Ombria In Shadow

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  FOUR

  The Alchemist’s Riddle

  “So the old besom cleared the Reprobate out at last,” Faey said. A bell in the palace had tolled its solitary dirge all night long. At dawn, other bells in clock- and watch-towers all over the city had joined it. The air seemed to pulse with ponderous, invisible wings of iron. “Leaving a child to rule and a senile great-uncle or herself as regent. I don’t need a crystal ball to tell me that she’ll make herself regent, and that the bastard will be her next prey.”

  “Not the child?” Mag asked. They were eating breakfast for once at breakfast time. Faey was dressed in deep mourning. She had borrowed her wan, beautiful, grief-stricken face and her clothes from a painting that hung above her on the wall. Shadows served them, vague sketches of color and movement dressed in a motley of fashions, who often seemed not to see one another. Faey’s cook was a mountainous, efficient woman who kept the kitchens dim and pretended not to notice who among her staff was real and who was shade. “Ducon Greve won’t inherit; why would Domina Pearl fear him?”

  “He won’t inherit, but he may decide to take. She can control the child for many years—forever if she begins right. But Ducon is an unknown quantity.”

  He was indeed. For all her listening beneath the sunflowers, Mag had heard little about him. She broke a corner off a piece of toast and winced. She had sprained her thumb in some altercation during the wild run the night before. Remembering the argument at the sunflower gate, she felt a sudden urge to dabble in politics. The palace, which for years had seemed less accessible and far less interesting than the streets of Ombria, was taking on intriguing hues of light and dark. People emerged to line themselves on either side. The child and the old woman faced one another. The outcast mistress, a mop in her hands, took her stand beside Kyel. Where, Mag wondered, would Ducon Greve stand? On his own? A divided man, one foot in shadow and one in light? Or beside the child prince? Surely not with the old besom, who might sweep him from present into past as tidily as she had done his uncle.

  Faey, calmly eating kippers underneath her own despairing face, flicked a glittering jet glance down the long table. “You’re not thinking, are you, my waxling? I didn’t make you to think.”

  “Occasionally,” Mag admitted, “I have a thought.”

  “Well. Makings such as you are difficult and seldom flawless. You keep away from Domina Pearl. She’s business for us, but she’s ruthless. I don’t want you anywhere in her thoughts.”

  “I thought you said she is mostly imagination.”

  “So she is,” Faey said softly, “and so are you. She’d melt you down like a candle if you got in her way. Don’t niggle arguments at me, just keep out of her shadow.”

  “Yes, Faey.”

  “I want you to go above. I need certain things. Don’t be long; we’ll have work by noon. Those who fear Domina Pearl’s housekeeping will be scattering through the city looking for protective charms.”

  “How can you do for them,” Mag asked curiously, “and at the same time do for her? You’ll undo your own spells.”

  Faey shrugged. “It’s business. Those who paid for protection won’t be around to demand their money back if it fails.” She tracked a stray fish bone with her tongue, removed it delicately from between her lips, and rose. “Come to me when you’ve finished; I’ll give you a list of what I want from up there.”

  Mag, alone but for the ghosts, toyed with a crust and entertained a carefully chosen thought or two. Coffee flavored with mint and chocolate was poured into her cup. She raised it to her face like a flower and inhaled noisily, then took a fashionably mincing sip. If the Black Pearl sent to Faey for help in ridding the world of Ducon Greve, would that be the world’s gain or its loss? Faey was rousing her powers and her waxling to deal in death again. Mag wanted to know for whose sake she might risk Faey’s fury and mistrust by thwarting her spells. To Faey, business was business. She bore no one ill will, even those she harmed, and she assumed her waxling thought as she did. But her waxling felt, as strongly as wax feels flame on the wick, that Domina Pearl was another matter entirely.

