The Inheritance Trilogy

by N. K. Jemisin

  I truly hadn’t meant anything by it. Jumping felt good and laughing felt good and she felt good and kissing her felt good. Her mouth was soft and warm, her breath a tickle against my upper lip. I smiled as I let it end and sat up.

  But before I could, her hands gripped the cloth at the back of my shirt, pulling me down again. I started as her mouth found mine again, more delicious sweetness like flower nectar; then her tongue slipped between my lips. Now the sweetness turned to honey, thick and golden, sliding down my throat in a slow caress, spreading molten through my body. She shifted a little to press her small breasts against my chest. (Wait, little girls didn’t have breasts, did they?) Oh, gods, her hands on my back felt so good, I hadn’t liked a mortal this much in ages, could it be the love that Remath schemed for? No, I loved Shahar already, had loved her since childhood, oh yes oh yes oh yes. Exquisite mortal, here is my soul; I want you to know it.

  We parted then, her gasping and jerking away, me letting out a slow, trembling sigh.

  “Wh-what…” She put a hand to her mouth, her green eyes wide and so clear in the afternoon sunlight that I could count every spoke of her irises. “Sieh, what—”

  I cupped her cheek, sighing languidly. “That was me.” I closed my eyes, relaxing into the moment. “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  I didn’t feel like explaining, so I didn’t. I just rolled onto my back and let myself drift. Thankfully, she said nothing for a long while, lying still beside me.

  Such moments of peace never last, so I didn’t mind when she finally spoke. “It’s your antithesis, isn’t it? Marriage, things like that. Anything to do with adulthood.”

  I yawned. “Duh.”

  “Just talking about it made you sick.”

  “No. Finding out that I’m dying and worrying about my orrery and talking about marriage made me sick. If I’m already strong, a little thing like that can’t hurt me.”

  “Your orrery?” I felt the bed shift as she sat up on her elbows, her breath tickling my face.

  “Nothing important. It’s gone now.”

  “Oh.” She was silent a moment longer. “But how do you keep yourself from thinking about things like dying?”

  I opened my eyes. She was on her side now, head propped on her fist. Her hair had come partially loose from its swept-up chignon, and her eyes were softer than I’d ever seen them. She looked thoroughly rumpled and a bit naughty, not at all the poised and controlled family heir.

  “How do you keep yourself from thinking about death?” I touched her nose with a fingertip. “You mortals have to live with that fear all the time, don’t you? If you can do it, I can, too.” I would have to, or I would die even sooner. But I did not say this aloud; it would have spoiled the mood.

  “I see.” She lifted a hand, hesitated, and then yielded to impulse, resting it on my chest. I couldn’t purr in this form, but I could sigh in pleasure and arch a little beneath her hand, which I did. “So… what was that, just now?”

  “Why, Lady Shahar, I believe it’s called a kiss in Senmite. In Teman it’s umishday, and in Oubi it’s—”

  She swatted my chest hard enough to sting, then blanched as she realized what she’d done, then got over it. Her cheeks had gone that blotchy pink that either meant sickness or strong emotion in Amn; I guessed she was feeling shy. “What I mean is, why did you do it?”

  “Why did you kiss me last night?”

  She frowned. “I don’t know. It felt right.”

  “Same for me.” I yawned again. “Damn. I think I need to sleep.”

  She sat up, though she did not immediately leave the bed. Her back was to me, so I could see the tension in her shoulders. I thought she was going to ask another question, and perhaps she meant to. But what she said instead was, “I’m glad you came back, Sieh. Really. And I’m glad… what happened that day wasn’t…” She drew a deep breath. “I hated you for a long time.”

  I folded my hands under my head, sighing. “You probably still hate me a little, Shahar. I took your brother from you.”

  “No. Mother did that.” But she did not sound wholly certain, and I knew the mortal heart was not always logical.

  “Wounds need time to heal,” I said, thinking of my own.

