoarse.

One appeared nearby: full-length, on a wheeled wooden pivot stand. I had no idea how it had been conjured. But when Deka got up and tilted it toward me, I forgot the mystery of the mirror. I stared at myself for a long, long time.

“It could have been much worse,” Deka said, while I sat there. “We—the scriveners—didn’t know what was wrong with you. Our warning-scripts led us to you. Then Lord Itempas revived and told us what needed to be done. I was able to design a negation-script to work in tandem with a loop-interrupt…” He trailed off. I wasn’t listening, anyway. It had worked; that was all that mattered. “We stopped the age acceleration. Then we repaired what we could. Three of your ribs were broken, your sternum was cracked, one lung punctured. There was some bruising to your heart, a dislocated shoulder…”

He stopped again when I reached out to touch the mirror.

My face was still handsome, at least, though no longer boyishly pretty. This was not my doing. My body was growing how it wanted now, and I could have ended up pudgy and bald. I’d gone gray mostly at the temples, though there was plenty threaded through the rest of my hair, which was long again, tangling into knots on the sheets behind me. The shape of my face was not so different, just softer. Temans tended to age well in that respect. The texture of my skin, however, was thicker, dryer, weathered, even though it had seen little of the outdoors. There were deep-set lines around my mouth, finer ones at the corners of my eyes, and I was looking decidedly grizzled, though thankfully someone had shaved me. If I kept my mouth shut and dressed right, I might be able to do “distinguished.”

When I lowered my hand, it took more effort to move. Slower reflexes, softer muscles. I was skinny again, though not nearly as bad as after the last mortaling. The food tube had kept me in healthy flesh, but it was definitely weaker, less resilient flesh.

“I’m too old for you now,” I said, very softly.

Deka pushed aside the mirror, saying nothing. That silence hurt, because I took it to mean he agreed with me. Not that I blamed him. But then Deka lay down beside me and pulled me to lie with him, draping an arm across my chest. “You need to rest.”

I closed my eyes and tried to turn away from him, but he wouldn’t let me, and I was too tired to struggle. All I could do was turn my face away.

“Aren’t you too old to sulk, too?”

I ignored him and sulked anyway. It wasn’t fair. I had wanted so much to make him mine.

Deka sighed, nuzzling the back of my neck. “I’m too tired to talk sense into you, Sieh. Stop being stupid and go to sleep. There’s a lot going on right now, and I could use your help.”

He was the strong one, young and brilliant, with a bright future. I was nothing. Just a fallen god and a terrible father. (Even to think this hurt, grinding agony throughout my body like a headache with serrated teeth. I bit my lip and focused on loneliness and self-pity instead, which was better.)

But I was still tired. Deka’s arm, draped over my chest, made me feel safe. And though it was an illusion, doomed like all things mortal, I resolved to enjoy it while I could, and slept again.

When I woke next, it was morning. Sunlight shone through the walls; the bedroom was illuminated in shades of white and green. Deka was gone from beside me. Glee was in the room instead, sitting beside the bed in a big chair.

“I knew it was a mistake to trust you,” she said.

I was feeling stronger, and my temper, at least, had not mellowed with age. I sat up, creaky, stiff, and glared at her. “Good morning to you, too.”

She looked as tired as Deka, her clothing more disheveled than I had ever seen it, though still neat by the standards of average mortals. But when the daughter of Itempas wears unmatched clothing with her blouse half undone at the top, she might as well be a beggar from the Ancestors’ Village. She had, as perhaps a final concession to exhaustion, bottled her thunderstorm of hair rather than style it with her usual careless confidence: a tie pulled it into a fluffy bun at the nape of her neck. It did not suit her.

“All you had to do,” she said tightly, “was shout Yeine’s name. It was twilight; she would have heard you. She and Naha would have come and dealt with Kahl, and that would have been that.”

I flinched, because she was right. It was the sort of thing a mortal would have thought to do. “Well, where the hells were you?” This was a weak riposte. Her failure did not negate mine.

“I am not a god. I didn’t know he’d been attacked.” She sighed, lifting a hand to rub her eyes. Her frustration was so palpable that the very air tasted bitter. “Father didn’t use his sphere to summon me until Kahl was long gone. His first thought, upon returning to life, was of you.”

If I had still been a child, I would have felt a small and petty pleasure at this hint of her jealousy. But my body was older now; I could no longer be childish. I just felt sad.

“I’m sorry,” I said. She only nodded, bleak.

Because I felt stronger, I took in more of my surroundings this time. We were in the bedchamber of an apartment. I could see another room beyond the doorway, brighter lit; there must have been windows. The walls and floors were bare of personal touches, though I glimpsed clothes hanging neatly in a large closet across the room. Some of them were the ones Morad had given me before we’d left Sky. Apparently Deka had told the servants I was living with him.

Pushing aside the covers, I got to my feet, slowly and carefully, as my knees hurt. I was naked, too, which was unfortunate as I seemed to have sprouted hair from an astonishing variety of body parts. Glee would just have to endure, I decided, and made my way to the closet to dress.

“Did Dekarta explain what has happened?” Glee had composed herself; she sounded brisk and professional again.

“Aside from me taking a great flying leap toward death? No.” All my clothes had been made for a younger man. They would look ridiculous on me now. I sighed and pulled on the most boring of what I found and wished for shoes that might somehow ease the ache in my knees.

Something flickered at the edge of my vision. I turned, startled, and saw a pair of boots sitting on the floor. Each had good, stiff leather about the ankles, and when I picked one up, I saw it had thick padding in the sole.

I turned to Glee and held up the boot in wordless query.

“Echo,” she said. “The palace’s walls listen.”

“I… see.” I did not.

She looked fleetingly amused. “Ask for something—or even think of it with enough longing—and it appears. The palace seems to clean itself as well, and it even rearranges furniture and decor. No one knows why. Some remnant of the Lady’s power, perhaps, or some property that has been permanently built in.” She paused. “If it is permanent, there will be little need for servants here, going forward.”

And little need for the age-old divisions between highbloods and low, among Arameri family members. I smiled down at the boot. How like Yeine.

“Where is Deka?” I asked.

“He left this morning. Shahar has kept him busy since Kahl’s attack. He and the scriveners have been setting up all manner of defensive magics, internal gates, and even scripts that can move the palace, though not with any great speed. When he hasn’t been here, tending you, he’s been working.”

I paused in the middle of pulling on pants. “How long have I been, er, incapacitated?”

“Almost two weeks.”

More of my life slept away. I sighed and resumed dressing.

“Morad has been busy organizing the palace’s operations and preparing sufficient living quarters for the highbloods,” Glee continued. “Ramina has even put the courtiers to work. Remath has begun transferring power to Shahar, which requires endless paperwork and meetings with the military, the nobles, the Order…” She shook her head and sighed. “And since none of those are permitted to come here, the palace’s gates and message spheres have seen heavy use. Only Remath’s orders keep Shahar here, and no doubt if Deka were not First Scrivener and essential to making the palace ready, she would have him visiting fifty thousand kingdoms as her proxy.”

I frowned, going to the mirror to see if anything could be done about my hair. It was far too long, nearly to my knees. Someone had cut it already, I suspected, because given my usual pattern it should have been long enough to fill the room by this point. I willed scissors to appear on a nearby dresser, and they did. Almost like being a god again.

“Why the urgency?” I asked. “Has something happened?” I hacked clumsily at my hair, which of course offended Glee. She made a sound of irritation, coming over to me and taking the scissors from my hand.

“The urgency is all Remath’s.” She worked quickly, at least. I saw hanks of hair fall to the floor around my feet. She was leaving it too long, brushing my collar, but at least I wouldn’t trip on it now. “She seems convinced that the transition must be completed sooner rather than later. Perhaps she has told Shahar the reason for her haste; if so, Shahar has not shared this knowledge with the rest of us.” Glee shrugged.

I turned to her, hearing the unspoken. “How has Shahar been, then, as queen of her own little kingdom?”

“Sufficiently Arameri.”

Which was both reassuring and troubling.

Finishing, Glee brushed off my back and set the scissors down. I looked at myself in the mirror and nodded thanks, then immediately ran fingers through my hair to make it look messier. This annoyed Glee further; she turned away, her lips pursed in disapproval. “Shahar wanted to be informed when you were up and about, so I let a servant know when you began to stir. Expect a summons shortly.”

“Fine. I’ll be ready.”

I followed Glee out of the bedchamber and into a wide, nicely apportioned room of couches and sidebars that smelled of Deka, though it did not at all feel like him. No books. One whole wall of this room was a window, overlooking the bridge-linked tiers of the palace and the placid ocean beyond. The sky was blue and cloudless, noonday bright.

“So what now?” I asked, going to stand at the window. “For you and Itempas? I assume Naha and Yeine are searching for Kahl.”

“As are Ahad and his fellow godlings. But the fact that they have not yet found him—and did not, prior to his attack—suggests he has always had some means of hiding from us. Perhaps he simply retreats to wherever Enefa kept him hidden before now. That worked well enough for millennia.”

“Darr,” I said. “The mask was there.”

“Not anymore. Immediately after leaving here, Kahl went to Darr and took the mask. To be precise, he forced a young Darren man to pick up the mask, and took him. The Darre are furious; when Yeine arrived, searching for Kahl, they told her everything.” Glee folded her arms, the expression on her face very familiar. “Apparently Kahl approached Usein Darr’s grandmother, more than fifty years ago. He showed them how to combine the art of mask making with scrivening techniques and godsblood, and they took it further still. In exchange, he claimed the best of their mask makers and had them work on a special project for him. He killed them, Sieh, when they’d done whatever work he needed. The Darre say the mask grew more powerful—and Kahl grew less able to approach it himself—with every life he gave it.”

I knew what Kahl was doing now. That sickening churn of wild, raw power I’d felt near the mask, like a storm—the Three had been born from something like that. A new god could be made from something similar.

But he’d killed mortals to give it power? That I didn’t understand. Mortals were children of the Maelstrom, it was true; we all were, however distant. But the power of the Three was as a volcano to mortals’ candleflames. Mortal strength was so much lesser than ours as to be, well, nothing. If Kahl wanted to create himself anew as a god, he would need far more power than that.

I sighed, rubbing my eyes. Didn’t I have enough to worry about? Why did I have to deal with all these mortal issues, too?

Because I am mortal.

Ah, yes. I kept forgetting.

Glee said nothing more, so I experimented with wishing for food, and the precise meal I wanted—a bowl of soup and cookies shaped like cute prey animals—appeared on a nearby table. No need for servants indeed, I mused as I ate. That would serve the family’s security interests well, as they would have no need to hire non-Arameri. There would always be a need for certain tasks to be done, though, like running errands, and the Arameri were the Arameri. Those with power would always find some way to exert it over those who didn’t. Yeine was naïve to hope that such a simple change might free the family of its historic obsession with status.

Still… I was glad for her naïveté. That was always the nicest thing about having a newborn god around. They were willing to try things the rest of us were too jaded even to consider.

The knock at the door came just as I finished eating. “Come.”

A servant stepped inside, bowing to both of us. “Lord Sieh. Lady Shahar requests your presence, if you are feeling better.”

I looked at Glee, who inclined her head to me. This could have meant anything from hurry up to hope she doesn’t kill you. With a sigh, I rose and followed the servant out.

Shahar had not chosen the Temple as her seat of power. (Already it had acquired capital-letter status in my heart, because what I had done with Deka there was holy.) The servant led us instead to a chamber deep within the palace’s heart, directly below the central high platform that had already come to be called the Whorl. Deka and his crew had been busy, I saw as we walked. Transport-sigils had been painted at intervals throughout the palace’s corridors and painted over with resin in order to protect them from scuffing or wear. They did not work quite like the lifts in Sky—standing on one sent a person anywhere they willed themselves to go within the palace, not merely up and down. This was awkward if one had never been to a particular location. When I asked the servant about this, he smiled and said, “The first time we go anywhere, we go on foot. Steward Morad’s orders.” Just the kind of eminently sensible thing I expected of her, especially given that with servants so sparse, she could not afford to lose even one to oblivion.

Since the servant had been to the audience chamber before, I allowed him to control the magic, and we appeared in a space of cool, flickering light. Echo was more translucent than Sky, reflecting more of whatever colors surrounded it. By this I guessed immediately that we were somewhere beneath the waterline of the palace—which was confirmed as we passed a row of windows. I saw a great expanse of glimmering, shadow-flickering blueness and a passing curious fish. I grinned in delight at Shahar’s cleverness. Not only would her audience chamber be safer underwater than the rest of the palace, but also any visitors—the few who would be permitted to see her in person—would instantly be awed by the alien beauty of the fishes’-eye view. There was a certain symbolism to the choice as well, as the Arameri now served the Lady of Balance. Shahar’s safety would depend on the strength of the walls and windows and the equilibrium they could maintain against the weight of the water. It was perfect.

And even though I am a god, it was I who stopped when we entered the audience chamber, staring about in awe.

The chamber was small, as befit a space that would never be used by many people. Echo would have little need of the tricks that Sky had employed to intimidate and impress visitors, like vaulted ceilings and proportions meant to make supplicants feel unimportant before the great stone throne. This room was shaped like Echo itself: a descending spiral, though with small alcoves surrounding the depressed central space. In the alcoves, I glimpsed some of the soldiers who had come with us, at guard. Then I noticed more shadowy figures interspersing them, these crouched and oddly still. The ever-elusive Arameri assassins.

A poor choice, I decided. They made it too obvious that Shahar felt the need to guard herself from her own family.

When I finally stopped boggling, I noticed that Deka had preceded me. He knelt before the chamber’s depression, not looking up, though he’d probably heard me. I stopped beside him, emphatically not kneeling. The seat we faced was almost humble: just a wide, curving stool lined with a cushion, low-backed. Yet the room was structured so that every eye was drawn to it, and all of the flickering oceanlight coming through the chamber’s windows met in overlapping waves there. Had Shahar been sitting on the stool, she would have seemed unworldly, especially if she sat still. Like a goddess herself.

Instead, she stood near one of the room’s windows, her hands behind her back. In the cool light she was almost unnoticeable, the folds of her pale gown lost amid flickering blueness. Her stillness troubled me—but then, what about this little scene didn’t? I had spent centuries in chambers like this, facing Arameri leaders. I knew danger when I sensed it.

