The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (13 page)

I rejected that image, that feeling, almost as soon as it came to my mind. But it was another warning.

“The Maelstrom that begat us was slow,” Nahadoth said. If he sensed my sudden unease, he gave no sign. “I was born first, then Itempas. For uncountable eternities He and I were alone in the universe—first enemies, then beloved. He liked it that way.”

I tried not to think of the priests’ tales. Tried not to wonder if Nahadoth was lying, too—though there was a feel of truth to his words that rang within me on an almost instinctive level. The Three were more than siblings; they were forces of nature, opposed yet inextricably linked. I, an only child and a mortal who had never had a beloved of her own, could not begin to understand their relationship. Yet I felt compelled to try.

“When Enefa came along… Lord Itempas saw her as an interloper?”

“Yes. Even though before her we felt our incompleteness. We were made to be Three, not two. Itempas resented that, as well.”

Then Nahadoth glanced at me sidelong. In the shadow of my body, for just an instant, the uncertain shift of his face resolved into a singular perfection of lines and features that made my breath catch. I had never seen anything so beautiful. At once I understood why Itempas had killed Enefa to have him.

“Does it amuse you to hear that we can be just as selfish and prideful as humankind?” There was an edge to Nahadoth’s voice now. I barely noticed it. I could not look away from his face. “We made you in our image, remember. All our flaws are yours.”

“No,” I said. “A-all that surprises me are… the lies I’ve been told.”

“I would have expected the Darre to do a better job of preserving the truth.” He leaned closer, slow, subtle. Something predatory was in his eyes—and I, entranced, was easy prey. “Not every race of humankind worships Itempas by choice, after all. I would have thought their ennu at least would know the old ways.”

I would have thought so, too. I clenched my hand around the silver fruitstone, feeling light-headed. I knew that once my people had been heretics. That was why the Amn called races like mine darkling: we had accepted the Bright only to save ourselves when the Arameri threatened us with annihilation. But what Nahadoth implied—that some of my people had known the real reason for the Gods’ War all along and had hidden it from me—no. That I could not, did not want to, believe.

There had always been whispers about me. Doubts. My Amn hair, my Amn eyes. My Amn mother, who might have inculcated me with her Arameri ways. I had fought so hard to win my people’s respect. I thought I had succeeded.

“No,” I whispered. “My grandmother would have told me…”

Wouldn’t she?

“So many secrets surround you,” the Nightlord whispered. “So many lies, like veils. Shall I strip them away for you?” His hand touched my hip. I could not help jumping. His nose brushed mine, his breath tickling my lips. “You want me.”

If I had not already been trembling, I would have begun. “N-no.”

“So many lies.” On the last word, his tongue licked out to brush my lips. Every muscle in my body seemed to tighten; I could not help whimpering. I saw myself on the green grass again, under him, pinned by him. I saw myself on a bed—the very bed on which I sat. I saw him take me on my mother’s bed, his face savage and his movements violent, and I did not own him or control him. How had I ever dared to imagine that I might? He used me and I was helpless, crying out in pain and want. I was his and he devoured me, relishing my sanity as he tore it apart and swallowed it in oozing chunks. He would destroy me and I would love every minute of it.

“Oh gods—” The irony of my oath was lost on me. I reached up, burying my hands in his black aura to push at him. I felt cool night air and thought my hands would just go on, touching nothing. Instead I encountered solid flesh, a warm body, cloth. I clutched at the latter to remind me of reality and danger. It was so hard not to pull him closer. “Please don’t. Please, oh gods, please don’t.”

He still loomed over me. His mouth still brushed mine, so that I felt his smile. “Is that a command?”

I was shaking with fear and desire and effort. The last finally paid off as I managed to turn my face away from his. His cool breath tickled my neck and I felt it down my whole body, the most intimate of caresses. I had never wanted a man so much, never in my whole life. I had never been so afraid.

“Please,” I said again.

He kissed me, very lightly, on my neck. I tried not to moan and failed miserably. I ached for him. But then he sighed, rose, and walked over to the window. The black tendrils of his power lingered on me a moment longer; I had been almost buried in his darkness. But as he moved away the tendrils released me—reluctantly, it seemed—and settled back into the usual restlessness of his aura.

