The Golden Key

by Melanie Rawn

  He painted oscurra into the woodgrain, set a border around the edges, signed his name beneath the latch. And when Ignaddio came up the stairs and asked what he was doing, he did not do more than cap his little pot, clean his brush upon a rag, tuck both into his scrip.

  “She asked me to do this,” Sario said quietly. “Before she left, she requested this.” He shrugged. “Who can predict what fancy will take a woman?”

  Shadows cradled Ignaddio’s eyes. “Why did she leave?”

  “Because she loved the Duke, but he is to marry the Princess of Pracanza.”

  “She could have stayed here!”

  “Eiha, some things are too bitter, too painful for women to bear.” He turned toward the stair. “Will you come? I thought I would walk through Galerria Viehos Fratos; would you like to accompany me?”

  The boy’s color ebbed, then rushed back. “With you?”

  “Eiha, it is not so much.”

  “You’re Lord Limner!”

  “And so you would like to be.” Sario smiled to see the sudden blush, put a hand upon the thin shoulder and guided him toward the stairs. “Is that so poor an ambition? I think not. I think it a worthy goal.”

  Ignaddio descended the stairs, twisting to look back over his shoulder. “Do you think I could be? Ever?”

  “Oh, I do believe so … but only if you survive!—mind the stairs, mennino, or you will break your neck.” He smiled easily. “And that would be a terrible sorrow for both of us.”

  Ignaddio gripped the rail more firmly. “For me, eiha, I suppose. But—why for you?”

  “Because I need you.”

  Now the boy missed a step, caught himself. One more and he was down, and there he turned swiftly. “Why? Why would you need me?”

  “Because there is much of me in you, if also a surfeit of innocence. But that can be altered …” He laughed softly. “Have I utterly stunned you, ‘Naddi?”

  The boy nodded mutely.

  On the final step Sario halted. “I need your youth. I need your strength, I need your talent, your Gift, your flesh, your Luza do’Orro. Because one day mine will fail.”

  Ignaddio’s voice rose to a broken squeak. “I’m Gifted?”

  “You are.”

  “But—how can you know? I haven’t undergone Confirmattio yet, and you’ve seen none of my work”

  “Bassda.” He touched a shoulder briefly. “It is in me to know. And I do. The Light recognizes itself in another.”

  “But—”

  “But. Bassda. Come with me to the Galerria; if you would begin your lessons, they are best begun today.”

  “Merditto,” Ignaddio muttered, and then reddened. “Regret-to … but—how long will it take? To know what you know? Will I ever?”

  Sario guided him gently down the corridor. “You are thirteen, no? Eiha, let me say only this: in fifteen years’ time I will be thirty-five and you twenty-eight …” He nodded; smiled inwardly because he told the boy everything, everything, yet would not be understood. A perverse jest, and ironic. “By then, I feel certain. Perhaps later it will require fewer years, but for now, fifteen. To be safe. In fifteen years I will be irreplaceable, and Alejandro will know the truth—he must know, eventually!—but he can’t dismiss me because I am irreplaceable … and so he will learn to use me, to rely on me absolutely, to require me—and it will all become an infinitely simple matter.” He looked down at the boy. “Can you wait fifteen years, ‘Naddi? To be a Lord Limner?”

  The boy’s eyes shone. “Fifteen years is a very long time, Lord Limner.”

  “But such things as I will teach you require time—if you are to be me. And I am to be you.”

  The words within words bewildered Ignaddio. “But—I can’t be you! Can I?”

  “Eiha, perhaps not—perhaps I exaggerated.” Sario made a dismissive gesture. “But I most certainly can be you, because I know how.”

  “How?”

  “Lessons,” Sario explained crisply. “Lessons learned from an old estranjiero, a Folio, and a few reclaimed pages of a most holy book.” He smiled. “And now let us proceed to your lessons, and in fifteen years you will know absolutely everything I know. I promise it.”

  Ignaddio stopped short. Thrust his young, unformed chin into the air. “Make an oath of it.”

  Sario laughed, then inclined his head. “As you would have it.” He lifted his key to his lips, kissed it, pressed it to his heart. “Nommo Matra ei Filho. Nommo Chieva do’Orro.”

