Dust and Light (8 page)

His gavel fell again. And so it was done.

It seemed a reasonable judgment. The witnesses scattered, the widow whining that there had only been
two
lunae in the purse, not twenty, so
why didn’t someone search the whore. Were I the straw-haired girl, I’d take care to know where my food came from and not to walk in my own dark alley. The evil aspects of the Widow de Seti and her sallow boy would have soured milk while still inside the cow.

As I followed Bastien down the passage to his office, my snarling stomach and soggy knees reminded me how long it had been since I’d eaten anything. Two portraits should not have drained me so, but the second . . . The magic had been extraordinarily intense.

Bastien dropped onto the stool at his writing desk. He did not invite me to sit. I didn’t care. Purebloods did not sit down with ordinaries.

Watching the coroner ferret out the truth of the matter had been more interesting than I’d imagined, but I couldn’t allow him to assign me another task for today, not even to complete the girl child’s portrait. Though the unfinished portrait remained a raw wound, my urgency had drained away with my magic.

“Master Bastien,” I said. “What time should I arrive tomorrow?”

“Dawn,” he said. “We’ll have a full day. But don’t think you’re leaving until you explain.”

Maintaining calm was exceedingly difficult at so late an hour. “Explain what?”

“What were you playing at earlier,
flickering
as you did when drawing the girl?” said Bastien, biting each word as if it were a walnut. His hand waved as if to encompass the necropolis. “A place like this . . . It’s taken five years to convince folk we’ve a mind for truth and reason, not ghosts and ghouls, and in one hour you set us back again. Everyone who saw you will be babbling Caton is demon-haunted.”

“
Flickering
?” Bastien sounded like Constance—using a nonsense word that was close to, but not quite, one that had meaning. Yet, unlike hers, I couldn’t interpret this one.

“When you were drawing the girl, you—your whole self—faded, blurred, and then sharpened up again, over and over, as if you were only partly here, partly elsewhere. Half the people in the yard were on their knees, so many palms spread against evil, Magrog’s demons couldn’t have slid between! Garibald swore it was just snow squalls hiding you. But it was magic, wasn’t it? And you’re not allowed to use magic I didn’t tell you. That’s a violation of the contract.”

“That’s impossible.”

I had observed countless pureblood artists, many whose bent was far stronger than mine. None
flickered
or
faded
as they worked. Master Pluvius would hardly have ignored such a manifestation. Gilles and I had worked in the same studio for five years.

“I am
incapable
of working other magic while using my bent. Whatever you saw was exactly as you say—snow or smoking firepots or the foul vapors from your charnel house. It certainly wasn’t me.” Annoyance, fed by exhaustion and this petty foolery, sharpened my tone more than I liked.

The bells rang out from the city of the living. Bastien glared at me for the full span of their clanging. Nine peals. So late! Juli must be terrified at my absence.

“You swore to obey.” He snarled like a wild dog. As if I were one, too.

“So you interrupted my magic and whisked the child away because you thought I was what—trying to get my contract voided by scaring your customers away? That’s ridiculous and insulting. I keep my word.”

All the awfulness of the day and the previous one boiled out of me—the shame, the awkwardness, the horrors and grief of the past brought so close to mind.

“Indeed, your interruption ensured I could
not
give you my best work. Perhaps
you
are trying to void my contract or work out better terms with the Registry by drumming up false accusations. Perhaps you wish me punished because I was born an Aurellian sorcerer and not a low—”

I snapped my mouth shut.
Fool, idiot
,
undisciplined wretch, to let him glimpse such emotional weakness.

“But it wasn’t just the magic.” Bastien yanked a scrap of parchment from his iron chest and thumped it on the writing table. “You’re either inept or scheming. How do you decide what to put in the picture besides the face?”

“What?” My head spun. “I don’t
decide
. The magic . . . my bent . . . enables me to make a bond of the senses with my subject . . . to shape a true image of the person. If you’re talking about background details, that’s just incidental. An artist’s instinct, some call it. I draw whatever the image suggests, whatever feels right. I don’t think about those things at all.”

He turned the page toward me and moved the lamp closer. But divining Bastien’s purpose was the issue here, not some imperfection in my art. I gave the portrait a token glance.

