Authors: Carol Berg
“Indeed,” said Bastien, far more relaxed at this exchange than I. “So First Secretary Collium informed me. Thus I am scrupulous in obedience to the rules I was given. Test my truth in it: The pureblood’s neither left this chamber nor spoke to any living person in more than a month. ’Tis a great deal of trouble. As I said before, if you wish to house him while still making him available to serve his contract, you’re welcome to it.”
“Insolent—”
“We shall continue to monitor your compliance, Coroner Bastien,” said Pons, interrupting her fellow. “And the First Curator wishes me to inform you that we intend to fetch Remeni to the Tower from time to time. He must be tested to better judge the state of his reason.”
It was all I could do to keep from shaking my head
no
. If they took me again, I’d never come back.
“Certain, you’re welcome to take him for a visit,” said Bastien, “as long as his work is caught up, which I judge might be in whatever year this god-cursed weather eases. He’s required to draw every corpus we receive. More every day, and I’ll not have his time wasted. Nor mine. You might consider turning your magics to the weather. Excellency.”
Scrutari’s visage near melted, as if the gold sunburst pendant gleaming at his neck—the symbol of his Karish loyalties—had captured the sun’s heat. Pons’s face mimed an ice-sheathed torrent. A fine thing the mask
pinched my mouth, else I might have found myself grinning in a wholly inappropriate fashion. Indeed, wild-haired, leather-clad Bastien could have been a master hound, prancing back and forth, guarding his yard against a pair of mountain lions twelve times his size. I’d never known anyone at once so perceptive and so foolish.
“Show us these portraits,” said Scrutari, snarling. “I’ll not have a murdering madman coddled.”
“If you like. I’ve a few in my chambers—a pair of soldiers, a starveling or two. Not every drawing is useful. Though just today we’ve turned over a murderer to the magistrates—a vintner’s steward who had borrowed too heavily from a hard-fisted pawner. The fellow thought cutting the crone’s throat would ease his troubles.”
So my portrait of the old woman had been true. Satisfaction stirred my blood, spawning gratitude that Bastien had allowed me to know. And his choice of sketches to show did not include impossible portraits of royal bastards that might feed the Registry’s belief in my madness.
“No. I wish to watch him work,” said Pons, eyes glittering in the harsh white light. “Have a corpus brought in, Coroner. Unbind his hands and command him to draw.”
What did they think to see? Did they think I summoned gatzi to fill in unexpected details in my portraits? Lord of Fire, if I could only see the curators’ portraits.
Bastien puffed his cheeks and sighed in dejection. “I’d be most pleased for you to witness my servant’s diligence, excellencies. But with all respect, it’s nigh on midnight. Our laborers are home and bedded. Unless you’re willing to roust them or conjure a dead man through our halls and onto this table yourselves, whilst at the same time making the sun to rise and give my servant proper light to work, you’ll have to wait till day for that enjoyment.”
“I told you he’d have an excuse,” spat Scrutari.
“We’ll come back for our observations, Coroner,” said Pons, unruffled. “Be sure of it.”
Magelight burst from a ring on her finger, spreading into a glowing ball. She stepped close, raising her hand until the light was contained between us, illuminating eyes of gray marble set in a body of stone. The features behind her gray half mask revealed no more than those exposed, neither glee, vengeance, triumph, curiosity, nor righteous sorrow, nothing to reveal her purposes, and nothing at all to hint at what she had done with Juli.
“You are a deviant soul, Lucian de Remeni-Masson,” she said, “one who has been too long shielded from the understanding of his aberrant nature. You have no place in this world.”
Her pronouncement slammed me in the gut like a fist, its mortal weight forcing a bellow of denial into my throat. I had done
nothing
wrong. My portraits were
true
, my magic holy and right, no matter that it stemmed from two sources. How could one bent be divine gift and two be deserving of death?
To keep silent and bow as was required near broke my back. Foolish even to attempt control of my posture. My indignation, anger, and loathing must be clearly visible to one with the skills of an investigator.
“Come,
eqastré
,” she said, hurrying to the door. “We’ll examine those samples of his drawings before we go.”
