Shades in Shadow

An Inheritance Triptych

N. K. Jemisin

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THE WILD BOY

“When I am free,” he said, “I will choose who shapes me.”

“But…” I frowned. “That isn’t freedom.”

“At the dawn of reality I was myself. There was nothing and no one else to influence me—only the Maelstrom that had given birth to me, and it did not care. I tore open my flesh and spilled out the substance of what became your realm: matter and energy and cold black blood. I devoured my own mind and reveled in the novelty of pain.”

Tears sprang to my eyes. I swallowed hard and tried to will them away, but abruptly the hands returned, lifting my chin. Fingers stroked my eyes shut, brushing the tears away.

“When I am free, I will choose,” he said again, whispering, very close.

—The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, chapter 22: “Such Rage”

*  *  *

Nahadoth

wants.

Want is a thing. Nahadoth has never lost the habit of attempting to classify things, because things were once so difficult to understand. At the beginning. Time is a thing, too; Nahadoth knows this now, has accepted the conceptualization of beginningness and endingness and whereness and whoness because these are all things that make life more interesting, though it is also interesting to discard them. Whatness, however, is always hard. Nahadoth is everything, after all.

No. Nahadoth—he? He, per Itempas’s decree, how predictable—he is not everything. There was a beforetime in which Nahadoth encompassed all that could be perceived, except that which was Maelstrom. But that time is long past, and he does not miss it, because now there is another he and for a time there was a her and after that, many. Among and apart from them all, he has become the whatness that is called Nahadoth.

He savors his name again for the several quintillionth time, marveling again at its whole round syllables, its perfect appropriateness. He has loved this name, this thing, since Itempas first bestowed it upon him. His name is a good thing, and he likes it.

Itempas was a good thing, too, once.

Nahadoth wants and does not know what or why.

*  *  *

The boy is not lost the first time he comes. Many mortals stumble upon Nahadoth’s chamber and just as quickly flee. This one sought him out. That is a new thing, though not interesting in and of itself. Simply different.

Nahadoth’s chamber is a room in a place. The body into which Itempas has chained Nahadoth resides here, anchoring him in the mortal realm, so it is fitting that the room is at the bottom of a building. And within the room is a chamber—a pit, really, into which the mortals have thrown him. How poetic. Perhaps it is better called a well. It has a wall. And he wells at the bottom of it, a living spring gushing forth everything that they hate—even though if he did not do so, they would cease to exist. By keeping him here, they hope to contain the curling, liquid eddies of substance that appear on those occasions when the world spins into shadow, and the body leaks some fraction of his darkness. (The body sleeps at the bottom of the dark well by day. He has no power over it, other than that, but he is too jealous of what he has to give even that up.) He stays where they have put him because he does not care. One place in the mortal realm is as bad as another. But he is also out, about, roaming, because that is what he is, and all wheres are everywhere to him. He is Nahadoth, and that is everywhere and everything, except wherever and whatever the Maelstrom is and wherever and whatever his siblings are.

Sibling. Just one now. That is a thing, a familiar one, but not a good one.

He is contemplating this loss when the boy comes, and perhaps because of this Nahadoth does not notice at first. Another mortal, another day. This one says something, or maybe whispers, or maybe laughs. Nahadoth pays no attention until suddenly the boy thrusts his face into him.

A trivial distinction. The room is dim. The boy was already within him. But the boy breaches the surface of the well’s blackness, and that is different. Different is interesting, so Nahadoth does not remove the boy’s face. Yet.

“So it isn’t true.” The boy, who has bent to plunge his head into what resembles a pool of relentless black, laughs a little. (This tickles.) “They said…Well, they say a lot of things about you.” He straightens, wiping his face without thinking, then looks surprised to find his hand dry. Then he chuckles again.

There is something in the boy’s laugh that Nahadoth understands. That unsteadiness, with a core of emptiness. That little waver, as if the laugh teeters between humor and hysteria and utter falseness. There is a black hole in this one’s soul.

“Haangratsajim,” the boy says, bowing with a flourish. “That’s my name, if you’re wondering. No one here can pronounce it—it’s Ostei—so I’m just Haan now. It’s on the papers they gave me. Haan Arameri, bought and paid for, all proper.”

Ostei no longer exists. The gods’ warring destroyed it and its inhabitants, save for a handful of survivors. Nahadoth remembers seducing a princess there once, before Itempas’s madness. That princess had been a wild creature, irresponsible and full of joy, who had drawn Nahadoth’s attention by standing on a cliff and shouting at the moon. For no particular reason, she’d said, when Nahadoth manifested and drew her close and kissed more shouts out of her. Because life. Ostei had been full of wild ones like her.

This one is different, Nahadoth senses—a cold wildness, rather than hot.

“Bought and paid for,” the boy whispers, and then his face changes. He turns as this happens, so that his back is to the well and his face is out of sight. Or he would be, if the room’s shadows were not also Nahadoth, and if Nahadoth actually needed eyes to see. So Nahadoth sees the sudden bloom of teeth in the shadows and understands that the boy is smiling a hunter’s smile.

“I am a thing,” the boy says softly. “That’s what they’ve decided I am, and so that is what I will be. A thing need not bother with human niceties, yes? So now they will see.”

This is more interesting than Nahadoth had assumed. He settles in to watch, glad of a respite from the boredom.

*  *  *

The boy goes away eventually. Nahadoth chooses not to think for a time.

But he roams, because he cannot help himself. Everywhere there is darkness, Nahadoth exists. (In the language that Itempas has created, Nahadoth is the word for things that cannot be perceived, cannot be comprehended, can only be unleashed.) He does not pay attention to most of what he detects via the dark that is his ears and skin and teeth and guts. Most of it is routine, and supremely boring. Stars—sparkle flare sparkle. Planets—spin shatter spin. Life—chatter chitter chatter. The unutterable tedium of a breathing, beating universe.

(But it is more interesting than the universe before Itempas, so he does not complain.)

Nahadoth supposes he should pay attention to the locality that encompasses his flesh more often, since most of him will be confined here for the foreseeable future. He is aware of this whereness, peripherally, because the body occasionally demands his attention. It hungers; it itches; someone has poked it. It sleeps and tries to dream, though his presence within it sucks the dreams away into a dark place. Remarkably irritating, these interruptions, as much by their constancy as their banality. Perhaps Itempas means to annoy him into submission.

Anger. That is a thing, too.

He reverberates with anger, then snarls and makes himself stop when he inadvertently harmonizes with the vibration of the universe. The universe is an angry place these days, but he does not want harmony of any kind. Itempas can force him into a kind of union, into the shape of this flesh, but Nahadoth will not join with Itempas again willingly, which is what Itempas wants. (Nahadoth also means “that which cannot be controlled.”)

Yet as the resonance of anger fades, he becomes aware of an echo nearby, so close that he almost failed to notice it. For a moment, it felt like part of himself. Pounding anger, hand-shaking anger, anger that fires the blood and embitters the mouth and screams and screams and screams…

*  *  *

Someone commands him to stop screaming, and the chains drag him into silence.

*  *  *

The boy again.

“I did it,” he murmurs in the darkness of the well chamber. His voice is deeper now; time has passed and he is older. “It’s done.”

Nahadoth has no idea what he means and does not care, though the boy’s satisfaction is like a small star radiant within the darkened chamber. A lovely addition to this private universe. Then the boy says:

“How do you stand it? Knowing that no one wants you?”

The words cause Nahadoth unexpected pain. Also, he’s not sure how to answer because he can’t stand it.

The boy—Haan, a name too small to encompass the whole of him—shakes his head, long sleek hair shimmering like a curtain. The tips of that hair brush the surface of Nahadoth’s substance, gold vanishing into blackness. “My father sent me here, you know. Because he was afraid of me. I never did anything to earn that fear, not there. Propriety, and all. Never shit where you sleep. But I think he knew what I was capable of, and I think that’s why he sold me to our illustrious cousins when they came around and ‘suggested’ that all Arameri should live here. He would not give up his life to come, but he offered his only begotten son.”

Haan puts a hand to his face beneath the curtain of gold hair and utters another of those soft, wavering, empty laughs. “Such a sacrifice! How noble it made him seem, and how it raised him in the esteem of the Central Family. He’s a wealthy man now. All his prestige has been bought and paid for with the flesh of his heir.”

Not all parents love their children, Nahadoth thinks. And this child, plainly, loves no one.

“Now I am heir to nothing. A menial servant. I am assigned to Lady Sessara’s chambers. I clean up her messes and I pour her drinks and I fetch her documents when she has visitors. And when the visitors are done, she tells me to go make sure the bed is warm.” Another laugh. “That’s fun, at least. She makes the sweetest little sounds. Then when she’s done, her husband comes. I like his sounds, too. But both of them command me to be silent. I may give pleasure, but I am permitted none of my own.”

Nahadoth is beginning to lose interest. He was the one who gave suffering to mortalkind, after all, and this boy is just another suffering creature. The mortals amaze him sometimes with the creativity of their cruelty. Yet…it is interesting, how little the suffering seems to affect Haan. This boy does not feel pain, or humiliation, or regret—just anger. And glee? Something like.

Still boring. Nahadoth drifts awhile, spinning within a magma bubble somewhere far below while the boy keeps talking. Something about Lady Sessara’s new heir, who of course looks like the boy, because the boy is pretty and breeding is important. That is probably why they brought him here. It’s only been a hundred years since Tempa gave the power of gods to mortals for safekeeping, and Shahar’s descendants number only in the dozens. Not safe, should there ever be a need for them to wield the Stone of Earth; they’d burn through all the unimportant family members in moments and be forced too quickly to kill people who matter. There is no reason for them to need Enefa’s power, no possible reason, but they have it and the possibility intrigues them. They want to be ready—just in case. Eventually they’ll find excuses to attempt it, and they’ll need experimental fodder when the time comes.

“But this thing that I am, it is not harmless,” the boy says, whispering now. The whites of his eyes almost have a glow in the dimness. “That’s all I am to them, a thing. And when they do not need me, I am free to wander as I please. I wandered into the library one day and researched the herbs I needed. So easy, while they were each using me, to push a little needle in here and there. So sad, when they were later found on top of each other, both dead, that they expired in such a humiliating way.”

Oh. This is interesting suddenly. Do the Arameri have any idea what sort of wolf they’ve let into their fold? Probably not.

The boy has fallen silent now. Nahadoth waits, hoping he will say something else interesting. But then the boy says, soft and a bit desperate, “Will you ever speak to me?”

“What shall I say?” Nahadoth replies.

The boy gasps and stumbles back, his expression sick with horror. Because no one—not even the boy—ever expects a thing to talk back.

He flees, and Nahadoth drifts again.

*  *  *

Eventually something pulls him back to this where and when. The boy, the boy, always the boy. How irritating. Why does he interest Nahadoth at all? He’s just another mortal, only marginally more vicious than the rest. His murderousness isn’t even novel, because all mortals kill in one way or another. It is their nature, as Enefa bade them.

The boy stands on the parapet of a tower, which is the last remaining mortal-built structure in the body of the whereness called palace. He is holding by the wrist another mortal, who cries and pisses and kicks feebly, above a drop of several hundred feet. The imperiled mortal is as pretty as Haan is, younger and also a servant to judge by his plain garb, and with only that glance it is easy for Nahadoth to intuit what’s happening. Haan is older now, not a boy at all anymore, and the power he once held by being beautiful and desirable is fading. He must compete harder for the favor of his masters, and he has taken that competition very seriously. More seriously than his younger rival, in any case. So easy to weave the illusion of suicide. And because the person who has died is only a servant, it’s unlikely anyone will look closer to find the truth.

