Master of restless shado.., p.22
Master of Restless Shadows Book Two, page 22
part #2 of Master of Restless Shadows Series
None of this was new; in fact, he felt certain that he’d passed scenes like this countless times when he’d ridden with Ciceron to opera houses or theaters. But on those evenings he’d been occupied with the pleasure of Ciceron’s company, and to a greater degree than he wanted to admit, he’d accepted Ciceron’s resigned opinion of the sick, crippled and desperate individuals surrounding them.
There are always people who’d rather beg than take the work offered them. There’s nothing to be done about that.
Those nights the gaunt horses, rangy hounds and lanky cats had received more of Fedeles’s sympathy. But tonight he felt touched by the humanity of the people around him. In great part because few of them could see his observations. The pale cerulean filaments of Oasia’s spells were invisible to them—though for Fedeles they glowed like a dozen full moons, illuminating the features of unsuspecting folk all along the streets.
Drunks and tired peddlers. A young man fingering his nostril and another scratching his balls. None of them performed for the pity of his purse, as Ciceron had called it. Nor were they glowering daggers at him.
Under the cover of night he observed the people around him in repose, and revelry, as well as despair and grief. He considered a wide-eyed man who appeared entirely occupied shouting insults at a rainspout above him. Then his attention shifted to a group of scabbed oldsters sharing a poppy pipe. One of them stroked the shoulder of another, who lay unconscious.
They were ugly and anguished, but also beautiful in their care for one another.
Having spent his whole day in the company of royalty, the disparity of human circumstances seemed suddenly very stark. Was it any wonder that some of these people might resort to picking pockets, mugging and burglary? They possessed so little, while just across the Gado Bridge, people like himself lived in opulence and luxury.
If he had been born to a poor family, would he have fared better than the beggars they passed? When he’d been out of his mind, status and wealth had shielded him, and it had empowered his friends and family with the resources to free him. If Javier had been toiling day and night in a slop-house, neither he nor Fedeles would’ve attracted Kiram Kir-Zaki’s attention. He would never have been saved by the man’s knowledge of machinery. Fedeles wouldn’t have fared any better than the man now raving at the rooftops.
A figure burst from the shadows.
Fedeles jerked Firaj to a halt as a gangly Cadeleonian girl in a threadbare dress shot across the street. He nearly called out an admonishment to her, but then he saw the Haldiim infant that she snatched up from a heap of rags in the mouth of an alley. She gripped the baby to her chest as three mangy dogs prowled near. They growled, snapping at the girl’s legs. She kicked and bellowed obscenities at the animals. Her baby let out a reedy yowl.
Fedeles reined Firaj nearer and the dogs bounded away. The girl shouted after them but didn’t seem to notice Fedeles. Tears dribbled down her cheeks and she wiped her face quickly with the back of her hand. Then she began singing in a soft, broken voice as she soothed her child.
Fedeles stared in horrified wonder.
On another occasion, perhaps in different company, he might have sneered at the girl and questioned her quality as a mother for leaving her baby like a heap of offal for stray dogs to feed on.
But tonight he recognized the tenderness in her expression as she sang to the child nursing at her breast. Fedeles took in her battered, bare feet and the chapel star painted across the back of her dress. He saw how painfully young she was, as well as the beggar’s cup hanging from a penitent’s rope tied around her waist.
All at once he realized that he had no idea about the circumstances of her life. Was she dependent upon a chapel that would have taken her half-Haldiim baby from her if she didn’t hide it? Had she been repudiated by her family? Abandoned by the father? He couldn’t know and he certainly couldn’t judge. The only obvious truth before him was that she adored her child. Just as he loved his. So, how was he any different from this girl, when he too had gone out into the night, leaving his child behind?
He’d inherited a household of maids and guards who ensured his son’s safety. But he wasn’t on hand to do it himself. This girl couldn’t afford sandals to protect her own feet, much less a mansion of servants to coddle her baby. But when her child had needed her most, she’d stood before snarling hounds, placing her own flesh between their teeth and her child.
