An Artist's Eye (Dica Series Book 5)
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Yet more silence, its cold air settling to chill Prescinda’s apparently sleeping face.
“So,” Nephril clearly directed towards her, “what be thine own opinion, eh, mine no-longer-snoring Prescinda? What be thine own unique view upon this matter, for thou hath no hope that I know of, being of Dican blood? And of course, know nothing yet of what I must soon divulge.”
13 With an Artist’s Eye
When Prescinda opened her eyes, she saw a mug beside her, standing on the cabinet, forlorn, forgotten, its heart chilled. “Oh,” she groaned, “I must have nodded off.”
“There be a bed made up for thee, whenever.”
“Thank you, Nephril,” she strained as she struggled to sit up. Yawning, she rubbed her eyes and then blinked at the two men before Nephril spoke.
“I would firstly, though, if thou feel up to it, like to discuss what today has brought,” to which Prescinda only nodded, “but before I do, perhaps I ought to refresh thy tea.”
He rose and turned to Falmeard. “And if thou might refrain from discussing what thou each hath seen,” and at Prescinda, “at least until I am back.”
He let the door to the kitchen swing to behind him but didn’t close it. Various tea-making sounds soon drifted through to them, as they knew their own conversation would to him.
“You were right, Falmeard,” Prescinda presently said, bringing him from his thoughts. He stared at her, clearly unsure. “It was enjoyable. Quite exhilarating in fact. I wouldn’t mind doing it again.”
Falmeard smiled at her eyes for they must surely have glinted. “I don’t think we’ll get the chance I’m afraid, not again. Our ascent cost Bazarral three weeks’ worth of ammonia production. It was that very expense that dictated events. It was also why I wasn’t in Yuhlm to meet you. Sorry.”
Nephril came back with a mug in each hand and asked if Prescinda wouldn’t mind moving to the other sofa, “So I may get into these drawers, mine dear,” and he nodded at the cabinet. She moved to the sofa opposite, almost spilling her tea as she sank into the plush but once again cold leather. Nephril pushed her original seat out of the way and bent to the cabinet, unlocked and slid open its topmost drawer.
He carefully lifted out a large sheet of parchment, which he draped across his arm before carrying it to the desk. Falmeard removed his own mug and quickly wiped away the wet ring it had left.
Once the parchment was settled and delicately smoothed flat, Nephril asked Falmeard to bring out the notepad he’d kept so safe in his pocket. Taking it in his hand, Nephril stepped aside, drawing Prescinda from the sofa. She eased past him and stood beside Falmeard, who now looked down at the parchment.
“It’s uncanny,” he whispered and reached forward to touch the creased and cracked surface, but Nephril asked he please didn’t. Falmeard turned his head and stared at Nephril for a moment, a smile growing. “And you tried to deny me the match?”
Nephril said nothing at first, only opened the notepad, reached forward between them and lay it on the desk beside the parchment. He waited whilst they stared from one to the other.
“They’re definitely the same,” Falmeard soon said, but Prescinda thought not.
“You drew eight, Falmeard. Look,” she said as she counted along the herrings on his own drawing. “Eight, but how many are on Nephril’s?”
He gasped, “Oh yes, only seven skyscrapers.” He tried to turn to Nephril but couldn’t take his eyes from the drawings. “So, the city had to be alive when yours was drawn, Nephril, for it clearly lived on long enough to build yet another tower.” He finally dragged his eyes away and turned to Nephril. “Where ... where did you get this from, and how old is it?”
Nephril knew its exact age for it had a signature and a date in one corner, but when he told them, they both exclaimed, “A hundred and sixty thousand years!”
“Give or take,” Nephril said, then moved away and sat on one of the sofas, leaving them to pore over the drawing.
After a while, though, he asked, “What else be different, Prescinda, apart from the detail lavished on mine?”
“They’re taller,” she soon answered, “or thinner, one or the other.”
“They art taller, mine dear, for the artist who drew mine did so from much nearer. We saw only the upper third from the balloon, the rest lies hidden beyond the land between.”
