Shadow Scale (9 page)

Still, Finch was a needle in a city-sized haystack. From his mask and leather apron, I knew him for a plague doctor; in visions I usually glimpsed him in sickrooms or down alleys, trapping rats. My vision-eye couldn’t stray far from the ityasaari I was observing; it was hard to know where those sickrooms were.

And it would be hard for me to ask. I didn’t speak Ninysh, due to a peculiarity of my upbringing. My stepmother, Anne-Marie,
came from the notorious Belgioso family, exiled from Ninys for a variety of crimes. My dragon mother had not been public knowledge, and Papa was anxious to keep it that way; his dastardly in-laws surely would have blackmailed him had they but known. My tutors were to teach me Samsamese and Porphyrian, but no Ninysh. I’m not sure what Papa thought—perhaps that a wily old Belgioso auntie could trick me more easily in her own tongue? My stepmother’s generation were all native Goreddi speakers. Whatever Papa’s motives, I had no Ninysh. I was not so enamored of grammar that I’d gone looking for it.

I hoped Abdo’s ability to see mind-fire might make up for my language deficit—maybe he might spot Finch across a crowded plaza or down an alley. We skipped the shiny parts of town in favor of more workaday neighborhoods, where brewers’ vats gusted hops-scented steam, wood turners swept sawdust into mounds, mules brayed, tanners scraped hair off stretched cowhides, and butchers washed blood off the abattoir floors, pushing it into the gutter with flat brooms. Neither Abdo nor I saw the first sign of Finch.

I did manage—through drawings and gestures—to find a hospital, but it was a facility for the well-to-do. An attendant nun who spoke some Goreddi turned up her nose when I asked about plague houses. “Not in the city,” she said, looking scandalized.

It wasn’t until the third morning that Abdo caught my arm and pointed out a space between two half-timbered shop fronts, a dark slit from which emanated a sigh of decay.
I saw a glimmer, very faint. Through the buildings. It’s gone now, but we should follow it
, he said, his eyes bright, almost as excited as he’d been to see the
cathedral. I stuck my head into the darkness, where a stair curled down into shadow. Hand in hand, we descended the slick steps and passed through a dank culvert, into the streets behind the streets, the grim warrens of the very poor.

The alley was narrow, unpaved, and dark. Chamber pots might be emptied onto streets all over town—that was part of city life in the Southlands—but the city didn’t hire anyone to wash the streets in this neighborhood. Everything clumped together in an open sewer down the middle. I hesitated, worried about bringing Abdo here, but he seemed not frightened in the least. He walked ahead of me, prudently skirting puddles and piles of rags. The piles bestirred themselves and stretched gnarled hands toward him, palms up, wordlessly begging.

Abdo dug a hand into his shirt, where he kept his purse on a cord around his neck.
Does Goreddi coin spend here?
he asked.
That’s all I’ve got
.

“I’m sure it will,” I said, hastening after him. Needy hands plucked at my skirts. It surely wasn’t safe to flash coins, even Goreddi copper, in a place like this. I let Abdo pass out a handful, and then shepherded him along. “Do you see the mind-fire down here?”

Abdo started forward again, craning his neck and squinting. At last he cried,
I do!
He pointed at a rickety timber structure.
Through that building
.

“He’s inside the building?” I asked, incredulous. I’d had no idea this light, invisible to me, could shine so brightly.

Abdo shrugged.
Moving behind it, more like
.

We circled the building to the east, then Abdo said,
No, this
way. He’s moving west
. I followed him down a cluttered alley that reeked of old onions; it began westwardly but soon veered south.

This is wrong
, he said.
I can see his light through walls, but not what road he’s on. It’s like a maze, and we’re in the wrong part
.

Several dead ends later, we emerged into a broader dirt lane and saw, far ahead, a figure in a long leather apron and broad-brimmed hat, walking away from us. Abdo grabbed at my hand excitedly and pointed.
That’s him!
We hurried, our feet splashing in the drainage ditch, skidding on filth. This was the very edge of the city, where the country began creeping in; we dodged a pig in the road and navigated a flock of complaining chickens. A mule, piled high with bundled twigs, obscured my view, but I cleared it in time to see our man duck down a stairwell and into the basement of a crumbling church.

