Shade was a messenger mouse. And when the queen called a messenger mouse, it came.

The call arrived at a quarter to midnight. Shade sat at his table, chewing on a whisker, threading a patch of batwing over the torn corner of his satchel. He’d gotten lost in the motion of the thread, and the sour turnings of his own mind, so when a tinkling ball of silver burbled through his open window, he nearly squeaked.

The ball shimmered a moment and disappeared. From its place a star-mite dropped and clinked against the floor. The stone caught the firelight and twinkled.

“Pah.” Shade stamped out the fire in the hearth with his boot. Never enough time to get anything done. He tucked the star-mite into his jacket pocket, dropped to his paws, and scampered through the hole and down the mossy pipe.

The queen awaited him below. She reclined at the end of the long slate hall upon a throne of silver. Before her stood two pale children with shining white eyes. Shade loped as far down the hall as he dared. He stopped short of the throne and bowed.

“Lady Light,” he said, drawing from his pocket a woodbine quill and parchment.

The white woman gestured to the children. “Take word to my sister: I have reclaimed the children. The boy-child rescued from the flood is to be king. He is the one who shall bring a quiet to the world. His sister shall wield the axe they call Forbearance, and she shall be the slayer of slights.”

Even as the queen’s last echo faded into the depth of the hall, Shade had the message copied and the last of the wriggling shadow settled onto the parchment. He folded it up into his vest.

“It’ll be done, my lady,” he said.

“So go.” Shade went.

By the time he’d maneuvered back up the pipe, passing his hole and continuing west through the cracks, sliding down another moss-slick duct and splashing into a wider passage, the clock far above in the street clanged midnight: twelve dissonant hammer-strokes against bent metal rods. Shade knew because he’d seen the rods and hammers himself.

Good shadow in the dark of a clock, it was true. And spooling shadow came as natural to Shade as breathing. He had spooled the shadow out of the clock until the innards were gray as a dead mouse’s belly.

But that was time ago.

He pulled the message out and read it to himself, pushing aside its implications. The parchment wouldn’t get wet, and it wouldn’t burn, but it could still be lost. So he committed it to memory. He had it down soon enough. Shade reached the Worming Ways and went left, toward the skinny tubes. Toward Bathtub Man.

The tubes made tinny clatters as Shade wound down their steep and sudden curves, further and further, until he slid into a curved pocket near full with brackish water. Shade paddled until his paws clasped a ladder. Then it was up and up. He emerged from the drain of a porcelain sink.

The man in the bathtub wore a tatty, pale hoodwink. The water around him had long ago gone tepid and green, and mayflies droned about the sloughing flesh congealing on its surface. More flesh still stretched out from the man’s body in tendrils and webs, worming between cracks in the wall’s ceramic siding. Shade hopped over the sink and landed amongst the red and white toadstools poking through the tile.

Bathtub Man spoke first. “If you’re here on the business of that scofflaw Wendsy, save your breath.”

“Haven’t spoken with Wendsy in weeks,” said Shade. “I’d know better than to show face here if I had.”

“Hmph.”

“It’s the Lady Light who’s called.”

Bathtub Man shifted in his water. Shade climbed a toadstool and hopped from cap to cap until he gained the side of the tub. The man had food stashed somewhere. Shade could smell it.

“Suppose she’s in a row with that hag sister of hers,” Bathtub Man said eventually.

“No. She’s found the children.”

“The prince?”

Shade swatted at a mayfly. “And princess.”

Bathtub Man took this in. Dripping, he gestured to an ashtray choked with half-smoked cigarettes.

“Give us a light, would you, mousey?”

Shade did not like to be called mousey, but he obliged, lifting the filter end into the man’s drooping mouth and lighting it with a phosphorous match from the man’s moldy matchbook. Bathtub Man took a deep drag, exhaled.

“What’ll you need, then?”

“Misery,” Shade said, catching the scent of food again. “She’s peripatetic. I need to find her, and rather fast.”

“And what’ll you give me, mousey?”

“Another Virginia?”

“No. Turkish.”

“Rather hard to find a Turkish.”

“Not where you’re going.” Bathtub Man took another deep drag and let the butt plop into the bathwater. The mayflies swarmed it, lifting it up into the air, yanking on either side.

“No?” asked Shade.

“Two Turkish. Or I’ll give the Lady’s words to the frogs, for all I care.”

Shade shrugged. Not worth bandying offers with this thing. He followed his nose to the edge of the tub and spied the package of crackers stashed in a cabinet. “Deal. Now…”

Bathtub Man waved vaguely as his flesh-webs began to pulse deeper into the walls. Shade stuffed a few crumbs in his pockets and munched on another. Stale. But ever-so-salty. He brushed the flakes from his hands and clambered back up the tub.

