A Radical Act of Free Magic

by H. G. Parry

  The dragon was very large: perhaps only as large as the kraken, but that size was impressive on land and more impressive still in the confines of the chamber. It was curled up, its breathing slow and measured: at each exhale, its sides heaved with a blast of sulfurous heat. As Napoléon approached, its eyes blinked open. They were gold, its pupils vertical slits like those of a cat. Faster than a snake, its head reared high, almost to the roof; its neck arched; and its jaws snapped open.

  Napoléon fired his own eyes with mesmerism, and he held it.

  “No,” he said.

  Dragons had no language in common with humanity, not even in thought. But he felt its mind touch his—cautious, probing, intrigued. He felt it notice the blood magic of his friend, and Napoléon’s own weak mesmerism. It was interested. But it was more intelligent than the kraken, and a command would not be enough to bind it. It would have to agree to be bound.

  “Come with me,” he said, layering his voice with mesmerism. “I will give you entire armies to devour.”

  He felt his mind tangle with the dragon’s, felt the mesmeric force burning in his veins, and felt the moment when it acquiesced.

  This, at last, was the power he had come to Egypt to find, ancient and unknowable and unstoppable. It was everything he had ever dreamed of.

  Paris

  November 1799

  Napoléon’s arrival in France was perfectly timed. News of his most recent victory in Egypt had preceded him by only a few days; without a clear chain of daemon-stones, there had been no way for France to hear any report of his defeats but what he chose to send them, and he did not often choose to send any. Despite Napoléon’s calculated effort to build his own legend over the years, even he was astonished at the reception that met him in every town he passed. Work was dropped, shows were halted mid-performance, as people flocked to cheer him in the streets. Mob magic burst overhead in celebration. His friend had been right: he didn’t need a dragon to win the love of the people. The kraken had been enough; the tales of his victories in Italy and in Egypt had been enough. They were tired of rule by committee, of revolutions and warfare and politicians. They wanted a savior. Napoléon was young and brilliant and bright with destiny, and they believed in him as they had once believed in Robespierre.

  He returned to Paris as quietly as possible, to avoid alarming the Directory. In truth, the Directory were already alarmed, and seriously considered using his desertion of Egypt as an excuse to court-martial him and strip him of his power. But it was too late for that, and they knew it. His power had grown beyond them, and the people would never let them remove it. When Napoléon reported to them at the Luxembourg on his first morning back, they greeted him cordially, praised his accomplishments, and gritted their teeth.

  Napoléon was quiet, too, at first. He returned to his house at the rue de la Victoire, dressed in civilian clothes, and caused no trouble. The house had been lavishly decorated by his wife in his absence, much to his irritation. He had no intention of ever seeing Joséphine again. “Forget her,” he told Barras roughly, when his patron tentatively mentioned her name. “I’m done with that whore.”

  He had reckoned without Joséphine herself. She had married him when he was a promising yet awkward career officer, with some reputation and a degree of patronage but no solid prospects. She was not about to be divorced by him now that he was the summoner of the kraken, the conqueror of Egypt, and the savior of France.

  Joséphine had grown up in the heat of Martinique, the daughter of a wealthy plantation owner. She was a water-mage and had been trained as such; her training, though, was that of a highborn lady, and her magic manifested in sparkling fountains, fine mist reflecting rainbow prisms, graceful forms that rippled like living sculptures from her hands. Everything about her was graceful, so Napoléon had thought when he first saw her, and he wasn’t alone. Her first husband had been killed in the Revolution, and she and her two children had survived largely on the strength of that very grace and beauty. But water magic was more than beautiful. It could break down barriers; it could wear patiently away at stone; it could drown. So could Joséphine.

  After three days of her knocking and calling, in between softening assaults from her daughter, Hortense, Napoléon opened his door to her. She was even more beautiful than he remembered, with her perfect waves of chestnut hair and her hazel eyes brimming with hurt. No matter how he shook her and called her names, she stood her ground.

