by Brent Weeks
Lifting his eyes, Feir saw more: ruts from the passage of wagons, grass beaten flat by marching feet, holes for the firepits and latrine pits of an abandoned military camp. But no tents or tools. Anything that could be looted had been taken long ago, but everything that remained stayed unchanged.
That didn’t only apply to the land. Two hundred paces away, the bodies began. First, a few marking the edge of the battle, and then hundreds, and then thousands, until in the distance the ground lay under a black blanket of the dead. The epicenter of death was a perfectly round dome of black rock the size of a small mountain covering the city and the hill where the castle had once been. At the base of the dome, siege engines on broken wheels, half-consumed by fires, tottered but hadn’t fallen despite the centuries.
The dome was surrounded by a larger circle of magic in the land itself, miles across, called the Dead Demesne. Outside the circle, time continued, wind blew, rain fell. Inside the Dead Demesne . . . they didn’t.
Feir rolled his great shoulders, readying himself. He cupped his hands close to his face and conjured a fire with his Talent. Then he stepped across the boundary into the circle of death. Nothing happened. He let the fire die.
“That’s odd,” he said aloud. Antoninus grunted in assent. Feir squinted at the air.
The Dead Demesne—like Black Barrow itself—was Emperor Jorsin Alkestes’ work. He had made it lethal to use the vir within the circle, but because vir had similarities to the Talent, there was always some dissonance in the circle when anyone tried using the Talent. Little things would be different, like mage fire being red instead of orange. But Alkestes’ weave was gone.
Feir rubbed his scruffy beard. It was good for him. He wouldn’t have to factor it into the work he’d come here to do. But someone had broken what Jorsin made. That was not good.
Examining the air over the circle in the same way he had examined the circle in Ezra’s Wood, Feir studied the magic. He could feel an emptiness in the weaves—the great magics Jorsin had woven didn’t break without leaving a trace. Unfortunately, he couldn’t tell much except that that the weaves had been broken recently. But to break a spell Jorsin Alkestes had made using Curoch would have required someone incredibly powerful here wielding some artifact, or a couple of hundred magi or Vürdmeisters working together. Feir couldn’t imagine anyone with a shred of sense or decency participating in such a scheme. So that meant Vürdmeisters.
Jorsin’s other weaves, the ones sealing the ground and sealing the dead, were perfectly intact. Feir didn’t think they would be so easily broken, either. He hoped not.
Feir scanned the distant trees, suddenly queasy that unfriendly eyes might be hiding within them. He walked across the plain quickly, the air curiously odorless even as he approached the first body.
The creature was the black of a bloated corpse and man-shaped but ill-proportioned. Its arms were too long, its face too long, lower jaw jutting forward, ragged hooks of teeth stabbing up into the air from its lower jaw, mismatched black and blue eyes staring. It was massively muscled. Its skin was hairy, bordering on fur, and it had neither clothes, nor weapon. It was a krul. The meisters could not make life, but they could mimic and mock it. There were, Dorian had once told Feir, dark mirrors of almost every natural creation.
Feir and Antoninus walked on. It was going to get worse. A lot worse.
Soon, dead krul lay everywhere. Thousands had been killed bloodlessly by Jorsin’s magic, but thousands more bore the marks of their deaths. Ugly faces had been crushed by war hammers or flailing hooves. Chests were caved in from being trampled. Throats were cut, torsos disemboweled, eyes hung by optic nerves from broken sockets, and blood glistened freshly in the wounds, never drying, never congealing.
Paths had been cleared through the bodies, and they followed them mutely. It wasn’t long before Feir saw a human arm amid the krul, then a leg that appeared to have been half eaten. The bodies were piled knee-deep on either side of them. Then they began passing krul who’d been killed by magic. There were great craters in the battlefield empty of all but pulverized scraps of meat. Others had been burned or cut in half or shocked. Some had torn their faces to ribbons with their own claws.
