I stopped at the door. I didn’t care, I told myself. My life was ruined and it was Shiny’s fault. He didn’t care. Why did it matter what he and Madding said to each other? Why did I still bother trying to understand him?
“—he could love you again,” Madding said. “Pretend that means nothing to you, Father, if you like. But I know—”
Father. I blinked. Father?
“—in spite of everything,” Madding said. “Believe that or not, as you will.” The words had an air of finality. The argument was over, one-sided as it had been.
I stepped back against the bedroom wall and out of the doorway, though that would do me little good if Madding came back into the room. But although I heard Madding’s footsteps leave whatever room they’d been in and stomp away, they headed downstairs, not back to his bedroom.
As I stood there against the wall, mulling over what I’d heard, Shiny left the room as well. He walked past Madding’s room, and I braced myself for him to notice that I was out of bed and perhaps come in and find me. His footsteps didn’t even slow. He headed upstairs.
Which one to follow? I wavered for a moment, then went after Madding. At least I knew he would talk to me.
I found him standing atop the largest of his pools, glowing bright enough to make the whole chamber visible as his magic reflected off walls and water. I stopped behind him, savoring the play of light across his facets, the shift and ripple of liquid aquamarine flesh as he moved, the patterned flicker of the walls. He had folded his hands together, head bowed as if to pray. Perhaps he was praying. Above the godlings were the gods, and above the gods was Maelstrom, the unknowable. Perhaps even it prayed to something. Didn’t we all need someone to turn to sometimes?
So I sat down and waited, not interrupting, and presently Madding lowered his hands and turned to me.
“I should have kept my voice down,” he said softly, amid the chime of crystal.
I smiled, drawing up my knees and wrapping my arms around them. “I find it hard not to yell at him, too.”
He sighed. “If you could have seen him before the war, Oree. He was glorious then. We all loved him—competed for his love, basked in his attention. And he loved us back in his quiet, steady way. He’s changed so much.”
His body gave off one last liquid shimmer and then settled back into his stocky, plain-featured human shell, which I had come to love just as much over the years. He was still naked, his hair still loose, still standing on water. His eyes carried memories and sorrow far too ancient for any mortal man. He would never look truly ordinary, no matter how hard he tried.
“So he’s your father.” I spoke slowly. I did not want to voice aloud the suspicion I’d begun to develop. I hardly wanted to believe it. There were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of godlings, and there’d been even more before the Gods’ War. Not all of them had been parented by the Three.
But most of them had been.
Madding smiled, reading my face. I’d never been able to hide anything from him. “There aren’t many of us left who haven’t disowned him.”
I licked my lips. “I thought he was a godling. Just a godling, I mean, not…” I gestured vaguely above my head, meaning the sky.
“He’s not just a godling.”
Confirmation, unexpectedly anticlimactic. “I thought the Three would be… different.”
“They are.”
“But Shiny…”
“He’s a special case. His current condition is temporary. Probably.”
Nothing in my life had prepared me for this. I knew I was not especially knowledgeable about the affairs of gods, despite my personal association with some of them. I knew as well as anyone that the priests taught what they wanted us to know, not necessarily what was true. And sometimes even when they told the truth, they got it wrong.
Madding came over, sitting down beside me. He gazed out over the pools, his manner subdued.
I needed to understand. “What did he do?” It was the question I had asked Sieh.
“Something terrible.” His smile had faded during my moment of stunned silence. His expression was closed, almost angry. “Something most of us will never forgive. He got away with it for a while, but now the debt has come due. He’ll be repaying it for a long time.”
Sometimes they got it very wrong. “I don’t understand,” I whispered.
He lifted a hand and drew a knuckle across my cheek, brushing a stray curl of hair aside.
“He really was lucky to find you,” he said. “I have to confess, I’ve been a bit jealous. There’s still a little of the old him left. I can see why you’d be drawn to him.”
“It’s not like that. He doesn’t even like me.”
