Ombria In Shadow

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  The guards looked real enough, standing among the shelves in the little oval room. The fine, polished surfaces of their buckles and sheaths and the silver embroidery on. their sashes kindled cold stars from the candlelight. Their grim faces warned Mag that in the next moment their swords would slash the air into ribbons of silver; she should escape, hide herself, quickly, now. But she had grown up with ghosts, with their eyes always looking at the past, with the frail flickering embers of their thoughts. These were strangely passive; they never even blinked. They told her not that she was in danger, but that the books were, from the likes of her. They wore the uniforms of the palace guard; they were not ancient ghosts, simply no longer alive.

  They would belong to Domina Pearl. Mag felt again the dry, butterfly pulse of a vein in her throat. She had chanced across the Black Pearl’s library. The knowledge she found important, her spells, perhaps her history. But Ducon Greve had no time for history; he must be somewhere near the end of it. She turned quickly to resume her desperate search, then stopped again and allowed the nagging, slippery thought that she was trying to drown in the bottom of her mind finally surface. If she found him and he was dying, what could she do? Take him back to Faey?

  “Here,” she whispered, “there are spells.”

  Caution, left idling at the bottom of the stairs, caught up with her. She wrapped her hands in the wide black skirt before she touched the books. If it glittered later with a stardust of guilty fingerprints, the dress could remain in the palace; Mag’s hands couldn’t. She read the faded bindings carefully, hearing what they promised before she dove heedlessly into them. Maps, one said, of the Known World, Useful Plants From the Hindmost Islands and What to Do With Them, The History of Ombria From the Beginning of the World, How to Maintain Hair, Teeth and Nails After Accidental Death. She nearly opened that one. But she had no time now for Domina Pearl. Finally, a likely title in gold ink on a pale-leather binding caught her eye. Natural and Unnatural Poisons, it said, and Antidotes.

  She pulled it down and heard steps in the hall below.

  She was moving, blowing out candles and eying the shelves for a place to hide, almost before she caught her breath in surprise. Ducon, she hoped fiercely, and remembered to put the book back on the shelf. She slipped through one of the guards and hoped she left nothing of herself in his shade. There was room for her between the wall and the overladen shelves. She shifted two scrolls and looked through them, like spyglasses. Then she heard the Black Pearl’s voice in the room below and closed her eyes.

  “Look at this door,” she demanded. “And that mirror. Both wide open. He wanders through these passages; he disturbs things. What does he do, what is he looking for, if not my secrets?”

  A man’s voice, thoughtful but not servile: “I don’t know, Domina.”

  “Ask him. He has always trusted you. I want him watched. I want to know where he goes at all times. No one can find him now; he hasn’t been seen in days. He is either out on the streets, or within these walls. The child is beginning to fret again.”

  Mag, her breath stirring the scrolls, heard them coming up the stairs. She willed herself boneless, a shadow, less than a ghost, nothing. The Black Pearl stepped into the room. Mag opened her eyes suddenly, wondering if she could smell the smoke and warm wax of blown candles. But another burning taper floated into view within the circle of the scroll.

  The man carried it, apparently, for Domina Pearl came between the light and Mag’s eyes. She closed them again, thinking: Nothing. No one.

  “Where is that book…” The Black Pearl seemed to be speaking through a tube of parchment. She was close enough to smell. “He comes here, looks through my books. How does he get in here? What doors does he know besides that mirror in the nurse’s room? Has he shown you?”

  “No.”

  Mag heard an impatient breath. “I put it here, on this shelf, after I killed Halil Gamelyn.” Her voice grew thin as a fly’s wing and Mag’s skin shifted. “If he took it, I will blind him. He is clever and far too secretive. He could kill us in our beds. If we slept in them.”

  “He doesn’t mention anything more dangerous than art. That and the young prince are all he seems to care about. You must not harm him needlessly. We may need his eyes. Tell me what you’re looking for; I’ll help you search.”

  “Natural and Unnatural—Ah! Here it is.” The book slid off the shelf, revealing a swath of dark that was Mag’s sleeve. Domina Pearl turned away, and Mag saw the man’s face, lean and intent, his chestnut hair threaded, here and there, with silver. In the candlelight, his eyes flared yellow as a cat’s.

