Broken Shadow

by Jaine Fenn

  “The militia captain who His Grace named; Tador is friends with his nephew and I knew him by sight so I thought him my best contact.”

  Not Markave, thank God. “Fetch Brynan and Nerilyn please.”

  Suddenly her frustration had a focus.

  The two house servants crept into the bedroom looking uncertain, though Brynan briefly smirked at the sight of her and Markave together, in their underclothes. She turned to him first.

  “Brynan, when you went to the palace with my papers, who did you give them to?”

  “One of the ministers on the duke’s list.”

  “And how did you locate him?” It seemed unlikely Brynan had any personal contacts at the palace.

  “I asked a footman. When the footman asked me why I needed to speak to a minister I said I had a message from Countess Harlyn, and it was House business.”

  “A plausible lie.”

  “Was that… all right? You said no one must know you were sending your papers to the duke. I spoke to the same minister both times. He was very helpful.”

  “You did the right thing.” Rhia turned to her maidservant. “You’ve also taken papers twice. Who did you give them to?”

  “One time the militia captain and the other time a minister.”

  “And how did you find the right individuals?”

  “I asked Adern.”

  Rhia sighed. “Tell me you did not let him know what you were up to.”

  “He asked…” Nerilyn wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  “And what did you say?”

  “The first time, I said it was none of his business. He was a bit funny about it, but he plays around, does Adern; sometimes I don’t know whether he’s annoyed at me or just having fun.”

  “And the second time?”

  Nerilyn looked at her feet. “I didn’t mean to say anything. Only he was mocking me, so I said my mistress had a great mind, and he said he’d heard she wrote crazy stuff, and I said no, it’s just you wouldn’t be smart enough to understand it, and he said, so would the duke then? And I, I didn’t say anything, I really didn’t. He worked it out. But when he asked directly if I was smuggling papers to the duke for you, I couldn’t lie, not to him. I made him swear not to tell anyone.”

  “You foolish, foolish girl!” But Rhia was a fool too; she’d been thinking how she could use Nerilyn’s lover as a source of useful information. Why had it not occurred to her that someone else might do the same in return?

  “I’m so sorry! Please I never meant to, I just–”

  “Get out!” The fury boiled up, cold and bitter. “You have no idea the harm you have done, girl. No idea.”

  “But m’lady–”

  “Not a word. Not one more word. Get out and don’t come back. I will not have traitors in my house! I never want to see you again, do you hear me?”

  Tears starting from her eyes, Nerilyn nodded, then turned and fled.

  Rhia waved an exhausted hand, “Brynan, you can get on with whatever you were doing.”

  Which just left Markave. He said nothing, but she sensed a new distance between them at seeing her treat Nerilyn so. “Shall I go too?” he murmured.

  “Yes. Please.” She did not trust herself with company.

  The Church sent a canon and his clerk. They introduced themselves but Rhia instantly forgot their names. She met them in the dining room and handed over a thick bundle of papers without a word.

  “Is this everything you have on the theory the Church has ruled against?”

  “Everything I have in this house, yes.”

  The churchman looked around the well-furnished but book-free dining room. “We would like to see where the other papers and potential items of interest are please.”

  “If you must.”

  She led them up to her study. Their faces fell at the sheer volume of papers, books and instruments on every surface. “This may take a while,” said the clerk.

  “Good,” said Rhia, then changed her mind. “Actually I would like you done and out of my house as soon as possible.”

  The canon said, “I will recruit an additional clerk and we will return first thing tomorrow.”

  “Well, I’m not going anywhere.”

  She did wonder, after they were gone, whether she should go away rather than stand helplessly by while her life’s work was destroyed. No: she would watch the Church’s minions, and fight them if they overstepped their admittedly wide remit.

  But thinking about the estate jogged her memory. She needed to write to Etyan! As soon as I can face it, she told herself.

