Nicodemus was just about to finish undressing when he heard the door move. “I’m not—” he started to say but the screen slid away to reveal a tall, lithe woman, her long brown hair wet and plastered against her face and shoulders. She wore a wizard’s black robes and a red physician’s stole. The rain made the cloth cling to her hips, her slight breasts. She hadn’t aged a day since he first saw her, could not age a day. The tropical sun had darkened the spray of freckles across her fair cheeks. Her mouth was parted slightly and her very dark brown eyes stared at him with what he was sure was a mirror of his own desire. It had been almost a year.
“Francesca,” he breathed and dropped the towel.
A few steps from the door, he caught her up in his arms and spun her around as she pressed her lips hard into his. She was the heat in his blood, a drug that evaporated all his solid thoughts of death into vapor.
He spun her around again and her feet struck the screen and sent him tottering back. She laughed as he landed her on her feet.
They were fumbling with her clothes now, tossing her stole to the ground and working with clumsy fingers at her collar fastenings.
“But the regent,” he said. “We can’t—”
“I have to get out of these wet clothes anyway.”
“Good point.”
“Nico,” she whispered as they continued to work at the fastenings, “I’m bringing horrible news from Dral.”
“Later,” he whispered before pressing in for another urgent kiss and then, “The door.”
She turned and with a flick of a wrist sent a silvery paragraph across the room to push the screen door shut. The loud clap made Nicodemus aware that he could hear more people moving around on the floor below. He thought perhaps he heard footsteps and turned to the door.
But then Francesca undid the ties around her collar, drew her robes up over her head and tossed them aside.
“Fran,” he said, “someone—”
“Later,” she whispered while pressing herself against his chest. Her warmth scattered his wits. He wrapped his arms around her and saw how his dark skin made hers seem fairer. They kissed again and—
Someone walked in the hallway with deliberately heavy tread. Reflexively, Nicodemus put himself between the door and his wife.
A woman cleared her throat. “Magistra, I hope you’ll pardon the most regretted interruption.”
“Yes, Ellen?” Fran asked.
“Another party has come to the palace. It’s your daughter.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Kneeling in the throne room, Nicodemus looked up at a hundred-ton whale floating an inch above his head. Or he listened to a spider whisper in his ear. Or he straddled the muscular, musky back of an elephant marching rhythmically around the Floating Palace. Or, and more likely, he did none of these things.
Trickster deities always gave Nicodemus a headache.
“Divine Trimuril,” Nicodemus said, hiding the annoyance, “might I have a moment? Your godspells are…” His perceptions flickered. The whale thrashed. The spider nattered. “A moment…” The elephant reared. Groaning, Nicodemus placed both his hands on the floorboards to steady himself.
Leandra had just finished reporting that thugs were attacking minor city deities. Now the Trimuril was trying to communicate directly with Nicodemus and so was unintentionally baffling his perceptions. To almost any other soul, the Trimuril projected herself as one aspect of her trinity. However, Nicodemus’s cacography partially misspelled the Trimuril’s texts, and so her godspells had an imprecise and often prismatic effect upon him.
Most people thought of tricksters as mischief-makers: clever pranksters, rapacious thieves, clownish dupes. Most would say tricksters were rule-breakers. But in Nicodemus’s experience tricksters did not break rules so much as they showed rules to be broken.
Often humans prayed to tricksters for help escaping from dire situations, laws, customs. Tricksters facilitated such escapes by altering perceptions. They might, for example, play the idiot who commits misdeeds to demonstrate the folly of such misdeeds and so—reinforced with perception-altering godspells—reshape the values of a village, city, kingdom. Or they might humiliate another god to change how the god was worshiped. Tricksters were the deities of altered moral perception.
Nicodemus felt his perceptions reel again through the Trimuril’s incarnations. He tried to glean unaltered reality by concentrating on what he knew about the Trimuril.
