Someone shook me an uncountable time later, pulling me from a hazy dream dominated by a woman’s bulging belly. Naturally I thought I was still dreaming when I opened my eyes to find another belly hovering in front of me, and naturally I put out a hand to stroke it. I have always found pregnancy fascinating. When mortal women permit, I hover near them, listening for the moment when the child’s soul ignites out of nothingness and begins to resonate with mine. The creation of souls is a mystery that we gods endlessly debate. When Nahadoth was born, his soul was fully formed even though no mother ever carried him within her body. Did the Maelstrom give it to him? But only things with souls can bestow souls, or so we have come to believe over the aeons. Does this mean It has a soul? And if so, where did Its soul come from?
All irrelevant questions, because an instant after my hand touched Usein Darr’s belly, her knife touched the skin beneath my eye. I came very much awake.
“My apologies, Usein-ennu,” I said, lifting my hand very carefully. I tried to lift my eyes, too, to focus on her, but it was the knife that dominated my attention. She had been much faster than Hymn, which I supposed was not surprising. I seemed to attract women who were good with a blade.
“Just Usein,” she said in Darre. A rude thing to do to an obvious foreigner, and unnecessary, since her knife made its own silent point. “My father is in poor health, but he may live years more, despite the ill wishes of others.” Her eyes narrowed. “I imagine women in Tema are no happier to have strangers pawing them, so I see no reason to excuse your behavior.”
Swallowing, I finally forced my gaze upward to her face. “My apologies,” I said again, also in Darre. One of her eyebrows lifted. “Would you excuse me if I said I’d been dreaming about a woman like you?”
Her lips twitched, considering a smile. “Are you a father already, little boy? You should be at home knitting blankets to warm your babies, if so.”
“Not a father and never a father, actually, not that any woman would want children who took after me.” (My own smile faltered as I remembered Shahar; then I pushed her out of my mind.) “Congratulations on your conception. May your delivery be swift and your daughter strong.”
She shrugged, after a moment taking her knife from my skin. She did not sheathe it, however—a warning. “This babe will be what it is. Probably another son, given that my husband seems to produce nothing else.” With a sigh, she put her free hand on her hip. “I noticed you during our council session, pretty boy, and came over to find out more about you. Especially as Temans don’t bother coming here anymore; they’ve made their allegiance to the Arameri clear. So, are you a spy?”
Casting an uneasy glance at her still-naked blade, I considered several lies—then decided the truth was so outrageous that she might believe it more readily. “I’m a godling, sent by an organization of godlings based in Shadow. We think you might be trying to destroy the world. Could you, perhaps, stop?”
She did not react quite as I’d expected. Instead of gaping at me, or laughing, she gazed at me in solemn silence for a long, taut moment. I couldn’t read her face at all.
Then she sheathed her knife. “Come with me.”
We went to Sar-enna-nem.
Night had fallen while I napped, the moon rising high and full over the branching stone streets. I had only a few moments to glimpse this before Usein Darr and I—accompanied by two sharp-eyed women and a handsome young man who’d greeted Usein with a kiss and me with a threatening look—stepped inside the temple. One of the guardswomen was pregnant, too, though not overtly so because she was stocky and heavyset. Her child’s soul had grown, though, so I knew.
The instant I crossed the threshold, I knew why Usein had brought me here. Magic and faith danced along my skin like raindrops on a pond’s surface. I closed my eyes and reveled in it, soaking it in as I walked over the glimmering mosaic stones, letting my reawakened sense of the world steer my feet. It had been months since I’d last felt the world fully. Listening now, I heard songs that had last been sung before the Gods’ War, echoing from Sar-enna-nem’s ceiling arches. I licked my lips and tasted the spiced wine that had once been used for offerings, tinged with occasional drops of blood. I put out my hands, stroking the air of the place, and shivered as it returned the caress.
Illusions and memories; all I had left. I savored them as best I could.
