Category: The Gloaming

For work in Pallas

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Twilight in Heaven: Chapter 12

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Chapter 12

I had a moment of peculiar introspection. Maybe not even introspection. Recollection maybe.

Less than an hour ago, I’d considered killing all five of them for the blade. That would have been a bad fight, but I was desperate. Now, I had the sword, they stood to let me take it, but I’d have to pay them nigh everything I had.

Two hundred and fifty thousand sesteres was a lot of money. I told myself not to get wrapped up in comparative value. They had a nice house, probably worth a million or more, and it made the quarter ton I’d offered them look light.

Forget all that. The assassins would have been paid a million, half up front and gone, half on completion. Half-a-million sesteres lay in cases I’d hid around the city, a lot of money, and if this deal walked, I’d walk away with a quarter ton. If I was smart with it, smarter than the idiots I knew or the fool I had been, I could stretch a that a long way. I knew people who knew money. Northshore had a finance department, and I had friends. I could do well.

But I didn’t pay them, with all four drops I’d have more, and I could do much better. That’s the way money works. More is a lot better than what you have.

All the risk was front-loaded. Draw now, kill everyone, leave. It nicely silenced any talking mouths too.

That was what Koru had meant to do to me.

It wasn’t any complicated ethics I thought of. I thought of people: Koru, Astras, Hoarfast, and Seraphine. Seraphine had let them try to kill me. They had done unto me what I considered doing onto these others. There are rules and laws about killing. We had religions like cow turds on a ranch, and some variation of ‘Don’t kill people’ seemed present in all of them. I didn’t care about any of that.

I thought of Koru.

I warned Apseto. “I’m going to point this toward that wall.”

He moved clear but stayed between me and the windows.

I rotated the blade, keeping the tip away from him and avoiding anything that could be interpreted as a slashing motion.

The edge was flecked with stars. They moved inside the steel, floating like dust specks in water. A lighter type of steel, almost milky, made up the cutting surface. The metal body was darker but polished like a mirror. I saw distorted images of myself and the Hemlin cousins. The straight edge was as thick as my pinky finger, and just forward of it ran a groove on both sides. Up and down it dripped shadows, a slow dissipation of darkness into air.

The bottom had a fake stamp, artfully forged. A flower crossed a scepter, and below it stood three runes. No one read runes any more. I didn’t either, but I’d memorized these three: All Things Ending.

Badly-engraved writing on the hilt said, ‘Saber by Hasso, Twenty Fourth of Messidor.’

Hasso had left a maker’s mark on a forgery. I contemplated that for a moment.

“Sleep forever,” I whispered, and the sword glittered. My words ran down the blade like a wave breaking through a tide of phosphorescent algae. Star-fragments sparkled under the fluid of shadow and went still.

I put it down on the table and wrapped it in their table cloth. Anything they hadn’t already seen, I didn’t want them seeing now.

“It’s real. Decide who’s coming. I want to leave Hyperion tonight.”

The room exhaled again.

“’You taking the table cloth?” asked Nurim.

“I’m taking the table cloth.”

“Take the table cloth.”

A number of lower intensity negotiations happened. I said I’d stay away from the table provided no one else came close. They agreed, but Zenjin said he’d cover me. I agreed but wanted him to put the gun away. They hashed out who was coming with me and decided on Zenjin, Osret, and Aesthus. I ate the rest of their bread. That I wouldn’t tell them where the money was didn’t bother them. They expected that. Likewise, I expected their refusal to leave me alone for any reason until they’d been paid.

“That includes using the water house,” said Zenjin, waving his finger. “If you’ve got to drop a package, we’re going to be in the stall with you.”

I nodded. If three of them joined me in a stall, we’d better be really friendly, and we were not that friendly. But none of them were going to go alone.

I thought of them as one entity, the cousins Hemlin. That entity would stay close until paid.

They’d also eaten and snacked. We left Nurim and Apseto, and headed out into the city.

I carried the saber, and Zenjin walked behind me. Osret walked with him. Aesthus took at my left side, and I carried the saber in that hand. Osret had given me a gym-bag for my wet clothes, which was quite clever because now I had a bulky thing in each hands. The saber was too long to fit in the bag.

They weren’t stupid. They’d made a few mistakes, but they were smart people trying to think their way through hard problems with very little warning and no experience. I felt better that I was going to pay them and leave.

The first drop had been a little lending library in the Anentine neighborhood. The Anentines, a collection of insecure new gods that coalesced into a pantheon to stop other people from making fun of them, built immense, empty palaces with tiny backyard houses. They threw a lot of dinner parties, spent fortunes on candles for their unoccupied mansions, and lived in their tiny houses. Most were nature aligned in some way. The little lending library I went to had stood on a small pole mostly engulfed by a wild hedge, an idiotic bit of gardening fashion that I found quite useful. The hedge was no longer wild.

It wasn’t anything. Nor was the lending library. Mallens had stomped it into a hole through the crust of the earth. I saw sandstone and lime, thicker marble, black basalt, and deeper bedrock until vast drive gears loomed underground like hidden shapes.

The cousins Hemlin observed me looking at the crater. Eyes narrowed. Frowns hardened. I did a little mental trig. The library had been in the center of that crater.

“Keep walking,” I said and set off quickly.

I felt the cousins glancing between each other, watching me, looking at the buried hole. I felt like the empty houses hid dozens of watchers. I had to fight down the notion that the Hemlin cousins were going to figure out I had lied about everything and they’d know what I’d done. I kept walking.

The next drop was much simpler. I’d wrapped the package in wax paper, waterproofed it with more, and dropped it into a horse trough. They say the stables of Hyperion are always clean, but this one had some algae growing in it. Rain gutters fed it from the stable’s roof.

The trough was arm-deep, so I dropped the gym-bag, held the wrapped saber, and stuck my arm in. Without words, Aesthus kept a watch, Zenjin watched me, and Osret watched them.

The package was there, but it had gotten stuck. I had to use some muscle. The Hemlins were big guys, and any of them could have done it easier. I didn’t ask, and they didn’t offer.

I yanked it out, took the gym bag, and we ducked into the stable. The horses didn’t care.

“Somebody got a knife?” I asked.

Osret did. “Give me the package. I’ll open it.”

“Just let me use your knife. I’ll open it.”

Glances shot between them. Aesthus nodded. Osret ignored him. Zenjin finally nodded, but Osret refused him too. I really didn’t want to use the saber.

“There could be anything in there,” argued Osret.

“There’s money and my stuff. It’s not weaponry or dangerous, but it’s mine,” I said.

“I’ll just open it–”

“Don’t do that,” said Aesthus, for the first time sounded tired and short. “If it’s booby-trapped, I want it to go off on him.”

Osret froze. “Is it booby trapped?”

“Of course not.”

I didn’t even fake lie. They weren’t going to believe anything I said anyway.

Unhappily, Osret gave me a stubby pocket knife. I’d sealed the package well, so I had to scrape sealing-wax aside. Zenjin moved out at an angle, standing by a tack rack, and drew that piece of his again. He kept it down, but I was getting quite tired of the way he went for it everytime something happened.

Maybe he’d just bought it.

I put the box on the ground so everyone could see it, squatted, and opened the wooden box. It had a sliding lid, the outside of which was damp. Inside, packed in cedar shavings, rolls of silver coins lay in wax rolls. Each coin bore Mallens’s seven-pointed crown, the points capped with glittering fragments of real stars, and the edges rippled with alloyed adamant. Each coin was worth five thousand sesteres, and I’d packed five rolls of five.

Without uttering a word, I gave all five rolls to Osret.

He unrolled one, inspected the coins, and gave them to Aesthus. The two of them went through each coin. Zenjin watched, and I could see his shoulders clench. He kept leaning forward when they picked up a silver piece and held it to the faint light of the stable. But he stayed cautious, back, and tried to look everywhere at once. Osret offered him a roll of money. He declined to keep both hands on the gun.

The package also had four wax-paper rolls of ambrosia. I took one out, opened it so they could see what it was, and offered them a wafer. It had dried out. They declined. I popped one, chewed and swallowed, and hid the rolls in my clothing or in the gym-bag.

I took out four sets of passage documents and hid them in the gym-bag. The package also had a tiny idol of Limatra, the Autumn Goddess of Good Luck and Found Wealth. She was four inches tall, standing, with one hand out, two others clasped, and one loose at her side. The loose one was a hidden switch for a spring-loaded blade. I showed her as well before putting the idol in a pocket.

The package also had a dead rat. I hadn’t put it there, and it worried me immensely. I threw it to a hungry plant, which woke up long enough to eat the rodent corpse. On a hunch, I threw the plant the box too, as well as the wax paper and as much wax as I could scrape off the ground.

“That was one twenty five. Of the next package, I will give you one hundred and twenty five, and our business will be done. Do we all agree?” I asked.

“Yeah. Let’s go,” said Aesthus.

We left. Our walk was a little easier, significantly less tense. Payment breeds loyalty, and while they gave me no loyalty, I had bought a little trust. I popped a few more ambrosia wafers.

Ambrosia’s the stuff. If you want to really put on mass, you lift heavy, eat ambrosia, train, eat ambrosia, and lift heavy again, all in the same day. You can get huge, and you don’t get the aches and pains of low-lifting. I used to do strength circuits every morning, four hours of combat in the afternoon, pop ambrosia, do it again, and sleep like bliss. I hadn’t worked out hard in a couple of weeks as that assassination thing had been taking up my time, but the ambrosia did its work. I was feeling better than ever.

The next drop point was a similairly waxed package, hidden in the dirt under some flowers. They formed a small garden, not two feet wide, that ringed a large flower-shaped fountain, one that spouted like pedals. It was a little park, mostly out of the way, and not exactly hidden but not easily seen either. I had worried about this one, because the dryads who tended such gardens could easily have found it. They hadn’t.

I took the package, the four of us dipped into a parking area, and hid between two carriages. The carriage horses, mules, goats, lions, or whatever had been stabled elsewhere, and the leading harnesses stripped. The carriages were tall, four-wheeled things, capable of carrying four important passengers in comfort and perhaps half a dozen servants on varying benches, platforms, and fold-away chairs. Not only was the carriage yard concealed by a tall wall, through with there was only one gate, but no one in that direction could see us through the carriage anyway.