Of course. No one would waste hospital beds on plague victims.

I reached the peeling door just as the latchstring was being pulled back through the hole. I grabbed at it, getting only a knot burn for my trouble.

His shimmer is directly behind the door
, said Abdo, tracing an outline on the splintery wood.

I knocked, but there was no answer. I put my eye to the latch hole and peered into a dim crypt. Straw pallets littered the floor between the blocky priests’ tombs and the thick support columns. Upon each pallet lay a wrecked being, neck and eyes swollen, fingers curled into gangrenous fists. Nuns—Sisters of St. Loola, by their yellow habits—picked their way gingerly among the dying, administering water or poppy tears.

Only now did the groans reach me, and the cadaverous stench.

Finch yanked open the door, and I nearly fell inside. A terrible beaked face glared at me with big glassy eyes; it was a sackcloth plague mask, the eyeholes set with lenses, the bulging leather beak stuffed with medicinal herbs to filter bad vapors. His leather apron was spattered and his gloves stained; his eyes, behind the glass lenses, were startlingly blue—and kind. He spoke in muffled Ninysh.

“D-do you speak Goreddi?” I asked.

“Must I ask you to leave in two languages?” he said, switching without apparent effort, his voice still muffled by the leather and by the real beak hidden under the mask’s. “Is the stench, the neighborhood, your good sense not warning enough?”

“I need to speak with you,” I said, putting my foot forward because he seemed about to close the door again. “Not now, clearly, but perhaps when you finish here?”

He laughed mirthlessly. “
Finish
, you say? When I leave this place, I have a leper colony to attend. Then I will be pulled in a dozen more directions. The poor need so much, and there are so few who care to give.”

I fished my purse out of my bodice and pressed a silver coin upon him. He stared at it, lying forlornly in the worn palm of his glove. I gave him another.

The doctor cocked his head, like a bird listening for a worm. “Well, why didn’t you say so?” he said, nodding slightly to Abdo.

I shot Abdo a glance, but Abdo was watching the doctor with imploring eyes. “I can find her house,” said Finch, “but it will be evening before I have time.” The masked doctor turned his eyes to
me, gently pushed my foot aside with the grimy toe of his boot, and shut the door.

“So what did you tell Dr. Finch?” I asked Abdo as we turned to leave.

That we are of his kind
, said Abdo dreamily, taking my hand.
He is curious by nature; he will come. I liked his mind. It’s a humane color
.

I was delighted. We’d succeeded in finding a half-dragon after only three days’ searching; he’d seemed cautiously receptive, at least. After weeks of mud, I finally had something substantive to report to Glisselda and Kiggs.

It was a most propitious start. I would enjoy telling Dame Okra as well.

We stopped briefly by Dame Okra’s, but she wasn’t home and we were too merry to stay indoors. I fetched my flute, and Abdo and I passed the afternoon performing in the cathedral plaza.

Once I could not have done this. I’d so feared exposure (and my father’s wrath) that I would never have dared to play in public. It was still nerve-racking, but I’d discovered that playing in public was also tremendously gratifying, emblematic of my new life, new freedom, new openness. Once I had feared for my life; now my greatest fear was flubbing a note, and it seemed right to celebrate that shift as often as I could.

Abdo danced and tumbled while I played, and we drew an
appreciative crowd. The Ninysh are famous lovers of art, as the sculpture, fountains, and triumphal arches of Segosh will attest.

Of course, as every Goreddi knows, Ninysh public art was built on the back of Goredd: the Ninysh let us fight all those expensive, destructive dragon wars ourselves. It had rarely seemed worth Goreddi effort to create beautiful monuments or statuary, not when the dragons were going to raze it. Until Comonot’s Treaty and the forty-year peace, only music had been able to flourish in Goredd, the one art we could pursue while surviving in tunnels underground.

