The Golden Key (9 page)

Again movement, coupled with a voice made raw by screaming, thickened by crying. “Who is that? Is someone there?” A scrabbling from above. “I beg you, aid me … O Blessed Mother,
aid
me—”

Sario gulped breath.
Matra Dolcha, are we found out
? No, surely not; would he be asked for aid if so?
Unless it be a trap
— His hand trembled, and the flame nearly went out. He steadied it with effort, groping one-handed for the latch.
If we are found out
… And then into attenuated illumination at the top of the stairs scrabbled a body, which huddled itself precariously on the sharp-angled cusp of the tiny closet floor and the narrow staircase.

Sario, startled for the first time in his life into abject and utter silence, stared gape-mouthed at the man.

“Have you come to help me?” The man braced himself against the walls with racked, bone-fevered hands, knuckles swelling flesh obscenely, lumps and calluses disfiguring what had been agile fingers, disciplined fingers, now wrenched awry until what the man
used to steady himself was little more than warped, misshapen claws. Gold glinted briefly in the rich folds of costly fabric; he had been a vain man, once, who catered to self-adornment. “Are you there?”

The candle spilled light into all but the most distant of the corners. And yet the man asked if Sario were there.

I am
… but he said nothing, could say nothing at all, not yet; merely swallowed heavily, painfully, and gazed in sickened fascination upon the opaque milky substance that filled the man’s eyes.

The body was young, the flesh, the bones, the hair, the features. He was in all ways, in all things, Tomaz Grijalva, fine-boned and blazingly talented, Gifted and gifted. But Neosso Irrado.

And duly disciplined.

Realization was absolute:
This is what it was for.
The direst punishment that could be visited upon a Gifted Grijalva: discipline of the damned. As indeed this man was damned.

Sario’s voice echoed softly in the confines of flame-washed imprisonment. “You will never paint again.”

Tomaz spasmed. “Who is that? Who is there? What do you want? Have you come to gloat? Is this a part of the punishment?” Startled from balance, he scrabbled for purchase with ruined hands. “Who are you, cabessa merditto?”

Sario laughed. He could not help himself. “Neosso Irrado, Tomaz … just like you.” And then an irrational comprehension crashed into his mind and bounded unchecked onto his tongue like an untrained, ill-mannered hound. “But
wiser
than you …” He hiccuped with brief laughter. “… because me they will never catch!”

“Filho do’canna—who
is
that?”

Fascination overrode shocked horror now. They had denied him so much, the moualimos who saw youth in place of talent; who recognized the talent and tried to contain it, to turn it, to make him distrust it in the name of their traditions, their control. What crouched before him now, begging help for blinded eyes and ruined hands, was the fault of his teachers, of the Master Limners, of the Viehos Fratos who ruled without imagination, without the wit to acknowledge his gifts.

They are afraid of me
…
they will do to me what they have done to Tomaz.
Fear. Why else was there justification to destroy another’s talent? Tomaz’s Luza do’Orro remained in his brilliant if undisciplined mind, but the means to share it with the world was forever denied.

Discipline of the damned. Profanation incarnate of what the
Grijalvas worshiped, a far more exacting deity than the Blessed Mother and Her Son.

The Gift. The Golden Key—Chieva do’Orro. And its use.

Sario drew in a careful breath. A cruel, unrelenting focus replaced shock with an unnamed lust far more powerful than that of his youthfully pretentious loins. “How was it done, Tomaz? Yes, I saw them do it—I saw them paint the afflictions into the
Peintraddo Chieva
, and thus they were visited upon you!—but
how
was it made to affect you? How was the magic worked?”

The body collapsed upon itself. “Filho do’canna,” Tomaz sobbed brokenly. “They have sent you to bait me!”

“Oh, no …” Sario closed and latched the door behind him. “En verro—it is truth, I promise: no one has sent me. I came to learn a thing, and I have learned more.” The candle flame guttered, but Tomaz did not, could not, mark it. “I am Gifted, Tomaz, as are—
were
—you, but I want to know how such things are done. I
need
to know—they will claim me too young, a mennino moronno, but I have a hunger in me!” Matra Dolcha, the hunger! “I need to know
now
, so I may be prepared.”
So what has happened to you will not happen to me.

Silence. Then Tomaz blurted, “Do’nado. I can tell you nothing.”

No,
not
nothing,
not
denial—not from one who knew the secrets, the truths. “Why not? Do you bear them loyalty, after what the Viehos Fratos have done to you?”

Tomaz’s unsteady breathing was loud in the staircase. “You are not to know until you have achieved Confirmattio.”

“It begins with the
Peintraddo Chieva
,” Sario said intently. “Doesn’t it? A self-portrait, perfect in every way … and it was
their
Gifts which brought these afflictions upon you, Tomaz! What loyalty is owed?”

Silence, save for breathing. And then, hollowly, “They will not grant me release. Much as I have no wish to live as this, they will not release me.”

“Neosso Irrado,” Sario said very softly, “share with me your truths.”

Tomaz laughed wildly. “You see what truths can gain you!”

Sario chewed his lip, then revealed his personal truth that only Saavedra knew. “I have read in the
Folio.
”

“So? We all read in the
Folio!
”

“I have read
ahead.
”

“How?” Tomaz accused now. “It isn’t permitted.”

“What you did was not permitted. You did it anyway. That’s why you’re here.”

It startled Tomaz into a nearly coherent shout. “When they come, I will tell them you were here!”

