Chris Willrich - [BCS261 S01] - Shadowdrop (html)

by Shadowdrop (html)

  I was a cat, however. I stepped lightly, never quite giving the carpet the excuse to grab me, all the while marking the scuttling behind. As the candlequicks tried to pounce, I leapt to one side, slamming hard onto the magical fabric. Like a spring I shot up again, this time landing beyond the carpet’s reach.

  It closed upon the candlequicks. It quivered, and smoke began pouring out either end. I hurried on.

  ... Eighty-three, eighty-four, eighty-five...

  The upper chamber boasted four ornate rune-covered doors, one for each cardinal direction. Nightwise had spoken of the intricate patterns required to open each portal. I possessed a memory honed by learning the ways of the slow-motion cauldron that was Archaeopolis, and so I clawed at the necessary runes of Wurm’s door, leaping sometimes to catch the high ones.

  ... Ninety-five, ninety-six, ninety-seven...

  The door swung open without a whisper. The chamber beyond surprised me in being brightly lit, filled with ferns and flowers, decorated with paintings of sunny scenes, enlivened with shelves of colorful curios. Mistress Wurm left her skulls and newts for the workshop. But she—willowy, silken-haired, gentle of face, back turned—was tapping blood-colored nails upon the glowing Orb.

  Within it swam a scene that couldn’t belong to Here and Now, for the sun outside her window was high and bright, not clouded with volcanic ash. And it couldn’t belong to Once and Elsewhere, for those buildings that were collapsing were Castle Astrolabe with its newest towers and the Sidereal Senate with its fresh mural portraying all the Eldshore’s provinces. Wurm was considering the Maybe Soon. And smiling.

  That is, had been smiling, for the expression was already a ghost of itself as she finished speaking to someone not present. “Enough of your misgivings, Quickfang, and shove the page through the window. Hauntclaw will do the rest.” Then she spun and said, “Whiskerdoom, you have much to—”

  She screamed and fell to her knees.

  ... One hundred.

  “You,” Wurm gasped, rubbing her fingers to her temples, as Postgrad’s years of rage were conveyed by the medium of Whiskerdoom’s collar. The scene of Archaeopolis dying flickered away as I rushed upon the Orb. I touched paws to its cold white crystal, just like a housecat yearning for birds beyond a winter window. But what lay revealed to me were black cats, many of them already converging like an eclipse upon the sun-soaked forum. As though the Orb recognized me now, it responded to my silent wish and let me speak to all the black cats of Archaeopolis at once, wherever they were.

  “It is I, Shadowdrop! Many of you have already received my summons to the Forum. It is urgent that you all go there. Our kinswoman Hauntclaw is at the foot of Castle Astrolabe. I believe she’s been ordered to catch a page from a magical book. She will deliver the page into the hands a great force of evil! Be kind to her, but do not let her take it. For we are lackeys of no man or woman or Thing. We are cats!”

  I perceived that Wurm was rising and not altogether pleased. A sensible cat would go. I stayed with the Orb. “Shred the page to bits, my friends, to bits! To you let it be as mouse, sparrow, butterfly, and armchair! Rend!”

  “No!” Wurm rose, and her lithe fingers played a symphony upon the air, and the lovely room became noxious and stale, like a place deep underground. I gagged upon a scent like rotten eggs. “Stupid animal! Do you have any idea what I’ve sacrificed? What I could achieve? Yes, some people will perish at first, but I’ve warned those of quality, and this city will be made safe again! No more monsters underfoot! No more sinkholes and collapses! No one ever again dying in some meaningless toppling of old architecture, like my parents. All things will be made new.“

  Now I embraced the better part of valor, but Wurm snagged me by the tail. “You... you’re not Whiskerdoom. You lack even his feeble magic. What do you have to say for yourself, copycat?”

  “You think you’re a hard person,” I observed, “but your eyes are soft.”

  I treated her face like a rodent.

  It was something new, after so many months of being a shadow, to become the lightning-stroke. Wurm screamed and brought her hands together. She spoke words that were like sharp rocks in the ears. Her spell knocked me over as if I were a crumbling wall. Something in me, something feline or dragon-touched, I do not know, protected me. I fell, but I lived.

