The Boy with the Porcelain Blade (11 page)

Another idea slithered into his mind, unwelcome but difficult to resist. Lucien peeled back one of the Domo’s voluminous sleeves to find short spiny growths extending from his forearms, flattened backwards, running toward the elbow. Lucien forced down a surge of panic. Golia and Dino had the very same spines.

Bile soured his throat as he lifted the heavy cowl of the robe, forcing it back above the line of the Domo’s nose. He fell back with a cry, his scabbard catching a low table awkwardly. Unsure of what he had seen, he crawled across the carpet, lifting the hood once more. There were human eyes, but all were small and mismatched. Lucien counted six of them scattered across a high forehead and felt his stomach turn. The Domo’s eye sockets were just two twisted indentations. The man had a narrow face, his chin and nose pointed, skin leathery and deeply lined.

Something happened to the Domo’s chest just as Lucien was about to withdraw in revulsion. It came again, a twitching movement, like something stirring in sleep. Too great a movement to be the rising and falling of breath. And there was the smell. An unwholesome scent permeated the room, not of unwashed flesh, rather the sweet tang of rot. Three flies drifted in lazy spirals above the Domo. Lucien looked toward the door, plucking at his lip with forefinger and thumb. He knelt quickly, retrieving a knife from his boot. It was simple quick work to cut open the fabric. Starting under the Domo’s chin, Lucien split the garment to the navel, sawing through the rough weave. He dropped the knife, holding the back of his hand to his mouth. His stomach protested and he ran to the side of the room, heaving into the bucket of firewood.

For long shaking seconds he stood, bent over double, hands clutching his knees, trembling with the force of his unease. Cold sweat sprang out across his brow.

‘And now you know what I am.’

‘Hardly a surprise,’ grunted Lucien. ‘I can’t believe I didn’t realise sooner.’ The acid foulness of vomit stained the air between them.

‘You and I are much alike, Lucien.’

‘No, we’re not. We’re Orfano, and that’s where the similarities end.’

The Majordomo had recovered himself, the cowl pulled down over his many eyes, sleeves smoothed down over his forearms. He held the cut fabric of his robes together with a massive fist.

Lucien’s curiosity could brook no further silence.

‘What were you doing with that girl?’

‘Ah, the girl.’ The Domo bowed his head a moment. ‘Her mind had fled. She was a danger to herself and her family. That is why we have the
sanatorio
; it is for the sicknesses of the mind. The king has no jurisdiction there; he deals only in the flesh.’

‘She was suffering from madness?’

‘Yes. It is an unfortunate side effect of this island. The damp settles on weak lungs while the winters unsettle the mind.’

‘So, so you weren’t ab—’ Lucien paused. Remembering the harsh texture of the gargoyles beside him. How Giancarlo had cuffed the girl into submission. The rope burns on her slender wrists.

‘Abducting her? No.’ Another grim smile from beneath the cowl. ‘But there are many in Landfall and Demesne who are ashamed of madness.’ The Domo sat forward, pressing his fingertips together. His fingernails were ragged and chewed. ‘They fear the diseases of the mind are contagious. This is not the case. People fear things they do not understand. This is why we take people at night.’

Lucien said nothing, not sure what he was hearing. The Domo fetched up the knife from the dusty floorboards, then stood, towering over Lucien. He offered the hilt toward the boy.

‘There is no need to be afraid, Lucien. I am sorry if you have been worried by this thing.’

Lucien took the knife, not returning it to the sheath in his boot. He turned the blade over in his hands, looking at the inscrutable darkness beneath the cowl of the Domo.

‘And if I succumb to madness?’

‘Then I’m afraid you’ll go to the
sanatorio
too, although I find that outcome unlikely. Both your spirit and your mind are too strong, Lucien.’

The steward turned his back and passed through the doorway, leaving Lucien wondering how much truth, if any, he’d just been told.

