The Inheritance Trilogy Omnibus(322)

Remade him. “What are you?” I asked, suspicious.

He shrugged, setting that shining black hair a-ripple over his shoulders. (Something about this movement nagged me with its familiarity.) Then he lifted a hand, casually, and turned it into black mist. My mouth fell open; his smile widened just a touch. His hand returned, still holding the smelly cheroot, which he raised for another long inhalation.

I went forward so swiftly and intently that he rose to face me. An instant later, I stopped against a radiant cushion of his power. It was not a shield; nothing so specific. Just his will given force. He did not want me near him and this became reality. Along with the scent that I’d drawn near him to try and detect, this confirmed my suspicions. To my horror.

“You’re a godling,” I whispered. “She made you a godling.”

Ahad, no longer smiling, said nothing, and I realized I was still closer than he wanted me. His distaste washed against me in little sour-tasting tides. I stepped back, and he relaxed.


I did not understand, you see. What it meant to be mortal—relentlessly, constantly, without recourse to the soothing aethers and rarefied dimensions that are the proper housing for my kind. Years passed before I realized that to be bound to mortal flesh is more than just magical or physical weakness; it is a degradation of the mind and soul. And I did not handle it well, those first few centuries.

So easy to endure pain and pass on in turn to those weaker than oneself. So easy to look into the eyes of someone who trusted me to protect him—and hate him, because I could not.

What he has become is my fault. I have sinned against myself, and there is no redeeming that.


“So it appears,” Ahad said. “I have such peculiar abilities now. And as you’ve noticed, I grow no older.” He paused, looking me up and down. “Which is more than I can say for you. You smell like Sky, Sieh, and you look like some Arameri have been torturing you again. But”—he paused, his eyes narrowing—“it’s more than that, isn’t it? You feel… wrong.”

Even if he had not become a god, he was the last person to whom I would have willingly revealed my condition. Yet there was no hiding it, now that he’d seen me. He knew me better than anyone else in this realm, and he would be that much more vicious if I tried to hide it.

I sighed and waved a hand to clear some of the drifting smoke from my vicinity. It came right back. “Something has happened,” I said. “I was in Sky, yes, for a few days. The Arameri heir—” No. I didn’t want to talk about that. Better to get to the worst of it. “I seem to be”—I shifted, put my hands into my pockets, and tried to seem nonchalant—“dying.”

Hymn’s eyes widened. Ahad—I hated that stupid name of his already—looked skeptical.

“Nothing can kill a godling but demons and gods,” he said, “and the world’s fresh out of demons, last I heard. Has Naha finally grown tired of his little favorite?”

I clenched my fists. “He will love me until time ends.”

“Yeine, then.” To my surprise, the skepticism cleared from Ahad’s face. “Yes, she is wise and good-hearted, but she didn’t know you back then; you played the innocent boy so well. She could make you mortal, couldn’t she? If so, I commend her for giving you a slow, cruel death.”

I would have gotten angrier, if my own cruel streak hadn’t come to the fore. “What’s this? Have you got a baby-god crush on Yeine? It’s hopeless, you know. Nahadoth’s the one she loves; you’re just his leftovers.”

Ahad kept smiling, but his eyes went black and cold. He had more than a little of my father still in him; that much was obvious.

“You’re just mad neither of them wants you,” he said.

The room went gray and red. With a wordless cry of rage, I went for him—meaning, I think, to rip him open with my claws, and forgetting for the moment that I had none. And forgetting, far more stupidly, that he was a god and I was not.

He could have killed me. He could have done it by accident; newborn godlings don’t know their own strength. Instead he simply caught me by the throat, lifted me bodily, and slammed me onto the top of his desk so hard that the wood cracked.

While I groaned, dazed by the blow and the agony of landing on two paperweights, he sighed and sucked more smoke from the cheroot with his free hand. He kept me pinned, easily, with the other.

“What does he want?” he asked Hymn.

As my vision cleared, I saw she had gotten to her feet and was half ducked behind her chair. At his question, she straightened warily.

“Money,” she said. “He got me into trouble earlier today. Said he needed to make it up to me, but I don’t need any of his tricks.”