Ombria In Shadow

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She tore a ring out of her hair, threw it behind her, and half her ragged following stopped to scrabble in the street. She threw another ring; an urchin caught it, swallowed it, grinning. She threw another, and another, until her hair hung loose down her torn, dirty gown. Laughter came too close, retreated; signposts pointed in too many directions. Someone threw a bottle at her; it shattered under her feet. She cried out, running on thorns now, on broken splinters of fire. Tavern signs rocked overhead: the Iron Maiden, the Walking Oak, the Moon and Owl. Which was her father’s? Was he there still? What was the name? Fingers clamped around her wrist, loosened abruptly, as if she burned. In that instant, she saw a face watching her that did not threaten; it seemed uncannily calm in the dusty streak of lamplight, as if the young woman standing there were a ghost. In that moment, Lydea remembered: Rose and Thorn, on Sheepshead Lane.

  She gasped, “Sheepshead Lane—which way?”

  The ghost pointed, and disappeared, was gone, was nothing. A sharp, bewildered sob broke out of Lydea. Where can you go from here? she pleaded silently at the empty shadows. How do you find nowhere? Voices gabbled at her; stray hounds had joined the pursuers, barking wildly. She ran again, on burning embers, on the razor’s edge. She was stopped and caught and free again, for no discernible reason but that everyone must be blind, staggering drunk. Turning into Sheepshead Lane, she saw the painted rose hanging beneath the moon.

  She flung herself through the doorway, fell on her knees in front of a short, bald, brawny man who was sweeping up beer-sodden straw on the floor. He stared at her; she stared at him. He turned his head, spat on the straw.

  “Back, are you?”

  She pulled herself away from the door so that he could bar it. The voices and barking faded into curses, laughter, the yelp of kicked dogs. She leaned against a bench, her eyes closed, listening to the brisk, angry strokes of the broom.

  She spoke finally. “You’ve no one to sweep.”

  “I have myself.”

  “I remember how.”

  “It’s not a broom handle you’ve held for five years.”

  She opened her eyes. He leaned the broom against the bar, folded his arms, his expression like another barred door. Sorrow caught fire in her throat; she swallowed the ember down, for he would have no pity. She asked, “Do you have someone to scrub tables?”

  “My right hand.”

  “And to wash the glasses?”

  “The street is full of taverns these days,” he said, then grudged her another sentence. “I make do, with what I have.”

  “I’ll do for nothing.”

  “So you have done, these five years.”

  Her mouth crooked. She looked at her torn hem, her bruised knees, the bloody straw where her feet rested. “You’re right, there. I was that much a fool. I won’t beg you—except, if you’re going to throw me back out, I beg you wait till morning. It’s fierce out there.”

  “I heard the mourning bells,” he said. “But I didn’t think you’d come here.”

  “No one there wanted me except the boy.”

  “The boy. Will they let him live?”

  She shook her head wordlessly, her eyes burning. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “He is even more helpless.”

  He shifted straw with his foot, watching her. “I told you don’t go.”

  “I know.”

  “So did she. She begged.”

  “I know.”

  “So now you’re back.”

  “I’m not begging,” she said carefully. “And you owe me nothing. But I will work.”

  “How, with those feet?”

  “I’ll work on my knees. In five years no one has had me but the Prince of Ombria, and I fought through half the city tonight to keep that true. There were other places that would have taken me in, but I’d rather wash the floor with my hair. And your windows. They could use it.”

  His jaw knotted; she saw a flick like a shutter opening in his eyes. He drew breath. “Then,” he said softly, “you do that. You wash the floor with your hair. If you’re still here by morning, for your mother’s memory I will not throw you out.”

  She spread her hands. That morning they had been soft as feathers, jewelled, polished, perfumed. Now they were crisscrossed with blood and dirt, wearing only bruises for jewels. She said, “Where’s the bucket?”

  “I’ll get that for you,” said her father, and fetched her future from behind the bar.

  TWO

  The Enchanted Heart

  Mag was seven when she discovered that she was human. Until then she had only been what Faey called “my waxling.” That Faey could make a child out of wax to help her with this and that was scarcely in question. Mag knew nothing of life before Faey made her, and when Faey gave her memory, memory and her quick, curious eyes that went everywhere in the ancient city of Ombria, became her greatest assets.

