Or he listened to a spider whisper in his ear. Or he straddled the muscular, musky back of an elephant marching rhythmically around the Floating Palace. Or, and more likely, he did none of these things. Trickster deities always gave Nicodemus a headache. “Divine Trimuril,” Nicodemus said, hiding the annoyance, “might I have a moment? Your godspells are…” His perceptions flickered. The whale thrashed. The spider nattered. “A moment…” The elephant reared. Groaning, Nicodemus placed both his hands on the floorboards to steady himself. Leandra had just finished reporting that thugs were attacking minor city deities. Now the Trimuril was trying to communicate directly with Nicodemus and so was unintentionally baffling his perceptions. To almost any other soul, the Trimuril projected herself as one aspect of her trinity. However, Nicodemus’s cacography partially misspelled the Trimuril’s texts, and so her godspells had an imprecise and often prismatic effect upon him. Most people thought of tricksters as mischief-makers: clever pranksters, rapacious thieves, clownish dupes.
