Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(149)

I make my will a mirror, I chanted to myself. I make my wall a silver sphere.

I glanced up; nothing had changed, except that Jannoula was looking at me. I don’t know what I must have looked like to her. Nothing reflected or gleamed.

I had been a fool to think this could work. On the battlements, Jannoula crashed her fists together like she’d done during our talk on the tower. She was out of her mind, and I’d been out of my mind to imagine I could counter her.

I froze. Out of my mind.

Go into the cottage, go out of my mind. Those had been my ritual words when I fortified the Wee Cottage and banished her from my garden. Might I have inadvertently created yet another inside-out house? What if that door led out of my self-constructed fortress and into the world? The egress might have been right in front of me all along.

I closed my eyes and found my shriveled garden at once. I filled it like I filled my own skin. The cottage door loomed before me; its padlock crumbled to dust in my fist. I took a terrified breath, opened the door, and stepped through.

I was a thousand feet tall, a towering blaze, a column of fire extending to the sky. I saw everything: the limp, slender river; the trampled plains and rusty mountains; the war camps, full of beings who shone like stars; the city ablaze with humans and my kind. Even the dragons were lit up like bonfires. I saw cows and dogs and every squirrel in the forest. Did life glow like that? Had it always?

It was profoundly, unsettlingly right. I’d been dealing in shadows before.

Surfaces were no obstacle. I could discern Glisselda in the city, could see right to the heart of her. I saw Josquin in Segosh and Rodya and Hanse with the Samsamese, saw Orma in the seminary and Camba in the tower. Comonot, Eskar, and Mitha gleamed in the Tanamoot—how was it possible? Kiggs was with the city garrison, and I felt a pang for him, but not only for him. For the whole shining world.

Jannoula on the walls shone differently. She did not blaze forth from a single incandescent core; at her center was a deep, hollow emptiness, like a hole in the world.

I remembered that emptiness. I’d seen it firsthand.

Humans and dragons—everyone she had touched with word or deed—were linked to Jannoula with shining filaments. Some threads stretched to the Tanamoot. To my new eyes, she was a spider in a vast web; Abdo had described Blanche’s mind-fire filaments that way, yet this network was vaster, and the connections seemed to draw light toward Jannoula. The half-dragons, lined up beside her on the city wall, were more than simply hooked. They were grappled to her with bright bands as strong as iron.

It was in service of the void at her heart, this light being drawn from all directions. What she gave was nothing compared to what she took. That dread, sad emptiness drew me; if I looked too long, I feared, I might fall in.

She saw me, knew me, reached for me with tentacles of fire. I was already fire, but still they seared and burned and tore. She struck again, but I could not bear to strike back, not when she had such a hole at her heart.

Not when I suspected I’d helped create it.

She lashed and flailed; I bore her agony, took the pain into myself and diffused it. However much I absorbed, she had more for me. I began to weaken under her onslaught.

I see you, Phina! cried a familiar voice, and then another mind unfurled in the Queenswood: Abdo. He’d been invisible to me; now his mind bloomed and cavorted.

I’ve been trying to do this! he cried. That old grump under the swamp would not advise me, but I see what you’ve done.

I could have wept with relief, I was so glad to see him. But how could I hear him? I let you go, I said.

His entire being smiled fire. You did. But I did not let go of you.

He reached toward me, across miles, with a jet of flame; I reached and felt my strength renewed. Can we free everyone? he asked.

We began, tentatively, with the spider filaments closest to us; it was hard to direct our fire to such a fine task. The threads severed easily, glowing ends floating away in the bright air, but they were myriad, a dense netting all around us. The more lines we broke, the more we saw.

We should free the ityasaari, said Abdo. Some might be able to help us.

Jannoula heard us. Were our very minds open to the air now? “Keep back!” she shouted. “I will walk them off this wall!”

Abdo ignored her and reached toward the city with a fist of fire.

An ityasaari pitched off the battlements, screaming as he fell. Abdo and I reached convulsively to catch him, but he fell through our immaterial hands and shattered on the ground.

It was Nedouard. His light went out.

The loss reverberated through my being. All the light was my light.

Even the eerie glow in the north.

It was enormous.

I see you! I cried, addressing that glow. The earth shook, the tremor lasting seconds, then minutes. Pieces broke off the walls; trebuchets tumbled end over end; cauldrons of pyria burst into geysers of flame. My body fell down, and my mind reached out, despairing, for the people of my city and the ityasaari on the wall.

Jannoula held the ityasaari back from the edge; the tremor wasn’t her doing.

Behind the city something rose, its life so unbearably bright that I narrowed my mind’s eye and used my human eyes. It was a walking mountain covered in dirt and scrubby trees, black ooze pouring off it. As it walked around the city, pieces of swampland starting to cake off, it began to look like a monstrous man. The city walls came up to his waist; he moved like he’d forgotten how, or had rusted during his years underground. He seemed to be made of metal.