The Kingdom of Gods (53 page)

A lick of something, like fire without pain. The world breathed through both of us, quickening —

At this point, Ahad noticed me and knocked my hand away, glaring. I smiled back. “So you’ve found your nature?”

His glare became a frown so guarded that I couldn’t tell whether he was confused or just annoyed again. Had I guessed correctly, or had he not realized what he was feeling? Or both?

Then something else occurred to me. I opened my mouth to breathe his scent, tasting the familiar disturbed ethers as best I could with my atrophied senses. Particularly around that flower. Yes, I was sure.

“Glee’s been here,” I said, thoughtful. She had worn the flower in her hair, to judge by the scent. I could tell more than that, actually — such as the fact that she and Ahad had recently made love. Was that what had him in such a mood? I held off on teasing him about this, however, because he already looked ready to smite.

“Weren’t you going somewhere?” he asked, pointedly and icily. His eyes turned darker, and the air around us rippled in blatant warning.

“Back to Sky, please,” I said, and before I finished the sentence, he’d thrown me across existence. I chuckled as I detached from the world, though he would hear it and my laughter would only piss him off. But Ahad had his revenge. I appeared ten feet
above the daystone floor, in one of the most remote areas of the underpalace. The fall broke my wrist, which forced me to walk half an hour for a healing script from the palace scriveners.

There had been no progress on determining who had sent the assassins, the scriveners informed me in terse, monosyllabic responses when I questioned them. (They had not forgotten that I’d killed their previous chief, but there was no point in my apologizing for it.) They were hard at work, however, determining how the masks functioned. In the vast, open laboratory that housed the palace’s fifty or so scriveners, I could see that several of the worktables had been allocated to the crimson mask pieces, and an elaborate framework had been set up to house the white mask. I did not see the mortal to whom the white mask had been attached, but it was not difficult to guess his fate. Most likely the scriveners had the corpse somewhere more private, dissecting it for whatever secrets it might hold.

Once my wrist was done, I returned to my quarters and stuffed the clothes and toiletries Morad had given me into Hymn’s satchel and was thus packed.

The sun had set while I did my business in Shadow. Night brought forth Sky’s glow in unmarked stillness. I left my room, feeling inexplicably restless, and wandered the corridors. I could have opened a wall, gone into the dead spaces, but those weren’t wholly mine anymore; I did not want them now. The servants and highbloods I passed in the corridors noticed me, and some recognized me, but I ignored their stares. I was only one murderous god, and a paltry one at that. Once, four had walked the halls. These mortals didn’t know how lucky they were.

Eventually I found myself in the solarium, the Arameri’s private garden. It was a natural thing to follow the white-pebbled path through the manicured trees. After a time I reached the foot of the narrow white spire that jutted up from the palace’s heart. The stairway door was not locked, as it had normally been in the old days, so I climbed the tight, steep twist of steps until I emerged onto the Altar — the flattened, enclosed top of the spire where, for centuries, the Arameri had conducted their Ritual of Succession.

Here I sat on the floor. Countless mortals had died in this chamber, spending their lives to wield the Stone of Earth and transfer the power of gods from one Arameri generation to the next. The spire was empty now, as dusty and disused as the underpalace. I supposed the Arameri did their successions elsewhere. The hollow plinth that had once stood at the center of the room was gone, shattered on the day Yeine and the Stone became one. The crystal walls had been rebuilt, the cracked floors repaired, but there was a still lifelessness to the room that I did not remember feeling during the days of my incarceration.

I pulled En off its chain and set it on the floor before me, rolling it back and forth and remembering what it had felt like to ride a sun. Aside from that, I thought of nothing. Thus I was as ready as I could have been when the daystone floor suddenly changed, brightening just a little. The room felt more alive, too.

He had always had that effect, in the old days.

I looked up. The glow of the daystone made for a nice reflection in the glass, so it was easy to see the two figures behind me:
Glee and someone the same height. Broader. Male. Glee nodded to me in the reflection, then vanished, leaving the two of us alone.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hello, Sieh,” said Itempas.

