They watched dog and horse jump up into the sky and become harder to see, until it was impossible to separate Ori and Shimny from their background, and Danny knew they had dissolved into Chromos. He felt a pang of loss, but there was warmth in his chest at the thought that Ori might go into Chromos and see for him. What a dog to have. What a friend.
He kept his eyes fixed on the spot where he had last seen a fragment of her, and waited for her to come back.
Danny couldn’t say how much time passed before they returned, only that the day grew old and the evening shadows lengthened, but the skies above the beach stayed clear. The light faded and his eyes grew tired, but he stared out toward the place where Ori and Shimny had disappeared, and he tried to imagine what might be happening to them.
Cath and Barshin roamed about the beach and brought him things to eat: raw seaweed that was so salty, it took the skin off his lips; glistening fleshy blobs excavated from their shells, which he swallowed down without examining. He didn’t want to know what they were. At least they filled his growling stomach.
And then, as he began to fear that night would fall and Ori would still be gone, the wind picked up and the waves leapt a little, and he saw a black-and-white leg appear in the low sky over the sea.
They landed in a swift rush, looming out of the air and surging toward him, and Danny put up his hands—to protect himself, to show his delight, or because he wanted to throw his arms around Ori, he didn’t know which—and Shimny came to a halt before him.
Ori leapt down from her back, tail wagging, pushing her head into Danny’s palm.
“Did you see it?” was all he could ask.
“Yes! Of course I did! I told you I would, didn’t I?”
“Where?” asked Danny. “Where, exactly?”
“There are some woods, not far from where you live. Emma wasn’t buried, but your parents scattered her ashes in a clearing, under a big oak tree. It is just out of town.…”
Danny knew where it was. The place he’d first seen Isbjin al-Orr. Of course.
It was a nature reserve he’d often visited with his parents. They’d never said anything about Emma being there, but they’d taken him for walks, shown him all the little paths and tracks that crisscrossed the small woodland, sat down with him to eat picnics in hidden clearings. It was the first place he’d thought of when he’d wanted to bury the stick, hoping somehow that it might be reclaimed by ordinary nature. And then he’d gone there to get the stick back and seen the stag in the silver moonlight, and everything had spiraled out of control again.
It was an enchanted place. A shadowed place.
Emma’s place.
“But it’s all the way back home,” he said, still slow with the wonder of remembering. “We can’t go back through Chromos because of the gray.… We’ll have to go on earth, and I don’t know the way, or even how far it is. Just that it’s very far.”
“But I can go through Chromos,” said Ori. “I can imagine it and steer Shimny there. Can’t you all sit on Shimny’s back with your eyes closed while I guide her?”
Danny frowned, looking at the horse. “It wouldn’t work—”
“Come on,” said Ori. “You thought it wouldn’t work last time, but it did, didn’t it? Couldn’t you put your trust in me? I’d save you from anything.”
“Maybe. But what about them?” Danny looked at Cath and Barshin. Terror plucked at his chest as he imagined setting off without Cath’s strength or Barshin’s wisdom.
“If you all could close your eyes and trust me,” said Ori, “then I think we’d do it. We all want to get there, don’t we?”
Danny turned to Cath. “Could you go through Chromos with your eyes closed?”
“Ah,” said Barshin. “You mean, like Orpheus in the underworld? Not to look, on pain of losing all that you most want? I could do it.”
“I asked Cath,” said Danny.
Cath was silent, gazing down at the sand. Danny wished he knew more about what she thought. She was strong enough to do anything. Why would she hesitate at this?
At last she looked out to sea. “I could,” she said. “I’d go even grayer. But I could do it.”
“Why would you go grayer?”
Cath rolled her eyes. “You’ll never get it,” she said. “Chromos is just a means to an end for you. For me, it’s the whole world.”
Danny wanted to argue with her, but there wasn’t time for anything now, except getting back to the woods and making the Book of Shadows work and setting Tom’s soul free. He clambered up onto Shimny’s back and helped the rest of them up. Ori sat at the front, between Shimny’s shoulders, and stared forward.
