THE SHADE WHO FOLLOWS

I slept for nineteen hours.

When I woke it was night again. Someone had laid my coat over me. Someone had cleaned the burns on my palms with a strip of cloth and bound them, neatly, with a precision that told me the someone had done it before, in worse places. Nimbus lay in the curve of my stomach with his splinted wing stretched out, snoring in a thin delicate whistle that he would have denied under oath.

The Warlord sat on the floor of the chamber, ten feet away, with his back against the black glass and his right hand lying open on his knee.

He did not look at me when I stirred. He was looking at the chains.

"Eight," he said. "Eight left. The ninth draws on me at a rate of a drop a minute. The others hold. I can lift one arm, and I can speak as I like, and I can stand for as long as I wish. But I cannot cast. I cannot leave." He said it without bitterness. "I had hoped you might be quicker."

"I nearly died."

"You did not nearly die. You nearly fainted. There is a difference, which I will teach you." His tone was dry. "The second chain was the weakest. The third and fourth will take a day each, the fifth three, and the keystone—" He considered. "The keystone will take a season. And you will need to be a different person to unpick it."

"Then I will become one."

"Yes. I thought you might say that." He turned his head and gave me a long look. "That brings us to the difficulty."

I sat up, wincing.

"I cannot leave," said Declan. "You, I take it, must. You have a Gauntlet to win and a Chancellor to avoid, and a very great many things to burn. You cannot sit in this room unpicking my chains for a year. And yet you cannot do what you must without my training, because you are about to walk into a country of people who will murder you, and you do not yet know how to fight."

"I know how to fight."

"You know how to survive. They are not the same, and the world is about to teach you why." The gray eyes were pitiless. "You are a clever child with a good memory and a talent for ambush. It has taken you this far. It will not take you to Gold."

I did not argue. I had already come to the same conclusion, privately, on the stairs.

"What do you propose?"

"A Shade."

…

I had read of such things. They were in the margins of the Doctrine, now lodged in my head like a second set of memories. A Soul Shade: a fragment of a mage's consciousness, pared off and sent out, a leaf from a tree. A shade could see through its own eyes, speak with its own voice, and learn what it learned. It could not touch. It could not cast. It was a ghost with a mind, bound by a thread to the body that had made it.

"You can do that," I said, "in your condition."

"I can do a good deal in my condition. I can do rather more than the Senate suspects." He lifted his free hand and turned it. In the dim light a small gray flame sprang up above the palm, no larger than a candle's, and burned there without heat. "A Shade will not be me. It will be perhaps a tenth. But it will be enough to teach, to watch, and to hold a conversation. It will go where you go. I will see what it sees. And I will give you what I can, which is more than you have."

"And in exchange?"

"In exchange I get out of this cell." He smiled thinly. "In a manner of speaking. You will not understand how long it has been. Forty years in the dark. I would like to see a sky. Even through a borrowed eye."

I considered it. I looked at the flame. It was an odd color, neither gray nor silver nor white, but all three, like the underside of a cloud.

I thought: If he is lying to me, it will cost me.

I thought: If he is not lying to me, it may be the only thing that saves my life.

"Conditions," I said.

"I should be offended if you had none."

I held up a finger.

"One. You do not give me orders. You advise. You instruct. You criticize, if you must. You do not tell me what to do."

"Agreed."

A second finger. "Two. You do not protect me. If I'm in danger and I fail to see it, you may say so. You may not step in. You will not shield me, save me, or interfere. If I'm going to die, I will die on my own account."

He was silent a moment. Then, rather oddly, the severe line of his mouth softened.

"That," he said, "I would have demanded of you."

A third finger. "Three. You do not explain what I haven't asked. I have been told things all my life by people who thought they knew better. I will ask when I am ready to know."

"Hm. That one will be difficult." But he inclined his head. "I accept. All three."

"Good."

"And yours, I suppose, is the obvious one." His eyes glinted. "You wish to know why I'm agreeing so readily."

"It crossed my mind."

