Chapter 227 An Exhausting God

The True Sultan patted the root beside him, the way a man pats a cushion for a friend.

"Sit, sit. You look like a scarecrow."

Malik did not sit.

He stood in the ash with one arm hanging at his side and looked at the man.

The face belonged to Cyrus.

He had seen it only in the memory of a cave, a many confrontation, a final battle to the death before his very family, and in the margins of a diary, but the shape of it was unmistakable. The easy mouth, the long hands that hadn’t lifted anything heavier than a pen.

Whatever sat in that body had borrowed it the way a man borrows a coat, and it wore the coat comfortably.

"You are not him."

"No."

"He is dead."

"Very."

The True Sultan sounded pleased about it.

"It’s a good body, though. The last one I left lying around. I keep it in the corner of the dusk for visitors, and you are the first in a very long time."

"Why that one?"

"Familiarity."

He turned the black leaf between his fingers.

"People find it easier to talk to a face they’ve been angry at already. It saves time."

Malik considered that.

It was annoyingly accurate.

"You are wondering how you got here."

"I was sitting on a sack of barley."

"You were."

The True Sultan nodded gravely.

"A noble place to be summoned from. I thought about letting you finish your thoughts, but you didn’t have any more, did you? I looked."

"You looked."

"Only a little."

He set the leaf down on his knee and smoothed it flat with one thumb. The movement was strangely gentle.

Over his head, the great crown of the tree shifted, and a few black leaves came spinning down through the violet dusk and settled in the ash without a sound.

"It’s simple enough. You broke your Divine Kingdom on that hill. Archive of Fate was never built to be spent like a purse of coins, and you spent it like a drunk at a festival. Every ledger came loose."

He gave a dry smile.

"When something breaks that badly, it leaves a gap. I have been waiting for a gap for a very long time."

"You were already in it."

"Ah. Clever."

The pink eyes brightened.

"A sliver, yes. A small piece of my power, no larger than a grain of rice, sitting in the lowest drawer of your Kingdom since the day you first opened it. It hasn’t done much. A diary here, a diary there. I did slip my consciousness into your Wheel, though. I was rather proud of that one."

Malik’s jaw tightened.

’The Wheel.’

He had thought of the itch as Corruption’s work, and some of it had been. But a piece of it had been this God, reaching up through the floorboards of his own Soul and sliding gifts across the table, feeding him.

"You were watching me gamble."

"I was watching you learn. It’s a different thing."

The True Sultan tilted his head.

"Every spin was a lesson, if you had the eyes for it. It was the past re-emerging, taking what you were taught in years now in only minutes. A God of Death on a pile of sand. A diary from a dead man. A trinket from a girl who loved you. You took them all and made something useful of each. I could not have designed a better education."

"You designed it?"

"Mm. Only certain parts; you did the rest."

He leaned back against the bark and folded his hands.

It was the posture of a teacher about to deliver the last lesson of the term.

Malik had seen it on a hundred old men, and he disliked it on all of them.

"You know what you are."

"I have been told."

"Tell me anyway."

Malik said nothing.

"A vessel."

The True Sultan said it softly, with no cruelty at all.

"A boy who was meant to grow into the Golden Throne. A Soul stitched together from two halves and sent down into the dirt of Zawaya to harden. The cane. The hunger. The cave. Every cruelty that was done to you was a cruelty I knew about. I did not cause them, but I did not stop them either, because they were making you into the right shape."

His voice grew quieter.

"The Gods who signed that contract wanted a replacement. I was tired. I am still tired. My throne is heavy, little Angel, above the gold, and I have been sitting on it since before your world had a name. They wanted someone to take it from me, and I wanted someone to take it, and for a very long time those two wishes were the same."

He opened one hand.

"It’s the reason you can burn Corruption. It’s the reason the Spine Splitter listens to you. It’s the reason you were allowed to walk through the Gates of Hell and come back with your Soul intact. You were built for it; you were groomed... By Them, by me, by IT, and by this body."

He smiled faintly.

"And now, at last, you are ready. All you need to do is say yes. Sit down on that root beside me. Take my hand and take the crown. I will fade, you will hold the whole of Death in your palm, and the war will end."

The God of Death waited.

But Malik only laughed.

It came out of him entirely without humor, and it startled the old man.

A black leaf slid off the True Sultan’s knee; the pink eyes widened a little.

"No."

"No?"

"You think I’ve done all this just so I can continue the status quo?"

The words came out flat.

"You think I broke off whatever those Gods held over me so I could jump right back into the chain? I walked into a Soul Contract with a knife. I cut it. I lost memories I’m still trying to process. I killed Angel after Angel with my hands, and I buried my father with a sword."

He took a step forward.

"I did not do any of that to put my neck back into the same collar."

The True Sultan looked at him for a long time.

Then, slowly, an even wider smile spread across the borrowed face.

It was warmer than the polite smile of a host, and sharper, carrying a note of... relief.

He lowered His hands into His lap, and He began to laugh, a rolling laugh that shook the leaf on his knee.

"Oh, that is a fine answer."

"I was not trying to be fine."

"No. That’s why it is."

He wiped one eye with the heel of His thumb.

"Yes. Yes, of course. We of Devil’s Maw were never meant to be held under any chain. It’s the reason the other Gods hate us so much. I only wanted to hear you say it."

Malik frowned.

"You wanted me to refuse."

"I wanted to know whether you would."

The True Sultan sighed contentedly.

"A man who says yes has already been bought. A man who says no has at least tried to weigh the price. I find I prefer the second kind, as I am very tired of the first."

The Sultan stared blankly at his truth.

’This God is exhausting.’