Opening Acts

by SFnovelists

  *** ***

  "Cousin Portier. We've not met before, I believe." The tall, broad-shouldered man in maroon and silver stood by a grand window that opened onto the sprawling country estate called Margeroux. His clear voice resonated with confidence. His extended hand bore a ruby signet, crested with Sabria's golden tree.

  "Indeed, sire, I've not had that privilege." I dropped to one knee and kissed his proffered ring. "How may I serve you?"

  I felt immensely relieved and a bit foolish. Four long days in the saddle give a man occasion to recall every synonym for idiot. Philippe de Savin-Journia was a sovereign in his prime. His wealth and open-mindedness had artists, explorers, scholars, and academicians of every science flocking to his court. What possible need had he of a librarian, schooled in a fading art? I had decided that, at best, the kinsman awaiting me would turn out to be some moronic relation as bereft of fortune and prospects as I. Worse cases abounded.

  But the King of Sabria enveloped my left hand with his own-a broad, hard, warm hand, scribed with the myriad honorable scars of a warrior's life, as well as the same Savin family device that marked mine-and hauled me to my feet. Eyes the deep blue of Sabria's skies took my measure.

  "I've a mystery needs solving, cousin. The matter is delicate, and certain aspects require me to seek counsel beyond my usual circles. Where better than with a member of my own family?"

  "I'm honored you would think of me, sire." Mystified, to be precise. Curious.

  His well-proportioned face relaxed into a welcoming smile. "Good. I've heard decent reports of you over the years and was sure you were the man I needed. I've delayed this unconscionably, hoping- Ah, you'll hear all the sordid complications soon enough. Come along."

  He led me on a brisk walk through a series of pleasant, sunny rooms to a deserted kitchen in the back of the house. Pausing only to light a lamp from the banked kitchen fire, which seemed odd in the bright midafternoon, he headed outdoors.

  "Tell me, Portier," he said, striding across a shady courtyard. "The methods of sorcerous practice have not changed in these years of my estrangement with the Camarilla, have they? No revelation of opticum or mechanica, no new-writ treatise on anatomy or mathematics or the composition of minerals has altered the teaching of spellwork?"

  "Not at all, sire. Indeed some progressive mages believe that instruments such as the opticum will support our understanding of the physical melding of the five divine elements." Not many. Most magical practitioners stubbornly maintained their posture that the mundane sciences offered nothing to sorcerers.

  "And your brethren yet renounce superstition and demonology?"

  "Mages of the Camarilla work entirely within the bounds of earth. They practice as methodically as do the scientists and natural philosophers you embrace."

  Had I ever imagined having the opportunity to seed the king's mind with some good feeling for the art of sorcery, I would have prepared more refined arguments. Philippe was known as a man of lively intellect and devouring curiosity.

  "Sire, it seems a sad waste that political disagreements with the Camarilla have so undermined your confidence in an art that has so much to offer your kingdom."

  He choked down a laugh. "I will not argue science and magic with you, Portier. My bodyguard reports that you yourself carry a compass rather than some 'directional charm' that might fail inexplicably at the dark of the moon and lead you off a cliff."

  We left the path and crossed a dark corner of the yard to a narrow downward stair. Wading through a litter of dead leaves, twigs, and walnut husks, we descended the stone steps to an iron grate that blocked the lower end.

  Philippe twisted the latch and tugged a rusty handle, the grate rising more smoothly than its appearance and location would suggest. The low-ceilinged passage beyond, much older than the house, smelled of stagnant water and old leaves. The king adjusted his lamp to shine more brightly. Once the grate slid closed behind us, a fierce sobriety wiped away my cousin's affable demeanor.

  "Last year, on the twenty-fifth day of Cinq, an arrow penetrated my mount's saddle, not three millimetres from the great vein in my thigh. By the grace of the Pantokrator's angels, the villain archer's hand wavered, and he lies dead instead of me. Gross evidence implicates my wife."

  "Sainted ancestors! I never heard-" Well, perhaps a traveling mage had brought gleeful rumors of a foiled assassination plot, but I'd thought nothing of it. Few mages held excessive love for Philippe, who had set out to dismantle the Camarilla Magica's pervasive influence in Sabrian society, scholarship, and business, and done exceeding well at it. But the queen . . . the shadow queen, rumor named her, or the lady of sorrows, who had lost one husband already, her parents in a fire, her firstborn to an infant fever, and three others miscarried . . .

  We proceeded deliberately through a warren of dank passages. "Few know the complete story, in particular that the nature of the archer, and certain other aspects of the event, evidenced the collaboration of one from your magical fraternity. Somewhere a sorcerer has, for whatever reason, decided that his king ought to be dead. Though her two pet mages have no use for me, I utterly reject the idea that my wife could be involved."

  "Sorcery."

  "That's why I chose you, cousin. I need a sorcerer to serve as my confidential agent in this matter."

  The snaky uneasiness in my belly quickly tangled itself into a familiar knot of disappointment. Though I held no grievance against Philippe, man or king, or his predecessor, King Soren, I forever cursed their presence in my family tree. As early as age ten, I had realized that our royal connection and its excess of expectations had ruined my father, leaving him with no true friends, no money, no useful purpose to his life, and a marital contract sufficient to produce me, but naught else.

