The Daemon Prism: A Novel of the Collegia Magica

by Carol Berg

  She’d gone off in entirely the wrong direction. Unlike Portier, I seemed incapable of steering a conversation where I wanted it to go.

  “At the Sabrian court, Iaccar was never known for patronage.” In truth, I didn’t recall. That life—everything before meeting Xanthe—was becoming so remote as to be someone else’s.

  Xanthe turned up her nose. “He is constantly putting on grand feasts. But a more dismal host I’ve never seen. Quareg the Torturer laid a better table, and his entertainments were unmatched, if a bit bloody.”

  “Surely this great lord Ageric does not encourage you to supplant Iaccar. Despite ghosts, and missing young men and women.”

  “ ’Tis only men vanish, which is why they’re all so ripe for pleasuring just now. A terrible, cruel queen might have great delight ruling over a city of frightened men. Oh, quit your scowling, Matron Dante! I was very careful, as you forever warn me. I twisted my face into a ferocious frown and told Ageric I was shocked he dared speak so kindly of the fiend who once ruled Mancibar. ‘It borders on treason to our beloved Regent,’ I said. He near strangled! He wouldn’t have dared stand up just then, lest we all note evidence of his fright on his elegant pantaloons.”

  What chokehold did Jacard maintain that could so terrify young lords? Night’s daughter, I needed to know!

  Xanthe sighed and fondled a bite of cold meat. “Yet, dear Ageric was so delightfully handsome and so willing, and I do relish men less grim than you and Iaccar. So I reached under the table and squeezed his leg. My fingers traveled into his garments to places he did not imagine I knew.”

  “Perhaps he thought it was one of Iaccar’s ghosts.…”

  She giggled. “The ghosts steal your sons or brothers, not your virtue! Indeed my clan mother, Mutiga, would have beat me senseless and shut me in a closet for a month for my bold fingering. Stonekeepers could not lie with any but Maldeon’s favorites—and they were always old, ugly men who cared naught but for their own pleasuring.”

  Xanthe gave up on my supper, already postponed until near middle-night. Humming a cheery valzi, she spun about the room in graceful glee. One might compare her to the painted figures in one of Queen Eugenie’s dainty music boxes, save for the words she wove into her melody: “Mutiga, Fadra, and Gisra of the Cold Hands are dead, dead, dead. In the ground they lay. Worms in their eyes, beetles in their thighs, too-ra-li, toor-a-lay, lack-a-day.”

  She rang for Hosten, and then collapsed on her couch, her face flushed. “The consiliar and I retired to the garden. Ageric sang to me sweetly after. Someday, I must hear you sing.…”

  Smirking, she held out her open palm. “Come, kiss the hand that gives you sustenance, slave. Show me you mean it.”

  Heat pulsed from her body as I bent over her hand that smelled like fennel, pepper, and good fat. And I remained ignorant of Jacard’s purposes.

  A FEW MORNINGS LATER AS Xanthe dispensed a last bit of roast lamb for my breakfast, she talked of her latest conquest, a rich landholder named Mercurio de Blase. A tedious man who talked of nothing but dogs and the haunting of the city by the dead prince. His wife was simple and had never before visited the city, so Xanthe had thought it great fun to flatter such a woman with her special and serious friendship, and then invite the husband up to bathe with her. De Blase was older than me, she said, perhaps forty or forty-five, rough and demanding in bed. “I shocked him with a taste of rough bed play. Do you wish to hear about it?”

  “We’ve much work to do if you wish to learn to create illusions, Mistress.”

  “Such a hard taskmaster you are, magus. You must learn to give all kinds of pleasure.” She yanked a fistful of my hair, grown out long enough to grab, and kissed me hard on the mouth.

  When I did not respond, she shoved me onto my backside. She paced to the window, then spun round, her eyes glittering at me in a most unhealthy fashion. Dropping my gaze, I arranged Rhymus on the plate where we kept it as we worked.

