A Conjuring of Assassins, page 11
“In Paolin the spiral is a snake bearing knowledge,” said Vashti, “and as the snake uncoils, we learn. Learn what? That is the story surrounding the symbol’s use, its…” She wagged a summoning finger at Dumond.
“Context?” he said.
“Yes. Perhaps the context of your visitor—the story of his mark’s use—will be more revealing than the context of a bronze charm.”
“I’ve come to think Teo’s context is very important. While dozing this morning…”
I told them of cracked pillar walls and faded mosaics and seeping fire.
“Demons!” Dumond’s elbows rested on the table. His clasped hands, scarred from years of dealing with molten metal and edged tools, rested on his mouth. “That is very like the visions from the statue. And you believe you may have heard things he wished to tell you, things barely whispered, if even that. Perhaps … You were right to keep him.”
I drained my cup, as satisfied as if I’d just trounced Placidio in a duel. Certain, it could be mere coincidence that I would dream such a dream this day; little more than a tenday had passed since I’d experienced the vision from the statue. But I didn’t believe in coincidence.
Dumond slipped his own charm back in his shirt, emptied his cup with one swallow, and stood. “But then again, maybe you should give this drowning fellow back to the river and let Lady Fortune entice someone else to fish him out—if she cares.”
Dumond kissed his wife and left, just as the city bells clanged the first hour past noonday.
“He’s in a foul mood today,” said Vashti. “The price to share time in Pascal’s foundry has gone up again. But he refuses to use the prize money from your last escapade to pay. Says it has to be put away for me and the girls if he’s going to be working with the Chimera to prevent wars and vendettas.”
“Does he want to stop? We can’t doubt what we’re doing.”
Vashti’s laughter could light the moon.
“He believes he should want to stop,” she said after a moment, “but I told him I’d take the girls off to Paolin if he did. The Chimera has waked Dumond from long sleep. Using magic for worthy purpose glories his soul, and his soul feeds his art which is his first love—beyond me or the girls.”
“I don’t believe that.”
Her fine brows arched. “You should see the painting he is working—”
The front door burst open.
“Bandages, vaiya!” Dumond yelled as he and two cloaked figures crowded through the narrow opening.
“We’ll need his bag. I dropped it in his shop.” Neri’s voice grated from under one hooded cloak. He and Dumond were supporting the third man—bigger and taller than either of them. Placidio. With far too much blood on him.
9
FOUR DAYS UNTIL THE PRISONER TRANSFER
AFTERNOON
“Lay him here,” said Vashti, shoving all the worn floor cushions into a heap.
A dreadful groan followed me as I bolted from the house and down the alley to Dumond’s workshop. Placidio’s armaments bag, splattered with blood, lay in the doorway. I grabbed it and ran.
Dumond already had Placidio’s blood-soaked shirt and breeches torn open, exposing a dreadful, bloody gash from breastbone to hip. “Vash!”
“I’ll bring the box,” she said. “Romy-zha, in our bedchamber press will you find linen sheets. Bring several and whatever blanket looks raggedest.”
She hurried toward the kitchen and called down the cellar stair, “Cittina, take the littles to Meki’s house for the night.”
The girl’s shining black hair appeared at the top of the stair. “What’s—?”
“No questions just now, sweeting. Out the back way.”
“Aicha, naihi.” Cittina sighed hugely.
As the children bustled down below, I raced the upward steps three at a time.
Dumond’s family slept in one large room the same size as their kitchen and sitting room together. Two corners were walled off by colorful draperies made from scraps, while shelves, stools, and clothes chests were set orderly about the remaining space. In the center of the fourth wall stood a white lacquered cabinet painted with scenes of forest and field, red deer, bears, and a great spotted cat.
I rummaged through the cabinet. Belly wounds meant sepsis; sepsis meant death. Another bellowed curse rattled the walls as I returned downstairs with two many-times-mended folds of linen and a clean blanket that looked like it was old when Dumond was a babe.
“Stop that…” Placidio’s breathless growl came as Neri cut away the rest of the swordsman’s garments.
Every jostle spurred another curse, bubbling in the blood streaming from his nose. “Blighted udiverse … Debonshit!”
