Dust and Light

by Carol Berg

  “Show us these portraits,” said Scrutari, snarling. “I’ll not have a murdering madman coddled.”

  “If you like. I’ve a few in my chambers—a pair of soldiers, a starveling or two. Not every drawing is useful. Though just today we’ve turned over a murderer to the magistrates—a vintner’s steward who had borrowed too heavily from a hard-fisted pawner. The fellow thought cutting the crone’s throat would ease his troubles.”

  So my portrait of the old woman had been true. Satisfaction stirred my blood, spawning gratitude that Bastien had allowed me to know. And his choice of sketches to show did not include impossible portraits of royal bastards that might feed the Registry’s belief in my madness.

  “No. I wish to watch him work,” said Pons, eyes glittering in the harsh white light. “Have a corpus brought in, Coroner. Unbind his hands and command him to draw.”

  What did they think to see? Did they think I summoned gatzi to fill in unexpected details in my portraits? Lord of Fire, if I could only see the curators’ portraits.

  Bastien puffed his cheeks and sighed in dejection. “I’d be most pleased for you to witness my servant’s diligence, excellencies. But with all respect, it’s nigh on midnight. Our laborers are home and bedded. Unless you’re willing to roust them or conjure a dead man through our halls and onto this table yourselves, whilst at the same time making the sun to rise and give my servant proper light to work, you’ll have to wait till day for that enjoyment.”

  “I told you he’d have an excuse,” spat Scrutari.

  “We’ll come back for our observations, Coroner,” said Pons, unruffled. “Be sure of it.”

  Magelight burst from a ring on her finger, spreading into a glowing ball. She stepped close, raising her hand until the light was contained between us, illuminating eyes of gray marble set in a body of stone. The features behind her gray half mask revealed no more than those exposed, neither glee, vengeance, triumph, curiosity, nor righteous sorrow, nothing to reveal her purposes, and nothing at all to hint at what she had done with Juli.

  “You are a deviant soul, Lucian de Remeni-Masson,” she said, “one who has been too long shielded from the understanding of his aberrant nature. You have no place in this world.”

  Her pronouncement slammed me in the gut like a fist, its mortal weight forcing a bellow of denial into my throat. I had done nothing wrong. My portraits were true, my magic holy and right, no matter that it stemmed from two sources. How could one bent be divine gift and two be deserving of death?

  To keep silent and bow as was required near broke my back. Foolish even to attempt control of my posture. My indignation, anger, and loathing must be clearly visible to one with the skills of an investigator.

  “Come, eqastré,” she said, hurrying to the door. “We’ll examine those samples of his drawings before we go.”

  They threw the latch and left me in the dark. The shackles prevented my pacing, so I sat in the corner, elbows on knees, bound arms crushing my skull in an attempt to silence useless anger.

  Later, when the door latch clattered again, I could not make myself rise or look. Let them think me asleep. Let them drag me if they wanted me up or elsewhere.

  But it was only one heavy body that shuffled across the room and sagged onto the pallet just beyond my feet. He stank of old leather and death. Bastien.

  “That went well, I think,” he said, yawning. “What a pair of arrogant gatzi spawn. How did you ever put up with folk like that? Good thing you had that muzzle, eh? Likely I should have had one, too.”

  He shifted his position, reached around, and unlatched the mask. Dislodging my hands, he dragged it off me and tossed it across the chamber. As I coughed and swabbed the spittle from my mouth, he unwound the silk hand bindings.

  “So, you’ve got to tell me one thing, pureblood. Do they know about the flickering? The only rise I got out of them was when I said I had a way to watch you as you worked without you knowing it. The woman snapped her head around so fast I thought she might break her neck . . . something like you’ve just done.”

  No light was needed to know he was grinning in his smug fashion.

  “There was no flickering,” I croaked. “That was only snow . . . mist.”

