by Carol Berg
“Good,” I said, dropping to my knees and bowing my head without being told. Hosten removed the inhibitors and bowed his way out.
“I want more,” she said, shoving my staff into my hand. “Work all night, if you must.”
“Honored Mistress, I regret that I’ve done all I can manage in a day.” I laid my ancille aside. “Depleted as I am, I could go mad or die.”
Only one lash, not hard enough to knock me over. Then she pouted and began to wheedle. “Come, magus, only a small taste more. You’ve left me—”
Heavy, hurried footsteps stopped her.
“Do you mock my courtesy, damoselle?” Jacard stomped through the doorway in midrant. “Have I insulted you, interfered with you establishing your household or managing your slave?”
“Certainly not!” said Xanthe. “Come, what’s wrong? Such a delight to have you here. Sit.”
“Not until I understand with what authority and what motive you moved the librarian.”
Gods, Portier. I remained quiet and unmoving beside the couch.
Xanthe giggled. “Oh, dear friend Iaccar, we should dispatch my burrow rat back to his hole before discussing my wickedness.…” Xanthe rang the bell to summon my jailer.
“Your—” Jacard whirled about in my direction, growling.
I bit my lip to prevent baring my teeth as Hosten locked the inhibitors on my wrists. Portier yet lived. Jacard had said moved. Not killed. Not buried.
“Give the slave three choices for his supper,” Xanthe told Hosten. “Feed him whichever he chooses. He must repeat your offering exactly.”
With a wicked grin, she whispered a word and touched her lips. Instantly, my ears felt as if plugged with mud. With laughter I could not hear, she turned away.
There were no delays in getting me back to the sorcerer’s hole. And, of course, I could not hear what choices were offered and I went hungry. It was another long night.
On the next morning, we began again.
XANTHE’S EXUBERANT PURSUIT OF SPELLWORK left me increasingly uneasy. It became difficult to find things that would please her, yet not lead her into serious sorcery. No one should have the breadth and depth of command Orythmus provided. The Stone allowed its bound master or mistress, even one with no intrinsic talent, to control a considerable variety of powerful magic. Not that those with talent were in any proportion more likely to be wise in the use of magic than those without.
Preoccupied with tricks and games, I had no chance to explore more of Orythmus’s intrinsic nature. I hoped that studying Rhymus, comparing and contrasting the two, would give me better opportunity. But I had learned my lesson. I waited for the lady herself to suggest we move on to her second Seeing Stone.
On one evening seven or eight days after I’d seen Portier, Xanthe was amusing herself feeding me while altering the flavor of each morsel to something other. Fish that tasted of dirt. Olives flavored with mint. Pomegranate that reeked of burnt fat.
“Command is all very well,” she said, waiting as I gagged on an almond that tasted like a clot of mold, “but I’m chafing to learn more of Nessia’s Stone. And Iaccar is impatient that I learn to…enhance…his subjects’ dreams. Gossip rumbles about his hauntings and vanishings, and more of his subjects lament the old prince, which angers him terribly. ’Tis not so terrible a way of maintaining order. Maldeon’s ways were very…messy. So much screaming and bloody entrails everywhere. Iaccar claims you withhold the most powerful magics apurpose.”
A good thing I was flushed already. Her accusation hit too close to the mark.
She threw down the food and dipped her hands in a basin of water. “Last night I bound myself to Rhymus. I decided not to show you how I did it.”
“As I told you before, Mistress, I’ve no intention of wielding the Stones.” In truth, my aversion to the Seeing Stones had grown more firm as the days passed. My hands felt dirty after touching them—something I’d never before experienced with a magical artifact. Yet, indeed, the disappointment stung. “May I ask a question before we move on?”
“You may ask.” Implying with her tone that she might not answer.
“On the day you enslaved me”—she relished it when I referred to my servile state—“I looked into Rhymus and saw…and participated in…the librarian’s torment. It wasn’t a dream. How could I see so specific a scene?”
She shrugged, her dark blue gown slipping off her shoulder. “Perhaps it was the words I used to invoke the dreams. I just wanted you distracted and confused.”
“But Iaccar had told you of my blinding. He believed the librarian my ally. Perhaps he suggested the scene? Or the scenes in the dreams, when Rhymus showed the rivers of blood, the pervasive gloom…and sadness?” And Ixtador’s spectres walking among mortal men, a comely young man as their shepherd.
“Inside the dreams or outside, Rhymus chooses what to show through its seeing face. I saw those visions first when I peeked over your shoulder.”
“And the dream of the meadow, where you learned of my father and Portier?”
“That was invoked with words!” Xanthe laughed, practicing dance steps with an invisible partner. “Iaccar said that if I knew the names of people of importance to you, he could tell me more about them so we could fetch them or kill them or make our plans. So, I sang an old verse in the dream. ‘The heart of man charts a four-legged course; father, friend, lover, and always his horse.’ And sure enough your dream showed me those people and a horse—though the beast was naught but bones.” She shuddered. “I hated that part.”
