Shadow and Light

by Peter Sartucci

  Her next words brought his thoughts back to the garden.

  “You have gone to significant trouble to gain an opportunity to talk to me. If you give me your soul’s word to offer no harm to me or mine, I am willing to grant you privacy for that talk. Can you make that pledge honestly?”

  He’d expected her to threaten him, and the lack of it threw him even more off balance. This hadn’t turned into the outraged confrontation he’d expected. A chance to talk; she was so old, she must know so much. What if she knew what he really was? Would she tell him? Could he trust her if she did?

  “As the One God is my witness, Lady Ymera,” he croaked. “I don’t want to hurt anybody. Not you, or any of yours. Just, please, Lady, please . . . tell me.”

  She stared at him inscrutably for a moment before she said something in a language he didn’t know. The eight men surrounding him drew back their blades, retreated and left the garden. He almost fainted in relief. She pointed to the bench opposite hers. He stumbled to it and dropped onto the hard stone. She made a swift gesture and cast a spell that encircled them both only an arm’s length away, arching over their heads as if they we inside a giant soap bubble.

  “Now we have privacy,” she told him.

  He nodded gratitude, not quite trusting his voice to speak. His earlier anger had evaporated like dew in the morning sunlight.

  “Welcome to my House, Kirin DiUmbra. I thank you for not damaging any of my guardian spells. Am I correct to assume you could have destroyed them had you wished to do so?”

  That heartened him. He raised his chin a little defiantly. “Yes. I could.”

  Her hand caught his attention and he drew a sharp breath and stared. The delicate little fingers were a veil over something with claws. Fangs in her mouth, claws on her hands.

  “Ah. You see more than most, don’t you?” She didn’t sound surprised. “As do I. Which makes you quite disturbing to contemplate, young man.” She stared fixedly at his chest. “Quite disturbing.”

  Hearing those words from her lips heartened him more. Kirin let his gaze wander over her. His eyes told him he looked at a diminutive Silbari woman with beautiful brown skin, round ears, and flowing chestnut hair, as petite and unthreatening as some pampered merchant princess who had never set foot outside her father’s house. His magesight showed the layers of gauzy spells wrapping her, ablaze with all the colors of power.

  His Shadow showed him her claws, fangs, lithe strength, and pallor whiter than any Gwythlo.

  “What are you?” he blurted out.

  Her lips parted in toothy amusement. “Exactly what you think I am, I suspect.”

  “You don’t even look human!”

  “Perhaps I’m not, now.” She twitched her hands in a dismissive gesture. “I was born like anyone else, longer ago than you can probably imagine, but as I grew I changed. I’ve learned that most who are born like me don’t survive that change. I was uncommonly fortunate. I learned caution early and found a way to be tolerated amidst ordinary people. Thus, I lived, and became what I am now.”

  A gesture of her hands took in their surroundings, her power and wealth and position, all the things that he didn’t have. Resentfully he demanded, “Do you drink babies’ blood to live?”

  “What a repulsive thought.” Her perfect lips shaped a moue of distaste, disturbing when his vision also showed her fangs. “No. I choose to feed much more cleanly than that. There, I’ve now told you more than any other living being knows about me, though many suspect. My turn. What are you?”

  “I’m a DiUmbra, an acrobat.” He hesitated, and she gave him a sardonic expression that pushed him to put words to the obvious. “I’m a half breed. My mother was Silbari but my father must have been a Gwythlo. I don’t remember him; he might have been a merchant that she fell in love with. Or,” he swallowed against the humiliation. “A soldier who raped her. She died when I was small and Pieter DiUmbra took me in. Adopted me.”

  “That’s who you are,” she said delicately. “Not what you are. What are you, mysterious Kirin DiUmbra?”

  Her words reminded him of that Duermu fortune teller who had insisted on reading his fortune, many tendays ago and far away. “I don’t know,” he whispered. “I hoped . . .”

  “That I could tell you?”

  His throat almost closed on the words and he had to force them out. “Yes. Lady Ymera. Please. I need to know.”

