Beardless boys, decrepit old men, cripples and beggars, traveling merchants who hadn't yet heard that there wasn't a copper coin to be made in Ombra now, or who did business with those leeches up in the castle – that was what you saw these days in the once lively streets. Women with eyes reddened from weeping, fatherless children, men from beyond the forest hoping to find a young widow or an abandoned workshop here… and soldiers. Yes, there were plenty of soldiers in Ombra. They took what they wanted, day after day, night after night. No house was safe from them. They called it compensation for war crimes, and they had a point. After all, Cosimo had been the attacker – Cosimo, his most beautiful and innocent creation (or so, at least, Fenoglio had thought). Now he lay dead in a sarcophagus in the crypt beneath the castle. Minerva claimed that Violante went down there every day, officially to mourn her dead husband but really – so people whispered – to meet her informers. They said Her Ugliness didn't even have to pay her spies. Hatred of the Milksop brought them to her by the dozen. Of course. You had only to look at the fellow – that perfumed, pigeon-breasted hangman, governor only by the grace of his brother-in-law, the Adderhead. If you painted a face on an egg, it would bear a striking resemblance to him. And no, Fenoglio hadn't made him up. Once again, the story had produced the Milksop entirely by itself.
As his first official act, he had ordered a document to be hung up by the castle gates, listing the punishments that would be meted out in Ombra for various crimes from now on – with pictures, so that those who couldn't read would know what threatened them, too. The loss of an eye for this offense, the loss of a hand for that one, whippings, the pillory, branding, blinding. Fenoglio looked away whenever he passed that notice, and when he was out with Minerva's children he put his hand over their eyes if they had to cross the marketplace, where most of the punishments were inflicted (although Ivo always wanted to peek). Of course they could still hear the screams.
Luckily, there weren't too many offenders left to be punished in this city without men. Many of the women had left with their children, traveling far away from the Wayless Wood that no longer protected them from the prince who ruled on the other side of it, the immortal Adderhead.
And yes, Fenoglio thought, that had undoubtedly been his idea. But more and more rumors were being heard all the time, whispering that the Adderhead took little pleasure in his immortality.
There was a knock at the door. Who could that be? Oh, the devil, was he forgetting everything these days? Of course! Where was the damn note that crow had brought yesterday evening? Rosenquartz had been scared to death when he'd suddenly seen the bird perching on the skylight. Mortimer was coming to Ombra. Today! And wasn't he, Fenoglio, supposed to meet him outside the castle gates? This visit was a reckless notion. There were "Wanted" posters up for the Bluejay on every street corner. Fortunately, the picture on them didn't look the least like Mortimer, but all the same… Another knock.
Rosenquartz stayed where he was, beside his thimble. A glass man wasn't even any good at opening doors! Fenoglio felt sure Orpheus didn't have to open his door for himself. Apparently, his new bodyguard was so large he could hardly get through the city gate. Bodyguard! If I ever do write again, thought Fenoglio, I'll get Meggie to read me a giant here, and we'll see what the Calf's-Head has to say about that.
The knocking was getting rather impatient.
"Coming, coming!" Fenoglio stumbled over an empty wine jug as he looked for his trousers. Laboriously, he climbed into them. How his bones ached! The hell with old age. Why hadn't he written a story in which people were young forever? Because it would be boring, he thought as he hopped over to the door, one leg in the scratchy trousers. Deadly boring.
"Sorry, Mortimer!" he called. "The glass man forgot to wake me up at the right time!"
Behind him, Rosenquartz began protesting, but the voice that replied to him outside wasn't Mortimer's – even if it was almost as beautiful as his. Orpheus. Talk of the devil! What did he want here? Come to complain that Rosenquartz had been in his house spying? If anyone has a reason to complain, I do, thought Fenoglio. After all, it's my story he's plundering and distorting! Miserable Calf's-Head, Milkface, Bullfrog, Whippersnapper… Fenoglio had many names for Orpheus, none of them flattering.
