by Carol Berg
The conversation was at an end. I touched my forehead and bowed.
He paused at the doorway and looked around. “A hundred and fifty-eight days. That’s how long they had you.” He jerked his head and vanished.
A hundred and fifty-eight days. Almost half a year. Lord of Fire and Magic . . . what did they want of me?
CHAPTER 18
To immerse myself in magic and art once again was blessing immeasurable. I began with a quiet hour sketching, limbering my fingers and the linkage between eye and hand. I purposely refrained from any subjects that might influence the work to come, keeping to birds, dogs, horses, anonymous faces, and hands—one of the most expressive parts of the human body. Perched on my stool beside the window, I worked at capturing the bustling energies of the cart road below. Runners, diggers, Constance flying hither and yon, slow and steady Garibald. One deadcart after another rolled through the east gate.
A hundred and fifty-eight days. Despite intermittent showers of snow, sleet, and rain, it was spring . . . the season of promise and planting . . . famine time. Bastien likely had a hundred starvelings for me to draw. What did it feel like to starve? No pureblood ever thought to know. This dread new aspect of my bent—to feel a subject’s death pain—could teach me a thousand things I never thought to know.
Shaking my head, I focused on line and shape and movement. Distractions, especially of the life-afflicting kind, must not interfere with my power to probe the truth of my subjects.
When my fingers felt an extension of my eyes, I laid down my pens and sat cross-legged on my palliasse. My tutors had taught me mental exercises useful to smooth the pathways between art and magic. Now I had this notion that my two bents had begun to work in harmony, I wondered if it might be possible to forge a more certain joining than passing chance. My duty, as a holder of the divine gift, was to explore its nature and improve it.
With the breath of my will, I blew upon the two centers of my magic and brought both banked fires to life, keeping them in balance as they grew to flame. Then I focused my eyes inward and began to release magic, not to flow through my fingers—not yet—but to invest the ephemeral energies with solidity so I could manipulate them.
Easy. Astonishing. Between twin ingots of gleaming silver—one between my eyes, one behind my breastbone—stretched a spiderweb ribbon of light. Perhaps the connection would strengthen on its own, but with my future so uncertain, I wanted to be sure.
I wove molten magic through the connecting web, twisting and shaping as a silversmith draws his heated filaments into the straights and curves he desires, until the two centers were joined with a solid strength. From this gleaming bridge, I forged new channels to guide my magic from both centers at one. Once all felt stable and secure, my will released the image.
My eyes opened. Lungs filled and emptied. And still I felt the power inside, spanning heart and head—a strength as real and available for my use as if the width of my thighs had somehow doubled or the brawn of my shoulders could now hold up the sky.
The desire to share the wonder of it with one who might understand wrenched my heart. I offered a petition to Mother Samele that she might embrace my little sister and reunite her with the rest of our kin, and I tried to envision them all together in some grand feasting hall in Idrium. But every effort rang false. Only magic would speak truth.
Whispering an invocation to the Lord of Fire and Magic, I rang the bell and took my place facing the wall.
When the shuffling footsteps and nervous whispers died away, an elderly woman awaited me on the stone table. Her face was not deeply wrinkled but creased with tiny lines like old linen. Capable hands, not coarse or scarred, but accustomed to work, suggested a shopkeeper or housekeeper. Her limbs were straight, her cheekbones quite prominent, though without suggestion of starvation. In truth she looked quite healthy, save for the gaping gash across the great vein in her neck.
Magic answered my summons swiftly and in glorious abundance, flowing through my new-wrought channels as cleanly as Palinur’s springs flowed through its pipes and fountains. Before I knew it, a fire-eyed, thin-lipped harridan had taken her place on the parchment, a well-filled purse in one hand, a sturdy cane in the other.
My fingers rubbed my neck, where the sensation of a fiery knife cut yet stung. Someone would know her. Identifying the particular person who had slit her throat might not be so easy, however. Her pitiless visage suggested that those who had grievances with her outnumbered the graves at Necropolis Caton. Heart and bone, eye and spirit, swore the likeness was true.
