A conjuring of assassins, p.9
A Conjuring of Assassins, page 9
That something, of course, was the odd stranger sleeping—I hoped—in my bed. I’d a mind to ask Dumond about the symbol on the luck charm, but thought I’d see if my drowned rat had died or vanished with my pens and pots before telling my partners about him. I felt entirely foolish for dragging the man home. Neri would enjoy pointing out how foolish.
Vashti refilled our cups one last time. “The swordmaster will come in the afternoon, yes?”
As well as serving the Chimera as a rescuer of lost souls, as a generous purveyor of food and drink at unlikely hours, and as a seamstress who could transform one into a contessa, a tart, or a shepherdess with a few scraps, ten buttons, and a feather, Vashti provided intelligent advice and a certain detached clarity that kept us focused.
“We’ve got to find him first,” I said. “But he’ll be here.”
Neri and I made our farewells and headed homeward, a not inconsiderable walk halfway around the Beggars Ring. We’d be lucky to reach our beds before first light.
“You did well tonight,” I told Neri as we set a modest pace along the Ring Road. “You’ve learned a lot in a year.”
“Got no choice with you and Placidio always on me. Like badgers, you two.”
“We are, no question.”
I could have told him how much change I saw and how proud I was, but I heeded Placidio’s advice not to let him off his caution too easily. Certain, Neri was still young and frighteningly fearless. But he honored his swordmaster above any other person he knew, his sister included.
“Where could Placidio be?” I said.
“Did you look in at Jaco’s Spoon? It’s not so close, but he likes their sausage loaf after a hard fight.”
“I checked everywhere you’ve mentioned except for the one you weren’t sure of—the Bull something. No one had seen him since I left him at the woolhouse.”
“Don’t like it,” Neri said, his concern feeding my own. “Where was this rough match to be?”
“I don’t even ask any more. If he doesn’t tell me on his own, asking only annoys him.”
“Yeah. I’ll find him.”
Matches between registered duelists were not intended to be death matches. But the weapons used were neither wood nor blunted steel, and any wound could be deadly. Official referees helped prevent the most severe injuries, but the duelists themselves had to pay the referee’s fee, and both participants had to agree to do so. At least half of Placidio’s matches had no referee. Every match carried risk, even for a duelist with magic as his ally.
Our anxiety trailed after us like a lonely dog.
Only a few people were about so early in the day. A giant of a man in a leather vest dragging a wood cart. An elderly woman carrying a cage of chickens, destined for the poulterer. Neither gave us a second glance. Two skinny cats darted into a shadowed alley.
“Why’d you pull your mask off when you went into that room?” asked Neri after a while. “I thought you’d gone loony.”
“All those years, Rossi and I were neither of us quite respectable. I was a whore; he was poor—very different from all the others who gather around il Padroné. We spent a lot of hours on the peripheries of social gatherings. As we both loved contests of wits, we became friends. Tonight I believed Rossi would listen to me. Dreadfully naive, as I look back on it.”
“You never suspected he was a spy?”
“Never. Though it makes all kinds of sense. People discounted his intelligence because he was short of money, charming, and told wild stories. But he had traveled everywhere, seen so many things, and once you got beyond his fantastical tales, he was so intelligent and witty. A perfect persona for deception.”
“Sort of like what you do with your impersonation magic.”
“Better.” For an instant, the yawning emptiness of Bawds Field rolled through me, a cold wind whistling through my ears. “Safer.” Would I ever be able to use it again?
A few hundred paces ahead of us, two horses whinnied.
Our feet slowed. Horses were a rarity in the Beggars Ring and rarely meant anything good.
A linkboy emerged from a lane of shabby tenements and market stalls, his torch illuminating the horses and the yellow blazon on their caparison. Praetorians—the military auxiliaries of the Philosophic Confraternity.
Shouts and protests accompanied the party that followed the boy into the street. Two men in scarlet-trimmed yellow dragged a wriggling scrap of a yelling woman. A small party of men and women erupted from the lane behind them, shouting and waving their arms. Rocks flew, startling the horses and infuriating the praetorians.
