Dust and Light (31 page)

“Just a little way and we’ll be out,” I said, guiding him past a godling’s staring head.

“’M all right,” he mumbled through swollen lips. The poor man’s face was rapidly taking on all the hues of the rainbow. “Not a milksop.”

“Certainly not,” I said. “Keep moving.”

My dread of the journey to come was quickly distracted by a longing for boots. Negotiating patches of oil and broken glass with my bare feet took much too long. We had made it past the now placidly steaming caldarium pool and had started down the mold-slick steps into the drainage channel when voices rose behind us.

“We oughtn’t come down here, Rafe.” A young man’s voice quavered. “None’s allowed.”

“I tell you I spied two fellows atop the stair. Sarat was so sure they’d head for the front gates, he never searched the women’s cells. Man’s got bricks in his skull. The pureblood was down here at the bath, so I’m guessing he’ll come back to get out. Maybe we’ll earn the livery if we find Fal’s murderer.”

Murderer . . . Please, gods, no.

“Oughtn’t be here, Rafe. Goddess looked straight into my soul. What if she comes again?”

“She won’t. Sinduria said ’twas all fakery.”

I ignored the hisses of pain that squeezed through Garen’s teeth and urged him faster through the hot passage and down into the cold dark.
The arguing voices dwindled. The rats clicked and scuttered over my bare feet.

Rafe’s timid partner must have won the dispute, as none followed us through the sludge and the swarming vermin to the desolate spot where Fleure had died. And as far as I could tell none saw me kick out the grate or watched us creep through the drain hole and start down the muddy, ice-slicked ramparts below the Elder Wall.

The night wind whined and whipped across the exposed slope. My bare feet were quickly numb; my hands cut and frozen. A heart-pounding slide ripped cloak and blanket from our fingers, and the bluster sucked them into the night, threatening to wrench us from the slope as well. I kept Garen above me as we crept downward, pressing him to the rock lest he plummet all the way to Magrog’s hell.

Garen mumbled repeatedly, “Please to hold on,
domé
.” Before we’d descended halfway, he slumped into deadweight.

An eternity, that descent, but eventually, blessedly, my feet reached easier ground. I hefted Garen across my shoulders and stumbled and slid down the muddy slope of the lower ramparts, through the willow brake where Fleure’s body had been found, and into the lane beside the hirudo piggery.

Shoulders on fire, I halted to shift the weight. The tortuous path to the necropolis plateau loomed above us in the dark. The ascent looked as welcome as the road to divine Idrium—and just as unreachable.

“Well, well, well, what have we here?”

Light flared from an unshuttered lantern. A blur of dark shapes sharpened and clarified into five Cicerons. So many knives and swords bristled in the lamplight, I might have been a rabbit in a thornbush.

“Sounded like a pack of dogs in the mud,
sengé
,” said a gravelly voice. “Looks more like bumbling thieves . . .”

“Or perhaps someone thinks to dispose of another corpse amongst us.” Smooth. Unruffled. Half-mocking. I knew this man’s voice.

Hands shoved me to my knees in the icy muck. Others dragged Garen from my shoulders. Had they strangled me, I couldn’t have lifted a hand to stop them. All I could feel was relief that I didn’t have to move anymore.

“He’s Coroner Bastien’s runner,” I croaked, my head drooping. “Bleeding badly. Would appreciate a message being sent.”

A woman snorted. “Coroner’s
runner
, he says. It’s
Garen
.”

“Fetch the coroner, Jadia. A small appreciation from his newfound riches
would suit us well. Kalme, Ferde, take the coroner’s man to the commons house. Hercule, wake the barber to tend him. I’ll bring this one along.”

The four hurried off, with scarce a footfall between them. The one giving orders remained. The
sengé
—the headman. Demetreo’s smooth authority was unmistakable.

A callused hand lifted my drooping chin and his dark eyes memorized my face. “Not often does Serena Fortuna allow a Ciceron to see a pureblood unmasked. You appear quite human. Neither monstrous deformity nor divine beauty hiding in half the face.”

The hand let go and my chin sagged again. The wet crawled up my thin hose and the hem of my tunic. The crumpled page bearing my signature had vanished from my waist. A small loss. But my failure was far worse than that.

The scroll case that contained the name and signature of the child murderer had lain a handsbreadth from Garen, and I’d not thought to grab the thing as we fled. And in accomplishing this nothing, I had gotten Garen beaten to raw meat. To top it all, I had taken life, sullying my family’s name beyond repair.