  “Who, now?” he asked curiously.

  “Kyel,” the Black Pearl said with chilling composure. “Nothing to kill him, just to subdue him, dampen his spirits, produce a melancholy more appropriate to his loss than temper tantrums. You will find him far more docile when you begin to tutor him.”

  The man’s thin mouth tightened slightly, but he said nothing. He turned to follow the Black Pearl out. The light receded down the stairs. Mag’s eyes clung to it; all her thoughts, mothlike, danced after it. At the bottom, the Black Pearl spoke again.

  “I’ll set a spell on this lock. No one but you or I will open this door.”

  She murmured something. Mag heard a faint click. Steps and voices faded. Mag stared through her paper spyglass at the dark.

  THIRTEEN

  The Jewel in the Toad

  Lydea, drinking an endless cup of tea in the sorceress’s leafy chamber, realized occasionally, in the buried part of her where time still moved, that she was spellbound. Somewhere, hours passed during a single sip; night fell as she replaced her cup in the saucer; the sun rose when she lifted it again. The sorceress, or an illusion of her, spoke lightly of the weather, though there was none, and of people whom she seemed to think that Lydea knew, while her terrible eyes smoldered and fumed boiling pitch and fire. Sentences echoed through time, repeating themselves. Now and then, Lydea, her mind as tranquil as a summer afternoon, heard the echo, felt her mouth move to say appropriate words that she must have said a hundred times between the moment she began to raise her cup and the moment it touched her lips. She never tasted the tea; she might have been drinking cloud.

  “How fortunate we are that the morning rain has ended,” the sorceress commented, though neither night nor day was visible around them. “We will be able to go after all to—” She stopped abruptly. Lydea felt perfunctory words leaving her lips like bubbles. The sorceress interrupted her harshly. “There is a stranger below.”

  Lydea, about to make her usual reply to that, realized that she had none. As if a glass dome over her had shattered, she sat in shards of time, bewilderedly trying to piece fragments together. She stared at the teacup halfway to her lips. The tea was stone-cold and had grown a tiny, floating garden of mold.

  She dropped it back into the saucer, feeling dizzy, frightened. “What—Where—”

  Faey had risen and was pacing. She looked as if she were scenting the air with her ears, or trying to see with her mind. Lydea stood up. The plants whispered around her; she caught at a chair back, lightheaded and oddly stiff.

  “How long have I been here?”

  Faey ignored her. The room was changing around them, walls growing sheer, the sharp-bladed palms withering in their pots and vanishing. The chair in Lydea’s hands fell apart; its parts turned into pebbles or little, many-legged things that scuttled away toward the river. She stood on its bank, a wall of earth rising behind them toward the light of some day or another high above her head. Only the teapot, a strange crockery animal with legs like tree trunks that poured tea through its long snout, refused to vanish.

  “Odd,” Faey remarked finally. “Very odd.”

  “I have to go home,” Lydea told her, wondering if she could climb the cliff of earth to the light. Faey flung her a glance that left a burning streak in the air.

  “I need you,” she said succinctly. “My waxling is nowhere to be found. Come with me.”

/>   “But my father—He’ll be up to his ears in dirty beer mugs.”

  “I’ll send your father a note.”

  “He can’t read.”

  “Well, he’ll have to wait,” the sorceress said irritably. “Mag doesn’t argue with me. I need someone human to deal with the body when it fails. I wish,” she added, beginning to move quickly along the river, “that people wouldn’t die down here. I can usually send them back up before they get too far, but I was busy searching for Mag…” She turned, gestured at Lydea, who could not seem to find her feet. “Do you want to walk or fly?”

  Lydea caught up with her.

  They found the man lying facedown within the rubble of a shattered room. The window he had fallen through had mostly sunk below the street. Lydea gave a cursory glance at his white hair. Then her eyes rose desperately to the scant feet of freedom that led into the noise and light of Ombria. If he had gotten in, she could get out…

  The sorceress, standing beside the body, was murmuring something with her eyes closed. Lydea heard a sharp, anguished groan from the dying. He lifted his face blindly. His skin was gray with old mortar and bloody where he had scraped himself, rattling down among the broken slate. He opened one eye and one blackened hand as if to drag himself away from Faey’s voice, and Lydea felt her bones try to leap out of her skin.