  “Your torment will be prolonged,” Wurm said, wiping her bleeding face. “You will become an arch-stone in a bridge, perhaps, and be trampled forever, or a lightning rod or a sewer grate...”

  “Mistress Wurm,” the voice of Nightwise came from the door. “A Word.”

  He spoke it, and hearing it was like the tiniest of rocks pricking the skin. Whatever it was, it afflicted Wurm far worse. She staggered, muttering her spell for the second time. This time it shattered the window.

  When I dared look up she was gone, and hot winds blew in from the city. I scented the festival, with its sweat and food and fire and dust. We heard the baying of hellsnouts and shouts of alarm. I couldn’t take it all in. “Nightwise? I thought you couldn’t face her. And I thought familiars had only minor spells.”

  Nightwise licked his paw. “I like you. And she made me mad. And I used a trivial enchantment called Krumwheezle’s Mnemonic Fishhook. It makes entities remember the most important thing that’s slipped their minds.”

  “Page 99,” I said, rising.

  “I suggest we use the window. The Masters are coming.”

  I realized Nightwise had no collar.

  “Yes,” he said, noticing my stare. “Today I remember the hunt.”

  We picked our way along the windowsill and leapt among crenelations and gargoyles. I am not ashamed to say that I lost my footing and toppled to the place of the cat door, though I landed on my feet. I saw Nightwise taking a slower and saner route, so I decided to check on Postgrad.

  “Shadowdrop,” Nightwise said. “Don’t.”

  “I will be quick,” I told the edgy Nightwise. I felt that, forewarned, I could endure the warding. I was right. Paws shaking, I entered the alcove.

  What I couldn’t so easily endure was the sight of Postgrad in pieces.

  “No,” I said. His struggle with Wurm had shattered him from the inside.

  “Shadowdrop...” came a weak wooden voice. “Thank you. I am free... Perhaps somewhere someone is making a magic sword, or a magic statue, or a magic accordion that needs an animating spirit with experience... My schedule is open ... At any rate, at last I gave Wurm a piece of my mind, or, heh, a splinter...”

  “No,” I said again, and pawed the remains of the scratching post. This time there was no answer.

  The human-sized steel door behind him began to open. Master Hake or Master Slint must be looking for us, and after the commotion upstairs I doubted they were in any mood to listen to cats.

  I hissed and almost stood my ground. But I didn’t have time for these Underseers. I had to stop Wurm and Ruingift. I turned tail and exited through the cat door. Outside, Nightwise gave me a wordless look. As soon as we dared, we raced to the Stairway of Ages.

  Hork and the other hellsnouts roared back and forth, frothing in anger and fear. They had good reason; thirty black cats filled the Forum, and more were still arriving. The crowd was panicking now, but it hadn’t yet bolted. When it did, people might be trampled, bad luck or no.

  “Difficult to get through,” Nightwise said, “without crossing anyone’s path.”

  “Yes,” I said, surprised he would care.

  “What you said before,” he said. “About the humans your luck killed...”

  “Yes.”

  “I have wondered since if you are right. About our power. That the harm we can do means we ought to be careful. Always. But—Shadowdrop? What sort of life is that? To always constrain your own strength?”

  “I don’t know. What does it mean to an ordinary cat, that her mere footsteps can destroy tiny insects? Let her enjoy her ignorance! But for us, if we care about other beings, somehow we must learn restraint. There are compen
sations, Nightwise. To know we’ve spared something good, that may live and grow. To tread lightly upon the world and know we leave it none the worse. To sleep in sunbeams secure that we bring no suffering thereby.”

  “These seem like thin rewards.”

  “Thin as a shadow, and as wide. Some days like a river, others like a drop.”

  I blinked three times, and he followed suit. We darted past the hellsnouts, who for once were too agitated to notice us. In wordless agreement we slipped between people’s feet, trying to merely brush their world-lines. Some tripped, others collided, one had a fit of sneezing, another briefly choked on his own spittle. But no one passed away at our passing.

  Yet death was in the air... At the edges of my vision I saw those bubbles in the haze of probability over Archaeopolis, larger than ever. Now I knew their import. The plans of Ruingift would lead to slaughter.

  There was no sign of Whiskerdoom or Quickfang as we reached our brethren, but there sat Hauntclaw, encircled by her fellows, hissing her outrage. “How dare you accuse me?” she said to them. “I bet you’re just jealous I’ve got important work to do!” Her gaze flicked to us. “Nightwise! Are you behind all this? Is this about you thinking I’m hogging the Orb again?”

