The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (11 page)

THERE IS A SICKNESS CALLED the Walking Death. The disease causes tremors, terrible fever, unconsciousness, and in its final stages a peculiar kind of manic behavior. The victim is compelled to rise from the sickbed and walk—walk anywhere, even back and forth in the confines of a room. Walk, while the fever grows so great that the victim’s skin cracks and bleeds; walk while the brain dies. And then walk a little more.

There have been many outbreaks of the Walking Death over the centuries. When the disease first appeared, thousands died because no one understood how it spread. The walking, you see. Unimpeded, the infected always walk to wherever healthy people can be found. They shed their blood and die there, and thus the sickness is passed on. Now we are wise. Now we build a wall around any place the Death has touched, and we close our hearts to the cries of the healthy trapped within. If they are still alive a few weeks later, we let them out. Survival is not unheard of. We are not cruel.

It escapes no one’s notice that the Death afflicts only the laboring classes. Priests, nobles, scholars, wealthy merchants… it is more than that they have guards and the resources to quarantine themselves in their citadels and temples. In the early years there were no quarantines, and they still did not die. Unless they rose recently from the lower classes themselves, the wealthy and powerful are immune.

Of course such a plague is nothing natural.

When the Death came to Darr a little while before I was born, no one expected my father to catch it. We were minor nobility, but still nobility. But my paternal grandfather had been a commoner as Darre reckon it—a handsome hunter who caught my grandmother’s eye. That was enough for the disease, apparently.

Still… my father survived.

I will remember later why this is relevant.

That night as I readied myself for bed, I came out of the bath to find Sieh eating my dinner and reading one of the books I’d brought from Darr. The dinner I did not mind. The book was another matter.

“I like this,” Sieh said, throwing me a vague wave by way of greeting. He never lifted his eyes from the book. “I’ve never read Darre poetry. It’s strange—from talking with you I’d thought all Darre were straightforward. But this: every line is full of misdirection. Whoever wrote this thinks in circles.”

I sat down on the bed to brush my hair. “It’s considered courteous to ask before invading others’ privacy.”

He didn’t put the book down, though he did close it. “I’ve offended you.” There was a contemplative look on his face. “How did I do that?”

“The poet was my father.”

His face registered surprise. “He’s a fine poet. Why does it bother you to have others read his work?”

“Because it’s mine.” He had been dead a decade—a hunting accident, such a typically male way to die—and still it hurt to think of him. I lowered the brush, looking down at the dark curls caught in the bristles. Amn curls, like my Amn eyes. I wondered, sometimes, whether my father had thought me ugly, as so many Darre did. If he had, would it have been because of my Amn features—or because I did not look more Amn, like my mother?

Sieh gazed at me for a long moment. “I meant no offense.” And he got up and replaced the book on my small shelf.

I felt something in me relax, though I resumed brushing to cover it. “I’m surprised you care,” I said. “Mortals die all the time. You must grow tired of dancing around our grief.”

Sieh smiled. “My mother is dead, too.”

The Betrayer, who betrayed no one. I had never thought of her as someone’s mother.

“Besides, you tried to kill Nahadoth for me. That earns you a little extra consideration.” He shifted to sit on my vanity table, his rump shoving aside my few toiletries; the extra consideration apparently did not extend that far. “So what is it you want?”

I started. He grinned.

“You were glad to see me until you saw what I was reading.”

“Oh.”

“Well?”

“I wondered…” Abruptly I felt foolish. How many problems did I have right now? Why was I obsessing over the dead?

Sieh drew up and folded his legs, and waited. I sighed.

“I wondered if you could tell me what you know of… of my mother.”

“Not Dekarta, or Scimina, or Relad? Or even my peculiar family?” He cocked his head, and his pupils doubled in size in the span of a breath. I stared, momentarily distracted by this. “Interesting. What brings this on?”

“I met Relad today.” I groped for words to explain further.

“Quite a pair, aren’t they? Him and Scimina. The stories I could tell you about their little war…”

“I don’t want to know about that.” My voice was too sharp as I said it. I hadn’t meant to let him see how much the meeting with Relad had troubled me. I had expected another Scimina, but the drunken, bitter reality was worse. Would I become another Relad if I did not escape Sky soon?

