Dust and Light (14 page)

He didn’t wait for my agreement. He recognized that honoring the contract mattered to me. I hated that he knew me even that much.

Once a frosted haze obscured the sun’s brief visit, I signaled Garen to carry in the first of this day’s corpses, while I returned the child to her ice barrow. I offered a brief prayer for her soul’s peace to whomever might be listening, then returned to my studio, touched a man’s brutally cloven brow, and reached for magic.

“’T
ain’t a palace,” said Egan
the linkboy, understating the obvious, as we descended the decrepit stair into the Bakers’ District alley, scattering a collegium of bony cats. “But we’re below, and Mam’s fierce about vermin. She lays traps and ratsbane, and sets out alder leaves and glue for the fleas. You’ll never see none of either. . . .”

House
was too generous a term for the ungraceful stack of soot-blackened stone. From its shape, the lay of the land, and other hints scattered through the street, I’d guess a grand Aurellian villa had once stood in this place, destroyed in the war that expelled the last remnants of the empire. Egan’s residence was likely built around the hearth of the main residence. Stones from the ruin would have provided the extra walls, as well as accounting for the baking ovens that gave the district its name.

“. . . and when we’ve a fire, the heat’ll warm your floor. Last lodger said his toes were never chilled. I won’t lie, there’s rough in the street, but Ju—the lady says she’s got ways that I know I’m not supposed to speak of. Nor will Mam, though she’ll have to know such if she’s to companion the lady. Got to say, it feels anxious, knowing such persons as yourself suffer
the hard times.” Egan’s verbiage had never slowed since I met him on the broad steps of Arrosa’s Temple.

I had already visited the dank corner where the temple precincts abutted Palinur’s inner rampart. A stair had taken me to the walk atop the hoary Elder wall. The view was most enlightening. Had someone dropped the child from the top of the wall her body would have been much more damaged than it was. But at a place where the Elder Wall bounded the temple’s gardens, a drainage grate opened from the bottom of the wall. Seeps had carved channels down the earthen rampart toward the dark tangle of the hirudo willow thicket far below. The murderer had rolled the child downslope with the sewage.
Despicable
.

“How much?” I said, interrupting Egan’s description of his mother’s bread. “What must we give for it?” For two rooms, one approximately the size of Juli’s clothes chest, the other perhaps twice that.

“Uh, four citrae the day, one more for coal. Another copper for each extra shovelful. But it’s a clean house, and to have its own fire grate is a rarity, even in the Bakers’ District.”

Great gods, he was apologizing for the amount. I’d spent more than the year’s tally on my last order of ink and parchment. That wouldn’t be the case this year.

“And your mam’s cooking, we would pay.”

“She’ll not take—”

“We will
not
be obligated to you. If a stranger asked her to cook the food he supplied, what would she charge for the doing?”

He pondered this as if it were the fate of the world, scuffing his boot in the alley filth, while the frost wind billowed my cloak. “Can’t say exactly, but her bread’s a citré the loaf, as it’s promised no weevils nor droppings in it. She’d surely think a citré for the day’s cooking was fair, as she cooks for me and her anyways. If she had to cook aught that was strange, maybe two?”

“We eat normal food.” Perhaps he thought sorcerers might require delicate birds’ livers poached in nectar, no weevils or droppings preferred. “A citré a day seems fair, along with an extra shovel of coal from time to time, perhaps.” A charm against vermin would be more valuable, but Bastien would have to consent and I could not imagine asking such a boon. Yet my imaginings had certainly fallen short already. Here I was negotiating with a linkboy.

“Aye, that should do it.”

A quick calculation told me the story of our future. We could allow ourselves approximately fifteen citrae a day. The rooms, the cooking, and two loaves accounted for half of that. Other food, wine, ink, parchment, Juli’s lessons, and our clothes . . . everything else must come out of the remainder.

“Come to our courtyard tonight and I’ll give you an answer.” Perhaps the sky would turn a summer’s blue in between or the warm breezes blow in from the west bringing us a better alternative. “To see the house was useful.”

