by Sarah Roark
“I wonder which gifts you’re thinking of,” Etrius said dryly. “At any rate, she and her cohorts sent regular word of their discoveries for a time. She mentioned in one letter that they’d set themselves up as a sort of priesthood for a god named Telyavel, and were accepting blood libations from the people in that guise. I should have taken warning at that right away. That sort of thing is fit only for hedge-wizards and idolaters—not for those who study the wonders of the one transcendent Logos. I thought she’d left the petty gods of her pagan childhood far behind, just as I abandoned mine long ago, but it seems they have reclaimed her.”
He turned. His eyes were downcast, almost closed. “Which means she is lost to us.”
“Master.” Jervais rarely used the term of address with Etrius. It felt familiar, and they both despised anything that smacked of closeness between them. But the turn in the conversation was alarming him now. “Are you sure you…want me to destroy her? Them?”
Etrius’s eyes snapped back open at that.
“You insolent little maggot ,” he said in a strangled tone. “You dare worm into my thoughts? You think to unlock my heart, the hearts of all your betters and learn our secrets like spells you’ll invoke at your later pleasure?”
“Not at all, milord—”
“You haven’t even been back an hour! Doesn’t common decency prescribe some kind of grace period?” The archmagus’s teeth gnashed, but it wasn’t his teeth Jervais watched with dread: it was his deft hands, to see if they were shaping themselves for some terrible curse. “Look at me! Do you believe this is the first time I have had to order the death of someone I once counted a magus of quality. Do you honestly believe that?”
“No, milord! I, I beg your lordship’s pardon.” He hated himself even as he said it, but he knew that the word beg was the fastest way to signal complete submission. Unlike Goratrix, who’d always seemed to think a great warlock never showed anything past polite contempt or contemptuous amusement to inferiors (and he plainly counted nearly everyone in the world, with the possible exception of Great Tremere himself, his inferior), Etrius didn’t trouble to hide his hurts. In fact, he wore them almost as badges of honor. But that didn’t make him an idiot or unsubtle. He knew quite well that Jervais wouldn’t forget this outburst. Jervais never forgot an unguarded word anyone spoke. There was nothing Jervais could do about that now. All he could do was try to present as insignificant and meek a target as possible.
“I’ve had almost a century to think about the Telyavs, Jervais, and they’ve had just as long. In fact they have had multiple warnings, which they’ve chosen to ignore. Rest assured, the requisite agonizing has been done. Nor do I seek your moral guidance on who is and isn’t a loyal scion of the House and Clan. I am telling you what you need to know to perform your duty. That is all.”
“I understand, milord.” Jervais bowed low, hoping this would be the end of the tirade, but it wasn’t. His superior’s sluggish movements had taken on a decided spark of animation now, as though his own anger warmed and limbered him.
“I’d think a man in your position would deem it wiser to keep his mouth shut. The question of your own loyalty isn’t on the firmest ground as far as I’m concerned. There must be some reason you haven’t found time to come home and do your job in over a decade. They left you to hang, didn’t they—your sire and grandsire? A fine reward for your long years of conniving on their behalf. I cannot believe you still don’t grasp how much they despise you. How much they’ve always despised you.”
The elder Tremere smiled unpleasantly. He took a hissing snake out of the round blown-glass globe that held it, expertly hooked its fangs over the lip of a small vial, squeezed its head to milk out the venom, then broke its body open and poured the blood in as well. He took the mortar full of pungent crushed herbs and dumped both it and the vial into a pan of sludge sitting in the coals of a little brazier. He picked up the pan carefully with a pair of tongs and tilted it around to let the contents mix.
“You never were the cloth out of which Tremere are cut. You’re not one of their kind, or mine. You barely had the skill to be a myopic grog scribe in the Paris chantry basement. And don’t think they don’t know it. They’re happy to lead you on, of course, because they know your envy makes you a fine tool. It makes of you a well-balanced dagger to twist into others’ backs. But you will never be a true wizard, Jervais. Despite whatever lies they told you, the blood can’t give you that. I know you don’t believe me now, but the centuries will teach you the bitter truth.” He dusted off his hands. “Assuming you survive.”
