A Ruin of Shadows

by L. D. Lewis

  “No,” she smiled. “I’m quite clear. All the world I’ve put at your feet and this is what you’d do with it. What you’d have me do with it. I slaughter demons and demigods to make whatever point it is you are still trying to make about Os Vazios but this is beyond sense and beneath the Empire.”

  “You’re out of line!” shrieked a reddening old Admiral along the wall, more paunch than punch now by the look of him.

  “I was speaking to His Eminence,” she said calmly.

  “You forget your place, General,” insisted the Chief Minister.

  “With respect, Xir, it’s more likely you’ve had my place mistaken.”

  In a rage, Negus stood to admonish his viciously insubordinate General likely in some blustering, stammered fashion, but she stood as well to take her leave. The sheer audacity left the warnings he was prepared to spew boiling in his throat.

  “I’ll be invoking Autonomy, Xir. His Eminence’s prerogative is his own. But I will not allow myself to be a part of it this time. Excuse me.” She bowed at the waist and turned to stride away toward the door.

  “You have not been dismissed!” The Emperor bellowed, and men stepped between the General and the door with an urgent sort of smugness carved into their sagging faces. She exhaled slowly and turned back to his attention, plotting her escape with One at her back in case the need arose.

  “Autonomy isn’t for you. If it was, the time to take it would have been when you were too young to know better so Mr. Remy could have left your impertinent hide in the muck where he found you. You owe your every breath to the State. And you will pay that debt.”

  Debt? Oh my, she had words for that.

  The General controlled the sneer threatening her lips. There were easily twenty men here, all old, yes, but it would be foolish to discount their decades of combat experience just because they’d gone a little thick round the middle. She smelled an eagerness on them. They wanted her to violently misstep. She felt the secret armor in her blood rising to the surface beneath the collar of her shirt.

  This wasn’t the time.

  She relaxed into a smile but met the Emperor’s pointed, imperious gaze. “Well, I tried.”

  “Then you’ll brief the Shadows and report on a course of action within the week,” said the Chief Minister. The rebellion squashed, he seemed comfortable again.

  The General gave what could grudgingly be considered a nod.

  “Now you may go,” the Emperor declared with bass in his voice.

  “Your Eminence. Ministers.” She bowed for the second time and waited for the men barring the door to stand aside. Mr. Remy followed her and One into the hallway.

  “What in the Three Known Worlds was that?” He blustered.

  “Not now, old man.”

  “Daynja Édo!”

  The General slowed her stride, cringing at the reflex that made her submit to this man’s browbeating.

  “What has gotten into you? You don’t refuse him. It’s unprecedented and will demand unprecedented consequences. I guarantee as soon as you left they began trying to work around you.”

  “I said I’d comply.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  She stifled a groan and wondered if he would follow her all the way home.

  “It’s the mask, isn’t it? The hubris of invincibility has finally addled your brain.”

  “Mr. Remy...”

  “They’ve always said it should be kept in the armory, someplace we can regulate its use. But I’ve defended your keeping it, and...”

  “MR. REMY.”

  “Then what is it?” He huffed.

  She spun on him. “I made him. Negus’s throne sits on corpses I delivered. I owe these men nothing. He will know that before the end.”

  Half a century of military bearing didn’t allow Mr. Remy to flinch. He read her, looking up into her face the way he’d looked down into it thirty years ago.

  “Whatever it is you’re plotting, I’d advise against it,” he said quietly.

  “Who says I’m plotting anything?” Daynja started away again.

  “I am your only friend in that room, General Édo.” He called after her.

  “And you should stop that when it stops serving you, Mr. Remy.”

  She whistled two sharp notes and her assassins fell into formation, trailing her out of the building.

  “Are you plotting something, General?” wondered One, his voice low as they marched back out into the moonlight.

  “Only dinner, One,” the General replied.

  “You called Autonomy. If you don't intend to comply, you should give up the mask.”

  The General turned again on her army. One stared coolly down at her, while the others exchanged glances of confusion.

  “Code of the Shadow Army.” Édo growled. She made eye contact with all of them. “It means that you are Shadows. You originate from me and you do not exist without me. So you have no opinions unless I give them to you. You will have your orders when I create them. If that is clear, you are all dismissed.”

  Shadows Two through Seven went about their vanishing as ordered, but One remained rooted to his spot on the drill pad, standing at ease with his jaw clenched.

  “Your boldness is both grating and poorly timed, One.” Édo carped.

  “We are forbidden egos,” One insisted anyway. “Boorhian soldiers are born, trained, used here. And if we are exceptional, we are handed names so we can live forever as stars and stories. But you, General, you have never been one of us. We know you were this foreign, dirt-caked orphan in the Hinterlands when they found you. But you have always had a name and our fate is tied to yours. Your disgrace before the Emperor is our disgrace.”

  Daynja inspected him silently a moment, recalling the first image she’d had of him at nine or ten years old. His eyes were intense and intelligent, his slender, brown frame swift and graceful in its movements. Any steel weapon placed before him was wielded with effortless beauty and impeccable accuracy.

  Why wouldn't he grow up to be trouble?

