Shadow Scale

by Rachel Hartman

  The saarantrai sat, arms folded skeptically.

  “Do you know why the Censors exist?” he said. “Because there are those who believe that without strict emotional repression, we will fall into anarchy. They think dragons will be so swayed by what they feel that they will disregard their logic, their ethics, and their duties.”

  At the back of the crowd, I saw Brisi squirm.

  “I have been trying to understand the truth of it for more than half a year, living in human shape, walking the razor’s edge of feeling,” Comonot continued. “My opinion has changed over time; emotion is not always the liability I once believed it to be.

  “Now we prepare to strike the Censors themselves. Not the Old Ard, but the supposedly neutral organization that enforces our repression. Like the Old Ard, the Censors want to take us backward, but I think we’ve come too far for that. I think you exiles—you who have lived two lives and seen both sides—are the stronger for it. You are our way forward, toward continued peace with humankind and the renewal of dragonkind.

  “But I need you to show me that I’m not a fool to consider disbanding the Censors. Show me that two hundred emotional dragons can keep discipline, follow orders, and work well together. That last one—cooperation—is what our opposition lacks, and that, I think, is surely where feeling makes us stronger.”

  The exiles were sitting up straighter, whispering excitedly among themselves. Comonot had appealed to their emotions, of all things, and it had worked. He had a new tool at his disposal, and it was formidable indeed.

  “Now,” said Comonot, “who’s going with Eskar to reconnoiter at Lab Four?”

  Lalo, beside me, raised his hand at once.

  “Lalo, son of Neelat,” said the Ardmagar, scanning the crowd. “Two more.”

  “Seraphina must come with us,” said Eskar.

  “Done,” said Comonot, not bothering to solicit my approval. If Eskar wanted me there, it surely had some connection with Orma. I didn’t argue.

  Sounds of disagreement grew at the back of the group. I looked behind me and saw Brisi arguing with her mother.

  “Is there something the hatchling would like to say?” called Comonot, looking down his nose at them.

  Brisi sprang to her feet, shaking off Ikat’s grip. “I volunteer to go with Eskar!”

  “You have caused enough trouble!” shouted her mother, tugging at Brisi’s tunic.

  Ardmagar Comonot exchanged a look with Eskar. She shrugged minutely. “If the hatchling wishes to redeem herself,” said Eskar, “this would be a prime opportunity.”

  And so it was settled.

  Eskar, Lalo, and Brisi unfolded themselves as the first sliver of moon rose over the distant peaks. Each time I dreaded flying a little more; each time my neck was sorer and my rib cage more bruised. Flying was fastest, even if it was harder to stay out of sight. We kept below the mountaintops, skimming the bottoms of valleys and faces of glaciers. I reached my hand down once and grabbed snow, that’s how low we were. We flew until the predawn aurora was visible in the east, at which point Eskar spotted a cavern. She entered first, killed a bear she found there, and let the rest of us come in after her.

  My companions ate the bear. I found I had no appetite.

  We waited out the daylight. I was supposed to sleep, but the floor of the cave was rocky, and my companions, three full-sized dragons, snored, stank, and gave off terrible heat. I crouched in the cave entrance, where the air was fresher, dozing against a boulder when I wasn’t working out the snore harmonics. They made a weird quintal chord, these dragons, or sometimes a diminished …

  A change in the chord startled me awake. There were only two dragons snoring now. I looked back and saw Eskar shrinking down. She rifled through my bag without asking, took out my blanket, and wrapped it around her waist. Then she sauntered up to the cave entrance and sat a little apart from me.

  “I can’t speak quietly in that shape,” she whispered. “I have things to tell you.”

  I straightened up and nodded, expecting her to delineate the plan for tonight, but instead she said, “Your uncle and I were mated.”

  “Indeed!” I said, embarrassed by her wording. I did not require more details along those lines. “Does that make you my aunt?” I asked, trying to joke.

  She considered the question in all seriousness, staring out the cave entrance toward the glacier, and finally said, “You may call me that without inaccuracy.” She was silent for several beats more, then added, with unaccustomed softness in her tone, “I never thought much of him as a dragon. He’s small. A tenacious fighter, granted. A decent flier, considering his wing was once broken, but he could never have kept up with me. I’d have bitten the back of his neck and sent him on his way.

