Hearts of Tabat

by Cat Rambo

He let his fingers uncurl, releasing the pent-up power, and the magic flowed outward in a crystalline glitter, fine as frost. The wave spread outward in a circle, and each plant it encountered was encased in ice, a sudden sculpture of Spring, rendered perfect in every detail.

  Sebastiano’s father was the only thing left untouched by the glittering frost. In a note of finesse that Sebastiano doubted his father noted or appreciated, he coated the wilted blossom the old man held squeezed between thumb and forefinger with a layer of delicate crystals.

  He laughed outright at his father’s face. Exaltation replaced the anger that had been singing through his veins. His father had never seen him work magic like this. From the still shock with which his father contemplated him, Sebastiano wondered if the old man had ever grasped the power that his son manipulated.

  Corrado Silvercloth was used to scoffing at the College of Mages, calling them tinkerers and puppeteers. He forgot that they wielded the forces that drove the Great Tram, the aetheric lights spreading out through the city, the throbbing heart-brains of the Peacekeepers, each holding a storm’s worth of lightning.

  For his masterwork, Sebastiano had delivered a salve that cured pox in basilisks. He had not bothered to send notice of it to his family, but his mother, who followed such news regularly, had sent him a letter of congratulation. In gratitude, he’d sent her a case of the tiny octagonal bottles, enough to cure a swarm of poxy basilisks.

  Corrado Silvercloth had never even asked him about it.

  His father’s eyes rolled whitely, looking left, right, left again. Sebastiano regretted not covering him in frost. It was not too late to do so. He started to twitch his fingers, but ceased when the old man sputtered, “Get out!”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Killed my flowers! Every last one of them! Unconscionable!”

  The pang Sebastiano felt at the sight of the tears in his father’s eyes was a match for his childhood guilt at branding him a monster. He’d hurt him unforgivably. Was this the sum of his life, the blows that he’d dealt his father? Would a child really heal those injuries?

  “Don’t send any bills my way again!” Corrado shouted. “Jewelry! The last straw. You’re cut off. You hear me? Cut off!”

  “I’ll do my best to oblige,” Sebastiano snapped back, recovering his anger enough to pull himself upright, rejoicing in the six inches of height plus an inch of boot heel advantage he held over his father.

  He stalked from the mansion, ignoring the regret tugging at his heels, pushing past Letha without speaking, ignoring her questions, and rushing out onto the sunlit street.

  AS HE STOOD WAITING in the meal house’s outer chamber, Sebastiano fidgeted with the chain around his neck. He rarely wore the Merchant’s golden chain that showed his affiliation to the Silvercloth House, but tonight he had deliberately donned its heavy weight, and chosen a waistcoat patterned with the rich stitchery of the Silvercloth trade. It had shown in the deference of the servants here, who clearly didn’t know Sebastiano wasn’t authorized to sign things to the Silvercloth ledgers any more.

  All to impress Adelina.

  Father may have cut me off, but I am still entitled to use the House’s pomp and pageantry, even if this meal takes the last of my money. Pretty birds shake their tail feathers enticingly for their mates and I am as pretty a bird as any that Adelina finds will come to her hand.

  In the distance, he heard the clocks strike one after another. He sighed. He’d almost hoped Adelina had grown out of the lateness that had marked her childhood, but then again, maybe he’d try to look on it as something endearing. As though evoked by this patient thought, he saw her across the room, looking about from the entrance.

  Catching sight of his wave, she made her way across the room in a flurry of skirts and papers, but did not explain her absence as she settled into her chair, smiling at him.

  Moments after her arrival, the waiter placed a roasted duck set in naked brazen glory atop a nest of gold-dusted noodles before them, fragrant with spicy steam, its wings poised as though ready to attempt flight.

  “Almost too pretty to cut,” Adelina said, but the waiter was dissecting the duck skillfully even as she spoke, filling a plate for each of them.

  Sebastiano sipped his wine, looking at her. She had dressed with care for this, he thought, as much care as he had. Her skirts were blue velvet embossed with seagulls, and she wore her House’s chain of rank around her neck. Opal bracelets, their style as delicate as her features, clinked on her wrists.

