Shadows of Ivory

by T L Greylock

  “Mama,” Eska cried, “you can’t believe I killed him.”

  Sorina raised her eyes to the ceiling. “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course not. But you did something. How else could that commander have your name up her sleeve?”

  Eska turned and paced away. “I told the Chancellor to take a tea of eldergrass and finallion root for his stomach pains. You know as well as I do that eldergrass and finallian can’t kill.”

  “That may be, but the Chancellor is dead, apparently after taking your advice.” Sorina let out a harsh laugh. “I imagine that will put an end to our negotiations.” The Ambassador-Superior sighed and caught Eska by the shoulders, bringing a halt to her pacing. “It will all be cleared up. You’re innocent. The man might have died of natural causes. I will go speak with the commander, with the Vismarch if needed. Everything will be fine.” She waited until Eska gave a nod, then placed her palm on her daughter’s cheek. “I’ll return as soon as I can. Try not to worry.” And then she was gone, leaving Eska without a chance to tell Sorina of the attempt on her life.

  The sudden turn of events, Eska realized with a bitter laugh as she went to her window, at least gave her something to dwell on other than the memory of the night before. Instead of remembering the weight of the man, the sound of his voice in her ear, the helplessness she had felt—instead, she could fume over the time taken away from her work, ponder how a man suffering from a minor ailment might die less than a day later, and, most of all, wonder what the punishment might be if she were declared guilty of murdering one of the highest-ranking officials in Toridium.

  ***

  If the Toridua commander wanted to torture Eska into a confession, she could not have chosen a better method. That is, if Eska had anything to confess.

  As it was, she spent her solitary confinement alternating between pacing from chamber to chamber, fidgeting at all of the windows, and composing a letter to Albus in her head—while pacing, naturally. His letter, forgotten in her haste to return to the city, lay unread in her tent.

  No.

  His letter was unceremoniously folded in her coat pocket, the same long, dusty coat she had pulled on that morning before leaving the dig site.

  Seizing on anything that might distract her from her situation, Eska nearly tore the folded pages as she pulled out the letter and broke the seal of the Lordican. Suddenly aware she was parched, Eska poured herself a glass of lemon water and settled into the window seat to read Albus’s neat, flowing script aloud.

  “‘My dear Eska. I won’t say I hope this letter finds you well as I know you enough to know that simply digging in the dirt is the same as being well in your mind—therefore, you are, I am sure, incandescently happy. As it is my chief pleasure to be among my books, it is yours to be sun-beaten and dirty.’—I’m not that dirty, Albus—‘But now it is my turn to remind you to stop and consume something resembling food, just as you have so often counseled me.’” Eska smiled, the letter so at odds with the reality of her situation that she could not help but find some joy in imagining the librarian hunched over a writing desk, absent-mindedly penning the opening lines, his thoughts flitting back to whatever treatise he was currently engrossed in.

  “‘Your esteemed father has given a speech in favor of amending the trade agreement with Parphea. Naturally I was not in attendance as I can’t imagine a more tedious way to spend a morning than in the company of political manipulators and over-stuffed barons—though several of my colleagues did attend.’” Eska paused for a moment, the comment about Parphea earning a moment of study. Though Parphea was not one of the Seven Cities of Bellara, the kingdom had been on good terms with the Seven for generations. “First new negotiations with Toridium, and now Parphea?” she mused.

  She took a sip of lemon water before continuing. “‘But it seems to have made quite the stir, being the first indication from any of the senior government officials that action might be taken. I do wonder, Eska, what your mother might have to say on the subject given the years she served in Parphea. That reminds me—I should like to ask her about the friezes in the undercity, not yet having had a chance to see them myself.’ Yes, Albus, I’m sure my mother spent her spare time examining underground friezes. Honestly, one might think you imagine librarians are the only people capable of putting in a full day’s work.”

  Eska rolled her eyes and nearly tossed the papers to the ground, the turn of Albus’s attention no longer serving to distract her own, but a shift in the librarian’s handwriting at the top of the second sheet caught her eye and she snatched at the half-escaped pages.

