The Painted War (12 page)

The thought was cheering. She began to paint, carefully skirting around the little girl, using the pressure of the brush to nudge and persuade the painting to take on magical properties and adapt to them, in the same way she'd use her thumb to make the first impressions on a piece of blank clay.

By the time Marco and Mistress Frazetti returned with an inkwell and a clean jar full of water, the whole left hand side of the picture had some depth to it.

Mistress Frazetti stood and stared at the painting.

‘The tree looks so far away,' she muttered. ‘It looks like you could walk right up to it.'

‘Thank goodness,' said Bianca, reaching up and taking the ink. ‘I need something to make a mark here, and I'm almost out of
lux aurumque.
' She dipped the paintbrush into the ink and reached into the painting. She heard Mistress Frazetti give a little gasp as she leaned into it and started to paint a shape onto the trunk of the big oak tree. Bianca was careful not to make too much of the black lines – just a subtle suggestion of darkness visible through the cracks in the bark, and two small holes chiselled into the wood to serve as a keyhole and handle. Then she rinsed the brush and started to work over the lines with the golden, glowing fluid.

She pulled back, rinsed and wiped the brush again and then turned it in her hand.

‘Hidden rooms, secret passages, second city,' she said.

‘Oh, isn't that darling?' Mistress Frazetti said, staring hard at the small copper key as it clicked into place. ‘But is this really going to work?'

Bianca didn't answer – the only answer she had was,
Oh God, I hope so
.

She leaned inside the painting, slid the key into the lock, turned it, and pulled on the door handle. The trunk of the tree swung out, almost as if it'd been designed that way from the beginning, and, beyond, Bianca saw the flickering torchlight, paint-speckled stone walls and puddle-strewn floor of the secret passages.

‘We're in!' Marco said.

Bianca turned to the stunned lady and shook her hand gratefully. ‘Thank you so much,' she said. ‘Remind me to tell you what a great thing you've done for La Luminosa sometime.'

‘All right,' said Marco. ‘You ready?'

Bianca nodded. Then she grabbed him and gave him a big, squeezing hug. When she pulled away, he raised one eyebrow at her.

‘I'm not coming, am I?'

Bianca shook her head. ‘I'll do better by myself – I know my way around, and I know how to find the Resistance. I promise I'll be all right.'

‘Be careful,' Marco said.

‘I will.'

‘More careful than that.'

Bianca fixed him with a serious stare and crossed her heart. ‘I solemnly swear I will do absolutely everything I can not to get hurt. OK?'

‘All right. Good luck,' Marco said, and stood back. Bianca smiled again at Mistress Frazetti, who was looking a little queasy, and then turned and climbed inside the painting.

It was a tight fit, because she hadn't had much canvas to work with, but the tree did grow a little bigger as she climbed through the painting towards it, and she ducked down and squeezed through the door in the trunk. When she was standing in the secret passages, she bent down and looked back, waving before shutting the door behind her.

As soon as she turned around and started walking down the passage, Bianca could tell that there was something wrong here. She could smell smoke, and the floor of the passage was still sloppy with canal water in wide puddles that Bianca had to hop and skip and criss-cross the corridor to avoid. She came to the end of a short passage, and looked both ways.

‘This isn't right  … ' she muttered, and as soon as she'd said it she knew why. This
should've
been part of the passages that she knew, but some of the doors she had been expecting to see had just  …  gone. It was as if the doors on both sides of the missing ones had shifted up to take up the space, shortening the whole passage.

She walked up to the closest door and opened it a crack. She could see the inside of the painting. It was one she knew, with two girls dancing in front of a mirror. It should've been hanging in one of the guest rooms at the palace, but outside of the painting, there was nothing but a blank, white-ish void. It took her a moment to realise where she was: inside the stack of paintings that'd been moved to the museum. She reached out gingerly and prodded the white thing. She was right – it had the texture and give of canvas.

‘This is odd,' she muttered, and pulled back into the passages, closing the door. She patted it, glad to know that this painting was safe, for now.

If that was the painting of the dancers, then Bianca thought the painting that led to the little walled garden in Oscurita ought to be to her left. She turned and started walking, hopping over or tiptoeing through the puddles, trying not to worry about the way the smell of smoke seemed to come and go.

A blast of heat and light from behind her made her skid on the wet floor, spinning around to see that one of the doors she'd just passed was on fire. There'd been no warning, no crackling or increase in heat, just a sudden burst of flame that roared over the surface of the door. Bianca stepped back, shielding her face, and watched as the fire crackled and flowed. There was a strong smell of burning paint – oil, bone, and a tang of magic that stung the back of Bianca's nose – and then the door crumbled to black ash.

Bianca blinked and rubbed her eyes. The door was gone and there was another in its place. She looked up and down the corridor. It had definitely become a little bit shorter.

