Chapter 43 – Assault

That Thursday, Valentina arrived a good hour earlier than usual at Violet Delights.

The little bell above the door to Gretta’s tailor shop jingled softly as she entered. Outside, dusk had already fallen, and inside the workshop, all the Essence lamps were already lit and their warm light fell on the carefully draped fabrics.

Gretta looked up from her work and smiled. “So early today?”

“Madame asked me to come in before the others. We have to finish the quarterly accounts.”

“Oh, you poor thing.” Gretta rolled her eyes with feigned sympathy. “But well, I know you excel at that sort of thing.” She pushed the heavy roll of fabric aside and cleared the way. “Go right on through, dear.”

The two young seamstresses at the work table, who were just sewing a trim onto a dress, greeted Valentina with a brief nod without looking up from their work. Everything was as usual.

The narrow, clean corridor, which wound in a gentle curve from Greta’s workshop to Violet Delights, lay silent before her, and Valentina’s footsteps echoed softly on the stone floor. At the end of the corridor, she entered the small dressing room where the girls prepared for their shifts.

She opened the box containing her illusion artifact and placed the strand of blonde hair into the designated setting. Then she activated the pattern in the largest of the stones, and the familiar warm tingling ran over her skin as the illusion enveloped her. In the mirror on the wall, she saw Lily, with golden curls, full lips, and blue eyes.

She brushed a curl from her face and continued on, down the hallway and through the heavy door into the back salon, where she stopped abruptly.

The room was lit only by two Essence lamps, and both were dimmed so low that they gave off little more than a dim, amber-colored flicker.

And the velvet curtains were drawn. That was unusual. Normally, the back parlor was well-lit and inviting, but now the room lay almost in darkness.

It took Valentina a moment to make out the figure on the upholstered bench against the wall. Someone was lying there, curled up, half on their side, one arm bent at a strange angle. The figure wore a nightgown that was torn at the shoulder and had long, dark grey hair that shimmered silvery in the twilight.

A man? No, it was Madame’s original form.

The Distilled Essence in Madame Dolorosa’s illusion artifact must have been depleted, for the woman Valentina knew had vanished, and in her place lay the slender, angular figure of Maurice Delacroix on the velvet bench, as if someone had scraped away a painting to reveal the raw wood beneath.

At first, Valentina thought Madame Dolorosa might simply have fallen asleep, perhaps while working, perhaps over a glass of wine, that wouldn’t have been entirely unusual.

But then she saw the blood.

It hung in her long grey hair, dark and crusty, and her left arm was not only in an unusual position but was bent at an angle that was clearly wrong. Her lip was also split open and covered with a crust of dried blood. Several bruises were visible on her neck and wrists, dark purple with yellowish edges.

“Those are from hands,” Vyxara murmured in her mind.

Valentina’s breath caught, but only for a heartbeat. Then she was beside the bench, kneeling down and carefully placing two fingers on Madame Dolorosa’s neck to feel her pulse. It was fast and shallow, but reassuringly present.

“Madame.” Valentina’s voice was urgent. “Madame, can you hear me?”

The figure on the bench stirred. Madame Dolorosa opened her pale grey eyes, which, without their usual illusory coloring, looked completely bare and vulnerable. She looked at Valentina, but her gaze was empty and unfocused, as if she were trying to piece together an image that made no real sense to her.

“Valentina…” The cultured tenor was rough and brittle, and the use of her real name here in this place told Valentina everything she needed to know about her patient’s state of consciousness.

Madame Dolorosa blinked, and something like panic flickered in her grey eyes. “Lily. I mean Lily. Forgive me.”

“It’s all right, no one heard. Don’t move.”

Valentina gently placed her hand on Dolorosa’s shoulder and gently pushed her back onto the bench as her counterpart tried to sit up. Dolorosa groaned softly and closed her eyes.

“How long have you been lying here?” Valentina asked.

“I… it was night. It is still night, isn’t it?”

It was late afternoon. At least fifteen hours, then, maybe more.

“That’s a severe head injury,” Vyxara said in her head, and the demon’s voice was unusually sober. “Confusion and slurred speech, I don’t like this at all.”

“Me neither,” Valentina thought back.

She slipped off her cloak, folded it up, and gently slid it under Dolorosa’s head, then began to examine her more thoroughly.