Centuries ago, when the archipelago sought to escape the First Neosolar Empire, each island culture incarnated a different trickster. Oka’pahui, a blue whale navigator goddess, helped Sea People smugglers befuddle the imperial fleets. Elephantine Ghajal had built secret jungle roads for Lotus Culture warriors. Araxa, the Ancestor Spider, taught the Cloud People how to forge and spy. The first Ixonian king had negotiated the fusion of these deities, and the resulting complex had tricked all of the archipelago’s pantheons into uniting against the empire.
By focusing on these thoughts, Nicodemus’s perceptions consolidated. Gone were the whale, spider, elephant. He knelt in a wide wooden throne room, a row of arched windows behind the dais. To his right knelt his wife, to his left his daughter. They were both looking at him with concerned expressions so similar it made his heart ache. Neither mother nor daughter had looked at or spoken to the other.
Behind Nicodemus sat Doria, Sir Claude, and Rory. To their left sat Leandra’s divinities; to their right, Francesca’s student Ellen. Presently Rory cocked his head, whispering to Ellen. At the back of the room sat a small crowd of Ixonian dignitaries and deities. Notable in the crowd was Tagrana, the archipelago’s most powerful war deity. Her tiger-eyes studied Nicodemus, and a brilliant aura leapt about her muscular body like flames.
In front of Nicodemus stood a dais and a simple wooden throne. Upon it sat the Sacred Regent, who ruled Ixos in the name of an ancient royal family, long ago made figureheads and confined to a temple city on Mount Ixram. The present Sacred Regent was a thin, dark-skinned man well past his first century with lank white hair and blank white eyes. Nicodemus had never learned his given name—which was taboo to mention—but knew that before his elevation, the Sacred Regent had been the head of the hydromantic order. Presently, the regent wore sumptuous robes of yellow silk and an expression of grave consideration.
Beside him stood a short androgynous figure with limestone skin, a slight potbelly, six arms, a shaved head, wide stone eyes, and a slight smile indicating an emotion beyond human conjecture. This was the Trimuril’s true incarnation.
“My apologies, Divine Trimuril,” Nicodemus said. “I am ready.”
The stony incarnation waved one of six hands to dismiss the comment. The divinity moved with irregular, insectlike jerks. “There is no need to apologize.” The Trimuril’s lips did not move; rather the words came from a thin, screechy voice as if Ancestor Spider’s incarnation were sitting on Nicodemus’s shoulder and whining in his ear. “I wondered if we might play a game. It would be fun.”
With twitchy movements, the Trimuril flatted all six of her palms toward the sky in a gesture of offering. To govern her diverse pantheon, the Trimuril constantly sent her soul into various ark stones to cause her incarnation to appear to the deities she judged to need guidance. She did this with incomprehensible speed. The small pauses in her twitching movement indicated those brief moments when she would send her soul somewhere else on the lake. The fact that she had manifested her soul in her physical incarnation for so long indicated how important she felt the present audience was.
Nicodemus blinked and had to fight down his annoyance. Imperial scouts and an unknown deity stalked the bay and the Trimuril wanted to play? “What game, goddess?” Nicodemus asked levelly.
The Trimuril’s enigmatic smile grew. “A game of imitation.”
“How do you mean, goddess?”
“I challenge you to do something that I cannot imitate perfectly. The only limitations will be that it must be performed in this room and canno
t involve Language Prime. Other than that, your challenge could be anything: a feat of spellwrighting or singing or storytelling or dancing.” The statue smiled and the spider voice tittered in his ear. “Anything really. It will be fun.”
Nicodemus frowned and then glanced at Francesca and Leandra. They wore reflections of his own confusion and had tilted their heads to one side; apparently the spider was speaking in their ears as well.
Nicodemus turned back to the Trimuril. She had always been his reliable ally, and he could think of no reason why that should have changed. It seemed unlikely that she was trying to punish or humiliate him. “When might we play this game, goddess?”
“Whenever you like, Nicodemus. You simply need to speak your challenge and we will play. You may have as many attempts as you like until you admit defeat. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”
No, it bloody didn’t. Nicodemus could think of nothing he could do—outside of altering Language Prime texts—that the divinity complex couldn’t. “What stakes shall we play for?”
