The Kingdom of Gods (61 page)

Wrath was gone, though his soldiers were present, guarding the doors and the balcony. It had been his suggestion to gather all the highbloods together; easier to guard. While we waited for him to say when we could leave — no time soon, I gathered — some servant had brought the large seeing sphere from the scriveners’ storage, setting it up on the room’s single long table.
Through this, we were able to behold the ominous stillness in the streets of Shadow.

“Are they waiting for something?” asked a woman who bore a halfblood mark. She stood near Ramina. He put a comforting hand on her back while she stared at the hovering image.

“Some signal, perhaps,” he replied. For once, he was not smiling. But long minutes passed, and there was no movement on the part of the maskers. The person panning the sphere stood atop the Salon’s steps. On either end of the arc swing we could glimpse Arameri soldiers, clad in the white armor of the Hundred Thousand Legions, hastily setting up barricades and preparing for a defensive battle. Even in such brief glimpses, however, we saw enough to despair. The bulk of the Arameri army was outside the city, in a vast complex of permanent barracks and bases stationed a half day’s ride away. Everyone had assumed that the attack, when it came, would be from beyond the city. The army was no doubt marching and riding and gating into the city as fast as it could now, but those of us who had seen the maskers in action knew that it would take more than soldiers to stop them.

I turned to Shahar, who stood on one of the elevated tiers around the chamber’s edge. She had wrapped her arms around herself as if cold; her expression was too blank to be intentional. In the whole room, where her relatives clustered in twos and threes and comforted each other, she stood alone.

I considered for a moment, then stepped away from Deka and went to her. Her head turned sharply toward me as I approached. She was not at all in shock. A subtle shift transformed her
posture from the lost girl of a moment before to the cold queen who had tried to enslave her brother. But I saw the wariness in her. She had lost that battle.

Deka watched me go to her but did not join us.

“Shouldn’t you contact Remath?” I asked. I kept my tone neutral.

She relaxed fractionally, acknowledging my unspoken offer of truce. “I’ve tried. Mother hasn’t answered.” She looked away, through the translucent walls, at the lowering sun. West, toward Sky. “There’s no point, in any case. The army is there and under Mother’s command as it should be, along with the bulk of the scrivener and assassin corps and the nobles’ private forces. Echo is barely functional and understaffed as it is. We have no help to offer.”

“Not all support must be material, Shahar.” It still felt strange to remember that Remath and Shahar loved each other. I would never get used to Arameri behaving like normal people.

She glanced at me again, not so sharply this time. Considering. Then Ramina said, “Something’s happening,” and we all grew tense.

There was a blur in the air, a few feet above and to one side of the image we’d been watching. The soldiers reached for their weapons. The highbloods gasped and one cried out. Deka and the other scriveners tensed, some pulling out premade, partially drawn sigils.

Then the image resolved, and we saw Remath. The image was angled oddly — over her shoulder and slightly behind her. The sphere must have been set into her stone seat.

Facing her, in Sky’s audience chamber, was Usein Darr.

Shahar caught her breath and moved down the steps, as if she meant to step through the image and aid her mother. The soldiers in Sky’s audience chamber had drawn their weapons, swords and pikes and crossbows. They did not attack, however. Remath must have warned them off, though two of her guards, Darre women, had moved to stand between Remath and Usein, crouching with hands on their knives. Usein stood proud and fearless at the center of the room, ignoring the guards. She had come unarmed, though she did wear traditional Darre battle dress: a leather-wrapped waist, a heavy fur mantle that marked her as a battlefield commander, and armor made of thin plates of flakespar — a light, strong material the Darre had invented a few decades back. She looked taller when she wasn’t pregnant.

“I take it we have you to thank for the spectacle below,” said Remath. She drawled the words, sounding amused.

Usein inclined her head. I thought she would speak in Darre, given her nationalism, but she used clear, ringing Senmite instead. “It is not our preferred way of doing battle, we in the north. To use magic, even our own, feels cowardly.” She shrugged. “But you Arameri do not fight fair.”