“I know.” He dropped his hand. “I’m not sure he’s capable of caring for anyone now, not in any real way. He was never good at changing, bending. He broke instead. And he took all of us with him.”
He fell silent, reverberating pain, and I understood then that, unlike Sieh, Madding still loved Shiny. Or whoever Shiny had once been.
My mind fought against the name that whispered in my heart.
I found his hand and laced our fingers together. Madding glanced down at them, then up at me, and smiled. There was such sorrow in his eyes that I leaned over and kissed him. He sighed through it, resting his forehead against mine when we parted.
“I don’t want to talk about him anymore,” he said.
“All right,” I said. “What shall we talk about instead?” Though I thought I knew.
“Stay with me,” he whispered.
“I wasn’t the one who left.” I tried for lightness and failed utterly.
He closed his eyes. “It was different before. Now I realize I’m going to lose you either way. You’ll leave town, or you’ll grow old and die. But if you stay, I’ll have you longer.” He fumbled for my other hand, not as good at doing things without his eyes as I was. “I need you, Oree.”
I licked my lips. “I don’t want to endanger you, Mad. And if I stay…” Every morsel of food I ate, every scrap of clothing I wore, would come from him. Could I bear that? I had traveled across the continent, left my mother and my people, scrabbled and struggled, to live as I pleased. If I stayed in Shadow, with the Order hunting me and murder dogging my steps, would I even be able to leave Madding’s house? Freedom alone, or imprisonment with the man I loved. Two horrible choices.
And he knew it. I felt him tremble, and that was almost enough. “Please,” he whispered.
Almost, I gave in.
“Let me think,” I said. “I have to… I can’t think, Mad.”
His eyes opened. Because he was so near, touching me, I could feel the hope fade in him. When he drew back, letting go of my hand, I knew he had begun to draw back his heart as well, steeling it against my rejection.
“All right,” he said. “Take as long as you like.”
If he had gotten angry, it would have been so much easier.
I started to speak, but he had turned away. What was there to say, anyhow? Nothing that would heal the pain I’d just caused him. Only time could do that.
So I sighed and got up, and headed upstairs.
* * *
Madding’s house was huge. The second floor, where his room was located, was also where he and his siblings worked, pricking themselves to produce tiny vials of their blood for sale to mortals. He had grown wealthy from this and from his other lines of business; there were many skills godlings possessed that mortals were willing to pay a premium for. But he was still a godling, and when his business had grown, he hadn’t considered opening an office; he’d simply made his house bigger and invited all his underlings to come live with him.
Most of them had taken him up on the offer. The third floor held the rooms of those godlings who liked having a bed, a few scriveners who’d slipped the Order’s leash, and a handful of mortals with other useful talents—record-keeping, glassblowing, sales. The next floor up was the roof, which was what I sought.
I found two godl
ings lounging at the bottom of the roof stairs when I came up from below: Madding’s patch-skinned male lieutenant/guard and a coolly handsome creature who’d taken the form of a middle-aged Ken man. The latter, whose gaze held wisdom and disinterest in equal measure, did not acknowledge my presence. The former winked at me and shifted closer to his sibling to let me pass.
“Up for a breath of night air?” he asked.
I nodded. “I can feel the city best up there.”
“Saying good-bye?” His eyes were too sharp, reading my face like a sigil. I mustered a weak smile in response, because I did not trust myself to keep my composure if I spoke. His expression softened with pity. “It’d be a shame to see you go.”
“I’ve caused him enough trouble.”
“He doesn’t mind.”
“I know. But at this rate, I’ll end up owing him my soul, or worse.”
“He doesn’t keep an account for you, Oree.” It was the first time he’d used my name. I shouldn’t have been surprised; he’d been with Madding for longer than I had. Perhaps they’d even come to the mortal world together, two eternal bachelors seeking excitement amid the grit and glory of the city. The idea made me smile. He noticed and smiled himself. “You have no idea how much he cares for you.”
