by Eileen Wilks
Dyffaya advanced on Nathan’s body. He stopped about ten feet away, studying it. His expression changed and he moved forward more quickly. Maybe he’d confirmed that Nathan’s heart was stopped. Maybe it was too badly damaged to heal. Maybe—
Dyffaya knelt and stretched out a hand.
Nathan rolled onto his side, his arm swinging in a smooth arc, with Claw in his hand. And buried the blade in Dyffaya’s chest.
The world screamed.
FORTY
THE air, the ground—everything screamed along with the god. Including the people behind Kai. Behind her, because she was already running toward Nathan and the being—the intention—impaled on his knife. The very large knife that had been made from a dragon’s living claw, freely given. Made with a dragon’s knowledge of death to carry the Gift Nathan had been born with.
Which was also the knowledge of death, freely given.
Thoughts roiled around Kai as she ran, streaming clouds of color and agony. She raced through the darkest violet and a tattered mist of white, instinctively ducked to avoid a snapping pattern in furious red. She landed on her knees beside what had never truly been a body, propelled by her Gift.
Dyffaya’s not-body had changed. Gone was the form she’d seen. The body Nathan’s blade pinned to the ground was larger, more muscular. A Greek Adonis with shining blond hair snarled up at Nathan, reaching for him even as his body began dying.
Kai waited. Now that she was here, ready to act, her Gift no longer pushed, but waited with her. This was not the right moment. Not yet.
Nathan twisted the blade. Dyffaya and the world shrieked. And he changed again—this time to a youth, maybe ten years old, his arms slim and lovely. His legs were slim and lovely, too. And dying.
The next body wasn’t human. It wasn’t elf, either. It was huge and hairy, with arms like tree trunks ending in claws that could have ripped out a rhino’s throat. He swiped one arm at Nathan.
Who held on grimly to Claw, even as blood splashed from a deep wound to his chest.
Dyffaya wasn’t bleeding. With a huge knife in his chest, he didn’t bleed. No-blood-no-scent, Dell had called him. He changed again. This time, as he died, one of the great trees nearby came crashing down. Kai was suddenly certain each death had brought down a tree, but the others had been too distant for her to hear. She gasped as this enormous trunk smashed against its neighbor, splintering as if it were glass—the patterns, oh God, the patterns, broken now into crystalline fragments, each shard a fragment of—of—
The world groaned.
Dyffaya began changing faster. From hairy beast he flipped into a race Kai had never seen before, one with blue-green skin and gills. The aquatic being had no time to suffer for lack of water before dying. Then to an old man—an elfin man, his white hair streaming around his face and shoulders, which were bare now, for the god was forgetting to add clothing, his face lined and bewildered. “Why are you doing this?” he whispered. “I can’t die.”
With every change—every death—another tree came crashing down. Some distant. Some closer by.
Dimly she was aware of Dell coming up beside her as Dyffaya cycled through yet more forms—another human shape, then two that were grotesque, then a new one that was female. That was . . . her. Kai looked down at her own face, distorted by pain. Saw herself gasp Nathan’s name. Quickly she looked up at Nathan.
The determination on his face didn’t falter, but sweat poured down his cheeks, wetted his hair, dripped down his chest to mingle with the blood from his wounds—one from a sword, one from a beast’s claws. Still bleeding, those wounds, and they shouldn’t be. His healing stopped bleeding almost immediately. Had he lost weight? Even as she watched, did his cheeks become more hollow?
Another death. Another tree came down. And Dyffaya changed again.
This one was different. She saw that or sensed it in the turbulence of thought around them. He was a boy again, but an elfin boy—slim and more beautiful than any of the other forms he’d worn, for this one was true. This was how he’d looked once.
This time, he looked at her, not Nathan. Tears shone in his eyes. “Please,” he whispered. “Make him stop killing me.”
Now. This moment. She reached for the boy’s face and laid her hands on his cheeks. Touched him, too, with her Gift. Lightly, lightly . . . “Nathan,” she said. “You must stop.”