A brief, grateful interlude with a mug of ale and a withered plum that had been left in the dry laver, and I rang the bell again. As the echoes faded, I took my place facing the wall.
My second subject was an ancient Ciceron, so lean I could count his knobby bones. His few teeth were stained dark by pipe weeds, his sagging earlobes riddled with punctures. Naught suggested how he’d died, save only the expiration of age. And the portrait bore that out, though it showed him standing straight and tall, his ears bearing a hundredweight of brass and silver earrings, and his tattered black vest clean, new, and blazoned with a white hand.
A handful of old figs had been left for me. Though hard and chewy, their sweetness was invigorating. I finished them off and closed my eyes for a short while, then rang the bell again. On this day at least, Bastien would get full measure from me.
The new subject was entirely bald, like the barbarians from the lands south of Evanore’s mountains. Unlike the squat Kafru, however, this young man was tall and slim. Or . . . I examined him more closely. Not a man, but a youth, despite the lack of hair. Not so much tall as gangle-limbed like a colt, still out of proportion. He’d been dead for a while. His cold flesh had begun to darken and shrink as Fleure’s had.
Many would deem an accurate portrait impossible now the body had begun its final change. Bastien believed I could do it. And I? I wasn’t sure what my limits were. I laid out a fresh parchment and began to trace my left hand over the youth’s cold, leathery features.
Constance had clad him in one of her white tunics, likely because his clothes had been shredded. Near every quat of the boy’s flesh was abraded, crushed, or battered—unhealed. Death wounds, then. The scars and calluses of his undamaged hand testified to a childhood and youth of unremitting labor. A hard life and a hard death.
I reached deep, accepting the pain sure to come. If my art touched the youth’s spirit, as Bastien claimed, then perhaps he could experience my magic’s glory, as I experienced his hurt. Again the surge of enchantment was swift and enormous, filling me with warmth, life, and purpose. When it set my right hand trembling, I released it to spill upon the page before me and began to draw. . . .
A stiff, cold breeze brushed my short hair, flapped my shirt, and teased my eyes and nose, redolent of damp and fish and a tang those in the river country ever named Ocean.
“What—?”
Astonished, I spun round. Light bathed gentle hills, scattered with clumps of slender pine and spruce. Though snow yet nestled in the shadowed clefts between the hills, slips of green peered from the matted gold of the year before. And beyond the rolling landscape a strip of blue sparkled like diamonds in the morning sunlight.
Rising urgency spurred me through the wakening grass, stepping tuft to tuft through a spongy gully until I reached a rib of rock that would lead me upward. I climbed, sweating in the damp chill. Halfway up, I paused and turned to look. The vista took my breath. A vast, heaving water stretched all the way to meet the gray-blue sky. Was this Ocean?
What was this place?
I clambered upward again, using both hands and feet when the way became too steep. Something waited for me at the top . . . an answer . . .
I shuddered and blinked. The fingers of my left hand rested on the dead youth’s brow. My right had paused after lying in the curve of a soft hat that wrapped that brow. Had I fallen asleep in the midst of magic working? Inexcusable weakness, if so, but I wondered. Pushing di
straction aside, I summoned power. . . .
* * *
The city bells rang the first hour of afternoon as the footsteps faded down the prometheum stair. Body aching as if I had tumbled down Monte Cleone in a rockslide, I faced the wall, awaiting whomever Constance would bring to replace the battered youth—not the hairless, withering remnant of life who had lain on my table, but the sun-browned, gangle-limbed boy who now looked out boldly at the world from the portrait laid beside the earlier two.
Easy, confident, graceful, the youth sat astride a sleek stallion that would be found only in a wealthy man’s stable. His threadbare tunic, slops, and padded jaque were those of a common laborer, his cheap boots clotted with muck and hay. His hands were bundled in dirty linen, and an old-style liripipe sat atop his head, the long tail wrapped about his neck for warmth.
