Ombria In Shadow

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Domina Pearl,” Camas agreed. “Or you. Or perhaps even Ducon. He is another puzzle piece, I think. He is drawn to the hidden palace, and to the odd, unnoticed places in Ombria where the boundaries are visible between the city and its shadow. He draws them constantly.”

  “So you would pledge your loyalty to him or betray him, depending on the moment?”

  “Or her. Or you,” Camas answered, nodding briskly. Mag stared at him with wonder. “Exactly. Depending on the moment.”

  Faey raised a white-gold brow. Undeterred by her silence, Camas picked up the thread he had dropped some moments before and continued his conjectures about Faey, the past that surrounded her, and its connection to the shadow city.

  “Is it true?” Mag asked her softly. “That the city is on the verge of change?”

  The sorceress twitched an indolent shoulder. Her eyes, still on Camas, had narrowed. “Who knows? Who would know? This is a very foolish and very dangerous man.”

  “What will you do with him?”

  She answered simply, “Give him what he wants. Let him walk into the past until he no longer remembers the way back.” She eased onto the couch to merge with her illusion and poured Camas a cup of tea. The tutor, suddenly quiet, blinked at her confusedly.

  “What—what were we saying?”

  “You were telling me of your deep interest in Ombria’s past. When you have finished your tea, Mag will show you the undercity.” She offered him confections of whipped sugar, egg-white and chocolate; he swallowed one whole in his excitement.

  “I cannot tell you how invaluable this would be to me. Nor how grateful I am. And will be in the future, and can be, if all goes as planned.” He paused, sipped tea, then sat frowning at it without knowing why. His eyes went to Mag, questioning. She gazed back at him composedly, without pity. He said hesitantly to the sorceress, “You haven’t asked me for anything in return. I thought that all magic has its price.”

  “Magic does,” Faey said. “But let us consider this an exchange of knowledge. I’ll tell you what you want to know and you’ll tell me why you want to know it.”

  The tutor’s eyelids drooped; his thoughts drained out of his face like water seeping into earth. “A fair exchange,” he said equably, and raised the cup to his lips.

  Mag showed him through Faey’s house, from the high attic rooms where she kept her menagerie, to the spell-steeped chamber where she worked over her cauldron. He examined everything with interest, but murmured, “This is now, not past. Where does she keep her past?”

  He found it in her ghosts.

  Being a historian, he recognized some of them from old paintings: the immensely fat, warty and befurred merchant who had built many of Ombria’s docks for his fleet of ships; a tiny, long-nosed woman who had painted three generations of the House of Greve; the balding, ferociously mustached duke who had forged an army out of the city’s surprised citizens and defended Ombria from the closing maw of barbarian hordes attacking at once by land and by sea; the stripling in a long, moth-eaten robe who had written the first history of Ombria. Mag had never seen any of them before in her life. They all spoke, which startled her as well. The household ghosts she was accustomed to were a ruminant lot who could understand the present but spoke only to the past.

  Faey was making them, she realized suddenly, as visions from the past kept wandering across Camas Erl’s path, passing through doors without bothering to open them, or rising up from the depths of chairs that had been empty a moment before. Camas spoke to them all eagerly, amazed with his good fortune; each answered his questions willingly so long as it was alone, and held all his attention. The moment he became distracted by another, the one he was speaking to began to fade. As if, Mag thought, they existed only when he saw them.

  They were leading him slowly, ghost by ghost, to the front door. He did not seem to notice. A tall, bronze-haired woman with close-set green eyes, dressed in a long tunic of hide and deer fur, a sword in a leather sheath hanging from her belt, walked him out the door as Mag opened it for them. Mag lingered on the steps; Camas Erl, his long fingers seeming to pluck his words out of the air as he gestured, strayed toward the river. Across the bridge another ghost waited, one less incongruous against the background of sunken mansions. Their opaque windows softly brushed by light from the river lamps, they looked as if they had opened their dreaming eyes to watch.

