Dust and Light

by Carol Berg

  A wound in the world . . . the Danae in Palinur had spoken of the world as broken. The silver one said my talents were ones they waited for. “Yes. But I don’t know where. Did he?”

  Pons blew a sharp exhale. “I don’t think so. He just wanted to destroy the chest and forget what he’d found. He believed it would be your doom as well as his. As it proved. I persuaded him to hide the thing instead, even from me. But it is not righteous to ignore such a matter.”

  Gilles moaned, bringing Pons instantly to his side. Like a statue of ice, she stared down at him.

  “Do it again, whatever you did to him,” I whispered, my pent questions ready to explode. “What does this have to do with the Danae?”

  “Danae?” Her puzzled look crushed my hope. “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You must tell me. I’ve drawn a portrait that shows the future more clearly than a diviner’s cards. I’ve existed in another place. A Danae woman has spoken to me of something I need to do, but in riddles impossible to unravel. I’ll listen to you. I’ll learn. But I have to know whom to trust and where to find answers. I am not mad, Pons. I swear it.”

  “Our time is done,” she snapped. “My colleagues will be here in moments. Give me your hand.” She extended hers. “Now, fool, or die here and end our hopes.”

  “Lord of Light, Pons, hopes of what?”

  But she refused to speak. Her hand waited.

  No matter how formidable her magic, we could not stand against four curators. Perhaps her skills could hide me. I extended my hand.

  Pons grasped my wrist. Her hand was not cold as I had always imagined, but warm and womanly and unbelievably strong. She knelt beside Gilles and drew me down, too, but on opposite sides of him. She maintained her grip on my wrist across Gilles’s body and she fixed her eyes on mine.

  “Vincente de Remini was a coward, Lucian. Your family died for it, and we very nearly lost you, the first matured dual bent in more than half a century. I am going to lay the blame for all the ills of the Registry at Vincente’s feet—and your feet—blackening your name beyond redemption. It was love for you that weakened Vincente’s knees. Sentiment, a terrible lesson you must learn as I did. To make this right, you have to run.”

  Every bone in my body protested. I would not abandon my sister.

  “I won’t. I am not you.”

  “Exactly so.” She averted her gaze, her mouth grim, her body rigid. “So you have to change.”

  She jammed my fingers into Gilles’s chest. Explosive magic—brutal, ferocious, scouring turbulence—raced through my arm, through my fingers, drawn from my centers of power, as if a god’s hand stripped out my entrails.

  “Gods’ bones,” I gasped, “what are you doing?”

  Gilles’s fine doublet charred, orange embers flaring as it shriveled and revealed his shirt, already blackening, and then his chest, each wiry black hair flaring and curling. As the fire gouged into his thick, raw flesh, his eyes popped open and he screamed.

  “Curse you! Stop this!” I tried to pull away, but she held on, her grip like a steel manacle bolted to stone.

  Inside me and without, all was fire and screaming and raging power. I could not slow it. I could not stop it. Horror-struck, dizzy from the draining magic, I twisted and dragged at my hand until it seemed the bones must snap. She would not budge. So I lunged across Gilles and plowed into her. Crushing her with my entire weight, I wrenched my hand free and scrambled back to Gilles’s side.

  Too late. His back arched in a single great spasm of agony. Then he collapsed, a smoking, fist-sized hole where his heart should be.

  “Ah, gods!” Shaking, disbelieving, I could not draw my eyes from my onetime friend. “What have you done, witch?”

  “Only what is necessary.” Pons knelt at my side.

  As I closed Gilles’s eyes, she grabbed my wrist again. Using both hands and inhuman strength, she pressed my fingers to her own body and dragged a second gout of magic from my soul. How was this possible?

  “No!” I yanked my arm from her weakening grasp and leapt to my feet. She remained kneeling, back curled, head down, as flames of scarlet and vermillion devoured the pale flesh of her shoulder.

  “We’ll find you when the time is right,” she said harshly. Her whole body spasmed. She clenched her teeth. “Now run and don’t look back.”

  A wisp of a smile, and then she screamed as if her soul was ripped from her body and slumped to the cold stone. Insensible. Dead? Her shoulder smoked. The enchantment had eaten halfway through it.

