Ahad steepled his fingers, propping his elbows on the arms of the handsome leather chair. I wondered whether this was a sign of nerves. “I should think you’d have guessed. Considering how easily you defeated me in—” He paused, frowning, and then I finally did catch on.
“No mortal tongue has words for it,” I said softly. I would have to speak diplomatically, and that was never easy for me. “In our realm there is no need for words. Naturally you will have picked up some of our tongue over the centuries….” I let the question ask itself, and he grimaced.
“Not much of it. I couldn’t hear… feel…” He struggled to say it in Senmite, probably out of stubbornness. “I was like any other mortal before Yeine did this to me. I tried speaking your words a few times, died a few times, and stopped trying.”
“Your words now.” I watched Ahad absorb this, his expression going unreadably blank. “I can teach you the language, if you want.”
“There are several dozen godlings living in Shadow,” he replied stiffly. “If and when I deem it valuable, I can learn from them.”
Idiot, I thought, but kept it behind my teeth, nodding as if I thought deliberate ignorance was a good idea. “You have a bigger problem, anyway.”
He said nothing, watching me. He could do that for hours, I knew; something he’d learned during his years in Sky. I had no idea whether he knew what I was about to say.
“You don’t know your nature.” That was how I’d known I could best him, or at least get him off me, in the contest of our wills. His reaction to the touch of my thoughts had given it away: I had seen mortal newborns do the same at the brush of a fingertip. A quick, startled jerk, a flailing look to determine what and how and why, and will it hurt me? Only learning oneself better, and understanding one’s place in the world, made the touch of another mundane.
After a moment, Ahad nodded. This, too, was a gesture of trust between us. In the old days he would never have revealed so much weakness to me.
I sighed and got up, swaying only a little as I gained my feet, and went over to his chair. He did not rise this time, but he grew palpably less relaxed as I got closer, until I stopped.
“I will do you no harm,” I said, scowling at his skittishness. Why couldn’t he just be a coldhearted bastard all the time? I could never truly hate him, for pity. “The Arameri hurt you worse than I ever did.”
Very, very quietly he replied, “You let them.”
There was nothing I could say to that, because it was true. So I just stood there. This would never work if we began to rehash old hurts. He knew it, too. Finally he relaxed, and I stepped closer.
“All gods must learn who and what they are for themselves,” I said. As gently as I could—my hands were rough and dirty from my days in the alley—I cupped his face and held it. “Only you can define the meaning and limit of your existence. But sometimes, those of us who have already found ourselves can give the new ones a clue.”
I had already gained that clue during our brief metaphysical struggle. That fierce, devouring need of his. For what? I looked into his strangely mortalish eyes—strange because he had never really been mortal, yet mortality was all he knew—and tried to understand him. Which I should have been able to do because I had been there at the moment of his birth. I had seen his first steps and heard his first words. I had loved him, even if—
The nausea struck faster than ever before, because the alcohol had already made me ill. I barely managed to whirl away and collapse onto the floor before I was retching, screaming through the heaves, wobbling because my legs were trying to jerk and my spine was trying to bow backward even as my stomach sought to cast out the poison I had taken in. But this poison was not physical.
“Still a child after all.” Ahad sighed into my ear, his voice a low murmur that easily got through my strangled cries. “Shall I call you big brother or little brother? I suppose it doesn’t matter. You will never grow up fully, no matter how old you look. Brother.”
Brother. Brother. Not child, not
forget
Ahad was not my son, not even figuratively, because
forget
Because a god of childhood could not be a father, not if he wanted to be at all, and
forgetforgetforget
Brother. Ahad was my brother. My new little brother, Yeine’s first child. Nahadoth would be… well, not proud, probably. But amused.
My body unknotted. The agony receded enough that I stopped screaming, stopped spasming. There was nothing in my stomach anyhow. I lay there, returning gradually to myself as the horror faded, then drew one cautious breath. Then another.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
Ahad, crouching over me, sighed. He did not say you’re welcome, because I was not welcome and we both knew it. But he had done me a kindness when he hadn’t had to, and that deserved acknowledgment.
