Shadow Scale (57 page)

At the door to the main corridor, he took the lanterns back and whispered, “The corridor does a dogleg, so they won’t see you emerge from this room. Peek around and choose your moment. You’ve got your thnik?”

I jabbed a finger at him. This one was a ring.

“I noticed you left the dagger behind,” he said quietly. “I
considered bringing it, but decided you were making a principled choice. I hope we don’t regret that.”

I swiftly kissed the edge of his beard. That probably didn’t assuage his worry, but it raised my courage. I stepped outside, and he silently closed the door behind me.

I crept up on Glisselda’s guards, who sat facing each other on stools, engrossed in a card game. They did not see me until I was directly in front of her door. “Hoy, maidy, how’d you get up here?” said the taller guard, craning his neck to peer down the corridor, as if there might be more of me coming.

“I’m one of the ityasaari,” I said, raising my doublet sleeve enough to show a couple of scales. “St. Jannoula sent me with a message for the Queen.”

“It couldn’t wait till morning?” said the other guard, older but shorter, with a helmet like an overturned basin. He folded and unfolded his hand of cards. “Her Majesty is very particular about her sleep. Hand it over and we’ll see she gets it in the morning.”

“I’m to tell her in person,” I said. “It’s important.”

The men looked at each other and rolled their eyes. “St. Jannoula herself, by the Queen’s order, don’t see her in person after hours,” said the taller guard, stretching his legs forward so they were blocking the door. “Even if we let you by, which we won’t, you’d still have to talk your way past her bodyguard, Alberdt. There’s no doing that.”

“Why not?” I drew myself up as if I were equal to any Alberdt under the sun.

“Because he’s deaf,” said the older guard, reordering his cards
by suit. “Only responds to finger signs. Dunno about you, but I only know this one.”

His gesture asked me, unsubtly, to leave. I gave meager courtesy, turned on my heel, and walked up the hallway with what dignity I could muster. Once past the dogleg, I ducked quickly into Kiggs’s suite and bolted the door—and none too soon. I heard them stomp past once, twice, thrice, trying doors, trying to work out where I’d gone.

“I take it that didn’t work,” whispered Kiggs. “Now what?”

It occurred to me that we might stay in this suite until morning; I suspect it occurred to Kiggs as well. If so, we each rejected the notion on our own, without any discussion. He led me back to the secret passage.

“It will be harder to move around undetected during the day,” Kiggs whispered as we left his rooms. “I think we should get down to the council chamber while we can, and wait for the morning council meeting. Would that suit you as an arena for your return?”

It was as good as anything I could think of. Kiggs led the way, sticking to hidden passages as much as possible, watching for guards in the open hallways.

We reached the council chamber without incident; it was shaped like the quire of a cathedral, with rows of tiered seats facing each other across a central aisle. At the head of the room was a dais with a throne for the Queen. Beyond it, green and violet banners draped the wall behind a large wooden crest of our national emblem, the prancing Pau-Henoa. Kiggs counted off curtains and behind the third from the left found a notch in the wall, which
proved to be a door. He worked the trick latch, and we slipped through into a narrow room, furnished only with a long wooden bench.

“In the old days, when the council consisted of unruly knights and warlords, our queens kept armed men concealed here, just in case,” said Kiggs, setting down his lantern. “Now it’s a forgotten space.”

We tried the bench, found it uncomfortably narrow, and resituated ourselves on the floor, with our backs to the council chamber wall.

“Sleep if you can,” said Kiggs. “You’ll need all your wits if you mean to spring out at the council in the morning.”

He sat so close that his arm was touching mine; I was wide awake. Cautiously, I tilted my head until it rested on his shoulder, expecting him to shrug me away. He didn’t.

He leaned his head against mine.

“You haven’t mentioned Orma once since you returned,” Kiggs said softly. “I haven’t wanted to ask, for fear of upsetting you.”