  Her bones and her shadow and her dank eyes boded nothing but ill for Ombria. Her ways had eaten the heart out of its better days; she was busily turning the city into a parched, crippled, bitter husk. Faey seemed indifferent to the Black Pearl’s workings in the city or the palace, as if, living beneath and in the past, she could not be touched by the mausoleum’s schemings. But Domina Pearl had above all a power for hatred of which Faey seemed oblivious. The Black Pearl had thrown the prince’s mistress out to be murdered in the streets, for no other crime than an upside-down innocence. She would at least contemplate the death of a child. She would kill again in secret, with or without Faey’s help. Mag, who was fascinated by secrets, studied the coffee trembling under her breath. How much power did the old besom wield? Where had she gotten it? Who was she? Was she even of Ombria, or had she been born in some distant country so long ago that nothing was left of it now but its name and its dubious achievement, the indestructible Pearl?

  The woman in the painting suddenly found her mouth and spoke. “Mag!”

  She started guiltily. “Yes, Faey.”

  “You are thinking, my waxling.”

  She made a swift decision, and finished her coffee on the way up. “I’m coming,” she said, both to Faey and to the young woman on Sheepshead Lane, whose sapphire-heeled shoes Mag had tossed down the chimney beneath the sunflowers.

  She took them with her when she went above into day.

  She bought a lamb’s heart at the butcher’s. She waited at a familiar doorway in a back alley for goats’ eyes and candles made of goat fat. At a small shop with dusty windows and an ancient apothecary sign, she picked up powdered bone and extractions from strange, fleshy plants that had been diverted from Domina Pearl’s pirate ships. For the cook, she bought violets. At the brewer’s, she traded silver for quicksilver, and a crock of Faey’s favorite ale. The brewer’s son had trouble counting change and kept dropping coins until his amiably chatting father went to load a few kegs for a merchant. Then, as Mag worried the crock into her basket, trying not to squash goats’ eyes and violets, the young man reached across the counter and seized her hand. She gazed at him in wonder. He had thick, moist fingers, and she needed her hand to shift the eyes.

  “Mag,” he said huskily. His heavy, earnest face was sheened with sweat and the bluish shadow of his first beard. “How can you not see how we belong to one another? We’ve grown up together, like night and day. You are moon to my sun, you are silver to my aspiring gold—You would complete me—”

  “Wait,” she pleaded. “The crock is on the violets.”

  “Marry me. Together we would become the marvel we seek, the transmutation of time into eternity—”

  She snorted inelegantly, and felt something peculiar flowing through her bones, an unaccustomed panic, a desperate urgency she barely knew words for. He thought he recognized her as human. “You are mistaken,” she said coldly. “And from what I’ve seen of both alchemy and marriage, all the marvels lie in the expectation.”

  “Mag!” He was clinging to her basket now, while she settled the crock.

  “Besides, I belong to Faey.”

  “But she doesn’t own—”

  “She does. I am her waxling.”

  “But—”

  “Wax transmutes to smoke and air, not gold.”

  “But I love you!”

  She only stared at him, perplexed. He tossed his hands into the air with a groan, and she escaped.

  Shadows in the street told her time was passing, but she stole a little of Faey’s, taking shortcuts through an abandoned shop and what looked like the walled end of an alley to get to Sheepshead Lane. There she found the Rose and Thorn, where she had last seen the harried, bleeding woman who had fled across the night locked safely away behind its door. The limping tavern-wench serving beer and boiled mutton did not notice Mag. Her eyes were swollen with grief and weariness; her br
ight hair was bundled away into a cap. The man behind the bar, burly and bald as a bed knob, watched her narrowly. She worked patiently, without complaint, though her jaw tightened now and then in pain. Mag dropped one sapphire shoe into the empty bucket in a corner behind the bar and slipped away before they saw her.

  She descended, not through the nearest hole as was her childhood habit, but more sedately down a marble staircase that began life in the upper world as an innocent stairway from a cellar door. Below, Faey complained about her tardiness, but was too busy to press for explanations. A gentleman from the palace had sent a request, with gold, for a method of detecting poison. Mag sighed. It would be a smelly afternoon.

