Dust and Light

by Carol Berg

  She sank back on her heels, gaping at me as if I were indeed a madman.

  “Swear to me, Juli. On everything we deem holy. On our beloved dead. There is no other way.” I believed that with a certainty I could apply to nothing else in the world.

  Her eyes widened. “Luka . . .”

  “Swear it.”

  Without shifting her furious, frightened gaze from mine, she swore. “On our name and blood, on our holy gifts, on the lines of magic unbroken, I vow all that my Head of Family has asked of me. Witness my oath, great Deunor, Lord of Fire and Magic. Witness my truth, mighty Erdru, Lord of Vines. Witness, too, that I will not rest until the need for this posturing is undone.”

  Her speaking was bitter, her body rigid. If someone told me I had worked the very magic I had wished for, I would have believed it.

  She broke off her glare and rose, cold and pale as one of the stone grave markers. “To whom shall I surrender, ancieno?”

  And this was near the hardest part of all. “Pons. I think it must be her. She will believe the worst you say of me. But she is hard and very intelligent. Convince her, and you convince them all.”

  I wanted to beg her to be careful, to suggest she get herself filthy and torn before going to the Tower, to remind her that she was everything in the world to me and that only the lack of any alternative could force me to send her into such danger. But her back was already turned.

  “Whip him if you need, Coroner Bastien, and keep him shackled,” she said as she rejoined my master, “for he is assuredly a raving lunatic. You and your woman must forget me.”

  “We shall forget everything we’ve seen or heard, Doma Remeni. I warrant my life on it.”

  He exchanged a few insistent words with Constance. Juli did not look back as she waited. Only a moment and the two women vanished into the vaulted passage.

  Bastien near yanked me from the bench. “Mother save me, Remeni, you are the hardest bastard I ever hope to meet.”

  He left me silk bound and shackled that night, the chain linked to a new bolt in the floor. And he installed the mouth strap so I could speak no words of magic. Perhaps he thought I would regret my decision and run or set his prometheum afire. Yet it was not second thoughts that kept me awake until dawn, nor was it Garibald’s hammers and chisels installing locks and hinges, but only the sick certainty that I should have frightened Juli more.

  CHAPTER 20

  By the time dawn sneaked through the cracks in the shutters, my studio in the necropolis resembled a prison cell. Both the solid wood door, now hinged, and the thick shutters sported new brass locks, soundly fastened. Yet the very same light proved the cell’s vulnerability. No such petty prison could confine me. Every pureblood youth was taught spellwork enough to burn wooden barriers and break mundane locks.

  In the Tower cellar, the possibility of backlash from the iron enclosure sufficed to keep a sensible prisoner well behaved. What of a wildly angry, terrified young girl, though?

  For the hundredth time in the long hours, fear and anger curled me into a knot. Fear for Juli. Fury at those who had driven us to such circumstances. I near bit through the sodden leather strap, growling through a blizzard of impossible schemes. Lock the curators in their judgment room and demand answers. Stalk Pons to her residence and hold a knife to her throat until she explained herself.

  Every alternative crumbled. I could not run. I could not fight openly. If my sister and I were ever to be reunited, if we were ever to use our gifts as the gods intended, then I had to learn what had happened to our family and why. There was no learning to be had in the Tower cellar, nor did I imagine there would be any escape did they find cause to lock me in there again.

  Bless the Mother, Bastien arrived early with instructions for the day. Discipline reared its weary head. I stumbled to my feet.

  “I’ve decided that you’re to draw every corpus brought in that’s not already rotted.” New keys jangled from the coroner’s belt as he slipped the silk knots on my hand bindings. “As we’ve seen, there’s no guessing whether the unlikeliest mess might be a person of interest.”

  I dipped my head. Work would be good.

  He unbuckled the leather mask and threw it on the shelf. He did not invite me to speak aloud. Indeed, I had naught to say.

  In a blur of leather, he was gone. To my chagrin, the shackles remained in place.