She carefully palpated the forearm, and Dolorosa hissed through her teeth but remained still. A fracture obviously, but it wasn’t open, and there were no bone fragments protruding through the skin at least. However, the two bones of the forearm were displaced relative to one another, and the swelling around them was already considerable.

“A very clean break,” Vyxara confirmed. “This was done by someone who knows exactly how to break an arm.”

Valentina continued her examination. The head injury was a swelling above the right temporal bone, beneath the dried crust of blood, and as Valentina carefully palpated the scalp, she could feel spongy tissue beneath it. There was a dangerous swelling inside. The split lip was superficial. The bruises on her neck told her that Dolorosa had been choked.

“I’ll set your arm,” Valentina said calmly. “And treat the worst of the head injury. Hold still, this will hurt for a moment.”

She pulled the cork from the bottle of Distilled Essence she carried with her and let a controlled stream flow into an Ard pattern she formed around the broken forearm. The bone had to be put back into place first. She grasped Dolorosa’s wrist with one hand and her elbow with the other, felt for the resistance of the misalignment, and then set the bones with a short, decisive pull.

Dolorosa gasped, half in pain and half in surprise, but she held on to the bench and remained still. She was tough.

The Ard pattern stabilized the fracture and held the bones in place while Valentina layered a second, finer Leb pattern over it, which would accelerate the healing process and reduce the swelling. Then she turned her attention to the head.

“Be careful with the pressure,” Vyxara warned. “The swelling is close to… oh, never mind, in any case close to a dangerous spot. Don’t overdo it.”

Valentina constructed the finest Leb pattern she was capable of, a delicate geometric structure that she carefully guided around the swelling beneath the skull. The trick was to reduce the pressure evenly and allow the excess blood and fluid to drain gently and slowly, rather than forcing it out.

The work required concentration and a considerable amount of Distilled Essence, but she didn’t care about that at that moment at all.

Slowly, over the course of several minutes, the swelling subsided, and as it subsided, a little more clarity returned to Dolorosa’s eyes.

After that, Valentina healed the split lip, which didn’t take long and cost hardly any Essence, and then sat back on her heels.

“How do you feel?”

Dolorosa blinked several times and looked at her, and this time her gaze was much more focused. Still exhausted and contorted with pain, but there was someone at home again, so to speak.

“Headache.” She still looked like Maurice, but the intonation, the way she formed the words, was entirely Madame Dolorosa. “But much better. What did you do to my head?”

“Reduced the swelling in your skull. You have a severe concussion. Can you tell me what day it is today?”

“Thursday,” said Madame Dolorosa after a moment’s hesitation. “Thursday. And you’re here early because I asked you to help with the quarterly accounts.”

“Good.”

“What is… oh no, look at me.” Dolorosa flinched as she looked down at herself, and a pained expression crossed her fox-like face. “The Essence in the Artifact…”

“Is empty, yes. I’ll take care of it before the others arrive. But first, you have to tell me what happened.”

Valentina poured water from the pitcher on the side table and held the cup out to Madame Dolorosa, who took it with her uninjured right hand, which trembled only slightly as she did so. Then she drank, slowly and carefully, and began to speak.

“It was after closing time, well past midnight. I was sitting in my study going through the books, as I do every night. The girls had long since gone, and the house was empty.”

She paused and took another sip of water.

“And then… he was just there, as if out of nowhere. The man, I mean. I didn’t hear him come in, and that shouldn’t have been possible, not in this house, with all the security measures we’ve built up over the years.” Her jaw tensed. “He was wearing a mask. One of those ornate Padavese festival masks they wear in Northern Padavo. It was a white mask with gold embellishments, and the eye slits were so narrow that I couldn’t see his eyes properly.”

“A Padavese mask,” Vyxara repeated thoughtfully in Valentina’s mind. “That’s either a deliberate misdirection or perhaps an actual clue to his origins, who knows.”

“He was an Essence Weaver,” Madame Dolorosa continued. “And an exceptionally skilled one at that. I’m not helpless, you know that. I didn’t build this house by relying on the kindness of strangers.” A bitter smile tugged at her swollen lips. “But he overpowered me as if I were a novice, Lily, I didn’t stand a chance. He bound me with patterns I’d never seen before, as if it were nothing. When I fought back, he broke my arm.” She raised her left arm slightly and let it drop again. “And when I kept lashing out anyway, he slammed my head against the wall and he choked me.”

