Dust and Light

by Carol Berg

  The command was a lightning bolt writ in bone and sinew. My head bowed of itself. Must be standing, back to the door, else they’ll keep you in this leather horror forever. But my limbs were lead. Something held me down. Dust . . . a thousand years of dust, and these scraps of clothing . . . Panic tangled my thoughts. Must be naked for the inspection. It’s disobedient to die before inspection. How else can they find the vermin? They must see the rat bites, so they’ll keep the beasts away.

  I clawed at the layers, choking on the dust, gasping for air, but everything was dust and leather and I was retching, drowning in bile, and I’d no hands . . . only blunt clubs . . .

  “Get it off him! Where are those blankets?”

  Someone hammered at my head. Nelek must be bolting the mask to my skull. Sweet Mother, please, no! I writhed and flailed with handless arms, battering whatever flesh was in my way. Without hands, I’ve no magic.

  Hands crushed my limbs, pressing me onto bare stone. Maybe they would fix me in stone, wall me up in a statue, without voice, without hands, without magic. Registry curators were the most powerful of sorcerers. Despairing, I fought and bellowed like a brutish beast.

  The choking leather came out of my mouth and I coughed so hard and so long, it seemed my lungs must rip. Until the world turned black . . .

  * * *

  “. . . Not been starved or beaten. Just frozen and worn thin. Keep him warm. Keep him drinking. Let him sleep. And get that infernal mask off him.”

  “Can’t just yet. He is who he is. And I’ve got to have him working.”

  Bek stood on one side of me. Bastien on the other. I was bundled in magnificent warmth. I cracked open one eye—no surprise the vile leather yet covered the other—and noted that my cozy nest comprised Constance’s entire stock of sheets for covering corpses. My hands ached . . . unbound. A beautiful, blessed ache as I wriggled my fingers and drew them to my breast.

  “If he’s to be keeped in here, I could see to him of a morn. That he’s fed and got his necessaries while you’re off with your investigationing.” Even a whisper identified Constance unmistakably.

  A smile curved my lips—gods, what a pleasure—and some kind soul had wiped the crusted drool, blood, and vomit from the corners of my mouth. My eye drifted shut again.

  “I think our sorcerer’s back with us, Coroner,” said Bek, quietly, “though I suppose I’m not allowed to acknowledge his existence. Isn’t that the rule?”

  Someone harrumphed and spat.

  “What’s doing here, girl?” No whispering from Sexton Garibald. “We’ve two new dead out the yard. Garen, Pleury, we’ve bones need hauling. Some can gawk at god-cursed spelltwisters of a morn. Others got work.”

  They were all here, the mainstays of Caton. Honor required an act of importance.

  With my blessedly free hands, I pushed up to sitting and squinted into the yellow light until I spotted a broad man with a thatch of wiry, sand-colored hair. I pulled my legs around and slid from the table, lowering myself to one knee. Pressing my fingertips to my half-leather forehead, I inclined my back toward him as if he were a king. I wanted all to see. The Registry had no rule about not kneeling to an ordinary, as what pureblood would ever imagine doing so? Unless he had been liberated from the netherworld.

  No one spoke after, and my unobscured eye refused to stay open long enough to note their reactions. I just climbed back on the stone table and buried myself in grave windings. Everything else had to wait for a while . . . magic, grief, understanding. Perhaps I could recapture that glorious dream of stars and Danae . . . Sanctuary sounded marvelous.

  * * *

  I didn’t wake in the surgery, but on a hard palliasse in a corner of the pureblood preparation room—my makeshift studio up the short stair. Constance had reclaimed some of her sheets, but a small brazier sat nearby, giving off warmth in a circle about one pace wide. It felt magnificent. Even better, the leather mask sat on the stone bier instead of my head, and gray daylight peeked around the closed shutters. I breathed deep, sat up, and then stood on wobbly legs.

