The Kingdom of Gods

by N. K. Jemisin

  I fell to the ground — we were still at the back of the alley, where the ground was relatively clean — and laughed and laughed, until my sides ached. Hymn, however, began picking her way over the tumbled debris, trying to find a way out of the alley that would not require her to walk through a layer of filth.

  Surprised at being abandoned, I stopped laughing and sat up on one elbow to watch her. “Where are you going?”

  “Away from you,” she said. Only then did I realize she was furious.

  Blinking, I got to my feet and went to her. Strong as I was feeling after that trick, it was nothing to grab her about the waist and leap over the front half of the alley, landing in the brighter-lit, fresher air of the street. There were a few people about, standing and murmuring in the wake of the muckrakers’ spectacle, but there was a collective gasp as I landed on the cobblestones. Quickly — hurriedly, in some cases — all of the onlookers turned and left, some of them glancing back as if in fear that I would follow.

  Puzzled by this, I set Hymn down, whereupon she immediately began hurrying away, too. “Hey!”

  She stopped, and turned back to me with a look of such wariness that I flinched. “What?”

  I put my hands on my hips. “I saved you. What, not even a thanks?”

  “Thank you,” she said tightly, “though I wouldn’t have been in danger if you hadn’t called out to them.”

  This was true. But … “They won’t bother you again,” I said. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  “What I wanted,” she said, turning red in the face now, “was to do my business in peace. Should’ve left when I figured out you were a godling! And you’re worse somehow. You seemed so sad, I thought for a moment that you were more” — she spluttered, too apoplectic to speak for a moment —“human. But you’re just like the rest of them, screwing up mortal lives and thinking you’re doing us a favor.” She turned away, walking briskly enough that the limp made her gait into an ugly sort of half hop. I’d been wrong; the bad foot didn’t slow her down at all.

  I stared in the direction she had gone until it became clear she would not stop, and then finally I sighed and trotted after her.

  I had nearly caught up when Hymn heard my footsteps and stopped, rounding on me. “What?”

  I stopped, too, putting my hands in my pockets and trying not to hunch my shoulders. “I need to make it up to you.” I sighed, wishing I could just leave. “Is there something you want? I can’t fix your foot, but … I don’t know. Whatever.”

  I could almost hear her teeth grinding together, though she did not speak for a moment. Perhaps she needed to master her rage before she started shouting at a god.

  “I don’t want my foot fixed,” she said with remarkable calm. “I don’t want anything from you. But if it’s your nature that you’re trying to serve, and you won’t leave me alone until you’ve done it, then here’s what I need: money.”

  I blinked. “Money? But —”

  “You’re a god. You should be able to make money.”

  I tried to think of a game or toy that might allow me to produce money. Gambling was an adult game; it did not suit my nature at all. Perhaps I could act out a children’s tale or lullaby, that one about the golden ropes and the pearl lanterns … “Would you take jewelry instead?”

  She made a sound of utter disgust and turned to leave. I groaned and trotted after her. “Listen, I said I could make things that are valuable, and you can sell them! What’s wrong with that?”

  “I can’t sell them,” she snapped, still walking. I hurried to keep up. “Trying to sell something valuable would get me killed. If I took it to a pawnbroker, everyone in South Root would know I had money before I left the shop. My house would get robbed, or my relatives would be kidnapped, or something. I don’t know anyone in the merchant cartels who could fence it for me, and even if I did, they’d take half or more in ‘fees.’ And I don’t have the status to impress the Order of Itempas, so they’d take the rest in tithes. I could go to one of the godlings around town, maybe, but then I’d have to deal with more of you.” She threw me a scathing look. “My parents are old, and I’m the only child. What I need is money for food and rent and to get the roof fixed and maybe to buy my father a bottle of wine now and again so he can stop worrying so much about how we’re going to survive. Can you give me any of that?”

  I stumbled after this litany, a little stunned. “I … no.”

  Hymn stared at me for a long moment, then sighed and stopped, reaching up to rub her forehead as if it pained her. “Look, which one are you?”

  “Sieh.”

  She looked surprised, which was a welcome change from contempt and exasperation. “I don’t recognize your name.”

  “No. I used to live here” — I hesitated —“a long time ago. But I only came back to the mortal realm a few days ago.”

  “Gods, no wonder you’re such a horror. You’re new in town.” This seemed to ease some of her anger, and she looked me up and down. “All right, what’s your nature?”

  “Tricks. Mischief.” These were always easier to explain to mortals. They found “childhood” difficult to grasp as a specific concept. Hymn nodded, though, so I took a chance and added, “Innocence.”

  She looked thoughtful. “You must be one of the older ones. The younger ones are simpler.”

  “They’re not simpler. Their natures are just more attuned to mortal life, since they were born after mortals were created —”

  “I know that,” she said, looking annoyed again. “Look, people in this city have lived with your kind for a long time now. We get how you work; you don’t need to lecture.” She sighed again and shook her head. “I know you need to serve your nature, all right? But I don’t need tricks; I need money. If you want to conjure something, sell it yourself, and bring me that later, that would be fine. Just try and be discreet, will you? And leave me alone until then. Please.”