The krul began to vary, too. Pure white krul with spiraling rams’ horns led every unit of twelve, and larger ones seven feet tall appeared more rarely still. They walked past an entire platoon of four-legged feline krul the size of horses, with jet-black skin, sparse hair like a rat’s tail, and exaggerated maws like a wolf. Rarer still were those like bears, easily twelve feet tall and with thick fur the color of new blood. As they trekked through the vast battlefield, it seemed every natural animal had found a dark mockery here. Bats, ravens, eagles, fanged horses, horned horses, even dark, red-eyed elephants carrying archers lay in ignominious death.
“The monsters,” Antoninus said quietly. “Was nothing holy to them?”
Feir followed Antoninus’s gaze and saw the krul children. They were most beautiful of all the krul, with balanced features, big child’s eyes, pale skin close to a human shade, and long claws for fingers. These still wore their human clothes. Even the looters hadn’t touched them. Feir almost gagged. They moved on, ever closer to the great black dome.
After a while, Feir felt inured to the horror. There were a thousand thousand permutations of death, krul of every shape and size and sometimes men and often horses, but the magical fixedness of it, the lack of smell, the stillness of the air, lent it a certain unreality, as if the dead were figures carved of wax.
If Jorsin was to be believed, one million one hundred thirteen thousand eight hundred and seventy-nine krul lay dead here. Various magi scholars had guessed that between five hundred thousand and a million krul would face them. Against fifty thousand men. The rest of Jorsin’s armies had been drawn away by his own treacherous generals.
Then Jorsin had done all this, with Curoch—the very blade Feir had gone into the Wood to retrieve. Of course, he had only retrieved instructions. Curoch was safe in Ezra’s Wood forever, and thank the gods for that.
“Well, here we are,” Antoninus said as they finally touched the dome of Black Barrow. “Now we can forge our counterfeit Ceur’caelestos and save Lantano Garuwashi and all his men. Indeed, maybe all the south.”
Feir said, “All we have to do is find Ezra’s secret entrance to Black Barrow, find Ezra’s workshop and his gold tools, find seven broken mistarille swords, rediscover a forging technique every present-day Maker says is a myth, find one giant ruby, and avoid detection by a couple of hundred Vürdmeisters plotting gods know what.”
“Oh,” Antoninus said, waggling his great, single kohled eyebrow, “here I thought it was going to take all winter.”
40
A knock sounded on Vi’s door hours later. “It’s Sister Ariel. May I come in?”
“I can’t stop you. There’s no lock on the door,” Vi said.
Sister Ariel came in. She said nothing for a time, staring around the bare room with apparent nostalgia.
“What do you want?” Vi asked.
“A bit nervous about going to the lecture, huh? Or was it your meeting with Elene that’s got you acting more like a tyrant than a tyro?” Sister Ariel said.
“I fucked up,” Vi said, sulking, knowing it, hating it, and sulking anyway. “Now they hate me, like always.”
“They’re twelve years old. They don’t dare hate you.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“I’m not terribly concerned about your feelings, Vi. However, given the difficulties of your case and that I discovered you, and most of all because I couldn’t come up with an excuse quickly enough, I’ve been put in charge of your tutelage.”
Vi groaned.
“My feelings exactly. First of all, this room is entirely inappropriate for you.”
“I get a better room?”
“You get to share a room. You were given a single in deference to your age. That was a mistake. You’re isolated enough as is. As of
this afternoon, you’ll have a roommate. In case you’re curious, the room will be only slightly larger than this one.” Vi pitched back onto the bed. “Now, since you are my responsibility, you’ll go to lecture. Now. Elene will have to wait until later.”
Vi didn’t move.
“Do we need to repeat certain lessons we learned on the trail?” Ariel asked.
Vi stood quickly.
“And by the by, lest you being put under my care be seen as a reward, all the punishments that your unfortunate floor monitor imposed will be carried out, as well as a few of my own. Follow.” Ariel left, and Vi had no choice but to follow her like a whipped dog.
The Chantry had been constructed with beauty and practicality as its first considerations. Cost had obviously been no object. Even here, in the tyros’ area, the arched ceilings were ten feet high, incised with a different pattern in every quarter. The tyros occupied the lowest level of the Chantry, though storerooms, archives, and the like lay beneath the water line. Because it was housed entirely within the giant statue of the Seraph, the interior of the Chantry was arranged in circles: living quarters arrayed along the quadrasecting halls, and lecture halls around the outside to take advantage of the sunlight necessary for magic.