  “Not so! I’ve watched you careful. Before your prisoning, it was like a cloud came between you and my eye. But when you drew the horse boy, you vanished entire. Might have thought I just blinked . . . save it was four or five blinks until you showed up again in exactly the same position you were when you vanished. You weren’t here, and then you were. Happened again with every one of those dead children. Most times only an instant, but once even longer than the first. Damnedest thing I ever saw. Since that day it’s gone back to like before. You fade from time to time, neither exactly here nor exactly gone. What’s the difference? And where in all hells do you go?”

  Impossible to see his face in the dark, but his voice demanded sober answer—of which I had none.

  “I don’t—I never believed you about it.”

  How could I believe such idiocy now? Save that something had been different since the Tower. The lapses. The visions. The insistence of both physical senses and instinct that I existed somewhere else entirely for those few moments. And in the Tower cellar itself, Nelek’s young assistant had reported me vanished from the iron room as I invoked my bent . . . when I’d dreamed of starlight and silver-marked Danae.

  “I’ve never heard of anything like,” I said. “But . . .”

  I had to tell Bastien the truth; he had rescued me, defended me. Yes, for his own interest, but for mine, as well. He had kept Juli’s secret. And he had been wise enough to see that freeing me from the Tower was not enough. He had allowed me a fallow time, with naught but a steady stream of work, time for me to regain balance. Clarity.

  “. . . a few times I’ve felt as if I’ve dropped off asleep as I work. I lose focus and slip into dreams, see places and people that make no sense, though they feel true. The smell, the sensations, they linger when I open my eyes here—like a true experience, not dream. It sounds mad, I know.”

  Was that what the Registry was looking for? Evidence of madness? Such a phenomenon would surely be considered aberrant magic. Unless they knew more about it than I did. “Earth’s Mother, you didn’t mention this to Pons?”

  “Give such a delicious tidbit to those who are rabid to take you away from here?” Bastien’s satisfaction near blazed a hole in the dark. “Not in any age of the world! I said that as long as your pen was moving, I was happy, and that, otherwise, watching you draw was about as exciting as watching the leaves turn color in the autumn and drop off the trees.”

  “Holy, blessed gods.” My fingers scraped through my greasy mat of hair. Words were insufficient to express my astonishment . . . or my fear . . . or my guilt, as the cascading implications battered me like hailstones.

  “So, you truly didn’t know?” said Bastien, muting his excitement. “You weren’t just being pigheaded?”

  “No. On the day I visited the city, I mentioned the possibility of such a phenomenon to another portraitist I worked with. He’d never heard of such a thing, either—” My throat constricted.

  “And on that same night your house burned and six people died.” As if our minds worked as one, Bastien voiced my own hideous conclusion.

  Who had Gilles consulted? Master Pluvius? Or his uncle, Curator Albin—more rigidly traditional than Gramphier himself? Or some other curator whose portrait had been altered? My teeth ground. “Stupid, ignorant, blind!”

  All these events were linked in a chain of lies and fire and murder. Answers so near, yet so unreachable. Rage and curses spilled from my lips until I could no longer come up with new ones.

  Bastien ignored my bellowing fit and settled his back to the wall and fumbled in his jerkin. After much unseeable business involving flapping leather, taps, scrapes, and strange mouth noises, a pulsing glow appeared in the region of his beard. A few breaths and a curl of highly aromatic smoke teased at my
nostrils. A Ciceron smoking pipe.

  “I’m thinking,” he said between leisurely sighs that enveloped us in a weedy fog, “now you’re more settled in your mind and we’ve got their first little visit out of the way, it’s time to unravel a few mysteries. The way I see matters is we’ve got to find out who’s this hairy, black-booted devil been killing off royal bastards. He could be Prince Bayard’s man or Osriel the Bastard’s. He could be one of Perryn’s own nobles, ready to betray the best hope Navronne’s got. We need his name, so’s you’ve got to get back to Arrosa’s Temple and find the document he signed when he left the child there . . .”

  He left me no pause to name him lunatic. Settled in my mind?

  “. . . and then we’ve got to discover who’s trying to bury you, else your testimony won’t be worth a barrel of squirming slugs when we get the goods on the villain.”

  “You’d help me?” Astonishment prevented any more purposeful answer. “It would violate the contract.”

