Ombria In Shadow

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She waited, sleepless and frightened, until someone tapped on her door. She opened it and found hot water, tea, bread and fruit. She washed and dressed, drank the tea and ignored the food, then sat tensely on the bed until she heard another tap on the door.

  She opened it, stared at Ducon, just as he was staring at her, startled again by the face she wore.

  She put a hand to her mouth. “What happened to you?” He had a bruise near his temple as big as a fist, a cut lip, and a taut, puckered set to his mouth, as though it hurt him to move. He only shrugged a little, which he had second thoughts about afterward.

  “Politics.” He tried to smile and was sorry about that, too. “Don’t worry.”

  She composed herself. “Do I look suitable? I feel like I’m going to my own hanging.”

  “You look very calm, very self-possessed for a woman about to be hanged.”

  Camas Erl did not recognize her. He thought he would; she could tell by the sudden, puzzled expression in his eyes. There was a moment’s confusion for them all when Ducon, about to introduce her, remembered just as she did that she had no name.

  “Rose,” she said hastily, wondering if she would live to see her father’s tavern again. “Rose Thorn.”

  “Mistress Thorn,” the tutor repeated curiously. He must have buried himself in the library for the five years she had lived in the palace, for she did not remember him at all. “I asked Domina Pearl’s permission to have you teach the young prince the rudiments of reading and writing, so that I can spend the time on research for my history of Ombria. I will instruct him in mathematics, languages and history. You will assist me with that as necessary.”

  She bowed her head sedately, appalled at the thought. “As you wish, Master Erl. Though my skills are somewhat—”

  “I’m sure they will be adequate for our purposes,” he interrupted quickly. “My lord Ducon, you will be somewhat of a distraction for the prince, wearing that face. I suggest you take your leave before Domina Pearl brings him here. She should perhaps have no reason to assume that you and Mistress Thorn have ever met.”

  Ducon made himself scarce. Lydea, her heart thudding at the imminence of the Black Pearl, stood quietly as Camas Erl studied her.

  He asked abruptly, “You can read and write?”

  “My mother taught me,” she answered carefully. “She only knew enough mathematics to make change.”

  “It’s astonishing.”

  She met his eyes, surprised. “Master Erl?”

  “She did it, didn’t she? That sorceress who lives underground. Tell me how you met her.”

  She hesitated. “Master Erl—”

  “If we go down under the Black Pearl’s eye, we go down together. Ducon will have to rescue us. I’ve spoken with the sorceress’s girl—the one she calls her waxling.”

  She drew breath. “You’ve seen Mag? Recently?”

  “She sent me a note last night to leave under Ducon’s door, telling him that she is safe. I met her while she was searching for Ducon. She said that the sorceress dwells in the ruins of Ombria’s history and that she would take me to see her. You’ve been there.” She did not answer, only watched him narrowly, astonished and disturbed without knowing why. He did not seem to need an answer; he continued, his strange eyes wide, alight with visions of the city’s past. “I have only one passion in my life and that is the history of Ombria. Have you heard the story of the Shadow City?”

  He was not afraid, she realized suddenly. That was what she found disturbing. In that palace where a scion of the House could be all but murdered in broad daylight on the way to his chamber, Camas Erl did not have the sense to be afraid.

  He was waiting for an answer this time; she said tardily, remembering the question, “Yes. I used to tell—” She stopped in time. Babbling like he is, she thought. But he didn’t seem to notice.

  He said very softly, “I believe it.”

  “Believe—” she began bewilderedly, and then fell silent again at the sudden flatness in his eyes. She turned.

  The Black Pearl entered with Kyel beside her. She kept a hand on his shoulder, but her eyes were on the stranger standing next to Camas Erl. Lydea felt her face freeze. Luckily she could not see Kyel clearly; he walked with his head lowered. A trifle belatedly, she remembered that the Black Pearl and Kyel were also regent and prince; she swept her skirts and herself immediately into a deep curtsey, hiding her eyes from Domina Pearl’s scrutiny.