  “What poetry are we going to listen to?” she asked. “I didn’t know you liked poetry.”

  “I don’t know much about it,” he confessed. “I overheard some people talking about it and thought that it might appeal to you. Some woman called Melusine.”

  Adelina raised an eyebrow. “Melusine?”

  “Are you familiar with her poetry?”

  Her smile was faint and hard to read. “I have heard of her.”

  The neighborhood in which the reading took place was not the worst in Tabat, but it was close. Sebastiano was uncomfortably aware of the gold across his chest and the opals at Adelina’s earlobes. But there were several burly looking bouncers nearby—one nodded to Adelina as they passed—and richly dressed couples coming back and forth from the cab stand nearby, where two pedal cabs stood patiently waiting with an unhurried air that signaled well-tipping fares.

  They made their way down a stairway leading under an anonymous looking building—warehouse? office? and into a larger space. Most of the inner walls had been knocked out, leaving pillars of bricks that had been gilded, glass gems glued on them in irregular, snaky patterns, lines of emerald and sapphire, ruby and topaz. The floor was laid with wooden planks, worn with the gloss of years of use, and here and there gleaming silhouettes had been stenciled in gold on the floors, outlines of Dragons and Unicorns, Gryphons and Hippocampi.

  Sebastiano handed coins to the almond-eyed Sylph perched on a high oak stool beside the inner door. She nodded and hopped down to lead them to seats near the back of the room, close to the stage, barely larger than the small table at which they sat.

  Sebastiano glanced at the frieze of coupling Beasts that had been painted on the wall near them. “The conversation didn’t say anything about the place.” He was beginning to sense he had made some sort of tactical error. How to read Adelina’s silence? Was that a trace of amusement or irritation in her expression?

  “You are looking as though there is some joke to this,” he said, looking at her.

  “Melusine is one of the finest erotic poets of Tabat,” she said.

  His ears reddened. “Erotic poets? As in, what, she uses erotic imagery?”

  “As in she has one series, Between the Sheets, which is devoted to an intimate accounting of the love-making habits of six different partners, framed in such a way that it becomes evident, over the cross of the cycle, that she is fucking all of them at once.”

  He groaned. The economic caution with which Merchants approached alliances, and their innate dislike of bringing outsiders into the clan, made sex something formal and not to be discussed for at least a dozen rendezvous, during which the wooer was expected to display him or herself, to strut and preen and proclaim their financial as well as physical suitability.

  “This is unworthy of you,” he said. “I will beg your forgiveness, and we will go and do something more pleasant, like one of the goose-boats. We will paddle out into the darker waters and see the lights of the city, and it will be a pretty sight. Will you?” He held out his hand, half-standing, but she forestalled him.

  “Let us stay a little while longer and drink more of the wine your gold has bought us,” she said. “And I will stop teasing you about it. Erotic or not, Melusine is reckoned one of the finest poets of Tabat.”

  “Are you sure?” His heart soared. His mistake was redeemable.

  Melusine stepped out and ascended the stage. She looked to be a water Nymph. The lanterns near her feet lit her face from below,
giving it an odd, distorted look, amplifying her eyes and making her mouth look bloated. Her hair was tied into individual strands with glossy blue ribbon, a Centaur fashion that many of the lower classes were adopting this season.

  As she began, Adelina leaned over to speak quietly in his ear. “Have you ever thought about it?”

  “Thought about what?” he ventured.

  “Sex with a Beast. Isn’t it a rite of passage for some young Merchants in Tabat?”

  “For some,” he said, adrift and unsure what he could admit. The scratch on his cheek throbbed and he thought of the Doctor frowning at him. He remembered pooling coins with three other boys to have their cocks fondled by a Mermaid. A nostalgia of shame and sex tugged at his groin. “Was it so among your friends? Not so much with mine.”

  The poet ended and looked around expectantly. Applause swept the room and Sebastiano and Adelina clapped as well, soundly enough to be appreciative, not so loudly as to stand out.

