“Bah.” She cut him off with a waved hand. “You had the right of it. And it is not so hard these days. I am like a tame bear to many of your people, a beast that walks upright and dances and does clever tricks. No one fears the dancing bear. In the early days, when I was not such a fixture here, there was much fear, as if I might suddenly drop to all fours and devour the servants without sauce.”
Shane nodded. “The paladins—my brothers and sisters who survived the Saint’s death—so many people watched us as if we might run mad and kill everything that moved.” Honesty compelled him to add, “Though they had reason, unlike with you. Many of us did, when the Saint died.” Shane himself, with his brother Stephen, had attacked the paladins of the Dreaming God that they had been escorting, and only the fact that they had been half-blind with pain and confusion had allowed the others to survive. And if Istvhan had not simply passed out, I suspect that tale would have a very different ending.
“That was a hard year,” said Lady Silver gently.
“Perhaps the god of that year was cruel.”
He was half joking, but she took him seriously. “No, no. The year-god did not do that, friend Shane. The world did it, and Second Waking put herself between us and the world.” She studied him intently, her great golden eyes unblinking as a cat’s. “There were many hard things that year, and she turned aside as many as she could, and blunted the rest. Our gods are a little like you paladins, I think.
The ones who fight for us.”
Shane bowed his head, feeling oddly humbled.
Lady Silver took up a pen and began to write. Shane waited, listening to the scratch of pen on parchment. “I do not know how your god was killed,” she said, when she had finished and sat waiting for the ink to dry. “Or what did so, or why.”
“Killed?” Shane asked, startled. “What do you mean, killed?”
Lady Silver’s nostrils flared. “But of course, killed. Your god did not simply die, paladin, or none of you would be as you are. I have been the servant of a year, and when She died, She slipped out of my soul as kindly as She had come. She did not tear a bloody wound as your god did to you.”
“Perhaps your god was less cruel,” said Shane, and stopped, shocked by the bitterness in his voice.
“There are many gods that seem cruel to us, who cannot know what They know, and no doubt a few who truly are. But I cannot believe that a god who loved His followers as your Saint must have loved you would have chosen to leave you as He did. No, this was as shocking to Him as it was to you, I expect. And since gods do not fall down the stairs or choke on fishbones…” She spread her hands.
Shane hardly knew what to say in response. Could this be true? In the first days, I know we lashed out because we thought that our god was taken from us, but that was just the pain, wasn’t it? And I know the Temple did their best, but they couldn’t turn up anything. We were so busy surviving afterwards that we didn’t think about it until Piper laid hands on the altar and felt…
something.
“You seem surprised,” said Lady Silver gently.
“I think we’d somehow all agreed that we’d probably never know what happened,” Shane admitted. “It was too big and it didn’t seem to involve mortals at all. If another god had killed the Saint, we couldn’t do anything about it.”
But Lady Silver was already shaking her head. “For a god to kill another god is a natural death, of sorts. At least, if one is a god. There are many legends of such things. This was something else. There are stories of heroes with weapons that could slay a god, but that sends a shockwave around the earth, and this did not.”
The shockwave it sent through us was quite enough, I suppose. And what would I do if I found out that it was another god? Take up one of these god-slaying weapons in revenge?
He was very afraid that the answer was yes. Not for the Saint of Steel, precisely, but for His chosen, who had suffered and died alongside their god.
“How could a mortal kill a god, without a god-slaying weapon?” he asked.
Lady Silver’s eyebrows—or the patches of fur that served as eyebrows—went up. “You think like a warrior,” she said. “Think like a courtier instead. How would you kill someone, if you had no blade? If you were weak and they were strong?”
Shane frowned. “Poison,” he said finally. “Accident. You say that gods don’t fall down the stairs, but can you push a god off a cliff?”
Lady Silver flicked her ears, amused. “I don’t believe that’s ever been tried.” She looked down at the letter before her, then folded it and handed it to him. “For your Bishop. I do not know exactly how it was done, but someone or something killed your Saint. My own meager archives—” she waved her hand at the shelves of books “—contain nothing but hints. You will require a more specialized library for that.” She nodded to the letter. “I have listed those that I believe might contain more.”
Shane tucked the letter away, and Lady Silver rose to escort him out. “It is an interrresting puzzle,” she said, and he guessed by the growling trill that she had remembered to reassume her accent. No one fears the dancing bear. He wondered if she realized that he’d noticed. Probably. I do not think Lady Silver misses many things. I wonder how old she is? He had no way of knowing. She might have been half his age or a dozen years his senior, even assuming that her race lived the same span as a human would.
“One thing…” Shane paused, one hand on the door. “The weapons that could kill a god. Has anyone ever slain a year-god that way?”
A shiver ran through Lady Silver’s great ears. “Once, long ago. The year outside a year.”
“What happened?”
“For seven months, there was no one to stand between us and the world. Floods came, and famine. Many, many died. It broke the great cycle, and the next god was declared First Enduring and began a new one.”
“Oh.” I’m sorry I asked.
The cynocephalic’s eyes were brooding. “That is why it is important to learn these things. If someone can go about killing gods, what hope is there for mortals?”
She shut the door before Shane could think of an answer for that, assuming one existed at all.
WREN WAS STILL awake when he returned. Part of him noticed this in a detached fashion— of course she stayed awake, someone should be on guard when one of us is out—but the rest of his brain was a whirl of dead gods, dead priests, and dead years. He dropped into his chair and stared blindly at the ceiling.
“You look like you just took a board to the back of the head.”
“That’s about how I feel.”
Wren considered this, then said, cautiously, “Romantic evening go badly?”
It was such a completely wrong guess that it startled a crack of laughter out of him. “Oh gods and saints! I only wish!” Haltingly, he spelled out the details about Lady Silver, Beartongue’s message, and what the scholar had said. Wren’s eyes got rounder and rounder as he talked, until she looked like a small, muscular owl.
He finally ran out of words. A minute later, Wren said, in a small voice, “Whoa.”
Shane wanted to laugh again, or weep, or both. He put his face in his hands. “What do we do if it’s true?”