If this was how mortals usually felt when a god was done with them, I felt fresh guilt for all my past dalliances.
Eventually I recovered, however, and told Deka that I needed to leave. All the highbloods were selecting apartments in the uppermost central spirals of the palace—the old pattern from Sky. It would be easy for me to find him later. There was an uncomfortable moment when Deka gave me a long and silent perusal before replying, but whatever he saw in my face satisfied him. He nodded and rose to get dressed himself.
“Be careful,” was all he said. “My sister may be dangerous now.”
I thought that was probably true.
I found Itempas less than a half hour before sunset. As I’d suspected, he’d taken up residence on the wide central platform where we’d first arrived, which had become a meadow of bobbing sea grass in the meantime. This palace had not been configured to exalt him; nevertheless, the highest center point of anything was a natural place for him to settle.
He stood facing the sun, his legs braced apart and arms folded, unmoving, though he must have sensed my approach. The grass whispered against my pant legs as I walked, and I saw that the grass nearest Itempas had turned white. Typical.
I did not see Nahadoth or Yeine or feel their presence nearby. They had abandoned him again.
“Want to be alone?” I asked, stopping behind him. The sun had almost touched the sea in the distance. He could count the remaining moments of his godhood on one hand. Maybe two.
“No,” he said, so I sat down in the grass, watching him.
“I’ve decided that I want to remain mortal,” I said. “At least until… you know. Close to. Ah. The end. Then the three of you can try to change me back.” Unspoken was the fact that I might change my mind again then and choose to die with Deka. It was a choice that not every god got to make. I was very fortunate.
He nodded. “We felt your decision.”
I grimaced. “How unromantic. And here I was thinking that was an orgasm.”
He ignored my irreverence out of long habit. “Your love for those two has been clear to all of us since your transformation into mortal, Sieh. Only you have resisted this knowledge.”
I hated it when he got sanctimonious, so I changed the subject. “Thanks for trying, by the way. To help me.”
He sighed gently. “I wonder, sometimes, why you think so little of me. Then I remember.”
“Yes. Well.” I shrugged, uncomfortable. “Is Glee coming to fetch you?” Unspoken: when you are mortal again?
“Yes.”
“She really loves you, you know.”
He turned, just enough so that I could see his face. “Yes.”
I was babbling, and he had noticed. Annoyed, I stopped talking. The silence collected around us, comfortable. In the old days, I had only ever liked being quiet around him. With anyone else, the urge to fill the silence with chatter or movement was overwhelming. He had never needed to command me to be still. Around him, I just wanted to.
We watched the sun inch toward the horizon. “Thank you,” he said suddenly, surprising me.
“Hmm?”
“For coming here.”
At this, I sighed and shifted and rubbed a hand over my hair. Finally I got up, coming to stand beside him. I could feel the radiant warmth of his presence, skin tightening even from a foot away. He could blaze with the fire and light of every sun in existence, but most times he kept the furnace banked so that others could be near him. His version of a friendly invitation—because naturally he would never, ever just say he was lonely, the fool.
And somehow, I had never, ever noticed that he did this. What did that make me? His twice-fool son, I supposed.
So I stayed there beside him while we watched the last curve of the sun flatten into an oblong, then puddle against the edge of the world, and finally melt away. The instant this happened, Itempas gasped, and I felt a sudden swift wave of heat, as of something rushing away. What remained in its wake was human, ordinary, just a middle-aged man in plain clothes and worn boots (brown again, ha ha!) with too much hair for practicality. And when he toppled backward like an old broken tree, unconscious in the aftermath of godhood, it was I who caught him, and eased him to the floor, and cradled his head in my lap.
“Stupid old man,” I whispered. But I stroked his hair while he slumbered.
Would that things could have ended there.
A moment after I’d settled down with Itempas, I felt a presence behind me and did not turn. Let Glee think what she would of me with her father. I was tired of hating him. “Make him decorate his hair,” I said, more to make conversation than anything else. “If he’s going to wear his hair in a Teman style, he ought to do it right.”
“So,” said Kahl, and I went rigid with shock. His voice was soft, regretful. “You have forgiven him.”
What—
Before the thought could form, he was in front of me, on Itempas’s other side, with one hand poised in a way that made no sense to me—until he plunged it down, and too late I remembered that Glee had been protecting him from this very thing.
By that point, Kahl’s hand was up to the wrist in Itempas’s chest.
Itempas jerked awake, rigid, his face a rictus of agony. I did not waste time screaming denial. Denial was for mortals. Instead I grabbed Kahl’s arm with all my strength, trying to keep him from doing what I knew he was about to do. But I was just a mortal, and he was a godling, and not only did he rip Itempas’s heart out in a blur of splattering red, but he also threw me across the platform in the process. I rolled to a halt amid the salt-sweet stench of bruised sea grass, barely three feet from the edge. There were steps wending around the platform, but if I’d missed those, it was a long way—several hundred feet—to the base of the palace.
Dazed, I struggled upright and discovered that my arm was dislocated. As I finished screaming from this, I looked up and found Kahl standing between me and Itempas’s corpse. The heart was in his hand, dripping; his expression was implacable.
“Thank you,” he said. “I’ve been hunting him for years now. His demon daughter is good at hiding. I knew that if I watched you, however, I would eventually get my chance.”
“What—” Hard to think around pain. If mortals could do it, I could, damn it. I ground my teeth and spoke through them. “What in the infinite hells is wrong with you? You know that won’t kill him. And now Naha and Yeine will be after you.” I was not a god anymore. I could not call them with my thoughts. What could I do, as a mortal, facing the god of vengeance in the moment of his triumph? Nothing. Nothing.
“Let them come.” So familiar, that arrogance. Where had I seen it before? “They haven’t found me yet. I can complete the mask now and take it back from Usein.” He lifted Itempas’s heart, peering intently at it, and for the first time I saw him smile in unreserved pleasure. His lips drew back, showing a hint of canine—
—sharp teeth, so much like—
“Only a spark left. Just enough, though.”