The Kingdom of Gods

by N. K. Jemisin

  Nahadoth faded into view near Yeine, a storm weaving itself from nothingness into a semblance of mortal flesh. The shape that he took was an homage to his time of suffering: male, pale, the tendrils of his substance bleeding away like drifting, living smoke. (There had been a mortal body within that smoke once: Ahad. Did he shiver now, somewhere in the city below, feeling the nearby presence of his old prisoner?) Nahadoth’s shape was the only thing that had not changed since the days of his enslavement, for I felt his power now, gloriously whole and terrible, a weight upon the very air. Chaos and darkness, pure and unleashed.

  There were murmurs and cries of alarm within the group of Arameri as Nahadoth manifested, though Remath quelled them with a glare. Making an example of herself, she stepped forward. I did not think less of her for pausing to steel herself.

  I did think better of Shahar, though, who took a deep breath and moved away from us, hurrying to her mother’s side. Remath glanced back at her, forgetting to hide her surprise. Shahar inclined her head in taut reply. She had, after all, met Nahadoth before. Together, both women proceeded to join the two gods.

  Deka did not attempt to join them. He had folded his arms and begun to shift from foot to foot, throwing frowns at Itempas and then at me, generally radiating unhappiness. It was not difficult to guess at the source of his distress: the Three walked among us, even if they were not quite complete, and Deka was not stupid enough to believe they had all come merely to build the Arameri’s vacation home. No doubt he guessed now why I had been so upset the night before.

  I came for you, Itempas had said.

  I folded my arms across my chest as well, but this was not defensive. It just took effort to steel myself against hope.

  Then the conversation was done, and Yeine looked up at all of us, nodding once in absent reply to something Remath said. Her eyes met mine across the forecourt just as, beyond her, the horizon flared gold with the sun’s first delicate rays. For just an instant — as fleeting as the dawn itself — her form changed, becoming something indescribable. My mind tried to define it anyway, using images and sensations that its mortal perceptions could encompass. A phantasm of herself drawn in silver-pastel mist. A vast and impossible landscape, dominated by a whole forest of trees as great as the one that cradled us now. The scent and taste of ripe fruit, tooth-tender and succulently sweet. For a moment I ached with most unfilial yearnings: lust for her, jealousy for Naha, and pity for Tempa because he had gotten to taste her only once.

  Then the moment passed, and Yeine was herself again, and her smile was for me alone, her first and favorite son. I would not give up that specialness for all the world.

  “Time to go,” she said.

  And suddenly we were no longer in Sky.

  “We” being all of us, gods and Arameri, right down to the servants and baggage. One moment we were in Sky’s forecourt, and the next, the forty or so of us were somewhere else in the world, transported by a flick of Yeine’s will. It was later here; the dawn had advanced into full morning, but I paid little attention to this. I was too busy laughing at the Arameri, most of whom were stumbling or gasping or otherwise trying not to panic, because we stood atop an ocean. Waves surrounded us, an endless plain of gently heaving emptiness. When I looked down, I saw that our feet dented the water, as though someone had laid a thin and flexible coating between the liquid and our shoes. When the waves bobbed beneath us, we bobbed with them but did not sink. Some of the Arameri fell over, unable to adjust. I chuckled and braced my feet apart, balancing easily. The trick was to lean forward and rely on one’s core, not the legs. I had skated oceans of liquefied gas, long ago. This was not so different.

  “Bright Father help us!” cried someone.

  “You need no help,” Itempas snapped, and the man fell over, staring at him. Tempa, of course, was rock-steady upon the waves.

  “Will this do?” Yeine asked Remath. Remath, I was amused to see, had solved the problem of maintaining balance and dignity by dropping to one knee again.

  “Yes, Lady,” Remath replied. A swell passed beneath us, making everyone rise and then drop several feet. Yeine, I noted, did not move as this occurred; the dent beneath her feet simply deepened as the water rose and flowed around her. And the swell died the instant it drew near Nahadoth, the wave’s force dissipating into scattered, pointless motion.