  “But as a saarantras …” She paused, a finger to her lips. “He’s something extraordinary.”

  I pictured my uncle’s shrubby hair and beaky nose, his spectacles and false beard and angular limbs, every detail absurd and dear to me. My chin trembled.

  “These human eyes seemed weak at first,” said Eskar, still staring away from me, scratching her short black hair. “They detect fewer colors and have terrible resolution, but they see things dragon eyes cannot. They can see beyond surfaces. I don’t understand how that’s possible, but it happened incrementally as I traveled with Orma: I began to see the inside of him. His questioning and gentle nature. His conviction. I’d glimpse it in something as incongruous as his hand holding a teacup, or his eyes when he spoke of you.”

  She turned her needle-sharp gaze on me. “What is that inner being? That person within a person? Is that what you call the soul?”

  According to Southlander theology, dragons don’t have souls; she knew that. I hesitated, but surely there was no danger saying this to her now, not after what had already happened to Orma. “He had a mighty soul, my uncle. The greatest I ever knew.”

  “You speak as if he is dead,” she said sternly.

  The tears finally came; I could not reply.

  She observed me closely, her dark eyes dry, her arms wrapped around her knees. “The Censors took a risk, entering Porphyry clandestinely. They were supposed to have petitioned the Assembly, and I have determined they did not. In my day, we would have run such a risk only if someone very important wanted Orma quickly. It gives me hope that this isn’t the usual capture of a deviant, that they may have brought him in not for excision but for some other purpose.”

  The word excision chilled me. “What if the deed is done?” I said, drying my eyes. “Will he still be himself?”

  “It depends what they take. Usually they only remove memories. Those neural pathways are largely the same whether we are in dragon or human form.” She spoke as neutrally as if she were describing her breakfast. “The emotion centers of the human brain overlap with dragon flight centers; it would cripple him to remove those. They wouldn’t permanently deprive him of flight, not the first time. They would remove his memories, put him on an emotional suppressant—a tincture of destultia—and give him a second chance.

  “Plenty of us undergo excision at some point. Look.” She bent her head forward and parted the hair behind her left ear, revealing a white stripe of scar tissue. “When I quit the Censors, they removed my memories of working there so I couldn’t reveal their secrets. But I am still myself. I was not irreparably damaged.”

  I recoiled, horrified. “But—but you remember working for the Censors!”

  Her mouth flattened. “They informed me afterward that I had been in their employ so I wouldn’t reapply. But I also made myself a mind-pearl so I could remember why I quit. That was important to me.”

  “Why did you quit?” I asked.

  “Several reasons,” she said. “They would not reprimand Zeyd, the agent I authorized to test your uncle, for threatening you with harm in the course of that test.”

  I put a hand to my heart, touched. “You didn’t even know me!”

  “I didn’t have to know you.” Her black eyes flicked toward
me. “Entrapment is an unacceptable testing practice.”

  So the wrong had been in attempting to trap Orma into an emotional reveal, not in dangling me over the edge of the cathedral tower. I sighed and changed the subject. “My mother left me mind-pearls. Are they difficult to make?”

  Eskar shrugged. “Mothers make simple ones for their children. To encapsulate a lot of memories, and hide them well, requires outside help. There are saarantrai who specialize in clandestine meditation, but it’s illegal and expensive.” Her eyes unfocused. “You’re wondering whether Orma did such a thing.”

  I held out my hand and wiggled my pinkie, showing her my pearl ring. “He sent me this in Ninys, along with the words The thing itself plus nothing equals everything. I think he was trying to tell me he’d done it.”

  Eskar took my hand and brushed the pearl lightly with her thumb; the spark of hope in her eyes was almost unbearable. “Perhaps he was,” she half whispered, “but I don’t know when he could have had it done. Not while I was with him. He might have made a simple pearl on his own with a few bare facts, brief images, your name.”

  I took my hand back and twisted the ring on my finger.

  “Mind-pearls can be difficult to retrieve if you don’t know the trigger for locating and opening them,” Eskar said, standing up. She hesitated, then added, “He will always be your uncle, whether he remembers he is or not.”

