A Conjuring of Assassins, page 25
I was pleased to find a neatly folded paper bearing Cuarona’s seal in L’Scrittóre’s message box. And dreadfully curious when I found a second fold of paper underneath it bearing a plain wax seal and no markings.
Romy!
I scanned carts, foot traffic, and roof tops for Placidio to no result.
“Ssst!” The hiss came from the sliver of dead space—the squeeze—between my shop and the rambling house that occupied the corner of Lizard’s Alley.
Stuffing the two messages in my waist pocket, I backed up to the wall next to the dark slot and murmured over my shoulder, “What are you doing in there?”
“Sshh.” A hand encircled my arm with a grip very like that of Germond the ironmonger’s vise, dragged me around the corner, and shoved me into the squeeze. The crooked walls of the adjacent buildings converged, blocking the slot’s far end, and the overlapping roofs hid the sky, leaving the dead space in perpetual night.
This was not Placidio. This person stank of fish.
“Could this be the lying wretch who’s eaten my food, occupied my bed, and accepted my coin?” I said. “Did you think of something else you wanted from me? My purse? What’s left of my virtue?”
“Yes, ’tis I, but—no, I would never … I’ve come to warn, not harm, you.”
“Then let me go before you break my arm.”
He snatched his hand away and retreated. But only a few steps, and he remained between me and escape. The glare from the street behind him blazed too bright to make him out. Certain, he was dripping wet. Where he’d pressed close to me, I was, too.
“Were you followed here?”
“No. I’m sure of that. But, Romy, the danger is terrible. Up in the city, I was searching, and soldiers were everywhere followed by—I don’t know what they were. Green demons? Monsters? Though of human form, they had no eyes. No mouth. Ne ears. No words. They howled like beasts, terrible cries of anger and suffering.”
“Magic sniffers. I warned you about them, and you told me you didn’t carry the demon taint. But sniffers don’t chase ordinary folk, only sorcerers. So the things you told me about the healing, about your grandmother … your marks … your healing, were they all lies, too?”
“I swear to you I do not lie,” he said fiercely. “I have no magic. I’m just—I am not where I belong.”
“Sniffers are sorcerers. Enslaved sorcerers. They detect magic. Their owners are called nullifiers and they arrest sorcerers. Nullifiers carry an axe so they can chop off your foot to prevent your running away. Spirits, I was so stupid to believe you.”
“I didn’t lie. Not apurpose, at least. Nothing makes sense. I’ve duties. I just cannot explain…”
I wasn’t going to fall for his distress or his excuses this time. “You’re sure the sniffers haven’t followed you here to the Beggars Ring?”
“I swear not. When I realized they were after me, high up on the cityhill, I sneaked and hid and ran”—even in silhouette, I could see how his chest pumped as if he were still running—“and when I was sure none could see I took to the river near one of the great bridges. Demons cannot follow through moving water. So I swam upriver and came through that narrow gate we crossed through on the night you rescued me. I’d never have risked coming back here, never have intruded on your peace, were I not afraid for you.”
His matter-of-fact mention of demons roused the tingling disquiet of midnight walks through graveyards. I shook it off. He was playing me. “Warn me of what?”
“You were concerned about evils in the city,” he continued, “and enemies who might find me at your house. These pursuers … their evil was clear. Please believe me. You saved my life, and I feared for your safety. Once I was sure I’d lost the pursuers, I didn’t know what else to do.”
Neri was right. Dumond was right. I was the world’s biggest idiot. Even now I wanted to believe him. But I’d seen the sniffers on his heels and heard them howling.
There was only one thing to do.
“We’re going back to the river,” I said. “Upstream there’s a place we can talk freely—an old stone warehouse standing off by itself. We go now. You first.”
20
ONE DAY UNTIL THE PRISONER TRANSFER
AFTERNOON
Before leaving the squeeze, I paused to blink away the glare and watch Teo vanish into the sunlight. Placidio was sitting on the rubble wall that fenced off the ironmonger’s yard just across the Ring Road watching two Demon Dancers rattle and spin past, orange ribbons fluttering. He bade a good afternoon to Germond as I joined him.
