by Carol Berg
Hands clapped my shoulders, thick fingers gouging dents in my bones, affirming that a wrestling match with Andero would end worse now than when we were boys of seven and eight. “I’ll take you as far as you need, little brother.” He squeezed the words through his teeth. “But if you ever mention paying me for it, like I’m some pissing manservant or a whore to be thrown aside when you’ve better company, I’ll break your limbs into such small pieces, you’ll need to lap your food from a dish on the floor.”
“I didn’t—” My intents made no difference. I had insulted him. Stupid, Dante. Bridle your temper.
He tapped my ankle in warning, as was his practice, and in one huge thrust shoved me onto Devil’s back. “No bat wings. That’s a disappointment.”
Tutting like a disapproving granny, he led me down the hill and toward a town a signpost had announced as Castelivre.
CASTELIVRE
“I’ve never seen so many Temple folk in one place. Yellow badges. Yellow robes. They’re stopping everyone who wants inside.” Andero’s anxious ambivalence mirrored my own.
“Then we turn around,” I said, attempting to be halfway intelligent, rather than following my most urgent desire to be under a roof before another storm came down on us.
“No…” Andero drawled his contradiction out long and thoughtfully. “If we’re to get me a horse when we’ve not twenty kivrae between us, then you’ve a bit of confusticating on order. It’s too late, anyhow. We retreat and they’ll notice. Follow my lead. We’ll go a steady pace, but always stop when I get to three. Now, dismount…”
These commands made no sense whatsoever until the next few moments resolved themselves with Andero on Devil’s back and the lead rope wrapped around my wrists.
“You blasted, bloody-minded foo—”
“The road’s smooth, little brother. Trust me.”
The rope grew taut and I had no choice but to stumble forward. I had just shaped a spell to burn through the cursed leash, when someone not ten paces away yelled, “Halt.”
“Eyes down,” snapped Andero quietly. “One, two, three.”
I halted.
“What have we here?” The man’s garments reeked of incense and jasmine. Temple. His nasal tones smacked of excitement.
I ducked my head and hunched my shoulders, tugging at my cloak with my bound hands, unsure whether I should try to expose my collar or muffle it. Damn, damn, damn you to the netherworld, Andero.
“I am Manet de Shreu,” announced Andero, “sergeant major, First Legion of Coverge, fetching my lord duc’s third mage to Castelivre as ordered.”
“The Duc de Coverge’s third mage? I sincerely doubt that.” The Temple man sounded as if he already envisioned himself draped in a High Tetrarch’s furs.
Not since the first vile nights after my blinding had I felt so helpless. Though anger boiled in my veins, it was heat without flame, a knife without an edge. I had naught but the dregs of power left after my day’s spending.
“Even a Temple bailiff must recognize His Grace’s badge on my cloak. And anyone who’s visited an alehouse since summer must have heard how my lord duc trusted his third mage, Talon, to beat back a raid from the Igoni banditieri by bringing a rockfall down on top of them. But this slimy crumpet of a spell-twister couldn’t budge the boulders, despite all his grand assurances.”
Andero bellowed this nonsense with the bombast of an alehouse tale spinner, and accompanied it with a sharp haul on the leash that caused me to stumble forward. I would have fallen flat had I not bumped into Devil’s flank.
“Caused my good lord to take a loss of both men and coin. Between you and me”—he dropped his voice—“a considerable loss. And now we’re sent here to be met by a mage from the Camarilla Magica who’s charged to reive this cursed sorcerer’s mind to discover if he’s suborned or just incompetent.”
I could have given lie to his prating by triggering a firespout. My staff was tucked away in its saddle straps right between my nose and Devil’s hind end. But I didn’t wish to harm the faithful Devil, and reason whispered that my brother had spun us a decent opportunity.