Though white marble predominated, the tyros’ floor didn’t feel austere. A castle with so much stone would be cold and dark, but here the floors were warmed to welcome bare feet, and the ceiling itself was luminous. The walls were filled with bright, cheery scenes to comfort girls away from home for the first time: rabbits, unicorns, cats, dogs, horses, and animals Vi had never seen played together. They were drawn fancifully, but exquisitely.
Vi touched a painted pink puppy curled in sleep next to an impossibly friendly lion. Its eyes opened and it licked toward her fingers, its pink tongue pressing against the wall as if it were just on the other side of a glass. Vi yelped and jumped backward, clawing at her belt for a dagger that wasn’t there.
“His name’s Paet,” Sister Ariel said. “He was one of my favorites. He doesn’t wake until noon.”
“What?”
“It’s a timepiece. Watch this,” Sister Ariel said, stopping outside one of the classrooms.
Gently, the ceilings pulsed violet, red, yellow, green, and blue in succession as a bell tolled. Seconds later, several hundred girls between ten and fourteen poured into the halls in a flood of noise and motion. Vi saw more curious glances than frightened ones. Apparently the rumors hadn’t spread to the entire school yet. She folded her arms and scowled.
“Class starts in five minutes. Can you read and write?”
“Of course,” Vi said. Her worthless mother had done that much.
“Good. I’ll collect you at noon. Oh, and Vi? If you have a question during class, raise your hand. Sister Gizadin is a stickler. When called on, stand with your hands behind your back. If you don’t, they’ll think you’re being disrespectful. Oh, and no magic. And remember everything. Lectures are arranged in triads to help with that.”
“Triads?” Vi asked, but Sister Ariel was already gone.
Five minutes later, Vi was seated in a too-small chair at a too-small desk in the front row of a lecture hall. Three walls were unadorned white stone. The east wall, however, was as transparent as glass. The late morning sun poured down, bathing Lake Vestacchi and the snow-capped mountains beyond in light. The lake was the deepest blue Vi had ever seen, and dozens of fishing boats dotted the surface.
Vi barely noticed when her whispering classmates suddenly quieted. A squat Sister tut-tutted and the wall shimmered, becoming opaque white like the others in seconds. Without preliminaries, Sister Gizadin began: “There are three reasons glamours should be used sparingly. Anyone?” Not a girl made a move. “First, glamours are unpredictable. Second, glamours are unnatural. Third, glamours are unappreciated.
“Unpredictable. First, a glamour may affect only men or only women or only children. Second, a glamour may affect some people much more strongly than others. Third, a glamour will attract people according to their own predispositions. It may impart, particularly in men, an overwhelming sexual desire for the caster. Or it may impart a slavish servitude, where the person finds in you every good thing they could imagine. Or it may impart a simple attractiveness and persuasiveness.
“Unnatural. First, a glamour can operate by exaggerating a quality you already have. That could be exaggerating your inherent attractiveness, or it could exaggerate people’s perception of your courage or honor or strength, or it could exaggerate a bond such as friendship that you share with the glamour’s target. Second, a glamour may feign the attractive features of another person. Third and most powerfully, a glamour may tap the subject’s mind for what he finds most attractive. One man might say the caster was blonde and blue-eyed whilst the man beside him would swear she was buxom and green-eyed. But this type of glamour is unusual and challenging to use. And obviously, if the two men talk after that maja leaves, they will notice the discrepancy.
“That leads us to the third reason glamours should be used sparingly: Glamours are unappreciated. First—” she stopped, irritated. “Viridiana, stop fidgeting. You have a question?”
“What if you can control all that?” Vi asked, standing up and putting her arms behind her back, feeling like a child. “It’s not that hard.”
All the girls in the class looked at Vi as if they couldn’t believe she’d dared speak.
“Do you really wish me to believe that you have natural mastery of one of the more difficult relational spells?”
“I didn’t say mastery,” Vi said defensively. The truth was, she was still off-kilter, the thought of having to go talk to Elene hanging over her like a death sentence—which, she realized, it might actually be.
