City of Burning Shadows (Apocrypha: The Dying World)

by Barbara J. Webb

  I’d done the magic enough in the past couple days that the pattern to detect Jansynian spy tech came solid and energized to my mind with only a moment’s thought. Lucky thing, too, because today I actually found some.

  Locators on the bike were no surprise. There were all sorts of legitimate, even helpful reasons for it to stay in contact with the computers back at Desavris. For my purposes, however, that wasn’t going to work.

  The whole circuit board in the handlebars glowed blue, sending little tendrils of energy up into the air. This was going to take some delicate work if I still wanted the cycle to function once I was done. Taking one more quick look around to make sure I was alone on the street, I closed my eyes and focused on the pattern.

  Magic is a slippery, finicky thing. We create patterns to help our minds lock magic into a shape we can control. The broad strokes, common controls and limitations, had standard symbols that everyone used so that places like the workroom in Kaifail’s temple could exist. But this was magic I’d figured out for myself, based on Seana’s explanations, and the pattern in my mind was an almost random series of numbers and shapes—suggestive of an order, but nothing that would make sense to anyone else who happened to see it. It was all metaphor, short-cuts and mnemonics to trick our brains into doing the things that came so naturally to Iris and her people.

  But it worked. I concentrated on the imaginary images, muttered nonsense syllables that seemed to fit the rhythm. When I opened my eyes again, the fuzzy blue glow had sharpened, shrank. I stared, willing my vision to sharpen with the magic, until I could identify the tiny bridges on the chip that were sending out the signals I wanted to stop.

  Three different locations. I leaned in, saw the blue lines reach up from one to strain in the direction of my collar. Searching for my identification. That one had to stay. The other two…

  Another layer of control in my mind to limit the power to just those two circuits. And then a jolt, a flare, drawn from the energy of the bike itself. Just a touch—I hardly dared think about it. But I caught a tiny whiff of ozone and the blue glow faded away.

  As satisfied as I could be that no one could follow, I set off for downtown and a looping, evasive ride to Spark’s safehouse.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Promises and Threats

  As I pulled up to the building, Vik was out on the front steps, smoking a cigarette and watching the plume of black smoke clearly visible from the nearest of the fires. All business this morning, he didn’t give me any trouble. Just nodded. “Ash.”

  “Vik.” I tried to gauge the distance of the fire. “You think that’s going to be a problem?”

  He shook his head. “Saw some bird priests flying in that direction. They should be able to keep it contained.” Still, he didn’t move except to give me space to climb the steps, and his attention never left the smoke.

  The Oulirians had their own kind of power. The gifted ones—like the priests, like our attacker last night—had a relationship with the physical world that gave them power over air and flame. When their goddess had still been around, their power had been greater—thus the plentiful rains for our desert city—but even diminished, they should be able to keep a fire from spreading. Except there wouldn’t be near enough of them to protect all of Miroc if the terrorists got ambitious.

  I knocked on the door to Spark’s apartment. Vogg’s armored bulk answered the door. “Priest Ash of Kaifail.” He sounded surprised. “Is there trouble?”

  The answer, of course, was yes. “I need to talk to Spark.”

  He stepped aside, once again touching his fingers to his horns in what I guessed to be a gesture of respect. With Vogg out of the way, I could see Spark at the kitchen table, an array of computer bits and less identifiable tangles of wires and circuits. “Hi Ash,” she greeted me brightly. “You here to keep me company?”

  “I brought you a present.” I dug the melted data stick out of my bag and slid it across the table at her.

  Spark’s long, nimble fingers dug an ancient-looking NetPad out from under a pile of other parts. She slotted in the data stick then exclaimed, “My research!”

  “That’s everything the Jansynians have done. All the information on their project. And somewhere in there, something is broken. The researcher they had working on this is dead.” I saw no need to go in to details. “I don’t know how long it will take them to sort out what went wrong. Maybe too long.”

  She sobered, looking up at me with her huge, clear eyes. “I saw on the news this morning. It’s getting bad out there.”