Her voice was hoarser now, and Valentina saw a dark, smoldering rage flash in her pale grey eyes.

“And then he interrogated me.”

“Interrogated?”

“Yes. He was almost polite, considering he’d just broken my arm and nearly cracked my skull.” Madame Dolorosa slowly sat up, leaning on her good arm, and Valentina placed a pillow behind her back. “He asked me about an artifact I once owned.”

Valentina’s heart was pounding, but her hands remained steady and her expression professional as she adjusted the pillow.

“What kind of artifact?”

“An old thing. A bronze cube that I… I brought it back from Clairmontine.”

In Valentina’s mind, Vyxara was suddenly as alert as a cat sensing prey. “He’s looking for the Eye of Deceit.”

Valentina swallowed, but managed a concerned smile. “That sounds troubling. Where did you get this artifact?”

“I… stole it when I was still young and foolish and curious and, let’s say, less cautious. It belonged to a merchant in Nasille, and I took it, along with a whole bunch of other curiosities. I’ve been working with it for years, trying to study its principles. Much of what I’ve learned about Essence Illusion comes from studying this cube. Without it, the illusion artifacts we use here wouldn’t even exist.”

“And where is it now?” Valentina asked.

“No idea. One day it was gone.” Madame Dolorosa made a helpless gesture with her good hand. “Someone broke in, and the hiding place where I kept it was empty. To this day, I don’t know who took it. That was many years ago.”

Valentina had a pretty good idea who did it. Gladder. Thereon Gladder, the former university gardener who had acted as an agent of demonic forces at the university for decades. It all fit perfectly. Gladder had stolen the Eye of Deceit from Madame Dolorosa at some point and passed it on to Faustus Boarfend, and from Faustus it had eventually found its way to her.

But of course Valentina didn’t tell her that.

“He seemed to believe me, but he kept asking more and more questions,” Madame Dolorosa continued. “Whether I had ever tried to sell it, or whether I had lent it to anyone. And he wanted to know if anyone else knew I possessed it.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“The truth. What else could I have told him? I didn’t know where it was. I didn’t know who had taken it, and I never told anyone about it while I still had it. That was the truth.”

“How did he talk?” Valentina asked cautiously. “Is there anything we can use to identify him?”

Madame Dolorosa shook her head slowly, wincing as her arm protested. “He spoke well, but his voice was distorted in an unnatural way, as if he were deliberately altering it. Perhaps because of the mask, or some other artifact.”

“How tall was he?”

“Taller than me. Broad-shouldered, but not bulky, and he moved like someone who knows how to fight.” She closed her eyes briefly. “But that damned mask covered his face.”

The cloaked figure. The figure in the alley across from Valentina’s house, the figure at the edge of the market square next to the pumpkin cart. She had seen the man twice, and both times he had vanished before she could identify him. Could this be the one who had attacked Madame Dolorosa?

Someone was actively searching for the Eye of Deceit in Bridgewater. Someone powerful enough to break into Violet Delights unnoticed and overpower Madame Dolorosa.

“You mustn’t tell her you have it,” said Vyxara.

Valentina hadn’t planned to anyway. Besides, she had other things on her mind right now.

“When are the others coming?”

“In an hour, or maybe less, I… I don’t know.” Madame Dolorosa looked down at herself, at the masculine figure, the torn nightgown, and Valentina saw the despair in her pale grey eyes. “Lily, they mustn’t see me like this.”

“I know, don’t worry.” Valentina reached for her bottle of Distilled Essence. Her supply was alarmingly low after the healing, but there was still enough left to recharge the Illusion Artifact. That would be enough. She took Madame Dolorosa’s necklace, opened the setting of the largest stone, and carefully let the last of her Distilled Essence flow into the reservoir.

“That’ll last for the rest of the evening,” she said. “You’ll have to get it refilled first thing tomorrow morning.”

Madame Dolorosa placed the necklace around her neck and activated the pattern. The transformation took place in an instant, and in place of the slender, angular man with fox-like features stood the tall, elegant woman with raven-black hair and glowing violet eyes whom Valentina knew as Madame Dolorosa. The bruises and the split lip just vanished beneath the illusion, but it was still obvious that she was in no good shape at all.

“Thank you,” said Madame Dolorosa, and beneath the smooth surface lay a tremor that the illusion could not conceal. “Thank you, Lily.”

“No problem. We will manage this.”