Master of restless shado.., p.41
Master of Restless Shadows, page 41
part #1 of Master of Restless Shadows Series
Mistress Delfia’s meekness struck him as an artifice equal to his own pretense at drunkenness.
“I’d hoped that someone in the household could tell me a little about him,” Narsi said.
“He’d not served the duchess long,” Mistress Delfia replied. “And as far as I can tell his only close companions were his dice. Not that they showed him much kindness.”
Narsi frowned at Mistress Delfia’s cool assessment of the guard—though Atreau felt that it was likely quite perceptive. No doubt there had been much more to the man; the quality of his weapons and quantity of books implied a measure of discipline and thoughtfulness. People were rarely so simple that a single sentence could sum them up.
“I’d hoped to find out if he had family that I might contact to offer my condolences.” Narsi edged closer to the table. Atreau started to comment on the title of one of the larger volumes but then stopped himself when he realized that something on the dressing table clearly caught Narsi’s attention.
“There is no family that I know of,” Delfia stated. “Only outstanding debts. The duchess asked me to look through his room to see what, if anything, could be sold or passed along to settle his accounts.”
“It would reflect poorly upon the Quemanors to have troops of money-lenders and gamblers gather at the gates waving bills, I imagine.” Atreau offered the comment to draw Mistress Delfia’s attention away from Narsi and whatever it was that he found so fascinating. “Or is our beloved duchess the superstitious type who worries that unsettled debts can draw a ghost back from his grave?”
“No, you had it right with your first guess. She doesn’t want odious persons hanging about,” Mistress Delfia answered him but then started to turn back toward Narsi.
“This halberd looks well enough made, don’t you think?” Atreau added quickly. He stepped closer to the weapon rack and ran his hand over the polished wood of the shaft and Mistress Delfia’s attention leapt to him.
Yes, she was a woman who knew better than to look away from a man with his hand on a weapon. She couldn’t help herself but to watch him.
“Worth a few silver at the very least. I certainly wouldn’t mind owning such a weapon.” Atreau lifted the halberd as if to test its weight.
All at once a man’s hand shot out and gripped the halberd’s shaft, stopping Atreau. Master Ariz seemed to materialize from the shadows of the weapons rack. With horror Atreau realized he’d been standing there—deadly still and silent—the entire time. So close he could have slit Atreau’s throat without fully extending his arm.
Across the room from them, Narsi gave a short gasp and then laughed nervously. “I didn’t see you there at all, Master Ariz. You’re quiet as a shadow.”
Wasn’t he just, Atreau thought.
“I didn’t want to intrude upon your conversation.” Master Ariz’s words were courteous, but his expression struck Atreau as empty, almost slack—more the face of a fresh corpse than a man of living passions.
Atreau released the halberd and drew back, so as to place Mistress Delfia partly between himself and the line of the weapon’s strike. Emotionless as he appeared, Master Ariz still didn’t seem the type who’d risk cutting down his own sister to get at an opponent.
“Did Dommian owe money to you as well, Atreau?” he asked.
“No. Sadly, I haven’t any grounds to claim his fine halberd or that lovely winter coat, hanging there behind you. Though I do think we two frequented some of the same gaming houses.” Atreau resisted the urge to look to Narsi to see what he might be up to. Instead he did his best to keep the conversation flowing between the Plunado siblings and himself. “He may have owed quite a large sum to the proprietor of the Fat Goose.”
“The Salt Island Spider, you mean?” Mistress Delfia said. “Yes, he gambled and lost at the Fat Goose every chance he got. From what I’ve heard those debts may well have cost him his life.”
“You think?” Atreau pulled a slightly theatrical expression of horror. “If so, then I may not have long for this world myself. My losses at the card table there have been startling of late. All too soon you and your brother may be searching through my tatty rooms for anything worth throwing to my slavering debtors.”
“I doubt it would come to that.” Mistress Delfia offered Atreau just the hint of a smile. “Anyone so foolhardy as to attempt to do you harm would no doubt find himself attacked on all sides by armies of barmaids, actresses and goose girls. You should not fear.”
