The Daemon Prism: A Novel of the Collegia Magica

by Carol Berg

  A last chance to turn and ride the other way. Free, with full use of my senses, I might be able to learn of the Seeing Stones, spy on Jacard, and locate Portier. But I’d no water, and I could not doubt the lady’s threat to rescind her gift of sight. It took no genius to understand that Xanthe’s desire to be independent of Jacard presented me a better chance to find Portier and learn what was needed than proceeding on my own. Damnably risky, but better. I had to set guilt aside and work.

  A small, focused heat stung my waist, as if a glowing ember had fallen into my pocket. I wound Devil’s reins about my dead hand and investigated. As it had in Castelivre, Anne’s nireal scorched my fingers, its gleam brighter than noonday. Seeing her gift made it so much more solid than I had ever imagined it. I could almost glimpse her tidy figure in the glare, almost hear her sober questions, her quiet teasing, her foolish sentiments.…

  “We wait here,” I said, muzzling a ferocious growl. I yanked Devil to a halt in the scant shade of a tamarisk grove and ignored Xanthe’s prattle about the trinkets and delicacies Iaccar had promised.

  The dust cloud disgorged a troop of ten horsemen clad in green and gold livery. A red-haired officer with wild brows, leather skin, and a neck as wide as his shoulders halted them and dismounted. “I’m Captain Hosten of Mancibar’s palace guard. Have I the honor of greeting the most gracious lady Xanthe, the Mistress of the Maldeona?”

  “Most assuredly you do,” she said over my shoulder, giggling again. The sound grated already. Anne’s laugh—

  I squeezed the nireal in my fist and shut out the thoughts of her. What if Xanthe commanded me to spill my thoughts? Sabria’s court ladies had done so all the time, even when they feared me. This woman reminded me of those empty-headed jennies in the queen’s household, save with a touch of malice and cruelty that would shock even Sabrian aristos.

  “The Regent of Mancibar has commanded me offer you his hospitality and transport, paying you all due respect.” He bowed crisply and gave her a hand down from behind me.

  As I dismounted, I stuffed pendant, ring, and chain into my boot, along with the distraction I could not afford. I took a position behind Xanthe.

  Hosten’s signal brought one of his men forward leading a yellow-gold mare, outlandishly outfitted with tassels, bells, and quilted satin. Xanthe examined the placid beast. Then she spun round, a smile teasing her rosy lips.

  “My servant can ride this one. His stallion pleases me better.”

  “As you wish, Mistress,” said Hosten.

  There was no argument to be made. Under my breath I cursed the fact that this would leave my staff, as well as Devil, with Xanthe.

  Silver eyes sparking in the sunlight, she whispered in my ear, “Assergio de nom Maldeon. Follow me. The rest of you”—the captain and his men paused as she raised her voice—“hear this: No one is to speak to my slave or heed his speech. His words are mine alone.”

  She may have been a servant, deliberately kept illiterate and uneducated, but she was clever and insightful. I underestimated her at my peril.

  Xanthe took her seat on my horse, casting a sidelong glance my way. With a twist of malice to her smile and a clear augury of my immediate future, she laid into Devil with a whip she had appropriated from the red-haired captain. Her bonds tightened around me. I mounted the gaudy mare and rode after.

  HOURS WE RODE ACROSS THE wastelands. Every shrub, every rock, every crack in the red, hard-packed dirt became fodder for my seeing. No matter how hateful the circumstances of my recovery, I needed to know this place so I could use its keirna in spellwork. The sky deepened from flat silver to purest azure.

  Our desert track joined a wagon road, wider and well traveled, though we saw little traffic. As the shadows lengthened and our route bore farther south and west, the landscape became more benevolent. We no longer traveled in the rain shadow of the Kadrian highlands, but through grasslands of ocher velvet with patches of rich, well-watered green. Each rolling hill opened onto a more verdant scene of fields, small orchards, and an occasional sparse woodland.

