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He dreamed of Aubade, as he had often enough since leaving the place behind. Nocturnal insects chirped in the bushes, and against the distant rumbling rhythm of the shore Hadrian could hear the voices of birds rising in their dusk chorus, a sound he had missed every night and morning since returning to Hieron, where songbirds were dying out one by one.
Through gently swaying curtains, he could see the strong silhouette of Samothes standing on the balcony, looking out to sea. Hadrian was in no rush to speak with him. He lay there, eyes half-closed, and let a warm, slightly earthen scent wash over him in waves of increasing clarity.
Among the voracious new growths that pierced Hieron from the laminae below, there were some worth foraging. One of these was a nettle-like plant whose leaves were toxic, but whose small round seeds, when ground to an aromatic powder, had the miraculous property of making hot watered-down ale bearable to drink. In the absence of trade from Rosemerrow or the south, this cheap spiced brew had become a staple, and it was this scent that woke Hadrian from where he had fallen into a restless doze on the matting of the main room of their quarters after getting home far, far too late last night. He had rolled out his camping mat, not wanting to disturb Rosana in their bedroom at such an hour, but years of comfort had left him unused to sleeping on the ground and part of his back had gone numb in complaint.
While Hadrian did his level best to wring out the stiffness from his limbs, Rosana finished pouring out two cups from a flask she must have taken from the kitchens, then made her way over and perched on the low table beside where he was sitting.
“Is Benjamin up yet?”
“I think he left already.” Hadrian found his throat dry, and coughed to relieve it.
“Probably.” Rosana blew gently, tiredly, on her still-steaming drink. “What kind of teenager wakes up at dawn to study?”
“He didn’t get it from me,” Hadrian agreed. That should have made Rosana smile, but her posture did not ease. With the window behind her, the light of morning turned the very edges of her hair a gold-accented auburn where they peeked from under the satin of her bonnet, and painted in harsh relief the shadows under her eyes—she was beautiful, but it looked like she had slept no better than Hadrian. Unable to bear it any more, Hadrian spoke.
“Are you going to ask where I was last night?”
“Where were you?”
“I saw Samot.”
“How was he?”
“Fine…” Hadrian started weakly, “well, no, I don’t think he’s doing well. But his wounds are healing… better than I could have hoped.”
He looked into the fog of ground spices at the bottom of his cup and waited for he knew not what. Accusation? Praise? Rosana had told him he should talk to Samot, after all… but she said nothing, only:
“That’s good.”
It pained him to admit that it didn't really matter what he and Samot had been doing in the woods. The point was that he had been away from his family for too long, too long consorting with gods. The tone of her voice told him that they would speak of this properly later; that nebulous time, later, when life itself did not hang from a fraying thread and Hadrian from one even closer to breaking. The words Samot had given him the night before, words of Samothes’, piled up on his tongue until he was sick with them. He had wanted to share them with Rosana so that faith could be a bridge between them as it once was, a naive thought now that he saw it in the light of day.
“Can we stay home this morning?” he asked, knowing it was selfish.
“I have to teach. It’s bad enough that I’m leaving next week.” Rosana levelled her gaze at him, not without fondness. “You’re an important man. You should have things to take care of.”
Hadrian managed a smile, still kneading at his cramped lower back. “Am I?”
Hadrian, Sword of Samothes, had been an important man, or at least an important weapon. He had thought many times about returning to Alexander, but the name no longer felt like his own.
***
Benjamin had unearthed the map from the corner of some library, a brittle fragment folded into the binding of another book whose ink had not survived the centuries. The paper crumbled into several pieces when he tried to extricate it from the binding, but these pieces could be arranged back together to reveal a partial chart of the University.
This fragment covered what were now the aboveground farms and the western woods they backed onto, though at the time of the map’s making the area appeared to have been a part of the University gardens. There were several hints at underground passageways which Benjamin copied down into his own notes, strewing pages across the kitchen table for an afternoon until Hadrian came along before dinnertime and made him clear them up.
It was then that Hadrian saw it: the symbol of a sun drawn in faded ink over a thicket to the west, barely within what were now the bounds of the star barrier. Below it was a bit of script he did not recognise, except for Samothes’ name delineating a holy place. Even if this map did not itself predate the Dark Son, the sun on the map had no rays.
He would have shared what he saw if telling Benjamin would not also have been telling the wizard Arrell. Had he done so, he would have found that the symbol revealed itself only to him, which should have been the first sign of a god’s interference. And perhaps he had known… after all, he went quietly, stealing out of the house after sleeping only an hour in his chair, not long enough to dream. He took the map, following a concealed path underground from the basement of the library and feeling his way across lichened walls until he emerged into the night.
Darkness was near-total in the woods, the space between tree trunks a morass of shadows undeterred by the remaining moon, which far above made a cobwebbed circle of branches with its light. More than once, Hadrian’s boots sank into earth soft from flooding or he tripped over an unexpected root and had to catch himself on vines which pricked his hands mercilessly. Still, the route was not as impassible as the woods out west had lately proven to be. There had clearly been a path here once, and that knowledge kept Hadrian moving.
Just when he had begun to consider turning back, his foot sank through a husk of moss and hit something solid. Feeling around, the ground was flatter here, divided into even tiles which were unmistakably the remnants of a manmade structure. A sickly wind soughed through brambles packed so tight that Hadrian immediately understood how this place had stayed hidden for so long.
