Ombria In Shadow

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “We have little time to waste searching, and none of us knows anything about poisons. I say we disguise ourselves as guards and smother him in his bed.”

  “Poison is more subtle, and would make the Black Pearl immediately suspect.”

  “We could poison her instead of Kyel.”

  Ducon felt his heart clench like a fist and hammer against his ribs. He bowed his forehead against the door, cold sweat beading along his lip, his hairline. The unaccustomed weight of the sword at his side caught his attention, tempted him. He forced himself to listen.

  “We discussed that. We agreed.” Their timbreless whisperings made them all anonymous; he could not match faces to their voices. “She is too unpredictable. Ducon might be knowledgeable and cunning enough to kill her, but he refuses to act against her. If he thinks she killed Kyel—”

  “He’ll kill her. So. End of the Black Pearl’s reign. And no one will ever suspect us.”

  “What if—”

  “There are no what if’s.”

  “She could blame Ducon.”

  “No one would believe her now; she’s gone too far already.”

  “What if she kills Ducon when he attacks her?”

  There was a brief silence. Ducon, gripping his sword hilt so hard his fingers might have turned to metal, held his breath while they pondered.

  “Then we are lost,” someone acceded in a tendril of sound. “We flee with the rats out of Ombria. This is our only hope.”

  “But where in this maze does she keep her poisons?”

  Ducon opened the door.

  He had drawn the sword before he realized; it was just there, a long flare of silver from the taper light, rising in a slow, strangely elongated moment during which every stunned, mute face turned to him etched itself indelibly in his head. Then the tip of the sword came gracefully to rest on bare skin just above the fine embroidered collar of the most fervid conspirator. His eyes changed. Ducon, staring at him, felt himself moving and watching from a distance, for the blink of an eye, the shifting muscle in the throat beneath his blade that would make a decision for him. The young man was motionless, his face the color of his candle; around Ducon no one breathed.

  The sword trembled in his hand, fire rippling down it. He felt the fury then that he had not dared feel before, that had separated him from himself. The young man, his blanched face going slack, his eyes closing, tried for a word.

  “Be quiet,” Ducon advised, his own voice barely enough to cause a flame to flicker. The sword, like his rage, still had arguments of its own; neither would yield yet. He freed it finally, drew the blade back and drove it with all his strength into the wall. Blood from a thread-thin nick in the side of the young man’s neck flicked like a scatter of garnets against the paint. He reeled abruptly, doubled up, and retched.

  Ducon sheathed the sword, his hands shaking. No one even tried to speak. The man who had almost died straightened slowly, painfully, leaned back against the wall, facing Ducon again. The passion had gone from his eyes; the expression in them, weary, hopeless, reminded Ducon of Kyel.

  Ducon breathed suddenly, his voice catching, “If Kyel dies, I will kill you. One by one. I have drawn all your faces.”

  “My lord—” the young man whispered helplessly.

  “Leave the Black Pearl to me.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Tutors Minus Two

  Lydea saw the change in Ducon when he came to her door early the next morning. Like hers, his true face had vanished; the mask that hid it was rigid, unsmiling, its eyes guarded. Mistress Thorn received a stranger into her chamber, who said tautly to the stranger that she was, “I can’t find Camas Erl, and Kyel’s life hangs in a very precarious balance.”

  Lydea felt the blood startle out of her face; Mistress Thorn only folded her hands tightly and asked gravely, “What can I do?”

  “Don’t leave his side while you’re with him. Especially if anyone you don’t expect enters the library.”

  “You’ll be with us,” she reminded him, suddenly unsure even of that. So was he; he put a hand to his face, rubbed the fading bruise absently and winced.

  “Domina Pearl confers in the mornings with her advisers,” he murmured. It was a polite title for what found its way out of the streets and docks to her council chambers. “She won’t know I’m gone.”

  Lydea swallowed drily. “Where?”

