by Carol Berg
19 OCET, NIGHT
Suffocation had never been one of my terrors. Not until the Camarilla inquisitor dropped the hood of wool and iron over my face. My shoulders already bore the weight of a voluminous gown, designed to mask a Witness’s identity, and sewn with iron rings, designed to confound spellwork. So the gray-haired man had explained to me.
The inquisitor himself or herself—there was no way to know—had not spoken and would not. His silence signaled to all that the Camarilla would hear no plea, no testimony, no bargaining or command until the Witness had been taken to the Bastionne Camarilla and properly questioned.
“You’ve no right to question me. I’ve done nothing.” I stumbled backward, wrenching the thick wool away from my mouth. “I am King Philippe’s gooddaughter, the queen’s maid of honor. This is the king’s house.”
I struggled to keep from babbling. Did they believe I had poisoned the serving girl? How did one prove innocence?
A body behind me halted my retreat.
“The Concord de Praesta prescribes that the Camarilla needs no authority but this warrant to enter any house, even a palace, or to summon or detain any Witness, even a king’s goddaughter, pursuant to investigation of criminal matters involving sorcery.” The gray-haired man’s voice quivered with excitement.
“Then name my crime.” I scrabbled at straws. Poisoning was not equivalent to sorcery.
“All will be revealed in time. Unless you are accused, you shall be returned here without prejudice. If you cooperate, we’ll have no need for shackles.”
Saints defend, shackles . . . the Bastionne . . .
They tugged the hood downward, deadening sound and cutting off the light, leaving me in the dark, accompanied by images of the gaping ruin and its floating lights. My stomach lurched as if I were plummeting from the splintered floors into the pooled darkness. My spirit boiled with fear.
We moved briskly, the adept holding one arm, the inquisitor the other, supporting me firmly enough I would not stumble. Heat and fear made my head swim, and I quickly became confused at the turns. No one spoke to me. I was alone with my jerky breaths and thudding heart.
Camarilla inquisitors had led Adept Fedrigo and Mage Orviene to their execution in shackles, shrouded in these same awful garments. Orviene had wailed from beneath his hood, Do you know what they do to you in the Bastionne?
No one did. Rumor spoke of terrible magics. My father had said that, whether or not the flesh displayed scars or bruises when a Witness emerged from the Bastionne, the spirit certainly did.
I considered calling on my friend in the aether. If he was close, he could get a message to the queen . . . someone. Or what if the inquisitors could detect such things? Hearing voices . . . speaking to them . . . they’d accuse me of practicing sorcery without Camarilla sanction, which would put my fate solely within their purview. He might even be one of them.
My father had railed against the Camarilla’s prerogatives to adjudicate all matters of sorcery. He felt it an unwarranted infringement of civil authority. The Camarilla insisted that no civil authority was fit to judge the particular demands, requirements, and possibilities of magical practice. But Papa had argued we might as well give the Temple sole authority over believers, or fishmongers sole authority over fishermen. No, the Camarilla would bear no good feeling for Michel de Vernase’s daughter.
But as my captors rushed me down steep stairs and through short turns, alternating sudden halts with bursts of haste, I came to the most unsettling impression that they were sneaking me out of the palace. If no one saw them take me, who might guess my whereabouts when I turned up missing? Panic won out. “Wait!”
Another short descent—stone steps without enclosing walls—and we trod on gravel and dirt. I flailed within my shroud. Screamed. Dragged my feet. Surely someone would see. But as iron fists crushed my arms, a hand thrust under my hood and forced a bitter draught into my mouth. Muffled in the heavy wool, unable to get a breath, I had no choice but to swallow.
“Wildcat witch . . .” The two words were all I heard before slipping into a terrifying blackness.
AWARENESS RETURNED WITH HELLISH NOISE. Saints save me, my cranium rattled with a din worthy of Dimios the Souleater’s return at world’s end—the mindstorm in full bluster.
“. . . supposed to be a last resort, you toadwit! Why dose her when you’ve already got her in hand?” The woman stood close by.
My face lay on a firm surface of scratchy linen. Cool air bathed my cheek. My upper arms throbbed but were under my command, causing me immense relief, until I recalled where and why they had been trapped. Saint’s mercy, I was in the Bastionne Camarilla. I blinked my gritty eyes but did not move.
