The Kingdom of Gods

I could feel the power woven into every sweeping balustrade, keeping the massive edifice afloat — but there was more to it than magic. Something about the structure itself worked to maintain its buoyancy. If I had still been a god, I might have understood it, for there are rules even where we are concerned, and it was Yeine’s nature to seek balance. Perhaps the magic harnessed the ocean’s waves in some new way or absorbed the power of the sun. Perhaps the foundation was hollow. Regardless, it was clear this new palace would float, and with some assistive magic would travel readily across the ocean. It would defend the precious cargo within its walls, if only because no mortal army could assail it.

While the mortals turned about, most of them speechless with awe, the rest making sounds of shock and delight and incomprehension, I strode across the drying daystone of the central platform. Yeine and Nahadoth turned to face me.

“Not bad,” I said. “Bit white, though, isn’t it?”

Yeine shrugged, amused. “You were thinking gray walls? Do you want them all to kill themselves?”

I looked around, considering the vast but monotonous surrounding oceanscape. Faintly I could hear surf and wind; aside from that there was silence. I grimaced. “Point. But that doesn’t mean they should have to endure the same borineepg, austere sameness of the previous two palaces, does it? They’re yours now. Find some way to remind them of that.”

She thought a moment. Nahadoth, however, smiled. Suddenly the daystone beneath our feet softened, turning to thick black loam. Everywhere I looked — on railings, edging the bridges — the daystone had remolded itself into troughs of soil.

Yeine laughed and went to him, a teasing look in her eye. “A hint?” She extended her hand, and he took it. I could not help noticing the easy camaraderie between them and the sudden softness of Nahadoth’s cabochon eyes when he gazed at her. His ever-changing face grew still, too, becoming a different kind of familiar: brown-skinned and angular and Darren. I fought the urge to glance at Deka, to see if he had noticed.

“We have always built better together than alone,” Naha said. Yeine leaned against him, and the soft dark tendrils of his aura swept forward to surround her. They did not touch her, but they did not have to.

A movement at the corner of my vision drew my attention. Itempas had turned away from his siblings’ intimacy, watching me instead. I gazed back at him in his solitude, surprised to feel sympathy instead of the usual anger. We two outcasts.

Then I spied Shahar, standing near Dekarta. He was alight as I had never seen him, turning and turning to try and take in the whole of the palace. It looked as though he would never stop grinning. I thought of the adventure novels he’d loved so as a child and wished I was still god enough to enjoy this pleasure with him.

Shahar, more subdued, was smiling, too, glancing now and again at the spirals, but mostly she was just watching him. Her brother, whom she’d lost for so long, come back to her at last.

And purely by chance as I watched them, they noticed me. Deka’s grin grew wider; Shahar’s small smile lingered. They did not join hands as they walked over to me, stepping carefully over the soft soil, but the bond between them was obvious to anyone who knew how love looked. That this bond included me was equally obvious. I turned to them, and for a long and wondrous moment, I was not alone.

Then Yeine said, “Come, Sieh,” and the moment ended.

Shahar and Deka stopped, their smiles fading. I saw understanding come. They had made me mortal so I could be their friend. What would happen to us once I was a god again?

A hand touched my shoulder, and I looked up. Itempas stood there. Ah, yes; he had loved mortals, too, over the years. He knew how it felt to leave them behind.

“Come,” he said gently.

Without another word, I turned my back on Dekarta and Shahar and went with him.

Yeine and Nahadoth met us, and their power folded around us, and we vanished just as the first green shoots began to push up from the soil.

18

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"0em" push up fIn the name of Itempas

We pray for light.

We beg the sun for warmth.

We diffuse the shadows.

In the name of Itempas

We speak to give meaning to sound.

We think before we act.

We kill, but only for peace.

The chamber in which we appeared was not far from the others. Still in the new palace, in fact — one of the smaller, delicate nautilus chambers that had formed on the palace’s outermost edges, covered over by prism glass. As soon as we appeared in it, I knew what it really was: a pocket of space made different from the world around it, ideal for scrivening or channeling magic without spreading the magic’s effects to the surrounding structure. Deka would love these when he found them.