The Golden Key (56 page)

All in all, though, he much preferred the pungent scent of paint—not surprising, as he had recently finished mixing a full array. The wax- and oscurra-sealed pots rested safely in a locked coffer of his atelierro above the wine shop, ready for use. Never again would he wait until he’d found his next host. Once, he’d been so physically weak after the bleeding that the transfer had nearly been ruined. (Although once the spell was cast, feebleness had worked
in his favor; restraining the worn-out old body had been simplicity itself.) Each time since then, he had come home prepared.

He had also learned not to wait until his current host began to age. He’d made that mistake two lives ago. So contented had he been with Oaquino’s posting at the elegant Court of Ghillas that the years had slipped past unnoticed. Then, one shocking morning in early spring, a hip joint stabbed so sharply that he could barely rise from his silken bed. Oaquino had been but forty-two, and the swift onset of age had caught him unawares. The journey back to Tira Virte had been an agony of physical pain and mental anguish, the relocation into a healthy eighteen-year-old cause for profound relief.

Oaquino—and after him Ettoro, who’d developed the bone-fever at the ridiculously young age of thirty-five—had also taught him to check bloodlines for early death and inbreeding. Dioniso, his current host, came from excellent stock and at forty-one looked and felt ten years younger. This time he intended to give himself years and years to pick and choose and find exactly the right young man with exactly the right traits. Through the centuries, his specifications had become most exacting indeed.

First and foremost, the boy must possess good ancestry and excellent health. He must be an acknowledged talent, so that the slow revelation of real genius would not excite comment. He wanted a good-looking boy as well—and cringed to recall that graceless gawk Renzio, a choice that had been no choice at all due to his advanced years and urgent need. No more Renzios; he refused to be stuck again inside an ugly man for twenty years.

Recently he’d added family connections to his list of desired attributes. His first hosts had been mainly from lesser branches of the vast Grijalva tree. He’d reasoned that comparative anonymity was a good thing; he could pass more or less unnoticed as he accustomed himself to his new lives. And the fewer people intimate with his chosen incarnation, the fewer who must be deceived while he made the gradual changes of personality necessary to bring past behavior in line with his own character. Grazzo do’Filho, teenaged boys were
expected
to be unpredictably skittish, and adolescent artists in particular were moody en tudo paletto.

But family connections had become important to him: Dioniso was of an influential line that had produced two Lord Limners and a Ducal Mistress in the last fifty years. The advantages of position were obvious—worth the extra effort to find and worth the extra work of fooling family and friends. Dioniso was on the short list
for every plum assignment; when he had expressed a desire to be posted to Niapali, authorization had come within days. Best of all, whenever he returned home, he was warmly welcomed and celebrated and given the choicest rooms available.

Though when making his selection he always hoped for a personality similar to his own, it didn’t matter all that much. He’d become adept at subtle alterations in character. And if the strain of acting a part became too great, or friends grew puzzled by the changes, there were two convenient options. First, he could volunteer for a few years of itinerant duty, the shit-work of the marginally talented Grijalva. Galling as it was, the bolt-hole had served him well in several instances. Time spent as an Itinerarrio earned marks for service as well as provided a cushion of years between memories of who “Zandor” or “Timirrin” had been, and who he
really
was.

His other option was, of course, a suggestive or even fatal painting or two done in his atelierro above the wine shop. But he disliked the trouble of collecting specimens—a disgusting process at best, and occasionally dangerous.

He paused within the Galerria’s great bronze doors while an assistant curatorrio rattled through a chaotic desk for a copy of the latest guide sheet. Absent from Meya Suerta these twelve years, he wanted to know whose work was currently fashionable, what changes had come to the arrangement of paintings—and what the historians were writing nowadays about his portrait of Saavedra. An acknowledged masterpiece, a priceless work of genius, a delight to anyone lucky enough to behold it—and, he grinned to himself, the despair of student Limners who could never hope to equal even the tiniest featherstroke of his brush on canvas.

At last a page of heavy paper was given him. Beautiful work, he mused idly, expert fingers judging rag content, artist’s eye approving the typeface. He hadn’t exercised his paper-making skills in—oh, a century or so. Perhaps he ought to take it up again as a hobby.