It was still so easy for the old ruin. He must have been keeping in practice all this time, at some other luckless soul’s expense. The shame was awful, sickening, pestilential. It was also the only thing that kept Jervais from dashing forward to try to tear that scornful throat open, or lay hold of that pale, blubbery arm and set the cold blood in it boiling—which would have given Etrius great delight, no doubt, in addition to a fine excuse for a sorcerous drubbing. Still, he hoped the hate and not the pain was what showed on his face. He’d heard these charitable sentiments before, of course, but never all in a string…
All at once he realized that the Councilor’s gaze was not just figuratively but literally going through him. He turned. Fidus (whose presence in the chamber he’d completely forgotten about) stood there frozen with eyes open wide to catch every nuance of the scene before him.
Little pitchers have big ears.
“Fidus, why don’t you go see if our quarters are in shape for the day’s sleep?”
The lad scampered off immediately, still goggling.
“Laying groundwork for the future, milord?” he said bitterly.
“Rubbish, Jervais.” Etrius took the pan out of the brazier, holding it by the tongs, and stuck a mop-ended brush into the potion. “I’m sure the boy has long since formed his opinion of you. After all, he has the joy of your nightly company. A few candid words of mine won’t cancel that out, will they?”
No, they’ll just let him know to whom he can run crying if he ever feels especially ill used.
The Councilor smiled again as though he’d heard this thought (quite conceivably he had), and, still holding the pan, he proceeded to chant softly. He snapped his fingers in the air just inches short of Jervais’s skin to prick his halo, the protruding edge of his soul-body, awake. He smoothed it in some places and drew it out in others, shaping it easily with gestures of his free hand. Jervais had always loathed the touch of Etrius’s spell-craft. Not that it was painful or cruel, as his words had just been. In fact, just the opposite. It was effortless, light as a butterfly’s wing, artful as its flight, pleasant and even inspiring to experience, a masterpiece of efficiency…
A true wizard’s touch.
Even the Swede’s derelict face seemed alight with something like a soul when he was at his work. He’d likely never known a day without the magic. Possibly a night, though. Possibly those first nights lashed awake each sunset by the hunger of the Blood, before the Tremere learned to adapt the old sorcery to their new, unbreathing bodies. How he must have suffered, how they all must have, at the thought that they might never practice the Art again. And even now, perhaps, at the nagging knowledge that what they had now was not, could never again be, what they’d once possessed. Their flight toward Heaven had ended like Icarus’s had, in drowned prayers and wings scorched beyond healing.
Let him suffer. Let them all suffer. And let them sneer, too, at their brothers who never knew the oh-so-transcendent joys of the “natural” gift. At those who have only this life, this half-life, in which to taste whatever measure of infinity they can. At me.
Etrius took his brush then and slopped it across Jervais’s face. The foul, stinging stuff stuck reasonably well but did drip onto his robe. Jervais didn’t flinch. He would not give Etrius the gratification of a flinch. As the old vampire continued to work the dweomer whose purpose he had not, would not and saw no obligation to explain, he paused once in his ch
anting to snort ironically. “I see your colors, Jervais, not a pretty sight. Keep at it. This is exactly what the charm needs. I knew the chief serpent of my snake den would not disappoint me.”
I am not your serpent to milk or crush, Jervais promised himself while he endured stroke after stroke of decorative filth. I’m not a true wizard either, but I will show you in time just what it is that I am. And long after you’re gone and your precious mortal magic is the stuff of nursemaids’ tales, I will have taken what is truly there to be taken and known what there truly is to know.
It was a vague enough oath, but it carried him through that moment on its sheer vehemence, and that was all he required of it for now.
He carried a candle that glowed with a little spark of cool, flameless light. It was necessary to see at all in the cave-black rooms, but even with benefit of starlight he would have wanted something to sweep the gloom from the corners. The Ceoris keep held something like two dozen blood-wizards and even more servants and vessels, but one would never have known it just now, in the gritty violet predawn. A constant, distant dripping was the only noise, and it seemed to follow him around, always just off to his left. In his old quarters, cobwebbed and neglected like the tomb of an especially disliked uncle, trunks and reasonably fresh bed linens awaited him, but no apprentice. (He also noticed that someone had long since broken the enchanted lock on the wardrobe where he’d once kept his stores of vis.) He frowned, continued through the corridor and hurried down the stairs.