Thus, instead, I stepped away, raised my hands, growled a few menacing nonsense words, and conjured a minimal illusion of a copper-ringed whipsnake. With a worthy display of grumbling and curses, I dispatched the slithering snake in the approximate direction of the Temple servitor and had it rise up in its attack posture, only to fall limp as a wet ragmop and dissolve. Two even more ridiculous failures, accompanied by puffs of smoke from the leash rope as if I were trying to burn it through, drew a crowd round us. They all stank of incense. My knees were jelly, not entirely from magical depletion.
Andero bawled curses at me, and I shook my leash and mumbled over it, setting off cold sparks that would accomplish nothing. The onlookers taunted and guffawed. Warm spittle splattered my nose and cheek, just as a hard boot to my shoulder sent me reeling. Keeping my telltale claw of a hand hidden inside my cloak left me unable to catch myself. Thus I sprawled ignominiously, face down in a sea of half-frozen muck.
“None fails my liege in his need, Talon,” Andero bawled. “May the Camarilla leave your skull a burnt hollow. Now, stay there until I tell you.”
Trust him. Trust him. Devil’s hooves splashed terrifyingly near my head. I held absolutely still. The frigid wetness seeped through my cloak and into my boots, as my brother fell into conversation with the Temple guards, jabbering like a gossip at the village well.
“So, tell me, honorable bailiff, why is a Temple servant questioning visitors? Don’t know as I’ve seen that in all my years.”
“Our Tetrarch de Ferrau is hunting a devil mage, accused of necromancy and murder,” said the nasal-voiced Temple man. “But your buffoon doesn’t look as if he could heat a stoup of cider, much less draw fire from the sky or flay a company of swordsmen with his eyes. You’ve till tomorrow, middle-night, to do your business and be on your way back to your lord.”
The cursed de Ferrau again.
“Well, then.” Andero yanked the tether and hauled me up. “Perhaps you could give me a hint as to where a Camarilla visitor is like to shelter in Castelivre. Their kind ever cluster together. Perhaps with your town mage?”
“Castelivre’s got no town mage or any magic practitioner for hire. Not since the Blood Wars. The land doesn’t forget. People don’t forget, though most who lived here died. The Concord prevents us from barring them altogether, so we let Adept Denys keep the house up top of the hill, next the ruins. But he’s required to house any others come to town and give them fair warning of our laws. I’ll advise you get your prisoner up there and out of sight or he’ll have no skull to reive.”
“Aye, I’ll do that. Get up, you bumbling fool, or I’ll drag you.”
A firm tug on the rope and I staggered to my feet, frantically estimating the position of Devil’s hooves. My awkwardness set the onlookers guffawing again. Yet even humiliation could not thaw my skin. I was near paralyzed with the cold.
Creaks and clanks and a wafting exhalation of smoke and sewage signaled the gate’s opening. Once through and slogging through muddy streets, we were surrounded by the noise and bustle of commerce. I’d forgotten it was afternoon.
Focused on keeping my footing behind Devil, I had little attention to spare for the angry mutterings that followed us through the hawking of jams, olives, and chickens, the barking of prices, and strident calls summoning children. Like fog from a river rose the market-day odors of raw fish, stewing turnips, frying meat pies. But something fouler rode on the chill air—worse than the street or the middens, worse than my muck-soaked self, who stank like a dung heap.
Andero’s three sharp tugs on the rope signaled something. Hurry? Impossible.
“Keep close, bumbler.”
He was drawing me in. The chinks and creaks of Devil’s tack were in my ear. I hooked my bound hands to his stirrup.
“Indeed they’ve no love for your kind here. See those cages hung up just ahead of us? Fool or betrayer, t
hat’s where you’ll be once you’re judged, mewling like those fellows, splatted with spit and dung. Get out my way, citizen! I’m taking this scum to his trial.” He jerked the rope again and fixed it so I was tethered close on his right. “Eight, ten of your kind are lining that road up the hill. You’ll look fine in yellow rags, the mark of the Souleater seared onto your brow.…”
As we climbed the steepening road, Andero’s preachments painted a vivid picture. Cages hung on posts. Prisoners, branded on the face—a degradation reserved for practitioners of illicit sorcery—in various stages of humiliation, disease, and starvation. But wearing yellow rags, not crimson. These were Temple prisoners, not the Camarilla’s.