I waited, then smiled. “No ‘It’s been a while,’ or ‘You’re looking well’?”

“You aren’t looking well.” He paused. “Does it seem a long time to you?”

“Yes.” It wouldn’t have, before I’d turned mortal. He had been mortal for a century himself, though; he understood.

Footsteps, heavy and precise, approached me from behind. Something moved on the periphery of my vision. For an instant I thought he would sit beside me, but that would have been too strange for both of us. He walked past me and stopped at the edge of the Altar, gazing through the glass at the night-dark, branch-shrouded horizon beyond.

I gazed at his back. He wore a long leather coat that had been bleached almost white. His white hair was long, too, twisted into a heavy mane of thick cords, like Teman cable-locks but bare of ornamentation other than a clasp that kept them neat and controlled. White trousers and shirt.
Brown
boots. I found myself perversely pleased that he’d been unable to find boots in white.

“I will, of course, accept Nahadoth’s offer,” he said. “If it is within my power to heal you, or at least stop your aging, I will do all I can.”

I nodded. “Thanks.”

He returned the nod. Though he faced the horizon, his eyes
were on me in the glass reflection. “You intend to stay with these mortals?”

“I suppose. Ahad wants me to keep him informed of what the Arameri are doing.” Then I remembered. “Of course,
you’re
Ahad’s boss, so …”

“You may stay.” His gaze was intent, lacking none of its old power despite his mortal condition. “And you
should
stay, to be near the mortals you love.”

I frowned at him. His eyes flicked away from mine. “Their lives are too brief,” he added. “One should not take that time for granted.”

He meant Glee’s mother. And perhaps the first Shahar Arameri, too. He had loved her despite her obsessive, destructive madness.

“How do you feel about the Arameri dumping you?” I asked, a bit nastily. I didn’t have the energy for real nastiness. I was just trying to change the subject.

I heard the creak of leather and the rasp of hair as he shrugged. “They are mortal.”

“No tears shed, hmm?” I sighed, lying back on the stone and stretching my arms above my head. “The whole world will follow them, you know, and turn away from you. It’s already happening. Maybe they’ll keep calling it the Bright, but it’ll really be the Twilight.”

“Or the Dawn.”

I blinked. Something I hadn’t considered. That made me sit up on one elbow and narrow my eyes at him. He stood the way he always had: legs apart, arms folded, motionless. Same old Dayfather, even in mortal flesh. He did not change.

Except.

“Why did you allow Glee Shoth to live?” I asked.

“For the same reason I allowed her mother to live.”

I shook my head in confusion. “Oree Shoth? Why would you have killed her?” I scowled. “She wouldn’t put up with your shit, is that it?”

If I hadn’t been watching him in the glass, I would never have believed what I saw. He
smiled
. “She wouldn’t, no. But that wasn’t what I meant. She was also a demon.”

This rendered me speechless. In the silence that fell, Itempas finally turned to me. I flinched in shock, even though he looked the same as the last time I’d seen him, apart from the hair and the clothes. And yet something about him — something I could not define — was different.

“Do you plan to kill Remath Arameri and her children?” he asked.

I stiffened. He knew. I said nothing, and he nodded, point made.

Suddenly I was full of nervous tension. I got to my feet, shoving En into a pocket. The Altar was too small for real pacing, but I tried anyway, walking over to him — and then I stopped, seeing my own reflection beside his in the glass. He turned, too, following my gaze, and we looked at ourselves. Me, short and wiry and defensive and confused. I had developed a slouch in my manifest maturity, mostly because I did not like being so tall. Him: big and powerful and elegant, as he had always been. Yet his eyes were so full of knowing and yearning that almost, almost, I wanted him to be my father again.

Almost, almost, I forgave him.