  Camas crossed the bridge to the elegant lady in lavender silk who took his arm. Behind him, the warrior vanished. Mag sat down on the steps. The ghosts had him well in hand; he had forgotten her. She wondered how far Faey would send him. Parts of the undercity were impenetrable, even by Mag. They were so old, they seemed little more than visible memories, and no matter how she had tried to reach them, they remained always in the distance.

  She toyed with the locket around her neck and wondered if Faey could conjure up her mother’s ghost. If she were dead, she reminded herself. But she had never come to retrieve her child, and the three drops of blood in the locket had belonged to someone. Perhaps both parents had died, and a grieving friend had brought the baby to the sorceress. “Perhaps” could be spun endlessly into different tales; even telling herself all of them, she would still be none the wiser. She opened the thin leaves of the locket, one after another: blood, rose, charcoal. All she knew of the tale was those three words. Watching for Camas Erl and listening for Faey, she strung the words together in highly improbable ways. It doesn’t matter, she told herself at last, coldly. It doesn’t matter. I have always done without.

  The door opened behind her. A ghost sat down beside her, or so she thought until she smelled its sweat. Faey’s hair had fallen down; it looked more white than gold now. The perfect, listless oval face had grown pallid and seamed; her violet eyes sagged with weariness. But a smile clung to the still flawless lips, a small, wicked thing like an imp that had crawled out of the sorceress’s mouth.

  Mag felt a ghostly hand flutter down her backbone. She asked, “Will he come back?”

  “Perhaps. When he gets hungry enough. But he will, continue to see ghosts for as long as he desires them. We are the insubstantial ones to him now.”

  “Domina Pearl will miss him. He is supposed to be tutoring the prince.”

  The sorceress snorted. “I’ve done her a favor, if she only knew. That man would betray his own shadow. And for what? A child’s tale.”

  “Is it?” Mag looked at her. “Is it only a tale?”

  For a moment, the purple eyes grew dark, black as the little rags of shadows that Mag saw on empty streets or patches of barren ground, attached to nothing, seemingly blown at random from some place adrift in light.

  But Faey only answered, “How would any of us know? The tale promises nothing. Camas Erl has been trapped in his own illusion.”

  “What will happen to Lydea if he doesn’t return?”

  “I suppose she will become the prince’s tutor until Domina Pearl finds another. At least she can read and write.” She drew limp, damp hair away from her neck and waved away Mag’s next question. “Not now, my waxling—It was exhausting, remembering all that history.”

  “You remembered it?” Mag breathed.

  “Well, yes. I was young once, you know.” She dropped a hand on Mag’s shoulder and pushed herself up. The darkness had faded from her eyes, but a certain grimness lingered. “Stay out of the palace. If Domina Pearl truly sees what Camas Erl says she does, then she is as mad as he is. Without any help from me. Come in to supper now. Camas Erl will likely eat illusions and get drunk on history for some time before we see him again.”

  “Yes, Faey,” Mag said absently, following the sorceress in, her hand closed around blood, rose, charcoal, as though the locket were a talisman. Ducon has his mysterious charcoal, too, she thought curiously. I wonder what he sees with it.

  “Mag.”

  “Yes, Faey.”

  “Don’t ‘yes, Faey’ me. Listen to me this time.”

  “Yes, Faey.”

  TWENTY-ONEr />
  This or That

  Ducon stood at the edge of the shadow city, drawing. Deep within the hidden palace, he had been pulled like some perverse moth to the place that no light could penetrate. The doorway with the bare wood on one post, the painted irises on the other, held a darkness so palpable that it seemed, like the charcoal in his hand, a crucible in which anything might form. When he held a candle across the threshold, the black swallowed the fire completely. When he tried to step across it, he felt nothing beneath his foot. Sometimes he heard rain, a bird-cry, wind soughing through tall trees; mostly he was aware only of an intimation of vastness, silence, as though he stood at the edge of a world.

  He saw nothing. So he let the charcoal imagine what might lie on the other side of the door. Faces came out of it, and fantasies of airy palaces, endless woods and frothy seas upon which sailed ships with bowsprits like the spiralling horns of unicorns. One face in particular it drew at random. Ducon found it on a figure riding through the wood, or standing on the top of one of the high towers. Once or twice the man wearing that face walked the streets of a city that might have been Ombria, if Ombria could harbor an entire forest of ships’ masts, and the windows overlooking its twisted streets were filled with flowers.

