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Li glances away when I turn, waiting for his reply. But then he shrugs. “Well, don’t look at me. I’m certain my family would take me back.”
“Of course they would,” I snort. Of our little group, Li is the most spoiled.
“But alone,” he warns direly. “And…eventually. If I begged and pleaded enough.”
“An’ that’s assuming they don’t behead ye first,” Britta sniffs.
“There is that,” Li acknowledges with another easy shrug.
Britta humphs. “Well, I’m certain yer all welcome back to Golma with me. It’ll be cold, but yer all welcome. Me family’s very inviting. Salt of the soil, through and through.”
“I’d rather cast myself on a pyre,” Li mutters under his breath. When Britta glares at him, he shrugs again. “What, I hate the cold. Do you not feel how miserable it is right now?”
As the pair continue glaring at each other, Keita walks over, puts his arm around my shoulder. I sink into his touch, burrowing my head into his neck. “Home is where you are, Deka,” he says. “It’s where all of you are, even you”—he directs this last comment at Li, who grunts, pretending to be offended.
Then Keita returns his attention to me. “I know you’re sad, but once this is done, we’ll find a home—a much better place, where we can all live together peacefully.”
He and all my friends, that is.
The thought is a sobering reminder. If this ends in our victory, I’ll be a god, and gods do not reside with mortals. At least, not truly.
I don’t say this out loud, and Keita doesn’t acknowledge it, but we both know it is the eventuality. If we succeed, we’ll soon part ways for different planes entirely. And if we don’t, we’ll still part ways, albeit in a different manner.
“That sounds like a dream,” I say, nodding. Then I wait a few more moments, savoring Keita’s touch, before finally, I pull back. “All right, that’s enough sentimentality. Time to do what we came here for. We need to search the entire house for traces of Mother. Anything that might be sentimental enough to spur a strong response.”
Belcalis nods. “There’s sure to be something,” she says in what almost seems like a hopeful tone. “Look at the way they ransacked this place—it’s shoddy, shoddy work. They’re sure to have missed something.”
“That’s precisely what I’m hoping,” I say as I walk into the kitchen, where Mother, like most Oteran women, spent most of her time. If there’s any bit of her remaining in this house, it’ll be either there or in the room she and Father shared. But I don’t have the strength to go up there just at this moment—not given how emotionally vulnerable I am.
The moment I fully enter the kitchen, however, I notice it, the strangeness. It’s been niggling at me all this time, but I couldn’t put my finger on it before.
“I can’t remember her,” I say, puzzled.
“Wha’s that?” Britta has followed me, and she seems confused by my words.
“Mother, I can’t picture her.” I frown. “I’m here, I should be having memories of her—and I am, but it’s strange. It’s like I—”
I stop, suddenly chilled to my bones.
The air has shifted. “The Idugu,” I gasp, immediately recognizing the heavy oiliness settling over my skin. “They’re here.”
“Get us out, Deka!” Keita rushes toward me. “Create a door!”
But when I try to sink into the combat state, a strange force clamps over my body, an invisible vise I can’t see, even though it’s taken firm grasp of me.
“No, no, Deka,” a familiar voice says, tsking. When I turn my head slowly but painfully to the door, a shadowy figure is flickering there.
Okot. I recognize Anok’s counterpart immediately.
Of the four Idugu, the male gods that are the Gilded Ones’ counterparts, only he has Anok’s midnight-dark skin, as well as those deceptively kind eyes. Deceptively, because unlike the goddess I considered my only ally among the Gilded Ones, Okot is not kind. Not even near it. He is a monster that shapes itself as a deity. One that uses others to do his bidding and feeds off the pain and blood of innocents. The Merciless One, he calls himself.
“Do not struggle,” the god continues, floating into the room like he’s the essence of a being rather than an actual person. “It will do you no good.”
The farther he drifts in, the more my friends back away, their slow but horrified movements telling me that he’s chosen to make himself visible to them, a first for any of the Idugu. Unlike the Gilded Ones, the male gods thrive on secrecy and deception, a side effect of their years of being imprisoned by their counterparts. They rarely allow themselves to be seen and for centuries even convinced most of the jatu, their own sons, that they were a singular god called Oyomo instead of the four complements to the Gilded Ones.
The nearer Okot approaches, the larger he becomes, although the edges of his silhouette are strangely faded, tatters rather than a firm outline. He seems downright haggard, his body faded like the crystal trees back in the pathways.
He must be even more starved than he was when last I met him. But then, creating shadow vales takes power. Perhaps much more power than the gods have recovered from all the sacrifices the priests have thrown into the vales for them.