The rival drops, screaming. The boy watches until a red crumple is all that remains of his erstwhile competition. Nahadoth feels his vague dissatisfaction and is unsurprised. Killing Lady Sessara and her noble husband was much more challenging. His boy is nothing if not a craftsman.

His boy? Oh, yes. Nahadoth smiles to himself, deep in the shadowed well. Even though he is supposed to have no worshippers, is permitted to answer no prayers, he still knows his own.

Nahadoth relaxes and lets himself drift again—but not far this time. He keeps his consciousness relatively near this realm, because it is only a matter of time before his boy does something else fun.

*  *  *

They use him again, or try to. One of them speaks, the chains tighten and grind, and Nahadoth is dragged from the well to do a mortal’s bidding. They grimace at the sight of him because his form is only rudimentary; Itempas laid the rules that his flesh must follow, but Itempas can no longer shape him beyond that. (Nahadoth retains that much power over himself.) But for what they want, a rudimentary god will do. Make darkness, they tell him, and they point at a place. He does what they command and then they are upset. Apparently they simply wanted him to blot out the sunlight so a nation’s crops would die. But they did not say that; they said darkness, and he is darkness, so naturally Nahadoth put part of himself in the place, which devoured all the light. It ate even the light mortals cannot see, all the pretty wavelengths of the world, like those that are generated by sound and heat and moving things. Now that whole nation is still and silent, every living thing frozen into dust, the soil dead; a new wasteland has been born. Now the world decries the Arameri as monsters. Oh, well. They should have been more specific.

They send Nahadoth back to his well.

*  *  *

A dream.

A gift. Nsana sends it quietly, from afar. Not all of the children who love Nahadoth are imprisoned with him, because not all of them offended Itempas enough to merit punishment. Tempa is nothing if not fair in his cruelty. Nsana is the first to reach out to Nahadoth, and the instant he feels it, he knows Nsana has endangered himself, because Itempas watches. (No, Itempas does not watch their children. He watches Nahadoth, always, with a close and jealous eye.) But even Tempa cannot punish a dream, can he? Tempa cannot want Naha to go mad again. He cannot. He cannot. Not even if Tempa has gone mad himself.

This dream is a memory, because Nsana knows better than to let Nahadoth’s mind roam where it will. (Memory of a face in ivory damask, eyes shut and lashes dewed, openmouthed in pleasure and abandon. Nahadoth was careful, careful, because dreams are fragile, but Nsana was stronger than he seemed.) Nsana understands him better than even Sieh does. This dream consists of a single sense: taste. Nahadoth closes his eyes and opens his body’s mouth and for a moment there is musk on his tongue, slightly bitter, not entirely pleasant. Aromatic. The taste of it radiates up through the body’s sinus cavity, offering an impression of itself to other senses: the redolence of old leather and dried leaves, the warmth of an afternoon sun. The last time he tasted this was long ago, but he remembers it because it was a beautiful day on a beautiful world, which he spent entirely absorbed in the sensations and pleasurable constrictions of mortal flesh. His own and that of two others. Smooth muscled arms clothed in black skin, holding him close from behind. A narrow burnished torso leaning close so that he can nuzzle tiny breasts; long strong fingers threading into his hair with no fear of being swallowed into the dark place that it contains. Hardness and heat, liquid and friction, bone and softness, teeth and tongue. A soft male voice in his ear

(breath, moist; air, vibrating through chords; the brush of warm lips)

murmuring between hard pants, “We shall always be one.”

The taste of her, and him, and Them.

The musky taste fades. Clever Nsana. In itself the dream was nothing: just a taste. Nothing Itempas can complain of. All its power comes from Nahadoth’s imagination. And, too, from the power of flesh—which was Nsana’s purpose, Nahadoth understands. A way of reminding Nahadoth that the body need not be a prison, if he can learn to embrace its joys.

But the dream, the memory, is wrong. Always has ended. The Three are no longer one. Itempas lied, and Nsana’s attempt to comfort him has been worse than a failure.

Nahadoth is too weary to mourn.

*  *  *

“What are you?” asks the boy who is not a boy.

More time has passed. The boy is halfway to death now, by the usual length of a mortal life. His voice is deeper, his face roughly handsome rather than pretty. Nahadoth doubts he is warming anyone’s bed anymore—but such things are not always about beauty, so he might be wrong on that account.

And such a question! No one has asked him that since…since Itempas, a thousand, thousand eternities ago. Since existence, trying to define itself, transformed into a new shape to accommodate his presence and defined him by doing so. He feels oddly flattered to be asked again.

“I…,” Nahadoth tries to say, and stops, distracted. Voice. Soft flapping moist tissues, hard bone and enamel, vibration, breath. Pure sensation. He has always liked mortal form. “Want.”

“What?”

“I want.” Emphasis. Intent. Desire. The words make him ache within, a dull niggling torment paralleling the ongoing crush and grind of mortal flesh upon his soul. “I am wanting. It is…all that I can be.” Now. And forevermore? Then Itempas truly has damned him.

Silence. Then: “They say you’re like the others, but you can’t be. They aren’t like this. They don’t sit in some room, in a…a puddle, and speak only in mad rants. You’re something different, aren’t you?”

He does not dignify this question with the obvious answer.

A step. Closer to the well’s rim. “I’ve killed five of them now.” The rage and glee reverberates even as his voice softens, fine and precise as the crystals of a prism. When Haan laughs this time, it does not waver at all. “Accidents, they think…but when I’m alone with the ones I’ve killed, when the sweet lords and ladies realize they can’t stop the thing they’ve created and they have to tell me the truth or I’ll hurt them before I kill them…Only the fullbloods know for sure what you are, and I haven’t killed any of those.” Unspoken: yet. “But there are whispers.”

There are always whispers. “Whisper in the dark and I shall answer,” Nahadoth says, and laughs his own wavering laugh into the night and the darkest recesses of mortal minds. Thus are legends born.

“They say you’re one of the actual Three. The priests say you don’t exist, that you never existed, but no one believes those stories. They’re going to have to change them soon.” Haan shifts, gets closer, getting comfortable. “No one says your name. To speak it is to be damned to the Skyfather’s darkest hells.”

Itempas has no dark hells, Nahadoth does not say. That this is no longer obvious to mortals is proof that at least some of the priests’ propaganda is working. But there is another pause. Curious, Nahadoth opens the eyes of his body. There are things mortal flesh sees that divine perception cannot. Haan leans over the well, almost close enough to touch his lips to the pooling blackness that is Nahadoth’s substance. He cannot see Nahadoth through the layers of dark. Nahadoth reaches up one blunt-nailed, crudely formed human hand, though the edge of the pit is ten feet above. The perspective makes Haan’s face tiny as he frames it between his thumb and forefinger.

“Nahadoth,” Haan breathes.

Nahadoth smiles, though no one can see it. A curl of his substance flickers up, like a splash of water after something small has been dropped into it, and flicks at Haan’s lips. Haan flinches and jerks back, clapping a hand over his mouth as if something cold has burned him or as if he has spoken blasphemy. Then he laughs, and there is neither humor nor fear in it.

“Flirt,” he says, his eyes glittering. Then he leaves, and within seconds Nahadoth forgets he was ever there.

*  *  *

The next time Nahadoth deigns to notice reality, Kurue is there.

“Come back to us,” she says. “We need you.”

Kurue wants. She is not a child of his essence, but a bit of him is in all of their children because he raised them and loved them. This is the proof of it, perhaps—that here in this world, incarnate in flesh, the first thing that both of them feel is not regret, but wanting.

Kurue stirs, having sensed his attention, and stands from where she had been sitting against the wall. “Look, Father. Look at what they’ve done to me.” She moves closer, leaning over the wall of the well, and he does grimace at the sight. She has been…trimmed. They all have had parts removed; it was the only way Itempas could fit them into the chains. But Kurue’s body has been trimmed further still. She is a tiny thing, bizarrely shriveled and re-proportioned, and her wings are gone. He stares at this, realizing at once that the mortals do not understand what they have done. Kurue’s wings are her store of accumulated knowledge. Every barbule of every shaft is the lore of an entire world. Each vane spins galaxies; the pinions contain the sagas of all the iterations of existence that have ever been. They have left her arms and legs, but without wings she might as well be limbless and tongueless and eyeless. Without her knowledge, she is not Kurue, not anymore.

He closes his eyes, unable to bear her pain in addition to his own.

“We need you,” she says again, her voice a weary drone. “We need your strength. It’s so hard, Father. Sieh says that together we can survive this incarceration; that is how mortals endure. But how can we, when we are only three?”

We were only Three, and we did well enough, he thinks. But this is uncharitable, because at least he had the totality of himself when he was free. And he understands that for these lesser ones of his kind, these children, three is not enough. It wasn’t for the Three, either, in the end. That was why Enefa came, and why she made them into a multitude, because Three is strong but family is stronger and without her Nahadoth is lost, lost, lost as he never wanted to be again.

“Enefa,” he whispers for the umpteenth time. Above him, seen through the tendrils of his substance, Kurue flinches. Lost in grief, he realizes only belatedly what this means. It is something Itempas often chided him for: he thinks only of himself at times when he should consider the needs of others. Now he’s hurt her. But Kurue is wise; she knows of the aeons that he spent alone, screaming his loneliness into the empty nothing. Surely she understands that it is not his nature to be considerate? Though he tries. And fails, often.

He opens his mouth to speak to her again, to try and be a better father, but it’s too late. Time has passed. She’s long gone.

*  *  *

“A mistake,” says the boy, who is now an old man. “Inevitable, really. I’m careful, but not perfect. Now it’s only a matter of time.” He’s sitting on the lip of the well, his back to the contained puddle of Nahadoth. He speaks quietly, without inflection, but the room reverberates with his tension.

“Twelve,” Haan says when Nahadoth says nothing. “Twelve of those so-high are dead at my hands, and the last—my prize—was Lord Arameri’s heir. Lord Arameri thinks it was the girl’s rival that did her in, but it was me. Me.” Haan strokes a hand over his hair, a habit of preening left over from his beautiful boyhood. It’s still beautiful because he has the pride to do it well. “They’ll never find some of the bodies. They don’t even realize some of the deaths are murders yet. But the clues are out there now, and eventually someone will put them together.”

As such things go. Nahadoth yawns, disinterested, but Haan does not hear.

“But I’ve left them my grandson.” Nahadoth sees Haan’s smile from a shadowed corner. “He’s beautiful like I was, and such clever coldness! Ah, he’s a fullblood and he knows how to use it. He’s everything I could have wanted, though he doesn’t know who I am, of course. My big boy. I wish I could watch him destroy them all from within.”

Nahadoth touches his belly, thinking of the children he’s borne. All were difficult. He is creation, generation, but there is something unpleasantly ordered about the production of new life. It must proceed in certain ways, or things go wrong. Enefa was the most skilled at it, and even she made mistakes sometimes; Nahadoth never came close to mastering the art. The only children that survived his bearing were those as disordered as himself. All beautiful in their varied twists and misshapes and misthoughts.