  “It’s been bad for a long time,” Vogg said. His eyes found mine. “I was still with the city police during the riots, after the Abandon. There was no honor in what happened.” He turned back to Spark. “The sickness has lived in this city a long time. It will be all that’s left when everything else is burned away.”

  Spark shook her head, smiling. “People will surprise you if you give them a chance. Have faith, Vogg.”

  Faith in what, I wondered? “Everything will calm down if you can fix the satellite and make it rain.”

  “I should be able to. Once I sort through their schematics. How should I get in touch?”

  “You shouldn’t.” I didn’t want even a secure call from Spark coming in while I was up in the Crescent. “I’ll check in again tomorrow morning.”

  Spark focused her attention back on the files. I’d lost her attention for now. Which was fine. I left her to her work.

  Vogg walked me out. “I’m glad you brought this. Not just for the city. This project was dear to her, more than she would admit. It wounded her to lose it. Even more when the Jansynians couldn’t bring it to fruition.”

  Vik was still outside, watching the thinning smoke. He moved a polite distance away and pretended to ignore us. “How long have you known Spark?” I asked the hulking lizard.

  “When I left the police, Copper found me. The city wasn’t yet desperate, but Copper is smart. She saw how the wind would blow. And she knew the importance of Spark’s idea.”

  His massive, claw-tipped hands gripped the bare wooden railing that bordered the apartment building’s tiny porch. “I must confess, there have been times I’ve questioned—I’m not certain I believe this city worth saving.” He, too, looked up at the pillar of smoke, avoiding my eyes. “I was there when your temple burned. I stood aside as I was ordered. We—the police—we stood aside to let the rabid crowd have its way.”

  Destroying the temples had been the final act of the maddened populous. The violence against priests had started weeks earlier, and I’d been caught up in it—brought down by it—long before the temple fell. “I was in the hospital when it happened. Unconscious.”

  “It was shameful.” Vogg didn’t specify if he was talking about the rioters’ actions or his own.

  “They were terrified.” My own hands clenched at the memory. “They still are.” Now, as it had then, the air smelled of burning. My pulse spiked in response. “They’re desperate and their gods have abandoned them.”

  At least the terrorists were taking action. Horrible, dangerous action, but it was something. “We’ve all been wandering, waiting for something to happen. Waiting for rescue.” Waiting for the gods to come back. “If Spark’s device works—if we can take that step towards saving ourselves—maybe then everyone can go back to living forwards. Maybe we’ll be able to rebuild.”

  “You have more faith than I, Priest Ash of Kaifail.”

  Faith? I tasted the word. Found it bitter. “Keep safe, Vogg. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  He stayed out on the porch to watch as I swung onto my Jansynian cycle and zoomed away.

  #

  I aimed for home. I wanted a change of clothes and maybe another quick nap. Sooner or later, I was going to need a real night’s sleep, but for now, the couple hours I’d grabbed here and there were enough to keep me going.

  My apartment complex was a lot like Spark’s safehouse. The main floor boasted five more units like mine, w
ith the second and third floor holding the more generous one- and two-bedroom spaces. The neighborhood sat on the far edge of Miroc—a short evening stroll could take me past the city limits and into the desert—but it was cheap and relatively safe.

  I was the only human who lived in my building. Safer that way. While I kept to myself, the boneheads and lizards who shared walls with me were less likely to freak out about my status as a former priest than other races might have been—my own included. Most lizards were like Vogg or the two on the train the other day—respectful, if not always friendly. And boneheads, well, I’d never seen one of them freak out about anything.

  Speaking of, one of my neighbors was out in front of my building as I pulled up, toiling away in the small, decorative cactus garden he’d managed to keep alive through the drought. He stood as I pulled up, turned his head in my direction.

  I don’t say he looked at me, because he didn’t. Boneheads—the race formerly known as Lorath’s Children—had no eyes. If Jansynians were the race the most like humans, the Lorathians were strong contenders for the title of least.