  Winter had not touched this land. Yet something did. The clean air of desert and field was tainted with smoke and char and something worse underneath. The third time Captain Hosten guided our party away from the route to avoid plumes of greasy black smoke, I asked Xanthe why. She passed the inquiry to the bullnecked captain.

  “Those villages lie under the interdict of the Regent of Mancibar,” he said. “Visitation is forbidden.”

  “Loyal to the old prince, I’ll vow,” Xanthe said, loud enough all could hear. “The Regent told me he was yet subduing a few parts of the countryside. ’Tis none of our affair.”

  Three villages in the space of four hours’ ride struck me as more than a few. But I didn’t contradict her. I wasn’t sure if I could.

  As the sky’s azure deepened to cerulean, we approached a range of stark cliffs rising from the fields. My body thrummed with exhaustion, all focus and concentration fled. My eyes streamed with tears again, exhausted by light and color, and I felt neither here nor there. Mingled with images of squat mud houses and bony flocks were visions of arrows raining from the stars, of burning books, of a pregnant sky filled with ravenous faces. Emerald light limned rock and tree like the werelights in a bog. As the road steepened and led toward the cliffs, I clung to the mare. One un­toward jolt would send me sliding from the saddle.

  We passed into a great city crowded up to the bulky heights. Yet it seemed not a human city, for it lay in shadow while the rays of evening still shone on the green-gold grasslands and fields behind us. Ranks of burning torches lined streets crowded with fine stone houses but lacking people. No groups chattered their way to local taverns; no sausage vendors hawked their wares for a tradesman’s supper.

  The red-haired captain shouted unintelligible commands and dour-faced soldiers in green passed us along. Xanthe peppered Hosten with questions, but I grasped only snippets—blood cadres…spiders…hauntings…disappearances—and comprehended nothing.

  Dirt yielded to cobbles and still we rode upward.

  “Attend, magus! Are you deaf now?”

  Xanthe’s severity roused me from the murk. I shook my head like a wet dog. “Lady?”

  She rode beside me—the dream. Her silvered eyes glinted in the onrushing night. “Behold the Regent’s house,” she said. “Remember, you are my servant and will not speak unless I allow it.”

  “Naturally,” I said, dizzy and thick tongued, as overwhelmed as a pebble placed to hold back a roiling river.

  The Regent’s house stood on a horn of rock protruding from the heights. Red sand cliffs rose sharply behind it. Yet the house was no fortress, but a palace. I had never before seen so much glass in any building. Come morning, it must be a well of light.

  “I know this place,” said Xanthe. “Not the house or the city. ’Twas never Mancibar, the City of Moneylenders, in the days of Maldeon. Hardly even a village. We knew it as Sirpuhi of the Red Cliffs.”

  Sirpuhi was not a word in Sabria’s common speech. Arothi, I thought. But I knew it. I’d read or heard it but could not recall where.

  As I lowered my leaden bones earthward, Xanthe slipped from Devil’s back and ran up the wide steps. She might have just stepped fresh from her enchanted lake, as her white gown and pale hair streamed out behind her in a balmy breeze. A green-robed figure awaited her.

  “I’ve brought him!” she called. “Our bargain is commenced.”

  I discovered I could not move from the spot where I dismounted. Just as well, as I’d no wish to go closer. The waiting man’s sharp features and dark wedge of a beard were unmistakable. Jacard.

  Inevitably, Xanthe beckoned me to her side. I trudged forward, fixing my bleary eyes on her.

  “Kneel, magus,” she commanded, pointing her long white finger at the pavement. “The Regent of Mancibar is lord of all you see here, and all we have seen on our travels from Carabangor. My servants will offer him his accustomed honors.”

  Neither pride
nor will, hatred nor disdain, was an issue. My knees bent of themselves before her words were completed, and my head touched the paving stones and stayed there. We can always fall lower than we believe possible.

  “Master Dante. I cannot say what pleasure it gives me to see Philippe de Savin-Journia’s hireling, the betrayer who ruined the greatest venture in the history of magic, brought to his knees. Though I am distressed to see my gift to you undone—even for this brief time. Did you enjoy the doom I shaped for you…creeping about in the dark like an earthworm…left ignorant and crude as you were at birth…books, charts, maps, all arcane lore out of your reach? Your power fades, doesn’t it? I knew it would. Your corrupted approach to spellwork relies too heavily on sight.”

