Vishnu poured the sake with an unhurried and precise care, his wrist turning at exactly the right angle to send the liquid into the ceramic cup in a thin, unbroken stream. The cup filled to the right level and he set the tokkuri down and slid it across the zelkova table toward me with two fingers.
Then he poured his own.
I hadn't moved since he sat down. My hands were on my knees and my Blank field was running at moderate output and achieving nothing whatsoever against the man sitting three feet away from me, and the name he'd just spoken, Vishnu, was still sitting in the air of the Tsuki room.
He raised his cup and drank, and his throat moved once and the cup came away empty and he set it back on the table with a soft click against the lacquer.
"You are running your nullification field at what I estimate to be roughly forty percent of its maximum output," he said. His tone was mildly interested. "I can feel it pressing against me. It is a remarkable ability, and I mean that without reservation. I have not encountered anything quite like it in a very long time."
"It's not doing anything to you," I said.
"No. It is not." He folded his hands on the table. "Your field suppresses supernatural energy below a certain threshold. My power exceeds that threshold by a margin that renders the suppression irrelevant. You encountered a similar limitation with the Satan Leviathan, I believe."
He tilted his head. "You may lower it if you wish. Or keep it running. It does not trouble me either way."
I kept it running.
He smiled at that, a small and knowing smile, and the back of my neck prickled.
"How did you find me?" I asked.
Vishnu picked up the tokkuri and refilled his cup smoothly.
"I felt you," he said. "Not your abilities. Not your technology. Not the considerable infrastructure you have built across South Korea and Japan."
He looked at me across the table. "I felt your blood."
I stared at him.
"You are Indian by ethnicity, Amir. Your parents were born in Gujarat. Your grandparents were born in Gujarat. Your lineage extends backward through that region for generations beyond what your family's records document, and every generation of that lineage carried a connection to me." He set the tokkuri down. "It is a small thing. A thread so fine that it is functionally invisible, even to most supernatural beings. But it is there, in every person of Indian descent across the world. When a child of Indian blood is born in Portland, Maine, or in London, or in Johannesburg, or in any city on any continent, I feel it. A whisper. A pulse. The faintest possible signal, transmitted across whatever distance separates us."
He lifted his cup but didn't drink. He held it between his thumb and his forefinger and turned it slowly, watching the sake catch the candlelight.
"For most people, that signal never changes. It arrives at birth and it persists, constant and unremarkable, for the duration of their lives. I am connected to approximately one and a half billion people in this manner, and the vast majority of those connections are indistinguishable from one another. Background noise. The hum of a civilization going about its business."
He drank.
"Your signal changed."
The candle between us burned without flickering. Through the window, the fishing boats' lights moved on the dark water of Sagami Bay.
"Approximately two years ago, the thread connecting me to a young man in Portland, Maine, began to carry something new. Power. Foreign power, of a type I did not recognize and could not immediately categorize, entering a body that had been entirely ordinary the day before. The change was abrupt and dramatic." He set the cup down. "And then the signal changed again, and again, and again, at intervals that grew shorter as the power grew larger. Each time I turned my attention to you, you were different. Stronger. More complex. Carrying energies and augmentations that did not belong to any system I was familiar with."
"You've been watching me since Portland," I said.
"Watching is perhaps too strong a word for the early period. I was aware of you. I noted the changes with interest but did not intervene. I have found over a very long existence that patience reveals more than action." He paused. "I began watching in earnest when you killed Helena Stolas."
Helena Stolas, the High-Class Devil I'd killed in Portland; the fight that had started everything.
"The killing itself was noteworthy," Vishnu said. "But what interested me more was what happened afterward. You did not consolidate. You did not seek allies among the existing factions. You did not attempt to leverage the kill into political capital. You disappeared."
"I ran," I said.
"Perhaps," he corrected. "But you did so for your parents, did you not? You could defend yourself, but not them."
I looked at him across the table, and it hit me, just then, all at once.
Vishnu was real.
The Hindu gods were real.
I'd spent two years hunting supernaturals, fighting devils and fallen angels, employing a Drukhari fleshcrafter and commanding Space Marines and buying cold fusion reactors from a cosmic vending machine. I'd accepted all of that and built my entire life around it. And somehow, in all of that, I hadn't once stopped to think about the gods my grandmother had prayed to.
I just... hadn't thought to ask the question. The supernatural world had come to me wearing the face of devils and fallen angels. I really hadn’t considered others. But, then again, maybe I should’ve. After all, Vampires were real and I did kill Sebastian. There was also that one mage a long while ago, the first guy I ever killed. Still, it was quite the jump.
"You're real," I said.
Vishnu watched me patiently.
"Yes," he said.
"The whole pantheon. Brahma. Shiva. Lakshmi. Ganesha. All of them."
"All of them. Each with their own nature and their own domain and their own relationship to the world, but yes, all of them. We rule from Mount Meru, and we have been there for a very long time, Amir. We predate the Great War. We predate the Three Factions that fought it. We predate the Biblical God himself. We are one of the oldest and most powerful mythological forces in existence, and Shiva alone is ranked among the ten strongest beings in all of creation."
"My grandmother," I said, and my voice came out wrong. "My grandmother prays to you every day. She has a shrine in her kitchen. Brass murti, fresh flowers, incense. She's been doing it for seventy years."
"I know," Vishnu said. "Her name is Padma. She favors marigolds."
The room went quiet.
I picked up the sake cup and drank, and it burned going down. I needed a second.
"Why now?" I asked. "You've been watching for two years. You could've contacted me at any point. Portland. Seoul. When I first got to Japan. Heck, you could’ve contacted me when I was passing through India. Why wait?"
