The Daemon Prism: A Novel of the Collegia Magica

by Carol Berg

  “You sent the horse and provisions. It was idiocy for me to wait longer.” So I had convinced myself after Marta’s dismissal. “Magic will take me through.”

  I doubted a voice that shook as much as mine could convince a rabbit to hop. Twice, I’d come a step from falling into an open pit shaft—only instinct warning me of the waiting void. Whether it would be worse to starve in an abandoned bell pit or be instantly consumed in a sink of boiling mud, I’d not yet decided. After hearing details of my infancy, either end seemed fitting.

  “Told you I had to pawn off my dogs. And I heeded Marta’s suggesting to down a stoup at Grev Tey’s before I left. I grumbled at considerable length about a man too iron-headed to die when he ought, and terrifying brothers come back from the dead to fright the old buzzard. I warned those who listened not to repeat my story of your abrupt departure, flying on batwings to the north, lest a chase of daemons come ravaging in the night and boodle Raghinne into its own pits. A good story, I must say. I doubt a tongue will flap or a door will open for a tennight.”

  He took Devil’s lead rope, curled my dead fingers about a stirrup, and led us forward at a brisker pace. “You’ve only wandered half a kilometre out of the way. We’ll make it through the Sweats by dusk. I doubt the fellows coming down the Spine will figure it out.”

  Resolution crumbled. I didn’t tell him to go back. I didn’t tell him he had matters in Raghinne to deal with. My urgent fears for Portier and Anne were undeniable, but, in raw and humiliating truth, I simply had never been so grateful for a companion.

  Even so, I dared not leave one matter unaddressed. “Da said he was working on a silver chain before the accident. Did you see it? Did it survive the fire?”

  “Fire was hot as Dimios’s forge, little brother. Naught was left inside but ash and a mound of debt to pay for it. He said he’d got a proposition that would make him rich beyond imagining. He used every kivre he had, sold half his tools, and pledged our work to the steward for a year to buy forty slugs of silver. I’d seen no customer, nor could I find anyone who knew what he was up to. And though I nagged him about it, he kept his work hid, doing it all in the night after I’d gone home. So what did the devil say that set you off in such a pother?”

  I recounted Da’s rant as near word for word as I could recall it, as much to imprint it on my memory as anything. When I got to my father’s presumption that I had confounded his dreams to spite him, my brother halted so suddenly as to startle Devil, whose buck near yanked my right arm from its socket.

  “He wet the mold? Burnt his own boy apurpose?” Andero hawked and spat. “Saints blight his soul forever! I’d have broke his neck had I known it. You never hurt none with your oddment. Always carried your share of the work.”

  He couldn’t understand, of course. I couldn’t loathe my father any more than I did already.

  “What’s done is done.” I kept my voice level and stroked Devil’s neck. “It’s the rest of it that’s important. These people are going to bury a man alive because they think he’s a being who cannot die. They believe it will give them power over life and death.”

  “Night’s balls. Is that possible?”

  “Possibility doesn’t matter as long as they believe it. The conspiracy we believed thwarted two years ago could be raising its head again, but this time it’s all bound up with this angel woman and the dream.” Which I desperately needed to understand better.

  With Devil settled, we took out again. Though the ground was increasingly steep and rough, we quickly established a comfortable rhythm. Andero assured me we were not followed. Walking in the cold air was good. I needed to think clearly.

  “I’m doubting she was an angel,” Andero offered.

  “No,” I said. “No angel. I’m not sure what she is. But somehow she’s involved with a devious little cretin with all the magical talent of an earthworm. When Gautier decided to punish me for double-dealing, it was Jacard who told him to blind me.…”

  Kajetan’s nephew Jacard, an adept of the Camarilla, had been set in place as my assistant at Castelle Escalon to spy on my works. He’d been too thick to see what I was doing…until the end, when my arrogance and de Gautier’s clever scheming left him an opening. By then he knew me well enough to know what punishment would unhinge me. He just didn’t understand about Anne and how our shared curse allowed us to work together. Fate grant that he had never figured it out.

