The Kingdom of Gods (6 page)

“No.” Reluctantly I lifted my head from her soft breast and reached up to touch her more rounded face. “Something is changing in me, Naha. I feel it like a vise gripping my soul, tightening slowly, but I don’t know who holds it or turns it, nor how to wriggle free. Soon I might break.”

Naha frowned and began to shift back toward male. It was a warning;
she
was not as quick to anger as
he
was. He was male most of the time these days. “Something has caused this.” His eyes glinted with sudden suspicion. “You went back to the mortal realm. To Sky.”

Damnation. We were all, we Enefadeh, still sensitive to the stench of that place. No doubt I would have Zhakkarn on
my doorstep soon, demanding to know what madness had afflicted me.

“
That
had nothing to do with it, either,” I said, scowling at his overprotectiveness. “I just played with some mortal children.”

“Arameri children.” Oh, gods, the moons were going dark, one by one, and the mirror-pebbles had begun to rattle ominously. The air smelled of ice and the acrid sting of dark matter. Where was Yeine when I needed her? She could always calm his temper.

“Yes, Naha, and they had no power to harm me or even to command me as they once did. And I felt the wrongness
before
I went there.” It had been why I’d followed Yeine, feeling restless and angry and in search of excuses for both. “They were just children!”

His eyes turned to black pits, and suddenly I was truly afraid. “You love them.”

I went very still, wondering which was the greater blasphemy: Yeine loving Itempas, or me loving our slavemasters?

He had never hurt me in all the aeons of my life, I reminded myself. Not intentionally.

“Just children, Naha,” I said again, speaking softly. But I couldn’t deny his words.
I loved them.
Was that why I had decided not to kill Shahar, breaking the rules of my own game? I hung my head in shame. “I’m sorry.”

After a long, frightening moment, he sighed. “Some things are inevitable.”

He sounded so disappointed that my heart broke. “I —” I hitched again, and for a moment hated myself for being the child I was.

“Hush now. No more crying.” With a soft sigh, he rose, holding me against his shoulder effortlessly. “I want to know something.”

The couch dissolved back into the shivering bits of mirror, and the landscape vanished with it. Darkness enclosed us, cold and moving, and when it resolved, I gasped and clutched at him, for we had traveled via his will into the blistering chasm at the edge of the gods’ realm, which contained — insofar as the unknowable could be contained — the Maelstrom. The monster Itself lay below, far below, a swirling miasma of light and sound and matter and concept and emotion and moment. I could hear Its thought-numbing roar echoing off the wall of torn stars that kept the rest of reality relatively safe from Its ravenings. I felt my form tear as well, unable to maintain coherence under the onslaught of image-thought-music. I abandoned it quickly. Flesh was a liability in this place.

“Naha …” He still held me against him, yet I had to shout to be heard. “What are we doing here?”

Nahadoth had become something like the Maelstrom, churning and raw and formless, singing a simpler echo of Its toneless songs. He did not answer at first, but he had no sense of time in this state. I schooled myself to patience; he would remember me eventually.

After a time he said, “I have felt something different here, too.”

I frowned in confusion. “What, in the Maelstrom?” How he could comprehend anything of this morass was beyond me — quite literally. In my younger, stupider days, I had dared to play in this chasm, risking everything to see how deeply I could dive,
how close I could get to the source of all things. I could go deeper than all my siblings, but the Three could go deeper still.

“Yes,” Nahadoth said at length. “I wonder …”

He began to move downward, toward the chasm. Too stunned to protest at first, I finally realized he was actually taking me in. “Naha!” I struggled, but his grip was steel and gravity. “Naha, damn you, do you want me dead? Just kill me yourself, if so!”

He stopped, and I kept shouting at him, hoping reason would somehow penetrate his strange thoughts. Eventually it did, and to my immense relief, he began to ascend.

“I could have kept you safe,” he said with a hint of reproof.

Yes, until you lost yourself in the madness and forgot I was there.
But I was not a complete fool. I said instead, “Why were you taking me there anyhow?”

“There is a resonance.”

“What?”

The chasm and the roar vanished. I blinked. We stood in the mortal realm, on a branch of the World Tree, facing the unearthly white glow of Sky. It was nighttime, of course, with a full moon, and the stars had shifted fractionally. A year had passed. It was the night before I was to meet the twins a third time.

“There is a resonance,” Nahadoth said again. He was a darker blotch against the Tree’s bark. “You, and the Maelstrom. The future or the past, I cannot tell which.”

I frowned. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“Has it ever happened before?”

“No.”

“Naha …” I swallowed my frustration. He did not think as lesser beings did. It was necessary to move in spirals and leaps to follow him. “Will it hurt me? I suppose that’s all that matters.”

He shrugged as if he did not care, though his brows had furrowed. He wore his Sky face again. This close to the palace where we had both endured so many hells, I did not like it as much.

“I will speak to Yeine,” he said.

I shoved my hands into my pockets and hunched my shoulders, kicking at a spot of moss on the bark beneath my feet. “And Itempas?”

To my relief, Nahadoth uttered a dry, malicious laugh. “
Inevitable
is not the same as
immediate
, Sieh — and love does not mandate forgiveness.” With that he turned away, his shadows already blending with those of the Tree and the night horizon. “Remember that, with your Arameri pets.”

Then he was gone. The clouds above the world wavered for an instant with his passing, and then reality became still.