When the servant knelt to murmur to Shahar, she nodded and then raised her voice. “Guards. Leave.”

They exited with no hesitation. The assassins did so by slipping out through small doors in each alcove, which the servant also used to leave at Shahar’s quiet command. Presently, she and I and Dekarta were alone. Deka rose to his feet then, glancing once at me; his face was unreadable. I nodded to him, then slipped my hands into my pockets and waited. We had not seen Shahar since that moment in the Temple, when she had witnessed our claiming of each other.

“Mother has accelerated the schedule again,” Shahar said, not turning to us. “I asked her to reconsider, or at least send more help. She has agreed to do the latter; you will receive ten scriveners from the Sky complement by tomorrow afternoon.”

“That will do more harm than good,” Deka said, scowling. “New people need to be trained, shown around, supervised. Until they’re ready, that will slow down my teams, not speed up the work.”

Shahar sighed. I could hear the weariness in her voice, though I also heard her struggle to contain it. “It was the only concession I could gain, Deka. She’s like a heretic these days, filled with a fervor no rational person can comprehend.”

In this I also heard a hint of sourness that I was certain she only revealed because we would have detected it anyway. Was she upset about Remath’s decision to turn from the Itempan faith? A pointless concern, given all our other troubles.

“Why?”

“Who can say? If I had the time to conspire against her, I might accuse her of madness and seek backers within the family for a coup. Though perhaps that’s why she’s sent me here, where I’m less of a danger.” She laughed once, then turned—and paused, staring at me. I sighed while she took in my new, middle-aged shape.

It surprised me that she smiled. There was nothing malicious in it, just compassion and a hint of pity. “You should look like my father,” she said, “but with that look of disgust on your face, it’s clear you’re still the same bratty little boy we met all those years ago.”

I smiled in spite of myself. “I don’t mind so much,” I said. “At least I’m done with adolescence. Never could stand it; if I don’t want to kill someone, I want to have sex with them.”

Her smile faded, and I remembered: I had lain with her while we were both adolescents. Perhaps she had fond memories of what I now joked about. A mistake on my part.

She sighed, turning to pace. “I will have to rely on you, both of you, more than ever. What is happening now is unprecedented. I’ve checked the family archives. I truly don’t know what Mother is thinking.” She stopped at last, pressing fingers against her forehead as if she had a terrible headache. “She’s making me the family head.”

There was a moment of silence as we both processed her words. Deka reacted before I did, stricken. “How can you be head if she still lives?”

“Precisely. It’s never been done.” She turned to us suddenly, and we both flinched at the raw misery in her face. “Deka… I think she’s preparing to die.”

Deka went to her at once, ever the loving brother, taking her elbow. She leaned on him with such utter trust that I felt unexpected guilt. Had she come seeking us for comfort that night, only to find us comforting one another, uninterested in her? What had she felt, watching us make love while she stood alone, friendless, hopeless?

For just an instant, I saw her again at the window, stock-still, her hands behind her back. I saw Itempas gazing at the horizon, stock-still, too proud to let his loneliness show.

I went to them and reached for her, hesitating only at the last moment. But I had not stopped loving her, either. So I laid a hand on her shoulder. She started and lifted her head to look at me, her eyes bright with unshed tears. They searched mine, seeking—what? Forgiveness? I wasn’t certain I had that in me to give. But regret—yes, that I had.

Naturally, I could not let such a powerful moment pass without a joke. “And here I thought I had problem parents.” It wasn’t a very good joke.

She chuckled, blinking quickly against the tears and trying to compose herself. “Sometimes I wish I still wanted to kill her.” It was a better joke, or would have been if there had been a grain of truth in it. I smiled anyway, though uncomfortably. Deka did not smile at either joke—but then Remath had no interest in him, and he probably did want to kill her.

It seemed Deka was thinking along the same lines. “If she steps down in favor of you,” he said, all seriousness, “you will have to exile her.”

Shahar flinched, staring at him. “What?”

He sighed. “No beast can function with two heads. To have two Arameri palaces, two Arameri rulers…” He shook his head. “If you cannot see the potential danger in that, Shahar, you aren’t the sister I remember.”

She was, and she could. I saw her expression harden as she understood. She turned away from us, going back to the window and folding her arms across her breasts. “I’m surprised you’ve suggested only exile. I would have expected a more permanent solution from you, Brother.”

He shrugged. “Mother doubtless expects something along those lines herself. She’s not a fool, and she’s trained you well.” He paused. “If you didn’t love her, I would suggest it. But under the circumstances…”

She laughed once, harshly. “Yes. Love. So inconvenient.”

She turned then, looking at both of us, and suddenly I tensed again, because I knew that look. I had worn it too many times, in too many shapes, not to recognize it on another being. She was up to no good.

Yet when she focused on me, the look softened. “Sieh,” she said. “Are we friends again?”

Lie. The thought came to me so strongly that for an instant I thought it was not my own. Deka, perhaps, sending his words into my mind as gods could. But I knew the flavor of my own thoughts, and this had the particular bitter suspicion that came of years spent with this mad family and aeons of life amid my own madder one. She wanted the truth, and the truth would hurt her. And she was too powerful now, too dangerous, for me to hurt with impunity.

For the sake of what we’d once had, however, she deserved the truth, painful or not.

“No,” I said. I spoke softly, as if that would ease the blow. She stiffened, and I sighed. “I can’t trust you, Shahar. I need to trust the people I call friend.” I paused. “But I understand why you betrayed me. Perhaps I would even have made the same choice, in your position; I don’t know. I’m not angry about it anymore. I can’t be, given the result.”

And then I did something stupid. I looked at Deka and let my love for him show. He blinked, surprised, and I added insult to injury by smiling. It would hurt so much, leaving him, but he did not need an old man for a lover. Such things mattered for mortals. I would do the mature thing, preserve my dignity, and step aside before our relationship grew too awkward.

I have always been a selfish fool. I thought only of myself in that moment, when I should have thought of protecting him.

Shahar’s face went utterly blank. It was as though someone had thrust a knife into her and cut out her soul, leaving only a cold and implacable statue in her place. But it was not empty, this statue. Anger had filled its hollows.

“I see,” she said. “Very well. If you cannot trust me, then I can hardly allow myself to trust you, can I?” Her eyes flicked over to Deka, still cold. “That puts me in a difficult position, Brother.”

Deka frowned, puzzled by the change in Shahar’s manner. I, however, was not. It was all too easy to see what she meant to do to her brother, in her rage at me.

“Don’t,” I whispered.

“Dekarta,” she said, ignoring me, “it pains me to say this, but I must ask that you accept a true sigil.”

When Deka stiffened, she smiled. I hated her for that.

“I, of course, would never presume to dictate your choice of lover,” she said, “but in light of Sieh’s history, the many Arameri he has slain through his tricks and deceptions—”

“I don’t believe this.” Deka was trembling, fury clawing through the shock on his face. But beneath that fury was something much worse, and again I knew it by experience. Betrayal. He had trusted her, too, and she had broken his heart as she’d broken mine.

“Shahar.” I clenched my fists. “Don’t do this. Whatever you feel toward me, Deka is your brother—”

“And I am being generous even to let him live,” she snapped. She walked away from us, going to sit on the stool. There, she was poised and implacable, her slim form washed in ice-water light. “He just implied that I should kill the head of this family. Clearly he needs the restrictions of a true sigil, lest he plot further treachery.”

“And this would have nothing to do with me fucking your little brother instead of you—” My fists clenched. I stepped forward, intending… gods, I didn’t know. To grab her arm and make her see reason. To shout into her face. She tensed as I came near, though, and the sigil on her brow turned to white light. I knew what that meant, had felt the whip’s sting too often in the past, but that had been a mortal lifetime ago. I was not prepared when a slash of raw magic threw me across the room.

It didn’t kill me. Didn’t even hurt much, compared to the agony that Kahl’s revelation had caused. The blast threw me upside down against the window; a passing squid seemed fascinated by my shoelaces on the glass. What amused me, even as I lay there dazed and struggling to right myself, was that Shahar’s sigil had only treated me as a threat now, in my useless mortal form. She had never truly feared me when I was a god.

Deka pulled me up. “Tell me you’re all right.”

“Fine,” I said muzzily. My knees hurt more, and my back was killing me, but I refused to admit that. I blinked and managed to focus on Shahar. She hovered, half standing, above her seat. Her eyes were wide and stricken. That made me feel better, at least. She hadn’t meant it.

Deka meant it, however, as he let me go and got to his feet. I felt the black pulse of his magic, heavy as a god’s, and thought for a moment that I heard the echoing sibilance of the air as he turned to face his sister.

“Deka,” she began.

He spoke a word that cracked the air, and thunder roiled in its wake. She cried out, arching backward and clapping both hands over her forehead, half falling over her seat. When she struggled upright a moment later, there was blood on her fingers and streaking her face. She lowered her trembling hand, and I saw the raw, scorched wound where her semisigil had been.

“Mother is a fool,” Deka said, his voice echoing and cold. “I love you, and she thinks that keeps you safe from me. But I would rather kill you myself than watch you become the kind of monster this family is infamous for producing.” His right arm levered away from his side, stick-straight, though his hand hung loose, the backs of his fingers caressing the air like a lover. I remembered the meaning of the markings on that arm and realized he really was going to kill her.

“Deka…” Shahar shook her head, trying to clear blood from her eyes. She looked like the victim of some disaster, though the disaster had not yet struck. “I didn’t… Sieh, is he all… I can’t see.”

I touched Deka’s other arm and found the muscles as tight as woven rope. Power tingled against my fingers, through his shirt. “Deka. Don’t.”

“You would do the same, if you still could,” he snapped.

I considered this. He knew me so well. “True. But it would be wrong for you.”

That caused his head to whip toward me. “What?”

I sighed and stepped in front of him, though the power that coiled around him pressed warningly against my skin. Scriveners were not gods. But Deka was not just a scrivener, and it was as a brother-god that I touched his arm and gently, firmly, guided it back to his side. Gestures were a form of communication. Mine said, Listen to me, and his power withdrew to consider my suggestion. I saw his eyes widen as he realized what I had done.

“She is your sister,” I said. “You’re strong, Deka, so strong, and they are fools to forget that you’re Arameri, too. Murder is in your blood. But I know you, and if you kill her, it will destroy you. I can’t let you do that.”

He stared at me, trembling with warring urges. I have never before seen such deadly rage mingled with loving sorrow, but I think it must have been what Itempas felt when he killed Enefa. A kind of madness that only time and reflection can cure—though by then, usually, it is too late.

But he listened to me and let the magic go.

I turned to Shahar, who had finally gotten the blood out of her eyes. By the look on her face, she had only just begun to realize how close she’d come to death.

“We’re leaving,” I said. “I am, anyway, and I’m going to ask Deka to come with me. If you’ve decided that we’re your enemies, we can’t stay here. If you’re wise, you’ll leave us be.” I sighed. “You haven’t been very wise today, but I suspect that’s a onetime aberration. I know you’ll come to your senses eventually. I just don’t feel like waiting around for it to happen.”

Then I took Deka’s hand, looking up at him. His expression had gone bleak; he knew I was right. But I would not press him. He’d spent ten years trying to get back to his sister, and she’d undone that in ten minutes. Such things were not easy for any mortal to bear. Or any god, for that matter.

Deka’s hand squeezed mine, and he nodded. We turned to leave the audience chamber. Shahar stood behind us. “Wait,” she said, but we ignored her.

When I opened the door, however, everything changed.

We stopped in surprise at the noise of many voices, raised and angry. Beyond the main corridor, I glimpsed soldiers running and heard shouts. Immediately before us was Morad, her face red with fury. She was shouting at the guards, who’d crossed pikes in front of the chamber’s entrance. When the door opened, the guards started, and Morad grabbed at one of the pikes, half yanking it away before the guard cursed and tightened his grip.

“Where is Shahar?” she demanded. “I will see her.”

Shahar came up behind us. It was a measure of Morad’s agitation that she did not blink at the sight of the heir’s bloody face. “What has happened, Morad?” I heard the thinness of the calm veneer on Shahar’s voice. She had composed herself, just.

“Maskers have attacked Shadow,” Morad said.

We stood there, stunned into silence. Behind her, a troop of soldiers came tearing around the corner, running toward us. Wrath was behind them, walking with the ominous deliberation of a general preparing for war. All around us I could feel a hollow thrum as whatever protective magics Deka’s scriveners had put into place came alive. Seals for the gates, invisible walls to keep out foreign magics, who knew what else.

“How many maskers?” asked Shahar. She spoke more briskly now, all business.

After the worst had passed, I would remember this moment. I would see the false calm on Morad’s face, and hear the real anguish in her voice, and pity her all the more. A servant and a queen were as doomed as a mortal and a god. Some things could not be helped.

“All of them,” Morad said.

20

Ashes, ashes, we all fall DOWN!

It was the stillness that made them so frightening.

It was not easy to view city streets and crowds via a seeing sphere. The spheres were made to display nearby faces, not vast scenes. And what Wrath’s lieutenant in Shadow had to show us, by slowly panning his sphere in a circle, was vast.

There were dozens of maskers.

Hundreds.

They filled the streets. In the Promenade, where normally pilgrims jostled with street performers and artists for space, there were only maskers. Along the Avenue of Nobles, right up to the steps of the Salon: maskers. Just visible amid the trees and flowers of Gateway Park: maskers. Approaching from South Root, their shoes stained by street muck: maskers.

We could see many fleeting forms that were not maskers, most of them hurrying in the opposite direction, some of them carrying whatever they could on horses or wheelbarrows or their own hunched backs. The people of Shadow were no strangers to magic, having lived among godlings for decades and in the shadow of Sky for centuries. They knew trouble when they smelled it, and they knew the appropriate response: run.

The maskers did not molest the unmasked. They moved in silence and unison, when they moved. Most of them stopped moving when they reached the center of Shadow, then just stood there, utterly still. Men and women, a few children—not many, thank me—a few elders. No two masks were alike: they came in white and black; some were marbled like Echo’s substance; some were red and cobalt blue and stony gray. Some were painted porcelain, some clay and straw. Many were in the High Northern style, but quite a few displayed the aesthetics and archetypes of other lands. The variation was astonishing.

And they were all looking up at Sky.

