Authors: Carol Berg
“Garibald’s the sexton,” said Bastien, even as I opened my mouth to voice the question. “He sorts out who gets taken inside, who stays out in the yard, who gets washed, who gets burnt, who gets coins on the eyes, who gets dug up and his bones boiled. That sort of thing.”
“But I thought you—”
“Nay. I’m the king’s law here. I’m needed only if there’s a question about the death. Man comes in with a knife hole in his back. Woman comes in with her neck broke. Or maybe someone’s dug up that oughtn’t be in that burial ground when the sexton’s plowing bones. Garibald and Constance see to the common work. I see to the interesting bits.”
Garibald and the girl arrived at the steps. The sexton cast a disapproving glare my way. “Bought yerself a pot o’ trouble, Coroner.”
The girl crowed in bald delight. “You got ’im!” she said in her ear-itching squawk. “Thought sure they’d twink you out of the deal. Near swallowed my eyes when the gate oped to bloods in all their fineries.” Her faded blue eyes raked me scalp to boot. “This’n’s a prime looker, though his lovely duds’ll look a sight first time he takes on splatter or spew. Mayhap his magic can clean him! And mayhap—”
She inhaled sharply and bent over until her nose was scarce a handspan from my chest. She examined the front of my doublet, her bony cheeks taking fire. “Can you set him to magic
us
fine garbs, too, Coroner? Pearls, that’s what I’d want. Pearls like what’s on his buttons. And ribbons. I do so yarn for red ribbons. And yourself’d look lordly in purple brocady next time you sit a ’quest.”
Perhaps she thought the mask left me deaf and blind.
Bastien snorted. “I doubt such gifting would be among his magical skills. Remeni, this would be Master Garibald, Sexton de Caton, and his daughter and chief assistant, Mistress Constance. You will heed their commands as you do my own, save when it comes to pearls or brocades or other such
frivolous babbling
.”
The girl didn’t seem to mind his ferocious glare. The sexton harrumphed in disgust.
“As you say,” I replied, and left it at that. Protocol forbade me offer the two ordinaries honorifics of any kind—even were I so inclined—and discouraged any speech or notice beyond my master’s business, even for a girl. Well, Constance was a woman grown, truly, despite her broomstick figure and lack of manners. Close on, it came clear the bloom in her pale cheeks was more windburn than tender years. Her bony hands, stained and peeling in the cold, looked older than her father’s knobby face.
Anyway, better fewer words than many, lest these hear some trace of my growing distaste for this place. I didn’t like thinking what she meant by
splatter
or
spew
.
“Have we mysteries this morning?” asked Bastien. “I want to test him right off.”
“Constable dumped a fellow last night.” Garibald pointed to a corner, well away from the hovering crowds and laborers. “Hard froze. I’ve set him to thaw.”
“Let’s take a look.”
The taciturn sexton waved a dismissive hand my way. “I’m back to work. Magical foolery won’t get these folk out my yard.” He stomped away.
Constance elbowed Bastien as we hiked across the bustling yard. “Ye’re the right king of our dead-city now, sweeting,” she murmured with a giggle. “Da’ll be wanting to get ’isself a sorcerer.”
“This fellow’d best be useful,” grumbled Bastien. “If not, I’ve set my plans back ten years.”
Sweeting?
Family confidences? Ordinaries coupled in haphazard ways, as I had learned so hard. Yet, even observing these two so short a time, a match seemed unlikely.
Constance pulled open the door of a weather-worn shed in the corner of the yard beyond the merchant stalls. Smoke and warmth from a small brazier escaped quickly along with a distinct sewer odor as Bastien and the woman carried the body into the daylight.
He’d been a bulky fellow, and no beggar. The cloak that covered the most of him was scuffed and muddy, but of good, thick wool lined with dark fur.
“No blood.” Constance hunched over the dead man, examining the back of his head, cloak, and legs, and pawing at his collar. “No rips in ’is clothes. No bumps or blusies.”