But then I blinked and examined it more carefully, squinting in the
shifting light. The likeness was good. The round cheeks. The small nose. But the hair . . . How had I got the hair so wrong? It wasn’t chopped off ragged, but elaborately curled, pale and shining, caught up in ribbons. Her eyes were light and merry, the color of a winter sky. And her gown and cloak . . . not rough sacking, but the soft folds of satin, edged with beads and elaborate embroidery. And on her bodice . . . Idrium’s Gates! Worked in pearls and shining thread in the center of her stiff bodice was a trilliot—the three-petaled lily of Navronne.

My head spun in confusion; words died unspoken. I glanced up at a grim Bastien.

“If you’re setting me up to play the fool, Servant Remeni, I swear on Kemen Sky Lord’s balls, you’ll live to regret it. If not, then you’d best tell me why your drawing shows no dead ragamuffin, but a child wearing the mark of the royal family.”

N
ear an hour I spent convincing Bastien that I had no idea why I’d portrayed the child in such fashion. To explain the mechanisms of my bent as he demanded was impossible. I was baffled. And disturbed. A touch of the page assured me that the image inside and that on the page matched exactly. Of all things, my art was true. Never had any of my portraits shown such a difference in personal details as this one. And such significant ones! Certainly for the coroner to prance around the city, bellowing about strangled royal children, could not be wise. At the least he’d look the fool. At the worst . . .

All I could do was swear up, down, and sidewise that it was neither purposefully misleading nor inept. In truth the drawing was as fine as any I had ever done, no matter that it was scribed in plummet on a scrap of parchment so blotched and worn it would have been burnt in any reputable artist’s studio.

“The
face
is true,” I said. “Look at it. Look at the child. You’ll find no better likeness anywhere. As for the rest . . . perhaps these strange surroundings warped my seeing. Or the noise. I’ll start again tomorrow. I’ll bring fresh parchment and work in ink.” But I
knew
it was true. It was my gift, the magic I brought to my art.

Bastien tossed the drawing into his iron-bound chest and slammed the lid so hard the stack of wax tablets in the book press toppled, clattering, onto the floor. “Be here at six bells of the morning, or I’ll report a violation
to your Registry. The woman said your people had proper punishments for cheats and violators.”

I squeezed out the only words possible without risking another outburst. “I’ll be here.”

My hurried steps echoed in the prometheum halls, and I burst gratefully through the heavy door into the open air. Once outside the necropolis gate, perhaps I could breathe again. I needed to get home, ease Juli’s fears, eat—gods, my belly was about to devour itself—and then try to make sense of the strange portrait. The Registry punishments for contract cheats were severe, for our contracts were the sacred word of
all
purebloods. Violators could be whipped or bound to silence for months or years, or dressed in garishly colored garb and publicly displayed for days on end beside a notation of their crimes.

The fire bowls had been doused, allowing the night’s cold to settle into the walled yard. Wind darted hungrily through the gatehouse, setting the torches that flanked the gate to dancing. The yard was deserted, save for Constance. She scrubbed at an empty bier in the erratic light, humming a bouncing, untuneful melody in time with her strokes. Her hands must be freezing.

She glanced up as I passed. Grinned, but did not speak. As I hiked across the snow-dusted paving, I tucked my hands into the thick fur of my pelisse.

Garibald stepped out of a dark hole in the gatehouse wall, a lantern raised high. The wavering light revealed a narrow stair behind him, likely ascending to a watch chamber above the tunnel.

“Guess he wants out.” This observation was addressed to the brick wall at my left, though I was the only living person anywhere within hearing.

He unlocked the iron gate, dragged it open, and poked his head out, scanning the sky for a moment as if to assess the weather. As the gate swung shut behind me, another few words tumbled out of him. “Battle was three days north. He’ll be busy the morrow. Low, nasty work. Ugly. Better he not come back.”

Garibald’s annoyance sparked a bitter amusement, certainly not at the thought of wounded soldiers dying in sight of home, but only at his odd interpretation of the law that forbade him speak to me. Would that I dared tell him how deeply I loathed the thought of returning here.

The gate latch clicked behind me, and Garibald’s heavy steps retreated. My own feet lingered. All the turmoil of the last hours fled before the daunting prospect of my journey home.

Rarely had I ventured into such inky blackness as lay upon the land outside the walls. A few lights gleamed from the temple heights inside the city, the wind-driven snow leaving them little but blurs. A smudged fire glow wavered in the gusts scouring the field of hummocks, while odd blue flares in the distant trees teased at my eyes.

