The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2010 (volume 1)
Page 46
She smiled and the sharp tips of her incisors showed briefly. “The Incantor has finished the spell for the final engraving. I have it here.”
She held up a thick creamy piece of parchment covered in precise script interwoven with symbols and sigils, the true meaning of which was known only to the men and women of the Incantors Guild. Casco had made Verre’s House famous (and rich) with her unique ability to bind incantation to glass. This latest venture would be Verre’s most ambitious; other Houses watched with envy and greed, willing them to fail.
“When did you become so reckless, girl? You blithely wave around our secrets?” Casco’s fingernails sheared five tiny furrows into the parchment’s top edge when Claudio snatched it from her grasp. Shaking his head furiously, he carefully scrolled the spell, spun Casco around and slid the paper tube into the leather porte-parchemin she wore slung across her back. He clipped the case shut, then let his hands slip down her spine, lingering at her waist, the soft curve of her hips, before he caught himself and stepped back. Claudio cleared his throat. “Mirko, ensure that she goes straight to her work-cell. I must have a few words with the Incantors.”
Pater Claudio strode out of the vestibule, muttering about young girls and unreliable employees.
Mirko put one large hand around Casco’s upper arm. He pinched hard at the soft skin but she gave no sign that he had hurt her. “I won’t even bother asking where you were—as if I didn’t know. Spying on Daddy-dearest?”
Casco narrowed her eyes. Some days Mirko thought he saw fire there. “You are not my keeper, no matter what he says,” she hissed. Yes, definitely sparks in the depths, wheeling and forming, flashing and moving, then gone as she controlled her temper.
He sighed and loosened his hold. “There’s nothing either of us can do about that, girlie. I am charged with keeping you in my sights, whether you like it or not.” Smoothing the fabric of her shirt as if trying to erase all evidence of his gruffness, Mirko muttered, “Mark my words, when he gets a ring on your finger he won’t be so kindly about your little jaunts.”
“Pater has not asked me to marry him.”
“Nor will he—he assumes it will happen. Haven’t you noticed since his wife died how much he watches you? Did so before too, I swear, but he’s less circumspect about it now. So he waits, until the time is right, when it will be respectable for him to take his young ward to wife. It will be so tidy: Sepphoris’ greatest Engraver married into its greatest House, and Pater Claudio with his bed warmed once more. You’ll be a lovely February bride, sweetness. Keep those nails of yours sharp and those britches laced up tight, mark my words.”
Casco had noticed. The official period of mourning for a wife was one year. She had a month’s grace left.
Mirko patted her shoulder. “Just stop hanging around your father’s house, Casco. There’s nothing for you there and it only enrages Claudio.”
“Let me worry about that.”
* * *
Casco opened the book. Its covers had been crafted by ancient hands: smooth, polished copper encased the most secret, most puissant spells ever made for Verre’s House in its four hundred year history. Not all of the spells, for no book could hold so many; the lesser ones lived on in smaller volumes in the Library’s folio collection. These ones though—the ones with the power to entrap empires, to ensnare virgin brides in glass coffins, to create dresses of blown glass that felt and fell as soft as silk, to make crystal children so realistic they might even fool doting parents for a time—were collected and wielded by the engravers of Verre’s House.
She took the inscribed parchment and smoothed it flat on the table’s burnished wooden worktop. Using the diamond tips of her fingernails, she punctured a series of minute holes into the page’s edge then inserted it in the very back of the book. Taking up a fine needle and a strand of flexible steel thread, Casco stitched it securely in place. She then propped the book up in the wrought-iron holder next to the table, open at the spell, and placed page-clips at the corners to make sure the leaves did not close. At last prepared, she turned her attention to the House’s next great work.
Running a third of the length of the workbench and held firmly in the grip of a giant vice, lay the Empire bottle. The glass was thick and had a slightly green tint to it. Without inscription, the metre long by half metre wide bottle was proof of the Glassblowers’ skill, but was otherwise forgettable. However, when Casco engraved the spell upon its body, the bottle would become a weapon: buyers from both sides of the current war would arrive to bid on it.
