Scholar of Decay

by Tanya Huff

  “I disinfected all his scratches, sir,” Edik told Aurek placidly, setting the mug back on the table. “While the water was undeniably filthy, his wounds were not deep, and I have done what I can to see that he takes no permanent damage.”

  “Thank you, Edik.” That his servant—his faithful servant for all it sounded so cliché—had effortlessly taken responsibility for Dmitri lifted a load from Aurek’s mind. He wished only that there were as easy an answer to the problem of Jacqueline Renier’s young relatives. While he knew very little about their kind, what he’d learned was not encouraging. He doubted very much that Dmitri had seen the last of them, and while their games were not likely to be fatal, thanks to the Lord of Richemulot’s warning, neither would they be pleasant.

  “People,” he said at last, falling into the lecturing tone Natalia had tried unsuccessfully to break him of, “are not always what they appear to be. You’re in a new place where the rules might not be what you’re used to. Think twice before you believe someone is a friend.”

  “Like you care,” Dmitri scoffed, closing his eyes. “Go away before I puke again.”

  “I just want you to be careful.…”

  “And I just want you to leave.” His throat convulsed, and he grimaced as he swallowed. “I’m not kidding about the puking.”

  Closing the door to Dmitri’s bedchamber softly behind him, Aurek wearily reflected that, at least for the morning, he’d know exactly where his brother was. He didn’t understand why the boy was always so angry, why their meetings always ended—if they didn’t begin—with Dmitri snarling and snapping at everything he said. Natalia had understood, but Natalia—his sweet and loving Natalia—was no longer able to explain.

  “You’re in a good mood this morning.”

  Louise slid into her seat at the scarred table that nearly filled the morning room, and smiled beatifically at her sister. “Why shouldn’t I be?”

  “No reason.” Jacqueline took a long, slow swallow of coffee and studied Louise over the gilded rim of the cup. While she hadn’t yet been to bed, it was obvious that her twin had just risen. “Your fits of pique usually last longer.”

  Greedily heaping her plate with an assortment of food, Louise shrugged. “I found a diversion.”

  “How nice. Will he be joining us for … breakfast?”

  Louise swept a critical gaze over the full platters, a laden fork halfway to her mouth. “I don’t think that’s necessary. There’s plenty here now.”

  The burly servant carrying the body out of the west wing heard the twins’ shared laughter and suppressed a shudder. As bad as it could be at the Chateau when they fought, it was worse still when they got along.

  The house, or what remained of it, was on the east shore of Souris Island. Only the third story, gray-green lichens flaking off its blackened stonework, showed over the almost leafless branches of the thorn trees. Aurek scanned the empty windows and picked a careful path toward the door through what had once been an attractive courtyard, years of dead and decaying leaves squelching under his feet.

  Braided rope straps cut painfully into his shoulders as his oilskin pack snagged on a six-inch thorn. Muttering under his breath, he reached back and snapped it off the tree.

  There was power here. It lay like an oily film over the house and grounds. He could all but taste it in the air.

  The remains of the door hung from a single, twisted hinge. He checked that the floor beyond the threshold was solid and stepped onto it without pausing to inspect it for arcane protections. The level of power he could sense deep in the abandoned building was far too slight to be a threat. The danger was greater that the house might collapse around him.

  The entryway held only a staircase that rose in a graceful spiral to the second story. Although it remained essentially in one piece, the stairs had long since rotted past safety. Fortunately, the artifact he searched for was below, not above. Eyes narrowed, senses extended, Aurek moved through the ruins of a formal dining room and out the narrow door the servants had once used to bring food from the kitchens. Stairs to the lower levels would be at the rear of the house.

  Webs hung like tattered shrouds from every corner, and he was increasingly conscious of being watched. Breathing shallowly, for every step stirred up noxious clouds of dust and mold, he made his way cautiously to the kitchens.

