The Midnight Lie

by Marie Rutkoski

  But of course, I never could.

  * * *

  “Well,” Lillin said imperiously, when her Middling maid showed me into the parlor. “Who are you, and what do you want?” She had exquisitely delicate features: an oval face, slender lips, gray eyes so pale and clear that you could see faint stars of blue around the pupils. I thought of her with Sid, and Sid with her, and wished I had never succeeded in convincing Madame Mere to give me her address.

  “We both know Sidarine,” I said, and Lillin’s face flashed with understanding. “We saw each other at the party with the ballroom that rained.”

  “Oh,” she said. “You. I didn’t recognize you. Sid’s not here.” She brought the fingers of one hand together in a little flutter and then flourished them open, as if they had captured something invisible only to let it fly away. “Gone. Left the city for good, I hear. It looks like you have it bad for her, poor thing. She is the worst sort of rake. We are well rid of her. The worst is how she makes you feel special, for a time.”

  “She said you had something for her. Maps.”

  She narrowed her silvery eyes. “What do you want with them?”

  “You don’t have to give them to me, but I would like to look at them. I will trade you something for it.”

  She flitted a bored hand, gesturing at the pearl-and-gold parlor that surrounded us. “I have everything.”

  “I can give you a memory. Even if you think you remember something, I can make you feel it again, taste it again, as fresh as when it happened.”

  She was intrigued, I could tell. “Is this like pleasure dust?”

  “More like an elixir.”

  “I’ve never tried such an elixir.”

  “I’ll show you,” I said, “if you let me touch your hand.”

  “Any memory I want?”

  “Yes,” I said, though I wasn’t confident in my own control.

  She lifted her little chin. “I’m not sure I fully believe you.” She offered a cruel dare: “If you can really do as you say, make me remember my last time with Sidarine.”

  I touched her hand, and thought of how it must have touched Sid. As painful as this was, part of me also wanted it: to share Sid with someone, to know that I was not the only one who had wanted her.

  Lillin’s eyes slipped closed. Her hand twitched in mine. A breath escaped her lips. I hated this. I needed it. It felt like we were both trying to hold a ghost.

  When it was over, she showed me the maps of the Keepers Hall that she had taken from her brother. She haughtily reminded me that they did not belong to me, but I simply glanced once at each page and took my leave, wondering what she had seen in her memory, and how it compared with mine. I shivered, to think of Sid falling asleep next to me. My heart clenched with missing her.

  * * *

  The Keepers Hall was less imposing than I had thought it would be, and more mercurial, with windows at oddly staggered intervals and riotous façades, rippling balconies that must have been made of stone yet looked as fluid as water. Turrets sprang from odd places and were jewel boxes of stained glass. The sun was hot on my head. My vision dazzled. The snakelike edges of the building seemed to bend, and when I glanced again, the windows appeared to have reordered themselves and were now shaped like stars where before they had been melting circles, the tops round and the bottoms deformed. Sometimes I saw the present and sometimes the past.

  I slipped a hand into my dress pocket, where I ran a finger along the packet of poison Aden had given me. It rested against Sid’s letter, which I could not read yet could not leave behind. The poison was the only weapon I had. I didn’t know if it would be of any use, but it reassured me to have it, perhaps like Sid’s dagger might reassure her, wherever she was now. I remembered how difficult it was to unstrap the belt, and how amused she was at my fumbling. She had slid it undone so that it fell heavily to the bed.

  At the entrance, whose open double doors were slick with red paint as shiny as a mirror, dour militiamen stood. They barred my way.

  “This building is reserved for councilmen,” one of them said.

  “Go prepare for your party,” another said, his voice just careful enough not to be a sneer. I had always feared the militia and resented the power they had over me, but now knew that they were just Middlings who had been hired as all Middlings were to do work the High Kith disdained. I saw that they must have had wishes and fears and resentments of their own.

