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It was strange; knowing who my mother was hadn’t changed my attitude toward the gods one iota. But the fact that Pritkin had some of their blood, too . . . weirdly enough, that did. It made me wonder about them for the first time.
“I still know so little about her,” I told him. “About any of them. I’ve been fighting them for months, but I still don’t know them.”
“Just as well.”
“Is it?”
I glanced at the oddly funny manlikans again. They made me wonder if I knew the Svarestri, either. Were they all like their crazy king, or were there some of them who didn’t want this war any more than we did? And if they felt that way . . .
Did some of the gods feel the same?
“This all has to end sometime,” I reminded him. “They aren’t going to stop coming; we know that. So what’s the end game? They all die or we do?”
“Or we prevent them from coming in. There’s no other solution, Cassie!”
I frowned. “How do we know that, when we haven’t even looked for one? People have wars all the time, but they don’t end in annihilation. They make treaties, they compromise—”
“Yes! People do. People like you, who have compassion and a kind heart and want to do the right thing. Not the gods!”
“But that’s—”
“No! Listen to me!” A strong hand gripped my shoulder. “I know what they are; how they think. I’ve seen the spawn they left behind. The things they designed—deliberately designed—to use against us! They would view your compassion only as weakness—”
“So you want them all dead, then.”
“If that keeps them the hell out of here! As long as you’re safe, I could give a damn!”
Hard lips came down on mine, and this time, there was no slow-building sweetness. It was liquid fire that spilled through me, running down every vein, stroking deep inside where no hand could reach. And, suddenly, I could have cared less that we were on a cliff’s edge, teetering over top of the world, and not even our own.
But I did care about something else.
“Pritkin!”
“I know. Give me a moment,” he said, struggling a little with the snowsuit.
“No! Not that!”
“What?” He blinked at me, the green eyes looking almost drugged.
“That!” I whispered, and physically turned his head toward what was coming around the side of the mountain.
“Bloody hell,” he breathed, and flung himself on top of me.
Chapter Forty-one
I was about to protest—not the time—when I noticed: the vivid arc of the sky had just dimmed and the mountains had blurred, as if covered by some kind of—
“Shield?” I whispered.
“Camouflage,” Pritkin said, as my eyes finally managed to focus on what looked like a soap bubble stretching all around us. It was more or less transparent, except for the bits of snow catching on the surface. But I guess that wasn’t true from the other side.
Because the giant sentinel coming our way didn’t see us.
Not that it probably could have anyway, I thought, staring at the strangest creation I’d seen yet.
This manlikan was even jazzier than the one with the gold war paint, with a head that looked like a giant geode had exploded. One side was crusty and dirty, with clods of earth clinging precariously to the pitted “flesh,” as if a tumor had eaten half the face. But the other half was breathtakingly beautiful, with chiseled features and crystalline spikes of what looked to be pure amethyst that caught the sunlight in dazzling profusion.
Everything from deep purple to palest violet speared out in all directions, with the largest being a massive column that had to be four stories tall. It was so dark in color at the base that it was almost black, before going through every possible shade of purple as it rose upward, until it finished almost clear at the tip, showing a distorted mountain scape beyond. And it was so heavy that the creature’s “head” was permanently drawn slightly to one side.
