Shades in Shadow (2 page)

The rival drops, screaming. The boy watches until a red crumple is all that remains of his erstwhile competition. Nahadoth feels his vague dissatisfaction and is unsurprised. Killing Lady Sessara and her noble husband was much more challenging. His boy is nothing if not a craftsman.

His
boy? Oh, yes. Nahadoth smiles to himself, deep in the shadowed well. Even though he is supposed to have no worshippers, is permitted to answer no prayers, he still knows his own.

Nahadoth relaxes and lets himself drift again—but not far this time. He keeps his consciousness relatively near this realm, because it is only a matter of time before his boy does something else fun.

They use him again, or try to. One of them speaks, the chains tighten and grind, and Nahadoth is dragged from the well to do a mortal's bidding. They grimace at the sight of him because his form is only rudimentary; Itempas laid the rules that his flesh must follow, but Itempas can no longer shape him beyond that. (Nahadoth retains that much power over himself.) But for what they want, a rudimentary god will do.
Make darkness
, they tell him, and they point at a place. He does what they command and then they are upset. Apparently they simply wanted him to blot out the sunlight so a nation's crops would die. But they did not
say
that; they said
darkness
, and
he
is darkness, so naturally Nahadoth put part of himself in the place, which devoured all the light. It ate even the light mortals cannot see, all the pretty wavelengths of the world, like those that are generated by sound and heat and moving things. Now that whole nation is still and silent, every living thing frozen into dust, the soil dead; a new wasteland has been born. Now the world decries the Arameri as monsters. Oh, well. They should have been more specific.

They send Nahadoth back to his well.

A dream.

A gift. Nsana sends it quietly, from afar. Not all of the children who love Nahadoth are imprisoned with him, because not all of them offended Itempas enough to merit punishment. Tempa is nothing if not fair in his cruelty. Nsana is the first to reach out to Nahadoth, and the instant he feels it, he knows Nsana has endangered himself, because Itempas watches. (No, Itempas does not watch their children. He watches Nahadoth, always, with a close and jealous eye.) But even Tempa cannot punish a dream, can he? Tempa cannot want Naha to go mad again. He cannot. He cannot. Not even if Tempa has gone mad himself.

This dream is a memory, because Nsana knows better than to let Nahadoth's mind roam where it will. (Memory of a face in ivory damask, eyes shut and lashes dewed, openmouthed in pleasure and abandon. Nahadoth was careful, careful, because dreams are fragile, but Nsana was stronger than he seemed.) Nsana understands him better than even Sieh does. This dream consists of a single sense: taste. Nahadoth closes his eyes and opens his body's mouth and for a moment there is musk on his tongue, slightly bitter, not entirely pleasant. Aromatic. The taste of it radiates up through the body's sinus cavity, offering an impression of itself to other senses: the redolence of old leather and dried leaves, the warmth of an afternoon sun. The last time he tasted this was long ago, but he remembers it because it was a beautiful day on a beautiful world, which he spent entirely absorbed in the sensations and pleasurable constrictions of mortal flesh. His own and that of two others. Smooth muscled arms clothed in black skin, holding him close from behind. A narrow burnished torso leaning close so that he can nuzzle tiny breasts; long strong fingers threading into his hair with no fear of being swallowed into the dark place that it contains. Hardness and heat, liquid and friction, bone and softness, teeth and tongue. A soft male voice in his ear

(breath, moist; air, vibrating through chords; the brush of warm lips)

murmuring between hard pants,
“We shall always be one.”

The taste of her, and him, and Them.

The musky taste fades. Clever Nsana. In itself the dream was nothing: just a taste. Nothing Itempas can complain of. All its power comes from Nahadoth's imagination. And, too, from the power of flesh—which was Nsana's purpose, Nahadoth understands. A way of reminding Nahadoth that the body need not be a prison, if he can learn to embrace its joys.

But the dream, the memory, is wrong.
Always
has ended. The Three are no longer one. Itempas lied, and Nsana's attempt to comfort him has been worse than a failure.

Nahadoth is too weary to mourn.

“What are you?” asks the boy who is not a boy.

