The Conjurers

by David Waid

  Something snapped in the air outside, as if a sheet of ice had been stepped on. Instantly, Bran leapt forward, deep-throated barks shattering the quiet, startling the others awake. Fearghal came bounding from Nairne’s room in long strides as the door to the farmhouse slammed inward.

  For a moment, Eamon thought he’d entered another dream. A man, huge like a giant, stood beyond the threshold with a torch and a massive broadsword. He wore a coat of hard leather scales and was so immense he had to stoop his head and shoulders to enter. The giant jabbed at the dogs with his torch, and shadows leapt across the walls.

  Duff threw aside his skins. The spear he’d used lay with the family’s baggage by the door, the giant between him and it. Scrambling instead for a collection of thick, knobbed, walking sticks, he grabbed one up, left the rest clattering to the floor. Caitlin, caught in a swirl of blankets screamed, “No, no,” both hands over her ears. Baodan rolled from his pallet towards the back where a wood-axe leaned by the other door.

  The giant man forced the dogs back and a second brigand followed him in, then a third. These others were men of normal size, but armed like the giant. The second man, limping, with a bandage wrapped around his thigh, shouted orders and stabbed at Bran. Eamon took the third to be a woman, so thin and slight the brigand looked. Then he saw it was a boy, the one he’d seen in his vision. Bits and pieces came back, vivid as life.

  Brigands standing in a half circle by the village church.

  “No!” Eamon shouted.

  Father Rhys on his knees.

  Grabbing Caitlin, he pulled her backwards across the floor. Duff swung the improvised club for the giant’s hands and wrists. Baodan stood opposite the young brigand, axe overhead, feinting strikes, while Bran snarled and snapped for the limping man’s legs and Fearghal attacked the giant.

  Eamon looked for a weapon, saw the spill of walking sticks, but Caitlin grabbed his arm, pointing.

  “Look!”

  Nairne walked toward the chaos, a skinning knife in one hand, her other outstretched, testing, feeling. The old woman’s gray hair hung loose and wild, her dead, rheumy eyes stretched wide.

  “Nairne!”

  She stopped, spinning to his voice. “Where are ye, boy?”

  Eamon stumbled forward, dodging behind the table where they’d eaten. Caitlin followed, clinging to fistfuls of his shirt. Grabbing Nairne’s elbow with one hand, he put the other over hers on the knife. “This way.”

  Bran had the limping man’s sword arm in his teeth. The dog’s jaw muscles bunched. Bran shook his head and the brigand’s scream rang through the house.

  Seeing the back door, Eamon thought of leading his sister and Nairne to escape, but they had no coats, no shoes and he couldn’t leave Duff. A dog yelped and Eamon whirled in time to see the giant stepping back, Fearghal dead on the ground.

  The giant jabbed his torch at Duff and brought his sword around in a chest-high cut. Eamon’s stepfather ducked beneath and the swing carried past, exposing the brigand’s side. With a shout of triumph, Duff came up. He jumped, bringing his stick down overhand, like a hammer aimed for the skull. The bandit flinched away, ducked his head and it was his shoulder that took the blow. It might yet have felled the man, but the club splintered, leaving Duff with a stub of wood.

  Straightening to full height, the giant rolled his shoulder and tossed the torch aside. He grasped his sword with both hands, brought it over his shoulder and walked forward. With Nairne’s skinning knife in his hand, Eamon tried to run forward, but the old woman gripped his collar with one hand and, with the other, locked fingers on his wrist.

  “Let me go! What are you doing?” Eamon thrashed but Nairne’s fingers were powerful.

  “Ye saved my life, now I’ll save yers,” she said. “While yer alive there’s hope.”

  “Duff will be killed!”

  The giant advanced and Duff backed away.

  “Let go!” Eamon said.

  “The only thing certain if ye go is yer death.”

  Duff threw a chair and the giant batted it aside.

  Eamon thrashed in the old woman’s grip like a wild thing. The giant stepped forward, but Duff would retreat no more. He ran in for a grapple, but the brigand stabbed, piercing Duff’s stomach so the blade emerged from his back slick with blood. They stayed that way, staring at each other until Duff fell to his knees. The giant withdrew his sword and Duff fell forward.