  She swooped down, kissed the top of my head lightly, and then headed toward Lalo and Brisi at the back of the cave. “Four hours until sunset,” she called over her shoulder. “Sleep.”

  I leaned against the boulder and closed my eyes.

  I only knew I’d slept because I dreamed about Abdo. He was riding in the back of a wagon with several other people, jostling and bumping over a rutted country road. The road wound into the Queenswood, which was just turning golden and autumnal. At a bend in the road, where the undergrowth was particularly dense, Abdo suddenly leaped to his feet and flipped himself out of the wagon. His companions shouted in protest, some reaching out dark hands to stop him, but he was beyond their reach, somersaulting down the hill through ferns and shrubbery until he disappeared from view.

  I heard his voice: Don’t look for me.

  In the wagon, Paulos Pende stood shakily. His eyes rolled up in his head, and he fell down dead.

  “Seraphina!” screamed a steam kettle, which, once I opened my eyes, turned out to be full-sized Eskar. “Ready yourself. It’s time to go.”

  I was disoriented, and the first thing I wanted to do was look for Abdo in my head. The dream had been so vivid that I had the impression he’d really spoken to me, that it wasn’t a dream at all.

  Of course, his message had been that I shouldn’t look for him. I felt my resolve tangle in knots.

  In any case, there was no time. Eskar was snorting impatiently. I hastily wrapped the blanket around my ribs, and Eskar grasped me in her talons again. There wasn’t much further to go; the three dragons skimmed one more valley and landed at the edge of a glacier, silver beneath the narrow moon. Ghostly wisps of steam rose from a deep crack in the ice. Eskar set me down, stuck her head into the crevasse, and flamed the ice; our companion dragons paled to blend with the glacier and spread their wings to block her light. When Eskar had widened the crack sufficiently, the others squeezed through. I would have followed on my own, but Eskar took me up protectively and carried me in. I was glad once I realized we were in a downward-sloping icy tunnel, longer than it looked; even Eskar’s claws had trouble finding purchase.

  We reached a flat floor at the bottom. My eyes were almost useless under the glacier; the ice was too deep for the moon to shine through, and the cavern was very dimly lit. I was more worried about the smell. A moist, clingy, sulfuric funk had hit us about halfway down the tunnel—and I mean hit, like we’d run into a brick wall of stench. My eyes watered. My nose finally gave up the game, but my throat still felt a thickness in the air and gagged in self-defense. The floor was covered in cold mush up to my ankles.

  A scuttling echoed above us and a squishing below. Sparks rained in the darkness. I thought it was my eyes playing tricks, until the sparks became steady open flames at the ends of fifty long tongues, belonging to as many quigutl, the smaller, lizard-like cousins of dragons. My eyes adjusted; the cavern opened far larger than I’d realized, a cathedral of ice and stone enclosing a hulking mountain of festering muck. Quigs swarmed all over it, some with shovel blades strapped to their ventral hands.

  “You’re trethpassing,” said a quigutl in lisping semi-Mootya, raising its spiky, lizardy head in front of us. On its hind legs, it was nearly as tall as me. Its eye cones swiveled, taking us in.

  “We need to see Mitha!” screamed Eskar.

  “If you know Mitha,” said the quig, flaring its head spines suspiciously, “then you know Mitha doethn’t work in the cesspitth.”

  Cesspits. That would be the mountainous muck. I wrapped an arm around my face, gagging again, and tried not to think about my boots.

  A commotion arose, a stout quigutl crawling toward us over others on the dung heap. He stood up in front of us, facing his fellows, and raised his hands for silence; he had only three hands. “I am Thmatha, Mitha’s cousin,” he said. “I know this dragon. She saved me from Dr. Gomlann’s experiment. He took my arm, but I’m alive in the pits, not pretherved in a jar.” Thmatha saluted Eskar. “I will bring Mitha.”

  He plunged into the darkness, and we were left to wait. “Are you hungry? We’ve got dung,” quipped one of the others.

  Eskar cried, “Seraphina, get out your flute!”