Closely printed on both sides, with the Grand Ducal Seal at the top, the guide sheet began with a brief reference list of Tira Virte’s rulers and the Lord Limners who had served them. He nodded his thanks to the curatorrio, thinking with an inner chuckle how shocked the youth would be to know that the greatest Lord Limner of them all, and likewise the painter of most of the important and all of the finest pictures in the Galerria, was about to take a tour of his own works.

He strolled slowly along the tiled floor, pausing before paintings with which he was long familiar, pretending studiousness for the benefit of a group of silent sanctas half the Galerria away. Every so often he stopped in honest interest before a
Treaty
or
Marriage
painted by someone he’d known. Old Bennidito had really had a way with color; he’d forgotten how Tazioni could make trees look as if a breath would visibly and even audibly rustle leaves; no one, not even he, had ever outdone Adalberto for exquisite rendering of the drape of a shawl along a woman’s arm. He nodded wordless tribute to long-dead colleagues, generous in his own genius, able to acknowledge theirs.

He passed the sanctas with a nod. They looked like a herd of dried-up dun cows: skinny, big-eyed, darkly tanned from incessant gardening that fed only a tiny percentage of the poor—but at least provided roses for Grand Duchess Gizella’s scent-pillars. They recognized the salute with abrupt dips of white-wimpled heads, lips tightening at the sight of the Chieva do’Orro hanging from its chain around his neck.

Like all Limners who wore the Golden Key, to the Ecclesials he was an object of disgust. Sterility was unnatural, an abomination to a Faith based on the fertile Mother and Her Son, and thus a sign of divine disapproval. He’d always wondered how the Ecclesia reconciled this with the abundant fecundity of Grijalva women and the proven virility of unGifted Grijalva men. Perhaps the attitude was merely the last fierce-held remnant of the years of the Nerro Lingua, when the Grijalvas had suffered more deaths than any other family in Meya Suerta; this had been seen as a mark of divine retribution for having sheltered the chi’patros. He lost himself in reverie of his first life for a moment, remembering that old canna of a Premia Sancta, Caterin Serrano, and her banishment of all Grijalvas from the shrines and Sanctias she controlled. Alejandro had taken care of
that
, but the animosity remained. To the sanctas and sanctos of Tira Virte, the Grijalvas were an affront that centuries of service to their country had done little if anything to mitigate. Condemning them were their chi’-patro origins as bastards of infidel outlaws, their rumored magic, their power at Court, and especially their scandalous personal lives—and most especially of all, the Mistresses. The family was tainted, root, branch, and stem; the Ecclesia had not changed its attitude since Duke Renayo and Duchess Jesminia returned to Meya Suerta with fourteen ladies-in-waiting pregnant by Tza’ab outlaws, the twenty chi’patro children of those outlaws, and the corpse of Verro Grijalva. As he passed the silent sanctas, he wondered
what the official line would be on the reality of Grijalva art—let alone his uses of it. The thought made him smile, and the women turned away in renewed scorn of one who dared a pleasantry to those who loathed him and all his kind.

Dismissing the sanctas from his thoughts, he stopped before a
Birth
by Guilbarro Grijalva—or, rather, attributed to Guilbarro, for of course it was his own work. He let slip a sigh as he contemplated it. A rare masterpiece, even for him. The only daughter of Cossimio I was surely the loveliest baby ever born. Painting her and her beautiful mother had been one of the great joys of his lives. He recalled it so clearly: gambas playing softly in the recesses of the summer-shaded arborra, iced drinks served whenever he flicked a finger, Grand Duchess Carmillia aglow with happiness, her baby daughter laughing the whole time. And there little Cossima was, as sweet and lively as on the day he’d finished the last rose in the vase at her mother’s elbow. The child sat on Carmillia’s knee, both of them dressed alike in simple white linen and a rainbow of ribbons. A golden cage rested on a pedestal beside them; noting Cossima’s fascination with the birds, at some point he had opened the cage to let them fly about the arborra. He could hear her giggles still. Delight had nearly distracted him from quick-sketching her excited little face and the smile on her mother’s lips. Both expressions looked down at him now, perfectly captured, looking as if painted yesterday. Very fine work, indeed. Adorable little Cossima … how he would have loved to have painted her
Marriage.

