A Clatter of Chains

by A Van Wyck

  “No,” he answered the watchman’s question, “I am afraid the family will have to forego reclamation of the bodies. At least until I have finished my investigation. The remains will be remanded into the custody of the Temple until then.” He spared the watchman a quick glance. “Please run downstairs and ask the cold-carriage porters who should have arrived by now to come up.” He turned his attention back to his sketching. “I’m almost done here…”

  * * *

  It was a small service. He’d done the last address himself, Marco and he in their formal robes, standing over the open grave and the tragically small coffin within. It had been just the three of them, himself, Marco and the grave digger, smoking his pipe a respectful distance away, giving them their privacy.

  He’d had the words, “A new friend,” added beneath the only name the girl seemed to have had. Destitute indeed to have had only one name to call her own. He’d seen Marco’s eye catch on the added line. The boy had bitten his lip but his eyes had remained mercifully dry and he’d said nothing.

  He’d kept the service short and simple, choosing one of the more obscure passages from the holy texts for its striking imagery more than for its message. During his brief monologue, tears had silently started to roll down Marco’s cheeks and the boy’s shoulders had gradually hunched until he’d stood with them drawn up about his ears.

  “Peace shall be your nourishment and contentment your sustenance and my love shall be the soil from which they both shall grow,” he ended his sermon. “Now and forever – life without end.” He’d bowed his head.

  “If you would like to say a few words…” he’d finally prompted.

  Marco had been trembling, his hands clenched into fists, shaking at his side. Anger and guilt had been a potent cocktail in his heart. He’d taken a step toward the open grave as if stepping out to face his own death.

  “I’m sorry,” he’d whispered. “I should have saved you.” Tears had fallen to the carefully kempt grass, the chasm of grief opening wide within the boy. But anger had sparked first, carrying him up and out of the despair that beckoned. He’d whirled.

  “I should have saved her,” he’d raged at Justin. “She saved me,” he’d admitted, the raw pain momentarily breaking through the fragile anger. “She saved me and I killed her.” New tears fell from the corners of his eyes. “If only I’d convinced her to come with me… I was so stupid! But she didn’t leave me. She followed me. And then she saved me again and I couldn’t even save her once!” The words had trailed off into helpless sobs.

  In fits and starts, coughing on tear muffled words and grief induced hiccups, Marco had told the story, standing there by the graveside.

  Justin had listened in silence, letting his heart bleed along with the boy’s. The part of him that had remained objective had noted that there was no mention of dogs in the tale. The two men had been alive when Marco blacked out and he’d woken up back at the Temple.

  When at last the story had been done and told, he’d finally put a consoling arm around Marco. The boy had buried his face in Justin’s robe, his narrow shoulders shaking with the force of his grief.

  He’d nodded discreetly at the digger to start filling in the grave.

  He’d had to be strong for the boy. But now, sitting in Cyrus’s apartments, he was himself a wreck. Over his many years he had of necessity cultivated a resistance to the deluge of emotions he lived every waking moment in. Else he would have long since gone mad from the constant bombardment. The emotions of others, particularly when they cut deep, could sometimes be hard to separate from one’s own. This business with Marco had breached his armor like a Renali lance – pinning a lifetime of careful distance right to the boy’s broken heart.

  “They’re right you know,” the healer said, sipping his tea. “If the men were mauled by tooth and claw, then your boy didn’t do the mauling. Unless you’re telling me you believe in boggels now?”

  “Fairytale monsters didn’t murder those men.”

  Cyrus spent long moments appraising him in silence.

  “You look like you’ve been spat out by the Dark Places.”

  He glanced up at Cyrus’s bland and wrinkled face.

  “I feel even worse.”

  “Feel free not to elaborate,” Cyrus growled in his customary phlegmatic rasp, “I’ve got enough worries of my own.”

  That stirred something in him. His single greatest fear regarding Cyrus – and the one that Cyrus himself paid the least attention to – was the old priest’s failing health. If it had degenerated to the point where Cyrus himself had finally taken notice, then he needed to know.

