The Daemon Prism: A Novel of the Collegia Magica

by Carol Berg

  But it was already too late. “Welcome, travelers, be ye men or spirits!”

  “It’s four of ’em come out,” murmured Andero. “Elders. A scrawny lot, but grinning wider than a pawner when a lord walks into his shop.”

  “Rest ye this night ’neath our roofs,” said a breathless man who sounded older than the road. “We’ll spit a lamb in celebration of thy company, then share a cup and a tale of the wide world.”

  “We’ve no wish to put you out,” said Andero. “And we need to be on our way.”

  “There’s naught before thee but the haunted heights and the sea of sand. The dead will wait. We get few living travelers along this road. What news and stories thou might share will sustain us longer than the bits of sustenance we provide.”

  “Have you seen travelers ride through since the change of season?” I blurted, as another cold pocket of air gave me a shudder. Easy to understand how people living here could imagine ghosts on the road. “Perhaps a party with a prisoner?”

  “Only the one group, some two cycles of the moon since,” said a rasp-voiced woman. “Maybe a dozen riders. They didn’t slow. Didn’t even look our way. We thought they might be dead.”

  Perhaps Portier and his captors. Two months…The timing could be right. Not dead, though. Surely not dead.

  “We’d be grateful for whatever you can spare,” said Andero. “My name is Manet de Shreu. This is my master, Mage Talon, and our servant, John Deune. My master travels south to ply his work in desert climes.”

  “A sorcerer!” The old man’s voice grew wary. “This land aches from magework.…”

  “But he is welcome, anyway,” pronounced a woman, chiding. “He Who Wanders the Stars bids us welcome wanderers of all kinds.”

  “I’ve no business here, elder,” I said. “Just a need to sleep.”

  The villagers paraded us to each house in turn. Most were occupied by women and children, their men out with their animals. They sustained a small herd of sheep and goats by spreading them far out on the plains to graze, companioned and comforted in their lonely nights by their god or angel or whatever He Who Wanders the Stars was thought to be. The women produced woolen cloth that they colored with dyes distilled from the highland plants. Every other year, they took their cloth to Mattefriese to trade. They spoke of the journey with wonder, as if it were one of King Philippe’s voyages of exploration, a dangerous and exciting adventure from which one might or might not return with riches untold.

  The colors and weaving were quite fine for starveling villagers, so John Deune declared aloud, as if poor folk might be as deaf as blind men.

  Yet, indeed the villagers did the same. Whispers trailed us like dust in our wake:…he wears bruises from the Hungry One’s rod. Hide the children. Is he dead? Daemon. From Castelle Escalon to this village at the end of the world, I could not seem to escape the name, the same in every myth. It had never bothered me until Castelivre.

  Claiming recent illness, I excused myself from the lamb spitting, tale spinning, and further mumbling. They provided me tea and the porridge they kept on the fire for infants and elders, and did not ask me to reconsider. Andero insisted we not crowd their cramped homes, so they offered us a lambing shed to bed down in. Stomach satisfied, grateful for a windbreak and the deep straw, I rolled up in my blanket and forced urgency aside. Andero would watch.

  As sense played chase-and-hide with oblivion, a solid mass manifested itself a few centimetres from my head. Perhaps with a touch of a wheeze. My hand crept to my staff.

  “Soft.” The old man’s words weighed in the night like gold amid feathers. “Thou’rt safe with me. I recognized thee from afar—a wanderer who cannot choose what realm he walks. Who crosses boundaries no man is meant to venture.”

  “You’re more right than you could know,” I said, exhaustion slurring my words. “Sometimes it’s hard to find the way.”

  “Arise, Daemon. Walk the road of the dead. But be wary of thy companion, required to speak truth, though his meaning is ever lies. And though wary, stay with him, for he leads thee to thy unhappy destiny. Thou’rt other, born in darkness, gifted with strength that can quench the light of Heaven.”

  My body near stood up of its own self, ready to bellow a denial. But my limbs would not answer and I decided I must be asleep. Born in darkness. How else could he know that?

  “DANTE, ARE YOU STILL AWAKE?”

  “No,” I muttered into my arm. “There’s no wind. No rocks. No more wheezy old men with doom on their tongues. King Philippe sleeps no better.”

  “I need to speak with you.” My brother’s voice was troubled, and when I didn’t answer right off, he didn’t go away.

  “So speak.”

  “It’s middle-night.”

  Gods, my turn to watch. I groaned. “All right, all right, I’ll get up. Are you drunk?”

  “Nay. The shepherds said they’d keep watch. I told them bandits tried to steal your collar at Mattefriese and might be after us. It’s— I’ve been drinking tea with the headman and his wife.”

  “Then, what?”

  “I don’t like to trouble you.”

  I sat up, trying not to grind my teeth. “I’m awake. You’re not troubling me, and I don’t eat large men more than once a year. What is it?”

  “There’s a man and a child been herding sheep in the hills out east. A boy went out this morning to take them supplies and found the little one half dead and the man bashing his head on the walls of his hut and tearing his skin away. They’ve no healer in the village.”

  My spirit froze. “I’m not a healer, Andero.”

