by Alyc Helms
The Lady moved past me, touching everything with her spider-leg fingers – a poster for Madoka, the back of the couch, the colorful quilt that Shimizu’s mother had made her last Christmas, a picture of mini-me, missing a tooth and wearing a crisp white gi, from the days before my grandfather had left.
“I was exploring the Gumshan and I noticed the kraben amassing. May I keep this?” Without waiting for my assent, she tucked the picture under her arm alongside the Maglite.
“The Gumshan?” I asked, surprised to hear the Chinese nickname for San Francisco on the lips of a creature from the Shadow Realms. I closed the refrigerator door. The Lady’s curious meandering and capricious hoarding had the odd effect of putting me at ease. She did remind me of Templeton.
“It is the name we give places like this where the Lung Di holds sway. Held sway. Until recently, nobody dared venture into such locations, but the Lung Di is gone, and his protections fade without his presence to sustain them. I am not the only one curious to see what lies on the other side of the forbidden.”
So the sigils thinning the veil might have allowed the Conclave knights to cross over, but until recently they’d been leery of intruding on Shadow Dragon territories. Was that how Mei Shen and David Tsung had learned about the attack? Was that what Mei Shen had been talking about that day on the bridge, her uncle’s protections unraveling?
But that raised the question – protections against what? “Are you with the Conclave, then?”
The lady paused in the act of sniffing a Nightmare Moon figurine. She carefully set it back among the other ponies. “No.”
Ah. Okay then. Definitely a mis-step, if that icy curtness was any indication. I picked up fallen junk – mail, pens, a coffee mug that had survived the impact with the floor. I’d need a brush and pan to catch all of Shimizu’s rhinestones. I swept them aside with my foot for later. “Do you know why they were here last night? In the Gumshan?”
“That is what I came to investigate. Whenever the Conclave amasses its forces, that bodes ill for the rest of us.” She stopped again at a listing, life-sized figure stashed in the corner behind the TV. Blue-white Christmas lights wound through an old lace bridal gown that Shimizu and I had rescued from Goodwill. We’d draped it on a headless frame of chicken wire and papier-mâché and bundled a cluster of red lights at the breast, blasting Florence + the Machine and giggling all the while over how utterly goff we were.
“May I keep this?”
Shimizu was going to kill me. “Uh. Sure.” I’d get her a replacement. “What did you find out?”
“The Conclave gathers power – artifacts like this manikin – so they might shape the Voidlands to their purpose.” The glass lights clinked and rattled against each other, and the papier-mâché creaked as the Lady struggled to pull the goff bride out of the corner. “Last night they acquired such an object.”
I went over to help her. She made a little noise of disappointment when the Christmas lights winked out.
“It needs a power source,” I said, holding up the plug I’d just pulled from the wall.
“Ah. Yes. I’ve encountered such before.” She tucked the bride under one arm and retrieved the Maglite and framed picture from where she’d dropped them on the couch.
“The Conclave, you said they succeeded?” I trailed her back toward my room.
“They usually do.”
“Should I be concerned about what they want this object for? The thing they stole?”
The Lady juggled her treasures to turn off my bedside lamp. The room sank into shadow except for the Maglite beam. Even that seemed dimmer than it had been a few minutes ago, as though it had run through its batteries even though they were fresh. “Lung Di was the power that held both the Voidlands and the Conclave in check. The Conclave feared him. Now they fear nothing. They are gathering power. That is cause enough for concern.” Christmas lights rattled as she hitched the sagging bride higher on her hip and flicked off the Maglite.
“Wait!” I held out a hand to stop her. I could feel the veil between this world and the Shadow Realms thinning, but it was none of my doing. Whatever this Lady was, she was more powerful than any Shadow Realms denizen I’d ever met. Not even the Conclave knights or Templeton had her kind of power. And yet even she seemed to fear the Conclave. “Maybe we can help each other. I don’t want the Conclave to go unchecked any more than you do. Is there some way I could call you if I wanted to talk?”