  “Maybe so.” After another moment, she stood with a sigh. “I’ll be in my room.”

  She left. I was tempted to lie there awhile longer and fight the urge to sleep, but there are times to be childish and times when wisdom takes precedence. Sighing, I rolled over and curled up, giving in.

  5

  ABOVE MORTALS ARE THE GODS, and above us is the unknowable, which we call Maelstrom. For some reason It likes the number three. Three are Its children, the great gods who made the rest of us, who named themselves and encompass existence. Three also are the rankings of us lesser gods—though that is only because we killed the fourth.

  First came the niwwah, the Balancers, among whose ranks I am honored to be counted. We were born of the Three’s earliest efforts at intercourse, for they had other ways of lovemaking long before reproduction had anything to do with it. They did not know how to be parents then, so they did many things wrong, but it was long ago and most of us have forgiven them for it.

  We are called Balancers not because we balance anything, mind, but because each of us has two of the Three as parents in what we have come to realize is a balanced combination: Nahadoth and Enefa in my case, Itempas and Enefa in others. We do not like each other much, Nahadoth’s children and our half siblings who belong to Itempas, but we do love each other. So it goes with family.

  Next are the elontid, the Imbalancers. Again, this name is not because they take any active role in the maintenance or destruction of existence, but because they were born of imbalance. We did not know at first that certain mixes among us are dangerous. Nahadoth and Itempas, first and foremost—Enefa made them able to breed together, but they are both too similar and too different to do so easily. (Gender has nothing to do with this difficulty, mind you; that is only a game for us, an affectation, like names and flesh. We employ such things because you need them, not because we do.) On the rare occasions that Naha and Tempa bear children together, the results are always powerful, and always frightening. Only a few have lived to adulthood: Ral the Dragon, Ia the Negation, and Lil the Hunger. Also counted among the elontid are those born of unions between gods and godlings, reflecting the inequity of the merging that created them. They are gods of things that ebb and wane, like the tides, fashion, lust and liking.

  Nothing is wrong with them, I must emphasize, though some among my fellow niwwah treat them as pitiable creatures. This is a mistake; they are merely different.

  Third we count the mnasat: those children we godlings have produced among ourselves. Here there is weakness, in the relative sense of things, for even the mnasat can destroy a world if pressed. Countless numbers have been born over the aeons, but most are culled in their first few centuries—caught in the cross fire of the Three’s endless battling and copulating, or dragged into the Maelstrom by accident, or lost through any of the other legion hazards that might befall a young god. The War in particular decimated their ranks—and I will admit that I took my share of their lives. Why shouldn’t I have, if they were so foolish as to interfere in the concerns of their betters? Yet there were a few whom I could not kill, and who proved themselves worthy through that trial-by-apocalypse. The mnasat have shown us by the harsh example of their deaths that it is living true, not mere strength, which dictates matters among us. Those who submitted to their natures gained power to match even the strongest of us niwwah—and those who forgot themselves, no matter how much innate power they possessed, fell.

  There is another lesson in this: life cannot exist without death. Even among gods there are winners and losers, eaters and eaten. I have never hesitated to kill my fellow immortals, but I sometimes mourn the necessity.

  The demons were the fourth ranking of us, if you’re wondering. But there is no point in speaking of t
hem.

  I awakened with a rude snarfle and a groan. Dreams. I had forgotten those, a plague of mortal flesh. Bad enough mortals wasted so much of their lives insensible, but Enefa had also given them dreams to teach them about themselves and their universe. Few of them ever listened to the lessons—a total waste of creation in my eyes—but thanks to that, I would have to endure these mind-farts every time I slept. Lovely.

  It was late in the night, nowhere near morning. Though I had been asleep for only three or four hours, I felt no further urge to rest, perhaps because I wasn’t yet fully mortal. So what to do with the hours until Shahar was awake to entertain me?