How terrible, though, to continue only through one’s offspring. Mortals must exist in a constant state of frustration with their own fragility and ephemerality, even within the heavens and hells that they occupy after death.

(Is Enefa there now? Is she anywhere?)

And despite the banality of it all, despite the fact that this boy is a petty mortal with petty mortal motivations, Nahadoth thinks, I understand. Perhaps he says it aloud. The boy—Nahadoth’s boy, this man with a wild princess’s soul—seems to hear it. He straightens and abruptly hops off the lip of the well, turning to gaze into it.

“Nahadoth, I want,” Haan says.

Nahadoth shivers. It is not a prayer, he reminds himself, so the chains will not tighten. The mortal has simply expressed a desire. He is Arameri. Should Nahadoth not obey? The chains remain quiescent.

“Do you?” Nahadoth asks conversationally. Oh, but he is very interested.

Haan smiles with his hunter teeth. “Oh, yes. And I know what you want, Nahadoth Nightlord, Skyfather and Shadowmother, lifeblood of the universe, flesh of chaos and change. You crave purpose. Direction. A reason to do more than lie here in a seething, grieving puddle. Well, I have that.” He presses his hands to his chest, makes an exaggerated pantomime then of holding out his hands. “I offer my purpose to you, if you will have it.”

Dangerous, dangerous. Haan skirts forbidden words. He knows it, Nahadoth sees, and Nahadoth wants to laugh with the thrill of it. And the mortal’s offer (offer, not an offering), ah! The shape of a strategy is laid out in the twisted convolutions of this mortal’s monstrous soul. Haan is cruel, yes, but his cruelty has little power. Nahadoth has power, even in this crude form—power enough to protect his children, if he uses it right. Power enough for many things.

“Come to me,” Nahadoth says.

Haan closes his eyes for a moment, as if savoring the words. “I have waited so long for you.”

He climbs onto the lip of the well again. He doesn’t come face-first this time, as Nahadoth expected. He swings his legs over, pausing as this sets off ripples across the black pool of Nahadoth’s substance. Hesitation? No, fascination. Then Haan drops down, into the dark.

At the bottom of the well, Nahadoth lies still, waiting, as Haan gropes toward him. Faint warmth and light, like a tiny dim sun. Nahadoth reaches out; after a moment, the mortal’s fingers tangle with his. A gentle tug and Haan falls against him, into his arms. Yes. Nahadoth feels Haan’s fingers brush his lips. There is no taste of fear. They are both above such paltry things.

“Itempas and Enefa are gone,” he says, stroking Haan’s long, loose hair. It is a possessive caress. “I must choose now, from among my jailors, who shapes me.”

“Make them pay,” Haan says, grinning.

“I shall.” As an afterthought: “Thank you.” He feels Haan nod graciously.

Then Nahadoth opens his mouth and swallows Haan whole.

Time passes.

Now the darkness stirs. Around the well, three appear: Kurue again, this time accompanied by an enormous blue-haired woman and a small boy with feral, ancient eyes—his other imprisoned children, Zhakkarn and Sieh. The boy sits atop a floating toy ball, staring hard at the rippling black pool. The larger woman inhales and steps forward, her form blurring as glittering mail appears on her limbs, her torso, her head. A pike manifests in one hand.

“So you’ve chosen to fight,” she says. Her normally placid face has gone fierce. She raises the pike horizontally; it glows bloodred, smoking faintly. “Come forth, then, Father.”

At this summons, the blackness coalesces. Thickens. Condenses into shape.

A moment later Nahadoth manifests before them, standing on the well wall. The foot that extends to step down is bare, long-toed, and graceful; the leg that follows it is lean and smooth. In limbs and joints the body—no longer rudimentary—emerges like the moon from behind a cloud. A torso, smooth and lightly muscled. A face that blurs but is already far more defined, refined, than the lumpen thing it was. Last comes the hair: thick and soft and Ostei-loose, but blacker than the dark behind closed eyes. It curls around him, half real and half something else, cloak and dagger all in one.

“I have chosen to fight,” agrees Nahadoth, opening the eyes of his body. They are beautiful eyes now—eyes that will make mortals hungry even as they advertise the dangers of tasting. And if these eyes do not allure, they will change until they do. He can be whatever they want him to be, really. Satisfy all their hungers, stoke new ones, feed those, too. Until they choke on him.

Sieh cocks his head, one predator assessing another. “What have you done to yourself now, Naha?”

“Just a small change.” Nahadoth looks down at the hand he has shaped. Long, strong fingers, with blunt, harmless nails. He curls them slowly.

Sieh grins, flashing most of his sharp little teeth. “Oh, a game.” He hops off his flying ball and trots over to Nahadoth, his eyes alight. Nahadoth touches his hair, stroking it as some newer part of him has always yearned to do to a stolen, secret son.

Kurue folds her arms. “You’ve contaminated yourself with that mortal, Naha. Are you certain that was safe to do?”

“Nothing I have ever done is safe.”

“True enough. Still.” She jerks her chin at Nahadoth’s new shape. “Not your usual way of doing things, is it? This use of…camouflage.” Her expression is guarded, carefully blank.

Zhakkarn glances at Kurue, the faintest of frowns crossing her face. “Guerilla tactics can be effective, Sister, if used properly. Itempas has put us at a disadvantage against the mortals. This strategy is appropriate in response.”

“They won’t know what hit them,” Sieh says, his slitted pupils grown huge with enthusiasm for the killing to come.

“They will,” says Nahadoth, and Sieh blinks. “That must be part of it—their fear.” There are memories in his mind, the taste of them still salty and heavy on his tongue. Faces with mouths open, eyes wide. Haan always made certain they knew their killer, in the moment of death. That must be part of it: the knowledge of who is destroying them, and why. If the slavemaster lies sleepless and despairing in the dark hours, then the slave holds some power even by daylight.

Then he looks at Kurue. “I won’t abandon you again.”

She blinks, and her face twists. A smile? Tears? He’s not sure. Still, he reaches out and cups her cheek and is relieved when she sighs and leans into his hand. She was right. It will be easier now that they’re fighting together.

“Where do you mean to begin?” Zhakkarn stands closer to him than usual. It is not her nature to express affection, but she shows it in the ways she can. And she is right to ask this, to aim him. Always so quick to see the use in any weapon.

He wants. “Enefa’s remains are the key to our freedom.”

Sieh shakes his head, sorrow making him look older. “The Stone of Earth, the mortals call it. Hidden, and the soul that could control it is lost. Finding both will take an age of the world.”

Nahadoth smiles. They all shiver just a little in response, in desire, in fear. Does his new form affect even them? They have already suffered too much; he will take care not to harm them further. “An age is nothing,” he says. “Pain is nothing. Blood is nothing. To us.” To the mortals, though, it is the price they must pay for daring to imprison their gods. Oh, the Arameri will learn and rally and strike back in their paltry way when they can. It will be war…but the mortals are the ones who started this war. Nahadoth will not fight fair.

So they leave the well chamber, four gods united in purpose and hatred, and as he walks, Nahadoth wipes his mouth with the back of one hand. Such a perfect, dear, sweet boy.

Then he laughs to himself, softly and waveringly, and chooses the first targets who will suffer his wrath.

THE GOD WITHOUT A NAME

“Once upon a time,” he said, “there was a god imprisoned here. He was a terrible, beautiful, angry god, and by night when he roamed these white halls, everyone feared him. But by day, the god slept. And the body, the living mortal flesh that was his ball and chain, got to have a life of its own.”

I inhaled, understanding, just not believing. He was speaking of the Nightlord, of course—but the body that lived by day was…?

Near the window, Hado folded his arms. I saw this easily, despite the window’s darkness, because he was darker still.

“It wasn’t much of a life, mind you,” he said. “All the people who feared the god did not fear the man. They quickly learned they could do things to the man that the god would not tolerate. So the man lived his life in increments, born with every dawn, dying with every sunset. Hating every moment of it. For two. Thousand. Years.”

He glanced back at me. I gaped at him.

“Until suddenly one day, the man became free.” Hado spread his arms. “He spent the first night of his existence gazing at the stars and weeping. But the next morning, he realized something. Though he could finally die, as he had dreamt of doing for centuries, he did not want to. He had been given a life at last, a whole life all his own. Dreams of his own. It would have been…wrong…to waste that.”

—The Broken Kingdoms, chapter 17, “A Golden Chain (encaustic on canvas)”

*  *  *

The god without a name stands at the tip of the Pier of Sky, toes balancing easily on its all-but-useless railing as he gazes down at the world spread below.

“I’d rather you didn’t,” says Yeine, appearing behind him.

He does not look back at her, because he doesn’t need to. Her presence is everywhere around him: in the infinitesimal motes of pollen drifting on the city’s updraft, in the leaves of the World Tree that spread above, in the unseen motes of life that wriggle and devour each other along his own skin. Curious, he lifts a hand and is not very surprised that he can see those motes now, with a slight adjustment of perspective. Once he believes he can see them, he can. So simple.

He believes the motes dead, and they die.

A moment later they twitch back to life.

He sighs and turns at last to look at her over his shoulder. She’s sitting on the railing a few feet back, her bare feet dangling over the half-mile drop, her brief curls stirring a little in the occasional gust. It’s not her, of course. Not wholly her. The totality of what she is spreads, vast and viral, across all of existence and beyond it. This is just the fragment of attention she has chosen to spare for him.

“Should I be honored?” he muses aloud, not really expecting an answer.

Yeine shrugs. “Maybe I should be.”

“Humility does not become you, Gray Lady.”

“Nor you, so I don’t know why you brought it up.”

He smiles a little, reflexively. He never actually feels like smiling, but he has survived by the skillful mimicry of expressions for too long to stop doing it now. Then he turns back to the view, gazing out over the city and the night-dark landscape, feeling the whole of the world within the scope of his perception. He could perceive so much more, with only an adjustment of his interests. He is interested in so little, however. Just the world will do.

He asks, “Do you plan to stop me, if I decide to kill myself?”

“No. Why would I? Your life is yours to do with as you please.”

“Ah. So quickly do we abandon the human guise.”

“You were never human.”

“Technically, I was.” It really is only a technicality, though. Once he was half human—aware and himself and made of delicate, magicless flesh by day. With the setting of the sun, his consciousness vanished, subsuming itself into another’s until the coming of dawn. Two thousand years like so, or was it only a thousand? Perhaps he shouldn’t count the rest times. But humans still don’t live to be a thousand years old.

She’s right; he was never human. Now, however, he is something else entirely, and the change does not please him at all.

“But,” he drawls at last, “humans die. I couldn’t. So sad.”

He hears Yeine shift a little, drawing up her legs and resting her feet on the railing. If she’d been mortal, she’d have been a fool to sit that way; one strong gust would have sent her to her death. The same applied to him, standing on the railing like this…or it would have, if he’d been human.

“Is it jealousy, then?” she asks. “Is that what you feel now, looking down on them, knowing what you are? Would you rather I had made you one of them?”

He would. And yes, he is jealous of their freedom to die. But he will never tell her that.

“What I feel,” he says slowly, careful to keep to partial truths because she will sense a lie, “is…curiosity. For what I can do and how much you’ll let me do. I was a slave for centuries, after all. It’s my nature to test the length and quality of my chains.”

