Revenant

TWENTY-ONE

I gave them a chance to leave before I emerged from the bedroom and went downstairs, assuming they’d be in the salon, which proved to be empty. Quinton was in the kitchen with Rafa, asking her questions.

“Where?” he said.

“In the Alentejo. The olive trees were all that was left. I’m sorry. . . .” She stopped speaking when she saw me. “Bom dia, Senhora Blaine.”

“Good morning, Rafa. How are you?”

“I am very well, thank you. It is good to see Dom Carlos as he should be.”

“Where is he?” I asked.

“In the garden.”

Carlos in a garden in the daylight. This I needed to see. I started to go, then turned back. “Rafa, where did Dom Carlos sleep last night?”

She frowned. “In his bed. Where else should he sleep?”

“I mean where in the house. The cellar?”

She shook her head. “No. In the master’s chamber on the second floor. I had to take him there myself.”

“How did you lift him? He must weigh more than two hundred pounds.”

She blushed. “Avó helped me. He is light as a child with her hand on him.”

“And where is she now?”

“Oh, I think she won’t come for some time. It was very hard for her to bear him up after all that happened.”

There seemed to be more questions opened than answered, but I let them go and nodded to her, thanking her and starting for the door to the back garden.

“Oh, the key!” she cried. “Take the key.”

That was interesting: The garden apparently didn’t lie in her time frame of the house. I took the key off a hook by the door and went out.

In the modern daylight, the garden was shabbier than it had seemed the night before. Jasmine climbed up broken trellises against the house walls, growing from pots that had seen much better days. Three dwarf orange trees set in a shallow V were dusty and seemed in need of attention while the bougainvillea had overgrown the wall and was encroaching on the tiles around a fountain mounted to the surface. The pool and fountain were dry, the tiles and plaster cracked and chipping here and there. Carlos sat on the rim of the empty pool and squinted upward at the sun through the dusty leaves of an orange tree. A shaft of light struck blue highlights off his hair and warmed his skin with a ruddy glow across one cheekbone. It was like seeing some young relative of the Carlos I knew, one who hadn’t yet gained bitter knowledge and a taste for blood and power.

“You’re not supposed to look directly at the sun,” I said.

“I am also not supposed to be alive and sitting in my own garden. It’s run-down—I shall chastise the management company for that—but as I am somewhat run-down myself, I shan’t be too harsh on them.”

“I’m afraid I overheard part of your conversation with Quinton.”

“I know it. As, I suspect, does he. But we each pretend the other does not and thus we save our foolish male pride.”

“Why aren’t I attached to you, blood-bound, because of what I did?”

“Always direct, Blaine.”

“Why should I be otherwise?”

He replied with nothing but an ironically raised eyebrow.

“Come on, man of mystery. Tell me.”

“I’ve already told you. I am not blood-bound to another because I did not die of the Bliss—of the blood addiction. I Became, my blood poured onto the ground to feed something else. While I can—or could before this change—create blood kindred, it must be carefully and deliberately done. You gave me your blood. I gave nothing back—or at least nothing that I intended.”

“There’s still something more to this. . . .”

“Yes, but I cannot tell you what it is. I don’t know. I think I know what I’ve received from you, but what may have passed to you, is unknown. But it isn’t the blood tie, nor any form of control. You are not in thrall to me. Although it might be interesting if you were. . . .”

I rolled my eyes. “Please.”

He smiled a perfectly ordinary smile, the sun showing every bone-white scar where the glass of the church window had cut him, and finding tiny wrinkles around the corners of his eyes and mouth that darkness had never revealed. The smile faded quickly; then he shook himself and stood. “Let us not bait your beloved any longer. We should go inside and speak of dragons.”

He put his right hand out in a courtly, old-world gesture and I, laughing at it, put my left hand onto his, aligning our fingers.

For a second, our hands were one oddly shaped construction of four overly long fingers and two opposed thumbs that sprouted from both our wrists like the overlap of conjoined twins. I gasped and flinched, yanking my hand up and back without thinking.

