Ash and Silver (25 page)

“Damon!” Pons waited at the bottom of the stair, torchlight turning her thick skin yellow. My protégé was a singularly unattractive woman. “Do you know what these idiots think to do here?”

“Hide their crimes,” I said, “as you did, my friend.”

Pons's maturity had produced a formidable intellect, and she had performed admirably as our newest curator, as I knew she would. Her connection to Remeni and his cowardly grandsire had been invaluable; her fitness for the duties of her future unquestionable. Never had I known any person at once so diabolically ruthless and so morally conflicted as Elaia Pons-Laterus. I planned a grand future for her. And she was perfect.

M
y heart hammered so violently, it yanked me out of the magic for a moment. I drew a great breath, willed my body to slow down, and dived back into Damon's memory. Into Lucian de Remeni's past. My past.

T
he remaining four of our six—Gramphier the Blood-handed, Pluvius the Idiot, Scrutari the Holy Hypocrite, and Albin the Devil's Insufferable Cock—waited in the cell they'd set up as an artist's studio. The blindingly white plaster that masked the iron walls had taken a month to install. The worktable bowed with the weight of inkhorns, pens, and artist's paraphernalia, the fodder for their schemes. The chair where they'd bound sleeping ordinaries in hopes of seeing Remeni vanish as he drew them had been pushed to the side. Did they not listen to Pons's tales of the man's stubborn righteousness and extraordinary discipline?

Through session after session, slobbering from the potions and magics they used to force him to speak after months insisting he mustn't, Remeni claimed that his magic could draw out a man's soul. He refused to draw anyone who was alive. We could kill him or not, he'd said, but the gods would never forgive him such a crime.

His confusion and weakness had been subterfuge. None of the others recognized it. And none of them had the grit to haul in a corpse for him to draw—which gave him the victory, albeit a small one, as my magic ensured he would not remember it. After six increasingly brutal attempts, Albin and Scrutari, at the least, had come to believe the
vanishing
was a lie. Their illogic never ceased to astonish me.

Let them believe it. The tides of history would sweep them aside.

A clattering in the passage announced his coming. My colleagues, shy of being seen by the jailers, veiled themselves.

The knaves hauled Remeni in naked and chained, his hands silkbound, his eyes blindfolded. No matter how often I'd told them it made no difference, they always insisted he be bound “lest he remember being without.” The imbeciles could not comprehend magic that could so precisely expunge a man's experience. They shoved him to the floor.

“Unbind him,” I said. “How can he possibly do what's needed while trussed like a goose?”

Remeni, head bowed and eyes squeezed shut, twitched as nervously as a twistmind craving his nivat. As the jailers removed his bonds, he buried his eyes in the crook of his elbow. It was hard on him coming into the brightness from the pitch-dark cell.

Unfortunately, that darkness, too, was necessary. Lucian de Remeni-Masson was a stubborn, disciplined man. Breaking him was never going to be easy, and these games in the cellar hadn't helped in the least. I didn't have forever to grind him down and rebuild.

Crouching beside him, I laid a hand on his cold flesh. He jumped, and I sent a bit of soothing magic into him. Not too much. We needed him lucid. “I heard you've been dreadfully sick, Lucian. Is that so?”

Lucian wouldn't speak without magical coercion. He knew the rules of his confinement, and discipline comprised his very bones.

He squinted over his arm, trying to blink away the tears flooding his eyes so he could get a good look at me. The flash of hope that followed was always the most painful part to witness. He couldn't remember how often we had done this.

Today, though, he just stared dully, buried his eyes again, and nodded. Good . . . we were getting close to the end of this business.

“I'm truly sorry for that. We've tried to keep you clean and healthy. If I find your minders have been careless or have maliciously dosed you to make you ill, they'll be soundly thrashed.”

I glared and dismissed the brutes.

“We've a different task for you today. A bit of painting. Some of my colleagues are uncomfortable about their portraits. Small alterations can ease their concerns. No souls involved. No betrayal of your bent. No magic at all, save that mundane sort which lives in any fine portrait artist's hands. And just think, you'll learn your masters' intimate secrets!”

His breath visibly slowed. He was considering it. I wondered if he could manage the work. His hands trembled like terrified rabbits.

“I swear on my hope of a nobler world, Lucian, that once this task is done to our satisfaction, we'll have no choice but to consider your madness much improved and perhaps relent in the strictness of your confinement. Come, stand up. . . .”

His body had not deteriorated as much as five months' imprisonment would lead one to expect. I made sure he was fed adequately and kept free of vermin. Silence and darkness would make him stronger. Physical inaction would leave him all the more ready for the Order's molding. A mad starveling would do the world no good at all.

Still blinking, he let me lead him to the stepstool and the great easel where the man-high painting stood waiting under its sheet. As I unshrouded Pluvius's portrait, the Master of Registry Archives unveiled himself. I wasn't sure Remeni even noticed the man. He stared at the painting.