  “‘My dear Eska,’” she read, the words tumbling faster now, “‘two days have passed since I began this letter to you and I can hardly begin to formulate the words that will adequately convey to you what I have come to understand since yesterday afternoon. You must forgive me if my thoughts seem out of sorts, but I scarcely know where to begin. But in short, the item you left in my care has defied most of my expectations and proved to be even more interesting than I could ever have imagined. You, with your infinite capacity for imagination, likely thought of this scenario and half a hundred more just as unlikely.’” Here the letter was interrupted by several marks of ink, as though Albus had hesitated over the paper, setting the pen to the page only to change his mind more than once.

  “‘Eska, I don’t know what made you want to take a peek inside the Iron Baron’s ivory box, but I fear this curiosity will either carry you to immortal fame or be the death of you. How this object got to be in one of the six famed celestial reliquaries from the Alescu era is quite beyond me, but it is a truly remarkable thing, not merely made of metal. Strange as it is to say, the item’s most extraordinary feature is not the metal’s ability to compress, to fold and reshape itself as you so ably demonstrated. No, stranger still is that the metal is somehow knit together with the faintest hint of diamonds—and a second substance I cannot name. Though my hand trembles to write the words and I might, for the first time in my career, wish to be incorrect, all my research indicates that this is a god disc.’”

  Eska’s hands dropped slowly to her lap. Her mouth hung open, not having recovered from speaking Albus’s words. A god disc. One of the Hands of Fate. Albus gave her far too much credit—of all the imaginative scenarios she had conceived, this one had never crossed her mind. To presume she might have found a god disc, an object so mysterious, so mythical most scholars doubted its very existence, was the very idea of hubris. She returned to the last paragraph of the letter.

  “‘If you have recovered sufficiently, I’m afraid I have one last piece of news. I believe I know where another such disc is. You must go to Cancalo, Eska. And you must find a way into the sunken vault at the bottom of Lake Delo. You know the stories about the Hands of Fate better than I.’”

  For a moment, Eska forgot all about the locked door, about Chancellor Fiorlieu and his unfortunate demise, about her own uncertain future. For a moment, her mind was elsewhere, on the shores of Lake Delo, the water sparkling in the sun. The lure of the vault was so strong that Eska came to her feet—and then everything came back to her.

  Her hands trembling, Eska folded the letter, neatly this time, and set it on the desk. Better to put that aside. Better not to dream that dream. Not yet, not like this. Not while an over-eager commander had her under lock and key.

  She began to pace once more.

  ***

  As the time dragged on and her mother still did not return, Eska’s resentment and anger faded, as did her ability to occupy her mind, replaced by a true sense of fear—fear made all the more palpable by the assassination attempt. And so it was that when Sorina de Caraval was readmitted, she found Eska cross-legged on the floor, hunched over herself, her face in her hands.

  Sorina rushed over and lowered herself onto the floorboards, her hands reaching for Eska’s. “My darling,” she said, her voice hushed and gentle.

  Eska raised her head and met her mother’s gaze. She knew immediately Sorina did not bring good
news.

  “The Vismarch did not see me,” Sorina began. “I spoke with the commander and Chancellor Nevolis, who oversees the prosecution of crimes in this city. I demanded to know what evidence they have.” She hesitated. “I saw Fiorlieu’s body. They wanted me to see proof of poison.” Sorina squeezed Eska’s hands. “I do not know what killed him, but he did not die naturally. The poison strangled the life from him.” She took a deep breath. “They showed me the remnants of what he took. I could smell the eldergrass and finallian root, just as you said, but there was something else. And they let me speak with a servant who said the Chancellor had asked him to prepare the tea on your instructions.”

  “A child learning logical arguments can see the holes in this theory of theirs,” Eska said, her voice bitter. She stood abruptly and went to the window.