  She tilted her head, half closed her eyes and gazed at him. Her eyes roved up and down him in a way that would have been lascivious if it weren’t so cold. He had to resist the urge to cover his crotch with his hands.

  When her spells followed her gaze, he grappled his Shadow and fought it to a standstill, forcing vulnerability on himself. Her magic felt like and unlike a priestess’ Diagnosis spell, delicate and yet harsh at the same time. After long moments of that torture she said, “Your aura doesn’t taste of demon—and don’t ask me how I know, it’s not a memory that I am eager to dwell on. You lack the specialized features of someone like me, and you are old enough that you would have developed them by now if you were ever going to do so. Your mage-gift is difficult to see, you are as opaque as one of the utterly untalented. I suspect you have nothing more than magesight, correct?”

  He nodded jerkily, not trusting himself to speak. Not a demon, not a vampire, that’s good, very good!

  “Yet a Shadow nests in you. You let me see it at Millago’s and I simply thought it a clever illusion. A sign that I’ve grown too complacent, alas. Now that I realize what it is, I am astonished. I have seen living Shadows before, and always they were rooted to a place. A Shadow rooted in a person is unprecedented.”

  Unprecedented. It took him a moment to parse out the big word and when he did his hopes sagged. Not a demon, not a vampire, but maybe still a monster.

  She still studied him. “Do you command that living Shadow?”

  “Yes,” he whispered. “Most of the time. Sometimes it fights me.”

  “Do you always win those fights?”

  “So far.”

  She stared at his face unblinking for a long moment, nodded. “Your Shadow ate my feather-fall spell, and the spell holding Dona Keldra’s dress together?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you loosed it at me, would it eat my personal spells as well?”

  He twitched at her bluntness, forced himself to answer. “I think so. Yes.”

  “Which could mean my death.” She sounded very matter-of-fact about it, but he caught the tension in her voice and saw the way her claws flexed. “As I said, quite disturbing to contemplate.”

  Hastily he assured her, “I already said I don’t want to kill you and I meant it! I don’t want to kill anybody! I keep it leashed, I only kill fleas and ticks and vermin like that.”

  “You know something of restraint. I wonder if . . . yes, let’s find out.” She made a gathering gesture at the fountain-pool with one hand and held up a shining globe of air as big as his head. “You kill fleas? Here are a few water-fleas. Kill them and show me what you do with their life-force.”

  He hesitated. Slaying on command always nauseated him. But his instinctive refusal to kill without need stuck in his throat.

  “Let me sweeten my request. Show me how you kill fleas, and I’ll show you where the souls of the dead go.” She tossed the spell toward him like a ball.

  Reflex made him catch it and the fragile spell broke in his hands. Three water-fleas clung to his fingers, tiny sparks of life. They weren’t doing him any harm, but she had asked him to kill.

  They were just fleas.

  He nerved himself, focused his Shadow, and slew all three of them. The tiny sparks of life flowed through him and into Darkness.

  The way her eyebrows twitched hinted at how much she’d been impressed. “That,” she declared evenly, “Is not something I’ve ever seen before.”

  Kirin’s hopes fell. She hasn’t seen anybody like me. She doesn’t know what I am. “You said you would show me where the souls of the
dead go.”

  “That I can and will do, if you truly want to know.”

  Kirin closed his eyes as his thoughts raced. I killed Gerlach while he tortured me, but where did his soul go? What really happened? Am I a soul-eating monster? He didn’t trust himself to speak, only nodded more violently than he’d intended.

  She made a gesture of agreement and added, “I warn you, you may not enjoy the experience, and I will hold you to your word. Come.”

  Her privacy spell winked out as she rose to her feet and beckoned him to follow. She led him into the house through the side door, which led to a hallway and stairs that wound upward two levels. He heard grunting and moaning from the rooms they passed and blushed furiously. It was one thing to hear his kin making love in the family home; listening to strangers somehow felt more shameful. The top level had separate spell-wards and he wrapped himself in his Shadow to walk through them without a ripple.

