Ombria In Shadow

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She saw quite clearly in spite of it, even into her waxling’s head. “Yes,” she said dreamily, as if Mag had asked, “the poison is in the ash. Take the pictures out of the frames and tear them up. Cut them if they don’t tear. Put the pieces into the cauldron. They’ll melt away soon enough, with what’s in there. But they’ll leave their images among the ashes…”

  “What else is in there?” Mag asked in spite of herself. Faey, beginning to speak to the cauldron, did not answer. Mag cut and tore paper and canvas, mingled cloud and city, tree and child and dying knight into the brew. What lines they might make for Ducon as they came out of the charcoal, she could not guess. When she finished, Faey handed her the paddle.

  “Gently, my waxling, gently. It will sear if it splashes on you.”

  Mag stirred. The mess turned various colors from the paint, then no color at all, so deeply black that the cauldron seemed to be filled with night. Faey watched it without blinking, still murmuring, her drifting eyes hooded. Her voice grew smaller and smaller; so did her brew, ebbing toward the bottom of the cauldron. Finally she whispered a word. The last of the inky liquid shrank together and hardened. A rounded stick of artists’ charcoal lay at the bottom of the cauldron.

  Faey loosed a sigh; her eyelids flickered open. She reached down briskly, picked up the charcoal and tossed it lightly in her hand. “There. Now we can get some rest.” Mag’s eyes followed the charcoal as Faey turned to lay it gently in a plain wooden box. “Don’t touch this,” she warned Mag. “It will poison you as easily as Ducon Greve.”

  “Yes, Faey.”

  The sorceress dusted charcoal off her hands and stretched, popping a bone or two back into place. Then she rearranged her face and yawned.

  “Clean up, my waxling, and take the toad back up.” She slid the wooden box into her skirt pocket. “I have the perfect case for the charcoal in my room. Gold with ivory inlay. It’s worth giving away for what I’m being paid to kill the bastard.” She paused, blinking, then touched her eyes with her fingers, and added with an unaccustomed hint of regret, “Well, the Black Pearl would have been the death of him sooner or later. This is just sooner.”

  Mag lay awake later, listening for Faey’s snores. The gypsy was unusually quiet for hours. Finally, when the Watch on the streets cried midnight, Mag heard a delicate, sea-shell snoring echoing through the house. She slipped out of bed, walked barefoot to Faey’s room, avoiding the slats and steps that creaked. The door was open. Faey had fallen asleep with a candle burning. An Illustrated Book for Gardeners lay open across her face. The room, untidy at best, was a formidable chaos of half-visible things: furniture that could not possibly fit in it, great wardrobes, the corners of massive tables, other beds. Clothing or fabric was strewn everywhere; shoes from several centuries lay piecemeal and without partners all over the floor. The skins of slain animals along with their heads hung across mirrors, upside down from wardrobe doors. They watched Mag, tiny candle fires in their eyes. Even the grate seemed full of oddments, illusions, as if every painting from which Faey had ever borrowed her bedchamber were all crowding into the room at once.

  The charcoal in its gift box could be anywhere: stuffed into a shoe, in a bear’s mouth, lying on a table like an illusion in yet another room. Mag felt an odd prickling of panic, though there was still time. She could intercept the messenger or the box in the morning, exchange ordinary charcoal for the poisoned. Even if the box eluded her hands, Ducon would not drop dead immediately upon receiving it; it would take its time. On the bed, the gypsy gave a sudden snort; the book slid. Mag pressed herself against the wall outside the door, breathless and motionless as wallpaper. She could simply warn Ducon, or better, return to the palace, find his chambers and steal the charcoal. That way he would not see her face.

  The gypsy had stopped snoring.

  Mag closed her eyes, held her breath, and fashioned her thoughts into the peonies and peacocks flaunting their glories on the wall behind her. Something crashed onto the floor. The candle in Faey’s room went out.

  Faey heaved over, muttered a word or two, and began to snore again. Her waxling slunk quietly away like a cat avoiding the other boot and found her own untidy room.

