To Walk in Shadow
(Worm/Chronicles of Amber)
by P.H Wise
3.1 - Steer Your Way
Disclaimer: This is a work of fanfiction. Worm belongs to Wildbow. The Chronicles of Amber is by Roger Zelazny. I own neither. Please support the official release.
Thanks to [USER=321191]Cailin[/USER] for beta-reading.
The journey home was almost disappointingly easy. We returned to the cart; on the way, Fiona happened to locate a pair of horses wandering the mountain. A short time spent calming them, and we led them back to pull the cart with our gear. The journey home took several days, but I made sure that all of it was downhill along a gentle slope, which made things easier. The price of that gentle slope was an on-again, off-again precipitation that was more of a mist than a rainfall, and we were all a little soggy by the end of the first day, but the not-quite rain lifted during the night, and the rest of the trip was pleasantly warm.
In time the unceasing downward slope became the slopes of the foothills surrounding Brockton Bay, and our destination gleamed upon the water. The eternal twilight of the half-world gave way to dawn, and in that light of day the earth and sky were renewed. The breeze had cut the haze of smog that might have otherwise hidden the Protectorate Rig in the bay, and water and forcefield alike sparkled with reflected light.
John Shade watched the sun's progress as if he had never before seen a sunrise; and in that revelatory light, he had no shadow.
When we reached the city limits, Fiona bid us dismount. "I have a few things to take care of," she told me. "Papers to have done up for John, arrangements to make for you. Then I'm back to Amber."
"How long?" I asked.
"Two and half days here for every day in Amber," she reminded me. "Expect me within a fortnight."
She left us on the side of the road. Then she drew reign and guided the horses away, and the sound of the cart's wheels on the concrete faded.
People stared, but not at me. I had changed my clothes into something appropriate for Earth Bet as part of the shift from the half-world, but John drew his black cloak about him and smiled at the attention. Then he said, "I'll have a look around the town. Call my name when you need me. My real name. I'll hear you."
His real name was the one Fiona had told me not to get in the habit of using: Shadowjack. Or Jack of Shadows. Jack, Whose Name is Spoken in Shadow if you wanted to be formal about it. I was pretty sure he wasn't human, but I wasn't in a position to throw stones about that.
"Try not to get arrested," I muttered, and he laughed.
Then I was alone, and on my way home, and the world around me seemed very, very ordinary.
So childe Taylor to the Bay of Brockton came. ... Wait. No. That wasn't nearly overblown and self-important enough. How about something more like: Riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Brockton Bay and environs.
Yeah. Perfect.
The house was a mess. Dirty dishes in the sink, empty takeout boxes overflowing from a garbage can that should have been emptied a week ago, floors in need of cleaning, and the living room was worse.
Dad was asleep on the couch, his glasses askew. He was still wearing his work clothes, he smelled of sweat, his hair was lank and greasy, and he hadn't shaved.
Guilt came first. Then anger that I should feel guilty for leaving him. Then I saw the new lines of care on his brow, and anger subsided into pity. I turned away from his sleeping form, brought down a blanket, and lay it around him.
He woke as I did this, looked up, stared blearily. Recognition flickered in his eyes, and then he sat up all at once, the motion sending his glasses tumbling to the floor. "Taylor!" he exclaimed.
He moved as if to hug me, hesitated too long, stopped short. He stared at me, some uncertainty building behind his eyes. "Is it really you?"
My hair, while still painfully short, was longer than the two weeks that had passed from his perspective would have allowed for; my skin had gone pale after two months in twilight, and I had put on muscle, but surely he would still recognize me. "Hi, Dad," I said.
He smiled like the sun coming out from behind storm clouds. We hugged, and some of the worry-lines in his face eased away.
I wanted to tell him what I'd learned about Mom, that I'd met my Aunt Fiona, that I'd walked the Pattern and could reshape the universe if I wanted. An angrier, more resentful part of me didn't want to say a damned thing. I wanted to sarcastically ask him if he planned to fall apart every time I went out of town for a week or two. I wanted to say I was sorry for worrying him, that I wouldn't do it again. What I said was, "Anything happen while I was gone?"
He didn't say anything for a long moment. And then, "Oh, the usual."