  Spiders, he thought, ducking under the first intact web he’d seen. Large ones. A floorboard cracked under his heel, and he flung his weight forward barely in time to prevent breaking through. Fully confident of his ability to deal with anything he might meet, he still had no desire to find himself buried under a ton or two of rubble.

  Vines growing over kitchen windows long empty of glass filled the room with flickering shadow.

  Something skirted the outer edge of his vision.

  Shrugging off his pack, Aurek pulled out a small enclosed lantern and quickly lit it. Insects scurried in the walls all around him, above him, below him—it was impossible to tell where the sounds originated. Holding the lantern over his head, he slowly turned in place. The shadows rearranged themselves but didn’t entirely flee.

  In the far corner, he found what he was looking for: a flight of stairs, leading down.

  The desiccated body of a rat hung wrapped in spider silk in the exact center of the doorway. Its condition seemed to indicate it hadn’t been hanging there for very long.

  Aurek studied the situation for a moment, then picked a piece of dry and insect-eaten kindling from a half-empty box by the rusted stove and lit one end in his lantern. When the flames caught, licking hungrily toward his hand, he torched the web.

  Almost instantly, a sheet of flame filled the doorway and, just as quickly, it was over. The body of the rat fell smoldering to the floor. Nothing remained of the web save an acrid smell that scraped at the back of his throat. Aurek coughed, sucked another shallow breath through his teeth, and froze in place.

  A sound … above and behind.

  The weight of the spider dropping onto his shoulders flung him to his knees. Biting back an involuntary cry—the last thing he needed was to attract more attention—he rolled, dislodging the huge arachnid as mandibles clattered like knives beside his ear. Regaining his feet, he whirled and barked out a word that tore into the already-abraded surface of his throat, the first three fingers of his left hand extended toward the attacking spider.

  The oval body of the creature thumped onto the floor as all eight legs collapsed under a sudden increase in weight. Pedipalps whipping frantically from side to side, it dug pairs of hooked claws into splintering boards and dragged itself forward, its prey reflected in each of the eight gleaming black eyes on the top of its head.

  Carefully setting his lantern on a dirt-encrusted sideboard, Aurek flipped the table in the center of the room over onto its side and, bracing his foot against the bottom boards, tried to rip off a heavy, carved leg. Soft and punky from the omnipresent damp, the wood crumbled under the pressure. Instead of pulling the leg from the table, Aurek began to kick pieces of the table off the leg.

  Inch by inch, the spider advanced.

  Finally holding a reasonably solid club, Aurek turned, took a deep breath, and methodically beat the nearly immobile spider to a pulp—its chitin smashed like an eggshell. When its legs had stopped thrashing and the bloated body was no longer recognizable, he flung his dripping weapon aside, grimacing with disgust. He hated the brutality implicit in killing such a creature, even when he admitted the necessity.

  Brushing futilely at the moist stains on his clothing, he retrieved his lantern and started down the stairs, irritated by the delay.

  The shadows were thicker on the lower level, the air damper, the floors more thoroughly decayed. Even the spider webs appeared to have been long abandoned. Pallid colonies of fungus sprouted in cracks and, in spite of moving with extreme caution, Aurek’s foot broke through the floor twice before he crossed the first room. The second time it happened, he pitched backward, arms flailing wildly. Altho
ugh he managed to keep his grip on the lantern, the flame went out.

  Except for a gray rectangle marking the floor at the bottom of the stairs, the darkness around him was absolute. Hair rising off the back of his neck, ears straining to hear anything approach, Aurek fumbled the lantern open, found his focus, and spoke a word of power.

  The light, once restored, showed he was still alone but, as he cautiously moved around piles of trash toward the artifact, he suspected that couldn’t last. While the ruins of Pont-a-Museau held nothing he considered an actual threat, there would, no doubt, be a number of minor, annoying battles remaining to interfere with his search.

