The Kingdom of Gods

Glee tapped a finger on the table, thoughtful. “Couldize?ncea they hide even from the Three?”

“No. Not if they united. But the Three have had their own problems to worry about for some time now. They are incomplete.” I blinked then, as something new occurred to me. “And the Three could be why none of us remembers this Kahl. Enefa, I mean. She might have made all of us —”

forget

Shut up, Mother, I thought irritably.

“— forget.”

“Why would she do that?” Eyem-sutah looked around, his eyes widening. “That makes no sense.”

“No,” said Nemmer softly. She met my eyes, and I nodded. She was one of the older ones among us — nowhere near my age, but she had been around to see the war against the demons. She knew the many strange configurations that could result among the children of the Three. “It makes perfect sense. Enefa —” She grimaced. “She had no problem killing us. And she would do it, if any of her children were a threat to the rest. After the demons, she wasn’t willing to take more risks. But if a child could survive without harming others, and if that child’s survival depended for some reason on others not knowing of its existence …” She shook her head. “It’s possible. She might have even created some new realm to house him, apart from the rest of us. And when she died, she took the knowledge of that child with her.”

I thought of Kahl’s intimation. Enefa is dead now. I remembered. Nemmer’s theory fit, but for one thing.

“Where’s this elontid’s other parent? Most of us wouldn’t just leave a child to rot in some heaven or hell forever. New life among our kind is too precious.”

“It has to be a godling,” Ahad mused. “If it were Itempas or Nahadoth, this Kahl would just be” — his mouth began to shape the word normal, but then Lil turned a glare on him to make Itempas proud, and he amended himself —“niwwah, like the rest of you.”

“I am mnasat,” Kitr snapped, glaring herself.

“Whatever,” Ahad replied, and I was suddenly glad the platter’s paring knife was out of Kitr’s reach. Hopefully Ahad would find his nature soon; he wasn’t going to last long among us otherwise.

“Many godlings died in the War,” said Glee, and we all sobered as we realized what she meant.

“Gods,” murmured Kitr, looking horrified. “To be raised in exile, forgotten, orphaned … Did this Kahl even know how to find us? How long was he alone? I can’t imagine it.”

I could. The universe had been much emptier once. There had been no word for loneliness back then, in my true childhood, but all three of my parents — Nahadoth in particular — had worked hard to protect me from it. If Kahl had lacked the same … I could not help but pity him.

“This complicates things to an unpleasant degree,” said Ahad, sighing and rubbing his eyes. I felt the same. “From what you reported, Sieh, it sounds atr ?the same s though the High Northers and Kahl are working at cross-purposes. He’s using their dimmers to create a mask that turns mortals into gods, for some reason I can’t fathom. And they are using the same art to create masks that somehow kill Arameri.”

“Or else Kahl has been killing the Arameri, using the masks, and doing it to cast suspicion on the northerners,” I said, remembering the dream conversation I’d had with him. I have already begun, he had said then. It was the oldest of tricks, to sow dissension between groups that had common interests. Good for deflecting attention from greater mischief, too. I contemplated it more and scowled. “And there’s another thing. The Arameri destroy any land that injures them — which guarantees that their enemies will strike decisively, if and when they ever do.” I thought of Usein Darr, proudly stating that she would never kill just a few Arameri. “The High Northers wouldn’t bother with assassins and a lowblood here, a highblood there. They’d bring an army and try to destroy the whole family at once.”

“There’s no evidence that they’re building an army at all,” said Nemmer.

There was, but it was subtle. I thought of Usein Darr’s pregnancy and that of her guardswoman, and the woman in Sar-enna-nem who’d had two babies with her, both too young to be eating solid food yet. I thought of the children I’d seen there — belligerent, xenophobic, barely multilingual, and every one of them four or five years old at the most. Darr was famous for its contraceptive arts. Even before scrivening, the women there had long ago learned to time childbearing to suit their constant raiding and intertribal wars. Their war crop, they called it, making a joke of other lands’ reliance on agriculture. In the years preceding a war, every woman under thirty tried her best to make a child or two. The warriors would nurse the babes for a few days, then hand them over to the nonwarriors in the family — who, having also recently borne children, would simply nurse two or three, until all the children could be weaned and handed over to grandmothers or menfolk. Thus the warriors could go off to fight knowing that their replacements were growing up safe, should they fall in battle.