Squeezing his way through the bushes as they caught on his clothes, Hadrian was eventually forced to move on his hands and knees, which allowed him to feel when the broad paving underneath him gave way to overgrown mosaic tile. Pulling up clumps of thick moss, he unearthed what seemed to be a threshold stone with sunlight seeping up through its edges, near-blinding in its contrast to the surrounding dark. Blinking, Hadrian saw that what he had thought to be flecks of moonlight on the forest floor were in fact this same glow peeping out from spots of exposed architecture.
By this light, Samothes’ light, the shrine revealed itself.
One axis of the mosaic sun under Hadrian’s hands led forward several metres to a raised dais, upon which two figures took shape from the night. The first figure, once and half again the scale of a human man, was a statue of Samothes. He was depicted holding a scroll to his chest and a hammer by his side, his face shrouded by low-hanging leaves so that Hadrian might not have been certain of the likeness if not for the way the second figure was fixated on it. A hand veined with glowing scars moved subtly on the statue’s ankle, wind ruffling through wisps of blond hair shorn brutally short. Waves of that artificial daylight moved across the floor in time with the movement of Samot’s fingers, as though he were playing with the shrine’s residual magic.
Feeling at once that he had stumbled into something very private, Hadrian took a step back—and clunk , a stone dislodged by upgrowing roots tipped under his heel. He had no time to curse his luck before Samot called for him, his soft and husky voice betraying little surprise.
“Hadrian.”
He was still facing away, but at this point Hadrian couldn’t very well pretend not to be here.
“I’m… sorry. The path let me in.”
“I know.” A singsong trochee that made Hadrian feel like he was being toyed with, albeit benevolently. “You’re not interrupting anything. Come in.”
Samot’s jewellery tinkled in the light breeze as he moved his head. He was wearing plain trousers and a loose white shirt with sleeves tied off by golden clasps, in its neckline a pendant that Hadrian recognised from when he and Ephrim had rifled as respectfully as possible through the dresser in Samot’s old rooms. The fabric was cut low enough to reveal the slight muscle of his chest and the lightning-white scarring that led down towards the centre of his torso, where he had caught the worst of the Ordennan blast, shrapnel narrowly missing some vital organs and tearing right through others. Had he not been what he was, it would have killed him instantly.
Word on campus was that the University’s resident god was still in recovery. Samot hadn’t been seen outside his tower in days; especially not by Hadrian, who since the funeral had wanted to give him space. He could still feel godsblood slick and drying on his hands, still see the look of icy resolution on Samot’s face after Samol had whispered to him those last words, whatever they had been. People were still digging out leftovers from that last night of festivity, when Samol had played his guitar and given his life, to stave off the coming shortages for one more day, one more day.
Once he came within a few feet of the statue, Hadrian was able to see Samothes’ face uplit behind the leaves that had shrouded it before. It was a good likeness, degraded as it was from years of neglect; the curve of his lips and the shape of his nose so accurate to life that Hadrian had to think this had been sculpted by someone who knew the man personally. How odd that he himself was qualified to make that judgement now.
Hadrian lowered himself down onto the uneven stone to pay his respects to a friend, muttering under his breath a rote greeting to Samothes, the words of which didn’t matter much to him or his absent god. Of course, when he rose, Samot was watching him.
“I’m sure he’d be touched to know that you still pray,” he said softly.
Even though he can no longer hear you .
Hadrian was privately glad of that thought. Throughout his sojourn in Aubade he had prayed little, because doing so would have felt like heaping troubles upon the diligent lord who lived atop the castle mount. Never again now would he know the heat of Samothes’ attention, never again would he start awake on the ground of some makeshift campsite and know , with an immanence he could not yet name, that his god was with him… no, Samot was right, the absence left him hollow. But in the tumult of recent weeks he hadn’t had a moment to think about it.
“Since I came back, I don’t honour Him alone,” he said in the end. “How could I, in this place?”
“You wouldn’t be the first.” Samot gave a wry, slight smile. The allusion to what little Hadrian knew of the University’s founding had been intended to please him, and so it had. “And this is his sanctum. Even I… well, I don’t come here to pray to myself.”
This past minute or so, his hand had been moving continuously on the statue of Samothes, and what Hadrian had at first assumed to be a gesture of longing had taken on the distinct air of searching for something. Now, he seemed to find it.
“There.”
A whisper-click of stone sliding into place, and with remarkable smoothless given its age—a familiar miracle, Samothes’ work—the statue slid aside by a metre and a half, leaving Samot sprawled beside a newly opened stairwell. This entrance was not veined with sunlight like the rest of the building, but amber-lit as though by torches further down the stairs. Samot stood, picking up a fine-looking bottle that had been near his right hand on the dais.
“This statue stands guard over a small collection of books that Samothes refused to hold in the library proper,” he said, the lilt of his speech making it abundantly clear to Hadrian that he had been drinking, now that the bottle had tipped him off to listen for it, “or it used to. I haven’t been down here in a long time. Come with me, and we’ll see what has survived.”
Hadrian followed. How could he not? The Last University had all sorts of forgotten corners, layers built upon layers in the manner of Hieron itself, and Hadrian hoped as much as anyone that the school would yet yield up some useful secrets. This was the excuse he had given himself for his interest in Benjamin’s map fragment. Of course, now his mind was elsewhere.