  TEN

  The Magic Shop

  Lydea, still working for her father while she waited impatiently for her feet to heal, felt worry sharpen itself on the whetstone of each passing day. The child-heir of Ombria had been crowned; afterwards, he might have simply disappeared, as far as anyone knew. So had Mag, apparently, and no amount of wishing could produce her. Perhaps she had spoken the Black Pearl’s name once too often, in the wrong company. What Lydea wanted her for might be just as dangerous. But Mag’s curiosity was already snared by people and events governing Ombria, to the extent that she could meddle in subtle and eerie ways with who lived and who died, so Lydea might as well make use of her. She had thwarted Domina Pearl at least once already by saving Lydea’s life. In the fearless and coldblooded way of the young who have not yet learned what they could lose, she was weighing Ducon Greve’s life in her balance. If Lydea could persuade her to apply her peculiar talents to the palace, perhaps she could discover some role for Lydea to play in Kyel’s life that would give comfort to the child without attracting attention or suspicion.

  But where was Mag?

  She found herself finally moving without pain through her mundane tasks, though she was no less distracted. All the noisy, sweaty, hairy faces blurred together; she would gaze at them helplessly with a tray of mugs and cold meat in her hands, wishing the air would ignite into letters over their heads, telling her who wanted what. Her father complained little, though she glimpsed, a time or two, a wistful memory of sapphires in his eyes.

  One morning she found herself trying to remember the name of the sorceress with whom Mag lived.

  Underground, she had said. Not an easy place to find. Lydea, washing mugs piled up after a late night, paused to frown down at the damp floorboards. People found her, evidently, this sorceress who could unmake life and who didn’t approve of Domina Pearl. The difference between the two of them eluded Lydea, but it had seemed clear to Mag. If Mag didn’t come to Lydea, then Lydea would go to Mag. Underground couldn’t be that difficult to find. It was as simple as not breathing; everyone found their way there in the end.

  She blinked back the sudden sting of tears. Fate, she thought.

  Faey.

  “I’m going out for a little,” she told her father when she finished. She had not, she realized with some surprise, been out the door since she had flung herself, bruised and bloody, through it into the path of her father’s broom. He remembered, too; she saw the sudden darkness in his eyes.

  But he only said, thinking she meant to look for work, “Perhaps it’s best.” He bent, reached into the petrified boot behind the bar where he kept his money. He handed her a coin. “In case you see something you need.” He added gruffly, at her expression, “I’d pay anyone else to do what you do.”

  “You’d show anyone else the door,” she said wryly. “I’ll be back before it gets busy in here.”

  “Be careful.”

  By daylight the narrow streets were as ragged, noisome and lively as she remembered them. She dodged cows and sheep led to market or slaughter, stepped through skinny urchins playing intense and mysterious games with a stick or a ball of rags. She resisted urges to catch hold of a hank of hair or a dirty ear and demand: Did you try to run me to death that night? Did you swallow my ring? By day, their watery, shifty eyes looked around her, through her. She existed in some other world; if they had pursued her, it had only been in a dream. Smells changed with every breath she took: great waxen wheels of cheese in a shop, a puddle of piss, a waft of green from a piebald patch of grass in front of an inn, perfume, a billow of brine from the sea. She was looking for something, she realized after a time. She didn’t remember what, but she would recognize it when she saw it. Some childhood memory: a dusty window, the door into an empty house left ajar for so many years
that it had taken root in the floor. A place that led into, and then down into an echoing darkness that smelled of water. Or had she dreamed that?

  She stopped her headlong ramble into childhood. She had never found a sorceress then, and it didn’t seem the best way to find one now. She looked at the shop signs around her with a clearer eye than memory. Might a baker know where a sorceress lived? Unlikely. An apothecary? Possibly. A purveyor of fine quills and bound blank books for divers and sundry purposes? She could not venture a guess about that one, but since most could barely write their names in that part of the city, she could make a shrewd guess about the state of the purveyor’s business. The dust was so thick on the window panes she couldn’t tell if anyone was inside. The window had been cobbled together from the bottoms of glass bottles, thick, whorled circles shaded green, blue, amber. The sign above the door, a quill letting fall three drops of ink like blood in a fairy tale, was so old it had cracked.

