The Kingdom of Gods

by N. K. Jemisin

  “You don’t know him,” she said, with a hint of sharpness that told me there was more to the “thing” than she was letting on. “He does not reveal himself to you. He loved you once; you can hurt him as no one else can. What you think of him, and what he truly is, are very different things.”

  I rocked back a little, surprised at her vehemence. “Well, clearly you don’t trust him —”

  She flicked a hand impatiently, dismissively. Gods, she was so much like Itempas that it hurt. “I’m not a fool. It may be a long time before he sheds the habits of his former life. Until then, I’m cautious with him.”

  I was tempted to warn her further: she needed to be more than cautious with Ahad. He had been created from the substance of Nahadoth in his darkest hour, nurtured on suffering and refined by hate. He liked to hurt people. I don’t think even he realized what a monster he was.

  But that impatient little flick had been a warning for me. She wasn’t interested in whatever I had to say about Ahad. Clearly she intended to judge him for herself. I couldn’t really blame her; I wasn’t exactly unbiased.

  I wasn’t tired, but clearly Glee was. She fell silent after that, and I turned back to the window to let her sleep. Presently her breathing evened out, providing a slow and curiously soothing background noise for my thoughts. The people in the common room had finally shut up. There was no one but me and the city.

  And Nahadoth, appearing silently in the window reflection behind me.

  I was not surprised to see him. I smiled at the pale glimmer of his face, not turning from the window. “It’s been a while.”

  The change to his face was minute; a slight drawing together of those fine, perfect brows. I chuckled, guessing his thoughts. A while; two years. Barely noticeable, to a god. I’d taken longer naps. “Every passing moment shortens my life, Naha. Of course I feel it more now.”

  “Yes.” He fell silent again, thinking his unfathomable thoughts. He didn’t look well, I decided, though this had nothing to do with his actual appearance, which was magnificent. But that was just his usual mask. Beneath that mask, which I could just barely perceive, he felt … strange. Off. A storm whose winds had faltered at the touch of colder, quelling air. He was unhappy — very much so.

  “When you see Itempas,” he said at last, “ask him to help you.”

  At this I swung around on the windowsill, frowning. “You’re not serious.”

  “Yeine can do nothing to erase your mortality. I can neither cure nor preserve you. I meant it, Sieh, when I said I would not lose you.”

  “There’s nothing he can do, Naha. He’s got less magic than me!”

  “Yeine and I have discussed the matter. We will grant him a single day’s parole if he will agree to help you.”

  My mouth fell open. It took me several tries to speak. “He’s endured barely a century of mortality. Do you really think we can trust him?”

  “If he attempts to escape or attack us, I will kill his demon.”

  I flinched. “Glee?” I glanced at her. She had fallen asleep in the chair, her head slumped to one side. Either she was a heavy sleeper, an excellent faker, or Naha was keeping her asleep. Most likely the latter, given the subject of our conversation.

  She had tried to help me.

  “Are we Arameri now?” I asked. My voice was harsher than usual in the dimness, deep and rough. I kept forgetting that it was not a child’s voice. “Are we willing to pervert love itself to get what we want?”

  “Yes.” I knew he meant it by the fact that the room’s temperature suddenly dropped ten degrees. “The Arameri are wise in one respect, Sieh: they show no mercy to their enemies. I will not risk unleashing Itempas’s madness again. He lives only because the mortal realm cannot exist without him and because Yeine has pleaded for his life. I permitted him to keep his daughter only for this purpose. Demon, beloved … she is a weapon, and I mean to use her.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “You regretted what you did to the demons, Naha. Have you forgotten that? They are our children, too, you said —”

  He stepped closer, reaching for my face. “You are the only child who matters to me now.”

  I recoiled and struck his hand away. His eyes widened in surprise. “What the hells kind of father are you? You always say things like that, treat some of us better than others. Gods, Naha! How twisted is that?”

