by Carol Berg
“Law gives me the right when there’s a question,” he said when the storm of noise had passed. “The duty, even. But if it eases your mind, I’ve had the Mother’s high priestess sanctify this room. She laid pureblood magic and temple blessings about it, and said the souls can’t escape if we close the door and turn all the vessels upside down before we open it again.” He leaned close and dropped his voice. “Besides, I have ’em sewed up after.”
He chuckled and laid a genial boot into a slack-jawed boy who was peering in from the atrium to gawk at me.
Bastien had not eased my mind in the least. Nor was I soothed when a slight, unshaven man, carrying a tattered leather case, appeared in the doorway. His dark hair was a greasy tangle, his eyes burnt-out hollows. “Heard you’ve work for me.”
“Ah, Bek! I want this done quick. He’s no wounds we can see, but someone’s cut off his purse and snatched his weapons. . . .” Bastien reeled off the sum of his observations and all we had learned of Valdo de Seti. “Just need to make sure we’re not missing something obvious before the widow arrives. Though she’s not pounced on us wailing, as some do. I’ve a notion this Valdo was not a likable man.”
The surgeon’s shoulders drooped. “So, the body’s claimed, then. Too bad.”
His voice was low and surprisingly clear, considering the reek of spirits about him and his unsteady gait as he crossed to the table. He set his case on the wheeled table and opened it. His hands shook as if he suffered a palsy.
Bastien slapped the man’s back. “Soon as wounded come in from these quarreling princes’ battle, we’ll doubtless have a Moriangi or five mixed in by mistake. Mayhap even a Hansker mercenary. You can slice mongrels to pieces as your heart desires. Some folk say Hansker have no balls. Some say they’ve three balls, but no heart. Do you think that’s so?”
“Some folk believe burying a live cat at the full moon will cure their crabs.” The surgeon picked a short saw blade from his case and set its tip just below de Seti’s throat before glancing over his shoulder at Bastien. “You’ve a good enough mind to know—”
He lowered his blade and fixed his sooty gaze on me. “What have we here?”
Gray threaded the surgeon’s hair, and creases seamed a narrow face neither so old as I expected, nor so degenerate. Yet my blood curdled at a man who spent his days cutting flesh—living or dead—much less one who took pleasure in it.
“I’ve bought me a luck charm,” said Bastien, grinning. “Better days coming to Caton.”
“If you think a sorcerer can raise the dead to life again or squeeze out where their gold’s hid, I’ve a few bits of anatomical learning to share with you.” The surgeon’s quiet speech dripped irony.
“Ah, Bek, when you’re done here I’ll give you a sight of what the fellow can do. Mayhap you’ll rethink your tawdry bits of learning. Or pay me to have him redraw that anatomical map you carry about.”
They spoke as if I were a dead man or one of the statues in the prometheum rotunda.
It had been the same in Montesard. Pureblood discipline had forbidden me to break silence to exchange ideas with my tutors or fellow students, which sorely hampered my learning. Once the strangeness of my presence wore off, the others talked in just such fashion, which made matters even worse. But one day in our tutorial session, Morgan, she of the green eyes, had wondered aloud whether those who refused to speak in session might be required to write out their opinions, arguments, and questions. The tutor could read them aloud so that all might benefit from a new perspective. And so we had done. The others yet spoke as if I weren’t there, but they spoke of me by name. Lucian believes . . . Lucian wonders . . . It had worked exceedingly well.
Cheating, Investigator Pons had called it. Compromise of your position in life. Unvirtuous engagement with ordinaries . . .
“Just don’t share your opinions with him, bone-cutter,” said Bastien. “Nor your ale nor your vermin nor your secret vices. Don’t even look at him. I don’t want Registry lackwits finding an excuse to snatch him back. Not only did his little sketch identify our corpse to the folk who knew him, it told me where to look; Valdo de Seti yearned for nasty pleasure.”
The surgeon snorted, wiped his brow on his sleeve, and turned back to his morbid work. His hands stopped their trembling as he began. Mine did not.
