Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(11)

No. But we do know about mind-stuff. We call it soul-light. With practice, some of us can learn to see it around other ityasaari, like a second self made of sunlight. I can reach out with mine a little; that’s how I talk to them. I send out a finger of fire, said Abdo, sending his real finger in a slow, dramatic arc to poke Lars in the stomach.

Lars, his lips moving as he read, swatted Abdo’s hand away.

Abdo gestured at Dame Okra with his head. Her light is spiny, like a hedgehog, but Lars’s is gentle and friendly.

I saw nothing around either of them, but I noted an omission. What about mine?

Abdo studied the air around my head, toying with one of his many hair knots. I see strands of light sticking out of your head like snakes, or umbilical cords, where we three—and others—are connected to you. Cords of our light. I don’t see your light, and I don’t know why.

Heat rose in my cheeks. My light was missing? What did that mean? Was I deficient? An anomaly even among anomalies?

Dame Okra interjected in a voice like a braying mule: “Might we all participate in this conversation? That requires it to be audible.” She paused, her scowl deepening. “No, don’t talk to me silently, you villain. I won’t tolerate it.” She glared at Abdo and waved a hand around her head as if fending off gnats.

“He says we’ve all got—” The word soul-light didn’t sit well with me; it smacked of religion, which brought me quickly to judgmental Saints. “Mind-fire. He can see it.”


Lars carefully folded Orma’s letter and placed it on the couch between us, shrugging his bulky shoulders. “I can’t do anythink special with my mindt, as far as I know, but I am heppy to be a bead if someone else is the string.”

“I’m sure that will be fine, Lars,” I said, nodding encouragingly. “Abdo or I will discover the way to thread through you.”

I don’t think you can reach out like that, Phina madamina, said Abdo.

“I’ve reached out with my mind before,” I said, more waspishly than I meant to. I had reached back into Jannoula’s mind; I suppressed that memory at once.

Recently? he said, pulling the neck of his tunic up over his mouth.

“Give me a minute to relax into it. I’ll show you,” I said, glaring at the little skeptic. I nestled into a corner of the couch, closed my eyes, and focused on my breathing. It took time, because Dame Okra snorted like a horse, and then Viridius kept tinkling away on the harpsichord until Lars stepped over and gently asked him to stop.

I finally found my garden, and then Loud Lad’s ravine in the middle of it. Loud Lad sat upon the lip of the chasm, as if waiting for me, a beatific smile on his round face. I prodded him to standing, and then concentrated on myself. I always imagined myself bodily present in the garden; I liked feeling the dewy grass between my toes. When I had tried this before—with Jannoula—I had needed to imagine that the grotesque and I were immaterial.

With effort, Loud Lad began to blur around the edges, then turn translucent in the middle. I could make out shapes through him. My own hands grew transparent, and when I was insubstantial enough, I stepped into Loud Lad to join my mind-stuff with his.

I passed through him as if he were fog. A second try gave the same result.

“It’s like trying to travel through a spyglass,” said a voice behind me in the garden. “If we could do that, I’d step through and visit the moon.”

I turned around to see Fruit Bat—Abdo’s double—animated by Abdo’s consciousness. He could speak in my garden, unhindered by his scaly throat; this was how he spoke in my mind.

“I’ve done this before,” I said.

“Yes, but your mind may have changed since then,” he said, his dark eyes solemn. “It has changed in the time I’ve known you. I walked out of this garden and into your wider mind once—do you remember?”

I did. I had been depressed, and then a door had appeared in the undifferentiated fog of … of the rest of my mind. He had stepped through to comfort me, but I’d taken him for a second Jannoula. “I made you promise to stay in the garden after that,” I said.

He nodded. “That’s not all you did. You took precautions. There used to be an Abdo-sized hole in the wall, but you bricked it up.”

Not intentionally, if so. The garden’s edge was in sight; I pointed crossly. “Bricked? It’s a woven willow fence.”

“Ah, madamina. I know you call this place a garden, but it doesn’t look like one to me. I see us confined to a narrow gatehouse, with no admittance to the castle of your larger mind.”

I looked around at the lush vegetation, the soaring blue sky, Loud Lad’s deep ravine. “That’s absurd,” I said, trying to laugh, but deeply confused. This place had been created by my imagination, of course, but was its appearance so subjective?

This wasn’t solving our mind-threading problem. “Even if I can’t reach out to Lars,” I said, “can you reach out and thread your mind-fire to mine? Make me a bead on the string?”

Abdo bit his lip and darted his gaze about. “Maybe,” he said slowly.

“Go ahead and try it,” I said.

There was a pause and then a blinding flash of pain, as if my head would split in two. I screamed—in my head? in the real world?—and scrabbled around the garden, looking for the egression gate. I found it and returned to myself, my throbbing head cradled in someone’s hands.