Inkdeath (3 page)

When he saw the blood on their clothes, Gecko turned pale. But the shadows of the Inkworld had obviously left the isolated farm untouched again last night.

Mo almost fell over his own feet with weariness as he walked toward the well. The Prince reached for his arm, although he, too, was swaying with exhaustion.

"It was a close shave this time," he said quietly, as if the peace were an illusion that could be shattered by his voice. "If we’re not more careful the soldiers will be waiting for us in the next village. The price the Adderhead has set on your head is high enough to buy all of Ombra. I can hardly trust my own men anymore, and by this time even the children in the villages recognize you. Perhaps you ought to lie low here for a while." Mo shooed away the fairies whirring in the air above the well, then let the wooden bucket down. "Nonsense. They recognize you, too."

The water in the depths below shone as if the moon were hiding there from morning.

Like the well outside Merlin’s cottage, thought Mo as he cooled his face with the clear water and cleaned the cut that a soldier had given him on his forearm. All we need now is for Archimedes to fly up on my shoulder, while Wart comes stumbling out of the wood.

"What are you smiling at?" The Black Prince leaned on the edge of the well beside Mo, while his bear lumbered around, snuffling, on ground that was wet with dew.

"A story I once read." Mo put the bucket of water down for the bear. "I’ll tell it to you sometime. It’s a good story, even though it has a sad ending."

But the Prince shook his head and passed his hand over his tired face. "If it ends sadly I don’t want to hear it."

Gecko wasn’t the only man who had been guarding the sleeping farm. Mo smiled when Battista stepped out of the tumbledown barn. Battista had no great opinion of fighting, but Mo liked him and the Strong Man best of all the robbers, and he found it easier to go out at night if one of them was watching over Resa and Meggie. Battista still did his clown act at fairs, even when his audience had hardly a penny to spare.

"We don’t want them forgetting how to laugh altogether!" he said when Snapper mocked him for it. He liked to hide his pockmarked face behind the masks he made for himself: laughing masks, weeping masks, whatever he felt like at the time. But when he joined Mo at the well he handed him not a mask but a bundle of black clothes.

"A very good morning to you, Bluejay," he said, with the same deep bow that he made to his audience. "Sorry I took rather a long time with your order, but I ran out of thread. Like everything else, it’s hard to get in Ombra. But luckily Gecko here," he added, bowing in the man’s direction, "sent one of his black-feathered friends off to steal me a few reels from one of the market traders. Thanks to our new governor, they’re still rich."

"Black clothes?" The Prince looked inquiringly at Mo. "What for?"

"A bookbinder’s garments. Binding books is still my trade, or have you forgotten?

What’s more, black is good camouflage by night. As for this," said Mo, stripping off his bloodstained shirt, "I’d better dye it black, too, or I can’t very well wear it again."

The Prince looked at him thoughtfully. "I’ll say it again, even though you don’t want to listen. Lie low here for a few days. Forget the outside world, just as the world has forgotten this farm."

The anxiety in his dark face touched Mo, and for a moment he was almost tempted to give the bundle back to Battista. But only almost.

When the Prince had gone, Mo hid the shirt and his bloodstained trousers in the former bakehouse, now converted into his workshop, and put on the black clothes.

They fit perfectly, and he was wearing them as he slipped back into the house just as the morning made its way in through the unglazed windows.

Meggie and Resa were still asleep. A fairy had lost her way in the gloom of Meggie’s room. Mo lured her to his hand with a few quiet words. "Will you look at that?"

Snapper always used to say. "Even the damn fairies love his voice. Looks like I’m the only person not to fall under its spell."

Mo carried the fairy over to the window and let her flutter out. He pulled Meggie’s blanket up over her shoulders, the way he used to on all those nights when he and she had only each other, and he glanced at her face. How young she still looked when she was asleep. Awake, she seemed so much more grown-up. She whispered a name in her sleep. "Farid." Was it when you fell in love for the first time that you grew up?

"Where have you been?"

Mo spun around. Resa was standing in the open doorway, rubbing sleep from her eyes.

"Watching the fairies’ morning dance. The nights are getting colder now. Soon they’ll hardly leave their nests at all."

