Conservation of Shadows (9 page)

“Someone else to fight?” he said, both dismayed and determined.

“No,” she said. Her smile was crooked and not a little rueful. “Mine. Or did you think we were going to find paper and ink by raiding the villages of people who never had the fortune to learn to read?”

In actuality, Sakera’s citadel was a small fort atop a hill deep in a tangle of woods and vines. Tamim was astonished by the proliferation of vegetation. “Is any of this safe to eat?” he asked, especially after he saw the half-dissolved bones of birds beneath one tree with lush purple fruit.

“The fruit’s all safe,” Sakera said offhandedly. “It’s getting it without making the tree angry that’s the problem.” To demonstrate, she threw a rock at one of the trees.

The wood splintered open with a screaming sound at impact, and fingers of bark-less wood stroked the stone before hurling it back toward them.

“Don’t catch it!” Sakera said, as if Tamim had to be told. Streaks of sap marred the stone’s surface.

“What good is a fort without guards?” Tamim said, uneasy that they had had to leave the giants back a little ways. He supposed the trees were worth something, but . . .

“So maybe I exaggerated when I called it a citadel,” Sakera said. “It’s more like a supply depot.”

He sighed.

Sakera drew out a key of blackened iron and opened the fort’s gates. It was built of concrete and dark granite, which had to have been brought from somewhere else. Sakera lit a small candle—one of their spoils—and led the way to a room down the end of the hall. She opened it with a smaller key.

Inside the room were stacks and stacks of paper, and in one corner, an escritoire. “This,” said Sakera, “is where you are going to learn to draw your own patterns.”

“Why is this necessary?”

“Do you remember the encounter where you couldn’t get rid of the hand?”

“You noticed?” he said.

“Please,” she said. “It was a dead thing climbing up another dead thing. I couldn’t help but notice. If we can draw the necessary motions, that won’t happen again. We must prepare as many maneuvers as we can think of.”

“It’s been years since I’ve used a brush and ink,” Tamim said.

“I taught you to use the giant, didn’t I?” Sakera said.

He looked pointedly at her hands. “The tremor’s getting worse.”

She averted her eyes. “I know. But food first. I bet you’re famished.”

They made a meal of leftover pemmican and fruit preserves. Then Sakera went to give herself a sponge bath with water from the cistern. Tamim waited patiently. Her long hair took forever to wash, and he knew that when he returned from his own bath, she would still be working out the tangles with a broken-toothed comb.

Tamim kept watch while Sakera drowsed in the sun outside the fort, letting her hair dry. At last she got up and danced across the ground, arms outflung, face lifted. “Time to learn drawing,” she said.

After learning the alphabet and numbers by drawing them in the dirt, Tamim felt frustrated at returning to the beginning. Sakera was relentless, however. She made him review the basics: how to hold a brush, how to make perfect single strokes. Then she made him learn each letter all over again, with the initial, medial, and final forms that she had omitted the first time around.

“Couldn’t you have taught me all the forms to begin with?” Tamim said.

“You wouldn’t have sat still for it,” she said.

When she deemed him ready, Tamim wrote out a passage she dictated to him, words that had no meaning to him and probably had no meaning to anyone but Sakera.

“It’ll do,” she said when the ink had dried and she had a chance to inspect it minutely. “We’re running short on time. I hope you have a good eye for motion.”

She brought out a chart of the human body, except it was boxed off and marked with numbers. “What do you make of this?”

At first he was bewildered by the sheer number of lines and curves. Then, as he studied the chart, pieces came clear: notes on the proportion of head height to body height, head width to shoulder width, the range of motion of the major joints.

“I can memorize this,” Tamim said.

“You have to do better than memorize,” she said. “You’ll have to draw.
This
is the kind of thing you’ll have to produce.” She brought out another chart—no, a sheaf of drawings on translucent paper—and showed him how to flip through them. Each paper in the sheaf was numbered.

The drawings showed something very simple: a man—no, woman, from the wider pelvis—walking, the motion depicted in painstaking detail, from the lift of the feet to the shift in balance.

Tamim closed his eyes and visualized Sakera walking, although she had a peculiarly straight-hipped stride for a woman. How would he draw a diagram for Sakera? He opened his eyes. “We can already make the giants walk,” he pointed out.

