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

  Surrounding these sharp, bright pathways was a kind of haze of silver possibility shrouding the city, like a fog that crept in on little cat feet. I could enter that fog without harming the humans, though I sometimes wondered if even then little accidents might spread upon the wind—stubbed toes, lost coins, forgotten names. In some places—markets, crowded neighborhoods, the castle—the probability mist curdled thick, foaming with the mixed fortunes of a throng. In others—back alleys, quiet rich neighborhoods, graveyards—the mist was thinner, the futures less volatile. I sought such places when I could.

  There was another reason for preferring quiet retreats. Over the last few days, I was noticing a new factor: bubbles in the thickest parts of the fog, places where the possibilities were rent. The bubbles were slowly expanding like cracks in the clouds of chance. I didn’t know what to make of them, yet they made my hair rise.

  There were many such bubbles today.

  I blinked three times and banished my fatesight. I was nearing the Market, which was open late in anticipation of the festival, with bright stands sprawled across the hulks of old ships like flowers strewn amongst broken pots, and for all that I worried over humans I had to focus on what could hurt a cat.

  Scatterwind Market didn’t merely encompass dilapidated piers and boardwalk; it filled hundreds of wrecks crushed together like fish from a catch. I scrambled up the hull of the Dawn Zephyr, which lay on its side amid tidepools and muck, and from there leapt to the overturned hulk of the Grandiloquent, with its many market tents upon the keel. Sliding down its edge I boarded the Modest Compensation, a gigantic hulk split into two pieces, rope bridges thick between them.

  My target was the neighboring Boon Companion, a wreck of recent vintage. It had a more or less level orientation, with several bright-colored and rich-scented food stalls. There was a butcher there, one whom I’d visited before, and unlike his cohorts, his meat didn’t stink. I slunk in, batted my Blazon toward his feet, and stole a pheasant.

  “That cat!” roared the proprietor. “That benighted cat!” Other merchants shouted and commenced chase, while he himself stood back and quietly pocketed the coin.

  My pursuers, naturally, had no chance. Prize in mouth I bounded off, taking in turn the hulks of the Cloudrunner, the Deep Ending, and the Windthreader. The tricky part was protecting the humans as I veered around their world-lines. At last I ducked belowdecks on the Windthreader and followed a rat-path I knew well, through dark interstices where the day-lit hulks crushed against the deeper ships.

  Tru had read me the history. The Market’s pile-up began centuries ago in the great storm of 744 E.Y., when that ill-timed hurricane destroyed a victorious returning armada, and the resulting naval graveyard was long considered haunted. Flooding and engineering created the Hourglass Harbor while reeds and mud shrouded the old one.

  But, as if the dead ships held a fatal attraction for live ones, new vessels joined the originals every few years. At last the emperor, shrugging at old ghosts, declared a peculiar rehabilitation. Enterprising vendors strewed scaffolding and rope bridges across the wreckage, because only in Scatterwind could a business operate tax-free and away from official eyes. Thus humans flocked to this creaky place for the promise of bargain prices or disreputable wares.

  Down here amid planks and mud were skeletons of sailors still clutching their treasures. Sometimes adventurers excavated them, drawing the wrath of the merchants who needed the whole mad conglomeration stable. The risks were great and the rewards slim and I rarely noted any speculative archaeology in this spot. And yet...

  As I passed through the hold of the Heat Mirage into the belly of the Sickle Moon, I caught a scent and saw a glow, both disturbing and familiar. Red lights moved in hidden spaces far beneath my paws, a ship or two below me, where no human ever went.

  “You were not followed?” rose a voice I’d recently heard from a sewer grate.

  “Control your fear,” came a woman’s voice, rich and strong like salty waves. “I am unsuspected. Why did you ask to see me personally?”

  I hesitated. Yes, I had a mission. But I was curious. So kill me.

  “I require one last component. A book called the Nominus Umbra. Specifically, page 99.“

  “What? I know the Nominus Umbra. It is kept in the Northstar Tower of Castle Astrolabe, watched by constelletons and sealed in a dome of crystalized phlogiston. Even Underseers are not allowed to consult it, save with an Overgazer escort and tongs. To steal it—”

  “The whole book is unnecessary. Only page 99. You can burn the rest.”