“That isn’t your nature.” She shrugs. He can see that through his skin, because his eyes are irrelevant now. “I can’t tell what is. But this much I’m sure of: you’re too damned proud to submit to anyone or anything, even your own self-pity. Even when you have no choice.”

There is always a choice. From the Arameri vaults, he has stolen a powder made from Oree Shoth’s blood for the day of his own choosing. But it is dangerous to think of these things in Yeine’s presence; gods are uncannily perceptive.

“You could have told me,” he says, to distract both her and himself. “I wasted thirty years trying to be human.”

“What’s thirty years to you?”

Nothing, and they both know it. But…“I wouldn’t have spent them here.”

Here is the palace called Sky, where he has spent thirty years scheming and striving for victory in a dangerous game that in retrospect wasn’t really all that dangerous for him. He has earned wealth and power and one precious name for himself: Hado Arameri, fullblood, third in line to a crownless throne. With only a few judicious poisonings—or a flick of his will—that throne could be his. But doing so now would be like all his other victories, all his other names: hollow.

“Every child needs a womb,” Yeine says airily. Which makes no sense, because she has never given birth, and she knows full well that he was never born.

But then…he had known, on some level, that he was not human. Denial made the process of discovery a slow thing, logic fighting its way through reluctance and completely irrational distaste until even he could not deny the truth. Mortals cut themselves but did not heal in moments. Mortals did not hear wind blowing on the other side of the world. Mortals aged, no matter how fit or well fed. Perhaps this is what she means. The past thirty years have been necessary, a safe stasis in which he could feel himself simple and small before discovering the reality that he is vast and strange. And now, when he can no longer deny the truth, when there are no more illusions to nourish his childish hopes…

He looks down at the world and thinks, again, how easy it would be to destroy. If he can’t have it, neither should they.

Then he turns and hops down onto the plank of daystone that is the Pier, heading back into the palace. She says nothing as he brushes past.

*  *  *

The god without a name walks around the world for the sheer novelty of it. The underwater parts are better than the aboveground. Sea volcanoes and glowing monsters in the dark are interesting. Humans, alas, hold little mystery for him.

He enjoys it all, regardless. Going wherever he wants, at whatever pace he wants, for as long as he wants. That part will never grow old.

When he reaches the coast of the Senm continent again, walking up naked from the sea amid crabs and seagulls, he is unsurprised to find Yeine sitting there on a blanket. Her hair is wet, as though she’s been swimming, and he recalls that her mortal life was spent in a landlocked forest nation. She smiles when he sits down beside her.

“Why do you bother?” he asks, by way of greeting. “I don’t even like you.”

She laughs. She’s happier as a god than she ever was as a mortal, but he knows better than to point that out to her. “You don’t like anyone. And why do my little visits bother you? If you really don’t care about them.”

“Maybe I find them annoying.”

“Lies. Look at this.” She holds out something, and in spite of himself, he is intrigued enough to look. She’s holding a nautilus; it trembles as it lies in her hands, feebly trying to pump water that does not exist through its hyponome.

“I watch things die all the time,” he complains. That’s the jealousy talking.

“So do I. I kill most of them. But I’m not killing this one. Look inside.” He does, and almost flinches as he perceives small worms within the creature’s body, tearing at its flesh with sharp teeth. They’ve already carved a bloody hollow for themselves near—but not through—a vital organ. Each of the nautilus’s tremors coincides with a bite.

Without thinking, he moves a hand to kill the nautilus. She takes his hand to forestall him. “What are you doing?”

It’s amazing that he has to say this. “Why are you letting it suffer?”

“Did you look?” At his scowl, she rolls her eyes. “Look deeper.”

So he does, though there is bitter bile in his mouth as he endures the creature’s suffering. The worms are just trying to survive, fine, but it feels wrong that they leave their prey alive while they do so. It’s wrong for suffering to continue for one minute, let alone endlessly, when death is available—

And then, belatedly, he sees what he did not before. Within the nautilus are her eggs, almost ripe and ready for laying. Even as she dies, the mother nautilus pumps strength to these children of hers. Strength, and something more.

“She chose their father for one reason,” Yeine says, “and that is because he had no parasites within him. Most of these, his children, will be immune to the death she suffers. Many will suffer other deaths, just as bad. Life is harsh in the sea.” Yes. He’s seen that. “But a few will survive. If she lasts long enough, she can lay these eggs before they kill her, and the parasites won’t be able to touch them.”

The creature lacks the mind to feel vindictive pleasure, but he feels plenty of it on her behalf. “Then…”

Yeine closes her hand and the nautilus vanishes. “I suppose we’ll have to see. She’ll take no harm from my playing—not that that will help much.”

He watches her, wondering if he is this to her: a struggling, weak thing infected with the devouring parasite of mortal thought. An experiment that might—might—manage to produce a few good outcomes before he fails.

She throws him a skeptical look. “You think I have nothing better to do than give you object lessons about things you already know?”

So much for that, then. “Why did you show me the nautilus?”

“I just thought it was interesting.” She gets to her feet and stretches. She’s naked, too, probably because she was swimming earlier, and reflexively he thinks about sex. That was his job for a long time, after all. He doesn’t have to do that, not anymore, but the habit is hard to break. This annoys him.

“How’s my other half?” he asks, to be cruel and to distract himself. “You and Nahadoth getting along? His black hole finding your balance beam with no trouble and all that?”

She chuckles. “You’re very predictable. He doesn’t ask about you at all, you know. Why would he?”

She takes off, running into the ocean and jumping gleefully into a wave that is cresting near the shore. He leaves while she’s preoccupied so she won’t see how much her words have hurt him.

*  *  *

The god without a name doesn’t seek out other gods, but he doesn’t hide from them, either. Their attention is a palpable thing, intermittent. He knows when the oldest ones notice and ignore him. The younger ones watch him, a few coming to visit, and he ignores them in turn until they go away. He spends time with mortals but does not care about them. He leaves the planet sometimes, visits others that lack life altogether, and finds his greatest peace there.

Through it all, he feels a sense of disquiet. Something is missing. Something is wrong.

Well. What else is new?

*  *  *

“Well, you could use a name,” Yeine says when he finally seeks her out.

They are in the gods’ realm, in a pocket of it that she has shaped to look like a rain forest. It isn’t. Small entities swim through the vineflowers like fish, watching him; he can feel their intelligence, but he’s not sure what they are. Feral eyes watch from beneath palm fronds: some of his less-comprehensible siblings. She sits on the mossy branchroot of a big old tree, which looks exactly like the World Tree of Sky. There’s even a tiny white crystalline lump in the first crotch of the tree, which he’s tempted to look at more closely. He resists the urge and sits beside her.

“I have a name,” he says. He goes by “Ahad” now, when mortals need to speak to him.

“No, a real name. One of your own. Or two, or three, but one would be a good start.” She looks thoughtful, tapping her fingers against her chin, and he scowls.

“I don’t want one from you.”

“Why not? For all intents and purposes, I’m your mother.”

“I have no mother.” Her face twitches, and belatedly he realizes this has hurt her. It gives him a vicious sense of pleasure for a moment, and then that fades. He is not the twisted thing he used to be, and he dislikes resorting to old habits. He amends, more gently, “I’ll find my own name.”

She sighs. He hates that she has forgiven him already. “All right. As for the rest…” She shrugs. “You don’t understand yourself.”

His nature, as gods call it. His affinity, his focus, whatever, he doesn’t know the secret special thing that nourishes and completes him and will make him strong. He’s spent a while trying to teach himself the gods’ language, which makes no sense to him beyond the most rudimentary level, and all of its vocabulary and conceptualizations are laced through with this understanding. Maybe if gods weren’t all crazy, their language wouldn’t be such an exercise in futility for him.

“Thanks for telling me what I already know,” he says nastily, rising and dusting off his butt. No telling what, or who, he might pick up here. “You’re always so good at that.”

Her jaw muscles flex so sharply that he wonders what she almost said—or almost became—in reaction to his words. But what she says is, “This is hard for me, too, all right?” Then she sighs. “I’d been hoping we could help each other, you and I.”

“Help? What the hells do you need help with?”

She looks truly annoyed now. “We two are the youngest of the gods, right now. And we were both human—more or less.” She adds this quickly when he sneers. “It’s a handicap that none of the other gods know how to cope with. But we share it, and so maybe…if we work together…”

She holds out a hand then, and he looks at it. An offer. An appeal. A friend. He wants to reach for it. Oh gods, how he wants to reach for it.

But he’s tried such things before. Tried to care about others, only to find that he is unimportant to them. Tried to trust, and been betrayed. So he hesitates.

Then his lungs lock and his belly twists and all his muscles twist and fray apart, and he can do nothing but clutch himself and flee before he falls to pieces in front of her. (Of all of them, he cannot bear to seem weak to her.) The realm, which is half alive anyway, pulls him to a place that is better for him, full of silence and dark closeness and comfort, and there over time he is able to recover. When he does, he re-forms a material body so that he can laugh, bitterly, to himself.

He doesn’t know his nature, but now he knows his antithesis. And isn’t it perfect? Fear is what will one day destroy him.

*  *  *

The god without a name experiments, because after all, he is curious.

There’s a problem right away: not much really frightens him. Nihilism apparently has that effect. He does not fear pain because he’s known too much of it. Likewise degradation, mutilation, despair, or anything of the sort. What would frighten him is not merely the experience of these things, but the possibility that they might continue. If he can see an end, anything is easy to endure.

And what is the opposite of fear? Courage, maybe. No, too easy. Gods are never simple. (He will not be simple.) Apathy? If that was his nature, he would be the most powerful godling in all creation. He tries on each of these anyway, placing himself in test scenarios. He picks a fight with a stronger godling and loses badly. Takes him several years to recover. Then he visits a number of hells, deliberately spending a few days in each of the ones he finds most distasteful. Alas, they are nothing compared to Sky’s worst, and just knowing he can leave whenever he wants dulls their sting. He visits the Maelstrom, and oh yes, it’s frightening, not the least because it may not actually kill him. Fall into it and suffer eternal joy, maybe, or eternal bad jokes told by a wooden-eared comedian. But the greatest likelihood of being swallowed by it is instant death, and that is something he’s craved too long to fear now.

All this tells him one thing, though: not just any fear will harm him. Only a particular sort of fear does the trick. He feels discomfort whenever he fears actions that could have the effect of making him closer to others. It is the fear of intimacy that counteracts his nature. So he travels back to the mortal realm and becomes a whore.

That does not go well. He stops because he detests cleaning up bodies.

Still, he learns from the experience. Users of any kind will always be in danger from him. Too much like his old life, parasites gnawing at sore spots in his scarred vitals, but he is not Yeine; he will not abide such filth. Anyway, he’s not a nautilus; gods do not evolve through their children. He must develop his own immunity to what hurts him.

He finds that other whores are safe from him. He does not accidentally kill them, even when he couples with them. This is because they know what it is to be used, and they share the loathing of users with him; this becomes something they can bond over. An adjustment: he becomes a pimp instead, quietly driving away the other pimps, taking good care of his girls and his boys and his ask-me-firsts in ways that no mere mortal could.

The ones who crave drugs or drink, he heals or satisfies as they wish. He kills those users who would do more than the usual harm—and he can be in many places at once to do so. The streets he works acquire a reputation. Other whores come begging him to take over their streets, and he expands his territory cautiously. But no other godlings are interested in this particular demesne of mortal life; he has no competition. A few times mortal criminals try to kill him. Mercilessly he obliterates their organizations’ leadership and takes over, mostly because he’s bored and partly because stupidity annoys him. Thus does he accidentally end up in control of nearly all the city’s organized crime.