With naught but a nod between them, Bastien and Constance rolled the man onto his back. They unfastened the cloak and tugged the shirt and scarf away from his neck.
Still no blood or obvious wounding. But someone had tied a linen bandage over his eyes. Most Navrons believed the soul resided in the eyes. The priests of the Elder Gods said the soul could escape this world only through earth or fire, impossible if it was lost to the air before the body was buried or burnt.
I wasn’t so sure about souls or their exact location. My own essence seemed scattered in bits and pieces, sometimes floating free, most times bound to other people. For certain a piece of it had died in the fire at Pontia. And another had been stolen by a passionate voice, green eyes, and cool fingers. Some days I couldn’t seem to locate much of it at all . . . save when I used magic.
Though most purebloods claimed magic had its source just behind the eyes, my own bent seemed to originate just below my breastbone, flowing upward like hot wine through my chest, around back and shoulders, and down my arms. Magic was surely a part of the soul as well.
“What’s his story?” Bastien squatted across from Constance, watching her bony hands skim expertly through the folds of the dead man’s cloak, shirt, doublet, and braies. They came up empty.
“Constable said he were found in a nasty little hidey off Doane’s Alley in the Stonemasons’ District.” She yanked off the man’s gloves. He wore no rings or bracelets, and his shirt cuffs were worn and filthy. “Wouldn’t ha’ been found yet if a stonecutter hadn’t spied someone live in there with this’n, a body what run off soon as he heard the cutter yell. None knew the dead ’un in the streets roundabout. But ’tis not so likely he just froze dead with such a delectable cloak on him.”
“He’s lost his weapons,” I offered. The empty scabbard and sheath at his belt were old-style and plain, but well oiled. “Dropped or stolen?”
“Aye. His purse, too,” said Bastien, fingering a silver cord dangling empty from the man’s waist. Cut, certainly. “But he still has cloak and boots. No family blazon, lest he’d one on his purse, sword, or dagger.”
The coroner took up the man’s hands, examining back and palm, and each thick finger and its fingernail. He yanked open the man’s mouth, pulled out his tongue, and sniffed at it. “No signs of poison, though none could say how long he’s been dead in this cold. There’s recent scrapes on his knuckles, so he’d been in a bit of a fight, but for certain he was no stonemason. Never saw one didn’t have calluses or scars on his hands. And he’s too well dressed. Hey, Constance! Cloak’s too big for you. It’d take a full-size man to fill it up.”
Constance jerked her hand away where she’d been fondling the thick fur. “
None
gets the cloak till we find who he is. You know Da’s rules. Have you told your sorcerer the rules?”
“Ah, pureblood’s got finer than this.” Bastien paused his examination long enough to glance up at me, jerking his head at the materials in my hands. “So draw him, servant. I paid five years’ living for you. Folk pay well to know how their kinsmen die, who did the deed, and where they’re laid. Folk pay to know their enemies are dead, or their neighbor’s farm has no man to work it anymore. Nobles pay decent. Merchants pay better. And if they learn the news before rot sets in, they pay more. King pays me, too. A fee to find out who’s been murdered, and extra if I point his magistrates at the villain what did it. I’ve tried sketchers before, but I learned right off that none are good enough that a man could recognize his own mother. But pureblood drawings are said to be the same as truth. Show me truth.”
So much about this—their crude handling of the dead man, Bastien’s venality—appalled me. Yet the questions, the mystery, were fascinating. I
picked up a broken roof tile and sat cross-legged where I wouldn’t shadow the dead man’s face. Spreading one of Bastien’s scraps of parchment on the slate, I laid down a few lines with the gray plummet—appropriate for the gray-blue skin. The fellow was a decade older than Bastien, perhaps five-and-forty. And he was not half so fit. His chin was soft, his nose pitted—swollen and red I’d guess, before death and frost had sapped his color. A sinner’s nose, folk called it.