  She glanced at him. “You slip through my defenses as if they weren’t there. Even a swordsman with Haroun’s Gift wouldn’t be able to avoid my warning spells. Have you any idea how terrifying your mobile Shadow is to a mage?”

  “No, Lady.” He turned the idea over as she led him into a room and through it to a steep narrow stair. He barely noticed the luxurious bed and elaborate lady’s dressing table. He found comfort in the thought that he wasn’t the only one afraid of his Shadow.

  The cupola room shook him out of his abstraction. Hundreds of spells converged upon it from the Street outside. He gazed in awe at the twining skeins of them embedded in the walls, and breathed relief that they didn’t extend into the room itself. He doubted his ability to avoid wrecking some of them in the confined space, barely a dozen feet on a side. Then he saw the silver bowl brimming with sparks.

  “That—those are—what are those?” Kirin demanded, not wanting to believe what his magesight told him.

  “What you think they are, I expect,” she told him soberly. “The lives of the unborn, or rather, the never-will-be-born, since all of them are now severed beyond hope of reattachment to the flesh that nurtured them. Does that disturb you?”

  “Yes!” he answered fervently, backing away from the bowl until his rump pressed against the wall. His Shadow surged restlessly in his mind’s grip and one corner of a windowsill jabbed him in the buttock.

  She scooped up a double handful of sparks and looked at him over it. “You are about to see what I have rarely allowed another living being to see. It is necessary in order to show you what you want to know. I will not be surprised if you are repulsed by my actions; but listen to my words.”

  He stared in horrified fascination as she raised hands to her lips and spoke to the tiny sparks.

  “For me to live, you must die. I do not ask your pardon.”

  Then she drank them all down, her long white throat moving in delicate gulps. The light of those tiny sparks merged with her own and her power brightened.

  His first thought gasped, She really does kill to live! Followed by: But she’s so neat about it. And by, is that what I do to fleas? Eat their lives? His empty stomach roiled in queasy affirmation and he had to stop his Shadow from eating a spell in the wall behind him.

  Then she exhaled, and he saw the fine mist of gray souls. Saw the tenderness with which she bound them together. The sharp honesty of it slapped him like a cold wind off the mountains. Monster, but . . . not only a monster.

  He panted several breaths, fighting queasiness and his Shadow together, until his garbled thoughts settled and left one thought uppermost. Maybe I don’t have to be a monster even if I am one.

  He tried to exhale the memory of Gerlach and knew bitter disappointment when nothing happened.

  She looked at him thoughtfully while the swarm of souls hovered before her. “Now you have seen me feed. Does it illuminate your own ability?”

  “Yes. No. Maybe.” He struggled through his confusion to shape a question. “After I killed the fleas, did I glow like you do?”

  “No. You remained quite opaque. You still are; one might easily mistake you for an ordinary blank human with no talent. Whatever you did with those tiny life-forces is not evident. Tell me, what sensations did you know when you slew them?”

  “Like all the other times I’ve killed vermin,” he answered slowly. “Like I’m a tunnel and their lives move through me and away. Only my Shadow lives in that tunnel and it takes from them as they pass. Like a robber in an alley. And when they’ve passed on, they leave behind a taste.” He resisted the temptation to spit in the clean little room and swallowed instead. “I’ve never liked it.”

  “I can imagine that a diet of fleas does not appeal to one’s palette.” Her lips shaped that delicate moue again. “Ticks too?”

  “And bedbugs,” he added morosely. “I hate them worst of all. Well, I guess they’re not the worst. Once I killed a pigeon by accident and it took a whole bowl of spicy lentils to get rid of the taste. Worse than if I’d eaten the cursed thing raw.”

  He remembered the taste of Gerlach’s life. No spices could drown that out.

  “You perceive these lives as moving through you and into that Shadow of yours.” She watched him thoughtfully over the swirling cloud of gray souls. “You don’t gain any of their power for your own use?”

  “Nooooo.” He hesitated, thinking of Gerlach. “No. It goes into my Shadow, and it’s gone.”

