The Daemon Prism: A Novel of the Collegia Magica

by Carol Berg

  Xanthe tapped me on the shoulder and jerked her head back the way we’d come.

  I shook my head vigorously. It was much too soon to leave. She pinched my ear.

  I grabbed her hand and drew her down beside me. “I need to see this,” I said, scarce breathing the words. Gray smoke billowed from the pit below us.

  “Hosten,” she mouthed, glaring in warning.

  Yes, we were ended if I was discovered outside my cell. But to be so close…

  I peered through the gap, trying to register everything at once: shapes, materials, doorways, the stair that led from the cavern floor to our gallery, the empty bindings, anything that might help me understand what Jacard was about. A ritual enclosure, formed by the four angels and the pit. The nireals. The overpowering scent of incense from a small brazier, the apparent source of the thickening smoke. Green shafts of light streaming from Jacard’s Seeing Stone.

  The adept had left the enclosure and was unlocking a grate in the far cavern wall. If only I had time to read the words—

  Xanthe yanked on my ear yet again, and the sticking pain in my back felt very like a dagger’s point. I restrained my impulse to throttle her and ducked my head in submission. Like rats we scurried back the way we’d come.

  But before stepping through the door to the carpet room, I slipped over to the rail and took one last look. Every time a coil of smoke touched the naked man, he shrieked and shrank away, as if it carried the heat of its source. Or perhaps it was not pain but sheerest terror, for a giant figure was taking shape in the billowing fog: torso, limbs, head limned in emerald green. Its smoky hand was stretched to the prisoner’s naked flesh, stroking, fondling, caressing. Hungry.

  Gods! My hair stood on end. This was no illusion.

  Features began to take shape on the face in the smoke. A clanking gate and green fire signaled Jacard’s return and someone else with him, invisible in the murk. I raised my hand. I could snuff the candles and slip down the stair, fetch the prisoner before something horrid happened.…

  But of their own insistence my feet retreated through the door. Orythmus, the Stone of Command, gleamed in the dark.

  “Are you mad?” Xanthe growled through her teeth as she shut the door behind me. “I’ll not suffer for giving you a favor. There are many things short of murder Iaccar can do to me.”

  “Please,” I said, breathless, furious, frustrated. My body followed her without my doing. “The answer is so close. And, great gods, we cannot leave the prisoner to whatever—”

  “The prisoner might die or might not. I will not.”

  Xanthe ran. Which meant I ran, retracing our long path, up and right, up and right.

  A guttural scream tore through the darkness behind us, long and throaty, shriveling into mindless bleats before falling silent. And beyond it came another man’s cry of such pain and despair as set my spirit bleeding. The second set of bindings…a second victim?

  We’d not yet reached the grand rotunda, when a concussion of power through the aether near popped my eyes from my skull and the rising tension of massive spellwork ended. No gradual release. No sigh of completion. Jacard’s great working had aborted before it was done.

  My soul felt laden with grease, as if someone had smoked a pig inside a closed house. We’d scarce climbed the grand stair when Hosten bellowed at one of his men to relieve the watch. “I’m off to the magus gallery by the back stair. Report as soon as you’ve done.”

  The middle-night bells were already pealing. Hosten was going to arrive before we did. If he checked on me…

  “Set me loose, lady,” I said, breathless, matching her every step. “I can delay him.” Raw power could bring down a wall of plaster on his head or shatter a lamp. Hands quivering with pent rage, I’d just need a touch.

  A grinning Xanthe paused, fingered Orythmus, and spoke a word I’d given her. “He’ll have to take the long way around unless he’s a much more stalwart fellow than any I’ve ever met.”

  Thunder rumbled from the distant corridors. Wind howled, and hailstones clattered. No guard captain greeted us in the magus gallery. As the middle-night bells fell silent, I dashed into the sorcerer’s hole. Xanthe slammed the door behind me and shot the bolt.

  MY HEART HAD SCARCE SLOWED when a haggard Captain Hosten dragged me off my pallet and with his men and their spears marched me to Xanthe’s rooms. Though his leathers were soaked with sweat, he said naught of his night’s activities. “You’re to examine her balcony railing,” he said, shoving me into Xanthe’s chamber. “Don’t think to take advantage. We stay till she returns.”

  Fighting for composure, I stepped into the cool night. The air smelled deliciously of rain and dust. Though my spirit yet felt tainted with death and torment, the oppression of the night had eased. I dragged my hand idly along the half-painted wooden balustrade. To my astonishment, I encountered a barb in its smoothness—a plain, simple, nasty little spell attached to a small carving. Lean on the rail at that spot with even a slight pressure and the solid wood would splinter, catapulting the unfortunate leaner three stories onto a garden walk. Someone was trying to kill the lady.

  “I was right, wasn’t I, magus? You didn’t believe. I saw it on your face.” Xanthe stood in the doorway, her long hair damp, a gown of sheer silk sticking here and there to damp, bare skin. Any man in the world who wasn’t holding images of mutilated prisoners and manifesting revenants in his mind would think her a girl of seventeen, willing and ripe for the plucking.

