Jemisin - The shadowed sun

Many books are good, some are great, but few are truly important. Add to this last category The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms , N. K. Jemisins debut novel In this reviewers opinion, this is the must-read fantasy of the year.

Bookpage

A complex, edge-of-your-seat story with plenty of funny, scary, and bittersweet twists.

Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

The very best kind of sequel: as lush and evocative and true as the first, with all the same sense of mystery, giving us the world and characters we already love, and yet with a new story and a wonderfully new perspective on the whole dazzling world and pantheon the author has built.

Naomi Novik

The key is just to tell a great, exciting, engaging story that keeps you turning pages long past your bedtime. And Jemisin has definitely done that here.

io9.com

A similar blend of inventiveness, irreverence, and sophisticationalong with sensualitybrings vivid life to the setting and other characters: human and otherwise The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms definitely leaves me wanting more of this delightful new writer.

Locus

The Inheritance Trilogy

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

The Broken Kingdoms

The Kingdom of Gods

Dreamblood

The Killing Moon

The Shadowed Sun

Published by Hachette Digital

ISBN: 978-0-748-13000-9

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright 2012 by N. K. Jemisin

Excerpt from The Drowning City by Amanda Downum Copyright 2009 by Amanda Downum

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

Hachette Digital

Little, Brown Book Group

100 Victoria Embankment

London, EC4Y 0DY

www.hachette.co.uk

Contents

In the desert

I saw a creature, naked, bestial ,

who, squatting upon the ground ,

Held his heart in his hands ,

And ate of it.

I said, Is it good, friend?

It is bitterbitter he answered;

But I like it

Because it is bitter ,

And because it is my heart.

Stephen Crane,

The Black Riders and Other Lines

There were two hundred and fifty-six places where a man could hide within his own flesh. The soldier dying beneath Hananis hands had fled to someplace deep. She had searched his heart and brain and gut, though the soul visited those organs less often than layfolk thought. She had examined his mouth and eyes, the latter with especial care. At last, behind a lobe of his liver, she found his souls trail and followed it into a dream of shadowed ruins.

Piles of rubble loomed out of the twilit mistscrumbling structures so titanic that each single brick would dwarf a man, so foreign in design that she could not fathom their purpose. A palace? A temple? Camouflage, regardless. Beneath her feet the dust gleamed, something more than mica: each step displaced a million stars. She took care to put them all back in her wake.

To find the soldier, Hanani would have to first deal with the setting. It was simple enough to will the ruins into order, which she did by crouching to touch the ground. Threads of dreamichor, yellow-bright and gleaming, laced from her fingertips and etched the ground for a moment before vanishing into it. A breath later, the dust skittered up to seal cracked stone; the harbinger of change. Then the earth split and the ground shook as great bricks righted themselves and flew through the air, clattering together to form columns and walls. All around her, had she chosen to watch, the outlines of a monstrous city took shape against the gradient sky. But when the city was whole, she rose and moved on without looking. There was far more important work to be done.

[This takes longer than it should.

The injury is healing.

That does no good if he dies.

He wont. She has him. Watch.]

After first passing a stone archway, Hanani paused and turned back to examine it. The arch was man-height, the only thing of normal proportions in the dreamscape. Beyond the arch lay the same shadows that shrouded allno. The shadows were thicker here.

Prowling carefully closer, Hanani attempted to step through the archway.

The shadows pressed back.

She imagined illumination.

The shadows grew thicker.

After a moments consideration, she summoned pain and fear and rage instead, and wrapped these around herself. The shadows resistance melted; the soldiers soul recognized kindred. Passing through the arch, Hanani found herself in an atrium garden, the kind that should have helped to cool the heart of any homebut this one was dead. She looked around, ducking splintered palms and wilted moontear vines, frowning at a suppurating mess of a flowerbed. Then she spied something beyond it: there at the gardens heart, curled in a nest of his own sorrow, lay the soldier.

Pausing here, Hanani shifted a fraction of her attention back to the waking realm.

[Dayu? Ill need more dreambile soon.

Yes, HananiUm, I mean, Sharer-Apprentice.]

That done, Hanani returned to the dream of the hidden garden. The soldier lay with knees drawn up and arms wrapped about himself as if for comfort. In the curve of his body, a gaping wound spilled his intestines into a hole at the nests heart. She could see nothing beyond the hole, only that perverse umbilical connecting him to it.

Death , said the air around him.

Not here, petitioner, she replied. These are the shadowlands. There are better places to die.

He did not move, hungering again for death. Again she demurred. Memory , she offered, to entice him.

Anguish flared up in cold, purple-white wisps, wreathing the area around the nest as a new form coalesced. Another man: older, bearded in the way of those who bore northern blood, also garbed as a soldier but clearly of some higher rank than Hananis soldier. A relative? Mentor? Lover? Beloved, whoever he was.

Gone, Hananis soldier whispered. Gone without me.

May he dwell in Her peace forever, she said. Extending her hands to either side, she trailed her fingers through the ring of mist. Where she touched, delicate deep red threads blended and pulsed into the white.

[She uses more dreamblood? Shell run out at that rate.

Then well give her more. The desert scum have nearly cut him in two, man, what do you expect?]

Hananis soldier moaned and curled into a tighter ball as red threads stretched forth from the walls, soaking into his skin. Abruptly the mists flickered, the bearded soldiers image growing insubstantial as shadows. New scenes formed instead, appearing and overlapping and fading with each breath. A lonely perch atop a wall. Sword practice. A barracks bed. A river barge.

Hanani coaxed the memories to continue, inserting gentle suggestions to guide them in a new direction. Loved ones. Life. The scenes changed to incorporate the bearded soldier and othersdoubtless the petitioners comrades or caste-kin. They laughed and talked and worked at daily tasks. As the images flowed, Hanani reached carefully around the man and into the hole that was devouring him. The first contact sent pain slamming up her arm like a blowbut cold, so terribly cold! She gasped and fought the urge to cry out as her fingers stiffened and froze and cracked apart

No. She formed her soulnames syllables within her mind and clarity washed through her, a reminder that this was a dream and she was its master. This pain is not my own. When she drew her hand back, it was whole.

But the man was not; the pain was devouring him. She focused on the images again, noting one of a tavern. The petitioner was not there, although his dead beloved and other comrades were, laughing and singing a lusty song. There was danger in this, she realized abruptly. The petitioner had been injured in a raid, his beloved killed. She had no idea whether the rest of his companions had been cut down as well. If so, then what she meant to attempt might only increase his death-hunger.