  Sorina was quiet for a moment. When she did speak, the lack of resistance in her voice, the absence of fierceness, scared Eska more than the words that followed.

  “Things are not,” she paused, “well between Arconia and Toridium. The Vismarch speaks of love between brothers-in-rule, but it is a falsehood, propped up by both rulers so long as the status quo suits them. I only know this because your father sought to warn me. I am afraid the Vismarch may see this as an opportunity to chip away at that falsehood, to shift the status quo.”

  Eska turned, frowning. “Perhaps if I spoke to him. The Vismarch. Remind him that I am an archaeologist, not a poisoner.”

  Sorina shook her head. “I’m afraid a few moments in your company, no matter how charmed he was, would not be enough to combat years of enmity between him and the Archduke. He wouldn’t even see me, Eska. I think we will find him quite inflexible in this matter.”

  “This matter.” Something shattered within Eska and she lost control of the tension that had been building within her. “Is that how you would name it? This is my career we are talking about, Mama, perhaps my life.” A weight on her back, a cold voice in her ear. Knives in the shadows. Eska suppressed a shudder. “And you speak of it as you would a squabble between children.”

  The words weren’t fair. She knew they weren’t. Especially when her mother was ignorant of the attack she had fought off the night before. Eska crossed her arms and balled her fists, aware, for the first time, of tears threatening to spill down her cheeks.

  Sorina’s voice was more frail than she had ever heard it, more frail even than in the days she lingered between life and death after the incident that had given her the scars that covered a third of her body.

  “If I speak of it thus, it is because I am frightened, Eska. And I would do what I could to keep that fear at bay. To keep myself from succumbing to it. Because if I let it take hold, I will not be able to fight for you.”

  The tears and the sob slipped silently from Eska then. Her chest heaved, her shoulders shook, and then her mother was beside her, enveloping her in an embrace, her hand stroking Eska’s hair.

  “But I will fight for you,” Sorina whispered. “I will make this right.”

  Eska nearly admitted all in that moment. The words sat in her throat, the memory of the night before burning on her tongue.

  The heavy knock on the door broke them apart and whatever Eska might have said vanished like a candle flame in a strong wind. Sorina smiled as Eska wiped at her tears.

  “I would tell you to be strong, my dear, but you have more strength than a lioness. And so I will tell you to wait with all the patience you can muster.”

  Eska nodded, not trusting herself to speak. She certainly wasn’t about to admit that in that very instant, she realized she had no intention of waiting—not while she was innocent, not while her accusers were building their case against her, not while the Iron Baron knew where she was.

  And certainly not while the memory of holding a god disc in her hands—and the possibility of finding a second—sent a thrilling chill across her skin.

  ***

  When one chooses to escape from the Vismarch’s palace—via a window and a willingness to climb (fall, really, with many scrapes to show for it) down to a ledge and from there shimmy down a very stern looking statue of a Toridua statesman of old—then slip into the back of a wagon leaving the city and hide between layers of not-quite-dried shark skin while the night guards at the gate made a very lazy inspection, then tumble from said wagon at an opportune moment that also happens to be while the wagon is passing through a very muddy stretch of road—well, when one chooses to do all that, one is not often left in the most discerning frame of mind.

  It was Gabriel’s tent Eska had slipped into, having waved off—more severely than she ought—the sentries she passed at the edge of the site. Gabriel’s because Cedric, for all his many excellent qualities, would gape at her, his mustache working furiously over his upper lip as he tried to rearrange his sensibilities, and she didn’t have time for gaping.

  Of course, waking Gabriel meant waking Cosimo, but the engineer’s partner was a sensible sort of man and capable of not gaping.

  To his credit, Gabriel had awoken swiftly and taken in Eska’s disheveled, muddy appearance with equanimity. He had then carried out each and every one of her orders efficiently and quickly without even a single question passing his lips, though she could see them burning behind his eyes. Cosimo had made himself both scarce and helpful.

