The Conclave of Shadow

by Alyc Helms

  Mei Shen sighed and pulled away. “I wish…”

  “What?”

  She hugged herself, chewing her lip, before blurting, “It doesn’t help that you refuse to use his name.”

  I wanted to argue, but she was probably right. It may have been unconscious. It was also deliberate. “I don’t like him.”

  Mei Shen’s barked laugh caused several passing hikers to give us odd looks. “Yes. You have made that abundantly clear. You. Mian Zi. Father. And you have made it clear that you think less of me for thinking well of him.”

  Again, it was hard to argue with hard truths. I held out my hands. “Can you at least understand why we’re all so worried?”

  “No. Nothing is as clear as any of you have taught me it was. My uncle has done bad things. He also held the Voidlands at bay when nobody else would. And that he isn’t doing so now is because of what you and Father did.”

  Ouch. “You mean giving birth to you.”

  “I do not regret being alive. And I accept the responsibility you both have placed on me. But I no longer blindly accept that either of you knows what is best. I will determine that for myself.”

  Well. Shit. Maternal pride was a fucked up thing. I pulled her into a hug before I could start bawling. “I can live with that.”

  David Tsung finished conferring with the driver and came around the front of the car, scuffing at the gravel to announce his approach. “We should go. Are you sure you won’t come with us?”

  I gave Mei Shen a final squeeze before releasing her. We both spent a few moments wiping eyes and noses. “The Lady knows more about what’s going on than anyone. She can protect me until I come up with some kind of a plan to deal with… all of this.”

  “Right. Anything to add to your care package?” We’d discussed what I would need: a few changes of clothes, including a suit and hat in case Mr Mystic was needed. A few burner phones and a tablet. Cash. Food and water. He hadn’t raised a fuss at any of my requests.

  Dammit. I was going to have to start trying not to disapprove. “I think I’m good.”

  “Right then. Six pm. I’ll tell the driver to wait in case you get… delayed.” He held open the door for Mei Shen before climbing in himself.

  “Thanks. And… David?” I caught the door and pretended to ignore his stunned look and Mei Shen’s small, pleased smile. “At the risk of setting feminism back several decades and horribly offending my daughter’s sense of independence in the process… take care of her.”

  David nodded. I still didn’t trust him, but I believed him when he said, “With my life.”

  * * *

  Wandering Muir Woods for a while would have been a nice break from the darkness of the Shadow Realms and the stink of heated rubber and burning asphalt, but I was exhausted, and paranoia had me peering through ferns and jumping at every loud noise that echoed through the busy hub. Templeton had assured us that Lao Hu knew who I was, but not where I was. The assumption among the Conclave was that Mei Shen and I had escaped by flying across the bay. Before vanishing into the water, my Blood-Dimmed Tide had apparently covered that section of the island with a blood scent so thick that not even Lao Hu could track through it. Small mercies there.

  I used the money pooled from Mei Shen and… David to buy a couple of overpriced bottles of water and a few packaged meals from the visitors’ center café before wandering up one of the trails to the spot where we’d stepped through earlier.

  Templeton, bless him, was waiting for me on the other side when I slipped back through. And with him–

  “Rover!” I exclaimed. Possibly too brightly, as my voice echoed through the night-dark forest, bouncing oddly off the huge trees. Templeton flinched and glanced around nervously. I ignored him in favor of holding up my hand for the flitting spark to land on. Rover’s carapace – a few shades darker than Mei Shen’s scales, but no less shiny – closed with an impressive snap for a critter no bigger than my thumbnail.

  I should not have been this happy to be reunited with a bug I’d only just met. Or made? “I thought he got shredded by the gargoyles,” I explained to Templeton, shifting Red Rover from the back of my hand to my shoulder. He perched there like a shiny, bloody ladybug pin.

  “I thought he might be one of yours. He looks like the others.” Templeton sounded positively grumpy, which I thought might be due to my shouting while Lao Hu was on the hunt. He turned and trundled back in the direction of the Lady’s camp. There was something odd about his gait, the way his coat bristled along his back and his tail swished in agitation.

