Sunbolt was away, perhaps in the company of Mutano, and the rats were pranking about in his absence. I reflected admiringly upon Sunbolt’s prowess; the whole of the château had been under his guard; all alone he had protected it. The picture of this solitary, golden animal padding silently through the edifice had inspired my dream.
The other part of the dream was unreadable. The nobleman followed a cat through the dark, protecting in his bosom a flame that devoured him. At one point, when he came to an intersection of corridors, a shapeless shadow leapt out of the darkness and snatched at his own shadow, which cowered away from the attack, gibbering with the sound of a mouse squeaking.
Now here was a shade with power of will …
But only in my dream—and I place no faith in the revelatory powers of dreams. It is difficult enough to deal with umbrae, entities of fractional substance. To deal with dreams I would have to stretch my intuitive faculties beyond their capabilities. Astolfo shared my skepticism, though he did once remark that dreams have suggestive qualities and murmur to us hints sometimes worth pursuing.
For example, maybe a shadow did not have to be self-willed in order to act. What if it were under the control of someone other than its caster, someone who might train it as a hunter trains her hounds or Brotero his cats? If Sibylla’s shadow were actually controlled by Veuglio, it would serve him more efficiently as guide. But why would she relinquish control, assuming that to be possible? What was the relationship between them?
Now I recalled what Astolfo had said of them before their arrival at the villa. Not “she is his daughter” but “she is called by the name of his daughter.” I recalled also the marked emphasis Veuglio gave to his sentence: “Yet an accounting must be made.”
Tightly tangled, here was the central knot of the fabric.
“The rats grow in number,” I said to myself. “Shall we bring Brotero to bear?” I had seen little sign in my earlier visits, but now I fancied I heard rats in the walls and in drains and above the ceilings. “It is as if they keep watch, and when they see Sunbolt depart, gather together in the château.”
I returned to the courtyard, mounted the patient Defender, and rode slowly back to the villa, thinking aloud.
* * *
Mutano’s absence was a subject of sharp curiosity in our villa, but I did not fret. I surmised that if the bargain with Sunbolt had been concluded, the cat now again casting a shadow and Mutano possessing his rightful voice, my colleague would seclude himself for a time. He would be practicing to regain the use of the human tongue and running vocalic scales and singing arias to the groves and skies. He would return to us with his instrument in full glory, ready to bell out “A Boozy Short Leave to My Nymphs on the Shore,” as he so often used to do when the bottle held him in its warm embrace.
So I was surprised when I was walking down the corridor to my quarters to hear a familiar Sssst, ssst. Before I could react, he plucked me by the sleeve to draw me into an empty bedchamber there.
“How now?” I began, but he signed me to be silent and closed the door.
“Mrrr. Eewow…”
I was disappointed when he spoke in that tongue. I replied in my own: “So you could not strike the bargain you desired. Do we yet possess Sunbolt’s shadow?”
He assured me that the cat’s shade was ours still and that negotiations were ongoing, having taken a new turn. In the course of their private business, they had talked of many things, exchanging confidences that neither would have spoken of so freely with another of his own species. Neither would judge the other, since confessions of moral transgressions do not translate, the social codes being so dissimilar, and with cats already holding an opinion of humankind so low it could hardly worsen.
They spoke of this and that and the course of their duologue turned toward the subject of the Baron Tyl Rendig. Mutano wondered at the frigid reclusion of the man and Sunbolt ascribed this behavior to fear. At bottom of the matter were females.
Here the stream of converse grew muddy, because a cat hath no conception how one animal can lay possessive claim to the generative organs of another animal. Small wonder, Sunbolt remarked, that if humans hold to this strange doctrine, they reproduce so infrequently and take so long in the doing of it and bear such puny litters.
The baron was a creature of ugly lusts, according to widely whispered report. He was thought to have abducted more than one young girl, despoiled her in cruelest manner, and ended her life in a way sickening to describe. He had done some like harm to a member of Brotero’s clan, to a niece, perhaps, or to her friend. The baron was unaware of the connection when he applied to Brotero for a cat to patrol the château. Brotero deployed Sunbolt to the house, giving out that the feline was the most accomplished and many-victoried ratter in Tardocco, in all the province of Tlemia, and maybe in all of history, if the exploits of Prodicus the Black Island Mauler are discounted as legend. The baron held a vivid and particular fear of rats, that they would devour a secret treasure he had laid up in his château. Sunbolt could not say what this treasure was, but he proved worthy of his task. After a few spirited skirmishes, the rats learned to keep their wary distance.
“This Sunbolt ranks himself a champion,” I said.
“Long may he thrive, and my proper voice within him,” Mutano replied.
“Yet he never discovered the nature of the treasure?”
Mutano said that the cat told him he had once seen the baron alone in the close room as he fumbled with some dirty old candle ends, taking them up one by one and examining closely, then putting them by and tugging at his red beard. This accidental moment meant nothing to Sunbolt.
“It may be that some of the elements of this affair begin to cling together,” I said. I told him what I had learned from Astolfo and Veuglio about the baron’s fixed idea that the length of his life matched the length of a candle stub. “But how did these short ends come into his hands?”
