Shadow Scale (5 page)

When he’d finished breaking everything he’d brought, he stood upon the low wall and looked out over the city toward the horizon, where the sky kissed the violet sea. His lips moved, as if he were reciting a prayer. He stood unsteadily, lashed by the wind, and stared down the sheer mountain face at the glass shards winking invitingly in the sun.

In that instant, impossibly, I knew what he was thinking. He would throw himself down the mountain. His despair washed over me and led to desperation on my part. I was a floating vision-eye; he didn’t know I was there; I had no way to reach him; it couldn’t be done.

I tried because I had to. I reached toward him—with what?—and touched his face and said,
Please live. Please
.

He blinked like one waking from a dream and stepped back from the edge. He ran his hands over his hair, staggered to a corner of the old fort, and vomited. Then, his shoulders bent like an old man’s, he stumbled back down the mountain toward his cart.

Master Smasher looked so serene now, reconfiguring statues in my garden. I could have taken both his hands and induced a
vision, peered down upon whatever he was up to in the real world, but I didn’t like to do it. It felt like spying.

I had never understood what had happened that day, how I’d been able to reach out, and it had never happened again. I could use my garden connection to speak to ityasaari I’d met in the real world, but not to the ones I hadn’t. I could only peer at them, as through a spyglass.

Weariness hit me. I hurried on, ready to get to the end and go to bed. I tended short-limbed, elderly Newt, who rolled contentedly in his muddy wallow among the bluebells; I said good night to widemouthed, shark-toothed Gargoyella, who sat by the Faceless Lady fountain, gargling the waters. I paused at the swamp to shake my head bemusedly at Pandowdy, the most monstrous of all, an armless, legless silver-scaled slug, big as a standing stone, who lurked under the muddy waters.

Pandowdy was one I wasn’t sure I wanted to find. How would I bring him back if I did? Roll him up a ramp onto a cart? Did he have eyes or ears so we could communicate? It had been hard enough to create this avatar in the garden; I’d had to wade right into the filthy water and lay my hands on his scaly skin, in lieu of taking his nonexistent hands. He’d been ice-cold, and pulsed horribly.

Maybe I didn’t have to gather every one to make the invisible barricade strong enough. I hoped so, because I had no plans to find Jannoula, either. Her Wee Cottage was next, abutting the wetland; its surrounding yard, once full of herbs and flowers, was all gone to nettles and bramble. I picked my way gingerly toward the cottage door, my heart full of mixed emotions—pity, regret,
some lingering bitterness. I tugged at the padlock on the door; it felt reassuringly heavy in my hand, cold iron, unrusted, immovable. Relief entered the mix.

Jannoula’s avatar had been different from the very beginning, not passive and benign like the others. She’d been actively aware of this place—of me—and had eventually moved her entire consciousness into my head in an attempt to take me over. I had freed myself only by tricking her into entering this cottage and locking her inside.

I dreaded that happening again, not least because I wasn’t sure how it had happened, why she was different. Abdo was different, too, but that active connection had grown slowly, over time, and he seemed disinclined to move in and stay.

This was my primary worry about Orma’s plan. What did this mind-threading really involve? Was it the kind of link I’d experienced with Jannoula, or something shallower? What if we couldn’t untangle our … our mind-stuff, whatever it was, afterward? What if we hurt each other? As much could go wrong as could go right.

I turned away from the Wee Cottage, preoccupied with these thoughts, and found myself face to face with an incongruous snowy mountaintop. I had one more grotesque to tend, Tiny Tom, who lived in a stony grotto under the miniature peak. He owed his name to an eleven-year-old’s unsubtle sense of irony, alas: he was eight feet tall, strong as a bear (I’d glimpsed him wrestling one in the real world), and clad in ragged blankets, sewn together to make crude clothing.

He wasn’t inside his grotto, however, but in the snow out
front, leaving enormous clawed footprints as he staggered around clutching his woolly head, extremely agitated.