  Silence fell, and in it my soul shriveled. Not in fear. It was simply that I knew, or had known, precisely why he did not love all his children equally. Differentiation, variation, appreciation of the unique: this was part of what he was. His children were not the same, so his feelings toward each were not the same. He loved us all, but differently. And because he did this, because he did not pretend that love was fair or equal, mortals could mate for an afternoon or for the rest of their lives. Mothers could tell their twins or triplets apart. Children could have crushes and outgrow them; elders could remain devoted to their spouses long after beauty had gone. The mortal heart was fickle. Naha made it so. And because of this, they were free to love as they wished, and not solely by the dictates of instinct or power or tradition.

  I had understood this once. All gods did.

  My hand dropped into my lap. It was shaking. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  He lowered his hand, too, saying nothing for a long, bruised moment.

  “You cannot remain in mortal flesh much longer,” he said at last. “It’s changing you.”

  I lowered my head and nodded once. He was my father, and he knew best. I had been wrong not to listen.

  With a night-breeze sigh, Nahadoth turned away, his substance beginning to blend into the room’s shadows. Sudden, irrational panic seized me. I sprang to my feet, my throat knotting in fear and anguish. “Naha — please. Will you …” Mortal, mortal, I was truly mortal now. I was his favorite, he was my dark father, his love was fickle, and I had changed almost beyond recognition. “Please don’t leave yet.”

  He turned back and swept forward all in one motion, and all at once I was adrift and cradled in the soft dark of his innermost self, with hands I could not see stroking my hair.

  “You will always be mine, Sieh.” His voice was everywhere. He had never let anyone but me and his siblings into this part of himself. It was the core of him, vulnerable, pure. “Even if you love him again. Even if you grow old. I am not wholly dark, Itempas is not wholly light, and there are some things about me that will never change, not even if the walls of the Maelstrom should fall.”

  Then he was gone. I lay on the patterned rug, shivering as the inn room began to warm up in Nahadoth’s wake, watching the silver curls of my own breath. I was too cold to cry, so I tried to remember a lullaby that Nahadoth had once sung to me, so that I could sing myself to sleep. But the words would not come. The memory was gone.

  In the morning I woke to find Glee standing over me with a mixture of confusion and contempt on her face. But she offered me a hand to help me up from the floor.

  A new little sister. And Ahad was a new sibling, too. I vowed to try and be a better brother to them both.

  Dekarta’s procession was spotted on the outskirts of the city around midmorning. At the rate they were wending their way through the streets — passing through South Root, of all things; Hymn’s parents would make a killing — they would reach the Avenue of Nobles at twilight.

  Auspicious timing, I decided. Then I followed Glee out of the inn and we slipped into the crowd to try and keep Shahar and Dekarta alive for a few paltry years more.

  15

  The soldiers go a-marching

  pomp pomp pomp

  The catapults are flinging

  whomp whomp whomp

  The horses come a-trotting

  clomp clomp clomp

  And down falls the enemy

  stomp stomp stomp!

  The steps of the Salon were impressive on their own: white marble, wide and colonnaded, gently curving around the building’s girth. Clearly they were not impressive enough f
or Arameri tastes, however, and so the steps had been embellished. Two additional stairwells — immense and unsupported — curved off the Salon’s steps to the left and right like wings poised in flight. They were made of daystone so that they glowed faintly; only a scrivener could have built them. They were magnificent even against the looming backdrop of the Tree, which tended to diminish any mortal effort at grandeur to pointlessness. In fact, the twin stairwells seemed to come from the Tree itself, suggesting a divine connection for the people who descended them. Which was probably the point.

  I could not see the platforms at the tops of the daystone stairways, but it was not hard to guess that the scriveners had etched gates into each. Shahar, Remath, and perhaps a few others of the Central Family would arrive by this means, then descend to the Salon’s actual steps. Revoltingly predictable, but they were Itempans; I couldn’t expect better.

