Page 60 of Inkpot Gods

“Dodge, you bet me a week’s dishes. How am I supposed to pay up right now?” Roger sounds tired. Lilianne’s only known them for a few minutes, and she can already tell that having Dodger for a sister must be absolutely exhausting.

“That’s your problem,” says Dodger, shrugging off his concern.

Lilianne feels like she’s going to lose the breakfast she hasn’t had yet all over their kitchen floor. James Reed died because he managed to embody the Doctrine of Ethos. Everyone knows he succeeded, just like everyone knows he was behind the bombing that killed much of the American Congress. There’s no proof, no one is ever going to be able to provide an actual timeline of events that paints him guilty in the eyes of the unconvinced, but still, everyone knows.

As to the Doctrine, Lilianne knows he succeeded with them because her own parents told her so, right before they went back to building the next iteration of their labyrinth. All the incarnate forces knew when he harnessed the Doctrine and sealed it in human skin. That big a disturbance in the nature of reality wasn’t exactly subtle, wasn’t precisely the sort of thing that could be overlooked so easily.

She’s been dealing with incarnate forces since she was conceived; her mother was already sworn to serve the autumn when Lilianne was gestating in her womb, and there’s never been a time when she knew her parents as anything other than slightly otherworldly. And that doesn’t make this any easier. The Doctrine is huge, a god-level power—true gods, the ones who stopped incarnating long ago, because they no longer fit within the confines of the world. The various lunar and oceanic gods may manifest, but Zeus doesn’t. The ones who can remake reality in their own image don’t appear anymore.

She can’t be here. She can’t be in a room with these people, who barely understand how to be people, who are more like concepts thinly wrapped in sinew and skin. She has to go.

Lilianne begins to turn away, pulling her hand out of Smita’s in the process.

She doesn’t even have time to take a step toward the door before Erin is asking, tone mild, “Going somewhere, alchemist? But you haven’t had your breakfast yet. And you haven’t explained what the fuck you’re doing in our city. You want to come sit down and take care of things before you go?”

“No,” says Lilianne. “I want to go. I can’t— I shouldn’t— This is not a safe place for me to be.”

“Why not? Did you have bad intentions toward the occupants of this house? Should we be making sure you can’t leave, no matter how much you might want to? Come and sit down. Eat your breakfast. Answer our questions.” Erin’s voice remains level throughout, the kind of perfect calm one hears from people on the absolute edge of losing their tempers. “You’re already here, Lilianne. You can’t get out of here without us letting you, and we’re not ready to let you yet. This doesn’t have to be unpleasant. You have a choice in how this is going to go.”

Lilianne casts a desperate glance at Smita, then sags. “I’ll eat,” she says.

“Good.”

Lilianne turns back toward the table—as promised, another chair has been produced, pushed up against the one empty space like an invitation she isn’t allowed to refuse. She walks over, slowly, and pulls out the chair even more slowly. Its legs scrape against the tile, loud and unforgiving, and she swallows as she sits, all too aware of the eyes on her.

“Maybe we should all introduce ourselves,” says Smita, “so we can stop terrifying my houseguest?”

“Is it really a guest when you dig it out of the basement of a sealed alchemical lab and let it bleed all over the living room floor?” asks Erin. There’s a thin line of malice in her voice that wasn’t there before. She walks up behind Smita, dropping a bowl of oatmeal onto the table in front of her, not quite hard enough to spill, but definitely high enough that Lilianne jumps. “Eat,” she instructs, and walks away again.

“Thank you?” says Lilianne, twisting to watch her walk away. “I really don’t mean to be a bother—”

“But you are, and sometimes we just need to come to terms with that,” says Erin, returning to the stove.

This is already going well. Lilianne turns back to the table, where the Lunar she met before meets her eyes and gestures extravagantly to herself.

“I’m Artemis,” she says. “Goddess of the moon and the hunt.”

“Most Lunars don’t introduce themselves as their divinity,” says Lilianne, off-kilter from the oddness of that introduction.

“Most Lunars aren’t as old as I am,” says Artemis. “My mortal host is named Anna, and she’s not really with us anymore, thanks to an alchemist named James Reed who got hold of her while she was in a bad mental place. He put her in a worse one. Really, I think you’ll find that a lot of the problems in this house come from alchemists in general, and that man in specific. I introduce myself by my divinity because I never step down anymore. I’m always awake, and I’m always Artemis.”

“A lot of the problems, most of the people,” says the orange woman. “My name is Kelpie, and I used to think I was an alchemist, until the Congress sent an inspector to shut down our lab and reallocate our resources. That’s when I found out I was actually an alchemical creation. I’m technically a cuckoo, since I’m a manufactured embodiment, but since I’m an embodiment of something that used to happen naturally, it’s a little hard to pin me down with a specific label like that. I’m Artemis’s Hind. I run before the Moon when it shines down on the Impossible City.”

“I am neither a consequence of nor a practitioner of alchemy,” says Judith, with a lazy wave. “I’m one of many current incarnations of Chang’e, goddess of the moon and keeper of the peaches of immortality. I keep the pantheon young for as long as it needs to be. And I had a hand in healing that shoulder of yours. You’re welcome, and call me ‘Judy.’ This ‘Judith’ bitch sounds stodgy as hell.”

“You— How?” asks Lilianne. “You’re not a god of healing. How did you—”

“You can’t be immortal if you’re dead,” says Judy. “Peach pulp from my trees can be used to patch up almost any wound, when absolutely necessary. Slapped a bunch of that stuff on your screwed-up shoulder, and we were able to get you a long way toward living. But it was a group effort, and I can neither claim nor desire all the credit.”

Lilianne’s eyes flick to David, and she tenses, waiting to hear what he’ll say.

He looks directly at her, arms still folded, and says, “We’ve met.”

“You’ve mentioned,” says Judy. “I didn’t expect this to come to a head quite so quickly when you told us that you thought one of your roommates was an alchemist. Have you considered taking another look at the other two?”

“They’re not alchemists,” says Lilianne. “I’d know by now if they were. They’re just normal people who had the bad luck to move in with me.”

“Unlike me,” says David.