The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(93)

“But I am a councilman,” I said calmly.

Their brows wrinkled. They stared, then laughed.

“I will show you.” I produced my High-Kith passport. One of them accepted it, sliding a look his partner’s way, wondering where the joke was. I felt power prickle along my skin. It felt like panic, or pleasure. It felt the way the dark sky looks when lightning illuminates the clouds, giving the flat black sky sudden dimension.

“The last page in the booklet,” I told the man. “The one you just saw held the necessary document for entrance.”

“Oh,” he said, flipping back to it. “I see.”

“The person you saw,” I said to both of them, “the one who just walked up to you. You might have thought, because of a trick of the light, that you saw a woman, but he was a young man from a good family, well known, well liked, dressed as he should have been in his red robe.”

“Why, so it was,” one of the men said to the other.

I took the passport back. “You let him pass, as you rightly should, and then no one stood before you.”

They both stared blankly ahead. I went inside.

The entryway was dim, the walls painted red and green and pink in tight patterns, making the entryway appear as though covered with the scales of a wild, unknown creature.

Though councilmen passed me as I made my way through the building, following the maps in my mind, I did what I had done in the Ward, which was to wish that they didn’t see me, to make them forget me … which, I realized, as I became more practiced in doing it, was not quite forgetting but rather giving them an invented memory of a moment so quickly passed that it came to occupy the present in their minds.

I made my way to the library, where green flames burned in oil lamps and the books were so beautifully encased in rich leather that each row of books looked as though it were a jeweled strip of vitreous enamel. Red-robed readers sat at polished wooden desks, drinking from pots of pink tea. When they looked up, I made them remember me differently, to be what they expected to see, but it felt harder. Their faces frowned, and their minds seemed to tug away from the thoughts I gave them, so that I had to be more forceful with my wishing, sterner in my construction of the vision of me they were supposed to believe. Eventually, their eyes fogged over and they went back to their books.

I approached a councilman who was shelving books and appeared to be in charge of the library. “I am looking for a book very special to the Lord Protector,” I told him. “A history of the city.”

His narrow eyes studied me, confused. “That book is only for the Lord Protector to read.”

I replaced his memory of the person standing before him. “I am the Lord Protector.”

“Oh, yes. Forgive me, my lord. Of course you are. I will fetch the book for you now. There is memory elixir for you while you wait, though I know my lord never needs it.”

He set a glass pot of pink tea before me as I sat at a table. There were other, drained pots, and a little stack of glass cups that looked like a froth of bubbles. The man bustled away.

A memory elixir.

I glanced around the library at all the people reading, drinking their tea. Was that my blood in their glasses, drained from me when I was imprisoned?

I poured myself a cup and took a sip. It did nothing to me, probably because I already had any magic it could lend me, because I was simply giving myself back to myself. No wonder I’d had more trouble manipulating the memories of the readers in the library. They had drunk the tea, so what power I used on them had to work against the power they had already stolen and ingested in a diluted form. I set the cup aside. Then, after a thought, I slipped the packet of poison from my pocket and emptied it into the pot.

The librarian came back, bearing a red-bound book the size of a small child. He set it before me. Its front was embossed with a symbol I had seen on a card in the game of Pantheon. It was a grasping hand, the sign of the god of thieves.

“Will there be anything else you need, my lord?” asked the librarian.

“Yes.” I cleared my throat, eager to begin reading, suffused with a feeling I was not at first able to name, because I had never felt it before.

Superiority.

I had never felt able to make people do what I wanted. Now it was so easy. If I wished it, it was so. If someone resisted, I needed only to twist their memory to make them obey.

“Clear the room,” I told him. “And then leave. Bar the library doors. I wish to read alone, in peace.”

“Of course, my lord,” he said, and executed my order.

In the stillness that remained, I opened the book.

The gods once walked among mortals, read the first line. As I touched the page, a vapor rose from the printed ink. Specterlike, it drifted up to me. I inhaled, my gasp of surprise dragging the vapor inside me before I thought to resist it, and I fell into the story it told.





51


THE GODS ONCE WALKED AMONG mortals, charmed by their childlike ways, their lives as ephemeral as dew on grass. Most enchanting, however, was a mortal’s ability to surprise. A god might bless a mortal, yet never know how the seed of such a gift might grow. Sometimes a frail human might glow with song, a pure melody shuddering from the throat, expressing a longing the god of music had never known, with an intensity that made the god, despite her eternal years, listen with wonder. And a mortal might suffer beneath a gift, extra eyes popping out all over the skin like weeping boils, such that the god of foresight could not help but laugh as she had not done since the birth of the god of delight.