“Indeed. Goose girls can be quite fierce,” Atreau responded.
“Ferocious as their charges,” Mistress Delfia agreed.
Out of the corner of his eye he noted Narsi turn casually from the table. Atreau wondered if he hadn’t stolen something, for he looked just a little too studied in his innocent expression.
“Well, I suppose there’s nothing more I will learn of Dommian here,” Narsi said. “I’m sorry for the intrusion, Mistress Delfia, Master Ariz. We probably shouldn’t keep you from your work any longer. Thank you so much for indulging me.”
Mistress Delfia nodded politely, but she eyed Narsi with a certain suspicion as he worked his way through the chaotic room and back to the door. Atreau offered the woman a half bow and then hastened to follow Narsi out and away from Master Ariz. Neither of them said a word as they hurried down the hall. Just as they reached the turn in the corridor, Master Ariz’s voice sounded far too near their backs.
“Master Narsi,” he called.
Both of them turned back. Master Ariz stood hardly a yard from them, slack-faced and dull-looking as a potato sack. Had Atreau not seen the man’s bare body previously, he never would have given him a second thought. But now the purposeful deceit of his appearance struck Atreau as particularly sinister. Not since he’d gazed up at Elezar had Atreau laid eyes on so magnificent a musculature or such brutal scars. Master Ariz’s body belonged to a man of ceaseless action—a man hardened by violent combat—not a children’s dance tutor.
It could have been a coincidence that Master Ariz had been injured the same night Captain Batteo Ciceron had been murdered. No doubt any number of people all across the city had suffered falls, cuts and bruises that night. But the white swans emblazoned upon the kerchief that Master Ariz had clutched to his bloody arm nagged at Atreau.
He couldn’t help but wonder at the true natures of the Plunado siblings and whether they were part of Oasia’s machinations or if their loyalties lay far beyond the Quemanor household altogether. Either way, they both held positions too near Fedeles for Atreau’s liking.
“Yes, Master Ariz. Can I help you?” Narsi asked, and he managed to sound only a little nervous. He started toward Master Ariz and Atreau had to resist the urge to catch his hand and pull him back.
As it was, Narsi came alongside Master Ariz and they engaged in a very soft-spoken and brief conversation. Atreau overheard Sparanzo’s name and the mention of an early-morning hour. Then Narsi nodded and Master Ariz turned and walked back to Dommian’s room. Atreau watched him go.
He noted that Narsi too stood as if rooted in place, observing the man’s retreat. Only after the door closed behind Master Ariz did Narsi turn to Atreau and rush back to his side. Neither of them said a word. They all but raced from the duchess’s wing. More than once Atreau caught himself stealing glances back over his shoulder to ensure that Master Ariz was not creeping silently behind them like a murderous shadow.
They reached Narsi’s rooms moments later. There, Narsi locked the door behind them and then released a heavy sigh, as if he’d been holding his breath the entire time.
“I half expected Master Ariz would demand that I give back the book I took.” Narsi dropped down into one of the chairs beside his warm hearth. The black cat lying beside the fire stretched and sauntered to the chair so that Narsi could scratch its head.
“I thought he might well run you through and then do away with me as well,” Atreau admitted.
“I don’t think he’s so bad as that. All he actually wanted was to ask me to visit the dueling rooms tomorrow morning to look at the duke’s son. It seems his right leg bothers him.”
“Yes. Sparanzo does his best to hide it, but he tends to limp when he’s tired. It trips him up from time to time. Lliro, my oldest brother, had something much the same but outgrew the trouble by the time he was six. Now you’d never know he ever walked with a limp.” Atreau took the seat across from Narsi and went on before Narsi could make too much of any connection between young Sparanzo and Atreau’s family. “Now, what about this book that you’ve liberated?”
“Here it is.” Narsi shook the cuff of his physician’s coat and a leather-bound journal slid from his sleeve into the palm of his hand. Stained and battered, the thing reminded Atreau of the little charm-books that many lifelong gamblers kept to record their favored horses, lucky stars, bad omens and the names of marks who were still easy to cheat.
