The Broken Kingdoms (3 page)

“Good night,” I murmured. He said nothing in return as I headed off to bed.

Here’s what you need to understand. My houseguest was not suicidal, not precisely. He never went out of his way to kill himself. He simply never bothered to avoid danger—including the danger of his own impulses. An ordinary person took care while walking along the roof to do repairs; my houseguest did not. He didn’t look both ways before crossing the street, either. Where most people might fleetingly imagine tossing a lighted candle onto their own beds and just as fleetingly discard that idea as mad, my houseguest simply did it. (Though, to his credit, he had never done anything that might endanger me, too. Yet.)

On the few occasions I had observed this disturbing tendency of his—the last time, he had casually swallowed something poisonous—I’d found him amazingly dispassionate about the whole thing. I imagined him making dinner this time, chopping vegetables, contemplating the knife in his hand. He had finished dinner first, setting that aside for me. Then he had calmly stabbed the knife between the bones of his wrist, first holding the injury over a mixing bowl to catch the blood. He did like to be neat. I had found the bowl on the floor, still a quarter full; the rest was splashed all over one wall of the kitchen. I gathered he’d lost his strength rather faster than expected and had struck the bowl as he fell, flipping it into the air. Then he’d bled out on the floor.

I imagined him observing this process, still contemplative, until he died. Then, later, cleaning up his own blood with equal apathy.

I was almost certain he was a godling. The “almost” lay in the fact that he had the strangest magic I’d ever heard of. Rising from the dead? Glowing at sunrise? What did that make him, the god of cheerful mornings and macabre surprises? He never spoke the gods’ language—or any language, for that matter. I suspected he was mute. And I could not see him, save in the mornings and in those moments when he came back to life, which meant he was magical only at those times. Any other time, he was just an ordinary man.

Except he wasn’t.

The next morning was typical.

I woke before dawn, as was my longtime habit. Ordinarily, I would just lie there awhile, listening to the sounds of morning: the rising chorus of birds, the heavy erratic bap-plink of dew dripping from the Tree onto rooftops and street stones. This time, however, the urge for a different sort of morning overtook me, so I rose and went in search of my houseguest.

He was in the den rather than the small storage pantry where he slept. I felt him there the instant I stepped out of my room. He was like that, filling the house with his presence, becoming its center of gravity. It was easy—natural, really—to let myself drift to wherever he was.

I found him at the den window. My house had many windows—a fact I often lamented since they did me no good and made the house drafty. (I couldn’t afford to rent better.) The den was the only room that faced east, however. That did me no good, either, and not just because I was blind; like most of the city’s denizens, I lived in a neighborhood tucked between two of the World Tree’s stories-high main roots. We got sunlight for a few minutes at midmorning, while the sun was high enough to overtop the roots but not yet hidden by the Tree’s canopy, and a few more moments at midafternoon. Only the nobles could afford more constant light.

Yet my houseguest stood here every morning, as regular as clockwork, if he wasn’t busy or dead. The first time I’d found him doing this, I thought it was his way of welcoming the day. Perhaps he made his prayers in the morning, like others who still honored Bright Itempas. Now I knew him better, if one could ever be said to know an indestructible man who never spoke. When I touched him on these occasions, I got a better sense of him than usual, and what I detected was not reverence or piety. What I felt, in the stillness of his flesh and the uprightness of his posture and the aura of peace that he exuded at no other time, was power. Pride. Whatever was left of the man he’d once been.

Because it was clearer to me with every day that passed that there was something broken, shattered, about him. I did not know what, or why, but I could tell: he had not always been like this.

He did not react as I came into the room and sat down in one of the chairs, wrapping myself in the blanket I’d brought against the house’s early-morning chill. He was doubtless used to me making a show of his morning displays, since I did it frequently.

And sure enough, a few moments after I got comfortable, he began, again, to glow.

The process was different every time. This time his eyes took the light first, and I saw him turn to glance at me as if to make sure I was watching. (I had detected these little hints of phenomenal arrogance in him at other times.) That done, he turned his gaze outward again, his hair and shoulders beginning to shimmer. Next I saw his arms, as muscled as any soldier’s, folded across his chest. His long legs, braced slightly apart; his posture was relaxed, yet proud. Dignified. I had noticed from the first that he carried himself like a king. Like a man long used to power, who had only lately fallen low.

