The Kingdom of Gods (60 page)

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.

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.