Constance pulled the bandage from the dead man’s eyes. Small eyes, close set and slightly askew. I sketched quickly, smudging the plummet to mime the dark patches beneath his eyes, and again to shape the heavy brow. A scribble mimed the old scar on one temple. The image took shape, adequate for common sketching, but for the rest . . .
My hand paused. In the usual way, I would speak with my subject, triggering my inner sight through his voice or some meeting of the eye. Or it might be the way the person laughed or carried herself that sparked my magic. But this man had no voice, no spark, and I had no lifetime’s trove of memory to plumb, as when I sketched my dead grandsire. That left only touch.
Goddess Mother, he was cold. My left fore- and middle fingers traced the slack line of his jaw, the thick shelf of his brow, the cheekbone buried deep under frost-hard flesh, the cool, spongy lips. Disgusting.
Swallowing hard, I shoved aside thought and opened that place behind my breastbone where neither reason nor logic, happiness nor horror held sway. Enchantment surged from that dark reservoir in all its glory, infusing the lines, shapes, and textures my left hand explored and creating an image inside me. The erupting fire flowed through bone and sinew into my right hand, building in power until the stick of plummet trembled.
When my chest felt like to burst, I released the pent magic and began to refine my crude sketch. Sound and sensation fell away. There was naught but the image shimmering inside and the enchantment flowing through my hand. . . .
After a time I sat back and assessed the work. Plummet was much too limited. Its marks were faint and its line unvarying. Ink was far more versatile, flowing from brushes or pens of every possible dimension. Yet indeed the man looking back from the page was the man before me. A touch released a bit of magic to plump his lips and reveal the tip of that horrid tongue between them. Another gave a fullness to his cheeks and sagging
jowls. Yet another brightened the death-dulled eyes, narrowed the lids, and installed a few fine creases at their corners. He had a habit of squinting. A bit more flare to the sinner’s nose. Dissipated.
As I used my bent to ensure the drawing matched the true image in my mind, Bastien knelt watching, hands stilled, attention unwavering. When the work was as complete as I could make it without ink or brush, I passed him the page.
He studied it intently.
Sat back on his heels.
Said nothing. His eyes remained fixed on the scrap a very long time.
“Plummet is convenient, but much too limiting,” I said, unable to wait longer. “I can render it more accurately with pen and ink. A thin wash of color works even better. It
is
a likeness. But I can’t make it speak, if that’s what you want.”
His moment’s glance near stripped me bare. But he turned away to Constance. “Fetch a runner, girl. I want him to show this to whatever whores ply that alley of a midnight or have a crib nearby, even if they work different streets. Find especially any known for hard play. And send Pleury to fetch the barber. The fellow’s mostly thawed. We need to take a look inside before he warms up too much more.”
Whores? The barber . . . the
sargery
. . . Great Deunor, a barber-surgeon was going to cut into the dead man’s body? My mouth worked in speechless protest.
“Should I bind his eyes back now?” Constance waggled the bandage.
“I’d say yes,” said Bastien softly, shaking his head and staring at the portrait, “but I doubt there’s need. I think his soul has already been snatched out of him.”
H
is name was Valdo de Seti. We knew it before the midday bells rang. Bastien’s runners identified him using the portrait I’d made—and whatever had sparked Bastien’s whim to seek out low women.
De Seti was the chief steward of the draymen’s guild and, indeed, his favored harlot had a den off Doane’s Alley. He himself lived in the Wainwrights’ District with a wife and one of three sons—a boy of eleven years. The two elder were off fighting for Prince Perryn.
Chortling in glee as his runners delivered their reports, Bastien issued a summons to both wife and whore, as well as the son, the constable, the stonemason who had discovered the body, four other neighbors, and Valdo’s two fellow stewards in the guild. They were to attend him in his judgment chamber no later than fourth hour past midday. The
’quest
Constance had mentioned was an inquest—the coroner’s official inquiry into the circumstances of a suspicious death.
