A Summoning of Demons

by Cate Glass

  The thought shifted my perspective. The Confraternity had ignored this marriage contract for nineteen years. In the ordinary, this would mean they had little interest in fulfilling it. Perhaps the young man had objected or the family decided the match was unsuitable in other ways. But now they rushed to fulfill it before Livia came of age and could publicly assert her own refusal, risky and useless though that might be. Something had changed. Was it significant that only a few days had passed since the worst earthquake in decades?

  “I’m going back there,” I blurted.

  “Into the Academie?” Neri spat. “Are you bats?”

  “No. To the Street of the Bookbinders.” I tossed the empty bag back into the fountain pool. “Livia must have left something in that house, and we need to understand what it is. You head for the woolhouse. Tell the others everything we observed this afternoon about the Academie, the footbridge entry, and the villa. Plan how we’re going to get around that sniffer. Prepare for the snatch, just as we talked of. I’ll join you there quick as may be. But I suspect the key to this mission is whatever Livia delivered to the person in that house.”

  * * *

  I was exceedingly mindful as I retraced my steps to the Street of the Bookbinders. The evening was waning and the gate wardens were more attentive to those of us in attire unusual for a woman in the Heights. I’d worn slim trousers, tunic, and jerkin under my Academie gown—the best garments for sword training … and sneaking … and other Chimera activities. The guards’ interest waned quickly when I told them I was a bodyguard for Vivienne di Agnesi—a reclusive and notoriously vengeful painter, who employed only women.

  The Street of the Bookbinders had settled. Soft lamp glow from upper rooms had already replaced the more boisterous brilliance of early evening. Few besides the Shadow Lord and his kind could afford to squander oil or candles to hold off the night’s darkness, especially as the autumn days grew shorter. I sauntered down the lane to Lawyer Falzi’s house and around to the tradesmen’s entry at a small side gate, as I did when bringing him copied documents. There I paused and waited, watching the street. No one passed. No untoward noise interrupted the quiet.

  Relieved, I sped through the shadows to the house at the end of the lane. On the corner was a tidy brass signboard, listing two names. The lower read FILIPPI—SEED IMPORTER. The upper name read MARSILIA DI BIANCHI—STITCHED FOLIOS, PAMPHLETS, MISCELLANEA.

  Gleaming lamplight outlined a shuttered window and the age-darkened plank door at the top of the stair. A rap brought no reply.

  I knocked again. Still no reply. So I gripped the handle and slid my dagger blade through the gap between door and frame in search of a latch, only to feel the heavy slab shift at my first pressure. The door was unlocked.

  “Dama Bianchi?” I called as I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.

  The cluttered, lamplit room smelled of old paper and dust and … perhaps a chamber pot too long unemptied? Careless heaps of folded pages littered the plank floor and a workbench that spanned most of the room. Pens, ink bottles, awls, boxes of needles, large spools of linen string, and an array of small, sharp knives lay in a clutter. Finished pamphlets looked to have been tossed one upon the other against the front wall of the house. An off-kilter doorway led into another room.

  If I needed someone to bind a document, I doubted I’d choose anyone so careless with her work, unless— Had someone else come here searching?

  In one corner, a pot with spout and lid hissed and spat atop a brazier, far from the precious pages, but enough to make the lingering warmth of the day unpleasantly damp.

  My hand touched my dagger. With the other I rapped hard on the worktable.

  “Hello, Marsilia di Bianchi! I’m a law scribe come to inquire about stitching some of my clients’ documents. A friend recommended you. Your door is unlocked, and your pot is about to boil dry.”

  A soft scratching from the other room was accompanied by a sucking sound—very like the noise Teo had made when he was drowning.

  “Dama Bianchi?” My skin shivered and I crept through the clutter to the crooked doorway. The second room was no more tidy—with clothes chest and sling bed upended; the gray wool stuffing of the mattress coated the room like early snow. This was no careless clutter. And there was blood.…

  Halfway between the upended bed and a washing cabinet, a gray-haired woman sprawled on the floor. She was scratching the planks with her fingernails and choking on the blood oozing from her broken nose. Myriad cuts and bruises scarred her arms, face, and legs. Her ripped garments were sodden.