Dumond blotted and wiped the duelist’s face most efficiently, muzzling the noise. I could not but be pleased to hear the inventiveness of the curses that squeezed through the wad of linen. Certain, Placidio would not die without a fight.
Vashti passed Dumond my sheets and blanket, and immediately dragged me back to the kitchen. She told me to fill a bowl from the huge kettle she kept on her brazier and bring it in. She fetched a box from a high shelf and took it and a wad of rags into the other room.
When I brought the bowl, she set to washing the blood from Placidio’s belly. The box from the kitchen was open to a little knife that looked extremely sharp, a set of bone needles, and thread suitable for sewing wounds. Dumond and Neri had brought a hard pallet from the cellar and spread the old blanket on it.
“Hold on,” said Neri, crouching by Placidio. “We’ve got to move you one more time.”
“Touch be, boar snout—and I’ll roast—balls—for breakfast.” The swordsman’s croaks were punctuated with short explosive exhales. “You, too—you hab-handed son of debon-rutting—”
An agonized gasp swallowed Placidio’s stream of invective as Dumond lifted his shoulders and Neri his legs. They shifted the swordsman onto the pallet.
Once he was down, Dumond and Neri retreated, and Vashti returned to her attempts to get a closer look at the wound. Deep … oh spirits, so deep.
Placidio dropped his head back to the pallet. Took a few shaky, shallow breaths, screwed his face into a grimace, and blew a long slow exhale. “’S not so bad. As it looks.”
He could scarce get the words out through his clenched jaw. Sweat dripped from his forehead.
“The wound looks fresh,” I said. “When was the duel?”
“Last. Night. Match went bad. Second … and friends … chased … ambush.”
“Found him over to the Leguiza Hospice,” said Neri, “after looking over half the city for him.”
Only a few streets away.
Neri folded his arms. “Started out hunting for where he’d fought, which was not an easy place to locate when this hardhead won’t tell none of us his business. It weren’t none of his usual.”
Neri’s anger at this old grievance was very pointed.
“Had to traipse all the way up to the old barracks yard and ask the Dueling List Recorder, who sent me all the way downriver to the Fens, only to find him and everyone else long gone, but a dead man laying there and blood everywhere. No referee marker neither.”
A dead opponent. No referee. Spirits, Placidio …
“As I couldn’t follow him with magic, I followed this instead. ’Twas the same as that scabby Buto threw at him. Buto, what started all that when you—you know.” He held a scrap of gray cloth, stiff with dried blood. The scrap was a dueling badge embroidered with a lizard atop two crossed pikes, a family blazon everyone in Cantagna knew.
“By the holy, blasted Twins, Placidio, Buto stood for one of the Pizottis? And you marked Buto’s face, so of course in this duel you had to fight another of them.”
“Four. Had to win. To be rid—legal.”
“Because they had called a vendetta!”
If any family in the Costa Drago kept the outlawed tradition of the vendetta alive, it was the collection of hotheaded dullwits who occupied a mouldering fortress upriver from Cantagna. Unfortunately Digo and Falla Pizotti had four daughters, five sons, and innumerable nieces, nephews, and cousins, none of them with any ambition beyond winning contests of cards, jousts, dogs, chariots, cocks, dice, or drinking than the rest of their siblings. Inevitably their competitions had brought them into conflict with every family in Cantagna.
No Pizotti would take a defeat, a rebuff, or a slight in stride. Once you let yourself into their world of challenges and retaliations, it was near impossible to get out.
I bit my tongue. No one needed me to explain that the win might cost more than Placidio could pay.
“I followed the badge—found two fellows hamstrung,” Neri continued. “Then to the hospice ruin, where there was a third mostly dead fellow alongside this stronzo, who was trying to magic his own wound. Told me he didn’t need any frigging help, but he was so shaky he was spilling—”
“And. Then. You?” Placidio snapped.
“I bashed him in the nose to make him stop, so’s I could get him here. Not sorry.”
Neri’s defiance slumped quickly into genuine worry. No matter Placidio’s growling assertions, only pigheadedness was holding the man together.
