The Inheritance Trilogy

by N. K. Jemisin

  The World Tree.

  Its trunk was infested with tiny, crawling mites that had once been thinking mortals. The maskers climbed with a strength that mortal flesh should not have possessed—and indeed, a few of them did not. We saw them fall, the magic burning out their bodies. But more of them clung securely to the thick, rough bark, and more still made the climb, steadily. It was only a half-mile to Sky, straight up. Some of the maskers were more than halfway there.

  Shahar saw this and screamed DIE and We screamed with her. We swept Our infinite hand over the Tree, knocking the insects away: dozens, hundreds. Because they were already dead, some got up and began climbing again. We crushed them. Then We turned outward again, rushing, raging, toward Usein and her warriors. We were greedy for the taste of their fear.

  They were afraid, We saw when We reached them, but not of Us.

  We whirled and saw what they saw: Kahl. He stood in the air over the city, gazing down at what his machinations had wrought. He looked displeased.

  We were much stronger. Exulting, We raised Our hand to destroy—

  —my son—

  —and stopped, frozen. Indecisive, for the first time, because of me.

  We had no flesh, so Kahl did not see Us. His lips tightened at the scene below. In one hand, We saw, was the strange mask. It was complete now—and yet not. Kahl could hold it with no apparent discomfort, but the thing had no power. Certainly nothing that could forge a new god.

  He raised a hand, and it is my fault, not Ours, mine, for I am a god and I should have known what he was about to do. But I did not think it, and the lives lost will haunt my eternal soul.

  He sent forth power as a hundred whipcord serpents. Each wove through buildings and stone and sought its lair: a tiny, barely visible notch in all of the masks, so small as to be subliminal. (We knew across time. We saw Kahl doing a god’s work, whispering into the dreams of the sleeping dimyi artists, inspiring them, influencing them. We saw Nsana the Guide turn, sensing the intrusion upon his realm, but Kahl was subtle, subtle. He was not discovered.)

  We saw all of the masks glow blue-white—

  —and then explode.

  Too many. Too close to the base of the Tree, where We had swept the bodies. We screamed as We understood and rushed back, but even gods are not omnipotent.

  Roiling fire blossomed at the World Tree’s roots. The shock wave came later, like thunder, echoing. (Echo, Echo.) The great, shuddering groan of the Tree rose slowly, so gradually that We could deny it. We could pretend that it was not too late right up until the World Tree’s trunk split, sending splinters like missiles in every direction. Buildings collapsed, streets erupted. The screams of dying mortals mingled with the Tree’s mournful cry, then were drowned out as the Tree listed slowly, gracefully, monstrously. It fell away from Shadow, which We thought was a blessing—until the Tree’s crown, massive as mountains, struck the earth.

  The concussion rippled outward in a wave that destroyed the land in every direction as far as mortal eyes could see.

  We saw Sky shatter into a hundred thousand pieces.

  And high above Us, his face a mask of savage triumph to contrast the mask in his hands: Kahl. He raised the mask over his head, closing his eyes. It shone now, glimmering and shivering and changing—replete, at last, with the million or more mortal lives he had just fed it. Its ornamentation and shape flared to form a new archetype—one suggesting implacability and fathomless knowledge and magnificence and quintessential power. Like Nahadoth and Itempas and Yeine, if one could somehow strip away their personalities and superficialities to leave only the distilled meaning of them. That meaning was God: the mask’s ultimate form and name.

  We felt the mask call out, and We felt something answer, before Kahl vanished.

  We dissolved then. Shahar’s grief, Deka’s anguish, my horror—all the same emotion, but the respective reverberations were too powerful individually to meld into the whole of Us. With what remained of Us, We (I) remembered belatedly that We were in a flying palace that had been built as a floating palace, and either way it would not do well as a falling palace. So We (I) looked around and spied the Eyeglass Lake, a boring little body of water in the middle of even more boring farmland. It would do. Into this, carefully, We deposited the delicate shell that was Echo. Usein would be pleased, at least: the Eyeglass was small and unassuming, nothing compared to the ocean’s vast grandeur. Only a mile of distance would now separate the palace from the shore; people could swim to it if they wanted. Remath’s plan to isolate the Arameri had backfired. The Arameri, such as remained, would be henceforth more accessible than ever, and far, far closer to the earth.