The bizarre double hand divided at the knuckles of our middle fingers as if hinged there. All the rest of our hands were free and normal, the fingers sliding past one another, but our middle fingers remained connected at the medial joint. It was creepy to look at and impossible, like some kind of optical illusion where it appeared that my finger passed through the knuckle of his, without displacing either of our bones more than a micron or two. But it wasn’t an illusion. Our middle fingers were somehow locked together at that now-aching joint, mine pointing slightly downward from the plane of his hand.

Carlos winced but didn’t move otherwise. I felt a stab of hysteria as well as pain through the joined finger and up my arm.

“Don’t twist,” he warned. “The joint isn’t meant for that.”

Quinton stepped out of the kitchen door, looking puzzled as he walked toward us. “What’s up? You guys look spooked.”

“I misspoke about there being nothing between us,” Carlos said.

Quinton glanced at our oddly joined hands and blinked, then stared. “What the hell is that?”

“The ghost bone. It appears this is my gift to Blaine in exchange for my life. I haven’t seen the phenomenon in a considerable time. I had thought it died out.”

“Apparently, not so much. And it hurts,” I said, holding still at the expense of growing discomfort in my forearm and hand from extraordinary pressure on the conjoined digit. The rest of my finger was below Carlos’s hand and I couldn’t see it, though I was sure it was still there from the tingling ache. “Is the rest of my finger still attached? I can feel it, but . . .”

Quinton ducked his head to see. “Well . . . it’s there. What it’s attached to is in question, since it looks like it’s just growing out of the middle of Carlos’s knuckle on each side.”

I curled the finger, causing Carlos to take a sharp breath and close his eyes.

“Sorry,” I said.

“It’s wiggling, so if you’re doing the bending, it’s still your finger, babe.”

“I’m not sure how much of a relief that is.”

“It is better than the alternative,” Carlos said. “Perhaps we can reverse this action.”

“Worth a try,” I said, lowering and rotating my hand back to the position where my fingers had aligned with his. I could feel each finger brushing past his and back into position. The conjoined knuckle hesitated and balked like a tumbler in a rusted lock. I let out a little whimper and squeezed my eyes shut for a couple of seconds. The agony in my hand and arm was less, but the intensity of the ache in the finger was profound and after losing blood the night before, I felt a bit more weak in the knees than I wanted to admit.

Carlos scowled at our still-joined hands. “Hmm . . .”

I peered through the Grey at the knuckle. The bones looked like glass pipes filled with steam and outlined in white light. Thin red filaments of energy stretched along the bones and tangled at the joint, creating a mess I couldn’t make sense of. I leaned closer to the knot and slid a bit more into the Grey. The joint became less solid as I became less corporeal and the tight wires of red energy loosened, uncoiling slightly. I could see how the two bones of his hand and mine had—impossibly—slipped past each other and rotated just a little, locking the rounded ends together in the complexity of the joint. I twitched my hand a touch counterclockwise and arched the finger. . . . With a pop and a spark of discomfort, the bones slid free and our hands separated.

“Ow!” I yelped, jerking all the way back into the normal world.

I clasped the aching fingers in my other hand and looked up to see Carlos doing the same, cradling his right hand in his left. His eyes were still closed and he wore a thoughtful expression. “I see . . .” he muttered.

“What?”

He didn’t seem to hear me. He just said, “This could prove useful.” Then he opened his eyes and turned to the house. “We had best go back into Rafa’s memory of the house before anyone we would prefer not to talk to takes an interest.”

Inside, we walked up to the tower, having agreed that privacy was necessary for what we were going to discuss even in Rafa’s version of the house. Carlos opened the heavy curtains over the windows and pushed the casements wide, reveling in the touch of sunlight. A hushed flurry of minute rustlings and shuffling sounds rose at the intrusion of the light, and died away again, leaving an odor of newly turned earth and cut grass behind.