  Sebastiano watched the tables around them. The nearest held two boys. Not lovers, he thought, seeing the jostling and quick whispers back and forth as they eyed the poet. Merchant sons out looking for mischief, with enough coin in their pockets to get them in trouble. Beyond them, an elderly man holding a much younger woman’s hand in his, listening intently, all of his attention on the poem. The girl looked bored—a Beast, perhaps, or hired companion.

  Everyone in here was thinking of sex, having it hammered into their heads by the poem’s lines, by the explicitness of cock and cunny and warm wet mouths, the conceit of a two-headed Ettin engaged in orally pleasuring his mistress until she died of ecstasy.

  A hint of malice lurked below the surface of those last lines that gave him a chill. Was the poet Human or Beast? Surely the latter.

  Perhaps there was a lecture to be written on the topic—the creative efforts of Beasts. Would their poems be any more intentioned than a spider’s intricate web or the shading in the heart of a lily? he wondered.

  Some races of Beasts were more inclined to such efforts than others—Sirens, for one. He fidgeted at the thought, and Adelina laid her hand on his as though to still him.

  A sudden electrical intensity between them at the touch drew their startled looks together. Adelina dropped her gaze to the table, withdrawing her hand.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said, her voice unwavering.

  Melusine began to recite again, and they both listened. But even as the words flowed around him, Sebastiano’s mind dwelled on the moment of contact, the galvanic response to the slight touch, and he could not resist stealing glances at his companion all through the poem. Words of thighs and breasts and bellies flowed around him unheeded.

  And then! He glanced up at the same time she did and their awarenesses collided. This time it was his turn to drop his gaze, feeling embarrassment settle on him like a scarlet cloak.

  When the poem was done, and the room was applauding, he leaned over, touching her wrist for a second, a moment, a moth’s worth of contact to draw her attention. “Let’s go,” he said.

  She nodded, and rose to follow him.

  Out on the street, the air was cooler, combing their hair with the gentle fingers of a night breeze.

  “Where now?” Sebastiano said, regarding her.

  She smiled up at him. “You mentioned the goose-boats?”

  “An excellent choice.” He started towards a pedal cart but just then, there was a scamper and metallic whir near his feet. It was a clockwork crab, wearing on its back a blue and crimson enameled badge.

  “Pardon me.” He stooped and took the sealed wooden tube from the machine, twisting the stopper to open it and take out the tightly rolled paper. A summons to the College of Mages.

  Another attack.

  “I must apologize, it seems,” he said, re-rolling it. He said to the crab, “Tell them I’ll be there as soon as I can.” It stayed where it was, unmoving. He turned back to her. “I’m summoned to the College of Mages—an emergency.” He tried to convey his regret.

  “It was a lovely evening,” she said gravely. Seeing the uncertainty in his eyes, she rushed on, “No, I mean it, I had a good time.”

  He took out the box in his pocket and offered it to her. She extracted the comb.

  “How beautiful? Is it …”

  “A gift for you, yes.”

  She tucked the comb in her dark hair.

  In the pedal cart, he looked back. She still stood there, watching after him. He started to wave, but the cab turned a corner, and her moonlit figure was gone.

  He stared after her, giddy with delight. She had not seemed cool in the slightest.

  Not cool at all.

  CHAPTER 50

  Sebastiano had known the Della Rose House well enough to be shocked at its destruction.

  Now he knew this new murder scene as well. Had walked in the greenhouse long before whatever it was—Lilia’s giant wooden man, he wondered—had smashed the tables to flinders, reduced every bell jar that had once trapped a Fairy to a layer of ground glass and shredded greenery on the floor.

  There in the corner. Movement?

  A rogue Fairy, cowering beneath a bench. He used his cloak to catch it, bundled it away in one of the small collapsible cages he took from Milosh’s bench, thinking that the man wouldn’t be needing it anymore.

  Every family member and the three Human servants dead, including Milosh and Marta, their bodies taken away before his arrival, Gods be praised.

  Why Lilia, then Marta? They were both Merchant families. Surely it must be that commonality. Not Sebastiano.

