A Summoning of Demons

by Cate Glass

  “You search left; I’ll go right,” said Placidio as we reached the bottom and drew our blades.

  “Need help for that search?” mumbled one of the bundled beggars from the bottom step.

  “Three coppers’ll get you decent help for sneaking,” said the one next to him. “If you’re wanting assistance on the water, you needs must look elsewhere.”

  I spun to see, not daring to believe …

  “Aye,” said Placidio, throwing his head back in a silent crow. “Come along, you two brutes. We’ll test your skills right enough.”

  * * *

  We sat on empty casks at the end of a plank table at the Goblin Bait, far from listening ears. In that hour the Goblin Bait’s ale tasted like the Shadow Lord’s wine, no matter that it looked like something scooped from the puddles in the lane—and might have been. The partners of the Chimera were together in the Bottoms of Cantagna.

  Certain, Bottoms was entirely appropriate. The air of the seedy alehouse was so dense with grease and smoke we could hardly see each other. Not that any of us were much to see. Neri and Dumond were miserably wet, though they insisted that the blood in the puddles underneath them was not their own.

  “So it worked.” Neri’s question popped out first. “Dono sent the demons into you and then threw you in the river?”

  “The two of them—Dono and Livia—gave me the toss.” The acrid aftertaste of the ale had me coughing out my affirmation. And then I sneezed. A great deal of water had gone up my nose. “I saw there was no boat. Went half crazy. Came near drowning. It didn’t seem so far to fall when I was thinking about it, but I’ll swear I grazed my head on the riverbed.”

  Neri leaned forward, disappointment crushing his eagerness to rubble. “So Teo wasn’t—?”

  “So you knew the truth, like this one!” I said, jabbing an elbow into Placidio.

  Neri blew an ale-soaked exhale. “Couldn’t believe it when Swordmaster told me it was possible. Almost couldn’t do what needed done down by the river, neither. I wasn’t lying about how bad he was.”

  “You were stronger than me,” I said. “I could never have let the river take him. Yes, he was there. I don’t know that my plan would have worked without. Certain, I could never have stayed under so long, so deep, or swum so fast.…” The powerful sensation of the rushing water flooding around and through me came back for a moment, forcing me to a breathless pause. “I never actually saw him, nor even heard him until he left me. But what of you three? What happened?”

  “Thought Papa Dumond and I were done for,” said Neri. “After we left the tower, a sniffer caught my trail on the riverside path and hauled us out of the boat. The nullifier smacked us around some, then dragged us up where all the philosophists and praetorians were.”

  “Saw that,” said Placidio. “Couldn’t get to you.”

  “Dono and Livia vowed we weren’t the snatchers,” said Dumond, as if the marvel of it was still new. “And—”

  “Livia said the snatch-crew were pale-skinned Invidians,” Neri burst in, “and that must be why they sent Nis to do the talking. And then she went on and on about how dreadful the place was—though she couldn’t describe it—and how the ‘scurrilous villains only wanted the money’ and were so devious as to take advantage of all the hullaballoo about the Cavalieri. I thought old Bastianni was going to toss her into the river.”

  Neri gulped another half mug of ale. “And then somehow the sniffer changed its mind about me, like it lost the trace. Brought in two more, and they didn’t mark us neither. The nullifiers wanted to chain us up anyways, but Dono said they had to let us go, as he’d ‘not see the integrity of the Defenders of Truth besmirched’ out of vengeance over his own abduction. Besmirched … can’t you just imagine it? What a prig he is … and yet, gods’ truth, what he went through for those hours!”

  Neri’s effusive tale telling was amusing, but the meat of the story wasn’t lost on me. “A sniffer changed its mind after pinpointing a sorcerer,” I said. “How is that possible?”

  “The luck charms?” said Dumond. “It’s what we’ve hoped.”

  Or maybe Dono could not only hear the demons inside sniffers … but respond or suppress or divert. I wasn’t sure that skill would be worth the plague of hearing them.