  “The treachery’s not ours,” Nightwise said. The cats parted for us so that we stood within their mass. “You all heard Shadowdrop’s message.”

  “No page has fallen, sister,” said my sibling Sootpaw. “Bird droppings, yes. Pages, no.”

  My other sibling Moonset added, with suspicion scratching her voice, “Perhaps you have overreached, by a claw.”

  “Look at our numbers!” I said. “See how many are gone! Do you truly think that’s an accident? You know of the disappearances.”

  At that moment screams rose from the harbor, at the starting point for the parade.

  Of course. Ruingift had released our kin.

  We could not see exactly what was happening—what had come of fifty luckbane-blessed black cats tormented and terrified and then set loose to run. But through the screams we heard structures toppling. We saw fires rising along the Esplanade. Maddened horses ran from that place, with terrified riders and passengers tumbling in their wake. It was like mob violence without the inconvenience of a mob.

  “Do you see, Hauntclaw?” I said. “It’s begun.”

  “I...” she began, but halted as her gaze darted up.

  At a high window of Castle Astrolabe two black shapes struggled on the sill. I realized with a rattle in my throat it was Whiskerdoom fighting Quickfang. From their catfight tumbled a shredded page. It was covered with dark, twisted writing. Even from far below it made my hair rise like rows of sleeping vipers.

  Page 99 of the Nominus Umbra drifted down.

  Hauntclaw studied the falling page as though it were a tasty moth, before folding back her ears as though confronting a wasp.

  “No,” she said.

  “Fool!” cried a voice.

  A ragged Thing drifted upon the drought-wracked air. Jerkily it flew without wings, resembling a blanket torn loose from a Foottown clothesline, or a gliding vulture prematurely mistaking our land for a desert. Tentacles reached out from the tatters of an old cloak to seize the page, and I knew the apparition was Ruingift.

  She laughed, and now I saw her ravaged head, smirking there above our doomed city. “I’d hoped not to reveal myself, but soon most witnesses will be dead.” Her red trio of crystals picked me out of the crowd. “Levitation is among the first spells I attempted, you know, the day before I met you, cat. I could only rise a few inches then, but I’d been about to fly toward that boy I had mooned over, and summon him to me as well. If not for that spell, you’d not have crossed our paths.“

  “I am sorry,” I said, so quietly I was certain she couldn’t hear. And so help me, I was.

  “Do not be! That disaster was a gift. His death, and my maiming, showed me the truth about life. Love is fleeting, life precarious. Only power can be trusted. My dedication to my Art was tripled.“

  “I am sorry,” I said, meaning it even more.

  “I need no pity, cat.“

  “My name is Shadowdrop.”

  Just then, a old human figure in a toga leaned out of a window near Whiskerdoom and Quickfang’s catfight far overhead. I knew him only as the card-player, but the humans in the Forum began calling out, “Emperor Rel! Emperor, help us! Rel! Save us from the black cats!”

  Only then did I recognize him, from many a coin.

  He raised his fingers as if playing a card. Fire and lightning and stranger energies I could perceive only as a torment of the air all lashed downward at Ruingift.

  But though Ruingift shrieked and her tattered robes grew perforated with holes, she didn’t fall from the sky. Her false eyes blazed, and a fiery nimbus surrounded her and absorbed the emperor’s attacks. “Soon you will need pity, Shadowdrop—all of you. But for now, I cannot endure these annoyances forever. Come. I will teach you wisdom.”

  An invisible claw yanked me into the air, and I knew how the mouse feels.

  Ruingift and I flew over the mass of cats below, past the stupefied faces of Whiskerdoom and Quickfang in the tower, passing above the racing forms of the released black cats who even now charged up Timearrow Way toward the Forum, disaster in their wake. For a short stomach-twitching period, serpents of energy pursued us from the hand of Emperor Rel, but we outpaced them. Beside Ruingift I dove into Scarside and plunged into a series of dank tunnels to the lost temple where I’d previously encountered her. Mistress Wurm awaited us there. The human captives were still there too, bound to the altar by locks and chains.

