“Atone?” The bed shook with the force of his standing. He reached around her and grabbed the idol off the windowsill, leaving the incense and its excrement of ash behind. “Aquel and Achal.” He threw the statue onto the mattress beside her. It bounced, and rolled to rest with Aquel facing down and Achal snarling up. “These are bloodthirsty creatures. We have them locked up, and I’m glad for it. We killed people for them. Cutting yourself before that statue—do you know what it stands for?”
“Of course I do!” Metal walls reflected the force of her shout. Caleb stepped back. She stood, her half-open shirt flaring like the robes of a Deathless King. “The priests killed. Sure. But are we any different? Am I, after what I did today? You’ve seen Skittersill, and Stonewood, what our city does to the people who lose. Your father—”
“Don’t bring him into this. My father’s a criminal. A madman.”
“Your father led the Skittersill Rising! He tried for years to make peace between theists and Craftsmen, and when that failed he tried to protest. And they rained fire on him. They burned his followers by the hundreds.”
“He wanted to kill people. That’s the freedom they were fighting for, him and his followers. Freedom to kill people.”
“Freedom from persecution. Freedom to practice their religion. Freedom to sacrifice volunteers—people who wanted to die.”
“That’s murder! It’s murder when you carve someone’s heart out of their chest, no matter if you’re doing it because a god tells you to.”
Muscles on the side of her jaw twitched. “Fine. But what I just did was murder, too. When we sin, we shed blood to atone. That’s what my parents taught me.”
“Then they were crazy.”
He said the words before he knew them: they sprang to his mind, slithered down the spine to his lungs, infested the air, and burst out his mouth. Mal’s eyes widened, and her lips pressed thin together. Caleb opened his mouth to say something, anything, to apologize or explain.
The gods’ light faded, and it was too late.
Night filled the room. A great hand seized him, and threw him like a stone. He struck the wall, or perhaps the floor or ceiling. Directions no longer met in his mind. Weight pressed against his chest, the weight of thousands of miles of water. His ribs creaked and he fought to breathe.
“You don’t get to say that.”
She was talking. Good. Talking meant she wouldn’t kill him straight off.
Blood and silver, he thought, when did her killing me become a possibility?
He remembered her standing over him goddess-like on the border of the Skittersill. Deities kill those that follow them. He opened his mouth, but only a dry croak escaped his lips.
“My parents were good people.” Her voice was an anchor in his whirling world. “They were faithful, and they were angry, but they were good. They stood against the Red King in the Skittersill Rising, and fell. And burned. My mother took a week to die.”
He struggled against her Craft, but his arms did not move, his scars would not wake. Blood pounded in his ears. His lungs ached for air.
The Rising had been his father’s fault. When Temoc decided to walk a path, fools always followed in his footsteps. A peaceful demonstration, they claimed, and it was at first, but as weeks rolled on his control of the mob wavered. On the tenth day, some idiot threw a stone, a child died, and the Wardens moved in.
Battle lines were not drawn. There were no heroic struggles. Those who resisted, fell.
Caleb was ten. Mal could not have been more than twelve.
After the bodies cooled, the King in Red issued a public call for peace, and Temoc became an enemy of the state.
Caleb’s father had already gone, leaving his scars behind.
Caleb was also, in his way, an orphan of the Rising.
Mal’s parents lay burning in the streets in Skittersill. No amount of water could quench those flames, and their bodies would never fall to ash.
Mal, too, took power from her scars.
“I’m sorry,” he said as spots of black deeper than black swelled behind his eyes.
The weight lifted from his chest, and darkness drained away down the hole in Mal’s mind. He slumped, but though his legs felt like stretched and fraying rubber, he did not fall.
Mal stood between him and the gods, blanched and wan as a crescent moon. The draining dark had taken something from her.
“Sorry,” she said. “Yes.” And: “You should go.”
He reached blindly for the door, opened it, and backed out without looking away from her. He had to say something, but there was nothing to say.
She grew smaller as he withdrew. When he crossed the threshold of her room, she was the size of a statue. Three steps more, the size of an idol.
The door closed between them, and he turned away and ran.
INTERLUDE: DREAMS
Snow fell on Dresediel Lex for the first and last time, covering the bodies of men and gods that littered the streets. Where the snow fell in fire, it hissed and burst to steam. A falling god had cracked the face of a pyramid with one flailing hand, and rubble covered the broad avenue below. Rage and sorrow burned in the mottled sky.
Blood-slick, Alaxic stumbled through the city’s doom. Cold air stung his throat. Pain from the wounds in his chest, and arm, and leg, pierced and beggared thought. At dawn he had ridden into battle on a feathered serpent, bedecked with the blessing of the gods. The serpent lay dead two blocks away, and he was tired.
“Hello, Alaxic,” someone said behind him.
The voice was deep and familiar, but alien to this time, this place. He turned, fast as his wounds would let him.
A skeleton in a red suit stood in the road, between the burning corpses of two demigods. He bore no weapons save a cup of coffee.
The snow did not fall in the coffee, or accumulate on the skeleton’s robes.
“What are you doing in my dreams?” Alaxic asked.
“At the moment,” the skeleton replied, “I am pondering why of all the places and times you might choose to dream, you would select the Liberation of Dresediel Lex. This was not your finest hour.”
“It was a noble struggle.”
“You fought us and we crushed you.”
“You besieged and blockaded us. We had no choice.”
“Your people tore out my lover’s heart. What did you think would happen after that?”
“I had no part in that decision.”
“As the inquest found, or else we would have sunk you into solid bedrock, or trapped you in the corridors of your own mind, or tied you to a mountain somewhere with a regenerating liver and an eagle that likes
“My friends died in this battle. And we do not all choose where we dream.”
“You are a strange person,” Kopil said. “You were a priest, but became a Craftsman. You do not control your own dreams. You refuse to leverage your soul, though it means you won’t survive the end of that slab of meat you call your body.”
“The Craft,” replied Alaxic, “is a tool. Not all of us let our tools rule our life.”
Kopil sipped his coffee. “Tell me about Seven Leaf Lake.”
“I heard there were problems.”
“One of your employees went mad. Killed everyone on the station.”
