by Carol Berg
Andero’s glance could have pierced Ilario’s fragile belly. Whether it was general disapproval or a particular pique at the lord’s flippant teasing of a lady, I wasn’t sure.
Thus transformed into Marco Flamberge and his troupe of jongleurs, come all the way from the coast of Tallemant, we talked our way past the gate guards of Mancibar and into the haunted city.
We’d scarce emerged from the gate tunnel when John Deune pounced on us, dragging along a blotchy, gap-toothed boy in greasy slops that could only be one of his sons.
“I’ve a need to speak with you, lady,” spat the manservant, his complexion yellow, his hands trembling, “and find out what the daemon’s done with Will.”
“Discretion, John,” said Ilario, dismounted in a graceful instant. He herded us into a busy lane well shielded from watchful guards and the beggars, cutpurses, and swindlers waiting to cozen bewildered travelers. “Now, what’s the problem?”
The little man was seething and shaking, near collapse with fear and anger. “Tell ’em, Alvy.”
“A tenday ago, Will came to the Cockatoo acting crazy, so scared he’d pissed hisself. Said the sorcerer had found him in the stables and witched him. He wanted us to run off. But I told him Da wanted him to stay, and he’d be in worse trouble if he weaseled out of it.”
“What did he mean, the sorcerer witched him?” I asked.
“Said the sorcerer attacked him, near twisting his arm right out of its socket. He knew Will and me had been the ones following him, back when he was blinded. And he forced Will to tell his name and where he was certain to be in the mornings, so’s he could find him. Said he might want to use him. Will didn’t want to tell ’im naught, but said the sorcerer ate into his head with eyes like fire and said tell him or he’d cut off his cods. Will was mortal feared and told the mage that he come to the kitchen every day at dawnbreak. Next day Will never come back from the stables. Stableman says he must’ve got caught up in the ruckus about the daemon mage that morn. But the fellow didn’t dare talk about it, and said maybe Will’d show up dead from it like the rest of them the haunts take.”
“Dawnbreak…ten days ago,” I said. “That’s the day he disappeared? The day of this ruckus?”
“Tenday, aye,” said Alvy, chewing his dirty fingernails.
The dawn when Dante vanished after a night of horrors. “The mage didn’t tell him what use he might have for him?”
“The mage said he might want to tell Da a thing or two. That was all. Will was raving all night about the mage and the librarian. Said he couldn’t get the words out of his head and out his mouth. Summat about a cage in a navel.”
“But Dante didn’t say this to him?”
“Nay. Will must’ve heard it elsewise.”
It didn’t make sense. The cage, perhaps. But naval? We were fifty kilometres from the sea.
John Deune wagged a finger at Andero and me. “This is what comes of dealing with the Souleater’s own. We got to find my boy before they bleed him and throw him on the dung heaps.”
We’d heard enough about the vanishing young men of Mancibar to understand his fear. But I wasn’t going to tell John Deune of our plan. “We’ll do whatever we can to learn what happened. You do the same. Watch for us in the market and we’ll come up with a plan.”
Andero paid Alvy for his watching. No smiles on the smith’s face this day. The boy and his father hurried away.
Before the sun had set we had acquired lodgings in a poor district, the better to stay anonymous. Then we split up to survey the city.
Andero at my side, I strolled up the steep promenade, unable to take my eyes from the sprawling palace backed by the red cliffs. All day I’d held back, afraid. But seeing the place where he was, I paused, closed my eyes, and delved deep. Friend, I said in the voice only he could hear. I’ve come to help you. What in the name of all stars have you done?
The aether boiled around the stony silence.
CHAPTER 33
MANCIBAR
Rhea kicked a shoe across the cramped room. It didn’t wake me. The rising heat had long convinced all four of us that whatever sleeping we’d done had ended.
“I’ll fetch us something to eat that isn’t noodles,” she said, climbing over packs and pallets to the doorway. “And, yes, I can do it on my own. I’m not a child.”
The healer had gotten testier every hour we stayed in Mancibar and seemed near unstrung this morning. Not even Andero could calm her.
“She’s a Temple child,” I said, once the paper-thin door had stopped quivering. “Maybe she’s starting to worry about her soul now we’re so close to Dante.”
Maybe it was just sharing that nasty little room with three less-than-clean companions. The squalid Street of Beggars housed the most wretched residents of Mancibar. No reputable beggar would be seen there, as those who occupied its tin-roofed shacks and disease-ridden sniffing dens had nothing to spare for generosity.
Our lodging was a windowless lean-to at the back of a noodle shop. The nights were stifling, yet to open the door was to welcome flies, beetles, ants, rats, and the stink of the shop’s refuse heaps. When the noodle maker fired up his pots for the day, the walls wept grease.
Yet, the room was a cheery haven beside the city itself. Mancibar’s oppressive gloom gnawed at the spirit, fouling the taste of food and drink and evoking a sense that something horrid lurked in the alleyways alongside the piled-up filth.
