Shadow Scale (48 page)

Eskar shrugged. “Mothers make simple ones for their children. To encapsulate a lot of memories, and hide them well, requires outside help. There are saarantrai who specialize in clandestine meditation, but it’s illegal and expensive.” Her eyes unfocused. “You’re wondering whether Orma did such a thing.”

I held out my hand and wiggled my pinkie, showing her my
pearl ring. “He sent me this in Ninys, along with the words
The thing itself plus nothing equals everything
. I think he was trying to tell me he’d done it.”

Eskar took my hand and brushed the pearl lightly with her thumb; the spark of hope in her eyes was almost unbearable. “Perhaps he was,” she half whispered, “but I don’t know when he could have had it done. Not while I was with him. He might have made a simple pearl on his own with a few bare facts, brief images, your name.”

I took my hand back and twisted the ring on my finger.

“Mind-pearls can be difficult to retrieve if you don’t know the trigger for locating and opening them,” Eskar said, standing up. She hesitated, then added, “He will always be your uncle, whether he remembers he is or not.”

She swooped down, kissed the top of my head lightly, and then headed toward Lalo and Brisi at the back of the cave. “Four hours until sunset,” she called over her shoulder. “Sleep.”

I leaned against the boulder and closed my eyes.

I only knew I’d slept because I dreamed about Abdo. He was riding in the back of a wagon with several other people, jostling and bumping over a rutted country road. The road wound into the Queenswood, which was just turning golden and autumnal. At a bend in the road, where the undergrowth was particularly dense, Abdo suddenly leaped to his feet and flipped himself out of the wagon. His companions shouted in protest, some reaching out
dark hands to stop him, but he was beyond their reach, somersaulting down the hill through ferns and shrubbery until he disappeared from view.

I heard his voice:
Don’t look for me
.

In the wagon, Paulos Pende stood shakily. His eyes rolled up in his head, and he fell down dead.

“Seraphina!” screamed a steam kettle, which, once I opened my eyes, turned out to be full-sized Eskar. “Ready yourself. It’s time to go.”

I was disoriented, and the first thing I wanted to do was look for Abdo in my head. The dream had been so vivid that I had the impression he’d really spoken to me, that it wasn’t a dream at all.

Of course, his message had been that I
shouldn’t
look for him. I felt my resolve tangle in knots.

In any case, there was no time. Eskar was snorting impatiently. I hastily wrapped the blanket around my ribs, and Eskar grasped me in her talons again. There wasn’t much further to go; the three dragons skimmed one more valley and landed at the edge of a glacier, silver beneath the narrow moon. Ghostly wisps of steam rose from a deep crack in the ice. Eskar set me down, stuck her head into the crevasse, and flamed the ice; our companion dragons paled to blend with the glacier and spread their wings to block her light. When Eskar had widened the crack sufficiently, the others squeezed through. I would have followed on my own, but Eskar took me up protectively and carried me in. I was glad once I realized we were in a downward-sloping icy tunnel, longer than it looked; even Eskar’s claws had trouble finding purchase.

We reached a flat floor at the bottom. My eyes were almost useless under the glacier; the ice was too deep for the moon to shine through, and the cavern was very dimly lit. I was more worried about the smell. A moist, clingy, sulfuric funk had hit us about halfway down the tunnel—and I mean hit, like we’d run into a brick wall of stench. My eyes watered. My nose finally gave up the game, but my throat still felt a thickness in the air and gagged in self-defense. The floor was covered in cold mush up to my ankles.

A scuttling echoed above us and a squishing below. Sparks rained in the darkness. I thought it was my eyes playing tricks, until the sparks became steady open flames at the ends of fifty long tongues, belonging to as many quigutl, the smaller, lizard-like cousins of dragons. My eyes adjusted; the cavern opened far larger than I’d realized, a cathedral of ice and stone enclosing a hulking mountain of festering muck. Quigs swarmed all over it, some with shovel blades strapped to their ventral hands.

“You’re trethpassing,” said a quigutl in lisping semi-Mootya, raising its spiky, lizardy head in front of us. On its hind legs, it was nearly as tall as me. Its eye cones swiveled, taking us in.

“We need to see Mitha!” screamed Eskar.

“If you know Mitha,” said the quig, flaring its head spines suspiciously, “then you know Mitha doethn’t work in the cesspitth.”

Cesspits. That would be the mountainous muck. I wrapped an arm around my face, gagging again, and tried not to think about my boots.

A commotion arose, a stout quigutl crawling toward us over others on the dung heap. He stood up in front of us, facing his fellows, and raised his hands for silence; he had only three hands. “I
am Thmatha, Mitha’s cousin,” he said. “I know this dragon. She saved me from Dr. Gomlann’s experiment. He took my arm, but I’m alive in the pits, not pretherved in a jar.” Thmatha saluted Eskar. “I will bring Mitha.”

He plunged into the darkness, and we were left to wait. “Are you hungry? We’ve got dung,” quipped one of the others.

Eskar cried, “Seraphina, get out your flute!”

She couldn’t see the look I shot her in the dark; she might not have understood it if she had. “You want me to play flute. In the cesspit.”

“I do!” she screamed. “The quigs will like it.”

It meant taking deeper breaths than I cared to, but I tried to be a good sport and humor her. The acoustics of the dung-filled ice cave were extremely odd; my experimental warm-up notes echoed unpleasantly. There was a scuttling in the darkness; the quigs’ bobbing tongue lights closed in around me. I worried that the sound had upset them, until I realized they were jabbering at me. “What’th that? Do it again. Aim it at the western wall. That should give interesting reverberationth.”