  “We should begin.…” My voice croaked as it had when I was sixteen and Salvator insisted I learn what a willing woman could do for a restless, ever-angry youth. My skin pulsed with heat.

  I was not made of stone. The lady was beautiful and ripe and had demonstrated a number of times that she was willing. But despite the lack of outdoor labors or other exercise to deflect my body’s heat, I could not, would not, consider it. I was far too inexperienced with such matters and had decided early on that the only thing more dangerous than being Xanthe’s enemy was to be her bed partner. The memory of her sister’s cold flesh sufficed to cool nature’s urgency.

  Yet I was no fool, either. Someday my mistress would decide to prove her ultimate domination of me and complicate life beyond imagination.

  “No work this afternoon,” she said, curling up in a chair, catlike. “Iaccar has begged another audience. His hospitality has its price.”

  Jacard had been visiting Xanthe more frequently now she demonstrated the use of her Stones. He displayed only friendly interest, even when he brought a request that she not plague his palace guards with paralyzed arms, stoppered ears, or itching loins. But he seemed increasingly nervous. Behind his back or elsewise out of the lady’s view, his fingers clenched and clawed. His nails were chewed to the quick. He would never allow Xanthe to become a threat to him.

  “Tell me about the Regent, my lady. I live a hermit’s life here. What kind of ruler is he? Has the Stone of Reason given him enlightenment? Or even talent? Your skills already surpass any that I ever saw of his.”

  Xanthe was pleased at that. She was a quick study and knew it. Of course, she created no magic and provided no power for binding sorcery. She wielded spells already worked, an entirely different skill.

  “Was he truly wretched? He claims you corrupted his workings and made him look a fool to elevate yourself.”

  “He needed no help to look the fool.” I told her of some of Jacard’s more ridiculous failures, finishing with the occasion he set out to rid Queen Eugenie’s gaming rooms of ants and instead introduced a plague

  of rats.

  “It was you! You did it, you arrogant shitheel!” snarled the Regent of Mancibar, who had slipped in quietly in the middle of my account. Xanthe did not stop laughing, though Jacard’s face grew redder and his breath came faster. Quicker than he could cast any spell, he whipped the back of his hand across my face, knocking me flat.

  “It’s time we put an end to this farce, lady. I’ve watched this jackleg teach you juggler’s antics while storing up knowledge for himself, assuming he is even capable of reading the Maldeona, as you call them. I propose we put him to the test.”

  I fingered the painful gash his rings had left in my cheek. Jacard was still trying to have it both ways. Either I was incompetent, which saved his pride, or I was devious, which left him my moral superior and Xanthe’s defender and protector. In either case, the lady Xanthe had best hire someone to watch her back.

  “Never touch my slave, Iaccar!” A furious Xanthe descended upon me, not to lift me up or examine my bloody cheek, but to swipe some of my blood onto her palm so she could wave it in Jacard’s face. “You’ve damaged him.”

  “Let us learn if your slave has given you all to which you have a right. He’s taught you how to make a shopkeeper dream of vanishing pennies, but has he taught you of living dreams—scenes you can play out in your rooms here, the rooms of your friends or your enemies?”

  “Living dreams!” Xanthe glared at me. “Tell me, magus, why do I play with night sweats if I can do such things?”

  Xanthe had about driven the city wild with nightmares and bouts of frenzied bed play. But we both knew Rhymus could do more.

  “We were to begin work on illusions today, if you recall,” I said. “As I’ve told you from the beginning, the lore of the Stones is new to me, and I present what I find, as I find it…”

  Truly it was only the Stones’ greater purposes that yet eluded me. To see them dangling from the necks of these two set my teeth grinding. The three together had
enabled the Holy Imperator Altheus to bring down an empire fifty times his strength. They didn’t belong with a half-crazed serving girl or a sneaking, murderous, bumbling coward.

  “…but certainly, Mistress, have Regent Iaccar teach you what he will. What he can.”

