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Chapter Text

Omnia lay bright and busy beneath the morning sun, the city of Kom at its head brighter and busier still. The streets below the citadel were packed with travelers vying to complete their errands before the sun rose too high for work; already the gardens of the cafes and taverns were unfolding their awnings to snare merchants who had arrived too late to reserve a room at the inns. The Hubward chapel—there were six chapels within the city limits, outside of the High Temple—sighed under the heat, all of its wooden parts expanding like a cat stretching in the sunlight. It was untroubled by the Eighth Prophet of Om frantically skidding through its doors and crawling behind its altar, since it was only a building and like most buildings had no interesting opinions about anything.

Brutha pressed his back against the antique cedar wood of the chapel screen, fingers curling around its shapes tight enough to leave lines in his flesh. A pounding assortment of footsteps rang through the street outside and faded into silence.

God, he thought out of hard worn habit, if only I could walk in the desert again instead of dealing with this mess.

i. Bit petty of you, hiding like that.

Brutha looked up—not that there was anything above him, but the instinct came from deep in the part of his brain that had been taught first to kneel. Some part of him had thought that he would never hear that voice again. Some part of him had assumed the Great God would return to silence, to distant haughty inaccessibility. In Brutha’s own mind he was still only a half-way prophet, a stepping stone on someone else's way to real power.

He flinched away from a sound outside the chapel door, and suddenly he was more annoyed than humbled about the whole thing.

“It’s fine for you,” Brutha retorted, “you can live up on that mountain where nobody comes begging after you to touch them all the time.”

ii. Laying of hands comes with the territory. If you don’t like it don’t go out into the city by yourself.

“But I want to go out into the city by myself,” Brutha said. “I want to work in the garden. I want to go to the well. It's not fair, I can’t even do any miracles!”

iii. Reckon it doesn’t really matter much to them if you can or can’t, but if it makes you feel better I could—

“No!” Brutha snapped. “No miracles. We can’t rely on miracles alone.”

iv. Well then you’re going to have to learn to live with it. What did you think was going to happen when you got appointed Cenobiarch?

“I don’t know—” Brutha said, digging the heels of his palms into his eyes. “I didn’t think anything! There needed to be a Cenobiarch. It had to be me. I’m just—I’m just doing my job.”

Dusty sunlight cast woodwork patterns onto the wall above Brutha. He had left the door ajar.

v. If you don’t want to be Cenobiarch you don’t have to be, you know. Nobody’s making you.

“You’d choose another prophet?” Brutha asked, his stomach abruptly sinking in his chest. The prospect troubled him more than it ought to have.

v. Do you want me to?

“No,” Brutha said hastily, “no, I don’t mind.”

vii. Good, because I wasn’t going to anyways. Bad form to go around switching prophets mid-stream.

viii. It’d make me look a bit of a twat honestly.

Brutha’s lips twitched. He couldn't hide out here much longer, he knew. At the citadel there was a roster for him to look over and endless books still to transcribe, and ceremonies to memorize, councils to oversee… It was good work. It was necessary.

“I’ll miss the errands,” he said, breathing out a sigh. “And the well. And the cabbage garden.”

But there was work to be done, here and now—here and now…

“I was starting to think I’d heard the last of you,” he admitted, shifting the sleeves of his stole. The priestly garb was a lot more cumbersome than his old acolyte chiton. He fiddled with a delicately hemmed edge.

ix. I fought like hell to keep you, kid. You’ll see the last of me when you’re dead and buried, if you’re lucky.

Brutha turned, eyes on the sliver of blue just visible through the cracked door. The day seemed brighter, all of a sudden—wider; the world a softer place.

✥

This is how you know your story is over: you succeed. If no great urgency comes along to unseat you in the wake of your success, your story is over. Of course, lives don’t end where stories do.

“Owls?” Brutha said, pausing in his endless transcriptions with stylus poised.

“Terrible monsters,” the assistant head priest said. The church had clung to the old hierarchies with all their fingernails and whatever spare ones the inquisition squad had previously collected, and so Brutha was doing his best to quietly undermine them by meeting in no particular order with everyone down the whole chain of command. Yesterday he had held a very refreshing conversation with the executive head of cabbage acquisition, a position slightly more holy than Altar Boy but slightly less holy than executive head of persimmon acquisition.

“You do mean the night birds native to Ephebe, don’t you?”

The assistant head priest nodded vigorously. “They feed on human blood,” he reported. “And the big ones can carry away a small child.”

“How big,” Brutha said, “exactly?”

“Ohhh,” the assistant head priest hedged, “Big, I reckon. They’d have to be to carry off a child.”

“Perdition,” Brutha said, reverting to a first name basis. He hoped somewhat vainly that he could deescalate this to a less formal conversation. “I’ve seen owls. They’re quite small. They eat mice. They’re not particularly dangerous to anything bigger than a cat.”

“Yee-esss,” Perdition said, “well I reckon they would want you to think that. They probably send the small ones out on patrol to spy on folks. Then they report back to the king owl, who does the actual bona fide child eating.”

Brutha blinked. “They have a king now?”

“Well, yes, your holiness,” Perdition said. “Stands to reason.”

Brutha set down his stylus and sighed. There was no paperwork at the curiously rough desk of the Prophet, only stacks and stacks of meticulously copied library. He had found, quite on accident, that the presence of paper in stacks was all that a man of status really needed. People would fill in the rest for themselves. “Never the less,” he said, “I’m afraid I cannot support a—a…”

“Holy war,” Perdition prompted.

“A holy war,” Brutha said, “on the whole species of owls.”

“Oh no,” Perdition said, “they’re not a species, your holiness, they’re a genus. Fancy an elucidated sort like yourself not knowing that.”