Most would name the boy a common stable lad, exercising a noble master’s favored horse. Yet I wondered. Like the horse, the youth’s bones were fine, elegant, and strong, and the spark in his eye spoke of intelligence and ready humor. And his head was not bald. Shining curls the color of sunlight peeped out from under his poor man’s hat, and his mount’s saddle skirt bore the lily of Navronne.
Doubt nagged at me. Visions . . . lapses . . . impossibilities . . .
I abandoned the wall and snatched up the portrait. It would take them a while to bring the next, and I wanted to test the truth of the image. With a few strokes of the pen and dollops of magic, I transformed the lily into scrollwork, darkened the boy’s hair, and thickened the legs of his horse. I tossed the pen aside. The drawing screamed falsity.
Eyes closed, I touched the page and called up the true image, summoning will and power and a spell I had learned in the earliest years of my training. The quadreo was a massive enchantment, designed to strip away all conflicts between the true image and the actual. It used inordinate reserves of power, hastening depletion, and my masters had insisted that using it too often risked dissolving the very pathways of magic in one’s body. Having tested my work several times in the course of my training, I could believe that. But of all times, I needed certainty. A rush of magic scoured my sinews in arm and hand, blurring my vision as the world shifted. Taking deep breaths to settle my racing heart and spinning head, I opened my eyes.
The lily was back. The youth’s curls gleamed like summer noonday. The horse would be a worthy mount for Kemen Sky Lord himself. The drawing spoke truth.
Satisfied for the moment, I moved back to the wall. When Bastien’s work was done I’d give more thought to the strangely vivid dream—vision? distracted imagining?
The new subject brought in was the most challenging so far—a small child, little more than a babe, whose head had met with a wooden beam or a stone wall at some time not so recent. Swallowing my gorge, I touched a withered limb and reached for magic and justice and a touch of the gods’ grace.
This time the portrait showed not a child of royal origins, but a dull-eyed starveling Syan boy, his wrists scarce bigger than my thumb. No royal lily anywhere.
Three more children followed.
A filthy waif of similar age to the hostler’s boy, her body clotted and stained with sticky black muck, became a pouting girl in a ruffled silk bedgown. The three-petaled lily was carved into her bedstead. Not even the few spoonfuls of mead left in my cup could soothe a burning in my throat.
Another ragged child had black, chopped hair very like Fleure’s. I’d no expertise and no physical sensation to explain why she had died, but her portrait showed naught but a ragged, dark-haired child in striped skirt and dangling necklaces, armrings, and hair braided with cheap ribbons. A Ciceron child. She wore no royal lily, but interestingly, a tiny ball of fire hovered above her cupped hand. Some claimed that Ciceron sleight of hand mimed true magic.
The last was a small swollen body, scarce identifiable as human. My art deemed him an infant, swaddled in lace and satin. The pattern of the lace was Navronne’s lily.
Despite the nourishment left for me with each subject, my strength had reached its limits. For the drowned infant, I’d had to dig deep into my reserves.
I covered the babe with one of Constance’s sheets, sat beside him, and mourned the short, cruel life he’d known. And then I waited. Bastien had not given me a signal to tell them no more.
Clouds and night devoured the light. Rain pattered on the flat roof outside the smaller window and dribbled into the cistern. A profoundly melancholy night—how could it be other after spending the day with dead children?—but so very blessed to hear and smell the rain. The splat of each droplet etched shapes in my fallow mind—curved roof tiles, stone walls, leafless shrubberies, the carved aingerous at the end of the drainpipes spewing the collected rivulets onto the road from their long noses or pouted lips.
The contrast with the Tower cellar seemed to grant me an intense sensual clarity. The scent of damp wood evoked the shutters; that of hard-packed mud bespoke the cart road. The must of old stone conjured the flat roof and its round cistern.
Which took me back to my visions. Several more times during the day, I had lost focus. Twice the world had simply plunged into darkness as if I’d dropped off asleep. But once . . . Great gods, these happenings were so strange. I had been kneeling atop a bald, rocky prominence, the highest point of the very hills I had dreamed before. The same urgency had driven me there. Yet I could see naught but beauty. Steep-angled light of afternoon gold sculpted a greening land of hills and vales that jutted into the embrace of Ocean like a great hand, its five fingers spread, a slender wrist joining it to a dark continent to the south. Scarps of white stone ridged the five fingers of the land like exposed bone. The smell of the sea borne on soft wind gusts, the warmth of the angled light bathing my face, the certainty of the stone under my knees had insisted on the truth of my existence in that place.
