The Kingdom of Gods

I turned and blinked as I realized I was surrounded by white-clad children. Most were Amn, ten or eleven years old; all sat cross-legged on the floor, with their own slates or pieces of reed paper in their laps. All of them gaped at me.

I put my hands on my hips and grinned back. “What? Your teacher didn’t tell you a godling was dropping by?”

An adult voice made me turn, and then I, too, gaped as the children did.

“No,” drawled Dekarta from the lectern. “We’re doing show-and-tell next week. Hello, Sieh.”

Deka wore black now.

I had been surprised by this, but that was not the only shock. I stole little looks up at him — he was much taller than me now — as we walked through a brightly lit, carpeted corridor lined with the busts of dead scriveners. His stride was easy, unhurried, confident. He did not look at me, though he must have noticed me watching him. I tried to read his expression and could not. Despite his exile from Sky, he had still mastered the classic Arameri detachment. Blood told.

Oh, yes, it did. He looked like Ahad.

Demonshitting, hells-spawned, Yeine-loving ratbastard Ahad.

So many things made sense now; so many more did not. The resemblance was so strong as to be undeniable. Deka was an inch or two shorter than Ahad, leaner and somewhat unfinished in the manner of young men. He wore his hair short and plain, where Ahad’s was long and elaborate. Deka looked more Amn, too; Ahad’s features leaned more toward the High Norther template. But in every other way, and particularly in this new aura of easy, dangerous strength, Deka might as well have been made as Ahad had: sprung to life full grown from his progenitor, with no mother in the way to gum things up.

Yet that could not be. Because if Ahad was some recent ancestor of Dekarta’s, then that meant Dekarta, and Shahar, and whichever of their parents carried Ahad’s blood, were demons. Demons’ blood should have killed me the day we’d made the oath of friendship.

And not like this, slowly, cruelly. I had seen what demons’ blood did to gods. It should have snuffed out the light of my soul like water on a candleflame. Why was I still alive at all, much less in this hobbled form?

I groaned softly, and at last Deka glanced over at me. “Nothing,” I said, rubbing my forehead, which felt as though it should ache. “Just … nothing.”

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He uttered a low chuckle of amusement. My sweet little Deka was a baritone now, and not at all little anymore. Was he still sweet? That was something only time could tell.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“My laboratory.”

“Oh, so they let you use one by yourself?”

He had not stopped smiling; now he developed a smug air. “Of course. All teachers have their own.”

I slowed, frowning up at him. “You mean you’re a full scrivener? Already?”

“Shouldn’t I be? The course of study isn’t that difficult. I finished it a few years back.”

I remembered the wistful, shy child he had been — so unsure of himself, so quick to let his sister take the lead. Could it be that here, beyond the shadow of his family’s disapproval, he had unleashed that wild cleverness of his? I smiled. “Still the arrogant Arameri, in spite of everything.”

Deka glanced at me, his smile fading just a little. “I’m not Arameri, Sieh. They threw me out, remember?”

I shook my head. “The only way to truly leave the Arameri is to die. They’ll always come back for you, otherwise — if not for you, for your children.”

“Hmm. True enough.”

We had turned a corner in the meantime and headed down another carpeted corridor, and now Deka led me up a wide, banistered stairwell. Three girls carrying reed pens and scrolls bobbed in polite greeting as they came down the stairs and passed us. All three blushed or batted their eyes at Deka. He nodded back regally. As soon as they were out of sight around the corner, I heard their burst of excited giggling and felt a flicker of my old nature respond. Crushes: like butterfly wings against the soul.

At the top of the stairs, Deka unlocked and opened a pair of handsome wooden doors. Inside, the room was not what I expected. I had seen the First Scrivener’s laboratory in Sky: a stark, forbidding place of white gleaming surfaces that held only ephemeral touches of color, like black ink or red blood. Deka’s lab was Darrwood, deep and brown, and gold Chellin marble. Octagonal in shape, four of its walls were nothing but books — floor-to-ceiling shelves, each stacked two or three deep with tomes and scrolls and even a few stone or wooden tablets. Wide flat worktables dominated the center of the room, and something odd, a sort of glass-enclosed booth, stood on the room’s edge at the juncture of two walls. Yet there were no tools or implements in sight, other than those used for writing. No cages along the wall, filled with specimens for experiments. No lingering scent of pain.