  “Certainly, you were right.” Though who knew if her unfortunate servant was responsible. “I can destroy the spell tonight if you wish.”

  “Tomorrow. I’ve other plans for tonight.” She glanced behind her. “Hosten and his minions are gone. So did you enjoy your reward?”

  “Iaccar’s raised a revenant,” I said. “He’s trying to give it a body. I didn’t believe…Well, Tychemus and the…virtue…of this holy place lend him a great deal of power.”

  She crinkled her brow and leaned against the door arch. “I told you—a ghost. He brags that he plays with souls better than you ever did. You told me Iaccar was incapable of great magic and that ghosts are but memories. So I assumed the ones I’ve seen were illusions made to frighten me. Was I wrong?”

  But I hadn’t known about screaming victims and words written in blood and the potent keirna of Sirpuhi of the Red Cliffs that seemed to have left its weighty imprint in my body. “I confess to foolish arrogance, lady. What else would I have seen if we’d had more time? Please, we must know…to protect you from such wickedness.”

  She sighed and rolled her eyes, vanishing inside. Settling herself on her favored couch, she pointed me to the carpet at her feet.

  “I saw the face and figure of an old man in the cloud, little more than we saw tonight. Iaccar lifted Tychemus high, as if to offer it to the ghost, turning it this way and that. The face mumbled things I couldn’t hear. This went on interminably until they were yelling at each other.”

  Kajetan, almost certainly. Jacard had raised a revenant who could speak. I didn’t want to believe him capable of such. The abrupt discharge I’d felt signaled that Jacard had exhausted his power. But he had only one Seeing Stone as yet.

  I scrubbed at my face, trying to decipher what I’d seen. Why was he bringing a second victim to the wall?

  “Did you hear anything Iaccar said to the revenant? What were they arguing about? Was anyone else present?”

  Xanthe clutched the green Stones suspended from her neck. “I couldn’t hear anything. The prisoner would not stop screaming, though there were no hot irons or pincers or knives or anything but the ghost. It was a different prisoner than tonight’s, a beautiful young man. Iaccar bound the librarian up beside him and began to invoke Tychemus—”

  “The librarian!” I leapt from the floor as if struck by a pistol shot.

  “Yes, though he’s so scrawny and damaged he’s not at all pleasant to look on. When Iaccar began chanting his lists of words, the other prisoner’s skin jus
t swelled and…cracked. He started bleeding from his fingernails and from his mouth and nose. And his knees. And elbows.”

  “Not the librarian,” I said, “but the…beautiful man.”

  “Yes. All the bottles and jars exploded and the table collapsed. The ghost vanished as if Duonna the Mother’s great mouth had swallowed it. Iaccar screamed and cursed and kicked over the bowl of blood. The tomb was shuddering and the walls bleeding…so I ran.”

  Truth burnt in my soul, a stain no washing could remove. The damnable, arrogant lunatic was not just trying to raise his uncle’s dead spirit for an hour, but to instill it into one of the bodies he’d stolen from Mancibar. He wanted Kajetan to live again, in a strong young male body that would endure many years, a face unrecognizable to those who had known the vile mage. And I had given him the idea. That’s how I’d put an end to Germond de Gautier. To keep the vessel living was much more difficult, requiring practice and many young men.

  But far worse than such grotesque murder of an innocent…If Jacard had gotten so far as to destroy the hapless victim, that meant his uncle’s spirit had actually existed this side of the Veil, in such solid presence that it was crowding into a physical body. That meant that the tear in the Veil—the rent I had worked as I strove to disentangle de Gautier’s conspiracy—remained open.

  I paced to the windows and stared out at the night. My fingers dragged through my shorn hair, digging into my scalp as if the truth lay just beneath.

  “What is it, magus?”

  “I’ve got to think.” Eyes closed, I combined the gruesome scene I had witnessed and that Xanthe had described. Candles, nireals, Portier, the doomed victim, the looming phantasm…

  No. This was not the same rite we had worked on Voilline. Elements were missing, the positioning wrong. Yet neither was it so simple as retrieving one dead soul. To keep a balance in the cosmos, those who had written the Mondragon’s Book of Greater Rites had said an exchange must be provided to accomplish true necromancy—one living man killed just before the dead was transferred, not as a result of the transfer. But any death would suffice, and I could not believe Portier had been captured for that. If their object was simply Kajetan’s retrieval, they’d not need Portier to keep the passage through the Veil open permanently. So, then, what was my friend’s function in this rite? Was it his blood on the wall? If so,

  why? And why had Jacard held Tychemus up to the spectre, turning it, arguing…?

  The night wind shifted the draperies. Xanthe scowled at me unhappily. Pouting, she drew a shawl over her revealing garments.

  “He can’t read it!” I said, one small truth bursting free of confusion. I raked my fingers through my hair again and laughed in sick pleasure. “Iaccar’s thick wits may give us time.”

  “What could possibly be laughable, magus?”

  “I think Iaccar is working some ritual written in his uncle’s journal—possibly to raise his uncle from the dead to live again in another body. He’s done things I didn’t believe him capable of. But you, lady Mistress, have shown me that he doesn’t have the power to do it on his own. He cannot understand how to use Tychemus. His revenant uncle has to learn the Stone’s properties as I do and teach him how to use it.”

