Breath and Bone

by Carol Berg

  Gildas watched from the doorway. Using my arm to shield the work from the wind, I crushed the seeds with the bottom of the wooden cup. I tried not to inhale as I worked, but by the time they were powder, my heart was galloping. I dragged the lamp close.

  “Wait,” he said. “Before you begin, double that amount.”

  I stared at the pile of seeds in horror. Double…never had I known any doulon slave who used so much at once. “Fires of Deunor, Gildas, you’ll leave me no mind! I’ve told you I’ll do as you wish.”

  “I want this leash secure.” Why would he doubt? Unless Ronila had told him something…

  I recalled his anxious glances into the corner when he took me to Sila’s room…his annoyance that Sila was late for the meeting. He had known Ronila was there. The old woman had not contradicted his pronouncement about Danae males and their need for pain, though she had grown up in Aeginea and knew better.

  I poured out more seeds, crushed them, imagining each as one of Gildas’s bones.

  Ronila had no use for Sila’s vision of regeneration and neither did Gildas. At least for the moment, they were allies.

  I pricked my finger with the silver needle. It was not so insulting a discomfort as Jakome’s knife, but the pain of this exercise ran much deeper than my skin. I would give much to believe that the remasti had given me a higher tolerance for the perverse enchantment.

  My blood dripped into the crushed nivat, the scents mingling. Desire crept upward from my toes, inward from my fingers. “Gildas, please…” My voice was already hoarse with need.

  “Remember, I’ve watched you do this. I’ll know if you don’t complete it correctly.”

  I held the little mirror glass upright, angled so that I could see the fumes rise. Between two fingers of the alter hand, I gripped the length of linen thread, dangling the end into the sodden little heap. Gildas would expect that. But he didn’t know why I used the thread. Thus he didn’t stop me when my last two fingers made contact with the mound. To touch the paste as it heated drew off some of its potency, spreading the infusion over the preparation time. A small difference only, but perhaps enough to keep me sane. I released magic to flow through my fingers and down the thread.

  My gaze fixed on the ensorcelled mirror, as the otherwise invisible fumes rose from the bubbling black paste. Wind doused Gildas’s lamp and threatened the shielded table lamp. Sweat dribbled down my cheeks, down my spine, as dark fire prickled my hidden fingers and surged up my arm. The locks snapped on the door.

  Ought to look. Ought to listen…to refine the lock spell. Ought to stop… But I had gone too far. Even when the damnable mirror glass reflected the ruddy young face and the widening eyes of Ardran blue, I could not stop.

  “Your protector is occupied for the moment, lad,” said Gildas. “Did you not know of his little problem?”

  “What does he, Brother? Is it some pureblood magic?” Innocent still.

  Had I owned a mind or conscience just then, I would have wept at Jullian’s wondering stare. As it was, my arm quivered with the doulon’s burning, and all I could think was, Please, gods, make it hurt more.

  Gildas chuckled. “I’m sure he’ll explain when he’s done. Tell him that Malena’s forked blade can seal the spell, if he can but wait till nightfall to soothe all his lusts together. Then the priestess and I will both be happy.”

  His voice swelled in my ear. “You will be my slave, halfbreed, and I will not be a kind master.”

  Whispers and laughs faded. Friends…concerns…dangers faded. The world faded. Eventually the fumes ceased their rising, and I let the mirror glass fall. As my fingers scooped the hot paste onto my greedy tongue, my other hand groped about the table as if it had a mind of its own. Glass will cut…hot oil will burn. I needed pain.

  The doulon itself carved paths of agony from eyes to heart to limbs. My vision blurred. My back spasmed as if an Aurellian torturer had hung me from his hook and dragged me behind his chariot. Every nerve stretched taut and snapped like drawn bowstrings, launching nets that encompassed every part and portion of my body.

  Not enough. Not enough. Gods…I did not want to be this thing.

  I swept my arm across the table. The lamp crashed to the floor; the oil pooled and flared. The black paste clogged my gullet, slid downward, and seared my empty stomach. Still the enchantment would not resolve, but kept building…waiting. I choked and gasped and shook, hammered my fists on the table, then gripped its edge as if to snap the oaken plank in twain. I needed more.

