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Very late at night Lightsong has his servants drag every painting, sculpture, vase, rug, and piece of furniture in his palace into a single room and pile it. Llarimar sits on a stool beside the couch, watching without comment as the room fills with his god's wealth. Lightsong cannot get drunk; he drinks anyway. He confesses that he feels something is going on around him that is larger than he can see — a painting glimpsed only at one corner. The piled wealth, stripped of its careful settings, has stopped looking like beauty and has begun to look like junk. Llarimar points out that a thing is worth what it is treated as worth.

They turn to the Idris question. Lightsong cannot bring himself to declare for or against war on the pantheon's verdict, and asks Llarimar what he would do. The priest at first deflects, then takes off the heavy mitre — *I speak now as a friend, not your priest* — and admits he is torn. He would not invade his kinsmen for the highland passes, but he would not let Idris's tariff control of those passes go unchallenged either: declare war, make a show, and force the Idrians into more favourable treaties. Lightsong sits with it and is unconvinced. They are missing something. Why now? Why has the temperature spiked *after* the wedding that should have unified them? Neither of them knows. So they decide, quietly, to find out — and stand up.

Siri sits alone in the black bedchamber in her finery and is too terrified to be angry. Susebron does not come. The priests do not need her pregnancy to be real, only believed; she has been put away. The guards on her door have changed: the Lifeless and the priests of earlier hours have been replaced by crass, soldierlike men, and she notes the change without being able to explain it. She tells herself her job for the next six months is to hope. She taught her husband to read, and gave him the determination to break free of the priesthood's hold; that, now, will have to be enough.

Lightsong and Llarimar crouch in the bushes outside Mercystar's palace in the dark and watch the night patrol pass. The moon is in exactly the position Lightsong dreamed it would be the night before, the same dream that gave him the twisting tunnels. He still does not want to believe his dreams are forteelings; he is going down those tunnels anyway. He has to know. They go in a window. When that turns out to be in plain sight of two interior guards, Lightsong simply walks out, declares himself a god, and runs for the trapdoor he found his last visit. One guard freezes; the other bolts. Llarimar follows, cursing for the first time Lightsong can remember.

The trapdoor opens into a flour cellar, then a small crawlway, then a much larger lit shaft of the catacombs. They drop a grate behind them to slow pursuit. Lightsong starts feeling around with his life sense, picks out something living far down the main shaft, and instead turns to the side passages first. One slopes steeply down. Following it, they find a fresher-cut dirt tunnel running in a square with trapdoors up into each of the Lifeless warehouses — a covert route into the kingdom's army that no god has any reason to need, and that nobody told them existed. Llarimar crumbles dirt from the wall between his fingers and confirms this tunnel is newer than the rest. They withdraw back to the main shaft. The older branches off to the side, Lightsong guesses, go to several of the gods' own palaces. Then they go after the life-sense.

The shaft runs long and straight under what Lightsong guesses is the God King's palace. He sneaks better than he has any right to and Llarimar worse. In the distance ahead, voices. He turns the lamp down and creeps. A man — *Denth*, he learns when the other man names him — is telling a companion that he has Vasher strung up above and is about to torture him. The other man wants him to interrogate someone instead; Denth tells him he was not hired for it, and that if the man wants him used he can go fetch his boss. Denth's voice drifts off, leaving the other behind. Then a scream — Blushweaver's voice, demanding to be let go, *I am a goddess!* — and then a sharp cry of pain.

Lightsong charges. He rounds the corner from dirt tunnel into worked stone, bursts into a carved dungeon at the tunnel's end, and finds Blushweaver gagged in a chair, surrounded by men in God King's priesthood robes and several uniformed soldiers. He bowls the nearest guard into the wall, grabs the man's sword, and discovers — *Aha! Who's first?* — that he has no idea how to use one. His lunge misses by inches. A guard at his feet tackles his legs. Another runs him through the thigh.

The leg bleeds blood as red as any mortal's. Lightsong knows pain greater than anything in his short life, and screams. Llarimar tries his own valiant tackle and fares about as well; they are separated, restrained, and a bloodied blade is put to the god's throat. *Funny,* he thinks through gritted teeth, *that was not at all how I imagined this going.*