“Fidus?”
No answer. His spell-light sputtered and crackled, dancing on the wick. He felt a surge of rage and struck the cold wall with the flat of his hand.
“None of this nonsense…”
He ran through the second and ground floors, the abandoned dining room and the near-abandoned chantry kitchen, calling. When that proved fruitless, he started to spiral down into the first basement, but a sudden suspicious instinct came to him and he ran back to the ground floor, into a little chamber that had once been the robing room for the Great Hall. It had been a necessary precaution, of course, back when the occasional mortal guest magus had still walked Ceoris’s halls. No doubt Etrius still preferred that not every magus of the Blood know the location… Yes, there—a sharp, damp, moldy smell and a hunk of wall that had missed coming back into its original position by a fraction of an inch. Jervais touched his tongue to the correct block of stone then felt his way down the cramped tunnel that the block and its neighbors swung aside to reveal.
Even the candle couldn’t penetrate this wormhole. Extending his senses, he heard the croupy, labored breathing of the larder inmates in the hollow on the other side of the tunnel wall, and that maddening ghostly drip again, and a low muttering. How far had the idiot gotten? Jervais stumbled forward in a near panic.
“Fidus!” he shouted, then even more frantically, “Fidus!”
The boy stood before a very old ward, carved directly into the tunnel rock and then re-articulated with powdered emerald in a binding agent: emerald, enemy of black magic, here in the very Olympus of black magic. Embedded in the rock above the ward was a skull with its mouth fixed open and a small vial set within—no doubt containing the tongue of whatever poor devil’s head had been evicted from its grave to serve as guard and alarm here. Fidus was tracing the contours of the ward with a finger now smeared in blue-green. At the sound of Jervais’s voice he paused in his tracing, but the muttering went on. Jervais came up beside him.
“Mars in the eighth house and in opposition with Mercury…and when Jupiter is in Capricorn again, how shall I come back then? Ah, I see…”
“Jorge.” To his relief, the young Tremere’s birth name was shock enough to startle him out of his daze. Fidus jolted. “What—just what do you think you’re doing?” Jervais demanded.
“I thought I was in bed,” Fidus whispered.
“You ought to be in bed.”
“I was in the library of Alexandria…there was a book I had to find. It was hidden in a secret room, and if I could only unlock it, I would have the answer to everything. There was a voice explaining how.” His eyes strayed yearningly to the ward again. Jervais shook him so hard his teeth clacked shut.
“The chantry library is upstairs,” Jervais growled. “I will show you tomorrow. There’s nothing down here for apprentices, do you hear? Nothing.”
“I’ve never heard such a voice, master.”
“I have. Was it just slightly lower pitched than most men’s, in an accent impossible to define, calm and unyielding as marble?”
The lad frowned. “Yes—yes, it was. It was so wise, so assuring…but master, how, I mean when—”
“Hush. Never you mind.”
“Master, you’re shaking.”
“I said hush. You mustn’t listen to anything that may speak to you in this place, Fidus. Listen to me—listen only to me. Believe me when I tell you I am your only path out of here.” When his words alone didn’t produce immediate movement, Jervais seized Fidus’s arm and dragged him up out of the tunnel and back to their bedchamber, where he set Fidus to reciting the first chapter of Marbode’s lapidary just to chase all dangerous thought out of the boy’s head.
Nothing is mine here, he thought fiercely as Fidus droned on, simultaneously helping his master undress for bed. Even my own student whom I’ve poured all my labor and wisdom into. Etrius sees there only one more heart to turn against me, and the other…well, the other sees fresh blood, and innocence…
He made himself quiet his own mind. “That’s enough, Fidus. To bed.”
