“I won’t send many to you this time.” Nyx shifted closer, rubbing his boot against Azaiah’s hard cock, making him shiver. “There will be precious little work for you. Perhaps you can stay—I can keep you here, tied to my tent. But you don’t stay in one place for long.”
“I do… have a home.” Azaiah’s breath was coming faster, but there was no warmth to his cheeks when Nyx touched them. “By the river. A place for us, perhaps.”
“Perhaps?” Nyx touched his fingers to the scar at Azaiah’s throat, and even though Azaiah couldn’t feel pain, he must have felt the pressure, because he closed his eyes and started moving faster.
“It will expand to fit you.”
“I’d like to see it.” Nyx slid his fingers around the loop holding Azaiah’s head back and pulled, just enough to tip his chin up again. “I’d like to go there with you. Is there a sky, by the river?”
“Stars,” Azaiah gasped, and the laces strained as he shuddered. “Nyx. Beloved, my soldier—”
“Yes, that’s it.” Nyx snapped the laces in his fingers. Azaiah slumped against him, hands behind his back, and gasped out his release. Still, even in the midst of it, he tilted his head to the side so Nyx could look down at him, meeting his gaze.
He stripped Azaiah himself. He preferred it that way, too impatient to stand around while Azaiah carefully folded his clothes and set them aside. That would happen when they had the time for it, when they weren’t meeting on the battlefield or in rare moments of peace between Azaiah’s many duties. Or Nyx’s, for that matter. So Nyx tossed Azaiah’s clothes aside, letting the cloak pool over their discarded things, and when he pushed Azaiah onto his back on Nyx’s bedroll, they were both blessedly naked.
“You’ll come again tonight,” Nyx said, as the sky rolled with thunder. For a moment, he thought he heard rainfall, but that could have been a trick of the mind. He kissed him more roughly than he meant to, but Azaiah only kissed him back. Azaiah was pliant beneath him, and he moaned when Nyx found the bottle in his bag and started working him open. His cock stirred, and Nyx ground his own hard cock against Azaiah’s thigh.
Azaiah was still cool to the touch, but when Nyx pushed inside him, he wrapped his arms around Nyx’s neck and kissed him again, swallowing Nyx’s moan. Nyx thrust hard enough to move them both up against the bedroll, pouring all his pent-up dominance into it, all his grief and fear and frustration. He fucked Azaiah with the desperation he rarely had the freedom to show, crying out when Azaiah clenched around him. He gripped Azaiah’s cock and stroked it in time with his thrusts, sweat rolling down his back and cheeks like tears.
His orgasm washed through him in a rush, too fast and too hot, and Nyx only just managed to pull out of Azaiah to come across his stomach. Azaiah lay there, one hand on Nyx’s chest, hair wild around his head like a witch’s crown, as Nyx parted his thighs farther still to take Azaiah’s cock into his mouth. After only a few seconds, Azaiah was coming, too, shuddering as he spilled. Nyx climbed atop him again to let him taste himself on Nyx’s tongue, and they lay tangled up in each other, Nyx burning with heat, Azaiah with his cool fingers stroking Nyx’s cheeks and hair.
“You said there are stars above the river,” Nyx said, lying half over Azaiah while he rubbed the scar at his throat with a thumb. “Are they the same stars as here?”
Azaiah smiled. “No. They are stars you’ve never seen before. I don’t know what they are, or how many there are, or where they come from. I would like to know, I think.”
That was curious. Nyx would have thought Azaiah knew everything there was to know about the river of death. “Then we’ll find out together, perhaps. When this is over. It will be a nice change, I believe. Counting stars.”
“Yes.” Azaiah kissed him again and smiled as he drew away. “It will.”
ChapterTwelve
When Azaiah found himself standing in the middle of a quiet village, snow falling all around him and the scent of death thick in the air, he knew he had to do something.
Nyx was still trying to keep the Iperian empire together, a task that was becoming increasingly difficult as the clans in the mountains rebelled against Lamont’s bizarre new edicts and punishing tariffs designed to keep them all subjugated to his increasingly unstable throne. While Azaiah wanted to believe that Nyx’s obligations to the empire would end with Nadia and the children escaping, he wasn’t sure he could. Nyx’s ties to the mortal world would not be so easily broken, though Azaiah could discern no more than that.