After the sound of Perdition’s footsteps had disappeared down the long hallway, Brutha turned back to the window of his office with a sigh. “Please sit down, just because you’re God doesn’t mean you need to hover.”

Om considered the chair suspiciously. It was a low wooden thing, the kind of roughewn bulk in which powerful people the Disc over liked to seat their lessers. He couldn’t quite tell whether Brutha was making a point or completely ignoring it. In the paper under his hand there was a beautiful drawing of a bird of prey, painstakingly traced from memory as solid as any stencil. Brutha had no real artist’s talent as far as anyone could tell, but his deliberate, certain approach to all things rendered the most spectacular copies anyone had ever seen. Engravers two countries over went green with jealousy every time they were handed one of Brutha’s scrolls.

“What’s the occasion?” Brutha said, tilting his head just a fraction of an angle.

i. I heard someone say Holy War.

“Oh,” Brutha said. “You don’t need to worry yourself with that. I’ve been getting a lot of silly request lately. People don’t seem to know what to do with themselves without the Quisition around to point out the targets.”

ii. Ah.

Brutha narrowed his eyes. They were a little sunken, had never quite regained their youth after that long journey through the desert. “You’re not going to stick around like that are you?”

Om turned his attention down at himself.

iii. Manifestations of formless glory are very modern, I’ll have you know.

“Well I’ve got a very old fashioned candle maker due to arrive in five minutes and we won’t get much done if you’re being obtrusive and glorious over there.”

Outside the window of the Cenobiarch’s office, a long way away, the black outline of some feathered thing was swooping down towards the desert. They had been playing dice on Cori Celesti. Fate had rolled the things in his spidery fingers, and on the board below them there had been a crack of terrible dark thunder. Om could hardly stand the black, merciless eyes that turned to him, to offer him a roll.

Choose a player, Fate had said. Fate did not like Om much. Fate was an eagle, not a tortoise, and disliked the idea of upsetting the order of these things.

iv. Hmph. You used to pester me about the manifestations of Glory.

“That was before I knew you.”

Cori Celesti was not as Om remembered it. Tackier, for one thing. More pushing and shoving around the gambling tables. The chat was dull. Every overheard conversation seemed to send a twinge of guilt and anger running up the back of his metaphorical neck. He was beginning to worry that he was too much changed to ever really return.

There was a knock at the door. Brutha let out an explosive sigh. “Sure, of course he’s early.”

Om didn’t make a decision. It simply was, and then it was not, one way and then another. Om was a God, and then Om was a tortoise. He stood on stubby scaly legs, blinking unfamiliar eyes, in the middle of a dissembled encyclopedia of beasts. Ink smudged slightly under one small foot.

“Could you,” Brutha said, and then stopped fully as he noticed the creature padding slowly along the top of his desk. His great brown eyes did something peculiar, softening around their edges. “Oh,” he said. “I thought you wouldn’t want to do that again.”

“Hmmph,” said the Great God Om, shaking ink off a tiny toenail. “Nothing wrong with tortoises. Good solid animal. Dependable.”

“Yes,” Brutha said, thoughtfully. “They rather are. Drekh Frighten-the-Heretic-with-Irons, you can come in now.”

✥

“How shall I sing to my God in a foreign land,” Brutha murmured, pressing a hand flat against the endless marble columns of the Seriph’s palace. The Klatchian wind had risen over the walls of the city, bringing sand in from the endless desert hubward, but most of the dust settled far below them, on more ordinary houses.

"Don’t,” said the tortoise by his ankle. “You haven’t got much of a singing voice.”

Al Kali fascinated Brutha, who had thought he was getting the full metropolitan experience visiting Ephebe. He had been wrong. Here, at the outer wall of the palace, the city had become quiet and thoughtful again, majestic in its own bulky sort of way.

 “It’s from the Prophet Zech,” Brutha said, almost absently, “by the river of Tsort, yea we sat and wept when we remembered our home. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. It’s quite a good passage, particularly the bits about slaying the Klatchian negotiators with the harpstrings.”

 “Zech,” Om said, “Zech… Zech… wasn’t he the one with the runny nose? Hay fever I always thought.”

“I never thought I’d ever step foot on soil so far from home,” Brutha said. If he turned his head just so, he could see the great circle sea curling out below the capital city. Beyond that, another shore. Beyond that, further still than he could see: Ankh-Morpork, fabled city of exotic sins and pleasures. His secretary of domestic offense was really riled up about it lately, for some reason.

“Not that I’m complaining,” Om said, “but what are we doing out here in the arse end of nowhere?”*

“The Klatchian cultural attaché tells me that the prince’s palace is at the center of the universe,” Brutha replied. “But of course, everyone knows that’s the Citadel of the Cenobiarch.”

 Om cocked one orange eye up at Brutha. It was hard to tell these days how much he meant the things he repeated.

 “Come on, then,” Om said, “let’s hit a bar before things get too political to have any fun.”

 Brutha blinked down at him. “You’re a turtle. And I’m the Cenobiarch.”

 Om snorted, which was a tricky thing for a reptile. “I’m a deity,” he said, “and you’re a man. They can have us back tomorrow.”

The Omnian delegates were not staying in the Palace, with one deliberate exception. Brutha had thought that perhaps offering only him a room here in this grand building was intended to make him proud and malleable, or to make him nervous with isolation. What it had done, instead, was offer him a blessed respite from the crowding of the delegation party. Everyone was underfoot, and overbusy, and unsure if they could trust the young Cenobiarch to deal appropriately with foreign officials. Brutha had a worrying tendency to repeat things back to people that were not meant to be repeated or even remembered.

They had arrived at the city gates an hour before, dusty and irritable, and Brutha had quietly departed from the herd in order to examine the city for himself, before the tour guides could tell him precisely what to think about it all. He was not due to meet with the Seriph until morning, and his party would probably not look for him tonight. Why should they? A leader is not actually necessary to the basic running of a political party.