  Jacard, all pleasantries again, gathered Xanthe and faced her to the window, sweeping his arm toward the spreading landscape. “Touch your Stone of dreams, my lady, and repeat the words I tell you.…”

  One hand over hers and one hand on the Stone glinting on his own breast, he recited a sequence of Aljyssian words—spell keywords. With each word, the enchantment built—a surge in the aether that brightened the sunlight and twisted it in knots. My teeth ached with the pent power.

  With a concussive release, the spellwork shattered the glass of Xanthe’s windows. Balls of searing brightness bounced on her carpet. Flames sprang from the fireballs, soon roaring, searing skin, charring fabrics. All false. Illusion. But the thick smoke set us coughing, until it curled into storm clouds that obscured the painted ceiling. A cloudburst pummeled us with rain. Billows of steam shot upward as the cold raindrops hissed on glowing ashes. My garments flapped wetly in the wind, and then froze, as a frigid blast whirled snow. My teeth rattled like a dancers’ heels.

  “Too cold!” shouted Xanthe, squealing with excitement. “But I love the rain…warm rain! And fire! Could I truly set the stables afire? How I’d love to surprise that rude stableman and his ever-sniveling boy! Or houses…Those women who think I’m too stupid to see their scorn. Their men…oh, yes!”

  Jacard shouted the words she needed to shift the snow to rain again. More words warmed the shower and yet more quieted the wind.

  This was no weatherworking. But vivid illusions could drive men or horses mad. Though no man in Jacard’s stable claimed my loyalty, Devil did. Xanthe’s vengeful lust warned me yet again. I dared not delay protecting the people and things Xanthe must not know.

  I’d had no chance to do any spellwork of my own in these rooms. I was never out from under her eye. There was certainly no opportunity to stop and lay out a spell enclosure between here and the sorcerer’s hole. And even if I could get free, Hosten spent his nights on a chair outside my door.

  But Xanthe’s chamber rippled with so many enchantments at that moment, the captain could never trace one more. Jacard continued to spew one word of binding after another for her to use. He and the lady were wholly engaged in their play.

  There was no place for fear when working magic. So I throttled misgiving and dragged my staff around me, charring a circle in the thick carpet. Then I pulled out Anne’s pendant that I’d taken to wearing inside my shirt and laid it at my feet. A cup of water from the table to draw in what I had learned at a well in Kadr, a red silk towel, my own self, and vivid memory yielded keirna enough to work a small spell that I could trigger with a thought. I’d spent so many nights considering it that it settled into its pattern very quickly.

  The resulting spell was brutal. Entirely a last resort. Now to attach it to…something. I must be able to access it quickly, so that only a smat of power would bind it, no matter pain, illness, or confusion. But what did I have that Xanthe could not take from me? She could burn my staff on any day or force me to go naked. Using Anne’s pendant or my own flesh, especially as I was the focus of the spell already, introduced risks of backlash or simple failure. Gods…hurry.…

  Jacard’s flow of command words shifted their illusion back to rain. Thunder rolled and lightning set off more fires that consumed chairs and cushions and melted silver cups…only to move on and show them intact, undamaged. Silver…

  I touched the band about my neck. It had been a part of me for so long I rarely thought of it. With a surge of my own power, I bound the spell and linked it to my collar. And breathed relief. Xanthe would never get Anne’s name from me, nor any other secret that might betray her or my brother or Portier. To every fragment of the universe, I prayed I would never need use it.

  Quickly I returned the pendant to my shirt and erased the circle by starting a small fire that charred a large splotch of rug. Unlike the illusion fires, it did not heal itself when the two perpetrators moved on to other pleasures. I extinguished it with the red towel.