  I got up and went roaming again in the palace, this time not bothering to conceal myself. The servants and guards said nothing when I passed them, despite my nondescript clothing and unmarked forehead, but I felt their eyes on my back. What had Morad, or whoever served as the captain of the guard now, told them about me? There was no flavor of adoration or revulsion to their stares. Just curiosity—and wariness.

  I went into the underpalace first, to the Nowhere Stair. Which no longer existed, to my shock.

  In its place was an open atrium. Three levels of wide circular balconies ringed a space that had been reworked with sculptures and potted plants of the sort that needed little care. (At least it wasn’t dusty anymore. The Arameri no longer neglected the underpalace, having realized it could hide secrets.) The atrium lacked the intentionally carefree feel of most Sky architecture, and I could see where the edges of each balcony had been too-hastily molded by the scriveners, leaving them uneven and not as smooth as they should have been. Servants had cleaned up the rubble, but signs of the disaster were still there, for one who knew how to see.

  I crouched at the edge of one of the balconies, bracing one hand on the thin railing, and touched the rough daystone of the floor. Echoes still reverberated in the stone—not echoes of sound, since those had long since moved on, but echoes of event. I closed my eyes and saw again what the stone had witnessed.

  The Nowhere Stair. At the bottom of it, three children holding hands. (I marveled at how small Shahar had been then; already I had grown used to her older shape.) I watched the mortals’ faces change from smiles to alarm, felt the rising rush of wind, saw their hair and clothing begin to whip about as if they’d been caught in a tornado. They screamed as their feet rose from the floor; then they flipped entirely, twisting upside down. Only I did not budge, my feet seemingly rooted to the ground. Only their grip on each other and me held them down.

  And the look on my face! In the memory, I stood with mouth slack, eyes distant and confused, brow ever-so-slightly furrowed and head cocked, as if I heard something no one else could, and whatever I heard had obliterated my wits.

  Then my body blurred, flesh interspersing with white lines. My mouth opened and the stone beneath my fingertips gave one last microscopic shiver as a concussion of force tore loose from my throat. The Nowhere Stair shattered like glass, as did all the daystone around it and beneath it and above it. What saved the children was that the energy blasted outward in a spherical wave; they fell amid the rubble, bleeding and still, but not much of the rubble landed on them.

  And when the dust cleared, I had vanished.

  Taking my fingers off the stone, I frowned to myself. Then I said to the mortal who had hovered somewhere behind me, watching for the past ten minutes, “What do you want?”

  He came forward, preceded by the familiar mingled scent of books and chemical phials and incense; by that I knew what he was before he ever spoke. “My apologies, Lord Sieh. I did not mean to disturb you.”

  I rose, dusting off my hands, and turned to take his measure. An island man of late middle years, with salt-sprinkled red hair and a lined saturnine face that showed a hint of beard stubble. There was a fullblood mark on his brow, but he didn’t look Arameri or even Amn. And fullbloods rarely smelled of hard work. An adoptee, then.

  “You the First Scrivener?” I asked.

  He nodded, obviously torn between fascination and unease. Finally he offered me an awkward bow—not deep enough to be properly respectful but too deep for the kind of disdain a devout Itempan should have shown. I laughed, remembering Viraine’s cool, nuanced poise, and then sobered as I remembered why Viraine had been so good at things like that.

  “Forgive me,” the man said again. “But the servants passed word that you were abroad in the palace, and… I thought… well, it seems natural that you would come to the scene of the crime, so to speak.”

  “Mmm.” I slipped my hands into my pockets, trying very hard not to feel uneasy in his presence. These were not the old days. He had no power over me. “It’s late, First Scrivener, or early. Don’t you Itempans believe in a full night’s rest before your dawn prayers?”

  He blinked; then his surprise faded into amusement. “They do, but I’m not Itempan, Lord Sieh. And I wanted to meet you, which necessitated staying up late, or so my research suggested. You were known to be decidedly nocturnal during your”—his confidence faltered again—“time here.”

