The path opened up, and I was in the expected hovel-town of the Feyr. This space must once have been a cistern, or some other storage facility. Muck lines on the wall of the wide, round chamber showed that varying levels of some liquid had spent time here. It smelled, mostly of burning timber and cooked food. The tiny houses were elevated on stilts, with porches that joined towers of buildings like wide catwalks. The stilts were water- stained and black. Maybe the place still flooded occasionally. It wasn't a big place, maybe a dozen small homes for small people. The largest building, at the center, did not share a porch with anyone else. We headed for that building.
All around, the Feyr watched us. Cassandra had the archive in her arms, hugging it like a child as she rushed forward. The little people were silent, and simply dressed. Their hair looked like the swept-back roots of an overturned tree, thick ropes branching out from their scalps, the same shade of brown or black or chalk white as their hard, knobby skin. Their eyes were large and black, without pupils or irises, deep and watery like those of a shark. The rest of their faces were pinched and tiny, mere sketches of a nose and mouth filled with tiny, sharp teeth. They had three thick fingers, each opposed to the other two, and their nails were hard and sharp. They looked like something grown in the dirt, yanked out by their feet and still caked in the mud of their birth.
My guide took me to the building in the middle. It was wide and flat, almost entirely porch, open to the rest of the room. Up the stairs, and the guy in charge was waiting for us in a tall chair. More of a cushioned platform than anything else. He looked distracted.
His skin was as brown as a chestnut, and just as shiny. He sat with his hands in his lap, and his eyes on his hands, unmoving. My guide bowed out, leaving us alone with the creepy guy. Elemental, I think they called him, the guy in charge. Strange name for a boss. I waited for a while, then grew impatient.
'I've got some questions for you.'
'You do,' he said, without looking up from his hands. 'Old questions.'
'Pardon me?'
He raised his head, tired, blinking those deep, dark eyes like a man just waking up. He looked from me to Cassandra, and then to the archive.
'Old questions,' he said again. 'We wondered when one of you would come to us again, to ask these questions.'
'How do you even know what we're going to ask?' Cassandra said.
'When there is a flood, you do not ask about planting crops. When there is a fire, you do not ask about building boats.' He folded his fingers together and clenched them in front of him. 'Unless your boat is on fire, I suppose. And then you would have to ask very quickly.'
'Amon must have been a very patient man,' I said, 'to learn anything from you.'
'He was. Though it was not me, but my father.'
'Making you how many hundred years old?' Cassandra asked. Which wasn't what we were supposed to be asking about, but I suppose the Scholar is the curious type. I was getting impatient.
'We do not think in such paths.' The Elemental raised his hands to the dirty ceiling and nodded. 'The days and years are like-'
'Like water drops, right? Or snowflakes? And we are the blizzard. Look,' I leaned down to the tiny man, 'we've got some people who might be dying right now, and they do think in such paths, so maybe we could skip the poetry lesson.'
The Elemental looked at me, his hands still raised to the ceiling, his face placid.
'A child of Morgan, then?'
'Brilliant. And since you already know our question, why don't you go ahead and give us our answer, so we can get out of this sewer before it floods again?'
One of the Feyr, on a different platform, stepped forward.
'Flooding occurs on the third Friday of every alternating month, at a volume of-'
'Shut up!' I yelled across the porch to him. He did, and stepped back. Cassandra was taking notes.
'The question that you are asking, just so we are clear, it involves the cycle?'
'The cycle of. .' I glanced back at Cassandra, who was rubbernecking the whole Feyr populace. 'Of what now?'
'The Titans burned their candle slowly, and lived long. We burned ours even more slowly, so slowly that there was hardly a flame to be seen.' The Elemental gestured nebulously, addressing us. 'You burn quickly. Like a flare.'
'Like a fuse,' I corrected. 'This is the cycle of godhood, then?'
'Yes. We can feel it in the air. The gods are changing, and you are changing with them. The days of mankind on the throne of god are limited.'
'And after us, who?' Cassandra looked up from her notebook. 'You?'
'We have had our time, and will have it again. But I think it will not fall to us.'
'Then the Rethari? Or some other race that we've never met, across some other ocean?'
'A wise thought. Other oceans.' The Elemental folded his hands beneath his chin and stared thoughtfully at the ground. 'A good thought. But the power that will be released with your fall, I think it will go to the people of the scale. As you say.'
'Alexander should hear this,' I said. 'I'm sure he'd be pleased.'
'We have spoken. Not recently, but the nature of the formula is familiar to him.'
'He knows this stuff?' I asked. 'Knows that fewer gods means a quicker descent? That doesn't seem to make him likely to betray his brother either, does it?'
'Our conversation was after the death of your god. And only shortly after the death of yours,' he answered, nodding to Cassandra. 'He felt the change in power. It pleased him.'
'Pleased him?'
'Before there was one fountain, and three vessels. After, one fountain, one vessel.'
'More power for the godking,' I said. 'There's your motivation.'
'You are implying that Alexander killed Morgan, and framed Amon.' The Elemental shook his head. 'We do not know that. To be clear, we stay out of the affairs of brief men.'
'But it makes sense, doesn't it?' Cassandra asked, desperation in her voice. 'Amon spoke with your kind, learned the truth of the cycle of gods. Why would he kill his brother, knowing that it would doom the Fraterdom?'
'Why does Alexander not raise up more gods? Why does he keep what knowledge he has secret?' The Elemental spread his hands wide. 'Men do irrational things. Especially the Brothers.'
'So it could have been Amon,' I said, weighing the thought. 'All along, Alexander could have told the truth of that. The rest he's hidden just to accumulate power.'
'I will not lead you to answers like this. The ways of men are their own.' He shook his head sadly. 'I do not understand them.'
'This has been a tremendous help,' I said, rubbing my face. 'You've revealed to us, through a series of overly complicated proclamations, that Morgan could have been killed by Alexander, or he could have been killed by Amon.' I sat down and folded my hands over my knee. 'And either way, it doesn't really matter because the cycle of the gods is rolling over, and we're all going to end up servants of the Rethari. Any idea how long until that happens?'
'We don't know how it hasn't happened yet. It should have been years, the way Alexander is burning. Like a fuse, as you say.' He grinned and sat back. 'Like a fuse. I like that. I will remember it, for the next time one of your kind comes to ask us these questions.'
'So it should have happened already. And you have no idea why it hasn't?'
He shook his head. 'Something is holding the water back. That was the point of Alexander's questions, when last he came to speak to us.
'The hidden archive,' Cassandra said. 'The full knowledge of Amon. He must be handpicking the best for the Library Desolate and putting them to work on Amon's research into the cycle.'
'Which means he might have solved it,' I said. 'He might have figured a way to keep the cycle from turning.'
Again, the Elemental shook his head. 'The cycle will turn. The sky will turn. The waters will rise and the dam will burst, and everything will be washed clean. Our whole race could not hold the power. Madness and the Ruin
