Shadow Scale (50 page)

Sticky finger pads prodded my cheek. I sat bolt upright when I realized what they must be; half a dozen quigs scattered away from me, some up the walls and across the ceiling. I rubbed my eyes with my thumb and forefinger. The only light shone through the hole from the corridor. I could not tell what time it was.

“Mitha said to wake you,” called one from the ceiling above me, defensively.

“We’re collecting thnikth,” said another. “You’re to help uth.”

“How long did I sleep?” I asked, flopping back down.

“A very long time! It’s not today anymore. It’s tomorrow. That
Porphyrian dragon ith already up, being helpful.” They all did that peculiar mouth clap Mitha had done, and I wondered if that was quigutl laughter.

They gave me a meal of tough mountain greens and undercooked yak; it was dreadful, but at least nothing was rotten. I followed a gang of youngsters through service tunnels so low I couldn’t stand. The quigs sneaked into the personal lairs of the Censors and doctors, located thniks and thnimis (devices that also transmitted images), and squirreled them away in their mouths. Then they came back to the tunnel and regurgitated everything into a little wagon, which I wheeled past the warren into an area so tight and remote I could barely squeeze into it. A quig at that end unloaded all the devices into a storage room.

Of course, some of the devices were around the necks and wrists of Censors and doctors. Once we’d cleared out the lairs, Mitha used the interlab thnimi to broadcast his knobby face and crackling lisp to every corner of Lab Four: “Attention, Censorth! All transmitting devices must be submitted for upgrade. Compliance is mandatory, as per Censorial Order five-nine-five-oh-six dash nine.”

The dragons cooperated, lining up in the oversized corridors and dropping their thniks into a mechanical wheelbarrow Mitha had set up near the chemical labs. From an air vent near the ceiling, I watched and listened to draconic small talk—who had bitten whom, how come Inna went on leave, the molecular composition of that new neurotoxin, why yaks don’t get as fat as they used to. Their thniks were larger than the ones saarantrai carried, dragon bracelets that would be a heavy neck chain to a human,
rings that would be bracelets. Some had thniks fastened to their heads with cobwebby filaments so that they might talk with their talons unencumbered.

I lay on my stomach in a duct. The quigutls that had jammed in on either side of me kept rubbing themselves against me like cats. After a while it was too much for me, and I hissed, “Stop that!”

“Can’t,” said the one nearest my face. “If they thmell you, you’re dead and all Eskar’s hard work is thpoiled.”

It was hard to imagine that anyone capable of such tedious small talk would kill me, but four quigutl engineers had been mercilessly torched that day, one for getting too close to a Censor’s person uninvited, the others for seeking out thniks hidden in the dragons’ lairs. I went with Mitha’s nestlings to visit them in the quigutl infirmary when our work was done. It was a brightly lit space, with several small egg-shaped pools in the floor. The injured engineers each lay in one, soaking in some viscous liquid. Brisi was helping alongside the nursing quigs, scooping up the ooze with a ladle and pouring it over tender, charred heads. The hurt quigutl seemed cheerful enough, considering that burned, blackened skin was peeling off their bodies.

“Don’t worry, they’re on destultia,” a quig whispered in my ear. “They feel the pain, but they don’t mind it anymore.”

I was pondering this statement when Mitha arrived. He greeted each of his engineers in turn and then scampered up to me. He’d brought my flute from the warren; he presented it to me with a flourish of dorsal hands. “I hoped you might play a song for uth,” said Mitha. He ran a hand over his eye cone. “I wrote it. I will sing, and you harmonithe.”

“I like fifths!” someone piped up. “The wavelengths are integer multipleth!”

“I like tritones!” cried someone else.

Mitha coughed up an ember, spat it on the floor, and began to intone:

I stared dumbfounded, not merely because he’d come up with a poem that scanned and rhymed, but because the tune was so perfectly tuneless that I had no idea how to begin to play along. I couldn’t just play fifths because I couldn’t figure out what note he was singing. It wasn’t so much a particular note as a low, throaty rumble, but then there were shrill, whistling harmonics coming through his nose. It reminded me of Brasidas’s sinus-singing at the harbor market.