  “If he’s not so good with magic, and the enchantress is a prisoner, then how’s he mucking about in dreams and burning smithies?”

  “He’s got Gautier’s and Kajetan’s books and journals that detail a great deal of magic,” I said, “and now…if he’s found this woman and her emeralds…Last time, thanks to Portier, we knew where the conspirators were and had a hint of what they planned. This time I’ve no idea of either—Merona or Abidaijar or Jarasco, glory, chaos, or rending Heaven itself? If they’ve power enough to compel us through dreams, and to learn our fears and desires from them, I just— I just don’t know what the limits are. I’ve got to find Portier.”

  Sulfurous smokes and blurping bubbles of mud greeted us as we topped the rise at the end of the valley. The Sweats. We had no leisure for conversation for many hours after.

  DEMESNE OF DELOURRE

  “We can’t afford the delay,” I told my brother as we broke camp. Exhaustion, and the bitter wind battering the rocky hilltop beyond our sheltered niche, had kept us in our blankets late. The patchy sunbeams were angled halfway to midday. “We need to head straight for Mattefriese and the roads east.” Though to bypass Merona, forgoing the chance to confirm Anne’s safety, left acid in my mouth.

  Four days after leaving Raghinne, Andero and I had emerged from the mountains into the rolling border country between Coverge and Delourre. Ferocious blizzards that seemed aimed directly at the two of us had forced us relentlessly eastward. Now, the fastest route to Merona would require days of backtracking to Jarasco, where Tetrarch de Ferrau’s bailiffs would surely be on watch, and then ten days straight south, leaving us far west of Mattefriese, the gateway to the pilgrim road and Abidaijar. Yet Anne might not yet be in the royal city or anywhere within range of our mind speaking. If Jacard and the enchantress had discovered a way to revive de Gautier’s plan, I would need Anne and her power. But for now, it only made sense to head directly east to Portier.

  I shook the dusting of snow off my blanket and rolled it tight. “Everyone’s always after me to trust people. So I’m trusting de Santo to see Anne safe. He’s blighted stubborn. Sacrificing himself for the daughter of his hated enemy will suit his nature. Anne has friends and family to protect her, too, while Portier’s got no one around him but scholars and Cultists. If these people abduct him…try to bury him somewhere hidden…”

  I could not accept that some immortal nature prevented Portier from dying. True, he had shown an extraordinary ability to survive events that would kill other men, but scientific people could likely explain such a result. And even if such a thing were true, how could it improve his fate? To be a mortal soul buried alive, clawing at the dirt as your air ran out once and for all, was the stuff of nightmare. But how much worse to be a Saint Reborn, repeatedly dying and waking in the dark, knowing you would never again, in all eternity, breathe the air of the world. The imagining shivered me to the marrow.

  If we maintained a southeasterly course and the weather did not worsen, we could be in Mattefriese in the same twelve days that would take us to Merona. And only six or seven more would get us to Abidaijar. Keep yourself hidden, student. I could not bear the thought that they had him already. And yet, the woman’s words to my father…

  “Perhaps you’re right,” I said, attempting to rub the sticky residue of sleep from my face. “If they’ve taken him from Abidaijar, we’ll waste precious time going. Gods, I’d sell my soul to speak in dreams like this daemon woman, to interpret and learn.…”

  Andero took my rolled blanket and worked with straps and buckles. Devil whuffled and blew. “
You found your way to Raghinne by magic. Seems to me you could do the same to find where your friend’s hid.”

  “It’s not at all the same. To work a guide spell to a particular location you’ve got to know details: geography, history, stories, everything your senses can tell you about it. I know every rock in Raghinne, every path, the smell of the food, the feel of the air, the noises. I can still see enough of the blighted place in my mind to work a spell like that. But they could have taken Portier anywhere.” Was ever a mage so ignorant of the world? “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

  “But it’s not the place you want to find. It’s the man, yes?”

