Ombria In Shadow

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “She won’t harm him,” Ducon interrupted rashly. “She loves him.”

  Domina Pearl eyed him bleakly. “You know this Mistress Thorn well enough to assume that she would snatch the prince away from his guardian and his family out of love rather than malevolence and greed? I think she is yet another conspirator, trying to force my hand.”

  “I know her. So do you. She was Royce Greve’s mistress. The sorceress disguised her beneath a spell so that there would be someone in this decaying, dangerous, bloody-minded palace who would give the child love instead of a daily dose of poison—”

  Mag didn’t see Domina Pearl move, but Ducon was on his knees suddenly in front of her, struggling to speak, his face as white as bone. “She,” the regent said very softly, “will not be as fortunate this time. She will die where she is found, in front of the child. You will be even less fortunate. You will live. Here. Obeying me in all things, without question. You will never leave this room again.” She turned away from him to the cauldron standing on its grate above the floor. “You can begin now by helping me return this waxling to her proper state of wax.” Ducon loosed a harsh sound between a curse and a sob. She ignored him, her eyes going to the unusually silent tutor. “And you. How well did you know this Mistress Thorn?” He hesitated, torn between answers; she gestured, exasperated. “Never mind. I’ll have the truth out of you later. Go and find the prince. Make sure that my orders are carried out, and return here with the boy. You want to witness history: witness that. Cut off her hair when she is dead; I can use it in my—”

  She stopped abruptly, caught by a face within one of the mirrors. It spoke, silently except to her. Ducon, freed for no apparent reason, got to his feet unsteadily. He watched her, his face haggard and slick with sweat. She seemed to be listening to something of enormous portent. Mag held her breath, but heard nothing. The Black Pearl’s face smoothed like eggshell; all expression startled out of it. She eased down slowly on the edge of her bed. For an instant, as she sat staring at the unforeseen, she looked almost human.

  Her wide eyes went first to Ducon. “The child is dead.”

  Again he could not speak; her words had struck like a spell. He shook his head a little, holding her eyes, beginning to tremble as he waited.

  “Lydea,” the Black Pearl began; she had to stop and clear some acid out of her throat. “The guards cornered her at the top of the hidden palace. With no place left to go in the world she leaped out of it with the prince in her arms. The guards are searching for the bodies.” Ducon made a sound finally, soft, meaningless. Domina Pearl stilled a sudden twitch beside her mouth and rose. She said wearily to Camas Erl, “You will have to plan another funeral, suitable for a child-ruler. And untangle the genealogy charts to find out exactly who rules after him. I want no ambiguities left in this house.”

  Ducon, swaying forward to grip the rim of the huge cauldron in front of him as though to catch his balance, rocked it off the grate and heaved it into the air. He staggered under its ponderous bulk, but kept his balance as he swung it like a bell and hurled it. It seemed such an impossible task that even the Black Pearl was transfixed by the flying cauldron until the instant before it passed over the place where she had been standing. It crashed onto her bed. The bed splintered into a thousand pieces; beetle wings flew everywhere. Domina Pearl, reappearing to stare at the wreckage, gave a long, high-pitched wail. Mag, the bones of her face singing before she heard the sound, clamped her ears between her arms. Ducon reeled, but stayed on his feet, and followed the cauldron doggedly with the cast-iron tree of mirrors, in which, briefly, his harrowed face appeared in every mirror before they shattered.

  He hauled at the iron grate, his hands coming up black with ash. Mag held her breath, for the golden fluttering moth in its prison was just above the Black Pearl’s head. But, screeching like a hinge, she gave Ducon no chance. He froze before he could throw the massive grate, stood spellbound in her murderous gaze, trembling again at the weight dragging at him.

  She drew breath to speak, or perhaps just to spit and let her acid eat into him. The jar shattered abruptly above her head. They all looked up, except for Ducon, who seemed, even ensorcelled, still intent on throwing what he could at Domina Pearl. The moth flew free, spiralled an erratic flight across the room and came to rest in Mag’s hair.

