“Well, I am gone, but I am still a Divinity. And this is my place.” Olvos pats the log she sits on. “I can never lose this. And those who join me here, their hearts cannot be hidden from me. You wonder, Shara Komayd, great-granddaughter of Avshakta si Komayd, the last Kaj of Saypur, if I have lured you away from the Continent to get you on your own and destroy you—to destroy you for your family’s crimes, for your crimes, for the countless destruction your wars and laws have incurred.” Olvos’s eyes gleam bright, like rings of fire half hidden below her lids; then the fire in her eyes dims. “But that, as they say, would be stupid. A very stupid, silly, useless thing to do. And I am a bit disappointed you would expect such things from me. After all, I left the world when the Continent chose to begin its empire. Not just because it was wrong, but because it was a very shortsighted decision: time has a way of returning all heedlessness to those who commit it … even if they are Divine.”
Shara is still trying to come to grips with the reality of what is happening, yet Olvos is so profoundly unlike anything she expected a god to be that she is not sure what to think: Olvos’s manner is like that of a fishwife or a seamstress rather than a Divinity. “That’s why you left the Continent? Because you disagreed with the Great Expansion?”
Olvos produces a long, skinny pipe. She holds its bowl directly into the fire, puffs at it, and watches Shara as if wondering what sort of company she’ll be. “You read Mr. Pangyui’s notes, didn’t you?”
“Y-Yes? How did y—”
“Then you know he suspected that the minds of the Divine were not always their own, one could say.”
“He thought that … that there was some kind of subconscious vote taking place.”
“A crude term for it,” says Olvos. “But not wholly inaccurate. We are—or were—Divinities, Shara Komayd: we draw power from the hearts and minds and beliefs of a people. But that which you draw power from, you are also powerless before.” Olvos uses the end of her pipe to draw a half-circle in the mud. “A people believe in a god”—she completes the circle—“and the god tells them what to believe. It’s a cycle, like water flowing into the ocean, then up to the skies, and into rain, which falls and flows into the ocean. But it is different in that ideas have weight. They have momentum. Once an idea starts, it spreads and grows and gets heavier and heavier until it can’t be resisted, even by the Divine.” Olvos stares into the fire, rubbing the mud off of her pipe with her thumb and forefinger.
“Ideas like what?” asks Shara.
“I first noticed it during the Night of the Convening. I felt ideas and thoughts and compulsions in me that were not my own. I did things not because I wanted to do them, but because I felt I had to—like I was a character in a story someone else was writing. That night I chose, like all the other Divinities, to unite, form Bulikov, and live in what we thought was peace. … But I was profoundly troubled by this experience.”
“Then how could you leave?” asks Shara. “If you were tied or tethered to the wishes of your people, how could they let you abandon the world?”
Olvos gives Shara a scornful look: Can’t you put this together yourself?
“Unless,” Shara says, “your people asked you to leave. …”
“That they did.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Well, I thought I had done a pretty good job with them,” says Olvos, with a touch of pride. She glances at Shara’s cup. “Did you drink all of that already?”
“Erm … Yes?”
“My goodness.” She shakes her head, tutting, and pours Shara another cup. “That should have been enough to bring a horse back from the dead. Anyway … If you do these things well—and you, as a bit of a politician, probably understand—they sort of start to perpetuate themselves. I learned very early on not to speak to my folk from on high, but to get down with them, beside them, showing them how to act rather than telling them. And I suggested that they should do the same with one another: that they didn’t need a book of rules to tell them what to do and what not to do, but experience and action. But when I started to feel this … this momentum inside of me—these ideas that pushed and pulled at me, threatening to pull me with them and pull everyone else with me—I consulted with my closest followers, and they just”—Olvos is grinning with gleeful incredulity—“they just said they didn’t really need me anymore.”
“You’re joking.”
“No,” says Olvos. “Humanity’s relationship with the Divine is one of mutual give and take, and we mutually opted to part ways. But this perpetuation—setting up a way of thinking, and just letting it run—it doesn’t always yield good results.” She shakes her head. “Poor Kolkan … He never really understood himself, or his people.”
“He spoke to me,” says Shara. “He told me he had depended on you, in a way.”
“Yes,” says Olvos sadly. “Kolkan and I were the first two Divinities. We were the first to really figure out how it all worked, I suppose. But Kolkan always had a little more trouble running his show. He tended to let his people tell him what to do, and I watched from afar as he sat down and listened to them. … Like I told them all when I left, it just wasn’t going to end up well.”
“So you don’t think Kolkan was wholly responsible for what he did?”
Olvos sniffs. “Humans are strange, Shara Komayd. They value punishment because they think it means their actions are important—that they are important. You don’t get punished for doing something unimportant, after all. Just look at the Kolkashtanis—they think the whole world was set up to shame and humiliate and punish and tempt them. … It’s all about them, them, them, them! The world is full of bad things, hurtful things, but it’s still all about them! And Kolkan just gave them what they wanted.”