Fedeles reached into his coat and drew out his coin purse. He swung down from Firaj and dropped the purse into her beggar’s cup. The girl’s head came up at once and she peered at him through the dark.
“I don’t mean to disturb you,” Fedeles whispered. “I wish you both well.”
“Thank you,” she whispered back.
Fedeles gazed at the babe in her arms. “The wisteria of the Haldiim sacred grove could offer you better shelter than this place—”
“Fedeles,” Atreau called to him from the road. “God’s balls, man. Did you wake me up to do this? Because if you did—”
“Sorry.” Fedeles left the girl and swung back up into his saddle. He patted Firaj. “Lead on.”
“It’s not my guidance that’s in question. It’s you following along that seems less than assured,” Atreau muttered.
“There was a girl with a baby. I just wanted to do something for them,” Fedeles admitted.
“Keep Hierro from taking over the country and you’ll have done her and every other person in this nation a greater good than tossing them a few coins, I promise you that,” Atreau replied.
They continued riding along the narrow lane. The pungent odor of tanneries and dyers emanated from dark buildings. Raucous voices roared from winehouses and boomed through the quiet street. A nighthawk swooped down from a tiled roof and snatched a rat from a heap of tanners’ refuse.
Atreau scowled at the rodent’s brief, shrill squeal. He slowed his horse and peered through the dark. The cerulean glow of Oasia’s spells cast a deathly pallor across his face. Fedeles didn’t think he’d ever seen Atreau looking so haggard—not even the night he’d bribed the then young Captain Ciceron to release Atreau from the city jail.
Atreau shifted slightly and the distant glow of the sacred grove warmed his features but didn’t lift the shadows from beneath his eyes.
“The next street and around the corner. Corrdevo’s Wool warehouse will be in the middle of the cul-de-sac.” Atreau nudged his gray stallion, and Nube trotted ahead. Fedeles wondered if it was somehow symbolic that he, who could see the city illuminated by charms and spells, had no idea where they were, while Atreau, blind as he was in the dark, knew the way.
“I’ll follow right behind you this time,” Fedeles replied.
He wanted to say more to Atreau, to somehow engage him in a friendly conversation. Perhaps ask him about the play that he was writing for Jacinto, or inquire after the sales of the Haldiim translation of his latest memoir. But for the first time that Fedeles could recall, Atreau didn’t seem in the mood for conversation.
When they rode around a corner, Fedeles’s concerns about chitchat vanished. He stared in awestruck silence.
Ahead of them a two-story wooden warehouse sat in the center of a swirling mass of indigo spells. The incantations radiated with such intensity that every crack in the siding of the building—every seam beneath a shuttered window and doorframe—was outlined in spears of brilliant light. The six men guarding the building looked like burned-out shadows as they lounged by the double doors.
“I see it,” Fedeles called to Atreau.
Atreau drew his stallion to a halt. He stared straight ahead for a few moments, then squeezed his eyes closed. When he opened them again, his expression was grim.
“The wards defending this place are huge, aren’t they?” Atreau asked.
“Yes,” Fedeles admitted. “There’s a tapestry of indigo spells radiating through the entire warehouse. Some are wards, others thralls, but they look much more complicated than most of Hierro’s work. There’s something more to them . . .” The spells were far more complex and interwoven than he’d expected. The Circle of Wisteria and the Shard of Heaven were both protected by spells this intricate and vibrant, but those had been crafted by whole communities of clergy and worshipers. Their power had accumulated over generations. These spells couldn’t have been more than a few years old. How had Hierro managed to craft them in such a short time, and how on earth could he alone fuel them day in and day out? How much power did the man truly command?
Fedeles found his skin prickling and his hair standing on end as he rode closer. He strained to make out the hundreds of individual symbols that intertwined to weave each of the long, intricate spells. Those, in turn, were overlaid to form a nearly seamless fabric of magic. This was far more complex than the impulsive indigo masses that Hierro had cast at Fedeles and Oasia in the past. Could these be old spells—like the Brand of Obedience itself—preserved in relics or charms and passed down to Hierro?
