Kreth's Eyes

They say the moon was once neither lamp nor wound in the sky, but a veil drawn over the whole of it, that thinned on certain nights until something looked through. The god who kept it is gone. He left his eyes behind — and those who wear them no longer see the world that is, only the world as it would rather seem.

For a while the company did no travelling at all. The Celsian Athenaeum was still failing around them — the Sacred Pyre burned thin, a third of the grounds all that the dark had not yet taken — but they took the rest it offered, and set their affairs in order before the next leap into the black. Draz kept to the Runt God; with Ash-begets-Tide he had coaxed it into a kind of truce with the fungus the priest tended, and they meant to hold it by the pyre, both to leash it and to feed what little strength was left in the fire.

Heyou spent the days on himself. The motive-core Vanco had returned to him — the thing that had once moved him, before the Syndicate cut him down to a head and a torso and built the rest — he worked back into his own chest. It went in, but it did not take. It was not the heart he had lost; it was something very like him, with something of another's essence still lodged in it, and it would not keep time. He described it as an orchestra in which one player is forever a half-beat off, and cannot be unheard. From then on a part of his attention was always turned inward, listening to the wrongness of it.

Jamal mended more simply. Dagga saw to his hurts and his nerves both, and he passed the rest of the time with Pinchie, teaching the crab to fetch — a game the Athenaeum's students had taken up in their own way, letting the great pincers pluck them up one at a time and set them down again, terror and delight in equal measure.

Sylvie shut herself in the Forbidden Library with the paintings she had carried out of it. They showed a world she had never seen: golden light, verdant green, colours this age had lost — the past of this place, painted from vantages that still existed somewhere. A wide water strung with islands, and far off a city climbing a hill beneath giant archways. Craggy peaks and a steep pilgrim's road worn into them. And, through a screen of fruiting vines, the open sea and a great three-masted ship. In that last she found what she was hunting: small motes drifting like golden bubbles, and the certain knowledge that they were concentrated Splendor — and that whatever else had changed in the scene, the motes would still be there.

It turned her to a darker question, which she kept to herself. Was the world poorer for the want of Splendor, or for the want of the gods? If the one could not be had without the other — then might a person with Splendor enough become a god in their stead, and be the source that mends the world? She took it to the shelves. The answer she read was not the one she wanted: the gods had been to Splendor what the sun is to the deep, and their going was a winter no lamp could undo. What endured, endured only by clinging to dying embers or by finding some smaller source to live on. To match what was lost, she would have to become not a candle but a furnace — and even then, perhaps not enough. The true question, the books turned back on her, was how the gods might be brought home without earning their wrath — which begged why they had left at all.

On that there were no clean answers. The nearest thing to one was the last writ of the God-King — an apology, in effect: an order that a Sacred Pyre be raised in every settlement, an admission that he would be away, and that he would very likely not return. It did not say where he went, or whether he went willingly. The rest was rumour, numerology, and denial. But the moon kept surfacing, so she read on it too — and found that in the oldest texts the moon was no object at all. It was described as a membrane over the whole sky, that on certain nights or seasons turned half-clear, and through it came visions. That was the moon the ancients meant, and the god of it was Kreth. And the golden motes from the painting had a name in those pages as well. They were called the eyes of Kreth, and there were stories of those who had seen through them.

When she came up from the shelves she had a place to go. Before they left she planted a Portal Seed in the library — a door, should they ever want to come back to it, or the beginning of some larger web of doors. The Runt God would stay behind by the pyre. Pinchie would come, and so would Speaker, the faceless stone thing that answered only in single words and moved only when told. Then Sylvie took up one of the paintings as her true face, and the black tendrils rose around them all, and set them down somewhere else.

It was dark, and humid, and loud. A forest, dense and close, with the crash of waves somewhere off past the trees; things scurried in the branches and called in the black. To the north, motes of pale light blinked in and out — the same the painting had shown. Sylvie lit herself with a cold blue-white glow, so as not to seem to be creeping, and went toward them. Heyou oiled his joints against their squeaking and slipped after her, hanging back from her light. Jamal followed with a torch, Draz riding on Pinchie beside him.

