Usein picked it up, apparently heedless of its power. Couldn’t she feel it? How could she bring her child near something so terrible? There were no torches in the alcove; the thing glowed with its own soft, shifting light. Where Usein’s fingers touched it, I saw a hint of movement, just for an instant. The glass turned to smooth brown flesh like the hand that held it, then faded back to glass.
“This mask—or so Kahl tells me—has a special power,” she said, glancing at me. Then she narrowed her eyes at Kahl, who nodded in return, though he was looking decidedly uncomfortable, too. Hard to tell anything, looking at that stoic face of his. “When it’s complete, if it works as predicted, it will confer godhood upon its wearer.”
I stiffened. Looked at Kahl, who merely smiled at me. “That’s not possible.”
“Of course it is,” he said. “Yeine is the proof of that.”
I shook my head. “She was special. Unique. Her soul—”
“Yes, I know.” His gaze was glacially cold, and I remembered the moment he’d committed himself to being my enemy. Had the same expression been on his face then? If so, I would have tried harder to earn his forgiveness. “The conjunction of many elements, all in just the right proportion and strength, all at just the right time. Of such a recipe is divinity made.” He gestured toward the mask; his hand shook and grew blurry before he lowered it. “Godsblood and mortal life, magic and art and the vagaries of chance. And more, all bound into that mask, all to impress upon those who view it, an idea.”
Usein set the thing down on the carved wooden face that served as its stand. “Yes. And the first mortal who put it on burned to death from the inside out. It took three days; she screamed the whole time. The fire was so hot that we couldn’t get near enough to end her misery.” She turned a hard look on Kahl. “That thing is evil.”
“Merely incomplete. The raw energy of creation is neither good nor evil. But when that mask is ready, it will churn forth something new… and wondrous.” He paused, his expression turning inward for a moment; he spoke softer, as if to himself, but I realized that his words were actually aimed at me. “I will not be a slave to fate. I will embrace it, control it. I will be what I wish to be.”
“You’re mad.” Usein shook her head. “You expect us to put this kind of power into your hands, for demons know what purpose? No. Leave this place, Kahl. We’ve had enough of your kind of help.”
I hurt. The incomplete mask. It was like the Maelstrom: potential gone mad, creation feeding upon itself. I was not mortal enough to be immune to it. Yet that was not the sole source of my discomfort; something else beat against me like an oncoming tide, trying to drive me to my knees. The mask had heightened my god-senses, allowing me to feel it, but my flesh was only mortal, too weak to endure so much power in one place.
“What are you?” I asked Kahl in our words, between gasps. “Elontid? Imbalance…” That was the only explanation for the seesaw flux I felt from him. Resolve and sorrow, hatred and longing, ambition and loneliness. But how could there be another elontid in the world? He could not have been born during the time of my incarceration, not with Enefa dead and all gods rendered sterile for that time. And who were his parents? Itempas was the only one of the Three who could have made him, but Itempas did not mate with godlings.
Kahl smiled. To my surprise, there was no hint of cruelty in it—only that curious, resolute sorrow I’d heard in my dream.
“Enefa is dead, Sieh.” His voice was soft now. “Not all her works vanished with her, but some did. I remembered. You will, too, eventually.”
Remember what?
forget
Forget what?
Kahl staggered suddenly, bracing himself against the door and sighing. “Enough. We’ll finish this later. In the meantime, a word of advice, Sieh: find Itempas. Only his power can save you; you know this. Find him, and live for as long as you can.” When he pushed himself upright, his teeth were a carnivore’s, needle-sharp. “Then if you must die, die like a god. At my hands, in battle.”
Then he vanished. And I was alone, helpless, being churned to pieces by the mask’s power. My flesh tried, again, to fragment; it hurt, the way disintegration should. I screamed, reaching out for someone, anyone, to save me. Nahadoth—No, I didn’t want him or Yeine anywhere near that mask, no telling what it would do to them. But I was so afraid. I did not want to die, not yet.
