A Conjuring of Assassins, page 12
“Are you all right, swordmaster?” I said quietly, tucking the blanket around his chest and shoulders.
“Will be,” he whispered, eyes closed. “Just … need … time.”
“You need sleep. Dumond says Vashti has something to ease—”
“No.”
No surprise. A man of secrets who didn’t allow himself to sleep deeply would never approve such remedies.
Even after such a storm of the unexplainable, life resumed its forward course. Neri settled himself at Placidio’s shoulder with the swordmaster’s own flask of restorative ginger tea at the ready. His somber gaze didn’t waver from Placidio’s face.
Dumond returned to work, saying he’d be at his friend’s forge in the Asylum Ring until dark. Vashti changed her blood-soaked clothing and loaned me a fresh tunic. Then we bundled the pile of bloody linen to her washhouse behind the kitchen. I offered to do the scrubbing.
By the time I returned to the sitting room, Vashti was tidying Placidio’s sheet. The two of us retired to the kitchen to make more tea.
“Our swordsman does not rest easy,” she said. “But I see no sign of sepsis. A true wonder, what he did.”
“No disputing that.”
“Wait!” Neri’s cry from the other room spoke panic. “Don’t—”
“Fortune’s frigging blasted dam! Stick a shiv in me!” The croaking epithets silenced Neri and hurried me to Placidio’s bedside. He had attempted to roll to his side. A terrible mistake.
“Someone already punctured you,” I said, helping him settle on his back again. “Sleep it off.”
He threw an arm over his eyes. “Tie me down so’s I don’t move.”
“Hold up. Before you get back to snoring, I got your frog piss here.” Neri waved the flask of the salt-and-ginger tea in front of Placidio’s nose. “I’ve been taught it helps the body recover from just about anything.”
Neri dribbled a few spoonfuls of the salty tea down him. As I pulled the blood-stained blanket over his bare legs, Placidio mumbled, “Go run, lad. All the way. Round the Ring. It’s today’s … lesson.”
His eyes remained closed; his breathing shallow; his unshaven face a mask of pain.
Fear wreathed Neri. I turned him away from Placidio. “Better you go upstairs and sleep. You’ve been more than a day without, hunting this fool of a swordmaster. I’ll watch him until you’re back. You can have the night watch.”
Grudging, Neri agreed. But he didn’t retire upstairs. He threw several of Vashti’s cushions on a bench along the wall, laid down, and was asleep before I could blink. Placidio, on the other hand, did not sleep.
After a while of watching him struggle to hold still, I said, quietly, “How long does it take for a deep wound? For the magic to knit things back together?”
“A few hours to get well on the way.” As I suspected, he was nowhere near unconscious. “Feels likes snakes in there. Biting. Chewing.”
“Would it help if I talked to you? We’ve had interesting developments with regard to the prisoner and the Assassins List. And I’ve a mystery to share.”
“Anything.” A whisper of desperation wrapped the word.
Vashti motioned that she would be in the kitchen.
Laying a hand on Placidio’s rigid arm, I began. “Your student who so diligently dragged you in here so we could save your life has been spending his days chasing a rat dog…”
I told him about Neri’s sneaking, and our magic, and Rossi-Cinque who was not afraid of being turned over to those who would torture and hang him, yet had promised me that the Assassins List would not reach Vizio’s hand. “Dumond and Neri and I agree that we should make another attempt to acquire the list, but, as I’ve laid out, revisiting the Palazzo Segnori would likely get one or all of us caught for nothing.”
“Atladu’s balls.”
“Unfortunately neither manly Atladu nor any other divinity has provided insights as to our next step, except to learn as much as we can about our current rival for the Assassins List—the Mercediaran ambassador.”
“Elements. Of combat,” said Placidio through his clenched jaw.
“Elements…?”
Of course! Placidio the swordmaster. He insisted that the best way to survive any contest was to consider three essential elements before engagement—even if there were only moments to choose. Thus, before any practice scenario in our training sessions, Neri or I had to review the elements to prove we’d thought them through completely.
