“Says the girl goddess,” Koios said wryly.
“Says the small, powerful man,” she said.
He was actually so shocked that he didn’t move at all for a long moment. It must have indeed been long and long since he had felt genuinely offended.
“The point is that you’re exactly right,” she said. “Kip and I have certain similarities in rising fast and high by our wits. What I—”
“Did you know that an earthquake made the Red Cliffs? It thrust the seabed into the very sky. Those who climb still see the imprints of fishes a thousand paces above the sea. You see, in a great upheaval like that, or like the coming of the God of Gods, mountains are plunged into the sea, and low places are flung up to the heavens,” the White King said. “So when we find fish on a mountaintop, let us not praise them too quickly for making the climb.”
Liv saw several of the bodyguards grinning, as if he’d really put her back in her place.
“The point is,” Liv said, “Kip will die. I don’t intend to, ever, and I can’t trust whomever comes after him to keep whatever deal we make, no matter what oaths we swear. If I align myself with the Chromeria, they’ll come after me eventually. They’ll have to. By my very nature I’m an abomination to them. I’d forever be a compromise they made, and their . . . What was your word again? Their ‘gratitude’ toward me would eventually die. Worse, so would their fear. You, however, won’t.”
“Won’t . . . what? Betray you?”
“Die. Or forget. I understand you. You and I have reached the same conclusion. Everything you’ve done has been predicated on your understanding coupled with intelligence and patience.”
“Compliments?” the White King said. “That must have been painful for you.”
She had no idea what he was talking about. “Statements of fact are almost never painful to me.” That was true, of course. And they were becoming less so as she grew into her full nature.
She had also nearly forgotten how painfully inefficient most conversations were. “May I continue?”
“Please,” he said, and the symmetry of him saying ‘please’ to her in return for her earlier ‘please’ and thus closing the loop made her feel inordinately better.
“You and I understand that the nine kingdoms were doomed to fall, not because of who won the Deimachia, but by the very fact of it. Once the War of the Gods began, all of them were doomed, and their kingdoms, too. The very physics of this world are set against any one color dominating for long. Any can reign for a time, but with every additional year of the colors being out of balance, it takes more and more effort even to draft the dominant color, and less and less for one’s enemies to draft theirs. It’s a fool’s game, and you’re not that kind of fool. This is why you haven’t become a god yourself. Inside the system, you would be entrapped by the system. You wouldn’t be able to help attempting to dominate the colors. It is in the nature of the inner-spectrum colors to do so.”
“But not of your color?” he said.
She scowled. Did he not know? “Do you not know?” she asked.
“Enlighten me,” he said.
She scowled harder. If she lectured him on superviolet, she would want to tell him about chi, and whatever else he clearly didn’t understand. It was very hard for her not to finish a thing once begun. It was one of the weaknesses of her color that she had noticed, and she wished to keep those from him for as long as possible. Still, if she wished to live through today, she had to portray herself as just enough of a threat, and not too much, and a wellspring of useful information—enough so as to get him to swear the oath with her.
“Superviolet stands far apart, is rational, and strictly abides oaths,” she said, introducing the idea. “Only chi is safer to you, but it’s so far from human concerns as to be useless. Plus they get cancers and die within a few years. Blue is safe so long as the hierarchies above and below it are stable. Green can be corralled if given enough freedom. Yellow believes itself to be perfectly positioned to stand atop that hierarchy, and is most dangerous. Orange is wily, but hates direct conflict. Red and sub-red must be manipulated but are too chaotic to be threatening and are easily read and therefore misled. Paryl is profoundly influenced by any color at all, and therefore any magic. It can easily be made a puppet. But a paryl god could be as dangerous as a yellow, given a century or two. If her mind and will weren’t destroyed by a long tutelage of being controlled by every magic, one such might invert her weakness and attempt to control every magic instead.
“A less intelligent full-spectrum polychrome would have made himself the yellow god, hoping to balance all the others. Instead, you seek something harder, to take power over all the gods at once, because once held, that’s a power you could actually keep. You will become a king of djinn. Or, apologies, a god of gods.”
“Thank you,” the White King said.
She nodded.
“And you, you hardly fear me at all?”
“You’ll have better than my fear: you’ll know you can trust me.”
“Really? You bear me no ill feeling for when that rash fool Phyros Seaborn tried to chain you with the black luxin?”
She shook her head, baffled. If Phyros Seaborn had put the living black-luxin necklace on her neck, it would have plunged through her very spine if she’d tried to remove it or if she’d disobeyed the White King. She’d killed Phyros for trying to make her a slave. “Yours was a logical effort. Exactly what you should’ve attempted at the time. In truth, I resent you implying Phyros did it without your orders more than I resent the attempt.”
“A mistake,” the White King said. “I was curious to see how far you’d embraced your godhood. A mortal would be furious with me.”
It struck her oddly. “I remember a peculiar joy in being carried along at times by fury. It made me feel powerful.” She shrugged. “That’s no longer necessary. Nor is you chaining me.”
“Oh?”
“The power of order for one of my metaphysical nature is proportional to my power absolutely.”
It took him a moment to understand. “Ah. Ferrilux doesn’t lie.”
“I suppose that’s close enough,” she said. If one disdains nuance.
But apparently she’d not kept her face blank.
His lip curled.
She remembered again that though she had left most emotion behind, he had most certainly not. Her statements of fact could be taken as insufferable arrogance. How tiresome. She sighed. “What it means is that if I take an oath, I could break it, in my current state. But doing so would set me back two to three centuries. During all that time I would be vulnerable.”
“And in two or three centuries?” he asked with a smile that showed no contraction of the orbicularis oculi. It was not the part of his face that had been burned; thus the tell was true.
“In two or three centuries I hope I shall never be in such a vulnerable position that I shall need to take an oath.”
He gave a thin smile, as if she were a particularly dense child. “What I’m asking is, will you be able to break an oath you make, then?”
“An oath bonds one’s will and one’s nature in a temporalized and external rubric,” she said.