  I dropped to my knees at her side, grabbing the ripped bed sheet to blot the blood from her battered cheek. The pulse at her wrist was faint. My attempt to roll her to her back elicited a thready cry, so I left her be and bent down so she might see my face.

  “Dama, who’s done this? That girl who came here … she didn’t…”

  “Red devils.” The harsh sucking noise was her attempt at breathing. More difficult with each one. “Won’t silence her. Ever.”

  Red devils? Philosophists!

  “Did they find what she left?” I said, the story clear as sunlight. Certain, this was about Livia’s writings. “Brave woman, you tried. I can see that.”

  “None’ll find it, save one we trust.” Her clenched teeth could have bitten holes in her pamphlets. A shudder racked her bony frame.

  “The devils … you mean philosophists, yes?”

  Her head twitched in assent as she struggled for another breath. She didn’t have many more in her, so it was no time to play with secrets.

  “Please believe me. I’m a friend, trying to protect Livia. Her vicino-padre asked me to keep her and her work safe if you could not. When the philosophists can’t make her tell what she left here, they’ll come back—perhaps before the one you trust comes to help. They’ll tear this place apart and they’ll find it for sure. If we’re to preserve it, we must do it now. I’ll keep it safe.”

  Her eyes glared at me, warning of a death curse. “Name. Vicino-padre.”

  “Alessandro di Gallanos. Il Padroné. He wants Livia’s work to continue.”

  Her hand, slick with warm blood, grabbed my wrist. “Swear it. Mean it.”

  “By the grace of this universe, by the womb of the Great Mother and the spear of the Lord of Sea and Sky, by words or books or whatever you and I both hold sacred, I swear to keep Livia and her work safe at peril of my life.”

  “Don’t believe in Mother. Nor Sea Lord.” She squeezed her eyes closed and grinned—blood outlining her broken teeth. “But the universe, yes. And il Padroné…”

  “Marsilia, please tell me.”

  Her grip on my wrist fell slack; her half-curled fist tapped weakly on the floor. “Last place … any … sophist—”

  Her grin faded. The tapping stopped.

  Helpless, I shook her gently. “The last place any philosophist … what? Would go? Would look? Dama?”

  But it was no use. Laying a hand on her forehead, I bade her good journeying to wherever the universe might take her, and promised to make the villains who’d murdered her pay for their crime. Then I stood and looked helplessly at the mess the searchers had left.

  Her ravaged body and this upheaval smacked of fury—of certainty that there was something here to find. I doubted they would treat Livia so brutally. Surely she’d never have gone back if she feared that. But they would search her, question her. And they’d return here.

  What was the last place any philosophist would look?

  Begging the dead woman’s pardon, I checked under her skirts and down her bodice. The beasts had searched those already. Her fist had tapped the floor. So under it?

  I hunted for loose planks in the floor and then the walls, to no avail. There were no loose sections of her bedposts. No entry to the attic in her stained ceilings. Back in the workroom, I peered under the worktable and inside every vessel of ink, every thread spool, every box, and bin. Every stack of pages. The searchers had been thoroug
h.

  Stepping back through the crooked doorway, I tried to observe with a newcomer’s eyes. And the hiding place was clearly visible. Marsilia had tried to tell me. A finger of her half-curled fist pointed across the room, where only one item sat undisturbed, serenely filthy in its cubbyhole, pretending innocence even while exuding a stink no priggish philosophist would ever think to search. The last thing anyone would wish to touch.

  I knelt in front of the washing cabinet and removed the ornate ceramic chamber pot, hoping I wouldn’t need to rummage inside it. Modeled on a Typhonese amphora, painted with figures of athletes and jugglers, its rounded base fit into a matching depression in a rectangular holder of polished wood. One could not set the pot aside without spilling its overabundant contents.

