Ombria In Shadow

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Even Mistress Thorn’s composure cracked at the sight of two granite-faced men looming up in her tiny chamber, drawing their swords as she opened the door. The mathematical principles crashed to the floor. Mistress Thorn, abandoning propriety, slammed the door in their faces and fled.

  She heard the door crash open again as she rounded a corner. She passed a stairway, but dared not run up. By now, the image of her in those spellbound eyes must have passed from mind to mind throughout the palace. She heard a shriek behind her, partly muffled as laundry dodged the swords. The guards’ feet pounded hard on Lydea’s heels as she ran a scared rat’s path through the maze of hallways, taking every turn. She could not lose them, she realized with growing terror; it was as though she left. a glowing trail of footprints behind her.

  Someone moved ahead of her. She saw a pale head behind a huge urn standing grotesquely along the narrow passage. “Ducon,” she gasped on a rag-end of breath. He looked back at her, then disappeared. She gave a half sob of horror and despair, hearing the boots hammering the floorboards behind her. Casting a hopeless glance back for Ducon as she sped past the urn, she saw the narrow opening in the wall behind it.

  She threw herself into it, closed wall and wainscotting behind her. The inner passageway was empty; Ducon was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps, she thought incredulously, it had not been Ducon at all but his ghostly-seeming other. Pausing only to kick off her shoes, she fled noiselessly down the nearest turning, then up a stairway, angling her way without thinking, without stopping, deep into the secret palace.

  She paused finally to catch her breath, feeling her heart rattle against her ribs. She heard voices beyond the wall, a distant shout or two. Surely they knew those hidden hallways; they would search for her there. She moved as soon as she could, parched and aching, and certain that this time Mag would not appear out of nowhere and save her during her wild run. The Black Pearl must have sniffed Mag out in some sorcerer’s way, and left the guards in the chamber to trap her accomplice.

  Lydea fled up another stairway, this one lined with ornately framed paintings that had grown so dark with age they might have been of faces or of cities, she could not tell. The balusters were trimmed with peeling gold leaf, and supported a railing of black wood. At the top of the stairs, the sconces along the walls were of finely painted porcelain. She realized something then that made her stumble a step. All along her way, there had been candles lit, random and unobtrusive. Had she, she wondered in that instant, simply chosen the path that she could best see? Or was someone ahead anticipating her, lighting candles to guide her way?

  Down the shadowy hallway, something shifted. Lydea froze. Then Mistress Thorn, reasserting herself for a moment, reached up coolly and pinched the nearest flame out. A dim, perplexing shape moved into the frail light. Lydea, expecting guards to pour through the wall, didn’t immediately recognize what she saw. A door had opened, she guessed, but what came through near the level of the threshold looked confusingly like an arm, several sheets of paper, and a small, dark head.

  Her heart, which had been stopped for hours, it seemed, or days or weeks, gave a sudden, painful twist. She made an incoherent sound; the face turned toward her. She began to run again. Without hesitation, the small figure pulled itself into her path and carefully closed the door against the world.

  She caught him up as she ran. He clung to her, his arms around her neck, not speaking; she could hear his unsteady breathing. She held him tightly, fiercely. She felt his wet cheek against hers; she could barely see through her own tears. Beyond the hidden walls the palace murmured vaguely, undisturbed yet by the vanished prince, who had been left, Lydea guessed, to take a nap. She climbed another staircase, moving as far from his chamber as she could get until she could barely take another step. She pushed into the nearest room, an old ballroom by the look of it, empty but for half a dozen antique chairs spilling stuffing out of their tapestry seats where the mice had nested.

  She put Kyel down and sank to the floor, heaving for breath. He crouched close to her, put his hands on the sides of her face.

  “Lydea,” he whispered. “Lydea.”

  She kissed him, wiped both their faces with her sleeve. Then she held him again, glimpsing her own fate if she were caught running away with the Prince of Ombria, but knowing that she could not leave him an instant longer in that deadly place.

  “Where will we go?” he asked, echoing her thoughts.

  “Well,” she whispered back, “what goes up must come down. We’ll go down as far as we can under the palace, and from there we’ll escape to the undercity.”

