Dust and Light (24 page)

“This matter of my magic revealing things unexpected . . . I never noticed it before coming here. But I’m thinking some of those portraits might have disclosed something their subjects wanted hidden. And, gods have mercy . . .”

The man who wore Harrower orange in my courtyard had stood in the Registry Tower. Harrowers had sworn to kill all purebloods. My hands gripped the casement with such ferocity as could keep the vault of the heavens from collapsing on the sorry earth.

“. . . it wasn’t a tenday after I finished the portraits that Harrowers slaughtered my family.”

“You’ve no idea which portraits? You’ve no magic can tell you?”

“Be sure if I could redraw the cursed things, I’d do it this moment.” I scraped my fingers through my scruff of hair, struggling to keep my thoughts straight. “But I would have to see them.” Which couldn’t happen any time soon. But it would. Somehow, sometime, I would learn the truth. “Touching them would tell me exactly what’s been altered.”

“Could you undo what was done—make them look as they did at the beginning?
That
would be a weapon to use.”

“No.” Privacies poured out of me as if the days in the cellar had rotted
the barriers I’d spent my life building. “Magic can’t just strip away the changes. I can do that with my own work, to make it match the true image I carry. But if a different artist makes the changes, I’d have to correct it with paint or ink.”

Shaking his head, Bastien relinquished the stool. “Well, you’re befouled good and proper. And whoever they are, they’ve got me stuck keeping you quiet for them. So, as I’m unlikely to get admitted to the Tower again without a new king bearing me on his shoulder, I’d best get all the work out of you I can. And I’m off on other business in the city this morning.”

“Work will be very good,” I said, feeling a bit desperate. If I kept thinking, my head would fracture. “Magic—using it for good purpose—is important to me. Necessary. After I left here that night, I went to the temple as you wanted . . .”

A gesture dismissed my opening. “We’ve gone ahead and buried the lily child. But I’ve other interesting cases stacked up in the barrow, waiting for you. Once they’re done, we’ll talk about what you learned at the temple.”

It surprised me he wasn’t more interested. He’d seemed intent on solving the girl’s murder—Fleure’s murder.

“Your inks, pens, and pages are up there on the shelf,” he said, moving quickly to the door. “A bell, too. Take what time you need. Then ring it when you’re ready to have one brought. I’ll tell Constance what order I want them done. As they carry your subjects in and out, you stand facing the wall. I’d rather not have to put that mask on and off you all day. Clear?”

“Yes.”

“Until we’ve bars on the windows, the shutters will be locked save when you’re drawing. I understand you need the light to work. Behave yourself.”

The conversation was at an end. I touched my forehead and bowed.

He paused at the doorway and looked around. “A hundred and fifty-eight days. That’s how long they had you.” He jerked his head and vanished.

A hundred and fifty-eight days.
Almost half a year. Lord of Fire and Magic . . . what did they want of me?

T
o immerse myself in magic and art once again was blessing immeasurable. I began with a quiet hour sketching, limbering my fingers and the linkage between eye and hand. I purposely refrained from any subjects that might influence the work to come, keeping to birds, dogs, horses, anonymous faces, and hands—one of the most expressive parts of the human body. Perched on my stool beside the window, I worked at capturing the bustling energies of the cart road below. Runners, diggers, Constance flying hither and yon, slow and steady Garibald. One deadcart after another rolled through the east gate.

A hundred and fifty-eight days. Despite intermittent showers of snow, sleet, and rain, it was spring . . . the season of promise and planting . . . famine time. Bastien likely had a hundred starvelings for me to draw. What did it feel like to starve? No pureblood ever thought to know. This dread new aspect of my bent—to feel a subject’s death pain—could teach me a thousand things I never thought to know.

Shaking my head, I focused on line and shape and movement. Distractions, especially of the life-afflicting kind, must not interfere with my power to probe the truth of my subjects.

When my fingers felt an extension of my eyes, I laid down my pens and sat cross-legged on my palliasse. My tutors had taught me mental exercises useful to smooth the pathways between art and magic. Now I had this notion that my two bents had begun to work in harmony, I wondered if it might be possible to forge a more certain joining than passing chance. My duty, as a holder of the divine gift, was to explore its nature and improve it.

With the breath of my will, I blew upon the two centers of my magic and brought both banked fires to life, keeping them in balance as they grew to flame. Then I focused my eyes inward and began to release magic, not to flow through my fingers—not yet—but to invest the ephemeral energies with solidity so I could manipulate them.