I held the package up so everyone could see it too was thoroughly wrapped in wax paper. I asked for the knife, and Osret refused.

“No. I’m opening that one. I don’t know what your game is, but you’re up to something. Give it to me.”

Sickness take me, I should have given it to him and left. But there was ambrosia, and I needed it. There was an idol of Arya who hid secrets, and I thought I might keep her around. So I stayed for a bunch of stuff when I could have just given them the box and ran.

He took out his knife to cut it open and stopped. “Would you back up a little bit? You’re in my space.”

I wasn’t—well, I was in his space, but the space between the carriages wasn’t that big. I backed up.

“And you,” Osret said to Zenjin, who’d pulled his Puritan again. “Watch him.”

“I am watching him!”

“Not enough! Watch him like the Sun. Point the gun at him or something. He got a little loose last time he opened one of these.”

“Oh, blisters on you,” snorted Zenjin. He glared at me.

Aesthus looked like he wanted to avoid an argument, so he took a step away too.

Osret crouched down but shifted the box to his knife hand. He put his other hand on the bottom. I looked away for a split second at Zenjin, who was almost flagging me with the Puritan, and noticed some movement in Osret’s hands. I looked back.

With gun in his other hand, the one concealed underneath the package, Osret shot Zenjin twice in the chest. Something banged like sledgehammers on steel and blew Zenjin’s ribcage out his back.

Aesthus screamed, and Osret shot him too.

I bolted from the carriages and ran for the road.

Osret ran around the other side, tracked me across the parking-lot with his holdout gun, and sent rounds after me. Two missed.

The third did not.

For a holdout gun, that thing kicked like a horse.

He got me in the shoulder, I dropped and skidded on my face, and Osret walked me down. The saber fell a dozen yards away.

Before shooting, he said, “Sorry, Remus. I don’t know who you are and don’t care. If it makes you feel better, I don’t think you’re a bad guy. But I can’t have people knowing what happened here.”

Glory, I wish I had that forged sword. It was right there. But Osret was closer, and he drew a bead.

I flicked the hidden switch on the idol of Limatra, the spring-loaded blade shot out, and stabbed him through the center of the forehead. Luck was with me. He blasted wide, emptying his cylinder into the wall by the saber.

But I wasn’t there. I’d gone the other way, out the gate, and fled the parking lot. Everything was wasted, and I still didn’t have the sword.

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Timeline

Karesh Ni is the sequel to Bloodharvest. It’s comparatively ‘Modern Day’ in Pallas.

Twilight in Heaven is in the dawn ages. It’s part of my Silmarillion.

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Karesh Ni: Chapter 7

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Chapter 7

The front doors looked like the outside thirds of an oval shoved together. They were round and tall, and came together at a point. On either side hung a lantern on a silver cord, glowing with red, blue, and white light as if many different fires were confined to one small vessel of glass. Inside the floor was polished, and yet my feet could tell where the floor was smooth marble and where it was slicker quartz. But it was warm, and my breath no longer steamed. My hostess had me lead to another office, one with frosted glass walls and a glass roof, two floors up from the entryway to the building. She dismissed the guards at the door.

“Are you sure?” asked one of the guards when she told them they could leave us alone.

“Yes. You hospitallers may go,” she said.

“If she tries to escape?” asked the guard, a hospitaller apparently.

My real captor looked at me, the glass walls, the star-filled sky above, and back to him. “She can try.”

That ended their conversation. The guards left. She sat behind her desk and looked me up and down. Without taking off the ribbon, I couldn’t sit down. She put her knuckles to her lips like she was punched herself in the mouth very gently and sighed.

“Would you mind, please?” I asked. I held my hands out to her.

She stared at my hands, either lost in thought, cold and numb, or something else. I couldn’t tell. Suddenly she reached out and caught the ribbons with one index finger and pulled. The ribbons fell off.

When I was younger and had assumed serial killers would play a much larger part in my life, I’d learned to get out of handcuffs and ropes. I hadn’t started working on these yet, but I’d poked at them. I figured they were doable but tricky. They were not loose pieces of ribbon. They should not come off with a one-finger pull.

She got up, walked around the desk, and pulled the ribbon off my ankles the same way. Taking both, she returned to her seat while I transferred my coats to a hook on one wall. She looked at the binding, looked at me, and her face told me nothing. Her hands shuffled the ribbons back and forth as if she’d forgetten they were there.

“To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?” she asked.

“Astrologamage Elegy.”

“Astrologamage?” she repeated in a voice that didn’t imply she wanted a response.

I took off my first three jackets, left the last one on, and hung my various clothing, bags, sacks, and gear against the wall. I sat down. The room was pleasant and warm, brightly lit with more lanterns. They cast the same multi-hued glow. There were no drafts.

Like a frozen ship breaking out of the ice, my brain took a while to get back to that point.

She had lanterns and no drafts.

I looked around the room: no fireplaces, no vents, no holes in the ceiling. The room was warm and dry. There were no smoke trails on the glass, and the clean marble didn’t have soot trails. I stared at a lantern and saw twinkling white lights behind glass.

“You use stars in your lanterns?” I asked.

“Welcome to Whitefire,” said the woman, opening her hands to display her empty white desk and bright office. “The name means starlight, and we’re rather familiar with it. Now Astrologamage, star-sage, drawer of horoscopes, and reader of the future, why have you come to Karesh Ni?”

“I’m here to see Amon Tim,” I said.

“But you have not come to Hierophant Amon Tim, you have come to Eparch Tel Viv. Why do you wish to speak to the Hierophant?”

And that was the real question. I had actually thought about this, but my cold, confused brain wasn’t working. I had that feeling where I knew I knew something and couldn’t say it.

The first thing that came to mind was, “I’m looking for the previous hierophant, Kyria.”

Tel Viv rolled her lips around like she was tasting my words. “Why?”

“I threw her numbers, and she’s at the peak of my ascending fortune. The Treasure Chest favors her.”

“Bad news, girl. She’s dead.”

“My horoscope says she’s not.”

“We fed her to a dragon.”

“I believe.”

She didn’t really shake her head, just cocked it to the side like a half-shake. “Good luck.”

Our weird half-argument ground to a halt.

“Why did you ask for Amon Tim if you’re looking for Kyria?” asked the eparch.

“He is the hierophant. She was. He might be able to help me.”

Tel Viv gave that little half-shake again.

She sounded confident. She also wasn’t overcome with sadness. Alyssa had said Amon Tim and his eparchs, and Tel Viv called herself an eparch, had deposed Kyria. Also, just now, the eparch had said, ‘we fed’ of Kyria’s death.

“Why did you–” I wasn’t quite sure how to finish. I blinked a few times. If I could just start thinking, she was saying things I needed to know!

Tel Viv answered anyway. “Treason. Consorting with dark powers. Murder. If you want specifics, she summoned the dragon, we turned it away, and summoning dragons tends to end with someone getting eaten. Someone happened to be her and she deserved it.”

After a few seconds she continued, “You’re rather openly associating yourself with a dead traitor.”

And she jumped ahead of me. I hate the cold.

“I’m not associated with her yet!” I said quickly and just as quickly added, “Or at all if she’s dead. I can’t associate with her if she’s dead. I had no idea about any of this.”

Tel Viv looked at the ceiling. “Yes, I’m getting that impression. Well, Astrologomage, your astrology seems to be as useful as one would expect. I doubt the dead traitor is going to bring anyone to the Treasure Chest, or ascend through your Treasure Chest, or whatever. As a practical matter, I don’t think you’ll find anything you want here. We are the true followers of starlight, and you’re not impressing me much. There is no fortune here for an astrologer.”

“Oh.”

She thought I was too incompetent to be a traitor, which was good, I guess?

No, it was definitely bad. It was bad and better at the same time.

“In fact, unless you happen to be a wheat merchant, I think there’s really nothing for you here at all.”

I stared at her like a dog confronting a doorknob until the logjam of my thoughts cleared. “I just sold a contract of ten cargos of winter wheat to the Truis of Kageran.”

Tel Viv stared at me so blankly I think sheer incomprehension blocked her. She obviously thought I was lying, lying so badly she couldn’t believe it.

I kept going. “The buyer is House Ossaria of Elvenhome. The Celephians cleared the contract. Strike price is confidential. Baroness Alyssa and her consort Satre witnessed it. I have the contract in my bag.”

After several more long seconds Eparch Tel Viv said, “Show me, please.”

Because obviously, obviously I was lying. Obviously!

Except I went into my bag, pulled out the contract, and showed her. I even showed her the deposit receipt the Gesphains gave me when I deposited my loot. Satre had escorted me and insigned the receipt too. I don’t think he really trusted me, and I definitely believed he didn’t like this whole operation. Putting his stamp on the contract probably gave him a feeling of agency. But none the less, I had all the paperwork, and I hadn’t forged any of it.

Tel Viv couldn’t believe it or me. She kept shaking her head and unblinking like she was fighting sleep.

While she was staring at this incomprehensible truth, I scooted forward so I could put my hands on her desk. The chair complained when I dragged it.

“Tell me,” I said. “Do you need wheat?”

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Twilight in Heaven: Chapter 11

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Chapter 11

How expensive was their house?

It was a nice house. They had space. The couches didn’t butt up against the walls. They had artistically arranged chairs. Glass lamps rose over the softer chairs for reading, and bookshelves stood between the windows.

I read a few titles with big print: The History of Modern Airship Racing, Paint the Sky: The Gods of Dawn, and Lumina and Beauty.

I bet the cousins hadn’t read any of them but thought they impressed ladies.

The Hemlin cousins returned. Nurim had brought a plate with him, moshu fruit and a cracker, and he finally sat down. I mentally gave him two minutes before he got up.

“We have a counter offer,” said Aesthus. He paused. The rest of them watched me.

I waved him on.

“Five hundred thousand, but we’ll kick you back a hundred thousand.”

I opened my mouth, closed it, and exhaled the breath I’d taken to reply.

“You’re not paying us,” said Aesthus. He wore a hint of a smirk. “Your customer is. I won’t give you a receipt, but you can tell them the price was half a ton.”

