Ombria In Shadow

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She said, hiding an edginess behind the sweet, equivocal voice she had acquired from the brothel, “Can’t she do her own spells?”

  “Domina Pearl? Some, she can do. But not this one. This one is old, and it casts no shadow of the maker and it leaves no trace.” She sniffed, part at dust, part at Domina. “Her meanness outruns her talents. She’s mostly imagination. But up there, that mostly works.”

  Standing at the far wall, she measured a shorter length, severed the silk with precision, her teeth snapping like shears. Mag watched her out of still eyes. This was what humans did to each other: took one another’s lives and then pretended they had not. Faey was honest in her own way; she was too powerful to need to lie. But Mag, feeling the gold heart again in her throat, sensed that dealing death to humans would make her irrevocably human.

  “Hold steady,” Faey said.

  “I am.”

  She measured another short length and bit it off. Holding the three ends between her teeth, she braided the two shorter lengths down the long strand Mag held. Mag, watching shadows quiver at the edge of the room, heard Faey’s murmuring with occult clarity. The spell seemed to tremble down the strand into her ear. Faey took the thread ends from her mouth and pinched them. Three drops of blood fell on the floor. She took the light from a candle behind her onto her fingers, applied the tiny flame to the braid. It worked its way down, while she caught falling ash and blood in her palm. Mag stood quite still, expressionless, a thing carved of wax. A bird fluttered above the flame, a carrion crow of smoke, watching, waiting. Mag stared it down: it was dream, a wish of Domina Pearl’s, nothing. The flame reached the end of the braid, began its long, slow journey down the single strand, leaving an unbroken gossamer strand of ash in its wake.

  “Hold steady,” Faey whispered. “Steady.”

  “Yes,” Mag said, thinking: I am wax, I am a making, I am nothing. Slowly the flame came toward her; a drop of sweat rolled down her face like wax. Words followed the flame down the ash; she wanted to tilt her head, shake them out of her ear. The flame reached her finally; Faey’s voice, ragged and toneless, came from the other end of the room.

  “Blow it out.”

  She ducked her head, sucked it in between her lips.

  Either Faey did not notice, or it did not matter. She began looping the thread of ash in her hand, while Mag toyed with the taste in her mouth, and wondered whose life it was. Faey set the coil of ashes into an ivory box, and sent Mag with it to the palace.

  The sunflowers drooped beside the gate; their eyes had been picked out by birds. Mag stood among them in a chill autumn wind, alone in the streets of Ombria, her quick eyes missing not even the slink of black cat in the dark. She saw the shadow that came out of the palace before it saw her. A small woman moved into the torchlight between the gates. She wore black, close-fitting silk like a shroud, and a fantastic hair style: a tall, severe hillock above her brow in which she could have hidden an arsenal of dainty weapons. Mag smelled the age wafting from her, not even living ravages, but the dusty scent of old bones. She stood as intent as a cat among the sunflowers, her breathing hidden beneath the murmuring leaves. The woman sensed her finally; she stared into the withering stalks with a long, unblinking gaze. She lifted a finger, crooked it.

  “Come here.”

  Mag moved into the light. The woman’s eyes seemed to see more of Mag than anyone had ever seen in her life.

  “You are Faey’s making.”

  Mag said nothing, not willing to give this old raven even the sound of her voice. Domina Pearl smiled, a thin smile like a wrinkle in old leather.

  “Who made you really, I wonder? Did she find you in some doorway? Or do you have a more complex history? Is she too stupid to know you know you are human? You are curious. You like knowing things, seeing secrets. I will tell you this: if I find you watching me again I will unmake you so well, past and future, that not even Faey will remember you existed. Give me the box.”

  That night, the Prince of Ombria, who had suffered odd, sudden ailments all his life, grew very ill. Mag sat long past morning beside the chimney that rose into the roots of the sunflowers, listening to snatches of gossip echoing down the stones, as carriages of physicians and far-flung family rattled through the gate. She fell asleep listening, her head against the chimney stones. In her dreams, she heard the voices drift down from above, telling her that the prince’s life had been mysteriously spared; he would not die that night. The last thing she saw, in memory or warning, were two eyes as black and still as a toad’s eyes watching her.