There had been only a few people in the temple when we’d entered: a man in priest garb, a portly woman carrying two fretting babes, a few worshippers kneeling in a prayer area, and a few unobtrusive guards. I navigated around these and between the small marble statues that stood on plinths all about the chamber, letting resonance guide me. When I opened my eyes, the statue at which I’d stopped gazed back at me with uncharacteristic solemnity on its finely wrought features. I reached up to touch its small, cheeky face, and sighed for my lost beauty.
There was no surprise in Usein Darr’s voice. “I thought so. Welcome to Darr, Lord Sieh. Though I heard you stopped involving yourself in mortal affairs after T’vril Arameri’s death.”
“I had, yes.” I turned away from the statue of myself and put one hand on my hip, adopting the same pose. “Circumstances have forced my hand, however.”
“And now you help the Arameri who once enslaved you?” She did not, to her credit, laugh.
“No. I’m not doing this for them.”
“For the Dark Lord, then? Or my exalted predecessor, Yeine-ennu?”
I shook my head and sighed. “No, just me. And a few other godlings and mortals who would rather not see a return to the chaos of the time before the Gods’ War.”
“Some would call that time ‘freedom.’ I would think you would call it so, given what happened after.”
I nodded slowly and sighed. This was a mistake. Glee should never have sent me on a mission like this. I wasn’t going to be able to do a very good job of negotiating with Usein, because I didn’t really disagree with her goals. I didn’t care if the mortal realm descended back into strife and struggle. All I cared about was—
Shahar, her eyes soft and full of a tenderness I’d never expected to see as I taught her everything I knew of pleasure. Deka, still a child, blushing shyly and moving close to me whenever he could—
Distraction. A reminder. I had sworn an oath.
“I remember what your world was like then,” I said softly. “I remember when Darre infants starved in their cribs because enemies burned your forests. I remember rivers with water tinted red, fields that bloomed greener and richer because the soil had soaked up so much blood. Is that really what you want to return to?”
She came over, gazing up at the statue’s face rather than at me. “Were you the one who made the Walking Death?”
I twitched in surprise and sudden unease.
“It seems like the sort of disease you would create,” she said with brutal softness. “Tricksy. There hasn’t been an outbreak since Yeine-ennu’s day, but I’ve read the accounts. It lurks for weeks before the symptoms appear, spreading far and wide in the meantime. At its height, the victims of the disease seem more alive than ever, but their minds are dead, burned away by the fever. They walk, but only to carry death to new victims.”
I could not look at her, for shame. But when she spoke again, I was surprised to hear compassion in her voice.
“No mortals should have as much power as the Arameri had when they owned you,” she said. “No mortals should have as much power as they have now: the laws, the scriveners, their army, all their pet nobles, the wealth they’ve claimed from peoples destroyed or exploited. Even the history taught to our children in the White Hall schools glorifies them and denigrates everyone else. All civilization, every bit of it, is made to keep the Arameri strong. That is how they’ve survived after losing you. That is why the only solution is to destroy everything they’ve built. Good and bad, all of it is tainted. Only by starting fresh can we truly be free again.”
At this, however, I could only smile.
“Start fres
h?” I asked. I looked up at the statue of myself. Its blank eyes. I imagined them green, like my own. Like those of Shinda, Itempas’s dead demon son.
“For that,” I said, “you would have to go further back than the Bright. Remember what caused it, after all—the Gods’ War, which was what put me and the other Enefadeh under the Arameri’s control in the first place. And remember what caused that: our bickering. Our love affairs gone horribly, horribly wrong.” Usein grew silent behind me, in surprise. “To really start fresh, you need to get rid of the gods, not just the Arameri. Then burn every book that mentions us. Smash every statue, including this pretty one here. Raise your children to be ignorant of the world’s creation or our existence; let them come up with stories of their own to explain it all. For that matter, kill any child who even thinks about magic—because that is how deeply we have tainted mortalkind, Usein Darr.” I turned to her and reached out. This time when I put my hand on her swollen belly, she did not draw her knife; she flinched. I smiled. “We’re in your blood. Because of us, you know all the wonders and horrors of possibility. And someday, if you don’t kill yourselves, if we don’t kill you, you might become us. So how fresh of a start do you really want?”