Troubled beyond words, I became a cat and climbed the branch to a knot the size of a building, around which clustered several smaller branches that were dotted with the Tree’s triangle-shaped leaves and silvery flowers. There I curled up, surrounded by Yeine’s comforting scent, to await the next day. And I wondered — with no surcease since I no longer had to sleep — why my insides felt hollow and shaky with dread.

With time to kill before the meeting, I amused myself — if one can call it amusing — by wandering the palace in the hours
before dawn. I started in the underpalace, which had so often been a haven for me in the old days, and discovered that it had indeed been entirely abandoned. Not just the lowest levels, which had always been empty (save the apartments I and the other Enefadeh had inhabited), but all of it: the servants’ kitchens and dining halls, the nurseries and schoolrooms, the sewing salons and haircutters’. All the parts of Sky dedicated to the lowbloods who made up the bulk of its population. By the look of things, no one had been in the underpalace to do more than sweep in years. No wonder Shahar and Dekarta had been so frightened that first day.

On the overpalace levels, at least, there were servants about. None of them saw me as they went about their duties, and I didn’t even bother to shape myself an Amn form or hide in a pocket of silence. This was because even though there were servants, there weren’t
many
of them — not nearly as many as there had been in my slave days. It was a simple matter to step around a curve of corridor when I heard one walking toward me, or spring up to cling to the ceiling if I was caught between two. (Useful fact: mortals rarely look up.) Only once was I forced to use magic, and that not even my own; faced with an inescapable convergence of servants who would surely spot me otherwise, I stepped into one of the lift alcoves, where some long-dead scrivener’s activation bounced me up to another level. Criminally easy.

It should not have been so easy for me to stroll about, I mused as I continued to do so. I had reached the highblood levels by this point, where I did have to be a bit more careful. There were fewer servants here, but more guards, wearing the ugliest white
livery I’d ever seen — and swords, and crossbows, and hidden daggers, if my fleshly eyes did not deceive me. There had always been guards in Sky, a small army of them, but they had taken pains to remain unobtrusive in the days when I’d lived here. They had dressed the same as the servants and had never worn weapons that could be seen. The Arameri preferred to believe that guards were unnecessary, and they hadn’t been, in truth, back then. Any significant threat to the palace’s highbloods would have forced us Enefadeh to transport ourselves to the site of danger, and that would’ve been the end of it.

So, I considered as I stepped through a wall to avoid an unusually attentive guard, it seemed the Arameri had been forced to protect themselves more conventionally. Understandable — but how did that account for the diminished number of servants?

A mystery. I resolved to find out, if I could.

Stepping through another wall, I found myself in a room that held a familiar scent. Following it — and tiptoeing past the nurse dozing on the sitting room couch — I found Shahar, asleep in a good-sized four-poster bed. Her perfect blonde curls spread prettily over half a dozen pillows, though I stifled a laugh at her face: mouth open, cheek mashed on one folded arm, and a line of drool down that arm forming a puddle on the pillow. She was snoring quite loudly and did not stir when I went over to examine her toy shelf.

One could learn a great deal about a child from her play. Naturally I ignored the toys on the highest shelves; she would want her favorites within easy reach. On the lower shelves, someone had been cleaning the things and keeping them in
good order, so it was hard to spot the most worn of the items. Scents revealed much, however, and three things in particular drew me closer. The first was a large stuffed bird of some sort. I touched my tongue to it and tasted a toddler’s love, fading now. The second was a spyglass, light but solidly made so as to withstand being dropped by clumsy hands. Perhaps she used it to look down at the city or up at the stars. It had an air of wonder that made me smile.

The third item, which made me stop short, was a scepter.

It was beautiful, intricate, a graceful, twisting rod marbled with bright jewel tones down its length. A work of art. Not made of glass, though it appeared to be; glass would have been too fragile to give to a child. No, this was tinted daystone, the same substance as the palace’s walls — very difficult to shatter, among its other unique properties. (I knew that very well, since I and my siblings had created it.) Which was why, centuries ago, a family head had commissioned this and other such scepters from his First Scrivener, and had given it to the Arameri heir as a toy.
To learn the feel of power
, he had said. And since then, many little Arameri boys and girls had been given a scepter on their third birthday, which most of them promptly used to whack pets, other children, and servants into painful obedience.

The last time I had seen one of these scepters, it had been a modified, adult version of the thing on Shahar’s shelf. Fitted with a knife blade, the better to cut my skin to ribbons. The perversion of a child’s toy had made each slice burn like acid.

I glanced back at Shahar — fair Shahar,
heir
Shahar, someday Lady Shahar Arameri. A very few Arameri children would not have used the scepter, but Shahar, I felt certain, was not so
gentle. She would have wielded it with glee at least once. Deka had probably been her first victim. Had her brother’s cry of pain cured her of the taste for sadism? So many Arameri learned to treasure the suffering of their loved ones.

I contemplated killing her.

I thought about it for a long time.

Then I turned and stepped through the wall into the adjoining room.

A suite, yes; that, too, was traditional for Arameri twins. Side-by-side apartments, connected by a door in the bedroom, ostensibly so that the children could sleep together or apart as they desired. More than one set of Arameri twins had been reduced to a singlet thanks to such doors. So easy for the stronger twin to creep into the weaker one’s room unnoticed, in the dark of the night while the nurses slept.