The Kingdom of Gods

I saw Deka struggle for a mature response, which heartened me because it meant that he had not somehow outgrown me at a mere eighteen years. He took a deep breath and moved away from me, running a hand through his hair. Finally he turned to one of the tables in the room and pulled out a large sheet of the thick, bleached paper that scriveners used for their work. He took a brush, inkstone and stick, and reservoir from a nearby table, and said with his back to me, “The way you appeared was gods’ magic.”

“One of my siblings.” Your great-grandfather. Ahad was going to love this.

“Ah.” He prepared the ink, his fingers grinding the sigil-marked inkstone back and forth slowly, meditatively. “Do you think, next time, I’ll be able to summon you to me the way Shahar did?”

He was too tense to even attempt subtlety. I sighed and gave him what he wanted. “There’s only one way to find out, I suppose.”

“May I attempt it? At an appropriate time, of course.”

I leaned against the window again. “Yes.”

“Good.” The tension in his broad shoulders eased, just a touch. He began to sketch the sigil for a gate with quick, decisive movements — stunningly fast, compared to most scriveners I had seen. Every line was perfect. I felt the power of it the instant he drew the final line.

“I may be able to help you.” He said this briskly, with a scrivener’s matter-of-fact detachment. “I can’t promise anything, of course, but the magic I’ve been designing — my body-marking — accesses the potential hidden within an individual. Whatever’s happening to you, you’re still a god. That should give me something to work with.”

“Fine.”

Deka set the sigil on the floor and stepped back. When I went to stand beside it, his expression was as carefully blank as if he stood before Remath. I could not leave things that way between us.

So I took his hand, the one I’d held ten years before, when his demon blood had mingled with mine and failed to kill me. His palm was unmarked, but I remembered where the cut had been. I traced a line across it with a fingertip, and his hand twitched in response.

“I’m glad I came to see you,” I said.

He did not smile. But he did fold his hand around mine for a moment.

“I’m not Shahar, Sieh,” he said. “Don’t punish me for what she did.”

I nodded wearily. Then I let go of him, stepped onto the sigil, and thought of South Root. The world blurred around me, leaping to obey Deka’s command and my will. I savored the momentary illusion of control. Then, when the walls of my room at Hymn’s snapped into place around me, I lay down on the bed, threw an arm over my e’?ingyes, and thought of nothing but Deka’s kiss for the rest of the night.

14

IT FELT GOOD TO RUN UP SAND DUNES. I put my head down and took care to churn the sand behind me and scuff up the perfect wave patterns the wind had etched around the sparse grasses. By the time I reached the top of the dune, I was out of breath, and my heart was pumping steadily within its cage of bones and muscle. I stopped there, putting my hands on my hips, and grinned at the beach and the spreading expanse of the Repentance Sea. I felt young and strong and invincible, even though I really wasn’t any of those things. I didn’t care. It was just nice to feel good.

“Hello, Sieh!” cried my sister Spider. She was down at the water’s edge, dancing in the surf. Her voice carried up to me on the salty ocean breeze, as clear as if I stood beside her.

“Hello, there.” I grinned at her, too, and spread my arms. “All the oceans in the world, and you had to pick the boiled one?” One of my siblings, the Fireling, had fought a legendary battle here during the Gods’ War. She’d won, but not before the Repentance was a bubbling stewpot filled with the corpses of a billion sea creatures.

“It has nice rhythms.” She was doing something strange in her dance, squatting and hopping from one foot to another with no recognizable semblance of rhythm. But that was Spider; she made her own music if she needed to. So many of Nahadoth’s children were like her, just a little mad but beautiful in their madness. Such a proud legacy our father had given us.

“All the dead things here scream in time with each other,” she said. “Can’t you hear them?”

“No, alas.” It almost didn’t hurt anymore, acknowledging that my childhood was gone and would never return. Mortals are resilient creatures.

“A shame. Can you still dance?”

In answer, I ran down the dune, side-sliding so that I wouldn’t overbalance. When I reached level ground, I altered my steps into a side-to-side sort of hop that had been popular in upper Rue once, centuries before the Gods’ War. Spider giggled and immediately came out of the water to join my dance, her steps alternating to complement mine. We met at the tideline, where dry sand turned to hard-packed wet. There she grabbed my hands and pulled me into a new dance, formal and revolving and slow. Something Amn, or possibly just something she’d made up on the spot. It never mattered with her.