“That’s true,” Sakera said, “but walking is the fundamental thing. If you can master walking, the rest will follow.”

“Do we have time for this?”

“We have to make time. I don’t want to take any chances with the sorcerer.” She bit her lip. “I’ve already underestimated him once; how do you think I got this tremor?”

Tamim bent his head, studying the diagram some more. He didn’t miss Sakera’s hum of satisfaction.

In the days that followed, Tamim learned to draw the human form with graphite sticks. He grew accustomed to having greasy, grey-smeared fingers. “Does it matter whether I’m drawing the living or the dead?” he asked.

“You’re showing the giants the pattern of the motion,” Sakera said. “That’s what matters.”

He stared down at his latest tracing of one of Sakera’s beautifully inked drawings: a woman in the midst of a leap. The vast quantity of her papers was daunting, but when he wasn’t drawing—everything from butterflies to murderous trees to doomed birds, everything but Sakera herself—he was studying them. “How do you decide the interval of motion?” Sometimes the difference between two drawings in a sequence was fractional, and he had to hold both up to the sunlight to see what had changed.

“Think of it as equal intervals of time,” Sakera said. “You don’t need to be this meticulous to draw the motion for the giant; you’ll be mediating the action through your hands. All it needs are the distinguishing moments. But it’s useful to know the motion’s rhythm.”

“How many drawings like this does the sorcerer have?”

“Too many.”

“You can’t just burn them?”

She gave him a pained look. “Once they’ve been painted in ink—anything permanent—by the necromancer’s own hand, they’re available to every ghoul he raises. He’s probably burned them himself, to keep others from stealing his knowledge.”

“Ink,” Tamim repeated.

“Why do you think I’ve been having you work in graphite even though your calligraphy’s passable?”

“I had been wondering, yes.”

“You can start working with ink tomorrow,” Sakera said, as though she were granting him a favor. “Try not to mess it up.”

“I wish I could do something for your hands,” Tamim said.

She grimaced, and he regretted bringing it up. But she said only, “I can still do most necessary things. But a brush is sensitive to small motions. I can’t risk it anymore. Why don’t we organize the sketches that you want to do in ink, so we can increase your giant’s range of motion?”

“How much longer do we have?”

Sakera looked away, her eyes distant. “You remember that village? They’re on
uth.
”

Three to go. “You should have pushed me harder,” he said. “How often do they change the letter?”

“About once a week,” she said.

He could have asked earlier, and he hadn’t. “How far is it to the sorcerer’s palace?”

“From here? A week’s hard journeying.”

“Let’s start organizing,” Tamim said.

Tamim was never going to get all the ink out of his fingernails from painting maneuvers. Then again, it was cleaner than grave-dirt. Sakera’s fingernails weren’t much better, although Tamim had done his best to trim them for her. He missed the days of sketching with graphite. He had even attempted a portrait of his mother. It hadn’t come out very well, but considering that he hardly remembered her face, that was only to be expected.

They had re-rigged the giants’ harnesses using their best rope, their most cunning knots, loaded up the giants with supplies. “Once we’re out of the immediate area,” Sakera said, “expect more of the vultures’ patrols. We are not concerned with their total defeat. They’ll know we’re coming. The point is to get to the palace as quickly as possible.”

“The ghouls will swarm us,” Tamim said.

“I know,” she said. “Once we get close enough, your job will be to distract the sorcerer’s armies as long as you can. I—” She hesitated. “I may have to go in alone, if he doesn’t come out to greet us.”

“How are you going to keep them from tearing you apart?”

“I’ll be fast,” she said.

“You call that a plan?” he said incredulously.

She grinned.

“I will never understand you,” Tamim said.

“You will someday,” she said. “It’s time to go.”

Forever after, Tamim remembered that week in nightmare snatches, despite an ordinarily orderly sense of time. They passed statues that had been overgrown by violet-grey crystals that luminesced in response to the giants’ footfalls, roads that liquefied into vortices of glittering sand. The wind muttered at them, perhaps in words from extinct languages, perhaps in the universal language of nightmare. They passed more villages, some inhabited by the living, who fled their approach, others inhabited by ghouls marching the alphabet’s path in its countdown to
qaref.

Curiously, there were few vultures. When asked, Sakera said, “They’ve probably been recalled to the palace for the sorcerer’s protection.”