But that could not be, either. I hunched and looked away. Itempas lowered his eyes, and a long, solid silence formed in the enclosed space.

“Tell Glee to come back and get you,” I said at last, annoyed. “I’ve said all I’m going to say.”

“Glee is mortal, and I have no magic. We cannot speak as gods do; we must use words. And actions.”

I frowned. “What, then, you’re staying here?”

“And traveling with you to the new palace, yes.”

“Yeine will be here, too.” At this I clenched my fists and resumed pacing, in tight angry arcs. “Oh, but you must know that. You came here for her.” The two of them, entwined, his lips on the nape of her neck. I forced this image from my mind.

“No. I came for you.”

Words. Actions.

Both meaningless. They should not have made my throat clench the way they did. I fought them with anger, glaring at his back. “I could call Naha. I could ask him to kill you over and over, until you beg to truly die.” And because I was a brat, I added, “He’ll do it, too, for me.”

“Is that truly what you wish?”

“Yes! I’d do it myself if I could!”

To my surprise, Itempas pivoted and came toward me, opening his coat. When he reached into one of the inner-breast pockets, I tensed, ready to fight. He pulled out a sheathed dagger, and I grabbed for En. But then he handed the dagger to me, hilt-first. It was a small, light thing, I found when I took it; a
child’s weapon, in those parts of the world where mortals gave their children sharp toys. Not altogether different from the dagger I’d used to damage Shahar’s innocence, ten years before — except this dagger was strapped securely into the leather sheath, held in place by a loop about the guardpiece. No one would be able to draw this blade by accident.

As I turned the thing in my fingers, wondering why in his own name Itempas had given it to me, my nose caught the faint whiff of old, dried blood.

“A gift from Glee,” he said. “To me. If death ever becomes preferable to living.”

I knew what it was, then.
The gift of mortality
, Enefa had called it. Glee’s blood was on the knife — her terrifying, poisonous demon blood. She had given Itempas a way out of his imprisonment, if he ever found the courage to take it.

My hand clenched convulsively around the knife’s hilt. “If you ever use this, the mortal realm will die.”

“Yes.”

“
Glee
will die.”

“If she hasn’t already died by then, yes.”

“Why would she give this to you?”

“I don’t know.”

I stared at him. He wasn’t being deliberately obtuse. He must have asked her. Either he hadn’t believed her answer, or — more likely, given how much she’d taken after him — she hadn’t bothered to answer. And he had accepted her silence.

Then he knelt before me, flicking his coat behind himself in the process, so that it spread out gracefully along the white
stone floor. He lifted his head, too, partly because he was an arrogant son of a demon and partly to give me easy access to his chest and throat. Such a handsome, proud offering.

“Bastard,” I said, clenching my fist around the knife hilt. Death. I held the death of the universe in my fist. “Arrogant, selfish, evil
bastard
.”

Itempas merely waited. The knife was small, but I could angle it just so, get it between the ribs easily to prick his heart. Hells, if Oree Shoth had been a demon, too, then her daughter was more than half god. Even a scratch tainted with her blood might do the trick.

I unfastened the loop, but my fingers were shaking. When I took the hilt in my hand to draw it, I couldn’t. My hands just wouldn’t move. Eventually I let them — and the dagger — drop to my sides.

“If you want me to die —” he began.

“Shut up,” I whispered.

“Shut up, gods damn you. I hate you.”

“If you hate me —”

“Shut up!”
He fell silent, and I cursed and threw the dagger to the floor between us. The sound of leather on daystone made an echoing
crack
from the chamber’s walls. I had begun to cry. I raked my hands through my hair. “Just shut up, all right? Gods, you’re so insufferable! You can’t
make me
choose something like that! I’ll hate you if I damn well please!”

“All right.” His voice was soft, soothing. Against my will, I remembered times — rare but precious — when we had sat together in his placid realm, watching time dance. I had always been conscious of the fact that he and I would never be friends.
Lovers was out of the question. But father and son? That much we could do.