Shadow Scale

by Rachel Hartman

  The passage narrowed again, multiple pipelines running along the wall. The flameless lanterns glowed upon the ceiling at intervals. At a nexus sat a curious conveyance, like a six-legged headless pony, wide as a bed, consisting mostly of gears and sputtering. It reminded me of Blanche’s mechanical spiders, without the creepiness.

  At the thought of Blanche, I felt a pang. Except for my dream of Abdo, I’d barely thought of the other ityasaari in weeks. I had shied away from my shriveled garden. It was too distressing. Soon I would find Orma and we’d work out how to free my powers, and how to free the others from Jannoula.

  Assuming Orma still knew me. I shoved that fear aside.

  The mechanical pony had no seats as such; quigutl don’t sit like humans do. Mitha instructed us to lie on top of it on our bellies. I climbed aboard gingerly, grasping two leather loops to keep from sliding off. Brisi, beside me, gripped my arm with fingers like talons. Mitha clung to the contraption’s backside, behind the rattling engine, and reached around the side to pull a lever. The headless pony clanked along, snorting steam from its bum, faster than we could walk, through passages too tight for dragons. The dim, steady ceiling lights whizzed past. I tried not to think about falling off and being trampled.

  After half an hour, we reached a vaulted bay where several of these conveyances were moored, hissing and humming. Mitha helped me down; my knees were trembling.

  “Lab Four,” he said. “Under its own mountain. This is Quigutl Level Five, but any tunnel too thmall for a dragon is thafe. I will find you a nest. Are you hungry?”

  I shook my head. Brisi gaped at him; seeing him in full light had shocked her anew. I put a hand on her shoulder, which seemed to snap her out of it. “I’m sorry,” she said in Porphyrian, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I’ve heard of quigs from my mother, but we don’t have them in Porphyry. They’re so … ugly.”

  I hoped Mitha couldn’t understand her. He gave no sign, and then we were interrupted by the arrival of several more quigutl. These were lab quigs, cleaner than their comrades in the pits. They came straight over, gabbling to each other, and began examining our clothes, tugging at the hem of my tunic and the cuffs of Brisi’s trousers.

  “Porphyrian cotton,” said one knowledgeably. “That’s what we’re lacking, good fibrous plantth. I’m not keen on the ox hair or the bark. You see how fragile she ith?” She poked me in the face with a finger. “The bark would chafe.”

  “How do they do thith?” said one, fingering the key pattern along the hemline.

  “It’s called embroidery,” I said. His eye cones swiveled quizzically, and I realized the name didn’t explain anything. “You do it with a needle and floss.”

  The quig reached into his mouth, down into his throat pouch, and pulled out an awl. “Needle. Like thith?”

  “Finer. Sharper.”

  “Hey,” cut in another quig, who’d been sniffing me rudely. “She’s a half-breed!”

  The group oohed and aahed appreciatively, at which point Mitha decided the party was over and began to shoo them away. “Eskar is back,” he said as he shooed. “We have forty-eight hourth. There will be plenty of time to goggle over fabric later.”

  “When we all go south!” cried a particularly small quig. Everyone hushed her.

  “Thpread the word,” said Mitha. “Quietly.”

  They scampered off. I exhaled; their close scrutiny had made me tense.

  Mitha started up another corridor. He opened the door of an enormous room full of extremely noisy machinery; it was too loud to talk, but he made elaborate hand gestures at the quigs working inside, wordlessly communicating something. Eskar’s back, presumably. They all seemed to understand what that meant.

  “The generator,” he said as he closed the door. The word meant nothing to me.

  He brought Brisi and me to a quieter tunnel; the ceiling was even lower here, with hemispheric light fixtures, and we had to stoop. The walls were punctuated not with doors but with holes a foot off the ground; the air was damp and earthy. “Thith is the warren,” said Mitha, indicating the whole cheese-like network of holes. He walked on four legs now, his twiggy dorsal arms folded demurely against his back, sniffing around for the right hole. I was going to have to count.

  “My nest,” he said, encouraging us to go inside. “You’ve been up all night, and I know you’re not nocturnal.”