A few other squat houses along the street were stone built, similar to Egan’s. The rest were the usual ramshackle sheds with tenements above. The lane itself was a wallow, little better than the hirudo piggery, and the district was poorer than the Clothmakers’ District, but in truth, not as awful as it could be. The air was certainly fresher and fragrant with yeast and baking bread. Blackened ruins here and there, overgrown with winter-matted weeds, testified to local fires, but naught suggested riots. Yet what might happen in a bread makers’ street when famine ground tighter in the spring? Indeed, where in the city would be safe?

Here at midday, the street was jammed with people hurrying on their business; loading or unloading carts; hauling grain sacks, water pails, or children. Elders sat on barrels or benches minding children or playing dice or pegs. Activity had stilled and voices had fallen silent when Egan and I arrived. As we stepped from the alley, it happened again; every eye gawked. I didn’t want people noticing . . . gossiping.

“Do you need me to lead you back to the temple?” Egan’s gaze darted between me and a clot of neighbors.

I beckoned him close where we could not be overheard. “I can find my own way. But, Egan, you clearly know the law forbids discussing purebloods or their business. That includes
any
mention of their families, their circumstances, or even their names.” Juli would hear my opinion of her revealing our straits to this boy. “You must and will adhere to the law strictly, no matter what’s asked of you—even by your mam.”

“For certain. Always have. Always will.” No flush of guilt or embarrassment tainted his cheeks. “The lady swore me. Though she worried more about you hearing how I was coming round.”

My sister’s surprises seemed never ending. But I could not have anyone know we lived in such a place. Purebloods would never walk here unless
it was on the business of their contracts; and they’d never imagine one of our kind might come here voluntarily. Fortunately, purebloods rarely heeded ordinaries’ gossip, either.

“Not a word to anyone. The Crown’s penalties for violation are severe, but mine will be worse. You’ll regret the hour your tongue flaps.”

Indeed now all color left him, leaving cheeks bone pale and eyes huge. “Aye, lord. I swear on my mam’s head. Honest, truly, I’ll be silent. Like a tree. Like a rock. Like a—”

“Yes, yes.” No need to have him choke on his heart. “And should we meet again, the proper term of address is
domé
.”

I hurried away, my own cheeks hot, wishing for a thousandth time there existed some spell that could blot people’s memories.
Obscurés,
spells that could divert people’s attention, were terribly difficult. I’d never learned how to work one. Until I did so, Juli and I would forever make a show in such a street, as noticeable as jongleurs with monkeys on their shoulders.

I
t was a relief to
see the Registry Tower rising above the Council District like a god’s finger pointing the way to Idrium. Even after such a brief foray into the lower city, it seemed a sanctuary. I raced up the steps, my heart lighter already. Pons was not the only curator here. My grandsire had been one of the most respected men of any pureblood generation. My father’s chronicle of the music of the Middle Kingdoms was considered the finest work ever conceived on the subject, and my mother’s murals graced temples, cathedrals, and grand houses of living and dead all over Navronne. Their reputations had not died with them. Pons’s failure to negotiate my contract was a serious breach of pureblood protocols. Someone would listen to me.

T
he guar
ds at the outer door of the Registry Tower nodded crisply as I passed. Trained to sense the magical deadness of ordinaries, they knew who belonged inside and who did not.

Across the atrium at the grand stair, two more liveried guards held blackwood staves wrapped so tightly in spellwork, they made my lips itch. Somewhat surprisingly, the guards crossed the staves at my approach, barring my entry to the stair. “Your business,
Eqastré
Remeni-Masson?”

“I’m to see Master Pluvius,
servitor
,” I said coolly, unaccustomed to being challenged, and even less so to being addressed as a guardsman’s equal.

“Master Pluvius is not in the Tower today,” said the servitor.

“The Overseer of Contracts, then.”

“Curator Albin is unavailable to outside visitors.” Not the least hint of apology or accommodation. My gut tightened.