Now clad only in his nightshirt, he slid into bed. At least someone on staff had remembered his tastes, and supplied him with good sheets and a rich wine-red coverlet stuffed with goose down—precious little good to him when he lacked breathing company in bed, as his own torpid body gave off no warmth for the goose down to catch. Still, it was comfortable and soft. He snuggled down and waited for sweet oblivion.
Then he began to hear the voices from elsewhere on the floor. They started out as disturbing murmurs, which he had to prick his ears to decipher, but quickly grew too loud to ignore.
“You can’t do anything wrong, can you, Curaferrum, as long as you have His Porcine Majesty’s robes to run underneath? And now no one else who licks his arse on a regular basis can do any wrong either—”
“The robes you could always quite literally be found under aren’t here anymore, milady. That is the only reason you complain of my position now.”
“Your position! You see, you still dare not say milord’s name even as you cast vile aspersions on him, you lap-dog!”
“And you, you will not pronounce the name of mine, lest he hear—”
“Oh, won’t I? Etrius! Etrius Worm-spine!”
Jervais turned onto his other side, as though that would help. Not a peep from Fidus, but Jervais could fairly taste the lad’s avid attention. Wasn’t the sun up yet? Surely it was up already. It had been a long trip, a long torture session with the Councilor…surely he would fall asleep quickly now…
“I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head when you speak of this chantry’s master, milady!”
“A master indeed! Can he not even control the brats sucking at his teat? Or is this Torgeir doing his dirty work for him? Once upon a time, your precious master at least had the courage to do his own whining and plotting and sneaking. That was, of course, before he deliberately started drinking from only the most wine-besotted wretches in the larder.”
“Too many of us are reduced to that too often, milady, since we can depend on you to drain the best vessels dry right away!”
“Ah, ah, look, you see! You are trying to change the subject yet again, which is the outright breach of the Code committed by your little spy—”
You mustn’t listen to anything that may speak to you in this place… Why couldn’t he follow his own damned advice? He wondered if Etrius heard as well. Of course Etrius heard. If he, Jervais, could not block it out, then certainly the great arc
hmagus was perfectly aware. He pictured mighty Etrius also lying on his side in a chilly room, perhaps also futilely curled away from the source of the sound, pretending to be asleep. That image did not comfort as much as it might have.
“Well, now your own little spy is back, whom I doubt could even recite the Code in proper Latin much less follow it, so I suppose fair will be fair from now on, won’t it?”
He needed to sleep. He could feel it grinding in his very bones, the exhaustion. Every moment he lay here as though bewitched to stay awake was another drop of recovery lost to perdition. He didn’t want any part of this; didn’t want to hear anyone’s honest opinion of himself or Etrius or anyone else right now. He didn’t want to know what the people who dictated his existence were screaming at each other lately in the dead, tired hours of the dawn.
He stared out into the dark, imagining grain after grain slipping through the desk hourglass. Somewhere out in the true world the sun roused itself for one more bright roll across the dome, and still the arguing went on for what might only have been an hour but seemed like four, and Jervais did not sleep.
The next evening he turned from unpacking to find Malgorzata breaking upon him like a wave. Her chestnut hair was piled on her head in regal undulations, plaited and coiled together with gold thread; her eyebrows elegantly tilted and plucked; her lips dark red and just slightly blubbed, almost raw, especially compared to the ghostly pallor of her sculpted cheek. She reached out to him. He reached back without even thinking. She kissed him on the cheek and then stepped back to glance over him.
“You look well.” This was always her little joke whenever they reunited, ever since they’d both become vampires. It embarrassed and pleased him at the same time. He couldn’t help thinking of his bald pate, his eyes puckered and prematurely crow’s-footed from peering, his body rather too mountainous to qualify as handsome, but she never seemed to mind. She touched his face, ran her hand along the bottom of his beard from jaw to chin, then let it come to rest on his shoulder. It smelled of sandalwood and jasmine, the oriental scent that had turned his head like wine as a young man. On her fingers sat a minor constellation of rings, the most prominent of which was topped with a cabochon caged in gold. Within the ring, unless she’d been neglecting to refill it, was her emergency store of a poison that would kill a mortal within a day and send the Cainite who fed off such a mortal into several hours’ unconsciousness.