Ruthless Gods

by Emily A Duncan

  “You wanted answers,” Marzenya said. “It is time. There is only one way to get them. And with those answers I need you to do something for me.”

  Anything, Nadya said in a rush. She had been desperate for this for so long. She knelt at the edge of the pool, running her fingers over the symbols carved into the stone.

  Water would have been too simple, made too much sense.

  It was filled with blood.

  Nadya choked back a sob.

  She held her hand over the pool. This was what she had come for, this was what she wanted. But, at what cost? What would this take from her?

  What did she have left to lose?

  Anything, she repeated. I would do anything.

  And she shifted, dipping her foot into the pool of blood. It was sickeningly warm and she swallowed back the bile that surged in her throat. There were steps at the edge of the pool. How many before her had done this? Where would this lead?

  Before she could go on, something shook the very foundation of the mountain. Marzenya’s alarm struck her. The goddess turned away from her and toward something else.

  “What has that boy done?” her goddess hissed.

  Nadya’s stomach flipped. Serefin or Malachiasz? It was impossible to know and she had to keep going.

  She slid into the pool to her calves and stood, taking one shaking step down. The blood was at her hips, soaking into the fabric of her dress. She hastily tugged Malachiasz’s jacket off. She brought it to her face, catching the faded scent of him, before she tossed it to the corner of the room. She couldn’t bear the thought of ruining it. Nadya skimmed her hand over the surface. She took another step, the blood at her chest. The next step would take her under. She hesitated. The rumpled jacket in the corner sent a pang through her.

  What if this was the wrong choice?

  But Nadya had been touched by the gods, chosen for this.

  She took a deep breath and dropped, letting the pool of blood swallow her whole.

  * * *

  “And so the little bird risks oblivion.”

  This was obliteration.

  This was what it was to be pulled apart and cast out against the fabric of time. To hear the song that denoted the present but see it all before her. To see it play on and on and on.

  Here, then, were her answers, of a sort, in a way that was an assault unlike the careful fragmented pieces she had picked up along the way. A hierarchy of power that could be broken into, torn down, changed. The gods were real—they existed—but beings of benevolence? Hardly. They could manipulate this great song outside of the mortal realm, but they could not press past the boundary that separated them and mortality. And some were kind and some were cruel and they fought amongst themselves. Yet still, they held a careful alliance and only one single rule was to be followed: they could watch, they could suggest, but they were not to directly influence the course of mortality.

  Magic was an unwieldy beast, not to be tamed, but there were those who were capable. And there were those who could twist magic to their will in small ways. Mortal, powerful, imbued with magic.

  But what of those who could stand between realities; who would walk from one side to the other, shifting themselves into beings of coherence amidst the madness as they nudged the mortal realm along its path. They watched. They waited. They ferried the mortals along like ants. What had they been, once? Mortal or magic or something in between? Fallen gods or humans who had broken past a certain point of transcendence?

  That, in the end, was not the great mystery it might have seemed a year ago.

  Gods were gods were gods and it wasn’t a grand question because, yes, a mortal could make that ascension but at what cost? The few that survived were so altered, it was like they had never been mortal at all.

  Could you kill a god?

  Anything could be killed.

  And underneath it all was the song of the darkness. Underneath that careful hierarchy was a vast ocean of power that churned and held within it creatures ancient and unfathomable. And she knelt at the edge of that place and contemplated just what it meant that she wanted to dip into that ocean of power and take it all for herself—that somehow she felt as if she already had.

  She was everything and nothing and yet the scar on her palm twinged just once, an answer to that discordant call. And she let herself reach down. She let herself touch the surface of that dark water.

  The space she was in shifted, no longer a song, and Nadya woke up in a dim room where blood dripped from the walls and the stone floor was dusted with snow. She shivered, wrapping her arms around herself. Before her were rows and rows of strange jars and different pieces of bone, like an apothecary’s shop—or a witch’s workroom.

  “Magic is changing.”

  Nadya jumped. A young girl was alongside her, eyeing the shelves of jars. She had strange, wide-set features and a long black braid that brushed the ground by her bare feet. She picked up one of the jars.

  “The world is changing, but that’s how the world works. Magic, though, magic is supposed to flow in only one direction, and that is no longer a truth.”

  Nadya frowned. “I have a friend who would say it’s all the same.”

  “In essence, it is,” the girl agreed. “Are you not proof of that?”

  “Am I?” Nadya asked desperately. “What is all this?”

  “Bits and pieces of everything and anything. There are things happening now. A shifting in the world caused by so many little disasters, so many choices compounding to bring us to this point. The divine and the heretical are combined to twist a boy into the semblance of a god.”

  Nadya took in a sharp breath.

  “Impossible before, possible now. Don’t act surprised, you knew what he was studying. Your people study it in secret as well. A girl who had darkness locked away, what will you do now that it’s woken up?”

  This girl was familiar, but Nadya had no idea why. She didn’t even know if the girl was real. Nadya drew her hand close.

