She nodded. “And more.”
Seeing it now, he found it hard to believe that two years ago, he was afraid to leave an abandoned hotel because someone might jump out of the hedges and chew off his arm in crazed hunger, or kill him for the contents of his pockets. Here he could walk down a street with no planning at all and feel perfectly safe. Zhang couldn’t believe he almost hadn’t come—but he knew why. He hadn’t wanted to do it without Max.
“Zhang,” Davidia said, halting suddenly at the top of the gently sloping hill they’d been climbing. “This is The One Who Gathers. Here inside New Orleans, we call him simply Gajarajan.”
Zhang didn’t know what kind of person he’d been expecting, but it wasn’t the one that he saw. He stood beside Davidia, speechless. This was no Red King or even solemn-faced General Imanuel, and there was no fortress or palace or even modest house. It was simply a man—of vague middle age, thin, in plain, well-worn clothes. He was sitting outside on a patch of bricks, in front of a little wall nature had left undamaged purely by accident. And over his eyes he wore a thick strip of fabric tied gently behind his head.
“You’re—” Zhang paused. “You’re blind?”
“Yes and no,” the man said. Zhang startled—his mouth hadn’t moved.
Davidia nodded when he looked at her in confusion, and then she gestured behind Gajarajan, at the wall.
Zhang turned back to him, but the man didn’t say anything more. Zhang thought maybe he was supposed to speak—but words failed him as he watched. On the ground, the man’s shadow shifted, gliding farther back on the bricks until it broke across the line where the red stones met the wall, and began trailing up the smooth vertical face. The dark shape rose up, up, up, until it was roughly its owner’s height—but the man on the ground hadn’t moved at all.
“Oh my God,” Zhang whispered at last.
“I wish,” he said—not the man, Zhang realized now, but the shadow. Both he and Davidia laughed as Zhang stood there, dumbstruck, staring back and forth between the body sitting placidly on the ground and the shadow that moved and spoke freely behind it.
Finally Zhang stumbled, and Davidia caught him before he hit the ground. She helped him to his knees, where he scrambled into a clumsy crouch. The world was swimming in front of him. Impossible, Zhang kept thinking. But he looked again, and it was the same as he had seen the first time. All the rumors were real—but they weren’t about a person at all. They were about a shadow.
And not only that. Zhang peered closer. The shadow certainly did belong to the man, because Zhang could see that the two forms were joined at the feet and hips where the body sat on the ground, but it almost seemed like the shadow on the wall wasn’t his at all. They looked nothing like each other. The shadow looked more like . . . the shadow of an elephant.
“I apologize,” Gajarajan finally said. It seemed to be bending down slightly on the surface of the wall, to be even with Zhang. Yes, there were definitely large, fanning ears, and a third arm that came from the center of its face—a trunk. An elephant’s trunk. “I didn’t realize I was going to surprise you that much. Lately, newcomers who have come trickling in have heard what I look like before they arrive.”
“So you—” Zhang didn’t even know where to start. “Is the man, the body, he’s alive, right?”
“Of course,” the shadow said. “We’re one and the same.”
“Are you controlling him?”
“No more than he’s controlling me.”
It seemed true—the shadow was currently moving along the wall and speaking, and the body hadn’t been driven to mimic the actions. Perhaps if the man had wanted to move as well, he could have without snapping the shadow into following his form.
“There’s time for us to talk more later,” the shadow said. “You can come here anytime you like. I don’t want to keep you from your people—it was probably rude of me to call for you so quickly—but I was informed that you brought with you a great many things. Things for me.”
“We heard that you were . . . gathering something. Something that had to do with memories and shadows,” Zhang said. “We weren’t sure what.”
“I’m not sure either,” Gajarajan said. It shrugged its massive ears softly when it saw Zhang’s expression. “But it’s important that I find it. And perhaps it’s what you’ve brought.”
“What is it for?” Zhang asked.
The shadow smiled—or seemed to, somehow. “To help cure the shadowless.”
Zhang stared at Gajarajan for a long time—both his body and his shadow. They were nearly expressionless, the body because he seemed almost suspended in a trance, and the shadow because he had no face in the way that humans, or even elephants, have faces. But as Zhang stared into the deep black shade spread across the half-crumbled stone, he could feel it. The shadow meant what it had said.
“You can do it?” Zhang asked fiercely.