by Dave Duncan
I was careful not to look at William. This unexpected invitation seemed like a God-given chance to carry out our treachery, and the only one we would get, but the timing was next to impossible. “I should be honored to do so. I may bring my cantor to assist?”
The steward consulted his notes doubtfully. “The parlor will be very crowded. . . . As long as he leaves right after?”
“Certainly,” I said. “And I shall not presume to elevate myself to the status of a member of the baronial family. We shall both leave directly after we have completed our incantation.” We might be on our way to the dungeon. Or everyone might leave, in a mad, people-trampling stampede.
“Thoughtful of you, Adept. I shall so inform Her Ladyship.”
Sir Bertrand departed. Cantor and enchanter exchanged meaningful glances.
“We have about an hour to learn this thing and make it work,” William said, looking at the sunlight.
“And if we can’t, then we won’t have a blessing ready to chant instead. Well, I know a solo I can use, if the words don’t stick in my throat.” Wish Matilda happiness and her husband long life? Him yes, her no!
“And we still need a helper!”
“Yes,” I said, sitting down and reaching for a pen. “Scur. Go and find Sir Scur.”
“That maniac? He’s crazy.”
“So are we, to be even thinking of this, but Scur already knows about the second murder. He as much as told me that the priest hadn’t committed all three. And besides,” I added triumphantly, “if he tries to tell anyone else what we’re doing—or what we have done after we have done it—then no one will believe him. Find Scur. And be quick about it.”
I set to work transcribing the incantation. I still wondered why I was going ahead with this crazy risk. Not to avenge the murdered Archibald de la Mare, for the man had been a thoroughgoing scoundrel. Not to clear Father Randolf ’s name, for he was a worse murderer than Matilda: he had killed a child and his own uncle. No, I reassured myself, it was to stop the demented baroness from poisoning anyone else. That, at least, was a worthy cause, and if I could only achieve a good end by very shady means, then I must be guided by Ovid, who taught us that the result justifies the deed.
Surprisingly soon the door flew open and in bounced William, fizzing with excitement.
“I saw him. He didn’t see me this time, though.”
“Who? Oh, your—”
“Yes. My father and the count and Marshal Hugh. They were just riding out the gate—going to inspect Matilda’s dower lands, I shouldn’t wonder. So we probably have a little more time than we thought. Scur’s on his way.” William sat down, grabbed the sandstone, and began scraping away at a writing tablet in a frenzy.
“I don’t think we’ll need that one,” I said. “I’m copying out the responses for you. I think I can chant the versicles straight from the grimoire. It’s more legible than most.”
“Fox, Fox!” cried a discordant voice at the open door. “Have you gone to earth here, Fox?”
“Enter, Sir Scur,” I shouted. “And be welcome.”
“I jump in with both feet,” the big old man said, filling the doorway as he came through. “Are you a sight for a sore eye, Adept?”
“I would hope so, except that I would not that your eye be sore. Now sit down and listen, for we need your help.”
His solitary eye inspected me from the depths of his hood. “Ah, I am long past helping men with their troubles, excepting that I may ofttimes make them laugh at them.”
Refusing to be distracted, I said, “You told me earlier that three is too many. Now I respond that beauty in fact may not be beauty in act.”
He flinched and turned his head so that his face disappeared from view. “This is not to laugh at,” he whispered.
I said, “William, will you sand some more tablets, please? And do it outside, so we are not distracted.”
William glanced at the back of Scur’s hood, took the hint, and departed with a couple of tablets and the sandstone, closing the door rather more loudly than necessary.
Now I had to find a way to handle the fool. I could not help but remember tales of Beauty and the Beast. How long had that hideously maimed old man worshipped his master’s daughter from afar? Matilda would have been about seven or eight when Scur was mutilated.
“She must have been fair even as a child,” I said.
“Fair of face, aye.” As he emphatically was not.
“But never fair indeed?”
“‘Never’ is never fair.” His voice was growing steadily quieter.
I wanted to say “Was Beauty beastly to the Beast?” but that would be too crude, too rough. If my guess was correct, I was tampering with the man’s very soul. Had the child Matilda mocked the monster? Run from him screaming in terror? Did she mock the fool in the rabbit guise, as the others did?
“What of her soul, Sir Scur? Murder is mortal sin and she does not repent of it. Her lover has taken the blame and she hides behind that. She claims he gave her absolution, but absolution cannot be valid if she does not truly repent.”
Silence. He did not move, but at least he was not heading for the door, as he had done on previous occasions when the talk veered too close to Matilda.
“With your help, I think we could make her repent,” I said.
I waited patiently for a reply, and at last he whispered, “How?”
“I just need you to identify someone for me. I never met him, so I do not know what he looked like. She will not heed any other’s warning, but there is one who might persuade her—her victim.”
He turned his head until the single eye appeared, glittering at me.
“You would raise the dead, enchanter?”
“No, no! I lack such skill and hope I shall never feel the need. But I think I can charm my cantor so that he looks and sounds passably like Archibald de la Mare, at least for a few moments. If his shade can appear in a dim room and call her to repentance, surely by God’s mercy she will yield and be saved from the eternal fires.”