All I could manage was a shivering bark of a laugh. “Indeed. A b-bumbler, as your man said. Most . . . ordinary.”

I felt naked without a mask. Inside, too. The cold settled deeper.

“Come along.” Demetreo hauled me up as if I were Fleure’s size. “Wouldn’t want the coroner to think I’d misplaced his prize. Though tonight . . . mmm . . . you may discover your true place in his regard.” The thought seemed to amuse him.

Mercifully, the Ciceron babbled no more nonsense as he escorted me through his ramshackle domain. Perhaps he recognized that my spirit was leaden with failure and my sight smeared with blood. “Are you injured, too?” The top of Demetreo’s plaited hair might come only to the height of my ear, but the arm, snaked under my shoulder and around my back, could have wrestled the bear in my vision.

“Just deple—”
Idiot, mind your tongue! Remember who you are.
“Just cold. Tired. Wet.” I shrugged off his arm. “Don’t touch me.”

Given a bit of time, a bit of warmth, a drink, I could summon magic again.

He didn’t protest—or laugh—but backed away, spreading his arms wide. His mockery stung. He directed me into a narrow alley.

“So, it wasn’t just a common witness yon Garen escorted down our lane earlier this night,” he said, as we trudged between huts cobbled from wood, leather scraps, mud, and straw. “I was right to discipline my watch for neglecting to identify the trespasser.”

“We were on coroner’s business. Pureblood business.”

“Tell me, chosen of the gods, does the law forbid me to hinder a pureblood without his mask in the same fashion as one full-dressed? For I am determined to press you for more information. I must know whether to prepare for unpleasant intrusions from those who live so high above my little domain.”

His question pricked like a lance tip. The temple servant Rafe might easily report the two he’d seen atop the stair, and if Irinyi’s guards discovered the kicked-out grate, the priestess and her duc would know exactly where Garen and the pureblood murderer had ended up.

Honesty could complicate matters. But then again, I walked unharmed as yet.

“Be prepared, yes,” I said. “Arrosa’s Temple could very well send someone to inquire about a pureblood and his wounded servant tumbling into your lap in the deeps of the night. We were trying to identify the girl child’s murderer, but it all went wrong.”

How had Irinyi recognized my enchantments as fakery so quickly? They were good. I had tested them inside the prometheum. Perhaps it had been stupid to reveal what I knew about Fleure. Please gods the wind had snatched away the document with my writing on it. If I’d dropped it inside the temple, Irinyi could take the Registry a story about a pureblood who had conceived a child, betrayed his promise to give her to the goddess, and come back to use magic in a crime—stealing the evidence of his guilt and killing her servant. If someone was able to connect me with the page, they’d have a real murder to lay at my feet.

My head felt hopelessly muddled. “Does Bastien get his hands on me again, I’m thinking he’ll lock me up for a year,” I said. Or the coroner would be dead and I would be buried alive in the Tower cellar.

“I doubt that. You’ll be in his good grace, if a fiendish bulldog can be said to have graces.”

Now it was my turn to snort in disbelief. Bastien, the
fiendish bulldog
—exactly so. But good grace?

The outer wall—Caedmon’s Wall—loomed huge over the muddy
lanes. Firelight here and there illuminated a warren of huts and shacks built up so tightly to the wall, a defender would have to barge through some family’s hovel to find the steps up to the wall walk.

The hovels that clustered against the Elder Wall were, if anything, meaner. We ducked under a sodden length of ragged cloth hung on a stretched rope. Beyond a curtain of rain, a squat stone building roofed with black slate protruded from the Elder Wall’s rocky underpinning like a wart on a toad. As we crossed a lake of muck to reach it, the building’s red-painted door swung open as of its own will.

“Our commons house,” said Demetreo. He vanished inside. My skin prickled. Was he so sure I would follow?

Soaked and shivering, ankle-deep in freezing muck on a starless, moonless midnight, I stopped to consider that. If the headman believed Bastien had riches to share, then clobbering me on the head as I walked in and making a bid for ransom was not out of the question. Who knew whether Demetreo’s people had actually brought Garen here or had any real intent to help him? No one in his right mind would trust a Ciceron.