 “But I don’t have any money,” Brutha said.

 “Eh,” Om said, trying not to sound too keen, “we’ll hustle some.”

 Brutha crossed his arms. “That’s hardly appropriate behavior for a national representative.” 

“Well I’m not just going to conjure coins out of thin air, am I? No respectable god would stoop.”

They stared at each other for a moment, which required a little bit of strain on the posture of both. At last, Om pulled his neck back and set his sights on the city down below.

“What?” Brutha said. “What are you thinking?”

In a moment of simple somethingness, the tortoise ceased to be. On the top step of the Palace stairs, instead, there was a precise copy of Officer Simony, who fastidiously adjusted the lock of hair swiped back from his forehead.

 “Relax,” Om said, now shaking out the line of his tunic, “I’m just going to borrow some money. No trouble.”

“But—” Brutha began. Empty evening was all that received his complaint.

*Klatch had been renowned as the Disc’s greatest center of history and culture for more than five hundred years, but that didn’t mean Om had to acknowledge it.

✥

In a Klatchian bar, located directly across from a coffee shop with a foreboding front, many blocks from the palace, Brutha sang. His body was slung heavily over a tall harp. The song was a peasants’ lament written almost a thousand years before, which had scaled its way up one era of conservatism to another until it was known as the hymn of hymns, revered and routinely memorized by the most discerning, hierarchical type of clergy.

There was a small crowd of drunken patrons hunched over their cups around him, crying manfully into their drinks (and womanfully, in one case). The harpist didn’t mind—he was one of those snubbed talents too good to really belong in a tavern and too stubborn to take on with a patron. Jhon at the bar, as they say, was a friend of his.

“That boy sure can sing,” said the heavily swathed patron seated on the stool beside the Lord of Lords. 

“If you want to call it that,” Om replied. 

Brutha was still not a particularly good singer. He had learned hymns on the end of his grandmother’s sandal and had no training in pitch or projection. What he did have, in spades, was certainty. The truth of the world is that you can do anything, as badly as you want, if you have complete confidence in yourself. Many folk bands in other pockets of the multiverse have made careers off this little quirk of psychology. Brutha was a waterfall of certainty, crashing slightly off key through the dark wooden grotto of the Klatchian bar. There was no waver about him, only the pure and absolute movement from one phrase to the next. Om watched him with unblinking eyes. That certainty had drawn him up out of the sand and into consciousness—had carried him through the desert and placed him to tower once more over the streets of Omnia. 

It wasn’t right, he thought with a vague ripple of resentment. Humans are supposed to spellbound by gods, not the other way around. 

“Until the day breathes,” Brutha sang, “and the shadows flee, and you rest among the stones-” 

“Morbid song, huh?” Om said, throat dry, turning to the veil-wrapped patron beside him. 

“Is it?” she replied, apparently too dumbstruck to keep track of lyrics. 

“It’s Omnian,” the God said, a little sourly. “They all are.” 

Behind the netted veil, the patroness blinked rapidly. It was as if she were surfacing from a deep dive. “Omnian?” she said. She sounded as if she were frowning deeply. “Why would anybody sing those bastards songs?” 

Om glanced nervously at the door. “Er,” he said. “Dunno. Good question.” 

The patroness wobbled to her feet. She was apparently not part of the cult of Offler, if she was as tipsy as all that. Not that there was a whole lot of reason for an Offlerian to be sitting at a bar, but stranger things had happened. She swung herself upright, fumbling a short knife from her cloak. 

“Hold on now,” Om said, belatedly coming to his feet as well. “There’s no need for any of that.” 

“You!” the patron said, looking down the length of the knife she had now pointed at Brutha. “Young man! Why are you singing those Omnian pig's songs?” 

Pausing mid-verse, Brutha peeled himself up from the harp he had been slung over. He looked sleepy, almost, lax with the one drink that Om had pushed into his hands when they arrived. Lightweight, Om thought. He thought this with more vitriol than the situation properly warranted. 

“They’re the only songs I know,” Brutha answered. Around him the quality of the sudden silence was thickening, in the way that all sustained silence in bars must thicken. 

He looked so soft—at some point in the evening he had pulled off his over-tunic and discarded it on a chair, leaving himself too exposed for such public scenery. For a terrible moment Om wanted to drag him up in his arms and carry him away. Purple whorls of scar tissue spilled out from beneath his clothes. When Brutha shifted, the sleeve of his under-tunic slipped down his shoulder, and the memory of the machine that had left those burns punched right through the God all over again. The machine, the crowded square, Vorbis—Om had been battered by these tortuously tactile memories of it for a year, at the worst possible moments. It frightened him. He had never heard of a God being so troubled by a memory before.

It was probably the terrible physicality of the memory that got Om off his chair so fast. Before he quite knew what he was doing, he had crossed the tavern floor and gotten one arm* around his prophet.

“You give us any trouble,” he said, drawing Brutha in closer, “and you’ll have to answer to me.”

The crowd of patrons looked over the modestly intimidating body of Officer Simony, he of the rippling biceps and serious boots. The more sober of the crowd reluctantly drew back, keeping an eye on the center of action from their hunched vigil over their drinks. The sizable minority who had drunk all their common sense along with the worm at the bottom of the glass didn’t move an inch.

“Yeah,” the veiled patroness asked, “and who are you?”

“I’m—” Om paused and glared down at the elbow Brutha was digging into his side. Brutha shook his head, made an overexaggerated shushing motion. Om hissed out a frustrated breath. Fine. “I’m—I’m officer Simony and, I’ll arrest any pushy bastard who wants to have a go at an officer of the law.”

