Sar-enna-nem was once a temple. Its main entrance is a vast and vaulted hall supported by columns hewn whole from the earth, erected by my people in a time long before we knew of such Amn innovations as scrivening or clockwork. We had our own techniques back then. And the places we built to honor the gods were magnificent.
After the Gods’ War, my ancestors did what had to be done. Sar-enna-nem’s Twilight and Moon Windows, once famed for their beauty, were bricked up, leaving only the Sun. A new temple, dedicated exclusively to Itempas and untainted by the devotion once offered to his siblings, was built some ways to the south; that is the current religious heart of the city. Sar-enna-nem was repurposed as nothing more than a hall of government, from which our warrior council issued edicts that I, as ennu, once implemented. Any holiness was long gone.
The hall was empty, as befitted the late hour. My grandmother led me to the raised plinth where, during the day, the Warriors’ Council members sat on a circle of thick rugs. She took a seat; I took one opposite.
“Have you failed?” she asked.
“Not yet,” I replied. “But that is only a matter of time.”
“Explain,” she said, so I did. I will admit I edited the account somewhat. I did not tell her of the hours I wasted in my mother’s chambers weeping. I did not mention my dangerous thoughts about Nahadoth. And I most certainly did not speak of my two souls.
When I was done, she sighed, the only sign of her concern. “Kinneth always believed Dekarta’s love for her would safeguard you. I cannot say I ever liked her, but over the years I grew to trust her judgment. How could she have been so wrong?”
“I’m not certain she was,” I said softly. I was thinking of Nahadoth’s words about Dekarta, and my mother’s murder: You think it was him?
I had spoken with Dekarta since then. I had seen his eyes while he spoke of my mother. Could a man like him murder someone he loved so much?
“What did Mother tell you, Beba?” I asked. “About why she left the Arameri?”
My grandmother frowned, taken aback by my shift from formality. We had never been close, she and I. She had been too old to become ennu when her own mother finally died, and none of her children had been girls. Though my father had managed against all odds to succeed her, becoming one of only three male ennu ever in our history, I was the closest thing to a daughter she would ever have. I, the half-Amn embodiment of her son’s greatest mistake. I had given up on trying to earn her love years before.
“It was not something she spoke of much,” Beba said, speaking slowly. “She said she loved my son.”
“That couldn’t possibly have been sufficient for you,” I said softly.
Her eyes hardened. “Your father made it clear that it would have to be.”
And then I understood: she had never believed my mother. “What do you think was the reason, then?”
“She was full of anger, your mother. She wanted to hurt someone, and being with my son allowed her to accomplish that.”
“Someone in Sky?”
“I don’t know. Why does this concern you, Yeine? It’s now that matters, not twenty years ago.”
“I think what happened then has bearing on now,” I said, surprising myself—but it was true, I realized at last. Perhaps I had felt that all along. And with that opening, I readied my next attack. “Nahadoth has been here before, I see.”
At this, my grandmother’s face resumed its usual stern frown. “Lord Nahadoth, Yeine. We are not Amn here; we respect our creators.”
“The guard have drilled in how to approach him. A shame I wasn’t included; I could have used that training myself before I went to Sky. When did he come here last, Beba?”
“Before you were born. He came to see Kinneth once. Yeine, this isn’t—”
“Was it after Father recovered from the Walking Death?” I asked. I spoke softly, though the blood was pounding in my ears. I wanted to reach over and shake her, but I kept control. “Was that the night they did it to me?”
Beba’s frown deepened, momentary confusion becoming alarm. “Did… to you? What are you talking about? You weren’t even born at that point; Kinneth was barely pregnant. What did…”
And then she trailed off. I saw thoughts racing behind her eyes, which widened as they stared at me. I spoke to those thoughts, teasing out the knowledge that I sensed behind them.
“Mother tried to kill me when I was born.” I knew why, now, but there was more truth here, something I hadn’t discovered yet. I could feel it. “They didn’t trust her alone with me for months. Do you remember?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“I know she loved me,” I said. “And I know that sometimes women go mad in childbearing. Whatever it was that made her fear me then—” I nearly choked on the obfuscation. I had never been a good liar. “—it faded and she became a good mother thereafter. But you must have wondered, Beba, what it was that she feared so. And my father must have wondered…”
I trailed off then, as awareness struck. Here was a truth I had not considered—
“No one wondered.”
I jumped and whirled. Nahadoth stood fifty feet away at the entrance of Sar-enna-nem, framed by its triangle design. With the moonlight behind him he was a stark silhouette, but as always, I could see his eyes.
“I killed anyone who saw me with Kinneth that night,” he said. We both heard him as clearly as if he stood right beside us. “I killed her maid, and the child who came to serve us wine, and the man who sat with your father while he recovered from the sickness. I killed the three guards who tried to eavesdrop on this old woman’s orders.” He nodded toward Beba, who stiffened. “After that, no one dared to wonder about you.”
So you’ve decided to talk? I would have asked him, but then my grandmother did something so unexpected, so incredible, so stupid, that the words stopped in my throat. She leapt to her feet and moved in front of me, drawing her knife.
“What did you do to Yeine?” she cried. I had never in my life seen her so angry. “What foulness did the Arameri put you up to? She is mine, she belongs to us, you had no right!”
Nahadoth laughed then, and the whiplashing rage in that sound sent a chill down my spine. Had I thought him merely an embittered slave, a pitiable creature burdened by grief? I was a fool.
“You think this temple protects you?” he hissed. Only then did I realize he had not actually stepped over the threshold. “Have you forgotten that your people once worshipped me here, too?”
He stepped into Sar-enna-nem.
The rugs beneath my knees vanished. The floor, which had been planks of wood, disintegrated; underneath was a mosaic of polished semiprecious tiles, stones of every color interspersed with squares of gold. I gasped as the columns shuddered and the bricks exploded into nothingness and suddenly I could see the Three Windows, not just Sun but Moon and Twilight, too. I had never realized they were meant to be viewed together. We had lost so much. And all around us stood the statues of beings so perfect, so alien, so familiar, that I wanted to weep for all of Sieh’s lost brothers and sisters, Enefa’s loyal children, slaughtered like dogs for trying to avenge their mother’s murder. I understand. All of you, I understand so much—
And then the torchlight went out and the air creaked and I turned to see that Nahadoth had changed as well. Night’s darkness now filled that end of Sar-enna-nem, but it was not like my first night in Sky. Here, fueled by the residue of ancient devotion, he showed me all he had once been: first among gods, sweet dream and nightmare incarnate, all things beautiful and terrible. Through a hurricane swirl of blue-black unlight I caught a glimpse of moon-white skin and eyes like distant stars; then they warped into something so unexpected that my brain refused to interpret it for an instant. But the library embossing had warned me, hadn’t it? A woman’s face shone at me from the darkness, proud and powerful and so breathtaking that I yearned for her as much as I had for him, and it did not seem strange at all that I did so. And then the face shifted again into something that in no way resembled human, something tentacled and toothed and hideous, and I screamed. Then there was only darkness where his face should have been, and that was most frightening of all.