Wasn't it bad enough that he kept sending Farid to bother him? Did he have to come himself? He was sure to ask thousands of stupid questions again. Your own fault, Fenoglio! How often he'd cursed himself for the words he'd written in the mine at Meggie's urging: So he called on another, younger man, Orpheus by name – skilled in letters, even if he could not yet handle them with the mastery of Fenoglio himself- and decided to instruct him in his art, as every master does at some time. For a while Orpheus should play with words in his place, seduce and lie with them, create and destroy, banish and restore – while Fenoglio waited for his weariness to pass, for his pleasure in words to reawaken, and then he would send Orpheus back to the world from which he had summoned him, to keep his story alive with new words never used before.
"I ought to write him back where he came from!" Fenoglio growled as he kicked the empty jug out of his way. "Right now!"
"Write? Did I hear you say write?" Rosenquartz asked ironically behind him. He was back to his normal color. Fenoglio threw a dry crust of bread at him, but it missed Rosenquartz's pale pink head by more than a hand's breadth, and the glass man gave a sympathetic sigh.
"Fenoglio? Fenoglio, I know you're in there! Open the door." God, how he hated that voice. Planting words in his story like weeds. His own words!
"No, I'm not here!" growled Fenoglio. "Not for you, Calf's- Head!"
Fenoglio, is Death a man or a woman? Were the White Women once living human beings? Fenoglio, how am I to bring Dustfinger back if you can't even tell me the simplest rules of this world? Enough of his questions. For God's sake, who had asked him to bring Dustfinger back? If everything had gone the way Fenoglio had originally written it, the man would have been dead long ago in any case. And as for "the simplest rules," since when, might he ask, were life and death simple? Hang it all (and there was more than enough hanging in Ombra these days anyway), how was he supposed to know how everything worked, in this or any other world? He'd never thought much about death or what came after it. Why bother? While you were alive, why would death interest you? And once you were dead – well, presumably you weren't interested in anything anymore.
"Of course he's there! Fenoglio?" That was Minerva's voice. Damn it, the Calf's-Head had roped her in to help him. Cunning. At least Orpheus was far from stupid.
Fenoglio hid the empty wine jugs under the bed, forced his other leg into his trousers, and unbolted the door.
"So there you are!" Minerva inspected him disapprovingly from his uncombed head to his bare feet. "I told your visitor you were at home." How sad she looked. Weary, too. These days she was working in the castle kitchen, where Fenoglio had asked Violante to find her a job. But the Milksop had a preference for feasting by night, so Minerva often didn't get home until the early hours of the morning. Very likely she'd drop dead of exhaustion someday and leave her poor children orphans. It was a wretched situation. What had become of his wonderful Ombra?
"Fenoglio!" Orpheus pushed past Minerva with that ghastly, innocent smile he always had ready as camouflage. Of course he'd brought notes with him again, notes full of questions. How did he pay for the fine clothes he wore? Fenoglio himself had never worn such clothes, not even in his days of glory as court poet. Ah, he thought, but you forgot the treasures he's writing for himself, didn't you, Fenoglio?
Without a word Minerva went down the steep staircase again, and a man made his way through Fenoglio's door behind Orpheus. Even ducking his head, he almost got stuck in the doorway. Aha, the legendary bodyguard. There was even less space in Fenoglio's modest little room with this huge meatball inside it.
Farid, on the other hand, didn't take up much space, although so far he had played a big part in the story. Farid, Dustfinger's angel of death… He fo
llowed his new master through the door hesitantly, as if ashamed to be keeping such company.
"Well now, Fenoglio, I'm truly sorry," said Orpheus, his supercilious smile giving the lie to his words, "but I'm afraid I've found a few more inconsistencies."
Inconsistencies!