I could have let the conversation die then. It's what I would have done before. But I wasn't the same as I'd been before. I had been remade. The Pattern had remade me, and Fiona had taught me; I looked my dad in the eye. "We have a lot to talk about," I said, "but it can wait until after breakfast. I'm going to go take a shower, okay?"
"Okay," Dad said, and stood up. There was a crunching noise, and we both looked down.
His glasses. He had stepped on them, and the left lens was cracked. "Damn it," he hissed, and bent down to pick it up.
"That's not an omen," I said.
Dad put his cracked glasses on, but the frame was bent and it no longer rested easily on the bridge of his nose. "An omen?" he asked, and he had no idea what I was talking about.
"It isn't one," I insisted.
"Right," he said, and regarded me with a raised eyebrow.
I went upstairs and took my shower. After, I dried my hair - now long enough to qualify for looking like a pixie-cut - and refreshed my clothing out of Shadow. Halfway through straightening up my room, I realized that I was avoiding the issue. Firming my resolve, I did a thing more difficult than learning sorcery, harder than fighting a jabberwock, and more trying in some ways than walking the Pattern of Amber itself: I went downstairs to have a conversation with my Dad.
It went about as well as could be expected. We ate breakfast, and then we relocated to the living room. I told him about the journey, walking the Pattern, learning from Mom's sister. A strange expression came over his face when I mentioned Aunt Fiona. "Did you know about her?" I asked.
Dad shook his head. "Your Mom never mentioned a Fiona. She didn't talk about her family very much. I know she had a sister named Flora who she hated, but I'd never met any of them. She…" he swallowed. "She said there'd been a falling out."
"I don't actually know the full story," I said. "Fiona said she would be here within a fortnight, though, and we can ask her then. She also sent a tutor along with me."
"Oh?"
I nodded. "That's the other thing I wanted to talk about. Don't freak out, okay?"
Dad waited.
"Shadowjack," I said. "Jack of Shadows. Jack, come to me."
There was a strange expression on Dad's face. Then a long-fingered hand emerged from the shadow of the coffee table.
Dad jumped, whirled, staggered backward, yelled in fright.
A second hand, and then arms, a head, a torso; John Shade emerged from the shadow as a human might emerge from a swimming pool, and the shadow rippled in his wake.
Dad grabbed the poker from beside the fireplace and swung it at John's head.
John moved, caught the blow on the meat of his forearm. There was a sound of impact, but no crack of broken bones. He met Dad's gaze, and then the shadows swallowed him.
Dad's eyes darted about, seeking the intruder. "Wh… where is he?"
"Everywhere," John answered. "Nowhere." There was no direction to the sound of his voice, and it echoed in ways the shape of the room didn't allow for.
"Dad, stop," I said, and it wasn't John Shade whose safety I was worried about. "That's my tutor. Stop. I told you not to freak out."
John was there. He came out of the shadow cast by a bookshelf; it wasn't blackness that he emerged from, but out of the dimness of an object that interrupted a light source. "John, no…" I started, and then he seized my dad from behind, pinning Dad's arms in a painful looking joint lock. The poker fell to the ground.
"STOP," I thundered.
Dad froze. John didn't.
"Why should I stop?" John asked. "He attacked me, Taylor. I am a guest in his home, and he attacked. Why should I not pay him back?"
My heart raced. The room seemed to grow brighter, and everything that wasn't John Shade and my dad just wasn't important anymore. Almost without realizing it I invoked the image of the Pattern in the way Fiona had taught. It shone in the air before my outstretched hand, bringing with it the ability to perceive mystical forces in action.
Earth-Bet existed within an extremely low-magic universe, but that mattered not at all to me, for I held the image of the Pattern before me. The walls of reality shifted in response to my will, resonating through the Pattern before me and its mirror within me, and raw power came. It wasn't focused into a spell, for I had none prepared, and its use would would tire me quickly, but it came.
It was a mistake. When I changed the constants of the universe around me to allow for magic, it worked for John as well as for me. His eyes gleamed as he, too, drew in power from places beyond Earth Bet. The light grew brighter, the shadows darker, the separation between the two more distinct.
Dad struggled ineffectually; Shadowjack had a hand to my Dad's throat, and neither force of arms nor mystical might would stop him if he chose to kill.
