The Inheritance Trilogy Omnibus(286)

There is another lesson in this: life cannot exist without death. Even among gods there are winners and losers, eaters and eaten. I have never hesitated to kill my fellow immortals, but I sometimes mourn the necessity.

The demons were the fourth ranking of us, if you’re wondering. But there is no point in speaking of them.


I awakened with a rude snarfle and a groan. Dreams. I had forgotten those, a plague of mortal flesh. Bad enough mortals wasted so much of their lives insensible, but Enefa had also given them dreams to teach them about themselves and their universe. Few of them ever listened to the lessons—a total waste of creation in my eyes—but thanks to that, I would have to endure these mind-farts every time I slept. Lovely.

It was late in the night, nowhere near morning. Though I had been asleep for only three or four hours, I felt no further urge to rest, perhaps because I wasn’t yet fully mortal. So what to do with the hours until Shahar was awake to entertain me?

I got up and went roaming again in the palace, this time not bothering to conceal myself. The servants and guards said nothing when I passed them, despite my nondescript clothing and unmarked forehead, but I felt their eyes on my back. What had Morad, or whoever served as the captain of the guard now, told them about me? There was no flavor of adoration or revulsion to their stares. Just curiosity—and wariness.

I went into the underpalace first, to the Nowhere Stair. Which no longer existed, to my shock.

In its place was an open atrium. Three levels of wide circular balconies ringed a space that had been reworked with sculptures and potted plants of the sort that needed little care. (At least it wasn’t dusty anymore. The Arameri no longer neglected the underpalace, having realized it could hide secrets.) The atrium lacked the intentionally carefree feel of most Sky architecture, and I could see where the edges of each balcony had been too-hastily molded by the scriveners, leaving them uneven and not as smooth as they should have been. Servants had cleaned up the rubble, but signs of the disaster were still there, for one who knew how to see.

I crouched at the edge of one of the balconies, bracing one hand on the thin railing, and touched the rough daystone of the floor. Echoes still reverberated in the stone—not echoes of sound, since those had long since moved on, but echoes of event. I closed my eyes and saw again what the stone had witnessed.

The Nowhere Stair. At the bottom of it, three children holding hands. (I marveled at how small Shahar had been then; already I had grown used to her older shape.) I watched the mortals’ faces change from smiles to alarm, felt the rising rush of wind, saw their hair and clothing begin to whip about as if they’d been caught in a tornado. They screamed as their feet rose from the floor; then they flipped entirely, twisting upside down. Only I did not budge, my feet seemingly rooted to the ground. Only their grip on each other and me held them down.

And the look on my face! In the memory, I stood with mouth slack, eyes distant and confused, brow ever-so-slightly furrowed and head cocked, as if I heard something no one else could, and whatever I heard had obliterated my wits.

Then my body blurred, flesh interspersing with white lines. My mouth opened and the stone beneath my fingertips gave one last microscopic shiver as a concussion of force tore loose from my throat. The Nowhere Stair shattered like glass, as did all the daystone around it and beneath it and above it. What saved the children was that the energy blasted outward in a spherical wave; they fell amid the rubble, bleeding and still, but not much of the rubble landed on them.

And when the dust cleared, I had vanished.

Taking my fingers off the stone, I frowned to myself. Then I said to the mortal who had hovered somewhere behind me, watching for the past ten minutes, “What do you want?”

He came forward, preceded by the familiar mingled scent of books and chemical phials and incense; by that I knew what he was before he ever spoke. “My apologies, Lord Sieh. I did not mean to disturb you.”

I rose, dusting off my hands, and turned to take his measure. An island man of late middle years, with salt-sprinkled red hair and a lined saturnine face that showed a hint of beard stubble. There was a fullblood mark on his brow, but he didn’t look Arameri or even Amn. And fullbloods rarely smelled of hard work. An adoptee, then.

“You the First Scrivener?” I asked.

He nodded, obviously torn between fascination and unease. Finally he offered me an awkward bow—not deep enough to be properly respectful but too deep for the kind of disdain a devout Itempan should have shown. I laughed, remembering Viraine’s cool, nuanced poise, and then sobered as I remembered why Viraine had been so good at things like that.