As this was positively friendly by his standards, and I was tired of the flower silliness, I finally gave in to my curiosity. “You all right?”
“No. But I’m not interested in talking about it.”
Ordinarily I would have left him to his brooding. But there was something about him in that moment — a peculiar sort of weight to his presence, a taste on the air — that intrigued me. Because he wasn’t paying any attention to me, I touched him. And because he was so absorbed in whatever he was thinking about, he allowed this.
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"27 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 onto 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.