The Daemon Prism: A Novel of the Collegia Magica

by Carol Berg

  With a ray of hope my thoughts flew to Ilario, who was skinny as a sapling. But even Andero could not call the chevalier small, and, no matter his adventures, Ilario would never be dirty or crude-spoken. “What friend?”

  “Wouldn’t say. Said I might as well kill him if I wouldn’t let him speak to you. The upshot is, he’s outside waiting.”

  Though speaking to anyone was the last thing I wanted, we had no choice. “Bring him in, if he’s still out there. And I need my staff.”

  Andero left me at the head of the stair, cloak around my shoulders, its hood raised to shadow my battered face. My hand gripped the welcome solidity of my staff, though my fingers stayed well clear of its trigger points. A gust of bitter wind and the kiss of snow brought my brother back with the newcomer.

  “It is you, noble mage. I was r-right. Seeing you on the t-tether with this b-brute gave me doubts, and I’ve never seen you with any growth of b-beard. But I’ve been watching all these days, as I thought surely someone must come after my master. Assumed it would be Captain de Santo. Your concerns were always for greater things.”

  Despite his chattering teeth, I knew him. Hostile superiority masked by servility; he had ever grated on my patience. “John Deune?”

  “ ’Tis I, Master Mage, though sorely filthy and unkempt, which must provide a fit disguise though it d-dishonor my lord’s memory.”

  “His memory…”

  “To the world’s sorrow, my master lies dead, pierced through on that t-terrible night when you— When he saved you. I saw him fall, a sword pierced through his belly and out the other side.”

  The emptiness inside me rattled with echoes of Ilario’s foolery…and the deeper truth of him I’d only guessed at the end. “How were you there? How can you be sure he’s dead?”

  “I would never desert him! I followed the three of you all the w-way, even through Jarasco. Thought my lord might need me, as he rarely traveled without a gentleman c-companion. So I saw the battle. Soon as all seemed quiet, I ran to him. I tried to bandage his wound with oddments I carry in my bag. But there was so much blood, and he’d no patience to be quiet. Though his breath was short, he swore me to find you and serve however you commanded. Said the Saints Reborn valued you. And then his hand dropped away, and I thought he was passed. Before I could decide how to load him on my beast, a troop of Temple bailiffs came to fetch their dead. I hid, but as they threw my lord on their dead cart, he moaned…and so I followed.…”

  “You disobeyed his last order?” I said. The story was too smooth for me to swallow.

  “My loyalties lay with my lord as long as he breathed,” he said, indignant. “The bailiffs brought their wounded straight here to Castelivre. A scrubwoman confided they’d a hospice and better healers here than in Jarasco. But, alas, she reported that the ‘tall, skinny prisoner with hair like sunlight’ crossed the Veil before they arrived. I didn’t know what to do…till I saw you arrive with this…bulldog.”

  “You be watching your tongue,” said Andero with a menacing growl that set my own blood cold. “I serve the mage.”

  I ground the heel of my hand against my pounding forehead. I didn’t believe half what the squirrelly manservant said and could happily have thrown him from a cliff. Yet, truly, I was no judge of men, not when it came to honor and loyalty among servants and masters, the kind of things Anne and Portier took for granted. Anne’s own adored father, whom she held up as a model of chivalry, had mutilated de Santo just because the loyal captain had failed to anticipate a plot no one in the world could have predicted.

  Honorable or not, we dared not dismiss John Deune before we were safely away from Castelivre. The temptation of Temple rewards might sap his loyalty to a dead man.

  “We’ll take you out of the city, but I’ve no need of your service after that.”

  “But—”

  “We’re going to sleep for a while, then steal a horse for my bro—bulldog, as we’ve not coin enough to buy one. After that we’ll be traveling hard for many days. You’ll be safer to keep well away from us.” I wasn’t about to tell John Deune that Andero was my brother. Blood kinship was a powerful weapon in the hands of an enemy, too risky to share with the untrustworthy.

  “I’ll d-do as my noble chevalier would wish,” said the manservant, his voice not half so bold as his words. “I’ve my own horse. And, as it happens, I have my lord’s purse. Yes, I took it, as I thought to return it to his royal sister. But I know he would buy a mount for you, mage. If you command me, I’ll buy a mount for your man instead.”

  My lip curled. A dead-robber. Another reason not to trust him. But whether or not divine intervention had brought either of us here, I’d not turn down his offer. Ilario would, indeed, buy my brother a horse, or whatever else I needed if he were here. I only wished I’d understood that sooner.

  “The horse would be a boon.”

  “And I’m sure I could be of more use than that.” He pounced, eager as a cat on a bird. “You lived as a gentleman in Castelle Escalon and currently reside in the house of a noble lady at Pradoverde. I cannot imagine your rough companion taking care of your nether linens or shaving you as your man Finn does or providing other such intimate services.”

  Not hard to detect that the prunish servant would rather take up residence in a midden than care for my nether linens. Which made his annoying determination more incomprehensible. “I don’t need intimate—”

  “Do you cook?” Andero shoved his way into the exchange with an exasperated abruptness.

