by Erin Evans
Mehen considered the sagging scales around her eyes, her tight jaw. “You think he’s going to manage it.”
She shrugged. “He must,” she said, her voice thick. “We’re doomed elsewise. I know you were too busy making eyes with Arjhani in tactics lessons—”
“First off, I paid attention fine,” Mehen said. “Second, a plague-addled hatchling could see the trouble we’re in. No one in that conclave has a notion beyond doing what we’ve always done. We’ve gotten complacent and soft. An army full of demons, led by a man that calls himself a god—what are we going to do? Aerial strikes? A cavalry press? No one’s come up with a plan, because there’s nothing we know that will work, and testing the old ways means we risk killing our own. That leaves Dumuzi and his god of the lightning storms.”
Uadjit sighed. “It’s worse than that. That storm … the Second Blue Fire or the Rending or whatever you want to call it, that’s not the last of it. What the wizard noticed, it’s still the case—I talked to Kanjentellequor’s wizards when I went to see how they were voting. The planes are unstable. It’s likely to happen again. And we don’t have a way to prevent it, nor do we have a way to protect ourselves from it.”
“Except Dumuzi,” Kallan finished, “and his god of lightning storms.”
“Bad enough that he has to convince us all to change our ways,” Uadjit said, “but picture Anala, picture her allies accepting that now we must listen to a Kepeshkmolik hatchling, whose mother is the Vanquisher—now, right now, before the storms unmake us. Tyranny! Dynasty! The undoing of all we stand for! There is no way on any plane that they would see reason in time.
“Arjhani,” she went on more briskly, “will present the same problems from the other angle—my father has a tendency to forget sense when Verthisathurgiesh scrapes his scales—and even still, we’ll have Fenkenkabradon’s continuing tactical control.”
“More cavalry presses and aerial assaults,” Mehen said.
“Which of course assumes anyone can find Arjhani,” Uadjit said, all false cheer, “since he’s still slinking around avoiding anyone who might be a touch upset about him colluding with Fenkenkabradon.”
“How do you know he wasn’t just as surprised as I was?” Kallan asked.
“Because I know Verthisathurgiesh Arjhani,” she said darkly.
Kallan’s nostrils flared, his expression tense. “Narhanna,” he reminded her. Both Uadjit and Mehen snorted.
“Narhanna is an excellent secretary to her uncle,” Uadjit said carefully.
Mehen shook his head. “There is no way she’s not just the first person the Shestandeliath thought of. I suspect he’s kicking himself for that one.”
Kallan rubbed a hand over his face. “There’s a score of clans, and four candidates for Vanquisher? You really think no one will put forth someone else?”
“It’s only for a year and a half,” Uadjit reminded him. “We haven’t needed an interim Vanquisher in forty years, and there’s no clear answer about whether this counts as a term. No one wants to waste their best candidates.”
“Except Narghon,” Mehen pointed out.
Uadjit looked up at him. “I think Narghon knows I’m not truly in the running any longer.”
It was a pity, Mehen thought. For all the frustrations she had caused him, he knew Uadjit to be thoughtful, careful, and with a mind sharp and clear as a cut diamond. She would have made an excellent Vanquisher, among the best Djerad Thymar had ever seen.
“Have you taken up the rattle and altar yet?” Mehen asked.
Uadjit made a face. “Broken planes, no. I’m hoping there’s a way around that.” She glanced over her shoulder, as if her son might be just behind them. “I don’t know,” she allowed, “what’s true and what’s hearsay and what changes from god to god. But the maunthreki get up to some ridiculous things because their gods ask it. Garish robes, talking to statues, horrible off-tune chanting, asking someone who isn’t even there for every little thing.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how Dumuzi’s going to manage it, to be honest.”
“But he has to,” Mehen said, even though he agreed completely. “Could be worse? This Enlil doesn’t seem the sort to want blood sacrifices.”
“You aren’t helping.”
Mehen glanced out the gates of the city, toward the bustle of bodies there, the regiments of soldiers preparing to march toward Djerad Kethendi or to dig in and defend Djerad Thymar at the word of the Vanquisher. Any moment, he thought, they’re going to vote and things will get out of control.