  “There’s a secret place I want to find,” he said very softly. “I’ll search as quickly as possible, and return before she comes for the prince. If anyone enters the library while you’re alone with him, call the guards in. If Domina Pearl returns there before I do, suggest to her that I might have heard a rumor of Camas Erl and have gone to investigate.”

  “What—what should I teach the prince?” she asked, panicked at the thought.

  “Anything. It doesn’t matter.” He stooped, picked up a book from the clutter on the floor beside her bed. “You’ve been studying. What is all this?”

  “Histories and tales. Camas asked me to read them and write down references to the story of the fan.”

  “The what?”

  “The shadow city. What he calls the transformation. He thinks it’s real.”

  Ducon looked at her silently a moment; she could not fathom his expression. “Do you?”

  “I don’t know. How does anyone know? If it truly happens, no one remembers. And yet you can glimpse the tale there in all those books. It slips out unexpectedly like sun on a cloudy day, a shimmer of light across the world. And then it’s gone, but it never fades that quickly from your heart. The heart remembers. And so the tale worked its way into history.”

  He was still gazing at her. She saw the light pass through his eyes, turn them silver, and then stark again, metallic. “Strange,” he whispered, then found his voice again. “Maybe that’s what happened to Camas Erl.”

  “What?”

  “He was transformed.”

  “Ducon.” Her fingers, still locked together, felt icy. “I’m very frightened.”

  “Yes.” You should be, his face told her. Then he went to her, took her hands. His own were not much warmer, but his voice became less distant. “You,” he said gently, “are the prince’s Mistress Thorn and she is a woman of remarkable strength and ability. She is where Kyel has hidden his heart, and she will yield that to no one.”

  “Where are you going?” she asked him. “What are you searching for?”

  But he would not tell her.

  He met her in the library later; they waited together for the regent and the prince. The Black Pearl, her mouth clamped so hard she looked lipless as a tortoise, let loose a few terse words about Camas Erl’s absence. Lydea expected the fuming air around her to rumble with sullen thunder, snap minute bolts of lightning. To Lydea’s relief, she did not linger. She had urgent business, she told Ducon with exasperation; he should stay to tutor Kyel and then continue his search for Camas.

  She left. Lydea sat close to the prince, gave him their private greeting, and was rewarded with the rising sun of recognition in his eyes. When she turned her head, glanced around for Ducon, he had already gone.

  Mistress Thorn kept her voice calm; Kyel noticed nothing amiss. But when, after an hour or so, she strayed from letters into history, she felt him fidget. Hers was not the voice of history, and Ducon was the other safe stepping-stone above the angry current of it that was flooding through Kyel’s life. He turned his head toward the table behind them, where Ducon would have sat drawing while he waited for them to finish.

  He turned back, said with curious composure, “Ducon teaches me this.”

  “Ducon is busy, my lord. I will tutor you today. Do you mind?”

  He shook his head without perceptible distress and shifted closer to her, to lean over the book she read from and watch her moving finger beneath the words.

  Ducon returned so quietly she did not realize he was with them until, struggling through some rudimentary math, both of them counting on their fingers, she glanced
back in despair at her ignorance. There he was, reading quietly, his long legs crossed on a chair, one elbow propped on the table, his hand shadowing his face. Lydea wanted to melt with relief. Mistress Thorn in a thicket of numbers and no way out, opened her mouth to request help.

  There was a step at the threshold of the far door. A shadow intruded, a faceless figure falling starkly across the polished floor. Lydea, the words catching in her throat, watched it. Ducon did not move, except to lift his pale head slightly, his fingers repositioning themselves along his cheekbone. She saw him in profile; his back was to the door. But he had stiffened; despite the languid pose, he was aware and listening. Whoever stood at the door did not enter. The shadow watched him for a while; Lydea watched the shadow.

  Then it turned and was gone in a quiet step or two. Kyel touched her hand. “Mistress Thorn,” he said in the careful voice he had learned for his survival, “may we use our thumbs?”

  “I always do,” said Mistress Thorn. She watched the prince count and then form his answer with pen and ink: an egg with a tail curling over its back like a lap dog. Quick, light steps startled Lydea again; Mistress Thorn turned with graceful composure, an uplifted brow. But it was only Ducon coming back; the tutor felt even Mistress Thorn’s prim face ease.

