I was too busy minimizing contact between my body and his to notice that we’d stepped outside until the light hit my eyes, and I halted as I got my first look at the City of the Gods.
Wesha’s palace stood at the outskirts of a gentle, sloping bowl that contained the hundreds of temples and villas where the immortals dwelled. Our epics described the City as a walled garden, and the flowers were the first thing I saw. Espaliered cherry trees bearing both rosy blossoms and lush fruit separated mounds of hydrangeas and lilacs, without a single brown leaf or wilted petal, flowers of every season perfect together at once. Amidst the emerald lawns, chestnut and oak trees stretched their arms hundreds of feet into the sky.
The buildings were constructed in a single style, with the same tall-columned verandas and grand arched entryways as our oldest mortal temples, but no single one was made out of the same stoneas another. Here was one in red granite, here another in golden sandstone, a third in blue-veined marble, as though every quarry in the entire world had given tribute. The infinite dots of color across the landscape were harmonized by the green slate tiles each used on their roofs, and the profusion of columns underneath added to the suggestion that the buildings bloomed out of the soil like the other growing things in this celestial garden.
It was just morning by the color of the sky and the golden glow above the mountains, which came from everywhere and no direction in particular, but I couldn’t get my bearings. There was the Mountain in the distance, beyond many other snow-capped peaks. But wasn’t that the same shape to my left as well, beyond the parapets of the City? There was barely any shadow, even under my foot when I lifted it from the glinting stone of the path.
“Where is the sun?” I whispered.
“Flying over the mortal world, at this hour,” said Taran.
I took a deep breath, trying to steady myself against the overwhelming disorientation of the Heavens.
“You’ll get used to it,” he added, not unkindly. “All the other priests did.”
If I didn’t focus on any particular landmark, I might cry from the beauty of it all. If I tried to look more closely at any one tree or palace, I got the dizzying impression that I was seeing a slightly different scene through each eye.
I forgot myself and clutched Taran’s arm as he led me toward the center of the City, battered by the overwhelming perfume of the out-of-season flowers and hundreds of colors around me. The paved paths turned into boulevards, and the buildings grew closer together, more than my mind could absorb. Our destination seemed to be the very center of the bowl, a vast arena painted with enormous murals depicting the feats of the Stoneborn, all paintedin a single artist’s style. The arena was set down into the earth like the navel of the entire world, only one story high at the level of the street but dipping down hundreds of feet to accommodate a crowd of the full thousand little gods and their worshippers.
I saw them in the streets with us: gleaming immortals trailed by priests carrying the trains of their elaborate robes or carrying their gods aloft on ornate palanquins with silk cushions and gilded carry-bars.
“The service is for all the gods?” I asked, eyeing an immortal with the hindquarters of a ram and a long, yellow sash carried by a pair of priests wearing garlands of fragrant hops. There might be thousands of mortals here too, in that case.
Taran nodded. “Genna, with her boundless love of peace—and elaborate dinner parties—has invited the younger gods to come together and renew our vows of friendship.”
“The younger gods?”
“I am not the only one to experience some recent…challenges with immortality.”
I stopped, ignoring Taran’s impatience.
“Will Death be there?” I asked.
He stopped too, going very still.
“Why do you ask?”
Because you killed him. Because he killed everyone else.
“Because he died. He died six months ago, in the mortal world. Wesha said he’d been reborn. Here? Is he here?”
Taran’s expression relaxed. “He’s invited, but nobody’s seen him. Possibly he’s still crawling down the Mountain, since he hasn’t more than a few dozen priests and a handful of Fallen left.”
“But he’s in the Summerlands? The Stoneborn haven’t done anything to contain him? They let the Fallen roam the City and eat people?” My voice grew tighter as I imagined it.
“Technically, it isWeshawho lets the Fallen eat you, my precious almost-maiden-priest. Because she promised everything she owned to her husband.”
I hadn’t been anywhere near Death at Ereban. I’d been all the way in the rear with the other acolytes, shouting and pushing through the crowd as his priests led the young princess to the altar. I’d lived because I didn’t make it to the front in time.
Like every time I sent my mind there, I began to feel hot and confined. My throat remembered smoke. My arms remembered the press of other bodies. Too hot, too tight, the ceiling will—
Taran waved a hand in front of my face, drawing me back to the present.
“You’re not in any danger. If Napeth was reborn on the Mountain six months ago, he’ll be just as powerless and empty-headed as Marit. Stymied by the knots in his trouser laces and the names of his ugly children.”
“You don’t remember him either,” I pushed back, my fingernails cutting into my palms. “Everything he did. In the war. In either war!”
“What should I remember?” Taran asked, lifting an eyebrow.
