Conservation of Shadows (6 page)

Between one step and the next, a magistrate’s shade brushed her shadow. For a terrible, unblinking moment, she understood the principle by which Vorief’s framework could be used to kill from a distance, understood it in a visceral manner that her first-term reading of the treatise had failed to convey. What was a shadow, after all, but a shape in the moving world reduced to a projection of possibilities?

The dead magistrate had made his choices, Kaela was given to understand, and those choices collapsed into the single sharp fact of his death, the face of unflinching truth. What would her shade reveal after her heartbeat stilled?

She saw her life flattened to an ink-blot, her own shadow beginning to peel into shapes she did not want to confront, and fled the rest of the way to her room. Her hands shook as she spread her sleeping mat, and in the darkness, she laced her fingers together to still them. Only shadows, she told herself over and over as she sought sleep. Only shadows.

Kaela did not mention the Spinning Rose to her roomsister that day or the next or the next after that, even during sword-dancing practice. She reread
When Shadows Walk into the World.
She performed flawlessly on her next exam, which concerned the comparative history of execution and exile, although after she handed it in, she could not recall any of the questions, much less her responses. And, Teris told her one morning, she began talking in her sleep.

“What have I been saying?” Kaela demanded.

“Mathematical things,” Teris said, and recited some of them back to her.

She relaxed, then wondered why she had been tense. “Oh, that. I’ve been trying to reformulate Brien’s notation. I swear there’s something going on with those definitions, if I could just see what he was doing. The entelechy framework didn’t exist while he lived, so that third postulate must have seemed necessary to him. Why is it so hard to figure out how to derive it?” She swallowed. “I haven’t been keeping you up, have I?” Kaela slept deeply, so Teris’s comings and goings rarely woke her, but the reverse was not true.

Teris, in the process of unpinning her hair to brush it out before breakfast, paused and shook her head. The tangles were almost copper in the lamplight. “No. I’m just worried about you. I can’t say I understand your research, but you’ve got to ease up on yourself.”

Kaela averted her gaze from her roomsister’s earnest eyes. “I’m nearing the deadline for that rough draft, and my notes, the structures I see, they don’t quite come together. As if there’s a gap, and I should know the shape of the bridge.”

“Even so.” Teris passed the brush from hand to hand with unthinking precision. “Tomorrow, instead of your paper, promise me you’ll do something that hasn’t the slightest relationship to research. Sit in the library and read torrid love poetry if that’s what it takes. It’ll help. You’ll see.”

“I want to buy my own blades,” Kaela blurted out.

Forever after, Kaela would remember that her roomsister’s expression, rather than being surprised or amused or smug, became thoughtful and not a little pleased. “Tomorrow, hells. We can go shopping after breakfast, if you like. Neither of us has class today until the afternoon, is that right?”

“Yes,” said Kaela, thinking that, with blades of her own, she need no longer fear shadows.

That evening, and the evenings afterward, Kaela and Teris, both wielding steel, practiced true sword-dances. Teris showed her new exercises to ease her out of her self-consciousness. It helped for a while. She would never equal her roomsister’s shining poise, but she approached it in her own slow way. Sometimes, laying alone in the darkness with the blades beneath her pillow, she even forgot her encounter with the magistrate’s shade.

Scant weeks remained before her draft was due. Kaela resumed murmuring in her sleep. Teris continued to invite her to festhall sword-dances, but Kaela’s fear of shadows held her fast. Finally, she retreated to the Black College’s library after dinner to avoid the invitation, telling herself she needed to concentrate. As she slipped between the shelves, she avoided looking at the shreds of her shadow along the interstices of wall and floor. Teris, she was sure, had never struggled with phobia in her life.

She stopped by the shelves that housed the Black College’s history and counted backwards by decades until she found the era during which magistrate Brien had held office. So few volumes to encompass the long dance of lives, all reprinted via silhouette. Originals that old were stored elsewhere, and here the usual must of aging paper was replaced by a cleaner smell.