  “I’m a fine cook. My lord hired me from an inn in Nanver precisely because he enjoyed my fish and my dedication to cleanliness. And be sure I’m accustomed to cooking in the rough, as Lord Ilario—divine grace accompany him on his Veil journey.…”

  Even as John Deune exuded servility, Andero pulled me aside. “We might have need of someone who could cook, Dante,” he murmured. “From your stringy aspect, I would guess it’s not you, and to tell the truth, Marta’s done for me since I came back from the legion. So if you can’t conjure us up a brace of roasted rabbits now and then, and you’ve no other objection, I’d say bring the little hoptoad along.”

  “I don’t trust him.”

  “Then best keep him close, eh? And I’m not going to be shaving you nor washing your drawers, that’s certain.”

  I was too wrung out to argue with both of them. “We’ll take it day by day. Andero, give John Deune a torch and find him a closet—a secure closet—to sleep in.”

  “I know just the place. No wickedness will find him in the coal house.”

  While Andero was gone, I sank to the floor where he’d left me and suffered a proper fit of the shakes. Before I knew it, he was back again, slamming the door against the howling wind.

  “Locked up tight, cozy as a ewe in a lambing shed. Won’t be carrying tales anywhere tonight. He’s an odd sort. Don’t seem to be the kind for a great lord’s serving man.”

  “I never understood it, either. But now…If Ilario was the man I suspect he was, he wouldn’t have wanted a friendly manservant who might tempt him into confidences. He’d want someone awkward, not too clever. I wouldn’t trust John Deune farther than you can spit.”

  “I won’t.” Andero grasped my elbow and hauled me up. “You look done in, little brother. I’ve thrown your blanket on Denys’s bed. It doesn’t look so clean, but it’s better’n the floor.”

  “You take the bed. I’ll take first watch,” I said. “I need to eat. The adept had something on the fire.”

  “Fire’s out.”

  He laid my hand on a low stool near the hearth. The lingering heat of the stone hut scarce held back the winter night. The wind rattled the shutters, and threads of frost shifted my cloak and the blanket Andero threw over my shoulders.

  “If you could give it a boost with your—” My abrupt shake of the head cut him off. “Well, I suppose I can poke up the ashes.”

  “Doesn’t have to be hot,” I mumbled, but Andero went ahead anyway.

 
Power—even the rites to raise the dead and reive the Veil—had never frightened me. Not until this night. Magic had been my light, my salvation, but tonight I would eat Denys’s pottage cold rather than relight his dead fire with spellwork.

  As my brother puttered about with the embers, a new mania rose in me. Blindness and sentiment had made me weak. This cursed enchantress had been able to manipulate me, and a whining adept who couldn’t bind a true spell had driven me to heedless murder. I could not allow that. Not ever again.

  “What is that? I’ve seen you diddling with it on and off these past days.” Andero’s question yanked my attention outward. “Is it like your staff—summat to help you with spellwork?”

  “No. Though it is enchanted.” My fingers had pulled Anne’s pendant from my shirt. Strangely, the bit of silver scorched as if it had fallen into Andero’s blaze. “Is it—? Does it appear different from before?”

  “I’ve noticed it glowing, but never so bright. Looks like a star fell into your hand.”

  Though we were too far apart to speak, I was sorely tempted to touch Anne’s presence in the aether. But I couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Not with murder on my mind.

  I looped the slender chain from my neck and stuffed the little bundle into my pocket. “I don’t know exactly what it is. But it has naught to do with dreams or emeralds or rescuing Portier. Tell me, is there an oddment lying about in here? Some kind of device that would make a click. Denys used it as he read. It would likely be left beside his books or on a table.” Depleted as I was, I could detect no enchantments nearby.

  “There’s no books, and no device of any kind I can see.”

  The adept must have taken the books and the Gautier device downstairs. I sent Andero down to look for it, but he found nothing. “Naught left but splinters and ash down there.”

  “Nothing?” All those books…priceless books…other devices…Saints’ mercy, for that alone I deserved hanging.

  After we devoured Denys’s turnip soup, Andero rolled up in his blanket and dropped into his ever-easy sleep. I settled down to watch. I leaned my head on my staff, my senses stretched into the windy night. I wished I could shut off thinking.

  The taint of cold fury lingered in my veins and sinews. Never had I experienced anything like, not in the darkest hours of my double life, not on the other occasions my temper had skewed toward madness. I had never claimed to be other than ill-tempered and violent, but I had learned early that my best magic flowed from cool-headed patience, rather than the heated frenzy others described. Never had I so lost control of my power. But for that spark of reason, I would have brought this house down on my head.

  I could not separate the night’s experience from what I had learned over these past days. First there was Portier, my stubborn friend who would not stay dead. Then, a sneering enchantress who wielded a green Stone whose heart was corruption, who controlled people through dreams and thought to bury Portier where he could not be found, as if someone might find something other than a corpse in his grave. And now there was this tale of a noble king who wielded green Stones and conquered an empire, and who allowed himself to die only when his work was finished. A man whose enemies believed he could speak in dreams and might return from the dead to threaten them again. Connections undeniable. Anne always said that legends must illuminate some truth, even if it was not the truth the tale spinner believed.

