A Shadow All of Light (19 page)

“My duty? How can that come about? Castilio knows me and will take care that I do not depart a next encounter unscathed. How am I to evade his enmity?”

“Tomorrow at the noon hour he will be engaged in a duel with Mutano in the graveyard atop Mount Windscaur in the northern precinct of the town, a good half league distant from the Haywain Inn. Then you may enter his rooms, put the question to Sunbolt, and bring away with you Mutano's voice which you shall have captured in the chambered spirals of the silver trumpet. Also, you are to gather the two shadows of Creeper which ought to be present there.”

“Shall he not have suspected a design against him and have posted a confederate to guard his belongings?”

“That would present a difficulty your ingeniousness must overcome.”

“I do not comprehend why we have set upon him two shadows of Creeper,” I said. “Our plan as it stands does not require their presence.”

Astolfo said, “If 'twere only to train them to an exercise, that would be value enough.”

“Well, I will perform this commission,” I said, “but I should like to exact some payment for it, some just return for my trouble, so that I can fulfill my obligations to the family Sativius, for I have formed, I believe, an artifice that may help to resolve the affair.”

“What have you struck?”

When I began to list my necessities—the blue mirror, the sheet of transparent glass, the vials of silver salt, and so forth—I saw that Mutano looked at me with an expression of full surprise. I considered it a victory to have startled my raw-knuckled tutor, who so continuously regarded me as an addlehead ploughboy. Astolfo smiled knowingly, however, and murmured an unintelligible phrase about “membraneous effluence.” He acquiesced to my requests for materials and promised that Mutano would aid me in my endeavor.

Just before noon on the morrow I placed myself around the corner across the cobbles from the Haywain so that I might see while standing concealed. In time a groom led round a black, mettlesome mare with black leathers to the front and Castilio came out. He snatched the bridle from the lad and seemed to wish to bark at him an imprecation, yet no sound issued when he opened his mouth. He was in foul temper, all out of sorts with the bright day that had followed the rainy hours. He mounted and jogged crisply away, his saber flapping against his thigh as he plied more spur than necessary.

I tarried a while longer, observing all that I could, and then entered the inn and made my way unhindered to Castilio's rooms. All was just as it had been before, except that the female scarf was absent. No drawer was locked, no door bolted. The man seemed to invite inspection of his every article and, finding things thus, I went cursorily about the business, then turned my attention to matters feline.

First I ascertained the whereabouts of the two shadows of Creeper. The primary dark one had nestled beneath the neatly dressed bed; and the lighter secondary had crouched inside an overturned boot. In a cushioned chair by the window sat the orange Sunbolt that Mutano had found here and described in detail. There was no mistaking this large tom with his subtle stripes of slightly yellow tint. He dozed, with feet tucked under and eyes almost completely shut. But the movement of his ears indicated awareness that I was in his presence.

Here now was the moment of revelation. I had always been curious to conjecture what Mutano's voice would sound like, he being so large of corpus and saturnine of temperament. Would it boom out like a tympanum? Or might it thunder and reverberate like an empty barrel rolled down a tall flight of wooden stairs? Perhaps in issuing from the voice-box of this cat, it would roar forth like some tiger of the night.

I placed myself before the animal, produced our trumpet-device, and turned the wide bell toward it, keeping the cork-lined round of parchment stopper in my right hand, ready to seal the aperture once the sound entered into the tapering silver labyrinth. Then I put to it the question it could not evade:

“Art thou King of the Cats?”

It opened its green, agate-hard eyes and elevated its hindquarters and gave a mighty stretch with its forepaws, seeming to extend to the lengthiest every ligament and fiber of muscle in its thorax. It yawned its widest. Then it resettled itself into its former posture, turned its wedgy face upward, and said:

“Nay. The hour is not yet.”

I clapped the stopper in, wondering already if I had held the device in horizontal position aright and in sufficient proximity to the cat's mouth. I had tried to make no sound that would obstruct the passage of the words through the aether or adulterate them with an unwanted noise.

