The Seventh Shadow

Ingram Shawe is a plague doctor with a talent no license will ever recognize: when he lays his bare palm on the dying, he can eat their fever out of them. He cooks what he eats for seven days over his own hearth, until it cools into fever-glass, a warm crystal that pawnbrokers pay by the grain, and he spends every grain on the poorest quarter of the river city of Carrowgate. Bread for the ropewalk. Bark for the fever wards. A shilling a night for the sleepers who lie in his cellar so he can practice on the dark.

But the eating has terms, and Ingram reads terms for a living. The same fever can be eaten only once, and the second attempt will kill him. His shadow has to feed one day in seven, drinking warmth from a living sleeper, or the hunger turns on the hand that holds it. And his shadow is wrong. A finger too many, a second heart that beats half a beat ahead of his own, a throat that hums a sickroom song no work-song ever learned. When Ingram is angry, the shadow negotiates with lenders in his voice. When Ingram sleeps, it reads his ledger. And when the first fever is eaten, the whisper in the dark asks him one question that starts the whole account turning: it knows his name.

Then a pawnbroker shows him a red crystal the colour of a coal with breath on it, cut thirty years ago, and still warm. A gentleman in gloves is buying every grain of old red glass in the city through a private purse. A searcher's warrant from the great plague year has had its name scraped away by a careful pen. And the shadow on Ingram's wall begins, piece by piece, to grow itself a body: a rope-callused wrist, a heart, a throat, a woman's hand.

Someone was burned for that fever thirty years ago, on wet wood, in front of a quarter that was made to watch. Someone walked out of that smoke as a shadow on a wall, and has been passing from bearer to bearer ever since, six keepers in thirty years, every one of them dead of the trade, and Ingram Shawe is the seventh. To finish what the fire started, the shadow needs a man who can eat, and the man needs what only the shadow carries: thirty banked years of the deepest fever in the city, the vintage a dying physician will pay anything to drink, and burn a hospital full of the poor to own.

Hunted by the physician who signs the plague writs, protected by a runner with a rope-scarred past, a nurse with a poker, an old searcher who remembers the fire year, and a sergeant who counts everything, Ingram must audit the one ledger no one has ever been allowed to open: the account of what his shadow is, what it took from him without paying, and why the mark on his palm will never, ever take a price.

A plague-noir of ledgers and lantern-light, The Seventh Shadow is a story about debt: who pays it, who sells it, and what it costs to close an account thirty years in the keeping.