  “But I am a councilman,” I said calmly.

  Their brows wrinkled. They stared, then laughed.

  “I will show you.” I produced my High-Kith passport. One of them accepted it, sliding a look his partner’s way, wondering where the joke was. I felt power prickle along my skin. It felt like panic, or pleasure. It felt the way the dark sky looks when lightning illuminates the clouds, giving the flat black sky sudden dimension.

  “The last page in the booklet,” I told the man. “The one you just saw held the necessary document for entrance.”

  “Oh,” he said, flipping back to it. “I see.”

  “The person you saw,” I said to both of them, “the one who just walked up to you. You might have thought, because of a trick of the light, that you saw a woman, but he was a young man from a good family, well known, well liked, dressed as he should have been in his red robe.”

  “Why, so it was,” one of the men said to the other.

  I took the passport back. “You let him pass, as you rightly should, and then no one stood before you.”

  They both stared blankly ahead. I went inside.

  The entryway was dim, the walls painted red and green and pink in tight patterns, making the entryway appear as though covered with the scales of a wild, unknown creature.

  Though councilmen passed me as I made my way through the building, following the maps in my mind, I did what I had done in the Ward, which was to wish that they didn’t see me, to make them forget me … which, I realized, as I became more practiced in doing it, was not quite forgetting but rather giving them an invented memory of a moment so quickly passed that it came to occupy the present in their minds.

  I made my way to the library, where green flames burned in oil lamps and the books were so beautifully encased in rich leather that each row of books looked as though it were a jeweled strip of vitreous enamel. Red-robed readers sat at polished wooden desks, drinking from pots of pink tea. When they looked up, I made them remember me differently, to be what they expected to see, but it felt harder. Their faces frowned, and their minds seemed to tug away from the thoughts I gave them, so that I had to be more forceful with my wishing, sterner in my construction of the vision of me they were supposed to believe. Eventually, their eyes fogged over and they went back to their books.

  I approached a councilman who was shelving books and appeared to be in charge of the library. “I am looking for a book very special to the Lord Protector,” I told him. “A history of the city.”

  His narrow eyes studied me, confused. “That book is only for the Lord Protector to read.”

  I replaced his memory of the person standing before him. “I am the Lord Protector.”

  “Oh, yes. Forgive me, my lord. Of course you are. I will fetch the book for you now. There is memory elixir for you while you wait, though I know my lord never needs it.”

  He set a glass pot of pink tea before me as I sat at a table. There were other, drained pots, and a little stack of glass cups that looked like a froth of bubbles. The man bustled away.

  A memory elixir.

  I glanced around the library at all the people reading, drinking their tea. Was that my blood in their glasses, drained from me when I was imprisoned?

  I poured myself a cup and took a sip. It did nothing to me, probably because I already had any magic it could lend me, because I was simply giving myself back to myself. No wonder I’d had more trouble manipulating the memories of the readers in the library. They had drunk the tea, so what power I used on them had to work against the power they had alre
ady stolen and ingested in a diluted form. I set the cup aside. Then, after a thought, I slipped the packet of poison from my pocket and emptied it into the pot.

  The librarian came back, bearing a red-bound book the size of a small child. He set it before me. Its front was embossed with a symbol I had seen on a card in the game of Pantheon. It was a grasping hand, the sign of the god of thieves.

  “Will there be anything else you need, my lord?” asked the librarian.

  “Yes.” I cleared my throat, eager to begin reading, suffused with a feeling I was not at first able to name, because I had never felt it before.

  Superiority.

  I had never felt able to make people do what I wanted. Now it was so easy. If I wished it, it was so. If someone resisted, I needed only to twist their memory to make them obey.

  “Clear the room,” I told him. “And then leave. Bar the library doors. I wish to read alone, in peace.”

  “Of course, my lord,” he said, and executed my order.

  In the stillness that remained, I opened the book.