“You think I would give a shadow mage my name? You wish to summon me to a circle and bind me to obedience?”
I took a step back. I couldn’t see her at all now. The darkness that had crept into my bedroom was complete. But her voice shook with anger, and I felt that anger and darkness pressing down on me like the fins of the kraben. “No. I don’t know the first thing about summoning anything. I just want to keep the Conclave out of my world. Out of my home would be a nice start.”
“Ah. Then.” Something squealed like nails on chalkboard, loud enough that I covered my ears. Goosebumps washed over my skin. “That should serve.”
The darkness receded, leaving my room in a soft dimness that seemed as bright as a foggy day compared to the absolute blackness of before. I uncovered my ears and nervously stepped into that dimness so that I could reach the bedside lamp to turn it on.
On the wall above my headboard, the plaster had been scratched away in jagged clumps. Left behind were rough sigils oozing black in the center. They looked like the sort of thing a horror movie killer would leave over the bed of a dead roommate.
I nudged against the veil between realms, and it shoved back against me hard enough to make me stumble off-balance.
“Well, great.” The Lady had made my room safer from the Shadow Realms than just about any place in the city. I studied the oozing sigils. Shame I was never going to sleep in it again.
Six
The Road to Hell
I had the place mostly set to rights by the time Shimizu got home, which didn’t get me off the hook for explaining what had happened.
“How’d the date go?” I asked. Classic delaying tactic.
“And a swing and a miss. She spent the entire night talking about her primary and their agreements and how he’s totally cool with her dating women. I peaced out at the third mention of ‘clearing conversations’. I have no interest in your bi-curious bullshit.” Shimizu left her boots at the door and flopped on the couch, hugging her Totoro quilt close. “How hard can it be to find one good, old-fashioned femme in this city? No butches, no Asian fetishists. Just a nice, monogamy-minded princess. Is that too much to ask?”
“You’re too vanilla.”
She poked her head out from under the quilt. “I guess so. What’s with the redrum on the walls? And where’d Estelle go?”
I explained about the shadow attack and the Lady’s sigils, which I’d painted on the walls of every room, including Shimizu’s. Tomorrow I’d hit Home Depot and do the rest of the house.
My explanation of the sigils and Estelle the Goff Bride’s fate led to longer explanations about the attack on the Academy and the ongoing threat that lurked in our closets and cupboards, under our beds – any place that held shadows – now that fear of Lung Di wasn’t holding everyone back. We decided that, sigils aside, we both felt safer that night sleeping on the couch with our feet in each other’s faces and Totoro shielding us from danger.
We were woken in the early morning hours by an earthquake. Just a baby tremblor, barely cracked a 4.0 and only toppled a few of the figurines. Even Shimizu had trouble mustering her usual diatribes about how the ground wasn’t supposed to be a thing that moved and how she was heading back to Iowa before the Big One hit. But the quake reminded me of one thing I hadn’t told her: Mei Shen and her nebulous warnings about some greater threat that I was being deliberately oblivious to. I decided to refrain from sending Shimizu into a Big One panic until I had more evidence that there was something to panic about.
Which explained the depths of my foul moo
d that afternoon when I strode up the central staircase of Berkeley’s Anthropology building. I had a crick in my neck, my back ached, and not even a double shot of concentrated matcha had been enough to chase away the stripped raw feeling of being overtired. I’d only had a few hours’ sleep after a day and a half of being up. Such adventures tended to leave me grumpy these days.
Saturday at the start of the summer term meant the halls were mostly empty, but what traffic there was cleared as I strode through. Whispers followed in my wake: Is that…? and Oh my god, it is! and You know, his whole thing with China is deeply problematic… and Jesus, he’s hot for an old guy…
The walk-by commentary only increased my irritation. I deepened the shadows around my face and loomed, a little blot of peeved darkness, in the doorway of the office of Abigail Trent. The Antiquarian.
Abby.
