An Illusion of Thieves Read online

  Neri would have been amazed, too, but he had stayed behind; Fesci worried that the full moon was addling her patrons. Neri would also watch for anyone hunting message box number six at the writing shop down the road from the Duck’s Bone. No answer had yet come from the Commission on Public Artworks.

  “My head’s true wearied with this mold,” said Dumond, nodding at the small, odd blocks of hardened clay stacked on the table, each carefully numbered. Expertly placed protrusions and matching divots on each mating face would have fit the pieced mold together for the pouring of the wax. “The rippled wings. The god’s shoulder and the beast’s haunch twined and undercut as they are. Took three tries to get it right. Fortunate I had extra clay, and some … special techniques … for setting the clay quick.” He glanced up.

  Magic … for so mundane a thing as drying clay molds. “You are a brave man, Dumond.”

  “I’ve taken more risk for less worth. Decided long ago to live as I want.”

  His hard fingers rearranged some lengths of wax rod for no purpose I could see. “I’ve worked the wax a bit to take off the parting lines and correct some details to match the original. Soon as I fix these sprue rods onto the model, I’ll be ready to set the final pouring mold. Then we pour.”

  “Tonight then.”

  “Aye. A friend at the foundry up to the Asylum Ring started the bronze melt a couple of hours ago, soon as his master shut down for the night; he thinks I’m making more bronze birds for an impatient client.” He nodded to another mold fitted together in a block. “I should have the pour done by dawn. That’ll give me most of two days for the finish work. Not much cushion for mistakes.”

  “And the flaw that will expose it as a counterfeit? What do you suggest?”

  A false ease enveloped him as he settled his backside to the stone wall and folded his arms. If I so much as blinked out of time, he would notice. What might so powerful a sorcerer do if he was frightened? Recalling the flame in his hands as he opened his painted doorway prompted caution.

  “Who’s going to be inspecting our two bronzes to decide which is true?” he said.

  I breathed away a sudden chill. I’d no mind to deceive him. “The one who must be convinced the false statue is the original is a procurer of antiquities, holding whatever knowledge that implies,” I said. “He’s not the brightest fellow, but he could surely recognize something too obvious, like an extra finger or misplaced foot or a variation in the patina.”

  “This would be the person who most deceitfully deprived the true owner of his artwork?”

  “Yes, along with his partner who is perhaps less experienced in artworks, but assuredly more experienced in deception. The ones who must expose it as a counterfeit are prominent historians who know their business, and some men and women who know a great deal about art and antiquities, including the true owner.”

  “Any chance of a sniffer in either group?”

  “A sniff—?” The question caught me up short. “The Antigonean bronze carries magic?”

  “Not magic as I experience it.” He moved back to the table and brushed his finger along the beast’s rippled wing. “But it has a strangeness that’s something like. Hold it long enough and reach, as you do for magic, and you will touch something beyond … beyond this life. Not at all sure what it is. If any one of your inspectors can—and will—do that, then there’s no reason to introduce any common flaw.”

  Breathless with astonishment, I said, “I can’t imagine there would be a sorcerer in either party. And certainly none who would confess to it before witnesses.”

  But certain, this made me wonder not only about the bronze, but about the man who wanted it so intensely—the grand duc of Riccia, who claimed it was of divine origin.

  “Even if I’m present at the moment of revelation,” I said, “which is in no way assured, I wouldn’t dare suggest that sort of test.”

  “I’d not say sorcery is the only way to experience what I did.” Dumond retracted his hand and shook his head. “It might be only one pathway. But I must tell you, damizella, I’m not sure anyone in this city should possess this statue. Had I come across it on my own, I would pack it away in a cave somewhere until I had scoured this world for the wisdom necessary to make sense of it.”

  “Why? You must not think it evil, else wisdom would not unlock it. That would violate the most basic tenets of philosophy.”

  “I make no claim of good or evil. Try it yourself and judge.”

  I retreated a step, as if he’d pushed me closer.

  “It wreaks no hurt or harm that I can see.” He flung his arms open, then tapped his chest with his fingertips. “My heart yet beats. My gift yet answers my call. Not even my wife has noticed an alteration in me save a strange new desire to study myth, and she is an exceptionally perceptive person.”

