But, though the motives of these strange Unseen Powers in dealing with each other were supposed to be exalted and refined, the beings only seemed obsessed by their own images and power rank. There was no one way to best conduct oneself with them, – no standards held throughout the realm, and in the many more visits to come he learned that upsetting them was easy to do, with revenges coming fast.

Over the next weeks, the refectory, these visits to the higher realms, became a regular occurrence for Hamar. It gave a needed relief, however startling the realm. The beings always seemed to carouse a lot, their threat subdued in merrymaking, but the perverseness of their carousing shocked even him so that he stayed close to the walls, safe from the inevitable outbreaks of mayhem and jealous fighting that went with the lawlessness.

Sides were always getting changed, emotion ran everything and the immortal beings seemed hardly in control of it. What they prized was an invisible archive of heroes who’d won territory over others, all the accounts recorded as ending with victory celebrations and ingenious punishments, and every loser jettisoned to recover on their own to work out spiteful intrigues in their turn.

He kept his own powers out of it, far too small to cope with theirs, as he saw their thunderings cause black storms over nations, their pronouncements make earthquakes split river-like channels along the ground for a hundred stadia, their curses in revenge sending plagues swarming across border after border below. Their favour or disfavour wiped out human armies that had amassed underneath the gods to loyally march forth under the banner of their name. The military tactics on the ground were equally ingenious, but fast, and madly treacherous.

Hamar prudently tried to pierce the chaos, made note of the best tactics and each god’s pet ones, the scores, of which ones’ doings would need to be detected fast in the future, of which beings would prove the most useful to him when he came into his earthly rulership, all the while thinking he was holding himself apart from them and never realizing that that very non-committal amounted to complicity with their ways, if he abided them enough times. Conceding came of it, the idea that their values held sway over everything below. It gave him a scale for reckoning power beyond all he’d known, with a hope that the greater level would be available for him against his future royal task, but also with the warning that such overlording forces could just as easily attack him at random!

Aktiarh, he thought, must have known he needed this. Before long the last of his alarm at their meanness and lusts and depravity disappeared, while the Red Priest stood by. That, and the druggy wine Hamar was always made to drink first, re-patterned his mind. Just knowing their realm over-arched his earthly one made their arcane rule seem entitled to hold sway, even over him.

So far.

Despite himself, after visiting regularly for months he found he didn’t want to miss any scorings that went on in his absence. The being’s lives made for ongoing dramas full of nefarious schemes, and his fascination grew about knowing the endings, especially as Invisible Ones seemed to prefer showing up in female form when they took on physical appearance. It was like watching the worst of the female mind played out.

The first time one showed up, “Flat on your face for this one,” Aktiarh whispered to him, as a tall figure entered the room. “Hail, Queen Koohntee,” he said to her, and he and Hamar both prostrated themselves on the ground. The spirit-Queen over the Balt regions came forth arrayed in gold apparel and high headdress, an enticing spirit worshipped and followed in all those lands, her allure working below within every young Balt and Rus woman’s face, a knowing look of sexuality going on inside them no matter how plain or coarse, (her looks charmed Hamar, the memory of her dancings later on aroused him twice despite himself; he could hardly clear the images from his mind back in his bed while the special wine still had a hold). She’d been on her way to lob off the head of her rival sylph before her lover cheated again, muttering curses to pull his spine up into a hunchback in the meantime.

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