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trembles as she hands it to him, in fact. She expects to die—but she did not lie; she is willing, if by her death her comrades can be protected. Yes, yes, gods yes. He considers the logistics only long enough to figure out how it might be done, vanishes and has a few conversations, then comes back and offers her his hand. Bemused, she takes it. “Partners?” he suggests, and when she nods, that flutter is there again. He feels good. This is good for him. He wants more.
    He gives his new partner everything she wants. He buys houses all over the city and lets her choose the staff. The whores may live in them or off-site as they choose. Their housing is paid for—because after all, their beds are a place of work. Their medical care is paid for. He hires servants to see to their material needs, nannies to tend their children. His foot soldiers are permitted to visit the houses only if they can behave. He kills the ones who don’t; he has precious little patience. They mostly behave anyway, because they already know this about him.
    Thugs gossip like fishermen. They go away satisfied and awed and spread the word, and others quickly begin to come. Some are hungry to sample whores who regard themselves and are treated as people—such a rare thing in this world. Some are merely curious. His women have stretch marks and fat rolls, and his men don’t have giant prehensile penises or lantern jaws, but the sex is apparently amazing anyway. There’s a house for everyone: those who crave simple pleasures and those whose driving impulses are more complex. Those who need and those who have only vague interest. If there is pain, it is by mutual agreement. If there is perversion…well, that is a matter of perspective.
    He stops calling them whores. What they do is too skillful a thing for such a simplistic word. They are the residents who make these houses homes; they are sexual engineers; they are artisans of flesh and emotion. He is unsurprised, therefore, when one of his godling siblings comes to him, sheepishly requesting aid. She has always been curious, but mortals make her nervous. So delicate, so strange. He pairs her with his partner, that so-wise woman who demanded the earth from him and got the heavens…and then it all goes wrong.
    They fall in love.
    They fall in love , damn it.
    It’s so wrong. How can she do this to him? He has given her everything. He accepts his partner’s resignation with bitter, bitter grace; it is only another betrayal. She should know better. Her lover will only turn on her. Lovers always do. He tells her this, along with a choice few other cruel things, until she gives him a look so pitying that it shuts him up.
    “You have to try anyway,” she says gently. “Even if you know they’ll hurt you. That’s the whole point.”
    But he was trying.
    It hurts so much when she leaves that he is sick with it. He curls alone in the room he rarely visits, in the enormous bed that he never sleeps in—he hates sleep—and shakes for hours, with the door and windows sealed shut and blackened so that no one will see.
    Time heals. The god without a name recovers, slowly. Not fully.
    Other godlings come, after the first one’s glowing report. Some want to be clients and some want to join the artisans, and finally he realizes he’ll have to do something about this.
    So he sets up one last house, this one in the poorest area of the city—but quietly, because he is perverse, he makes it the most special of them. He works magic into the walls as they are built: whatever the clients bring with them will be returned threefold. Beauty for beauty, contempt for contempt. He requires the godlings to learn their trade from the mortals. The mortals think this is hilarious, but it is only wisdom; mortals are the experts in this. Mortals are strong…and he knows, better than anyone, how utterly useless gods can be.
    But the experiment, the experiment! He glories in it, quietly. Once his special house is ready, he