A Conjuring of Assassins, page 10
“I must go out,” I said to the sleeping man. “I’ve customers who need work done today, and it might keep me out late. But no matter what my common sense advises, I’m not going to throw you into the street. I’ve a notion that could cost your life and you might very well not even understand why. These are entirely unsupported beliefs, and I’m a most practical woman, despite my nonsensical ramblings, so I’m going to do something that is not very kind.”
I slipped loops of wire-twisted rope over one wrist and his ankles, including the ankle that had been broken and now was not. Padding his skin with strips of fabric, I tightened the knots. The rope between the loops was threaded through an iron eyebolt I had pounded into the foundation stones a year previous, on a day it was the only way I could keep Neri from getting us both killed. A second length of rope left a little slack for Teo’s other hand. He wasn’t going anywhere without my approval. If he was truly a sorcerer, maybe the wire would prevent him using magic to get free. Stories said so. For certain, Neri’s attempts had not got him loose.
I tapped Teo’s hand as if keeping him awake when he was clearly not awake, but it soothed my conscience to explain. “I’m sorry for the binding. I want to trust you, but I’m not sure I trust my own judgment in this case. I don’t want you falling in the river again, and if my enemies show up, you will appear to be a wholly innocent victim of my wickedness. If your enemies show up … well, how would they? We weren’t followed from the river. I’ve left you more of the ginger tea here.” I touched his slack-bound hand to a filled flask and set it by the bed. “Have all you want of the nasty stuff. I’ll be back before nightfall.”
8
FOUR DAYS UNTIL THE PRISONER TRANSFER
MIDDAY
Dumond maintained his workshop as well as his little stone house behind the cooper’s yard. Closer to the street, between the cooper’s yard and a chandler’s shop, sat the market stall where he sold bowls, spoons, metal jewelry, and small bronze castings.
When Neri was a small boy, Dumond had caught him stealing a bracelet from his locked stall—a gift, Neri had said, to persuade his lost elder sister to come home. The metalsmith gave him a small bronze charm instead, saying that anyone with special talents like Neri’s needed to keep a luck charm with him at all times. Neri had persuaded him to make one for me, too.
At my knock, one of Dumond’s black-eyed, black-haired younger daughters opened the family’s sturdy front door. As the child darted into the alley, she called over her shoulder that her papa was eating lunch.
The stone walls of the boxlike room bore Vashti’s mark—needlework tapestries of vibrant colors, hanging ribbons of red and green beadwork, and exuberant watercolor paintings of wildflowers and vineyards. But Dumond was alone, still wearing his leather work apron and seated on a floor cushion beside a low table.
He nodded a greeting and took another bite of noodles.
I pulled up a cushion opposite him. “Neri and I believe the Mercediaran ambassador is the key to unraveling Rossi’s intentions. So I’ve sent a query to the Shadow Lord’s consigliere. He’ll know whatever Sandro’s spies know about the man.” I laid out our reasoning.
“’Tis a curious business, no doubt.” The smith continued eating as if I’d told him I’d seen the sun rise or had breakfast. “But will the lawyer answer? The Shadow Lord told you he’d send word when the prisoner arrived. Did he ever?”
“No.” As well as dispatching the message to Mantegna, I had checked message box number six on the way. “Which is strange of itself. Why would Governor Taglino accommodate the prisoner so comfortably and so secretly that Sandro’s spies haven’t learned of it? Has someone else in the Sestorale ordered it?”
“Simplest explanation—a bribe. Man with a diamond-studded baldric could likely afford it.”
“Possibly,” I said, a bit deflated. “Maybe Rossi thinks to buy off the ambassador, too. Sandro didn’t believe any Mercediaran knew the prisoner was Cinque. Even so, Vizio’s loyal servant would never let off a man convicted of consorting with pirates.”
“Unless he is not a loyal servant,” said Dumond.
Not loyal. History and logic had told me that Vizio’s ambassador was a loyalist, but only a fool would anoint a logical assumption as a certainty. Philosophy taught that the strongest theories were built by keeping one’s assumptions to the minimum necessary.
