City of Burning Shadows (Apocrypha: The Dying World)

by Barbara J. Webb

  I laughed. A mad sound, even to my own ears. Nothing was fine. Nothing would ever be fine again. “Back off,” I said, once I had myself back under control.

  They did. With gun still raised, I moved around them, through the door they’d come out of. Up a stairway, into a hall where I startled several more scurrying maintenance people with my sudden, armed presence. They froze and I ignored them, continuing up another set of stairs, through an office where a secretary screamed and another security guard started to get in my way until he got a good look at me. I hadn’t had a chance to look in a mirror in the last few hours, but it seemed, at this moment, I came across as somewhat frightening.

  I made it out onto the street. I put the gun away again. Out here, it would cause more problems than it would solve. The sun had set while I’d been underground. The evening traffic was out. Any one of the people crowding the streets could be the thing hunting me.

  I shut that thought down. If I hadn’t evaded my hunter, there was nothing I could do about it. Not until it revealed itself. Or killed me.

  With my attention focused on the much more mundane threats of assaults and muggings and general mayhem, I aimed my path downtown, towards Kaifail’s temple. I headed alone down the city streets with as much confidence as I could muster.

  #

  For once, the universe was merciful. Not only did I make it safely to the temple, but I found Iris, Vogg, and Spark waiting for me there. They sat together in the ruins, deep enough in the shadow of a broken wall no one could see them from outside the wards. They stood at my approach.

  Vogg had bandages around one massive, scaled bicep, and the armor plate that protected the right side of his chest was cracked, but his movements weren’t slowed as he drew his gun at my approach.

  “Ash?” Iris asked, caution in her tone and her posture.

  “Still me,” I answered wearily. “You can ask me anything. Not that it matters. Turns out the shadows, they’re better actors than we realized. They know—somehow they know—” My throat closed around the words. I couldn’t keep talking.

  “Magic,” Spark said softly. “They can’t do magic.”

  I wasn’t sure I could. Exhausted, drained, scattered, broken. But I knelt on the rough, charred ground and drew a circle of sigils by rote. A small pattern, an archivist’s tool, it focused the dim starlight around us into a beam of illumination in the center of the circle. A light to read by. The best I could manage.

  It was enough. All three of them relaxed. I wished I could let them stay that way. “We need to get underground, and then…”

  I’d have to tell Iris about Amelia. Tell them the truth about Seana, about how she’d been one of them all along. How their goal was the death of this city and how, at this moment, I saw no way to stop them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  A Story Worthy of Retelling

  We built a fire in one of the work-circles that I modified to contain the flames. A couple chairs—beautiful antiques—were sacrificed for fuel. We settled around the fire. Spark, so small and frail, with a blue and silver tapestry draped around her shoulders like a blanket. Vogg sat next to her, his massive shoulders slumped and the tip of his tail twitching against the cool stone floor. Iris was subdued, her body softer and smaller than she usually appeared, her arms crossed against the story I was about to tell.

  As calm as I could, I laid out the story as I knew it, the timeline I understood. Spark’s contact with the city council as the triggering event. Eddis to Seana. The Jansynians guided by the shadows all along. My terrifying experience in the tubes. The few hints and clarifications Syed had shared. Finally, the path of the shadow who had brought the most grief to the people sitting in front of me. Copper, to Micah…to Amelia.

  After all we’d been through, Iris and Spark took the news calmly. Perhaps they’d even guessed. Spark’s orblike eyes closed for a moment, and color drained from Iris until she was more gray than anything.

  All three of us sat silent, overweighed by loss. Vogg, too, sat with head down. Did he mourn Copper? Micah? Others lost? Or was he, like me, overwhelmed by the simple impossibility of hope.

  Without a word, Spark stood and walked away from the fire, disappeared into the far depths of the workroom. Vogg followed at a distance, giving her space, but keeping her in sight.

  Iris and I stared at each other, both drowning in our own shocked loss. “If I’d figured things out sooner…” I started, but Iris shook her head in violent negative.

  “Don’t start. No rethinking, no second-guessing. You can’t change it. We can’t change any of it.” The nest of tiny braids that was her hair today were all starting to turn red at the tips. “We all had the same information. We all knew those things were involved. And we still—” she bit off the end of her sentence.

  It was kindness she offered, a share in the blame, but neither Iris nor Amelia had spent the last few nights sleeping next to one of the monsters. “I should have seen something. I should have known Seana was different.”

  “She’s gone.” Iris’s voice was as flat as I’d ever heard it. “Amelia’s gone. All we can do…”

  I looked at Iris, waited for her to finish, but she shook her head and shifted into the small orange tabby, then slunk off to find her own privacy.

  Leaving me alone. The workroom was big enough and cluttered enough with bookcases and boxes piled high and enough other stuff that we could all effectively disappear from each other.

  I couldn’t begrudge the others their need for escape. For isolation. It wasn’t what I wanted at all, but—as I suspected was true of Iris and Spark both—the person I wanted to be not-alone with couldn’t be here.