11

The Macabre Machine
THE CEMETRY
–
Febbraio
315

Lucien awoke on the cold floor of the mausoleum, just a dozen feet away from the final resting place of Stephano, sixth and longest-reigning Duke of Prospero. A flag lay atop the sarcophagus, a neatly folded triangle of purple and black. The house had flourished under Stephano’s guidance: craftsmanship had reached new levels of wonder, old methods refined, the prosaic now meticulous. Goods and artefacts commanded prices impossible to imagine just a decade ago. While Stephano was most certainly a buffoon in the public realm, he was a canny operator in his office. Few who left that room could claim the better part of any bargain struck. There was little House Prospero had not been able to achieve when combined with his wife’s hungry ambition. The duchess had brought a battery of schemes and plans to the wedding bed, not discounting a wealth of rumour and scandal. Never overburdened with chastity, it was told Salvaza counted Duke Emilio Contadino among her conquests, which made her marriage to Stephano all the more intriguing. Jealous members of other houses would sneer the word
mercantile
behind their hands, a pejorative for the newly rich. House Fontein had been forced to strike up an alliance in order to retain some standing. Contadino on the other hand had been relegated to a house of farmers and dullards. Some whispered that Lord Contadino’s reduction in influence had been a vengeful scheme long harboured by Salvaza Prospero. One did not bed her without some cost or consequence, it would seem. Lucien tried to imagine what it would be like to marry into that empire of commerce, being wed to Stephania. Small chance of that now he was outcast. His goal was not one of attaining status, but simply surviving. Beyond that he simply wished to see Rafaela one more time.

An unkindness of ravens heckled outside the mausoleum, their voices carrying over the windless skies. Lucien shivered and felt ridiculous. The graveyard was barely twenty minutes’ ride from Demesne. The complete darkness of the countryside had made escape impossible. He’d ventured beyond Demesne’s environs just a handful of times, and always by daylight. The poor visibility, combined with a lack of destination, had delivered him here. The sepulchre was a welcome refuge, shielding him from the night and the questing gazes of House Fontein.

He pined for hot water and soap, for plush towels and freshly baked bread. A curse escaped his lips as he pushed himself to his feet. His bruises grumbled, making themselves known across his back, writhing pain on his ribs. His shoulder had resumed its familiar dull ache. The rain, so prevalent these days, was absent, leaving a sombre but unthreatening grey sky. The sun itself was no more than a wan white disc at the edge of the world. He’d need to leave now if he were to escape the search parties sent by Giancarlo.

Head bowed, he approached the vast sarcophagus of Duke Stephano, laying one hand on the chilly stone. He thought about the night of
La Festa.

You’ll take care of her, my boy? Tell me you’ll take care of her?
the duke had all but begged, drunk and farcical in a powdered wig.

Tell me you’ll take care of her. You two have a chance I never had. You’re the same age. Don’t make the mistake I did.

Lucien felt a powerful pang of regret. He’d not made the same mistakes as the duke, but had created an entirely new catalogue of failures.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, kissing his fingers and laying his hand gently on the corner of the sarcophagus. He turned his back and chewed his lip, ignoring hunger pangs.

The cemetery was a study in stillness. Mist ghosted around headstones strangled with bindweed. Mourning angels presided over the scene, hands pressed together in reverence. The statues had been sculpted from the same dark grey stone as Demesne itself. A path of white gravel neatly bisected the tangle of dew-slicked grasses. Other mausoleums hunkered nearby, coated in moss, spattered with guano. Wrought-iron gates decked with tenacious ivy led to the road. And his escape.

The ravens called out in boisterous rude greeting, drawing his attention to the stand of trees beyond the cemetery wall. It was here he’d tied up Fabien, out of sight and sheltered from the worst of the downpour.

Lucien retreated back into the cover of the sepulchre.

A thin wisp of smoke wound its way into the skies, a single tendril drifting above the trees. Someone was cooking nearby.

But who cooks in a graveyard?

He gathered up the sack of food Camelia had given him and unsheathed the dagger from his boot. The trees whispered, confiding to each other as the Orfano set out toward the telltale plume, dew soaking his boots. Lucien climbed the wall easily, one handed, not wanting to trouble his left shoulder. He pressed on, fighting his way through a weeping willow, the limbs clinging and dragging at him like an intoxicated lover. All around were the trunks of dead trees swarming with woodlice; spiders picked their way across the woodland floor, beetles marched across leaf mould. Miniature life teamed and floundered. The ravens above had fallen silent or taken to wing. He was just moments into the woods when he stumbled across the discovery, able to do nothing but stare in disbelief.