  “If I singed even one corner of one page I’d be torn to pieces before I escaped the castle. And then they would punish me.”

  “Control your fear. I am collecting what I need for a diversion.“

  “You must cast the Dragonspark on Bloodsday, at the height of the Festival of Time’s Breaking. If you had been freer with your plans, Ruingift, I might have had agents in place.”

  “I have faith in your resourcefulness. The city is full of those who might profit from its destruction. In fact...” The one named Ruingift paused. “We are being watched.“

  I decided discretion was the better part of curiosity. I slowly padded through the darkness.

  A plank creaked.

  “Above,” said the one called Ruingift. “I will investigate.“

  Now I ran. Behind me something slithered and muscled through wreckage and muck. I scrambled through the maze of rubble separating the Sickle Moon from the Clean Getaway and from there burst through a portal onto a sunlit muddy bank. “I am a cat among cats,” I purred to myself, darting under the legs of a wine juggler on the boardwalk, escaping the market with my mouth full of pheasant, my ears full of shattering glass, my nose full of spilled Merlot.

  Tru’s family lived, you might say, in the very heel of the city.

  Foottown was peculiar even for Archaeopolis. Two hundred dwellings rose here, all in the shape of paired human feet. Foottown’s origin (as Tru had read to me) lay, or stood, with Emperor Garn, he who’d commissioned fifty-foot statues of himself and his Empress bestriding Archaeopolis’ eastern gate, glaring toward the frontier. Not content with dominating the land by day, Garn had his delven artisans fit the statues as watchtowers, with firelights crackling behind their stares. The flame-tenders dwelled in one foot of each statue, and the watchmen in the other. Not to be outdone, Garn’s daughter and heir Vame raised, just beyond the gate, statues of herself and her husband. These fit the original specifications except that the statues were fractionally taller. Garn’s grandson the Emperor Besk continued the tradition; he and Empress Krin were observed to rise a little higher than their predecessors.

  This pattern progressed for several generations, and the ever-changing city expanded to trail the statues, until the Emperor Vorg, facing three invasions, publicly denounced such wasteful monuments.

  That he was slain a week later by Mandrake Marauders was taken as a sign. The next sixty rulers raised statues tall and early.

  In the twilight of the Age of Emphatic Expansion, the needs of the far-flung provinces at last demanded economizing at home. Delven artisans were rejected, and increasingly flimsy materials went into ever-taller statues. Then came the great earthquake of 888 E.Y., which tore a gash in that district afterward known as Scarside. As buildings collapsed throughout Archaeopolis, the last and tallest pair of statues snapped backward at the ankles. They collided with their neighbors, which collided with their neighbors, and after the last crash had finally toppled the statue of Garn, the event became known as the Day of the Footless Emperors.

  Ever since, the east end of the city had been a poor district, rubble-strewn, never fully rebuilt—while Footside was itself a tolerable neighborhood cutting through two bad ones, though the housing was, it must be said, of modest footage.

  A family large as Tru’s might acquire, if lucky, two such foot-shaped houses, whose lost emperor had been demolished for materials long since. Tru’s had made theirs homey. Thatch
covered the hollow vestiges of legs, with a chimney poking up from the left shin. Laundry quivered on lines between sandaled stone feet. Dogs and chickens barked and clucked on the plot between. Seven human beings dwelled within the Emperor Vrul’s soles, four on the right, three on the left. They mostly slept in the toes. Tru herself, however, claimed the heel door, where she could communicate secret messages via clothesline to her little sister Dru.

  I knew eight-year-old Tru and seven-year-old Dru were holding the family together. As I approached, their mother and father were once again arguing about whatever adult humans argued about. (Lovefearmoneyworklusthope it could have been called, though humans tended to focus about only one aspect of that Great Worry Beast at one time.) Their noise echoed up a stovepipe. I neared Tru’s heel-door, watchful for humans.

  I dropped the pheasant outside, scratched on the wood, and slipped around behind the heel to wait. The door opened, and Tru appeared.