  “Please do elaborate…” he returned, feeling his encouraging smile fail on his face.

  Another deep appraisal, thick with the taste of speculation, followed.

  “How’s your tea?” the old priest changed the subject.

  He regarded his cup with puckered brow.

  “Fine. Why?”

  It wasn’t like Cyrus to dodge difficult questions. Disregarding harsh truths, yes. The old healer was a social battering ram.

  “Because,” Cyrus drawled in sly amusement, rolling an eye at Justin’s cup, “the milk is a week old.”

  He frowned. Discounting a sojourn in the Temple cold cellars, a week was an excessively optimistic life expectancy for milk. Personally, he liked his tea with a little more bite to it. But this tea was toothless.

  “Nothing wrong with the milk.”

  “Would it interest you to know…” Cyrus smiled a crinkled smile, “…it hasn’t left my office in all that time?”

  Milk subjected to Cyrus should have tried to escape on its own by day two.

  Holding his friend’s eyes, he took another purposeful sip.

  “You didn’t try reducing it to powder again, did you?” he speculated. “Even I thought that was disgusting…”

  With a gratified grunt, the old priest levered himself to his feet and shuffled the handful of steps to his desk.

  With a turn and a plonk a corked pitcher was deposited on the low table before Justin. Expecting some brilliant innovation, he leaned toward it. A light touch confirmed the pitcher was normal if high grade glass and unmistakably room temperature.

  “A week?”

  Cyrus nodded happily.

  “How?”

  With a spindly hand the healer drew something small from his robe sleeve.

  A wadded bundle of twine, jagged with beeswax teeth, landed in his lap. A glance confirmed the twine had been the pull string that had probably been embedded in – and had broken the wax seal around – the milk pitcher’s cork. The ends of the twine had been braided into a complicated knot.

  “A yarn charm?” he half-laughed.

  The healer nodded humorlessly.

  “Oh, surely not, Cyrus. There’s nothing arcane about them, unless you count their magical ability to keep children busy for bells. If you’d wanted to get into decorating, I’d have suggested flower arrangement. Or are you going to tell me that keeps milk from curdling as well?”

  The silence between them stretched.

  “It doesn’t, does it?” he queried, suddenly uncertain.

  “Come with me,” Cyrus commanded at length, gathering his staff of office from by the door.

  Letting the rope seal dangle from his fingers, he followed, across the hall and through the doors to the old priest’s private laboratory.

  The great room looked like nothing so much as the manse of a slightly deranged cartographer. Except that none of the many scrolls, maps and diagrams littering the tables, tacked to the walls – and in some cases, the floor – displayed any recognizable landmass or star chart. Undecipherable math, nonsensical symbols and confused line-drawings crowded every available bit of parchment. One wall was entirely given over to a mad construction of Temple-made beakers and flasks suspended in cast iron frameworks, their multicolored contents inert and the burners beneath cold.

  Justin raked his eyes over the quiet chaos.

  �
�Where are your assistants?” he wondered aloud. “And why does it smell of cheese in here?”

  “Those lickspittles the Assembly set to spy on me? I gave them the week off. Didn’t want them to see this…”

  “See what?”

  “It started a couple of months ago,” Cyrus shuffled through the chaos, not about to be rushed. “I ran into Father Obeiam. D’you know him?”

  “I haven’t had the pleasure.”

  “Precious few have. The man rarely comes above ground. We only met because I was in the Lower Library, doing research. He was there because he had nothing better to do…”

  Cyrus’s pause seemed to beg a response.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “As was he. You see, Father Obeiam spends most of his day, every day, charging glow globes.”

  “That sounds dreadfully dull.”

  “I imagine it is, which is the attraction it holds for him, I’m sure. After some tedious conversation, he confessed that his quota of glow globes had gone and charged themselves. Overnight.”

  His jaded eye glanced off Cyrus’s back.