  THREE

  Cat and Mouse

  When the prince finally took to his deathbed two years later, it was without Faey’s help. Receiving word of his uncle’s death, Ducon Greve picked the weeping Kyel up in his arms and disappeared, as far as anyone could tell. Exactly where they vanished on their way to bid farewell to the dead man, no one was able to explain to Domina Pearl, though everyone, she was assured, had been watching the two of them at all times.

  “I was afraid of this,” the Black Pearl said sharply. “The bastard will kill the boy. Find them.”

  Ducon, who had spent much of his life exploring the honeycomb of secret passages, hidden doorways, stairs behind stairs in the ancient, rambling palace, listened to this exchange as he walked along a narrow passage behind the corridor wall where the guards and courtiers were gathered. He held Kyel in one arm, and a candle in one hand. Kyel clung to his neck, silent, wide-eyed, watching the shadows plummet down the panelled walls ahead of them. There were unlit tapers Ducon had placed in sconces during other rambles; this time, knowing they would be sought, he did not leave a trail of light behind him. How well Domina Pearl knew the palace, he had no idea. If she found them alone, without witnesses, she might kill them both and lay Kyel’s death on Ducon’s own mute head.

  “May we talk yet?” Kyel whispered. Ducon, still hearing the murmur of voices beyond the wall, put his finger to his lips. The boy was silent again; he was still too astonished by the secret paths within the house to remember to cry. It was his small pale face, his quiet, hopeless weeping when he had been told that his father was dead and that Lydea did not want to stay with him any longer, that had cut Ducon to the heart. Without thinking, he had the child in his arms; without thinking, he had taken Kyel as far as he could get from time and death, to quiet his grief.

  He stopped at three hinged panels limned with carved roses. The panels opened under his touch. A few steps upward took them into a windowless chamber on a secret floor of rooms invisible from outside the palace. The rooms were full of moth-eaten tapestries, tiny, stiff, ornate chairs, paraphernalia from forgotten centuries. He set Kyel on his feet.

  “We can talk now.”

  Kyel gazed around him, then up at Ducon, out of his father’s dark blue eyes. He said, “Is this a secret place?”

  “This is your place. All these secrets, this house, all of Ombria is yours.”

  “Not yours.”

  “No. Not mine, nor Domina Pearl’s.”

  “But you,” Kyel said, “know all these secret places.”

  Ducon smiled a little. “Your father knew a few of them.”

  “Is this where Lydea went?”

  “No.” His smile had vanished. He knelt, drawing Kyel close to him so that the child could not see his face. Lydea was a blown flame; Lydea was yesterday; Lydea, alone on the streets of Ombria, was already changing into something neither of them would recognize, if she survived to see them again. “Lydea went back to her father.”

  “Domina Pearl said she didn’t want to stay with me.”

  “Domina Pearl was mistaken. Lydea loves you very much.” He hesitated, not knowing how much bitterness the boy could understand that night. “She would have stayed for you.”

  “Domina made her go,” Kyel whispered. He pushed his face hard against Ducon, burrowing away from what he saw. His voice rose suddenly, muffled in Ducon’s shirt. “Domina made Jacinth go, and Lydea—will she make you go?”

/>   “Maybe.” Kyel lifted his head; his face was scarlet, tear-streaked. He drew breath to shout; Ducon pulled him close again, his face against Kyel’s hot, wet cheek. “Shh. If they hear us, nothing will be secret.”

  “Tell her no!”

  “You will tell her. Not now, but when you are older. Now, you must do whatever she wants, and when you want to tell her no, you must draw a picture of what you want to say no to. I’ll show you a secret place to leave it. Never tell her no to her face, until you are old enough to make her do what you want. I’ll help you when I can. Promise—”

  “Ducon, don’t go.”

  “I won’t, unless I must.” He held Kyel’s face between his hands, seeing his uncle again. A thumb of grief pushed against his throat. He swallowed, dropped his forehead against Kyel’s. “Please,” he whispered. “Play this game with me, of silence, secret drawings, secret places. Please. Promise.”

