I got the gifts from my purse, handling them with care so I didn’t touch anything but the boxes and wrappers containing them. I laid them on the nearest table and stepped away to let Carlos examine them. “The white box contains both of the bone flutes. I get a sort of shock when I touch them, so you’ll have to open the box yourself.”
“Bone flutes are hardly an oddity on their own account,” Carlos said. “The bones of birds and cattle or deer shins have been used in musical instruments for eons.”
“These gave me the impression of human bones.”
Quinton stood beside me and we watched Carlos unwrap and study the objects. He picked each up, muttering, looking it over, then closing his eyes and cocking his head slightly as if listening to each in turn.
Carlos set the flutes aside with a delicate touch as if they might shatter in an instant. Then he picked up the crystal on its chain in one hand and the doll in the other.
“Quinton, were you a Boy Scout?”
“I was a Purlis scout. Why?”
“The wood is very old, but I hope you can build a fire with it.”
Quinton eyed the dusty, cobwebbed chunks of wood beside the fireplace. “They might burn a little fast if the bugs have gotten to them, but, yeah, I can make a fire with those.”
“Do so. Please.”
I made a face as Quinton busied himself with the logs. “I wasn’t a Girl Scout, but I do know how to make a fire.”
“I have no doubt, Blaine, but I need you to hold this,” Carlos said, handing me the chain. “Let the crystal dangle without swaying and take care not to touch it.”
I did as he instructed, letting the smoky, black-stabbed quartz hang straight from my fist with the excess length of chain wrapped around my hand. It was an uncomfortable object, making my hand prickle with cold as if it had fallen asleep.
Kneeling at the hearth, Quinton struck a spark from a small metal object with the back of his pocketknife, and the fire caught immediately on the dry tinder he’d placed under the wood. As soon as the fire had begun to consume the logs, Carlos told him to stand aside. Quinton, looking nervous, retreated to the corner of the desk.
Carlos drew his arm back and flung the doll into the fireplace with sufficient force to shatter its porcelain head. A vile black shape like a spider with too many legs fell from the broken doll and burst into flame with a shriek. The necromancer stepped closer to the fire, muttering rapidly and reaching forward as if to catch the black smoke that curled from the burning thing. The wisp of darkness bowed toward him, flowing against the natural current of air, which should have gone up the chimney but bent, instead, into Carlos’s hand. “Mostre-me onde ela é,” he said, sweeping the smoke toward me.
The black fume curled and flowed toward the crystal, then into it, swirling through the network of rutile that cut through the quartz. The crystal twitched and swung in a circle, then jerked north, the pendant wavering between two points for a moment until the crystal cracked with a harsh sound. A sudden rush of black smoke poured from the crystal in two directions until all the darkness had fled the room, leaving a nauseating stench like burning creosote in the air.
Carlos opened the window at the front while Quinton hurried to do the same at the rear of the room, letting the night’s cool wind sweep the stink away on the weeping song of Lisbon. I stood still with the broken crystal dangling from my hand, not sure what Carlos wanted me to do with the thing.
In a moment he crossed the room to face me, putting out his hand and narrowing his eyes as if he were thinking difficult thoughts. “That I did not expect.”
“What? The swinging or the breaking?” I asked, handing over the shattered pendant, glad to release it and feel warmth rush back into my hand.
Carlos took the crystal and chain with care and laid them on the table. “The inability to pick a direction. Unless the child is moving back and forth, there must be more than one ‘she’ that this device cleaved to.”
“If one is my niece, then, could the other be the mage who made this nasty bit of work?” Quinton asked, casting a disgusted glance at the wreck of the doll and its passenger, still burning in the grate. “One of Dad’s companions was female and Sam said she made an unpleasant impression.”
Carlos raised an eyebrow. “There were no female bone mages in my day—as there were no female priests, either—but there well could be now. It would explain a great deal. Let us see what else we can discover.”
“I’d be willing to bet the man with her was of the same party,” I added.
“Young or old?” Carlos asked.
“Seventy or so, Sam said, and she thought he was Portuguese, but I assume appearances can be deceiving in this case. She said he had blue eyes—she found it striking.”
He grunted, thinking, and asked, “What of the other?”
“Sam said the woman looked to be in her fifties, blond, probably American or English.”
Carlos looked intrigued and thoughtful as he turned back to the table where the two bone flutes lay. He picked up each one in turn and studied them. “An interesting pair. Made from matching bones and very similar, but not carved by the same mage.”
“I thought they looked like the same bone from different . . . um . . . donors,” I said.
“No. These came from the same human body. They are two arm bones—the radii—from the same person. Together they are a pair left and right, but not identical.” He held up the darker of the two flutes. “This was created by the master some time ago, a man I knew when he was but an apprentice”—he held up the other, cleaner flute—“and this recently by the current apprentice. Her name is Maggie Griffin, though that means nothing to me. It is strange, however, that the lesser instrument has the more difficult mouthpiece. . . .”
Quinton and I exchanged looks. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“The older instrument has a fipple—like the mouth of a recorder or tin whistle. They make sound easily. But the apprentice’s instrument is end-blown, like a quena, and has only an elliptical notch that is much harder to use. There’s no need for such difficulty, so it must be vanity. . . .”
“Vanity can be very useful from our perspective,” I said.
“Yes. In this, I think the apprentice made a mistake that will help us find her all the faster.”
“Do you think the apprentice is the woman who came to Sam’s house?” Quinton asked, scowling.
“Without a doubt. Even if her companion was the master, he would still insist on her placing the instruments herself. It was a test. The doll and crystal were lesser attempts, simpler, but less sophisticated. That there was a redundant method for luring your niece away speaks of ongoing training, though it is increasingly advanced. Perhaps not an apprentice but a journeyman, still within her master’s house, which could be why she chose the difficult mouthpiece—to show him her skill at small details.”
“To show off,” Quinton corrected.
Carlos gave him a small nod. “Perhaps. Certainly it would explain the vanity of such a piece. She has pride, which may be her undoing.”
“We can hope,” Quinton added.
“Before we can undo her, we must find her more precisely. . . .” Carlos began looking through the various equipment around the room, searching the cabinets, lifting up the pans piled beside the fireplace, and raising dust into the air. He put a few items, including the shattered crystal, on the worktable Quinton and I had been leaning against and where the bone flutes now rested. Then he went to the hearth and stooped to scoop some of the bright red coals out of the fire and into a three-footed iron bowl—some sort of small brazier, I guessed. The bowl smoked a little as the coals burned away the remnants of dust and cobwebs. Holding the smoking bowl in his bare hand, Carlos brought it back to the table and set it down, then arranged the flutes on either side of it, the mouthpieces facing the bowl of coals.
“Snuff most of the candles, being careful not to raise the dust. Leave a scattering of them alight,” Carlos ordered, scribing a circle around the brazier in the tabletop’s dust. Once closed, the circle gleamed gold.