Dust and Light (11 page)

Was that all? I had purposely used the undamaged parts of the men’s faces to rebuild the dreadful gaps, just as I could fill in a full head of hair for a woman who had lost hers or make a man’s rheumy eye clear.

“Any skillful portraitist can do the same. Magic simply makes it easier to get it accurate.”

“So, you truly don’t know . . .”

Control yourself, Lucian.
“Know
what
?”

“This one.” He held out the face on top. “I know this man.”

A narrow face with prominent cheekbones and a wide, straight nose—the one whose dreadful jaw wound yet throbbed in my skull. Instead of hair glued to his skull with blood, I’d given him a thick, waving mane to match the beard on his intact cheek, a logical extension of what I saw. And over his bloody hauberk, I’d sketched a clean, well-cut surcoat instead of the filthy remnants of his own.

“
You
chose him from the deadcarts, not I,” I said. “He wore decent mail and an expensive swordbelt.”

“But it’s not from the yard I know him. And I never met him in the
flesh. But whole like this, he’s the very image of the chief magistrate of Wroling, and of proper age to be old Maslin’s son. And that”—he pointed to a badge on the man’s surcoat, an intricate device of a wolf devouring a falcon—“is the badge of the Edane of Wroling. Perhaps you knew that already. Or did you hear some gatzi-fed slander and think you’d put it there for a jest?”

He bit off his last phrases as he might snap the neck of a stray chicken. Though I had no idea what
slander
he might mean, that was surely the source of his current annoyance, not my skills or lack of them. That relieved me. Complaints about my skills would only complicate matters.

The portrait glared at me as if daring me to solve its mystery. This soldier was not one of the two wearing torn badges. This man had worn no device. Which meant . . . what? Why had I interpreted his prosperity with a particular badge . . . as if I knew him?

Bastien’s fingers tapped, his impatience feeding my own.

“Nothing in that courtyard would put me in mind of a
jest
, Master Bastien, even if I knew what you were talking about. And by the time I did this portrait—”

No. If I told him about the pain, he’d just think me whining again. And I certainly couldn’t explain it. So I held to plain truth. “I’ve never been to Wroling nor met its lord or its magistrate nor heard any stories of them. I’ve no knowledge of Ardran noblemen’s badges. You’re certain of its design?”

“Aye. And I’m as certain of his parentage as I can be without showing him to his da. Seems uncanny two men would be birthed so like and not be kin. If I didn’t trust your art so far as a decent likeness, I’d have had you up before your Registry witch already.”

My shivers had waned, thanks to the food and drink and passing time, but my temper was as threadbare as Bastien’s velvet. “Hear me, Coroner, for the first and last time. I will not, not
ever
, deliberately falsify a drawing. My magic, my art, is the only thing—”

Again, no. I would not admit him to my privacy. But I had to convince him.

My fingers raked my hair. “I cannot explain the badge or the portrait’s likeness to someone you know. I cannot explain the girl child’s lily. But I swear upon my dead sire’s name and upon my dead mother’s heart, they arose from no artifice, only from magic . . . or instinct . . . or some blending—”

My breath caught. Was it possible that reaching for the life behind death’s mask had roused some fading ember of my second bent? My grandsire had discovered many marvels with his magic—new meanings for glyphs and symbols, legends that he could confirm only later, ideas that meshed with other discoveries to reveal a story unexpected. And he had often warned that pursuing our shared bent was fraught with the agonies of war, but, stars of night, I’d never imagined that meant
physical
pain. Yet it made much more sense that I could inherit a dead man’s pain by way of a bent for history than from drawing his portrait. And on the night just past when touching the frozen graveyard, I had glimpsed . . . threads . . . threads of vision that mimed the investigations of history.

My face heated under Bastien’s glare. “I gather that’s a strong oath for a pureblood,” he said. “I’ll take it for now.”

Compared to the storm rising inside me, his words pattered like raindrops. In the days when I practiced both bents, I’d felt the streams of magic entirely distinct—history deriving from the mind and art from the soul, or so I had explained it to my family. Never had I been able to merge them for any task, no matter how useful. When I was twenty and a fool, such a skill would have elated me. The blending would be a marvel, an unprecedented extension of the divine gift. But now? All I could see was the most cursed, wretched consequence.

