Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(19)

I decided to take it as a propitious sign.

Still, Finch was a needle in a city-sized haystack. From his mask and leather apron, I knew him for a plague doctor; in visions I usually glimpsed him in sickrooms or down alleys, trapping rats. My vision-eye couldn’t stray far from the ityasaari I was observing; it was hard to know where those sickrooms were.

And it would be hard for me to ask. I didn’t speak Ninysh, due to a peculiarity of my upbringing. My stepmother, Anne-Marie, came from the notorious Belgioso family, exiled from Ninys for a variety of crimes. My dragon mother had not been public knowledge, and Papa was anxious to keep it that way; his dastardly in-laws surely would have blackmailed him had they but known. My tutors were to teach me Samsamese and Porphyrian, but no Ninysh. I’m not sure what Papa thought—perhaps that a wily old Belgioso auntie could trick me more easily in her own tongue? My stepmother’s generation were all native Goreddi speakers. Whatever Papa’s motives, I had no Ninysh. I was not so enamored of grammar that I’d gone looking for it.

I hoped Abdo’s ability to see mind-fire might make up for my language deficit—maybe he might spot Finch across a crowded plaza or down an alley. We skipped the shiny parts of town in favor of more workaday neighborhoods, where brewers’ vats gusted hops-scented steam, wood turners swept sawdust into mounds, mules brayed, tanners scraped hair off stretched cowhides, and butchers washed blood off the abattoir floors, pushing it into the gutter with flat brooms. Neither Abdo nor I saw the first sign of Finch.

I did manage—through drawings and gestures—to find a hospital, but it was a facility for the well-to-do. An attendant nun who spoke some Goreddi turned up her nose when I asked about plague houses. “Not in the city,” she said, looking scandalized.

It wasn’t until the third morning that Abdo caught my arm and pointed out a space between two half-timbered shop fronts, a dark slit from which emanated a sigh of decay. I saw a glimmer, very faint. Through the buildings. It’s gone now, but we should follow it, he said, his eyes bright, almost as excited as he’d been to see the cathedral. I stuck my head into the darkness, where a stair curled down into shadow. Hand in hand, we descended the slick steps and passed through a dank culvert, into the streets behind the streets, the grim warrens of the very poor.

The alley was narrow, unpaved, and dark. Chamber pots might be emptied onto streets all over town—that was part of city life in the Southlands—but the city didn’t hire anyone to wash the streets in this neighborhood. Everything clumped together in an open sewer down the middle. I hesitated, worried about bringing Abdo here, but he seemed not frightened in the least. He walked ahead of me, prudently skirting puddles and piles of rags. The piles bestirred themselves and stretched gnarled hands toward him, palms up, wordlessly begging.

Abdo dug a hand into his shirt, where he kept his purse on a cord around his neck. Does Goreddi coin spend here? he asked. That’s all I’ve got.

“I’m sure it will,” I said, hastening after him. Needy hands plucked at my skirts. It surely wasn’t safe to flash coins, even Goreddi copper, in a place like this. I let Abdo pass out a handful, and then shepherded him along. “Do you see the mind-fire down here?”

Abdo started forward again, craning his neck and squinting. At last he cried, I do! He pointed at a rickety timber structure. Through that building.

“He’s inside the building?” I asked, incredulous. I’d had no idea this light, invisible to me, could shine so brightly.

Abdo shrugged. Moving behind it, more like.

We circled the building to the east, then Abdo said, No, this way. He’s moving west. I followed him down a cluttered alley that reeked of old onions; it began westwardly but soon veered south.

This is wrong, he said. I can see his light through walls, but not what road he’s on. It’s like a maze, and we’re in the wrong part.

Several dead ends later, we emerged into a broader dirt lane and saw, far ahead, a figure in a long leather apron and broad-brimmed hat, walking away from us. Abdo grabbed at my hand excitedly and pointed. That’s him! We hurried, our feet splashing in the drainage ditch, skidding on filth. This was the very edge of the city, where the country began creeping in; we dodged a pig in the road and navigated a flock of complaining chickens. A mule, piled high with bundled twigs, obscured my view, but I cleared it in time to see our man duck down a stairwell and into the basement of a crumbling church.

Of course. No one would waste hospital beds on plague victims.

I reached the peeling door just as the latchstring was being pulled back through the hole. I grabbed at it, getting only a knot burn for my trouble.

His shimmer is directly behind the door, said Abdo, tracing an outline on the splintery wood.

I knocked, but there was no answer. I put my eye to the latch hole and peered into a dim crypt. Straw pallets littered the floor between the blocky priests’ tombs and the thick support columns. Upon each pallet lay a wrecked being, neck and eyes swollen, fingers curled into gangrenous fists. Nuns—Sisters of St. Loola, by their yellow habits—picked their way gingerly among the dying, administering water or poppy tears.

Only now did the groans reach me, and the cadaverous stench.

Finch yanked open the door, and I nearly fell inside. A terrible beaked face glared at me with big glassy eyes; it was a sackcloth plague mask, the eyeholes set with lenses, the bulging leather beak stuffed with medicinal herbs to filter bad vapors. His leather apron was spattered and his gloves stained; his eyes, behind the glass lenses, were startlingly blue—and kind. He spoke in muffled Ninysh.