The world twisted around me. I slid through it, gasping—
Rough hands grasped me, hauled me over onto my back. Above me, Ahad’s face. Not Nahadoth but close enough. He was frowning, examining me with hands and other senses, actually looking concerned.
“You care,” I said dizzily, and stopped thinking for a while.
12
WHEN I WOKE, I told Ahad what I had seen in Darr, and he got a very odd look on his face. “That was not at all what we suspected,” he muttered to himself. He looked over at Glee, who stood by the window, her hands clasped behind her back, as she gazed out over the quiet streets. It was nearly dawn in this part of the world. The end of the working day for the Arms of Night.
“Call the others,” she said. “We’ll meet tomorrow night.”
So Ahad dismissed me for the day, ordering the servants to give me food and money and new clothing, because the old set no longer fit well. I had aged again, you see—perhaps five years this time, passing through my final growth spurt in the process. I was two inches taller and even thinner than before, unpleasantly close to skeletal. My body had reconfigured its existing substance to forge my new shape, and I hadn’t had much substance to go around. I was well into my twenties now, with no hint of childhood remaining. Nothing but human left.
I went back to Hymn’s house. Her family ran an inn, after all, and I had money now, so it made sense. Hymn was relieved to see me, though she puzzled over my changed appearance and pretended to be annoyed. Her parents were not at all pleased, but I promised to perform no impossible feats on their premises, which was easy because I couldn’t. They put me in the attic room.
There, I ate the entire basket of food Ahad’s servants had packed for me. I was still hungry when the food was gone—though the basket had been generously packed—but had sated myself enough that I could attend to other needs. So I curled up on the bed, which was hard but clean, and watched the sun rise beyond my lone window. Eventually I considered the topic of death.
I could kill myself now, probably. This was not normally an easy thing for any god to do, as we are remarkably resilient beings. Even willing ourselves into nonexistence did not work for long; eventually we would forget that we were supposed to be dead and start thinking again. Yeine could kill me, but I would never ask it of her. Some of my siblings, and Naha, could and would do it, because they understood that sometimes life is too much to bear. But I did not need them anymore. The past two nights’ events had verified what I’d already suspected: those things that had once merely weakened me before could kill me now. So if I could steel myself to the pain of it, I could die whenever I wished simply by continuing to contemplate antithetical thoughts until I became an old man, and then a corpse.
And perhaps it was even simpler than that. I needed to eat and drink and pass waste now. That meant I could starve and thirst, and that my intestines and other organs were actually necessary. If I damaged them, they might not grow back.
What would be the most exciting way to commit suicide?
Because I did not want to die an old man. Kahl had gotten that much right. If I had to die, I would die as myself—as Sieh, the Trickster, if not the child. I had blazed bright in my life. What was wrong with blazing in death, too?
Before I reached middle age, I decided. Surely I could think of something interesting by then.
On that heartening note, I finally slept.
I stood on a cliff outside the city, gazing upon the wonder that was Sky-in-Shadow and the looming, spreading green of the World Tree.
“Hello, Brother.”
I turned, blinking, though I wa
s not really surprised. When the first mortal creatures grew the first brains that did more than pump hearts and think of meat, my brother Nsana had found fulfillment in the random, spitting interstices of their sleeping thoughts. He had been a wanderer before that, my closest playmate, wild and free like me. But sad, somehow. Empty. Until the dreams of mortals filled his soul.
I smiled at him, understanding at last the sorrow he must have felt in those long empty years before the settling of his nature.
“So this is the proof of it,” I said. I had pockets for the moment, so I slipped my hands into them. My voice was higher pitched; I was a boy again. In dreams, at least, I was still myself.