  “Brother Valen? What’s wrong? Why do you look like that?”

  “Strike me…please…use anything!” Lest I be driven to roll in burning lamp oil or gash my hands with shards of glass, damaging myself beyond recovery.

  Wind tearing at his hair, Jullian backed away and pressed himself to the door.

  “Do it now, boy! Make it hurt!” My heart rattled my ribs, threatening to burst. My lungs strained for air enough to feed the raging power of enchantment. I screamed at him. “By holy Iero’s hand, strike me! I beg you!”

  His twelve-year-old limbs had done their share of labor around the abbey. He broke the second chair over my head. It was enough.

  A bolt of joyless ecstasy shot through my head and heart and gut, wiping clean the canvas of agony, settling the shards of life and mind into their proper places. I roared in release and rapture.

  As ever, the sensation abandoned me as quickly as it had come, and I collapsed across the table, dull, lead-limbed, sick. Only this time my head and shoulders felt as if I had rammed into a tree. And this time it was Jullian weeping.

  Though I could not lift my head from the table, I clung to conscious thought, heeded the crackle of dying flames, the smoky stink of cheap lamp oil, the blessedly cold wind—anything to keep me sensible for one moment. The two gatzi had left the boy and me to enjoy this vileness alone.

  I stretched out my hand across the table, palm up, and beckoned him nearer. “It’s all right, Archangel,” I croaked, near weeping myself when I felt him step closer. I did not deserve such trust. “You did well. Thank you. Just…give me a little time.”

  He tiptoed across to the bed and sat, and I fell into blackness.

  “Brother Valen.” The whisper came from a thousand quellae distant. From another world. I turned my back on it and slipped again into my sinful dreams.

  “Brother Valen.” The whisper touched me again, like the soft pecking of a chick.

  I reached for my wits, caution nagging that I had been unconscious much too long. Mud clogged my veins. Every pore and sinew begged for sleep, and I longed to drag my leaden limbs into a badger’s burrow and hide. From what?

  “Brother Valen.” Quiet. Patient. Terrified.

  Like a rain of sewage, the abasement of the day fell on my head. I located my hand and raised it, hoping he would see I was something awake. Then I turned my face to the windows, inhaling wind and cloud and winter to sweep away the detritus of sin. The sun, fallen far into the west, hid deep behind Navronne’s shroud of storm. I willed it to sear away these aches and guilts as if it were a cautery iron.

  I had no more time for sleep. Soon would come nightfall and Malena. Goddess mother, even after all this, the passing thought of the hateful wench…so ripe and willing…heated my core. I had no time for that either.

  I raised my head a quat or two. Blotted my mouth on the back of my hand so as not to drool before the boy. Which seemed a silly matter now he’d seen my worst. “Are you well, lad?”

  “None’s harmed me.” The terse declaration spoke more description than a warmoot’s worth of tales. Jullian, the scholarly boy who read books I would never comprehend, had no words to explain what his captors had done. What I had just done. So, Valen Lackwit, let anger banish lust and shame.

  “Sorry I took so long to find you,” I said, shuddering as a howling gust billowed the shirt on my back. “Not much of a rescuer, eh?”

  “I knew you’d come.”

  Needing to be still before my skull cr
acked, I lowered my head onto my hand, where a sea star nestled in the grass. “A few matters came up along the way. Some ugly…like what you just saw. Some wondrous…unexpected.”

  “Guessed that.” The bed creaked. His sandals scuffed a step or two in my direction. I felt his eyes on my glowing arms and feet. “Are you a demon?” he said softly.

  “Great gods, no. Or…I believe not.” I grinned into my hand. “I’ll show you later. Just now”—I opened my ears; no one on the stair as yet—“we need to prepare for visitors. In the chest, there’s a bag of knucklebones.”

  He scrambled to the task. Before I could lift my head up again, the canvas bag sat in front of my nose, alongside Gildas’s small lamp, relit from the dying flames of the spilled oil. “Do you know about the others held captive here—Thane Stearc and Gram?” he whispered over my bent back. “They need rescuing more than me. When I heard you’d come, I thought…”

  “Aye, I know of them. We’re all getting out.”