We—Shahar and Dekarta and I, and a good number of the highbloods and servants—stood in what would doubtless come to be called the Marble Hall, given the usual Amn naming conventions. For some reason known only to Yeine, the walls of the chamber were streaked with a deep rust color, interspersing white and gray, which made the whole room look washed in blood. There was some wry symbolism in this, I suspected; some element of Yeine’s morbid sense of humor. I was apparently too mortal to get the joke.

Wrath was gone, though his soldiers were present, guarding the doors and the balcony. It had been his suggestion to gather all the highbloods together; easier to guard. While we waited for him to say when we could leave—no time soon, I gathered—some servant had brought the large seeing sphere from the scriveners’ storage, setting it up on the room’s single long table. Through this, we were able to behold the ominous stillness in the streets of Shadow.

“Are they waiting for something?” asked a woman who bore a halfblood mark. She stood near Ramina. He put a comforting hand on her back while she stared at the hovering image.

“Some signal, perhaps,” he replied. For once, he was not smiling. But long minutes passed, and there was no movement on the part of the maskers. The person panning the sphere stood atop the Salon’s steps. On either end of the arc swing we could glimpse Arameri soldiers, clad in the white armor of the Hundred Thousand Legions, hastily setting up barricades and preparing for a defensive battle. Even in such brief glimpses, however, we saw enough to despair. The bulk of the Arameri army was outside the city, in a vast complex of permanent barracks and bases stationed a half day’s ride away. Everyone had assumed that the attack, when it came, would be from beyond the city. The army was no doubt marching and riding and gating into the city as fast as it could now, but those of us who had seen the maskers in action knew that it would take more than soldiers to stop them.

I turned to Shahar, who stood on one of the elevated tiers around the chamber’s edge. She had wrapped her arms around herself as if cold; her expression was too blank to be intentional. In the whole room, where her relatives clustered in twos and threes and comforted each other, she stood alone.

I considered for a moment, then stepped away from Deka and went to her. Her head turned sharply toward me as I approached. She was not at all in shock. A subtle shift transformed her posture from the lost girl of a moment before to the cold queen who had tried to enslave her brother. But I saw the wariness in her. She had lost that battle.

Deka watched me go to her but did not join us.

“Shouldn’t you contact Remath?” I asked. I kept my tone neutral.

She relaxed fractionally, acknowledging my unspoken offer of truce. “I’ve tried. Mother hasn’t answered.” She looked away, through the translucent walls, at the lowering sun. West, toward Sky. “There’s no point, in any case. The army is there and under Mother’s command as it should be, along with the bulk of the scrivener and assassin corps and the nobles’ private forces. Echo is barely functional and understaffed as it is. We have no help to offer.”

“Not all support must be material, Shahar.” It still felt strange to remember that Remath and Shahar loved each other. I would never get used to Arameri behaving like normal people.

She glanced at me again, not so sharply this time. Considering. Then Ramina said, “Something’s happening,” and we all grew tense.

There was a blur in the air, a few feet above and to one side of the image we’d been watching. The soldiers reached for their weapons. The highbloods gasped and one cried out. Deka and the other scriveners tensed, some pulling out premade, partially drawn sigils.

Then the image resolved, and we saw Remath. The image was angled oddly—over her shoulder and slightly behind her. The sphere must have been set into her stone seat.

Facing her, in Sky’s audience chamber, was Usein Darr.

Shahar caught her breath and moved down the steps, as if she meant to step through the image and aid her mother. The soldiers in Sky’s audience chamber had drawn their weapons, swords and pikes and crossbows. They did not attack, however. Remath must have warned them off, though two of her guards, Darre women, had moved to stand between Remath and Usein, crouching with hands on their knives. Usein stood proud and fearless at the center of the room, ignoring the guards. She had come unarmed, though she did wear traditional Darre battle dress: a leather-wrapped waist, a heavy fur mantle that marked her as a battlefield commander, and armor made of thin plates of flakespar—a light, strong material the Darre had invented a few decades back. She looked taller when she wasn’t pregnant.

“I take it we have you to thank for the spectacle below,” said Remath. She drawled the words, sounding amused.

Usein inclined her head. I thought she would speak in Darre, given her nationalism, but she used clear, ringing Senmite instead. “It is not our preferred way of doing battle, we in the north. To use magic, even our own, feels cowardly.” She shrugged. “But you Arameri do not fight fair.”

“True,” said Remath. “Well, then. I expect you have demands?”

“Simple ones, Arameri.” Family name only was the way Darre addressed formidable opponents, a mark of respect by her terms. To Amn, of course, it was blatant disrespect. “I—and my allies, who would be here if it had not taken all our dimmers and magicians to get even one person through your barriers—demand that your family give up its power and all trappings thereof. Your treasury: fifty percent of it is to be given to the Nobles’ Consortium, to be distributed equally among the nations of the world. Thirty percent will go to the Order of Itempas and all established faiths that offer public services. You may retain twenty percent. You may no longer address the Nobles’ Consortium. It is for them to say whether Sky-in-Shadow can retain its representative. Disband your army and distribute its generals among the kingdoms; relinquish your scriveners and spies and assassins and all your other little toys.” Her eyes flicked toward the Darre guards, full of contempt. I did not see whether the women reacted to this or not. “Send your son back to the Litaria; you don’t want him anyway.” (Nearby, Deka’s jaw flexed.) “Send your daughter to foster in some other kingdom for ten years so that she can learn the ways of some people other than you murderous, high-handed Amn. I will leave the choice of kingdom to you.” She smiled thinly. “But Darr would welcome her and treat her with such respect as she is capable of earning.”

“Like hells will I live among those tree-swinging barbarians,” snapped Shahar, and the other highbloods murmured in angry agreement.

Usein went on. “In short, we demand that the Arameri become just another family and leave the world to rule itself.” She paused, looking around. “Oh. And leave this palace. Sky’s presence profanes the Lady’s Tree—and frankly, the rest of us are tired of looking up at you. You will henceforth dwell on the ground, where mortals belong.”

Remath waited a moment after Usein fell silent. “Is that all?”

“For now.”

“May I ask a question?”

Usein lifted an eyebrow. “You may.”

“Are you responsible for the murders of my family members?” Remath spoke lightly, but only a fool would not have heard the threat underneath. “You in the plural, obviously.”

For the first time, Usein looked unhappy. “That was not our doing. Wars of assassination are not our way.” Left unspoken was that wars of assassination were very much the Amn way.

“Whose, then?”

“Kahl.” Usein smiled, but it was bleak. “Kahl Avenger, we call him—a godling. He has been of great help to us, me and my forbears and our allies, but it has since become clear that this served his own agenda. He merely used us. We have broken ways with him, but I’m afraid the damage is done.” She paused, her jaw tightening briefly. “He has killed my husband and numerous members of our Warriors’ Council. Perhaps that will seem a consolation to you.”

Remath shook her head. “Murder is never a thing to be celebrated.”

“Indeed.” Usein regarded Remath for a long moment, then bowed to her. It was not a deep bow, but the respect in the gesture was plain. An apology, unspoken. “Kahl has been declared an enemy by the peoples of the north. But that does not negate our quarrel with you.”

“Naturally.” Remath paused, then inclined her head, a show of great respect in Amn terms, since the ruler of the Amn had no need to bow to anyone. By Darre standards, it was probably an insult.

“Thank you for your honesty,” Remath added. “Now, as to the rest, your demands regarding my family: no.”

Usein raised her eyebrows. “That’s all? ‘No’?”

“Were you expecting anything else?” I could not see Remath’s face well, but I guessed that she smiled.

Usein did, too. “Not really, no. But I must warn you, Arameri: I speak for the people of this world. Not all of them would agree with me, I will admit, as they have spent too many centuries under your family’s control. You have all but crushed the spirit of mortalkind. It is for their sake that I and my allies will now fight to revive it—and we will not be merciful.”

“Are you certain that’s what you want?” Remath sat back, crossing her legs. “The spirit of mortalkind is contentious, Usein-ennu. Violent, selfish. Without a strong hand to guide it, this world will not know peace again for many, many centuries. Perhaps ever.”

Usein nodded, slowly. “Peace is meaningless without freedom.”

“I doubt the children who starved to death, before the Bright, would agree.”

Usein smiled again. “And I doubt the races and heretics your family have destroyed would consider the Bright peace.” She made a small gesture of negation with her hand. “Enough. I have your answer, and you will soon have mine.” She lifted a small stone that bore a familiar mark. A gate sigil. She closed her eyes, and a flicker later she was gone.

The lower image—of Shadow and the silent maskers—jolted abruptly, drawing our eyes. There was a brief blur of motion, which grew still as the soldier who held the sphere set it down. We saw him then, a young man in heavy armor marked with seven sigils: one on each limb, one on his helmet, one on his torso, and one on his back. Simple magic of protection. He held a pike at the ready, as did the other men—all in the same armor—that we could see. Their armor was white. I suppose Remath hadn’t gotten around to reequipping her army to symbolize the family’s new divine allegiance.

And beyond them, the maskers had begun to move. Slowly, silently, they walked toward the soldiers that we could see. I could only assume that beyond the image, the scene was being repeated throughout Shadow. All of the masks that we could see, in every color, were tilted upward, paying no attention to the soldiers before them. Fixed on Sky.

“How does she command them?” Deka murmured, frowning as he peered at the image. “We were never able to determine…”

His musings were drowned out by noise from both images. Out of view, someone shouted to the soldiers, and the battle began as volleys of crossbow bolts shot toward the masked ranks. Already we could see that the bolts did almost nothing. The maskers continued forward with arrows jutting from chests, legs, abdomens. A handful went down as their masks were split or cracked, but not enough. Not nearly enough.

In the higher image, Remath barked orders to the soldiers in her audience chamber. We saw hurried movement, chaos. Amid this, however, Remath rose from her throne and turned to face it. She leaned forward and touched something we could not see. “Shahar.”

Shahar started, coming forward. “Mother? You must come here, of course. We are ready to accommodate—”

“No.” Her quiet negative struck Shahar silent, but Remath smiled. She was calmer than I had ever seen her. “I have had dreams,” she said, speaking softly. “I’ve always had them, for whatever reason, and they have always, always, come true. I have dreamt this day.”

I frowned in confusion. Dreams that came true? Was that even possible for mortals? Remath was a godling’s granddaughter…

In the image below her face, the maskers charged forward, running now. The sphere’s range was too small to capture more than a segment of chaos. For brief stretches there was nothing to see, interspersed with blurring glimpses of shouting men and still, inhuman faces. We barely noticed. Shahar stared at her mother, her face written with anguish as if there were no one else in the room, nothing else that she cared about. I put a hand on her shoulder because for a moment it looked as though she might climb onto the table to reach Remath. Her shoulder, beneath my hand, was taut and trembling with suppressed tension.

“You must come here, Mother,” she said tightly. “No matter what you’ve seen in some dream—”

“I have seen Sky fall,” said Remath, and Shahar jerked beneath my hand. “And I have seen myself die with it.”

In the other image, the one in the large sphere, there were screams. A sudden loud concussion that I thought might have been an explosion. And suddenly the sphere was jostled from its place, falling toward the Salon steps. We heard the crunch as it broke, and then the image vanished. The other image—Remath’s image—shuddered a moment later, and she looked around as people exclaimed in alarm behind her. They had felt the explosion, too.

“Why did you have the Lady build Echo, if not to come here?” Shahar was shaking her head as she spoke, wordless negation despite her effort to speak reasonably. “Why would you do this, Mother?”

“I have dreamt of more than Sky.” Remath suddenly looked away from Shahar, her gaze settling on me and Deka. “I have seen all existence fall, Lord Sieh. Sky is merely the harbinger. Only you can stop it. You and Shahar and you, my son. All three of you are the key. I built Echo to keep you safe.”

“Mother,” said Deka in a strained voice. “This—”

She shook her head. “There’s no time.” She paused suddenly, looking away as a soldier came close and murmured to her. At her nod, he hurried away, and she looked at us again, smiling. “They are climbing the Tree.”

Someone in the Marble Hall cried out. Ramina, his face taut, stepped forward. “Remath, gods damn it, there’s no reason for you to stay if—”

Remath sighed, with a hint of her usual temper. “I told you, I have seen how this must go. If I die with Sky, there is hope. My death becomes a catalyst for transformation. There is a future beyond it. If I flee, it all ends! The Arameri fall. The world falls. The decision is quite simple, Ramina.” Her voice softened again. “But… will you tell her…?”

I wondered at this as Ramina’s jaw flexed. Then I remembered: Morad. She wasn’t present, no doubt trying to assist Wrath in preparing for the possibility of an attack. I hadn’t realized Ramina knew about them, but then, I supposed, he was the only one Remath could have trusted with the secret. No doubt Morad knew about Ramina fathering Remath’s children, too. The three of them were bound together by love and secrets.

“I’ll tell her,” Ramina said at last, and Remath relaxed.

“I will, too,” I said, and she started. Then, slowly, she smiled at me.

“Lord Sieh, are you beginning to like me?”

“No,” I said, folding my arms. It was Morad whom I liked. “But I’m not a complete ass.”

She nodded. “You love my son.”

It was my turn to flinch. Very carefully I avoided looking at Deka. What the hells was she doing? If any of us got through this, the whole family would find some way to use my relationship with Deka against him. Perhaps she simply thought he could handle it.

“Yes,” I said.

“Good.” She glanced at Deka, then away, as if she could not bear to look at him. From the corner of my eye, I saw his fists clench. “I could protect only one of them, Lord Sieh. I had to make a choice. Do you understand? But I… I did what I could. Perhaps someday, you…” She faltered silent, throwing another of those darting glances at her son. I looked away so that I wouldn’t see what passed between them, and saw others doing the same around the room. This was too intimate. The Arameri had changed indeed since the old days; they no longer liked to see pain.

Then Remath sighed and faced me again, saying nothing. But she knew, I felt certain. I nodded, minutely. Yes, I love Shahar, too. For whatever good that did.

It seemed to satisfy Remath. She nodded back. As she did this, there was another shudder in Sky, and the image began to flicker. Deka muttered something in gods’ language and the image stilled, but I could see the instability of the message. Color and clarity wisped away from the image’s edges like smoke.