It wasn’t exactly a lie. And the sleeves of the black tunic were long enough to hide the cut on his forearm. "Come with me, or we’ll wake this big daughter of ours."

He drew her with him into the bedroom where they slept.

"What kind of clothes are those?"

"A bookbinder’s outfit. Battista made it for me. Black as ink, Suitable, don’t you think? I’ve asked him to make you and Meggie something, too. You’ll be needing another dress soon.

He put his hand on her belly. You couldn’t see it yet. A new child brought with them from the old world, although they had found out only in this one. It was barely a week since Resa had told him. "Which would you like," she’d asked, "a daughter or a son?"

"Can I choose?" he had replied, trying to imagine what it would be like to hold tiny fingers in his hand again, so tiny that they could scarcely grasp his thumb. It was just the right time before Meggie was so grown-up that he could hardly call her a child at all.

"The sickness is getting worse. I’ll ride over to see Roxane later. She’s sure to know what to do for it."

"Yes, she’s sure to know." Mo took her in his arms, Peaceful days. Nights of blood.

Of course Orpheus did none of the digging himself. He stood there in his fine clothes watching Farid sweat. He had made him dig in two places already, and the hole Farid was excavating now was already deep enough to come up to his chest. The dirt was moist and heavy. It had rained a great deal these last few days, and the shovel was useless. In addition, there was a hanged man dangling right above Farid’s head. The cold wind swung the body back and forth on its rotting rope. Suppose it fell, and buried him under its decaying bones?

Three more somber figures swung from the gallows on Farid ‘s right. Milksop, the new governor, liked hanging people. Folk said that he had his wigs made from the hair of executed men and women and the widows in Ombra whispered that this was the reason why so many women had been condemned to hang.

"How much longer are you going to take? It’s getting light! Hurry up, dig faster!"

Orpheus snapped, kicking a skull down into the pit. Skulls lay beneath the gallows like terrible fruits.

It was true that day was beginning to dawn. Damn that Cheeseface! He’d had Farid digging almost all night long. If only he could wring the man’s pale neck!

"Faster? Get your fine bodyguard to do some digging for a change!" Farid shouted up to him. "Then his muscles would at least be some use!"

The Chunk folded his bulky arms and smiled down with derision. Orpheus had found the giant working for a physician in the marketplace, holding down the man’s customers while he pulled out their rotten teeth. "What on earth are you going on about now?" was all Orpheus had said, condescendingly, when Farid asked why he needed another servant. "Even the rag-and-bone men in Ombra have bodyguards to protect them from the riffraff roaming the streets. And I’m a good deal richer than they are!" In this he was certainly right—and as Orpheus offered better pay than the physician, and the Chunk’s ears hurt from listening to all those screams of agony, he went with them without a word. He called himself Oss, a very short name for such a large fellow, but it suited a man who spoke so seldom that at first Farid could have sworn he had no tongue in his ugly mouth. However, that mouth worked overtime at eating, and more and more frequently the Chunk would devour what Orpheus’s maids put in front of Farid, too. At first he had complained, but after Oss lay in wait for him on the cellar steps one night, Farid preferred to sleep on an empty stomach or steal something from the marketplace.

The Chunk had made life in Orpheus’s service even worse. A handful of pieces of broken glass inside Farid’s straw mattress, a leg stuck out to trip him up at the bottom of a staircase, a sudden rough hand grasping his hair.. . he had to be on his guard against Oss all the time. There was no peace from him except at night, when the man slept outside Orpheus’s bedroom, docile as a dog.

"Bodyguards don’t dig!" Orpheus explained in a weary tone, pacing impatiently up and down between the holes Farid had dug. "And if you go on dawdling like that we really will need a bodyguard. They’re bringing two poachers here to hang before noon!"

"Well, there you are, then! I keep telling you: Let’s just look for buried treasure behind your house!" The hills where gallows stood, graveyards, burned-out farms . . .

Orpheus loved places that sent a shiver down Farid’s spine. Cheeseface certainly wasn’t afraid of ghosts, you had to give him that. Farid wiped the sweat out of his eyes. "You might at least write a more detailed description of which damn gallows the treasure’s under. And why does it have to be buried so deep, for heaven’s sake?"

