The Inheritance Trilogy
Page 66
God spots: Local/colloquial name for locations in Shadow that have been temporarily or permanently made magical by godlings.
Gods’ Realm: All places beyond the universe.
Gods’ War: An apocalyptic conflict in which Bright Itempas claimed rulership of the heavens after defeating his two siblings.
Hado: A member of the New Lights. Master of Initiates.
Heavens, Hells: Abodes for souls beyond the mortal realm.
Heretic: A worshipper of any god but Itempas.
High North: Northernmost continent. A backwater.
House of the Risen Sun: A mansion. One of several attached to the World Tree’s trunk.
Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, the: Collective term for the world since its unification under Arameri rule.
Ina: A godling who dwells in Shadow.
Interdiction, the: The period during which no godlings appeared in the mortal realm, per order of Bright Itempas.
Islands, the: Vast archipelago east of High North and Senm.
Itempan: General term for a worshipper of Itempas. Also used to refer to members of the Order of Itempas.
Itempas: One of the Three. The Bright Lord; master of heavens and earth; the Skyfather.
Kitr: A godling who dwells in Shadow. The Blade.
Lil: A godling who dwells in Shadow. The Hunger.
Madding: A godling who dwells in Shadow. The Lord of Debts.
Maelstrom: The creator of the Three. Unknowable.
Magic: The innate ability of gods and godlings to alter the material and immaterial world. Mortals may approximate this ability through the use of the gods’ language.
Maroland, the: Smallest continent, which once existed to the east of the islands; site of the first Arameri palace. Destroyed by Nahadoth.
Mortal realm: The universe, created by the Three.
Nahadoth: One of the Three. The Nightlord. Also called the Lord of Shadows.
Nemmer: A godling who dwells in Shadow. The Lady of Secrets.
Nimaro Reservation: A protectorate of the Arameri, established after the Maroland’s destruction to provide a home for survivors. Located at the southeast edge of the Senm continent.
Nobles’ Consortium: Ruling political body of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.
Oboro: A godling who dwells in Shadow.
Order of Itempas: The priesthood dedicated to Bright Itempas. In addition to spiritual guidance, also responsible for law and order, education, public health and welfare, and the eradication of heresy. Also known as the Itempan Order.
Order-Keepers: Acolytes (priests in training) of the Order of Itempas, responsible for maintenance of public order.
Order of New Light: An unauthorized priesthood dedicated to Bright Itempas, comprised mainly of former members of the Order of Itempas. Colloquially known as the “New Lights.”
Paitya: A godling who dwells in Shadow. The Terror.
Pilgrim: Worshippers of the Gray Lady who journey to Shadow to pray at the World Tree. Generally High Northers.
Previt: One of the higher rankings for priests of the Order of Itempas.
Promenade, the: Northernmost edge of Gateway Park in East Shadow. A site popular with pilgrims, due to its view of the World Tree. Also the site of Art Row and the city’s largest White Hall.
Role: A godling who dwells in Shadow. The Lady of Compassion.
Salon: Headquarters for the Nobles’ Consortium.
Script: A series of sigils, used by scriveners to produce complex or sequential magical effects.
Scrivener: A scholar of the gods’ written language.
Senm: Southernmost and largest continent of the world.
Senmite: The Amn language, used as a common tongue for all the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.
Serymn Arameri: An Arameri fullblood, husband of Dateh Lorillalia. Owner of the House of the Risen Sun.
Shadow: Local/colloquial name for the largest city on the Senm continent (official name is Sky).
Shahar Arameri: High priestess of Itempas at the time of the Gods’ War. Her descendants are the Arameri family.
Shustocks: A neighborhood in Wesha.
Sieh: A godling, also called the Trickster. Eldest of all the godlings.
Sigil: An ideograph of the gods’ language, used by scriveners to imitate the magic of the gods.
Sky: Official name of the largest city on the Senm continent. Also, the palace of the Arameri family.
Strafe: A city along the northwestern coast of the Senm continent.
Teman Protectorate, the: A Senmite kingdom.
Time of the Three: Before the Gods’ War.
T’vril Arameri: Current head of the Arameri family.
Velly: A cold-water fish, normally smoked and salted. A Maroneh delicacy.
Wesha: Local term for West Shadow.
White Hall: The Order of Itempas’s houses of worship, education, and justice.
World Tree, the: A leafy evergreen tree estimated to be 125,000 feet in height, created by the Gray Lady. Sacred to worshippers of the Lady.
Yeine: One of the Three. The current Goddess of Earth, Mistress of Twilight and Dawn. Also called the Gray Lady.
APPENDIX
2
Historical Record;
First Scriveners’ notes, volume 96;
from the collection of T’vril Arameri.
(Interview conducted and originally transcribed by First Scrivener Y’li Denai/Arameri, at Sky, year 1512 of the Bright, may He shine upon us forever. Recorded in fixed messaging sphere. Secondary transcription completed by Librarian Sheta Arameri, year 2250 of the Bright. WARNING: contains heretical references, marked “HR.” Used with permission of the Litaria.)