  Could Templeton be jealous?

  “Hey.” I hurried to catch up with him, bumping his flank gently with my knee. “You’re still my favorite guy. My Rat-Friday.”

  He glanced up at me, and I realized that his gait was because he had his paw, the one with the jeweled gauntlet, clutched protectively to his chest. “Even though I serve the Lady now?”

  “Are you kidding me? I’m proud of you for that. Although I don’t understand why you’re doing it.”

  “Because of…” Templeton glanced around, but there was just us, the trees, and the black fungus creeping over everything. “Him,” he hissed.

  Him? Lung Di?

  Or. No. Him, Lao Hu. Tiger. “You became a spy to protect me?” Shit, I was going to cry again. I really needed to eat and sleep.

  We came to the tree with the hidden tunnel, and Templeton led the way through. The ambulatory octopodes were standing guard on the other side with their Louisville Slugger clutched between them. They waved us past after a few watery blinks.

  Templeton seemed to relax once we were in the safety of the camp. “He took over the Conclave so that he could hunt you, and in return he taught the Conclave how to use the light to shape the voidstuff more quickly. I couldn’t help hunt you. You’re my Missy. So I came to the Lady and said I would serve her if she would protect you.”

  I stumbled to a stop just outside the yurt, the edge of the flap wrinkling in my grip. “Oh, Templeton.”

  “I have to go back now. But you are safe.”

  “But…” I struggled with my protective urge. What I’d told the Lady was true. Templeton wasn’t mine to order about. He made his own decisions – even if many of those decisions seemed to be for my benefit, something I didn’t know how to curb. This was why I tried not to call on him too often. I didn’t want him putting himself at risk to help me.

  “I’m safe here now. I could challenge the Lady for you–” I fell silent when his whiskers drooped. Shit. “Rover. Red Rover.” I plucked the little scarab from my shoulder. “Go with him. Stay hidden. Help him as though he were me. I place you and all the Blood-Dimmed Tide under Templeton’s command. Understand?”

  Rover flashed and fluttered down to land on Templeton’s gauntlet, settling above the opal in the center like he was another jewel.

  “He is… very pretty,” Templeton said, snuffling at his new gem. “Thank you, Missy.”

  I crouched down to hug him. “Don’t do anything stupid. Keep yourself safe.”

  He nuzzled my cheek. “I will return when I can with more news,” he said, and trundled away admiring his new pal. It didn’t escape my notice that he hadn’t made any promises about his safety.

  Feeling pretty surly and with nobody present on whom I could fairly vent my irritation, I shoved my way into the Lady’s yurt.

  * * *

  The Lady sat on her throne with the shreds of my coat spread across her lap. She seemed to be picking it apart into pattern pieces with a pair of embroidery scissors. I really didn’t want to know what place it would take in her collection of junk. I dragged the bench away from the harpsichord, straddled it, and dug in to one of my boxed lunches.

  I devoured most of a tofu wrap with peanut sauce before I started to feel vaguely human again. I washed it down with one of my bottled waters, ran my tongue over my teeth. Lordy, I needed a toothbrush.

  “These wards you’ve created. Mei Shen says you’re tapping in to the Shadow Re
alms to power them. Eating away at it.”

  “All wards must be powered by something.” The Lady had changed out of the fatigues and… well, I could hardly say back into her gown when the gown seemed to be made of the same stuff that she was. She’d finished picking apart my coat and started piecing it back together with patchwork bits of fabric and silver thread. Was she… mending my coat?

  “All wards?” I asked. I knew big wards seemed to need it. Lung Di had imprisoned Lao Hu and the other Guardians of China – and all the Chinatowns – to create his barriers. That was why Lao Hu had it in for us. But… “Even the little ones, like the one you scraped into my wall?”

  “Little wards require little power. Great wards require great power. Few things are powerful enough to fuel the wards that hold back the Voidlands. So I use the potential of this land. It is not without cost, I admit.”