“They would be sent him as a gift,” Mutano said. “The gift would be a taunt or a threat. The accompanying message would tell that his life and soul depended upon the disposition of these unworthy objects and of the others in the possession of the sender.”
“Why would he credit the message?”
Mutano said, “It can only be that he is guilty of some black misdeed which the sender knows of fully. Fearful rumors abound. Sunbolt considers that the baron is a feral animal, unfettered in his acts by the customs of society or the sensible constraints of animal nature.”
“We must make inquiries,” I said. “This use of the candle ends bespeaks a desire for revenge.”
He stretched his arms before him and yawned widely. Then he enumerated three things we did not know that must bear upon this business. First, we knew nothing of the relation between Maestro Astolfo and Tyl Rendig; we knew little of Veuglio and Sibylla; and we knew not who sent the candles that struck such fear into the baron’s soul.
“It may be simplest to ask our questions directly,” I suggested. “Why not broach them at table tonight?”
He demurred, saying that we gave too much away upon the prospect of getting little in return. We could not know how well the trio were informed and what their own involvements might be. Better to act discreetly, he said, and to pursue inquiries that he and Sunbolt had discussed.
“Well,” I said.
* * *
I had readied a fable to explain Mutano’s absence from the evening table, but the room in which we usually took dinner was empty, the chairs tipped forward against the table, the tapers unlit, the sideboard bare. The kitchen was servantless and the foodstuffs packed neatly into the larder.
I decided to fodder myself in the town, but as I passed the open doorway to the larger library, I heard the scritch-scratch of quill on paper. Astolfo’s back was toward me as he sat writing in a tall ledger. I watched the rooster tail as it bobbed along in his hand and then I stole toward him, curious. I had never seen him write before.
“Come forward, Falco,” he said withou
t turning. “I have been waiting to hear what questions you have. Please seat yourself here at the table.”
I pulled out a chair. Two unlit lamps stood before him; the room was dim and gloomy in this early evening hour.
“For,” he continued, “I have no doubt that questions bedevil your mind.”
“A few, if we are to talk about the affair of the Baron Tyl Rendig.”
“We shall speak of anything you wish.”
“I wish to propose that you may be the one who gifted him with some peculiar tallow candles.”
“Why say you so?”
“The only other person I could conjecture would be unable to do so.”
“That is insufficient proof.”
“I am no magistrate or judge and do not care about legalism. There is much that you conceal from Mutano and me, we who carried out your directions in the baronial house. That is something of a sore point.”
He wiped his pen with a tuft of wool and laid it by the inkwell. “What do I conceal?”
“The true identities of our guests, the blind man with his hawthorn staff and the girl. Sibylla is not the daughter of Veuglio.”
“Never did I say so.”
“I should like to talk to them,” I said.
“The pair are not here. Veuglio wished to visit some of his old acquaintance in the town. As they would not be taking a meal, I dismissed the kitchen servants.”
“You had surmised that I was beginning to untangle some part of the conundrum and so put them out of reach of my questions.”
“Perhaps.”
“You know of the baron’s object of fear. There is but one way that you could. You must have observed some crime or misdeed on his part.”
“That is not exactly so.”
“To those miserable stubs you sent to him, you somehow attached a shadow of peculiar sort.”
“Peculiar?”
“I cannot describe it, but it acted upon his mind and spirit, and perhaps upon his body.”
“In what fashion?”
“So as to increase his natural apprehension to a state of continual, abject fear.”
“Why should I do so?”
“Your reason I cannot guess, but you are the only agent I can think of.”
“You believe that I desire to harm him.”
“Yes. It marks a strange turn in your behavior. You are a man well disposed toward most other men. He must have committed some dreadful act of which you violently disapprove.”
“Why then would I put you and Mutano to construct a maze to protect his interests?”
“I cannot fathom it.”
“Do you fancy me as an avenger of some wrong I know of? That ill suits my amiable disposition.”
“You are wealthy and may pursue any interest as you please. Why should you not avenge some wrong, if it suited your fancy?”
“Our age does not lack for wrongs. Do you picture me choosing among ’em like a butterfly in a flowery meadow, alighting at random?”
I leaned toward him and spoke slowly. “I will say what I think. I think that much of your character, even the greater part, is of a gamesome complexion. I believe that you enlist Mutano and me as players like chess pieces in your games. I believe also that there is an intricate network of these amusements, wherein each enterprise is connected with another in a web so convolute that I never could trace its outline. It may be that you cannot configure the whole of it yourself and that ofttimes you merely improvise. ’Tis likelier, though, that it all hangs together like the arcane philosophy of a deep-browed thinker long gone to his grave.”
He gave a gentle laugh. “That would be the vainest of sports.”
“There is earnest at the end of it. You make a dark search for something beyond the realm of outward appearance, something at the heart of the world, or within it.”
“You conceive that this jumble of a world hath a heart?”
“I can believe you are determined to find out.”
“You credit me too greatly,” he said. “I am but a tradesman.”