Bathtub Man moaned. Steam rose from his water. “Agway’s Sunken Mire. She’s in a tent… two miles outside Turnabout Town.”

“Pah.” Shade had much unfinished business in Turnabout Town. Business he’d hoped to keep unfinished. Tyshira the Tenant, for one thing. And worse than that—

“You’ll want to be quick. Won’t stay there long. Wolves in Agway’s. Dark things.”

“I like dark things,” said Shade. One flesh tendril remained pulsing. Shade leapt onto it, paws pattering wetly as he skittered its length and wormed into a crack in the wall.

“Two Turkish, mind!” called the Bathtub Man.

The flesh bridged the gap between the other side of the wall and a steep sledge of slate. From there, it was east through an old merchant’s tunnel. Merchants scarce came this close to the top anymore, not since the top had gone all gray, but someone at least had the decency to stop by to light the torches.

Green fire crackled from the sconces along the walls. Shade whispered the queen’s words. It was no easy task holding onto another’s words, blind Almus always said. But a messenger mouse always remembered.

At the bottom of the tunnel, a thin stone bridge arched high into the dark and descended again into the hall of a long slate gallery. Shade eyed the velvety shadow at the bridge’s highest point.

So deep. Untouched by pure light for thousands of years. No one would notice, no, not at least for a week. Maybe more. Only enough for a facsimile, he thought, in case things get wormy in Turnabout. He licked his lips and skittered halfway across the bridge, pausing at its zenith, and pulled free his black lantern.

Then it was spool, spool, spool, slipping through his nimble hands like cotton, brushing his palms like spider-spun silk, until his lantern was partway full and the section of the bridge now illuminated by a dull gray orb. Only partway, Shade reasoned as he skittered the rest of the length and into the gallery. I could have taken more.

At the gallery’s end, Turnabout Town sprawled below. Like some terrible red squid, he thought, frowning.

The town had been built into the bottom of a cavern, the ceiling of which was bestrewn with deep crimson crystals, casting the whole of the city in a shade the color of blood. Hundreds of chutes had been chiseled into the rock of the ceiling, for supplies and findings to be tossed from the top. The chutes spiraled and wound from the crystals hundreds of feet above into the warehouses and merchant courts of the city below. A thousand times Shade had tried to forget the terrible memory of hiding partway up one such chute, when only half a boy, nestled onto a loose bolt, cringing in fear every time a load of candlesticks or sack of ore banged its way down the wide metal throat.

Again, he touched the message in his vest. The town had earned its name in the old days, as it took up the entire of the cavern floor and its walls were nigh on impenetrable. It was either through or turnabout. Shade sighed and hopped down the stairs to the high brass-barrel gates.

If you were looking for trouble, Turnabout was the place to be.

No sooner had he passed the gate than a nest of snakes covered in dangling gemstone chains slithered up and cut off his progress, begging him to help their sickly sister, who dearly required a messenger mouse to hear her last words, if only he would come alone with the snakes to their den. Shade declined and ducked through an alley, rerouting down a spiral stair that spat him along an underway.

Red haze bathed everything beneath the covered bazaar. Shade slid inside, breathing deep the redolent air of boiled milk and cinnamon, roasting olives stuffed with chirping crickets. Shaven, gruff raccoons pawed at him and called him brother, and proffered him the ash of their enemies in clear stoppered jars. Even men, hunkered beneath the bazaar’s sheet awnings, thin leashes about their neck, sang warbling songs at the behest of a rat’s cracking apple-leather lash. Shade pushed through, pushed until he saw the rusted sign for Fence Alley, and turned north.

“Shade-mouse!”

Shade hissed. Of course. Why would it ever be easy? Cursing his luck, cursing the Lady Light and this war she intended to start, he turned and beheld Tyshira the Tenant, the cat that had ripped his satchel, seething by an apple stand with his brood of feral sons.

“Tyshira,” Shade sighed. “I’m busy.”

“Hot fuck on a stick you’re busy.” The rust-colored cat took an apple in his claw and crushed it. “My memory is long. How big a fool must you be to ever return here?”

“Fairly big fool.”

A gray tom spoke. “He’s the one what burned you, dad.”

Tyshira flicked apple pulp, hissing. It was true, the burns along Tyshira’s neck and jaw hadn’t healed very well. Shade tried not to wince at the sight of them. He failed.

“I’d like to apologize,” said Shade. “I was on business. Any of our dealings were strictly incidental.”

“I’m gonna eat you,” said Tyshira. “I’m gonna kill you slow, and then I’m gonna eat you.”

“Not ideal.” Shade’s hand crept to his lantern.

Tyshira’s eyes widened. “Don’t try it.”

Shade glanced upward. Through a gap in the rippling sheet awnings, he could see the high nickel dome of a temple, and the pool of shadow it cast when struck by the light of the crystals far above.