“Ummm,” Brutha hummed quietly, “I don’t think they have secret police here…”

“Oh,” Om said. He wracked his centuries of memory for an alternative. His heart sank. “Just regular watchmen, then?”

“Think so,” Brutha said.

“Damn,” Om said.

With the arm that wasn’t holding Brutha, the God reached out and promptly flipped over the entire table next to him. This would have been an impossible feat for the real officer Simony, but since Om had never stopped to consider that, the fact did not hinder him. Cups and small plates shattered across the floor, scattering confused patrons as Om made a mad dash for the door, dragging Brutha stumbling behind him. Half a dozen men shouted in rage. They burst out into the dark street and kept going, sandals slapping limestone, ducking between the lopsided walls of buildings older than the empire itself. Brutha tripped, remaining in motion only through the single-minded focus of the God dragging him up the side of a wall, as if gravity were an inconvenient after-thought. Sleeping shopkeepers above their storefront dreamed of distant cursing, and impossibly swift turtles.

At last Om broke stride on the hill above the harbor, in the yard of some minor official or another. The moon above them was white as the marble of the distant palace, the garden and the sea both silver and sharp under its light. Om collapsed against the wall of the house, the hand that was not still clutching Brutha’s pressed flat against the stone for support.

“Thunderbolts,” Om panted, “thunderbolts to—”

Beside him, Brutha was breathing hard as well, but mostly standing—his eyes were on the harbor.

“—and their abominable ankles to swell and fester,” Om concluded, with a little satisfaction. He spit a mouth full of saliva onto the sand, an unexpected and unpleasant side effect of all the panting. He looked over at Brutha, ready to do a quiet check for injuries, and found himself blindsided instead.

Brutha’s cheeks were rushed with blood, his eyes drink-glassy and wide, his breaths coming in quick bursts. In the center of the courtyard, among the burgeoning succulents, he was a dark mountain spire, a coolness as sweet as anything a human tongue had ever thirsted for.

Brutha caught the God’s eye, pinning him as surely as the end of any despot’s pike.

“Huh,” Brutha said, reaching out. “You still have tortoise eyes.”

Om blinked. Brutha’s hand was on his cheek, unsteadily turning him for a better look. Ten thousand years of curses on the obscure delicacy of human bodies, and whatever it was that made his skin burn underneath the touch.

“You do, don’t you?” Brutha said. “Simony’s eyes don’t look like that.”

“Er,” Om managed, “no. I mean, yes, it’s a—metathaumacle whatsit.”

Brutha seemed satisfied with that. He let go, leant his shoulder against the God’s. He was looking again at the harbor, the shattered moonlight on the currents of the circle sea. “Twice I’ve been to a bar with you,” he said, absently. “D’you suppose that makes us friends?”

Om froze. “I didn’t give you a Morpork Iced Tea did I?” he asked, forcing an uncertain laugh. 

At the place where their arms met, whorls of dark scar tissue began their searing journey across the prophet’s back. Om’s breath caught in his throat—the heat of that day, the swarming courtyard from high above, the smell of coal and burning flesh—and choked him.

“We—” he started. “We forgot your tunic in the tavern.”

“Oh.” Brutha seemed more troubled by this than anything preceding it. He cupped a hand around his exposed shoulder, his sweat growing cold in the night air. “That’ll be embarrassing tomorrow. Maybe we—”

But the God was gone, all at once, leaving the garden as still and untouched as if he had never arrived. Brutha frowned, gave the harbor one last thoughtful look, and retrieved the tunic that lay crumpled at his feet. There was a long morning ahead of him. He had best make his way back to the palace.

**a very sturdy arm, one of Officer Simony’s

✥

Brutha stepped out of the Seriph’s reception chambers with a heavy sigh, leaving behind the rich forest of fabrics for the relief of smooth marble pillars. The hall overlooked a courtyard where servants were coming and going, unseen by the lords that passed about above them. Brutha watched a tower of laundry disappear into darkness below the railing, a single scrap of white silk fluttering from the stack and onto the much-trampled grass. He considered it for a moment, and then with a little difficulty swung himself under the rail and climbed down the trellis below. The wood creaked, but held firm. He retrieved the silk from the grass, brushed a powder of dust from it, and tucked it carefully into his stole.

Servants gave him curious looks as they passed, but for the most part were too busy about their duties to give him much thought. The door through which the laundry had disappeared was propped open, the room beyond it indistinct but sharp with the smell of soap. For a moment Brutha stood with his eyes closed, remembering the alkaline smell of his grandmother’s washing room, where they had mixed oils and salts together for one excruciating week every year, when the rains came in the spring and there had been water everywhere, plentiful and easy to collect for soap-making. It had been hard work, raw-skinned work. He missed it.

Om found Brutha perhaps an hour later, elbow deep in suds.

“Not really traditional work for a Cenobiarch,” the God remarked, sniffing a little bit in distaste and a little bit for the smell of the workshop.

Brutha shrugged. “The Seriph wants me to sweat for a while. I might as well do something useful while I’m working it up.”

He lifted his head, belatedly, and took note of the form his God was wearing this morning. Regardless of whose mouth he used, Brutha always knew without question when it was Om addressing him. Today Om was the double of a beautiful scullery maid who had left the washroom a quarter hour before, a facsimile exact except for the slightly inhuman shape of the eyes, and the color—red, Brutha noted, the red of strange sands.

“Why don’t you ever come as yourself?” he asked, returning to his work.

By the sound of it, Om was frowning. “I am myself.”

Brutha glanced up, gave a meaningful look at the head maid lurking at the front of the washroom. “If you’re going to appear like a servant you had better at least look like you’re working. Give me a hand here.”

Om curled his pink lip at the tub between them. He shifted from foot to foot, arms crossed in front of him. “I don’t know how,” he hedged.

