The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

16. Sar-enna-nem

The priests do mention the Gods’ War sometimes, mainly as a warning against heresy. Because of Enefa, they say. Because of the Betrayer, for three days people and animals lay helpless and gasping for air, hearts gradually slowing and bellies bloating as their bowels ceased to function. Plants wilted and died in hours; vast fertile plains turned to gray desert. Meanwhile the sea we now call Repentance boiled, and for some reason all the tallest mountains were split in half. The priests say that was the work of the godlings, Enefa’s immortal offspring, who each took sides and battled across the earth. Their fathers, the lords of the sky, mostly kept their fight up there.

Because of Enefa, the priests say. They do not say, because Itempas killed her.

When the war finally ended, most of the world was dead. What remained was forever changed. In my land, hunters pass down legends of beasts that no longer exist; harvest songs praise staples long lost. Those first Arameri did a great deal for the survivors, the priests are careful to note. With the magic of their war-prisoner gods they replenished the oceans, sealed the mountains, healed the land. Though there was nothing to be done for the dead, they saved as many as they could of the survivors.

For a price.

The priests don’t mention that, either.

There had in fact been very little business to discuss. In light of the looming ceremony, the Enefadeh needed my cooperation more than ever, and so—with palpable annoyance—Kurue agreed to my condition. We all knew there was little chance I could become Dekarta’s heir. We all knew the Enefadeh were merely humoring me. I was content with that, so long as I did not think about it too deeply.

Then one by one they vanished, leaving me with Nahadoth. He was the only one, Kurue had said, who had the power to carry me to and from Darr in the night’s few remaining hours. So in the silence that fell, I turned to face the Nightlord.

“How?” he asked. The vision, he meant, of his defeat.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s happened before. I had a dream once, of the old Sky. I saw you destroy it.” I swallowed, chilled. “I thought it was just a dream, but if what I just saw is what really happened…” Memories. I was experiencing Enefa’s memories. Dearest Skyfather, I did not want to think about what that meant.

His eyes narrowed. He wore that face again—the one I feared because I could not help wanting it. I fixed my eyes on a point just above his shoulder.

“It is what happened,” he said slowly. “But Enefa was dead by then. She never saw what he did to me.”

And I wish I hadn’t. But before I could speak, Nahadoth took a step toward me. I very quickly took a step back, and he stopped.

“You fear me now?”

“You did try to rip out my soul.”

“And yet you still desire me.”

I froze. Of course he would have sensed that. I said nothing, unwilling to admit weakness.

Nahadoth moved past me to the window. I shivered as he passed; a tendril of his cloak had curled ’round my calf for just an instant in a cool caress. I wondered if he was even aware of this.

“What exactly do you hope to accomplish in Darr?” he asked.

I swallowed, glad to be on another subject. “I need to speak with my grandmother. I thought of using a sigil sphere, but I don’t understand such things. There could be a way for others to eavesdrop on our conversation.”

“There is.”

It gave me no pleasure to be right. “Then the questions must be asked in person.”

“What questions?”

“Whether it’s true what Ras Onchi and Scimina said, about Darr’s neighbors arming for war. I want to hear my grandmother’s assessment of the situation. And… I hope to learn…” I felt inexplicably ashamed. “More about my mother. Whether she was like the rest of the Arameri.”

“I have told you already: she was.”

“You will forgive me, Lord Nahadoth, if I do not trust you.”

He turned slightly, so that I could see the side of his smile. “She was,” he repeated, “and so are you.”

The words, in his cold voice, hit me like a slap.

“She did this, too,” he continued. “She was your age, perhaps younger, when she began asking questions, questions, so many questions. When she could not get answers from us with politeness, she commanded them—as you have done. Such hate there was in her young heart. Like yours.”

I fought the urge to swallow, certain he would hear it.

“What sort of questions?”

“Arameri history. The war between my siblings and I. Many things.”

“Why?”

“I have no idea.”

“You didn’t ask?”

“I didn’t care.”

I took a deep breath and forced my sweaty fists to unclench. This was his way, I reminded myself. There had been no need for him to say anything about my mother; he just knew it was the way to unsettle me. I had been warned. Nahadoth didn’t like to kill outright. He teased and tickled until you lost control, forgot the danger, and opened yourself to him. He made you ask for it.