"That's my dad, John," I said through gritted teeth.
"What is that to me?" he asked. It wasn't spoken callously, but almost curiously.
My thoughts raced. I called to mind everything Fiona had told me of Shadowjack to prepare me for dealing with him. I knew there was no use appealing to his sympathy, for he had none; no use asking for mercy which he might or might not give if it amused him to do so. That left only a few options. "He didn't realize you were a guest," I said through gritted teeth. "Guests usually come in through the front door. It was an easy mistake to make. And if you kill my dad, I'll be very angry with you."
My voice cracked as I spoke that last sentence, and in that moment, I knew that If he even hurt Dad, I would kill him, and not just once: I'd do it however many times I had to in order to make sure it stuck. If he killed Dad? I didn't know how yet, but I would make him suffer as few have suffered since the times of Old Night, when Chaos was all.
John held Dad a moment longer as he considered my words. "I suppose I understand his mistake," he said. Then he dropped Dad, stepped away, and grinned. "And it isn't the most violent greeting I've ever received from a maiden's father when he saw me with her in his home."
His joke did nothing to reduce my anger.
Dad coughed, and his return to his feet was an unsteady and careful affair. "Who is this, Taylor?" he asked.
I indicated John. "Dad, this is John Shade. My tutor."
Dad's eyes narrowed.
"John," I continued, "this is my Dad, Daniel Hebert."
"Hello," John said. They shook hands, and the muscles and tendons in Dad's hand tightened visibly; John didn't react.
"I'm not so sure I'm okay with this, Taylor," Dad said.
"I need him," I said. "But I'm not so sure I'm okay with it, either. John?"
He looked up.
"Get out," I said. "We'll talk about a time and place for lessons later. But if you ever come near my dad again? I'll kill you."
His eyes were flat above his smile, but he nodded. "You know how to reach me," he said. Then he stepped into the shadow cast by the kitchen wall and was gone.
Dad was staring at me. The poker from the fireplace lay discarded on the floor. For a long moment neither of us spoke.
"I'm guessing there are a few things about your trip that you haven't told me yet," he said.
I couldn't help it: I laughed. It felt good. "Yeah," I said. I released the Sign of the Pattern, let slip the alterations that made magic easier on Earth Bet, and began to take long, slow, regular breaths in an effort to come back down from fight or flight.
Dad was clearly shaken by what had happened, but he smiled. "You're definitely your mother's daughter," he said.
Something about the way he said that made me sad, but I couldn't say why.
Dad didn't take the rest of our talk very well. Looking back on it now I think I understand why. Part of it can be traced to the fact that both of us had just been exposed to stress sufficient to activate the fight or flight response, but that was only part of it. I'd hurt him very badly when I told him he couldn't help me. Then I'd left, from his perspective for two weeks. I was his teenage daughter, and he had no idea where I was, if I was safe, if I was even alive, and before putting him into that situation, I'd made him feel powerless. Then I returned, mission accomplished, quest completed, goal achieved. On some level, I think he was expecting things to go back to normal after that. But normal didn't exist for me anymore.
We argued. Both of us thought the other was being unreasonable. I was newly come into my power; he was discovering the limits of his. That we had stopped talking since Mom died, and only started again in April, after Lung burned me, didn't help either.
Yet once more, words were said that ought not have been said.
In my memory, three moments come most clearly from that argument. The first was Dad's face twisted into an angry scowl. "You're being ridiculous, Taylor," he snapped. "You can't just not go to school. You have to think about your future."
"I am thinking about my future," I explained calmly and rationally. By which I mean I all but screamed it at the top of my lungs. "What exactly am I going to learn there that's going to matter?"
"Math," Dad answered. "Science. History. Literature. Think, Taylor. Stop and think. You know what happens to people who drop out of high school. They either end up in the gangs or they come to me and I do my damndest to find them work, and I usually fail. You can't get by without at least a high school education in this town."
I didn't have a good response at the time; I thought of several when it was too late to use them.
The second moment from the argument that comes clearly came at the end of a heated exchange. I looked away from my dad, and my gaze happened to fall upon the window. It had rained during the night. The streets were still wet, and the sky was dappled with clouds that hadn't quite broken up. Sunbeams streamed through.