“First Curator Gramphier himself, then,” I said. “He promised to consult with me about my Registry position.”

My grandsire’s longtime colleague now held the highest rank of any pureblood. Though I’d met Gramphier often in the company of my grandsire, I’d spoken to the man only once in five years, when he sat for his official portrait. But this was more of a test than a true request. In truth, his offhand
promise
had been made to my grandsire when I began work here.

“Surely you cannot expect curators to abandon their business to see
just anyone at a whim.” A lean, balding man with the sinewed grace of a racing hound had joined us from the guardroom. Fortieri’s iron hand had commanded the Tower Guard for a generation. “I suggest you apply in writing for an appointment before returning to the Tower.”

Containing my rising anger required all the self-discipline I’d squandered at Necropolis Caton that morning. “Master Pluvius has never required me to apply in writing,” I said. “He has been my contract master and my mentor for five years. He declared his door open to me always.”

Fortieri’s hard gaze traveled my length, head to boots and back again. He sniffed, nostrils flaring in distaste. Great gods . . . the graveyard stink. Had I already sunk so low as not to notice?

“The Master of Archives no longer holds your contract, Remeni. Perhaps if your current master applied on your behalf for his counsel or tutelage, Curator Pluvius might have time to see you. Until then, it is our duty to ensure the serenity of these halls. As you well know,
eqastré
.”

Such insolence! I did not trust myself to respond. Cheeks aflame, anything but serene, I spun to go, only then glimpsing a host of curious observers on the gallery above the atrium. The humiliation I had felt when leaving the Registry chambers in Montesard in disgrace had been naught to this. And this time I had done
nothing
to deserve it.

Holding dignity, I maintained a steady, unhurried pace as I left the Tower and crossed the courtyard to the outer gate. But I had no intention of giving up so easily. I knew one person who would speak to me.

Touching my brow to the single guard at the gate, I hurried into the steeply descending street. I turned left into the first alley and sped past a series of painted doors: a copyist’s, a glover’s, a parfumerie. Halfway along the alley, I slipped into a niche scarce wider than a coal scrape. A narrow stone stair, so ancient as to predate almost every other structure in Palinur, climbed back toward the Registry Tower.

I sped up the shallow steps. The dark stone was treacherous, skimmed with ice where the drips from adjacent roofs had pooled and puddled in scoops left by centuries of boots.

Long before King Caedmon gave the Tower to the Registry as part of their accommodation, the kings of Ardra had brought secret prisoners through a low iron door in the foundation of the Tower. Much more recently, the Royal Historian, Vincente de Remeni, had used the entry to teach his eager grandson the marvels of reading thresholds. Thresholds
held the threads and knots of history in the same way crossroads and mountain passes did. We had spent hours here.

The black iron door remained exactly as it was the last time we’d come—and every time I’d used it since. Plain and smooth, its handles, locks, and latches long removed. Its hidden hinges were impervious to bars or levers. And I had no need to work magic.

“Aperite porte mordé!”

The door swung open silently at the incantation and closed softly behind me.

Magelight led me through dank, windowless iron chambers the Registry didn’t see fit to use for anything. I bypassed the twisting iron stair that led up to a guardroom on the fifth level of the tower. Just behind the stair, a seam in the wall housed a latch that would respond to a small infusion of my magic. Mine alone.

My grandsire had said that a man who visited the Archives at odd hours as often as he did tired of guards asking what was his business so late. And the iron stair was steep and tiresome. This particular door, cleverly hidden on both sides, opened onto the Registry’s back stair—the servants’ stair. The back stair also served as a highroad for junior portraitists and other low-ranked employees arriving late of a morning, but I was likely the only person living who knew about the secret access through the cellar.

Three turnings and a wrought-iron gate took me into the fourth level of the Tower. Were I blind I could recognize the Registry Archives. The scents of parchment and leather and the reek of sour vitriol and acrid tannin used to mix inks made the air a fragrant brew. I’d never noticed how pleasurable it was before donning the perfumes of the necropolis.

