Hearts of Tabat

by Cat Rambo

  The boy had haunted him, in fact. More than once, he’d thought he’d seen his face on a street urchin’s as they ducked away.

  “This will take much more than a salve and even then, I am not sure that I can actually cure it, only that I can keep it from growing much worse,” the Doctor said.

  Sebastiano blinked at him, astonished. “It is simply a scratch.”.

  The Doctor shook his head somberly. “No,” he said. “There is more to it than that. Magic is at odds with the forces of our bodies. That is how we know that the Gods have given us dominion over the Beasts, that they are made of dangerous energies that we must tame or quench.”

  His narrow face was solemn, and Sebastiano felt the mean urge to tease that the humorless usually provoked in him, and tried his best to fight it down. The Doctor was a colleague, after all, who had agreed to see him from professional courtesy, not from any need for the payment that the College of Mages would vouchsafe him on Sebastiano’s behalf. But still … a scratch like this, how can it be as dire a picture as he is painting, no matter how it hurts? he wondered.

  He said, trying to sound attentive, “What course of action do you prescribe then?”

  The Doctor’s eyes rested on Sebastiano as though guessing every moment of his thoughts. But all the thin lips said were, “You must strengthen the body. My theory is that there is a wrongness about the collision of flesh and magic, and that the wrongness grows till it overtakes the body. But for it to do so, it must reach a certain critical point—which might be a few months or even a few years down the road—and there will be a physical lapse as your system throws its all into that terrible struggle.”

  Sebastiano nodded encouragingly.

  The Doctor said nothing more.

  They stared at each other until finally the silence stung Sebastiano to speech. “And?”

  “And what? I have said all that is necessary. Nurse your health and wait for the crisis.”

  “You are a poor physician, not to take advantage and try to sell me philters and charms,” Sebastiano joked, but the jest fell flat in the face of that solemn pastel gaze.

  “I am sure you do not mean to suggest I am a poor physician,” the man said in a tone utterly at odds with his words. Defeated, Sebastiano signed his name to the orange chit the man thrust at him to show that he had been there, and that the College should pay his bill.

  Leaving, he passed through a stone-walled corridor, past a glass case in which the Doctor had mounted numerous curiosities. Entering, Sebastiano had yearned to stop but had been unable to. Now, he stopped and took advantage of his unattended state to look his fill.

  His stare moved from shelf to shelf, noting fossils, a stuffed Fairy, a double-lobed shell, a skull seemingly sunk into sandstone, jars of two-headed, multi-limbed infants, the sorts of curiosities a traveler into wilderness might collect. Indeed, when he hailed a passing servant and asked after the origin of the curiosities, the woman confirmed this theory.

  “His grand mam was one on the expedition they called Courage,” she said. “See those golden feathers? They say there was a whole lake full of them. And they’re gold, real gold, he told me.”

  Sebastiano grunted affirmation, intrigued by the label on the mummified Fairy. The handwriting was old-fashioned and ornate, difficult to decipher but he’d never seen one quite like it, although there were similarities of face and talon to the ones Milosh had shown him. “Very dangerous,” he deciphered, and wondered what the recording Scholar had meant. He made a mental note to look at the accounts of the expedition if he could find them, then put the thought away again. There was enough to do right now without chasing clouds.

  CHAPTER 27

  N o one spoke to Obedience in the few hours before Apothecary Dockis came, trailed by his apprentice. He was a big red geranium of a man, with a florid complexion and an apron as bright as the flowers Mamma had grown each Summer.

  Which sat in white-topped frosted pots now, cut back and waiting for the Spring Bella Kanto had denied them all.

  “I’ve done well by ya,” he was saying. “Your brother asked me to, and he can renegotiate it all when he gets back this evening, but I’m thinking, he’ll be pleased enough to leave you in the fine spot I’ve found.”

  Obedience listened with growing interest, despite the pain in her ribs and arms and face and back and legs. He’d renegotiated some of the others as well. Grace would board at the Tailor’s now and help tend the Tailor’s children. Honesty would be working now as a runner for the trading halls down at the docks.

  Envy seethed in her. Why did Honesty merit such a fine profession? Obedience would have been better at it. She was smarter and would have the streets memorized in half the time that Honesty would take.

  That woman Eloquence had brought—Adelina—surely she could find her an apprenticeship at the Press? That would be easy work, surely, and Adelina would be kind to her and buy her pastries, all for herself.

  Absolution and Mercy’s names hazed by as she was thinking this, wondering whether or not she dared speak up. Wisdom would be working at the School of Theater (another injustice!).

  Dockis frowned at her.

  “Looks like you’ve been fighting, gel,” he said. “Are you the troublesome sort who stirs up fights?”

  Indignation seized Obedience and she darted a look at Honesty. But before she could make any retort, Perseverance was speaking.

  “Sometimes she plays in the street and the sport is rough there,” she said. “What position have you found our youngest sister?”

  “The tannery,” he said.

  Shock thumped at Obedience, rendering her speechless. The tannery? The stench outside its entrance would knock you flat; what would it be like inside? Almost as bad as tending one of the underground farms amid the fungus and night soil. If Eloquence were here, she could appeal to him, but all she could do now was look to Perseverance.

