The Child Eater (22 page)

She came in the old-fashioned Way of the Supplicant, on her hands and knees all the way from her narrow, fabric-laden home, through streets of stone or mud or brick, past hovels and mansions, oblivious to mud or offal, to guards and shopkeepers, as she made her way, inch by painful inch, to the Gate of Light at the top of the city. On her back, pinned to her white dress, she carried a simple drawing of the Lost Child, and even without words it was enough, people knew, they understood, for hadn't it happened before, time after time? As she moved through the streets, cutting her knees and hands, more and more joined her, rich as well as poor, for even the great might wake up one day and call helplessly for a child who would never return. They walked upright, but slowly, so as not to get in front of her, until finally, by the time she reached the Gate, where once a wretched kitchen boy had begged for entrance, they were two-hundred strong.

“Matyas!” she cried to the gatekeeper, a skinny apprentice who turned and looked behind him for help. “Matyas!” the crowd shouted, some with a raised fist, assuming the name was an accusation.

In the tower, Matyas could feel her coming long before there was any sight or sound of her. Keeping his breath even, he had pretended to study a text on the hidden names of the hours, but a kind of prickly
sensation had washed over him, sharp heat that grew and grew until the moment his name rang out, and then the heat turned to ice, and it was all he could do not to gasp in pain. Even so, he might have ignored it and stayed in his book if Veil had not wandered to the window, where she said, “Matyas, a crowd of people appears to be calling for you.”

“I'm studying,” he said.

“They might not leave until you speak to them.” Matyas sighed and stood up. When he was at the door, Veil said, in that same casual voice, “Perhaps you should descend in your office.”

How did she know?
Did she go through his things, look under his mattress when he was on some errand or at the library? No, of course not, he realized as he went to his bed and fetched the hidden robe. She was Veil, she just knew.

Though he'd taken it out a couple of times when Veil was away, he'd only held it up, somehow afraid to try it on again. Now as he took hold of it dizziness passed through him, and something beyond excitement. Behind him, Veil said softly, “Go ahead. It's time.” Matyas nodded. He drew shut his meager privacy curtain and then removed his disguise to finally step forth as his true self.

“Good,” was all she said, but he could see the rare joy in her eyes. Despite his fear of what was about to happen when he faced Lahaylla, Matyas could not help but notice the strange sensation of whole worlds moving with him as he descended the stairs, and when he emerged into the courtyard light, it was as if the tree on his body took root in the stones and opened its branches to the Sun.

Lukhanan and several other Masters were waiting for him. For just a moment, Matyas allowed himself a small smile of satisfaction as Lukhanan opened his mouth to begin some prepared speech then stopped to gape at Matyas' robe—his
office
, as Veil called it. Matyas realized that he'd never noticed how weighed-down Lukhanan's robe was, with all that brocade and actual gold.

Such thoughts vanished quickly as the Head of the Council recovered and launched his attack. “Matyas,” Lukhanan said, “while we all respect how far you've come since we decided to give you a chance, the council has to protest this latest . . . this stunt. Maybe you believe you should bring the lower classes into this sacred precinct. Maybe you feel some misguided allegiance to your own, shall we say,
humble
origins.” He spoke the word as if it was a euphemism for “filthy.”

“I didn't summon them here. I don't know anything about this.”
Liar
, he accused himself.

“Matyas, they are chanting your name!”

Matyas could feel his face flush and realized Lukhanan could see it as well. He said, “I don't know why they would do that.” He tried not to stare at Lahaylla. Soon everyone would know his crime.

Suddenly Lahaylla's voice rose above the crowd. “I come in supplication, as one who is desperate. I beg the aid of Great Master Matyas, for he alone can help me.”

It was the Ancient Formula of Supplication, carved, in fact, above the very gate before her, though long since obscured by decorative flowers, dragons and planetary sigils. Some said it was the very origin of the Academy, a place where the wizards might be gathered for those who might need them. For a moment Matyas thought it a trick, a way to dramatize how Matyas had misused her and the punishment she would demand. But then he realized, belatedly, the desperation that had filled her voice, and it struck him, for the first time, that she might not have come to accuse him at all.