I said, “Now that’s very interesting.”

They were a lot smarter than I had given them credit for.

The mere fact I was snow-jobbing them something fierce didn’t diminish that. In fact, it meant they might be able to see through my plans if I gave them time. I had too many lies. The structure of them was flimsy. These cousins would start pushing, testing, and if they pushed too hard on anything, the whole structure would come falling down.

I had a moment. Call it clarity, caution, or cowardice, I suddenly understood that while I was winning right now, I could lose very quickly.

“Three hundred, same kickback,” I said.

“No,” blurted Apseto.

Aesthus shook his head. “No. We need more than that.” He spoke as if Apseto hadn’t.

Apseto nodded.

That wasn’t a counter-offer, but I’d done the same thing when Zenjin had asked ten million.

I was winning. Take the saber and run, self.

What number were they thinking of?

I’d gone forty two thousand for no particular reason. They probably wanted at least forty two each. That meant two ten. No self respecting grifter would lower his own bribe, so I had to add one twenty five. Round up.

I said, “Three fifty, but mine is one twenty five.”

This time Apesto didn’t speak. Neither did any of the rest. They looked to Aesthus, who watched me like a card player.

I looked away, ate something, but when I finished, Aesthus was still thinking. I locked eyes with him and waited. It became a challenge. He wouldn’t look away, nor would I, and I didn’t know what out he was looking for. After several seconds, his pride wouldn’t let him blink.

I’d made this mistake before. I’d gotten into a contest with someone, a contest I didn’t need to win, but the strain of it grew weighty in my mind. A throw-away fight became a matter of pride. I locked eyes with the Celestial, born of the line of Tollos, sister of Mallens, Lord of Creation, and tested him. He didn’t look away; he invested in our challenge.

His cousins did not interrupt.

But he had to win.

“Three seventy five,” he said. He flicked his fingers between us. “Same, same.”

I looked away.

Nurim was eating moshu. Moshu are soft little fruit with a shell like a walnut. The fruit inside has about the consistency and sweetness of an apple. Normally people open them with a nut cracker, and the skill is breaking the shell without squishing the fruit. People who eat moshu with sticky fingers look childish.

Nurim saw me looking and put down his cracker. He took out a knife. Tapping a fruit against the plate to show me the shell hadn’t gone stale, and without holding it, he sliced the fruit open cleanly with the knife. He didn’t touch it at all, merely drew the blade long-ways across it.

That was, in all honestly, simply astounding knifework. He was doing it to show off, but I was impressed.

“You laughed when I said there were five of us,” said Zenjin quietly. “You think you can win. Maybe. But not as easily as you think you will.”

Self, let them win. Get the blade, destroy it, be done.

I made sure there were no misunderstandings. “The price is three hundred and seventy five thousand sesteres, and you will pay me one hundred and twenty five thousand sesteres of that.”

Aesthus nodded. “Agreed.”

I nodded. “Done.”

The room exhaled.

“Do you want to shake on it?” Aesthus asked.

“No.” I shook my head. “But we have a deal. The money is hidden a few places through the city. I’ll need to collect it. Does one of you want to come with me and bring the saber?”

“Yes. Does the blade have a name, other than saber?”

“You don’t need to worry about that. That sword, that one right there, is the one I want.” I pointed at it. “But I want to inspect it. Now.”

They all exchanged glances.

There were five of them, but I’d be holding the weapon. That was a sword for the killing of gods. They didn’t know exactly what it was, but they knew enough.

But I wasn’t going to go any farther and find out that by some unimaginable coincidence, this wasn’t the right weapon.

“Go ahead,” said Aesthus. “Right now.”

All five of them got ready. Zenjin drew the Puritan, laid a finger along the slide, but held it down, pointed at the floor. Nurim stood up with the knife. Osret moved around to the other side, and Apseto shifted so he stood between me and the windows. We’d drawn the blinds when we came in. Aesthus waited by the foyer. He looked ready to run, but for safety or for a gun, I didn’t know.

I got up, moving slowly, and lifted the blade from the table. The room breathed again, inhaling after its previous sigh. This breath it held.

There were five of them, but I had a blade made to kill the Lord of Creation. I could take them.

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Karesh Ni, Chapter 6

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Chapter 6

As I descended, I thought about Whitefire. After leaving the Baroness’s office I’d asked about them because I’m super curious and definitely not just nosy.

Whitefire followed Starlight, one of several Celestial elements (Alyssa knew another, Lightning). They were lead by a Hierophant and four Eparchs, Kyria having been Hierophant before and Amon Tim being the Hierophant now. Hierophant Mal Set had built this fortress up among the stars, their source of power, after they fled in exile. It was called Karesh Ni, the Silver City.

When asked why the Ashirai empire ordered broad sanction against Whitefire, the Kagerani had generally agreed that nearly a century ago, Ashirai Emperor Thullus had married a young woman, Aryce, who’d already been engaged to Maurius, a Whitefire initiate. Royal Ashirai weddings are three-day affairs where the couple don’t sleep together until the third day, the first day of celibacy representing a sacrifice to their gods and the second a sacrifice for the people. By tradition the groom stays awake partying while the bride gets some sleep so the whole world can attest to their celibacy before heaven. Thullus had caught Aryce and Maurius breaking celibacy during God’s Night.

Before dawn he’d dragged them to the Gold River that runs through Ashirak, and before being cast in, Maurius had cursed him and all his people. Thullus had heaved him into the rapids himself, and within those waters, Maurius had been drowned or beaten to death on rocks. Aryce had begged for mercy, but when Thullus lifted her as he had her lover, she cursed him as well. She followed Maurius.

The romantic ending of the story is the lovers found each other down there. I don’t know.

But that didn’t cause the Maurite Prohibition. That came later. During the somewhat subdued feast of the People’s Night, Thullus had a bit too much to drink and went to the Gold River’s canyon wall to taunt their ghosts. The canyon wall gave way, and Thullus fell to his death.

The Empire left without an emperor, the Baron of Dylath-Leen, the Saffron Prince of Tyr, and Duke Larange, a cousin of Thullus’s, all went to war for the throne. The legions stayed out of it, and the Prince of Tyr won. However the oaths the Red Guard swore were to the ‘Emperors of Ashirak, born sons of Jermaine, Kings of Kings,’ and a matter of bloodlines precluded the Saffron Prince from taking the seat. When he tried, the legions threatened mutiny.

Prince Eigen of Tyr, the Saffron Prince, apparently told the Reds to kick rocks. Two legions marched on Tyr, and on the morning of the battle when the Prince realized that he was going to have to fight the Red Guard, the Swordsmen of Ashirai, he suddenly discovered a willingness to negotiate.

In the play Birthright of Gods the Red legions send their lowliest foot solder, Ve Therrin, to challenge the entire Tyrian military to a series of single combats. After seeing his forces ruined by one man, the Prince sued for peace. Pretty much everyone agrees that didn’t actually happen.

Anyway, without the bloodline to take the throne, the Prince Eigen ordained himself king, demoted everyone else to less-than-kings, a custom which continued to Alyssa’s ‘royal baronacy,’ and the legions declared obedience to the king of Tyr. End of that, right?

Of course not. Perhaps you see the loophole? If not, let me give you a hint. Duke Larange had a daughter, Hnoss, who at this point was eight. The Prince Eigen of Tyr was fifty three and married.

The Emperors of Ashirak were ‘sons of Jermaine’ and drew their birthright from direct descent from one of the gods of old. He couldn’t take the throne of Ashirak, but he could give it to a son, provided the mother of his son was Larange’s daughter.

His wife Tamora did not agree. She murdered him and Hnoss (the eight-year old!), the legions murdered her, and the Baron of Dylath-Leen took the throne, swearing the same oaths to respect the line. The throne was ‘given back to Jermaine’ since no one lived of his lineage to take it.

The Baron blamed the whole thing on Maurius and Aryce, because clearly their curses led to this affair. Rumor escaped that followers of Whitefire were to be rounded up and beheaded, their mouths stuffed up or tongues pulled out, and none of them stayed around to find out if the rumors were true. On pain of death, the followers of Whitefire were exiled from the lands of Asharai for the evil power of their curses.

The killing of Hnoss is the part that really got me. It was a hundred years ago, so I suppose it’s just history, but there was no reason for that! She was eight!

Kageran had joined the Ashirai Empire about twenty years back. Queen Alyssa had become Baroness Alyssa. Citi Kageran had accepted the Maurite Prohibition. Many Whitefire refugees who had lived in Kageran at the time disappeared. The people I’d asked hadn’t known where they’d gone, nor about this place. Alyssa and Satre had but seemed to have kept their mouths closed. The feeling of having secret knowledge, that I was one of the elect, pleased me. In spite of the cold, I hurried down the stairs.

Several hours later, that feeling of being special was really struggling to keep up with the desire to feel my toes.

I decided to give up. At the time, I was several hours into the murderously cold descent and had stopped to huddle on the stairs and eat another flat. I’d been walking in a trance, concentrating on keeping my footing on the wide, flat, and smooth stairs. Since I couldn’t feel my feet, every step had an element of hazard to it. I wouldn’t know I was slipping until too late. A low balustrade ringed the stairway, intricately working in white marble, and I sat by one of the balusters. For a while I looked out at the world, the skies undimmed by clouds, and wondered why I wasn’t overwhelmed.

I was too cold to be overwhelmed.

That was it. If you’re too cold to appreciate the vastness of space, the world laid out like a painting, and mythical architecture, you are too cold for anything. I ate my flat. I gave up. I slouched over to tie my shoes and happened to look down, past the stairway.

The island that hung below was a brown island about a deep cone. From an outer triangle, it rose to a vaguely circular ridge, and inside the ridge a deep pit sank into more white stone. Houses, buildings, roads, and clustered on the ridge like white crows sitting on rooftops, and two greater palaces stood on either side. One of the white stairways descended to each of them. The gold rope sank into the very center of the central pit.

