The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (19 page)

They would accept, of course. Whether I won or lost, they would get the freedom they wanted—unless, of course, I chose not to give it to them. So they would do whatever it took to keep me agreeable.

Reaching for another leafroll, I concentrated on chewing slowly so that my ill-used stomach would not rebel. It was important that I recover quickly. I would need my strength in the time to come.

I SEE MY LAND BELOW ME. It passes underneath, as if I am flying. High ridges and misty, tangled valleys. Occasional fields, even rarer towns and cities. Darr is so green. I saw many lands as I traveled across High North and Senm on the way to Sky, and none of them seemed half as green as my beautiful Darr. Now I know why.

I slept again. When I woke, Sieh still had not returned, and it was night. I did not expect an answer from the Enefadeh anytime soon. I had probably annoyed them by my refusal to trudge obediently to death. If I were them, I would keep me waiting awhile.

Almost as soon as I woke, there was a knock at the door. When I went to answer, a bony-faced servant boy stood very straight and said, with painful formality, “Lady Yeine. I bear a message.”

Rubbing sleep from my eyes, I nodded permission for him to continue, and he said, “Your grandsire requests your presence.”

And suddenly I was very, very awake.

The audience chamber was empty this time. Just me and Dekarta. I knelt as I had that first afternoon, and laid my knife on the floor as was customary. I did not, to my own surprise, contemplate using it to kill him. Much as I hated him, his blood was not what I wanted.

“Well,” he said from his throne. His voice sounded softer than before, though that may have been a trick of perception on my part. “Have you enjoyed your week as an Arameri, Granddaughter?”

Had it been only a week?

“No, Grandfather,” I said. “I have not.”

He uttered a single laugh. “But now, perhaps, you understand us better. What do you think?”

This I had not expected. I looked at him from where I knelt, and wondered what he was up to.

“I think,” I said slowly, “the same thing that I thought before I came here: that the Arameri are evil. All that has changed is that now I believe most of you are mad as well.”

He grinned, wide and partially toothless. “Kinneth said much the same thing to me once. She included herself, however.”

I resisted the immediate urge to deny this. “Maybe that’s why she left. Maybe, if I stay long enough, I’ll become as evil and mad as the rest of you.”

“Maybe.” There was a curious gentleness in the way he said this that threw me. I could never read his face. Too many lines.

Silence rose between us for the next several breaths. It plateaued; stalled; broke.

“Tell me why you killed my mother,” I said.

His smile faded. “I am not one of the Enefadeh, Granddaughter. You cannot command answers from me.”

Heat washed through me, followed by cold. I rose slowly to my feet. “You loved her. If you had hated her, feared her, that I could have understood. But you loved her.”

He nodded. “I loved her.”

“She was crying when she died. We had to wet her eyelids to get them open—”

“You will be silent.”

In the empty chamber, his voice echoed. The edge of it sawed against my temper like a dull knife.

“And you love her still, you hateful old bastard.” I stepped forward, leaving my knife on the floor. I did not trust myself with it anymore. I moved toward my grandfather’s highbacked not-throne, and he drew himself up, perhaps in anger, perhaps in fear. “You love her and mourn her; it’s your own fault and you mourn her, and you want her back. Don’t you? But if Itempas is listening, if he cares at all about order and righteousness or any of the things the priests say, then I pray to him now that you keep loving her. That way you’ll feel her loss the way I do. You’ll feel that agony until you die, and I pray that’s a long, long time from now!”

By this point I stood before Dekarta, bent down, my hands on the armrests of his chair. I was close enough to see the color of his eyes at last—a blue so pale that it was barely a color at all. He was a small, frail man now, whatever he’d been in his prime. If I blew hard, I might break his bones.

But I did not touch him. Dekarta did not deserve mere physical pain any more than he deserved a swift death.

“Such hate,” he whispered. Then, to my shock, he smiled. It looked like a death rictus. “Perhaps you are more like her than I thought.”

I stood up straight and told myself that I was not drawing back.

“Very well,” said Dekarta, as if we’d just exchanged pleasant small talk. “We should get down to business, Granddaughter. In seven days’ time, on the night of the fourteenth, there will be a ball here in Sky. It will be in your honor, to celebrate your elevation to heir, and some of the most noteworthy citizens of the world will join us as guests. Is there anyone in particular you’d like invited?”