“Up there,” he asked as they descended into the firelight. “Were you... praying to him?”
“Does that surprise you?” A layered, slightly bitter curiosity in Samot’s tone. “I suppose it’s to be expected. I have only myself to blame for letting your histories judge me unfaithful.”
“No, I only meant—”
Hadrian’s attempt to dissemble was cut off by a vivid and unwelcome flash of vision, whether a gift from Samot or a product of his own memory he honestly could not tell. His sabaton, raised over Hella’s hand and a dropped ring, on that bridge above the subterranean sky. Hadrian felt a sick lurch in his stomach, like he was seeing the drop to the deeper laminae for the first time over again.
“I…” Hadrian steadied himself on the damp stone wall. “Samot, I don’t doubt your faith. I just think it must be beyond my understanding.”
He was afraid Samot might take further offence at that, but the god only laughed, his dark mood passed over like a bank of cloud. “Maybe so. Maybe less than you think.”
His pupil-less white eyes shone in the dark, reflective like an animal’s. Hadrian found himself missing the violet they had been when Samot first appeared in his dreams; then felt guilty both for the feelings that memory stirred in him and for finding Samot’s injuries unnerving.
Not a week ago, he had said to Rosana that he had grown too used to talking with gods. While that was no lie, descending into the earth with a slightly uninhibited Samot like this filled him with the opposite of confidence. Maybe it was grief, or a sort of trapped-animal anger—Samot was always mercurial, but something in the air tonight made talking to him feel like walking on glass.
Spatially speaking, the stairs made less sense the farther down they went. Each new flight seemed to corkscrew back into space that had been solid stone when looked upon from above, and the library came upon them quickly, a heavy wooden door at the end of a corridor riven with damp. When Samot pushed it open, it creaked gently in welcome.
The space inside was small but well-equipped, five sets of shelves stacked to the ceiling in a semicircular shape with cupboards between them, all surrounding a small round table covered in a thin layer of dust. At regular intervals in the outer wall there hung tapestries punctuated between by small, daylit windows. This did not feel like a basement, more like the inverted tower that he and Hella and the rest had visited in the south. For all he knew, Samot had led him around the central axis of the ground and they were now hanging from the sky of the lamina below.
While Hadrian stood hesitating in the doorway, Samot had sunk down into a chair below a set of tall shelves kept barred by an iron grille and was leafing through a small book bound in forest-green. From the way he reached to touch the page with a distracted look on his face, Hadrian wondered.
“Are these... Samothes’ work?”
“No… no. These are new scholarship, from long after my time at the University. Someone must have found another way in. I’m glad.”
He was right: the shelves were strung in places with cobwebs and the library smelled of neglect, but the books and furnishings had not yet rotted, and it was in a better state than Samot’s room had been before they excavated it. Unlike the gardens above, this place had clearly been maintained.
“Arrell," Hadrian muttered, struck suddenly by the idea. The journal Arrell had kept in his room in Rosemerrow had spoken of secret collections at the University… perhaps this was that library of last things, repository of the texts that had birthed Arrell’s madness.
“Arrell?” It took a moment for recognition to dawn on Samot. “That… so-called wizard. Perhaps him, and others. As I said, it was after my time.”
When the name occurred to Hadrian, so too had the fear that Samot might know about Arrell’s conduit. Now it was clear he did not, which meant that Hadrian was treading dangerous ground. While he did not doubt Samot could deal with Arrell, he didn’t want to entrust this secret to anyone without the utmost interest in protecting Benjamin. When he recalled how Samot had used his own son…
No. That was unfair.
“Has that man threatened you?” Samot asked, and Hadrian clasped his mind shut. He didn’t think Samot could hear his thoughts unless he was praying, but Samot’s direct regard seemed to pierce right through him, setting an electric hum under his skin.
“Not exactly. There’s… there’s been a lot going on.”
“I know.” Samot closed his book and made as if to stand, changing his mind at the last moment so that the movement became a sort of feint where his scarred right hand gripped the arm of the chair too tightly. “But you know you can come to me about these things, Hadrian. If I’m to be here… at least until there is a chance of retaking the city, I want to be of use.”
Hadrian nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
Samot stood once he had gathered his energy, slotted the book he had been flicking through back into its place on the shelf and wandered over to a rich-looking wooden cupboard underneath one of the tapestries. Its doors had no visible knob or latch, but under a purposeful caress from Samot they clicked open, and he drew from its internal shelves a small shape tied up in cloth.
“You asked if there were works of Samothes’ here,” he said. “This one I know well. It’s obtuse, but it’s near enough the only work of eschatology he produced before he decided he preferred to think of the coming end as a pet project of mine.”
Hadrian swallowed a lump of eagerness and trepidation. If they were to build a future for the faith… because Samothes’ faith persisted, even if Hadrian knew too much to walk its sunlit path in exactly the way he once had, then it would be good to keep histories other than that of the Dark Son. As much as a part of him resisted the thought, not wanting to burden Samot nor to owe him, there was no person alive better to ask.
“Can you help translate it?”
Samot turned, holding the cloth-wrapped thing to his chest with the slightest hint of a smile. “I wonder if a book like this has anything left to teach someone who has known him as you have.”
