Anne Ursu - The Shadow Thieves

Philonecron squealed, and his squeal reverberated through Exile. The ground shivered, the stalagmites rattled, the stalactites trembled, the Unburied quavered, and the twelve buck-naked Footmen stood up as one and moved to attend to their master-who was more than a little moved by the gesture. He watched, marveling, as they lined up in a careful arc in front of him, precise and proud.

Philonecron sighed with pleasure. The men regarded him blankly, faces etched out of shadow and clay. He smiled munificently back at them and gestured to the packages. "Hold out your arms!" he sang, and, like that, twelve long, spindly pairs of arms dutifully shot out, ready to receive whatever burden he might bestow on them.

"Close your eyes!" he trilled, and twelve pairs of yellow eyes disappeared behind twelve pairs of heavy gray-white lids.

"Are they closed?… Good! Don't open them until I tell you to!" With great ceremony Philonecron walked down the line, one by one putting a package in a pair of arms. The Footmen did not move. When he was done, he took his place in front of them. "Right, now open your eyes!"

The Footmen were not very experienced at this sort of thing, and anyway, they tended to take their orders quite literally. So it took some coaching for Philonecron to get them to look down at the bundles their gray-white arms were embracing.

"Yes! Yes!" He held his arms out magnanimously "They're for you, my children! Go on! Go on! Put them on!"

It wasn't for several more minutes that Philonecron was able to get the Footmen to unwrap their packages, examine the garments, and then put them on. He never would have believed it before, but inbred, mindless loyalty does have its drawbacks.

But Philonecron's spirits were not to be dampened, and he in turn closed his eyes while his men dressed, and did not open them again until they were all lined up in their new finery.

And what he beheld made it all worthwhile. When his eyes opened, he let out a gasp. He shook his head. He clasped his hands together. His eyes moistened.

"Why," he exclaimed, "you're all just so… beautiful!"

The Footmen were wearing exquisitely crafted tuxedos with jet-black jackets trimmed with silk, impeccably tailored to the angular contours of their wearers. They wore white ties, white gloves, with crisply starched snow-white shirts, white silk waistcoats, and impeccably folded white silk handkerchiefs poking out of the breast pockets. Philonecron could practically see his reflection in their shoes.

Something happened to the Footmen when they put on their finery. They altered, grew into their sartorial molds – almost as if they were made out of clay. Which, in fact, they were. The transformation was not physical, exactly; they had been blank, mindless automatons, and they had become, well, still mindless, but possessed of dignity, elegance, and grace.

"Exquisite," he breathed. "Just exquisite!"

The Footmen all smiled their very first smiles and bowed their heads graciously one by one.

"My goodness," Philonecron enthused. "You're all so… well bred!"

Well, really, it was only natural. They were made with his blood, after all.

"Now," he said. "Come close, my beautiful darlings, and I will tell you what we are going to do."

It had all begun with the boy. You know. The Death. The old English woman. The family tableau. The man, the woman, and the boy. Something about the boy. His shadow. His shadow was loose!

Right then Philonecron knew that all of his problems had been solved. But he did not know quite how yet.

He stared at the boy and he thought. He thought hard.

And then he came up with a plan.

A delicious, delightful, delovely plan.

A lesser evil genius would have taken the boy's shadow right away. But not Philonecron. One shadow does not an army make. He would leave the boy's shadow, but he would take his blood.

Just a little. Not enough to kill him or anything;

Philonecron had a feeling he would need the boy later on, and anyway, he seemed like such a nice boy. The boy would be fine-woozy for a while, but fine. Children are awfully resilient.

He couldn't take the blood right then, of course, with the boy conscious and his parents right there. Yes, denizens from the Underworld can walk around the Upperworld unseen, but it's fairly hard to take blood from someone without his noticing. Philonecron didn't want anyone to start getting suspicious and behaving rashly He would have to wait until the boy was sleeping.

It was all right. He had plenty to do before then.

Philonecron spent four hours wandering the city; studying people and their shadows and the connections thereof. In the past he had regarded trips to the Upperworld as a necessary evil (that's evil in a bad way, nothing at all like evil genius, which is a wonderful thing) -you couldn't be a blood smuggler without visiting the realm of the Living. But he had always found these sojourns unpleasant-and it had little to do with all one had to endure just to come and go thanks to Hades' precious Security Decree. The Upperworld had become so uncivilized. The way people dress…

But on this day Philonecron felt nothing but joy as he orbited as far from the scene of the Death as he could. He loved the people, with their exposed legs and artificial fibers and white socks and vulgar shoes, for they were going to save him.

Since his first trip to the Upperworld Philonecron had always been fascinated by shadows. There was no such thing in the Underworld; shadows were a peculiar product of Life – something about the reaction between light and the Life Essence that allowed people and animals and things to exist in the Upperworld. (One of these days Philonecron would figure out what that Essence was so he could wander around the Upperworld unchecked, but that would be another evil plan for another day)

But for some reason he'd never paid any attention to children before. Perhaps it was because they were loud and too full of Life, or perhaps it was simply because one did not tend to find children around scenes of Death. Or perhaps he simply had never before been looking for an army.

On this day, though, Philonecron sought out as many children as he could find, Life Essence and all. Much to his delight, he learned that the boy, whom he had begun to think of affectionately as Patient Zero, was no aberration. If shadows were caused by the interplay between light and Life, a child's was still forming. An adult's was inextricably bound to his body, but a child had a tenuous relationship to his own permanence, and thus, his own shadow.

And so the shadow could be taken.

It would take a little work, a good spell or two, and he might have to materialize to carry it off. He might need to do a quick time spell or freezing spell, since children tended to congregate in groups and there was no sense in scaring the little dears off before they did their service to his cause, was there? But none of that would be difficult. In fact, right over there, look! Two children of just the right age. Let's give it the old college try. Be careful now. Approach them softly. Mutter a few words. They're frozen now, they won't notice a thing. Reach into their bodies… And there you go. Handle the shadows carefully, you don't want them to rip. That's right. Now, fold them up and put them safely in your breast pocket. Tonight you will experiment.

Philonecron patted the samples in his pocket with glee. It was a good start. There would be much left for him to do, of course. He would have to figure out how to enchant the shadows, how to turn them into soldiers. He would probably need to find a way to replicate them, for shadow collecting would be time consuming. And being around children tired him easily-now he was already beginning to feel the familiar stretching of his skin that meant he had stayed in the Upperworld too long, that this world of light and breath and time was beginning to wear on him. He would need some help.