Three Stories About Ghosts

by Matthew Marchitto

  It amused me that the mask should show such outrage for one it viewed with less enduring affection than it did the furniture in its favourite dining room. I was a component whose ageing and replacement was regarded as nothing more than an inconvenience. If my Grandfather-Looking-Out cared much for our family beyond his devotion to the Dispute, he did not show it, unless he stood to gain by doing so. To him—to all the Elders and the Crones—the families were nothing but a legal requirement, like the filing of a Petition or the seeking of an Opinion.

  I twitched in impotent silence, locked inside myself as he glared at Perro Verocci, bare-faced in the house of his family’s enemies. I knew my arm was getting tired from holding the pistol rigidly levelled at him; I knew Per’Secosa would barely notice, and certainly he would not care. When I finally slept, the ache would be mine alone to bear.

  In the world beyond my little silence, Perro had further prostrated himself. He wove an intricate web of flattery—it impressed the mask, which in turn impressed me. Per’Secosa gave ground, harking back to the shared history of our clans, of how we had made our homes within the Agreed Districts and how we could yet meet on amicable terms, despite all that had passed between us. He puffed out my chest as he would have done were he making a donation to an orphanage or a monastery, and opened the palm of my empty and gloved right hand.

  “Speak your terms, then,” he said. The words were hardly more than a whisper, my throat dry.

  “My terms would not be other than fair—I seek only to trade,” said Perro, suddenly returning to older, more formal terms.

  “Trade?” The mask’s interest was piqued. Regardless of his aspirations, Per’Secosa had been a merchant before he had been anything else. Bargaining ran deep into the grain of his soul. “There are no Contracted terms for trade between us.” A sniff, a tightening of the jaw. “You expect me to deal with you without letters, without the involvement of your family’s Advocates?” the mask snapped, Per’Secosa’s patience fraying.

  Perro held up his hands. “True, there are no terms. I am newly arrived in Terazzio, and had I known I would be here before I decided to take a walk through her beautiful streets… Well”—he made a contrite gesture—“I would certainly have written to beg a meeting. My ship”—he paused, cleared his throat—“is tied up at the docks.” Perro flashed a grin. “We arrived, as I say, this morning. I came here on my way to announce myself at the Ve… at my family’s offices.”

  “And you sent no word ahead that you would make port here?”

  A shrug. “We saw no sails for three days; we took the coast, to catch the trade winds. I carried but little cargo.”

  “Yet you seek to trade it here.”

  “At a favourable rate, I assure you.”

  I could feel his interest tug and gather, my Grandfather-Looking-Out. He was curious. More than that, he was hungry. “What does your ship bear, then, Perro Verocci, and from where?”

  The young man’s expression was a perfect replica of humility and embarrassment, arranged so as not to betray the triumph he felt. “Calveros. Raw, I’m sorry to say—from Altamiri. Forty weights.”

  The spirit within me shivered. Per’Secosa could almost smell the spice, mingled with the harbour air of all those years ago when he had walked the City’s jetties and wharfs on his own feet. It still thrilled him to strike a deal—particularly for such a large quantity of spice that had not passed through the hands of incompetent Altamiri smoking-houses, thus ruining its value.

  “I would be interested,” he said. My voice did not suit his flat, affected indifference. “Were you to seek a speedy sale of your goods. If we are to deal, I would know your business with Carra. I would know why you come to me before you come to any House that calls itself friend to your people.”

  “It would allow me to spend more time at my ease in your city. The Dances are soon, and I am young. Carra and I need to make sure we complement each other well. I could return to my people and say that I was able to unload my goods to a reputable and trustworthy buyer.” Perro’s eyes flitted from my own to the dull silver barrel of the pistol. My hands sensed the tension in the device, wound to breaking-point, needing only the trigger to be pressed to set the rasp spinning and fire the shot. “But I would have to know such a buyer could be trusted.”

  So I was to be bartered, then, and for forty weights of discounted spice. The mask was already musing on how and where he would take delivery of the Calveros. I could almost smell it.

