The Boy with the Porcelain Blade

by Patrick, Den

  ‘So, this is an unexpected visit,’ managed Lucien, hoping his uneasy grin wouldn’t be misconstrued as a grimace.

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ said the duchess. She and leaned forward as she sat down, and her neckline plunged even further. Lucien busied himself coaxing Antigone from under the armchair. The drake scaled his arm and took up her usual perch on his right shoulder. Lucien looked up and locked his gaze on the bulk of Duke Prospero, away from the heaving bosom of his wife.

  ‘We came to say how sorry we are that House Fontein saw fit to slight you in such a despicable way.’ Lucien guessed His Grace was partially deaf in one or both ears. There was simply no accounting for why he shouted so loudly.

  ‘Yes,’ said the duchess, ‘that business with Master Giancarlo’s attendance—’

  ‘Or lack of,’ said the duke.

  ‘—was most unbecoming of a house with the prestige of Fontein.’

  ‘Quite,’ said the duke, and patted his wife’s hand. Lucien noted the way the duke’s eyes lingered on his wife’s lips. Not the gaze of adoration, rather one of understanding. Lucien guessed the duke read her lips.

  ‘That’s very kind of you, and doubly so to visit me,’ said Lucien, charmed and baffled in equal measure. No lord or lady had ever paid him the slightest attention except when he was in trouble, and yet here he was with the rulers of House Prospero discussing the latest scandal.

  Rafaela appeared with a silver tray loaded with three glasses and two bottles of wine. She set them out, flicking a glance at Lucien with a raised eyebrow. He smiled back at her and she retreated to the doorway after the mandatory curtsey. The duchess sampled her wine and made a breathy, satisfied sound before turning her attention back to Lucien.

  ‘Stephano and I were keen to discover whether you had any romantic ambitions.’

  Lucien, who had been halfway through his first sip of a particularly pleasing Barolo, spluttered, then choked and finally swallowed. He stared blinking at Duchess Prospero, who continued as if nothing had happened. ‘It’s been quite some time since an Orfano has been in a position to wed. We suspect you might be the first.’

  ‘Assuming Golia doesn’t have his eye on someone, eh?’ rumbled the duke with a leery grin.

  ‘How dreadful,’ whispered the duchess. ‘I pity the poor girl who finds herself shackled to that dullard.’ She covered her mouth in mock dismay. ‘Oh, forgive me for being so uncouth. It’s not my place to speak in such a way of the king’s chosen.’ She smiled unapologetically and fluttered her eyelashes.

  Lucien beamed back and waved the breach of etiquette aside. He was far more interested in how Rafaela had stiffened. Her eyes were directed toward her feet, hands clasped in the small of her back. Antigone fidgeted on his shoulder but continued her vigil.

  ‘So, do you?’ bawled the duke.

  ‘Do I what?’ said Lucien, tearing his eyes away from Rafaela.

  ‘Have any romantic aspirations?’ pressed Duchess Prospero.

  ‘One such as you could position himself to enjoy the benefits of an alliance with any of the great houses,’ continued the duke.

  ‘Ah, I see,’ said Lucien, resting one elbow on his armchair and pressing a thumb against the point of his eye tooth. ‘I hadn’t really given it any thought, to be honest. I’m a bit young to get married.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ exclaimed Duchess Prospero, eyes suddenly full of a manic energy. ‘Why, I myself was married at just sixteen.’

  ‘You do realise I’ve only just turned sixteen?’

  ‘Why of course, my lovely boy,’ boomed the duke, causing Lucien to flinch. ‘That’s why we’re here.’

  Lucien sipped his wine and tried to grasp on to something, anything he could say. His mind remained resolutely blank.

  ‘Forgive me for being so forward again, Master Lucien,’ said Duchess Prospero, fanning herself. ‘You must think me dreadful. But I must ask, is there any truth to the rumour you were found in Mistress Anea’s apartment?’

  Lucien sat back back in the armchair and pressed his thumb against his tooth again. Antigone blinked but remained on his shoulder.

  ‘Yes, someone tried to assassinate her. With fire.’

  The duke and duchess gasped. The duke looked shocked. Duchess Prospero however had the look of someone hearing corroboration of what she already thought.