The chamber was cleaner than the last time I’d seen it, which surprised me at first, since I had expected the remains of whatever conjuring had drawn Carlos to Carmo to still linger in place. When had there been any time to straighten up? But the nevoacria—the shadow creatures that Carlos had drawn forth—had consumed and hidden away all traces of dust and disorder. Even the cobwebs and dry-rotted wood beside the fireplace were gone. Of the creatures themselves, there was only the smallest trace—persistent shadows in corners and under objects that cringed from sunlight and smoked when it touched them.

Carlos leaned against the edge of a table near the front window, so Quinton and I took the seats we’d occupied the last time, on the bench in front of a nearby table. The breeze through the window was pleasant, but the perfume of the garden had been muted by the odor of hot dust and old buildings.

“What about this ghost-bone thing?” I asked.

His expression was grave and remote. “We have little time for details. You will have to accept what I tell you without much explanation.”

“All right. Give me the short version.”

“It is a rare phenomenon—an affinity, not spell work. It’s related to but not the same as the bone magic you saw two nights ago. You noted then, I’m sure, that bones have resonance. If the practitioner can match the resonance and an appropriate bone is available, the bones can be exchanged or grafted to a degree. They do not have to touch or lie atop each other as ours did, but in this case, it appears the position completed the requirements. One of the bones of your hand and one of mine share the same resonance—as unlikely as it seems.”

“It doesn’t seem very useful to me,” I said.

“It is limited. True bone magic is more complex and broader in scope, but it requires tuning or reshaping the bones—utilizing them as the material and instruments of the spell work—as well as the ability to match resonance and draw a bone, living, from the body. This phenomenon is more use in healing bones—that was my mother’s skill.”

“I’m not sure I’m getting it,” I said.

“She would heal people of broken or diseased bones by grafting a small portion of her own bones to theirs through this ghost bone. Like you, she healed very quickly and barely noticed the loss of her bone matter most of the time. If the injury was severe enough, she would replace the bone with her own and bear the injury herself for a while. It was not pleasant to observe and I learned a great deal about pain, damage, and death by her side.” He saw me frown. “Not all of her experiments were successful and some of those she would have helped were too greatly injured to live. Some didn’t deserve her attention—I took them.”

I shuddered and felt the same reaction in Quinton, beside me. “How did this happen? Today, I mean—I think I know all I really want to about your relationship with your mother.”

Carlos chuckled. “In our case, it was simply luck. The hands of men and women are usually so unequally sized that one bone or another would have to be carved or reshaped—usually in the body. Grafted bones must be of the same status—living or dead. A dead bone doesn’t quicken in the body. But in our hands, there is something similar enough that the bones slipped past each other for a moment.”

“Because I’m tall and have large hands for a woman.”

“Paws,” Quinton added.

“Thank you, Captain Obvious.”

Now Carlos didn’t smile. “Regardless, tuning and assembling the correct bones—living and dead—weaving the appropriate spell through them, and binding them by power and sound are the processes of the Kostní Mágové. Theirs is a learned craft and the discipline doesn’t require that the practitioner have the ghost-bone affinity. It was not one I seemed to possess, but it appears that I’ve passed my mother’s latent ability on to you, temporarily, in exchange for what you’ve given me.”

“I’m not sure that there’s any . . . use for this ability, if I do have it. I mean, how would you even know you had the right bone to swap?”

“Practice and tuning. You should be able to hear the bones, if you have the skill.”

“Ugh. That’s a sound I’d like never to hear again, thank you.”

“Then you did hear it, even without this strange gift.”

“In the bone temple? Yes. The whole room was full of these tuned bones you’re talking about. It whispered everywhere. Every time Griffin cast or adjusted a spell, the whole room . . . wailed.”

Carlos turned an inquiring look on Quinton. “Did you hear this?”

“I heard something, but it only got loud once. Otherwise it was like a constant low whistling or whining that made my skin crawl.”