  Then We were gone, leaving only Deka and Shahar and I, who stared at one another as the power drained away. We fell as one and sought solace in the void together.

  21

  THINGS CHANGED.

  Deka and Shahar woke a day later. I, for reasons I can only guess at, slept for a week. I was reinstalled in Deka’s quarters and reintroduced to my old friend the feeding tube. I had aged again. Not much this time; just ten years or so. This put me in my early to mid-sixties, by my guess. Not that a few years really mattered, at that age.

  In the week that I slept through, the war ended. Usein sent a message to Echo the day after Skyfall. She did not surrender, but in light of the tragedy, she and her allies were willing to offer a truce. It was not difficult to read between the lines of this. Her faction had intended the deaths of the Arameri and their soldiers, and perhaps some abstract deaths in the future as mortalkind devolved to its endless warring. No one, not even a hardened Darre warrior, had been prepared for the fallen Tree, the shattered city, or the wasteland that was now central Senm. I am told that the northerners joined in the rescue operations, and they were welcome—even though they’d inadvertently caused the disaster. Everyone who could help was welcome, in those first few days.

  The city’s godlings did what they could. They had saved many by transporting them out of the area when the first explosions began. They saved more by mitigating the damage. The Tree’s roots had nearly torn free of the earth when it fell. If the stump had uprooted, there would have been no rubble from which to rescue survivors, only a city-sized freshly turned grave. The godlings worked tirelessly thereafter, entering the most damaged parts of the city and sniffing out the fading scents of life, holding up sagging buildings, teaching the scriveners and bonebenders magic that would save many lives in the days to follow. Godlings from other lands came to help, and even a few from the gods’ realm.

  Despite this, of all the mortals who had once populated Sky-in-Shadow, only a few thousand survived.

  Shahar, in her first act as the family head, did something at once stupid and brilliant: she ordered that Echo be opened to the survivors. Wrath protested this vehemently and finally prevailed in getting Shahar and the rest of the highbloods to relocate to the center of the palace—the Whorl and its surrounding buildings, which could be guarded by Wrath’s men and the handful of remaining soldiers who had come with the survivors. The rest of Echo was ceded to wounded, heart-lost mortals, many of them still covered in dust and blood, who gratefully slept in beds that made themselves and ate food that appeared whenever they wished for it. These were small comforts, and no consolation, given what they had suffered.

  In the days that followed, Shahar convened an emergency session of the Nobles’ Consortium and blatantly asked for help. The people of Shadow could rebuild, she said, with time to heal and sufficient assistance. But more than goods and food, they would need something the Arameri could not provide: peace. So she asked the assembled nobles to put aside their differences with each other and the Arameri and to remember the best principles of the Bright. It was, I am told, an amazing, stirring speech. The proof of this lies in the fact that they listened to her. Caravans of supplies and troops of volunteers began arriving within the week. There was no more talk of rebellion—only for the time being, but even that was a significant concession.

>   They may have been motivated by more than Shahar’s words, however. There was a new object in the sky, and it was drawing closer.

  A week after I woke, when I was feeling strong enough, I left Echo. Some godling—don’t know which—had stretched a tongue of daystone from the palace’s entrance to the lakeshore, wide enough for carriages and pack animals. Nowhere near as elegant as Sky’s Vertical Gate, but it worked. Deka, who needed a break from the frenetic work of the past few weeks, decided to come with me. I considered trying to persuade him otherwise, but when I turned to him and opened my mouth, he gave me such a challenging look that I closed it again.