  Thought had been given to my situation. An earthenware jug and a folded rag sat in the empty laver. A soft wad that looked like chewed gristle and smelled the same was evidently someone’s idea of soap. Bread and cheese sat atop the bier alongside a mug that I prayed was full of any drinkable liquid. And one of the covered urns, such as they used for holding human ashes or bodily organs, sat under the stone table, inviting me to relieve myself. Very practical. I took advantage. From my prodigious output and the vast cavern where my stomach ought to be, I estimated I’d slept more than a day.

  Interesting that a wooden plank blocked the doorway, though it didn’t seem to be attached as yet and was wholly out of keeping with the faded sanctity of the prometheum décor. A laugh bubbled through my chest. The rules said I was to be kept in close confinement. This was likely the best they could do on short notice. Bastien knew I wouldn’t run. Every road led back to the Tower cellar. Necropolis Caton was my sanctuary.

  Thoughts fell into a quiet emptiness. I felt scraped clean. Newborn. Not in some exhilaration of sanctity or purification, but because the life that had encompassed and defined my every thought and action was ended, and I had no idea what to do. For the moment, I existed, grateful for the small amenities.

  Shivering, I scrubbed face, hands, and every part of me within reach with the oily soap and cold water from the jug. The bread, cheese, and sour ale vanished in one great inhalation. Then I moved on to arm myself against the cold. I layered my own clothes over the prisoner’s garb, silk shirt over the linen one, woolen braies over the slops, and then, quite inexpert, set about doublet, hose, buttons, lacings, and boots.

  The velvet doublet smelled of smoke and sandalwood. I needed to tell Bastien about Gab and High Priestess Irinyi and Fleure and the big, hairy Bear Lord with Shiny Boots who’d killed her . . . so many things; so distant they seemed, as if my true life lay elsewhere.

  When I was dressed, I flung open the shutters and rested my elbows on the sill. Down below, Garibald’s legion pushed barrows of bones toward the charnel house—not a structure of horror, as I’d once imagined, but a tidy stone building with a pillared portico and a nicely proportioned dome. The laborers didn’t just dump their loads. The sexton stood close by, making sure they took time and care to place the bones in some arcane order. Carved angels, beasts, and impish aingerou flanked the wood doors and guarded every corner, drainpipe, and seam to prevent Magrog’s gatzi from creating fengrash—soulless human simulacra—from the resting bones. Old-woman stories. Myths. Like the Danae.

  Questions swirled in my head like windblown dust. Was it possible they were real? They’d certainly felt vivid, especially those who had attacked me in the alley. Both those limned in blue and the woman in silver had spoken of boundaries—of trespass or twisting. With my magic, I thought. But the former—those in the alley—had issued a warning. They’d known my name, vowed to drive me witless, while the woman in silver seemed more . . . welcoming.

  The door scraped open. Actually, it scraped, shifted, and toppled backward into the passage with a great thud.

  “Constance!” bellowed Bastien. “Need these hinges done first off.”

  He clambered over the door into the chamber, muttering, “It’d be just like those arrogant sons of Magrog to send an inquisitor this first morning.”

  Bastien eyed me at the open window, then stuck his head back through the doorway. “Constance! Need to install locks on these shutters, too. And none’s to come near this chamber without my say, or I’ll throw ’em in the lime pits!”

  He drew my tall stool to the window and sat. I straightened, touched my forehead, and bowed, raising my eyes to meet his ever-penetrating gaze. My life was here, not in myth.

  “So, my very expensive and troublesome servant, are you mad?”

  I shook my head.

  “Speak. You’re out of the damnable mask.”

  “I am not mad.” Astonishing . . . gratifying . .
. to hear words emerge. And to believe what I said. “Nor am I a murderer. I did not set the fire that killed my sister and our servants.” Harsh, unforgiving words, twisting the spike that would forever be lodged in my chest.

  “Didn’t think so. ’Twas only three days you worked among us, but I’ve never been so wrong about anybody as all that. Well, save one other young fellow, once.” His natural ruddy flesh darkened to the color of bricks. On one side of his forehead, a great bruise glared in its first purple-and-green glory.

