Chapter 2: The God Divided
He looked down. Shoes badly polished, jacket torn at the cuff, dust on one knee. The visitor badge was still clipped to his chest, blank now, the letters washed out of it.
Apparently death had respected the dress code. He took a breath out of habit. Nothing came in. Nothing needed to.
"Hello?"
His voice went out and did not come back. No echo, no floor under his shoes, and yet he did not fall. The white had no source and threw no shadow.
He turned around. The figure had not been there before. Or it had, and his mind had refused to look at it.
At first he thought two people stood a few meters away. Then they moved, and the mistake became impossible. One body. One head. One pair of arms.
The left half was a woman: pale, white-gold hair, an eye like a small moon behind turquoise glass. The right half was a man, darker, black hair threaded with red, an eye like a sun that had burned through everything it had.
A thin gold seam split them from forehead to throat. Behind their head hung a broken ring of roots and pages and dark orbital lines, with pieces missing.
They were beautiful the way old cathedrals are beautiful. Impressive, deliberate, and one bad winter from falling down. The man’s half smiled.
"You took your time."
"He was dead, Zahr," the woman’s half said.
"Which is why punctuality should have been easier."
The young man said nothing. He was busy counting the missing pieces of the halo.
"Good," the male half said.
"Confusion. A healthy response. Screaming would also be acceptable, though less productive."
"Am I dead?"
"Yes."
No softening. Somehow that helped. He looked at his hands. He remembered the locking wheel under his palms. The last bolt. The pressure arriving ahead of the sound.
"The people in the hall."
The two halves went still. The white seemed to gain weight.
"Most got out," the woman said.
"Not all."
"How many?"
"You are not ready to carry a number you can no longer change."
He lifted his eyes to hers.
"That isn’t your decision."
The male half made a small, surprised sound. The woman studied him for a long moment.
"No," she said.
"It is not. One hundred and eighty-seven left the building alive, because the northern stair stayed open. Twenty-three did not."
Twenty-three. A number is worse than not knowing. It gives the absence a shape. He stood in the white and let it sit exactly where it landed.
"Names?"
"You would carry them."
"Yes."
"Then no. Not today."
Something in her voice was not refusal. It was mercy, and she was clearly out of practice at it.
"Who are you?"
The male half put a hand over their shared chest with enormous dignity.
"Zahr. Creator, architect, occasional failure."
"Almina," said the other.
"She omits her titles because modesty is her preferred method of intimidation."
"You omit yours because most are no longer accurate."
"There are two of you," the young man said.
"Yes."
"In one body."
"Also yes."
"Is that normal, where you’re from?"
"Not remotely."
He rubbed his forehead. It was a uselessly familiar gesture and he was grateful for it.
"Why am I here?"
The white changed.
A dark line opened under their feet and widened into a forest seen from far above. Trees to the horizon, cut by silver rivers. Then mountains, coasts, roads with light moving in them like veins.
Then it pulled back, and a world hung in the distance, turning.
"Gaiark," Zahr said.
The name landed somewhere behind the young man’s ribs and stayed there. The image came closer, and broke into pieces.
A hall full of armed people, laughing. A child with a pane of light open in front of her, reading her own name off it, delighted.
A field cut by irrigation channels so precise they looked drawn with a ruler. Then it kept going.
A wagon. A line of people beside it. A clerk writing down their heights. A collar on a table, open, waiting.
A stamp coming down on a page. PROPERTY. The letters were in no language he knew. He understood them anyway. He looked at that one for a long time.
"You built this," he said.
"Yes," Almina said.
"And the collars?"
"Also us. Not deliberately."
She did not flinch from it.
"We built a world where worth could be measured, so that no bloodline could hoard it. We were proud of that. It did not occur to us that a thing which can be measured can also be priced."
"Numbers are honest," Zahr said, "right up until somebody decides they are permission."
The young man kept looking at the stamp.
"So fix it."
"We cannot."
"Won’t."
"Cannot,"
Almina said again, and for the first time there was an edge under it.
"Look at the halo."
He looked. As he did, another fragment came loose, faded, and did not return.
"Every time we reach into that world, it costs us something we do not get back. We have been reaching for a very long time." A pause.
"There is not much left to spend."
"So you spend people instead."
"Yes," she said.
He had expected a defence. The lack of one was worse.
"How many before me?"
"Two," Zahr said.
"Where are they?"
"Trying."
The word carried more grief than an explanation would have. The young man decided not to open it.
"So I’m the third."
"You are the last," Zahr said.
There it was. Not prophecy. Not destiny. Accounting.
"Why me? I’m twenty-two. I’ve never run anything. I’ve never held a weapon in my life."
"Because you read the emergency plan," Zahr said.
"That’s it?"
"A room panicked and you gave it a process. A building locked and you found the part that still worked. Do you know how rare that is, in a crisis? Everyone wants to be brave. Almost no one thinks to be useful."
"The other two were good people," Almina said.
"Good is necessary. It is not sufficient. We have watched goodness lose to a well-kept ledger more times than I intend to describe."