“So it makes doubly good sense to learn more of the ambassador. If he is bold enough or fool enough to let Rossi walk free, then we need to be there to catch them at it … and make sure Cantagna is not implicated.”
Dumond drained the contents of his cup and refilled it from the flowered teapot in the center of the table. “Makes sense to me. Are the others on their way? If we’re going to do this, we’d best get to it.”
“Neri went off hunting Placidio.”
Dumond twisted his mouth in disapproval. “Nasty profession, dueling. Wicked that the man can’t protect himself better.”
Neri said nullifiers occasionally brought their sniffers round to the dueling grounds “lest sorcerers intervene in arguments where Lady Virtue should be the final arbiter.” Spirits, where were they?
I picked a cup from the stack beside the flowered teapot and filled it. “Did you sleep this morning?”
“I’ve work pressing,” said Dumond. “A coroner up to the Merchants Ring ordered a batch of natalés to have in stock for customers who can’t afford to have them crafted special. My friend Pascal will cast them this evening if I get the molds done. It’s good pay for simple work.”
“Your natalés are exquisite,” I said. “The coroner can see they’re a bargain.”
Though Dumond used no magic to create his bronzes, celebrity was a risk. From what I’d glimpsed of his talent, he could take a place with the finest sculptors in Cantagna. Instead, he confined his artistic skills to cups and bowls and the little bronze statuettes parents placed on the graves of their dead children to distract demons from their tender souls. Unless, that is, the Chimera needed him to forge a statue of great antiquity to prevent scoundrels from fomenting a civil war, as we had so recently.
“Have you come to any theory about the grand duc’s bronze?” I said. “Why our magic made us see visions when we touched a statue of Atladu and Dragonis?” Visions clearly connected to each other in subject and emotion.
“No theories. Too many other things to think on.” Dumond never used three words if he could get away with two.
“Since then … have you dreamed anything like what you saw in the statue?”
He glanced at me sharply. “Nothing like. I don’t recall my dreams. Have you?”
“Once,” I said. “This morning, in fact. Something else came up last night…”
I told him of rescuing Teo, of the man’s strange state, his rapid healing, and the coincidence of the triangular symbol on his breast.
“… so what can you tell me about the mark?” I shoved my charm across the low table.
He glanced at it over the bowl of fragrant noodles, his spoon paused between bites. His gaze flicked up to meet mine, then returned to his lunch. “It’s lucky.”
I pressed harder.
“What does the design mean and why would it be inked on a man’s chest? How does the charm prevent sniffers from locating a sorcerer? Is it the mark that does it?”
The spoon settled back into the noodles.
“Maybe you’re the one should be answering questions.” Dumond was as unyielding as his front door. “You left a stranger—someone with power you can’t explain—in your own house while we used magic in the Palazzo Segnori. And that was right after Placidio raked Neri over the coals for carelessness. What were you thinking?”
Dumond used the same calm tone as he would if asking his three-year-old twin daughters if they truly wished to paint each other yellow while standing on their mother’s prized rug brought all the way from Paolin.
“It would have been murder to leave him,” I said. “The current would have swept him away in moments.”
“For an intelligent woman who thinks of herself worldly wise enough to spy for the Shadow Lord, that has to be the most nonsensical decision ever made. Strangers die every day.”
“You’ll be happy to know that he is currently tied up with wire rope, and nothing’s within his reach but a blanket and a flask of ginger tea, even though his heart is still limping along like a lame donkey in a horse race. His mystery is too important to let him leave before I can speak to him.”
Dumond’s glare scoured me. His eyes were not the common mellow gold or black-brown of most Costa Drago citizens, but the gleaming obsidian of the Shadhi.
Dumond’s father had been a factor for the largest mysenthe trading house in the Costa Drago. Sent to Paolin as a young man to maintain the trading house interests, Dumond the elder had wed a Shadhi woman. Only a few years later, the woman had died tearing her own flesh with sharpened nails for need of the same pleasure-inducing potion her husband traded in.