My mind produced imaginings of fae lights or the wandering Danae of my grandmother’s tales. Some of her stories named the Danae tricksters. Some said they danced and mated in the moonlight to keep the earth fertile. All said their naked flesh was limned in shadings of blue. I’d loved drawing Danae as a boy, before my grandsire had declared such myths the province of the ignorant and forbade my grandmother to taint my mind with them. History, he said, must keep its steely eye on firm evidence, logic, and provable truth. The ashes at Pontia had swept away my own faith in mystical benevolence. And if Danae had ever danced to keep the earth healthy, they did so no more.

A rhythmic crunch of metal and ice gave substance to the blockish shadow moving between me and the shifty fire glow of a lantern. A gravedigger I’d seen wheeling a cart through the gates was plying his shovel. Which meant that the hummocks we’d trampled that morning . . .

No wonder the taint of death teased my senses.

Leander had said it took an hour extra to bypass the slot gate and hirudo—surely longer for one who didn’t know the route. I’d collapse before arriving home. So I trod carefully between the hummocks—graves—and wished for a lamp.

Quivering shoulders and trembling hands told me how magically depleted I was. I’d not power enough to keep a magelight glowing, unless I could attach the spell to a solid object of reasonable size. The pocket tucked in the waist of my braies held naught but a kerchief. Cloth was too flimsy to hold a steady beam. I’d sent my father’s ring home with Leander and wore no other jewels. My eating knife was already wrapped in wards against poisons. And I was certainly in no mind to reverse my steps and beg a torch from the necropolis. My own night sight must serve.

Midway across the burial ground, I regretted that idiocy. Though I believed I was headed for the slot gate in the wall, I couldn’t be sure. The snow had petered out. The blustery blackness swallowed the overspill from Caton’s torches and reduced the gravedigger’s lantern to a pinprick. I trudged on until I tripped on something hard.

Kneeling up on the frozen mound, I searched the turf nervously. A
frozen bone would not be so awful. Truly. Though indeed this was old ground . . . a windy height drowned in an ocean of blood.
Raiding parties seeking good vantage. Clashing swords, whining arrows, grunting fighters, and the wild yelling of a charge; roaring magefire and screams of terror, layer upon layer of wounding and death . . .

I snatched my hands away. I had released no magic; my bent for history was long excised, naught but a charred stub between my eyes. The eerie night had but fired my imagination.

Patting lightly, I resumed the search. No fleshless bone, but a cold curve of iron had tripped me up—a closed half-circle, its diameter wider than my spread fingers. A part of my day’s learning: Such cheap artifacts, graven with the deceased one’s name, were used to mark poor men’s graves. The iron rod would be hammered into a family blazon for those who had such, or the fish-shaped eye of the Mother for a follower of the Elder Gods, or a sunburst symbol for one of the Karish believers. But this, an arché, an empty half circle lacking so much as a name, served for one whose identity and allegiance were unknown, like the girl child whose image burned behind my breastbone.

“Hope you don’t mind my borrowing this,” I said softly to the mystery who slept here. “I’ll bring it back tomorrow.”

Using the arché, I gouged a great circle in the mound and left my eating knife in the center of it. The spells on my knife should lead me back to this grave. Now for the light.

To shape the mental pattern of my desire took less time than sketching a tree. Drawing magic to fill it, however, was wretchedly difficult. I was grasping at the dregs of my energies, a sensation much like yanking on the inside of my empty belly.

But eventually, I poured the waiting spell into the chilled iron of the arché and triggered it with my will.

A narrow white beam parted the night, as if a voiding spell had removed a shard of the darkness. Satisfaction warmed my spirit, well beyond the needs of the moment. Touching my forehead to the earth, I vowed a libation to the gods who had graced me with their gift, and renewed my coming-of-age pledge to return them service a thousandfold.

I set out again, amused to imagine what someone at the necropolis might think of the mysterious flaring light in the middle of the burial ground. Only then did I recall my obligation to forgo magic, save at
Bastien’s command. If the contract lacked a personal-defense clause, this would be certain violation. But then, Bastien would likely disapprove of my breaking a leg on the descent into the hirudo.

Moving more confidently, I soon reached the wall and the slot gate. The steep descent was slower, as the muddy ruts and rocks were glazed with ice. But cautious steps took me to the pigsty with head and limbs intact.

Coal smoke thick as fog in fen country hung in the ravine. The night itself . . . the frigid air . . . all was heavy, damp, and silent, as if I were the only soul left living in the world.