The mountainsides were grim and dull, covered in the naked trunks of brown trees. Yet between them grew a few evergreens, dark enough to look brown or black themselves. At the center of the pit bubbled a white froth, and mist flowed through cracks in the right to fall down the slope. Cloud rivers fell off the sides of the island like smoke rises from a candle yet in reverse, descending smoothly in straight lines until they began to fold and curl up before catching the winds and spreading. They blew east, the direction Pallas passed far below. A wide band of milky white light flowed underneath the island.

I ate another flat.

Okay, fine, I thought, and I un-gave up. It was right there. I had to be almost done. This was one of those darkest-before-the-dawn moments.

It wasn’t. I wasn’t even close. I had to go twice as far as I’d come before. It turned so cold my eyes hurt. My eyelids froze shut, and I couldn’t see. I had to thaw them with my fingers, which made my fingers freeze, and then I had to thaw my fingers with my breath.

I got stubborn, kept going, did an awful lot of whining, said some very, very unfriendly things about Alyssa, Satre, people in general, and used a bunch of language that would not make Prince Aehr swoon with desire.

Did elves swoon?

They’d better. Someone was swooning after all this, and it wasn’t going to be me.

Honestly, I was getting pretty tired and felt like I could go for a swoon.

I couldn’t swoon now. I’d fall over the railing.

I kept walking.

#

The bottom of the stairs flattened out on a wide landing. On either side, the landing looked like it ended in cliffs, but that was because the landing was perched on one of the high points of that central ring-like ridge. There were paths and lower buildings below on both sides. Forward and behind more buildings rose from the crest, some of them geometric with windows and doors, some botanical like alabaster flowers, and some oddly shaped like spirals or points, all made of that same white marble.

Two stood out. One, a huge white orchid, stood by itself, and the body of the building resembled a closed flower, just in the act of unfurling. Between the petals, a red and gold light escaped. The other resembled a dragon’s skull and was the only animal-looking thing around. It perched on the crest of the ridge some distance behind me. It was a little bigger than a house.

I squinted at the dragon skull when the stairs passed overhead. It could be real. Dragons did get that big, and the skull was grayer than marble. The eyes, nostrils, and mouth had been blocked up with stone, making the difference obvious. But a skull that big would need a body even bigger, and I didn’t see any half-mile dragon carcasses lying on the island.

I didn’t see many people, and those I did see moved quickly. They usually had white cloaks with pointed hoods, ornamented with stars or silver bands. Many of their clothes looked quilted, with plenty of white designs sewn into white jackets, coats, and pants.

I don’t think they had much dye. That catches me by surprise sometimes, even as long as I’ve been here. People generally work with whatever color thread comes off the sheep or plant. Kageran is so unusual in its colors. Here, I spotted embroidery, but it was all the same white thread as the basic garment.

They didn’t look prepared for the cold. Most had little white shoes with turned-down cuffs no higher than the ankles and no gloves. They hustled, outdoors and walking quickly down a street, to return indoors again with a slammed door behind them.

I also spotted stair guards, and they looked miserable.

Sitting in a little hut facing the stairway were three people. Each one wore two or three of those white cloaks, but the same tiny shoes. Two had their arms folded with hands inside their armpits, but one’s sleeves hung floppily empty. I saw little pink fingers poking up through her collar as she breathed on her hands. The man on her left was frowning so hard his wrinkles looked like creases, and another man had his head down against his chest.

I was about two circuits up when one bumped another and pointed at me. They spoke among themselves, and someone ran off. I couldn’t very well turn around now, so I kept going. Before long several more guards arrived with one among them who seemed in charge, a dark-skinned Malician woman with her hair done up like two cacti. They stood informally at the bottom of the stairs, waiting.

Half a circuit up, I paused, tried to shake off the cold, and decided what I wanted to say. I adjusted my clothing and gear into the most comfortable manner. Then I walked down with fingertips on the railing.

The waiting party said nothing as they stood at attention, watching.

On a hunch, I stuck my both hands into my pockets as I stepped down onto the wide marble landing, and the lady in charge said, “On bound law, do not move.”

“Okay.” I did not move my hands out of my pockets.

“I am Eparch Tel Viv. Who are you?”

“Astrologamage Elegy.”

Official people tend to like following their own rhythm, so I let her go.

“Astrologamage Elegy, you have entered Karesh Ni. Do you have a mark of passage?”

“No.”

“Then you are detained and shall come with me for questioning. Do you have any remarks?”

“I’m here to see Hierophant Amon Tim,” I said.

She gave me side-eye while the guards stared straight ahead or turned their necks to stare at me.

“We’ll see about that. Hospitaller Ain Var, bind her hands and feed.”

The original lady guard, there were three there now not including Tel Viv, said, “Ma’am,” and took some white ribbons from her pocket. She looked like she’d been holding them while she waited.

Detaining seemed much like being arrested. They searched me and found the knives in my sleeves, belts, and boots. They missed two. We didn’t talk. The guards in the hut rotated, and Tel Viv lead the rest away.

We passed rows of sterile white houses with dead lawns out and empty gardens. Frozen watercourses, dry fountains, pristine white pathways swept of old leaves branched off the roads we followed, looking like they’d been carved of ice. The whole city, glorious, elegant, and polished, looked like some abominable dream in crystal. I was so tired.

People had told me about this. I didn’t listen. Mountaineers, Malicians, the incomprehensible people who voluntarily live even further north than Malice: they talk about how the cold wakes you up at first but then puts you to sleep, confuses your brain, and makes you stupid. I’m not stupid, so I’d just ignored them when they said the cold does it. But I was suffering the cold now, and it wasn’t some brutal, anguish of suffering. I wasn’t being cut by blades or burned with irons. I was just cold, miserable, dumb, and I hated it. The only way I could fight back against the cold was not complaining, so I walked along as silent as everyone else, as silent as the ghost-shaped people who watched from the rowhouses, as silent as the houses themselves. We entered the white lotus palace, veined with glittering quartz, and shaped like a blossom opening to the moon. It was, I would learn, the Sunset Basilica, and it had been made by humans imitating elves.

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Twilight in Heaven: Chapter 10

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Chapter 10

“Hold on, hold on, hold on I appreciate your help down there. I’m Aesthus of Hemlin, of the Line of Tollos. Thank you.” One of the cousins held his hands up, palm out.

He caught me by surprise. And after a moment, I replied, “You’re welcome. Thank you.”

The others looked like they didn’t know what to say, so they said nothing. I couldn’t fault them, but that left all the talking to Aesthus.

He continued. “You said you’re here to acquire the saber?”

I nodded.

“We can–” He paused. “—talk about that.” He paused again to make up his mind over something. “As I said, I’m Aesthus. These are my cousins, Zenjin, Osret, Apseto, and Nurim.”

The cousins looked varyingly wary, curious, or distrustful.

“Let’s temper blades,” said Aesthus. He glanced around.

The cousins had just not-fought each other, so they showed varying levels of willingness to not-fight me. Most looked guarded but listening.

“You too,” Aesthus told me. “You saved me, and I appreciate it. Let’s not waste your effort.”

I felt like arguing, but Aesthus was leaving everyone a way out. Besides, I’d saved their lives, and I’d be throwing that away if I fought them, something that moments ago, I’d been trying to figure out how not to do. This whole situation was making me short tempered.

But now that I was aware of it, I could fix it.

“Thank you. I’m pleased to meet you,” I said and waved specifically to Osret. He didn’t reply with much grace, but he nodded back. “I’m pleased to meet you all.”

“Come,” said Aesthus. “We live nearby. We’d be honored if you joined us.”

And again, I let myself agree.

We left the beach, avoiding the water if we could. In some stretches, there was no alternative, but the nereids did not pursue us while we looked for them.

#

The cousins Hemlin had a small palace that was basically a wide townhouse. Five stories tall with a courtyard out back, its second story overhung a tunnel through the first floor. The tunnel opened into the courtyard where a circle of smaller cobble stones between large slabs of sandstone formed the center of the back yard. Behind rose a small garden that seemed mostly full of strange rocks and small huts. The cousins lead me through an elegant glass door to a tiny foyer, a wide staircase, and on the second floor a large receiving room. They lit a fire from an ember dish, and offered me a stiff drink or a warm towel.

I took both, but the towel first.

Zenjim put the blade on the main table and patted it dry. I sat where I could see it.

“You said you’re prepared to pay for it?” asked Aesthus.

I considered before nodding.

“This is the only one left. It’s rare now, perhaps rarer. That’s got to be worth something.”

Maybe, I thought. There had been two assassin’s parties.

“How do you know?” I said, equally cautiously.

“Mallens didn’t just break the seashore. He broke the earth. There’s a power in him, an energy. When he strikes something, it comes apart, and not merely in breaking. The stuff of it disintegrates. I think he did not truly stamp this sword. Perhaps it was close to his foot but not hit. Maybe it had already been dropped and fell into the pit. But we found nothing else of its like, and we are from the high mountains. Apseto is particularly clever with finding things in stone, even stone under water.”

Apseto didn’t look cocky, but he did look confident.

“What if it’s in sand?” I asked.

“Sand is just a lot of very small stones,” said Apesto.

If that was how it worked for him, so be it.

“I’ll show a few cups,” I said and pointed at the copied sword. “I’m here to get that, and I’m willing to pay for it. My customer is willing to pay in cash, so there is no reason to be concerned about favors or credit. I was at the beach looking for the sword when we met and saved your lived. You owe me. Business is business, but enjoy all that breathing you’re doing. Drowning is a hard way to go.”

“Who’s your customer?” asked Zenjin.

“No,” I said. “That doesn’t need to be discussed.”

The group of them glanced at each other, and a silent conversation of shrugs and facial expressions told me they didn’t feel like arguing the point.

“I’m going to go change my clothes,” said Aesthus. He was dripping. We all were. “I don’t think we have anything that will fit you, but can I lend you some sweats?”

“Thank you. I’d appreciate that.”

Again Aesthus deflated the tension, but his idea was a good one. I didn’t want to let the saber out of my sight. They wouldn’t leave me alone with it. With some towels and a little consideration, everyone changed and met back up in their living room, arrayed on couches around the chair.

Aesthus wasn’t quite as big as the others and had a slightly softer look. He’d changed into khaki pants and a fitted sweater, leather shoes, and leather belt. My stubble was longer than the hair on his head.

