Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(67)

“Nautical Porphyrian wasn’t difficult to pick up,” Ingar explained over dinner in the crowded sailors’ mess. He, Abdo, and I were crammed together at a side table, eating salt cod and mushy lentils off square plates. “Once I realized they said braixai where standard Porphyrian has brachas, it was a matter of substituting diphthongs and—”

“You have a facility with languages,” I said, impressed in spite of myself. His Goreddi had improved, his Samsamese accent melting away before my ears, even during our first conversation.

He turned pink to his scalp. “I’ve read a lot, in many languages. That gives me a basis for speaking, but I didn’t have the phonemes until I heard them.”

“But how did you learn to read so many languages?”

I pressed. He looked up from his lentils, his spectacles reflecting the lantern light. “I examined the words from all angles until they made sense. Isn’t that the usual way?”

For the first time in days, I cracked a grin; my face felt like it had forgotten how. The usual way? It was the daft, steep, unscalable way, and yet I felt like I was glimpsing the real Ingar, not Jannoula’s stooge. “Maybe you can help me with Porphyrian grammar,” I said. “I’m hopeless at—”

Abdo kicked me under the table. I’m teaching you Porphyrian!

Of course you are, I said, but I need all the help I can get.

Abdo crossed his arms and glared at me. Ingar, oblivious to the tension between his tablemates, said: “Let me guess: you gender only the most obvious nouns correctly, you confuse the dative with the ablative, and you are completely thrown by the optative.”

Abdo’s mouth fell open. It’s like he knows you! he cried, and then he was speaking in Ingar’s head, where I couldn’t hear. Ingar smiled benignly, occasionally answering aloud in Porphyrian. I could follow much of what he said; I was a good listener, if nothing else, and my vivid imagination helped fill the gaps in my comprehension.

Ingar’s enthusiasm began to curdle, however. His eyes dulled and his speech slowed and slurred. Alarmed, I glanced at Abdo, only to see him staring in rapt fascination at a spot just above Ingar’s head.

Ye gods, said Abdo. She’s pouring into his mind right now, filling him up like a jug. A big, empty jug.

I pushed back from the table reflexively. Ingar’s eyes unfocused and a docile smile rippled across his fleshy lips. I waited, tensed like a hare, but Ingar only blinked vaguely. What’s she doing? I asked Abdo. Is she not here to speak to me?

Abdo frowned. Not everything she does is about you. She’s been visiting Ingar for years. They must have their own things to talk about.

Ingar’s head drifted a little to one side, like butter melting in a pan. He sighed.

Abdo and I helped Ingar to his feet, draping his heavy arms across our shoulders. Our mismatched heights meant we propped Ingar at an angle; his head lolled downhill, toward Abdo. The sailors grinned knowingly as we passed, as if we were helping our drunken comrade to bed.





Ten days later, Porphyry finally came into view, gleaming like a pearl. The city had been built into two enormous bowl-shaped depressions in the side of a double-peaked mountain. The twin branches of the river Omiga rushed out from behind it, plunging to the sea in a series of cataracts on the west side and a single, terrifying fall to the east. As our ship passed the lighthouses and entered the harbor, I began to see dark columnar trees sticking up like fingers from private gardens. Gilded statuary glinted atop the alabaster domes of temples; colonnades and porticoes, built from the purplish marble that gave the city its name, cast dramatic shadows in the afternoon sun. The city climbed vertically, terraced like the seats of an amphitheater, the eyes of the buildings fixed upon some captivating nautical comedy in the harbor below.

At least I hoped we were a comedy. That seemed preferable to the alternative.

Porphyry was not, strictly speaking, part of the Southlands, and Porphyrians would have been insulted by the suggestion. Abdo had told me more than once that his people considered Ninys, Samsam, and Goredd a backwater. Porphyry was the southernmost city-state in a vast trading network that extended to the far north and across the western ocean to countries we’d only heard the vaguest rumor of: Ziziba, Fior, Tagi.

Porphyry’s twelve founding families—the Agogoi—had settled at the mouth of the Omiga River more than a thousand years ago, believing it a strategic position for controlling trade with the Southlands. They weren’t wrong, exactly, but it took a few centuries before the Southlands were fit to trade with.

The Southlands in those days comprised dozens of chieftaincies, warring with each other and preyed upon by the dragons from the northern mountains. Eight hundred years ago, the legendary Queen Belondweg united Goredd under one banner and drove the dragons back for the first time. It didn’t last; the dragons returned in force in the Great Wave.

That conflict ended with the Age of Saints, six hundred years ago, when Saints walked the Southlands and taught us to fight dragons more effectively. There followed a two-hundred-year lull, the Peace of St. Ogdo, during which Ninys and Samsam were established. The dragons, however, were only biding their time.

The last four centuries had cycled surges and restorations, war and incomplete peace. Comonot’s Treaty had brought the first real peace since St. Ogdo’s.

All that time, the Porphyrians had watched and waited, apart from our turmoil. They’d made peace with the dragons as soon as they’d landed and could not fathom why we did not do likewise—or why we had not sensibly settled somewhere dragons didn’t care to hunt. The Porphyrians traded intermittently with the chaotic south and more steadily with the distant north and west, and while this hadn’t made them wildly wealthy, they’d lived comfortably enough to dabble in philosophy and scholarship and culture.