I deemed it an eternal irony that Dumond the son had returned to the Costa Drago to pursue his love of sculpture and bronze-casting, only to meet a young Shadhi woman whose father was also a mysenthe trader. Vashti’s father had been slaughtered by his customers because he could not supply them fast enough. The customers planned to sell the girl to a brothel, but Dumond had killed them and married Vashti. There was good reason mysenthe was called the soul-killer.
“Did it never cross your mind that the fellow might have been there to ensnare you?” said Dumond. “You frequent that riverbank, you who once lived with a very wealthy Cantagnese banker connected to strange incidents where magic might be involved. That might explain the man’s quick recovery.”
I wasn’t having that. “There was no deception in Teo’s pain, Dumond. Nor that his sickness made him cry out in Annisi, of all possible languages. Certain, if someone had been watching Neri and me cross the wasteland for a year, that would seem a perfect place to lie in wait. But for what? And why with a drowning man, instead of a sniffer? Nullifiers need no warrant to invade my house or question my friends.”
He had no answer.
“And even if Teo was lying in wait for me—which I will not concede—why would he be wearing that particular symbol? He has dozens of symbols inked on every part of him save his face and hands. Have you ever encountered such skin markings? I’ve only seen them adorning painted figures on pottery or walls—very old pots and very old walls. If I could understand what this symbol means, I might be able to figure out what the others mean as well.”
The smith’s jaw held a firm line in his sparse beard. He snapped up another bite.
“Why won’t you tell me? How many people carry charms like ours? Do you know other symbols of magical importance?”
It was entirely frustrating to know so little about something so extraordinary as magic.
“Tell her, Basha,” said the woman who hurried through the fringed curtain. She carried a fresh pot of tea, an armload of fabric, and the scented grace of summer breezes into the windowless room. “You and Romy-zha are pledged to each other with the most solemn oaths. You trust her with our lives, so I think you worry overmuch about your secrets.”
As ever, Vashti’s arrival softened Dumond’s sober mien. Only she could accomplish that. Though never harsh with their four daughters, he was ever somber around them, as if unable to shake his fear for their future in a world so hard. My experience had not eased his worries.
Vashti kissed his thinning hair. “You would not have left an injured man to drown any more than you abandoned a Shadhi girl to ruin, when you had every reason to believe she was a mysenthe slave who would betray you for three crystals of the soul-killer.”
Vashti set the teapot on the table, laid the garments carefully over a carved wood trunk, and lowered herself to a worn cushion like those Dumond and I occupied. As she refilled our cups and poured her own, the scent of jasmine flooded the room. “Pardon, Romy-zha. I was listening in the kitchen as I did the washing. The girls are in the cellar practicing their drawing.”
Her shoulder bumped Dumond’s. “So tell her.”
“Bah.” Dumond growled his defeat. “I didn’t invent the charms. I cast them, but I made the mold from a charm that was given to me. There is no enchantment on them that I can detect. That’s why, just as I’ve told you, they cannot attract a sniffer.”
“But I thought—”
“Do they truly hide the magic in the wearer’s blood?” He forged on as if now the dam was broken, he couldn’t stop. “How could I know? Can you detect the magic in Neri’s blood if he’s not using magic? I cannot. I knew your brother carried the taint because he walked through my wall to steal that bracelet. But the charms do something. I’ve walked right past sniffers, and they’ve never turned their green heads toward me. I’ve ever thought…”
He rapped a knuckle on the table as if to jar individual words into a pattern with meaning. “Sniffers are just sorcerers like us, with greater or lesser talents. Yes, their focus is honed because they’re not allowed to see or hear or think of anything else, but there must be more to it. Something they’re taught after they’ve chosen slavery over death. The Philosophic Confraternity has been exterminating sorcerers for thousands of years, and they’re the ones who train sniffers. Stands to reason they’d know more about detecting it than those of us born to magic. So I’m thinking, if you want to know more about that symbol and what the charms do to divert a sniffer’s attention, you needs must ask a philosophist. Right before the devil ships you off to the Executioner of the Demon Tainted.”
