The Conclave of Shadow (14 page)

Rather than flying over the trees, the gargoyles wove through the spaces between them. I lost sight of Tsung, and I could only track Mei Shen by the glow limning the black-barked trees.

At least, until we broke into a clearing ringed by trees grown so close together that the only access seemed to be through the upper branches, where the trunks narrowed slightly to create space. Down below, a collection of structures was wedged into the clearing. It had the look of a Burner camp. Small tents of silky shadowstuff were set up in concentric circles. Offset from the center of the camp stood the only spot of color to be seen, a yurt of actual canvas, desert pale against all the darkness.

Tsung had been dumped in the center of the clearing. The gargoyle that had carried him disappeared into the upper branches of the trees. Mei Shen landed, forming a protective circle around Tsung's crouched form. The light from her coils illuminated lurking shadows all around – the camp denizens come out to greet our arrival.

The moment my gargoyle dumped me, I moved, hauling Tsung to his feet with one hand and grabbing the searing end of Mei Shen's tail in the other. Using her light, I tried to pull us back across the veil.

We didn't go anywhere. My connection to the real world slipped away like I was trying to grab air. I dropped Mei Shen's tail, cradling my burned hand to my chest. Tsung shot me a confused glance, but I shook my head. I didn't dare explain just how bad our situation was, in case the gargoyles could manage more sentience than animal howls. At least Mei Shen's internal brightness seemed to be keeping the gargoyles and the shadow troops at bay.

The opening of the yurt was thrown back, and a familiar figure stepped out.

The Lady's skin was dark as anything in the Shadow Realms, but unlike the rest of this place, it carried an internal luminescence similar to Mei Shen's. Except the Lady's skin burned like a black hole, if a glimmer of light could escape that sort of gravitational pull. Her hair coiled like a living thing, and shadow trailed off her limbs when she moved. Instead of the gown of living shadow that I'd seen her wearing when we first met, she was dressed in black and grey camouflage military fatigues, a combat knife strapped to her thigh.

Tsung gaped. I seconded the feeling. I didn't know whether to be relieved or more terrified on seeing her. She wasn't the Conclave, true, but the enemy of my enemy was not always my friend.

“You are disturbing my people,” the Lady said to Mei Shen with the cool censure of a librarian telling a patron to hush.

Mei Shen's coils folded in on themselves until she was a dragon-scaled girl again and we were left in relative darkness. “Your people took mine.”

“My hounds secured you before the Conclave could find you. They are not precisely tame, but they meant you no harm. I cannot say the same of the Conclave's new master.” She inclined her head to me. “Hello again, Missy.”

“This is the Lady I was telling you about,” I whispered to Mei Shen. Then, to the Lady. “Thank you. The timely rescue was much appreciated. We'd appreciate it even more if you would let us go.”

“Yes. Of course. My hounds will take you outside the camp wards if that is your wish.” She waved an elegant, long-fingered hand as though my request and her offer were of little interest. “But your companions… this girl shares blood with the Shadow Dragon. As does the man, though it is further removed.” She turned her hungry, intense gaze on Mei Shen, only flicking to Tsung as an afterthought.

While I was busy worrying about what danger the Lady might pose to my daughter, Mei Shen was busy being insulted on Tsung's behalf. She stepped in front of him, facing off against the Lady. “I am Lung Mei Shen Mi, niece to Lung Di. David Tsung is his bloodline and my consort.”

“Consort?!” I blurted. Forget the Lady, Mei Shen should be more worried about me. “Does your father know about this?”

Mei Shen cast me a glare of perfect teenage disgust. “Not now, mother.”

Oh, definitely now. “Since when are you old enough to be taking consorts? And you–” I rounded on Tsung. “You are way too old for her.”

To his credit, Tsung squirmed and looked decidedly uncomfortable. “It is in name only. Purely ceremonial. To help strengthen her claim.”

“I don't care if it's meant to qualify you for the consort tax credit. You are not–”

“Mo-ther!”

“You are her mother?” The Lady's soft question broke through our moment of family drama, reminding me that for all her seeming friendliness, she was an uncertain ally. We weren't out of the woods yet. In more ways than one.

