by Carol Berg
I drained my cup of cider. Demetreo might hope for ransom, but he’d never have summoned Bek if he had murder in mind.
From his case Bek yanked out a steel pincer a little longer than my finger and proceeded to pick at Garen’s back with it.
The younger man near rose off his pillows. “Ow! Stop that!”
“Be still,” snapped Bek. “Do you know the Hansker cut their skin and stuff soot in their wounds apurpose to scar themselves? They believe it makes them look fearsome to their enemies. But I’m thinking you’d rather not wear such decoration if we can avoid it, so we needs must get all this mud and gravel out before you start to heal. Might have to stitch up a couple of these. Oldmeg, if you would . . .”
He motioned to the woman in the bone necklace to hold Garen’s arm out of the way and blot the free-flowing blood just above the youth’s left hip.
I winced in sympathy.
“No cutting on me, Bek.” Garen, full awake now, came near twisting his head off trying to see what the surgeon was up to. “No pricking nor sewing, neither. Maybe you just ought to let the women do— Ow! Butcher!”
“Our family healer would recommend exactly the same,” I offered. To my mind the surgeon was proceeding with admirable skill. “She always cleans wounds, sometimes even enlarges them a little. . . .”
But then, a pureblood healer could lay spells to discourage sepsis and charm the skin to prevent scarring. It was the magic in her fingers twined with the magic in her subject that made such healing possible—and thus impossible for ordinaries. My face heated. How boorish to compare my experiences with theirs.
Garen craned his head as if he’d just realized I was there. “Domé,” he whispered urgently. He yanked his arm from the crone and tried to reach his waist. “I’ve a pocket in my belt— Ow!”
“Be still!” The surgeon shoved Garen’s arm back into Oldmeg’s custody.
“Do as he commands,” I said. Crouching beside the surgeon, I lifted a bloody remnant of Garen’s tunic and found the canvas pocket tied to his belt. “Is this what you want?”
“Inside,” he said softly, even as he flinched at Bek’s next probe.
I pulled the bag open and poked my fingers inside, feeling a faint buzz of enchantment. Ah, gods . . . my mask.
“Good.” What else could be said? The whisper of regret shadowing my spirit was nonsense.
I slipped on the mask made of a dead man’s wrapping. Its enchantments snugged it around my eyes, ears, and the bony arch of my long pureblood nose until it felt like a second skin.
Garen dropped his eyes. And when I rose the lute fell silent, the chopping knife halted, and every eye in the room save Demetreo’s hardened and looked away. Very proper. As if I had vanished.
Beneath his black mustache, the headman’s lips twisted in amusement; then his expressive chin set the activities of the house moving again. But the talk was quiet and sparse, the chopping less exuberant, and even Garen’s protests buried in the dirty cushion. When I held out my cup to the cider girl for more, her hands shook as she poured.
Fixing my attention on the flames, I turned my back to the others and moved closer to the hearth. Eventually life would move on more easily behind me—a technique hard learned in Montesard.
Why had Demetreo brought me here? He was no benevolent overlord, accustomed to harboring wounded burglars or humbled sorcerers. From our first encounter, his every move had been calculated. He had barred my passage through the hirudo that first night, asking for a glimpse of Idrium’s glory, as if he’d never witnessed true magic.
On that same night my light spell attached to the iron grave marker had failed abruptly when I encountered Demetreo, yet once I’d escaped his snag, it had blazed anew down in the hirudo. That made no sense at all unless . . . Had another pureblood been here that night, working magic for Cicerons?
Curious, I spread my fingers wide before my breast, stretching my trained senses into the unexpectedly warm chamber. Magic! Faint, fragile, it riffled the hair on my arms, teased at my tongue like pepper, whispered in my ears like the drifting disturbance of a dead leaf come loose from a vine. Small enchantments wreathed the fire pit, just enough to slow the consuming of the wood, perhaps, or to send the smoke of damp fuel inerrantly through the dark vent hole overhead.
Reaching deeper, I discovered enchantments on every side of me, each slightly different in the subtle ways that testified to different sorcerers. More than one had been here. Strange . . .
