The Universal Mirror (2 page)

The breathing from the pit was quickening and Quentin remembered then that, whatever his own fear was, he had left Asahel deep down in the earth, alone with his.

"Have you got the hammer yet?" Asahel's gravelly voice was tight- showing more tension than Quentin suspected his friend would have liked.

"No, not yet." A pause, then Quentin lied to cover his shame. "I can't find it."

"It's in my coat."

His stomach lurched as he heard the words but he didn’t betray his feeling with sound. Instead, he stumbled over to the coat, his hands reddening as they rummaged through the coarse black wool. He dug through pockets full of receipts, coins and small, stray objects before his hand fell on the small wooden handle. Clenching it, he tugged it forth and returned to the hole.

Kneeling, Quentin called, “Do you want me to hand it down?” He heard the sound of a boot stepping in water.

“No, do you know- I think I’d rather you were down here?” Though the sentence was characteristically patient in tone, Quent could sense a strained urgency in the hurried weight of his friend’s voice. “My feet are half-soaked in this rain.” The sharp intake of Asahel’s breath echoed up, then the man added, “They’re not as big as yours.”

“Very funny,” he said, climbing down. His hand still coiled around the hammer so tightly the knuckles were white, he held it out to Asahel.

“You’re going to have to let go.”

“Right.” The fingers uncurled. He’d been unaware of how hard he was holding it. Quentin watched, his body numb, as Asahel knelt in the water, shivering. There wasn’t enough to create a consistent depth of more than a quarter-inch on the casket but he noticed that, clumsy as the broader man was, he managed to plant both of his knees in spots where the wood had warped and water had collected.

That faint, sweet smell was flooding his nostrils again, mingling with the complex textures of sweat, rain, earth and new grass. It reminded him of rose blossoms gone sour, overblown and gone to seed.

The first nail cracked, the wood of the casket groaning with the pressure. Asahel’s knee pressed down a little harder as he leaned forward, the wood sagging underneath his weight.

“Stop,” Quentin said. “Stop. This doesn’t seem right.”

“That’s because it’s not.” The other man’s paling face flickered with green shadows as he looked up at Quentin, wide brown eyes sunken with lack of sleep. “But it was your idea.”

“I didn’t think-” The clattering of the hammer against the wood as it dropped from Asahel’s fingers broke the words.

“I know you didn’t,” Asahel’s face looked fevered now, the bridge of nose and cheek so red it looked as if touching it would blister the skin. “You never do.”

“What do you mean by that?” He stepped closer, his foot bracing the pooling water that Asahel was kneeling in.

“Nothing, I guess.” The wind picked up and the lantern above them rocked, pulling the light away from the top of the hole. It was now so black that he couldn’t see the other man. Quentin could only feel the warmth echoing off his legs, only warm because it was so bitterly cold in the rest of the space.

“What do you mean by that?” Quentin repeated helplessly.

“You brought the shovel.” There was a long pause before Asahel said, “But I had to do most of the digging. That’s all.” It was more than shovel and hands of which he spoke. The younger man pushed himself off the ground slowly, body groaning from the strain of it. He didn’t take the hand that his friend was holding out. Quentin thought to himself that it was because he could not see it.

“She- it- was alive once.” It was a tame argument after the impassioned rhetoric that had brought Asahel with him in the dark of the night. “It didn’t seem real before.”

“No,” Asahel agreed. “It didn’t.”

“Perhaps if you hadn’t chosen a woman-”

“Perhaps.” But he didn’t sound convinced. The thud of metal of wood stilled Quentin slightly until he felt Asahel press the handle into his hands, still damp with the other man’s sweat. “You’re filling it in though.”

Quentin’s boots were still mud-slicked from the rain when he entered the hall.  He stood in the entrance for a moment; his arms outstretched just slightly, water dripping down from his coat onto the floor.  It was too late for servants to answer, however, and he had his coat off and in hand by the time Cosimo came barreling down the corridor.  The manservant’s eyes were still crusted in sleep, fingers curled in the fist that was his only weapon.

