Chasm of Fire

by Michael Wallace

  “That’s where we’re going, Alan. It’s a test, to see if you have what it takes to be my son and heir. We’re going into the Rift.”

  Chapter Six

  More than twenty years after the fateful day that had seen Alan descend into the Rift and return again as heir to the Carbón name and fortune, he waited until Iliana, Mota, and Thiego had crossed the lower wall and descended into the lower terraces to recruit men, then made his way back up the hillside to the Quinta. But not to his home. He went to confront Lady Mercado.

  He’d been caught up in thinking of a return to the Rift after all these years, and when recalling the events that carried him to that moment of entering the Quinta at his father’s side, had remembered for the first time in years what the older man had said about Lady Mercado’s secret. Something about the dumbre.

  Yet when Mercado stood on the wall looking down into the lower terraces, she’d claimed to have never seen them from such a close distance. And then there was her strange reaction when she saw Thiego. Carbón had never seen her react to another cabalist that way. For all her piety, she’d had no problem facing down either Salvatore or Naila.

  He climbed the terraces alone, and was soon approaching the Mercado estate. There was a fresh layer of stone atop her gatehouse walls since last fall, extending it three feet higher, and the gate was new, as well. Men challenged Carbón with drawn swords and primed muskets, but someone recognized him, and the master of the guard ordered the gate opened to let him inside.

  A servant escorted him from there to the manor counting room, where Mercado stood looking out the window with her hands behind her back. A trio of servants worked at a table in the room, counting silver coins from a strongbox that looked to have been carried in on poles, and dividing them into three smaller oak chests reinforced with iron bands. The first servant counted off the coins, the second separated them in a 3:2:1 ratio, and the third made notations in a leather-bound book.

  Every once in a while the one writing numbers would look up from her book and ask a clarifying question of the first servant, who either responded to the query himself or turned to Mercado, who answered without turning around. The questions largely concerned the price differential between the cost and sales price of peppercorn or beef tallow, or the percentage paid in tariffs to Lord Torre. Mercado seemed to know the answers by heart.

  The servant who’d led Carbón into the room cleared his throat. “Your Grace? Lord Alan Carbón to see you.”

  Mercado turned, and a haze seemed to fall from her face as she took in the visitor. “Is there something wrong, Carbón?”

  “There might be. It can wait if you need to finish your work.”

  She shook her head. “This is the sort of work that never finishes.”

  “You’ve got more coin than I do, if you can count silver forever and never get to the bottom of it.”

  She didn’t look amused. “What is it?”

  “A word in private?”

  Mercado hesitated, then nodded for him to follow her to an adjacent room, which was a small study with a fireplace and a wooden ceiling decorated with carved flying machines. Tapestries hung from the walls, showing scenes of commerce: barges on canals, stevedores hauling barrels of rum, a goldsmith with an eyepiece working at a necklace.

  Carbón studied one of the tapestries, this one illustrating men drying tobacco. “Is this Calernan work?”

  “You have a good eye.” Mercado looked pleased. “Mention Calerna and most people think of wine and ham. But the country has some fine craftsmen, as well.”

  “Each of these must represent thousands of hours of work.”

  “I would hope so, given how much coin the Calernan merchants demand for them. Is that one your favorite? I’m partial to the mill scene. It’s this one over here.” She walked over to give it a closer look.

  “Thousands of hours hunched over a tapestry, back aching, eyes straining,” Carbón said. “At the end of every week a weaver goes home with a few black coins—whatever the prevailing wage is in Calerna. It won’t be much—it never is. Then some merchant turns around and sells it for double what he paid the weaver. The new buyer sells it again, and that person hauls it north. Eventually it finds its way to your hands. Maybe it goes for ten times the worker’s labor by the time you’ve hung it in your manor.”

  “More like twenty times, but yes. That’s commerce for you.”

  “How often do you look at each individual tapestry, really study it?”

  “And here I thought you were admiring my collection.” Her expression had turned sour. “What’s your point?”

  “That years of labor are required to give you fleeting moments of pleasure.”

  “That’s the way the world is organized. Anything else would be chaos and bloodshed. Unnatural.”

  “Maybe,” Carbón said. “I admit that I struggle to think of a better alternative, but I believe I give it more thought than most. Given my childhood, I mean.”

  “No need to discuss that,” she said quickly. “Some things are better left in the past.”

  “Actually, that is exactly what I came here to discuss.”

  Mercado looked at the door as if afraid to see one of her servants standing there. She moved to close it. “Shut that window, will you?”

  Not only was the window open to the back gardens to bring a breeze on this warm afternoon, but he could hear the clink of coins and the murmur of voices from the counting room next door. He drew the window shut and dropped the bar as Mercado pulled the heavy wood door closed. The room was a good deal gloomier when they were done.

  “I’ve kept your secret for more than two decades,” she said. “And with good reason. There’s nothing to it. Nothing whatsoever. Your father had a good eye—better than most—and he plucked you out of the dumbre for a reason. Every day, every move since, you’ve proven him right.”

  “But what if he’d had living children of his own?” Carbón asked. “What if one of them had been another Daniel Torre? Would I be a mine laborer, wasting away in the darkness, while some hedonistic fool carried on the family name?”

