Shades in Shadow

by N. K. Jemisin

  She also discovers, as she travels through the sprawling north-Senm city of Esh Passe, that she can perceive magic. Her mother’s paintings have always felt of strangeness, but Glee can see those with her eyes. When she closes her eyes, however, she can see footprints on the Esh Passe streets etched in light and colors against the dark of her inner lids. She can see the air tinted in the wake of someone’s passing and feel those other presences around her like bright, glowing lamps shining against her skin. These are the marks of the godlings of Esh Passe, and it is strange to feel so much closer to her mother now, when she has never been farther.

  Beyond the magical lights of the godlings, Esh Passe is full of strings of colored lanterns and torches on posts and bonfires, as well as occasional spats of fireworks against the night sky. It’s hot during the day, so people here live for the night, and perhaps it is a dollop of Nahadoth’s nature that makes the city as wild as it is. Some of this fascinates Glee simply because it is different from the quiet life she’s led up to now, so she spends a few nights sitting in noisy clubs, nursing a drink and people-watching and politely refusing those who proposition her. Only once does she deign to dance, and instantly she realizes the danger and stops. Art is magic, she understands at last, and she is too much her parents’ child—artist mother, god father—to blend the two without disaster. Regretfully, she apologizes to her dance partner and leaves the club, never to return again.

  This is the moment when Glee first begins to understand what it means to be what she is. It has been a purely intellectual thing up to this point. Now it is an existential actuality: she can observe mortal lives and perhaps even share in them to some degree, for she is mortal herself. But she will, must, always stand apart no matter how hard she tries to fit in, because she is something else, too.

  It should not need to be said that this does not trouble her much. It is not loneliness that she feels. She has purpose, which keeps the loneliness at bay; that’s how gods cope, after all. She isn’t a god either, though, and she’s aware that at some point purpose may not be enough for her.

  It becomes another answer to the question of why she means to find Itempas. She’ll ask him about it, when she finds him.

  Glee grows three years older in the time that it takes to find her father. She has to stop sometimes and work to earn money. (Stealing, or forcing others to give her what she needs, is unfathomable.) She has to find places to sleep that are safe, ways to eat that are affordable, ways to protect herself that do not kill everyone in a hundred-mile radius. This is how she learns and, gradually, changes: under pressure, on demand, as much forcing the world to adapt to her uniqueness as subsuming herself within it. It is not an easy heritage that her father has accorded her, but neither is it impossible. She develops more appreciation for it with time.

  She finds her father at last on the island of Ken, in a small fishing town that doesn’t, as far as she can tell, have a name. It’s barely a town: just a collection of houses and piers and worksheds grouped around a dirt road lined with sun-bleached oyster shells. There’s one dingy trading post, with an equally dingy tavern next door. When she goes inside, the room is full of copper- and auburn- and brown-haired men and women, some of whom are clustered at one end of the sawdust-strewn floor listening to an old man regale them with stories of stingfish and sea serpents. Only one man looks at Glee as the haze of sweet pipe smoke parts and bends around her straight-backed walk; only he sits alone in this place of shared laughter and good company, without seeming lonely. This, far more than their shared racial features or any logical deduction, is how she knows him.

  She sits down across from him. “Hello, Father,” she says. “My name is Glee.”

  “Hello, Glee,” he replies. His face is nothing like hers beyond its color. It’s so still. He doesn’t smile, doesn’t move his mouth any more than the words require; it is the expected response to her greeting ritual, and nothing more. This is how she knows he isn’t pleased to see her. To reinforce this, or perhaps because honesty is also generally regarded as polite, he continues. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “I accept the risk.” Because she knows of the threat that drove him from her mother. When the Lord of Night and the Lady of Shadows promise to kill, they do not do so idly.

  He blinks, and much later she will realize that his blinks are perfectly regular, not at all the usual semi-erratic pattern that mortals use when they aren’t thinking about it. He’s thinking about it. He never stops thinking about it. He controls every movement that can be controlled within the scope of his mortality. She has spent all these years thinking of herself as a near mirror of him, and within five sentences she’d realized it isn’t true. His eyeblinks prove they aren’t much alike at all.

  “I do not,” he says.

  Glee tilts her head—acknowledging the point, not conceding it. She wants to be respectful, but her mother has warned her to demand respect as well. Did her mother ever understand just how utterly alien an entity he is, beneath his deceptively still face? Maybe. And maybe her mother didn’t care, even if she did; maybe one Shoth woman’s incomprehensible primal force is another Shoth woman’s giant ridiculous ass. This thought makes her smile, and that gives her strength. “That risk is mine to take, Father, not yours to deny.”

  His brow furrows. For the first time she sees something of herself in him, because the same scowl has graced her mirror whenever universal circumstances resist her design. “Return to your mother.”

  This has power, and might have worked if her mother had not armed her for this battle. Rituals, propriety, order—he has made her subservient to these things. A good daughter should obey her father. However…“My mother told me to come and find you.” Propriety cancels propriety, leaving Glee free to find her own path.

  He exhales. Is that exasperation? She is enough her mother’s daughter that she smiles again, just a little. Whatever it is, it’s a victory. But there is something more to his expression. What?

