by Carol Berg
“Indeed, every passing moment increases our risk.” Rhea’s superior, the ambitious young tetrarch who had reached his office through unrelenting pursuit of daemon influences in the world, could be no one’s image of a high-ranked cleric. Blocky, sharp eyed. More badger than wolf. I’d not have chosen to end up in his clutches. He didn’t sit, either.
I could not join the joust of precedence but settled on a cushion in a corner where the wall could hold me up. Months of bleeding had left me a husk. Despite Rhea’s marvelous tonics, a strong east wind could have blown me back six years to my quiet library at Collegia Seravain.
I wished it would. I’d waked in the dark hours, thirsty and frantic that I needed to do something vitally important. I’d had the same obsessive certainty since I was a boy, and I still didn’t know what it was. Every glance at the charcoal sky set my heart rattling. Faint streaks of purple and indigo that laced the grim overcast were not lightning, but more like glancing reflections. Like torchlight through deepening water. It was not mere lack of blood that kept my hands shaking like an old granny’s.
“We must first establish trust,” said de Ferrau. “I came to the Street of Beggars intending to persuade you to sit down with me and share our beliefs about Ixtador and the necromancer Dante. The sorcerer’s message has preempted that conversation. But if I am to be of help to you, damoselle—and I believe I can—you and your friends must be assured that I am not the same man who visited your parents’ home.”
Anne’s scorn could have shriveled a stone. I didn’t know enough to judge de Ferrau. It all came down to Rhea. Her quiet ways and incisive mind had made her a boon companion in a time when my isolation in Abidaijar weighed heavy. I had confided in her, unwisely it seemed. Had she truly been so naive as to believe Jacard de Viole just wanted to consult me about magic?
The word saint disturbed me for many reasons. It most certainly didn’t fit a man who had spent several months in a bleeding chair wanting to strangle a gifted young woman of nineteen.
De Ferrau plopped down at the low table, not graceful, but easy with himself. He poured tea for Anne, Ilario, and himself, then passed the pot on to Rhea and Andero.
“Prophecy is a troublesome thing,” he said. “It is not magic. It is not absolute. It does not prescribe a destiny for any person. That’s one of my persistent arguments with the Cult, which wants to give us all roles in miracle plays—good versus evil, angel battling daemon, saints to champion us incapable humans.”
Well put, I had to confess. Everyone in the Cult, including Ilario, liked dressing up their beliefs in mythic drama. The conclusions of evidence and logic were much easier to live with.
“The truth of prophecy lies in the human heart and hand,” de Ferrau continued, his earnest delivery belying his body’s stalwart calm. “Some of us are strong, some generous, some devious. Our skills vary from swordsmanship to magic to logic to healing. What is the Daemon of the Dead or a Souleater’s Chosen but a name for a collection of such qualities and skills imbued with intent? The true prophet sees a coming storm and tells us what qualities and skills we need to weather it. Those who heed prophets, alerted, seek out those who possess these qualities, trying to lure them into the path of the storm by naming the fulfillment of our need destiny. Sometimes, they frighten our champions away.”
Then again, sometimes one felt the call to destiny, but no prophet came forth with the need. My youthful dreaming had fed my yearning for great deeds: to be a scholar of renown, perhaps, or the mage who revived the lost glories of magic. Over and over again, I had failed. But then Dante had exposed truths about my past. And I had died three times on Mont Voilline. Belief began to nag at me that something extraordinary was going on. Thus, Abidaijar.
Two years I’d spent there, comparing my dreams with the texts, histories, and legends of the Cult of the Reborn and, indeed, I’d found an astonishing correspondence. Yet, the exercise triggered no memory. I abandoned the sainthood silliness and pursued other inquiries…until I found a dusty little scroll that tied everything together and made me believe that Dante was far more important in the scheme of the universe than Portier de Savin-Duplais, reborn or no. Rhea was right that I had been ready to run to Dante. I had hoped his acerbic view of the divine could put my feet back on the ground.
“You weren’t seeking skills when you came to Montclaire, Tetrarch,” snapped Anne, interrupting the mesmer of de Ferrau’s logic. “You hunted evidence to convict Dante of blasphemy.”
She kept her vision fixed to the window, which had a fine view of the palace where Dante and the green Stones waited. Whatever else Dante had learned these months, at least he had come to understand what I had known for so long. It was a measure of Anne’s strength that his profession of love had not wrecked her completely.
“You’re correct,” said de Ferrau. “I believed Master Dante the cause of what I saw happening in Ixtador.”
His simple phrasing snagged my attention like a meat hook. “What you saw beyond the Veil?” I blurted. “You’re a Reader.…”
“A skilled one,” said the tetrarch. “Since I first inhaled the smokes of a Temple reading room, I’ve seen Ixtador’s blighted fields as clearly as you see Sirpuhi’s cliffs outside that window.”
Dante had always believed that talent for magical practice was far more widespread than the Camarilla, locked into family and bloodlines, would admit. He used himself as the prime example. But he also pointed out Temple Readers, those who claimed to assess the progress of souls on their Veil journeys. Just because the cretins are attached to fancies about gods and angels doesn’t mean they can’t touch dead souls. Whyever not? It’s just another aspect of the aether.