  She felt a flame spark behind her eyes, in her throat, for no reason except that the moth was free and it had come to her. The room shuddered suddenly, oddly, under them. Shards of amber glittered and clicked; bones shifted. Domina Pearl stumbled, caught herself, her eyes searching wildly through the broken fragments of her mirrors. The walls shook again, as though in the heart of the hidden palace, or at its foundations, something massive and unimaginable was taking its first ponderous steps.

  The grate tore out of Ducon’s hold, gashed the floor as it hit. Jars rattled together on the shelves; things within them shivered. A shelf groaned as nails bent within the wood. It broke abruptly in half, showering glass and liquid and various stenches over the Black Pearl. She hissed a word, watching a crack growing across the ceiling.

  Camas Erl whispered, “She said she would do anything.”

  Domina Pearl looked at him, her face seamed like dry mud and as brittle; she might have broken at a touch. The room lurched around them, twisting, Mag realized, like one cog against another. The wall she was chained to had shifted behind the Black Pearl, giving Mag a clear view of Ducon’s stark, motionless face, and the tutor behind him, trying to see through the ceiling.

  “What is it?” Camas pleaded of whatever was shattering the boundaries of history as it moved to meet them. “Is it her? Or is it the beginning?”

  Domina Pearl, suddenly shedding illusions like old leaves, lost an eyebrow as she shrieked at him, “Why don’t you know? You’ve been studying this for years!”

  “The ending?” the tutor guessed, his face bloodless, rapt. Walls turned again as though the enormous being beyond the room were trying to open it like a jar. A voice, more wind than human, or the angry hiss of an enormous reptile, swept through it; the words it spoke seemed of some ancient language, only half-human and completely incomprehensible.

  Domina Pearl waded through splinters of glass and amber, picked up a broken piece of mirror. As she turned it futilely this way and that to see the speaker, her withered ear fell off. She cried out, searching for it in the rubble. Camas Erl, his yellow eyes flickering nervously, moved a step away from her.

  The voice flooded the room again with the furious energy of a roiling storm, its threat unmistakable, its words unfathomable.

  The Black Pearl spat a rotten tooth or two, tried to catch them. “Who is that woman?” she asked Camas hoarsely. “Where in Ombria did she come from?”

  “You must know her,” Camas answered frantically. “She has always been here.”

  Ducon came to life again unexpectedly; his arms, still straining around the fallen grate, finally dropped. He looked around bewilderedly at the wreckage, found Mag again within the shifted walls. Then a floorboard or a door tore itself apart just beyond the walls and he froze again, trying, as they all were, to see beyond the visible world.

  The voice boomed against them and shattered like tide hitting rock. “Give me my waxling!”

  The Black Pearl’s withered thumb fell off. She screamed suddenly, furiously back, “Take her!”

  She vanished. Camas Erl, shouting incoherently, wavered between history and magic, then followed the fleeing path of what he understood best.

  The moth fluttered out of Mag’s hair, touched the floor, and turned into Faey.

  She had cobbled a face of some sort together; her skin was iridescent and one eye smaller than the other. She straightened a strand of unnaturally glowing hair the color of the moth wings, and touched the iron cuff at Mag’s wrist. The cuff sprang open; her numb arm dropped. Mag, melting like wax, could not move even then. The moth in the jar in her mind kept turning into Faey, who had come out from under the world to rescue her. Fire sp
illed out of her eyes, burned down her face; she was blind with it, words changing to fire in her throat, until she hardly knew any longer if she were the wax or the wick and the flame.

  She heard Ducon’s voice, raw with rage and grief. “Where did they go? I want her dead. Will you help me?”

  Faey settled down on the floor beside Mag, put an arm around her shoulders. “Domina Pearl is dead even as she runs,” the sorceress told Ducon. “You killed her. She can’t regrow without her bed, and she will have no time to make another before she needs it. A form of mold, I think she must be. Or fungus. Something grown in the shadow of the world.”

  “Her guards ran Lydea and Kyel to death like animals.” Ducon’s face glistened, furrowed with sorrow. “Please. Can you tell me where they are?”

