“We are all of us god-killers. And what’s one more dead?” Treseano asks around a mouthful of some flaky pastry.
“One more might be you,” Okeanos says mildly.
“It won’t be.”
Though I feel chilled at the idea of a violent god murderingother gods, it is no more chilling than when a god watched my islands ravaged by storms and did nothing, when the waves choked my Lieve and no one came to help, when the fires swept across Calypsala and not a single divinity extinguished them, so they will forgive me if I am somewhat preoccupied by greater, heavier murders than the one done to El’Dorian. She was never my god, anyway.
Okeanos makes the ancient holy sign suddenly—the same he’d made on his little boat before he confessed to me that he had enemies bent on his harm. He had not exaggerated his situation. But I find I do not much care. After all, I am one of his enemies.
“Then I demand my right as one of the divine council to force the Resurgence at once. May each be washed of the past, relieved of the present, propelled to the future, and may it be done immediately, and done well, and done for a time and half a time,” he intones, as if speaking holy words.
They must have the authority of law, for the others put down their food, grimacing.
“We will still discuss this wife of yours and why she hid here spying on us instead of arriving with you,” Alexandros says, and his words seem threatening when he looms so close to Oke. “Even if it must wait until after proceedings occur.”
My husband is silent, silent enough that it sounds like a retort.
There’s a moment and then Treseano spreads his hands, mollifying. “I’m not one to humor anyone, but he’s spoiling my appetite with that miserable wound. I propose weexpedite the ceremonies and then we may make proper work of some repast while the sea goes off to sulk. Who would have thought he’d be more isolated and miserable married than he was unmarried?” He waves an indolent hand. “But then who has ever predicted what the tides might bring?”
There is no grumbling as there would be with humans. No dithering or discussing. There is a small grunt of annoyance from Markanos and a lifted eyebrow from Alexandros, but together they walk toward a spur of ground that splits off from this gathering place and toward another raised island carved from another heap of rock. The rock curves up from the sea like the arch of a rib and forms a delicate bridge. Around it, the waves surge and spray, the storm only growing as mauve twilight fills the sky.
Glorian is last to leave but us, her huge procession trailing after her. She spares me one hard glance that sends a spike of fear down my spine.
I swallow hard, my knees trembling as I take the first steps onto the stone bridge. I don’t remember seeing it here when I arrived, but I wasn’t looking for other islands. I was only looking to my goal—the death of a god.
Okeanos, as if oblivious to where we march, grips my hand like a sailor grips a line in a storm, as if somehow I will keep him from being blown to his death, though surely he knows—he must know—that nothing at all has changed. And though I must be sensible and wait for a moment when we are alone, when he trusts me, and when I have a god weapon, I am still just as determined to spill out his life aswhoever spilled out El’Dorian’s. I dare not do otherwise, not even now that I have met the gods themselves in all their terrible glory and strange familiarity.
“What are you doing?” I murmur as we walk, him with a pronounced limp.
“What areyoudoing?” he repeats back, and he is right. I cannot question him when I will not allow him to question me. We must both march to our fates on our own. We are married in name only, never in heart.
Chapter Seventeen
How could any other island be more impressive than the one with the towering statues of the gods? And yet the one we reach next is glorious, formed by ten arches that together make a kind of cupola with a round circle open to the moon above in the very center. It shines down directly onto an altar formed of the round dish of the earth herself perched on the backs of ten miniature forms of the gods. I wonder if those figures change with the change of the gods and if next time it will only have nine figures and El’Dorian’s will simply disappear.
We all gather around the strange earth altar in a loose circle and proceedings begin—a string of sacrifices and pronouncements that would mesmerize even the most jaded of mortals.
I ask Okeanos to tell me who this King of Heaven is, buthe shakes his head minutely and keeps his lips pressed close together. There is no idle chatter in this sacred place.
Markanos makes his obeisances first, moving up to the altar. I have to look away. Each time I see one of the gods, it is a renewed struggle not to bend beneath the glory of the divine. I hate it. And I hate how unrelenting it is, like the line of a song repeating again and again in my head until I am sick to death of it.
He declares, “This I lay on your altar, King of Heaven, my icy lands are yours. My mountains bow. I am your servant.”
He does as he says, laying an offering on the altar—a sword made of crystal, I think. It’s gorgeously wrought, though I doubt it would stand up to any true abuse. It’s hard not to wonder at the strangeness of the gods worshipping someone higher still. Is he real, or have they invented him? Must even a god have someone to worship?
The view between the open-walled pillars of this temple shifts from the view of the sea to an eagle’s-eye view of the territories of Markanos as he lays his treasure down. His lands are vast and gorgeous. His armies are assembled in ranks, his cities mighty, his crenellated towers a powerful defense of his people, his fields of wheat growing, swelling, harvested, fallow again, his herds rushing across the land as the seasons ebb and flow behind them. I have the strangest sense that he lays all that—the year, the harvests, the people and their lives—along with the crystal sword upon the altar. They are all one—his very identity and all his treasure represented in that one gift. And when the sword goes upin a bright white pillar of fire and is no more, I can feel the power surge back into him, feel how it enlivens his otherworldly glory to such a degree that I must look away. For a bare moment, I glimpse a golden corona around his head.
I cannot stand to even look at his face for a full breath as he states very calmly, as if this is something that has happened so frequently it barely needs noting, “I have no declarations of lands won or lost, of new allegiances or progeny.”
I’m breathless. Made so by his decadent majesty and by my consciousness of my own unworthy position here.
And yet.
And yet, I am undaunted in my goal.
These ten who I have known all my life as gods are not what I imagine a god to be. They offer their sacrifices to this King of Heaven and his power is granted back to them to use as they manage his world—like lords stewarding fiefdoms. That much Okeanos whispers to me and I am reminded of the story he told me earlier of how he’d railed against Vesuvius and been given his revenge by some great benefactor. Did he mean this shadowy deity?
Okeanos’s attention is intent upon the proceedings, as devout as any priest I’ve ever seen—far more so than Turbote, who I have seen secretly wipe a dripping nose on his vestments.