  “Ducon went up.”

  “What?”

  “When he took me here after my father died. He kept going up.”

  “He does come here, then,” she breathed in sudden hope. “Maybe he’ll look for us here and help us.”

  “He would look up,” Kyel guessed, gazing at the ceiling on which people in stiff and elaborate costumes appeared to be dancing on clouds.

  “Then we’ll go up first,” Lydea said, her lips against his hair, close to his ear. “And if he doesn’t find us there we’ll go down.”

  He drew back a little to see her face. “Where is Mistress Thorn?”

  “She’s still here. She hides me from everyone but you.”

  His face dropped against hers again; she stroked his hair, trying to think. Ducon had gone to find Camas Erl; he would come back eventually and report to the Black Pearl. Who would tell him then that she had trapped the sorceress’s spying waxling in Mistress Thorn’s room, and that Mistress Thorn had eluded capture and disappeared somewhere within the palace. And so, subsequently, had the Prince of Ombria. The inescapable conclusion being that she had stolen the prince for ransom, or other evil purposes. Camas Erl, who would hardly be thanked for introducing Mistress Thorn into Kyel’s life, would tell the Black Pearl that he had been hoodwinked by Ducon into accepting her: that Mistress Thorn was actually the ensorcelled Lydea, obviously deranged by grief and a grave threat to the prince; she might hide him anywhere, in any hovel in the city. Ducon might be sent to look for them, since they both trusted him. In which case “up” was indicated. Or he might be tossed into a pit in the cellar somewhere for bringing Lydea and the prince back together. In which case, “down” seemed safer…down and out and onto the sorceress’s mercy.

  She heard footsteps.

  She clung to Kyel again, her throat burning. So soon, she thought in despair. So soon.

  He held her as tightly, and whispered, “Don’t leave me.”

  “No,” she promised blindly, “I won’t.”

  Light footsteps pattered like rain, many of them on one side or the other of the ballroom, she couldn’t tell which. On one side the double doors were open as she had left them. Across the room, matching doors were closed. The steps seemed quiet, disorganized after the guards’ rigorous, mindless pounding, but who else would be gathered up there?

  “In here,” someone hissed, and the closed doors opened.

  Lydea’s arms locked around Kyel. She rose while the group of young men at the door pushing against one another to get in were brought up, transfixed, against the sight of the Prince of Ombria in a musty ballroom high within the secret palace, unguarded and alone except for the stranger who held him. Lydea recognized a few of them: the young sons of nobles and once-powerful ministers. They looked harried, she thought, desperate and reckless; most of them were armed.

  For a moment they were simply stunned at the incongruous sight; their faces refused to believe their eyes. Then someone said it, his voice flat, expressionless, “Kyel Greve.”

  Kyel twisted in Lydea’s hold, gazed back at them silently. Someone drew a sword; she backed a step.

  “Who are you?” one of the young nobles asked bewilderedly. “What are you doing up here with the prince? Have you kidnapped him? Are you mad?”

  “She must have,” someone breathed. “She must be.”

  Half of them, she realized with wonder, had inherited th
e soft black hair and dark blue eyes of the House of Greve. Kyel’s wayward kin, they were, each with a labyrinthine link to the throne of Ombria. She flung the question back at them.

  “What are you doing here? Armed and gathered up here in secret, with your faces out of Ombria’s history?”

  They looked at one another, startled again and silently questioning. Lydea took another step backward toward the open doors. A sharp word sent two of the young men, both armed, circling her to stand guard at the doors.

  “What shall we do with this?” one murmured. She recognized Lord Hilil Gamelyn’s impetuous son, with whom she had once danced. He did not recognize Mistress Thorn, whose formidable self-possession masked a growing and terrifying perception of the dangers that had chanced into the ballroom.

  “Kill him?”

  Mistress Thorn’s imperturbable face turned as brittle as glass. Someone else shook his head violently, scowling. “You heard Ducon Greve. I’m as afraid of him as I am of the Black Pearl. He does her bidding now; he’s lost to us.”