I worried whether the sound would carry through the tunnels,
but the quigs weren’t worried, and they surely knew their mountain better than I did. I decided to shrill along with him. I sent up some experimental whistles. Around me the quigs murmured; it sounded approving, but I couldn’t tell for certain until they started keening along with us.

We produced the most unholy cacophony, like fighting tomcats or the blast furnaces of the Infernum. The music brought tears to my eyes, not because it was teeth-grindingly dissonant but because they were all so swept up by it. They reached for each other as they sang, with hands and tails—one wrapped around my ankle—and with their crooning notes. If I closed my eyes, I could hear what they were doing, tendrils of sound curling and responding to each other, like pea shoots spiraling around a stake. The stake was Mitha’s lyrics, the one steady point of reference. This was art, quigutl art, and in some oblique fashion it was what I’d been looking for, what Dame Okra had once mocked.

I’d found my people and they weren’t even mine.

It grew late. Nobody wanted to crawl back to the warrens, and quigutl etiquette apparently smiled upon sleeping wherever you happened to be. Some lay down, others piled on top of them, and everybody snored. I crawled over to where Brisi was sitting, hugging her knees. “How are you getting on?” I asked her in Porphyrian.

She shook her head slowly. “My parents said they were like rats: dirty, clever, thieving, and diseased. And I’m … I see there’s
more to them, but I’m still uncomfortable here. Why would Eskar work with them? Not for pity. She knows nothing of that.”

It had made intuitive sense to me that Eskar would feel sorrow or outrage at the Censors’ treatment of Jannoula, Orma, or the quigutl—but Brisi was right. Eskar hadn’t felt any of that. “The thing about reason,” I said slowly, thinking of Comonot’s earlier explanation as I spoke, “is that there’s a geometry to it. It travels in a straight line, so slightly different beginnings can lead you to wildly divergent endpoints. I think Eskar must have begun from the position that all reasoning beings are equal.”

“Even if they smell?” said Brisi, yawning.

We found our own space on the floor. She quickly drifted off to sleep, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Eskar’s first principle. Was it provably true that reasoning beings were equal? It seemed more like a belief than a fact, even if I agreed with it. If you followed logic all the way back to its origin, did you inevitably end up at a point of illogic, an article of faith? Even an indisputable fact must be chosen as the place to start reasoning, given weight by a mind that believed in its worth.

At some point my mind gave up the fight, and by morning the quigs were all over me. I woke with someone’s tail wreathing my face and someone else half burrowed under my bum, but they’d left Brisi alone. The saar-quigutl distrust went both ways.

Today Eskar was to return with Comonot and the exiles, and the quigutl levels of the lab buzzed with anticipation. Mitha ordered quigs to their posts; everyone seemed to know where to go. He took Brisi and me with him to the Electrostatics Room, as he
called it, where we would be least likely to get underfoot when the fighting started. “It’s going to be pitch-dark in many of the corridorth,” he said, strapping a portable lamp to my wrist. It cast a ghostly bluish light. “Most backup power is already disconnected. What’s left will run lightth. Even those will blink out after a while.”

The Electrostatics Room had a high ceiling; Brisi and I gratefully stood upright, stretching our aching backs. The room was full of rotating machinery, so noisy that Mitha had to stand on his hind legs and shout in my ear: “That’th the generator! It makes power for the lights and machineth.” He studied my face to see if I’d understood. I hadn’t. He said, “You humans make fine fabric and music, eh, but you’re lacking in natural philosophy. Everything is made of other, tiny things, and we make some of the smallest do work for us by bothering them with magnetth.”

Mitha swiveled one eye cone, which I was beginning to understand was a quigutl wink, and said, “There are worlds within worlds, Seraphina.”

