The Stranger's Shadow Read online

  My contemplative exercises were cut short, quite literally. Something dark and heavy fell on my foot. I howled in pain and grabbed Shurf to keep my balance. He picked me up with one hand like a newborn kitten and put me down on the ground behind his back. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed how he tossed away his protective glove. Here on the Dark Side, Lonli-Lokli’s death-dealing left hand shone not white but fiery crimson.

  Only now did I realize that that the heavy object that had almost crushed my foot was only a Shadow with a clearly discernible anthropomorphic outline. To be more precise, it was the Shadow’s hand that had tried to grab my boot. No sooner did I realize this than the Shadow vanished, turning into a shapeless puddle onto the ground.

  “Did we just score a point?” I said. “Jeepers, that Shadow was one heavy son of a gun.”

  “Indeed, on the Dark Side, any Shadow, not to mention a Lonely Shadow, weighs a lot more than its master,” said Juffin, shaking his head. The boss was looking at me with so much reproach that it seemed I was responsible for the record-breaking increase in the weight of those mysterious creatures.

  “But Shurf, you killed it!” I said. “You didn’t even break a sweat.”

  “That was a novice,” said Lonli-Lokli, sighing. “The Shadow of one of the poor fellows who died last night. It was still soft and did not know anything about anything. Had that Lonely Shadow been a few days older, I doubt I could have done much damage to it.”

  “What about your Lethal Spheres?” I said.

  “Well, mine will certainly not harm them, but you should try yours. Who knows? Maybe they will work.”

  “It will be silly if it turns out I’m the only expert in eliminating Lonely Shadows in the World,” said Juffin, smirking. “After all, I’m the boss. I’m supposed to give orders, not do the actual work. So you, Sir Max, simply must try to kill them somehow. And I won’t take no for an answer.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “I’ll try.”

  “Please do, at your earliest convenience,” said the boss, livening up.

  We moved along. A few minutes later, Juffin turned into a courtyard and stopped in the very center of a circular area paved with small, unpolished rocks.

  “This place on the Dark Side corresponds to your house on the Street of Old Coins, Max,” he said. “It will be much easier for us to fight here, especially for you. Summoning the beasts here is also easy. An excellent spot in all respects.”

  With these words, Juffin took off his warm winter looxi and tossed it onto the branch of a nearby tree. His gorgeous turban followed his looxi.

  “They’ll get in the way,” he said.

  Now dressed in a thin silvery skaba reaching all the way to the ground, his head shaved, Sir Juffin Hully resembled a fierce priest of some ancient deity. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

  Juffin raised his hands in front of him. That motion projected so much power that it seemed as though he had cut through the very fabric of space. I was mentally preparing to hear the sound of it ripping apart when Juffin let out a piercing, guttural shriek. He shrieked for so long that I accepted this sound as the permanent soundtrack of the rest of my life. When the earsplitting shriek ended, I almost choked on the sudden silence.

  Juffin spread his arms out wide with powerful effort and erupted in sudden and forceful laughter.

  “Why, welcome, my dear fellows!” he said. “You can’t imagine how lonely we are here without you. Shurf, cover my back. Max, stand by my side. Even if you can’t help, you’ll at least learn something useful. See them now? All gathered here together, the bastards.”

  A gigantic dark mass of something was approaching us slowly and hesitantly.

  “This is the way I do it,” said Juffin. He laughed again with evil glee and stretched his palms toward the darkness that was encroaching on us. The next moment I saw how Juffin, with visible effort, crumbled something that resembled a human body. The dark mass dematerialized in his hands rapidly until there was nothing left of it.

  “It’s not as difficult as it may seem,” he said, winking at me and repeating his feat.

  “If you think I can possibly learn this, your ungrounded optimism has just gone off the scale,” I said.

  “I don’t need you to learn it. Your method of killing Lonely Shadows is most likely radically different from mine. I simply want you to find out what it is, and be quick with it,” said Juffin, killing a third dark silhouette. “There’s no special way to do it, so don’t try to copy me. Start off with what you can do already.”

