The Seat of Magic Read online

  Duilio did his best to keep his reaction from reaching his face. “My brother was killed during a duel. Why would you say he was murdered?”

  “From what I understand,” the man said, “his opponent fired into the air, making one question how Alessio could have been shot in the chest. We know that the Marquis of Maraval had it done, fearing that Alessio would seduce the prince out from under his influence. That, however, was not the true reason behind Alessio’s occasional visits to the palace. He was working as an agent of the infante.”

  Duilio kept from gripping the arms of the chair only by sheer will. Following Maraval’s arrest by the Special Police, their inspection of his private papers had revealed his mistaken assumption and decision to have Alessio killed. That last claim, though, was new. “I was unaware the infante has agents. He’s under house arrest in the palace. No one is allowed to visit him.”

  Strictly speaking, that was a lie. In the last month Duilio had met a team of four investigators who were, as far as he could tell, working for the infante. That could be viewed as treason so long as his elder brother, Prince Fabricio, held the throne. When Duilio asked, the group of investigators hadn’t admitted the association. They hadn’t denied it either.

  Bastião crossed one long leg over the other. “Alessio was acting as a messenger between the infante and Dinis. That was what took him to Lisboa so often.”

  Cold spread through Duilio’s stomach. What had Alessio been up to? Prince Dinis II ruled Southern Portugal, which Alessio had visited regularly in the last year of his life. Perhaps this Bastião was trying to determine whether Alessio had revealed any such activities in his journals. But if Alessio had worked for the infante, he’d not recorded a word about it. “Why would my brother do so? He was never fond of the throne.”

  Bastião smiled. “No, he believed things needed to change.”

  Alessio hadn’t been a revolutionary, but he’d thought the usefulness of the twin monarchies of Northern and Southern Portugal was long past. “And you’re suggesting his efforts in the infante’s name were . . . ultimately intended to reform the monarchies?”

  Bastião interlaced his fingers over his knee, looking perfectly at ease as he talked about treason. “Are you asking if I know the infante’s leanings?”

  Duilio watched him carefully. His gift spoke into his mind, warning him that this meeting—this man—was important. Unfortunately, it didn’t tell him how. “Do you?”

  “I also act in his name at times,” Bastião said, “so I know his mind on certain matters.”

  Duilio pressed his lips together. Why had this man come to tell him this? That the infante of Northern Portugal was bypassing his elder brother didn’t concern Duilio overmuch. He’d walked that line for years himself. He was half selkie; living in the city at all was illegal for him. And he’d willingly harbored Oriana Paredes, a sereia spy, in his household.

  “I know where the infante stands on the issue of nonhumans as well,” Bastião added, as if he’d read the path of Duilio’s thoughts.

  “How interesting,” Duilio said in what he hoped was a neutral tone. He had a feeling this man Bastião was trying to winnow out his personal leanings on the matter. He didn’t intend to be drawn. Not when he didn’t know who this man was.

  Bastião smiled at his vague comment, apparently recognizing it for evasion. “The infante could not, after all, be friends with Alessio Ferreira if he felt nonhumans were to be abhorred.” His eyes flicked downward to consider the kid-gloved fingers laced over his knee. “The ban on nonhumans is a ridiculous abuse of power by the prince.”

  Did that mean this Bastião was aware the Ferreira family wasn’t purely human? Or had he thought Alessio a Sympathizer? “Seers have predicted the prince will be killed by a nonhuman,” Duilio pointed out. “Is that not sufficient reason for the ban?”

  “Something will kill each of us one day,” Bastião said with a shrug. “Shall we banish the river to assure no one drowns?”

  That was, word for word, what Alessio had said once when speaking of the ban. This man had to have known him.

  Duilio rose and crossed to the mantel again. At least he now had a better answer to why his brother had been killed, a reason more dignified than being killed in a duel over a lover or because of Maraval’s strange idea that Alessio would seduce the prince. This new information made sense of what had previously seemed a pointless death . . . even if it meant that Alessio had been committing treason. “So if you’re not here about Alessio’s journals, what do you want from me?”