I stared at him and heard an entirely different conversation. In seven days the most noteworthy citizens in the world will gather to watch you die. Every mote of intuition in my body understood: the succession ceremony.

His question hovered unanswered in the air between us.

“No,” I said softly. “No one.”

Dekarta inclined his head. “Then you are dismissed, Granddaughter.”

I stared at him for a long moment. I might never again have the chance to speak with him like this, in private. He had not told me why he’d killed my mother, but there were other secrets that he might be willing to divulge. He might even know the secret of how I might save myself.

But in the long silence I could think of no questions to ask, no way to get at those secrets. So at last I picked up my knife and walked out of the room, and tried not to feel a sense of shame as the guards closed the door behind me.

This turned out to be the start of a very bad night.

I stepped inside my apartment and found that I had visitors.

Kurue had appropriated the chair, where she sat with her fingers steepled, a hard look in her eyes. Sieh, perched on the edge of my parlor’s couch, sat with his knees drawn up and his eyes downcast. Zhakkarn stood sentinel near the window, impassive as ever. Nahadoth—

I felt his presence behind me an instant before he put his hand through my chest.

“Tell me,” he said into my ear, “why I should not kill you.”

I stared at the hand through my chest. There was no blood, and as far as I could tell there was no wound. I fumbled for his hand and found that it was immaterial, like a shadow. My fingers passed through his flesh and waggled in the translucence of his fist. It did not hurt exactly, but it felt as though I’d plunged my fingers into an icy stream. There was a deep, aching coldness between my breasts.

He could withdraw his hand and tear out my heart. He could leave his hand in place but make it tangible, and kill me as surely as if he’d punched through blood and bone.

“Nahadoth,” Kurue said in a warning tone.

Sieh jumped up and came to my side, his eyes wide and frightened. “Please don’t kill her. Please.”

“She’s one of them,” he hissed in my ear. His breath was cold as well, making the flesh of my neck prickle in goose bumps. “Just another Arameri convinced of her own superiority. We made her, Sieh, and she dares to command us? She has no right to carry my sister’s soul.” His hand curled into a claw, and suddenly I realized it was not my flesh that he meant to damage.

Your body has grown used to containing two souls, Zhakkarn had said. It might not survive having only one again.

But at that realization, completely to my own surprise, I burst into laughter.

“Do it,” I said. I could hardly breathe for laughing, though that might’ve been some effect of Nahadoth’s hand. “I never wanted this thing in me in the first place. If you want it, take it!”

“Yeine!” Sieh clutched my arm. “That could kill you!”

“What difference does it make? You want to kill me anyway. So does Dekarta—he’s got it all planned, seven days from now. My only real choice lies in how I die. This is as good as any other method, isn’t it?”

“Let’s find out,” Nahadoth said.

Kurue sat forward. “Wait, what did she—”

Nahadoth drew his hand back. It seemed to take effort; the arm moved through my flesh slowly, as if through clay. I could not be more certain because I was shrieking at the top of my lungs. Instinctively I lunged forward, trying to escape the pain, and in retrospect this made things worse. But I could not think, all my reason having been subsumed by agony. It felt as though I was being torn apart—as, of course, I was.

But then something happened.

Above, a sky out of nightmare. I could not say if it was day or night. Both sun and moon were visible, but it was hard to say which was which. The moon was huge and cancerously yellow. The sun was a bloody distortion, nowhere near round. There was a single cloud in the sky and it was black—not dark gray with rain but black, like a drifting hole in the sky. And then I realized it was a hole, because something fell through—

Tiny figures, struggling. One of them was white and blazing, the other black and smoking; as they tumbled, I could see fire and hear cracks like thunder all around them. They fell and fell and smashed into the earth nearby. The ground shook, a great cloud of dust and debris kicked up from the impact; nothing human could have survived such a fall, but I knew they were not—

I ran. All around me were bodies—not dead, I understood with the certainty of a dream, but dying. The grass was dry and dessicated, crackling beneath my bare feet. Enefa was dead. Everything was dying. Leaves fell around me like heavy snow. Ahead, just through the trees—

“Is this what you want? Is it?” Inhuman fury in that voice, echoing through the forest shadows. Following it came a scream of such agony as I have never imagined—

I ran through the trees and stopped at the edge of a crater and saw—

O Goddess, I saw—

“Yeine.” A hand slapped my face lightly. “Yeine!”