  I used a wet nap to clean my fingers and thought about that cost. The Shadow Realms scared me, but they had their place and their function. They were meant to be a buffer between the Ten Thousand Things and the source that could not be named. At least, that had been Jian Huo’s way of explaining it. Lung Di had made what was on the other side of the Voidlands sound a lot more terrifying and, having seen it for myself, I was inclined to agree with him on that point.

  “Could something else… someone else… power it?”

  The Lady paused mid-stitch. Light from the lamps flashed off her needle and the silver thread. “Such as?”

  “Lao Hu?”

  She knotted off the piece she was working on and started on another. “I can’t imagine the cat being amenable to that.”

  “Wasn’t planning on asking him,” I muttered. Though that wasn’t precisely true. He was my last resort if my plan A fell through. “What about another realm? You mentioned the realm where the Djinn come from? Alam al-Jinn? You’re familiar with it?”

  The Lady stopped her mending again and leaned forward while I fidgeted on my bench. “So you suggest, instead of devouring this realm, that we substitute another?”

  “No. Not exactly. Look, the best solution would be a balanced approach. The Voidlands are encroaching because something on the other side is pushing. They’re out of balance. The Conclave–” The Lady hissed and drew back. I held up a hand. “Hear me out. The Conclave has figured out a way to redirect that energy. But it still has to go somewhere, so they’re making more and more knights. I think we can all agree that’s going to be a problem, especially if you keep weakening the foundation of your power in your own attempts to push back the Voidlands.”

  “I will not work with those men. They take everything that is precious.”

  “And I’m not asking you to. They’re not exactly my favorite people, what with being allied with Lao Hu and all. I’m just suggesting a more balanced exchange. We figure out how they’re siphoning off the void, and we feed that energy into Alam al-Jinn, which is also out of balance. The void gets burned off safely, then we use the surplus energy from Alam al-Jinn to ward off the weakened Voidlands.”

  The Lady sat back in her chair, long fingers stroking a ragged gash in my coat. “We will need to take away the Conclave’s stolen technology and subvert their lighthouse to our use.”

  I sighed “Yeah. Well, I can’t seem to avoid getting embroiled in that mess. Might as well do it for the right reasons.”

  “How do you propose to gather the energy of Alam al-Jinn?”

  That, at least, I had an answer for. “What do you know about the Djinn and their ability to travel through unalloyed metal?”

  * * *

  As it turned out, the Lady knew very little about the Djinn. No surprise, really. But she did have a wealth of ideas about how to connect a new network of Alam al-Jinn attuned nodes to the existing mishmash of wards.

  “– and that point would act as a terminus, creating a synergy between my vanguard, the Red Gate, the Shadow Dragon’s shrine, and the Conclave’s Citadel.”

  She placed markers – bottle caps from a jar that had been stuffed between the greaves of the suit of armor – on a cheesy cartoon map of the city that we had spread across the carpet. She had strange names for some familiar places, but with the map, I was able to follow most of them.

  “Right, so we need a node at Land’s End to connect what you have along the coast with the Golden Gate Bridge, Chinatown, and Alcatraz.” I scanned the map. Seven locations, aligning with the seven hills, with additional terminus nodes at the lighthouse on Alcatraz and the labyrinth at Land’s End.

  Nine. I liked nine. Nine was a number I was vastly comfortable invoking in a ritual. “Is that it? Do we actually have a workable plan?” I stifled the urge to laugh. To point out it was too easy. To point out that something was bound to go wrong.

  “There are still many details to be worked out. The shadow sigils will need to be paired with Djinn markings. We will need to acquire these nodes of yours. Any impurities will eventually create blockages that must be corrected. We will need to devise some sort of ritual to align and awaken them. And of course, we will need to subvert the Conclave’s hold on the lighthouse and divert it to our use.”

  “Right. Details.” I yawned as I again traced the lightning bolt path from the lighthouse to Land’s End. Terminus to terminus. For the next steps, I’d need a phone and a prayer in hell that I could avoid Lao Hu’s notice while I connected the people who needed to be connected.

