Irritation flashed through the tenderness she had been feeling. “It’s not the same. A disability and a disease are different things.”
“I know they are, sweetheart, but we do have some things in common. You inherited my misspelling but in you it caused a disease.”
“And that’s the point, Dad, your cacography isn’t going to kill you,” she said with more heat than she intended. “You and I don’t have that in common at all. My disease is going to kill me and there’s nothing either of us or anyone else can do about it.”
“I’m sorry that … I am not saying it right. It’s just … that I worry on some level you won’t accept help from me because you blame me. I wouldn’t fault you. I wanted better for you.”
“Dad, that’s not it.”
He studied her face again and then nodded. “Okay … Okay … You know the Trimuril played that stupid game today because she wanted you to be indebted to her or to me so that you would accept help from one of us.”
Leandra rolled her eyes. “Sounds like her.”
“Would you accept help from me?”
She looked into his green eyes, saw the uncertainty. “Yes, Dad,” she lied. “When I need help, I will come to you.”
The wrinkles around his eyes seemed to lessen.
Leandra was amazed that she could so completely fool her father. Part of her was grateful that she could do so. Part of her was frightened. And, if she was brutally honest with herself, part of her was just a little bit angry that her father should be so clueless. As infuriating as Francesca could be, she would never let her get away with any of this shit.
“Can I check on you later?” Nicodemus asked.
“I’m going into Chandralu. I won’t be back in the Floating City tonight,” Leandra said, hoping that she wouldn’t return until the prophecy of murdering someone she loved was resolved.
“Fran and I have to attend the war council, but I doubt it’ll run much past sundown. I can likely return to the family compound. You could see me there.”
Leandra tried not to flinch. That would be close enough to her that she might still have to kill him. “What do you plan to do other than check on me?”
Nicodemus’s gaze became unfocused. “I might need to prepare another metaspell.”
“In case Aunt Vivian casts one of her metaspells?”
“It’s horrible to imagine things getting as bad as that, but … better to have it and not need it than the other way around.” He returned from a distant thought and put both of his hands on hers. “Heaven willing, I’ll finish up the councils on the Floating City and then see you again in the family compound?”
God-of-gods let’s hope not. “Maybe.”
“If you need me sooner, you’ll come find me in the compound?”
“I will, Dad.” She kissed him on the cheek, hating herself for manipulating him so easily.
He squeezed her hand again and then got up to leave. “Keep yourself safe, okay?”
“I will.”
He nodded back and went out.
Leandra waited for as long as she could stand before calling for Dhrun.
The screen door slid and the four-armed goddess stepped back into the room.
“We’re going straight to Thaddeus as soon as Holokai gets back. Where is that stupid fish?”
“I’ll get everything ready.” Dhrun bowed. “I don’t know about Holokai … How was the conversation with your father?”
“I fooled him this time, but mother isn’t going to be satisfied with his report. She’ll keep pushing. That’s why…” She paused. “That’s why we have to get to Thaddeus immediately. If his spell to stop me from loving doesn’t work, then I’m sure…” Suddenly she had to blink rapidly. “Then I’m sure I’ll have to kill my father.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“The Cult of the Undivided Society worships Leandra?” Francesca repeated in confusion. “My daughter, Leandra? How?”
Below them, Tam and Lolo were still splashing around, at play in the lake.
Holokai said, “It started after Port Mercy, when you and she fought. Problem is I don’t know what exactly happened between the two of you. You’ll have to tell me.”
Francesca frowned. “You want me to tell you a private family matter?”
He shrugged and then smirked. “Doesn’t matter to me. You were the one asking how the Cult came to worship Lea. I can’t tell you how unless I know exactly what happened at Port Mercy.”
Francesca’s frown deepened as she thought it over. She had Holokai well enough under her control and there was nothing dangerous about his knowing the truth. She nodded. “So, sixteen or seventeen years ago, Lea and I were arguing so much about how to treat her disease that she let me talk her into enrolling in the academy for physicians at Port Mercy. I think mostly she wanted to learn enough to prove me wrong about something, maybe anything. She’s not a spellwright, but the academy makes exceptions for those with influence. She was there only two years and a miserable student. But she was away from me and living on her own. We were all a little relieved.”
Francesca watched Lolo try to pull Tam underwater. With a laugh the druid obliged and pretended to be dragged underwater. Moments later they both came up sputtering and laughing.
Francesca continued her story. “Leandra met a young man named Tenili. Very handsome, very wealthy. A merchant prince from Besh-Lo, he said. He had connections in Port Mercy and in Verdant. They became lovers and, of course, Lea told her father and me nothing. Tenili told her he wanted to marry her and take her back to Verdant. What Lea didn’t know was that he was in truth a minor but ancient Verdantine god of wind. He had cast some clever subtexts about himself to prevent her from seeing the red glow of his divine texts.”
Francesca looked back at Holokai. “He was primarily a messenger for the Verdantine pantheon, the kingdom’s priestly caste, and the more powerful orders of shamanistic spellwrights. But Vivian’s metaspells changed Verdantine society. The deities weakened while the spellwrights grew in power. In particular the wizards gained more and more power in that kingdom. They wanted to weaken the Verdantine pantheon and any shamans who supported them. So the wizards politically isolated Tenili. They planned to attack and deconstruct him. Shortly before they did so, Tenili and his devotees snuck away to Port Mercy, where they were living in exile.”