  Sighing, I craned my neck again from my vantage point: the lid of a muckbin at the corner of a dead-end street, about a block away from the Salon building. The Avenue of Nobles was a sea of mortal heads, thousands of people standing about or walking, laughing, talking, the aura of excitement wafting off them like a warm summer breeze. The city’s street artists had taken shameless advantage of the opportunity to make festive ribbon pennants, dancing puppets with the faces of famous folk, and small contraptions that blatted out a few flakes of sparkling white confetti when blown hard. Already the air was thick with the glittering motes, which did a marvelous job of capturing the thin, dappled light that passed for daytime in Shadow. Adults and children alike seemed to love the things. I shivered now and again as their pleasure in the toys stirred whatever was left of the god in me.

  Hard to focus, amid so many distractions. (My hands itched to play with one of the puppets. It had been so long since I’d had a new toy.) But I had a job to do, so I kept scanning the crowd, holding on to a gutter pipe as I leaned this way and that. I would know when I found what I was looking for. It was only a matter of time.

  Then, just as I had begun to worry, I spotted my quarry. Moving past a tightly packed group of middle-aged women who looked both thrilled and terrified to be among such a crowd: a boy of nine or ten years old. Amn, wearing old clothing that had the look of garments taken from a White Hall tithe pile, with unkempt hair that hadn’t seen a comb in days. He passed one of the women and stumbled, bracing one hand on her back to right himself and apologizing quickly. It was nicely done; he had bowed himself away and into the current of foot traffic almost before the woman realized he’d touched her.

  I grinned, delighted. Then I hopped down from the bin lid (another man immediately claimed my place atop it, throwing a belligerent look at my back) and hurried after him.

  Took half a block to catch up with him; he was small and wove among the members of the crowd as deftly as a river snake among reeds. I was a grown-up and had to be polite. But I’d guessed his destination — a pack of children milling about a stall that sold tamarind-lime juice — and that made it easy to head him off a few feet before he reached them. I caught his thin, wiry arm and stayed ready, because boys his age were not defenseless. They had no compunctions against biting, and they tended to run in packs.

  The boy swore at me in polyglot profanity, immediately trying to pull free. “Leggo!”

  “What’d you take?” I asked, genuinely curious. The woman hadn’t had a purse visible, probably fearing exactly what had happened to her, but there could have been one beneath her clothing. “Jewelry? A shawl or something? Or did you actually manage to get into her pocket?” If the latter, he was a master of his craft and would be perfect for my needs.

  His eyes grew wide. “’In’t take nothin’! Who th’ hells —” He jumped suddenly and grabbed at my wrist, which was already emerging from his pocket. I’d gotten only one coin; my hands were too damned big now for proper pocket-picking. But his face turned purple with fury and consternation, and I grinned.

  I lifted the hand that held the coin and closed my fingers around it. Didn’t even need magic for this trick: when I opened my hand again, two coins lay there, his and one from my own pocket.

  The boy froze, staring at this. He did not take either coin, turning a suddenly shrewd and wary look on me. “Wh’you want?”

  I let him go, now that I’d gotten his attention. “To hire you, and any friends you’ve got with similar inclinations.”

  “We don’t want trouble.” The slangy, contracted Senmite he’d been using vanished as swiftly as he had, after lifting the woman’s purse. “Keepers don’t bother us as long as we stick to pockets and wallets. Anything more and they’ll hunt us down.”

  I nodded, wishing I could bless him with safety. “All I want you to do is look,” I said. “Move through the crowd, see what you usually see, do what you usually do. But if you let me, I can look through your eyes.”

  He caught his breath, and for a moment I couldn’t read his face. He was astonished and skeptical and hopeful and frightened, all at once. But he searched my face with such sudden intensity that I realized, far later than I should have, what he was thinking. When I did, I started to grin, and that did it: his eyes got as big as twenty-meri coins.

  “Trickster, trickster,” he whispered. “Stole the sun for a prank.” En pulsed on my breast, pleased to be mentioned.

  “No prayers, now,” I said, cupping his cheek with one hand. Mine. “I’m not a god today, just a man who needs your help. Will you give it?”

  He inclined his head just a hair more formally than he needed to. Ah, he was marvelous. “Your hand,” I said, and he offered it to me at once.