It had taken my grandsire months of persuasion to delay my Declaration of Bent when I turned sixteen and to secure the Registry’s approval for me to continue exploring both gifts. And even
his
tolerance had collapsed at my first hint of undisciplined behavior. Now I was so clearly in trouble; if I were to plead my case to the Registry, try to bring Pons to account for her betrayal, any hint of a dual bent would undercut everything I said. History said that those with two strong bents inevitably went mad. Great Deunor preserve, they might try to excise it again! The memory of that pain made the echoes of wounding no more than the brush of a gnat’s wing.

Bastien thrust the page into my hand. “Copy this, and I’ll send it to Magistrate Maslin in Wroling. We’ll see what he says. Then, perhaps, we’ll both know something new.”

T
he coroner rejoined me in
the preparation room, where I was standing beside the window, wiping my hands with a damp kerchief. The aches in my thigh and jaw were fading, for which I was profoundly
thankful. It had taken me less than an hour to reproduce the soldier’s portrait, as if the throbbing in my own jaw had kept the lines and curves of the soldier’s face ready in my fingertips.

“I suppose you’re quit for the day,” snapped Bastien.

I could not summon the strength to challenge his insolence. “The light’s going. I do better—”

“Yes, yes. You can redo the girl’s portrait tomorrow. And I’ve a number of new subjects for you to work on.”

No point in broaching the subject of the contract. My flimsy hope of getting the cursed agreement voided lay in some Registry curator—Pluvius, I supposed—who could see what Pons’s betrayal meant to pureblood honor. And that was beginning to seem a very flimsy hope indeed.

I stuffed my kerchief in my waist pocket. “Master Bastien . . .”

He halted on his way out the door. “What?”

I’d thought to mention my need for new lodgings, but the wretched words wouldn’t shape themselves. He was an ordinary. He owned me. “At the same hour tomorrow?”

“Every day the same. And wear more of your furs if you’re so thin blooded as to get the shakes. Wouldn’t want a Registry inspector to think I’m mistreating you.”

Wordless, numb, I touched fingertips to forehead.

P
rofound night awaited me outside the walls. Half-hopeful, half-terrified, I peered into the sable winter of the burial ground. No blue threads teased my eyes. The wind gusts whispered no words. Living myth . . . Surely the morning’s vision had been but imagining.

Pride had vetoed such a violation of custom as bringing my own lantern from home; purebloods did not march about the city dangling lanterns or waving torches like linkboys. My fury over the contract had fueled my stubbornness. Laughable, now, that I had thought the penurious stipend the worst part of it. I had vowed to reserve enough magic to see me safely home. The long day’s work might well have undone that vow; without question identity portraits of the dead consumed more of my capacity than anniversary portraits at the Registry. But at the least I’d had sense enough to wear silver bracelets about my upper sleeves—ideal for supporting a spelled light.

As on the previous night, I shaped my desire and filled it with magic. Then I crimped the thin silver band around my left wrist and triggered the spell.

The ivory light guided me across the burial ground to the gap in the wall. Praying that my demonstration of the morning had sufficed to keep the Ciceron rogues at bay, I descended into the hirudo.

A bone-clawing chill had settled in the ravine. A number of folk huddled about small smoky cook fires. They’d bundled themselves head to toe in so many layers of rags and sacking, hats and shawls, one could scarce tell men from women from children.

Nattering, arguments, the clatter of dice, and drunken laughter died as I passed. No one looked at me. No one approached.

Feet and spirit longed to race through the lane, to distance myself as quickly as possible from Necropolis Caton and this, its wretched appendage. But running from a predator only set the beast’s juices flowing, so I kept my pace measured, eyes forward, ears alert, and fingers ready to snatch the dagger from my boot. The clearest answer to my morning’s work would lie ahead, before the path turned upward toward the city.

The arché was waiting for me, as I had commanded, though it remained secure in the grasp of a short, sinewy Ciceron. Red ribbons wove his black hair into five plaits, and the false gold of his dangling earrings glinted in the wavering torchlight. His gray-mottled black beard and heavy mustache identified him as the syrinx-player of the morning. His confident stance named him the headman of Hirudo Palinur.

“Demetreo, is it not?” I extended my right hand for the arché. The left, the wrist with the silver band, I raised just enough that those I sensed closing up behind me could see the light flare in silver spikes.

The Ciceron’s dark face blazed with more than my enchanted light. No sign of deference graced his posture. His gaze slid to the iron grave marker, then flicked back to me.

“So ye grant us the taste of glory we begged,
Domé
Remeni. I am most impressed. And more so that no soldiers or Registry inquisitors have invaded our homely swamp to beat proper manners into us. Though I must say”—he grimaced and rubbed a spot near his breastbone—“I’m like to wear the mark of this sturdy item until Voudras Day.”

