The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

28. Twilight and Dawn

I remember who I am now.

I have held on to myself, and I will not let that knowledge go.

I carry the truth within myself, future and past, inseparable.

I will see this through.

In the glass-walled chamber, many things happen at once. I move among my former companions, unseen, yet seeing all.

My body falls to the floor, unmoving but for the blood spreading around it. Dekarta stares at me, perhaps seeing other dead women. Relad and Scimina begin shouting at Viraine, their faces distorted. I do not hear their words. Viraine, gazing down at me with a peculiarly empty expression, shouts something as well, and all of the Enefadeh are frozen in place. Sieh trembles, feline muscles bunched and straining. Zhakkarn, too, quivers, her massive fists clenched. Two of them make no effort to move, I notice, and because I notice, I see them up close. Kurue stands straight, her expression calm but resigned. There is a shadow of sorrow about her, hugging close like the cloak of her wings, but it is not something the others can see.

Nahadoth—ah. The shock in his expression is giving way to anguish as he stares at me. The me on the floor bleeding out, not the me who watches him. How can I be both? I wonder fleetingly, before dismissing the question. It doesn’t matter.

What matters is that there is real pain in Nahadoth’s eyes, and it is more than the horror of a lost chance at freedom. It is not a pure pain, though; he, too, sees other dead women. Would he mourn me at all if I did not carry his sister’s soul?

That is an unfair question and small-hearted of me.

Viraine crouches and yanks the knife out of my corpse. More blood spills at this, but not much. My heart has already stopped. I have fallen onto my side, half-curled as if in sleep, but I am not a god. I will not wake up.

“Viraine.” Someone. Dekarta. “Explain yourself.”

Viraine gets to his feet, glancing at the sky. The sun is three-quarters above the horizon. A strange look crosses his face, a hint of fear. Then it is gone, and he looks down at the bloody knife in his hand and then lets it drop to the floor. The clattering sound is distant, but my vision focuses in close on his hand. My blood has splattered his fingers. They tremble just slightly.

“It was necessary,” he says, half to himself. Then he pulls himself together and says, “She was a weapon, my lord. Lady Kinneth’s last strike at you, with the collusion of the Enefadeh. There’s no time to explain now, but suffice it to say that if she had touched the Stone, made her wish, all the world would have suffered for it.”

Sieh has managed to straighten, perhaps because he has stopped trying to kill Viraine. His voice is lower in his cat form, a half snarl. “How did you know?”

“I told him.”

Kurue.

The others stare at her, disbelieving. But she is a goddess. Even as a traitor she will not yield her dignity.

“You have forgotten yourselves,” she says, looking at each of her fellow Enefadeh in turn. “We have been too long at the mercy of these creatures. Once we would never have stooped so low as to rely on a mortal—especially not a descendant of the very mortal who betrayed us.” She looks at my corpse and sees Shahar Arameri. I carry the burdens of so many dead women. “I would rather die than beg her for my freedom. I would rather kill her and use her death to buy Itempas’s mercy.”

There is a held breath of silence, at her words. It is not shock; it is rage.

Sieh breaks it first, growling out soft, bitter laughter. “I see. You killed Kinneth.”

All the humans in the room start, except Viraine. Dekarta drops his cane, because his gnarled hands have clenched into half fists. He says something. I do not hear it.

Kurue does not seem to hear him, either, though she inclines her head to Sieh. “It was the only sensible course of action. The girl had to die here, at dawn.” She points at the Stone. “The soul will linger near its fleshly remnant. And in a moment Itempas will arrive to collect and destroy it at last.”

“And our hopes with it,” says Zhakkarn, her jaw tight.

Kurue sighs. “Our mother is dead, Sister. Itempas won. I hate it, too—but it’s time we accepted this. What did you think would happen if we did manage to free ourselves? Just the four of us, against the Bright Lord and dozens of our brothers and sisters? And the Stone, you realize. We have no one to wield it for us, but Itempas has his Arameri pets. We would end up enslaved again, or worse. No.”

Then she turns to glare at Nahadoth. How could I have failed to recognize the look in her eyes? It has always been there. She looks at Nahadoth the way my mother probably looked at Dekarta, with sorrow inseparable from contempt. That should have been enough to warn me.

“Hate me for it if you like, Naha. But remember that if you had only swallowed your foolish pride and given Itempas what he wanted, none of us would be here. Now I will give him what he wants, and he’s promised to set me free for it.”

Nahadoth speaks very softly. “You’re the fool, Kurue, if you think Itempas will accept anything short of my capitulation.”

