Dust and Light

by Carol Berg

  “Come here, Lucian,” said Master Pluvius. Before I could think, I was signing my name where his finger pointed. Curator Albin snatched the paper from under my hand and applied his seal to the bottom. As if the terms were already settled.

  Pons rose briskly, her formidable bulk blocking the gray light from the casements behind her. “We shall provide the usual escort party to deliver you to your new master tomorrow . . . if all goes well in the negotiation, of course.”

  “Yes, certainly. My gratitude for your consideration, Doma Pons, Domé Albin, Master Pluvius.”

  The three curators had already reached the doorway as the necessary politenesses stumbled from my tongue. I felt as if I had been trampled by wild horses.

  “Go home, Lucian. Whatever you’re working on will have to be finished by someone else.” Master Pluvius lingered in the doorway. “I’m sorry about all this. Be sure I shall give you good recommendations.”

  “I appreciate that, master.”

  Yet why would I expect differently? The Registry required every pureblood to sit for a portrait each year until age twelve, every two years until age thirty, and every ten years thereafter. Each small artwork was magically linked to its subject, and our signatures irrevocably bound the artist and the work. The accuracy imposed by our bent ensured that no ordinary could pass for a pureblood, and no pureblood could pass for another. Gilles and I could scarce keep up with the load. How could they not renew my contract?

  “Master, why—?” The doorway was empty.

  If this Bastien de Caton was a person of influence, his request would never have been left unfulfilled long enough to gather dust. If he represented a town, a market fair, a temple, or another institution, the offer would have borne that name as well as his. And Caton. The man took his name not from a noble seat or reputable family but from some nearby settlement or crossroads so insignificant the name scarce shifted the dust of recollection. He was no one.

  I hurried after Pluvius, only to see him vanishing down the stair. “Master,” I called, “who is this Bastien de Caton?”

  The old man looked up, the torchlight reflecting a profound sadness that shook me to the marrow. “He’s Palinur’s coroner, Lucian. He’ll use your portraits to identify the dead.”

  CHAPTER 2

  “Poor ancieno. Is the new contract so awful? Who but Registry clerks would even want an ink dabbler like you? And old Pew-Pons to negotiate”—my sister’s mocking trilled—“the very picking crow who held you to the fire at the university. Now, that was ill luck.”

  Juli posed carelessly in our reception room door as we awaited the arrival of my escort on the morning after my dismissal. She was so slight, so deceptively languid. Very like an iron stanchion garlanded with orchids. Her heavy black-brown hair, gleaming with red lights in the lamp glow, spread loose over the indigo silk of her morning gown.

  “I’ve not met my master as yet,” I said. “But this is a fine opportunity and something different from anniversary portraits. My art was growing stale in the Tower.”

  I’d told Juli none of the wretched details. Our troubles had already changed her. No use making it worse.

  My mother had called Juli her angel child, and from eleven years’ distance, eldest to youngest, it had seemed true. When I’d lived at home, Juli was a bright and cheery sprite, playing at her beginner’s magic. Her bent revealed itself early as she built towers and miniature cities that sprawled across our inner courtyards. She smoothed sticks and chipped stones, teasing them into balance and harmony with her magic. She forever challenged my younger brothers to improve on her creations. At ten, in the same year I began work at the Registry, she applied herself seriously to her drawing. Whenever I went home for a visit, she pestered me incessantly to teach her.

  All that had changed. In the months since the horror at Pontia, my sister had prisoned herself in steel and brambles, pricking, jabbing, arguing, defying the rules all purebloods accepted gladly as the price of our gifts. She refused to explain herself. Refused to listen to my warnings or pleas or commands. She screamed that I was not her father, mother, or Head of Family. I felt helpless around her.

  “Ooh, la! Mother Samele prevent such talents as yours from getting stale! Perhaps another year at university would sharpen you. And this time without your elders to object.”

  Juli’s jabs about the university struck home, as she knew they would. I had been a fool in those days, associating with so many ordinaries in such . . . free . . . circumstances. I had been warned that even conversation with ordinaries could seduce an undisciplined man. But indeed I had forgotten myself, my place, and my responsibilities.