  She blinked and remembered it.

  She had opened the door long ago and gone in…but there was no inside. That had frightened her; she had fled back into the sunlight. What exactly had frightened her? she wondered curiously, and wrestled with the warped door until it opened. She heard a bell ring somewhere, though there was none on the door. She closed it and stared, astonished, at the place where the back wall of the shop should have been.

  There was nothing. The walls and ceiling and floor framed a square of darkness. A breath of moist air and earth came out of the dark. She moved cautiously toward it, hoping that the floor was not balancing on a precipice. It seemed solid enough. She held onto the edge of one wall and looked down.

  She caught a brief, puzzling glimpse of a black river far below, outlined and illumined by softly glowing lamps along its banks. The lamps and the water seemed to flow forever into the distance. Then the door opened behind her, and the bell clanged again, a jarring, tuneless note like a cowbell somewhere down in the dark.

  She turned, startled, expecting anyone, anything other than the portly woman in voluminous black, the bun on the top of her head wearing two jet skewers and a white, starched frill around it. She studied Lydea silently, her hands clasped demurely in front of her.

  Lydea said dazedly, “I’m looking for a sorceress named Faey. Is this—Do you know—”

  The woman nodded. “It’s one of my doors.” She had an opulent, husky voice that seemed at odds with the plump, prim face and the servant’s garb. As though sensing Lydea’s confusion, she touched her own face, feeling at it like someone blind. She gave a sudden snort of laughter. “I’ve tangled with my housekeeper. She’s not quite alive. You are—?”

  “Lyd—” Her voice would not come; she cleared her throat. “Lydea. I’m—I was—I—”

  “Come in,” the sorceress said graciously. And suddenly they were in, somewhere within the cavernous dark, Lydea guessed, standing in a small, cozy room. Its yellow walls were sprigged with painted violets; plump chairs seemed to have wandered through it and stopped at random beside potted plants spreading great fans of leaves as sharp as swords. The sorceress had evidently returned the body to her housekeeper. There was a chaotic tussle of color and image where she had been. Lydea watched, her mouth hanging indecorously. Finally a complete woman appeared, flushed and patting her hair as if she had been fighting her way out of a small whirlwind.

  “Sit down,” she said, with the same fascinating mix of rich and raucous in her voice. It did not match this face either, which was made of ivory and roses, the lines beside eyes and mouth as faint as cobweb yet, the hair an indeterminate hue between white-gold and white. Her eyes flicked over Lydea’s beer-stained homespun, the sleeves still rolled up from washing, her creased cap, her wooden clogs. She took a guess. “Love, is it?”

  “Love?”

  “You want a potion? To make someone love you?”

  “Oh. No. He’s dead.” She hesitated; Faey watched her curiously. “I’m looking for Mag,” she said finally. “I want her to do something for me. Maybe I’m wrong to ask.”

  The fine, arched brows rose as high as they could go. “You want to use my waxling?”

  “I didn’t know—She doesn’t seem at all waxlike to me. She helped me once before in odd ways, so I thought of her for this.”

  “How did she help you?” The rich voice purred; the wide green eyes watched like a predatory cat. There was no way out, Lydea realized; no way but into, through.

  “She saved my life. When the Prince of Ombria died, Domina Pearl threw me out of the palace in the middle of the night for being the prince’s mistress.”

  Both voice and eyebrows quivered at that. “You.”

  “Well, I wasn’t dressed like this.”

  Faey leaned back with an unladylike thump, her eyes trying to piece together the spell that Lydea had cast over the prince. Lydea pulled off her cap to help; her hair fell limply, still damp from steaming dish-water. But the sorceress was nodding, illumined. “I remember. The red-haired tavern girl. I heard rumors. But what do you think Mag can do for you? If you’re looking for revenge against Domina Pearl, you don’t want Mag and you can’t afford me.”

  “No. I’m not that much of a fool.”

  “Well? People don’t find their way here because they lead sensible lives. What kind of fool are you?”