"Because I have no habit of protecting anyone," said Declan Marrow, "and I do not intend to begin. But I have a long habit of watching people die slowly, in ways they could have avoided, because they would not listen. And I find that, in your case, I would like to see what happens if somebody does."

…

The Shade stepped out of the flame an hour later.

It rose from his palm like smoke from a candle and stood in the air a moment, shapeless. Then it condensed, spreading, thickening, and a figure formed on the stone before me: tall, shoulder-wide, cloaked in a long gray mantle that moved as if in a wind that was not there. It was almost transparent. I could see the chamber's black glass through its chest. Its face was the face of the man in the chains, but cleaner, younger, hard-edged, as if the forty years had been wiped away. The hair was cropped. The eyes were pale as a winter sky.

It looked at its own hands. It flexed them. It looked up.

"Hm," said the Shade, in Declan's voice. "I'd forgotten how it felt, to have a body that did not hurt."

"You are a tenth of a man," I said.

"I am a tenth of a man who is nine tenths smarter than you." He glanced around, and for a moment I thought I saw something move in his face. "Nobody else can see me. Is that right? Only you?"

"Only me. It is a soul-bond." I touched the hollow of my chest. "The Heart does it."

"Mm." He walked, a few slow paces, across the floor. His feet made no sound. Nimbus, who had woken at the first flicker of gray, sat bolt upright on my lap and stared at the Shade with silver eyes gone enormous.

"That one," said Nimbus, with great gravity, "is not a person."

"No," said the Shade. "I am a convenience."

"I do not like you."

"Good. Neither does anyone."

…

I trained for three months.

I will not recount it all. It was repetition, mostly: the dull daily grind of the apprentice, ten hours a day on a hillside in the sun. The Shade would stand at my shoulder with his arms folded, and he would say, in the dry flat voice I would come to know better than my own: Again.

I learned to hold a thread of Cinder steady for an hour without letting it flare. I learned to pull it into a blade, a rod, a net, a shield. I learned, by painful trial, the five failure modes of an overextended Bronze body, and the three signs that precede each. I learned to read a man's weight on his feet before he attacked. I learned to count, not time, but breath. The Shade made me spar with him, though he could not touch me. His blows stopped an inch from my face, each one a light cold breath on my skin, and he corrected me with a running commentary of acid brevity.

"Your left foot is a yard too far forward. A child could take that knee."

"You dropped your guard on the thrust. Why? Because you were tired? Then be tired somewhere else."

"That is a very good parry. You have no idea why it worked. Think about it."

He was merciless. He was also, I began to see, scrupulously fair. He never said a thing that was untrue. He never praised what did not merit it. When I did well he said nothing, and that was how I knew. Once, after an afternoon in which I had parried six consecutive strikes without error, I turned to him, panting, and found him standing with his head tilted and an odd expression on his face.

"What?" I said.

"Nothing." He looked away. "You did that rather well."

It was the first compliment he had paid me. I stared at him, and then, because there was nothing else to do, I got on with it.

At night, on the stairs of the Fort, I returned to the chamber and worked on the third chain. Declan watched me from his iron perch and said little. Sometimes he asked questions about the capital, about the street prices of coal, about who sat on the Supreme Bench now, and I answered them. Sometimes he told me things. He told me that the Founder had been a woman, and that the Founders' Compact had been the greatest act of political theft in Halvern's history. He told me that the Emberheart was not a relic but a wound. I did not ask what he meant.

Once I came in at dawn, aching and filthy, and found him sitting on the floor with his head bowed against the glass, asleep. His face in repose was younger than I had seen it.

I stood in the doorway for some time. Then I went out again, quietly, and left him to it.

…

The test came in the ninth week.

"Three Bronzes," said the Shade, one morning on the high plateau above the rim. He stood at the edge of a dry wash, hands behind his back, looking down. "Gorge Stalkers. I have flushed them from their den. They are not hungry, but they are angry. You will fight them without crystals."

"Without—"

"No crystals. No pistol. No grenades. No traps." He turned his pale eyes on me. "Your body. The Cinder. Your blade."

"I have no blade."

"You have a knife. I recommend it."

