The Way Shadows Live
| Author | M.C. Beeler |
|---|---|
| Series | Sacred |
| Number in series | Volume Two of A Sacred Tale Collection |
| Formats | Print and ebook, within A Sacred Tale Collection |
| Preceded by | The Heart of the Kella (short story) |
The Way Shadows Live is a novella by M.C. Beeler, set in Eslura before the events of the Sacred novels. It follows the Olphin Tabitha Glowdish as she moves to free her partner Fawn from the Hollowed Shadow, the underground club in Varaar where Fawn is held, and from Burkhan, the gang leader who owns it. It was written for A Sacred Tale Collection and appears there as Volume Two.[1][2]
The novella runs to four chapters, "The Hollowed Shadow", "Rescue Mission", "Return to the Shadow" and "Freedom". It is the longer of the collection's two stories.[2]
Synopsis
Tab crosses Varaar hooded, because an Olphin caught uncovered is sent to Morgaedion with the rest of her people. She has learned that Burkhan, who stole Fawn from her family as a child and killed the rest of them, means to marry her, and she has come to the Hollowed Shadow to cut his throat and free the women held there. Inside the club she reaches Fawn, but a drunk Damaziko lizard named Razaryn intervenes on behalf of another patron, throws Fawn to the floor and splits her forehead open. Tab breaks his nose and puts a blade in his belly, and carries Fawn out.[2]
The pair are caught in the main square, where the crowd turns on Tab as soon as her fins are seen. A woman named Lahda shatters her ankle with a steel-toed boot while her partner carries Fawn off to sell her back to Burkhan, and a cloaked tiger comes for the price Razaryn has put on Tab's head. Tab puts down the tiger, takes Fawn back at knifepoint, rides her pergonzia Nupika out to her camp in the desert, numbs the pain with grenspad leaves and stitches Fawn's forehead closed with a cactus needle and agave thread. She wakes at sunset to find Fawn gone and a line of footprints heading back to the city.[2]
At the Shadow's courtyard Tab watches Burkhan take Fawn back, order her cleaned and readied, and gouge out the eye of the bear on the door for letting her wander. Tab knocks out the troll left on watch and finds Burkhan alone in the emptied club. The fight goes against her; she pulls a table over to get free and the oil lamp on it sets the carpet alight. Burkhan comes through the flames after her, and she puts him down and holds her boot on his neck until he stops moving. A falling ceiling beam seals him under it, and she crawls out through the smoke.[2]
Locked out of the dancers' quarters, Tab is pulled through a window by Ayala, the dancer the others treat as their mother, and finds Fawn bandaged and awake. She tells them the Shadow and its owner are gone and that she cannot stay, because the gangs will hunt her and anyone standing near her. The women leave through a hole they had kept hidden behind a barrel, opened for them by the one-eyed bear, Kayloo, who says he has spent his whole life serving the gangs and that they are not the only ones looking for freedom. On the neighbouring rooftop Tab hands Fawn to Ayala, says goodbye, and disappears into the alleys alone.[2]
Characters
- Tabitha Glowdish, the story's viewpoint character, an Olphin living rough in the desert outside Varaar.
- Fawn, a dancer held at the Hollowed Shadow, and Tab's partner.
- Burkhan, head of the Damaziko gang and owner of the Shadow.
- Razaryn, an orange lizard high in the Damaziko ranks.
- Ayala, a tall, muscular dancer who is a mother to the rest of them behind the scenes.
- Hybie, a stoat dancer who could not have been more than fourteen years old.
- Kayloo, the bear on the Shadow's door.
- Nupika, Tab's pergonzia.
- Muldah, the elderly patron whose complaint starts the night's trouble, and Lahda, the woman who breaks Tab's ankle in the square.
Setting
The whole novella takes place in and around Varaar: the plaza, the alleys, the courtyard of the Hollowed Shadow, and Tab's camp of ripped tarps in the dunes outside the canyon. The five gangs that govern the city run through it, in particular the Damaziko and the Khaylant, the protection racket whose upside-down pine tree is shaved into the fur of the Shadow's doormen.[2]
It is also the fullest account in any of the books of what the War of Shadows cost the Olphins. Tab notes that her people had kept to Treenode, farming their own land and leaving the rest of Eslura alone, until their change of sides in the war made them unwelcome everywhere, and that vorath, a word for people who slept in the streets with the rats and the trash, was afterwards applied to Olphins as well.[2] The back matter of A Sacred Tale Collection places both of its stories before Sacred: Eslura's Calling, which it names as the next in line chronologically.[3]
Publication
The Way Shadows Live was written for A Sacred Tale Collection and was, at the time of the collection's Kickstarter campaign, available nowhere else.[1] The campaign was the author's first and a Kickstarter Project We Love pick, and the book's own closing pages credit it to Kickstarter and fifty contributing backers by name.[1][3] The print edition adds commissioned interior illustrations that the ebook does not have.[1]
The volume was edited by Mike Myers, copyedited by Celestian Rince, and published by Half Sun Press with cover art by Emir Orucevic and cartography by Alex Wiersum.[4]
See also
- A Sacred Tale Collection
- The Heart of the Kella (short story)
- Tabitha Glowdish
- Fawn
- The Hollowed Shadow
- Gangs of Varaar
- The Sacred Series