“For that same eighteen years,” the tetrarch continued, “I’ve lied to every petitioner who’s brought me a tessila to read. How can I tell them that their loved ones begin their Veil journey as hopeful as a bride on her wedding night and as eager as a bridegroom, only to starve and wither along the way? Every blasted one of them.”
Exactly as Anne, Dante, and I had posited! Though more skeptical of their skills, I had interviewed a few Temple Readers. None had ever confessed to see anything of the hunger and despair we had witnessed on Mont Voilline. They blamed time’s murky barrier or lack of information to make a proper link with certain souls. “You saw it!”
“I saw it clearly. Did you never wonder why most Readers limit their scrutiny to souls less than seven years dead? Two years ago this deterioration accelerated, taking nearer three years than five or seven. Ixtador has become a seething morass of human refuse. At the same time, rumors flew through the Temples about certain events at Mont Voilline. Master Dante already loomed large in my suspicions. Yet, I also heard disturbing rumors of the man who first brought the mage to Merona. Some said the man ought to be dead but wasn’t.…”
Anne bit. “And you sent Rhea to worm her way into Portier’s confidences to expose his heresy and Dante’s.”
Had a lioness’s tooth marks appeared on de Ferrau’s face just then, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
“But my faithful spy was changed.” The tetrarch didn’t shy away from the word as the others did, nor from Anne’s accusations. “On her return Rhea tried to give me convincing evidence that the world wasn’t as I believed. But by then I had a city gate collapsed and a dozen bailiffs dead, and I wasn’t listening. I needed her to keep the fool of a chevalier alive so I could get answers from him. When she and the fool, who was evidently not so much a fool, vanished, she left me a letter, detailing her reasons, her horror at my actions, and the urgency she felt that all our skills would be needed in this battle.”
He tossed a little bundle onto the table. “She also left me a small gift she’d brought from Abidaijar—one discovered by you, Duplais, I believe.”
The small yellowed scroll, tied up with a green ribbon, sat on the table like the blood-soaked evidence of a crime—or of marvels too huge to face.
“It is the first chapter of the Primordium,” said the tet
rarch, “the tale of the Creation, a tale as familiar as the alphabet. But this is a unique translation, the oldest in existence. It uses a very ancient word for the first of the Pantokrator’s creations—sandaemoni. A notation gives its meaning as—”
“Guardian,” I whispered, though my throat was a raw knot. I knew the text from memory.
“It gives a whole new meaning to the term Daemon of the Dead, does it not? We who heed prophets must get our terms correct before searching for the fulfillment of our needs. A passage in this text tells of the great war between Dimios and those sandaemoni led by Panthia and Celeres, these guardians of humankind. And it tells how Dimios learned he could increase his own strength by—”
“—draining the energies of the human dead.” Again I completed the tetrarch’s speaking. “Eating their souls.”
“Indeed so,” said the tetrarch. “So I asked myself, was this Dante himself the Souleater or his chosen champion, or was Rhea correct that the measure of a man must be discovered in his friends? If these exceptional friends were to be believed, something terrible was about to occur in the southern deserts. And so I came here, willing to listen. I never expected to find events so far advanced…or to discover truth laid in my lap so clearly as it was this morning.”
He sipped his tea, then plopped it on the table and shoved it away as if it had gone bitter. “I committed crimes in my pursuit of a man I believed an abomination. Be sure, all of you, that if Temple or king yet stands when we are done here, I will resign my office and submit myself for punishment. But today, I offer my service to you, lady, and to you, Duplais.”
Anne was no longer looking out the window, but propped on the window ledge, examining the tetrarch in that way that made you believe she was counting the hairs on your chest. “How do you think to help us?”
Ah, yes, the tasks of the day. I grasped mundanity. But my gaze flicked to the boiling sky and found no relief for the gaping hollow in my gut.
“Your first mandate, now you have secured Duplais, is to obtain the Seeing Stones before they are used and to destroy them.”
“Only we don’t know how,” said Anne.
“One of us might,” said de Ferrau. “If, indeed, he received them from the hand of the Creator.”
And in a single instant, he gave my dread a name. Several names: Ianne, Os, Vicorix, Altheus…
“I make no claims here,” I said, trying not to sound beggarly. It was one thing to believe. Another to produce evidence of that belief. Logic, intellect, science, study, had failed me. “There’s naught in me to answer such questions. I’ve tried—believe me, I’ve tried.”
Unfazed, de Ferrau jumped to his feet. “If I’m to humble myself before a group willing to take on the Souleater, then none of my nattering arguments with the Cult must get in the way.”
A few steps around the table and he crouched beside me, gathering my trembling hands in his own. Calluses…That surprised me. His nails were blunt. Clean. Consider anything but what he meant…
But the young tetrarch’s eyes bore the color and clarity the desert sky ought to display. And no little sympathy, besides. “Sonjeur de Duplais, if you are who and what some of your friends believe, then your soul has repeatedly passed beyond the Veil. Eighteen years I’ve spent making connections with souls that have undergone this change. It’s true I’ve considered only the soul’s current state, believing that its progress through Ixtador toward the gates of Heaven was all that should concern me. But souls beyond the Veil—those that remain whole—are not constrained by age or time. Neither should their essence be restricted to the life associated with…a current existence…if that soul has truly experienced more than one. It occurs to me that I might be able to touch memories that you, confined to this body, cannot.”