They threw the latch and left me in the dark. The shackles prevented my pacing, so I sat in the corner, elbows on knees, bound arms crushing my skull in an attempt to silence useless anger.
Later, when the door latch clattered again, I could not make myself rise or look. Let them think me asleep. Let them drag me if they wanted me up or elsewhere.
But it was only one heavy body that shuffled across the room and sagged onto the pallet just beyond my feet. He stank of old leather and death. Bastien.
“That went well, I think,” he said, yawning. “What a pair of arrogant gatzi spawn. How did you ever put up with folk like that? Good thing you had that muzzle, eh? Likely I should have had one, too.”
He shifted his position, reached around, and unlatched the mask. Dislodging my hands, he dragged it off me and tossed it across the chamber. As I coughed and swabbed the spittle from my mouth, he unwound the silk hand bindings.
“So, you’ve got to tell me one thing, pureblood. Do they know about the flickering? The only rise I got out of them was when I said I had a way to watch you as you worked without you knowing it. The woman snapped her head around so fast I thought she might break her neck . . . something like you’ve just done.”
No light was needed to know he was grinning in his smug fashion.
“There was no flickering,” I croaked. “That was only snow . . . mist.”
“Not so! I’ve watched you careful. Before your prisoning, it was like a cloud came between you and my eye. But when you drew the horse boy,
you vanished entire. Might have thought I just blinked . . . save it was four or five blinks until you showed up again in exactly the same position you were when you vanished. You weren’t here, and then you were. Happened again with every one of those dead children. Most times only an instant, but once even longer than the first. Damnedest thing I ever saw. Since that day it’s gone back to like before. You fade from time to time, neither exactly here nor exactly gone. What’s the difference? And where in all hells do you go?”
Impossible to see his face in the dark, but his voice demanded sober answer—of which I had none.
“I don’t—I never believed you about it.”
How could I believe such idiocy now? Save that something
had
been different since the Tower. The lapses. The visions. The insistence of both physical senses and instinct that I existed somewhere else entirely for those few moments. And in the Tower cellar itself, Nelek’s young assistant had reported me vanished from the iron room as I invoked my bent . . . when I’d dreamed of starlight and silver-marked Danae.
“I’ve never heard of anything like,” I said. “But . . .”
I had to tell Bastien the truth; he had rescued me, defended me. Yes, for his own interest, but for mine, as well. He had kept Juli’s secret. And he had been wise enough to see that freeing me from the Tower was not enough. He had allowed me a fallow time, with naught but a steady stream of work, time for me to regain balance. Clarity.
“. . . a few times I’ve felt as if I’ve dropped off asleep as I work. I lose focus and slip into dreams, see places and people that make no sense, though they feel
true
. The smell, the sensations, they linger when I open my eyes here—like a true experience, not dream. It sounds mad, I know.”
Was that what the Registry was looking for? Evidence of madness? Such a phenomenon would surely be considered aberrant magic. Unless they knew more about it than I did. “Earth’s Mother, you didn’t mention this to Pons?”
“Give such a delicious tidbit to those who are rabid to take you away from here?” Bastien’s satisfaction near blazed a hole in the dark. “Not in any age of the world! I said that as long as your pen was moving, I was happy, and that, otherwise, watching you draw was about as exciting as watching the leaves turn color in the autumn and drop off the trees.”
“Holy, blessed gods.” My fingers scraped through my greasy mat of
hair. Words were insufficient to express my astonishment . . . or my fear . . . or my guilt, as the cascading implications battered me like hailstones.
“So, you truly didn’t know?” said Bastien, muting his excitement. “You weren’t just being pigheaded?”
“No. On the day I visited the city, I mentioned the possibility of such a phenomenon to another portraitist I worked with. He’d never heard of such a thing, either—” My throat constricted.
“And on that same night your house burned and six people died.” As if our minds worked as one, Bastien voiced my own hideous conclusion.
Who had Gilles consulted? Master Pluvius? Or his uncle, Curator Albin—more rigidly traditional than Gramphier himself? Or some other curator whose portrait had been altered? My teeth ground. “Stupid, ignorant, blind!”