  “Now just stopple that annoying conscience. According to this holy contract, whatever I deem my business is my business, no matter that it doesn’t exactly involve ink and paper and corpses. So it’s no violation of your beloved rules. You can thank your empty-headed vixen of a negotiator for that; she likely thought I’d set you to stripping bones. Besides, when I show you things like this”—he wagged a pale blur in front of my face—“it’s going to distract you from your drawing work anywise, so we might as well get the matter untangled.”

  “And this is what?” The light of his pipe was hardly sufficient to reveal what he held.

  “The message sent to warn you and yours about the fire. That nameless person who informed me that my prickly servant had been hauled off to the Registry Tower left it with me. She thought we might have more use for it than she would.”

  Oh, brave and clever Juli. “What does it say?”

  “It says: Leave. Now. Else suffer your blood-kin’s fate. Unsigned, as you might guess. Addressed to you, not your sister. Naught else about it tells me anything.”

  “It speaks several things,” I said. “The writer knew the rest of my family had died in a fire. He believed I would be at home, so it couldn’t have been the same person who spied on my movements for the Registry. A friend, one might say . . . but not friend enough or powerful enough to stop it.” Pluvius, perhaps. Kind and cowardly, and not so skilled at his craft as his curator’s rank would imply. He had professed sympathy and intent to help, and then left me hostage to Pons and the other curators.

  “And what shall we do with this other thing was left alongside the message?” He stuffed a small heavy object into my hand. A heavy ring. Inner fires of vermillion and yellow glinted from a modest but perfect ruby—a sign of the small enchantments it held.

  “My father’s ring,” I said softly. My finger traced the gem’s sharp edges and the cold curve of the gold ring. “It was the only item we retrieved from Pontia. I think . . . if you would keep it safe for me . . . for her . . .” I forced my fingers to let it go. Such a treasure had no place in this life.

  Bastien harrumphed. “The person who gave me these things said I should make you tell about Montesard, as that’s when things went wrong for you and your grandsire and that Registry female. She was sure all this was connected. And she said she didn’t really mean it about the whipping, unless your stubborn righteous self locked everything all up inside you, as you had a bad habit of doing. I mentioned how I’d noted for myself how your ass was tight as a practor’s conscience.”

  “She was right about everything,” I said, my throat graveled with anger and grieving. “More than she knew. The curators . . . they didn’t mention . . .”

  “No. Not even when the other fellow was going on about how your lunatic self might murder all of us here in our beds. Which I said would be difficult, as mostly the folk here were already dead.”

  He drew on his pipe, the glow swelling, and blew out long and slow.

  “I did nick other gossip of interest, though. I had babbled summat about all the work we’ve had, as the Guard Royale wants no corpses on the streets when Prince Perryn returns to the city. And then the devil woman says I am to make sure you are chained and locked away on the day the Prince of Ardra comes calling to honor Remeni’s kinsman.”

  “My kinsman?”

  “I fussed a bit and asked what Prince Perryn had to do with you and said I understood you had no kinsmen alive. The witch said it was naught to concern you nor me, neither one. But I persisted. She said the prince is set to honor the anniversary of Caedmon’s Writ and all the politeness between the Crown and the Registry it signifies shortly after he returns to the city—a tenday from now, more or less. Perryn’s to come to the Tower to honor his father’s late Royal Historian.”

  “My grandsire.” It seemed so odd.

  “Seems to me it might be an interesting occasion. On a night when there will be comings and goings and hullaballoo and strangers in the Tower, even ordinaries, even princes, so all the purebloods will be in masks, yes? And an intruder might have a chance to look at certain portraits hung there out of common sight, don’t you think?”

  My head popped up. “It would be a terrible risk.” My fingers rubbed my sprouted chin. A beard might change my appearance just enough. “For you, too, if I’m caught, which would be more likely than not. You’d allow me?”

