The Inheritance Trilogy Omnibus(39)

“Why did Dekarta have my mother killed?”

“The only person who could answer that question is Dekarta. Do you plan to talk to him?”

Eventually, I would. But two could play the game of answering a question with a question. “Why did she come here, that last night? The night Dekarta finally realized she wasn’t coming back?”

I had expected the surprise in Viraine’s face. What I had not expected was the cold fury that followed swiftly on its heels.

“Who have you been talking to? The servants? Sieh?”

Sometimes the truth can throw an opponent off-balance. “Nahadoth.”

He flinched, and then his eyes narrowed. “I see. He’ll kill you, you know. That’s his favorite pastime, to toy with any Arameri foolish enough to try and tame him.”

“Scimina—”

“—has no intention of taming him. The more monstrous he becomes, the happier she is. He spread the last fool who fell in love with him all over the centeryard, I hear.”

I remembered Nahadoth’s lips on my throat and fought to suppress a shudder, only half-succeeding. Death as a consequence of lying with a god wasn’t something I had considered, but it did not surprise me. A mortal man’s strength had limits. He spent himself and slept. He could be a good lover, but even his best skills were only guesswork—for every caress that sent a woman’s head into the clouds, he might try ten that brought her back to earth.

Nahadoth would bring me into the clouds and keep me there. He would drag me further, into the cold airless dark that was his true domain. And if I suffocated there, if my flesh burst or my mind broke… well. Viraine was right; I’d have only myself to blame.

I gave Viraine a rueful smile, letting him see my very real fear. “Yes, Nahadoth probably will kill me—if you Arameri don’t beat him to it. If that troubles you, you could always help me by answering my questions.”

Viraine fell silent for a long moment, his thoughts unfathomable behind the mask of his face. Finally he surprised me again, rising from his workbench and going to one of the enormous windows. From this one we could see the whole of the city and the mountains beyond.

“I can’t say I remember the night well,” he said. “It was twenty years ago. I had only just come to Sky then, newly posted by the Scriveners’ College.”

“Please tell me all you can recall,” I said.


Scriveners learn several mortal tongues as children, before they begin learning the gods’ language. This helps them understand the flexibility of language and of the mind itself, for there are many concepts that exist in some languages that cannot even be approximated in others. This is how the gods’ tongue works; it allows the conceptualization of the impossible. And this is why the best scriveners can never be trusted.


“It was raining that night. I remember because rain doesn’t often touch Sky; the heaviest clouds usually drop below us. But Kinneth got soaked just between her carriage and the entrance. There was a trail of water along the floor of every corridor she walked.”

Which meant that he had watched her pass, I realized. Either he’d been lurking in a side corridor while she went by, or he’d followed close enough in her wake that the water hadn’t dried. Hadn’t Sieh said Dekarta emptied the hallways that night? Viraine must have disobeyed that order.

“Everyone knew why she had come, or thought they did. No one expected that marriage to last. It seemed unfathomable that a woman so strong, a woman raised to rule, would give it all up for nothing.” In the reflection of the glass, Viraine looked up at me. “No offense meant.”

For an Arameri, it was almost polite. “None taken.”

He smiled thinly. “But it was for him, you see. The reason she came that night. Her husband, your father; she didn’t come to reclaim her position, she came because he had the Walking Death, and she wanted Dekarta to save him.”

I stared at him, feeling slapped.

“She even brought him with her. One of the forecourt servants glanced inside the coach and saw him in there, sweating and feverish, probably in the third stage. The journey alone must have stressed him physically, accelerating the disease’s course. She gambled everything on Dekarta’s aid.”

I swallowed. I’d known that my father had contracted the Death at some point. I’d known that my mother had fled from Sky at the height of her power, banished for the crime of loving beneath herself. But that the two events were linked—“She must have succeeded, then.”

“No. When she left to return to Darr, she was angry. Dekarta was in such a fury as I’ve never seen; I thought there would be deaths. But he simply ordered that Kinneth was to be struck from the family rolls, not only as his heir—that had already been done—but as an Arameri altogether. He ordered me to burn off her blood sigil, which can be done from a distance, and which I did. He even made a public announcement. It was the talk of society—the first time any fullblood has been disowned in, oh, centuries.”