  “I suppose it is a matter of love. I want a disguise, to get back into the palace. It’s for Kyel’s sake. I can’t bear to leave him alone in the Black Pearl’s care. I’ve known him since he was born. You might say we grew up together.”

  Faey made a noise in the back of her throat. She broke a spray of leaves as long as peacock feathers off the plant beside her and fanned herself. Her eyes had narrowed. “And you wanted Mag for—?”

  “To spy in the palace, find some likely disguise for me. I never paid enough attention while I was there. I only looked at the surface of things within the palace. Not at how they were all kept working together. I thought of shoes, not about where they went to be cleaned, and satin sheets, but not who changed them. I thought Mag could—I know it’s dangerous—maybe I’m not thinking—”

  Faey was. A trickle of smoke or mist came out of one nostril. Lydea’s throat dried. “And you think she will do this for you?”

  “Well, she seems—She has an eye on what happens in the palace. She said she dislikes Domina Pearl.”

  The fan in Faey’s hand folded suddenly with a rattle of leaves. Lydea gripped the arms of her chair nervously. The sorceress rose, paced, the leaves twitching like a cat’s tail. Chairs shifted out of her way, Lydea saw with amazement. The sorceress’s eyes had turned black as charcoal.

  “Would Mag do this for you?” she asked abruptly.

  “I think—I think so.” Lydea swallowed, tried to steady her voice. “She is so curious, and so fearless. She came to me at my father’s tavern to ask about Ducon Greve.”

  “Ask what about him?”

  “Where his loyalties lie. In case you—” She faltered. “If—”

  But Faey only waved him away with her leaves. “Ducon Greve is taken care of,” she said with chilling disinterest. There was a hard furrow between her brows. Her face was changing, the elegant lines loosening, sagging, the brows growing coarse. Her neatly coiled hair fell down suddenly. She tossed it impatiently out of her face and pinned Lydea motionless with murky, smoldering eyes. “When did you last see Mag?”

  “The day,” Lydea whispered, “they buried Royce.”

  “Not since.”

  “No.”

  The sorceress flung herself back into a chair and touched her face here, there, tightening, adjusting, refining. The frown went and came again, a fainter line. “I warned her to stay away from the Black Pearl.”

  Since she was trapped anyway and apt to be turned to cinders by those eyes, Lydea risked a question. “What is she? Domina Pearl?”

  The sorceress only nibbled a palm leaf between perfect, white teeth. She seemed to be listening to something within herself, or in the dark beyond the pr
etty illusion around them. After a while, Lydea ventured another. “Do you know where Mag is?”

  Faey picked a fleck of green from between her teeth. “I have no idea.” She looked at Lydea, her eyes like molten stone. “Of course you’re welcome to wait with me. Tea?”

  ELEVEN

  The Stranger

  The death of Halil Gamelyn, following so closely the death of the Prince of Ombria, had a stupefying effect on the court. It seemed a portent of things to come, that the powerful minister and councillor of the buried prince had so suddenly breathed his last among the potted palms. Very little was said about the matter. He had felt his heart fail, it was expediently decided, and had stumbled into the conservatory looking for help. Why his lips and tongue had turned black, no one ventured to guess. But conjecture cast an eerie, frightened silence throughout the palace. For a day or two afterward, Ducon moved through his life with the expectation that it might unexpectedly and ruthlessly come to an end at the next moment. The Black Pearl had heard a whisper of conspiracy within the palm trees; she must have known Ducon had been among them. He refused to leave the palace for the streets, where he might have been paradoxically safer. Her malevolent eye would turn to Kyel next, if she thought Ducon had betrayed her and fled.

  But she simply sent the body back to Gamelyn’s family, and made no further reference to the matter. Her small, erect figure in black silk moving quietly across a room could transfix the courtiers, pare conversation down to meaningless, safe noises. She did not mention conspiracies to Ducon, or secret hiding places behind mirrors. She had, Ducon realized with growing uneasiness, effectively rid herself of a man who had threatened them both, and had cast suspicion on Ducon at the same time.