Yet truly, I’d left my right mind behind long ago. Demetreo’s behavior had some purpose beyond simple ransom. And if I could regain a bit of power for magic, I could find Garen. I certainly wasn’t going to leave him bleeding in this cesspool.

Filled with foreboding, I commanded my numb feet to carry me onward, through the red door into the den of thieves.

I
f
ever a man’s expectations were confounded, so were mine when I stumbled into the hirudo commons house. Expecting grimy dimness, I found plastered walls and a dozen lamps beaming through panes of emerald, scarlet, and diamond clarity. Demetreo’s pickthieves must have stolen a vat of oil to keep them lit.

Expecting dank and cold, I found a bonfire blazing in a circular stone pit. My frozen face stung with the glorious heat.

Expecting hostile, silent men twirling knives, I found a gallery of homely activity. Two ragged fellows diced in the corner, serious as if the rise and set of the sun depended on their continued play. A younger man, wearing hooped earrings and ribbon-laced braids, plucked the strings of a small harp. A swarthy giant chopped turnips as if the dusty roots were his enemies’ heads.

Garen lay prone on a pile of cushions near the fire, surrounded by old women. One toothless crone held a tin basin, while her twin clucked and blotted his bruised face with a scrap of linen. Another elder wearing a necklace of bones murmured soft encouragement as she peeled the shreds of his shirt from his bloody back. Garen’s mumbled protests had reached a reassuring vigor.

Trying to maintain a modicum of self-possession, I clamped suddenly trembling hands under my arms and looked away, only to find a cross-eyed girl boldly examining me sodden head to mud-splattered legs.
Grinning, she dropped a fistful of herbs into a pot steaming on the hob. My already heated cheeks blazed hotter than her fire.

Demetreo drank from a tin cup that sent out pleasant fumes of clove and lemon. A giggling girl child in a skirt woven of rags offered me one as well. “My granny’s cider. ’Twill warm your bones and vitals and make your eyes keen.”

I accepted the cup, inhaling the fragrant steam with gratitude. Lingering wariness prevented my tasting it right away, for, indeed, two hostile, silent men with blades had attached themselves to my flanks.

A lift of Demetreo’s chin dismissed the two to the shadowed corners whence they’d come. “What happened to Bastien’s man?” he said, pointing his cup at the prostrate Garen.

“A brute tried to beat secrets out of him,” I said just loud enough that Garen might hear, “but he yielded nothing.”

A rain-soaked breeze from the open door announced a newcomer.

“What’s so urgent to fetch a man from his finest dream in a twelvemonth?” A great yawn punctuated this drowsy question.

Slight, rumpled, his greasy hair a wet tangle, Bek the barber-surgeon fixed his charcoal gaze on Garen and the flock of women. “I trust you’ve sent for Bastien. And where’s our coroner’s luck charm?” He twisted around. “Ah.”

Waggling his eyebrows at me, the surgeon tossed his dripping cloak to the cider girl and stepped briskly to Garen’s side. “What in all hells happened to you, fool?”

“Din’ talk. No milksop.”

Garen’s slurred defense twisted Bek’s hard mouth into a cadaverous grin. “I’d never think it. Here, let me do that. . . .”

He took one of the twin crones’ rags, sniffed at it, and dipped a finger into the basin.

“Magrog’s balls, woman! Get me fresh water and make it hot. I’ve told you; hot water will
not
boil a man’s liver. I swear it on the
sengé
’s blessed grandmam.”

I drained my cup of cider. Demetreo might hope for ransom, but he’d never have summoned Bek if he had murder in mind.

From his case Bek yanked out a steel pincer a little longer than my finger and proceeded to pick at Garen’s back with it.

The younger man near rose off his pillows. “Ow! Stop that!”

“Be still,” snapped Bek. “Do you know the Hansker cut their skin and stuff soot in their wounds apurpose to scar themselves? They believe it makes them look fearsome to their enemies. But I’m thinking you’d rather not wear such decoration if we can avoid it, so we needs must get all this mud and gravel out before you start to heal. Might have to stitch up a couple of these. Oldmeg, if you would . . .”

He motioned to the woman in the bone necklace to hold Garen’s arm out of the way and blot the free-flowing blood just above the youth’s left hip.

I winced in sympathy.

“No cutting on me, Bek.” Garen, full awake now, came near twisting his head off trying to see what the surgeon was up to. “No pricking nor sewing, neither. Maybe you just ought to let the women do— Ow! Butcher!”