  Though I could not raise my head, no binding could have kept my tongue still. “Even blind, I heard you run gibbering in terror from Mont Voilline.”

  “Shall we compare the magnitude of our defeats, Master? Shall we ask my subjects to judge who’s won and who’s lost? I look forward to long talks in my dungeons, where we can compare the absolute divergence of our fates.”

  A thread of smoke rose from a dry grass blade that poked through the paving stones not three centimetres from my nose. The acrid stink seared my nostrils and caused my eyes to flood. The blade pulsed red-gold, blackened, and curled. But the blade next to it flared into a moment’s blaze. And then the next. I blinked rapidly, but Xanthe’s command held me powerless to move. Two more and my hair would catch.…

  My bowels clenched. Burning bore a horror near that of blinding. They mustn’t see. “Until my mistress chooses to surrender me, I serve her pleasures only.”

  “Surrender you?” Xanthe burst in. “Never! You have no claim to the magus, Regent Iaccar. Yes, we made a bargain, but you never told me he was so powerful.”

  In a billow of smoke, the little blaze went out. My lungs convulsed. Each spasm scraped my forehead on the paving.

  “We shall see how things fall out.” Jacard remained cool. “I would recommend you keep his talents under strict control, lady. We’ve a sorcerer’s hole and inhibitors prepared for him, as I’ve explained to you. But eventually…Dante and I have debts of honor between us, and I shall demand possession of him.”

  Jacard’s calm confidence wholly unnerved me. I had been liberal with derision, both public and private, making sure de Gautier and his fellows had seen my aide for the weakling coward he was. Jacard’s persistence had surprised me, until I discovered that his uncle, Kajetan, kept his foot up the little prick’s backside to keep him spying on me. The blaze under my nose had been Jacard’s warning. He had learned something of magic in these years.

  “I’ve done very well controlling my servant on my own,” said Xanthe haughtily. “Though I shall certainly make use of these things you offer. The magus is clever, and I don’t wish to play wet nurse.”

  Xanthe agreed that I should be locked up right away, and the two of them vanished into the house arm in arm. The sight left me more ill than I was already. The idea of Xanthe and Jacard forming some alliance with their Seeing Stones, including me as their magic-wielding slave, was the stuff of nightmare. I already had nightmares aplenty.

  Captain Hosten quickly took me in charge. “March, magus. Know this: My men have three spears poised to ream your ass and a sword aimed at each of your nice soft flanks. Do you twitch or mumble or look elsewhere than your feet, you’ll feel the sting of one or the other or mayhap all five at once.”

  The red-haired soldier delivered this speech with sober calm. He was a big man, near Andero’s height, though not so broad, and had likely found posturing unnecessary since he was a boy. Unwise to cross him. His five armed minions formed up around me, while he clamped a giant hand around the back of my neck and moved me forward like a stratagems gamepiece.

  Still fogged from hunger and magical depletion, I had no resources to resist. Up endless variants of wide shallow stairs, through courtyards and vast, brightly painted chambers trimmed with gilt and mirrors, along galleries open to the cooling night, we came to a less decorative gallery. From the stink, its open arches must have overlooked the midden. The interior wall held three solid doors inlaid with crosshatched strips of wood and iron. We halted in front of one.

  A sorcerer’s hole. I should have known. A normal prison cell was not effective at detaining a sorcerer of any significant ability. I hoped it was of some reasonable dimension and not the size of a coffin like some I’d seen. “Inhibitors” were unfamiliar. But having experienced Jacard’s contrabalance, a device of ancient magic designed to prevent spellwork while burning a sorcerer’s eyesight away, I had no desire to discover what an inhibitor might be.