Her jaw twitched, the muscles flexing once. I felt her fight for something—courage, maybe. Resolve. Beneath my fingers, her child shifted, pressing briefly against my hand. I felt its shiny new soul thrum in concert with my own for a moment. His soul, alas for her poor husband.
After a moment, Usein drew a deep breath. “You wish to know our plans.”
“Among other things, yes.”
She nodded. “Come, then. I’ll show you.”
Sar-enna-nem is a pyramid; only the topmost hall of it held prayer space and statues. The next levels down held much more interesting things.
Like masks.
We stood in a gallery of sorts. Our escort had left us at Usein’s unseen signal, though her glowering husband had brought an oddly shaped stool so that she could sit. She watched while I strolled about, looking at each mask in turn. The masks lined every shelf; they were set into the walls between the shelves; they were artfully positioned on display tables in front of the shelves. I even glimpsed a few attached to the ceiling. Dozens of them, maybe hundreds, every size and color and configuration, though they had some commonalities. All of them were oval shaped, as a base. All had open eyeholes and sealed mouths. All of them were beautiful, and powerful in ways that had nothing to do with magic.
I stopped at one of the tables, gazing down at a mask that made something inside me sing in response. There, on the table, was Childhood: smooth, fat cheeks; a mischievously grinning mouth; great wide eyes; broad forehead waiting to be filled with knowledge. Subtle inlays and painting around the mouth had been applied, some of it realistic and some pure abstraction. Geometric designs and laugh lines. Somehow, it hinted that the mask’s grin could have been simple joy or sadistic cruelty, or joy in cruelty. The eyes could have been alight with the pleasure of learning or aghast at all the evils mortals inflict on their young. I touched its stiff lips. Just wood and paint. And yet.
“Your artist is a master,” I said.
“Artists. The art of making these masks isn’t purely a Darre thing. The Mencheyev make them, too, and the Tok—and all of our lands got the seed of it from a race called the Ginij. You may remember them.”
I did. It had been a standard Arameri extermination. Zhakkarn, via her many selves, had hunted down every last mortal of the race. Kurue erased all mention of them from books, scrolls, stories, and songs, attributing their accomplishments to others. And I? I had set the whole thing in motion by tricking the Ginij king into offending the Arameri so that they had a pretext to attack.
She nodded. “They called this art dimyi. I don’t know what the word means in their tongue. We call it dimming.” She shifted to Senmite to make the pun. The word was meaningless in itself, though its root suggested the mask’s purpose: to diminish its wearer, reduce them to nothing more than the archetype that the mask represented.
And if that archetype was Death… I thought of Nevra and Criscina Arameri, and understood.
“It started as a joke,” she continued, “but over time the word has stuck. We lost many of the Ginij techniques when they were destroyed, but I think our dimmers—the artists who make the masks—have done a good job of making up the difference.”
I nodded, still staring at Childhood. “There are many of these artists?”
“Enough.” She shrugged. Not wholly forthcoming, then.
“Perhaps you should call these artists assassins instead.” I turned to look at Usein as I said this.
Usein regarded me steadily. “If I wanted to kill Arameri,” she said, slowly and precisely, “I wouldn’t kill just one, or even a few. And I wouldn’t take my time about it.”
She wasn’t lying. I lowered my hands and frowned, trying to understand. How could she not be lying? “But you can do magic with these things.” I nodded toward Childhood. “Somehow.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “I don’t know these people you work for, Lord Sieh. I don’t know your aims. Why should I share my secrets with you?”
“We can make it worth your while.”
The look she threw me was scornful. I had to admit, it had been a bit clichéd.
“There is nothing you can offer me,” she said, getting to her feet with pregnant-woman awkwardness. “Nothing I want or need from anyone, god or mortal—”
“Usein.”
A man’s voice. I turned, startled. The gallery’s open doorway framed a man, standing between the flickering torch sconces. How long had he been there? My sense of the world was fading already. I thought at first it was a trick of the light that he seemed to waver; then I realized what I was seeing: a godling, in the last stages of configuring his form for the mortal realm. But when his face had taken its final shape—
I blinked. Frowned.