  If truth permeated even these outlandish things, then what of the other thread of these days?

  Denys’s words: From the Three shall rise the Righteous Defender, who shall battle the Daemon of the Dead on the doorstep of Heaven.

  And my father’s and his prophet’s: Tha’rt Fallen, Dante. Darkborn in frost-cold blood. Suckled on pain. And so will come the last battle of the War for Heaven and guardianship of the Living Realm, when the Righteous Defender will rise from the ashes and battle the Daemon. He waits for you.

  Andero believed I had killed Denys while defending myself. But instead I had howled in triumphant rage, incidentally murdering a fool whose only crime was greed. What did that mean?

  As the hours of the night passed and the bitter wind wailed, images of those dying in the cages along the road haunted me. Their misery settled in my gut like lead, offering power to kill them all in the name of mercy and kill their captors in the name of justice. My hands shook with the need to do it. Rage. Murder. Magic. Inextricably bound.

  Gods save me, what if I was the evil at the heart of the woman’s green Stone?

  Anne

  CHAPTER 12

  23 ESTAR, MIDMORNING

  884TH YEAR OF THE SABRIAN REALM

  MONTCLAIRE

  “Damoselle Anne!” The girl stopped halfway down the hillside path waved her arms excitedly. “Visitors!”

  I waved back and reluctantly packed up my writing case. For one glorious morning—the best of Aubine’s mild winters—I’d chosen to escape account books, vintner’s agonies, and my father’s spotty memory by sitting in the meadow to write letters, one to my dear friend the Queen of Sabria and one to Dante.

  I had to smile at Kati. Everything excited the girl since I’d hired her on at Montclaire to help Melusina with the house and the cooking. Since the day I had mentioned to my father that Kati and some of the tenants’ children could scarce read, he had gathered them together in the afternoons for schooling in reading, history, geography, and mathematics. Sometimes Papa called them by their own names; sometimes he believed they were Ambrose, Lianelle, and me. No one minded.

  Yet my joy in Kati’s excitement was fiercer than shared pleasure at a child’s enlarged prospects or my father’s gradual emergence from the shadowed realms he had wandered for so long. The quicker I could get Montclaire functioning smoothly, the sooner I could leave. The most beautiful demesne in Sabria was no longer my home.

  As slow, steady water droplets on a prisoner’s forehead, each innocent and painless in itself, can become a torment, so was every day apart from Dante. I feared his brooding melancholy. I grieved at his stubborn refusal to believe that we shared much more than a house and a singular gift. And though he had warded Pradoverde well, I fretted about his myriad enemies. Offering the full story of his activities while king’s agente confide might win alliances that would leave him less vulnerable, but I’d learned quickly that to suggest overtures to the king, my parents, the Camarilla Magica, or the Temple was to raise a firestorm.

  “I did what was needed,” he would bellow. “We were victors on Mont Voilline. If the cowards mislike the result or quibble with my choices, let them hang me.” Then he would retreat to hammer molten iron or dig in the dirt for the rest of the day. Cowardly, I let matters rest and bided my time. Only when he was teaching me sorcery did he come alive. Yet even that was fraught with argument. I believed we should expend all our energies in solving the mystery of Ixtador before my sister’s soul was leached away. He insisted I must plod through ridiculous spellwork first. And to my heart’s pain, it seemed that only the magic raised his spirits, never the student.

  Latching the case and throwing my discarded cloak over my shoulder with the blanket, I began the long trudge up the hill.

  Mostly I just missed Dante himself. Every hour apart, no matter how busy, seemed vacant. Every person I encountered, including the gracious, well-educated, temperate young men who just happened to arrive every few days to introduce themselves—all recommended by Papa’s friends or Mama’s kin in Nivanne—seemed shallow as the dust on a tabletop.

  I should have considered myself fortunate that I could perceive Dante in the aether—a distant, tumultuous eddy in the mindstorm that I’d come to recognize as his presence. But my chest just ached the more. Even if we were close enough in distance to speak in our minds, he refused to engage in that way.

  “Who’s come, Kati?” I said, huffing the last few metres up the rise.

  The slim, fair girl was red-cheeked and near bursting as she fell in beside me for the rest of the hike to the house. “It’s one of the tenants, Buiron, a
nd his son. They asked for the lord, but I told them you took all business as yet. They seemed a bit fretful. Thought the son might puke when I had ’em come out the kitchen and into the business room as you’ve told me.”

  Probably a new baby on the way or perhaps a petition to expand their leasehold. I had let it be known that tenants were welcome to bring their business whenever it came up, rather than waiting for the conte to make his quarterly rounds.

  The two touched their foreheads in respect as I hurried into the whitewashed room off the steward’s office.

  “Divine grace, Goodman Buiron. And you must be Pev, your father’s eldest.” I motioned the large, hairy man and his blotchy son of fifteen to sit on the wooden bench that lined two of the whitewashed walls. “How may I help you this fine day? Such a fair new year we’ve seen already.”