  Believing she would approve, I made a nest from Marsilia’s body and her torn and bloody sheets to hold the pot upright. Examining the holder revealed that its wooden bottom would slide away and expose a very private little space—clean and dry—where a leather pouch and a set of rolled pages wrapped in oiled leather awaited me.

  The pouch held a small book with a red-dyed cover. The worn lettering of the title read Canonical Teachings of the Creation Wars and the Shaping of the Earth. The cover displayed the open book, lance, and flaming torch crest of the Philosophic Confraternity.

  But my first glance at Livia’s pages explained all. Her document was titled, “Exposing the False Mythology of Creation Stories Using Observations of Natural Phenomena.”

  Though I’d no time to read the texts, the significance of the pairing was not lost on me. False mythology. Spirits!

  With apologies for disrespect, I placed Marsilia, the vile chamber pot, and its now empty holder into the exact positions in which I’d found them. I left the shambles of her home little changed, and though it was difficult to contravene years of cautions about fire, I even left the brazier burning.

  I crammed the pouch containing the book inside my jerkin. The document, I rewrapped in its oiled skin, retied into as thin a scroll as I could make it, and slipped it into the knife sheath in my boot. The upper end stuck out a bit under my trousers. That would have to do.

  With all the care and mindfulness Placidio had battered into my head, I ventured into the night, speeding downward through the city to meet with the Chimera. For now, we had to stop a marriage. But Marsilia di Bianchi was dead and Livia di Nardo was in danger of arrest. We were going to save the girl, and then someday she was going to tell me why she had entrusted a brave old woman with what could be among the most dangerous items in all of the Costa Drago. The canonical teachings of the creation were the foundation of the sorcery laws.

  8

  ELEVEN HOURS UNTIL THE GIUNTURA

  NIGHT

  Dumond studied Placidio’s sketched map in the dusty lantern light of the woolhouse.

  “Is this refuge defensible?” said Dumond. “Wouldn’t need to worry about a siege, as long as I’ve time to paint us a way out. But praetorians are fierce. And they don’t stop.”

  “Aye,” said Placidio. “The path to the top of the bluff is steep and narrow, easy to defend. The rest is cliffs around. A skillful, determined man who knows the country well might find a way up with ropes and picks, but the place is out of the way.”

  I stood beside the map with the others, yet I could not force myself to take in all the details of Placidio’s inartistic efforts. Shortly before I’d arrived from the Street of the Bookbinders with a tale of murder and sedition and how sorely we had underestimated the significance of this mission, Neri had gone back to scout the Villa Giusti.

  “This Perdition’s Brink is close to the city, you say, but no one lives there?” Vashti sat on the pounded earth floor, her needle flying along a seam of black cloth.

  “It’s mostly a ruin, deserted since long before I came to Cantagna,” said Placidio. He tossed his stick of plummet onto the scrap of parchment spread on the upended barrel. “I heard of it through a bit of dueling lore. It lies north and easterly, a quick back and forth with Dumond’s friend’s horses. No more than two hours by foot, should need arise. We can get the horse cart to the bottom of the hill easy, and though the path’s a bit steep for carrying supplies the rest of the way, that’s all the better for staying hid.”

  Placidio and Dumond had agreed we had no choice but to abduct Livia as well. We needed to tell her about Marsilia and find out what in all the universe she thought she was doing. It was no good to persuade Donato to void the contract, only to have Livia insist on the marriage after all.

  “But why has no one rebuilt such a place so near the city?” said Vashti. “So much land in the countryside of vineyards…”

  “Same reason this place, solid as ever, sits available for us to practice our skills whenever we please.” Placidio waved his hand at the sturdy brick walls and mostly intact roof of the riverside warehouse. “Superstition. Instead of lingering plague ghosts, it’s a sorcerer’s curse scares folk away. After three years of blighted grapes, Conte Fumigari, the landholder, accused the neighboring landowner, Draco di Benetti, of hiring a sorcerer to curse his vineyards. To Fumigari’s delight, the Confraternity judiciar agreed. To Fumigari’s dismay, not only did the judiciar burn Benetti at a stake set in the middle of the blighted vineyard, the conte’s own overseer was the person accused of the doing the magic! Though Conte Fumigari—and a succession of buyers—tried to revive the field, the vineyard never bore another grape, and the Fumigari line died out in one generation.”

