The shadows had been lengthening since Ra's light, and now they were everywhere.
They crept across the grass in soft, patient tides and wrapped every ankle, and where they touched, the gods felt something go thin inside them. It was subtle. A man might have missed it. But a thin cold ran up from the earth into the legs of every god in the garden, tasting them, and their power dimmed like lamps in a draft.
Damien took one step and was no longer in front of them.
The first to die was Sekhmet.
She was Ra's own daughter, a lioness in a woman's shape, goddess of slaughter and plague, and she met the dark with a roar that rolled across the lake and flattened every reed on its shore. It was a sound that had broken armies. She dropped onto all fours and ran at the place where she had last seen him, claws flexing, mane of red hair streaming.
Damien came out of the echo of her roar.
He stepped out of the sound itself. One moment it was a thing she had made, and the next it was a doorway with a man in it, and a dagger of black fire in his hand. He put the blade into her open mouth. The flame ran down her throat and the roar went silent, not quenched but unmade, and in the last heartbeat before she fell she reached up to touch her own face and found that the lioness was gone. The plague was gone. The slaughter was gone. There was only a woman, frightened and small, and then there was nothing at all.
Ra saw it from fifty paces away and made a sound like a man choking on a stone.
Xipe Totec went next. He was the Lord of the Flayed Spring, and he wore the skin of the sacrificed like a robe of dark red leather. No blade or fire could finish him, because whatever was wounded he simply shed, and stepped out of it new. He had survived ten thousand years of war that way. He laughed when Damien's dagger found his ribs, split along the spine, and slid out of the ruined skin, glistening and unmarked.
Damien's dagger found his ribs again.
Xipe Totec shed a second skin, and laughed less. A third. A fourth. Each discarded skin fell steaming to the grass, and the black fire caught it, and the skin did not burn. It was erased. With every rebirth there was a little less of him standing in the place where he should have been, a thinner body, a smaller shape. The flame was eating the idea of renewal, the very concept the god was built on, and he could feel it going out of him piece by piece.
On the ninth shedding there was nothing underneath. He stood shaking in the grass, bare muscle and bone, scraping at his own shoulders with raw red fingers, reaching for a skin that would never come. Damien watched him do it for a long moment, patient and unhurried.
Then he cut the god's throat.
Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, was cleverer. He wore a disk of black obsidian on his chest and walked between reflections the way other men walk between rooms. He stepped into the flat face of a fallen sword and out of the polished surface of Ra's ankh, and he stepped into the lake, and appeared above Damien, behind him, beside him, a dozen knives flickering from one angle to the next, always in the one place his enemy was not looking.
The trouble was that every reflective surface in the garden belonged to Damien.
Tezcatlipoca stepped through the lake and found a hand waiting on the other side. It closed around his wrist. He screamed and tried to pull back, and Damien pulled harder, dragging him out through the glass of the water like a man hauling a fish onto a bank. The god landed on his knees in the wet sand. Damien set one boot on his back and pressed the flat of a dagger against the obsidian disk.
The mirror turned black with fire. The black ran across his skin in veins and spread into every reflection in the garden at once, and every mirror Tezcatlipoca had ever stepped through turned to ash. In the lake, his image stared up from the water and mouthed something silent. Then the surface of the water cracked like glass, and the image was gone.
The Morrigan did not run.
She came as three crows, then as a woman in a gown of feathers with eyes the color of old blood, and she stood in the middle of the garden with both hands open as if welcoming guests. She had foretold the deaths of kings. She had stood on a hundred battlefields before the first blade fell.
"I saw this," she said, when Damien appeared in front of her with a dagger in each hand. "I saw every one of us dying in this place. I told Zeus. He would not listen."
"Then you know how it ends," Damien said.
"I do." Her smile was thin and sad and not entirely unkind. "I only did not know how long it would take."
The shadows rose around her in a quiet net, and she did not fight them. Damien drew a dagger across her throat, almost gently, and she closed her eyes before she fell.
Mictlantecuhtli, Lord of the Dead, brought his army.
He wore an owl's mask with a hollow beak and a necklace of finger bones, and when he drove his staff into the sand at the water's edge the whole garden trembled. The lakebed cracked open. Skeletons clawed up out of the muddy shallows by the hundreds, soldiers of every age and nation, rusted armor hanging off their ribs, their eyeless sockets turning one by one toward the man in black.
Damien looked at them.
They looked back. A long, strange moment passed. Then, one at a time, they knelt.
They were the dead, and the dead have always belonged to the dark, and there was no darkness in any world deeper than the one standing in front of them. Mictlantecuhtli screamed commands. The bones did not move. When Damien lifted a single finger and pointed, a thousand rattling skulls turned as one and fell upon their master. The god went under a tide of bone and rusted iron. His mask split. The sound that rose from the pile went on for a very long time.
The others followed.
The gods who had thundered across the sky with banners of storm and sun died one by one at the foot of a quiet waterfall, and no two of them died the same way. Damien did not rush. He walked among them as a hunter walks through a forest, and he struck from the grass, from the spray of the falls, from the reflection in a startled eye. A god turned his head and found a black dagger waiting in the corner of his own vision. Another stepped back and the sand beneath his heel rose up to swallow him. Another tried to flee along the river and met himself coming the other way, a shadow with a knife.
Every death was different. Every death was terrible. Every death left the garden a little quieter, and a little darker, and a little fuller of the sound of someone breathing very fast.
At the end there were four.
Hou Yi stood with his back against a tree and his bow drawn to the ear.
He had stopped speaking. He had loosed shaft after shaft into the dark, and each one had flown true, and each one had been swallowed without a sound. His last arrow was wherever Damien had left it, and he knew it.
"Come," he said to the dark. "Come and let me see you."
Damien walked out of the shadow of the tree.
He did not try to hide. He stepped into the faint glow of the lake with the black arrow tucked through his belt and fire trailing from his daggers, and looked at the archer with calm, attentive eyes. Hou Yi reached for the arrow at Damien's belt, and found his own quiver empty. The arrow was no longer in Damien's belt. It was in Damien's hand.
"It is a very good arrow," Damien said. "It only needed to be pointed in a new direction."
He drove it through Hou Yi's left eye.
The archer screamed and went down on his knees with both hands clawing at the shaft. Damien's dagger flashed, once and then again, and the god's arms came away at the elbows and fell to the grass still gripping nothing. The scream turned into a thin wet whistle. The great bow dropped from his fingers.
Damien caught it before it landed.
He turned the long weapon over in his hands, admiring the lacquered grain, the dark sheen of the string. Then he set one end against his knee and broke it in half. The two ends were splintered and white and sharp. He knelt beside the swaying god and set the first splinter against his remaining eye, and pressed it forward with the heel of his hand.
The last piece went into the open mouth. He pushed until the tip came out through the back of the skull.
Hou Yi's body went rigid, shuddered once, and fell sideways in the sand.
Damien rose, wiped his daggers on his sleeve, and turned around.
Three gods were staring at him.
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