Chapter 38 #2
“I did as I saw necessary,” Anton hears coming from his mouth. This memory is not his own, the childlike voice unfamiliar. Which means it can only belong to Calla.
“Mortals cannot break their bounds and seek immortality,” the king of the heavens bellows. “The Way has severed. Your decision curses the heavens to destruction.”
“I made an informed decision within my domain! She needed me—she prayed to me. Greed on earth is to be balanced. Those who deserve it are owed it. Those who have gone too far—”
“Enough!”
Anton teeters, startled by the demand. His elbow strikes the sand right as the image lurches.
Pain, searing pain, spreads through the memory.
Whoever it belongs to—Calla, not Calla, someone else entirely—the sensation finds the deepest part of their qi, their very life force tearing apart, thread by thread.
“This is your task,” the voice booms. The king stands so tall and large that Anton has not once gotten a glimpse of his face.
How could this be his father? His father who was mortal.
His father who was killed by men with blades, who shouted for Anton to get back, get back, go hide before he could be seen.
“You will take the last dregs of our unpolluted qi to assume true mortal form. You will understand how you are to right your wrongs when you feel this pain again.”
His head is throbbing.
Her head is splitting.
The godling of greed hates everyone in this pantheon.
The godling of greed has only ever been pushed around and sneered upon as though her domain is something wicked, something foul.
But the king of the heavens forced her into being his bride, forced her into becoming the third queen of the heavens because he needed her power to reign.
She is not made for the court—she belongs to the casinos in Lankil’s cities, the basements of the temples in Eigi.
The godling of greed has statues built to her in Yi.
She has shrines in San, where the Palace of Earth gleams, and in Er, where the mortals built a residence they named the Palace of Heavens hoping the gods would like it.
The godling of greed does not do anything in half measure, and still the pantheon wants to act shocked when she performed as she was asked.
Their king brought this upon himself. What did they expect when he elevated greed into his court, into a bride?
Heavenly qi has been poisoned by a perverted undertaking, by a sigil that has ravaged her sister wife’s power.
The pantheon is losing the ability to answer to their mortals.
The mortals below stop sacrificing when they cannot feel their patron gods anymore.
Heavenly qi, already rotting, grows weaker as the royals below condemn the gods they once trusted.
Greed. This is greed. They knew.
“The heavens have fallen. Do your part on earth.”
She’s cast out from the heavenly realm with as much subtlety as an explosion.
Falling, falling, whipping through the clouds, above the seas, into the mountains.
When she crash-lands on cold stone tiles, she can barely parse her surroundings, her vision blurry.
She blinks. Shudders for breath. She sees the white snow first. Piled tall outside the windows, shimmering under the spell of the palace.
Then she sees Sinoa Tuoleimi. Her eyes closed in death, awaiting the moment she would be reborn a hundred years later.
Anton gasps, finally making the jump back to his own body.
He couldn’t take it anymore. He couldn’t stay.
It wasn’t a mere memory that he could recollect.
It was everything. How it felt, how it hurt.
Those thoughts that belonged to the godling of greed, who Sinoa Tuoleimi worshipped.
Sinoa’s tears, dropping onto the prayer mat when she realized her brothers would take the throne from underneath her.
Lightning strikes the beach. Anton feels every little hair along his arms rise in warning.
“Calla,” he whispers. “Who are you?”
Blood soaks the basin, delineating where the carnage began.
Calla opens her eyes in a new body just as it is midstep, diving for cover.
She doesn’t scramble for a weapon anymore.
It’s too slow. She pulls instead. She cuts herself open, throat to navel, and then she jumps—she has to be fast. Pain threatens the edge of her awareness with each new attack, but she’s moving before it can take effect, latching on to the next body that she can sense within the camp, then hurtling out again to let the occupant return. To let the Weisanna die.
When she lands at the rim of the basin, she pauses to inspect her work.
A minute. That’s how long it has been since she got started.
The smell at the camp has changed. Metallic isn’t enough to describe it.
It’s pungent. Death clogs her nostrils. There’s gore stained down the left leg of her borrowed body’s trousers.
It clings to her ankle—an unpleasant sensation that she finds herself focusing on, despite the rest of the destruction.
If the storm does not relent, the blood will travel.
It will flow to the yamen. It will flow along all the roads in Janton.
Calla picks her way down the hill, her steps careful in the mud.
She approaches a body that has fallen nearby: one of the Weisannas she targeted.
When she rolls him over, his eyes are glassy, silver staring up into the sky, unblinking despite the rain.
The wound in his throat was made not by a blade, but by qi, cutting a slit narrow enough that the blood was only spurting from the two ends.
Slowly, she unlatches the sword at his hip.
Calla walks toward a tent at the camp. She ducks through the flap.
The guards had enough time to light their lamps and pull on their shoes, but not to run out into the rain, to slip off into the trees.
Bodies, strewn over their pallets, folded over atop each other.
Calla, swallowing hard, exits the tent. She checks the others. She finds the same image. She walks the perimeter. Not a flicker of life remains. This was a massacre.
This is a victory.
With the sword clattering in her hand, she picks her way back onto the narrow path.
Back to the scene she’d left, where Anton waits with her body.
There’s a trail and footprints dragging through the wet ground, toward the shore, so she follows it carefully, her eyes alert in the dark.
She doesn’t want Anton reacting before he realizes that it is her.
Calla shouldn’t have worried. When she braces against the slope and slides down, Anton sights her through the rain at once, his gaze sharpening. He recognizes her yellow eyes; he waits for her to approach. It’s easy for her to identify all of this, because the light behind Anton’s eyes is blazing.
“What happened to protecting my body?” she asks.
“Trust me, I tried,” Anton says. His voice is hollow. “We need to talk about you, Calla.”