More time has passed. The boy is halfway to death now, by the usual length of a mortal life. His voice is deeper, his face roughly handsome rather than pretty. Nahadoth doubts he is warming anyone's bed anymore—but such things are not always about beauty, so he might be wrong on that account.

And such a question! No one has asked him that since…since Itempas, a thousand, thousand eternities ago. Since existence, trying to define itself, transformed into a new shape to accommodate his presence and defined
him
by doing so. He feels oddly flattered to be asked again.

“I…,” Nahadoth tries to say, and stops, distracted. Voice. Soft flapping moist tissues, hard bone and enamel, vibration, breath. Pure sensation. He has always liked mortal form. “Want.”

“What?”

“I
want
.” Emphasis. Intent. Desire. The words make him ache within, a dull niggling torment paralleling the ongoing crush and grind of mortal flesh upon his soul. “I
am
wanting. It is…all that I can be.” Now. And forevermore? Then Itempas truly has damned him.

Silence. Then: “They say you're like the others, but you can't be. They aren't like this. They don't sit in some room, in a…a
puddle
, and speak only in mad rants. You're something different, aren't you?”

He does not dignify this question with the obvious answer.

A step. Closer to the well's rim. “I've killed five of them now.” The rage and glee reverberates even as his voice softens, fine and precise as the crystals of a prism. When Haan laughs this time, it does not waver at all. “Accidents, they think…but when I'm alone with the ones I've killed, when the sweet lords and ladies realize they can't stop the thing they've created and they have to tell me the truth or I'll hurt them before I kill them…Only the fullbloods know for sure what you are, and I haven't killed any of those.” Unspoken:
yet
. “But there are whispers.”

There are always whispers. “Whisper in the dark and I shall answer,” Nahadoth says, and laughs his own wavering laugh into the night and the darkest recesses of mortal minds. Thus are legends born.

“They say you're one of the actual Three. The priests say you don't exist, that you never existed, but no one believes those stories. They're going to have to change them soon.” Haan shifts, gets closer, getting comfortable. “No one says your name. To speak it is to be damned to the Skyfather's darkest hells.”

Itempas has no dark hells,
Nahadoth does not say. That this is no longer obvious to mortals is proof that at least some of the priests' propaganda is working. But there is another pause. Curious, Nahadoth opens the eyes of his body. There are things mortal flesh sees that divine perception cannot. Haan leans over the well, almost close enough to touch his lips to the pooling blackness that is Nahadoth's substance. He cannot see Nahadoth through the layers of dark. Nahadoth reaches up one blunt-nailed, crudely formed human hand, though the edge of the pit is ten feet above. The perspective makes Haan's face tiny as he frames it between his thumb and forefinger.

“
Nahadoth
,” Haan breathes.

Nahadoth smiles, though no one can see it. A curl of his substance flickers up, like a splash of water after something small has been dropped into it, and flicks at Haan's lips. Haan flinches and jerks back, clapping a hand over his mouth as if something cold has burned him or as if he has spoken blasphemy. Then he laughs, and there is neither humor nor fear in it.

“Flirt,” he says, his eyes glittering. Then he leaves, and within seconds Nahadoth forgets he was ever there.

The next time Nahadoth deigns to notice reality, Kurue is there.

“Come back to us,” she says. “We need you.”

Kurue wants. She is not a child of his essence, but a bit of him is in all of their children because he raised them and loved them. This is the proof of it, perhaps—that here in this world, incarnate in flesh, the first thing that both of them feel is not regret, but wanting.

Kurue stirs, having sensed his attention, and stands from where she had been sitting against the wall. “Look, Father. Look at what they've done to me.” She moves closer, leaning over the wall of the well, and he does grimace at the sight. She has been…trimmed. They all have had parts removed; it was the only way Itempas could fit them into the chains. But Kurue's body has been trimmed further still. She is a tiny thing, bizarrely shriveled and re-proportioned, and
her wings are gone
. He stares at this, realizing at once that the mortals do not understand what they have done. Kurue's wings are her store of accumulated knowledge. Every barbule of every shaft is the lore of an entire world. Each vane spins galaxies; the pinions contain the sagas of all the iterations of existence that have ever been. They have left her arms and legs, but without wings she might as well be limbless and tongueless and eyeless. Without her knowledge, she is not
Kurue
, not anymore.