After I had been silent for a few breaths, Nahadoth turned to me. “The night is half over. If you mean to go to Darr, it should be now.”

“Oh. Ah, yes.” Swallowing, I looked around the room, anywhere but at him. “How will we travel?”

In answer, Nahadoth extended his hand.

I wiped my hand unnecessarily on my skirt, and took it.

The blackness that surrounded him flared like lifting wings, filling the room to its arched ceiling. I gasped and would have stepped back, but his hand became a vice on my own. When I looked at his face I felt ill: his eyes had changed. They were all black now, iris and whites alike. Worse, the shadows nearest his body had deepened, so much that he was invisible beyond his extended hand.

I stared into the abyss of him and could not bring myself to go closer.

“If I meant to kill you,” he said, and his voice was different, too, echoing, shadowed, “it would already be too late.”

There was that. So I looked up into those terrible eyes, mustered my courage, and said, “Please take me to Arrebaia, in Darr. The temple of Sar-enna-nem.”

The blackness at his core expanded so swiftly to envelop me that I had no time to cry out. There was an instant of unbearable cold and pressure, so great I thought it would crush me. But it stopped short of pain, and then even the cold vanished. I opened my eyes and saw nothing. I stretched out my hands—including the hand that I knew he held—and felt nothing. I cried out and heard only silence.

Then I stood on stone and breathed air laden with familiar scents and felt warm humidity soak into my skin. Behind me spread the stone streets and walls of Arrebaia, filling the plateau on which we stood. It was later in the night than it had been at Sky, I could tell, because the streets were all but empty. Before me rose stone steps, lined on either side by standing lanterns, at the top of which were the gates to Sar-enna-nem.

I turned back to Nahadoth, who had reverted to his usual, just-shy-of-human appearance.

“Y-you are welcome in my family’s home,” I said. I was still shivering from our mode of travel.

“I know.” He strode up the steps. Caught off guard, I stared at his back for ten steps before remembering myself and trotting to follow.

Sar-enna-nem’s gates are heavy, ugly wood-and-metal affairs—a more recent addition to the ancient stone. It took at least four women to work the mechanism that swung them open, which made a vast improvement over the days when the gates had been made of stone and needed twenty openers. I had arrived unannounced, in the small hours of the morning, and knew that this meant upsetting the entire guardstaff. We had not been attacked in centuries, but my people prided themselves on vigilance nonetheless.

“They might not let us in,” I murmured, drawing alongside the Nightlord. I was hard-pressed to keep up; he was taking the steps two at a time.

Nahadoth said nothing in reply and did not slow his pace. I heard the loud, echoing sound of the great latch lifting, and then the gates swung open—on their own. I groaned, realizing what he’d done. Of course there were shouts and running feet as we passed through, and as we stepped onto the grassy patch that served as Sar-enna-nem’s forecourt, two clusters of guards came running forth from the ancient edifice’s doors. One was the gate company—just men, since it was a lowly position that required only brute strength.

The other company was the standing guard, composed of women and those few men who had earned the honor, distinguished by white silk tunics under the armor. This one was led by a familiar face: Imyan, a woman from my own Somem tribe. She shouted in our language as she reached the forecourt, and the company split to surround us. Very quickly we were surrounded by a ring of spears and arrows pointed at our hearts.

No—their weapons were pointed at my heart, I noticed. Not a single one of them had aimed at Nahadoth.

I stepped in front of Nahadoth to make it easier for them, and to signal my friendliness. For a moment it felt strange to speak in my own tongue. “It’s good to see you, Captain Imyan.”

“I don’t know you,” she said curtly. I almost smiled. As girls we had gotten into all manner of mischief together; now she was as committed to her duty as I.

“You laughed the first time you saw me,” I said. “I’d been trying to grow my hair longer, thinking to look like my mother. You said it looked like curly tree moss.”

Imyan’s eyes narrowed. Her own hair—long and beautifully Darre-straight—had been arranged in an efficient braids-and-knot behind her head. “What are you doing here, if you’re Yeine-ennu?”

“You know I’m no longer ennu,” I said. “The Itempans have been announcing it all week, by word of mouth and by magic. Even High North should’ve heard by now.”

