The Inheritance Trilogy Omnibus(252)

YA: Enulai Sarfith, I wish you had not told me this.



NS: (laughs)



YA: You know what I must do.



NS: (more laughter) Ah, boy. What does it matter? I am the last descendant of Enulai—daughter of Enefa, last-born of the mortal gods who chose to spend their brief days among humankind. All the Maro’s kings and queens are dead. All my children and grandchildren are dead. All of us who carried the Gray Mother’s blood—we’re as dead as she is. Why should I bother hiding anymore?



YA: (speaks to a servant, sending for guards)



NS: (while he speaks, softly) All gone, demonkind. All gone. No need to search for more. None left.5



YA: I’m sorry. (garbled)



NS: Don’t be. (garbled) destroyed the last of demonkind. No need to search for more now.



YA: No need to search for more.



NS: There are no demons left in the world, anywhere.



YA: None left. (garbled, until the guards come) Farewell, Enulai. I’m sorry it had to turn out this way.



NS: (laughing) I’m not. Good-bye, boy.





[Interview ends]6





Acknowledgments


Since I thanked everybody and everybody’s sister in the acknowledgments of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, here I’ll offer some literary/artistic acknowledgments. Fitting, since The Broken Kingdoms is a more, hmm, aesthetic book than its predecessor.

For the vocabulary of encaustic painting, sculpture, and watercolor used herein, I again thank my father, artist Noah Jemisin, who taught me more of his craft than I ever realized, given that I can’t draw a straight line. (No, Dad, fingerpainting when I was five doesn’t count.)

For the city of Shadow, I owe an obvious debt to urban fantasy—both the Miéville kind and the “disaffected hot chick with a weapon” kind (to quote a detractor of the latter, though I’m a fan of both). But a lot of it I owe to a lifetime spent in cities: Shadow’s Art Row is the union   Square farmers’ market in New York, maybe with a bit of New Orleans’s Jackson Square thrown in.

For several of the godlings, particularly Lil, Madding, and Dump, I thank my subconscious, because I had a dream about them (and several godlings you’ll meet in the third book of the Inheritance Trilogy). Lil tried to eat me. Typical.

Oh—and for a taste of how people in a major city might cope with a giant tree looming overhead, I acknowledge my past as an anime fangirl. In this case, the debt is owed to a lovely little shoujo OAV and TV series called Mahou Tsukai Tai, which I highly recommend. The problems caused by the giant tree were handled in a much more lighthearted manner there, but the beauty of the initial image lingers in my mind.





THE

KINGDOM

OF GODS





BOOK THREE OF THE

INHERITANCE TRILOGY





BOOK ONE


Four Legs in the Morning





SHE LOOKS SO MUCH LIKE ENEFA, I think, the first time I see her.

Not this moment, as she stands trembling in the lift alcove, her heartbeat so loud that it drums against my ears. This is not really the first time I’ve seen her. I have checked in on our investment now and again over the years, sneaking out of the palace on moonless nights. (Nahadoth is the one our masters fear most during those hours, not me.) I first met her when she was an infant. I crept in through the nursery window and perched on the railing of her crib to watch her. She watched me back, unusually quiet and solemn even then. Where other infants were fascinated by the world around them, she was constantly preoccupied by the second soul nestled against her own. I waited for her to go mad, and felt pity, but nothing more.

I next visited when she was two, toddling after her mother with great determination. Not mad yet. Again when she was five; I watched her sit at her father’s knee, listening raptly to his tales of the gods. Still not mad. When she was nine, I watched her mourn her father. By that point, it had become clear that she was not, and would never go, insane. Yet there was no doubt that Enefa’s soul affected her. Aside from her looks, there was the way she killed. I watched her climb out from beneath the corpse of her first man, panting and covered in filth, with a bloody stone knife in her hand. Though she was only thirteen years old, I felt no horror from her—which I should have, her heart’s fluctuations amplified by her double souls. There was only satisfaction in her face, and a very familiar coldness at her core. The warriors’ council women, who had expected to see her suffer, looked at each other in unease. Beyond the circle of older women, in the shadows, her watching mother smiled.

I fell in love with her then, just a little.

So now I drag her through my dead spaces, which I have never shown to another mortal, and it is to the corporeal core of my soul that I take her. (I would take her to my realm, show her my true soul, if I could.) I love her wonder as she walks among my little toy worlds. She tells me they are beautiful. I will cry when she dies for us.