And before I could speak again, he was gone, the space in front of me cold in his absence. There was a glimmer of magic—something occluded by the hazy shimmer of Shiny’s body. Then a flurry of movement, cloth tearing, the struggle of flesh against flesh. A spray of wetness across my face, making me flinch.
And then silence.
I held still for a moment, my own breath loud and fast in my ears as I strained to hear the sound that I knew and feared would come: bodies, hitting the cobblestones of the street three stories below. But there was only that terrible silence.
My nerves snapped. I ran to the roof door, clawed it open, and flung myself into the house, screaming.
6
“A Window Opens”
(chalk on concrete)
THERE ARE THINGS he told me about himself. Not all of it, of course—some things I heard from other gods or remember from old stories of my childhood. But mostly he just told me. It was not his nature to lie.
In the time of the Three, things were very different. There were many temples but few holy texts, and no persecution of those with differing beliefs. Mortals loved whatever gods they wished—often several at once—and it was not called heresy. If there were disputes about a particular bit of lore or magic, it was simple enough to call on a local godling and ask about it. No point in getting possessive about one god or another when there were plenty to go around.
It was during this time that the first demons were born: offspring of mortal humans and immortal gods, neither one nor the other, possessing the greatest gifts of both. One of those gifts was mortality—a strange thing to call a gift, by my thinking, but people back then thought differently. Anyhow, all the demons possessed it.
But consider what this means: all the demons died. Doesn’t make sense, does it? Children rarely take after just one of their parents. Shouldn’t a few of the demons have inherited immortality? They certainly got the magic, in plenty—so much that they passed it on to us, when they mated with us. Scrivening and bonebending and prophecy and shadow-sending, all of this came to mortalkind through the demons. But even when the demons took godly lovers and had children with them, those children grew old and died, too.
For us, the divine inheritance was a blessing. For the gods, one drop of mortal blood doomed their offspring to death.
Apparently, no one realized what this meant for a very long time.
I scrambled downstairs much faster than I should have, given that I’d never gotten around to memorizing Madding’s stairs. Behind me trailed Paitya; the middle-aged godling; Kitr, who had come out of nowhere at my shout and was visible for once; and Madding. As we reached the room of pools, two more people joined us: a tall mortal woman who shone with nearly as many godwords as Previt Rimarn, and a sleek racing dog who glowed white in my sight. As I reached the house’s front door, I heard other calls upstairs; I’d woken the whole house.
I might have felt bad if my thoughts had not been filled with that awful silence.
“Oree!” Hands caught me before I got three steps out the door; I fought them. A blur of blue resolved into Madding. “You shouldn’t leave the house, damn it.”
“I have to—” I twisted to get around Madding. “He—”
“He who? Oree—” Madding abruptly went still. “Why is there blood on your face?”
That stopped my panic, though the hand that I lifted to my face shook badly. Wetness had splattered my face up on the roof; I’d forgotten.
“Boss?” Paitya had crouched to peer at something on the ground. I could not see what, but the grim expression on his face was unmistakable. “There’s a lot more blood here.”
Madding turned to look, and his eyes widened. He turned back to me, frowning. “What happened? Where were you, up on the roof?” Suddenly his frown deepened. “Did Father do something to you? So help me—”
Kitr, who had been scanning the street for danger, looked at us both sharply. “You told her?”
Madding ignored her, though I caught his wince of consternation. He turned me from one side to the other, checking for injuries. “I’m fine,” I said, holding my stick to my chest as I grew calmer. “I’m fine. But, yes, I was on the roof, with… with Shiny. There was someone… a man. I couldn’t see him; he must’ve been mortal. He knew my name, said he’d been looking for me—”
Paitya cursed and stood up, narrowing his eyes as he scanned the area. “Since when do Order-Keepers come by way of the damned roof? They usually have sense enough not to piss us off.”
Madding muttered something in gods’ language; it curled and spiked, a curse. “What happened?”