  Up on the floor above, the vines covering the larger of the two kitchen windows parted, and a pointed, ebony snout poked over the sill and into the room. Whiskers twitching, it wrinkled at the lingering smell of burned web and singed fur, then swung around toward the entrance to the lower level. The notched right ear flicked forward as it listened to sounds from below. Long ivory teeth flashed briefly in what was surely the equivalent of a satisfied smile as it withdrew. A moment later, curved claws found a grip on the ledge, and a sleek, black wererat dropped into the kitchen, landing almost silently in spite of its size. Green eyes gleaming, it padded over to the dead rat on the floor and batted it out of the way.

  The remains of the spider held its attention for a moment longer. It sniffed at the pulped body, ears flat against its skull; then, rising up on its hind legs, it stared thoughtfully at the entrance to the stairs.

  Smoothing long whiskers back off its face, it watched as a dozen giant rats swarmed into the room and disappeared into the shadows.

  Aurek swept his gaze over the floor-to-ceiling shelves and saw, through dirt and decay, what had once been a magnificent library. That the owner of the library had chosen a windowless room below ground level surprised him not at all. Sunlight baked both parchment and vellum to a brittle fragility, sucked the moisture from bindings, and faded ink. For certain kinds of books, books whose contents were meant to remain in shadow, sunlight was more dangerous still.

  “Aurek! You’re going to turn into a mushroom if you spend all your time sitting here in the dark!”

  “I have lamps.…”

  Natalia laughed and pulled him to his feet. “You need to get out into the sun and do something.”

  He stood motionless while the memory passed, afraid to move lest he lose it, for memories were almost all he had left.

  Almost.

  He cursed the circumstances that had forced him to finally respond to his wife’s frequent request that he do something, and he would have cursed himself, except that there seemed to be no point.

  And I’m wasting time, he thought. The artifact he sought, the artifact that might change his Natalia back to flesh and blood, was in this room. Fortunately, though it might have once held thousands of volumes, the room was nearly empty.

  Rust-brown beetles as big around as his thumb scurried out of his way as he systematically searched the shelves, sifting through and ignoring worm-riddled bits of moldering books and scrolls. Once, he might have been interested in these fragmented leavings of another’s scholarship, but life no longer allowed him that luxury. Finally, just as he’d begun to fear that only the signature of the artifact had survived and not the artifact itself, he found what he searched for tucked into a corner of a lower shelf, buried under a messy nest of chewed parchment and insect droppings. The slim, leather-bound book, barely as large as his palm, sizzled against his fingertips with a familiar sensation of not-quite-pain.

  Resting on one knee, the lantern on the floor beside him, Aurek murmured his wife’s name as though it were a talisman and carefully opened the book.

  The wards that had protected it for so long against the living had been unable to keep out the damp. Many of the upper pages were stuck together, the ink spread out in patterns only marginally similar to the original handwriting. The last few pages had dissolved entirely and clumped against the back cover in a foul-smelling, gelatinous mass.

  But in the middle of the book there were pages that could be read. Aurek’s pale eyes burned as he stared down at the most legible of these; as he stared down at the words that might possibly hold the key to unlock Natalia’s prison.

  He heard the silence first, the sudden and complete absence of the insect noises that had provided a constant background hum since he entered the house.

  Lips pressed together in irritation, he quickly pulled out a gray silk bag and slid the slender volume inside. Wrapping the excess fabric firmly around it, he tucked it safely down into a corner of the pack, slipped his arms back through the straps, and rose to his feet. That he’d expected this interruption made it no less annoying.

  At least I have the artifact, he thought. As soon as he dealt with whatever was approaching, he’d be able to return to the privacy of his study to find out just exactly what he had.

  Holding the lantern at arm’s length, he caught sight of a humped shadow just at the periphery of the light. Rats. He’d have been more surprised had he not run into rats in the abandoned houses of Pont-a-Museau, all things considered. He took a step forward, and the light reflected from a multitude of eyes—most a great deal farther from the floor than he’d expected.

  Not only rats—giant rats. Anxious to return to his study, he scowled at what had become an unavoidable delay.

