Conservation of Shadows (38 page)

Don’t make me laugh,
Vayag thought at the book. She didn’t need supernatural aid for something as simple as running. Even before the occupation, she had delighted in racing Kereyag up hills and down helter-skelter paths, through the wild hills just southeast of the city of their birth, losing herself—just for moments—to the illusion that she could step up and into the sky. She didn’t have a racer’s conformation, but she could sprint when she had to.

Page 4, the book said, persistent.

She was tempted. She couldn’t deny it.

Page 4 contained Yede Marannag, a teenage girl whose life had been dedicated to the Bird of Night when she turned fifteen. A map of the peninsula had been tattooed on her back, where she could never see it. Thereafter she could never be lost, even blindfolded. She used to live in the sacred labyrinth of Nyago-ot with its shroud of mists and its echo-birds. The book had made a note that Yede had been especially fond of tangerine offerings. It wasn’t typical for the book to care about such human details, but then, Kereyag had been fond of tangerines herself.

All she had to do was scrape the words off the page and swallow them like bitter medicine. If she got enough of a lead, she could probably spare the time. The book was good at such calculations, and it wouldn’t have offered her the option if there didn’t exist time in which to exercise it.

“No,” she said through her teeth. Six years she had survived since the massacre. She wouldn’t resort to the book after all this time.

She slowed down as she approached an intersection, quickly assessed her escape options: down to catch the rail? Or should she continue on foot until she could catch a bus? People had seen her fleeing. She had to decide soon.

No: best to take cover. She saw an open window above a garbage receptacle. Any moving shadows, on-off lights? Nothing so far. She would have to risk it. Vayag vaulted up, then up again, and through the window. She had to be grateful for the peninsular penchant for expansive windows.

The shadow feathers were still falling, only to dissipate when they met solid surfaces. But the sky was growing darker, and she knew there was not much time left before the goddess cried destruction on the city.

There was a potted plant on the windowsill, with withered pink flowers. Vayag took care not to knock it over. The room she found herself in was unlit, unoccupied. She closed the window—there were no curtains, that was a Meroi affectation—and moved away from it. Against one wall was a small chest worked in abalone inlay and a great scar against one of its panels. She left it alone.

The book reminded her of page 19, which contained Beherris Leleyen, another servant of the Bird of Night. During the New Moon Festival twice a year, he had folded himself up into shadows. People had come to watch him disappear, to hear his strong voice out of the empty darkness reciting the old chants in the temple language.

There was no need. She could hear sirens, shouts, but the authorities would be occupied trying to keep order. Instead, she took the door, placing her steps quietly and precisely.

The apartment was in the peninsular style. Most of the owner’s furnishings were age-worn. The communal sleeping room only had a single mat rolled up in the corner, though. She would have expected a family even in this tidy space: sisters and brothers and elders and grown-up children, and perhaps some of their children, as well. Whatever the story was here, it wasn’t for her to know.

Vayag spent the most time in the kitchen, where there was a satisfactory collection of knives and chopsticks. She selected the sturdiest one and leaned against the wall, staring at the unlit stove.

Now that her breathing was starting to slow, she could devote some thought to the bothersome question of how the resistance had triggered the Bird of Death’s appearance. The feathers were only fallout. The real target would be the Cloud Fortress, and on the ground she was powerless to help, or find out what was going on. It was tempting to turn on the television, but the noise might attract attention and she doubted that the authorities would allow any substantive reporting to get through.

The book sounded impatient this time, which was at least a welcome change from its customary smugness. It pointed out, very painstakingly, that Vayag had never matched the count of the dead against the book’s own pages.

“I never needed to,” Vayag retorted, surprised into speaking aloud, but now she wondered. The Meroi government had never released an official list of casualties, and even the reported deaths were probably well shy of the actual figure.

For that matter, Vayag had been there herself, but in the mist and chaos and the hectic gunfire, she had had no good way to tell how many people had failed to survive.

