TWENTY SEVEN

DIVINITY

You never expect to see a small girl come walking out from a blazing wall of fire, even less for that same girl to reach up and channel light down from the sky. And yet that was what this girl, fragile and slight as she was, appeared to be doing, her thin white arm reaching up to the increasingly tumultuous skies above as though to summon the elements themselves.

Neythan and Arianna cursed in unison as they stood in the middle of the street, a hundred feet away, and watched along with the other denizens who’d fled this way. All of them now frozen to the spot as the child stood there, her clothes and hair whipping up to the gust of some strangely localised blizzard all around her as the brilliant beam of luminescence shone down along its perfectly straight axis from the expanse overhead.

“What is she doing?”

“I don’t know,” Neythan answered. “But it can’t be good. And it can’t be good to allow her to do it.”

“Neythan?”

But he was already moving forward, walking up the street toward her. Blade drawn, limping with fatigue, the ever-present sag of the shadow on his sha dragging within him. The earth seemed to be gathering into a mild tremor, the skies rumbling, flickers of lightning igniting in strange shapes among the night’s clouds. The city’s south gate would be three-quarters of a mile beyond where the child stood in the street barring the way. One long straight road, bracketed by tenements and the flamboyant sprawl of the richer districts to the southwestern quarter, with their wide houses and expansive grounds. Neythan could see the look on the child’s face now, a concentrated grimace, her eyes closed, her pale body trembling slightly from the strain of whatever she was doing. The light was all around her, her skin glistening with it, her limbs fine lambent rods of alabaster. And Neythan could feel the resistance of it, whatever she was doing, an invisible tension in the air he had to push through. Like trying to walk uphill, or into a gusting wind. Somewhere behind him he could feel Arianna, following, trying with him to press a way to the girl to… what? What would they do? Strike her? Try to kill her? Politely ask her to stop?

He could see some of the buildings on the periphery beginning to shudder, as though mirroring her strain, trying to remain upright and intact against the pressure and weight of whatever she was trying to do.

And then Neythan heard the strange squawk-roar of one of the giant winged creatures somewhere overhead, circling back around, and the windswept shout of Arianna behind him, probably trying to beckon him back, or warn him. And it was then he realised, there at the eye of it all, amid the shudder-gust intensity of the light, the little girl was now looking at him, her body still fixed in place, unmoving, a slight tremor along her outstretched arm, but her eyes – icy blue, cold, spiteful – peering out from the whip-slap frenzy of her windblown hair across the chasm of energy between them, watching him approach. She shifted her arm, did something with her hand, relinquishing her hold on the sky and the intensifying shaft of light that had been gathering around her. Everything stopped – the tremors, the light, the sizzle of thunder that had begun to swell among the clouds above – all of it shuddering to a halt so sudden it seemed to make some of the buildings, released from the forces that had been gripping them, recoil and slacken back into place.

“You will never learn, will you,” the little girl said, eyes locked on Neythan’s. “But then each is taught in his own way. And, as I once tried to teach my sons, if a soul cannot hear…” She looked up, allowed her eyes to roll back in their sockets and closed them again, exhaling slowly, “he must feel.”

“Neythan, look out!”

He turned, swivelling to face Arianna, who was scrambling to the side of the street as the monstrous bulk of one of the creatures filled the thoroughfare, swooping down and gliding along its length toward the crowd still gathered there, toward him.

“Everyone down!” Neythan shouted. But it was too late. The beast’s wingspan scythed like the edge of a giant axe into the terraces that flanked the street, crumbling the walls, spraying dust. Neythan saw several men too old to run cut down as the beast flew low, its long belly parallel to the ground and its horrifyingly immense jaws hinging open, revealing the slick black flesh of its throat.

Neythan screamed and dived to the ground as the creature swept past, its wings passing over his head like a wave. He rolled and tumbled, dragged along the dirt in the after-draft of the massive wing’s wake as the beast reared up, climbing back into the night sky with the little girl now clinging to the furred girth of its neck, riding it.

“Neythan!”

Arianna was climbing to her feet. Blood and gore littered the road behind them where several men had been halved at the waist, their entrails spilt and scattered across the ground. The rest of the people were screaming, running back the other way to get out of the street as Arianna took hold of Neythan by the arm and helped him up.

“Quickly. That thing is circling back around.”