  “Where are we?” Shahar asked. She had knelt as well, following Remath’s lead, but even this seemed difficult for her. She did not look up as she spoke, concentrating on remaining at least somewhat upright.

  It was Nahadoth who answered. He had turned to face the sun, narrowing his eyes with a faint look of distaste. It did not harm him, however, because it was just one small star, and it was always night somewhere in the universe.

  “The Ovikwu Sea,” he said. “Or so it was last called, long ago.”

  I began to chuckle. Everyone nearby looked at me in confusion. “The Ovikwu,” I said, letting my voice carry so they could all share the joke, “was a landbound sea in the middle of the Maroland — the continent that once existed where we now stand.” The continent that had been destroyed by the Arameri when they’d been foolish enough to try and use Nahadoth as their weapon. He’d done what they wanted, and then some.

  Deka inhaled. “The first Sky. The one that was destroyed.”

  Nahadoth turned — and paused, gazing at him for far too long a breath. I tensed, my belly clenching. Did he notice the familiarity of Deka’s features, so clearly etched with Ahad’s stamp? If he realized what Deka was, what Remath and Shahar were … Would he listen if I pleaded for their lives?

  “The first Sky is directly below,” he said. And then he looked at me. He knew. I swallowed against sudden fear.

  “Not for long,” said Yeine.

  She raised a hand in a graceful beckoning gesture toward the sea beneath us. The Three can bring new worlds into existence at will; they can set galaxies spinning with a careless breath. It took Yeine no effort to do what she did then. She didn’t need to gesture at all. That was just her sense of theater.

  But I think she’d overestimated the mortal attention span. No one noticed her once the first stones burst from the sea.

  It was Deka who murmured for a bubble of air to form around all of us, warding off the now-churning waves and spray. Thus we were safe, able to watch in undisturbed awe as jagged, seaweed-draped and coral-encrusted chunks of daystone — the smallest the size of the Arms of Night — rose beneath and around us. Rubble undisturbed for centuries: it rose now, tumbling upward, stone piling atop stone and fusing, walls forming and shedding debris, courtyards rising beneath our feet to take the place of the heaving waves, structure shaping itself from nothingness.

  Then it was done, and the spray cleared, and we looked around to find ourselves standing atop glory.

  Take a nautilus shell; cut it cross section. Gently elevate its swirling, chambered tiers as they approach the tight-bound center, culminating at last in a pinnacle on which we all stood. Note its asymmetrical order, its chaotic repetition, the grace of its linkages. Contemplate the ephemerality of its existence. Such is the beauty that is mortal life.

  This was not Sky, old or new. It was smaller than both its predecessor palaces and deceptively simpler. Where those earlier structures had been built compact and high, this palace hugged the ocean’s surface. Instead of sharp spires piercing the sky, here there were low, smoothly sloping buildings, joined by dozens of lacy bridges. The foundation — for the palace had been built atop a kind of convex platform — was many-lobed and odd, with spars and indentations jutting out in every direction. Its surface gleamed in the dawn light, white and nacreous as pearl, the only similarity between it and Sky.

  I could feel the power woven into every sweeping balustrade, keeping the massive edifice afloat — but there was more to it than magic. Something about the structure itself worked to maintain its buoyancy. If I had still been a god, I might have understood it, for there are rules even where we are concerned,
and it was Yeine’s nature to seek balance. Perhaps the magic harnessed the ocean’s waves in some new way or absorbed the power of the sun. Perhaps the foundation was hollow. Regardless, it was clear this new palace would float, and with some assistive magic would travel readily across the ocean. It would defend the precious cargo within its walls, if only because no mortal army could assail it.

  While the mortals turned about, most of them speechless with awe, the rest making sounds of shock and delight and incomprehension, I strode across the drying daystone of the central platform. Yeine and Nahadoth turned to face me.

  “Not bad,” I said. “Bit white, though, isn’t it?”

  Yeine shrugged, amused. “You were thinking gray walls? Do you want them all to kill themselves?”