As the light filled his frame, it grew steadily brighter. I squinted—I loved doing that—and raised a hand to shield my eyes. I could still see him, a man-shaped blaze now framed by the jointed lattice of my shadowy hand bones. But in the end, as always, I had to look away. I never did this until I absolutely had to. What was I going to do, go blind?

It didn’t last long. Somewhere beyond the eastern rootwall, the sun moved above the horizon. The glow faded quickly after that. After a few moments, I was able to look at him again, and in twenty minutes, he was as invisible to me as every other mortal.

When it was over, my houseguest turned to leave. He did chores around the house during the day and had lately begun hiring himself out to the neighbors, giving me whatever pittance he earned. I stretched, relaxed and comfortable. I always felt warmer when he was around.

“Wait,” I said, and he stopped.

I tried to gauge his mood by the feel of his silence. “Are you ever going to tell me your name?”

More silence. Was he irritated, or did he care at all? I sighed.

“All right,” I said. “The neighbors are starting to ask questions, so I need something to call you. Do you mind if I make something up?”

He sighed. Definitely irritated. But at least it wasn’t a no.

I grinned. “All right, then. Shiny. I’ll call you Shiny. What about that?”

It was a joke. I said it just to tease him. But I will admit that I’d expected some reaction from him, if only disgust. Instead, he simply walked out.

Which annoyed me. He didn’t have to talk, but was a smile too much to ask for? Even just a grunt or a sigh?

“Shiny it is, then,” I said briskly, and got up to start my day.

APPARENTLY I AM PRETTY. Magic is all I see, and magic tends to be beautiful, so I have no way of properly judging the mundane myself. I have to take others’ word for it. Men praise parts of me endlessly—always the parts, mind you, never the whole. They love my long legs, my graceful neck, my storm of hair, my breasts (especially my breasts). Most of the men in Shadow were Amn, so they also commented on my smooth, near-black Maro skin, even though I told them there were half a million other women in the world with the same feature. Half a million is not so many measured against the whole world, though, so that always got included in their qualified, fragmentary admiration.

“Lovely,” they would say, and sometimes they wanted to take me home and admire me in private. Before I got involved with godlings, I would let them, if I felt lonely enough. “You’re beautiful, Oree,” they would whisper as they positioned and posed and polished me. “If only—”

I never asked them to complete this sentence. I knew what they almost said: if only you didn’t have those eyes.

My eyes are more than blind; they are deformed. Disturbing. I would probably attract more men if I hid them, but why would I want more men? The ones I already attract never really want me. Except Madding, and even he wished I were something else.

My houseguest did not want me at all. I did worry at first. I wasn’t stupid; I knew the danger of bringing a strange man into my home. But he had no interest in anything so mundane as mortal flesh—not even his own. His gaze felt of many things when it touched me, but covetousness was not one of them. Neither was pity.

I probably kept him around for that reason alone.

“I paint a picture,” I whispered, and began.

Each morning before leaving for Art Row, I practiced my true art. The things I made for the Row were junk—statues of godlings that were inaccurate and badly proportioned; watercolors depicting banal, inoffensive images of the city; pressed and dried Tree flowers; jewelry. The sorts of trinkets potential buyers expected to see from a blind woman with no formal training who sold nothing over twenty meri.

My paintings were different. I spent a good portion of my income on canvas and pigment, and beeswax for the base. I spent hours—when I really lost myself—imagining the colors of air and trying to capture scent with lines.

And, unlike my table trinkets, I could see my paintings. Didn’t know why. Just could.

When I finished and turned, wiping my hands on a cloth, I was not surprised to find that Shiny had come in. I tended to notice little else around me when I was painting. As if to rebuke me for this tendency, the scent of food hit my nose, and my stomach immediately set up a growl so loud that it practically filled the basement. Sheepishly I grinned. “Thanks for making breakfast.”

