“I like tritones!” cried someone else.
Mitha coughed up an ember, spat it on the floor, and began to intone:
O saar, beware!
Beware the horde,
The ones you never see.
We build your lairth,
Repair, invent,
We do all this for free.
You torch our hideth,
You crunch our boneth,
Kill with impunity.
But we are not Tho helpless now.
Our day cometh. We are free.
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-Ardma
gar 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.
The picture flickered off and the lights went out. Brisi shrieked like a child.
Eskar’s instructions—as per Mitha—were for the quigs to stay put, fighting only if the fighting came to them, but no sooner was the generator down than they swarmed out the door, looking for trouble. “Tho much for discipline,” said Mitha, although he didn’t seem particularly surprised. “Seraphina, it occurred to me that even if Orma had been here and his recordth deliberately erased, surely the Censorth would not have gone to the trouble to excise every doctor who dealt with him. One of the doctorth might know where Orma went next. I expect the medical staff will all be avoiding a firefight. We might be able to corner one in the operating theater. Would you like to try?”
I could not imagine how a quigutl, a human, and a … Brisi were going to corner a full-sized dragon, but surely doctors could be reasoned with, and might answer our questions. It was better than sitting here uselessly. I said, “Lead on, friend.”
Mitha scampered out of the room and up the service corridor. I grabbed Brisi’s elbow and dragged her along; she had a strange expression on her face, as if she were listening hard. All around us, draconic screams reverberated through the living rock. Brisi quivered—though with excitement or fear, I couldn’t tell.
Mitha darted up a dark side corridor, so narrow my elbows brushed the walls, and pulled a lever to open a thick stone door. We were immediately blown back by terrible heat, blinded by a cascade of fire in front of us. I choked, barely able to breathe, as if the dragon fire had burned the life-giving air. Mitha pushed me back, crying, “Wrong way! I didn’t think they’d be fighting in this corridor yet.”
But I couldn’t move. Behind me Brisi was pushing the other direction, wriggling, squirming past me; she shoved me hard into the rock wall in her haste to get by. She stopped in the doorway and stripped off her clothes. Her silhouette stood out starkly against the firefight behind her. She was all skinny arms and legs, and then she was more. She elongated and uncoiled into a terrible spiky shadow and leaped without hesitation into the fray.
I cried out, afraid for her, but Mitha was pulling the lever, closing the door. Tongues of flame licked around its edges, then were extinguished as it tightly closed. “Well, good,” said Mitha, a slight tremor in his voice. “She belongs there. It is right. Come—I’ve thought of a better route.”
He led me through some extremely tight tunnels; I crawled on elbows and belly and tried not to imagine getting stuck. At last we popped out of a trapdoor into an operating room, empty but for the hulking metal tables and surgical arms; they cast malevolent shadows in the light of my wrist lamp. A pool of silver blood glinted on the floor.
A dragon screamed in the surgery next door. Mitha scampered ahead, but I was loath to approach. I crept up to the enormous doorway and peeked into a room eerily illuminated from all angles by quigutl wrist lanterns. In the center was a full-sized dragon, its eyes wild. It snatched up a quig in its jaws and shook it like a terrier, snapping the smaller lizard’s neck. Two dead quigutl lay sprawled across a large metal table nearby, silver blood dripping off their dangling legs and congealing on the stone floor.
Around the dragon, on the walls and ceiling, under the cabinets and the sinister-looking surgical machinery, dozens of quigutl swarmed. The dragon tossed the dead one into the air and snapped at another; it dodged out of reach under the metal table.
“Dr. Fila!” cried Mitha. He’d reached the middle of the room, brandishing a dragon-sized scalpel in each of his four hands. They were like swords to a quig.
The dragon doctor turned, quigutl gore hanging from his teeth.
“Remember when you neutered my brother?” said Mitha, waving his surgical tools. “Remember when you removed my mother’th voice box?”
The doctor spat fire. Mitha dodged; the flame hit an operating table and sent it flying. I ducked back, terrified.
“Remember the acclaim you received for the machine my uncle built?” called another quigutl from behind the dragon. “Remember how you don’t remember we exist until something breakth or you decide to break one of uth?”