Easy. Astonishing. Between twin ingots of gleaming silver—one between my eyes, one behind my breastbone—stretched a spiderweb ribbon of light. Perhaps the connection would strengthen on its own, but with my future so uncertain, I wanted to be sure.

I wove molten magic through the connecting web, twisting and shaping as a silversmith draws his heated filaments into the straights and curves he desires, until the two centers were joined with a solid strength. From this gleaming bridge, I forged new channels to guide my magic from both centers at one. Once all felt stable and secure, my will released the image.

My eyes opened. Lungs filled and emptied. And still I felt the power inside, spanning heart and head—a strength as real and available for my use as if the width of my thighs had somehow doubled or the brawn of my shoulders could now hold up the sky.

The desire to share the wonder of it with one who might understand wrenched my heart. I offered a petition to Mother Samele that she might embrace my little sister and reunite her with the rest of our kin, and I tried to envision them all together in some grand feasting hall in Idrium. But every effort rang false. Only magic would speak truth.

Whispering an invocation to the Lord of Fire and Magic, I rang the bell and took my place facing the wall.

When the shuffling footsteps and nervous whispers died away, an elderly woman awaited me on the stone table. Her face was not deeply wrinkled but creased with tiny lines like old linen. Capable hands, not coarse or scarred, but accustomed to work, suggested a shopkeeper or housekeeper. Her limbs were straight, her cheekbones quite prominent, though without suggestion of starvation. In truth she looked quite healthy, save for the gaping gash across the great vein in her neck.

Magic answered my summons swiftly and in glorious abundance, flowing through my new-wrought channels as cleanly as Palinur’s springs flowed through its pipes and fountains. Before I knew it, a fire-eyed, thin-lipped harridan had taken her place on the parchment, a well-filled purse in one hand, a sturdy cane in the other.

My fingers rubbed my neck, where the sensation of a fiery knife cut yet stung. Someone would know her. Identifying the
particular
person who had slit her throat might not be so easy, however. Her pitiless visage suggested that those who had grievances with her outnumbered the graves at Necropolis Caton. Heart and bone, eye and spirit, swore the likeness was true.

A brief, grateful interlude with a mug of ale and a withered plum that had been left in the dry laver, and I rang the bell again. As the echoes faded, I took my place facing the wall.

My second subject was an ancient Ciceron, so lean I could count his knobby bones. His few teeth were stained dark by pipe weeds, his sagging earlobes riddled with punctures. Naught suggested how he’d died, save only the expiration of age. And the portrait bore that out, though it showed him standing straight and tall, his ears bearing a hundredweight of brass and silver earrings, and his tattered black vest clean, new, and blazoned with a white hand.

A handful of old figs had been left for me. Though hard and chewy, their sweetness was invigorating. I finished them off and closed my eyes for a short while, then rang the bell again. On this day at least, Bastien would get full measure from me.

The new subject was entirely bald, like the barbarians from the lands south of Evanore’s mountains. Unlike the squat Kafru, however, this young man was tall and slim. Or . . . I examined him more closely. Not a man, but a youth, despite the lack of hair. Not so much tall as gangle-limbed like a colt, still out of proportion. He’d been dead for a while. His cold flesh had begun to darken and shrink as Fleure’s had.

Many would deem an accurate portrait impossible now the body had begun its final change. Bastien believed I could do it. And I? I wasn’t sure what my limits were. I laid out a fresh parchment and began to trace my left hand over the youth’s cold, leathery features.

Constance had clad him in one of her white tunics, likely because his clothes had been shredded. Near every quat of the boy’s flesh was abraded, crushed, or battered—unhealed. Death wounds, then. The scars and calluses of his undamaged hand testified to a childhood and youth of unremitting labor. A hard life and a hard death.

I reached deep, accepting the pain sure to come. If my art touched the youth’s spirit, as Bastien claimed, then perhaps he could experience my magic’s glory, as I experienced his hurt. Again the surge of enchantment
was swift and enormous, filling me with warmth, life, and purpose. When it set my right hand trembling, I released it to spill upon the page before me and began to draw. . . .

A
stiff, cold breeze brushed my short hair, flapped my shirt, and teased my eyes and nose, redolent of damp and fish and a tang those in the river country ever named Ocean.

“What—?”

Astonished, I spun round. Light bathed gentle hills, scattered with clumps of slender pine and spruce. Though snow yet nestled in the shadowed clefts between the hills, slips of green peered from the matted gold of the year before. And beyond the rolling landscape a strip of blue sparkled like diamonds in the morning sunlight.