  Wishes, he thought. Dreams. That’s all the charcoal held: a child’s prosperous, perfect world, a city of ceaseless delights. Still, it seduced him, kept him coming back to that worn, silent, rain-riddled room, that doorway full of nothing.

  He had to be very careful moving through the palace. Domina Pearl insisted that he be guarded at all times, not only for his own sake, he suspected, but for the sake of her growing curiosity about what he did when he vanished into the secret palace. He had not seen Sozon or Kestevan again, but Domina Pearl had not frightened all of the conspirators away. He glimpsed the younger ones now and then, and knew they watched him. He found ways of eluding his guards when he wanted to, but though his secrets remained safe, he did not.

  Neither, it seemed, did Camas Erl, who left the palace one afternoon after tutoring Kyel and had not been seen since.

  The Black Pearl seemed inordinately incensed over the loss of a tutor.

  “First you vanish,” she snapped at Ducon when she summoned him to the library to show him the lack of Camas. Kyel and Lydea were waiting for the tutor with her. Both seemed indifferent to his absence, though Ducon suspected that but for her disguise of calm and composure, Lydea would have been tearing at her fingernails. “And now Camas Erl. Where would he have gone?”

  “I am at a loss,” Ducon answered, which was true: he would first of all have suspected Domina Pearl.

  “You are close to him. Where does he go? What does he do?”

  “He comes here,” Ducon answered blankly. “He reads and works on his history of Ombria. Perhaps he went to research something.”

  “When he should be with the prince? And without telling me?”

  “It does seem unlikely.”

  “Does anyone want him dead?”

  “For what?” Ducon asked, startled. “Why would anyone kill a tutor? Perhaps he ventured into the streets, though it’s not his habit. He might have been hurt.”

  “You know the streets better than anyone in this palace. Look for him. No.” She closed her eyes, touched them with fingernails as curved and dark as black beetles’ backs. “You must stay here with the prince. Tutor him yourself when the girl is finished with his letters. I don’t want them left alone in here, not even under guard. Go and look for Camas when you’ve finished. You’d know the odd alleys and rat holes to search, I’m sure. Arm yourself and do not leave the palace without a guard. Try to be careful.”

  He inclined his head and watched her leave, amazed that she did not precipitate a furious wake of fallen books and scattered papers behind her. Lydea sat beside Kyel, who was gazing listlessly at the paper and ink in front of him. She said his name softly, and then hers, in what must have been a ritual greeting between them.

  “My lord Kyel. I am Mistress Thorn.”

  He lifted his head, looked at her. The change in his face, hope flowering out of the mute, weary despair in it, made Ducon’s throat close.

  “I am the Prince of Ombria,” Kyel whispered, “and you are my secret Rose.”

  “Yes, my lord.” She lifted her head, met Ducon’s eyes; he searched, fascinated, but could not find the secret Rose at all within the cool, proper face of Mistress Thorn. “My lord Ducon,” she said, “do you have any idea—”

  “None at all.”

  “I fear that if the regent examines my education too closely while Camas Erl is away, she will not be entirely pleased.”

  He put a finger to his lips. “The ink pots may have ears. You don’t look as though you are afraid of anything, Mistress Thorn.”

  “If you leave,” Kyel said abruptly, “I will go with you.”

  “My lord,” she answered carefully, “I do not intend to go anywhere until you learn enough to write the story of the fan in several languages.”

  “Will that take a long time?”

  “A very long time,” she whispered, “since I will have to learn them first. Now. Perhaps, as your cousin is here, you could practice writing his name in case you ever need it.”

  He bent willingly over the work. Ducon watched him a while, soothed by the tiny island of peace they made for themselves in the troubled and dangerous place. It would end soon enough. But for that moment at least, the child remembered that he had a heart.