  Faey lived, for those who knew how to find her, within Ombria’s past. Parts of the city’s past lay within time’s reach, beneath the streets in great old limestone tunnels: the hovels and mansions and sunken river that Ombria shrugged off like a forgotten skin, and buried beneath itself through the centuries. Other parts were less accessible. Everyone knew of past, like they knew the smells of wild rose and shit and frying sausage, and the direction of the wind and the cry of gulls around the rotting docks. But though they relied on sausage and air, few paid attention to the city’s past. That suited Faey, who lived along the borderline of past and present. Those who needed her followed the scent of her work and found her. Those who didn’t considered her a vague seep out of someone’s cistern, an imprecise shadow at the end of an alley, and walked their ceaseless, complex patterns above her head, never knowing how their lives echoed down the intricate passageways of time in the hollow beneath the city.

  Mag, who did not consider herself human, moved easily in and out of the various places where Ombria crumbled into its past. By the time she was seven, she knew doors all over the city. There was the little worm-eaten gate in the sagging wall behind the stables in the yard of the Raven’s Eye Inn. There was the shadow at the end of Glover’s Alley, which Mag’s sharp eyes noticed never changed position, morning or noon. There was the gaudy patch of sunflowers beside the west gate of the palace of the Prince of Ombria, that did nothing all day long but turn their golden-haired, thousand-eyed faces to follow the sun. The Prince of Ombria, whom Faey called the Reprobate, never bothered with what stood outside his iron gates on their graceful, gargantuan stalks and sometimes peered over his wall. If Faey wanted spare eyes, Mag knew how to grow them. The door to the undercity lay in the midst of the sunflowers: a hole between roots where what looked like some animal’s den was the top of an ancient chimney. Steps leading down to the sea from the docks led farther than anyone guessed. Street drains, unused cellars, holes beneath steps, were doors that even the city urchins had discovered. Mag saw them sometimes, flitting through fingers of light from drains and broken windows and holes above their heads, exploring the secret streets, sitting on the walls of roofless houses, eating stolen apples or searching the rooms for treasure that lay just beyond their eyesight, in the moment just beyond their steps. They never eluded Faey’s notice, and she never let them stay, as often as they planned to take up residence in the quiet, warm, secret place and fill a ruined city with a tattered population of waifs. They would get uneasy as the upper light began to fade, start glancing over their skinny shoulders and scratching for nonexistent fleas. Faey made the stones they threw into streams echo across vast distances; she made the old joists and chimneys whisper; she sent the icy breath of something snoring in a cellar curling around their ankles, so that they scrabbled with relief back up to the dangerous twilight of Ombria.

  Mag had learned to move through the streets like a musician moves through music, tuning it note by note with every breath, every touch. A rough voice in the dark could render her invisible; at a touch, she was simply gone, up a pipe, down a barrel, down deeper than that, through a shadow o
r a door. Not being human, she never wondered at what humans did. She had seen them pilfer each other’s watches, slit each other’s throats, break each other’s hearts. She had seen newborns tossed away with yesterday’s rubbish. She had stepped over men snoring drunk on the cobbles; she had walked around women with bleeding faces, slumped in rich, torn gowns, weeping and cursing in tavern alleys. Since she was wax, none of this concerned her; they might have been dreams or ghosts she moved through, until they tried to pull her into their night-terrors. Then she melted as if flame had touched her, flowed away into a safer dream.

  The day Mag turned human, Faey had sent her on an errand up into light. Mag carried a silk handkerchief loosely in one hand, like the ladies she saw taking fastidious steps through the streets. Now and then, like them, she touched the silk to her nostrils. Tucked within the silk, nestled against her palm, was Faey’s spell: a tiny heart that looked of gold but was of many things. Faey had spent forever making it. Mag, watching and helping, had come as close as ever in her brief life to running like a street urchin up to the bumbling, crazed streets above. Even Faey looked affected, her pale skin glistening, her voice shaking with exhaustion. She barely had the strength to send Mag out. “Take this to the palace,” she whispered. “Someone will be at the west gate.” Mag, who had a vague, unwaxlike longing for light, chose to walk the upper streets to the Reprobate’s house.