  “I know that. It’s just that—well, it really sounds more up your line. The headman’s wife had them brought to a hut where they keep the sick, but she saw no signs of illness. No fever. No flux. Nothing. They’re thinking it’s a curse and are afraid to go near them. Maybe you could tell them what’s what.”

  “They don’t want me near them. You heard them mumbling about sorcerers and daemons. It’s naught but bad water or sheep fever.”

  “But the two will starve if their own people won’t care for them. The boy’s naught but a nub.”

  “I won’t. I know what you’re trying to do, but I can’t. You heard them. They don’t want magic. And so wary of it, they’re like to blame me even if this fellow’s broken his head or eaten poison.”

  “Just asking that you tell them whether it’s magic or no. I’ll vow you don’t have to use magic to do that much. After…if you can’t do for them, then that’s the way it must be.”

  The stubborn oaf was setting up to argue until dawn. If I wanted to sleep again, I’d have to look. “All right. All right. If they agree to accept my word, I’ll take a look. Make sure they understand.”

  AFTER A FEW HOURS UNDER a roof, the cold was fierce and hungry. The wind slammed my chest like a battering ram. As we made the long trek to the hovel where the shepherd and his son had been abandoned, I didn’t dare ask Andero to look at the sky. Dread rode the winds that night, outside me as well as inside.

  “If you see that dotard who barged in before you did, tell him he’s the Daemon,” I grumbled. The old man’s words trailed after me just enough to roil my gut, but not enough to mean anything.

  “Didn’t see him.”

  Maybe he was another dream. Gods, I was ready to be done with dreams forever.

  Someone had built up a fire in the healing hut before running away. The room was unbearably hot and smelled of burnt sheep dung. I sent Andero to discover if there was one person in the village who might assist me. I didn’t want my brother in the room if there was sickness after all.

  They had laid the burly shepherd on a pallet and tied his limbs to spikes fixed in the dirt. He fought, moaned, growled, and whimpered, spewing curses in what hoarse voice he had left. When I placed a hand on his forehead, he near bit it off. The boy lay beside his father unbound. Still and limp, skin clammy and breathing shallow, he was too wasted to be a threat.

  Neither showed fe
ver. The man was sweating profusely and stank of sheep, not drink.

  Raghinne’s healing women had used a litany of symptoms to gauge illness: sweet and sour, tongue and teeth, stiff and soft, pulse and palpitations. The shepherd’s breath and his puddled urine smelled normal, neither sweet nor sour. His blood-pulse raced, as one might expect, but was strong. His joints flexed almost too much; as I struggled to rebind his arm, he tried to choke me in his elbow. Squeezing his head in the crook of my arm, I fingered his tongue. Disgusting…

  The door creaked. Light footsteps hesitated, as the wind swirled the dust and smoke.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Dorothea,” she said in a breathy whisper. Her fear was like a fifth person in the room.

  “I don’t see,” I said, “so I need your help. Tell me about these two. Does the man smoke blisterweed or something like?”

  “Jono be an ill-luck man. But he’s my sister’s man and this her only babe…”

  The sister had died birthing the boy, five years past. Then Jono had lost two sheep the next summer and one more the next. And only in the last tenday he had returned from Mattefriese market with scarce half the full price for two years’ worth of cloth.

  “…but he’s a good da, and neither drinks spirits nor smokes any pipeweed. I can’t let them lie here, less’n you tell there’s no hope.”

  “Can’t say as yet,” I told her. “Come tell me how his tongue looks.…”

  We stepped through everything I knew of mundane healing without finding a hint of the problem. The man’s fingernails near pierced my skin, and he screamed as if the bed were made of iron spikes. The child scarce breathed. I’d naught left but magic. Gods…

  I was not so stupid as to mistake why I’d worked no magic since Castelivre. Andero had seen it. Some people have a terror of snakes, imagining them in their beds, transforming every tickle in their shoe or up their back to a slithering whipsnake. Some people feel spiders everywhere; some see bears in the shadows on moonlit nights. I had ever feared the dark. Jacard had seen it; thus his gleeful selection of my ruin.

  But down there in Denys’s cellar, fear and anger—madness?—had taken me to a place so cold and so dark, my sightless state seemed but eventide. I had lost control, lost my self, and stolen life from a man who likely did not deserve it. Worse, I had murdered him with magic, my lodestone, my center. I had thought that feeling my skills deteriorate through sensory crippling was the worst torment the world could wreak. But to corrupt the work that had given my life meaning was far, far worse. And now they wanted me to raise magic next a child.…

  Gifted with strength that can quench the light of Heaven. The old man might have spoke his words anew in that moment. Cold sweat drenched my clothing.

  “Are you well, mage?” The woman touched my shoulder, and I near jumped out of my skin.

  “Well enough. What’s the boy’s name?”

  “Luz. He is a cheery boy.”

  Luz…light. I almost laughed. Or sobbed. “And the father is Jono?”

  “Aye.”

  A cheery boy and an ill-luck man who were going to die if I couldn’t help.