As we awaited the witnesses, Constance stripped and washed de Seti in one of the troughs in the courtyard. Then two of Garibald’s workmen laid him in a chamber just inside the prometheum doors. It was a barren little cell, its four walls thick with layers of limewash. Easy to see why. The bier, the floor, the small wheeled table, and the pile of wadded linens in the corner were splattered with a disgusting panoply of morbid stains. This was where they cut them.
I pressed my back to the wall beside the door, as far as I could get from the bier.
“You’re a putrid shade of green, servant,” said Bastien. “You
do
know purebloods shit and die and stink like the rest of us?”
“You can’t just slice into a man’s body,” I said. “The Elder Gods forbid it. How do you know—?”
If the soul could escape through uncovered eyes, how could it not find its way out through an incision? My fist pressed on the tail of my breastbone, where my magic lurked. To be lost in this world, unable to participate in either this life or whatever awaits us beyond, must surely be a horror worse than Magrog’s netherworld of fire and ice.
Bastien stepped aside as a scolding Constance and two boys hauled in jars of water and a stack of battered tin basins, setting them beside the table.
“Law gives me the right when there’s a question,” he said when the storm of noise had passed. “The duty, even. But if it eases your mind, I’ve had the Mother’s high priestess sanctify this room. She laid pureblood magic and temple blessings about it, and said the souls can’t escape if we close the door and turn all the vessels upside down before we open it again.” He leaned close and dropped his voice. “Besides, I have ’em sewed up after.”
He chuckled and laid a genial boot into a slack-jawed boy who was peering in from the atrium to gawk at me.
Bastien had not eased my mind in the least. Nor was I soothed when a slight, unshaven man, carrying a tattered leather case, appeared in the doorway. His dark hair was a greasy tangle, his eyes burnt-out hollows. “Heard you’ve work for me.”
“Ah, Bek! I want this done quick. He’s no wounds we can see, but someone’s cut off his purse and snatched his weapons. . . .” Bastien reeled off the sum of his observations and all we had learned of Valdo de Seti. “Just need to make sure we’re not missing something obvious before the widow arrives. Though she’s not pounced on us wailing, as some do. I’ve a notion this Valdo was not a likable man.”
The surgeon’s shoulders drooped. “So, the body’s claimed, then. Too bad.”
His voice was low and surprisingly clear, considering the reek of spirits about him and his unsteady gait as he crossed to the table. He set his case on the wheeled table and opened it. His hands shook as if he suffered a palsy.
Bastien slapped the man’s back. “Soon as wounded come in from these quarreling princes’ battle, we’ll doubtless have a Moriangi or five mixed in by mistake. Mayhap even a Hansker mercenary. You can slice mongrels to pieces as your heart desires. Some folk say Hansker have no balls. Some say they’ve three balls, but no heart. Do you think that’s so?”
“
Some
folk believe burying a live cat at the full moon will cure their crabs.” The surgeon picked a short saw blade from his case and set its tip just below de Seti’s throat before glancing over his shoulder at Bastien. “You’ve a good enough mind to know—”
He lowered his blade and fixed his sooty gaze on me. “What have we here?”
Gray threaded the surgeon’s hair, and creases seamed a narrow face neither so old as I expected, nor so degenerate. Yet my blood curdled at a man who spent his days cutting flesh—living or dead—much less one who took pleasure in it.
“I’ve bought me a luck charm,” said Bastien, grinning. “Better days coming to Caton.”
“If you think a sorcerer can raise the dead to life again or squeeze out where their gold’s hid, I’ve a few bits of anatomical learning to share with you.” The surgeon’s quiet speech dripped irony.
“Ah, Bek, when you’re done here I’ll give you a sight of what the fellow can do. Mayhap you’ll rethink your tawdry bits of learning. Or pay me to have him redraw that anatomical map you carry about.”
They spoke as if I were a dead man or one of the statues in the prometheum rotunda.