Imyan’s arrow wavered for a moment longer, then slowly came down. Following her lead, the other guards lowered their weapons as well. Imyan’s eyes shifted to Nahadoth, then back to me, and for the first time there was a hint of nervousness in her manner. “And this?”

“You know me,” Nahadoth said in our language.

No one flinched at the sound of his voice. Darren guards are too well-trained for that. But I saw not a few exchanged looks of unease among the group. Nahadoth’s face, I noticed belatedly, had begun to waver again, a watery blur that shifted with the torchlight shadows. So many new mortals to seduce.

Imyan recovered first. “Lord Nahadoth,” she said at last. “Welcome back.”

Back? I stared at her, then at Nahadoth. But then a more familiar voice greeted me, and I let out a breath of tension I hadn’t realized that I felt.

“You are indeed welcome,” said my grandmother. She came down the short flight of steps that led to Sar-enna-nem’s living quarters, and the guards parted before her: a shorter-than-average elderly woman still clad in a sleeping tunic (though she’d taken the time to strap on her knife, I noted). Tiny as she was—I had unfortunately inherited her size—she exuded an air of strength and authority that was almost palpable.

She inclined her head to me as she came. “Yeine. I’ve missed you, but not so much that I wanted to see you back so soon.” She glanced at Nahadoth, then back at me. “Come.”

And that was that. She turned to head into the columned entrance, and I moved to follow—or would have, had Nahadoth not spoken.

“Dawn is closer, here, to this part of the world,” he said. “You have an hour.”

I turned, surprised on several levels. “You aren’t coming?”

“No.” And he walked away, off to the side of the forecourt. The guards moved out of his way with an alacrity that might have been amusing under other circumstances.

I watched him for a moment, then moved to follow my grandmother.

Another tale from my childhood occurs to me here.

It is said the Nightlord cannot cry. No one knows the reason for this, but of the many gifts that the forces of the Maelstrom bestowed upon their darkest child, the ability to cry was not one of them.

Bright Itempas can. Legends say his tears are the rain that sometimes falls while the sun still shines. (I have never believed this legend, because it would mean Itempas cries rather frequently.)

Enefa of the Earth could cry. Her tears took the form of the yellow, burning rain that falls around the world after a volcano has erupted. It still falls, this rain, killing crops and poisoning water. But now it means nothing.

Nightlord Nahadoth was firstborn of the Three. Before the others appeared, he spent countless aeons as the only living thing in all of existence. Perhaps that explains his inability. Perhaps, amid so much loneliness, tears become ultimately useless.

Sar-enna-nem was once a temple. Its main entrance is a vast and vaulted hall supported by columns hewn whole from the earth, erected by my people in a time long before we knew of such Amn innovations as scrivening or clockwork. We had our own techniques back then. And the places we built to honor the gods were magnificent.

After the Gods’ War, my ancestors did what had to be done. Sar-enna-nem’s Twilight and Moon Windows, once famed for their beauty, were bricked up, leaving only the Sun. A new temple, dedicated exclusively to Itempas and untainted by the devotion once offered to his siblings, was built some ways to the south; that is the current religious heart of the city. Sar-enna-nem was repurposed as nothing more than a hall of government, from which our warrior council issued edicts that I, as ennu, once implemented. Any holiness was long gone.

The hall was empty, as befitted the late hour. My grandmother led me to the raised plinth where, during the day, the Warriors’ Council members sat on a circle of thick rugs. She took a seat; I took one opposite.

“Have you failed?” she asked.

“Not yet,” I replied. “But that is only a matter of time.”

“Explain,” she said, so I did. I will admit I edited the account somewhat. I did not tell her of the hours I wasted in my mother’s chambers weeping. I did not mention my dangerous thoughts about Nahadoth. And I most certainly did not speak of my two souls.

When I was done, she sighed, the only sign of her concern. “Kinneth always believed Dekarta’s love for her would safeguard you. I cannot say I ever liked her, but over the years I grew to trust her judgment. How could she have been so wrong?”

“I’m not certain she was,” I said softly. I was thinking of Nahadoth’s words about Dekarta, and my mother’s murder: You think it was him?

I had spoken with Dekarta since then. I had seen his eyes while he spoke of my mother. Could a man like him murder someone he loved so much?