“Kai, he’s tricking you. He isn’t—”
She looked at him. Met his eyes. “I know what he is.” And she did. She knew what shapes were frozen in those terrible not-trees. “I know what I have to do.”
His eyes were pools of terrible strain, an effort she could see in his thoughts, as rigid as his shoulders as he held to his purpose. Trust eased in. Trust in her. He didn’t know what she knew, had no proof . . . and needed none.
He withdrew Claw.
Nathan couldn’t call back the death he’d already sent, but he’d stopped sending more. She had time. A little time. The patterns around her, those huge, tumbling patterns, so incredible and majestic . . . and furious. Tortured. Distorted, and growing worse.
Broken sad-bad, Dell had said. Yes. “What is your name?” she asked the boy.
His throat worked as he swallowed. “I can’t . . . I lost it. A long time ago, I lost my name. I looked and looked, but I couldn’t find it again.”
Crystalline sorrow surrounded her. She was in his thoughts, not reading them, yet somehow understanding much of what she saw. He referred to the moment of his first insanity, she knew, the one that started the rest. He’d been an adept. He’d known his true name. And yet he’d lost it. “What did your mother call you?”
“Sandetti.” A little boy’s voice. “It’s a love name, not a—a true name. My mother loved me, but she’s gone. I have been alone so long. So very long.”
Three thousand years or more. “Sandetti, will you let me help you?”
“I’m so afraid . . .”
The world shuddered with his fear.
“I know what’s wrong,” she told him gently. “You told us, didn’t you? You can’t die. Yet death has entered you. Death is here, and it can’t stop killing you, yet you can’t die.”
“Yes.” Tears wet his cheeks.
The black not-trees reaching from deep in the ground of this place to the blackness above . . . black, frozen pillars of thought. Of denial. Deep and total denial. He hadn’t wanted to die, so he’d denied death—and, being a god, he was the only one who could bind him.
That was his second insanity. He’d banished himself to his mind, used the power of his own words to trap himself, forever alone in his godhead and his delusion. That insanity gripped what was left of him, this broken god, yearning endlessly for the one thing he could not have.
Life. “Let me help you,” she said gently.
He looked at her for a long moment. His voice shook. “Will I be alone? I am so very afraid of being alone again.”
Before she could answer, Dell did. The chameleon moved up beside the boy-god and lay down, touching him. And purred.
He reached up weakly and stroked her fur. “She does love me,” he said in a marveling voice that, for a moment, sounded like the adult Dyffaya. “I was never sure . . . yes. You may help.”
Kai sank into trance. Quickly, easily, her Gift eager.
And saw everything. There was no ground. No flowers, no endlessly tall trunks. Only patterns. And there, buried deep, the tangled roots of those not-trees, the denial that had distorted that great mind. Thick and knotted and huge, they were the binding he’d laid upon himself when he refused to accept reality: that he’d been killed. For over three thousand years, everything that remained of him had been built on untruth.
Carefully she formed the purest white thought bubble and poured power into it. More power. It would take so much power to shift those roots, but she knew where to begin prying . . . there, where t
he shock and pain of death were true, at the very base of the roots. Before they became twisted into other shapes.
She shaped her thought bubble and sent it where it was needed. And began to pry apart that first, tight twist. As she did, something else became clear.
She knew how binders were made, what line had to be crossed. To turn into a binder, she would have to impose falseness on another mind. Falseness like this. But to do that, she’d first have to knowingly embrace the false, take it into herself. She couldn’t give what she didn’t have.
Like Dyffaya—like everyone?—a binder’s first victim was herself.
Perhaps it was because she was in the thoughts this time, instead of merely observing them. Perhaps it was because he was a god, however damaged. But this time, she heard thoughts. He spoke to her, whispering of events long past. Sometimes she saw the memories, moments of life flashing by . . .
“Tell me,” she said as she pulled and pulled at the next great knot. “Tell me what happened.”