My eyes were open. I blinked because they were dry. I was on my knees on the floor. Sieh crouched before me, his eyes wide with concern. Kurue and Zhakkarn were watching, too, Kurue looking worried and Zhakkarn soldier-still.

I did not think. I swung around and looked at Nahadoth, who stood with one hand—the one that had been in my body—still raised. He stared down at me, and I realized he somehow knew what I had seen.

“I don’t understand.” Kurue rose from the desk chair. Her hand, on the chair’s back, tightened. “It’s been twenty years. The soul should be able to survive extraction by now.”

“No one has ever put a god’s soul into a mortal,” said Zhakkarn. “We knew there was a risk.”

“Not of this!” Kurue pointed at me almost accusingly. “Will the soul even be usable now, contaminated with this mortal filth?”

“Be silent!” Sieh snapped, whipping around to glare at her. His voice dropped suddenly, a young man’s again; instant puberty. “How dare you? I have told you time and again—mortals are as much Enefa’s creations as we ourselves.”

“Leftovers,” Kurue retorted. “Weak and cowardly and too stupid to look beyond themselves for more than five minutes. Yet you and Naha will insist on putting your trust in them—”

Sieh rolled his eyes. “Oh, please. Tell me, Kurue, which of your proud, god-only plans has gotten us free?”

Kurue turned away in resentful silence.

I barely saw all this. Nahadoth and I were still staring at each other.

“Yeine.” Sieh’s small, soft hand touched my cheek, coaxing my head around to face him. His voice had returned to a childish treble. “Are you all right?”

“What happened?” I asked.

“We’re not certain.”

I sighed and pulled away from him, trying to get to my feet. My body felt hollowed out, stuffed with cotton. I slipped and settled onto my knees again, and cursed.

“Yeine—”

“If you’re going to lie to me again, don’t bother.”

A muscle worked in Sieh’s jaw; he glanced at his siblings. “It’s true, Yeine. We aren’t certain. But… for some reason… Enefa’s soul has not healed as much as we hoped it would in the time since we put it in you. It’s whole,” and here he glanced at Kurue significantly. “Enough to serve its purpose. But it’s very fragile—too fragile to be drawn out safely.”

Safely for the soul, he meant, not for me. I shook my head, too tired to laugh.

“No telling how much damage has been done,” Kurue muttered, turning away to pace the room’s small confines.

“An unused limb withers,” Zhakkarn said softly. “She had her own soul, and no need for another.”

Which I would happily have told you, I thought sourly, if I’d been able to protest at the time.

But what in the Maelstrom did all this mean for me? That the Enefadeh would make no further attempt to draw the soul from my body? Good, since I had no desire to experience that pain ever again. But it also meant that they were committed to their plan now, because they couldn’t get the thing out of me otherwise.

Was that, then, why I had all these strange dreams and visions? Because a goddess’s soul had begun to rot inside me?

Demons and darkness. Like a compass needle seeking north, I swung back around to look at Nahadoth. He turned away.

“What did you say earlier?” Kurue suddenly demanded. “About Dekarta.”

That particular concern seemed a million miles away. I pulled myself back to it, the here and now, and tried to push from my mind that terrible sky and the image of shining hands gripping and twisting flesh.

“Dekarta is throwing a ball in my honor,” I replied, “in one week. To celebrate my designation as one of the possible heirs.” I shook my head. “Who knows? Maybe it’s just a ball.”

The Enefadeh looked at each other.

“So soon,” murmured Sieh, frowning. “I had no idea he would do it this soon.”

Kurue nodded to herself. “Canny old bastard. He’ll probably have the ceremony at dawn the morning after.”

“Could this mean he’s discovered what we’ve done?” asked Zhakkarn.

“No,” Kurue said, looking at me, “or she’d be dead and the soul would already be in Itempas’s hands.”