Then why, the book said relentlessly, did it surprise her that someone else had compiled their own book out of the massacre?

Or indeed, of the other massacres, great and small, that had happened in the past years?

Vayag was sweating now. The thought that the shadow government had manipulated its own people in this fashion was intolerable.

The book informed her that it had welcomed death; welcomed the reduction of blood and sinew into curving letters, words of entwined red and black.

Vayag didn’t address the book by name. She never did. It hurt too much to think of Kereyag’s easy smile, Kereyag’s laugh, Kereyag’s footsteps next to her own. “I have a new target,” Vayag whispered. “Stand with me or against me.”

The book had always been her ally, even as she refused to make use of its capabilities.

All right. The next step, then, was to seek out her handler and pry information out of him. This meant going out into the feather-storm, but there was no help for it. She could only hope that, if the Cloud Fortress were indeed about to fall, that it didn’t land on top of her.

Vayag left by the door and took the stairs down to the ground floor. She made sure to lock the door behind her, out of an obscure sense of courtesy toward the individual whose home she had entered. A cat watched her, slit-eyed and unconcerned, as she emerged.

The air had grown cold and restless. She could almost feel the wind’s fingers creeping through her hair, along her face, up into her sleeves. There was the sound of fire, roaring and directionless, but no sign of heat or light.

Her handler wouldn’t be expecting her to check in. Indeed, their next contact was to be in nine days, which would work in her favor. It probably wouldn’t surprise him that she knew his usual hangouts, the clerk’s job that he had assumed, the tisanes he liked to order from the tea-shops.

A sudden motion on the ground caught her attention. The pavement had cracked in the shape of a perfect keyhole, one large enough to swallow her foot if she placed it wrong. The inner section slowly crumbled into particles of shadow. It was followed by another keyhole, and another. The particles swirled, gathering themselves into the shapes of vertebrae and tibias and mazed circuit boards.

She had to get out of here. Now.

On foot, taking adequate precautions under these conditions, it would take her the better part of three hours to reach her handler’s neighborhood. There was no help for it but to start walking. The book reminded her of page 62’s runner, as she had known it would. It was less easy than usual to ignore its suggestion.

Vayag kept to small, shadowed streets and away from major intersections, sprinting whenever she thought she could get away with it. Thankfully, she had always had good direction sense, and as she neared the city’s northwest-central district, the streets became familiar. About a third of the way there, she emerged from under the rain of shadow feathers, although she could still feel the dread wind and a more worrying, almost concussive force that transmitted itself in brief pulses, just below the threshold of human hearing.

She passed an eclectic variety of people. Children who were gawking at the spectacle, despite the best efforts of their parents and aunts and uncles. Looters who were taking advantage of the confusion to slip into undefended stores; she gave those a wide berth, not because she feared them, but she couldn’t waste the time to deal with them. On one street corner she spotted a circle of older women and men with their arms linked and raised toward the treacherous sky, singing the old hymn of the three goddesses dancing the dawn of the world. The occasional Meroi, brandishing guns and sticks to get people under cover. A beggar sifting patiently through one of the keyholes in search of stray change. Her arms were covered with skull-shaped soot-marks all the way up to the elbows.

She found herself wishing that the resistance’s gambit would succeed, given that they had tried it at all. The fact that the goddess was having difficulty with a Meroi Cloud Fortress was itself worthy of note. But then, she supposed, the problem was not the people but the technology. The Bird of Night was most concerned with people, and not at all with flying machines, and the Meroi were great believers in automated failsafes.

Vayag, the book said. It rarely addressed her by name. It told her to run. There was no playfulness in its tone at all.

People were watching. She shouted a warning, but couldn’t find the words. And then she ran as fast as she could. Not as fast as page 62 would have run—under other circumstances she would have been ashamed that the name had escaped her—but fast enough.

