Chapter 94: Gods and their agents
He looked at Jake and Elise with genuine interest that was also genuine evaluation.
"And your agents. The Raikarndel heir handles himself well. Most people don’t turn Naktuna’s words back on her so cleanly in a first conversation."
"I had good material to work with," Jake said.
"She made it easy."
Artiemes smiled, and the smile was real.
"No one should be looked down upon for their circumstances," he said.
"Regardless of which covenant they represent or what god sponsors them. Everyone present tonight arrived on their own merits."
Jake just watched the man in front of him. Though his words may sound noble and right, Jake couldn’t dismiss the feeling of unease that this man was giving him.
And watched Artiemes’s eyes catalog exactly where Jake and Elise sat in his personal hierarchy.
Near the bottom, currently. But being recalculated is upward.
The host moved on to greet other arrivals, and the crowd around them slowly returned to its own conversations now that the confrontation had resolved without violence.
"You made an enemy," Elise said quietly.
"Naktuna was already an enemy," Jake said.
"I just made sure she knew we’d noticed."
"And Artiemes?"
Jake thought about those eyes. About the warmth that was real and the superiority that was also real and how both things could coexist comfortably in someone who’d never had to choose between them.
"Not an enemy," Jake said.
"Not a friend. Someone who will be useful exactly as long as we’re interesting and dangerous to him and will move against us the moment we become inconvenient or weak."
He looked across the hall to where Artiemes was greeting another group with the same perfect warmth.
"The kind of person who genuinely believes he’s upright because being superior is so natural to him that it doesn’t feel like arrogance anymore."
"So we smile at him," Elise said.
"We smile at everyone," Jake said.
"And we watch."
Around them the feast of agents hummed with the particular energy of powerful people performing ease at each other, and Jake stood in the hall with his covenant sister on his arm and his forgotten goddess somewhere in the divine section, and the night had barely begun.
*
The feast moved through its first hour with the particular rhythm of formal gatherings where nobody was saying what they actually meant.
Jake circulated with Elise, collecting information through conversation the way he’d learned to collect it in guild offices—listening more than speaking, watching how people positioned themselves relative to each other, noting which agents avoided which others and what that avoidance communicated.
He could see that a lot of people were from his world and a lot of people he knew came from the world he didn’t know. Accents, clothes, appearances, and everything about the agents made him open to a wide range of possibilities. It wasn’t just his world that existed, but a number of them either.
The food was extraordinary. Divine hospitality apparently included cuisine that had no business tasting this good, and Jake ate with the appreciative focus of someone who had always believed that excellent food deserved proper attention regardless of surrounding circumstances.
Elise was better at social navigation than he was, her decades of piracy having produced an instinct for reading rooms and identifying where power actually sat versus where it performed sitting.
She guided them through clusters of agents with light touches on his arm—this group is safe, this one is hostile, this one is trying to recruit us; move on.
They were near the hall’s eastern end, examining a section of wall murals that depicted what looked like a tournament between divine agents from several centuries prior, when Jake felt it.
A sudden change in the air and it was kind of pressure that makes you feel threatened.
Not physical. Not Karut’s kind of pressure, which had been the focused output of someone using an ability deliberately. This was ambient, the natural emanation of someone nearby whose power was so excessive that simply existing in a space changed the quality of the air around them.
Jake turned slowly.
The agent was perhaps twenty meters away and walking toward them without any apparent urgency, pausing to speak briefly to other guests as he moved through the crowd. He was unremarkable in appearance—medium height, lean build, dark hair worn short, perhaps thirty years old in apparent age. His clothing was simple by the feast’s standards. Nothing about his surface suggested what Jake’s blood sense was screaming at him.
The man’s aura expanded outward from him like heat from a forge, invisible to normal senses but absolutely present to anyone who could feel power. Each step closer tightened something in Jake’s chest. By fifteen meters the pressure had a weight to it. By ten meters Jake’s breathing had become deliberate, the act of pulling air into his lungs requiring conscious effort against something that wanted to compress everything inward.