In front of him was a filthy man crouched by a mean fire pit. Fabien, Virmyre’s beautiful roan, lay on the ground, its throat a ragged wound, as if a large stake had punched a hole through the creature. The leaves nearby were splashed with congealing crimson. The roan was missing a foreleg, now sizzling over the meagre flames. The smell of blood was overpowering.

‘You bastard! You killed my horse.’

The man turned to him, saying nothing. Any further rebuke from Lucien died on his lips. He shuddered, stomach knotting, a thick surge of bile in his throat. Two sets of eyes, one pair below the other, stared back. One of the four was an odd blue, the rest three shades of unwholesome green. He looked to have lost his teeth, his lips forming a puckered arsehole below a broken blunted nose. The skin around his eyes and neck was deeply lined, his head bald and massive.

This creature was old.

Suddenly Lucien understood why the fire was so poor. The man had no hands. His wrists extended to black points, sharp and shiny, not unlike his own black fingernails. The right limb was splashed with gore, clearly the source of the roan’s demise. The grotesque didn’t move, only blinked and shivered, chest rising and falling, each exhalation making the sphincter of his mouth tremulous. He was stripped to the waist, skin raddled with discoloration, bruise-purple and jaundice-yellow. Four atrophied arms extended from his broad chest, hanging across his stomach. Each terminated in a withered child-like hand.

Lucien recalled the day the Majordomo had collapsed, remembered the horrors hidden beneath the ash-grey robes. The Domo and the wretch who crouched in front of him had much in common.

Lucien cut four skewers from some wood. He passed them over the flames a moment, burning off splinters, then ran the skewers into slender cuts of the dead roan. He took a moment to bank the fire up. Finally he set the meat above the flames. The toothless man watched with jealous fascination, his many eyes lingering on Lucien’s clever fingers. They waited beneath the trees as Lucien thought of the Orfano he’d killed on the rooftops of Demesne. He’d not been given the chance to feed that starving wretch but saw no reason the man before him should go hungry.

The meat sizzled, browned. Lucien gave the man a skewer, which he struggled to grip between the two pinions of his misshaped limbs. The flaccid ring of a mouth stretched open to reveal mandibles which tore and worried the horse flesh. Lucien looked away, unable to eat or even speak. After a few moments came a wheezing rasp. The grotesque was pointing an appendage at the remaining skewers. Lucien passed another and deliberately looked away, struggling to conceal his revulsion. Gratitude welled up in his chest as he studied his own fingers. Always a symbol of his difference, a source of embarrassment, they were now cherished in a way he’d never considered.

Lucien stood and busied himself, removing the saddle from the still-warm body of his short-lived mount.

‘Not like I was much of a horseman anyway,’ he mumbled. ‘Still, you deserved better than this, Fabien.’

He snatched a glance over his shoulder as the grotesque kept eating. How many more of his kind had been made outcast, hidden away on this windswept isle? How many had been too twisted and warped to serve any purpose? Lucien tugged and fussed with the saddle, performing a quick inventory of his possessions. A gentle tap on the shoulder brought him around sharply, his dagger clenched in his left hand. The wretch shrank back, a manoeuvre that looked as redundant as it was ridiculous; he had to be over six and half feet tall.

‘Sorry. You startled me.’ Lucien looked at the roan. ‘You shouldn’t have stolen my horse. I would have given you food. You mustn’t steal horses.’ He felt absurd, doubting the wretch even understood. He looked up into the mismatched eyes, studying the strange topography of a face wrought hideous.

‘You’re an Orfano, just like me. And this is how they treat us. Forced to live in graveyards and dine on horse meat.’ He regarded the roan. ‘
Porca misèria
. Virmyre will kill me for this.’

Lucien shook his head, wondering how far it was to the next town. The deformed Orfano loped away, then turned, a wheezing sound escaping the crude ring in his face. He waved the cruel spikes of its arms in agitation. Lucien realised he was being beckoned.