  “It didn’t happen that way.”

  “It could have though. If the fire-damp hadn’t exploded, I’d still be down there. Would I be any less of a person because I labored in the mines instead of owning them?”

  “Of course you would be. You’d be shaped by the dumbre, you’d carry their ignorance, their superstition, their filthy habits. You’d be one of them.”

  “No, you’re wrong. I was who I was before my father rescued me. He educated me, he taught me how to manage the mines, how to carry my responsibilities in the Quinta, but he didn’t change my basic nature. That was already in place.”

  “What are you getting at? You’re not proposing some revolutionary change to Quintana, are you?”

  “Change is already coming. Can’t you feel it?” Carbón shook his head. “But no, that’s not why I’m here. I’m not planning to step down, nor will I try to convince you to give up your privileges, if that’s what’s got you worried. But I want to talk about the dumbre.”

  “Forget your past. Just forget it, and worry about all of the things worth worrying about.”

  “You misunderstand me,” he said. “I’ve come to peace with my past—most of it, anyway. As much as anyone can. I want to talk about your experience with the dumbre, not mine.”

  Mercado turned rigid. The pale expression on her face that he’d spotted on the wall returned, and she licked her lips. “You know about that? Lord Carbón swore to me . . .”

  “My father kept your secret. Only alluded to it when I was a boy, when he was telling me who else knew about my origins in the dumbre. He told me you could be trusted because you had your own secrets.”

  “Oh.” She looked calmer, and he wondered if she’d try to backtrack, to claim that he’d been young and had no doubt misheard or misremembered. “Yes, I do have a secret. But that is irrelevant, now. Decades old, and to be forgotten.”

 
“Lady Mercado . . .”

  “No, I won’t discuss it. Was there anything else?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. The new Guardian of Secrets. Thiego.”

  He was studying her carefully, but he hadn’t surprised her this time. She raised her eyebrows. “So young—he’s practically a boy. Naila Roja must have been desperate to put him in. Desperate, or calculating that he’ll be easily controlled. Either way, it was a surprise.”

  “You know what else was a surprise? The way you turned pale when he drew back his hood and you saw his face.”

  “Ha! No, it was just seeing how young he was. I was startled, nothing more. Listen, I must return for the final counting. I trust my servants, but it’s always better to have an eye on the coin when it comes out in large quantities. It lets them know you are paying attention.”

  “Lady Mercado,” he said gently. “I saw your face—I was looking right at you. You were shocked, not startled. Almost terrified. And when you recovered, you hustled yourself out of there before you were forced to talk to him.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do know what I’m talking about. And I wasn’t the only one who noticed how strange you were acting. We all saw how you took the long way to get off the wall so you wouldn’t come face-to-face with Thiego.”

  “What are you saying, Carbón? Are you making an accusation of some sort?”

  “No, I’m not. I’m trying to figure out what you know, that’s all. I don’t understand it myself, I’m only telling you what I’ve noticed. The most important thing is that the expression on your face was not so different from the one you showed when I mentioned your secret about the dumbre just now.”

  He waited to see if she would tell him anything, but she remained silent, so he pressed on.

  “Thiego is from the dumbre. Plucked out by the Luminoso, who must have found him somehow, and identified his potential. Not so different than what happened to me. Neither of us belong up top. So you can see why I’m interested. When you add in the fact that he’s the new Guardian of Secrets, the second most powerful figure in the Luminoso, you can imagine that I’m not looking for simple gossip. I’m looking for something that can help us if Naila makes another move.”

  Mercado let out a long sigh and turned back to the tapestry of the flour mill. She rubbed a thumb and forefinger against the fringe.

  “It wasn’t the Luminoso that plucked Thiego out of the dumbre,” she said at last. “It was me.”

  “You went into the dumbre?” he asked, shocked.

  “Of course not. It was Salvatore who went down. But I pointed the boy out, told the cabalist where to look.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  Mercado stared at him a long moment, but he could tell right away that she was going to answer the question and only wanted to study his reaction as he’d studied hers. He determined not to let it show on his face until he’d had a chance to consider, regardless of what her response was.

  “Because I am Thiego’s mother.”

  It took all his willpower not to react. Instead, he slowly nodded. “You’d better explain how that happened.”

  “The usual way, of course.” Mercado laughed bitterly. “Even missing your manly parts, I would expect you’d know the answer to that.” She drew in her breath. “I’m sorry, that was cruel, I shouldn’t have said that.”

  Her comment cut, especially when he thought about Iliana’s near proclamation of love for him that day overseeing the bridge repair work, and how he’d let her down from her hopes. But he’d caught Mercado out in an unpleasant truth, and determined to give her leeway for the personal remark.

  “I understand. Go on.”

  “It’s just . . . you don’t know how hard it’s been all these years. Pretending, ignoring. And how necessary.” She stopped, looking down at her feet.

  “I’m listening, friend,” he said. “Whatever you say will remain private.”

  “I know it will. Only I don’t know how much more I want to tell you. None of it, I think. And all of it. It’s such a burden.”