"I've sent Farid here before with my questions, but you gave him some very strange answers." Looking portentous, he straightened his glasses and brought the book out from under his heavy velvet coat. Yes, that Calf's-Head had brought Fenoglio's book with him into the world of the story it told: the very last copy of Inkheart. But had he given it back to him, the author? Oh no. "I'm sorry, Fenoglio," was all he had said, with the arrogant expression that he had mastered so perfectly. (Orpheus had been quick to abandon the mask of a diligent student.) "I'm sorry, but this book is mine. Or do you seriously claim that an author is the rightful owner of every copy of his books?" Puffed-up, milk-faced young upstart! What a way to speak to him, Fenoglio, the creator of everything around Orpheus himself, even the air he breathed!
"Are you after me again for information on Death?" Fenoglio squeezed his feet into his worn old boots. "Why? So that you can go telling this poor boy you'll bring Dustfinger back from the White Women, just to keep him in your service?"
Farid tightened his lips. Dustfinger's marten blinked sleepily on his shoulder – or was this a different animal?
"What nonsense you talk!" Orpheus sounded distinctly peeved – he took offense very easily. "Do I look as if I have any trouble finding servants? I have six maids, a bodyguard, a cook, and the boy. You know very well it's not just for the boy I want to bring Dustfinger back. He belongs in this story. It's not half as good without him, it's a flower without petals, a night without stars -"
"A forest without trees?" Fenoglio muttered.
Orpheus turned as red as a beet. It was so amusing to make fun of the arrogant fop – one of the few pleasures Fenoglio still had left.
"You're drunk, old man!" Orpheus spat. His voice could sound very unpleasant.
"Drunk or not, I still know a hundred times more about words than you do. You trade at second hand. You unravel whatever you can find and knit it up again as if a story were a pair of old socks! So don't you tell me what part Dustfinger ought to play in this one. Perhaps you remember I had him dead once already, before he decided to go with the White Women! What do you think you're doing, coming here to lecture me about my own story? Take a look at that, why don't you?" Furiously, he pointed to the shimmering fairies' nest above his bed. "Rainbow-colored fairies! Ever since they built their horrible nest up there I've had the most appalling dreams! And they steal the blue fairies' stocks of winter provisions!"
"So?" Orpheus shrugged his plump shoulders. "They look pretty, all the same, don't they? I thought it was so tedious for all fairies to be blue."
"Did you, indeed?" Fenoglio's voice rose to such volume that one of the colorful fairies interrupted her constant chatter and peered out of her gaudy nest. "Then write your own world! This one's mine, understand? Mine! I'm sick and tired of your meddling with it. I admit I've made some mistakes in my life, but writing you here was far and away the worst of them!"
Bored, Orpheus inspected his fingernails. They were bitten to the quick. "I'm not listening to any more of this!" he said in a menacingly soft voice. "All that stuff about 'you wrote me here,' 'she read me here' – nonsense! I'm the one who does the reading and writing around here now. The only one. The words don't obey you anymore, old man. It's a long time since they did, and you know it!"
"They'll obey me again! And the first thing I'll write will be a return ticket for you!"
"Oh yes? And who's going to read these fabulous words? As far as I'm aware, you need someone to read them aloud for you. Unlike me."
"Well?" Fenoglio came so close that Orpheus's farsighted eyes blinked at him in annoyance. "I'll ask Mortimer! They don't call him Silvertongue for nothing, even if he goes by another name these days. Ask the boy! If it weren't for Mortimer, he'd still be in the desert shoveling camel dung."
"Mortimer!" Orpheus produced a derisive smile, although with some difficulty. "Is your head buried so deep in your wine jug that you don't know what's going on in this world of yours? He's not doing any reading now. The bookbinder prefers to play the outlaw these days – the role you created especially for him."
The bodyguard uttered a grunt, probably meant to be something like laughter. What a ghastly fellow! Had Fenoglio himself written him into the story or had Orpheus? Fenoglio scrutinized the muscleman for a moment, irritated, and then turned back to his master.
"I did not make it especially for him!" he said. "It's the other way around: I used Mortimer as my pattern for the character… and from all I hear, he plays his part well. But that doesn't mean the Bluejay no longer has a silver tongue. Not to mention his gifted daughter."