The track through the copse of trees was indistinct. Branches had been cut back long ago but since grown anew. The yellowing grasses had been trampled underfoot. Brambles conspired to entangle. Lucien followed, keeping his distance, not re-sheathing his dagger for fear of the destination. Suddenly the rude path ended, and they were at the edge of a clearing. Weeping willows formed the edges, while older oaks towered over all, shedding leaves as winter approached. Coarse grasses grew to chest height, now yellowed with the advance of the season. Not a clearing, Lucien realised; it was in fact a second cemetery. The
sanatorio
was monstrous for being in plain sight, but the secret graveyard affronted Lucien more. Unease constricted about him, but the faint sting of curiosity also piqued.

The headstones were simpler here. No angels watched over the resting dead, no elaborate crosses decorated the rows of graves, and there were certainly no mausoleums. Lucien spent long minutes resting on his haunches, reading inscriptions. He knelt and scraped moss and guano from where chiselled details had been obscured. The other Orfano stood mute, expression unreadable, seemingly rapt with Lucien’s investigation.

‘There must be nearly sixty graves here,’ said Lucien, as much for his own benefit as for his new companion. He was still undecided if the huge Orfano understood a single word.

‘And I’ll bet they’re all
streghe.
Every one.’

Lucien kept reading, advancing from grave to grave, then doubled back and rechecked his earlier findings. The wretch scratched at himself and looked around, wishing to be back at the fire perhaps. And the horse meat. He hummed to himself tunelessly, an unkind dirge from his ring-like mouth.

‘They’re born every three years on average,’ offered Lucien. ‘They die at various times, presumably due to complications from their deformities.’

Lucien eyed the wretch and wondered how he’d survived so long.

‘Or perhaps due to more direct action.’

The wretch gave an excited hoot, loping back to the path they had emerged from. The wind exhaled and set the willows to whispering. A raven called out, remaining hidden from view. The sun had continued its shallow climb while he’d been here, lost in the details of the dead.

Someone approached, and not alone.

Lucien collapsed down behind a gravestone, waiting, feeling cold sweat in the small of his back. His throat was suddenly dry. The silence of the secret graveyard was broken only by the beating of his heart.

The Majordomo appeared at the entrance to the clearing, carrying a body. Lucien’s eyes widened with horror. The wretch scampered in the Domo’s wake, subservient, trailing him like a favourite hound. Lucien’s panic mounted as he realised the Orfano could give him away at any moment, bounding over and drawing the attention of his master.

Instead the wretch began to dig with the spikes of his arms, Lucien’s presence apparently forgotten. The Orfano loosened the surface of the ground, then used both limbs in concert to lift the earth. The Majordomo let the body slump to the ground without ceremony or care. Lucien stole a glance from his hiding place, face pressed against the gravestone. The corpse was familiar to him. His hooded assailant, so keen to throttle him in the gutters of the rooftops, now dead by Lucien’s desperate attack. Seeing the corpse in the dawn light gave new fuel to his shame. Time ground on all too slowly, fraying Lucien’s nerves. He dared to think of sneaking away, but chose stillness over stealth. The Domo had always been preternaturally efficient at detecting him. The wretch continued digging, his breathing becoming more laboured, his wheezing more pronounced. Lucien squeezed his eyes shut, praying the Majordomo was too preoccupied with the burial.

There was a break in the work and Lucien risked another glance. The Domo had grasped the slain Orfano and was depositing the corpse in the crude grave. The wretch loped about, excited hooting escaping the ring of his lips. He dropped to his knees and looked up at his master expectantly. The Domo produced a loaf of bread, placing it between the deformed man’s limbs. This was how the wretch survived, Lucien realised. Another pawn in the Majordomo’s great game. Another cog in Demesne’s macabre machine. Lucien clutched himself, drawing his knees to his chest. Small wonder the Domo’s influence extended beyond the castle walls. Lucien doubted that any corner of Landfall was free of his unholy jurisdiction.

A sharp snap broke the stillness, ravens gained the skies, exploding from the trees in a flurry of black wings. Lucien pressed his face against the gravestone, one eye straining to see what had happened.