Shadow at Interest

by Fritz Leiber, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

At noon in the port city of Gallimaw the sun stands straight over the Square of Sundials, and the forty-one sundials there, which the guild of clockmakers erected to shame the guild of astrologers, all agree for once, because at noon there is very little shadow to disagree about. It is the one hour of the day when a woman who has lost her shadow can stand in public without being stared at. Hulda Skarrisdottir had worked this out on the third day. It was now the ninth, and she had begun to stand in the square from eleven until one, like a sundial herself, a very tall sundial with braids the colour of rope and a sword on her hip, casting nothing.

She stood a hand under seven feet. She had rowed in the war galleys of the Ice Coast until a captain's wife had taken an interest in her and the captain had taken a different one; after that she had come south to sing bass in the choir of the Temple of the Nine Lamps, the only choir on the Tongue estuary that would have her, and to fight for hire on the days the choir did not need her, which was most of them. She had a voice that could make a cathedral feel small. She had not slept in nine days.

"Behold me," she said, when Corvel Sneap came sidling across the square at a quarter past twelve with a hot pie in each hand. "A soul unhoused. A lamp with no lampstand. The dogs bark at me, Corvel. The children follow me to see if I am a ghost, and when they find I am not, they are disappointed, which is worse. Last night I lay down on my pallet and closed my eyes and nothing happened. Nothing at all. My dreams have nowhere to lie down."

"Eat a pie," said Corvel.

He was a small man, small enough that Hulda could have tucked him under one arm, and on two occasions had: once to carry him out of a fire and once out of a brothel, and he still argued about which had been the more necessary. He had been seven years apprenticed to Master Orrin Haze, the lamp-wizard of Candle Row, until Master Haze had blown himself into the harbour trying to bottle noon; since then Corvel had made his living by knowing exactly where every light in a room fell, which is a useful thing for a thief to know. He wore grey, he spoke dry, and he cast, on the warm flagstones at his feet, a neat little pool of a shadow like a puddle of ink. Hulda looked at it with naked envy.

"I am not hungry," she said, and ate the pie in three bites. "I am a tragedy, Corvel. I am a ballad. In the north they will sing of me: Hulda who gave her shadow for love."

"In the north they will sing of you: Hulda who gave her shadow for twelve silver sceats and an anklet for a dancer called Imbrel, who left town with a cinnamon factor the next morning. It doesn't scan, but it has the merit of being true." Corvel licked gravy from his thumb. "How much is the redemption now?"

Hulda took the pawn ticket from inside her jerkin. It was a slip of black card with silver lettering, and it smelled faintly of snuffed candles. Received in pledge of Hulda Skarrisdottir, singer, one shadow, adult, large, in fair condition. Lent: XII. Redeemable at the house of H. Vell, Lantern Stair, at interest of one sceat per diem until the dark of the moon, after which the pledge is forfeit and shall be sold.

"Twelve, and nine days' interest," said Corvel. "Twenty-one. And the moon goes dark tonight. What have we got?"

Hulda turned out her purse into her palm. It contained four sceats, a copper with a hole in it, a tooth that she did not remember putting there, and a pressed flower from Imbrel's hair, which she quickly put back.

"Four," she said.

"Four," Corvel agreed. He looked at the little pool of ink beneath him the way a merchant looks at a bale he is not sure he wishes to sell. Then he looked up and the look was gone. "Well. A pawnshop is only a strongroom that has persuaded itself it is honest. We'll go tonight."

"Steal it?" Hulda's face lit, which was a thing to see, like a beacon fire catching on a headland. "Corvel, you are a jewel. You are a brother. We will go in like the wind off the Fells—"

"We will go in like two people who would very much prefer not to be hanged," said Corvel, "and you will carry the lantern and do nothing else whatsoever. Is that understood?"

"Nothing else whatsoever," Hulda said, with her hand on her heart, and both of them knew what that was worth.