“Adept Vronsard said—”
“Adept Vronsard is not a prefect, fool! Tell me what prefect wrote the warrant, and I’ll—” She stopped abruptly. “Natti, you blighted, ignorant dunderhead. When I find out what lackwit summoned a Witness—this Witness—at middle-night without notice or preparation . . .”
“A high-level sanction was called. The plan says, in that case, we pick her up.” The man’s spindly silhouette manifested itself from the blur. “Can’t help it no one’s ready.”
Grinding the heels of my hands into my eyes, I wrestled the internal clamor into submission. Then I sat up. A searing white brilliance did naught to soothe the pain in my head. But I held my eyes open and mustered every shred of my wits. My life could depend on it.
“Awake, are you?” said the belligerent woman, little more than a shadowed shape within the fracturing light beams. “Give trouble and we’ll dose you again. Probably ought to anyway.”
I knew better than to imagine this was all a mistake, but perhaps these two weren’t so sure. “You’ve no cause to hold me,” I said, managing to sound calm and reasonably sure of myself despite a frog in my throat. “I am no sorcerer, nor do I pretend to be. I wish the queen notified of my whereabouts.”
“You are a Witness in a crime of sorcery, here to answer what’s asked of you.” The stout woman, shapeless in a gray gown and clearly unhappy over her assignment, passed her hand across the source of the blinding light, which began immediately to fade. “None cares what you wish.”
My eyes squeezed shut briefly, grateful for the reduced glare, and opened again to a windowless box of a room. A single door centered the whitewashed wall in front of me. I sat on a padded bench fixed to a similarly bare wall. Naught else occupied the space but the three of us.
The woman pressed the bronze door latch. “I’ll advise that truth is your best ally. You’ll not want us to extract it. We can and will. And don’t imagine we won’t know the truth when we hear it, no matter your family brilliance that mocks and destroys whatever stands in your way.”
Oh yes, she hated my father. And, indeed, the matronly woman, blessed with eyebrows thicker than a shoe brush and hands worthy of a blacksmith, appeared quite qualified to wrest truth from anyone—woman, man, sheep, or bear.
“Natti,” she said after a moment of contemplative scowling, “we’d best put Damoselle de Vernase in a resident cell. Put her in a day cell and we’ll have every accountant and registry clerk gaping at her by morning, especially once people guess who she is. We must proceed carefully. And get out of that gown. If a prefect sees you . . . by my mother’s womb, you’ll be resident here.”
“You take her! Prefect Angloria said we shouldn’t go down there.”
“Prefect Angloria has naught to say about this one. And don’t you be prattling to her about it.”
The ill-favored young man she’d called toadwit voiced his objection in a high-pitched squeak. He busily stripped off the black gown that flapped about his gawky frame, then unhooked the dull green cap that dangled around his neck and stuffed it into the gown’s sleeve.
That odd green cap . . . He was the formidable Camarilla inquisitor! Yet I’d have sworn he’d worn a mage’s collar when he arrested me.
“Then send Vronsard to transfer her.” Natti afforded me o
nly the briefest of glances, as if I might not hear his whispering if he weren’t actually looking at me. “She’s a wolverine. Felt her claws straight through the Witness gown when I searched her pockets.”
I breathed in relief that I’d put away the potion and the ring before the inquisitor arrived.
Sputtering in disgust, the woman yanked open the door. “I’ll send your rival in idiocy, Natti, and pray for the day we’ve acolytes who can follow procedures and control a slip of an untrained girl. If it’s the master from the palace who’s called this sanction, I suppose we must proceed. If it’s one of the others, I’ll have that one skinned and roasted.”
My brief surge of assurance withered. The master from the palace could only be Dante. The others . . . Other masters? Others from the palace? Who?
The woman slammed the door behind her.
“This is all a mistake, isn’t it?” I said to the bony Natti. “I’m not supposed to be here.”
“Sanction was called,” he mumbled.
I gambled. “Best take me back. Master Dante will flay you for deviating from his plan.”
“Wasn’t his plan! He’s not got the authority for—” His complexion faded to the color of whey. “You be quiet.”