  “Society seems to have painted you as a dullard, you know, Ferreira,” Bastião said. As he’d worked hard to cultivate that image, Duilio didn’t argue. “Yet Alessio once told me you got all the brains in the family, while he got all the beauty. I wanted to see for myself if that was true.”

  Alessio had been fond of saying that, even if it was insulting to both of them. “Very well, you’ve seen me.”

  “And if your infante needs your services, will he be able to call on you?”

  Now that was a dangerous question. Duilio considered Bastião with narrowed eyes. Someone had sent this man to pry into Duilio Ferreira’s political leanings—a fruitless task, since he wasn’t entirely sure of them himself. Would he serve the infante in defiance of a prince he found detestable? Was his distaste for the current prince grounds to risk his life as Alessio had? Duilio decided evasion was his safest course. “I’ll answer that when the infante asks me himself.”

  Bastião rose, a wry smile twisting his lips. “I’ll leave you then, to decide that another day. I’ll show myself out.” Nodding once in farewell, he walked out of the sitting room. A moment later, Duilio heard Cardenas speaking to the man, and the front door closed behind him.

  Duilio paced the strip of Persian rug behind the couch, trying to parse out what had just happened. He’d endured enough bizarre interviews in the last two weeks that not much surprised him, but this one had been different. The fact that Bastião had known Alessio at Coimbra a decade ago wasn’t enough to ensure his loyalties. Duilio had no way to know for whom the man worked now.

  After a moment Duilio stopped pacing and withdrew Joaquim’s note from his coat pocket. He read the contents and quickly stepped out into the hall, calling for Cardenas.

  The butler emerged from the end of the hallway. “Yes, sir?”

  “I need my gloves and hat immediately. I’m heading out to the cemetery.”

  Cardenas frowned. “It’s Sunday, Mr. Duilio.”

  “Unfortunately, the dead don’t honor the day of rest.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Inspector Joaquim Tavares perched on a stool at the far end of the barren stone cell. It was chilly in these rooms. This row of cells with their unadorned granite walls, once dedicated to prayer and meditation, was perfectly suited for preparing the poor of the city for burial. The Monastery of the Brothers of Mercy had once stood on the Street of Flowers not far from where Duilio’s house was now, but had been moved to this spot high above the river, outside the Golden City’s medieval walls. That placed it close to the city’s seminary for orphans. When the city had set a new cemetery in this area in the mid-nineteenth century, the brothers had been the natural choice to handle the final disposition of paupers.

  The girl on the stone slab was destined for one of those pauper’s graves marked with a small stone cross. Slim and pretty, with her dark hair trailing off to one side, she lay on the slab as if asleep. Joaquim knew her name—Lena Sousa—but little more. It likely wasn’t her real name anyway. She’d been found Saturday, crumpled in a doorway on Firmeza Street, by the elderly woman who owned the home. There had been no blood, no sign of any injury, and her small coin purse had still been in a pocket sewn into the seam of her skirt. If Joaquim hadn’t been notified, she would have gone to her grave nameless. Her disappearance had been reported to the police by another prostitute the afternoon before. Her l
ife had come down to a few lines written on a report and a tattered photograph, quickly forgotten, one of too many dead in a city of this size. The paperwork had been handed off to Joaquim but he had no way to find her family, not without her true name or hometown, so the police turned the body over to the brothers.

  But something had told Joaquim not to let this one go.

  When he’d asked to have the body autopsied, his captain shrugged it off. The police didn’t have the funds for a skilled physician’s services every time a prostitute died, particularly when there was no indication of violent death. Joaquim had considered applying to the medical college but that would have taken longer than he liked. So he’d taken a step he wouldn’t have been willing to pursue if he hadn’t needed answers—he asked Duilio to pay for the doctor’s time. The money was nothing to Duilio, so now Joaquim sat in this cold cell on a sunny Sunday afternoon, his jaw clenched and his stomach churning.