“I heard more, but not what Blaine describes.” Carlos returned his focus to me. “As a Greywalker, you hear the voices of Grey things more clearly, even without this strange, new gift.”

“All the damned time,” I said. “Lisbon sounds like it’s crying. Seattle hums. Mexico City rattles and whines like a steel guitar. I used to hear voices in the Grid itself, but I don’t anymore—which is fine by me. They almost drove me insane. Noisy is manageable, chatty . . . not so much.”

“It is something to bear in mind as we deal with the Kostní Mágové and their drachen.”

“Drachen?” Quinton asked. He looked at Carlos. “You mentioned something this morning. . . .”

“O Dragão do Inferno—the Hell Dragon. It is not the fragile thing that Griffin conjured two nights ago—she didn’t cast that herself, but released it from the small, carved bone she carried with her from the altar. That bone was another form of Lenoir’s spirit box. The Night Dragon and Hell Dragon require drachen bones and the work of a dreamspinner. Griffin is not one of those. But the Kostní Mágové here clearly have drachen bones and a dreamspinner in their company. They still need other bones and the chance to carve them with the appropriate spells and tunings, since they have yet to replace your niece. If they complete the skeleton and give life to the song of the bones, it will be a living nightmare.”

“And how are we going to stop them?” Quinton asked. “We took back Soraia, but there are other bones out there. We can’t protect every little girl. . . . Whatever they’re up to, they’re moving faster than we are. This morning, there were near riots outside the Jerónimos Monastery about the possibility that the tomb of Dom Sebastiaõ might not have been vandalized, but that ‘the desired one’ is coming back. Which is, frankly, an ‘End of Days’ scenario in my mind. You don’t want the Sleeping King to show up for anything less than—” He cut himself off and turned his head sharply away from both of us, staring out the front window.

“Less than what? An apocalypse?” I asked. “Why wouldn’t your father want that as well? It would do everything he wants and much faster than his current work with ghosts and undead agitators.” Then I turned to Carlos. “It’s what you said they—these bone mages—are after, too. We saw the master mage from the temple meet with another priest just before we saw the Night Dragon here in Alfama. And he matches the description of a priest seen at the monastery when it was robbed.”

“Rui,” Carlos said. “Are you certain they were the same man?”

“Not entirely—no one described his aura in the news report—but the one we saw just down the hill here? Yes. It was him—Rui. It’s not likely there are two priests of the same description involved in unrelated crimes concerning bones,” I said, “aura or not.”

Quinton and I told him about Purlis’s disruptions in other places—riots in Paris, bombings in Turkey, epidemics in Spain and the United States, the riots at the bank and the air base, the Night Dragons and monsters, and then about the dead pickpocket, the priests who must have been bone mages, and the other ossuaries that had been vandalized, coming at last back to the robbery at Jéronimos and the angry mutterings I’d heard the night before as I ran through the Baixa to Santa Justa.

“There is no Sleeping King,” Carlos said, but he was thinking as he did. “Sebastiaõ was not entombed in that crypt. But the dust of those bones would still be of use. . . . A great deceit—a pauper buried as a king. And they are aware that they can benefit from fear and unrest without having to cast a single spell to achieve it.”

“So that’s what my father has been doing in the past months, here in Europe—sowing discord and unrest to benefit the Mágové—as well as working for their ends more directly by acquiring materials and destroying resistance to economic and political decline. Europe is facing a crisis that’s not just about money or national boundaries—it’s the loss of hope for an entire generation. The system is failing them and they’re becoming desperate enough to do something rash. Or that’s what I think, from what I’ve seen in places like Ukraine and Syria. He still needs to create the same degree of division and despair here, but I’m not sure that rousing the hope of a few nuts in Portugal is going to do what the Mágové want.”

