Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(77)

I assumed Pende himself wouldn’t come, that I’d found my second Od Fredricka, though with considerably more power to resist Jannoula’s moving him by force.

We emerged onto the temple steps, facing a glorious sunset across the Zokalaa. The thinning crowds, rushing home to dinner, cast long shadows against the gold-glazed paving stones.

Camba had bent her long neck down to Ingar’s level and was muttering in his ear. “Do you feel the breeze on your face?” I heard her say. “That’s yours, and worth feeling. Look at those orange clouds. All the trials of a day may be endured if you know there’s such a sky at the end of it. Some days I told my heart to wait, just wait, because the sunset would teach me again that my pain was nothing compared with the eternal, circling sky.”

It was a dazzling sky, I had to admit, with clouds layered like wisps of pink and purple silk. Behind us, the blue deepened to black; the stars awakened.

“At last you see it with your eyes and no other’s,” said Camba, her own eyes shining. “It may feel overpowering and unbearable, but I am here to help you bear it.”

I was touched by her words; I hoped Ingar was, too, but he seemed too shocked to take in very much. I didn’t like to interrupt, but I needed to get him back to Naia’s. Camba spoke first, however, looking across at me: “When do you return to the Southlands?”

“In about two weeks, when friends come to fetch us back.” I meant Kiggs and Comonot; I wasn’t sure whether their coming was a secret.

Ingar groaned and sagged, his knees buckling; Camba’s circling arm kept him upright. “Two weeks isn’t much time for rehabilitation,” she said, her voice thoughtful and low. “Ingar needs help during these next days. He will feel lost without Jannoula at first, and he may invite her in again.”

I studied Ingar’s vacant eyes. “Abdo said Jannoula puts a hook in people; Pende phrased it the same way, ‘unhooking her from his mind.’ So why is Ingar so … empty?”

Camba smiled unexpectedly and gazed at Ingar almost fondly. “I’ve never seen such a deflated bladder; there’s barely enough Ingar-light to fill him up. Jannoula steals your mind, if you allow it. Her hook can be the roots of a tree, or a tapeworm, winding through you, sucking your soul-light away. She takes without giving, but she’s convinced him that he likes it, or deserves it.”

Camba’s eyes turned sad in the dwindling light. “Would … would you permit me to take him home and oversee his care? You’ve never had Jannoula forcibly stripped from your mind. I know what it’s like.”


I nodded solemnly, not wishing to seem too eager to be rid of him. Something else had struck me, however, a familiar huskiness in Camba’s voice. I knew her voice, I suddenly realized, but from where? Not from my visions. I said, “Camba, you’re ityasaari, and yet I’ve never seen you.”

With her free hand, Camba demurely raised the hem of her diaphanous dress, just enough to reveal a band of silver scales around each knee, distinctively half dragon.

That removed all doubts, if I’d had any. “In visions, I mean,” I said. “My mind reached out to others—before I stopped it—but not to you.”

Camba drew herself up to her full height; the gibbous moon was rising behind her towering hair. “You reached out to me. You even spoke. I recognize your voice.”

“Now I know you’re mistaken,” I said. “Only two ityasaari ever heard me speak, Jannoula and—”

“A person on the mountaintop, throwing crates and screaming,” she said, pointing north at the double peak looming over the city. “I looked different then. I was born into a masculine body, and I had misgendered myself.”

I had known the voice and hadn’t believed my ears. She was in my garden after all. I racked my brains for the Porphyrian verb Abdo had taught me, a polite inquiry that didn’t even exist in the Southlands. “How may I pronoun you?” I hazarded.

Camba smiled warmly and inclined her stately head. “I pronoun myself emergent feminine,” she said in Porphyrian, then added in my native tongue, “Or I do now, at last. On my Day of Determination, I declared myself naive masculine. I was already ityasaari; it embarrassed me to be even more complicated than that.”

She led Ingar down the temple steps and bundled him into her waiting litter. I studied her movements, looking for something that recalled that vision, the day she’d been ready to die. It was hard to see beyond the jewelry, hair, and saffron draperies, but suddenly the sunset glazed her bare shoulders a burnt orange, and I recognized in the strength and sureness of her limbs the echo of a person I’d once seen, a harmonic that I’d mistaken for the fundamental.

She was the one whose despair I’d felt, whom I’d reached out to in empathy. In my garden she lived in the statuary meadow, and I’d called her Master Smasher.





I walked back to Naia’s, lost in my memory of that vision, and then lost in fact. Porphyry became a labyrinth after sunset. It should have been a simple proposition to find Naia’s again: the harbor was downhill, and east was to the right along the shoreline. Porphyry, alas, was all dead ends and cul-de-sacs and nonplanar geometries. Three rights didn’t make a left. I began to fear that I would meet myself coming from the other direction.

I finally made it back, and up four flights of stairs. Naia had left a lamp burning. She was asleep on the couch, wrapped in a cobwebby shawl, her cheek pressed into the pillow I’d given her. I extinguished the lamp, and she didn’t stir.