Naught was left to do now but to gather the two shadows of Creeper into the inner folds of my shagreen cloak and march back home across Tardocco. I set a leisurely pace, for there was much to think on.

Mutano's voice was not orotund and commanding, as I had supposed, but rang out a clear, lyrical treble. Astolfo had avouched that he was a musical man, but that disclosure had not prepared me for the peculiar sweetness of tone and the light, reedy vibrato that were so winning in timbre. Had the cat's vocal physiognomy altered Mutano's own, to make it so dulcet? I have endured the amorous lays of cats in the midnight hours with small patience and have found none of them seductive. To appreciate the music they create requires an amount of education I did not yet possess. Whimsically, I pictured Mutano in a form feline, slinking out under a great buttery moon and entreating his lady love to his rapturous embrace with a harmonious cadenza and then receiving as her melodious refusal his own terse, traditional rebuttal:

“Nay. The hour is not yet.”

*   *   *

“These duels consume a tiresome portion of the clock,” Astolfo said to me when I returned.

The three of us had lately formed the habit of occupying the small library. In time past we had gathered most often in the great kitchen, but the scullery staff and Iratus complained that we were too often present when he had tasks in hand. For his part, Astolfo would rarely gainsay his favorite cook; that artisan was necessary, he claimed, for the conduct of financial affairs, supplying as he did a sumptuous table when clients were invited.

“I had not expected that Mutano would return till near twilight,” I said. I leaned forward in a strap-bottomed chair and watched the two shadows of Creeper gambol together in the far corner of the room. He, the caster of the umbrae, was nowhere to be seen. Lately, Creeper had been known to sleep for days on end, rousing only to tend to the demands of gut and bowel. It was explained to me that the drawing off of two lively shadows from his form depleted his store of
vis vitae
; long sleeping aided return of it.

“These two, Mutano and Castilio, are acting without seconds,” Astolfo said, “and there is no need for elaborate protocol—and yet they will be long at the business, though the combat itself shall prolong for only swift-flying minutes.”

“I marvel at his choice of weapons,” I said, “for Mutano knoweth well that the saber is not the steel to which he is best accustomed.”

“Perhaps his challenge is to himself, as well as to Castilio.”

“He hazards his life. Is it not too risky a venture to gain so small a point of honor?”

“The rules and limits Mutano establishes for himself are unknown to me. It may be that if we apprehended the rules, his comportment would display a logic.”

“'Tis well beyond my fathoming.”

“I see there in the corner the two shades of Creeper,” Astolfo said. “I conclude, then, that you have brought off your part of the affair successfully.”

“I cannot affirm yea or nay,” I replied. “I followed my instructions to the letter. Whether I managed to regain with our little trap Mutano's voice, I cannot say. If so I did, then it is here.” I reached behind my chair and produced the trumpetlike contraption.

Astolfo then required me to give a full account of all that took place but broke off my narrative when I told of entering the room. “Pray do not leap to the middle,” he said. “Did you take heed that Castilio had already departed?”

I hastened to assure him that I had kept watch until he had mounted for his appointment and had kept at my post for some little time afterward.

“You observed him to come out and take the reins?”

“I did.”

“How did his demeanor appear to you—in comparison, I mean, with the way you found him two days ago in the tavern room?”

I closed my eyes to bring the picture clear to mind. “He seemed restless of spirit. In the tavern he looked all a piece of easy insolence, but coming out to meet Mutano, he looked somdel apprehensive. Certes, he was irritable, for he was harsh to his groom.”

“It appeareth, then, that Creeper's shadows performed well their offices,” Astolfo said. “They were set there to obstruct his breathing in the night, thus to prevent sound sleep. You have experienced this obstruction of inhalation by the cat's shadow, have you not?”

“I have.”

“Out he came then, ill tempered and nervy, not so well fit to go at sabering.… And when he had mounted?”