  Flexing the fingers of his free hand, he contemplated the most effective use of the defense he’d prepared. As the rats were now between him and the only stairs he’d found, fire might be somewhat self-defeating, given that it would cut off his own retreat. However, if giant rats were anything like their smaller cousins, killing a few should scatter the rest. Primarily scavengers, rats tended to prefer survival over valor and seldom attacked prey that fought back.

  Then, just as he was about to speak, the largest rat he’d ever seen moved to the edge of the light. Noting the obvious similarities between it and the six that had attacked Dmitri made Aurek’s lip curl. Wererat. It sat back on glossy black haunches and lifted glisttening green eyes to his.

  Aurek let his hand fall back to his side, the gesture he’d been about to make now forgotten. He’d seen those eyes before, and the notch bitten from the right ear confirmed his incredulous identification. His skin crawled, and he stepped back, repelled. It was one thing to know that a beautiful woman was capable of changing into an immense rodent and another thing entirely to be brought face-to-face with the physical evidence.

  Unfortunately, Louise Renier wanted him.

  She wanted him today for games entirely different than those she’d wanted him for last night, but her expression hadn’t changed a great deal. He took a moment to consider how extraordinary that was, given the difference in her features. Then, all at once, he realized he was truly in mortal danger.

  Aurek knew hate when he saw it. This wasn’t a chance meeting, paths crossing by accident as both hunted in an abandoned building. It was personal. But why? Searching desperately for some reason behind the hate, Aurek finally decided it could only be a result of rejecting Louise’s advances at the party. Surely she didn’t kill every man who turned her down? Perhaps no one ever had. Or perhaps she did. Here and now, it didn’t much matter.

  “It is important that we take care of our families.”

  Remembering Jacqueline Renier’s warning, Aurek knew that if he saved himself today by injuring her twin, the promise of Pont-a-Museau, a promise strengthened by the book in his pack, would be closed to him. He doubted Jacqueline could actually kill him, but she could deny him Richemulot.

  He could easily defeat the rats.

  He didn’t know what to do about Louise Renier.

  He had to remain in Pont-a-Museau. The mist had abandoned magic in the ruins, perhaps the magic he was so desperately seeking. Freeing Natalia had become all that he cared about.

  He would kill if it became necessary to free his wife. Not killing—and surviving—would be much harder.

  “Mamsel
le,” he called, “if I have insulted you in any way, I apologize.”

  “You don’t know how you insulted me?” The voice from beyond the circle of light was incredulous—and faintly sibilant, as though she hadn’t bothered to change all the way back to human form.

  “I can assume only that my refusal to … to …” He paused, and tried again. “It’s just that I loved my wife very much. I intended no insult to you.”

  His only answer was a serrated trill of malicious laughter. Obviously, she didn’t care what he’d intended.

  As he could discover no way of getting by her without hurting her, and as she wouldn’t listen to reason, Aurek reluctantly accepted the only possible solution. He flung himself toward the library’s second door—not the one he’d come in through but one that led deeper into the building—and he ran.

  Satisfied that Aurek Nuikin had recognized who held his life, Louise dropped to all fours. She was going to take her time with the scholar’s death, and she was going to enjoy every moment of it.

  She laughed again and changed, woman flowing into rat in a grotesque metamorphosis. She was pleased to see him run. He couldn’t win the race, but it would add to the fun she planned to have with him before he died.

  The narrow flight of stairs angled steeply down into the cellars. Aurek paused for a heartbeat to check his footing and found the top three treads no longer existed. Heart pounding, he leaped over the hole, felt the fourth splinter under his weight, slammed his shoulder into the damp stone wall, and somehow managed to keep his feet. The rats had gone through the walls and cut him off. He had no choice but to go down.

  He hadn’t seen Louise Renier again, but he could feel the heat of her hate on his back.

  Lantern flickering ominously, the oil nearly spent, he dashed along the heavy beams that were, in places, all that remained of the floor. From the smell rising up through gaping holes outlined in bloated half-circles of fungus, the sewers were directly below.