Grave Ghost

by Tia Reed

  Mariano had wandered over to stand ever so close, but he had given his permission for them to talk, and the question held no impropriety, so Arun showed his amusement even as he raised an eyebrow. “Prince Vinsant was sentenced to the mines for his mischief, but this wretch would have forfeited his life long since for his blatant disrespect.”

  With nothing more to say, she retired to the grave that served as her refuge.

  Chapter 31

  RONDEL TOOK THE bowls out of Maya’s hands and set them in the washtub. Scraped of gruel, they needed a scant rinse.

  “You should rest,” he said.

  Neither his wife’s thin smile as she supported herself on the table nor the tattered gown she had patched with rags scavenged from the street could hide her ragged bones. He suffered a twinge of guilt for the coin he had hidden, Lady Jordayne’s silver hulek. The meat it could buy would nourish her body, the ingredients in the physic’s nit-picking diet would last a major moon, if only that were all she needed.

  “Maybe today,” she said, laying a soft hand on his cheek.

  “Maybe today,” he agreed, taking that hand and kissing it, kissing her lips, before stepping out the creaking door into a chill drizzle with all the resolve he could muster. For all his relentless trudging down roads made near impassable by fast-flowing runnels, for all his tramping from one packed warehouse to the next, work was scarce. Rumours of a war were flying thicker than the whispered dread of a dead man walking. He had an idea of where he could beg for labour, but there were other matters to attend. His wife was out of bed, if not in strength, and Rondel deq Oakson was not about to give the djinn the slightest excuse to renege on their pact. Head down to avoid the sting of a raging wind, he strode the cracked and worn cobbles to the temple. Its domes were covered with more gold than all the families of the entire poor quarter combined would earn in a lifetime. Such was the benevolence of these demanding gods.

  Rondel had no knowledge of whose domain the djinn inhabited. Vae’oeldin of the Air’s, no doubt. He shoved through the countless Moonsday worshippers and prostrated himself right before each statue of the Vae, each in its slender minaret: garlanded Vae’oenka of the Earth rising from her pit; scaled Vae’omar of the Sea sprayed by the waterfall trickling the stonework behind him; feathered Vae’oeldin of the Sky serenaded by the wind whistling through the windows in his tower. Since none of them had seen fit to bless his life, They could take divine heed of his visit and forgive him the transgression he was djinn-bound to commit.

  He halted a monk with an offering bowl full of downy feathers.

  “The boy. The boy that was here two days past, who hears the prayers of the faithful, has he come?” He would ask every single day until he was driven to the madness of visiting the mage guild with a sword.

  The hells, his luck had changed because the monk, in his simple wraparound robe of Vae’oeldin’s blue, nodded. “The boy was here this afternoon.”

  Affecting the desperation of a simpler man, he grabbed the monk’s hand. “He heard my prayer. He heard, and my sick wife grows well. I must thank him. I must ask him to continue to intercede.”

  The monk placed his own soft hand on top of Rondel’s. “Vae’oenka will hear if you pray.”

  “Days before he came I prostrated myself,” he lied. “She rose from her bed the day he marked my plea. The physic himself could not believe it.”

  “He will return. The High One requests it,” the monk said. “I will pray for you and ask His Holiness to do so too.” He took a feather from his bowl and tucked it into Rondel’s hair, as if his mortal blessing could intercede with apathetic gods.

  “Thank you. Thank you,” Rondel said bowing. Masked by the swell of the crowd, he dropped the worried squint, and walked into the abbey-bounded triangle with a natural confidence that was a more effective disguise than any fake beard or change of clothes.

  Since a break in the rain allowed him to lose himself in foolhardy plans, he cared not that the wind snatched the feather from his hair. His walked through the crowded, buzzing streets to the souk. The monks were a wily lot, to have petitioned for a temple so close to the market. Its proximity encouraged many a pious visit that might otherwise go unmade. As he trawled for work, a clever word to the shadiest of loiterers, the subtle bemoaning of lost arts to the most obscure of vendors ferreted out the name of two purveyors of secret repute.