Hadrian knew this was not refusal; quite the opposite, but he tried not to flinch at the way the word known fell from Samot’s lips. He wondered if Samot was capable of saying it in a way less laden with meaning.
“It’s not so much for me, but Rosana…” For a reason he couldn’t identify, Hadrian regretted naming her in front of Samot, though it was true that in this moment he thought of her work. “I know you’re a busy man. If there’s one chapter that you think would help most…”
Samot touched a hand to Hadrian’s arm and shushed him as he crossed back to the table. “I’m glad to be busy. And I need only give you a key to understanding the script.”
He bade Hadrian sit in the chair he had occupied a moment ago, then perched on the arm of it and leaned over to guide him, self-serious enough that Hadrian felt compelled not to notice the weight and proximity of his body. There were wooden blocks on the table with a slant to their surface, simpler but no less fit for purpose than the lecterns Hadrian had used once upon a time in the Velas church. Samot pushed two of them together to make a bookrest, then set his burden down upon it, unfolding the covering cloth to reveal a small volume with a plain leather cover.
The pages inside were of browned vellum that looked much older than the binding. Samot opened first to a page near the middle, which was covered in a delicate line drawing.
“What does this look like to you?”
Hadrian studied the lines, expecting to have no answer, but to his surprise he recognised the outline of a coast, the conical sprawl of tiny houses out towards farmland.
“Velas?”
“Yes. Not your Velas—he studied the erosion of the lower laminae for a time, early on.”
Parts of the map were rendered dark by careful cross-hatching. Hadrian had thought these to be markers of the seasonal floodplain, but now he guessed them to be the Heat and the Dark, encroaching along almost the same lines as the sea. Drawn to this ancient foretelling of what had now come to pass, he wanted to look longer…. but Samot was already turning the page to reveal what looked like a uniform grid of letters, evenly spaced across two pages outlined in red ink.
Not a system of writing Hadrian recognised. He did know some of the characters, though others left him lost—but he could not question whose work it was. Samothes’ handwriting was as it had been in Aubade, functional and disciplined. Messier and more recent hands spidered and squeezed themselves around and between the lines of the grid, Samot humming to himself as he traced them.
“Look, there’s one you’ll recognise.”
‘Mechanisms (Memoriam, facsimile), f. 109v', it read. A few rows below it, Hadrian spotted another snippet of familiar language: ‘can be reshaped to no end(?) but its own acceleration’, and another: ‘on permafrost: Didactum Samot, verse 998’.
Few of these were direct attempts at translation. Samot explained that they were for the most part references to scripture, some of them veering off into gestures to ancient books of engineering or poetry. In every case, to begin to decode Samothes’ work, the reader had to cross-reference these other texts for certain keywords which could be used to unlock the patterns of his meaning. Even if the requisite books could be somehow recovered, the process sounded like it would take years.
“That seems impossible,” Hadrian said.
“It is, of course it is. Don’t you know how Samothes was? He loved this sort of cipher. This, in particular, was a compromise he made with me: he allowed these books to be held on the University grounds, but kept them stored beneath a shrine in a vault that would open only to a god’s touch, and made their exegesis such a time-consuming process that anyone without a lifetime to spare would be forced to give up the effort. Still, if one knows his mind…”
There was something oddly euphoric in the way Samot began to speak of these riddles. Even had he been sober, or as sober as the god of wine ever was, Hadrian suspected it would have been the same. He couldn’t say he shared the feeling at all, but he was glad to have Samot so distracted from the topic of Arrell… and he did want to read the manuscript, even though its contents were both clinical and bleak; speaking mostly, in the most direct and authoritative terms Hadrian had ever seen in writing, of Nothing.
Samot read to him for a time aloud, his voice growing hoarse with use, pausing here and there to pass comment or wrestle for a beat with an interpretive process that should have taken mortal scholars a generation. Gradually, Hadrian found that the text before him grew less cryptic, the letters unfurling their meaning like ink dropped in water, a process frictionless yet obscure. It reminded him most of those times in his years as a sworn paladin when Samothes granted him a voice that could speak in any language, even that of inanimate things.
“Samothes did?” asked Samot quietly, making Hadrian start. He wished Samot wouldn’t eavesdrop, but it was true. For longer than he cared to think about, Hadrian had had the attention of two… no, three gods, while he believed he was communing with one.
“Was that you?” he asked.
“Not always. Sometimes it was.” Samot straightened from his perch on the arm of the chair, steadying himself on Hadrian’s shoulder as he did. Hadrian had no idea what the hour was, but it must have been late. His throat was parched, his eyes twitching and watery with the urge to sleep.
For a god, Samot was sensitive to such things, so he produced his bottle from before along with two gold cups and began to pour out two measures of a dark red wine. While they were reading, Hadrian had felt him twitching with the need to editorialise, but when he draped himself over the opposite chair to do so his words were uncharacteristically reserved, dour and quiet.
“If this book and its like are taught, you should… take care as to how. See if the scholarship here is any use in framing it. My husband is an authoritative writer, but that doesn’t mean his conclusions are right. In this matter above all, his mind was clouded.”
“He…” Hadrian didn’t want to argue with Samot, hardly felt qualified to, but was compelled to by the memory of Samothes’ voice wishing him strength, his hands on Hadrian’s shoulders as they embraced for the last time. The end will find us whether we cower or not. There is no reason to be fearful . “He saw the right of it, though. He built Aubade.”
