“Just for that, no. You can be surprised for once in your long life, Death.” Nyx cut a glance at him, then laughed.
The sound made Azaiah smile, and he laughed, too. He’d wanted this for so long, to walk with Nyx beside him and know he would be there, always.
They went through the green, rolling hills of Kallistos, where Azaiah took Nyx to his sister Pallas’s old temple. It was a sorry sight, more decrepit than the last time, with falling columns and cracked, broken stones covered with moss and weeds. Azaiah told Nyx about the last time he was there, about the woman trapped in the statue and the sight of his sister laughing wildly and making her puppet jerk about on its strings.
“She knew she was corrupted,” Azaiah said as they walked through Art’s former temple. The place was a ruin, but the scent of rotted fruit, dead flowers, and spoiled ink still remained in the air, along with the haunting memory of the melody that never sounded quite right.
The melody, he now realized, he’d heard an echo of in Cillian’s camp.
Nyx glanced at him. “And she didn’t try to stop it?”
“No.” Azaiah shook his head sadly. “This place was once so full of life, of color. Weavings on the wall, tapestries, musicians on the grass. I think she… thought she needed it all to be perfect. It wasn’t enough that people made things in her name, and I think it’s supposed to be.”
“What happened to her? Did she… like when you were Death—” Nyx glanced away. “Would your temples have fallen?”
“I don’t have any,” Azaiah said. “I had a cult, once. The coins the Arkoudai carry with them, to pay the ferryman’s fee? It started there, I think, back in Katoikos.”
Nyx wore the coin on a thin leather strip around his neck. He took it out and looked at it, smiling. But his smile faded as they went into the room where Pallas once reclined on a marble throne, her adoring acolytes buzzing around her like eager bees around the queen. Nothing remained, now, to suggest anything of beauty had ever touched this place.
“Where is she, do you think?” Nyx asked, looking at the only thing left in the empty monument a god once called home: the jester puppet, slumped over on itself but somehow not lost to decay, strings still dangling from its extremities.
“I don’t know. She was close to Somnus, who was the god of dreams before Astra, and even he didn’t know. But I think she is still around, somewhere. There should be another to take her place.” He tilted his head, thinking of Cillian, long-lived and cursed, carrying her scent of rot and ruin. “I think she’s keeping that from happening.”
“And you can’t… fix it? Take her across the river?”
Azaiah shook his head. “No. Only when she is ready. That is how it is with us. Gods and their companions must choose to leave.”
“You miss her,” Nyx said quietly, reaching out for the puppet’s strings. Azaiah felt a chill, wanting to stop him, though there was no reason for it. She could not hurt Nyx, even if some part of herwashere, and the puppet was a lifeless thing, covered in dust. “I can feel it. Your grief.”
“Yes, I do. I love all my siblings, of course. Some I have been closer to than others, but I always liked visiting Pallas. She had me painted a few times. On a horse, walking through a field of wheat.”
Nyx smiled. “I would have liked to see that.” He made the little puppet dance, or tried, and an odd look crossed his face. “I feel something, here. Is that… whatever power you gave me?”
“I would have to know what you feel, first,” Azaiah said, smiling gently.
Nyx dropped the puppet and shook his head, hugging himself. “It feels terrible. Sadness like an ocean.” He sounded far away, like he was off somewhere in his head. “But there’s so much anger. It reminds me of—” His mouth tightened. “Lamont, but I don’t know why I’d think ofhim, now. There’s something angry and resentful here. I don’t like it.” With that, Nyx kicked the puppet, which went skittering across the empty space.
The sound echoed, and then there was a soft whisper of a noise, a hint of a laugh. Azaiah and Nyx looked at each other, and, seemingly of the same mind, headed toward the door.
“Maybe we could find her,” Nyx said, after they were on their way once more.
“I don’t know. Perhaps. She found me… Well, Death is a subject artists find intriguing, but she was closer to Somnus, as I said. Arwyn might know, but I doubt she went to him. She never liked him much. Art finds Greed distasteful, I suppose.”
Nyx gave a small shake of his head. “This is a lot.”
“I know.” Azaiah patted him on the shoulder. “I do miss her, but that doesn’t mean I won’t take her soul across, when the time comes. It would be a relief, I think, but she doesn’t see it that way. When I offered, it was a bit like, hmm.”
“Trying to put a toddler down for a nap?”
Azaiah had to laugh. “I suppose so, yes. Ah, look, see that ship, there, in the distance? That’s Arwyn’s.” The ship was flying the crimson flag with the skull, and it was moving briskly in the water, somehow clipping along despite the lack of wind. “Once, he was Avarice, and he lived in a well deep in the southern seas. Now he has a form, and a companion. You’ll like Declan, I think. He was a soldier once, too.”
He told Nyx a bit about Arwyn as they walked, his brother’s ship disappearing beyond the horizon, likely on its way to the little town where Arwyn liked to pretend he was the mayor, or the mayor’s son, or the assassin sent to kill the mayor, or the assassin sent to kill the mayor’s assassin, or any number of convoluted and ridiculous scenarios that brought him no end of amusement.
They’d just crossed into Thalassa when Nyx snapped his fingers. “The flag on your brother’s ship, it looked familiar. The image, I mean. It’s almost like the image on the shroud in the crypt, the one I saw the first time we…”
“Came together, yes,” Azaiah agreed. “The figure on his flag is indeed similar, but when you get closer to it, you’ll see his crown is rust, the jewels are paste and cracked, and the flowers in his eyes are dead. It’s how he looks, beneath his pretty prince’s form.”
“And he got a companion?” Nyx glanced over at him. “I suppose that’s quite the story.”