  The glow of his pipe pulsed again and the smoke surrounded me before he answered. “Told you, pureblood, I solve one mystery, I get a witness for the other—the biggest has ever fallen in my lap, a mystery that could affect the future of this kingdom. I’m good at what I do, just as you are. But I’ve needed the right partner. Unfortunate that he’s brought me a pot load of trouble, but then, Serena Fortuna and I’ve had a testy relationship nigh on forty years now. And I’ll not deny, you’ve got me blasted curious about matters beyond imagining—this vanishing business, and portraits that show things you couldn’t know. Yes, indeed, I believe you must do both. Visit Arrosa’s Temple to learn of our murderer and attend this lordly celebration in your grandsire’s honor.”

  We sat in silence for a while. Partner with an ordinary? Risk my freedom to discover an ordinary child’s murderer? My ancestors must surely turn their backs on me in shame. Yet the pride and certainty that had given shape to my life lay in ruins. Perhaps the foundations I clung to remained intact beneath the dust and rubble; perhaps they didn’t. But Bastien offered me purpose and a chance to find answers. All I could do was scratch my head in amazement and relish the opportunity.

  “I’ll need clothes for both Temple and Tower. Fine ones. A heavier pureblood cloak than that ridiculous thing they left me. If my boots were cleaned, they’d do, and I presume these damnable shackles will come off. Most important, I’ll need a new silk mask, different from my old one. An ordinary tailor can make it and I can apply the enchantments. . . .”

  He didn’t interrupt. The next pulse of fire from his pipe revealed the pale gleam of his teeth. He was enjoying this.

  “You gamble my life quite easily, Coroner, considering I’m the best coin you’ve ever had.”

  He broke into bellowing laughter and slapped my shoulder. “You play the game hard, my prickly servant. Exactly as I do. But we’ll do better together, eh? We, the lowly, shall bring our arrogant adversaries to their knees.”

  PART III

  THE WAKING STORM

  CHAPTER 21

  “Scarce a shadow.” Bastien stuck his head through the door of my prison studio. “I thought now you knew, you might manage it every time. Vanishing could be a most useful skill.”

  “It would,” I said, examining the portrait of my latest subject, my third of the day.

  The bony, gray-skinned young woman lay peaceably on the bier. It was difficult to resist pulling up my shirt to ensure no one had slashed open my gut. The portrait explained the truth of her . . . her emaciated hand laid over a belly swollen with child. Someone had cut the babe out of her. Murder? Necessity? My magic couldn�
�t tell us—nor whether the child lived.

  The coroner took the drawing from my hand. “Requiring a corpse at hand whenever you wanted to vanish could be an inconvenience, though.”

  “Whatever makes it happen, it’s not sketching the dead.” I dragged the sheet over the woman’s lifeless features. “In the Tower cellar, I was using only my bent for history. Today, I’ve called on each bent alone and both together.”

  “I’ve one more interesting subject for you; then we’d best figure out how to burgle the temple.” Bastien didn’t wait for my agreement before the door slammed shut behind him.

  We had decided to learn what we could of my vanishings and the child murderer in these few days before Prince Perryn visited the Registry. We both knew my chances of returning from a venture into the Tower portrait gallery were tenuous at best. Perhaps I could learn to vanish from in front of a captor—and not return to the same place.

  I hobbled over to the window, chewing the dates Constance had left in the laver. Rain again today. Spring had arrived and Caton was awash in mud. A full-loaded deadcart had bogged down in the east gate, blocking the road all morning. Constance was screeching at her laborers to empty it. My windows displayed a distant sliver of hillside free of snow. Unfortunately it wasn’t green, either. Mud meant no planting.

  Juli detested rain. “Snow is perfection,” she’d once said. “It hides ugliness. Rain just turns the world to muck.”

  How I would love to tell Juli of the Danae. My little sister’s dark eyes had ever gleamed huge in the candlelight as our grandmother spun tales of naked dancers in the moonlight, of blue-flame bog lights ready to lure the unwary traveler to his death, of the beautiful young man enamored of a Dané, dissolving as he followed her to her lair in the Western sea, nevermore to walk the earth. Were the guardians of the earth real? Every time I considered what I’d seen, my breath caught in wonder. Perhaps Juli’s sharp mind could help me learn what all this meant.