Shades in Shadow Read Free Page A

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.