  This was no time for mysteries. Yet if this demonic taint Neri and I bore was a gift, as Dumond and Placidio both named it, and if it could reveal some danger in this bit of metal that should not be in powerful men’s hands …

  Reach, he’d said. He’d used the same word in the Temple when invoking his magic. I had never reached for magic but rather touched, like opening the stopcock on an ale cask and shutting it again after the first droplet. Closing my eyes, I tried to imagine what reaching must be like. Instead of cask and stopcock, I envisioned an open barrel and dipped my hand …

  Warmth flowed over and through me. I allowed it—the forbidden, the terrifying—much like the first night I told Sandro he could do as he wished with me, the first night I meant it and wanted it. All he’d done was touch, gentle, but firm and sure, everywhere, waking me to something new. As on that night, my heart beat faster, my breath came quick and shallow, my muscles melted. So it was with magic there in Dumond’s workshop. Whenever fear threatened, I imagined Sandro’s hand slowing, his voice soothing me until I let go.

  So the infusion of magic continued until my whole body must surely be swollen with warmth and life. There I held. As on that night so long ago, this was not to be a consummation, but an introduction. A test.

  Alive with magic, I opened my eyes and laid a hand on the mottled green-gold statue. So solid. Cooler than the heavy night breeze leaking through the door and shuttered windows of the stone workshop. And as if the earth opened beneath my feet, I fell breathless, fearless, into another place …

  Filmy veils of gray, white, and palest green, and others of soft colors that had no name wafted in a liquid breeze, cool on my heated skin. Beyond the veils a circle of tall torchieres in the guise of gleaming gold lilies centered a vast, domed hall. Their flames wavered in sinuous light, as if I viewed them through flawed glass. The arched ceiling rose far higher than the torch flames could reach, yet a pearlescent glow illumined figures, faces, beasts, plants, symbols carved on slender arcs of pure white stone.

  The breeze, the firm stone under my shoes, the snap of the flames and their scented smoke testified that I stood in this other place. But as I moved past the veils, the better to see the hall, my feet glided, dreamlike. Not so much walking as floating.

  Supporting the dome was a circle of pillars of polished stone, finely mottled in rose, green, and ivory. The dome itself was not a solid shell as I expected, but a maze created from the white arches—bridges they might be, though scarce wide enough for two feet. Each one arced higher or lower than the next, originating at some points around the circular base in a pattern I could not guess, and ending at points masked by other arches. Above the seven or nine whose origin points I saw, more of the graceful arcs sprang from higher points—a wonder matching any I had ever seen. Here and there behind the harmonious maze, I spotted wedges of midnight black. I could not tell whether these were merely areas of black paint or openings to a sky empty of stars.

  Some of the arches were carved with figures and beasts. Others were incised with words and symbols. I could neither read the words nor identify the figures at such heights, even if they were words or images I might understand. But everything
in my spirit said the words were meant to be read and the figures and symbols to be studied. Indeed—I spun around, slow, my eyes on the maze, the fluid air suspending my hair—for every carved arch there was a partner arch positioned exactly so that an observer standing on the partner could get a close-on view of the first. If one knew the point to begin, one could traverse every arc of the maze. What story would the journey tell?

  This place was no imagining, for nothing in me could have devised such a structure. It instilled a certainty of truth, though it was not the truth I had lived in my five-and-twenty years. Such clever artistry. Such serenity. Such … I could not name the swelling emotion that flowed into me alongside wonder. I hungered to know more.

  The place where I had entered the rotunda was no longer distinguishable, the veils vanished behind the pillars. The only break in the supporting colonnade was a vaulted opening that welcomed me to travel onward to some new mystery. Above the archway were incised three glyphs in a symbology that felt familiar, though undecipherable.