  “Does Thiego know?”

  “I don’t think so. At least, he’s never sought me out. He came up to the estate during the Festival of Fools, looking for Salvatore, and our eyes met. He gave no sign of recognition that I was anything but a Quinta lord, although he surely saw my surprise.”

  “How old was he when you brought him to the attention of the Luminoso?”

  “Fifteen,” she said. “I spotted him in the markets and knew at once that he was my son. He looks so much like his father, but he has my brother’s eyes—I knew it had to be him. In a moment of weakness, I had him followed. When I found out his father was dead, and that the boy was starving under the indifferent care of his stepmother, I had my servant press a few coins into the woman’s palm, got Salvatore to agree to take him on as an apprentice geometer, and tried to leave it alone. I couldn’t bring him up here, but I couldn’t leave him to rot in the dumbre, either.”

  “But why did he go down in the first place? Why didn’t you . . . that is, how did you meet his father?”

  Her face turned bitter. “It was after the plague. My husband died, and I lost one of my children—the youngest. Things were chaos at the time, people fleeing the city. Others coming in from Dalph, where the pestilence was worse.”

  “I remember,” Carbón said.

  “You must have been very young.”

  He nodded. “Four or five. But it’s hard to forget wheelbarrows of swollen bodies being rolled to the edge of the Wood Road and dumped into the Rift. I think that’s when my parents died, and I was passed to an aunt, who thought only to send me up to work the breakers.” Carbón couldn’t help but shudder as he thought about the cruel, cold work on the plateau.

  “I remember the wheelbarrows, too,” Mercado said. “Even in the Thousand. People were dying by the hundreds every day in the city, and there was nowhere to dispose of them. Somehow, even with all the dead, the dumbre kept growing bigger and more chaotic than ever. We were afraid they’d overthrow us, especially with watchmen abandoning their posts to stay away from the miasmas they thought were causing the pestilence.”

  “And Thiego’s father?”

  “I’m getting there, Carbón. For God’s sake, let me work up to it, will you?” She took a deep breath. “I was a young woman then, barely thirty, and couldn’t manage with staff dying and fleeing the city. A man came to the gate one day, claiming to be a merchant from Diana, and said he’d already taken ill and survived the plague. He was immune, you see. His trading company had either died or been killed by bandits, and he wanted to stay in my employ and work. It was all a lie—he was from the lower terraces.”

  “Didn’t you notice his accent? His clothes?”

  She gave Carbón a look. “I wasn’t so big a fool as that. He had the clothes of a Dianan. Even the turned-up mustache their merchants wore in those days. His accent . . . it sounded real enough to me. This man knew what he was doing.”

  “So he was hoping to move up?” Carbón asked. “Or was he looking to rob you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t know, either. An opportunist, taking advantage of the chaos. He ended up as my lover instead.” She shook her head as if trying to rid it of a foolish thought. “Might have even been my doing. I was lonely and grieving, and things were so stirred up that I actually thought for a stretch that I could skirt the code and marry a foreigner. Jason . . . that is, Thiego’s father, was a different matter entirely.”

  “But in the plague years . . .?”

  “You can marry into the Forty, if you like. Maybe under those circumstances, someone in the Thousand would have served as a husband. Not the dumbre, never that. Not even after the plague.”

  “I was adopted from the dumbre, don’t forget.”

  “Believe me, I don’t forget it. But that was different.”

  “Was it though?” He shook his head. “Never mind that, how did you find out
who he was?”

  “Someone recognized Jason, of course. That was bound to happen sooner or later, and it’s only a surprise it took so long. I don’t know what his plan was, really I don’t. He had to know it was going to end badly.”

  “Most likely he didn’t have a plan. Most likely he fell into it and tried not to think about it, because if he did, he’d have known sooner or later that it was bound to end.”

  “I was fortunate it happened when it did—we were at the Thousand market, trying to find a new shipping agent as the plague died down, and Jason was there as my servant, not as my betrothed.” Another shake of the head, this one more violent than the last. “I thought I was going to die from shame. To think I’d been polluted like that. I would have thrown myself off the terrace if I hadn’t already been carrying . . . well, you know. Oh, God. Why?”

  As for the rest, it was easy enough to guess. Mercado must have gone to Lord Torre, a close friend and later to be her lover, at least during the Festival of Fools. He must have arranged to have the baby sent down to live with his father.

  That was a foolish move. Unnecessary. Mercado should have pretended that the baby was her late husband’s. Servants might have done the calculations and realized that was impossible, but she could have hidden it from everyone else. But she would have felt polluted, unclean, and the only way to satisfy the code would have been to send the baby back to the place from which it had come.

  Damn the code. And damn the way it turned otherwise good people like Lady Mercado into slaves of superstition and fear.

  The magnitude of her sins was apparently hitting her now. She threw open the doors and stumbled onto the terrace, where she heaved against the railing and buried her head in the crook of her elbow, with her hair sweeping across her face to hide it.

  Carbón felt a stab of sympathy, almost a physical pain to see her hurting. There was so much emotion boiling off her: shame, fear of being found out, and the anguish of a parent who had given up her child to be raised by others.