“But you can locate the charms.”
“I can locate the charms when they’re separate from their owners—as I did with Neri’s on the day we met—because I’ve developed a skill to detect my own crafter’s mark. Just here.”
He turned my charm to the back and pointed to a tiny circle with a vertical line bisecting it.
“I shape the magic inside myself, like I do the fire above my hands when I work the portal magic,” he said. “The person who gave me the luck charm taught me how to make the fire to speed my workings, how to create a crafters’ mark so that I would only detect it if the charm was separate from its owner. It is exactly how I told you to create the handlight. Only way I can describe it is to channel the power straight from your soul to the work, instead of through your particular variant of magic. I don’t know why some of us can do certain things and some can’t, any more than why one of us can do your kind of impersonation and one turn painted portals into doorways.”
He scraped the last noodles from his bowl, but the spoon didn’t move to his mouth. I waited for the flood to spend itself.
“As to numbers, I’ve given out seventeen charms over the last twenty years and retrieved two that got separated from the owners. Never told any of the seventeen that I cast the charms, nor that I carried the taint myself. Don’t know any of their names, save yours and Neri’s. Never wanted to know. I just hoped they were protected when they needed it. That’s the sum of what I know of magic or charms or marks. Nothing.”
He stuffed the last noodles in his mouth as if I were going to snatch them away.
“No enchantment on the charms. Nothing more.” I was confounded. Since the day I’d met Dumond, when I’d watched him paint a door on a solid wall and then stepped through it after him into a place that was not the one which actually existed on the other side of that wall, I had believed he held the answers to every question I had about magic. Yes, he was reticent about that part of himself. We all were—even Neri. How else could one live, knowing that exposing your true self could get you bound in chains and thrown into the sea? But I’d thought that if we worked together long enough, grew comfortable with each other, Dumond would soften his barricades enough to let me learn from him. It was doubly wrenching to learn that the answers weren’t even there. Clearly it grieved him, too.
I tried to temper my disappointment. “So who was it gave you the original charm and taught you these things?”
“An old woman in Varela, where Vashti and I met. I was practicing my wall magic in a sea cave, and I made a wrong choice somewhere. I still don’t know which one of the thousand caves along the Varelan coast she lived in. She didn’t seem all that shocked when I walked in on her breakfast. She gave me this”—he tugged on a braided string around his neck and drew out a charm identical to mine—“and said to wear it always, as it was the surest protection one of the demon-tainted could carry.”
“Protection from what?” I said drinking the cooling tea.
“She told me it could not prevent a sniffer from detecting magic as I worked it or prevent them following the traces that magic left behind on me or the wall or whatever I touched with it. So I assumed that meant it masked the taint inherent in our blood. I believe it works.” Dumond shrugged and shook his head. “Maybe your ink-marked fish knows for sure.”
“If he ever wakes up.” I drew the charm back across the table and retraced the simple lines. “I think the sinuous line refers in some fashion to the sea. To Atladu, perhaps. Teo called on a divine father.”
“Among god-believers, the opened inward curve always represents the embracing earth,” said Vashti, her slender finger joining my ink-stained one on the charm, “or, with wider vision, the strength and power of the natural world. The curve that opens outward is sometimes interpreted as air, wind, and things unseen. But in Paolin, where people feel freer to speak of such things, the outward curve from a centered design would be interpreted as magic.”
“So three kinds of power—the natural world, the ocean, and magic—set as three equal sides of a triangle. A stable boundary, so I was taught,” I said, my finger tapping the charm, “but surrounding, protecting … what? The tight-coiled spiral can mean so many things—life and death, journeying, change. It’s used everywhere and has been for centuries. Unwind it a little and it is Atladu’s uncoiling wave. Unwind a little more and it becomes the Typhon symbol for wind.”