  The Grandfather-Looking-Out lowered my arm before restoring some semblance of sensation to my limbs. My left arm throbbed, aching and stiff. In my right hand there was only the itch, and Per’Secosa was adept at pushing that away. “Very well,” he said. “We will discuss the matter of your Calveros, in this office, at the first Sounding tomorrow morning. You may rest assured you have a dependable buyer. I give my word as Grandfather of the Vetruvi.” He drew himself up to his full height—my full height—a less than imposing five feet. Perro betrayed no sign of amusement.

  “You are most obliging, Honoured Elder.” Perro visibly relaxed.

  “Remember that when next your own Elders choose to wear you.”

  A bow, low and solemn. “I shall, venerable one.” The mask—used to centuries of flattery, lies, and betrayal—still loved to soak up praise. The corner of my mouth ticked up in a brief smirk.

  My hands reached up to lift the long, heavy curls of my hair and undo the clasp at the nape of my neck. Slowly my senses began to stir as I held onto the straps, reverently cradling the cheeks of the mask in the palms of my hands.

  As it fell forward, and I felt the cool air of the room on my skin, I sighed. I closed my eyes for a moment and allowed myself to enjoy the room—the scent of Perro’s perfume and of my own, chosen for Per’Secosa’s fond memories of the scent rather than for how well it suited me, filled my nostrils. The ticking of the heavy clock in the corner seemed richer when heard with ears that I did not have to share. I opened my eyes and turned to look around the room, moving with the clumsy gracelessness unique to those who spent most of their days masked. I lifted my hand and looked at it in a beam of sunlight, smiling at the motes of dust that drifted aimlessly by. I held up the mask in my right hand, studying its neatly crafted lines and contours, its idealised likeness of our family’s deathless patriarch. I stretched, letting loose a long groan as I awoke from his grip and steadied myself against the solid polished wood of his desk.

  “Carra?”

  Perro Verocci stood expectantly before me. I shook my head and placed Per’Secosa’s mask gingerly down. The dirgewood settled on the desk with a bone-hollow click, draped in the black ribbons my attendants had laced behind it that morning. The clock chimed heavily, the drawn-out sound marking the fifth Bell of the day. Across the Grand Piazza, the Civic Carillon took up the song, its high clear notes driving a flock of pigeons off the red tiles of the Collegia’s roof.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling the Sun’s gentle warmth on my skin. “It takes me a while to find myself when I lose contact with him. It is not unlike seasickness, and it takes me a moment to recover.”

  He nodded. “How do you feel now?”

  I seized his arm, yanking him forward and pulling him, stumbling, into my arms. I turned my mouth up to his kiss. We held each other in silence before parting, one step back, neither willing to let the other go.

  “Better,” I said, smiling.

  I fell back into his arms again and we held each other in the sunlight, cheek to cheek, no one but ourselves. We spun around, laughing, giddy with who we were.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m early, I know, but I couldn’t bear to stay away from you any longer. Carra…”

  “Shut up,” I replied, a feral smile on my lips. I pushed Perro back against the heavy wood of the desk and brushed away the papers, sending them fluttering to the sun-streaked carpet below.

  We had nothing more to say to each other.

  Interlude

  The Blood Summ
er

  WHEN I WAS young—no more than seven summers, by my remembrance of it—the last major attempt against our family’s lives by the Verocci took place. They moved quickly against each branch—the Senior lost his life out on the Stone Sea, swallowed along with his cargo as his ship burned down to the keel. Mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons—none were safe in those days. The Verocci were pitiless. We all were. No. They all were.

  Per’Secosa’s memories of the Blood Summer, as the grave-tenders took to calling it, are entwined with my own half-recalled whispers, the rumours and exaggerations of horrors and outrages that were brought to our doorstep every day.

