“Perhaps we should wait a while longer.”
“Fine with me.” I paused a moment, dizzy and weak just from talking. After a minute or more I asked, “Are you still breathing?”
Carlos seemed to have to test it before he replied, “Remarkably, yes. And my heartbeat seems to grow stronger, rather than fading away.”
“Maybe you’ve discovered a cure for vampirism.”
“No. I do not believe that aspect of my nature has changed, only the state in which it continues.”
“So . . . are you going to stay up and watch the sunrise?”
“I’m not persuaded that such a course would be wise.” Even in the dim light of the stars, I could see him scowl and raise his hand to his throat. “The knife . . . Where is it?”
“I threw it into the grass. I could barely stand to touch it long enough to pull it out.”
“Ah.” He crawled forward and ran his hands over the grass until he found the blade. He cursed as it nicked his fingers. Still, he picked it up and put it into his shirt, then sat in the grass and leaned back against the nearest column, facing me across the distance of what had been the south aisle, long ago. He looked wan and weary, but not dead, at least. I hoped I looked that good, because I felt awful.
“We can’t rest for too long, but I owe you a tale, since I can’t show you the window from here,” he said. “In the days of this church’s glory, I was a student at the University of Coimbra, in the north. Several years earlier, my father had decided, after much vacillating, to acknowledge me and provide an education and establishment befitting a younger son of an influential family. As I had begun late on my formal education, I was several years older than many of the students I studied with, but already arrogant in my power, which had come at a young age. I had discovered a tutor in the necromantic arts quickly and, with my mother’s help, I had thrived and learned to hide what I was.
“At university, I offended a certain gentleman of a wealthy family—not noble, merely rich—but he was a very distant cousin of mine and we were often thrown together. We were like sparks and gunpowder—always one setting the other off. Of me he knew two things: I was a bastard and I was a practitioner of dark arts, but of the latter he had no proof. The other was a well-known fact, but since Nuno Pereira himself—the great general who saved Portugal from Castile and built this convent—was born on the wrong side of the blanket and still became Condestável do Reino and a greatly honored man, it didn’t seem much of a bar. And one didn’t argue about the rights of an acknowledged son with my father. That my mother was Moorish and I dark in looks and dark in soul seemed to offend my cousin to a far greater degree.
“He was brilliant, an intellectual, but also a prig, a bigot, a hypocrite, and ambitious, with a hidden fear of the ancient nobility of which he was not a member. I hated him, as boys do, with a great misplaced passion, and he felt the same for me. We played at cat and mouse for years, he hoping to lure me into an act or admission that could send me to the Inquisition, and I hoping to shame and discredit him. And so it went. . . .” He closed his eyes and the light from the dim moon seemed to tremble on his skin as the black strands of magic wove around him. His voice drew me into the scenes of his tale, wrapping me in the moving shadows and fog of his recollection, his language and cadence becoming subtly more formal and archaic, as if he passed backward in time.
“When I removed to Lisbon with Amélia,” he continued, “my family name allowed me access to the thousands of books then kept here and I far preferred their company to hers. I was not merely callow, but thoughtlessly cruel in my self-absorption. I was still striving toward a goal of power that was ill-defined—and foolish for that—and I was obsessed with it. The city was also rife with the pitiful deaths few pay heed to, which suited all my plans.
“My antagonist had gone into politics and had family in the church as well, so it was no surprise that he, also, was in Lisbon frequently. When I came to read, I often saw him here. I baited the gentleman at every opportunity and in a fit of rage one afternoon, he attempted to stab me with the knife you drew from my throat. When he was unsuccessful, he threw me from a window in the library of the chapter house. That building is now obliterated but for the rear wall, in which my window still stands as part of the new building that rises like an ungainly phoenix from the ruins.” He paused, opening his eyes for a moment to stare at the wall above my head as if he were studying the tombstone mounted there. Then he shook his head and continued.
“I fell and should have died, stabbed to the gut and nearly all my bones broken, but death and I had already a fond acquaintance and though I had to be carried home, I lived. There was debate whether this confirmed my demonic associations or just the opposite. My adversary’s brother was a favored son of the church and through him, I was nearly brought down, but I escaped that fate as well. The excesses of the Inquisition were long over, but what remained were still terrible enough, however useless in the actual discovery of those like me. I learned caution. I began keeping to myself, showing myself less frequently and avoiding the men I’d known in college in particular. I also avoided Amélia, and when she would not let me to my own devices, I was brutal to her—in every way you can imagine and some I pray that you can’t. She left me for a year or so, but came back—for what reason I never knew—and found me more changed than she could have anticipated.
“During her absence, I discovered what I had been searching for—another master who could unveil a greater mystery of death, a higher state. I worked—lived—for that ‘Becoming’ with all my energy and passion. I searched for artifacts of power—one of which you know, the Lâmina que Consome as Almas—and destroyed what stood between me and them. I did murder in the dark and took the tribute of death for my own ends, spending all the hours of my mortal life in that pursuit. I had no time or desire for anything else, spared no thought for those that I harmed, and only a little more on those I killed. I did not even know Amélia was ill until she died and the whimpering release of her exhausted spirit passed through me. And I cared nothing but for the modicum of power it gave me. She died of fever I could have cured, wasting to nothing below my tower and I neither knew nor cared, such was my obsession.
“I attended the funeral and Mass, as I had to, and there I saw again my adversary, who was awaiting an influential political post. His brother had risen to bishop, and I had remained as I was—the wastrel younger son of a powerful man by his half-Arab mistress. It should have been a moment of rejoicing for him to see me no further advanced in the usual ambitions of society. But there was only silence when I appeared. My first thought was that they knew what I was and believed that I had killed Amélia, but it was far simpler than that. I was nearly fifty years old, yet I had barely aged past twenty-five. While they were men in their thirties, men of consequence with estates and children, I was as I am now. This was not only a prick to their vanity, but a proof that I was, if not actually in league with the Devil, at least uncanny.
“I knew they would come for me, confirmed in their own minds, even if they had not convinced anyone else, that I was in league with demons. I went then to my master, Lenoir, as I came again tonight, to ask for knowledge that would aid me against my enemies. Then, as now, a double-edged sword that cut deeper than I had expected.”
“That’s why you were here? To ask for help?”
“To discover what the Kostní Mágové are making from their bones. I may know now, but I’ll need more information about which bones they possess to be certain. Did you uncover that information?”
“Quinton did and I have some other information. We don’t know which bones, though—the news articles mostly recorded vandalism without specifics. And a robbery, a death, and a possible connection between one of these vandalisms and the bone mages . . .”