  Never could I repeat such a failure. My sister had no one else.

  “Lace up your gown, Juli, and bind your hair properly, else go back to your own rooms. I don’t know who the Registry will send as escort, but it does our reputation no good for you to appear so . . . untidy.”

  “Bind your own hair,” she snapped. “I think I’ll cut mine off today. I hate it.”

  “Don’t. Just don’t. Please, serena.” My sister’s hair was supposed to remain uncut, plaited, and wound about her head in the style of a country matron, which indeed looked ridiculous with her tender features. But our family discipline prescribed it, just as it prescribed everything else, from the color and shape of our masks to the particular aspects of our bents that we could practice and the very gods we worshipped. Registry and family protocols shaped every detail of our lives, and investigators noted lapses.

  “Four years and I can change the rule to a style you prefer,” I said. “Please, just behave until then.” I could not bear the thought of Pons sending a minder to supervise us until I came to my majority.

  Pons had been livid when I was not publicly whipped, censured, or otherwise shamed after Montesard. She desired me to be an example, so that no pureblood family would dare send their progeny into the libertine world of a university again. Perhaps with her promotion to curator, she had influence enough to get what she wanted. She couldn’t know that the price I’d already paid was irredeemable.

  For almost thirty years, my father’s father had served King Eodward as Navronne’s Royal Historian, using his magic to read battlefields or borderlands, for delving into ruins or deciphering ancient texts to extract the sweeping truths of war, migration, and civilization. The king had credited my grandsire with helping him grow Navronne into a healthy, prosperous kingdom renowned in the world—one with some chance to withstand this abrupt decline in the weather. I had longed to follow in his footsteps.

  By the age of ten years, almost every pureblood youth displayed a pronounced leaning toward one parent’s magical bent or the other’s. Yet my talents had remained balanced between the Masson bent for art and architecture and the Remeni bent for history. Though I showed a deft hand at portraiture, inherited from my Masson mother, my preference had ever been for my Remeni father’s bloodline magic. I relished the study of history.

  Dual bents were extremely rare, and usually displayed each as barely functioning. The family would prepare the youth for a modest future—hired work within pureblood society with severely limited use of magic, forbidden to marry or conceive children. Unfortunately, experience warned that two strong bents led inevitably to madness, and the Registry had long insisted that the lesser one be excised. Yet my talents had both manifested as quite robust, and by age sixteen, I still could not say honestly that one exceeded the other. The divine glory of the magic thrilled and satisfied no matter which I invoked. Even my brothers teased that my only madness was excessive adherence to rules.

  With the encouragement of my good and generous parents, my grandsire had allowed me to pursue both talents far longer than usual, even including a university education in history. If I maintained my strong discipline and even temper to the end of my studies, he would petition the Registry to allow me to retain both bents.

  Fool that I was, I squandered their indulgence, and my grandsire forbade me to pursue my bent for his
tory further. No matter my pleading never again to stray, he had spent one dreadful day laying enchantment on me to ensure it. It had felt as if he had removed a limb and seared its stump with a cautery iron. It had been clear to all that our Head of Family expended his honor and his considerable influence to save me from additional punishment. He had resigned his royal post within the month, and he—my beloved grandsire, the man I honored above every other on this earth—had never spoken to me again.

  The charcoal night beyond our glass window had shifted to winter gray. Incipient dawn brought the noise of boots and voices in the outer courtyard.

  Giaco, my manservant, arranged the folds of my cloak, fastened the clasp, and passed me my mask. I slipped the bit of maroon silk over the left side of my face, nudging its spelled edges to settle and cling about eye, nose, and ear, until it felt no different from my skin.

  The half mask required of every pureblood when going out among ordinaries signaled the magic that lay hidden within us. In company with the wine-red cloak, it ensured no ordinary could ever mistake us—a certain kindness, as the penalties for interfering with a pureblood were quite severe. The mask served warning to us, as well, reminding us of our need to maintain detachment from the ordinary world and focus on our masters’ tasks.