  “A good and steady employment that will keep her from the streets,” Perseverance said.

  Compassion had a steely grip on Obedience’s arm, just above another ring of bruises. “When does she start?” she asked. Her fingers quivered, promising more kicks and spittle in the offing.

  “Tomorrow will be soon enough,” Dockis said. “Enjoy yourselves this pleasant evening.”

  Eloquence entered on his heels; they heard him hail Dockis before he came in. He was smiling, a smile that dropped away at their faces.

  “Enough!” he said, holding up a hand. “I will not have this evening spoiled with anyone’s wailing and whining. I don’t expect to hear anything else till the morning!”

  And he was gone up the stairs with a suddenness that shocked Obedience. He was gone, and with him, all recourse.

  CHAPTER 28

  Every student wanted to get down into the furnaces. Sebastiano didn’t understand the draw, but then again they hadn’t been in existence at the time he’d been a student. He tried to remember what had been popular with them. Perhaps something with the Fairy hive and the Spring Festival, but was that really something very daring? His group had been much less adventurous, he decided cheerfully, and there was nothing wrong with that.

  And now here he was taking a student for an outing there.

  He glanced sideways at his companion.

  He didn’t even like Maz. The boy was prickly and defensive, quick to take offense, sometimes sly in a particularly infuriating way, thinking himself subtle when he was as transparent as Spring ice. He’d acted as though the furnaces held no particular interest for him, but Sebastiano knew better. Anyone possessed of magic skill could not help but be drawn to those great engines.

  “They run on Dryad logs?” The boy’s eyes were wide again, but was it wonder this time?

  “The principle was discovered some years ago here at the College,” Sebastiano said. “The Duke has taken full advantage of the technology.”

  The boy stood stock still, looking over the room: the rounded iron balls of the furnaces, the lengths of log being fed in
to each one, the silvery steam that came from the chimneys, captured in a network of wide-mouthed glass bells feeding pipes that led in a bewildering number of directions. It was very warm here, and the air smelled faintly of cinnamon; this complex adjoined the cave network where workers grew Ellora’s fruit.

  “How many logs does it burn each year?” he demanded. “It must be thousands!”

  “Close to that, aye,” Sebastiano confirmed.

  “This space … it must have taken years to build.”

  “It was here already. A natural cave system, vast in its scope, stretching down into the rock beneath the city.”

  “It goes deeper?”

  “No one knows how far down the tunnels stretch.”

  “Surely someone has tried to map them.” Maz poked at a heap of logs as they passed.

  “Careful,” Sebastiano said. “No, there have been expeditions, but they all failed. The caves are dangerous, inhabited by even more dangerous creatures.”

  “Why have the Dukes let them remain?”

  “I suspect they have resigned themselves to it. Tabat sticks to the upper levels.”

  Still, between the sewers, the mushroom farms, the furnaces, and endlessly tunneling rats, Sebastiano thought, it was possible Tabat would someday sink into the cliffs that housed it, sinking down, down, down like a knife through cheese.

  There were rumors of another city down there, and cavern systems that should have been, so close to the ocean, filled with seawater and yet were not. Measureless caverns. Every few years the College of Mages sent a small expedition down there, ostensibly in the name of exploration, but in truth bound there in search of artifacts, ancient magic from older days that could be used or at least deconstructed for other uses. Artifacts were distilled magic, a process that only a few magicians understood.

  He looked at Maz, staring around himself, the boy’s expression unreadable as any artifact.

  HE TOOK the basket back to the Silvercloth estate, hoping that Tiggy would offer him more food in return. Instead, she pointed him towards his mother’s sitting room.

  He found his mother and father there. Thinking to keep Corrado from asking the inevitable, he said, over the insistent yelps of the dragonfozes, “When did you take the carpeting up in here?”

  “It’s nice, isn’t it?” Letha said. “Once again your father and I butted heads and I emerged both victor and correct. This is much easier to clean.”

  Corrado snorted. “Not the first time, and certainly not the last. She’s been contradicting me since we first drew up our contract.”

  “Why did you pick Mother?” Sebastiano said, fascinated. There had to have been something other than love, some economic motive.

  Corrado’s shaggy beetles bristled as he peered over his eyeglasses at Sebastiano.

  “You don’t think it was love at first sight, eh?” He chuckled, sliding back in his seat. “But it was.” He picked up his drink and sipped on it, eyes fixed on the mid-distance, the arrogant lines of his face softening for a moment. “But it was.” A smile lingered in the words, flirted with his lips before deciding to abandon it and remain there in tone alone. “It most certainly was.”

  “You met at a trading post,” Sebastiano supplied. “It didn’t have anything to do with the goods she brought?”

  “Cynic! But,” Corrado admitted, “they were very good furs. And some dried mushrooms, the kind they used in anbobar sauce, which no one had invented yet at that stage, and some cloth she’d woven, which was terribly bad. I don’t know what she was thinking, bringing that along.”