  The churchmen returned the next morning. Rhia fluttered in and out of the study, staying for as long as she could bear while they rummaged through everything, then withdrawing to her room when the sight of their desecration became too much. At one point the canon pointed to the celestial model and said, “Tomorrow we will bring someone who can safely dismantle this.”

  “Oh, you’re not just going to take a mallet to it then?”

  “No Countess. The materials are your property. You can have them back.”

  “How magnanimous.”

  “There was one other thing though.”

  “What?”

  “You have a device which was produced at your trial, which claimed to magnify the sky.”

  “What of it?”

  “We need to examine it, and if necessary remove it as well.”

  “Oh no. You are not having my sightglass.”

  “I am sorry Countess, but if it breaks the Church’s proscriptions–”

  “It does not! And Cardinal Vansel used it safely without fear of imperilling his immortal soul. It stays.”

  “We have our instructions…”

  “And they do not include taking items which the Church has no problem with. I have acquiesced to the Church’s demands, I am cooperating fully, but if you want my sightglass you will have a fight on your hands!”

  “We will deal with the other items first, then.”

  “You do that.”

  She was glad now that she had already secreted the sightglass in her bedroom.

  That afternoon, as she was steeling herself to return to the depredations in her study, she ran into Markave as he was pulling the door closed on the guest room.

  “How is he?” she asked.

  “He woke up enough to ask for water a while back.” Kerne was unconscious most of the time now; unable to eat, drinking no more than a sip once a day, he was fading away in front of them.

  “I can take a turn, Markave. It might distract me.”

  “I won’t ask you to, unless you want to.”

  They stood facing each other in awkward silence, then Rhia said, “Was I too hard on Nerilyn?”

  “That’s not for me to say.”

  “But it is, doubly so now. I was so angry, and she was there, and couldn’t answer back.”

  “She is a well-meaning but foolish girl. This is not the first time she has made a mistake then covered it up.” He shrugged. “But she did not betray you on purpose, and I know she will be truly sorry.”

  “Maybe I’ll take her back in a while. Or else look for a new maid who isn’t such a fool.” She’d had to hunt around for clean clothes this morning. “I just don’t think I can face either option right now.”

  “I understand.” He put a tentative hand on her arm. She smiled back at him. “Just let me know what you decide and we can sort this out together.”

  When he was gone she paused, his touch lingering. She did not feel anything like lust for him, but his physical presence was not unpleasant. Now that she knew she would live they might consider having a child together, if they were not too old. Other women seemed fulfilled by motherhood. Perhaps she could learn to be too.

  The next day, true to their word, the churchmen dismantled the celestial model. All that work she and Kerne had put in, undone in half a day.

  She could not stand to watch for long, so she went and wrote the long-overdue letter to Etyan. She stated the fact
s baldly: I have married Markave to save our House; it is legal and has been accepted. Or at least not challenged. The Church found against me in my trial. They did not have the courage to harm me, but my work is all undone.

  Sometimes she thought of everyone on the world – shadowkin, skykin, everyone – as mere animals, living in a deep well. With such limited horizons, they never saw the full reality beyond the hole, only what fell in, or could be glimpsed passing over it. She doubted this analogy would stand up to the full force of logic, but then logic was not valued by most people anyway. The Church, despite its talk of ‘the heavens’, did not even seem capable of looking up out of the hole. And when she had dared to, she had been put firmly back in her place.

  CHAPTER 46

  Dej woke from dreams of other lives.

  She was lying on the floor, in darkness.

  Where? The city of Foam-cast-north, the beautiful vibrant settlement by the sea.

  When? At noon, reclining while giving advice in dappled shade. At cool midnight, making love on the shore, lost together in the murmur of the waves. During the festival of lights, fading to sleep after a joyful day, the dancers receding into the dusk. The dusk… the dark…

  She sat up, grabbing her head in her hands, palms pressed to forehead.

  She wasn’t them. That wasn’t then. The city was dead now. Empty. Overgrown. Everyone long gone.

  And it wasn’t her city; those weren’t her people. These weren’t her memories.