“You know,” he said, “you tore my satchel.”

“Your satchel? I swear on everything, you lackwit mouse, I’ll festoon your guts on the highest spire in Spirendell, you hear? Face me. Fucking face me.”

Shade focused on the pool and undid the clasp of his lantern. Tyshira lunged at him, howling.

Wind ruffled Shade’s fur. He opened his eyes, and he was atop the temple, standing on a slate ledge high above the city. Below, through the same gap in the awning he’d been beneath, he saw Tyshira swipe and pass through his facsimile: a black mouse, solid for a moment, then fading, slowly, slowly, as mist.

As inconspicuously as he could, Shade scrabbled over the dome and hunkered down. He’d be wise to stick to the rooftops until he got to Caura’s.

So on he crept for the better part of an hour, slipping over eaves and between smokestacks, sucking in the acrid air billowing from the pores of Turnabout Town.

Once, the path led him to a nest of twining chutes spilling through a hatch in a counting house’s ceiling. Shade wriggled through the press of corrugated metal and batwing leather, pushing away the memories: the jewel tucked away in his pocket, cold to his touch, his little heart beating as a war-drum patters, patters, his mother’s voice calling from the gutters below. But it was up the chute, wasn’t it? The only way out without getting anyone killed. The only way out, the way out—

And then it was Tyshira’s voice, there and then, carrying above the clangor of the streets. Careful as could be, Shade slipped the latch of a fifth-story window on the ramshackle tenement at the end of Fence Alley.

The hallway smelled of sulphur and copper. Soundless, Shade crept to the second door from the left and placed a fuzzy ear to the keyhole.

Muted voices. Metal clinking. Frowning, Shade rapped upon the door, thrice in quick succession.

A moment later the door groaned inward an inch. A jet black eye appeared in the crack.

Shade summoned a thin smile. “Hello, Caura.”

The crack in the door widened slightly, revealing a dormouse’s lovely, round face. “Shade.”

“Hello again. Let me in.” Shade pushed on the door.

It held. “You have a talent for showing up at the worst times, you know that?”

“Many would disagree. Come on.” He pressed again.

She held fast. Must have had a boot against the bottom, or something. “Maybe you should try an inn, Shade. I haven’t heard a word from you...”

“I haven’t time. I’ve got cats on my tail.”

“Shade…”

“Who’s that, star-mite?” came a voice from the room.

Caura’s face fell, in accordance with Shade’s stomach. Sighing, the dormouse swung the door open. A rat in a rumpled suit sat on the pallet bed behind her. He was fastening the last remaining buttons of his shirt.

“Reginald,” Caura said, “this is Shade. An old colleague.”

The rat stood hurriedly and walked toward him, extending his paw. “A colleague, eh? Well met.”

Shade’s own paw balled into a fist. But it would do him no good. What right did he have? So he swallowed and shook the rat’s damp, wormy paw. “Pleasure.”

“Yes. I was just, eh...”

“Leaving,” said Caura. The dormouse crossed to her trestle table and started to stack phials into a wooden box. Cinnabar ore, Shade noted, and gunpowder. Even sweetcinder, a nasty poison. She’d been busy.

“Leaving,” said Reginald. “I trust you’ll send a card when you’ve…”

“I’ll let you know. Be seeing you.”

“Right.” Reginald looked to Shade and smiled rather painfully. “Then I’m off to greet the mysteries of the day.”

“Charming fellow,” said Shade, when Reginald’s steps had receded down the stairs.

Caura shook her head. “You should send ahead when you feel like stopping by.”

“I thought you’d be happy to see me.”

“It’s been months.”

“Yes.”

Caura turned. “That all you got to say?”

Shade shrugged. “You look well.”

With a cry, Caura snatched a dagger from the trestle table’s surface. Before he could move, the dormouse had him pinned against the wall. The edge of the dagger bit along his windpipe.

“Caura...”

“No more silver words from you, Shade-mouse.”

“Don’t...”

“Don’t what? Slide this dagger across your throat, spill your life’s blood all over my floor?”

“Yes.”

“At least a dagger doesn’t lie. You know where you stand with a dagger. But with you, Shade-mouse — I waited for you half the night in that burrow. Half the night, like some silly girl.”

“I didn’t know,” Shade groaned. A wet warmth welled beneath the dagger’s steel. “I didn’t know — how long I’d be gone.”

“No. Kin like you can never be counted upon.”

“The queen counts upon me.”

“Isn’t that nice for her?”

He tasted her breath, hot and spiced with dark ale. Against his better judgment, Shade strained against the knife’s edge. Caura relented, just a bit. “Rat bastard,” she said, and the two mice kissed.

It lasted only a moment before she wrenched away. “No more of that.” Caura stabbed the dagger into the trestle table. “From now on, our dealings are strictly professional. You understand?”