This meant that Azaiah was still being seen when he did not want to be, in the taverns and markets where he intended only to observe. It meant that he stood alone in a snowy village, the only sounds the shrieks of crows and other scavengers that had come to pick apart the dead. It meant, as he searched for the shades that huddled in their homes with their bodies rotting in their beds, that he knew why it was snowing, knew why they were afraid to come with him no matter how patiently he waited or how kindly he smiled.
He'd been something else here, before he became aware of himself. When the snow started, he’d been the Lord of Storms. Death, without Azaiah’s humanity to temper him. The Harvester. The Reaper. No kindness, no compassion, no warmth. Just the cold darkness of the end, merciless, empty.
After burning the village to contain the sickness, Azaiah went to the river. He lay on his back in the water, let it carry him along, and looked up at the stars. His heart ached. He wanted Nyx here, by his side. Wanted to hold his hand the way his predecessor had done with her companion, laughing, ready for the river to finally allow them passage into whatever waited beyond the cave. He wanted to show Nyx these stars, sleep wrapped up in him, kneel for him. Strip away the hardness that was growing over Nyx, keeping the kind man he’d been when Azaiah met him in a tavern locked up for fear of what vulnerability would do to his family. For them, Nyx turned away from love, companionship, a life he wanted. The least Azaiah could do was wait for him, find a way to keep himself… whole.
He closed his eyes, reaching out with his awareness, letting himself drift so that he was more Death than Azaiah. Seeking sounds in the darkness, voices calling for him. He found it hard to believe that there were cults who sang to summon him instead of keeping him at bay, and he couldn’t imagine what they might want. Witches were always trying to control his brother Leviathan’s powers, but they, too, generally wanted him to stayaway.Summoning the god of war to make your armies strong—that, he understood. Even Somnus had temples, where it was said you could make offerings to the god of sleep and find truths and inspiration in your dreams.
But no one tended towantDeath, unless they were gravely injured or sick, or someone they loved was lingering in one of those states. As he drifted in the serene waters of the river of souls, he worked to hear those who might be trying to summon him. Most of the voices he heard weren’t really asking forhim—they were asking for his sibling Ares’s aid in battle and for Azaiah to walk only among their foes. Or, at his brother Avarice’s well, they asked for Azaiah to visit their father, or uncle, or mother, or someone else from whose death the supplicant would profit. They begged Leviathan to send his storms against enemy ships and Azaiah to take the souls of the armies they carried.
Eventually he made out a soft, faint whisper of something on the preternatural currents that wasn’t an entreaty for him to either stay away or visit someone else. He moved carefully toward it, seeking the gentle chime of what felt like honest entreaty to him and him alone. He’d never listened for such voices before, so it took him some time to find it, wading through his river until he found the right current.
Azaiah drifted, letting the waters carry him until he felt himself back in the mortal realm. Then he opened his eyes.
He was in a land of lush green hills, the moon bright in the sky above and a lake sparkling before him in the moonlight. He knew this place to be Katoikos, home of those who considered themselves the first citizensof Iperios and who stayed out of the empire’s grasp simply because they were an island with a wide bay separating them from the mainland. They controlled a great port, Azaiah knew, protected by a fearsome army of dominants. The small island was rich and could have been powerful, but the people there were content to steward their land and ignore the rest of Iperios, sending tribute to the Palace of the Moon and building comfortable homes with rooftop gardens and open-air theaters.
Their army protected; it did not conquer. Their politicians only argued for the sport of it, and they valued innovation and new ideas, tending toward science and medicine instead of superstition. The island enjoyed fertile land and temperate weather, and the storms that did break over it were rarely deadly. There was little need for Azaiah there—for the most part, his ferrymen handled the dead of Katoikos well enough.
How odd that the drums, the bells, the soft chants would originatehere.
Azaiah thought of Pallas’s temple in Kallistos as he moved toward a small island with a stone temple built upon it. The temple was not dedicated to any of his siblings—he thought perhaps the people of Katoikos were not Iperian, but from some other, unknown place—but to the land itself, and it hummed with the strange energy of worship without a construct as he stepped onto the stone porch. Perhaps, one day, the people’s piety would produce a being like Azaiah, or maybe Avarice, whose form was an amalgamation of his nature. Or perhaps it would only be this, energy like lightning on the air, swirling and aimless, without form.
The chants for Azaiah were coming from below. He squinted, looking about, and spotted a cleverly hidden wooden trap door set into the corner of the temple’s floor. He pulled it open, and the sky above started to thunder, and he felt a sudden rush ofexultationfrom whoever waited below.
