by Carol Berg
Soft lamplight bloomed beyond the statue that hid me. One cup was poured. And then a second. I bared my teeth and held motionless. Xanthe could not enspell Jacard with the Stones’ magic. But her own would do well enough. And the spell of vigor she’d had me put on the wine would ensure no flagging energy on Jacard’s part.
“You’ve been right all along. I’ve indulged him too much,” Xanthe called from the bedchamber. “He’s been getting ever more demanding, and says he will teach me only what he chooses!”
“Insolent.”
“I am mistress of Rhymus and Orythmus, and I’ve given him his sight, and he treats me like a performing monkey. The burnings were his idea to make your subjects fear him. I was not allowed to succor his victims or even to show my sympathy! I was so hoping— Well, ’tis not at all what I imagined those long terrible years imprisoned.” Her voice quavered. “Now, lord, tell me what you think.”
“Stars and Stones, lady! You are”—he was hoarse—“the loveliest.…That gown. I’ve not seen the like ever, here or in all of Sabria or in any artwork or vision or fancy.”
“I was saving it for my favorite. Come sit beside me, Iaccar. Is the wine not splendid as well?”
“Splendid. Yes.”
“You’re more generous with my folly than I’ve any right to expect. This evening has been so pleasant that I hate its ending. A thousand years of loneliness, and I just entering womanhood…”
Jacard was hooked in less time than a trout in a bucket.
More giggles. Their breathless exchanges deteriorated rapidly into elaborate sighs, much rustling of clothing, and increasingly urgent moans.
“…not so shy as ladies in this day. I would view all of your manly strength, lord…”
Xanthe was very serious about her diversionary tactics. I focused my mind on my plan for the Stones.
“…ah, slowly, sweet lord. Come, let’s chase the frights from my bed…more comfort…”
They carried the lamp with them. The door snicked shut. The bolts shot. The Stones remained behind, their quiet secrets seductive beyond Xanthe’s charms. It was difficult to delay even the brief interval I’d told myself was necessary.
When I could contain myself no longer, I crept out of my niche. A colorful pile of silks lay on the floor, topped by an intricately tooled leather belt complete with silver dagger. A lone candle, banded in silver, was left standing on the low table beside the couch, along with a wheel of thread and a familiar cup and plate of blue porcelain. Beside it lay the two neck chains with the objects of my desire held captive in their cages of silver. Smiling, I set up the cup and plate at the opposite end of the table from the candle. I would begin with Tychemus alone—to understand its properties so I might better interpret the mystery of the three together.
I placed Jacard’s Stone on the plate, aligning one face with the candle flame. Then I fetched my staff from its place beside the door and knelt. The Stone of Reason was like to its fellows. Irregular. Multifaceted. Similar in size, shape, depth of color, and clarity.
I closed my eyes, held my hand in proximity, and dived into the aether. Again, much like the other two. A magical void, surrounded by a corona of attached spellwork. I sorted through the dangling threads—a sensation akin to running my fingers through the fringe on a wool rug. The hundreds of spells displayed the characteristic leanness of Tyregious’s spellcasting. Some were instantly recognizable from my work with Xanthe’s Stones, while some…
I paused and sorted through a cluster of spells that dealt with substitutions—replacing a subject’s spoken words, redirecting a person’s attention from one idea to another—in search of a spell thread that had felt quite different from the rest. Bulky and awkward, as if the bit of fringe yarn was made of thick rope, rather than fine, combed wool, and was clotted with burrs, insects, and broken glass, its distinction was curious. I grasped the thing and began to disentangle its making.…
Jacard! I’d recognize his clumsy signature anywhere, but the structure itself, the more complex design and intelligence behind the formulaic magic, was more like Kajetan’s work.
I probed deeper. Behind a confusing screen of circular word replacements and unlikely scenarios lay a simple filtering spell—an encompassing layer that would be triggered by any spellwork that incorporated names scribed in fresh blood. Whenever Jacard bound such a spell using Tychemus, his own name—and the personhood that name must forever represent—would be replaced with that of his uncle.
I blinked and sat back on my heels. Names writ in blood…it seemed aimed at Jacard’s great working. But Jacard’s name would not appear on the cavern wall. It was insignificant to the work. He was neither the revenant nor the unfortunate human vessel provided for it, but only the practitioner. So there must be some additional aspect of the rite I hadn’t guessed. Perhaps Kajetan wanted something done that Jacard had refused. Thus their arguments…
I’d no time to sort out possibilities just now. So I left the consideration hanging and examined the facets of the Stone. Within moments I had identified the squaring, the doubling, and the skewing facets. A beam of yellow-green fire led me into the seeing face.
As before, the names in my thoughts seemed to shape what I saw. The candle that guided me into the vision was one of those on the cavern walls at the heart of Sirpuhi. As Xanthe had described, two naked victims were bound to the wall of blood-writ words, another robust young Mancibarran writhing in terror and lust, and on his left Portier, head drooping, limbs flaccid, drool sliding from his slack mouth. Above them, monstrous in the roiling gray smoke, leered Kajetan, eyes sunken and black, mouth gaping, gray tongue licking his colorless lips…hungry. Every touch of his smoky fingers evoked a silent shudder from Portier.