He strode to the gatekeeper. “Let her in,” he said.

Lukhanan walked up close to him. “I'm warning you,” he said.

Nervous, Matyas was about to try to explain when a breeze moved his robe. He felt the tree pulse with his heart, felt the snakes slide along his arms. The planets appeared to move in their orbits through his heart and lungs. He looked at the girl who made this for him, who'd brought the world out of his books and onto his body, and he knew that whatever she wanted, even to accuse him, it was only what he owed her and would always owe her. She'd given him his office. His skin.

“Open the gate,” he ordered the keeper. Lukhanan looked around to speak but glanced around, first at the Masters and apprentices gathered behind him, then Matyas. Finally, he just stepped away.

Lahaylla entered as she'd traveled, on her hands and knees, then lay face down on the stone mosaic of the planets in their true and secret order, her arms out to the sides, her legs slightly apart, as if she was not on the ground at all but flying, somewhere above all this human anger and sorrow.

“Arise and speak,” Matyas said, grateful he remembered the old formula, even as he feared what she might say.

Lahaylla stood up stiffly and reached behind her to pull away the drawing. “Great Master,” she said, “my brother Rorin has vanished.
From his home, from everyone who knows him. Please, Master. Find him. Return him to his home. We beg you.”

Matyas held the paper. Despite the simple drawing he could feel the boy, even see a glimpse of him as he closed his eyes. Around eleven years old, Rorin liked to run rather than walk, leap rather than step. He laughed often, especially when his sister or his parents tried to limit him in some way. At least, he used to. It took only a moment to realize that all these images were in the past. When he tried to see the boy now there was only a blankness.

Something was wrong. Even in the worst situation, even in death, something lingered, usually for weeks. He remembered how Medun had told him, all that time ago, that there were no such things as ghosts, only mindless spirits that attached themselves to a dead person's memories and emotions and believed they were that person. But there still should be traces of Lahaylla's brother, strong ones if it was only a short time since he'd passed. And that was assuming he'd died. Matyas simply had no idea what had happened to him.

He looked at Lahaylla. “When did you last see him?” he asked. “You or anyone.”

Her eyes filled with tears but her voice held steady. “Three days ago. He went to watch the jugglers in the market and never came back.”

“Did people see him in the market?”

“No,” she whispered.

Matyas closed his eyes a moment. Yes, that was the last time he could feel the boy, almost exactly three days ago. He could feel Mercury's position in the sky, the wizard's way to give a time signature to an event. He looked again at Lahaylla, her face shadowed by fear, yet still with hope—and faith, he realized. Faith in Matyas, who suddenly wished he could hold her, protect her in the robe she'd made for him. Instead, he tried to make his voice both strong and optimistic as he said, “I will need to cast a spell. It may take some time, an hour or more.” He looked at the crowd. “Can you stay with your friends?”

She looked back, hesitant, and Matyas realized she feared that if she returned outside the gate it would never open again. He said, “No one will bar the way, I promise you.” He glanced at Lukhanan, who looked away, then at Horekh, who stood at the back of the crowd. Horekh nodded gravely. Matyas looked up at the tower, saw Veil in the window. To
Lahaylla he said, “I will be back soon.” As he walked toward the tower door, the robe moved against his body.

Matyas was suddenly aware that he had no place of his own to cast a spell. He had performed many actions in the tower, some with Veil's instructions, more often on his own. But it was still her tower. The only place that in any way belonged to him was his small room in the library, and that only because he went there so often. The library was not a place for spells.

When he stepped into the room, Veil was standing facing the door, her hands clasped in front of her. It struck him that she looked exactly the same as when he'd first seen her, her body absolutely straight in a gray wool dress, ancient face of a thousand tiny lines, yet smooth and soft and somehow both blank and filled with expression. Her long silver hair moved in the air even without any discernible breeze. He thought of the times she'd made him brush her hair with that rough bristly brush, and of that one time that had changed his life, flooding him with letters and all they could give him. And then there were the eyes, small and sharp and vastly old.