“Enough.” Remath rubbed her eyes, and I felt sudden sympathy for her. When she lifted her head again, her expression held its usual briskness. “The family and the world are yours now, Shahar. I have no doubt that you will do well by both.”

The image vanished, and silence fell.

“No,” Shahar whispered. Her knuckles, where her hands gripped the chair, were a sickly white. “No.”

Deka relented at last and came over. “Shahar—”

She rounded on him, her eyes wild. My first thought was, She’s gone mad.

My second thought, when she grabbed Deka’s hand, then mine, and I realized her intent in the same instant that magic washed through me like the arc of light that heralds a star’s birth—

—was demonshit, not again.

We became We.

As one, We reached forth with Our hand, unseen and yet vast, and picked up the bobbing, lonely mote that was Echo. And it was as one that We sent that mote west, hurtling across the world so rapidly that it should have killed everything inside. But part of Us (Deka) was smart enough to know that such speed was fatal for mortals, and We shaped the forces of motion around the mote accordingly. And another part of Us (me) was wise in the ways of magic, and that part murmured soothingly to the forces so they would be appeased, or else they would have backlashed violently against such abuse. But it was the will—Shahar, Shahar, O my magnificent Shahar—who drove us forward, her soul fixed on a singular intent.

Mother.

We all thought this—even I, who hated Remath, and even Deka, whose feelings toward her were such a morass that no mortal language could encompass it. (The First Tongue could: maelstrom.) And for all of Us, mother meant different things. For me it was a soft breast, cold fingers, the voice of a god with two faces—Naha, Yeine—whispering words of love. For Shahar it was fear and hope and cold eyes warming, fleetingly, with approval, and a single hug that would reverberate within her soul for the rest of her life. For Deka—ah, my Deka. For Deka, mother meant Shahar, a fierce little girl standing between him and the world. It meant a child-godling with old, tired eyes, who had nevertheless taken the trouble to smile kindly at him, and stroke his hair, and help him be strong.

For this, We kept control.

The palace slowed as We approached Sky-in-Shadow. We saw everything, everywhere within the scope of Our interest. On the ground just outside the city: a small force of warriors, northerners from many nations. Usein Darr was among these, sitting on the back of a small, swift horse, watching the city through a long contraption of lenses that made the distant seem closer. Like a nautilus spiral, We cycled inward, seeing all the sane folk of the city evacuating, bottlenecks of traffic on every major street. Further in: a dead masker. Beside his body crouched a woman, alone, weeping. (Mother.) In. Godlings in the streets, helping their chosen, helping any who asked, doing what they could, not doing enough. We have always been far better at destroying than protecting. Further in. Maskers now, the ones whose bodies had been old or infirm; they straggled behind their more able comrades, hobbling toward the Tree. In, in. Dead soldiers here, in the sigil-marked white of the Hundred Thousand Legions. They littered the Salon steps, lay disemboweled on the Promenade stones, hung from the windows of nearby buildings—one with a crossbow still in his hand, though his head was gone. In.

The World Tree.

Its trunk was infested with tiny, crawling mites that had once been thinking mortals. The maskers climbed with a strength that mortal flesh should not have possessed—and indeed, a few of them did not. We saw them fall, the magic burning out their bodies. But more of them clung securely to the thick, rough bark, and more still made the climb, steadily. It was only a half-mile to Sky, straight up. Some of the maskers were more than halfway there.

Shahar saw this and screamed DIE and We screamed with her. We swept Our infinite hand over the Tree, knocking the insects away: dozens, hundreds. Because they were already dead, some got up and began climbing again. We crushed them. Then We turned outward again, rushing, raging, toward Usein and her warriors. We were greedy for the taste of their fear.

They were afraid, We saw when We reached them, but not of Us.

We whirled and saw what they saw: Kahl. He stood in the air over the city, gazing down at what his machinations had wrought. He looked displeased.

We were much stronger. Exulting, We raised Our hand to destroy—

—my son—

—and stopped, frozen. Indecisive, for the first time, because of me.

We had no flesh, so Kahl did not see Us. His lips tightened at the scene below. In one hand, We saw, was the strange mask. It was complete now—and yet not. Kahl could hold it with no apparent discomfort, but the thing had no power. Certainly nothing that could forge a new god.

He raised a hand, and it is my fault, not Ours, mine, for I am a god and I should have known what he was about to do. But I did not think it, and the lives lost will haunt my eternal soul.

He sent forth power as a hundred whipcord serpents. Each wove through buildings and stone and sought its lair: a tiny, barely visible notch in all of the masks, so small as to be subliminal. (We knew across time. We saw Kahl doing a god’s work, whispering into the dreams of the sleeping dimyi artists, inspiring them, influencing them. We saw Nsana the Guide turn, sensing the intrusion upon his realm, but Kahl was subtle, subtle. He was not discovered.)

We saw all of the masks glow blue-white—

—and then explode.

Too many. Too close to the base of the Tree, where We had swept the bodies. We screamed as We understood and rushed back, but even gods are not omnipotent.

Roiling fire blossomed at the World Tree’s roots. The shock wave came later, like thunder, echoing. (Echo, Echo.) The great, shuddering groan of the Tree rose slowly, so gradually that We could deny it. We could pretend that it was not too late right up until the World Tree’s trunk split, sending splinters like missiles in every direction. Buildings collapsed, streets erupted. The screams of dying mortals mingled with the Tree’s mournful cry, then were drowned out as the Tree listed slowly, gracefully, monstrously. It fell away from Shadow, which We thought was a blessing—until the Tree’s crown, massive as mountains, struck the earth.

The concussion rippled outward in a wave that destroyed the land in every direction as far as mortal eyes could see.

We saw Sky shatter into a hundred thousand pieces.

And high above Us, his face a mask of savage triumph to contrast the mask in his hands: Kahl. He raised the mask over his head, closing his eyes. It shone now, glimmering and shivering and changing—replete, at last, with the million or more mortal lives he had just fed it. Its ornamentation and shape flared to form a new archetype—one suggesting implacability and fathomless knowledge and magnificence and quintessential power. Like Nahadoth and Itempas and Yeine, if one could somehow strip away their personalities and superficialities to leave only the distilled meaning of them. That meaning was God: the mask’s ultimate form and name.

We felt the mask call out, and We felt something answer, before Kahl vanished.

We dissolved then. Shahar’s grief, Deka’s anguish, my horror—all the same emotion, but the respective reverberations were too powerful individually to meld into the whole of Us. With what remained of Us, We (I) remembered belatedly that We were in a flying palace that had been built as a floating palace, and either way it would not do well as a falling palace. So We (I) looked around and spied the Eyeglass Lake, a boring little body of water in the middle of even more boring farmland. It would do. Into this, carefully, We deposited the delicate shell that was Echo. Usein would be pleased, at least: the Eyeglass was small and unassuming, nothing compared to the ocean’s vast grandeur. Only a mile of distance would now separate the palace from the shore; people could swim to it if they wanted. Remath’s plan to isolate the Arameri had backfired. The Arameri, such as remained, would be henceforth more accessible than ever, and far, far closer to the earth.

Then We were gone, leaving only Deka and Shahar and I, who stared at one another as the power drained away. We fell as one and sought solace in the void together.

21

Things changed.

Deka and Shahar woke a day later. I, for reasons I can only guess at, slept for a week. I was reinstalled in Deka’s quarters and reintroduced to my old friend the feeding tube. I had aged again. Not much this time; just ten years or so. This put me in my early to mid-sixties, by my guess. Not that a few years really mattered, at that age.

In the week that I slept through, the war ended. Usein sent a message to Echo the day after Skyfall. She did not surrender, but in light of the tragedy, she and her allies were willing to offer a truce. It was not difficult to read between the lines of this. Her faction had intended the deaths of the Arameri and their soldiers, and perhaps some abstract deaths in the future as mortalkind devolved to its endless warring. No one, not even a hardened Darre warrior, had been prepared for the fallen Tree, the shattered city, or the wasteland that was now central Senm. I am told that the northerners joined in the rescue operations, and they were welcome—even though they’d inadvertently caused the disaster. Everyone who could help was welcome, in those first few days.

The city’s godlings did what they could. They had saved many by transporting them out of the area when the first explosions began. They saved more by mitigating the damage. The Tree’s roots had nearly torn free of the earth when it fell. If the stump had uprooted, there would have been no rubble from which to rescue survivors, only a city-sized freshly turned grave. The godlings worked tirelessly thereafter, entering the most damaged parts of the city and sniffing out the fading scents of life, holding up sagging buildings, teaching the scriveners and bonebenders magic that would save many lives in the days to follow. Godlings from other lands came to help, and even a few from the gods’ realm.

Despite this, of all the mortals who had once populated Sky-in-Shadow, only a few thousand survived.

Shahar, in her first act as the family head, did something at once stupid and brilliant: she ordered that Echo be opened to the survivors. Wrath protested this vehemently and finally prevailed in getting Shahar and the rest of the highbloods to relocate to the center of the palace—the Whorl and its surrounding buildings, which could be guarded by Wrath’s men and the handful of remaining soldiers who had come with the survivors. The rest of Echo was ceded to wounded, heart-lost mortals, many of them still covered in dust and blood, who gratefully slept in beds that made themselves and ate food that appeared whenever they wished for it. These were small comforts, and no consolation, given what they had suffered.

In the days that followed, Shahar convened an emergency session of the Nobles’ Consortium and blatantly asked for help. The people of Shadow could rebuild, she said, with time to heal and sufficient assistance. But more than goods and food, they would need something the Arameri could not provide: peace. So she asked the assembled nobles to put aside their differences with each other and the Arameri and to remember the best principles of the Bright. It was, I am told, an amazing, stirring speech. The proof of this lies in the fact that they listened to her. Caravans of supplies and troops of volunteers began arriving within the week. There was no more talk of rebellion—only for the time being, but even that was a significant concession.

They may have been motivated by more than Shahar’s words, however. There was a new object in the sky, and it was drawing closer.

A week after I woke, when I was feeling strong enough, I left Echo. Some godling—don’t know which—had stretched a tongue of daystone from the palace’s entrance to the lakeshore, wide enough for carriages and pack animals. Nowhere near as elegant as Sky’s Vertical Gate, but it worked. Deka, who needed a break from the frenetic work of the past few weeks, decided to come with me. I considered trying to persuade him otherwise, but when I turned to him and opened my mouth, he gave me such a challenging look that I closed it again.

It took us an hour to walk over the bridge, and we spoke little on the way. In the distance we could see the humped, distorted shape of the fallen Tree through the morning haze. Neither of us looked in that direction often. Closer by, a fledgling city had already begun to develop around Echo and its lake. Not all the survivors wanted to live in Echo, so they had built tents and makeshift huts on the shore in order to stay close to family or new-made friends in the palace. A kind of market had developed amid this camp as a result, not far from the bridge’s terminus. Deka and I rented two horses from a caravanner who’d set up a stall—two fine mounts for the young man and his grandfather, the proprietor said, trying to be friendly—and began our journey, which would supposedly take only a day. We had no escorts or guards. We were not that important. Just as well; I wanted privacy to think.

The road we’d chosen to take, once the main thoroughfare between the city and its surrounding provinces, was badly damaged. We rode across humped pavement and patches of rubble that forced us to dismount frequently and check the horses’ hooves for stones. In one place the road simply split, falling away into a chasm that was unpleasantly deep. I was fine with going around it; there was nothing but ruined farmland in the vicinity, so it wasn’t as though the detour would take long. Deka, however, in a rare show of temper, spoke to the rocks and got them to form a narrow, solid bridge across the gap. We crossed before I muttered something to Deka along the lines that he should really be less quick to use magic to solve problems. He only looked at me, and I hunched. It had just seemed like the sort of thing an older man should say to a younger one.

We moved on. By afternoon, we reached the outskirts of the city. It was harder going here, and the damage slowed us down. Every street that had once been cobbled was rubble; the sidewalks were death traps, where we could even find streets. I caught a glimpse of the utter ruin that was South Root and despaired. There was a chance, a slim one, that Hymn and her family had gotten out before Skyfall. I would pray for Yeine to watch over them, alive or dead.

We did not want the city itself in any case, so it was easier to skirt around the worst parts, using the outlying districts to make our way. These had been the homes and estates of the middling wealthy—too poor to build onto the World Tree’s trunk but rich enough to buy the better sunlight that could be had farther from the roots. This made things easier, because they had wide lawns and dirt paths that the horses could manage. There was plenty of sunlight now.

Eventually we reached the trunk itself, a long, low mountain laid along the earth, as far as the eye could see. We surprised our first survivors here, since the rest of the area had been thoroughly abandoned: scavengers, picking through the ruins of the mansions that had once been attached to the Tree. They glared at us and pointedly fingered hatchet handles and machetes. We courteously gave them a wide berth. Everyone was happy.

Then we reached Sky. Where, to my surprise, we were not alone.

We smelled Ahad’s reeking cheroot before we saw him, though the scent was different this time. My nose was not what it had been, so it was only when I got close that I understood he’d put cloves in the thing to make the smell less offensive. I realized why when I noticed that the smoke was mingled with Glee Shoth’s hiras-flower perfume.

They likely heard the horses before we came into sight but did not bother to alter their position, so we found Ahad draped atop one of the nearer, smaller piles of rubble as though it was a throne. Behind him was Glee. He leaned back against her, his head pillowed on her breasts. She had propped one elbow on a smooth piece of daystone, her free hand idly combing his loose hair. His expression was as cold as usual, but I didn’t buy it this time. There was too much vulnerability in his posture, too much trust in the way he’d let Glee hold his weight. I saw too much wariness in his eyes. He could not hide some things from me, which was probably why he hadn’t bothered to try. But he would kill me, I suspect, if I dared to comment on it. So I didn’t.

“If you’ve come to dance on this grave, you’re too late,” he said as we dismounted and came to look up at them. “I already did it.”

“Good,” I said, nodding to Glee, who nodded silently back. (She, unlike Ahad, did not bother to hide the pride she felt in him. And there was a decided smug possessiveness in the way she stroked his hair that reminded me fleetingly of Itempas, back when he’d held Nahadoth’s affections.) I stretched and grimaced as my knees twinged after the long ride. “I’m not really up to dancing anymore.”