  “Mistress Thorn,” Camas Erl said with a proper measure of briskness and indifference. “My lord Kyel, she will teach you to read and write.”

  Lydea risked a glance at the child beneath her lashes. He still had not looked at her; he made no reply to Camas.

  “At no time will the prince be left alone with Mistress Thorn,” the Black Pearl said tersely. “Especially not after yesterday’s events.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “I have doubled the guard outside; call them in if you must leave him. She’ll be useless if there is any trouble. I assume, Mistress Thorn, that you are not a skilled swordswoman?”

  Lydea gave a brief dance-step of a curtsey. “No, my lady.”

  “Don’t bounce up and down like that when I speak to you. Look at me.”

  Lydea raised her eyes reluctantly. The cold, black eyes had changed, she realized, in the brief time since Royce’s death. They looked harried, dangerously driven. She had smelled blood, this woman. She would not have bothered to escort the dead prince’s mistress to the streets; she would have tossed Lydea out the nearest window instead.

  “You look intelligent enough,” Domina Pearl said after an ominous silence. “I trust Master Erl’s judgment. And it may be just as well not to allow the prince to become too attached to his tutor. You will teach the prince only at Master Erl’s direction; you will see him at no other time, and in no other place. Outside of this room, you do not exist.”

  She turned. Lydea curtseyed again. Kyel, the weight having lifted from his shoulder, went to the table where paper and ink and books lay scattered, sat down and gazed at his reflection in the polished wood.

  Lydea straightened slowly. She glanced uncertainly at Camas Erl; he flicked a feathery eyebrow toward the prince and went to a far table so laden with columns of books and pyramids of scrolls that he all but vanished behind them.

  Lydea pulled out a chair beside Kyel. He did not look at her, though an eyelid flickered and he shifted slightly when she drew her chair close. She said gently, “My lord, will you show me what letters you have learned to write?”

  He drew a piece of paper out of the clutter and picked up a quill. She opened the ink for him. He dipped the nib and produced an egg with a tail, and then an egg lying at the foot of a post.

  “Shall I show you how to write your name, my lord?”

  He did not answer, simply waited while she printed his letters on the paper. Even to herself her face seemed a cold, dispassionate mask, while her heart was busy growing thorns, one for the pallor in his face, another for his listless silence, another because the spell had failed. He could not hear beneath the calm, precise voice of the stranger who meant nothing to him. How do I reach you? she thought in despair as he dutifully copied his name. How do I tell you who I am? How do I make you see?

  Talk to me, said the King of Rats while the Prince of Ombria lay dying, and those who loved the child had begun to disappear. The goose whispered, her throat aching at the memory, “Shall I tell you a story?”

  His pen stopped. He sat without moving, at the fork in the Y, so still he seemed spellbound. Waiting, she thought. Waiting. If he turned to look at her, the woman he waited for would disappear; there would be only this stranger.

  “Shall I tell you the story of the fan?”

  Still he waited, frozen, his eyes on the paper, the ink melting out of the nib into a black pool over his name.

  “This is Ombria, my lord,” she said. “The oldest city in the world.”

  His lips parted, silently shaped a word.


  “The most beautiful city in the world.”

  She heard his voice finally, frail and hesitant, picking up the thread. “The richest city in the world.”

  “The most powerful city in the world.”

  “These are the ships,” he whispered. “The ships of Ombria.”

  “These are the great, busy ports of Ombria.”

  His face was turning finally, his eyes enormous, shadowed. “This is the palace of the rulers—This is the world—”

  “This is the shadow of Ombria.”

  He stared at her. She smiled, her mouth shaking, and two tears spilled out of him, fell like rain among his letters. He leaned toward her, let his brow fall against hers; she cupped the crown of his head in her hand. She whispered, “I am your secret. Your secret Mistress Thorn. Remember when we played with the puppets?” He nodded against her; she felt him trembling. “I was the goose and you were the falcon.”