  At fourteen, I learned that no girl with a wit larger than an acorn would touch a male who wore the interlaced S and V on the back of his hand. The Camarilla mandated severe penalties for promiscuity, and when one of the parties hailed from the most notable, if not the most vigorous, of Sabria's seventeen remaining magical bloodlines, inquisitorial scrutiny was assured.

  In the very year I turned sixteen and began my studies at Seravain, the coolness between the young King Philippe and the Camarilla broke into an open struggle for dominance. Determined to make my way in the society of mages, I had quickly dropped the Savin from my name. Seven years later, my ambition had died its humiliating death, my Savin bloodline too weak to carry me farther in a life of sorcery.

  "My lord . . ."

  At the end of a branched passage, Philippe touched a most ordinary-seeming door of thick oak. The door swung open all of itself. Cool air rushed out, bristling with enchantment. For one moment I allowed the mystical wave to engulf me, a sensory pleasure as deeply human as the smell of damp earth in spring. But nine years of practiced honesty required I speak nature's inescapable verdict.

  "My lord, I must confess: I am no sorcerer, nor will I ever be."

  He swung around to face me.

  "I am failed, sire," I said, lest he had not heard enough. "Incapable of spellwork."

  "I see. Yet you excelled in your studies. Reports say you are as intimately familiar with the history and practice of magic as anyone in Sabria-including those who wear the collar of a Camarilla mage. Is that true? Answer squarely, cousin. False modesty has no place here."

  The truth was not so simple. Yes, I had read widely. But who would ever separate knowledge of sorcery from its practice? "I suppose one could say that, but-"

  "Skills can be bought. Knowledge takes much longer to acquire, and the ability to question, analyze, interpret, and deduce longer still. The capacity for loyalty is born in a man, reinforced, I believe, with family connection. I believe you the fit person to pursue a confidential, objective inquiry into a matter of sorcery. The burden of judgment is my duty and my prerogative. But if you take on this task, I shall give you freedom and resources to pursue matters as you think best. If you deem yourself unfit, turn right around and be on
your way. My time is exceeding short."

  Royal assassination. Magic bent to murder. The queen suspected. Were my eyes wholly dazzled with royal flattery that I would consider treading such dangerous ground? Did unseemly curiosity cloud my judgment? Or was I clinging to the improbable certainty that my life had meaning beyond breathing and dying?

  Perhaps reasons didn't matter. My mentor, Kajetan, had instilled in me a determination to honesty, and I allowed that to be my guide. "Beyond the practice of sorcery itself, sire," I said, "I do believe myself fit for such a task."

  "Good. Because now I must unnerve you a bit more." Philippe moved through the open door, his boots rapping sharply on the uneven paving of yet another passage. "The last man I set to this investigation, a skilled warrior and experienced diplomat, vanished nine months ago and is not found. For private reasons, I've allowed the public inquiry to lapse. Yet conscience nags that we speak not only of my personal safety, but of the security of Sabria herself."

  We halted beside an iron door. Philippe hung his lamp from a bracket and unlocked the door with a plain bronze key, but he did not open it right away. The lamplight ringed his pale eyes with shadow and carved false hollows in his firm-fleshed cheeks.

  "I don't believe in magic, Portier. For most of my eight-and-thirty years, I have judged its practice entirely illusion, trickery, or coincidence. Alchemists demonstrate every day that matter is not limited to sorcery's five divine elements. An opticum lens reveals that wood is not homogeneous, but is itself made up of water, air, and fibers. Water contains unseeable creatures and can be fractured into gaseous matter. Spark is but an explosive instance of heat and light and tinder. Similarly with air and base metal. Natural science brings logic and reason to a chaotic universe. We have discovered more of truth in the past twenty years than in the past twenty centuries, stimulating our minds, benefiting Sabria and her citizens in innumerable ways. However, in this room, it pains me to confess, we find something else again."

  He dragged open the door and gestured me in, and though I held ready arguments against his inaccurate understanding of the divine elements, an eager excitement drew me into the small, bare chamber. Swept and brushed, the close room smelled of naught but damp stone and lamp oil. On a stone table at its center lay an arrow, its point, splintered shaft, and ragged fletching stained deep rusty red; a brass spyglass, as a military commander or shipboard officer might use; and an untarnished silver coin. Simple evidence, an observer might say, unless he could sense the enchantment that belched from them in a volcanic spew.

  "Sight through the glass, Portier. Then I'll tell you my story of magic and murder."

  Magic, as I had told the king, was entirely of the human world and subject to its laws. So it was bad enough that I peered through the enchanted glass and saw a man staggering through a tangle of leafless thorn trees toward a barred iron gate-a view nothing related to the place where I stood. Far worse was my eerie certainty of the land he traveled. To glimpse the Souleater's ice-bound caverns or spy on the surpassing mystery of the Creator's Heaven could be no more fearsome, for every passing soul must first endure the Perilous Demesne of Trial and Journey-Ixtador of the Ten Gates, the desolation that lies just beyond the Veil separating this life from the next. Most unsettling of all was the reason for my certainty. The wailing, exhausted traveler was my father, a man nine years dead.