  As I dumped a carafe of water around the area to further mask the residue of my work, strange shapes emerged from the thunderstorm. Nightmare creatures of slime and rot, they looked like casualties of a century-old shipwreck rising from the seas outside the window and slogging toward us through the shattered panes, across the soggy carpets, and through the walls. Ridiculous. And yet…

  Striding through the windowpanes, among the monstrosities yet not with them, was the young man from my visions. His long coat and gold and gray hair floated in the illusory wind. Head thrown back, he let the false rain splatter his face. When he reached the wall, he glanced over his shoulder and waved his hand, as if summoning me to his side. It was all I could do to stay still. But he passed through and out of sight with the rest, trailing the faintest scent of rosemary and ash. What was he? No illusion—of that I was certain.

  In part to shake off the odd compulsion to pursue him through the solid wall, in part to rescue my position in Xanthe’s esteem, I laid my mind to Jacard’s enchantment. Illusions were relatively simple enchantments, a projection of a thought image into onlookers’ minds. They could appear as a veil overlying reality or substitute for the surrounding truth. Either way, nothing of nature was altered. They were ephemera…the scent of supper cooking, the day’s heat lingering in a stone wall, the recitation

  of a story.

  For Jacard and Xanthe’s collaboration, the true measure of success was not the illusion’s elaboration, but its length and intensity. A huge flow of power was required to maintain it. Jacard had learned to summon the joined power of his gem and Xanthe’s into his work—a triumph, to be sure. But it spewed forth unshaped and undirected, like water rushing through a pipe. And evidently, he still couldn’t create anything beyond illusion. Naught of this storm would remain once they stopped, no speck of moisture, nothing melted, burnt, or broken.

  In my mind I touched a spell pattern I had created from one of Rhymus’s spell threads and gave it a name, a simple word of binding. Then, with reckless hope that Xanthe would respect skill more than humility, I ripped Jacard’s spellwork apart. The convulsion in the aether near knocked me insensible. But in Xanthe’s chamber, all was silence and stillness. Not a hailstone or raindrop remained. All was dry and tidy. I sat on a large footstool that covered the only destruction, the sodden, charred spot where I had worked true magic.

  Xanthe and Jacard whirled on me.

  “You make it hard for her, Regent Iaccar,” I said as if bored. “My mistress is much more accomplished than you give her credit for. As always you just cannot see.”

  I crossed the room and knelt humbly at Xanthe’s feet. “If you will touch Rhymus, good lady, imagine what you have just seen, and whisper the single word I shall give you instead of the catalogues of words this gentleman provides…”

  A smile teased at Xanthe’s perfect lips as she bent close to whisper in my ear. “You play dangerous games, magus. Dangerous.”

  I nodded and gave her the key I had bound to Rhymus’s illusion spell, Praesti.

  “Now, lady, as we have done before,” I said. “Simply consider whatever changes you wish and they will manifest in the illusion.”

  She fingered Rhymus and whispered the word, and in an instant we were engulfed in another illusory storm. Not an intrinsically better illusion than the one Jacard had wrought, but far simpler to evoke and manipulate.

  “Magnificent!” she shouted over the rolling thunder. “I was beginning to fear my power would be too tedious to use. Why would you want to burden me with so many words, Regent Iaccar? So I might depend on you alone to remember them? I think I’ve chosen the better teacher, though perhaps he’s not so honest with me as he might be.”

  “You’re a fool, damoselle!” Jacard snapped. “
Let the daemon dole out his tidbits, and you can lap them up like some kitchen dog, but you’ll never wield true power at his hands. He’ll see you dead as he saw your sister. As he saw the great men who rivaled his power in the past. But not me. There shall be a new order in earth and Heaven, and you can either join me and be a part of it or suffer the fate of my enemies.”

  His boot met my belly with all the hate and fury he’d stored up since his first day as my adept. Even as I curled up retching, I was satisfied.

  Xanthe’s storm ended as abruptly as it had begun. A heavy silence fell, marred only by my choked heaves as I forced my breakfast to stay down. My mistress knelt beside me in a swirl and swish of satin.

  I glanced up. Jacard was gone, but so were Xanthe’s smiles and excitement. Spider fingers tickled my spine and I scrambled to my knees.

  “You’ve held back, slave.” Her menace pressed on my gut like a spear’s point.