  “You may not travel with me,” he states in a tone that brooks no compromise. “I am bound to serve mortals, to wander as one of them, unknown, commanding only what wealth and respect I can earn. It has been made clear to me that I must do that by wandering alone.”

  “Yes,” says Glee, unruffled. “I have no intention of traveling with you. I’ll simply wander alone, too. And if I sleep in the same hostels and work the same jobs and eat in the same restaurants, it will be merely coincidence.”

  His eyebrows flicker minutely—and deliberately—and at last her certainty returns. Yes, that is pleasure.

  “Very well, Daughter,” he says, and oh, the frisson of that acknowledgment. At the beginning of time, Itempas created family and all the complex rules and hierarchies of power that govern it, and in this instant she feels all the responsibilities and honor of that structure snap into place around her. “I wish you well in your journey.”

  Then he rises, placing a coin on the table to pay for the beer he ordered but did not drink, and walks out. Glee takes the beer, and when she has finished it, she leaves as well. When she steps outside, she sees him standing in the doorway of a hostel across the street, gazing idly at the horizon as if that is a thing the god of personified purpose would ever do. He turns, his gaze passing carelessly over her as she stands there, and heads inside.

  She takes a deep breath and says to herself, “I suppose I should find somewhere to sleep for tonight.” As if talking to herself without reason is a thing she would ever do. But there are those who watch without eyes and listen without ears in this realm, and this is a new ritual that has been designed for their sake.

  And how convenient: a hostel is right there.

  This small battle won marks the beginning of a time of change. She travels alone—with Itempas—from there forth. Here is his ritual of atonement: each town or community he visits merits one month of his time. When he arrives in a new place, he first secures employment in order to contribute to the community and earn resources for himself. Sometime
s the jobs include shelter and meals, sometimes just wages. The work varies, though it is generally manual and miserable: construction and repair, ship unloading or crewing, inventorying crates full of toxins in a poorly ventilated warehouse. He will not allow her to take these jobs alongside him. If she tries, he tells her not to; if she does it anyway, he quits and moves on to the next town early.

  Glee doesn’t understand it, but she stops trying to subvert his plans. Instead she finds her own jobs, generally somewhere close to where he is working, and to the degree that these jobs allow, she observes him. (It is wasteful, disrespectful of his time, to ask questions if she can figure out the answers herself.) Finally the pattern becomes clear to her: the jobs he takes are all dangerous. Time and again she is called to see to Itempas’s remains after he falls off unstable roofs or poorly made gangplanks. His purpled lips and staring eyes chastise neglectful factory owners and slumlords to rethink their business practices. And by using his own semi-mortal flesh to do such work, he keeps true mortals from being injured or killed in his stead. It is effective, if violent; some communities are angered when newcomers die horribly, and this pushes the unscrupulous to change their ways. He saves many lives by the repeated destruction of his own.

  It is also, Glee decides, horrifically inefficient. Mortal emotions are too fickle to reliably manipulate in this manner. For every town Itempas successfully reforms, there are ten others that care nothing for the deaths of strangers—especially when those strangers have white hair, or black skin, or cheap clothing, or male genitals, or Itempas’s haughty manner of speaking. Some towns like him for the same random things that other towns hate him for, yet still the outcome of his presence is never certain. There’s no sense to it.

  Glee discusses this with her father sometimes as they sit in another guesthouse, sharing a table purely to save space, eating meals on separate checks. “This serves mortals, certainly,” she says, “but would it not serve better to get them to make the world better? If you could get the selfish ones to see that their greed harms everyone, including themselves—”

  “Impossible,” Itempas says. “Selfishness is mortals’ nature. I did not command them to build a society that arbitrarily treats some as important and others as not, yet they have done so.” In his name, he does not add. They both find this offensive enough that there’s no need to mention it.

  “Change is mortals’ nature, too,” Glee says quietly. Itempas grimaces in distaste.

  “Only under duress,” he says. “They must have reasons to change.”

  She considers this, tapping her fingers on the table in her impatience, trying to come up with reasons that would work, and only belatedly notices that he is watching her.

  “This isn’t your burden,” he says when she frowns. His voice is gentle.

  “Of course it is,” she snaps, and then bites down on her temper so that she can remain respectful.

  He falls silent, and although nothing about him has overtly changed, she believes she has surprised him.

  * * *

  After a year or so of contemplation—she has never been so uncertain before—Glee proposes a way to enact the change they have discussed. Itempas listens and does not reply for another three months and towns. This is unusual for him; it is his nature, like her own, to make decisions at the speed of light. That he takes so long to answer tells her he agrees with her, at least in principle. He just needs time to adjust.

  But he does ask her, one evening, “Why?”

  It is her mother’s question, though for him it has multiple meanings: Why does she care? Why is she so determined to help him? Why is she bothering to spend the precious life she possesses, a life he has bent his own rules to create, on a task that may ultimately be futile? Now Glee has a better answer: “Because I know mortalkind can be better, and I’m willing to give my life to make it so.” She pauses. Hesitates. “I would appreciate help, however.”