  Ignaddio Grijalva broke into a brilliant grin of such magnitude it illuminated the corridor.

  It eased the soul, that smile. It will be well. It must be, and it shall be. And all of it worth it.

  He cast a glance over his shoulder, but could not see the stairway. Could not see the door.

  Eiha. In time, neither would anyone else.

  “Lord Limner?”

  Sario prodded a narrow shoulder. “Bassda. We have work to do.”

  Always the work. Always so much. Always so little time.

  Unless one were Limner. Gifted. Chi’patro.

  And willing to use Luza do’Orro, not to extinguish it.

  In the absence of day is night; in the absence of sound is silence; in the absence of light: darkness.

  I did not plan for this, anticipate this, dream of this. No one would, save a madman; and I can’t truthfully say he planned for it at first, or even in the middle … only at the end. For reasons I can’t know, save for speculation, though I’m certain he offers one. A single clever sentence full of explanation, of witty justification, explaining the need for such action.

  No need. Save his own.

  No fear, save his own, perhaps; for what I could say to one who would listen? Who might then respond with threat, with harm?

  But no one will ever know. He need explain nothing, and Alejandro will never think to threaten, to harm.

  It came upon me all at once. Engulfed me utterly. Blotted out my world and created another, at his behest. His requirement.

  Gift. Curse. In both there was conception, gestation, birth. I was progenitor once, though now I am prey, victim to magic, to power no one, not even those who are Limners, might comprehend. And what I—even I—can’t properly describe.

  Neosso Irrado. But he is more. Is other.

  That some call gift, I must name nightmare.

  What have you done to me?

  The vaulted foyer of Galerria Verrada was as coolly serene as he remembered, and as soothing in its early morning silence. But it smelled different. The current Grand Duchess, Gizella do’Granidia, had introduced a fashion from her sweltering southern home: glazed white porcelain pillars, high as a man’s head and slender as a woman’s corseted waist, pinhole-punctured in Tza’ab-like geometric patterns and stuffed every third day with fresh jasmine and rose petals. Set in every window recess, the pillars gave off only a faint odor now, but as the day wore on, the sun’s heat would fully release the fragrance. An affectation, but he had to admit its practicality. The hotter the day, the heavier the sweat—and the stink—of the privileged visitors. Yet the hotter it became, the richer the masking scent would become.

  An elegant solution to an inelegance; still, he found it effete. Without exception—but for a few Serrano mediocrities—the pictures here had been painted amid the sharp smells of blood, sweat, semen: crude and earthy smells that permeated canvas and colors. Long gone, of course, worn away by rainy winters and torrid summers, by cleanings, by the sighs of those who stood here in awe of Grijalva genius. It was too bad; the reality of power ought to be recalled in the smell of the paintings. Then he smiled at his folly. No one but ruling Grand Dukes ever knew the source of the magic, and not even they understood its real scope. That was how it must be. He had arranged that a very long time ago.

  All in all, though, he much preferred the pungent scent of paint—not surprising, as he had recently finished mixing a full array. The wax- and oscurra-sealed pots rested safely in a locked coffer of his atelierro above the wine shop, rea
dy for use. Never again would he wait until he’d found his next host. Once, he’d been so physically weak after the bleeding that the transfer had nearly been ruined. (Although once the spell was cast, feebleness had worked in his favor; restraining the worn-out old body had been simplicity itself.) Each time since then, he had come home prepared.

  He had also learned not to wait until his current host began to age. He’d made that mistake two lives ago. So contented had he been with Oaquino’s posting at the elegant Court of Ghillas that the years had slipped past unnoticed. Then, one shocking morning in early spring, a hip joint stabbed so sharply that he could barely rise from his silken bed. Oaquino had been but forty-two, and the swift onset of age had caught him unawares. The journey back to Tira Virte had been an agony of physical pain and mental anguish, the relocation into a healthy eighteen-year-old cause for profound relief.

  Oaquino—and after him Ettoro, who’d developed the bone-fever at the ridiculously young age of thirty-five—had also taught him to check bloodlines for early death and inbreeding. Dioniso, his current host, came from excellent stock and at forty-one looked and felt ten years younger. This time he intended to give himself years and years to pick and choose and find exactly the right young man with exactly the right traits. Through the centuries, his specifications had become most exacting indeed.