“What did Mother tell you, Beba?” I asked. “About why she left the Arameri?”

My grandmother frowned, taken aback by my shift from formality. We had never been close, she and I. She had been too old to become ennu when her own mother finally died, and none of her children had been girls. Though my father had managed against all odds to succeed her, becoming one of only three male ennu ever in our history, I was the closest thing to a daughter she would ever have. I, the half-Amn embodiment of her son’s greatest mistake. I had given up on trying to earn her love years before.

“It was not something she spoke of much,” Beba said, speaking slowly. “She said she loved my son.”

“That couldn’t possibly have been sufficient for you,” I said softly.

Her eyes hardened. “Your father made it clear that it would have to be.”

And then I understood: she had never believed my mother. “What do you think was the reason, then?”

“She was full of anger, your mother. She wanted to hurt someone, and being with my son allowed her to accomplish that.”

“Someone in Sky?”

“I don’t know. Why does this concern you, Yeine? It’s now that matters, not twenty years ago.”

“I think what happened then has bearing on now,” I said, surprising myself—but it was true, I realized at last. Perhaps I had felt that all along. And with that opening, I readied my next attack. “Nahadoth has been here before, I see.”

At this, my grandmother’s face resumed its usual stern frown. “Lord Nahadoth, Yeine. We are not Amn here; we respect our creators.”

“The guard have drilled in how to approach him. A shame I wasn’t included; I could have used that training myself before I went to Sky. When did he come here last, Beba?”

“Before you were born. He came to see Kinneth once. Yeine, this isn’t—”

“Was it after Father recovered from the Walking Death?” I asked. I spoke softly, though the blood was pounding in my ears. I wanted to reach over and shake her, but I kept control. “Was that the night they did it to me?”

Beba’s frown deepened, momentary confusion becoming alarm. “Did… to you? What are you talking about? You weren’t even born at that point; Kinneth was barely pregnant. What did…”

And then she trailed off. I saw thoughts racing behind her eyes, which widened as they stared at me. I spoke to those thoughts, teasing out the knowledge that I sensed behind them.

“Mother tried to kill me when I was born.” I knew why, now, but there was more truth here, something I hadn’t discovered yet. I could feel it. “They didn’t trust her alone with me for months. Do you remember?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“I know she loved me,” I said. “And I know that sometimes women go mad in childbearing. Whatever it was that made her fear me then—” I nearly choked on the obfuscation. I had never been a good liar. “—it faded and she became a good mother thereafter. But you must have wondered, Beba, what it was that she feared so. And my father must have wondered…”

I trailed off then, as awareness struck. Here was a truth I had not considered—

“No one wondered.”

I jumped and whirled. Nahadoth stood fifty feet away at the entrance of Sar-enna-nem, framed by its triangle design. With the moonlight behind him he was a stark silhouette, but as always, I could see his eyes.

“I killed anyone who saw me with Kinneth that night,” he said. We both heard him as clearly as if he stood right beside us. “I killed her maid, and the child who came to serve us wine, and the man who sat with your father while he recovered from the sickness. I killed the three guards who tried to eavesdrop on this old woman’s orders.” He nodded toward Beba, who stiffened. “After that, no one dared to wonder about you.”

So you’ve decided to talk? I would have asked him, but then my grandmother did something so unexpected, so incredible, so stupid, that the words stopped in my throat. She leapt to her feet and moved in front of me, drawing her knife.

“What did you do to Yeine?” she cried. I had never in my life seen her so angry. “What foulness did the Arameri put you up to? She is mine, she belongs to us, you had no right!”

Nahadoth laughed then, and the whiplashing rage in that sound sent a chill down my spine. Had I thought him merely an embittered slave, a pitiable creature burdened by grief? I was a fool.

“You think this temple protects you?” he hissed. Only then did I realize he had not actually stepped over the threshold. “Have you forgotten that your people once worshipped me here, too?”

He stepped into Sar-enna-nem.