  ‘I rescued her.’

  ‘Oh, bravo!’ boomed the duke, clapping great meaty hands together. ‘Bravo, my splendid boy. Dashing.’

  ‘Very dashing,’ agreed the duchess.

  They all took a moment to drink their wine.

  ‘So, there’s no truth that you and the most mysterious of the Orfani are engaged in a secret affair?’ The duchess had become less animated, like a cat just before it pounces. Lucien regarded her a moment and narrowed his eyes.

  ‘It wouldn’t be very secret if I told you, would it?’

  Duchess Prospero glowered. The duke, who clearly hadn’t heard Lucien’s retort, continued beaming his cheerful smile. Rafaela was still as straight as a blade, eyes downcast.

  ‘However,’ continued Lucien in a voice loud enough for even Duke Prospero to hear, ‘Anea is just thirteen. We’re friends. Anything else would be unseemly.’ He smiled and the duchess softened. ‘Friends united by the fact that we are both Orfani, which is much less fun than people imagine.’ Lucien couldn’t cover the bitterness in his voice.

  The duke and duchess sipped their wine, nodding sagely.

  ‘If I might impose upon your greater knowledge of the history of Demesne,’ said Lucien, ‘is there any previous record of an Orfano marrying into the houses?’

  ‘None my boy! None at all,’ said the duke. ‘All the Orfani have been too strange and misshapen to even entertain the idea of it.’

  ‘There’s also the high mortality rate,’ said the duchess. ‘Something a political marriage might insulate you from.’

  Lucien met Duchess Prospero’s eyes, realising just how much steel lay beneath her breathless amiability.

  ‘Well, you’ve certainly given me a great deal to think about. I’m afraid I have to feed the drakes now, but I hope we can reconvene again soon.’

  ‘Yes, that would be most proper, my splendid boy,’ shouted the duke so loudly even the duchess shrank away from him.

  They left in due course, the duke ambling out in his threadbare suit, the duchess a riot of brocade and velvet. Lucien set about feeding the drakes their usual meal of crickets.

  ‘Well,’ he said aloud, mostly to himself, ‘I’ve no idea what that was about.’ Antigone had no answers for him and bit in half a still-wriggling cricket. Rafaela gathered the silver tray and made it to the door before turning to him.

  ‘You do know that Duke Prospero has a daughter, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course. She’s ten or maybe eleven,’ replied Lucien, intent on the drakes, who had gathered around him.

  ‘Actually she turned fifteen back in August. You’d know if you’d bothered to attend the party you were invited to.’

  Lucien looked up at her and shrugged his shoulders, shaking his head, eyes blank.

  ‘Really? I don’t think I’ve ever met her. Does she have a name?’

  Rafaela exited, the door slammed behind her, causing Lucien to swear.

  ‘What in nine hells has got into her?’ he said to the empty room. The drakes, now fed, slunk off with full bellies. Lucien sat back in his armchair and opened a book. He managed to get through a paragraph before leaping to his feet, the book hitting the floor with a thump.

  ‘Che cazzo? They can’t possibly . . . I can’t get married. I’m only sixteen.’

  29

  Stranded and Blind

  KING’S KEEP

  – Febbraio 315

  Another pair of doors greeted him, left ajar, inches apart. The lantern light fell on flecks of crimson which adorned the wood around black iron handles. Further down, a smeared bloody handprint testified to the king’s wickedness. Lucien pushed against the doors, cursing under his
breath as the hinges moaned a mourning creak. He passed into the chamber with a growing sense of repugnance.

  Many feet away a huge object sat at the centre of the chamber, indistinct. Lucien crept toward it, braving the arachnid tide as it swirled and eddied around him. Each step was a dreadful massacre. Finally, the lantern light fell on his prize. He’d been expecting a table. Instead he found an ornate bed, the largest he had ever seen, fully four times the size of his own. The bed was as wide as it was disgusting. Mildew spread and spoiled the once-pristine sheets. Stains of rust-brown and jaundice-yellow spread like bruises. And there was the smell. Lucien gagged at the ammonia reek and stepped away retching. It was then he realised he was not alone.