  Baodan had fallen, too, slipping in a pool of Fearghal’s blood. The boy brigand jumped forward, slashing twice, his blade cut gaping wounds. From the other side of the fight, a black streak tore behind the giant, smashing into the boy, bowling him over. Bran. The hound’s teeth slashed the air by the screaming boy’s neck, only a forearm keeping the animal at bay.

  Eamon stood stunned, eyes on Duff’s pooling blood and, behind that, the sight of the great hound making his stand. The giant’s discarded torch had gone out. In the semi-dark of the hearth coals, Bran’s coat gleamed. His eyes and muzzle were lost in shadow but from his throat came a growl so deep it seemed to thrum in Eamon’s chest.

  At first, he didn’t see the limping man grab up Duff’s spear, couch it in his left arm and rest it across the other above a mangled wrist. Eamon didn’t see until he ran forward stabbing its tip into Bran’s shoulder. The glancing, awkward thrust still managed to push the hound backwards. The boy-brigand scrambled to his feet and the giant rushed in. While Bran tried to dance away from the spear tip, they circled and swung their weapons. Bran went down snarling, but when the brigands stepped back, he was dead.

  13. Lodovicetti’s Sanctum

  Genoa

  Standing in the Maestro’s kitchen, Teresa glanced back at the stairs circling down into the cellar. She held her lamp overhead in a shaking hand, courage slipping away. Ignacio, she said to herself. Shutting her eyes tight, Teresa took a deep breath and set her back on the stairs and their path to safety. Ignacio.

  Ahead was a door and around its edges faint light shone from the room beyond. To her left the kitchen opened up with two tables in front of a broad hearth. On one of them, a collection of knives lay by a leaning pile of copper cook pans. Teresa set the lamp on the floor, crossed to the door and pressed an ear to it, hearing nothing. Her white-knuckled hand clutched the door-latch. The words of a skipping game she used to play echoed in her head, repeating in a child’s sing-song voice. Take too long and you’re trapped, step too quick and you’re snapped. Working the latch, she pushed the door open slowly, peering through the gap. Empty. A long trestle table stood in the center of a rectangular room, a solitary chair pulled to it. Thick candles burned in holders covered in wax drippings.

  Although she’d never seen the Maestro, Teresa could imagine him sitting here: spindly, thinner than a thighbone, hunched over his plate with Bezio standing behind ready to ladle more bloody meat onto the juice-soaked trencher. Long, twin drapes hung on the wall to her left, poorly sized so that extra lengths of the beige cloth pooled at the bottom like ribbons of cake batter. Teresa nearly laughed at the sight. She put a hand over her mouth. Terror was making her lightheaded.

  Voices came from one of the chamber exits and she froze, almost bolting back through the kitchen, but the voices did not approach. She crept forward. From an archway at the end of the room she peered into a corridor. The arch stood at an elbow bend; the corridor stretched off to her left and extended ten paces straight ahead, opening into a brightly lit chamber. From her vantage, she could see little of the chamber, but here is where the voices came from, low and indistinct.

  She touched the hunting knife in her belt, taken from Ignacio’s room. Its touch reassured her, but she was here to rescue her brother, not take vengeance. Finding the chamber where the Maestro practiced his “inquiries” must be her one goal. That was where she most expected — most feared — to find Ignacio. From her brother’s journal, Teresa had pieced together the path she thought would take her there. Moving silently into the passage on the left, she ignored the voices. Along thi
s corridor would be stairs to the second floor.

  After twenty feet, she found them and ascended, quick and quiet. How long the people below would stay there she didn’t know. And she could only pray no others were in the house. The flooring at the top was made of wood planks. She had a vision of herself creaking across it, with the people in the chamber below tipping their heads up to listen. Teresa eased weight first onto her heel and then the toes. The voices below talked on at the edge of hearing and she realized the door before her hung ajar.

  Morning’s first light filtered through the room’s shuttered windows like bars of gold and she heard the distant cries of gulls from the docks. She smelled the sea but also the stench of blood and sweat.

  Cluttered like the cellar, the chamber had benches and drafting boards crowded in with tools, scrolls and ceramic jars. Her eye was drawn to the man-sized table in the center of the room with grooves cut in the surface like a meat platter.