  “They didn’t even get around to ferreting out our real names,” said Neri, his enthusiasm undamped. “It was as near as I ever want to get to getting caught. Dono and Livia saved us.”

  “We should keep our stories for Vash,” said Dumond, rising from his splintery stool. “Doubt if she’s slept in four days, and how she got all the goods to that stair has got to be a story of its own. Can’t say I want to venture city gates right now, but I’m thinking we could go around outside the walls and meander through that Bastianni mausoleum again. For me, that’s not so far from home.”

  Certain, we had some thinking to do. Our relief at being free, relatively unscathed, and—on my part—of relatively sound mind could not mitigate our uncertainty about what we had accomplished. Was the Villa Giusti pérasma spring truly free of demons? Would Livia’s scheme to sour the pool prevent more of them roosting should any come drifting by? And our two marks … what would become of them? Would Dono truly challenge his father? And what would we do about Director Bastianni who had now seen Dumond and Neri, false names or no? If I had a spymaster to whom I must report, I’d have no idea what to tell him of our mission.

  “Go home, Dumond. Certain, you should spend time with Vashti and the girls,” I said. “We should all get some sleep. Stay apart until things cool down a bit, as we’ve done before. Maybe then we can make some sense of what we’ve done.”

  We agreed to meet at Dumond’s the next evening at the Hour of Contemplation if all seemed well.

  Avoiding the Avanci Bridge, we took the long way around through the Bottoms to its partner, the Vinci. Once we were back cityside, Dumond split off, taking the main road that led around to the north side of the city. Placidio, Neri, and I took the riverside path upriver, a shorter route for the three of us to get home. Neri and I walked together; Placidio followed well behind. Gardia patrols were thick along the river path.

  We decided it was too risky to fetch what might be left of the ransom atop the Avanci Tower, but we did take a few careful moments to clear the hidden stair. Vashti’s two large canvas bags crammed with rope and bandages, sponges, ale flasks, and our wet and bloody clothing would provide us a good cover as scavengers, and il Padroné would find nothing untoward should he care to stroll the bridge privately any time soon.

  Neri left us at the South Gate. He wanted to stop by the Duck’s Bone and meet up with a friend. Food and ale, I guessed. Maybe the friend was a bed partner. With difficulty I refrained from any and all sisterly warnings.

  I was happy to walk on with Placidio. He planned to sleep at the woolhouse. He was always cautious at reentering his life after a mission, concerned that someone who had seen him fight might make a connection with Placidio di Vasil, the duelist.

  The closer I got to the River Gate that would take me home, the slower I walked. When it came time for me to turn, Placidio paused, but I walked straight onward. The night was cool, but not unnaturally chilly. The moon was setting, abandoning the sky to brilliant stars. I needed no light to find the familiar track to the woolhouse.

  “You’re not wanting to sleep, I’m thinking,” said my companion, rejoining me.

  “Don’t want to dream.”

  “’Twas a brave thing you did tonight,” he said.

  “All of us—”

  “We did our parts, but you risked your life, your mind, everything. If those two children have any sort of sane, honorable life ahead of them, it’s you they’ve to thank. And here—” He dug in his waist pocket and laid a slip of metal in my hand. “Told you I’d give it back when you were back safe.”

  I needed no light to recognize my luck charm either. I had decided that if our theories were correct that the luck charm protected us from sniffers because
they somehow shielded us from the demon inside that sniffer, then I’d best not have it on me when Donato sent a horde of demons my way. The scheme had worked, so perhaps we were right.

  Placidio hadn’t argued with the logic. He had been quiet over these past days … standing stalwart to the side, guarding our backs, unsurprised as we unraveled the mysteries of demons and myth.

  “You knew about the triangle symbol, didn’t you?” I said. “You knew about it long before Dumond gave you a charm.”

  We walked a little farther before he answered, guarded as ever, when we drew near the mysteries of his own past.

  “I’d seen it. Didn’t know its meaning, or whether it bore any power of its own, only that it was the sign of the Vodai—the mages of the water—the Timeless Watch.”