  It took us an hour to walk over the bridge, and we spoke little on the way. In the distance we could see the humped, distorted shape of the fallen Tree through the morning haze. Neither of us looked in that direction often. Closer by, a fledgling city had already begun to develop around Echo and its lake. Not all the survivors wanted to live in Echo, so they had built tents and makeshift huts on the shore in order to stay close to family or new-made friends in the palace. A kind of market had developed amid this camp as a result, not far from the bridge’s terminus. Deka and I rented two horses from a caravanner who’d set up a stall—two fine mounts for the young man and his grandfather, the proprietor said, trying to be friendly—and began our journey, which would supposedly take only a day. We had no escorts or guards. We were not that important. Just as well; I wanted privacy to think.

  The road we’d chosen to take, once the main thoroughfare between the city and its surrounding provinces, was badly damaged. We rode across humped pavement and patches of rubble that forced us to dismount frequently and check the horses’ hooves for stones. In one place the road simply split, falling away into a chasm that was unpleasantly deep. I was fine with going around it; there was nothing but ruined farmland in the vicinity, so it wasn’t as though the detour would take long. Deka, however, in a rare show of temper, spoke to the rocks and got them to form a narrow, solid bridge across the gap. We crossed before I muttered something to Deka along the lines that he should really be less quick to use magic to solve problems. He only looked at me, and I hunched. It had just seemed like the sort of thing an older man should say to a younger one.

  We moved on. By afternoon, we reached the outskirts of the city. It was harder going here, and the damage slowed us down. Every street that had once been cobbled was rubble; the sidewalks were death traps, where we could even find streets. I caught a glimpse of the utter ruin that was South Root and despaired. There was a chance, a slim one, that Hymn and her family had gotten out before Skyfall. I would pray for Yeine to watch over them, alive or dead.

  We did not want the city itself in any case, so it was easier to skirt around the worst parts, using the outlying districts to make our way. These had been the homes and estates of the middling wealthy—too poor to build onto the World Tree’s trunk but rich enough to buy the better sunlight that could be had farther from the roots. This made things easier, because they had wide lawns and dirt paths that the horses could manage. There was plenty of sunlight now.

  Eventually we reached the trunk itself, a long, low mountain laid along the earth, as far as the eye could see. We surprised our first survivors here, since the rest of the area had been thoroughly abandoned: scavengers, picking through the ruins of the mansions that had once been attached to the Tree. They glared at us and pointedly fingered hatchet handles and machetes. We courteously gave them a wide berth. Everyone was happy.

  Then we reached Sky. Where, to my surprise, we were not alone.

  We smelled Ahad’s reeking cheroot before we saw him, though the scent was different this time. My nose was not what it had been, so it was only when I got close that I understood he’d put cloves in the thing to make the smell less offensive. I realized why when I noticed that the smoke was mingled with Glee Shoth’s hiras-flower perfume.

  They likely heard the horses before we came into sight but did not bother to alter their position, so we found Ahad draped atop one of the nearer, smaller piles of rubble as though it was a throne. Behind him was Glee. He leaned back against her, his head pillowed on her breasts. She had propped one elbow on a smooth piece of daystone, her free hand idly combing his loose hair. His expression was as cold as usual, but I didn’t buy it this time. There was too much vulnerability in his posture, too much trust in the way he’d let Glee hold his weight. I saw too much wariness in his eyes. He could not hide some things from me, which was probably why he hadn’t bothered to try. But he would kill me, I suspect, if I dared to comment on it. So I didn’t.

  “If you’ve come to dance on this grave, you’re too late,” he said as we dismounted and came to look up at them. “I already did it.”

  “Good,” I said, nodding to Glee, who nodded silently back. (She, unlike Ahad, did not bother to hide the pride she felt in him. And there was a decided smug possessiveness in the way she stroked his hair that reminded me fleetingly of Itempas, back when he’d held Nahadoth’s affections.) I stretched and grimaced as my knees twinged after the long ride. “I’m not really up to dancing anymore.”

  “Yes, you do look like shit, don’t you?” He exhaled a long, curling stream of smoke, and I saw him consider whether to hurt me further. There were so many ways he could have done it with a casual comment. So it turns out you’re an even worse father than I thought, or perhaps Glad to know I wasn’t your first mistake. I braced myself as best I could, though there was really nothing I could do. According to Deka, I was still aging faster than I should have been, perhaps ten days for every one. Merely knowing that I was a father was a relentless poison that would kill me in a year, two at the most. Not that any of us had so long to wait.