  After confiscating my knife, spoon, and copper bracelet, one of Captain Hosten’s men performed a brisk search of my pockets, which turned up naught but my spare gloves, wool scarf, and a dirty rag. They found the second, smaller knife in my boot sheath. It was common belief that a metal object might permit a sorcerer to work spells in a sorcerer’s hole. That belief was entirely unfounded; one could not bind spells inside a well-constructed sorcerer’s hole. Nonetheless, I was pleased they failed to check deeper inside my boot, where I had stuffed Anne’s pendant, Portier’s ring, and the silver chain.

  At spearpoint and without a spare word, they shoved me into the windowless closet lined with cypress and camphor laurel, turned the iron lock, and left me alone with no light. With every smat of will within me, I stifled rising panic. The place was not a coffin. Air, albeit ripe, lay just beyond the door. Darkness was no friend of mine, but at least I could function adequately in its demesne.

  I felt around the space, then settled in the corner, huddled in a quivering knot. Only a few paces square, my new home contained but a few items: a straw mattress and blanket, a covered clay bowl for sanitation, and, of course, a sorry excuse for a sorcerer and the desert of his soul.

  CHAPTER 21

  MANCIBAR

  Wild, confusing nightmares savaged that first night, as if stripping away the light again had stripped away my pretense of sanity. I walked a desolate road, cold and dry as death. From the corners of my eyes I glimpsed starving faces, and each time their cold hands brushed my skin, I wanted to be sick.

  In a whirlwind change, Xanthe laughed as she affixed my hands and feet to an ice-glazed pinnacle with bolts of green crystal. The bolts infused my bone and blood with fire, so that I exhaled green flame, yet could not die. She licked my cheek and whispered of the Souleater’s coming—Dimios, the First of the Fallen, whose lash of ice could flay the skin in layers so thin one could see through them. The torment would last for millennia.

  Before me stood a forest of ice pillars, and frozen into each was someone whose death lay on my head. Ilario, Nessia, Denys, a dozen temple servants, my father…so many. Portier, too, stood in his frozen pillar. Unlike the others’, his eyes were open—and living. His mouth moved, but I could not hear.

  I woke repeatedly through the long hours, bathed in sweat and panicked by the dark, certain I was blind again. Though sleep would help replenish my power, I fought to stay awake. I pinched my skin and calculated sums, distances, and the number of stars in the heavens. But inevitably exhaustion would triumph, and I would slip back into nightmare.

  Perhaps the dreams were naught but thirst. Perhaps they were more of Xanthe’s play. They were not some ripple in the aetherstorm. The same energies that bound a sorcerer’s hole to prevent magic working shut off the current of voices. The waking dark offered naught but my own harsh breathing and thumping heart. All else was unnerving silence.

  In the middle of yet another grueling torment came an eruption of painful yellow brightness. This one was real.

  “Up and out, magus. Your mistress summons you.”

  I could have kissed Captain Hosten’s boots. I didn’t care that he hauled me out by my filthy shirt or shoved me onto my knees.

  “Drink. Please.” I hated asking for additional favor when he’d already brought me morning.

  “N
o. The lady wants no trickery before you’re brought to her.” Hosten motioned his men to clamp my wrists in bracelets of heavy wood, inlaid with iron and thorn and linked with a short, rigid iron bar. The inhibitors?

  “Won’t trick.” My mouth felt like scabs. Likely it was a good thing, as I couldn’t smile. Though dreadfully uncomfortable, these inhibitors were no artifact of true magic, but a popular device among country folk who believed all magic flowed through a practitioner’s hands. Once I had rested, eaten, and drunk enough to replenish my power, they would not hinder me.

  “I asked if you were to be fed or bathed,” said the captain, wrinkling his nose as the soldiers dragged me to my feet. “The lady said she would decide.”

  I nodded with as much dignity as I could muster, then straightened my back and lifted my chin as if I were a court mage once again, and not a filthy, unshaven prisoner with dust for bones. For the same reason, I pressed my shaking hands tight against my belly, even if the thorn bindings poked through my shirt. I wouldn’t want these men to misinterpret my condition as wreckage. No indeed, wouldn’t want them to know I could likely not charm a bee to buzz about their ears as yet, with or without the prickly manacles.