All these events were linked in a chain of lies and fire and murder. Answers so near, yet so unreachable. Rage and curses spilled from my lips until I could no longer come up with new ones.
Bastien ignored my bellowing fit and settled his back to the wall and fumbled in his jerkin. After much unseeable business involving flapping leather, taps, scrapes, and strange mouth noises, a pulsing glow appeared in the region of his beard. A few breaths and a curl of highly aromatic smoke teased at my nostrils. A Ciceron smoking pipe.
“I’m thinking,” he said between leisurely sighs that enveloped us in a weedy fog, “now you’re more settled in your mind and we’ve got their first little visit out of the way, it’s time to unravel a few mysteries. The way I see matters is we’ve got to find out who’s this hairy, black-booted devil been killing off royal bastards. He could be Prince Bayard’s man or Osriel the Bastard’s. He could be one of Perryn’s own nobles, ready to betray the best hope Navronne’s got. We need his name, so’s you’ve got to get back to Arrosa’s Temple and find the document he signed when he left the child there . . .”
He left me no pause to name him lunatic.
Settled
in my mind?
“. . . and then we’ve got to discover who’s trying to bury you, else your testimony won’t be worth a barrel of squirming slugs when we get the goods on the villain.”
“You’d help me?” Astonishment prevented any more purposeful answer. “It would violate the contract.”
“Now just stopple that annoying conscience. According to this holy contract, whatever I deem my business is my business, no matter that it doesn’t exactly involve ink and paper and corpses. So it’s no violation of your beloved rules. You can thank your empty-headed vixen of a negotiator for that; she likely thought I’d set you to stripping bones. Besides, when I show you things like this”—he wagged a pale blur in front of my face—“it’s going to distract you from your drawing work anywise, so we might as well get the matter untangled.”
“And
this
is what?” The light of his pipe was hardly sufficient to reveal what he held.
“The message sent to warn you and yours about the fire. That nameless person who informed me that my prickly servant had been hauled off to the Registry Tower left it with me. She thought we might have more use for it than she would.”
Oh, brave and clever Juli.
“What does it say?”
“It says:
Leave. Now. Else suffer your blood-kin’s fate.
Unsigned, as you might guess. Addressed to you, not your sister. Naught else about it tells me anything.”
“It speaks several things,” I said. “The writer knew the rest of my family had died in a fire. He believed I would be at home, so it couldn’t have been the same person who spied on my movements for the Registry. A friend, one might say . . . but not friend enough or powerful enough to stop it.” Pluvius, perhaps. Kind and cowardly, and not so skilled at his craft as his curator’s rank would imply. He had professed sympathy and intent to help, and then left me hostage to Pons and the other curators.
“And what shall we do with this other thing was left alongside the message?” He stuffed a small heavy object into my hand. A heavy ring. Inner fires of vermillion and yellow glinted from a modest but perfect ruby—a sign of the small enchantments it held.
“My father’s ring,” I said softly. My finger traced the gem’s sharp edges and the cold curve of the gold ring. “It was the only item we retrieved from Pontia. I think . . . if you would keep it safe for me . . . for her . . .” I forced my fingers to let it go. Such a treasure had no place in this life.
Bastien harrumphed. “The person who gave me these things said I should make you tell about Montesard, as that’s when things went wrong for you and your grandsire and that Registry female. She was sure all this was connected. And she said she didn’t really mean it about the whipping,
unless your stubborn righteous self locked everything all up inside you, as you had a bad habit of doing. I mentioned how I’d noted for myself how your ass was tight as a practor’s conscience.”
“She was right about everything,” I said, my throat graveled with anger and grieving. “More than she knew. The curators . . . they didn’t mention . . .”
“No. Not even when the other fellow was going on about how your lunatic self might murder all of us here in our beds. Which I said would be difficult, as mostly the folk here were already dead.”
He drew on his pipe, the glow swelling, and blew out long and slow.
“I did nick other gossip of interest, though. I had babbled summat about all the work we’ve had, as the Guard Royale wants no corpses on the streets when Prince Perryn returns to the city. And then the devil woman says I am to make sure you are chained and locked away on the day
the Prince of Ardra comes calling to honor Remeni’s kinsman
.”
“My kinsman?”