  “Elaia, where are you?” Closer. Running footsteps in the passage. Hammering fists. “Pons!”

  I backed toward the window, aghast. Any pureblood who examined Gilles would determine that I had worked the enchantment that killed him. Magic turned to murder was the most heinous crime a pureblood could commit. They would execute me—slowly, painfully.

  “Down here, Pluvius! This lock’s been melted!” A blow left the door splintered at the hinges.

  “Get out of my way!” Gramphier.

  I scrambled out the window to a boot-wide ledge, closed the casement, and then stretched to reach the drainpipe. Clutching the rusted conduit with hands and knees, I levered myself downward, heedless of wind, sharp edges, the blackness below. My boots scrabbled for footholds in the stone face of the Tower. Bits of mortar crumbled out from under. I prayed for fog, for blizzard, for direction, for redemption. . . .

  When the casement burst open two stories above me, I gripped the pipe with cold, bleeding hands, closed my eyes, and kept moving. Magelight flashed around outside my eyelids. But no crackling discharge slammed me to the earth so far below.

  “Get Fortier down there to greet the murderer,” yelled Gramphier. “And hurry, or the royal prick’s men will take him first. He must be ours.”

  “I’ll see to it myself. We’ll have him.” Damon.

  The magelight faded, and I moved downward faster, terrified my screaming hands would not hold. I passed between two arrow slits and risked a pinprick beam of my own. Rain-slick cobbles gleamed far enough below to hollow my belly. And even so small a magic left the world swirling like soup in a kettle.

  A dozen years it had been since my brothers had challenged me to such folly. I had always been overcareful, always well disciplined, so Germaine was forever goading me into competitions, sure that his focused determination must win. Emil had been wild in all ways, while clever Ari, the youngest, save Juli—

  My hands slipped and tore again. My toes gouged holes in old mortar. I clutched the iron pipe with arms, elbows, knees, and will, until my heart slowed and I dared resume my downward creeping.

  I had to find Juli. Assuming Pons survived her wound, how long would it be until the madwoman chose to sacrifice Juli for some noble purpose? My sister was not safe anywhere in Palinur.

  Another quat and one foot slipped and dangled free. Rusty metal ripped my palms yet again. I gripped with knees and forearms, kept from falling by one precarious toehold. But my hands could not squeeze tight enough to support me while I found another foothold, so I took a breath, let go, and dropped.

  The cobbles slammed into me sooner than expected, jarring one knee. But I stumbled to my feet and ran.

  CHAPTER 36

  My spine shivered with a foretaste of magic. Searchers ahead and behind.

  Before the searing magelight could expose or blind me, I reversed my steps yet again and pelted into a slotlike alley I’d passed earlier for fear it was a dead end. Muck seeped into my boots; the air stank of decay and mold. I flattened my back to the wall and closed my eyes as white flares pierced the night.

  The maze of narrow lanes surrounding the Registry Tower had become another trap. Every time I headed downhill toward the corner where I’d left Bastien, I’d run into Damon’s search party and their cursed magelights. An eternity of dodging and hiding and I was thoroughly lost.

  What was the hour? The city bells pealed from time to time, but I’d had no concentration to spare
for counting. Now the eerie quiet taunted me. Surely it was near midnight. If he’d kept his promise, Bastien would be safely returned to Caton, though his safety was like to be as ephemeral as my own. Magrog devour your bones, Pons!

  The brilliance beyond my eyelids faded, and I took off down the alley, stretching my arms forward. The slimed walls were scarce farther apart than my shoulders, and high enough to keep the alley dark as an oubliette. Best not think of cellar prisons.

  Aagh! A solid lump tripped up my foot, threatening to buckle my twisted knee.

  My hands flew outward to hold me upright. Gritty brick scraped another layer from the raw flesh of my palms, the pain entirely out of proportion to the injury. Pressing the heels of my cupped hands hard to my forehead, I let my sleeves absorb my ragged breaths.

  “Help me. Sweet Magrog, help me.” The slurred entreaty originated at my feet.

  “Who’s there?” I whispered. No light or voices behind me as yet, but the pounding chase rumbled deep in the earth. Or maybe just in my own chest.