“Yes, you do look like shit, don’t you?” He exhaled a long, curling stream of smoke, and I saw him consider whether to hurt me further. There were so many ways he could have done it with a casual comment. So it turns out you’re an even worse father than I thought, or perhaps Glad to know I wasn’t your first mistake. I braced myself as best I could, though there was really nothing I could do. According to Deka, I was still aging faster than I should have been, perhaps ten days for every one. Merely knowing that I was a father was a relentless poison that would kill me in a year, two at the most. Not that any of us had so long to wait.

Ahad said nothing, to my relief. Either he was feeling magnanimous, or Glee had begun to mellow him. Or perhaps he simply saw no point under the circumstances.

“Hello,” said Deka. He was staring at Ahad, and belatedly I remembered that I’d never gotten around to telling him about his origins. My long-lost son’s attempt to destroy the universe had been a bit distracting.

Ahad sat up, eyeing the boy. After a moment, a slow smile spread across his face. “Well, well, well. You would be Dekarta Arameri.”

“I am.” Deka said this stiffly, trying and failing to conceal his fascination. They did not look wholly alike, but the resemblance was close enough to defy coincidence. “And you are?”

Ahad spread his arms. “Call me ‘Grandpa.’ ”

Deka stiffened. Glee threw an exasperated look at the back of Ahad’s head. I sighed and rubbed my eyes. “Deka… I’ll explain later.”

“Yes,” he said. “You will.” But he folded his arms and looked away from Ahad, and Ahad uttered a sigh of disappointment. I wasn’t sure whether he really minded Deka’s disinterest or was just using another opportunity to needle the boy.

We fell silent then, as was proper at graveside.

I gazed at the great piles of tumbled daystone and slipped my hands into my pockets, wondering at the feelings within me. I had loathed Sky for all the years of my incarceration. Within its white walls I had been starved, raped, flayed, and worse. I had been a god reduced to a possession, and the humiliation of those days had not left me despite a hundred years of freedom.

And yet… I remembered my orrery, and En pulsed in gentle sympathy against my chest. I remembered running through Sky’s wild, curving dead spaces, making them my own. I had found Yeine here; without thinking, I began to hum the lullaby I had once sung her. It had not been all suffering and horror. Life is never only one thing.

Ahad sighed above me. Sky had been his home once. Deka touched my hand; same for him. None of us mourned alone, for however long that mourning might last.

Above us, halfway between the sun and the faint, early risen moon, we could all see the peculiar smudge that had grown steadily larger since the day of Kahl’s victory. It was not a thing that could be described easily, in either Senmite or the gods’ language. A streaking transparency. A space of wavering nothingness, leaving nothingness in its wake. We could feel it, too, like an itch on the skin. Hear it, like words sung just out of hearing—but it would not be long now before we all heard it, more clearly than any sane being would want. Its roar would eclipse the world.

The Maelstrom. Kahl had summoned It, and It was coming.

After a time, during which the sun set and the early stars began to show, Ahad sighed and got to his feet, turning to help Glee to hers. They flickered to the ground, which made Deka start, then inhale as his suspicions were confirmed. Ahad winked at him, then sobered as he turned to me.

“The others think they can ride out whatever happens in the gods’ realm,” he said softly. “I have my doubts, but I can’t blame them for trying.” He hesitated, then glanced at Glee. “I’m staying here.”

It was an admission I would never have expected from him. Glee was mortal; she could not survive in our realm. When I glanced at Glee, to see if she understood how profound a change she had worked on him, she nodded minutely, lifting her chin in a blatantly protective challenge. Ahad was not the only one of us who could cause pain with a comment.

I had no interest in hurting Ahad, however. I’d done enough to him.

“Perhaps a more productive line of conversation is saving this realm, rather than fleeing it,” said Deka, and by the edge in his voice, I knew I would get an earful when we were alone. But Ahad shook his head, growing uncharacteristically serious.

“There’s no saving it,” he said. “Not even the Three can command the Maelstrom. At best, they can stand aside while It punches through the realms, and rebuild from whatever’s left. Not that that does us much good.” He shrugged and sighed, looking up at the sky. The smudge was just as visible at night, a waver against the carpet of stars. Beyond It, however, the stars were gone. There was nothing but black void.

“My father believes it is worthwhile to try and save this realm,” said Glee. Deka stared at her, probably guessing more secrets. I really should have told him everything beforehand. More stupidity on my part.

“Yeine and Nahadoth, too, if I know them at all.” I sighed. “But if they could have stopped it, they would have done so by now.”

I did not add that I had prayed to both, more than once, in the preceding nights. They had responded with silence. I tried not to worry about what that meant.

“Well, we’d better get going. Just came to wish the old hell good-bye.” Ahad’s cheroot had finally burned down. He dropped the butt to the ground and stubbed it out with his toe, throwing one final glance at Sky’s tumbled bulk behind us. The daystone still glowed at night, ghostly soft radiance to contrast the torn emptiness in the sky above. A fitting marker for mortalkind’s grave, I decided. Hopefully Yeine and Naha would find some way to preserve it when the world was gone.

And Itempas, my mind added to Yeine’s and Naha’s names, though of course that was less certain. Perhaps they would let him die with the rest of us. If they were going to, this would be the time.

“We will see you again,” Glee said. I nodded, noticing at last that they were holding hands.

Then they vanished, leaving me alone with Deka. “Explain,” he snapped.

I sighed and looked around. It was well and truly night. I hadn’t figured on the journey taking as long as it had. We had no supplies with which to make camp. It would be horse blankets on the ground instead. My old bones were going to love that.

“Let’s get comfortable first,” I said. His jaw flexed as though he would have preferred to argue, but instead he turned to the horses, bringing them closer to the daystone pile so that they could have some shelter from the wind.

We set up on what had been the foundation of a house, blown clean away by the force of the Tree’s fall. A few small pieces of daystone had landed here, so we gathered them into a pile for light, and Deka murmured a command that made them generate heat as well. I laid out our blankets separately, whereupon Deka promptly moved his over next to mine and pulled me into his arms.

“Deka,” I began. We had shared his bed since my last mortaling, but both of us had been too tired for anything but sleep. Convenient for putting off necessary conversations, but they could not be put off forever. So I took a deep breath and prayed briefly to one of my brothers for strength. “You don’t have to pretend. I know how it is for young men, and—”

“I think,” he said, “you’ve been stupid enough lately, Sieh. Don’t make things worse.”

At this I tried to sit up. I couldn’t because he wouldn’t let me and because my back complained fiercely when I tried. Too much time on horseback. “What?”

“You are still the child,” he said quietly, and I stopped struggling. “And the cat, and the man, and the monster who smothers children in the dark. So you’re an old man, too; fine. I told you, Sieh, I’m not going anywhere. Now lie down. I want to try something.”

More out of shock than any real obedience, I did as he bade me.

He slid a hand under my shirt, which made me blush and splutter. “Deka, gods—”

“Be still.” His hand stopped, resting on my chest. It was not a caress, though my stupid old body decided that it was and further decided that perhaps it was not so old after all. I was grateful; at my age there were no guarantees that certain bodily processes still worked.

Deka’s expression was still, intent. I had seen the same concentration from him when he spoke magic or drew sigils. This time, however, he began to whisper, and his hand moved in time with his words. Puzzled, I listened to what he was saying, but they were not words. It was not our language, or any language. I had no idea what he was doing.

I felt it, though, when words began tickling their way along my skin. When I jumped and tried to sit up, Deka pressed me down, closing his eyes so that my twitching would not distract him. And I did twitch, because it was the most peculiar sensation. Like ants crawling over my flesh, if those ants had been flat and made of sibilance. That was when I noticed the soft black glow of Deka’s marks—which were more than tattoos, I realized at last. They always had been.

But something was not right. The marks he whispered into my flesh did not linger. I felt them wend around my limbs and down my belly, but as soon as they settled into place, they began to fade. I saw Deka’s brow furrow, and after a few moments of this he stopped, his hand on my chest tightening into a fist.

“I take it that didn’t go as expected,” I said quietly.

“No.”

“What did you expect?”

He shook his head slowly. “The markings should have tapped your innate magic. You’re still a god; if you weren’t, your antithesis wouldn’t affect you. I should be able to remind your flesh that its natural state is young, malleable, embodied only by your will….” His jaw tightened, and he looked away. “I don’t understand why it failed.”

I sighed. There had been no real hope in me, probably because he hadn’t told me what he was doing ahead of time. I was glad for that. “I thought you wanted me mortal.”

He shook his head again, his lips thinning. “Not if it means you dying, Sieh. I never wanted that.”

“Ah.” I put my hand over his fist. “Thank you for trying, then. But there’s no point, Deka, even if you could fix me. Godlings are fragile compared to the Three. When the Maelstrom breaks this universe, most likely we—”

“Shut up,” he whispered, and I did, blinking. “Just shut up, Sieh.” He was trembling and there were tears in his eyes. For the first time since his childhood, he looked lost and lonely and more than a little afraid.

I was still a god, as he had said. It was my nature to comfort lost children. So I pulled him to me, intending to hold him while he wept.

He pushed my hands aside and kissed me. Then, as though the kiss had not been sufficient reminder that he was no child, he sat up and began tugging my clothes off.

I could have laughed, or said no, or pretended disinterest. But it was the end of the world, and he was mine. I did what felt good.

We would all die in three days, but there was so much that could be done in that time. I was not a true mortal; I knew better than to take Enefa’s gift for granted. I would savor every moment of my life that remained, suck its marrow, crunch its bones. And when the end came… well, I would not be alone. That was a precious and holy thing.

In the morning, we returned to Echo. Deka went to look in on his scriveners and ask again whether they had found some miracle that could save us all. I went in search of Shahar.

I found her in the Temple, which had finally been dedicated as such. Someone had put an altar in it, right on the spot where Deka and I had first made love. I tried not to think lewd thoughts about human sacrifice as I stopped before it, because I refused to be a dirty old man.

Shahar stood beyond the altar, beneath the colored swirl that now cast faintly blue light on us, like that of the cloudless sky outside. Her back was to me, though I was certain she’d heard me approach. I’d had to speak to four guards just to get into the room. She did not move until I spoke, however, and then she started, coming out of whatever reverie she’d lapsed into.

“Friends lie,” I said. I spoke softly, but my voice echoed in the high-ceilinged chamber. It was deeper now, with a hoarse edge that would only get worse as I grew older. “Lovers, too. But trust can be rebuilt. You are my friend, Shahar. I shouldn’t have forgotten that.” She said nothing. I sighed and shrugged. “I’m a bastard, what do you expect?”

More silence. I saw the tightness of her shoulders. She folded her arms across her chest. I had seen enough women cry that I recognized the warning signs and decided to leave. But just as I reached the doorway, I heard, “Friends.”

I stopped and looked back. She held up her right hand—the one that had held mine, years ago when we’d taken our oath. I rubbed a thumb across my own tingling palm and smiled.

“Friends,” I said, raising my own. Then I left, because there was something in my eyes. Dust, probably. I would have to be more careful in the future. Old men had to take good care of their eyes.

22

… and they all lived happily ever after.

The end.

The world remained surprisingly calm as the Maelstrom grew to dwarf the sun in the sky. This was not at all what I had expected. Mortal humans are only a few languages and eccentricities removed from mortal beasts, and it is the nature of beasts to panic at the approach of danger.

There were some beastly acts. No looting—the Order-Keepers had always been quick to execute thieves—but many cases of arson and vandalism as mortals destroyed property to vent their despair. And there was violence, of course. In one of the patriarchal lands, so many men slaughtered their wives and children before killing themselves that one of my siblings got involved. She appeared in the capital wreathed in falling leaves and let it be known that she would personally carry the souls of such murderers to the worst of the infinite hells. Even then the killings did not stop entirely, but they did decrease.

All this was nothing to what could have been. I had expected… I don’t know. Mass suicide, cannibalism, the total collapse of the Bright.

Instead, Shahar married Datennay Canru of Tema. It was a small and private ceremony, as there had not been time to prepare for anything better. At my prompting, she asked Deka to administer the rites as First Scrivener, and at my prompting, Deka agreed. There were no apologies exchanged. They were both Arameri. But I saw that she was contrite, and I saw that Deka forgave her. Then Shahar had the Order of Itempas spread word of the event by crier and runner and news scroll. She hoped to send a message by her actions: I believe there will be a future.

Canru agreed readily to the marriage, I think, because he was more than a bit in love with her. She… well, she had never stopped loving me, but she genuinely liked him. We all sought our own forms of comfort in those days.

I spent my nights in Deka’s arms and was humbly grateful for my fortune.

So the world went on.

Until its end.

We gathered at dawn on the final day: Arameri, notables from Tema and other lands, commonfolk from Shadow, Ahad and Glee, Nemmer and a few of the other godlings who had not fled the realm. The Whorl was not as high as Sky had been, but it was as good a vantage point as any. From there, the heavens were a terrible, awe-inspiring sight. More than half of the sky had been devoured by the swirling, wavering transparency. As the sun rose and passed into the space of change, its shape turned sickly and distorted, its light flickering on our skins like a campfire. This was not an illusion. What we saw was literal, despite the impossibility of the angles and distance. Even Tempa’s rules for physics and time had been distorted by the Maelstrom’s presence. Thus we beheld the slow and tortured end of our sun as it was torn apart and drawn into the great maw. There would be light for a while longer, and then darkness such as no mortal had ever seen. If we lasted that long.

I held Deka’s hand as we stood gazing at it, unafraid.

Alarmed gasps from the center of the Whorl meadow drew my attention: Nahadoth and Yeine had appeared there amid the bobbing sea grass. The gathered folk stumbled back from them, though some quickly knelt or began weeping or calling out to them. No one shushed them, for hope had never been a sin.

I dragged Deka with me as I pushed through the crowd. Between Nahadoth and Yeine was Itempas; they had brought him. All three of them looked grim, but they would not have come without reason. Nahadoth might act without purpose, but Yeine tended not to, and Itempas had never done so.

They turned to me as I reached them, and I was suddenly sure of it. “You have a plan,” I said, squeezing Deka’s hand hard.

They looked at each other. Beyond the Three, Shahar stepped out of the crowd as well, Canru in her wake. He stopped, gazing at them in awe. Shahar came forward alone, her fists tight at her sides.

Itempas inclined his head to me. “We do.”

“What?”

“Death.”

If I had not spent countless eternities enduring his manner, I would have screamed at this. “Can you be more specific?”