“But,” Falmeard said, “that would put them going on for ... well, a hundred miles from Dica, maybe more!” He stared at Nephril. “How did you get hold of this?” and Nephril smiled.
“Mystery upon mystery, Falmeard. A conundrum if ever there was,” and he leaned his head against the back of the sofa and stared at the ceiling, as though watching it all played out upon its cracked and sagging surface.
He began by telling them that not long after he’d assumed his role as Master of Ceremonies, some two thousand years ago, his new position had come with a particularly strange duty. As Supreme Head of Galgaverre, and the king’s lieutenant, Nephril had taken all authority from the Guardian of the day, and with it a most peculiar key.
He reached into his robes and withdrew a golden necklace, on which hung what appeared to be a glass eye.
“The two of thee are now the only others to have seen the Ege af Dragana since I took charge, all that time ago.” He held it out to them, as far as its chain would allow, and it glassily returned their stares.
“It came only with its name and one instruction,” he said, “that it never be used in Leiyatel’s presence.”
“Used for what, Nephril?” Prescinda asked.
“I never knew, not until recently.” He smiled at her, but then slipped the chain back inside his robes and moved his story on to only a few short years ago.
Baradcar had been in need of adjustment at the time, better to suit the newly growing Leiyatel. All had been made ready for his entry into her lair, as he’d done many a time before, and so once again had found himself beneath the crater, beneath the eye of Baradcar.
“The very place where I first entered Dica,” Falmeard whispered, Prescinda straining to hear, “or entered once more.” Their eyes met and she remembered his and Nephril’s heated argument at the front door of Blisteraising Farm, the year before.
“Indeed, Falmeard,” Nephril said, “when thou did come most fortuitously to Leiyatel’s aid. On my last visit, though, mine tasks were fortunately far easier. Routine stuff. But I came across something that intrigued me, something I had seen many a time before but never really noticed.”
Nephril had been in the honeycombed shaft beneath Baradcar’s island charge, and there had stubbed his toe against a small, white metal chest. On this occasion, though, he explained, he seemed to see its incongruity for the very first time, and so stood back to regard it anew.
Prescinda saw the wonder in his face as he told them how it seemed to stare at him, like the skull of a one-eyed man.
“The pendant ... the key,” she blurted out, making Nephril laugh.
“I forever forget thine own quick mind, Prescinda, do I not? Thou art quite right, although I know not what made me think as thou now dost.” He gently patted the key against his chest.
“It fit perfectly, and once looking into its own socket, the eye silently opened the chest and saw once more what it had so painstakingly helped to create, all that time ago.”
“So that,” Prescinda said, pointing at the parchment, “was what you found in there,” but then shuddered as what Nephril had said sank in.
“But why, Nephril?” Falmeard had to ask, “why put it there?”
“Because it be the one place in the whole of Dica where no man could go whilst Leiyatel lived, not until mine own infusion of her weft and weave. Even then, as sole bearer of the key, I was sworn to deny its use.”
Prescinda stared at him. “So how come you used it then?”
His face hardened. “Mine vow was to the Dican royal line, and only that.”
“Which died out some while back,” Falmeard said with a sly grin, “freei
ng you from your oath. But, what does it tell us, Nephril?”
“It tells us, as I suspect Prescinda be getting near to working out for herself, that this land was not empty when the first Bazarran came ashore from the west. Carefully omitted from the legends of old, it seems a city lay to the east, a teeming city rising from what at that time could only have hinted at being a desert. A clear threat to the carefully wrought blood of the Bazarran, to its paramount isolation.”
“Of course,” Prescinda said, “and that’s why Dica’s a castle, eh, Nephril? Why they had to build such monumental walls. I’ve often wondered, but now it all makes sense.”
She slowly shook her head as so many pieces fell into place. One, though, remained gruesomely awry. Why did that long dead artist’s eye now hang hidden at Nephril’s breast?
14 Of Glut and Famine
Despite the cold, the pitch blackness when they’d doused their candles and the makeshift beds, Prescinda and Falmeard both slept well in the rooms adjoining Nephril’s office. He himself took poorly to sleep, a forfeit of a long life, and so had sat deep in thought until the sun began to lighten the sky.