For a while there was nothing but the jolt of her feet against uneven pavement, watering eyes, the thumping of her heart. And then she heard the Bird of Night’s scream. It scratched every cloud out of the sky. Even the feathers stopped falling.

The book told her she could stop now.

It took her several moments to convince herself that this was the case.

She backtracked because the people who had been standing were standing no more. She had been perilously close to the boundary line, and she had to wonder if the book had protected her in some fashion.

Vayag only checked six corpses, but six was enough. Each one had a bloody gaping wound in the shape of a keyhole where its heart should have been.

Bile rose in her throat. Had the resistance’s plan failed? How could they have allowed it to go so wrong?

It was by no means certain that her handler would have answers, but she had nothing else left to try. She continued heading northwest. The sun was so bright that it was giving her a headache, but it was better than the rain of shadows.

She made sure to mop the sweat off her face with a handkerchief before she approached her handler’s favorite place for afternoon tea. It was a small tea-shop with a wooden unsign, well-weathered and unpainted.

A glance through the door told her he wasn’t there. Well, it was too much to expect to get lucky so early. The book was curiously silent about her options, although she knew perfectly well that page 98 contained someone with a tracking ability. Since the sun was in the sky it would even work right now.

Vayag had no luck with the next three places she tried, and she was considering risking his workplace when she thought of going back to the tea-shop and asking if they’d seen the man. She pretended, not very gracefully, to be a worried lover, but the woman at the tea-shop was too distracted by the news on the television of this latest massacre—in her home city, at that—to need much convincing. It turned out he had not shown up today, so chances was that he was either sick or pretending to be.

Her handler was not only at home, he was cooking a late lunch: fried rice with shrimp and strips of pork. She came directly through the door—picking the lock was absurdly easy, but then he wouldn’t want to arouse suspicion with unusually high security—and wavered for a moment out of sheer hunger.

“I take it they stopped all the trains,” was the first thing he said to her. “But you’re days early, you know. Do you want something to eat? There were going to be leftovers anyway.”

Vayag didn’t know his real name, the way he didn’t know hers. Probably. “We have to talk,” she said shortly. She supposed this meant sharing a meal with him, and she really didn’t want to be burdened by thoughts of hospitality customs.

He turned off the stove and dumped the pan’s contents onto two plates, divided evenly. “Sit, then.” He gestured vaguely toward a table and two plain oak chairs.

She sat, but didn’t touch the food. She did pick up the chopsticks he had provided, though.

Her handler eyed her, then shrugged and began eating. After a while, he said, “You really know all you need to know. If you’re going to ask for operation details—”

“It’s already out on the television,” Vayag said pointedly. “What’s there to hide?”

He wasn’t looking her in the eye, although that could have been because he was very interested in his lunch.

“What was the objective?” she said. She wasn’t shouting yet. “A lot of people died because we fucked this up.”

Still no answer. Now she was certain that he was avoiding eye contact. She reached across the table and shoved the plate violently. It spun off the table, scattering fried rice everywhere, and shattered against the floor.

“That was uncalled for, agent,” the man said in a dead, even tone. Still, he made no move to defend himself when she abruptly got up and leaned forward to grab him by the throat.

Vayag still had a chopstick in one hand. She set its point against his lower eyelid. “I need to know,” she said, “why those people had to die. The people whose freedom we are supposed to be fighting for.”

“An agent who can’t follow orders isn’t of much use to us,” he said.

She increased the pressure of the point, angled the chopstick up toward his eye. He only flinched a little, to his credit.

“I have killed people for you,” she said. “I have risked death for you. I need to know that you’re
doing it right.
”

“All right,” he said slowly. “But I’m going to have to remand you to a higher authority, and they could just as well decide to have you killed for being a security risk.”

“I’ll take that chance,” Vayag said.

“What did you think the objective was?”

“To damage the Cloud Fortress, I suppose,” she said. She hadn’t thought very hard about it.