Shades in Shadow Read online

  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 a
ctually 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.