  Though not so powerful as de Gautier had been, Kajetan was a learned sorcerer. But what did he know of the aether, of keirna, of the truths of magic I had studied since boyhood? I had seen Kajetan’s work, and he was lacking in these basic understandings. Or did death provide enlightenment?

  “Give a dead man a new body?” Xanthe had developed an unwholesome glitter in her eyes. “Could I learn to do that?”

  “I’ve no idea. But I know now that we’ve some time, though not enough to waste. I must examine Tychemus before Kajetan can teach Iaccar how to use it more effectively.”

  “So what if Iaccar plays with ghosts? I think I’d rather have you teach me to do the same.”

  Gods, why could she not understand?

  “Heed me, good Mistress. Before, we were in a tug of war with Iaccar, a sometime adept whose incompetence forever makes his workings go awry. As long as it was Iaccar, I had every confidence we would be able to wrest control of Tychemus from him as soon as we understood enough. But now I discover that the idiot is sucking the life from Mancibar to get assistance from his family—his dead uncle, who very nearly succeeded in upending the very laws of nature that make arrows fly where we aim them or stones fall to the ground when we drop them. Kajetan is a wholly different and more dangerous adversary. He has set all this in motion, first with his notes and journals and books, and now through these rites.”

  And another consideration I could not ignore. “Iaccar in his pride and ignorance most likely believes his loving uncle retains some blood loyalty and will do whatever he, Iaccar, wishes. But Kajetan is a creature of blood no longer. And he is not a man who will like being dead. So you can be absolutely sure he will get great satisfaction from wreaking havoc on the living. Your life, as well as your power for magic, is not worth a pile of dung if Tychemus can tell Kajetan how to circumvent its protections.”

  Kajetan would be in a hurry to escape Ixtador. He would wish to retain his own mind, his own purposes, and not become one of the starving spectres we had seen. And already Jacard had enough power to make Altheus’s tomb shudder.…

  I believed I had her worried. Gods knew I was. But I had learned one thing of infinite importance.

  Hold on, student. I know where they keep you. The grate in the cavern wall.

  CHAPTER 29

  MANCIBAR

  A few days after the bloody adventure, Captain Hosten delivered me to the stable instead of Xanthe’s apartments. “Pleasure riding?” I said, astonished.

  “Never fear, I’ll be alongside you. And I’ve archers posted all over the mountain to take you down do you choose to ride off somewhere on your own.” A tenday past, Hosten would have grinned at me with his warning. But the big man’s easy, soldierly confidence had yielded to rigorous obedience. Dealing with the bloody evidence of Xanthe’s rage and the monstrous indoor thunderstorm that had put his family in the way of it would bring anyone up short.

  “The lady’s chained my cods to Mancibar,” I said as I inhaled the bright morning. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  He squinted into the crimson sunrise. “You’re a crafty one, mage. I’ve a mind you’ve chose to be here. So I’m watching for the day you regret the choice. You’ll not get away.” As always he spoke this without anger, threat, or hostility.

  “You’re a fine jailer, Hosten,” I said. “You’ve done your duty fair.”

  “Don’t presume. Don’t test me.”

  I bowed to him. I’d known that from the first.

  The morning birthed cool and sunny, the dome of clear blue promising a searing noonday. Xanthe said it would never get any colder than I’d seen. Her home had not been far from here. She seemed to feel no regrets or even any strangeness at knowing that all her past life, including everyone she had ever known, lay in long-buried ruins. My former life felt much the same.

  The lady was late. Hosten got involved in a long argument with the head groom over the care of his horse, and I wandered into the stable, thinking to have a word with Devil. Did the day come I could shed this place, perhaps in a hurry, I’d not want him to have forgotten me.

  A pale, scrawny youth was grooming Devil. The boy mumbled and sniffed, pausing every so often to wipe his nose on his sleeve. An overwhelming odor of pipeweed filled the horse box.

  Pipeweed…skin the color of paste…ill-fitting clothes…Gods!

  I came up quietly behind him. Devil nickered and bobbed his head. Under the cover of the horse’s greeting, I grabbed the boy’s wrist, clamped my right arm about his throat, and shoved him hard into the corner of the horse box. “Who the devil are you? You’ve followed me on half a year’s journey to the netherworld, so you know I can destroy you if you lie to me. Speak—and quietly and I might not hurt you.”

  “Followed you? I was born ju
st a ways down—”

  I pressed his face into the splintered wood and twisted his arm up his back. “Do not play with me. You were at the caravanserai at Mattefriese, and hung about us on the road for days before that, and though I was blind, I saw you, hiding in a clump of locusts. I need to know what you’re doing here.”

  He was a squint-eyed, blister-faced boy still in his teens. His slack lips gave me no great confidence in either his intelligence or his goodwill. “If ’twere my saying, mage, I’d run my knife crost your foul throat and rid the world of a pestilence. But I’m not here of my own wish, and not to do you ill, but only to keep watch on you. To see what comes about. Go on. Kill me if you like.”