“I was coming to say,” he told Kallan, “we ought to go take a patrol and survey these giants. Find out how many enemies we’re looking at and whether we might convince them to our side. Do you want to come along?”
Kallan gave him a crooked smile. “Have you ever taken down a giant?”
“I said survey,” Mehen pointed out. “We’re all hoping for allies. Even if it would be nice to beat the aithyas out of something that deserved it.”
“Assuming you can actually get close enough. What are you planning to do?” Uadjit demanded. “Steal two of the handful of giant bats we still have?”
“Could be one,” Kallan said, all innocence. “I can ride cozy.”
Uadjit raised a brow ridge. “One bat could hardly carry Mehen when he was eighteen. You’ll ground the karshoji thing a league out, riding together, I don’t care how cozy you get.”
“Horses,” Mehen said. “We’ll take horses.”
“Just the two of you?” Uadjit said.
Mehen folded his arms over his chest. “All right. You want to come along?”
Uadjit regarded him levelly. “As it happens … Narghon wants me to do the same thing. As I said, I’m fairly sure he’s realized I’m not going to be Vanquisher any time soon. Except Dumuzi … I can’t leave him now.”
“Dumuzi will be fine, you know?” Kallan said. “Whatever happens to god-worshiping hatchlings in your clan, that’s not happening to Dumuzi. People might be getting angry, but everyone knows he’s got the ear of a power that can stop the karshoji Blue Fire, plus that shiny black axe you handed down to him—which enough people saw him plant in that demon’s chest. Nobody’s troubling Dumuzi right now if they have any sense. Besides,” he added, “he’s a good hatchling. Worst case, someone’s nasty at him.”
Uadjit regarded Kallan the way she might have a merchant being too effusive about the deal she was getting, and Mehen knew all too well what she must have been thinking. “Did you tell him you were leaving?” he asked.
“Not yet,” she said. “I was rather hoping I wouldn’t need to go.”
Mehen suppressed a sigh. She would have to. He would have to. “We go fetch these giants, maybe we don’t need a god, and Dumuzi can be rid of all that.” And then I can convince them to help me smash Havilar’s prison open.
“Have you ever fought a giant?” Kallan repeated skeptically.
“No one’s fighting them,” Uadjit said. “At least, I doubt it. Gilgeam doesn’t like nonhumans. Why would he have a rearguard made up of giants?”
Kallan shrugged. “Why would he have demons in his army?”
“My guess? He feels he can control the demons. Master them. The maurezhi sounded like it was doing his bidding—or trying to look like it was. I doubt giants come with the same strings.”
“So how you going to pull them in to our side?”
“Can’t be harder than arguing with the Imaskari,” Mehen said. “And more vital to us all.”
“You sound like Narghon.” She glanced back at the city gate. “We’ll miss the Vanquisher vote, you know.”
“I thought that was part of the plan,” Kallan said.
Uadjit gave Mehen a dark look. “Why am I reminded of being goaded into skipping tactics?”
“Because you dragged your heel claws then too. Go tell Dumuzi you’re heading out. If he wants to come along, we’ll have him. I’ll get my things.” Uadjit left them, heading back up the pyramid toward the enclaves. Mehen cast a glance sid
elong at Kallan. “Are you going to run off before I get back?”
Kallan watched Uadjit. “Nah. This hunt’s a little more to my liking. I’m sorry,” he added without looking at Mehen. “For assuming you were on Anala’s side with this. I didn’t … I didn’t want to ask and find out I was right, you know? Not my best quality.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“Better than some,” Kallan teased. “ ’Specially given your idea of courting is riding off into the sunset to fight giants—or better yet, negotiate with them—with a handsome man and his ex-betrothed.”
Mehen turned away, as if he could avoid the compliment by looking out the gates. “I am on Anala’s side a little,” he told him. “At least I don’t think she’s wrong, even if she’s going about it in a pothach way. You’d be a good Vanquisher.”
“Flatterer.”
“I might be out of practice at this, but if that’s how I flatter, then drop me in the karshoji sarcophagus right now.” Mehen shook his head. “You are possibly the only person I know who could talk sense into any of those elders without them closing you out. You make people listen even when they don’t want to—so long as you’re actually talking to them.”