I had gone too far. The big man shuddered, then rose to his feet—slowly, almost reluctantly. If he reached the door I had failed.
“Wait!”
He stopped moving to listen, but did not turn to look at me.
“You see those goblets, Scur?” Neither William nor I had ever put them away, out of sight. It was almost as if we had left them there on the table, in full view, as a reminder of our mission to solve the mystery of the killings. “Matilda put poison in the wine and then only pretended to drink from her goblet. But Sage Archibald did not know that, so he drank from his, and he died. She still has much poison left, Scur! How long will it be before she kills off that ugly old man she is about to marry? Will we, who could have stopped her, not share in the guilt of that murder?”
The old man groaned, then he lumbered back to his stool and whispered, “Tell me what you want me to do, Adept.”
That was about the first coherent statement I had ever heard from him. There was still some trace of a human being inside the fool.
chapter 37
scur departed with orders to return at sundown. William read out the remaining responses and I wrote them. Sunlight moved inexorably up the wall. We checked our work. By the time Scur returned, we had rehearsed the incantation backward twice and were ready to make our first attempt. William closed shutters and lit lamps.
This would be the second time we had performed before a witness, first the suave and confident Sir Stephen and now the hideous and embittered Sir Scur.
“These spells rarely work at the first attempt,” I warned him. “If it does, then William here should change to look like Archibald de la Mare. If he looks like anyone else, we’ll have failed. If he doesn’t change, then we try again and again.”
Scur dragged a stool over to the fireplace, turned his back on us, and did not answer. He did not wish to be involved in this deviltry.
Singing from the crabbed and faded grimoire text by candlelight was no easy
matter, and I was not surprised when the first attempt produced no results. I reached for the ink bottle.
“Give me your first tablet,” I told William. “There’s a mistake in the fourth response.”
Scur, hunched by the fire, peered around and said, “How can you know that?” I had not realized that he was paying so much attention.
“Inspired guesswork,” was all I said. I was not going to reveal the secrets of my art to an outsider.
We began again, calling on spirits to give William the likeness of Archibald de la Mare. As we drew near the end I began to feel the glow of approaching acceptance. Then, suddenly, it was gone.
William was frowning. “I thought . . .”
“So did I. The second-to-last versicle? Ah, yes. Got it—a word missing. Start over.”
The castle bell began to sound, signaling that supper was ready. My stomach rumbled. I ignored it.
Third time lucky. Even as I was chanting the final few versicles, I could heard William’s voice changing as he sang the responses, and I think Scur must have heard the difference, too, because when I pronounced the concluding Fac sicut dico! he cried out in terror. The man across the table from me was no longer Squire William Legier. Scur jumped up and made a fast shuffle for the door. Archibald sprang after him and got to it first, pressing his back to it to keep the old man from leaving.
“It’s all right, Sir Scur,” he said in the London voice I recalled from the first time we had used the Morðor wile ut incantation. “I’m not dead. I’m still Squire William.”
“He doesn’t look quite real, does he?” I said, limping over to lay a hand on Scur’s shoulder. “He sort of wavers. It’s only an illusion.”
Scur let me draw him back to the stool he had vacated, but he walked backward, never taking his eyes off the apparition. I could feel him trembling.
Archibald had been around thirty when he died. At first glance he did not look as I expected a notorious womanizer to look; his nose was too long, his ginger mustache too droopy, his beard too scanty, his eyes too sly. And yet . . . I decided he had a sort of smug confidence about him that might impress some people. He was studying me with arrogant amusement, even as his hands were exploring his own body.
The apparition’s face was realistic, yet somehow unsubstantial, and his clothes were ill defined, somewhere between the belted blue tunic that William was wearing and a longer robe of indeterminate color, topped by a hint of a sage’s green cape, but it was hard to concentrate on details. The general effect was one of a memory only poorly recalled. For people who had known him, he would suffice as an overall memory of Archibald and they probably wouldn’t look at him more closely than they had to, especially since he was known to be dead and gone to Hell.
William finished patting himself. “I hope you can get me out of this, Adept. Pot belly, all my muscles gone to flab? Flat feet.”
“I’m more worried that the illusion will fade before we have a chance to use it,” I said. “I’ll try the dismissal now. If it doesn’t work, sunlight tomorrow will certainly free you. Stay away from the candelabras.”
“The sun doesn’t shine in dungeons.”
Or in graves. I said, “Ready? Dimitto!”
William was back, instantly. Scur let out a burbling gasp of relief.
The glosses in the grimoire had been right, though. Oculos deceptus was a party trick, and a trick in very bad taste when used to impersonate the dead. Nevertheless, the shimmery, ambiguous image it produced was ideal for our purpose.
“Let’s try the reprise,” I said. “Ready? Here we go again, then: Fac sicut dico!”
Archibald leered across at me.
“Dimitto!”
William was back.
How many times the illusion could be recalled without repeating the whole incantation I did not know, and chanting the entire spell again might not work either. So we would have to go with what we had, and hope that it would serve. I took up my staff, feeling I needed the confidence that it gave me and the cane did not. William opened the door, but he and Scur let me lead the way.