  I stared at him. “How can you not be Itempan?” All scriveners were Itempan priests. The Order gave anyone with a knack for magic a single choice: join or die.

  “About—hmm—fifty years ago? The Litaria petitioned the Nobles’ Consortium for independence from the Order of Itempas. The Litaria is a secular body now. Scriveners may devote themselves to whichever god, or gods, they wish.” He paused, then smiled again. “As long as we serve the Arameri, regardless.”

  I looked him up and down, opened my mouth a little to get a better taste of his scent, and was stymied. “So which god do you honor?” He certainly wasn’t one of mine.

  “I honor all the gods. But in terms of spirituality, I prefer to worship at the altars of knowledge and artistry.” He made an apologetic little gesture with his hand, as if he worried about hurting my feelings, but I had begun to grin.

  “An atheist!” I put my hands on my hips, delighted. “I haven’t seen one of you since before the War. I thought the Arameri wiped all of you out.”

  “As well as they did all the other gods’ worshippers, Lord Sieh, yes.” I laughed at this, which seemed to hearten him. “Heresy is actually rather fashionable among the commonfolk, though here in Sky I am more circumspect about it, of course. And the, ah, polite term for people like me is primortalist.”

  “Ugh, what a mouthful.”

  “Unfortunately, yes. It means ‘mortals first’—neither an accurate nor complete representation of our philosophy, but as I said, there are worse terms. We believe in the gods, naturally.” He nodded to me. “But as the Interdiction has shown us, the gods function perfectly well whether we believe in them or not, so why devote all that energy to a pointless purpose? Why not believe most fervently in mortalkind and its potential? We, certainly, could benefit from a little dedication and discipline.”

  “I agree wholeheartedly!” And if I didn’t miss my guess, there were probably a few of my siblings involved in his mortal-worshipping movement. But I refrained from pointing this out, lest it disturb him. “What’s your name?”

  He bowed again, more easily this time. “Shevir, Lord Sieh.”

  I waved a hand. “I make the Arameri call me ‘lord.’ It’s just Sieh.”

  He looked uneasy. “Er, well—”

  “Arameri is a state of mind. I’ve known some adoptees who fit right into this family. You, sir, are a die among the jacks.” I smiled to let him know that had been meant as a compliment, and he relaxed. “Remath told you all about me, then?”

  “The Lady Arameri informed me of your… condition, yes. I and my staff, including those in the city below, are already hard at work trying to determine what might have caused the change. We’ll inform Lady Remath at once if we find anything.”

  “Thank you.” I refrained from pointing out that telling Remath wouldn’t do me any good unless Remath chose to pass the information along. He probably knew that and was just letting me know where his lo
yalties lay. Mortals first. “Were you here in Sky, eight years ago?”

  “Yes.” He came to stand beside me, staring avidly at my profile, my posture, everything. Studying me. Knowing his beliefs, I did not mind for once. “I was head of the healing squadron then; it was I and my colleagues who treated Lord Dekarta and Lady Shahar after their injury. I was promoted to First Scrivener for saving their lives.” He hesitated. “The previous First Scrivener was removed from office for failing to realize that a god had visited Sky.”

  I rolled my eyes. “There is no scrivening magic that can detect a god’s presence if we don’t want to be detected.” I had never wanted to be detected.

  “The lady was informed of this.” He was smiling thinly, not bitter at least. I supposed there was no point in laying blame.

  “If you were here back then, you—or your predecessor—would have conducted an investigation.”

  “Yes.” He straightened as if giving a report. “The incident occurred in early afternoon. There was a tremor throughout the palace, and all of the boundary scripts sounded an alarm, indicating unauthorized active magic within the palace’s walls. Guards and service staff arrived to find this.” He gestured at the atrium. The debris had been removed, but that changed nothing; it was painfully clear to anyone who had seen it before that the atrium was really just an enormous sunken pit. “No one knew what had happened until three days later, when first Dekarta, then Shahar awakened.”