Ritual Magic

else
she
is, she’s a lot more than human. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that exposure to her causes psychopathy, though. Why do you ask?”
    “Because what happened today doesn’t make sense. Unless she’s really around-the-bend nuts, not operating logically—”
    “That’s not her kind of crazy.”
    “What kind of crazy is she, then?”
    “Um . . . she’s not human, so I guess I’d say she’s crazy the way her peer group defines insanity.”
    Her peer group being other Old Ones? “Can you narrow that down for me?”
    Cynna glanced at the three men facing them. “Most of the stories are shared with all the clan, but the thing you want to know is from the
primus memorias.
First Memories. First Memories are from when lupi were created, and they’re shared only with lupi, and they’re spoken while the Rhej is touching the memory itself, in order to keep the telling as close to the original as possible. Can’t do that perfectly because the language they’re in is hard to translate, but we do our best. But it’s considered safest to touch or enter those memories only at Clanhome.”
    “So you can’t—”
    Cynna flapped a hand. “Let me think this through.” She did that, frowning. Then nodded. “You’re Lady-touched, so it’s okay for you to know the
primus memorias
, but I don’t want to tell them without touching them. I’d be paraphrasing, and it’s okay for others to do that, but not me. But the guys can talk about them.” She looked at the three men facing them. “Someone want to tell Lily what the Lady told Aswan about the gods going insane?”
    For a long moment, no one did. Miles and Jonathan exchanged an uncomfortable glance. Oddly, it was Mike who finally spoke . . . odd because he was Leidolf, so Cynna wasn’t his Rhej, and Mike was not exactly a shining example of liberated thinking.
    “I’m not going to say this right,” he warned, “but here’s what I remember. The Lady was talking about why we aren’t ever to worship her. She said that it’s normal for the new races to worship those like her, who’d stayed on from the last cycle to help with this one. Like when a baby thinks his mother’s breast is the whole world, see? But that time ends. When he becomes a toddler he learns the word ‘no’ and can’t stop using it, and the older he gets, the more he becomes his own person. Only something went wrong this time. I didn’t understand, but somehow the godhead got sticky. It stuck to them when it wasn’t supposed to, and that was wrong. It would keep the younger races from knowing themselves fully, which is how God comes to know Himself—”
    “Herself,” Scott put in.
    “The universe,” Miles said. “The way I heard it, it’s how the universe comes to know itself. Through everything it creates, but especially the sentient races.”
    “You’re all mostly right,” Cynna said. “The word from the memories doesn’t have an English translation, so your Rhejes would have used whatever felt closest. That could be ‘God’ or ‘the universe’ or even just ‘life.’”
    Mike nodded, accepting that. “There was a big argument. Some of the Old Ones thought the sticky godhead must be the way God—or the universe, or whatever you call it—wanted to know Himself this time around. They thought it would be terrible and wrong to abandon their power and leave the new races without help and guidance. But most of them didn’t think like that. The new gods didn’t have that stickiness, and—”
    “New gods?” Lily asked, then wished she hadn’t interrupted.
    Scott answered that from up front. “Gods who weren’t Old Ones.”
    “Like the Native American gods?” Nettie had said something about that once.
    Jonathan nodded. “They weren’t as powerful as the old gods. Maybe that’s why they remained more like counselors and elders, worshiped but . . . differently. That’s not something the Lady said,” he added quickly. “That’s just me thinking about it.”
    Mike picked up his thread again. “So the Lady and most of those like her stepped back from their godheads. It’s not just that they renounced being worshiped, though that’s part of it. They, uh . . . this part I don’t remember very well.”
    “I do,” Miles said suddenly. “‘And so we sundered ourselves from the being and power of gods. Reft and bereft, we grew smaller and more vast, and slowly returned to ourselves. In our return, we saw that we had started to slip