Every painting that was destroyed made the secret passages smaller. If Secretary Franco ever destroyed them all, would the passages wink out of existence altogether? What would happen to someone who was in the passages when that happened? Or someone who tried to step through a door only to find it suddenly aflame?

She shuddered, and broke into a run. She had to get to Oscurita, find her mother, find the Duchess, stop the war.
Then
she would handle Secretary Franco's terrible idea to ban all magical art.

The door to Oscurita was blessedly cool and solid under her hands when she eventually found it. Bianca opened it a tiny crack and looked through. The alleyway and neglected garden were empty. She climbed through the door and out into Oscurita without hesitating. She glanced back at the mural, with its cracked paint and subtle sense of depth. At least this one of her grandfather's works would be left alone.

Bianca realised she must be one of the very few in Oscurita who even knew it was an opening to the secret passages – Edita would have every entrance to La Luminosa that she knew about under guard, ready for the invasion.

She walked out through the archway to the street. She was heading for the big public square that she'd found by accident when she'd first visited Oscurita. At that time there had been barely any clue that this place was under the thumb of a tyrant. Everyone had seemed to be getting on with their normal lives, buying and selling from the market stalls that lined the streets, strolling along through the pools of crackling blue light from the thunder lamps in their glass orbs.

Straight away, this felt different. The streets were still full of people, perhaps even busier than before, but nobody strolled or stopped to chat – they walked quickly, clutching baskets or books to their chests, their hands thrust into the pockets of their black and grey frock coats and the hoods of their cloaks pulled up over their heads. A door along the street creaked open and then slammed shut again without anyone having stepped out.

There seemed to be fewer flashes of colour around their clothing too, though Bianca saw two women who looked like they belonged at Edita's court wearing long black velvet robes embroidered with bright purple and turquoise. They stopped walking and stood arm in arm, as if waiting for something. Then Bianca heard it – the sound of marching, armoured feet.

She looked around and saw a phalanx of soldiers coming towards her, armed to the teeth and carrying a purple banner.

Bianca's first thought was to run, but then she noticed that everybody else on the street had also stopped. They stared at their shoes or up to the starry sky. Nobody looked directly at the soldiers, but nobody turned their back on them either. A running figure among the crowd would be spotted at once, and chased down.

Bianca looked down at her feet, praying that her headdress and grey costume would protect her from being spotted.

The soldiers approached, drew level, and began to pass her. She swallowed hard as she counted the lines: five, ten, twenty rows of soldiers marching five abreast. A hundred soldiers – and that was just this troop. She sincerely doubted that this was the whole Oscuritan army.

None of them stopped to challenge her, or made any sound that suggested they'd even noticed her. The street seemed to come alive again after they'd passed by. Bianca let herself pause for a deep breath before she made herself join the hurrying crowd and cross the street. There was even more of an air of people scampering to get their business done and get home.

Bianca hurried through the dark streets, trying to look as if she was heading for an important errand and her mistress would miss her if she was stopped. She made it to the public square without being caught or questioned.

The square itself was almost deserted. When she'd been here before, it'd been as busy as the Piazza del Fiero, with stalls selling strange fruits and beautiful rolls of brightly coloured ribbon and thread. Now as she looked across at the statue of Annunzio di Lombardi, she gasped. The statue had been covered up, hastily draped with thick grey cloth and bound with rope. Bianca approached the statue, walking gingerly across the black and white tiles to the centre of the empty square. She felt a burst of anger when she saw that the
lux aurumque
flowers around the base of the plinth had all been cut down. Their black, stick-like stems poked up around the statue like a bed of thorns, but all their beautiful, glowing white flowers had been taken away.

A movement in the corner of Bianca's eye made her gasp, and she forced herself to turn around slowly, as if casually, to glance behind her.

A few people in heavy cloaks had entered the square and were walking quickly around the edge. One stopped to look at their reflection in the darkened window of a tavern. On an empty market stall nearby, a grey tabby cat licked its paws and gave Bianca a hard stare. Nothing else moved.

Bianca shook herself. She just had to keep moving. After all, there was nothing more suspicious than someone checking to see if they were followed every few minutes.

She stepped around the veiled statue and carried on across the square. Above her the spire of the Cathedral d'Oscurita loomed, black and spindly like one of the stems of the beheaded flowers. On the other side of the square, a few doors down from the cathedral's firmly shut doors, she saw it: Dante's Grocery. It was one of the very few shops in Oscurita that still seemed to be open – the windows glowed with the soft light of a fire in a hearth, and a lit thunder lamp hung over the door to illuminate the sign. There was even a woman coming out of the door carrying a small loaf of bread as Bianca approached. She gave Bianca a brief, appraising look, and then hurried off.