Shade wiped his neck. It came away red and sticky. “Yes.” A thought occurred to him. “Where’s Causha?”

Caura frowned and crossed to the window. A tankard sat on the sill. She took it up, drank from it. “It’s none of your concern. But — the armory deal went sour. She’s with the frogs.”

“Oh.” Causha had always been the fool of the two. Fool enough to cross Bathtub, it seemed. He wanted to know more. But he had no time. Caura drew the drape and stalked back to her table, bringing the tankard with her.

“What brings you here, Shade? Aside from wasting more of my time?”

Shade tossed the crumbs from his pocket on the table. Lantern light danced across the flakes of scattered salt.

She caught the drift before he even spoke. “Real?”

“Taste.” Shade hid a smile as Caura’s tongue touched a flake.

“Where’d you get this?”

“Never mind. Good, no?”

“What do you want in return?”

“Cigarettes, actually.”

“Wendsy?”

He couldn’t keep lying to her. “I haven’t seen Wendsy in weeks.”

“So?”

“Turkish.”

The word fell at her feet like a leaden ball. Caura’s face darkened. “Him?”

Sighing, Shade scraped a low chair from the corner. “Caura…”

“You think I’d pay him off for you?”

“I didn’t know about Causha. I promise you, once I finish this, I’ll look into it.”

“I know what promises from you are worth.”

“I will.”

“What are you doing sniffing around that abomination anyway? You think he won’t turn on you too?”

“Caura, Lady Light has found the children.”

He held her eyes a moment. Deep black, unwavering. Then she laughed, bitterly, and took up her ale, and drank it until it was gone.

“Better and better,” she murmured, wiping her chin. “So it’s to be war.”

“I suppose.”

“That what you’ve got written on that little paper of yours? About the children?”

Shade shrugged.

Her smile did little to hide her scorn. “How many do you think are going to die because of that paper?”

“Don’t.”

“A hundred thousand? Likely more?”

“None. The paper does nothing. The queen, her sister, the Witnesses — these are their dealings. You want the salt or no?”

The dormouse chewed her lip a moment. Then, “I’ve got Turkish in the back. How many you need?”

“Two.”

Caura nodded, eyeing the salt. “Let me prepare them. Have an ale. Won’t be long.”

Snatching up her dagger, the dormouse disappeared behind the shuttered doors into her workspace. Shade found a flagon of boiled water with bits of comfrey floating in it, and poured that into a pewter tin and drank while he waited.

By the time the clock high above in the street clanged three after midnight, Caura had emerged with two exquisitely white, man-sized cigarettes. She helped fasten them across Shade’s back with two leaf-leather straps, for which she did not charge him. Then they divvied up her portion of the salt and shook paws, and that was it done.

“When the message is delivered,” Shade said, “I’ll come back and we’ll discuss Causha.”

“You shouldn’t come back, Shade.”

“Don’t be a fool. Who better to help you with this? Your rat?”

Caura scowled and produced a ring of keys from her pocket. “Reginald is the senior supply sergeant for Turnabout’s militia. These are the keys to the armory.”

Brilliant. He could have kissed her again. “Oh.”

“And for your information, I entertained him with no more than heavy petting. I’m fine without you. I’m usually without you.”

“UP THERE!” rang out a voice from the courtyard below.

Shade gave Caura the signal for “quiet” and crept to the paneled window, peering through the slit.

Mangy cats filled the courtyard, blazing bright lanterns dangling from their belts. Tyshira clutched Reginald by the scruff of his neck. The rat was pointing frantically toward Caura’s apartments.

“That’s where you seen him?” growled Tyshira.

“I- I swear it,” said Reginald, struggling against the cat’s paw. “Now, I’ve done as you said. Release me, and I…”

“You’ll do what?” hissed a gray tom.

“I shall be forgiving and forgetful in my incident report.”

The cats broke into rough laughter. Tyshira tossed the rat into the claws of the gray tom. “Mrtaka, you may keep this one for sport. The rest of you, follow me. No one leaves this building without our say.”

Floorboards creaked. Shade looked to Caura, but she had gone again, disappeared into the recesses of her workroom. He balled his fist. Lantern was empty, he knew. It would be awful to rob this room of its shadow, even the enticing pools of it hiding in the corners.

It was his fault, of course. His fault for coming here. His fault for making promises he knew he’d never keep. And now Tyshira’s band had come — would likely find her, torture her for Shade’s whereabouts, his mission, the letter. Gut her afterward, likely. The only way out without getting anyone killed — the only way out—

Shade flung the panels open. “No need, Tyshira. Here I am.”

Tyshira’s pupils went wide as saucers. “So the rat wasn’t lying.”

“I want no issue with you, Tyshira. Release the rat. Call off your sons. Can we not talk this over? I am well-connected, and well-known in the high courts.”

