“You’d be surprised.” She unsheathed the sword and touched the blade, running a finger lightly along the edge. The metal glowed; something about a goddess’s touch helped fight off most of the creatures that plagued the area; all weapons in the Devoted’s arsenal had been blessed in this manner. Asteria’s voice grew softer, sadder. “What is your diagnosis?”
I kept my voice level. “I’ll need more time. . . .”
“I cannot lose her, Lan.” A new note entered her voice; anger, determination, more than a trace of arrogance. Some people still spoke in hushed whispers about how she had broken the world to save it from her mad twin. So many had died that few were old enough to remember the Breaking, and they spoke of Asteria’s terrible majesty. The Asteria I served now was gentler, soft-spoken and quiet, but behind that kind exterior lay a mind of steel.
I knew about her previous Devoted. I knew none of them save Gracea had survived the Breaking. I knew she’d fled here to protect what was left of her people and had founded Aranth. Her desire to see everyone safe was something I’d always admired in Asteria. I respected and trusted her—but sometimes, even I wondered if those old stories about her were true.
“We’re the only ones of our kind left. In time, she will marry and have children of her own. It would break my heart to see them afflicted with her sickness.”
The thought broke my heart too, but in a different way. Of course she’d marry someone. Aranth would need more goddesses. “I’ll figure it out.”
“I’ll save her even if I have to break the seas open again—” She broke off with a loud gasp, rising to her feet.
“Your Holiness?” I grabbed her arm—
The pain hit me on all sides. The tower, the room, Asteria—they all disappeared, and in their place I found myself staring up at a great emptiness, rising from the bowels of an endless abyss. It was nothing I could describe, because that’s what it was—a great and abhorrent nothing; a loathsome void.
I saw Aranth ravaged by floods and ice, the storms sweeping mercilessly through until the screaming had tapered off and there was only silence. A large wave loomed, and the city disappeared underneath its swell.
The shapeless thing lifted its maw toward the heavens and screeched. And then it turned its eyeless gaze on something beyond mine.
My child, it whispered.
The vision faded. The goddess had sunk back down into her seat, and I was sprawled on the floor.
“What was that?” I croaked. I knew that Asteria had visions sometimes—of the future or of an immediate present, I was never sure—but I’d never had the opportunity to use my Catseye abilities to gain access to what she saw. It wasn’t something I was willing to ever do again.
“I saw a creature,” she whispered, no longer calm, but harsh as the storms waging war outside, “made from hollowed stars, rising from the breach. It is coming this way. It is searching for me, and it is searching for Odessa.”
Chapter Two
Arjun, Son of Clan Oryx
THE ROYAL SUN GODDESS, Heiress to the Realms of Light, Blessed of the Sun, Second of the Blood, and enemy of my people, was a blithering idiot.
She sat atop the beast’s cadaver and wept, paying no attention to my approach. The Salt Sea had receded again, the third time in the last month alone, leaving nothing but acrid black sand, several more miles of useless territory on the Skeleton Coast—ironic, because this hadn’t been a coast in decades—and this gruesome offering in its wake. The corpse was easily two hundred tons and a hundred feet long and had perished long before the waters gave it up to dry land.
Her hands pressed down against the heavy spines along the creature’s back, and I saw patterns of Light gathering around the goddess, sparking and hissing like she was a flint from which life could spring forth. She pushed, and the ridges underneath her rippled in response to her frantic movements. But for all her efforts, the beast remained inert, and silent, and dead.
She was alone. You’d expect an armed escort with someone of her importance, so my assumption of idiocy obviously held. I wore armor forged by Stonebreaker craftsmen, a necessity to survive the heat out in the desert and the near-lethal rays of the sun, but she wore none that I could see.
An idiot, even for a goddess. When the fires flickered low and the silence in the caves went on for too long, the elders would tell us how the Sun Goddess Latona had ripped the sky in two and feasted on her twin sister’s heart, dooming us to a lifetime of wasteland because she could not stop craving the light. That this goddess, Latona’s daughter, was just as cruel. We were born hating them. We had every reason to.
I would never have this chance again. This was my opportunity to kill one of the women responsible for sending the world to shit.
This was justice. That was all. But I wavered, lowering the Howler, and with my hesitation the chance for a preemptive strike was lost.
“It’s an aspidochelone,” she sniffled without quite looking at me, still pushing down.
“A what?”
“An aspidochelone. It’s a great whale, one of the largest known. People used to mistake them for islands. They’d land with their ships and take refuge on the creatures’ backs, only to realize too late they were standing on living animals.”
From behind the beast’s torpedolike head, she paused in her attempts at resuscitation to glance down at me. Only the Sun Goddesses had multicolored hair; hers was cut a few inches above the shoulders, and it floated around her head like it had a mind of its own. But her eyes were magnificent, and I drew in a sharp, quick breath at the sight: the sunlight glittered against bright, pale irises shining with tears.
Mother Salla had told us about the Sun Goddesses’ atrocities, but she’d never mentioned this.
“It’s dead,” I said, not sure what else I was supposed to say.
You’re a moron too, Arjun. You really think you can take on a goddess alone when armies couldn’t? If she were anything like her mother, you’d be a smoking pile of ashes by now.
But she isn’t her mother, is she?
“I have a theory,” she said softly. “I’ve looked through the old histories. I’ve learned the names of creatures long dead, researched places that didn’t survive the Breaking. It wasn’t the healthiest pastime, Mother used to say. There was no point in mourning what couldn’t be brought back. But one of my ancestors, a goddess named Nyx, did the impossible and resurrected a dead bird. She wrote her process down. We must channel all the gates at once, she said, for the Gate of Life to open. I don’t really know what that means—to channel them all at once is impossible. But I thought . . . if she could do it, then maybe I could. . . .”
I didn’t know what she was babbling on about, or why she was treating me like I wasn’t a danger to her, but that was one more factor to my advantage while she was vulnerable on the aspi-whocares. I was within cannon’s sight, closer than anyone from the Oryx clan had ever been to a Sun Goddess. But the Howler felt heavier on my stump than usual, the weight dragging my arm down.
She was crying over a damned whale. How the hell was I supposed to shoot a girl crying over a sand-damn-rocked whale?
She sniffled again and wiped her eyes. “You’re very polite, for someone who wants to kill me.”