Conservation of Shadows (7 page)

“There,” she said with evident satisfaction. “What do you think? One’s yours, of course.”

He stared at her stonily.

“It’s not like I can ride two of them at once,” she said, as if she made perfect sense and he was the slow one. “You haven’t run screaming yet. That’s always useful.”

Clearly the world had plans for him other than suicide today. “I was reared by the undead,” Tamim said. His mother, a woman with a brilliant smile and an aristocrat’s long, slender hands, had given him into the care of a company of ghouls, reasoning that it would prepare him to survive in the rimlands and eventually take up her cause. But one by one his caretakers had fallen apart, rotting teeth and decaying eyes, a toe here and a loop of shriveled intestine there.

His mother had died attempting to assassinate the sorcerer when Tamim was a child. The undead did not fall apart immediately upon their creator’s death, but lingered for a span of years proportionate to the creator’s skill. Tamim’s mother, for all her ambitions, had not been a particularly skilled necromancer. He had a dim memory of crying when the last of his caretakers ceased to move, even the mindless, instinctive creeping of a rotted finger toward the hand. It had been the last time he cried.

The girl nodded as though his childhood was unremarkable. Perhaps it was, from a necromancer’s point of view. “Right or left?” she said.

Involuntarily, Tamim looked up at the giants. The one on the left had a long, narrow skull and cracked teeth. Curiously, spurs extended from the back, as though wings had been broken off. The one on the right had a broader visage and no spurs, and its left arm was longer than the right.

“I don’t know your name,” Tamim said. “Why should I take up with a necromancer?” He hadn’t known that any necromancers remained in the rimlands who did not serve the sorcerer. The Pit was death, and the sorcerer controlled the Pit: ergo necromancers served he who ruled death. The rest had fled to the lands beyond the Pit, or died in a hundred small rebellions. The sorcerer was not notable for his sense of mercy.

“I’m Sakera,” she said. “Pleased to meet you, I’m sure. I’ll make you a bargain, O soldier”—her eyes alighted briefly on the gun—“who wishes to die. Help me bring down the sorcerer, and at the journey’s end I will give you the death you desire.”

The gun was an unbalancing weight at his hip. He had lived with such things all his life. “How long a journey?” Then, realizing that he was actually considering it, he added, “I don’t need your help to kill myself.”

“Months,” Sakera said. “But I’ve seen what happens when you miss with a gun. You might live out the rest of your days as a mangled thing with less mind than a ghoul. With a necromancer, death can be certain. It can even be swift.”

“I’m not that incompetent.” He had long years of practice killing.

“No, I imagine not.” Her voice was brisk. “Let’s put it another way, then. There can’t be many necromancers left in the rimlands. If you’re no vulture-friend, I may be your best chance of getting rid of the sorcerer.”

“I don’t trust you,” Tamim said. Tact had never been one of his strengths. Among other things, it was wasted on ghouls.

“You don’t need to trust me,” Sakera said. “You just need to believe me.”

It disappointed him that she wanted to kill the sorcerer. Tamim had no fondness for the man’s reign, but he suspected that Sakera meant to replace the sorcerer. Some traitorously sentimental part of Tamim had expected better from this girl, for all that he had met her only minutes ago.

Sakera made a fist, rotated it, then opened her fingers. The lopsided skeleton knelt before her. She clambered up the bones and sat on one of the kneecaps, legs dangling. “Or I could leave you to die in the giants’ shadow, before I take this one away,” she said. “Your choice. But I hope you come with me. It will be a lonely journey to the sorcerer’s palace otherwise.”

“What is your grievance with him?” Tamim said, on the grounds that he might as well be certain.

“He raised my family as ghouls,” she said. “They’re still not at rest.”

It sounded plausible. Maybe she was a good liar. “You came here for the giants’ skeletons.”

“Yes.”

“How did you know I’d be here?”

“I may not be a vulture,” Sakera said, “but I can smell death on the wind.”

“I could have used your help when I was fighting the vultures,” he said. The company of ghouls had taught him how to fight—his mother, a pragmatist in her way, had sought out the corpses of veteran soldiers—but it had still been one against several.