“Fancy words worth less than shit. You’re only trying to weasel away again.”

Shade swallowed. “I want no issue.”

Hackles high, Tyshira turned and whispered to his band. A few cats broke away, advancing toward the apartment, sliding around the back. Coming up to seize Caura. Coming up to seize her so he couldn’t get away.

So Shade placed both paws on the sill and, without another thought, leapt out the window.

The courtyard rushed toward him. Shade met it with his shoulder. It cracked. White-hot agony spewed up his arm. He skidded into a pair of boots. His vision blurred. He tasted copper.

Tyshira yowled, and next Shade knew he was being hauled up. The cat’s voice raked like claws on tin, inches away, his breath warm and sour with meat.

“Stupid mouse. No more running. You see my lanterns? No more shadows for you to steal. Thief. Fucking lie to me. Fucking sell me false coin. You see those lanterns? Thrice-paned glass. The kind they have in the forge. No smashing those. No more of your clever tricks, Shade-mouse. Where’s that rat? Pay that fucking rat.”

Coins jangled about a hundred miles away. Reginald stammered his thanks, and Shade felt something pawing at his back.

“These are Turkish,” purred Mrtaka, and one of Caura’s leather straps snapped.

“You count that,” said Tyshira. Shade realized he was dangling from the hook of his claw. “You remember Tyshira always pays for loyalty. Pays well.”

The lantern light was blinding bright. Not a wandering shadow to be found, Shade bemoaned, his broken arm dangling useless at his side. Mrtaka gnawed at one of the stolen Turkish and dipped the cigarette’s end into his lantern. He took a deep drag. Thick smoke poured out.

“That’s the ‘spensive stuff,” Mrtaka mused.

“Gonna do you nice and slow,” said Tyshira, every one of his fangs glittering. “Didn’t I tell you I was gonna hang your guts from the Holy Spires?”

Mrtaka coughed. “Bloody strong. Have a drag, dad.”

“We’re finished here, boys.” Tyshira shoved Shade into his jacket pocket. Shade’s shoulder screamed. “Let’s make to the Falls tenements. We’ll hole up there for the night.”

Mrtaka coughed again, ragged. “Too bloody strong. I — kof. I need water. Wa — kof.”

The other cats laughed, but the gray tom went on coughing, until he fell to his knees, heaving and retching. The cigarette dropped to the cobbles and rolled away, trailing smoke.

“What’s wrong with you?” Tyshira tried dragging him up by the shoulders. Mrtaka’s eyes had gone wide and fearful. Blood flecked his lips. “Give him some water. Any of you lot have water?”

The cats looked at each other gormlessly. Growling, Tyshira snatched up the cigarette and held it at a paw’s length. He sniffed. “High Halls be broken,” he whispered. “It’s poison. The cigarette’s poisoned.”

Mrtaka pawed blindly at open air and fell convulsing onto his side, black steam rising from his open, gagging mouth. Other cats staggered away fearfully. Tyshira ripped Shade from his jacket and cast him to the cobbles.

“Fix him, mouse. Something’s wrong with that cigarette.”

Shade raised his head. “I — don’t know.”

“What does that mean? You’re the one carrying them. Why you got poison cigarettes?”

Shade opened his mouth to tell the cat he hadn’t a clue that the cigarettes were poisoned. But the moment he did, Tyshira’s left leg sprouted the head of a bloodied crossbow bolt. The cat hissed and collapsed to his knee. His eyes went wild with bewilderment.

High above in the window, Caura whistled, a six-shot slingbow hefted in her small arms. The cats whirled and spread, shattering their circle of light.

Shade saw the chance. Haphazard, his shoulder a blazing crucible, the mouse grasped at the fluttering fragments of shadow with his good paw and stuffed them into his lantern.

“That was a warning,” Caura called. “The next will be your eye. Now, will you kitties find another courtyard for your mewling? You do carry on so.”

“Fucking mouse!” spat Tyshira, struggling to rise. “I’ll cut your heart from you, you hear me? Gah, my fucking leg.”

Shade scampered to the edge of the courtyard, where some more shadow huddled in an obscured corner of a wall. He ripped it away as one would a drape in a darkened room. His lantern drank it gratefully. The corner would never again know the relief of darkness. But it’s all the same down here, he told himself.

More cats still spilled from the courtyard, hissing and slinking and swearing vengeance. Tyshira strained again to stand. But his leg had been cut through. The corpse of Mrtaka lay beside him, still.

“Go, Shade,” called Caura. “I’ve got this handled.”

Shade lifted the lantern for its weight. Heavy enough. Enough to get out quickly.“They’ll come back for you,” he called to her.

“Go. Start your war. I’ve got other concerns.”

“I’ll come back for you.”

“Don’t.”