  The mumbling continued uninterrupted: “Help me . . . help. . . .”

  I shrouded a risky wisp of magelight with my cloak and exposed a filthy man of indeterminate age, bleeding from deep gouges on his face. His bloody fingers trembled as he desperately sucked a black paste from a twist of cloth. A twistmind, then. Locked into cycles of self-injury, pain, and pleasure by the spell-wrought paste of nivat seed, he didn’t even know I was there.

  The familiar disgust did not manifest itself. I could not judge corruption. Pride, arrogance, willful ignorance, lust for vengeance . . . who could measure my own sins that had left my family, servants, and young Pleury dead, and Gilles with his heart burnt away?

  But there was no help to give a twistmind. I snuffed the light and stepped over him.

  Fingers of enchantment tickled my back. The faint snap of orders sped my steps.

  Damon had offered me refuge in a house of reflection. Now he drove me like prey before the hunt. Pons had claimed interest in my survival, then proceeded to blacken my name beyond redemption. Had everyone gone mad? Had they killed Pleury, too, trying to force me to run?

  Pons’s lunacy answered one question. I could trust no pureblood.

  A thin slot of flickering light ahead—torchlight? bonfires?—proved the alley no dead end, though the mold-slicked walls closed in so tight I had to squeeze through sidewise. No one of any bulk was going to be able to follow me through there, much less take me captive. As long as I could fit. As long as the flickering lights ahead weren’t a second search party.

  But it was a broad expanse of cobbles that awaited me, lit with torches and populated by the remnants of a dispersing crowd. Knots of men and women lingered in agitated conversation, while other groups hurried into the dozen streets that opened off the square.

  Each of the twelve districts of Palinur centered on such an open yard where all the principal streets came together. The focus of each was the district well, fed by Aurellian pipes and conduits from the deep-buried springs. Here—the heart of the prosperous Council District—water sluiced over magnificent bronze representations of Kemen Sky Lord and his sister, the Goddess Mother Samele, surrounded by their three offspring: Deunor Lightbringer; Erdru, Lord of Vines; and the Goddess of Love, Arrosa.

  But it wasn’t the imposing bronzes that had drawn gawkers so late. District squares also housed a pillory and flogging post for meting out punishments for local miscreants, from thieves to scolds. And because the Council District housed the Registry Tower and Hall of Magistrates, its square also sported a gallows for timely executions.

  Magical vision merged into the scene before me, as if I’d walked into a memory. A man dangled from the gallows, just as I’d witnessed hours earlier. Even at a distance I recognized the Duc de Tremayne.

  Four of the Guard Royale stood watch, preventing thieves from stripping the corpse or mutilating it. And someone else stood close, surveying the thinning crowd. A broad man clad in leathers and sporting an unruly thicket of brown hair and beard. Bastien.

  Blessed gods! A hard knot in my gut untied itself. I squeezed out of the alley and hurried around the dark peripheries of the square to join him. But as if my relief had conjured them, Damon and a dozen men in Registry livery hurried into the square.

  I ducked into a shadowed colonnade. The search party passed right by Bastien, but then the damnable fool yelled and flailed his arms to catch their attention. In moments he was surrounded.

  Mumbling curses, I scuttered through the shadows, aiming to get as close as possible before Damon’s men noticed me. The Registry was not going to harm Bastien right in front of me. I dug deep for magic and readied my pitiful catalog of spells.

  Pons was right about the inadequacy of my training. Working alongside my grandsire, reading a rare codex borrowed from the Karish monastery at Pontia, or walking out with my favorite drawing master on fine days to sketch the countryside had ever tempted me away from boring lessons in common spellwork. I’d never gotten past the childish amusements of void holes and fire, excitements, inflations, and sketchy illusion.

  By the time I got close enough to Bastien to do any good, half of Damon’s men were jogging toward the alley I’d just escaped. Bastien remained unbound and unwounded, ranting at Damon in undecipherable complaint. I imagined words about contract rights and his pureblood property.

  Damon waved the rest of the Registry guards after the others, snapped a few words at Bastien, and then hurried after his men. As the coroner bowed to their backs, untouched and free, I could not hold back a grin. Some ordinaries carried their own magic.

