The Golden Key (153 page)

“What book?”

“The
Kita’ab.
You must burn it.”

She swallowed. “A copy of the
Kita’ab
? How can that be?”

“I was given it, many years ago, by an old Tza’ab man. The
Folio
the Viehos Fratos have is an incomplete copy, lacking so much … so much. Say you will do as I ask.”

“Yes. Yes, I will. I can.” On this matter, at least, she knew what was right. “That way no one else can do what you have done.”

“Moronna! What do I care if others follow after me, if they seek as I sought? I do not want them to find what I possessed! Only I, Sario, will have mastered the
Kita’ab
and the hidden magic. Only I! I am the true master of the Gift, and there will be no other to follow me. Do you understand, estuda?” He was shouting now. “You alone I grant the right to paint as well as I have painted, to be the master after me, but to no one else will I give my knowledge of the Gift. No one else can have that!”

He
was
mad. But he was also right.

“I will go,” she said at last. “I will do as you ask.”

“Burn it,” he said fiercely. “Burn everything you find there. Will you not set me free, Eleyna?”

She looked at the door, barred and locked from the outside, then back at him. “I cannot set you free. You know I cannot. Matra Dolcha, you murdered my dear brother. How can you expect me to forget that? To let you free to perhaps do it again to some other woman’s brother?”

But he thought only of himself. She should have understood that about him all along. “I cannot live this way, in prison, forbidden forever from my art. Do as I ask, I beg you.”

She went. His directions were easily followed, and to her great surprise she recognized the wine shop. Rohario had found employment here in his brief life as a clerk.

Rohario.
She had last seen him in the crowd at the Cathedral. Then there had been a note, written in his beautiful handwriting, informing her that he had to visit his estates and would be back soon. Assuring her of his love.

Love was a strange word, speaking of what binds one soul to another. By that measure, she loved Sario Grijalva, monster though he was. “
You are like me.
” Forever bound to him, she must work his will in this matter at least.

Eleyna introduced herself to the proprietor, Oliviano. She surprised him with her knowledge of the deed’s hiding place; she spoke the word that marked her as heir. She commandeered soap and water from his good wife. Odd, to go to the stairs and feel so sharply that she
ought not
to be going there. But she got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed away the oscurra painted into the wood. Imagined Sario shivering in his cell, as his blood and saliva dissolved in plain soap and cold water. How she wanted to study the spiraling mural of leaves and vines and flowers, but she dared not. She dared not let its magic take hold of her mind before she could erase it forever.

She finished and opened the door with the small bronze key sealed into an envelope with the deed.

“Up here I left the food for him,” said Oliviano, treading almost on her heels, curious and yet afraid. “At the door. Farther I never went.”

“I will go in alone,” she said.

She opened the door and walked in. The chamber was long and dark. She opened shutters and looked out over rooftops and the tiled facades of apartment houses and shops. She measured the chamber with her feet, blew dust off the tabletop. This was the atelierro in which he had created Alazais; she recognized it from the
painting. There was a chest under the bed. She pulled it out and unlocked it with the key.

A few stoppered clay pots. A tiny silver jewel-box. Three glass vials filled with old dried red pigment. A skull.

She shuddered and set the skull on the table, then reached in and pulled out a book so ancient that it crackled with age when she opened it. The flowing script was alien to her, but the borders! Eiha! She had never seen such sinuous lines, weaving in and around the calligraphed words. The parchment itself was heavy, thick, and when she ran her finger across the page, feeling the thin line of ink that was the body of each letter, she felt as if the page itself was warm and somehow alive.

She turned the pages, but all of it was nonsense to her. She could not even recognize letters. But its great age and the flowing, beautiful border drawings attracted her. Words were not as familiar to her as the language of image, yet even words could eventually be deciphered. And in the words rested the knowledge Sario had hoarded for so long. She closed the book hastily.

In the room there was also an easel, broken down, and behind it a huge panel shrouded by a yellowed linen cloth. Of the rest of Sario there was no sign, no paints, no brushes, no paraphernalia of his life and work. After all, his life went into his paintings, not into the detritus of daily living.