“Here,” Brutha said, reaching out. He took Om’s hands between his and pressed them into the fragrant liquid. “I’ll show you. You can just do what I do.”

Om was staring at their joined hands as if he had never seen human hands before. Brutha let go, set back to work, taking care to make his movements broad and simple. After a moment, Om followed suit.

“I meant,” Brutha said, “how come you always look like someone else? You must have your own shape. Everybody does.”

A curl of amber hair slipped over the God’s ear. He seemed sour with the whole situation, the question not least. After a moment of silence, he replied, “Well I couldn’t very well wear it here could I?”

“No?”

“No,” Om said, his mouth pressing flat. “I picked up a bit too much tortoise for my own vanity. You know how the shape of the body influences the mind?”

“Yes,” Brutha said, “you told me that.”

“Well it goes the other way too,” Om informed him, unhappily. “I won’t be winning any beauty pageants anymore.”

Brutha considered this for a while, trading out one load of silks for another. A maid picked up the wet load for drying, giving Om a dubious look as she passed. There would be gossip, possibly, for the poor girl whose body Om had borrowed. Hopefully nothing too dire, although Brutha was already on thin ice if the head maid noticed that he wasn't part of the regular staff.

“I’m certain that you look exactly as you should,” Brutha said, at last.

“What a lot of good it does me,” Om retorted. “I used to be a great fiery bull. Now that was a body.”

“You have beautiful eyes though,” Brutha said. “I’m sure that the rest of you is just as nice. Strange can be beautiful too. My grandmother used to say you should never trust people who are too pretty, since they’re usually painted Jezebels. It’s always better to be what you are.”

Om made an uncertain noise low in his throat.

“I’d like to see you,” Brutha concluded. “I’d like it. I know I would.”

Om didn’t reply. They worked quietly for a long time after that, absorbed in the soft rhythm of labor shared.

✥

Not quite a caravan, not quite a war party, the Omnian delegation stretched over the sand in the formation of a particularly frazzled snake. Brutha had taken up the rear, on foot, out of the way of the process. It was the best place to think, if you didn’t mind watching where you walked—the low sun and the harsh scrape of the air, the solitude. No one had paid him any attention since they left the city, and he was happy enough for it to stay that way. In a way Brutha was deeply grateful for the diplomatic staff, who couldn’t care less who the Cenobiarch was as long as he stood still for the reception ceremony. Vorbis would have eaten them all alive and picked his teeth with their memo books.

It was a few hours walk to the river where their remounts were waiting, still more hours to the walls of Kom. The sea lay far behind them, as harsh and endless as it ever had been. Beyond that, Al Kali. Still further, the plains, Sto Lat, Ank-Morpork, the mountains, the hub of the world… and Cori Celesti.

“Om,” he said, “I believe in you.”

There were abruptly two sets of footprints in the sand behind the lumbering convoy.

“What?” Om said.

“Oh, I thought you might need the boost?” Brutha said. “You don’t seem very popular with the other gods.”

Om let out a little breathy noise that wasn’t exactly a denial. His lips were the lacquered black of priceless wood—his skin rich with patterns of yellow and green and orange, his nose hooked. There was indeed quite a lot of tortoise still about him, almost scale-glittering in the sunlight. Brutha returned his attention to the path, satisfied.

“I like it,” he said, with finality.

“Huh,” Om said. “Well that’s fine for you, isn’t it.”

Brutha smiled to himself. “Will you stay?” he asked.

“I’ve had quite enough of trudging through the desert,” Om replied, kicking at a patch of sand. His golden sandals were the most exquisite things Brutha had ever seen. “I’d rather take my chances with the bastards up on the mountain.”

“Please yourself,” Brutha said.

The sun set behind the convoy, painting Brutha’s back alone the orange of strange sands.

✥

Once upon a time, the great and honorable prophet Brutha walked with God in the Cenobiarch’s gardens.

“There’s no such thing as a perfect peace, it seems,” Brutha said.

i. Wherever there’s something worth having there’s something worth stealing.

“I’m worried,” Brutha admitted. “Anyone who’s been in that many wars will have gotten good at it. They have to, otherwise they couldn’t keep getting into them.”

ii. That’s irrelevant. The point is, our walls are better.

“Objectively,” Brutha said, “that may not be true.”

Brutha paused in his path among the succulents and desert roses, eyes dark with a lack of prophecy. He turned to Om, and he was as solid and unbent as the day he had stood in the town square to receive his deliverance. His fingers were brown with the golden darkness of desert sands. He brushed one heavy hand along the sharp line of the God’s jaw, glittering scale, a reassuring touch.

iii. I promised you a hundred years

“I know,” Brutha said. “And that will be true until the day I start to count on it.”

iv. No, it’ll be true until I bloody well say it isn’t.

Brutha’s lips cracked into a half smile. He was not handsome in the way of Tsortian statues—he had never quite shed that burnt and half-starved look he had carried out of the desert. The skin of his upper arms was perpetually loose around his bones. His shoulders were waxen with octagons of skin burnt years ago. Om watched the half smile break over his lips like a sunrise above a canyon and could not bear to look away.

“There are worse things than dying,” Brutha said.

v. You prophet types always say that, but you're awfully vague about the alternatives. Load of nonsense if you ask me.

“That’s why you’re a god,” Brutha said, kindly, “and not a prophet.”

Brutha dropped his hand and returned to the garden path. The cactus flowers were blooming in the dry season, a miracle of Om’s Divine Manifestation. The God, watching Brutha pass a hand over one bloom, could not have cared less for all the impossible flowers of the fabled Hersheban gardens while Brutha’s sand-dark skin was outstretched above them, perfect and impossibly ephemeral.

Brutha looked back after a moment, but he was no longer walking with God.

