The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (3 page)

He put a hand on the balcony railing with slow, palpable deliberation.

“What is it, Naha?” said a woman’s voice, echoing faintly along the corridor. A moment later she appeared. Unlike the man, she was clearly visible to me: a reedy Amn beauty of sable hair, patrician features, and regal grace. I recognized her by that hair as the woman who’d sat beside Dekarta at the Salon. She wore the kind of dress that only an Amn woman could do justice to—a long straight tube the color of deep, bloody garnets.

“What do you see?” she asked, looking at me although her words were for the man. She lifted her hands, twirling something in her fingers, and I saw then that she held a delicate silver chain. It dangled from her hand and curved back up; I realized that the chain was connected to the man.

“Aunt,” T’vril said, pitching his voice with a care that let me know at once who she was. The lady Scimina—my cousin and rival heir. “You look lovely this evening.”

“Thank you, T’vril,” she replied, though her eyes never left my face. “And who is this?”

There was the faintest pause. By the taut look on T’vril’s face, I gathered he was trying to think of a safe answer. Some quirk of my own nature—in my land, only weak women allowed men to protect them—made me step forward and incline my head. “My name is Yeine Darr.”

Her smile said that she’d already guessed it. There could not have been many Darre in the palace. “Ah, yes. Someone spoke of you after Uncle’s audience today. Kinneth’s daughter, are you?”

“I am.” In Darr, I would have drawn a knife at the malice in her sweet, falsely polite tone. But this was Sky, blessed palace of Bright Itempas, the lord of order and peace. Such things were not done here. I looked to T’vril for an introduction.

“The lady Scimina Arameri,” he said. He did not swallow or fidget, to his credit, but I saw how his eyes flicked back and forth between my cousin and the motionless man. I waited for T’vril to introduce the man, but he did not.

“Ah, yes.” I did not try to mimic Scimina’s tone. My mother had tried, on multiple occasions, to teach me how to sound friendly when I did not feel friendly, but I was too Darre for that. “Greetings, Cousin.”

“If you’ll excuse us,” T’vril said to Scimina almost the instant I closed my mouth, “I’m showing Lady Yeine around the palace—”

The man beside Scimina chose that moment to catch his breath in a shuddering gasp. His hair, long and black and thick enough to make any Darre man jealous, fell forward to obscure his face; his hand on the railing tightened.

“A moment, T’vril.” Scimina examined the man thoughtfully, then lifted her hand as if to cup his cheek under the curtain of hair. There was a click, and she pulled away a delicate, cleverly jointed silver collar.

“I’m sorry, Aunt,” T’vril said, and now he was no longer bothering to hide his fear; he caught my hand in his own, tight. “Viraine’s expecting us, you know how he hates—”

“You will wait,” Scimina said, cold in an instant. “Or I may forget that you have made yourself so useful, T’vril. A good little servant…” She glanced at the black-haired man and smiled indulgently. “So many good servants here in Sky. Don’t you think, Nahadoth?”

Nahadoth was the black-haired man’s name, then. Something about the name stirred a feeling of recognition in me, but I could not recall where I’d heard it before.

“Don’t do this,” T’vril said. “Scimina.”

“She has no mark,” Scimina replied. “You know the rules.”

“This has nothing to do with the rules and you know it!” T’vril said with some heat. But she ignored him.

I felt it then. I think I had felt it since the man’s gasp—a shiver of the atmosphere. A vase rattled nearby. There was no visible cause for this, but somehow I knew: somewhere, on an unseen plane, a part of reality was shifting aside. Making room for something new.

The black-haired man lifted his head to look at me. He was smiling. I could see his face now, and his mad, mad eyes, and I suddenly knew who he was. What he was.

“Listen to me.” T’vril, his voice tight in my ear. I could not look away from the black-haired creature’s eyes. “You must get to Viraine. Only a fullblood can command him off now, and Viraine is the only one—Oh, for demons’ sake, look at me!”

He moved into my line of sight, blocking my view of those eyes. I could hear a soft murmur, Scimina speaking in a low voice. It sounded like she was giving instructions, which made a peculiar parallel with T’vril in front of me doing the same. I barely heard them both. I felt so cold.