  Their overall shape was similar—two legs, two arms, and a head—but there any resemblance ended. They had skin of a sort—pale and desiccated and so thin you could see the clear lines of their blood vessels underneath—but that skin was mostly covered by the knobby chitinous exoskeleton that supported their bodies. Sure, the lizards had armor plates over most of their bodies, but they still had bones on the inside. Not the Children of Lorath.

  Also, did I mention they had no eyes? The entire top half of their head—from their inset nostrils up—was a ridged dome of bone-matter. They moved through the world with the use of a finely honed psychic sense that every one of them seemed to have in equal measure. Most races, some were more gifted than others. The boneheads were more like Iris’s people, where every single one of them shared that same ability.

  “Drake,” he said in a low, grinding voice. They always sounded rusty when they talked—something they didn’t do very often with me, and never among themselves.

  I didn’t know his name, or even if he had a name. I didn’t even know if he was actually a he. “Hi. I don’t think we’ve met.”

  “Strangers here. In your space. This morning. Searching.”

  A cold chill washed over me. Had Syed tracked me down? “Human strangers?”

  “No. Your minds are empty spaces. Quiet. The minds in your home were of Jansyn.”

  A relief—sort of. Had they been Seana’s people? When she and I had been together before, I’d suffered through a number of random security sweeps. If she considered us back together, she would have sent her people over here for an inspection without a second thought. A good thing I hadn’t left any information about Spark in the apartment. “Thanks, but they were friends. I think.”

  Without any sort of acknowledgement or dismissing gesture, he bent back down to the garden. In the whole conversation, he’d made no expressive or communicative gestures at all. A little creepy. But I had bigger concerns right now than interracial cultural divides.

  “Thanks,” I repeated, hoping I hadn’t offended him in some incomprehensible way. I went inside.

  The inside hallway was dark. Some neighborhood kid stealing lightbulbs again. Our building was easy prey—the boneheads didn’t notice one way or the other, and the lizards—like me—kept odd hours. Nothing more sinister occurred to me.

  Until I opened my door and reached for the light switch and nothing happened. And remembered the shadow that had attacked Eddis. And the way Iris had forgotten Syed the moment he’d told her to. What made me think my Lorathian friend outside would be any different?

  But this wasn’t a dark, empty street. This was my home. “Light!” I called out in a strong, clear voice. I’d enchanted the sconces months ago, during a time I wasn’t sure I’d be able to pay the electricity bill.

  My apartment lit up to reveal—yes—Syed standing in wait.

  He stood at the wall, looking over the pictures I’d taped to the bare plaster. Reminders of better days.

  “Joshua Drake,” he said, and my mind started to swim in that unhealthy way. But by now I was used to his tricks. I focused, pushed, and anchored in a way that was becoming reflex.

  “None of that.” I didn’t move any closer, but neither did I back away. “What are you doing here?”

  “Where is the Fyean?” he countered. “Where is Spark?”

  “What do you want with her?”

  “I don’t care about her,” Syed snapped. “It’s the people who are after her I want.”

  The Jansynians. “Why?”

  His eyes narrowed and the shadow swam inside them. Once again my mind tried to go gray. I fought it back, and asked through clenched teeth, “Why are you trying to stop the satellite project? Why don’t you want them to bring rain to Miroc?”

  He took a step towards me. “How do you do that? How can you push me away?”

  Even if I knew the answer, I wasn’t about to tell him and lose whatever edge I had. “If you won’t answer my questions, I don’t see why I should answer yours.”

  “Enough of this.” His eyes went black, and then every light in the room snuffed out.

  The darkness wasn’t natural. I couldn’t see the glowing clock on the oven, the blinking red of my NetPad’s charging station. Only blackness. And somewhere in that blackness, Syed and his murderous shadow.

  I fled.