Sakera grimaced. “If only. A necromancer is only as useful as the bones she can call to her service. I promised myself I would only touch giants, who are long gone from the world, and whose families will not miss them.”

“That’s an inconvenient promise,” Tamim said, without approbation.

“I came here for the bones. I’m glad you came, too. Most people are afraid.” She waved down at him. “Over here.”

Tamim craned his head and regarded her skeptically.

“Oh, that’s right.” She made another gesture. The giant began lowering her to the ground, but her hand spasmed. The giant lurched. She somersaulted clear and rolled to safety, swearing in a language he didn’t recognize.

Tamim helped her get up, more out of curiosity than politeness. Both her hands were shaking. “How long has that been going on?” he asked.

“Long enough,” she said, embarrassed. “That’s the other reason I need an ally. I can’t draw the patterns by myself anymore.”

Patterns? “You’d better show me how to work the—” What should he call it? “—the giant.” As though it were a set of tools. “Why do you need patterns?” He didn’t recall that his mother had ever drawn anything.

“Do you know how the sorcerer came to power?” Sakera asked.

Tamim shook his head. His mother had told him gilded tales of the sorcerer’s court as though it had always existed, a place where enemies’ skulls were made into banquet cups and musicians played upon lyres of bone or tortoiseshell.

“In the old queen’s court, he was her most trusted general and a master calligrapher. First he conquered the Pit, which is death. Perhaps he made some terrible bargain there. Then, in the palace archives, he discovered some scrolls on ancient fighting forms, and applied those to the corpses he raised. Thus even ghouls who were once farmers and potters and prostitutes can fight, because they are aligned with the necromancer’s patterns.

“As for the sorcerer, he had become smitten with his queen. When she refused to marry him—well. You can guess the end of that story.”

Tamim was thinking of the patterns. “This implies that if you draw other fighting forms, you could apply those to the ghouls as well. Am I correct?”

Sakera nodded. “But you have to have an accurate hand and a knowledge of inner anatomies. Writing is troublesome for me, and drawing is impossible.”

It didn’t surprise him that a necromancer would be literate. Tamim had learned the alphabet from his mother, and could read and write, if shakily. He hadn’t had much opportunity to practice. “Teach me,” he said.

Her face lit. He had never seen anything like it, on the dead or the living. Carefully, she repeated the motion that had caused the giant to kneel. Although her hands shook a little, Tamim could tell what the gesture was supposed to look like. He did it several times until Sakera nodded her satisfaction.

“How do I get the giant to respond to me?” Tamim said. “Surely it doesn’t move every time you twitch your hands. The ghouls I knew just followed orders. They didn’t require constant guidance.”

“Give the giant a name,” Sakera said, “and use the name to address it in your mind. As for guidance, it’s a thing of memory. The recent dead remember who they were, after a fashion. They remember how to do the things they did in life, for a time. Or they’re instructed by patterns. The giants have been dead so long that they do require constant guidance.”

When he died, would she raise his bones and—

“No,” Sakera said. “I wouldn’t do that. I am a necromancer, yes, but I made a promise. I told you, the death you desire.” Her tone was almost cheerful. “Come on, give it a try.”

Tamim looked at the giant with spurs.
Ifayad,
he thought, which meant
bird of prey.
He could see the letters in his head:
iro-fel-alim-yod-alim-dirat.
Then he made the gesture Sakera had shown him.

The giant knelt. He climbed up and up, into the skull, along the ridge of an abraded tooth in the open mouth. He wondered what it smelled like: earth, probably, and crushed flowers, and the tang of minerals newly exposed to air. His sense of smell was deadened from so many years among ghouls, and his adolescent years among the few remaining resistance fighters had not restored it.

If something went wrong and the great jaws closed, he would be crushed. It comforted him. “Now what?” His voice echoed oddly in the space of the skull.

“How are you supposed to see anything from in there?” Sakera said. He couldn’t tell whether she was laughing or exasperated. “Come down again and we’ll learn to ride the giants properly. Then, when we have paper, I can show you how to scribe your own patterns.”

Tamim lingered a moment longer, drawn to Ifayad in spite of himself. Despite the restricted field of vision, he appreciated that the skull would provide protection against enemy fire.