Dad saw it a second later, and we both halted our argument to look, if only for a little while.
The third moment came at the end. Neither of us were giving ground, and both of us were frustrated. I turned to Dad and said, "I didn't have to come back, you know. You have no idea what's out there, how amazing it all is. If I wanted, I could just leave Earth Bet behind and explore other worlds and other universes for the rest of my life. Do you know why I didn't?"
"No," Dad said.
"Neither do I."
That one still bothers me. I still wish I hadn't said that. People underestimate the power of words. A sword or a gun can leave life threatening injuries, but the wrong words - or the very right words - can break a person. Maybe what I said wasn't as bad as that, but I still wish I hadn't said it.
After, in my room, I sat for a while and tried not to think about much. Eventually, I got tired of sulking and decided to make contact with Lisa if I could. She didn't reply to my email, so I got out a piece of paper and a pencil and started to draw in the fashion that Fiona had taught me. It took hours, and three failed attempts went into my waste basket. Each line had to carry meaning beyond what was possible for any mortal artist; every stroke of my pencil had to be invested with a power very much like the one I used to shift shadow. I had to visualize the subject as completely and perfectly as I could while I worked, and I could not allow that focus to disrupt the drawing process. When I began my first attempt I was still too upset to do it well, or at all. A master of the Trumps can make their creation look effortless and seem to take no time at all, but I was no master. I had received the necessary instruction, but it would be many years before I could create a Trump quickly or easily.
Hours ticked by. Patience prevailed. I hadn't left my room for lunch, and it was near dinner when I finally set down my pencil and regarded the image I had drawn.
It was her: Lisa, with bottle-glass green eyes and dirty blonde hair. She had the devil in her smile, and the image was cold to the touch. I focused on the picture, centering it in my vision and in my attention. As I looked, the paper grew colder. Colder. Colder still. Then the image gained color, came to life, changed.
"Lisa?" I asked. "It's Taylor. Are you free? I wanted to talk."
Contact. Our minds touched. She gasped.
She was seated in a dim room. Her hands were cuffed behind her back, and blood trickled from her wrists and from twenty some small cuts along her arms. A bright light shone directly into her eyes, which were filled with hate for her tormentor.
He was tall and skeletally thin, and he wore a black bodysuit with a stencil of a white snake curling around it, its head upon his forehead. There were no eye holes, but he saw well enough. An array of cruel instruments was set on trays on a table beside him. Some were sharp, some blunt, a few were power tools of various descriptions. One was a soldering gun.
"I almost wish I could keep this timeline," the man was saying. "It would go a long way toward curbing that irritating independent streak of yours."
Lisa smiled, and there was nothing pleasant about it. "We can't always get what we want, can we, boss?" she asked in a flippant tone that seemed deliberately calculated to annoy the snake guy. This was Coil. Or at least, I was pretty sure he was Coil. Coil was one of the lesser know of the crime bosses in Brockton Bay. I only knew as much as I did about him because I'd run into his organization on the alternate Earth Bet.
"No, we can't," he agreed. He paused to consider her face. "I think I'll take your eye next." He took up a bloody scalpel from the tray beside him.
"I'm coming," I said.
She looked up. Her eyes flickered left and right. Then our gazes met, and there was something in her eyes that hadn't been there before: hope.
Coil moved the scalpel into position.
I reached out. My hand touched her shoulder. I took a step forward. I was at her side: no longer in my room, but in Coil's torture chamber.
Coil didn't react to my presence. "If you fight me, my Tattletale, it will only make it hurt more," he said, his voice low and intimate.
I broke his arm in three places, shattered his knee, and then threw him against the far wall, and he didn't so much as twitch. There, slumped against the wall and unable to rise, he continued as if I hadn't intervened. Incredibly, the scalpel was still in his hand. He dipped it delicately into empty air and smiled indulgently. "Now," he said as though he felt no pain, "this next part will probably hurt even more. I'll try to be gentle about severing the cranial nerve, but if you want to continue to make animal bleats while I go about it, I'll understand."
Lisa, who was still bound to the chair, stared at Coil's fallen form. Then she looked at me. "Taylor?" she asked again.