The Stones were all about seeing. About pathways. Connections. They were prisms, not gems.
“My eyes had never seen Devil. That’s why the dream showed naught but bones.”
The words fell from my lips before I could consider my folly. Xanthe paused in her dancing. I glanced up. Her brow crinkled in the way I’d come to dread.
“And so one of the men was your father. And the friend was this librarian, whom you said was not your friend.…”
“An unfaithful friend,” I said urgently. “He pretended friendship while he used me. Just as my father ruined and discarded me. What kind of father cripples his son to be rid of him? I rejoiced in his pain. All of them were betrayers.”
“The lover, too? The woman? You never mentioned a woman. You refused to name her.…”
“She is the worst traitor of all. Her care was naught but pity. When I would not fawn upon her as she wished, she returned to her aristo parents. I could not bear her presence in my dream.” I drew on all the bitterness festered from Anne’s leaving. She was a deceiver. She had certainly deceived herself these two years. “She kept secrets with other men.”
“Like Maldeon.” Xanthe crouched before me, enveloping me in her warmth and sweet scent. Her flowing sleeves tickled my face as she stroked my cheek, smiling like a benevolent queen. “And even your horse is a betrayer. I indulge him with apples and sweet hay and he loves me dearly. He does not pine for you, magus. No one pines for you, I think.”
I bleated a laugh. Terror of exposing Anne lined my airways with thorn. “You are surely correct, Mistress.”
Before another day passed, I had to devise some triggering spell that would prevent me revealing Anne’s name. Then, perhaps, I could work without this persistent distraction.
Xanthe returned to her dancing, her laughter like music, her form voluptuous as she dodged the darting sunbeams. She was so like a child, sunlight and shadow, pleasure and fury, each quickly raised and each quickly dismissed as long as one paid close attention and took quick action. There were certainly more difficult traits in a companion.
I wrenched eyes away and returned to the puzzle of Rhymus’s visions. Jacard had told her that Rhymus itself transformed her words into its visions, drawing on the observer’s desires or fears. But the Stones were magically void, and none of the attached spellwork touched the Stone itself. Which left…what?
Was someone else influencing the Stones and their visions?
Orythm
us gleamed jewel-like in the lamplight, its facets taunting me. Squaring. Skewing. Doubling. Vanishing. Altering one’s view of what existed already. Its seeing facet had shown me a different candle…and Portier…and his fragment of writing that stuck in my logic like a fly in butter. Was that seeing in the present or in the past? Either seemed possible, for an intrinsically impossible thing. Yet I believed the vision true, and that wherever and whenever he had been writing the history of the Souleater, Portier had heard my call.
Was it possible that the energies of depleted souls nourished some divine cannibal? Though I had put the questions of Portier’s nature…and mine…aside in the daylight, I could not ignore evidence. If I could but see more of Portier’s writing…
“Did the wizard say if all the Stones have the same facets as Orythmus?” I said. “Doubling, skewed, and all.”
“He said they did. Should we set up the demonstration for Rhymus? Though nothing you’ve taught me seems to use the facets at all.” Xanthe’s sunny presence dipped into cloud again.
“It would be helpful,” I said. “The more I know, the sooner I can teach you to influence dreams.” The sooner I could learn what in the name of all gods was going on.
“Oh, yes!”
It made sense that the optical properties of the three would be the same if they were cut from the same larger piece. Yet the facets differed in shape and angle, which must also affect their behavior.
We set up the candle and the thread and she turned the crystal this way and that. Indeed, similar facets caused similar effects. We even found a strengthening face that bolstered the candle flame until it was as vivid as a sunbeam, which reminded Xanthe that Orythmus had one as well.
On this day, at the least, Rhymus’s seeing face showed the past.
The candle stood on a wide table in a room that could only be the library at Pradoverde. My own books were among those on the shelves. Two heads were bent together over a book on the table. One head was my own…the ragged mass of black hair untamed. My clawed hand rested on the table, an abomination. The other person wore a thick braid, the escaping curls sporting all the hues of autumn. Her small, capable hand turned the page. From time to time she turned her head to me—the one who was sitting with her listening to her read, not the one who looked down on her from this unbridgeable distance. And once…ah, gods…her two fingers touched my disgusting hand ever so gently, my nerveless hand that could feel naught but the memory of agony. And she did not turn away.
Xanthe and I worked long hours after that. But the seeing haunted me all through it. And never had I such a struggle as on that long night in the sorcerer’s hole. My body ached. My spirit was desolation. Though I dared not call her name aloud, I bellowed it through the aether with all the hunger of a blind man longing for light. Anne!
CHAPTER 25
MANCIBAR
Over the next tenday, I explored both Stones. Whereas the spellwork of Orythmus gave its wielder the power of physical command, Rhymus’s allowed one to induce laughter, weeping, or jealous rages, fright or devotion.