“You smell,” he said, “and you’re filthy, and you look like horseshit. Since you’re too useless to take yourself out of here as you should, I have no choice but to put you up for the night. But don’t get used to it; I want you living somewhere else after this.” He got up and went away, I assume to find a servant and make arrangements for my stay.
When he came back, I had managed—barely—to sit on my knees. I was still shaky. Insanely, my stomach now insisted that it needed to be filled again. In or out, I told it, but it did not listen.
Ahad crouched in front of me again. “Interesting.”
I managed to lift my eyes to him. His expression betrayed nothing, but he lifted a hand and conjured a small hand mirror. I was too tired even for envy. He lifted the mirror to show me my face.
I had grown older. The face that gazed back at me was longer, leaner, with a stronger jawline. The hair on my chin was no longer downy and barely visible; it had grown darker, longer, the wispy precursors of a beard. Late adolescence, rather than the middling stage of it I’d been in. Two years of my life gone? Three? Gone, regardless.
“I should be flattered, perhaps,” Ahad said. “That you remember the old days with such fondness.” His words skirted the edge of danger, but I was too tired for true fear. He could kill me anytime he wanted, and would’ve done it by now if he’d really meant to. He just liked flaunting his power.
Suddenly this seemed monumentally unfair. “I hate this,” I whispered, not caring if he heard me. “I hate that I’m nothing now.”
Ahad shook his head, less annoyed than unsurprised. His hand seized the back of my shirt and pulled me to my feet. “You’re not ‘nothing.’ You’re mortal, which is far from nothing. The sooner you accept that, the better off you’ll be.” He took one of my arms, holding it up, and made a sound of disgust. “You need to eat. Start taking care of your body if you want it to last for the few years you have left. Or would you rather die now?”
I closed my eyes, letting myself dangle from his grasp. “I don’t want to be mortal.” I was whining. It felt good to realize I still could, however much I’d grown up. “Mortals lie when they say they love you. They wait until you trust them, then shove the knife in, and then they work it around to make sure it kills you.”
There was a moment of silence, during which I closed my eyes and honestly contemplated having a good cry. It ended when the office door opened and two servants came in, and when Ahad gave me a slap on the cheek that was not quite gently chiding.
“Gods do that, too,” he snapped, “so you’re damned whichever way you turn. Shut up and deal with it.”
Then he shoved me into the servants’ waiting arms and they hauled me away.
11
I L-O-V-E, love you
I’ll K-I-S-S, kiss you
Then I pushed him in a lake
And he swallowed a snake
And ended up with a tummy ache
THE SERVANTS TOOK ME to a large sumptuous bathchamber with lovely benches that reeked of sex despite their freshly laundered cushions. They stripped me, throwing my old clothes into a pile to be burned, and scrubbed me with c
areless efficiency, rinsing me in perfumed water. Then they put me into a robe and took me to a room and let me sleep the whole day and well into the night. I did not dream.
I woke up thinking that my sister Zhakkarn was using my head as a pike target, though she would never do such a thing. When I managed to sit upright, which took doing, I contemplated nausea again. A long-cold meal and a pitcher of room-temperature water sat on a sideboard of the room, so I decided on ingestion rather than ejection and applied myself grimly. It helped that the food tasted good. Beside this sat a small dish holding a dab of thick white paste and a paper card, on which elegant blocky letters had been written: EAT IT. The hand was familiar, so I sighed and tasted the paste. The alley rat had been more rancid but not by much. Still, as I was a guest in Ahad’s home, I held my breath and gulped the rest down, then quickly ate more food in an attempt to disguise the bitter taste. This did not work. However, I began to feel better, so I was pleased to confirm it was medicine, not poison.
Fresh clothing had been set out for me, too. Pleasantly nondescript: loose gray pants, a beige shirt, a brown jacket, brown boots. Servant attire, most likely, since I suspected that would suit Ahad’s sense of cruelty. Thus arrayed, I opened the door of the room.