I rounded the piggery with quiet steps. Perhaps I could slip through unnoticed. Or perhaps the Guard Royale had chosen this day to scour the hirudo as they did from time to time, chasing the cursed Cicerons into the wilderness.

A few quercae forward into the ramshackle warren, and the faint drone of a hurdy-gurdy and the muted rapping of a tabor testified that not all its residents slept. I imagined I heard a trill of piping as well . . . and laughter. . . .

As a fiery lance out of the blackness, grief pierced my breast. Remeni-Masson family gatherings had ever been noisy, joyful celebrations. Games and music and a generous table. Contests of strength, speed, and magic, a rare balance to the strict discipline of our daily life. I had sorely regretted the extra work that kept me away from the last one. Until the Registry messenger had come from Pontia . . .

Keep focused, fool.
I muted my light to a deep red and reduced its span to the small circle of a lantern’s gleam, just enough to keep me on the muddy path and away from obstacles. The hirudo night opened before me and closed down behind.

The music and merriment swelled as I passed a tarry alleyway, damped quickly as I moved on.

Soft, running steps to my left slowed my feet. I turned slowly as I walked, but glimpsed no movement.

Onward, a little faster. A swish of heavy fabric accompanied a waft of steam bearing the stink of boiling cabbage.

Just as the darker spaces between shacks and sheds grew wider and the path angled upward toward the Elder Wall and the city, my light failed. It didn’t fade or dim, but just . . . stopped. I halted, puzzled. A bound spell shouldn’t need constant infusion of magic to hold.

“Ye’ve paid no toll, masked one.” The calm, low-pitched challenge came from behind—or perhaps my left.

I held still, squinting into the pitchy night. “You acknowledge my mask. You know better than to hinder me.”

“But ’tis the third time this day ye’ve caused a trespass.” He moved as a ghost might, one darker shadow against the rest, ending squarely on the path ahead of me. “Your minions twice and now yourself.”

“Yet you waited to interfere until there was one alone,” I said, chilling my tone as best I could. “Perhaps you imagine the penalties for interfering with a single pureblood are something less than delaying five or four. That’s not at all the case. Step aside.”

“’Tis years since city guards have visited Hirudo Palinur for aught but frighting us. Dangers abound, even for such as you. But I can see to your safe passage.”

“I can protect myself.” My declaration sounded far braver than my jellied sinews told. I didn’t know any magic that could actually hurt a determined fighter. And depleted as I was, I couldn’t even confuse them with an illusion.

“Perhaps so. Perhaps no. But then, you are a wealthy man like all your kind. Is not ease of passage worth sharing a small portion of your treasure with those who’ve so little?”

If I’d had the wherewithal, I’d likely have paid, risking worse extortion the next time I passed. “I carry naught a thief would prize. Certainly nothing worth the trouble he’d reap did he steal it.”

“See, now? There you’re wrong.”

Shadowy movements on every side of me were no fey imaginings.
Magrog’s balls!
I invoked the arché’s spell binding yet again. Why did it refuse to take fire?

“All we wish is a little magic,
Domé
Remeni, one glimpse of Idrium’s glory on our dank verge of Magrog’s realm. Naught to violate the law. Naught to hinder one of the gods’ chosen on his important business.”

Magic? Cicerons were masters at deceit and sleight of hand. Some ordinaries claimed Cicerons could work true magic. History declared that impossible, but tonight I was no better. I couldn’t even spark my own light, which meant the only two defensive magics I knew—void holes beneath their feet and spits of true flame—were wholly out of reach. What did he truly want?

I could tell them that constables were on the way to join me to examine the place the dead girl child had been found. But what if they didn’t believe me? Because what could a constable learn in the deeps of night? This was hugely, stupidly aggravating. Only one thing left . . .

“You lurk in the dark, refusing me a glimpse of your face.” I stepped forward, listening carefully, estimating his position. “How am I to interpret such shyness? I’ve just spent the day with the dead, and would rather not see more of them, and I am so damnably hungry, I could eat this muck in your street. So, if you wish to take the mortal risk of turning out my pockets or snatching my boots, let’s get on with it.”

He laughed then. A hearty chuckle, so rich with life and menace that I felt heat beneath my breastbone. Had I pen and parchment, I could sketch him from the sound alone. Instead, I flung the heavy arché directly at that laugh.

His breathless grunt brought a smile to my face as I darted past him, speeding up the hill with a burst of strength drawn from my very marrow.