“Bury your face in me,” she advised Danny. “And Cath should put hers against Barshin’s fur.”
“We won’t be able to breathe,” said Danny.
“Perhaps that might be a good thing,” said Ori. “Perhaps, the less of Chromos you let into your senses, the less you’ll want to look at it.”
As they climbed up into the land of colors, Danny felt it singing to him, warm and green. Open your eyes, his heart said, beating strongly. Let yourself back into Chromos.
He pushed his face farther into Ori’s fur and concentrated on her earthy, greasy smell. Ori, he thought. Ori, my friend. I trust you, and I will not look.
Cath felt the wind stir into a great gale; it blew around her ears, tugging at her hair. Come and dance with me, it said. Come and run wild through the mountains.
No, she answered it miserably, her heart hard. Just when I thought there was nothing more for me to lose, they’ve taken the last bit of freedom from me. I’m not allowed to look at Chromos. This is as bad as the world can ever get.
But one day, the wind said, you’ll come back here and you’ll fly free forever.
And it let her go.
Night rolled over as they traveled and gave way to a pale, raw morning. As the last wisps of Chromos fled away, Shimny plodded back onto the Earth again and they arrived at the road that ran past the nature reserve. There were no cars about, only a few frozen birds and an edge of winter sun. They left Shimny at the gate and started up the narrow forest path.
Danny wasn’t thinking of Emma as he made his way toward the clearing. He was thinking of the first time he and Cath had been here together, when he’d persuaded Isbjin al-Orr and the doe Teilin to take them on their journey.
“Cold, ain’t it?” said Cath, rubbing her arms. She had her bundle of rags draped around her neck and shoulders, but she was shivering.
The last dead leaves clung to the branches of the trees. There wasn’t enough sunlight for shadows here; the weak, white day filtered gloomily through the treetops, and the woodland floor was silent.
Danny came into the clearing and looked around. It was just a space between some trees in a muddy little patch of tattered scrub. There was no sign of the hole he’d dug under the tree when he’d buried the stick, of course. The woodland had long since filled it in and pushed out all traces of him.
White sky. Mottled brown earth. Trees, lichens, mosses, fungi, and decaying leaves. No brightness, no darkness. Hardly the border between two worlds.
The four of them stood in the chilly wind. Even Ori’s luxurious coat looked shabby as the breeze picked at it. Her eyes were running; two teardrops of gummed-up hair dribbled toward her jowls. Barshin’s fur had faded again to a moth-eaten gray. Cath was filthy, her torn clothes long outgrown.
Danny took out the Book of Shadows and stood with it in his hand, waiting for something to happen.
Somewhere, in a distant corner of his mind, he heard Sammael laughing at him.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” sneered the jeering creature. “You can’t do anything by yourself. Pathetic.”
Except I can, thought Danny. Because I have a taro.
He took the stick from his pocket and laid it over the sailcloth cover. It was a natural, thoughtless gesture, and he wasn’t expecting anything to happen, but almost at once the stick lost its hardness
and sagged softly into the sailcloth, pressing itself into the material.
Danny crouched at the foot of the oak tree and placed the book on the ground. He put both hands on the stick and pressed. His fingers sank in, as if it were made of modeling clay. When he pulled them away, there were two rows of dents on the stick. He could mold it. It was asking him to make something else out of it.
And then he remembered. The cover of the Book of Storms had been a taro, hadn’t it? Sammael had hammered out a taro and wrapped it around the pages, and the book had given him the power to write Danny’s movements—to write him galloping along a hilltop on Shimny, to write them falling into a quarry.…
Now it’s my turn, thought Danny in grim delight. Now it’s my turn to write for him.
He stretched out the stick, smoothing it between his fingers. It never felt as if it would break, but it was a slow process, because sometimes it wanted to recoil from the stretching and contract back into its original shape. Then he would mutter a curse and remember what he was trying to do, and he’d stretch it out patiently again until it agreed to hold. He never looked up at the others, although he knew they were watching him.