I hated what I was doing and myself for doing it. Enchantment should be used to good ends—heal the sick, find the lost, frustrate evil. Never to deceive and entrap, which is what I was doing now. If we could trick Matilda into confessing, well and good, for she was a murderess and not deserving of pity. But we would necessarily have to fool the spectators as well, and might start a panic in which people would be crushed. William was no more talkative than I was.
Was I frightened? No, I was terrified. My day had been such a triumph and now it bid fair to end in utter disaster, with all my winnings lost.
Scur left us when we reached the keep. He ate in the kitchens, he told me gruffly, never in the hall, and we had no choice but to trust him. I was fairly confident that no one would believe the old wreck if he said he had just watched Adept Durwin raise the dead.
Stars were coming out as we plodded up the stairs to the door.
“I will try to signal to you by clapping you on the shoulder before I speak the command,” I said. “We mustn’t overdo it! Once the first shock wears off, people may start to analyze what they’re seeing. There won’t be any swords at a wedding party, but they might attack you with daggers. So call her to repentance, and I’ll bring you back while everyone’s eyes are on her, looking for her reaction.”
William said nothing, and I realized how weak it all sounded. He was going to be more exposed than I was, although the count might have us both dragged out to the whipping post before the night was over. William probably wouldn’t even care. He desperately wanted to watch his father writhe in horror and humiliation when he heard the truth about his future bride. Just how he was going to escape from the parlor without being unmasked seemed to bother him much less than it bothered me.
The previous night I had heard the party long before I got to it, but there was much less rejoicing now. The castle was to be torn down and many of the residents would see their livelihood vanish with it. The count would build himself a fine new home, no doubt, using the masonry salvaged from the keep. It would likely be a lot more spacious and comfortable than the two cramped rooms he and the countess lived in now, but the loss of his castle would make him feel degraded. He would not need nearly so many retainers.
The hall was even brighter than it had been last night, because there were fewer people there. I noticed that women outnumbered men. The knights and squires had all gone off to visit the village alewife, and I saw few stable hands either. Arth was fiddling his heart out, but the music seemed to dissolve unheeded in the pervasive gloom.
As before, food was laid out on a long communal table and eaten standing. The family had a separate supply up on the dais, and it was a reasonable guess that the people gathered around it were those who would retire to the parlor later: count and countess, knights Stephen, Hugh, and Bertrand. None of the knights had wives, so far as I had heard, although Stephen might have a family elsewhere. Aveline was there, but no priest yet, or my blessing would have to be canceled. Nor could I see Alwin, who would prefer to carouse with the boys. Two men I did not know wore green hunting dress. I decided they must be Baron Weldon retainers, brought along to even the odds a bit and support him in the wedding ceremonials. The bride and groom had not yet arrived.
Stephen was the one who worried me most. He lived in a more sophisticated society than Barton, probably accompanying the king back and forth to his lands in France. Others might flee or faint when the Archibald wraith appeared, but Stephen was far more likely to see through the masquerade and investigate what would happen if he stuck a sharp blade into the self-proclaimed ghost. Sir Hugh was another man of action, but the much younger Stephen was more dangerous.
Which way to turn, though? Should we gatecrash the gentry’s party on the dais, or mingle with the commons at the other end of the hall until we were summoned? Discretion won: I headed for the servants’ feast, with William at my heels.
I found that I
had no appetite. I exchanged some small talk with Megan and other laundry maids, which pleased them greatly. I tried to comfort a couple of stable hands and a farrier. There was no shortage of horses in England, I said. I wished I was on one of them right then, heading anywhere at a full gallop. I even exchanged meaningless greetings with Lady Aveline, the first time we had spoken.
“Adept Durwin?” piped John the page at my shoulder. “Sir Bertrand says they are ready for you now.”
I suppose I answered him civilly. I remember glancing at William and seeing his teeth bared in a grimace of sheer delight as he savored his forthcoming revenge for all those years of hectoring and abasement. I suspected he would look like that if he knew he would be beheaded right after. He never seemed worried by the prospect of future punishment. That is common in the young, but he carried it to extremes.
I desperately needed a privy, but William and I followed John along the hall to the dais, where Bertrand was waiting for us. He had the dais all laid out now: the food table at my extreme left, temporarily abandoned, then the count and countess standing in their finest finery, then two state chairs, back against the rear wall to receive the happy couple, and the parlor door, from which they would obviously emerge. Everyone else was clustered to the right of that, and behind them two heralds stood holding silver trumpets.
“The bride and groom are about to appear,” Bertrand told me. “Her Ladyship decided that the parlor is too small for all the people who must attend, so you will chant your blessing out here. Wait over there if you please, until she signals for you to begin.”
Oh, disaster! I had been counting on a small room, dark because there would be about as many people as candles, and so crowded that no one would see clearly what was happening or who was doing what. Instead we would have to perform our deception on stage, in clear view of a hundred eyes. I gave up hope. We could never pull it off.