On the Isle of Sound and Wonder (32 page)

“I did what you asked, I did, I tried! I tried to do what you asked!” Karaburan covered his face with his long fingers. “Leave me in peace!”

Mira frowned. “What is he talking about?” She looked over at Aurael quizzically, and saw that the spirit had become mostly invisible, his shape fading chameleon-like into almost nothing against the stone wall. “Aurael,” she growled warningly, and his face became visible again, the picture of innocence.

“Yes, my mistress?”

“What is he talking about?”

“I’m sure I have no idea,” said Aurael, looking as though he wanted nothing more than to flee.

Mira made her hand into a fist at him, yanking on his silvery aura. He made a sharp, uncomfortable noise and cleared his throat.

“I may, or may not, have pretended to be you, but it was for a very, very good reason, I promise you,” Aurael choked. Mira squeezed her fist a little, feeling the anger and disgust rising in her chest. “A very good reason!” Aurael squeaked.

Karaburan gaped openly at Mira, as though entranced. “Voices,” he stammered to himself. “Voices on the air, and false visions!”

“Explain!” Mira snapped.

“I convinced him that if he killed your father, you two could reunite, and you would forgive him.” Aurael rubbed at his non-corporeal throat and scowled. “I was only half wrong, wasn’t I? This is all for the greater good, you know,” he added nastily.

Mira felt her insides churn.
The more I find out, the worse this knot tangles,
she thought, trying not to let the anger rise again in her chest. Her eyes flew to Karaburan, who cowered, trembling in the rain. She exhaled slowly and moved cautiously forward. Karaburan did not look up as she drew closer, and she stopped just within arm’s reach, feeling her pulse quicken. Her instinct screamed at her to get back, reminding her of his weight, his scaly skin, his strange smell, but she tightened her jaw and stayed still.

“Karaburan,” she said, quietly. “I am not an illusion. I’m real. I’m me.” He did not raise his head, but shuddered. “This is important. It’s more important than you and me. Listen to me, Kabu.”

The long-unused childhood nickname made him lift his eyes toward hers in disbelief, and they were the same pale blue of the tiger. Mira resisted the urge to recoil, her free hand balled into a little fist to keep it from shaking.
Fight it,
she thought.
Fight whatever lies have been woven over us. We were best friends before Aurael used you.

“Mira?” Karaburan’s voice was hushed, his eyes suddenly focused and clear of whatever madness he had borne. “Mira? I’m sorry . . . I think I was very bad.”

It was as though the last few years had never happened, and Karaburan looked up at her with the decided love and loyalty of his childhood. It was deeply strange, after these long years, to face him in this way. Mira had often wondered what would happen if they ever met again by accident. At different times, she had felt wrathful, then sorrowful, then demanding, then neutral, and never knew for certain what she would do or say if face to face with Karaburan once more. As time passed, she had stopped wondering, and had known with certainty that she would never forgive him.

But he was manipulated by magic. He was forced.

“I know,” Mira said aloud, and swallowed. “You . . . You have a chance to do something good now. Something important.”

Karaburan put his hands down and tipped his head to one side, the rain sliding down his uneven face. “What is to be done?” he asked, his voice timid. “I will do it.”

“My father’s book. The big, old book he carries when he’s . . . working.”

Karaburan’s eyes widened as he nodded. “I know the one,” he murmured.

“I have to get it. I have to take it away from him before he does something very bad. I need your help to get the book so I can destroy it.” Mira held his gaze. “If we destroy the book, no one else will get hurt, and we’ll all of us be free. You won’t be a slave, and neither will Aurael.”

“Who?” Karaburan made a face of confusion.

“He doesn’t even know you’re here?” demanded Mira loudly, her patience waning as she glared at the spirit.

Aurael shrugged and became more opaque, his expression one of frustrated impatience. “So it’s my fault his mother never introduced us?” he muttered. “Dante told me I wasn’t to manifest before him, so I didn’t.”

Mira turned back to Karaburan, who looked thunderstruck at the sudden appearance of the spirit. “Kabu,” she said, pulling his attention again. “My father has kept you and Aurael as slaves these last several years. He has kept me an unwitting prisoner, in ignorance of the past, and of the world beyond our island. He has done all of us a great injustice, and now he aims to murder several men. I need your help for this. Will you help me?”