  Bastien hooked his bootheels on the top rung of the stool, leaned forward, and rested his elbows on his knees, his fingers twiddling the ties of his jaque. “For what it’s worth to you, the Registry does not want you dead. Secretary Collium’s document forced them to decide the matter. It said that if you were being detained for a matter entirely of civil law, then they must turn you and all their evidence over to a royal magistrate for prosecution—which would likely have your carcass swinging in the wind, from what I know of the matter. If the offense was a simple violation of pureblood rules or even a tangle of both civil law and pureblood rules, then the Registry could punish you according to their own lights—even execute you. But as long as you are breathing, they must ensure you are available to me for the duties as outlined in the contract.”

  He scratched his beard. I believed he was grinning. “Took ’em so long to decide, I thought I might have got you dead after all. But then they summoned me back to the Tower and agreed I could make you work. I told ’em they could lock you up at night if they wished, as long as they delivered you safely by sunrise every morning and fetched you when your day’s work was done, which might be any hour twixt dusk and midnight. That’s when they laid out the rules for me keeping you here. Guess they’ve the right to do that . . .”

  His pause invited an answer.

  “Yes.” I flexed and folded my sore fingers. “And I’ll abide by them. I swear it. Last night . . . if I did that”—I touched my own forehead and then pointed at his bruise, before uttering words that would have scalded my mouth in my former life—“I apologize. I was . . . confused.”

  “You’re stronger than you look. Bek claimed it was the cold unhinged you.”

  My panicked lunacy on my arrival disturbed me. How long had I been confined? Though I had lost count of the days so early, I could not shake this notion that it had been little more than a few tendays . . . a month . . . maybe two.

  “I was dreaming. Thought I was back in the Tower. Coroner, I would know how long—”

  The rules I’d just sworn to obey halted my query. Bastien was not supposed to speak to me of matters beyond business of the contract. “Honestly, I am not mad.”

  His scowl was not reassuring. “So, you claim the fire was happenstance? Witnesses saw a pureblood setting it. And the flames seemed designed to burn only your residence and no one else’s.”

  Custom demanded I refuse to speak of these matters, as they were personal and not my duties. Yet my sanity or lack of it was very much my master’s business.

  “I don’t even know how to set such a fire as that, confined to boundaries.”

  “It was fire killed the whole rest of your family—the very circumstance they said left you most of a lunatic.”

  “Grieving did not drive me to murder.” I needed him to believe me.

  “Perhaps it was not grief, but failure to complete the job.”

  “How dare you suggest—!” I glanced up sharply, leashing the burst of outrage in the instant of its birth. This was Bastien the coroner. The questioner. His head was tilted, his eyes alight with curiosity, not accusation. But very determined curiosity. He had laid his neck on a knife edge to get me back. He wasn’t going to let me hide anymore.

  “My family—including every person who died last year, my young sister newly deceased, and the servants who lived with us and saw us unmasked—was more precious to me than the crown of Navronne to its princes. They and the magic they nurtured in me were my world, my life. I did not arrange for their deaths. And yet . . .”

  My arms wrapped my chest and my eyes squeezed shut, as if the act might redeem my coming treachery.

  “My every bone tells me that my sister’s death was no happenstance. As for the rest of my family, Harrowers slaughtered them all in a raid on the town of Pontia last autumn. It was merest chance that my sister and I weren’t with them. Was Pontia selected for a raid that night because the entirety of the Remeni-Masson family was gathered there? Harrowers loathe all purebloods and want us all dead. And I know of no reason my family would be singled out . . .”

  Though my voice shook, I pushed on.

  “. . . and yet speaking of it aloud this way, it seems obvious. If none of these recent events was random, how could that one be so?”

  Bastien’s fingers paused in their idle occupation. “Are they responsible, then? The Registry? And if not you and not the Registry, then who? You would like to tell me it’s none of my business. But it strikes me that a sorcerer who has such a grievance with you might not stop, and ’twould behoove your master—and jailer—to pay attention, you see.”

  I scrubbed my shorn scalp. So casually he suggested that the unshakable foundations of pureblood life were as flimsy as a bridge of feathers—hinting at calculated murder and unimaginable corruption. Yet bringing such questions into the light, speaking the words aloud, made them take on the shape of reality . . . of horror . . . of truth.