Rising urgency spurred me through the wakening grass, stepping tuft to tuft through a spongy gully until I reached a rib of rock that would lead me upward. I climbed, sweating in the damp chill. Halfway up, I paused and turned to look. The vista took my breath. A vast, heaving water stretched all the way to meet the gray-blue sky. Was this Ocean?

What was this place?

I clambered upward again, using both hands and feet when the way became too steep. Something waited for me at the top . . . an answer . . .

I
shuddered and blinked. The fingers of my left hand rested on the dead youth’s brow. My right had paused after lying in the curve of a soft hat that wrapped that brow. Had I fallen asleep in the midst of magic working? Inexcusable weakness, if so, but I wondered. Pushing distraction aside, I summoned power. . . .

T
he city bells rang the
first hour of afternoon as the footsteps faded down the prometheum stair. Body aching as if I had tumbled down Monte Cleone in a rockslide, I faced the wall, awaiting whomever Constance would bring to replace the battered youth—not the hairless, withering remnant of life who had lain on my table, but the sun-browned,
gangle-limbed boy who now looked out boldly at the world from the portrait laid beside the earlier two.

Easy, confident, graceful, the youth sat astride a sleek stallion that would be found only in a wealthy man’s stable. His threadbare tunic, slops, and padded jaque were those of a common laborer, his cheap boots clotted with muck and hay. His hands were bundled in dirty linen, and an old-style liripipe sat atop his head, the long tail wrapped about his neck for warmth.

Most would name the boy a common stable lad, exercising a noble master’s favored horse. Yet I wondered. Like the horse, the youth’s bones were fine, elegant, and strong, and the spark in his eye spoke of intelligence and ready humor. And his head was not bald. Shining curls the color of sunlight peeped out from under his poor man’s hat, and his mount’s saddle skirt bore the lily of Navronne.

Doubt nagged at me. Visions . . . lapses . . . impossibilities . . .

I abandoned the wall and snatched up the portrait. It would take them a while to bring the next, and I wanted to test the truth of the image. With a few strokes of the pen and dollops of magic, I transformed the lily into scrollwork, darkened the boy’s hair, and thickened the legs of his horse. I tossed the pen aside. The drawing screamed falsity.

Eyes closed, I touched the page and called up the true image, summoning will and power and a spell I had learned in the earliest years of my training. The
quadreo
was a massive enchantment, designed to strip away all conflicts between the true image and the actual. It used inordinate reserves of power, hastening depletion, and my masters had insisted that using it too often risked dissolving the very pathways of magic in one’s body. Having tested my work several times in the course of my training, I could believe that. But of all times, I needed certainty. A rush of magic scoured my sinews in arm and hand, blurring my vision as the world shifted. Taking deep breaths to settle my racing heart and spinning head, I opened my eyes.

The lily was back. The youth’s curls gleamed like summer noonday. The horse would be a worthy mount for Kemen Sky Lord himself. The drawing spoke truth.

Satisfied for the moment, I moved back to the wall. When Bastien’s work was done I’d give more thought to the strangely vivid dream—vision? distracted imagining?

The new subject brought in was the most challenging so far—a small child, little more than a babe, whose head had met with a wooden beam or a
stone wall at some time not so recent. Swallowing my gorge, I touched a withered limb and reached for magic and justice and a touch of the gods’ grace.

This time the portrait showed not a child of royal origins, but a dull-eyed starveling Syan boy, his wrists scarce bigger than my thumb. No royal lily anywhere.

Three more children followed.

A filthy waif of similar age to the hostler’s boy, her body clotted and stained with sticky black muck, became a pouting girl in a ruffled silk bedgown. The three-petaled lily was carved into her bedstead. Not even the few spoonfuls of mead left in my cup could soothe a burning in my throat.

Another ragged child had black, chopped hair very like Fleure’s. I’d no expertise and no physical sensation to explain why she had died, but her portrait showed naught but a ragged, dark-haired child in striped skirt and dangling necklaces, armrings, and hair braided with cheap ribbons. A Ciceron child. She wore no royal lily, but interestingly, a tiny ball of fire hovered above her cupped hand. Some claimed that Ciceron sleight of hand mimed true magic.

The last was a small swollen body, scarce identifiable as human. My art deemed him an infant, swaddled in lace and satin. The pattern of the lace was Navronne’s lily.

Despite the nourishment left for me with each subject, my strength had reached its limits. For the drowned infant, I’d had to dig deep into my reserves.