  “Hippolyte is a friend,” she said. “Of course I spent time with him—I was lonely without you. But the rumors only arose because I was faithful to you. The men that used to entertain me were jealous. They wanted you to throw me out so that I would return to them.”

  “Do you expect me to believe that?” he said, but his temper had cooled at last. Now he sounded merely sullen.

  “Yes!” she said, and she was right. He knew he was being deceived; he even knew, with the kind of insight that usually came only on the battlefield, that he would look back on this moment in the future and remember knowing that he was being deceived. And yet he would still be deceived, because he wanted to be.

  “Besides, Bonaparte,” she said, and she gave him the smile he could never resist, the one that held a secret behind it. “If you want to take over the government in France, you do need me.”

  It was true. Paris was still a fog to him, and Joséphine was a guiding light. He needed her if he was to sift through the many plots and counterplots breeding in its seething shadows and find those he could trust both to support him and to succeed.

  His brother Lucien was the first who sought his attention. They barely knew each other, and Napoléon had always suspected his younger brother thought little of him. Lucien had always been a genuine revolutionary; at fourteen, soon after the fall of the Bastille, he had emerged as one of the most prominent and fiery Jacobins at their home in Corsica. Now he was president of the Council of Five Hundred, the lower legislative body of the Directory, and like many true revolutionaries he was dissatisfied by the watered-down collection of politicians the French government had become.

  It was his brother who introduced him to Emmanuel Sieyès. The cool-eyed, narrow-faced weather-mage had been one of the key influencers of the Revolution, a leader in the National Convention who had protested the Reign of Terror and survived, had become one of the five directors at the head of the Directory, and was now ready to take control of the Directory itself. He wanted the support of a strong general, one who could serve as his dagger in a dangerous world, and he had settled on Napoléon. He assumed that Napoléon would be content to serve this role. Napoléon did not bother to correct him.

  “It’s very simple,” he told Napoléon as the two of them dined together at Sieyès’s home. “To make this legal, the first thing to do is to force the resignation of the five directors. One of those is myself—I believe I can bring in at least two of the others. Without them, the other two could be intimidated, and if not, they’ll be relatively powerless without a quorum able to be reached. The second part is to convince the two assemblies to sign over power to you and me.”

  “Very simple,” Napoléon snorted. “But hardly easy.”

  “I’ve heard of your victories in Egypt. If you can give me the loyalty of the army, then I can give you the assemblies.”

  In the end, it was that absolute confidence that led Napoléon to choose him. There were other potential conspirators he trusted more—Barras, his mentor, for example—but none that exuded the same cold, arrogant intellect. It told Napoléon that Sieyès could probably do what he said. More important, though, it told Napoléon that Sieyès would almost certainly underestimate him.

  “I can give you an army,” he said.

  In the early hours of 9 November, 18 Brumaire by the revolutionary calendar, the two councils of the Directory arrived sleepy-eyed and yawning to an emergency session of government, only to be told their lives were in peril. A group of dark magicians were plotting against the Republic, and it was imperative that
the representatives be moved at once to the Château de Saint-Cloud, a former royal residence about three miles outside Paris. Napoléon Bonaparte, the hero of the Republic, was to escort them. Most of the council members were more bewildered than alarmed, but at Lucien’s urging they agreed to go.

  Meanwhile, Sieyès and two others of the five members of the Directory quietly resigned; the other two, effectively powerless, protested and were equally quietly arrested. There was a power vacuum at the heart of the French government; once inside the Château de Saint-Cloud, surrounded by guards, with the full force of the army outside, the two councils were urged to sign over power to Emmanuel Sieyès and Napoléon Bonaparte immediately, or the Republic would fall to dangerous enemies.

  It was here that things began to go wrong.