  “An abomination, and yet…” She paused thoughtfully. “Maybe something more. To be both is impossible. Both is oil and water and yet that boy. And yet you.” The girl picked up a jar trapped in a perpetual state of a drop of blood falling into milk, the colors still separated. “This is what you want.”

  But Nadya was drawn to a silver jar with a string of teeth tied around its neck. She picked it up, aware of the girl watching her.

  “What will I find?” she whispered.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I want to know what I am.”

  The girl shrugged.

  Nadya carefully opened the jar. She got what she wished.

  A girl. Like any other. A girl who could hold power that would doom another mortal. A peasant girl from a monastery deep in the mountains of Kalyazin. A girl who had known loneliness and hunger and war. A girl who had lost and loved and wondered.

  A girl who had doubted.

  Everything and nothing.

  But these were things she already knew. She let out a frustrated sound.

  “Give it a moment,” the girl said.

  That ocean, that well, that vast roiling chaos of power. Eldritch and darkness and madness. There was another twinge of acknowledgment from the scar on her palm. A thrill of confirmation.

  She capped the jar, putting it back on the shelf.

  “You’re not asking the right questions,” the girl observed. “You know who—and what—you are. That never changed.”

  “Then what did?”

  Something had changed. Something had led her down this path toward destruction where she had ruined so much under the guise of trying to do right.

  The girl cupped Nadya’s face in one hand. “Maybe you were never meant to save the world, daughter of death, maybe you are doing exactly what you were supposed to. You danced on the edge of darkness and light and you fell. You were always going to fall. The darkness was always going to have you. There has never been any escape from it. It was exactly
what you were born for.”

  That couldn’t be possible. The girl wordlessly handed Nadya the other jar.

  “This won’t destroy Tranavia, will it?”

  “I told you,” the girl said, “destruction is not my intent.”

  Nadya let the jar fall from her fingers, watching the glass shatter into crystals. Myth and hope and faith.

  40

  NADEZHDA LAPTEVA

  This world awaits a turning, a revolt, a reckoning. It has churned and spat and twisted itself into something that is so different from the plan the first ones, the old ones, the dead ones wished it to be. Do not assume that plan was good and just. Never assume kindness. Assume oblivion.

  —The Volokhtaznikon

  With a hard yank, Nadya surfaced, choking and gasping for air. Malachiasz pulled her out of the pool, panic shot through his voice as he repeated her name over and over.

  “It’s fine,” she said, spitting out a mouthful of blood, wiping it out of her eyes. “I’m fine.” She hesitated before looking up to where he crouched before her.

  He was half gone. The mask had been shredded away but he had grasped onto pieces of it. His black hair was wild, his features fluid. Black horns spiraled back into his hair. But his eyes were pale blue, and he gently pushed her blood-soaked hair out of her face and wiped the blood from her skin.

  “What did you do?” he murmured.

  Nadya shook her head, wordless. She had given him up. She had chosen Marzenya. How was he here and mostly whole?

  He studied her face and she was terrified that if he looked too close he was going to see. He would know what she had done.

  She grabbed his face and kissed him hard. It was meant to distract him, but then he made a sound and heat burned all the way to Nadya’s core. She wanted this, wanted him. How many lies had she told herself as she pushed him away?

  He kissed her back with the same kind of desperate hunger she was feeling. She shifted closer, straddling his hips and tangling her hands into his hair.

  “Nadya,” he groaned. “This is a bad time.”

  “Shut. Up. Malachiasz,” she said between breathless kisses. She didn’t know if she was kissing him out of regret, if this was goodbye, or if this was a reminder that no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t pull herself away from this terrible, beautiful Tranavian boy.

  She didn’t want it to be any of those things. She had chosen Marzenya because she had to. But she loved Malachiasz, terribly, painfully, desperately, and what if she had chosen wrong?

  His hand cupping her face turned hard, grasping her jaw, breaking off the kiss as he turned her head roughly to one side, kissing her jaw, her throat. When his sharp teeth grazed against her collarbone she gasped, her fingers curling against the back of his head. His other hand trailed down her spine before flattening against the small of her back, pulling her as close as possible.

  There were too many layers of clothing between them. Nadya grasped one of his spiraling black horns and used it to yank his head back so she could kiss him again, tugging his lower lip between her teeth, hearing the groan that broke from his chest. He leaned back on one elbow as she shifted her weight against him. The white flowers covering the floor curled away from their movements. Every place he touched burned long after his hands roved on; the pressure of his mouth exquisite torture.

  His hand gathered up her skirt to grip her thigh and she was too far gone to be mortified by the whimper that escaped her and the way her hips ground down onto his. Kissing him deeper, his lips parted as he followed her lead, as she slid her hands under the hem of his shirt and traced the lines of his body, his skin hot beneath her hands.

  He froze. Nadya kissed his cheek, the bridge of his nose, the tattoos on his forehead, before she realized he had gone still against her. She leaned back slightly.

  His pale eyes narrowed, his edges sharpened, but somehow it didn’t feel like he was looking at her. “Nadya,” he whispered, panic lacing his voice, “what did you do?”

  “I—”

  “What did you do?” He grabbed her upper arms, his grip hard enough to hurt.