---

Lantern Stair climbs from the fish market to the Street of Respectable Debts in a hundred and twelve steps, and every one of them is lit. That is the joke of it. The lamp-sellers had the stair first, two hundred years ago, and when they moved uphill to better rents they left their sconces behind, and now the lenders of Gallimaw keep the sconces filled with oil at their own expense, because a well-lit street is bad for burglars and good for business. Under that blaze of oil-light, at the hour the bells call the third watch, the stair was empty except for two figures with long, wavering shadows going up it—one long, wavering shadow, rather, belonging to the smaller of the two; the larger walked up the hundred and twelve steps casting nothing whatsoever, and a cat on the ninth landing watched her pass and then went very carefully the other way.

"Here," said Corvel.

The house of H. Vell was narrow, tall and black, with a door painted to look like the open mouth of a lantern, and above the door a sign: three silver balls, and under them, smaller, the image of a man standing in sunlight with no shadow at his feet. Somebody had a sense of humour. Corvel did not think it was a pleasant one.

The lock took him the length of a short prayer. Inside, the shop was dark, and the dark had a smell: wax, dust, and something else, faintly sweet, like the air in a room where a great many people have been sleeping. Corvel struck a light and lit the lantern Hulda carried. It was not an ordinary lantern. It was the last thing he had taken from Master Haze's workroom before the bailiffs came: a cage of brass and horn with seven little mirrors set round the flame on hinges, so that by tilting them a knowing hand could send the light where it was wanted and keep it from where it was not.

"Hold it still," he said. "Higher. There."

He tilted three mirrors. The light swung away from his feet and his shadow went with it, folding itself tidily up behind him like a cloak over a chair. It was the oldest trick of the Lamp Guild and the one Master Haze had been proudest of: a lamp-wizard's apprentice can cross a lit room without letting his shadow touch the floor, which is the only way to cross a room in which something is listening for shadows.

And something was. Behind the counter, behind a curtain of black felt, a door stood ajar, and through it came a sound that Hulda would afterwards describe, at length and in several metres, as the noise of a forest of bats dreaming. Corvel, who had no patience with metres, said that it sounded like coats.

It was coats, more or less. The vault beyond the curtain was long and low, and from floor to ceiling, on row upon row of brass pegs, hung the shadows of Gallimaw. Each was tagged with a strip of black card and silver lettering. They hung limp, like garments in a wardrobe, but they were not quite still: they stirred as the lantern came in, they leaned very slightly away from the light, and where two hung close together their edges overlapped and rustled. There were long shadows and short ones, the stooped shadows of old men and the narrow shadows of girls, the shadow of a man wearing a hat and the shadow of a woman carrying a basket that was no longer there. There was a shadow, near the door, of a child of about six, and its tag said pledged by the mother, for bread. Hulda stopped in front of that one, and the lantern in her fist shook, and all the shadows in the vault shook with it.

"Higher," said Corvel softly. "And still. Please."

Hers was at the far end, as the large items always are. It hung from three pegs, because one would not hold it, and it was snoring.

There was no other word for the sound. It was deep and regular and slightly nasal, and it came from a shadow that lay folded against the wall with its great shadowy head tipped back and its great shadowy mouth open, and Hulda, who had not slept in nine nights, stood in front of it and stared at the thing that had been doing her sleeping for her.

"It's had my dreams," she said. "All nine nights of them. Corvel, it's had Imbrel."

"It's welcome to her," said Corvel. "Unhook it. Gently. Keep it in the light. If it touches the dark it'll run into the general dark and we'll never get it out again—it's what shadows do, they're homesick for it. Lantern up. Up."

Hulda unhooked her shadow. It came away from the pegs heavy and loose, like a wet sail, and woke with a snort, and saw her, and for a moment the two of them regarded each other, the woman and the dark shape of the woman, with the expressions of two sisters meeting after a quarrel. Then the shadow yawned enormously and tried to lie down again.

"Hold it in the light," Corvel said, "and walk."

"I would not," said a voice behind them, "if I were you."

---

Corvel had already turned, and his knife was already in his hand, and he did not throw it, because the thing to do with a knife is not to throw it at what you cannot see. The voice came from the darkest part of the vault, a corner where no shadow hung, and from it, after a moment, stepped Hesper Vell.