Kaela knew that she would find little on Brien here; she had already looked. Her roomsister, better trained in historical methodology, would have told her if anything useful appeared elsewhere. Who had Brien’s friend the traitor been, and what had he betrayed? She should have paid more attention, even if it seemed like gossip too ancient to have any relevance, especially to mathematics.

“Brien,” she said into the rows of listening books, tasting the name. The ancient gossip had once been anything but ancient or irrelevant; had captured three people, at least, in its knots. She did not know what they had looked like or what their voices sounded like. She did not know the touches they exchanged or failed to exchange.

The archivist on duty, bemused by Kaela’s interest, found no contemporary portraits of the three, but located a later woodprint of the execution, called
Between Shadows.
The first thing Kaela noticed was the utter absence of blades in the picture, although even today, full magistrates carried a ritual sword of office. “Who is who?” Kaela asked, captivated by the stark stiff lines and shadows, the contrasting fluidity of the falling leaves that framed the scene.

“Rahen the Traitor,” said the archivist, pointing to the man who stared defiantly from the center of the picture, hands bound behind him. “Magistrate Kischa.” A woman with a river-fall of dark hair around her averted face, to Rahen’s left. “Magistrate Brien.” A thin man with no expression except in his hands, with his fingers laced together. In those tense hands, Kaela, who had learned to read stances as a sword-dancer, saw a cry too broken for other expression.

And all around them, the falling leaves, each three-lobed. No, shreds of leaves. Even Kaela understood that symbolism, the implication of death and divided lives. She thanked the unknown artist for being straightforward.

The archivist said, “Shall I make you a silhouette of this?”

“Yes,” Kaela said. “Oh, yes.” Brien had a face now. She would settle for that.

She made it back to her room with a half hour to spare before curfew, clutching the woodcut-silhouette all the way. She laid it atop her escritoire and studied it more closely. For all she knew, the artist had invented the faces. But those tense, anguished hands had a truth in them beyond fact or fancy.

Next to the picture, she laid her silhouette of the shadow postulates in their earliest known formulation, although the archaic notation gave her headaches. Three postulates, braided around each other and into the entelechy framework. Three-lobed leaves. Three people, two lovers, one death.

The bell tolled curfew. Kaela was nowhere near ready to sleep. She stretched, then segued into the Wolf Approaches, miming the blade. Her shadow partnered her, a solitary shape against the wall. She stopped. No. Without Teris, it wasn’t the same.

“I am not afraid,” Kaela said to her shadow.

Kaela repeated the stretches to keep her muscles from knotting up. Idly, letting her mind drift free of her body, she negated the third shadow postulate, then followed the strands of logic in search of the inevitable contradiction. She knew the extended framework as intimately as her hands knew the unruly cascades of her hair. With practiced discipline, she began working through the consequences of a system identical save for that one negated postulate.

There was no contradiction.

Kaela sat before the escritoire. She laid her hands on her notes, intending to make sure she was remembering the postulates correctly, then snatched them back before they clenched and crumpled the sum of her work. Her gaze fell again on the woodcut-silhouette with its border of falling leaves.

No. She had not misremembered.

It was as though, having lived all her life in the belief that roomsisters or roombrothers must come in threes, she discovered they could live in pairs, as with herself and Teris, or quartets. The Black College organized itself around a rule of three, but why not a rule of two, or four?

A person cast one and only one shadow under most circumstances, but in the darkness, no shadows lived; in the light of several lanterns, shadows proliferated. Each scenario, for a given set of light sources, was equally valid. And so it was with the third shadow postulate.

Two shadows crossing and uncrossing while she watched, breathless, from the doorway of the Spinning Rose.

“Teris,” Kaela breathed, eyes widening. She was in love with Teris Tascha, despite the sister-taboo.

Falling leaves, three-lobed leaves. Brien must have loved his friend’s lover, the woman with the long, dark hair, although it had gone unwritten and Kaela, in the absence of textual evidence, would never be able to prove it.

Kaela began writing, scarcely conscious of her pen’s outpouring. She knew the shape of the entelechy framework and the alternate structures that would result from the variations on that third, mutable postulate, from its possible negations. She knew, too, that she could not articulate the key insight, the silent cry that Brien had left within the single language abstract enough to trust with his anguish at standing outside his friends’ romance.