“It’s too bad that the duchess was so conscientious or we might have had the room to ourselves and had a greater opportunity to search the place.” Narsi turned the little book over and carefully untied the leather thong that held it closed.
“I doubt conscientiousness had anything to do with the Plunados being there,” Atreau replied. “They were obviously tossing the room in search of something.”
“You think so?” Narsi’s expression brightened but then turned concerned. “Do you suspect they were involved in his murder?”
“I don’t know.” Atreau scowled at the small journal for lack of anything better to focus his uncertainty upon. They were definitely involved in something. “Oasia—the duchess—controls her own agents and has her own designs. From what Fedeles tells me, she and he are aligned in their ambitions and she keeps him abreast of all she knows . . .”
“But?” Narsi prompted.
There was so much—too much—that Atreau could have told him. But to give voice to any of it would have only revealed the part he’d played in the death of Oasia’s previous husband. Seven years of sick, shameful guilt churned through him, but he’d had enough of mulling over that tonight.
“I don’t trust her. That’s all. I just don’t trust her and I don’t know why Fedeles does.”
“She is his wife,” Narsi suggested. “He likely knows a side of her that others don’t.”
“That or he’s been beguiled by her.” She’d managed to drug and nearly destroy Atreau, despite his considerable experience with lovely and clever women. God only knew how well she could manipulate a man as pure and sincere as Fedeles.
Thankfully Narsi didn’t pursue the subject beyond a shrug. Instead he opened up the charm-book. Numerous pages had been torn out and other pieces of paper stuffed in between the pages. Odd symbols and tiny cramped notes darkened the pages to the point of near illegibility. On top of that, it appeared that most of the writing had been angrily blotted out.
“Do you think this is a kind of cypher?” Narsi asked. “Or was he just incredibly frustrated? He’s nearly torn through the paper here where he scribbled these lines out.”
Between the flickering light, the defaced pages and his own exhaustion, Atreau found the charm-book almost impossible to read. He leaned in closer, as did Narsi. Atreau felt his head just touch Narsi’s, but neither of them drew away. Atreau squinted at the sepia ink. Narsi started to turn the page when a darker blotch in a corner caught Atreau’s eye.
“Wait. There.” Atreau lifted his finger but couldn’t bring himself to touch the symbol that he discerned from beneath a frenzy of scratches.
Narsi studied the mess of ink and then his eyes widened. “It’s the spell Lady Hylanya showed us—the symbol I saw branded into Dommian’s chest.”
“The thrall that made a slave of him,” Atreau murmured.
Once he recognized the shape, Atreau found himself picking it out again and again, from beneath angry scrawls. No wonder Dommian obsessed upon it and at the same time tried to blot it out of existence.
“I’m not certain of what this will tell us, aside from the fact that Dommian was a deeply unhappy man,” Atreau commented. “At least that’s all I can discern between the poor light and my wearied faculties. It’s been a long day, for us both, I think.”
Narsi nodded, but his attention had once again returned to the charm-book. “I wonder . . . how do you think a person actually works magic? How can this symbol drawn here command no more power than any random scribble?” Narsi tapped the page in his hand. “But as a brand—or even traced out in the air by Lady Hylanya—it becomes alive and deadly?”
Atreau glanced to the black cat, but it appeared to have fallen asleep beside the fire.
“Obviously one is magical and the other isn’t,” Narsi went on. “But what is magic, really?”
“I’m hardly an expert,” Atreau said “But as far as I’ve seen, it seems that magic is simply a natural force—like the wind or rain—something that flows and pools through the world. Most of us rarely sense it, much less manipulate it. Then there are a rare few people who appear born with the potential to control it.”
“Like Hylanya Radulf and Javier Tornesal,” Narsi commented and Atreau nodded.
“Yes, those are two who have certainly honed their potential, but I don’t think everyone with potential goes on to become a mystic or witch. Some folks probably don’t even know that they could.”
