A Conjuring of Assassins, page 5
Then, too, a man might know a few words of Annisi if he was born on one of Mercediare’s two hundred tributary islands. Once I considered that, I couldn’t shake the notion that this might even be our Mercediaran prisoner escaped from his captors. If he lay insensible in the shallows, the current could swallow him at any moment. Whatever the truth, I couldn’t abandon him.
Every few steps through the fog I paused to test the ground ahead for sinkholes or steep banks and to locate the sound of the eddies around the ruined docks. That’s where I’d heard him choking. Unfortunately the closer I got to the river, the thicker the fog. The lantern light reflected from the murk, revealing naught farther away than my own feet.
Neri had heard tales of sorcerers who could use their raw magic to create a light as well as fuel their own particular talent. We had tried it several times. He’d had no success. One time I believed a glow emanated briefly from my hand. Gone as quickly as it had come, it had left me feeling chilled and sick, which I learned were symptoms of weak or ill-formed enchantment. So maybe it was possible.
Using magic was always a risk, even outside the city walls. But tonight my choice was either risky magic or a risky search or abandoning the desperate stranger to the river. Perhaps Lady Virtue would look kindly on the favor. And attempting a light did not require me to leave my soul behind.
Closing my eyes, I reached deep into the well of power inside me. Familiar now, the heat flooding veins, muscle, and bone, speeding my heart’s beat, quickening my breath, sharpening my perceptions so that I could see, hear, smell, taste, and feel with heightened acuity.
Certain, a body lay somewhere down and to my right. Solid. Astonishingly cold. Heart beating so slowly it was scarce detectable. Fog and rippling current masked his exact position.
Infusing my desire with magic and need, I focused my will on my hand … on seeing … on light to penetrate the fog.
Spirits! A soft ivory beam shot from my hand. It revealed no colors, but rather left everything in its narrow range stripped of all but black and gray: the urgent river, the weedy, rutted earth, scattered rocks and shards of brick. The rotting understructure of a broken dock. And a slender man sprawled in the muddy backwater amid the forest of old pilings. The river tugged at his floating legs, drawing him slowly, inexorably, into its grasp.
4
FIVE DAYS UNTIL THE PRISONER TRANSFER
NIGHT
I abandoned my case and the flickering lantern on a flat rock.
“Hold on!” I said, not imagining the man was in any state to hear as I slid down the steep embankment, scrambled over logs and uprooted saplings, and slogged through slime and mud. Wavelets sloshed his face. He did not stir, even as the hungry current dragged him another handspan farther into the flood.
Planting my feet, I grabbed him under the arms and hauled him onto the muddy bank. Another heave. He was damnably heavy for a man very near my own size. A groan slipped through his teeth when his foot caught on a snag, but the pain didn’t wake him enough that he could aid me. A few more heaves got him to the drier ground atop the embankment.
My magical light died.
Already breathless from the effort, now fighting the wave of cold and nausea that always followed imperfect magic, I bent over, hands on knees, swallowing hard. My skull bones ground against each other. Breathe. Hold. Blow out slowly. Breathe …
I knelt beside the sodden figure, and rolled him carefully to his back. He lay as cold and still as a man twelve hours dead, but my ear on his chest confirmed my earlier perceptions. His heart was beating, but at the pace of a funeral processional. My damp cheek detected a thready breath at his mouth, though the rise and fall of his chest coincided more with the pace of the seasons than with healthy respiration.
Grabbing the abandoned lantern, I took a better look.
An unraveling braid of pale hair marked him a foreigner, but beyond that, had he been my own brother I could not have guessed his age or what he actually looked like. His eyes were swollen shut, his lips split, his face and hands mottled with cuts and bruises. His nose was surely broken.
The light revealed no significant issue of blood elsewhere, though I couldn’t judge his state of wounding without better light and far less mud on him. Yet from the condition of his face I couldn’t discount something dire. Someone—or more than one—had been at him with fists and boots, taking him to the point of death and then dumping him into the river to drown. That he had not done so said something about his endurance.