I wrapped my arms around myself, wondering if I would ever stop shivering.

“Your mother was a true Arameri,” said Nahadoth.

That shocked me out of desire, as suddenly as a slap.

“She was all that Dekarta wanted and more,” he continued. “Their goals were never the same, but in every other way, she was more than a match for her father. He loves her still.”

I swallowed. My legs were shaky so I did not stand, but I made myself straighten from the hunch that I had unconsciously adopted. “Then why did he kill her?”

“You think it was him?”

I opened my mouth to demand an explanation. But before I could, he turned to me. In the light from the window his body was a silhouette, except for his eyes. I saw them clearly, onyx-black and glittering with unearthly knowing and malice.

“No, little pawn,” said the Nightlord. “Little tool. No more secrets, not without an alliance. That is for your safety as well as ours. Shall I tell you the terms?” Somehow I knew that he smiled. “Yes, I think I should. We want your life, sweet Yeine. Offer it to us and you’ll have all the answers you want—and, too, the chance for revenge. That’s what you truly want, isn’t it?” A soft, cruel chuckle. “You’re more Arameri than Dekarta sees.”

I began to tremble again, not out of fear this time.

As before, he faded away, his image disappearing long before his presence did. When I could no longer feel him, I put away my mother’s belongings and straightened the room so that no one would know I had been there. I wanted to keep the silver fruitstone, but I could think of nowhere safer to hide it than the compartment where it had lain undiscovered for decades. So I left it and the letters in their hiding place.

When I was finally done, I went back to my room. It took all my willpower not to run.

T’VRIL TOLD ME THAT sometimes Sky eats people. It was built by the Enefadeh, after all, and living in a home built by angry gods necessarily entails some risk. On nights when the moon is black and the stars hide behind clouds, the stone walls stop glowing. Bright Itempas is powerless then. The darkness never lingers—a few hours at most—but while it lasts, most Arameri keep to their rooms and speak softly. If they must travel Sky’s corridors, they move quickly and furtively, always watching their step. For you see, wholly at random, the floors open up and swallow the unwary. Searchers go into the dead spaces underneath, but no bodies are ever found.

I know now that this is true. But more important—

I know where the lost ones have gone.

“Please tell me about my mother,” I said to Viraine.

He looked up from the contraption he was working on. It looked like a spidery mass of jointed metal and leather; I had no inkling of its purpose. “T’vril told me he sent you to her room last night,” he said, shifting on his stool to face me. His expression was thoughtful. “What is it you’re looking for?”

I made note: T’vril was not entirely trustworthy. But that did not surprise me; T’vril doubtless had his own battles to fight. “The truth.”

“You don’t believe Dekarta?”

“Would you?”

He chuckled. “You have no reason to believe me, either.”

“I have no reason to believe anyone in this whole reeking Amn warren. But since I cannot leave, I have no choice but to crawl through the muck.”

“Oh, my. You almost sound like her.” To my surprise he seemed pleased by my rudeness. Indeed, he began smiling, though with an air of condescension. “Too crude, though. Too straightforward. Kinneth’s insults were so subtle that you wouldn’t realize she’d called you dirt until hours afterward.”

“My mother never insulted anyone unless she had good reason. What did you say to provoke her?”

He paused for only a heartbeat, but I noted with satisfaction that his smile faded.

“What do you want to know?” he asked.

“Why did Dekarta have my mother killed?”

“The only person who could answer that question is Dekarta. Do you plan to talk to him?”

Eventually, I would. But two could play the game of answering a question with a question. “Why did she come here, that last night? The night Dekarta finally realized she wasn’t coming back?”

I had expected the surprise in Viraine’s face. What I had not expected was the cold fury that followed swiftly on its heels.

“Who have you been talking to? The servants? Sieh?”

Sometimes the truth can throw an opponent off-balance. “Nahadoth.”

He flinched, and then his eyes narrowed. “I see. He’ll kill you, you know. That’s his favorite pastime, to toy with any Arameri foolish enough to try and tame him.”