“How do you mean?” Narsi closed the charm-book and turned his full attention to Atreau. Meeting his gaze, Atreau felt a little of his exhaustion slip away. He straightened in his chair.
“I suspect it’s like being born with a gift for music or dance or art. There’s potential, but whether it’s developed depends on a person’s character and surroundings.” Atreau remembered what Javier had said about Fedeles. If the choice had been his, he never would have entered the realms of magic and political conspiracies. But seeing Narsi’s intellectual excitement, Atreau let go of the forlorn pondering and continued. “Just like a painter working her oils, I think that every person who shapes the magic around us into spells adds individual qualities to those spells.”
“Thus the colors, sounds and scents of spells that you wrote about in Five Hundred Nights in the Court of the Scarlet Wolf ?”
Atreau nodded. Narsi leaned back in his chair and peered up at the shadows of firelight flickering across his ceiling. Atreau watched too, feeling the dance of light and shadows soothe him like the murmur of a brook.
“That still doesn’t answer the question of how such people physically sense and interact with . . . for lack of a better term, let’s call it free-floating magic,” Narsi said.
Atreau almost laughed. Clearly, he and Narsi thought of entirely different things when they contemplated shadows and firelight.
“From autopsies on Bahiim,” Narsi went on, “we know that they don’t possess any new or unusual organs. They don’t possess better hearing, taste, sight or sense of touch than other people either. So how do they interact with magic and create spells?”
Atreau grinned. Wasn’t it just like a Haldiim physician to take on the mystic realms with reason, logic and fact.
“A thousand Labaran witches will tell you that they work magic through their witchflames,” Atreau informed him. “Their souls.”
“Yes, but we all have souls,” Narsi replied. “If you believe certain Bahiim mystics, every living thing, no matter how small or nasty, has a soul. Plants. Flies.”
“Well, perhaps we’re all just a little bit magic but we don’t know it,” Atreau replied with a grin. “Maybe we live in a world built entirely from countless spells crafted by everything from mosquitoes and roses to Old Gods.”
Narsi stared at him as if he wasn’t certain whether the idea was idiotic or ingenious. Atreau laughed.
“Would you like to know one thing I’ve always found rather intriguing, but I’ve never written down?” Atreau said.
“Of course.” The gleam of fascination that lit Narsi’s eyes was surprisingly rewarding. Atreau found himself glad that he’d never shared this observation with anyone else.
“I’ve noticed that the ability to perceive and use magic also seems to create certain blind spots. A friend of mine once showed me a symbol—” Atreau snatched up a graphite stylus and pulled a scrap of thin paper from his pocket. He drew a simple circular symbol. “It’s a null sign, very much like the Haldiim mathematical naught—but for many witches it can act like a spell that becomes almost invisible to them.”
“Really?” Narsi appeared skeptical, as Atreau had been when he’d first encountered that fact. “Your friend wasn’t having a joke?”
“I might have thought so,” Atreau replied, “if Count Radulf hadn’t used this very symbol to render himself invisible to the demon lord Zi’sai when they battled.”
Narsi stared at the scrap of paper and the little graphite mark.
“So, I could walk around with that and render myself invisible to anyone magical?” Narsi still didn’t sound completely convinced.
“This one, drawn on a flimsy bit of paper? Probably not,” Atreau admitted. “But if it were cut into one of those ancient stones that magic pools into? Then perhaps it might render you invisible to witches, other magical folk, even common people . . .”
Atreau ran his finger over the null sign. “Though I have a theory that even this little sign that I’ve written is somehow difficult for such people to perceive. I know, it sounds daft, but the fact is that I’ve met a fair number of magical people from different places and with different understandings of magic and power. But the one thing I noticed is that they’ve all had trouble with mathematics. And it’s almost always because they become confused by null signs or other symbols that represent nothing.”
Narsi stared at him, then suddenly sat upright. “Do you think that it’s possible that they might actually be making the symbols into spells just by reading them?”