“He wasn’t at Lab Four.” My voice creaked as I spoke. I inhaled sharply through my nose, trying to hold down my feelings; I didn’t want to cry, not now. “I don’t know the state of his mind. The Censors sent him here, at Jannoula’s request, so I presume she knows where he is. I mean to ask her.”

“I’m so sorry,” said Kiggs, his voice like sunlight. “How awful not to know.”

I closed my eyes. “I try not to think about it much.”

There was a long pause; the sound of his breathing soothed
me somewhat. “Do you know what some theologians believe about that story I told you? The inside-out house?” he said at last.

“I thought it was a pagan tale, predating the Saints,” I said.

“Yes, but some religious thinkers—the ones I like best—believe the pagan ancients were wise, that they caught glimpses of greater truths. They take Dowl’s house, the emptiness surrounding the fullness of the universe, as a metaphor for the Infernum. Hell is nothingness.”

I frowned. “According to your earlier analogy, that’s my mind, friend.”

He chuckled into my hair, enjoying this. I loved him terribly just then, how he puzzled through obscure scholarship and reveled in ideas, never mind that he’d called my mind hell. The idea was the thing; he would entertain all comers.

“So if the Infernum is an empty interior, what’s Heaven in their conception?” I asked, nudging him.

“A second inside-out house, inside—or rather, ‘outside’—the first,” he said. “If you cross its threshold, you realize our world, for all its wonder, has been but a shadow, another kind of emptiness. Heaven is more than this.”

I snorted, unable to contain the urge to argue. “Might there not be another inside-out house in Heaven, and on and on in infinite regression?”

He laughed. “I can barely get my head around one,” he admitted. “In any case, it’s just a metaphor.”

I smiled in the darkness. There was nothing “just” about metaphors, I was beginning to think; they followed me everywhere, illuminating and failing and illuminating again.

“I have missed you so much,” I said, overcome. “I could spend eternity here at your shoulder, listening to you muse about whatever takes your fancy.”

He kissed my forehead, and then he kissed my mouth. I kissed him back with an unanticipated urgency, thirsty for him, dizzy with him, filled with light. One of his hands lost itself in my hair; the other found itself at the hem of my doublet, fingering the linen shirt at my waist.

Alas, I was a dragon at my center, encircled in silver scales. That touch started me thinking, and thinking was the beginning of the end.

I spoke into the space between kisses—“Kiggs”—but then another kiss pulled me under. I wanted nothing but to forget all my promises and drown in him, but I couldn’t let myself. “Lucian,” I said more determinedly, taking his face in my hands.

“Sweet Heavenly Home,” he gasped. He opened his deep brown eyes and leaned his forehead against mine. His breath was warm. “I’m sorry, I know, we can’t.”

“Not like
this
,” I said, my heart still racing. “Not without discussing or deciding.”

Kiggs wrapped his arms around me, as if to still my trembling, or anchor me to the earth; I buried my face in his shoulder. I could have wept. I hurt all over like one suffering terrible insomnia, when the body aches with longing for sleep.

Somehow we both did find our portion of sleep there in each other’s arms.

I awoke, with my cheek against his shoulder and a terrible crick in my neck, to the sound of voices in the council chamber. The drapes filtered light greenly through a lattice in the door; we could see nothing but could hear everything clearly. The councilors, a couple of dozen ministers and nobles, filed into the room beyond and found their seats. A trumpet fanfare goaded everyone into standing for Queen Glisselda’s entry.

Kiggs shifted from floor to bench and leaned his elbows on his knees, listening.

Glisselda spoke in a voice subdued and mild: “Blessed, would you kindly open this session with a prayer?”

Blessed? Kiggs and I exchanged a glance.

“I am humbled and honored, Majesty,” said a contralto voice. It was Jannoula’s. Kiggs raised his eyebrows inquiringly, and I
nodded. He twitched restlessly, as if fighting the urge to rush out and put an end to this false-Saint nonsense right now. I touched his arm to still him; he covered my hand with his own.