“Off he cantered, after a sharp spurring of the stallion's flanks.” I went on to tell, at a calm pace, everything else that I had heard and seen and done, expressing my surprise at the sound of Mutano's voice as the cat spoke its sentence to me. I tried to describe the peculiar sweetness of timbre and melodiousness of cadence.

“Have you ever stood in a wintry grove of trees with a cold wind scraping and rattling the bare limbs together so that they creaked and squealed?” Astolfo asked.

“Yes.”

“That is how I recall the sound of Mutano's voice. None of this consort of musical tones that you speak of, but an eldritch grating almost to stand one's neck hairs on end.”

“I will avouch for what I heard. You told me before that he was a sometime minstrel.”

“His speaking voice was quite unmusical. It may be that this is a peculiarly musical cat and that his native talents wrought a happy change upon Mutano's vocal qualities in his ordinary speaking. We may hope this to be the case, for the other explanation is less sanguine.”

“How so?”

“A man who performs so audacious a theft as that of another man's voice will not be content to perform the deed a single time only. It may be that this o'er-sugared voice you heard belongeth to another than Mutano and that his is placed in another receptacle. Would you think that the voice you heard from the cat might have been purloined from a woman?”

I thought upon it. “I should not say so. For all its harmoniousness, it lacked a certain softness we associate with the fair.”

“We shall not know what is certain for some small space of time,” Astolfo said. “Perhaps you will tell now what progress you have made in the affair of the Sativius family.”

“I shall describe a contrivance I have imagined, a complicated arrangement of mirrors and sheets of glass. I cannot effect the portage of these elements alone and will ask Mutano's aid.”

“He is in your debt.”

“So I have expected. I shall desire him to help to move and position these glasses.” I rose and walked to a long library table and returned with a large square of paper. “Here I have drawn out my plans, if you should care to see them over.”

Astolfo took the crowded page with an air of lazy amusement, looked at it, and began turning it sidewise and topsy-turvy. “You make up your designs with great enthusiasm,” he commented. Soon, though, he commenced to study my scribbles and hatchings with care, humming a tuneless ditty. He spent a goodish deal of time examining the sheet before rolling it into a cylinder and laying it across his lap. “These conceits you have laid out here—do they originate in your brain or found you them in some treatise tucked away in our shelves?”

“They are mine.”

He nodded. “The pride of your tone assures me. I ask the question because of the coincident nature of your imaginings.”

“In what way?”

He held up the page. “The designs you have made are similar in many respects to the methods that Mutano and I employed to animate the shades of Creeper.”

“I have no knowledge of how that was done and, as you can see, I have no ambitions to create shadows of independent force and motion. I would not care to animate the children's umbrae, only to separate them one from another.”

“It is your notion then that the twins do each possess a shadow and that one is contained inside the other?”

“Yes.”

“And you propose with this arrangement of glasses to separate the two shadows so that they will then attach to their proper casters?”

“That is my plan.” I waited with some wariness for his sentence upon my constructions. I could hardly expect him to applaud them, but if he disallowed Mutano to work in my behalf, I would have to begin over once more, and he had warned me that time was rapidly shortening before a sad fate befell the young ones.

“It seems sound so far as it reaches,” he said. “I might suggest a few improving touches, if they will not injure your pride or damage your project as you see it.”

“I welcome any advice of Maestro Astolfo.” I made a teasing half bow from my seated position.

“My advice must wait,” he said, “for Mutano has returned, I believe.”

In strode he. His complexion was flushed, his eyes glary, but he wore one of his monstrous, wide-mouthed grins.

A line of spattered blood dotted his tunic from the collar down to the last button. It was not his own.

“Welcome,” said Astolfo.

In reply, Mutano tossed upon the small table between us a blood-soaked codpiece I recognized as belonging to Castilio.

*   *   *

Astolfo and I were not to hear the sound of Mutano's voice—if indeed he had acquired a voice—for some little time, because he took himself aside to spend long hours in company with the capturing instrument, inhaling or imbibing his own voice from the mechanism. We surmised that vocal experimentation engaged him, that he was exercising his throat in private, and that he would reveal the result when he thought most proper.