“ ’Cause I wasn’t having a tantrum and scaring them. That’s not fair, is it, Daddy? I didn’t have a tantrum the last two years.”
“True, but you did fly the plates and cookies around, and you spilled tea on the carpet from a cup floating through the air. We know you were trying to help, but they don’t understand it.”
“Oh.”
“So what did you tell him?” Beth asked.
“I said we were all getting better.”
Christmas night, Beth and I took turns saying good-night to the kids. While she was in with Tim, I sat on the edge of Lisa’s bed, patting Singer, who, when he wasn’t talking, did a passable imitation of a kitten.
Lisa’s art supplies covered a desk she had made larger to accommodate them. Some of the brushes stood upright in a jar of water, and some colors sat in three-dee oodles on the palette: red, blue, white, purple. She’d started painting on one of the canvases, outlined and half colored in a shape that might be a cat.
“You never told me what your elf gift was,” Lisa said. “Did he give you magic, Daddy?”
“Yeah. Mine’s different from Tim’s and your mom’s—it doesn’t work all the time—but it’s pretty good.”
She sighed and snuggled deeper under her covers, her smile wide. “Now everybody has magic I can see in the daytime. This is the best Christmas.”
I kissed her cheek.
We locked the door and I got out my tin. I ate a candy. I needed to be an elf for what I had to tell Beth.
“I learned something else while I was working on this today. We both come from magical families, Beth. Your great-grandmother was a healer.”
“Sure, Granny Nightshade. She died when I was ten. How could you know about her?”
“I asked the right questions.” I placed my hands on her shoulders, closed my eyes, and looked inside her for the hidden spring of her lineage. Barely a trickle, but there. I primed it with some of the magic I could draw in this form, strengthened it. “Do you feel that?”
“What? Oh. Yes.” She stroked a hand down her front. “What is it, Will?”
“It’s your power. I have some, too, but I can’t get to it unless I’m in this form. Lisa got her magic from us.”
She placed a palm on my chest. I felt a flow of warmth there that didn’t come from me. “Will?” she said, fear and wonder in ther voice. “Will?”
This didn’t feel like Lisa’s shifter power, a rain of pins and needles directed toward whatever part of me Lisa wanted to shift. It was more like a warm bath, being enveloped in pleasure. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, I had returned to my large self, the person Beth had married. She stared down at her open palm, then up at me. “Oh, Will,” she said, and hugged me.
THE TRADE
Fiona Patton
Fiona Patton lives in rural Ontario, Canada with her partner, a fierce farm Chihuahua, and inum erable cats. She has five novels out with DAW Books: The Stone Prince, The Painter Knight, The Granite Shield, The Golden Sword, and The Silver Lake. She has twenty odd short stories published in various DAW/Tekno anthologies including Sirius the Dog Star, Assassin Fantastic , and Apprentice Fantastic.
THE CITY OF Cerchicava had been struck by the plague. The oppressive summer heat, hanging over the streets like a pall, kept the purifying air from the Ardechi River from reaching the sick and spread the disease like wild-fire. All those who could, had fled, leaving the poor and the infirm to die by the hundreds. While the gravediggers and the ragged priests who served the city’s most desperate citizens struggled to bring the sickness under control, the nobility and their servants spent a peaceful, isolated summer amidst the sweeping trees and cool river banks of the surrounding countryside.
In the ornate glass conservatory of his family’s summer palazzo, three-year old Montifero de Sepori sat on his nurse’s lap, turning the pages of a large picture book while she read the story aloud to him.
“And the man asked, what is the greatest power in the world?”
She glanced down, an indulgent smile on her face.
“And what do you think the answer is, young master?”
Running one finger along the next word, Montifero sounded out each letter carefully.
“Faith?” he asked.
His nurse beamed down at him. “Yes, that’s very good. Your lady mother will be so proud of you. Yes, faith will sustain you when all else fails. Faith in the Church and in its priests,” she said fingering the Church made charm around her neck reverently. “Their magics can work miracles.”
Later, that afternoon, however, as they passed the open doorway of the crofter’s cottage they’d often brought gifts of food and clothing to, his nurse drew him away fearfully. In the parlor he could see the body of a tiny baby laying in its cradle, still and silent, while its mother sat beside it, weeping inconsonantly.
“The child is dead, young master,” his nurse said in a hushed, frightened voice. “It’s not safe. Come away and leave the family to their grief.”
He looked up at her, his dark, intense eyes confused. “But can’t the priests use their magics to bring it back to life?” he asked.
Horrified, his nurse bundled him back to the palazzo at once. His mother sent for the family priest who stared reprovingly down at the boy from beneath his thick, graying brows.
“Death is final, Montifero,” he said sternly. “And it’s heresy, sacrilege, to tamper with a dead body, magically or otherwise. Anyone who visits spellcraft upon the dead is dammed for all time. Remember that.”
Later, his father’s footman had explained it better.
“Only the Death Mages work spellcraft on the dead, young master,” he said as he polished Montifero’s new riding boots. “They work terrible necromantic magics that attack the living. They call it the Trade.” He leaned forward conspiratorially. “And they’re everywhere. They come and go like ghosts in the night. They can snatch a corpse before the priests have a chance to even begin the purification rituals or break into a poorly protected crypt to do their evil work, and then vanish again like smoke.”