  Still not the answer, but not an embarrassment, either. Itempas is silent, and that is the end of the conversation.

  But a few days later, wordlessly, Itempas begins the process of accepting this necessary change. It is fascinating, watching how he does this. And pitiful.

  They have just concluded their business in the latest town, where Itempas nearly drowned trying to help a fishing boat haul in its catch with old fraying nets and a captain who did not heed the dire weather reports. Because other mortals’ lives were at stake, Itempas could use magic to save them, translocating everyone from the boat to the shore just as the mast sank beneath the waves. As a crowd gathers ’round to exclaim over the miracle of survivors, and to shout at the captain who sits ashamed nearby, Glee goes to her father, who stands watching all of this with a sterner-than-usual set to his face. There is more to it than the captain’s negligence, Glee understands. The boat’s nets were frayed because the captain could barely afford to keep his business afloat. His business was in danger because the price of fish is being artificially controlled by the Nobles’ Consortium in order to please several of the wealthier islander merchants, who run large fish distribution enterprises. The same people who curse the captain now have happily bought the cheap fish that made him so desperate for just one more catch. Now the man has lost his livelihood altogether, as have his crew members—but the price of fish will stay low, driving other captains into other storms and causing other wrecks from which there will be no magical rescue.

  It is painfully clear even to Glee, who has less of a jaded eye toward human foibles, that these people will never believe themselves complicit in the lives lost. They accept that this is the way the world works, in part because it is all they know and in part because it is all they wish to know. They are Itempans, probably, all of them. Comfortable with the status quo.

  They must be made to see a better way. It can be done quickly, but that would be violent, clumsy, crude. Itempas is not a god of revolution. Sea change, though, the transformation of attitudes and refinement of higher principles over generations? Yes. An exertion of positive influence here. A pressure against injustice there. It is what the Bright should have been, but the Bright went wrong because the Arameri were merely human. It can be done again, done right, with a god’s hand on the tiller.

  Now Itempas stands at a literal crossroads, dusty and tree-shaded, where two old wagon tracks meet near the coast. They are on the Senm continent again, and if he follows the pattern she has come to expect of him, he will turn north; there’s a small mining village in that direction that looks promising Instead, he stands staring at the sign for longer than Glee can hold her breath.

  She feels the moment when he makes the choice to begin, to change, because the whole universe utters a little shocked gasp. Then, slowly, gratingly, he turns southeast. The road going in this direction is wider, better kept, and the sign that points down its length reads SKY-IN-SHADOW.

  It’s easier for him, once he’s walking. Putting one foot in front of the other is repeating an action he took before. But well before dark she finds an excuse to ask them to stop, and after she has built her separate fire and made herself some food—more than she needs, so, sadly, the excess will go to waste if she cannot give it to someone else, but look here is another person who needs it—he all but falls onto his bedroll. He refuses to eat from the parcel of conveniently leftover roasted groundnut and fowl in herbs. For the rest of the night he shivers and sweats, not actually sleeping but barely conscious nevertheless. When she touches his forehead, he is feverish. The infection that is change must run its course within him.

  Glee keeps a surreptitious watch over him and contemplates the revelation that mortals can be stronger than gods under certain circumstances. Daughters can be stronger than fathers. The knowledge changes her, too, just a little.

  And the next morning, when the sunrise makes him better, she is not wholly surprised when he sits up slowly, looking at her through bloodshot eyes. “I will help you,” he grates out.

  It is the new purpose that they both need. S
he sees him take a deep breath after this declaration, some of the nausea fading from his expression. He sits up straighter, pushing his shoulders back. Makes another decision, this one apparently easy in light of the previous night’s cataclysmic paradigm shift.

  “I would speak of a thing,” he says, as if to the fire. “You may listen if you wish. There is an order that comes of the implementation of justice, rather than the avoidance of conflict. Striking the blow to create this order requires tangibility, manifestation, intention, and in the past this has taken the form of a sword of white metal whose name cannot be said aloud without unraveling this realm.” His eyes shift to her for a moment. “Why might you utilize such a sword, if it became available to you?”

  It is the third why that her parents have presented to her, and it is perhaps the most dangerous of them. After all, she is merely mortal—fickle, changeable, weak. What he describes is a degree of power that perhaps only a god can wield successfully, because only a god is ruled by purpose. But mortals are not so very different from gods sometimes, when the cause is great enough…and after all, Glee is only half mortal. The gift that he offers comes with risk—but it is a risk that she knows is hers to choose, if she wants it. He will not deny her.

  So she smiles, because at last she has an answer to this why that satisfies her and that is worthy of his question.

  “I would utilize it,” she says, “because I am your daughter. Why else?”

  He does not smile. However, for the briefest of instants, his eyeblinks become irregular and rapid, and he looks away. By this she knows: she has made him unbearably proud.

  There will be trials to come, naturally. Worlds do not change easily, and certainly not without risk. But this world will change, now, because Glee has decided that it must. This is why she needed him, after all: to understand herself. Now that she does…well. She smiles at the fire and contemplates the new order that she means to build. It is only a matter of time.