Casco flexed her hands, cracked her knuckles, circled her wrists like birds tied to a single point in the ground. She took a deep breath. This was the first Empire bottle Verre’s House had been charged to build in fifty years; it was the first one Casco would engrave that wouldn’t immediately be destroyed as a practice piece. When her task was complete, Casco’s beautiful weapon would be capable of sucking an entire civilisation inside it: the ultimate victory for the side that could afford such a thing. She took a final look at the page, her memory catching the design and imprinting it on her mind. This would fund the House for a century, if carefully husbanded. She exhaled slowly, gave her hands a final shake and began.
Her nerves soon settled. Unlike other Engravers, who relied on forged implements and unwieldy blades, Casco and her tools were one and the same. Her diamond nails scored even the finest glass without shattering it; her dragon’s blood seamlessly guided the Incantors’ spells from her mind through her hands and into the glass. Verba volant, scripta manent, Pater Claudio always said, and he was right. Spoken words fly away, written words remain. Enchantments hummed through her body like a song while she worked and that song was permanently embedded in the glass beneath her fingertips.
Hours passed, the day shifted from sunshine to the silk-grey of afternoon. Outside her window Proclaimers climbed minarets, calling those who would come to evening prayer. A servant brought her supper tray, then cleared it away again, untouched. Lamplighters came in around five and the torches flared, creating a kind of artificial daylight so she could continue her work. In between reading chapters of a well-loved book, Mirko paced between the room’s gaping fireplace and the tessellated fresco on the far wall, which depicted a scene from the Fall of the Dragons. Underscoring all of this activity was a disturbance that gradually, persistently, drew Casco’s attention.
“Can you hear that?” she asked Mirko as she straightened up, her back aching. He shook his head.
She frowned, mimicked his gesture. A third of the bottle had been adorned, but it could not be activated until she had covered it, completing the spell. Casco ran a finger across the ridges and valleys of the glass’s newly uneven surface while she listened. She became aware, slowly, that she had been hearing the sound for some time—one day, or two? A week? She couldn’t be sure; it had dug itself so deeply into her unconscious that she couldn’t remember when it hadn’t been there.
It was a long rhythmic hum, constant as a piece of machinery, low as a lullaby. Casco’s heart raced, and her stomach pulsed with nerves and excitement. The room seemed to dissolve around her as the sound grew in intensity; the workbench, the bottle, Mirko, the nightingale’s trill outside—everything faded to black and white as the rumbling bass conjured visions of bright scales rippling, stretched over taut muscles; of flames describing her figure, bare and shimmering with sweat; of someone large, musky, strong taking her in his firm grip; of talons encircling her slender waist, the sensation of sharp tips cutting into her torso a mixture of pleasure and pain. All this and more, suggested by the resonant, wordless song. Now she could feel it as a flush in her cheeks, a warmth in her chest that eased the ache perpetually residing there. Its reverberations moved lower until she caught her breath, blushed, embarrassed and swiftly wet. A sigh escaped her parted lips. Is this how Pater Claudio feels? she wondered, then shuddered to think of his unwanted, palsied caresses. The world rushed back in a flood of colour, but it paled in comparison to the vivid images
the song had fixed in her mind.
“I’ll be back in a moment, Mirko.” She took a deep breath to steady her voice, to calm herself before she continued. “I need to . . . clear my head. Don’t worry, I’ll not leave the House.” Her steps were quick and light with only the slightest clack as her heel-talon met the cool stone beneath. Mirko grunted his assent, and bent to retrieve the Book of Oztin from where he’d tucked it under his seat; Casco knew that before she had reached the door he would be absorbed in the tale of his favourite glass-girl heroine.
She stepped out into the corridor. After the brightness of her cell it took a moment for her dragonish membranes to adapt. They widened to absorb the dim orange light emanating from fire gutters running along the tops of the walls.