  I yawned again and glanced at an old windup alarm clock I’d dug out from the Lady’s hoard. It was the kind with two bells on top that I could have sworn only existed in cartoons. I’d ballparked the time when I set it, and I was confident that David’s delivery driver would wait all night if he had to, but I didn’t want to put him out. Besides, the sooner I met up with him, the sooner I could crash out and sleep for… oh, days, at least.

  “I need to go out again,” I told the Lady, rising and stretching. Walking all day the day before and then spending a chunk of the afternoon kneeling over the map made my legs creak.

  “Then I will go with you,” the Lady said, rising as well.

  I gave myself a few moments to come up with a response more diplomatic than “the hell you will.”

  “Um. Are you sure that’s… you stand out, a bit. And there will still be a decent number of hikers around to notice you.”

  “I do not need to stand out. I am able to walk the light realms without drawing notice.” She lifted my mended coat from the chair, a mad patchwork of shreds and silver threads now, and slipped it on.

  Great. Just peachy. But I was too tired to argue, so I just shrugged and led the way back to the spot where I’d met Templeton.

  I was not too tired to raise a protest when the Lady and I stepped into the real world and I realized I was facing a doppelganger of myself.

  “Holy, what the everloving – ack!” In my stumble backwards, my feet found a helpful log and I tumbled over it. The ferns rustled as I displaced them, and the ground squelched soggily under my ass.

  “Is this not adequate?” The Lady… my twin… reached down a hand to help me. Now that I could take a moment to look, there were subtle differences. Her hair was a darker red than mine and didn’t catch the light. The hollows beneath her eyes and cheekbones seemed more sunken, more shadowed. And of course, the coat she wore looked like some ragged custom fairy version of the original.

  Great. She wasn’t just my twin. She was my evil, gothy twin.

  “That’s uncanny as shit is what that is.” I reluctantly let her help me up. Her fingers still had that overlong, double-jointed quality, which didn’t help at all with the uncanny. “Can you just… at least change the rest of the clothes up? We’re only going to attract more attention with the Doublemint Twins bit.”

  After some coaching, the Lady was able to shift her clothing so that we were more complementary than identical, and her features, which was unnerving enough for me that I had to look away. But eventually, we got her sorted. Exhaustion was forming a sort of buffer around my reactio
ns. I just couldn’t seem to sustain the will to care about anything for longer than a few minutes. We hiked down to the visitors’ center and parking lot, the Lady taking in the world outside the Shadow Realms with the same wide-eyed wonder that she’d explored my apartment. I guess she didn’t get out much.

  The driver was late, because of course he was. I sat on a bench at the parking lot dropoff while the Lady wandered, peering at cars, poking at tourists – or maybe that was the other way around. I struggled to keep my eyes open, waved at the hikers who were meandering back to their cars. The golden afternoon sunlight streaming through the canopy mellowed and dimmed as the sun dipped below the tree line, and still no driver. My shoulders hunched higher and higher at having my back exposed to a mountain’s worth of trees and ferns. Exactly the sort of terrain Lao Hu was suited for. Even the squirrels were making me jumpy by the time a familiar blue Fit looped around the passenger dropoff zone and pulled into one of the short-term spaces near the front of the lot.

  “Shimizu?” I hopped up from my bench, torn between irritation and relief. I’d been expecting a stranger. I shouldn’t be this happy to see a friend. “I’m going to kill Mei Shen for letting you put yourself in danger like this,” I shouted, even as I hurried around the front of the car to hug her as she climbed out.

  She squeezed back just as hard. “Like I gave her a choice. It was me or Jack, and I won the rochambeau.”

  I giggled. “Nothing beats rock?”

  “You know it. Here, before I forget.” She snagged the strap of an overnight duffel sitting in the passenger seat and passed it to me. “The suit bag and hatbox are in the back. And I hear you might need some stitches?”

  I lifted my bound arm, digging out a toothbrush one-handed. “It’s fine. You are the best.”

  “Yeah, you can – holy fuckballs!”

  I looked behind me to see the Lady approaching, groaned and rested my head against the doorframe. “Yeah. Tell me about it.”

  “Is… how is… I… need to sit.”