“Hey, fellow! Wake up!” I shook his shoulder, gently at first and then more vigorously. “I really don’t want to leave you this way. Wild dogs roam this riverbank, and they’ll delight in ripping out your throat. Wander about on your own and the fog will have you right back in the river.”
He stirred, then sank back into his stupor.
Strange for our tepid weather, he wore as many layers as a winter-born babe: tunic, shirt, doublet, netherstocks, trousers, over-jacket, wool cloak, and a second mantle atop all. All were visible, because all were torn and slashed to shreds. He’d no belt, weapons, purse, or waist pockets. His attackers must have taken his valuables, even his earrings. Ragged wounds on his lobes testified to a brutal snatch. In the southlands men wore earrings just as women did.
“Come on. I can’t carry you, and there’s no one else about.”
I shook him again, tugged at his hair, wriggled his legs. Each time he moved a little more, but to no lasting effect. Hating to do it, I slapped his mauled cheek.
He stifled a gasp and rolled to one side, drawing up his knees.
“Sorry, sorry,” I said. “But you’ve got to get up. I can’t carry you, but I’ll help you into the city. Maybe you’ve kin in Cantagna?”
His whole body twitched.
Theíko Patéra, voíthisé … The quiet plea for help, threaded with pain, had no more substance than a wisp of the fog.
I patted his cold hand. “No divinities have been seen in Cantagna for millennia, I’m afraid—Fathers or Mothers either one. Tonight you’ll have to take help from a scribe.”
Shoving my arm under the man’s shoulders, I raised him up to sitting. His head drooped, chin resting on his chest. An attempt to breathe through his nose set him choking.
“Stand up,” I said, shaking him when he’d got his breath again. “Síko páno.”
Had I pronounced the words correctly? How would I even know?
“I know it’s hard. But after a bit of a hike, we’ll find you a bed. Get something hot inside you. Never felt a man so cold who wasn’t dead.”
Whispers of bone-deep terror ghosted past my ear. Not dead. Blind.
Was it the ongoing residue of feeble sorcery that made my bones quiver, too?
“Maybe not blind,” I said, relieved that he comprehended at least some of my words. “Whoever had at you, they did a right thorough job.”
Draping one wet, cold arm over my shoulders, I hauled him up. He got one foot under himself, but the other refused to bear any weight. Thankful for Placidio’s nagging insistence on developing my arm strength, I kept the fellow from collapsing while switching myself to his weaker side. The awkward move felt like trying to dance a galliard with a giant fish.
Balancing him upright, I grabbed the writing case and hung it on my shoulder. The lantern would have to remain behind. Now to move.
I shuffled forward. One of his feet moved, the other dragged, eliciting a faint moan.
“Well done.” I expelled the words with a grunt.
He said nothing during that agonizing journey. Breathing through his mouth was difficult, through his swollen nose impossible. I spoke only what breathless encouragement seemed necessary. All my focus was on keeping him moving toward the faint red smear that marked the River Gate.
Surely two hours had passed by the time the red smear and a blaze of firelight from the gatehouse near blinded me to the hulking shape bawling a challenge. “Hold up. Who’s come?”
I looked entirely disreputable, damp hair straggling, garments sodden and covered in mud. My back and shoulders screamed so loud, I could scarce think. What to answer …
“This fellow was— He’s—”
I floundered for words that ought to come smoothly. I needed to be someone else, but without using magic. Swaying on my feet, I dug deep into exhausted confusion. Think, Romy.
“What’s your business out riverside on a night like this?” The spearpoint that pricked my breast spoke a warden with too little to do.
Mystiko. Secret. Maybe something risqué for bored gate guards.
“Aright. Aright,” I blurted, shaking my limp hair over my face. “Found this sweetum at the Rusty Knob. We was just takin’ our first roll, out where ’is mate wouldn’t see. Guess he had a swig too much to rise his mettle for the plunge. Me, too, maybe, so I needs must reposit him where I found him or his mate’ll ’ave his nuts, which’d be a waste beyond thinkin’, I can tell you, pretty as they are.”
Fortunately neither of us had weapons in hand to damp the wardens’ hilarity. They shoved us through the gate with their boots, laughing louder when I stumbled and crashed atop my injured companion in a puddle of muck.