He chirped to his fellows at the far end of the room, away from the generator, and grabbed Brisi and me and dragged us over. They were adjusting a large lens to focus on an image of the mountains. “The electronic eye,” said Mitha, as if that explained anything.

One of his comrades pointed to a speck on the screen above the mountains. We watched it differentiate into two specks, which resolved into flying dragons. As they drew closer, the viewing angle changed, keeping the pair in sight even as they landed below the eye, on a ledge that stuck out of the mountain like a rocky lip.

I knew who they would be, but still shivered to recognize them: Eskar and Ardmagar Comonot.

A pair of enormous doors opened, sliding silently back into the mountain. A small battalion of quigutl rushed out and swarmed over the pair of them. “Sniffers,” Mitha explained to Brisi and me. “To identify them with thertainty.” The quigs scuttled back indoors, and soon five Censors emerged, surrounding Eskar and Comonot, who ducked their heads and submitted to bites on the neck.

The largest of the Censors spoke, his voice ringing hollowly from the little speaker by the lens. “Eskar, daughter of Askann, agent emerita first class, and Comonot, the ex-Ardmagar,” he cried, circling them. “A peculiar pair to land on our doorstep. What brings you here, Agent Emerita?”

Eskar saluted the sky. “All in ard, Agent. I was recalled to active duty by the Censor Magister.”

“You have the paperwork for that?”

“This assignment came under the floor.” Eskar extended a wing toward Comonot. “I was uniquely positioned to capture the ex-Ardmagar.”

All around me, the watching quigs quivered with excitement, whispering Eskar’s name to each other. “Oh, but she is deliciously deviouth!” said one.

Only Mitha flattened his head spines in disagreement. “Not devious enough.”

The head agent screamed, “You seem not to realize that we have a recent file on you, Emerita. You have been consorting with deviants in Porphyry.”

Eskar did not flinch; she arced her neck scornfully. “Your agents broke the law, entering Porphyry without the Assembly’s permission,” she said.

Around me the younger quigutl clapped their mouths open and shut enthusiastically. Mitha flared his nostrils and smacked the most exuberant on their heads.

The senior agent arced his neck in turn. “It is also against the law to fraternize with exiles. And by ‘fraternize,’ I mean—”

“He knew where to find the ex-Ardmagar,” Eskar interrupted. Comonot, still low to the ground, eyed her with interest; apparently her relationship with my uncle had not been explained to the general. “But of course, your agents captured Orma before he would tell me. You set me back in my investigation. I could have you fined.”

They mirrored each other, arched necks and flared wings. The juxtaposition of that aggressive pose with talk of fining gave me a certain cognitive dissonance. “I was told to bring the ex-Ardmagar to the nearest Censorial facility,” snarled Eskar. “I was told we were expected, and you would process my prisoner at once. This questioning is out of order.”

“I outrank you. I have the right.” The Censor’s words came out mumbled; he was working up a flame, intending to give Eskar a hot foot at the very least. Around me, quigs squirmed anxiously. Mitha made a rumbling sound in his throat to calm them.

Never taking her eyes off the ranking agent, Eskar fiddled with a chain at her wrist as if it were a thnik. “I’ve signaled the Board,” she screeched.

“Good. They’ll send an auditor, who will affirm my right.”

“No,” said Eskar, almost sweetly for a dragon. “They’re sending an ard.”

At precisely that moment, a hundred dragons rose above the mountains behind Eskar, flying in dual wedge formations, and a loud rumbling echoed deep within the Censors’ mountain, as if the earth had indigestion.

That was our signal. Mitha and his comrades swarmed the generator. I glued my gaze upon the scene in the lens, knowing it was about to disappear. For a frozen instant I saw a tableau: the four sub-agents rushing back into the lab; the head agent reaching for his neck, where his thnik should have been but wasn’t; Comonot springing up, jaws wide to strike at him; and Eskar looking straight up into the electronic eye.