I bolted. Outside the surgery, I poked the plump youth dozing on the bench—Pleury, Bastien’s runner, the lad who’d found the whore. “Clean drinking water?”
Though loath to ingest anything in such a place, my stomach was going to grind itself to pulp if I didn’t get something inside it.
“Great lordly sorcerer . . .” The fair-skinned youth with an affliction of pustules on his cheeks dropped to one knee, near yanked his forelock from his scalp, and bent his back until his chin grazed the floor, as if I were some combination of god, noble, and demon gatzé all in one. The dramatic effect was entirely spoiled when he passed wind with the timbre of a royal trumpet.
With a distressed moan, he prostrated himself completely.
A ghostly memory of my younger brothers and certain secret “jousting tournaments” twitched my lips. “Clean water?” I said evenly.
“Fonts, troughs. Comes straight from the wellsprings. So Garibald says.”
“Good. All right, then.” Relieved, I escaped to the small font I had seen in a bay near the royal preparation room. A tin cup sat on a waist-high shelf beside the little font.
Palinur’s wellsprings were a source of wonder. The intricate system of ducts and pipes that brought the highland water into the city had been installed by my clever ancestors, invaders from the Aurellian Empire. Aurellians had overrun the lands of Ardra, Morian, and Evanore centuries past, only to discover that their minor magical talents took fire with power here. They had called Navronne the Heart of the World.
The fonts and ducts had endured far longer than the conquest. Even Aurellian magic could not stave off the crumbling decadence of the empire itself, or hold its expansive territory against the heirs of mighty Caedmon, King of Ardra. Caedmon had united three ever-warring provinces and created Navronne.
Three hundred Aurellian families swore allegiance to Caedmon and his heirs in return for freedom to pursue their magic as they saw best in service to Navronne. They called themselves the Registry. Their negotiations ensured that pureblood contracts, breeding rules, and protocols would be enforced by the Crown. When Caedmon’s great-great-grandson Eodward drove the last Aurellian legions out, the Registry, including my own ancestors, had remained.
The cool water soothed my churning belly. I rinsed the cup, returned it to the little shelf, and sagged against the wall. Both passage and bay were deserted. The prometheum was quiet, the trickle of the font soothing. Sleep had eluded me the previous night. My eyelids drifted shut. . . .
“Still squeamish?”
I startled, whacking my elbow on the protruding shelf. Though a big man, Bastien had crept up on me without a sound.
“I’ve no skills to aid such activities,” I said, wincing as I rubbed my elbow. “I could use the time to reproduce de Seti’s portrait in ink. If you have archives . . .”
“There’s other tasks more pressing. Anywise, you don’t have the original to copy. Come along.”
“I don’t need it. The true image remains with me for a while.”
He paused mid-departure. “You can draw it again exactly, without the face in front of you?”
“Yes.”
“As many times as I might want?”
Prideful fool. I oughtn’t have mentioned it. Copying was a tedious chore. Pureblood families often requested ten or twenty copies of their son’s or daughter’s anniversary portraits to pass around to families who might provide suitable marriage partners.
Bastien waited, his brows raised high enough to take flight on their own. He had shown himself most perceptive, and I had pledged my family’s honor to this contract. Besides, I’d never been a good liar.
“Yes. But for three days at
most. After that, I would need to retrieve the true image by touching the original portrait. I could then copy it or determine if anyone had tampered with it.”
“Hmmph. Useful.” His not-quite-a-smirk was immensely irritating. “But not now. Constance sent word we’ve another mystery.”
Shuffling off annoyance, I clutched my parchment scraps and plummet and followed him into the courtyard.
Our new mystery was a girl child of eight or ten summers. Her tunic and leggings were little more than sacking. Her dark hair was chopped off short. Though disease and harsh winter hit the poorer ordinaries very hard, she looked neither wasted nor ill. Had it not been for the scrapes and black streaks on cheeks and brow and the mud all over—from tumbling into the ditch where she was found, so Constance surmised—and her unnatural pallor, one might have thought her a healthy child, asleep.