Holokai was frowning. “Did Lea know?”
Francesca shook her head. “Tenili was running a legitimate trading house, but my agents discovered he was in communication with the empress’s court. At that time, Nicodemus and I were trading off the duty of Warden of Ixos. It was my year to do so, so I sailed to Port Mercy to investigate. When I landed, things were more strained than usual with Lea. I had no idea why. But then I began to close in on Tenili. Secretly he had agreed to deliver Leandra to the empress in return for an end to his exile.”
Holokai grimaced. “This explains … a few things about Lea.”
“It gets worse. The game between Tenili and me heated up. Two of my officers discovered his identity, but he killed them both before they could report to me. He finally convinced Leandra to run away with him to the empire, though how she could be so stupid still escapes me. In any case, the morning they were to sail, he took her to his trading house. Remember, she’s only sixteen. She had iron in her soul even then, but she wasn’t yet as wise or cynical as she is now.”
The shark god nodded.
“After I discovered my dead agents and figured out who Tenili was and what he intended to do with my daughter, I rashly stormed his trading house. A shaman in Tenili’s service, a skinwalker and the guardian of the house, killed my only surviving officer. Unfortunately for him, his attack also induced my draconic transformation.”
Francesca paused to draw in a thoughtful breath. “It’s never a good idea to separate a dragon from her daughter. So, I killed the skinwalker and began tearing the trading house apart. Inside, Tenili figured out what was happening and so confessed to Leandra. He begged for
her forgiveness and promised he would convert for her and join the Ixonian pantheon. She was young and in love; she believed him. But as an avenging dragon, I couldn’t be stopped. I kept after him. He was a god of the air, very nimble, and kept hiding behind Lea. She kept pleading his case. When I finally caught him … I ate him.”
Holokai laughed humorlessly. “Not much else you could do. If there’s anybody who’d understand about having to eat somebody, it’s a shark god, hey?” He shook his head and looked down to Lolo. “You sorry for eating him?”
“I should be, but truly I’m only sorry I did it in front of Lea. He tried to sell my daughter to the empress; I couldn’t let him live.”
“You see why I will do anything for my boy?”
“Maybe you’re not such a dumb fish after all. Why do you think I knew it would work to meet you like this?”
“You still have no right.”
“We both want to make things better for our children. We can help each other.”
“You’re just telling a pretty story about the ugly thing you’re doing.”
“Fine, you want the ugly story? Cross me, and I’ll raise Lolo as my own personal hostage.”
He glared at her again, his eyes darkening by a shade. But when she held his gaze for a long moment, he looked away. “Don’t leave much room for choice, do you?”
“None.”
“Lea said that about you.”
“I don’t doubt it. Now, I believe you have something to tell me. How is it that my daughter has a cult?”
“So, my conversion, that’s when I found out. I was incarnated twenty years ago by a village of Sea People on Mokumako Island. They prayed to me to consume their enemies, to defend them against the demons when the Disjunction comes, and to provide a son who would lead them to glory. At first, attacking the enemies meant attacking the rival factions on Mokumako Island. I was a young neodemon then, fearless, stupid. For five years, I destroyed other tribes of Sea People and wrecked merchant ships not owned by my devotees. It wasn’t long before my cult controlled the island.”
“That’s when Lea came to take you down?”
“One night I found a young woman swimming alone in my sacred lagoon, which is taboo. I attacked her and of course it was Lea. She flared her disease and nearly killed me. One minute I was a fifteen-foot, two-ton shark, the next she dispelled me down to a scrawny fifteen-year-old boy. She left me with just enough strength to swim back to shore. Next night, she was again swimming in my lagoon. My high priests saw this and were afraid that I was too weak to enforce my own taboos. Their fear stopped them from praying to me. I’d been tangling with her for only a day, and she had me more helpless than an amberjack with a fishing hook through the gills.”
Francesca smiled. “That’s my girl.”
“You ain’t kidding. I had been incarnated long enough to know I was a pirate god and that sooner or later the Trimuril would try to either deconstruct me or take my ark hostage and enslave me in some divinity complex. I figured Lea was there to convert me and couldn’t see any way to fight it. So I swam out to her in my human incarnation, expecting never to be free again.”
His gaze became vague. “It was a moonless night. The two of us out there in the swells. She was nineteen years old then and this was one of her first commands. She hadn’t yet been named a warden and feared that she wouldn’t be and that you or her father would keep the title. So, she told me I had three choices. I could resist, and she’d deconstruct me and bring the royal fleet down on my island. I could convert and become a war god for the Trimuril. Or I could help her maintain her independence and stay free. If I went with that last choice, there’d be no turning back after she told me how.”
“So you went with the third option.”
“How could I resist? We swam ashore together, and she told my priests that the Creator had given her a special calling. She said that the world was a corrupt one in which the strong preyed upon the weak. She scorned the priests for using the power of prayer against their brother Ixonians. But it wasn’t their fault that the world was so corrupt; the spellwrights had made it that way. She said that the league was no better than the empire. The only difference was that in the empire, cruelty was practiced by the spellwrights on the deities.”