“Thought I might have to come fetch your corpus in that squeeze,” he said.
“It’s good I wasn’t counting on a rescue.”
“If you’ve not learned enough to handle a stripling like that, then you’re not the student I thought you were.” He glanced down at me. “The fish man?”
“No stripling I’ve ever met has a grip like his. I’ll have bruises tomorrow.” I rubbed my throbbing arm. “But I’m glad you didn’t intrude. We’re heading for the woolhouse, where he’s going to explain a few things. I think you’d best follow him discreetly and see what he’s up to along the way. Once we get there, I’ll introduce you.”
Placidio touched a finger to his brow in mock salute and vanished as quickly as Teo had. I hiked through the winding lanes toward the River Gate, mumbling curses, speeding up, stopping to check my shoe so as to catch a glimpse behind or to the sides. I was not followed.
Not another person was in sight along the riverside wasteland. Rumors of unquiet spirits from the plague years, when thousands had died along this section of the Venia, kept fishermen down past the docks or farther upriver on the side streams. Water birds, caring nothing for hauntings, screeked and dove for the neglected fish.
When I ducked behind a broken brick oven and checked behind me, my secret wish that the intriguing complication that was Teo might vanish was dashed yet again. His soggy tan tunic, brown slops, and pale hair made him almost invisible amid the sunlight, rocks, and ruins. Placidio emerged from the River Gate well behind him and ambled over to sit on the riverbank. Unthreatening.
I waited at the door to the woolhouse.
“What is this place?” Teo examined the high beamed roof pocked with holes that allowed stray beams of sunlight to streak the dusty air. The hanging bolsters. The bundled straw.
“My friends and I come here to be private. None can approach without being seen or heard from a good way off.”
“So you know yonder fellow who followed me out of the gate?”
“I do.” That man was now blocking the path behind him.
“Is he here to kill me?”
Teo might have been transparent, or a rough cut of marble under an artist’s chisel. Every line of his thin, sodden form was taut, poised to fight. But it was neither apprehension nor bravado written on his spirit. Only resignation, a touch of sorrow, and absolute confidence.
“No,” I said, before Placidio could answer. “You can trust him as you do me. But we need to understand. Now, show us your magic.”
“Friend Romy, I told you—”
“Show us your searching, then. Whatever you call it. But sniffers follow people wielding magic, not people seeking a new hammer or a lost child. What are you searching for?”
“I so very much wish I could tell you. The world appears to me like a glaring lens, a pool of sunlight where everything is so clear, so loud, so hard-edged—the barge, the river, you, this city. But outside the perimeter of that lens all is mud and murk, darkness and danger—and all these things I can’t remember. One shining thread leads through that murk into the glare. I am near blinded, so I cannot see what draws me, though everything in me says I must continue. I use no magic—not that I know. I don’t know how to do that or what it would feel like if I did.”
I wondered again if the beating had taken a toll on his head. Certain, it hadn’t harmed his strength; his grasp could have paralyzed Placidio. Perhaps he actually could have swum against the Venia’s strong current all the way from one of Cantagna’s bridges.
“Show us what you were doing when the sniffers discovered you.”
“I simply … turned inward,” he said. “Composed myself. Put aside worries and noise and distractions. When I’m settled, I open my eyes and the thread gleams, even in this glaring lens of the world.”
“Show us.”
As his eyes closed, his whole being changed. His brow smoothed. His cheekbones softened. His back curved ever so slightly. The long sinews in his arms released, until those limbs hung loose at his side. Then he spread them slightly away from his body, hands open and relaxed.
A few moments of stillness and his eyes flicked open. He began to walk in a slow circle about the empty woolhouse examining the packed dirt and straw, the walls, our practice fixtures. Placidio and I might have been the river breezes wafting through the doors.