  What had Teo said when telling the story of his family? They had offered the world their own future to maintain Macheon’s prison. “The Watch … They guard the Enemy, maintain the protections that confine him.”

  “Aye.”

  “That means, if Teo came here last spring to find the Antigonean Bronze—the statue of Atladu and Dragonis—as we surmised, then it must play a part in those protections.”

  “That would be a logical conclusion. I know naught of what that might be.”

  Placidio had told me that he once lived near the sea and knew a woman from the Isles of Lesh. He’d said she had the skin markings and skills similar to Teo’s.

  “The woman you knew from Lesh, she was a Guardian like Teo.”

  “She was a Guardian, but not like Teo. He is … more.”

  “And she?”

  “She was my mother.”

  I inhaled sharply, but did not press. He had given me a gift that he knew would distract me from the lowering clouds of my dreams. My best thanks for that gift would be waiting until he was ready to give more.

  “We have to see Donato and Livia again,” I said, after a while. “I need to remove their memory of Teo. Nothing we’ve done tonight will undo Dono’s link to Macheon. And who knows what Livia believes or will write or say when she is ready? We can’t have them remembering anything about Vodai Guardians.”

  “I think that would be very wise. Tomorrow night—well, tonight it would be—after the day to let things settle a bit in the Villa Giusti, we could have Neri pay Dono a visit and arrange a meeting. By that time Dono should know his situation better and perhaps the status of the pérasma.”

  We walked a little farther, past the old docks where I’d first pulled Teo from the water. I slowed, hesitating. “I should head for home.”

  “If you would sleep better with a body nearby, come along to the woolhouse. Go home in the morning.”

  Though I felt a bit foolish, I did exactly that.

  29

  LIVIA’S BIRTHDAY

  LATE AFTERNOON

  By the time I woke, afternoon sunlight poured through the woolhouse doorway and Placidio was gone. He’d laid his ugly robe over me. A filled mug of salt-and-ginger tea and a decent dagger lay where I could not miss them when I woke. Livia’s fine Lhampuri blade had been lost after my attack on Bastianni.

  I’d had no dreams that I could recall, and the air felt cool and the sunbeams pleasantly warm—good signs that the Enemy had not snuck into my sleep and raised the fire in my blood. I had felt a door close between Malcheon and me as Teo propelled me through the river. I wouldn’t fool myself that it would stay closed forever, especially when I used my magic. But my friend the Vodai’s lessons had stood me well and I would practice them every day of my life.

  Holding my nose, I downed the awful lukewarm tea; though I’d never admit the fact to Placidio or Neri, it did return a bit of stamina after a rough stint of activity. Only when I’d drained the cup and wiped it out did I notice a fold of parchment tucked under the knife sheath. My scribe’s eye identified it as fine parchment.

  I snatched it up. Evidently Placidio or Neri had checked message box number six while I slept. It was admirable restraint that they’d not broken the plain red seal, but they certainly should have waked me to do so. They knew who’d likely sent it. One glance at the familiar script affirmed my guess.

  To the Chimera: I was notified in the dark hours of the successful ransom exchange for my vicino-figlia and the young man to whom she is contracted in marriage. I was gratified that they are seemingly unharmed. I was also told that the villains who snatched them from their beds by such extraordinary means were not apprehended. One, a woman, fell from the bridge. This outcome concerns me greatly.

  Although I’ve as yet had no chance to speak to the two young victims since their return, I have it on good authority that discrepancies have arisen concerning the marriage contract and that the nuptials are indefinitely postponed. Perhaps not forever, though, as the young woman has accepted the gracious offer of protection by the gentleman and his family.

  I would very much like to discuss these matters with you. I will be taking coffee at a favorite Garden spot this evening at the Hour of Contemplation.

  So, one question answered. They weren’t married. Yet.