“Somewhere under that mud might be a fine figure of a woman,” one snorted to his fellow, “but you’d have to haul the body through the cistern at the Pipes even to find which parts it has.”
By the time I dragged my companion to his feet and coaxed, berated, and begged him as far as the tarry blackness of Lizard’s Alley, the watch was calling the hour before midnight—and the man was so limp my jellied muscles could scarce hold on to him. My constant shivering didn’t help. His chilled body had surely leached every bit of warmth from the world.
I kicked open the door and hauled him through the dark into the curtained alcove that held my bed and Neri’s. Supporting him against the wall, I yanked back the blanket, then let him sag into a sodden heap on my rag-and-straw-filled pallet.
I wanted to collapse as well, but he’d be dead soon if I didn’t get him warm. If I let go of thought for even a moment, I’d not be awake to prevent it. Damned if I’d let him die after all this trouble.
In the dim recesses of my wit I questioned why I’d brought him here. Yes, I had good reason to bypass nosy gate wardens, but I’d passed at least three taverns on the Ring Road and never considered dumping him on their doorsteps. It wasn’t like me to be protective of strangers.
I grabbed a shawl from the hook beside my bed and wrapped it around my damp shoulders. Then I fetched the tinderbox and forced my trembling hands to strike sparks in a little wad of cattail fluff and shaved bark. After many more attempts than I liked, tiny flames licked the kindling in our brazier. Once there was a steady vigor to it, I piled in a few chunks of coal from the hod. A tin pot of water sat atop the clay surface.
Visions of the ever-ready fires in il Padroné’s house and his instantly available carafes of rare, expensive coffee mocked me as I worked. I erased them with memories of the squalid, bitter days when my parents and most of my twelve younger siblings crowded this same room, forever stinking of mold and piss.
By the light of a small lamp lit from the growing fire, I fetched blankets, rags, and Neri’s spare shirt from our chest.
“Got to get you out of these wet scraps else I’ll never get you warm,” I said, teeth chattering as I unfastened the laces, buttons, and pins that held together the ruins of his sodden garments. “I’ve seen more men naked than you’d like to think on, including my brother who’ll likely combust if he spies a stranger in my bed. So you’ve nothing I’ve not seen before.”
Only he had.
From neck to ankle, wrist to wrist, his pale flesh was marked with wolf-gray ink in a variety of lines and curves, purposeful designs large and small, all of them pleasing to the eye. Here, a pair of interlinked circles. There, a straight line with thorn-like protrusions along its length. Here, a starburst. Eerily familiar designs, though I had never seen them on living skin, only on painted figures decorating a painted urn—one of il Padroné’s most prized antiquities. He believed the urn fired in the Typhonese city of Umbra Lunae a thousand years ago.
Gingerly, I pushed the man’s long wet braid aside and blotted his back, arms, legs, and buttocks with the towel. The markings were fixed in his skin—as were plentiful cuts, bruises, and oozing stripes from repeated beatings with belts or chains.
I rolled him over. More ink markings. More mottled bruising, more broken and abraded skin.
My breath stopped. A palm-sized pattern over his heart comprised a triangular form of three intersecting arcs—one concave, one convex, one sinuous—bracketing a tightly coiled spiral. Intimately familiar.
I yanked Dumond’s bronze luck charm from my pocket. The engraving on the charm was exactly the same design, even to the placement of the three arcs—the concave on the left, the convex on the right, the sinuous curve across the bottom. The charm supposedly masked magic in the blood. Was this man a sorcerer?
Unfortunately, Dumond lived halfway round the city. I couldn’t easily roust him to ask why the symbol on his luck charms might be inked on the skin of a half-dead man who spoke Annisi.
After confirming that my guest yet breathed, I nourished my little blaze with fuel and begged the water pot to heat before I shivered my bones to dust. Failing anything hot to drink as yet, I filled a cup with Placidio’s salt, lemon, and ginger tea. Neri believed in its efficacy, and kept a ready supply in a stone flask.