"Why buried so deep? Why not behind my house?" Orpheus pursed his girlishly soft lips scornfully. "What an original idea! Does that sound as if it belongs in this story?

Even Fenoglio wouldn’t fall for such nonsense. But why do I bother to keep explaining? You wouldn’t understand anyway.

"Oh no?" Farid drove his shovel so deep into the damp soil that it stuck. "Well, there’s one thing I understand very well. While you’re writing yourself treasure after treasure, acting the rich merchant and chasing every maid in Ombra, Dustfinger still lies among the dead!"

Farid felt tears come to his eyes yet again. The pain was as fresh now as it had been on the night when Dustfinger died for him. If he could only forget that still face! If he could only remember Dustfinger as he was in life! But he kept seeing him lying in the abandoned mine, cold and silent, his heart frozen.

"I’m sick and tired of being your servant!" he shouted up at Orpheus. In his fury he even forgot the hanged men, whose ghosts certainly wouldn’t like so much shouting in the place where they had died. "You haven’t kept your end of the bargain! Instead of bringing Dustfinger back, you’ve made yourself as comfortable in this world as a maggot in a side of bacon. You’ve buried him, like all the others! Fenoglio’s right, you’re about as much use as a perfumed pig’s bladder! I’m going to tell Meggie to send you back again. And she’ll do it, just you wait and see!"

Oss looked inquiringly at Orpheus, his eyes asking permission to seize Farid and beat him black and blue, but Orpheus ignored him. "Ah, so we’re back to that subject!" he said, barely able to control his voice. "The amazing, wonderful Meggie, daughter of an equally fabulous father who answers to the name of a bird these days, hiding out in the forest with a band of verminous robbers while ragged minstrels make up song after song about him."

Orpheus adjusted his glasses and looked up at the sky, as if complaining to the powers above of Mo’s unearned fame. He liked the nickname those glasses had earned him: Four-Eyes. It was whispered with fear and horror in Ombra, which pleased Orpheus even more. And the glasses were regarded as evidence that all the lies he told about his origins were the plain truth: He came from beyond the sea, he said, from a distant land ruled by princes who all had two sets of eyes, which allowed them to read their subjects’ thoughts. He claimed to be a son of the king of that country, born out of wedlock, and said he’d had to flee after his own brother’s wife had fallen madly in love with him. "By the god of books, what a wretched story!"

Fenoglio had cried when Farid told Minerva’s children about it. "The slushy notions churning around in that fellow’s mind! He hasn’t a single fresh idea in his slimy brain — all he can do is mess about with other people’s stories!"

But while Fenoglio was spending his days and nights feeling sorry for himself, Orpheus had leisure to put his own stamp on this story — and he seemed to know more about it than the man who had originally made it up.

"When you love a book so much that you read it again and again, do you know what it makes you wish?" Orpheus had asked Farid as they stood outside the city gate of Ombra for the first time. "No, of course you don’t. How could you? I’m sure a book only makes you think how well it would burn on a cold night. But I’ll tell you the answer all the same: You want to be in the book yourself. Although certainly not as a poor court poet. I’m happy to leave that role to Fenoglio though even there he cuts a sorry figure!"

Orpheus had set to work the third night after he arrived, in a dirty inn near the city walls. He had told Farid to steal him some wine and a candle, and from under his cloak had produced a grubby piece of paper and a pencil — and the book, the thrice-accursed book, Inkheart. His fingers had wandered over the pages collecting words, more and more words, like magpies in search of glittering baubles. And Farid had been fool enough to believe that the words Orpheus was so busily writing on his sheet of paper would heal the pain in his heart and bring Dustfinger back.

But Orpheus had very different ideas in mind. He sent Farid away before reading aloud what he had written and, before dawn the next morning, ordered him to dig up his first treasure from the soil of Ombra, in the graveyard just beyond the infirmary.

The sight of the coins had made Orpheus as happy as a child. But Farid had stared at the graves, tasting his own tears in his mouth.

Orpheus had spent the silver on new clothes for himself, hired two maids and a cook, and bought a silk merchant’s magnificent house. Its previous owner had gone away in search of his son, who had ridden with Cosimo to Argenta and never come back.