  I looked around, considering the vast but monotonous surrounding oceanscape. Faintly I could hear surf and wind; aside from that there was silence. I grimaced. “Point. But that doesn’t mean they should have to endure the same boring, austere sameness of the previous two palaces, does it? They’re yours now. Find some way to remind them of that.”

  She thought a moment. Nahadoth, however, smiled. Suddenly the daystone beneath our feet softened, turning to thick black loam. Everywhere I looked — on railings, edging the bridges — the daystone had remolded itself into troughs of soil.

  Yeine laughed and went to him, a teasing look in her eye. “A hint?” She extended her hand, and he took it. I could not help noticing the easy camaraderie between them and the sudden softness of Nahadoth’s cabochon eyes when he gazed at her. His ever-changing face grew still, too, becoming a different kind of familiar: brown-skinned and angular and Darren. I fought the urge to glance at Deka, to see if he had noticed.

  “We have always built better together than alone,” Naha said. Yeine leaned against him, and the soft dark tendrils of his aura swept forward to surround her. They did not touch her, but they did not have to.

  A movement at the corner of my vision drew my attention. Itempas had turned away from his siblings’ intimacy, watching me instead. I gazed back at him in his solitude, surprised to feel sympathy instead of the usual anger. We two outcasts.

  Then I spied Shahar, standing near Dekarta. He was alight as I had never seen him, turning and turning to try and take in the whole of the palace. It looked as though he would never stop grinning. I thought of the adventure novels he’d loved so as a child and wished I was still god enough to enjoy this pleasure with him.

  Shahar, more subdued, was smiling, too, glancing now and again at the spirals, but mostly she was just watching him. Her brother, whom she’d lost for so long, come back to her at last.

  And purely by chance as I watched them, they noticed me. Deka’s grin grew wider; Shahar’s small smile lingered. They did not join hands as they walked over to me, stepping carefully over the soft soil, but the bond between them was obvious to anyone who knew how love looked. That this bond included me was equally obvious. I turned to them, and for a long and wondrous moment, I was not alone.

  Then Yeine said, “Come, Sieh,” and the moment ended.

  Shahar and Deka stopped, their smiles fading. I saw understanding come. They had made me mortal so I could be their friend. What would happen to us once I was a god again?

  A hand touched my shoulder, and I looked up. Itempas stood there. Ah, yes; he had loved mortals, too, over the years. He knew how it felt to leave them behind.

  “Come,” he said gently.

  Without another word, I turned my back on Dekarta and Shahar and went with him.

  Yeine and Nahadoth met us, and their power folded around us, and we vanished just as the first green shoots began to push up from the soil.

  18

  In the name of Itempas

  We pray for light.

  We beg the sun for warmth.

  We diffuse the shadows.

  In the name of Itempas

  We speak to give meaning to sound.

  We think before we act.

  We kill, but only for peace.

  The chamber in which we appeared was not far from the others. Still in the new palace, in fact — one of the smaller, delicate nautilus chambers that had formed on the palace’s outermost edges, covered over by prism glass. As soon as we appeared in it, I knew what it really was: a pocket of space made different from the world around it, ideal for scrivening or channeling magic without spreading the magic’s effects to the surrounding structure. Deka would love these when he found them.

  Nahadoth and Yeine faced Itempas, who gazed back at them. No expression on any face, though this meant little, I knew, for they had never needed words to speak. Too much of what they needed to exchange was emotion in any case. Perhaps that was why, when Nahadoth spoke, he kept his words brief and his manner cool.

  “Until sunset,” he said. “You will have that much parole.”

  Itempas nodded slowly. “I will attend to Sieh at once, of course.”

  “When sunset comes and you return to mortal flesh, you will be weak,” Yeine added. “Be sure you prepare.”

  Itempas only sighed, nodding again.

  It was an intentional cruelty. They had granted him parole for my sake, but we needed his power for only a moment. For them to allow a whole day of freedom beyond that, when they would only snatch it back at the day’s end, was just their way of turning the knife again. He deserved it, I reminded myself, deserved it in spades.

  But I will not pretend it didn’t trouble me.