It was early afternoon—not the hours for portrait sittings, thus easy to slip unseen through the Archives and around the corner into the junior portraitists’ studio. The unruly black hair and broad, meaty back roused a grin. Gilles was working at his easel, retouching a drawing of a wrinkled dowager. I was only three days gone, and he already had the place a jumble.

I closed the door carefully, slipped across the floor, and perched in the window seat, waiting for his pen to lift from the parchment.

After a while he sighed and yawned noisily, as he always did when he released his magic.

“Grace of the Mother, Gilles,” I said softly.

He poked his head around his easel.

“Lucian! What the devil—? Great gods, I’ve missed you! I’m buried!” Hapless, he extended his arms to include the stacks of portrait folios, as well as his usual litter of discarded pages, blotted rags, emptied ink horns, broken pens, and the remnants of half a dozen meals.

“Shhh. I had to sneak up the back stair.” I tried to maintain some tone of levity. “Don’t think I’m supposed to be here.”

His broad brow creased. “I didn’t expect to see you for ages yet. Truly I’ve not known what to think—all the stories going round. On that last day you were standing by the open window, so I told myself you’d taken some sort of fever instead of . . . anything else. Earth’s Mother, you
do
smell like a sickroom.”

“Sorry about the stink. It’s my new master’s business—smoke and such. I’ve certainly not been ill. That would have been better in a way. No one told you I had a new contract?” He hadn’t been here when I picked up my things that day, but I had assumed he’d learn soon enough. His own uncle Albin had announced my dismissal.

“Not ill? But everyone says it.” Puzzlement creased his brow. “We’ve heard you needed a change of scene for now, else—”

“Else?”

“You’d do something awful. Hurt yourself or someone else. Run away. Rebel.”

“
Hurt
someone?
Run
? Why ever—?” Juli’s taunt echoed in my thick skull. “Gilles, has no one else had a contract terminated early these past few days?”

“Certainly not. Who’s ever heard of such a thing?”

“Three days ago your uncle Albin told me that all contracts scheduled to expire next year were accelerated, to be renegotiated—or not—immediately. They didn’t renew mine. Booted me out that same day.”

“Perhaps”—flooding sympathy erased his disbelief—“that’s just what they told you. To make it easier.”

“Easier?” I exhaled disgust. “I am neither ill nor violent nor rebellious, but I am assuredly an idiot. This is all Pons. The witch has stuck me in a contract you couldn’t imagine in your nightmares. And no curator will see me so I can protest it.”

And the witch’s revenge was worse than I knew. To put it about that I was on the verge of rebellion . . . a
recondeur
 . . . driven to violence or, great heavens, self-murder! No wonder I wasn’t allowed into the Tower.
Even if I found someone to listen to my complaints about the lack of negotiation or Pons’s five years of spite, who would believe them? Without funds to maintain our station, rumors of my disintegration would seem to be true. At best Juli and I would fade out of sight; at worst . . . Lord of Fire. Mad sorcerers were extremely dangerous.

Gilles shook his head vigorously, then plowed his inky fingers into his hair and yanked on the unruly mop, holding his locks stretched out until it seemed his scalp must be torn off—his customary reaction when details of a portrait refused to come together. “I’ll say the rumors threw me. You’ve always been so well disciplined. You’re saying the other curators let Pons dismiss you—the finest portraitist in the Registry—because of that matter at the university?”

At one of our late suppers I’d told him why Pons was always looking over my shoulder.

“They didn’t give me any better reason.”

Gilles shoved his easel aside and leaned forward, forearms planted on his formidable thighs, ink-stained fingers clasped. Unaccustomed sobriety stilled his face and lowered his voice. “The rumors say you went out of your head with what happened to your family. That it’s been getting worse for a while and was affecting your work. Reports—I can’t even say whose, as it seemed to be common knowledge all at once—said you were on leave and that everyone should keep away from you.”