  First and foremost, the boy must possess good ancestry and excellent health. He must be an acknowledged talent, so that the slow revelation of real genius would not excite comment. He wanted a good-looking boy as well—and cringed to recall that graceless gawk Renzio, a choice that had been no choice at all due to his advanced years and urgent need. No more Renzios; he refused to be stuck again inside an ugly man for twenty years.

  Recently he’d added family connections to his list of desired attributes. His first hosts had been mainly from lesser branches of the vast Grijalva tree. He’d reasoned that comparative anonymity was a good thing; he could pass more or less unnoticed as he accustomed himself to his new lives. And the fewer people intimate with his chosen incarnation, the fewer who must be deceived while he made the gradual changes of personality necessary to bring past behavior in line with his own character. Grazzo do’Filho, teenaged boys were expected to be unpredictably skittish, and adolescent artists in particular were moody en tudo paletto.

  But family connections had become important to him: Dioniso was of an influential line that had produced two Lord Limners and a Ducal Mistress in the last fifty years. The advantages of position were obvious—worth the extra effort to find and worth the extra work of fooling family and friends. Dioniso was on the short list for every plum assignment; when he had expressed a desire to be posted to Niapali, authorization had come within days. Best of all, whenever he returned home, he was warmly welcomed and celebrated and given the choicest rooms available.

  Though when making his selection he always hoped for a personality similar to his own, it didn’t matter all that much. He’d become adept at subtle alterations in character. And if the strain of acting a part became too great, or friends grew puzzled by the changes, there were two convenient options. First, he could volunteer for a few years of itinerant duty, the shit-work of the marginally talented Grijalva. Galling as it was, the bolt-hole had served him well in several instances. Time spent as an Itinerarrio earned marks for service as well as provided a cushion of years between memories of who “Zandor” or “Timirrin” had been, and who he really was.

  His other option was, of course, a suggestive or even fatal painting or two done in his atelierro above the wine shop. But he disliked the trouble of collecting specimens—a disgusting process at best, and occasionally dangerous.

  He paused within the Galerria’s great bronze doors while an assistant curatorrio rattled through a chaotic desk for a copy of the latest guide sheet. Absent from Meya Suerta these twelve years, he wanted to know whose work was currently fashionable, what changes had come to the arrangement of paintings—and what the historians were writing nowadays about his portrait of Saavedra. An acknowledged masterpiece, a priceless work of genius, a delight to anyone lucky enough to behold it—and, he grinned to himself, the despair of student Limners who could never hope to equal even the tiniest featherstroke of his brush on canvas.

  At last a page of heavy paper was given him. Beautiful work, he mused idly, expert fingers judging rag content, artist’s eye approving the typeface. He hadn’t exercised his paper-making skills in—oh, a century or so. Perhaps he ought to take it up again as a hobby.

  Closely printed on both sides, with the Grand Ducal Seal at the top, the guide sheet began with a brief reference list of Tira Virte’s rulers and the Lord Limners who had served them. He nodded his thanks to the curatorrio, thinking with an inner chuckle how shocked the youth would be to know that the greatest Lord Limner of them all, and likewise the painter of most of the important and all of the finest pictures in the Galerria, was about to take a tour of his own works.

  He strolled slowly along the tiled floor, pausing before paintings with which he was long familiar, pretending studiousness for the benefit of a group of silent sanctas half the Galerria away. Every so often he stopped in honest interest before a Treaty or Marriage painted by someone he’d known. Old Bennidito had really had a way with color; he’d forgotten how Tazioni could make trees look as if a breath would visibly and even audibly rustle leaves; no one, not even he, had ever outdone Adalberto for exquisite rendering of the drape of a shawl along a woman’s arm. He nodded wordless tribute to long-dead colleagues, generous in his own genius, able to acknowledge theirs.

  He passed the sanctas with a nod. They looked like a herd of dried-up dun cows: skinny, big-eyed, darkly tanned from incessant gardening that fed only a tiny percentage of the poor—but at least provided roses for Grand Duchess Gizella’s scent-pillars. They recognized the salute with abrupt dips of white-wimpled heads, lips tightening at the sight of the Chieva do’Orro hanging from its chain around his neck.