  “I brought it with me,” Letha said, “as a test for any men that started sniffing around, because by then I’d had my fill of such. Any that made fun of my efforts was out on his ear. Life is too short to battle with your own teammate, and while I don’t know that I was ready to settle down at that point …”

  She broke off and gave Corrado a look that implied some private joke was being referenced, but he refused to meet her eye in an embarassed way that made Sebastiano even more embarrassed by it all.

  “Well,” Corrado said stiffly. “In any case, I wanted to talk to her because she made me laugh, the way she was describing her own goods, and telling of all the trouble she’d had on the trip there, wolves and outlaws and Mandrakes and Moons know what all else.”

  “Every word of it was true,” Letha said, and winked at her son. He laughed.

  “But she sat there neat as you please, with the firelight gleaming in her eyes, and I knew she was the only one for me,” Corrado said. “It came on me sudden as a ghost.

  “Mind you,” he added with a glare for his son, “if you haven’t found someone like that, you still can contract an alliance, as most folks do, with a mind to trade. That’s by far the more sensible option.”

  Sebastiano fought desperately to keep from rolling his eyes, then abandoned the battle and let them fly.

  “You ask me to go find someone like that, regardless of whether or not I am drawn to them, but then tell me a story like that!” he said to his father. “What am I to do with it?”

  “This is what you are to do with it,” Corrado snapped. “You are to understand that because you have not been looking, you have not found anyone. I did not know that I would find a bride on that trip, but I had been looking for years before I found her.” He crossed his arms.

  Sebastiano eyed his father. “Are you truly saying that if I go looking, I will find true love? What sort of sappy notion is that?”

  “What sort of sappy notion is it that you require it?” Corrado shouted. “Dammit all, Sebastiano, do you truly not see that we are on the same ledger page here?”

  Sebastiano started to answer but then, at a look from Letha, cast back through what his father had said, and found that his father was correct.

  He pulled himself upright further, taking on additional dignity, before he said, “Very well.”

  “Very well?” Corrado pursued, pushing himself forward at Sebastiano.

  “Very well,” Sebastiano said, and was startled to find himself sounding like a sulky child and equally startled to notice his mother’s enjoyment of his realization. “I will go look harder.”

  “You do not have to confine it to my list, you know,” Corrado said. “Those are the very best candidates in my eyes, but who should know better than I that taste differs from one man to another?” He gave Letha a fond look, then reached out to take her hand. “All those foolish Northern men who did not realize what a gem they had in their midst! And I the lucky traveler who chanced upon it.”

  “I was not some bauble to be picked up,” Letha said. “No one is, Sebastiano, bear that in mind. Just because you set your heart on someone, it does not mean that they are obliged to set their heart on you. Sometimes to believe in true love is simply to create heartache.”

  Corrado looked hurt at her words, and she smiled, letting herself be pulled to him in order to lay a kiss on his lips.

  Sometimes to believe in true love is to create heartache, she says, Sebastiano thought, but then shows me what I should not dream of.

  CHAPTER 29

  F rost still prevented the apricots from blooming at the Snowfield estate. In lieu of the flowers, pink paper blossoms were wired onto each tree in unnatural profusion.

  Adelina glanced around at the nobility and Merchants represented here. Plenty in attendance trying to achieve influence, through any number of social machinations.

  Was that Sebastiano Silvercloth? Emiliana had mentioned him as part of the briefing over dinner. She wanted Adelina to find out what the plans for the Order of the Rune Party were, and had mentioned how well Sebastiano and she had gotten along in childhood days.

  So many of her peers from those days were here and looking a little jowlier, a little saggier, a little more defeated by the world. Unlike Bella, she was aging with them, and it made her think for a moment—would her younger self have ever believed that she would come to a spot where she would be running an actual publishing house,
let alone a highly successful one?

  That, despite how badly she’d fit in with her fellows, who were so concerned with appearances and the language of clothing and adornment. Merchants paid as great attention to it as the nobility, because it was what let you fit in among them, even though you would never actually be one, but more than that—and this was why the Merchants didn’t mind the sidelong smiles or occasional bit of patronizing advice about the cut of one’s dress or boots—it was a matter of profit and convincing the nobility to part with the coins they so begrudgingly spent.

  Was it here—she remembered a moment when a fellow Merchant, a boy perhaps a year younger than her at thirteen—Sebastiano, in fact, I remember that now.

  Him drawling in a tone that still burned in her ears, “May the Gods not send you the floods you so clearly fear,” while eying her hemline with a smirk.

  She hadn’t known it wasn’t the right length because she hadn’t been aware that she’d undergone another growth spurt, and she’d slipped out of the house to get to the birthday party, leaving her chaperone, her nurse, to catch up with her.

  Even though she didn’t remember all the details, she remembered that, and ever since then she’d been more particular in her clothing, sometimes to the point of changing outfits several times, despite the lateness that the habit caused sometimes.

  What hurt worst was that she had liked him well enough before then. As Emiliana had mentioned, they had played together, all sorts of games of Merchants and Explorers and Scholars. To have him exercise his vaunted wit on her, that had been a betrayal.

  Is that all we are, compositions of slights and injuries that lead us to do what we do? But Bella is made of joys as well, surely …

  “You are lost to us again,” Leonoa chided, and Adelina found herself blinking awake.