I spun slowly in place as if I might see spells hanging here and there like cobwebs. Was it the lamps? What about the red door that seemed to open of itself?
My gaze roved the dusty dimness above the lamplight. When it reached the wall opposite the outer door, that which abutted the Elder Wall, astonishment swept aside my idle questioning. In the shadows beneath the timber rafters was a small fresco, its paint infused into the wall when the plaster was soft and raw. The image depicted a black lozenge bearing a white hand, thumb and fingers slightly spread.
I whirled to confront Demetreo, but the headman was no longer present. The others’ quiet activities and banter ebbed and flowed around me as if I were but another hearthstone.
Were Cicerons somehow related to the Danae mystery? It seemed so unlikely. Yet I had sketched a blazon of the white hand on a dead Ciceron’s portrait. And in the Tower cellar, when I had hunted dark-haired, long-nosed Aurellian warriors in the threads of history, I’d encountered Cicerons wearing black tabards marked with a white hand.
Ignorant folk had ever claimed Cicerons could work true magic. Only the children of pureblood parents carried the power for magic—that was a law of the universe as fundamental as the sun’s rising. Certainly what magic I sensed here was weak and crude, nothing at all like the bent, yet it was far more than trickery. And though a talent for simple spellcasting was a rare possibility in first-generation halfblood children—those like Eodward’s bastard youngest son, Prince Osriel, whose mother was pureblood—it would be wholly absent in any descendant. Proven time and again through generations: Interbreeding with ordinaries destroyed the gods’ gift. Which meant purebloods or halfbloods had worked these spells. Did Cicerons make a habit of sheltering renegade sorcerers?
I turned back to the fire. Every pureblood was under obligation to report instances of true magic where it had no cause to be. If Demetreo had sheltered a recondeur, every life in the hirudo was forfeit. I didn’t want to know.
My cowardice did not escape me. Had my questions arisen before donning the mask, before all these people knew what I was, I might have mustered the words to inquire what some of them knew of the history of this place or their lamps or the red door. I might have asked if anyone had heard the term Path of the White Hand. But the mask returned me to my proper place, and it was not in me to break the barriers it created.
The red door opened yet again to the pounding rain. Two newcomers ducked through the doorway, a lean, hard-faced woman in leather jaque and breeches, wringing water from her wet hair, and Bastien.
The coroner hurried across the chamber, sparing no glance for anyone but Bek and his patient. “Tell me.”
“He’ll be dancing your bidding in a day or three,” said the surgeon without looking up, sounding wholly unsurprised to find Bastien at his side. “Give me half an hour to stitch up this hole in his side, and you can haul him off to the domain of the dead. To work, naturally . . . or whatever else might take his mind off his wounds. Carefully, I would suggest.”
The hard-faced woman rolled her eyes, snatched a tin cup from a shelf, and joined the cider girl, who was refilling her pot from a barrel. The lute player, who had been studiously polishing his instrument, met the glance of the turnip chopper. They lifted their eyebrows in a unity of amusement.
The source of their jollity escaped me, right along with patience. I was happy to hear Garen would be well. And Bastien’s concern for Garen spoke well of a man I was just beginning to know. But he would understand the significance of the white hand
and would be better at the inquiries than I. “Coroner Bastien—”
“Errrggh!” Garen’s pain leaked around a stick they’d placed in his mouth.
Bek’s steady hands poked a needle into the tender flesh between the runner’s hip and waist. He drew and knotted the stitch . . . without spells to ease it. And again . . .
My arms clenched my middle.
“Easy, bonecracker!” Bastien knelt beside the makeshift couch. From his expression, one might think the surgeon was stitching the coroner’s own flesh.
All were silent, respecting the wounded man’s pain.
“Done,” said the surgeon at last, sitting up and twisting a cramp out of his shoulders. “Does the estimable Constance have an onion or three tucked away, do you think, Coroner? I’ll vow she knows how to make an onion poultice, woman of many talents as she is. That would do as well as anything I’ve got to stave off sepsis. So near the gut isn’t a place you want rot to set in.”
“I can get onions.”
