Ombria In Shadow

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She murmured something, pulled a mirror out of nowhere and delicately straightened the line of one rumpled brow. The mirror vanished; she said, “Ducon, what are you doing here at this hour of the morning?”

  “I’ve come for Camas Erl.”

  She sniffed. “He’s not worth the rescue. I’d leave him, if I were you.”

  “Domina Pearl sent me to bring him back,” he answered, and saw a glint in one lowered eye as if it had turned as darkly glittering as the wild magic around her. She sat down on the stairs, gestured for him to join her.

  “Did she now?” she asked lightly. “He’d betray her, too, with no more thought about it than he’d spare to clean his teeth. He’s demented.”

  “Maybe, but she wants him. Do you? Will you stop me?”

  “No. Take him. I find him annoying. But you’ll have to get his attention away from those ghosts. He’s lost in history and babbling about transformations. I doubt that he’d recognize you unless you’re dead.”

  “Will you help me? I was told to ask you. Domina Pearl said that you have never refused her anything.”

  Her face turned away from him; she leaned back against the steps, idly watching something, perhaps the play of her own magic through the underworld. “No,” she said softly. “I haven’t. And no, I won’t help you. I find I thoroughly dislike them both, and I do not care a cat’s breath if Camas Erl and the Black Pearl are ever reunited in the world above.” She looked at Ducon again, lifted a finger and turned his face to examine the bruise on it. Her eyes grew suddenly black, pupilless, like the empty eyes of ancient statues. “Even you,” she said. “Even you deceive.”

  “I have to, in that palace.” The dark, rich currents of her magic flowed through her eyes then; he could not look away.

  “You say one thing to the Black Pearl, another to Kyel, another to the man who nearly killed you. He tried again?”

  He nodded, remembering the cold metal against his throat, the manticore’s mad eyes. “But I never lied to him. He expected me to and panicked. I haven’t seen him lately.”

  “There are others…”

  “Yes,” he heard himself say very softly. “They want me to kill her and rule Ombria.”

  “Will you?”

  He hesitated, thinking of the Black Pearl and her mirrors watching him. The sorceress smiled. “She cannot hear you now. You are in my mirrors, within my illusions. So,” she added, reading his mind. “These others, you never tell them yes, you never tell them no.”

  “For Kyel’s sake,” he whispered. His hands had clenched, holding all the possibilities, all that he tossed into the air and kept from falling in the world above. “They see no need for him; they would as soon be rid of him. They are young, ambitious, desperate—”

  “So you are holding up the sky over the young prince’s head.”

  “Trying.”

  “Which is why you are down here to rescue the unscrupulous tutor for the wicked regent.”

  “For now,” he answered, “I do her bidding.”

  “For Kyel’s sake. And for whose sake are you deceiving me?” He stared at her, his face slackening with surprise, and her eyes turned the pale matte brown of walnuts. “Why,” she asked, “do I find my waxling on your mind?”

  “I had no intention of deceiving you,” he protested, startled by her perception. Intent on Camas Erl, he had forgotten Mag. The sorceress queried him with a sparse brow; he admitted, “I would have let Mag tell you that we met. I found her in the servants’ halls; she was looking for me.” Both brows went up at that. But she let him finish. “She wanted me to draw with the piece of charcoal in her locket. She thought I might coax her mother’s face out of it.”

  “Did you?”

  “I had no time. I left her waiting for me in Lydea’s room.”

  The sorceress exhaled harshly; Ducon half-expected her breath to flame. “I told her to stay out of that palace.”

  “I warned her not to wander.” He watched Faey, asked cautiously, “Do you know who her mother is?”

  “I have not the slightest idea,” Faey said. “Nor have I ever been much interested in the question.” But she was now, Ducon guessed. Her brows had creased; she studied something invisible in the air between them. Then she studied him. The flare and welter of her powers transfixed him with their intensity and secret beauty; again he could not look away. “You see me,” he heard her say, “in ways no other human can. Except Mag. I have hidden such things from her since she was small, so that she would do my bidding without being distracted by them. But when I first found her, I saw the reflection of my powers in her eyes. She would try to catch the glittering in her hands. Someone left her charcoal. She saw it and connected it to you.”