Ilario scowled as he tied back his hair, newly darkened with black dye. “She’s likely got actor’s jitters. She didn’t ask me to show her my urine this morning, and when I asked her if I was free of that particular duty, she yelled at me that she couldn’t possibly sing in front of anyone.”
I scraped up a grin. “She’s likely ready for something more interesting than urine.”
He glanced up sharply, flushed a deeper scarlet than his sunburn, which I’d not thought possible. “Oh, you mean—” His laugh was a bit thin. “No. She knows far too much about me for that.”
The smith had followed Rhea as far as the doorway, watching her go. He swallowed the last of the ale from one of our flasks and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. His jaw was hard enough to crack nuts. “Damoselle, couldn’t you speak to my brother in the way you do?”
“No. I mean, I’ve tried, but he doesn’t hear me…or won’t answer…or can’t.” Every hour, I tried.
He settled on his haunches and swiped at his tangled hair. “Wouldn’t want to stay in this poison city too long. When you can’t even get a smith to talk free, there’s something rotten. Never knew a smith was feared of haunts or treachers either one.”
Andero had spent the previous day hunting for work. Though my purse could use replenishing, his quarry had been gossip more than coin.
“I’ll scout the walls and gates today,” he said. “See if that channel gate the farrier mentioned would serve to get us out of the city. Don’t like a place where leaving is so wicked tougher than getting inside.”
“Nor I,” said Ilario.
Every person, from noble to infant, was examined before being allowed to leave Mancibar. No man of fighting age was allowed to leave without written permission from the Regent.
“When we take Portier, Jacard will drop whatever might he has amassed right on our heads.” I blotted the sweat already dampening my neck. “I’d like to think—”
A little explosive destruction might serve us well. But we’d no assurance Dante would or could come with us. Yet surely if he could rescue Portier—or wanted to—he’d have done it by now. I hated my inevitable conclusions.
Andero left abruptly with a promise to return by dusk. While I sewed cheap bangles on ruffled skirts Rhea and I had found at the market, Ilario dashed up and down the alley, dodging, spinning, and leaping as if he’d been bitten by a mad dog. Then he had me climb up a rickety staircase that led to the roof and drop wood shavings and scraps from the height, so he could thrust and poke at them with his sword, working to resharpen his eye, and then he du
eled with the rats and wild cats that populated the lane. He was healing.
Rhea had not yet returned when the chevalier threw his sword on the pallet, donned his odd hat and cloak, and with a knightly flourish, kissed me on the head. “Offer what divine petitions you know, little seahorse. Soon we’ll know whether Maestro Flamberge and his troop will be allowed to entertain the Regent of Mancibar and his guests.”
“Every care, Chevalier,” I said, squeezing his hand. “I’ll not lose you again.” By every right, by every medical judgment, he should be dead. Rhea was a marvel.
He bowed, scraping his hat’s new feathers on the filthy floor. “Every care, damoselle. Save me comestibles, please. My body may no longer be that of a fifteen-year-old boy, but my appetite is.”
Ilario de Sylvae was as gifted as any person I knew. How a man could draw a smile from me on that morning in that place was beyond imagining.
Rhea returned not long after he left, apologizing that she’d found only a few pieces of dried fish and some oversoft grapes. Sad to say, they were a tasty change from our landlord’s soggy noodles.
The two of us spent the next hour practicing some gigues favored by Montclaire’s tenants and a few more exotic dance steps I’d learned on my family’s travels when I was a child. Rhea threw up her hands at every misstep. “I’m as graceful as a barge pole.”
“With three of us we attract less attention. We need your good hands and good eyes, and if we find Portier and he’s injured or ill…” Eyes swimming with tears, she joined me again, at least until the next time she stumbled or tripped.
We made masks for each of us from a silk petticoat we’d found in a rag box at the market. My every attempt at conversation fell dead. When I commented on Ilario’s returning health, she threw down her work and retired to the alley. She couldn’t undo the puffy redness around her eyes when she came back inside. But if she wouldn’t tell me why she wept, I had no help to offer.
Only when the afternoon had fully matured into breathless heat did Ilario return. With a groan, he dropped onto his and Andero’s pallet and threw an arm over his face.
My heart sank. “What luck?”
“Never have I been so humiliated,” he said. “I’ve spent this entire day in one queue after another, answering highly impertinent questions from a legion of officious servants. “What is your entertainment? How long is it? Where have you performed? How many in your party? Despicable, flat-eared, bug-eyed, no-talent jog-wattles! As if bureaucrats could pass judgment on a true artist. They hated my piping. Said it sounded like Belphusian donkey horns.”
“Your piping? Are you mad? I thought you bought the shawm just for show. It’s broken…no reeds…”
“But I’ve always wanted to play. Music is food for the spirit as cavorting can never be. I thought I would add a bit of civilization to our performance.”
“Oh, Ilario, what were you thinking?”
“Our application?” asked Rhea, biting her lip.
“Rejected.”
I slumped against the wall. “Saints…”
“But then I tried to soothe my crushed heart by singing the ‘Cancionero de Amiste,’ and the other selectors decided we might be worth a tryout after all. At the next feasting…which happens to be tonight.”