You could be Vanquisher, he thought, and turn the might of this city to my daughter’s safety. But he said none of this. Mehen could wait. Until he couldn’t.
“People only listen to me because I’m not in charge of them,” Kallan said. “Waste all my time delegating, letting people muck things up and arguing, arguing, arguing.” He made a face. “I’m better when I can just get everything done on my own terms and make the ones handing out assignments happy they assigned me. It’s how I get the good coin.”
“You think there was never a Vanquisher who did things like that?”
“I think if there were, he or she spent a karshoji kraken’s load of time getting an earful from prideful elders,” Kallan told him. “Besides, they’d poke me full of holes. Mar this pretty face.”.
• • •
DUMUZI STOOD BEFORE the Hall of Trophies, the passageway that connected the Vanquisher’s Hall and the Adjudicators’ enclave and Lance Defender barracks beyond. Its doors had been closed since the demon had run rampant through it, killing Vanquisher Tarhun and several guards. A white ribbon bound the door handles, themselves shaped from ancient dragon talons.
You surround yourselves with reminders of your time in bondage, the god’s voice noted.
So we don’t forget, Dumuzi thought. How swiftly could a tyrant rise? How dangerous could a usurper be? How quickly could they forget themselves what it meant to be the chattel of the dragon tyrants?
Perilously quickly, the god’s voice said. Flashes of another time, another world, danced before Dumuzi’s eyes, a waking dream. The dark-eyed people who must be Untherans, the first children of Enlil, bound by pale-skinned wizards, calling out for aid. The Untherans again, arguing the prices of slaves coming off a ship. This cannot happen again.
Dumuzi looked up at the doors, at the carvings depicting Vayemniri, with every clan’s piercing carefully etched into the pale stone around them. Wondering if you could fit carvings of dark-eyed humans in between them.
What happens if I can’t convince them? Dumuzi thought. Do you force them?
Silence. That would not help matters. I see that.
This isn’t what you’re supposed to be doing, he thought to himself. You’re supposed to be finding Arjhani.
You don’t like how he preens, Enlil noted. You don’t like how he turns all things to himself.
Dumuzi studied the joints of the stone. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.
“Sorry?” He spun at the voice and found Farideh standing behind him. She put her hands up in a gesture of calm. “We don’t have to talk about anything if—”
“Sorry,” Dumuzi said. He waved vaguely at his own head. “Not you.”
She gave him a pitying sort of smile. “Mehen thought I should come talk to you. About … Chosen and gods and things.”
“That’s kind of you,” Dumuzi said stiffly.
“I don’t know how you convert thousands of Vayemniri,” she went on. “I don’t even know how you convert one.”
“Put him in an impossible situation and let him count the odds,” Dumuzi said dryly.
The moment he said it, a pang of guilt went through Dumuzi. That made it sound like Enlil was nothing but a convenience, a weapon snatched up in the heat of battle. And even if that were true, at the time … now he wasn’t sure he could imagine going back to life before the god began speaking to him—something far more likely to happen if Dumuzi kept thinking things like that.
You forget, Enlil said, I know you better than you think. I understand.
Dumuzi sighed. He understood too—Enlil would be better off with a more dedicated Chosen, but Dumuzi was all he could get.
“Dumuzi?” Farideh frowned at him, as though that hadn’t been the first time she’d called his name.
“Sorry.” Dumuzi rubbed his forehead along the row of his piercings. “Is this what it’s like? For you? I feel as if I’m half in one world and half in another. Every time I sit down, I fall asleep and dream, and even when I’m awake, it’s as if I’m tracking the dream through everything, like guano out of the bat stables.”
Farideh shook her head. “I don’t think Asmodeus is like Enlil. I don’t think he’s like most gods. Except … I suppose except like Azuth.”
“The one the wizard speaks to?”
“I suppose Azuth is more like Enlil in that,” Farideh said. “I only meant they’re intertwined still. Though I don’t know.”
He frowned. “Does he not tell you?”
“I’m not his Chosen anymore,” Farideh reminded him. “She … Bryseis Kakistos took that too.”