FIRST SCRIVENER Y’LI ARAMERI: Are you comfortable?
NEMUE SARFITH ENULAI: 1 Should I be?
YA: Of course. You are a guest of the Arameri, Enulai Sarfith.
NS: Exactly! (laughs) I suppose I should enjoy it while I can. I doubt you’ll have many more Maro guests here in the future.
YA: I see you’ve decided not to use the new word. Maroneh2—
NS: Three words, actually, in the old tongue. Maro n neh. Nobody says it right. Too much of a mouthful. I was Maro all my life; I’ll be Maro ’til I die. Not long, now.
YA: For the record, would you be willing to state your age?
NS: The Father has blessed me with two hundred and two years.
YA: (laughs) I was told you liked to claim that age.
NS: You believe I’m lying?
YA: Well… madam—I mean, Enulai…
NS: Call me what you like. But remember that enulai always speak the truth, boy. Lying is dangerous. And I wouldn’t bother lying about something so trivial as my age. So write it down!
YA: Yes, madam. I have done so.
NS: You Amn never listen. In the days following the War,3 we warned you to respect the Dark Father (HR). He is not our enemy—we told you—even if he is Bright Itempas’s. Before the War, he loved us better than Enefa (HR) herself. The things you must have done to him, to fill his heart with such rage.
YA: Madam, please. We do not speak… that name you mentioned, the—
NS: What? Enefa? (shouts) Enefa, Enefa, Enefa!
YA: (sighs)
NS: Roll your eyes at me one more time.
YA: My apologies for disrespecting you, madam. It is only… The absolute dominance of Itempas is the fundamental principle of the Bright.
NS: I love the White Lord as much as you do. It was my people He chose as the model for His mortal appearance (HR), and we were the first to receive His blessing of knowledge (HR). Mathematics and astronomy and writing and—all of that, all of it, we did it before any of you Senmites, or those ignorant bastards up in the north, or that bunch of pirates on the islands. Yet for all He gave us, we have always remembered that He is one of Three. Without His siblings, He is nothing (HR).
YA: Madam!
NS: Report me to your family head if you like. What will he do, kill me? Destroy my people? I have no
thing left to lose, boy. That’s the only reason I came.
YA: Because the Maro royal family is gone.4
NS: No, fool, because the Maro are gone. Oh, if we get to making babies, there might be enough of us to limp along for a while longer, but we’ll never be what we were. You Amn will never let us get that strong again.
YA: Er, yes, madam. But specifically, it was the duty of the enulai to serve the royal family, was it not? As, ah, let’s see, bodyguards and storytellers—
NS: Historians.
YA: Well, yes, but much of that history… I have a list here… legends and myths…
NS: It was all true.
YA: Madam, really.
NS: Why did you bother to invite me here?
YA: Because I am a historian as well.
NS: Then listen. That’s the most important thing any historian can do. Hear clearly with just your ears, not with ten thousand Amn lies garbling everything—
YA: But, madam, an example, one of the enulai stories recorded… the tale of the Fish Goddess.
NS: Yes. Yiho, of the Shoth clan, though they’re all dead now, too, I suppose.
YA: The tale speaks of her sitting by a river for three days during a famine and causing schools of ocean fish to swim up the river—from salt water to fresh water—and fling themselves into nets.
NS: Yes, yes. And ever since then, those breeds of fish have continued to swim up the river to spawn, every year. She changed them forever.
YA: But that’s… Is the tale from before the War? Was this Yiho a godling?
NS: No, of course not. She dies an old woman at the end of the tale, doesn’t she?
YA: Well, then—
NS: Though the gods had many children.
YA: (pause) My gods. (sound of a blow) Ah!
NS: That’s for blaspheming.
YA: I don’t believe this. (sighs) You’re right, my apologies. I forgot myself. I was only… You’re suggesting that the woman described in the tale was… was a half-breed, a child of the gods—
NS: All of us are children of the gods. But Yiho was special.
YA: (silence)
NS: (laughs) What’s that I see in your pale eyes, boy? Have you suddenly started listening? Figures.
YA: Remembering, actually. Many of the Maro stories in my records prominently feature enulai themselves.
NS: Yes, go on…
YA: Every member of the royal family had an enulai. The enulai would educate them, advise them, protect them from danger.
NS: (laughs) Get to the point, boy. I’m not getting any younger.
YA: Protect them, often using strange abilities that the Litaria has designated unlikely or impossible—
NS: Because you scriveners don’t make your own magic. You borrow it, secondhand, using the gods’ language. But if you spoke the magic yourselves—if that didn’t kill you—or, better still, if you could simply will a thing into being, you could do all that the gods do. And more.
YA: Enulai Sarfith, I wish you had not told me this.
NS: (laughs)
YA: You know what I must do.
NS: (more laughter) Ah, boy. What does it matter? I am the last descendant of Enulai—daughter of Enefa, last-born of the mortal gods who chose to spend their brief days among humankind. All the Maro’s kings and queens are dead. All my children and grandchildren are dead. All of us who carried the Gray Mother’s blood—we’re as dead as she is. Why should I bother hiding anymore?