  “M’kay,” I said and almost mechanically snapped the fingers of my left hand. I never had any problem whatsoever with launching my Lethal Spheres.

  I saw the green fireball fly out of my fingers and approach the huddle of dangerous Lonely Shadows. The dark clump jolted and backed off. My Lethal Sphere, now big and almost transparent, attacked the retreating clump.

  “Hey, they’re running away from your Lethal Sphere, Max!” said Juffin. “Excellent. Now we can take front-row seats, relax, and watch the show. Look, look!”

  I looked and saw something incredible. The dark clump was covered in a veil of a glowing green mist and was starting to shrink.

  “Looks like your Lethal Sphere is eating the bastards,” said Juffin. “Soon, I hope, there will be nothing left of our little friends. See how easy it all turned out to be? Sir Shurf, what’s your news?”

  “Nothing in the back, so far,” said Lonli-Lokli. “But I am not sure that all the Lonely Shadows answered your summons.”

  “Of course not,” said Juffin. “The protagonist of the show, the leader of the gang, isn’t here. I can sense that villain, though. It’s somewhere near. It can’t make up its mind to attack, and it can’t run away. My spell is worth something after all.”

  “Hey! Look what happened to my Lethal Sphere!” I said. “It didn’t disappear, it’s still there. Are you sure this is normal?”

  “No, Max, it isn’t,” said Juffin, surprised at what he saw.

  The dark clump was gone, but the enormous green sphere had become very dense. It emanated a sense of power and danger so clear and apparent, it sent shivers down my spine. It seemed that my Lethal Sphere had a mind of its own, completely independent of my fickle wishes. Any second now it could take it into its head that the three of us made as good a lunch as the Lonely Shadows just had.

  A dark-burgundy flash put an end to our anxieties. My Lethal Sphere wobbled like jelly that had plopped onto the floor and disappeared.

  “There,” said Shurf, smirking and putting his protective glove back on. “For your every action there is a counteraction, Max.”

  “And I’m so happy there is,” I said. “I’m almost positive that my brazen fireball was about to have us for lunch. Those Lonely Shadows of yours weren’t nutritious enough for it.”

  “Well, they are shadows, after all. What kind of nutritional value would they have?” said Juffin with a straight face. He came to the tree on which his clothes were hanging and put on his turban and looxi. “Thank you, Sir Shurf. I am eternally grateful to you. Now I’m going to deal with their leader. I hope that creature is tougher than its minions, and more talkative. I’d love to have a chat with it. When Lonely Shadows begin walking down the streets of Echo all of a sudden, someone has a motive. I wish I knew who it was and what his motives were. Step aside, boys. I’m going to need some room here.”

  “Come here, Max. Are you stuck?” said Shurf. Then he did the only right thing to do: he grabbed me and pulled me aside. If he hadn’t, I would have still been standing there, as though struck by lightning, trying to process the idiotic escapade of my own Lethal Sphere.

  “Do not fret,” Lonli-Lokli said softly. “That was valuable experience. Everything changes on the Dark Side, including Lethal Spheres. Once we are back in the World, your Lethal Spheres will start obeying your commands again.”

  “I got really scared,” I said in a whisper.

  “I can relate. Now look at Juffin. This is quite a rare
and fascinating spectacle.”

  I turned around and saw that the cobblestones in the courtyard were shining a soft golden color. In the middle of that beautiful shimmering stood Sir Juffin Hully, motionless and ablaze like the brightest candle. I noticed that this time, his arms, again spread out on either side of his body, were wrapped in the fabric of his looxi, as though he were about to grab a boiling caldron.

  “Holy cow!” I said. “Look, Shurf, there’s something I don’t get. It’s just a bunch of shadows—granted, they’re a bunch of Lonely Shadows —and we’ve already wreaked havoc so early in the morning. I’ll bet you didn’t have to stage this show too often even before the Battle for the Code. Are Shadows really so dangerous?”