Abdo and I returned to Dame Okra’s near dusk in anticipation of Finch’s arrival. I’d expected to find our dinner in the kitchen, since Dame Okra had stayed late at Palasho Pesavolta the last two evenings. Tonight, though, I heard her braying in the formal dining room, over an unfamiliar basso counterpoint.

Dame Okra sat at one end of the gleaming table, taking coffee with a much younger man, who leaped to his feet upon our arrival. He was a scrawny fellow, shorter than me, with lank red hair to his shoulders, a long face, and a wispy chin beard. He wore Count Pesavolta’s orange and gold livery. I guessed he was past twenty, but not much.

“You deign to grace us with your presence at last, do you?” said Dame Okra, glaring at us. “Your armed escort is arranged. You leave tomorrow. Josquin here will prevent your getting too lost.” She flapped a hand at him obscurely; he understood it as a command to sit. “He’s my great-great-grand-cousin, or some nonsense.”

“Pleased to finally meet you both,” said Josquin, pulling out a chair for me. His voice was far deeper than his skinny build gave any hint of. “My cousin has told me—”

“Yes, shut up. My point is,” said Dame Okra, bristling, “I trust him. For years he and his mother were the only people who knew what I was, and they never told. His mother sews my dresses and helps me look properly human.” She adjusted her majestic—and false—bosom at this juncture, underscoring her point. Josquin politely found something deserving of attention in his coffee.

“He’s been riding as a herald since he was ten,” Dame Okra continued. “He knows every village and road.”

“Most of them,” said Josquin modestly. His blue eyes crinkled with amused affection for his old cousin, despite her surliness.

“The best roads,” snapped Dame Okra. “The ones worth knowing. He’ll translate. He’s already engaged his fellow heralds to ride ahead and spread word of a reward for information leading to the hermit and the muralist. That will save you time, I should think. And he knows you’ve got to get to Samsam in time for—”

Dame Okra suddenly froze and took on a dyspeptic look, her eyes unfocused.

Abdo, who’d claimed a chair and cup of coffee for himself, looked first at Okra and then toward the front of the house.
I wish you could see this, Phina madamina. Dame Okra is having a premonition, her soul-light darting out like lightning. A big spiky finger from her mind to the front door
. He pointed to illustrate.

She reaches out with her mind, too?
I asked.
She claims it’s her stomach
.

Maybe she can’t tell them apart
, said Abdo cheekily.

Dame Okra jerked grotesquely, recovering herself. “Saints in Heaven!” she cried. “Who’s this creature at the front door, then?” She leaped to her feet and rushed up the hall just as someone knocked.

I hurried after her. I had not yet had a chance to mention Finch. “Before you answer that—” I began, but it was too late.

“Augh!” she cried, her voice dripping disgust. “Seraphina, did you invite this person here, all plaguey and pestilent? No, sir, you may not track contagion into my house. Go around to the carriage yard and strip down.”

The doctor had removed his grimy apron and gloves and changed his robes; he still wore the ominous beaked mask, and his boots were indeed too muddy for her fine floors. I squeezed by Dame Okra, who puffed up indignantly.

“Leave your boots here,” I told the doctor. He hurriedly pried them off. I took his arm and said, “You are welcome. I failed to warn her you were coming.”

I led our new guest to the dining room, Dame Okra squawking behind us. Josquin stood again, with a cry of “Buonarrive, Dotoro Basimo!” and offered the older man his seat.

Finch shuffled over in his stocking feet, shoulders hunched anxiously, and sat. Josquin took the seat beside him.

“You know this ghoul?” demanded Dame Okra, switching the conversation back to Goreddi. She lingered behind in the doorway with her arms folded skeptically.

“Dr. Basimo keeps Count Pesavolta apprised of plague cases,” said Josquin brightly. “They’re trying to prevent another epidemic year. It’s a noble endeavor.”

The doctor perched on the very edge of a chair, his hands clasped between his knees, eyeing us through his glass lenses with trepidation.

“He’s one of us,” I said to Dame Okra. “We found him this morning.”