Chapter 40— The plan Beneath the tide
The house on the black lake smelled, in equal parts, of salt and stories. Candles caught the corners of the room with patient flames; maps lay folded and refolded across the table like paper muscles. Makroz sat with his cup cupped in both hands, watching the steam curl up and break into shapes that were no one's business to name. Zed—Zed Zobop, who carried the kind of anger you can see like heat shimmer—kept his smile small and his hands smaller. He was a man who would explode if given polite company and not enough promise.
Mèt Agwe-Djall moved slow, as water does when it has a point to make. He listened to the two men without interrupting until the silence was heavy enough to be awkward, then he set a small bowl of salt near each of them and pushed the map toward Makroz with a forefinger that smelled faintly of brine.
"You want doors?" Agwe-Djall asked. His voice wasn't loud. It just filled the room the way a tide fills a bay—eventually everything felt its pressure.
Zed leaned forward until the light carved new edges through the lines of his face. "Yes. Doors. Windows. Keys. Anything to get my child back."
"Good answer," Agwe-Djall said, and for a second he smiled like someone indulging a small joke. Then his face closed. "But you need to hear truth first. Natas is older than many names. Older than sun-hot tempers and older than the first day someone thought to set a law. He is not a man whose favors can be bargained by fire and shadow alone."
Makroz's fingers tightened on his cup. "Tell it plainly."
Agwe-Djall nodded. "Natas thinks in arcs and debts. He collects things that bend fate—pieces of bloodlines, artifacts that make memory obedient, trophies that can twist a funeral into a lesson. Annaïs is not simply a child of Zed. She is a hinge—family lineage made visible, a string that binds past and future."
Zed's laugh was more bark than humor. "My hinge? She's a stubborn, loud-mouthed girl who steals my lunch and never washes the soot from her elbows."
"Exactly," Agwe-Djall said. "Which is why she is dangerous to certain gods. The ones who believe loudness can be harnessed and made quiet. The ones who believe heritage is an instrument."
Zed's jaw worked. "He wants to re-tune her. Turn her light into a note he can play."
"Worse," Makroz said quietly. "He wants to teach. Not to enlighten. Teach as in remold. Use her to show a shape to those who still resist his order."
Agwe-Djall placed both hands on the table and tapped an empty patch of parchment twice, as if summoning the map's recollection. "Natas has rooms within rooms. A thing you think you've reached will open into another thing that tastes colder. He uses places that ask for price—not coin, but weight. Memory, flesh, silence. Every door he opens asks something in return. And sometimes the cost is small; sometimes the cost is the thing you care about most."
Zed's fingers drummed the rim of his cup. "So what are we? Peddlers of coin, or thieves with empty pockets?"
"You are friends," Agwe-Djall said, not unkind. "Friends with the wrong tools for the job if you go in pounding on the heavy door. Natas will be watching the kind of anger you give him and using that shape to set traps. He will not fight like a man. He will fight like an illness that moves through bones and makes each limb do the wrong thing. You cannot win a mind that way with swords."
Makroz rubbed his thumb along the ceramic. "So we need something gentler."
"Not gentler," Agwe-Djall corrected. "Smarter. You need to make him choose how to use you. Or make him so distracted with the right question he pays less attention to the rest of the room. Natas is patient. Patience eats haste."
Zed laughed, sharp and hard. "So you want me to be patient. Hilarious. Have you ever seen me be patient, Agwe? My idea of waiting is standing with a kettle, then throwing it. Waiting with me is terrifying."
Agwe-Djall's smile was like a tide's small crest: inevitable. "Then you will practice. At the very least, you will learn what it smells like when Natas is angry in a corner of a room. Learn to feel the pitch of his patience."
They spent the next hour like men who were learning to read a storm. Agwe-Djall showed them the routes rumors made—places where the First had once passed and left behind signatures of his presence: half-melted stones that hummed, ponds whose waters boiled in no weather, and a track of ancient gatherings where sacrifices had been offered in wrong order. He unfolded maps that were not maps but catalogs of shivers, marking the spots with a dot and a note: Watch for echoes. Do not—ever—speak the old name backwards. If you see a child braid their hair clockwise, run the other direction for a while and then return.
Makroz listened the way he had when he first learned shadow-shaping—quiet, hands on the table like he was holding something fragile. Zed argued with a grin at first and then grew quieter, the grin becoming a knife that sharpened into purpose.
