The Golden Key

by Melanie Rawn

  He moved then, shifting weight, aware of slick flesh adhered to his own—and knew instantly and with utter certainty that he had wasted himself, his seed; had thrown away that which could better be used for power.

  It palled: fleshly contact, release, sheer physical need. He pushed away from her and rose, climbing free of tangled sheets and coverlet, unheeding of his nudity as he stood beside the bed. Sweat dried on him as she turned, shifted, propped herself up on one elbow.

  “Go,” he said. “Now. Adezo.”

  It shocked her. “But—”

  “You have had all of me you shall have … what is left is mine, and there are better ways to spend it.”

  Astonishment now was anger. She tore back the bedclothes and climbed out, equally naked, equally uncaring. The epithet she used was framed in a mouth accustomed to such, and he laughed.

  “Boys? Is that it?” She found and reached for smallclothes, yanked the shift over her head and tugged it across lush breasts and undulant hips. “Girl, followed by boy—as sweet vinho follows sour? Is that it?”

  He said nothing. He watched her, marking the coursing of colors in her face: he had not studied scorn before, or humiliation, or such taut, restrained fury. All were tangible to him. I must recall this … use this …

  She muttered again such vile commentary upon his person, his manhood, his poor and hasty industry that he grinned unrestrainedly, entertained by her vocabulary. Which infuriated her the more, and when at last she departed, she banged the door shut so forcefully he feared it might crack the lintel.

  Gone. The smell of her remained, a cheap, thick perfume concocted of violets in an oil going rancid, and the undertang of love-making, of sweat, of spent—wasted!—seed. Yet naked, now dry, he stared at the bed and considered his emotions. That he was a man, he knew; that there was something worth more than the transient physical pleasure of copulation he was certain.

  Transient pleasure … wholly unlike art that remained as alive, as permanently documented as that passing moment of physical bliss could not be, ever, as alive and real as art because art was of the body and the mind; and art, once completed, could never be extinguished by such trivial things as exhaustion, as infrequency, as the inability of a man under certain circumstances to raise the infamous sword.

  Sario smiled. That sword is worthless. It ages, sickens, grows lax. But the blade of true creation cannot be broken. Ever.

  Nor the one of power. He knew its name, its guises. And learned more each time he read of the Kita’ab, that was also Folio.

  Meya Suerta, as most cities, began with small ambitions. But they had grown even as the city, and now the tattered hem of voluminous skirts covered much of the mellow land between the broken palisades of rising hills leading to the heights, and thick lowland marshes. Surrounded by orchards and vineyards, the walls and lesser dwellings of those who built beyond the city were buffered against depredations of the marshes, and yet the citizenry felt its incursions regardless. Most particularly Grijalvas, in their very bones.

  Raimon paused near the fieldstone wall, noting idly how its spine had collapsed in places. The undulant sweep of stacked stone followed the line of the hills, separating vineyard from vineyard, orchard from orchard, so that grapes and olives did not offend one another; so that the citrus remained inviolate.

  He walked the crown of a quiet hill, aware of exquisite rose-golden light that made him long for paletto and easel; aware also of impatience and growing expectancy. The quick-scribbled message had said nothing beyond that it was urgent he come. It was not from a Limner—there was no invocation of the Golden Key—but was nonetheless from someone who knew him, who knew where his interests lay.

  When she came, striding up from the city with lifted skirts clasped into fists, he was startled. He did not know why he expected a man, but he had; and now she was here, all grown out of awkward adolescence into inarguable beauty, a warm, exotic beauty formed of the best of Tza’ab features and the best of Tira Virteian, so that she was not one or the other but wholly of them both.

  Raimon did not understand why he had not marked it before, why it had taken Alejandro do’Verrada’s interest to make him truly see her. Perhaps it was that she was so much younger than he … but no, youth meant nothing save promise to a man who died when not yet old. Perhaps it was that he had been distracted, dedicated to family goals and compordotta, to the Viehos Fratos, to Sario. Or perhaps he had been blind. Foolishly blind.

