The Conclave of Shadow

by Alyc Helms

  Ten

  The Hard Place

  The initial intestinal twists of the damp cave gave way to a long, smooth-walled corridor that glistened dimly in the soft glow of my scarab and Mei Shen’s scales. The smoothness of the walls and the uniform shape of the passage confused me until I reasoned that this was not man-made nor water-carved, but the ecofact of some long-gone – and disturbingly large – seaworm of some sort.

  At least, I hoped it was long gone. The fear that it might not be kept Tsung, Mei Shen, and myself moving with little conversation. None of us wanted to call the attention of something awful by talking too loudly.

  I was only able to track how long we followed my little red spark by the creaking of my knees and the double-fisted tension in the small of my back. Walking was my main mode of transportation around the city, so if I was getting sore, then however far we’d gone, it was far. It was only when my thighs started burning and my breath shortened that I realized we were walking up an incline and probably had been for some time.

  “I think we’re out from under the bay,” I whispered, a weight of fear lifting now that I wasn’t imagining several million gallons of seawater – or the Shadow Realms equivalent – crashing down on top of us.

  “Can you get us out? Either of you?” Mei Shen asked. I pressed my hand against the red-dim wall illuminated by her glow. Shook my head. Tsung was already shaking his.

  “Not enough light to get to the other side,” I said, cursing again that I’d thrown aside my backpack in my rush to get to Mei Shen. So many things I could have used – my glow sticks, my cell phone. Instead, I’d led us into a tunnel that still might lead nowhere. Stupid, stupid.

  “I can’t even tell what’s on the other side,” Tsung said, which made me feel a little better. At least I wasn’t the only member of the poor-planning brigade.

  “Rock. I’m not sure there’s even a tunnel on the other side,” I said. Up ahead, my little Red Rover was bobbing and flickering strangely.

  Mei Shen scraped a claw along the wall. “How can that be?”

  “Whatever creature made it only exists on this side.” I reached for Red Rover just as he flickered and winked out.

  I stumbled to a stop. Mei Shen crashed into me, and Tsung behind her, pushing me forward. My face smooshed into a vertical bed of spongy black fungus and underneath that, a wall of solid stone.

  “Ack!” I shoved back, my hands slipping on the fungus-covered wall. The crushed fungus exuded an odor of old tires and brackish water. I scrubbed at my cheek, which did little good given my hands were covered with the same slime. “Dead end,” I said. Overcoming my reluctance to touch the fungus again, I poked through it with one finger. There was no sign of Red Rover. Poor little guy.

  “Is it?” Mei Shen raised a hand. Her scales were dimmer at her extremities, but her long, curved claws gleamed the mellow gold of antique pearls. Instead of the corridor roof, the area above us opened up. We stood in a sunken carbuncle in the floor of what seemed to be a narrow crevasse running perpendicular to our passage. A lazy flicker of red flitted down and landed on my shoulder, shadow wings tucking neatly away under his shining carapace.

  “Good job, little guy,” I said, and got a little wing flutter in response.

  “Which way?” Tsung asked, already searching the walls of our carbuncle for the best route up and out. The fungus-covered wall didn’t offer much in the way of purchase, but he was tall enough to catch the lip and strong enough to pull himself up.

  Tsung caught me when I jumped, hauling me up to the lip so I could climb. We both assisted Mei Shen, grimacing at the heat of her scales.

  “I could try flying us–”

  “Too narrow, and we don’t know how high the passage goes. We don’t want you getting stuck or injured,” Tsung said before I could weigh in. Just as well. I didn’t want to point out that in this place, Mei Shen’s touch was uncomfortable for both of us. Too uncomfortable for her to fly us around for any length of time. That was the sort of disturbing bit of knowledge I’d prefer to dissect over tea and biscuits.

  “If I’m reading Rover correctly, one way’s as good as another?” I held up one fungus-damp finger, testing the air. “That way?”

  “Why?” Mei Shen asked, peering in the direction I’d pointed.

  “Because I read too much Mark Twain as a kid? There’s a breeze.”

  With no good argument against it, we left the carbuncle and headed along the crevasse toward my elusive breeze.