  “I don’t think—” His breathing came heavy and fast. “I don’t think they could possibly—I’ve heard Thane Stearc since they brought him here. Why would they do that to anyone? They’ve kept me just down the passage from his cell. They wake me so I can hear. I pray…” His voice quivered. “I pray for him to die.”

  “The pr—Gram. Have you heard him, as well?” Jullian did not know Gram’s true identity.

  “Coughing. Crying out. Mumbling madness like with a fever. Gildas complains he’s dying and can’t tell them what they want.” Good to hear the boy’s touch of anger. He should be angry. “Gildas says Stearc will open the lighthouse or they’ll burn off his—”

  “Doesn’t matter what the gatzé says, Jullian. We’ll get them home.” I ignored the way the room sloshed like the waves of Evaldamon and lifted my head higher where I could look at the boy, so he might believe. His aspirant’s gown had been replaced by scraggly leggings and a thin yellow tunic, belted with rope. Dirt and grease matted his red-gold hair, and his ruddy cheeks were pinched with cold and fear. But his hands held steadier than mine, and his slender jaw jutted firm, willing to work with a demon to free his friends.

  “Father Abbot would be proud of you, Jullian. There’s naught you could have done to help Stearc. Stearc himself would tell you that. The god knows it, too.”

  I had once imagined Jullian to be Eodward’s youngest bastard, a Pretender to the Navron throne, hidden at Gillarine until his majority. Though I knew better now, he was well worthy of it—likely more so than any of the three men who stood in line.

  “Gildas said I would stay here with you from now on, save when your…woman…came.”

  “We’ve a thing or two to teach Brother Gildas.”

  I fumbled Saverian’s vials from the knucklebone bag, wishing one of her medicines might help what was most wrong with me. I drained the blue vial. If we were going to be rousting dungeons, my stomach would need calming. The prince’s vial I stuck in the pouch at my waist, along with the vial of yellow broom. On the floor the silver needle gleamed in the lamplight, and beside it lay the little mirror, cracked through the middle. The nivat bag lay soaking up the unburned lamp oil. Even shamed and sickened, I dared not touch them.

  “Those things I was using…toss them through the window bars. Quickly, before I tell you different.”

  “What are they?” he said, retrieving them gingerly. “I thought you were working some powerful sorcery. Or dying.”

  “Something of both.”

  “While I waited…I touched you…to make sure you were breathing.” Gods, he was apologizing.

  “The enchantment is called the doulon, Jullian. It is a sinful weakness, a poison that enslaves the mind and body. When I was scarce older than you, I used it to run away from terrible things. But the doulon itself is more terrible than any of the things I ran from. Someone may tempt you to it some day. Gildas may. But don’t allow it. Not ever.”

  I did not watch as he disposed of the implements of sin, lest I grab them away. Instead I pressed my eyeballs back into their sockets and tried to think how to go about what we needed to do. Last time Gildas had given me an excess of nivat, I had experienced recurring attacks of thickheaded confusion for most of a day. Abbot Luviar had died because of it. I could not allow that to happen again.

  “Gildas says you’re to be his slave,” said the boy. “I didn’t see how he could force you.”

  I shoved myself to my feet. “He won’t. Help me with this palliasse.”

  Using the lamp flame to burn through the rope webbing, we unstrung half the bed and ended up with several moderate lengths of rope. I had Jullian pile the palliasse and quilts back over the half-strung frame, using the broken chair to create a hollow like a badger’s burrow at one end, while I rested my woozy head between my knees. Great gods how was I ever going to accomplish anything?

  “Can you tell me what guards watch Stearc and Gram?” I asked from my odd position.

  “There’s always one or two in the passage except when they all go down to beat Thane Stearc in the morning and when they…hurt…him in the evening. Nikred or Crado mostly. Both of them in the day. At night they take turns for rounds, changing at Matins and Lauds and again at Prime.” Matins—morning at midnight. Lauds was third hour, Prime sixth—the dawn hour in summer. “I try to keep the Hours here. I thought…I hoped I might help him.”

  “And this torturing happens the same time every night?”

  “Between Vespers and Compline…when they call the last watch but one before Matins. Crado says they like him to know when it’s coming.”