When Agwe-Djall finished, he set a hand on Zed's shoulder that was heavy with the sea's authority. "I will give you pieces. I will tell you where some of his doors have been seen. I can speak currents and make them hint at what lies under their skin. But I will not walk your path for you. Natas will ask something. He will weigh it. Do not think bargains with him are transactions; they are tests."
Zed closed his eyes for a moment. "I will take any test that brings my girl back."
Agwe-Djall watched him, and for the first time their old friend wore nothing like a trick on his face. "Words for a promise. Make sure your legs are ready if you need to run with the promise. It's easy to say you'll do anything when the promise is still a word and not a thing you must carry."
Makroz leaned forward. "If we find him, we try to bargain?"
"Depends on what he asks," Agwe-Djall said. "If he asks for humiliation, he's setting a teacher's trap—someone will go home broken and everything will be called a lesson. If he asks for memory—your wife's poems, a story from your childhood—that is worse. He will then own it forever. If he asks for blood—run. If he asks for obedience, consider whether obedience could mean a future without Annaïs. Many roads, Zed. Not one straight line."
Zed put his palms on the table and pushed himself upright. The fire inside him made his voice almost crack with strain. "Then we make him choose. We put the right kind of hurt on his decisions. He wants muscle? We give him the wrong kind of muscle. He wants obedience? We bring a copy he can never trust."
"How do you make a god choose the wrong muscle?" Makroz asked.
Zed blinked as if the question and the plan were both new to him. "You make him feel urgent. You give him options that are all bad and one is worse—so he picks the worst and you use that."
Agwe-Djall tapped his lip. "It is a dangerous plan, Zed. But I would be lying to you if I said it was not possible."
They spent the rest of the night forming the shape of the plan in smaller pieces. Agwe-Djall offered to send currents to listen—a thin stream that would act like an ear under the water; Makroz promised scouts cloaked in shadow; Zed refused to be the bait and then accepted that sometimes you have to be the voice that draws a thief out. Each promise had a price: a favor owed later, a tidal secret kept, a memory offered as a decoy. The room filled with favors and strategies and the kind of humor that only people who have nearly lost everything can use without flinching.
Zed's anger never fell away entirely. It settled into a hard, useful core. Makroz's patience bent around that core like a done arc. Agwe-Djall's knowledge wrapped them both with a net the size of a thought.
When the plan had been broken down into pieces—who would scout, who would create the noise, who would create the shadow-doors and hide the children's shapes—Agwe-Djall poured them each a smaller cup. "You will want a war," he said softly. "But some wars are quieter. Some wars are doors that open and say 'come in' with their teeth showing. You will step in where the teeth are covered with lace."
Zed laughed, which nearly made him cough. "If it comes with lace, I will burn the lace and then the teeth will be left alone and the man who put them there will be very sorry he chose that job."
A small sound—an honest laugh—escaped Makroz. "Don't make promises you'll have to charm out of stitches later."
Zed wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "I prefer to promise first and charm later. It's a method."
By the time they stepped back out toward the lake the moon had thinned to a sliver. Outside, the water moved with the rhythm of nervous animals; fish flicked themselves against the skin like people trying to remember a dream. Agwe-Djall said one last thing, quietly, like a man giving prayer and not directions.
"Remember this: Natas was first for a reason. He is not merely old. He sits not because he wants to rule you, but because someone once taught him that the world bends if you are patient enough to make it."
Zed put both palms on the rail and stared into the water until his reflection was a pale, angry thing. "Then we will be patient. We'll make him impatient."
Makroz's hand found Zed's shoulder. "We'll keep our hands still then. Save the fury for when it is worth the river of it."
Agwe-Djall watched them move away and then called after them, "Bring Annaïs home without making her a lesson. If you must hurt a god, hurt him in a way he can still use later as a warning."
Zed turned his head and offered the barest grin. "I have an ugly grin that scares kings. I'll make him regret the day he considered my daughter a key."
They walked away from the house over the black skin of the lake, each step making dark marks that closed almost instantly. The forest swallowed the sound of their feet with that secretive, old appetite. Plans slid into pouches and then into pockets; practice would start at first light, and Agwe-Djall would have currents listening like little forks stuck into the world.
When they reached the lip of the water, Makroz glanced at Zed. "You'll have to trust me to keep the night from talking when you need silence."
Zed met the look and did something rare: he exhaled. "And you'll have to trust me not to set the world aflame just to make a point."
They shouldered into the dark together. They had a plan that smelled of salt and smoke and a child waiting somewhere with a story being written over her life. It was an ugly, good thing: the kind of plan that would either put a girl back into her father's arms or teach them each a new shape of grief.
Either way, they would go forward.
They always had.