  * * *

  “I think we may have chosen poorly,” Tsung said some while later. The ache in my spine and knees had moved down to my feet. My toes throbbed. My arches cramped. My legs felt like they were held together with rubber bands, like one of those little plastic figures that collapses when you press the button in the base. I kept on keeping on only because I knew that once one of us flagged, the other two would quickly follow. Sorry, Anne Robinson, but I was not going to be the weakest link.

  However, if Tsung’s words were preface to him giving up and asking for a rest, I was fine with nudging that along. “What makes you say that?”

  “See that darkness up there?”

  I snorted, too tired to dredge up a real laugh. Outside the glow of Mei Shen’s scales, there was nothing but darkness. Even Rover had buried himself somewhere in the folds of my coat. “Gee, which darkness is that? The pitch black, the oily obsidian, or the velvet depths of nothingness?”

  “The Voidlands.”

  Any urge to laugh drained away. I skidded to a stop, looking ahead and trying to see what my brain clearly didn’t want me to see. “That’s not funny.”

  “I’m not laughing.”

  No, I didn’t think he was. Now that I wasn’t concentrating on setting one foot after the other, I could see what he meant. Between the velvet and the obsidian was an absence of light so deep that I could only measure its existence by holding up my hand for foreground comparison. Seeing the Voidlands through the protection of the veil dimmed their awfulness. Now I was being forced to confront it head on, and my mind was twisting itself into a pretzel in its attempts to not comprehend.

  I had been in the Voidlands. Once. During my rescue of Mei Shen after her uncle had kidnapped her. I still wasn’t quite sure how I had made it out, other than using the insanity of the place to trick myself into thinking I was sane long enough to escape it. What else could explain the swarm of Templetons that had bubbled up to drag me out? I still wasn’t sure how much of my perception of that experience had been real and how much had been pleasant alternatives to whatever I’d really experienced. I was pretty sure I’d tried to end the world by opening the bridge to the essence of not-being. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. Which was the problem.

  “We should head back,” Mei Shen said, interrupting my moment of gibbering terror.

  “What an excellent suggestion,” I said. We all retreated several steps before turning to hurry back the way we’d come.

  Only to collide again a moment later when Tsung stumbled to a halt. “We’ve got company.” Sure enough, several raptor shapes soared ahead, a slightly dimmer grey than the sheer walls that trapped us. They swooped down the crevasse like patrolling TIE-fighters. A screech of discovery from one of them jolted me out of my inaction.

  “Shit. Run!” I hesitated in following my own directive. There was only one way to run that wouldn’t put us in the path of the raptors.

  “Which way?” Tsung asked, stymied by my hesitation. I glanced back at the Void. Even worse than entering voluntarily would be to be driven into it in terror.

  “The tunnel. Back the way we came!” And hope for a miracle, I didn’t bother to add. I sprinted as best I could along the uneven ground. No need to tell anyone that pretty much either way, we were screwed.

  We ran beneath the raptors, close enough to see that they weren’t raptors at all. They were gargoyles. They howled and wheeled about, nearly colliding in their confusion as we changed course. It gave us a few moments’ lead, but
that wouldn’t be enough.

  It also gave me a good look at what we were facing, which wasn’t always a good thing. The gargoyles’ bodies were heavy-boned and muscled, vaguely doglike. Their skin was dark as weeping stone and looked just as solid. Their pinions spread wide, a canopy of bone-shot shadow, and they rattled with every downbeat. If Tom’s rocket pack and the Kestrel stretched credulity with how they managed to fly, then the gargoyles snapped it like tired Silly Putty. They weren’t aloft by their own design, but by the will of another. A powerful will. That was the way of things in the Shadow Realms. Nothing kept its shape longer than an echo, unless someone with power willed it so.

  My experience with the Blood-Dimmed Tide and Red Rover was still new and unfamiliar. Until now, the most I’d managed to craft was a half dozen or so amorphous blobs. I didn’t have the power to sustain something as complex as these gargoyles for any length of time. Only the Conclave could command a half dozen flying gargoyle soldiers of bone and shadow.