Another pang of guilt—how far from this world, from everything he knew to be right, had Dumuzi drifted that he spoke so casually about the crisis that took Havilar away? “I’m sorry,” he said again. “Have you heard anything from Havilar? From Brin?”
“No.” She got a distant sort of look. “Can you ask him questions? Will he answer in a way that makes sense?”
“I suppose,” Dumuzi said. “It works better if I’m sleeping or … I mean, if I’m not entirely here.”
“When I’ve seen Asmodeus,” she said, “there’s … there’s a sort of sigil on him, the way there is on you. I’m guessing, because it’s the name of Azuth, that this is the … spark, let’s say, that made Azuth a god. That’s the thing Asmodeus was trying to consume, but—”
She uses mortal words for immortal things, Enlil murmured. It can run a mind into a mire.
Dumuzi related this. Farideh frowned. “The part of Azuth that Asmodeus needed to become a god. Can we just call it a spark? Or a godhood? Does Enlil have that?”
A flood of singular emotion hit Dumuzi. “Obviously,” he said.
“But he didn’t die, right?” Farideh said. “He was just somewhere else. What if he were dead?”
It remains unless it doesn’t, Enlil said. As the storm comes, the dead wake—unless they don’t.
Dumuzi flinched. “I think he says it depends. It can stay. It can also go out. Whatever is happening with the planes and the gods and things seems to be waking the ones who kept their godhood despite being dead.”
“What if,” Farideh said, “you take the spark out of a god?”
Dumuzi’s chest grew suddenly warmer. That is what makes one Chosen, Enlil said. A fragment of strength, of power, shared out to better anchor us, to spread our words. Dumuzi repeated this, though the notion made him distinctly uncomfortable—deep down he couldn’t deny how little he wanted to be the one spreading any god’s words.
Farideh shook her head. “All of it, I mean. What happens if you take all of that away? Just ripped it out?”
Enlil fell still and silent before answering. “If the spark is removed,” Dumuzi repeated, “or if it dwindles too far, then that is not a god anymore.”
The w
ords left a hollow spot in Dumuzi’s heart. They might have been speaking of Asmodeus and Azuth, but Enlil also meant himself. He had Dumuzi. He had one not-quite-true-believer, one reluctant Chosen dithering over how to approach the rest of the city like a hatchling suggesting his own qallim. That wasn’t a god. He wasn’t even sure what that was.
Farideh sighed. “Thank you. That’s better than I could have found on my own, even if I still don’t quite understand it.”
You’re not meant to understand it, Enlil said gently. Sadly.
“Don’t thank me,” Dumuzi said. “I’m nothing but the translator.”
She peered at him, her mismatched eyes narrowed in puzzlement. “How do I say thank you to Enlil then?”
“I … I don’t know,” Dumuzi said. From Enlil there was only silence for such a long time that Dumuzi began to worry he would have to invent something on his own.
The old words do not suit, the god finally said. I am not as I was, not entirely. The world is not as it was. Tell her these words …
“Prominent one whose words are well-established,” Dumuzi said, “whose words bring comfort like fine oil for the heart, whose command and support are things that are immutable, whose utterances take precedence, whose plans are firm words, Great Mountain, Father Enlil, your praise is sublime!”
Farideh pursed her lips. “I just repeat it?”
“And do this,” Dumuzi said, cupping his hands to his mouth and exhaling hard. Her look grew more skeptical, and Dumuzi had to agree—no one was going to want to do this ritual, but how could he tell Enlil that? What kind of Chosen told his god that his prayers sounded pothach? “Do you think we should work on it?” he asked stiffly.
“I would work on it,” Farideh said. But she repeated the words and the gesture, and in that moment, Dumuzi saw how she was symbolically offering a share of her breath to Enlil, the god with storms in his blood …
A crackle of electricity danced up the scales on Dumuzi’s neck, and all of a sudden he felt a bit light-headed. Farideh looked at him, alarmed. “Are you all right?” she asked.
Are you all right? Dumuzi thought.
Yes—the answer hummed in his blood, firm and forthright, and in it, Dumuzi saw the answer.