  This was the table Ignacio stood beside as the Maestro carved up a dead boy-child from the quarry, where a broken dog had whined through its death, jaws clamped in the Maestro’s muzzle. She stepped to one side of the wooden slab, raised her hand as if to touch it. Her palm began to prickle and that was all the warning she had before her head snapped back. A rush of impressions assaulted her — pain, fear, nausea — so strong they blotted everything. The room swung, her knees buckled.

  Reeling away from the table, Teresa nearly collided with a chair. With a jolt and a twist of her stomach, she realized that a part of what she’d just experienced had the taste of her brother, his pain and fear mixed with the rest in her mouth and nose. She convulsed, bent double and heaved, but her stomach had nothing to give.

  She wanted to charge downstairs, knife in hand, to confront the Maestro. Yet even through the haze of her anger, Teresa knew she was too small. The only thing she could possibly accomplish would be her own death and her parents mourning the loss of two instead of one.

  Teresa shook with frustration. Ceramic and glass containers were placed about the room, but breaking them would make too much noise. A collection of wood bowls. A jumble of rib bones. On a nearby desk, Teresa spotted a stack of books, four high. Books, hand-copied and illuminated. Valuable by any measure, but to the Maestro, who so treasured knowledge…

  Choosing the book with the finest binding, she opened to a random page. She drew Ignacio’s knife and held it overhead. The blade shone in a strip of sunlight, then fell, gutting the volume with determined slashes. Soon she was able to pull the binding apart with her hands as ribbons of paper drifted to the floor. She started on to the next book, and the next. When Teresa opened the fourth, knife raised for the final slaughter, her hand wavered, then dropped to her side. On the page beneath her, Teresa saw the word that had captivated her when she’d read it in Ignacio’s journal.

  Geistmage.

  “Where are my things?”

  “They have been loaded onto the ship, master, exactly as you specified.”

  The Maestro sat on a gilt chair, studying Bezio as the man shifted from foot to foot. It had been a long time since he’d paid close attention to his servant. He was surprised to see tremors, and the man’s skin had a jaundiced hue behind the red patches on his face. Bezio was drinking himself to death.

  Fine veins had burst in the skin of the man’s cheeks and the Maestro found himself wondering if they had burst below the skin as well. Bezio paled beneath his master’s interested stare. A muscle fluttered beneath one of the drunkard’s eyelids.

  “Which part of my instructions have you chosen to disregard this time?” the Maestro said.

  “None, Maestro.”

  “I will board La Sientespirit soon enough and see for myself.”

  “Maestro, the ship departs as soon as you arrive. Gamberale assures me his is the fastest vessel on the sea and you will be in the port of Dublin soon. I swear everything is as you asked.”

  “Then you are a new man.”

  “I know how important your work is, Maestro.”

  “No, you do not. If you knew what it is I attempt, you would not endanger me with your stupidity.”

  “It is the fault of that little de Borja bitch.”

  “If you had not taken the remains of the corpse through my front door, the girl would have never seen a body.” The Maestro leaned forward and his servant stepped back. “Don Abozam’s suspicious muttering would have been more easily set aside. The yammering of the nobles would have never begun and I would have completed the important inquiry I had begun.”

  “I am sorry, Maestro. I will kill the puttana myself.” Bezio’s voice shook and his eyes grew wet, his breathing coarse and loud. The Maestro wondered at the state of his lungs. “Ignacio is in the cellar,” Bezio continued quickly. “I will dispose of him as you have told me to.”

  A sound came from the corridor. Bezio’s head snapped round at it. Truly, the man had no more capacity for focus than a squirrel. The Maestro pounded the chair’s armrest until he had Bezio’s attention once more. “I am a lenient man. It is a failing, yet I admit it. However, I tell you now, I expect my affairs here to be kept in order.”

  “They will be, Maestro. I swear they will.”

  Teresa fumbled her way back into the kitchen in a fog, the Maestro’s book under her arm. The voices from the other room droned on, but she ignored them. She’d heard enough. Ignacio is in the cellar. She must have been near her brother when she first entered. And, per Dio, the Maestro was escaping Genoa. Grabbing up her lamp, she dashed down the spiral stairs, heedless of the door left open behind. Tears threatened, the pressure building behind her eyes, but she wouldn’t give in.