  Chest and gut had tightened, so I could scarce squeeze out speech. “I’ve no idea who or why. They didn’t question me. . . .”

  Not that I knew of. Yet it would have been so easy to touch me with enchantment or slip a potion into my food. The persistent hunger; perhaps I had truly lost hours. How would I know? I had been sleeping so much near the end. Those ghostly shapes . . . the malevolent whispers just beyond hearing . . . the headaches and nausea and the cut on my arm. Yet I would surely remember their faces, their questions; rumor said certain powerful sorcerers could erase memories, just as rumor said some sorcerers could fly or walk in dreams. But no one I knew had ever witnessed such magic for himself. Such a short time ago, even on that morning I’d been told the Registry no longer needed my service, I would have indignantly denied such possibilities.

  “. . . but yes, I believe not the Registry itself, but someone at the Registry is behind the fire at my town house, at the least, and certainly the rumors of madness. Families of mad sorcerers have to lock them away.”

  “And as you’ve no family, the Registry must tend to mad Lucian de Remeni, just as they negotiated for you. It gives them freedom to do as they want with you. And ensures that no one will believe a word you say. But to what purpose?”

  Bastien was a hound straining at the leash. “Only one possibility has occurred to me. It might be nothing. Last year I painted portraits of the six curators.”

  He was right. Those who had murdered Juli and our servants to gain control of me certainly weren’t going to flinch at destroying Bastien and the others here, if they chose to try again. And whether they truly thought I was mad or wanted me burnt or buried alive, they wouldn’t leave me here forever. Someone should know these things.

  “This matter of my magic revealing things unexpected . . . I never noticed it before coming here. But I’m thinking some of those portraits might have disclosed something their subjects wanted hidden. And, gods have mercy . . .”

  The man who wore Harrower orange in my courtyard had stood in the Registry Tower. Harrowers had sworn to kill all purebloods. My hands gripped the casement with such ferocity as could keep the vault of the heavens from collapsing on the sorry earth.

  “. . . it wasn’t a tenday after I finished the portraits that Harrowers slaughtered my family.”

  “You’ve no idea which portraits? You’ve no magic can tell you?”

  “Be sure if I could redraw the cursed things, I’d do it this moment.” I scraped my fingers through my scruff of hair, struggling to keep my thoughts straight. “But I would have
to see them.” Which couldn’t happen any time soon. But it would. Somehow, sometime, I would learn the truth. “Touching them would tell me exactly what’s been altered.”

  “Could you undo what was done—make them look as they did at the beginning? That would be a weapon to use.”

  “No.” Privacies poured out of me as if the days in the cellar had rotted the barriers I’d spent my life building. “Magic can’t just strip away the changes. I can do that with my own work, to make it match the true image I carry. But if a different artist makes the changes, I’d have to correct it with paint or ink.”

  Shaking his head, Bastien relinquished the stool. “Well, you’re befouled good and proper. And whoever they are, they’ve got me stuck keeping you quiet for them. So, as I’m unlikely to get admitted to the Tower again without a new king bearing me on his shoulder, I’d best get all the work out of you I can. And I’m off on other business in the city this morning.”

  “Work will be very good,” I said, feeling a bit desperate. If I kept thinking, my head would fracture. “Magic—using it for good purpose—is important to me. Necessary. After I left here that night, I went to the temple as you wanted . . .”

  A gesture dismissed my opening. “We’ve gone ahead and buried the lily child. But I’ve other interesting cases stacked up in the barrow, waiting for you. Once they’re done, we’ll talk about what you learned at the temple.”

  It surprised me he wasn’t more interested. He’d seemed intent on solving the girl’s murder—Fleure’s murder.

  “Your inks, pens, and pages are up there on the shelf,” he said, moving quickly to the door. “A bell, too. Take what time you need. Then ring it when you’re ready to have one brought. I’ll tell Constance what order I want them done. As they carry your subjects in and out, you stand facing the wall. I’d rather not have to put that mask on and off you all day. Clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “Until we’ve bars on the windows, the shutters will be locked save when you’re drawing. I understand you need the light to work. Behave yourself.”