Casco felt herself pulled along by the thread of sound. Its cadences threatened to overwhelm her again; she walked as though in a dream, her gaze turned inward and outward simultaneously. Covering her ears was no use; the humming was not something heard, but something felt. It took all her energy to resist the urge to run.
The song grew louder as the trail led her down: down through the levels of Verre’s House; down past the upper rooms, those that caught the light Casco and lesser Engravers required for their work; down past the large workshops where the mixers of coloured silica plied their trade; then down further to the glassblowers’ residences, where the golden glow from their lehrs and annealers kept the gloom at bay. Down the last set of stairs, past the guards who gave her cautious looks even while they let her pass.
The steps beneath her feet were not cool, as might be expected of flagstones implanted in the earth so far underground. Instead they were warm, so warm Casco could feel the heat through the soles of her boots; her heel spur gave off the smell of hot ossified hair.
The noise swelled now, its rhythm throbbing through her veins more insistently. A monumental iron door, which was weighted with mortar and banded with silver and bronze, confronted her at the end of the hallway. She knew what waited beyond it. Two more guards, stationed one to each side of the barred entrance, looked askance at her.
“Engraver?”
“Let me pass.”
“It’s too dangerous, Engraver Casco. Pater Claudio would have our heads if any ill came to you.”
“The creatures are chained. They are all chained and channelled, for flints’ sake. There is no danger to me.” She smiled at their hesitation. “They never hurt me. They know my blood; they know what I am.”
The men shrugged and shot the bolt on the only door that would keep the fire of the furnace dragons at bay.
Casco slipped through the opening.
The chamber seemed to spread across a width greater than the entire compound of Verre’s House above, an effect that was enhanced by the tunnels leading off into the darkness of its far walls. An enormous central furnace rose from the floor and stretched to the vaulted ceiling high above; its embers bathed the room with a simmering orange glow. Casco’s pale skin adopted a warm bronze sheen and her hair scales flickered with reflected tongues of fire.
At the four compass points were four huge cages, and in each one lay a dragon. Three were older creatures, their majestic scales now hoary with age. They faced arched apertures in the furnace’s brick walls, though none of them were firing. The fourth was black, shiny, his musculature evident and beautiful under his plates. He was a robust young firedrake; his silver eyes locked on Casco’s slender form as she approached. His tongue flicked out to snap up a mouthful of brimstone from the trough in front of his cage. Had she been two steps to the left, his glistening grey tongue would have wrapped around her instead. This thought echoed those inspired by the song too closely; she blushed, grew suddenly shy, and wondered where her breath had gone.
A snort like an abbreviated chuckle came from Casco’s left. She caught the large emerald dragon winking at her. Her flush deepened. The emerald had been at Verre’s House for decades, ancient long before an infant Casco first toddled past his crucible. He was from the greatest line of dragons in Sepphoris, and renowned for his keen eye. She nodded respectfully, her gaze steady, observing the traditional courtesies, which he returned.
Casco turned next to the northern dragon, a vermilion female well beyond breeding years. She had always been aloof, regal, but as the girl touched the bars of the firedrake’s cage, the red rolled onto her side, exposing a soft underbelly. It was a gesture of trust, of acceptance. Without a second thought, Casco tilted her own head back, unbuttoned the neck of her tunic, and bared her pale throat.
In the southern cage, the yellow gave her a disdainful look. Something tightened in her stomach—it was the kind of look she’d seen on her father’s face. The sort of look that said she was such a diluted creature that she was worth nothing.
The music from the firedrake’s cage crescendoed. Made bold by this welcome, Casco reached through to rest a hand against his hide. The scales were strangely cool. She could feel the tremor of his humming.
She had watched, not many weeks since, when first the dragon-catchers had brought him to Verre’s House, drugged and bound. They had taken his freedom and his joy. Now he was channelled like the others and, barring an act of gods or accident, he would spend the rest of his life beneath the earth, a slave to the furnaces. She wondered if he missed the life they’d stolen from him; if he had a family that yearned for his return.
“Little half-thing.” The voice sounded as soft thunder in her head, an edge of contempt brushing gently against her pride.