  Yearning for understanding, I moved past the ring of torchieres and through the arch into a passage—or perhaps it was the torchieres and pillars that moved past me for I had no consciousness of walking. On either side of the passage, for as far as I could see, niches large and small were inset into the walls, each with a stone tablet hung beside or below it. No lanterns or torches, but the same ivory glow from the stone itself illuminated the passage, revealing that each held a sculpture of gleaming bronze. One niche, though—

  Rippling unease flooded through the vision, through me and around me. The air began to quiver with heat. One gleaming bronze toppled slowly—impossibly slowly—from its niche. Then another and another. Cracks appeared in the glowing stone, streaking and forking like summer lightning, and the currents that bathed me grew hotter, scalding. I screamed and ran, but the great white arches were cracking—

  “Damizella! Romy!” A hand tapped my cheek, only to leave off as quickly as it had begun, in a burst of epithets. “Shite, shite, shite!”

  “No! Wait!” My eyes yet strained to peer into the stone passage, but the vision was broken.

  My hand had fallen away from the statue, and I was sitting on a stool beside the wall. A grimacing Dumond fanned my overheated face with a kerchief while pressing his other fist to his chest with a ferocity that bespoke pain.

  “By the Sisters, woman, I thought you were going to burst into flame. Scorched my hand you did. What did you see?”

  “A great rotunda, domed with narrow bridges … carvings of figures and words, torches shaped like lilies, cold flames that cast no light and walls that glowed of their own. And a passage of knowledge … revelation…”

  Dumond transferred the kerchief to his own round face, blotting his brow. “Evil? Dangerous?”

  “Not at all. It was all about knowledge, truth.” And something else. “Sadness, perhaps. The hall was so empty of life. And I think”—I touched the bronze carefully, experiencing no sensation save its chill solidity—“it is the place where this belongs.” One of the niches along that vaulted passage had been empty.

  “But there at the end everything changed. The structure was breaking; the bronzes were falling, and these waves of heat…”

  “Come, let’s get you tea. You’ll find yourself cold soon enough.”

  “I’m not—” But I was already shivering, not sick and horrible as before when I touched magic, but deeply chilled as on those rare nights that snow dusted the hills of Cantagna. “Yes, please.” Arrows of ice shot through my bones as I stood.

  Dumond threw his own thin wool cloak over my shoulders and led me from the stone workshop. We hurried down a dark alley that skirted the back of the cooper’s store and the uphill wall that separated the Beggars Ring from the Asylum Ring. Enough warm light leaked around wood shutters to reveal a wood door with dark metal strips embedded in its length, but no latch or knob or hole to grip.

  The door swung open silently at Dumond’s touch. Between the clattering of my teeth and rattling of my ice bones, a guess manifested itself: Not just anyone could push that door open. Was that magic or smithing?

  “Vashti! We need the jasmine tea!”

  I followed him inside and, had I not been shivering so hard as to keep me awake, would have believed I had again fallen into a vision, this time of perfumed warmth and riotous color packed into a tiny box of dust and stone.

  “Sit.” Dumond steered me to a pile of cushions, worn and misshapen, but still blazing with brilliant-hued designs worked in silk thread. Hangings from the distant lands of the east softened the grimed walls. Some depicted homely life in field and garden; some were worked with no design beyond the sheerest exuberance of color. A threadbare carpet centered the cracked stone floor, and everywhere stood lamps of brass and bronze, copper plates, bronze-cast running children, ball players, and a lark on the wing, shaped with such truth of flight I could almost sense the rush of air.

  “Your work, D-Dumond?” I said amazed. Such sculptures would take a place of honor in any of Sandro’s homes. “This lark is m-magnificent.” My frosted bones rattled.

  “The bronzes are mine,” he said. “But the truest artistry here is the needlework, don’t you think?”

  “Truly b-beautiful,” I said. “Such harmony of c-color.”

  From behind one of the fringed hangings emerged someone draped in green and orange carrying a tray. The ebony sheen of braided hair and willowy stature suggested Dumond’s flirtatious daughter Cittina. But she glanced up as she set the tray on a low table. The web of creases beside her beaming eyes put her at an age with the middling Dumond, though her smooth skin, the hue of deep, rich sand at eventide, glowed as fresh as the girl’s.

  “Basha deems I feel no worth if someone admires his bronze bird,” she said, with a lilting accent. “I say him there is worth enough in the world for both of us.”