  As the engineer had made the necessary preparations and woke the necessary crewmembers, Eska had taken a moment to wash the worst of the filth from her body, using a dipper and a liberal amount of drinking water from a barrel. She had then changed into clean clothes and packed her own belongings, not all of them, of course, but some necessary things.

  It was in that moment, of deciding what should stay and what should go, that she made two decisions. The skeleton was the first one. It seemed cruel to leave it unfinished, its story undiscovered. And if she had to abandon the whole site, this at least she could take with her. She had then written a note for Cedric, to explain her sudden departure. He would be tasked with bringing the majority of the crew and equipment safely back to Arconia aboard the Argonex.

  The second decision was even stranger and more abruptly made and acted upon—before she could change her mind.

  As Eska had packed the last of her things, her gaze had fallen on the fox sculpture, its black form nearly golden in the lantern light. She picked it up.

  “I’ve never been one for gods of any sort,” she had murmured while stroking the fox, “but if there ever was a god for me, I’d like to think it’d be you. I won’t say you’ve guided me, but you’ve been here with me, you’ve been part of every step of my journey. So perhaps I’m trying to say thank you. And goodbye.”

  And so it was that Eska stood watching Bastien gallop back to Toridium, a dark shape disappearing into a moonless night. He carried two objects with him: the fox sculpture wrapped in linen, the folds pinned closed with a silver hawk clasping a snake in its talons.

  “Parisia of Mehatha,” Bastien had repeated, nodding to show he understood what was being asked of him. “Who is she?”

  Eska had smiled. “A woman with thirty years of determination. She will know what to do with this.”

  Bastien had nodded once more and tucked the precious cargo in his satchel, then vaulted up onto the horse.

  “And Bastien,” Eska had said, “say nothing of who you are or of Firenzia Company. Don’t linger in the city. Cross the river at the Iluvian Bridge. Ride hard to the southwest. You’ll find us before long.”

  Eska turned away when she could no longer see Bastien. She did not permit herself a final look around the abandoned site, did not allow herself to think of the Onandyan pottery that she might now never uncover.

  She nearly ran into Perrin as she passed between two tents.

  “What’s going on?”

  She hadn’t forgotten about him. She had merely been unable to decide what to do with him.

  “I have to leave. Urgent business elsewhere.”

  The light of a lantern burning in
side a tent exaggerated Perrin’s frown. Eska made to move on, but Perrin put a hand on her arm.

  “Take me with you,” he said.

  The light was certainly not exaggerating the note of desperation in his voice.

  “Perrin,” Eska said, shaking her head. She hesitated. “I can’t.” She thought of what Alexandre had told her, of the agreement she had made to look after Perrin. But most of all she thought of the training they had done that morning and the look on his face when he was prepared to take a life for her.

  Perrin released her arm and his gaze dropped to fix somewhere around Eska’s navel. “Please,” he murmured. “You asked for my help. Don’t tell me you don’t need it now more than ever.”

  He looked a little like his sister in that moment, but not as Manon had ever appeared to Eska. The night darkened his fair hair to look like hers. There was something in his posture, both proud and broken, that reminded Eska of the other Barca. And when he looked up at Eska once more, the eyes were the same, and yet held a look Eska had never seen in Manon’s: loneliness.

  It was that look that made her agree, not her promise to Alexandre, not even the events of the night before.

  “Perrin,” she said quietly, “understand that this is more than the Iron Baron. This is something I do not understand and do not yet know how to fight. Knives may matter little here and it may be that I will be unable to protect you from what follows. To be associated with a de Caraval may become a dangerous thing in the coming days.”

  Perrin was quiet for a moment, the loneliness in his face replaced by something she could not quite read and Eska began to think—fear—that he had changed his mind.

  “I can think of little our families have in common, Eska,” he said, “but perhaps it can be said that our names do not go hand in hand with a simple life.” He stepped close, reaching out as though he might take her hand, but then he lowered his gaze and made no further movement. “My family has a way of abandoning each other,” he went on, his voice very quiet. “I do not wish to be like them.”