And promptly stopped, as the sounds of laughter and music drifted up from downstairs. Nighttime. For a moment the urge to play a dozen bawdy, vicious tricks was almost overwhelming, and I felt a tickle of power at the thought. It would be so easy to change all the house’s sensual oils into hot chili oil or make the beds smell of mildew rather than lust and perfume. But I was older now, more mature, and the urge passed. I felt a fleeting sadness in its wake.
Before I could close the door, however, two people came up the steps, giggling together with the careless intimacy of old friends or new lovers. One of them turned her head, and I froze as our eyes met. Egan, one of my sisters—with her arm around the waist of some mortal. I assessed and dismissed him in a glance: richly dressed, middle-aged, drunk. I turned back to meet Egan’s frowning gaze.
“Sieh.” She looked me up and down and smirked. “So the rumors are true; you’re back. Two thousand years wasn’t enough mortal flesh to satisfy you?”
Once upon a time, Egan had been worshipped by a desert tribe in eastern Senm. She had taught them to play music that could bring rain, and they had sculpted a mountain face to make a statue of her in return. Those people were gone now, absorbed into the Amn during one of that tribe’s endless campaigns of conquest before the War. After the War, I had destroyed Egan’s statue myself, under orders from the Arameri to eliminate anything that blasphemed against Itempas, no matter how beautiful. And here stood the original in mortal flesh, with an Amn man’s hand on her breast.
“I’m here by accident,” I said. “What’s your excuse?”
She lifted a graceful eyebrow, set into a beautiful Amn face. It was a new face, of course. Before the War, she had looked more like the people of the desert tribe. Both of us ignored the mortal, who had by now begun trying to nibble at her neck.
“Boredom,” she said. “Experience. The usual. During the War, it was the ones who’d spent the most time among mortalkind, defining their natures, who survived best.” Her eyes narrowed. “Not that you helped.”
“I fought the madman who destroyed our family,” I said wearily. “And yes, I fought anyone who helped him. I don’t understand why everyone acts like I did a horrible thing.”
“Because you—all of you who fought for Naha—lost yourselves in it,” Egan snapped, her body tensing so with fury that her paramour lifted his head to blink at her in surprise. “He infected you with his fury. You didn’t just kill those who fought; you killed anyone who tried to stop you. Anyone who pleaded for calm, if you thought they should’ve been fighting. Mortals, if they had the temerity to ask you for help. In the Maelstrom’s name, you act like Tempa was the only one who went mad that day!”
I stared at her, fury ratcheting higher in me, and then, suddenly, it died. I couldn’t sustain it. Not while I stood there with my head still aching from alcohol and Ahad’s beating the day before, and my skin crawling as infinitesimal flecks of it died—some renewed, some lost forever, all of it slowly becoming dryer and less elastic until one day it would be nothing but wrinkles and liver spots. Egan’s lover touched her shoulder to try and soothe her, a pathetic gesture, but it seemed to have some effect, because she relaxed just a little and smiled ruefully at him, as if to apologize for destroying the mood. That made me think of Shahar, and how lonely I was, and how lonely I would be for the rest of my mercilessly brief life.
It is very, very hard to sustain a two-thousand-year-old grudge amid all that.
I shook my head and turned to go back into my room. But just before I could close the door, I heard Egan. “Sieh. Wait.”
Warily I opened the door again. She was frowning at me. “Something’s different about you. What is it?”
I shook my head again. “Nothing that should matter to you. Look…” It occurred to me suddenly that I would never have a chance to say this to her or to any of my siblings. I would die with so much unfinished business. It wasn’t fair. “I’m sorry, Egan. I know that means nothing after everything that’s happened. I wish…” So many wishes. I laughed a little. “Never mind.”
“Are you going to be working here?” She smoothed a hand over her mortal man’s back; he sighed and leaned against her, happy again.