  “All right.” Slowly I sat back onto my heels. The boy perched on the rumpled bed, two or three steps away, his body a wiry knot. “So tell me how the cells are laid out, if you can.”

  In moments he had sketched an outline of the prison block in the sooty remnants of my lamp. I planted the image in my head, then had him rub it out with his boot. “Clearly you’re a good observer. So did you happen to note the guards when they brought you up the stair earlier?”

  Though his eyes flicked between my face and my glowing hands, he did not falter with his answers. “One at each level. Sometimes when Gildas brought me to walk in the inner ward or to study the map, I’d see two at the hall level.”

  I popped my head up, blinking until the windows took their proper places instead of whirling one atop the other. “To study the map—the big one in Sila’s sleeping chamber?”

  “Aye, that’s it. Gildas doesn’t understand what she does with it, so he studies it when she’s not there, and he has me study it, too, so I can remind him of details he might forget. It maddens him that no paper or pens are allowed here, save the map, your grandfather’s book, and the Aurellian book he uses to interpret the maps.”

  The great map…its luster of age and art and magic…its shifting images…had captured my imagination. I closed my eyes and envisioned the green and ocher washes over the wordless fiché. Made for those who could not read words—Danae, then, or halfbreeds like me and Sila. Just as in the book of maps, Janus’s secrets lay exposed for all to see, if only I knew how to look at it. “Does Gildas say what he suspects about the map?”

  Jullian shook his shaggy head. “Only that the features change over time. He thinks the old woman knows a secret about it that even Sila doesn’t know, and that bites him sorely.”

  A map made for the Danae…but Kol had shown me they could not interpret maps, even ones without words. What would prompt Janus to make them a map—a map that Sila found use for and that held place in the gap of secrets between Sila and Gildas and Ronila?

  I felt the sun slipping lower. Both enlightenment and vengeance must wait, for I’d yet to come up with a route out of Fortress Torvo. “Where did they take you to walk?”

  “Gildas would walk me in the inner ward—”

  “—where half the north end wall has collapsed? Piles of rubble all around?”

  “Aye.” Wind rattled the window bars. Jullian scrambled back onto the bed, shiv
ering, burrowing slowly into the quilts.

  I pushed myself up to a squat, summoned all my resolve, and stood up. In hopes that movement might shift the clay in my limbs and rouse some insight, I crossed the room, raking fingers through my hair, trying to reconstruct the scene I’d glimpsed through Sila Diaglou’s arrow loops. “The broken wall once supported a row of privies hanging out over the court. Do you recall seeing a drainage canal on that end of the yard? It would only make sense…the sewage draining out of the privies into the canal.” Unless the privies had been put in after the canal was rerouted, or no one had considered draining the muck from an inner court that was naught but a well in which to trap one’s enemies and pour down death on them.

  “A cistern sits in the middle of the court, but I didn’t see a canal. If it’s there, it’s full of rock.”

  I grabbed my heaviest wool shirt from the clothes chest, convinced my leaden feet to carry me back to the bed, and dropped the shirt over Jullian’s head. Then I took myself to the window, bathing my skin in the cold afternoon. “Did you notice any grates around the walls? Something as tall as my knees?”

  His head popped through the shirt’s neck hole, his eyes curious. “Aye, I saw a rat squeezing through a grate…just south of the broken wall…at the ground where a canal might run…”

  I grinned as he wrestled his arms into the warm gray shirt and retied his rope belt to tame its bulk. “I know going inward seems an unlikely route to the outside, but it might serve if we can find no better. You can find the way to this yard in a hurry?”

  He gave me his most scathing look. It was all I could do to keep from ruffling his filthy hair.

  Footsteps echoed on the stair. I knelt in front of Jullian and took his cold hands in mine. “A woman is going to come here soon. You must hide in the burrow you made, and make not a sound, not a sneeze, not a prayer, no matter what you hear or think you hear. You’ll come out only when I tell you.”

  He nodded, solemn faced, curious, but not so frightened anymore.

  “Gildas thinks to torment me by prisoning us together, knowing you’ll see what this vile enchantment does to me and what Sila Diaglou intends for me to do here every night. But then, he doesn’t believe in angels or aingerou or any other blessing that a god might send to sinful men. We’re going to show him different.”