There was the faintest twitch of Itempas’s lips. “Kahl has called the Maelstrom to join with him,” he said. “He will have to appear in order to take It into himself and—he hopes—use Its power to become a god. We will kill him and offer It a new seat of power instead.” He spread his hands, indicating himself.

I caught my breath, horrified as I understood. “No. Tempa, you were born from the Maelstrom. To return to It—”

“I have chosen this, Sieh.” His voice cut across mine, soothing, definitive. “It is the fate my nature demands. I have felt the possibility since Kahl’s summoning. Yeine and Nahadoth have confirmed it.” Behind him, Yeine’s face was unreadable, serene. Nahadoth… he was almost the same. It was not his nature to contain himself, however. He could not hide his unease entirely, not from me.

I scowled at Itempas. “What is this, some misguided attempt at atonement? I told you a century ago, you stubborn fool, nothing can make up for your crimes! And what good does it do for you to sacrifice yourself, if your death will cause everything to end anyway?”

“The Maelstrom may cease Its approach if It fulfills Kahl’s purpose,” Itempas replied. “In this case, creating a new god. We believe the form that this new god takes will depend on the nature and will of the vessel.” He shrugged. “I will see that what is created is a fitting replacement for myself.”

I stumbled back, and Deka put a hand on my shoulder in concern. It was the same conjunction of power and will that had forged Yeine into a new Enefa, and where that had been wild, a series of not-quite-accidental coincidences, now Itempas hoped to control a similar event. But whatever god was created in his place, however stick-in-the-mud that new one might turn out to be, Itempas would die.

“No,” I said. I was trembling. “You can’t.”

“It’s the only solution, Sieh,” said Yeine.

I stared at the two of them, so set in their resolve, and did not know what I felt in that moment. Not so long before, I would have rejoiced at the idea of a new Itempas. Even now it was a temptation, because I might have forgiven him and I might still love him, but I would never forget what he had done to our family. Nothing would ever be the same for any of us. Would it not be easier, somehow—cleaner—to start over with someone new? Knowing Itempas, the idea had some appeal for him, too. He did like things neat.

I turned to Nahadoth, hoping for—something. I didn’t know what. But Nahadoth, damn him, wasn’t paying attention to any of us. He had turned away to gaze at the swirling sky. Around him, the dark wreathing tendrils of his presence wheeled in a slow, matching dance. Inching higher, in random increments, as I watched. Toward the Maelstrom.

Wait—

Itempas spoke his name sharply, before my thoughts could crystallize into fear. Yeine, surprised by this, frowned at both her brothers. For a moment, I saw incomprehension in her face, and then her eyes widened. But Naha only smiled, as if it amused him to frighten us. And he kept looking up at the Maelstrom, as if It was the most beautiful sight in the mortal realm.

“Perhaps we should do nothing,” Nahadoth said. “Worlds die. Gods die. Perhaps we should let all of it go, and start anew.”

Start anew. My eyes met Yeine’s across the drift of Naha’s blackness. Deka’s hand tightened on my shoulder; he understood, too. The unsteady tremor of sorrow that edged Nahadoth’s voice. The way his shape kept blurring in time with the Maelstrom’s perturbations, resonating with its terrible, churning song.

But there was no fear in Itempas’s face as he took a step toward Nahadoth. He was smiling, in fact—and I marveled, because even though he was trapped in mortal flesh, his smile somehow had all the old power. Nahadoth, too, reacted to this. He lowered his gaze to focus on Itempas, his own smile fading.

“Perhaps we should,” Itempas said. “That would be easier than repairing what’s broken.”

The drifting curls of Nahadoth’s substance grew still. They shifted aside as Itempas approached Nahadoth, allowing him near—but also curving inward, and sharpening into jagged, irregular scythes. Fanged jaws ready to close on Itempas’s so-powerless flesh. Itempas ignored this blatant threat, continuing forward and, finally, stopping before him.

Behind him, Glee stood stiff and wide-eyed. I held my breath.

“Will you die with me, Nahadoth?” he asked. His voice was low, but it carried; we all heard it, even over the twisting, growing shriek of the Maelstrom. “Is that what you want?”

Beyond them, perhaps only I saw Yeine’s expression tighten, though she said nothing. Anyone could see the delicacy of the spell Tempa had woven, more fragile still because it was nothing but words. He had no magic. No weapons at all for this battle, save the history between them, good and ill.

Nahadoth did not answer, but then he didn’t need to. There were faces he wore only when he meant to kill. They are beautiful faces—destruction is not his nature, just an art he indulges—but in my mortal shape I could not look upon them without wanting to die, so I fixed my eyes on Itempas’s back. Somehow, despite his mortal shape, Tempa could still bear Naha’s worst.

“The new one,” Tempa said, very softly. “I’ll make certain he’s worthy of both of you.”

Then he lifted his hands—I clamped down on my tongue to keep from blurting a warning—and cupped Nahadoth’s face. I expected his fingers to fall off, for the black depths around Naha had grown lethal, freezing flecks of snow from the air and etching cracks into the ground beneath their feet. It probably did hurt Itempas; they always hurt each other. This did not stop him from leaning close and touching his lips to Nahadoth’s.

Nahadoth did not return the kiss. Itempas might as well have pressed his mouth to stone. Yet the fact that it had occurred at all—that Nahadoth permitted it, that it was Itempas’s farewell—made it something holy.

(I clenched my fists and fought back tears. I was too old for sentimentality, damn it.)

Itempas pulled away, his sorrow plain. But as he stood there, his hands hiding Nahadoth’s face from any view but his own, Naha showed him something. I couldn’t see what, but I could guess, because there were faces Naha wore for love, too. I had never seen the one he’d shaped for Itempas, because Itempas guarded that face jealously, as he had always done with Naha’s love. But Itempas inhaled at the sight of whatever Naha showed him now, closing his eyes as if Naha had stricken him one last, terrible blow.

Then he stepped back, and as his hands fell away, Nahadoth’s face resumed its ordinary, shifting nature. With this, Naha turned his back on all of us, his cloak retracting sharply to form a tight, dark sheath around him. Itempas might as well not have been there anymore.

But he did not look up at the sky again.

When Itempas mastered himself, he glanced at Yeine and nodded. She regarded him for a long, weighted moment, then finally nodded in return. I let out a breath, and Deka did, too. I thought perhaps even the Maelstrom grew quieter for a moment, but that was probably my imagination.

But before I could digest my own relief and sorrow, Nahadoth’s head jerked sharply upward—but not toward the Maelstrom, this time. The blackness of his aura blazed darker.

“Kahl,” he breathed.

High above—the same place from which he’d struck down the World Tree—a tiny figure appeared, wreathed in magic that trembled and wavered like the Maelstrom.

Before I could think, however, I was nearly floored by the furnace blast of Yeine’s rage. She wasted no time in deciding to act; the air simply rippled with negation of life. I flinched, in spite of myself, as death struck Kahl, my son—

—my unknown, unwanted, unlamented son, whom I would have mentored and protected if I had been able, whose love I would have welcomed if I’d been given the choice—

—did not die. Nothing happened.

Nahadoth hissed, his face twitching reptilian. “The mask protects him. He stands outside this reality.”

“Death is reality everywhere,” Yeine said. I had never heard such murderousness in her voice.

There was a shudder beneath us, around us. The townsfolk cried out in alarm, fearing another cataclysm. I thought I knew what was happening, though I could no longer sense it: the earth beneath us had shifted in response to Yeine’s hate, the whole planet turning like some massive, furious bodyguard to face her enemy. She spread her hands, crouching, the loose curls of her hair whipping in a gale that no one else felt, and her eyes were as cold as long-dead things as they fixed on Kahl.

On my son. But—

Nahadoth, his face alight, laughed as her power rose, even as the inimical nature of it forced him to step back. Even Itempas stared at her, pride warring with longing in his gaze.

This was as it should be. It was what I had wanted all along, really, for the Three to reconcile. But—

—to kill my son!

No. That I hadn’t wanted.

Deka glanced at me and caught my hand suddenly, alarmed. “Sieh!” I frowned, and he lifted a hank of my hair for me to see. It had been brown streaked thickly with white; now the white predominated. The few remaining brown strands faded to colorlessness as I watched. It was longer, too.

I looked up at Deka and saw the fear in his eyes. “I’m sorry,” I said. And I truly was, but…“I never wanted to be a poor father, Deka. I—”

“Stop it.” He gripped my arm. “Stop speaking, stop thinking about him. You’re killing yourself, Sieh.”

So I was. But it would have happened anyway. Damn Enefa; I would think what I liked, mourn as I wished for the son I had never known. I remembered his fingers on the back of my neck. He would have forgiven me if he could have, I think, if forgiveness had not been counter to his nature. If my weakness had not left him to suffer so much. Everything he’d become was my fault.

There was a crack of displaced air as Yeine vanished. I could not see what followed—my eyes were not what they had been, and I seemed to be developing cataracts. But there was another crack from high above, a thunder of echoes, and then Nahadoth tensed, his smile fading. Itempas stepped up beside him quickly, his fists clenched. “No,” he breathed.

“No,” Nahadoth echoed, and then he, too, was gone, a flicker of shadow.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

Deka squinted above us, shaking his head. “Kahl. It isn’t possible. Dear gods, how is he—” He caught his breath. “Yeine has fallen. Now Nahadoth—”

“What?”

But there was no time to consider this, because suddenly the space where Nahadoth and Yeine had been was filled again, and we all fell to our knees.

Kahl wore the God Mask, and the power that it radiated was the worst thing I had ever felt in my life. Worse, even, than the day Itempas forced me into mortal flesh, and that had been like having all my limbs broken so that I could be stuffed into a pipe. Worse than seeing my mother’s body, or Yeine’s when she died her mortal death. My skin crawled; my bones ached. All around me I heard others falling, crying out. The mask was wrong—the emulation of a god, extraneous and offensive to existence itself. In its incomplete form, only godlings had been able to feel the wrongness, but now the God Mask radiated its hideousness to all children of the Maelstrom, mortal and immortal alike.

Deka moaned beside me, trying to speak magic, but he kept stuttering. I struggled to stay on my knees. It would have been easier to just lie down and die. But I forced my head up, trembling with the effort, as Kahl took a step toward Itempas.

“You’re not the one I would have chosen,” he said, his voice shivering. “Enefa was the original target of my vengeance. I would thank you for killing her, in fact, but here and now, you are the easiest of the Three to kill.” He stepped closer, raising a hand toward Itempas’s face. “I’m sorry.”

Itempas did not back up or drop to the ground, though I saw how the ripple of power around Kahl pressed at him. It likely took everything he had to stay upright, but that was my bright father. If pride alone had been his nature, no force in the universe could ever have stopped him.

“Stop,” I whispered, but no one heard me.

“Stop,” said another voice, loud and sharp and furious.

Glee.

Even with my failing eyesight, I could see her. She was on her feet as well, and it was not a trick of the light: a pale, faint nimbus surrounded her. It was easier to see this because the sky had grown overcast, stormclouds boiling up from the south as a brisk wind began to blow. We could no longer see the Maelstrom, except in snatches when the clouds parted, but we could hear It: a hollow, faint roar that would only grow louder. We could feel It, too, a vibration deeper than the earth that Yeine had shaken. A few hours, a few minutes; no telling when It would arrive. We would know when It killed us.

Itempas, who had not stepped away from Kahl, stumbled now as he turned to stare at his daughter. There were many things in Glee’s eyes in that moment, but I did not notice them for staring at her eyes themselves, which had gone the deep, baleful ember of a lowering sun.

Kahl paused, the God Mask turning slightly as he peered at her. “What is it that you want, mortal?”

“To kill you,” she replied. Then she burst into white-hot flame.

All the mortals nearby screamed, some of them fleeing for the stairs. Itempas threw up an arm as he was flung farther back. Ahad, beside her, cried out and vanished, reappearing near me. Even Kahl staggered, the blur around him bending away from the sheer blazing force of her. I could feel the heat of her fire tightening my skin from where I was, ten feet away. Anyone closer was probably risking burns. And Glee herself…

When the flames died, I marveled, for she stood clad all in white. Her skirt, her jacket—dear gods, even her hair. The light that surrounded her was almost too bright to look at. I had to squint through watering eyes and the shield of my hand. For an instant I thought I saw rings, words marching in the air, and in her hands… no. It could not be.

In her hands was the white-bladed sword that Itempas had used to cleave apart Nahadoth’s chaos and bring design and structure to the earliest iteration of the universe. It had a name, but only he knew it. No one could wield it but him; hells, no one else had ever been able to get near the damned thing, not in all the aeons since he’d created time. But Itempas’s daughter held it before her in a two-handed grip, and there was no doubt in my mind that she knew how to use it.

Kahl saw this, too, his eyes widening within the mask’s slits. But of course he feared it; he had disrupted the order of all things, bringing the Maelstrom where it did not belong and claiming power he had no right to possess. In a contest of strength, he could endure, even against Nahadoth and Yeine—but there is more to being a god than strength.

“Control,” said Itempas. He had drawn as close as he could, anxious to advise his daughter. “Remember, Glee, or the power will destroy you.”

“I will remember,” she said.

And then she was gone, and Kahl was, too, both of them leaving a melted, glowing trough across the Whorl’s grassy plain.

Then two more streaks shot across the horizon in that direction, moving to join the battle: Nahadoth and Yeine.

Without Kahl’s power to crush me, I struggled to my feet. Damned knees hurt like someone had lined the joints with broken glass. I ignored the pain and grabbed for Deka, then dragged him over to Ahad. “Come on,” I said to both of them.

Ahad tore his eyes from the dwindling, shining mote that his lover had become. In the distance, plates of spinning darkness swirled out of nowhere, converging on a point. A massive, jagged finger of stone shot up from the earth, hundreds of feet into the sky in seconds. The second Gods’ War had begun, and it was an awesome sight—even if, this time, it would leave far more than just the mortal realm in ruins.

“What?” Ahad looked dazed when I gripped his arm.

“Help me get Itempas,” I said. When he simply stared at me, I jabbed him in the ribs with my gnarled fist. He glared; I stepped closer to shout into his face. “Pay attention! We have to go. With that kind of power in play, Glee won’t last long. Nahadoth and Yeine might be able to stop him, I hope, we can pray, but if not, he’s going to come back here.” I pointed at Itempas, who was also staring after Glee, his fists clenched.