  Emerging from the mouth of the spiral staircase, Teresa stood at that point to which all the mirrors faced. She saw herself, lamp held high in one hand, the book she’d stolen from the room of inquiry in the other. Running to the center of the cellar, she turned in circles, knowing there wasn’t much time. Teresa put down the things she carried and ran to tear a sheet away from a piece of shrouded furniture, exposing a lacquered cabinet. She wrenched away another sheet and then another. Every shape seemed like it might hide her brother, but none did. Short and fat revealed a heavy chair with grape clusters carved at the corners. Tall and thin, another mirror angled to the stairs. She ran, pulling sheets aside, dropping them, moving on.

  Standing at the room’s center again, Teresa peered into the aisles, scanning frantically. She wasn’t thinking clearly and she knew it. Panic threatened to close her throat. She forced herself to swallow, take a breath. Where would Bezio have put her brother? Nowhere that required extra work; that much was clear from what she’d read. A trail wound through the jumble of the cellar to the space where the concealed passage began, the path Bezio must ultimately take. Following that path with her eyes, she spotted a large, square table, low to the floor. The table’s shape was so obvious, she hadn’t bothered to strip it of its sheet. A half dozen wooden pulleys and a length of rope lay scattered across the top.

  She ran to it, lifting the edge of the cloth, leaning in close. The first thing she noticed was that one of the carts made for use in the narrow tunnel had been slid under here. Second were the soles of bare feet. Something, some faint smell she couldn’t name, had been building in the tiny space.

  “Oh, Mary, be with me.”

  She tugged and the cart rolled into the light.

  Teresa groaned. Ignacio’s body lay partially covered with a large sack of tough sailcloth that sat on his torso. It looked identical to the one Bezio had used to carry that other corpse to the canal. Her brother’s hair was matted against his head. A patch of skin and muscle had been cut from his arm, exactly as she’d seen it on the apparition in his bedroom. She wouldn’t remove the sack that covered him. It seemed to dip where his heart and stomach should be and she couldn’t bear to see what lay beneath. The Maestro, she suspected, had gone deeper there, done more.

  “Nacio.”

  Turning away, she put her palm over her mouth
, eyes wide above it, breathing hard through her nose. All the tears she’d been holding back spilled and for some time she couldn’t move.

  When the tears slowed from flood to trickle, she sat on the floor beside him, staring into space. Bezio or the Maestro could come down and catch her. Let them. Ignacio didn’t deserve this end. For whatever things he did with the Maestro — still, not this. A sensation touched her that stopped her wandering thoughts, nearly made her scream.

  Her palms had begun to prickle.

  They prickled as they had in the room of inquiry, as they had when she stood outside the Maestro’s house, preparing to knock. Teresa stiffened, waiting for something bad to follow. Instead she felt a gentle wave of her brother’s presence. It was unmistakable. Ignacio. Something stood half hidden by furniture on the edge of her light, a smudge of grey amid black shadows. She held tight to the hand of her brother’s corpse and swallowed. “Ignacio?”

  The thing came into the light, yet remained an indistinct blot with no definite edges, impossible to bring into focus. Squinting, she stood and the apparition moved towards her.

  “Is that you, Ignacio?”

  Its approach quickened.

  “Per Dio!”

  There was no time to run. She tried to turn, but it hit her like a wind, rushing into her, a black, cold ache. She crumpled, eyes rolled back in her head and she lay shuddering, moaning.

  “Ignacio…” The word came through her parted lips like breath, her head rocking from side to side. Occasionally, her hand would lift briefly, fall back.

  “Yes,” she said. And again, “Yes.”

  At last, her eyes fluttered open and she put a hand to her forehead. Sitting up, she leaned against the pallet which held Ignacio’s body and then, shaking, swaying, she stood. Retrieving one of the sheets from the floor, Teresa brought it back to cover her brother, tucking it around his shoulders.

  Bezio stared at the door for a long time after he closed it. The Maestro had gone off to Ireland, a place Bezio could only dimly imagine. Even dimmer was his interest. Every time the Maestro left on one of his unexplained journeys, he might be gone for days, weeks and once even for several months. That was the important thing. He thought about how the Maestro had been earlier: agitated, excited, unpredictable. For a man who lived by gauging his master’s moods, this was frightening. Bezio had seen intensity in the Maestro’s glare, as if he had been sizing his servant up for a place on the slab.