Sario wished to hiss him into silence as he had with Saavedra. Instead, he relied on a truth even Tomaz could not deny. “We live so short a time, we Grijalvas … our days are as weeks to others. Yesterday, you had fifteen or twenty years left before the bone-fever twisted your hands, before the milk-blindness robbed you of vision … but now you have none. No years at all.” He paused. “Tell me, Tomaz, and I will do whatever you ask.”

“Mercy. That is what I ask. That you would release me from this horror to the Matra’s sweet mercy.” Tomaz’s face, painted into a chiaroscuro of light and shadow by Sario’s candle flame, was overpainted now by a torturous knowledge and helpless grief into grotesque
caricaturro
of the handsome young man he had been but hours before. “Yes, I will tell you—and then you must kill me!”

Sario’s need for a comprehension of his own talent and gifts did not lead him to a knowledge of how to undertake such a thing as that. The thought and its conception stunned him. “You said—you said ‘
release
‘… not ‘kill’!”

Tomaz’s desperate laughter cracked. “Are you so young, then? So very young, that death is unknown to you?”

Stung, Sario retorted swiftly. “I know death! The Summer Fever took both my mother and my father three seasons ago!”

“And so they have had you since, the moualimos? Eiha, then I cry your pardon.” Tomaz sighed. “It begins as it always begins, for Gifted Grijalvas, even for
you
, one day: with the
Peintraddo Chieva.
And so it ends as well. Destroy it, mennino moronno, my fellow Neosso Irrado, and you grant me my release.”

“En verro?”

Tomaz barked a brief, bitter laugh. “En verro. By my very soul.”

Matra Dolcha!—here, then, was the first of the real truths, the incandescent Luza do’Orro of the Grijalva Gift.

Sario’s hungry inhalation hissed. “Tell me!”

  THREE  

“
So
,” the woman said, “will you leave me now? Set me aside?”

The man smiled. “Never.”

“You have a son. You have a daughter.”

“Having legitimate children does not predispose me to set aside a woman who brings me contentment, even if the relationship is not properly sanctioned by the Ecclesia.” Beside her, in the massive, draperied bed—her bed, his bed; one and the same for two years—he stretched prodigiously. “Matra Dolcha!—but this pleases me! She is healthy, they say, and like to thrive;
this
time the Matra ei Filho have blessed us.”

“‘Us?”’

His spine felt younger already, though it cracked alarmingly. “Tira Virte. Me. The Duchess. And you, viva meya; if I am blessed, you are blessed.”

Silence. She lay curled beside him, feet intertwined with his own, but she was not much given to silence; if she held it, she was not pleased.

He levered himself up on one elbow. Her back was to him; he could see the long curve of her delicate spine lying so shallowly beneath smooth young flesh.
So young—so much younger than I.
With gentle fingers he traced the line of the spine from neck to waist, counting idly: —
premo—duo—treo
— “What is it? Have I not put your fears to rest?”

An elegant shrug of a single pearlescent shoulder, once dusted with costly scented Ghillasian powder, now drying after their exertions. The bed linens drooped; she was modest only in a curtain of rich brown hair, and the fall of silk across her hips.

“Viva meya, what is it? Do you require further proof of my affection? My devotion?” He sighed, letting his hand fall away. “Have I not presented you with the deed to this manor? You are a wealthy woman, suitably honored … and your future is secured. What more could you want?”

She shifted now, turning to face him. Tendrils of hair, seduced by the dampness of recent lovemaking, coiled against her hairline. “Security for my family.”

He laughed, then silenced his mirth as he saw she was serious.
“Your brother is Lord Limner at Palasso Verrada. Others of your family inhabit Court. You inhabit my bed more often than the Duchess. What more security is there, Gitanna?”

Her lush mouth, blushed by his attentions, was eloquent, though what it issued was not—quite—a plea. “There is one small thing, Baltran …”

He could not help but touch her again, to claim the flesh of her breast as his and only his, cradled against his palm. “Name it, then.”

“Revoke the Ducal Protection of the Grijalvas.”

He stilled.

“Is it so much, Baltran? They traffic in dark magic … they plot to replace my family in all things of importance—”

“Gitanna—”

“—and no doubt they would as soon replace
me
with one of their chi’patro women—”

“Gitanna.”

“—and if they are not stopped, they will destroy you, Baltran, you and your family—and claim the duchy for themselves!”

He withdrew from her warmth, her wheedling, her woman’s warfare. Without assistance he could not dress completely—and the servants were under strict orders not to enter the bedchamber— so he donned his clothing unassisted: hosen; loose summer-weight lawn shirt, crimped cuffs and collar untied; soft, thin-soled leather shoes, studded with polished brass at toes and heels. He did not attempt the doublet with its formal and convoluted intricacies.

“Baltran!”

He turned to her, clasping the massive, ornate bedpost with a long-fingered hand as he leaned forward. On the forefinger glinted the ducal ring, bloody red in a shaft of midday sunlight slanting through shutters left ajar.

“For this, I will not blame you, Gitanna … not entirely. They seek to use you in this, when I refuse to listen to their pleas otherwise; eiha, I suppose I cannot blame them for that—they believe what they believe—but I will not lie abed with the same political pettiness that chokes the Court. Recall what is between us, viva meya, and that it has nothing to do with politics or Grijalvas.”

She was very pale, luminously so. “But it was politics that brought us together! There, at Court—my brother brought me there for you, Baltran—”

“Or for any wealthy, influential man who might be seduced by your redoubtable charms; it happened to be his Duke.” The hand,
partially obscured by pleated cuff, tightened upon the bedpost. “You know nothing of what you request, Gitanna. You know nothing of Grijalvas.”