The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (33 page)

—AND THEN—THEN—

You remember.

No. No, I don’t.

Why are you afraid?

I don’t know.

Did he hurt you?

I don’t remember!

You do. Think, child. I made you stronger than this. What were the sounds? The scents? What do the memories feel like?

Like… like summer.

Yes. Humid, thick, those summertime nights. Did you know—the earth absorbs all the day’s heat, and gives it back in the dark hours. All that energy just hovers in the air, waiting to be used. It slickens the skin. Open your mouth and it curls around your tongue.

I remember. Oh, gods, I remember.

I knew you would.

The shadows in the room seemed to deepen as the Nightlord rose to his feet. He loomed over me, and for the first time I could not see his eyes in the dark.

“Why?” he asked.

“You never answered my question.”

“Question?”

“Whether you would kill me, if I asked.”

I won’t pretend I wasn’t afraid. That was part of it—my pounding heart, the quickness of my breath. Esui, the thrill of danger. But then he reached out, so slowly that I worried I was dreaming, and trailed his fingertips up my arm. Just that one touch and my fear became something entirely different. Gods. Goddess.

White teeth flashed at me, startling in the darkness. Oh, yes, this was far beyond mere danger.

“Yes,” he said. “If you asked, I would kill you.”

“Just like that?”

“You seek to control your death as you cannot control your life. I… understand this.” So much unspoken meaning in that brief pause. I wondered, suddenly, whether the Nightlord had ever yearned to die.

“I didn’t think you wanted me to control my death.”

“No, little pawn.” I tried to concentrate on his words while his hand continued its slow journey up my arm, but it was difficult. I am only human. “It is Itempas’s way to force his will upon others. I have always preferred willing sacrifices.”

He drew one fingertip along my collarbone now, and I nearly moved away because it felt almost unbearably good. I did not because I had seen his teeth. One did not run from a predator.

“I… I knew you would say yes.” My voice shook. I was babbling. “I don’t know how, but I knew. I knew…” That I was more than a pawn to you. But no, that part I could not say.

“I must be what I am.” He said it as if the words made sense. “Now. Are you asking?”

I licked my lips, hungry. “Not to die. But—for you. Yes. I’m asking for you.”

“To have me is to die,” he warned me, even as he grazed my breast with the backs of his fingers. The knuckles caught on my already-taut nipple and I could not help gasping. The room got darker.

But one thought pushed up through the desire. It was the thought that had motivated me to do this mad thing, because in spite of everything I was not suicidal. I wanted to live for whatever pittance of time I had left. In the same way I hated the Arameri, yet I sought to understand them; I wanted to prevent a second Gods’ War, yet I also wanted the Enefadeh freed. I wanted so many things, each of them contradictory, all of them together impossible. I wanted them anyway. Perhaps Sieh’s childishness had infected me.

“Once you took many mortal lovers,” I said. My voice was more breathy than it should have been. He leaned close to me and inhaled, as if scenting it. “Once you claimed them by the dozen, and they all lived to tell the tale.”

“That was before centuries of human hatred made me a monster,” said the Nightlord, and for a moment his voice was sad. I had used the same word for him myself, but it felt strange and wrong to hear him say it. “Before my brother stole whatever tenderness there once was in my soul.”

And just like that, my fear faded.

“No,” I said.

His hand paused. I reached up and caught it, my fingers tangling in his.

“Your tenderness isn’t gone, Nahadoth. I’ve seen it. I’ve tasted it.” I pulled his hand up, up, to touch my lips. I felt his fingers twitch, as if in surprise. “You’re right about me; if I must die, I want to die on my own terms. There are so many things I will never do—but this I can have. You.” I kissed his fingers. “Will you show me that tenderness again, Nightlord? Please?”

From the corner of my eye I saw movement. When I turned my head there were black lines, curling and random, etching their way along the walls, the windows, the floor. The lines flowed out from Nahadoth’s feet, spreading, overlapping. I caught a glimpse of strange, airy depths within the lines; a suggestion of drifting mist and deep, endless chasms. He let out a low, soughing breath, and it curled around my tongue.

“I need so much,” he whispered. “It has been so long since I shared that part of myself, Yeine. I hunger—I always hunger. I devour myself with hunger. But Itempas has betrayed me, and you are not Enefa, and I… I am… afraid.”