“Read my soul.…” I squirmed as if a scorpion crawled up my leg, heading for my nether parts.
“Do you believe you have crossed the Veil or not?”
His clear gaze would not let me turn away. “Yes. But I—”
“And do you believe that prior to one of those crossings you might have held the knowledge we need?”
Logic had foresworn belief and yet…“Yes.”
“Well, then, the choice is yours. If you say no, we’ll find some other way.” He sat there like an impenetrable wall. No tic, no smirk, no doubt or hesitation gave me cause to deny him.
Anne’s gaze flicked between de Ferrau and me, as if expecting one of us to launch an attack. Ilario’s eyes were closed; he was a prayerful man. But we had no time for quibbling, and this de Ferrau— Curse it all, I believed him.
“Unless someone has a simpler way…” I swallowed hard. “Though I suppose it’s not so simple.”
“It shouldn’t hurt,” he said, the corners of those eyes crinkling. “None of my subjects has ever complained.”
Before I could answer…or laugh…or have a second thought, he dropped my hands and whirled into action. “Rhea, your medicine box. Our friend will need a sedating potion. In half an hour, I need him conscious, but wholly incapable of directing his own thoughts.”
“An hour,” she said, firmly, not looking at me. “I can do it more safely, and he needs to eat.”
“An hour, then. No more. Goodman Andero, perhaps you would assist Sonjeur de Duplais into the small chamber adjoining. I’ll have a meal sent in. Lord Ilario, Lady Anne, once I’ve gathered the materials I need from Scholar Agramonte’s cabinets, I’ll need to speak with you outside Duplais’s hearing.” He raised his open palms as if to quell my concern. “This is only to learn what details of your person and…history…might enable me to make this connection. Just as I would do in the deadhouse.”
I nodded, the terror lodged in my throat preventing speech. Drugged again. Helpless again…holy night. I should be glad he hadn’t suggested killing me. Nothing in Beltan de Ferrau’s face or manner suggested he was incapable of that.
“Until then, Lady Anne, perhaps you would consider writing down the message we heard this morning. There’s ink and paper on the writing table. We’d best not lose a word.”
Once they’d shown me to a pallet in an otherwise empty room, Rhea brought in a vial and a glass dropper. “I’ll give you only a little at a time,” she said. “That way, I can judge better when it’s enough. I’d take a dose myself—double even—but—”
“I’d prefer you stay clearheaded,” I said and swallowed her bitter drops. “And please don’t apologize any more. When we’ve time, we’ll sort it out. Besides, I’ve a friend here to protect me.” Andero remained in the doorway, neither in nor out. He’d said not a word since de Ferrau’s arrival.
Biting her lip, Rhea touched my arm and hurried off.
“Come talk to me, Andero, if you would. I never knew Dante had a brother.…” I surely didn’t want to stew for an hour.
Andero was good company, once I convinced him I was neither on the brink of death nor a god. “Honestly, I’ve had limited success with everything I’ve done,” I said as we shared a glorious hotchpotch of veal bone, dates, and lentils. “I was a decent librarian but a terrible son, a fine investigator who convicted the wrong man, and only by your ‘little brother’s’ grace can I do a lick of magic. As to this other thing…” My spoon paused. I blew a long sigh in an attempt to calm my gut. “That could be but one more grand delusion.”
“You’re the first man ever made a friend of Dante,” said Andero, attacking his bowl as if he’d not eaten in a decade. “Even his teacher—this fellow Salvator—was a brute, forever trying to bind his wildness, more than half scared of him.”
“I don’t know anyone who wasn’t—isn’t—more than half scared of Dante. Every time I’d start to believe us friends, he’d get angry with me about something. But we partnered well.”
The smith told me of their grim childhood, of playing together and growing apart, and he shared the tale of their journey south—their father’s death, Adept Denys, Jono the foolish shepherd, and the settlers of Hoven. Between the times Rhea arrived to
drop her bitter potion on my tongue, I came near forgetting what we were doing. Almost…
When my eyes grew heavy, my tongue thick, my fear swollen, Andero crouched close to my face, his broad face grave and thoughtful. “Most of this morning, I’ve felt the need to break your neck for dragging Dante and me into this. The life we were born to was no place a divine hand would nurture a favored son. But telling the whole of it…That tetrarch made sense with what he said about prophets and gifts and looking for the right person. That’s what you did. You found him.” A grin creased his face, and he gave a rumbling chuckle. “Guess that’s what your king did, too, way back at the beginning. Went looking for what was needed and found you.”
Maybe Andero left then. Maybe he didn’t. But I laughed until Rhea’s worried face appeared above me. Her features swirled and flowed like the reflection in a poor-quality mirror, and I tried to answer. “Sorry pair…Dante and me…prophet’s nightmare…”