Quinton and I scrambled to extinguish as many of the candles as we could, leaving four burning in various locations throughout the room. The light was just enough to see the room by and no brighter. Carlos dropped dried matter and powders onto the bright red coals in the brazier. Then he put his open hand palm up on the bench where shadows now gathered. Two of the nevoacria crept into it, making his hand disappear in their darkness. He lifted them to the table and they crept to huddle in the shade of the bowl.
The bowl emitted the smell of sandalwood and graveyard dust, white smoke curling upward from the embers.
“Quinton, I require a drop of your blood.”
“Mine? Why?” he asked, but still started forward.
“The familial tie should strengthen our connection to your missing niece and the woman who took her. My own blood won’t do, and I fear to think what would happen if I fed this spell a drop of a Greywalker’s blood.”
Quinton finished crossing the room faster and stopped beside Carlos. He put out his hand, looking determined, though his fingers trembled. “If that’s what it takes.”
Carlos must have noticed Quinton’s fear and discomfort, but he said nothing, picked up a measuring compass from the tabletop outside the circle, and pricked the smallest finger on Quinton’s hand with one of the points. Quinton flinched but made no sound as a single large, bright drop of blood fell onto the smoking coals. Quinton yanked his hand back as if it had been scalded.
The smoke billowed into a cloud that expanded only as far as the edges of the circle, but rose upward in a confined column. Carlos put the compass down. “Step away from the table.”
Quinton did as he was told, watching the smoking brazier with suspicion.
Carlos snatched both the nevoacria from their hiding place under the hot bowl and threw them into the brazier, one on each side. The shadow creatures squealed and writhed in the heat, but they didn’t burn or dissolve. Carlos muttered while making a pulling-apart motion with both hands over the squirming things. They stretched from the bowl until they had touched the flutes, their bodies of shade and gloom forming conduits through which I could see the smoke begin to flow.
The candles flickered and burned low. Carlos continued to speak in a low, rapid voice that seemed to rob the world of sound rather than add to it—until the flutes began to sing.
The smoke from the brazier gave voices to the bone flutes and they played a long, high chord of melancholy and pain. Carlos snatched at the smoke as it rose from the flutes and muttered into his fisted hands, “Show me where the child is. Show me Soraia Rebelo,” before he blew the smoke away.
The keening smoke coiled and seemed to resist for a minute. Then it turned, swirling trails of white vapor in the air, and moved toward the map pinned to the wall above the mantel. It wove back and forth a moment, then plunged into the map on the north wall, spinning against the dusty surface and raising a smell of burning.
In a few moments the smoke had vanished as the flutes burned to ash, leaving only a smudge and a stink of singed parchment. Carlos put a lid over the brazier, smothering the coals and the screaming nevoacria. Then he smeared his hand over the edge of the circle, wiping a clean swath in the dust all the way to the edge of the table. The light of the remaining candles flared up brighter, chasing away the closed feeling and silencing the crying sound of the city below.
Quinton and Carlos looked at the map while I stood a bit behind them. “It points to nothing, just north again. That’s more than we had, but not much,” Quinton said.
Carlos frowned at the map. “The stain lies beyond the city’s edge. . . .”
“Only when that map was accurate,” I said. “I’d be willing to bet there’s something there now. We need a modern map the same scale as that one. We can overlay the location and find out what’s there now.”
Quinton gave a harsh laugh. “We don’t need to go to that much trouble. I have a computer. All we need is to measure the distance and direction from here and then enter the two sets of coordinates into the right type of mapping program. I just need that compass from the table and I can get to work.”
Quinton was relieved to finally have something to do, rather than just marching through the collection of data and waiting through the arcana of spell casting, and he went at it with a grim determination. Once Carlos had handed him the compass, he set it against the distance scale on the edge of the map and prepared to stab one of the measuring points into the parchment. “Where are we on this map, Carlos?”
Carlos touched a small brown square on the lower section of the map. “Here.”
Quinton set one of the compass points on the square and used the spine of a book to guide him as he measured the distance, muttering to himself, before asking for something with which to write the information down. When he was satisfied, we closed the windows and extinguished the candles before we left the tower and returned to my rooms.
Quinton fetched his small laptop from his messenger bag and opened it on the tiny desk. “It’s a good thing the management company installed a data line a few years ago or we’d be screwed,” he said. He fiddled and typed for a while, entered some data, typed some more. . . .
“Carlos, tell me if I’ve got the right house.”
The vampire looked over his shoulder. “You do.”
Quinton grunted. He typed some more numbers and then hit RETURN.
We waited a few minutes and the map appeared with two red pins on it. Quinton zoomed the view in to the point he calculated the smoke had touched on the other map. It looked like a huge empty field about a half mile from the nearest major road, with only a single crooked block of shanty buildings sitting in the middle of nothing at the end of a dirt road called Alta da Eira.
“What is that?” I asked.
“The area is called Penha de França and that in particular looks like a car repair shop in an abandoned commercial development. I think the area’s scheduled for urban renewal, but until the bulldozers come and the building starts, it’s pretty depressed and there aren’t a lot of people there. A perfect place to hide a little girl for a few days.”
Carlos continued to look at the screen for a while without speaking. At last he said, “It was a pastoral hill and fields for miles in every direction around the Rock of France and its small church. Shepherds and cowherds grazed flocks under the trees. Now there are no trees, no flocks, no church. Only the emptiness of progress.”
“The church is still there,” Quinton said, tapping the screen with his fingertip on a tiny building packed tightly into a block of other buildings.
“That is not the church I recall.”
“It may have been rebuilt.”
“I have no doubt.” Carlos’s tone closed that avenue of the conversation like a tomb.
The silence lingered and weighed upon us until Quinton broke its hold. “Carlos . . . What do you think these bone mages want my niece for?”
The necromancer turned his bowed head, studying Quinton with narrowed eyes and an unpleasant curl to his lips. “For her bones, boy. What else?”
“They’ll kill her for them?”
“Yes, but not casually or quickly. They are frugal and it will be done by rite and ceremony they may have had no time to prepare yet. And they may have other uses for her before she dies.”
Quinton paled, but in cold fury, not fear. “You probably shouldn’t tell me what other ‘uses’ they might have.”
Carlos scoffed. “Nothing so profane as you’re imagining. They’re aesthetes, priests of the bones. They’d have little interest in defiling her in such a manner.”
“That isn’t much of a relief. Who would murder a six-year-old girl for her bones? What kind of monsters can do that?”