  She blew out a long slow breath, and raised her head. She was lying at the foot of the seer’s bed. A sweetness, the beginning of decay, wafted down.

  It took a while to get her legs under her. Her limbs were weak and she was appallingly thirsty; she’d been out of it for days. Felt like years. Lifetimes. But already the seer’s past lives were fading, some gone forever, others forever deeply embedded in her.

  The darkness wasn’t as thick now; it would be dawn soon. She stood, sighed, and rubbed her back. The seer’s body looked undisturbed, except for the head. Good. In time local creatures would find it, eat it, return it to the world. But that was something she didn’t want to see. Bad enough, in the pre-dawn shadows, to see that deeper shadow between the eyes. A knife hadn’t been enough: she’d had to use a sharp stone to smash Jat’s skull, working fast, feeling the animus’s life drain away, following its host into oblivion. When she finally uncovered it, nestled between two squishy grey masses, it was smaller than she expected; no bigger than a finger, bone-white and segmented. It looked like a maggot, though rather than wriggling it had just shivered as she plucked it out, as though shying away from the outside world.

  Her gorge rose for a moment. But only a moment.

  The animus had tasted of nothing and everything. The texture had been nauseating, the way the segments rolled then burst against the roof of her mouth, releasing an earthy, salty warmth. Swallowing had taken all her willpower. But even while its gelatinous texture and foul taste lingered in her mouth, its essence had begun to fill her head.

  Crèche tattle said that skykin relived past lives in their dreams. Before now, she never had, being incompletely bonded; the only time she’d accessed her own animus’s memories had been fleetingly, at her bonding.

  She hadn’t eaten the seer’s animus to dream about his past lives. And she hadn’t eaten it to prolong her own life, as the clanless elder, Mar, had done. She had consumed Jat’s animus to gain the knowledge he hadn’t had time to pass on.

  His final life, the one that had broken him, had contributed few dreams to her menagerie of memory. He hadn’t wanted to remember. But while the sensual specifics of dozens of lives drained away, the cold details of the vital, terrible work he had done as his last duty to their people sharpened, became more real, a part of her worldview.

  It had been bad enough knowing what Etyan had done. He’d ruined an innocent girl, and hurt those who’d cared for her. But this ongoing horror affected every skykin who’d ever lived. She sagged and tottered, half putting a hand out to the seer’s deathbed for support. This knowledge had destroyed a seer. Who was she, a rootless nobody, to know the awful truth? And it would die with her, out here. Her worldview shattered, for nothing.

  Her flailing hand brushed her swollen belly, felt the life within. She paused, focused.

  It’s not just me any more.

  No, it was her too. The innocent child inside. A girl: yes, she knew that now. A moment of cold, personal doubt intruded on her attempts to dispel the world-shaking desolation. Back at the crèche, Min had been sure her child was a girl, sure without any skykin intuition. Maybe she’d been right. But she and the baby had both died.

  “You’ll survive,” she told the child. “I’ll make sure of it.”

  The world might be built on a lie, but her daughter still deserved the chance to live in it.

  She turned away from the mangled body of the seer, and tottered out into the pre-dawn light.

  CHAPTER 47

  “Rhia! Rhia wake up!”

  “What? Are they here already?” In the week or so since the Church had begun their vile work she had become increasingly lethargic, exhausted by losing her battle. She had taken to sleeping late. It was bright daylight already.

  “No, not the churchmen.” In the light pressing in through the shutters Markave’s face was a mask of horror.

  “Kerne! Oh no.” She struggled to sit up. Kerne had reached the stage of the fever when his pain was constant and his skin bruised at a touch. Death was not far off, and she wanted to be with Markave when his son died.

  “Not Kerne.”

  She looked more closely. Markave looked stricken. “What is it? What’s happened?”

  Markave took two halting steps to the window, then tugged one shutter open, jumping back at once as though scalded.