His voice grew clearer. It was a boy’s voice, not a man’s. “When they came for me, Winter and her sister . . . she was my friend, and she’d promised. I’d asked her to promise before . . . before a lot of things happened that made me lose my name. I don’t remember that very well, but I know what happened when they came for me. I’d changed my mind. I didn’t want to die! I told her and told her but she wouldn’t listen.”
The word he used for friend was elfin, and meant true intimacy. . . . “She’d promised to kill you?” So much power already used, but she needed more. She drew it and kept working.
“Yes, because I thought something bad would happen to me. Or was happening . . . I don’t remember what.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I don’t want to remember.” But he wept now, for he did. She’d untangled too much for him to keep forgetting. He wept and wept, first for the deaths that he’d caused. Some he’d meant, for they’d been at war. Some he hadn’t, but they’d happened anyway, for in that long-ago time, which was also happening now, chaos was becoming his master instead of his servant.
Somewhere, in all those deaths, he’d lost himself. Whatever was meant by a true name, he’d lost it. But he’d retained chaos and all its incredible power. And so his friend, a true friend, the Queen of Winter, and her sister of Summer, had come for him as she’d promised she would if he lost himself in the madness of chaos. She’d come and . . .
“They killed me,” he whispered. “I . . .”
“Yes.” Almost finished now. Kai felt weak. It was hard to keep pulling at that last, terrible knot, but she had to.
For a moment, a face wavered in front of her—the face of the elf boy she’d seen earlier, changing slowly into the face of a man. An elfin man, beautiful as they all were, but with something more. Something she couldn’t name. His eyes—startling eyes, a turquoise as bright as crystallized laughter—opened wide just as Kai undid the last knotted root.
He looked at her, astonished. “I died!”
“Yes,” she whispered. And wondered if she were dying, too. She was so weak, and she didn’t know how to get back. How to find her body again, when all she saw were patterns. Fugue. She’d fallen into fugue, and she was lost here in the thoughts of a dying god.
“Tell Winter,” he said, his voice growing fainter as he died . . . it took time for such a vast mind to fade. “Tell her to remember Sandetti, and forget that other one. The god. He didn’t do well for himself. For anyone.”
How could she? She was lost in his thoughts and would die with him. She wouldn’t see Winter again. Or Nathan, who would grieve so terribly. Or Dell, who might die when she did, because the familiar bond—
The dying god gripped her suddenly. Not with hands, which he lacked, just as she lacked a body to feel them—yet it was much like being held in strong hands. And that—the brush of a kiss? Something very like that, and the merest whisper of a name that reverberated through her with such truth. And then he shoved her, shoved her hard, spending the last of his power.
Shoved her away from him. Out of his thoughts.
And back into her body. She drew a deep, shuddering breath.
“Kai, Kai.” Nathan was holding her. She was half in his lap. Dell, who’d lain down next to Dyffaya so he wouldn’t be alone, was next to her now. She figured out all that from feel because she hadn’t managed to open her eyes yet.
She made the effort. It was worth it, because there he was, bent over her. His cheeks were wet.
“Your heart stopped,” he told her. “You were gone so long, and then your heart stopped.”
“So . . . did yours.” She reached up to touch his wet cheek.
“That was just Cullen. Yours . . . I thought I’d lost you.”
“You still could,” Cullen said dryly. “This place is coming apart. We have to get out. The question is, how?”
Some of his unspoken urgency carried over to Kai, gave her a spurt of energy. She couldn’t quite sit up, but her effort to do so got Nathan’s attention. He propped her up higher against him.
Dell was beside her, yes. And next to Dell were two more chameleons, smaller and leaner—much leaner. And Dell was skinny. Her ribs showed. Kai had drawn too much power. Alarmed, she sent a quick question, and Dell huffed and returned the knowledge of hunger. The Queen’s stone was almost empty, too, but there was enough to hold the three of them for a time.
Relief shuddered through her and she looked around. The not-trees were gone. All of them. The stuff that looked like ground still glowed, but it was cracking. Cullen was near, his arm around the dark-haired woman who hadn’t been beguiled. Benedict was carrying someone, a woman too weak to stand. A young man was held up by two of the others. “Where’s Malek?”