Though his eyes were yet closed, my back straightened and my mind focused on the problem. “The first element is opponent. My assessment of our proper opponent is in progress. Currently it is the prisoner. No one knows anything about Cinque beyond rumor and the sample of his handwriting. As to Rossi—I know as much as anyone, because I paid attention over a span of seven years. He is far more intelligent than anyone gives him credit for. He is clearly skilled at deception, but vain and determined to win. I judge him sincere in his belief that he can survive and also in his promise that Vizio is not to get her hands on the Assassins List. Together those lead me to the conclusion that he expects to bribe, extort, or charm the Mercediaran ambassador. Before I arrived here this afternoon, I dispatched a request for information about Ambassador di Sinterolla to the Shadow Lord’s consigliere.”
“Terrain?”
“As I outlined, I believe re-entering the Palazzo Segnori would be excessively dangerous and ultimately fruitless. Barring some unpredictable occurrence like fire or earthquake, the next place we can find our opponent will be the Mercediaran embassy four days hence. The Palazzo Ignazio in the Quartiere di Fiori of the Heights serves as both embassy and ambassadorial residence, and what information is known about the building could be obtained in the City Architect’s Office, a place with which I am more than passing familiar. Indeed … I could do that tomorrow. As to the third element—the weapons…”
The corner of Placidio’s mouth turned upward ever so slightly. “Us.”
“Yes. The Chimera and our magic. Time enough to decide how we use it once we have our opponents and the terrain more clear. I must allow … I hope it involves no impersonations. Though today’s magic”—I tapped his wrist—“reminded me of its grandeur.”
I spooned a bit of the ginger tea into Placidio’s mouth. He wet his lips, but little more.
“Now we have a start on our plan of engagement, are you up for another story? A mystery unrelated to spies and assassins?”
“Please.”
“Last night, I was walking home from the woolhouse…” I told the story of Teo, the mark, the dream and how it felt so similar to the visions Dumond and I had experienced.
“Fortune’s. Dam. Woman.”
Placidio’s exclamation was quiet, but forceful.
The disbelieving echo from behind me was equally fierce, but much louder. “A stranger in our house? A sorcerer? Someone who gets into your head with words and dreams? You’re always asking me if I’m a lunatic. Time to take a look at yourself!”
Neri looked as if he’d been awake for a while.
“Dumond agrees with you that I was a bit foolish—”
“Of course you were!” said Neri. “Think, Romy. Even drunk or mostly drowned, seems he was well enough to poke his name into your head and make it all the way to Lizard’s Alley. You could have left him down to the Duck’s Bone or over at the Pipes. Someone would have found him there. We four have important things going on. Risky already. You convinced us. Reminded me of it after Bawds Field. And now you park a stranger in your bed, and no knowing what’s wrong with him, if anything?”
I sympathized with Neri. It was tiresome to hear people telling me how stupid I’d been and awful to have the notion they were right.
But I gritted my teeth and remained cool. “Even beyond the notion that I’ve never left anyone to die if I can help it, even admitting that Teo might have somehow coerced me to take him somewhere safe and hidden, how can I get rid of him now? Assuming he returns to a condition to go anywhere, think of the answers he might have for us. About magic. About ourselves. About the Antigonean bronze…”
At that last I glanced specifically at Placidio, who steadfastly refused to speak of the Grand Duc Eduardo di Corradini who now owned the statue, much less to speculate on why the nobleman was so intent on owning that particular artifact. Placidio’s eyes remained closed, but his stillness reflected concentration, not vagueness, especially as I told of the visions and the dream.
“Of course, it is a risk for all of us. But tell me what else I could do or can do but see it through, even in the midst of a Chimera scheme.”
Not even Neri had an answer.
It was no use trying to describe the trust I felt for Teo, his palpable distress, and my sense that I could ease it. They would rightly attribute it to the very reason I understood his needs without his moving his lips. But why was I not afraid? Was this what demon possession was really like?
“Burn candles around him as he sleeps,” whispered Placidio. “Five at least. Won’t harm him. Leave no water inside the ring. Don’t ask me why.”