Osret wasn’t quite as tall but wider built, and he wore tight clothing to show off his muscles. None of his shirts had sleeves.

Zenjin was a bigger guy but didn’t have the gym build of Osret. He had a huge back, shoulders, and gut. He wore designer t-shirts and jeans, the sort of sports shoes that get dropped in limited quantities. A silver-handled Puritan nestled under his left arm, set for a cross-body draw. No one else seemed to be carrying a gun, so it certainly was a statement, but fashion or security?

Puritans, from the 22nd Testament of Thorophus the Weapon Maker, were good guns. They were such good guns people collected them, which made them rare, then valuable, and now they were fashion statements themselves. Still, they shot straight and rarely jammed.

Apseto showed up in a suit, and I don’t know a whole lot about suits. His seemed to fit well. He had thunderbolts on his tie pin, thunderbolt cufflinks, and a brown shirt with a white tie that drew attention to his face. They said he could find things in stone, even stone under water. That could be a valuable skill, depending on how good he was, and he wore the suit comfortably. He didn’t pick at it.

Nurim sized up the bunch of us and started making something in the kitchen. He threw chips in a bowl, got everyone a glass of water or beer, and brought out some bread and a few spreads. He was always moving, cleaning plates or putting glasses on coasters. He and Aesthus were slim compared to the others, but they were still big guys. He wore jeans of some unremarkable make, a hooded sweater, a watch he kept checking, and slip-on shoes. He changed the latter twice during our meeting.

I started. “Let’s talk peacefully. I’m not looking for a fight.”

“I don’t see why that’s relevant,” said Zenjin. “You’re mortal. There are five of us. A fight won’t go well for you.”

“He’s hiding his power,” said Aesthus. He looked at me. “I don’t think the fight will go the way you think it will, but since you attacked nereids in water, you’ve got something in reserve. But let’s put that aside. Temper blades. You’re not looking for a fight, we’re not looking for a fight. How much?”

“And when and where and all that,” said Nurim, coming in with snacks. “You’re not carrying any suitcases full of cash.”

“Yeah, also we’re not letting the sword out of our sight,” said Zenjin.

“The hand-over can be arranged.” I tried to wave pleasantly. “One or all of you can follow me to where I have the money.”

“Let’s talk about that,” said Apseto. “How much?”

The sidebars stopped. Nurim in the kitchen stopped puttering. Zenjin leaned forward, elbows on knees. All eyes watched me.

I’d made two payment drops for each of the two groups. The killers had been paid half up front and half for after the job was done.

I’d never known exactly how Koru made his riches. Earlier, I hadn’t cared. Now I cared, but I didn’t know. He had money. Bills, bribes, and charitable donations had all been paid, and I’d paid most of them. I had also hidden small packages of silver coins and ambrosia for the successful assassins.

I’d been such an honest fool. I hadn’t taken a coin or a bite. The money waited for me now.

I said, “Forty two thousand.”

That was a bad lowball. Forty two thousand sesteres was new horse money, maybe even nice new horse, but not a race winner nor a good sire. It would make a downpayment on a home. Someone like me could live easily on forty two thousand a year and scrimp it out three years. All four drops combined had about five hundred thousand.

“That seems a little light,” said Aesthus.

“It’s a magnficient blade,” I said. “It’s also stolen. It was used in the commission of a crime, and people will come looking. Problems will come. You don’t know me. I don’t know you. And the saber will disappear and you can say, with utmost honesty, you have no idea where it is.”

“We know your name,” said Osret. He stuck his chin out at me.

I had to bite back a quick remark. Osret was hot-tempered to begin with. I had things too say but for once, didn’t say them.

“You are correct,” I agreed neutrally. “You know my name, Remus.”

Apseto sighed. He and Osret sat on a couch together, and Apseto leaned over and whispered something to the other.

Osret kept a stoneface for several seconds. “Of course. You are Remus, and when someone comes looking for the saber, I will tell them Remus has it.”

“Please do,” I said.

Mental clockwork shifted everyone else in the room. Nurim glanced at Aesthus, and if I had to guess, I’d say Nurim was recalling Aesthus saying I was hiding my power.

“Ten million,” said Zenjin.

“Nope.” I shook my head and ignored him.

“It’s a rare and stolen sword. The rest are destroyed. Ten million,” he insisted.

“That’s not an offer.”

“I said ten million, and we’ve got it right now.” Zenjin moved forward a little on his chair.

I reached out, took a slice of bread, and examined the sauces. Nurim had laid out butter, olive oil, and something yellow and ganular. I don’t think it was hummus, but I bet it was close enough to rhyme. I scraped invisible butter on the bread and layered over top with the hummus stuff.

I took a bite. My mistake: it was hummus, but they’d mixed ambrosia in here.

Wow.

I wasn’t faking. It tasted like euphoria. My wounds began to close. My scrapes healed. My aching muscles felt salved. Those little wrinkles of tension around my eyes relaxed, and I suddenly noticed a coldness in my side by the way it faded.

I had really lowballed them with that offer.

“This is really good.” I held it up to Nurim. “Sourdough?”

He nodded. “We get it from the artsy place down the street. Girls like it.”

Zenjin said, “What about the–”

And Aesthus interrupted him, “Do you mind if we take a moment?” he asked me.

I waved the bread. “Please do. I’ll be here.”

They looked at me, the saber, and gears clicked behind every pair of eyes. I waited.

The cousins got up and moved into the kitchen, forming a small huddle between the stove and an island of counter.

I tried to look relaxed and dangerous. I tried to look thoughtful. I thought, but I was thinking about ambrosia in hummus.

We had tried to kill the Lord of Creation for a million sesteres. One thousand miles, a ton, two weeks pay for a legion. We’d tried to kill the King of the Gods for a million sesteres. And these fools who had the saber had enough money to put ambrosia in the hummus!

Their house was worth more than a million.

I was in the wrong line of work.

A volcano went off between my ears. I heard nothing but eruptions and thunder. I thought of stale wayhouse sandwiches and of not being able to afford stale wayhouse sandwiches so I stayed hungry until I made it home. I thought of sleeping hungry so I could eat manna in the morning.

They’d laid out a whole spread of artsy bread with ambrosia in the hummus.

These guys could get blisters. I wasn’t going to stop for appearances. I ate all their hummus.

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Karesh Ni: Chapter 5

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Chapter 5

For all that she had me over a barrel, I got something else out of it. I got land. Baronness Alyssa offered me a small manor house within Kageran proper. Manse Plachar filled about a quarter of one of Kageran’s round city blocks, with a shared private well in the center. It needed some work. The roof leaked, and there were mice in the walls. But a complete refurbishment was only a mark or so, even for an eighteen room mansion with a summer kitchen. Manse Plachar came with a title as well, and I would be Lady Elegy of Kageran.

It’s not a high title, but it’s the first step above.

So I sat on a boat in the middle of the lake, waiting for moonrise. The Sun would rise swiftly behind the waning Moon, but for now the sky held nothing but stars. It was bitterly cold. The Baroness’s office had been chilly; this was a compound hell. Wind blowing down the Aph valley carried all the Doon’s chill. There was no snow, but a fine sleet of dust and sand from the uplands stung my face. Waves beat away from the wind, pulling my boat elsewhere.

I was wrapped up in every blanket I could carry. Every few minutes I would unwrap myself enough to pull the oars and row back to the point Alyssa had prescribed west of the dead center of the lake. Then I swam back under my blankets and sulked. No one could see me sulking. The sky was clear. Alyssa should be stilling that wind, not watching me.

But just in case she was watching, I said some mean things about her. This was her fault.

Why don’t powerful sorcerers ever build their temples of evil on beaches? Warm beaches? Beaches where I can drink something in a coconut mug? You’re powerful sorcerers! Do warm things!

The wind gusted, I rowed back to position, and the air was so cold my face hurt. My hands ached where they weren’t numb. People do freeze to death on the water in winter. This could kill me, I realized, and not in the whiny, I-don’t-want-to-be-here way. There’s risking death for a job, but this wasn’t really the job yet. This was sitting in a boat on a nigh-frozen lake in winter, waiting for a sorceress to kill the damn wind.

You know, this just wasn’t worth it. I could cut the contract and be done. Her job was to stop the wind, and I wasn’t going to die because my employer couldn’t stop a wind from breaking up reflections–

The wind died, like a switch was flipped, and the lake-surface flattened into glass.

My boat stopped rocking. I lost all sense of time.

In the east, the trees of the Arsae rose black against a star-speckled sky. Here and there a star would peek through, twinkling as leaves blocked it, but the forest-ocean looked like a low shadow crouching on the horizon. That great thicket by the Three Sisters where ghosthearts rose high above the rest stood unusually dark, unusually tall.

The moon peaked through the thicket. The water lay flat as a mirror and the air dead still. I waited. A thin sliver of moon broke above the treetops, a bit of crescent only, and that meant soon it would be dawn.

In the lake’s surface, the reflection of the moon looked startlingly bright. Prepared as I was for sorcery, it looked mystical. But the night was dark, the trees below the moon blocked the stars, and the water was thick with silt from the mountains. I couldn’t be sure.

The moon kept rising. Its reflection brightened, I tried to discount what I saw as optics and perspective, but the reflection brightened further until the moon in the lake and the moon in the sky hurt my eyes. I blinked and glanced away.

I looked back, and the reflection was rising out of the water. A rash of bubbles set the surface foaming, and a low, white rock with a mooring pin stuck up.

I rowed once, and the boat slid through water. I winced at every wooden creak and the hint of splashing in my wake. Nothing else made a noise.

The prow bumped the rock with a solid, mundane ‘thump.’

I reached out, caught the mooring pin, and stepped from boat to rock. Up close it was white marble, veined with something translucent like quartz. The moonlight hitting the side cast rainbows thought it. I tied off the rowboat.

The moon rose further, and with it rose the platform. My rock rose on a crescent of other stones, all white and crystalline. They reached around a pool of water, the boat at the center. Every new block in the crescent appeared below the one before, and soon the boat was in the center of a small lagoon of white blocks, apparently standing unsupported in the center of the lake. The stones were as still as the water.