I had seen Mad’s eyes when he’d asked me to stay. “I do know,” I whispered, and then had to take a deep breath. “I’ll see you later, ah…” I paused. All this time, I had never asked his name. My cheeks grew warm with shame.
He looked amused. “Paitya. My partner—the woman?—is Kitr. But don’t tell her I told you.”
I nodded, resisting the urge to glance at the older-looking godling. Some godlings were like Paitya and Madding and Lil, not caring whether mortals accorded them any particular reverence. Others, I had learned, regarded us as very much inferior beings. Either way, the older one already looked annoyed that I’d interrupted their relaxation. Best to leave him be.
“You’ll have company,” Paitya said as I moved past him. I almost stopped there, realizing who he meant.
But that was fitting, I decided, considering the churn of misery inside myself. I had been raised as a devout Itempan, though I’d lapsed in the years since, and my heart had never really been in it, anyhow. Yet I still prayed to Him when I felt the need. I was definitely feeling the need now, so I proceeded up the steps, wrestled the heavy metal lever open, and stepped out onto the roof.
As the metallic echoes of the door faded, I heard breathing to one side, low to the ground. He was sitting down somewhere, probably against one of the wide struts of the cistern that dominated the rooftop space. I could not feel his gaze, but he must have heard me come onto the roof. Silence fell.
Standing there, knowing who he was, I expected to feel different. I should have been reverent, nervous, awed maybe. Yet my mind could not reconcile the two concepts: the Bright Lord of Order and the man I’d found in a muckbin. Itempas and Shiny; Him and him; they did not feel at all the same, in my heart.
And I could think of only one question, out of the thousands that I should have asked.
“All that time you lived with me and never spoke,” I said. “Why?”
At first I thought he wouldn’t answer. But at last I heard a faint shift in the gravel that covered the rooftop and felt the solidity of his gaze settle on me.
“You were irrelevant,” he said. “Just another mortal.”
I was growing used to him, I realized bitterly. That had hurt far less than I’d expected.
Shaking my head, I went over to another of the cistern’s struts, felt about to make sure there were no puddles or debris in the way, and sat down. There was no true silence up on the roof; the midnight air was thick with the sounds of the city. Yet I found myself at peace, anyhow. Shiny’s presence, my anger at him, at least kept me from thinking about Madding or dead Order-Keepers or the end of the life I’d built for myself in Shadow. So in his own obnoxious way, my god comforted me.
“What the hells are you doing up here, anyhow?” I asked. I could not muster the wherewithal to show him any greater respect. “Praying to yourself?”
“There’s a new moon tonight.”
“So?”
He did not reply, and I did not care. I turned my face toward the distant, barely there shimmers of the World Tree’s canopy and pretended they were the stars I’d heard others talk about all my life. Sometimes, amid the ripples and eddies of the leafy sea, I would see a brighter flash now and again. Probably an early bloom; the Tree would be flowering soon. There were people in the city who made a year’s living from the dangerous work of climbing the Tree’s lower branches and snipping off its silvery, hand-wide blossoms for sale to the wealthy.
“All that happens in darkness, he sees and hears,” Shiny said abruptly. I wished he would stop talking again. “On a moonless night, he will hear me, even if he chooses not to answer.”
“Who?”
“Nahadoth.”
I forgot my anger at Shiny, and my sorrow over Madding, and my guilt about the Order-Keepers. I forgot everything but that name.
Nahadoth.
* * *
We have never forgotten his name.
These days, our world has two great continents, but once there were three: High North, Senm, and the Maroland. Maro was the smallest of the three but was also the most magnificent, with trees that stretched a thousand feet into the air, flowers and birds found nowhere else, and waterfalls so huge that it was said you could feel their spray on the other side of the world.