“No.” Then I remembered Ahad’s plans. “Not… like this.” I gestured toward her with my chin. “No offense, but I’m not overly fond of mortals right now.”
“Understandable, after all you’ve been through.” I blinked in surprise, and she smiled thinly. “None of us liked what Itempas did, Sieh. But by then, imprisoning you seemed the only sane choice he’d made, after so much insanity.” She sighed. “We all had a long time to think about how wrong that decision was. And then… well, you know how he is about changing his mind.”
By which she meant he didn’t. “I know.”
Egan glanced at her mortal, thoughtful, and then at me. Then at the mortal again. “What do you think?”
The man looked surprised but pleased. He looked at me, and abruptly I realized what they were considering. I couldn’t help blushing, which made the man smile. “I think it would be nice,” he said.
“No,” I said quickly. “I—er—thank you. I can see you mean well… but no.”
Egan smiled then, surprising me, because there was more compassion in it than I’d ever expected to see. “How long since you’ve been with your own?” she asked, and it threw me. I couldn’t answer, because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d made love to another god. Nahadoth, but that was not the same. He’d been diminished, stuffed into mortal flesh, desperate in his loneliness. That hadn’t been lovemaking; it had been pity. Before that, I thought it might have been—
forget
Zhakka, maybe? Selforine? Elishad—no, that had been ages ago, back when he’d still liked me. Gwn?
It would be good, perhaps, to lose myself in another for a while. To let one of my kind take my soul where she would and give it comfort. Wouldn’t it?
As I had done for Shahar.
“No,” I said again, more softly. “Not now… not yet. Thank you.”
She eyed me for a long moment, perhaps seeing more than I wanted her to see. Could she tell I was becoming mortal? Another reason not to accept her offer; she would know then. But I thought maybe that wasn’t the reason for her look. I wondered if maybe, just maybe, she still cared.
“The offer stands for whenever you change your mind,” she said, and then flashed me a smile. “You might have to share, though.” Turning her smile on the mortal, she and he moved on, heading up to the next floor.
My stirrings had been noticed. When I turned from watching Egan leave, the servant man who had quietly come upstairs bowed to me. “Lord Sieh? Lord Ahad has asked that you come to his office, when you’re ready.”
I put a hand on
my hip. “I know full well he didn’t ask.”
The servant paused, then looked amused. “You probably don’t want to know the word he actually used in place of your name, either.”
I followed the servant downstairs. During these evening hours, he explained quietly, only the courtesans were to be visible; this was necessary to maintain the illusion that the house contained nothing but beautiful creatures offering guiltless pleasure. The sight of servants reminded the clientele that the Arms of Night was a business. The sight of people like me—servants of a different kind, he did not say, but I could guess—reminded them that the business was one of many, whose collective owners had fingers in many pots.
So he took me into what looked like a closet, which proved to lead into a dimly lit, wide back stairwell. Other servants and the occasional mortal courtesan moved back and forth along this, all of them smiling or greeting each other amiably in passing. (So different from servants in Sky.) When we reached the ground floor, the servant led me through a short convoluted passage that reminded me a bit of my dead spaces, and then opened a door that appeared to have been cut from the bare wooden wall. “In here, Lord Sieh.” Unsurprisingly, we were back in Ahad’s office. Surprisingly, he was not alone.
The young woman who sat in the chair across from him would have been striking even if she hadn’t been beautiful. This was partly because she was Maroneh and partly because she was very tall for a woman, even sitting down. The roiling nimbus of black hair about her head only added to the inches by which she topped the chair’s high back. But she was also elegant of form and bearing, her presence accented by the faint fragrance of hiras-flower perfume. She had dressed herself like a nobody, in a nondescript long skirt and jacket with worn old boots, but she carried herself like a queen.
She had been smiling at something Ahad said when I entered. As I stepped into the room, her eyes settled on me with a disconcertingly intent gaze, and her smile faded to something cooler and more guarded. I had the sudden acute feeling of being sized up, and found wanting.
The Inheritance Trilogy Page 86
