Three Stories About Ghosts

by Matthew Marchitto

  “And I you.” I looked him up and down once more—another thought, another memory to keep me company. He had dressed swiftly, and was as impeccable and dashing now as he had been when he first strode through the office door. Pulling the heavy brocade of my formal dress up and into place, I turned my back on him and lowered my head, baring my neck. Instinctively he moved to stand behind me. I felt his breath against the skin of my neck and my resolve almost crumbled.

  “I need your help with the laces,” I said, my voice cracking.

  “Are you sure?” His fingers danced at my hairline, brushing against bark-brown ringlets. “Isn’t there anything else I can do? You know my skills lie in the unpicking of knots—not in their making.”

  I held my breath as his fingers inched around my shoulders. I swatted back at him. “Perro! We’ve already been too long. Lace me up.” I tapped at the back of my bodice and Perro reluctantly set to work.

  As he worked I thought in silence, staring out of the window at the narrow barges as they made their slow way upriver from the docks, wallowing under the weight of their cargo.

  “When do you want me to come with you?”

  He stopped for a moment. “Will you come?”

  My shoulders slumped. “I want to. You know I do. I just...”

  “You fear you will be caught and punished.” I thought of my mother, vanished for years behind some Elder’s mask that she could never again remove, locked forever inside herself for a moment’s foolishness in defying the Claim. I thought of her dark hair matted beneath buckles and locks, her eyes looking out but never seeing, until all that had been her was worn away like stones in a riverbed.

  “Yes.” There was no harm in honesty. It was like strong liquor; speaking from my heart, speaking as myself, was intoxicating.

  Perro took a deep breath as his nimble fingers threaded the bright colourful laces through my bodice, tightening my dress with a seamstress’ care. “As do I, Carra.” I felt a tremor run through him. He swallowed. “In three months, Carra, it will be high summer.”

  “The Truce Dance.” I fell silent, trying to coax the words out of him.

  “Yes. At the Dance...” He cleared his throat. I could feel the tension, the fear in him. He was torn between telling me everything and bolting for the door.

  I had never seen this side of him before.

  “That night, when next we see each other, meet me in the kitchens. Bring him.” He jabbed a finger at the mask on the desk before us. “I will bring Antonos.”

  I shivered once more, though the spring sunlight was warm on my bare arms. I knew what he proposed. Each of us could not harm our borne masks without harming ourselves, but a mask that belonged to our enemy’s family had no blood connection with our own.

  Our enemy’s masks—those we could destroy. Those we could burn, casting their dirgewood ghosts out forever.

  Perro pulled my laces tight. I gasped as the air was driven from my body.

  “Let me think about it, Perro,” I said.

  “What time is there to think? We will not meet again before the Dance, Carra.”

  I closed my eyes. Perro was right—there was no time. Our pleasant afternoon together was an aberration of the sort neither of our families would allow again. Per’Secosa’s greed would not often overwhelm his caution, and it was unlikely that he would ever allow me so long out of his keeping again. Nor could I see Antonos or the Verocci Crones permitting Perro to walk the streets without at least a pair of Cousins looming over his shoulder.

  “Yes.” The word made my heart beat faster. Perro’s arm circled my waist. “Yes, Perro. I will meet you in the Palace kitchens, on the night of the Dance.”

  I spun to face him. He planted a gentle kiss on my forehead. “Come at Tenth Bell, at the fullest of the night.”

  I looked back over the desk—the papers were tidy once more, the Claimant’s world back in order. It was as if Perro and I had never been here. To make a place look undisturbed is one of the first skills a bearer masters, though we keep that from our elders. My fingers strayed toward the mask. I turned back for one final glance.

  “I love you, Perro.”

  He bowed his head, a tear glistening in one eye. “And I you.”

  I touched the mask and the spirit of Per’Secosa rushed impatiently into me. My limbs grew numb as he snatched them from me one by one. My senses dimmed, and my world was once more dark and quiet and small. Within Per’Secosa, Carra looked out on her beloved as the Claimant took his seat.

  “Are you still here?” I said, in the voice that was not mine. “Did you get what you wanted?” Grandfather’s tone was a vicious barb, my lips rolled back in a cruel smile. “Will you be quite the complement to my bearer at the Dance?”