“My son.” Tyshira lay a paw over Mrtaka’s stilled breast. “My second eldest. My clever boy.” The burned cat’s face had twisted into something resembling madness. “You mice. In my city. You mice in my city!” Tyshira sank his claws into the cobbles and began to shamble toward Shade. “I won’t rest until you’re eaten! She’ll have to kill me!”

Shade spared Caura one last look. But her eyes had gone cold. He wouldn’t leave forever. He’d keep his word.

Perhaps.

Shade glanced over his shoulder toward the wall at the edge of the city. The shaded battlement by the gate. Sighing, he pulled the stopper of his lantern.

The beadle on the wall squealed in surprise. But Shade had already laid his eyes on the sprawling cottonwood far along the muddy road. He landed once upon the stones of the wall, jumped, pulled the stopper, and his feet squelched into the muck and roots beneath the rambling tree. The city far behind him, the mouse tucked his wounded arm beneath his jacket and ran as fast as he could on three paws, claws digging into the mud. Behind him, his facsimiles faded, quickly, as mist.

He ran until his lungs were brittle as paper, and his throat as ragged as stripped bark, and the pain in his shoulder threatened to overtake him. He ran until his legs gave out and he collapsed into the road, and dragged himself by one paw beneath a bare pine tree. The message still lay in its wedge between his shirt and vest. Chest heaving, Shade took it out. Read it again. Ran his thumb over the paper.

A hundred thousand. Likely more. “I know what promises from you are worth.”

The tall grass seemed to grasp at him as he inched his way down the hill off the side of the road. Sulfurous wetlands lay beyond it, yawning away into foggy forever. Shade knelt in the warm water, lay the paper amongst the reeds. The mouse gave it a push. It drifted. He watched for a while, watched the paper bob this way and that in the light, listless current. It was fine, wasn’t it? A messenger mouse always remembered.

He sank a paw into the earth, drew it up. Muck dripped from his fist in globs. Shade trudged back up the hill and down the road.

A little after five he reached Agway’s rusted sign: a curved frown of faded paint overtaken by hanging moss, pocked by empty sockets. Beyond that lay the ruin.

Shade did not know what the ruin once was. Its walls had long ago fallen, and what was left of the glass chambers had been shattered by overgrown cottonwood and willow and flooded by mire. Here and there were the remnants of pitched stone stairs, now hardly distinguishable beneath briar and trickling rivulets. Meaner shapes still slunk in the fog of the broken stairways and towers, long shapes with vulpine forms and glowing green eyes.

And yet in this place, Shade did not fear. How could he, when all he could think of was the rich shadow hung like tapestries beneath every branch, within every half-forgotten chamber, beneath the waters themselves, untouched until — until —

Much of the ground had given way to bog, so Shade scaled a cottonwood and followed the path from above, leaping from branch to branch through tangled canopy. All the time he repeated the message to himself. Lady Light’s words, words like daggers, words to awaken the fires of war that still smoldered in the hearts of men.

Lady Misery’s peat fire burned like a lone star. Her tent had been pitched on a small rock island at the center of a pool. A boat rested on its shore. On the bank opposite sat her buckboard, piled high with chests and sheaves of flowers and fabrics and sticks. Shade watched her shamble from her tent and heave various boxes and bundles onto the boat. Light as he could, Shade slipped down the sickly ash and waited her arrival by the wheel of her buckboard.

He hadn’t surprised her. No sooner had she staggered onto the bank than she croaked, “Sour eve, heavy-foot. Come to help me with my baggage?”

“Would that I could.”

“Even if ye could, ye’d find a reason not to. Is ye Smiley?”

“Shade.”

“Ah. Don’t remember. Hard to tell one mouse from another, tell the truth.”

“Lady Misery… ”

She beckoned him toward the boat. “Not here. There’s wolves about, kin. Come back to my tent if ye’ll speak of sour things." 

So Shade nestled himself down in the boards of the boat, and Lady Misery paddled them back to her rock. By the fire he could see her better: slick-skinned, noseless, with a wild, staggering step and knotted hair that swung about her waist. A monstrous eel lay dead upon a plank of wood by the water. She produced a dagger from her bodice and sliced the beast from nape to tail. Dark entrails spilled out. Lady Misery thumbed through them thoughtfully, grunting to herself.

“Sour, sour,” she muttered. “Sour tides abound. Go on, mouse. Shade or Smiley. Speak your tidings and flutter-fly ‘way.”

“I bring word from Lady Light.”

“‘Course ye do. And how is the pretty princess? Still meddlin’ in the turnings of a world that ain’t hers?”

Shade faltered. “I...”

“And I wonder how she found me. Eyes of sparrows, most like. A lucky mouse, I was only just packing for brighter pastures.” Lady Misery brought an organ to her nose and breathed deep. Licking her lips, she staggered to the fire, where she cast the organ into a pan and started mashing it with thumbs. “There are sad spirits wandering this place, swamp spirits, lusty and lost and lingering. But I have given them more than enough of my time. Speak my sister’s words, and be gone.”