Carlos wore a speculative frown. “The numbers of those who truly believe in the Sleeping King may be small, but it will take very little to convince those whose despair and desperation can be romanticized into supporting a foolish cause. Poverty, unrest, disillusion, dispossession . . . This modern Europe is full of it and the number of those who feel hopeless and angry is growing. And from what I see, my countrymen are not what they once were. The world, the passage of time, has crushed them, reduced them from a people who once ruled an empire girdling the globe to those who barely rule their own country. With the Inferno Dragão, the Kostní Mágové could burn Portugal to ash and that alone would not be enough. But a legendary monster rising in a time of fear? It fits the myth of a coming apocalypse that they have sown, and it amplifies the irrational. It is something so far beyond what normal men and women believe in normal circumstances that many—most, eventually—will reject any more logical attempt at explanation. It will turn their logic against them. They will be hopeless, unable to imagine what to do, in the face of the impossible made flesh. Not all of the relics the bone mages have taken are intended to build the creature—only to sow discord and create other, smaller engines of terror. We will have to deprive them of the remaining pieces of their puzzle.”

“How?” I started.

Quinton interrupted. “None of this conversation is going to matter if we get captured,” he said, taking a step away from the bench and the window near it. “Look out the window, discreetly, and tell me what—or more to the point—who you see across the street.”

Carlos leaned his head to one side and peered down. I turned my gaze sideways through the Grey, looking for energy signs that were familiar or dangerous. There were three distinct and unpleasant forms outside in the Grey and a fourth, weaker one, farther down the road. The first was a violent tangle of colors tightly contained in bands of white that rose from the cold lines of the Grid in the street below—I knew the shape of it, but the colors weren’t as I remembered them. Beside it were two shorter shapes: One was a brittle black and bone-white with towering spikes of blood-red erupting from it; the other was a less-complex black-and-white I recognized from two nights earlier as Maggie Griffin. I couldn’t tell much about the fourth one—the colors were strange shades of aqua, violet, and marine blue, their curling, calligraphic shape unfamiliar. I stepped away from the window also and pushed myself back into the normal plane, casting only a glance out the physical window to confirm what I thought.

Well down the road, a skinny teenager crouched at the edge of the sidewalk, looking around with strange, dreamy eyes as he chalked something on the stones. I wasn’t sure if he was part of the party closer to the house or not. Across the street, at its widest point, where the road turned and flowed around a huge old tree that was now in the center of the lane, Maggie Griffin stood with her back to us, dressed as before in her narrow black dress and heels. She stood just in front of two men as if arguing with or being chastised by them. One I recognized instantly: Quinton’s father, James McHenry Purlis. He leaned heavily on a cane and his stance was awkward, his left trouser leg falling unevenly over the clumsy shape of a badly fitted artificial leg. Beside him stood the old man I’d seen with the priest and again at the bone temple with Griffin. He was short and slim, but age hadn’t bent him and where his wavy hair hadn’t gone gray, it was the lusterless black color of soot.

“Rui Araújo e Botelho de Carreira,” Carlos said. “When we both labored under Lenoir—the mage who imprisoned Sergeyev—he was called O Anjo do Dor.”

Quinton scowled. “The Angel of Pain? That seems kind of anticlimactic. Why not the Angel of Death? It has more gravitas.”

“That is what he called me when his education passed into my hands.”

“I should have guessed.”

Carlos only lifted an eyebrow.

“And of the others, one I don’t know, one’s Griffin, and the other’s your father,” I added. “And like Sam said—his left leg is missing from the knee down and his energy color is . . . way off. That can’t be good.”

Now Carlos scowled. “This presents a complication, but possibly an advantage to us. Rui cannot leave Portugal and plainly he is the master at work here. Whatever else they need to complete the Dragão do Inferno, it must be in Portugal and they will set it aflame here.”

“That’s nice. In the meantime, we need to get the hell out of Dodge,” said Quinton.

“There are tunnels—” I started.

“Those will only take us into the castle,” Carlos said. “With Rui and Griffin this close, that would be an insufficient distance. We can buy time, but with no safe harbor to flee to, time is not enough.”