A praetorian drew his sword, whirled around, and ordered the protesters away. His partner soothed their mounts, then fixed a rope from the woman’s bound wrists to one of the saddles.
Though tempted to bolt or halt to watch the confrontation play out, Neri and I rounded the next corner as if we saw such things every day while strolling the Ring Road before dawn. Indeed, nothing but the hour was unusual.
“That was Nandi the Palmist,” said Neri, in a choked whisper. “A fey girl, always laughing. Likely getting ready for her dawn readings. She thinks Lady Fortune sees better at dawn.”
“Certain, they’re just going to warn her,” I said, as soon as my heart abandoned my throat and returned to beating. “Preach at her about the evils of augury. Put a scare into her.”
That was the usual. Certain, if the woman was being arrested for magic, there would have been a nullifier and his unholy sniffer there as well. No law explicitly proscribed fortunetelling, though the Philosophic Confraternity proposed one to the Sestorale every year, claiming the spiritual arts led our citizens into realms of unreason. The Philosophists enforced the sorcery laws.
We returned to the Ring Road well past the site of the arrest.
“We can’t just leave this mission go, can we?” said Neri. “Since your friend didn’t say where was the cursed List.”
My mind was in the same place as his. Using our magic was ever a risk.
“No. I think we must try again, even if the damnable thing is somewhere we’d never think to look. How can Rossi possibly guarantee it won’t get to Protector Vizio if he’s to be a prisoner of Mercediare? That says to me that someone else knows what and where Cinque’s prize is—which I find difficult to believe. Or that he doesn’t expect to be a prisoner very long.”
“Does he think the ambassador will set him free?”
“Possibly. Two years … now three that would be … the ambassador’s been posted here, so he could have encountered Rossi. But Rossi was never shy about his opinions of Vizio, and no Mercediaran earns the post of ambassador to Cantagna without being one of Vizio’s most trusted, loyal bureaucrats. So why is Rossi not afraid of him?”
“Maybe Cinque has something on the ambassador himself, not just Vizio,” said Neri.
“Extortion. Very possible, which says our next step must be to learn more about Ambassador di Sinterolla.”
As Neri trudged along in silence, I considered how we might do that. I’d never met the man. Sandro had taken his young wife to formal diplomatic functions, and the Mercediaran ambassador was rarely seen in the more relaxed company where mistresses were welcomed. He was a widower, and gossip named him a straitlaced sort. Of course, the Shadow Lord, desiring to know as much about anyone of influence in Cantagna, always had his spies investigate newcomers posted to Cantagna. And all the information they gathered was kept in a safe place …
“Mantegna,” I blurted.
“What’s that?” Neri’s head popped up.
“Cosimo di Mantegna is a lawyer. Prosperous and well-respected. Unknown to most people, he also happens to be the Shadow Lord’s consigliere, his advisor in matters of the law. He has access to all information gathered by the Shadow Lord’s spies—which should include something about the Mercediaran ambassador.”
The streets burst into life with the predawn light as if the sun had entered the tenements and hovels and tapped everyone on the shoulder at the same time. Carts laden with vegetables, coal, and hanging cook pots clogged the Ring Road. Laborers with picks or sledges over their shoulders strode out of the side lanes. Girls carried buckets of water. Boys herded pigs.
As we entered the Quartiere dell Fiume—the River Quarter, where Neri and I lived—Neri spoke up abruptly. “I’m off to find Placidio. Doubt I can sleep anyways.”
“Someday we’re going to learn why your talent lets you walk through walls to find a silver bracelet or a biscuit, but can’t take you to your swordmaster or your sister,” I murmured. “Does every magical skill have a major flaw like that … like my relinquishing problem? Or is it just that we don’t know what we’re doing?”
“Thought for a while it might be the luck charms, since I can’t walk to those neither. But Placidio and I tried it. With or without, if he’s hid, I can’t walk to him.”
“Did Dumond ever tell you how the charms work? Or what the mark engraved on them means?” The bits of bronze supposedly masked the magic we carried from sniffers. But none of us could detect dormant magic in each other with or without the charms.