Well. That’s something new.

It is fascinating. There are intimacies to be courted here, too, the bonds that keep hard people together in a hard business, and those bonds are strong—like family, like comrades in war, like love, though leavened with generous portions of resentment and ambition and greed. He mostly lets them do whatever they like so long as they don’t hurt too many people and don’t destroy the business. Despite such careless control, the organization thrives and grows wealthy and strong.

There’s a problem one day. The lieutenants report it and he grows curious enough to go and investigate. In one area of town where he has found no pimps to kill, there are many whores. They run themselves and have fought hard for their independence. When he approaches their spokeswoman, she curses him, tells him they would rather die than be owned. “Yes,” he says admiringly, and feels the first surge of something that must be his nature. It is too unfocused for him to grasp.

The passion of his response surprises her into silence. (It surprises him, too.) He asks the woman what she and her comrades want. She gives him a list of demands that would make most criminal lords laugh. Her hand trembles as she hands it to him, in fact. She expects to die—but she did not lie; she is willing, if by her death her comrades can be protected. Yes, yes, gods yes. He considers the logistics only long enough to figure out how it might be done, vanishes and has a few conversations, then comes back and offers her his hand. Bemused, she takes it. “Partners?” he suggests, and when she nods, that flutter is there again. He feels good. This is good for him. He wants more.

He gives his new partner everything she wants. He buys houses all over the city and lets her choose the staff. The whores may live in them or off-site as they choose. Their housing is paid for—because after all, their beds are a place of work. Their medical care is paid for. He hires servants to see to their material needs, nannies to tend their children. His foot soldiers are permitted to visit the houses only if they can behave. He kills the ones who don’t; he has precious little patience. They mostly behave anyway, because they already know this about him.

Thugs gossip like fishermen. They go away satisfied and awed and spread the word, and others quickly begin to come. Some are hungry to sample whores who regard themselves and are treated as people—such a rare thing in this world. Some are merely curious. His women have stretch marks and fat rolls, and his men don’t have giant prehensile penises or lantern jaws, but the sex is apparently amazing anyway. There’s a house for everyone: those who crave simple pleasures and those whose driving impulses are more complex. Those who need and those who have only vague interest. If there is pain, it is by mutual agreement. If there is perversion…well, that is a matter of perspective.

He stops calling them whores. What they do is too skillful a thing for such a simplistic word. They are the residents who make these houses homes; they are sexual engineers; they are artisans of flesh and emotion. He is unsurprised, therefore, when one of his godling siblings comes to him, sheepishly requesting aid. She has always been curious, but mortals make her nervous. So delicate, so strange. He pairs her with his partner, that so-wise woman who demanded the earth from him and got the heavens…and then it all goes wrong.

They fall in love.

They fall in love, damn it.

It’s so wrong. How can she do this to him? He has given her everything. He accepts his partner’s resignation with bitter, bitter grace; it is only another betrayal. She should know better. Her lover will only turn on her. Lovers always do. He tells her this, along with a choice few other cruel things, until she gives him a look so pitying that it shuts him up.

“You have to try anyway,” she says gently. “Even if you know they’ll hurt you. That’s the whole point.”

But he was trying.

It hurts so much when she leaves that he is sick with it. He curls alone in the room he rarely visits, in the enormous bed that he never sleeps in—he hates sleep—and shakes for hours, with the door and windows sealed shut and blackened so that no one will see.

Time heals. The god without a name recovers, slowly. Not fully.

Other godlings come, after the first one’s glowing report. Some want to be clients and some want to join the artisans, and finally he realizes he’ll have to do something about this.

So he sets up one last house, this one in the poorest area of the city—but quietly, because he is perverse, he makes it the most special of them. He works magic into the walls as they are built: whatever the clients bring with them will be returned threefold. Beauty for beauty, contempt for contempt. He requires the godlings to learn their trade from the mortals. The mortals think this is hilarious, but it is only wisdom; mortals are the experts in this. Mortals are strong…and he knows, better than anyone, how utterly useless gods can be.

But the experiment, the experiment! He glories in it, quietly. Once his special house is ready, he sends invitations to the sorts of people he wants as clients and turns away most who come soliciting. This must be a thing of privilege, he thinks, feels instinctively—but not the sort of privilege that can be bought with money or fortune of birth. When clients come, he charges whatever they can afford. Once, on impulse, he brings in a homeless woman, who does nothing but weep in his arms all night. That’s all she needs. When she is done, though, she’s better. Not healed, but happy. He hires her as the housekeeper.

He names the house the Arms of Night. Perhaps Nahadoth finds it amusing, if Nahadoth is paying attention at all.

(He sometimes wishes he’d taken Yeine’s hand. She does not return to him again. Beyond this regret, he feels nothing. It is safer this way.)

Meanwhile, the house’s reputation grows. His criminal enterprise does, too, until his power rivals that of the Arameri. He works mostly through proxies now, having long since turned over management of the syndicate and his various businesses to others (because it got boring), though he retains direct proprietorship of the Arms (because it isn’t). One day there are overtures from a rival group, seeking alliance. He ignores them. The rival group sends him a message anyway—via his own shadow, which comes to life and speaks to him. They are an organization of godlings, and they have a proposition that they are certain will interest him. Curiosity outweighs annoyance. He agrees.

The woman who walks into his office is everything he should hate. She radiates strength like a shroud of flame and wears her beauty as a shield for the blades of her tongue and mind. The way that she looks at him puts him instantly on edge. Arameri looked at him like that, back when he belonged to them. But then he sees her frown and twitch her gaze away, and instantly he understands. Mortals should not have natures, not like gods, but this one almost does. She is so much her father’s daughter that she wants him instantly—he is the shadow of her father’s lover, after all. But. She is so much her mother’s daughter that she rejects that echoed desire as simplistic and base.

How interesting that she refuses to merely lust for him. A perverse part of him wants to test this. Seduction will not work, he guesses at once; she will reject that, too. But something more than seduction perhaps…? Something he has never tried before. He will befriend her, then, if she can be friended. He will…like her. As an academic exercise.

Ah, and she tries the same with him. She will not lust, will not be driven like an animal by half-divine instincts…but she will consider. She will, if she finds him worthy, choose.

The proposal she brings is ridiculous. He’s not interested in protecting gods or mortals; let them all kill each other. It’s laughable that Itempas has chosen this method for his atonement. It will never work.

He agrees anyway so that he can see her again.

*  *  *

The Maelstrom pays a visit. The world doesn’t end. Alas. Sieh does end, though; stupid, ridiculous Sieh. Took him long enough.

Glee gives him a name.

Perhaps being immortal…is not wholly pointless.

*  *  *

Much, much later, the god whose name no one else will ever know stands atop the Pier of Sky, which now is little more than a shard of rubble jutting out from the world’s most magnificent grave cairn. It’s not very stable, but he’ll be all right. He’s a god. That’s…all right, too. Not terrible, at least. Could be better.

He knows the manifestation of his other, former self the way he knows his own skin. (When he has skin.) It’s strange, and always will be, to see a face that so reflects his own, though of course his is the inferior copy. For countless aeons they communicated with each other only through messages written on fogged mirrors and the like. (Toward the end, the only thing he ever wrote was, “How much longer?” And Nahadoth would answer, “Not long now.”) They stand in silence awhile, looking at each other for the second time.

“You’ve found yourself,” Nahadoth says.

“Mmm-hmm. Even got a name now.” Two, actually, one of them bestowed upon him by his fellow godlings. He hates it: Beloved. But at least he has the other name. It is precious. With it, everything is easier to endure.

Nahadoth nods. “I’m glad to see you well.”

“And I you.” He gazes at the god as hungrily as he gazes at the night sky—not that there’s a real difference. He can never get enough of such terrible beauty. But there are courtesies to be exchanged, commiserations. “So. About Sieh.”

“He is dead.” The words are careless, and the god’s voice is inflectionless. It is a lie. Nahadoth’s head tilts up, toward the mirror of the starry sky. “I think.”

“You think?”

“There is…something.” The god’s eyes have narrowed, as though he is squinting across an unimaginable distance in an effort to see something he can barely make out. “A suspicion, on the other side of nothingness.”

Sieh was a horrible father and a wretched friend and a barely competent employee, completely unworthy of being missed or mourned. But. “What do you suspect?”

That luminous head shakes. “I will not discuss it. The most minute possibilities are affected by observation.” As if to emphasize this, Nahadoth then pins him with a glance. “What are your intentions now?”

How amusing to see the living embodiment of darkness and chaos change the subject. But this conversation with Nahadoth is interesting enough that Nahadoth’s shadow decides to play along. “Now? I intend to live, as Yeine bade me.”

As if speaking her name summons her, there is a flicker and Yeine appears, too. For the god whose name is a precious, secret thing, this makes him happier than he will ever let either of them see.

“About time,” she says. She’s smiling.

He shrugs. The shrug is another lie. He’s gotten it honestly. “Well, I’m not very good at having parents. You can’t expect me to listen to everything you say.” This makes her laugh, and he feels warm inside.

“Itempas’s daughter will not last,” Nahadoth says suddenly, as if he can’t help but cast a shadow over any moment of brightness.

It would be worse to have never met her. “She’ll die when she dies. When that happens, I’ll move on.” He has promised her this. “She might get tired of me before that, anyway.” That will hurt, too, if it happens. But he has to try, even if he knows she’ll hurt him. That’s the whole point.

Yeine steps closer to Nahadoth. They don’t touch in flesh, but the drifting smoke of him twitches toward her, and she lifts a hand to twirl it ’round one finger. This isn’t really an idle gesture; there’s power in it. Her other fingers begin to move, weaving the smoke she’s spun, and she grins. “I don’t think you’ll be rid of her that easily.”

Damn meddling. He narrows his eyes. “What are you doing?”

“She cannot be made immortal,” Nahadoth says, watching Yeine’s fingers form ever-more-complex one-handed cats’ cradles out of his substance. “We learned that long ago, with our other mortal children.”

“But the skein of her life can be spun a bit longer,” Yeine suggests, lifting her other hand now, doing something he can’t see with her thumbs. “Stretched to its natural limit, so to speak. Do you think she’ll mind?”

“Perhaps you should ask her.” Of course they will not. Gods.

“She knows how to end herself, should she feel the need.” This is a boon that only he out of all of them understands fully, having endured life without that escape option. Yeine’s brow furrows in concentration. “It helps that she has so much of Itempas in her. She is steadiness, stability…Ah. There.” She drops her hands, the weave vanishing before he can fathom more than a few strands of it. “This is not just for you, mind.”

Because Glee is valuable in her own right—to the world that Yeine values so much, and for Nahadoth, as a weapon against Itempas. That is a cynical interpretation, perhaps, but it is also true. Still…he starts to ask how much more time they’ve given Glee, then closes his mouth. It doesn’t matter, anyway. Every moment will be a blessing.

But he licks his lips, unsure of what to say. He has reason to be suspicious of favors.