"Because until now, you were building, and I had no intention of complicating a process that was proceeding remarkably well without my interference." He reached for the tokkuri and refilled both cups. "But circumstances have changed. The technologies you are introducing to the human world have attracted attention from every major supernatural faction on the planet. The devils are analyzing your batteries in laboratories in the Underworld. The fallen are attempting to reverse-engineer your reactor designs. The Yokai are watching your house."
He picked up his cup. "And you are all alone on the Izu Peninsula with extraordinary personal power and no political protection whatsoever."
"I have assets."
"You have personal power, I grant." He drank. "But every faction, every pantheon, every alliance operates within a framework of mutual recognition and mutual deterrence. The Three Factions, the devils and the angels and the fallen, have maintained a ceasefire since the Great War precisely because the cost of resuming hostilities exceeds what any of them can sustain. The Norse maintain their sovereignty because Odin commands power that makes open aggression against Asgard suicidal. The Yokai hold their territories because the alternative is a war that no faction wants to fight. These deterrent relationships keep the supernatural world in a rough equilibrium that has persisted, in various configurations, for millennia."
He set the cup down.
"You exist outside that equilibrium. You have no patron, no faction, no alliance. I believe you have something of an alliance with the Hunters and the Sikh Demon Hunters, but you are not one of them.” Vishnu said. “You are powerful, and you are growing more powerful, and you are operating in the territory of multiple factions simultaneously, and you have no diplomatic framework to manage the friction that generates. The devils could send a peerage after you tomorrow and face no political consequences because you do not belong to anyone."
"Yeah, I can handle a peerage."
"One peerage, perhaps. Two. Can you handle the political apparatus of the Underworld directing sustained attention toward you while simultaneously managing the attention of the Grigori, the Yokai, Heaven, and every other faction that has an interest in the technologies you control?" He looked at me. "You are a nation of one, Amir. And nations of one, no matter how powerful, eventually find themselves surrounded."
I sat with that, and the fishing boat lights moved on the bay beyond the window.
"So what are you proposing?" I asked.
Vishnu placed both hands flat on the table.
"I would like you to represent the Hindu Pantheon," he said.
I waited.
"Not serve it," he continued. "I am not asking for fealty or worship or obedience. The relationship I am describing is closer to what the European maritime empires called a privateer. An independent operator flying a recognized flag, pursuing his own interests with the understanding that certain minor tasks may be requested from time to time, and that the flag he flies affords him the protection and recognition of the power that issued it."
"What kind of tasks?"
"Minor ones. Errands, in truth. A message delivered to a faction representative in a region you happen to be operating in. An observation made and reported during the course of your normal activities. Occasionally, the resolution of a small problem in a territory where our direct intervention would carry political complications that a more independent agent could avoid." He folded his hands again. "Nothing that would endanger your life. Nothing that would compromise your operations or your principles. The tasks would be infrequent and negotiable, and you would retain the right to decline any request that you judged to be incompatible with your interests."
"And in exchange."
"In exchange, you operate under the formal protection of the Hindu Pantheon. Your enemies become aware that acting against you means acting against Brahma, Shiva, Indra and the Devas, and every other deity operating from Mount Meru. Shiva alone would give the combined forces of the Underworld pause. The full weight of our pantheon is something no faction in the supernatural world is willing to test. The devils, specifically, become unable to move against you without risking a confrontation with a power bloc that outclasses their military capacity by an order of magnitude they would rather not calculate."
I poured myself another cup, and the sake went down easier this time.
"You said the devils could send a peerage after me tomorrow with no consequences," I said. "If I'm flying your flag, that changes."
"Completely. An attack on a recognized representative of the Hindu Pantheon is an attack on the Pantheon itself, and the response framework for that is well established and understood by every faction in the supernatural world. The Underworld will not risk it. They will find other ways to engage with you, diplomatic ways, and those are ways you can manage."
The candle flame burned straight and still, and the sake was warm in my chest.
"Why?" I asked.
Vishnu looked at me.
"Why would you offer this? It’s too easy. Too simple. So what's the catch?"
Vishnu was quiet for a moment, and through the window a fishing boat's light tracked slowly across the dark water.
"There is no catch," he said.
I waited for the rest of the sentence; it didn't come.
"There is no catch," he said again, and his voice was the same steady baritone it had been since he'd walked through the door. "At least, nothing that isn’t already immediately obvious."
He picked up the tokkuri and turned it in his hands. His thumbs moved along its glazed surface.
"The Hindu Pantheon does not lack for powerful representatives, Amir. Indra commands the Devas. Shiva could end this conversation and the mountain beneath us and the ocean beyond it with a thought. We have warriors and sages among our number whose abilities dwarf anything the Underworld fields in its Rating Games. I am not offering you this position because we need you." He set the tokkuri down. "We don’t. I am offering it because you need us."
I looked at the god sitting across from me in a blue kurta with bare feet on the tatami, his dark eyes and his folded hands, and I thought about my grandmother's marigolds.
"I need to think about it," I said.
Vishnu nodded.
"Of course. Take whatever time you need." He reached into the folds of his kurta and produced a coin, old and heavy, with a lotus on one face and a wheel on the other, and placed it on the table between us. "When you have reached your decision, hold this and speak my name. I will hear you."
He stood from the table and looked down at me calmly.
"Eat the kaiseki," he said. "The chef here is exceptional, and I paid for the full course. It would be a waste."
He walked to the door and slid it open, and the corridor beyond was dim and warm and empty.
"Goodnight, Amir."
He stepped through the doorway and the door slid closed behind him, and the air in the room shifted and the candle flame began to flicker again, and the sounds of the ryokan and the town and the coast came flooding back in.