Tears stung my eyes. Reaching up, I cupped his face in my hands and pulled him down to me. His lips were cool, and this time they tasted of salt. I thought I felt him shiver. “I will give you all I can,” I said, when we parted.

He pressed his forehead against mine; he was breathing hard. “You must say the words. I will try to be what I was, I will try, but—” He groaned softly, desperate. “Say the words!”

I closed my eyes. How many of my Arameri ancestors had said these words and died? I smiled. It would be a death befitting a Darre, if I joined them.

“Do with me as you please, Nightlord,” I whispered.

Hands seized me.

I do not say his hands because there were too many of them, gripping my arms and grasping my hips and tangling in my hair. One even curled ’round my ankle. The room was almost entirely dark. I could see nothing except the window and the sky beyond, where the sun’s light had finally faded completely. Stars spun as I was lifted and lowered until I felt the bed underneath my back.

Then we fed each other’s hunger. Wherever I wanted to be touched, he touched; I don’t know how he knew. Whenever I touched him, there was a delay. I would cup emptiness before it became a smooth muscled arm. I would wrap my legs around nothing and only then find hips settled there, taut with ready energy. In this way I shaped him, making him suit my fantasies; in this way he chose to be shaped. When heavy, thick warmth pushed into me, I had no idea whether this was a penis or some entirely different phallus that only gods possessed. I suspect the latter, since no mere penis can fill a woman’s body the way he filled mine. Size had nothing to do with it. This time he let me scream.

“Yeine…” Through the haze of my own body heat I was aware of few things. The clouds, racing across the stars. The black lines, webbing the room’s ceiling, widening and melding into one great yawning abyss. The rising urgency of Nahadoth’s movements. There was pain now, because I wanted it. “Yeine. Open yourself to me.”

I had no idea what he meant; I could not think. But he gripped my hair and slid a hand under my hips, pulling me tighter against him in a way that sent me spiraling again. “Yeine!”

Such need in him. Such wounds—two of them, raw and unhealing, for two lost lovers. So much more than one mortal girl could ever satisfy.

And yet in my madness, I tried. I couldn’t; I was only human. But for that moment I yearned to be more, give more, because I loved him.

I loved him.

Nahadoth arched up, away from me. In the last starlight I caught a glimpse of a smooth, perfect body, taut-muscled and sleek with sweat all the way down to where it joined with mine. He had flung back his hair in an arc. His face was all tight-clenched eyes and open mouth and that delicious near-agony expression men make when the moment strikes. The black lines joined, and nothingness enclosed us.

Then we fell.

—no, no, we flew, not downward but forward, into the dark. There were streaks within this darkness, thin random lines of white and gold and red and blue. I put out my hand in fascination and snatched it back when something stung the fingertips. I looked and found them wet with glimmering stuff that spun with tiny orbiting motes. Then Nahadoth cried out, his body shuddering, and now we went up—

—past endless stars, past countless worlds, through layers of light and glowing cloud. Up and up we went, our speed impossible, our size incomprehensible. We left the light behind and kept going, passing through stranger things than mere worlds. Geometric shapes that twisted and gibbered. A white landscape of frozen explosions. Shivering lines of intention that turned to chase us. Vast, whalelike beings with terrifying eyes and the faces of long-lost friends.

I closed my eyes. I had to. Yet the images continued, because in this place I had no eyelids to close. I was immense, and still growing. I had a million legs, two million arms. I don’t know what I became in that place Nahadoth took me, because there are things no mortal is meant to do or be or comprehend, and I encompassed all of them.

Something familiar: that darkness which is Nahadoth’s quintessence. It surrounded me, pressed in, until I had no choice but to yield to it. I felt things in me—sanity? self?—stretch, growing so taut that a touch would break them. This was the end, then. I was not afraid, not even when I became aware of a sound: a titanic, awful roar. I cannot describe it except to say something of that roar was in Nahadoth’s voice as he shouted again. I knew then that his ecstasy had taken us beyond the universe, and now we approached the Maelstrom, birthplace of gods. It would tear me apart.

Then, just when the roar had become so terrible that I knew I could bear no more, we stopped. Hovered, pent.