  I still had a few ways of using magic, though they were crude and weak and a betrayal of my pride to employ. The universe did not listen to me the way it once had, but as long as I kept the requests simple, it would grudgingly obey. “Look,” I said in our tongue, and the air shivered around us as I traced the shape of an eye into the boy’s palm with my fingertip. “Hear. Share.”

  The outline flickered briefly, a silver flash like drifting confetti, and then the boy’s flesh was just flesh again. He peered at it, fascinated.

  “Find your friends,” I said. “Touch as many of them as you can with this hand, and send them out among the crowd. The magic will end when the Arameri family head returns to Sky.” Then I closed my free hand and opened it again. This time a single coin sat in my palm: a hundred-meri piece, more than the boy could have stolen in a week, unless he’d gotten very bold or very lucky.

  The boy’s eyes fixed on it, but he did not reach for it, swallowing. “I can’t take money from you.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” I said, and tucked the coin into his pocket before I let him go. “No follower of mine should ever do something for nothing. If you need to change it safely, go to the Arms of Night in South Root and tell Ahad I sent you. He’ll be an ass about it, but he won’t cheat you. Now go.” And because he was staring at me, awe stunting his wits, I winked at him and then stepped back, letting myself vanish amid the crowd. There was no magic to this. It just took an understanding of how mortals moved when they gathered together in great herds like this. The boy did the same thing as part of his pickpocketing, but I had several thousand years’ experience on him. From his perspective, I seemed to disappear. I caught a final glimpse of his mouth falling open, and then I let the traffic carry me elsewhere.

  “Smoothly done,” said Glee when I found her again. She had been waiting in front of a small café, standing as still and striking as a pillar amid the flow of babbling mostly Amn.

  “You were watching?” The café had a bench, which was packed; I didn’t even try to sit. Instead I leaned against a wall, half in Glee’s shadow. Though neither of us were Amn, I was betting no one would notice me with her there. After five minutes I knew I was right; half the people who had passed us glanced at her, and the other half ignored us altogether.

  “Some,” she replied. “I’m not a god. I can’t see without my eyes like you do. But I can see magic, even in a cr
owd.”

  “Oh.” Demon magic was always strange. I slipped my hands into my pockets and yawned loudly, not bothering to cover my mouth despite the disgusted glances of a passing couple. “So, Itempas around here somewhere, too?”

  “No.”

  I snorted. “What exactly is it that you’re protecting him from? Nothing short of demons’ blood can kill him, and who would do that, given the consequences?”

  She said nothing for a long moment, and I thought she would ignore me. Then she said, “How much do you know about godsblood?”

  “I know the mortals drink it, when they can, for a taste of magic.” My lip curled. During my first few decades in Sky, some of the Arameri had taken blood from me. It had done nothing for them, since my flesh then was more or less mortal, but that hadn’t stopped them from trying. “I know some of my siblings sell it to them, gods know why.”

  Glee shrugged. “Our organization, via Kitr’s group, keeps an eye on such sales. A few months ago, Kitr received a request for some very unusual godsblood. More unusual, anyway, than the standard requests for menstrual flow or heart blood.”

  Now it was my turn to be surprised, mostly because I hadn’t realized any of my sisters bothered menstruating. Why in darkness — Well, it didn’t matter. “Itempas is mortal now. His flesh is, anyway. His blood would only sour some poor mortal’s stomach.”

  “He’s still one of the Three, Sieh. Even without magic, his blood has value. And who’s to say that these mask users can’t find a way to eke magic out of Father’s blood even in his current state? Remember that there is godsblood in the northerners’ masks … and remember that Kahl’s mask is yet incomplete.”

  I cursed as I understood. I did this strictly in Senmite — too dangerous to speak our tongue under these conditions. No way to know who was listening or what strange magics slept nearby. “This is what comes of gods selling pieces of themselves to mortals.” My stupid, stupid younger siblings! Hadn’t they seen, again and again, that mortals would always find a way to use gods, hurt us, control us, if they could? I slammed a fist against the unyielding stone of the wall behind me and gasped as, instead of cracking the wall, my hand reminded me of its fragility with a white, breathtaking flash of pain.