Sieh fell silent, probably reading every thought on my face. So it did not entirely surprise me when a look of calculation came into his eyes, and he gave me a lazy, wicked smile.

“I’ll tell you what I can,” he said. “But what will you give me in return?”

“What do you want?”

His smile faded, his expression changing to one of utter seriousness. “I said it before. Let me sleep with you.”

I stared at him. He shook his head quickly.

“Not as a man does with a woman.” He actually looked revolted by the notion. “I’m a child, remember?”

“You aren’t a child.”

“As gods go, I am. Nahadoth was born before time even existed; he makes me and all my siblings combined look like infants.” He shifted again, wrapping arms around his knees. He looked terribly young, and terribly vulnerable. Still, I was not a fool.

“Why?”

He uttered a soft sigh. “I just like you, Yeine. Does there have to be a reason for everything?”

“I’m beginning to think so, with you.”

He scowled. “Well, there isn’t. I told you; I do what I like, whatever feels good, as children do. There’s no logic to it. Accept that or not, as you please.” Then he put his chin on one knee and looked away, doing as perfect a sulk as I’d ever seen.

I sighed, and tried to consider whether saying yes to him would somehow make me susceptible to Enefadeh trickery or some Arameri plot. But at last it came to me: none of that mattered.

“I suppose I should be flattered,” I said, and sighed.

Instantly Sieh brightened and bounded over to my bed, pulling back the bedcovers and patting my side of the mattress. “Can I brush your hair?”

I could not help laughing. “You are a very, very strange person.”

“Immortality gets very, very boring. You’d be surprised at how interesting the small mundanities of life can seem after a few millennia.”

I came to the bed and sat down, offering him the brush. He all but purred as he took hold of it, but I held on.

He grinned. “I have a feeling I’m about to have my own bargain thrown back in my face.”

“No. But it only seems wise, when bargaining with a trickster, to demand that he hold up his end of the deal first.”

He laughed, letting go of the brush to slap his leg. “You’re so much fun. I like you better than all the other Arameri.”

I did not like that he considered me Arameri. But…“Better than my mother?” I asked.

He sobered, then settled against me, leaning on my back. “I liked her well enough. She didn’t often command us. Only when she had to; other than that she left us alone. The smart ones tend to do that, exceptions like Scimina notwithstanding. No sense getting to know your weapons on a close personal basis.”

I did not like hearing such a casual dismissal of my mother’s motives, either. “Perhaps she did it on principle. So many of the Arameri abuse their power over you. It isn’t right.”

He lifted his head from my shoulder and looked at me for a moment, amused. Then he lay back down. “I suppose it could have been that.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“Do you want truth, Yeine? Or comfort? No, I don’t think it was principle that made her leave us alone. I think Kinneth simply had other things on her mind. You could see that in her eyes. A drive.”

I frowned, remembering. There had been a driven look to her, yes; a grim, unyielding sort of resolve. There had been flickers of other things, too, especially when she’d thought herself unobserved. Covetousness. Regret.

I imagined her thoughts when, sometimes, she had turned that look on me. I will make you my instrument, my tool, to strike back at them, perhaps, though she would have known far better than me how slim my chances were. Or perhaps, At last, here is my chance to shape a world, even if it is only that of a child. And now that I had seen what Sky and the Arameri were like, a new possiblity came to me. I will raise you sane.

But if she had also worn that look during her days in Sky, long before my birth, then it had nothing whatsoever to do with me.

“There was no contest in her case, was there?” I asked. “I thought she was the sole heir.”

“No contest. There was never any question Kinneth would be the next head of the clan. Not until the day she announced her abdication.” Sieh shrugged. “Even after that, for a time, Dekarta expected her to change her mind. But then something changed, and you could taste the difference in the air. It was summer that day, but Dekarta’s rage was ice on metal.”

“That day?”

Sieh did not answer for a moment. Abruptly I knew, with an instinct that I neither understood nor questioned, that he was going to lie. Or, at least, withhold some part of the truth.