I looked down the wash. They were coming up it already, three gray bodies sliding over the rocks, unhurried, pale hands feeling the stone.

I lost.

I want that stated plainly. I fought as well as I knew how. I used every trick the Shade had given me. I killed one of the Stalkers with a knife through its throat, which cost me two ribs and the use of my left hand. I burned the eyes of the second, though it had no eyes, and it screamed. But there were three of them, and I was one, and I was tired, and by the end I lay in the wash with my face in the dust and a Stalker's foot upon my back, and I felt the pointed fingers close around my skull.

The Shade stood at the lip of the wash. He did not move.

Of course he does not, I thought, in a haze of pain. He promised.

I had agreed to it myself.

It was the most peculiar sensation, to be dying and to be perfectly, coldly angry. Not at the Stalker. Not even at him. At myself, for having been so stupid, so soft, so exhausted. For having arrived in the arena of my own life with a hundred things to burn and so little to burn them with.

Get up.

It was not the Heart. It was not Nimbus. It was a thin, precise voice, my own, from a very long way away.

I dragged my good hand under me. I reached for the Cinder. It was almost gone; I could barely feel it. But there was a little left, a thread, a spark in the ash at the bottom of the grate. I breathed on it.

The Stalker's fingers tightened.

I let the spark go.

It went down through my palm into the dust, and out through the earth, to the Stalker's foot, and up through its bones to its skull. It was not much. It burned for perhaps a second. But in that second the Stalker's nervous system, which ran along lines of Mana as clear as threads, lit up like a lamp, and the thing arched and shrieked and fell off me.

I rolled out from under it. The other two had backed away, hissing. I got to my knees. I got to my feet. I stood there, swaying, with blood in my eye and my knife in my teeth and one arm hanging, and I looked at them.

They ran.

I watched them go. Then I sat down very suddenly in the dust and was sick.

The Shade came down the slope. He stopped in front of me and stood there, looking.

"You lost," he said.

"Yes."

"You were beaten, and you were hurt, and you were on the ground."

"Yes."

"And you got up."

I looked up at him, through the blood. In the pale morning light his face was unreadable.

"That," said the Shade, "is the only lesson I have to give. The rest is detail."

…

We left the Gorge in the last week of the fourth month.

It was a glassy blue morning, high-skied and cold. The Bronze mark on my arm had deepened to the color of old coins, and under it, if I held my arm to the sun, I could see the faint beginnings of silver. I had grown two inches. I had lost fifteen pounds. I was, according to the Shade, "marginally less appalling." Nimbus had healed completely, and could now fly, in a dignified way, to the height of a barn roof. He disapproved of the rest.

I stopped at the rim of the Gorge and looked back.

The mist had gone. The great red gash lay open in the sunlight, plain, naked, nothing to fear. Somewhere far below, in the dark of the Fort, a man in chains was lying awake in the dome of light, watching through borrowed eyes as the sky came up.

I'll be back, I thought.

"You had better," said the Shade at my shoulder. I had not spoken aloud.

We walked up the road to the Junction. At the foot of the telegraph pole at the crossroads, someone had nailed a broadsheet to the wood. The paper had been there some weeks. It had gone yellow at the edges. A knot of cowhands stood around it, reading.

I read it over their shoulders.

THE FOUNDERS' GAUNTLET, it began, in capitals three inches high. By order of the Senate of Houses, and under the patronage of the High Chancellor. Open to all aspirants of the Republic. Enrollment closes the first of the month.

Below it was a list of seeded entrants, printed in small black type. Two names were picked out in red.

ALDEN WHITLOCK, House Whitlock. Silver Sigil.

CORDELIA FAIRCHILD, House Fairchild. Silver Sigil.

I read it twice. Then I turned and looked at the Shade, who had come up beside me to read the list with an expression of great interest.

"Silver," I said. "Both of them."

"So it would seem."

"In four months."

"I imagine," said the Shade, "there has been a great deal of help."

Nimbus yawned. Behind us the sun was rising over the Gorge. Ahead of us lay the long white road to the railhead.

I smiled.

It was a small smile, a cold one. It was the first honest one I had worn in a very long time.