  “Masters, there’s nowhere to run!” Tsung panted beside me. He was right. We’d already walked this path. The walls were too high and sheer to scale. This was why, as a rule, I avoided the Shadow Realms. It was a place of impasses.

  Like now. Keep running, or stand and fight a losing battle?

  The first gargoyle plummeted into a dive, taking the choice from me. I dropped and rolled, but the talons snagged my coat, jerking me half-aloft. I raised my arms and struggled out of my coat.

  There was a screech of pain and fury as a second gargoyle swooped down, right into Tsung’s roundhouse kick. The creature was knocked aside with a rattle of bone, but Tsung landed with a wince and a gasp, favoring his foot.

  “What are these damn things made of? Granite?”

  Another dove for Mei Shen, and her claws cut through its wings, sending severed bone spurs flying. They clattered against the wall, the rattle of bone drowned out by the gargoyle’s screech of pain.

  “Or tofu,” Mei Shen said with a pleased little smirk, holding up her gold-gleaming claws. “You run. I will fight these.”

  Tsung and I shared a rare look of perfect agreement. Yeah, like either of us was going to leave her alone.

  We didn’t have time to argue with her. Five more gargoyles were diving down on us, their pinions snapping close to their bodies as though wind resistance was an issue. Which it wasn’t. They were just shadow on wings of shadow diving through more shadow. This place was nothing else.

  Except maybe perception?

  “Go for their wings.” I willed my own shadow into shape. It was nothing compared to the complex constructs attacking us. Just a gently undulating veil, only a little more corporeal than the shadow around it.

  That’s all the kraben had been, really. That’s all I needed.

  On my command, the veil rose up behind the attacking gargoyles and wrapped around one of them. Head on, the gargoyle would have torn through the tissue-thin veil with momentum alone, but from behind the veil could wrap, and wrap, and bind those wings close. Howling its fury, the gargoyle plummeted to the ground. I fell to my knees, exhausted even from the small effort of keeping the winding sheet under command.

  Another cry came from my left – human. I glanced over. Tsung had wrenched back the wing of one gargoyle – it hung askew as though broken – but another gargoyle had seized him from behind and was launching aloft.

  “David!” Mei Shen screamed. The other three gargoyles had surrounded her, keeping her trapped in a cage of bone wings and shadow without coming within range of her claws. All three were knocked back by a long, sinuous tail as she transformed into a full dragon.

  Light exploded through the crevasse like an M-80 going off in an old coffee can, blinding me and, I could only hope, the remaining gargoyles. It would have been so easy to use that light to step back into my own world, but there was nowhere to step. Everything on the other side of the veil was stone. And I couldn’t leave Mei Shen.

  Though apparently, she had no such qualms about leaving me. By the time my eyesight cleared enough that I could tell my real foes from the dancing blobs of my blown-out rods and cones, Mei Shen was a streamer of red-gold light diminishing into the distance, and the five gargoyles she’d left me to deal with had recovered and were closing in.

  Well, fuck. I suppose there was one way to follow Mei Shen and Tsung. Not that it looked like I had much of a choice.

  I put up no resistance when one of the gargoyles caught me with clawlike hands and launched aloft, wrenching my arms with every wing beat. We were flanked by two more, and the two with damaged wings limped behind, tearing my coat to shreds between them. There but for the grace of God went I?

  We crested the lip of the crevasse. The landscape beyond was carved with deep ravines, like the claw marks of some long-gone leviathan. They all led in the same direction. Ahead of me, the gargoyle carrying Tsung banked, Mei Shen’s red-gold streak in close pursuit. My captors trailed in their wake. We flew over the claw-mark ravines, heading toward the looming Voidlands. The leading edge cut across the landscape like the event horizon of a black hole; nothing beyond that dark curtain was visible, nor did I particularly care to see what it hid. In the rush of contained terror that followed that realization, the destruction of my coat barely mattered.

  Wherever we were headed, God’s grace didn’t mean squat.