“Let’s start by getting out of this room where they can see us,” I suggested. “Apparently, Rafa’s temporacline doesn’t operate here, since we see the contemporary world through the windows, and not the world of her time—as we did in the salon last night.”

Quinton looked to Carlos. “My dad’s a hell of a tracker. What about this Rui?”

“Only fair, without recourse to the bones, but he has the scent of us from our visit to their circle. He knows we are here as well or better than your father does.”

“Would he be able to detect our presence when we’re in Rafa’s time frame?”

“Yes, but it would be confusing, even with Griffin’s assistance. If they were in the house and we were outside it, however, the difficulty would be greater, since the house traps magic and contains many temporaclines that scatter and dissipate spells attempted by those unfamiliar with the building’s peculiarities. I could also ensure that they have difficulty leaving. . . .”

“Then we should get into the kitchen, where Rafa’s effect is strongest. That will buy us a little time right now to figure out where to run and how to get them stuck in here when we do.”

“I have no doubt that they will enter on their own if we leave any opening. You trust our mysterious Rafa’s effect more than I,” Carlos said, but he started for the door with us right behind him.

“It’s not that I trust it—or her,” said Quinton as we began down the tower stairs, “but that I’ve been stuck here more hours than either of you and had the chance to study her more. There’s something very strange about Rafa.”

“What, aside from being dead?” I asked.

“Yes. She’s aware of the passage of time since her death, and yet she really isn’t. It’s as if events happen in a vacuum and they all occur simultaneously.”

“Ghosts lose their sense of time and chronology,” I said. “They have no reference for events outside their own lifetimes. Or at least most don’t.”

“I’ve been trying to figure out how she’s connected to this house, aside from having been the housekeeper. She seems to know Amélia, and yet, their lifetimes have no overlap. Ghosts aren’t usually aware of other ghosts, are they?”

Carlos and I exchanged glances over Quinton’s head, but it was I who answered. “If they were aware of an older ghost before they died, they might know about them afterward. But it’s rare for them to know a ghost from a different time frame the same way you and I know living people. It’s not like there’s some ghostly party going on where they discuss their afterlives with one another.”

“But that’s the relationship they seem to have. Rafa calls Amélia ‘Avó,’ which means—”

“Grandmother,” Carlos supplied.

Quinton stopped at the second floor hallway and offered an expectant look.

Carlos shook his head. “I had no children and most of my near family was executed. There were a few surviving women and children, but their descendants would be remote nieces or cousins at best.”

“But it’s possible she is a relative.”

“In a distant fashion.”

Quinton looked thoughtful. “Did your family have any . . . estates or land elsewhere in Portugal?”

“Yes, many.”

“Any that grew olives?”

“Probably, but they were no concern of mine since I was a bastard and would not inherit any of them.”

“What about your wife?”

“Her family had no title, but they were wealthy and I believe they gave her a small property as a wedding gift. It produced income, but it was in the east. I never saw it.”

“You mean, like . . . the Middle East?”

“No. Eastern Portugal near the Spanish border. It was an area frequently in dispute between the two countries.”

“They grow olives in the east, but are more famous for cork, wheat, livestock. . . . No wonder she apologized. . . .”

“For what?”

“She said there was nothing left but olives as if that were a disappointment. If, when you were alive, the estate made its money off the cork oaks or other products but those are all gone now, she might have felt she’d let you down . . . Dom Carlos. She talks about you like you’re some kind of family legend. You’re certain Amélia didn’t . . . have an affair or anything like that . . . ?”

“No. It would be surprising if she hadn’t. But there was no pregnancy, no child.” Carlos frowned. “But if Rafa is a granddaughter of Amélia’s through adultery, she should have no tie to this house. It is mine alone.”

“Well, she’s somebody’s kid. Maybe we should have a chat with Amélia before we blow town,” Quinton suggested, and turned to continue down the stairs to the kitchen.

Outside, I heard a distant boom and a crack like that of giant wings, while a shiver of heat passed through the Grey.