But she had died of a fever before her fourth birthday. And within a year of completing this picture, Guilbarro himself was dead. Cossima’s
Birth
was the only work of his in the Galerria—and the guide sheet commented on how sad it was that so promising a talent had been lost so young.

A corner of his mouth turned down. He could have done so much as Guilbarro. Clever, handsome, with all the right connections, he’d already taken the initial steps toward becoming Lord Limner. The
Birth of Cossima
had, in fact, been his audition.

Scenes from the past cast dark veils over the portrait of the laughing baby and her radiant mother. A hunting accident; a broken leg from which Guilbarro was recovering nicely—and then disaster. Some fool of a sancta mixed pain medication incorrectly. It was discovered within two weeks, but by then the damage had been done. He was well and truly addicted.

They’d tried to wean him from it. But even had the withdrawal
worked, his ambitions were finished. No Lord Limner could be made vulnerable by addiction to liquor, gambling, sexual habits, or drugs. The potential for subornation was too great. Even if the medical establishment avowed him free of it, the danger of relapse would always be there. Neither the do’Verradas nor the Grijalvas could countenance a Lord Limner with a drug habit in his past.

The agony of that life’s ruin very nearly matched the agony of never having
quite
enough of the drug. He could neither think nor work in such a state. But he understood his choices all too well: he could suffer through the cure and survive and never become Lord Limner, or he could abandon this life and assume another.

Guilbarro’s younger brother Matteyo saved him—and in the saving condemned himself. He couldn’t bear remembering, but suffocating memories swept like thick tapestry curtains across his vision. Desperation led Matteyo to procure drugs enough to augment doses that became weaker every day in the attempted cure. Devotion caused him to bring Guilbarro his paints, a canvas, a mirror. The hell of it was that the self-portrait was Matteyo’s idea. “
Paint yourself into being well again
,” the boy said. “
You’re good enough, ‘Barro, you can do it. I know you can.
”

Oh, he had. He had. Despite shaking hands and drugged dreaminess, he painted Guilbarro. And when the work was done and the time came, he actually explained the process.
And Matteyo agreed.
By painting Guilbarro to the life, he had painted Matteyo to his death.

“
I’m a mediocrity, all the moualimos say it. But you’re a true genius, ‘Barro. You deserve your chance to be Lord Limner. The world deserves to see your work. I don’t matter.
You
do.
”

And so it had been done. He’d Blooded the paints with Matteyo’s help, and killed Matteyo with a quick, merciful thrust of Saavedra’s golden needle in Guilbarro’s painted heart. Easy enough to call it suicide: despair at tragic circumstances, agony of withdrawal, and so on. Easier still to weep when Guilbarro’s corpse was discovered, with Matteyo vanished from it. Selfless, generous, loving Matteyo: the only one he’d ever regretted.

Two days later, with the body safely buried, he wept while he tore the Guilbarro portrait to shreds. A month after that, within the fresh and healthy fifteen-year-old body, ready to honor the boy’s devotion by becoming Lord Limner not just for himself but for Matteyo, too, he found himself under arrest. Someone had discovered Matteyo’s illegal purchases of drugs; the boy was accused of
assisting Guilbarro’s suicide. The irony had escaped him at the time, and caused no more than a bitter grimace now. The thought of Matteyo still hurt too much.

Convicted of the lesser charge—though Matteyo’s branch of the family was influential, the scandal required a name to hang it on—he was banished. The remote and arguably civilized barony of Esquita was a misery of empty hills and emptier minds, whose ruler required cosseting because of his one asset: iron ore. Not for sixteen long years did he return to Meya Suerta, not until word came that Matteyo’s mother was dying. The Grijalvas appealed to Duke Cossimio I, who allowed him to come home for the death watch: the bond between mother and son was the most sacred in the Faith. As she lay dying, he found Timirrin and began the next painting—began, too, the displays of frantic grief that accounted for Matteyo’s suicide soon after his mother’s death.

He blinked a blur from his eyes, still thinking of Matteyo, and saw again Cossima’s sweet little face. Almost two hundred years since he’d painted her plump fists reaching for the bright-feathered birds. Though visitors to the Galerria sorrowed over her tragedy, they left remembering her laughing black eyes and her mother’s joy. Such was the power of sheer artistic skill, nothing to do with magic.