  “And did your friend also blame fairytale creatures for this misfortune?”

  Cyrus halted them, turning at bay before a high cabinet.

  He weathered his friend’s scowl in good humor.

  “These,” Cyrus pronounced, swinging the cabinet’s doors open, “charged themselves a week ago.”

  The cabinet contained row upon row of glow globes. The majority were fluorescent, though there was a patchwork of others that were faded or flat.

  “Father Obeiam,” Cyrus continued into the silence, “keeps meticulous records. Endless, endless records,” the healer weezed with remembered tedium. “He only takes days off when there isn’t enough work and there’s only ever not enough work when the globes charge themselves. With reference to his records, I was able to predict when the next… event would occur.”

  Cyrus indicated the lit cabinet with a measure of aplomb.

  Justin regarded the healer skeptically.

  “How do your yarn charms tie into this?”

  “Aha!” Cyrus waved a finger. “Glow globes are old magic. The kojo’vitrum follow centuries old instructions most of them can no longer read. So I thought, what better control group for my experiment,” the healer snatched up a nearby tome, “than something equally ancient?”

  The manual was battered and threadbare, its pages veined yellow with age and crumbling. He held up the wax laden seal to the faded illustration in the book Cyrus brandished. They mirrored each other.

  “And you think whatever did that,” he inclined his head toward the luminous cabinet, “is also responsible for this?” he shook the snarled seal.

  Cyrus turned from him to whip the concealing sheet off a nearby table, revealing a covey of identically sealed jars.

  “Behold my subsequent efforts.” Some of them had a decidedly green tinge. “These,” Cyrus waved, “are all inert. This one,” the old priest pointed proudly to an immaculate jar, “was sealed on the eve of the event. And these,” Cyrus indicated the two greening monstrosities flanking it, “were the evenings before and after.”

  He was having trouble taking his eyes off the pristine specimen.

  “I tried to show you,” Cyrus added reproachfully, “but I couldn’t find you.”

  A week ago he’d been standing over a comatose Marco in a dark alley.

  “May I?”

  “Go ahead.”

  He hefted the jar in question. It was not especially chill to the touch. He tilted it and the milk inside sloshed merrily instead of attacking the glass. Cyrus gave him an encouraging nod. So, taking a deep breath, he woke his streaming…

  And almost dropped the jar.

  “This is…” he breathed.

  Cyrus nodded in silent agreement.

  The merest lick of power was trapped in the rope seal but from it grew a gossamer skein of magic that wrapped the jar like a silkworm’s web.

  “So I thought to myself,” Cyrus drawled, relishing his stunned silence, “if glow globes can be charged by this event, reversely, couldn’t streaming mimic this preservation charm?”

  That snapped his head up. Cyrus grinned villainously at him… and stepped aside to reveal many more jars, identical to the one he held.

  “You did it?” he breathed.

  “With a little experimentation,” Cyrus speculated modestly, “I’m betting I can find a way to dispense with the string. Use the vessel itself as the focus.”

  He looked again at the jar he held. The string was retaining energy like a… like a crystal! It was nowhere near as efficient, off course. The breath of power it held was probably its upper capacity and it seeped terribly. But it more than made up for that in function. He doubted such a feat of preservation was possible by any other known method.

  This was immense. It was unprecedented. It was–

  Dangerous.

  “Cyrus. This phenomenon. Have you any idea what it is?”

  “Not the foggiest,” the healer admitted. “But it seems to be some sort of naturally occurring magical surge in the ether.”

  He considered this.

  “I haven’t experienced any variations in the potency of my streaming.”

  “You wouldn’t. Streaming is internal, your own power. Whatever this is, its source is external.”

  This was skirting the border of heresy…

  “And that source?”

  Cyrus shrugged.

  “You have a theory?” he pressed.

  “Of course,” Cyrus scoffed, defensive at his need to ask.

  “Then let’s have it.”

  “You want the long version or the short one?”

