“You believe that the caster of this shadow is still alive?” Pecunio asked.
“I know men now standing in their flesh less lively than this shade. Whoever stole it from its caster had best beware.”
Pecunio replied quickly, his tone apprehensive. “I did not take it and I do not know who the thief might be. I bought it only for its fine qualities. How it came to the seller I do not care to know.”
“Very well,” Astolfo said. “But in that case, I fail to see how I might be of service.”
“It was represented to me as the shadow of Morbruzzo,” Pecunio said.
“The pirate?” Astolfo asked. There was an unaccustomed hint of surprise in his voice. “The sea raider infamous in broadside and ballad? The villain who razed the port of Lamia and ravished the queen of the Dimiani clan? If this be his, it is a rare treasure, but its price may be higher than you are willing to pay.”
“I have already parted with a smallish treasury for it.”
“I do not speak of gold.”
“My life, you mean?”
“He is no squeamish breed of pirate, by all account.”
“What if it is not Morbruzzo but only some other felon?”
“Then the value of the object decreases, yet you are still in danger.”
“Can you determine for me the lay of the situation?”
“Let us be clear,” Astolfo said. “You would have me first affirm whether this shadow really is that of the man-slaughtering Morbruzzo; then I am to find out if he has sent or is sending agents against you; and then I am to advise you whether you may guard yourself or if you should rid you of the property as soon as may be.”
Pecunio hesitated, then nodded.
“If I undertook this commission, I should put myself in mortal danger.”
“To which you are no newcomer.”
“In fact, you have already exposed me to such by inviting me here.”
“There are already those with designs upon your life by day and by night.”
“If I accepted this little chore, my fee would be a tall one.”
“Your fees are always exorbitant.”
“You shall have answer two days hence. I know that Falco and I will be followed when we leave here today, but I shall take pains to ensure we will not be followed when we return. Now if you will bid a servant guide us out of this labyrinthine storehouse, I will make certain that rash Falco here will refrain from puncturing him.”
Pecunio smiled. “Of course.”
Astolfo placed the shadow back in the great dark closet and Pecunio turned home the locks upon it. Then he crossed to the table and raised the decanter in invitation. “Shall we seal our compact with another sip?”
“I have not yet agreed,” said Astolfo. “But when our business is concluded, a glass would be welcome.”
“I understand.” Pecunio reached to a shelf above, took down a hand-sized copper bell, and rang it. Almost immediately the door opened and a serving man stood there, a slender, yellow-haired fellow who wore incongruous high boots. He was fair of countenance, and his person might well have been thought attractive by helmsmen as well as seamstresses. His feet, to judge by the boots, were outsized, even larger than my own.
“Be so good, Flornoy,” Pecunio said, “as to show our guests the way out.”
As we followed this figure through the corridors, I was surprised by the aggressive way he stepped along, but Astolfo seemed to take no notice, peering in one direction and another along the clammy walls.
* * *
When the warehouse door eased to behind us and we were alone in the malodorous alley, I started to ask one of the hundred questions that bubbled in my head.
“Not yet,” Astolfo said. “We shall be followed, and we must discover by whom. At the corner next, we shall part. I shall cross the cobbles to the tavern opposite. You turn to the right toward the wharf, then cut back through the little passage there and come round behind our pursuer. Find out everything you can, and we shall rejoin at the manse.”
I followed his orders and took advantage of the occasion to gain some knowledge of this port of Tardocco upon which the well-being of the city depended. The bay was one of the most tranquil, protected from the wild storms of the Rodantic Sea by two peninsulas that curved round like the claws of a crab to form an inlet. The harbor that lay within was extremely deep, unfathomed at its centermost, so that its waters were more black than blue, so black as to give credence to old wives’ tales of a sea dragon that dwelt below. It was called the Mardrake, this dragon. The old fable with its monster was a favorite among the gentry and nobility, who recalled the legend as a handy terror with which to correct mischievous children. “The Mardrake adores to gobble up wicked little boys like Ricardino.” There were Mardrake toys of various shapes and forms to amuse children.
The hoary legend was no hindrance to trade. Tardocco was a busy and prosperous port but not well guarded by civil or military arms. The possibility of pirate attack was a source of continuous concern. Part of the lore of the Mardrake was that it was guardian during the direst circumstances. When the enemy came, it would rise from unsounded depths to fall upon their vessels and tear them to flinders. It was a jolly tale, but it did not serve so well as would a warship.
I wandered about for a space, trying to appear to be aimlessly idle as I kept my eye out for any figure that might be following me. At last I turned my steps toward Astolfo’s town villa, which was now my home.
* * *
When I got back there Astolfo had not yet arrived. Mutano, his dumb but not at all deaf servant, allowed me the largess of the pantry, including a hunk of buttery cheese, a handful of black bread, and a tankard of ale to obliterate the taste of Pecunio’s sickly-sweet wine. While I was making good use of these eatables, Mutano signaled to me that Astolfo had returned and now awaited me in his library—the small one with the fire grate, not the great glum one with all the musty books and their eye-murdering tiny print.
Seated in his leather armchair, Astolfo motioned me to the splint-bottom across. “Who was’t dogged us, think you?”