He said, “I need to do something.”

“I know. Do you have all you require?”

“Yes.”

She closed her eyes a moment, and for some reason such a great sadness flowed from her that Matyas wanted to step up and hold her. But then she sharpened her eyes and nodded. “Very good,” she said. At the door, she hesitated—Veil uncertain!—turned and said, “Be careful, Matyas. When we search for something, we do not always know what we will find.”

A search spell is not a very complicated thing and it embarrassed Matyas a little that he had wanted Veil to leave. Somehow, around his teacher he always remained a student, despite all his knowledge and skill. Once she was actually gone, however, he shrugged off such thoughts and set out the powders, candles and stones that would mark the “true ground” of his work, a place that existed simultaneously in the world of light and the world of dirt. On this ground he placed stone markers for the four main gates of the city, the royal palace in the center and the Wizards' Academy in the northeast. Finally, he used a scrap of cloth to represent Lahaylla's home in the southern quarter, near the Summer
Gate, and some pebbles for the market with its jugglers, Rorin's destination when he'd left his sister.

Despite his ascendance to Mastery, Matyas kept his tools—his “attributes,” as people called them—in a small oak chest fitted with a simple iron lock. As he lifted the box, he thought how embarrassing it would be if anyone saw him, the great wizard, hiding his magic under a servant's bed. He knew he should move into his own rooms in the Masters' Residency (would they take him? Yes, of course they would). And yet he found it hard to leave Veil. Who would buy her cheese from the market, cook her porridge, keep her hearth fire bright? Though he knew, of course, that she'd lived there many years before he'd stumbled his way to her, it was somehow hard to imagine.

From the bottom of his trunk, he took out a small knife in a black leather sheath. The black blade was double-edged, one too dull to cut bread, the other sharper than the glass scalpels the Academy supplied to the king's surgeons. The handle was made of some rough black stone veined with gold. Matyas had found it at the edge of the river, hidden among rushes in a place Veil had sent him to find five perfectly white stones. Of course she'd known the blade was there, maybe she'd even hidden it herself, but they never talked about it.

Matyas stood just outside the marker for the Winter Gate and “opened the way” by drawing the sharp edge through the air in front of him. He stepped into the circle, closed his eyes and felt the city all around him. The image came to him and he held it a moment with his fingers spread wide before his face. Energy rippled in them, tingling, eager to do their work. He said, “Unwind from me, my seeker threads, find me the boy, be he living or dead.” Like young snakes the energy shot from his fingers and moved through the city.

Matyas knew that no one could see it, but anyone with training, even an outsider with talent or sensitivity, would feel them darting in and out of every street, every room, searching for the boy, for traces of him—fingers that might have touched him, ears that might have heard him, eyes that might have spotted him.

Nothing. The shadowsnakes returned to hover in the air, empty. He could feel their disappointment, even shame, like dogs that have let down their master. Matyas didn't understand it. Even if Rorin had left the city, the searchers would have found a trail. Even if he was dead . . . And then a thought came to him. He tried to banish it, it was impossible,
but he remembered what Veil had said—
When we search for something, we do not always know what we will find
.

The command he had given was for a
creature
, something that lived or
had
lived. There was a much simpler version, one used just for
objects
. It made no sense, he told himself, and tried to abandon the idea, but he could not go back to Lahaylla and claim he had done his best if he hadn't tried everything. He thought suddenly of what he'd heard in the wood so long ago, the second half of the prophecy that had promised him he would fly.

So now he held up his hands, as if to order the shadowsnakes not to leave, and did his best to reimagine Rorin, not as a boy but as some kind of lifeless puppet. No, not even that, just some mix of pebbles and dirt that purely by chance had come to resemble a child. Then, without even a chant, he sent the snakes on their way.