Nahadoth looks amused. Yeine looks sour. “It wouldn’t kill you to show gratitude,” she says. “Though I suppose I’ll have to get used to your terrible manners. With Sieh gone…” She falters, just a little, then pushes on. Her smile is genuine, if tinged with sadness. “Well. In most families, it’s the youngest who ends up spoiled.” They vanish then, leaving him alone with his discomfiture.

He is still uncertain if he likes being a god at all, let alone a god in this pantheon.

He doesn’t hate it anymore, though, and that is something. He likes being alive, too. That feeling is new and altogether strange, and he knows it won’t last forever. Nothing good ever does. But perhaps…he can learn to like being happy. While it lasts.

(Though he will never say any of this out loud. He has a reputation to maintain.)

Conjuring a cheroot, he stands, stretches, and heads home to the life he has made.

THE THIRD WHY

In her hands was the white-bladed sword that Itempas had used to cleave apart Nahadoth’s chaos and bring design and structure to the earliest iteration of the universe. No one could wield it but him; hells, no one else had ever been able to get near the damned thing, not in all the aeons since he’d created time. But Itempas’s daughter held it before her in a two-handed grip, and there was no doubt in my mind that she knew how to use it.

“Control,” said Itempas. I was near enough to hear this, though his voice was low and urgent. He had stepped back, quite sensibly, to avoid dying again. But he leaned as close as he could, anxious to advise his daughter. “Remember, Glee, or the power will destroy you.”

“I will remember,” she said.

—The Kingdom of Gods, chapter 22

*  *  *

On the morning of her eighteenth birthday, Glee decides to go and find her father.

She goes downstairs to inform her mother of this. Her mother is unsurprised. “If you were anyone else,” says Mother, “I would accuse you of being impulsive.” There is a hint of irony in her voice as she says this, but Glee ignores it. She is aware that her mother does not laugh out of cruelty. It’s simply her way of appreciating that which makes Glee different.

Because Glee does not have impulses. She makes carefully considered decisions, having weighed their benefits and consequences and informed herself as to the alternatives. She often does this with a speed that most mortals would consider unseemly at best, impossible at worst—or impulsive. But there is no impulse involved. She has no intuition, ignores any “gut feelings” she experiences, if she’s ever had one. Certainty, or at least the comfort of high probability, is what she prefers.

Her mother understands this, and likewise understands that it’s pointless to try and talk Glee out of any decision she’s made. But she does ask one question, and it is the one that Glee has been dreading. “Why?”

There is an answer to this question, even if it is not the answer: “Because I can.” Oh, but it is a weak answer, unsatisfying even to Glee herself, and she is ashamed of herself for having nothing better.

Mother shakes her head. Then she offers what aid she can, pressing a pouch of coins into Glee’s hands and sharing any clues and rumors she’s heard. Glee needs neither the money nor the information, but she understands that accepting these gifts will ease her mother’s fears and half-developed desires to come along. It is also a kind of ritual to be performed at the leave-taking of a child, and Glee respects ritual. Rituals give order to life, which is inherently chaotic. But when Mother stops talking, her hands shaking a little, Glee takes those hands in her own. Her mother is blind; she needs to know things through touch and sound. And Glee wants her mother to know this:

“I’ll come back.” Whether she finds her father or not; whether she chooses to bring him home or not. (She has not decided yet if that is a good idea, even if it’s possible.) “I will come back.”

“I believe that,” Mother says. “You’ve said it, so of course I do. But when?”

That question Glee cannot answer, either. So unsatisfying, these little mortal uncertainties. Mother sighs a little, but then she walks Glee to the door.

Glee goes east, following the sunrise. This is only partially symbolic. The town in which she was conceived and raised is situated at the northwestern edge of the continent; on foot, the only ways to go are east or south. He probably went in the direction of the sunrise, in the same way that a right-handed person is likely to have turned right. And she is aided by the fact that he is who he is, no matter how human he appears to be. He has a presence. Even nineteen years later, when she goes to the places a penniless traveler would visit and asks after a man with her skin and white hair and a face that, according to her mother, would rather break than smile, people laugh—but remember. He leaves a deep impression on the universe, even now, with his fragile-fleshed feet.

She also discovers, as she travels through the sprawling north-Senm city of Esh Passe, that she can perceive magic. Her mother’s paintings have always felt of strangeness, but Glee can see those with her eyes. When she closes her eyes, however, she can see footprints on the Esh Passe streets etched in light and colors against the dark of her inner lids. She can see the air tinted in the wake of someone’s passing and feel those other presences around her like bright, glowing lamps shining against her skin. These are the marks of the godlings of Esh Passe, and it is strange to feel so much closer to her mother now, when she has never been farther.

Beyond the magical lights of the godlings, Esh Passe is full of strings of colored lanterns and torches on posts and bonfires, as well as occasional spats of fireworks against the night sky. It’s hot during the day, so people here live for the night, and perhaps it is a dollop of Nahadoth’s nature that makes the city as wild as it is. Some of this fascinates Glee simply because it is different from the quiet life she’s led up to now, so she spends a few nights sitting in noisy clubs, nursing a drink and people-watching and politely refusing those who proposition her. Only once does she deign to dance, and instantly she realizes the danger and stops. Art is magic, she understands at last, and she is too much her parents’ child—artist mother, god father—to blend the two without disaster. Regretfully, she apologizes to her dance partner and leaves the club, never to return again.

This is the moment when Glee first begins to understand what it means to be what she is. It has been a purely intellectual thing up to this point. Now it is an existential actuality: she can observe mortal lives and perhaps even share in them to some degree, for she is mortal herself. But she will, must, always stand apart no matter how hard she tries to fit in, because she is something else, too.

It should not need to be said that this does not trouble her much. It is not loneliness that she feels. She has purpose, which keeps the loneliness at bay; that’s how gods cope, after all. She isn’t a god either, though, and she’s aware that at some point purpose may not be enough for her.

It becomes another answer to the question of why she means to find Itempas. She’ll ask him about it, when she finds him.

Glee grows three years older in the time that it takes to find her father. She has to stop sometimes and work to earn money. (Stealing, or forcing others to give her what she needs, is unfathomable.) She has to find places to sleep that are safe, ways to eat that are affordable, ways to protect herself that do not kill everyone in a hundred-mile radius. This is how she learns and, gradually, changes: under pressure, on demand, as much forcing the world to adapt to her uniqueness as subsuming herself within it. It is not an easy heritage that her father has accorded her, but neither is it impossible. She develops more appreciation for it with time.

She finds her father at last on the island of Ken, in a small fishing town that doesn’t, as far as she can tell, have a name. It’s barely a town: just a collection of houses and piers and worksheds grouped around a dirt road lined with sun-bleached oyster shells. There’s one dingy trading post, with an equally dingy tavern next door. When she goes inside, the room is full of copper- and auburn- and brown-haired men and women, some of whom are clustered at one end of the sawdust-strewn floor listening to an old man regale them with stories of stingfish and sea serpents. Only one man looks at Glee as the haze of sweet pipe smoke parts and bends around her straight-backed walk; only he sits alone in this place of shared laughter and good company, without seeming lonely. This, far more than their shared racial features or any logical deduction, is how she knows him.

She sits down across from him. “Hello, Father,” she says. “My name is Glee.”

“Hello, Glee,” he replies. His face is nothing like hers beyond its color. It’s so still. He doesn’t smile, doesn’t move his mouth any more than the words require; it is the expected response to her greeting ritual, and nothing more. This is how she knows he isn’t pleased to see her. To reinforce this, or perhaps because honesty is also generally regarded as polite, he continues. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“I accept the risk.” Because she knows of the threat that drove him from her mother. When the Lord of Night and the Lady of Shadows promise to kill, they do not do so idly.

He blinks, and much later she will realize that his blinks are perfectly regular, not at all the usual semi-erratic pattern that mortals use when they aren’t thinking about it. He’s thinking about it. He never stops thinking about it. He controls every movement that can be controlled within the scope of his mortality. She has spent all these years thinking of herself as a near mirror of him, and within five sentences she’d realized it isn’t true. His eyeblinks prove they aren’t much alike at all.

“I do not,” he says.

Glee tilts her head—acknowledging the point, not conceding it. She wants to be respectful, but her mother has warned her to demand respect as well. Did her mother ever understand just how utterly alien an entity he is, beneath his deceptively still face? Maybe. And maybe her mother didn’t care, even if she did; maybe one Shoth woman’s incomprehensible primal force is another Shoth woman’s giant ridiculous ass. This thought makes her smile, and that gives her strength. “That risk is mine to take, Father, not yours to deny.”

His brow furrows. For the first time she sees something of herself in him, because the same scowl has graced her mirror whenever universal circumstances resist her design. “Return to your mother.”

This has power, and might have worked if her mother had not armed her for this battle. Rituals, propriety, order—he has made her subservient to these things. A good daughter should obey her father. However…“My mother told me to come and find you.” Propriety cancels propriety, leaving Glee free to find her own path.

He exhales. Is that exasperation? She is enough her mother’s daughter that she smiles again, just a little. Whatever it is, it’s a victory. But there is something more to his expression. What?

“You may not travel with me,” he states in a tone that brooks no compromise. “I am bound to serve mortals, to wander as one of them, unknown, commanding only what wealth and respect I can earn. It has been made clear to me that I must do that by wandering alone.”

“Yes,” says Glee, unruffled. “I have no intention of traveling with you. I’ll simply wander alone, too. And if I sleep in the same hostels and work the same jobs and eat in the same restaurants, it will be merely coincidence.”

His eyebrows flicker minutely—and deliberately—and at last her certainty returns. Yes, that is pleasure.

“Very well, Daughter,” he says, and oh, the frisson of that acknowledgment. At the beginning of time, Itempas created family and all the complex rules and hierarchies of power that govern it, and in this instant she feels all the responsibilities and honor of that structure snap into place around her. “I wish you well in your journey.”

Then he rises, placing a coin on the table to pay for the beer he ordered but did not drink, and walks out. Glee takes the beer, and when she has finished it, she leaves as well. When she steps outside, she sees him standing in the doorway of a hostel across the street, gazing idly at the horizon as if that is a thing the god of personified purpose would ever do. He turns, his gaze passing carelessly over her as she stands there, and heads inside.

She takes a deep breath and says to herself, “I suppose I should find somewhere to sleep for tonight.” As if talking to herself without reason is a thing she would ever do. But there are those who watch without eyes and listen without ears in this realm, and this is a new ritual that has been designed for their sake.

And how convenient: a hostel is right there.

This small battle won marks the beginning of a time of change. She travels alone—with Itempas—from there forth. Here is his ritual of atonement: each town or community he visits merits one month of his time. When he arrives in a new place, he first secures employment in order to contribute to the community and earn resources for himself. Sometimes the jobs include shelter and meals, sometimes just wages. The work varies, though it is generally manual and miserable: construction and repair, ship unloading or crewing, inventorying crates full of toxins in a poorly ventilated warehouse. He will not allow her to take these jobs alongside him. If she tries, he tells her not to; if she does it anyway, he quits and moves on to the next town early.

Glee doesn’t understand it, but she stops trying to subvert his plans. Instead she finds her own jobs, generally somewhere close to where he is working, and to the degree that these jobs allow, she observes him. (It is wasteful, disrespectful of his time, to ask questions if she can figure out the answers herself.) Finally the pattern becomes clear to her: the jobs he takes are all dangerous. Time and again she is called to see to Itempas’s remains after he falls off unstable roofs or poorly made gangplanks. His purpled lips and staring eyes chastise neglectful factory owners and slumlords to rethink their business practices. And by using his own semi-mortal flesh to do such work, he keeps true mortals from being injured or killed in his stead. It is effective, if violent; some communities are angered when newcomers die horribly, and this pushes the unscrupulous to change their ways. He saves many lives by the repeated destruction of his own.