He popped up to sitting, his blue eyes sparkling like some mischievous sprite. Rhea caught it sooner and picked up the first thing to hand, a bracelet of bronze disks, and threw it at him, saying he was surely the most hopeless, ridiculous man on the face of the earth. A shoe soon followed, and then another. I joined in by beating him with the gaudy skirt.
Andero arrived just as Ilario called out a muffled surrender. The smith’s expression declared we’d gone insane, perhaps from the heat and the stink. But Rhea’s hiccup-laced explanation of Ilario’s teasing cracked the smith’s grim facade like a spring thaw at a frozen pool. “Thought you’d found us summat stronger to drink than ale,” he said, with a wistful chuckle.
“Regent Iaccar is feasting tonight with at least three hundred guests,” said Ilario, as we downed Rhea’s fish and grapes and most of Andero’s ale. “We are to be served somewhere between the soup and the meat. We’ll hope the guests are enjoying themselves enough to pay us no attention.”
Andero shook his head. “Doubt it. Folk say the vanishings come more frequent of late. Even the merchants and noble folk want to stay home, but the Regent bids them come, and if they don’t they’re fined or beaten. If any dares an opinion, they say it’s the strange lady’s mage who’s brought them worse times.”
The reminder instantly sobered us all.
“What could justify burnings and bleedings?” Andero slammed his great fist on the inner wall, likely shaking the noodles in their pots. “When Dante told me the things he’d done, I passed it off, thinking he exaggerated. Seeing that adept left naught but ash at Castelivre set me back. But then he near killed himself helping that hard-luck shepherd. But hearing all this…and about the Temple murders in Coverge and the ruination in Jarasco…They say these fellows taken here in Mancibar are found with their skin split open and no blood in them.”
Germond de Gautier’s screaming yet tainted my dreams—the terror and pain as the revenant of de Gautier’s own grandsire tried to reshape the scholar’s living body. Was Jacard merely clearing out those loyal to the old prince, or was he using the nireals and the Mondragon books to work some terrible magic? Dante had always believed a threat would come, but never from Jacard. Never from himself.
“Dante always has a reason,” I said, not believing it at all, “even if we can’t see it. But first we must find out where Portier is.”
“What did Alvy say?” said Andero. “A cage in a navel?”
“Naval implies ships, water…which make no sense. We don’t know for sure that the phrase had any meaning.”
“Actually, it might refer to a physical navel.” Rhea had retreated to the corner of our pallet. Elbows on her drawn-up knees, hands on her hair, her long forearms hid her face and left her quiet words almost unhearable. “I was told…learned…when I was out today that Mancibar was once called Sirpuhi of the Red Cliffs, a holy place—”
“The navel of the world,” said Ilario, straightening, his tin plate slipping from his hand. “Saints Awaiting, Altheus was born here…died here. I’d no idea. Of course that’s where they’d bring Portier. Kajetan would have known of this place…and told Jacard.…”
His gaze skewered me as if to implant what he knew straight into my head.
“Years ago, Portier and Dante spoke of places on this earth where the ‘Veil was thin’ because of certain meaningful events…places like Eltevire, where the first murder took place, like Mont Voilline, where Ianne brought us fire. Oh, yes, Ani. He’s here inside that palace.”
“Who?” said Andero.
“Portier…Altheus…Sante Ianne. And Jacard is planning to use him again.…”
Was it possible that Dante had passed us the message about Portier’s prison?
The nerves I planned to have so firmly under control attacked me so hard I couldn’t eat for the rest of the day. Naive hopes kept floating to the surface despite my best attempts. I would likely not see Dante. More than a tenday had passed since he’d attacked Will Deune in the stable. On the next morning, Will had vanished during a “ruckus about the daemon mage” and Dante’s spirit had vanished in a flurry of agony. His presence in the aether had altered not one whit since that time. He could be dead. I tightened my grip yet again and continued our preparations.
THE WESTERING SUN HAD ALREADY touched the red cliffs by the time we trudged up the steep hill toward the Prince of Mancibar’s palace. Though positioned like a fortress, the building appeared more like a temple, its stately facade of columns and beast statuary facing the sun’s rising. The final approach did not creep timidly under guard towers and battlements but divided into two sweeping curves that embraced an expanse of terraced gardens that made Castelle Escalon’s look primitive. Water cascaded through stone-lined
channels to feed the myriad garden beds and fountains.
Elegantly dressed people on foot, horses, or litters thronged the road above the terraces where its two arms rejoined to form a stately causeway. Any unknown to the guards were required to show passes before entering the iron gates.
“Maestro Marco Flamberge and his jongleurs: Mistress Madeleine, Mistress Tasserie, and Sonjeur Dero.” Ilario produced the paper he’d been given.
“What’s in here?” The guard had Andero drop the large canvas bag draped on his shoulders and proceeded to pull out wads of blue-dyed fustian and veils of black crepe.
“Costumes, my kithara and its case, equipment for juggling. We’re presenting a tableau about a maiden whose heart is—”
“Around the right side, third door back. And keep to the waiting room if you enjoy having blood and bowels inside your skin.”