He closes his eyes, unable to bear her pain in addition to his own.

“We need you,” she says again, her voice a weary drone. “We need your strength. It's so hard, Father. Sieh says that together we can survive this incarceration; that is how mortals endure. But how can we, when we are only three?”

We
were only Three, and we did well enough,
he thinks. But this is uncharitable, because at least he had the totality of himself when he was free. And he understands that for these lesser ones of his kind, these children, three is not enough. It wasn't for the Three, either, in the end. That was why Enefa came, and why she made them into a multitude, because
Three
is strong but
family
is stronger and without her Nahadoth is lost, lost, lost as he never wanted to be again.

“Enefa,” he whispers for the umpteenth time. Above him, seen through the tendrils of his substance, Kurue flinches. Lost in grief, he realizes only belatedly what this means. It is something Itempas often chided him for: he thinks only of himself at times when he should consider the needs of others. Now he's hurt her. But Kurue is wise; she knows of the aeons that he spent alone, screaming his loneliness into the empty nothing. Surely she understands that it is not his nature to be considerate? Though he tries. And fails, often.

He opens his mouth to speak to her again, to try and be a better father, but it's too late. Time has passed. She's long gone.

“A mistake,” says the boy, who is now an old man. “Inevitable, really. I'm careful, but not perfect. Now it's only a matter of time.” He's sitting on the lip of the well, his back to the contained puddle of Nahadoth. He speaks quietly, without inflection, but the room reverberates with his tension.

“Twelve,” Haan says when Nahadoth says nothing. “Twelve of those so-high are dead at my hands, and the last—my prize—was Lord Arameri's heir. Lord Arameri thinks it was the girl's rival that did her in, but it was me.
Me
.” Haan strokes a hand over his hair, a habit of preening left over from his beautiful boyhood. It's still beautiful because he has the pride to do it well. “They'll never find some of the bodies. They don't even realize some of the deaths are murders yet. But the clues are out there now, and eventually someone will put them together.”

As such things go. Nahadoth yawns, disinterested, but Haan does not hear.

“But I've left them my grandson.” Nahadoth sees Haan's smile from a shadowed corner. “He's beautiful like I was, and such clever coldness! Ah, he's a fullblood and he knows how to use it. He's everything I could have wanted, though he doesn't know who I am, of course. My big boy. I wish I could watch him destroy them all from within.”

Nahadoth touches his belly, thinking of the children he's borne. All were difficult. He is creation, generation, but there is something unpleasantly
ordered
about the production of new life. It must proceed in certain ways, or things go wrong. Enefa was the most skilled at it, and even she made mistakes sometimes; Nahadoth never came close to mastering the art. The only children that survived his bearing were those as disordered as himself. All beautiful in their varied twists and misshapes and misthoughts.

How terrible, though, to continue only through one's offspring. Mortals must exist in a constant state of frustration with their own fragility and ephemerality, even within the heavens and hells that they occupy after death.

(Is Enefa there now? Is she anywhere?)

And despite the banality of it all, despite the fact that this boy is a petty mortal with petty mortal motivations, Nahadoth thinks,
I understand
. Perhaps he says it aloud. The boy—Nahadoth's boy, this man with a wild princess's soul—seems to hear it. He straightens and abruptly hops off the lip of the well, turning to gaze into it.

“Nahadoth, I want,” Haan says.

Nahadoth shivers. It is not a prayer, he reminds himself, so the chains will not tighten. The mortal has simply expressed a desire. He is Arameri. Should Nahadoth not obey? The chains remain quiescent.

“Do you?” Nahadoth asks conversationally. Oh, but he is very interested.

Haan smiles with his hunter teeth. “Oh, yes. And I know what you want, Nahadoth Nightlord, Skyfather and Shadowmother, lifeblood of the universe, flesh of chaos and change. You crave purpose. Direction. A reason to do more than lie here in a seething, grieving puddle. Well, I have that.” He presses his hands to his chest, makes an exaggerated pantomime then of holding out his hands. “I offer my purpose to you, if you will have it.”