  A cupful of beechnuts—pignuts, many called them—waited in the dry trough. Bitter and annoyingly small, they were scarce more edible than an acorn. But someone—Constance?—had taken time to roast them so they were less likely to cause a rebellion in the gut. I downed them and the cup of robust ale. Then I rang the bell, hobbled to the wall, and awaited the dead.

  * * *

  Presented with a never-ending stream of corpses, I worked each day until dusk. Determined to keep these drawings true—and to prove myself sane—I allowed no extraneous thought to interrupt the work. I saw no visions, felt no sensation of falling and glimpsed no scenes of other places. I was not mad. I was not. But my denials had an increasingly false ring to them.

  Each night, once the last corpse had been removed, I hobbled to my palliasse, knees flaccid, magic depleted, cramped, blackened fingers silk bound, determined to untangle the mysteries of my life. Each night, despite my best intents, exhaustion took me to sleep before it was full dark.

  Though Bastien kept me in shackles and bound my hands at night, he never put me back in the mask. He offered no conversation, entering the studio only to bind or unbind me or collect the day’s portraits. A bowl of water greeted me each morning, too little and too cold to do aught but splash on face and hands. For the first time since manhood, my beard sprouted untended. I didn’t care.

  A month, more or less, we continued in this fashion. On the night Garibald finished installing iron gratings in my windows and replacing the wooden door with one of solid iron, Bastien removed my shackles. When he did not bind my hands, either, I nodded my understanding and acquiescence. He had complied with the Registry rules and I would as well.

  Without a word, Bastien took the chains, the silk cord, and the light away.

  Outside my shuttered window, a steady drizzle whispered across the city of the dead. Did the corpses I drew lie in their pits, listening to the rain they could not touch, contemplating those they would never see again or a life that had once held meaning? Silence and detachment in a house of death certainly gave one a bit of objectivity. And clarity.

  For the first time in a month, I dared contemplate what I had done to Juli. The consideration that I might never know her fate hurt like a bruise on the heart itself, but no longer did it drive me wild. My decision had been the only one possible.

  Men could rightly judge me a lunatic that I should approve my own confinement and the possibility of hers. Yet I’d ever heard tales of the Cartamandua recondeur, old, mad Janus’s drunkard grandson who had run while just a boy. Ten or fifteen years and the Registry had never found him—the only renegade who had never been reclaimed. Pureblood magic flared like a beacon in the ordinary world, and Registry investigators were always on the watch for it in places where no sorcerers should be. Which meant he used no magic. One might as well say he no longer breathed or had cut off his own hands. More likely he was dead. Juli and I had matters to attend before we died.

  Freed by that surety, other truths unfolded before me like a parade of compliant servants.

  They—the ones who spoke rumors and set fires—wanted me, not Juli. My comings and goings had been watched; they knew I’d not yet come home on the night of the fire. Had it not been for the boy Egan and the warning he had delivered—how stupid I’d been not to ask Juli the exact words—my sister would have been sleeping and died with the others. No crime could have been planned more perfectly to convince the pureblood population that I should be locked away.

  So why me and not Juli—or one of my brothers or cousins or uncles? I could no longer avoid the possibility that my family had died as a result of this
same savage conspiracy. We were of the same blood, the same upbringing. Our family’s gifts had ever displayed strong. If one discounted sex and age, only one thing marked me different enough to choose over the others: my dual bents.

  Why were dual bents so feared? Rumors. Old women’s tales. My family had ever celebrated the varied manifestations of magic, whether amongst our own or in other pureblood families. They were part of the beauty of the gift—of our lives. Which brought me back to my grandsire.

  Always I had assumed that it was my failure had sealed my grandsire’s lips and heart. But it seemed so clear now that the severity of his reaction had been entirely out of proportion to my offense.

  Capatronn had instilled in our family his belief that our magic was not our own. Grumbling at Registry intransigence, he had vehemently defended his decision allowing me to pursue both bents for a few years. “My colleagues are wrong about this, Lucian,” he’d said after postponing my declaration of bent when I turned sixteen. “How are we to judge the will of the divine Givers, whether they be gods or angels or nature itself? Study and strive and you will find the harmony inside yourself. Every step you take toward your future is a joy to me.”