“Nah.” Neri kept his voice quiet as well. “He only said that ’twas not the bronze itself, but the graving kept sniffers off us. I didn’t know to ask if it were the exact mark—or if any other mark might do as well. At the time I thought it was likely the grooves in the metal held the magic … like troughs, you know.” He glanced at me from under the locks of dark curling hair the local girls found so fetching. “Stupid, eh?”
“How could you have known different?”
Neri wasn’t at all stupid. But he’d lived his first fifteen years in Beggars Ring squalor, ignorant, angry, scared, with a houseful of bawling infants and parents who were terrified of him. The only person in the world who might have understood was his elder sister, the whore who lived in luxury with the most dangerous man in Cantagna. If Sandro had not thrown me out, Neri would have been dead by sixteen.
I laid a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll meet you and Placidio at Dumond’s at midday. Find him, Neri.”
“Be sure of it.”
He vanished into the cramped lane that would take him to Placidio’s room. Sometimes I envied those who had gods to ask for protection for those they cared for.
* * *
Weary to the bone, I pushed through the traffic to Lizards Alley as if I were tumbling down a well. I didn’t even slow to check the message boxes in front of the shop. My clients would have to wait. If Lady Fortune was kind, Teo would be gone, and I could collapse on my pallet. Or at the least he would be snoozing peacefully with a normal heartbeat and I could collapse on Neri’s pallet.
I shoved open the door.
He was still there. Damnation.
The house was still warm when I shut the door on the noisy morning and dropped to my knees beside the mound of blankets on my pallet. Don’t you dare be dead!
I touched his covered shoulder. “Teo? Are you alive? Awake? Feeling better?”
He didn’t move.
Steeling myself for the worst, I loosened the blankets and rolled him onto his back. Only to fall back to sitting on my heels. Teo’s face …
The swelling, the bruises, the cuts and abrasions had vanished, revealing a narrow face of fine bones and wide-set eyes. Still sleeping, he breathed slowly through a long, straight, and decidedly unbroken nose. How was that possible? Anyone would think it had been a month since I’d seen him, not a few hours.
I yanked the covering from his leg and stared, wonderstruck. The swelling in his ankle was down, the bruising faded to pale green. Equally astonishing, the ink markings on his legs were no longer gray, but raven black. Brazen, I pulled back the blankets to expose the rest of him.
Like those on his leg, the inked markings, including the one so like that on our luck charms, had turned a vivid black. Faint reminders of the worst cuts and bruises from the beating remained. So I wasn’t a lunatic.
I laid my cheek on his breast. After a noticeable interval, his heart thumped. His chest rose ever so slightly. Paused. Fell. Much, much too slow, and his flesh remained terribly cold.
Teo’s state had not been some figment of the night and the fog. He’d been horribly beaten, near drowned. Terrified. His face had been so badly swollen he feared blindness. But the man in front of me might have posed for one of the marble statues in the ruined Temple of Atladu in the Market Ring—tall, sexless, serene, sculpted in a time when the popular style rejected natural muscle and bone in favor of the sublime.
Never had I heard or read of such rapid healing. The only thing I’d seen that approached it was certain magic—on a day when Placidio had touched a poisoned wound with fire and power, bringing himself back from the verge of death. Even that marvel could not measure to this.
My fingers gripped Teo’s slender wrist and I closed my eyes and plumbed every sensation. No fiery power coursed through me as happened when my brother, Placidio, or Dumond called on their magic.
“Hey,” I said, shaking his arm, then his leg. I slapped his cheek. He didn’t even twitch. “Xýpna, Teo! Wake up!”
I pulled the blankets back to his chin.
Why in the name of the Unseeable had I brought him here? Of course it was irrational. I’d known it at the time.
“I was simply exhausted,” I said aloud, as if Neri, Placidio, and Dumond were standing around me accusing. “And honestly, he was in a dreadful way. I was sure he’d die if I left him and I just couldn’t allow that. Which I can’t explain either, much less how he’s recovered from his injuries so fast or why these marks are darker than they were. I was not mistaken about those. I couldn’t leave him helpless.”