  “From what I saw, they went out that door. The one you drew so often, with the iris beside it. Or did they go into it? You’d know better than I. Look for them through there.”

  He stared at her uncertainly, tormented by her riddling. A short, harsh sob shook him; he vanished, without answering, out the Black Pearl’s invisible door.

  Or had he, Mag wondered, vanished into? “We should go after him,” she said uneasily. “Help him. She’s not dead yet, and her guards are everywhere.”

  “I can keep an eye on him from here,” Faey answered. “Unlike some, I don’t need all those mirrors for spare eyes.”

  Mag wiped at tears with her sleeve, said huskily, “I came here trying to find my true mother in a piece of charcoal. I don’t think that seeing her face could ever move me as much as seeing you now. Whichever face you happen to put on.”

  Faey, adjusting her mismatched eyes, said pensively, “I have been wrong in my life almost as often as I changed my face. We learned something together, you and I. Just when I thought I knew everything I would ever need to know, you taught me how to see beyond my sorcery into my heart.”

  “Can you show me how to see without eyes?”

  “You’ve seen Ducon that way already,” Faey said simply. But she reached for a piece of broken mirror. “Here, use this; they still work. Think of his face.”

  Mag summoned Ducon to memory and looked in the mirror. The thing outside took another immense step that seemed to shake the palace from weathercock to wine cellar. Mag started. The mirror shivered in her hand; the image forming in it rippled like water. The walls made their clockwork turn.

  “I thought,” she said uneasily to Faey, “that it was you making all the noise out there. What is it?”

  “It happens,” Faey answered obscurely. “This is a good place to wait it out. It’s outside of time, and you’ll remember better afterward.”

  “Wait what out? Remember what? What exactly is going on out there?”

  The sorceress shrugged slightly; an eyebrow tilted. “I’m never sure. But it seems to happen whenever I come up from the underworld.”

  Mag stared at her, speechless. The secret room revolved like a star in an orrery, following its immutable pattern across the night.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Ombria in Shadow

  Ducon had to fight his way through the slit in the air that was the Black Pearl’s invisible door. Even air and time seemed to be warping within the palace along with floorboards and joists. He pushed back illusions of falling beams, shoved through bare walls closing together, all in a narrow corridor of time which led in and out of the Black Pearl’s inmost chamber. In abandoning her secrets, she had all but trapped him. The misshapen door at the end of her corridor was growing smaller, odd angles closing in on one another in a blind iris of moldings and boards. He reached it just before it grew too small to pass through.

  Emerging from within that brief pocket of time, he was startled to feel the floor shake under him. Something other than the sorceress was happening in the ancient palace. It stirred like a living thing, murmured and groaned like a dreamer. He stepped out of the little antechamber in the hidden palace within which the Black Pearl had built her door, and stopped, swallowing drily. Death had stalked those empty, forgotten passages. He recognized the hot-eyed young cousin who lay in his own blood in the hallway. He still wore the shallow scratch on his neck from Ducon’s blade. Ducon coaxed the sword out of the stiff fingers and listened. But for the faint trembling of the crystal prisms in an enormous chandelier, the place was soundless. He began to run, inward and upward toward the secret heart of the palace.

  He was unprepared for the virulence of the Black Pearl’s guard. The first one he met nearly impaled him before he remembered that he would be their quarry now; Domina Pearl, who had nothing left to lose, would not let him live a moment longer than she wanted. He fought desperately. The sight of him in one barren, mindless pair of eyes attracted other guards. Ducon heard shouting down the distant corridors, the crack of boot heels along the bare, aged floors. The palace shook again. Fire sprang briefly alive in the dusty tapers along the wall. Ducon, ducking a slash that might have blinded him, smelled an astonishing scent of violets.

  But it was a dream, a child’s tale. The threshold Lydea had crossed had led her to her death; the silent man who wore Ducon’s face and drifted unexpectedly across his past was already a ghost. He had seen enough of them in the sorceress’s house to recognize one more. The ceiling above him groaned; a beam had twisted or straightened itself. Ducon, distracted again by possibilities, was forcibly reminded of the most likely when the guard’s blade burrowed past his attention to shear a bloody ribbon down his sleeve. He jerked back. The blade, arcing toward his throat, flew abruptly upward as the floor shook again. The guard stumbled and fell. Ducon turned on his heel and ran.

