She dreams, still, of wings and swords of fire. Of labyrinthine pursuit, and falling blades, and blood.
Of home.
She sleeps on her side, curled in a crescent, within a circle of tall beeswax candles and chalk on bare floorboards, on the top floor of a haunted building in a haunted city; paces out days and nights on cracked and twisting streets.
When the shadows went to war, so many lives disappeared into the dark; and in the aftermath many survivors washed to strange shores, with no past they cared to speak of. She is just another; just another strange face, grey eyes and hair magnesium-flare white, just another hand reflexively ready with a blade, just another hard expression that turns away questions.
People find niches, afterwards; or they fall into their own personal ruins. She's definitely doing one of those.
The haunted building goes both tall and deep, a maze of damp cellars. For sixteen minutes, each dawn, she sits in the deepest of them, within a circle of black sand and bones arranged to radiate. Inside it, for convenience, are an antique writing-desk and chair. On the desk, a skull — wrapped in hair-fine enamelled copper wire until its shape blurs, dipped in successive layers of black and white wax, symbols carved into its eventual smooth shape. Within its cranial hollow, a monkey's fist knot of cable wrapped around something dark and secret, the trailing end snaking out through the wax-shelled slot of the jaws and ending in an antique telephone. Almost always, the telephone is silent.
This morning, it rings.
There are two of them, stuck together through common origin and choice of loyalties and held apart by personal distrust and ancient contempts. This had been a hotel, once; she finds him in the office behind the reception desk, muttering as he flicks through the overstuffed contents of sagging pigeonholes.
"Daniel."
"Lana."
"There's been a...theft."
He looks around, disbelieving. "From here?"
"No. Not here." She mimes a telephone handset to her head. "The Halls."
The colour runs out of his face. "No," he says, soft and dreading. "Do they — how? And what?"
She passes him a twice-folded piece of notepaper; he opens it, makes a noise of horror, and hurriedly closes it up, as if to imprison the single word inside.
"What do they want us to do?" he says, hopeless.
"They think it's being brought through here," she says calmly.
He finds a greyer kind of haggard to pale to.
They need specialist help, she suggests. People whose talent is to find things, places, people.
"You mean the kind the war slaughtered, and scattered the rest all over? The ones with no place of their own any more, so nobody finds them, and no kind of willingness to help if you did?" He waves it off, sourly.
"They're still here, Daniel. And some of them still freelance."
"Well, good luck." He starts to turn away.
"If they bring it here, Daniel...." She stands like a bright knife and lets it lie, lets the consequences bloom in his mind's eye. "What's your plan, for finding it?"
He makes an irritable gesture of concession, and stalks out of the room.
It's true, though, that the Vanishers are gutted and gone to ground, that there's no trust left in them. She makes patient inquiries in the usual places, and meets silence and indifference. No, nobody like that here. No, no friends-of-friends to refer her to. Nothing that money or favours or name-dropping can buy, no offers, no leads.
But she expected this. To carefully disturb still waters, to make her name and interest known. To watch and wait and be prepared to dive deep, after elusive fish.
Sunset, from the vantage of the harbour bridge; light rain, a promise in the air that the later cold will have teeth. A lone figure, small and hunched around habitual fury, softened into an empty crumple by exhaustion. A windblown tangle of black hair, an ancient jacket held together with patches and duct tape. One booted foot resting on the lowest bar of the handrail, hands in pockets.
Lana advances slowly, steps calm and measured, beneath an umbrella. The Vanishers are named for their affinity for shadows, for shadows' affinity for them; the ability to be invisible, in the dark. The ability to find, and not be found, the two aspects of whatever ancient pact still slithers through their veins. This is not a chance meeting, but neither is it one she can take for granted; at the slightest whim or turn of conversation, she can find herself standing apparently alone, and time is short. Time maybe already be gone.
"Hello," she says, and the Vanisher turns her face away from the disappearing gleams of sunlit colour, eyes boring straight into Lana's, then flicking down her, up to the umbrella, and back to pinning her gaze.
The thing about stories, Lana feels, very suddenly and sharply, is that there's never only one. A constant, endless onion-skin layering of them, tissue-thin, their beginnings endlessly cascading and their ends simply creating the space in which others immediately germinate. She is more stories than person; warrior, exile, penitent, spy. She came here because a terrible game's afoot already. She knows all these stories, their shapes and resonances. She understands who and what they tell her to be.
"What," the Vanisher says, in a voice that rasps from dried-up crying, "do you want," and Lana almost takes a step back and flees, startled beyond measure, beyond anything she remembers. At a beginning she doesn't understand, a story she doesn't know, the terrible inevitable shape of a onrushing future she can't see coming.
What do you want? sounds like prophecy. Doom.
An opening line.
Two figures stand on a bridge, and one almost-snaps a question at the other. And the taller, pale figure lifts a courteous hand to move them both beneath the shelter of her umbrella, and there at the beginning of it, says:
I'd like your help.