Whose plan had been triggered too early, if not Dante’s? To call sanction to the Camarilla must mean to accuse a person of illicit sorcery in a way more serious than rumor or suspicion. And the Camarilla would likely investigate a serious accusation from any person, sorcerer or not.
I considered threatening or bribing the awkward young man to get a message to Eugenie, but this whole thing might be a trap aimed at her—her attendant, the traitor’s daughter, arrested. Better to stay calm and learn more. Never had I felt closer to the heart of this conspiracy.
Natti’s help arrived. Adept Vronsard was the gray-haired man who had stood in my bedchamber and issued the summons.
“You’ve no metal on your person, damoselle? ” said Vronsard, examining my neck and wrists. “It’s not allowed here.”
“None. Why?”
“Can’t have prisoners working magic, now, can we?”
I’d not considered the particular problems of imprisoning sorcerers. Metal was involved in most spellwork. I knew that much. But, of course, previously devised spells could be attached to artifacts of wood or stoneware, shell, liquid, or powder, creating charms and potions that anyone could use, as Lianelle had done for me. Mages attached their favorite worked spells to their ancilles—wands, rings, or staffs, like Dante’s. Lianelle had once shown me a drawing of the ancille she planned to create—five silver rings, each attached to a bronze bracelet with a delicate silver chain—a gauntlet of magic, she’d called it.
One man on each side of me, we paraded through a huge, windowless, whitewashed room, stuffed with a hodgepodge of tables and chairs piled in teetering towers, rolled carpets and tapestries, cobbled-together racks hung with robes, crates stacked upon crates and every other kind of container. It appeared like nothing so much as an attic or undercroft where unwanted household furnishings were stored.
Yet desks and worktables were tucked into every possible niche amid the jumble. Between two overloaded book cupboards, two women stirred the contents of a copper pan over a small burner that belched green flames. A gowned man sat writing at a desk tucked into a nook of half-charred casks. These things must have been rescued from the ruined wing of the Bastionne.
Once past the far door, a long passage stretched before us, evidencing the Bastionne’s more somber purposes. Cells, barred with stone latticework, lined the left side of the passage. Most were empty. A young woman with painted eyes and long greased curls hissed at us as we passed. Two old men in adjacent cells played cards by laying out their game outside the bars, though neither could see the other’s face. The inmates would likely be offenders dragged in from the marketplace and kept for a few hours for questioning.
“These are what you name day cells,” I said.
Natti jumped when I spoke, glancing at me suspiciously, as if I were using some magic to steal his knowledge.
“It’s so,” he said as we started down a flight of black granite steps. Resident cells were likely for longer-term prisoners of the Camarilla. My throat knotted.
The downward stair led us into a tangle of dim lower passages. And surely I recognized the moment our path took us into the lower reaches of the ruin on the Plas Royale. Natti opened an iron door that groaned and complained as it scraped the well-worn floor. Misery, horror, and despair whispered through the corridor, tickling my ears as if the voices inside me had escaped through my skin. Though torches had been mounted on the passage walls, the gloom sapped their luminance. And when I blinked, faint threads of purple light floated into view, hovering on the periphery of sight. Just as in the Rotunda.
The wide passage reeked of camphor. It was notched on one side by square nooks, empty and of a size matching that of the day cells. Wood latticework had been embedded in the stone walls, floors, and ceilings. Oddly, no bars closed them off. Odd, too, the nooks were spaced irregularly, as if the builder had forgotten to open the passage wall for some few . . . or as if those had been walled shut. Sealed.
“Don’t leave me down here,” I said. “For love of the holy saints, please don’t. . . .”
“Resident cell five,” said Adept Vronsard, halting at the corner of one empty niche. “You’ll work no illicit magic here. Step in, damoselle.”
“I’ve done nothing. I can’t work magic. I’ve been tested. I’m not responsible for my father’s opinions . . . my father’s crimes. . . .” I babbled shamelessly, all notions of truth or pride, honesty or loyalty vanquished by fear of being walled up down here with the purple lights and the burgeoning mindstorm.
Vronsard crammed a folded blanket and a stoppered clay flask into my arms.