“Fedeles?” Atreau asked. He peered at Fedeles with a concerned expression. “If this is too much, just tell me. We can find another way.”
“No. I—I can do this. But I need to study them more closely,” Fedeles decided. “If I can ride around to the west side of the building, the sacred grove will help me discern each of the individual parts of the spells that make up the wards and the thralls . . . I’m wondering how much of this Hierro crafted himself and how much he’s seized . . . if that makes sense?”
“You wish to read the individual words from which Hierro has composed his manifesto. Yes?” Atreau cocked his head slightly. “Perhaps some of them are lifted from other sources. Hierro seems the type who’d plagiarize a spell just as readily as he’d claim the work of a forgotten poet as his own, I think.”
“He does, doesn’t he,” Fedeles agreed. It was so easy to forget just how quick and canny Atreau could be. Had he been born a witch, he probably would have mastered magic just as readily as he learned musical instruments and languages.
“Well, you’ll need a distraction then.” Atreau nodded and gazed at the men guarding the warehouse. “I play a rather engaging drunkard. That should do. But be careful. If this is too much, then . . . just don’t get yourself killed for a bunch of strangers, all right. Master Ariz would be heartbroken.”
Fedeles felt both flattered and flustered by the sentiment. Before he could think of a response, Atreau swung his leg over his stallion’s back and then turned around so that he sat backward in his saddle. He patted Nube gently and the horse gave a relaxed sigh. Nube enjoyed showing off.
Fedeles smiled. When they’d schooled together, Atreau had often amused them all with riding tricks. He’d never been one for the daring charges that Elezar excelled at or the valiant leaps that Javier coaxed from his mount, Lunaluz. But Atreau’s clowning and humor had never failed to win him laughs and the attention of numerous delighted ladies. It had been a few years since Fedeles had last seen him perform. Still, he fondly remembered how easy and foolish Atreau managed to make the intricate maneuvers appear.
Atreau caught Nube’s tail as if he were gripping reins and then very gently nudged the stallion. Nube trotted backward toward the guards, while Atreau wove and wobbled in his saddle like a drunk about to topple.
As he neared the guards, they came to attention. One hefted a spear and another drew his sword. Fedeles almost called out to Atreau. But then one of the guards laughed and an instant later they all observed Atreau’s backward advance with bemused expressions.
“She’s left me! Flung me aside like a clipped toenail!” Atreau tilted in his saddle and then flopped forward over Nube’s hindquarters. “You lot, come on. Kill me!” Atreau slurred and then let out a long wail. “Cut off my head and rip—rip out my heart! Then give that to her!”
Two of the guards snickered openly at Atreau, but the other four looked more pitying—one even wore the sympathetic expression of a man who’d cried out those same words just recently. None of them spared a glance in Fedeles’s direction as he edged Firaj around the west side of the warehouse and swung down from the horse’s back.
A dog chained behind the warehouse barked in alarm and Fedeles almost bolted back to Firaj. But then one of Oasia’s shining threads hurtled ahead of him and wound around the chained animal. The dog grumbled, snorted and then settled into a deep sleep.
The guards at the front of the building didn’t seem to have noticed the barking at all. Instead, one of them assured Atreau that he’d never met, much less seduced, Atreau’s wife. Atreau responded with sobs as he begged the man to give her back.
“She farts like the north wind rolling off a refuse heap!” Atreau howled. “But I don’t care. Tell her to come back home! Tell her I’ve written her a poem!”
And then he began reciting:
“How your kisses filled my heart, oh, my ample, breezy love.
But rank wind blew us apart, and drained me limp as a glove.
That stench blown by a hound of hell conjured words I spoke in haste.
Wrongful blame upon you fell, so you fled my choked embrace.
Deprived of comfort and of bliss, I ride in vain pursuit.
I die for a single kiss. Alas you, my love, care not a toot.”
Fedeles laughed to himself. Atreau’s genius truly was wasted on his perplexed audience. One of the guards commiserated with him while two others seemed to feel Atreau could do better and started dispensing advice about where he could find another woman.