Tamim climbed down, bemused at himself for having any sort of faith in the necromancer. She would betray him in the end, and surrender to the sorcerer, and he would have to kill her. Until then, he would learn what he could.

Tamim had always been quick with his hands, quick of reflexes, even as a child. It had taken him a while to appreciate this. He had thought it was something ordinarily true of people, as opposed to ghouls. Ghouls were unrelenting once they had a goal, but dexterity was not one of their virtues.

Sakera was methodical in her lessons. They started with stances and moved on to simple motions—an arm lifting, a hand opening, a foot shifting—then compound motions. Familiar with the precepts of arms training, Tamim accepted this as necessary. They did everything slowly: gesture followed by the giants’ motion. Tamim’s hands became callused from clutching Ifayad’s ridged teeth to keep from rattling around inside the skull.

He and Sakera went hunting together. Sakera was good at tracking animals, even the tricky, shadow-colored animals that lived in the rimlands. “Every life is a potential death,” she said when he asked her about it, since she didn’t seem to pay much attention to the usual cues, such as tufts of fur snagged in the rimlands’ scraggly foliage, or scat, or scuffed tracks in the dirt. Tamim was good at making snares, although a certain percentage of the animals that he caught that way were half-ghoul themselves, and had to be released. The problem had only grown worse over time.

Between the two of them, they often had a full stew-pot. Sakera tended to pick at her food; sometimes he wasn’t sure she ate at all. When he pressed her on the topic, she ate the better portion of a rabbit, just to show him she could.

“I’ve been thinking about our rides,” Tamim said to her over this night’s stew. “Have you ever ridden a horse?”

Sakera shook her head. “No,” she said. “Hasn’t it been a long time since the rimlands saw anything but ghoul-steeds?”

“Probably,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking about the horses themselves, but of harnesses. Do you think we could create some kind of harness for riding the giants? That way, if something goes wrong”—he couldn’t help but think of Sakera’s unsteady hands—“you won’t be thrown.”

“Interesting,” she said.

“Something with buckles, maybe?”

“We’d have to find a smith,” Sakera said drily. They had approached a settlement last week, leaving the giants behind, crouched behind some hills. The settlement’s buildings had been intact, but corpse-colored fungus grew from all the doors, releasing pale spores. They had retreated in haste. Sakera had been withdrawn for the rest of the day. “I don’t have any power over metal. Maybe we’re better off with some carefully chosen knots.”

“With your hands?” Something else occurred to him: he had once seen a trader trapped under a fallen horse, back in the days when horses were to be found in the rimlands. “You’d want to be able to get out in a hurry, in case something went wrong.”

“A slip knot of some sort?”

He considered it. “It might work.”

Unfortunately, Sakera was not any good at finding trees. It took them several days to track down a stand of widely separated willows by following one of the rimlands’ black rivers. Sakera drank the water fearlessly, although she grimaced at its taste.

Tamim showed Sakera how to strip the bark and plait it into cords. Once they had enough rope, it took them more time to devise a system of knots that would work on the giants. Sakera knew an amazing number of knots. “They’re a kind of magic from the sea-folk,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen the sea.”

Supposedly there was a black sea on the other side of the Pit’s boundary, with ships of rotting timbers and ghost-fabric sails. “No,” he said. “There’s nothing magical about knots, either, no more than a gun is magical.” He still had five bullets, although they were of iron rather than jade. Death and undeath were the only magic he recognized.

Sakera flexed her fingers, grimacing. Her skin was torn from working the bark. She washed her hands in the river, then dried her hands on her coat. “If only things were that simple,” she said.

They made more rope, just in case, and took the opportunity to bathe and wash their clothes. Sakera’s coat was beginning to look more grey than black. Tamim suspected it was losing its dye. Sakera insisted on going around in a ragged blanket while the coat dried.

“Do you really get that cold?” Tamim said.

“Death is cold,” Sakera said. “It’s the absence of warmth and the absence of light.”

All Tamim could think of was the grave he had dug for the last of his caretaker ghouls. All virtue had gone from their bones, and no necromancer would raise them again. But he had wanted to do them that honor anyway, to offer them the peace that his mother had denied them. He had wanted to lower himself into the grave, too, but then no one would have been left to cover them with earth.