“She were found in the hirudo ditch next the piggery,” said Constance, scratching her ear vigorously as if a bug had flown into it, “but none claimed to know her. Demetreo, the headman, swore it so when he had her brought here, with his honorable complinations to the coroner. Not that we’d believe a Ciceron’s barbling any more’n a frog’s spit. But she don’t have the visible of a hirudo kind, no matter her garb.”
“Aye, look at her hands,” said Bastien, brushing dirt away. “No hirudo child.”
Her fingernails were broken, with a thin rime of dirt underneath, but her hands were smooth and plump. And when the coroner pulled the tunic away from her neck, he grunted and spat. “No mystery as to her dying, neither.”
Blue-gray bruises around her neck showed the very spread of the fingers that had strangled the life out of her. Bastien glanced up at me. “You’ve no magic can tell us whose hands made these marks, do you?”
I shook my head. Not even a bent for history, fully practiced instead of a lifeless stump between my eyes, could pull such a revelation out of the air.
“Then bestir yourself, pureblood. We’re like to get no bounty from her family, but catching a dastard who’s murdered without provocation tots up a decent fee.”
Revulsion left me incapable of speech. The slim, pale neck could have been Juli’s but a few years ago, or the innocent flesh of my young cousins who died screaming in the fire at Pontia. I already hated this place, this life, this despicable world of ordinaries.
Dispensing with preliminary sketches, my left hand traced her cold cheeks, her violated neck, smooth hands, and ragged hair. Then I reached deep into my bent. . . .
The bawling, clattering business of the city of the dead faded. War and winter vanished. Past horror, present anger, and anxiety about the future fell away. My senses were aflame with magic that seared a river of fire through bone and sinew, engraving the image of the murdered child upon my spirit and pouring through my fingers onto a flimsy scrap of animal skin.
Other images intruded. Bare white bones. Sinuous threads of silver. A heaving grayness streaked with moonlight. Odd. Cursing distraction, I shrugged them off and plunged deeper.
Time lost shape, but at some point well in, an urgency forced its way into my awareness, and a blur swept between my eyes and the page like some great insect.
I growled and shooed it away. I was not yet done. There was so much to convey.
“Remeni!” At the brittle utterance of my name, someone yanked the page from under my hand. The loss of connection doused my frenzy like cold rain down my neck.
“Give it back! It’s not done.” My right hand shook with pent urgency. I squeezed my eyes shut as if I could hold on to the vanishing lines and curves. But lacking a knot of completion, I could not hold on to the true image even for a few moments. Without touching the page, I was blind to my creation.
“We’ve guests arriving.”
Coroner Bastien crouched beside me, though he sounded as if he were at the bottom of a well. The yard was as quiet as the stone halls of the prometheum. Constance stood on the far side of the bier, holding her cloud-goddess cloak spread wide as a tent, as if to shield Bastien and me from the wind. Her pale eyes had grown to near half her thin face.
I shook my head to clear it. “I should finish it now,” I snapped. “Details come sharper on the first connection. What’s wrong?”
“Naught, I trust,” spat Bastien, mouth twisted into a sneer. “But you’re going to work inside the prometheum from now on. You attract far too much interest.” He snatched the stick of plummet away. “We’ll speak of it later. For now you stay with me.”
The portrait wasn’t right. But without examining it, I’d no idea why. The image burning inside me would not manifest without my hand in contact with the page. In the main, I was pleased not to be constantly plagued with all the faces I’d drawn, but an unfinished work irritated like grit in a raw wound.
Constance bawled for a yard boy to bring a sheet. As they covered the child and carried her away, Bastien’s expression, only half-masked by his unruly hair, was entirely grim.
“Now,” he said, once we were alone, “I’ve a whore to question, and the other witnesses are dribbling in. Best you see how we do things. But don’t think you’ll escape this contract, no matter how much you dislike it.”
Dull and shivering, I followed him across the yard. Never had it taken so long for my senses to clear. But then, I’d been very deep in the work and wasn’t used to being interrupted. What had set Bastien off about the contract?