He thought about the shutters coming down in a building that had a manual release behind a red cover, and about how many people had died two meters from a lever nobody had read about.
"What are you offering?"
The white darkened around Almina’s open hand and a sphere came into it, holding stars at impossible distances. She did not explain it. She let him feel it, and what he felt was every question he had ever asked.
Above Zahr’s palm, stone and iron and water broke into shining dust and came back together as something dark, threaded with red.
Behind them a door opened onto a dark that had shelves in it, and a horizon curving the wrong way.
"There is more," Almina said.
"It will not all fit in you today. Some of it may never fit."
"And the cost?"
Zahr’s expression became almost fond.
"There you are."
"That’s not an answer."
"Mana. Time. Knowledge. Consequence. The greater the authority, the less forgiving the misuse."
He shrugged with half a body.
"And a certain amount of blood, eventually, though we prefer not to lead with that in the recruitment materials."
"Can I refuse?"
Everything stopped. No visions. No wind, because there had never been wind.
"Yes," Almina said.
Zahr did not joke.
"You cannot go back to your body. But you may rest. No punishment. No accusation. We will not buy a world with consent we had to manufacture."
The young man closed his eyes.
Twenty-three people had not left the building. He would carry that anyway, whatever he chose. He had already learned that much about himself in the vault, in the dark, with his hands shaking.
And there was a stamp coming down on a page somewhere, over and over, with a word on it that turned people into property. In a world with no red cover on the wall and no lever behind it.
"If I say yes," he said, "you answer my questions."
"About the world," Almina replied.
"Its laws, its languages, its materials, its history. Not the future. Not who to trust. Not who deserves to die."
"Why not?"
"Because advice that removes a choice is only another kind of rule."
He breathed out, though there was still no air.
"Then yes."
The gold seam across their body flared.
"One problem," Zahr said.
"Of course there is."
"Your name belongs to a world whose rules stop here. In Gaiark a name is lineage, claim, invitation, shelter. To carry what we are about to put in you, you need one the world can hold."
His hand rose to the blank badge on his chest.
"Does the old one go away?"
"No," Almina said.
"A new name does not erase the person who accepts it."
Zahr leaned in, and his dark eye brightened.
"It does make you considerably harder to find."
"By what?"
"By whatever is already there," Zahr said, "and got there first."
It was the only time either of them looked away from him.
"What name?" the young man asked.
Zahr said, "Mataon." Almina said, "Gaael." The two words met in the white and came out heavier than sound.
Mataon Gaael. It was unfamiliar, but it was not foreign. Like a door in a house he had lived in all his life and had never once opened.
"Say it," Almina said.
He hesitated once.
"Mataon Gaael."
Pain came back.
Not the heat of the blast. Something finer went in under his left eye and wrote itself toward the bone. He staggered, hand flying to his face, and gold came through his fingers.
A pattern spread across his vision. Roots. Orbit lines. Letters. And a narrow fracture shaped exactly like the seam that divided the two gods in front of him.
The white shook. Zahr’s broken halo came apart, and every missing piece turned to light and drove into Mataon’s chest. He went down on one knee.
"You said tools."
"I am famously imprecise."
Zahr’s voice had thinned.
Almina reached for his forehead. Her hand went through skin and light as though both were negotiable, and the cold that followed had forests in it, and metals with no names.
And then, for the first time, the world put something in front of his eyes and let him read it.
[Authority transfer complete — partial]
[Bearer: Mataon Gaael]
[All-Knowing Worlds — Rank F] ask the world a question; it answers what it knows
[Druid Extraction — Rank F] take water, fibre, resin or ore out of dead matter
[Astronomic Space — Rank F] a room behind the world; store what your hands cannot carry
[Exception — sealed] locked until a law is found that contradicts another
[Level 1 · Mana 100/100]
[Warning: three of four Authorities exceed the bearer’s capacity. Damage on use is expected.]
Four names. Four plain descriptions. After a lifetime of being told his worth by formulas he was not allowed to see, somebody had finally handed him the sheet.
He read the last line twice, because it was the only one that mattered, and it was a warning.
Then the heat came behind the cold, and something vast and dark opened up inside him, and he understood with total clarity that he was much too small to hold it.
He tried to pull back. There was nowhere to go. The two of them were becoming transparent.
"What happens to you?" he asked.
Zahr’s smile returned in pieces.
"I become less handsome. A tragedy with few witnesses."
"Zahr."
Almina’s voice was quiet, and it stopped him. She looked down at Mataon.
"We remain where we can. When you call for knowledge, one of us may answer. Sometimes neither."
"You’re coming with me."
"Not as rulers," she said.
"Not as your conscience. Not as fate."
Zahr lifted one fading finger.
"Possibly as commentary."
"Unhelpful commentary," Almina said.
"The finest kind."
Mataon tried to stand. His legs declined.
"Wait," he said.
"The thing that’s already there. The one that got there first."
Almina’s eye met his, and for one moment she looked exactly like someone who had run out of time to lie.
"Do not go looking for her," she said.
"She is very good at being found."
The white cracked under his knee. And a world that was not Earth reached up through the crack and took him.