  “What are you saying?” His own voice sounded far away, very calm. “That we are somehow kin?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I had never seen her before this morning. But when I looked at her, I thought we must have met, in some other time and place.”

  “Perhaps you did.”

  She loosed him too abruptly; he felt stranded, bewildered, a fish out of water and all her haunting currents out of reach. Her eyes held human color again. She contemplated him dispassionately, as though she were examining a crooked stitch in a vast and complex tapestry. “I will be extremely interested to see what comes out of that flake of charcoal. But she could have asked me to summon you, rather than running off to the palace and putting herself under the Black Pearl’s nose. I do wish at times that I had encouraged her to think.”

  She stood up. “But wait,” he pleaded. “Tell me. What time? What place?”

  “How should I know? Maybe the charcoal will tell you. Domina Pearl is right,” she added, “about one thing. I will help you if you ask me. But don’t ask me for help with Camas Erl. Deal with him yourself.” She wandered away from him, yawning again. “I’m going back to bed.”

  He followed the path the lamps lit along the river; here and there the great houses illumined a window to watch him pass and then grew dark again. The river narrowed, quickened, its surface trembling like the eyes of dreamers. The sun rose. Gold, dusty crossbeams of light fell from forgotten windows, drains, the broken husks of buildings whose floors had long since fallen. The river ran deeper, sloping down toward earlier times. Houses on its banks grew smaller, clustered closely together; old streets looped and coiled like mazes. Once he smelled the sweet, astonishing scent of grass newly cut in a field, another time the scent of lavender.

  He walked until he saw how far he would have to go to reach the beginning of time in the undercity. The fragmented, ephemeral memories of shadowy walls, towers, the river fanning into a vast black sea, seemed too far to reach except in dreams. Perhaps, he thought, kneeling on the riverbank for a handful of water, Camas had gone that far beyond history.

  But the tutor had not yet reached the end of time. Ducon saw him finally, walking across a bridge of rough-hewn stone arching over the river. His head cocked in concentration, arms folded, he was listening to a huge, burly man in silk and fur, white fox heads dangling over one shoulder, his boots trimmed with fringes of ermine tails. Camas’s tangled hair slid over his haggard face, caught in the ragged stubble on his jaws. His clothes looked dank, muddy, as though he had walked through water; he was missing a shoe. But he spoke earnestly, eagerly, to the ghost as if it had stepped for a moment into the palace library to help the tutor with his research.

  Ducon appearing out of nowhere at the end of the bridge made no impression on the tutor. He continued his thought without a flicker of recognition, as he stepped down to the bank, “And all of this happened during the reign of Sisal Greve, whom you say, contrary to all our written histories, would never have—” What Sisal Greve would never have done about what was lost forever as Ducon’s fist slammed against the tutor’s jaw. Camas tripped backward against the end of the bridge and sat down on it heavily, all his attention suddenly riveted on the living.

  The ghost, ignored, vanished. The
tutor, his wide, stunned gaze on Ducon, permitted no distractions; no one else appeared. Ducon flexed the bruised bones of his hand, then reached down for Camas’s bedraggled collar and hauled him to his feet.

  “Ducon,” the tutor said bewilderedly. “What are you doing here?”

  “Domina Pearl sent me to bring you back.”

  “But I’m in the midst of my research. Ducon, you would not believe what I have learned—” He stopped suddenly, looking confused, caught, Ducon guessed, between lies. He shifted his hold to the back of Camas’s collar, twisted it, and pushed him upriver toward the sorceress’s house. The tutor, turning his head fretfully, complained, “I can hardly breathe.”

  “You didn’t hear me.”

  “I heard you. Domina Pearl sent you.”

  “She showed me her secret room, where she makes her spells and her poisons, and puts her crumbling body to bed to regrow itself at night. She had me help her shift enormous mirrors to search for you. She said that you usually do such things, but you were missing, so—” His fingers tightened abruptly on the cloth at Camas’s throat; the tutor, his breath rasping, flailed at his collar, tore a button off. He bent, hands at his knees, groping for breath. “All those years,” Ducon said between clenched teeth, “you lied—”

  “I never lied—You never asked—”

  “Did you help her kill my uncle?” He heard Camas’s breath stop for an instant. “Did you?”