Carefully she folded the linen shroud away from the panel. Stared, hands caught in linen folds.

It was a portrait of many men, each face stark against the background and all of it decorated with an almost invisible border whose flowing oscurra and twined intricacies threaded through the painting like a living creature, an unbroken link. Some of the men wore the clothing of centuries past, one the fashions of ten years ago. She recognized Sario—her Sario—at once. Matra Dolcha! There was
Riobaro
Grijalva, the great Lord Limner! She had scrawled his signature on a tablecloth at Gaspar’s inn, as tribute to the dead master’s famous gesture. Wasn’t that Dioniso Grijalva? First among them was the first Sario, his image clear but marked with age.

One man’s mind, his spirit, transferred to another man’s body. And this, his
Peintraddo Memorrio
, his true self-portrait, recorded those lives. She recognized the herbal border: water willow for Freedom, vervain for Enchantment, juniper for Protection, white oak for Independence, golden roses, twined through the portraits, for Perfection.

He had murdered sixteen men and inhabited their bodies, lived
their lives. Whose skull out of all of them had he kept, which rested now on the attic table?

A lamp stood on the table. Eleyna lit it. For a long while she watched it burn. Then she sought and found a jar of oil to replenish the flame.

Tearing off the first parchment leaf, she held it up next to the fire. Sario, in each of his lives, watched her. She could believe that somehow, in his cell, he could see her through his Blooded, painted eyes. “
To no one else will I give my knowledge of the Gift.
”

Only to her. Had he not promised to teach her
all
the secrets of the Limners? And more besides, the secrets only he knew, that he had puzzled out over three hundred years of unnatural life? All of this he had given into her hands, no one else’s. Because she was like him.

Her hands shook as she held the page closer to the lamp’s flame. Fragile with age, its buttery grain and flowing script beckoned her, whispered like
his
voice. In time, she could puzzle out the words, as he had done. Given enough time, she could know everything he knew and, although she had no Gift to paint spells herself, she could take on students of her own, teach them—

Matra Dolcha.
This
was where such thoughts led: to pride; to arrogance; to ruin. To death. With this knowledge he had murdered Agustin, Andreo, all the men in the
Peintraddo
, and countless unknown others: their memories, their lives, lost forever.

Cursing him, she set a corner of the ancient parchment into the fire. The borders flamed and shriveled. The letters flared with silver light and sparked and died. Their ancient beauty turned brown, then black, then exploded into white flame, scorching her fingers. She yelped and dropped the page.

So would
she
be burned, if she followed Sario’s path. Weeping, she watching the page flame and die. When only ashes remained she turned to stare at his
Peintraddo Memorrio.

Walking over to it, she brushed her fingers lightly over the painting as if to read what traces of him might remain there. So cracked in some sections, ancient and yellowing; new, almost fresh, in others, the style altered by the passage of time and fashion but yet demonstrably the same hand. It was a masterwork, these men who regarded her from the canvas. Each one an individual and yet each one bearing the eyes of the original: desert-bred brown. It should have been an awkward composition, and indeed one section of the painting remained unfinished, white ground unsullied by sketch or underpainting or the glazes and frotties of a finished portrait. Yet the
Peintraddo
was of a piece. Even had she not known some of the
men, recognized some of the faces, she could have traced Sario’s life through each of the men he had inhabited. His skill drew the eye from life to life, a natural progression. Hidden deep within the colors she distinguished oscurra, delicate tracings like the hidden story of his life traced across years and faces.

“
Burn everything you find there.
” But she could not. She could not destroy it.

She sniffed hard and wiped tears off her cheeks, then crossed back to the table. Skull sat next to
Kita’ab
, in their juxtaposition telling the essential story of his life: the knowledge that had killed the first Sario—though Sario still lived—killed what was best in him, he who had succumbed to the worst that hides in ambition. What else had the Tza’ab written in this holy book? Not only bad things, surely; might there not be
good
written here as well, things Sario had ignored? She could not judge.