  “Romy of Lizard’s Alley, meet the truest treasure in my home. My wife, Vashti Saryali of Paolin. Vashti, this is my most unusual customer who will provide our Cittina with a dowry.”

  “P-Paolin!”

  Far beyond the rocky hills and harbors of Empyria, where our traders had found markets rich with spices, strange and delicious fruits, colorful tapestries, and fine needlework, lay the kingdom of Lhampur. In Lhampur giant horned beasts brought silk through ranges of mountains that touched the vault of the sky from lands even farther east … from Paolin, the Land of Smoke and Silk.

  “Here, Romy-zha, jasmine and ginger will warm you.” The woman’s smile laid another blanket around me. “Basha is often cold after magic work.”

  The painted porcelain cup seemed fragile as a rose petal. A small crack seamed its lip. But I thought no more of the vessel as I inhaled the rich fragrance, sipped, and let heat and spice thread its way through vein and sinew. One cup stilled my teeth. A second quieted my limbs. The third eased the rigor in chest and back. I felt almost human again.

  Dumond had dug into a bowl of noodles that smelled of ginger and pepper and other things I couldn’t name. Vashti offered me the same. With apologies, I stayed with the tisane. It banished the cold, but not the vision.

  “What did you see when you touched it?” I asked, when I could speak without stammering. Clearly Vashti and Dumond had no secrets.

  “A city of domes and spires crumbled to ruin,” he said, laying down his spoon. “I stood atop a strange mount made of living creatures of every color, and there it was below me in a deep ravine. Sad, as you said. Dusty white with growths of lichen everywhere—and quiet, as if color and music had been lost even before its dwellers abandoned it. In the cliffs behind the city were caves, and like you, I was certain as sunrise that if I could enter them, I would learn something important.”

  He blotted his mouth with a tatter of embroidered linen.

  “Soon as I thought it, I stood in one of the caves that was stacked in every crevice with chests of books and scrolls. The end wall was carved with figures three times my height, but I can’t
recall them—only that great cracks in the wall had broken them. There was an enchantment about the place. Magic? Maybe, maybe not. But when I think of it too much, ’tis all I can do to stay at my work and not try again.” Creases seamed his broad face until he shook his head as if to clear the remembrance.

  Marvelous and terrifying. Would Neri see a third view if he were to touch the bronze while reaching for magic? Would we see different ones if we tried again?

  Dumond paused his spoon. “So, should the ‘rightful owner’ possess the Antigonean bronze or not?”

  “The rightful owner is not demon tainted,” I said, “and he will take care with it. He intends it as a gift for a good and scholarly man, who has been searching for it over many years.”

  I could not imagine that the grand duc of Riccia carried the taint of magic any more than Sandro did. Perhaps Placidio knew the truth of that. But if Eduardo di Corradini did carry magic, perhaps he was exactly the one who should own the thing and learn what it meant. Both Sandro and Placidio believed him a good soul. I had met him only once. He’d been polite and not unfriendly, but I had found him water to Sandro’s robust vintage. He was very shy. Perhaps he was more interesting than he appeared.

  “We proceed with the plan,” I said. “The counterfeit goes to the thieves. The true statue goes to its rightful owner. We can solve only the problems that we know, and the dangers of allowing the thieves to win out are too great to ignore. Many lives could be lost. If you need to know more of reasons…”

  “I’ll hold with our bargain,” said Dumond, pushing to his feet, “which means I’d best get the mold to the foundry. Wouldn’t want to leave my friend Pascal with a pot of molten bronze and naught to pour it into. Once I get to the finishing, I’ll leave a small bit of the new work’s surface—perhaps the god’s manly balls—with a patina that looks and feels the same as the original, but will react to a common solvent I’ll provide you. A bare finger’s touch will reveal exactly the same as would touching the true statue. But wipe Atladu’s balls with the solvent, and the spot will come clean down to the raw metal. Your antiquities dealer has probably done something similar to prove the bronze in the first place, and upon reacquiring it might test again to ensure he’s not been fooled. But no man’s going to go straight for the balls, is he? And if the fellow knows his business, he’s certainly not going to risk washing down the whole thing and destroying the very patina that proves its age. He’ll believe it’s the same work he thought stolen.”