A week later, the footman brought word of plague in the local village.
“Your lady mother is very ill, young master. You cannot see her today. Come and play with your hobby-horse like a good boy.”
Montifero had tried to tell them that he had to see her, that he needed to tell her that faith would sustain her and protect her, but his words, like his screams of rage, went unheeded. Later, when the house had grown quiet and his nurse slumbered in the hot stifling air of his nursery, he’d crept away, down the wide, richly carpeted stairway to his mother’s apartments. Pushing the white and gold-painted door of her bedchamber open, he’d slipped inside.
The room was shadowy and dark with the curtains drawn, and it smelled of incense, magic, and sickness. A figure, his mother, lay stretched out on the silken sheets of her bed, dressed in her finest linens, her palms laid across her bosom. Her face, although peaceful in expression, was covered in red, pus-filled sores, already gone sunken and black.
Montifero stood guard over her body until the priests came to take her to the family crypt, and even then, it took the strength of three footmen to drag him away, screaming in fear, that the Death Mages would steal her body.
“The Death Mages are everywhere.”
His father returned from the fighting against neighboring Pisario as soon as he received the news of his wife’s death. He took young Montifero to visit her tomb but, as the summer passed into autumn, he saw less and less of him. Consumed by grief, Lord Ramiro de Sepori’s health began to fail.
“Oh my sweet boy, what is to become of us now? What is to become of you?”
This time his nurse and the other servants had been too distraught to stop him. Across the wide hallway from his mother’s apartments, the dark, paneled door stood slightly ajar, inviting him inside.
The figure, his father, lay on his own bed, his arms flung out, the blood and sweat-stained sheets in disarray beneath him. The smell of di
sease was strong, much stronger than the masking scent of incense and failed magics, a biting, acrid odor that scratched at the back of his throat. Montifero stared at the body suspiciously.
His nurse had told him that his father was a soldier, a general, a man the duc of their city relied on to keep them safe from all their enemies; an undefeatable giant and a pious lay member of the Church. But the man in the bed was no undefeatable giant; the man in the bed had been defeated by plague; defeated by death. Faith had no more sustained him than it had Montifero’s mother.
Turning away, the boy returned to his nursery.
“What is the greatest power in the world, Piero?”
Seated in the large glass conservatory of the Palazzo de Sulla in Cerchicava, seven-year-old Montifero, ward of his uncle, the great General Matteo de Sulla, glanced over at the retainer charged with his education.
“What do you think it is, young master?” Piero replied.
The boy stared out the window at the great spire of the San Dante Cathedral just visible above the line of cyprus trees that marked the borders of his uncle’s home.
“Death,” he said simply.
Giving him a shrewd glance, Piero nodded. “And so the man who can harness the power of death is . . . ?”
“The most powerful man in the world.”
“Yes.”
After a long moment, Montifero turned his darkly, intense gaze on Piero’s face. “I want to be the most powerful man in the world,” he stated.
The retainer nodded. “And you shall be, young master.”
And so at the age of seven, Montifero de Sepori accepted the binding spells of Piero Bruni, one of Cerchicava’s most talented Death Mages, and entered into the study of the Trade.
“The most powerful components are those collected from corpses no more than a few moments dead, and they include in descending order: organs, muscle, skin, bones, fluids, and hair. They may be stored for up to one year but every moment they spend in preserving solution leaches their potency away. The best storage is always the mark’s living body.”
Another hot and stifling summer had descended on the city. Seated on a high stool before a corpse laid out on a spotlessly clean worktable in a warehouse in Vericcio—one of Cerchicava’s most destitute housing districts—ten-year-old Montifero removed an example of each component, sealing them into individual ceramic urns before glancing up at Piero, his intense eyes ringed with the red glow of a death spell.
“What about the earth from a freshly dug grave?” he asked. “It’s on the Church’s list of proscribed items.”
Piero snorted in disgust. “Earth, young master, is not flesh. It’s used by amateurs and charlatans and is not to be bothered with by serious practitioners of the Trade.”
“Then why does the Church believe it otherwise?”
“Because amateurs and charlatans are generally the only ones the Church is able to catch. The most powerful Death Mages act behind the protective screen of the nobility and their subordinates carry binding spells so strong, they can restrict the breathing passages at the first hint of betrayal. The less powerful hide themselves in Vericcio and Bergo where the Church rarely bothers to go.
“But we’re not invulnerable, young master,” he continued. “The priests are powerful mages in their own right and they have powerful identify and locate spells. The best deflecting wards include hair and skin boiled in urine, then thrown on a fire. Urine collected from a corpse related to the enemy priest is best, but liquid mediums do not have to be necromantic components; any urine will do. Except your own, young master. Never use anything of your own in any spell-casting. It will lead the priests and their Order of the Holy Scourge right to you. And then you’ll hang, be you nobleman or pauper.”