  “No!”

  The sorceress’s eyes opened. She broke off a word, stood with a curious stillness, gazing down at the man. “No,” she agreed softly as Lydea knelt beside him. She recognized him in piecemeal fashion: the silvery eye, the charcoal on his hands, the bone-white hair. Several drawings lay crumpled beneath him; others had drifted into the shadows. She rolled him over as gently as she could. He was still breathing. His other eye opened; he gazed at her senselessly.

  “Ducon.” She touched his hair lightly. “Ducon. It’s Lydea.” She heard his breath catch as she glanced in wonder up at Faey. “It’s Ducon Greve.”

  “I know it’s Ducon Greve,” the sorceress said. “I was paid to kill him.” Lydea stared at her. Faey bent, gripped Ducon’s wrist briskly and rolled him up over her shoulder. She wore him as easily as a scarf trailing down her back. “I can’t send him up in this condition.”

  “What are you going to do with him?” Lydea whispered. She got to her feet as Faey began to move, and caught at Ducon, forcing the sorceress to stop. Her voice rose to a scream that echoed down the dark river. “What are you going to do?”

  Faey turned to look at her. Her eyes, beneath the arched, elegant brows, had grown blue again. Lydea could not read the expression in them; they hardly seemed to see her at all. “I’m not sure,” the sorceress said finally. “But since my waxling is gone, you must take care of him.”

  She began to walk toward the distant, graceful line of lamps lighting the crumbling faces of houses that rose like fragments of dreams along the water. Lydea followed with one hand on Ducon’s back. She asked, her voice trembling in the aftermath of the scream, “Where are you taking him?”

  “To my house.”

  “Why did—Who wanted him killed? Domina Pearl?”

  “I have no idea. Someone very rich, whose servants wear a manticore.”

  Lydea lost a step in astonishment. “Lord Sozon? I wonder why.” She heard Ducon murmur something. She bent to hear, but he said nothing more. She stayed close to him, talking so that he could hear a familiar voice in that eerie place. “You won’t now, though. You won’t kill him.”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  Lydea, waiting, gave up finally and asked another, tentatively, “What did you do to him? It would help me to know, if you don’t want him to die.”

  “It was in the charcoal.”

  “What was?”

  “The poison.”

  Lydea heard another incomprehensible word from Ducon. She lifted her free hand, touched her closed eyes with icy fingers. “Do you have an antidote?”

  “Yes,” the sorceress said. “Me. He’ll be very weak afterwards; he’ll need someone to care for him. If that woman has my waxling, I’ll make a broth out of her bones.”

  “I wish you would,” Lydea said fervently. “Then there would only be one of you.”

  Faey was facing Lydea so suddenly that Lydea’s puzzled eyes were still trying to see her turn. The sorceress’s well-bred face was a mask of frosty displeasure. “I cannot imagine why you would insinuate that we are in any way alike.”

  “I do not believe,” Lydea said in her best courtly manner, “that I have insinuated any such thing. I said it. You’re a pair, you both are; I can’t tell the difference between you. You’re the one who tried to kill Ducon, not Domina Pearl. Living down here, safe in magic, you don’t have to care about anything or anyone. If you had killed Ducon, it would have broken Kyel’s heart. He may be only a child, but he is the Prince of Ombria, and if his heart dies so soon, so will Ombria. Not that it would come to your attention if the city over your head vanished. It would have to be dead a century or two before you’d notice.”

  The blue eyes stared at her without expression. Then the sorceress was moving again, toward a sprawling mansion that might have sunk under the weight of the immense cream-colored urns balanced on its portico. Her voice drifted back to Lydea. “I do care about something. I care about my waxling.”

  “Her name,” Lydea said coldly, catching up, “is Mag.”

  “I know. I named her.”

  “She’s not just something you made out of candle drippings. Who is she? Is she your child?”

  Something snapped out of the sorceress, as if she had spat lightning. Ducon gave a sudden cry of pain. Lydea pushed her hands tightly against her mouth.

  “Do not meddle,” Faey said softly without turning, “between me and my waxling. She belongs to me and does my bidding. That’s all you need to understand.”