I had thought his marks were simply skin art, similar to drawings on the walls of caves or figures painted on urns. Now I wondered if they masked what he carried in his blood, as the luck charms purportedly did, or were they talismans, carrying power in themselves?
Power. Sorcery. Magic. Teo must be a sorcerer. I knew nothing about the varieties of magic in the world, much less the intrigues related to it. Even so, I couldn’t believe him a danger. He had been lonely and afraid and hurt … grateful for my help.
Which led me to another mystery. I’d not seen him speak a word, nor make a sign of communication but his hunger when I fed him. So how was it I knew these things about him? That he feared being blind. That he had a whimsical humor. Not lead. Not dead. Need fed. Name’s Teo.
Surely he would wake soon. Spirits, he could be dancing or running up the scarps of the Boars Teeth by noonday if he continued this rate of healing. The moment he opened those eyes, I would demand answers.
So I sat beside the pallet to wait, dagger in hand. Rossi, the Assassins list, Teo … my thoughts soon dissolved into murky confusion …
Sweet fronds of deep green, fruits of red and purple both sweet and tart, succulent leaves, perfect to wrap little crabs and tiny shrimps … such beauty here. I glided onward, till they joined me in the garden with the news. Another new crack in the pillar wall; it had been one per year, warm water seeping through a jagged opening in the foundation. Concerning, but a novelty. Then it was one per cycle of the moon. Water still, but bubbling hot, a pleasant warmth unless you poked an appendage inside the fracture. But now the foundation was crazed with them, and the pillar wall suffered. Mosaics that had lasted a hundred generations fading, colors washed out like dead fish on the sand. Two a day the rents appeared; some spat molten red streaks that sizzled and dissolved the flesh of the unwary. Time was running out …
The test is upon us … we cannot hold much longer as we are … your time has come early, along with opportunity …
A quiet moan accompanied a rustle of movement. I sat up abruptly, panic like lightning bolts in my limbs. I shook my head to clear away the detritus of sleep. So vivid a dream …
I rubbed my eyes. Bright daylight streamed in around the shutters and the door. Teo was turned halfway round, his legs hanging off the low pallet as if he’d tried to get up.
“Let me get you straight,” I said, “raise you up a bit. Spirits, you must be thirsty. Were you having terrible dreams like I was?”
I refilled his cup with the salty lemon-ginger tea and propped his back and head high enough for me to put the cup to his lips more easily than the previous night.
Though he never opened his eyes, Teo sipped, swallowed, and then opened his mouth again, as eager as a child tasting his first watered ale. He continued until the cup was drained. Then his head lolled sidewise.
Was he dreaming, too? Creeping destruction. Urgency. Ruin. Very like the visions wrought when Dumond and I touched the grand duc’s statue with magic. Mine had been pillars and graceful stone arches, faded mosaics with fiery cracks in them, niches containing bronze artworks. Dumond had seen a grand city abandoned and overgrown with fungus, and a cave room with carved walls creased with fractures. Chests of books and manuscripts had filled that crumbling room. The differing scenes had engendered similar emotions in Dumond and me—sadness, yearning for hidden knowledge, grief, a certainty of magic. Perhaps the presence of this strange man, the wonder of his healing, had but triggered the recollection as I slept.
I needed to get moving and meet the others at Dumond’s. Fortune grant that Neri and Placidio were gorging themselves at Vashti’s bountiful table.
Meanwhile the matter of the Assassins List and Rossi came rushing back. Rossi had persuaded me that no argument, bribe, or threat would persuade him to turn over the list. And even if my alteration of his memory had worked perfectly, the injury to his face would have put his guards on alert, making any play in the Palazzo Segnori far more dangerous. A second foray into Rossi’s chamber would accomplish nothing. We had to approach the problem less directly.
Pulling parchment, pen, and ink from a shelf, I scratched out a message to Cosimo di Mantegna. Disguised as a request for employment references to benefit my brother, my message asked for what information the Shadow Lord might have on the Mercediaran ambassador.
Once the letter was sealed, I cleaned myself up a bit and fetched a few things hanging beside our door. Tied some knots. Knelt at Teo’s bedside.
