The Inheritance Trilogy Omnibus(285)
She swatted my chest hard enough to sting, then blanched as she realized what she’d done, then got over it. Her cheeks had gone that blotchy pink that either meant sickness or strong emotion in Amn; I guessed she was feeling shy. “What I mean is, why did you do it?”
“Why did you kiss me last night?”
She frowned. “I don’t know. It felt right.”
“Same for me.” I yawned again. “Damn. I think I need to sleep.”
She sat up, though she did not immediately leave the bed. Her back was to me, so I could see the tension in her shoulders. I thought she was going to ask another question, and perhaps she meant to. But what she said instead was, “I’m glad you came back, Sieh. Really. And I’m glad… what happened that day wasn’t…” She drew a deep breath. “I hated you for a long time.”
I folded my hands under my head, sighing. “You probably still hate me a little, Shahar. I took your brother from you.”
“No. Mother did that.” But she did not sound wholly certain, and I knew the mortal heart was not always logical.
“Wounds need time to heal,” I said, thinking of my own.
“Maybe so.” After another moment, she stood with a sigh. “I’ll be in my room.”
She left. I was tempted to lie there awhile longer and fight the urge to sleep, but there are times to be childish and times when wisdom takes precedence. Sighing, I rolled over and curled up, giving in.
5
ABOVE MORTALS ARE THE GODS, and above us is the unknowable, which we call Maelstrom. For some reason It likes the number three. Three are Its children, the great gods who made the rest of us, who named themselves and encompass existence. Three also are the rankings of us lesser gods—though that is only because we killed the fourth.
First came the niwwah, the Balancers, among whose ranks I am honored to be counted. We were born of the Three’s earliest efforts at intercourse, for they had other ways of lovemaking long before reproduction had anything to do with it. They did not know how to be parents then, so they did many things wrong, but it was long ago and most of us have forgiven them for it.
We are called Balancers not because we balance anything, mind, but because each of us has two of the Three as parents in what we have come to realize is a balanced combination: Nahadoth and Enefa in my case, Itempas and Enefa in others. We do not like each other much, Nahadoth’s children and our half siblings who belong to Itempas, but we do love each other. So it goes with family.
Next are the elontid, the Imbalancers. Again, this name is not because they take any active role in the maintenance or destruction of existence, but because they were born of imbalance. We did not know at first that certain mixes among us are dangerous. Nahadoth and Itempas, first and foremost—Enefa made them able to breed together, but they are both too similar and too different to do so easily. (Gender has nothing to do with this difficulty, mind you; that is only a game for us, an affectation, like names and flesh. We employ such things because you need them, not because we do.) On the rare occasions that Naha and Tempa bear children together, the results are always powerful, and always frightening. Only a few have lived to adulthood: Ral the Dragon, Ia the Negation, and Lil the Hunger. Also counted among the elontid are those born of union s between gods and godlings, reflecting the inequity of the merging that created them. They are gods of things that ebb and wane, like the tides, fashion, lust and liking.
Nothing is wrong with them, I must emphasize, though some among my fellow niwwah treat them as pitiable creatures. This is a mistake; they are merely different.
Third we count the mnasat: those children we godlings have produced among ourselves. Here there is weakness, in the relative sense of things, for even the mnasat can destroy a world if pressed. Countless numbers have been born over the aeons, but most are culled in their first few centuries—caught in the cross fire of the Three’s endless battling and copulating, or dragged into the Maelstrom by accident, or lost through any of the other legion hazards that might befall a young god. The War in particular decimated their ranks—and I will admit that I took my share of their lives. Why shouldn’t I have, if they were so foolish as to interfere in the concerns of their betters? Yet there were a few whom I could not kill, and who proved themselves worthy through that trial-by-apocalypse. The mnasat have shown us by the harsh example of their deaths that it is living true, not mere strength, which dictates matters among us. Those who submitted to their natures gained power to match even the strongest of us niwwah—and those who forgot themselves, no matter how much innate power they possessed, fell.