  Dressed in a lacy gown she had torn to fit her, in fine black gloves some lady had dropped in the past, her feet bare, the silk to her nose, she turned her face to the sun like the sunflowers. She paid no attention to the women who flung her startled glances, or to the boys who minced, giggling, in her shadow. They were no more than smoke, the leftover dreams of the sunken, deserted city. So she thought, until Gram Reed, who pastured a cow in a bit of green behind the Raven’s Eye Inn, led the cow into the street, looking one way at an oncoming beer cart while Lady Barrow, looking the other way at a carriage and pair, led her old blind spaniel into the cow.

  The spaniel yelped; the cow swung its head at the noise. Somehow teeth and great spongy nostrils collided. The cow bellowed; the spaniel lunged hysterically. Lady Barrow sat down on the cobbles, showing darned woolen hose under an avalanche of lace. Gram Reed, appalled, stooped to help her. The cow, jerking away from yellow, snapping teeth, pulled out of his hold and ran mooing into Amalee’s Lady’s Lace for Discreet and Public Occasions. An assortment of bird noises arose from within the shop: parrot screeches, peacock screams, the twitterings of finches. The cow bellowed again. There was a sound like the flat side of a door smacking a haunch of beef. The cow lumbered back out, trailing yards of eyelet lace and a pair of beribboned drawers from one horn.

  Gram Reed groaned. Lady Barrow fainted, her wig toppling into a puddle. Mag laughed. She had never laughed in her life: wax does not. She was so startled by the sound she made that she jammed the handkerchief against her mouth. Something caught on her breath; she swallowed. It was then, poised between horror and laughter, a lunatic place where, she had observed, humans balanced most of their lives, that she saw she was one of them.

  She swallowed again, felt the heart in her throat dissolve. For one second she was a slender, wild-haired, barefoot child in a woman’s torn ball gown, a pair of gloves five times the size of her hands, watching a cow wearing underwear loom over her. Then habit moved her; she was halfway up a drainpipe, and the cow had careened into the Black Rose tavern. Gram Reed, who was fanning Lady Barrow’s face with her wig, cursed bitterly and flung the wig back into the puddle. Ladies from the lace shop came to her aid then, and Gram plunged into the tavern after his cow. Mag slid down the drainpipe and sat under it, blinking.

  Something besides being human was happening to her. Everything seemed to be whispering secrets: the cobblestones, the gurgling drain, her heartbeat, the thin walls of the city through which voices and dreams flowed like blood or light. She wanted to touch everything, feel the pocky texture of granite, the silken slide of water, the tangle of human and horse hair in Lady Barrow’s wig. She wanted to touch the blue-white pouch beneath Lady Barrow’s closed eye, feel the quick life humming in it. She could hear everything, it seemed: Gram Reed and the tavern keeper arguing, a pigeon nosing under a feather for a flea, murmurings of love through the wall behind her, a footstep in a silent room, a drop of water rolling down the pipe, Amalee’s indignant recountings, amid a chorus of shaking wattles and sharp glottals, of the cow coming through the door, and the more gleeful recountings of the street urchins in the next alley.

  “… And then Faey’s girl shinnied up the drainpipe, she moved so fast, like a spider jumping, here one, with the cow coming at her, and there the next, and the cow flying ribbons into the tavern, and old Beakernose Bailey didn’t even take his nose out of his glass, he just reached out like he saw what he was expecting since the day he was born, and pinched the bloomers off the cow’s horn and stuffed them up his sleeve…”

  Faey’s girl. The street was suddenly far too noisy. Was she truly visible for comment? If not Faey’s making, then whose? She rolled onto her knees suddenly,, feeling sick, and crawled a little way into the alley. There she slid into the window of a tiny room in a cellar that no one remembered was there. The room went down and down, a great bank of earth, for its floor had collapsed decades before. Dizzily, hearing stones and ghosts murmuring around her, she made her way along the silent river, where the reflections of invisible lamps along the bank patterned the dark water. Stepping across a bridge, she stepped across time. The lamps became real, lit her path to Faey’s house beside the water. The door opened. The housekeeper, in archaic clothes and barely visible, greeted her. The only sound Mag heard in the rich, quiet house was Faey’s snoring. Mag stumbled upstairs to her own bed and slept.