  She closed her eyes, the tears threatening to flood her. She didn’t know what she had done. She had simply followed her goddess’s orders. She had chosen her goddess.

  “I did what I had to,” she whispered.

  Abruptly, she was dumped from his lap as he scrambled to his feet. Panic was causing his features to shift swiftly and chaotically to the point where it looked painful, until it tapered down, disappearing, and all that stood before her was a lanky teenage boy, broken and lost.

  “No,” he whispered. “She’s taking it all. She’s taking everything.”

  What did I do?

  “The profaned magic will never be cast again,” Marzenya said, sounding smug. “How can they use what they do not remember?”

  The bottom of the world fell out. Oh. She carefully got to her feet, afraid of what Malachiasz might do. She had broken something in the fabric of the universe. She had pulled the knowledge of blood magic away from Tranavia.

  She had changed the world.

  She had done the one thing that might end the war.

  But at what cost?

  Malachiasz was laughing. It was a horrible, panicked sound, his eyes bleeding, darkening to onyx. His posture shifted and all Nadya’s will to fight bled away as she faced the Black Vulture.

  “No, oh, no, it’s not that easy,” he said. “Clever, though, clever girl,” he spat. “An eye for an eye. Betrayal serves itself, I see.”

  He took a step closer. She took a step back, but the pool of blood was close and she did not want to fall under its magic once more.

  “Blood and bone, I underestimated you,” he said, voice tangled and dark. “A mistake I will not make again.”

  “Malachiasz, please, I—”

  “You’ve done enough,” he said through iron teeth, grasping her jaw in one hand, pulling her closer. His eyes flickered pale for a heartbeat and the aching betrayal there broke her heart.

  “You thought that would finish things, did you? No more devil magic.”

  She closed her eyes. She hadn’t known that this would happen, but she had known that bringing him here would break him. That this would break Tranavia. She had gotten exactly what she wished.

  “All this time,” he murmured. “This was the game you were playing. You weren’t looking for answers at all. You needed me so you could stab me in the back.”

  “Like you did to me,” she snapped. She would not let him forget what he had done to her first.

  “This is about revenge?” He sounded incredulous.

  It wasn’t. It was never about revenge.

  “Would that make it easier?” she asked softly.

  He stared at her, hurt and angry. She couldn’t stop the tears from rolling down her cheeks.

  “Would it make it easier to cast me as the villain who only wanted to hurt you as you’d hurt me? If you were only the nightmare in my dreams? If this was just a game I was playing so I could twist the knife a little harder? You know none of that is true.”

  “Nadezhda, stop,” he said.

  “You know that I will always choose my goddess and my country and you will always choose your Vultures and Tranavia.”

  “Nadya.”

  Her goddess had lied to her, deceived her, had made her believe she was nothing without her—and it wasn’t true. Yet Nadya could not turn her back on the one thing she had always believed in.

  “Tell me you didn’t mean for this to happen,” he said beseechingly. “Tell me you weren’t planning this the whole time.”

  She remained silent.

  He let out a choked breath and let go of her. One of his hands went to his hair, unknotting a piece of bone that was tied in the strands. He worked quickly and efficiently until he had a pile of bones in his palm.

  “Well played, towy dżimyka,” he said, “but you and I are so very different and you forgot to keep your eyes forward. You forgot that thi
s game would continue. Was it supposed to touch me as well?”

  “Malachiasz…”

  “Take away all I had? The only thing that has ever made this worthless life even a little bit useful?” He rolled a piece of spine between his fingers. “I am so far past that.”

  Each of his words was a blow.

  “I am so much more,” he whispered, as though his heart were splintering. Then, colder, “I’m a god. As admirably as you have played this game, you’ve lost. Because of course I would help, of course this is how this would end. You brought me right where I wanted to be.”

  And she was too numb for shock because his words were inevitable. Betrayal was inevitable. That was all they really had between them—the willingness to betray one another to push their own ideals further. She had been a fool to believe it might be anything more.

  She had twisted a web around him, but she had never been set free from the tangle he had caught her up in and he had used that. She had let him.

  He crushed the bones between his hands. The monstrous godlike being he had become given form. His edges started to shiver.

  Nadya thought fast. There were beings with more power and they existed just outside this realm. She heard the doors slam upstairs, but it was too late, she had stepped backward, back into the pool of blood. Back into oblivion.

  SEREFIN MELESKI

  Serefin spat out a mouthful of dirt. He struggled to his feet, his head spinning.

  “You’re not finished, boy,” that voice hissed. Chyrnog. “There is still more for you to do. They’re at the temple. I want the boy.”

  Serefin groaned, pressing his hands against his forehead. What had he done? And the gods were still here, he hadn’t been let go.

  Chyrnog laughed. “Did you think you were ever going to be free? No. This is your fate. You gave up. You fell. You belong to us.”

  Serefin tried to fight. He tried to take control of … something. But he had nothing left to fight with. He started walking but it was barely of his own accord.

  Soon he could sleep.

  He must rid Tranavia of the traitor, stopping him before he set into motion something cataclysmic. Just one more thing to do.