  I found myself wandering back towards the mural of the Thirteen. I wanted to be angry. I wanted to blame someone. And who better to blame than the thirteen smiling faces before me. I stood before Kaifail, looked up at his handsome, joyous face. I wanted to claw the paint from the wall. “You left us here to die. You shepherded us and made us what we were and then turned your back and walked away.”

  “Is that what you believe, Joshua Drake?”

  I didn’t have the energy to be surprised. “Syed.” I hadn’t heard him approach, but when I looked back over my shoulder, he stood mere inches away. “How did you get in here?”

  “Your misdirections are clumsy things, and the magic does not touch me.”

  “What about the others?” My worry was muted by exhaustion. “Can they get in? Will they find us here?” I couldn’t imagine where else we could go.

  “You should be safe from my father’s children. Presuming you have no further plans to race into danger.”

  I punched him in the jaw. I was as surprised by my action as he was, but his cold, superior tone drove me to it, and the sudden violence broke something open inside me, waking a rage that burned away the daze I’d been moving through.

  Whatever Syed was, he wasn’t used to brawling. I hit him squarely and he fell back, stumbled over a book-filled crate and crashed shoulder-first into a file cabinet.

  I’d bloodied his lower lip. His tongue ran along the split as he lay on the ground, looking up at me. “Better?” he asked in that same chilly tone.

  “You soulless fucker. Heartless asshole. If you’d come to me at the start. If you’d told me…if you’d told me anything! People I love are dead, and you stand there and sneer at me for putting myself in danger?”

  “I don’t care about your friends. Would you like me to pretend otherwise?”

  “You’re an inhuman monster.”

  “Yes.” He sat up, rubbed at his jaw. “And you are a buzzing insect whose life will be even shorter than the usual feeble spark of your kind if you don’t start acting in a rational fashion.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  He smiled, his face a mask of frigid amusement. “I will not kill you. You don’t matter enough for me to bother.”

  I wanted to hit him again. Except that it would probably only make him laugh at me more. “Why are
you here? Why do you keep following me? If you’re not going to help—”

  “I never said I wouldn’t help.”

  I couldn’t do this. Whatever was to happen, however we were to go forward, right now, at this moment, I just couldn’t do this. I left him sitting on the floor and went to find my own quiet corner. Now it was my turn to need to be alone.

  #

  Syed was sitting by the fire by the time I felt ready to face him again. If the others had seen him yet, no one was inclined to join him.

  I didn’t want to, but it was time. Time to stop flailing. Time to understand what we’d all been drawn into.

  Time to fight back.

  “Will you answer my questions?” I asked.

  His eyes stayed locked on the fire as he spoke. “Understand, it is not recalcitrance or petulance that keeps me silent. It is woven into the fabric of my being. We are not like you, Joshua Drake, so flexible and fickle in your nature. It seems such a challenge for you humans to understand how the rest of us are different.”

  Iris had said something similar, back at Amelia’s. I wondered if she realized there was something she and Syed agreed on. “You want to stop these other three of your kind, and you need my help to do it. You can’t deny that—you wouldn’t be here if it weren’t true.”

  “I do not deny it.”

  “That’s the price for my help. I need to know what you know.”

  He laughed, a dark, hollow sound without an ounce of humanity to it. “What I know? What I know? I have been as I am since a time when your ancestors were still huddled around fires and telling stories to keep back the night. What I know? I have seen empires rise and fall. I have watched the births of not just men and women, but entire races. For four thousand years I have served and I have watched and I have given counsel to gods,” he snarled the word, “and now I must speak to you, one more mortal in an endless sea of faces as disposable as tissue, and beg your help as though you were an equal and you demand to know what I know?”

  I answered in the same calm, cool tone he’d used on me earlier. “That’s about the size of it, yes.”

  He gave a bitter, inward-focused smile, and continued to stare into the fire. When he spoke, his words were flat and even. Syed was no storyteller, but in this case, my interest in the material outweighed any flaws in the delivery.

  “Understand this is your fault—humanity. All the scrabbling, curious, intrusive lot of you. I wasn’t there to see it, but I can only imagine the first words out of the mouth of the ape who first learned how were, ‘What’s next?’ And so you’ve gone on, poking and prodding and changing things.

  “My father’s children were created to mitigate the changes, to keep you from rewriting the world every time you had some new whim. We couldn’t stop you entirely. The other gods would have objected. The chaos gods—Ouliria, Drinion, the Twins—they loved you humans. They took delight in the way you kept trying to break the world.

  “Fools. Every one of them.”

  “Do you know where they went?” I interrupted.

  He shook his head with a thin smile. “Even I do not hold the answer to that question.”

  He continued. “It was a delicate balance. We had to choose carefully. A researcher, for example. A politician. One pivotal person through whom we could act, calming pockets of chaos and smoothing dangerous ripples.”

  “You killed them.”

  He shook his head. “Even now, you do not understand, Joshua Drake. We don’t kill. We become.

  “Death is change—the greatest change of all. It brings chaos. It drives response. No, we did not kill these people. We slipped inside them and turned them from their dangerous path. Then remained with them until their appointed time. Each intervention was a labor of years, and my father’s children moved silently from one lifetime to the next.”