It had been the same in Montesard. Pureblood discipline had forbidden me to break silence to exchange ideas with my tutors or fellow students, which sorely hampered my learning. Once the strangeness of my presence wore off, the others talked in just such fashion, which made matters even worse. But one day in our tutorial session, Morgan, she of the green eyes, had wondered aloud whether
those who refused to speak in session
might be required to write out their opinions, arguments, and questions. The tutor could read them aloud so that all might benefit from a new perspective. And so we had done. The others yet spoke as if I weren’t there, but they spoke of me by name.
Lucian believes . . . Lucian wonders . . .
It had worked exceedingly well.
Cheating
, Investigator Pons had called it.
Compromise of your position in life
.
Unvirtuous engagement with ordinaries
. . .
“Just don’t share your opinions with him, bone-cutter,” said Bastien. “Nor your ale nor your vermin nor your secret vices. Don’t even look at him. I don’t want Registry lackwits finding an excuse to snatch him back. Not only did his little sketch identify our corpse to the folk who knew him, it told me where to look; Valdo de Seti yearned for nasty pleasure.”
The surgeon snorted, wiped his brow on his sleeve, and turned back to
his morbid work. His hands stopped their trembling as he began. Mine did not.
I bolted. Outside the surgery, I poked the plump youth dozing on the bench—Pleury, Bastien’s runner, the lad who’d found the whore. “Clean drinking water?”
Though loath to ingest anything in such a place, my stomach was going to grind itself to pulp if I didn’t get something inside it.
“Great lordly sorcerer . . .” The fair-skinned youth with an affliction of pustules on his cheeks dropped to one knee, near yanked his forelock from his scalp, and bent his back until his chin grazed the floor, as if I were some combination of god, noble, and demon gatzé all in one. The dramatic effect was entirely spoiled when he passed wind with the timbre of a royal trumpet.
With a distressed moan, he prostrated himself completely.
A ghostly memory of my younger brothers and certain secret “jousting tournaments” twitched my lips. “Clean water?” I said evenly.
“Fonts, troughs. Comes straight from the wellsprings. So Garibald says.”
“Good. All right, then.” Relieved, I escaped to the small font I had seen in a bay near the royal preparation room. A tin cup sat on a waist-high shelf beside the little font.
Palinur’s wellsprings were a source of wonder. The intricate system of ducts and pipes that brought the highland water into the city had been installed by my clever ancestors, invaders from the Aurellian Empire. Aurellians had overrun the lands of Ardra, Morian, and Evanore centuries past, only to discover that their minor magical talents took fire with power here. They had called Navronne the Heart of the World.
The fonts and ducts had endured far longer than the conquest. Even Aurellian magic could not stave off the crumbling decadence of the empire itself, or hold its expansive territory against the heirs of mighty Caedmon, King of Ardra. Caedmon had united three ever-warring provinces and created Navronne.
Three hundred Aurellian families swore allegiance to Caedmon and his heirs in return for freedom to pursue their magic as they saw best in service to Navronne. They called themselves the Registry. Their negotiations ensured that pureblood contracts, breeding rules, and protocols would be enforced by the Crown. When Caedmon’s great-great-grandson
Eodward drove the last Aurellian legions out, the Registry, including my own ancestors, had remained.
The cool water soothed my churning belly. I rinsed the cup, returned it to the little shelf, and sagged against the wall. Both passage and bay were deserted. The prometheum was quiet, the trickle of the font soothing. Sleep had eluded me the previous night. My eyelids drifted shut. . . .
“Still squeamish?”
I startled, whacking my elbow on the protruding shelf. Though a big man, Bastien had crept up on me without a sound.
“I’ve no skills to aid such activities,” I said, wincing as I rubbed my elbow. “I could use the time to reproduce de Seti’s portrait in ink. If you have archives . . .”
“There’s other tasks more pressing. Anywise, you don’t have the original to copy. Come along.”
“I don’t need it. The true image remains with me for a while.”
He paused mid-departure. “You can draw it again exactly, without the face in front of you?”
“Yes.”
“As many times as I might want?”
Prideful fool. I oughtn’t have mentioned it. Copying was a tedious chore. Pureblood families often requested ten or twenty copies of their son’s or daughter’s anniversary portraits to pass around to families who might provide suitable marriage partners.