  “The King of Rats.”

  “Yes. Only now I am Mistress Thorn. You will only see me here, and you must not say my name outside this room. I will teach you how to read and write.”

  “She sent you away,” he whispered, his voice no more than the scratch of quill on paper.

  “I came back.”

  “She’ll find you again.”

  “She doesn’t remember who I am. So you must not remind her. Say my name.” He breathed it against her cheek. “No, my lord. Not here in the other side of the story. We are in the Shadow City, and I am Mistress Thorn.”

  He drew back from her a little. “Then who am I?”

  She touched his face, swallowing, drew his hair back from his eyes. “In the Shadow City, you are my heart.”

  They got very little done in the hour Camas Erl allotted for words and letters. But he did not seem to notice. He had drugged himself with past, Lydea thought; ghosts stared out of his eyes. He studied Kyel’s drunken row of letters without seeing them and murmured, “Good, good.” In the time he spent writing numbers and puzzling over the grammar of an ancient language, Kyel’s eyes grew vague again. Pointer in hand, revealing the muddled lives and politics of Kyel’s ancestors, Camas Erl grew lucid, passionate and frustrated over his pupil’s indifference. By the time Domina Pearl came to take Kyel away, both seemed much as she had left them. To Mistress Thorn, hovering in a corner with her hands demurely clasped in front of her, the Black Pearl gave no thought whatsoever.

  “I wonder,” Camas Erl said to Lydea, “if you might do something for me. Domina Pearl says that you do not exist beyond this room, which reveals an imprudent failure of imagination on her part. Those whom we think beyond notice are those who do what we might never dream. You have a room; you will go to it; what will you do there?”

  “Have nightmares,” Lydea said succinctly.

  “You don’t embroider? Or some such?” She looked at him incredulously. He indicated the book in his hands. It was old and tired, with a cracked leather binding, a sagging spine and gilt-edged pages crammed with an endless flow of words. It looked dry as a rusty bucket. “You might,” he said, “consider this. And take these, too. And this.” He put the book into her hands, piled paper, pens, an ink pot on top of it. “To write down whatever you consider significant.”

  “About what?” she asked distractedly. She was already missing Kyel and fretting over him, anxious about what the Black Pearl might come up with next to keep him docile. Would he think Lydea had been a dream? Would he forget and say her name?

  “The story you were telling the prince. About the Shadow City.”

  She gazed at the book, hugged the paper and ink close so that she could open it. There seemed no shadows in it anywhere, just words packed as thick as cobbles in a road, and all looking alike. “This doesn’t seem like any story I’ve ever heard.”

  “It might be there, it might not.” He watched her, his odd, intent eyes yellow as a street dog’s. “If you glimpse it in here, write down what you see for me. There’s no time left to hunt through everything.”

  “No time?” she repeated puzzledly. “What do you do now? Darn socks?”

  “No time,” he answered obscurely, “in the world. Please. I can pay you.”

  She shrugged a little, righting the ink pot before it fell. “I don’t know. I’ll see how far I can get. It may be more complicated than I could possibly understand.”

  His thin mouth twitched upward. “You understand a great deal, Mistress Thorn. You have been high above the world with the Prince of Ombria, and beneath it with the oldest sorceress in the history of the city. You were going to tell me how you found her.”

  “Was I?” she asked evenly, perplexed by him and still disturbed. “I went down a street until I recognized a sign, remembered a shadow I had run from once…and I opened a door.”

  “And there she was,” he finished softly. “You walked into the oldest story in Ombria.”

  Still puzzled, trying to understand what he was telling her, she carried the magpie’s nest of words and paper and quills to the tiny, silent room allotted to her station.

  She read for the rest of the day, and lit a candle to read into the night.