I sensed nothing untoward, but then I never sensed anything from Placidio or Neri when they worked their magic. Beckoning Placidio to join me, I signaled what I wanted to do.
He nodded. The next time Teo paused to contemplate something, we each took a wrist.
Spirits! A bright, narrow torrent of searing cold rushed through my veins. Magic, certainly, though nothing like the fire of my own or the others of the Chimera. But intimately recognizable. Keen as a honed blade. Clean. Cold.
I dropped Teo’s arm.
Placidio had already done the same. “It was his,” he murmured. “The boost of magic during the healing rite; the one that felt like melt from a glacier.”
Not Vashti, but Teo. He’d never explained how he followed me to the cooper’s yard.
“How did you do it?” I snapped. “How did you interfere when we were helping my friend heal? You were just outside the door, and somehow— Why didn’t you see fit to mention that you’d joined in a magical working that day?”
Teo was not listening to me. He spun in place, arms wide, gaping about the woolhouse as if with new eyes.
“Extraordinary! This is just as when you found me on the riverbank. On that night, I was certain I’d arrived at the place I needed to be. Only I wasn’t. Nor am I now. But it was here—this mystery I seek—though it is no longer. How is this possible?”
I threw up my hands. We were talking of two different mysteries. “We held your wrists just now and felt your power. Why do you tell me you’re not a sorcerer?”
He paused his spinning, the flush of exhilaration fading in bewilderment. He peered at his outstretched arms, as if they were a stranger’s appendages.
“Because I’m not! Or … I’ve never thought of myself as a sorcerer … something evil. I try never to do any evil thing, although sometimes—”
Shadows darkened his pale face. His crossed arms pressed to his chest. “Certain, I am not perfect. I get tired. Selfish. Afraid. Angry. Life is hard, and we sometimes do things we ought not. But this thread—the path to this thing I need to find—draws me forward, demanding I follow it. A piece of that thread lies in this very place. It also led me to the barrelmaker’s yard where you found me. It led me up into this city today. I wandered the street for hours, but what I seek was not there, either, and I fear it is lost because somehow I am broken.”
I knew what evil he had done that sullied his delicate conscience. The Piazza Vasaio potter had told me. Fearing for Sandro … and myself … I had heard, but not listened to the woman’s tale of bad omens. Sniffers, two headless swans, three men dead …
“Three men were found dead at the docks on the night I dragged this fellow out of the river,” I said for Placidio’s benefit. “You killed them, didn’t you, Teo? The three bargemen who kept you captive.”
He clutched himself tighter and squeezed his eyes tight, and murmured, “Theíko Patéra, synchorste tin apotychía mou. Synchorste. Synchorste.”
“Forgive your failure? Were you supposed to kill more people? Or were you after their cargo—salt? pearls? coins? Is that why they beat you and you killed them?”
His whole body shook. With effort, I thought, as if he were trying to lift a mountain. “The story I told you was truth. By the divine father, I swear it. To slay … needlessly … what greater failure? What greater weakness? I am not meant for killing.”
“What are you meant for? Thievery? Spying?”
“By the gods I serve, my brave and patient rescuer, I cannot say.”
“Cannot or will not? What are you searching for? How will you know when you find it?”
Wincing, he opened his arms wide—helpless. “I very much wish I could tell you these things. They must be important to drive me so. To make me kill from weakness and fear of death. Because I must stay alive. Someday I will face a reckoning for those deaths. For the rest … I swear I do not know.”
I should kill him. He was surely the most convincing storyteller ever born—the most dangerous of all opponents. Thousands of lives could hang in the balance if I judged wrongly, beginning with my brother’s, and Dumond’s and his family’s, and that of the man standing just a few steps away, silent and ready. I had all but admitted to this stranger that I and my friends were sorcerers. But no logic or reasoning could deny that Teo was one of us, whether he admitted it or not. The power coursing through his body, though different, was as recognizable as my own. How could he not know what he was? Why wasn’t he afraid of his condition—lost in a place so unfamiliar, committed to a purpose he didn’t understand, missing pieces of his life?