  Light flooded the room. Not just normal daylight but a burning blue-white radiance that made Rhia throw her hand up to shield her eyes.

  She knew that light.

  No. It can’t be.

  She turned to Markave. “When did… how…”

  “Everything was like this when I woke up. What’s happening? What is this?”

  “This,” she pointed at the window, squinting against the glare, “or rather that, is the Sun. What the Sun really looks like.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “In the skyland. The Sun looks like that in the skyland.”

  “How can this be?”

  “An excellent question.” A breathless animation gripped her. How can this be indeed. “I need to go to the palace.”

  “Is it… safe?”

  “No. But given the fact we can endure this light at all I’d surmise we have a cloudy sky.”

  “More than cloudy. There’s a storm brewing.”

  “Ah yes, that would make sense. I’ll need my thickest cloak. You and Brynan must wait here.”

  “I have no intention of going out in that.”

  Rhia did not want to. But she had to know how bad it was.

  Markave was right about the storm. Clouds swirled and billowed overhead, while menacing rumbles of thunder sounded in the distance. As she turned the first corner, a fierce gust of wind yanked at her cloak, blowing the hood down. She pulled it back up, holding it in place with one hand. She should probably have worn gloves to protect her hands too.

  The streets were empty – it was still early – but there were distant shouts from farther down the hill.

  At the palace a pair of demoralised guards half made to stop her, until her glare silenced them. She took back corridors unused since childhood, when she had become Francin’s regular playmate after he lost his sister and they had run riot in places they were not meant to go. The servants she passed were either making a point of going about their business as normal or muttering fearfully in corners. Rhia ignored the air of restrained panic, heading ever upwards.

  She emerged on the noon tower – so named because of an old, complicated and probably untrue story about a distant ancest
or of the duke who had ended up throwing himself off it at midday. It was the highest point of the palace.

  Up here the wind was a gale. Rhia stayed back from the parapet, and crouched down against the constant buffeting. Overhead, the already-bright clouds flashed searing white, and a moment later a thunderous crash reverberated across the city. She flinched, then made herself untense. With one hand on the tower’s flat roof for support, she looked out over what Francin called “the best view in the land”.

  Normally the skyland was a silver-white band along the far horizon. Now, the whole land was lit silver-white, in every direction.

  It was as bad as she feared. The celestial shade that made Shen what it was hadn’t just moved. It was gone.

  A splat of warm rain hit her cheek. She recoiled, then scuttled back down the stairs.

  A staircase and two corridors later, the courtier heading towards her stopped and said, “The duke would–”

  “Where is he?”

  “I’ll take you to him.” The man, some scion of a minor House, took her to one of the duke’s meeting rooms. Francin was huddled round a table with half a dozen minsters. He looked up when she burst in, and said, “Gentlemen, please wait here. I need a quick word with my cousin.”

  The men muttered, horrified gazes going to her scarred and mask-less face, but Rhia ignored them. Francin opened a side door to a smaller chamber, containing just two chairs and a desk. He did not sit. He looked as agitated as she had ever seen him, and before she could speak said, “Something far above us has gone awry, hasn’t it?”

  “I believe so.”

  “You believe so. Can you be sure?”

  “Yes. I am as sure as I can be.” With a jolt she realised that her theory, which the Church had dismissed as delusion and which she had begun to doubt herself, may just have been unexpectedly, terrifyingly vindicated. She had an inappropriate urge to laugh.

  “And whatever has gone wrong has left us exposed to the unshielded Sun.”

  “Yes. Thankfully there are clouds, at the moment.”

  “Is it just us?”

  “Us? Oh you mean just Shen.” The thought that this might be a worldwide phenomenon stopped the breath in her throat. She made herself inhale, and think. “I can’t be sure.” The shadeswarm consisted of structures whose motions and interactions were beyond her ability to model, but it must be sophisticated, dynamic and, until now, reliable. If one part of the system failed, others would compensate. “But I don’t think every shadowland will be affected, at least not immediately.”