  Brisi and I crawled through the hole into a roughly circular room. The floor was lined with animal skins and dry leaves. There seemed to be no beds as such. Brisi slumped to the ground, exhausted. I handed her my bag to use as a pillow, and she took it gratefully. “I’ll be right back,” I whispered. “I need to ask Mitha something.”

  She uttered no protest. She may already have been asleep.

  I stuck my head out of the hole and hissed, “Mitha!” He was still in sight; he stopped and waited for me to waddle to him, like a duck. I bumped my head twice, not on the low rock ceiling but on the low-hanging hemispheric lights. “Eskar has ordered me to find someone, a particular prisoner.”

  “We call them victimth,” he said. “But yeth, I can help you look.”

  He led me out of the warren and up another service tunnel into a room full of … I guessed it was machinery. I saw a jungle of gleaming metallic vines and a peculiar slab of silvery ice nested into the facing wall. Mitha flopped onto his stomach on a quigutl stool, like a little ramp that led nowhere. From the tangle of silvery vines in front of him, Mitha pulled on a cluster of little cups and drew them toward him. Their wiry stems made them look like a bouquet of honeysuckle flowers. He stuck his claws in, one per flower, wiggled his fingers, and glowing writing appeared behind the ice.

  It wasn’t ice but glass. I felt a little foolish.

  I’d seen written Mootya in my mother’s memories—in fact, I’d seen my mother use a device called a note block. This seemed similar, but much larger.

  “All right,” said Mitha, squinting at the panel. “Best do this now before we reroute all the power. Which victim are we looking up?”

  “My uncle Orma,” I said. The word victim set my palms sweating. “Can you contact him with this, uh, machine?”

  “No, no,” said the quig. “These are medical recordth. We can determine which cell he’th in, and whether they’ve made a mince of him yet.”

  I clamped my lips tightly shut and let Mitha do whatever he was doing. His eye cones flitted back and forth as he read; impatient sparks crackled on the end of his tongue. At last he said, “He has an enormouth file, but no record of him being here.”

  I’d braced for the worst, but this took me aback. “Could they have moved him to a different facility?”

  One of Mitha’s eyes swiveled toward me. “I checked. He’th not at any Centhorial facility. Is that him?” He gestured toward the panel with one of his dorsal hands.

  I gasped. Orma stared out as if from a window, his brows arched in mild curiosity. “What do you mean, he’s not here?” I cried. “He’s right there!”

  “That’s a picture,” said Mitha. He tapped the glass; Orma didn’t blink.

  If words could appear behind the glass, why not a portrait? I felt a little foolish, but it was so life-like.

  Mitha was talking: “Sometimeth files are deleted for security reasonth. We’ll sniff around; there may yet be something to find.” Text slid up the screen; his mouth moved as he read. “Your mother was the dragon Linn, I deduce?” His fingers waggled manically in their scabbards. Two pictures of my mother, in her dragon and human forms, appeared. I pressed a hand to my mouth, not sure whether I was holding back laughter or tears.

  I had never seen an image of her. She looked a lot like Orma. Prettier, maybe.

  Mitha said, “She and Eskar were friendth. When Linn was compromised, Eskar wrote letterth begging her to come home and be fixed, but she would not.”

  “Dragons write letters?” I asked, struck by the oddity of it.

  Mitha swiveled an eye cone toward me. “Your mother was in human form; she
couldn’t have read an aerial etching on the mountainthide. Eskar would have dictated it to one of uth. My point is, that was the beginning of the end of our Eskar’s employment here. She began to doubt.”

  “Eskar told me she quit because Zeyd threatened my life,” I said.

  Mitha’s head spines wobbled. “That too. Then she hired my cousin to thpy on her superiorth. He learned about the imprisoned half-human; that convinthed her to quit.”

  I stared at him, a knot forming in my stomach. “The imprisoned half-human?” I repeated slowly. I knew all the half-humans; only one had been imprisoned.

  “The one they raised from a baby and experimented on,” Mitha said simply, plucking the control cups from his fingers.

  An icy certainty gripped my insides. “D-did she live in a cell with a tiny window and wear a dreadful suit of rabbit skins?”