A few archers had gathered at the street’s other end, others on a mezzanine overlooking the road from the east, trying to sight the beast as it arced high and swung across the moon to turn around. It split the night with another cry, gathering speed as it descended back toward the narrow straight of the south road. Neythan and Arianna were limp-skipping toward the end of the street but they could already tell it would be too far. Neythan could hear the rip of the wind as the beast’s wings began to skim the rooftops behind them, preparing to lower further to scythe and decapitate with its wings. Some of the archers ahead had begun to loose their arrows, aiming low, unsure how to measure the distance with the creature’s rising speed.

“Do you see that?”

Arianna beside him, jogging with his arm across her shoulder as she pointed toward the end of the street – the archers still there, but a few paces beyond them and still walking, a figure, moving toward them along the middle of the road whilst the people fled in the opposite direction to exit it.

“Who is–”

The crash of broken stone behind them. The beast was in the street, the blade-sharp edge of its wings once again scraping along the walls as it flew headlong toward them.

“Let me go.”

“Neythan, what are you–”

He shrugged her off. “Let me go. We won’t both make it. I can’t run.” He turned, sword held low, and stepped toward the middle of the road to face it. Arianna turned to join him instead of running to escape as Neythan wanted, but there was no time to argue now.

They watched it come, and for the first time Neythan could see something of the beast’s shape and countenance as it sped low toward them – the shoulders of its wings, thick long limbs with talons of black bone protruding from the joint. The broad girth of its neck, furred with coarse chunky bristles, probably more like fingernails or scales than hair, covering the vast musculature of the breast and neck like armour. The malicious sneer of its snout, something between a giant wolf’s and a shark’s, creaking open as it neared to reveal the black oily flesh and drool of its throat. Its huge skull bobbed slowly with each subtle row of its wings, almost gliding now, its flight barely hindered as the bony edges of its pinions sliced and bumped along the walls of the housing, issuing sparks with every contact as the beast continued to drive forward with the weight and speed of its gathered momentum. Neythan found himself cringing and flinching at the sound – like the magnified grind of steel on whetstone – as he tried to still his sha and bring himself more fully to the moment.

He gripped his sword two-handed, digging the toes and heels of his sandals into the dirt, and stood side on, knees slightly bent, poised to meet victory or death as the beast only seemed to accelerate further with its mouth now stretched wide to show its teeth, long serrated blades of enamel several rows deep, ready to snatch and puncture and grind. And Neythan could feel himself trembling now, a shivering weakening churn along his every sinew and through his organs as he leaned into the pureness of the moment – here with his sword, Arianna at his shoulder, just the two of them again like those days back in Ilysia sitting atop the Great Dry Lake’s edge as though they alone were the world’s last remaining survivors and witness, and now in a way perhaps they were, here in the heart of the crown city, standing in the middle of the main south road as the vast hulking frame of death incarnate raced toward them on the wind to–

The flash came from nowhere, whiting out the road – the night, for a moment, radiant, the surroundings lit bright as the noonday sun. A dazzling burst of fluorescence detonated on the beast’s chest like a bolt of lightning. The creature roared in agony, and then abruptly pulled up, favouring its left wing where the flesh beneath the shoulder sizzled and glowed, its singed fur smouldering like the dying remains of a furnace as the beast groaned and flapped to haul itself clear. Neythan shielded himself from the rise of dust as the creature ascended, and then spun around to see the hooded figure on the street, standing a few feet behind them. Amber eyes aglow, gleaming like hot metal as she removed her hood.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Arianna said as she looked on.

Neythan said nothing, stunned silent. He took a step closer, to be sure of who he was seeing, and then frowned as the questions raced through his thoughts. How could she be here? Where had she been? How did she just do what she’d just done? But instead the only thing that came out was: “Nyomi?”

Nyomi got them out of the city, guiding them to waiting horses by the forum before leading them through sidestreets and alleys to navigate around the continuing pockets of fighting and exit through the trade gate at the eastern wall. Once out of the city she took them several miles east into the mountains where they made camp. From there they looked down on the landscape at Hanesda, shimmering in the night like a miles-wide lantern sprawled across the plain as the fires and fighting continued.

“Your skin,” Neythan said. He’d been staring at it for almost the entire way here.

Nyomi sat by the fire with her cloak over her head, her scalp wrapped in a coloured headscarf beneath it as the hot amber gleam of her eyes slowly dimmed to something approximating normality.

“It’s different,” Neythan added.