“Dead. The body vanished.”
She looked at Nathan.
“No,” he said. “Not me. He killed himself when his god died. He didn’t want to face the Queen’s justice.”
“No,” she said, “that was grief.” Malek had been a small, slimy man, and when he’d found something larger than himself to serve, he’d chosen badly. But his devotion had been real.
Not so for the others gathered around them. Some of those who’d been kept by the god were weeping. Some looked dazed as they woke from the beguilement that had vanished with the god . . . who was not here to hold things together.
Or to send any of them back.
Kai wanted to weep, too, from sheer frustration. To have come so close, done so much . . .
“Wait,” Benedict whispered. He cocked his head. Some emotion broke over his face, deep and painful, cracking the grimness, revealing the man inside the warrior. Hope. “Do you hear that?”
A moment later, she did.
Drumming. Coming from—“Thataway,” she said, drunk with exhaustion and a burgeoning joy. She’d survived. As had Nathan and Dell and all who’d made it to this last, terrible day. They’d all survived, and someone—or Someone, or more than one?—had come to help them get home. She couldn’t see Them, but as she listened to the drums, the breath of those Presences stirred her hair and her soul.
Kai lifted one limp arm, pointing in the direction of the drums. Down. The drums were beneath the cracking not-ground. Many drums, she realized, beating in unison. Many, many drums. “We go that way. Down, toward the drums.”
“What drums?” Nathan asked.
He couldn’t hear them? Well, he wasn’t Diné. She grinned like an idiot. “The drums of thousands of the People. Grandfather’s drums.”
FORTY-ONE
NO two people reported exactly the same experience of that strange return. They all saw the not-ground lose its glow. As it did, one of the cracks widened, becoming a wide hole spilling light into the dark, crumbling godhead.
Kai had gone down a steep slope where tough grass mingled with rock. Cullen and three others had seen slopes, too, but their des
criptions didn’t match hers. Nathan had seen only light, but that light formed itself into a ramp leading down. He remembered carrying Kai down that long ramp, while Kai remembered him carrying her down that short, rocky slope. One of the women swore she’d ridden down an escalator. Stairs were the most popular version. A couple people reported walking endlessly through mist or fog, and Dell had the simplest descent. She’d leaped down the hole and landed directly in the Ordinary World.
Benedict wouldn’t say what he’d experienced. When asked, he only smiled and shook his head, though something in his eyes made Kai wonder if he’d actually seen the Presences she’d only sensed.
She didn’t ask. Such experiences were too personal.
They’d all descended in whatever manner to emerge on a real slope, that of Little Sister. At the base of that small, unprepossessing mountain, gathered around it in the thousands—sixteen thousand and ninety-five, she later learned—were those of the People who’d answered Joseph Tallman’s summons. They’d been drumming for eighteen hours straight.
It had taken several days for all of those thousands to arrive at Clanhome. They’d had time, though. On Earth, ten days had passed since Eharin opened a hole in one grassy wall of the hobbit house so she could bludgeon Kai with a cosh she’d purchased online.
Three days after Eharin knocked Kai out, Karin Stockman had taken down the ward at the hobbit house. She’d had to call in a Midwestern coven to help. Turned out the ward had been a keepaway, just as Kai suspected. Once it was gone, Ackleford and his crew had found bodies—Eharin’s, and those of his four witnesses. They’d also found all sorts of evidence cops love, like that cosh.
Cullen hadn’t come up with a way to destroy the chaos motes. He had, however, come up with an alternative. At the last minute, as they were leaving the godhead, he’d stuffed his pockets with handfuls of the sandy ground. The motes were strongly attracted to the godhead-stuff, and he was using that attraction to gather them. Kai and Nathan would ask the Queen to send an adept to retrieve the motes. Nathan agreed with Cullen: a number of adepts would be eager to get their hands on such concentrated power, however hazardous. The problem would be deciding who could be trusted with it.