  “You know her!” said Mitha. “But don’t call it dreadful in front of the otherth. We don’t have good fibrous plants here in the mountainth.”

  I had not come looking for Jannoula’s childhood. Mitha’s description made me shudder, but I couldn’t turn away. I had to know. I had to understand who she was and what she was doing, and here were surely answers to the questions she had always dodged.

  Mitha didn’t want to take me to her cell, but I insisted. He led me through the maze of service corridors, pausing only to tell the quigs we passed that Eskar was back and they had work to do. We crossed a full-sized corridor meant for dragons after Mitha made sure the coast was clear.

  Our path took us through a surgery with an operation in progress, some poor saar with his brainpan open to the air. Three dragon doctors stood around the high metal table, employing mechanical arms for the actual cutting, like jointed insect legs ending in scalpels. I balked at the sight of the surgeons, but Mitha grabbed my arm with his twig-like dorsal hand and pulled me along behind the steel equipment racks. The doctors’ eyes were covered with cup-like eyepieces; they could only focus on their work. Mitha signaled to the nurse quigutls, who made extra noise fetching sponges and suture thread.

  I cringed and hurried quietly after Mitha.

  Another service corridor brought us to a row of human-sized cells, all empty. The gray predawn light filtered through the narrow barred windows. “Not every victim cooperateth,” said Mitha. “Some won’t return to their natural size. They keep such mithcreants here, and they kept her at the very end.”

  I walked down the corridor, my heart in my throat, and opened the heavy door to Jannoula’s former home. The cell was familiar to me: the dirty floor, the low bed, the cold walls. The rabbit-fur suit hung on a peg beside the door.

  They had experimented on her. My stomach clenched.

  No wonder she’d reacted to me the way she had. I was perhaps the first humane presence she had known. I had popped in out of nowhere and been kind to her.

  And then I’d cast her out of my garden and back into this life.

  My throat was almost too dry to speak. “They let her go in the end. It’s too much to hope that it was an act of mercy, but … but why did they do it?”

  “Let her go?” said Mitha. “As in releathe her to the wild? They didn’t.”

  I frowned. “I saw her in Samsam.”

  He snapped his mouth open and shut, thinking. “She taught herself strategy games, and she was very good. They started asking her opinionth on various thingth.”

  “Strategy,” I said numbly.

  “General Palonn took her with him to the Battle of Homand-Eynn,” said Mitha. “We made the chain for around her neck, and a better suit of musk ox hair, because they were thitting in a glacier, watching.”

  I was trembling uncontrollably. I sat down on her little wooden bed and held my head in my hands. “Homand-Eynn was an early defeat for the Loyalists. Comonot told me about it. The Old Ard surprised his Loyalists by hiding in a hatchery.”

  “Putting their own hatchlingth in danger,” Mitha said, his eyes swiveling. “A gamble, but it worked. General Palonn was exceedingly pleased. He boasted to the doctors: ‘You’ve finally created something useful: a general from a lady.’ ”

  Mitha said lady in Goreddi, which startled me. “Did Palonn use that very word?”

  “It became her nickname,” said Mitha. “And she won the Old Ard more battles.”

  All this time we’d been assuming lady was a dragon name, not a word in our own language. Jannoula was the notorious General Laedi.

  Glisselda had to be told Jannoula was working for the Old Ard, maybe even acting under orders in Samsam. She would be traveling to Goredd to join the other ityasaari soon, if she hadn’t already. The Queen needed to capture her and lock her up before she could do any more damage.

  I pulled out the thnik I’d acquired in Porphyry and would have used it at once, but Mitha cried, “They’ll hear you!” He snatched the device from my hand and tossed it down his gullet, chain and all.

  I stared at him, appalled.

  Mitha made an inscrutable clicking sound in his throat; I couldn’t tell whether he was scolding or apologizing. “The Censors will detect unauthorithed transmissionth. Come. We will talk when you have thlept.”

  I swayed on my feet, exhaustion finally catching me up, and didn’t have the wherewithal to protest. He led me back to the warren by a different route—no operating theaters—but when we reached his nest, it was full. About twenty quigutl lay in a heap together. “There’th room,” Mitha insisted. “Pile in.”