  They said that the Verocci had slaughtered the Patriarch of the Casparians, casting him and his sworn guards into a ravine while still in their coach. It was not long before I learned that it was in fact my family that had done this terrible thing, after the Patriarch met with Antonos Verocci. They also said that we, the Vetruvi, had barricaded the doors of the Monastery of San Arcosa, where Santos Verocci had claimed sanctuary, before burning it down. That too was a lie, spread to cover the Verocci’s looting of the monastery, and Santos’ death at the hands of its defenders.

  In his grain Per’Secosa felt closer to a settling of the Dispute than he had for two hundred years. The Verocci felt the same way, and so between us our Houses seeded many graves as we grasped at the Dukedom.

  The masks, when the Blood Summer was done, felt the price they had paid was too high. Too many of their kind—enemy and kin alike—had been touched by fire. Too many souls had been scattered in ash.

  I was playing in the study of my father’s summer house at Villa Anora, spinning the globe and studying all the far-off lands that traded goods with us in countries that paid no tribute to our King. It was a red-skied evening late in the Blood Summer. Swordsmen lounged in the porticoes, drinking in silence. I remember little of that night, after the attack—little but shouting, servants and family members running back and forth, and the smoke.

  So much smoke.

  They said it was one of the servants—one trusted for many long years, yet one able to be turned against their masters. The masks, both Council and Crone, cannot agree on how this happened. A sliver of dirgewood driven into the base of their skull, some say, would make a Vetruvi servant as pliable as a Verocci Cousin. Others presume that the unfortunate’s family was used to force them to turn the knife on their masters. None will countenance that perhaps the servant simply despised us. It would be dishonest to claim the Vetruvi were kind and generous masters, and I have learned to save my dishonesties to be used when they will have the greatest effect.

  The fire started in the kitchens. Like poison that spreads through the whole body from the smallest of cuts, the Villa Anora was turned from a fortress to a killing floor through the kitchens. The swordsmen sitting out at the gates slumped insensible, drugged by their own wine. Verocci men flitted through passageways burrowed into the Anora’s walls to save my family from people like them. Behind it all, the fire burned, hollowing out my father’s house and plucking away strand after strand of my people.

  I was lost in the villa, deep within halls and passages I did not know, as it filled with smoke and heat. It seemed as if I would never escape, never find my way out to the lush green gardens and never sit beneath the night-blooming flowers that curled their way around my bower. The smoke and flame shrouded the places I remembered, turning my home against me. I ran with tears hot on my cheeks.

  It was in the receiving room where my father met his associates that I first felt cool air. The bookcases were already licked by flame, books buckling as the lacquered wood singed beneath them. I had screamed—screamed until my throat was raw, and I fervently believed there could be no more voice left in me to scream. I had never been more afraid. Sniffling, I saw a darkness that promised a way out of the heat. A window had been left open. Smoke probed it hungrily as I ran over to it.

  The floor was slick. I fell, hard, and tripped against something heavy. A body slumped against me in the darkness. Fire licked around me. As if in a nightmare, I remember that moment from two perspectives—a frightened child, her hand in the flames, and a dying man, spurred on to a last act by the mask he wore. The stink of smoke and iron was everywhere as the man—as my father—reached out to me. Howling in pain, I reached out with my right arm to a man who had been little more than a silent presence in my life. I screamed louder, my voice cracking, as he pressed the bloody mask into my hand.

  As children we were taught to always treasure our Elders. We respected them, even when their voices were not ours to hear. In that moment, as my injured hand gripped the mask and my father slumped back into the smoke and flame, I first knew the silence that would come to dominate my days as the first whispers of my Grandfather-Looking-Out, Per’Secosa Vetruvi, crawled through my skin and into my heart.

  I often think back to the moment I burst from the window of the Villa Anora and the smoke peeled away from me. I held the mask in my tiny hands, shaking and alone and frightened, but it felt so good to breathe the clean air as, behind me, my playthings and my home burned to the ground.