“Viraine’s study is two levels above us. There are lifting chambers at every third corridor juncture; look for an alcove between vases of flowers. Just—just get to one of those, and then think up. The door will be straight ahead. While there’s still light in the sky you have a chance. Go. Run!”

He pushed me, and I stumbled off. Behind me rose an inhuman howl, like the voices of a hundred wolves and a hundred jaguars and a hundred winter winds, all of them hungry for my flesh. Then there was silence, and that was most frightening of all.

I ran. I ran. I ran.

SHOULD I PAUSE TO EXPLAIN? It is poor storytelling. But I must remember everything, remember and remember and remember, to keep a tight grip on it. So many bits of myself have escaped already.

So.

There were once three gods. The one who matters killed one of the ones who didn’t and cast the other into a hellish prison. The walls of this prison were blood and bone; the barred windows were eyes; the punishments included sleep and pain and hunger and all the other incessant demands of mortal flesh. Then this creature, trapped in his tangible vessel, was given to the Arameri for safekeeping, along with three of his godly children. After the horror of incarnation, what difference could mere slavery make?

As a little girl, I learned from the priests of Bright Itempas that this fallen god was pure evil. In the time of the Three, his followers had been a dark, savage cult devoted to violent midnight revels, worshipping madness as a sacrament. If that one had won the war between the gods, the priests intoned direly, mortalkind would probably no longer exist.

“So be good,” the priests would add, “or the Nightlord will get you.”

I ran from the Nightlord through halls of light. Some property of the stuff that made up Sky’s substance made it glow with its own soft, white luminescence now that the sun had set. Twenty paces behind me charged the god of darkness and chaos. On the one occasion that I risked a glance back, I saw the gentle glow of the hallway fade into a throat of blackness so deep looking that way hurt the eye. I did not look back again.

I could not go straight. All that had saved me thus far was my head start, and the fact that the monster behind me seemed incapable of moving faster than a mortal’s pace. Perhaps the god retained a human form somewhere within all that dark; even so, his legs were longer than mine.

So I turned at nearly every juncture, slamming into walls to brake my speed and give me something to push against as I sprinted away. I say this as if the wall slamming was deliberate on my part; it was not. If I had been able to reason through my abject terror, I might have retained a general sense of which direction I was going in. As it was, I was already hopelessly lost.

Fortunately, where reason failed, blind panic served well enough.

Spying one of the alcoves that T’vril had described, I flung myself into it, pressing against the back wall. He had told me to think up, which would activate the lifting spell and propel me to the next level of the palace. Instead I thought AWAY AWAY AWAY, not realizing the magic would oblige that, too.

When the coach had brought me from the Salon to Sky-the-palace, I’d had the curtains closed. The coachman had simply driven us to a particular spot and stopped; my skin had prickled; a moment later the coachman opened the door to reveal we were there. It had not occurred to me that the magic had pulled me through half a mile of solid matter in the blink of an eye.

Now it happened again. The little alcove, which had been growing dim as the Nightlord closed in, suddenly seemed to stretch, its entrance moving impossibly farther away while I remained still. There was an inbreath of tension, and then I shot forward as if from a sling. Walls flew at my face; I screamed and flung my arms over my eyes even as they passed through me. And then everything stopped.

I lowered my arms slowly. Before I could muster my wits enough to wonder whether this was the same alcove or another just like it, a child thrust his face through the opening, looked around, and spied me.

“Come on,” he said. “Hurry up. It won’t take him long to find us.”

The Arameri magic had brought me to a vast open chamber within the body of Sky. Dumb, I looked around at the cold, featureless space as we hurried through it.

“The arena,” said the boy ahead of me. “Some of the highbloods fancy themselves warriors. This way.”

I glanced back toward the alcove, wondering if there was some way to block it off so the Nightlord couldn’t follow.

“No, that won’t work,” said the boy, following my gaze. “But the palace itself inhibits his power on a night like this. He can hunt you using only his senses.” (As opposed to what else? I wondered.) “On a moonless night you’d be in trouble, but tonight he’s just a man.”

“That was not a man,” I said. My voice sounded high and shaky in my own ears.