“So, perhaps much of the blood is from the nose—and perhaps from these dead and wounded men?” said Vashti, rinsing her rag in the bowl. “But your pain is true.”
She glanced across the room at me—and the worry in her face did not mirror her optimistic theory. Dark blood welled unceasingly from the horrid wound.
I wrapped my arms about my own belly, as if that could keep Placidio together.
“Knife nicked a rib,” said Placidio, his breathing fast and shallow. “Hurts like devil’s own, but it’ll heal. For the cut—need fire and cauter salt. Like before.” He looked straight at me. “The mission … I’ll be ready…”
The fire quickly faded from his glare and his head lolled. His lips were bloodless. With a nicked rib, he might not even be feeling the belly wound, but that’s what would kill him. Vashti’s rags and apron were already soaked.
“We must do as he says right now,” I said, answering Vashti and Dumond’s questioning looks. “We’ve seen him use fire and magic to drag himself back from the verge of the Night Eternal. Neri, do you know what cauter salt might be?”
“I’ve a guess.”
“And we’ll need a lit taper, Vashti.”
“I’ll fetch it.”
“Stay with us, swordsman,” said Dumond, slapping Placidio’s cheek. “Damned right you’re going to be ready for this mission. Not going to get me to do swordfighting or impersonating.”
“Ham. Handed.” Placidio could scarce whisper his riposte. “Just sear—the rip—let me rest.”
“Good,” said Dumond with a jerk of his head. “Vashti’s got a powder. Won’t mend the rib, but can ease it.”
Neri scrambled back to Placidio’s side with a brown vial he’d pulled from the armaments bag.
Dumond glanced from Neri to me. “So which of us is going to do this fire thing?”
“Me.” Neri blurted his answer before anyone could preempt it.
If we’d not been watching his lips we couldn’t have heard Placidio’s answer. “Not Neri.”
“Fine.” Neri shoved the brown vial into Dumond’s hand, and then bent over and shouted into Placidio’s face. “This is what he’d pulled out down at the hospice, but he weren’t able even to open it. I could have helped him right there. You know I could.”
Placidio had drifted off again, so didn’t answer Neri’s resentment. But I knew why he didn’t want Neri to hold the taper. Placidio believed he was going to die, and didn’t want Neri left with the burden of it.
Dumond held up the vial. “So what do I do?”
“Cover the entire wound with whatever’s in the vial,” I said, “then use the taper to sear the wound end to end.” I moved around behind Placidio’s head. “The three of us will hold him down.”
“Burn him?” Dumond’s horror reflected my own from our prior experience with this.
“Touch the flame to the wounded flesh, yes. Carefully, of course. You’ll know when you’ve done enough. Evidently his magic protects him while he works the healing. That’s why he’s got to be awake.”
I leaned over and spoke directly into Placidio’s ear, in hopes he could hear me. “Signal when you’re ready for the fire, swordmaster. You need to use your magic.”
Neri held Placidio’s ankles. I gripped one wrist. Placidio’s pulse raced like squirrels in spring.
Dumond used his one hand to gently spread the long, ugly, and very deep gash open and the other to sprinkle fine white crystals into the surging blood.
Placidio’s eyes blinked open, and his face drained of what color had remained. His sinews tightened, his fists curled, and his whole body began to tremble.
Dumond set the vial aside. Vashti passed him the taper and grabbed the swordmaster’s other wrist. When the last of the white crystals had dissolved in the ooze of blood, Placidio’s colorless lips moved slightly, but no words came through his clenched teeth.
“I think he’s ready,” I said. “Sear it, one end to the other.”
At its first touch to raw flesh and treated blood, the flame blazed white. Fire flowed through my hands as well, Placidio’s magic grown into a thunder and lightning that raced through his limbs. Not with the searing pain racking his body, but a living elixer of magic—sharp, clarifying, forcing my every sense alive. I could hear sparrows picking at the waking seeds outside and felt the surging power of the Venia as it wrapped Cantagna in its soulless embrace.
