The embrace hurt. The froth of lace fringing every layer of blue silk was starched marble-hard. It itched where it dug in. “You’re not mad?” Hawk said, as she reclaimed her own body autonomy from the god.

  “Mad? Of course I’m mad. We’re all mad. We’re ancient and old and bored to tears and that’s driven us insane. Kali’Mar was a creep. He was a creep as a mortal, he got no better as a god. Naomi was always a terror to work under, and Argon…” she did not shudder theatrically. Rather, she froze slightly, in a way that burred against Hawk’s compassion. “Argon was worse.”

  “I take it getting absolute power and authority didn’t help much.” Hawk tried to keep her voice light. She recognized that freeze response. It was the sort that comes at the lip of a memory hole where not even rabbits should dwell.

  “No,” Illyris said. “But tell me,” And she clasped both of Hawk’s hands in hers. “Would I be allowed to go home? If I helped you, if I gave you the other gods, and protected the temple, would I get to go home?”

  Her grip was nearly crushing.

  “I don’t know,” Hawk said, cautious. “That’s not my decision to make. The military is involved. But I can say you can’t stay here. No one can. The Rift will close. We need to start getting people out before that happens.”

  “We’ve always planned an invasion, when the Temple and the Nexus draw near enough to make that feasible.” Illyris said.

  “That won’t happen until it’s all nearly done, and the Rift itself is maybe minutes away from closing.” Hawk was bluffing. She knew it. But it felt like a safe bluff. “And the time dilation will make it nearly impossible to get more than a few dozen people at a time. We already have that problem. They’re trying to get ladders and a backhoe in so we can evacuate faster, but the refugees from the fire are still trapped at the Temple because we can’t clear the ladders fast enough.”

  Illyris waved a dismissive hand, bejeweled and graceful even in negation. “Oh, there’s ways around that, I’ve been assured. We wouldn’t have spent all these long and dreadful years planning for nothing. Perhaps the hole would be widened. Or time would be equalized. Or some such thing would be done. That was all planned out centuries ago.”

  “By whom? And how?” The Shadow said.

  Hawk heard doubt in his tone, and ignored it completely. She thought of the lines of people still waiting patiently to escape…and the dreadful line of people whose time had run out. She’d seen the bodies under sheets in passing on her trips between Holia and Earth. Failures to be gathered to someone’s ledger. Hers, if she couldn’t find a way around this restriction. “We could really use that information right now,” She said.

  “Whatever for? There’s time aplenty for us now. More than enough time to plan our own attack.” She began pacing, her fingers ripping at the jewels on her rings and the hem of her garments. There was an especially large sapphire in the net across her shoulders. She pulled at it hard, twisting it between her fingers until Hawk worried for the integrity of the chain. “We can die,” she repeated, marveling at the words. “And with Kali gone…yes. Yes. Please show my guests to rooms.” She said this last vaguely, already starting back up her dais. “And bring me my maps! Bring them at once!”

  The Shadow was immediately insistent that he and Hawk be roomed together. They were each given a set of guards in silver and blue livery, who immediately started herding Hawk away from both the shadow and the nearest, most opulent looking hallway. But the Shadow shucked his guards as if they were standing still, and interlaced his arm with Hawk’s. “Together,” he said, “we stay together or we depart at once.”

  This caused some consternation. A cluster of people, some of them the guardians, collected together and began speaking in Holian, gesticulating wildly. There was even fear on some faces. Hawk, worried, leaned over to the Shadow. “What are they saying?” she said.

  “That Illyris would be most put out, should we happen to share a bed beneath her roof.” His voice was sardonic, with a very pleased smile. Oh, yes, he had recovered this much of Alex, at least: His hobby was fucking with people.

  “Jealousy?” Hawk said.

  “Oh, that woman is a multitude of complex sins. Jealous of everything that is not her, and guilt when she is caught out.” A pause. “She collects men, too. Like rabbits.”

  Rabbits, Hawk remembered, had filled the Holian pet niche for cats. “Any attachment?”

  “None, unless the men should choose to leave.” He said.

  Right. And that brought up the next, most important question. “So should we fuck with her by flirting, or…” she trailed off.

  He looked to her with blazing surprise, then considered her words with a surprising delicacy. The concatenation of guards and staff continued their somewhat frantic debate. Rushed and hasty, with many glances at their Goddess’s throne. She was ignoring them all, pouring over a set of maps, held open for her perusal by a very handsome, bare chested man. Hawk did not assume that meant they could escape her ire.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “Flirting would be too great a risk. I have always been the least of her prizes, unwanted and god-gnawed. She’s made that quite clear. But all she needs see is you valuing me higher, and I will become something valuable again. And that will be a contest you may not survive.” He paused a moment. “It does not bother you?”

  “That you slept with her? Why should it? You didn’t even know I existed.” She crossed her hands over her chest. It did bother her.

  “Don’t lie to me, Hawk-of-the-West.” He said, immediately.