  TWENTY

  City of Ghosts

  Mag met Camas Erl one afternoon a few days later in a small, leaf-choked courtyard surrounded by empty buildings. A century ago they had been an inn and its stables and carriage house. Now, roofs were sunken under the weight of moss and rain; shutters dangled; not a shard of window pane big enough to throw a stone at had been left unbroken. It was yet another door into the sorceress’s world. The casual passerby found no reason to linger there. Those who needed Faey made their way through drifts of leaves and shadows and fallen roof beams to the cupboard door beneath the stairs.

  Mag opened the door for Camas. A bell rang faintly in the undercity. The tutor, who had been silent until then, his birds’ eyes flicking everywhere, looked at Mag incredulously. “A shop bell?”

  “It’s business,” Mag answered.

  They stepped through the cupboard door into the sorceress’s house.

  Faey, whose assessment of her visitors was astute and unpredictable, welcomed them accordingly. She had decided to give Camas Erl the last thing he expected: that seemed to Mag the only explanation for the languid, violet-eyed beauty draped across a couch who extended a lily-pale hand to him from out of a cavern of velvet cushions and filmy shawls. He accepted it uncertainly, still looking for the sorceress, trying, it seemed, to see into the lady’s bones.

  “How can I help you?” she asked with polite indifference.

  He was at a loss himself, until he found the word he wanted. “Illusion,” he murmured, studying her intently, as though she were something nameless and tropical that had floated in on one of Domina Pearl’s ships. “Everything with you is illusion. Even your waxling. May I see your face?”

  She sat up, scattering cushions. For a moment Mag, holding her breath, thought Faey would give him what he asked. But she only said, “Actually, I can’t remember which face I had first. And if I show you what I am now, it would cost you more than you would ever want to give.”

  Sensibly, he yielded to that with a nod. She flung a few cushions over the back of the couch and patted the seat beside her. He joined her without a qualm that Mag could see. “Tea?” the sorceress suggested, and slid her insouciant, flower-petal eyes to Mag. “Perhaps?” she added doubtfully, as if she were not capable of wringing a stream of tea out of thin air. Mag left her alone with Camas. She waited until the sorceress summoned her silently. Then, laden with illusions of propriety in the shape of a tea tray, she returned to the room that Faey had composed like a mood around her, with its shadows and sultry purples, its whiff of scented wax and ash. There she found Faey pacing and Camas sitting on the couch, passionately discussing the history of Ombria with the fair, indolent illusion who nodded encouragingly from time to time but never spoke.

  Mag put the tray down and listened.

  “There are pieces to the puzzle missing,” Camas
said. He was tugging at his hair; his eyes glowed eerily in the red light from a stained-glass lamp. “And pieces that don’t yet fit. What, for instance, precipitates the shift from city to shadow city? Is it sorcery? Has it to do with the precarious state of affairs in the House of Greve? The powerless heir, the bastard who cannot act? What secrets are hidden within the secret palace? What is there to gain by anticipating and surviving the shift? Domina Pearl believes that it is possible, if one can remain aware during the transformation, to amass enormous knowledge and power. To rule the shadow city when it emerges, since no one else will remember the previous city, and who ruled then. All will be accepted as it is revealed. All of which is why I am so eager to speak with you. You live in Ombria’s past, its ghosts and memories. How far back do you remember? Were you alive before the previous shift? How many transformations have there been? Many? One? None at all? How old are you?”

  The illusion of Faey inclined her head gracefully; Camas continued without listening for answers. Faey spoke then, her voice sliding within, beneath his words. “What do you expect to gain from what you call the transformation?”

  Camas interrupted his own sentence with a word. “Enlightenment. And the power that comes with an unbroken memory of the history of the city. Domina Pearl’s knowledge of sorcery may not survive the transformation if she herself is not aware of the shift. I want to stay alive, be aware of the shift from city to shadow, and I will ally myself and my abilities to anyone powerful enough to maintain the integrity of existence, knowledge, memory and experience through the transformation.”

  “Such as Domina Pearl?” the sorceress suggested. She kept her voice light, careless, but her eyes were very dark.