There was a creak on the wooden stairs and the faint stir of displaced air as he approached. A hand took hold of mine and guided it to the smooth, rounded edge of a plate, heavy and slightly warm underneath. Warmed cheese and fruit, my usual, and—I sniffed and grinned in delight. “Smoked fish? Where on earth did you get that?”

I didn’t expect an answer and I didn’t get one. He guided me over to a spot at my small worktable, where he’d arranged a simple place setting. (He was always proper about things like that.) I found the fork and began to eat, my delight growing as I realized the fish was velly from the Braided Ocean, near Nimaro. It wasn’t expensive, but it was hard to find in Shadow—too oily for the Amn palate. Only a few Sun Market merchants sold it, as far as I knew. Had he gone all the way to Wesha for me? When the man wanted to apologize, he did it right.

“Thank you, Shiny,” I said as he poured me a cup of tea. He paused for just a moment, then resumed pouring with the faintest of sighs at his new nickname. I stifled the urge to giggle at his annoyance, because that would’ve just been mean.

He sat down across from me, though he had to push a pile of beeswax sticks out of the way to do it, and watched me eat. That sobered me, because it meant I’d been painting long enough that he’d gone ahead and eaten. And that meant I was late for work.

Nothing to be done for it. I sighed and sipped tea, pleased to find that it was a new blend, slightly bitter and perfect for the salty fish.

“I’m debating whether I should even go to the Row today,” I said. He never seemed to mind my small talk, and I never minded that it was one-sided. “It will probably be a madhouse. Oh, that’s right—did you hear? Yesterday, near the Easha White Hall, one of the godlings was found dead. Role. I was the one who found her; she was actually, really dead.” I shuddered at the memory. “Unfortunately, that means her worshippers will come to pay respects, and the Keepers will be all over the place, and the gawkers will be as thick as ants at a picnic.” I sighed. “I hope they don’t decide to block off the whole Promenade; my savings are down to fumes as it is.”

I kept eating and did not at first realize Shiny’s silence had changed. Then I registered the shock in it. What had caught his attention—my worrying about money? He’d been homeless before; perhaps he feared I would turn him out. Somehow, though, that didn’t feel right.

I reached out, found his hand, and groped upward until I found his face. He was a hard man to read at the best of times, but now his face was absolute stone, jaw tight and brows drawn and skin taut near the ears. Concern, anger, or fear? I couldn’t tell.

I opened my mouth to say that I had no intention of evicting him, but before I could, he pushed his chair back and walked away, leaving my hand hovering in the air where his face had been.

I wasn’t sure what to think of this, so I finished eating, carried my plate upstairs to wash, and then got ready to head to the Row. Shiny met me at the door, putting my stick into my hands. He was going with me.

As I had expected, there was a small crowd filling the nearby street: weeping worshippers, curious onlookers, and very snappish Order-Keepers. I could also hear a small group off at the far end of the Promenade, singing. Their song was wordless, just the same melody over and over, soothing and vaguely eerie. These were the New Lights, one of the newer religions that had appeared in the city. They had probably come looking for recruits among the dead goddess’ bereft followers. Along with the Lights, I could smell the heavy, soporific incense of the Darkwalkers—worshippers of the Shadow Lord. There weren’t many of them, though; they tended not to be morning people.

In addition to these were the pilgrims, who worshipped the Gray Lady; the Daughters of the New Fire, who favored some godling I’d never heard of; the Tenth-Hellers; the Clockwork League; and half a dozen other groups. Amid this rabble I could hear street-children, probably picking pockets and playing pranks. Even they had a patron god these days, or so I’d heard.

Small wonder the Order-Keepers were snappish, with so many heretics crowding their own hall. Still, they had managed to cordon off the alley and were allowing mourners to approach it in small groups, letting them linger long enough for a prayer or two.

With Shiny beside me, I crouched to brush my hand over the piles of flowers and candles and offertory trinkets that had been placed at the mouth of the alley. I was surprised to find the flowers half wilted, which meant they had been there awhile. The godling who’d marked the alley must have suspended the self-cleaning magic for the time being, perhaps out of respect for Role.