The Camarilla diligently prosecuted hedge witches and charm sellers, folk who might carry enough talent for magic to make their granny’s healing potion work or their family curse have some effect, but deigned to practice without sanction of the prefects. My teacher Salvator had died in a Camarilla cage. But the Temple usually confined its cruelties for those like me who dabbled in the mysteries of the Veil between the mortal world and Ixtador, threatening the orderly progress of the dead on their final journey. The Pantokrator had given us one road to Heaven, so they taught, and it was a mortal crime to interfere with it.
What gave the Temple such sway here? And what had these poor bastards been up to? Was this the damnable de Ferrau’s work, too?
We left the market crowd behind us as we climbed the hill road. But not the bitter wind that flapped my sodden garments. And not the stench.
“Brother mage, have mercy.…” The whisper came from my right, where the stink of excrement and mortified flesh placed a captive whose life numbered days, not months. But the plea was soon echoed from before and behind us.
“Mercy. Mercy, mage. Master…please, kill me.”
The quiet desperation was more terrifying than the spite below. These captives were as good as dead, no matter the term of their sentences. Without knowing them, without sight to learn their faces and hone a spell, I could deal them no kinder mercy than the blizzards following us out of the mountains. Bending my head lower, I growled through chattering teeth. “C-cannot. Imp-possible. Sorry…”
“Have a care. Turning right.” It was Andero whispering, not one of the captives. The wind spat spicules of ice in my face. The ground leveled from the rutted hill track to rough grass and rocks. “One, two, three.”
My feet stopped. My shivering did not. My blood was slush. My heart ice.
Andero dismounted and unbound my wrists. As I shook out my cramped shoulders, a soft, encompassing weight dropped over my shoulders, was gathered in the front of me, and stuffed into my numb fingers. The wool blanket smelled of horse and felt like Heaven’s own bliss.
“B-b-bless—” Before I could thank him, something more than woolly warmth crept through me, toes, legs, groin, torso.…
“Didn’t think you’d wish to actually visit whoever this Adept Denys is like to be, though it seems accommodation’s sorely limited and the weather’s failing. There’s ruins enough here we could likely— Dante? What is it?”
But my attention had turned inward, where a chaos of light and indefinable shapes and colors lay…crystal towers…bridges…arcs and whorls, a landscape as broken as any physical ruin that lay around us, yet as vivid as knife blades plunged into my gut. Magic…everywhere.
My teeth ripped off my left glove, and I brushed my bare hand over thin soil, rocks, crumbled masonry, tufts of hard grass. My knuckles grazed dressed stones…a wall that ended thirty centimetres above the earth. Every pebble, every blade, and most especially the broken wall reeked of enchantment. Complex. Luminous.
“Where in the name of all g-gods are we?”
“Ruins. Spread all over the hillside. No single piece big enough to identify. The outer walls have been repaired to connect down to the town walls, but there’s naught else new been built up here since these were knocked down. A deal of years, I’d say, from the overgrowth. Nobody even took what stones were left to use elsewise. Gives me the crawlies, like a graveyard.”
Why hadn’t I heard of such a place at the boundaries of Delourre and Coverge? Perhaps Castelivre was a modern name.…I inhaled sharply. Castel. Livre. In Aljyssian, the most ancient language of Sabria, it meant palace of books. And it explained exactly why the locals detested sorcery.
“Yes, we must most definitely visit Adept Denys. Gods, Andero, this is the ruin of Collegia Magica de Gautier. The Gautieri Library. The place where the Blood Wars began.”
CHAPTER 10
CASTELIVRE
“Don’t seem as if anyone’s here.” Andero had already yanked the bell cord three times. A squat stone house, he’d said, one many times repaired and tucked into the bend of the outer wall.