  Eight was of course a redoubtable age for cats (in those days I was three) but very young for a human. Her green eyes looked old, however—until she saw the pheasant. Then those eyes widened on her too-thin face, and a smile burst beneath them bright as sunlit rain, its breadth moving freckles like dark wheeling stars in a sepia sky. “Pepper! I know you’re out there. Thank you! Mama and Papa are fighting again. This will distract them. Wait! I’ll be back.”

  There were sounds within of surprise, fumbling speech, and grumbled apology. I padded closer, and Tru emerged.

  “Thank you, Pepper,” Tru said, sitting down and twitching her extended fingers. Now that Tru wasn’t moving, I could approach, nuzzle her fingers, curl up in her lap, and purr. I deigned to do these things.

  Being called ‘Pepper’ was neither fish nor fowl to me. Humans were always making up silly names. And here was a strange thing: being unable to talk could be soothing. Just now it allowed the notion that I was a simple kitten looking for warmth.

  The illusion couldn’t last. “Pepper, I know you can’t really understand. But it helps me to talk to you. I’m worried. My brother Zik is missing.”

  I stopped being a kitten. I perked my ears.

  Tru said, “People saw his gang? in Scarside, exploring old mansions. That was yesterday. They never came back.” She hugged me until it hurt, but I didn’t want to deny Tru her solace. At last I mewed my discomfort and Tru loosened her grip, saying, “Mom and Dad keep screaming at each other. I think they care more about who’s to blame than how to help Zik. It’s like when Vil died.”

  I went still as a drop of shadow. I remembered well when Vil died.

  “You were the only thing good about that day,” Tru was saying. “You and the Millers. That was the first day they loaned me a book.”

  I nuzzled Tru, wishing she’d change the subject and read one of those books again, about the city, about magic, about anything.

  “Mama says Papa’s been too hard on Zik since we lost Vil. Papa says Mama went too easy. I just want them both to shut up and look for him, but I’m just a child...”

  I wished I could say It will be all right. But I couldn’t communicate this idea, in which I had less than perfect certainty. So I mewed.

  When Tru was called inside, I slinked through Foottown and crossed a bridge into Bookside. I padded through alleys behind those shops where amateur mages find their spells, toward another district where few humans tread after dark. I wanted to get far from Foottown and the river and the thought of Vil’s death.

  I blinked away my fatesight as I passed into the Tombgreen. There were still very faint traces of silver in the air before the sight left me, remnants of mourners perhaps, or nearly imperceptible world-lines of mice and moths, or vestiges of ghosts. My presence couldn’t hurt anyone here. The mourners were long gone, the animals were little affected by my power, and ghosts were already about as unlucky as they could be.

  It was quiet. Dead-silent, vine-choked, dust-hushed, web-wrapped, stone-still. Peaceful.

  But quiet brought me no peace. Misfortune seemed everywhere—drought, hellsnouts, missing children. And I, creature of bad luck, felt somehow responsible for it all. What I wanted was to leap, scamper, chase, claw, pounce, grapple. I wanted to hunt without ever considering the effects of luckbane.

  I wanted to be pure cat.

  I climbed atop a tomb sculpted with visions of afterlives hopeful and otherwise. Up there was the last thing I wanted to see.

  It was another cat.

  Specifically, it was a meekbreed, an ordinary cat. A calico, healthy of body, but with a torn and badly healed ear. So... a feral cat but a frequently fed one, perhaps with several adopted human households. It hissed in the unsophisticated way of our mundane kin. “Go away,” the sound conveyed.

  “I wish only a corner of your domain,” I tried to explain.

  “Go away.”

  “I am most inoffensive and will be gone soon.”

  “Go away,” came the hiss.

  “I am bad luck!” I hissed back.

  The other cat, sensing in its sinew the truth of things, screeched and leapt off the tomb.

  “Yes,” I called after it. “Yes, run! For I am a black cat. I am unlucky, and that is all you need know. I am destruction with four legs and a tail and fangs. I need no friends.”

  I lay down. A moth landed beside my nose.

  “I am too dejected to eat you, O stupid and happy insect. Mock me, fluttery one.”

  In this melancholic mood I surveyed my city, the ancient and ruined, the thriving and splendid. My gaze settled upon the tower of the Underseers. While firelights appeared in other buildings of the Forum, this citadel’s windows shone with strange flickers of blue, red, purple, green. Within dwelled humans who did not fear black cats. There, amid musty grimoires and dripping alembics and singing skulls and talkative brains in jars, a cat could just be a cat. Albeit one who might know a spell or two.