  “My apologies, Per’Secosa. I had a most enlightening talk with Damma Carra Vetruvi. I assure you, we did not speak of family business, and the Claim was not raised.”

  Per’Secosa rolled my eyes. “That at least is something. The young are full of all manners of idiocy—to throw away so much simply to speak to another foolish child.” He wrote out a small slip with a flourish, pushing it across the table at Perro.

  “I will expect to take receipt of your forty weights of Calveros, Verocci, at Lightfall on the docks. Our inspectors will be very thorough.”

  Perro bowed low. “Duly noted—they will find nothing amiss, and the shipment will not want for a feather of weight, Per’Secosa Vetruvi.”

  He withdrew with a final flourish, and once again the office was silent apart from the scratching of the pen and the ticking of the clock. Per’Secosa looked down at his papers, his attention drawn to my right hand. My jaw tightened as he turned, looking around the desk for the single black glove he always bade me wear.

  It itches, I whispered. The ghost snarled and tugged the glove into place over my fingers, rolling it up past the elbow to cover the puckered, burned flesh. “You are of a Family, Carra. To show such a mark to our enemy…” He trailed off, glaring at the door.

  “Disgraceful,” muttered Per’Secosa, shaking my head in disgust at the thought of a scion of a Family—even one as despised as the Verocci—making his way bare-faced through streets built on Vetruvi wealth.

  If I could have, I would have smiled.

  THERE ARE FEW wonders to equal the sights of Terazzio at night. This is as well, for night is the only time I ever get to experience the city as myself—though, of course, such things are not permitted.

  The city is grand—impossibly so. Even for one such as I who can lay curdled memories of other, older cities in far distant countries over the place of my birth, and who has hundreds of stolen hours recalled on far shores beyond the Duchy’s reach, there is nothing to match Terazzio. The city spreads over the countryside for miles—on a clear day, she is a mosaic of brick and tile, of garden and river and stone and copper that reaches out and grasps her hinterland like a diva drawing back a velvet curtain. At night, those colours are replaced by a shimmering sea of warm, ruddy amber that paints the clouds above with silver and gold. Terazzio is a city of the earth, but her touch is felt among the Heavens themselves.

  Terazzio is a city built on trade—at the mouth of the Largo, it straddles the wide delta in a web of bridges and locks and dams. A network of canals, cut by nature and hard work, ferry goods upriver to the Summer Cities. They in their turn bring down wine and olives and cloth from the mountain country that our own family’s ships spirit out into the far seas, only to return to port months later, their bellies heavy with Calderan wine and Saskaran pepper.

  In the days when Per’Secosa was a young man and alive, Terazzio was already an old city—I sometimes see his memories of it when a scent or a half-familiar face stirs his deep, ancient mind. The Elders in dirgewood have struggled long against the effects of time and rot on the mansions and townhouses and temples and public piazzas of Terazzio, and it surprises me not how little has changed—for very little has, and the city is a place where dirgewood can be happy with life as it once w
as—but that anything has changed at all. It secretly thrills me that, despite the Elders’ efforts to stop time and to keep the city as it was in their day, Terazzio nonetheless grows. The new harbour at Porto Cassare—with its fragile wooden bridges that are pulled up on rude pulleys during the spring flood-tides and its streets that still smell of timber and paint—is one of my favourite places in the city. Per’Secosa hates it—the sharp-roofed little buildings with their high dormers and painted lintels are, to him, squalid and cheap, a blight on the civic honour.

  He is forever writing letters to the Commune, offering all sorts of rewards to them if they would but acquiesce and tear down Porto Cassare or the little Church of Alcaron at Novamira, or whatever structure happened to capture his scorn on that morning. It pleases me that they are—to the greatest extent that decorum will allow—politely ignored.

  The night after my respite in Perro’s arms I was allowed some time to myself. Something was displeasing the Claimant, and he had been grinding his teeth ever since he had finished his letters and contracts for the day and made the journey upriver to the Estate.