  “Do you think Juffin and I simply wanted to stretch our muscles? Well, even as exercise, it was effective. But these are Lonely Shadows . . . I do not know about other places, but in our World, they are among the most dangerous and deadly of beasts. If we did not take action, in a couple dozen days Echo would become a dead city, its tale recounted in legend. First Echo, then all of Uguland. Not the most enviable fate for the Heart of the World.”

  “I see,” I said with a sigh and stared back at Juffin. “What’s going on down there?”

  The boss was not wasting any time. A tall, dark shadow was slowly approaching him. Its blurry outline obscured anything human in its shape. Juffin leaned in toward his adversary, demanding and impatient. The Shadow moved faster, as though attracted by a strong magnet. Moments later Juffin was wrapping his looxi around the dark silhouette. The amber light of the courtyard began to fade, and Juffin’s body was not blazing anymore. He relaxed, even stooped a little, and came over to us.

  “La commedia è finita!” he said in the thin voice of an evil gnome. I was stunned. Had Juffin just said something in Italian? “I’m sorry, Max,” Juffin said, laughing. “I didn’t mean to scare you. On the contrary, I wanted to give you a pleasant surprise. I fished this mumbo jumbo out of your head. What does it mean, by the way?”

  “‘The show is over.’ So you got that right,” I said. “But don’t scare me like that anymore, okay?”

  “All right, all right,” said Juffin, pleased with himself. “So shall we go home, boys? Magicians only know how much time has passed in our World while we were partying out here.”

  “Time flows differently here and there?” I said.

  “Occasionally,” said Juffin, nodding, “but not necessarily. It’s difficult enough to control the flow of time when you travel between Worlds. When you’re on the Dark Side, time is absolutely unpredictable. We’d better hurry.”

  Juffin stood between Shurf and me and put his arms around our shoulders.

  “Melifaro!” he yelled like an angry mother calling her son back home for dinner.

  “No need to yell,” said Melifaro. There was just a single copy of him again, which suited me just fine. Two Melifaros in one room is one Melifaro too many, in my book.

  “Where’d you come from?” I said.

  “I didn’t come from anywhere, you did,” he said. “What took you so long? Women and wine?”

  “Indeed. What else would one do on the Dark Side?” Juffin said in an absentminded voice. Then he looked at me and laughed. “I’ll be darned, Max. I’m going to take you to the Dark Side every day from now on. I love seeing that sweet, innocent, idiotic smile on your face.”

  “Oh, yeah? What did you look like after you returned from your first trip over there, I wonder?” I said.

  “The same way I always look,” he said and laughed again. “But only because I was incredibly dense. I thought I had dreamed it all up. And that sneaky Mackie was enjoying my idiocy and didn’t even try to cure me of my delusion.”

  “He’s not sneaky, he’s a great fellow,” I said, sighing. “If someone persuaded me that our trip was just a dream, I’d just go back to my quiet life again.”

  “Dream on,” said Juffin. “No quiet life for you, son. Although, in some sense, every trip to the Dark Side is a dream. A dream that only a person who is wide-awake can dream, though. Keep that in mind, if it makes you feel any better.”

  He walked down the narrow passageway, and we followed him. I sneaked a quick look at Shurf. Even in the semidarkness of the dungeons I could see his face transforming back to the all too familiar imperturbable mask of Sir Lonli-Lokli.

  “Putting on your traveling attire, Shurf?” I said in a whisper.

  “Yes. Did you like the metaphor?”

  “Immensely.”

  “I am glad to hear that.”

  He even made a slight bow, as if we had exchanged some stock compliments at a royal ceremony. Yet at the corners of his mouth, I could still discern a daredevil smile that he had smuggled over from the Dark Side.

  A half hour later we left the dungeons and marched down the hallways of Headquarters.

  “Say what you will, but I’m going home,” said Melifaro. “You should thank me for not passing out in the bathroom.”

  “Thank you,” Juffin and I said in unison and laughed at our perfect timing.

  “Do you want me to give you a lift?” I said. “You’ll be under your blanket in no more than five minutes.”