“If that were true, you wouldn’t be running for your life right now.” And apparently I wasn’t running fast enough. The boy caught my hand and pulled me along faster. He glanced back at me, and I caught a glimpse of a high-cheekboned, pointed face that would one day be handsome.

“Where are you taking me?” My ability to reason was returning, though slowly. “To Viraine?”

He uttered a derisive snort. We left the arena and passed into more of the mazelike white halls. “Don’t be foolish. We’re going to hide.”

“But that man—” Nahadoth. Now I remembered where I’d heard the name. Never whisper it in the dark, read the children’s tales, unless you want him to answer.

“Oh, so now he’s a man? We just have to keep ahead of him and everything will be fine.” The boy ran around a corner, more nimble than me; I stumbled to keep up. He darted his eyes around the corridor, looking for something. “Don’t worry. I get away from him all the time.”

This did not sound wise. “I w-want to go to Viraine.” I tried to say it with authority, but I was still too frightened, and winded now besides.

The boy responded by stopping, but not because of me. “Here!” he said, and put his hand against one of the pearlescent walls. “Atadie!”

The wall opened.

It was like watching ripples in water. The pearly stuff moved away from his hand in steady waves, forming an opening—a hole—a door. Beyond the wall lay an oddly shaped, narrow chamber, not so much a room as a space between. When the door was big enough for us both, the boy pulled me inside.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Dead space in the body of the palace. All these curving corridors and round rooms. There’s another half a palace in between that no one uses—except me.” The boy turned to me and flashed an up-to-no-good grin. “We can rest for a little while.”

I was beginning to catch my breath, and with it came a weakness that I recognized as the aftermath of adrenaline. The wall had rippled shut behind me, becoming as solid as before. I leaned back against it gingerly at first, then gratefully. And then I examined my rescuer.

He wasn’t much smaller than me, maybe nine years old, with the spindly look of a fast grower. Not Amn, not with skin as dark as mine and sharpfold eyes like those of the Tema people. They were a murky, tired green, those eyes—like my own, and my mother’s. Maybe his father had been another wandering Arameri.

He was examining me as well. After a moment, his grin widened. “I’m Sieh.”

Two syllables. “Sieh Arameri?”

“Just Sieh.” With a child’s boneless grace, he stretched his arms above his head. “You don’t look like much.”

I was too tired to take offense. “I’ve found it useful,” I replied, “to be underestimated.”

“Yes. Always good strategy, that.” Lightning-quick, he straightened and grew serious. “He’ll find us if we don’t keep moving. En!”

I jumped, startled by his shout. But Sieh was looking up. A moment later, a child’s yellow kickball fell into his hands.

Puzzled, I looked up. The dead space went up several floors, a featureless triangular shaft; I saw no openings from which the ball could have come. There was certainly no one hovering above who could have thrown the ball to him.

I looked at the boy and suffered a sudden, chilling suspicion.

Sieh laughed at my face and put the ball on the floor. Then he sat on it, cross-legged. The ball held perfectly still beneath him until he was comfortable, and then it rose into the air. It stopped when he was a few feet above the ground and hovered. Then the boy who was not a boy reached out to me.

“I won’t hurt you,” he said. “I’m helping you, aren’t I?”

I just looked at his hand, pressing myself back against the wall.

“I could have led you in a circle, you know. Right back to him.”

There was that. After a moment, I took his hand. His grip left no question; this was not a child’s strength.

“Just a little ways,” he said. Then, dangling me like a snared rabbit, he floated us both up through the shaft.

There is another thing I remember from my childhood. A song, and it went… How did it go? Ah, yes. “Trickster, trickster / Stole the sun for a prank. / Will you really ride it? / Where will you hide it? / Down by the riverbank…”

It was not our sun, mind you.

Sieh opened two ceilings and another wall before finally setting me down in a dead space that was as big as Grandfather Dekarta’s audience chamber. But it was not the size of this space that made my mouth gape.

More spheres floated in this room, dozens of them. They were fantastically varied—of all shapes and sizes and colors—turning slowly and drifting through the air. They seemed to be nothing more than a child’s toys, until I looked closely at one and saw clouds swirling over its surface.