“Won’t smell nice, though, will he?” Bek grinned, nudging the coroner with his elbow. Bastien looked as if he might strike him.
Which flummoxed me.
Bek cleaned his tools, while Oldmeg blotted away blood and tied a strip of linen over the angry wound. The activities of the room resumed. Bastien noticed none of it. The coroner laid his wide hand on the runner’s battered cheek and whispered something I couldn’t hear. Garen gave a hoarse croak that might have been a laugh and fumbled about until his slender hand lay atop Bastien’s. Then he opened his dark eyes and locked the coroner with a smoky gaze as could speak a vault full of secrets.
I caught my breath, understanding naming me a flat and utter fool. Even my sheltered experience of the wide world testified that theirs were neither the touch nor look of mere friends or even blood-kin.
My education in Montesard had encompassed many things. In one of my tutorial groups a quiet, well-favored young man was ever in close company with another man, their touch and conversation distinctly intimate. I had heard rumor of such relations, but never witnessed it. The university abruptly dismissed the two young men for indecent behavior, so it seemed the ordinary world disapproved. My parents had never mentioned such things, which implied the same.
I’d never quite decided what I thought. Though the exact mechanics remained a mystery and speculation left me queasy, I had wondered if such practices might provide a humane solution for older, unmarried pureblood men, who must live forever subject to the Registry’s strict breeding laws. Clearly no children could result. But this . . .
Bek rose, swiped his brow with his sleeve, and yawned. “Anyone else need a swab or a stitch?”
No one responded, save the cider girl, who brought the surgeon a cup that he emptied in one long swallow.
“Time I got back to my bed, then. Coroner, see he doesn’t rip out those stitches until I say. You can pay my landlord my fee; less chance of it going astray in these days of decadence. And I’d appreciate all of you refraining from bloody adventures in the middle of the night. Sengé . . .”
Throwing on his cloak and hefting his case, the surgeon inclined his back to Demetreo, who had appeared again, lounging against the outside wall. The red door opened by no apparent means, and the surgeon trudged into the night.
“Your care of my servants leaves me in your debt, Sengé Demetreo.” Smoldering anger had enveloped all Bastien’s sentiment. “But I would know how you come to have them in your custody—in such a state. We had an agreement.”
The headman’s chin jerked again. The turnips went into the simmering pot, the lyre into its skin case. The dicing men quenched the lamps. In moments only we three were left in the house, along with Oldmeg of the bone necklace, who was yet sponging blood from a sleeping Garen.
“Custody is hardly the case, Coroner,” said Demetreo, emptying the cider pitcher into a cup and passing it to Bastien. “More like they imposed their inconvenient selves on my hospitality, and be sure ’twas in worse condition than you find them. Your pureblood will confirm this.”
The headman perched on the rim of the fire pit. Bastien took one of the stools abandoned by the dice players and with a sharp gesture directed me to the other. A formal parley, then. Protocol forbade me from sitting as an equal with two ordinaries, but that wasn’t why I remained standing. My curiosity was like to outstrip my patience for this dance between them.
“My apologies, then,” said Bastien, unapologetically. “I shall, of course, offer a proper gratuity.”
“We have reaped no ill from the dead child found here in the heart of winter. For that alone, I would offer you this consideration.” Demetreo gestured toward Garen. “But if this night’s work comes down hard on us, as your pureblood warns, our tally will be unbalanced yet again.”
Bastien whirled on me. “You babbled our business to a Ciceron? Gossip outweighs gold in his trafficking!”
Demetreo seemed unmoved by Bastien’s insult, but then, no masked pureblood kept his thoughts closer than did the headman.
“We’d no escape from the temple save the drainage channel,” I said, “and Garen needed more help than I could give. When Demetreo and his people found us and demanded the reason for our trespass, I explained that we’d sought evidence of the girl child’s murderer. The temple sits above the place where she was found. He is not stupid.”
Demetreo dipped his head in mocking acknowledgment. The veins in Bastien’s forehead pulsed. Perhaps I’d stated my case more forcefully than necessary, for my rendering wasn’t yet complete.