  “Whiskerdoom,” I said, rising. “On reconsideration, brother, you have a deal.”

  I leapt to the hallowed ground. Once when I glanced behind me, I noted the moonlit moth meandering about the tomb, and the calico stalking it. I couldn’t shake the notion, just then, that the whole city was in the much the same peril as the moth.

  “Well...” said Whiskerdoom, at last emerging from behind the arcane cat door, “... met by moonlight, eh? By that I mean it’s late. I wasn’t planning for the switch, sister.”

  “It’s still the night before Moonsday,” I persisted. “It can’t be too late.”

  “In a wizard’s tower, arrangements must be made! I have prismspiders to contain, slinkrats to debrief, rafterghasts to feed. I must now do all this in haste, so you won’t be in a position to mess things up.”

  “Why, thank you. Then you will do it?”

  “I will do it, sister.” Now that I was actually interested, he made it sound like a magnanimous gift. “And of course I benefit as well. I will experience this city of ours as a real inhabitant sees it, not in passing along the way to beast-infested sewers or ghost-troubled houses.”

  “I am pleased for you, Whiskerdoom. There’s one more thing...”

  “No doubt.”

  “There’s an errand I myself couldn’t complete, that your vast talents might easily master.”

  “A cat appreciates flattery. Go on.”

  I told him of Tru’s brother, lost in Scarside.

  Whiskerdoom wrinkled his nose. “You have not promised anything to this Tru person, I hope?”

  “I can’t even talk to the humans, Whiskerdoom. You need spells for that.”

  “Ah, indeed.” Whiskerdoom twitched his tail. “Well, no doubt I can find him if I wish. Heh. That could be fun. A real adventure! And not as a mere servant!”

  “Thank you, brother.”

  “All right, all right. I can never refuse you! Well, I often can’t. Once in a while I can’t. But you must be wary, sister. I won’t have time to coach you. I will do my Moonsday morning chores now. Moonsday afternoons are taken up with naps, so you won’t
be expected to do anything but look elegantly sinister. I think you won’t mess that up.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  I gave him directions to Tru’s place, and he gave me quick instructions. I was at my liberty until dawn. Now that I’d done something about Tru’s brother, I decided to roam the city’s nighttime heart, in case I could detect any more signs of monsters, or of this Ruingift.

  This region was frequented by nobles and the rich (overlapping but distinct sets) but also by commoners enjoying the Forum and Coliseum. There weren’t many this late, however, and with care they could avoid cats and catastrophe. I strolled upon the edge of the Fountain of Shackled Seas (they’d cleared the fallen coach) wondering what it would be like to visit a place where my kind was some approximation of normal.

  “Good evening, my feline friend,” an old human’s voice interrupted my thoughts.

  I didn’t know how I’d missed him before. He was a grey-haired dark-brown man with a scarlet spattering of psoriasis like a topographic map of volcanoes. He had the deflated look of a big human gnawed thin by disease, and yet, as his toga-covered frame perched on the rim of the fountain, studying a set of cards laid out in solitaire fashion, there was an intensity to his eyes like the first crow to spot the corn.

  I recognized the human game as one called Treatment. Every card represented either an illness (demoniacal tittering fever, perhaps, or nasal crabs) or a medical procedure (e.g., crack of dawn screaming monkey surprise or bloodletting-and-nice-fresh-air.) The right combination of cards would let players eliminate their diseases, discard their hands, and escape the “hospital.”

  “I have seen you now and again,” the man continued, setting down a treatment (blindfolded medium-range acupuncture) that required two side-effect draws (intestinal monologue and peculiar luminous seepage.) “You had a hand—or paw—in the Forum’s recent excitement.”

  There was something wrong about all this, but I was too fascinated by the man and his game to slip away.

  “But there was only so much excitement, eh?” he said, eliminating mossy shingles by adding placebo pudding flambé to his treatment spread. “For you are the black cat who endeavors never to cross anyone’s path. The one with heart and conscience.” He was down to three cards now. “You realize that every chain of events can have the most wonderful, hideous, and outré results.”