Shades in Shadow (5 page)

“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.

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.