  Kyel slumped against him. The promise was a long time coming; when it came, it was little more than a breath of shaped air.

  Ducon took him higher in the palace, showed him spider webs of passages, cunningly wrought doors opening into bedrooms, council chambers, ballrooms. The secrets there did not interest Ducon much; having learned to thread through them, he used them only to get to the place that intrigued him most, where he was slowly leading Kyel. Kyel, sometimes in his arms, sometimes holding his hand, went willingly, though his face was stiff and white with grief and shock. He seemed to hope that if they walked far enough, Ducon would lead him out of sorrow and fear and uncertainty, into a morning in which his father only slept and Domina Pearl did not exist. They went to the hidden, forgotten crown of the palace, so high that when they first heard the mice-like pattering on the roof, Kyel asked in astonishment,

  “What is it?”

  “Rain.”

  The rain came down and down and down, like the song Ducon heard Lydea sing to Kyel one night, her voice lilting down, down, down as Kyel’s eyelids slowly drooped. Kyel clung hard to Ducon’s hand, for there were more noises around them than the rain. The old walls wept water; timbers were rotting, old mortar crumbling, newer plaster bleeding damp, swelling, as if the inner house were in pain. Roosting pigeons heard their steps, fluttered off exposed rafters into the dark. Ducon felt rain in his hair. Vast rooms loomed about his fluttering candle; the shadows moved and sighed. Fire pulled gold out of the dark: flaked gold trim around doors and long windows in rooms where the patterns of slow, complex dances had worn into the floor. Ducon had sketched that door, that window; he watched them now, as he stood at the elusive boundary between light and shadow, and wondered if the fiery star of light in a shard of glass was a reflection of his candle, or another light moving to meet him.

  The palace, like the city, had been sinking into itself longer than memory, floors shrinking, chipped paint revealing underlayers, joists and beams shifting restlessly, night by night, century by century. Ducon, for reasons he scarcely understood, had made himself witness to the changing, in hundreds of sketches and watercolors he had made through the years. The Black Pearl occasionally rifled through them, left them disordered without caring that he saw. He wondered if she knew why he would paint the same door again and again in changing lights. Mingled among the doorways, gates, thresholds, stairs and alleys of Ombria, they deceived her eyes; she thought he wandered only in the streets to find all his ruined doorways. So he guessed, and hoped it was true, and that they would not find her waiting for them in the old palace’s heart.

  Kyel made a sound and stumbled; Ducon realized he must be walking half-asleep. He stooped, picked the child up. Kyel was trembling with cold, his eyes smudged with weariness, but he turned in Ducon’s hold, gazing ahead toward whatever hope Ducon had walked so far to find for them. It was only another doorway: this one distinguished by painted irises twining up the carved wooden posts. One post was cracked, bent under the shifting weight of the ceiling, the paint long warped away. The other still bloomed irises in delicate greens and purples. Ducon stopped.

  He stood there for a long time, at the threshold beneath the lintel, in the moment between worlds, watching the flat slab of dark not even the light of his candle could enter, while Kyel finally fell asleep against his shoulder.

  Air trembled on the threshold, smelling of grass, slow rain, lavender. A light sparked, reflecting Ducon’s candle; how near or far, he could not tell in the utter darkness. There were voices, whisperings. A bell began its slow dirge, faint and far away within the shadow, for someone who had died. Ducon felt the icy hand of sorrow and wonder glide over him. Shaken, unable to move, he heard a second bell, louder, on this side of the shadow, its great open mouth speaking the word that Royce Greve could not. Ducon closed his burning eyes and wondered if, in the shadow city, someone stood like him, in a secret place, listening to the mourning bell of a city within a tale.

  Kyel woke when they left the rain behind, entered the maze of secret passages again.

  “Are we there?” he asked. Ducon walked quickly, taking a shorter route, alert for footsteps, unexpected voices.

  “Not yet.”