  Both councils were fairly convinced, at this point, that there was no dark magic in play, only a coup in progress. They were unsure, however, what they wanted to do about it, and they were furious at being imprisoned inside a derelict palace to decide. A day and a night passed in furious debate. The building had been uninhabited for many years, and it was cold and damp inside and out. Candles flickered, died, and were replaced. Napoléon waited in the moldering drawing room he had claimed as his headquarters, paced, and occasionally relieved his feelings by shouting at innocent officers. Sieyès waited with him, along with Napoléon’s elder brother, Joseph, and some of the other conspirators. They did not speak to each other.

  As the afternoon waned, Joseph Bonaparte broke the silence. “Perhaps we should abandon this,” he said tentatively.

  “It’s too late for that,” Napoléon said tersely. “We’ll be arrested at once if we fail.”

  “Who will arrest us?”

  “The same men who’ll rush to shake us by the hand if we succeed,” Sieyès said. He didn’t seem worried, exactly, but his thin frame was completely still. “Fouche, for one. He has the arrest warrants already written, just in case.”

  “I thought he supported us.”

  “Well. Exactly.”

  Napoléon got to his feet in a surge of frustration. He could be patient if the situation called for it, but he did not do well waiting for others to make a move. “To hell with it. I’m going to talk to them.”

  “You’re going to talk to whom?”

  “The councils. Both of them. They need to be told what’s at stake.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Sieyès said with some alarm. “It could ruin everything.”

  “Everything’s already ruined if I don’t. I think they’ll listen to me.”

  He truly believed this. He had forgotten they were politicians living in the age of the greatest orators since ancient Greece, and he was a soldier who had rallied men on the battlefield. Men on the battlefield wanted to believe what they were told. Politicians did not. When Napoléon strode into the decayed magnificence of the Chamber of Apollo, where the Council of Elders had been closeted, they did indeed listen, but they did not agree.

  “France is without a government until you act,” Napoléon told them. “I had no desire to take command; I was called upon to defend the Republic, and I answered. Liberty is in peril. We all need to defend it.”

  “And what about the constitution?” one of them demanded.

  “You have broken the constitution yourselves!” he snapped. “Many times. France has had more governments in the last few years than it has in the last few hundred. How do you expect the constitution to save you?”

  It was entirely the wrong thing to say, and he had just sense enough to see it but not enough to take it back. He kept on, hoping to bury his words beneath a flurry of slogans, until one of the other generals dragged him from the room.

  “I think that worked,” Napoléon said. Perhaps he meant it; he couldn’t tell anymore. He felt flushed and light-headed. All he knew was that the wine of rebellion had been drawn, and now it had to be drunk, even if it killed them. “I’ll try the next room.”

  The Council of Five Hundred did not even give him a chance to speak. As soon as he entered the room, they set upon him. Magic flew in his direction: fire and water, the simplest of the mob magics, but once a blade curved through the air in a display of metalmancy that he barely ducked to avoid. He wore an amulet against fire—the rare shot actually intended to hit him cascaded into useless sparks on its approach—and the water left him soaking but unharmed. Worse than the magic was the sheer press of people, of pummeling fists and angry shouts and hands that shook his lapels until his teeth rattled. He had been in battles, countless times, but this was something different and terrible. He had enough presence of mind to know he couldn’t draw his sword against unarmed representatives in a council chamber, and so he could only fight to break free while the crowds tore his jacket and pulled him farther in. The room spun and contracted, the air too thick with magic and heat to breathe.

  “Traitor!” they shouted.

  It was not an empty insult. They had the power to declare him a traitor of the state and have him executed as such. All they needed was the excuse, and he had given it to them.

  By the time several of the others pulled him free and helped him to the room he had taken as his headquarters, he was barely conscious. His vision was dim; it took a cup of wine and several long, deep breaths before color filtered back into the world, and when it did, he was cold and sick. The water from the magic inside had cooled on his skin in the November frost, and he couldn’t stop shivering.