  Bastien strode toward the corner where the Riie Segundo branched off the square. I set out to intercept him. While I retrieved Juli, he could—

  No. My steps slowed. Better if he got back to the necropolis and looked to its safety. And better if he had no idea where I was if or when the Registry came calling. But I would keep my vow to be with him at dawn. Whatever danger Oldmeg feared would drive the Cicerons to the sanctuary beyond the portal would surely endanger the necropolis as well. Then, if we survived it, Bastien, Juli, and I could map out a plan for the future. I felt safer, stronger with Bastien at my side, but just now the night was too dangerous. I was too dangerous.

  Once he was out of sight, I sped down the Riie Domitian toward the Temple District.

  * * *

  A cadaverous young man and a woman heavy with child ascended the broad steps of Mother Samele’s temple into its forest of painted columns. They were the first supplicants I’d seen in my hour’s watching. I ran lightly up the steps and followed them, dodging from column to column to see where they would go, hoping to find the high priestess without anyone taking note of me.

  The temple was replete with sights to awe and inspire. Great bronze cauldrons billowed fire. Statues of the goddess and her minions stood taller than three men. Stone altars, large and small, bore the stains of blood sacrifice, and baskets of charred bones sat beside glowing braziers, where supplicants burnt their offerings. And every lintel, every column sported its impish aingerou, waiting to carry the sweet odors of blood and smoke to the Mother.

  I cursed as the pair knelt before a bronze of the seated goddess.

  A careful circuit of the temple peripheries had convinced me that it was not being watched. But the labyrinthine temple was entirely open to the night air. Where were the priestesses?

  Conflicting anxieties gnawed at me. Despite Pons’s brutal madness, I believed she wanted me to live, just as she’d said. She had killed Gilles and maimed herself, at the least, to force me to run. She had pointedly not pressed me for what I’d done with the painted chest so she could not testify as to its whereabouts, but she could be made to tell where Juli was. And she had admitted that a fourth person besides her, me, and the high priestess knew my sister’s hiding place. To fetch Juli would be to plunge her into my danger, pointing Registry and Albin arrows at her back as well as mine, but I dared not leave her here.

 
It seemed an interminable time before the bony husband helped his wife rise. Before they could begin some other devotion, I stepped out.

  “Goodman,” I said, “where would I find the Mother’s gatekeeper?” Every temple of the Goddess Mother had at least a gatekeeper—a crone bound to answer a Seeker’s questions.

  The man’s slack mouth gaped at my mask. The wife’s dull eyes locked on my bloody hands, trembling with magical depletion.

  I drew my hands into my cloak and bit back rudeness. “It is permitted to answer me. It is required.”

  The woman’s stammering direction led me to an unpainted column deep in the temple. The massive column measured at least twenty quercae in diameter and was chiseled to mime a sheaf of wheat, the heads sprayed out across the ceiling. An ancient woman sat cross-legged at its base, nibbling a withered apple while the damp breeze fluttered tatters of gauze about her birdlike limbs. At her feet sat a basket holding a sparse collection of coins, twigs, bundles of herbs, and scraps of parchment. Behind her, an arch of midnight opened into the column. That’s where I would find them.

  “Naema,” I said, crouching beside her. The title was perhaps overmuch, but the Mother’s gatekeepers were certainly holy elders. The old woman might have been the high priestess herself at one time. “I bring the goddess a problem of mortal urgency. It is necessary that I speak with the Sinduria.”

  “Look round you, chosen of the gods. The wind blows from every quarter. The birds have abandoned the city. All matters of the Mother are of mortal urgency, are they not? Especially in an hour of portents. ’Tis an awful and perilous thing for any to interrupt the goddess’s rites on such a night, most especially”—her bony finger tweaked my cloak aside, exposing my torn hands—“for a male creature with blood on his hands, not all of it his own.”

  Fear seeped from that deep-buried place inside where ancient stories shaped us. This had been the Goddess Mother’s place for centuries before my ancestors had invaded Navronne. I tugged at my cloak, as if it could hide the blood taint from the goddess’s eye.