Arianna followed his gaze and saw that he was right. Nyomi’s hands, resting on her lap as she sat cross-legged before the fire, were no longer their usual chestnut brown, but instead blanched. Patches of white skin dappled her fingers and knuckles and wrists in blotchy patterns, and the same seemed to have happened on her face, flecks of pale skin speckling the area around her forehead and merging into larger jagged patches that ringed her eyes and cheeks like the shorelines of small continents.

Nyomi grimaced as she reached toward the fire to warm herself. She was breathing heavily, clearly weakened. “It is the mark of my blood,” she said wearily. “My ancestry. I will be able to hide it again as I regain my strength.”

“Because of what you did back there?” Arianna asked.

Nyomi scowled in pain as she adjusted. “It has been many years since I last had to… uncover myself that way. Decades actually. But there was little choice. You could not be harmed. The time…” she inhaled deeply, it was as though she was struggling to breathe, “it grows short. So short…” She trailed off, glancing back to the plain beyond the exalted crack of rock she’d settled them in.

“What are you, Nyomi?”

Her gaze reeled back in from the cold dark of the horizon and settled on him. There was still a glint of the luminescent amber of earlier as the fire reflected in her gaze. “In Súnam, there are those whose skin is this way. Dark, and light. There are others whose skin is pale only, though they are born of the Summerlands. Although many do not understand why these things are, I do. I always have.”

“You are… some kind of mystic?”

She laughed, then wheezed. “A little more than that perhaps, Neythan.” She looked up at him then, fixing him with that tigerish yellow gaze. “What I am about to tell you will mean you will no longer have a choice, either of you. You cannot know what I am unless you remain bound on this course. I tell you this because there will be things to come that will make you want to depart from the way upon which you are now set.”

Neythan exchanged glances with Arianna, then shrugged. “After all we have seen, Nyomi, I don’t think there is any going back for us.”

Nyomi looked at each of them to be sure this was true, and then nodded to herself. “I am the firstborn child of a god,” she said, then returned her gaze to the flames to continue warming herself.

“Hmm, yeah sorry, see I’m confused,” Arianna answered. “You’re saying you’re the daughter of a god. Like… a god.”

“Centuries ago some left their world to come here,” Nyomi said, “to abide among men, to relinquish the garments of light and be clothed in the flesh of dust. They transgressed laws to do so, to establish kingdoms for themselves. They sired offspring with your men and women, sons and daughters of flesh and light, children of divinity. Some in the Reach, some among the lands you now call the Sovereignty, some further south in Súnam, like me… You could say we were… different. Like men, yes. Mortal. Some more easily killed than others. But also divine, touched by the light of our forebears, and inheritors of some of their nature, some of their strengths.”

“Wait,” Arianna said. “So… how old are you?”

“Centuries. Although I will say displays like the one I was forced into tonight are unlikely to help me remain for many more. Many of my brothers and sisters are dead because of their profligacy with their light. We are mortals, not gods. These powers were never intended to abide in the flesh of men; it is too weak to withstand their cost. But when we were young, we did not care for these things. Many of my siblings used their strengths to become rulers and champions among men. Pale kings, they called us then, and so we were. Drunk with greed and pride because of the things we could do. In the end, it is what betrayed us.”

“Why did you not tell us any of this before?”

“It is as I said, you are bound to the light that has been shown to you. You cannot unknow what you have been told, and once you have been told, you cannot turn away. You will not understand these things now, you are only human. We do not hide these things from you, we hide them for you. They come to you as they are ready to be received. This is a law, the way of all light. But as I say, you are only human.”

“You’re saying there’s more, other things you haven’t told us?”

“There is always more, there is no end to finding out. But not all things are mine to tell. Some things are Filani’s to tell. And some will come by the hand of others.”

“She remains alive?”

“She does. For now, at least. When I lost you at the shrine, I returned to Jaffra by night to see her.”

“They didn’t tell us that,” Arianna said.

“They didn’t know. I did not announce my presence when I went… She was weak though, when I saw her… it is unlikely she will recover.” Nyomi coughed, leaning away from the fire, and then wiped her mouth with a sleeve.

“Are you alright?”

“I shall be, given time.”

“Why did you do it, Nyomi?” Neythan asked. “Why did you save us?”

“You are part of a battle that began before you were born, both of you. A battle for bloodlines and territories and things beyond what you will at this moment be able to understand… What you can and should understand is that that little girl you met back there in the city was not really a little girl.”