  The girl hadn’t been dead long so there was surprisingly little smell, but watching a doctor take apart a young woman and put her back together always bothered Joaquim. He had never developed the strong stomach he needed for this job.

  A discreet tap at the door preceded portly Brother Manoel opening it to allow Duilio inside. Joaquim gestured him over to another empty stool, and Duilio came, looking winded as if he’d run all the way from his house. Likely he had. He shifted his morning coat as he settled atop one of the other stools, then adjusted his well-tied necktie. Joaquim might accuse his cousin of being a dandy if Duilio’s up-to-the-mark garb didn’t make him self-conscious about the shabbiness of his own brown tweed suit.

  Joaquim shot a glance at the doctor’s square shoulders. He didn’t know Dr. Teixeira well, but he’d run across the older man at Mass several times. Teixeira hadn’t looked up from his work at Duilio’s intrusion, occupied with replacing things he’d previously removed. Joaquim turned away, glad he hadn’t eaten lunch.

  “How long have you been here?” Duilio asked.

  “Hours,” Joaquim said with a heavy sigh. “I’m sorry I didn’t get to see Rafael before he headed back to Lisboa. But I caught Dr. Teixeira at Mass and he preferred to do this right away. You’ll be paying extra, by the way, for doing this on a Sunday.”

  Duilio shrugged. “So what has he found?”

  “Nothing. Not yet.”

  “Poison?”

  “No sign of it,” the doctor intoned without glancing over. “There’s surprisingly little bloating, though, despite the time passed since her death. I don’t know that it’s pertinent.”

  Duilio got to his feet and crossed the room to where the doctor was replacing the last of the organs he’d removed. Not willing to miss anything exchanged there, Joaquim followed, doing his best not to look at the body lying on the table.

  “There are, of course, poisons we can’t trace,” Teixeira added, “but we usually see some damage in the affected organ. Nothing here looks out of the norm except for the heart.”

  Duilio leaned closer to peer down at the body, probably looking inside, which was a ghastly thought.

  “Is there a poison that affects only the heart?” Joaquim asked.

  The doctor shook his head. “Not this way. Not that I’ve ever seen before. It’s possible one exists, but . . .” He exhaled and said, “If you look at the damage to the heart and the tissues around it, it resembles damage done by a bolt of lightning. But that’s not what happened to her.”

  “Why not?” Duilio asked.

  The doctor laid his hand somewhere on the body and Joaquim forced himself to look. The doctor had pulled the sheet back up to cover most of the girl’s body and her skin had been pulled closed, saving Joaquim from casting up the nonexistent contents of his stomach, but the long incision running down the center of her chest and up to each shoulder was grisly enough. The doctor pointed to the skin above the girl’s left breast. “No evidence of an entry or exit. When lightning strikes, the electricity passes through the body and usually leaves a burn on each end. This is localized to the tissues directly around the heart.”

  Joaquim looked up at him. “And what would do that?”

  Teixeira glanced over at Duilio and then back. “How familiar are you with healers?”

  “A healer did this?” Duilio asked before Joaquim had the chance.

  The doctor shook his head. “That’s not what I said. But”—he scowled down at the body—“keep in mind that I haven’t seen this kind of thing in a very long time. When I was a young man at the medical college, I had a chance to observe a healer at work. They don’t actually heal, you know. Instead they encourage the body to heal itself. They can control the flow of not only the blood, but of energies in the body.”

  Joaquim estimated Teixeira’s age between forty-five and fifty, although on the younger end of that spectrum. Teixeira’s dark hair had little gray in it and he seemed in the prime of his life. That would put this memory of the medical college twenty years or so past.

  Duilio crossed his arms over his chest. “Do you mean electricity?”

  “That isn’t the term they use for it,” the doctor said patiently, “but there are similarities between tissues that have been damaged by an accidental electrical discharge and tissues that have been . . . manipulated . . . by a healer.”

  “And you think a healer could have killed this girl without leaving any external mark?”