  Kyel drowsed again, woke when Ducon stopped beside a little door. He blew his candle out, set it in the sconce beside the door, and shifted the sconce. The door clicked, opened a crack.

  He whispered, “This is Jacinth’s room. Since you have no nurse now, it will remain empty. This is where you can leave drawings for me. The other side of this door is a mirror. Within the mirror’s gilded frame, there are two red jewels. Push them both at once, and the door will open. Can you remember that?”

  “Two red jewels,” Kyel said obediently. His eyes were half-closed.

  “It’s a secret,” Ducon reminded him. “Our secret.” He pushed the small door open, stepped through. As the mirror clicked shut behind them, the tip of a rapier blade, quick as lightning and burning cold, snaked past Kyel to hover in the hollow of Ducon’s throat.

  Kyel moved abruptly; the blade cut. “No,” the boy said, shocked out of sleep. Ducon, frozen, stared into the cold eyes of one of the household guards who had watched his eccentric roaming in and out of the palace for years without question. The guard’s bleak, empty face was so expressionless it seemed entranced. He no longer recognized the man he might kill, Ducon realized; he would recognize only Domina Pearl.

  Ducon saw her then, standing quietly beside the doorway between Kyel’s bedchamber and the nurse’s. More guards poured past her into the room, their swords drawn, their empty eyes intent on the Black Pearl’s prey. Ducon could not tell if she had seen him come out of the wall; her eyes told him nothing either. It will not matter anymore, he thought in sudden surprise that his life ended there, at a step through a mirror.

  But again, he was surprised.

  “Take the prince to his bed,” Domina Pearl said to the guards massed and prickling like a hedgehog around Ducon. “Summon his attendants. Leave the bastard to me.”

  The rapier loosed him. Ducon set Kyel down gently, feeling him tremble. The child drew breath to speak. Ducon shook his head slightly and Kyel swallowed words, his mouth pinched tight. His eyes clung to his cousin until guards falling into ranks around him hid him from view.

  Domina Pearl closed the door behind them. She gazed at Ducon a moment without speaking. Her face, he thought wearily, resembled some barren landscape, a desert, a cliff, more than anything human. He matched her stare for stare, feeling the blood seep into his shirt from the rapier’s cut.

  The old jaws creaked open. “Ducon Greve. I don’t need you in order to rule Ombria. I do not even need the boy. Any of his doddering, whey-faced relatives in line to inherit would do as well for me, likely with less trouble. I am older than the memory of anyone alive in this court. I have been called great-aunt to rulers and their heirs far longer than anyone would care to delve into. With a prince scarcely out of his cradle and his direct heirs glimpsing into their open graves, I can finally assume power. No one would dare argue rights with me to my face. Would you?”
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br />   The question seemed rhetorical, but he opened his mouth to offer a reckless answer anyway. A spider web of lines covered her face; her voice thinned. “Yes. I know you that well. So I will warn you once, now, that if you challenge me, or conspire against me, or interfere with me in any way, I will kill Kyel and lay the blame on your head. Do you understand me?”

  “No,” he whispered. “I don’t understand you at all.”

  She showed him cracked yellow teeth, like some ancient, feral street cat. It was, he realized, her version of a smile. “Good. I have many eyes in this palace, many ears. If you betray me, I will know. I would prefer to keep the boy alive to maintain a semblance of continuity. An illusion of hope. The prince is dead, long live the prince. I may need that illusion to suit my purposes with other courts, other countries. But his life depends upon you, my lord Ducon. If you do nothing to harm me, I will do nothing to harm him.”

  She turned. In that brief moment he thought how easy it would be to crush those dry bird-bones at her neck between his fingers. She stopped, glanced back at him, and he felt hands as cool and smooth as the glass behind him slide around his throat and tighten. “A word, my lord Ducon,” he heard through the sudden black wind roaring through his head, “of warning.”

  He woke some time later at the foot of the mirror, his throat as raw as if he had swallowed a rapier. He managed to find his feet and stumble into Jacinth’s bed. There he took some comfort in her lingering scent of violets and the memory of her delicate hands before the long night opened its toad’s eyes in his thoughts and watched.