  Ahad said nothing, to my relief. Either he was feeling magnanimous, or Glee had begun to mellow him. Or perhaps he simply saw no point under the circumstances.

  “Hello,” said Deka. He was staring at Ahad, and belatedly I remembered that I’d never gotten around to telling him about his origins. My long-lost son’s attempt to destroy the universe had been a bit distracting.

  Ahad sat up, eyeing the boy. After a moment, a slow smile spread across his face. “Well, well, well. You would be Dekarta Arameri.”

  “I am.” Deka said this stiffly, trying and failing to conceal his fascination. They did not look wholly alike, but the resemblance was close enough to defy coincidence. “And you are?”

  Ahad spread his arms. “Call me ‘Grandpa.’ ”

  Deka stiffened. Glee threw an exasperated look at the back of Ahad’s head. I sighed and rubbed my eyes. “Deka… I’ll explain later.”

  “Yes,” he said. “You will.” But he folded his arms and looked away from Ahad, and Ahad uttered a sigh of disappointment. I wasn’t sure whether he really minded Deka’s disinterest or was just using another opportunity to needle the boy.

  We fell silent then, as was proper at graveside.

  I gazed at the great piles of tumbled daystone and slipped my hands into my pockets, wondering at the feelings within me. I had loathed Sky for all the years of my incarceration. Within its white walls I had been starved, raped, flayed, and worse. I had been a god reduced to a possession, and the humiliation of those days had not left me despite a hundred years of freedom.

  And yet… I remembered my orrery, and En pulsed in gentle sympathy against my chest. I remembered running through Sky’s wild, curving dead spaces, making them my own. I had found Yeine here; without thinking, I began to hum the lullaby I had once sung her. It had not been all suffering and horror. Life is never only one thing.

  Ahad sighed above me. Sky had been his home once. Deka touched my hand; same for him. None of us mourned alone, for however long that mourning might last.

  Above us, halfway between the sun and the faint, early risen moon, we could all see the peculiar smudge that had grown steadily larger since the day of Kahl’s victory. It was not a thing that could be described easily, in either Senmite or the gods’ language. A streaking transparency. A
space of wavering nothingness, leaving nothingness in its wake. We could feel it, too, like an itch on the skin. Hear it, like words sung just out of hearing—but it would not be long now before we all heard it, more clearly than any sane being would want. Its roar would eclipse the world.

  The Maelstrom. Kahl had summoned It, and It was coming.

  After a time, during which the sun set and the early stars began to show, Ahad sighed and got to his feet, turning to help Glee to hers. They flickered to the ground, which made Deka start, then inhale as his suspicions were confirmed. Ahad winked at him, then sobered as he turned to me.

  “The others think they can ride out whatever happens in the gods’ realm,” he said softly. “I have my doubts, but I can’t blame them for trying.” He hesitated, then glanced at Glee. “I’m staying here.”

  It was an admission I would never have expected from him. Glee was mortal; she could not survive in our realm. When I glanced at Glee, to see if she understood how profound a change she had worked on him, she nodded minutely, lifting her chin in a blatantly protective challenge. Ahad was not the only one of us who could cause pain with a comment.

  I had no interest in hurting Ahad, however. I’d done enough to him.

  “Perhaps a more productive line of conversation is saving this realm, rather than fleeing it,” said Deka, and by the edge in his voice, I knew I would get an earful when we were alone. But Ahad shook his head, growing uncharacteristically serious.

  “There’s no saving it,” he said. “Not even the Three can command the Maelstrom. At best, they can stand aside while It punches through the realms, and rebuild from whatever’s left. Not that that does us much good.” He shrugged and sighed, looking up at the sky. The smudge was just as visible at night, a waver against the carpet of stars. Beyond It, however, the stars were gone. There was nothing but black void.

  “My father believes it is worthwhile to try and save this realm,” said Glee. Deka stared at her, probably guessing more secrets. I really should have told him everything beforehand. More stupidity on my part.