She fingered the pages and knew then she could not burn it. Yet neither could she keep it. That much she had learned from Sario Grijalva.

Closing the heavy book, she set it gently inside the chest together with the skull andlocked the chest with the bronze key. She covered his
Peintraddo
with the shroud, locked the attic door behind her, and walked back through quiet streets to Palasso Grijalva. Grand Duke Renayo’s carriage stood in the courtyard. Lights burned in the Atelierro. She hurried upstairs, knocked, waited, wondering what reception she would receive.

They let her in.

“I am glad you have come,” said Cabral, moving to greet her. “Sit here, mennina. Witness.”

She was shocked to see not only the Grand Duke but also the Premio Sancto and the frail figure of the Premia Sancta. They were seated on the other side of the chamber. On an easel in the middle of the great chamber stood a painting of a plain whitewashed room, no windows, no doors, no furniture except for a mirror, propped on an easel, that reflected candle and lamp flame from the unseen end of the tiny room. Iron stands stood in the corners holding hour candles. Two lamps hung from the ceiling, and Saavedra’s artistry was such that their flame suggested the first flare of light in a newly-lit lantern. Otherwise the room was featureless. Not even the plank floor had any distinguishing marks.

Saavedra stood beside the easel, preparing her paletto. She was now dressed in a high-waisted white gown stamped with small lavender sigils; Eleyna recognized it a moment later as one of Beatriz’s gowns, let down at the hem to accommodate Saavedra’s
greater height. The Viehos Fratos sat to one side, and poor Edoard sat behind his father, gazing at his bride-to-be with a look compounded of equal parts worship and terror.

Eleyna winced when the Limner woman stuck herself calmly with a lancet, drawing blood and mixing it in with the paints. The Premia Sancta murmured an audible prayer. But no one objected.

“Bring him up,” said Saavedra.

And when they brought him, she asked: “Is there anything more you wish to tell us?”

“There is nothing I wish to tell you,” Sario said, “but I wait for you to thank me for forcing you to acknowledge your Gift.”

She ignored this. “The secret of your long life? How you come to be here now? Whose bodies and lives you stole? I know what you did, for I have knowledge of my own, gleaned from the book you painted into the room with me. It is that book, Sario, which taught me all that I need to know now, this night. For what I mean to accomplish here.”

He set his lips and would not speak.

“Place him there,” she ordered. They shoved him forward until he stood within a circle painted on the floor. Only then did they unbind his hands. They turned him so his back was to Saavedra.

Facing this way, he saw Eleyna at once. His eyes lit.

Saavedra lit a candle and set it under a painting of Matra ei Filho. She began to speak words under her breath, a melodious chant that filled the room with its soft humming noise.

“Don’t forget, Eleyna,” said Sario in a low, intent voice, staring at her so fixedly she dared not look away from him. “There is no golden key you can hold in your hand that will effortlessly give you the mastery of painting. What we Limners wear is only a symbol of what we strive for.”

Out of the corner of her eye Eleyna saw Saavedra painting, the bold, confident strokes of a master intending to paint alla prima, a finished portrait in one sitting.

“Don’t forget that your ultramarine is excellent for glazes.” He went on in that same rushed manner. “But it will soften if it is stored when already made with oil, so you must add a little wax.”

Beside her, Cabral shuffled his feet nervously back and forth as Saavedra painted and the light waned.

“Whiting is excellent to cut pigments for sketching colors, but Ghillas chalk has greater brilliance. … For your drying oils, linseed dries most thoroughly but poppy yellows less with age.”

Damiano stood and lit lamps, and their combined glow cast a
strange brilliance over the chamber, as if locking them all within a single frame.

“When you use a linen canvas, which must be of the best quality, prepare it in this fashion. … In tempera, use only eggs from city chickens for your light complexions, but eggs from country chickens for your dark complexions.”

Renayo coughed. The Premio Sancto murmured the evening prayer in his sonorous voice, a counterpoint to Saavedra’s soft chanting.

“For the thinnest covering of color use your fingers. … If a passage of work is not quite right, you must be prepared to discard it and begin again.”