At last, it was done. Stretched, the stick kept its brown, woody color, but when he wrapped it around the sailcloth, it went black. He didn’t have to untie the string of Cath’s hair and fix it on—it stuck by itself to the cloth, tucking itself neatly around the edges, holding to a square shape at the corners.
Danny held it, suddenly afraid of the quiet around him. Had he lost his power to speak to everything, by using the taro for something else?
“Ori?” he said.
“I’m here,” answered the dog, and he knew it was okay. He hadn’t lost anything. He had made something new.
And there was only one thought in his head.
“Where’s Sammael?” he said, looking up at Barshin. “I’m going to kill him.”
CHAPTER 15
PLAYING WITH SHADOWS
“The shadows,” said Barshin. “You have to stop the shadows first.”
“Right,” said Danny, and he opened the book, took Ida’s pencil from the remains of her notebook, and wrote, And then there were no more shadows.
The world vanished into scorching white light. Cath screamed: a horrible, deathly howl of pain, and before Danny could see what was happening to her, his vision disappeared, and he had to throw his arm around his face to shield it from the blinding whiteness and the burning heat, and he was struggling to breathe, gasping for cool air.
His shaking hands did the job for him—they scribbled out the words he’d just written, gouging a hole in the page, and fumbled out new words underneath.
The shadows came back.
The world sank into bleak normality. It happened quickly enough, but before he looked at his friends, Danny scribbled, Cath, Barshin, Ori, Danny, and Shimny were okay.
“Idiot,” said Cath. The familiarity of the word was oddly comforting. Danny didn’t disagree with her.
“Okay,” said Barshin. “I think we’ve established that whatever you just wrote, it wasn’t a good idea. What did you write?”
“Just that there weren’t any more shadows,” said Danny, his cheeks going red again. “I thought it’d know what I meant.”
“Idiot,” said Cath again. She rubbed her eyes.
“Quite,” said Barshin. “Apparently some shadows are necessary. They seem to filter the sunlight to a bearable level.”
Danny bit back a rude word and took a deep breath. He couldn’t argue with that.
“Okay,” he said, looking at the book lying like a slab of explosive in his hand. Then he put the pencil point down against its page once more. What could he try that wouldn’t do anyone any harm?
He wrote, A bluebird appeared—just because it was the first thing he could think of—and there it was in front of him, hopping over the woodland clearing. A bluebird.
It hopped twice and pecked at a fragment of something. A real, small bird the color of the sky in Chromos.
The book trembled in his hands, rough bark wriggling against his palms.
Use me, it said. I am yours. Use me. Don’t be afraid. Make the world again, exactly how you want it.
Danny stared at the bluebird for a moment longer. Then he readjusted his hold on the pencil and wrote, Tom’s soul found peace.
The air released a gentle puff of wind. Would it blow away the shadows?
They raced to the, he wrote, and then scribbled out They and replaced it: Cath, Barshin, Ori, Danny, and Shimny raced to the top of the hill, where they could—he saw with alarm that the page was starting to fill up and tried to keep his handwriting small—watch the town.
And they were racing—back to Shimny, dragging her with them—all five of them in crazy leaps and bounds across roads and fields, over hedges and around trees. Cath caught her foot on a stone wall and fell headfirst over it, grazing her face and hands. Barshin threw himself at a five-barred gate and misjudged its height, crashing against the top rail. Ori dodged a car and ran into a tree on the roadside, and Danny stumbled into an abandoned fridge, but they all got up again and ran on, couldn’t stop running, couldn’t think to slow down. Only Shimny kept her head low, lost in her dark misery, steadily plodding after the other four as they capered on.
Danny had written it, and it had to happen now. He kept tight hold of the pencil. He could stop them just by writing they stopped, but he was running too fast to write—he had written himself out of his own control.