  At the cardinal points the circular room featured alcoves, reached through decorative arches supported by delicate clusters of colonnettes. Each apse was a deep enclave of night, and yet in one something had reflected the lantern light, a sharp glint drawing his eye. He drew his blade and advanced with caution, breath shallow and constricted. He could never have imagined what greeted him.

  They sat on four exquisite wooden chairs, regarding him from behind blackened glass spectacles. Each nursed an instrument in long-fingered hands. He’d not seen them since the day of the Domo’s collapse seven years ago. He remembered them distinctly. A quartet of dusty musicians dressed in out-of-fashion clothes, led into the king’s chambers to play. Each had worn jet spectacles, concealing their blindness. How jealous he’d been of them that day, made privy to Landfall’s greatest mystery while he had been forced to remain in the corridor outside.

  They were of course quite dead now, their clothes, their very essence, undone by decay. Only mute grinning skulls kept him company in the darkness. Lucien approached, wondering if they had been made prisoners, but none of the skeletons wore shackles. Perhaps rope, which had succumbed to the same decomposition as their flesh? Lucien tried to imagine what it must have been like to sit in the solitude of blindness, waiting for the Majordomo to lead them away from their audience with the king. Waiting, starving.

  The stairs were wooden and clung to the curving wall of the alcove with a ramshackle tenacity. The steps disappeared up, mahogany-brown but for a coat of the all-pervading dust. He took the first flight, eight steps in total, before coming to a landing. The king’s bedchamber must be two storeys high.

  He took the next eight steps and spied an immense chandelier he’d not noticed earlier. It hung over the broad expanse of the bed, glittering in the meagre light. Shards of amethyst glass hung like wicked crystal knives. Any candles that had once been placed in the structure had been consumed, the wax existing only as drippings. It was simply a crystalline constellation looking down on the king’s festering resting place.

  Lucien pressed on, willing the stairs not to collapse. Sweat sheened his palms as he clutched the hilt of the sword, his other hand grasping fretfully at the lantern. The flights of stairs and landings continued until he found himself before double doors. They were scrawled over with formulae, the handwriting erratic. Light escaped beneath the doors and shone like a miniature sun through a keyhole. Lucien set down the battered lantern and tried the handles. They turned with rusty reluctance. He pushed against the wood and, taking a deep breath, stepped through, willing his shaking hands to calm themselves.

  He was in the laboratory he’d discovered the night he’d been up on the rooftops of Demesne. The cupola he’d stared down from was at the centre of the ceiling, windows looking out onto night. The room was eight sided, eight benches surrounding a hollow octagon in the centre. Each was piled high with water-stained glass containers or books with long-broken spines. Pages lay scattered on the floor, clustering about table legs, screwed up and discarded in one corner. The sconces on the walls were all empty and starlight filtered in from the cupola above. Lucien closed with the nearest of the benches, discovering a withered organ suspended in a cloudy yellow fluid. The piece was ruddy red, but he failed to identify it or which animal had surrendered it. The glass container had a scrap of parchment pinned to the cork lid bearing a single word and a date, but the ink was so faded Lucien could make no sense of it. Other containers on the benches held increasingly grisly trophies. Here an adult hand, there a drake skeleton, not an ounce of flesh on the bones. Lucien spent minutes lost inside this museum of the grotesque, not daring to linger on any exhibit too long.

  Until he arrived at the head.

  The cloudy preservative made it difficult to discern the man’s age, but he was younger than Virmyre, possibly younger than D’arzenta. His hair had become a congealed mass. The jaw hung slack, the teeth inside brown or blackened. Two strands of unknown material tethered the severed cranium to the container’s base. Lucien could not tear his eyes away. He felt his heart hammering in his chest, breath refusing to come. His grip slackened on the hilt of the sword. It was then the head in the specimen jar opened its eyes.

  Lucien stumbled back, a strangled cry escaping his lips. He crashed into another bench, unsettling another of the awful containers. The bench rocked, a flare of pain seared through his ribs, and a specimen jar crashed to the floor. A cloud of dust rose, filling the air with particles, causing him to cough. His boots were awash with fouled preservative, but that was a small concern compared to what followed. Clawing its way out of the shattered glass of its former prison, the thing emerged, wet and gasping, then righted itself.