Jacard could not be thinking to install his uncle’s soul in Portier. Portier’s body was weak, wasted. He’d been cut repeatedly in hatchwork patterns—systematically bled with a ten- or twelve-bladed scarificator. And de Gautier’s cruelty at Voilline had already left one of his legs a ruin. Why offer the revenant a crippled vessel? Even if Jacard and Kajetan believed in Portier’s kind of immortality, surely rebirth was centered in the soul that passed beyond the Veil, not the mortal shell left here to rot. The younger, healthy male must be the chosen vessel.
Jacard tossed his blood-soaked brush aside and stepped up beside Portier, exposing the words he’d just painted on the wall. Vosi Portier de Savin-Duplais au recivien, Matthei Pistor. From Portier to the vessel, Matthei the miller. But he’d also scribed a second line: Vosi Jacard de Viole au recivien, Matthei Pistor.
Before I could comprehend what the addition meant, Jacard grasped the caged Seeing Stones—all three, blazing green—and laid his hand on Portier’s head.…
A consuming brilliance erased the vision and left the seeing face blank.
Head swirling, I took up breathing again.
From Portier to the miller. From Jacard to the miller. What had Jacard said as I watched the beginnings of his last attempt? If this works, you shall be worthy to walk with divinity.…
Both souls to be transferred! First from Portier, who was half dead, incapable of resistance, and then Jacard’s own.
Diabolical! My mewling adept would inherit a fine body and Portier’s gift of rebirth. He could easily assert dominance over the remnants of a weakened Portier from the beginning. Save for one problem: Jacard’s name was writ in blood. I stared at Tychemus and considered Kajetan’s crafty little spell. The rite might not work as Jacard believed.…
Giggles and moans floated through the dark air. How much time had passed? I needed to move on. The other two Stones waited. Beyond Jacard’s scheme and his dead uncle’s nasty twist lay the answer to their riddle and my own need to understand the most profound magic I had ever seen. The three were meant to be joined, and I could not escape the conclusion that all the wondrous spells Tyregious had attached to them were peripheral to their true purpose.
Quickly, I placed Rhymus and Orythmus on the blue plate. A gleaming protrusion on
Rhymus slid exactly into a V-shaped notch adjacent to the Stone of Command’s seeing face. Turning Tychemus with its seeing face upward as well, I found the orientation that would fit the Stone of Reason into a wedge-shaped gap between facets of the other two. I pushed them together.
The edges flashed and sparked, until the three appeared a seamless whole. Emerald light swelled and then receded, as if the great prism were a living heart with but one pulse left in it.
Though tempted to seek further enlightenment in the seeing face right away, I held discipline and examined the joined Stones. As with the individual prisms, the conjoined three exhibited no magical structure of their own. Nor did they disturb the aether in the slightest. How was that possible? Unless…
If a man poured a bucket of water into the stream at Pradoverde, he might see ripples, splashes, or momentary diversions in the flow. But the water itself would be indistinguishable from the river. Perhaps the Stones did not alter my perception of the aether because their energies were of the same substance as that flow where I perceived emotion, magic, and dream.
Had time and secrecy not bound me, I would have laughed aloud at such a notion. And yet years of study and, indeed, the entirety of my life, shaped and driven by magic, provided me no other answer. As nature directed water to manifest itself as liquid, as ice, and as vapor so fine as to float in the air, perhaps it directed this mystical substance to manifest itself as both solid matter and as the energies Anne and I sensed and touched. It would explain my certainty of the truth the Stones revealed in their visions. Lies were instantly detectable in the aether.
Drunk with revelation and possibility, I looked closer, only to slam into another wall of impossibility. The wizard’s myriad spell threads were no longer in evidence. No spells at all were in evidence. What Tyregious had shaped for the three individually was astonishing, glorious, intricate magic. How could the three together be nothing? I ought to heave the thing from the Xanthe’s balcony, just to see—
My left hand—my good hand, which grasped the conjoined Stone—spasmed with pain, as if Hosten had speared it to the table with his dagger.
All right. Not that. Night’s daughter! I stretched and clenched my fingers until the spasm eased.
Tyregious had told Xanthe that his little demonstration showed all there was to know about the Stones. The candle had dwindled, yet not so much that I could not use it to test the great prism. One by one, I peered into its facets. My seeing passed through the deep and richly colored glass but discovered no image of the candle flame. I stretched Xanthe’s thread to check the candle’s position. Turned the Stone. Checked again. Peered again. Nothing but glass and color. I was flummoxed.
Before examining the conjoined seeing face, I took a moment to prepare. My glimpses of truth in the individual Stones had each been fed by my own concerns. Assuming the three showed anything, I wanted nothing in me to influence what it might be, lest I miss some aspect of importance. I blocked out the sounds from the other room. Buried guilts, desires, and worries about Portier and Anne, and the terrors of blindness, necromancy, and unhealed wounds in the Eternal Veil. I went cold. Immersed myself in nothing. Became Dante, the agente confide who could not be moved by grief or joy.