“I saw no one,” I said.
He thought. “That means there were not two hounds on our trace. You would have spotted two. You might well have spotted one who was inept. So either there is none or there is one who is sharp in his craft. We shall of course proceed on the latter assumption.”
“Proceed to what end?”
“Why, to preserve our skins and to plate them with gold; that is, to stay alive and make a profit. Here lies the shape of things as I surmise. Pecunio did not come by this shadow in the way of ordinary trade. It was offered to him by someone close enough to Morbruzzo, or whoever the shadow’s owner is, to be in the confidence of the robbery victim so that he could betray him. This would be someone well skilled, with an expensive price on his head. His first thought might have been to sell the shadow back to its caster for a goodly sum and then to renege on the bargain and afterward sell it to Pecunio. In this way, he could make two profits at once. But there may be other motives involved.”
“Who is this overly sly one?”
“He has to be an artful shadow thief. Three well-known adepts have lately dropped from sight. The red-haired Ruggiero with the scarred right hand has not been seen in a fortnight. Perhaps he visits his sullen uncle Pedrono, from whom he hopes an inheritance. The canny, silvery woman Fleuraye and her carefree lover Belarmo have made off with many a prominent shadow over the last few years. Their latest theft, of the Countess Tessania’s shade, has made them conspicuous. Rumor hath it that they now lie low in the neighborhood of the western marshes. Those are three possibles for Pecunio’s seller. And there are others, but there has been some delay. For some reason, Pecunio has kept the shadow too long by him. He feels dangers mounting.”
“How so?”
“Pecunio must have had in hand a second buyer with a heavy purse, or he would not have undertaken so perilous a prospect in the first place. He was to turn it over as s
oon as he got hold of it; the price would be paid; his buyer would have departed for his distant home place, leaving no track. Those who came sniffing around Pecunio would find nothing. But once he had it in his store he was loath to let it go. He kept putting off his buyer. And now this buyer has become fearful and has wisely absented himself. The longer the shadow stays in one place, the easier it is to find.”
“Whatever could Pecunio want with the thing, if not to reap profit as the middleman?”
“Let us consider,” Astolfo said. “What are your thoughts?”
“Well, he is no footpad to use the shadow to lurk for prey at night. He is no diplomat to veil with it the intentions of his words. Nor is he sculptor, painter, or composer to use it to tinct his compositions, adding nuance and subtlety. He is no—”
“We shall both molder in our tombs before you list all the things he is not,” Astolfo declared. “What was his own shadow like when you saw it in his place?”
“The room was dim,” I said, “but meseemeth his own was but paltry, thin, and malformed and palsied when the candles flickered. Just such a shadow as I’d expect to find companion with a miserly merchant.”
“Do you think he would describe his shadow in these terms?”
“You have told me that people rarely form true pictures of their own shadows, but he must have some notion that his is not the handsomest.”
“His temptation, then?”
I thought for a while. “To try it on.”
“To cloak himself in the shadow of one who has faced a hundred dangers in the heaving waters, who has peered laughing into the noose’s mouth, who has crossed sabers with four opponents at once, who has abducted princesses and caused them to adore him—would not that be a seductive temptation?”
“For a daydreaming schoolboy. But Pecunio is elderly.”
“Old, and with little opportunity remaining for a life not bound to the counting house, the tax summons, and the accompt ledger. With the shadow folded about him, he feels the vibrancy of that other life; the sounds and smells of mortal conflict thrill his sluggish blood; the swathe of the shadow around his thighs is like the caress of a woman.”
“So he shall keep it as a plaything?”
“It is too lively. The emanations will give it—and him—away. But his one foolhardy prospective buyer has deserted. Pecunio now believes he has but a single choice left.”
“He is holding it for ransom? Is not that the most foolish of choices?”
“It is. But he can try to misdirect those who would corpsify him to retrieve the shadow.”
I dreaded to ask. “How shall he misdirect his pursuers?”
“By employing us. We shall have been seen visiting Pecunio. His goings and comings are watched every hour. Those who have seen us will take us for middlemen arranging a sale on his behalf. We shall be watched even more closely than he is. They expect that sooner or later we must transport this shadow to the buyer with whom we have made arrangements. At that point, they will attack. They will slash our throats, thrust pikes into our tender guts, and chatter like jovial monkeys as they bear away the prize.”
“We are but decoys in the old man’s plan,” I said. “Let us go now to his rat-ridden warehouse and remove his liver and spleen and feed them to the alley curs. I do not like being made a dupe.”
“What then?”
“We shall be revenged on his insolence.”
“Revenge will not make weightier our purses.”
“We shall have the shadow.”
“And along with it those who will kill us for it. Are you satisfied that it truly is the shade of Morbruzzo the infamous pirate?”
“You described it as the companion of a daring privateer.”
“Yet I think if it belongs to Morbruzzo we would see lying at the mouth of the bay two of his three-masters and his attendant sloop cruising the harbor. He would not scruple to torch this city of Tardocco if he thought he would regain his shade by doing so.”