  Lucien stared in astonishment. The creature before him resembled a spider only in locomotion. Eight legs, pink and vivid, reached out from an oval corpus. Lucien blinked, then realised the object with eight spindly legs was a human head, oversized and unlovely. Bright blue eyes and a hooked nose adorned the front of the corrupted skull; the mouth opened but the scream was a silent one. For a few moments Lucien and the head faced each other, stunned silence and revulsion heavy on the air between them. Then, sensing much-longed-for freedom was now in its grasp, the head ran blindly.

  How many more of the king’s twisted experiments would he be forced to endure? he wondered. His eyes swam in and out of focus, finally settling on a patchwork of parchment pinned to the wall. Lucien searched the sprawling script, grateful for something, anything, to occupy his mind. The parchment had a vast tree drawn upon it, and every branch that reached out from the trunk bore a name and split into finer twigs. After a minute or two Lucien realised the pictorial was governed by certain rules. The branches were all named after women. The thick branches also bore dates, all rendered in a legible hand. The names, male and female, on the further extremities of the branches were accompanied by a variety of details including house designations. Talents and aptitudes were recorded in succinct remarks. The general health of each was recorded as well as any defects. It was a family tree of sorts, he decided, but one that mentioned only mothers and their offspring. Lucien was pressed up against the parchment now, his fingers running across the paper, hoping to absorb some clue through the very membrane of his skin. It was then that he located Golia’s name. Then his own. And Anea’s.

  The room spun.

  He felt light-headed. His lungs refused much-needed air. He bent double, head between his knees, willing himself not to pass out. Gradually he returned to his upright position, but not before noticing one detail he’d missed before. At the base of the tree, at the point where the trunk met an unsketched earth, was a crown. Dazed and willing himself to close his eyes, Lucien looked up, finding a branch drawn in a wavering hand, the ink blacker, scribed more recently. The surname da Costa. The first name Salvaggia. The date just two nights past.

  Speechless and shaken, the Orfano stepped away as if in a dream, exiting the laboratory in a fugue state. Lucien felt his mind clutch and seize at the evidence in front of him, failing to acknowledge a terrible truth he could not escape from. He staggered down the staircase, supporting himself with the rail, with the wall, retrieving the lantern subconsciously. The wood groaned and complained under his footfalls but held fast. It was as he passed the rotting putrescence of the king�
�s bed that he heard his name. Lucien turned with an unfocused gaze, eyes searching the gaping maw of the alcove, opposite the resting place of the musicians. Existing at the edge of the illumination was the face of an old man, deeply lined and ashen.

  ‘You should not be here,’ whispered the king.

  Lucien stared back wordlessly.

  30

  Tegenaria Duellica

  LUCIEN’S APARTMENT

  – Maggio 313

  ‘That’s dreadful,’ complained Stephania as Achilles bit the head off a cricket. The insect’s legs continued to pedal the empty air until the drake consumed it entirely. ‘Are they always like this?’

  Lucien nodded, eying her intently. She was the image of her mother, just coming into her birthright of an hourglass figure the equal of Duchess Prospero’s. It was for the best that she had not acquired any of her father’s features. She shared her mother’s taste in gowns, although decidedly less provocative. Her coiffed hair was always immaculate, matched by flawless olive skin. Many of the bravos of House Fontein spoke of lusting for her.

  Lucien idly wondered which of his parents’ attributes stared back at him from the looking glass. Did he share any aspect of their temperaments? Or any of their intellectual gifts? He’d never know, he realised, masking his loss in front of Stephania, who remained oblivious.

  ‘And my mother thought I’d be interested in this?’ She pouted and looked away to the windows, shuddering theatrically. Lucien plucked at his lip, not knowing what to say.

  ‘Do you know the capo?’ she asked brightly.

  ‘I think I insulted him once. Isn’t he—’

  ‘Very good-looking,’ interrupted Stephania, suddenly serious. Lucien shrugged his shoulders and stole a glance at Rafaela, who stood by the door into his apartment from the corridor. She refused to meet his eye. As Lucien’s appointed maid, she was required to act as chaperone. Stephania’s own maid perused Lucien’s bookshelves, ignoring everyone.