The Kingdom of Gods (27 page)

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I
T
SHOULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED
.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My lord —” she began.

“
Lord?
” I spat this, folding my arms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I did not understand, you see. What it meant to be mortal — relentlessly, constantly, without recourse to the soothing aethers and rarefied dimensions that are the proper housing for my kind. Years passed before I realized that to be bound to mortal flesh is more than just magical or physical weakness; it is a degradation of the mind and soul. And I did not handle it well, those first few centuries. So easy to endure pain and pass on in turn to those weaker
than oneself. So easy to look into the eyes of someone who trusted me to protect him — and hate him, because I could not.

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