“Scimina—”

“—has no intention of taming him. The more monstrous he becomes, the happier she is. He spread the last fool who fell in love with him all over the centeryard, I hear.”

I remembered Nahadoth’s lips on my throat and fought to suppress a shudder, only half-succeeding. Death as a consequence of lying with a god wasn’t something I had considered, but it did not surprise me. A mortal man’s strength had limits. He spent himself and slept. He could be a good lover, but even his best skills were only guesswork—for every caress that sent a woman’s head into the clouds, he might try ten that brought her back to earth.

Nahadoth would bring me into the clouds and keep me there. He would drag me further, into the cold airless dark that was his true domain. And if I suffocated there, if my flesh burst or my mind broke… well. Viraine was right; I’d have only myself to blame.

I gave Viraine a rueful smile, letting him see my very real fear. “Yes, Nahadoth probably will kill me—if you Arameri don’t beat him to it. If that troubles you, you could always help me by answering my questions.”

Viraine fell silent for a long moment, his thoughts unfathomable behind the mask of his face. Finally he surprised me again, rising from his workbench and going to one of the enormous windows. From this one we could see the whole of the city and the mountains beyond.

“I can’t say I remember the night well,” he said. “It was twenty years ago. I had only just come to Sky then, newly posted by the Scriveners’ College.”

“Please tell me all you can recall,” I said.

Scriveners learn several mortal tongues as children, before they begin learning the gods’ language. This helps them understand the flexibility of language and of the mind itself, for there are many concepts that exist in some languages that cannot even be approximated in others. This is how the gods’ tongue works; it allows the conceptualization of the impossible. And this is why the best scriveners can never be trusted.

“It was raining that night. I remember because rain doesn’t often touch Sky; the heaviest clouds usually drop below us. But Kinneth got soaked just between her carriage and the entrance. There was a trail of water along the floor of every corridor she walked.”

Which meant that he had watched her pass, I realized. Either he’d been lurking in a side corridor while she went by, or he’d followed close enough in her wake that the water hadn’t dried. Hadn’t Sieh said Dekarta emptied the hallways that night? Viraine must have disobeyed that order.

“Everyone knew why she had come, or thought they did. No one expected that marriage to last. It seemed unfathomable that a woman so strong, a woman raised to rule, would give it all up for nothing.” In the reflection of the glass, Viraine looked up at me. “No offense meant.”

For an Arameri, it was almost polite. “None taken.”

He smiled thinly. “But it was for him, you see. The reason she came that night. Her husband, your father; she didn’t come to reclaim her position, she came because he had the Walking Death, and she wanted Dekarta to save him.”

I stared at him, feeling slapped.

“She even brought him with her. One of the forecourt servants glanced inside the coach and saw him in there, sweating and feverish, probably in the third stage. The journey alone must have stressed him physically, accelerating the disease’s course. She gambled everything on Dekarta’s aid.”

I swallowed. I’d known that my father had contracted the Death at some point. I’d known that my mother had fled from Sky at the height of her power, banished for the crime of loving beneath herself. But that the two events were linked—“She must have succeeded, then.”

“No. When she left to return to Darr, she was angry. Dekarta was in such a fury as I’ve never seen; I thought there would be deaths. But he simply ordered that Kinneth was to be struck from the family rolls, not only as his heir—that had already been done—but as an Arameri altogether. He ordered me to burn off her blood sigil, which can be done from a distance, and which I did. He even made a public announcement. It was the talk of society—the first time any fullblood has been disowned in, oh, centuries.”

I shook my head slowly. “And my father?”

“As far as I could tell, he was still sick when she left.”

But my father had survived the Walking Death. Surviving was not unheard of, but it was rare, especially among those who had reached third stage.

Perhaps Dekarta had changed his mind? If he had ordered it, the palace physicians would have ridden out after the carriage, caught up to it and brought it back. Dekarta could have even ordered the Enefadeh to—

Wait.

Wait.

“So that’s why she came,” Viraine said. He turned from the window to face me, sober. “For him. There’s no grand conspiracy to it, and no mystery—any servant who’d been here long enough could’ve told you this. So why were you so anxious to know that you’d ask me?”