“The touch of a dead man’s hand will not cure goiter as some believe, however, the fingernails from a dead man’s hand will locate the last piece of precious metal he ever touched; a much more useful bit of spellcraft, when even a second-rate physician can cure goiter.”
In the enshrouding darkness of Debassino’s Heretic’s Cemetery, eleven-year-old Montifero listened with half an ear to the lesson as he watched two of Piero’s markers carry a shrouded corpse from a crumbling mausoleum.
“And if the dead man was a Bergo thief cut down off a gibbet and tossed into an unprotected crypt?” he asked, pulling his scalpel and moving swiftly forward, “how useful a spell can that be?”
“If that thief was hanged because he robbed a richly furnished palazzo in the Carmina District, a very useful spell indeed, young master,” Piero answered. “Gold buys more than fine clothing and beautiful homes, it buys loyalty and it buys silence. In the most extreme cases it can even buy access or egress from prison.”
Slicing open the shroud to reveal one, blacked hand, Montifero nodded his understanding before removing each fingernail, one by one.
“And so a potion of lemon, honey and cinnamon will not only soothe the throat but, when used in concert with a mirror and a silver key, can predict the most advantage time to engage in . . . well to produce an heir. The silver in the mirror and key promotes the banishment of all save the magical intent. Do you see, young master?”
Thirteen-year-old Montifero indicated his understanding of his herbal master’s words with a wave of one hand. Everything a young nobleman of Cerchicava needed to take his place among the rich and powerful members of his class had been made available to him in the glittering halls and richly paneled studies of the Palazzo de Sulla; dancing, swordscraft, riding, magery, theology, trade, and politics.
Everything he needed to take his place among the rich and powerful members of the Trade had also been made available to him in the stinking alleyways and silent, shadow-draped cemeteries of Vericcio and Bergo: marking, collecting, creating and unleashing offensive spellcraft, and the tactics and politics of avoiding detection.
The individual lessons often had just enough similarity to be amusing.
His dancing master on the art of the waltz: “You hold your partner lightly but firmly with your hand in the small of her back, young master, then as the music directs you, you turn fluidly, guiding her steps to flow in tandem with your own.”
Piero on the art of collection: “You hold the scalpel lightly but firmly, young master, cutting with just enough force to part the skin but not so deeply as it pierces the desired component beneath. Then reaching in with the left hand, position the organ like so and slice it cleanly through.”
Other lessons had just enough difference to color that amusement with practicality.
His uncle’s swords master on combat tactics: “Slash to kill the enemy.”
Piero’s marker on setting a mark for a collection: “Thrust to kill the mark.” And sometimes there was no similarity at all.
“Or you could just bash his brains in. Whichever works best,” the huge marker added, holding up a heavy jack.
“Make no mistake, the Holy Scourge—may they be blessed in their most sacred mission—will ferret out the defiling heresy of necromancy, no matter where it might be found. Cerchicava will soon be free of the Death Mages so that all its people may walk safely and freely without fear of damnation.”
Seated in his family’s pew in the San Dante Cathedral, fourteen-year-old Montifero listened intently to the Bishop Enrico Sebesti’s sermon. The Scourge had a zealous new Captain, Lord Romuald Croce, a fiery-tempered cousin to the Achivescovo himself. Under his leadership a dozen necromancers and their subordinates had been arrested in the past week. The shocking news that one such Death Mage had been Lord Guido Peruzzi, a high ranking member of the duc’s court, had rocked the nobility. Standing with a group of youths before morning services, Montifero had maintained a distant air while paying very close attention to the buzz of rumors and accusations that swirled around him.
“It’s said they found a secret workshop beneath his palazzo filled with the most vile accoutrements.”
“The house servants have all fled into Bergo and Vericcio of course.
Half of them must be necromancers themselves.”
“The Scourge should burn them all out.”
“I heard that the duc has expanded the powers of the Scourge and that Captain de Croce is looking for a dozen new novices to train in his holy crusade.”
“It’s true; my own son has been named lieutenant.”
“And they say there’s going to be a new tax to maintain the wards on the city’s paupers’ cemeteries to put a strangle hold on the supply of bodies to the Death Mages.”
“What? It’s all one can do to afford the wards on one’s own family crypt.”
“The Death Mages are everywhere.’’
Watching the Bishop gesticulate with every forcefully delivered denouncement of the Trade, Montifero considered the situation from each angle. He needed to know where the Scourge was holding Peruzzi and how much they had forced him to reveal and the only one who could tell him this was the Bishop Enrico Sebesti.
At the reception held afterwards in the cathedral’s expansive gardens he mingled casually with the rest of the richly garbed congregation, all the while keeping a sharp eye out for the Bishop’s distinctively brocaded church robe. He finally spotted him by the long, linen-draped buffet table, and after exchanging greetings with a young woman whose eyes glowed with the bright, anticipatory green popular among the city’s youth that season, he positioned himself beside the older man and helped himself to a thin slice of melon.
Behind him, he heard the expected guffaw.
“That miserable bit of nothing won’t hold you for an instant, lad.”
Montifero turned, a perfectly crafted expression of polite respect on his face.
“My Lord Bishop,” he said formally.
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