He stepped farther into the light. The features he’d chosen certainly hadn’t been meant to help him blend in. He was short, about my height. Brown skin, brown eyes, deep brown lips—these were the only things about him that fit any mortal mold. The rest was a jumble. Teman sharpfolds with orangey red islander hair and high, angular High Northern cheekbones. Was he an idiot? None of those things fit together. Just because we could look like anything didn’t mean we should.
But that was not the biggest problem.
“Hail, Brother,” I said uncertainly.
“Do you know me?” He stopped, slipping his hands into his pockets.
“No…” I licked my lips, confused by the niggling sense that I did know him, somehow. His face was unfamiliar, but that meant nothing; none of us took our true shape in the mortal realm. His stance, though, and his voice…
Then I remembered. The dream I’d had a few nights before. I’d forgotten it thanks to Shahar’s betrayal. Are you afraid? he’d asked me.
“Yes,” I amended, and he inclined his head.
Usein folded her arms. “Why are you here, Kahl?”
Kahl. The name wasn’t familiar, either.
“I won’t be staying long, Usein. I came only to suggest that you show Sieh the most interesting of your masks, since he’s so curious.” His eyes never left mine as he spoke to her.
From the corner of my eye, I saw a muscle in Usein’s jaw flex. “That mask isn’t complete.”
“He asked you how far you were willing to go. Let him see.”
She shook her head sharply. “How far you are willing to go, Kahl. We have nothing to do with your schemes.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t call it nothing, Usein. Your people were eager enough for my help when I offered it, and some of you likely guessed what that help would cost. I never deceived you. You were the one who chose to renege on our agreement.”
There was a curious shiver to the air, and something about Kahl wavered again, not quite visibly. Some aspect of his nature? Ah, but of course; if Usein had indeed reneged on some deal with him, he woul
d consider her a target for vengeance, too. I looked at her, wondering if she knew just how dangerous it was to cultivate a godly enemy. Her lips were tight and her face sheened lightly with sweat as she watched him, her knife hand twitching. Yes. She knew.
“You used us,” she said.
“As you used me.” He lifted his chin, still watching me. “But that’s beside the point. Don’t you want your gods to see how powerful you’ve become, Usein? Show him.”
Usein made a frustrated sound, part fear and part annoyance. But she went to one of the wall shelves and pushed aside a book, exposing a previously hidden hole. She reached into it and pulled something. There was a low clack from somewhere behind the shelves, as of an unseen latch opening, and then the whole wall swung outward.
The power that flooded forth staggered me. I gasped and tried to stumble back from it, but I had forgotten the new size of my feet. I tripped and fell against a nearby table, which was the only thing that kept me upright. The radiating waves felt like… like Nahadoth at his worst. No, worse. Like all the weight of every realm pressing down, not on my flesh but on my mind.
And as I panted there, sweat dropping onto my forearms where they trembled on the table, I realized: I had felt this horror before.
There is a resonance, Nahadoth had said.
I managed to force my head upright. My flesh wanted to let go of itself. I fought to remain corporeal, since I wasn’t sure I’d be able to re-form if I didn’t. Across the room I saw that Kahl had stepped back, too, bracing his hand against the door frame; his expression was unsurprised, grimly enduring. But elated, too.
“What…?” I tried to focus on Usein, but my sight blurred. “What is…”
She stepped into the hidden alcove that had been revealed by the opened wall. There, on a darkwood plinth, sat another mask—one that was nothing like the others. It seemed to be made of frosted glass. Its shape was more elaborate than an oval, the edges fluted and geometric. I thought it might hurt the face of whoever donned it. It was larger than a standard mask, too, bearing flanges and extensions at jawline and forehead that reminded me, somehow, of wings. Of flight. Of falling, down, down, through a vortex whose walls churned with a roar that could shatter the mortal realm—
The Inheritance Trilogy Page 88