She was a tall thin woman in black, with a face like a folded letter, and she wore a pair of smoked spectacles although the room was dark. She carried no light. She did not need to carry one. As she came into the circle of the lantern, the thing at her feet unrolled across the floor, and it was not one shadow but a great many, laid one on top of another like the petals of a black rose, so that her outline on the boards was ragged with elbows and hat-brims and the corners of skirts that were not hers.

"I am a woman of substance," said Hesper Vell. "As you see." She took off the spectacles and polished them on her sleeve. Her eyes were perfectly ordinary, which was somehow the worst thing about her. "You're Haze's boy. I wondered when one of the Lamp Guild would come up the stair. Your master tried it, you know, twenty years ago. He wanted the shadow of noon. I told him I don't take in what's not pledged."

"He found a way," said Corvel. "Briefly."

"So I heard. They're still finding pieces of the bottle." She put her spectacles back on and turned to Hulda, and looked up at her—a long way up—with the professional interest of a pawnbroker pricing a chandelier. "Madam, you are welcome to your shadow. You are welcome to walk out of my door with it in that very clever lantern. I want you to understand what you'll be walking out with, that's all. A shadow is a pledge. It knows it's a pledge. Take it unredeemed, and it will follow you all your life, but always two paces behind, never at your feet, and it will never lie down with you again. You'll never sleep. And everyone who sees you in the street will see a woman with a shadow walking after her like a bailiff, and they will all know exactly what you are."

"And what am I?" said Hulda.

"A debtor," said Hesper Vell. "Which is to say, a person. It's nothing to be ashamed of. Only to pay." She smiled. Her teeth were very good. "Twenty-one sceats. Or the moon goes dark at the fourth watch, and I sell it. There's a silk merchant on the Hill who has been asking after a large one. He wishes to look more imposing at the Guildhall. His own is rather small."

Hulda drew her sword. It made the sound a big sword makes coming out of a scabbard in a closed room, which is a sound like a bell deciding to be a blade, and every shadow on every peg flinched away from it.

"Madam," she said, in the voice she used for the low notes of the Dirge of the Drowned, "you are a vampire and a cheat, and in the north we would put you on the ice at midwinter and let the wolves argue over you. I am going to cut down every shadow in this room. I am going to carry them down Lantern Stair in my two arms and give them back to the poor of Gallimaw, one by one, in the sun. The child's first."

"They won't stay on," said Hesper Vell, quite gently. "None of them. Two paces behind, for life. The mother would never sleep again, and nor would the child. Do you think I make the rules? I only keep them, like a lamp. Ask him." She inclined her head at Corvel. "He knows."

Hulda looked at Corvel. Corvel was looking at the floor, where the lantern-light lay in its careful shapes, and he was doing what he did over a chessboard in the Lame Horse, when his opponent had made a move he did not like and he was going through every answer to it, one after another, to the bitter end of each.

"She's right," he said at last. "That's the rule. My master said so. A shadow is the most honest thing a man has—it can't be lied to about where the light is coming from." He let out a breath. "Hulda, take the lantern and your shadow and go down the stair. Keep it in the light. Wait for me at the bottom."

"I will not leave you with—"

"You will," said Corvel, "because you promised to carry the lantern and do nothing else whatsoever, and because I'm going to settle with the lady for her lock, which I broke, and you'll only make a speech. Go on. Go and stand under a lamp and sing something. Sing the one about the drowned herring-wives. I like that one."

Nobody moved. The shadows stirred on their pegs. Then Hulda sheathed her sword, which was almost as loud as drawing it, and turned, and went out through the felt curtain with the great snoring shape of her shadow held up in the lantern-light before her, like a bride carrying her own train. At the door she stopped and looked back at the child's shadow, and Corvel saw her face, and looked away.

When she had gone Hesper Vell sat down on a stool by the wall and folded her hands in her lap.

"Well, Haze's boy," she said. "What have you got?"

---

Hulda waited at the bottom of Lantern Stair, under the last of the sconces, for the length of the third watch and part of the fourth. She held the lantern up until her arm shook. She sang the one about the drowned herring-wives, all nineteen verses of it, and the one about the bear who married the bishop, which had fewer verses but more of them were unrepeatable, and two fishwives on the steps of the market applauded and a third threw a mackerel. Her shadow hung in the lamplight before her and slept, and when she stopped singing it seemed to listen.

