N. Jemisin - The Broken Kingdoms

I had once wanted to die. This would be worse. But if I did it, I would be free.

I must have stayed silent too long. Shiny turned to me, his heavy gaze more compassionate than I had ever imagined it could be. He understood; of course he did. It was a hard thing, sometimes, to live.

“I understand,” I said to the Lord Arameri.

He nodded. “Then it shall be done. Remain here another day. That should be sufficient time for me to make the arrangements.” He turned back to the window, another wordless dismissal.

I stood there unmoving, hardly daring to believe it. I was free. Free , like old times.

Shiny turned to leave, then turned back to me, radiating irritation at my failure to follow. Like old times.

Except that he had fought for me. And won.

I trotted after him and took his arm, and if it bothered him that I pressed my face against his shoulder as we walked back to my room, he did not complain.

It should have ended there. That would have been best, wouldn’t it? A fallen god, a “dead” demon, two broken souls limping back toward life. That would have been the end that this tale deserved, I think. Quiet. Ordinary.

But that wouldn’t have been good for you, would it? Too lacking in closure. Not dramatic enough. I will tell myself, then, that what happened next was a fortunate thing, though even now it feels anything but.

I slept deeply that night, despite my fear of what was to come, despite my worry about Paitya and the others, despite my cynical suspicion that the Lord Arameri would find some other way to keep me under his graceful, kindly thumb. My arm had healed completely, so I stripped off the bandages and the sling and the sigil-script, took a long, deep bath to celebrate the absence of pain, and curled up against Shiny’s warmth. He shifted on the bed to make room for me, and I felt him watching me as I fell asleep.

Sometime after midnight, I woke with a start, blinking in disorientation as I rolled over. The room was quiet and still; Sky’s magical walls were too thick to let me hear movement in the halls beyond, or even the sound of the wind that must surely be fierce outside, up so high. In that, I preferred the House of the Risen Sun, where at least there had been small sounds of life all around me—people walking through the corridors, chanting and songs, the occasional creaking and groaning of the Tree as it swayed. I would not miss the House, or its people, but being there had not been wholly unpleasant.

Here there was only the quiet, bright-glowing stillness. Shiny was asleep beside me, his breathing deep and slow. I tried to remember if I’d had a nightmare but could recall nothing. Pushing myself up, I looked around the room because I could. There would be things I’d miss about Sky, too. I saw nothing, but my nerves still jumped and my skin still tingled, as if something had touched me.

Then I heard a sound behind me like tearing air.

I whirled, my thoughts frozen, and it was behind me: a hole the height of my body, like a great, open mouth. Stupid, stupid. I had known he was still out there but thought myself safe in the stronghold of the Arameri. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

I was halfway across the bed, dragged by the hole’s power, before I could open my mouth to cry out. Convulsively, my hands locked on the sheets, but I knew it was futile. In my mind’s eye, I saw the sheets simply pull free of the bed, fluttering uselessly as I disappeared into whatever hell Dateh had built to hold me.

There was a jerk, so hard that friction heat burned my knuckles. The sheets had caught on something. A hand wrapped around my wrist. Shiny .

I shot backward into the terrible metal roar, and he came with me. I felt his presence even as I screamed and flailed, even as the feel of his hand on my wrist faded into cold numbness. We tumbled through trembling darkness, falling sideways into—

Sensation and solidity. I struck the ground—ground?—first, hard enough to jar the breath from my body. I felt the breath. Shiny landed nearby, uttering a grunt of pain, but at once he rolled to his feet, pulling me up, too. I caught my breath and looked around wildly, though I could see only darkness.

Then my eyes caught on something: a faint, blurry form, curled and fetal, hovering amid the dark. Dateh? But it did not move, and then I saw the shimmer of something between me and the form. Like glass. I turned again, trying to comprehend, and saw another murky form, hovering in the dark beyond the glass. This one I recognized by her brown skin: Kitr. She did not move. I reached for her, but when my hands encountered the glassy dark, they stopped. It was solid, enclosing us entirely above and around, a bubble of normality carved out of the Empty’s hellish substance.

I turned again, and there was Dateh.

He was closer to us than the blurry forms, on the other side of the wide room that the bubble formed. I wasn’t sure he knew we were there (though his will had brought us here), because his back was to us, and he crouched amid sprawled bodies. I could not see the bodies, except where their dimness occluded my view of Dateh, but I could taste blood in the air, thick and sickly and fresh. I heard the sounds I had hoped never to hear again: tearing flesh. Chewing teeth.

I stiffened and felt Shiny’s hand tighten on my wrist. So he, too, could see Dateh, which meant there was light in this empty world. And it meant Shiny could see which of his children lay around us, sprawled and desecrated, the magic of their lives long gone.

Tears of helpless rage pricked my eyes. Not again. Not again. “Gods damn you, Dateh,” I whispered.

Dateh paused in whatever he was doing. He turned to us, still in a crouch, moving in an odd, scuttling manner. His mouth, robes, and hands were stained dark, and his left hand was closed around a dripping lump. He blinked at us like a man coming out of a fugue. I could not see the demarcation between pupil and iris in his eyes; they looked like a single dark pit, too large, carved into the white.

He seemed to recall himself slowly. “Where is Serymn?” he asked.

“Dead,” I snapped.

He frowned at this, as if confused. Slowly he rose to his feet. He drew a breath to speak again, then paused as he noticed the heart in his hand. Frowning, he tossed it aside and stepped closer to us. “Where is my wife?” he asked again.

I scowled, but behind my bravado, I was terrified. I could feel power sluicing off him like water, pressing against my skin, making it crawl. It shimmered around him, making the whole chamber flicker unsteadily. He had been missing since the Arameri raid on the House of the Risen Sun. Had he spent all that time hiding here, killing and eating godlings, making himself stronger? And madder?

“Serymn is dead , you monster,” I said. “Didn’t you hear me? The gods took her to their realm for punishment, and she deserved it. They’ll find you, too, soon.”

Dateh stopped. His frown deepened, and he shook his head. “She isn’t dead. I would know.”

I shuddered. So the Nightlord had been in a creative mood after all. “Then she will be. Unless you mean to challenge the Three now?”

“I have always meant to challenge them, Lady Oree.” Dateh shook his head again, then smiled with bloody teeth. It was the first hint of his old self I had seen, but it chilled me nevertheless. He had eaten the godlings in hope of stealing their power, and it seemed he had managed to do so. But something else had gone very, very wrong. That was plain in his smile and in the emptiness of his eyes.

It is bad, very bad, for a mortal to eat one of us , Lil had said.