  “Fine. Yes. Yes, it bothers me that you slept with someone else. It wouldn’t matter who. I’m a possessive git who can’t get out of my own way. But you don’t remember me. They stole that from you. And you said it yourself: She’s used you, badly.” And Hawk wasn’t convinced that she didn’t prize the Shadow as a lover; she just didn’t want him to know it. There was a sort of romantic manipulation there, most commonly called “negging”. Degrade the self-esteem so they won’t leave. Hawk didn’t think the Shadow had any self-esteem to degrade, but he must have, once. He wore the tattered remnants of ego the same way he wore his shredded robes. Hawk had wondered idly why he was so ashamed of himself; now she began to suspect Illyris was part of the reason.

  “Fidelity is important,” Hawk said. “But whatever we had is broken now, and you don’t seem interested in rebuilding it. So you could sleep with her now.” And she swallowed against the bile that thought dragged up.

  “That would hurt you,” He said.

  She rolled her eyes. “Of course it would. And it would be the end of any attempt at fixing us, so if you really want to put paid to our relationship, you go right on ahead.” And she reeled her ire in. “But I’m not talking about what’s romantic. I’m talking about what’s fair. And it isn’t fair to hold her against you, when you didn’t know about me.”

  “But…” He looked a bit pole-axed.

  “You’re not a prize to be fought over. You’re a human being—well, sort of—and you deserve to get to make your own goddamn choices. Besides, if I get angry at you for sleeping with her, that’s giving her a win. She’s trying to find my boundaries, dude. Same way Kaiser was in…well, you wouldn’t remember that.”

  Silence. Long, lingering, and filled with a very active Holian argument about where to house their two important guests. And then, very softly, “Was it a white-walled room?”

  She looked at him with widening eyes, his words a shock to the gut. It had been a plastic walled room, but without the modern context…

  “Enough!” Illyris’s voice echoed throughout her throne room. “Put them together, for all I care. Just get out and leave me to my work!”

  And there was no chance to follow up on his comment, because their escorts stopped their endless nattering and moved now to sweep them away.

  ***

  The rooms they were taken to were the expected amount of opulence. What Hawk did not expect was for them to be cold. Freezing, as a matter-of-fact. For a moment she thought ice had formed across every surface. Then she realized the ice was the surface. Everything in this room, from the chairs to the floor, the tables to the rather impressive silk-and-fur covered bed, all were made of ice.

  She began shivering. “Ice,” she said.

  Shadow, nodding, lifted a thick rabbit-like fur off the bed and dropped it around Hawk’s shoulders. The thick, radiant folds immediately cut through the worst of the cold, but she still shivered beneath it until her own warmth caught up. “Ice is a form of Water,” he said, his brow knitted with concern. “She has used it for furnishings before, but never for me and never before for anyone of mine. She’d do it to Argon’s people, or Kali’mar’s. Never to a fellow God and certainly never to any of Nasheth’s servants.”

  “I must have really pissed her off,” Hawk said, and sat on an ice chair, tucking as much of herself into the fur as she could. “You don’t seem cold.”

  “I am. But it doesn’t threaten my life,” he said. He sat across from her. “I’m used to being uncomfortable. And doing anything to alter what she’s done to these rooms will alert her and draw her attention back to us.”

  “Mmm,” Hawk said. She leapt over the romantic angst completely and went straight to the jugular. “Her entire attitude sure did change when you told her Kali’Mar bought it, didn’t it?”

  The smile he offered at these words was leonine, and should have come with a growl. He reclined in that chair like the ice was the African veldt. “Indeed she did. Did you know the gods make a habit of murdering each other?”

  “No one mentioned it,” Hawk said.

  “It’s mostly at Nasheth’s command, though sometimes petty squabbles end with one of the pantheon stabbing the others, or ripping limbs or a head off. And there is a ten-year feast, though the distance between such feasts never seems the same. That is when the gods sacrifice each other to their Mother. Why, I think the only God who has never been reduced down to their orb before is Nasheth…and I believe she is the reason none of the others have ever dared damage an Orb before. I am the only one who has ‘benefitted’ from such behavior. I suppose I am quite lucky to be alive.”

  “Mattias never hinted at this,” Hawk said.

  “Mortals do not witness such things. Those who do are blinded and silenced.” A pause. “They compete for the honor, of course. Because such things are always presented as a desirable honor. At the ten-year feast, the gods hack each other apart with knives, and make a dreadful mess of it. I’ve seen three such feasts—I stole my way in, sometimes as a witness, sometimes as…something else.” He thought for a moment. “I was the furniture once. It took some effort to pass myself off as a chair. I got bled upon terribly, the clotted fuel of the divine.”

  “And they…what? Line up and slash at each other?”

  “They stand each at the point of a triangle, with metal blades in hand, and on Nasheth’s signal they slash at each other until one or another is defeated. Argon has sometimes been the only one standing. Illyris has fallen, I think, more than either of the other two. And each time Nasheth takes the orbs of the fallen, kisses them, and places them back in the wet earth where they fell. Then, they wait until they again rise and it’s another ten years of pavilions and processions and parades before they have to stand in Nasheth’s blessed temple once more.”

  Hawk nodded, thinking. “She’s enforcing her superiority. They have to batter themselves to pieces. She doesn’t. Certainly implies that she’s the most powerful of the quartet.” She paused. “Trio, now.”

  “Blessed trio,” He said, smiling broadly. “Perhaps we can make it an even more blessed duo.”