  The gods once walked among mortals, read the first line. As I touched the page, a vapor rose from the printed ink. Specterlike, it drifted up to me. I inhaled, my gasp of surprise dragging the vapor inside me before I thought to resist it, and I fell into the story it told.

  51

  THE GODS ONCE WALKED AMONG mortals, charmed by their childlike ways, their lives as ephemeral as dew on grass. Most enchanting, however, was a mortal’s ability to surprise. A god might bless a mortal, yet never know how the seed of such a gift might grow. Sometimes a frail human might glow with song, a pure melody shuddering from the throat, expressing a longing the god of music had never known, with an intensity that made the god, despite her eternal years, listen with wonder. And a mortal might suffer beneath a gift, extra eyes popping out all over the skin like weeping boils, such that the god of foresight could not help but laugh as she had not done since the birth of the god of delight.

  Gradually, the gods left their realm, or left it for a time, drawn to a jewel of an island on the sea, its beaches dusted with pink sand, its inland lakes brimming with fresh water and fish brilliantly scaled. A city was raised on hilltops. The god of the sea carved a gentle bay from the coast into a natural harbor. Mortals chiseled marble statues in honor of the gods, and the gods were pleased, because worship was a relatively new pleasure. For certain gods, fear was equally pleasing.

  The city was called Ethin, the word in the gods’ language for the exhalation of praise.

  A mortal’s life is as fluttering and uncertain as a bird that flies into a lamplit hall filled with joy and argument, and then dives out a window into the unseeing night. A few of the one hundred gods came closer to certain mortals, enchanted by their beautiful brevity, their supple skin, their strangely warm mouths, their odd ways, their stumbling yet earnest efforts, their brilliance. Sometimes the gods would argue among themselves over a mortal. One might accuse another of blessing a claimed favorite. And a mortal might reveal a grace or intelligence marked by no god, causing the pantheon of the hundred to murmur among themselves, entertained—even, occasionally, concerned—that some mortals possessed skills due to no one but themselves, to human luck or labor.

  One day, a mortal gave the gods the greatest surprise of all: a baby. The child radiated divinity. There could be no doubt that god-blood lurked inside her, though no god dared claim her as their child. She captured the love of most of the gods, who charmed sunbeams to her cradle, and cushioned her every tumble, and painted her skin with glorious colors to bear the sign of their favor.

  Even the god of death stayed his heavy hand.

  The god of foresight smiled her cruel smile. Death will come to the girl anyway, she said.

  She will never lose a drop of blood, decreed the god of luck. She will never suffer disease, Luck said, nor the corrosion of age.

  So may it be, said the god of foresight, who visited the girl in the night, and drew a blanket over her sleeping face until her breath grew slight, then smothered, and the small body was as cold as clay.

  No god likes to be wrong, especially not this god.

  I said it would be so, she told the mourning pantheon, and hear me yet. There will be more of her kind, to our everlasting misery.

  The god of truth grew grim. His brother-sister god, the moon, whose great eye saw the dealings of the mortals’ nights, shrank to a narrow crescent smile. The moon knew the sweet and salt of mortal flesh. This god had tasted mortal savor, and the incandescence of human love. Though sister-brother moon saw no reason to tell tales on fellow gods—at least, not when it was to no apparent advantage, and not when the moon sinned as other gods sinned—the moon knew that the god of foresight’s words rang with truth.

  Once tempted to taste a mortal kiss, many gods could not resist. Soon the bellies of mortals and gods alike swelled with hybrid fruit. Half-godlings slipped into the world.

  They had gifts of their own—weaker but unpredictable, spectacular, subtle. The gods fought among themselves to protect the half-gods, or make them pawns in games against their god-kin. Most consternating, however, was that the little half-gods looked no different from humans. Sometimes divinity did not shine from them as with the gods’ first half-child, but rather sank deep, undetected, like underground water.