  Then she stopped breathing. Ducon, glancing at the open book on the table, asked swiftly, “Is Camas back?”

  No, her mouth said without sound. She found her voice with an effort and rose. “Practice your numbers, my lord, while I speak to your cousin.”

  Ducon waited for her to join him on the other side of the room, his face closed again, tense, his fingers splayed across the open pages.

  “Someone was here,” he murmured.

  “You were,” she said helplessly. “You were sitting there and reading.” His hand rose from the book, closed on her arm. “Someone tried to come in. Whoever it was saw you and left.”

  She saw his face turn as pale as paper. He loosed her slowly, sat down on the table. He tried to speak, swallowed. His eyes turned molten suddenly, she saw with astonishment, silvery with unshed tears.

  “It wasn’t me,” he whispered.

  “It looked like you.”

  “Did you see his face clearly?”

  “No. You had your—he had his hand—” Her throat closed, burning, though she did not know why. “Ducon, who was he?”

  “He came out of my charcoal. I saw him in the streets; I’ve seen him in dreams. I see him in the absolute darkness at the heart of the secret palace. On the boundary between shadow and light.”

  “Is he you?” she asked incredulously.

  “No. If he had let you see his face, you would have guessed, even without knowing either of us, that he might be my father.”

  Her eyes widened; she felt the spell fraying like cobweb across her face. Ducon touched her again in warning. Her hands rose to her waist, clasped tightly; her face quieted itself, firmed within its mask.

  “My lord,” she said softly, “perhaps you could show the prince where your father might be placed on the family tree.”

  “I think, Mistress Thorn,” he answered unsteadily, “that we would need a different family tree entirely.”

  When the regent came for the prince, all was as she expected it to be: Ducon leading Kyel through some tangled patch of grammar, and Mistress Thorn reading at the far end of the room while she waited to be dismissed.

  She took the book with her when she left. It was the one the stranger had been reading: a collection of children’s tales. It seemed a peculiar choice for a man who had wandered between worlds in response to his son’s need. Ducon’s father, she thought wonderingly. The unsolved mystery of the court of Ombria. Who was he, in his own world? And how had Royce’s sister caught his eye, drawn him across the elusive boundaries between light and shadow and time? Or had she gone to him?

  Or had they met at the conjunction of their worlds, the place where air and water kissed, and the white-hot blaze of fire streaked out of the sky to ignite the earth?

  Ducon’s mother had never said. She had just borne her white-haired child who, if Ducon guessed correctly, was heir to both worlds, one impenetrable and the other all too likely to be the death of him.

  Lydea tried to imagine, as she ate her solitary meal in her room, where he had gone that morning, what he was plotting that he would not tell her. Then she continued reading the book the stranger had chosen. She was completely unsurprised when she came across an archaic version of the story of the fan.

  The Black Pearl was no happier the next morning with the prolonged absence of Camas Erl.

  “Come with me,” she said brusquely to Ducon. “You have wandered through my private rooms, tried to pry into my secrets, tried to discover what I know and what I can do. I can find Camas Erl, but I need help from someone with intelligence, strength and discretion. He is not here to help me with this; you must take his place.”

  Ducon started to speak, faltered. He stared at her, the bruise on his face suddenly vivid against his pallor, as if she had struck him. She gave him her feral smile.

  “You trust too easily. Like your uncle did. I taught Camas all those years while he was teaching you. I find him helpful and I do not wish to lose him. But if he has betrayed me as well, then you will help me kill him. I have my ways.”

  Still he could not find words. Lydea, her heart pounding, resisted every impulse to draw the listless Kyel close to her. Even Mistress Thorn was blinking rapidly, discomposed. Ducon spoke finally, huskily.

  “Why me? Anyone off the streets would do for you. Why reveal your secret powers to me?”