“If it is not Morbruzzo’s, then—”
“Then we must think upon the matter dispassionately. We must meanwhile guard ourselves closely. Mutano and you and I had better stand four-hour watches until we more clearly comprehend the situation. I will stand first; Mutano will wake you for the third.”
* * *
In the bare little room of the manse Astolfo had allotted me I sat for a while musing at the wall. I stared at the rhymes he had ordered me to carve into the thick headboard of my bed—Bumpkin lad, Protect thy shade; As in this life I come and go, The hardest task myself to know—but they were too familiar to have force upon my mind.
Was I really so bloodthirsty as I boasted? Would I kill an old man in cool revenge? I had never killed anyone, though I had broken pates and cracked bones in rough combat and left a few ostentatious scars on the hides of the unmannerly. But I had never felt an urge to draw blood for the sake of it, even to revenge myself.
Then I realized why my temper had grown so short. I was unsure whether this affair of the pirate’s shadow was an actual piece of business or only another training exercise. Astolfo had set me upon several ventures before, escapades involving intrigues, espials, petty thievery, forgery of sale documents, and so forth. Then, when things were just coming to full boil, he’d stopped me off, saying, “You have done none so ill. But when the actual business is afoot, you must not talk so freely or so loudly, you must not be so hasty to unsheathe, you must listen to the words and even more carefully to the music of the words.” And so forth. I had felt duped as a child is duped, and if this affair with Pecunio was but another lesson in the trade, it seemed a vain waste indeed.
Sometimes I fancied I could see my sweet and zesty youth disappearing like a gourd of water poured on desert sands, and I would wonder if learning the craft of shadows was worth the toil. How had I ever thought of doing it?
In part, my brother Osbro had helped me to decide. He thought himself the clever son, the one quick with ciphering and plans. Claiming to be a reader, he loved to lord over me by quoting some cloud-minded poet or graybeard sage and then asking with an expression of cool mockery, “Now what do you think about that?” And my reply would be a shrug, for I never comprehended a word of what he had said.
At Astolfo’s direction, I have read shelf upon shelf of antique tomes to learn the lore of shadows and the history of that lore. This newly gained knowledge led me to suspect that all those wise saws and pithy remarks Osbro uttered were actually senseless strings of words he linked together himself and that he could not read even one written sentence. That his pretense of ability masked a keen yearning to be a lettered man.
Me he regarded as a backward mud-wit, and his superior airs grew so intolerable that I determined to make my way in life by the use of my mind. I had heard much of those who dealt in shadows, men who stole them and sold them to artists and criminals and politicians and suchlike, men who bought shadows and fashioned them to the taste of pampered women and subtle nobility, men who kidnapped shadows and held them until their proper casters crossed their palms with currency. Such a craft seemed a sort of magic—to transmute a thing so filmy and unsubstantial as a shadow, something almost not there, a thing that was barely a thing, into gold and silver, into acres and houses, carriages and servants. If I could do that, it would be proof that I was not the stone-brain Osbro made me out. Let him poke holes in the dirt and set in his turnips and chop at weeds and counterfeit false sagacities; let him grub out the rest of his days under the rheumy gaze of our taciturn father. With subtle and daring schemes, with swift and nimble fingers, I would amass out of the air itself a fortune as solid as a mountain.
* * *
After Mutano with no gentle hand had shaken me awake, I found myself patrolling the winding, silent corridors of the manse, listening to my own footfalls over the slate floors, seeing naught but the moonlight rubbing through the horizontal slits below the ceilings. No rodent, no death-watch beetle, was stirring; no nightjar sang outside.
I search
ed the cellars with their huge wine casks and stone jugs of oil and bins of grain and meal. All was in order, so I stepped through a small door and sidled up the steps into the south garden. The moon was beginning to set and shadows were long and still. The breezeless, warm hour left the trees motionless.
Nonetheless, there was another presence here, I thought, and in mid-thought saw a heavy form bulk over the top of the garden wall, squeeze carefully around the spearheads mounted there, and begin its descent. This encounter was too easy, and one of Astolfo’s sayings muttered in my head: Where one is seen with ease, Two will be in place.
I slipped off the flagstone path into the dark shelter of an arching willow. My presence would have been spotted by the thief on the wall; he had the advantage of height. But maybe his confederate had not discerned me and would come from hiding to join the other if I stayed still.
No such luck. He was here among the swarm of the drooping withies with me, and when I heard the whisper of leaves against leather behind me, I grasped a handful of the stringy branches and swished them about. By this means I located my man, and I had my dirk in my left hand on the instant; no space for sword-use in this tangle of greenery.
The skulker grunted in surprise and, since the sound would bring his colleague, I thought I might set them upon each other. Shaking the bunched withies as hard as I could to cause confusion, I uttered a doleful, loud groan, as if I had been thrust through. This noise brought the other swiftly into the swirl of branches, and as he came blundering through on my left-hand side, I kicked with all my might the place where one or the other of his knees ought to have been.
He crashed through the willow leaves, falling directly into his comrade’s chest, and this other, finding himself so rudely attacked, choked out a curse and buried his fist in the clumsy one’s face. If his sword had not been so entangled in the willow, he would have taken the life of his friend. But he only laid him cold at his feet.