  “Short.”

  “Alright.” The old man threw his arms wide, sweeping his robes dramatically. “Magic,” he proclaimed, “is returning.”

  He stared at his friend, digesting that.

  “I was not aware it had gone anywhere.”

  “Of course you were,” Cyrus gestured angrily. “Everyone is. Although no one likes to think about it. The bridge at Orkto Ganalwi. The Lldar canyon caves. The Rasrin channel. Even our own Lilly Tower. Magic-made edifices on a scope to beggar comprehension. Even with every streamer in the Empire working in unison, we could never hope to duplicate such works. And these are just the examples we can touch and see. Don’t forget feats by legendary figures like Morna Falluska who raised an island from the ocean. Or Hitchi kwali-Amata who supposedly sunk one. If only a tenth of these tales are a tenth part true, magic used to be a force in the world to rival the heavens.”

  “So what happened to it?” he queried. “Did we use it up? Did we break it? Did we lose it?” He fixed his friend with a warning gaze. “Did it get taken away because we weren’t careful enough with it?”

  Cyrus shrugged unconcernedly. “Perhaps it went into hibernation – who knows? All I can say for certain, is some kind of magical resurgence is in the offing. I don’t know how, or why or even how widespread it is. It might be a completely natural occurrence, like the tides. Certainly it flows and ebbs. And it’s getting stronger. Obeiam’s schedule confirms the events are following more and more closely on each other’s heels. They’re weeks, if not months, in between still – but speeding.”

  His friend moved to grip him by the shoulders, more animated than he’d seen the healer in years.

  “Our world is waking,” Cyrus enthused. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

  He wasn’t certain it was.

  “As long as no one tries to sink us beneath the ocean.”

  He saw the curtains of cynicism return to occlude his friends gaze, adding years back to the briefly transformed visage. “Perhaps it would be best,” he proposed guiltily, “if your discovery remained between us for the time being?”

  “Hmm,” Cyrus grunted assent, the customary scowl taking up residence on the wrinkled forehead. “I hadn’t planned on telling anyone. The last thing we need is the general populace experiment
ing with wild magic.”

  He had a sudden, horrible, image of an Empire returned to the barbarism of public witch burnings.

  Deep in thought, Cyrus wandered toward his workbench. “In any event,” the old priest said over his shoulder, “I’ve cheered you enough for one day. You can let yourself out.”

  Speechless, he simply stood for a moment before the smile overtook him. In his own way, Cyrus had tried to cheer him – by gifting him an even bigger worry to detract from his current worry. His thoughts turning back to Marco as he turned towards the door, he wondered whether it was up to the task.

  * * *

  Inquisitor Torvan Mattanuy made his way along the airy corridor. In the past the Inquisition had had their headquarters down in the basement levels of the Temple, among the dank and the dark and the guttering candles. Like one of the vaunted Purlian criminal houses.

  Ridiculous.

  The move to these first floor apartments had represented a welcome break with their antiquated reputation as coldly merciless and outrageously suspicious torturers. Of course, they were still coldly merciless as well as outrageously suspicious. But they hadn’t had anyone to torture in generations. People learned. And of course, he’d had some of the decommissioned torture devices discreetly polished up and safely put away. As nothing more than keepsakes of course. Yet the thought that they were there, that they existed, kept him warm at night.

  Junior inquisitors all but stood to attention as he passed, cringing if his eyes inadvertently brushed across them. It was more respect than they would show High Inquisitor Crosius if the old relic were to pass by, which happened with growing infrequency. Mattanuy barely noticed. He was too absorbed in the details of his new case.

  As a young man in the ranks of the Inquisitori he had found himself addicted to the thrill of the chase, the sardonic joy of tying together a seemingly random series of events just so and the quiet satisfaction of seeing those he tangled in their own strings hang. His discovery in himself of a shrewd political creature brewing in a pool of depthless ambition had changed his craving for that thrill not one whit. It had merely… given his craving direction.