He looks up then. I have no flesh in this vision, this dream, but I want to shiver. His eyes are black through black. The skin around them is crazed with lines and cracks, like a porcelain mask on the verge of shattering. What gleams through these cracks is neither blood nor flesh; it is an impossibly black glow that pulses like a heartbeat. When he smiles, I cannot see his teeth.

“Isn’t that true… Brother?” His voice holds echoes of emptiness. He is looking at Viraine.

Viraine, half-silhouetted by the dawning sun, turns to Nahadoth—but it is my eyes he seems to meet. The watching, floating me. He smiles. The sorrow and fear in that smile is something that only I, out of this whole room, can possibly understand. I know this instinctively, though I do not know why.

Then, just before the sun’s bottommost curve lifts free of the horizon, I recognize what I have seen in him. Two souls. Itempas, like both his siblings, also has a second self.

Viraine flings back his head and screams, and from his throat vomits hot, searing white light. It floods the room in an instant, blinding me. I imagine the people in the city below, and in the surrounding countryside, will see this light from miles away. They will think it is a sun come to earth, and they will be right.

In the brightness I hear the Arameri crying out, except Dekarta. He alone has witnessed this before. When the light fades, I look upon Itempas, Bright Lord of the Sky.

The library etching was surprisingly accurate, though the differences are profound. His face is even more perfect, with lines and symmetry that put mere etching to shame. His eyes are the gold of a blazing noonday sun. Though white like Viraine’s, his hair is shorter and tighter-curled than even my own. His skin is darker, too, matte-smooth and flawless. (This surprises me, though it shouldn’t. How it must gall the Amn.) I can see, in this first glance, why Naha loves him.

And there is love in Itempas’s eyes, too, as he steps around my body and its nimbus of coagulating blood. “Nahadoth,” he says, smiling and extending his hands. Even in my fleshless state, I shiver. The things his tongue does to those syllables! He has come to seduce the god of seduction, and oh, has he come prepared.

Nahadoth is abruptly free to rise to his feet, which he does. But he does not take the proferred hands. He walks past Itempas to where my body lies. My corpse is fouled with blood all along one side, but he kneels and lifts me anyhow. He holds me against himself, cradling my head so it does not flop back on my limp neck. There is no expression on his face. He simply looks at me.

If this gesture is calculated to offend, it works. Itempas lowers his hands slowly, and his smile fades.

“Father of All.” Dekarta bows with precarious dignity, unsteady without his cane. “We are honored by your presence once again.” Murmurs from the sides of the room: Relad and Scimina make their greetings as well. I do not care about them. I exclude them from my perception.

For a moment I think Itempas will not answer. Then he says, still gazing at Nahadoth’s back, “You still wear the sigil, Dekarta. Call a servant and finish the ritual.”

“At once, Father. But…”

Itempas looks at Dekarta, who trails off under that burning-desert gaze. I do not blame him. But Dekarta is Arameri; gods do not frighten him for long.

“Viraine,” he says. “You were… part of him.”

Itempas lets him flounder to silence, then says, “Since your daughter left Sky.”

Dekarta looks over at Kurue. “You knew this?”

She inclines her head, regal. “Not at first. But Viraine came to me one day and let me know I need not be damned to this earthly hell for all eternity. Our father could still forgive us, if we proved ourselves loyal.” She glances at Itempas then, and even her dignity cannot hide her anxiety. She knows how fickle his favor can be. “Even then I wasn’t certain, though I suspected. That was when I decided on my plan.”

“But… that means…” Dekarta pauses then, realization-anger-resignation flickering across his face in quick succession. I can guess his thoughts: Bright Itempas orchestrated Kinneth’s death.

My grandfather closes his eyes, perhaps mourning the death of his faith. “Why?”

“Viraine’s heart was broken.” And does the Father of All realize that his eyes turn to Nahadoth when he says this? Is he aware of what this look reveals? “He wanted Kinneth back, and offered anything if I would help him achieve that goal. I accepted his flesh in payment.”

“How predictable.” I shift to myself, lying in Nahadoth’s arms. Nahadoth speaks above me. “You used him.”

“If I could have given him what he wanted, I would have,” Itempas replies with a very human shrug. “But Enefa gave these creatures the power to make their own choices. Even we cannot change their minds when they’re set on a given course. Viraine was foolish to ask.”

The smile that curves Nahadoth’s lips is contemptuous. “No, Tempa, that isn’t what I meant, and you know it.”