  Per’Secosa ordered the gates to the Vetruvi grounds locked before passing his mask away to safekeeping deep in the family vault and letting me rest for the night. The ghost needed no sleep—dirgewood is always restless—but he had learned centuries ago to at least show the impression of caring for his bearer. He had no interest in our nights, and forcing us to keep moving despite our exhaustion was considered an act of a low-station Elder.

  The last memories of Tollio, who had starved to death while Per’Secosa wore him, were strong enough to etch themselves into the old man’s wooden soul. I had felt them myself once, on a dark and lonely night when I was tired and my guard was down, and had no wish to ever experience them again.

  Per’Secosa had ordered bedclothes laid out for me, and a fresh bowl of scented water by the dressing table. I splashed the faint aroma of roses onto my cheeks and brow, blinking in the chill as I dabbed at myself with a cloth. When I was sure I was alone—that the guard outside, thinking I had retired for the night, had retreated to the kitchens to raid the cook’s supply of brandy—I slipped quietly across the room and opened my wardrobe. Silently I brushed my dresses aside and pulled out a bundle concealed behind my winter hats and scarves. I heaved it up onto the bed and undid the leather thongs that held it shut.

  With some pride and pleasure I smoothed out my costume—a battered weatherproofed tricorn, a heavy cloak, a nondescript tunic and breeches, and a pair of scuffed, solid shoes. After dressing I drew out a dark wig, curled and pomaded in a style fashionable a few years ago among the city’s young men. Carefully smoothing down my hair, I fixed and pinned the wig in place and let the neat little ponytail stick out from beneath the brim of my hat. I shrugged on the cloak, scooped up one of Per’Secosa’s old timepieces, and undid the latch on my window. Catching my foot on a toehold in the vines outside, I pressed myself tight against the wall and climbed quietly and patiently down.

  In the distance, I heard the bell in the family’s chapel chime four times—Four Bells since Moonrise.

  I smiled. If I was lucky, I had four hours. I set off at a sprint for the orchard behind the glasshouse—with a whirl of my cloak I was gone, beyond the family’s walls and into the sprawl and noise and clamour and stink of the city at night.

  He had not told me where he was staying, but my guess was that Perro—or rather Antonos—would decline to lodge with his cousins in the Casa Serafina. It was well known that Antonos loathed the pious Verocci Crones, and his taste for refinement and music would likely steer him to the Roscovi in the old Harbour district where he could listen to Calimbe’s quartet in the evenings.

  Now I was well away from the family, I was in no hurry, so I took a longer route over hulking old stone bridges and newer ones of rope and wood that swayed alarmingly high above the canals. I ate a fresh pastry stuffed with honey, cinnamon, and rich stewed apple while dangling my feet over the bank of the Silver Canal at Novamira and drank cheap wine seasoned with cheaper spices in a smoky tavern full of cursing dock workers. I danced to music teased from old fiddles by young sailors and fended off the advances of pretty girls and old men alike.

  There is nowhere in the world like Terazzio at night. My hesitancy to rush to Perro may be hard for some to understand, but the world beyond the mask’s interests is one that does not exist for the Untrusted in the way that it does for those allowed to live their own lives. Should an apprentice to a miller decide to drink a glass of beer, gulping it hungrily down on a hot summer morning, they can do that. Should a young woman in love dance with her paramour on a sawdust-strewn floor, they can laugh together and enjoy the music and the fire and each other’s company. One of us—the children of Vetruvi and Verocci—cannot freely do any such thing. For us, being able to escape, even for a few hours, is a hard-won and rarely spent coin. It is, for us, life.

  Besides, dancing and eating and drinking—in short, living a short moment of life as I would want to live it myself—only made my heart race all the more at the thought of seeing my Perro.

  I left Novamira contented and warm, with the chill of the spring wind on my cheeks and the fire of the spiced wine tingling in my belly. I took the narrow winding back streets around Altavestra, crossing the sluggish waters of the Septava Canal by the Prayer Bridge. Stopping at the tollbooth under the bell tower of the Temple of the Holy Flame, I slipped a silver coin that had been rubbed as smooth as a pebble into the devotion box. It was supposed to bring me blessings, though in truth the only blessing it brought was a shortcut and a fine view as the fire-monks unlocked the door and parted before me, bowing as I stepped up out of the booth and onto the high bridge.