  Nor did all half-gods bear allegiance to the gods, or even fellowship toward humans. Mortals who suffered the devious machinations of half-gods begged for protection from them. Some half-gods, resentful of being chits in immortal games, bucked the authority of their undying parents. They stole secrets. They played games of their own. They thwarted the will of the gods and wrought unhappiness.

  They will kill one of us, said the god of foresight.

  Impossible, said the pantheon. But the god of death, their monarch, craved the god of discovery’s aid.

  Identify them, Death commanded.

  Discovery ferreted out all the half-godlings and marked them with a sign on their brows that mortals and gods alike could see. For a time, there was calm, and the power of surprise was no longer a half-god’s domain. For a time, all was well.

  But a god took pity upon the half-ones. A god who had enjoyed the chaos they caused, who had chuckled with the god of games and wrought his own mischief in the chaos.

  And it was this god who undid them all.

  * * *

  “Do you enjoy what you read?”

  The voice startled me out of my reverie, out of the world the book painted in my mind: the birth of Ethin with its sequined waters; the extravagant beauty of the gods, some of whom looked vaguely human, and others alien, with rose-colored skin or a snakelike form. Misty Death, who could coalesce into a solid weight greater than stone. The shifting Moon: sometimes a male, sometimes a female, sometimes invisible to all.

  I glanced up from the unfinished book, my pulse high because I had been startled, but I wasn’t truly afraid, not even when I saw who had spoken. I would twist his memory easily enough.

  It was the Lord Protector.

  He was sitting in a chair beside me, the Elysium bird on his shoulder. It called to me, its cry echoing in the empty library. The Lord Protector smiled. His face was resolutely plain, features so smooth and unremarkable that I found I had a hard time looking in his face. “Well?” he said. “It is impolite not to answer a question.”

  “No.”

  “Mend your words, child. After all, this is my book. Surely you do not wish to offend me. Why doesn’t the story please you?”

  Because he had made no move to hurt me and I was confident I could make him misremember me long enough to escape, I told him the truth. “Something bad is about to happen.”

  “Oh, yes. Something is. Tell me, little one, what is the appropriate punishment for someone who sneaks, who lies, who steals?”

  Warm with my power, proud of using it, I said, “I didn’t steal.”

  “Shall we put you in a barrel studded with nails and have you dragged by horses thr
ough the streets?”

  I paused, staring. Expression mild, he waited for an answer.

  “I am a councilman,” I told him quickly, my voice high. “I have been your favored assistant for years. You were glad to see me when you entered the library.”

  “Or put your hands in the fire until the skin crackles and the flesh cooks off the bone? A punishment most worthy for a thief.”

  My heart beat hard and fast. I tried using magic again. “This book was always an ordinary book.”

  “It is too bad your foreigner is gone. I could take her from you. I could squeeze her body down to a pin. I would carry the pin with me always, and drive it through the tongues of liars.”

  I scraped my chair back, leaping to my feet. The bird shrieked. “I left already.” The words spilled out of my mouth in a tangled stutter. “The library was empty when you arrived.”

  “Sit,” he said, “or I will show no mercy in how I chastise you.”

  I sat. Fear crawled over my skin.

  “A sneak may be a sneak,” he said. “A liar a liar, a thief a thief, and yet still show courtesy.”

  “I—” I faltered, unsure what he wanted.

  “Your name.”

  “Nirrim.”

  He waited.

  “Nirrim,” I said, “my lord.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Better.”

  “May I”—the glass pot wobbled in my hand as I lifted it—“pour you some tea?”

  He lifted his brows. I still could not quite tell the color of his hooded eyes. “How unexpected.” He accepted a cup and sipped. “It tastes like I imagine you do.” He drank deeply, and I tried not to show my relief. “It tastes like something else, too, but what?” He drained the cup.

  I lowered the pot to the table, waiting.

  “Poison.” He licked his lips. “Good try, my child, but poison is no way to kill a god.”

  52