But as Dumond moved the taper slowly along the dreadful wound, the flame darkened. Flickered weakly. A putrid scent impinged upon my senses—a taint that threatened to overwhelm all other sensations. The firestorm in my limbs yet rumbled, but cooler, fading.
“His magic’s failing,” whispered Neri. “We need to help him.”
“I don’t know how,” I said.
“Draw your power as when you practice the handlight,” said Dumond. “Will it to go where he needs it.”
Fouled blades caused deadly sepsis in a living body. I’d seen it—the fever, the purulent fluids building. Perhaps if I aimed my magic at that …
I drew on the fire waiting inside me, but instead of touching an ancient statue to release its mysteries or imagining a light glowing from my hand, I envisioned Placidio’s corrupted flesh and willed my magic to cleanse the vileness.
As if my swordmaster had grasped the lifeline of my power and hauled it to him, my magic surged into the racing current.
The river became a flood tide—multiple, distinct streams, creating a heady mixture greater than any one of them. One current, thin and bright, was hot as molten silver. Whimsy named it Neri’s magic. A deep, quiet, steady warmth put me in mind of Dumond. Certain, the mighty flow that surged through hands and heart with the unruly power of a thunderstorm was Placidio’s, now heated anew by the rest. But twining with these others and my own was yet another stream—immensely strong, but not at all fiery. Rather, cold and clean like a winter freshet. Perhaps that icy flow was the potency of Placidio’s cauter salts, but it felt as live as all the rest.
As the magic reached a crescendo, Placidio could no longer hold back his screams—agony, yes, but edged with triumph. With defiance. With life.
But by the time the taper reached the lower end of the wound, Placidio lay still. All sense of foulness was gone, and the torrent of magic had collapsed into a slow moving rivulet. Letting go of Placidio’s wrist, I lost the sense of the remainder.
Dumond doused the taper in the basin of bloody water. The stink of burnt hair and scorched flesh mingled with the iron stench of blood. Neri released a breath so long, one might believe he’d held it since he first heard Placidio was missing. Vashti fetched a clean towel to blot Placidio’s sweat-soaked face.
That cool stream of magic that felt so different … Was Vashti hiding something from us? Did she know? She’d sworn she had no power for magic, but her hands had touched Placidio’s skin like the rest of ours. Or perhaps what I’d felt was no individual thread of power, but only a product of our joining.
Dumond squatted beside me. He inspected the dry wound and the ruined, red-black flesh around it. “Looks fairly awful. Don’t know as we’ve healed anything, but at least he’s asleep.” He prodded Placidio’s shoulder without eliciting so much as a twitch. “For sure, this time.”
“This is a new wonder to the world,” said Vashti, softly. “I yearn to hear what you sensed of this, Basha. Each of you. Your faces told me this was the work of all.”
“I’d like to hear what you experienced, as well, Dumond,” I said. “Anything odd? Anything surprising?”
“Whole damnable thing’s odd. Felt the magic, sure. By the Creation, that swordsman’s got a powerful gift, and he definitely sucked down some of mine. Maybe yours too. Couldn’t tell. Couldn’t see what he was doing. The flame turned color, which was likely these salts burning away as they do in a kiln.”
Perhaps my notion about the mingled streams of magic had been entirely my imagining. What did I know of it? What did anyone know of magic?
Vashti nudged Dumond aside and tied a loose bandage over the charred skin. “For now best keep it dry, so my naihi taught me. We’ll apply a cooling salve later. It’s the rib will pain him more when he wakes. Injured ribs are like dragon’s claws; as long as they are inside you, anything you do just makes matters worse.”
Dumond sat back and scratched his head. “I suppose we’ll see what’s what if he wakes.”
“When he wakes,” said Neri. “He said a few hours would see him good.”
Amusement crept closer to Dumond’s surface than usual. “As you say, boy: When. I shall be eternally resentful if he was wrong about that. Only four days until the prisoner’s turned over.”
While Neri, Vashti, and Dumond cleaned up the bloody mess of rags and torn clothing, sponges and basins, I moved Placidio’s bare arms to his sides and pulled the edges of the blanket up to cover them, while leaving the bandaged wound exposed. Though his eyes were closed and his body still, his clenched hands were quivering.