“Actually,” Shade said, “before that, may I inquire if you have anything for a wounded shoulder?” He shrugged his injured arm from his jacket.

After giving his shoulder a painful pinch, the hag waddled into her tent and produced a phial of yellow serum and a wooden spoon and fed a few drops onto Shade’s lips. Immediately the throbbing pain in his shoulder faded. His heartbeat settled, too. He rolled the shoulder experimentally. “Wonderful,” he murmured.

“Wonderful now. Three days hence the pain will return tenfold, and on the fourth day the bone will knit and ye’ll be healed. Better payment than ye deserve for words. Now.”

Shade cleared his throat. “From Lady Light...”

“What’s this? Where’s your paper?”

“My parchment was lost in Turnabout Town. But I have the message memorized.”

The old hag’s eyes twinkled suspiciously. She brought the mash to her tongue, tasted it, and shrugged.

“Aye. Go on, then.”

“From Lady Light: I have reclaimed the children. The boy-child rescued from the flood is to be king. He is the one shall bring a quiet to the world. His…”

“Bah!” Lady Misery sprang to her feet, suddenly tall, her face a mask of astonishment and glee. “Ye lie, little mouse. Or else I’d say ye did lie, if ye could.” Her mouth curled into a cruel smile. Every one of her teeth seemed to be from a different animal, and all in the wrong spots. “I don’t suppose ye could prove your comings from the High Halls, and that these are my sister’s words, before I allow ye to poison my thoughts any further.”

Shade produced the star-mite, warm in his palm, from his jacket pocket. It glowed ever-so-faintly.

Misery cooed. “So it is. Land above. Alright. From the beginning, then.”

“From Lady Light: I have reclaimed the children. The boy-child rescued from the flood is to be king. He is the one shall bring a quiet to the world. His sister shall wield the axe they call Forbearance, and she shall be the slayer of slights.”

For a moment, the only sound was the chirrup of crickets and the far-away hoot of an owl. Misery sucked in a breath to speak. Shade stopped her.

“There is a Post-Script.”

The old hag laughed throatily and beckoned him continue. He had to keep his face still. His voice must not tremble. He thought of Caura’s breath, hot and spiced with dark ale.

“These words must never be written: The first message is a lie. The children were lost in the flood. These things in my possession are decoys, conjurings of the Witnesses in an attempt to draw me into war. We must play along if we are to maintain our grasp below the clock. Have my mouse make facsimiles of the axe and crown, and we shall appease the children and guild while I manifest another plan. Breathe of this to any other and I shall rend your atoms in a million different directions.”

Misery laughed again, wild and too loud in the quiet of the night. Embers danced as she jabbed at the fire with a stick. Shade wished to disappear like one of those embers, to fade into air.

But he kept his face still.

“Land above, words and whispers. Not so sour as it seemed.” She cocked her brow. “Fact-silly-me. Ye can make them?”

“I can try. Usually, it’s only a copy of myself. A distraction, for escape. But I’ve done objects before. Keys, and… .” He cleared his throat. “I’ll have to touch them, though. The crown and the axe.”

“Heh. What’s they made of? Wishes and stardust?”

“Shadow.” Shade glanced around. “Plenty of it here. But I’ll — have to take a lot. The more I use, the longer they’ll hold.”

Misery ran a gray tongue along her teeth. “Take? Take? Does it come back?”

“No.”

The old hag tossed the stick to the ground, hefted the limp corpse of the eel in her arms, and sloughed the body off into a basket. Then she staggered back into her tent, whispering to herself. Bright metallic clangs rang out. Misery returned with a large bronze box. Careful, she laid it by the fire and patted the lid.

“They’s in here.”

“Good. I’ll need a moment to gather the resources.”

“Be quick about it. My wagon leaves at ha’past Six. No exceptings.” She gestured for him to follow her to the boat. “Little Sister, what have you gotten us into? Turnings, turnings…”

The hag did not bid him luck when she dropped him ashore. Little did he need it. Sweat slicked his palms, and saliva pooled beneath his tongue. Everywhere. The richest, the purest, deep and warm and his for the taking.

A messenger mouse was never to lie. “Lie,” Almus had taught him, “and your life shall be cursed, and your loves shall be smitten with pestilence and madness.” But those were only stories. Fear would keep the kits in line. But Shade was no kit. And Caura had been right. So many lives — all hanging upon the words of a mouse.

And besides. Look at it. Look at it all.

He started beneath a willow, drawing up a line of it from beneath its rampant roots. It pulsed in his palm. He worked his way up the whips, threading every silken rope of shadow from beneath every leaf, jammed in every crag of bark, until the tree glowed a sullen gray that shone like a beacon in the dark of the mire. But no matter. He would make it all match.