“That is a half truth at best. I have busied myself about shadows long enough now to know that close company with them affects the spirit and character of a man.”
“Or a woman, think you?”
“A woman also. Such a woman as Sibylla, perhaps, she who tends the saintly Veuglio.”
“How would you describe these effects you believe umbrae to produce upon a person?”
“Since you know of this subject more deeply than I, I shall not waste breath. But I have thought it best to tell you my thought. I would not have you suspicion that I am spying upon you. Yet I shall try to discover what you game at.”
“Thou’rt an honest fellow then.”
“As this world wags, yes.”
“An honest man must sometimes fortify his virtue with a glass. Let us journey to the kitchen and make trial of a cask of canary Iratus purchased yesterday.”
“Very well,” I said, “and I thank you. But I would like to ask—”
“And we shall speak no more upon this subject.”
He rose and I followed him away. But the subject did not leave my mind.
VII
Shadow of Candles
We were at the paddock in the blue light of morning, inspecting the horses. They had been enclosed here for a long time, the stable being occupied by our Nighthouse and its shadow-eating plants. The horses were in need of exercise. Mutano had been absent from our villa for days and now Defender nuzzled him so heartily that he was nearly pushed over.
“How does the affair progress?” I asked him. “Do you still speak only feline?”
In that language he told me that negotiations had taken a different turn entirely. He had found out that the precious treasure, the valuable to which Tyl Rendig had unbreakably shackled the length of his life, was in the possession of Brotero.
When I asked how this impresario of cats had come by it, he told me that it had been brought to him from the château by a huge black rat he had trained to filch and poach and despoil and do dire damage upon the valuables of Brotero’s foes.
“Is it not his proper purpose to kill rats and not to league with ’em?”
“Ho now, Defender,” he said. “Be still.” The horse was always restless when addressed in cattish.
Mutano scratched with his thumbnail along the line of the black mane and said, “Now and again he will choose one rat and train it in infamous trickeries. He plucks more strings than one upon his cithara.”
“Do you know what this treasure is?”
“I do not, but we are shortly to find out.”
“How so?”
“I made a wager with the man to match Sunbolt in battle against the best of his Maulers. When Sunbolt defeats his champion, Brotero will give over the treasure to me.”
“Do you not run a dread risk? Doth Sunbolt agree to such an arrangement?”
“He is avid upon the prospect.”
“How may he profit?”
“I have wagered with him also. If he loses the battle, I will give back his shadow. If he wins, we will bargain again on different terms.”
“He has the best of it,” I said.
“We shall see.”
“Have you looked upon this Mauler? He may be of size and strength to kill your Sunbolt.”
“Incertitude makes possible the wager,” he replied.
“And the contest will be fair? Brotero does not seem an exemplar of plain dealing.”
“He may try to take a knavish advantage.”
“What then?”
“You shall be looking out for’t and, if it befall, I shall pin his carcass to the wall with a sword and possess myself of a cattery.”
“You are well fit,” I said, “as you already speak the language.”
“Make clear your hours for the second night hence,” he said. “That is the appointed time.”
* * *
The appointed place was a large, resounding, empty warehouse on Rovers Wharf.
A dolorous edifice of crumbling red and black brick, it sat squat upon waterside, poking a rotting pier out over the tides like a twig thrust into a campfire. I arrived early and made a tour of the outer structure but found nothing amiss. I made short work of the lock on a narrow side door and entered the cavernous space. Unlit torches were set about the walls and a low, makeshift gallery had been carpentered around the large, dusty space in the center, the space where the trial of strength would occur.
I examined all closely. The only cause for suspicion was a profusion of rat-holes at the base of the walls; these would be ordinary, except that I formed a strong impression that no rats had infested here for a long period. When I left the building, I took care to set the door-lock back as it had been.
A brothel catercornered eastward offered a balcony with a view of the warehouse, and I stationed there to watch the arrivals. They began to show just before the hour and they made up an expectable crowd of some four score or more: sailors, draymen, panders, cobblers, doxies, grooms, and the like. They were a vocal, excited rabble, already trading lies and offering wagers.
When I saw Mutano go inside, bearing on his left shoulder a large, leather-bound trunk outfitted with numerous small holes, I left my elevated post, pushed through the remnant of the throng, and entered.
No time was wasted on preliminaries. Brotero, dressed in his gray tunic and trunks, brought in his big black Mauler cat on a red leather leash attached to a length of hempen rope. He led the animal to the middle of the floor and announced his name: “Uccisore.” I thought “Murderer” a proper name for the specimen.
When Brotero stepped away into the first row of spectators, Mutano approached slowly. His leisurely progress gave me time to look about, paying particular attention to the heavily shadowed rafters. I saw nothing untoward.
Mutano did not speak, of course, but lifted the trunk from his shoulder and set it down eight paces from where Uccisore sat on his haunches, watching closely my friend’s every move. The trunk was constructed so that the hasps opened along the bottom. Mutano unlatched them one by one and lifted off the trunk as a whole to reveal Sunbolt. Our fine orange cat was the most colorful object in the room, except for the flambeaux with their swaying red-and-yellow flames.