Scholar of Decay

by Tanya Huff

  “Enough!”

  The power in that single word snapped his mouth closed. It was not a voice that could be argued with. Not by him nor, apparently, by those in the river. Finding Dmitri shoved suddenly within reach, Aurek hauled him, choking and gasping for breath, up onto the algae-covered rocks of the riverwall. His clothing had been ripped into a grotesque parody of fashionable dress, but the wounds below were less serious than they had at first appeared.

  “Has he been bitten?”

  Aurek twisted and was not surprised to see Jacqueline Renier advance from the shadows, her expression showing only polite curiosity. As the horrifying implications of her question sank in, he quickly examined his brother’s injuries more carefully.

  “No,” he said at last, sitting back on his heels, relief making him weak. “No bites.”

  “Good.” It was clear from her tone that the word did not refer to Dmitri’s state but was rather a reprieve pronounced for other listeners.

  The river was dark and still. The wererats, if not gone, were watching silently. Motionless.

  “I suggest you take him home,” Jacqueline continued, the suggestion manifestly one Aurek was expected to follow. “He has no doubt drunk a great deal of filthy water, and those scratches should be cleaned before they infect.” She paused, and Aurek found his gaze drawn to hers. Unable to look away, he felt a dark power caress his heart with unforgiving fingers. When she spoke again, he heard the warning behind the words. “It is important that we take care of our families.”

  Still on his knees beside his brother’s trembling body—a position, he realized that also put him on his knees at Jacqueline’s feet—Aurek inclined his head. Had he not already been certain of who and what she was, this glimpse of a small fraction of her power would have convinced him.

  While she acknowledged his right to take care of his own, she had clearly reminded him that, in turn, she would take care of hers.

  As Aurek helped Dmitri stand, she murmured, “You’ve proven yourself to be a discreet man, and you will, of course, say nothing of what has occurred here.”

  “My brother should be told …”

  “Nothing,” she repeated, and he had the distinct feeling she’d allowed him as much license as he was likely to get. While he doubted he was in any personal danger—he knew his own abilities too well—he was responsible for more lives than merely his own. He had forgotten that once, and the price had been almost more than heart and mind could bear.

  “I will say nothing,” he agreed reluctantly, hoping that the semiconscious young man in his arms had been forced to figure it out for himself.

  Aurek hadn’t intended to return to the party, but the fastest route to the private dock where the canalboats waited passed through the house. With one arm around Dmitri’s waist and the other gripping his right elbow, he half-carried his brother in through the terrace windows, ready to defend him if it became necessary. Fortunately, given Jacqueline Renier’s warning, it didn’t become necessary.

  Dmitri’s new playmates were either gone or lying very low.

  The festivities had degenerated during the short time Aurek had been outside, and the remaining crowd seemed intent on self-abuse and debauchery. The sight of a young man, stinking of river water and bleeding sluggishly from a number of shallow wounds, appeared to attract no interest. Lips pressed thin in disgust, Aurek could only assume it wasn’t that unusual a sight.

  With lips curled inhumanly far off her teeth, Louise watched Jacqueline follow Aurek Nuikin in from the terrace. Her anger blinding her to everything outside its narrow focus of insult and betrayal, she ignored Dmitri’s presence entirely and saw only that Aurek had declined her company for her sister’s.

  Seeing them together, a mere body-length apart, she suddenly realized what it was about the man that had seemed so familiar. He reminded her of Jacqueline. Not physically, but they shared an arrogance that suggested, rather than considering the rest of the world beneath them, they didn’t consider the rest of the world at all. That apparent similarity with her twin was the last thing Louise needed to fan her rage into white heat.

  When Jacqueline, feeling the blind fury lap against her back, turned and smiled with taunting triumph, it nearly shredded away the last of Louise’s self-control.

  Jacqueline could not be made to pay, so Aurek Nuikin would pay for them both.

  He will beg for death before I’m through!