But that was fine. He was a trickster, and a god, and when all was said and done I was a member of the family that had kept him in bondage for centuries. I could not expect complete trust from him. I would take what I could get.

“The day she came to the palace,” Sieh said. He spoke more slowly than usual, palpably considering each word. “A year or so after she married your father. Dekarta ordered the halls empty when she arrived. So that she could save face, you see; even then he looked out for her. He met her alone for the same reason, so no one knows what was said between them. But we all knew what he expected.”

“That she was coming back.” Fortunately she had not, or I might never have been born.

But why had she come, then?

I needed to find that out, next.

I offered Sieh the brush. He took it, sat up on his knees, and very gently began working on my hair.

Sieh slept in a sprawl, taking over much of the very large bed. I had expected him to cuddle close, but he seemed content merely to have some part of his body in contact with me—a leg and a hand this time, tossed over my own leg and belly respectively. I did not mind the sprawl, nor the faint snoring. I did, once again, mind the daylight-bright walls.

Despite that, I dozed off anyhow. I must have been tired. Sometime later I half-woke and opened my eyes, bleary, to see that the room had gone dark. Since dark rooms at night were normal to me, I thought nothing of it and drifted off again. But in the morning I would recall something—a taste in the air, as Sieh had termed it. That taste was something I had little experience with, yet I knew it the way an infant knows love, or an animal knows fear. Jealousy, even between father and son, is a fact of nature.

That morning I turned over and found Sieh awake, his green eyes dark with regret. Wordlessly he rose, smiled at me, and vanished. I knew that he would never sleep with me again.

AFTER SIEH LEFT I ROSE EARLY, intent upon finding T’vril before the day’s visit to the Salon. Despite his reassurance that I’d already met everyone who mattered, that had been in reference to the contest of heirs. In the matter of my mother, I hoped someone might know more about the night of her abdication.

But I turned left where I should have turned right, and didn’t take the lift far enough down, and instead of T’vril’s office I found myself at the palace entrance, facing the forecourt where my life’s most unpleasant saga had begun.

And Dekarta was there.

When I was five or six, I learned about the world from my Itempan tutors. “There is the universe, ruled by the gods,” they told me. “Bright Itempas is chief among these. And there is the world, where the Noble Consortium rules with the guidance of the Arameri family. Dekarta, the Lord Arameri, is chief among them.”

I had said to my mother, later, that this Lord Arameri must be a very great man.

“He is,” she’d said, and that was the end of the conversation.

It was not the words that had stuck in my mind, but the way she said them.

Sky’s forecourt is the first sight that visitors see, so it is calculated to impress. Besides the Vertical Gate and the palace entrance—a cavernous tunnel of concentric arches, around which stands the intimidating bulk of Sky itself—there is also the Garden of the Hundred Thousand, and the Pier. Of course nothing docks at this Pier, as it juts out from the forecourt over a half-mile drop. It has a thin, elegant railing, about waist-high. This railing would do nothing to stop a person intent on suicide, but I suppose it provides some reassurance to everyone else.

Dekarta stood with Viraine and several others at the foot of the Pier. The group was some ways off, and they had not yet seen me. I would have turned at once and headed back into the palace if I hadn’t recognized one of the figures with Dekarta and Viraine. Zhakkarn, the warrior goddess.

That made me pause. The other people present were Dekarta’s courtiers; I remembered some of them vaguely from my first day. Another man, not nearly as well-dressed as the rest, stood a few paces onto the Pier, as if gazing at the view—but he was shivering. I could see that even from where I stood.

Dekarta said something, and Zhakkarn lifted a hand and conjured a gleaming silver pike. Pointing this at the man, she took three steps forward. The pike’s tip hovered, rock-steady despite the wind, a few inches from the man’s back.

The man took a step forward, then looked back. Wind whipped his hair in a wispy cloud about his head; he looked Amn, or of some sister race. I recognized his manner, though, and his wild, defiant eyes. A heretic, flouter of the Bright. Once there had been entire armies like him, but now there were only a few left, hiding in isolated pockets and worshipping their fallen gods in secret. This one must have been careless.