  With this, Hymn turned to walk away, slower this time as she had calmed somewhat. I watched her go, feeling altogether out of sorts and wondering how in the infinite hells I was going to get money for her. Because she was right; playing fair was as fundamental to my nature as being a child, and if I allowed the wrong I had done her to stand, it would erode a little more of whatever childhood she had remaining. Doing that prior to my transformation would’ve made me ill. Doing it now? I had no idea what would happen, but it would not be pleasant.

  I would have to obtain money by mortal means, then. But if there were jobs to be had, would Hymn have been digging through muckbins and making knives from broken crockery? Worse, I had no knowledge of the city in its current incarnation, and no inkling of where to begin my search for employment.

  So I began walking after Hymn again.

  The streets were quiet and empty as I walked, taking on a dim, twilightish aspect as the morning progressed. Dawn had come and gone while I tormented the muckrakers, and all around me I could feel the city awakening, its pulse quickening with the start of day. Ghostly white buildings, long unpainted but soundly made and still beautiful in a run-down way, loomed out of the dark on either side of the street. I saw faces peering through the windows, half hidden by the curtains. Through gaps in the buildings I could see the mountainous black silhouette of a Tree root. Roots hemmed in this part of the city, while the Tree itself loomed above all to the north. There would be no sunlight here, no matter how bright the day grew.

  Then I turned another corner and stopped, for Hymn stood there glaring at me.

  I sighed. “I’m sorry. I really am! But I need your help.”

  We sat in the small common room of her family’s home. An old inn, she explained, though they hardly ever had travelers through anymore and survived by taking in long-term boarders when they could. For the time being, there were none.

  “It’s the only way,” I said, having reached this conclusion by my second cup of tea. Hymn’s mother had served it to me, her hand shaking as she poured, though I’d tried my best to put her at
ease. When Hymn murmured something to her, she’d withdrawn into another room, though I could hear her still lurking near the door, listening. Her heartbeat was very loud.

  Hymn shrugged, toying with the plate of dry cheese and stale bread her mother had insisted upon serving. She ate only a little of it, and I ate none, for it was easy to see this family had almost nothing. Fortunately this behavior was considered polite for a godling, since most of us didn’t need to eat.

  “Your choice, of course,” she said.

  I did not like the choices laid before me. Hymn had confirmed my guess that there was little in the way of work, as the city’s economy had lost ground in recent years to innovations coming out of the north. (In the old days, the Arameri would have unleashed a plague or two to kill off commoners and increase the demand for labor. Unemployment, frustrating as it was, represented progress.) There was still money to be made from serving the mortals who came to the city on pilgrimage, to pray for one of any dozen gods’ blessing, but not many employers would be pleased to hire a godling. “Bad for business,” Hymn explained. “Too easy to offend someone by your existence.”

  “Of course,” I sighed.

  Since the city’s legitimate business was closed to me, my only hope was its illegitimate side. For that, at least, I had a possible way in: Nemmer. I was to meet her in three more days, according to our agreement. I no longer cared that some sibling of ours was targeting the Arameri. Let them all die, except perhaps Deka, whom I would geld and put on a leash to keep him sweet. But the conspiracy against our parents meant I should still see her. I could ask her help in finding work then.

  If I could stomach the shame. Which I could not. So I had decided to try another way into the city’s shadier side. Hymn’s way: the Arms of Night. The brothel she had already tried to convince me to join.

  “A friend of mine went to work there a couple of years ago,” she said. “Not as a prostitute! She’s not their type. But they need servants and such, and they pay a good wage.” She shrugged. “If you don’t want to do the one thing, you could always do the other. Especially if you can cook and clean.”

  I was not fond of that idea, either. Enough of my mortal years in Sky had been spent serving one way or another. “I don’t suppose any of their customers would like a nice game of tag?” Hymn only looked at me. I sighed. “Right.”

  “We should go now, if you want to talk to them,” she said. “They get busy at night.” She spoke with remarkable compassion given how tired she already was of me. I supposed the misery in my expression had managed to penetrate even her cynical armor. Which might have been why she tried again to dissuade me. “I don’t care, you know. If you make up for nearly getting me killed. I told you that.”

  I nodded heavily. “I know. This isn’t really about you, though.”

  She sighed. “I know, I know. You must be what you are.” I looked up in surprise, and she smiled. “I told you. Everyone here understands gods.”

  So we left the inn and headed up the street, which was bustling now that I’d been out of sight for a while. Carters rattled past with their rickety old wagons while vendors pushed along rolling stands to sell their fruit and fried meat. An old man sat on a blanket on one corner, calling out that he could repair shoes. A middle-aged man in stained laborer’s clothes went over to him, and they crouched to dicker.

  Hymn limped easily through this chaos, waving cheerfully to this or that person as we passed, altogether more comfortable amid her fellow mortals than she’d been in my company. I watched her as we walked, fascinated. I could taste a solid core of innocence underneath her cynical pragmatism, and just the faintest dollop of wonder, because not even the most jaded mortal could spend time in a god’s presence without feeling something. And she was amused by me, despite her apparent annoyance. That made me grin — which she caught when she looked around and caught a glimpse of my face. “What?” she asked.