It is also, Glee decides, horrifically inefficient. Mortal emotions are too fickle to reliably manipulate in this manner. For every town Itempas successfully reforms, there are ten others that care nothing for the deaths of strangers—especially when those strangers have white hair, or black skin, or cheap clothing, or male genitals, or Itempas’s haughty manner of speaking. Some towns like him for the same random things that other towns hate him for, yet still the outcome of his presence is never certain. There’s no sense to it.

Glee discusses this with her father sometimes as they sit in another guesthouse, sharing a table purely to save space, eating meals on separate checks. “This serves mortals, certainly,” she says, “but would it not serve better to get them to make the world better? If you could get the selfish ones to see that their greed harms everyone, including themselves—”

“Impossible,” Itempas says. “Selfishness is mortals’ nature. I did not command them to build a society that arbitrarily treats some as important and others as not, yet they have done so.” In his name, he does not add. They both find this offensive enough that there’s no need to mention it.

“Change is mortals’ nature, too,” Glee says quietly. Itempas grimaces in distaste.

“Only under duress,” he says. “They must have reasons to change.”

She considers this, tapping her fingers on the table in her impatience, trying to come up with reasons that would work, and only belatedly notices that he is watching her.

“This isn’t your burden,” he says when she frowns. His voice is gentle.

“Of course it is,” she snaps, and then bites down on her temper so that she can remain respectful.

He falls silent, and although nothing about him has overtly changed, she believes she has surprised him.

*  *  *

After a year or so of contemplation—she has never been so uncertain before—Glee proposes a way to enact the change they have discussed. Itempas listens and does not reply for another three months and towns. This is unusual for him; it is his nature, like her own, to make decisions at the speed of light. That he takes so long to answer tells her he agrees with her, at least in principle. He just needs time to adjust.

But he does ask her, one evening, “Why?”

It is her mother’s question, though for him it has multiple meanings: Why does she care? Why is she so determined to help him? Why is she bothering to spend the precious life she possesses, a life he has bent his own rules to create, on a task that may ultimately be futile? Now Glee has a better answer: “Because I know mortalkind can be better, and I’m willing to give my life to make it so.” She pauses. Hesitates. “I would appreciate help, however.”

Still not the answer, but not an embarrassment, either. Itempas is silent, and that is the end of the conversation.

But a few days later, wordlessly, Itempas begins the process of accepting this necessary change. It is fascinating, watching how he does this. And pitiful.

They have just concluded their business in the latest town, where Itempas nearly drowned trying to help a fishing boat haul in its catch with old fraying nets and a captain who did not heed the dire weather reports. Because other mortals’ lives were at stake, Itempas could use magic to save them, translocating everyone from the boat to the shore just as the mast sank beneath the waves. As a crowd gathers ’round to exclaim over the miracle of survivors, and to shout at the captain who sits ashamed nearby, Glee goes to her father, who stands watching all of this with a sterner-than-usual set to his face. There is more to it than the captain’s negligence, Glee understands. The boat’s nets were frayed because the captain could barely afford to keep his business afloat. His business was in danger because the price of fish is being artificially controlled by the Nobles’ Consortium in order to please several of the wealthier islander merchants, who run large fish distribution enterprises. The same people who curse the captain now have happily bought the cheap fish that made him so desperate for just one more catch. Now the man has lost his livelihood altogether, as have his crew members—but the price of fish will stay low, driving other captains into other storms and causing other wrecks from which there will be no magical rescue.

It is painfully clear even to Glee, who has less of a jaded eye toward human foibles, that these people will never believe themselves complicit in the lives lost. They accept that this is the way the world works, in part because it is all they know and in part because it is all they wish to know. They are Itempans, probably, all of them. Comfortable with the status quo.

They must be made to see a better way. It can be done quickly, but that would be violent, clumsy, crude. Itempas is not a god of revolution. Sea change, though, the transformation of attitudes and refinement of higher principles over generations? Yes. An exertion of positive influence here. A pressure against injustice there. It is what the Bright should have been, but the Bright went wrong because the Arameri were merely human. It can be done again, done right, with a god’s hand on the tiller.

Now Itempas stands at a literal crossroads, dusty and tree-shaded, where two old wagon tracks meet near the coast. They are on the Senm continent again, and if he follows the pattern she has come to expect of him, he will turn north; there’s a small mining village in that direction that looks promising Instead, he stands staring at the sign for longer than Glee can hold her breath.

She feels the moment when he makes the choice to begin, to change, because the whole universe utters a little shocked gasp. Then, slowly, gratingly, he turns southeast. The road going in this direction is wider, better kept, and the sign that points down its length reads SKY-IN-SHADOW.

It’s easier for him, once he’s walking. Putting one foot in front of the other is repeating an action he took before. But well before dark she finds an excuse to ask them to stop, and after she has built her separate fire and made herself some food—more than she needs, so, sadly, the excess will go to waste if she cannot give it to someone else, but look here is another person who needs it—he all but falls onto his bedroll. He refuses to eat from the parcel of conveniently leftover roasted groundnut and fowl in herbs. For the rest of the night he shivers and sweats, not actually sleeping but barely conscious nevertheless. When she touches his forehead, he is feverish. The infection that is change must run its course within him.

Glee keeps a surreptitious watch over him and contemplates the revelation that mortals can be stronger than gods under certain circumstances. Daughters can be stronger than fathers. The knowledge changes her, too, just a little.

And the next morning, when the sunrise makes him better, she is not wholly surprised when he sits up slowly, looking at her through bloodshot eyes. “I will help you,” he grates out.

It is the new purpose that they both need. She sees him take a deep breath after this declaration, some of the nausea fading from his expression. He sits up straighter, pushing his shoulders back. Makes another decision, this one apparently easy in light of the previous night’s cataclysmic paradigm shift.

“I would speak of a thing,” he says, as if to the fire. “You may listen if you wish. There is an order that comes of the implementation of justice, rather than the avoidance of conflict. Striking the blow to create this order requires tangibility, manifestation, intention, and in the past this has taken the form of a sword of white metal whose name cannot be said aloud without unraveling this realm.” His eyes shift to her for a moment. “Why might you utilize such a sword, if it became available to you?”

It is the third why that her parents have presented to her, and it is perhaps the most dangerous of them. After all, she is merely mortal—fickle, changeable, weak. What he describes is a degree of power that perhaps only a god can wield successfully, because only a god is ruled by purpose. But mortals are not so very different from gods sometimes, when the cause is great enough…and after all, Glee is only half mortal. The gift that he offers comes with risk—but it is a risk that she knows is hers to choose, if she wants it. He will not deny her.

So she smiles, because at last she has an answer to this why that satisfies her and that is worthy of his question.

“I would utilize it,” she says, “because I am your daughter. Why else?”

He does not smile. However, for the briefest of instants, his eyeblinks become irregular and rapid, and he looks away. By this she knows: she has made him unbearably proud.

There will be trials to come, naturally. Worlds do not change easily, and certainly not without risk. But this world will change, now, because Glee has decided that it must. This is why she needed him, after all: to understand herself. Now that she does…well. She smiles at the fire and contemplates the new order that she means to build. It is only a matter of time.

Then when Glee gets up to head to her bedroll, she stops and puts a hand on her father’s shoulder for a moment. Without looking, he reaches up to cover it. It is a meaningless gesture, performed for no particular reason. Not even a ritual. Just chance. Then they part, and there is nothing more that need be said between them. Everything is exactly as it should be.

Meet the Author

N.K. Jemisin

N. K. Jemisin is a Brooklyn author whose short fiction and novels have been multiply nominated for the Hugo, the World Fantasy Award, and the Nebula, shortlisted for the Crawford and the Tiptree, and have won the Locus Award. Her website is nkjemisin.com.

Also by N. K. Jemisin

THE INHERITANCE TRILOGY

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

The Broken Kingdoms

The Kingdom of Gods

INHERITANCE TRILOGY SHORT FICTION

The Awakened Kingdom (e-only novella)

Shades in Shadow: An Inheritance Triptych (e-only novella)

DREAMBLOOD

The Killing Moon

The Shadowed Sun

THE BROKEN EARTH

The Fifth Season

The Obelisk Gate

If you enjoyed

SHADES IN SHADOW,

look out for

THE FIFTH SEASON

THE BROKEN EARTH: BOOK 1

by N. K. Jemisin

THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS. FOR THE LAST TIME.

A season of endings has begun.

It starts with the great red rift across the heart of the world’s sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun.

It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter.

It starts with betrayal, and long-dormant wounds rising up to fester.

This is the Stillness, a land long familiar with catastrophe, where the power of the earth is wielded as a weapon. And where there is no mercy.

1

you, at the end

YOU ARE SHE. SHE IS you. You are Essun. Remember? The woman whose son is dead.

You’re an orogene who’s been living in the little nothing town of Tirimo for ten years. Only three people here know what you are, and two of them you gave birth to.

Well. One left who knows, now.

For the past ten years you’ve lived as ordinary a life as possible. You came to Tirimo from elsewhere; the townsfolk don’t really care where or why. Since you were obviously well educated, you became a teacher at the local creche for children aged ten to thirteen. You’re neither the best teacher nor the worst; the children forget you when they move on, but they learn. The butcher probably knows your name because she likes to flirt with you. The baker doesn’t because you’re quiet, and because like everyone else in town he just thinks of you as Jija’s wife. Jija’s a Tirimo man born and bred, a stoneknapper of the Resistant use-caste; everyone knows and likes him, so they like you peripherally. He’s the foreground of the painting that is your life together. You’re the background. You like it that way.

You’re the mother of two children, but now one of them is dead and the other is missing. Maybe she’s dead, too. You discover all of this when you come home from work one day. House empty, too quiet, tiny little boy all bloody and bruised on the den floor.

And you… shut down. You don’t mean to. It’s just a bit much, isn’t it? Too much. You’ve been through a lot, you’re very strong, but there are limits to what even you can bear.

Two days pass before anyone comes for you.

You’ve spent them in the house with your dead son. You’ve risen, used the toilet, eaten something from the coldvault, drunk the last trickle of water from the tap. These things you could do without thinking, by rote. Afterward, you returned to Uche’s side.

(You fetched him a blanket during one of these trips. Covered him up to his ruined chin. Habit. The steampipes have stopped rattling; it’s cold in the house. He could catch something.)

Late the next day, someone knocks at the house’s front door. You do not stir yourself to answer it. That would require you to wonder who is there and whether you should let them in. Thinking of these things would make you consider your son’s corpse under the blanket, and why would you want to do that? You ignore the door knock.

Someone bangs at the window in the front room. Persistent. You ignore this, too.

Finally, someone breaks the glass on the house’s back door. You hears footsteps in the hallway between Uche’s room and that of Nassun, your daughter.

(Nassun, your daughter.)

The footsteps reach the den and stop. “Essun?”

You know this voice. Young, male. Familiar, and soothing in a familiar way. Lerna, Makenba’s boy from down the road, who went away for a few years and came back a doctor. He’s not a boy anymore, hasn’t been for a while, so you remind yourself again to start thinking of him as a man.