At each lapse I had pulled myself back, dizzy and disoriented, until I could grasp the stream of magic and purpose. Astonishing that I’d produced aught but scribbling.
What else could I call them but visions? Yet I had been shivering from the cooling wind when I blinked away this second experience of land and Ocean, and even now, sitting in my studio, I caught the lingering scent of the sea as if it were imprinted on my clothes.
Perhaps my bent for history had deposited some impression of the hairless youth’s history in my senses, like the lingering taste of garlic. For certain, the landscape had been nothing from my own experience.
If the cause was magic—perhaps some strange effect from the joining of my bents—it wasn’t my conscious work of the morning that had done it. The vision that had interrupted my use of the bent in the Tower had borne the same sensual clarity. The cold wind had raked my naked body as I walked through dry grass under the stars and met a Dané. A Dané who spoke with Morgan’s odd archaic lilt . . . thee and thou . . . an untouchable memory that could summon the fire in me as if she stood at my side. The incident in the blizzard, though not triggered by magic working, was very like. Intensely vivid, and the two limned in blue had spoken in the same patois.
What could such odd lapses signify? A mind’s weakness, perhaps, affirming what the curators said of me. How could they be truth? Morgan was no mythic creature, but as real and human as anyone I’d ever known. Ah, gods, her mind had been bright and keen as a blade; her body as lush as the summers of my childhood; her skin rose-brown, kissed with sunlight, not marked in blue or silver fire. Was she so deeply embedded in my spirit that visions took on her voice?
The pattering rain began to puddle on the floor. Reluctantly, I closed the shutters. As I fastened the latch, torchlight flickered behind me.
“So, you’ve declared an end to the day’s work?” Bastien clambered over the fallen door, torch in hand, bringing the real world with him.
I nodded.
“Presumptuous of you.”
My empty hands spread helplessly. My truer retort—asking how he expected me to draw in the dark—remained unspoken. He wasn’t stupid. L
ike a mosquito, he just enjoyed pricking at people. Depleted by work and memory, curiosity and wonderment, I doubted a lion’s bite could rouse me to anger just now.
“From now on, ring twice when you’re done and they’ll carry the last corpus away without bringing another. Where are the drawings? And speak aloud, for the gods’ sake.”
But before I could say, he spotted the row of pages spread on the floor well away from the windows. He crossed the room with the speed of a spider toward warm blood.
“Never expected seven portraits on your first day back.” He squatted beside the row.
“The sleep helped, and the food.” I rang the bell twice and moved to face the wall. “It was an interesting selection. Sad. So many children.”
“Children of ordinaries die all the time. From many causes.” He snatched up one drawing, his nose almost touching it. “Horns of the goat, I knew it!”
I couldn’t see which portrait drew his exclamation, but it told me what had become obvious as the day wore on. He had suspected what some of the portraits would show.
Footsteps on the stair held me silent. “So, he’s done with all, is he?” Constance’s whisper bleated from the doorway. “About ’is supper: I’ve naught extra but a bit of olive paste and old bread. Garen says he knows a man gots a cartload of pignuts to sell morrow dawn. I’m sending—”
“Whatever you can spare,” snapped Bastien. “He needs it to keep working. We’ll arrange better for tomorrow. But later. I’ve business here until ninth hour. Do as I instructed.”
“Oh, aye. I’ll see to it. Da says locks and hinges will have to come after that if you want ’em today. ’Twar a busy—”
“Yes, yes, after is fine.” Bastien sounded as if he might kick her. Once all was quiet again, he sighed deeply. “That woman is the gods’ retribution for every sin I ever contemplated, much less every one I committed.”
“She’s the foundation of Necropolis Caton.”
