“And the names,” added Diego. Eneko nodded. “Yes. Marco and Benito are common names, of course. Still . . .”
“One moment,” said Diego. He left the room and returned shortly with a scarf in his hand. “I obtained this from the little girl whom we saw the boy treat that time. She was reluctant to part with it, but . . .”
Lopez couldn’t refrain from wincing. Another coin gone, from the few they had in their possession. But he did not utter any protest. Like Diego, he thought the money well spent.
“Yes,” he said forcefully. “With that scarf, we can discover the boy’s past. As much, at least, as that scarf was a part of it.”
Pierre, unlike his two companions, was not well versed in sacred magic. “Unreliable . . .” he murmured. “Possibly even risky.”
Diego shook his head. “Not in the least, Pierre. This is not like scrying, which another mage could detect and distort. Nor is it as difficult—almost impossible, really—as foretelling the future. The past is done, immutable. What Eneko proposes is simply an aspect of—” Diego, who had a bit of the pedant in him, began what was clearly going to be a long-winded description of the principles of contagion as applied to sacred magic. But Eneko cut him short.
“Enough!” he chuckled. “Pierre wants to hear it less than I do.” To Pierre: “It can be done. Trust me. Will you join us in prayer?” He cast his eyes about their new home. “Since I am going to be living here, working here—” He raised his eyebrow significantly. “—and worshipping here, it should be cleansed first. And Diego, you may pretend ignorance, but you know very well how to ritually cleanse a dwelling.”
Diego groaned. “I’ll get a broom.”
“A prayer of intention, first,” Pierre said, with a laugh of his own.
* * *
The ritual cleansing didn’t take long; to be honest, although the room was physically filthy, there wasn’t much in the way of negativity to chase from it, and nothing at all of evil. The smells might be dreadful, but the spiritual atmosphere was clean. There was a practicality to a ritual cleansing—following the principle of “as above, so below,” you cleaned; you cleaned everything, floor to ceiling, in order to set a barrier of protection permanently in place, but you cleaned with intention, prayer, and the magic to flush away the “dirt” you couldn’t see along with what you could. Diego was very good at floors.
One of the reasons Eneko had chosen this particular room was because of a peculiarity of alignment: the four corners were exactly pointing to the four cardinal directions. By nailing a bit of wood into each corner to serve as a shelf for the tiny statues of the Archangels Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel he had brought, he recreated, in miniature, a ritual chapel. Like Hagia Sophia on the other side of town, like the ritual chapels of Hypatians everywhere, by the time he and Pierre finished blessing it, setting up the boundary-spells, blessing it again, this was sacred ground, protected from evil.
“Ah!” Eneko said, stretching his arms and shaking out his hands when they were done. “I much prefer this sort of comfort to anything Casa Brunelli offered.”
“I can’t say as I blame you,” Pierre replied. Diego just shrugged and picked up the scarf, which they had left lying on the cot.
“If you’re going to do this, you might as well get it over with,” he said, holding it out to Eneko gingerly, as if it was a viper.
Eneko just smiled and dug a flat bowl out of his belongings, while Pierre went out to find a water-seller. He returned with a cask of potable water which he set up in the corner beneath the statue of Gabriel and tapped. “Strange that in a city on the water, you can’t drink any of it,” he remarked.
“No stranger than being on a ship, surrounded by water,” Diego countered. “For that matter, would you drink water from the Loire in Orleans?”
“Ah . . . no. Here you are, Eneko.” Pierre had filled the flat bowl with clean water and put it on the floor where the two of them knelt on either side of it. Eneko murmured a blessing over it, and Pierre blessed salt and cast it over the top of the water. Then, holding an end of the scarf each, the two mages bent over the bowl, while Diego peered at it from his perch on the cot.