“Unless you’ve actually cast this spell, sit and be silent.”
Vi paused, then scowled. “I have.”
“Oh? Pray tell.” Sister Gizadin gave a condescending smirk.
Fine, bitch. “I was fucking this guy and he was having trouble waking the snake,” Vi said. Sister Gizadin’s eyes went huge. “So I kicked in a sex glamour. That usually does it in about five seconds. I mean, it’s embarrassing. If you use too much, they’re done before they get naked. With this one, the glamour did nothing. In your terms, I guess I was exaggerating my natural attractiveness. So I played around with it until I felt something give. His eyes glazed over and he started talking about my boyish figure—while holding two hands full of tit.”
Sister Gizadin’s mouth was open, but no words came out.
“Anyway,” Vi said, “it wasn’t hard. I mean, I’m most experienced with glamours for sex, but I figured those out with a pointer or two from a courtesan, so with Sisters teaching me, how hard can the other glamours be?”
For a long time, no one said anything. Vi noticed belatedly that everyone was gaping at her. Sister Gizadin’s mouth closed. She began to speak, and then stopped. Finally she looked past Vi to a buck-toothed twelve-year-old who raised her hand. “Yes, Hana?” Sister Gizadin asked.
Hana stood with her hands behind her back. “Please, Sister, what kind of mage is a courtesan?”
Vi laughed.
That snapped Sister Gizadin out of it. “Sit, both of you!”
They sat.
“Unappreciated,” Sister Gizadin said. “Even if people’s perceptions of the caster are not altered, there is still a feeling of wrongness after a glamour. During the spell, they won’t notice they’re being manipulated, but afterward, especially if they were wildly manipulated, they’ll realize that their reactions were out of proportion. The irresponsible use of glamours is one reason why magae have historically been distrusted. No one wants to be manipulated, and in essence, glamours are all about manipulation. That’s all. Class dismissed.”
It was as if Vi had never spoken. Sister Gizadin didn’t answer Vi’s question, or Hana’s. Indeed, she didn’t seem affected in the slightest, except, Vi realized later, that she’d forgotten to teach the last portion of her lecture
in triads.
Momma K adjusted the topazes hanging in her long hair, examining herself critically in Master Piccun’s mirror. She’d found a note on her bedside table when she woke. It was written in Durzo’s cramped hand, “I live. I will come for you.” That was all. Bothersome man. She’d gotten up and dyed her hair one last time: a natural gray. No, silver, she decided.
Then she’d come here. It hadn’t been easy to order Master Piccun to make her blue dress for the coronation more muted and higher cut than any she’d ever worn, but at least his hands had strayed when he took her measurements—as they always did. When his hands stopped wandering, she would know she was old.
“You are extraordinary,” he said. “I have this meeting with every one of my beautiful clients. Normal women make new compromises with age daily, so it’s less of a shock to them. Beauties seem to run into it all at once, and it happens here. They ignore my advice and order the latest fashion one more time, and then they see themselves. Some accuse me of making them look bad on purpose. Others stare at the old stranger in the mirror, shocked. Always there are tears.”
“I’m not much for crying.”
“You know when I’m only flattering, Gwinvere. The body is my canvas, and I tell you, your body is years from that day of tears. You have something ineffable. You walk through life like a dancer, all strength and beauty and grace. I have this client, stunning girl, a bit muscular to be fashionable—I told her to start sitting on her ass and eating chocolates—but saved from being boyish by these hips and tits that would make a goddess green. By Priapus, the girl can wear anything—and will. I’d make her clothes for free, just to see her wear them.”
“Now you’re going to make me jealous,” Gwinvere said. He knew she was kidding, though a small part of her wasn’t. Aemil Piccun was talking about Vi Sovari.
“What I mean to say is that if I put up portraits of her and you at her age, a man would be hard-pressed to choose between you, but in person, it’s no contest. Her beauty is wasted on her. She is divorced from her flesh, joyless. You, on the other hand, have this ability to enjoy a man enjoying you on any of a dozen levels. If I could imbue a dress with what you have, I would not be a tailor, I would be a god. Of all my clients, you will always be my favorite, Gwinvere.”