“Ahh,” Ancestor Spider said into his ear as the statue pressed her three pairs of palms together. “I would like to play for your daughter.”
Nicodemus made a surprised choking sound while Francesca blurted out, “What?”
The Trimuril’s expression did not change. “I am a very old divinity, and I should like to have a child. Did you know I never had? Hearing how your daughter so cleverly discovered these thugs with the perfect circle tattoo—oh, and I agree with her assessment that they are an organization, likely criminal, impersonating a cult—makes me think she would be a good daughter for me, if she and her mother also consent to our game.”
“But I don’t understand why we should play such a game,” Nicodemus said.
“If you should win,” Ancestor Spider creaked in Nicodemus’s ear, “I will grant any request you might have of me so long as it doesn’t harm another soul.”
Nicodemus’s confusion worsened. He had no requests of the Trimuril and couldn’t think of any that he might soon have.
“However,” Ancestor Spider continued, “if you should admit that I win, then I will adopt Lady Warden Leandra as my daughter and you will cease all familiar relationships with her.”
Nicodemus wondered why either Leandra or he would want such a thing.
Apparently anticipating his confusion, the Sacred Regent spoke, “There is an obscure law that pertains to this game. As the daughter of the Trimuril, Lady Warden Leandra would have a guaranteed seat on the Regency Council.”
Francesca started to speak with heated words. “But—”
Leandra interrupted, “I consent.”
Nicodemus and Francesca looked over at their daughter in surprised silence.
Ignoring her parents, Leandra kept her eyes on the goddess. “I trust in the Trimuril’s wisdom.”
“What fun,” the spider creaked in Nicodemus’s ear. “And Lady Warden Francesca?”
Nicodemus looked over at his wife, who was staring openmouthed. If Nicodemus were not so distressed, he would have been amused to see his unflappable wife at such a loss.
“Consider,” said the Trimuril, “that Nicodemus need never invoke the challenge if he doesn’t want to.”
Francesca closed her mouth. “Goddess, I think perhaps we have more pressing—”
“The divine Trimuril is able to decide what is pressing in her own kingdom,” Leandra interrupted.
Nicodemus looked back at his daughter and then to the Trimuril. Were they conspiring? To what purpose?
“Then…” Francesca spoke hesitantly, “… then I would defer to my husband.”
“You’ll what?” Nicodemus asked. This was a first.
Francesca looked at him with a flabbergasted expression.
Nicodemus turned back to the Trimuril. The divinity complex regarded him with an enigmatic smile. Impatience overwhelmed Nicodemus. This was ridiculous; they needed to get on with pressing business. “Very well, Goddess, we accept but I can’t imagine a situation in which I would challenge you.”
“Wonderful fun!” Ancestor Spider creaked in Nicodemus’s ear as the statue clapped each of her three pairs of hands, from lowest to highest. “Well then, pardon my interruption. Please continue with your reports. I believe Lady Warden Leandra had just finished telling us about the thugs with the tattoos.”
There followed a silence in which Nicodemus waited for the goddess to say more. When she didn’t, he looked at Francesca. She looked back at him. They both looked at Leandra, who ignored them both.
“Lord Warden Nicodemus,” the Sacred Regent said in his raspy voice, “would you describe your recent expedition in pursuit of the monkey neodemon of brigands to the east who has evaded us for so long?”
“Yes, your excellency,” Nicodemus replied and then reported about how he had falsely claimed to pursue the brigand neodemon when he had sought to entrap the River Thief on the Matrunda River. He explained that he had done so because he believed someone in the Regency or in Leandra’s service was informing the neodemons. On hearing this, Leandra stiffened.
Nicodemus described his encounter with the River Thief, what he had surmised about her cult, and his recommendations about preventing her reincarnation.
The only thing that Nicodemus withheld was mention that the River Thief had been wearing Leandra’s face; he wanted to discuss this with his family before making it public knowledge.