  “That would be great,” said Melifaro. It was the rare case of Melifaro accepting my help without showing off. He must have been really wiped out.

  “I’ll be back before you have time to finish a cup of kamra,” I told Juffin.

  “A cup of kamra would be just the ticket right now,” said Juffin, sighing. “All right, go help your friend. See you soon.”

  It was almost completely dark outside. The sky was covered in pitch-black clouds that hung so low, it seemed you could touch them if you stood on the roof of a moderately tall house. Streetlamps were out, of course, and almost all the windows were shuttered. There were no pedestrians on the streets. While we were gone, the Capital had led a very gloomy existence.

  In the amobiler, Melifaro was dozing off and I expressed my compassion to the best of my abilities.

  “I’m just glad I don’t have your talents,” I said, summarizing our little chat. “The job of a Sentry doesn’t seem like a walk in the park.”

  “It is, though,” said Melifaro, yawning. “No need to gloat. You just took an awful long time. Thanks, though, you monster, I’m home. Would you be so kind as to pull over? I don’t feel like jumping out of a moving vehicle today.”

  “Sure thing, buddy,” I said, stopping by the door of his house. Melifaro pandiculated and got out of the amobiler.

  “Oh, one more thing. Would you please tell Lady Kenlex that I just could not possibly stuff her sisters’ stomachs with Kumonian sweets today?” he said.

  “With what sweets?” I said, making an innocent face.

  “Kumonian sweets. And don’t give me that innocent look. I know you were spying on us in the Kumonian Honey. I don’t blame you. I would have done the same if I were you.”

  The heavy front door of his house had already closed behind him, and I was still shaking my head in disbelief. How on earth did he find out?

  On my way back to the House by the Bridge, I sent a call to Tekki. She replied in no time.

  No need to explain. Sir Kofa has told me the story of Lonely Shadows five times already. At first, it was amusing. Then it got old.

  Five times? How long have I been gone then?

  Only four days. Kofa’s just having a bad case of unrequited love for my kamra and, well, me by extension.

  He’s got great taste.

  Then we chatted a little more. I had already reached Headquarters, so it was time for us to “hang up.” Not for long, I hoped.

  Our side of the House by the Bridge was empty. Even couriers were nowhere to be seen. In the office, Kurush and Juffin were the only living souls, and the buriwok was fast asleep.

  “Is Shurf already on the roof?” I said.

  “Not yet. I think he’s in the restroom,” said Juffin.

  “He frequents it, too?” I said.

  �
��Apparently. You could have come back sooner, though,” said Juffin in a grumpy tone. “You said you’d be back before I finished a cup of kamra, and I have already started my third.”

  “I was practicing Silent Speech. One has to do it sometimes,” I said. “On the upside, I’m not going to bother asking you how long we’ve been gone. I know it’s been four days.”

  “I don’t see that as an upside. You’re going to ask me something else,” said Juffin, sighing. “For example, where Kofa and Melamori are.”

  “I’m sure they’re asleep at home. Changing into their pajamas, rather,” I said. “I guess they didn’t have much time to sleep while we were gone.”

  “You guessed right, although life in the Capital was pretty uneventful in our absence. Even criminals are scared of Lonely Shadows, which is wise of them. The inhabitants have simply been staying home. How about we don’t tell them that everything is over? We’ll get a few days of the best vacation ever.”

  “That’s an excellent idea,” I said.

  “Sir Juffin,” said Lonli-Lokli, entering the office, “do you think I should take care of the sky over the city?” To my surprise, he wasn’t wearing his turban and generally looked disheveled.

  “The sky can wait,” said Juffin. “I’m going to finish my kamra and interrogate our captive. Who knows, maybe we’ll need to expect more guests as early as tonight.”

  “Do you believe that is possible?” said Lonli-Lokli.

  Juffin just shrugged.

  “Shurf, you’re all wet!” I said, finally realizing what was wrong with him.

  “Of course. I recommend that you follow my example. A trip to the Dark Side calls for a good shower. To be perfectly frank, a full bath is in order, but there are no bathing pools in Headquarters.”