Once this kind of behavior had meant I had a vision coming, but I knew how to circumvent that now. Thanks to my faithful tending, visions had become rare. I’d had only one in the last three years, the vision of Abdo at midwinter, and in that case Abdo had been actively looking for me. That wasn’t the usual situation at all.

“Sweet Tom, merry Tom,” I said quietly, circling the wild man, keeping clear of his swinging elbows. He was hard to look at without pity: his filthy clothing, his sun-bleached thatch of hair, his beard cluttered with twigs, his crumbling teeth. “You’ve been living on that mountain all alone,” I said soothingly to his grotesque, drawing closer. “What has it taken to survive? What have you suffered?”

We had all suffered, from Tiny Tom to Master Smasher. By all the Saints in Heaven, and their dogs, we didn’t need to suffer alone. Not anymore.

Tiny Tom was breathing raggedly, but calming. He lowered his hands; his rheumy eyes bugged out at me. I did not turn away or flinch, but took his elbow and gently led him back into his cave, to the nest of bones he had made himself. He let himself be seated, his gigantic head beginning to nod. I ran my hand over his matted locks and stayed by him until he was asleep.

We needed this place, this garden, in the real world. I was going to make it happen. I owed it to all of them.

The Queen’s support for the project, however, depended more on whether we could get this mysterious barrier working than on my wish to find the others. I gathered the three ityasaari of my acquaintance that afternoon to see what we could do. Lars offered the use of Viridius’s suite.

Viridius was home and, because he was having a good day gout-wise, sitting up at the harpsichord in his brocade dressing gown, caressing the keys with his gnarled fingers. “Don’t mind me,” he said when I arrived, waggling his bushy red eyebrows. “Lars tells me this is half-dragon business; I won’t interfere. I just need to get the second theme of this concerto grosso down.”

Lars entered from the other room, a delicate porcelain teapot held gingerly in one large hand. He paused by Viridius and squeezed the old composer’s shoulder; Viridius leaned briefly into Lars’s arm and then turned back to his work. Lars brought the tea around and filled the five cups on the ornate table by the gout couch. Dame Okra had claimed the couch, putting up her feet and spreading her stiff green skirts around her. Abdo, swathed in a long knit tunic against the cold, bounced on his upholstered chair as if he could barely be constrained to sit, his long sleeves flapping over his hands like flippers. I took the other couch, and Lars settled his bulk carefully beside me, trading me a cup of tea for Orma’s letter, which the other two had just read.

“Have you heard of anything like this?” I said, glancing from Dame Okra’s scowl to Abdo’s wide brown eyes. “Mental connections have occurred with some of us. Abdo can speak in our heads; my mind used to reach out compulsively to other half-dragons.” Jannoula had entered my mind and seized it, but I didn’t like
talking about that. “What kind of connection is this mind-threading?”

“I’ll tell you right now, I won’t participate in any mind-threading,” said Dame Okra flatly, her eyes swimming behind her thick spectacles. “It sounds horrible.”

It sounds interesting to me
, said Abdo’s voice in my head.

“Do you know whether the Porphyrian ityasaari have ever joined together this way, or used their … their mind-stuff for this kind of physical manifestation?” I asked aloud so Dame Okra and Lars could hear half the conversation, anyway. Abdo’s mouth and tongue were shingled with silver dragon scales, and he could not speak aloud.

No. But we do know about mind-stuff. We call it soul-light. With practice, some of us can learn to see it around other ityasaari, like a second self made of sunlight. I can reach out with mine a little; that’s how I talk to them. I send out a finger of fire
, said Abdo, sending his real finger in a slow, dramatic arc to poke Lars in the stomach.

Lars, his lips moving as he read, swatted Abdo’s hand away.

Abdo gestured at Dame Okra with his head.
Her light is spiny, like a hedgehog, but Lars’s is gentle and friendly
.

I saw nothing around either of them, but I noted an omission.
What about mine?

Abdo studied the air around my head, toying with one of his many hair knots.
I see strands of light sticking out of your head like snakes, or umbilical cords, where we three—and others—are connected to you. Cords of our light. I don’t see your light, and I don’t know why
.