  “I remember you all from before you were mine,” she smiled slightly. “Your name, child, was Waahid. Do you feel any more powerful now, knowing that? Or are you still just the first of seven? Still of me, of Boorhia, and expendable at our whim?”

  She waited for a response, for his lips to move as he fit his own lost name to them. He gave her nothing, just the stony gaze that meant he was thinking but didn’t want to be caught doing it. She stepped toward him though, and found hints of confusion in his eyes. That would suffice.

  “I know you must think you’re exceptional, that your invitation into that room was for your grooming for something greater than what you are. And that may be the case. But I can guarantee you one thing tonight,” she growled and leaned up into his face so close that barely air passed between them. “If you speak to me again without your sense, Waahid — One — I will flay you alive and feed you your own hide. Doubt me.”

  She left him alone on the drill pad with her promise. Every step away, she listened to the breeze for the blade she knew he would drive into her back. Eventually, she trusted, he would try.

  ∴

  Daynja stood distracted on the catwalks overlooking the pits. It was her duty to the Empire that she continue to spend the daylight hours supervising training exercises and conducting inspections. Young soldiers grouped by age and ability sparred and practiced their formations in the grid of stone recesses on the east end of the fortress. Over decades, legions of men and women whose lives were pledged compulsorily and without question to the empire submitted under her gaze. They wanted her to make eye contact, to call on them for demonstrations so they might prove their value and be asked to join her Shadows.

  Her boots crunched on the gravel over their heads as she moved about the grid. She remembered being a part of them. Not of them, but among them. She’d been a gangly, belligerent child, late to the game at thirteen and infected with ego. But she’d been recruited for her quick study and resourcef
ulness at the Empress’s request to keep her out of trouble.

  Men in uniform had once peered into the training pits to observe her. Their brass-loaded breasts made for annoyance in the sunlight. They gave voice to salacious and disquieting thoughts in whispers they didn’t try hard enough to make inaudible while she sweat beneath them. They played intimidation games, staring into her eyes too long and too hard in order to break her concentration. It never worked because she neither knew nor cared who they were.

  So when she watched the young soldiers, she left her brass at home. And when she made eye contact, it was only to push the ones who needed it.

  She was more mindful today that they were children. The thought made the sun feel hotter and the sweat scorched her skin. Lately she'd been having dreams about the young queen she was supposed to kill and none of them were the victorious type. The hand she’d had in creating the force that would undo the child weighed on her. She had, in fact, been noticing more about the ground, for the new difficulty she found in holding her head high.

  In her periphery, a young woman approached. She was pretty and wore the fortress’s classroom uniform but had a bit too much of a twitch in her hips to be a soldier. A smile played about her lips, and as she drew nearer, she winked one gold and then one gray eye.

  “Where have you been?” Daynja asked the Djinni.

  “I’ve only been gone a minute,” they replied, standing beside the General and joining her in feigning interest in the young soldiers below.

  “It’s been days.”

  “Possible,” they shrugged. “Ti—”

  “Immaterial. Yes.”

  “What happened? What did you do?”

  “What do you mean what happened? Who says anything happened?” Daynja muttered and continued to pace the catwalk. Djinni followed.

  “The words ‘Autonomy’, ‘Édo’, and ‘traitorous demon’ are floating around with unusual regularity and you’re clearly in a mood. So this is either a very specific cosmic coincidence or you’ve done something.”

  Daynja sighed and watched the other officers milling about the area. Each did seem to be taking extra effort to keep their eyes from hers. “I expressed some... displeasure with a mission Negus proposed. Ordered. He wants me to kill the Eros queen.”

  “When are you leaving?”

  She abruptly turned to Djinni and scowled. “She’s a child!”

  “She’s a statesman!” Djinni scoffed. “What have you been doing this entire time but laying waste to creatures in her position?”

  “This isn’t the same. Os Vazios are a plague and I haven’t minded clearing them. She’s no threat to anyone. She is a child.”

  “They are children, too. You’ve helped make them into threats though, haven’t you?” Djinni nodded toward the young soldiers clashing in the pits below. “This is about your 405 thing, isn’t it?”

  “Probably,” she admitted. “What have you heard? The whispers?”

  “There’s talk of replacing you.”

  “Replacing me?” She raised an eyebrow.

  “With your Shadow.”

  “One?” The other eyebrow raised itself. “I’ll admit I get the sense lately that he’s eager but he isn’t ready.”

  “Doesn’t have to be One. You do have six others. They’re all pretty sure your job can be done as long as they have the mask.”

  “Is that right?” Daynja chewed the inside of her cheek and nodded down at proctors who waited for a sign of whether or not she approved of the exercises. How certain was she that all the rest of her Shadows wouldn’t follow their brother’s lead against her?

  “You might consider that vacation more seriously now,” Djinni chirped.

  “I can’t. I can’t run off and let them kill that girl,” Daynja insisted, though leaving sounded like an increasingly important thing to do.

  “How do you intend to stop them?”

  “Haven’t figured that out yet.”

  “You’re going to do something reckless.”

  “If I do, you’ll show up to say something about it, won’t you?”