Finally understanding, Ahad caught my arm. I was holding Deka. There was a flicker as we moved through space, and then Ahad had Itempas by the arm as well. Itempas looked startled, but cottoned on faster than Ahad had; he did not fight. But then Ahad frowned. “Where can we go that he won’t find us?”

I almost wailed the words. “Anywhere, anywhere, you fool!” The planet was going to die. All reality was beginning to falter, bleeding out through the mortal wound that the Maelstrom had punched into its substance. All we could do was start running, anywhere we could, and hope that Kahl did not catch up. Though if he did…“Dear gods, I hope you’ve found your nature by now.”

Ahad’s face went too impassive. “No.”

“Demonshitting brak’skafra—” There was a hollow whoosh behind me, louder even than the Maelstrom’s growing roar, and Deka turned quickly, barking a command to counter whatever I’d stupidly unleashed. The sound went silent; Deka glared at me. “Sorry,” I muttered.

“Anywhere,” Ahad said, but he was looking away from us. Something bloomed against the horizon like a round, white sun. I wanted to cheer for magnificent demon girls, but the light died too quickly for me to feel comfortable, and then Ahad took us away from the palace.

With his attention so thoroughly divided, I should have realized where we would end up. When the world resolved around us, we stood on tumbled white stones littered with the debris of everyday life: torn bedsheets, broken perfume bottles, an overturned toilet. Looming high overhead: broken, wilting limbs as thick as buildings.

“Sky?” I rounded on Ahad, wishing for once that I had a cane. I had to shout to be heard over the rising cacophony, but that was fine, because I was furious. “You brought us to Sky, you stupid son of a demon? What were you thinking?”

“I—”

But whatever Ahad might have retorted died in his mouth as his eyes widened. He whirled, looking north, and we all saw it. A great amorphous blotch of blackness was fading from view, but against its contrast we could see a tiny, blazing white star.

Falling, and winking out of sight as it fell.

Ahad took a great, shuddering breath, and the air around him turned the color of a bruise. The sound that he made was less a word than an animal, maddened shriek. For an instant he became something else, shapeless and impossible, and then we were all flung sprawling as daystone and Tree wood and the air itself whipped into an instant tornado around him. He was a god, and his will forged reality. All the matter nearby hastened to do his bidding.

Then he was gone, and all the debris that had been blasted away in his wake pelted onto whatever body parts we’d been foolish enough to turn upright.

I pushed myself up slowly, trying to get a broken Tree branch off my back and daystone dust out of my mouth. My hands hurt. Why did my hands hurt? I’d never had arthritis on any of the previous occasions I’d become old. Then again, that had been old age as I’d imagined it; perhaps the reality was simply more unpleasant than I’d thought.

Hands grabbed me, helping me up: Deka. He pushed the branch away, then pushed my hair out of my face; it was waist-long now, though thin and stringy white. No matter how old I got, the stuff kept growing. Why couldn’t I go bald, damn it?

“Should’ve seen that coming,” I muttered as he helped me to my feet.

“Seen what?”

Then Itempas was there, also helping me. Between the two of them, I was able to scramble over the jagged, unstable stones of the fallen Sky. “That one.” Itempas nodded in the direction Ahad had gone. In another life I would have laughed at his refusal to use Ahad’s borrowed name. “Apparently, his nature has something to do with love.”

No wonder it had taken Ahad so long to find himself. He had lived the past century in the antithetical prison of his own apathy—and his centuries of suffering in Sky had probably not predisposed him to attempt love, even when the opportunity came along. But Glee… I bit my lip. In spite of everything, I prayed that she would be all right. I did not want to lose my newest sister, and I did not want this other, surrogate son of mine to discover himself through grief.

It is not an easy thing to climb a pile of rubble the size of a small city. It is harder when one is a half-blind old man of eighty or so. I kept having to stop and catch my breath, and my coordination was so poor that after a few close calls and nearly broken ankles, Itempas stepped in front of me and told me to climb onto his back. I would have refused, out of pride, but then Deka, damn him, picked me up bodily and forced me to do it. So I locked my arms and legs round Itempas, humiliated, and they ignored my complaints and resumed climbing.

We did not speak as the Maelstrom’s roar grew louder. This was not merely because of the noise but also because we were waiting, and hoping, but as we kept climbing and the moments passed, that hope faded. If Yeine and the others had been able to defeat Kahl, they would have done it by now. The universe still existed; that meant the two gods were alive at least. Beyond that, no news was not good news.

“Where can we go?” Deka had to shout to be heard. All around us was a charging, churning monstrosity of sound. I made out bird whistles and men shouting as if in agony, ocean surf and rock grating against metal. It did not hurt our ears—not yet—but it was not pleasant either.

“I can take us away once, maybe twice,” he said, and then looked ashamed. “I don’t have a god’s strength, or even…” He looked toward where Glee had fallen. I hoped Ahad had managed to catch her. “But anywhere in the mortal realm, Kahl will find us. Even if he doesn’t—”

We all paused to look up. High above, the clouds had begun to boil and twist in a way that had nothing to do with weather patterns. Would the great storm stop there in the sky, once It reached the place from which It had been summoned? Or would It simply plow through and leave a void where the earth had been?

Back to Echo, then. Deka and I could join with Shahar again, attempt to control what we had done only by instinct before… but even as I thought this, I dismissed it. Too much discord between Shahar and Deka now; we might just make things worse. I leaned my head on Itempas’s broad shoulder, sighing. I was tired. It would be easier, so much easier, if I could just lie down now and rest.

But as I thought this, suddenly I knew what could be done.

I lifted my head. “Tempa.” He had already stopped, probably to catch his breath, though he would never admit such a thing. He turned his ear toward me to indicate that he was listening. “How long does it take you to return to life when you die?”

“The time varies between ten and fifty minutes.” He did not ask why I wanted to know. “Longer if the circumstances that caused me to die remain present—I revive, then die again immediately.”

“Where do you go?” He frowned. It was hard to make my voice work at this volume. “While you’re dead. Where do you go?”

He shook his head. “Oblivion.”

“Not the heavens? Not the hells?”

“No. I am not dead. But I am not alive, either. I hover between.”

I wriggled to get down, and he set me on my feet. I nearly fell at once; the circulation in my legs had been cut off by his arms, and I hadn’t even felt it. Deka helped me to sit on a rough piece of what—I think—had once been a part of the Garden of the Hundred Thousand. Groaning, I massaged one of my legs, nodding irritably for Deka to take the other, which he did.

“I need you to die,” I said to Tempa, who lifted an eyebrow. “Just for a while.” And then, using as few words as I could to save my voice, I told them my plan.

Deka’s hands tightened on my calf. He made no protest, however, for which I was painfully grateful. He trusted me. And if he helped me, I would be able to pull my biggest trick ever.

My last trick.

“Please,” I said to Tempa.

He said nothing for a long moment. Then he sighed, inclining his head, and took off his coat, handing it to me.

Then, as coolly as though he did such things every day, he looked around, spying a thin, fine extrusion jutting up from the pile. A piece of the Wind Harp: it was a wickedly sharp spear perhaps four feet long, angled straight up in the air. Tempa examined it, flicked away a scrap of faded cloth that had wrapped around its tip, and yanked it to the side, jostling loose a good bit of rubble while he positioned it to his liking. When he’d gotten it to about a forty-five degree angle, he nodded in satisfaction—and fell forward onto it, sliding down its shaft until friction or bone or gods knew what stopped him short. Deka cried out, leaping to his feet, though it was too late and he’d known it was going to happen anyhow. He protested because that was just the kind of man he was.

I reached up to take Deka’s hand, and he turned to me, his face still writ in lines of horror. How had an Arameri been born with a soul as perfect as his? I was so glad I’d lived to see it, and to know him.

He proved his worth again when grim determination replaced horror in his eyes. He helped me to my feet, handing me Tempa’s coat, which I put on. The wind had risen to a gale, and I was a skinny, frail old man.

We both looked up then, startled, as a sound like wailing horns filled the sky and the clouds tore apart. Above us, filling the sky, a new and terrible god appeared: the Maelstrom. What we saw was not Its true self, of course, which was vaster than all existence, let alone a single world. Like everything that entered the mortal realm, It had shaped an approximation of Itself: churning clouds, the sun stretched into glowing candy, a string of floating pieces of worlds and shattered moons trailing in Its wake. In Its boiling surface, we could see ourselves and the world around us, a reflection distorted and magnified. Our faces screamed; our bodies broke and bled. The imminent future.

Deka turned his back to me and crouched. Speech was no longer possible now. Soon our ears would rupture, which would be a blessing, because otherwise the roar would destroy our sanity. I climbed onto Deka’s back, pressing my face into his neck so that I could breathe his scent one last time. Ignoring my sentimentality, he closed his eyes and murmured something. I felt the markings on his back grow hot and then cold against my chest.

Gods do not fly. Flying requires wings and is inefficient in any case. We leap, and then stick to the air. Anyone can do it; most mortals just haven’t learned how. There’s a trick to it, see.

Deka’s first leap took us nearly into the Maelstrom. I groaned and clung to him as the thunder of the storm above us grew so great that I lost the feeling in my hands, nearly lost my grip entirely. But then, somehow, Deka corrected his error, arcing down now toward the gods’ battle.

Which was not over. There was a flash of darkness, and we passed through a space of coldness: Nahadoth. Then warm air, redolent of spores and rotting leaves: Yeine. Both still alive, and still fighting—and winning, I was glad to see. They had dissipated their forms, corralling Kahl in a thickening sphere of combined power so savage that I urged Deka to stop well away, which he did. At the center of this sphere was Kahl, raging, blurring, but contained. The God Mask had made him one of them, temporarily, but no false god could challenge two of the Three for long. To win, Kahl would have to make his transformation permanent. To do that, he would need strength he didn’t have.

Which was why I, his father, offered that to him now. I closed my eyes and, with everything that I was, sent my presence through the ethers of this world and every other.

The swirling, searing forms of Yeine and Nahadoth stopped, startled. Kahl spun within the shell that held him, and I thought that his eyes marked me from within the mask.

Come, I said, though I had no idea whether he could hear my voice. I prayed it, shaping my thoughts around fury, to make sure. My poor Hymn, whom I’d never been able to bless. All the dead of Sky-in-Shadow. Glee and Ahad. And he wanted Itempas, my father? No. It was not difficult to summon a craving for vengeance in my own heart. Then, carefully, I masked this with sorrow. That wasn’t hard to dredge up either.

Come, I said again. You need power, don’t you? I told you to accept your nature. Enefa threw you in a hole somewhere, left you forgotten and forsaken, for me. You cannot forgive me for that. Come, then, and kill me. That should give you the strength you need.

Within his glimmering prison, Kahl stared at me—but I knew I’d baited the trap well. He was Vengeance, and I was the source of his oldest and deepest pain. He could no more resist me than I could a ball of string.

He hissed and flexed what remained of his power, a miniature Maelstrom straining to break free. Then I felt the unstable surge of his elontid nature, amplifying the God Mask and waxing powerful enough that the shell Naha and Yeine had woven around him cracked into smoking fragments. Then he came for me.

This was my gift to him, father to son. The least I could offer, and far less than I should have done.

My Deka; he never wavered, not even when the outermost edges of Kahl’s blurring rage struck and began to shred his skin. We both screamed as our bones snapped, but Deka did not drop me. Not even when Kahl wrapped his arms around both of us, tearing us apart by sheer proximity, in an embrace that he’d probably intended as a parody of love. Perhaps there was even a bit of real love in it. Vengeance was nothing if not predictable.

Which was why, with the last of my strength, I reached into Itempas’s coat, pulled out the dagger coated with Glee Shoth’s blood, and shoved it into Kahl’s heart.

He froze, his green, sharpfold eyes going wide within the God Mask. The power around him went still, as the calm within a storm.

My hands were bleeding, mangled claws, but thankfully they were still the hands of a trickster. I snatched the God Mask from Kahl’s face. This was easy, as he was already dead. As it came away, his face, so like mine, stared at me with empty eyes. Then all three of us began to fall, separating. Kahl slid off the knife as we twisted in the air. I hung on to it by sheer force of will.

But there came a jolt, and I found Yeine leaning into the diminishing plane of my vision.

“Sieh!” Such was her voice that I could hear her even over the great storm. I felt her power gather to heal me.

I shook my head, having no strength to talk. I had enough left, just, to raise the God Mask to my face. I saw her eyes widen when I did this, and she tried to grab my arms. Silly former mortal. If she had used magic, she could have stopped me.

Then the mask was on me.

It was on me.

IT WAS ON ME AND I—

I—

—smiled. Yeine had released me, crying out. I’d hurt her. I hadn’t meant to. We gods just have opposing natures.

She fell, and Deka fell. Yeine would be all right. Deka would not, but that was fine, too. It had been his choice. He had died like a god.

Nahadoth coalesced before me, just beyond the range of my painful, vibrating aura. His face was a study in betrayal. “Sieh,” he said. I had hurt him, too. He looked at me the way he looked at Itempas these days. That was worse than what I’d done to Yeine. I felt sudden pity for my bright father and prayed—to no one in particular—that Nahadoth would forgive him soon.

“What have you done?” he demanded.

Nothing, yet, my dark father.

I won’t say I wasn’t tempted. I had what I’d yearned for. It would be easy, so easy, to go and kill Tempa with the knife, as he had killed Enefa long ago. Easy, too, to absorb the Maelstrom, make the transformation permanent, take Itempas’s place. I could be Naha’s lover in earnest then, and share him with Yeine, and make all of us a new Three. I heard a song promising this in the Maelstrom’s ratcheting scream.

But I was Sieh, the whim and the wind, the Eldest Child and Trickster, source and culmination of all mischief. I would not tolerate being some cheap imitation of another god.

So I turned, the power coming easily as my flesh remembered itself. A beautiful feeling, greater than anything I had ever known, and this wasn’t even real godhood. Closing my eyes, I spread my arms and turned to face the Maelstrom.

“Come,” I whispered with the voice of the universe.

And It came, Its wild substance passing into me through the filter of the God Mask. Remaking me. Fitting me into existence like a puzzle piece—which worked only because Itempas’s temporary absence had left a void. Without that, my presence, a Fourth, would have torn it all apart. In fact, when Itempas next awoke, the sundering would begin.