  His Sleep Disturbed by Kaleidoscopic Dreams of a laughing ghost, Aurek lay awake and watched the gray light of dawn touch his window. As the pigeons in the eaves announced to the day that they’d survived another night, he gritted his teeth and threw back the bedclothes. If he couldn’t sleep, he had plenty to do awake.

  The huge four-poster bed had been one of the few pieces of furniture he’d not gotten rid of. Most of the rest had been eaten away by insects and the damp, but the heavy, near-black wood of the bed had seemed impervious. He’d never seen a bed quite like it. As it reminded him of nothing in his past, he’d taken it for his own use.

  Slipping his arms into the sleeves of a blue woolen dressing gown, he padded barefoot across the floor—deftly avoiding a rough-plank patch filling a hole where the original boards had rotted through. The tiny panes of the window had been leaded together from salvaged pieces of shattered glass. Conscious of how few unbroken windows there were in Pont-a-Museau, Aurek opened it carefully and leaned out to study the city.

  Mist clung to the curve of the river in smoky tendrils the gray-green shade of fungus. The air smelled no better than it looked and would, Aurek knew, smell worse as the day warmed. Eyes narrowed, he studied the dirty gray stone of the neighboring buildings. If their secrets could have been discovered by force of will alone, his gaze would have stripped the crumbling façades away and exposed their rotting hearts.

  Richemulot had appeared in his lifetime. Fifteen years before it had not existed, then suddenly there it was, pressed up against Borca’s western border. The cities—Mortigny, Ste. Ronges, and Pont-a-Museau—had been from the beginning much as they were now, complete with buildings, the buildings themselves complete with the decaying paraphernalia of daily life. Though Aurek had searched every existing record, scholarship had been unable to determine if, for some reason, the buildings had been created in the state they were found, or if the mist had dragged them from another time and place.

  The Mist.

  What it was, why it was, no one knew for certain. In the oldest records out of Barovia, Aurek had seen it described as a preternatural force capable of reasoning and response. More recent research suggested it was nothing more than an ethereal border between planes—dangerous and unpredictable but unable to be influenced by those around it.

  Although he had dared much for the sake of knowledge, even Aurek avoided the mist.

  He didn’t care whether the mist had created the cities of Richemulot or if it had dragged them across the planes. He was interested only in the artifacts that could be gleaned from the ruins.

  Artifacts like the green glass bead with the golden fire at its heart. Its power had pulled him, red-eyed and shaking, out of his study to confront the Vistana who wore it hung around his neck. The bead had not been for sale—not for any price. Only a madman—which he wasn’t, quite, in spite of grief and guilt—threatened the Vistani. The Vistana had known only that the bead had been found in an abandoned building in Pont-a-Museau.

  If there was magic abandoned here … His fingers closed on the edge of the windowsill. It wasn’t really a question. Staring out at the city, he could feel, very faintly, the places where power lingered. Places the city’s scavengers avoided. Today, he would begin his search and, perhaps, soon …

  “Soon,” he repeated aloud. And then again, “Soon.”

  Closing the window and latching it, he entered what probably had been a sitting room at one time but was now his study. Adjoining his bedchamber, it had a second door opening into the second floor hall. This room also had been scrubbed free of ac
cumulated filth until it gleamed. For lack of a bookcase, the notes and papers he’d brought from Borca were stacked on a corner of the large, somewhat worm-eaten desk.

  Although the shutters were closed, a soft light filled the room from an alcove cut into an inside wall. The light appeared to have no origin—neither candle nor lamp. It brightened imperceptibly as Aurek slowly approached.

  In the alcove was a wooden pedestal, so classically pure in design it appeared to have been grown rather than carved. Centered on the pedestal, bathed in gentle light, stood an exquisitely perfect porcelain statue of a woman. Though she stood barely eight inches high, the clothing that identified her as a member of the Borcan upper class was complete down to the impossibly tiny stitches on her embroidered sleeves. Her back was slightly arched, and her perfectly detailed hands were raised, as though to block a blow. Her face looked up through the shield of her hands, twisted into an expression of utter horror. Except for the horror, she would have been beautiful.

