The changeless days and salt spray had clouded my mind, but not my instincts. With my swollen eyelids barely cracked, I mumbled the blessing of fire, managing a diffuse ball to cast at the seagull.
The seagull was not the most agile of birds, and I caught its tail with my fire as it tried to dodge. I had half a thought that I might somehow char and eat it, but that thought fizzled with my fire when the birdspoke.
“Fuck! Shit!” It swore both surprisingly and uncreatively as ithit the glassy water next to my boat to extinguish its singed feathers. “What was that for?”
Birds didn’t swear, unless I was closer to death than I thought, but immortalsdid.
Fuck. Shit.
“Who are you?” I sat up and groped for the surgical knives on my belt. I needed a better weapon for a sea battle than fire, but I chanted a ball of it into my off hand anyway. “What do you want?”
“Stop throwing fireballs and I’ll tell you,” the immortal yelped before diving again under the water.
I wracked my uncooperative brain for any tales of a god who liked to take the form of a seagull, and what they might do to me. No immortal was likely to be very happy with me, in light of the destruction of the temples, but obviously there were gods andgods, and worse and worser ways to die.
The bird popped up, waited to see if I had anything else in my divine armory, and then flapped back to the prow when I didn’t try anything else.
“I was just coming to ask where you were going,” it grumbled angrily.
“Who are you? Did I somehow pass the Gates of Dawn?” I demanded, hands still poised to attack.
“You ask a lot of questions for someone who tried to kill me straightaway!” the bird said in a voice I tentatively decided was female. “I’m Awi, to answer the first one.”
I pressed cracked lips together, wondering whether I ought to engage with the immortal. I didn’t recognize Awi’s name, but there were famously a thousand of the little gods, some of which had helped mortals before Wesha closed the Gates, and others of which had preyed on them.
“I’ve never heard of you,” I said, hoping to draw her out.
The seagull shrugged her wings in a parody of dismay. “No?I’ll tell you, mortals don’t appreciate birds the way they used to. Three hundred years ago, nobody so much as took a shit in the fields unless the birds flew west and did the correct loopty-loops first.” The bird’s shape blurred, and instead of a seagull, a large raven now perched on my boat, glossy black feathers incongruous in the middle of the featureless ocean. She jabbed her beak at me. “Mortals used toworshipbirds. And now I get screamed at? Fireballs? All this time with only Death for company did not improve your manners.”
I tried to lick my lips, but no moisture would come.
“I apologize,” I said slowly. “For my bad manners.”
“You should,” Awi said snippily.
I waited in the hopes that she would say more, but I was a mortal dying of thirst on the open sea, and she was an immortal. I ran out of patience first.
“Where am I? Please tell me.”
After eyeing me with some curiosity, she deigned to answer.
“In the Sea of Dreams, obviously. Were youtryingto go to the Painted Tower? It’s just that way.”
I tried to follow the point of her beak, but got dizzy when I craned my neck. I was about to pass out from this small interaction.
“I haven’t seen a priest come this way in years,” the bird added, probing for information. “Didn’t they all go up the Mountain three years ago?”
“I’m not going up the Mountain. I’m going to the Underworld.”
“Huh. Don’t know why you’d be in such a hurry when mortals only get a few decades before making that trip in the traditional way. Just wait a bit longer, and then I’ll eat you, and boom you’re on your way.”
I glared and put my hands together defensively, but the bird kept her attitude of benign interest, watching me through one unblinking eye.
“I’m going alive. I’m a maiden-priest. I’m going to see Wesha first,” I insisted.
This at last seemed to impress the bird.
“Business with Wesha? Ithoughtyou might be one of the rebels, what with the fire. Didn’t you burn down all her temples?”
