Carlos gave him a sideways look that bordered on amusement. “At the moment, the balance of my impulses appears to be positive. Don’t tempt me to upset the scales.”
Quinton made a dismissive snort, as if he had no fear of what Carlos could do to him. It was an interesting reaction, but I was too worn down by sleeplessness and pain to give it much thought.
Carlos turned his attention back to me, saying, “If you must use it to call to Rui’s bones, remove the binding I’ve put around it, first, or the sound will die in the air. It should do you no further harm now that you no longer own the bone it sang to.”
“All right,” I said, my voice barely audible even in the quiet room as I accepted the flute. “There is one other thing,” I added. “Rui mentioned Coca and the Inferno Dragão as if they were the same thing. He said . . . the dust from the tomb of King Sebastian . . . Let me think. . . . ‘The dust of a great deception will make it seem to burn like flesh.’ I’m not sure what he meant, but I thought . . .”
Carlos picked up where my flagging voice gave out. “It will lend the drache the illusion of solid flesh that burns without being consumed.”
“But if it’s only an illusion—” Quinton started.
“The illusion of flesh. ‘A great deception,’” Carlos repeated. “But the flames will not be a mirage and there is no Saint George or Sleeping King to save the people that this burning death will descend upon, although Purlis’s agents have done a great deal to give the distressed hope of such a miraculous rescue.”
Quinton added, “After creating or contributing to their distress to begin with.”
Carlos nodded. “And when there is no rescue, their resistance to fear, despair, and the rhetoric of hate will be shattered.” He closed his eyes as if he were worn out and covered his face with his hands before running his fingers back through his hair in a gesture I’d never seen him use before. “Ah . . . now I know what he needs and where he’ll have to go to find it.”
Quinton and I both stared at him in expectation while he fell silent, thinking, the colors of energy around him whirling like the view through a kaleidoscope full of volcanic glass.
“What?” Quinton demanded after a while.
Carlos replied slowly, as if dredging his thoughts from long-faded memory. “The day Rui and the Kostní Mágové have chosen to raise the Dragão do Inferno is the memorial day of Saint Jerome. That sharp-tongued aesthete is the patron saint of librarians, translators, and encyclopedists, and in that regard, the Kostní Mágové consider themselves Hieronymites—followers of Jerome. I had almost forgotten. They are gatherers, translators, and protectors of the knowledge of the bones. Jerome himself was fascinated with the bones of the dead and the righteous. He walked through the tombs and catacombs of Rome regularly as penance for his sins when he was a young man—he considered it a vision of hell. His biographies say that he cited a passage from Virgil’s Aeneid: ‘Horror ubique animos, simul ipsa silentia terrent’ to describe the horror and repentance that he felt in the silent judgment of the dead. It is ironic that the bones of a common soldier were entombed and venerated as those of a king—the dust of a great deception—in the monastery of Saint Jerome. And now that profane dust lies in the hands of fanatics who consider themselves the hidden acolytes of that same saint.
“On Saint Jerome’s Day, they will bring forth their monster, clothed in fiery deception, blessed by the saint’s own, and constructed of bones from both the innocent and the depraved, carved with the song of an unholy resurrection. The perversity of their plan is magnificent. It binds the sacred indivisibly to the obscene. The drache cannot be killed, because it is not alive. It cannot be cursed away by darkness, nor banished by light, since it is made of both. Rui has advanced better than I’d expected. It’s too bad I’ll have to kill him.”
“You make him sound . . . commendable,” I murmured.
“I would be lying if I said I did not admire tenacity and ingenuity. Especially since I hadn’t expected him to survive ten years after I left. But how he’s chosen to use his talents and with whom he’s chosen to ally himself do not please me in the least. I will consider the return of his powers to me as a worthy apology for the small matter of his sending his student to kill me. . . .”
Quinton shuddered beside me and I felt no happier about the idea myself. “He gave me the impression that Griffin either did that on her own, or didn’t follow his instructions,” I said, compelled to be fair.
“A detail of no consequence. Rui seems to have forgotten that I am also tied to Saint Jerome—I was born and died on the saint’s memorial day. That will give us some additional strength, but we would be better served if we could stop him and the rest of the Kostní Mágové before they can assemble the final form of the drache. Given what we know he has and what he intends to create, how he means to weave the holy with the blasphemous, I know what else he must have that can only be found in the ossuaries of Alentejo. He has already taken the bones of a sacred, virgin child from Évora. Now he will need the bones of someone infected with a plague that killed thousands, and he will need the skull of a repentant thief who died in a fire. I know where both of those might be found. If they yet lie undisturbed, we may be able to upset Rui’s plans. But if we cannot, we must be prepared to fight a monster that may be nigh on unstoppable.”
“How come this doesn’t surprise me?” Quinton asked the air of the room. “Leave it to my father to hook up with a bunch of bone-waving spell-slingers who can raise an undead and unslayable dragon that breathes fire.”
“Not merely breathes fire. Is made and born of eldritch flame that burns everything it touches except the beast itself.”
“So . . . fire extinguishers aren’t going to help?”
I snorted a laugh and winced as my whole aching body seemed to nag at me for moving.
Carlos turned to look me over again, his face creased with unaccustomed worry, and held out his hand for mine. “May I see it?”
“Not pretty,” I warned him—more for Quinton’s benefit since Carlos wouldn’t care one bit how my mutilated finger looked. I put my hand into his and he unwrapped the bandages with great care.
Beneath the gauze, my whole hand was swollen, discolored, and misshapen. I winced with an unexpected pang as Carlos removed the last of the packing around my dismembered joint. I hadn’t looked at it since I’d cut off the tip of my finger and was taken aback by how terrible it looked. The skin remaining on the palmar side had been stretched over the cut end and stitched down, leaving a hideous line of bloody sutures and bruising across the top of what had been the upper joint of my ring finger. The wound had wept blood and serum and the doctor hadn’t been overly nice about his work. It looked as if there were no remains of the bone I’d hacked off, but I didn’t know if I’d managed to remove the fingertip so cleanly myself or if the surgeon had done that, cleaning up some chopped-off bit I’d left behind inadvertently. I hoped the latter hadn’t been the case, since even a sliver of the bone might draw Rui to the doctor who would have no reason to lie for us even if the bone mage didn’t do anything to persuade him.
Carlos glowered and shook his head. “It could have been better done.”
“The chopping or the sewing?” I asked, my voice nearly faded to nothing by now.
“Both. And you waited too long in repairing it.” He held on lightly and laid his free hand over mine. His hands were cool and dry, his touch more soothing than I could have imagined. I closed my eyes and let the sensation flow over me, not caring where it came from. “I can’t make it whole again—the tip is unrecoverable—but the remaining bone and tissue are dying,” he said, his voice very low. “For that I have some recourse.”
The relief of pain I hadn’t even acknowledged was so great that I cried and was dizzy. Tension that had held my shoulders rigid for hours faded away. I could feel Quinton supporting me, his arms around me, pulling me to his chest. I went limp against him, his breath stirring my hair. The constant, red ache in my body eased and flowed away, replaced by a cool, creeping tide that seemed to loosen all my joints and draw me toward a sensual floating sensation. I felt adrift, aware of the room as if from a distance. Then the coolness began to warm to an uncomfortable degree. I moved a little, trying to pull away, trying to make an objection with my sleepy, ruined voice, but it came out as a weak whimper. I forced my eyes open as Carlos let go of my hand, surrendering it to Quinton with a thin smile.