  We were going to have to agree to disagree on whether they were killing people or not. “How did this go on—you said you’ve been around for thousands of years—how did no one notice? How did we not know about an entire race?”

  “My father made his children to be good at what they do. When I say that we became, I don’t speak figuratively or poetically. When we join with a person, we gain their mind, their thoughts, their memories—everything about them. No one notices because there is no difference. If we redirect their life path, alter choices by some small amount, it is a change of heart, nothing more. Always explicable and defensible.”

  Maybe because we were facing the end of the world, maybe because of all the terror I’d already faced over the last couple days, I found this all fascinating. In a horrifying way. “How did you know?” I asked. “How did you choose people where no one would question that kind of change?”

  “My father’s children did not choose anything.” He lifted his head, met my gaze with his pale blue eyes. “You make a mistaken assumption when you group us together, me and the others.”

  “But you are the same. I’ve seen the shadow in your eyes, just like I see in theirs.”

  “Oh yes, the body is the same.” His eyes went black and a darkness passed over his face. “We have no physical substance of our own. We are beings of thought and shadow, as my father made us.”

  “So how are you different? Other than the fact they’re trying to end the world right now and you’re not.”

  He sighed, clearly disappointed. I’d failed some test. “Your question is the answer.”

  “You’re being cryptic again.”

  He tilted his head, acknowledging, if not apologizing. “They are not like me. They are not like you, or Iris, or Spark, or anyone you know. They were not created to be people; they were made to be servants. Servants of my father. They had no minds of their own, no thoughts of their own. They were extensions of his will—his eyes, his hands, his power.”

  “Puppets,” I supplied. “Except when their strings got cut, they didn’t lie down.”

  “They cannot reason in any way you understand. Their veneer of sentience is driven by the people whose minds they share. They cannot be dissuaded or turned from their path because it is not a decision they made—their actions are driven by their nature, a fundamental instinct to continue doing what they were told.”

  “No, wait,” I held up a hand, “that doesn’t make any sense. If they’re against change—if you’re all against change—how can their programming be driving them to do what they’re doing. They’re trying to destroy Miroc—to kill everyone who lives here. How is that not change?”

  “They are trying to keep Miroc on the path ordained—as they understand it—by the gods. Miroc is dying, has been dying since the Abandon. Spark’s research in the hands of the Jansynians could have turned it away from that path. Could have kept the city alive.”

  “So preserving the city is change and letting it die is stasis.” I shook my head. “That makes no sense.”

  “To you,” he countered. “It does not have to make sense to you. I simply explain what drives them.”

  I wondered if, deep down, Syed understood them any better than I did. If they were as different from him as he said, it was possible behind those cold eyes he was flailing in the dark as much as I was. “You say you don’t kill, and even if I’m willing to accept your definition of things, they’ve still been doing a lot of killing. Copper, Micah, this thing in the tube station…”

  “I heard your description to the others, of the deaths from which you ran.” He said the words with no accusation, stating a simple fact. “That demonstration concerns me more than anything else that has happened in this last week. It seems…it seems they are changing.” His voice twisted around the word, as though it were the most distasteful thing he could imagine. If I understood everything he’d told me, it probably was.

  “I know it’s offensive to you, but I don’t see how it makes our situation any worse if they’d developed a taste for the murder they’re already committing.”

  “Don’t you?” Again, his voice held disappointment. “The fact the
city still stands means it has not occurred to them yet, but consider what happens when one of them realizes that display in the underground could be repeated on a larger scale. Once they have embraced the notion of death after death after death, why bother with political machinations when they can simply flow through the city, touch by touch, body by body, until no one is left?”

  No one could defend against them. No one would even know what was happening. “Can they do that?”

  “It would not be an act of sanity. To go from body to body like that—I can’t imagine how it would break any sense of identity they’ve managed to build.”

  “Is it uncomfortable?” I was grasping at straws, anything that might keep this nightmare from happening. Because now Syed had said it, I couldn’t see any other possible outcome. “Is it hard?”

  He turned his face away, back to the fire. “I do not know,” he said softly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I do not know,” he repeated. “I have never….” He sighed. “I have been the same, unchanging, for the whole of my life. I have never taken another. I have never killed.”

  “Except for that poor sap whose body you’re walking around in.”

  “His life would have been harsh and brief. A struggle for survival with the rest of his primitive tribe. Because of me, his eyes have seen wonders.”

  “But he’s not really there. You took his memories, you know who he was, but it isn’t like he’s still in there with you. Right?”

  “Are we to debate the nature of the soul?” Syed’s amusement was back. “I can’t explain what it’s like, to become, and it doesn’t affect our situation either way.” He reached out for a chair leg in the pile of broken furniture we’d made and used it to stoke the fire, then threw it on top. “Storytime is over, Joshua Drake. Summon your companions. It is time to discuss what happens next.”

  #

  We were all of us still moving through something of a state of shock, which probably contributed to the fact that, after I’d introduced Syed and proclaimed him on our side, no one objected to his presence. Although Iris pointedly sat as far away from him as she could and still be in on the conversation, and Vogg kept a suspicious eye on him. I couldn’t fault either one of them.