  He smiled. He knew what lived within her spirit; it pleased him to see the exterior matched it.

  She did not smile back. She reached the crown of the hill, dropped crumpled skirts, faced him poised so rigidly he feared she might shatter. “Do you know what he has done? Do you know what he is?”

  Pleasure was extinguished. He opened his mouth to ask identification of whom she meant; closed it. He knew. Blessed Mother … does everyone know what I have done?

  Fine cheeks were wind-glazed from the walk. “Can you stop him?”

  That startled. “Stop him? Why? We have worked many years to place a Grijalva in his position.”

  She shook her head; thick ringlets, bound loosely back, massed across slim shoulders. “He isn’t a Grijalva anymore. He’s— he’s …” She considered, gestured helplessness. “More. Less. Other.”

  He turned away from her abruptly, staring across terraced vineyards and orchards toward the dark smudge of marsh beyond. From there, Davo claimed, came the pestilence that afflicted them; the bone-fever that twisted joints into painful immobility and helplessness. Is it the fever that kills us so young? Some poison in our blood?

  “What will you do?” she asked. “What can you do?”

  Is it the pigments we grind, tempered with bodily fluids to create the Peintraddos?

  “You can’t do nothing,” she said. “You must do something.”

  He did not turn to her. “I have done something. I helped create him.”

  “You didn’t!” Skirts rustled against breeze-stirred grass as she came deliberately around to face him. “You as much as anyone have counseled proper compordotta … do you know the truth of it? Of him?”

  “That he is capable of more than other Limners?—eiha … I know.”

  “For how long?”

  He looked into her face, into fierce but frightened eyes. “Since the beginning.”

  “I will not accept that.” Delicate color tinged the flawless clarity of her skin. “No one has known ‘from the beginning.’ Or surely he would never have been admitted to the Viehos Fratos, surely you would have done more than invoked the Lesser Discipline.” Color deepened. “I recall Tomaz. Do you recall Tomaz? How he died?”

  Startling himself as much as her, he caught her arm. “How much do you know, Saavedra? How much has Sario said of us?”

  “Of you?” She shook her head. “He breaks no oaths, Il Sanguo—there are no secrets of the Limners I should not know, because we all of us are Grijalvas—”

  She knows too much. He clamped her arm more firmly within his grasp. “That is not the question I asked, nor is it proper answer.”

  “Nor have you answered my questions,” she countered sharply. “Nommo do’Matra, Sanguo Raimon … you say you helped create him. Do you know what you have done?”

  “Lost control,” he confessed, “if there was any I ever claimed.” He released her arm abruptly, aware of the twinge in his knuckles. “I think there is more in his soul than even I believed possible.”

  Eloquent brows arched. “And yet you did not tell the others?”

  Guilt scoured him into self-flagellation. “Better to ask, what did I tell the others.”

  Color fled her face. “That he was suitable. Oh, Blessed Mother—you suggested him! En verro—you supported him!” Wind plucked at ringlets. “He said there was only one he trusted, only one who believed in him.”

  “I believed him suitable, yes. And I believed it vital that he be given the opportunity to become Lord Limner.”

  “Why?”
/>   That angered him. “Because one of us had to be!”

  She flinched briefly from the sheer volume and vehemence of his shout, recovered ground. “Is it so very important that Grijalvas regain now what was lost?”

  “Yes.”

  “No matter the price?”

  He thrust between them one hand, displaying fingers that already began the transformation from powerful into powerless. “We know the price, Saavedra! It coils within our bones, waiting for the day when it may creep out into the light.”

  She checked, went on. “But if you knew he—”

  Curtly, he overrode her. “How could I know what he might do? It was enough that he might not.”

  She shook her head. “I am a Grijalva. I was raised to believe as you believe, as Sario believes, that we should stand by the side of our Duke—”

  “By the side,” he emphasized.

  “Yes, of course.” And then she understood. “Do you believe Sario might want more?”

  “I do not. He will not.”