Perhaps Brien had executed the traitor, friend and rival both, with a traitorously glad heart himself. Perhaps he had wished to discard himself in the traitor’s place, after seeing what the execution did to that dark-haired woman. The artist, in drawing Brien’s fingers as a cage of tension, convinced Kaela that the latter was closer to the truth.

Kaela remembered the name of Teris’s lover, but it didn’t matter. She put down her pen. Now that she understood what she had overlooked, she had time to formulate a coherent thesis. Roz Roven, her sponsor, would be pleased.

She also understood that she could never mention her insight to Teris in a language that the other woman could fathom. Kaela had no desire to break the paired beauty of hand meeting hand, blade meeting blade, to step between two sword-dancers’ shadows intersecting beneath the eyes of light. But she could find her own dance.

I have loved you in your own language,
Kaela thought as she picked up her blades,
so softly that we never knew it. Let your language be mine; let me cast my own shadows.

No shadows interrupted her all the way through curfew hour that night as she walked to the Spinning Rose, or any night thereafter.

Whatever else might be said of the sorcerer who ruled the rim of the Pit, he had never been able to raise the bones of giants. The bones lay scattered in the rimlands, green-grey with moss and crusted with crystals, whorled with the fingerprints of desperate travelers. The bones did not easily surrender fingerprints. The locals considered it bad luck to leave their marks on the giants’ bones.

Tamim was sitting in the lee of a rock and had raised his gun to his head when the giants’ bones embedded in the hill shook themselves free of earth. He knew that the gun wasn’t going to be of any use against the bones. He knew of only two ways to destroy ghouls: lure them past the rimlands’ borders so they would crumble into dust, or pierce them through the heart with jade.

The border was days away. Tamim had used the last of his jade bullets escaping a vulture patrol.

His finger hesitated on the trigger.

“You shouldn’t do that,” a girl’s voice, or a young woman’s, called from the other side of the rock.

He shouldn’t have let his guard down, even for a suicide attempt. Maybe especially for a suicide attempt. The sorcerer’s Vulture Corps was always happy to collect corpses.

Tamim edged around the rock. He didn’t like leaving bones at his back, but they were taking their time assembling themselves, as though unseen ligaments were growing at each joint. Their clattering made him jumpy.
Assess the threat,
he reminded himself,
then decide.

The girl was in plain sight. She had brown skin like Tamim’s own and long black hair in tangles down to her waist, too long to be practical, the kind an aristocrat might have. No aristocrat, however, would have been caught in that high-collared black coat.

Tamim knew the rimlands’ sumptuary laws, knew what the black coat meant: vulture, and necromancer besides. He aimed and fired.

He must have made some noise to alert her. She ran toward him, ducking at the right moment. The bullet missed her by inches; a lock of hair drifted free. “I’m not what you think, boy,” she said breathlessly. She barely came up to his shoulder. Her hand, surprisingly strong, caught his and twisted the gun to point at the ground between them.

Five bullets left, but he wanted to save one for himself. Admittedly, at this range he was more likely to shoot himself if he tried again. That wasn’t even taking into account the girl’s reflexes. “What are you, then?”

“I’m no vulture,” she said. “I’m alone out here. I need help, and I’ll take what I can find, whether it comes in the shape of a giant or a boy who looks half-ghoul himself.” She stared directly into his eyes as she released her grip on the gun.

Tamim made a frustrated noise and holstered the gun. A soldier wasn’t supposed to feel curiosity, but today he had forfeited any claim to being a soldier. “You’re the one raising the bones,” he pointed out.

He had been wrong about the skeleton. There were two of them, not one, entangled oddly from aeons in the earth’s embrace.

The girl took her attention off Tamim for a moment. She laced her fingers together, then pulled them apart. In a rush, the bones separated into two skeletons. Loam, uprooted grass, and glittering gravel showered both Tamim and the girl. Dust swirled in the shape of grinning skulls, then settled. The girl paid it no heed. Apparently she was as accustomed to the rimlands’ behavior as he was.