  “You,” I said, grinning.

  “What about me?”

  “You’re one of mine. Or you could be, if you wanted.” That thought made me cock my head in consideration. “Unless you’ve pledged yourself to another god?”

  She shook her head, though she said nothing, and I thought that I sensed tension in her. Not fear. Something else. Embarrassment?

  I remembered Shevir’s term. “Are you a primortalist?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Do you ever stop talking?”

  “It’s very hard for me to be quiet and well behaved,” I said honestly, and she snorted.

  The road we were on went uphill for a ways. I guessed there might be a root of the Tree underground somewhere, close to the surface. As we went up, we passed gradually into a zone of relative brightness, which would probably receive direct sunlight at least once a day, whenever the sun sank below the Tree’s canopy. The buildings grew taller and better maintained; the streets grew busier, too, possibly because we were traveling inward toward the city’s heart. Hymn and I now had to shift to the sidewalk to avoid coaches and the occasional finely made palanquin borne along by sweating men.

  At last we reached a large house that occupied the majority of a bizarrely triangular block, near the intersection of two brisk-moving streets. The house was triangular as well, a stately six-story wedge, but that was not what made it so striking. What made me stop, half in the street, and stare was the fact that someone had had the audacity to paint it black. Aside from wooden lintels and white accents, the whole structure from roof edge to foundation was stark, unrelenting, unabashed blackness.

  Hymn grinned at my openmouthed expression and pulled me forward so I wouldn’t get run over by a human-drawn carriage. “Amazing, isn’t it? I don’t know how they get away with breaking the White Law. My papa says the Order-Keepers used to kill homeowners as heretics if they refused to paint their houses white. They still issue fines sometimes — but nobody bothers the Arms of Night.” She poked me in the shoulder, making me look at her in surprise. “You be polite, if you really care about making it up to me. These people are into more than whorehouses. No one crosses them.”

  I smiled weakly, though my stomach had tightened in unease. Had I fled Sky only to put myself in the hands of other mortals with power? But I owed Hymn, so I sighed and said, “I’ll be good.”

  She nodded, then led me through the house’s gate and up to its wide, plain double doors.

  A servant — conservatively dressed — opened the door at her knock. “Hello,” said Hymn, inclining her head in a polite bow. (She glared at me, and I hastily did the same.) “My friend here has business with the proprietor.”

  The servant, a stocky Amn woman, swept a quick assessing glance over me and apparently decided I was worthy of further attention. Given that I wore three days’ worth of alley filth, this made me feel quite proud of my looks. “Your name?”

  I considered half a dozen, then decided there was no point in hiding. “Sieh.”

  She nodded and glanced at Hymn, who introduced herself as well. “I’ll let him know you’re here,” the woman said. “Please, wait in the parlor.”

  She led us to a small, stuffy little room with wood-paneled walls and an elaborately patterned Mencheyev carpet on the floor. It had no chairs, so we stood while the woman closed the door behind us and left.

  “This place doesn’t feel much like a whorehouse,” I said, going to the window to peer out at the bustling street. I tasted the air and found nothing I would have expected — no lust, though that could only have been because there were no clients present. No misery either, though, or bitterness or pain. I could smell women, and men, and sex, but also incense and paper and ink, and fine food. Far more businesslike than sordid.

  “They don’t like that word,” Hymn murmured, coming near so that we could speak. “And I told you, the people who work here aren’t whores — not people who will do anything for money, I mean. Some of the ones here don’t work for money at all.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what I’ve heard. And more
, the people who run this place are taking over all the brothels in the city and making them work the same way. I hear that’s why the Order-Keepers give them so much leeway. Darkwalker tithe money is just as shiny as anyone else’s, when it comes down to it.”

  “Darkwalkers?” My mouth fell open. “I don’t believe it. These people — the proprietors or whatever — they worship Nahadoth?” I could not help thinking of Naha’s worshippers of old, in the days before the Gods’ War. They had been revelers and dreamers and rebels, as resistant to the idea of organization as cats to obedience. But times had changed, and two thousand years of Itempas’s influence had left a mark. Now the followers of Nahadoth opened businesses and paid taxes.

  “Yes, they worship Nahadoth,” said Hymn, throwing me a look of such challenge that I instantly understood. “Does that bother you?”

  I put my hand on her bony shoulder. If I could have, I would have blessed her, now that I knew who she belonged to. “Why would it? He’s my father.”

  She blinked but remained wary, her tension shifting from one shoulder to the other. “He’s the father of most godlings, isn’t he? But not all of them seem to like him.”

  I shrugged. “He’s hard to like sometimes. I get that from him.” I grinned, which pulled a smile from her, too. “But anyone who honors him is a friend of mine.”

  “That’s good to know,” said a voice behind me, and I went stiff because it was a voice that I had never, ever expected to hear again. Male, baritone-deep, careless, cruel. The cruelty was most prominent now, mingled with amusement, because here I was in his parlor, helpless, mortal, and that made him the spider to my fly.