Conservation of Shadows Read Online Free PDF

wasn’t.
    “I don’t know,” it said. “After you were separated from them, I had no way of finding out. Lisse, I think you had better find out what Kiriet wants. She is not your friend.”
    I was the logistical coordinator, Kiriet had said. And her surprise at seeing the ghost— It has a name, Lisse reminded herself—struck Lisse as genuine. Which meant Kiriet had not come here in pursuit of Vron Arien. “Why are you here?” Lisse asked.
    “You’re not going to like it. I’m here to destroy your kite, whatever you’ve named it.”
    “It doesn’t have a name.” She had been unable to face the act of naming, of claiming ownership.
    Kiriet looked at her sideways. “I see.”
    “Surely you could have accomplished your goal,” Lisse said, “without talking to me first. I am inexperienced in the ways of kites. You are not.” In truth, she should already have been running. But Kiriet’s revelation meant that Lisse’s purpose, once so clear, was no longer to be relied upon.
    “I may not be your friend, but I am not your enemy, either,” Kiriet said. “I have no common purpose with the Imperium, not anymore. But you cannot continue to use the kite.”
    Lisse’s eyes narrowed. “It is the weapon I have,” she said. “I would be a fool to relinquish it.”
    “I don’t deny its efficacy,” Kiriet said, “but you are Rhaioni. Doesn’t the cost trouble you?”
    Cost?
    Kiriet said, “So no one told you.” Her anger focused on the ghost.
    “A weapon is a weapon,” the ghost said. At Lisse’s indrawn breath, it said, “The kites take their sustenance from the deaths they deal. It was necessary to strengthen ours by letting it feast on smaller targets first. This is the particular craft of my people, as ghostweight was the craft of yours, Lisse.”
    Sustenance. “So this is why you want to destroy the kite,” Lisse said to Kiriet.
    “Yes.” The other woman’s smile was bitter. “As you might imagine, the Imperium did not approve. It wanted to negotiate another hundred-year contract. I dissented.”
    “Were you in a position to dissent?” the ghost asked, in a way that made Lisse think that it was translating some idiom from its native language.
    “I challenged my way up the chain of command and unseated the head of Wolf Command,” Kiriet said. “It was not a popular move. I have been destroying kites ever since. If the Imperium is so keen on further conquest, let it dirty its own hands.”
    “Yet you wield a kite yourself,” Lisse said.
    “ Candle is my home. But on the day that every kite is accounted for in words of ash and cinders, I will turn my own hand against it.”
    It appealed to Lisse’s sense of irony. All the same, she did not trust Kiriet.
    She heard a new voice. Kiriet’s head turned. “Someone’s followed you.” She said a curt phrase in her own language, then: “You’ll want my assistance—”
    Lisse shook her head.
    “It’s a small flight, as these things go, but it represents a threat to you. Let me—”
    “No,” Lisse said, more abruptly than she had meant to. “I’ll handle it myself.”
    “If you insist,” Kiriet said, looking even more tired. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Then her face was replaced, for a flicker, with her emblem: a black candle crossed slantwise by an empty sheath.
    “The Candle is headed for a vortex, probably for cover,” the ghost said, very softly. “But it can return at any moment.”
    Lisse thought that she was all right, and then the reaction set in. She spent several irrecoverable breaths shaking, arms wrapped around herself, before she was able to concentrate on the tapestry data.
    At one time, every war-kite displayed a calligraphy scroll in its command spindle. The words are, approximately:
    I have only
    one candle
    Even by the mercenaries’ standards, it is not much of a poem. But the woman who wrote it was a soldier, not a poet.
    The mercenaries no longer have a homeland. Even so, they keep certain