“Does he fear the giants?” Tamim asked.

“Wouldn’t you?” She sounded cranky. It seemed sleep deprivation could affect even her.

At last they reached the sorcerer’s high road, paved at the sides with dark, gleaming stones. An army of ghouls awaited them. The banner of the vulture flew high in the distance, along with the standards of individual companies. Tamim had Ifayad crane its head back so he could glimpse the black-and-iron palace high on its hill.

“Do we charge?” Tamim said.

“Wait,” Sakera said implacably.

The ghouls parted. Down the road came the sorcerer, mounted on a blood bay horse with a skull for a head, although no other part of it had decayed. The sorcerer was tall, and he wore ornate lamellar lacquered red and black.

The ghouls bent their heads to the sorcerer in unison. For his part, the man removed his helmet and shaded his eyes, looking unerringly at Sakera’s giant. “You are brave to return, Sakera,” he said. He had a low, resonant voice, and he sounded respectful but unintimidated.

“I have an ally this time,” she said.

Tamim said, “Ghouls may require jade bullets, but he’s only human. Let me shoot him.”

The sorcerer raised a spyglass and fixed it on the giant’s maw. Tamim held still; he had nothing to hide. “You must be Liathu’s son,” the sorcerer said, almost fondly. “It’s in the shape of your face. She was brave, too, in her way.”

To Tamim’s dismay, Sakera had the giant lower her to the ground. It took her a while to disentangle herself from the harness. “It’s been a long time,” she said.

“You are destroying the realm I would have built,” said the sorcerer. “What good is the Pit when everything in the rimlands is becoming an extension of death? This could have been a prosperous realm, if not for your revenge. I did not think even you were so cruel.”

Sakera’s revenge? What revenge?

“Not death,” Sakera said, “but undeath. You misunderstand the nature of the problem. There’s only one way to reverse what has happened to the rimlands. Abdicate. Else there are two giants, and there will be more. All the old bones of the land will rise up against you, extinct though their race may be, when the ghouls write
qaref.
”

“You know better than to expect me to listen,” the sorcerer said, “especially after you took away the woman I loved.”

“She was not yours to have, not that way,” Sakera said quietly. “A ghoul can do as it is told, but it cannot love, not the way the living do.”

Tamim didn’t want to hear any more of the sorcerer’s history. He sliced his hand through the air. Ifayad’s hand moved correspondingly.

The sorcerer said, unfazed, “Has it never occurred to you, son of Liathu, to wonder why I didn’t raise the giants as ghouls myself? Do you know who it is you have been allied with all this time?”

Tamim stopped. The hand stopped short of the sorcerer and his uncanny mount.

Once it would not have mattered. But if he didn’t find out now, he would never know.

“Go ahead,” Sakera said to the sorcerer. “Tell him.” She raised her chin as if in challenge. Her hands were trembling. For once, Tamim thought it was out of anxiety.

“It is perhaps unforgivable that Liathu’s child should be so ignorant of necromancy,” the sorcerer said, “but she was never much of a teacher. A necromancer can only raise people who died during his life-span. And the giants became extinct before any humans came into being. They were possibly the first to walk the world. What does that tell you about the woman you have been traveling with?”

Sakera was certainly no giant.

Then he knew. “Death,” Tamim said. “Death is the oldest necromancer of all.”

“Would you rather be ruled by Death,” the sorcerer said to Tamim, “or by someone who is likewise human?”

“The Pit was never meant to be ruled by mortal man or woman,” Sakera said. “Did you think your conquest solved anything? There must be a place in the world where Death has a home, and that is the Pit, else there is no rest for anyone when the last breath flees, when the heart finally stills.”

“Choose,” the sorcerer said harshly. “Choose by numbers, if nothing else: fight and fight though you may, even after my death, the Vulture Corps will track your every footstep.—Do you make no argument, Sakera?”

“It has to be a real choice,” Sakera said. “His choice, because he is a child of life and death both.”

Tamim didn’t believe in facing violence with his eyes closed. He knew what he had seen, all his life in the rimlands, the unclean animals and the countdown ghouls, bleeding earth and ashen fruit. Once he would not have had the courage to imagine something better—if not for himself, then for whatever generations might follow.