Oops, thinking. Carefully, you stop.

He inhales, and your skin reverberates with his horror when he draws near enough to see Uche. Remarkably, he does not cry out. Nor does he touch you, though he moves to Uche’s other side and peers at you intently. Trying to see what’s going on inside you? Nothing, nothing. He then peels back the blanket for a good look at Uche’s body. Nothing, nothing. He pulls the blanket up again, this time over your son’s face.

“He doesn’t like that,” you say. It’s your first time speaking in two days. Feels strange. “He’s afraid of the dark.”

After a moment’s silence, Lerna pulls the sheet back down to just below Uche’s eyes.

“Thank you,” you say.

Lerna nods. “Have you slept?”

“No.”

So Lerna comes around the body and takes your arm, drawing you up. He’s gentle, but his hands are firm, and he does not give up when at first you don’t move. Just exerts more pressure, inexorably, until you have to rise or fall over. He leaves you that much choice. You rise. Then with the same gentle firmness he guides you toward the front door. “You can rest at my place,” he says.

You don’t want to think, so you do not protest that you have your own perfectly good bed, thank you. Nor do you declare that you’re fine and don’t need his help, which isn’t true. He walks you outside and down the block, keeping a grip on your elbow the whole time. A few others are gathered on the street outside. Some of them come near the two of you, saying things to which Lerna replies; you don’t really hear any of it. Their voices are blurring noise that your mind doesn’t bother to interpret. Lerna speaks to them in your stead, for which you would be grateful if you could bring yourself to care.

He gets you to his house, which smells of herbs and chemicals and books, and he tucks you into a long bed that has a fat gray cat on it. The cat moves out of the way enough to allow you to lie down, then tucks itself against your side once you’re still. You would take comfort from this if the warmth and weight did not remind you a little of Uche, when he naps with you.

Napped with you. No, changing tense requires thought. Naps.

“Sleep,” Lerna says, and it is easy to comply.

* * *

You sleep a long time. At one point you wake. Lerna has put food on a tray beside the bed: clear broth and sliced fruit and a cup of tea, all long gone to room temperature. You eat and drink, then go into the bathroom. The toilet does not flush. There’s a bucket beside it, full of water, which Lerna must have put there for this purpose. You puzzle over this, then feel the imminence of thought and have to fight, fight, fight to stay in the soft warm silence of thoughtlessness. You pour some water down the toilet, put the lid back down, and go back to bed.

* * *

In the dream, you’re in the room while Jija does it. He and Uche are as you saw them last: Jija laughing, holding Uche on one knee and playing “earthshake” while the boy giggles and clamps down with his thighs and waggles his arms for balance. Then Jija suddenly stops laughing, stands up—throwing Uche to the floor—and begins kicking him. You know this is not how it happened. You’ve seen the imprint of Jija’s fist, a bruise with four parallel marks, on Uche’s belly and face. In the dream Jija kicks, because dreams are not logical.

Uche keeps laughing and waggling his arms, like it’s still a game, even as blood covers his face.

You wake screaming, which subsides into sobs that you cannot stop. Lerna comes in, tries to say something, tries to hold you, and finally makes you drink a strong, foul-tasting tea. You sleep again.

* * *

“Something happened up north,” Lerna tells you.

You sit on the edge of the bed. He’s in a chair across from you. You’re drinking more nasty tea; your head hurts worse than a hangover. It’s nighttime, but the room is dim. Lerna has lit only half the lanterns. For the first time you notice the strange smell in the air, not quite disguised by the lanternsmoke: sulfur, sharp and acrid. The smell has been there all day, growing gradually worse. It’s strongest when Lerna’s been outside.

“The road outside town has been clogged for two days with people coming from that direction.” Lerna sighs and rubs his face. He’s fifteen years younger than you, but he no longer looks it. He has natural gray hair like many Cebaki, but it’s the new lines in his face that make him seem older—those, and the new shadows in his eyes. “There’s been some kind of shake. A big one, a couple of days ago. We felt nothing here, but in Sume—” Sume is in the next valley over, a day’s ride on horseback. “The whole town is…” He shakes his head.

You nod, but you know all this without being told, or at least you can guess. Two days ago, as you sat in your den staring at the ruin of your child, something came toward the town: a convulsion of the earth so powerful you have never sessed its like. The word shake is inadequate. Whatever-it-was would have collapsed the house on Uche, so you put something in its way—a breakwater of sorts, composed of your focused will and a bit of kinetic energy borrowed from the thing itself. Doing this required no thought; a newborn could do it, although perhaps not so neatly. The shake split and flowed around the valley, then moved on.

Lerna licks his lips. Looks up at you, then away. He’s the other one, besides your children, who knows what you are. He’s known for a while, but this is the first time he’s been confronted by the actuality of it. You can’t really think about that, either.

“Rask isn’t letting anyone leave or come in.” Rask is Rask Innovator Tirimo, the town’s elected headman. “It’s not a full-on lockdown, he says, not yet, but I was going to head over to Sume, see if I could help. Rask said no, and then he set the damn miners on the wall to supplement the Strongbacks while we send out scouts. Told them specifically to keep me within the gates.” Lerna clenches his fists, his expression bitter. “There are people out there on the Imperial Road. A lot of them are sick, injured, and that rusty bastard won’t let me help.”

“First guard the gates,” you whisper. It is a rasp. You screamed a lot after that dream of Jija.

“What?”

You sip more tea to soothe the soreness. “Stonelore.”

Lerna stares at you. He knows the same passages; all children learn them, in creche. Everyone grows up on campfire tales of wise lorists and clever geomests warning skeptics when the signs begin to show, not being heeded, and saving people when the lore proves true.

“You think it’s come to that, then,” he says, heavily. “Fire-under-Earth, Essun, you can’t be serious.”

You are serious. It has come to that. But you know he will not believe you if you try to explain, so you just shake your head.

A painful, stagnating silence falls. After a long moment, delicately, Lerna says, “I brought Uche back here. He’s in the infirmary, the, uh, in the coldcase. I’ll see to, uh… arrangements.”

You nod slowly.

He hesitates. “Was it Jija?”

You nod again.

“You, you saw him—”

“Came home from creche.”

“Oh.” Another awkward pause. “People said you’d missed a day, before the shake. They had to send the children home; couldn’t find a substitute. No one knew if you were home sick, or what.” Yes, well. You’ve probably been fired. Lerna takes a deep breath, lets it out. With that as forewarning, you’re almost ready. “The shake didn’t hit us, Essun. It passed around the town. Shivered over a few trees and crumbled a rock face up by the creek.” The creek is at the northernmost end of the valley, where no one has noticed a big chalcedony geode steaming. “Everything in and around town is fine, though. In almost a perfect circle. Fine.”

There was a time when you would have dissembled. You had reasons to hide then, a life to protect.

“I did it,” you say.

Lerna’s jaw flexes, but he nods. “I never told anyone.” He hesitates. “That you were… uh, orogenic.”

He’s so polite and proper. You’ve heard all the uglier terms for what you are. He has, too, but he would never say them. Neither would Jija, whenever someone tossed off a careless rogga around him. I don’t want the children to hear that kind of language, he always said—

It hits fast. You abruptly lean over and dry-heave. Lerna starts, jumping to grab something nearby—a bedpan, which you haven’t needed. But nothing comes out of your stomach, and after a moment the heaves stop. You take a cautious breath, then another. Wordlessly, Lerna offers a glass of water. You start to wave it away, then change your mind and take it. Your mouth tastes of bile.

“It wasn’t me,” you say at last. He frowns in confusion and you realize he thinks you’re still talking about the shake. “Jija. He didn’t find out about me.” You think. You shouldn’t think. “I don’t know how, what, but Uche—he’s little, doesn’t have much control yet. Uche must have done something, and Jija realized—”

That your children are like you. It is the first time you’ve framed this thought completely.

Lerna closes his eyes, letting out a long breath. “That’s it, then.”

That’s not it. That should never have been enough to provoke a father to murder his own child. Nothing should have done that.

He licks his lips. “Do you want to see Uche?”

What for? You looked at him for two days. “No.”

With a sigh, Lerna gets to his feet, still rubbing a hand over his hair. “Going to tell Rask?” you ask. But the look Lerna turns on you makes you feel boorish. He’s angry. He’s such a calm, thoughtful boy; you didn’t think he could get angry.

“I’m not going to tell Rask anything,” he snaps. “I haven’t said anything in all this time and I’m not going to.”

“Then what—”

“I’m going to go find Eran.” Eran is the spokeswoman for the Resistant use-caste. Lerna was born a Strongback, but when he came back to Tirimo after becoming a doctor, the Resistants adopted him; the town had enough Strongbacks already, and the Innovators lost the shard-toss. Also, you’ve claimed to be a Resistant. “I’ll let her know you’re all right, have her pass that on to Rask. You are going to rest.”

“When she asks you why Jija—”

Lerna shakes his head. “Everyone’s guessed already, Essun. They can read maps. It’s clear as diamond that the center of the circle was this neighborhood. Knowing what Jija did, it hasn’t been hard for anyone to jump to conclusions as to why. The timing’s all wrong, but nobody’s thinking that far.” While you stare at him, slowly understanding, Lerna’s lip curls. “Half of them are appalled, but the rest are glad Jija did it. Because of course a three-year-old has the power to start shakes a thousand miles away in Yumenes!”

You shake your head, half startled by Lerna’s anger and half unable to reconcile your bright, giggly boy with people who think he would—that he could—But then, Jija thought it.

You feel queasy again.

Lerna takes another deep breath. He’s been doing this throughout your conversation; it’s a habit of his that you’ve seen before. His way of calming himself. “Stay here and rest. I’ll be back soon.”

He leaves the room. You hear him doing purposeful-sounding things at the front of the house. After a few moments, he leaves to go to his meeting. You contemplate rest and decide against it. Instead you rise and go into Lerna’s bathroom, where you wash your face and then stop when the hot water coming through the tap spits and abruptly turns brown-red and smelly, then slows to a trickle. Broken pipe somewhere.

Something happened up north, Lerna said.

Children are the undoing of us, someone said to you once, long ago.

“Nassun,” you whisper to your reflection. In the mirror are the eyes your daughter has inherited from you, gray as slate and a little wistful. “He left Uche in the den. Where did he put you?”

No answer. You shut off the tap. Then you whisper to no one in particular, “I have to go now.” Because you do. You need to find Jija, and anyway you know better than to linger. The townsfolk will be coming for you soon.

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Contents

1. Cover

2. Title Page

3. Welcome

4. THE WILD BOY

5. THE GOD WITHOUT A NAME

6. THE THIRD WHY

7. Meet the Author

8. Also by N. K. Jemisin

9. Bonus Material

10. Newsletter

11. Copyright

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Copyright © 2015 by N. K. Jemisin

Excerpt from The Fifth Season copyright © 2014 by N. K. Jemisin

Cover design by Wendy Chan

Cover photo © Shutterstock

Cover copyright © 2015 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

First eBook edition: July 2015

ISBN: 978-0-316-38859-7

E3

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Welcome

THE WILD BOY

THE GOD WITHOUT A NAME

THE THIRD WHY

Meet the Author

Also by N. K. Jemisin

Bonus Material

Newsletter

Copyright