  “It’s not that simple—”

  “He’s your friend, by god, which is more than Raghinne ever was to ye, and from what you’ve told me, you’ve few enough. Angels’ mercy, your magic kept him living when he was drownded.”

  I’d never successfully worked a locator spell entirely focused on a person. To do so without that person’s physical presence or some physical bit of him—hair, fingernails, skin, tooth—was likely impossible. Yet trying it would take far less time than traveling a thousand kilometres out of the way.…

  “I’d need your compass,” I said, “and do you have any kind of map?”

  “Aye, as it happens. But it’s a poor sort and not so accurate.” He sounded embarrassed. “I scratched up one as I traveled with the legion, so’s I could find my way home again. Been keeping it up as we’ve come away from the Sweats.”

  I muzzled a smile. “Only sensible. Good. Lay it down someplace dry and show me where.”

  Forgoing the usual reminder that a blind man can’t do squat with a map, he guided my hand to a well-softened fold of paper spread on a scrap of leather. A search of my own pockets brought out Anne’s silver pendant. I dropped it beside the map.

  “It’s a trinket of Anne’s,” I said. “She values Portier. Any physical artifact that might connect me to him will lend power to the spellwork.” Which reminded me of the prize I’d brought—Portier’s own ring, made to tell me of the power I’d released in him, a connection of true significance. Perhaps I could make this work after all.

  I found my way to Devil and rummaged through my pack, coming up not only with the ring, but with a wadded cloth that smelled distinctly of horse. “Ilario gave me this to rub down Devil. He and Portier were better friends than I knew. They had secrets.…”

  The three of them, Anne, Portier, and the chevalier. The three aristocrats. They’d kept secrets even these two years since they learned I’d worked for their same ends.

  With a fierce shove, I banished the annoyance the idea raised, along with the cold, the wind, my empty belly, my brother, and the horses. Spellwork needed surety and focus, especially when the physical elements were so lean. Kneeling beside the map, I set a marker stone and scribed a circle in the dirt, enclosing myself and my paltry collection of artifacts. Then I retreated from the world.

  With my own peculiar hieroglyphs, I sketched a portrait of Portier—slight of build, dark hair, prominent chin, dark eyes crisp with intelligence, yet filled with unabashed wonder and visible yearning whenever I demonstrated the truth of magic. Eyesight weak enough to need spectacles for reading. His usual garb of dull gray and black. The cane that supported his limp; the bloody wreckage of his leg when de Gautier dragged him onto the ledge at Mont Voilline. The profound peace, the trust, I’d felt from him through Anne’s mind as the water closed over his face…as he relied on me to save his life. It humbled me to recall it, shamed me as I understood the arrogant stupidity of my actions this month past. Fear and pride had kept me at Pradoverde. I should have gone to Portier the moment de Cuvier left.

  Deliberately I opened the wound I had just discovered, the intimacy of Portier’s friendship with Anne and Ilario. Only now did I understand the full magnitude of the chasm between the three and me. Portier’s scorn for Ilario had diminished after our journey to Eltevire—six years. And I’d ever believed that Anne and I—and perhaps the King of Sabria—were the only ones to glimpse the depths of the librarian. But Ilario, no fool, but a serious man, believed him a Saint Reborn.

  I sketched that into my working, too. Even the possibility was an aspect of Portier’s keirna, affecting his view of himself and his relationships with others. I needed everything to make this work—his scholarship, his father’s resentment at his family’s impoverished aristocracy, the physical and spiritual scars left by Portier’s relationship with his father, the trust of his royal cousin, Portier’s devastation at the fates of the children murdered by de Gautier’s conspiracy.…

  Once his image was as complete as I could devise, I touched Andero’s map and drew our need into my working—the malevolent voice of the enchantress in white, the dread visions lurking inside her emerald, her threat spoken through my father’s dying breaths—and I sketched a wider map of Sabria and the bordering lands of Aroth and Norgand, deserts and mountains and far Syanar. Feeding power into my structure, I bound it with will and intent. Magic erupted from the brass ring…

  … and I felt him there with me…my friend Portier, breathing rapidly…frightened…lost.