  From the peak of the Prayer Bridge it is possible to see the lights of the Harbour district spread out beneath you like diamonds on velvet. Craning over the parapet I could make out the lights burning in the Roscovi. Carriages—a rarity in Terazzio’s cramped streets, and a sign of new-family vulgarity—pulled up alongside to deposit fat, smug-looking merchants whose faces would no doubt be mercifully hidden behind the common oak and ash masks they wore as an affectation. Stifling an excited giggle, I wondered which light in its ornate facade marked Perro’s rooms. As I jumped back from the parapet to the walkway, I adjusted my scarf and hat. The Roscovi was busy. I would have to be more careful there than I had been in Novamira, where members of my family rarely ventured among the little low buildings that clustered along the banks of the canals and tidal streams there. I touched a hand to my forehead, absently moving to adjust Per’Secosa’s weight against my nose, and almost laughed as the wind tugged at my cloak.

  Of course. Without the mask, there was little chance I would be noticed at all. Even my own family members would be hard-pressed to know me without it. Few would claim to know Carra Vetruvi so well—perhaps even none, save for Perro. My cheeks burned at the foolishness of thinking I might be recognised for myself, even if my disguise were anything less than magnificent, which I was unwilling to admit.

  I all but skipped over the bridge and down the slippery steps that led to the Harbour district.

  The cramped streets that wound through the canalside boundary with Altavestra stank of wharf and fish and the coal that fed the soot-wreathed Saskaran ships that bumped heavy against their stone jetties. I walked with a light step and hat pulled down low, trying not to draw any attention to myself. It was better to appear suspicious on the docks at night than to look innocent—such attempts to defray attention only make it appear you have something to hide.

  The night air was heavy and thick around the Harbour, and my wig itched. Choking fumes of Saskaran coal tore at my throat, and the scent of fire caused me to scratch the mottled flesh at the back of my right hand. Hurrying on, I slipped around a lounging group of dock-workers. One of them—a young man, scarcely older than myself—shouted to me, and I felt a prickle of sweat between my shoulder blades.

  “Patriciar!” A ripple of laughter rose
up from the group. “Patriciar, it’s a good night.”

  It took me a moment to realise the honorific was directed at me—a moment longer than that to understand that the porter raising a bottle by a brazier meant it in earnest. The man raised his eyebrows and beckoned me over to the fire.

  “It’s been a good day for us, Patriciar. Will you share our fire?”

  I counted eight of them—an auspicious number. “Thanks,” I said, my voice higher than I would have liked. I kept my hat over my eyes and my cloak hunched over my shoulders as I made my way back to them. They were red-cheeked and laughing—evidently, the bottle of wine they were finishing was not their first of the night.

  “How is it with you, gentlemen?” I winced inwardly. My greeting was stiff, formal—the sort of phrase you might consider using to open conversation with a clerk in a counting-house while waiting for the Master to produce your accounts. The porters laughed. I balled a fist, hoping my hands would stop shaking, that my nerve would hold.

  “It goes eminently well with us, Nobilus—eminently well.” The man holding the bottle performed a loose bow that made him look like a broken marionette. “We have been given a full slate of ships to unload tomorrow, and have done well enough today to earn ourselves a compliment.” He raised his eyebrows as his foot tapped at the pile of empty bottles by his feet.

  I rubbed my hands together, favouring my chilled left at the fire. One of the men pressed a bottle into my hand. I considered wiping it on my cloak, before dismissing the idea as rude. In a quick motion I brought the bottle to my lips and took a swig.

  “Gods!” I all but jumped back from the fire, my eyes watering. The porters burst out laughing as I sputtered and spat, running my tongue over numb lips. “What in—what in the name of the High Ones is that?”

  “Strong, isn’t it?” I glanced over at the porter to my left—a burly sack of a man with a weather-worn face and eyes that watched me with sharp, focused intent. “Given to us by the House of Verocci this morning, for a job well done.” He nodded over at a vast shadow, its spars swaying high above the docks. “Tied up their ship today, brought her cargo ashore—even picked up a shipwright to attend to the hole she picked up on the way here.”