  “But if he did—”

  “How much time,” he asked deliberately, “will you have to paint when you have borne a child? As you raise that child? As you bear and raise another?”

  Though she said nothing, her answer was implicit in the tautening of her face. Little time. No time.

  Raimon nodded once. “Above all, he must paint.”

  “En verro.” Her voice was rusty. “I know—I’ve known all that he was since boyhood. I saw the Luza do’Orro—I saw it always, though others denied it; though they distrusted and disliked him.”

  “Called him Neosso Irrado.” He nodded again. “So they called me. It seems a prerequisite.”

  She understood at once. “Then if you—”

  “There are those who are,” he said, “and those who shape.”

  “As you shaped Sario.”

  He offered no response.

  “Why?” she asked. “Was there no other but he? Would there be no other suitable Limner perhaps a decade later?”

  “These are matters for the Viehos Fratos—”

  She cut him off neatly. “Make them mine, grazzo. I shaped him as much as you.”

  Wind ruffled his hair, stripped it from his face so he could hide nothing from her. “Because I wanted to.”

  She recoiled. “That is your answer? Your justification for allowing this to happen?”

  Bitterness warped his laughter. “When a man cannot become what he himself desires, he may shape another to assume his place.”

  “But—”

  “Bassda!” It burst from him abruptly, astonishing him as well as her. “I am aware of the magnitude of my failure,” he declared, “and its repercussions. Matra ei Filho—I was foolish, Saavedra, but not estupedio. Nor deaf. Nor blind.”

  Tears suddenly welled, were dashed away. “Neither was I,” she said in a raw, bleak tone. “Neither am I, but I did no more than you. I did less than you!”

  “Eiha, neither of us is to blame.”

  “No? But I am. I said nothing of the old man, the old Tza’ab, who taught him things.”

  “And I said nothing of the pages of the Kita’ab, and the truth of our Folio.” He saw her startlement. “Do you see? Assigning blame, assuming guilt, accomplishes nothing. Unless we care to share it, and thus dilute its focus.”

  Her exquisite face was devoid of color, stark as bone beneath soft-worked vellum. “I came to you so the Viehos Fratos would understand what he is. So they could stop him.”

  “How?”

  “Peintraddo Chieva,” she murmured wretchedly.

  “Would you have us kill him? Cripple him?”

  “No! Sweet Mother, no—”

  “Then what, Saavedra? Invoking the Lesser Discipline did nothing to dissuade him.”

  “No,” she said. “Ah, no, not that, not either …” And then she went whiter still.

  “Saavedra?”

  “His Peintraddo—”

  “We have it. With the others. It remains in the collection of the Viehos Fratos.”

  She shook her head rigidly. “No … no, Il Sanguo—you have a copy.”

  “A copy—”

  “I have the original.” Her face was wasted. “He gave it into my keeping.”

  Breath gusted out of his lungs. “This abrogates all oaths … Nommo Chieva do’Orro, this is not possible!”

  “It is. It was done. I have it. I have his Peintraddo.” Wind stripped the coil out of a ringlet beside her ear, gave it back fecklessly. “Would a threat to it be enough?”

  Bones ached in the fragile envelope of flesh. “For Sario? What do you believe?”

  “I believe … I believe …” She shivered as gusting wind snapped her skirts away from her body, but he knew it was not that which caused the response. “I believe he would do what he thinks is necessary. That he would be what is necessary …” Tears bloomed, died. “He told me so.”

  “’Vedra.” He used the diminutive; saw it register. “’Vedra, why did you come to me?”

  She swallowed heavily. “Because I am afraid. For him. Of him. And because I love him.” She gestured hastily, forestalling him. “Eiha, no—not the way I love Alejandro … not the way women love men whom they wish to marry, to whom they desire to bear children—it was never that way between us—” She checked minutely and he wondered if Sario could so freely admit the same. “—but in a different way, a way I don’t understand, not truly, save to know it exists. Here.” She pressed a hand against her heart. “I understand him, Il Sanguo … I see his light, his flame, I answer it—and he sees mine. Believes in mine.” Bleakly, she said, “Sario always told me we shared the same soul.”