“Hark, ye lovely Saints above,” Jannoula began, in an unwieldy imitation of ecclesiastical language. “Gaze on us beneficently, and bless your Goreddi children and your worthy ityasaari successors. Give unto us the strength and courage it will take to fight the beast, thine unrighteous enemy, and bring us bold allies in our time of need.”

It was time. I nodded to Kiggs, who opened the door. I silently slipped through the curtains and stepped onto the dais beside the golden throne. Jannoula stood a few steps in front of the Queen. The ministers and courtiers of the Queen’s council had bowed their heads in prayer, as had the dozen ityasaari to the left of the aisle. They did not notice me.

I glanced over at the throne, looked again, stared. I had not recognized Glisselda. The full crown, not her usual diadem, was perched on her head, and in her pale hands she bore the orb and scepter, emblems of queenship that her grandmother had rarely brought out of storage, considering them an unbecoming ostentation. Queen Glisselda wore a stiff golden cape edged with ermine, prickly lace at the neckline, and a silk gown, embroidered gold on gold. Her fair hair seemed frozen in corkscrew curls; her face, already pale, had been whitened with cosmetics, her lips stained pomegranate red.

The lively, intelligent girl I knew was almost invisible under all that pomp. The blue eyes were familiar, but they pierced me with a terrible coldness.

We’d wondered how much influence Jannoula had gained over the Queen; the answer was visible in this change, I had no doubt.

I tore my gaze away from the glittering Queen. Jannoula, dressed in crisp white linen, stood before me with her head bowed. Her brown hair came to a point at the nape of her neck.

“Does Heaven ever grant you the bold allies you pray for, Jannoula?” I said, loud enough for the whole room to hear.

She whirled to face me, mouth agape and green eyes startled. “Y-you’re here,” she stammered. “I knew you would come.”

She hadn’t known; I’d caught her flat-footed. I found a small satisfaction in that.

“My Queen!” cried Jannoula, turning to Glisselda. “Look who’s come.”

Glisselda looked past us as if we weren’t there, but Jannoula didn’t seem to care. She turned back toward me, her hands tucked into the broad sleeves of her pale gown. “I knew you would return to me of your own accord, Seraphina,” she said ingenuously, surely playing to her audience. “Do you regret forsaking your dearest sister?”

It was a ludicrous, deplorable act, and yet even I wasn’t immune to it. She’d asked the one question that would hurt me. “I do,” I said, swallowing hard. Alas, it was true.

Was it possible for me to test the degree to which Queen and council were being manipulated by Jannoula? I wanted to shock them, and I wanted Kiggs to hear the reaction, too, from his hiding place. I cleared my throat and tugged at the hem of my doublet, buying time as I considered what to try. “I rushed back from
Lab Four because I feared for you, sister,” I said slowly. “I heard news that worried me.”

Jannoula’s lips parted; she looked convincingly innocent. “What was it?”

“The dragons claim you work for them, that you devised the Old Ard’s strategies and advised their generals. They nicknamed you General Lady,” I said, surreptitiously observing the room. The half-dragons did not react to the news, but many council members were whispering among themselves, looking disturbed. Glisselda remained impassive.

I held my breath, imagining Kiggs holding his, too. Would Queen and council question Jannoula about this alarming information? Were they so besotted with her that they’d excuse her every transgression?

“Blessed Jannoula,” said the Queen, her high voice piercing the councilors’ growing grumble. “Seraphina implies that you’re the Tanamoot’s spy.”

For the briefest instant, Jannoula met my gaze with steely coldness, but then her green eyes widened. “Your Majesty,” she said warmly, “it pains me to say that Seraphina’s charge is true, if incomplete and imperfectly understood. Dragons held me prisoner my entire life. My mother, the dragon Abind, returned pregnant to the Tanamoot and died in childbirth. My uncle, General Palonn, donated me to Lab Four as an infant.”

I expected her to show her scarred forearms again, the way she had in Samsam, but she was unlacing her bodice, baring the middle of her torso. The council gasped in horror; she turned to face the Queen, who neither flinched nor looked away. A long, purpled
scar ran down Jannoula’s body, from her breastbone to somewhere below her navel.