  I believed Dono would keep to his bargain if his position was secure as he had hoped. But we didn’t know that for certain. The discrepancies Sandro mentioned could result from a challenge or from the questions I’d raised about the contract’s timing. Which meant I had no idea if Livia had chosen to stay on. Her continued residence at Villa Giusti might be a result of the family courtesies Donato specified as necessary for their safety or simply because Director Bastianni had decreed it so.

  We needed to speak to Donato and Livia in person.

  Pocketing the note, I leapt to my feet, strapped on the dagger, and headed for the city and home. I would rid myself of the river stink, find out where everyone was, and dispatch Neri to contact Dono. At sometime after the Hour of Contemplation, I would meet Sandro at his favorite bench in the Ucelli Gardens. Not so much to ease his concerns about my welfare. He needed to hear what I had to tell.

  * * *

  I’d scarcely had time to wash and dress when Neri burst through our door. “You’ve got to come now, slugabed! It’s Donato and Livia!”

  “What? What’s happened?” Every sort of vision cascaded through my head, from a forced wedding processional through the Heights to the two being paraded in chains to the ship that would take them to the Executioner of the Demon Tainted.

  “I paid Dono a visit. Swordmaster said you’d talked about it.”

  “What? In the middle of the afternoon? How stupid—” I bit my tongue. “Go on.”

  “I figured he’d be sleeping late, like all the rest of us. And he was. I fixed on his signet, the one he wears around his neck, and sure enough I was able to walk right into his bedchamber.” He rolled his eyes. “And yes, I made sure no one was in there watching over him.”

  “So he’s all right. Not chained up or—”

  “Nah. He says they are both all right. He’s being watched close, but he thinks his da believes the snatch and the exchange. I told him we wanted a parlay, and he said the two of them—and lots more people—would be in the Ucelli Gardens at the Hour of Gathering. Then someone tapped on the door and I had to get out.”

  “The Ucelli Gardens!”

  “Aye. Il Padroné is honoring Livia with a birthday celebration. Evidently no one at the villa wanted it—not even Livia, who’s never even met him—but of course, it’s il Padroné…”

  “… and even Director Bastianni daren’t say no. You didn’t—”

  Neri’s glare spoke clearly. He knew what I was going to say.

  “Certain, you knew better than to mention il Padroné’s role in all this,” I said, swallowing my question. “I do trust you, little brother. You are the spark that makes the Chimera work. You have leave to glare at me and roll your eyes anytime I forget that. Old habits are hard to shake.”

  Neri brayed like a donkey and proceeded to devour all the sausage in our larder while I gave thought to how to work this plan. I couldn’t use a true
impersonation; they would have sniffers everywhere about the gardens. Two episodes of memory-replacement magic would be quite risky enough for one evening. Besides, I wasn’t sure I was ready to breach the Singular Wall so blatantly as yet. Another requirement, I had to go alone to the celebration. Director Bastianni had seen Placidio last spring when we played archaeology scholars in front of the Public Arts Commission, and he’d seen both Dumond and Neri on the bridge. So I couldn’t bring any of them safely.

  “Tell the others I’m doing this one myself. And with no magic save for the memory adjustments. They’ll know why. I’ll make it quick, but it would be well if I had reinforcements available. The Gardens have three gates.”

  “Got it,” said Neri. “And I won’t tell you to be careful and don’t do anything loony, even though I feel the need to get in the habit of it.”

  I shoved him out the door so I wouldn’t see his smirk.

  So, what to wear? I’d believed I was done with intrigue for a while. But this venture could provide answers to our most important questions about Livia and Dono and the pérasma. And then I could stroll across the lawn to a very particular secluded bench and have a conversation with the Shadow Lord. I did not explore my sense of relief to know that the birthday celebration made his choice of the Ucelli Gardens for our assignation a logical convenience. Better a reasoned choice than some pointed reminder of us two drinking coffee on that particular bench.

  * * *

  The Hour of Gathering. The time for fortunate families to light the lamps at home … to make food … drink wine. The time to end arguments. To make music. The time when day markets closed and night markets opened, and when the destitute could stand quietly in the lanes where sellers might discard withered fruit or meat that could not last through a warm night.