Nsana smiled, strolling toward me along a path of flowers that stirred without wind. For a moment his truest shape flickered before me: faceless, the color of glass, reflecting our surroundings through the distorting lenses of limbs and belly and the gentle featureless curve of his face. Then he filled in with detail and colors, though not those of a mortal. He did nothing like mortals if he could help it. So he had chosen skin like fine fabric, unbleached damask in swirling raised patterns, with hair like the darkest of red wine frozen in midsplash. His irises were the banded amber of polished, petrified wood—beautiful, but unnerving, like the eyes of a serpent.
“The proof of what?” he asked, stopping before me. His voice was light, teasing, as if it had been only a day since we’d seen each other and not an aeon.
“My mortality,” I said. “I wouldn’t have seen you otherwise.” I smiled, but I knew he would hear the truth in my voice. He had abandoned me for mortalkind, after all. I’d gotten over it; I was a big boy. But I would not pretend it hadn’t happened.
Nsana let out a little sigh and walked past me, stopping on the edge of a cliff. “Gods can dream, too, Sieh. You could have found me here anytime.”
“I hate dreaming.” I scuffed the ground with a foot.
“I know.” He put his hands on his hips, his expression frankly admiring as he gazed over the dreamscape I’d created. This one was not merely a memory, as my dream of the gods’ realm had been. “A shame, too. You do it so well.”
“I don’t do anything. It’s a dream.”
“Of course you do. It comes from you, after all. All of this”—he gestured expansively around us, and the dreamscape rippled with the passage of his hands—“is you. Even the fact that you let me come here is your doing, because you certainly never allowed it before.” He lowered his arms and looked at me. “Not even during the years you spent as an Arameri slave.”
I sighed, tired, even asleep. “I don’t want to think right now, Nsa. Please.”
“You never want to think, you silly boy.” Nsana came over, wrapping an arm around my shoulders and pulling me close. I put up a token resistance, but he knew it was token, and after a moment I sighed and let my head rest on his chest. Then it was not his chest—it was his shoulder—because suddenly I was taller than him and not a child anymore. When I lifted my head in surprise, Nsana let out a long sigh and cupped my face in his hands so that he could kiss me. He did not share himself with me that way because there was no point; I already stood encompassed within him, and he within me. But I did remember other kisses, and other existences, when innocence and dreams had been two halves of the same coin. Back then, I’d thought we would spend the rest of eternity together.
The dreamscape changed around us. When we parted, Nsana sighed, the fabric patterns of his face shifting into new lines. They hinted at words, but meant nothing.
“You’re not a child anymore, Sieh,” he said. “Time to grow up now.”
We stood on the streets of the First City. Everything that mortals will or might become is foreshadowed in the gods’ realm, where time is an accessory rather than a given, and the essences of the Three mingle in a different balance depending on their whims and moods. Because Itempas had been banished and diminished, only the barest remnant of his order held sway now. The city, which had been recognizable just a few years before, was only barely so now, and it shifted every few moments in some cycle we could not fathom. Or perhaps that was because this was a dream? With Nsana, there was no telling.
So he and I walked along cobblestoned streets that turned into smoothly paved sidewalks, stepping onto moving metal pathways now and again as they grew from the cobblestones and then melted away, as if tired. Pathways of mushrooms grew and withered in our wake. Each block, some of which were circular, held squat buildings of painted wood, and stately domes of hewn marble, and the occasional thatched hut. Curious, I peered into one of these buildings through its slanted window. It was dim, full of hulking shapes too distorted and uncomfortable-looking to be furniture, its walls decorated with blank paintings. Something within moved toward the window, and I backed up quickly. I wasn’t a god anymore. Had to be careful.
We were shadowed now and again by great towers of glass and steel that floated, cloudlike, a few meters off the ground. One of them followed us for two blocks, like a lonely puppy, before it finally turned with a foggy groan and drifted down another avenue. No one walked with us, though we felt the presence of others of our brethren, some watching, some uncaring. The City attracted them because it was beautiful, but I could not understand how they endured it. What was a city without inhabitants? It was like life without breathing, or friendship without love; what was the point?