  And indeed as I grew older and expressed my longing to pursue my bent for history beyond our household tutors, my grandsire had agreed, despite Registry disapproval of a pureblood youth mingling with ordinaries. He would take a house in Montesard, he’d said, as it was situated near a region he had wanted to explore for many years. While he pursued his own work, I could study as I wished, yet live securely within the discipline of family—a circumstance that should mollify the Registry. By the age of three-and-twenty, I could declare a single bent or prove the Registry’s hidebound tradition wrong. It seemed a perfect solution.

  Three short years later, over a passing indiscretion, this same wise, generous grandsire had tried to obliterate half of my soul. What had changed?

  As a rising wind rattled my locked shutters, I drew up my blanket and rifled through my memories of those years. All my efforts served up no disagreement, no reprimand, no incident or encounter that could explain his change.

  In spring of the year I turned eighteen, once the roads were free of snow, we had traveled through northern Ardra and into the eastern reaches of the province of Morian. Vigorous and eager, Capatronn seemed to feed on my excitement at the adventure. Once we were settled, Capatronn took up his work.

  Xancheira was a small duchy squeezed somewhere between Navronne’s northernmost province and the Aurellian Empire. Xancheira’s culture, law, and beauty were common bywords for elegance—whether in art, fashion, or judicious governance. Yet no scroll, painting, building, or artifact remained to support our use of the terms. Supposedly, the duchy—a single great city and its outlying villages, their grazing lands and fields—had been obliterated in one savage day during Aurellia’s prolonged retreat from Navronne. The city had been razed and the population slaughtered. Every source gave a different date for the Xancheiran Massacre, somewhere between a hundred and two hundred years previous. King Eodward had charged his Royal Historian to discover the truth of Xancheira’s end, as well as what he could of its laws.

  That first summer in Montesard, I had accompanied my grandsire on his search. We found no ruins, artifacts, or even a town site, much less evidence of the massacre. When the university term began in the autumn, I became wholly immersed in my studies. In early spring, my grandsire took his investigating to a new site, one promising enough to keep him in the field for many months. He’d sent one exuberant letter, saying he had found clues to his hunt and looked forward to telling me more when he returned.

  But by the time he returned to Montesard the following autumn, I had met Morgan. Guilty, afraid he might discover my transgressions, I had kept my distance, displaying no curiosity about his findings. I’d thought myself skillful and clever. And then someone had reported my dalliance to the Registry.

  I sat up, drew my blanket around my shoulders, and summoned everything I knew of Vincente de Remeni. His presence was yet so vivid—I could smell the oil he used on his ancient leather boots, the soap his manservant used to wash his hair, and the fennel seeds he chewed while he read or wrote. His deceptively long gait had me doubling my steps to keep up until the year I reached my full height. When he joined and guided my boyhood magic in the way of experienced tutors, his hands were dry and cool.

  Never had I seen him afraid . . . not until my vision of him as he excised my second bent. Would Gramphier know why? Or Pluvius? I’d never suspected anyone had watched.

  Attempting his portrait again might give me answers. Bastien would have to approve. . . .

  As if his name had conjured his presence, the iron door flew open and Bastien’s torchlight flooded the studio. “Up, sorcerer. Quickly. Serena Fortuna shows her spite yet again.”

  It was not yet midnight.

  “Feet first. Then the hands. Remain silent.”

  His urgency declared this was no petty jousting. Mumbling curses under his breath, he sped through the binding and locking. Even the leather mask came off the shelf.

  I did not resist. Only one eventuality could spur such tight-lipped preparations. The Registry.

  When done, he jerked his head to the pallet and raced out again, securing the iron door behind.

  My gut scarce had time to tie itself into a knot when the door clanged open a second time. I raised up on my elbow and shielded my exposed eye against glaring magelight. Two of them.