“Our family healer would recommend exactly the same,” I offered. To my mind the surgeon was proceeding with admirable skill. “She always cleans wounds, sometimes even enlarges them a little. . . .”

But then, a pureblood healer could lay spells to discourage sepsis and charm the skin to prevent scarring. It was the magic in her fingers twined with the magic in her subject that made such healing possible—and thus
im
possible for ordinaries. My face heated. How boorish to compare my experiences with theirs.

Garen craned his head as if he’d just realized I was there.
“Domé,”
he whispered urgently. He yanked his arm from the crone and tried to reach his waist. “I’ve a pocket in my belt— Ow!”

“Be still!” The surgeon shoved Garen’s arm back into Oldmeg’s custody.

“Do as he commands,” I said. Crouching beside the surgeon, I lifted a bloody remnant of Garen’s tunic and found the canvas pocket tied to his belt. “Is this what you want?”

“Inside,” he said softly, even as he flinched at Bek’s next probe.

I pulled the bag open and poked my fingers inside, feeling a faint buzz of enchantment. Ah, gods . . . my mask.

“Good.” What else could be said? The whisper of regret shadowing my spirit was nonsense.

I slipped on the mask made of a dead man’s wrapping. Its enchantments snugged it around my eyes, ears, and the bony arch of my long pureblood nose until it felt like a second skin.

Garen dropped his eyes. And when I rose the lute fell silent, the
chopping knife halted, and every eye in the room save Demetreo’s hardened and looked away. Very proper. As if I had vanished.

Beneath his black mustache, the headman’s lips twisted in amusement; then his expressive chin set the activities of the house moving again. But the talk was quiet and sparse, the chopping less exuberant, and even Garen’s protests buried in the dirty cushion. When I held out my cup to the cider girl for more, her hands shook as she poured.

Fixing my attention on the flames, I turned my back to the others and moved closer to the hearth. Eventually life would move on more easily behind me—a technique hard learned in Montesard.

Why had Demetreo brought me here? He was no benevolent overlord, accustomed to harboring wounded burglars or humbled sorcerers. From our first encounter, his every move had been calculated. He had barred my passage through the hirudo that first night, asking for a glimpse of Idrium’s glory, as if he’d never witnessed true magic.

On that same night my light spell attached to the iron grave marker had failed abruptly when I encountered Demetreo, yet once I’d escaped his snag, it had blazed anew down in the hirudo. That made no sense at all unless . . . Had another pureblood been here that night, working magic for Cicerons?

Curious, I spread my fingers wide before my breast, stretching my trained senses into the unexpectedly warm chamber. Magic! Faint, fragile, it riffled the hair on my arms, teased at my tongue like pepper, whispered in my ears like the drifting disturbance of a dead leaf come loose from a vine. Small enchantments wreathed the fire pit, just enough to slow the consuming of the wood, perhaps, or to send the smoke of damp fuel inerrantly through the dark vent hole overhead.

Reaching deeper, I discovered enchantments on every side of me, each slightly different in the subtle ways that testified to different sorcerers. More than one had been here. Strange . . .

I spun slowly in place as if I might see spells hanging here and there like cobwebs. Was it the lamps? What about the red door that seemed to open of itself?

My gaze roved the dusty dimness above the lamplight. When it reached the wall opposite the outer door, that which abutted the Elder Wall, astonishment swept aside my idle questioning. In the shadows beneath the timber rafters was a small fresco, its paint infused into the wall when the
plaster was soft and raw. The image depicted a black lozenge bearing a white hand, thumb and fingers slightly spread.

I whirled to confront Demetreo, but the headman was no longer present. The others’ quiet activities and banter ebbed and flowed around me as if I were but another hearthstone.

Were Cicerons somehow related to the Danae mystery? It seemed so unlikely. Yet I had sketched a blazon of the white hand on a dead Ciceron’s portrait. And in the Tower cellar, when I had hunted dark-haired, long-nosed Aurellian warriors in the threads of history, I’d encountered Cicerons wearing black tabards marked with a white hand.

Ignorant folk had ever claimed Cicerons could work true magic. Only the children of pureblood parents carried the power for magic—that was a law of the universe as fundamental as the sun’s rising. Certainly what magic I sensed here was weak and crude, nothing at all like the bent, yet it was far more than trickery. And though a talent for simple spellcasting was a rare possibility in first-generation halfblood children—those like Eodward’s bastard youngest son, Prince Osriel, whose mother was pureblood—it would be wholly absent in any descendant. Proven time and again through generations: Interbreeding with ordinaries destroyed the gods’ gift. Which meant purebloods or halfbloods had worked these spells. Did Cicerons make a habit of sheltering renegade sorcerers?

