Shadow Scale (34 page)

“We should wait to discuss that,” said Camba, glancing apprehensively at Pende.

Pende’s sunken eyes had popped open at the sound of Abdo’s name. He began to speak, quietly at first, then with growing vehemence. His Porphyrian was opaque to me, but his tone grew transparently angry. Was this about Abdo?

Camba left Ingar’s side and sat at the old priest’s feet. She touched his feet and spoke in low tones, but Pende would not let himself be calmed. His complaint reached a climax; his eyes reeled and spittle flecked his lips. Finally, he turned his baleful gaze on me and shouted in heavily accented Goreddi, “And you! You want to take the rest from me. I do not permit this.”

I recoiled as if struck. He’d grown angry so quickly. What had I done?

Camba rose to her feet, cutting short a new tirade, I suspected;
she bowed deferentially, and the old priest lightly touched the crown of her towering hair. I wasn’t sure what to do, if I should bow or say something, but Camba hauled Ingar to his feet and held out a strong arm to usher me away. “Don’t speak,” she whispered. “Follow me.” I did as she asked, but kept my eyes on Pende as long as I could. He did not meet my gaze but closed his eyes and folded his limbs as if settling in to meditate.

“I should have warned you not to talk to him after the unhooking,” muttered Camba as we made our way back through the priestesses’ cloister. “He’s two hundred years old; he can’t keep his temper when he’s tired, and Abdo is the sorest of subjects.”

“What did Abdo—” I began, but Camba cut me off with a hiss and a finger on her lips. I followed her gaze toward one of the veiled priestesses. Could that be Abdo’s priestess mother? I watched her pass, but the god did not open her eyes.

Camba, bearing Ingar on one arm, pulled me with her free hand. “He broke Pende’s heart,” she whispered. “Abdo was to be the priest’s successor. Now Pende has no one.”

“He has you,” I hazarded, hoping I’d interpreted their relationship correctly.

She flashed a mournful look from under her lashes. We’d reached the anteroom, where our shoes waited; Camba slipped on her sandals and helped Ingar with his scuffed ankle boots before answering: “With luck, I can be a stopgap until the god grants us another, mightier mind. Which he may or may not do. Such is the nature of Chance, may he strike us softly.”

I followed Camba through the dim, smoky sanctuary, occupied with my own thoughts. Pende clearly didn’t want me to take
the other ityasaari south. How much power did he have to enforce his wishes? If he said the word, would the ityasaari agree? Even if they didn’t agree, were they bound to obey?

Camba had seemed deferential and protective, yet acutely aware of Pende’s limitations as an irascible old man whose strength was failing. Besides, the ityasaari could return to Porphyry after assisting Goredd. Maybe I’d once hoped we’d all be together forever, but that seemed naive and foolish now.

I assumed Pende himself wouldn’t come, that I’d found my second Od Fredricka, though with considerably more power to resist Jannoula’s moving him by force.

We emerged onto the temple steps, facing a glorious sunset across the Zokalaa. The thinning crowds, rushing home to dinner, cast long shadows against the gold-glazed paving stones.

Camba had bent her long neck down to Ingar’s level and was muttering in his ear. “Do you feel the breeze on your face?” I heard her say. “That’s yours, and worth feeling. Look at those orange clouds. All the trials of a day may be endured if you know there’s such a sky at the end of it. Some days I told my heart to wait, just wait, because the sunset would teach me again that my pain was nothing compared with the eternal, circling sky.”

It was a dazzling sky, I had to admit, with clouds layered like wisps of pink and purple silk. Behind us, the blue deepened to black; the stars awakened.

“At last you see it with your eyes and no other’s,” said Camba, her own eyes shining. “It may feel overpowering and unbearable, but I am here to help you bear it.”

I was touched by her words; I hoped Ingar was, too, but he
seemed too shocked to take in very much. I didn’t like to interrupt, but I needed to get him back to Naia’s. Camba spoke first, however, looking across at me: “When do you return to the Southlands?”

“In about two weeks, when friends come to fetch us back.” I meant Kiggs and Comonot; I wasn’t sure whether their coming was a secret.

Ingar groaned and sagged, his knees buckling; Camba’s circling arm kept him upright. “Two weeks isn’t much time for rehabilitation,” she said, her voice thoughtful and low. “Ingar needs help during these next days. He will feel lost without Jannoula at first, and he may invite her in again.”

I studied Ingar’s vacant eyes. “Abdo said Jannoula puts a hook in people; Pende phrased it the same way, ‘unhooking her from his mind.’ So why is Ingar so … empty?”

Camba smiled unexpectedly and gazed at Ingar almost fondly. “I’ve never seen such a deflated bladder; there’s barely enough Ingar-light to fill him up. Jannoula steals your mind, if you allow it. Her hook can be the roots of a tree, or a tapeworm, winding through you, sucking your soul-light away. She takes without giving, but she’s convinced him that he likes it, or deserves it.”

Camba’s eyes turned sad in the dwindling light. “Would … would you permit me to take him home and oversee his care? You’ve never had Jannoula forcibly stripped from your mind. I know what it’s like.”

I nodded solemnly, not wishing to seem too eager to be rid of him. Something else had struck me, however, a familiar huskiness in Camba’s voice. I knew her voice, I suddenly realized, but from
where? Not from my visions. I said, “Camba, you’re ityasaari, and yet I’ve never seen you.”

With her free hand, Camba demurely raised the hem of her diaphanous dress, just enough to reveal a band of silver scales around each knee, distinctively half dragon.

That removed all doubts, if I’d had any. “In visions, I mean,” I said. “My mind reached out to others—before I stopped it—but not to you.”