  The hall was just as dark, but sunlight greeted me—blinded me—when I opened the outside door. I stumbled forward, ran for the bike, didn’t turn around. I didn’t know what he could do. The shadow that had killed Eddis, the shadow I’d seen swimming behind Syed’s eyes, I didn’t know if it could survive in the sunlight or if it needed darkness to kill. To possess. I had no plans to linger and find out.

  I dared a glance in the rearview mirror as I leaned in hard to speed away. No sign of Syed. He hadn’t followed me out into the street. At least, not that I could see.

  That thought sent a shudder through me.

  We’d believed all the Favored Children dead—assassinated when their gods went missing. I never thought I’d be this upset to find out one had survived.

  If Syed was after me—if he was after Seana—if he was trying to stop the rain and Miroc’s salvation, I needed to find out everything I could about him and what he could do. And fast. Trouble was, how did you find things out about the Favored Son of the god of secrets?

  I turned toward the road that would lead me to Amelia’s part of town and hoped she’d have an answer.

  #

  A strange man answered Amelia’s door. “Miss Price is in a meeting,” he said. “She said you might make use of her office.”

  I followed the butler-housekeeper-security-guard-whatever to an office as lush as the parlor I’d been in last night. And I wasn’t alone. “Iris!”

  She looked good, back to her normal self with no sign of injury. But that was her nature, after all. If she was still hurting on the inside, it didn’t show as she stood to greet me with a bright smile. “About time you got here. I’m bored to tears waiting for Amelia to get done.”

  I went over to Amelia’s desk—a burnished monstrosity of imported hardwood. I had to assume the invitation to use her office included access to her computer. “Who’s she meeting with?”

  “Big-wigs. The city council. Her father.”

  “Her father?”

  Iris hopped up on the desk—there was plenty of room—and sat down cross-legged next to the computer monitor. “I swear, Ash, even I know this shit. Her father—Lucien Ellsworth.”

  It was true I didn’t pay much attention to politics—and had paid even less back before the Abandon—but even I had heard of Lucien Ellsworth. “Amelia’s an Ellsworth?”

  Iris must have heard the horror in my voice. “And that’s why she goes by her mother’s family name.”

  Now it made sense. Amelia’s money, her connection to the city council—all her connections. “What
are they talking about in there?”

  “The bombs is my guess.”

  After my encounter with Syed, I’d almost forgotten. Too many things happening. Danger coming at us from all sides. And all of it might go away if we could just make it rain.

  “I’ve had my own exciting morning.” I filled Iris in on my encounters with Syed, both the attack in my apartment this morning and what she’d missed while she was zoned out by his manipulations last night.

  As I talked, she got more and more fidgety. First, fingers drumming on her knees, then feet twitching, until her skin itself began to ripple. Once I finished, she shook her head hard, a fervent denial. “He’s supposed to be dead. All the Favored Children are dead.”

  I shrugged. “Secrecy is the very nature of the Silent One. Maybe he was able to hide.”

  Iris shook her head again. “Not secrets, Ash. Well, yes, secrets. But that’s the effect, not the cause.”

  She jumped up, started to pace. As she moved, her body morphed—tall, short, skinny, wide, dark, light, human…not. Like her entire self had lost focus. “Iris, what—”

  “You Kaifail priests, you think you’re so smart. With your books and your words and your talking. But he kept secrets from you. From all of you. From Kaifail and Jansyn and Lorath and all the rest. Only we know. Because of what we are, we had to know.”

  She stopped and faced me. Black shapes moved across her skin. The suggestion of shadows. “You humans, you can’t understand. Kaifail’s experiment—you became what you were, grew and evolved in the world for his entertainment. You aren’t reflections, limited by the imagination of your creator.” Her body had become a fluid thing, pulsing with her agitation.

  “I don’t understand,” I said as calm as I could. “What does this have to do with Syed?”

  “He’s the nightmare we are raised to.” She raised her hand. Her fingers fused, separated, became bird claws, then lizard, shimmering with a rainbow of color. “This is what I am. This is what all my people are.”

  “Magic.”

  “Change,” she corrected. “Magic is what your people use to touch it, but change is what we are.”