But the moon kept rising, and more rocks appeared underwater within the circle. They faded into view down there among the reflections of the stars, a long, spiral stairway that sank into the reflected sky. I looked east. The sickle moon was now fully above the trees, and in the water, the stairway descended up into the sky.

I walked down to the lowest part of the crescent to rise above the Hyades. Underwater the landing at the head of the stairs bridged the gap in the arc. Here the stairway that seemed to descend through the reflection of the sky rose to its highest/lowest point. The first step was right before my feet, underwater.

Do you have any idea how cold that water was going to be?

I’m really not very brave. I thought about dying, freezing to death feet first, if I stepped off the dock and onto the stairway. That’s how Alyssa said I could climb to the Karash Ni, the Silver City. But I didn’t have much time, for the Sun was closely chasing the Moon and would soon wipe the reflections and the stairway from the lake as it wiped the stars from the sky. To get to the Silver City, I had to step onto the stairway, go down into the water, while the Moon reflected. I had to start before dawn.

Back in the office, Satre had come back from his snit and reluctantly agreed with her.

“It’s not that hard,” he’d said. “It’s all downstairs, anyway.”

He’d sounded like my father. On the landing I paused, took out a small honeyed pastry called a ‘flat’, and had a snack.

#

I was born outside Indianapolis, Indiana and have exactly zero memories of it. Apparently I lived in Columbus, Ohio until I was one. But I grew up in Alexandria, Virginia in a big family, six kids, and remember it well.

I don’t know what small families are like, but big families are wondrously intense and you sort of want to murder someone. Everyone is in your business. For us this was partially because our house was so small that brothers or sisters had to be in your business. They had nowhere else to go! The parents had no money and worked odd hours, so the only thing they spent on us was time. Sometimes I wondered if they should have had such a big family when they struggled financially and realized they just really liked kids.

The parents liked messing with us. My father told outrageous lies, and my mother enjoyed having someone with her. I asked her about it growing up.

She said, “I wanted to matter. I don’t remember who won the Academy Award when I turned eight, and I don’t recall who took the Nobel Prize. I remember the president because I had to memorize him and the VP for class, but they’re just names and pictures on a wall. But I know my mother liked to cook chicken and beans, and she seasoned them with garlic. I remember my father coming home and making me take off his boots in the evening. His fingers had been run over long ago, and the way he wore his laces they ratcheted tight over the day until he couldn’t remove them at night. When I was in school I thought about trying to become a celebrity or a politician, but they only touch people superficially. I wanted to matter to someone so they would never forget me. So we had you.” And she touched my head. I was nine, she was thirty four, and she was always the most beautiful woman on Earth with black hair and a quiet smile.

“Do I have to?” I asked her. “Be a Mom and not a famous person?”

“No, sweetie. You don’t. You can if you want to, but you can be a politician, or scientist, or businesswoman, or anything you want. You can be both. Just be the best person you can be.”

Then I asked my dad why he had kids.

“Tax breaks,” he replied.

Even at nine, the peak of believing everything my father said, I had a feeling that wasn’t true.

“I don’t think you had kids for taxes, Dad!” I told him.

“We haven’t made a profit yet, but next year you’ll be old enough for the salt mines!” He wiggled his bushy eyebrows. “And we may sell your spare kidney on the black market. You have two!”

My father had the worst of all social diseases: he thought he was really funny.

My mother liked to cook with one of us kids at a time. The kitchen was tiny, and she didn’t want fighting around hot stoves and ovens. She liked our questions, she liked answering, and she liked to pat my head or touch my back while I was doing something tricky.

Dad could cook, and Mom once told me that he’d cooked for her when they’d dated, but he enjoyed stirring the pot of a great fighting mass of kids, all of us arguing and yelling, so to him fell the setting of the table with one kid, the clearing of the table with another, washing the dishes with a few more, and innumerable cleaning tasks, limited only by the number of children he could foist them off on.

Dad– I never really got a handle on Dad. Dad was far more entertained by us than Mom was. He had a bit of distance which let him observe us as pawns on a chessboard or maybe more like dogs at a park. He was immensely invested in all of us, and he enjoyed everything that went on regarding us. He liked driving us on errands because he would put someone in the front seat and talk, sometimes about economics, often the back-stabbing politics of tenure, the history of technology, or equally intensely our little struggles. He loved us, loved putting time into us, and equally loved bothering us: deep down, bone deep irritating his children. He once snuck into my room at night and unlaced all of my shoes.

Why would anyone ever do that? I just assumed it was one of the brothers, but maybe my sister because we were fighting at the time, and only years later he’d admitted it was him.

“Why?” I’d asked, astounded beyond words. I truly felt flabbergasted.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I just wanted to see what you’d do.”

Coming from Earth to Pallas is a story for another time. I can’t go back. I don’t think about the trip much, but I think about Mom and Dad, the world I lived in, and the differences between them. They don’t have flats on Earth but Pallas doesn’t have sugar like Earth. Nothing here is as sweet. Food-wise, I mean. There’s no food here as sweet.

#

But eating finishes a pastry quickly, and then I had sticky fingers and was still scared. If I stepped into the water, and that reflection of stairs was just a reflection, I’d splash right through. That would kill me. Even if I climbed out immediately, out here, on the lake, in the cold, I would die. I had blankets in the boat nearby, but I didn’t think they would matter.

But some horrible part of my brain said, You could make it. Those blankets are right over there. Even if you fall into the water, you can jump right out, wrap yourself in blankets, and you’ll be fine.

You could even quit, said my brain. Right then. If those stairs aren’t real and you fall into water, Alyssa hired you under false pretenses, and you could quit the job immediately. Take your money and go. First you just need to take that one step.

And every other part of me said, don’t do it! but that one terrible part of my brain said, just try.

I whined a little and stepped into the lake.

My foot landed on a dry marble stair. I knew where the water level should be, but inside the stone crescent the water was so clear I couldn’t see the lake at all. My foot stayed dry. I stepped off the landing and took the next step. Then I took another. Soon I was grumbling and muttering to myself, walking down a helix of stairs that descended towards stars and clouds. Behind and above, the crescent of white stone hung just like a moon in the star-speckled sky. A few revolutions down, the stone crescent was the sickle moon, hanging in a star-speckled sky, and the night-wrapped expanse of Pallas lay below.

To the east lay the dark Arsae, the great tree ocean between the elven homelands and goblin nations. To the west rose jagged mountains. The Doon, the great mountains on the north of Tenemerrair, looked like rumpled laundry thrown over big dogs. The glaciers looked white and cold, the valleys between them dark and deep, and tiny, ribbons of silver water appeared and disappeared between peaks. North and south, the mountains met the trees in a folding line. I knew that the mountains pushed east to the north and far up there the great goblinmounts rose, but I was making stuff up if I told myself I could see them. To the south, the sharp border cut hard west, and I could see peaks abutting the blackness. Further south, and I might be making up details because I knew they were there, I thought I saw the floodplains of Nar, maybe the dun grasslands of the Horned Lords to the west and the gentler trees of the Solange to the east.

Directly below me hung the Silver City. My helix of stairs danced with its match, another white marble stairway that rose from Karash Ni. That stairway rose to the black part of the moon, the shadow within the crescent. Between them ran a long gold cable, thick as a building, made of braided gold cords, themselves made of twisted gold strands. Throught the middle of it ran something white and red. If I leaned over the inside railing, I saw the stairs spiral together until vanishing at a distant point, the gold cable running through the center. If I looked outside, Pallas spread out like a misty map with dawn rising in the distance.

I stopped to appreciate the view, cold be damned, and stayed still long enough to see the world slide by. The Silver City remained a fixed point, but the ground beneath it slid east. Soon we passed the blotch of the Hyades to hang over ice-capped ripples. The mountains looked so tiny and mild. A long, thin cloud slithered by. The city stayed perfectly still as the world walked past underneath.

I wasn’t on Earth any more and hadn’t been for a long time.

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Twiligh in Heaven: Chapter 9

Previous Chapters

Chapter 9

The day was dark, the sky heavy, and the seas had no waves. Even the winds seemed hushed. What had been a perfect beach of endless sea and beautiful golden sand had become a cacophony of rock, deep pits, and broken shore. Mallens’s wrath had lifted the bedrock. Sand had fallen aside, sandstone jutted up into the air, and basalt plates rose from the lagoons.

I’d heard the five cousins perfectly though they stood about fifty feet away. A little hint of a breeze blew in my direction, so perhaps that helped, and the flat water had no waves to wash out their voices. I was trying to find an alternative to mugging them but nothing came up.

My thinking time ran out when the five of them turned and entered the shallow water between sandbar and shore. They were talking deliberately lightly about how great everything was going to be when they gave Mallens the sword, the one thing I absolutely couldn’t let them to do. That had to be stopped. Violence it must be. I crouched, Nurim walked in front of the rest and said something about Jesephene, before he vanished as if the ground underneath the water sucked him down.

The others screamed, and dark scaled hands grabbed them from below. Like a surge of little plops, the cousins plunged underwater. They struggled. Several propped themselves up on knees and elbows, but their heads were below the shallow surface. It’s said an angry nereid can drown you in a palm’s worth of water, and these had almost a foot to work with.

The cousins struggled. I saw their backs heaving, and the sea nymphs climbing on top of them: a pack of predators focused on their prey.

The heavens parted. Lights appeared. Inspiration sang.

This was a problem I could solve by hitting people!

I screamed Obesis, ran across the water, and they heard me coming. I wanted them to. There were more than a dozen of them, and they paid little attention to one, shouting idiot charging.

They should have noticed I ran on the water, not through it, but they learned.

“Obesis!” I shouted again and threw myself down and forward, skidding across the surface like an ice skater. A nereid rose out of the water to grab me, and I caught her in the face with a deep fist, the low swing you use on a grappler when he’s shooting. That’s a punch that has to hit like a boulder stopping a rhino to be any good at all. Mine sufficed.

Knuckles hit scales. I pushed through. My fist dragged her out of the water and threw her a dozen feet through the air. She landed on sand but hard enough it still splashed.