I turned back to the fire. Every pureblood was under obligation to report instances of true magic where it had no cause to be. If Demetreo had sheltered a
recondeur
, every life in the hirudo was forfeit. I didn’t want to know.

My cowardice did not escape me. Had my questions arisen before donning the mask, before all these people knew what I was, I might have mustered the words to inquire what some of them knew of the history of this place or their lamps or the red door. I might have asked if anyone had heard the term
Path of the White Hand
. But the mask returned me to my proper place, and it was not in me to break the barriers it created.

The red door opened yet again to the pounding rain. Two newcomers ducked through the doorway, a lean, hard-faced woman in leather jaque and breeches, wringing water from her wet hair, and Bastien.

The coroner hurried across the chamber, sparing no glance for anyone but Bek and his patient. “Tell me.”

“He’ll be dancing your bidding in a day or three,” said the surgeon without looking up, sounding wholly unsurprised to find Bastien at his
side. “Give me half an hour to stitch up this hole in his side, and you can haul him off to the domain of the dead. To work, naturally . . . or whatever else might take his mind off his wounds. Carefully, I would suggest.”

The hard-faced woman rolled her eyes, snatched a tin cup from a shelf, and joined the cider girl, who was refilling her pot from a barrel. The lute player, who had been studiously polishing his instrument, met the glance of the turnip chopper. They lifted their eyebrows in a unity of amusement.

The source of their jollity escaped me, right along with patience. I was happy to hear Garen would be well. And Bastien’s concern for Garen spoke well of a man I was just beginning to know. But he would understand the significance of the white hand and would be better at the inquiries than I. “Coroner Bastien—”

“Errrggh!” Garen’s pain leaked around a stick they’d placed in his mouth.

Bek’s steady hands poked a needle into the tender flesh between the runner’s hip and waist. He drew and knotted the stitch . . . without spells to ease it. And again . . .

My arms clenched my middle.

“Easy, bonecracker!” Bastien knelt beside the makeshift couch. From his expression, one might think the surgeon was stitching the coroner’s own flesh.

All were silent, respecting the wounded man’s pain.

“Done,” said the surgeon at last, sitting up and twisting a cramp out of his shoulders. “Does the estimable Constance have an onion or three tucked away, do you think, Coroner? I’ll vow she knows how to make an onion poultice, woman of many talents as she is. That would do as well as anything I’ve got to stave off sepsis. So near the gut isn’t a place you want rot to set in.”

“I can get onions.”

“Won’t smell nice, though, will he?” Bek grinned, nudging the coroner with his elbow. Bastien looked as if he might strike him.

Which flummoxed me.

Bek cleaned his tools, while Oldmeg blotted away blood and tied a strip of linen over the angry wound. The activities of the room resumed. Bastien noticed none of it. The coroner laid his wide hand on the runner’s battered cheek and whispered something I couldn’t hear. Garen gave a hoarse croak that might have been a laugh and fumbled about until his
slender hand lay atop Bastien’s. Then he opened his dark eyes and locked the coroner with a smoky gaze as could speak a vault full of secrets.

I caught my breath, understanding naming me a flat and utter fool. Even my sheltered experience of the wide world testified that theirs were neither the touch nor look of mere friends or even blood-kin.

My education in Montesard had encompassed many things. In one of my tutorial groups a quiet, well-favored young man was ever in close company with another man, their touch and conversation distinctly intimate. I had heard rumor of such relations, but never witnessed it. The university abruptly dismissed the two young men for indecent behavior, so it seemed the ordinary world disapproved. My parents had never mentioned such things, which implied the same.

I’d never quite decided what I thought. Though the exact mechanics remained a mystery and speculation left me queasy, I had wondered if such practices might provide a humane solution for older, unmarried pureblood men, who must live forever subject to the Registry’s strict breeding laws. Clearly no children could result. But this . . .

Bek rose, swiped his brow with his sleeve, and yawned. “Anyone else need a swab or a stitch?”

No one responded, save the cider girl, who brought the surgeon a cup that he emptied in one long swallow.