  He thought of his complaints to his mother. Had he said anything like it to anyone else? Murga, perhaps. He couldn’t remember well.

  Back at the stable, he tried to extract the Fairy from the cage, but it clung to the interior. Exasperated, he shook it loose only to have it burst free with alarming speed, wings buzzing wasp quick. It darted at him and he backed away, colliding with the half door to Fewk’s stall.

  The Fairy thrummed through the air at him and he flung his arm up. Fewk’s beak snapped shut on a Fairy limb, yanked it back in the air past his ear. The noise of a brief but furious scuffle filled the stall, ending with an agonized death shrill from the smaller creature.

  “Are you all right?” Sebastiano fumbled for the gate with trembling fingers.

  “Stung me,” Fewk complained. He extended a forepaw, and Sebastiano examined the wound.

  “It isn’t much,” he said. “Here, let me treat it.” He searched about for something suitable, chastising himself. Fairies were unintelligent; why had he acted as though he could question it? He had been reading too many Abolitionist texts. He’d told Murga that, but the man seemed to have forgiven him, had even sent that salve …

  Which Sebastiano found on the shelf where he had left it. He sniffed it cautiously but it smelled unremarkable, if fragrant. Still, it would make the Gryphon feel well tended, and that was half the thing in dealing with Beasts, who had minds and thoughts that affected their healing.

  He rubbed the salve on and the Gryphon curled in the straw.

  “I will be back soon,” he promised. He caressed the Gryphon’s warm neck one last time, calling over his shoulder, “I am going to fetch you apples. Maz is coming by soon. Don’t let him overfeed you.”

  “No promises,” the Gryphon murmured, opening one eye before going back to sleep.

  Wind from the evening outside swept into the stable, contradicting the smell of dung and fresh straw with sweet jasmine and warming earth. Sebastiano exited through the opened double door to the space beyond, where the wind played in and out of the iron bars of the tall fence, shaking the greenery that reached to hide the sharp points capping the upright spears of poles. Again, he wished he’d had the weather spectacles, that he could see the demons running like horned rats through the curls of ivy, that he could glimpse tumbles of wind imps setting off sparks of magic.

  The dining hall was closing down. Two students stood emptying the day’s sl
ops out back. They nodded familiarly when they saw him, but he held up a hand.

  “No coins tonight, I’m sorry,” he said regretfully.

  The two students exchanged glances. “Well, here, take what we’ve saved, Merchant Mage,” the taller said, and proffered an apron full of apples. “No one ever eats these anyhow. It’s good to see them going to use.”

  Sebastiano thanked them and filled his pockets with the sour little apples that the cook persisted in using as garnish. Rumor held it that the fruit were washed off and recycled from meal to meal, but he knew that they changed daily, at least, for he often bought the last of them to feed Fewk.

  Footsteps behind him and a voice calling his name. Maz, his face flushed and sweaty.

  “Fewk,” he said, “he asked to have you summoned, but then I thought I would fetch you myself. Come quick.”

  The Piskies chattered angrily as Sebastiano rushed past, Maz at his heels.

  The Gryphon lay on his side in the straw of the stable.

  The posture alarmed Sebastiano. Like horses and Centaurs, Gryphons rarely lay down unless their physical straits were dire indeed.

  “I didn’t know what to do but summon you,” Maz fretted. “He wouldn’t get up.”

  Sebastiano ignored him, spurred by anxiety. But other signs showed the Gryphon to be in good health: breathing regular, eyes wet and lively, plumage well groomed.

  Sebastiano said to Fewk, “Why did you have me summoned, you great faker?”

  But there was a distracted air to Fewk’s gaze. The Gryphon considered him and the look’s gravity chilled him.

  “What is it?” he said, and fear sharpened his voice like a knife.

  Fewk flinched away from that tone. It was the first time he had ever seen the Gryphon falter.

  “I had a pain,” the Beast said sullenly.

  He knelt beside Fewk, putting a hand on the solid heavy warmth of its skin. It twitched beneath his touch, and then settled, but he could still feel movement deep in the muscles, like the twitch of electricity. He realized the wings were trembling, as though with impatience or fear.