“Though we got away, the danger is real. I lost the scroll with my handwriting—perhaps on the steps, perhaps in the temple—”
“And to remedy your bungling, you’ve put us in the debt of Cicerons.” My master the bulldog, yes. “Are you determined to get us all dead?”
Patience held by a thread. “I’ll tell you the particulars later. Removing ourselves and allowing Sengé Demetreo to see to his defenses should suffice for their safety, especially as his people seem to have resources I’d have sworn were impossible.”
Demetreo’s amusement stilled. Bastien noticed, his wiry brows rising. Curious.
I pressed on. “But before we leave or natter on about my incompetence, I must know about the hand.”
The inscrutable Demetreo blinked. “The hand?”
Bastien echoed the headman’s confusion.
I pointed to the fresco, almost invisible so high above the shuttered lamps.
“A white hand,” whispered Bastien. “The same as in—” He caught himself.
“What do you wish to know?” Demetreo had shuttered his face again.
“What does it mean? Is it the emblem of your clan? A warding symbol?” The questions rolled out of me.
“What would you pay to know of it?”
One might assume Demetreo bargained his own knowledge. But Oldmeg had lifted her head as I questioned. The slightest jut of Demetreo’s most commanding chin had set her back to her work. He knew something. Perhaps she knew more. But speculation profited me nothing when he held her reins, as Bastien held mine, when it came to that. Though the headman had directed his inquiry to me, I forced myself to defer.
“Master?”
“Such a trivial request to ease my servant’s curiosity,” said Bastien. He maintained the marketplace posture of a man who could walk away from trivial matters, though we all three knew full well that he and I had already betrayed the importance of my question. “I owe you Bek’s fee to apply to his rent. Perhaps a small increase . . . say, double?”
Good. He did not scrimp.
Demetreo held up his hand as if to slow whatever river of coppers Bastien might produce. “Perhaps something less expensive.” A cat’s purr could be no more satisfied. “Keep the surgeon’s fee and the generous excess. Instead we ask that you avert your eyes for one hour. A simple bargain.”
“Avert my eyes from what? A murder? Thieving?”
“It is a matter of our safety and no violation
of the law. You have my word—which has proved itself worthy of late, yes? Just leave the hirudo, taking your eyes from us for an hour. My men will carry Garen to your house—or wherever you want him. You can see to his recovery.”
Bastien fingered his purse. “And in exchange, Bek’s tally is forgiven for the month, and we learn what the pureblood would know.”
“Exactly that,” said Demetreo, rising, sober and sinuous as a snake.
“Done.” The glint in the coroner’s eye and the twitch of his profligate mustache as he pounced proclaimed him pleased. He didn’t recognize Demetreo’s trap, and I wasn’t about to warn him. Not if the bargain would illuminate the white hand.
“Come along, pureblood. We’ve work . . .”
“Ah no,” said Demetreo, apologetic as he sprung his trap. “I said nothing about releasing your pureblood just yet. We wish to consult with him on these private matters. Never fear, we’ll send him back with his question answered and our debts squared, none the worse for our exchange.”
“Private—!” One might have thought a rock blocked Bastien’s throat. But shock quickly yielded to annoyance—whether more with me or the headman the only question. He had been fairly outmaneuvered and knew it. Had he been willing to risk Registry outrage by hiring out an hour of my service to other unscrupulous Navrons, he could likely have charged five hundred times Bek’s rent for a year. I was well content. An hour was nothing.
Grumbling, Bastien shifted his scowl from me to Demetreo to Garen, who lay shivering despite the fire and blankets. He hated leaving, but, of all people, he knew how quickly evidence could vanish. By morning, the Ciceron could change his mind. Or the Registry could snatch me away. Or any one of us could be dead; Oldmeg looked as if she had cheated the Ferryman for decades. Bastien wanted to know about the white hand, too.
“My servant must be at the necropolis gate before the second-hour bells ring.” He eyed my feet. “And if you’ve a rag to wrap his expensive pureblood toes before you send him up, I’ll ignore the next dead Ciceron backslider shows up with his tongue stapled.”