“She can’t have meant that.”
Holokai’s forehead creased in surprise. “But she did. And, you know, she’s convinced me.”
“That the Creator has given her special purpose? That she’s some kind of prophet?”
“Oh, no. That part’s just for show. She’s not got any more contact with the Creator than the rest of us. But she was serious about there being no difference between league and the empire. I have seen countless times what the empire does to their deities. It’s horrific, torturing them, pulling them apart so their wizards can figure out how they work.”
“And how have you seen this?”
“So that’s the thing. What Leandra told the priests, she said that it was right that the wardens hunt down neodemons in the league. But, she said, just as the wardens struggled to save humans in the league from neodemons, they should also save the deities in the empire from the spellwrights.”
Francesca pressed a hand to her mouth. “Leandra is the one smuggling the deities out of the empire?”
“She told my priests then that she had been sent to them by the Creator as punishment for what they had done to the island, that she would destroy their god and bring the royal fleet down upon them. But because their god had humbly sacrificed for them and agreed to swear allegiance to her, their cult was going to become one of the many that made up an undivided society of humanity and divinity. They were not to pray to her, but to continue to pray to me as I fought for an undivided society.”
Holokai shrugged. “So they did. Lea has brought many other cults into the Undivided Society this way.”
“How many?”
“Maybe two dozen. All of them small and well hidden, from all over the archipelago. She makes sure that her deities are free from Trimuril’s influence. If the kingdom ever discovered the true Cult of the Undivided Society—” He paused then looked quizzically at Francesca. “By the way, you have figured out that all those rumors that go around about the Cult of the Undivided Society worshiping demons and all that are total nonsense.”
“I had hoped you’d say so.”
“I do say so. Anyway, to make sure the Trimuril wouldn’t hold power over me, Lea directed my priests to pray for a trickster god who could fool the Trimuril into thinking that he was me. They incarnated him within a few days. He’s my double, much weaker than I am, and it’s his ark that floats somewhere on this lake. My ark is still back on my home island.”
Francesca began to understand. “So that is how you can still have a requisite that allows you to kill women.”
“I don’t kill them. I have told them all what I am and what we are hoping to accomplish. They knew the risks.”
Francesca ignored this weak justification. Her mind was busy reinterpreting the last few days. “So … when Lea takes a new neodemon into her cult and hides them from the pantheon, it isn’t always so neat is it? Sometimes the neodemon’s devotees pray to her and that makes the neodemons more like her. And that is why, when Nicodemus fooled the River Thief into attacking him and he saw her…”
“She was wearing Leandra’s face,” Holokai finished. “The River Thief was a member of the Undivided Society. Her cult resides mostly in the river villages, and they prayed to her for equitable theft from all the trade that flows down their river. So she stole from the merchants and smugglers alike. Some of her takeaway she gave to the river villages, but most she gave to the Undivided Society.”
Francesca nodded. “And the River Thief knew Leandra would never come after her because she was in Lea’s service. It was only because Nicodemus lied to Lea that she made the mistake of attacking him.”
“That’s it. With the River Thief taken down, it will be a season or more until she’s reincarn
ated. It’s a big problem because she brought in so much of our coin. We need the funds now that we’re using so many more godspells from the smugglers.”
“Godspells?”
“Lea can’t smuggle deities out of the empire without circumventing imperial spellwrights. The only way to do that was to use the same spells that they were using. I don’t know how that fancy spellwrighting works. But she started buying godspells from special smugglers from the empire. Recently she’s bought a spell from a smuggler who’s still in Chandralu. The spell lets her know things about an hour into the future. That’s how she knew her father would rescue her in the throne room. She sensed that she would be intensely irritated and then grateful for him.”
Francesca frowned. “And what of the attackers wearing the Perfect Circle tattoo? How’s that connected to Lea?”
“It isn’t. They’re not connected to us. Hell, a pack of the bloody fools, attacked us on Utrana Way earlier today. Lea thinks they’re a bunch of thugs trying to scare people by pretending to be the Undivided Society.”
Francesca pressed three fingers against the bridge of her nose as she thought. “Whoever they are, if the empress knew half of what Lea’s done, she’d attack the league with everything she has. It’d be a war to destroy all of humanity before the Disjunction even began. How could Leandra do this? How could she risk weakening us before the demons from the Ancient Continent cross the ocean?”
“What’s the point in saving a corrupt society? Empire or league, they’re both unjust.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Hey, Francesca, does it look like I’m joking?”
“No. No it does not. God-of-gods damn it all! How are we going to get out of this?” She paused. “How was Lea planning on getting out of this?”
“Can’t say that I know her plans, especially as she’s just learned what you just said in the throne room, that the shape-shifter we smuggled into Dral has been caught by the empress. But I can say that her plans were to meet again with the smuggler from the empire. She was thinking of buying another godspell from him, maybe she still is, but I think she’s now planning to try to pump him for information about what’s going on with the attacks on the deities and how soon we might expect an imperial attack.”
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