I stared at him and heard an entirely different conversation. In seven days the most noteworthy citizens in the world will gather to watch you die. Every mote of intuition in my body understood: the succession ceremony.
His question hovered unanswered in the air between us.
“No,” I said softly. “No one.”
Dekarta inclined his head. “Then you are dismissed, Granddaughter.”
I stared at him for a long moment. I might never again have the chance to speak with him like this, in private. He had not told me why he’d killed my mother, but there were other secrets that he might be willing to divulge. He might even know the secret of how I might save myself.
But in the long silence I could think of no questions to ask, no way to get at those secrets. So at last I picked up my knife and walked out of the room, and tried not to feel a sense of shame as the guards closed the door behind me.
This turned out to be the start of a very bad night.
I stepped inside my apartment and found that I had visitors.
Kurue had appropriated the chair, where she sat with her fingers steepled, a hard look in her eyes. Sieh, perched on the edge of my parlor’s couch, sat with his knees drawn up and his eyes downcast. Zhakkarn stood sentinel near the window, impassive as ever. Nahadoth—
I felt his presence behind me an instant before he put his hand through my chest.
“Tell me,” he said into my ear, “why I should not kill you.”
I stared at the hand through my chest. There was no blood, and as far as I could tell there was no wound. I fumbled for his hand and found that it was immaterial, like a shadow. My fingers passed through his flesh and waggled in the translucence of his fist. It did not hurt exactly, but it felt as though I’d plunged my fingers into an icy stream. There was a deep, aching coldness between my breasts.
He could withdraw his hand and tear out my heart. He could leave his hand in place but make it tangible, and kill me as surely as if he’d punched through blood and bone.
“Nahadoth,” Kurue said in a warning tone.
Sieh jumped up and came to my side, his eyes wide and frightened. “Please don’t kill her. Please.”
“She’s one of them,” he hissed in my ear. His breath was cold as well, making the flesh of my neck prickle in goose bumps. “Just another Arameri convinced of her own superiority. We made her, Sieh, and she dares to command us? She has no right to carry my sister’s soul.” His hand curled into a claw, and suddenly I realized it was not my flesh that he meant to damage.
Your body has grown used to containing two souls, Zhakkarn had said. It might not survive having only one again.
But at that realization, completely to my own surprise, I burst into laughter.
“Do it,” I said. I could hardly breathe for laughing, though that might’ve been some effect of Nahadoth’s hand. “I never wanted this thing in me in the first place. If you want it, take it!”
“Yeine!” Sieh clutched my arm. “That could kill you!”
“What difference does it make? You want to kill me anyway. So does Dekarta—he’s got it all planned, seven days from now. My only real choice lies in how I die. This is as good as any other method, isn’t it?”
“Let’s find out,” Nahadoth said.
Kurue sat forward. “Wait, what did she—”
Nahadoth drew his hand back. It seemed to take effort; the arm moved through my flesh slowly, as if through clay. I could not be more certain because I was shrieking at the top of my lungs. Instinctively I lunged forward, trying to escape the pain, and in retrospect this made things worse. But I could not think, all my reason having been subsumed by agony. It felt as though I was being torn apart—as, of course, I was.
But then something happened.
Above, a sky out of nightmare. I could not say if it was day or night. Both sun and moon were visible, but it was hard to say which was which. The moon was huge and cancerously yellow. The sun was a bloody distortion, nowhere near round. There was a single cloud in the sky and it was black—not dark gray with rain but black, like a drifting hole in the sky. And then I realized it was a hole, because something fell through—
Tiny figures, struggling. One of them was white and blazing, the other black and smoking; as they tumbled, I could see fire and hear cracks like thunder all around them. They fell and fell and smashed into the earth nearby. The ground shook, a great cloud of dust and debris kicked up from the impact; nothing human could have survived such a fall, but I knew they were not—
I ran. All around me were bodies—not dead, I understood with the certainty of a dream, but dying. The grass was dry and dessicated, crackling beneath my bare feet. Enefa was dead. Everything was dying. Leaves fell around me like heavy snow. Ahead, just through the trees—
“Is this what you want? Is it?” Inhuman fury in that voice, echoing through the forest shadows. Following it came a scream of such agony as I have never imagined—
I ran through the trees and stopped at the edge of a crater and saw—
O Goddess, I saw—
“Yeine.” A hand slapped my face lightly. “Yeine!”
My eyes were open. I blinked because they were dry. I was on my knees on the floor. Sieh crouched before me, his eyes wide with concern. Kurue and Zhakkarn were watching, too, Kurue looking worried and Zhakkarn soldier-still.
I did not think. I swung around and looked at Nahadoth, who stood with one hand—the one that had been in my body—still raised. He stared down at me, and I realized he somehow knew what I had seen.
“I don’t understand.” Kurue rose from the desk chair. Her hand, on the chair’s back, tightened. “It’s been twenty years. The soul should be able to survive extraction by now.”
“No one has ever put a god’s soul into a mortal,” said Zhakkarn. “We knew there was a risk.”
“Not of this!” Kurue pointed at me almost accusingly. “Will the soul even be usable now, contaminated with this mortal filth?”
“Be silent!” Sieh snapped, whipping around to glare at her. His voice dropped suddenly, a young man’s again; instant puberty. “How dare you? I have told you time and again—mortals are as much Enefa’s creations as we ourselves.”
“Leftovers,” Kurue retorted. “Weak and cowardly and too stupid to look beyond themselves for more than five minutes. Yet you and Naha will insist on putting your trust in them—”
Sieh rolled his eyes. “Oh, please. Tell me, Kurue, which of your proud, god-only plans has gotten us free?”
Kurue turned away in resentful silence.
I barely saw all this. Nahadoth and I were still staring at each other.
“Yeine.” Sieh’s small, soft hand touched my cheek, coaxing my head around to face him. His voice had returned to a childish treble. “Are you all right?”
“What happened?” I asked.
“We’re not certain.”
I sighed and pulled away from him, trying to get to my feet. My body felt hollowed out, stuffed with cotton. I slipped and settled onto my knees again, and cursed.
“Yeine—”