Bastien waited, his brows raised high enough to take flight on their own. He had shown himself most perceptive, and I had pledged my family’s honor to this contract. Besides, I’d never been a good liar.
“Yes. But for three days at most. After that, I would need to retrieve the true image by touching the original portrait. I could then copy it or determine if anyone had tampered with it.”
“Hmmph. Useful.” His not-quite-a-smirk was immensely irritating. “But not now. Constance sent word we’ve another mystery.”
Shuffling off annoyance, I clutched my parchment scraps and plummet and followed him into the courtyard.
Our new mystery was a girl child of eight or ten summers. Her tunic and leggings were little more than sacking. Her dark hair was chopped off short. Though disease and harsh winter hit the poorer ordinaries very hard, she looked neither wasted nor ill. Had it not been for the scrapes and
black streaks on cheeks and brow and the mud all over—from tumbling into the ditch where she was found, so Constance surmised—and her unnatural pallor, one might have thought her a healthy child, asleep.
“She were found in the hirudo ditch next the piggery,” said Constance, scratching her ear vigorously as if a bug had flown into it, “but none claimed to know her. Demetreo, the headman, swore it so when he had her brought here, with his honorable complinations to the coroner. Not that we’d believe a Ciceron’s barbling any more’n a frog’s spit. But she don’t have the visible of a hirudo kind, no matter her garb.”
“Aye, look at her hands,” said Bastien, brushing dirt away. “No hirudo child.”
Her fingernails were broken, with a thin rime of dirt underneath, but her hands were smooth and plump. And when the coroner pulled the tunic away from her neck, he grunted and spat. “No mystery as to her dying, neither.”
Blue-gray bruises around her neck showed the very spread of the fingers that had strangled the life out of her. Bastien glanced up at me. “You’ve no magic can tell us whose hands made these marks, do you?”
I shook my head. Not even a bent for history, fully practiced instead of a lifeless stump between my eyes, could pull such a revelation out of the air.
“Then bestir yourself, pureblood. We’re like to get no bounty from her family, but catching a dastard who’s murdered without provocation tots up a decent fee.”
Revulsion left me incapable of speech. The slim, pale neck could have been Juli’s but a few years ago, or the innocent flesh of my young cousins who died screaming in the fire at Pontia. I already hated this place, this life, this despicable world of ordinaries.
Dispensing with preliminary sketches, my left hand traced her cold cheeks, her violated neck, smooth hands, and ragged hair. Then I reached deep into my bent. . . .
The bawling, clattering business of the city of the dead faded. War and winter vanished. Past horror, present anger, and anxiety about the future fell away. My senses were aflame with magic that seared a river of fire through bone and sinew, engraving the image of the murdered child upon my spirit and pouring through my fingers onto a flimsy scrap of animal skin.
Other images intruded. Bare white bones. Sinuous threads of silver. A heaving grayness streaked with moonlight. Odd. Cursing distraction, I shrugged them off and plunged deeper.
Time lost shape, but at some point well in, an urgency forced its way into my awareness, and a blur swept between my eyes and the page like some great insect.
I growled and shooed it away. I was not yet done. There was so much to convey.
“Remeni!” At the brittle utterance of my name, someone yanked the page from under my hand. The loss of connection doused my frenzy like cold rain down my neck.
“Give it back! It’s not done.” My right hand shook with pent urgency. I squeezed my eyes shut as if I could hold on to the vanishing lines and curves. But lacking a knot of completion, I could not hold on to the true image even for a few moments. Without touching the page, I was blind to my creation.
“We’ve guests arriving.”
Coroner Bastien crouched beside me, though he sounded as if he were at the bottom of a well. The yard was as quiet as the stone halls of the prometheum. Constance stood on the far side of the bier, holding her cloud-goddess cloak spread wide as a tent, as if to shield Bastien and me from the wind. Her pale eyes had grown to near half her thin face.