  “But, we could blame it on this woman. He has no direct heir; I could make a claim as strong as anyone’s.” The young man moved out from the group to study the glacial Mistress Thorn more closely. “Who are you?” he asked softly. “How did you dare snatch the Prince of Ombria out of the Black Pearl’s grip? And how long did you think you were going to live afterwards?”

  Lydea, feeling the prince trembling in her arms, opened her mouth to plead, to make suggestions, to bargain like the tavern-wench she had been. Thunder rolled down the worn hallways, drowning her voice. The young men, blood startling out of their faces, moved abruptly, scattering through the ballroom toward the open doors. Caught up in their mute urgency, Lydea ran with them a moment or two before she realized what she heard. Domina Pearl’s guards, boots echoing everywhere, burst through the doors on one side while the young nobles and the prince’s kidnapper fled through the opposite doors. The last of them turned courageously to fight; Lydea heard the explosive argument of blades.

  She tried to outrun the running nobles, lose them in sudden turns down the chipped, twisting halls, but they stayed grimly at her heels like hounds after the deer, while the guards, rumbling over the worn floors like a pack of horsemen, clamored after them. Breath like fire in her throat, her arms shaking under Kyel’s weight, Lydea moved hopelessly, feeling his damp cheek against hers. Up and up the hunted ran, dodging, circling, dashing toward any shadow, down any empty corridor or stairway. The guards, relentless as flood water, flowed everywhere after them.

  She glimpsed an impossibility ahead of her, as a window in a room she reeled into gave her a sight of Ombria far below, the crooked, winding streets she had fled down in the night spread out like a maze between the palace and the sea. A tall man with hair the color of ivory moved away from the window to slip through a shadowed doorway in the wall. “Ducon,” she whispered, with barely strength enough to shape the name. Shadow lay as deep and stark as midnight sea across the door.

  But there was no place else to go. Someone caught at her, tried to stop her, shouting at her that there was nowhere left to go. But Ducon had just walked through the doorway. And so she followed him, carrying the Prince of Ombria with her into nowhere.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Time Out of Mind

  Mag, shackled to a wall in a room without a door, watched what looked like a huge moth with glowing golden wings beat incessantly at the glass sides of a jar on a shell. The jar was sealed with cork and wax; the moth should have died long before Mag ever laid eyes on it. But it kept fluttering around and around in the jar, never resting, ceaselessly battering itself against an illusion of freedom until Mag could not bear looking at it. But she couldn’t bear looking away, either. Then things half in shadow and glowing in the dark crossed her sight, like the pile of bones in a corner and the deformed creatures floating in other jars that seemed to study her curiously. The room itself, windowless, doorless, and steeped in smells, she recognized easily. It was Domina Pearl’s most closely guarded secret, the center of the she-spider’s web. That she had permitted Mag to see it, Mag found profoundly disquieting.

  Earlier, Mag had watched her pull parts of herself back out of the charcoal whirlpool that had stolen them and reattach them, muttering a trenchant mix of spell and imprecation. The best she could do was a withered black carrot for a thumb, a crumpled leaf for an ear, and a dead-white eyebrow. Looking into a mirror, she had spat at her reflection. The glass melted where her spittle ran down. Then she had turned to Mag, who was slumped on the floor, one arm dangling from a metal cuff on a chain and growing numb.

  “As for you,” the Black Pearl said harshly, staring into Mag’s expressionless eyes. “You will stay here as bait. I will refuse every offer she makes for you until she is forced to come for you. Then she will reckon with me. If she does not care enough to come, then you will be my waxling, in name, in thought, in heart. I will use you against her as she used you against me. That will teach the sorceress not to meddle in a world where she does not belong.”

  She left then. Mag watched closely, but it was as though the Black Pearl had seeped through the stained floorboards, or compressed herself into a speck and blew between slats in the wall. Mag stood up to work the blood back into her arm. Faey would rescue her somehow, sooner or later; she clung to that, trying not to demand how soon? or how? from thin air.