  Head bowed, Aurek stood motionless before the alcove. A vein pulsed in his temple as he concentrated with all his power, all his heart, on the tiny figure.

  Then his shoulders sagged, and a strangled cry of despair escaped. He could feel the spirit trapped within the statue but, try as he might, he couldn’t reach it. Had never been able to reach it.

  “It’s a new day, Natalia.” With a trembling finger, he reached out and tenderly stroked the statue’s auburn hair. “Perhaps it will be the day we’ve been waiting for. I have permission to search,” he continued, clasping his hands behind his back as though afraid of what they’d do if free. “The Lord of Richemulot is a woman—well, technically not a woman, but female—less predictable than the Lady Ivana and probably more dangerous because of that. We …” He paused, strangely reluctant to tell the wife he loved so desperately that he and Jacqueline Renier had touched, if only for an instant, beneath the other’s surface.

  “I don’t know why she hides what she is,” he said instead. “Her family is so strong here it couldn’t possibly make any difference. But then, her kind enjoy dark and labyrinthine games, so perhaps that’s sufficient explanation. I’m sure it amuses them to mingle with the citizens of the cities.”

  That the citizens worked so hard at remaining unaware, he strongly suspected came in a large part from instincts of self-preservation and in a small part from plain and simple denial. The evidence was plentiful if any of them chose to heed it.

  “I believe she recognized what I am in much the same way as I recognized her—power calling to power.…” His voice trailed off as he remembered another time power had called to power and his beloved Natalia had paid the price of the visit. Finally he regained control and continued. “She as much as promised me that if I leave her family alone, she will leave mine alone. I think we’re safe here.” He had never worried about safety before, had taken it for granted … before.

  He half-turned as he heard a door open back in his bedchamber and the floor protesting under a familiar heavy tread. “It’s time for me to go, Lia.” Swallowing his grief, he cupped both hands around the statue without actually touching it. “I love you,” he whispered through the constriction in his throat. “I promise you, I’ll find a way.”

  Face twisted with painful memories, he returned to his bedchamber, pulling the study door closed softly behind him.

  Edik, his servant, had come and gone, leaving a pitcher of steaming water on the shaving table. Feeling as though at any moment misery and guilt could tear him apart, Aurek fought for control as he filled a bowl and reached for his razor.

  When he looked into his shaving mirror, his hand froze, the blade cold against the skin of his throat. The laughing face of the wild-haired man filled the glass. His lips writhed with the force of his amusement. Under heavy lids, his eyes, locked on Aurek’s, were dark with gleeful hate.

  A muscle jumped in Aurek’s jaw. Though the man in the mirror was eight months dead—his name unknown, his body food for worms—this was no true ghost. If it were, it would have long since been banished. But Aurek took little comfort in knowing that he haunted himself with a phantom called up out of his own pain and, even knowing its origins, he couldn’t help responding.

  After setting the razor down with studied care lest he be tempted to use it, he found his voice and cried, “Why bother taunting me? My victory has never been anything but ash in my mouth!”

  To your victory! jeered the apparition.

  Self-abuse or not, this was more than Aurek could bear. Shrieking in rage, he flung the mirror against the far wall, where it smashed into a hundred pieces.

  Edik, a carafe of coffee dwarfed by his huge hand, stood in the open door and shook his head at the broken glass. “Break a mirror, break your luck,” he intoned portentously, sucking air through his teeth.

  “Luck?” As his pride, wearing a dead man’s face, mocked him from every piece of silvered glass, Aurek laughed bitterly.

  Awakened by the sun shining through the tattered velvet curtains, Louise stretched, freed herself from a shredded tangle of bedclothes, and climbed out of bed. Although she hadn’t fallen asleep until nearly dawn, she wasn’t the least bit tired. Nearly a hundred carpets of every imaginable pattern and hue, scattered ankle-deep on the floor, provided her with a cushioned path from the enormous canopied bed to a tarnished, gilt-framed mirror that took up almost one entire wall.