  “It’d be weird if I didn’t.”

  A cluster of uniformed officers were coming toward them from the administrative buildings. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but two of them were the first men to look at her all day.

  “You should go.”

  “You do realize I am a timeless being of incredible untold power and not actually someone who takes orders from you, right?” Djinni smirked. The General gave them a serious look and they relented, turning on their heel to head back wherever they’d come from.

  The General squared her jaw as if bracing for something, an attack, another summoning from Remy or Negus. The uniformed officers met her gaze and saluted as they passed with no word but the conversation between them. She tried to relax but the sun was still too hot, the drums too loud. She couldn’t keep herself from checking corners and the lines of rooftops for eyes sent to watch her. If Djinni was right and the chatter was now about replacing her, moves were already being made.

  She smirked as she crossed the drill pad back toward her apartment. Thick jags of gold alloy filled widening cracks in the stone pathways she followed. They suggested to Daynja that the Boorhian Empire would always be able to repair whatever damage she inflicted in the name of saving the girl.

  Unless, of course, she dismantled it entirely.

  Her pulse quickened at the idea of conquering something worthwhile for once. Emperor Negus would be dissuaded from the attack on Eros. And when he inevitably refused, he and anyone else who chose to be in the way of her mission would be removed with Daynja Édo’s personal brand of violence.

  Including One.

  ∴

  Daynja still dreamed, just never the guilt-ridden nightmares expected of career murderers. If anything, her mind always returned to the ruins. She drifted off listening to her own breathing until the jungle sounds of her youth filled her mind, the drone of a million insects, leaves bothered by creeping things or distant breezes high overhead. The stars were always different through the holes in the thatched canopy her parents had built between crumbling pillars. She would lay where she could look through it. In her dreams she could almost feel her bony shoulders pressed against cold, gray stone, and smell heady jaboticaba and hearth.

  Sometimes she heard her parents. Their voices were indistinguishable from one another in her memories by now. They were frail; each ages older than they’d been the day before, their faces gaunt shadows bickering in whispers near the cooking fire. She had never known them young or in the kind of love Djinni’d described. She knew them as two people surviving with one destiny, too proud to beg for what they were increasingly too weak to steal.

  That was always the dream, little Daynja pretending to sleep beneath the canopy, watching her mother and father as living silhouettes before a crackling fire. Suddenly now though, she was lying on a mat of animal pelts with her head in her mother’s lap. Her view was of her mother’s bare feet at the bottom of a bright blue dress. They were dark and bony, nearly a century old, but clean. The toes tapped the air to some unheard rhythm. Ringed fingers with knuckles like knots ran the plaited rows of little Daynja’s scalp. This was a memory.

  “When will you die?” she heard herself say.

  “When you forget me,” her mother said. They had always spoken plainly of the curse.

  “Will it happen to me?”

  “Will what, meu amorzinho?”

  “The Old Magik,” she said. She looked up into her mother’s face. It was long and thin, the cheekbones sharp and brown eyes over-large in her skull. She kept a gold stud in her nose, and when she laughed, her teeth were still intact and bright. It was not hard to imagine she was lovely once.

  “No,” her mother smiled. “Even magical crones have mercy for children.”

  Daynja jolted awake to find it was night and gooseflesh trailed her arms. She was alone. Bundles of braided razor-sharp fuse line called spiderwire lay sc
attered and unspooled across the coffee table where she dozed off and left it. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her mother’s face in her dreams. Undoubtedly it had something to do with the Eros assignment.

  “Caralho,” she cursed quietly and drew a hand long over her face. She cursed again when she found her cachaça bottle had less than a finger left of the stuff in it. If she was going to sleep or find the creativity necessary to parse her plan, she would need to be lubricated. Outside her window, city lights still twinkled beyond the inner wall. Citadela was not asleep yet. There was still time to replenish her supply.

  It wasn’t expressly forbidden, but those who trained and worked within the inner walls rarely went out into the city. The romantic justification of course was that it was a distraction. Somehow engaging with the demilitarized world made one a weaker protector of it. That experience was sacrificed to make one a better soldier.

  The practical reason was that everything a soldier of Boorhia needed was already inside the walls and if you were training hard enough, you were too tired to venture beyond what was convenient at the end of the day. What wasn’t issued was requested and delivered by couriers. Meals were prepared by a small clutch of mediocre cooks and served and eaten in a dining hall at designated hours. It was mostly tough meat spiced beyond reason, an alternately watery or too-dry substrate, and an indistinguishable muddling of still more peppers and leafy greens. There was a library, a ball field, and enough down time and dark corners to sneak in clumsy, hormone-addled, adolescent trysts when needed.

  She relished how quiet it was on base when the drums were stopped. So quiet, in fact, she could hear herself being followed. It was a faint, sporadic sound that trailed her through the inner gate; a jostling of cobblestone to her rear first on the left, then the right. Someone walking regularly would have produced the noise more consistently. This was someone who had to stop to hide and pace themselves behind their mark.

  She donned a black straw farmer’s hat — its wide brim useful in hiding her face as she walked the streets — and wondered who Negus had found brazen enough to tail her.