Markanos watches me, seeming to be amused. He won’tsee the dead god, of course, so I look like a madwoman. But maybe he knows what I am doing, because he allows it, lounging against the statue of the screaming woman. I feel my cheeks grow hot, but there’s no time for quibbling.
“Vesuvius,” I say as the dead god appears to me.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see the war god raise an eyebrow.
Vesuvius’s spirit face matches his statue. In the flickering light of the lantern, both carry the exact same mockery, but when his gaze finds the marble image of himself, his expression is transformed to one of singular delight.
“I’ve never seen it before,” he says, and sounds a little breathless. “Who would have thought Okeanos had it in him to honor me thus?”
He sounds very pleased for someone who has clearly been set in memory for all time as a vicious torturer, and hidden in a crevice besides, so that only the most persistent—or someone like me who came here by accident—will ever see it.
Casually, Markanos picks up my trident and spins it in his hands. He can’t see Vesuvius—but he can hear me talking to the former sea god and he is not looking at me as if I am mad. He seems more interested in swishing the weapon through the air as if testing its balance.
“You cannot keep calling me up from the grave as if I were your cupbearer,” Vesuvius says in a silky manner that tells me this is merely the beginning of a negotiation.
“You were friends with Treseano, God of Treachery and Death. Or so Markanos keeps telling me.”
“Fitting, don’t you think?” Vesuvius asks, skittering over the rock to get closer to his own statue. He runs a hand over the man carved forever in a pose of agony within the grasp of his stone tentacles and he smiles.
“We would like to know where he might go if he were hiding something.”
Vesuvius looks back and forth between Markanos and me.
“We, is it? You move very quickly, Drowned Queen. Two dead husbands and already another one on the way. I commend you. Can I assume you have already looked at Treseano’s home? Knocked on the door? Invited yourselves in? No?” He looks at me wide-eyed. “Maybe try those things first.”
“We already found him at Ordanus’s house. Where that god lay dying.”
Vesuvius goes very still.
“So we can only assume he will not make himself so easy a target.”
Vesuvius waves a tentacle idly, first as a gesture, but then he seems fascinated by it, and he twists it back and forth to admire.
“And yet you are here. At your home. Admiring my form set into the rock. Gods are arrogant people. They like to be where they can be found.”
I turn to Markanos. “He says to look at Treseano’s home.”
Markanos flicks one of the points of the trident. “What do you think I was doing all day while you were playing crustacean?”
Vesuvius turns at that and regards me through narrowedeyes. “Crustacean? Such a hard creature for such a well-rotted heart to dwell in. Tell me, Coralys, God of the Sea. What would tempt you to such a course?”
I clench my jaw. I will tell him nothing more than I must.
“Tell him to tell us where Treseano hides,” Markanos breaks in. He is still unconcerned that I am having a conversation with a dead god he cannot see. “He will know. The pair of them were hand in glove a few centuries ago.”
Vesuvius leans in close so that his lips nearly touch Markanos’s cheek, and he whispers, “I could touch him and he’d never know. I adore that kind of power.”
I roll my eyes. We both know he cannot. His threat is empty.
Markanos’s jaw clenches as if he suspects exactly what is happening right now. His hands grip the trident a little tighter.
“Just tell us, Vesuvius,” I say.
“I don’t think I will. There’s nothing I want that you can trade for that information.”
He’s just starting to smile when Markanos moves so quickly that I’m still sucking in a surprised breath when he’s finished. He pivots sharply to his left, arms arcing perfectly, my trident an extension of them, and in a very neat spin and strike he’s pinned Vesuvius to his own statue with the trident.
Vesuvius’s cry is more surprise than pain, but even so he’s stuck in place, thrashing on the end of the trident’s barbs.