  By evening, there was more work. Two days later, Mag stood on the bank of the river outside Faey’s house, blinking tiredly at the slow dark water. Lamps along the banks, iron-wrought fantasies of palaces and carriages and windblown galleons that Faey lit when she happened to remember, tossed flowers of fire on the water. Houses on the river crumbled in the damp, revealing pale, elegant rooms, massive hearths, delicate paints. Their roofs sometimes rose to support the streets above. Rooms still sealed emitted frail lights; shadows moved like dreams across silk curtains. The undercity wandered into caves, bridged side streams, flowed toward a distance with no horizon, its streets breaking over chasms in which, far below, other lights patterned the dark water.

  Mag could smell the spells in the ruffled ivory taffeta she wore. She could smell them on her skin. The spells lay in small, expensive boxes, ready to be called for. Swallow this and nothing you eat or drink will harm you. Unwind this and stretch it across your doorway; no one will be able to pass over it. Place this beside you at night: it will cry out if it senses danger. Domina Pearl would find them, these trinkets of sorcery, and send her own request to Faey: a spell to undo all spells.

  As Faey said, no one would be alive to complain. Mag swallowed a yawn and contemplated a finger of sunlight falling a long way from a chink in a drainage ditch onto the water. She would find a chink to meddle with that spell, she decided. The Black Pearl should not have her own way so easily. Above her, cobblestones rattled continuously under carriages trailing black ribbons from their doors, making their way to the great, solemn funeral that would finally put an end to the tolling of the bells.

  “Mag!” Faey called within the house or within Mag’s mind; she was too tired to tell which.

  “Coming,” she answered, but lingered a moment longer, her eyes narrowed, searching the shadowy river-bank for the place where some woman might have come, years earlier, to bear a nut-eyed child in the dark and leave her there, wailing in the forgotten city, until the city’s sorceress stumbled out of bed, prodded her ancient face into some recognizable shape, and went to see what was disturbing her sleep.

  “Mag! My waxling! I need you now, not tomorrow.”

  Or, Mag wondered dispassionately, was I just found abandoned in some gutter above, and traded, along with a bucket of salamanders and some mandrake root, for a few coins to the sorceress who lives underground?

  She moved at last. “I’m coming.”

  “I want you to go out again,” Faey told her, and gave her a list. “When you come back, you may rest. I can do these last myself.” Then she sniffed. She was not ordinarily sensitive, but her spells had been potent. Her own eyelids hung like crescent moons with weariness, but she moved busily, gathering this and that. “Change your clothes and get aired, my waxling. A lady should aspire to smell of roses, not sulphur.”

  Rose, thought Mag.

  An hour or two later, errands finished and the sorceress satisfied, Mag sat down among the idlers in the Rose and Thorn. Like them, she wore black. The entire city seemed to be dressed in funereal shades, not only for the dead prince, but in vigorous, reckless mourning for the hope being buried with him. Mag, in brocade so old that its interweave of silver thread had tarnished, was scarcely visible behind the long black veils she had pinned to her hat. Those who caught a glimpse of her slender waist and the graceful fingers exposed beyond the lace of her fingerless gloves, came up against the ghostly swaths of black and turned uneasily back to their cups. The tavern maid, her eyes glazed by sorrow and the incessant clamor of the bells, limped over to Mag. Even she seemed startled out of her grief by the apparition.

  “What would you—” She saw the sapphire heel flash from beneath the veil and her voice died.

  “I brought your other shoe,” Mag said softly. The woman’s attention riveted itself on the opal mounted on gold between two pearls on Mag’s forefinger. She closed her eyes suddenly as if they stung. Mag added, “And this belongs to you. I took it from a sailor. The others were lost.”

  The woman’s eyes rose from the ring to the lacy dark obscuring the face within. “It was you,” she whispered. “Helping me that night. That’s how I made it through the streets alive. But how? Why did you help me?”

  Mag, who hadn’t stopped to think about it, shrugged lightly and then discovered answers. “I like meddling,” she said simply. “And I dislike Domina Pearl. I was hiding in the sunflowers at the west gate when she threw you out of the palace.”

  The woman seemed to be trying to guess at the strength, the agility hidden beneath brocade and lace. “But how?” she repeated. Mag worked a jet pin idly out of her hat, touched the long, barbed shaft to the tip of her finger. The woman’s mouth opened, but nothing came out; she watched wordlessly as Mag replaced the pin.