“Do you have all the materials you need to make a few small changes to this work?” I said. “Lucian! Tell me.”

The prisoner jerked his eyes from the canvas, glanced at Pluvius and then at the worktable. His hand, steadier, poked through the materials—dishes of ground pigments, flasks of oils, resins, and sharp-smelling chemicals, rags, brushes, scraping knives and tweezers of all sizes. His fellow portraitist Gilles had made the selection. Poor Gilles, to be sacrificed as so many others had been . . . and would be.

Lucian dipped his head and held out a hand, palm up, as if to ask what he was supposed to do.

“Tell him what you want repaired, Pluvius. . . .”

I
t was a very long time until I slipped back into my own body, imagining I could yet smell the paint and ethers I'd used to alter four paintings of my own making. But I did not open my eyes or move or give an indication to whoever might be watching that I was yet returned. How could I ever comprehend what I had just witnessed?

Only Morgan's testimony and Bastien's convinced me that the half-mad prisoner was me. How unnerving, how extremely odd, to observe oneself in such a state. Odder yet to believe to my depths that the scene was true, and to have absolutely no recollection of it. Over four sessions in that white room, my art had hidden truth to mask a multitude of sins. I felt dirty. To alter the truth of one's divine bent was a corruption of the soul.

Curator Pluvius, who had been my contract master at the Registry, had told me to erase a symbol of Xancheira's white tree that hinted at forbidden Registry secrets in his possession, and to replace a missing hand, an unwelcome reference to a second bent, excised when he was a child. The genial old man had also called me
son
and
lad
and talked of persuading the other curators that he should have custody of me until my madness was deemed cured. His kind talk might have had some meaning had I not been naked, mute, and half mad, doing his bidding in a prison cell.

I had originally depicted Curator Scrutari-Consil, a small, ugly man, at his desk writing. The official seals of the king of Navronne and the two highest clergymen in the kingdom, already pressed into red wax, lay beside the document. The seals were not
attached
, however, and none of the three men were present—the makings of a royal forgery. Damon had goaded Scrutari to confirm that the document was a false will that named Perryn of Ardra as Eodward's heir. At the behest of his contract master and Prince Perryn himself, Scrutari had executed a forgery that would give a cheating coward the throne of the mightiest kingdom in the world at a time of its gravest crisis. I had obliterated the evidence.

Bastien had told me I'd eventually gone back to the Tower to see the altered portraits, and that a small matter of justice had come out of that visit. Was it the matter of Fallon's dead sister?

Curator Gramphier, the gaunt, aristocratic First of the Curators'
Council, had me remove a bloody dagger with Xancheira's white tree on its hilt and blood on his hand. Together they exposed his complicity in the murder of anyone other than purebloods who attempted true magic—and anyone who came too close to revealing Registry secrets. Gramphier laughed as he told me these things, sneering as he spoke of murdering purebloods, entire bloodlines, and any Ciceron who crossed his path. He knew I'd not remember anything he told me.

None of them mentioned the particular
Registry secrets
the white tree represented. Damon, whose body I occupied, who so freely exposed my identity, my unusual bent for portraiture, and the other curators' crimes, never considered those secrets either. Yet the symbol itself gave me a clue. Xancheira. Were any of these villains aware there might be witnesses to the Registry's guilt yet living?

Lastly, Curator Albin, a ferocious toad-like man, insisted I alter a background landscape that exposed the subtle truth of his portrait—evidence of his connection to the Harrowers hired to slaughter a pureblood family. Again and again I refused, for I had recognized it as my own family's murder. In his fury, he came near slicing off my hand. Perhaps it was the threat of mutilation that made me comply—or simply that I was too worn down to fight. Damon believed I'd reached the nadir of my confinement at that confrontation and expressed readiness to set his plan for me in motion. His thoughts did not reveal what that plan might be.

According to Inek, a prominent pureblood had died for my family's murder. Goddess Mother, let it be the loathsome Albin, who never in all those scenes bothered to tell
why
my family had to die.

At the end of each session, Damon had handed me a wooden token that contained a splinter of silver, and using the identical one in his hand had erased my memory of the men, the room, the work, and the secrets. Each time the jailers chained me and dragged me, uncomprehending, back into the dark. Order memory magic.
Sky Lord's wrath!

“I know you're back,
Lucian
. Is the truth not what you wanted?”

For a moment it seemed the emotionless voice was inside me instead of out, for it was so exactly the voice of the body I had occupied for these untold hours. Damon was exactly what he seemed.

Flesh touched mine, pressing a soft square of linen into my palm. Then the cool glass of the eyewash cup. The smell of the eyeglim's antidote seared my nostrils. The world I knew existed outside of me, while I yet dwelt in that other with a most unsettling conviction. I did not know everything yet.