“Sir—” Despite the tired blinking of his eyes, Cosimo didn’t yawn.  “Let me take your coat.”

He held out an arm towards Quentin and the younger man draped the damp fabric over it, ignoring the fact that Cosimo was still in his nightclothes.  The ritual was performed as gracefully as if Quentin had come in at sunset rather than near-dawn.

“Is Catharine awake?”  Quentin’s voice lifted on the question, his foolish eyes hopeful.

Cosimo hesitated.

“Come on, man,” Quentin said, “I know that you hear everything in this house.”  The movement of the older man’s head was close enough to a nod to give Quentin hope.

“Perhaps you would like—”

“No, no.”  Quentin’s eyes were still on the landing.  “Don’t bother on my account.  I’m home late, that’s all.”  If Cosimo thought his lord’s behavior strange, his face didn’t betray it.  He simply nodded, picking up his lamp.

“Do you need anything more of me then?”

“Blast, no,” Quentin laughed unevenly.  “Just don’t remind me tomorrow what a fool I was tonight.”  Cosimo nodded again, this time deeply, and began to walk back towards the servants’ quarters.  The other man waited for him to disappear completely before springing up the stairs.

Catharine’s room was at the far end of the hall, at opposite ends to his own.  Since their wedding night three years before, Quentin had spent little time behind that door.  No servants’ gossip or the idle chatter of society had brought them any closer together—instead, the more people talked, the further away she edged from him.  He stared longingly at the crack of light under the door, not invitation, but announcement.

He walked over.  His knuckles rapped lightly against the wood, then drew away.

Quentin looked down at his hands and saw that they, too, were still dirty.  Bits of clay and dust tainted the lines of his palm as he flexed it, watching the grime fall in tiny flakes to the floor.  How bad were Asahel’s hands?  Even at his cleanest, his friend’s face seemed always to be smudged with dirt, his clothing to smell of the sea.

Quentin loved that about him but he would never, ever admit it.

The door opened while he was thinking of the other man.  When he looked up, he wasn’t sure how long Catharine had been staring.  Her eyes were the only beautiful part left of her face—wide and gray; there was a life in them that he knew no other woman to possess.  The rest of her skin was pitted and scarred, a reminder of the plague that had come to Cercia just before she reached womanhood. 

“Yes?”  She asked, sleep in her voice.  As always, Quentin felt a tremble on the back of his neck at the sound of her words.  He could feel his ears start to go red at the tips, the heat flushing rapidly into his cheeks.

He didn’t know what to say now that the moment was upon him.

“It’s late,” Quentin finally managed to scratch out.  He wasn’t sure why he’d said it, save for some lost, lingering hope that she might care.

“I know.”  Catharine’s eyes narrowed.  A pock on her left cheek strained with the gesture, the red skin cracking.  She crossed her arms over her chest like a shield.  What do you expect me to say?  Her gaze seemed to ask and Quentin looked down once more at the dirt covering his body.

She moved away from the door, opening a path inwards, and he said, “No.  I didn’t come here for that.”  It hurt to see her shoulders relax as he said it, her arms coming uncrossed.

“What did you come for then?”

“I thought we could… talk.”  The confidence he showed his best friend disappeared in the presence of his wife.

“Talk?  About what?”  Everything about Catharine went sharp.  “We don’t talk, Quentin.”  She withdrew again, her gaze receding.  He noticed how thin she’d grown since they married, how pointed the tips of the elbow she rubbed nervously.

He reached for her and she flinched.

Their eyes met.  Catharine turned away first.

“I wanted to tell you where I was tonight,” he said lamely.

“I don’t want to know.”  He couldn’t determine what she was thinking by the sound of her voice.  It was simply heavy, the sound of a woman used to carrying the world on her back.  “Please, Quentin, if you need a confessor, call Cosimo.  It is what we pay him for, isn’t it?”