Karaburan looked frightened still, and ashamed, but he nodded after a moment. “I will try. If it means we all go free, I’ll try.”

Aurael crossed his arms, his disgust written in his frown. “We could have done without him,” he muttered to Mira.

She turned and met his gaze, watching him melt and cower a little before her. “No,” she said decidedly. “We couldn’t. We need him to enter unnoticed.”

“Unnoticed?” Aurael’s dark eyes narrowed.

“You will disguise yourself, take the shape of a mostly drowned sailor. Karaburan will bring you into the cave, telling my father that he has found one more body on the shore, while you remain unconscious. You will grant me your invisibility, and I will follow you both in. While Karaburan goes for the book, we will rescue the men, unseen. Then we destroy the book.”

“What if he catches us?” shuddered Karaburan. “I’ll be beaten . . . we all will.”

“He will destroy us if we fail,” agreed Aurael.

“We have no choice! He has wronged us, and he’s going to kill Ferran and his family. Do you understand?” Mira drew a deep breath. “If we go, then we all go down together. If we do not try, we will never be free.”

There was a silence, except for the gentle rain. Thunder rolled overhead. At last, Karaburan nodded slowly.

“We go,” he agreed.

Aurael sighed through his nose, and, with a shimmering like light through water, he vanished, re-appearing on the ground in a crumpled heap. His new shape wore torn trousers and a blood-stained shirt, his face obscured with long damp hair and wounds where perhaps sharks had nibbled away at his flesh. Karaburan recoiled at the sudden change, but Mira only raised her eyebrows.

“How authentic,” she said dryly.

Aurael made the castaway’s face contort in disdain, then relaxed again into neutrality, feigning death.

Karaburan made a startled sound and stepped back, looking all about him in nervous disbelief. “Mira?” he cried, his eyes wide. He shifted his weight anxiously like a dog on a leash, turning his head this way and that.

Aurael must have made me invisible already,
she thought. “I’m right here,” she answered, putting out her hand to touch Karaburan’s shoulder. He stopped fidgeting and stared at the rain in front of him blankly. “Can you see me?”

“No!” breathed Karaburan in amazement. “It’s good magic.”

“Of course it is,” sneered Aurael from the castaway’s puffy mouth.

“Quiet!” Mira patted Karaburan’s shoulder and then stepped back, out of his way. “All right. Drag him in, I’ll follow behind. But don’t let my father know our plan, Kabu. Just get us in there, and get me the book.”

“I’ll try.” Karaburan wiped a scaly hand across his eyes to clear away some of the rain, and shook himself a little. Then he bent down and hefted the sailor’s body over his shoulder, cautiously making his way into the cave.

Mira paused at the thin passage into the stone and shed her woven cloak onto the ground. She slipped into the cool, damp cave after Karaburan and Aurael, and squeezed the staff tightly in her free hand, willing it to give them the strength and speed they needed to do what must be done.

Hold on,
she thought, picturing Ferran in her mind.
Hold on, we
’
re coming.

* * *

Despite his every nerve and sinew begging to remain unconscious, Ferran drifted awake, the pounding in his head too steady and too loud to be natural. He forced his heavy eyelids open and saw, through a black fog, a massive clock face set into the rock across from him. The heavy tick and tock of the exposed, rusted gears was the source of the rhythmic pounding echoing in his skull.

What happened to me?
His palms stung and throbbed painfully. He vaguely remembered crawling and struggling down the narrow passageway of the cave in an escape attempt, scraping his hands and knees on the rocks. There was an echoing pain at the back of his head.
An ambush,
he remembered, and as he blinked, the black fog in his vision cleared a bit.

Ferran was held upright with his arms and legs splayed, pinned by unseen chains to the rock wall behind him. His shirt was missing, and blood coursed weakly down his cheek, throat, and chest. A painful spot swelled on his head. The cavern he was in now was much larger than the previous one. This room was round and vast, and on the wall, evenly spaced along the points of a diagram which occupied nearly the entire vast floor space, were several other men, limbs splayed as Ferran’s were, heads bowed in unconsciousness. All bore recent injuries, bruises and drying blood painting their bare chests and arms as though they’d been through war. Between each man, a torch burned, illuminating the eerie scene and darkening the shadows in the room.

