Eric Flint - The Shadow of the Lion

Lopez couldn't refrain from wincing. Another coin gone, from the few they had in their possession. But he did not utter any protest. Like Diego, he thought the money well spent.

"Yes," he said forcefully. "With that scarf, we can discover the boy's past. As much, at least, as that scarf was a part of it."

Pierre, unlike his two companions, was not well versed in sacred magic. "Unreliable…" he murmured. "Possibly even risky."

Diego shook his head. "Not in the least, Pierre. This is not like scrying, which another mage could detect and distort. Nor is it as difficult?almost impossible, really?as foretelling the future. The past is done, immutable. What Eneko proposes is simply an aspect of?" Diego, who had a bit of the pedant in him, began what was clearly going to be a long-winded description of the principles of contagion as applied to sacred magic. But Eneko cut him short.

"Enough!" he chuckled. "Pierre wants to hear it less than I do." To Pierre: "It can be done. Trust me. Will you join us in prayer?" He cast his eyes about their new home. "Since I am going to be living here, working here?" He raised his eyebrow significantly. "?and worshipping here, it should be cleansed first. And Diego, you may pretend ignorance, but you know very well how to ritually cleanse a dwelling."

Diego groaned. "I'll get a broom."

"A prayer of intention, first," Pierre said, with a laugh of his own.

The ritual cleansing didn't take long; to be honest, although the room was physically filthy, there wasn't much in the way of negativity to chase from it, and nothing at all of evil. The smells might be dreadful, but the spiritual atmosphere was clean. There was a practicality to a ritual cleansing?following the principle of "as above, so below," you cleaned; you cleaned everything, floor to ceiling, in order to set a barrier of protection permanently in place, but you cleaned with intention, prayer, and the magic to flush away the "dirt" you couldn't see along with what you could. Diego was very good at floors.

One of the reasons Eneko had chosen this particular room was because of a peculiarity of alignment: the four corners were exactly pointing to the four cardinal directions. By nailing a bit of wood into each corner to serve as a shelf for the tiny statues of the Archangels Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel he had brought, he recreated, in miniature, a ritual chapel. Like Hagia Sophia on the other side of town, like the ritual chapels of Hypatians everywhere, by the time he and Pierre finished blessing it, setting up the boundary-spells, blessing it again, this was sacred ground, protected from evil.

"Ah!" Eneko said, stretching his arms and shaking out his hands when they were done. "I much prefer this sort of comfort to anything Casa Brunelli offered."

"I can't say as I blame you," Pierre replied. Diego just shrugged and picked up the scarf, which they had left lying on the cot.

"If you're going to do this, you might as well get it over with," he said, holding it out to Eneko gingerly, as if it was a viper.

Eneko just smiled and dug a flat bowl out of his belongings, while Pierre went out to find a water-seller. He returned with a cask of potable water which he set up in the corner beneath the statue of Gabriel and tapped. "Strange that in a city on the water, you can't drink any of it," he remarked.

"No stranger than being on a ship, surrounded by water," Diego countered. "For that matter, would you drink water from the Loire in Orleans?"

"Ah… no. Here you are, Eneko." Pierre had filled the flat bowl with clean water and put it on the floor where the two of them knelt on either side of it. Eneko murmured a blessing over it, and Pierre blessed salt and cast it over the top of the water. Then, holding an end of the scarf each, the two mages bent over the bowl, while Diego peered at it from his perch on the cot.

While Pierre readied the bowl to reflect the images that came to it, Eneko used a thread of power to "talk" to the scarf. Show us where you have been, was the gist of his spell, and in a moment, a mist passed over the face of the water, and images appeared there, looking exactly like reflections.

Except these reflections were of nothing that was in the room.

The scarf itself was not very old, which was just as well; Eneko hurried past the silkworm, the weavers, the dandy (prone to getting recklessly drunk in foolish places) who had owned it, until he came to the moment that Benito Oro plucked it from the drunk's neck.

"Ah?" said Diego, with interest. Now they settled down to watch in earnest.

When the work was finished, the magic dispelled, and the blessed water scattered around the room, Eneko chuckled again. "The Marco boy may be an innocent, but his young companion Benito is certainly not. Which, unfortunately, leaves us knowing not much more than we did before. Since the scarf was stolen only a few days before Marco gave it to the child."

He rose to his feet. "Still, there is enough here to warrant further effort. Diego, I need to make a trip. It will use up most of what we have, until we get another disbursement of funds from the Grand Metropolitan. But well worth it, perhaps."

Pierre had risen to his feet also. "It will do us good to live on alms for a while, anyway."

Diego, still seated on the cot, cast a questioning look upward. "A trip? Where? And to do what?"

When Lopez told him, Diego sighed. "And what makes you think the old man will allow you the privilege? He's ferocious on that subject, by all accounts."

Lopez handed him the scarf. "I will give him this. Then tell him how the younger boy acquired it and what the older one did with it. If our suspicion?say better, surmise?is correct, he will allow me to see the portrait."

"If there is one," demurred Pierre. "He may have burned whatever existed."

"Oh, I doubt that," said Lopez softly. "It is one thing for a man to disown his daughter and cast her out. It is another thing entirely to burn his own memories."

"It appears that Marco has come to no permanent harm in his sojourn in the marshes," said Antimo, carefully. "The money you've been sending Aldanto to keep the boys was well spent. Although?" For a moment, Bartelozzi's prim mouth pursed with distaste. "Needless to say, he's been letting everyone think that it was his money which rescued Marco."

The Old Fox chuckled wryly. "You expected Caesare Aldanto to be truthful and modest?"

Antimo shrugged, acknowledging the truth in the little jest. "However, there is another aspect of the new situation you need to consider, milord. A quite unforeseen one. It appears the boys have acquired another protector besides Aldanto?and one who is every bit as skilled, and in some ways perhaps even more dangerous."

Dell'este put his hands behind his head and rocked back on his chair. "They seem to have a talent for attracting supporters and defenders. That is a valuable trait for the Dell'este," he said cheerfully. "You might even say: a family custom."

Antimo looked at him. A steady unblinking basilisk stare.

The Old Fox sighed. "All right, Antimo. Who is it?"

"Fortunato Bespi."

The chair came down with a thump. The Old Fox looked anything but cheerful. Then he shook his head sharply.

"All right, Antimo. You've succeeded! For once you have brought me a piece of information that was so totally unexpected I was at a loss. Bespi! Who would have thought it? All reports claimed he was dead. That he should turn up protecting Lorendana's children is… bizarre."

There was a long silence. The duke sat quietly. After a moment, he turned his lined old face away from Bartelozzi and stared blindly at a far wall. Moisture welled in his eyes, and, eventually, slowly, a tear found its way down one cheek.