are bound together by the immortal blood we share. Let me help you.
No! she retorted. I don’t trust you! Leave me alone! Get out of my mind!
I’m speaking in your mind to save your embarrassment. You trusted me enough to accept my help when the hole in the world first came for you, back in the Maremma marshes. What is so difficult about allowing me to lend you the strength to climb a little wall?
Because I am empty now, she said simply. And if I allow you access, you will take me, fill me and never let me go. Her secret fear, her secret desire.
No, Stella. Elation, disappointment. I give you my word.
She laughed mockingly. Your word?
A glimmer of anger came through the blood-borne connection. My word is all you have, my queen. At any point in the last seventy years I could have overwhelmed you just as I did during the Falthan War. Any time, Stella, but I forbore.
The Most High broke your power over me, Stella sent, trying to hide her uncertainty, her growing terror.
Really? Then how do you explain this?
He seized her, his fist wrapped around her heart, taking her body and mind. Breath stopped, throat closed, eyes bulging, she stood—he forced her to stand—and walked two paces, placed her hands against the wall, as though about to climb. Then he let her go.
She collapsed onto the pile of rocks, gasping like a landed fish. “You, you,” she said, searching in vain for a swearword sufficiently dire.
“Come, Stella. We have shared so much on this quest. This is the Most High’s business. Would he have put us together and left you defenceless?”
“Apparently,” she breathed.
“I am your defence. I will protect you.”
“It is you I need protecting from! Ah, this is meaningless. All we do is go around in circles. Leave me. I’ll climb your wall.”
Halfway up she turned and snarled at him. “Don’t think I can’t tell what you’re doing. You’re sending me strength, curse you.”
Hugging the wall just below her, he offered no comment apart from a bland smile.
I could never give myself to you, she thought. Not when I have no idea what is going on behind those black eyes.
* * *
The opening led to a narrow corridor, barely wide enough to squeeze through. Stella barked the skin on both knees trying to ease her way past one sharp, stony obstruction.
“All this is new,” Noetos said, indicating the tunnel they were navigating. “The rock is clean. No growth, no patina.”
“Get on, rock expert,” his son said to him, a smile on his open face.
Now there’s one I could have fallen for seventy years ago, Stella admitted to herself.
“It’s the Children’s Room!” Lenares said, her voice drifting back down the corridor to where Stella laboured.
“So we’ve found the House of the Gods?” Kannwar called out.
“Oh yes,” came the reply, from Duon this time.
“Huh,” said the Undying Man under his breath. “I didn’t think it was possible.”
“What wasn’t possible?” Stella asked him.
“To get into one of the Houses apart from using the proper entrances.”
“If you were so doubtful, why did you suggest we all climb up here and risk breaking our necks?”
He smiled crookedly. “I was curious.”
After assembling in what Lenares had called the Children’s Room, the travellers stood and stared at what lay around them. Even those who had been here—wherever it was—before found themselves astonished anew at the room; and those who had not—Cylene, Cyclamere, Bregor and Consina—wandered around the space with their mouths open. Of them all, Cyclamere looked the most troubled. Keppia had forbidden this place to the Padouki. It would no doubt take him time to overcome his unease.
“The child who grew up here must have been enormous,” Bregor said, one hand resting on a bulbous object twice his own height that might have been some sort of baby rattle.
“Children, I think,” Kannwar said. “My suspicion is that the House of the Gods was built by the Most High as a place to raise his two children, the Son and the Daughter.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Lenares protested. “The Son and the Daughter were selected as adults from the world of men. How could they have become children?”
“Things were likely much more… fluid back then. Just because Keppia and Umu were adults doesn’t mean they didn’t have to become child-gods. And I’m not entirely sure, Lenares, that either Keppia or Umu were ever what we’d call human.”
He crossed the room to a pile of rocks. “Counting devices, if my guess is correct.