And how long had I worked? The light was failing. Snow drifted from lowering clouds, vanishing into the fire bowls with a quiet hiss. A few of the biers were draped with yellowed sheets, their occupants abandoned, but most were empty. Hours, then. Two, at least.
Something was wrong. I pressed a fist to my forehead. Enchantment smoldered like a snuffed torch behind my eyes.
“If you’re dissatisfied”—I matched my stride to the coroner’s—“I need to see the portrait to perfect the details.” Interrupted while drawing a living subject, I could always insist on a new sitting. But the dead must be burned or buried in a reasonable time, identified or not, and even if held back, I’d no idea how long a dead face would resemble a human person’s, much less its living antecedent’s.
“Later,” snapped Bastien. “And you’d best have answers. That contract gives me remedies if you trick or deceive.”
“I’ve never—” But he was clearly in no mood to listen. What was he talking about?
My steps dragged as I crossed the smoky yard behind Bastien. Gods, how I wished to be home, bathing away the stink of this place!
Most of the vendors had gone. The coffin maker’s girl huddled on a stool outside his stall. The purveyor of oils and unguents, pantaloons sagging in the damp, engaged in excited conversation with two of the yard workers. Their attention was fixed on the main gates.
I kept my head down into the sharp north wind, uninterested in any newcomers.
“Coroner!” Garibald’s sharp hail halted Bastien. Like an obedient donkey I paused, as well.
The sexton cast a blistering glance my way and shook a dirty finger toward the gates. “Seems your prize has a visitor already—another spelltwister what refuses to step out the gatehouse.”
“Damn and blast!” Bastien whirled about, spitting daggers. “Who is it?”
I shrugged, mystified.
“This inquest is a pot boiling up,” snapped the coroner. “I must be there to stir it, and I want my expensive pureblood at my side. So be this the First Curator or your revered granny, get rid of him.”
CHAPTER 5
Garibald grumbled all the way to the gate. “Someone had best tell the high and mighty that us around here have work to attend. I’m no runner to carry messages.”
Speculating wasn’t going to soothe the sexton. Perhaps Leander had decided to see me safely home. I couldn’t imagine what other pureblood might have followed me to this vile place.
I entered the gatehouse alone. The growing dark revealed only a bulky man in a thick, ankle-length pelisse. But when he turned, recognition shocked m
e out of mind. “Master Pluvius!”
“Discipline, lad! We do not speak names in a den of ordinaries.”
“My sincerest apologies, master. I just—I never expected to see you here.”
A Registry curator at Necropolis Caton? No pureblood in the world would expect that. Yet hope struck embarrassment and astonishment aside. This was all a mistake. He’s taking me back.
“I needed to speak with you privately, Lucian. To express my outrage at . . . this.” His gesture at the view beyond the gate completed his thought. “Your talents will be sorely missed in the Archives.”
If such words spoken through clenched teeth were not enough to blight my greening hope, the morose head shaking and sympathetic clucks that followed certainly sufficed.
“I’m glad to hear it was not poor work, domé.” Manners were hard to come by.
“Certainly not. Had Albin allowed, I would gladly have taken on the duties as your negotiator.”
“I appreciate that, master.” Though it seemed unhelpful that he would say it here, rather than in front of Pons and Albin. “It would be enlightening—Master, why was I dismissed?”
“Curators’ deliberations cannot be shared. To come here and imply that our decision was not unanimous is violation enough. But when your grandsire contracted you to the Registry, I took it as a personal contract as well—to see to your development as an artist and as a man.”
Pluvius had always been complimentary about my work and supportive as I dealt with our family difficulties, but he had never directed any particular attentions my way beyond suggesting I keep my clothes clean. And though he was forever looking over my shoulder, he’d had little mentoring to provide. He was a historian, not an artist.
“If I just understood—?”
“I will do my best to see this situation remedied. But I have to warn you—”
His hesitation left me teetering on a ledge for a very long while. What could be worse than this shameful fall?
“Warn me, domé?” I said at last.