Corvel came down the hundred and twelve steps a little before the bells of the fourth watch, walking briskly, with his hands in his pockets. He went down the left side of the stair, against the wall, where the sconces were set high and the light fell steepest, and Hulda, who was looking at the ticket he held out to her—REDEEMED, it said now, in silver, across the black—did not see what lay or did not lie at his feet.

"Settled," he said. "She's a businesswoman. Businesswomen can be reasoned with. Dawn's in an hour. Let's go down to the quay and get that thing back on you before you fall over."

"With what? Corvel, how did you—"

"I told you. Reason." He took the lantern from her. "When we get there, face the east and keep still. It's like hemming a sail."

They went down to the quay. He set the lantern on a bollard and went round behind her, where she could not see his feet, and the sun came up out of the estuary like a coin rising in a glass of wine, and Corvel turned the seven mirrors of Master Haze's lantern one by one until the light of the lamp and the light of the dawn fell together on the cobbles. In that double light he took the shadow by its slack shoulders and laid it down at Hulda's feet, as you lay a coat over a sleeper, and it lay down, and joined her at the heels with a small sound like a door closing in another house.

And Hulda Skarrisdottir, a hand under seven feet, sat down on the quay of Gallimaw where she stood and was asleep before she had finished sitting.

---

She woke in the late afternoon, which is a bad time to wake in Gallimaw, in the Square of Sundials, which is a worse place. She did not remember coming there. She remembered being steered, and leaning on something that complained, and a great many steps. She was sitting with her back against the tallest of the forty-one sundials, the one the clockmakers call the Rebuke, and the sun had gone well over towards the hills, and she had been dreaming of the Ice Coast in summer, when the sea is the colour of a pigeon's throat and nobody needs to sleep at all.

She looked down. Her shadow lay at her feet, long across the stones as the afternoon makes it, and hers. She wept a little about that, and was not ashamed, because the north is very forgiving about weeping as long as you do it loudly.

Corvel was sitting beside her, eating a pie. He was sitting very close, inside the edge of her shadow, his knees drawn up, as if he were cold, and it was the hottest day of the month.

She looked at him. Then she looked at the flagstones around him, in the slanting light, in the place where a small neat pool of ink should have been lying, and was not.

"Corvel," she said.

"It was a small shadow," said Corvel Sneap. "Barely worth the peg. She gave me fifteen for it, which I thought was generous, and took two back for the lock, which I thought was not. The rest I had." He chewed. "It'll keep till the next dark of the moon. That's twenty-nine days. I'm told the interest on a small one is half a sceat a day, which tells you everything about this city. She was quite decent about it, really. She asked if I wanted the peg next to the child's."

Hulda opened her mouth to make a speech. It was going to be a very good speech. It was going to begin with the word brother and go on through the sagas of the Ice Coast and the friendships of heroes, and it would have ended, about a quarter of an hour later, with an oath on the bones of her grandmother to storm the house of Hesper Vell with fire and steel and to sing the burning of it to the end of her days. She could feel the whole of it rising in her chest like a tide.

She shut her mouth again. She stood up.

She looked at the sun, and at the angle of it, which was sinking, because evening in Gallimaw does not wait for anybody. Then she moved round until the sun was square at her back, and her shadow, which was large even at midday, fell forward over the flagstones and over Corvel Sneap, and covered him, pie and all.

"I'll sing for it," she said. "The temple pays a sceat a funeral, and in the hot months this city buries two a day. Twenty-nine days. We'll have it out with interest and buy back the child's too." She held down her hand. "Get up. Walk in front of me. Keep in the dark."

Corvel looked up at her, past the edge of her shadow, into the white sky. Whatever he was going to say, about funerals and fees and arithmetic, he did not say. He got up.

They crossed the Square of Sundials together, the very tall woman and the small grey man, slowly, so as not to outrun anything. People turned to look at them, because they were an odd pair, but nobody stared, because there was nothing to stare at: only a large woman with her back to the sun, and a great dark shadow going before her across the stones, wide enough for two.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Friderīcō Leiberō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Fritz Leiber, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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