“Do people in the Isles of Lesh work magic? Is it permitted?”
Tugging on his wet snarl of hair, he pondered the question much longer than it should have taken. “We are … as we are.”
“That’s not much of an answer,” I said, surprised when Placidio did not erupt in scorn. He did not tolerate excuses. But since detecting Teo’s magic, he’d kept silent, his cinder eyes narrowed. Thoughtful.
Screwing his own visage into a charming confusion, Teo sat heavily on a straw bundle. “I agree. Again, I beg pardon. Somehow my home—a home that I love and long for—resides mostly in the murk. I recognize that some things I do, like recovering from injury, might seem extraordinary to the two of you, in the way your life without the sea feels so strange to me. But naught that I remember, naught of my own deeds or those of my family, speaks of sorcery—those stories of terrible works intended to pervert the gods’ making of the world.”
He spoke of myth, not common magic. It was our vocabulary that differed.
Nothing for it; I wasn’t going to learn anything unless I hinted at the truth. “Each of those places where you followed this thread were places where magic had been worked.”
Here. Dumond’s house. Sandro’s house. Mine, too. Had he also wandered into the Heights where a fiend-for-hire had worked a magical explosion to kill Sandro? Had he found the little street in the Market Ring where I had stolen the memory of my name from Lawyer Cinnetti? Or into the Palazzo Segnori where I’d used magic to corrupt Fernand di Rossi’s memory? Perhaps this searching business was his own particular talent, as impersonation was mine and anticipation Placidio’s. Perhaps it had come upon him late in life, as abruptly as it had manifested in me at two and Neri at three. Yet even that wouldn’t explain what we’d felt at Placidio’s healing.
“When you were in the cooper’s yard, a great magic was being worked nearby. We felt your power in the middle of that working—exactly what you demonstrated just now—as if you were lending it to the work being done. It was very strong and like nothing I’d ever felt.”
I glanced at Placidio for a confirmation … or dissent, but his face and posture revealed nothing of his thoughts. Exasperating man. Both of them.
Teo peered out from under his tangled hair. “You felt no evil that day?”
“No. Far from evil.”
Grimacing, he scrubbed at his head. “Was it worthy work? A good purpose?”
“Very worthy. Healing a dying man. How did you do that without touching his flesh? How could you not know you were doing it? You were surprised when I found you there. Surely you experienced something different than this ‘pulling thread’ you speak of. What did you feel? What did you do?”
“I followed the thread to that place just as I told you. While I was seeking, there came an explosion in my spirit, like a glorious sea storm with thunder and lighting and waves as high as the cliffs of Lesh, and warm as the sands of Lesh itself. I opened myself to the storm, thinking I might have found the object of my search. Such beauty it was. Such power! But at the center of the storm lurked a devouring malevolence. I tried to understand it, afraid it might swallow me, terrified that I’d gone mad as you seemed to think—which is why I didn’t mention it to you at the time—and knowing I must hold against it with all my strength. After a while, it came to me that the malevolence was not a … mindful … evil, which made no sense at all. Even so, I dared not yield. After a while, the storm abated, the malevolence seemingly vanquished. I was so drained … and so confused … that I pulled the blanket over my head and tried to sleep.”
“And that’s where I found you.” He had simply reacted according to his nature—whatever that nature was. He had no wondrous secrets of magic to offer.
I assumed the malevolence Teo fought had been the sepsis lurking in Placidio’s gut and not our magic. And yet …
“What would you call a mindful evil?”
“The three who beat me in hopes of treasure until I could no longer sustain my life.” His clenched fist tapped his chest, where his shirt hid a triangle of variant curves enclosing a tightly coiled spiral. “I should have held longer.”
He had resisted until he was driven to extremity. So he killed them. And now felt shame at his weakness. Divine spirits, who was he?
Teo cocked his head, wry apology written on him. “I would have offered help freely in your worthy work if I’d known it could be done. I’m glad it was not just a figment of my broken head.”