So he was also my challenger of the previous day. My pleasure at his bruising was choked by dread that he would not yield. My hand remained outstretched.

He proffered the grave marker, hesitating half a quat before it touched my fingers. “Rumor says Caton’s new pureblood turns his magic to the murdered child was found here. Ill fortune to have such a discovery in one’s own district. The estimable coroner is dogged in his mission and, for certain, no friend of the hirudo. But perhaps you, one of the gods’ chosen, could say him again: She was not one of our own.” Sly humor and brassy posturing vanished like ice in fire. “Child strangling is more trouble than any here would invite. I see to that.”

No one with eyes or ears could doubt the headman’s sincerity . . . or his
ability to enforce such a rule. And it was no mystery that he would be concerned. A constable or city guard captain given a hint of a noble child—much less a
royal
child—found dead in the hirudo would not bother listening to explanations. Blood and fire would bloom in the night, and every one of these people would be reduced to severed necks, charred bones, and ash.

But then why had he turned her body over to the necropolis in the first place? Unless he hadn’t known . . .
With complinations
to the coroner, Constance had said of the headman’s sending the child’s body to Caton—
compliments
, perhaps. He’d been seeking to curry favor with Bastien, and only then heard gossip about me and the portrait.

A fair humor rippled through my skin. Demetreo had likely cursed Serena Fortuna’s whim to the depths of his being when he learned what the portrait showed. Perhaps an opportunity lay here to learn something. The child deserved the truth. And the wound of her unfinished portrait yet stung.

“I could report such a statement to the coroner, as you ask,” I said. “Yet its verity would surely be strengthened by a demonstration of goodwill. For example, if you relinquish this grave marker I so carelessly dropped . . .”

He laid the arché in my hand.

“. . . and if you showed me the place where the girl child was found.”

“Easily done.”

Demetreo motioned to one of his watchers, an elderly woman wearing a bone necklace. She grabbed a smoky torch and led us up the lane.

As if the settlement breathed a sigh, the other Cicerons went back to their business.

My daily route to the slot gate and Caton’s plateau climbed up from the north side of the piggery, where the rocky slope of the ravine supported Palinur’s outer wall. Demetreo, the old woman, and I veered to the other side of the wallow, where a soggy drainage channeled all the moisture from between the two ramparts, including the city’s seeps and sewage, down through the hirudo. We slogged across the stew of snow, ice, muck, and lifeless vegetation to a low embankment thick with leaf-bare willows.

“A boy was out skinning bark for his mam yestermorn,” said Demetreo, pushing through the willow thicket. “He found the dead child caught in the tangle.”

Wrenching hair, collar, and sleeves free of willow snags, I emerged from the thicket to an open hillside of patchy snow and dead grass. Impossibly
steep, the ground rose all the way to the base of the inner wall—the Elder Wall. Not that we could see much beyond our ring of torch- and magelight.

The Ciceron pointed out a clump of disturbed willow withes a few steps away. “There.”

The unrelenting slope offered no easy access for anyone thinking to hide a body. My boots insisted on sliding back down toward the line of densely packed willows. One could have more easily and safely buried the girl in the pigsty or even the muck of the channel. A week’s warm weather would have her rotted beyond identification. Why stow her behind the thicket?

Something whitish caught my eyes near the spot Demetreo had indicated. I slipped and slid across the muddy slope and crouched to see it better. Bark shavings, half-buried in the frozen mud. The boy’s tale was true. . . .

Fruitlessly, I scanned the ground for anything else that might have fallen from the child or her murderer.
Faugh!
Surely such a heinous act must leave traces.

My fingers picked again at the strips of bark, then moved hesitantly into the crescent of trampled grass beside the willows. People, especially those in heightened states of fear, anxiety, or other passions, left traces that were not solid artifacts. The gift to discover and interpret those traces had once lived in me. It might again.
If
my grandsire’s excision had not worked completely.
If
I dared violate his stricture and the most solemn oath I had ever sworn.

Yet what meaning had youthful swearings in the face of true wickedness? If I could use my maimed bent to expose a child murderer, would that not be a virtue to counter any violation? Why had I been given such a gift, only to have it ripped away because I’d been young and foolish, overheated by my body’s urges? Perhaps that punishment had run its course, and the strange effects of my bent in this place were the gods’ sign that I must begin again and use what I was given.

“Is a great sorcerer like you as flummoxed as ordinary folk?”