  “You must,” the tutor said raggedly, “consider the consequences. The rewards are incalculable.”

  Gaunt as he looked, he still had more strength than Ducon realized. He felt it as the tutor straightened suddenly, and propelled a shoulder into Ducon’s chest, trying to push him into the river. A ghost appeared, waited calmly for the outcome. Ducon shifted, rolling from under the tutor’s weight, and caught Camas again as he lost his balance and reeled toward the water himself.

  Camas fell to his knees on the bank. Ducon, standing behind him with one hand around his throat, the other clamped to his shoulder, said succinctly, “Don’t fight me. Just explain. What is so important to you that you would kill one Prince of Ombria and put the next in such danger? Ombria is your passion, and Greve is its ruling house. Why?”

  The ghost disappeared. Camas, shifting fitfully under Ducon’s hand, said breathlessly, “I am so close—so close to understanding it myself—”

  “Understanding what?”

  “You must let me stay here. I’ve spoken to ghosts who have survived the last transformation of Ombria—”

  “You’ve spoken to the sorceress’s illusions,” Ducon said flatly.

  “No—They have been appearing to me freely. Listen to me. Perilous times, a desperate city, the ruling house in chaos, in danger—all of this signals the change, and causes it. The deeper Domina Pearl plunges the city into misery and hopelessness, the stronger its visions of hope and longing for change become. Do you understand? When the desire becomes overwhelming, the transformation becomes inevitable. It has happened before, it will happen again, and we are reaching that point—” He stopped, choking on his own words as Ducon’s hand tightened.

  “Because of you.” Ducon felt cold fury bore through him like a blade of ice. “You and the Black Pearl are destroying Ombria for a fantasy—a child’s tale—”

  “No—” His fingers prying, Camas gained another word’s worth of air. “Listen—”

  “You listen. I’m not giving you back to Domina Pearl. Tale or true, you’ll never know; you won’t be here to see, and this change, if it comes, will more likely come from your absence than from any dream you spin out of history.”

  “What—”

  “You are going on a very long sea journey to the outermost islands where Domina Pearl’s ships stop to collect her strange plants and poisonous reptiles. You will never return to this city.”

  “Domina,” Camas gasped, striving with Ducon’s hands. “She’ll stop you—”

  “Not when I explain to her that you were conspiring with this sorceress against her. She’ll put you on the ship herself.”

  “No—” The force of the tutor’s desire overwhelmed him. One hand, groping upward, caught Ducon’s shirt. “I must see it—I must be here—” He wrenched at Ducon; his other hand, scrabbling along the earth, found a stone. Ducon, jerking back, avoided the flailing weapon, but his grip loosened. Camas turned, his eyes desperate with visions. “No one,” he said and swung the stone again as he pulled free. His weighted fist cracked across Ducon’s face. The distant lamps turned suddenly to tiny pinpoints of light; Ducon fell endlessly into them, still hearing the tutor’s voice. “No one will stop me.”

  “No one,” the sorceress snapped, “is going anywhere.”

  Ducon raised his head. Blurred colors and textures took shape slowly into damp earth and the tip of the sorceress’s blue silk shoe. He rolled unsteadily, spat blood. The tutor, seeing yet another ghost in the willowy, red-haired beauty, stared transfixed across Ducon’s prone body. Then he blinked as she said irritably to an elegant lord in black velvet and silver chains,

  “Go away. All of you: back into the cauldron.”

  Blood streaked through Camas’s face. He shifted, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly. “You didn’t—” he managed finally. “You couldn’t have made them all—”

  “You,” she said pithily, “are a fool of the first water.” She held a slender, jewelled hand to Ducon and flicked him to his feet as though he were made of down. Then she skewered the tutor again with eyes the color of metal. “I didn’t make them. I summoned them out of memory.”

  “You knew them all?” the tutor demanded hoarsely.