  Ducon stayed with them, teaching Kyel randomly about scorpions and tidal waves and such, trying to keep the struggling recognition alive in his eyes. The Black Pearl returned for Kyel in the early afternoon. Ducon walked to his chambers, guards flanking him at every step, to get his paints and paper and the sword he never bothered to wear except at court. Then he went through a door beside the fireplace in his bedchamber, and made his way alone through hidden corridors to the cellar and down a vaulted passage beneath the back gardens to the street.

  Where to look for Camas Erl eluded him completely. But Lydea was right: if Domina Pearl was forced to look for another tutor and questioned Lydea too closely about her background, the sorceress’s spell might unravel completely under her probing gaze. Lydea would be found under a pier with a broken neck and Kyel would become a living ghost. Therefore, Ducon had to find the missing tutor.

  He made inquiries among the taverns and brothels he knew best, but without great hope. If Camas had wanted to visit such places, he would have asked Ducon to come with him. The tutor was retiring and abstemious; the idea of him walking alone through the door of some ale-soaked den called the Mackerel Smack and quaffing down a tankard seemed ludicrous.

  Twilight brought Ducon back to the palace, certain that Camas would more likely have lost himself in the maze of the hidden palace before he found trouble in the streets. He returned to his room the way he came, left his drawings there, and stuck his head out the door to check on his guards. They were too ensorcelled to be embarrassed or furious with him, but they were confused and very reluctant to admit to Domina Pearl that they had misplaced Ducon Greve. They hadn’t, his presence assured them. He vanished back into his chamber and went from there into the secret palace.

  He was making an erratic, impulsive path toward places he thought Camas might have found when he began to hear voices.

  He stopped to listen.

  There was a rustling in the walls, an occasional word, squeals from the floorboards. He started to say Camas’s name and didn’t. There were too many feet. They seemed to be moving down a parallel corridor, or through chambers opening into one another on the other side of the wall. Guards, he thought, searching for Camas. But Domina Pearl’s guards did not move furtively or whisper. His mouth tightened.

  It was easy for him to elude the young conspirators; they had no idea where they were going in the labyrinth of forgotten rooms and hallways. Ducon retraced his steps, slipped through a door or two and blew out his candle. He saw them ahead in the hallway,
their faces lit by their own tapers, absorbed, eager, as they opened doors, thrust their fires into dark rooms to search them, then closed the doors again, trying to make no noise beyond their breathing and occasional, muffled arguments.

  Ducon followed cautiously, wondering if they could possibly lead him to Camas. He couldn’t begin to guess what they were looking for. They separated at one point, scattered through what he knew to be rooms empty but for cobwebs and mice and his own dusty footprints. He hid himself where they agreed to meet and heard their whisperings when they regrouped.

  “It must be in another part of the palace. There’s nothing here.”

  “Ducon might know.”

  “We can’t ask Ducon; he’ll want to know why. Besides, what if he betrays us to Domina Pearl the way he betrayed Hilil Gamelyn?”

  “He hasn’t yet. And I don’t believe he would betray anyone to her. He hates her.”

  “She hasn’t taken anything from him.”

  “He’s a bastard; he doesn’t have anything. No lands, no title worth anything, nothing to lose except a bed in the palace and an allowance that the regent controls. Unlike our fathers.”

  Ducon, behind a door in a room they had already searched, heard a sharp, bitter explosion of breath. “I can’t believe what she’s taking. She told my father yesterday that any ship docking in Ombria henceforth will be considered the property of the Prince of Ombria, and all the goods therein. She has already appropriated the docks and the harbor fees for her pirates. Now she’s stealing ships. My father has half a dozen on the open sea; there’s no way to get word to them.”

  “She took lands from my uncle that have been in our family for generations,” someone else said as vehemently as was possible in a whisper. “She showed him a map drawn centuries ago when the land belonged to the House of Greve. It was given to my family! She said the land was improperly deeded and should have been reclaimed a hundred years ago. She wants the timber on it, my uncle said, for more ships.”

  “Why not? No one will dock here after this but her ships. Ombria will be completely dependent on her stolen goods.”