Scholar of Decay (32 page)

Louise smiled as the door slammed behind him. “As Grandpapa always told us, the best defense is an ambush.” It was a useful lesson. Jacqueline had applied it to their grandfather, and now Louise was about to apply it to Jacqueline.

Humming a popular dance tune, she lowered herself back onto the chaise and arranged her skirts around her ankles. Obviously this figurine was very important to the wizard. She was even more strongly convinced that it remained her best bit of leverage.

“Perhaps now that the danger has been defined,” she said thoughtfully to herself, “and the parameters for safety have been established, I’d best become more personally involved.”

Shaking his head, the boatman watched Aurek stagger across the esplanade and up the front stairs of the townhouse. Something
bad, something very bad, had happened in the Narrows. He didn’t know what, and his employer wasn’t talking, but the man he’d let off in the early morning was not the same man he’d picked up in the late afternoon.

Sometime during the day, Aurek Nuikin had been broken and just barely put back together again. The boatman had never considered himself an imaginative man—imagination was usually a liability in Pont-a-Museau—but it seemed to him that the wrong word would shatter his employer into a thousand pieces. He could almost see the cracks.

“I guess book learning’s no protection after all,” he muttered, pushing out into the river and turning his boat toward home.

The door opened as Aurek reached it, and he stumbled into the entryway, only Edik’s hastily outstretched arm keeping him from falling on his face. Fingers tight around the servant’s arm, Aurek looked wildly about and muttered, “Can’t you hear him? He hasn’t stopped laughing since I entered the workshop. He laughs and laughs and laughs and …”

“Master!” Edik’s voice cut off the flow of words. “There is no one laughing.”

Aurek sighed and pushed himself erect. “He’s laughing. And why shouldn’t he be? There’s nothing left in the workshop; all of it was destroyed. No book. No spell. No freedom. No redemption. I wanted to die when I saw it, Edik. I wanted to die, but I can’t. I can’t give up, because my Natalia is trapped in horror and I am responsible. I’m as trapped as she is, and I only hope her horror is less than mine.” All at once, he clapped his hands over his ears. “I could go on if only he’d stop laughing!”

Edik closed his hands around Aurek’s wrists and pulled them
away. He could see the challenge in other man’s eyes, and he ignored it. “You need food, master. And rest. But first, you need a bath.”

With no denial to fight, the laughter dimmed. Aurek drew in a long, slow breath and savored the absolute normalcy of Edik’s words. “A bath,” he agreed weakly. “Yes.” Ever since he’d seen the destruction of the workshop, he’d felt as though he were falling. Finally someone had thrown him a line. He was still in a pit, dark and grim and echoing with malicious glee, but at least he wasn’t falling anymore.

He allowed Edik to help him up the stairs, strip off his sodden, stinking clothes, and wrap him in a robe. He watched dully through the open door of his bedchamber as the house servants filled the hip bath, and he sank into the hot, scented water with something very like relief. As Edik cleaned old wounds and investigated new bruises, Aurek drifted, obeying instructions—“Lean forward, sir.” “If I could see your finger, sir.” “Please, sir, close your eyes while I rinse your hair.”—but refusing to think. To remember.

But eventually he was clean and dry and fed, and it was time to face his failure once again. As though it had been waiting for his return, fully aware that there could be no real escape, the laughter grew louder.

“Master?”

One hand already on the study door, he was stopped by Edik’s voice.

“There’s something you should know.”

The laughter reached a crescendo.

Struggling to control his rage, Aurek reached out and gently touched the imprisoned spark of Natalia’s life. It felt no different
than it ever had, no different than it had the day he’d crawled across his study floor and clasped the figurine in both shaking hands. He had to assume that the day’s events had left her safe and unharmed. He had to assume that, because if even for an instant he thought differently, he’d lose his final grip on sanity.

Opening his eyes, he traced the perimeter of the maze spell with trembling fingers, smoothing over the disruption the wererat’s death had made in the pattern.

Not until he had fully reassured himself that his Natalia’s protections were unbreachable did he turn to Edik.

“Why—” he began, then repeated it a little more loudly as the mocking laughter threatened to drown out his voice. “Why didn’t you tell me about this the instant I entered the house?”