The impact stopped me. I sank. Water swirled around my feet. I shouted Obesis again, jumped to the surface of the water, landed on the splash, and when nereid hands reached for my ankles, I reached for them. I yanked him fully up into the air by his own wrists, and he gave me that look of shock that came with a hesitation. The utter comprehension of how bad this was about to be made it inevitable.

I spoke Raln, and all things were blades, even my fist.

I punched about half his head off, and all of him dropped.

Surprise gone, they stopped drowning the cousins and turned on me. I beat them down. Blood underwater is black, and nereids soon floated on the surface of the lagoons. The cousins lurched to their feet gasping, and when the sea people hesitated, counting their losses, I started shoving the big, solid cousins toward the sea.

“Out of the water! Run!”

He argued. “We can–”

I interrupted. “You don’t fight nereids in the water! Run!”

He ran. They all ran. The nereids attacked. I put down two but probably not fatally, and turned before the rest. Maybe they didn’t really want to catch me, or maybe I could run across the waves faster than they could swim beneath them, but I made it to the shore safely. The cousins stood there gasping, and the six of us ran uphill.

For a moment the spirits of the sea watched. Then they slipped beneath the waves. The one I’d knocked out of the sea had vanished, leaving beside just marks in the sand, and the forms I’d thought were corpses sank beneath the waves. You’d be amazed what a spirit can live through in their place of power, but I doubted all of them lived.

Whatever. It was over. I stood with the cousins, panting, and trying to get my breath back.

After a minute or two they asked the most reasonable question: “Who in death and darkness are you?”

And of course I lied. “Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am Remus, and I am a finder of rare, exotic, and stolen weapons. I’m here for the saber.” And I pointed honestly at the sword Nurim carried.

“It’s not a saber. It’s straight!” said Zenjin.

“Yeah,” said Nurim. “Hold on. It says something here.” He peered at the butt of the handle and held it right up to his face. He could barely see through the gloom of the heavy overcast.

I couldn’t remember the handle saying anything, but since I was trying to erase all traces of it, I didn’t want anyone to know if it did.

“It is called a saber because sabers are weapons of the elite. They’re more expensive.”

Five confused, wary people looked at me. The one holding my forgery grabbed it. I think he wanted to look threatening, but all I noticed was he wasn’t inspecting any writing any more.

I continued. “The single curved cutting edge gives some justification for saber. Likewise, the shape makes it slightly point heavy to augment slashing. However the straight back, as noted, would normally bring it into the longsword category. All of this is missing the point. Curved swords are weapons of the elite. Straight swords are cheap. If the maker called it a saber, he could charge double for it. If he called it a longsword, he couldn’t. As such, it’s a saber.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Osret. “You can’t charge more for something just because you call it something it isn’t.”

I laughed at him.

“People who have enough money to buy it would know it isn’t a saber!” he yelled.

“Correct. But that is an extremely expensive weapon, so it’s not going to see a lot of use. It will be worn, not wielded. It can be called anything the owner wants.”

“When you say expensive, how expensive do you mean?” asked Apseto.

“Extremely,” I said. “It’s also extremely stolen, and those two extremelies are about equal. I’m authorized to pay you for it, and I’m authorized to kill you and take it. My customer doesn’t care.”

“Parasite, there’s five of us!” said Zenjin. He looked like he was holding a grudge.

I looked at them and the dark lagoon. “How’s that working out for you?”

I waited until the silence became uncomfortable and then began a slow, mocking clap. No one joined in. I stared him dead in the eyes until he looked away.

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Twilight in Heaven: Chapter 8

Previous Chapters

Chapter 8

“So we’re going to turn this in, right?” asked one of the men on the shore.

“Yes, we’ve decided to be stupid about it,” agreed one swimmer from the center of the water. It was the one who’d claimed to have gotten it before.

“Oh, the blight upon you!” swore the other swimmer in the dark lagoon, and he turned, pulling hard toward the shore. The blighted one followed.

I ran between dunes and broken trees. Knotted pines had fallen over. Rifts had been driven into sand and dune, and narrow rivulets crawled through them. I could see where the hills had sunk, and where they would level out as wind and rain would shave the sand bar’s rough edges. But I also saw huge shelves of black stone up on their sides like broken dinner plates dropped from a picnic. Mallens’s stomps had lifted the bedrock here, driven it down there, and hills like the Flatirons of Thango rose out of flat beaches. They gave me great cover.

Around a jetty I found the sandbar the five had stopped to rest on, but it wasn’t connected to the land. Between us was a submerged section of dark water, filled with silt and black weeds. It looked about knee deep. I could run across, but they’d hear and see me coming. Their spit of sand had no dunes.

I could wait and hit them when they crossed. If I timed it right, I could catch the few in front and put them down while the others were still in the water. That might cause problems depending on who had the sword, but it seemed better than bull-rushing the five of them.

I hid and waited. There was some argument I couldn’t catch, and I broke cover to get closer. They didn’t notice.

“I’m agreeing with you!” said the disagreeable agreer. “We all agreed to be stupid, and so stupid we shall be. We’re going to turn it in, because Mallens will give us a reward and certainly not just take it as his due. We aren’t going to take this obvious item of power to the mists and and make a party palace out of it! We’ll stay in our little house instead of making a mansion because all the partying would distract us from our complaining time!”

Someone sighed. “Osret,” he said, slowly and as if in great pain.

“What?” yelled Osret. “Who wants all that party sex? Clearly, not anyone here.”

“If this is one of the weapons used to try to kill Mallens, do you really think we should keep it?” asked another one. “Does that seem remotely wise?”

“Of course not. We definitely shouldn’t transform it into something nothing alike, because Mallens will clearly start watching the property market for mist palaces when he needs to find assassins. Blessings of feast and fortune, you’re so smart! There’s certainly no way we could hide a sword.”

Someone else sighed.

They all looked so tired except for Osret. He took advantage of their silence.

“And we certainly couldn’t do something worthwhile with it, like give it to the ghost. This is only exactly what she asked for, and then we’d get revenge on the man who killed your mother,” Osret almost screamed.

“You want to use a forbidden weapon to hire a ghost? Osret, what part of that plan could go right?”

“She’s a ghost! She disposes of things so they are never found. She’s a ghost!” Now Osret was yelling.

Another repeated, “You want to use a forbidden weapon-”

Osret said, “It’s not forbidden. Mallens doesn’t even know it exists!”

“Who cares?” interjected a third. “Are you going to argue with him if he finds out? Claim ex post facto rules don’t count? He’s the Lord of Creation! He’ll stomp you to death and unmake your essence. What will you do then? Be dead at him?”

“Osret, we’re decided,” said another. “No one cares what you think, so stop talking.”

“Death upon you,” said Osret, and I thought he would strike the other.

But he didn’t. The two of them glared at each other while the other three formed a silent, worried crowd. Then Osret looked away, and the rest spoke among themselves quietly.

One of them came forward. “Everyone. Osret, Zenjin–” he looked at the one Osret had cursed “–we have to live together. Can we all agree with that?”

No one agreed with that. Several muttered. Osret and Zenjin looked away.

“Now bless feasts,” said the one trying to still the conflicts.

Osret and Zenjin didn’t bless anyone’s feasts. Osret managed to look nauseated, annoyed, and tired at once, and Zenjin was looking at him like he’d just spotted someone he’d always hated and never been drunk enough to fight.

“Glad we’ve put that behind us. Now we–” He was looking at Osret when he sighed a deep, gurgling thing of bubbles in his throat. His entire attitude changed, and he turned back from the sandbar that separated us to fully addressing the others.

“Osret, it’s just us. You can stop performing. There’s no one here to see you. We’re cousins. Me, you–” he tapped his chest. “Nurim, Apseto. Zenjin–” he double-tapped the other on the chest too. “You’re wishing death on people! Osret, that’s not necessary! I understand, I’m with you, but we’re not trying to get you. We’re your family. Osret, it’s okay. Hesh, you with me?”

Osret wouldn’t look at him.

“Come on, hesh. Hesh, we go back from before we could walk. Before my Mom died, she used to tell stories of when you used to chew on me when we were crawlers. Come on. Please. I’m not fighting with you. I’m your cousin. I’m Aesthus. I’m a person, I’m family, not some enemy. Come on.”

And Osret still wouldn’t look at him, but he sighed.

“And Zenjin, you too. You had no reason to say that. It was disrespectful.” Aesthus held out an open hand, both warning and calming.

“Yeah, ye,” said Zenjin. He made an act of will. “Osret, I apologize I shouldn’t have said that.”

To Zenjin, Aesthus said, “Thank you.” And to Osret added, “See? We’re with you.”

Osret and Zenjin stood awkwardly for a moment, then shook hands like limp fish. But if they weren’t embracing like brothers, their shoulders held less tension, and their arms didn’t clench.

Aesthus continued. “We talked about this, and four of us agreed. But Osret, we’re not dismissing you. Yes, if things go right, making a mansion from the blade would be something, or giving it to the ghost. Yes, we could make a party house, and yes, if we didn’t have to pay rent, we could throw double bumps. I also heard you about giving the sword to the ghost. Feast and fortune, Osret, of course I want revenge. He killed my Mom!

“But she’s my Mom! And I think about her, the way she kept telling me to be smart and take care of myself. Mallens is mad. Not just angry, but mad with with fury. He threw Tollos into the sky! If he finds anything, anything about the sword, he’s not going to be calm. We’re not going to have a chance to argue our case. He’ll just start killing people.

“I’ll take the sword to him. I massage his feet. I know all of you hate it, so I’ll do it. I’ll tell him how wonderful he is and how loyal we are, and how everyone else is wrong and he’s right. I’ll give him the sword. And you’re right; he’s not going to reward us.

“But we’ll be made. And if we can talk him down, all of the other gods holding their breaths will remember. And if we plead–and I’ll plead, remember. You don’t have to say anything—he’ll take Tollos down from the heavens, and she’ll remember.

“You’re right, okay. If everything goes well, your ideas are better. But if anything goes wrong, we’re all going to die, and Mallens isn’t going to be calm or reasonable about it. But I’m pretty good talking to him, and I’ll massage his feet, get between the toes, and he’ll be okay. We win this way.