Something small came to meet them, squeaking, and seemed to offer help; it held up a soft fruit like a gelatinous melon, and Pinchie took it gently and passed it up. Draz — still himself, still awake — ate it without a second thought, and it put him down at once, into a sleep that did not lift for the rest of the night; he rode out the wood insensible on the crab's back.

Sylvie drew near one of the larger motes — a floating orb grown to the size of a man — and found she could not stop. Her body carried her the last steps against her will, and close up she saw what hung inside it: a faerie person, drowned and kept whole in the liquid. As she understood it her own chest filled with cold water, her lungs labouring on nothing, until she tore herself back and coughed the drowning out of her. Elsewhere Heyou put a foot wrong into a nest, and the small thistle-down things boiled up out of it — four inches of thorn and wing, and a vibration to them like hived bees, that loosened even the fittings of him. He gave ground and got behind Jamal and Pinchie.

Sylvie tried a gentler approach. She conjured the image of a moon to hang in the air, and said she had come to speak with any who cared for it — and something answered. A soft-edged thing, child-sized, its figure never quite fixed, came to her and asked what she sought. Then it opened its eyes, and its eyes were two of the pale moon-orbs; and twelve feet up and behind it, in the dark, two more eyes opened in a great looming shadow that stood over it like its own cast silhouette. It named itself Moonshadow; the towering dark behind it was the Shadow Cast. It had Kreth's eyes, it said. Kreth had gone away and left them behind — he had had to fetch something, something surely very large — and it did not know if he would return. It ate a handful of dirt and roots and offered her some, and she thanked it and declined.

A third thing came gliding up: a turning pane of glass, scenes drifting across one face and a terrible face across the other. Its voice arrived inside their heads. Will the interloper submit? Sylvie said she kept no god's eyes but that she honoured the moon, and the pane named it a contest, then — it would not play fair, it would play to win, but if one so taken with the moon could shatter it, they might stay. Heyou spoke up and pinned the terms down, wary that the moon's god is also the god of deceit, and learned it was no rigged loss and that the company might stand together in it. Blood was not the currency; a fighter beaten only fell out of the contest.

So it was fought. The pane threw up copies of itself and hurled shards like knives; Moonshadow spent little and roused the lesser fae in ones and twos and fours — the sweet small thing that had brought the fruit came at Sylvie with a kitchen knife, a beautiful pixie stabbed at Jamal with a needle that ran his body to pins and paralysis, the thistle-down swarm harried whoever stood nearest. the Shadow Cast came down over Heyou and swallowed him whole into itself, and held him. The company answered together: Jamal and Pinchie and Heyou's Axe of Fortunus and Sylvie's Power Push, all at once, scattering the glass and blinking one copy out of the world. Sylvie kept to Fireball and would not reach for the crueler things she carries; she called the fire a handshake, and the other arts too unfriendly for a first meeting.

Held inside the Shadow Cast, Heyou saw for a moment as it saw. The wood was drowned in sunlight and green and living things, and moving through that brightness was a company of monsters wearing the faces of his friends — and the great shadow that held him was no horror at all, but something gentle. Then he tore free, out of its eyes and back into his own, and the world turned inside out again to the dark. He took the measure of the pane where it hung — a hard, flat, half-inch sliver of some natural glass — and worked it apart into two lesser mirrors, the face darting between the halves, connected on its edge and severed on his. It named him clever, and granted the company its hospitality.

With that the wood went quiet, and let them rest. And as they rested, Speaker rose — the mute stone thing that had never had words of its own — and spoke in a full and sonorous voice none of them had heard from it: Stop seeing. The truth is not always what is seen plainly. Use wisdom to decide whose eyes to trust. Then it went still again, and stood there as before — save that now it too wore two of the pale moon-eyes, that the fight had set into its face.