Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(111)

I hoped Mitha couldn’t understand her. He gave no sign, and then we were interrupted by the arrival of several more quigutl. These were lab quigs, cleaner than their comrades in the pits. They came straight over, gabbling to each other, and began examining our clothes, tugging at the hem of my tunic and the cuffs of Brisi’s trousers.

“Porphyrian cotton,” said one knowledgeably. “That’s what we’re lacking, good fibrous plantth. I’m not keen on the ox hair or the bark. You see how fragile she ith?” She poked me in the face with a finger. “The bark would chafe.”

“How do they do thith?” said one, fingering the key pattern along the hemline.

“It’s called embroidery,” I said. His eye cones swiveled quizzically, and I realized the name didn’t explain anything. “You do it with a needle and floss.”

The quig reached into his mouth, down into his throat pouch, and pulled out an awl. “Needle. Like thith?”

“Finer. Sharper.”

“Hey,” cut in another quig, who’d been sniffing me rudely. “She’s a half-breed!”

The group oohed and aahed appreciatively, at which point Mitha decided the party was over and began to shoo them away. “Eskar is back,” he said as he shooed. “We have forty-eight hourth. There will be plenty of time to goggle over fabric later.”

“When we all go south!” cried a particularly small quig. Everyone hushed her.

“Thpread the word,” said Mitha. “Quietly.”

They scampered off. I exhaled; their close scrutiny had made me tense.

Mitha started up another corridor. He opened the door of an enormous room full of extremely noisy machinery; it was too loud to talk, but he made elaborate hand gestures at the quigs working inside, wordlessly communicating something. Eskar’s back, presumably. They all seemed to understand what that meant.

“The generator,” he said as he closed the door. The word meant nothing to me.

He brought Brisi and me to a quieter tunnel; the ceiling was even lower here, with hemispheric light fixtures, and we had to stoop. The walls were punctuated not with doors but with holes a foot off the ground; the air was damp and earthy. “Thith is the warren,” said Mitha, indicating the whole cheese-like network of holes. He walked on four legs now, his twiggy dorsal arms folded demurely against his back, sniffing around for the right hole. I was going to have to count.

“My nest,” he said, encouraging us to go inside. “You’ve been up all night, and I know you’re not nocturnal.”

Brisi and I crawled through the hole into a roughly circular room. The floor was lined with animal skins and dry leaves. There seemed to be no beds as such. Brisi slumped to the ground, exhausted. I handed her my bag to use as a pillow, and she took it gratefully. “I’ll be right back,” I whispered. “I need to ask Mitha something.”

She uttered no protest. She may already have been asleep.

I stuck my head out of the hole and hissed, “Mitha!” He was still in sight; he stopped and waited for me to waddle to him, like a duck. I bumped my head twice, not on the low rock ceiling but on the low-hanging hemispheric lights. “Eskar has ordered me to find someone, a particular prisoner.”

“We call them victimth,” he said. “But yeth, I can help you look.”

He led me out of the warren and up another service tunnel into a room full of … I guessed it was machinery. I saw a jungle of gleaming metallic vines and a peculiar slab of silvery ice nested into the facing wall. Mitha flopped onto his stomach on a quigutl stool, like a little ramp that led nowhere. From the tangle of silvery vines in front of him, Mitha pulled on a cluster of little cups and drew them toward him. Their wiry stems made them look like a bouquet of honeysuckle flowers. He stuck his claws in, one per flower, wiggled his fingers, and glowing writing appeared behind the ice.

It wasn’t ice but glass. I felt a little foolish.

I’d seen written Mootya in my mother’s memories—in fact, I’d seen my mother use a device called a note block. This seemed similar, but much larger.

“All right,” said Mitha, squinting at the panel. “Best do this now before we reroute all the power. Which victim are we looking up?”

“My uncle Orma,” I said. The word victim set my palms sweating. “Can you contact him with this, uh, machine?”

“No, no,” said the quig. “These are medical recordth. We can determine which cell he’th in, and whether they’ve made a mince of him yet.”

I clamped my lips tightly shut and let Mitha do whatever he was doing. His eye cones flitted back and forth as he read; impatient sparks crackled on the end of his tongue. At last he said, “He has an enormouth file, but no record of him being here.”

I’d braced for the worst, but this took me aback. “Could they have moved him to a different facility?”

One of Mitha’s eyes swiveled toward me. “I checked. He’th not at any Centhorial facility. Is that him?” He gestured toward the panel with one of his dorsal hands.

I gasped. Orma stared out as if from a window, his brows arched in mild curiosity. “What do you mean, he’s not here?” I cried. “He’s right there!”

“That’s a picture,” said Mitha. He tapped the glass; Orma didn’t blink.