Page 96

The shadow.

The screaming man that’s made a home in Baz’s guilty conscience.

He puts the glass down carefully and lets out a long, slow breath.

“That’s Roen,” Baz eventually says. “The coauthor on my monograph I told you about. The research assistant. The man who used to work with me at the Mortis, who no longer works at the Mortis, whose name I have not spoken out loud outside my own apartment for two years. Who I see in corners of this room when the light is low and my mind is tired.” He pauses. “The shadow is something I’ve convinced myself isn’t really there, isn’t what it seems. But all this time, I knew it was him. And the fact that you saw him only confirms it.”

I can tell talking about it pains him, but still, I must know.

“What happened to him?”

He brings his knees up to his chest and stares down at his hands, his fingers steepled. “Roen was my student first, and then my research assistant, and then…more than that, I suppose, in the way research partners sometimes end up being more than that. Not romantically, mind you. He was like a brother to me. He had the kind of mind that worked well alongside mine, which is unusual, because my mind doesn’t work the way most people’s minds work and most people find it exhausting. But…Roen didn’t. Roen found it interesting. He found me interesting.”

He presses his lips together in thought for a moment, a sardonic smile tugging at the end of his mouth before it disappears. “We were working together on a piece of research, on the boundary between the living and the dead, which is work the Mortis sanctions in principle and watches very closely in practice. We were trying to understand what happens to the structure of a working at the moment of a crossing. It’s technical and dangerous, and the reason it’s dangerous is that if you make a mistake at the exact moment of the crossing, the person at the center of the working can get caught in the between…in the Mire, as you’d call it, I think, though I didn’t know the word for it then. And anyway, when that happens nobody can get them out. The in-between isn’t a place with doors. The practitioner has to be still, steady, fully present. You do not look away. You do not get distracted. You do not let your mind run off down a side corridor. If your mind goes somewhere else, even for a damn second, even on something small, the thread slips, and the subject slides, and you can’t pull them back.”

I know what he’s about to say before he even says it.

“And, so, my mind went somewhere else. We were doing the working. He was the subject. I was holding the thread. I had been holding it long enough that I was starting to feel the strain. You know, I was tired, I had been pushing too hard for weeks, I was trying to prove something to someone at the Mortis. And I had a thought. A nothing thought, really. I think it was about whether I had closed the window in my office? Maybe wondering if I’d forgotten to blow out the candles before I left? In the time it took me to have that thought and come back, the thread had moved. Not much but…it was enough. I came back to the present, and I had him and then I didn’t, and I grabbed, and I grabbed, and he was gone. He had slipped past my reach and he was in the Mire and he had the horrified look on his face of a man who understood exactly what had just happened, and we locked eyes across the thinning of the veil, and then he was lost to me.”

He looks at me with the horror of reliving it etched on his face. “He’s still there, Saturna. I’ve tried every working I know and he is still there, lost, because my mind, my stupid careless, reckless, faulty brain forgot something. Because I could not concentrate on the one thing I needed to.”

“Baz,” I whisper. “It’s not⁠—”

“The Mortis buried it,” he goes on with a wave of his hand. “They let me keep teaching. They let me keep the apartment. But now they watch me closely. I owe them.”

“You know it’s not your fault.”

His eyes are watering but he looks away. “It’s someone’s fault. It’s mine. There isn’t a day where I don’t beat myself up over it. I’m a boxer, you know, I’m very good at it.” He lets out a caustic laugh. “I should have stuck to boxing. I was better at that, it was less dangerous, my brain didn’t have to think too deeply, just quickly. No, I killed Roen because my mind doesn’t work the way it should. I’m lazy when it counts, I can’t even make myself do the things I want to do, it’s like a brick wall comes down and stops me and there’s no way over it. I am too impulsive for my own good and make too many rash decisions. I’m undisciplined. I’m un…governable. The only reason I have gotten as far as I have is dumb luck.”

“No, it’s because you’re a good teacher and you’re brilliant.”

“How can I be brilliant and broken? Why can’t I just…be like everyone else?”

“You think being like everyone else means you won’t make terrible decisions or do things you’ll regret? Being normal doesn’t save you from pain. Like it or not, part of the human experience isn’t just joy, but suffering. It’s grief. And it’s having to live with things you wish you could change.”

I pull him against me and he lets me. He has his face against my hair and his shoulders are shaking slightly, not crying but perhaps trying to rein it back, and I hold him there in the middle of the ransacked main room and the shadow of Roen gone from the corner but still, I’m sure, in the apartment with us.

I hope that Roen can see how much Baz suffers. I hope he can find it in his heart to forgive him.

“The boxing,” I say after a moment.

“What about it?” he says wearily, his mouth against my neck now, not kissing me but just there.

“You boxed because you have the kind of brain you have. Because you had to put the energy somewhere. Because reading people in a ring is the only time all of that attention has a job to do. Right?”

“Mmm.”

“Where did you learn to do that?”

“Auremonte. Then I left to win bigger prizes elsewhere. The holy city isn’t really a fan of violence. Unless it’s state-sanctioned, of course.”

“Tell me about Auremonte. I hear so much about it, but I’ve never met anyone from there.”

He takes a slow breath against the top of my head.

“Auremonte is a place that does not know what to do with a mind like mine. It is a place of ledgers and sermons and family dinners that start on time and end on time and conversations in which everyone has already agreed on everything they are going to say before they say it. My father was in banking. Maybe still is. My mother was what one might call a woman of society. I was the one child who could not sit still for a sermon and could not stay quiet at a dinner and could not focus on anything unless I found it interesting. Naturally, I was told that this was a spiritual failing, which is the way they talk about things in Auremonte. My mother would say my mind was ungoverned. She would say it as if ungoverned were a thing I could govern if I chose to. She did not understand what she was asking of me, and in the end I just became a befuddling disappointment to her. My father agreed with her because he agreed with her about everything, the bastard was far too chicken to ever put his foot down. Except when it came to me.”

He sighs. “And when I was caught doing a thing I shouldn’t have been doing, my family cast me out, with what my mother would have described as relief rather than grief. But to me, I was free of them. Finally. I took a train west, then east. I boxed. I read everything I could get my hands on about the one thing that had ever quieted my mind, which was necromancy, and when the Mortis invited me to apply I applied, and the Mortis accepted me.”