Then, empty and impervious to compulsion, I knelt up and peered through the seamless seeing face. The candle appeared as flame only, a distant smudge of yellow in a world of rich-hued emerald light. Focusing entirely on the sea of green in front of me, I abandoned the world and opened myself fully to the aether.…
“THROUGH MILLENNIA HAVE I WAITED for you, Dante, Master Mage of Sabria, son of Raghinne, child of the dark.”
I knew him before he rounded the angled glass corner, his long stride eating the distance between us. Cool, dry air moved through halls of glass, carrying scents of ash and rosemary, shifting his gold and gray hair and his ankle-length coat, offering glimpses of the sword belted at his waist.
His smile-that-was-not-quite approved of my arrival. For I was there, too. My every sense told me I walked in a green gloom bound by angled glass.
“Who are you?” I said. “Mage or god or…other?”
I had experienced strangeness beyond comprehension in my life, yet this surpassed all. Overwhelming wonder might have paralyzed me entire, had I not come empty.
“We have walked a long road together, friend. Some might say I met you in the dark of Grymouth Caves. For certain, I have watched you since your birth, witnessed your deeds.”
He laid a hand on my shoulder, pressing slightly. My knees flexed, but in my emptiness, refused to bend.
“You are a stubborn man, clinging to disbelief. It stunts your ability to make choices.”
“I explore. I perceive. And only then do I draw conclusions,” I said. “I’ve rarely trusted anyone…including myself…and other sorcerers least of all. This is magic the like of which I’ve not experienced. I dare not abandon what’s served me well.…”
Though somewhere in the place I had submerged desire, I wanted to kneel. I had ever been crude, ugly, and violent, while he was all serenity, all that was fair in speech, in form, in grace. But my body refused to succumb.
“This is not sorcery, Dante,” he said. “And I am as real as you. Come. Let’s walk.” Inviting.
It was my dreams come to life, angled walls and ceilings of emerald. Each turning brought us into another hall or another room of smooth-polished glass. We ascended glass stairs, wide and narrow, that turned upon themselves, only to find ourselves below the room we’d just left. Doorways vanished behind us, subsumed in the translucent walls. The candle spark lit our way.
A spot on my chest burnt as if the spark’s twin had taken residence there. At a distance so great as the sun itself, I knew what that heat was, but I refused to articulate it, even in thought.
“Here is the task you were born for.”
We entered a hexagonal room. Six triangular panes formed the ceiling that reached its apex high above us. The view beyond the walls appeared as a turbulent sea. Only it was not.
Gaunt, hollow-eyed spectres, far more numerous than my dreams had revealed, crowded to the glass, pawing, licking, wailing with soundless hunger. This was no illusion, no vision of past, present, or to come, but the truth that had driven my actions for two years. Anne had glimpsed it through the rent in the Veil at Mont Voilline. Ixtador Beyond the Veil. Somewhere out there were de Gautier’s victims, my victims: Anne’s sister, Lianelle, her friend Ophelie, men named Gruchin, Denys, de Gautier, a dozen Temple bailiffs, Ilario de Sylvae, Nessia, my father.…
“Their souls are gone to feed one who grows stronger each day. He believes you will serve him, because the alternative is unthinkable.”
“Who is he?” I said, knowing the answer already. “What does he want of me?”
“He has many names you will not accept, any more than you will accept my own identity. He is called First of the Fallen. Once Beloved of the Creator. The Lord of Gedevron. The Tempter. The Corruptor. The Souleater. He Who Longs for Release. Dimios, Son of Light and Dark. He believes you were born to be his champion in a very ancient duel.”
“And so you name yourself the Righteous Defender?”
“That is one of my names.”
“The Souleater is myth. The Righteous Defender is myth. I seek truth.”
He smiled in sympathy and waved his slender hand to encompass the strange edifice we occupied. “Myth is truth, though one must learn its provenance in order to comprehend it fully. When the provenance is the Greater Truth of the universe, the learning can take many human lifetimes. But be assured, we can speak naught but truth in these halls.”
Just as in the aether. Yes, as I suspected. But whoever this person was, I didn’t want him trying to insert me into his myth. “I don’t believe in destiny,” I said.
“As well you should not. Choice is all. Will is all. A magus knows this.” He stepped forward and a door opened onto an endless glass passageway. The dead swarmed both walls, atop the ceiling, under the floor. �
��Perceive: The universe is disordered. These dead are but shells, and they dwell in a place created by human ignorance and greed.”
“What we call Ixtador.”
“This aberrant intrusion into the wider universe set Dimios free to prey on the human dead. And so he has done, as you see. Now his deepest craving is to pursue this pleasure in the living world as well. You, my friend, gave him the opening he craved.”
“When I opened the Veil.” The vision in de Cuvier’s dream had grown sublimely evil since Mont Voilline. The living world peopled with starving spectres. Eyes that had no souls. Eyes alien to the bodies they looked out of. No matter that the act had been necessary; I had opened the way to such a future. That was truth.
He nodded. “From the Beginnings, my choice has been to defend the divine from corruption, whether from my own kind or yours. But in this case, my power to intervene is limited, because the damage has been done by human works. Human gifts, human strength, must correct it. Yours, I think.”