“Most distressing,” the Sacred Regent said when he finished. “My Lady Warden Leandra, have you any idea who in your service might have been leaking information to the River Thief?”
“No, your excellency.”
The old man frowned as if waiting for the Trimuril to speak. When she did not, he nodded. “We shall investigate immediately.”
Nicodemus glanced over at his daughter and could almost feel the coldness radiating off of her. He didn’t blame her. It had been an infringement on her independence to take down the River Thief as he did, but still he could not see any other way he could have brought the neodemon down.
“Lord Warden,” the regent said. “I hope you do not have any more distressing findings?”
Nicodemus turned back to the dais. “I’m afraid I do, your excellency.” He described the carnage at Feather Island and what he had learned from the pyromancer, who was now under guard in the city’s infirmary.
As he spoke, the regent’s expression grew more and more puckered until the man looked as if he were sucking on a lemon. “Imperial scouts? What can the meaning of this be?”
To Nicodemus’s surprise, Francesca spoke. “I’m afraid, your excellency, I have the answer.” All eyes turned to his wife. She paused, a little dramatically. “When my husband and I first learned that the empire was strengthening its air and sea fleets, we decided that he would travel to Ixos both to cast his metaspell and also to help deter any thoughts the empress might have had about a misadventure on the archipelago. At the same time, I set my agents in Dral to discover what might be causing the empress’s actions. Roughly ten days after Nicodemus set sail, I made a horrible discovery, the news of which I could not trust to a colaboris spell or a messenger.”
Leandra clenched her hands so tightly her knuckles blanched. Nicodemus felt the same anxiety.
Francesca continued. “For decades now I have suspected several men and women in Dral of selling information to the empire. Our investigation started by examining their recent activities. Surprisingly, we learned that half of them had disappeared. More distressing, perhaps forty days prior to our investigation, all three of the suspected imperial spies in the city of Cree had met unexpected deaths.”
The Sacred Regent made a low, thoughtful sound. Beside him, the Trimuril wore her usual enigmatic smile.
“Further investigation revealed that all the suspected spies had either fallen ill or were the victims of violent accidents during the same time a powerful shape-shifting neodemon was discovered in the city. The exact nature of the neodemon was never discovered because the
local deities deconstructed it before my agents or I received word of the events. I sent the druids Kenna and Tam, both of Thorntree, to discover the shape-shifting neodemon’s potential worshipers and requisites; however, they found no evidence of his cult in Cree. In fact, they found no evidence of any new worship at all. Given this finding and the neodemon’s great power, we suspected that the divinity had migrated from elsewhere. When looking into this possibility, the twins discovered a devotee of the shape-shifter, one of his priestesses no less. She had fled Cree and was trying to make it to Warth. Without her god’s protection, she was dispirited and near starvation. After an offer of protection, she confessed that her god was, in fact, an old god of the kingdom of Verdant.”
The room was filled with involuntary sounds of surprise. Everyone had heard the rumors that the empire was deconstructing their weakest deities in order to empower their texts and spellwrights, but if deities were fleeing the imperial kingdoms, then the situation was far worse than suspected.
The Sacred Regent cleared his throat. “It was my understanding that it is impossible for a divinity to escape the empire.”
“That is the most distressing thing of all,” Francesca replied. “The priestess reported that her god was smuggled out of Verdant by spies of the league.”
“Impossible,” Nicodemus said. “None of our allies would be so foolish.”
Behind him, the room filled with murmuring. For the league to smuggle deities out of the empire would be to violate their sovereignty, no different from kidnapping their citizens or stealing from their treasuries. To smuggle imperial deities would be to incite war.
Francesca’s expression was calm. “It might sound impossible, but in this case it seems to be the truth. We found witnesses in Calad who had helped the priestess and her god enter Dral. Worse, we believe we have found strong evidence that several other neodemons discovered in Dral and Ixos originated in the empire and were somehow smuggled in.”
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