  I eyed the sleeping quigs. “They won’t be alarmed to see me when they wake?”

  “Perhapth,” was all he said before scurrying off again.

  I found some edge space where I didn’t touch anyone, but this part of the floor was covered in bark shavings, which poked my skin. Exhausted though I was, my nerves vibrated alertly. I thought about entering my neglected garden and sending a message through Lars again, but the last time had ended with Viridius hurt. Whom else could I contact? Who wasn’t compromised by now? I lay a long time, despairing.

  Sleep crept up on me like a glacier.

  Sticky finger pads prodded my cheek. I sat bolt upright when I realized what they must be; half a dozen quigs scattered away from me, some up the walls and across the ceiling. I rubbed my eyes with my thumb and forefinger. The only light shone through the hole from the corridor. I could not tell what time it was.

  “Mitha said to wake you,” called one from the ceiling above me, defensively.

  “We’re collecting thnikth,” said another. “You’re to help uth.”

  “How long did I sleep?” I asked, flopping back down.

  “A very long time! It’s not today anymore. It’s tomorrow. That Porphyrian dragon ith already up, being helpful.” They all did that peculiar mouth clap Mitha had done, and I wondered if that was quigutl laughter.

  They gave me a meal of tough mountain greens and undercooked yak; it was dreadful, but at least nothing was rotten. I followed a gang of youngsters through service tunnels so low I couldn’t stand. The quigs sneaked into the personal lairs of the Censors and doctors, located thniks and thnimis (devices that also transmitted images), and squirreled them away in their mouths. Then they came back to the tunnel and regurgitated everything into a little wagon, which I wheeled past the warren into an area so tight and remote I could barely squeeze into it. A quig at that end unloaded all the devices into a storage room.

  Of course, some of the devices were around the necks and wrists of Censors and doctors. Once we’d cleared out the lairs, Mitha used the interlab thnimi to broadcast his knobby face and crackling lisp to every corner of Lab Four: “Attention, Censorth! All transmitting devices must be submitted for upgrade. Compliance is mandatory, as per Censorial Order five-nine-five-oh-six dash nine.”

  The dragons cooperated, lining up in the oversized corridors and dropping their thniks into a mechanical wheelbarrow Mitha had set up near the chemical labs. From an air vent near the ceiling, I watched and listened to draconic small talk—who had bitten whom, how com
e Inna went on leave, the molecular composition of that new neurotoxin, why yaks don’t get as fat as they used to. Their thniks were larger than the ones saarantrai carried, dragon bracelets that would be a heavy neck chain to a human, rings that would be bracelets. Some had thniks fastened to their heads with cobwebby filaments so that they might talk with their talons unencumbered.

  I lay on my stomach in a duct. The quigutls that had jammed in on either side of me kept rubbing themselves against me like cats. After a while it was too much for me, and I hissed, “Stop that!”

  “Can’t,” said the one nearest my face. “If they thmell you, you’re dead and all Eskar’s hard work is thpoiled.”

  It was hard to imagine that anyone capable of such tedious small talk would kill me, but four quigutl engineers had been mercilessly torched that day, one for getting too close to a Censor’s person uninvited, the others for seeking out thniks hidden in the dragons’ lairs. I went with Mitha’s nestlings to visit them in the quigutl infirmary when our work was done. It was a brightly lit space, with several small egg-shaped pools in the floor. The injured engineers each lay in one, soaking in some viscous liquid. Brisi was helping alongside the nursing quigs, scooping up the ooze with a ladle and pouring it over tender, charred heads. The hurt quigutl seemed cheerful enough, considering that burned, blackened skin was peeling off their bodies.

  “Don’t worry, they’re on destultia,” a quig whispered in my ear. “They feel the pain, but they don’t mind it anymore.”

  I was pondering this statement when Mitha arrived. He greeted each of his engineers in turn and then scampered up to me. He’d brought my flute from the warren; he presented it to me with a flourish of dorsal hands. “I hoped you might play a song for uth,” said Mitha. He ran a hand over his eye cone. “I wrote it. I will sing, and you harmonithe.”

  “I like fifths!” someone piped up. “The wavelengths are integer multipleth!”