The diagram was composed mostly of foreign shapes and letters. It had many points, and spiraled inward toward the center of the room, with strange runes drawn out around the perimeter. Directly adjacent to Ferran was a series of makeshift shelves and crates, some unusual-looking handcrafted tools, and various clay jars and bowls filled with powders, herbs and who knew what else.

Several weather-worn books were stacked on the ground, the topmost of which lay open to a page showing the same diagram which was painted on the floor. At the center of the chamber was a faint patch of light from a hole in the ceiling that acted as a sort of skylight. The moon was not bright enough yet to show, but the dim gleam of night danced on the raindrops that fell down through the hole and pooled on the floor of the cave.

This does not look good,
thought Ferran weakly. Stories of human sacrifice and black magic rituals fluttered through his mind like nightmare moths, making his palms sweat and his stomach churn.

Ferran suddenly recognized one of the men along the wall: Truffo. The prince inhaled sharply, causing hard pain to flare throughout his body. He winced hard, gasping for air, and, as the moment passed, he realized that he knew all of the prisoners: Truffo Arlecin, Stephen Montanto, Duke Torsione, Uncle Bastiano—and Ferran’s own father, King Alanno.

Father!
Ferran could not even cry out. His voice was as empty as a dying wind, gagged by his exhaustion. He tried to call again, but no sound accompanied his breath.
He
’
s not dead yet; he can
’
t be! Oh, gods, Father! Please don’t die, don’t die yet, hang on . . . Please . . . 

A scraping sound echoed from the passageway, and Ferran let his head loll forward again, feigning unconsciousness. From under the cover of his hair, he watched with one eye open as Dante emerged from the dark, dragging a large, sharpened tool of some kind. It looked to be carved out of ivory, with a well at one end, almost like a soup ladle. Ferran had never seen a bone that big before, and wondered nervously what kind of animal it had come from, and how Dante had come by it in the first place.

Dante was muttering to himself, but did not seem agitated as he moved across the chamber to the set of small clay pots. He drew a pinch of some dark powder from one and sprinkled it lovingly over the instrument, then rubbed it in with his hands as gently as any healer performing rites for the wounded. This process he repeated several times with different powders, calm and methodical. Ferran studied the man, finally having a chance to really look at him.

Ferran could not imagine this weathered, sun-soaked man as a decadent duke, but he must have looked very different, long ago. Dante’s hair was mostly dark gray, only partly tamed by what may have originally been a gentlemanly queue, but over time had tugged looser and looser by the wind, giving him a wild, unkempt look. The cloak he wore was salt-stained and ragged, composed of many different fabrics sewn and tied together. The colors ranged from black to blood red to midnight blue, with hints of what must have been gold and silver embroidery once upon a time. Dante’s hands shook visibly when he moved, and even more so when he stood still; Ferran hadn’t noticed it before, and wondered if those hands had shook when Dante first attacked him in the woods.

If I did not know better now,
Ferran thought,
I would think him a gentle and kind-faced old man. Perhaps he was even handsome once, like his brother.
But there was something about Dante’s calm that terrified him.

“Your thoughts are as loud as your breathing, Prince,” said Dante quietly, turning to look at him. “There is no need for panic, yet.”

Ferran’s blood ran cold. He swallowed, his mouth kept firmly shut, but he lifted his head to meet Dante’s eyes.

“You have grown much since last we met,” Dante observed, turning back to continue his business with the bone. “In height, in weight, in mind . . . And yet, not grown enough in spirit to please your father, I understand. At least, that’s what I hear from your father’s dying dreams.” He nodded toward the king’s limp body. “His impressions of loss and disappointment are powerful. It must be difficult for you to shoulder your father’s dismay as you do.”

The sting of the remark prickled Ferran’s skin like hedgehog spines, but it was nothing compared to the pain he still felt pounding through his head and pulling at his wrists and ankles. He said nothing.

“So. A prudent prisoner.” Dante smiled. “That’s fine with me.” He went back to the clay pots.