“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 fe
eling, 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.
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