It was only his gentle knock at her door that brought Prescinda from a surprisingly untroubled sleep, and his knock then at Falmeard’s that stirred her to rise.
She’d slept in her coat but still felt chill as she rubbed the misting from a pane of the room’s lone window. Only the dull, grey sheen of a dew-dampened roof met her gaze, the view beyond still swathed in the night’s own lingering darkness.
A door clattered somewhere, drawing her bleary eyes away from the window, their gritty feel demanding a wash. She slipped out into the corridor, along which she padded to the lavatory. It was locked, the sound of morning ablutions groaning to her through its thick, wooden door.
A knock at Nephril’s office, though, brought an airy call to enter, and the tempting wafts of cooking as she opened the door against the cabinet again. “Oops. Sorry,” she croaked but then cleared her throat. “Morning, Nephril.”
He swept into the room carrying a handful of cutlery. “Good morn to thee, mine lovely one. Sit thyself down at the desk and I wilt bring thee a plate.” He then hurried back to the kitchen, cursing as the sound of sizzling bacon met the scrape of a knife in a pan.
“Hast thou seen Falmeard?” he called.
“I think he’ll be a while, Nephril. He’s always been slow at getting going in the morning.”
When Nephril came in carrying a plate piled with slightly burnt bacon and sausages, she asked, “Is it really an eye, Nephril?”
He stopped - fat dripping from the hot, towel-held plate to the wooden floor. “I take it as such,” he quietly said as he moved to the desk, “for its name, Ege af Dragana, be the ancient Bazarran for the Eye of the Artist, or draughtsman to be precise.”
The fat now dripped onto the desktop where he’d placed the plate before it scalded his fingers through the towel. Prescinda was about to warn that it would mark when she saw the plethora of other such stains, and quietly took up a knife and fork.
“This isn’t bad, Nephril,” she had to admit after her first mouthful, soon foregoing words for eating.
By the time Nephril sat at the other end of the desk she’d taken much of the edge from her appetite. “Falmeard had better hurry,” he said, “for we have far to go today.”
“Far?”
“And I would prefer we were on our way before the steward stirs himself.”
Prescinda narrowed her eyes, a forkful of sausage paused before her mouth. “Why don’t you want Steward Melkin to know about the city, Nephril?”
“Because,” he replied through a mouthful of black pudding, “it may be no such thing at all, but if it is a city then ... well, all that Dica stands for may be at risk.”
“You think there might still be a threat of invasion?”
“Not of invasion, mine dear, but of subversion.”
The door rattled, opened and Falmeard shuffled in, blinking into the growing light from the window.
“Morning, Falmeard,” Prescinda smiled, but he only grunted back. Still barefoot, he’d yet to tuck in his shirt.
“Come on, sleepyhead, ‘tis near time we were on our way,” Nephril chivvied, but still drew no words. Instead, he turned to Prescinda and promised “I wilt tell thee more as we travel,” which made her wary, “for both of thee should rightly know.” He rose and brought Falmeard his own now rapidly cooling breakfast.
“Do you think Falmeard could drive today?” she asked.
“If he can fill his stomach in short order and thereby hath the energy then by all means,” at which Prescinda quietly sighed.
“Oh, and Prescinda, may I suggest thou take yon bundle,” he flicked his finger towards the cabinet, “and change out of thy frock. I do not think it quite appropriate for a sea crossing, even a short one.”
“Sea crossing?” they both cried then stared at each other, lost for words.
“South across the bay,” Nephril grimaced, “but at least on something bigger than what once took me across the estuary.” The thought clearly brought the memory back to his landlubber stomach.
A little later, when they were hurrying down the steps of the college entrance with the dawn chorus about their ears, Prescinda hitched up her oversized trousers. “Couldn’t you have got me something that fitted, Nephril? Look at this waist!” She stopped at the foot of the steps and pulled the waistband out before her.