  My tasks . . . I’d not even had a chance to read the new contract. A Head of Family usually informed his kinsman of the contract terms before delivering him to a new master. Evidently a Registry negotiator felt no such need. Certainly, Bastien de Caton, Coroner, must have prospered mightily from the war to afford me.

  Giaco knelt to dust off my boots, as if that might prevent them from being sullied in the streets . . . or my master’s charnel house. Rumor had it that during last spring’s famine riots and the summer’s sickness, corpses had piled up so high they rotted in the lower streets or were thrown into open pits outside the walls. What would I do in such a place? Deunor’s fire . . .

  “Gods’ mercy, Luka. What’s wrong?” Juli’s rosy skin had drained of color.

  I swallowed my gorge. “Nothing. All’s well.”

  Soflet, both steward and porter, glided across the atrium to admit my escort party. I inhaled and composed the half of my features yet exposed.

  But Juli, swift as a hummingbird, slipped in between me and the door. “You’re not going into battle, are you, serving one of these cursed princes in their war? They’re not going to lock you away? You’re coming back?”

  For that one moment, the brambles fell away and the steel dissolved to very young flesh.

  I clasped her quivering shoulders. “No battles, no princes, no traveling, no war,” I said softly. “Old Pew-Pons assured me I’ll be allowed to live here with you. As the city settles under Prince Perryn, we’ll dredge up your tutors and all will be as before. Speak with Maia and prepare the sealing feast for tonight when I get home. Have Soflet bring up our best vintage, and send Filip to find us meat, no matter the cost. I’ll be bringing home the fee to replenish the Remeni-Masson treasury. Today we begin our family anew.”

  Her face froze. She whipped her hands apart, breaking my grip. “Maybe I will; maybe I won’t.”

  “Domé Remeni-Masson . . .”

  The soft-spoken newcomer and his three men, outfitted in black and scarlet and framed by the gilded entry, could not have noted Juli’s sneer or heard her insolence. Indeed, as they introduced themselves and motioned me toward the outer courtyard, my sister composed herself, standing haughty and expressionless as was proper for a pureblood woman. The initiation of a pureblood contract was a most solemn occasion.

  * * *

  By the Mother, it was cold! Bitter wind howled through the streets, disguising splintered shutters, scattered refuse, overturned wagons, and charred stalls with dusty snow.

  None could recall such winters as had plagued Navronne these last ten years. Those far older than I shook their heads and murmured of a universe out of balance, of the bowl of the sky slid askew, of angry gods or the lost Danae, mythic beings who once tended Navronne’s fields and forests. Every baker filled his shelves with feast bread at the turn of the seasons, ready for those who would set it out to lure the Danae back to heal the lands of men. No such beings ever showed themselves, of course. The land grew more ill by the season.

  My back itched; sighs teased at my ears. I hitched my cloak higher as we trudged down the hill.

  No need to worry about risky impressions. My escorts were but Registry servitors. Purebloods with bents too weak to garner contracts were frequently employed as Registry guards, clerks, or messengers—positions where the presence of ordinaries would be unthinkable. It was respectable service. Leander de Corton-Zia and his comrades were likely skilled swordsmen and well trained in defensive magics.

  The blizzard seemed to have calmed the city this morning, chasing the panicked refugees under cover. As we left the broad avenues of the upper city and the sprawling, bright-painted Temple District, hurrying down the sweeping turns of the Riie Domitian into the poorer streets, we spied them crowded into abandoned warehouses or huddled around fires in cramped alleyways. Until the war, Palinur had been an orderly place.

  I dipped my head into the wind, wishing our family custom mandated a full mask of wool in winter. Better yet if discipline mandated a lock on the thing when one was young and stupid. It had been a sunny afternoon in Montesard when slim, sure fingers had tugged off my mask so that the most astonishing green eyes in creation could look upon my face. Morgan . . .

  An aching heat flooded my belly.