I turned in the indicated direction and began to play a nursery tune, “Dance a Biddy Weasel.” The quigs chattered animatedly about the wavelengths of the notes, whether one could make such an instrument from a musk ox femur, and what sort of modifications would be required if one had no lips.

I glanced at Eskar; she nodded minutely. Somehow this was part of the plan.

Thmatha returned about an hour later, evidenced by the quigs shifting their attention. He and another quigutl were ushered up
to the front, and the new arrival—who I presumed was Mitha—saluted Eskar the way a saarantras would have, gesturing toward the sky. Eskar saluted back. A murmur went up; as a rule, dragons did not salute quigutl. Mitha said to Eskar, “You brought us a novelty. You were alwayth generous that way.”

“It took me a long time to return!” cried Eskar. “This is meager recompense.”

Mitha gave a strange double shrug with his two sets of shoulders and said, “No matter. We’re ready. We’ve been ready for yearth. I hope this isn’t all the firepower you brought with you.”

I stared at Eskar, silhouetted in the feeble light: the shadow of her horns and spiky protuberances, her folded wings. She looked suddenly alien to me, full of secrets. She had not merely quit the Censors. She had not come here to see whether she could persuade the quigs to help. She’d already organized them; she’d been planning this for a long time.

There was more to her than I had guessed. For the first time it occurred to me that she was quite well suited to my uncle.

She conferred with Mitha, agreeing on what he should do and when. He replied, “All will be as you athk. We’ve cunningly rewired the lab, so we need only—”

“I trust your diligence!” she screamed, apparently not caring for the details. “You have two days. These hatchlings, Seraphina and Brisi, are to assist you in your sabotage.”

“Exthellent,” said Mitha, swiveling his conical chameleon’s eyes to look at us. “I shall keep them as thafe as my own eggth.”

Eskar signaled to Lalo, who began to climb back out of the tunnel. She made as if to follow him, hesitated, and turned back to me. “Three things, Seraphina,” she said, snorting acrid smoke in my face. “One: find Orma. Two: stop his excision, if possible. Three: secure yourself someplace safe during the fighting.”

She turned around so rapidly the tip of her tail hit me. Mitha kept me from falling backward into the sludge, but then he kept hold of my arm and took a sniff at my wrist.

“Well, call me a thalamander: you’re half human. How odd. Come on, then.” He started toward a tunnel on the right-hand wall, then paused and eyed Brisi, whose wings drooped forlornly. “Shrink down, hatchling,” said Mitha. “These tunnelth are too thmall for you.”

Brisi blinked at him dumbly, as if the smell had paralyzed her. I touched her scaly shoulder with my hand. “Into your saarantras,” I said in Porphyrian, supposing she found the quigutl accent difficult.

She shrank down, but she’d brought no clothing. Eskar hadn’t warned her, maybe because Eskar would have gone naked without a second thought. I pulled a linen shirt, doublet, and breeches out of my bag, led her into the less mucky corridor, and helped her change. She found the buckles and laces of Goreddi clothing quite alarming. Mitha waited, flicking his tongue flame on and off.

When Brisi was finally dressed, Mitha rose on his hind legs and walked at my side, one of his hands touching my elbow lightly for balance. We followed the corridor to a chamber, excavated into
the living rock, where quigs processed the dragon leavings. Translucent orbs set into the ceiling provided an eerie, unflickering light. “Methane and solid fuelth,” said Mitha, gesturing toward pipes and tanks, gauges and kilns. “The labs run on dung. Helpth keep the facility hidden if there isn’t a cess-valley nearby.”

The passage narrowed again, multiple pipelines running along the wall. The flameless lanterns glowed upon the ceiling at intervals. At a nexus sat a curious conveyance, like a six-legged headless pony, wide as a bed, consisting mostly of gears and sputtering. It reminded me of Blanche’s mechanical spiders, without the creepiness.

At the thought of Blanche, I felt a pang. Except for my dream of Abdo, I’d barely thought of the other ityasaari in weeks. I had shied away from my shriveled garden. It was too distressing. Soon I would find Orma and we’d work out how to free my powers, and how to free the others from Jannoula.

Assuming Orma still knew me. I shoved that fear aside.

The mechanical pony had no seats as such; quigutl don’t sit like humans do. Mitha instructed us to lie on top of it on our bellies. I climbed aboard gingerly, grasping two leather loops to keep from sliding off. Brisi, beside me, gripped my arm with fingers like talons. Mitha clung to the contraption’s backside, behind the rattling engine, and reached around the side to pull a lever. The headless pony clanked along, snorting steam from its bum, faster than we could walk, through passages too tight for dragons. The dim, steady ceiling lights whizzed past. I tried not to think about falling off and being trampled.

After half an hour, we reached a vaulted bay where several of
these conveyances were moored, hissing and humming. Mitha helped me down; my knees were trembling.

“Lab Four,” he said. “Under its own mountain. This is Quigutl Level Five, but any tunnel too thmall for a dragon is thafe. I will find you a nest. Are you hungry?”

I shook my head. Brisi gaped at him; seeing him in full light had shocked her anew. I put a hand on her shoulder, which seemed to snap her out of it. “I’m sorry,” she said in Porphyrian, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I’ve heard of quigs from my mother, but we don’t have them in Porphyry. They’re so … ugly.”

I hoped Mitha couldn’t understand her. He gave no sign, and then we were interrupted by the arrival of several more quigutl. These were lab quigs, cleaner than their comrades in the pits. They came straight over, gabbling to each other, and began examining our clothes, tugging at the hem of my tunic and the cuffs of Brisi’s trousers.

“Porphyrian cotton,” said one knowledgeably. “That’s what we’re lacking, good fibrous plantth. I’m not keen on the ox hair or the bark. You see how fragile she ith?” She poked me in the face with a finger. “The bark would chafe.”