YA: (speaks to a servant, sending for guards)
NS: (while he speaks, softly) All gone, demonkind. All gone. No need to search for more. None left.5
YA: I’m sorry. (garbled)
NS: Don’t be. (garbled) destroyed the last of demonkind. No need to search for more now.
YA: No need to search for more.
NS: There are no demons left in the world, anywhere.
YA: None left. (garbled, until the guards come) Farewell, Enulai. I’m sorry it had to turn out this way.
NS: (laughing) I’m not. Good-bye, boy.
[Interview ends]6
Acknowledgments
Since I thanked everybody and everybody’s sister in the acknowledgments of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, here I’ll offer some literary/artistic acknowledgments. Fitting, since The Broken Kingdoms is a more, hmm, aesthetic book than its predecessor.
For the vocabulary of encaustic painting, sculpture, and watercolor used herein, I again thank my father, artist Noah Jemisin, who taught me more of his craft than I ever realized, given that I can’t draw a straight line. (No, Dad, fingerpainting when I was five doesn’t count.)
For the city of Shadow, I owe an obvious debt to urban fantasy—both the Miéville kind and the “disaffected hot chick with a weapon” kind (to quote a detractor of the latter, though I’m a fan of both). But a lot of it I owe to a lifetime spent in cities: Shadow’s Art Row is the Union Square farmers’ market in New York, maybe with a bit of New Orleans’s Jackson Square thrown in.
For several of the godlings, particularly Lil, Madding, and Dump, I thank my subconscious, because I had a dream about them (and several godlings you’ll meet in the third book of the Inheritance Trilogy). Lil tried to eat me. Typical.
Oh—and for a taste of how people in a major city might cope with a giant tree looming overhead, I acknowledge my past as an anime fangirl. In this case, the debt is owed to a lovely little shoujo OAV and TV series called Mahou Tsukai Tai, which I highly recommend. The problems caused by the giant tree were handled in a much more lighthearted manner there, but the beauty of the initial image lingers in my mind.
THE
KINGDOM
OF GODS
BOOK THREE OF THE
INHERITANCE TRILOGY
BOOK ONE
Four Legs in the Morning
SHE LOOKS SO MUCH LIKE ENEFA, I think, the first time I see her.
Not this moment, as she stands trembling in the lift alcove, her heartbeat so loud that it drums against my ears. This is not really the first time I’ve seen her. I have checked in on our investment now and again over the years, sneaking out of the palace on moonless nights. (Nahadoth is the one our masters fear most during those hours, not me.) I first met her when she was an infant. I crept in through the nursery window and perched on the railing of her crib to watch her. She watched me back, unusually quiet and solemn even then. Where other infants were fascinated by the world around them, she was constantly preoccupied by the second soul nestled against her own. I waited for her to go mad, and felt pity, but nothing more.
I next visited when she was two, toddling after her mother with great determination. Not mad yet. Again when she was five; I watched her sit at her father’s knee, listening raptly to his tales of the gods. Still not mad. When she was nine, I watched her mourn her father. By that point, it had become clear that she was not, and would never go, insane. Yet there was no doubt that Enefa’s soul affected her. Aside from her looks, there was the way she killed. I watched her climb out from beneath the corpse of her first man, panting and covered in filth, with a bloody stone knife in her hand. Though she was only thirteen years old, I felt no horror from her—which I should have, her heart’s fluctuations amplified by her double souls. There was only satisfaction in her face, and a very familiar coldness at her core. The warriors’ council women, who had expected to see her suffer, looked at each other in unease. Beyond the circle of older women, in the shadows, her watching mother smiled.
I fell in love with her then, just a little.
So now I drag her through my dead spaces, which I have never shown to another mortal, and it is to the corporeal core of my soul that I take her. (I would take her to my realm, show her my true soul, if I could.) I love her wonder as she walks among my little toy worlds. She tells me they are beautiful. I will cry when she dies for us.
Then Naha finds her. Pathetic, isn’t it? We two gods, the oldest and most powerful beings in the mortal realm, both besotted by a sweaty, angry little mortal girl. It is more tha
n her looks. More than her ferocity, her instant maternal devotion, the speed with which she lunges to strike. She is more than Enefa, for Enefa never loved me so much, nor was Enefa so passionate in life and death. The old soul has been improved, somehow, by the new.
She chooses Nahadoth. I do not mind so much. She loves me, too, in her way. I am grateful.
And when it all ends and the miracle has occurred and she is a goddess (again), I weep. I am happy. But still so very alone.
1
Trickster, trickster
Stole the sun for a prank
Will you really ride it?
Where will you hide it?
Down by the riverbank!
THERE WILL BE NO TRICKS in this tale. I tell you this so that you can relax. You’ll listen more closely if you aren’t flinching every other instant, waiting for the pratfall. You will not reach the end and suddenly learn I have been talking to my other soul or making a lullaby of my life for someone’s unborn brat. I find such things disingenuous, so I will simply tell the tale as I lived it.