  She couldn’t see the look I shot her in the dark; she might not have understood it if she had. “You want me to play flute. In the cesspit.”

  “I do!” she screamed. “The quigs will like it.”

  It meant taking deeper breaths than I cared to, but I tried to be a good sport and humor her. The acoustics of the dung-filled ice cave were extremely odd; my experimental warm-up notes echoed unpleasantly. There was a scuttling in the darkness; the quigs’ bobbing tongue lights closed in around me. I worried that the sound had upset them, until I realized they were jabbering at me. “What’th that? Do it again. Aim it at the western wall. That should give interesting reverberationth.”

  I turned in the indicated direction and began to play a nursery tune, “Dance a Biddy Weasel.” The quigs chattered animatedly about the wavelengths of the notes, whether one could make such an instrument from a musk ox femur, and what sort of modifications would be required if one had no lips.

  I glanced at Eskar; she nodded minutely. Somehow this was part of the plan.

  Thmatha returned about an hour later, evidenced by the quigs shifting their attention. He and another quigutl were ushered up to the front, and the new arrival—who I presumed was Mitha—saluted Eskar the way a saarantras would have, gesturing toward the sky. Eskar saluted back. A murmur went up; as a rule, dragons did not salute quigutl. Mitha said to Eskar, “You brought us a novelty. You were alwayth generous that way.”

  “It took me a long time to return!” cried Eskar. “This is meager recompense.”

  Mitha gave a strange double shrug with his two sets of shoulders and said, “No matter. We’re ready. We’ve been ready for yearth. I hope this isn’t all the firepower you brought with you.”

  I stared at Eskar, silhouetted in the feeble light: the shadow of her horns and spiky protuberances, her folded wings. She looked suddenly alien to me, full of secrets. She had not merely quit the Censors. She had not come here to see whether she could persuade the quigs to help. She’d already organized them; she’d been planning this for a long time.

  There was more to her than I had guessed. For the first time it occurred to me that she was quite well suited to my uncle.

  She conferred with Mitha, agreeing on what he should do and when. He replied, “All will be as you athk. We’ve cunningly rewired the lab, so we need only—”

  “I trust your diligence!” she screamed, apparent
ly not caring for the details. “You have two days. These hatchlings, Seraphina and Brisi, are to assist you in your sabotage.”

  “Exthellent,” said Mitha, swiveling his conical chameleon’s eyes to look at us. “I shall keep them as thafe as my own eggth.”

  Eskar signaled to Lalo, who began to climb back out of the tunnel. She made as if to follow him, hesitated, and turned back to me. “Three things, Seraphina,” she said, snorting acrid smoke in my face. “One: find Orma. Two: stop his excision, if possible. Three: secure yourself someplace safe during the fighting.”

  She turned around so rapidly the tip of her tail hit me. Mitha kept me from falling backward into the sludge, but then he kept hold of my arm and took a sniff at my wrist.

  “Well, call me a thalamander: you’re half human. How odd. Come on, then.” He started toward a tunnel on the right-hand wall, then paused and eyed Brisi, whose wings drooped forlornly. “Shrink down, hatchling,” said Mitha. “These tunnelth are too thmall for you.”

  Brisi blinked at him dumbly, as if the smell had paralyzed her. I touched her scaly shoulder with my hand. “Into your saarantras,” I said in Porphyrian, supposing she found the quigutl accent difficult.

  She shrank down, but she’d brought no clothing. Eskar hadn’t warned her, maybe because Eskar would have gone naked without a second thought. I pulled a linen shirt, doublet, and breeches out of my bag, led her into the less mucky corridor, and helped her change. She found the buckles and laces of Goreddi clothing quite alarming. Mitha waited, flicking his tongue flame on and off.

  When Brisi was finally dressed, Mitha rose on his hind legs and walked at my side, one of his hands touching my elbow lightly for balance. We followed the corridor to a chamber, excavated into the living rock, where quigs processed the dragon leavings. Translucent orbs set into the ceiling provided an eerie, unflickering light. “Methane and solid fuelth,” said Mitha, gesturing toward pipes and tanks, gauges and kilns. “The labs run on dung. Helpth keep the facility hidden if there isn’t a cess-valley nearby.”