Bianca paused outside the shop, reading a sign that had been put up in one of the windows:

Bianca raised her eyebrows at the sign. La Luminosa's evil threat against Oscurita? She would have laughed, if it hadn't been so ominous.

Could this be the place? It didn't look particularly revolutionary – and even more worryingly, the sign contained the phrase ‘the true Duchess Edita'. If she walked into this place and said ‘God bless the true Duchess' as she'd been told, would the shopkeeper give her a blank look, or call the soldiers?

Still, the sign above the door said ‘Dante's Grocery', and that was where Saralinda had told her to go. She had to trust her mother.

She screwed up her courage and pushed through the door and into the shop.

It seemed like a pretty ordinary grocer's shop. Apart from the everlasting darkness outside the window and the fire roaring in the hearth, and one or two strange fruits and vegetables in baskets by the door, it was just like the shop in La Luminosa where she used to go sometimes with Angela the kitchen maid to pick up a few extra ingredients for dinner.

‘Got your ration book?' said a voice from the next room, making Bianca jump. ‘Or are you here to pick one up?'

Bianca tried to breathe steadily and not look as scared as she felt when a large man in a leather apron appeared behind the counter. He had grey hair and a grey beard, and bags around his eyes as if he hadn't slept properly in a long time. To Bianca's surprise, he still wore a flash of colour on his dark grey tunic – a bright purple button over his heart in the shape of an open eye. It was small, but it shone out like a beacon in the dim shop.

‘Are you Dante?' she asked.

The man frowned at her. ‘The one and only,' he said, crossing his arms. She noticed that there were faded purple tattoos on his forearms. ‘And what can I do for you?'

Bianca swallowed. It was now or never. She touched both eyes, her heart, and both her shoulders. ‘God bless the true Duchess,' she said.

Without a word, Dante beckoned Bianca to come behind the counter, and then walked into a back room. Bianca clasped her hands together to try and stop them from shaking, glanced around to make sure there was nobody watching her through the windows from the square, and followed him.

She'd found the place.

‘There it is,' said Dante, gesturing to the far wall of the storeroom.

Bianca frowned. There was no doorway, not even a painting – instead there was a big sculpture, a relief of the front of the cathedral.

‘Um  … ' she said.

Dante's face broke into a friendly, conspiratorial smile and he walked up to the model and fished something that glinted out of his pocket. It was a key! He slipped it into the towering front doors of the cathedral – in real life they were several storeys high, and on the model they were just a little bit smaller than Bianca. They swung open and Bianca peered through to see a passage on the other side. It seemed to burrow straight through where the rest of the building should be, extending much further than it should.

‘Is it magic?' Bianca asked.

Dante nodded and stood back to let Bianca go through, then bent nearly double and followed her inside, shutting the doors behind them.

‘I didn't know you could make magical doors in sculptures too,' she said. ‘I don't know why it never occurred to me.'

‘This was created in a hurry,' said Dante. ‘It goes only two places – my shop, and the hiding place of the Resistance. Don't be afraid,' he added. ‘If you're the young lady I was told to expect, you're among friends.'

‘I hope so,' Bianca muttered, as she followed him down the dark passage. There was a single torch halfway along the corridor. Bianca guessed that even for full-blooded Oscuritans, it gave only just enough light for them to navigate a straight line along the passage and not bash into the black stone walls. She reached out and let her fingers drag on the stone, and smiled as she realised that of course, this magical passage would feel as if it was chiselled out of stone, rather than painted onto canvas  … 

‘You know, I helped your grandfather escape the palace so he could take you through to the bright city,' said Dante.

Bianca's heart rose at the mention of her grandfather.

‘A real gent,' Dante continued. ‘I was sorry to hear he died.'

‘Thank you,' said Bianca.

‘Now, remember what I said.' Dante unlocked and pushed open the doors at the other end. ‘Don't be afraid.'

Bianca stepped through into what looked like some kind of vision of hell. She gasped and staggered back against the doors as Dante ducked through and shut them behind him. Skulls grinned at her from the walls, hundreds and hundreds of them, piled on top of each other like bricks, or tiles. A large candlestick in the middle of the room held twelve enormous red candles, casting flickering pink light over an altar made of rib cages and a snaking design across the ceiling that was laid out in hundreds of vertebrae. A whole, small skeleton stood to one side in a special alcove, which was also made of skulls. Its arms were crossed over its rib cage. Bianca forced herself to look closer, and saw the thin wires that'd been strung through the middle of the bones to hold them in that pose.

‘Where have you brought me?' Bianca gasped.

‘We're deep in the old catacombs of the city,' Dante said quietly. ‘It's an Oscuritan tradition – instead of burial, people bequeathed their bones to the catacombs and the monks here made them into beautiful sculptures and decorations for their church. It's art.'