Camba drew herself up to her full height; the gibbous moon was rising behind her towering hair. “You reached out to me. You even spoke. I recognize your voice.”

“Now I know you’re mistaken,” I said. “Only two ityasaari ever heard me speak, Jannoula and—”

“A person on the mountaintop, throwing crates and screaming,” she said, pointing north at the double peak looming over the city. “I looked different then. I was born into a masculine body, and I had misgendered myself.”

I had known the voice and hadn’t believed my ears. She was in my garden after all. I racked my brains for the Porphyrian verb Abdo had taught me, a polite inquiry that didn’t even exist in the Southlands. “How may I pronoun you?” I hazarded.

Camba smiled warmly and inclined her stately head. “I pronoun myself emergent feminine,” she said in Porphyrian, then added in my native tongue, “Or I do now, at last. On my Day of Determination, I declared myself naive masculine. I was already ityasaari; it embarrassed me to be even more complicated than that.”

She led Ingar down the temple steps and bundled him into
her waiting litter. I studied her movements, looking for something that recalled that vision, the day she’d been ready to die. It was hard to see beyond the jewelry, hair, and saffron draperies, but suddenly the sunset glazed her bare shoulders a burnt orange, and I recognized in the strength and sureness of her limbs the echo of a person I’d once seen, a harmonic that I’d mistaken for the fundamental.

She was the one whose despair I’d felt, whom I’d reached out to in empathy. In my garden she lived in the statuary meadow, and I’d called her Master Smasher.

I walked back to Naia’s, lost in my memory of that vision, and then lost in fact. Porphyry became a labyrinth after sunset. It should have been a simple proposition to find Naia’s again: the harbor was downhill, and east was to the right along the shoreline. Porphyry, alas, was all dead ends and cul-de-sacs and nonplanar geometries. Three rights didn’t make a left. I began to fear that I would meet myself coming from the other direction.

I finally made it back, and up four flights of stairs. Naia had left a lamp burning. She was asleep on the couch, wrapped in a cobwebby shawl, her cheek pressed into the pillow I’d given her. I extinguished the lamp, and she didn’t stir.

I quietly ventured a peek behind Abdo’s curtain, just to check on him. Getting him together with Pende was going to be harder than I’d realized, and I did not like the idea of Abdo suffering in
the meantime. I listened for steady breathing to tell me Abdo was asleep, but I heard nothing.

Once my eyes adjusted to the near darkness, I saw that Abdo had propped himself on an elbow and was staring back at me.

I hoped it was Abdo and not Jannoula. I approached cautiously.

“How are you feeling?” I whispered, drawing back the curtain on the window so the moonlight illuminated us. His sleeping mat took up half his alcove. I sat beside him on the wooden floor, my back against shelves of Naia’s ledger books.

Abdo lay down and was silent for some moments. At last he said,
I feel awful. When we were on the ship, Jannoula ignored me most of the time. Maybe she was busy, maybe it was simpler to watch you through Ingar. For several days she’s hounded me, though, and especially these last hours. She’s come after me with such terrible force that I feel like my head might split open
.

I felt a rush of horror just under my ribs. She was taking revenge for Ingar’s release, I had no doubt.

“I don’t suppose you can let her through to talk to me?” I realized as I spoke the words that this was a terrible idea, but I was itching to pick a fight with Jannoula myself.

Abdo was shaking his head vehemently, the whites of his eyes reflecting the moonlight.
If I let her seize me while I’m awake, I’m sure she’ll never let go. I have to push against her every minute
. He wrapped his arms around his head and began to weep soundlessly.
I’m scared to sleep. I’m scared to move. I have to concentrate
.

My heart was breaking for him. I said, “Pende pulled her out
of Ingar’s head; he could do the same for you. We could go to the temple of Chakhon first thing tomorrow morning.”

He sobbed harder, his breath coming in ragged gulps. I didn’t know what to do. I took his good hand between both of mine, sympathetic tears blurring my vision, and I hummed softly, a Southlander lullaby. His breathing slowly calmed; he wiped his eyes with the back of his useless hand.

I should go to the temple and let him fix me
, he said.
But it feels so much like defeat
.

“What do you mean?” I asked, stroking his hand.

Pende invaded my mind, too
, said Abdo.
Not literally, but I felt his expectations as creeping, strangling vines. He said my mind was the brightest in ten generations and that only I could be his successor. His hopes were going to swallow me right up, and … I had to push back. I would have disappeared otherwise
.

You needed to dance
, I said silently, feeling I understood him. I’d left my father’s house, despite the danger of exposure, because I needed to play music, to grow into myself and my own life away from him. I remembered how assertive Abdo’s dance had been the first time I saw him, how it seemed to be a way of underlining his presence in the world.

He inhaled shakily.
I’ll come with you to the temple. I hate it, but I’m in too much pain. I can’t keep fighting her forever
.

“Pende can’t keep you against your will,” I said firmly, not sure whether that was true. Getting Jannoula out of Abdo’s head was surely the first priority, though; we’d face the repercussions of letting Pende help after that was sorted out.

Abdo was soon asleep, in spite of himself. I hoped Jannoula would have mercy and let him stay that way. He still had a tight hold of my hand, and I couldn’t disentangle myself without waking him. I lay upon the wooden floor beside his mat and somehow found my own portion of sleep.

A few hours later, I was startled awake by the realization that I’d forgotten to tend my garden again. I closed my eyes and quickly went to check on it. The denizens were all calm and quiet, as if nothing had happened; it was becoming more and more apparent that they didn’t rely on my daily vigilance. I spent several minutes walking in circles before I realized I was looking for Pelican Man—Pende’s grotesque—and that I wasn’t going to find him or his topiary lawn.