By five meters Jake couldn’t move.
Not paralysis exactly. More like the air around him had developed opinions about his freedom of movement and those opinions were restrictive. His shadow serpent abilities were there if he reached for them but the reaching itself felt like pushing through deep water. His sorcerer’s bloodline responded sluggishly, the power present but muffled, like hearing through walls.
The man stopped before him and looked at Jake with the incurious attention of someone examining something mildly interesting they’d found on a path.
"You," the man said. His voice was quiet, completely relaxed.
"You’re the one who spoke to Naktuna earlier."
Jake tried to respond and found the pressure on his chest had reached his voice somewhere along the way. He managed a breath. Managed to straighten slightly through sheer refusal to visibly collapse. Could not manage words.
Elise, beside him, was in the same state, her face pale, her hand gripping Jake’s arm with fingers that couldn’t feel their own strength.
The man tilted his head slightly. His expression hadn’t changed. There was no cruelty in it, which was almost worse—cruelty implied the target mattered enough to emotionally invest in. This was something closer to boredom, wearing a polite face.
"Asurani’s agents," he said, more to himself than to them.
"She actually found people."
"That is trash, befitting her position."
The weight increased fractionally. Just enough to make the point. Jake’s knees wanted to make independent decisions about remaining functional, and he spent significant energy overruling them. His vision had developed a subtle dimness at the edges, the body’s polite suggestion that operating under this level of external pressure was not sustainable long-term.
He looked at the man’s face and saw nothing useful there. No leverage, no weakness, no angle. Just someone who radiated more natural power than Jake had encountered outside of Karut and who apparently had no particular agenda beyond demonstrating that their existence could crush Jake’s without effort.
This was what genuine class difference felt like.
Not combat, not a duel, not even a confrontation. Just proximity.
The man was about to say something else when a new presence entered Jake’s awareness—warm, soft-edged, carrying none of the crushing weight but somehow pushing back against it the way a steady wind pushed back against something heavier.
"Vikram."
The voice came from a goddess who appeared at the edge of the group with the unhurried manner of someone who had decided to join a conversation and saw no particular urgency in doing so. She was beautiful in the way that kind things were beautiful—not overwhelming, not weaponized, just genuinely warm. Her divine form was softer than the sharp-edged magnificence that most gods cultivated, wrapped in colors that reminded Jake of early morning light before the day’s business began.
Apsharathevi. Jake didn’t know the name but knew immediately what she was, the way you knew certain people by the quality of how they moved through space.
The agent called Vikram turned toward her, and the pressure eased by degrees, not disappearing but retreating from immediately crushing back to merely enormous. Jake took a proper breath and felt Elise’s grip on his arm loosen.
"Lady Apsharathevi," Vikram said, and there was genuine respect in his tone, the kind that was earned rather than obligatory.
"Come away," she said simply.
"You’re making the air uncomfortable."
It wasn’t a command. It wasn’t even a rebuke. Just a statement of fact delivered by someone who knew it would be listened to. Vikram looked at Jake one more time with that incurious assessment, then nodded slightly at the goddess and moved away through the crowd, the pressure trailing after him like weather following its source.
The hall’s air normalized gradually.
Jake stood still for a moment, running an internal inventory. No damage. Just the comprehensive, bone-deep reminder that he was at the beginning of something and other people were considerably further along. The feeling wasn’t new—Karut had introduced him to it on the road—but each encounter with it drove the point home more permanently.
A woman appeared at Apsharathevi’s side, having arrived silently at some point during the preceding situation. She was perhaps in her early thirties, with features that made Jake’s first-life memories produce a vague sense of cold forests and grey mornings—fair-skinned, light-eyed, with the kind of composed physical confidence that spoke of someone equally comfortable in comfort and hardship. She looked at Jake and Elise with straightforward concern that had no performance in it.
"You’re both upright," she said, as though confirming it to herself.
"Vikram doesn’t always notice when he’s overdoing the ambient pressure."