“You couldn't tell by the way she ignores my very reasonable concerns?”

I paid no heed to Mei Shen's disgusted huff and eyeroll, nor did the Lady.

“Yes. I understand that the relationships between mothers and daughters can be… fraught.” The Lady touched long, segmented fingers to Mei Shen's brow, ignoring the hiss and shadow smoke that rose from the contact. “I had perhaps thought to keep you. You would be much use against the Voidlands. But as you are blood, you are free to leave with your mother.” Her smile was like the glimmer of darkness between stars. And oddly indulgent. “You and your handsome consort.”

“Don't encourage them,” I muttered under my breath.

“Thank you,” Mei Shen said loudly, as though the vindication made up for the implicit threat that the Lady had been intending on keeping them.

“If I may, Lady,” Tsung said, brow furrowed. “You indicated you are working to contain the Voidlands?”

“In the Shadow Dragon's absence, someone must. And I do not like the methods the Conclave employs, nor the price they hope to exact.”

Mei Shen and Tsung exchanged a look that left me feeling very much the third wheel. This was the secret Mei Shen had been loath to share with me.

“We share similar goals, and I hope our methods are more palatable than the Conclave's,” Mei Shen said. “Perhaps you don't need to hold us to secure our assistance. Will you show us?”

S
howing us
, as it turned out, required a gathering of what seemed like half the camp – gargoyles, spiky goblinoids, a few of the manta-like kraben, and a dozen other denizens of Shadow that I had neither name nor description for. They armed themselves with a variety of equally mismatched artifacts from my world. Several of the goblins carried trash that looked to have been liberated from a construction site – bent rebar, nail-studded boards, coils of razor wire. A pair of ambulatory octopodes wielded a Louisville Slugger between then, passing it from tentacle to tentacle as they rolled along. The Lady's army was nothing like the organized, faceless regiments of the Conclave knights.

The Lady led us through a narrow passage bored out of one of the skyscraper trees. “It is not often that the Conclave sends scouts this far, nor that creatures of the Voidlands escape its pull, but I prefer to prepare for both eventualities.”

Cheering thought, that.

We marched, a few dozen strong, toward the ever-present absence that was the Voidlands. It felt like walking down a steep hill, even though the ground was level. I ignored the pull in favor of gently interrogating our guide.

“You said the Shadow Dragon had been the one to hold back the Voidlands,” I said to the Lady, frowning at Mei Shen. At least she had the grace to duck her head, and her luminous scales seemed to tint slightly pinker. “I thought he was holding back the Conclave.”

The Lady moved gracefully around trees and through brambles that had the rest of us, even her own people, struggling. “He was a check on all powers at the borders. The fulcrum that held them in balance, if you will. He was not particularly well liked for it. If not for him, I would have destroyed the Conclave decades ago, before they were this much of a nuisance. But I do not think any of us fully appreciated his… service.”

Just as well. If Lung Di knew he was missed, even grudgingly, he'd be insufferable.

“I am trying to revitalize his wards,” Mei Shen said. “But I do not have his power.”

“Nobody does, child. The Shadow Dragon is a Leviathan, and it took more than one such to contain the heart of the Void. But you know that, do you not? Being of that bloodline? I do what I can to ward against the encroachment of the Voidlands; the Conclave tries to siphon them and shape them into something they can control. Others do their part, knowingly and unknowingly. It is not enough. Ah. Here we are.”

We emerged from the trees and stood at the edge of a dead zone. Some of the trees had fallen over into the encroaching curtain of darkness. Others had bark turned ashen and desiccated where it faced the leading edge of the Voidlands. Some of the largest, oldest, trees still stood tall, bisected by that same edge. I wondered if they would fall before they were engulfed.

The black fungus from the carbuncle covered almost every surface. The air stank of fresh asphalt burning in the sun.

In a space between two of the fallen trees, a headless white figure faced the void, swaying. Blue-bright stars eerily illuminated the lace and tulle of her gown, and a knot of blood-red light pulsed at the center of her chest.