“Why would anyone think that?” It was true that rumor held disproportionate sway in pureblood life. Families were closed, insular, the six Registry curators worst of all. No pureblood was intimate enough with any other to counter widespread gossip. “Did your uncle tell you this?”

“You know Uncle Guilian doesn’t talk to me about serious matters. But he did remind me that I should be exceptionally discreet because we worked together, you and I. Investigators plagued me right after you left. I swear I told them I’d not seen evidence”—his complexion colored a bit—“well, not anything so dire as all that. I mean, you were grieving, that was clear, and angry, but who wouldn’t be? As for the rest . . . perhaps someone is just seeing you’ve got some time to settle matters, financial things, your sister. Pons would never spread false rumors over an old discipline matter.”

“She’s done more than you know. She was appointed my negotiator, and she failed to—”

Caution halted me. Pons’s betrayal of every principle we lived by was very serious and should be reported only to her superior Gramphier, the First Curator of the Registry. But first I needed to understand who was circulating these reports. If Pons’s influence was so sweeping, I didn’t want Gilles left in her bad graces.

I sagged against the casement, letting the cold draft chill my anger. “Well, it’s no matter. I’ll get to the bottom of it. Pons pawned me off on an old bid from outside the city. Perhaps the curators truly believed the change would do me good.”

Perhaps someone had got wind of Pons’s malfeasance and was trying to hush it up. Lay it all at my feet somehow.

“Sometimes our superiors do things for our own good that make no sense at the time.” Gilles’s black eyes shone like those of a proud uncle, relieved, it seemed, that I’d thrown sand on my fire.

“Perhaps you did need a change of scene,” he said. “No matter the stink, you’re a deal more lively. Honestly, Lucian, a runaway chariot heading straight for you wouldn’t have roused you three days ago, nor any of these past few months. Unless it had six new sable brushes on it.”

Laughter belched up from somewhere, a decent good humor that seemed to cleanse the clotted fury from my veins. Gilles had always been able to get it out of me.

“I’m still drawing portraits,” I said. “But the subjects aren’t very lively, so I’ve had to use some new methods. Which reminds me: Has anyone in your family ever shown”—it sounded so ridiculous, but Gilles came from an even longer line of artists than I did—“an obscured presence when he worked, as if the magic created a fog or curtain that veiled him? Someone said—Of course, we were outdoors at the time, so I’m sure it was snow and mist.”

“Never heard of such a thing.” He scratched his head vigorously, as if trying to put it all to rights. Then his chin lifted and he grinned. “Though there have always been strange manifestations of talent. Patronn was telling stories of Janus de Cartamandua, the cartographer, the other night, when we were speaking of—Well, old Janus has long gone loony, you know. But it was said that when he was making his maps, he could walk right out of this world.”

“Ah yes, into the
realm of angels.
” According to some, good King Eodward was actually Caedmon’s son, instead of his great-great-great grandson. Supposedly the boy prince had lived with the angels for a
hundred and forty-seven years before claiming his throne and becoming the greatest king in the history of the Middle Kingdoms. “Earth’s Mother, Gilles, did you really think I’d gone mad like old Cartamandua?”

“Certainly not.” His cheeks could have roasted a goose. “I was just worried and asked Uncle Guilian if they’d heard any news of you.”

“I’ve got all my wits for the moment,” I said. “Truly I’m doing some of the best work I’ve ever done. Though it’s odd—”

“Oh!” His head popped up. “Speaking of your best work. Perhaps it was not quite your best. Master Pluvius is having the curators’ portraits completed for you. They want them hung for, well, I can’t quite remember what occasion. It’s too bad you can’t do it yourself.”

“But the portraits were completed months ago. You know I can’t leave a portrait unfinished.”

Pluvius had never explained the delay in unveiling the results of my first senior commission, but neither had he mentioned any need for modification. And for one pureblood artist to alter the work of another risked compromising the image’s truth. The disharmony was instantly detectable to anyone who took the trouble to look.