Thus I raised the knife coated with my son’s blood. There was plenty of Glee’s left, too, I hoped—though really, there was only one way to find that out.

I drove the knife into my breast, and ended myself.

23

In the sky above, just when it seemed the Maelstrom would crush everything, It suddenly winked out of existence, leaving a painful silence.

As I pushed myself up from where I’d been curled on the ground, my hands clamped over my ears, Lord Nahadoth appeared, carrying my brother. Then came Lord Ahad, bringing a newly revived Lord Itempas and a badly wounded Glee Shoth. A moment later, Lady Yeine arrived, bearing Sieh.

I am Shahar Arameri, and I am alone.

I issued an edict to the Consortium, summoning them to Echo, and to this I added a personal invitation for Usein Darr, and any allies that she chose to bring. To make my position clear, I phrased the note thus: To discuss the terms of the Arameri surrender.

Mother always said that if one must do something unpleasant, one should do it wholeheartedly and not waste effort on regret.

I invited representatives from the Litaria as well, and the Merchants’ Guild, and the Farmers’ Collective, and the Order of Itempas. I even summoned a few beggars from Ancestors’ Village, and artists from Shadow’s Promenade. As Lord Ahad was indisposed—he would not leave the bedside of Glee Shoth, who had been healed but slept in deep exhaustion—I included an invitation to several of the gods of Shadow, where they could be located. Most of them, not entirely to my surprise, had remained in the mortal realm as the disaster loomed. It was not the Gods’ War again; they cared about us this time. To wit, Ladies Nemmer and Kitr responded in the affirmative, saying that they would attend.

The Litaria’s involvement meant that all parties could gather quickly, as they sent scriveners forth to assist those mortals who could not hire their own. Within less than a day, Echo played host to several hundred of the world’s officials and influencers, decision makers and exploiters. Not everyone who mattered, of course, and not enough of those who didn’t. But it would do. I had them gather in the Temple, the only space large enough to hold them all. To address them, I stood where my brother and my best friend had shown me how to love. (I could not think of that and function, so I thought of other things instead.)

And then I spoke.

I told everyone there that we, the Arameri, would give up our power. Not to be distributed among the nobles, however, which would only invite chaos and war. Instead, we would give the bulk of our treasury, and management of our armies, to a single new governing body that was to consist of everyone in the room or their designated representatives. The priests, the scriveners, the godlings, the merchants, the nobles, the common folk. All of them. This body—by vote, edict, or whatever method they chose—would rule the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms in our place.

To say that this caused consternation would be understating the case.

I left as soon as the shouting began. Unconscionable for an Arameri ruler, but I no longer ruled. And like most mortals who had been near the Maelstrom that day, my ears were sensitive, still ringing despite my scriveners’ healing scripts. The noise was bad for my health.

So I sought out one of the piers of Echo. A few hadn’t been damaged by the palace’s precipitous flight from ocean to lake. The view from here was of the lakeshore, with its ugly, sprawling survivors’ encampment—not the ocean I craved or the drifting clouds I would never stop missing. But perhaps those were things I should never have gotten used to in the first place.

A step behind me. “You actually did it.”

I turned to find Usein Darr standing there. A thick bandage covered her left eye and that side of her face; one of her hands had been splinted. There were probably other injuries hidden by her clothing and armor. For once I saw none of Wrath’s constantly hovering guards about, but Usein did not have a knife in her good hand, which I took as a positive sign.

“Yes,” I said, “I did it.”

“Why?”

I blinked in surprise. “Why are you asking?”

She shook her head. “Curiosity. A desire to know my enemy. Boredom.”

By my training, I should never have smiled. I did it anyway, because I no longer cared about my training. And because, I was certain, it was what Deka would have done. Sieh, I suspected, would have gone a step further, because he always went a step further. Perhaps he would have offered to babysit her children. Perhaps she would even have let him.

“I’m tired,” I said. “The whole world isn’t something one woman should bear on her shoulders—not even if she wants to. Not even if she has help.” And I no longer did.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

She fell silent, and I turned back to the railing as a light breeze, redolent of algae and rotting crops and human sorrow, wafted over the lake from the land beyond. The sky was heavily overcast as if threatening a thunderstorm, but it had been so for days without rain. The lords of the sky were in mourning for their lost child; we would not see the sun or the stars for some time.

Let Usein knife me in the back, if she wished. I truly did not care.

“I am sorry,” she said at length. “About your brother, and your mother, and…” She trailed off. We could both see the Tree’s corpse in the distance; it blocked the mountains that had once marked the horizon. From here, Sky was nothing more than tumbled white jewels around its broken crown.

“ ‘I was born to change this world,’ ” I whispered.

“Pardon?”

“Something the Matriarch—the first Shahar—reportedly said.” I smiled to myself. “It isn’t a well-known quote outside the family, because it was blasphemous. Bright Itempas abhors change, you see.”

“Hmm.” I suspected she thought I was mad. That was fine, too.

After a time, Usein left, probably returning to the Temple to battle for Darr’s fair share of the future. I should have gone, too. The Arameri were, if nothing else, the royal family of the numerous and fractious tribes of the Amn race. If I did not fight for my people, we might be shortchanged in the time to come.

So be it, I decided, and hitched up my gown to sit against the wall.

It was Lady Yeine who found me next.

She appeared quietly, seated on the railing I had just leaned against. Though she looked the same as always—relentlessly Darren—her clothing had changed. Instead of pale gray, the tunic and calf-pants she usually wore were darker in color. Still gray, but a color that matched the lowering stormclouds above. She did not smile, her eyes olive with sorrow.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

If one more person, mortal or god, asked me that question, I was going to scream.

“What are you doing here?” I asked in return. An impertinent question, I knew, for the god to whom my family now owed its allegiance. I would never have dared it with Lord Itempas. Yeine was less intimidating, however, so she would have to deal with the consequences of that.

“An experiment,” she said. (I was privately relieved that my rudeness did not seem to bother her.) “I am leaving Nahadoth and Itempas alone together for a while. If the universe comes apart again, I’ll know I made a mistake.”

If my brother had not been dead, I would have laughed. If her son had not been dead, I think she would have, too.

“Will you release him?” I asked. “Itempas?”

“It has already been done.” She sighed, drawing up one knee and resting her chin on it. “The Three are whole again, if not wholly united, and not exactly rejoicing at our reconciliation. Perhaps because there is no reconciliation; that will take an age of the world, I imagine. But who knows? It has already gone faster than I expected.” She shrugged. “Perhaps I’m wrong about the rest, too.”

I considered the histories I had read. “He was to be punished for as long as the Enefadeh. Two thousand years and some.”

“Or until he learned to love truly.” She said nothing more. I had seen Itempas weep beside the body of his son, silent tear tracks cleansing the blood and dirt from his face. This had been nothing meant for a mortal’s eyes, but he had permitted me to see it, and I was keenly conscious of the honor. At the time, I’d had no tears of my own.

And I had seen Lord Itempas put a hand on the shoulder of Lord Nahadoth, who knelt beside Sieh’s corpse without moving. Nahadoth had not shaken that hand off. By such small gestures are wars ended.

“We will withdraw,” Lady Yeine said, after a time of silence. “Naha and Tempa and I, completely this time. There is much work to be done, repairing the damage that the Maelstrom did. It takes all our strength to hold the realms together, even now. The scar of Its passage will never fade completely.” She sighed. “And it has finally become clear to me that our presence in the mortal realm does too much harm, even when we try not to interfere. So we will leave this world to our children—the godlings, if they wish to stay, and you mortals, too. And the demons, if there are any left or any more born.” She shrugged. “If the godlings get out of hand, ask the demons to keep them in line. Or do it yourselves. None of you are powerless anymore.”

I nodded slowly. She must have guessed my thoughts, or read them in my face. I was slipping.

“He loved you,” she said softly. “I could tell. You drove him half mad.”

At that, I did smile. “The feeling was mutual.”

We sat then, gazing at the clouds and the lake and the broken land, both of us thinking unimaginable thoughts. I was glad for her presence. Datennay tried, and I was growing to care for him, but it was hard to keep the pain at bay some days. The Mistress of Life and Death, I feel certain, understood that.

When she got to her feet, I did, too, and we faced each other. Her tiny size always surprised me. I thought she should have been like her brothers, tall and terrible, showing some hint of her magnificence in her shape. But that was what I got for thinking like an Amn.

“Why did it begin?” I asked. And because I was used to how gods thought and that question could have triggered a conversation about anything from the universe to the Gods’ War and everything in between, I added, “Sieh. How did we make him mortal? Why did we have such power over him, with him? Was it because…” It was difficult for me to admit, but I’d had the scriveners test me, and they had confirmed my suspicions. I was a demon, though the god-killing potency of my blood was negligible, and I had no magic, no specialness. Mother would have been so disappointed.

“It had nothing to do with you,” Yeine said softly. I blinked. She looked away, sliding her hands into her pockets—a gesture that tore at my heart, because Sieh had done it so often. He’d even looked like her, a little. By design? Knowing him, yes.

“But what—”

“I lied,” she said, “about us staying wholly out of the mortal realm. There will be times in the future when we’ll have no choice but to return. It will be our task to assist the godlings, you see, when the time of metamorphosis comes upon them. When they become gods in their own right.”

I jerked in surprise. “Become… what? Like Kahl?”

“No. Kahl sought to force nature. He wasn’t ready for it. Sieh was.” She let out a long sigh. “I didn’t begin to understand until Tempa said that whatever Sieh had become, he was meant to become. His bond with you, losing his magic—perhaps these are the signs we’ll know to watch for next time. Or perhaps those were unique to Sieh. He was the oldest of our children, after all, and the first to reach this stage.” She looked at me and shrugged. “I would have liked to see the god he became. Though I still would have lost him then, even if he’d lived.”

I digested this in wonder and felt a little fear at the implications. Godlings could grow into gods? Did that mean gods, then, could grow into things like the Maelstrom? If they could somehow live long enough, would mortals become godlings?

Too many things to think about. “What do you mean, you would have lost him if he’d lived?”

“This realm can abide only three gods. If Sieh had survived and become whatever he was meant to be, his fathers and I would have had to send him away.”

Death or exile. Which would I have preferred? Neither. I want him back, and Deka, too. “But where could he have gone?”

“Elsewhere.” She smiled at my look, with a hint of Sieh’s mischief. “Did you think this universe was all there was? There’s room out there for so much more.” Her smile faded then, just a little. “He would have enjoyed the chance to explore it, too, as long as he didn’t have to do it alone.”

The Goddess of Earth looked at me then, and suddenly I understood. Sieh, Deka, and I; Nahadoth, Yeine, and Itempas. Nature is cycles, patterns, repetition. Whether by chance or some unknowable design, Deka and I had begun Sieh’s transition to adulthood—and perhaps, when the chrysalis of his mortal life had finally split to reveal the new being, he would not have transformed alone.

Would I have wanted to go with him and Deka, to rule some other cosmos?

Just dreams now, like broken stone.

Yeine dusted off her pants, stretched her arms above her head, and sighed. “Time to go.”

I nodded. “We will continue to serve you, Lady, whether you’re here or not. What prayers shall we say for you at the dawn and twilight hour?”

She threw me an odd look, as if checking to see if I was joking. I wasn’t. This seemed to surprise and unnerve her; she laughed, though it sounded a bit forced.

“Say whatever you want,” she said finally. “Someone might be listening, but it won’t be me. I have better things to do.”

She vanished.

Eventually I wandered back into the palace, and to the Temple, where the assembly was breaking up at last. Merchants and nobles and scriveners drifted down the hall in knots, still arguing with each other. They ignored me completely as I came to the Temple entrance.

“Thanks for leaving,” said Lady Nemmer as she emerged looking thoroughly disgruntled. “We got exactly one thing done, aside from setting a date for a future useless meeting.”

I smiled at her annoyance; she scowled back, the room growing oddly shadowed. But she wasn’t really angry, so I asked, “And the thing you got done was?”

“We chose a name.” She waved a hand, irritable. “A pretentious and needlessly poetic one, but the mortals outnumbered Kitr and I, so we couldn’t vote it down. Aeternat. It’s one of our words. It means—”

I cut her off. “I don’t need to know, Lady Nemmer. Please convey to whoever’s speaking for this Aeternat that they should inform me when they’re ready for the transfer of military command and funds.”

She looked at me in real surprise, then finally nodded. We turned at the sound of someone calling my name from down the corridor: Datennay. He’d sat in on the Aeternat’s session. I would have to quickly dissuade him from doing that, now that he was my husband. Beyond him was Ramina, who watched me with a solemn sorrow in his expression that I understood completely. He caught my eye over the heads of a gaggle of shouting priests and smiled, however, inclining his head in approval. It warmed me. I would need to have his true sigil removed sometime soon.

And I would need to send a note to Morad, I reminded myself. She’d quit her position and gone home to southern Senm, to no one’s surprise. I still hoped to entice her back eventually; competent stewards were hard to find. I would not press Morad, however. She deserved the time and space to mourn in her own way.

While Datennay approached, I inclined my head to Nemmer in farewell. “Welcome to ruling the world, Lady Nemmer. I wish you enjoyment of it.”

She spoke a godword so foul that one of the nearby lanterns turned to melted metal-and-oil sludge and crashed to the floor. As I walked away, I heard her cursing again—in some mortal tongue this time, more softly, as she bent to clean up the mess.

Datennay met me halfway down the hall. He hesitated before offering me his hand. Once, I had discouraged him from displaying affection in public. Now, however, I took his hand firmly, and he blinked in surprise, flashing a smile.

“These people are all mad,” I said. “Take me away from here.”

As we walked away, something pulsed hot between my breasts, and I remembered I had forgotten to tell Lady Yeine about the necklace we’d found on Sieh’s body. The cord had been broken, half the smaller beads lost to whatever had snapped it, but the central bead—the peculiar yellow one—was fine. It was surprisingly heavy, and sometimes, if I was not imagining things, it became oddly warm to the touch. I had put the thing on a chain around my own neck, because I felt better wearing it. Less alone.

Lady Yeine would not mind if I kept it, I decided. Then I stroked the little sphere as if to comfort it, and walked on.