  “Lydea!” the tavern keeper barked from behind the bar. “Take the lady’s order and get this beer before it loses head.”

  Lydea shifted position from one bandaged foot to the other, but did not turn. She asked abruptly, “Where can I find you later? He’s counting off hours for my transgressions. Right now I doubt that I could live long enough to satisfy him.”

  “Who is he?”

  “My father.”

  Mag examined him curiously. “I never had one.”

  “They’re a mixed blessing. But I owe him for taking me in that night. And I owe you a great deal, it seems. Where do you live?”

  I live underground, Mag said silently, with a sorceress named Faey. The facts had never surprised her before. But Lydea’s weary, harrowed eyes trying to see her clearly within the shadows disconcerted Mad oddly. People knew her only vaguely as belonging to Faey. She had never been asked to explain herself in human terms. She said weakly, “It’s not an easy place to find.”

  “Oh.”

  “You could help me now, though.”

  “How?” Lydea asked promptly.

  “You must have known Ducon Greve while you were at the palace. Is he worth saving?”

  “Worth—” Lydea echoed bewilderedly. “Worth saving how? From what?”

  “From death.”

  Lydea stared at her. At the next table, her father rattled a tray irritably; heavy glass and pewter careening together could not produce his daughter’s attention. Lydea found her voice finally. “Is he in danger?”

  “Faey—the woman I live with—thinks he will be.” Lydea was still perplexed. Mag sighed noiselessly, scarcely disturbing lace, and put it more clearly. “Faey thinks that Domina Pearl will ask her to make something that will unmake Ducon.”

  “Unmake?”

  “Something subtle. A spell no one would suspect.”

  Lydea’s brows leaped up; so did her voice. “To kill him?”

  “It would be something Faey is quite capable of doing.”

  Lydea groped for the back of a chair, but she did not sit. Her eyes, stunned and horrified, seemed to expect nothing predictably human beneath the veil. “She would do that?”

  “It’s business,” Mag said fairly. “But I think that Faey must care a little about Ombria, because she doesn’t approve at all of the Black Pearl.”

  “And you.” Lydea’s voice was disappearing, burrowing high up into her throat. “What do you do?”

  “I help her.”

  Lydea backed a step at that, then stood still again, gazing in complete
confusion at the veiled contradiction under her nose. “You help her kill?”

  “No,” Mag said very softly, her eyes on a knothole between Lydea’s clogs, as though Faey might be under the floorboards listening. “She rarely does that, and when she does, I find ways to meddle without her knowledge.” She paused, remembering the taste of blood and fire when she had first given breath back to one of Faey’s undoings. “That’s why I asked you about Ducon Greve. If he is worth saving, or if Ombria would be better off without him. It’s not easy, changing Faey’s spells. And I don’t know what she would do to me if she caught me. What do you think? Should I bother?”

  Lydea stared at her, dumbfounded. Then her gaze grew inward, searching memory, and Mag glimpsed beneath her careworn, grieving face, the fine-boned beauty who had been a prince’s mistress scant days before. Lydea said slowly, “I never knew him well. He kept his life and his thoughts private, from me at least. Kyel trusted him. Which may be to Ducon’s advantage now, or may not be. I couldn’t say. He has no love for Domina Pearl, but then who does? I know he wanders through the city. He would show Royce his drawings of odd things that caught his eye in the streets. Doorways, crooked alleys, barred cellar windows. I didn’t understand them. Royce would tell him to be more careful, but he’d go out alone, unarmed, come back whenever he chose. He had no place in the world, he said once, therefore he could go everywhere.”

  Like me, Mag thought, startled by the recognition. She asked, “What does he look like?”

  “Like no one I’ve ever seen. He’s striking, with his silvery eyes and hair as white as fish bone, though he’s not much older than I am. He looks capable of taking care of himself in Ombria at night.”

  “Like me,” Mag murmured, curious now. Behind the bar, the tavern keeper upended an entire tray of mugs into a wash basin; Lydea started at the clatter. Still she lingered, caught by another memory. “He mentioned a tavern once. What was it? The King of Flounders. The name made Kyel laugh.”