Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(9)

I chatted soothingly to each one, squeezed shoulders, kissed foreheads. I had never met them but felt we were old friends. They were as familiar as family.

I reached the sundial lawn, ringed by a rose garden, where Miss Fusspots presided. She was the third and final half-dragon I’d met so far, the Ninysh ambassadress to Goredd, Dame Okra Carmine. In my garden, her double crawled on hands and knees between the roses, digging up weeds before they had a chance to sprout. In life, Dame Okra had an idiosyncratic talent for premonition.

In life, she could also be a cranky, unpleasant person. That would be a potential hazard of gathering everyone together, I supposed. Some were surely difficult people, or had been hurt just struggling to survive. I passed the golden nest of Finch, an old man with a beaked face; he must have been stared at, scorned, threatened with harm. Would he be bitter? Would he be relieved to find a safe place at long last, a place where half-dragons could support each other and be free from fear?

I passed several Porphyrians in a row—the dark, slender, athletic twins, Nag and Nagini, who raced each other over three sand dunes; dignified, elderly Pelican Man, who I was convinced was a philosopher or an astronomer; winged Miserere, circling in the sky. Abdo had hinted that in Porphyry, ityasaari were considered children of Chakhon, a god, and were revered. Maybe the Porphyrians wouldn’t want to come?

Some of them might not, but I had a hunch some would. Abdo did not seem keen on the reverence, wrinkling his nose when he spoke of it, and I had firsthand knowledge that Master Smasher had not always had it easy.

I was approaching Master Smasher’s statuary meadow now, where eighty-four marble statues jutted out of the grass like crooked teeth. Most were missing parts—arms, heads, toes. Master Smasher, tall and statuesque himself, picked through the weeds, collecting broken pieces and reassembling them. He’d made a woman out of hands and a bull entirely of ears.

“That finger-swan is new, isn’t it?” I said, picking my way toward him. He didn’t answer; I’d have been alarmed if he had. Just being this close to him brought it back, though, the memory of the terrible day I’d first seen him, when I had still been seized by involuntary visions, before I’d built this garden and gotten them under control.

My vision-eye had opened upon a craggy mountaintop, high above the city of Porphyry, where a man pulled an oxcart loaded with crates up a stony track too steep for any sensible ox. His wiry shoulders strained, but he was stronger than he looked. Dust frosted his knotted hair; sweat soaked through his embroidered tunic. Through brush and bramble, around brutal lumps of rock, he labored up the rutted path. When the wagon would budge no further, he lifted the crates and carried them to the ruins of an ancient tower that ringed the summit like a crown. It took three trips to move six large crates; he balanced them upon the crumbling wall.

He wrenched each crate open with his bare hands and hurled them, one by one, into the open sky. The boxes tumbled end over end through the emptiness, shedding straw and glassware into the sunlight. I heard the gritty crush of glass, the sickening crack of shattering wood, and this handsome young man, behind it all, shouting in a language I didn’t know, with a rage and despair I knew too well.

When he’d finished breaking everything he’d brought, he stood upon the low wall and looked out over the city toward the horizon, where the sky kissed the violet sea. His lips moved, as if he were reciting a prayer. He stood unsteadily, lashed by the wind, and stared down the sheer mountain face at the glass shards winking invitingly in the sun.

In that instant, impossibly, I knew what he was thinking. He would throw himself down the mountain. His despair washed over me and led to desperation on my part. I was a floating vision-eye; he didn’t know I was there; I had no way to reach him; it couldn’t be done.

I tried because I had to. I reached toward him—with what?—and touched his face and said, Please live. Please.

He blinked like one waking from a dream and stepped back from the edge. He ran his hands over his hair, staggered to a corner of the old fort, and vomited. Then, his shoulders bent like an old man’s, he stumbled back down the mountain toward his cart.

Master Smasher looked so serene now, reconfiguring statues in my garden. I could have taken both his hands and induced a vision, peered down upon whatever he was up to in the real world, but I didn’t like to do it. It felt like spying.

I had never understood what had happened that day, how I’d been able to reach out, and it had never happened again. I could use my garden connection to speak to ityasaari I’d met in the real world, but not to the ones I hadn’t. I could only peer at them, as through a spyglass.

Weariness hit me. I hurried on, ready to get to the end and go to bed. I tended short-limbed, elderly Newt, who rolled contentedly in his muddy wallow among the bluebells; I said good night to widemouthed, shark-toothed Gargoyella, who sat by the Faceless Lady fountain, gargling the waters. I paused at the swamp to shake my head bemusedly at Pandowdy, the most monstrous of all, an armless, legless silver-scaled slug, big as a standing stone, who lurked under the muddy waters.

Pandowdy was one I wasn’t sure I wanted to find. How would I bring him back if I did? Roll him up a ramp onto a cart? Did he have eyes or ears so we could communicate? It had been hard enough to create this avatar in the garden; I’d had to wade right into the filthy water and lay my hands on his scaly skin, in lieu of taking his nonexistent hands. He’d been ice-cold, and pulsed horribly.