“The Prefect Inquisitor will determine your innocence,” said Natti, as the two of them shoved me into the empty niche. “We’ll retrieve you when he’s ready.”
“A prefect?” I yelled, spinning in place, “or the Aspirant?” A fourth wall stood in place.
Throwing down the blanket and flask, I hammered my fists on the wood-latticed wall, and then all the way around the cell in a panicked hunt for a way out. Half a minute, and I could not have said which wall fronted the passage.
An ash gray gleam emanated from the stone, enough to reveal a thinly padded stone shelf fixed to one wall and a lidded commode in one corner. But no sooner had I lavished thanks on the Creator’s messengers than the gloom faded to black. The sole illumination emanated from the drifting threads of purple, green, and rose. The only sounds were the faint whispers, just this side of hearing. Even the mindstorm had fallen silent.
Wholly unnerved, I retreated into a barren corner and wrapped the scratchy wool blanket around my shoulders. I didn’t want to see what might take shape from the floating lights. This time it might be Lianelle, her chest caved in by explosive magic, or Lady Cecile, lips stained black with poison, her elegantly long neck twisted as she gazed on me with dead eyes.
Talk to me, I said. Friend, please. With all the strength I could muster, recalling every nuance of his presence . . . the sound of him . . . the sense of his pleasure at our exchanges, the muted longing, I reached into the night. I dared not tell him where I was, but I was desperate to hear a friendly voice.
The aether felt dull and impenetrable. No voices. No friendly, curious intruder. No mindstorm. Nothing.
Shifting air riffled the enveloping blanket and my skirts. Warm, dry, the gusts bore a pungent, resinous scent—juniper or cedar—that mingled with the unpleasant camphor and musty stone. The colored threads floated past, their movements unaffected by the eerie breeze. Their touch tickled my skin, giving off bursts redolent of sickness and decay.
I waved them off. Blew on them. Whispered, yelled, clapped my hands. But no action affected their random wanderings. They passed straight through my hand, and through the walls and ceiling.
As the time ti
cked away, they gathered about me, their sighs and whispers a swelling canon of failure and loss, anger, avarice, and . . . hunger. . . .
I searched out the flask Adept Vronsard had given me, uncorked it, and sniffed. Water. After a welcome swallow, I poured some onto the floor. The threads flocked to the puddle until it glowed . . . and the whispered pain surged as if I dangled a crust of bread just beyond the reach of a starving prisoner.
I’m sorry. Sorry. Hastily I splattered and smeared the water into smaller puddles and droplets, overcome with the feeling that I had committed some incalculable cruelty, though exactly what or against whom I could not guess. When the shifting air had dried the last of it, the whispers receded again. My trembling did not.
Bathed in cold sweat, I huddled in my corner, closed my eyes, and practiced the exercises Papa had used to banish my nightmares. I calculated the time it would take to ride a horse from Merona to Abidaijar. I reconstructed Ludaccio’s proof of the invariant ratios of squared triangles. . . .
A clatter and scrape of steel and stone shattered my concentration and sent me scrabbling to my feet. A narrow door stood open in the wall opposite the bench. Backlit by the torches in the outer passageway, Mage Dante stood watching me.
CHAPTER 19
19 OCET, MIDDLE-NIGHT
“ An ugly place to findan aristo lady.” Save for the band of silver about his sinewed neck, the mage might have been any ruffian out of Riverside. Worn canvas breeches, russet shirt, and buff jerkin could more likely suit a pikeman newly returned from campaign than the Queen of Sabria’s First Counselor.
But I was not fooled. Every nerve, every sense quivered with danger. I chose my words precisely. “I’ve been brought here in error, Master. I am no sorceress, thus I do not fall under the authority—”
“Hold your arguments. I know naught of Camarilla rules.” He leaned against the doorframe, half in, half out of the cell, as one of Montclaire’s neighbors might when stopping in for a taste of the new vintage. “I was waked from a sound sleep and told a Witness had been brought to the Bastionne to be questioned. As this was a very special Witness, and the designated inquisitor was not available to record a preliminary interrogation, I was to do it. Yet no one bothered to inform me as to what this person was witness to, so I’m at a loss to know what to ask. Perhaps you could tell me. Have you been misbehaving? Following in your wicked father’s footsteps?”