✥

Brutha had given the benediction every year since they had made him Cenobiarch. In the Omnian church of previous authorities, the service had generally been a day long affair with innumerable readings and a multi-part sermon, and a byzantine system of call and response interspersed with enough kneeling to throw an incautious knee out. Under Brutha, it was becoming shorter and shorter.

For the first time in his entire existence, Om watched the service unfold. There was an awful lot of gold leaf, which he liked, and chanting, which he could take or leave. Oh, sure, the chanting was expected alright, but it was a bit much to actually sit through. So far he’d waited through several passages detailing miracles he would swear he had never sanctioned, read by a junior priest doing his damndest not to let his voice crack in front of an audience.

Om hovered in the loft, among the servants and the visiting merchants and the organ pipes, watching the crowd.

Brutha stepped up to the altar at last. In a tomb of gold filigree and carved cedar he looked alive, sunlit and humble among the delicate decorations. It was exactly as Om had feared. He felt his whole being, incorporeal and towering, shake under the weight of that one human presence. Brutha had not moved the mountain—Brutha was the mountain.

Kneel before your God, Om nearly shouted. He imagined himself huge and terrible among the rafters of the temple, soft little bodies below him cowering in fear, faces pressed to the floor. Be afraid, he could demand, throw yourself on my mercy.

Brutha looked up. The chalice in his hand was as steady as it could be, and his eyes were only searching, curious, thoughtful. He was a man peering through the window in search of expected visitors, preparing a seat at the table just in case. His shadow-cast eyes held nothing back.

Om’s presence recoiled, withdrew into the shadow of the organ pipes. He could take a form now, could come down the long aisle to the altar and keel there, press his forehead to the ground in front of the prophet. He felt the urge like a kind of insanity. Kneel before—

Om retreated in a single impulse of thought to the Cenobiarch’s garden, where the cactus flowers were already beginning their impossible resurgence. The fountains glittered. Have mercy, he thought, distantly. For somebody’s sake, would you have some mercy on me.

✥

“It’s going to be the library,” Brutha told him, a load of wooden slats balanced precariously on one shoulder. “I want it to be just as important as the temple. Maybe more.”

Om, in the shape of a girl Brutha had once known in his grandmother’s village, regarded the cement foundation skeptically. He’d never seen stone like that before and he wasn’t much impressed.

“Didactylos has found a buyer for some of the copies of Lavaeolus’ Tsortian Complaints I drew up and it turns out they’re even more expensive than we thought they were. I’ve moved construction up since we have the funds—I think this is going to be good for the economy… Urn has been trying to teach me about financial theory but Didactylos says he’s going about it all wrong so we never seem to get anywhere.”

Om lifted a complicated measuring tool, still skeptical. In his experience, you showed up as a great fiery whatsit in some wealthy king’s dreams and temples just sort of… appeared, as a consequence. The actual act of building struck him as excessive.

He trailed after Brutha for a while, as the Cenobiarch explained his plans, mostly just listening. Brutha had quite a lot of plans, all of them related in one way or another, and so he still had not run out of things to talk about when the workmen whistled for an end to the day. The two of them—a young man and a girl to the rest of the world, perhaps even friends—paused in the street to watch the men leaving. The sky cast everything in a peculiar shade of purple, the shadows and the very dust in the air. Beside him, Brutha looked satisfied.

“I used to think that a Cenobiarch had to live a certain way,” he remarked, watching one workman roll up his tools. “Because Vorbis used to live a certain way. But Vorbis was Vorbis, and I’m me. And I think I’ll live the way I want to.”

Om glanced at him, trying not to look too closely. He was wary of what he might see. “Most humans like the servants and the mountains of pillows. Can’t tell you how many prayers I get.”

“I betook myself to pleasures,” Brutha said. “Everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.”

“Zech?” Om guessed.

“Zech,” Brutha agreed.

The fruit vendors were storing up the last of their wares—Kom was not as large or as lively as Al Kali, where the vendors remained and the lamps were lit in the store fronts late into the darkness. Here, the salesmen rolled up their lives like bedrolls, packed away for another morning. In the Kom that Brutha imagined, the nighttime streets rang with laughter and shouting.

“All things pass eventually,” Brutha said, “pleasure and legacies both. There’s no perfect peace, but there’s also no truly endless war. Here and now, we are alive.”

“Who said that?” Om asked, brow furrowing.

“Me,” Brutha said. “And you.”

Om looked down at Brutha’s hand, loose at his side. Possibly it was shape informing mind—the girl whose body he had borrowed had been very much the teenager—but he wondered what would happen if he were to reach out and take hold of it. Would the workmen think them a young couple? What would Brutha’s hand feel like—where were his callouses, which palm lines were deepest?

“So then what,” Om asked, although the philosophy of mortal lives had never been high on his list of interests. “Why bother, if it’s all pointless anyway?”

“While we live,” Brutha said, “we must tend our garden.”

Om felt a heaviness in the plurality of those pronouns, a weight. We, he thought, our. He stared at the work site, unseeing. Finally, he reached down and took Brutha’s hand in his, interlacing the fingers. Brutha made a confused noise.

“You mention this in any holy testament anywhere,” Om said, “and I mean, anywhere, and I’ll have you back on that iron turtle before you can say perdition.”

“Oh,” Brutha said. “Got it,” Brutha said, very clearly not getting it.

 But his hand remained where it was, warm and blunt and very, very human. We, Om thought. Our.

Chapter Text

Brutha’s rooms were often mistaken for those of the head of staff by new employees at the Citadel. It wasn’t that Brutha was particularly given to deny himself luxuries for the sake of denying himself luxuries, it was just that his idea of a luxury had stalled out somewhere around “mattress” and “table”.