Heat rose in my cheeks. My light was missing? What did that mean? Was I deficient? An anomaly even among anomalies?

Dame Okra interjected in a voice like a braying mule: “Might we all participate in this conversation? That requires it to be audible.” She paused, her scowl deepening. “No, don’t talk to me silently, you villain. I won’t tolerate it.” She glared at Abdo and waved a hand around her head as if fending off gnats.

“He says we’ve all got—” The word
soul-light
didn’t sit well with me; it smacked of religion, which brought me quickly to judgmental Saints. “Mind-fire. He can see it.”

Lars carefully folded Orma’s letter and placed it on the couch between us, shrugging his bulky shoulders. “I can’t do anythink special with my mindt, as far as I know, but I am heppy to be a bead if someone else is the string.”

“I’m sure that will be fine, Lars,” I said, nodding encouragingly. “Abdo or I will discover the way to thread through you.”

I don’t think you can reach out like that, Phina madamina
, said Abdo.

“I’ve reached out with my mind before,” I said, more waspishly than I meant to. I had reached back into Jannoula’s mind; I suppressed that memory at once.

Recently?
he said, pulling the neck of his tunic up over his mouth.

“Give me a minute to relax into it. I’ll show you,” I said, glaring at the little skeptic. I nestled into a corner of the couch, closed my eyes, and focused on my breathing. It took time, because Dame Okra snorted like a horse, and then Viridius kept tinkling away on the harpsichord until Lars stepped over and gently asked him to stop.

I finally found my garden, and then Loud Lad’s ravine in the middle of it. Loud Lad sat upon the lip of the chasm, as if waiting for me, a beatific smile on his round face. I prodded him to standing, and then concentrated on myself. I always imagined myself bodily present in the garden; I liked feeling the dewy grass between my toes. When I had tried this before—with Jannoula—I had needed to imagine that the grotesque and I were immaterial.

With effort, Loud Lad began to blur around the edges, then turn translucent in the middle. I could make out shapes through him. My own hands grew transparent, and when I was insubstantial enough, I stepped into Loud Lad to join my mind-stuff with his.

I passed through him as if he were fog. A second try gave the same result.

“It’s like trying to travel through a spyglass,” said a voice behind me in the garden. “If we could do that, I’d step through and visit the moon.”

I turned around to see Fruit Bat—Abdo’s double—animated by Abdo’s consciousness. He could speak in my garden, unhindered by his scaly throat; this was how he spoke in my mind.

“I’ve done this before,” I said.

“Yes, but your mind may have changed since then,” he said, his dark eyes solemn. “It has changed in the time I’ve known you. I walked out of this garden and into your wider mind once—do you remember?”

I did. I had been depressed, and then a door had appeared in the undifferentiated fog of … of the rest of my mind. He had
stepped through to comfort me, but I’d taken him for a second Jannoula. “I made you promise to stay in the garden after that,” I said.

He nodded. “That’s not all you did. You took precautions. There used to be an Abdo-sized hole in the wall, but you bricked it up.”

Not intentionally, if so. The garden’s edge was in sight; I pointed crossly. “Bricked? It’s a woven willow fence.”

“Ah, madamina. I know you call this place a garden, but it doesn’t look like one to me. I see us confined to a narrow gatehouse, with no admittance to the castle of your larger mind.”

I looked around at the lush vegetation, the soaring blue sky, Loud Lad’s deep ravine. “That’s absurd,” I said, trying to laugh, but deeply confused. This place had been created by my imagination, of course, but was its appearance so subjective?

This wasn’t solving our mind-threading problem. “Even if I can’t reach out to Lars,” I said, “can you reach out and thread your mind-fire to mine? Make me a bead on the string?”

Abdo bit his lip and darted his gaze about. “Maybe,” he said slowly.

“Go ahead and try it,” I said.

There was a pause and then a blinding flash of pain, as if my head would split in two. I screamed—in my head? in the real world?—and scrabbled around the garden, looking for the egression gate. I found it and returned to myself, my throbbing head cradled in someone’s hands.