Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(114)

“I like fifths!” someone piped up. “The wavelengths are integer multipleth!”

“I like tritones!” cried someone else.

Mitha coughed up an ember, spat it on the floor, and began to intone:

O saar, beware!

Beware the horde,

The ones you never see.

We build your lairth,

Repair, invent,

We do all this for free.

You torch our hideth,

You crunch our boneth,

Kill with impunity.

But we are not Tho helpless now.

Our day cometh. We are free.



I stared dumbfounded, not merely because he’d come up with a poem that scanned and rhymed, but because the tune was so perfectly tuneless that I had no idea how to begin to play along. I couldn’t just play fifths because I couldn’t figure out what note he was singing. It wasn’t so much a particular note as a low, throaty rumble, but then there were shrill, whistling harmonics coming through his nose. It reminded me of Brasidas’s sinus-singing at the harbor market.

I worried whether the sound would carry through the tunnels, but the quigs weren’t worried, and they surely knew their mountain better than I did. I decided to shrill along with him. I sent up some experimental whistles. Around me the quigs murmured; it sounded approving, but I couldn’t tell for certain until they started keening along with us.

We produced the most unholy cacophony, like fighting tomcats or the blast furnaces of the Infernum. The music brought tears to my eyes, not because it was teeth-grindingly dissonant but because they were all so swept up by it. They reached for each other as they sang, with hands and tails—one wrapped around my ankle—and with their crooning notes. If I closed my eyes, I could hear what they were doing, tendrils of sound curling and responding to each other, like pea shoots spiraling around a stake. The stake was Mitha’s lyrics, the one steady point of reference. This was art, quigutl art, and in some oblique fashion it was what I’d been looking for, what Dame Okra had once mocked.

I’d found my people and they weren’t even mine.



It grew late. Nobody wanted to crawl back to the warrens, and quigutl etiquette apparently smiled upon sleeping wherever you happened to be. Some lay down, others piled on top of them, and everybody snored. I crawled over to where Brisi was sitting, hugging her knees. “How are you getting on?” I asked her in Porphyrian.

She shook her head slowly. “My parents said they were like rats: dirty, clever, thieving, and diseased. And I’m … I see there’s more to them, but I’m still uncomfortable here. Why would Eskar work with them? Not for pity. She knows nothing of that.”

It had made intuitive sense to me that Eskar would feel sorrow or outrage at the Censors’ treatment of Jannoula, Orma, or the quigutl—but Brisi was right. Eskar hadn’t felt any of that. “The thing about reason,” I said slowly, thinking of Comonot’s earlier explanation as I spoke, “is that there’s a geometry to it. It travels in a straight line, so slightly different beginnings can lead you to wildly divergent endpoints. I think Eskar must have begun from the position that all reasoning beings are equal.”

“Even if they smell?” said Brisi, yawning.

We found our own space on the floor. She quickly drifted off to sleep, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Eskar’s first principle. Was it provably true that reasoning beings were equal? It seemed more like a belief than a fact, even if I agreed with it. If you followed logic all the way back to its origin, did you inevitably end up at a point of illogic, an article of faith? Even an indisputable fact must be chosen as the place to start reasoning, given weight by a mind that believed in its worth.

At some point my mind gave up the fight, and by morning the quigs were all over me. I woke with someone’s tail wreathing my face and someone else half burrowed under my bum, but they’d left Brisi alone. The saar-quigutl distrust went both ways.

Today Eskar was to return with Comonot and the exiles, and the quigutl levels of the lab buzzed with anticipation. Mitha ordered quigs to their posts; everyone seemed to know where to go. He took Brisi and me with him to the Electrostatics Room, as he called it, where we would be least likely to get underfoot when the fighting started. “It’s going to be pitch-dark in many of the corridorth,” he said, strapping a portable lamp to my wrist. It cast a ghostly bluish light. “Most backup power is already disconnected. What’s left will run lightth. Even those will blink out after a while.”

The Electrostatics Room had a high ceiling; Brisi and I gratefully stood upright, stretching our aching backs. The room was full of rotating machinery, so noisy that Mitha had to stand on his hind legs and shout in my ear: “That’th the generator! It makes power for the lights and machineth.” He studied my face to see if I’d understood. I hadn’t. He said, “You humans make fine fabric and music, eh, but you’re lacking in natural philosophy. Everything is made of other, tiny things, and we make some of the smallest do work for us by bothering them with magnetth.”

Mitha swiveled one eye cone, which I was beginning to understand was a quigutl wink, and said, “There are worlds within worlds, Seraphina.”

He chirped to his fellows at the far end of the room, away from the generator, and grabbed Brisi and me and dragged us over. They were adjusting a large lens to focus on an image of the mountains. “The electronic eye,” said Mitha, as if that explained anything.