The rugs beneath my knees vanished. The floor, which had been planks of wood, disintegrated; underneath was a mosaic of polished semiprecious tiles, stones of every color interspersed with squares of gold. I gasped as the columns shuddered and the bricks exploded into nothingness and suddenly I could see the Three Windows, not just Sun but Moon and Twilight, too. I had never realized they were meant to be viewed together. We had lost so much. And all around us stood the statues of beings so perfect, so alien, so familiar, that I wanted to weep for all of Sieh’s lost brothers and sisters, Enefa’s loyal children, slaughtered like dogs for trying to avenge their mother’s murder. I understand. All of you, I understand so much—

And then the torchlight went out and the air creaked and I turned to see that Nahadoth had changed as well. Night’s darkness now filled that end of Sar-enna-nem, but it was not like my first night in Sky. Here, fueled by the residue of ancient devotion, he showed me all he had once been: first among gods, sweet dream and nightmare incarnate, all things beautiful and terrible. Through a hurricane swirl of blue-black unlight I caught a glimpse of moon-white skin and eyes like distant stars; then they warped into something so unexpected that my brain refused to interpret it for an instant. But the library embossing had warned me, hadn’t it? A woman’s face shone at me from the darkness, proud and powerful and so breathtaking that I yearned for her as much as I had for him, and it did not seem strange at all that I did so. And then the face shifted again into something that in no way resembled human, something tentacled and toothed and hideous, and I screamed. Then there was only darkness where his face should have been, and that was most frightening of all.

He stepped forward again. I felt it: an impossible, invisible vastness moved with him. I heard the walls of Sar-enna-nem groan, too flimsy to contain such power. The whole world could not contain this. I heard the sky above Darr rumble with thunder; the ground beneath my feet trembled. White teeth gleamed amid the darkness, sharp like wolves’. That was when I knew I had to act, or the Nightlord would kill my grandmother right before my eyes.

Right before my—

Right before my eyes she lies, sprawled and naked and bloody

this is not flesh this is all you can comprehend

but it means the same thing as flesh, she is dead and violated, her perfect form torn in ways that should not be possible, should not be and who has done this? Who could have

what did it mean that he made love to me before driving the knife home?

and then it hits: betrayal. I had known of his anger, but never once did I imagine… never once had I dreamt… I had dismissed her fears. I thought I knew him. I gather her body to mine and will all of creation to make her live again. We are not built for death. But nothing changes, nothing changes, there was a hell that I built long ago and it was a place where everything remained the same forever because I could imagine nothing more horrific, and now I am there.

Then others come, our children, and all react with equal horror

in a child’s eyes, a mother is god

but I can see nothing of their grief through the black mist of my own. I lay her body down but my hands are covered in her blood, our blood, sister lover pupil teacher friend otherself, and when I lift my head to scream out my fury, a million stars turn black and die. No one can see them, but they are my tears.

I blinked.

Sar-enna-nem was as it had been, shadowed and quiet, its splendor hidden again beneath bricks and dusty wood and old rugs. I stood in front of my grandmother, though I did not remember getting up or moving. Nahadoth’s human mask was back in place, his aura diminished to its usual quiet drift, and once again he was staring at me.

I covered my eyes with one hand. “I can’t take much more of this.”

“Y-Yeine?” My grandmother. She put a hand on my shoulder. I barely noticed.

“It’s happening, isn’t it?” I looked up at Nahadoth. “What you expected. Her soul is devouring my own.”

“No,” said Nahadoth very softly. “I don’t know what this is.”

I stared at him and could not help myself. All the shock and fear and anger of the past few days bubbled up, and I burst out laughing. I laughed so loudly that it echoed from Sar-enna-nem’s distant ceiling; so long that my grandmother peered at me in concern, no doubt wondering if I had gone mad. I probably had, because suddenly my laughter turned to screaming and my mirth ignited as white-hot rage.

“How can you not know?” I shrieked at Nahadoth. I had lapsed into Senmite again. “You’re a god! How can you not know?”

His calm stoked my fury higher. “I built uncertainty into this universe, and Enefa wove that into every living being. There will always be mysteries beyond even we gods’ understanding—”

I launched myself at him. In the interminable second that my mad rage lasted, I saw that his eyes flicked to my approaching fist and widened in something very like amazement. He had plenty of time to block or evade the blow. That he did not was a complete surprise.

The smack of it echoed as loud as my grandmother’s gasp.

In the ensuing silence, I felt empty. The rage was gone. Horror had not yet arrived. I lowered my hand to my side. My knuckles stung.