  He went up the nearest stairs, and up again and farther up, until he could hear the doves rustling in the rafters beneath the rotted openings in the roof. He could no longer hear the guards thundering down the hallways, throwing open doors that had been closed for centuries. They would also keep going up, he knew; in the end, like Lydea, he might be forced to run out of time. The doorway he came to at last seemed unchanged: one post painted with irises, the other worn bare long ago. The blackness across the threshold looked absolute.

  “I told you,” the Black Pearl said behind him, “that he would come here.”

  He whirled, his back to the open dark, the sword raised futilely. She spoke to Camas Erl, who watched Ducon with burning curiosity, as though he were not quite human, something unnameable whose movements would be entirely unpredictable. The Black Pearl, missing various parts as though she had pulled herself together too hastily in a grave, glowered at him malevolently.

  “He has drawn this doorway many times,” she continued. “Something pulls him here to this place. Draw something for us now, Ducon. Draw a door for us. You have that charcoal. You always carry it.”

  The great palace shuddered; the city beyond the warped glass in the windows blurred briefly, became distinct again. Standing in the ancient, decaying room overlooking the twisting streets below, overgrown piers crumbling into the blinding afternoon sea, Ducon felt his heart break apart like something battered too long by rain.

  “It’s nothing,” he told her wearily. “No place. It’s where Lydea and Kyel died. You think you can walk into that and come to life again?”

  “Draw a door.”

  “The door is open.”

  “Is it?” Camas asked, still studying him. “You’ve seen such places all your life. You recognize them. What draws you to them?” Ducon was silent, the blade still raised between them, guarding the place where his ghosts lived in some other, tranquil world. “Shadow,” Camas told him. “You draw shadow. The shadow city.”

  “So,” Ducon said tersely, “it is full of shadows.”

  “Is it?” Camas took a step toward Ducon in his fervor. The sword followed him. Domina Pearl spat something, and the blade flew out of Ducon’s hand, pierced a broken piece of molding across the room.

  “I may be dying,” she told him, “but I am not powerless. You are dead. You will die either on this side of the threshold
or the other, as you choose.”

  “But either way I will not draw you a door.”

  “Yes, you will,” Camas said softly. “Because you have been drawing doors to find this door all your life. You could not die without knowing if we are right: that you are the door and the key and the threshold between worlds. Are they alive or dead? Kyel and Lydea? They could be either, within that dark. Draw the door and find out.”

  Ducon felt a door open somewhere in his thoughts; he glimpsed himself across the threshold. The palace lurched again, jarring them. He felt it from a distance, though it had flung him off balance onto his knees. He caught himself, leaving a bloody handprint on the floor. He did not answer, only took the charcoal from his pocket and began to draw the outline of a door on the floor where it might have fallen if dark could cast a shadow.

  As he drew, he remembered all the strange corners he had turned, the unexpected alleys, the crooked streets that had led him to that moment, where he crouched at the Black Pearl’s feet, giving her the last thing he would ever draw. She and Camas had conceived the idea of the shadow door; it had never occurred to him. But he, with his strange compulsions, his eye for whatever was obscure, ambiguous, paradoxical within their lives, and his restless charcoal had led them to that conclusion. Lydea might have leaped to her death across that dark threshold. The Black Pearl saw a different door: its shadow, opening to light.

  His fingers grew black, swirling charcoal into shadow. He left the bright splayed handprint showing through it as both door latch, and the hand reaching out to the latch. He outlined it heavily in black, for it was his hand and his heart’s blood, and as close as the Black Pearl might allow him to get to opening that door. He was right about that. When the black rectangle on the floor could not possibly hold another stroke of darkness and the charcoal hesitated, Ducon felt the blade at his throat forcing him back. Guards she had summoned surrounded him, their mad, passionless eyes watching his every breath.