Even so, the simple room was alive and rich with gifts from friends: a silver lamp brought back by Urn from the Sto Plains, a Hersheban carpet bought from a vendor who mistook the Prophet Brutha for a wandering monk, some lovely sturdy blankets from kitchen staff who often forgot the Cenobiarch wasn’t one of their grandchildren, and the mirror—Om’s one and only gift to his prophet.

“Here,” said the Great God Om, standing back to survey his work. “Now you can see yourself in the mornings.”

“But I don’t need to see myself,” Brutha said. He was seated among the piles of blankets on his low bed, bemused. “I've already seen what I look like.”

Om made a noise like an exasperated tea kettle and flicked the air, miraculously shifting the circle of glass an inch to the left. It was morning, technically, but the sky beyond the window was heavy with night. Brutha had not been to sleep yet, due to some commotion in the kitchens that he was presently explaining in a haphazard, preoccupied sort of way.

“So anyways,” Brutha went on, “we did have to throw out all the sheep eyes that came in today, but honestly I think the best dinner diplomacy is just to make whatever you’re good at and have a vegetarian option available. Smite-Them-Perniciously is beside himself about it all, he was dead set on having a D’rek delicacy for them. Why a mirror?”

“Huh?” Om said. He shifted the mirror back an inch.

“Why did you bring me a mirror?” Brutha asked. He paused, brow scrunching up. “And where did you get it? You didn’t steal it did you?”

Om glared out the corner of his eye at his prophet. “Gods don’t steal,” he replied. “I’m the Great God Om, I own everything. People are just… borrowing things from me for a while."

Brutha looked at him expectantly.

"But no, actually, I didn’t steal it. If you must know.”

“Did you make it?” Brutha said, graciously overlooking that bit of theological posturing. “I thought making things took a lot of power.”

“Well I am currently the most Believed In thing on the Disc, so I suppose I could have, but I’m no good at the fiddly bits,” Om said, gesturing to the scroll-work on the edge of the frame. “I shopped around in Al Kali for a bit. They were having a sale.”

“Where’d you get the money?”

“Lifted some from the coffers,” Om said. He frowned at the wall—was the mirror made wonky or something? Could you even wonk a circle? No wonder it was on sale.

“That’s my money,” Brutha said, “so it’s not really a gift, per say, is it?”

Om snorted. This was made easier by the shape he was wearing which was the same one he’d used to buy the thing: a certain young man who had said something heretical a few centuries ago and been spontaneously immolated for his cheek. Om admitted he had been a handsome one, and had always felt a little bad about being so trigger happy with the smiting flames. Possibly something could have been worked out—about that time Yonis, Goddess of Tittering and Rumors, had been showing off her new boytoy at the dice table and Om had felt a little bit Behind the Times.

“I went to the trouble of finding it,” he said. “It’s a gift.”

“Hm. But why a mirror, specifically?”

Om pursed his lips. “Well I imagine if I had to drag the same flesh apparatus around day after day I’d fancy a bit of a touch up now and then, wouldn't I?”

“I’m not as vain as you,” Brutha said, and probably only meant it as statement of fact. Probably.

There was a veil hanging from the ceiling around Brutha’s mattress, oddly luxurious compared to the simple bed beneath it, but that had been a gift as well. Something from the eldest prince in Klatch, a sort of generic gift with a bit of a derisive edge, but it was by far the most expensive thing in the room. The delicate fabric must have been the work of extremely skilled seamstresses. As he did with most of the diplomatic gifts he received, Brutha had tried to find someone within the citadel who wanted it (after waiting the obligatory month or so out of politeness), but in matter of fact it had been just a little too fancy. The serving staff had very serious views about what Sorts ought to have what Things, and although sumptuary laws hadn’t been on the books in Omnia for decades, they all shook their heads and clicked their tongues until he dragged it back up to his bedroom, quite put out. In the end he had simply accepted it, integrated it, and thought no more about it. Om often found himself eyeing the thing. Brutha’s blissful ignorance of its value drove him absolutely mad, like everything else about his prophet.

“So now you can start in on it,” Om replied testily.

“I wouldn’t even know how to,” Brutha mused, curiosity now firmly attuned to the mirror image of himself over the God’s shoulder.

Om grit his teeth—the impulse came with the body. “If the rest of us have to look at you all the bloody day,” he said, “then you should have to do it too.”

Brutha's gentle bemusement dropped away. He frowned. “You don’t need to insult me.”

“I’m not—” Om paused and turned, lost now. “What?”

“I know I’m not much to look at,” Brutha said, grimly touching the darkly scarred curve of his shoulder with one hesitant hand, “but it’s not so important, is it?”

“What?” Om said again.

“We can’t all change whenever we like, the way you can,” Brutha said. “Some of us have to live with what we’ve got.”

“Wait,” Om said, “weren’t you the one who gave me the whole lecture about beauty and strangeness and all that?” 

“I wasn’t lecturing.” Brutha traced the top of one shining whorl absently, as if he had forgotten his hand was there. “And I’m not the one with the fixation on beauty.”

“Alright, first off,” Om said, pointing sharply. “I’m not fixated. Gods have a—there’s a certain expectation, it’s not like I woke up one morning and decided to be shallow.”

“You don’t have to care about it just because they do,” Brutha pointed out, patiently.

“Second off,” Om plowed on, “you seem to be under the misapprehension that I’ve got some kind of problem with the way you look, which is a bit insulting, to be honest.”

“…Insulting?”

 “Yes,” Om said. He turned and jabbed at Brutha’s reflection in the mirror, which didn’t quite have the desired effect because from where Brutha was sitting he seemed to be about an inch off and pointing at the window. “What’s wrong with you, really? Some scarring? Maybe your face is a little sharper than other people’s? Anyways you could look like a troll and I’d still get distracted, petty mortal standards of prettiness hardly matter—what are you looking like that for?”