  * * *

  The gargoyles banked again before we crossed over into the Voidlands, their path paralleling the leading edge. The claw-marked landscape gave way to a primordial forest of trees the size of small skyscrapers. No surprise, really. A glance across the veil told me we were somewhere in north Marin. I suspected we were seeing the Shadow equivalent of Muir Woods. It settled some of my fear. At least they weren’t returning us to Alcatraz.

  Rather than flying over the trees, the gargoyles wove through the spaces between them. I lost sight of Tsung, and I could only track Mei Shen by the glow limning the black-barked trees.

  At least, until we broke into a clearing ringed by trees grown so close together that the only access seemed to be through the upper branches, where the trunks narrowed slightly to create space. Down below, a collection of structures was wedged into the clearing. It had the look of a Burner camp. Small tents of silky shadowstuff were set up in concentric circles. Offset from the center of the camp stood the only spot of color to be seen, a yurt of actual canvas, desert pale against all the darkness.

  Tsung had been dumped in the center of the clearing. The gargoyle that had carried him disappeared into the upper branches of the trees. Mei Shen landed, forming a protective circle around Tsung’s crouched form. The light from her coils illuminated lurking shadows all around – the camp denizens come out to greet our arrival.

  The moment my gargoyle dumped me, I moved, hauling Tsung to his feet with one hand and grabbing the searing end of Mei Shen’s tail in the other. Using her light, I tried to pull us back across the veil.

  We didn’t go anywhere. My connection to the real world slipped away like I was trying to grab air. I dropped Mei Shen’s tail, cradling my burned hand to my chest. Tsung shot me a confused glance, but I shook my head. I didn’t dare explain just how bad our situation was, in case the gargoyles could manage more sentience than animal howls. At least Mei Shen’s internal brightness seemed to be keeping the gargoyles and the shadow troops at bay.

  The opening of the yurt was thrown back, and a familiar figure stepped out.

  The Lady’s skin was dark as anything in the Shadow Realms, but unlike the rest of this place, it carried an internal luminescence similar to Mei Shen’s. Except the Lady’s skin burned like a black hole, if a glimmer of light could escape that sort of gravitational pull. Her hair coiled like a living thing, and shadow trailed off her limbs when she moved. Instead of the gown of living shadow that I’d seen her wearing when we first met, she was dressed in black and grey camouflage military fatigues, a combat knife strapped to her thigh.

  Tsung gaped. I seconded the feeling. I didn’t know wh
ether to be relieved or more terrified on seeing her. She wasn’t the Conclave, true, but the enemy of my enemy was not always my friend.

  “You are disturbing my people,” the Lady said to Mei Shen with the cool censure of a librarian telling a patron to hush.

  Mei Shen’s coils folded in on themselves until she was a dragon-scaled girl again and we were left in relative darkness. “Your people took mine.”

  “My hounds secured you before the Conclave could find you. They are not precisely tame, but they meant you no harm. I cannot say the same of the Conclave’s new master.” She inclined her head to me. “Hello again, Missy.”

  “This is the Lady I was telling you about,” I whispered to Mei Shen. Then, to the Lady. “Thank you. The timely rescue was much appreciated. We’d appreciate it even more if you would let us go.”

  “Yes. Of course. My hounds will take you outside the camp wards if that is your wish.” She waved an elegant, long-fingered hand as though my request and her offer were of little interest. “But your companions… this girl shares blood with the Shadow Dragon. As does the man, though it is further removed.” She turned her hungry, intense gaze on Mei Shen, only flicking to Tsung as an afterthought.

  While I was busy worrying about what danger the Lady might pose to my daughter, Mei Shen was busy being insulted on Tsung’s behalf. She stepped in front of him, facing off against the Lady. “I am Lung Mei Shen Mi, niece to Lung Di. David Tsung is his bloodline and my consort.”

  “Consort?!” I blurted. Forget the Lady, Mei Shen should be more worried about me. “Does your father know about this?”

  Mei Shen cast me a glare of perfect teenage disgust. “Not now, mother.”

  Oh, definitely now. “Since when are you old enough to be taking consorts? And you–” I rounded on Tsung. “You are way too old for her.”

  To his credit, Tsung squirmed and looked decidedly uncomfortable. “It is in name only. Purely ceremonial. To help strengthen her claim.”