Page 23 of Inkpot Gods

Chang’e leans forward, gaze sharpening as it fixes more firmly on Máni’s face. “Tell me why.”

“She keeps odd hours, even for a college student; she constantly smells of astringent herbs and unusual chemical components. I think—”

“You? Not David?”

Máni nods. “In this case, yes. I think I smelled alkahest on her two days ago, when she came back from a lab tour with a guilty look on her face and blood under her fingernails. She’s doing something.”

“We drove the Alchemical Congress out of Berkeley after we disrupted their plan to embody the secondary Lunar incarnations,” says Roger. He pauses, making a face like he’s just bitten directly into an invisible lemon. “I hate my life for being the sort where that sentence made actual sense. That sentence should not make actual sense. That sentence should not be.”

“True enough,” agrees Máni. “But it is, and it does make sense, and this is the life you have. I haven’t met the woman we’re talking about. If she really is an alchemist, it’s not safe for me to step up in her vicinity.”

Roger and Chang’e both nod understanding, Chang’e’s expression tinted with understanding. Lunars are among the most common incarnates, thanks to the incredible cultural range of moon gods the humans have invented and subsequently embodied, and their service to the Impossible City requiring them to live in proximity to one another. They’re social incarnates, and that makes them easy to find, if the person looking is determined enough. The alchemists have had the time and motivation to find plenty of uses for Lunars, blood and bone and other fluids. They even figured out how to use their remains to recreate Roman concrete. Treating it with godsblood made it almost impossible to destroy. Even their precious alkahest couldn’t do the job.

With a known alchemist around, the gods were limited, because the gods were already limited by the nature of reality. Maybe in the days of lightning bolts and global floods, a human with a knife wouldn’t have been so frightening, but far too few incarnate gods had that sort of control over their domains. Máni can shine bright enough to temporarily blind when he has to, and when children are in danger, he can temporarily change the phase of the moon. Impressive beyond measure, from a physics and astronomy standpoint, probably not going to stop him from getting cut open and harvested like a field.

Chang’e is a little better protected. As the goddess responsible for maintaining the peaches of immortality, she can grow a peach tree from a pit to fruiting maturity in seconds. Máni may never be able to forget how brilliantly offensive that ability can be. In the natural world, bamboo grows fast enough that it can be used as a torture device by strapping people down on top of cleared ground where young bamboo canes are trying to break through. Chang’e doesn’t need straps or clear ground. She just needs to get a peach pit into position and let the carnage unfold from there.

He’s seen it happen once. He’ll be entirely content with his life if he never has to see—or hear—it happen ever again.

“May I speak to David, then?” asks Chang’e, politely. She could order him to step down and return David to the surface, could press the issue. That she doesn’t is a sign of both respect and weakness, and it makes Máni worry for her even as he stands straighter and nods.

“You may,” he says. “May I make one last observation before I go?”

“You may,” she says, an echo of his own answer.

He glances to Roger, who is at least keeping quiet and mostly pretending not to listen in, but whose presence is an inescapable complication to this conversation. “I would feel more comfortable speaking if we were alone.”

“And I would feel more comfortable if I were still dropped down and watching my mortal host perform human mating rituals, but here we both are.” Chang’e sounds like she’s losing patience with the situation. “You can speak in front of the Doctrine. He and I have agreed to keep one another’s secrets, and his numeric half doesn’t listen when he’s with my host.”

“Wonderful,” says Máni. “Very well, then. I worry—we worry—that your entanglement with the Doctrine takes away from your focus on your station. We are still lessened by the losses we suffered when there where alchemists here before, and now the alchemists may be returning, sliding their terrible hooks into the fabric of our city. What will you do to protect us? When your attention is split between your duty and your desire, how can you be properly devoted to either?”

Chang’e goes very still, and the glow around her intensifies, becoming bright enough to wash away the silver of Máni’s own. The various Lunar gods draw their strength from the number of believers they have left among the more ordinary world, and he has just enough time to remember that Chang’e still has a massive base of extremely active, extremely devoted followers (they named the Chinese lunar exploration program after her) before the weight of her divinity slams into him and forces him down to his knees.