“True,” said Remath. “Well, then. I expect you have demands?”

“Simple ones, Arameri.” Family name only was the way Darre addressed formidable opponents, a mark of respect by her terms. To Amn, of course, it was blatant disrespect. “I — and my allies, who would be here if it had not taken all our dimmers and magicians to get even one person through your barriers — demand that your family give up its power and all trappings thereof. Your treasury: fifty percent of it is to be given to the Nobles’ Consortium, to be distributed equally among the nations of the world.
Thirty percent will go to the Order of Itempas and all established faiths that offer public services. You may retain twenty percent. You may no longer address the Nobles’ Consortium. It is for them to say whether Sky-in-Shadow can retain its representative. Disband your army and distribute its generals among the kingdoms; relinquish your scriveners and spies and assassins and all your other little toys.” Her eyes flicked toward the Darre guards, full of contempt. I did not see whether the women reacted to this or not. “Send your son back to the Litaria; you don’t want him anyway.” (Nearby, Deka’s jaw flexed.) “Send your daughter to foster in some other kingdom for ten years so that she can learn the ways of some people other than you murderous, high-handed Amn. I will leave the choice of kingdom to you.” She smiled thinly. “But Darr would welcome her and treat her with such respect as she is capable of earning.”

“
Like hells
will I live among those tree-swinging barbarians,” snapped Shahar, and the other highbloods murmured in angry agreement.

Usein went on. “In short, we demand that the Arameri become just another family and leave the world to rule itself.” She paused, looking around. “Oh. And leave this palace. Sky’s presence profanes the Lady’s Tree — and frankly, the rest of us are tired of looking up at you. You will henceforth dwell on the ground, where mortals belong.”

Remath waited a moment after Usein fell silent. “Is that all?”

“For now.”

“May I ask a question?”

Usein lifted an eyebrow. “You may.”

“Are you responsible for the murders of my family members?” Remath spoke lightly, but only a fool would not have heard the threat underneath. “
You
in the plural, obviously.”

For the first time, Usein looked unhappy. “That was not our doing. Wars of assassination are not our way.” Left unspoken was that wars of assassination were very much the Amn way.

“Whose, then?”

“Kahl.” Usein smiled, but it was bleak. “Kahl Avenger, we call him — a godling. He has been of great help to us, me and my forbears and our allies, but it has since become clear that this served his own agenda. He merely used us. We have broken ways with him, but I’m afraid the damage is done.” She paused, her jaw tightening briefly. “He has killed my husband and numerous members of our Warriors’ Council. Perhaps that will seem a consolation to you.”

Remath shook her head. “Murder is never a thing to be celebrated.”

“Indeed.” Usein regarded Remath for a long moment, then bowed to her. It was not a deep bow, but the respect in the gesture was plain. An apology, unspoken. “Kahl has been declared an enemy by the peoples of the north. But that does not negate our quarrel with you.”

“Naturally.” Remath paused, then inclined her head, a show of great respect in Amn terms, since the ruler of the Amn had no need to bow to anyone. By Darre standards, it was probably an insult.

“Thank you for your honesty,” Remath added. “Now, as to the rest, your demands regarding my family: no.”

Usein raised her eyebrows. “That’s all? ‘No’?”

“Were you expecting anything else?” I could not see Remath’s face well, but I guessed that she smiled.

Usein did, too. “Not really, no. But I must warn you, Arameri: I speak for the people of this world. Not all of them would agree with me, I will admit, as they have spent too many centuries under your family’s control. You have all but crushed the spirit of mortalkind. It is for their sake that I and my allies will now fight to revive it — and we will not be merciful.”

“Are you certain that’s what you want?” Remath sat back, crossing her legs. “The spirit of mortalkind is contentious, Usein-ennu. Violent, selfish. Without a strong hand to guide it, this world will not know peace again for many, many centuries. Perhaps ever.”

Usein nodded, slowly. “Peace is meaningless without freedom.”

“I doubt the children who starved to death, before the Bright, would agree.”