  “Do you dream about them afterward?”

  “Not . . . the fleas. Or the ticks and bedbugs.” He made himself ask. “Do you?”

  “Yes. The more life-experience a soul has, the stronger the dreams.” She contemplated the cloud of gray souls. “And the opposite as well. I suspect the normal fate of my kind is to go mad from the dreams, at least for those who feed on adult lives. The memories must be overwhelming. But the unborn do not have memories, so the dreams they induce are shallow things. My particular, very narrow role in human society seems to have saved me from that fate.”

  “You get life and power without danger?” Acid envy touched him.

  “You mean, other than the not-inconsiderable danger that your Hierarchy might burn me in the public square?”

  Kirin flinched. They might do that to me too! For a moment the old fear stirred in his heart, but her words in the garden came back to him. She said I’m not a demon, and she must know. He found a strange sort of relief in being told by a monster that he wasn’t a demon and believing her.

  She still watched him in that thoughtful way; now she gave him a tiny nod. “There is also a responsibility, which I will show you.”

  She folded back the wooden louvers covering the north window. He noticed that they were mounted on clever bronze hinges; he moved two steps closer to see what she did. That also got his hungry Shadow away from its persistent straining for the spell-filled walls. She reached over her head with one clawed fingertip to touch the top of the window frame. When she drew her finger downward in a smooth slashing line, the air split open.

  Beyond the windowsill an unbelievable vastness gaped ahead and down. His Shadow abruptly reversed its reaching for the spell-wrapped walls and lunged for the hole she’d torn. He stopped it inside his chest but had to take two steps toward the opening before he caught his balance again. The windowsill, weirdly bent and stretched, lay close enough that he could see over it.

  He had never known vertigo in his life, but he knew it now. His heart beat faster as he stared into the vastness below. His lungs heaved as if some mage had taken away half the air. Streams of gray wraiths advanced from all sides, some from right under the room, to pour over slick cliffs red as blood. They plunged into a vast dim crimson well that went down, down, and yet still down for an impossible distance.

  “What is it?” he gasped.

  “A portal looking into the Well of the World.” She answered him matter-of-factly.

  He found in her voice an anchor for his reeling senses. “And those gray things?”

  “Wraiths. Severed souls of dead people, hastening
towards judgement like your Silbari Holy Writ claims. Down there lies Hell.”

  “And the door into Heaven.” He added that by rote; if the priestesses were right, he looked on the place toward which his life’s journey had always been bound. It terrified and fascinated and he couldn’t look away from it, until she shepherded her fog of tiny souls through the opening. He tore his gaze from the Well to watch the gray mist pour down into the rushing flood. The surging dead absorbed the unborn lives with barely a ripple.

  “What happens to them?” He found that he deeply wanted to know, like an awakened itch inside his chest that he couldn’t scratch. His Shadow still surged and strained to reach for the portal, pushing him right to its edge.

  “Careful! Flesh cannot safely pass through, and the portal might sever your soul from your body. You could find your answer in a very personal and permanent way.” She twitched her shoulders in an elegant gesture. “Indeed, I expect that the only way to truly know would be to follow the dead into Hell, which I decline to do today, thank you very much. But if the Writ is accurate, they go to judgement, after which some will pass on to Heaven and some will not.”

  “You mean babies might have to stay in Hell?” That thought shook his unthinking faith in the certainties of his world. Will I? Am I damned to spend the rest of eternity in the Pit like the priestesses say she will?

  “Or perhaps be sent back to life, reborn into new bodies for a second chance.” An acid tone crept into her voice. “I have listened to learned theologians of the Writ expound on this subject and I don’t believe that they know any more than I do.”

  “But why? How can—” Words failed him, and he struggled in an internal storm of confusion. Did Gerlach’s soul go down there? Aloud, he demanded, “Do all souls go into Hell?”

  Her lips twitched. “You are asking me? How would I know? I only see these few that pass while I have opened the skin of the world. I cannot maintain this portal for long.”