  They probably hoped I was there to rescue them. After my dizzying flight I threw up on them instead. At least the magical fire was gone; perhaps Ruingift needed to raise it again. And the hellsnouts were busy elsewhere. These were factors in my favor, if only...

  “Pepper!” called out my human, Tru.

  “Her name is Shadowdrop,” Ruingift mocked, alighting and drawing her fiery dagger. “And at last I recognize you, sister of my hapless boy. It is fitting that you and the cat converse properly at the end.“

  Although I now crouched upon the floor, I couldn’t move, for the invisible claw held me still.

  “What do you mean?” Tru said, terrified but unwilling to panic. Here, even at the end of it all, I was proud to know her.

  “It matters little, save that it amuses me,” Ruingift said. “Wurm, make her comprehend cat-tongue.“

  “I’m not your lackey,” said Wurm.

  “You’ve no secrecy any longer,” Ruingift said. “You must see our partnership through. And I am preoccupied casting the Dragonspark.“

  Wurm said, “If you don’t cast it, your life, too, is forfeit.”

  “But unlike you I am mercurial and mad. You know this. Dare you risk me abandoning my whole plan on a whim?“

  Wurm considered this. Then she snarled and spoke various Words. Ruingift laughed and approached the altar, clutching Page 99 like a mad composer about to conduct.

  “There’s a tickling in my head...” Tru said. “Pepper? Shadow...”

  “Shadowdrop,” I said. “Do you understand?”

  “I do! Shadowdrop. You’ve been trying so hard to help. I’m sorry I got you into all this.”

  “I got you into all this. It’s because of me your brother Vil died.”

  “Vil...? Oh. And when I fell into the river?”

  “That was just bad luck. The ordinary kind.”

  The last thing I expected was for Tru to laugh, but she did. “It doesn’t matter now. There’s always bad luck, and there are always people—and cats—doing their best, despite it. And there’s always wickedness. That’s what I’ve learned from all those books. But I’ve learned this too, that if we can endure without becoming wicked ourselves, enjoying life until the bad luck finally gets us, then we’ve done all right.”

  Wurm studied her. Her voice was strange. “Why not release these children, Ruingift? They are
rather like innocents... caught in a structural collapse. Does the Dragonspark require them?”

  “No,” Ruingift said, perusing her spell. “But they remind me of my youth. I hope some will yet join me in comprehending the truth of power.”

  Wurm was silent. She put a finger to her lips and traced patterns in the air.

  The locks snapped open.

  The children rubbed their wrists. Two boys ran, but Zik stayed beside Tru. I still couldn’t move, but Tru stepped beside me and stroked me between my ears. Never let anyone tell you doomsday is no time for a head scratch.

  Ruingift shrugged. “I see your sentimentality, Wurm. No matter. They will likely die when the dragon wakes.“

  “That is what the Dragonspark does?” I asked. “Awaken the Elddrake?”

  Ruingift was incanting. It was Wurm who answered me. “It does. Even a brief awakening can convulse the land. Archaeopolis, sited in his eye, will suffer most.”

  “Why?” Tru said. “You swore to defend this city.”

  “After a while, you get tired of dragging bodies from the rubble. I discovered Ruingift, and learned that her goals ran parallel to mine. I wish to wake the dragon to make a clean slate. She wants to siphon its power, as we siphon luckbane from our familiars. She will found her own empire far away, while I rebuild this one. Is that not right, Ruingift?”

  Ruingift was still muttering and did not answer.

  I mewed, “Throw me,” so low that only Tru could hear.

  “What?” Tru began.

  Page 99 took fire, ignited by the dagger. But there was no salvation in this. Rather, blazing letters fell from the page as Ruingift read with rising glee. The burning symbols sprouted tiny insectile legs and skittered around the room, falling into cracks, plunging deep into the earth.

  “Wurm!” cried a human voice.

  The other Underseers had arrived. Mistress Voyd, and Masters Hake and Slint, all bore glowing trowels, and with these they advanced upon their estranged colleague.

  In that moment of distraction Tru grabbed me and threw me at Ruingift.

  The paralysis broke as we connected. I tore away the blindfold. I’d expected to see empty sockets or worse. Instead I beheld beautiful brown mad eyes, as perfect as that day upon the river. Ruingift had simply abandoned her natural vision to view the world through other means.