  What seemed to be the Black Pearl’s bed distracted her for a few moments. It stood open against the far wall, a chest as long as a coffin with a high, rounded lid. The outside looked as if it had been made of amber and the gleaming wings of thousands of beetles. Inside the box and along the lid, some strange substance had formed a mold of the Black Pearl, complete to the end of her nose and the tips of her outstretched fingers, as she lay enclosed within the box. The substance looked vaguely porous, spongy, like bread dough, and was the color of dried blood. It was that yeasty muck, Mag guessed, which nightly rejuvenated the Black Pearl, and gave her, judging from its smell, the peculiar odor of musty, unaired linen.

  She sat on the floor again and watched with mindless intensity as the luminous, beautiful moth fought the prison around it. If it freed itself, she felt, then so could she; if it could just find the way beyond the invisible door, then so could she… The Black Pearl emerged out of the air. Her face seemed patchy, streaked with passion; her lips had all but vanished. She looked, Mag thought uneasily, as if she had inhaled a thunderbolt.

  She went to what resembled a cast-iron tree that grew mirrors like fruit on every branch. She angled different mirrors rapidly. Mag caught fleeting images of the palace: a rich, shadowed chamber in which naked figures dimly moved on rumpled satin sheets; the kitchens where a cook carried a steaming pot high over the bowed heads of a row of girls peeling vegetables; the secret library where once Mag had been trapped. Domina Pearl whispered something, and every mirror showed her the harsh, expressionless face of a guard.

  “Watch all entrances, even to the kitchens, and all the stairways to the cellar. Do not let them leave the palace. When you find them, kill her and bring the prince to me.”

  Lydea, Mag thought, feeling her skin grow icy. The Black Pearl whirled suddenly, tore off her stiffly piled hair and flung it on the floor. A small knife bounced out of it, and a little glass vial of something green. Domina Pearl stared at the hair, breathing heavily. Mag stared at the bald, seamed head of the regent. She bent finally, grunting, and put her hair back on her head. The small black hillock seemed so rigid that Mag expected it to have cracked. But not a hair was out of place.

  She vanished again. Mag, frightened thoughtless, threw whatever she could reach at the golden moth to break the jar, including her shoes. Everything bounced off the recalcitrant glass except for one shoe, which narrowly missed the reappearing regent and fell into her bed instead. The Black Pearl left a weal across Mag’s cheek with her signet ring, and tossed the shoe into the bone pile. Mag swallowed, motionless again. Half the shoe had melted.

&
nbsp; She could not see exactly how Ducon and Camas Erl found their way into the Black Pearl’s secret, but there they were suddenly, standing in front of her. Ducon’s face, even worse for wear, had a hard, hopeless cast to it, as though he had been forced to absorb something bitter. The bitterness, Mag guessed, was Camas Erl, safely returned from the backwaters of history to Domina Pearl. She was only partly right, she learned soon enough. Ducon gave her a harried look that took in her throbbing cheek and shackled arm. He said nothing, but she glimpsed the deepening despair in his eyes.

  He handed Domina Pearl a sheet of dove-grey paper sealed with Faey’s customary splash of black wax. She read it and sniffed contemptuously. “As I expected. She has begun to bargain for her waxling.”

  “What will you do?”

  “Accept nothing until she has no choice but to come here. She has grown too free and unpredictable in her underground city. I want her here, under my control, doing my bidding. While I wait, I will make a few necessary adjustments to the girl.”

  “What kinds of adjustments?”

  “She is too curious,” the Black Pearl answered succinctly. “Like you.”

  “Let me take the girl back,” the tutor pleaded. He had tidied his hair, but his chin still bristled like one of the Black Pearls peculiar fleshy plants, and he wore a water-line across his shirt. “I still have many questions for the sorceress. Her past is extraordinary; it stretches back to the beginning of Ombria’s history. She promised me—”

  “You,” Domina Pearl snapped, “have been gone far too long. You have neglected your duty, and because of you the history of Ombria is liable to take a deadly turn. Your Mistress Thorn has stolen the prince.”

  “What?” Ducon whispered. Camas Erl, wordless and blinking rapidly, seemed caught between lies and considering the more expedient of them.

  “She is trapped in the old palace, along with another covey of conspirators flushed out by the guards. Nestlings, all of them, thinking they will succeed where their fathers failed and died. Of course, Mistress Thorn cannot elude the guards, but who knows what she may do to the prince when she is cornered—”