  Then there was a shimmer, all that my mortal mind could perceive, and the whole world sang clean when they stripped the mortal covering from him and cast it away. Itempas did not cry out, though he should have. I would have. Instead he only shuddered, closing his eyes as his hair turned to an incandescent nimbus and his clothes glowed as if woven from stars and — I would have laughed, if this had not been sacred — his boots turned white. Even with my dull mortal senses, I felt the effort he exerted to control the sudden blaze of his true self, the wash of heat that it sent across the surface of reality, tsunamis in the wake of a meteor strike. He stilled it all, leaving only profound silence.

  Would I do as well, when I was a god again? Probably not. Most likely I would shout and jump up and down, and maybe start dancing across any planets nearby.

  Soon, now.

  When the blaze of Itempas’s restoration had passed, he paused for a moment longer, perhaps composing himself. I braced myself when he focused on me, as he had promised. But then, almost imperceptibly — I would not have noticed if I hadn’t known him so well — he frowned.

  “What is it?” asked Yeine. “There is nothing wrong with him,” Itempas replied.

  “Nothing wrong with me?” I gestured at myself, with my man’s hand. I’d had to shave again that morning and had nicked my jaw in the process. It still hurt, damn it. “What is there about me that isn’t wrong?”

  Itempas shook his head slowly. “It is my nature to perceive pathways,” he said. An approximation of what he meant, since we were speaking in Senmite out of respect for my delicate mortal flesh. “To establish them where none exist and to follow those already laid. I can restore you to what you are meant to be. I can halt that which has gone wrong. But nothing about you, Sieh, is wrong. What you have become …” He looked at Yeine and Nahadoth. He would never have done anything so undignified as throw up his hands, but his frustration was a palpable thing. “He is as he should be.”

  “That cannot be,” said Nahadoth, troubled. He stepped toward me. “This is not his nature. His growth damages him. How can this be meant?”

  “And who,” asked Yeine, speaking slowly because she was not as practiced as the other two at rendering our concepts into mortal speech, “has meant it?”

  They looked at each other, and belatedly I realized the gist of their words. I would not be regaining my godhood today. Sighing, I turned away from them and went over to the curving nacre wall. I sat down against it and propped my arms on my knees.

  And, quite predictably, thin
gs went very bad, very fast.

  “This cannot be,” Nahadoth said again, and I knew his anger by the way the little chamber suddenly dimmed despite the bright morning sunlight filtering through its glass ceiling. Only the chamber dimmed, however, rather than the whole sky. Clever Yeine, planning for her brothers’ tempers. If only I had not been trapped in the chamber with them.

  Nahadoth stepped toward Itempas, his aura weaving itself darker and thinner, becoming a glow that no mortal eyes should have been able to see by any law of nature — but of course he defied such laws, so the blackness was plain to all.

  “You have always been a coward, Tempa,” he said. The words skittered around the chamber’s walls, darting, striking in echoes. “You pressed for the demons’ slaughter. You fled this realm after the War and kept our children away, leaving us to deal with the mess. Shall I believe you now when you say you cannot help my son?”

  I waited for the explosion of Itempas’s fury and all the usual to follow. They would fight, and Yeine would do as Enefa had always done and keep their battle contained, and only when they were both exhausted would she try to reason with them.

  I was so tired of this. So tired of all of it.

  But the surprise was mine. Itempas shook his head slowly. “I would do no less than my best by our child, Naha.” Only the faintest of emphasis on our, I noticed, where once he would have made a show of possession. He did not look at me, but he didn’t have to. Every word that Itempas spoke had meaning, often in multiple layers. He knew, as I did, that his claim on me was precarious at best.

  I frowned at him, wondering at this newfound humility; it did not at all seem like the Tempa I knew. Nor did his calm in the face of Nahadoth’s accusation. Nahadoth frowned at this, too, more in suspicion than surprise.

  And then something else unexpected happened: Yeine stepped forward, looking at Nahadoth with annoyance. “This serves no purpose,” she snapped. “We did not come here to rehash old grievances.” And then, before Nahadoth could flare at her, she touched his arm. “Look to our son, Naha.”