“He’s here. Just preoccupied.” Active spellworking tickled my mind through the aether, weak and awkward as a hedge witch’s charms. It was an inharmonious contrast to the layered enchantments of the ruins around us. And yet…
“Ring again.” I reached again. A pinpoint of purest magic darted through the aether like a sun glint on silver. “Once we’re settled, leave me alone with him. Camarilla sorcerers keep their secrets close. He’ll never say anything in front of an outsider.”
The gusty wind swirled up from behind me, flapping the blanket around my shoulders and my sodden clothes underneath. I was glad of the scarf Andero had tied about my eyes, just for the sheer warmth of it. Shelter would be welcome.
Gripping my staff, I stretched my hearing again. Faint footsteps, quick and light. A solid door slammed, metal, from the muffled clang of it.
“You said this house is small? Someone’s coming from a long way inside.” After four days together, Andero no longer questioned such observations.
“The place is no bigger than my own, and we’ll both need to duck to go through the door. Mayhap he’s dug a deep cellar.”
Even a man so dismissive of fate and destiny as I was could not ignore our happening upon this place. The Blood Wars—a century of savage strife among magical dynasties—had come near destroying Sabria two centuries ago. Our ordeal at Mont Voilline had proved its embers held fire enough to flare again. And here we were at the very hearth where those flames had first been lit. The voices in the aether had surged into scarce-controllable chaos, the echoes of ancient triumphs, cruelties, and magic merged with the hectic mindstorm of the town.
Why would a Camarilla adept take up residence in a town that had witnessed the ugliest and most destructive events in the history of magic, a town that remembered that history, rightly despising any who wielded enchantment? Our best chance to obtain a horse by “confustication” would be late night, when the chance of scrutiny was lowest. Surely spending a few hours to salve my curiosity would be well spent.
The scrape of unoiled hinges interrupted Andero’s fifth ring. “Greetings, sir! You’re Adept Denys, I would assume. And very grateful am I to find you at home this foul day.”
“Who are you?” The snappish query came from a man of height similar to mine, whose voice exhibited no rust of age.
“I am Manet de Shreu, sergeant major, First Legion of Coverge, and this mage is my prisoner.…” With all proper indignation, Andero repeated his story of my imminent interrogation by a Camarilla Inquisitor. “Though I must say, I’m thinking my lord’s messenger bespoke our destination entirely wrong. These locals bear a fearsome hate for the magical arts. Why would your noble prefects choose such a town for this interrogation?”
“They wouldn’t. Go away.”
My brother’s quick forward movement resulted in a solid thump. The door remained open. “Now, now, my good fellow, let’s not be hasty. I’ve no wish to put you out. But them at the gates told me in no uncertain manner that a mage admitted into Castelivre must take lodging here. That, in fact, you are required to shelter my prisoner and me. We’ve provision for ourselves, of course, and would be pleased to share with you…” That was a stretch of the imagination worthy of the story writers
Anne favored. “…but I must insist you let us in. My weakling charge is about to shiver himself to splinters, which my lord duc would sorely disapprove, as he’d rather chop the vermin’s hands off for himself. Tomorrow I’ll send messages to my captain in Jarasco and confirm the location of the interrogation. Mayhap we’ll only be with you three or four days, instead of a month!”
“A month?”
The fellow’s screech evidenced such dismay, it was no wonder Andero was able to shove my head down, drag me under the lintel, and slam the door behind us. The small house—indeed I could feel the door closing’s echo bounce off thick walls not three metres apart—was stifling. Somewhere to my left a hearth sent out a blast of smoky heat worthy of Da’s forge.
“You are not welcome here, Sergeant Major. Neither of you. What are you—?”
“We’ll have a jolly visit,” said Andero, cheerfully, as he sat me on the floor and briskly wrapped his end of my leash about my ankles. “I like nothing better than meeting new folk. It’s one reason I joined the legion. This mage is sour company, I can tell you. Perhaps you could send him up your chimney to unclog it.”