I wanted to grin and ask something like, "What's a girl like you doing in a place like this?" but I couldn't quite bring myself to do it. Instead, I broke her handcuffs and cut the ropes holding her. "You looked like you weren't having fun," I said.
"I definitely wasn't," Lisa said. Then she hugged me, and I stiffened in surprise. "Thank you," she whispered.
"That's it," Coil said from where he was still slumped. Occasionally he moved as if he were still standing, shifting his weight from one foot to another, making delicate cuts into nothing at all. "Gently, ever so gently, and…" The scalpel dipped and circled. Then he looked at something which he still appeared to see as being in front of him. "You know, I think I like you better this way. Broken. Afraid. Begging for mercy. Maybe I'll keep this timeline after all."
"What's wrong with him?" I asked.
Lisa's eyes went to Coil. "No idea." She paused. "Failure to model…" Understanding lit up her face. "It's precognition. Has to be. His power. He thinks he's creating two timelines and choosing which one to keep, but it's precognition. Simulation. Once he chooses, his power autopilots him through the decisions he made in the simulation, and then he can choose again. His power couldn't account for you and however you got here, and now he's stuck acting out a scenario that's gone off the rails with no ability to change it until he gets to the end of what he simulated." She looked at me. "How did you get here?"
"I drew a picture," said I.
"Ah." Lisa looked down at the broken man. "... which means he chose to keep the scenario where he tortured me." She spat on him.
My emotions felt distant. Unreal. I felt like a spectator in my own life, as though I was just passing through. I had come into an unexpected situation quite suddenly, taken action, rescued Lisa, crippled Coil, and after the thing with John and the fight with my dad and not having slept the previous night after several days of travel, I was getting towards physically and emotionally exhausted. "Why would he torture you?" I asked. "He's your boss, isn't he? Even for a villain, torturing your employees seems…" Wicked? Evil? "... counter-productive."
"He's usually much more careful than this," Lisa explained. "He was upset when I disappeared on him, even more when he found out that the ABB turned our hideout into a pile of rubble. Then Regent brought us home the long way around - the card he used to teleport us didn't take us anywhere near Earth Bet - and we all tried to lie low, mostly because none of us want to let the ABB know we're still alive. Coil brought me in the next day. I'm pretty sure he found out about everything we did. The other universe, Wonderland, Tir na Nog'th. It was…" she snarled suddenly, her face twisting in anger. Then she walked over to Coil and kicked him in the groin. Then she pulled her foot back and did it again, and again, and again, and besides the physics of the act knocking him around and the distressing sound of his pelvis cracking with the final kick, he didn't react. "Sorry," Lisa said.
I shook my head. "It's fine," I said.
Then she brightened. "Hey, want to help me rule the criminal underworld with an iron fist?"
I snorted indelicately. "Can I suborn your organization from the inside to turn you into a hero against your will?"
"I'd be disappointed if you didn't try."
I didn't quite have the energy to smile, but I think something of it showed in my eyes. "Ask me again some day that's not today," I said.
"I will," Lisa said. A beat passed. "What did you want to talk to me about?"
"Oh, that," I said. I scratched my earlobe and shifted uncomfortably. "I was just tired of being cooped up in the house. I figured I'd ask if you wanted to hang out."
There was something like understanding in her eyes, and I was certain she was getting way more information out of my statement than I'd intended to put into it, but that was par for the course with her. "Yes," she said with a grin. "I'd like that very much. Let me take care of a few things first. Want to meet up around seven?"
This time I did smile. "That sounds good," I said.
Though my surroundings were still Brockton Bay, my life had left familiar territory behind. I had fought with Dad, damn near picked a fight with my tutor, rescued a friend who was also a villain, crippled a man who I was fairly sure that Lisa wouldn't let live, been offered a position of power in the criminal underworld, and the day wasn't over yet.
Besides hanging out with Lisa, I still needed to arrange the start of my lessons with Shadowjack, plan my debut as a hero, inform the Protectorate that there was a chance Leviathan and the Slaughterhouse Nine might come here one after another based on a scenario I saw play out in an alternate universe, decide what to do about the list of names I'd copied from the Endbringer Memorial in said alternate universe, and see if I couldn't make progress on my plan to kill Lung.
I was swamped, and there was nothing to do but get started.