“I didn’t know you taught here,” I said when she didn’t immediately notice my looming.
Abby looked up from the legal pad she was scrawling notes on. Her braid was fighting a futile battle to contain her hair. She had a set of half-moon reading spectacles perched on her nose and let them drop to the end of a chain around her neck as she stood. Her blue work shirt was rumpled and her khakis had creases from sitting in an un-airconditioned office all day.
“Visiting lecturer. Year-long appointment. I’m still moving in.” She gestured at the bookshelves lining the walls, dusty but mostly empty, and the stacks of boxes forming a wall behind her and blotting out most of the light from the windows. She shifted her weight to one hip and back to the other, and it took me a moment to realize she was fidgeting. Abby, one of the most rock-solid women I knew. “About the other night…”
I waited for her to continue, but Abby seemed determined to run through every way to begin to say something before she arrived at the actual saying of the thing.
“Might I sit down?” I asked, because my hip flexors were starting to twinge again.
“Oh. Yeah. Just move that junk to the floor.”
I relocated the pile of papers as she’d suggested and sat in a slat-backed chair I was fair certain had been designed as a torture device for students. Perhaps I should have remained standing. “Why don’t we start with an explanation of how Asha escaped, and we can work from there?”
Abby’s shoulders sagged on a sigh. “Right.” She dug in the top drawer of her desk and pulled out a lump of folded fabric. Tossing it to me, she crossed to the door to close it.
I unwrapped the lump and lifted the silver lapel pin that was inside. “This isn’t an explanation.”
“The explanation is coming.” Abby returned to the front of her desk, half-leaning, half-sitting. I had to crane my neck to watch her face, which improved my mood not one whit. “That’s how Asha escaped. She reverted to her true form and fled through that.”
“Her true form.” I recalled the smoke. “Which would make her…?”
“She’s one of the Djinn. A djinni.”
“As in ‘I Dream of…?’” I asked.
Abby snorted and picked at a nick on the edge of the desk. “Not even remotely. Except for the smoke thing.”
I took several careful breaths, giving myself time to process. It wasn’t that difficult. Some of my best friends weren’t exactly human. “How did she get away?”
“Djinni are similar to your shadow creatures. They’re from a realm of elements – Alam al-Jinn – but everything’s out of whack there. It’s all fire these days, and the Djinn can’t remain there long. Most of them have moved into small enclaves in the Shadow Realms. It’s more bearable than Alam al-Jinn and easier to shape than this world.”
“Asha doesn’t seem to have much difficulty navigating this world,” I said, turning the silver pin over in my hand. She’d made sure that everyone had one. Why? I held up the pin. “And that still doesn’t explain how she got away.”
“Not even the Djinn can handle the fires of Alam al-Jinn for long, but they can still travel through it, like you do with shadows.” She nodded at the pin. “They get there through unalloyed metal.”
“Unalloyed metal?” I tapped the pin.
“Silver, gold, platinum, copper, iron, tin. Those are the most common.”
“No metal content is entirely pure.”
“No, but the higher the alloy content, the harder it is for a djinni to use it for travel. There used to be entire branches of alchemical study backed by the Djinn, pursued by the Djinn, to try to determine the exact cutoff and figure out ways to create purer metals for safer travel.”
I set the pin down on the edge of the desk. “Why does that matter?”
Abby went to the stack of boxes and pulled the top one onto her desk. She began unloading its contents. I recognized a polished copper knob the size of a baseball with a cylindrical hole bored through it – the banister fixture that had gotten me shot. The other objects – all metal – could have been from anywhere.
“The impurities in a metal build up a resonance when a djinni passes through it. Like an afterimage. If a djinni uses the same object too often, or if the impurity content is too high, a djinni can get trapped.”
“And from there we get the legends of the slave of the lamp?”
“Exactly. At least some of that alchemical research was dedicated to looking into how to free a djinni from that sort of imprisonment.” She set aside the empty box and surveyed the jumbled array of artifacts. “There’s no record of anyone succeeding. Most of the Djinn tend to limit travel between realms to avoid becoming trapped. Asha is different.”
