N. Jemisin: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

“That was not a man,” I said. My voice sounded high and shaky in my own ears.

“If that were true, you wouldn’t be running for your life right now.” And apparently I wasn’t running fast enough. The boy caught my hand and pulled me along faster. He glanced back at me, and I caught a glimpse of a high-cheekboned, pointed face that would one day be handsome.

“Where are you taking me?” My ability to reason was returning, though slowly. “To Viraine?”

He uttered a derisive snort. We left the arena and passed into more of the mazelike white halls. “Don’t be foolish. We’re going to hide.”

“But that man—” Nahadoth. Now I remembered where I’d heard the name. Never whisper it in the dark , read the children’s tales, unless you want him to answer.

“Oh, so now he’s a man? We just have to keep ahead of him and everything will be fine.” The boy ran around a corner, more nimble than me; I stumbled to keep up. He darted his eyes around the corridor, looking for something. “Don’t worry. I get away from him all the time.”

This did not sound wise. “I w-want to go to Viraine.” I tried to say it with authority, but I was still too frightened, and winded now besides.

The boy responded by stopping, but not because of me. “Here!” he said, and put his hand against one of the pearlescent walls. “Atadie!”

The wall opened.

It was like watching ripples in water. The pearly stuff moved away from his hand in steady waves, forming an opening—a hole—a door. Beyond the wall lay an oddly shaped, narrow chamber, not so much a room as a space between . When the door was big enough for us both, the boy pulled me inside.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Dead space in the body of the palace. All these curving corridors and round rooms. There’s another half a palace in between that no one uses—except me.” The boy turned to me and flashed an up-to-no-good grin. “We can rest for a little while.”

I was beginning to catch my breath, and with it came a weakness that I recognized as the aftermath of adrenaline. The wall had rippled shut behind me, becoming as solid as before. I leaned back against it gingerly at first, then gratefully. And then I examined my rescuer.

He wasn’t much smaller than me, maybe nine years old, with the spindly look of a fast grower. Not Amn, not with skin as dark as mine and sharpfold eyes like those of the Tema people. They were a murky, tired green, those eyes—like my own, and my mother’s. Maybe his father had been another wandering Arameri.

He was examining me as well. After a moment, his grin widened. “I’m Sieh.”

Two syllables. “Sieh Arameri?”

“Just Sieh.” With a child’s boneless grace, he stretched his arms above his head. “You don’t look like much.”

I was too tired to take offense. “I’ve found it useful,” I replied, “to be underestimated.”

“Yes. Always good strategy, that.” Lightning-quick, he straightened and grew serious. “He’ll find us if we don’t keep moving. En! ”

I jumped, startled by his shout. But Sieh was looking up. A moment later, a child’s yellow kickball fell into his hands.

Puzzled, I looked up. The dead space went up several floors, a featureless triangular shaft; I saw no openings from which the ball could have come. There was certainly no one hovering above who could have thrown the ball to him.

I looked at the boy and suffered a sudden, chilling suspicion.

Sieh laughed at my face and put the ball on the floor. Then he sat on it, cross-legged. The ball held perfectly still beneath him until he was comfortable, and then it rose into the air. It stopped when he was a few feet above the ground and hovered. Then the boy who was not a boy reached out to me.

“I won’t hurt you,” he said. “I’m helping you, aren’t I?”

I just looked at his hand, pressing myself back against the wall.

“I could have led you in a circle, you know. Right back to him.”

There was that. After a moment, I took his hand. His grip left no question; this was not a child’s strength.

“Just a little ways,” he said. Then, dangling me like a snared rabbit, he floated us both up through the shaft.

There is another thing I remember from my childhood. A song, and it went… How did it go? Ah, yes. “Trickster, trickster / Stole the sun for a prank. / Will you really ride it? / Where will you hide it? / Down by the riverbank…”

It was not our sun, mind you.

Sieh opened two ceilings and another wall before finally setting me down in a dead space that was as big as Grandfather Dekarta’s audience chamber. But it was not the size of this space that made my mouth gape.

More spheres floated in this room, dozens of them. They were fantastically varied—of all shapes and sizes and colors—turning slowly and drifting through the air. They seemed to be nothing more than a child’s toys, until I looked closely at one and saw clouds swirling over its surface.

Sieh hovered near as I wandered among his toys, his expression somewhere between anxiety and pride. The yellow ball had taken up position near the center of the room; all the other balls revolved around it.

“They’re pretty, aren’t they?” he asked me, while I stared at a tiny red marble. A great cloud mass—a storm?—devoured the nearer hemisphere. I tore my eyes from it to look at Sieh. He bounced on his toes, impatient for my answer. “It’s a good collection.”

Trickster, trickster, stole the sun for a prank. And apparently because it was pretty. The Three had borne many children before their falling-out. Sieh was immeasurably old, another of the Arameri’s deadly weapons, and yet I could not bring myself to dash the shy hope I saw in his eyes.

“They’re all beautiful,” I agreed. It was true.

He beamed and took my hand again—not pulling me anywhere, just feeling companionable. “I think the others will like you,” he said. “Even Naha, when he calms down. It’s been a long time since we had a mortal of our own to talk to.”

His words were gibberish strung together without meaning. Others? Naha? Calm?

He laughed at me again. “I especially like your face. You don’t show much emotion—is that a Darre thing, or your mother’s training?—but when you do, all the world can read it.”

My mother had warned me of the same thing long ago. “Sieh—” I had a thousand questions and couldn’t decide where to begin. One of the balls, a plain green one with bright white poles, went past us, tumbling end over end. I didn’t register it as an anomaly until Sieh saw it and stiffened. That was when my own instincts belatedly sent a warning.

I turned to find that Nahadoth stood behind us.

In the instant that my mind and body froze, he could have had me. He was only a few paces away. But he did not move or speak, and so we stared at each other. Face like the moon, pale and somehow wavering. I could get the gist of his features, but none of it stuck in my mind beyond an impression of astonishing beauty. His long, long hair wafted around him like black smoke, its tendrils curling and moving of their own volition. His cloak—or perhaps that was hair, too—shifted as if in an unfelt wind. I could not recall him wearing a cloak before, on the balcony.

The madness still lurked in his face, but it was a quieter madness now, not the rabid-animal savagery of before. Something else—I could not bring myself to call it humanity—stirred underneath the gleam.

Sieh stepped forward, careful not to move in front of me. “Are you with us yet, Naha?”

Nahadoth did not answer, did not even seem to see Sieh. Sieh’s toys, I noticed with the fragment of my mind that wasn’t frozen, went wild when they came near him. Their slow, graceful orbits changed: some drifted in a different direction, some froze in place, some sped up. One split in half and fell broken to the floor as I watched. He took a step forward, sending more of the colored balls spinning out of control.