And with that, the door shut in his face.  The sound of its closing was quiet—not even Catharine dared to slam a door in the face of a husband.

Quentin almost knocked again.  He knew what she was thinking.  There were no good reasons for him to have been out almost until dawn.  The cold, harsh light of morning shining through the hall windows reminded him that this was best. The lie that she believed was better—safer—than the truth.

In his room, he took a seat at the small desk in the corner.  There were no books at it, no ledgers—only a few sheets of paper, a quill, and inkpot.  Quentin hated to write for himself.  The ink always bled into his skin and stained for days.

He stared now at the quill, focusing angrily on the currents of energy in the room. There was little magic in him at the moment but he forced out what was.  The pressure released from his bones, wrapping itself around the quill instead as it jerked up of its own accord, lightly dipping down into the inkpot.  It slashed the air as it came out.  Quentin bit back a yelp of irritation as ink splattered across the desk and his sleeve.  He grabbed the quill furiously to stop its hideous movement, magical energy stinging his hand, then ebbing until it was little more than a hum.

“Asahel,” he wrote.  Quentin paused after he wrote the other man’s name.  They were meant to be acquaintances, nothing more.  Certainly not friends.  He didn’t want to think about what name might be given to the act of grave robbing—conspirators would have been a gentle name for that.  Blowing a strand of hair away from his face, he stared down at a blotch already on the page and started again.

“Asahel—I ought not to have dragged you into this—” He didn’t do apologies well, much less so ones he didn’t mean.  Quentin scratched the letter out and began again.

“Asahel, about last night—”

And again.  “Asahel, next time, I’ll bring the shovel—”

It was the last which gave him real pause and he crumpled up all his attempts at letters, ignoring the wet ink that leaked onto his palms.  The pages went sailing into the corner, left for some servant to retrieve.

There is nothing for it, Quent thought as he stumbled into his bed, falling face first into the pillows.  I’ll just have to go and see him.

Sun had barely broken through the clouds by noon.  It was a hazy light that shadowed the docks, a blue cast to the air.  It evoked the murmurings of the men that Asahel passed on the pier.  His head watching his own feet more carefully than the sky, he didn’t bother to shut out their voices.

“The weather’s been like this for days,” a low voice growled.

“You figure the magicians had a hand in it?”  The question—spoken just barely in Asahel’s hearing—hushed the group’s whisperings.  Asahel kept walking, his step slowing enough to catch a few stray words.  “Not him.  This weather hurts him as much as us, it does.”

It was difficult to keep walking casually after that, the deliberate absence of their eyes just as heavy on his mind as their staring would have been.  If he stopped, Asahel knew, the men would say no more.  He wasn’t a bold enough man to challenge them and never had been.

He stopped at the last pier, feeling the wood yawn under his weight.  There was no one here—the last ship that had moored on this dock was Serenissma.  The great vessel had disappeared at sea months ago and with her, Asahel suspected, his mother’s last hopes for his greatness.  What there was of the Soames fortunes had been tied up in Serenissma and her cargo hold full of spice.  While they hadn’t yet acknowledged defeat, the small wreaths of flowers drying on the pilings showed that others had given their men up to the sea.

Lowering himself down, he sat on the edge of the pier, his legs dangling off the edge.  It was here that the sounds of the sea could engulf him.  Gulls cried and swooped above him, gray wings fluttering louder than the waves slapping the wood beneath his feet.  In the distance, he could hear the clanging of bells as a boat neared the fog that surrounded Cercia.

A ferry, he thought.  Cercia was a small island in comparison to the Eastern Nations.  As a child, his father had delighted in taking him on shipboard voyages.  They had wandered through the spice markets of Anjdur, selecting wares for trade.  Asahel could still taste the chalky-sweet cassia powder of the stalls in his memory as he closed his eyes.