And somehow, perhaps because I am no longer alive and no longer thinking with a fleshly brain, I understand. Enefa is dead. Never mind that some remnant of her flesh and soul lingers; both are mere shadows of who and what she truly was. Viraine, however, took into himself the essence of a living god. I shiver as I realize: the moment of Itempas’s manifestation was also the moment of Viraine’s death. Had he known it was coming? So much of his strangeness became clear, in retrospect.

But before that, disguised by Viraine’s mind and soul, Itempas could watch Nahadoth like a voyeur. He could command Nahadoth and thrill in his obedience. He could pretend to be doing Dekarta’s will while manipulating events to exert subtle pressure on Nahadoth. All without Nahadoth’s knowledge.

Itempas’s expression does not change, but there is something about him now that suggests anger. A more burnished shade to his golden eyes, perhaps. “Always so melodramatic, Naha.” He steps closer—close enough that the white glow which surrounds him clashes against Nahadoth’s smoldering shadow. Where the two powers brush against each other, both light and dark vanish, leaving nothing.

“You clutch that piece of meat like it means something,” Itempas says.

“She does.”

“Yes, yes, a vessel, I know—but her purpose is served now. She has bought your freedom with her life. Will you not come take your reward?”

Moving slowly, Nahadoth sets my body down. I feel his rage coming before, apparently, anyone else. Even Itempas looks surprised when Nahadoth clenches his fists and slams them into the floor. My blood flies up in twin sprays. The floor cracks ominously, and some of the cracks run up the glass walls—though, fortunately, these only spiderweb and do not shatter. As if in compensation, the plinth at the center of the room shatters instead, spilling the Stone ignominiously onto the floor and peppering everyone with glittering white flecks.

“More,” Nahadoth breathes. His skin has cracked further; he is barely contained by the flesh that is his prison. When he rises and turns, his hands drip something too dark to be blood. The cloak that surrounds him lashes the air like miniature tornadoes.

“She… was… more!” He is barely coherent. He lived countless ages before language. Perhaps his instinct is to forego speech altogether in moments of extremity, and just roar out his fury. “More than a vessel. She was my last hope. And yours.”

Kurue—my vision swings toward her against my will—steps forward, opening her mouth to protest. Zhakkarn catches her arm in warning. Wise, I think, or at least wiser than Kurue. Nahadoth looks utterly demented.

But then, so does Itempas, as he stares down Nahadoth’s rage. There is open lust in his eyes, unmistakable beneath the warrior’s tension. But of course: how many aeons did they spend battling, raw violence giving way to stranger longings? Or perhaps Itempas has simply been so long without Nahadoth’s love that he will take anything, even hate, in its place.

“Naha,” he says gently. “Look at you. All this over a mortal?” He sighs, shaking his head. “I’d hoped that putting you here, amid the vermin that are our sister’s legacy, would show you the error of your ways. Now I see that you are merely growing accustomed to captivity.”

He steps forward then, and does what every other person in the room would have considered suicide: he touches Nahadoth. It is a brief gesture, just a light brush of his fingers against the cracked porcelain of Nahadoth’s face. There is such yearning in that touch that my heart aches.

But does it matter anymore? Itempas has killed Enefa; he has killed his own children; he has killed me. He has killed something in Nahadoth as well. Can he not see that?

Perhaps he does, because his soft look fades, and after a moment he takes his hand away.

“So be it,” he says, going cold. “I tire of this. Enefa was a plague, Nahadoth. She took the pure, perfect universe that you and I created and fouled it. I kept the Stone because I did care for her, whatever you might think… and because I thought it might help to sway you.”

He pauses then, looking down at my corpse. The Stone has fallen into my blood, less than a handbreadth from my shoulder. Despite Nahadoth’s care in setting me down, my head has flopped to one side. One arm is curled upward as if to try and cup the Stone closer. The image is ironic—a mortal woman, killed in the act of trying to lay claim to a goddess’s power. And a god’s lover.

I imagine Itempas will send me to an especially awful hell.

“But I think it’s time our sister dies completely,” Itempas says. I cannot tell if he is looking at the Stone or at me. “Let her infestation die with her, and then our lives can be as they were. Have you not missed those days?”

(I notice Dekarta, who stiffens at this. Only he, of the three mortals, seems to realize what Itempas means.)

“I will hate you no less, Tempa,” Nahadoth breathes, “when you and I are the last living things in this universe.”