  “On your feet, plebeiu.” Even with so few words, I recognized Pons’s contralto, as warm and cheery as one of the headstones in the Hallow Ground. How could I have sent Juli to her? A month it had been. Holy Mother, forgive me.

  The two swept in, garbed in full display of brocades and jewels, silk masks, and fur-lined cloaks. Behind them two servitors held magelight lamps on poles. I stumbled up, raised my bundled hands to my chest, and bowed, suddenly conscious of my filthy clothes, my unwashed body, and the scraggle of beard that itched so sorely under the mask.

  A murmur between the two, and Pons moved briskly to examine the shuttered windows and their locks. Her companion tested my hand bindings and the locks on the mask and shackles. The man’s modest height, his hair cut straight at ear length, and the twist of his spine that caused his head to appear forever cocked to one side named him Curator Scrutari-Consil.

  Scrutari was a prickly sort of man, always finding fault, meticulous in his grooming despite his distaste for any hint of color. My family had scorned Scrutari as a bit too involved in the politics of ordinaries for a curator. Purebloods did not consider ambition unvirtuous, of course, unless it was so very obvious. Scrutari had contracted himself as an advisor to the most prominent clergyman in Navronne—the Karish hierarch Eligius of Ardra—and he bustled in and out of the Tower as if his dual positions ranked him as exceptional in both divine and human realms.

  Arrogant and condescending, Scrutari had not exchanged ten words with me as I painted his portrait. It was easy to imagine that his might be one of the suspect portraits—a highly unjust supposition. Most purebloods were excessively prideful, myself not excepted. Gods, how low I had fallen this month past. Scrutari had certainly noticed. He held a kerchief across his nose as he stepped around me.

  Shame heated my cheeks, not for how my state reflected on me, but for the disrespect to my family and Bastien.

  “These bars are inadequate, Coroner.” Pons cut through the oppressive silence. “Plates of iron over the windows would be more secure.”

  Bastien, little but a shadow in the doorway, bowed. “Unfortunately, excellency, my requirements—supported by our contract—mandate that my servant create identification portraits. But drawings done in firelight are unreliable, costing us money and speed. As we deal with bodies in varying stages of corruption . . . I’m sure you understand. And, of course, this chamber—the only one at the necropolis suitably isolated—has no provision for breathing save the windows. If you wish the pureblood smothere
d, you might as well take him back and do it yourself.”

  “Watch your tongue, ordinary!” snapped Scrutari. “We can do exactly that.”

  “Indeed,” said Bastien, far more relaxed at this exchange than I. “So First Secretary Collium informed me. Thus I am scrupulous in obedience to the rules I was given. Test my truth in it: The pureblood’s neither left this chamber nor spoke to any living person in more than a month. ’Tis a great deal of trouble. As I said before, if you wish to house him while still making him available to serve his contract, you’re welcome to it.”

  “Insolent—”

  “We shall continue to monitor your compliance, Coroner Bastien,” said Pons, interrupting her fellow. “And the First Curator wishes me to inform you that we intend to fetch Remeni to the Tower from time to time. He must be tested to better judge the state of his reason.”

  It was all I could do to keep from shaking my head no. If they took me again, I’d never come back.

  “Certain, you’re welcome to take him for a visit,” said Bastien, “as long as his work is caught up, which I judge might be in whatever year this god-cursed weather eases. He’s required to draw every corpus we receive. More every day, and I’ll not have his time wasted. Nor mine. You might consider turning your magics to the weather. Excellency.”

  Scrutari’s visage near melted, as if the gold sunburst pendant gleaming at his neck—the symbol of his Karish loyalties—had captured the sun’s heat. Pons’s face mimed an ice-sheathed torrent. A fine thing the mask pinched my mouth, else I might have found myself grinning in a wholly inappropriate fashion. Indeed, wild-haired, leather-clad Bastien could have been a master hound, prancing back and forth, guarding his yard against a pair of mountain lions twelve times his size. I’d never known anyone at once so perceptive and so foolish.