  Rondel paused outside the shop of the first and regarded what he assumed was its grand name boasted on a sign hung above the door. Its front was nondescript front and the lane unremarkable, but a picture of a star in a crescent moon confirmed he had found the right place. A reliable source of potions and spells, if one did not mind dealing with a foreigner and parting with good coin, a portly, well-dressed merchant had informed him. Rondel had left the man to bemoan the loss of a ship sailing the eastern Baregan Ocean to some other hapless, jobless soul. He pushed open the door to Weng Wu’s Eastern Emporium and entered a dusty, incense-choked world of cluttered fakes.

  “You want present, jade dragon, lacquered bowl?” The thick, smokey incense had parched the voice. Rondel was in luck. The master himself, a veritable picture of a magician with skin brittle as aged parchment and fingernails grown to daggers, sat on a cushion at a low table carved with eastern landscapes and covered with scrolls.

  “I seek your arts.”

  The magician rose with the agility of the young. “Many picture with fine stroke,” he said, turning the scroll to display its eastern characters. A composed man would have missed the suspicion in his slanting eyes.

  Rondel closed the door with a firm click. “A spell of invisibility.”

  The magician pursed his lips, and allowed the parchment to scroll closed. “This no exist.”

  “Then your reputation is unfounded.”

  Weng Wu slid the scroll onto a pile of others on a crowded shelf. “Such spell wanted by people who do bad.”

  “My intent is my business alone.”

  “Cannot provide.”

  Someone tried the handle to the front door. Rondel held it closed. The rattle of its wood set off the echo of a tinkle in the bell above it. “Sell me a flying carpet.” The stuff of legend, he feared it would cost the weight in gold of the generous, ignorant Lady Jordayne, but exist it did. That much was obvious from the magician’s study of Rondel’s determined jaw, the set of his shoulders, the missing finger on his left hand. A thrill of nerves coursed through him. He was a fool to let it weaken his grip on the door. It barged ajar before he slammed it closed.

  “Twenty thulek.”

  Comprehension dawned with the weight of a stone anchor. “I have a hulek.” One silver, not twenty gold.

  Out in the lane, footsteps receded.

  “You go before you lose me more custom.”

  Rondel slammed a palm on the rustic counter. “A hulek for the love of the Vae. My wife’s health depends on it.”

  Weng Wu struck a gong on a shelf empty of all else. Its deep note resounded through the shop. A young man came through the inner door, the two daggers in his kamarband in easy, threatening reach, whatever he might intimate with his folded arms.

  “We do not worship your Vae,” the lad said. His presence was a heavy-handed declaration of these traders’ contempt.

  The shrivelled, scum-sucking leech of a magician was wrong: a spell of invisibility did exist, and it cloaked the bodies of the poor.

  The old magician shuffled on his bowed legs past his protector to the inner door. “You ask for treasure, you pay for it,” he said, his back to Rondel, arrogant old money with no concern for the needy save what muddy drops he could milk from their dry well.

  “We will see.” The irksome incense was making Rondel’s eyes water. His anger was best bottled, but his shoulders trembled as he stormed from the shop and made his way westward, to the souk. A sudden downpour plastered his clothes to his body, but he knew better than to hunch his shoulders, or draw his coat close. He wandered rickety, ill-made stalls squeezed shoulder
to shoulder as loud traders vied for custom, and customers more concerned about closing a deal than getting wet haggled for jumbled wares. Lost among the tangle of carpets, brass lamps, bracelets and kurtas, he searched and questioned until he found himself among shifty-eyed men with knotted muscles and the furtive glances of those up to no good. Well, was he not one of them? In the lightening rain his eyes passed over a djinn’s burn, prominent on the neck of a solid man. Scars and bruises aplenty adorned the sellers in this narrow street, but not many walked brazen with a mark displayed so plain.

  His hand dropped to his dagger as he made his cautious way to where the porrin dealer had stood, behind a stand of cheap trinkets, the sort a man down on his luck might buy his wife, the sort Rondel had no intention of demeaning Maya with. Prahak deq Fraaq was gone, and Rondel’s chance to plead his innocence with him. A risky thing that, with those royal troublemakers visiting The Tipsy Toad right after they had left his home.