“Estelle?” I gaped at the sight of the goff bride Shimizu and I had made.

“Who?” Tsung said.

“I… nothing.” I turned to the Lady. “That's why you wanted her?”

“A simulacrum crafted by a shadow mage is a powerful artifact. And this one triply so for the form she takes and the name you used to shape her.”

Right. Because brides and ghosts were both liminal, border creatures. Apparently ghost brides were even better. And ghost brides named after stars… I'd hit the trifecta of symbolism without even intending to.

“But how is she lit up?” I picked up the end of the Christmas light cord, which trailed along the ground behind the ghost bride.

“By me. You may have named her, but I am giving her life.”

Wait. Life?

The swaying I'd written off as the effect of a breeze became a full-fledged turn. The headless figure raised an empty sleeve and dipped into an awkward curtsy.

I shrieked, cast the plug away from me like it was a snake, and leapt back.

Mei Shen caught me. I think she might have been stifling giggles.

“Shut up,” I grumbled, collecting myself and pulling away from her overheated scales before I burned myself again. Brat.

The Lady led us along the narrow no-man's land between trees and void's edge, from waypoint to waypoint – a pachinko machine, a fiber-optic Christmas tree, a glowing inflatable bunny the size of an elephant.

“And all of these draw their power from you?” Tsung asked when we stopped at a cabinet aquarium that had to be over two hundred gallons. It was filled with luminous anemones and iridescent cichlids whose scales glowed almost as brightly as Mei Shen's in the UV of the tank's lights. “How are you still standing?”

The Lady shrugged, as though it was nothing of note, but I noticed our escort shifting, choking up on their weapons. The ambulatory octopodes squeezed together until they looked like one creature with too many tentacles. “I am no leviathan, but I manage. It would be easier with assistance.”

“Then why have you not allied with the Conclave?” Tsung pressed. “Whatever your differences, surely this is–”

“Those men,” the Lady spat. “They know nothing of danger, nor of obligation. They were only ever freed of that prison because of my goodwill, and the first chance they had, they turned against me because they fear women. They fear me. They have done all they can to overthrow me ever since.”

I might not have made the connection if I hadn't spent the morning on an Alcatraz tour and the afternoon trying to escape it. “Wait. Three men. About… fifty years ago?”

The Lady nodded, shoving through the undergrowth with more force than needed. One struggling sapling creaked, groaned, and fell slowly into the squelchy cushion of the fungus surrounding it. “Even so. One had a touch of Shadow upon him. The other two were brothers of my bloodline, greatly removed. Three ingrates. Three fools. I will let the Voidlands end them before I join with them. And if you are foolish enough to seek them out, I will have naught to do with you.”

I pressed my lips hard together. It wouldn't do to laugh in the face of such fury. I fell back and braced myself against the tarry trunk of a fallen tree. More of the scorched-asphalt smelling fungus covered it. Even the spongy slick surface and the stink couldn't dampen my amusement. I released it under the guise of a coughing fit.

“Mother?” Mei Shen's hand hovered above my back, a comforting heat. She exchanged a worried glance with Tsung. I waved away their concerns and regretted it when my waving sent a waft of eau de burned rubber in my direction.

“It's fine. I'm fine. I just… I think I know the identities of the Conclave.”

I
explained
as we trailed the Lady back to her camp, about Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers, John and Clarence. About the years they spent digging with spoons through the porous stone at the back of their cells, of the raft made of rubber-backed coats – or was it? Kraben skin had that same rubbery quality – and the nighttime escape. I told them about the disappearance, the presumed death, the conspiracy theories and reported sightings over the years. The
Mythbusters
episode.

“Seriously, Tsung. You've never seen
Escape from Alcatraz
?” I muttered.

Mei Shen, at least, could be forgiven for her lack of pop culture knowledge. “It makes no sense. They could have gone anywhere, and they went back to the place they escaped?” she asked.

I shrugged. “It closed less than a year after their escape. Wonder if they had something to do with that. Or maybe they just took advantage of it.”

“And the chance to assert control over what once controlled them?” Tsung mused. “Men have done stupider things for similar reasons.”