  I lost four relatives that night. We mourned my father, who had served as Per’Secosa’s bearer for over thirty years, as well as Uncle Secorro, who ran back into the house moments before it collapsed, and the masks of Liberi and Papiro, which had been hanging in state for three days following the deaths of their wearers at Court. The loss was bitter, and the pain of losing almost total use of my right hand was hard to bear, but what I recall most of that night was the feeling of breathing free air—of being all but suffocated before a moment of liberation, of life springing once more back into me as I stood on cool grass beneath the stars and knew that I would not die.

  I feel it again, every time my own hands take the mask from my face.

  Chapter Two

  WE FIRST MET years ago, at Court. We were both children without a childhood. I was twelve summers, and had been bearer of the Vetruvi Claimant for five years. I was still getting used to his ways, but in many ways, it is easier for a child—you are cowed, silenced by the mask, and you retreat to a world of your own dreaming, and play there, muffled from the outside while the Elder makes the decisions. You learn something akin to respect. There is little else that you do learn—the Claimant rarely indulges in the business of spending time with their bearer’s immediate family, and your education is considered of little consequence when all that the Vetruvi have ever known is at your fingertips.

  After the fires and the killings of the Blood Summer, Per’Secosa was left as Ranking Claimant and Grandfather to the Vetruvi clan. Two older siblings, twins whose graves lay beneath the roots of the same tree, had been lost that year. One, Aldanisti, had been struck down by my cousin Valeria, his own bearer—of course, the Curse claimed poor Valeria almost immediately afterwards, withering her away to ash as her spirit was claimed by the blooded dirgewood.

  As Grandfather and Claimant, Per’Secosa had a right to be heard before all other family members, living and dead, in legal disputes and diplomatic matters. His Claim—and the Claim of my branch of the family, as he had bonded with me after that night at Villa Anora—had seniority. So it was that we found ourselves at Court, flanked by dusty-robed Advocates bearing rolls of stiff parchment and heavy glass pots of ink. Perro was young and nervous-looking, flanked by a pair of burly, slack-jawed Cousins silent behind cheap porcelain and slivers of dirgewood. Perro’s face was entirely hidden by the cumbersome enamelled mask of Antonos Verocci—a crudely carved grey oval with no real attempt to capture the family patriarch’s likeness. The only concession to individuality in the Verocci style was the dead man’s personal coat of arms picked out in bright shining paint on one cheek like an ornate beauty mark. A spiderweb of cracks spread out over the lacquered surface, mottling the age-old personal sigil of Antonos Verocci. Behind him stood his family’s advisors in mute attendance, their own smooth masks embellished only with abstract designs that denoted to whic
h of the Verocci estates they belonged.

  I had no idea how long Perro had been bearing Antonos; after five years, I already moved with a confidence that mirrored Per’Secosa’s in life. It was a far cry from Perro’s clumsy stiffness as bearer of Antonos. None of our family or our retainers had been able to determine beyond doubt whether Antonos’ awkward gait was a sign of weakness or a deliberate feint. Antonos had been bound into his sleek grey shell for so long it had been rumoured he was starting to forget things, and that the use of his limbs was largely given over to his bearers. A minor scandal to be sure, but even the hint of blood in the water can rouse the vindictive interest of the Vetruvi. Any advantage, once it can be placed in our hands, is greedily seized upon.

  Our family’s old motto—In All Things Can Be Seen the Blade—was never spoken aloud these days, but it still shaped the thoughts of our Elders. It cut the course of the only decisions that mattered to the Vetruvi.

  Perro and I stood before the Judge, each of us flanked by our guards, each of us resplendent in fresh silks dyed in the colours of our families. Through me, Per’Secosa studied the Judge as he blessed the proceedings—a public servant in a bone-white mask with no eyes and a carefully neutral cast to his mouth, he counted off conditions of the Accord on shaking black-gloved fingers as the sunlight passed carelessly over polished dark wooden benches. I was bored, and Grandfather-Looking-Out shared that boredom. He was far more concerned with Antonos than with the bounds and details of the proceedings at hand. Perro, with Antonos’ soul clasped over his face, shuffled fitfully and cast furtive glances around the room.