on to the edges of the stone, warm under her hands, and reassuring. From here, the view was once more very different.
She was looking out over a garden. The desert had retreated and was only visible at the edges, where a line of ochre stone showed above the foliage. Beneath, at the foot of the fort, radiating lines of trees reached outwards like a wheel, and it was only this symmetry that told Shadow she was not looking out over a forest. But the trees were not saplings; they were fully mature, their canopies arching up towards the sky in full leaf. From this height, however, they looked as tiny as toys. Shadow could see something moving methodically between them: a small dark figure.
Beyond these trees stretched others, but they did not seem to have been planted with planned regularity. She could see groves and clusters, with lines of pale grass in between. These trees, too, were in full growth, with high arched branches and scatters of green, gold, and flame-coloured leaves. The air, drifting up from the garden, smelled warm and fragrant, heavy with pollen. Shadow thought she could almost hear the distant humming of bees. She did not know if it was the spirit’s senses that made the colours so vivid, the scents so strong. It was as if every colour contained a thousand shades within it, too rich for a human to comprehend. Shadow took a breath and felt dizzy. She stepped back.
“Where is it?”
“I-” the demon stopped.
“Gremory. Do you know?”
“I think so. But I’m not sure.”
“Where, then?”-but the Duke shook her head.
“I won’t name it. If I say its name, it might secure it-like an anchor.”
“It looks pretty secure already to me,” Shadow said. “And there’s someone down there. But if we go down, will it change?”
“I don’t know.”
A thought struck Shadow.
“Tell me what you see.”
“I see a garden. It’s full of decay; everything is rotting. The trees are dying and I can see bones in the grass. It’s quite magnificent, actually. An excellent place to spend a quiet Sunday afternoon. Why? What do you see?”
“Not the same thing.”
“No,” the Duke said. “I didn’t think so.”
On the far side of the fortress, they found a flight of steps, leading down. There must have been a thousand or more.
“After you,” Gremory said.
Rather sourly, Shadow lowered herself over the little break in the battlements and began her descent. She half expected the landscape below to alter, reversing itself back into desert, but to her surprise the garden stayed put. She was now worried that they’d become stuck: there had been no sign of the city from the other side of the fortress and given its height, there should have been. Nor had she been able to see the Devil’s Ears, or Ator’s hut, beyond the limits of the garden.
But as they descended, the garden became more vivid, its features more pronounced. She could still see the figure moving between the trees but it showed no signs of having seen either her or the demon. Just as well. The scent rising from the garden was still overpowering: Shadow detected roses and lilies, the heady musks of jasmine and frangipani. She wondered, from the demon’s description, whether it was somehow designed to be appealing to whoever beheld it: perhaps Gremory was assailed by the odours of blood and forges and smoke. She asked.
“You would not wish to know,” the Duke said, her eyes glittering.
“I was just curious.”
Soon, they reached the final flight of steps and Shadow could feel the muscles of her calves vibrating as though they were the strings of a harp. She was in good physical condition, but even so, it had been a long way up to the top of the fortress and it was a long way down again, too. She felt she would be lucky to be able to stand once she reached the ground and, indeed, her first step was a stagger. Gremory caught her arm in a grip like a steel band.
“Take care. This is not a good point to show weakness.”
Grimly, Shadow nodded. She could see a shape moving beyond the trees: that distant figure. It would have been nice to think that it was just a gardener, but in Shadow’s experience, things rarely worked out under the category of “nice.”
There was no sign of desert sand beneath her feet. Instead, thick grass covered the ground, a dense vivid green and somehow unnatural. Shadow was not sure whether this could be attributed to her new senses or to something about the place itself. She could see cushions of moss and small starry flowers in the grass: there seemed to be a richness of species, as if different ecological layers had folded themselves into one particular space. Then her vision, quite suddenly, narrowed down so that she could see a tiny ant labouring up one of the blades of grass. Definitely the spirit’s sight, she thought, with its spatial differentials. With Gremory, she skirted the trees, trying to keep out of sight of the gardener.
She thought it had worked, until they were quite far into the orchard. Shadow did not recognise the fruit that grew on the trees: the leaves were like an apple’s, but the fruit was oval, small, the colour of sunsets, and they emitted a strong pungent fragrance.
“Do you know what they are?” she asked Gremory in an undertone.
“Don’t eat the fruit,” the demon replied.
“But you can see them, yes?”
“Yes. They grow on bones.”
Clearly Gremory was still apprehending the garden in a somewhat different way.
Shadow was tempted to pick one of the fruits, but reason told her this would be insane. She moved in and out of the trees, zigzagging, then movement caught her eye. She turned. To her dismay, the gardener was watching her.
It was a hunched, dark shape. The shoulders were massive in proportion to the rest of its body, tapering to a narrow waist and strong legs. She could see the small dark eyes, whiteless in its broad face. It looked more like an ape than a man, something primitive and ancient. It was watching her with a stillness that suggested intelligence, however, and when it saw that she had observed it, it began to bound forwards with long, loping strides.
Shadow drew her blade. She was conscious of the demon turning beside her, but Gremory’s hands remained at her sides. The gardener leaped. Shadow threw herself to the side, rolling out and down. Teeth snapped along her arm, grazing her sleeve and she thickened her veil to maximum across her shoulders and head. An arm like a club shot out and struck, knocking a numbing blow over her left shoulder. Her left arm grew limp; ignoring it Shadow feinted, then lashed out with the sun-and-moon blade. It hit home, just beneath the gardener’s collarbone, but there was no blood, just a small powdery shower. The thing’s lips, rubbery black like a dog’s, pulled back from its teeth and it gave a soundless growl, a vibration which Shadow felt rather than heard. Behind it, the demon took a dancing, mincing step backwards. Shadow took a chance and threw the blade. It struck the creature in the centre of its throat and should have severed the windpipe. The creature gave a breathy cough and spat something out into the grass: it looked like a small leaden cube. Shadow reached down and snatched it up with a corner of the veil, not wanting it to make contact with her skin. Then the creature fell apart. Its head burst like a melon dropped from a turret; its chest exploded, fragmenting outwards until only the legs were left, twin crumbling trunks which tottered and fell. Soon, the only thing left was clots of soil, dark in the greenness of the grass.
“Thanks for your help,” Shadow said sarcastically to the demon. Gremory shrugged.
“I didn’t want to steal your kill. You looked like you had it under control.”
“Well,” Shadow said, wiping the earthy blade on the grass. “Maybe I did.”
Thirty-Nine
Darya’s transformation was over almost as soon as it had begun. The teeth drew back, the bone structure returned to human-normal. Mercy’s hand, clasping the hilt of the sword, relaxed by degrees. Darya bent and swiftly