“But we have to stick together. We have to work together. You need to stick with us. Zenjin won’t say anything like that again, he apologized, and the rest of us will be a little more respectful. But if we, family, are fighting like this, Mallens is flipping plates. Come on, hesh. Stay with us.”

Osret made a noise like he’d eaten bad shrimp. He frowned at the sea and waves.

“Osret, agree with us,” said Aesthus. His voice was low but not soft. He insisted. “Let this be done.”

Osret looked away. The others watched.

After a moment, Osret tried to walk away, but Aesthus caught him and held him back. Another struggle of wills happened, and Osret obviously just wanted the others to drop it. But Aesthus wouldn’t, and while he didn’t contest with Osret, he didn’t look aside either. He stood peacefully demanding, and the other three cousins stood in a close circle around Osret. He wouldn’t be able to get away with shoving or fighting.

Aesthus repeated, “Agree with us. Let it be over.”

And Zenjin added, “I did apologize, hesh. I shouldn’t have said that.”

Finally Osret took Aesthus’s hand and shook it. “Fine.” He shook hands with the others, Zenjin again, and they were fast but tight handshakes. But it galled Osret, and I could see a deep banked fury in his eyes. It bordered on malice. His cousins must have seen it too or chose not to.

I felt like a pervert watching this conversation, so I looked down and away. The notion of running up on them and hard initiating to take the sword felt even worse. There didn’t seem to be any alternatives, but I stared around as if magic was hidding under a rock.

Instead I saw dark, quick figures like shadows slide through the shallow water. They moved without even rippling the surface, through water barely knee high. Nereids, fish spirits, the dryads of sea and surf, I thought.

All around me the wreckage of the beach rose in piles and towers. The nereids swam into the deep black water around the cousins’ sandbar and vanished. Nereids are usually peaceful, lazy, and they like to tease. But the shore had been ruined and disrupted by Mallens’s efforts, and the dryads had swum silently and fast.

They swam like predators, I thought. Suddenly I had something worse to worry about than Osret.

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Twilight in Heaven: Chapter 7

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Chapter 7

It took me two days to run from Angel’s Crest to Hyperion moving with all due haste. Clean air filled my lungs and made me want to move. Manna kept me going. The mountains of the west dwindled. North of me, other mountains would be rising though I couldn’t see them. Mallens had drawn the privacy veil around Mount Attarckus, thick white clouds that rolled with wind and thunder.

Of course that had nothing to do with me…well, it had everything to do with me (Yay! I mattered!), but I hoped no one figured that out.

My master plan to become famous seemed to have some rather significant problems.

I put them out of my mind.

When I arrived, I had one of those moments of indecision where I knew whatever I chose, I’d choose wrong. The heavy cloud cover blotted out the sky, and Hyperion, Beloved of Light, lay dark. I couldn’t see squat. I could head in at night, but I wouldn’t be able to see what I was entering. If I waited until dawn, that was time wasted.

After unpleasant hesitation, I waited. The city beloved by light lay dark. That didn’t look right. It didn’t sound right in my head. It didn’t feel right on my skin. I slept and started with a full stomach.

In the morning I couldn’t see the Sun, but dawn came anyway. The world went from dark gloom to light gloom.

Mount Attarckus rises north of Hyperion, the eastmost and tallest of the Broken Fangs. Other, lesser kings who had ruled Heaven before had built their mansions on those peaks, and Mallens had thrown them down when he heaved Attarckus up. In clear weather, it’s a cone that reaches the sky. A pennant of stars trails behind Attarkus’ summit at night, and at the summer solstice the Sun has to change his path to avoid hitting the peak. Now it looked like a funnel or a wagon stand. The green of trees had turned to dingy gray, and the cone of the base had barely begun to taper when it hit darker gray clouds. They spread outwards and rolled like the top of a pot of water just coming to boil.

The Headlands of Ju rose above the Dawn Sea on white sandstone. To the east they met the ocean with marble cliffs. Hyperion took up most of the headland, a rumpled plateau where white hills jutted up from manicured forests and table-top mesas held marble palaces. Every forest had been perfect, every stream bed sculpted. Spirits of water and rain came from the ocean or the fast flowing rivers nearby to tend the springs of the city. Sandstone is a dry rock, and only constant attention by the spirits made Hyperion livable by the gods.

I say by the gods because Hyperion was a city for the gods. No one else was welcome. The spirits were tolerated and Celestials allowed, but they both received cold welcome even as they kept it running. Being mortal in the capital city of Heaven was a capital offense.

So’s treason.

Earthquakes had shorn the edges of the plateau off, and golden palaces and magnificent lawns lay in rubble fields. Idyllic rivers tumbled over marble cliffs and ran through broken houses. The main roadway had fallen apart, and the sign that said ‘No Mortals’ had been torn apart. I scrambled up a scree-field and entered the city without ever passing a sign.

There were no guards. Sometimes I saw movement in broken palaces, and a few timid people moved on the streets. Mostly I saw no one. I’d catch a glimpse of someone a few blocks ahead, but by the time I got there, the streets were empty. A few times I came upon someone, but they pretended not to see me. I did what I could to take advantage of this.

From my mother’s side, I knew that spirits did live in Hyperion, more of them than even the gods knew. Many dryads came here to tend the perfect forests. Nereids warded the beaches and watched the waves like shepherds. Naiads sculpted the crystal rivers that flowed between houses, kept the deep pools clear of pond scum, and ensured the wild life didn’t get wild enough to inconvenience the gods of the city, much less the titans who ruled it and all.

Also from her I knew of the deep frictions between the spirits and Celestials. The Celestials, mostly born of titans and the great powers, but occasionally the forgotten offspring of gods, were powers of themselves, atavistic beings of might. Hoarfast was one. They had skins of steel, they breathed snowstorms, they wore capes of rain, or their bodies were goats or boars. Some were extremely powerful. Death was a Celestial. Some were mere animals. The Boars of Herindon pulled the chariot of Regulus and ate the corpses of his victims. There were many of them. Mallens had fathered five hundred sons. They were not gods and not titans, but somehow less.

Which put them in the ranks of spirits, but they had to be better than somebody.

In Hyperion, Celestials formed the interactive working class. They ran forges, carried bags, pulled rickshaws, and served food. Spirits tended their domains: forests, rivers, and parks. Celestials tended the works of the gods.

No one cared about mortals. We weren’t even a thing.

If they could, spirits and Celestials belligerently ignored each other. They could walk face-first into each other on a corner and move on without either recognizing the collision happened.

After crossing the outer walls, I headed east. If I approached someone among the trees, I walked near the roads. If someone with iron skin or bee’s wings approached, I stuck to the forests. Everyone put me in the ‘other’ group, and if questioned later would have a hard time identifying me.

Soon I found the waterfront facing the Dawn Sea. The Sun Palaces lay in tatters with roofs stomped in and grounds torn with canyons. Mallens’s stomps had driven the ground down to bedrock, and the tops of great trees stuck out of sand traps. Whole buildings were driven underground or smashed flat. Over this place a curse of dark skies hung.

But there were no signs forbidding me to enter. I suppose the clouds and curse of dark skies meant that, but they didn’t say so.

This was it. If someone found the scepters before I did, I was dead. I’d tattle on Koru immediately, and we’d be tortured together. My death would be agony, but his would last forever. I’d win.

Self! Stop!

I didn’t want to die in agony. Death in agony wouldn’t be better if Koru’s was worse. I needed to find the weapons, dispose of them, and I didn’t know what to do next, but there wouldn’t be a next if I didn’t get find the scepters first.

I thought of two utterly blistered summers at Fate, filing unread documents in the bowels of an office building. It’s beautiful and majestic office building. It’s built on Firmament of the Sky, behind the stars of the Mask! But you know what a basement in a scenic building looks like?

It looks like every other basement.

High stress, someone always checking my work but no one ever needing it, no promotion potential, I had almost nothing to show for those two summers. I’d already spent my wages on rent.

But I had four little bits of luck.

I prayed to the Pattern Spiders and asked for one of my favors. I needed to find those weapons.

I glanced around. No one watched. I jogged down to the sea and started searching.

#

It took me several hours to figure out what was where. The New Light Cape had detached completely from the mainland, and Mallens had stomped lagoons into the beach, making a false shore. Wooden towers for lowly gods to greet the dawn had toppled over. The deeps east of the Cape bred tall waves that rolled on or collapsed, depending on what took place beneath the surface. A morass of beach houses, scrub trees, and rocks hid under calm water.

I looked for Heridite’s Crest. It was, or had been, a low prominence where yellow rock stuck up through the beach, a famous picnic spot surrounded by small pagodas and pavilions. Mallens had stood there the last four years when he’d greeted the dawn at First Light. That’s where we’d planned the hit to occur, so it would be a good place to start searching. However the geography of the place had been rearranged.

While I was poking around on a spur of boulders, splashing noises suddenly broke the otherwise dead silence. They didn’t sound like fish or whales surfacing, and after a moment, I made out shouting from the other side of a line of dunes.

“We’ve got it,” said someone.

“You mean I got it.”

“Oh, shut up. We got it.”

Wondering what it they got, I ran over.

Two heads were splashing and yelling in the middle of a black lagoon, and several more were swimming for the beach. The swimmers resolved themselves into three climbing out of the water and fell, gasping, onto the sand. The two in the lagoon were still yelling.

“Would you both shut up?” yelled a guy on the beach. He held up something. “We got it!”

‘It’ had a blade as long as an arm with a two-hand handle. It had no hilt. The cutting edge formed a stretched S; the other was straight and blunt. The blade wept a kind of darkness when the man waved it, a faint staining shadow like ink in water. But it would cut like razors. It would cut gods. It was a godly weapon.

It was a magnificent copy of Death’s All Things Ending, and Hasso, who’d made it, knew exactly who I was.

My jaw clenched.

I looked over the five of them, three if I could get there quickly enough. They were tired; I was fresh. I could probably hit them from ambush.

Was I really about to kill three people to take that sword?

The idea bothered me, and yet, what did I face at Mallens’s hand?

I ground my teeth like I was chewing rocks.

Maybe I could get the sword quickly. I’d take it without killing anyone.

Yeah. No one had to die. It would be fine.

I stayed low and started around the rocks.