  Raimon could not offer what she required—Alejandro’s embrace, his warmth, his love—but he offered what he could: hands clasped upon her shoulders, and such truths as he could muster. “Your soul is your own,” he promised. “I see no blight in it, no disease that destroys its strength.” He turned her toward the vineyards, the orchards. “You are not as the vines are, as the olives and the oranges, vulnerable to wind, to frost, to depredations of the insects … you are Saavedra Grijalva, gifted with talent beyond so very many, beloved of a Duke—and possessed of a soul no one else may share. That no one else, even Sario, may destroy in his own designs.” He squeezed her shoulders briefly, suppressing a wince as pain bloomed in his fingers, then turned her back so he might look into her face. “I asked you before why you came to me. Is this fear of what he will do?—or fear for what he has done?”

  “Both,” she said as wind buffeted. And told him about the portrait of a maimed Zaragosa Serrano.

  When she was done, when she justified her fear far beyond overwrought imaginings, he turned sharply from her. He saw nothing, no terraced vineyards and orchards, no fieldstone walls, no marshlands beyond a bright blurred haze of tears.

  “Sanguo Raimon?”

  So much I have done.

  “Il Sanguo?”

  So much as this, bred out of my own desire, out of my own design.

  “Sanguo Raimon …” She paused. “I could not bear to see such talent extinguished.”

  He said nothing.

  “And there is always Alejandro.” He had given her comfort, Raimon realized. By sharing her fear, she took encouragement from him, from no longer being alone. “I could speak with Alejandro.”

  She could. More so than he could.

  “Perhaps you could speak with Sario.”

  Why not? He had shaped him. Had shaped this woman as well, and her fear; he had done far more than ever he intended.

  I wrought too well.

  Davo had said it. A flawed tool, breaking, may injure another. Others.

  Time, he realized. All of it for time, because we claim so little. Had I waited—had I sought another boy—

  There was no other. There could be no other in Raimon’s lifetime, who contained within one flesh so much that was required.

  Mine to do, he realized. Mine to undo.

  “Sanguo Raimon�
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  He turned. Smiled brilliantly. Kissed his fingers and pressed them against his heart. “Nommo Matra ei Filho,” he said, repeating the motion with his key. “Nommo Chieva do’Orro. It shall be seen to.”

  Hope kindled, as did color. Wind tore hair from her face and bared it, bared the magnitude of her relief. She murmured gratitude to Mother and Son, said it more forcefully to him, then smiled against the wind and turned to make her way back.

  Raimon watched her go. That much, I have done that deserved to be done. Wrought peace within her soul.

  If at the cost of his own.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Ignaddio had done exactly as directed: stacked paintings, panels, wood for stretchers and frames against the walls of Saavedra’s new atelierro; piled jammed portfolios and sketchbooks, sheaves of unused paper in one corner; set out baskets and bottles and boxes into an ill-defined puzzle upon the floor, the worktable, even upon the lone chair. Saavedra herself, mired in the midst of sorting everything out of unfamiliar clutter into the equally cluttered arrangement she found comfortable and useful, did not at first mark the visitor’s arrival; it required a pointed clearing of the throat before she heard, turned to see—and then she very nearly dropped the dented pewter tankard serving as brush holder.

  “Alejandro!” —Eiha, but he is glorious!

  Alejandro Baltran Edoard Alessio do’Verrada grinned his renowned grin, unself-consciously displaying the crooked tooth that was in adolescence considered a flaw, yet now was called charming. “I prefer you like this, I think, rather than Court-clad; it reminds me of the day we met.”

  She remembered it as well as he. She had reeked of oil and solvents set into grimy linen, bore paint and chalk dust beneath her nails—while tangled, unbound ringlets were soaked with fountain water. Aside from the water, her present appearance in the midst of dust-laden industry nearly echoed that day.

  She clutched the mashed tankard. “But I’m filthy! You might as well send me off to the middens, or to the dyers, even the tannery—”