“That I can believe,” Arianna replied.

“She is Markúth, isn’t she?” Neythan said.

Nyomi regarded him. “You knew what she was?”

“I suspected… I’d been having… I don’t know… visions, of her. The girl.”

“What visions?” Arianna said. “You never told me.”

“I didn’t want to worry you.”

“As I recall, I asked you specifically about things like this.”

“I didn’t know how to make sense of it myself. I didn’t understand. Not until I saw her.”

“You are seeing the worlds within the world,” Nyomi remarked soberly, “and they will know it now too. They are able to look at you just as you look at them.”

“Who are?” Arianna asked.

“The gods: the Fathers, the Mothers. This is why I came for you. Why I had to come for you. You are a key. There will be others, but you are the one they can see now. Perhaps the only one. They will be seeking you because of this.”

“What do you mean, a key?”

“The girl you saw. She is Markúth’s to make himself flesh – to abide here, in this world. Now that he has succeeded, others will be able to try. He is the father, you see. He had to be first. But he is not the only one who has been seeking to enter. There are others who hope to do the same, some who belong to him, some who oppose him.”

“You’re saying things like that,” Arianna pointed vaguely back in the direction of the crown city burning in the plain below, “are going to be happening more?”

“If we do not stop them, yes.”

“And how are we supposed to do that?”

“The scroll. You still have it?”

“Of course.” Neythan patted his sword sleeve on the ground beside him, which was where he typically kept the scroll, strapped to his back in a pocket of the sleeve beside his blade.

“Good. It will help us. The secrets of how to defeat them are hidden on its page, and also the pages of the others.”

“Others?”

“There are five Magi scrolls in all, Neythan. You have one of them, the Earth Scroll. The Brotherhood were thought to have another, but as for the rest, they are hidden. We hoped, Filani and I, that you would be able to help us find them, once you’d read your own. The scrolls were written knowing these days would come; that once the priesthoods fell, the way for the gods to return would be made open. Qoh’leth, the author of your scroll and the father of the Shedaím, did not want to turn on his own kind and help to destroy the priesthoods. He did so because he knew they had become corrupt, embroiled in conflicts with each other that threatened to tear apart every known land. But he also knew that their right purpose was to ensure there would be no return to what had come before them: no return to the Godswar. So, he and others collected and created relics, distilled them, and put them in order to be included in these scrolls – all the knowledge needed to bring about the downfall of the gods when they returned. They must be found, and their secrets learned, in order to prevent what is coming. It was for this purpose we began the Fellowship of Truths.”

“The Fellowship the Shedaím tried to destroy?” Neythan asked. “You started it?”

“I helped to, together with Filani and others. That the gods chose to use the Brotherhood to try to keep us from discovering the scrolls is precisely why we must find the others and learn to read the one you have.”

“I have learned,” Neythan said. “It’s why we came to Hanesda. I saw Elias, the Sharíf’s chamberlain, in a vision one of the stones in the scroll showed to me of Karel, the first Sharíf. Elias was there. At the Battle of Banners nearly three centuries ago, he was there.”

“Then he also is a descendant of the gods, as I am, but working to help them.”

“He took Caleb, Nyomi… We have to find him.”

“I agree.”

“You do?”

“You are surprised.”

“I thought you would tell us to find the scrolls first.”

“Elias will likely have answers concerning them. We must find him.”

“I guess the only question that leaves, for now at least, is how,” Arianna put in. “We have no way of knowing where he has gone.”

Neythan reached for the satchel they’d filled with the contents of Elias’ table and emptied it out between them on the ground by the fire. “We took these from his room, in the palace.”

Nyomi shuffled closer to examine the items – letters, scraps of writing on torn pieces of vellum, a stylus, what appeared to be some kind of signet ring. Nyomi lifted it, inspecting the jewel – a small sapphire seated in a gold fixture. “You say you learned to read the scroll,” Nyomi said.

“Yes?”

“You may be able to read this jewel the same way.”

“Are you sure? The priest at the shrine warned against reading things that are untreated.”

“I will guide you. If you follow carefully what I tell you to do, you may be able to dip into the jewel for a short time, like a gull taking fish. A jewel like this, that has perhaps been bound to a man for many years, will carry something of his sha within it. If it is not too old, the shift will be very clear. You will be able to see its memories well.”

Neythan hesitated, looked to Arianna, who answered with a noncommital shrug. “What do I need to do?” he asked Nyomi.