From all around the room, the quigs began to croon Mitha’s song: But we are not so helpless now.…
Mitha did a waggling dance around the room, avoiding Dr. Fila’s jaws. The dragon doctor kept his wings folded; there wasn’t room to spread them without getting entangled in wires and dangling instruments. Mitha capered upon a metal table; the doctor struck, missed, and bit the table. The clang reverberated sympathetically up my spine, setting my teeth on edge. For a moment the doctor seemed disoriented.
The quigs all pounced at once.
They moved so fast I saw nothing but streaks of light, the wrist lamps writing danger in the air. Within seconds they’d bound Dr. Fila with thin, strong flesh-flensing wire, shutting his jaw so he couldn’t flame and immobilizing his limbs.
Once they had him tied up, they did not taunt or harm him; they scurried about the room, mopping up blood, righting toppled equipment, and—absurdly, to my mind—making repairs. They removed the bodies of their fallen kin.
I approached cautiously. The constant movement of their lights made it difficult to navigate the maze of broken metal and glass; the room reeked of quig breath and sulfur. The dragon fixed his shiny black eyes on me. Smoke leaked from his nostrils.
Mitha looked up from scooping broken beakers into his mouth and waved at me. He gestured toward a metal basin full of water. I handed it to him and he spat melted glass into the water, which cooled and hardened into a long, transparent noodle. Mitha ran his tongue over his lips, scouring them with its ignited end, and then said, “Shall we question thith fellow?”
“Will he be in any mood to answer?” I said, sounding more flippant than I felt. I was still shaken. “They’ve wired his jaw shut.”
The dragon’s head was on the floor. Mitha clocked him on the nose with the basin, then climbed up and sat among the spikes with a scalpel aimed at the doctor’s eye. “We’re going to unfasten your jaw,” the quigutl explained. “You will answer Seraphina’s questionth nicely. If you make any threatening move, I will pull out your eyeball, climb into the hole, and eat your brainth. My mate will lay eggth in your sinuseth.”
“Enough, Mitha,” I said. Mitha chirped, and one of his fellows began working on the wires around Dr. Fila’s jaw, loosening them until the dragon could form understandable words through clenched teeth.
“Seraphina,” he said thickly. “I know your name. I have a message for you.”
Fear bloomed over my heart like frost. “From whom?”
“Your sister half-human. General Laedi,” he snarled. “She has your uncle. We sent him south to her. You
are to return to Goredd at once. She is done humoring you.”
“Did you excise his memories before you sent him south?” I asked, my voice low and fearful.
Dr. Fila snorted. “Would he be a lure to you if we had? It’s you she wants, Seraphina. If she had known the mad lengths you’d go to in order to find him, she never would have had us bring him here. She’d have kept him at her side from the start.”
Mitha, for reasons known only to him, hit Dr. Fila again with the basin and knocked him out cold.
Within the hour the lab had surrendered to Comonot and his exiles.
Eskar explained it to me later: the stronger fighters, storming the gates, had drawn the best of the Censors’ guard to the main entrance. The weaker fighters, sneaking into the escape tunnel, had relied on stealth and deviousness, ambushing Censors and scientists one by one. They’d reached the heart of the mountain virtually unopposed, and the Censors had had no choice but to admit defeat.
Well, most decided they had no choice. The Censors were not untainted by the new ideology Comonot and Eskar had observed. Five Censors fought to the death and took three exiles with them, injuring four more. Others seemed to subscribe to the extreme anti-human ideology but couldn’t quite make up their minds to die for it. They were herded down into holding cells deep underground, where they would have ample time to reconsider their political affiliation.
I was still with Dr. Fila when two exiles came to collect him; I followed them through twisting, darkened hallways to an enormous atrium at the heart of the mountain. Here, at least, light trickled in through several small windows in the ceiling, so far away they looked like buttonholes. Hundreds of dragons milled around the atrium, patching each other up and inventorying supplies. Dr. Fila, who still seemed woozy from his encounter with Mitha, was sent across the room to line up with scientists, technicians, and a dozen deviants from the holding cells.
“You are called upon to aid your Ardmagar,” Saar Lalo was screeching at them. “The world is changing; you may yet change with it.”
Shadow Scale Page 35