  “I don’t understand anything at all,” Lydea whispered, but only to her hands.

  She recognized the plump, prim housekeeper who opened the door to them, and who betrayed, not even with the flicker of an eyelash, no surprise at the man dangling across the sorceress’s shoulder.

  “The peacock room, I think,” Faey said. The housekeeper nodded without speaking and picked up a branch of candles to light them up the marble stairway.

  In a room colored the indigo and green of peacock feathers, the sorceress let Ducon fall among velvet cushions on a bed, and drew breath to call. She loosed it, said incomprehensibly, “I forgot; she isn’t here to get my toad. See to him while I’m gone.”

  She left abruptly. Lydea grappled a moment with the idea of an urgent need for toad, then gave up. She was undressing Ducon when the silent housekeeper returned with water and linens; she waited, while Lydea washed the charcoal and dirt and blood off him. He was unconscious again, his breathing shallow and erratic. The housekeeper was helping to settle him beneath the sheets when Faey returned.

  She opened the small casket she carried, and slid her hand beneath the toad in it. She lifted it out, raised it to eye level. Silently, eye to eye, the toad and the sorceress conversed. So it seemed to Lydea, who was beginning to recognize Faey’s methods. The toad’s eyes closed to hairline slits of darkness.

  The sorceress set it on Ducon’s forehead.

  She brought a forefinger to her lips as Lydea, her heart hammering at the strangeness, opened her mouth. She closed it. Faey lowered her finger and touched the toad very gently between its eyes. She closed hers.

  Lydea shifted close to the fat corkscrew of ebony that supported one corner of the canopy over the bed and clung to it tightly. The toad never moved; neither did the sorceress. After a while, Lydea realized that Ducon’s breathing had slowed, grown deeper, rhythmic. The sorceress’s breathing had slowed to match his. So had Lydea’s.

  The toad spoke. Its word formed a bubble of milky liquid between its jaws, like a great pearl. Faey opened her eyes, quickly moved her hand to receive the pearl. She let it fall in
to the box. The toad opened its eyes, shifted a splayed foot. Faey opened her hand again, and let it waddle onto her palm.

  “My beauty,” she murmured and kissed its nubbled back lightly before she set it into the box. “Thank you. I must take him back and feed him,” she said to Lydea, who wondered for the first time since she had opened the sorceress’s door, if she were lost in someone else’s dream. But there was Ducon, in it with her, his stiff face beginning to relax, lose its frightening pallor. “Tell the housekeeper what you need for him. I am going to find my waxling.”

  “Please,” Lydea begged desperately. “Please. Is there someone you could send to tell my father not to worry about me? He’ll think I’ve died in the streets, or left him again.”

  Faey glanced at her housekeeper. “Send someone from the kitchen,” she said briefly. “Someone alive.”

  “The Rose and Thorn,” Lydea said faintly, as the housekeeper bowed her frilled and skewered head. She lingered, her eyes going to questioningly Ducon. “Oh. He’ll need a little broth,” Lydea added, “when he wakes.”

  “Feed her as well,” the sorceress told the housekeeper. “And now I do not wish to be disturbed by anyone, living, dying, or dead.”

  Alone with Ducon, Lydea pulled a chair to the bedside and sat, her eyes on his face, her thoughts stunned by magic and coincidence. The housekeeper returned with a tray. She drank a little wine, nibbled a bread roll crumb by crumb until her head sank back into the soft tapestry bosom of the chair and she napped. She dreamed something had slipped out of her grasp; she had lost it. She started awake. Ducon was still asleep. The bread had slid out of her hand. She rose, feeling spellbound again, this time by sleep. She lay down in the wide bed beside Ducon and closed her eyes.

  When she opened them again, he was awake and staring at her.

  “Lydea?” he whispered. He looked incredulously past her at the rich, unfamiliar chamber. Then, with painful slowness, he lifted a few inches of velvet and glanced at his own nakedness. He turned his head again, studied her stained apron, the crumpled cap on her head, askew and trailing strands of her hair. He swallowed. “I don’t understand.” His voice sounded husky, weak and groggy with sleep. “How much did I drink last night? I’ve never felt so terrible in my life. Where are we?”