Nothing but me.
“Oh gods, no,” I whispered. What could I do? En pulsed hot against the skin of my chest. I grabbed for it; then I remembered. En’s power was mine; when I was strong, so was it. But I was only mortal now. If I used En, drained the last of its strength…
No. I would not kill my oldest friend, not for this. And I would not let my new friends, even if one of them had betrayed me, die. I was still a god, damn it, even without magic. I was still the wind and caprice, even bound into dying flesh. I would fear no mere mortal, no matter how powerful.
So I bared my teeth and lashed the tail I no longer possessed. Shouting a challenge, I ran down the steps to meet the crimson masker.
My words had been in the First Tongue, a command, though I hadn’t expected the man to listen. But to my shock, the crimson masker stopped and turned toward me.
This mask was beautiful and horrid, the runnels and paint suggesting fouled rivers, the strange-angled eyes like crooked mountains. Its mouth—a stylized thing of lips and teeth with a dark pit of an opening beyond which I could not see its wearer’s face—was twisted, a wail of utmost despair. Murderer, its markings whispered to me, and suddenly I thought of all the evils I’d done during the Gods’ War. I thought of the evils I’d done since—sometimes at the Arameri’s bidding, sometimes out of my own rage or cruelty. Forgetting my own challenge amid crushing guilt, I stumbled to a halt.
I felt a jolt. Sudden restriction and pain. Blinking, I looked down and found that the man had made a blade of his hand and had thrust it into my body at the midriff, nearly up to the wrist.
I was still staring down at this when Dekarta reached me. He grabbed my arm and spoke without words, whipping his head in a wide, vicious arc. Sound and force flooded from his throat, a roar of denial powered by the living energy of his skin and blood and bone. Better than many gods could have done. Where the power struck the crimson-masked man, I saw it cancel the mask’s message. The mask split down the center with a faint crack, and an instant later he flew backward a good fifty feet, vanishing amid the fleeing crowd. I could not see precisely where he landed because then Deka’s power struck the steps of the Salon, which erupted, shattering into rubble and bursting upward in an arcing spray.
There could be no precision to such a strike. Guards and soldiers went flying, screaming, along with the enemy. Through all this I saw another white-masked man, one I hadn’t noticed, run into the barrier of broken, flying stone and tumble back. But as the dust and rubble returned to earth, he sat up.
Nemmer appeared swathed in shadows, facing me. I saw her eyes widen at the sight of my wound. Beyond her, I saw the fallen white-masked man get to his feet and come charging again, this time leaping with godlike strength over the channel of rubble that Deka had created. I willed a warning, since I could not muster the breath, and to my astonishment Nemmer seemed to hear me. She turned and met the man as he struck.
Then I was in Deka’s arms, being carried like a child, bump te bump te bump. It was nice that he was so much bigger than me. He ran up the steps to the rest of the Arameri party, who had finally—finally!—begun to hurry up the curving steps toward the nearer gate. From Deka’s embrace, I tried to shout at them to go faster, but I couldn’t lift my head. So strange. It was like my first day as a mortal, when Shahar had summoned me to this realm as the cat, or the day two thousand years before that, when Itempas had thrown me down in chains of flesh and given my leash to a woman, one of Shahar’s daughters, who looked equal parts horrified and elated at the power she held.
Then we reached the top of the steps, and the world folded into a blur, and I passed out in its rippling crease.
16
I see something I should not.
I see as gods do, absorbing all the world around us whether we have eyes to see it or ears to hear it or a body at all present. I know things because they happen. This is not a mortal thing, and it should not happen while I am in the mortal realm, but I suppose it is proof that I am not completely mortal yet.
We have reached Sky. The forecourt is chaos. The captain of the guard is shouting and gesturing at a gaggle of men who crossed the gate with us. Soldiers and scriveners are running, the former to surround the Vertical Gate with spears and swords in case the maskers follow, the latter bringing brushes and inkpots so that they can seal it off before that happens. While this occurs, Wrath and Ramina try to pull Remath into the palace, but she shakes them off. “I will not retreat in my own home,” she says, so the soldiers and scriveners make ready to defend her with their lives.
Amid all this running and shouting, I flop about in Deka’s arms, dying. Dying faster, that is, instead of the decades-long death that aging has imposed on me. The crimson masker has punched a hole through many of my organs and a good chunk of my spine. If I somehow survive, which is highly unlikely, I will never walk again. Yet my heart still beats, and my brain still fires sparks within its wrinkled meat, and as long as those things continue, there is an anchor for my soul to hold on to.
I’m glad it will be like this. I died protecting those I cared for, facing an enemy, like a god.
Deka has carried me off the Vertical Gate, onto the unblemished white daystone of Sky’s forecourt. He falls to his knees, shouting for someone to hold me, he can save me if he has help, help him, damn it.
It is Shahar who comes to her brother’s call. She kneels at my other side, and their long-awaited reunion is a quick and panicked meeting of eyes across the gore of my open belly. “Get his clothes open,” he commands, though she is the heir and he is nothing, just a fancy servant. (I am useless, aside from the part of me that watches. My eyes have rolled back in my head, and my mouth hangs open, ugly and inelegant. Some god.) While she struggles to lift my shirt—she tried to tear it first, thinking that would disturb the wound less, but the cheap material is surprisingly strong—Deka pulls a square of paper and a capped brush from wherever scriveners keep such things, and sketches a mark that means hold. He means for it to hold in my blood, hold back the filth that is already poisoning my body. That will give him time to write more sigils, which might actually heal me. (Has he only painted offensive magic into his skin? Silly boy.)
But as he completes the mark and reaches for me, putting his hand on Shahar’s to brace himself so that he can lay the sigil in place, something happens.
The universe is a living, breathing thing. Time, too. It moves, though not as mortals imagine. It is restless, twitchy. Mortals don’t notice because they’re restless and twitchy, too. Gods notice, but we learn to ignore these things early on, the same way mortal newborns eventually ignore the lonely silence of a world without heartbeats. Yet suddenly I notice everything. The slow, aeons-deep inhalation of the stars. The crackle of the sun’s power against this planet’s veil of life. The minute scratching of mites too small to see on Shahar’s pristine white skin. The lazy, buzzy jolt of hours and days and centuries.