  Pivoting naked in front of the glass, Louise smiled at her reflection, well satisfied with what she saw. The few scars left behind by family arguments she hadn’t won in the first few seconds were all positioned where fashionable clothing easily covered them. “Aurek Nuikin is a fool,” she murmured, her hands dancing lightly over alabaster skin. “Don’t you agree, Geraud?”

  The young man lying facedown on the bed made no reply.

  Her smile widened as she turned and patted him gently on one bare buttock. He was in no small way responsible for her mood this morning. When she’d brought him home from the party, still blindly furious at the scholar and her sister, he’d done everything he could to make her feel better. Pitifully grateful to be noticed after her earlier dismissal, he’d been attentive and adoring and … athletic. Unfortunately, he hadn’t survived the experience.

  “Geraud?” Louise reached over and drew a fingernail down the sole of his bare foot. The skin parted, but Geraud remained perfectly still. “No matter; just checking.”

  The servants would know what to do with the body when they found it. It wouldn’t be the first slipped into the dark depths of the river to add its soupçon of rot to the muck and decay. It wouldn’t be the last.

  “It probably won’t be the last today.” Sliding the crimson silk robe up over her shoulders, Louise exchanged a glance of malicious anticipation with her reflection. “If Aurek Nuikin intends to wander in deserted buildings, he’d best take care. After all, a great many unpleasant things could happen to a poor helpless scholar intent on research.” The tip of her tongue slid along the full curve of her lower lip. “A great many unpleasant things,” she repeated.

  Aurek stood silently in the doorway and watched with a worried frown as Dmitri, his body nearly doubled over in pain, vomited bile into a chipped porcelain bowl. When he finally fell back against the pillows, dripping sweat, hands feebly clutching at the tangled bedclothes, Aurek stepped into the room.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, crossing to the bed.

  Dmitri stared up at his brother in disbelief, bloodshot eyes squinted nearly closed in spite of the diffused light coming through the drawn curtains. “Oh, I’m just fine,” he mumbled. “Just fine.”

  Brow creased, Aurek laid an inquiring hand on Dmitri’s brow only to have it abruptly shaken off. He sighed and clasped his hands behind his back instead. “What do you remember about last night?”

  “I remember your being a patronizing …”

  “No. What do you remember about your … adventure?”

  “Adventure?” Dmitri laughed humorlessly. “I got dr
unk and fell in the river.”

  “That’s all you remember?”

  “Well, I think there was something in the water with me, but that’s hardly surprising. There’re probably as many things living in that cesspool as in the city.” Misinterpreting his brother’s expression, he flushed and added, “Look, it’s no big deal—you dragged me out and I’m grateful, but I bet it happens all the time.”

  “Yes.” Aurek nodded grimly. “Very likely.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Only that you’re probably correct: what happened to you very likely happens all the time.” Could he only count on the younger man’s discretion, he’d tell him the truth—whether Jacqueline Renier wanted it told or not. Unfortunately, the odds of Dmitri opening his mouth at an inopportune time were too great.

  So, my brother tells me you’re a wererat.

  He could just hear Dmitri announcing all he knew and ruining everything. He must be permitted to search the ruins of Pont-a-Museau. Nothing could interfere with that. Nothing.

  “You needn’t look so superior,” Dmitri muttered defensively into the silence. “I’m sure you’ve had a few too many on occasion.”

  Aurek shook his head. “I’ve never seen the point in either losing control and making a fool of myself or in making myself violently ill.”

  “Oh, right. I forgot. You’re a … a thing of virtue. What’s that?” he demanded as Edik replaced the porcelain bowl on the bedside table with a heavy clay mug.

  “A purgative, young sir.”

  “Another one?”

  “It is very important that we are certain you have flushed all the river poisons from your system.” Wrapping his huge hand around the mug, he lifted it to Dmitri’s mouth, the other hand supporting the younger man’s head in such a way that he had no choice but to drink.

  Dmitri pushed at Edik’s arms with the same effect a kitten would have in attempting to uproot a tree. Coughing and sputtering, he swallowed.

  “I hate you,” he muttered melodramatically when Edik finally moved the cup away. Glaring up at his brother he added, “And I hate you, too.”