I chose Xanthe’s gifts with caution, certainly more than I’d given the first. The command of silence was like an iron ball chained to my foot. She decided I was too curious, which distracted me from proper service. Thus, never was I allowed to hear any voice but hers. Never did I visit any part of the palace but her apartments and my dismal abode. I became a slave in truth and began to believe my bold deception had fallen flat. Jacard seemed in no hurry to use me. Neither he nor Xanthe spoke of Portier. Imagining my friend’s state was all that prevented me from screaming halt to the masquerade.
Xanthe had begun to attract friends of her own from among the courtiers and city dwellers that frequented the palace. She glowed with youth and ambition like some lighthouse set out to pierce Mancibar’s dark nights, and her strange history was a source of fascination. Aristos flock to centers of power like rabbits to gardens.
“I met three great lords last night, magus,” she said one evening, as she fed me hard bits of winter apples.
“And did you bewitch them, or did you drive them mad with itching and sneezing as you did with Edane Mintierra last tennight?”
Hearing of her conquests, I felt quite like some mendicant brother along the pilgrim road, listening to Cult ladies describe sins in which he could have no part. Which made no kind of sense. I’d spent my whole life alone. Why did I feel as if I were shriveling into nothing?
“Mintierra would not keep his hands to himself. I choose whose hands will investigate me further, and it was not to be that foul-breathed scarecrow. And these were much greater lords, a consiliar and two warlords. Or that is what they would have been called in Maldeon’s court. I cannot keep the modern ranks quite straight.”
Well, of course she could. There was nothing of relevance to her ambition that she failed to learn the moment she was aware of it.
“Consiliar Ageric was dashing. Younger than you and quite merry. He whispered charming things in my ear all through supper tonight. His tunic was woven gold. Delicious! He’s having me a cape made of the same material. He is quite exasperated with Iaccar and his grave robbing.”
She fetched another bite. Grave robbing…She had mentioned that before. I considered my words carefully.
“But of course this consiliar would not elaborate on what he meant by an accusation of grave robbing,” I said.
I had to let Xanthe talk as she would. Asking pointed questions ensured a topic would be closed off for days or my ears would be stoppered. Demonstrating frustration led inevitably to a lashing. Yet reticence was the worst offense of all. It was a most refined torture.
“Perhaps he said grave filling.” She cocked her head and poked the wad of bread in my mouth. “Iaccar thinks to raise a legion of ghosts to conquer Sabria. Mayhap he slays the young men who go missing to fill his ranks.”
I near choked. Likely a good thing my mouth was stuffed, as she took no note of it.
A legion of the dead. Fodder for the one who devoured souls. Was that Jacard’s play? Imagining himself serving the Souleater in return for…what? Forgiveness for his own crimes? High rank in Dimios’s icy demesne? Power to afflict the living?
The stuff of fables and preaching. Stories to induce submission to unreason.
Yet, inevitably, talk of myth and mystery took me back to Portier in his horror: You are the Daemon. Not a daemon, but the Daemon.
I forced my attention back to Xanthe. Hurry meant mistakes. Distraction risked exposure. Four years it had taken me last time.
“…most tedious. As the moon wanes, Mancibar becomes plugged tight as a bunghole. What charming gentlemen wish to risk falling prey to the haunts for want of a hunting party? Only Iaccar is bold enough to feast through the dark of the moon. Once the moon grows back again, so do entertainments. It’s all to do with Iaccar’s ghost rites.”
Ghost was an entirely unspecific term. It might refer to a spectre—focused energy left behind by the dying, like sun glare after closing one’s eyes. Spectres could take on the appearance of the dead but bore no soul or life. True ghosts were troubled spirits—lingering memories, one might say—that manifested themselves more in feeling than in sight, around battlefields or sites of trauma or murder.
Souls that had crossed the Veil were a different matter. Only necromancers could give a revenant soul physical substance—as little as a filmy vapor or as much as a solid apparition. But that required an opening in the barrier that separated living and dead, complex, intricate spellwork. Only Temple Readers—those few who weren’t devout cheats—could reach across the Veil without magic. While in a trancelike state, they could locate a dead soul and give some assessment of its state—its progress toward Heaven’s gates, they claimed.
The Jacard I knew was no Temple Reader, and he could no more work the complexities of necromancy than an infant, even with some progression in these two years past. Yes, he could pour the raw power of his Seeing Stone into an enchantment. And he had escaped with h
is uncle’s journals and the nireals, which could lure a revenant spirit into a human body, instruments that had taken me years to perfect. But Anne and I had shut down the tear in the Veil that allowed a soul’s true passage. Was that why he wanted me here?
“Surely, ghosts—even cadres of them—are but children’s frights,” I said. “I understood this was a cultured city.”
“Ageric says that Mancibar was once the most civilized place in the Southern Kingdoms. The old prince bought himself sculptors and artists, and singers and dancers who performed every night of the year. At winter solstice the prince and his favorites would progress from one great house to another for a month or more, taking mummers and jugglers, actors and magicians, each pageant outdoing the last. Prince Damek himself would don masque and costume!”