Inkdeath (Inkworld 3)

Oss looked inquiringly at Orpheus, his eyes asking permission to seize Farid and beat him black and blue, but Orpheus ignored him. "Ah, so we’re back to that subject!" he said, barely able to control his voice. "The amazing, wonderful Meggie, daughter of an equally fabulous father who answers to the name of a bird these days, hiding out in the forest with a band of verminous robbers while ragged minstrels make up song after song about him."

Orpheus adjusted his glasses and looked up at the sky, as if complaining to the powers above of Mo’s unearned fame. He liked the nickname those glasses had earned him: Four-Eyes. It was whispered with fear and horror in Ombra, which pleased Orpheus even more. And the glasses were regarded as evidence that all the lies he told about his origins were the plain truth: He came from beyond the sea, he said, from a distant land ruled by princes who all had two sets of eyes, which allowed them to read their subjects’ thoughts. He claimed to be a son of the king of that country, born out of wedlock, and said he’d had to flee after his own brother’s wife had fallen madly in love with him. "By the god of books, what a wretched story!"

Fenoglio had cried when Farid told Minerva’s children about it. "The slushy notions churning around in that fellow’s mind! He hasn’t a single fresh idea in his slimy brain — all he can do is mess about with other people’s stories!"

But while Fenoglio was spending his days and nights feeling sorry for himself, Orpheus had leisure to put his own stamp on this story — and he seemed to know more about it than the man who had originally made it up.

"When you love a book so much that you read it again and again, do you know what it makes you wish?" Orpheus had asked Farid as they stood outside the city gate of Ombra for the first time. "No, of course you don’t. How could you? I’m sure a book only makes you think how well it would burn on a cold night. But I’ll tell you the answer all the same: You want to be in the book yourself. Although certainly not as a poor court poet. I’m happy to leave that role to Fenoglio though even there he cuts a sorry figure!"

Orpheus had set to work the third night after he arrived, in a dirty inn near the city walls. He had told Farid to steal him some wine and a candle, and from under his cloak had produced a grubby piece of paper and a pencil — and the book, the thrice-accursed book, Inkheart. His fingers had wandered over the pages collecting words, more and more words, like magpies in search of glittering baubles. And Farid had been fool enough to believe that the words Orpheus was so busily writing on his sheet of paper would heal the pain in his heart and bring Dustfinger back.

But Orpheus had very different ideas in mind. He sent Farid away before reading aloud what he had written and, before dawn the next morning, ordered him to dig up his first treasure from the soil of Ombra, in the graveyard just beyond the infirmary.

The sight of the coins had made Orpheus as happy as a child. But Farid had stared at the graves, tasting his own tears in his mouth.

Orpheus had spent the silver on new clothes for himself, hired two maids and a cook, and bought a silk merchant’s magnificent house. Its previous owner had gone away in search of his son, who had ridden with Cosimo to Argenta and never come back.

Orpheus made claim that he himself was a merchant, one who sold the granting of unusual wishes—and soon it had reached the Milksop’s ears that this stranger with the thin fair hair and skin as pale as a prince’s could supply bizarre things: spotted brownies, fairies as brightly colored as butterflies, jewelery made of fire-elves’

wings, belts set with the scales of river-nymphs, gold-and-white piebald horses to draw princely coaches, and other creatures previously known in Ombra only from fairy tales. The right words for all sorts of things could be found in Fenoglio’s original book of Inbheart — Orpheus just had to fit them together in a slightly different way. Now and then one of his creations would die after taking only a few breaths, or would turn out vicious (the Chunk often had bandaged hands), but that didn’t bother Orpheus. Why would he mind if a few dozen fire-elves died of starvation in the forest because they had no wings, or a handful of river-nymphs drifted dead in the water without their scales? He pulled thread after thread out of the fine fabric that Fenoglio had spun and wove patterns of his own, adding them to the old man’s tapestry like brightly colored patches and growing rich on what his voice could entice out of another man’s words.

Curses on him. A thousand and one curses. This was too much.

"I won’t do anything for you anymore! I won’t do anything at all!" Farid wiped the moist earth from his hands and tried to climb out of the hole, but one gesture from Orpheus, and Oss pushed him roughly back again.

"Dig!" he grunted.

"Dig yourself!" Farid was trembling in his sweaty tunic, though whether with cold or rage he couldn’t have said. "Your fine master is just a fraud! He’s already been in jail for his lies, and that’s where he’ll end up again!"

Orpheus narrowed his eyes. He didn’t like to have that chapter in his life mentioned at all.

"I bet you were the sort who cons money out of old ladies’ pockets. And here you are all puffed up like a bullfrog just because your lies are suddenly coming true. You suck up to the Milksop because he’s the Adderhead’s brother-in-law and think yourself cleverer than anyone else! But what can you really do? Write fairies here who look like they’ve fallen into a vat of dye, chests full of treasure, and jewelry made of elves’ wings for him. But you can’t do what we brought you here for, you can’t do that. Dustfinger is dead. He’s dead. He — is — still — dead!"

And now here came those wretched tears again. Farid wiped them away with his dirty fingers while the Chunk stared down at him as blankly as only someone who doesn’t understand a word of what’s being said can. And how could he? What did Oss know about the words Orpheus was collecting on the siy, what did he know about the book and Orpheus’s voice?

"No one brought me here for anything!" Orpheus leaned over the edge of the pit as if to spit the words into Farid’s face. "And I certainly don’t have to listen to any lectures about Dustfinger from the boy who caused his death! Have you forgotten how he sacrificed himself for you? Why, I knew his name before you were even born, and I and no one else will bring him back, after you so drastically removed him from this story . . . but how and when I do it will be my own decision. Now dig. Or do you think, you brilliant example of the wisdom of Arabia"— Farid thought he felt the words slicing through him — "do you think I’ll be more likely to write if I can’t pay my maids and I have to wash my own clothes?"

Damn him. Damn him to hell. Farid bowed his head so that Orpheus wouldn’t see his tears. The boy who caused his death.

"Tell me why I keep paying minstrels good silver for their pitiful songs. Because I’ve forgotten Dustfinger? No. It’s because you still haven’t managed to find out how and where in this world I can speak to the White Women who have him now! So I go on listening to bad songs, I stand beside dying beggars, I bribe the healers in the infirmaries to call me when a patient is at death’s door. Of course, it would be much easier if, like your master, you could summon the White Women with fire, but we’ve tried that often enough and gotten nowhere, right? If at least they’d visit you, as it seems they like to visit those they’ve touched once with death already — but no! The fresh chicken blood I put outside the door was no use, either, nor were the children’s bones I bought from a gravedigger for a bag of silver after the guards at the gate told you that was sure to raise a dozen White Women at once!"