  In my first year at the university, my youthful eye, craving knowledge of the manly experiences I’d heard whispers of, had fallen on another student who was also reading history. She was a tall young woman of strong opinions and an incomparable eloquence in their defense, of deceptively plain features that took on a deep golden glow when she spoke of the tides of war, conquest, peace, and lawgiving that had made Navronne a model for all kingdoms in the middle continent. Morgan was her name—an ordinary—though the word failed absolutely when applied to her. Against all rule and discipline, I had spoken to her, laughed with her, touched her, and, in time, allowed her to remove my mask . . . kissed her . . . worked magic for her. . . .

  “This way, Domé Remeni.” A firm hand on my shoulder dragged me to a halt. Leander, breathless, pointed back to a lane of deserted alehouses where his men waited. I had raced right past my escorts.

  I bricked up the bitter memories in the vault where I’d prisoned them. “Thoughtless of me,” I said, and followed him.

  The fertile fields and rugged scarps of central Ardra had been occupied for a thousand years, city upon city layered on Palinur’s heights, comprising at least four enclosing walls. The two most recent yet stood. The outermost wall, Caedmon’s Wall, had been built by the great king himself at the unification of Navronne. The innermost, the Elder Wall, had gone up at least five hundred years before that.

  Leander halted at an arch of broken bricks. A steep path led down into an ill-favored warren of rickety houses, sheds, stables, and sop-houses grown up between the two standing walls at the lowest end of the city.

  “Traversing the hirudo is our best route, domé. Every other way takes us outside the city gates, an hour longer at best, especially in such a wind. Unless you say differently . . .”

  He sounded as if he was hoping I would say differently, but a terse message from Pons had told me to report to my new master at eighth hour, and the second quarter bells had already rung. Contracts left no choices. We headed down.

  The hirudo was a dangerous, unhealthy place. In constant shadow, forever damp, the unruly settlement festered like an untreated wound, rife with disease and every kind of unsavory activity. Cicerons ruled here.

  Cicerons plagued every Navron town and highroad like wandering packs of wild dogs. Skin as dusky as purebloods, bedecked with arm bracelets, earrings, and necklaces of false gold, they bred thieves, smugglers, fortune-tellers, and artists at picking pockets, knife juggling, and sleight
of hand. Their knives found human targets, as well, especially any who crossed them. It was hard to tell one of them from another, and when constables ran one band of thieves to ground, they would find another in its place, their quarry long moved on.

  We threaded the shadowy labyrinth for half a quellé, dodging diseased cats, racing ragamuffins, and ropes hung with rags. The wheedling gamblers fixed their eyes on their dice cups. The simpering procurer fell silent and looked away. None showed fear or awe. Even the women wore knowing, secretive expressions, and I could not shake the sense that they believed that someday I would walk this path alone and matters might be different.

  My escorts kept hands on their swords and raised green magefire around us. In honor of the occasion, my father’s ruby ring hung from my neck on a slender chain. I folded my hand over it, the only object of value we had retrieved from the ashes at Pontia.

  Too much to hope that my contract included provision for a daily escort. The Registry came down hard on any who interfered with purebloods, but Registry guards, too, were stretched thin with the city so unsettled. My own sword training was scarce more than dabbling, and I’d spent so much time pursuing the two bents that my stock of common spells, including anything useful in combat, was pitifully thin.

  The narrow path arced around a pigless sty at the far end of the hirudo, where the land kicked up sharply. A steep, tortuous ascent, including a last series of some fifty steps half a boot wide and almost vertical, brought us to a narrow slot in Caedmon’s Wall, laced with iron bars. Neither horse nor armored knight nor even a person particularly well fed would be able to squeeze through. We emerged atop a broad plateau.

  The prospect astonished me. Beyond a lumpy field of ice-crusted mud, like a phantasm behind the haze of swirling snow, sprawled a walled compound of stone spires, shed roofs, and chimneys. Atop the gatehouse arch, the twinned images of Deunor Lightbringer and his half brother Magrog, Lord of the Underworld, held pause in their never-ending battle for human souls. A necropolis . . . a city of the dead.