She nodded and shuffled on her seat again, turning herself square to him. “Imagine that you are Elias. Imagine, from your sha, not with your mind, what it is like to be him.”

“But I do not know him.”

“I said not with your mind, Neythan. You don’t need to know him. Just close your eyes. Breathe.”

And so Neythan obeyed, stilling his sha, closing his eyes.

“You will follow what I say. Do not think. Do not try to understand what I say. Only follow. Are you ready?”

Neythan nodded.

“Good. Now. Think on Elias, the chamberlain, and imagine that it does not matter whether you know him well or not. Imagine he is a perfect stranger.” Nyomi paused, allowing Neythan to settle into his breathing. “Imagine all you need to know is already present within you, waiting in your sha. Because it is. Trust that. Trust your sha. Lean into the not knowing. And let yourself fall into the truth that you already do know him, as all men know all…”

Neythan breathed deep, and then let go, allowing his mind to follow whatever notions of the man it conjured.

“I’m going to put the jewel into your hand, Neythan. And you’re going to imagine yourself frightened, fearful of the future; the things you planned are failing, all you have built is dying. You need a safe place, free of the weight of things. You need somewhere to go and understand what is to be done next. Imagine how much you need that place, Neythan. Think on it as you touch the jewel.”

Neythan did, and felt the pull instantly, an abrupt whip-like gravity, stronger than before, tugging on his bones and drawing him inexorably inwards with the sudden thrust and snap of a recoiling bowstring.

And suddenly he is… elsewhere. Outside. Daytime. It’s the stillness he notices first, the warm calm air close to his skin, and then, as he turns, the wide blunt horizon, an unending scape of green marshy lowlands, punctuated here and there between the long reeds by pools of murky water as the land stretches away beneath the clouded sun for as far as his eyes can see. He watches the sun’s light where it pierces the bright scuds of cover overhead, watches the way it parades in slow broad patterns across the windless terrain whilst dead trees stand erect amid the slough like giant antlers, still as a picture, their barren branches arcing up to cradle the sky. The ring is on his hand now, its gold band snug to his middle finger and the blue jewel winking in the cloudy brightness. He tries to wipe the mudsplatter from the stone but it only smears, and there’s more gathering on his arms and clothing, kicking up as he treads ankle deep through soft squelching earth toward a single living tree up ahead. From what he can tell, it is the last living tree for several miles in any direction. And the one he knows he is meant to go to.

It puzzles him to look at it, a tall bold cypress, standing there surrounded by the flimsy buzz of mayflies and the sodden earthy stench of the grass: because it seems – this tree – so lonely and fragile, and yet so powerful too, its defiant height pushing up from the vast, mushy landscape as though to embody some ancient law. He finds, as he looks, that he admires this tree, he likes the way the fluffy gossamer blossoms trail down from the gnarled boughs like hung ghosts. And it’s only then he notices he’s not alone. He sees the figure: there, beneath the tree, waiting within its thin, broken shade as he continues to plod toward it. And he knows they are there for him. They’ve arranged to meet like this. They will share some needful secret to guide and instruct him. This is where he needs to be. Which is why he is stunned, as he watches the figure begin to step forward beyond the tree’s plaited shadows to show themselves, when it all begins to collapse – the tall bold cypress with its spectral blossoms, the shorter dead leafless trees that surround it, the milky sky with its pale muted sun, distant and hidden above the clouds like a coy stranger – all of it sliding into a dimming blur and coming apart piece by piece like beams of scaffold until there is no more day or marsh or unending bright cloudy horizon, all of it brushed aside like a common drape to reveal the world as it really is.

Neythan blinked awake to find the night around him and Nyomi and Arianna gazing at him from across the dwindling campflame. He hadn’t collapsed this time, which was interesting. Perhaps he was beginning to get used to these visions, developing his own special tolerance for them.

“What did you see?” Nyomi asked.

And so he told them, explaining the details of the land and the tree and the shadowed stranger waiting beneath it.

“I know this place,” Nyomi said. “It is an altar, deep in the Sumerian Riverlands. Maybe a day’s travel south from here.”

“You are sure?”

But when she turned to Neythan to answer she seemed distracted, her gaze and thoughts already drifting beyond them to somewhere else. She nodded vaguely. “Yes. I am sure.”

Neythan watched her for a moment, and then nodded. “Alright. Then that is where we shall go.”