But there was something in the distance that caught my attention, and Nsana’s, too. Deep in the City’s heart, taller and more still than the floating skyscrapers: a smooth, shining white tower without windows or doors. Even amid the jumbled, clashing architecture of that place, it was clear: this tower did not belong.
I stopped and frowned up at it, as a mushroom taller than Nsa spread its ribbed canopy over our heads. “What is that?”
Nsana willed us closer, folding the city until we stood at the tower’s feet. This confirmed there were no doors, and I curled my lip as I realized the thing was made of daystone. A little piece of Sky amid the dreams of gods: an abomination.
“You have brought this here,” said Nsana.
“The hells I did.”
“Who else would have, Sieh? I touch the mortal realm only through its dreams, and it does not touch me. It has never marked me.”
I threw a sharp look at him. “Marked? Is that how you think of me?”
“Of course, Sieh. You are.” I stared at him, wondering whether to feel hurt or angry or something else entirely, and Nsana sighed. “As I am marked by your abandonment. As we are all marked by the War. Did you think the horrors you’ve endured would simply slough away when you became a free god? They have become part of you.” But before I could muster a furious retort, Nsana frowned up at the tower again. “There is more to this, though, than just bad experiences.”
“What?”
Nsana reached out, laying a hand on the surface of the white tower. It glowed like Sky at night beneath his touch, becoming translucent—and within the tower, suddenly, I could see the shadow of some vast, twisting shape. It filled the tower, brown and indistinct, like ordure. Or a cancer.
“There’s a secret here,” said Nsana.
“What, in my dreams?”
“In your soul.” He looked at me, thoughtful. “It must be old, to have grown so powerful. Important.”
I shook my head, but even as I did so, I doubted.
“My secrets are small, silly things,” I said, trying to ignore that worm of doubt. “I kept the bones of the Arameri I killed in a stash beneath the family head’s bedroom. I piss in the punch bowl at weddings. I change directions on maps so they make no sense. I stole some of Nahadoth’s hair once, just to see if I could, and it almost ate me alive—”
He looked hard at me. “You have childish secrets and adult ones, Sieh, because you have never been as simple as you claim or wish to be. And this one—” He slapped the tower, making a sound that echoed from the empty streets around us. “This one is something you’ve kept even from yourself.”
I
laughed, but it was uneasy. “I can’t keep a secret from myself. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“When have you ever made sense? It’s something you’ve forgotten.”
“But I—”
forget
I faltered, silent. It was cold all of a sudden. I began shivering, though Nsana—who wore only his hair—was fine. But his eyes had narrowed suddenly, and abruptly I realized he’d heard that odd little burp of my thoughts.
“That was Enefa’s voice,” he said.
“I don’t…” But it had been. It had always been Mother whispering in my soul, nudging my thoughts away from this place when they got too close. Her voice: forget.
“Something you’ve forgotten,” Nsana said softly, “but perhaps not by your own will.”
I frowned, torn between confusion and alarm and fear. And above us, in the white tower, the dark thing shifted with a low rumbling groan. There was the faintest sound of stone shifting, and when I looked up at the tower, I spied a series of fine, barely noticeable cracks in its daystone surface.
Something I had forgotten. Something Enefa had made me forget. But Enefa was gone now, and whatever she had done to me was beginning to wear off.
“Gods and mortals and demons in between.” I rubbed my face. “I don’t want to deal with this, Nsa. My life is hard enough right now.”
Nsana sighed, and his sigh transformed the City into a playground of delights and horrors. A high, steep slide ended in a pit of chewing, flensing, disembodied teeth. The chains on a nearby swing set were wet with oil and blood. I could not see the trap in the seesaw, but I was certain there was one. It was too innocent-looking—like me, when I am up to something.
“Time for you to grow up,” he said again. “You ran away from me rather than do it before. Now you have no choice.”
The Inheritance Trilogy Page 89