  “The Spellmaster,” he growled at the owner of the stall, a dirty little man who inclined his head towards a lane squeezed with two rows of stalls selling clothing stained with wear, and skewers of rat-chewed meat. The tables pressed so close their customers had to brush to pass. The lane ended at a narrow arch which led into a covered recess. Whatever crumbling words were carved around it would neither deter nor encourage an illiterate man, and just as well. The recess concealed a door into a hidden warren bustling with hagglers whose coin bought not the shabby, dented goods displayed on their tables, but secrets fetched from under the kilims draping the stalls. Rondel wove through rickety stands of chipped porcelain, broken tiles glazed in vibrant colours, and chains of silver and gold no metalworker in this quarter of the city would have the skill or tools to produce. This end of the souk, cheap and nasty, for the desperate and the down and out, had a reputation for supplying illicit goods, contacts with assassins and the infamous porrin. The naive man who stumbled these passages beware because cheating was rife, murder common and misinformation the norm for those unable to pay the overinflated asking price. Rondel’s wary eyes would mark him as a misfit, darting for signs of danger, but if they spared him a knife in the gut, he would bear the black magician’s bloated fee.

  “The Spellmaster,” a ragged urchin said, sidling up to him. Water dripped from his greasy hair and the tip of his dirty nose. “I’ll take you for a lek.”

  Rondel kept walking. The cracking soles of his boots squelched in puddles muddied by excrement. “Bargain with your master for I’ve not the lek to spare.”

  The youngster skipped ahead and poked out his tongue with the brash confidence of a boy twice his age. “You won’t find him.”

  “Then he won’t earn my coin.” Mean and low was the whispered word on the practitioner of black arts, crooked, ah yes, but accessible to the common man.

  The boy watched him pass a stand of rotted fruit. Its fermented redolence reminded Rondel of Maya. Maya who was out of bed with a smile which would fade if he did not hold up his end of the damnable deal. “The Spellmaster,” he mumbled to the indifferent vendor, and received a nod to the left for his trouble.

  “The Spellmaster,” he kept asking, and was gestured this way and that through the drizzle.

  Feet pattered up behind him. “You come,” the shivering urchin said. He darted away.

  Rondel shouldered through the crowd. The boy stopped beside a swarthy man with shifty eyes who was standing among six crates cluttered with every ware imaginable.

  “He’s the Spellmaster,” the urchin said, tucking one ankle over the other and leaning against a high, windowless wall beneath an awning. He shook water from his tatty sleeves.

  “I have need of certain talents,” Rondel said.

  The man flashed a gold tooth in a dangerous smile. “Do you wish me to read your mind? Ten lek that will cost.”

  “I have need of a spell of invisibility and a flying carpet.”

  The boy chuckled.

  The Spellmaster rubbed his chaffed hands. “These are rare mysteries, hard to come by.”

  “If you cannot deliver, I will save my coin for a sword.” Rondel put his hand into his pocket and clinked the silver hulek against a copper lek.

  “Two hulek, one for each.”

  “Ninety-five lek. For both.”

  “Ninety lek for your choice, potion or carpet.”

  “Ninety-five for both.”

  The man shook his head with a snort meant to convey the absurdity of the price. Rondel knew the sort. He turned away. He had gone five paces before he heard the desperate call.

  “Wait. Wait. You’ll bankrupt me, my children will starve.”

  He slowed. “Ninety-five for both.”

  “Business is slow. I have no choice. The Vae will condemn you for your unfairness.”

  He stopped, lifted his head, but did not turn.

  Sand trickled through the hourglass.

  “Okay, okay.”

  Rondel turned. With a waggle of his head, the Spellmaster beckoned. Rondel fished his hulek out of his pocket and held it between thumb and forefinger. From a box beneath the stall, the Spellmaster fetched a fraying, tasselled rug, and a vial of brown liquid. Leaning across, he lowered his voice. “Whisper levitos to make the carpet fly, but its good for one trip and only that. You must take the potion in its entirety or you’ll appear as a ghost. Ninety seconds is all you’ll get.” He plucked the coin from Rondel’s fingers, slapped five lek into his palm, and pressed the goods into his arms.