Even spoken in a whisper without inflection, I knew this information came from beyond one of Placidio’s unbreachable boundaries. Something to do with his youth. With his magic. With the bronze statue. With the mystery of an unnamed young man who had leapt to his death in the sea, and with the devout and honorable Eduardo di Corradini, grand duc of Riccia, collector of antiquities. Someday I would know what else lay beyond those boundaries that might link those stories together.
“I’ll try that.”
The city bells tolled five hours past noonday. I’d already left Teo bound half a day with naught but the ginger tea—assuming he could help himself to it.
I squeezed gently on Placidio’s arm. “I need to get back and see to him. I promise to be careful. And discreet. Nothing will interfere with what we decide to do over the next four days. The prisoner is still the gateway to the Assassins List. We’ll see if I hear back from Mantegna, and I’ll unearth what I can about Palazzo Ignazio.”
Placidio said nothing. His arm was definitely less rigid than when I’d started. Perhaps he had at last fallen asleep. Even better, his breathing was even, and his skin neither clammy nor fevered. Neri moved onto my cushion as soon as I was off it.
“Watch out for him,” I said. “And meet me in the Piazza Livello tomorrow at half-morn. I’ve an idea how we can filch a map of the streets around the Mercediaran embassy from the City Architect’s office. Two of us will make it easier.”
“You’d trust me stealin’? Can’t imagine that, useless as I am.”
“I trust you with my life, Neri. So do we all. Placidio well knows who saved his today. And he well knows who it was got him—and you—and all of us involved with the Pizottis, of all the blighted lunatics in this world. None of us are without fault.”
I crossed the room and poked my head into the kitchen where Vashti was doing something ravishing with a skillet, garlic, and fish. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Neri’s staying to help with Placidio. If it’s all right I’m taking that slit skirt and the purple hat you made for me. I’m feeling the need for a disguise.”
“Virtue’s hand, Romy-zha. We’ll take good care of both of them. And certain, take the pieces. Have a care in all your works.”
After collecting the garments, I closed Dumond’s door quietly behind me and strolled down the alley behind the cooper’s yard to the mundane harmonies of hammers and saws, bellowing mules and carts. Late afternoon was a busy time for the barrelmaker and his neighbor the chandler. I took my usual circuitous route between the stacks of casks and barrels and the head-high pyramids of planks awaiting conversion to useful occupation.
There was naught to be done about resentful young brothers but trust them to come around. At least Placidio’s regimen had settled my mind as to our next activities. For the moment I paid attention to my surroundings, scanning the latticed roof and the intersecting alleys, peering into the dappled light that made mysteries of the corners and niches of the cooper’s yard. I would not be complacent even in such commonplace surroundings.
If not for that, I might have mistaken the shapeless pile of blankets in a dim corner near Dumond’s workshop for a shapeless pile of blankets, instead of a huddled, blanket-draped person with bare feet. Feet smeared with black mud … or …
“Fortune’s dam! Teo?”
10
FOUR DAYS UNTIL THE PRISONER TRANSFER
AFTERNOON
Impossible. “Teo, how in all grace did you find me?”
The blanket—my own blanket—slid from snarls of fair hair to reveal a pair of wide-set eyes filled with genuine astonishment, a slender unbroken nose, and a smile that could illuminate a solstice midnight. “Kyria! How in all grace did you recognize me?”
Impossible not to return that smile. “The feet,” I said. “Many Cantagnans lack shoes, but I’ve seen no other foot inked with the uncoiling spiral—the Typhonian symbol for wind.”
He leaned over his knees to peer at his feet. “The mark speaks wind to you?”
“You didn’t know?”
“Every symbol has a thousand meanings. I wanted something to make me feel fast when I run. The inkmaster said this would do. Wings would have looked more … complicated.”
Not the answer I was expecting. Certainly not the answer to my original question or any of the hundred others pelting me like hailstones.
“I’m sorry for binding you; I meant no harm. How did you get loose?”
“Please don’t apologize. I’d no desire to fall in the river again or run afoul of your enemies, though I cannot imagine such a generous person having enemies.”
So he’d heard what I’d told him. My cheeks heated when I considered some of the things I’d said when I thought him thoroughly insensible. Was he like Placidio who never slept deep enough to miss a spoken word, or was he something else entire?