“So he did, and by all accounts it’s beautiful. But I wonder how long it can be until that, too…”
Instead of finishing his thought, Samot pushed the second cup of wine across the table towards Hadrian. It felt far too late to be drinking, but then again Hadrian had no water, so he took a sip and felt its burning warmth slide down his throat. Blinking, he saw the pages before him shift into better focus, a little of his tiredness washed away at least momentarily. It wasn’t hard to believe Samot’s wine had magical properties of some kind.
“He wouldn’t have sealed off the blade if he didn’t fear it coming. A barrier of starstuff…” Samot sighed, drumming his fingers lightly on the table. “An incomplete measure.”
Hadrian took a deep second draught of his drink, and thought of things shored up inadequately… the University’s storeroom with its reinforced roof, the grain that had rotted when the moon fell and the floods came. That impulse to repair and rebuild was what the Samothes who had built this library would have described as inertia, a good and natural inertia, yesterday’s work perpetuating itself into tomorrow for no other reason than that it was dangerous for things to change, for each risk taken by those who could not see the cogs and levers of reality in the way Samothes could was a step closer to tipping the machine that was humanity back into primordial chaos. Would the Samothes Hadrian met in Aubade have agreed with that any longer? He had a hand always ready to tip the scales of life in that place, but he had trusted Hadrian to carry his word back into Hieron…
So had Velas been no more than a staunched wound, long before the present crisis came. Like most things in that new and ancient town, the church had been built up from the ruins, pews stood in rows across a floor still uneven from where it had once been grown through with weeds. Arched windows ran along both sides of the building to stop just before the altar where Lucius, a stern youth, had given sermons, and Hadrian had knelt until his feet were full of needles.
But Velas was gone. Hadrian had felt and heard and seen it, smelt the acrid smoke of Ordenna as it seeped over the northwestern horizon, heard harried accounts from friends among the refugees.
“Hadrian…” There was surprise in Samot’s voice as he reached a hand across the table, stopping short of any touch. Hadrian had thought to hide it, but Samot was astute enough to catch the well of unreleased tears in his eyes before he swallowed them down.
Did it sadden him that much? Was he weeping for himself, for lonely, bereaved Samot; for Samothes, for the church in Velas—for the mewl of seagulls and long summer services he now remembered mostly for Rosana making eyes at him from the third row, not knowing whether the awe that thickened the air was Samothes’ or their own?
Perhaps it was for her, for them both, for what their faith had been.
For Samothes, after all.
“To speak with him again…” he said to Samot, “after so long. How was he?”
Samot tilted his head in a curious way plainly intended to send his old mane of hair cascading over his shoulder—he was not used to having it short, but the gesture was still pretty.
“You’re thinking of Rosana.”
Hadrian’s tongue was so absolutely stuck in his throat that he could not summon a denial.
“You came back to her, and in doing so you’ve righted the greatest wrong. The rest, I think, will come.” Samot played listlessly, gently, with his cup. “As for Samothes, he seemed well when I spoke with him. Very well indeed. I thought he was too confident in having sealed himself away, but now I find myself… glad, in a way, that I’ll never have to suffer his forgiveness for what I’ve done.”
Hadrian chose to interpret that as an echo of what he had said about abandonment, because it was easier than considering a god’s use of tense.
“Don’t say that. We’ll… find a way for you to see him again.”
“Oh, Hadrian.” Samot reached up to touch the side of Hadrian’s face, tracing fingertips down his cheek in a trail of cold sparks to cup his chin tenderly, reverently. “How he would have wasted you.”
Hadrian felt his face flush with heat. Again he was tongue-tied, because he knew now what Samot was and what he had been, and the way he was looking at Hadrian—it was like he wanted to devour him, leaving nothing behind.
“What do you mean?” he managed to ask.
“I mean that you are strong, and you have tremendous vision, certainly more than I’ve had in these years lording over his tomb. It’s a part of what I saw in you that day at my old tower… it’s hard, even now, not to believe you’ll see us through what is to come.”
Hadrian didn’t know what to do with such praise, such unwarranted faith. Samot’s hand was cool and strong against his cheek, the veins of starstuff buzzing strangely against Hadrian’s skin, though its violently transformative properties seemed leashed by Samot’s form; a body well accustomed to containing such forces.
“Samothes… told me to try to be good. To do good.”
It felt like an inadequate answer to what had been said, but it made Samot smile.
“You miss him,” Samot observed, and after a moment’s contemplation leaned further over the table in a flicker of inhuman fluidity. “Let me…”
Feeling Hadrian flinch, Samot stopped his advance, but held the back of Hadrian’s jaw in a light yet inescapable grip. “Let me give you something of him, something more than words.”
“You mean… through the mask?”
“No,” Samot said, and of course, that was impossible now, Hadrian felt foolish for saying it. “I mean in memory. It’s been… a long time since you allowed me to grant you a dream, hasn’t it?”
In memory? In lieu of looking at Samot’s glowing, expectant eyes, Hadrian touched the vellum of the old manuscript between them, imagining the divinely skilled hands that had stripped and dried and bound it. Hands he had touched, hands that had held his own in care and apology. He swallowed down a clumsy blend of emotions, among them embarrassment that Samot had noticed his avoidance… and above that the feeling that he owed this to his younger self, who had lain a thousand nights dreaming of a Samothes who so little resembled either of those he had met.
