The Inheritance Trilogy Omnibus(410)

And they were all looking up at Sky.

We—Shahar and Dekarta and I, and a good number of the highbloods and servants—stood in what would doubtless come to be called the Marble Hall, given the usual Amn naming conventions. For some reason known only to Yeine, the walls of the chamber were streaked with a deep rust color, interspersing white and gray, which made the whole room look washed in blood. There was some wry symbolism in this, I suspected; some element of Yeine’s morbid sense of humor. I was apparently too mortal to get the joke.

Wrath was gone, though his soldiers were present, guarding the doors and the balcony. It had been his suggestion to gather all the highbloods together; easier to guard. While we waited for him to say when we could leave—no time soon, I gathered—some servant had brought the large seeing sphere from the scriveners’ storage, setting it up on the room’s single long table. Through this, we were able to behold the ominous stillness in the streets of Shadow.

“Are they waiting for something?” asked a woman who bore a halfblood mark. She stood near Ramina. He put a comforting hand on her back while she stared at the hovering image.

“Some signal, perhaps,” he replied. For once, he was not smiling. But long minutes passed, and there was no movement on the part of the maskers. The person panning the sphere stood atop the Salon’s steps. On either end of the arc swing we could glimpse Arameri soldiers, clad in the white armor of the Hundred Thousand Legions, hastily setting up barricades and preparing for a defensive battle. Even in such brief glimpses, however, we saw enough to despair. The bulk of the Arameri army was outside the city, in a vast complex of permanent barracks and bases stationed a half day’s ride away. Everyone had assumed that the attack, when it came, would be from beyond the city. The army was no doubt marching and riding and gating into the city as fast as it could now, but those of us who had seen the maskers in action knew that it would take more than soldiers to stop them.

I turned to Shahar, who stood on one of the elevated tiers around the chamber’s edge. She had wrapped her arms around herself as if cold; her expression was too blank to be intentional. In the whole room, where her relatives clustered in twos and threes and comforted each other, she stood alone.

I considered for a moment, then stepped away from Deka and went to her. Her head turned sharply toward me as I approached. She was not at all in shock. A subtle shift transformed her posture from the lost girl of a moment before to the cold queen who had tried to enslave her brother. But I saw the wariness in her. She had lost that battle.

Deka watched me go to her but did not join us.

“Shouldn’t you contact Remath?” I asked. I kept my tone neutral.

She relaxed fractionally, acknowledging my unspoken offer of truce. “I’ve tried. Mother hasn’t answered.” She looked away, through the translucent walls, at the lowering sun. West, toward Sky. “There’s no point, in any case. The army is there and under Mother’s command as it should be, along with the bulk of the scrivener and assassin corps and the nobles’ private forces. Echo is barely functional and understaffed as it is. We have no help to offer.”

“Not all support must be material, Shahar.” It still felt strange to remember that Remath and Shahar loved each other. I would never get used to Arameri behaving like normal people.

She glanced at me again, not so sharply this time. Considering. Then Ramina said, “Something’s happening,” and we all grew tense.

There was a blur in the air, a few feet above and to one side of the image we’d been watching. The soldiers reached for their weapons. The highbloods gasped and one cried out. Deka and the other scriveners tensed, some pulling out premade, partially drawn sigils.

Then the image resolved, and we saw Remath. The image was angled oddly—over her shoulder and slightly behind her. The sphere must have been set into her stone seat.

Facing her, in Sky’s audience chamber, was Usein Darr.

Shahar caught her breath and moved down the steps, as if she meant to step through the image and aid her mother. The soldiers in Sky’s audience chamber had drawn their weapons, swords and pikes and crossbows. They did not attack, however. Remath must have warned them off, though two of her guards, Darre women, had moved to stand between Remath and Usein, crouching with hands on their knives. Usein stood proud and fearless at the center of the room, ignoring the guards. She had come unarmed, though she did wear traditional Darre battle dress: a leather-wrapped waist, a heavy fur mantle that marked her as a battlefield commander, and armor made of thin plates of flakespar—a light, strong material the Darre had invented a few decades back. She looked taller when she wasn’t pregnant.