“Enemies can appear from anywhere,” I said. “The world can be a harsh place.”
“Harsh, yes.” He unfolded himself and popped to his feet in the corner of the cooper’s shed, as if he’d never been broken or drowned or jousting with death. Expression sober, he inclined his back in a graceful bow. “Kyria Romy, I am not your enemy. I owe you my life, a debt I shall carry always. My service is yours in whatever way I can give.”
“Come, let’s walk. I’ll take payment in answers.”
“As you say!” The cheerful note of his reply seemed at odds with dreams of fracturing cities that leaked boiling water and spat molten fire.
The Assassins List and the dangers it posed had to remain my chief concern, but it was too late to get Teo lost and abandon him. If he was a risk to us, I needed to discover it, and if he carried answers regarding magic, I’d be a fool to throw away this opportunity to learn. So I’d start with simple things, gain his trust, learn what might illuminate his purposes, and only then lead into the dangerous topic of magic.
Teo trailed behind me into the sunlit lane. I was happy to see he’d found Neri’s outgrown slops that we were hoping to trade for new ones, so he wasn’t entirely naked under the shirt and the blanket wrapped round his shoulders.
“Are you still cold?” I said, as we joined the afternoon bustle of the Ring Road. The air was tepid, the milky sky not quite shed of the previous night’s fog.
“In truth, yes. I’m accustomed to warmer climes.”
“You’ve come from the south, then,” I said, waving him up to walk beside me. “Mercediare?” I kept my inquiries conversational.
“East and southerly of that. The Isles of Lesh, beyond the Hylides.” Spoken without a hint of guilt or anxiety, just before he darted across the road to peer into a wood-slat pen, where a dozen weanling piglets were squealing for their recently departed mam.
Though I’d heard of the Isles of Lesh, I wasn’t familiar with them. Thousands of islands bordered the Costa Drago. Beyond the Hylides would place them halfway across the Mare Lacrimé—the Sea of Tears that separated the Costa Drago from the tribal kingdoms of Empyria. At least a month of sailing island to island would be required even to reach the mainland at Varela or Mercediare.
“You’re an adventurer, then, traveling all the way around the tip of the Costa Drago and upriver this far inland.”
“No adventurer,” he said, spinning full around as he walked to watch two ragged dancers leap and twirl past us. Their orange ribbons fluttered; their garishly painted faces leered; and their flailing rattles, clackers, and bell sticks clashed with the six slow chimes marking the Hour of Gathering. “I’ve not left the Isles before. I’m a foolish, naive traveler. Please do tell me what are those two doing.”
“They’re members of the Order of Demon Dancers,” I said. “They believe that constant noise and movement prevent demons from infesting a house or a street or a city. These two will dance along this Ring Road until they drop from exhaustion—sometimes eight hours or more. At the very moment they stop, two more believers will take up the dance. And so it goes on.”
“Never stopping? Are they successful at their chosen task?”
His open wonder and serious question belied suspicions of lies or secrets. Childlike, some would say. But then, those bearing Dragonis’s taint could certainly mask their lies. Just half a month past, the man I’d lived with intimately for nine years had looked me in the face and believed I was a demure young scholar of antiquities. Did Teo carry the same magic as my own? It was maddening not to know if that was even possible.
“These two belong to an Order family who’ve danced the Beggars Ring continuously since I was a child. And I can truthfully say I’ve never seen a demon in the Ring Road. Unless you are one.” Fear of my own gullibility put an edge to my offhand jest.
Teo darted in front of me and halted in the middle of the road, forcing me to stop in turn. “Kyria, you don’t truly believe that I—? What is your experience of demons that you see such possibility in me?”
He was no longer bantering, either with death or with me. Furrows creased his brow, and trouble deepened his eyes. Such eyes … They stole my breath away. I’d never seen any like, so deep with subtly shifting color. In one instant a rich and bottomless green, in the next, bluer than a mountain lake at midsummer, then a cool gray, and then green again, flecked with gold … and filled with a soul-deep horror.