“How?” he asked, the word coming out hoarse.
Samot leaned forward an inch further, taking Hadrian’s cup from his hand to set it aside so there was no shield of beaten gold between them.
“Kiss me.”
Hadrian almost laughed. Of all the things the gods had asked of him, these long years…
But he was afraid laughter would seem like ridicule, so he steeled his nerves, and the scent of the library gave way to a slight perfume as he bent to kiss Samot’s cheek. His skin was cool and smooth, the wine on his breath somehow heady and pleasant. Hadrian was about to pull back when, far too nonchalantly for what was a very devious act, Samot tightened his grasp on the back of Hadrian’s head and turned his own face just enough to press their lips together. Here he was warm and tasted of ozone. Hadrian had only a moment to temper his body’s reaction before colour burst into his vision.
Light and hue, prismatic and dazzling, wheeled in his eyes before they resolved into anything as legible as sight. Hadrian was a wolf running through cavernous woods, a king watching dust motes spin in the light of an empty audience chamber and a general shaking snow from the shoulders of his white cloak, a nameless creature crouching among orchids to hide from the sun.
Finally, he was walking past a grand mirror in a spacious, carpeted corridor, and if Hadrian had been in control at all he would have stopped to stare at the reflection he caught for a moment there—Samot, hair floating freely about his shoulders as he swept on down the hallway. This must have been his younger self, but of his age there was no indicator. Hadrian had spent enough time reckoning with the humanity of gods that he would expect the centuries to have altered something in Samot, but in every detail he was the same ageless boy Hadrian had first glimpsed on the isle of Eventide.
Hadrian had been in Samot’s body before in dreams, so that part was not as odd as it might have been. Samot was a little smaller, thinner, younger in physicality if not in truth; but Hadrian had been smaller, thinner, and younger in his time. The effect was that he felt he was walking along the corridors of a clerical school he might have attended at seventeen, twenty. As if at any moment he might turn a corner and see Velas, rows of seaboard houses stacked up against the ruins.
But Velas was gone, burned away years ago by Ordenna, and they were somewhere landlocked. Hadrian could tell by the taste on the air, even if he were not already able to identify this as some corner of the University—when had it become known as the Last?
They descended a staircase of pink stone into a walled garden, then followed a path beside a clematis-laden wall to the cusp of the outer gardens, where Samot cast a look back at the University behind them. From the mist, the tops of trees and towers loomed like strange projections uncoupled from their roots. The central tower looked too short, a lopsided jag, and it took Hadrian a moment to surmise that it was not damaged but incomplete. That certainly would explain the silence in the gardens as Samot walked through them, boots darkening grass that lay otherwise untouched, spangled still with spiderwebs and dew.
Of course, the quiet could simply be that of early morning. The sun’s light was behind them, and even indistinct as it was beneath the mist it seemed to grow in power as Samot loped west, his body falling and flowing into something grey and swift. Orchards and dwellings flashed by: new sprouts in turned earth, a door wreathed with sweetpeas, a slit of blue sky there and gone. Samot moved too fast for Hadrian to really get his bearings, but he knew their direction of travel, so it came as little surprise when Samot stopped at a roadside shrine.
Here, half-drowned in a fall of white-gold-green honeysuckle whose subtle sweet scent suffused the air, a statue of Samothes stood marking the western entrance to the University. Seeing it like this made Hadrian wonder if shrines to the other gods, or at least to Samot, had once been placed similarly in other cardinal directions—and since had crumbled to dust or been deliberately crushed, with Samothes’ likeness being spared only by the forest that had grown up around it even before the Spring. Regardless, in this moment the statue shone fresh as the gardens did, the paint that touched its robe maroon and its crown gold so bright that it almost seemed still wet.
Then the god himself called Samot’s name, and the statue was forgotten.
Flanked by two dismounted guards on the road ahead, wearing a robe of sumptuous red under his travelling cloak, was the Samothes of the statue, the Samothes of old. His head of curls shone full and dark, not a hint of the grey Hadrian knew, a golden circlet in his hair bright as summer celandines. His very presence seemed to dispel the mist for several metres around. This was a god; a god, and he stood with arms open for Samot, who fell into them and let himself be enfolded.
“How was the road?” Samot asked once they had held each other for a moment. Said in a strange old language, but by the same grace of Samot’s that had unravelled the manuscript’s code for him, Hadrian understood.
“Long,” said Samothes, “but better for knowing you waited at the end of it.”
Samot let out a quiet laugh, and Hadrian was surprised when instead of teasing Samothes he simply leaned up to kiss him. Samothes made a low sound of appreciation and leaned into it, pulling Samot against him by the waist so that they bent together like two saplings. When they parted, Samothes looked ruffled and pleased about it, his lips aglow and his inner robes pulled open an inch or two at the chest where Samot’s hand had wandered. Samot straightened out the hem while he stood there, turning to the two guards who had come with Samothes.
“Thank you. Leave us, and take the morning for yourselves.”
The road-worn pair looked to Samothes, at whose nod they bowed their gratitude and turned to go. They looked nonplussed by the display their lords had just put on, which Hadrian supposed meant they were used to such spectacles, or perhaps out of loyalty or fear remained impassive.