Fedeles turned his own attention back to the warehouse wall. The gold glow from the Circle of Wisteria illuminated more details of Hierro’s indigo spells. Here and there the light from the sacred grove seemed to sear the indigo light and give off a faint musky vapor. Irsea was obviously directing the power of the sacred grove to keep Hierro’s spells from spreading beyond the Weavers’ Ward.
But even as Fedeles watched, the Circle of Wisteria’s light dimmed and drifted slightly from the warehouse wall. Irsea’s connection to the living realm was fading. Without her, or another Bahiim watching over the sacred grove, its power would be without a direction or a purpose. Ripe for a man like Hierro to steal and twist to his own ends.
Fedeles felt a prick of guilt for secretly hoping that Irsea might come to his aid. She needed to preserve all the strength she possessed just to remain in the living realm until a new Bahiim arrived to protect the sacred grove. That wouldn’t be anytime soon, not until the royal bishop was brought to heel.
Fedeles leaned into the wall of the warehouse. Peering through a crack, he spied the interwoven threads of tiny spells that made up the dense thralls that Hierro had cast. Waves of malevolence rolled off the spells and radiated through the wooden walls like heat issuing from an oven. Blue light blazed into his eyes even after he clenched them closed. Up so close, the press of Hierro’s presence was pervasive—as if the man’s breath filled Fedeles’s throat and his fingers pinched and jabbed at Fedeles’s body. It revolted him and reminded him of those horrifying years when Scholar Donamillo had slithered into his body and taken possession of him.
Fear set his heart pounding, but Fedeles forced himself to remain where he stood. He let his initial surge of terror fade. Then he focused, studying both the thralls and the protective wards surrounding them. He leaned in, and as his senses adjusted to the onslaught of Hierro’s witchflame, he began to discern patterns and structures. Steadily he realized that the bold indigo light of Hierro’s power didn’t emanate from most of the spells. Instead, it encased them—like a thin skin of gold plating ancient iron.
When Fedeles probed beneath Hierro’s indigo aura, he felt momentarily shocked. The intricate spells below looked almost identical to Oasia’s work. Fedeles almost felt betrayed by the sight of them. Then he noted that the tight knots and lacy curls turned in the opposite direction to the counterclockwise spells Oasia favored. And as he drew even closer, he caught a scent beneath the brash musk of Hierro’s power. Not the subtle lilac that encircled Oasia, but something more complex and rank—like funerary smoke twisting on river breezes.
The power sustaining these spells didn’t belong to Hierro alone, Fedeles realized. There was at least one other witch whose soul also fed the brands that Hierro controlled. Or was it that Hierro fed off spells crafted by another far more powerful witch? Was this a partnership, or was Hierro a parasite? As Fedeles studied the way Hierro’s presence engulfed and distorted the far more refined spells, he was reminded of the way pincushion galls warped roses, producing fantastical blossoms where a simple leaf would otherwise have grown.
Fedeles had no idea who this other witch could be—except that the resemblance of the spells to those Oasia crafted made him think it was another member of the Fueres family. Perhaps someone who had influenced Oasia’s magic. Her mother had died while Oasia was only a child, but her father, Paulino Fueres, remained very much alive. Was it possible that he sustained the ambitions of his son, Hierro, even at a cost to his own soul? As a father, Fedeles understood the impulse. Though he wasn’t certain Paulo Fueres was so loving a parent as to sacrifice so much.
Fedeles placed his hands against the rough wooden wall and sent his shadow creeping through the cracks and seams of the building. A few blue wards inside snapped and spit like frying oil struck with water. Fedeles gave no response, holding his shadow like a breath caught in his chest. The wards hissed and twisted, but without direction. Fedeles’s lungs began to ache; still he waited. A minute passed, though it felt like an hour. The wards calmed, then settled back into serene tapestries. Fedeles’s shadow crept between them like a mere play of light. He reached a thick column where the thralls Hierro controlled were gathered and bundled, like individual fibers spun into a single yarn. Indigo fire encased them all.