  “Oh, stop,” she said in exasperation. “I’ve been hearing you babble for days.” She thrust a folded piece of paper at Ducon. The seal was broken, but he recognized it. He opened the paper. Faey, her words as staccato as the heels in the streets high above their heads, told him what it said before he read it. “That woman has Mag.”

  Ducon felt a sudden flare of pain where Camas had struck him. “I left her safe,” he whispered, sickened. “I thought I did.”

  “She was never good at sitting still. The Black Pearl wants to know if my making of wax is worth anything to me before she unmakes it. And what I might consider offering her for its safe return.”

  “What will you do?”

  “Whatever I must,” she said succinctly. “For now, I’ll consider an offer. You’ll take it to her along with Camas Erl.”

  “No,” he protested incredulously. “You must not give Camas back to her.”

  “I think that, under the circumstances, I should not like to offend the regent.” She turned abruptly to Camas Erl, donning manners like a ball gown. “Forgive my brusqueness. I am distressed. I hope that before you go you will accept a pair of shoes?”

  He spoke cautiously. “I would be grateful. I can’t think what might have happened to my other shoe. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I entirely understand what I have seen and done the past few—” He stopped, felt his chin. “Days?”

  “And, perhaps, a cup of tea?”

  “Yes. And if I could just speak to you for a few more moments, about your earliest memories? I know the regent will show herself grateful for anything that you can tell me.”

  “Then I will tell you anything,” the sorceress said.

  “I will not,” Ducon said, his voice rising precariously, “put Camas Erl back under the same roof with Kyel.” He took a step toward her, his fists clenched. “He helped Domina Pearl kill Kyel’s father. You told me to deal with him. I will. I will kill him before I return him to the—”

  She turned a face to him that seemed half bone, half nacre, and stripped of all human expression. Her eyes grew colorless, shrivelled; that white stare burned all language out of him, all thought. “I will do anything I must for my waxling,” she said. He felt her voice like hoarfrost in his heart. “You will do as you are told.”

  Shedding centuries again, she slipped an arm through Camas’s,
and accommodated herself, like one of her own ghosts, to his blistered hobble along the river, while Ducon, betrayed by his own spellbound bones, trailed helplessly in her wake.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The Wild Hunt

  Lydea, exposed to her own ignorance for the better part of a morning in the library and surrounded by guards who looked as though they might lop off her head for a misspelled word, was deeply grateful for Mistress Thorn’s unruffled voice. She sat as close to Kyel as she dared, but did not touch him; she had no idea how much the Black Pearl saw out of the hard, unblinking eyes around them. Kyel seemed to sense her tension. He did not question her about Ducon, or why she only read him history and did not try to teach him words in other languages. She braved the silent guards stationed along the bookshelves to come up with Simple Mathematical Principles. She was struggling, in Mistress Thorn’s sedate manner, to make sense of that for Kyel when Domina Pearl spun through the door like a bony, furious whirlwind.

  She disconcerted Mistress Thorn, who sucked in a dust mote and gave a genteel cough as she rose. The Black Pearl, early by an hour or two, looked oddly dishevelled, peculiar, though she was scarcely there long enough for Lydea to examine. She carried a crumpled drawing in one hand; the other she held out peremptorily to Kyel.

  “Come, my lord. Enough, Mistress Thorn. You may retire.”

  The thumb on that hand seemed withered and strangely dark. Mistress Thorn blinked at it, then curtseyed hastily. Kyel, taking the hand without expression, glanced back at Lydea as he left, his eyes wide, uncertain. Domina Pearl hissed something at him; he looked down at the floor instead. The guards followed her out.

  Lydea, wondering, returned books neatly to the shelves, except for the book on basic mathematics, which she took with her to her room. The halls were silent at that hour before noon, but for the occasional passing bundle of rich and colorful laundry that had been removed quickly from sight in the upper world to be transported to the lower through the servants’ halls. She remembered Mag, then, waiting in her room or not waiting, as the mood had seized her. Lydea quickened her step, expecting either Mag or a lack of Mag to greet her beyond her door.