Shades in Shadow (3 page)

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 offer
ing
), 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 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.”