  Eager, I poured in every scrap of power I could muster. Where are you, student?

  The map I’d sketched with magic floated in my inner darkness like a stratagems game board, mountains, cities, rivers, and roads where I knew of them. My ignorance left vast stretches blurred. But with every scrap of skill I could muster, I focused my inner sight on the place I believed the ancient city of Abidaijar stood.

  The sense of Portier, though still faint, solidified. My attention traveled east and then west along the Great East Road, but naught changed in my perceptions. North from Abidaijar, and I came near losing him. Southerly…Gods, yes.

  My power began to ebb, the map’s strength wavering as I drew on my reserves. Southeast, no. But southwesterly from Abidaijar, the sense intensified. Where are you?

  I traversed the shimmering map west and south, caught glints of green…and then shafts of light, deep green rays as if the sun poured through window glass made of…emerald.…

  Blackness erased my inner vision, but I clung to the waning enchantment a moment longer. “I’m coming, student,” I whispered, as if he could possibly hear if I only willed it enough. “You shall not die in that place.”

  “What place? Did it work?”

  Andero’s sharp questions yanked me back into my skin. My lips and cheeks were numb; hair and garments crackled, stiff with frost. My frozen joints cracked as I dug in with my staff and pushed up to my feet. Somewhere in the bluster, Devil cropped dry grass.

  “Better than I’d ever have thought,” I said, commanding my knees to hold me up. “He’s wherever the emerald is.”

  “Abidaijar?”

  “South and west of there. Gods, how long was I working?” The day had most definitely changed, and my stomach felt like to devour my bones.

  “Most of the day. We’d best twitch our tails if we’re to get inside this next town before they close the gates.”

  No wonder I felt as if my age was nearer two-and-eighty than two-and-thirty. But discomfort could not damp my elation. I’d worked something new and complex from little more than memories, and located a certain sense of Portier. Yes, he was captive, but alive. And I’d saved us half a month’s wandering. Perhaps I could try the spell again as we got closer and conjure a better sense of him. Was the emerald light some aspect of truth or was it only the proximity of the gem?

  And then, as if my map had taken shape in the real world, truth spread itself before me, the echo of an old soldier’s desperation. The place de Cuvier had told me of, the place where this journey had begun…

  Gods, how I loved magic! “You’ll need a horse, elder brother, and a good look at a map of Arabasca and Aroth. We’ll find Portier south of the pilgrim road, halfway between Mattefriese and Abidaijar. It should definitely be warmer there. We start our hunt in Carabangor.”

  “So that’s the plan, is it
?” he said as he brought Devil up. “We find me a decent horse and I ride beside you off the edge of the world.”

  My belly tightened as if he’d slammed his fist into it. Caught in between our difficult journey these past days and my deep-rooted fears, I’d never questioned Andero’s intent. In truth he had agreed only to get me away from Raghinne.

  “Naturally, you’ve a choice.” This came out stiff as a dry plank. “It’s a very long way. The danger won’t be small, and I’ve a notion we’ve not seen the last of pursuit. But my power, my magic— The blindness takes its toll, but I can still protect you. And if we survive it”—gods, there was just no acceptable alternative—“I’ll see you’re well paid for your time.”

  The noises of preparation ceased. The silence seemed eternal.

  “You’ve no bat wings to carry us?”

  The question blurted out of the eternal dark so abruptly and in so grave a tenor, I spat the answer before thinking. “I work magic, not miracles. What kind of idiot—?”