Edik considered his answer for a moment, and when he spoke, the words emerged with the conviction of truth. “I believed it would drive you mad.”

Aurek wet his lips and forced his rage to give way to reason. “You were probably right.” He ground the admission out through clenched teeth. Had Edik told him about Natalia’s danger immediately upon his return, he’d still be falling into that black pit. But, while he acknowledged the need to take care of himself before he could hope to take care of his beloved wife, he didn’t have to like it. He wanted to destroy something, he needed to destroy something, and Edik was all there was to destroy. “Get out,” he growled, pounding his fists into his thighs. “Do not return until I send for you.”

“But …”

“I said GET OUT!”

When the red cleared from his vision, Aurek was alone with the trapped spirit in the study. He had never kept anything from her, and he couldn’t start now. He was all she had. Sinking down to the
floor at the foot of her pedestal, he stared up at her with tears in his eyes. The laughter found his tears amusing.

“I went back to the Narrows today, Lia …”

When he finished, he asked for her forgiveness, much as he had a thousand times before. She stared at him in mute horror, unable to forgive.

“There’s a chance,” he said quickly, almost babbling in his need for absolution, “a very small chance that the book survived, that it was taken from the workshop before the place burned. A wizard’s spellbook is a powerful artifact.…” His voice trailed off as he realized what he was saying, and he closed his eyes. Moisture trickled down each cheek and into his beard. He had no need to tell Natalia about the attractions of a wizard’s spellbook.

The explosion lifted him up and smacked him hard against the wall. He heard Natalia scream his name, he heard laughter—no longer merely maniacal, but insane—then he heard nothing at all for some time. When he regained consciousness, he was alone in the study except for a corpse with a crushed temple and a tiny porcelain statue of his wife, her hands lifted in a futile attempt at protection, her face twisted in horror
.

Between the red leather covers of the book nothing remained but a fine gray ash
.

When Aurek opened his eyes his beard was wet, and he could still hear the laughter. He brushed his hair back off his face with shaking hands. “No. The shield spell, I forgot the shield spell. Only another wizard could have removed the book through the shield and have it survive the passage, and I am the only wizard in Pont-a-Museau.

“The book has been destroyed.”

And with it hope?

He felt the pit open beneath his feet, and he longed to let it
swallow him. He was so tired. But if he surrendered hope, he surrendered Natalia and, while life remained, that he could not do.

The mad wizard in his head stopped laughing long enough to point out,
That’s guilt, you fool, not hope!
but Aurek ignored him.

“I found the spell once, Lia. I can find it again.”

“Phew! What stinks?” Shrugging his multi-caped greatcoat up onto his shoulders, Dmitri waved a hand in front of his nose. “You haven’t been swimming in the sewers, have you, Edik?”

“No, sir, I have not.”

Dmitri’s eyes widened as he recognized the clothing held between the servant’s thumb and forefinger. “Hey, that’s Aurek’s. Don’t tell me he went swimming in the sewers?”

“Very well, sir.”

As Edik passed, Dmitri took a closer look. “It looks as though he went for a roll in a fireplace after he got out of the water. What’s going on?”

“I can’t say, sir.”

“Of course you can’t,” Dmitri agreed bitterly. “You can’t, and he won’t. I suppose he’s locked himself in his precious study with his precious little statue doing some precious studying of whatever precious bit of crap he dragged out of the sewer or the fire this afternoon.”

“No, sir. Your brother went to retrieve something today, something very important, and found it had been destroyed.”

“He told you that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh, that just figures.” Dmitri spat out the words. “He’ll tell you—a servant—but he won’t tell me—his brother. Well, he can just keep his lousy little secrets.” His lip curled up into a sneer he’d
learned from Yves. “I stopped caring weeks ago. He can’t shut me out if I don’t want in!”

Edik winced as Dmitri slammed the door behind him, the draft blowing out three of the five candles illuminating the entry hall. He supposed he should have anticipated the young master’s reaction. The situation had deteriorated too far for the knowledge that a servant knew more than he did about his brother’s pain to cause anything but anger.

Anger being a young man’s way of expressing fear. Fear of yet another rejection. Fear of not measuring up. Fear of never being thought necessary.

Perhaps he should’ve spoken sooner. Or not at all.