  “Thus the name,” said Dumond.

  “Aye. The place looks a blight, but the keep has a solid roof and the spring tastes sweet. Unless anyone here’s squeamish, it’ll do fine for us to hole up and figure out how to convince this Confraternity stripling to void his marriage contract.”

  “All right, then,” said Dumond, scratching his thinning hair as he settled to the ground at Vashti’s side. “We’d best spend these few hours before we breach the philosophic fortress hauling supplies up there. I’ll work on an escape door once we’re settled, assuming we’re successful in extracting the bride and groom.”

  “Perhaps Neri will bring good news on that.” Vashti reached over to pat my foot. “Unknot yourself, Romy-zha. Truly, he’s not been gone so long. And before he left, he and the swordmaster went over exactly what he needed to learn and how to be so very careful.”

  I stilled my drumming fingers and ceased chewing my lips. “Certain, he proved himself thrice over at Palazzo Ignazio.”

  My brother’s skill at darting in and out of a stranger’s lair without being seen had been the twine that bound our mad scheme regarding the document known as the Assassins List into a successful whole. But he always tried to do too much on his scouting excursions. Over and again Lady Fortune had dealt him a lucky hand. Someday the payment would come due.

  Thus I could not tear my eyes from the largest of the three leather bolsters hanging from the woolhouse rafters. Most days, we used it for developing our skills at punching and kicking with authority. Tonight, so they’d told me, it was the spot where Neri’s magic had enabled him to walk straight from the woolhouse to the three-spike fountain in the Villa Giusti courtyard. If all went well, he would reappear in the same spot with information enough to abduct Donato and Livia from their beds.

  “He remembers there’s sniffers about the villa,” said Placidio, with his own attempt to soothe my agitation. “I reminded him what they do first, once they decide to offer a captive sorcerer the opportunity to stay undrowned. I think he’ll be well-focused.”

  The reminder did not help my nerves. Only a young male sorcerer was even given the choice to remain living as a sniffer, and the first thing the Confraternity did was geld him.

  “Such risks we’re taking,” I said, staring down at the book and manuscript in my hands. “And now we don’t even know if Livia truly wants this done. Why would she go back to that house, knowing the Confraternity would consider this writing and this book together—a pilfered book, it would appear�
�blasphemous? She should have run as far and fast as her feet would take her. Does she think submitting to the marriage will somehow save her?”

  “It might be the only way to save her,” said Dumond. “The Confraternity would never risk a public arrest and trial, as they’d have to admit her true offense. Even if every word she’s writ is drivel, they could never allow such arguments to be exposed. She’s an otherwise virtuous young woman, the steward’s daughter, embroiled in a draconian marriage contract, but accepting its terms. Very sympathetic.”

  Lacking time to read the whole treatise, we’d shared the first few paragraphs which laid out Livia’s thesis quite clearly: For millennia the Confraternity had chosen to assert the infallibility of the Creation Story—in particular the drowning of the city of Sysaline and imprisonment of Dragonis beneath the lands of the Costa Drago—for the sole purpose of eradicating sorcery. Earthquakes and volcanoes that shattered mountains and fractured the landscape were their evidence. Livia asserted that, in her travels throughout the world, she had gathered evidence from multiple locations and sources that led her to conclude that mountains and earthquakes arose from perfectly natural processes, not divinities warring with a monster. She believed evidence could be gathered in the Costa Drago to prove the same.

  It was no wonder il Padroné, besides any personal concern for the girl, would be both fascinated by her theories and concerned for her well-being. If no raging monster existed beneath the earth waiting to be set free by his magical kin, then the underpinning of the Confraternity’s two-thousand-year campaign to exterminate sorcery collapsed. Eventually, the balance of authority throughout the Costa Drago might change in reason’s favor—and sorcery could be studied in a more rational light. The stakes of this mission had become deeply personal for each of us.