Usein smiled again. “And I doubt the races and heretics your family have destroyed would consider the Bright
peace
.” She made a small gesture of negation with her hand. “Enough. I have your answer, and you will soon have mine.” She lifted a small stone that bore a familiar mark. A gate sigil. She closed her eyes, and a flicker later she was gone.

The lower image — of Shadow and the silent maskers — jolted abruptly, drawing our eyes. There was a brief blur of motion, which grew still as the soldier who held the sphere set it down. We saw him then, a young man in heavy armor marked with seven sigils: one on each limb, one on his helmet, one on his torso, and one on his back. Simple magic of protection. He
held a pike at the ready, as did the other men — all in the same armor — that we could see. Their armor was white. I suppose Remath hadn’t gotten around to reequipping her army to symbolize the family’s new divine allegiance.

And beyond them, the maskers had begun to move. Slowly, silently, they walked toward the soldiers that we could see. I could only assume that beyond the image, the scene was being repeated throughout Shadow. All of the masks that we could see, in every color, were tilted upward, paying no attention to the soldiers before them. Fixed on Sky.

“How does she command them?” Deka murmured, frowning as he peered at the image. “We were never able to determine …”

His musings were drowned out by noise from both images. Out of view, someone shouted to the soldiers, and the battle began as volleys of crossbow bolts shot toward the masked ranks. Already we could see that the bolts did almost nothing. The maskers continued forward with arrows jutting from chests, legs, abdomens. A handful went down as their masks were split or cracked, but not enough. Not nearly enough.

In the higher image, Remath barked orders to the soldiers in her audience chamber. We saw hurried movement, chaos. Amid this, however, Remath rose from her throne and turned to face it. She leaned forward and touched something we could not see.

“Shahar.” Shahar started, coming forward. “Mother? You must come here, of course. We are ready to accommodate —”

“No.” Her quiet negative struck Shahar silent, but Remath smiled. She was calmer than I had ever seen her. “I have had dreams,” she said, speaking softly. “I’ve always had them, for
whatever reason, and they have always, always, come true. I have dreamt this day.”

I frowned in confusion. Dreams that came true? Was that even possible for mortals? Remath
was
a godling’s granddaughter …

In the image below her face, the maskers charged forward, running now. The sphere’s range was too small to capture more than a segment of chaos. For brief stretches there was nothing to see, interspersed with blurring glimpses of shouting men and still, inhuman faces. We barely noticed. Shahar stared at her mother, her face written with anguish as if there were no one else in the room, nothing else that she cared about. I put a hand on her shoulder because for a moment it looked as though she might climb onto the table to reach Remath. Her shoulder, beneath my hand, was taut and trembling with suppressed tension.

“You must
come here
, Mother,” she said tightly. “No matter what you’ve seen in some dream—”

“I have seen Sky fall,” said Remath, and Shahar jerked beneath my hand. “And I have seen myself die with it.”

In the other image, the one in the large sphere, there were screams. A sudden loud concussion that I thought might have been an explosion. And suddenly the sphere was jostled from its place, falling toward the Salon steps. We heard the crunch as it broke, and then the image vanished. The other image — Remath’s image — shuddered a moment later, and she looked around as people exclaimed in alarm behind her. They had felt the explosion, too.

“Why did you have the Lady build Echo, if not to come here?” Shahar was shaking her head as she spoke, wordless
negation despite her effort to speak reasonably.
“Why would you do this, Mother?”

“I have dreamt of more than Sky.” Remath suddenly looked away from Shahar, her gaze settling on me and Deka. “I have seen
all existence
fall, Lord Sieh. Sky is merely the harbinger. Only you can stop it. You and Shahar and you, my son. All three of you are the key. I built Echo to keep you safe.”

“Mother,” said Deka in a strained voice. “This —”

She shook her head. “There’s no time.” She paused suddenly, looking away as a soldier came close and murmured to her. At her nod, he hurried away, and she looked at us again, smiling. “They are climbing the Tree.”