Then he is a roaring black tempest, streaking forward in attack, and Itempas is a crackle of white fire bracing to meet him. They collide in a concussion that shatters the glass in the ritual chamber. Mortals scream, their voices almost lost as cold, thin air howls in to fill the void. They fall to the floor as Nahadoth and Itempas streak away, upward—but my perception is drawn to Scimina for an instant. Her eyes fix on the knife that killed me, Viraine’s knife, lying not far from her. Relad sprawls dazed amid glass shards and chunks of the broken plinth. Scimina’s eyes narrow.

Sieh roars, his voice an echo of Nahadoth’s battle cry. Zhakkarn turns to face Kurue, and her pike appears in one hand.

And at the center of it all, unnoticed, untouched, my body and the Stone lie still.

And here we are.

Yes.

You understand what has happened?

I’m dead.

Yes. In the presence of the Stone, which houses the last of my power.

Is that why I’m still here, able to see these things?

Yes. The Stone kills the living. You’re dead.

You mean… I can come back to life? Amazing. How convenient that Viraine turned on me.

I prefer to think of it as fate.

So what now?

Your body must change. It will no longer be able to bear two souls within itself; that is an ability only mortals possess. I made your kind that way, gifted in ways that we are not, but I never dreamt it would make you so strong. Strong enough to defeat me, in spite of all my efforts. Strong enough to take my place.

What? No. I don’t want your place. You are you. I am me. I have fought for this.

And fought well. But my essence, all that I am, is necessary for this world to continue. If I am not to be the one who restores that essence, then it must be you.

But—

I do not regret, Daughter, Little Sister, worthy heir. Neither should you. I only wish…

I know your wish.

Do you really?

Yes. They are blinded by pride, but underneath there is still love. The Three are meant to be together. I will see it done.

Thank you.

Thank you. And farewell.

I can ponder for an eternity. I am dead. I have all the time I want.

But I was never very patient.

In and around the glass room, which no longer has glass and probably no longer qualifies as a room, battle rages.

Itempas and Nahadoth have taken their fight to the skies they once shared. Above the motes they have become, dark streaks break the gradient of dawn, like strips of night layered over the morning. A blazing white beam, like the sun but a thousand times brighter, sears across these to shatter them. There is no point to this. It is daytime. Nahadoth would already be asleep within his human prison if not for Itempas’s parole. Itempas can revoke that parole whenever he wishes. He must be enjoying himself.

Scimina has gotten Viraine’s knife. She has flung herself on Relad, trying to gut him. He’s stronger, but she has leverage and the strength of ambition on her side. Relad’s eyes are wide with terror; perhaps he has always feared something like this.

Sieh, Zhakkarn, and Kurue feint and circle in a deadly metal-and-claw dance. Kurue has conjured a pair of gleaming bronze swords to defend herself. This contest, too, is foregone; Zhakkarn is battle incarnate, and Sieh has all the power of childhood’s cruelty. But Kurue is wily, and she has the taste of freedom in her mouth. She will not die easily.

Amid all this, Dekarta moves toward my body. He stops and struggles to his knees; in the end he slips in my blood and half-falls on me, grimacing in pain. Then his expression hardens. He looks up into the sky, where his god fights, then down. At the Stone. It is the source of the Arameri clan’s power; it is also the physical representation of their duty. Perhaps he hopes that by doing that duty, he will remind Itempas of the value of life. Perhaps he retains some smidgeon of faith. Perhaps it is simply that forty years ago, Dekarta killed his wife to prove his commitment. To do otherwise now would mock her death.

He reaches for the Stone.

It is gone.

But it was there, lying in my blood, a moment before. Dekarta frowns, looks around. His eyes are attracted by movement. The hole in my chest, which he can see through the torn cloth of my bodice: the raw lips of the wound are drawing together, pressing themselves closed. As the line of the wound shrinks, Dekarta catches a glimmer of thin gray light. Within me.

Then I am drawn forward, down—

Yes. Enough of this disembodied soul business. Time to be alive again.

I opened my eyes and sat up.

Dekarta, behind me, made a sound somewhere between choking and a gasp. No one else noticed as I got to my feet, so I turned to face him.

“Wh—what in every god’s name—” His mouth worked. He stared.

“Not every god,” I said. And because I was still me after all, I leaned down to smile in his face. “Just me.”

Then I closed my eyes and touched my chest. Nothing beat beneath my fingers; my heart had been destroyed. Yet something was there, giving life to my flesh. I could feel it. The Stone. A thing of life, born of death, filled with incalculable potential. A seed.

“Grow,” I whispered.