The Inheritance Trilogy Omnibus(320)

I smiled weakly, though my stomach had tightened in unease. Had I fled Sky only to put myself in the hands of other mortals with power? But I owed Hymn, so I sighed and said, “I’ll be good.”

She nodded, then led me through the house’s gate and up to its wide, plain double doors.

A servant—conservatively dressed—opened the door at her knock. “Hello,” said Hymn, inclining her head in a polite bow. (She glared at me, and I hastily did the same.) “My friend here has business with the proprietor.”

The servant, a stocky Amn woman, swept a quick assessing glance over me and apparently decided I was worthy of further attention. Given that I wore three days’ worth of alley filth, this made me feel quite proud of my looks. “Your name?”

I considered half a dozen, then decided there was no point in hiding. “Sieh.”

She nodded and glanced at Hymn, who introduced herself as well. “I’ll let him know you’re here,” the woman said. “Please, wait in the parlor.”

She led us to a small, stuffy little room with wood-paneled walls and an elaborately patterned Mencheyev carpet on the floor. It had no chairs, so we stood while the woman closed the door behind us and left.

“This place doesn’t feel much like a whorehouse,” I said, going to the window to peer out at the bustling street. I tasted the air and found nothing I would have expected—no lust, though that could only have been because there were no clients present. No misery either, though, or bitterness or pain. I could smell women, and men, and sex, but also incense and paper and ink, and fine food. Far more businesslike than sordid.

“They don’t like that word,” Hymn murmured, coming near so that we could speak. “And I told you, the people who work here aren’t whores—not people who will do anything for money, I mean. Some of the ones here don’t work for money at all.”

“What?”

“That’s what I’ve heard. And more, the people who run this place are taking over all the brothels in the city and making them work the same way. I hear that’s why the Order-Keepers give them so much leeway. Darkwalker tithe money is just as shiny as anyone else’s, when it comes down to it.”

“Darkwalkers?” My mouth fell open. “I don’t believe it. These people—the proprietors or whatever—they worship Nahadoth?” I could not help thinking of Naha’s worshippers of old, in the days before the Gods’ War. They had been revelers and dreamers and rebels, as resistant to the idea of organization as cats to obedience. But times had changed, and two thousand years of Itempas’s influence had left a mark. Now the followers of Nahadoth opened businesses and paid taxes.

“Yes, they worship Nahadoth,” said Hymn, throwing me a look of such challenge that I instantly understood. “Does that bother you?”

I put my hand on her bony shoulder. If I could have, I would have blessed her, now that I knew who she belonged to. “Why would it? He’s my father.”

She blinked but remained wary, her tension shifting from one shoulder to the other. “He’s the father of most godlings, isn’t he? But not all of them seem to like him.”

I shrugged. “He’s hard to like sometimes. I get that from him.” I grinned, which pulled a smile from her, too. “But anyone who honors him is a friend of mine.”

“That’s good to know,” said a voice behind me, and I went stiff because it was a voice that I had never, ever expected to hear again. Male, baritone-deep, careless, cruel. The cruelty was most prominent now, mingled with amusement, because here I was in his parlor, helpless, mortal, and that made him the spider to my fly.

I turned slowly, my hands clenching into fists. He smiled with almost-perfect lips and gazed at me with eyes that weren’t quite dark enough. “You,” I breathed.

My father’s living prison. My tormentor. My victim.

“Hello, Sieh,” he said. “Nice to see you again.”





10



I T SHOULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED.

Itempas’s madness, Enefa’s death, Nahadoth’s defeat. The War. The sundering of our family.

But it had, and I had been chained within a sack of meat that slurped and leaked and thumped about, clumsy as a cudgel, more helpless than I had been even as a newborn. Because newborn gods were free, and I? I was nothing. Less than nothing. A slave.

We had sworn from the beginning to look out for one another, as slaves must. The first few weeks were the worst. Our new masters worked us to the bone repairing their broken world—which, in all honesty, we had helped to break. Zhakkarn went forth and rescued all the survivors, even the ones buried under rubble or half crisped by lava or lightning. I, better than anyone at clearing up messes, rebuilt one village in every land for the survivors’ housing. Meanwhile, Kurue made the seas live and the soils fruitful again.