The Kingdom of Gods

But flesh makes for an excellent conduit. This was something the Arameri had learned by trial and error, though they’d never fully understood it. They wrote contracts with us onto their foreheads for protection, calling them blood sigils as if that was all they were, and we could not kill them, no matter how badly worded they were. Now Deka had written demands for power into his own skin, and his flesh gave the words meaning. He had written it in a script of his own devising, more flexible and beautiful than the rough speech of his fellow scriveners, and the universe would not deny him.

He had made himself not quite as powerful as a god — his flesh was still mortal, and the marks had only limited meaning — but surely more powerful than any scrivener who had ever lived. I had an inkling that his markings would be more effective than even the northerners’ masks; those were only wood and gods-blood, after all. Deka was more than that.

My mouth fell open, and Deka smiled. Then he closed his undershirt.

“H-how …?” I asked. But I could guess. Demon and scrivener. A combination we had already learned to fear, channeled here toward a new purpose. “Why?”

“You,” he said, very softly. “I was planning to go find you.”

There was, fortunately, a small couch nearby. I sat down on it, dazed.

We exchanged stories. This was what Deka told me.

Shahar had been the one to suggest his exile. In the tense days after our oath and the children’s injury, the clamors for Deka’s execution had run loud in the halls of Sky. There were still a dozen or so fullbloods and twenty or thirty highbloods altogether. In the old days, they had not mattered because the family head’s rule had been absolute. These days, however, the highbloods had power of their own. Some of them had their own pet scriveners, their own pet assassins. A few had their own pet armies. If enough of them banded together and acted against Remath, she could be overthrown. This had never happened in all the two-millennia history of the Arameri, but it could happen now.

But when they had demanded Deka’s death, Shahar had spoken for him, as soon as she was well enough to talk. She had gone toe-to-toe with Remath — an epic debate, Deka called it, all the more impressive because one of its combatants was eight years old — and gotten her to acknowledge that exile was a more suitable punishment than death. Deka could never win enough support to become heir now, even if his looks could somehow be overcome. He would be forever branded by the stigma of failure. And Shahar needed him alive, she had argued, so as to have one advisor whose prospects were so truncated, so hopeless, that he would have no choice but to serve her faithfully in order to survive. Remath had agreed.

“I imagine dear Sister will fill this in when I go back,” Deka said then, touching his semisigil with a soft sigh. I nodded slowly. He was probably right.

So Deka had left Sky for the Litaria. The first few months of his exile had been misery, for with a child’s eyes, he had seen only his mother’s rejection and his sister’s betrayal. He had not reckoned, however, on one crucial thing.

“I am happy here,” he said simply. “It isn’t perfect; there are cliques and bullies, politics, unfairness, like anywhere. But compared to Sky, this is the gentlest of heavens.”

I nodded again. Happiness has healing power. Between that and the wisdom brought by maturity, Deka had come to realize what Shahar had done for him, and why. By then, however, several years had passed during which he’d returned all her letters, until she’d finally stopped sending them. It would have been dangerous in the extreme to resume communication at that point, because any of Shahar’s rivals — who were surely watching her mailings — would know that Deka was once again her weakness. There was strength in the fact that she could pretend not to love him and point to her hand in his exile as proof. And as long as Deka pretended not to love her back, they were both safe.

I shook my head slowly, though, troubled by his plan. Love could not be conditional. I had seen the danger of that too often. Conditions created a chink in otherwise unbreakable armor, left a fatal flaw in the perfect weapon. Then the armor broke, at precisely the wrong time. The weapon turned against its wielder. Deka and Shahar’s game could so easily turn real.

But it was not my place to say that, because they were still children enough to learn best through experience. I could only pray to Nahadoth and Yeine that they would not learn this lesson in the most painful way.

After our talk, Deka rose. An hour or so had passed. Beyond the laboratory windows, the sun had moved through noon into afternoon. I was hungry again, damn it, but no one had brought food. Perhaps there were no servants in this place where learning created its own hierarchy.