Nahadoth’s head had turned with the blow. He lifted a hand to his lip, which was bleeding, and sighed.

“I must work harder to keep my temper around you,” he said. “You have a memorable way of chastising me.”

He lifted his eyes, and suddenly I knew he was remembering the time I had stabbed him. I have waited so long for you, he had said then. This time, instead of kissing me, he reached out and touched my lips with his fingers. I felt warm wetness and reflexively licked, tasting cool skin and the metallic salt of his blood.

He smiled, his expression almost fond. “Do you like the taste?”

Not of your blood, no.

But your finger was another matter.

“Yeine,” said my grandmother again, breaking the tableau. I took a deep breath, marshaled my wits, and turned back to her.

“Are the neighboring kingdoms allying?” I asked. “Are they arming for war?”

She swallowed before nodding. “We received formal notice this week, but there had been earlier signs. Our merchants and diplomats were expelled from Menchey almost two months ago. They say old Gemd has passed a conscription law to boost the ranks of his army, and he’s accelerated training for the rest. The council believes he’ll march in a week, maybe less.”

Two months ago. I had been summoned to Sky only a short while before that. Scimina had guessed my purpose the instant Dekarta summoned me.

And it made sense she had chosen to act through Menchey. Menchey was Darr’s largest and most powerful neighbor, once our greatest enemy. We had been at peace with the Mencheyev since the Gods’ War, but only because the Arameri had been unwilling to grant either land permission to annihilate the other. But as Ras Onchi had warned me, things had changed.

Of course they had submitted a formal war petition. They would want the right to shed our blood.

“I would hope we had begun to muster forces as well, in the time since,” I said. It was no longer my place to give orders; I could only suggest.

My grandmother sighed. “As best we could. Our treasury is so depleted we can barely afford to feed them, much less train and equip. No one will lend us funds. We’ve resorted to asking for volunteers—any woman with a horse and her own weapons. Men as well, if they’re not yet fathers.”

It was very bad if the council had resorted to recruiting men. By tradition men were our last line of defense, their physical strength bent toward the single and most important task of protecting our homes and children. This meant the council had decided that our only defense was to defeat the enemy, period. Anything else meant the end of the Darre.

“I’ll give you what I can,” I said. “Dekarta watches everything I do, but I have wealth now, and—”

“No.” Beba touched my shoulder again. I could not remember the last time she had touched me without reason. But then, I had never seen her leap to protect me from danger, either. It pained me that I would die young and never truly know her.

“Look to yourself,” she said. “Darr is not your concern, not any longer.”

I scowled. “It will always be—”

“You said yourself they would use us to hurt you. Look what’s happened just from your effort to restore trade.”

I opened my mouth to protest that this was merely their excuse, but before I could, Nahadoth’s head turned sharply east.

“The sun comes,” he said. Beyond Sar-enna-nem’s entry arch, the sky was pale; night had faded quickly.

I cursed under my breath. “I will do what I can.” Then, on impulse, I stepped forward and wrapped my arms around her and held her tight, as I had never dared to do before in my whole life. She held stiff against me for a moment, surprised, but then sighed and rested her hands on my back.

“So much like your father,” she whispered. Then she pushed me away gently.

Nahadoth’s arm folded around me, surprisingly gentle, and I found my back pressed against the human solidity of the body within his shadows. Then the body was gone and so was Sar-enna-nem, and all was cold and darkness again.

I reappeared in my room in Sky, facing the windows. The sky here was still mostly dark, though there was a hint of pale against the distant horizon. I was alone, to my surprise, but also to my relief. It had been a very long, very difficult day. Without undressing I lay down—but sleep did not come immediately. I lay where I was awhile, reveling in the silence, letting my mind rest. Like bubbles in still water, two things rose to the surface of my thoughts.

My mother had regretted her bargain with the Enefadeh. She had sold me to them, but not without qualm. I found it perversely comforting that she had tried to kill me at birth. That seemed like her, choosing to destroy her own flesh and blood rather than let it be corrupted. Perhaps she had only decided to accept me on her terms—later, without the heady rush of new motherhood to color her feelings. When she could look into my eyes and see that one of the souls in them was my own.

The other thought was simpler, yet far less comforting.

Had my father known?