The Ciceron’s taunt propelled me forward onto my knees. Laying my hands on the cold ground, I offered a swift prayer that I was not wrong and a swifter apology to my grandsire. Then I plunged deep into the cold, dark space between my eyes.

A flash of vermillion flared in the dark . . . an ember, hot and bright.
Blessed Deunor, Lord of Light and Magic, let this be your sign. Empower me.

I sparked the ember with my will, and a storm of magic raced through my neck, shoulders, and arms and into my waiting fingers. And when my hands felt swollen with it, I released the flood into the earth.

Impressions assaulted my senses like a stampede of wild boars.
Leash the threads—bind them!
The memory of my grandsire’s teaching rang out above the thunder.
Tame the avalanche! Parse out your magic slowly, else you’ll have no time to think, to make linkages, to see truth.

I grasped wildly at the fleeting sensations—noises, images, ideas, scents, emotions, people and beasts, sun and wind—and tried to bind them into patterns that made sense. It had been so long.

There! Hunters . . . generations had tracked the beasts that came here to the springs . . . tall grass . . . bare feet . . . spears and crude arrows. Enmity and death had permeated all endeavors here, a swirling cyclone threatening to obscure the rest.

Grasp a thread of substance and collect the stragglers that cluster around it
.

The massive walls. Pride, pain, and elation swelled as the stones rose; devastation ruled when they broke or failed. Magics so large as to crumble cities had been expended hereabouts, only to be quenched by more blood and stone. Anger had been trapped between the elder and newer walls, furies soaked deep as the storm floods that raged through the channel.

But I was not interested in the distant past. I would be here for days if I could not sort out the recent from the ancient, small from large. How did one find the pebble in the raging river, the grain of sand fallen into the ground wheat?

Seek a precise emotion and then trace its source
.

The boy, of course, startled by his discovery. He knew death; all in the hirudo knew death. But this one would have surprised him, made him curious and a bit fearful. Perhaps the victim was not so different from him in age.

Another lesson.
We all believe we are immortal, no matter the death around us.

I almost didn’t grasp it. The scents fooled me—incense, moonflowers, oils of rose and ephrain, the latter a pungent rarity found in bathhouses. But the exotic threads entwined the curious boy and a pattern formed around willow bark and a stained white bundle tumbling downward. . . .

Before I could form a conclusion, the tide of visions receded. What dregs of power I had brought to this enterprise had dissipated quickly and cold seeped into my bones.

“I’m finished here,” I said, rising on unsteady legs. “I need to go.” The wavering light from my bracelet would not see me home.

“As you wish.” The old woman’s torch lit our way through the dark thicket. Arms like lead, eyes watering from the icy air, I could scarce push through the thicket. As willow branches scraped my face and frozen hands,
I clung to the last image: the spinning bundle of white . . . falling. What did it mean?

We reached the channel and the path through the settlement. I trudged through the mud behind Demetreo’s determined back. Almost crashed into him when he halted at the spot where I’d met him. Then, like a latch snapping into place, two clear questions emerged from the turmoil in my skull.

“I detected naught to contradict your story,” I said. “Clearly the child’s death was not accomplished here. I shall report your insistence to Coroner Bastien. But I need to know what happened to her wrapping.”

“Her wrapping?” Demetreo hesitated just long enough to tell me I’d made him curious.

“At some time before her body was deposited beside the willows, the child was draped in a white cloth, yet she was not wrapped when she was delivered to the necropolis. Coroner Bastien will need the cloth. There may have been other garments underneath, different from the ones she was wearing.”

The Ciceron jerked his chin to the old woman. She hobbled away.

Unlikely that the lily dress was here. Demetreo would never have delivered the girl to Bastien if he’d seen it. And the girl had been strangled, yet the white cloth in my vision had been stained with blood.

A spindly man returned instead of the crone and whispered in the headman’s ear.

“There was no winding cloth,” said Demetreo, firmly. “No garments but those you saw.”

I believed him. What I had seen was truth, but not necessarily the truth of the moment the child came to rest beside the willows. Rolling down the steep slope had abraded her skin and torn her poor garments. Perhaps the winding cloth had been ripped off her partway down, the scraps blown away in the wind or buried in snow or mud. Or perhaps it was removed before she was dressed in rags, so none could identify its origin. For I saw no conclusion but that she had been delivered to the willows from above.

All of which led to my second question. One I could not ask of this man, for the asking itself was a certain risk. But I would discover its answer: What house scented with moonflowers lay just inside the Elder Wall of Palinur, so high above the hirudo piggery?