  “Because,” she said contemptuously, “you have shown me that I have nothing to fear from you.” She summoned guards into the room to watch over the prince. “Let no one enter,” she ordered. “Hold anyone who comes here.” Her baleful gaze swung to Lydea then, boding no good to Mistress Thorn. “Camas chose you; I must trust that, for the moment. But if you speak of this I will tear out your voice and drop it down the nearest drain.”

  Mistress Thorn bowed her head speechlessly. The Black Pearl eyed the young prince. But nothing in his blank face told her that he had paid the slightest attention to anything she had said. She gestured imperiously to Ducon. His face rigid, he followed her out of the room without a backward glance.

  Mistress Thorn found herself trembling. She sat down beside Kyel, silent until she felt the imperturbable mask of the spell conceal her thoughts. He had understood something, she realized; he leaned against her for comfort even before she said her name.

  To her relief, Ducon came to her at some black hour of the night. He brought a taper in with him, and lit her candles while she pulled her dishevelled hair out of her eyelashes and her mind out of nightmares. She searched his face silently; it looked very pale, hollow with weariness and vaguely stunned. She sat up; he sat down beside her, ran his hands through his hair until it spiked.

  “She opened the door for me,” he whispered incomprehensibly, “and I went in. I’ve been searching everywhere for that door.”

  “To her secrets, you mean?”

  “The place where she works. She sleeps there, too,” he added. “In a kind of cocoon. I think it makes nightly repairs on her raddled carcass.”

  “Did she find Camas?”

  “After a fashion. He seems to have wandered into history. He was talking to a lot of ghosts. I had to shift some heavy mirrors for her, and tell her what I know about the sections of Ombria they saw.”

  “What part of Ombria has so many ghosts?” she asked bewilderedly. Then she answered herself, with a suck of breath. “The undercity.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that where he is? With the sorceress?”

  “After a fashion. He’s lost to the world and babbling to ghosts. You met him. You saw how he is. Temperate and predictable. So I thought.” He rose suddenly, not before she glimpsed the cold flare of anger in his eyes. “He lied to me and he would have betrayed Kyel. I can’t forgive him that. His
clothes are torn and dirty; his hair falls across his face; he looks as though he eats whatever ghosts eat. Domina Pearl had no idea where he could be in the undercity; she has never been there. She couldn’t tell if Faey had anything to do with the ghosts haunting Camas. If he knew they existed, he would easily have found them irresistible and gone looking for them on his own. She tried to summon him back here.”

  “He wouldn’t come?”

  “He didn’t seem to hear her.” He paced a step or two restively, then turned back to Lydea. “She wants me to go there and bring him out. With Faey’s help, she said, if I needed it. She said the sorceress bore her no ill will and always did what she asked.”

  Lydea thought of the sorceress striding down the riverbank with Ducon dangling over her shoulder, brought to a halt mid-pace by the notion that she might in any way be compared to Domina Pearl. “Really.”

  “So she thinks. I wanted to tell you now so that you’ll know where I am tomorrow.”

  A pulse of fear beat in Lydea’s throat; she swallowed. “Leaving me alone—”

  “To tutor Kyel.”

  “With a woman who wants to tear my voice out and me having to count on my fingers to multiply.”

  He sat down on the bed, shifted a strand of hair from her face with his fingers. “Even now, you manage to look like the poised and decorous Mistress Thorn. Domina Pearl has far too much on her mind to remember that you exist.”

  “I hope so,” she whispered. Then somehow the dispassionate Mistress Thorn found herself gripping his wrist. “But, Ducon, Camas knows who I am! He told me so! He’ll tell her—”

  “No, he won’t,” Ducon answered quickly. “He knew and didn’t tell her; he would be caught in his own lie. I’ll remind him of that when I find him. I’ll be back as soon as I can; I don’t dare leave Kyel long.”

  “Be careful. Don’t get lost with Camas.”

  “I don’t intend to.”

  Something in his voice made her look sharply at him. “What do you intend?”

  “To ask him a question. To ask him what he wants so profoundly that he would destroy the House of Greve and the city he loves for it.”