Samot took Samothes’ arm and walked with him across the mosaiced floor of the shrine, apparently in no hurry to return to the University proper. Samothes settled down with a sigh on the ledge of stone beneath his own statue, leaving Samot to lay across his knees and hold him; since that first embrace they seemed unwilling to let go of each other for even a second. The mists had not yet cleared completely, and the silence and obscurity of the landscape made this place feel like a private bower, no sign of life except for the trill of birds, the idle hum of insects in the honeysuckle.
“Have you been teaching this morning?” Samothes asked.
“Not today. It’s a day of rest.”
“Oh,” said Samothes, with a tactful disapproval which made Samot turn stern, reaching up to take Samothes’ face in both hands.
“Don’t tell me you planned on getting any work done today. I won’t permit it.”
Samothes laughed and pulled Samot further into his lap to lavish apologetic kisses on his neck, his shoulder, his jaw, while Samot curled his hands into Samothes’ travelling cloak and continued to talk of business—which to Hadrian felt hypocritical, but what did he know.
“The initiates we have are working as hard as can be expected. But high-minded enchantment can only take us so far. I’ve been telling you we need more people; those willing to teach, those who share our outlook, and those who do not. The word must be spread far and wide.”
Samothes hummed his agreement.
“You won’t distract me from this,” Samot said with a frigidity belying the tingling heat that rose from every place Samothes touched him.
“On the contrary. I don’t mean to. You’ll have your public opening when the tower is finished.”
“Just like that?”
“Of course, just like that,” Samothes said, and pressed his next kiss to the top of Samot’s head, the most chaste either of them had been with the other since reuniting. “People from every corner of Hieron will flock to see the wonders we have built. I’ve been off making preparations.”
“And here I thought you had gone to sulk in your forge.”
Samothes grumbled into Samot’s hair. “What have I ever done to make you think so little of me?”
Samot laughed at the way his breath tickled, twisted in his arms until he was straddling Samothes properly and so had the right angle to lean in and kiss him, hungrily but slowly. Quite a change from his attitude of moments ago, but then Hadrian supposed he had got what he wanted. How oddly transparent Samot could be at times… but Samothes’ hands were on his hips, Samothes’ lips on his, and the sensation was so much that Hadrian began to lose the distinction.
The distinction between his consciousness and Samot’s, that was—he felt himself taken in strong hands, turned around, and as his back flattened to rest against smooth stone he wondered at how real it felt, as though the stars and Ordenna, the sunless winter and the Spring, had been a passing dream so easily supplanted by this; Samot’s old love, Hadrian’s old faith. Hadrian, Samot, tilted his head back against the statue and Samothes took the invitation to kiss his throat, lips as soft as metal heated to the point of perfect malleability. Hadrian felt sure his skin must be burning to blisters, but Samot only clutched their lord closer, sighing out loud. This, then, was the intimacy of gods.
A muffled sound of metal under fabric. Samothes must have unclasped something in their robes, because as he lifted Samot, Hadrian, by the thighs his hands found contact with bare skin.
“I’ve missed you,” Samothes said, the same heat in his voice as in his touch.
“Samothes…” There was a passionate tremor like Hadrian had never heard in that laugh as he lowered his face into Samothes’ neck, one hand in his hair, allowing himself to be pressed up against the statue’s torso by the weight of Samothes’ body. "Show me," he whispered between kisses. "Show me how much..."
He wrapped his legs around Samothes’ waist. Hadrian felt—
Hadrian felt blood rush to his head. Would… would Samot really allow him to watch this?
As if on cue, he heard Samot speak as though in his ear, a ticklish internal whisper. “Is it too much? You can tell me.”
His voice was different from the other’s, Hadrian noticed only now. Hadrian had always thought Samot’s voice soft and pleasant, but compared to his younger self it had a certain hoarse depth, perhaps a product of the starstuff knitting together his airways. Was it too much? How could he possibly answer? He didn’t want to think about the present.
In Samothes’ arms he was whole, young, resplendent.
Neither did he ever ask Samot how they had come up from the library, though in time the lazy birdsong of the dream gave way to a vacant silence, ample flowerbeds to the shadowy impressions of strange new plant life around crumbled pillars. Feeling his senses come slowly into focus, Hadrian fought off the need to run into the forest in search of cold water.
“Was that…?” True? Real? He couldn’t find the words, much less when he looked at Samot, who was watching Hadrian from where he lay beside him with his chin propped boyishly in hand.
“Wasn’t it a nice dream?”
Hadrian rolled onto his back, and before the darkened sky he saw the stone face of Samothes. Even though this shrine was bare to the cooling night, he felt feverish with a sensation that had cradled him since his youth in the pews of Velas, a sensation that had saturated the very air of Aubade, but here could only be wrung like blood from old stones. Still, a difficult feeling to…
To relinquish? Was that what he must do?
Samot watched, awaiting his answer, with a look that made Hadrian itch beneath his skin.
It was not the hunger in those eyes that discomforted him. That he understood; Samot was a wolf too long starved of the one he wanted most, and Hadrian had been recently in Samothes' company. No—it was the vulnerability that he found terrifying, the inexplicable raw affection in Samot’s voice when he said Hadrian’s name, the way his lips were flushed and parted and his chest rising and falling with the effort of the vision he had granted them. The line of his body in the light from the stones was exquisite beyond words.