  I curled my dead fingers about my staff and laid my left hand on the shepherd’s forehead. A simple detection spell. I could at least leave these people with an answer. I summoned every discipline I knew, then applied a miserly smat of power. “Maleferre, Jono.”

  Stars exploded; cannons thundered, blistering, ripping, shredding.…

  “Damnation!” I yelled, rubbing palm and fingers on my cheek to convince myself my sole useful hand was neither bleeding, nor charred, nor fleshless. Dorothea moaned and crashed against the door, letting in another gale to choke us with blowing ashes.

  “It’s all right. It’s all right,” I said, breathless from pain, surprise, disgust, and a smat of relief. “Come back. It’s just…the fool has gone and bought himself a gheket!”

  Every marketplace had a gheket seller. Maybe the bone man, maybe the silk merchant. But always there was one who would note an idiot who was down on his luck and whisper in his ear, I’ve got my gammy’s luck charm or my da’s cure-all or my mam’s everheal. All it will cost is a quarter of what’s in your pocket. Or a half.

  Outlawed by the Camarilla—one instance in which I agreed with the prefects—ghekets were luck charms constructed from fifty to a thousand elements, from shark’s teeth to pine needles, without regard to keirna, formulas, or good sense. The good ones were entirely inert. The rest, bound with some smattering of true power, could be a disaster. As they comprised so many things, there was always a possibility that the random combination would make a difference in the buyer’s life—about the same chance as a star falling on one’s head. But in general they were so ridiculous in composition that they caused much more trouble than they could possibly help. This one had been bound with a hefty dollop of true power, but the conflicting energies had shattered. The bits and pieces of spell-laden junk were literally ripping this man’s mind to shreds. I could not ignore it.

  Holding my power, I touched the boy. “Maleferre, Luz…”

  Relieved, I called Dorothea in from the night, where she had retreated in terror.

  “The boy’s not ill, and there’s no curse on him,” I said. “He’s hungry and overheated, and his father has most likely harmed him without meaning to. Look for a bump on his head. Get someone to carry him out of here, and send my companions to me.”

  She fetched Andero and John Deune, and then picked up the boy herself and carried him out, crooning to the child as Anne did to her horses.

  I told Andero and John what I’d discovered. “I can likely take care of it. I’ve done it before. But I’ll need a decent fire, lots of strong sweet tea, and someone to see the man doesn’t tear his limbs off or mine. And someone to see that I don’t…forget what I’m doing. Get carried away.”

  “John will take care of the fire and the tea,” said my brother. “I’ll see to the rest.”

  “Good.” Andero knew why my hands were trembling. “Watch carefully. Be quick. And do whatever is needed. Whatever. I mean that.”

  The task I faced was daunting. It was as if a creature the size of an elephant, having the thickest, curliest wool of any sheep, had rolled in a field thick with briars. I had to remove each single briar, as well as every tiny spine of the briars that might have broken off, from that creature’s coat. There was no general sweep that would do it, and no partial solution. If the man was to be helped, every spell fragment must be dealt with individually. And I had no time to waste; he would be dead or irreparably damaged in another day. There was no choice.

  Dragging my staff around the pallet, I scribed an enclosure in the dirt floor; then I knelt at the shepherd’s bedside and laid my hand on his forehead. Taking a deep breath, I willed Andero to be strong, opened myself to the aether, and reached deep to summon power.…

  The spell fragments abraded my senses like burrs, bee stings, needle pricks, and ant bites. I destroyed each with a tiny burst of power. One. Then another. Then another. With utmost care.

  From time to time, I stopped, resting briefly by John Deune’s tidy fire, drinking his tea and eating honey cakes villagers left by the door. Only then did I hear Andero straining to keep the giant shepherd from harming himself, speaking as gently as if Jono were some outsized babe. Yet I felt the burn of my brother’s eyes on me. Good. I nodded his way, then knelt and began again.

  Fortunately, as each spell fragment was removed, the man settled a bit. By late afternoon, he slept peacefully. John Deune slept on the dirt floor next the remnants of his steady fire. Andero and I sat outside the door in the sun, too drained to speak. All three of us had done well. I felt clean again, or as if the hangman had withdrawn the noose a few centimetres. I had kept control. Hadn’t murdered anyone. The lingering intoxication of true magic warmed my blood.

  Dorothea reported that the boy had indeed suffered a blow to the head and a sprained ankle. He was now awake and eating a hearty supper. I told her t
o bring him to sit with his father, so the child could see that all was right with him. Perhaps it would restore the lunatic father’s faith in his luck to see his boy on waking.

  Andero sighed. “I suppose I’d best saddle the horses so we can be off.”

  I croaked a laugh. “You’d have to stuff me in your baggage to get me traveling today. But I do need Devil. I’ve got to visit the hut where they found these two. A gheket is always bound to an artifact of some kind—a twig circle, a twist of cloth, or some such. If someone else finds it, we’ll have to do this all over again.”

  He groaned. “Not in this life!”

  The boy who had discovered the raving shepherd volunteered to take me to the hut. He had escaped the curse once, so I supposed he thought riding on a horse named Devil with a nasty-looking sorcerer behind him could do no harm.