  Sieyès had entered the room at some point. “Lucien’s trying to calm them down,” he said. “But they’re not going to budge. We need to make our next move.”

  “Take the army in there and make them sign,” one of the other generals said. “They’ll do it with enough swords at their throats.”

  Napoléon shook his head. Hot anger helped him to stand and shake off any supporting hands. “We need a reason to go in,” he said. “Or half the army won’t follow, and those that do will be branded traitors and executed. Why can’t those bastards just do as they’re told?”

  He turned to Sieyès.

  “I’m going out there. Give me a reason to come back with an army.”

  Sieyès must have known that if he were to do so, he would lose what little control of the coup he had. It would become a military affair, and any victory would belong to Bonaparte. He could have refused. Instead, his cool eyes met Bonaparte’s. “Go out and rally the men,” he said. “We’ll give you your reason.”

  Bonaparte didn’t hesitate, not even to ask questions. His horse was waiting outside; he mounted and tore up the lines of the troops.

  The sun was beginning to set. The various troops and guards had been waiting outside for two days, and confusion had mounted steadily. Most of them had been told there was treason afoot, but they had no idea who was responsible. They had thought they were protecting the Directory. Now rumor flew through the troops that the Council of Five Hundred had tried to kill Napoléon Bonaparte. When Napoléon himself emerged, bleeding and bruised and calling them to arms, nobody quite knew what to do.

  “I came to save the Republic!” Napoléon told them. “And instead I was attacked and almost killed by the council. There are conspirators among them. We need to move quickly.”

  The men looked at each other, uncertain.

  In that moment, the palace disappeared.

  One moment it was there, pale gray stone bathed by the setting sun; the next there was nothing but a shadowy patch of lawn and a sky streaked with clouds. The effect was immediate. Men gasped, even screamed; Napoléon’s horse tossed and reared, so that it took all his skill and a burst of soothing mesmerism to bring it back under control.

  It took time for Napoléon’s brain to clear enough to piece it together. To create a mist was simple weather magic, the sort of thing Sieyès could easily have conjured in his sleep. The palace’s disappearance was a matter of refracting light, as the British fleet did at times to create the illusion of more ships. But he had never seen such a thing done before, not ev
en onstage. To refract mist to render a building invisible, a vast and chilling void in the world… It was one of the subtlest and most inventive acts of magic he had yet seen. The hairs rose on the back of his neck.

  The hairs rose on the backs of other necks too, and not for the same reason. To the uninformed, it was an act of dark magic or worse.

  Almost at once, renewed commotion rose from the troops nearest the palace, and the lines parted.

  It was Lucien, on horseback, flanked by a small cohort of light cavalry. Napoléon felt a flicker of relief—even though he was almost certain the invisible mist was from Sieyès, even though Lucien was his brother really in name only, he had feared for him. He started forward, almost on impulse, and Lucien drew alongside him and clasped his hand briefly.

  “Citizens!” Lucien sounded breathless, but his voice carried. “A group of magicians within the Five Hundred have seized control of the council. They’ve proclaimed my brother a traitor to the state and enshrined the palace in dark magic. They need to be arrested, or everything we’ve built is lost.”

  The guards took in the tousled, haggard look of the president of the Five Hundred, the unnatural hole in the world, the blood on Napoléon’s face. Napoléon had enough experience of men that he could feel their resolve settle.

  “How do we know you and your brother aren’t behind this magic?” a voice came from the crowds. Napoléon’s head whipped in the direction of the voice; of course, the speaker was not foolish enough to come forward.

  Lucien drew his sword. Before Napoléon could blink, he found the point of it directly at his chest. It took all his strength to quell his instinct to retaliate.

  “If my brother is a traitor,” Lucien said, “I will plunge this sword through his heart myself. I tell you, the traitors are within. We need to save the Republic.”

  After that, there was no further doubt. On Napoléon’s command, the troops marched forward into the void where once the palace had stood, and were swallowed up.