“What?” Casco looked around the furnace room, but there was only her and the dragons. She turned back to find the drake’s eyes upon her. Inside them, a storm, a fire like nothing she’d ever seen. Inside his eyes, a universe, all colours and yet none; all life and all death. Love and hatred, pain and comfort, balm for sorrow and a talon to the heart. She wanted to fall into them, for there surely the ache would cease. She leaned closer to the bars, trying to defy their solidity.
“Half-thing, neither one nor the other, but blooded of both. How do you live?” There was mockery in the question. She pulled away.
“Who are you to ask me that? No one has chained me.”
He laughed and sparks flew. “Your chains are not visible to the eye. I am Feus, prince among my kind.”
“A prince in shackles. You are a tinderbox with scales,” she spat. His candour rattled her; the truth of his words seared.
“Why did you call me here?” she asked.
There was a pause. “I could not not do it,” he whispered.
“Feus,” she said softly, her gaze sweeping around the room. The older dragons now slept, or at least feigned it. “Mighty Feus, reduced to a furnace feeder.”
She turned away and was five paces from the door when his voice throbbed through her once more. “Don’t go.”
Casco lingered for a fraction of a second. Flames on bare flesh—sinuous tongue lapping—claws tickling, pressing—she shook her head to clear it. Feus’ timbre filled the hollow inside her, it woke something, it made her feel new and bold. It made her feel different, maybe too different. She kept walking.
She opened the door, heaving its great weight slowly, then left it to clang shut behind her. It did not stop the sound of his song, merely dulled it.
* * *
“Would you like some lunch?”
Casco jumped. She hadn’t heard Pater Claudio approach. She wondered how long he’d been standing behind her, clutching a bowl of soup. Watching her.
“Thank you.” The pottery dish made a dull clunk as Claudio rested it on the workbench. Casco wasn’t hungry, hadn’t been since she’d spoken with Feus last week. The things he had said—the weight of his gaze! And that silver tongue . . . Her work-cell, the largest studio in the House, suddenly felt stifling.
“It’s not very warm, I’m afraid.”
“Pardon?”
“The soup.” Pater Claudio drew closer to the Empire bottle, rested his hand on Casco’s shoulder as he admired her handiwork.
“Beautiful,” said Pater Claudio. He was no longer looking at the bottle.
A sign that I belong here. She scraped her fingernail along a newly etched symbol, completing its curving stroke. With that, she finished detailing the trunk, two days ahead of schedule. She had only the base and stem left. It had taken all her concentration to keep working, to resist the pull of Feus’ song. The effort exhausted her, not least because she was so short on sleep.
For six consecutive nights, her dreams had been unlike any she’d ever had—in these, she didn’t feel alone. A presence, always hidden but undeniably there, shadowed her every move. She could sense him behind her, beneath her, around her as she floated from nonsensical fancy to fancy. One night, kittens tap-danced on an inverted canoe for her pleasure, waving miniature Empire Bottles in their gloved paws; but their purrs soon transformed into a sultry, familiar rhythm, and she felt her unseen lover press up against her as kittens became fire-breathing sirens. The next night, she swam the seas off the coast of Bandragoon; waves lapped at her naked skin, pulled her further away from her unknown goal, until a hydra surfaced to serve as her steed. And as it slid up beneath her, forcing her to straddle its slippery back, she awoke with a throbbing between her legs that had left her gasping. All week, over and over, it had been the same; the dreams, the insistent humming, the reveille—
“Just beautiful.” Casco was shaken from her thoughts. She felt Claudio’s breath against her cheek, the press of his thumbs kneading small circles into the firm muscles between her shoulder blades.
She stepped away from his grip. “I’m sorry, Pater,” she stammered, remembering Mirko’s warnings and horrified that the older man might now infiltrate her nocturnal sojourns. “I think I’ve left a scroll with the Incantors.” She fumbled with her porte-parchemin, scraping its soft leather with her nails in her haste. “I really must go and collect it, immediately.”