"Oh yes? And do you know where he is?" Orpheus asked almost casually. He was staring at his fingernails again, while his bodyguard had set to work on what was left of Fenoglio's breakfast.
"Indeed I do. He's coming -" Fenoglio fell abruptly silent as the boy suddenly came up and clapped his hand over the old man's mouth. Why did he keep forgetting the lad's name? Because you're going senile, Fenoglio, he said to himself, that's why.
"No one knows where the Bluejay is!" How reproachfully Farid's black eyes were looking at Fenoglio! "No one!"
Of course. Damn drunken old fool that he was! How could he have forgotten that Orpheus turned green with jealousy whenever he heard Mortimer's name, or that he went in and out of the Milksop's castle all the time? Fenoglio could have bitten off his tongue.
But Orpheus smiled. "Don't look so alarmed, old man! So the bookbinder's coming here. Bold of him. Does he want to make the songs that sing of his daring come true before they hang him? Because that's how he'll meet his end, like all heroes. We both know that, don't we? Don't worry, I don't intend to hand him over ripe for the gallows. Others will do that. No, I just want to talk to him about the White Women. There aren't many who have survived a meeting with them; that's why I really would like a word with him. There are some very interesting rumors about such survivors."
'I'll tell him if I see him," replied Fenoglio brusquely. "But I can't think that he will want to talk to you. After all, I don't suppose he'd ever have met the White Women at all if you hadn't been so willing to read him here for Mortola. Rosenquartz!" He strode to the door with as much dignity as was possible in his shabby boots. "I have some errands to run. See our guests out, and mind you keep away from that marten!"
Fenoglio stumbled down the staircase to the yard almost as fast as he had on the day when Basta had paid him a visit. Mortimer would be waiting outside the castle gates already! Suppose Orpheus found him there when he went to the castle to tell the Milksop what he had heard? The Bluejay was the Governor's mortal enemy.
The boy caught up with him halfway downstairs. Farid. Yes, that was the name. Of course. Going senile, for sure.
"Is Silvertongue really coming here?" he whispered breathlessly. "Don't worry, Orpheus won't give him away. Not yet! But Ombra is far too dangerous for him! Is he bringing Meggie with him?"
"Farid!" Orpheus was looking down at them from the top of the stairs as if he were the king of the Inkworld. "If the old fool doesn't tell Mortimer I want to speak to him, then you do it. Understand?"
Old fool, thought Fenoglio. O ye gods of words, give them back to me so that I can get this damned Calf's-Head out of my story!
He wanted to give Orpheus a suitably cutting answer, but not even his tongue could find the right words now, and the boy impatiently hauled him away.
6. SAD OMBRA
My courtiers called me the happy prince, and happy indeed I was, if pleasure be happiness. So I lived and so I died. And now that I am dead they have set me high that I can see all the ugliness and all the misery in the city, and though my heart is made of lead yet I cannot choose but weep.
Oscar Wilde, "The Happy Prince"
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Farid had told Meggie how difficult it was to get into Ombra now, and she had passed on everything he said to Mo. "The guards aren't the harmless fools who used to stand there. If they ask you what you are doing in Ombra, think hard before you answer. Whatever they demand, you must stay humble and submissive. They don't search many people. Sometimes you may even be lucky and they'll just wave you through!"
They weren't lucky. The guards stopped them, and Meggie felt like clinging to Mo when one of the soldiers gestured to him to dismount and brusquely asked to see a sample of his craft. While the guard looked at the book of her mother's drawings, Meggie wondered in alarm whether she already knew the face under the open helmet from her imprisonment in the Castle of Night, and whether he would find the knife hidden in Mo's belt. They might kill him just for that knife. No one was allowed to carry weapons except the occupiers from Argenta, but Battista had made the belt so well that even the suspicious hands of the guard at the gate could find nothing wrong with it.
Meggie was glad Mo had the knife with him as they rode through the ironbound gates, past the lances of the guards, and into the city that now belonged to the Adderhead.
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