She stands, moving slowly, deliberately toward him, and he hasn’t felt this small, or this mortal, since he first found the path to his ascension. He feels human, breakable … and trapped. A small god in the face of a larger one might as well be a gnat, ready to be swatted aside.

“Mercy,” he says, throat dry, voice growing thick with an accent that has never been David’s, that belongs to another part of the world, another life entirely. “I meant no offense. Please.”

“Be quiet, little god,” says Chang’e. She leans forward, caressing his cheek with one radiance-enveloped hand, the glow of her presence so bright that he can see it even when he closes his eyes. He smells peaches, in all their stages, from the smallest budding flower to the fermenting fruit, well on its way to becoming wine.

She takes her hand away, and it’s all he can do not to cry. “I should have alleviated your fears long before this, and for my silence, I apologize,” she says. “My Judy is … unaccustomed to the mantle of leadership. We both supposed, when Diana fell, that Artemis would insist upon claiming her position. She is far older than we are, far more suited to the role. When she refused it, we were confused, and did the best we could.”

Artemis is an ancient Lunar, possibly the oldest Máni has ever heard of—definitely the oldest he’s ever encountered. Most Lunars live a few decades longer than they would have without their symbiotic relationship to divinity, extending their youths with the peaches grown by the various incarnations of Chang’e, whittling new shapes out of their mortal lives, but still in symbiosis, still sharing, still aging day by day. This specific incarnation of Artemis is … different.

Alchemists again. It’s always alchemists when things go wrong, when they break from the patterns they’ve found for themselves across the centuries and run rampant into new territories, uncharted and unpredictable. She had been a girl named Annabelle Austin who, when she started to hear the Moon whispering to her, had been too slow to conceal the voices that followed her and haunted her dreams, and her father had learned of her condition. That had been a different time, a world where any sign of deviance from the norm had been taken for a severe and incurable ailment, and her father had been utterly distraught.

Seeking to cure his heir and only daughter, he’d turned to a so-called doctor named James Reed, paying him to restore the girl. Instead, Reed had shown a rare degree of restraint for an alchemist, and had only manipulated her, rather than taking her apart. He’d turned her into a prisoner in her own mind, forcing her down into the deep dark and leaving Artemis eternally ascendant.

It’s still unclear what he was hoping to accomplish by locking one of the more powerful aspects of the Moon into a permanent ascension, rather than just killing her when he was done with his research. Maybe he’d been planning to use her like a hunting hound, a way to flush lesser Lunars out into the open for the harvest. Or maybe he’d been following the plans Asphodel left behind, obscure and unknowable, moving toward the cosmic conquest that had been his goal since his own creation. It had something to do with access to the everything, the all-space no-space channels that the Lunars use to reach the Impossible City.

Whatever it was done for, it’s left them with an Artemis who’s far older and more powerful than she should have been, who’s only really controllable by her incarnate Hind, a sheltered former lab experiment who’d believed herself to be an alchemist transformed by careless research. The thought that Artemis might take over the Berkeley-area Lunars after Diana’s death had been more optimistic than logical, and even then, the optimism had been severely tempered by the knowledge that letting her run things might be uncomfortably close to handing power over to the Alchemical Congress.

And none of this matters now, because Artemis is gone, haunting the wilds where she belongs, her Hind beside her, and she has ceded this territory to Chang’e. Chang’e, who is now taking her hand away from Máni’s face and stepping backward, leaving him suddenly cold, suddenly alone in the world.

His eyes don’t want to open. The thing they most recently beheld was divinity in the purest form he may ever experience, and they’re still savoring the sight. He manages, with an extreme effort, to convince them to obey his commands, and he sees that Chang’e is still there, a few feet away now, but still gleaming like the Moon itself. She has never been this beautiful.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers.

“I know,” she replies. “And I understand. Your concerns are not unreasonable, not after Diana, not after everything. We live in complicated times, and that leads to complicated fears. But no. I am not compromised because my mortal half-loves a man.”