Hadrian wanted him—could no longer deny it, he wanted to share in what had for so long been Samothes’, in some audacious part of his heart wanted to take a god in his arms and see if he could fulfil just for one moment whatever it was Samot saw in him. But gods help him, he had his own affairs to fix. He knew Samot would give of himself in some ways, would fulfil this desire he had stoked so wilfully in Hadrian; but life did not end between the legs of a beguiling man the way it did in the jaws of a wolf, and Hadrian could not say what would come after.
So he hauled himself up from among the roots. He had wanted to give Samot a hand in standing, as though that would make up for everything else, but Samot was already up and leaning against the base of the statue, holding his shirt about himself as though he had started to feel the cold.
“May I… tell some friends of mine about this place?” Hadrian asked. “I think they’ll want to see the books, but if I try to carry them back now…” his body flagged at the thought, “well, I’m worried they’ll end up in the mud.”
Samot laughed, a humourless indulgence. “What an end that would be. I will leave the way open. Tell your archivists, let them come by daylight—soon, before the damp gets in.”
“Thank you. For that, and…” Hadrian found he lacked words again, a dilemma which was not helped by Samot looking up at him with increasingly wicked amusement, waiting for the end of the sentence until Hadrian gave in and settled on: “Do you need any help getting back?”
“I’m not an invalid, Hadrian.” Samot stepped forward and stroked Hadrian’s chest, straightening his shirt out far more carefully than necessary in what struck Hadrian as the same gesture he had used with Samothes in the dream. “When you return from Alcyon...”
Hadrian was not the only one too tired to fetch his words quickly, so he waited for Samot as Samot had for him.
“...Go safely, and return with haste.”
Hadrian promised he would.
Samot went near dawn, a ragged grey wolf treading among the first dull blotches of sun to fall through the canopy. Because he didn’t pause to look back at the statue of Samothes, Hadrian did it in his stead. The growing light made the age of the monument far clearer, each surface pockmarked with erosion that had put paid to even the smallest chip of paint. Like the land itself, this was no living god but a death mask on the cusp of falling into who knew what darkness. Still, Hadrian could now see that something had made a little nest of woven branches in Samothes’ crown, and though that too was a sign of neglect it made him glad. Better an unknowing visitor than none.
***
Rosana closed the book in her lap, feeling the divots in the embossed bronze edges of its cover. Normally she would end her classes with a half hour of discussion, but they had started late after she spent some of the morning at home with Hadrian. Time they could not really afford, but nonetheless it was sweet.
She thanked the children for their attention and shooed them off; they spilled out of the temple’s side chamber, laughing about something she couldn’t make out and didn’t care to. The bell in the secondary tower was tolling with the promise of a midday meal, though she knew it would not be enough to fill the bellies of all the people she could see coming up the hill from this vantage. A hundred trails of smoke rose to stir the sky from points along the slope down to the encroaching forest, the land itself yet seeming to breathe, which should have felt morbid but did not.
She had her doubts about the trip to Alcyon, about the barrier of starstuff, about every measure they tried to stave off ruin, even and especially about her makeshift curriculum. What was the use in teaching theology, history, in a world that seemed about to be pulled up by the very roots she was trying to cast light on? A rhetorical question. She knew the use, but that made the work no easier.
So too was she torn between wanting safety for Benjamin and for all the people of the University who might be menaced by Arrell; torn between wanting answers for Hadrian and believing he was right to distance himself from Samot, who was not Samothes’ enemy, not the beast the Dark Son made him out to be, but there was something... something in the way he had watched her speech at the funeral with eyes at once focused and vacant. Part of her had long wanted to speak with this god of books, but he was surely still grieving, and perhaps selfishly, she did not want to court the attention of gods.
Someone called her name. It was Sunder Havelton, propped up on a staff which made her look very sage with her long robe and her pile of greying curls, descending the hill followed closely by Benjamin. Neither looked troubled, and the latter was carrying three leaf-wrapped parcels from the kitchens.
“Have you eaten?” Sunder asked. Rosana touched a hand to her stomach, which now that she spared it a thought was rumbling pitifully.
“No,” she admitted.
They found a place to sit underneath a yew that grew in part from the crumbled stones of an old wall, overlooking the farms to the west whose lowest reaches lay under glassy floodwater. While they ate, Benjamin found time between bites to relate the latest lesson he had learned from his ghostly mentor in magic, leaving Sunder to nod thoughtfully every other sentence. Even if by necessity she and Hadrian did not trust Sunder, Rosana appreciated how tolerant the mage was of their son’s interests. Benjamin had long since reached the point where neither of his parents knew what he was talking about much of the time, despite their best efforts.
In among the moss and buckled stones underneath the yew, there was a small stone dark as slate and rounded like a beach pebble. Maybe it had been smoothed by flooding or carried here from the coast once upon a time, but it reminded Rosana of a small cove near Velas that had been made up entirely of stones like these. Because it was pretty, she resolved to take it home.
The stone was warm to the touch when she picked it up, the underside cool from resting in moss but the rest of it replete with the midday sun’s heat. She turned it in her hand and prayed to Samothes just like she once had as a girl, though with smaller ambitions; for the sun to rise the same tomorrow, and if He could, the day after.