The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms - By N. K. Jemisin Page 0,129
times brighter, sears across these to shatter them. There is no point to this. It is daytime. Nahadoth would already be asleep within his human prison if not for Itempass parole. Itempas can revoke that parole whenever he wishes. He must be enjoying himself.
Scimina has gotten Viraines knife. She has flung herself on Relad, trying to gut him. Hes stronger, but she has leverage and the strength of ambition on her side. Relads eyes are wide with terror; perhaps he has always feared something like this.
Sieh, Zhakkarn, and Kurue feint and circle in a deadly metal-and-claw dance. Kurue has conjured a pair of gleaming bronze swords to defend herself. This contest, too, is foregone; Zhakkarn is battle incarnate, and Sieh has all the power of childhoods cruelty. But Kurue is wily, and she has the taste of freedom in her mouth. She will not die easily.
Amid all this, Dekarta moves toward my body. He stops and struggles to his knees; in the end he slips in my blood and half-falls on me, grimacing in pain. Then his expression hardens. He looks up into the sky, where his god fights, then down. At the Stone. It is the source of the Arameri clans power; it is also the physical representation of their duty. Perhaps he hopes that by doing that duty, he will remind Itempas of the value of life. Perhaps he retains some smidgeon of faith. Perhaps it is simply that forty years ago, Dekarta killed his wife to prove his commitment. To do otherwise now would mock her death.
He reaches for the Stone.
It is gone.
But it was there, lying in my blood, a moment before. Dekarta frowns, looks around. His eyes are attracted by movement. The hole in my chest, which he can see through the torn cloth of my bodice: the raw lips of the wound are drawing together, pressing themselves closed. As the line of the wound shrinks, Dekarta catches a glimmer of thin gray light. Within me.
Then I am drawn forward, down
Yes. Enough of this disembodied soul business. Time to be alive again.
* * *
I opened my eyes and sat up.
Dekarta, behind me, made a sound somewhere between choking and a gasp. No one else noticed as I got to my feet, so I turned to face him.
Whwhat in every gods name His mouth worked. He stared.
Not every god, I said. And because I was still me after all, I leaned down to smile in his face. Just me.
Then I closed my eyes and touched my chest. Nothing beat beneath my fingers; my heart had been destroyed. Yet something was there, giving life to my flesh. I could feel it. The Stone. A thing of life, born of death, filled with incalculable potential. A seed.
Grow, I whispered.
29
The Three
AS WITH ANY BIRTH, there was pain.
I believe I screamed. I think that in that instant many things occurred. I have a vague sense of the sky wheeling overhead, cycling day through day and night and back to morning in the span of a breath. (If this happened, then what moved was not the sky.) I have a feeling that somewhere in the universe an uncountable number of new species burst into existence, on millions of planets. I am fairly certain that tears fell from my eyes. Where they landed, lichens and moss began to cover the floor.
I cannot be certain of any of this. Somewhere, in dimensions for which there are no mortal words, I was changing, too. This occupied a great deal of my awareness.
But when the changes were done, I opened my eyes and saw new colors.
The room practically glowed with them. The iridescence of the floors Skystuff. Glints of gold from glass shards lying about the room. The blue of the skyit had been a watery blue-white, but now it was such a vivid teal that I stared at it in wonder. It had never, at least in my lifetime, been so blue.
Next I noticed scent. My body had become something else, less a body than an embodiment, but its shape for the moment was still human, as were my senses. And something was different here, too. When I inhaled, I could taste the crisp, acrid thinness of the air, underlaid by the metallic scent of the blood that covered my clothing. I touched my fingers to this and tasted it. Salt, more metal, hints of bitter and sour. Of course; I had been unhappy for days before I died.