  While Duilio continued questioning the doctor, Joaquim gazed down at the girl’s peaceful face, trying to ignore the neat incision just past the edge of her scalp. She hadn’t been more than eighteen. She’d come to the Golden City from the country—unfortunately, her friend hadn’t known from what town—looking for work. It saddened him that prostitution was the only work she’d been able to find. He should stop by a church tonight and light a candle for her. Since her family couldn’t know she was dead, he doubted anyone else would be praying for her soul.

  Duilio had gone on with his questions. “. . . unethical to use their abilities to take a life? Like doctors and their oath to do no harm?”

  “There is no regulating body for witches,” Joaquim reminded him.

  Duilio cast an exasperated look his direction, one not entirely unearned. Being a seer, even one of limited ability, Duilio was considered a witch as well. The gift passed to all the males of the Ferreira line, father to son, so it bypassed the Tavares family. There were times that Joaquim had been envious of Duilio’s talent, since Duilio used his ability to help solve crimes. But those with such gifts had an equal potential to use them wrongly. Although the Church had tried to control them in the past, now that was usually left to the Public Security Police, a body with little experience dealing with such people.

  “Inspector Tavares is correct about that,” the doctor said with a shake of his head. “This could, conceivably, have been an accident. But if it happens again, we may have a predator of sorts on our hands.”

  Joaquim licked his lips. The doctor didn’t need to know this wasn’t the first girl to die without any apparent cause. In the last two weeks, the brothers had buried two other girls, both of whom Joaquim had identified as prostitutes who’d gone missing. Neither had any mark on their bodies, making it possible they’d died the same way. He took a deep breath and asked, “Was she raped?”

  The doctor shifted from one foot to the other, brow rumpling. “She recently had relations with a man, but not directly before death and my best guess is that it was . . . consensual.”

  “The vast majority of healers are female,” Duilio pointed out.

  Had he known that? Joaquim mentally ran through reasons one woman might kill others, but they were very much the same reasons men might kill. He didn’t see how that changed the equation. Even so, according to the brothers neither of the other two girls had shown signs of rape. That linked the deaths more closely. Joaquim puffed out his cheeks. “Duilio? Any more questions?”

 
Duilio pressed his lips together, considering. “Can the brothers leave her until tomorrow afternoon, perhaps? I was wondering if the Lady might come and take a look at her.”

  Joaquim had wondered if Duilio would think of her. The Lady—who was literally nameless as far as they knew—was one of four investigators who’d arrived in Northern Portugal only a couple of months ago. They’d been brought in to clean out some of the less desirable elements of the Special Police, apparently at the behest of the infante. Their inquiries had become entangled with his and Duilio’s investigation of The City Under the Sea, that work of art and death being assembled under the river’s waters. Each of the four investigators had a particular skill that made them more suitable for chasing down witches than Joaquim himself. “But the Lady specializes in witchcraft, not healers.”

  “I’d bet she knows more about healers than we do,” Duilio pointed out. “How this might have happened, and if it was intentional.”

  The Church held that there was a clear distinction between witches and witchcraft. Craft was learned, a way of augmenting one’s inborn abilities instead of working only with what was given by God. Witches like Duilio, so long as they didn’t seek to increase their natural abilities through witchcraft, were tolerated by the Portuguese Church, even though the Spanish Church still hunted them. And while the Lady had studied witchcraft all her life, she’d claimed she’d never practiced the art, which made her blameless in the eyes of the Church.

  Joaquim scowled. It wasn’t the Lady who bothered him so much as the Lady’s usual escort, Miguel Gaspar. An inspector brought from the former colony of Cabo Verde, Gaspar had eyes that saw too much. He was a meter, a witch who could merely glance at another and know what gifts that person possessed. When he’d first started to work with the man, Joaquim hadn’t found that too disturbing, but it had become clear as the days progressed that Gaspar wanted something from him. The man was convinced he was a witch, and wanted Joaquim to admit it, surely unaware of the questions such an admission would raise. And Joaquim wasn’t convinced of it himself. Not quite.