The hundred clans of my people—called just “Maro” then, not “Maroneh”—were plentiful and powerful. In the aftermath of the Gods’ War, those who had honored Bright Itempas above other gods were shown favor. That included the Amn, a now-extinct people called the Ginij, and us. The Amn were ruled by the Arameri family. Their homeland was Senm, but they built their stronghold in our land, at our invitation. We were smarter than the Ginij. But we paid a price for our savvy politicking.
There was a rebellion of some sort. A great army marched across the Maroland, intent upon overthrowing the Arameri. Stupid, I know, but such things happened in those days. It would have been just another massacre, just another footnote in history, if one of the Arameri’s weapons hadn’t gotten loose.
He was the Nightlord, brother and eternal enemy of Bright Itempas. Hobbled, diminished, but still unimaginably powerful, he punched a hole in the earth, causing earthquakes and tsunamis that tore the Maroland apart. The whole continent sank into the sea, and nearly all its people died.
The few Maro who survived settled on a tiny peninsula of the Senm continent, granted to them by the Arameri in condolence for our loss. We began to call ourselves Maroneh, which meant “those who weep for Maro” in the common language we once spoke. We named our daughters for sorrow and our sons for rage; we debated whether there was any point in trying to rebuild our race. We thanked Itempas for saving even the handful of us who remained, and we hated the Arameri for making that prayer necessary.
And though the rest of the world all but forgot him outside of heretic cults and tales to frighten children, we remembered the name of our destroyer.
Nahadoth.
* * *
“I have been attempting,” said Shiny, “to express my remorse to him.”
That pulled me from one kind of shock into another. “What?”
Shiny got up. I heard him walk a few steps, perhaps over to the low wall that marked the edge of the rooftop. His voice, when he spoke, was diluted by wind and the late-night sounds of the city, but it came to me clearly enough. His diction was precise, unaccented, perfectly pitched. He spoke like a nobleman trained to give speeches.
“You wanted to know what I had done to be punished with mortality,” he said. “You asked that of Sieh.”
I pulled my thoughts from their endless litany of Nahadoth, Nahadoth, Nahadoth. “Well… yes.”
“My sister,” he said. “I killed her.”
I frowned. Of course he h
ad. Enefa, the goddess of earth and life, had conspired against Itempas with their brother, the Nightlord Nahadoth. Itempas had slain her for her treachery and had given Nahadoth to the Arameri as a slave. It was a famous story.
Unless…
I licked my lips. “Did she… do something to provoke you?”
The wind shifted for a moment. His voice drifted to me and away, then back again, singsong and soft. “She took him from me.”
“She—” I stopped.
I did not want to understand. Obviously Itempas had been involved with Enefa at some point before their falling-out; the existence of the godlings was proof enough of that. But Nahadoth was the monster in the dark, the enemy of all that was good in the world. I didn’t want to think of him as the Bright Lord’s brother, much less—
But I had spent too much time among godlings. I had seen that they lusted and raged like mortals, hurt like mortals, misunderstood and nursed petty grudges and killed each other over love like mortals.
I got to my feet, trembling.
“You’re saying you started the Gods’ War,” I said. “You’re saying the Nightlord was your lover—that you love him still. You’re saying he’s free now and he’s the one who did this to you.”
“Yes,” said Shiny. Then, to my surprise, he let out a little laugh, so laden with bitterness that his voice wavered unsteadily for an instant. “That’s precisely what I’m saying.”
My hands tightened on my stick until it hurt my palms. I sank back to a crouch, planting the stick in the gravel to balance myself, pressing my forehead against the smooth old wood. “I don’t believe you,” I whispered. I could not believe him. I could not be that wrong about the world, the gods, everything. The entire human race could not be that wrong.
Could we?
I heard the gravel shift under Shiny’s feet as he turned to me. “Do you love Madding?” he asked.
It was such an unexpected question, so nonsensical in the context of our discussion, that it took me several seconds to make my mouth work. “Yes. Dear gods, of course I do. Why are you asking me that now?”