  Like all Limners who wore the Golden Key, to the Ecclesials he was an object of disgust. Sterility was unnatural, an abomination to a Faith based on the fertile Mother and Her Son, and thus a sign of divine disapproval. He’d always wondered how the Ecclesia reconciled this with the abundant fecundity of Grijalva women and the proven virility of unGifted Grijalva men. Perhaps the attitude was merely the last fierce-held remnant of the years of the Nerro Lingua, when the Grijalvas had suffered more deaths than any other family in Meya Suerta; this had been seen as a mark of divine retribution for having sheltered the chi’patros. He lost himself in reverie of his first life for a moment, remembering that old canna of a Premia Sancta, Caterin Serrano, and her banishment of all Grijalvas from the shrines and Sanctias she controlled. Alejandro had taken care of that, but the animosity remained. To the sanctas and sanctos of Tira Virte, the Grijalvas were an affront that centuries of service to their country had done little if anything to mitigate. Condemning them were their chi’-patro origins as bastards of infidel outlaws, their rumored magic, their power at Court, and especially their scandalous personal lives—and most especially of all, the Mistresses. The family was tainted, root, branch, and stem; the Ecclesia had not changed its attitude since Duke Renayo and Duchess Jesminia returned to Meya Suerta with fourteen ladies-in-waiting pregnant by Tza’ab outlaws, the twenty chi’patro children of those outlaws, and the corpse of Verro Grijalva. As he passed the silent sanctas, he wondered what the official line would be on the reality of Grijalva art—let alone his uses of it. The thought made him smile, and the women turned away in renewed scorn of one who dared a pleasantry to those who loathed him and all his kind.

  Dismissing the sanctas from his thoughts, he stopped before a Birth by Guilbarro Grijalva—or, rather, attributed to Guilbarro, for of course it was his own work. He let slip a sigh as he contemplated it. A rare masterpiece, even for him. The only daughter of Cossimio I was surely the loveliest baby ever born. Painting her and her beautiful mother had been one of the great joys
of his lives. He recalled it so clearly: gambas playing softly in the recesses of the summer-shaded arborra, iced drinks served whenever he flicked a finger, Grand Duchess Carmillia aglow with happiness, her baby daughter laughing the whole time. And there little Cossima was, as sweet and lively as on the day he’d finished the last rose in the vase at her mother’s elbow. The child sat on Carmillia’s knee, both of them dressed alike in simple white linen and a rainbow of ribbons. A golden cage rested on a pedestal beside them; noting Cossima’s fascination with the birds, at some point he had opened the cage to let them fly about the arborra. He could hear her giggles still. Delight had nearly distracted him from quick-sketching her excited little face and the smile on her mother’s lips. Both expressions looked down at him now, perfectly captured, looking as if painted yesterday. Very fine work, indeed. Adorable little Cossima … how he would have loved to have painted her Marriage.

  But she had died of a fever before her fourth birthday. And within a year of completing this picture, Guilbarro himself was dead. Cossima’s Birth was the only work of his in the Galerria—and the guide sheet commented on how sad it was that so promising a talent had been lost so young.

  A corner of his mouth turned down. He could have done so much as Guilbarro. Clever, handsome, with all the right connections, he’d already taken the initial steps toward becoming Lord Limner. The Birth of Cossima had, in fact, been his audition.

  Scenes from the past cast dark veils over the portrait of the laughing baby and her radiant mother. A hunting accident; a broken leg from which Guilbarro was recovering nicely—and then disaster. Some fool of a sancta mixed pain medication incorrectly. It was discovered within two weeks, but by then the damage had been done. He was well and truly addicted.

  They’d tried to wean him from it. But even had the withdrawal worked, his ambitions were finished. No Lord Limner could be made vulnerable by addiction to liquor, gambling, sexual habits, or drugs. The potential for subornation was too great. Even if the medical establishment avowed him free of it, the danger of relapse would always be there. Neither the do’Verradas nor the Grijalvas could countenance a Lord Limner with a drug habit in his past.