  Faey, who missed little, watched her reel out of her room later and follow an erratic butterfly path to the water closet. She watched her come out again. Mag, feeling slow, blurred and jangling with a great city’s noises, didn’t see Faey’s lifted hand or feel the blow. She skittered under it, came up sitting against the wall, staring like a rag doll, wide-eyed and stuffed. Faey, with all the work to do over again, and without the aid of her stricken waxling, said, mingling pity and exasperation, “It will only last three days.”

  But certain effects lasted years.

  Mag never told Faey that she knew she was other than made. Human being what it was—raging, messy, cruel, drunken and stupid—she decided to remain wax. If, she reasoned, she did not say the word, no one would ever know. Saying “human” would make her so. Someone else might have made her body, but Faey had the making of her mind, and Mag had no desire to change the turn it had taken. Faey, who was efficient after a fashion, decided to expand Mag’s usefulness, to give her an understanding of what she saw in Ombria. So she sent Mag to grateful clients in the upper world to be educated. Mag learned to read in the back room of an elegant brothel, following words across a page above a jewelled and scented finger. She learned languages from a retired smuggler, who spoke three well, seven well enough to live on, and whose parrot supplied her with a tantalizing vocabulary which the smuggler could be persuaded, with old sherry, to translate. She created eerie fires and stinks and subterranean bubblings in the book-strewn rooms of a brewer who, in the evenings, put on a long robe and a solemn expression, and spoke of the transmutation of the physical and spiritual world. Mag, whose idea of the spiritual world was what spoke out of Faey’s fires, paid scant heed to the foggy, beer-steeped philosophy. Nor did she notice, for years, the cow-eyed glances of the brewer’s young son. But she loved the colored fires and salts, the essences, the apparatus, the occasional explosions. She picked up math from helping a baker with his recipes, and the baker’s wife with their accounts. The history of Ombria, the intricate and precarious structure of its ruling family, as well as the spider web of the streets, she learned by breathing, it seemed, or by listening to resonances in the air. Odd facts found her and clung; expertly, she wove the world around her, for ignoranc
e was dangerous, and the heart she had eaten had become her defense.

  Seven years passed before she met the woman to whom she should have given that heart. Faey had taken the second making herself to the palace, for her small assistant was still stupefied with impressions. Seven years later, a second request had come from within the gate. For what, Faey would not say, but Mag, watching her read the note the tongueless man had brought, saw Faey’s mouth tighten.

  “That woman.” She turned, began rattling among jars, boxes, dried bats, moth-riddled sacks. “Old she-spider. She must have died a century ago; it’s a wonder her bones don’t clatter when she moves.”

  “What does she want?” Mag asked, putting a name to the description.

  “Never you mind what she wants, just don’t swallow it this time. Come here and hold this.”

  Mag rose from the gilt chair she sat on. Candle-like at fourteen, she was tall and lean and pale as wax but for her hair, which was a long, untidy straw-gold mass, and her odd, slanting eyes, the color of coffee with too much cream in it. She still wore whatever she found in the old chests and cupboards in the tumbledown mansions. That day it was black silk, jet beads, white lace, a sedate and scholarly look at odds with her unruly hair. Faey, who had been born in Ombria before it had a past, had sunk gradually underground along with it. No longer remembering her own face, she changed faces as often as she changed her clothes. Mag had gotten used to waking up to a stranger using Faey’s rich, husky, imperious voice. Now, she had yellow-grey hair and violet eyes; she was dressed in what looked like an alchemist’s robe with bits of mirror sewn all over it. She gave Mag a skein of silk on a spool to hold, and walked one end of the thread across the room. It had been a ballroom once. Ornate sconces and pastel colors still clung to the walls, despite spells that should have scorched the paint. Faey plucked prisms like fruit off the chandeliers when she needed them; she had worn all the faces in the paintings. The mirrors, overused, were shadowy with images. Mag, who had guessed from the length of the thread what Faey was making, felt a peculiar tightening in her throat, as if the gold heart were still caught there. She wondered who was about to die.