“You get distracted?” Brutha said. “Looking at me?”

“It’s not—I didn’t say—” Om blew out a huge irritated breath. His instincts told him to deny it, safely, and flip the conversation back on Brutha. But the whole point of this conversation was that Brutha had the wrong idea, and how could he flip it back on him without making him feel… worse?

Hellfire and damnation, Om would give just about anything to go back to not caring about how human beings felt.

“I guess I’ve noticed,” Brutha said, slowly, mostly talking to himself. “You look at me an awful lot more than most people do.”

“I just—well, what else am I supposed to look at? Sand? The sun? There’s not a lot out here that’s nice to stare at. I didn’t come down but every couple hundred years for a reason.”

“You think I look nice,” Brutha said, deliberately missing the point of that whole explanation.

“Ugh, it’s—” Om pinched his borrowed temples, “that’s not the point, the point is it doesn’t matter to me what you look like. Any way you look is… fine. With me.”

Brutha got up from the bed, made his way across the floor and took both of Om’s hands in his. “Hey,” he said, “I’ll let it go. I don’t want to make trouble.”

“That’s not trouble,” Om said, mournfully, “this is trouble.”

“What… is?”

Om looked deliberately down at their joined hands, which were warm and worryingly light and filling him with a sort of physical ecstasy he completely despaired of. “This,” he repeated. “Me. You. Me complimenting you.”

“Oh,” Brutha said. “It’s okay,” he said. “I wouldn’t get any ideas, I know it’s not—of course I’m just a human, at the end of the day, and you’re the Lord of Lords. It would be beneath your station to—”

“To what,” Om said, feeling uncomfortably like he was listening to his own inner dialogue repeated back to him. “Get chummy? I think we missed the boat on that one.”

“I would never expect anything of you,” Brutha soldiered on, “not like I’d expect from another person. I know that Gods don’t get close to humans, really.”

“Well some Gods do,” Om replied, unable to stop from shoving his foot deeper in his mouth. “I mean, in Tsort you can’t hardly keep some of them out of the brothels—”

 “Yes,” Brutha said, “but you’ve never been like that, have you? According to the Prophet Jeriha—”

“Bugger what the prophet Jeriha said,” Om snapped. “I never even met the bastard!”

There was a moment of silence in which the God stared determinedly at their joined hands and refused to look up.

“I think I’m lost,” Brutha said, still not letting go.

“Well you’re in good company,” Om muttered. He shook his hands free, with some effort. “Here, let go. What did Jeriah say about me?”

Brutha’s face took on that distant look he got when he was quoting voices from quite a long time ago. “The Lord your God desires not to debase himself in flesh but rather to abide in the spirit,” he said, “for he abideth not in desire which leads to sin. Not like those bastards on the other side of the mountain. There was a schism going on at the time.”

“Prophets,” Om grumbled, “maybe if they gave the flesh a chance once in a while they wouldn’t be such mucks about it all.”

“Is this one of those things that you said but you didn’t really say,” asked Brutha, who was quite a bit faster on the uptake these days. It was almost like they were getting somewhere.

“Look,” Om said, reaching up suddenly to catch Brutha’s jaw in both hands, “what if, hypothetically, I said Jeriha was a blubbering nitt and I wanted you to forget everything he ever said. Could you do that for me?”

“I can’t forget anything,” Brutha said, slightly squished sounding because of Om's hands. “Why?”

Om groaned. “You’re impossible to reason with.” 

“You’re still holding my face, you know.”

Om made a sound of exhausted rage that only a human throat could produce, pulled Brutha in, and kissed him. Or approximated a kiss, at any rate. The Great God had actually no idea what he was doing, having come fully grown and largely formless into the world and thus missing the entire unpleasant business of adolescence in which one learns the ineffable mysteries of kissing. He was at least ninety percent certain lips should be touching at all times.

Brutha made a sound remarkably similar to a smooshed “Umm”. Om snapped back from the contact immediately.

“That’s,” Om said, “that is–”

Brutha touched his lips with two fingers. He seemed a trifle dazed.

“I think you should consider,” Om said, swallowing thickly, “the benefits of– um– that is, it’s a great honor for a God to– and anyways it’s not as if you’re rolling in love letters right now, is it?”

“But,” Brutha said. 

“Of course I can be any way you like,” Om barreled on, trying desperately not to sound like he was making a sales pitch. “There’s a reason why gods are so popular with the shepherd lads and the peasant girls. You wouldn’t believe how many of them start paying special attention when they realize you can turn into a bull. Nobody’s keen to admit it, though.”

“No,” Brutha said. 

“I once knew a Deity from Lancre who–” Om plowed onwards.

“Hey,” Brutha said, grabbing hands for the second time that evening. It was enough to entirely derail the Great God’s train of thought. “No.”

“No?” Om said, heart sinking. Figured didn't it, the one mortal who could knot the Great God Om up into a tangled mess would also be the one mortal who was too good for interspecies snogging. That was life wasn't it, a right laugh from start to finish. Did he feel a fool or what.

“No,” Brutha said again. “If we’re going to… be anything, it’s going to be us. Only us. I don’t want you to look like anything else. Just be… you.”

“Oh,” Om said. “Ah. So then, you do–?”

Brutha looked down, at their hands, and then looked up. He smiled. It was as if the dawn had broken through the window. “If you promise to stop spending my money,” he said, “then, yes, why not.”

The two of them, in the mirror, seemed oddly matched – Om allowed himself to slide back into his true shape, scales and patterns of color and all. Oddly matched for sure: soft and hard, brown and black, human and very, very inhuman. What a pair they were.

Brutha met his round orange eyes in the mirror, still smiling.

“Who else,” Brutha said. “Who else could I love, really?”