  Rondel’s nagging doubts fled when he glimpsed a scowling eye between wagging heads, the djinn’s burn on the weathered neck. The crowd was no protection, not from the likes of Prahak. His precious cargo was tucked under an arm, and would hamper any attempt to defend himself. Rondel tucked the vial into his belt. He flipped the rug open and draped it over his shoulders, securing it by knotting the tassels at his neck. The opposite direction made a sensible route. He quickened his pace. The crowd pressed close, blocking every lane with heated haggling that precluded the courtesy of letting a stranger pass. Elbowing through, Rondel slipped into an alley. A blind alley, he realised too late. He turned but a mob of hefty thugs blocked the way out. They parted enough to let the drug dealer through, his grey eyes locked on Rondel, the djinn’s burn bright red on his neck.

  “Need help?” a deep voice drawled from Rondel’s left. It prickled the hairs on his neck. He risked a glance. The indigo djinn was sitting atop a pile of splintering wood, a tiny figure not taller than his hand.

  “You’ll keep me alive,” Rondel said. “I’ve yet to fulfil my end of our bargain.” He was dicing with fate, but fate was a heady thing when Maya was well and he had the means to fulfil his end of the deal with the conniving djinn. When he was sure he could secure work that would keep him safe from scum like Prahak.

  “So sure, flea?”

  Prahak pulled out a nasty dagger.

  Rondel assumed a cold grin. “So sure.”

  “You have a debt to pay,” Prahak said. The urchin who had led Rondel to the Spellmaster was behind him, rubbing the sole of one tattered boot against his shin. Prahak tossed him a coin. He caught it in both hands.

  “You should’ve paid me, mister.” The boy ran out of the alley, ducking around hips and between legs.

  “I paid for the drug in full,” Rondel replied, feigning ignorance. The royal scum owed him for exposing him like this.

  Prahak twirled the dagger with a speed that almost matched the whirling djinn’s. “Snitches don’t live to make the same mistake twice.”

  “You’ll find none of them here.”

  “No? Then how is it the palace blights were seen leaving your home just before they raided my tavern?”

  A shift of weight saw Rondel ready to spin. “I might ask you the same question. They searched me for the drug. You alone knew I purchased it.”

  The dagger stopped twirling with sudden finality. “I have a reputation to uphold. I need to make an example, you understand.”

  “So my innoc
ence or guilt is of no concern to you.”

  Prahak threw the dagger. Rondel spun, falling at the thud between his shoulders. Footsteps clapped over the cobbles.

  “Changed your mind?” the djinn asked.

  Rondel lay limp as a fresh corpse, listening, gauging.

  A sword rasped out of its scabbard. He braced himself to roll at the first rush of air. A fishy smell washed through the alley.

  “Dropping of a flea on the dysenteric behind of a dog. Kneel before me, you ignorant dealer in death.”

  Metal grated across stone. “Are you here to deal, djinn? To offer me riches or maidens? I have both,” Prahak said.

  The djinn’s laugh echoed through the alley, loosing crumbling stone from the wall. A wind brushed over Rondel, flicking tassels onto his face. One tickled his nostril. Scum-drenched djinn, a sneeze threatened.

  “Well, indigo djinn? Will you not ask after my heart’s desire?” Prahak said.

  Rondel’s sneeze exploded as the gusts strengthened. The djinn’s laugh became the wind’s hollow howl.

  “You who carry my mark dare to offer a deal?”

  Rondel rolled over, pulling the dagger free of the carpet. Prahak stood braced against the wind.

  The djinn’s laugh echoed and died. “I will bind you to servitude, Prahak deq Fraaq.”

  Prahak ran. The alley stood quiet amid the cacophony of haggling drifting from the souk.

  Rondel got to his feet and flapped the folds out of the rug. The hole through the rug’s centre was a worry.

  The djinn swooped from the roof, forcing him against the end wall. The glare in the vermillion eyes as the creature loomed, arms crossed, would have slain a cowardly man.

  “You owe me, flea.”

  Rondel slapped his palms against the stone. The solid contact reassured. “I do not, for I neither bargained nor requested your aid.”

  The djinn snarled. He twirled until his body blurred into a whirlwind of smoke which twisted into the rumbling sky.

  Rondel strode through the lingering stench of rotting fish. He had no delusions. He was a marked man. Word of his blacklisting would spread through the slums, and when it did, his reprieve would end. Even so, he had two more stops to make before he returned to Maya.