Sammael would be laughing at me, he thought, as he hurdled a bench and dodged around the bus stop. But it’s only a small mistake. It won’t hurt me. I’ll get to the top of the hill, then I’ll watch the shadows clear from the town and know not to write myself into the story in the future. I’ll stay in control. The story will just be about Sammael, and how he dies.
He scrambled through a hedge, not feeling the hundreds of tiny thorns that raked his skin, and the top of the hill was in sight, and he looked forward to the view.
They came to a stumbling, scratched halt and stood together, looking down over the patchily shadowed town.
“Jeez,” gasped Cath, breathing hard. “What was that?”
Danny nodded. “Sorry. It was the book. It takes things kind of … literally.”
“Maybe be a bit more specific next time?” said Cath. “I mean, maybe just say fly, or something?”
Danny wanted to thrust the book at her and tell her she could do it herself if she knew so much better. But it was definitely his book. No one else could touch the taro. She was irritatingly right, though—flying would have been a much better idea. Danny had still been thinking in normal, practical terms.
But what did it matter? The shadows were about to disappear.
He stood and waited.
And waited.
The clouds stayed still.
The shadows stayed still.
Danny looked at the book to check. Yes, he had written it exactly as he’d thought—Tom’s soul found peace. But nothing was happening.
Perhaps Tom’s soul needed to collect up the shadows. Danny didn’t dare write anything specifically about shadows again.
He tried And all the effects of Tom’s torment were lifted from the earth.
Something happened to the breeze. It shifted, realigned itself, and Danny felt for a moment that he might be standing in the middle of an invisible game of Tetris, feeling the blocks tumbling and rearranging themselves around him.
But the clouds stayed, and the shadows stayed.
“Look!” Cath pointed toward the far horizon in the south, on the other side of the low valley. Clouds were bunching together in the distance—swooping, homing in on a fixed point. It was so far away that Danny knew they wouldn’t be in danger, but he shuddered nonetheless. There were farms on the other side of the valley. Houses. Villages. People. Animals.
“Ain’t you gonna stop them?” said Cath.
“I’m trying,” snapped Danny. “It’s not that easy.�
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“Just write that they stop, dumbo.”
Danny clenched his fist around the pencil. “You want to go blind again? No? Well, shut up, then.”
“Shut up yourself,” said Cath. “Just sort it out. You said you knew it was Tom.”
“It is,” said Danny. It took a strange effort to say the words, which made him wonder if he was doubting himself. He frowned. “At least, I think so.… It does sort of … feel … like it is.… Don’t you reckon?”
Cath’s face was drained and gray. She thought for a moment.
“I don’t know,” she said. “You said it was. Did you get it wrong?”
“No!” Danny flushed. “No, I can’t have! It must be him, I’m sure of it. I just haven’t found the right thing to write, that’s all.”
“Well, can’t you write him here in front of you, then ask him?”
An uneasy claw picked at the nape of Danny’s neck.
He ignored it. Of course! He could use the book to make Tom alive again! Then everything—completely everything—would be fine.
Tom, alive—!
He seized the edge of the book and wrote quickly, Tom came alive again.
The hillside stayed quiet as he scanned it eagerly for signs of Tom. The wind dropped.
And nothing came. Danny had a sudden vision of Tom stuck in the airless atmosphere of the ether, brought back to life and struggling to breathe.
He wrote on, rapidly. Tom was on the hillside with Danny.
The air around him lurched sideways, as though the Earth, sailing through space, had struck an iceberg. Before him, the sky thinned and changed color from white to peach, and then a figure was standing a few meters away, and Danny raised his eyes to it.
Tom.
Not Tom.
Horribly burned, his blond hair reduced to a few black strands across his scalp. His eyes were empty sockets, his body a withered skeleton. Tom had fallen into a fire.…
Danny couldn’t look. He closed his eyes and turned away as bile rose in his gut and a pain tore across his chest. Keeping his face averted, he tried to add to the sentence in the book. Something—anything—to get rid of whatever was standing in front of him.
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