Giggling, the mouse took to another tree, ravishing it, ripping it away, and the stone by the tree, and the reeds in the creek by the stone, and beneath the creek itself. Shade splashed like a madman, hopping over the remains of the glass chambers into the murky swamp, pulling, spooling, dragging the shadow behind him like a net. And all the while his lantern drank. It had never drunk so deep.

He scaled the broken towers, brushing it from the cracks in the stones, scooping it up from the spiraling steps. Wolves cowered before him, whining and slinking away into the shrinking darkness, and if Shade had wished he could have run them through with his quill and drawn the shadow from within them too. But he was kind, wasn’t he? A god in his own right. And when he was done they would call it Graymire and scorn it from their travel. No wolves. No witches.

All at his fingertips. All to feed the lantern. All to save the world. If they only knew—

Blood spattered from his palms onto the colorless mud of the bank. Misery scowled down from the seat of her buckboard.

“Horrible creature. You’ve ruined this place.”

Shade wiped his palms on his vest. They’d gone gray too, down to his wrists. He pressed a finger to the pad of his paw. Numb to the touch. Must have stripped some away from his palms.

Never again to know the relief of darkness — no good for a mouse who lived by hiding. He shook the thoughts from his head.

“It was a ruin, my Lady.”

“Tell that to the snakes and the frogs.” She clambered down and boarded the boat. “Come along, Shade.”

The axe had a haft of minotaur bone inlaid with inscriptions of lapis lazuli. Its blade was Damascus steel, sharp enough to cut a falling leaf. The crown had a band of threaded black iron. Its points were fifty spikes of titanium.

Shade lay a paw upon the axe’s haft. It would have felt cool, or smooth, or slick. But he could sense nothing. Something he would have to get used to, he supposed.

Careful to keep his eyes from revealing his sight, Shade focused beyond his Graymire, on the furthest reaches of untouched wetland that he could see. He pulled the stopper of the lantern.

The axe went black. Solid, with a slight mist rising from its form.

The splash in the far distance was barely perceptible.

Misery hadn’t heard it. “Where’s it gone?”

“Where does shadow go when the light above shines bright?”

“No riddles.”

He gestured to her box. “This facsimile will last a week. Maybe two. When it is gone, the axe will return to your box.”

Based on her reaction, he’d been convincing. He went on to do the crown. He thought she might have heard that splash, but if she did, she dismissed it.

“Horrible creature,” she murmured later, tying up her tent onto her buckboard. “I will encourage my sister never to use your services again. Things like ye should stay up top. We needn’t ruin another world.”

“I am at your service should you change your mind.”

Misery scoffed and tightened a strap.

“You don’t smoke, do you?” Shade jerked a thumb at the cigarette on his back.

“No.”

“Does Lady Light? I’ve got a Turkish I don’t need.”

Misery peered at him suspiciously. “Don’t know. Why?”

“I’ll leave it on the ground here. If she’d like it, it’s of good quality. Consider it a good wish for all her future endeavors.”

So it was that Shade walked alone through the mire. The trees had lost their definition and stirred ghostly in the thick swamp breeze, but still, they were fine for climbing. He made his way through the network of colorless branches, overlooking gray water lapping upon the gray shores. His creation. And why shouldn’t he make the whole world match? Who would stop him, with his lantern so full? He wondered whose side he was on.

Certainly not Lady Light’s. Not anymore.

A further ways along the path, he spotted something bobbing in the white waters. Something that had managed to maintain its color. Frowning, Shade scampered down the tree and picked his way across a log to snatch it from the pond.

A devilish grin broke out across his face.

Careful, he took his woodbine quill from his vest and retraced his letters, sucking the words from the precious parchment. Maybe he would start again in the deeper places, beneath the temples of Argon, or in the Land of Running Water. A mouse could make money running messages for them without legs. And he didn’t need much. The parchment found its place beneath his vest, and he felt a certain warmth at having it there again.

The Call came as the clock high above in the street clanged Seven, a time when most of the world was rising awake, and Shade stood alone in the ruins of Agway’s Sunken Mire. The buzzing blue ball bobbed through air toward him, sizzled, and dissipated. From its place fell a sapphire seashell ornament. It thunked into the colorless mud.

Shade stooped and picked it up. So Wendsy had likely heard of all the trouble he’d been getting into. Probably wanted a piece of leverage before the war games started in earnest. He ran a thumb across the shell. It would be at least a week before Lady Light had her servants on his tail. More than enough time to run a few messages, stack a few coins before things got too wormy.

Shade flipped the shell in air and stuffed it in his pocket. A messenger mouse must never resist a Call. Besides, he felt his business Downbelow was not quite finished. There was work to be had. Words to be carried.

Words to be changed.