And then we fell again through gibbering strangeness and layered dark and whirlpools of light and dancing globes toward one globe in particular, blue-green and beautiful. There was a new roaring as we streaked down through air, trailing white-hot fire. Something glowing and pale reared up, puny then enormous, all spikes and white stone and treachery—Sky, it was Sky—and it swallowed us whole.

I think I screamed again as, naked, skin steaming, I smashed into my bed. The shock wave of impact swept the room; the sound of it was the Maelstrom come to earth. I knew no more.

HE SHOULD’VE KILLED ME THAT NIGHT. It would have been easier.

That’s selfish of you.

What?

He gave you his body. He gave you pleasure no mortal lover can match. He fought his own nature to keep you alive, and you wish he hadn’t bothered.

I didn’t mean—

Yes, you did. Oh, child. You think you love him? You think you’re worthy of his love?

I can’t speak for him. But I know what I feel.

Don’t be a—

And I know what I hear. Jealousy does not become you.

What?

This is why you’re so angry with me, isn’t it? You’re just like Itempas, you can’t bear to share—

Be silent!

—but it isn’t necessary. Don’t you see? He has never stopped loving you. He never will. You and Itempas will always hold his heart in your hands.

… Yes. That is true. But I am dead, and Itempas is mad.

And I am dying. Poor Nahadoth.

Poor Nahadoth, and poor us.

I woke slowly, aware first of warmth and comfort. Sunlight shone against the side of my face, red through one of my eyelids. A hand rubbed my back in little arcs.

I opened my eyes and did not understand what I saw at first. A white, rolling surface. I had fleeting memories of something else like it—frozen explosions—and then the memories swam away, deeper into my consciousness and out of reach. For a moment understanding lingered: I was mortal, not ready for some knowledge. Then even that vanished, and I was myself again. I was wearing a plush robe. I was sitting in someone’s lap. Frowning, I lifted my head.

Nahadoth’s daytime form gazed back at me with frank, too-human eyes.

I did not think, half-falling and half-leaping off his lap and rolling to my feet. He rose with me and a taut moment passed, me staring, him just standing there.

The moment broke when he turned to the small nightstand, on which sat a gleaming silver tea service. He poured, the small liquid sound making me flinch for reasons I did not understand, and then held the cup forward, offering it to me.

I stood naked before him, an offering—

Gone, like fish in a pond.

“How do you feel?” he asked. I flinched again, not sure I understood the words. How did I feel? Warm. Safe. Clean. I lifted a hand, sniffed my wrist; I smelled of soap.

“I bathed you. I hope you’ll forgive the liberty.” Low, soft, his voice, as if he spoke to a skittish mare. He looked different from the day before—healthier for one, but also browner, like a Darre man. “You were so deeply asleep that you didn’t wake. I found the robe in the closet.”

I hadn’t known I had a robe. Belatedly it came to me that he was still holding out the cup of tea. I took it, more out of politeness than any real interest. When I sipped, I was surprised to find it lukewarm and rich with cooling mint and calmative herbs. It made me realize I was thirsty; I drank it down greedily. Naha held out the pot, silently offering more, and I let him pour.

“What a wonder you are,” he murmured, as I drank. Noise. He was staring and it bothered me. I looked away to shut him out and savored the tea.

“You were ice cold when I woke up, and filthy. There was something—soot, I think—all over you. The bath seemed to warm you up, and that helped, too.” He jerked his head toward the chair where we’d been sitting. “There wasn’t anywhere else, so—”

“The bed,” I said, and flinched again. My voice was hoarse, my throat raw and sore. The mint helped.

For an instant Naha paused, his lips quirking with a hint of his usual cruelty. “The bed wouldn’t have worked.”

Puzzled, I looked past him, and caught my breath. The bed was a wreck, sagging on a split frame and broken legs. The mattress looked as though it had been hacked by a sword and then set afire. Loose goosedown and charred fabric scraps littered the room.

It was more than the bed. One of the room’s huge glass windows had spiderwebbed; only luck that it hadn’t shattered. The vanity mirror had. One of my bookcases lay on the floor, its contents scattered but intact. (I saw my father’s book there, with great relief.) The other bookcase had been shattered into kindling, along with most of the books on it.