Though the injured man showed no other signs of waking, he swallowed the nasty liquid voraciously. Then I finished drying him off, eliciting quiet groans when I pressed gently on his discolored belly and his horribly swollen left ankle.
My brother’s old russet shirt swallowed the man’s upper body, but scarce covered enough length to keep him modest. Struggling with his dead weight, I’d not noted how thin he was, his height all angles and bones.
“Your bones must be lead, whatever-your-name-is,” I said as I propped his head on a rolled blanket, drew a sheet over him, and laid a wet compress over his eyes and nose. “But by the Holy Sisters, that’s all I can do for you until the pot boils.”
I slid to the floor, my back to the wall beside the low bed.
Not lead. Not dead. Need fed. Name is Teo.
The whispers came as much from inside my head as above or beside me … and I’d have sworn they were wrapped in whimsy and tied up with a fervent blessing.
“Rest, fish man,” I said, laughing. “Soon as the water heats, I’ll feed you.”
I patted his blanketed arm, then drew my dagger and laid it close to hand. Though I willed myself to stay awake, my thoughts soon dissolved into realms unknown, mostly centered around why in the name of the Unseeable I had brought a stranger into my house …
The stink of scorching metal stung my nose. My eyes blinked … sticky with sleep. “Ah, confound it!”
The overheated tin pot was long dry and the ashes were pulsing with the death throes of my fire. At least the room was warm. Plenty warm for me, though my guest … Teo?
I knelt up and laid my ear on his chest. Heart still beating. Breath still pumping, but with no more vigor than before. His forehead and cheeks had warmed a little, but his arms and legs were still cold as dead fish.
“Sorry. I’ll try again.”
Something nagged at me as I replenished the fire and used some splintered sticks to get it blazing again. Need fed … Spirits, the poor fellow was starving!
He welcomed another sip of the ginger tea, but surely he needed something more substantial.
Cooking was not an element of my education either at the Moon House or in il Padroné’s household. Neri would eat anything he didn’t have to make, but our brazier wasn’t very efficient and coal was more expensive than food we could fetch from the Beggars Ring market. Edible was the best that could be said of that, but anything was better than my fitful attempts. My prowess was limited to boiling—eggs, dry noodles, or gruel.
As I waited for the steam to rise, I drew a stool to the side of the bed and leaned my back against the wall, still tired and muddle-headed. Certain, I could sleep through until tomorrow’s afternoon. Warm and drowsy, I started talking to keep myself awake.
“What am I going to do with you, Segno Not-Lead-Not-Dead-Now-Soon-to-Be-Fed? You pose mysteries too interesting to let go. Why do you cry out in a lost language? What are these marks, especially this one over your heart? I think you must have secrets with so much hidden under your dozen layers of garments.”
My eyes itched from the smoke. I squeezed them closed. Golden stars sparked through wavering glass. A watchful peace … drifting … healing. Silver lights darted past. Fronds of deep green teased the skin. A tracery of white far below prompted a wave of pleasure … and sorrow. Home …
I jerked and jumped up, knocking over the stool with a clatter. The water on the brazier bubbled and steamed in its pot.
“Not all boiled away,” I said, relieved when I inspected the pot. “I’d have felt a right idiot if I’d done it again.”
Stirring in some oats I’d crushed to powder, I let them stew a bit, then added a bit of salt and a dollop of sagging butter from the dish on a shelf. I returned to Teo’s bedside with a bowl holding a few spoonfuls.
Though his puffy, blackened eyes did not open, the taste of gruel on his tongue prompted more reaction than even the ginger tea. Not only did he not choke, which I had feared, but he licked his lips and panted a shallow breath as he swallowed. I paused between the minuscule bites to ensure he’d got them down, prattling to fill the interval as if he might bite me did I not distract him.
“You are experiencing a rare privilege, segno. My longtime master was the last person to be fed from my exquisitely trained hand. There are numerous ways a courtesan can present food and drink to the master or mistress, all of them beautiful and graceful—though perhaps it would not be seemly to mention them to a man I don’t know, an injured man whose … ah … level of worldliness I cannot judge.”
