He glanced back at her. She stopped, but felt a bit of a teeter. She'd almost thrown herself off-balance, but it didn't look as if he noticed. He looked away again, shrugged, and said, "Actually, it could take twenty, thirty years. Honestly, it's not a high priority in my research right now. I'm still rather captivated by the demiplane of shadow, as you may have guessed. But perfecting a simulacrum-link with the prime material… home, as it were… is rather vital to that endeavor as well. Your having destroyed my own simulacrum will mean I'll have to stick around here until I get a new one together.
"Rather inconvenient, actually."
By conjuring some kind of big black disc under their tingling feet, he lifted both of them up toward the crystal in the center of the room. She was gaining greater movement, but so slowly she still wouldn't be able to defend herself before he did whatever he was going to do.
Below, Alashar could see the copy of herself staring blankly ahead, standing in her own customary pose, weight on her right foot, arms crossed over her chest.
Shadow almost never looked at Alashar, instead watching the gemstone nearing above them. "All you have to do is touch it," he told her, not really sounding too consoling. "You won't feel a thing."
They were almost there, an inch away, when he added, "As far as I know-"
Alashar grabbed him. Her elbow was shot through with pain, and it felt as if the joint popped, but her hand took a firm hold of his slippery silk robe. She felt him flinch. She wished she could laugh when he screamed out his own name.
Wherever they were, it was dark gray.
A cold wind whipped the hair around Alashar's face, and she forced herself to stand, releasing Shadow's robe. He stepped away. They stood together on a rolling plain covered in a sort of tall grass with small, sparse leaves. Sprinkled across the gray landscape were the shapes of trees, which ruffled in the wind but made no sound. The grass and trees seemed to blend together where they touched or overlapped.
Nothing had real substance; nothing had color.
Shadow looked at her with a strange mix of anger, relief, and… could that be admiration? His face was the only color anywhere. His cheeks were flushed, his lips unnaturally red. In a black and white world, anything but gray is garish.
When she started backing away from him, he didn't say anything. When she drew her whip-rapier, he laughed. When she threw her body at him, sword first, he disappeared.
"You can't kill me here," he said from behind her. She spun on him, but he was too far away, a hundred yards or more. Movement in the corner of her right eye made her reflexes explode. She drew her whip-rapier through the air. It whistled for a split second. Then there was silence and resistance as it cut through something.
Her own shadow had come up from the ground at her feet and was trying to touch her. Or was it trying to claw her? Scratch out her eyes, or put a reassuring hand on her shoulder to tell her it would be okay if she just-
No, it was trying to kill her. Its touch was like ice, but not even ice was this cold. Her body shuddered-not a shiver but a seizure. She curled the tip of her whip-rapier back at her own shadow, and it passed again through that same strange substance that dragged at the wire-thin blade.
"Kill it!" Shadow's voice called to her. It sounded as if he was farther away, but the wind, the bizarre feeling to the air, and the… shadowy quality to the ground, the grass-everything-made it impossible for her to judge sound here.
Her bare feet were numb from the cold, but moved fast even for her. She managed to keep the tiling away from her. It was a gray, flat nothing, literally a shadow in her shape. Sometimes the arms seemed deformed and stubby, other times overly long and thin. How it was managing to touch her, she had no idea, but when it did it hurt.
Only a few seconds had passed, but she was starting to get weaker. There was more movement. More shadows, or maybe creatures casting shadows of their own, were approaching.
She heard Shadow curse and grunt. There was a flash of light, and he cursed again, almost screamed.
Her own shadow stopped just long enough for her to drag her whip-rapier through it once more. It fell away all at once, even though she never got the feeling she'd hurt it. Her head was spinning, her knees were about to give way, and the whip-rapier quivered in her weakening grip. She looked around and saw dozens more shadows. They were everywhere, in the grass, slithering out of the trees, in a hundred shapes and all sizes. The one coming at Shadow was absolutely gigantic.
The look on his face was a mask of fear and disappointment.
A single, clear thought shot through Alashar's brain like a crystal arrow: He's the only one who can get me back.
Rushing to his defense, she felt hands and tentacles and tendrils and other things her language had no name for reaching shadow fingers from the grass to caress her legs with agonizing cold. Her body felt as if it would shake itself apart. Reaching the huge creature that charged Shadow, she attacked as if her life depended on it… because it did.
The shadow things-smaller ones-were still converging on Shadow, but he was keeping them at bay with flashes of light-for now.
Alashar sent her whip-rapier into a spinning spiral. The sound of it whistling through the air pierced her eardrums and drowned out Shadow's constant, unintelligible muttering. When the giant shadow thing touched her, her knees gave out; she fought from the ground. She had to shred the thing, swing the whirling blade back and forth through it.
Whistle. Silence. Resistance. Whistle. Silence. Resistance… Finally she just closed her eyes and let her arms do their work.
Then the resistance was gone, and she wanted to believe the giant thing was dead.
She felt a hand on her arm, warm and real, and forced her eyes open to see that it was Shadow. He was saying something, but he must not have been talking to her because she couldn't understand a word of it. Another of the smaller things, this one the shadow of a sort of monster goat, touched her again, but the cold wasn't quite as bad and didn't last as long.
Her body gave out. Though she was already sitting sprawled on the cold ground, she started falling. She took a sharp breath, surprised.
By the time she hit the floor, the cold was gone, the wind was gone, and she saw the pillars and the warmth and light of the spherical laboratory. She lay on her back. Her neck went limp, and her head rolled to one side. Her eyes met the eyes of her simulacrum, also lying flat on its back. As she slipped into black unconsciousness, she couldn't help noticing how green her double's eyes looked.
She didn't remember their being that green.
The bedcovers were oppressively heavy, but Alashar was still shivering when she awoke. The first thing she saw was a carved wooden post-a corner of the bed- and a molded plaster ceiling scarred black from a fire. Movement made her turn her head, light flashed in her eyes, and there was pain. When her vision cleared, she saw a young woman, barely more than a girl. The woman wore a simple white shift, her dark hair in an almost comically girlish bob, her face an expressionless mask of ambivalence. A servant. The girl glanced at her, peered over her shoulder at someone or something, and then walked away, holding a bucket of water that didn't seem heavy enough.
"Don't try to move just yet," Shadow's voice echoed slightly from across the room.
She moved anyway, and regretted it. The pain in her head was almost overwhelming, almost made her pass out again. She didn't have the energy to fight it. She could and did accept it, sitting up slowly in the opulent bed, shivering, working at breathing.
"Anyone else would be dead," Shadow continued. "You're quite something."