Falmeard smiled. “Well, tighten the belt then.”
“It’s too long.”
Whilst Nephril cranked the Halcyon into raucous life, Falmeard took out his knife and bored another hole in her belt. By the time he’d finished, Nephril stood by the carriage, its doors wide-open and he grinning at Prescinda.
“Thou couldst well pass for a Bazarran now,” he laughed, “which will be no bad thing.”
She stared at him as Falmeard tugged at her belt, fastening it. “What do you mean pass for a Bazarran? I thought the old enmity had been left well behind.”
“There,” Falmeard said in triumph. “That should do it,” and patted her stomach.
“Perhaps in Dica,” Nephril said, “but we art now upon a Bazarran task, one to take us beyond the castle, a task they art keen to keep to themselves.” He glanced up at one of the college windows and hastened them on.
In no time at all, they’d climbed aboard, and as they roared away, Prescinda noticed a large figure at a window. Its tousled, curly black hair could clearly be seen tumbling across a very surprised face.
“When will you tell the steward?” she asked Nephril, now squeezed uncomfortably in the seat behind.
“When I knowest what be safe to tell,” he sighed, and then they were through the gate and out onto the road south, across the Upper Reaches towards Leigarre Perfinn.
Another bright morning lit Falmeard’s way along wide and well-made roads. He followed Nephril’s directions onto the southern side of Mount Esnadac’s broad shoulder, leaving time enough now for Nephril to tell them more.
“Thou will know little of what I am about to reveal, Prescinda,” he began as the sun slowly tinged the thin, high cloud with the palest of salmon pinks. “Falmeard knows much, much more than most in Dica, but some of what I will say will be new even to him.”
It took some time for Nephril to explain Dica’s ancient purpose, how it was founded to keep life alive in their dying world. “Nature took advantage of our greatest strength, though, Prescinda, for it be also life’s greatest weakness. Not just our own kind of course, although in us it be manifestly more so.”
Life persists through greed, he stated, through its single-minded urge to consume, for it is a good strategy, one that delivers just enough sustenance from Nature’s own harsh denial. It does, though, he allowed, occasionally fall foul of glut.
“Glut?” Prescinda said.
“Aye, when Nature’s own chance happens to lay before life more than it needs, when the going becomes too easy.” He reminded her o
f the plagues they’d occasionally suffered, before Leiyatel had been made strong again, when grain stores could so quickly be emptied by fast growing numbers of mice.
“Until the glut becomes famine and they die in their millions.”
“We became a plague? Is that what you’re saying, a plague on the world?”
He didn’t answer for he didn’t rightly know, but Falmeard did. “Our glut wasn’t food, Prescinda, ours was energy, and an energy that should have remained locked away.”
Both Prescinda and Nephril stared at him until he could ignore them no longer. He drew the Halcyon to a halt and turned to them both, but couldn’t meet their eyes. He stared instead through a gable-gap at Mount Esnadac’s distant crown, now picked out by the sun’s silken light.
“Our own life,” he almost whispered, “and all oxygen breathing species, came about only because the ancient trees before us took so much carbon from the air, burying it with their corpses, deep in the earth.”
Prescinda started to speak but Nephril stopped her with a hand on her arm, his eyes held rapt upon Falmeard’s face. A magpie cackled from a nearby roof, no doubt challenging the Halcyon’s bright blue presence, but Falmeard seemed not to hear. He stayed silent, staring with unseeing eyes.
“So?” Nephril cautiously asked. “What happened?”
Falmeard seemed to awaken, looked blindly at them both but shook his head.
“Tell us, Falmeard. Please. Before you forget,” Prescinda urged, drawing a look from him that almost broke her heart. She managed a smile that she thought might encourage him but his eyes grew heavy and wet.
“Pandora’s Box,” was all he could manage before he lowered his head and wept.
“I think,” Nephril soothed, “I ought to drive from now on,” and gently patted Falmeard’s shoulder. “Come on, mine treasured friend, let us change places, eh?” which they slowly did, Nephril then driving them south in silence.
15 Blood’s Own Past