I picked up a gold bathroom faucet that looked like it had been ripped from its mooring. “These are all things she’s traveled through?”
“She’s careful.” Abby nodded at the silver Kestrel pin. “She sets up escape routes beforehand. Never carries anything on her. Never uses the same object more than once.”
The faucet clunked when I set it back on the desk. All of Abby’s attention was on the artifacts she’d collected. “What’s your connection to her? What was she doing at the Academy? And why did you blame me for her escape?” I waved a hand at the scattered artifacts. “How could I possibly have known any of this?”
“I was pissed. And I’m sorry.” Abby rubbed her face, ran her fingers through her hair, which caused a few more witch curls to spring free. “I’m not exactly rational where Asha is concerned. But I think – Argent thinks – she was telling the truth for once. She’s a lone operator. A… liberator of antiquities, is how she puts it.”
“A thief?”
Abby fell back into her chair, arms crossed, lips twisted into something between a grimace and a grin. “And when she isn’t stealing for private collectors or sorcery consortiums, she does pro-bono work for indigenous groups. She succeeds where repatriation fails just often enough to be really annoying.”
“So the other night was…?”
“Not a part of her pro-bono work. Just a failed theft.”
I thought back to the Lady’s words. “Asha may have failed. The Conclave didn’t.”
The chair creaked as Abby leaned forward, hands braced on the desk. “You know about that? How do you know about that?”
“I have my sources.”
“Do you know what they took?”
Pretending knowledge would gain me nothing. “No. Does Argent?”
Abby stood and started packing her collection back in its box. “It’s why I asked you to meet me. They did manage to take… something. Highly experimental. Potentially dangerous.”
“What did they take?”
Abby chewed her lip and toyed with the little Kestrel pin. “I really can’t say. It’s proprietary information that–”
“The Conclave doesn’t much care about the real world, which means if they took something, it’s to do with problems in the Shadow Realms. That concerns me more than Argent’s loss.” I stood as if to leave, mostly so I could meet her eyes without craning my neck, but it had the added benefit of an implied threat. “If you want my help,
you’ll tell me what they took.”
“Wait!” Abby reached to halt me, even though I hadn’t made a move towards the door. “Argent was working on a more efficient titanium extraction process using thorium, and we ended up stumbling onto a more efficient thorium fuel cycle instead. One that could be safely miniaturized and…” She sighed at what was probably my expression of utter bafflement. “Basically, we made a mini nuclear reactor. A power source of immense potential energy.”
Power. Energy. Yes, given my meeting with the Lady and my experiences that anything with a battery died a quick death in the Shadow Realms, I could begin to see why the Conclave might want something like that. Just as I could see why I might not want them to have a nuclear reactor, miniature or not. “I thought you said everything on display was dismantled.”
“I was wrong. Argent wants your assistance in retrieving our stolen tech from the Conclave.”
“And how do they suggest we do that?”
Abby held up the pin. “We recruit a thief.”
* * *
“I have spent half my life hunting this woman. You are insane if you think a summoning ritual is going to work.” Abby slammed her fists on the conference room table and stood to loom over the rest of us. She turned to Sadakat, who’d stopped tapping away at her tablet to look up in surprise at Abby’s outburst. “There’s a substantial Djinn enclave in the Shadow Realms near Pakistan. We need to go there.”
“You know why we can’t go there,” Sadakat said softly. They glared at each other for several moments, neither woman looking as though she intended to back down.
“Pardon me,” I said into the sullen silence that followed. “But I do not know why we can’t go there.”
Sadakat’s brows furrowed. She seemed to frown at me rather a lot. “Where do I start, Mr Masters? We have no permission from the government and are not likely to get it. The entire region is unstable. Not even Argent has the pull necessary to get you there in a timely manner or to support you on the ground. And let me not even bring up Professor Trent’s insistence on traveling with firearms.”
