by Carol Berg
Hurry. Dante’s voice was faint, or perhaps my inner hearing had been deafened by the screaming or perhaps it was the swelling mindstorm . . . fury . . . hunger . . . lust . . . hatred . . . anger. . . . We must destroy the lens. But Portier first. I cannot maintain—Hurry!
I needed no spur. I rolled Kajetan out of his cloak. Holding tight to the zahkri, I sped to the second circle, where my father lay slumped like a discarded rug. His heart was beating, faint and uneven, the wound in his breast seeping slowly. I wadded his ragged tunic over the wound and used the leather leash to tie it in place. Then I tucked Kajetan’s cloak around him, and with a kiss and a promise moved on to Portier. Angels’ grace that they had not laid the stone lid over him.
I splashed into the frigid water, ducked under, and wrenched away the chains that held him down. Once he was free of the chains, the water supported his upper body as I reached under his shoulders and lifted his face above the surface. Spirits, he was cold. The water might have flowed straight off a glacier. I searched in vain for breath or heartbeat.
“You are n-not dead,” I said through chattering teeth, tugging him toward the steps. “N-not dead. Not dead.” I sat on the steps, hauling him up one step, then backing up to the next, and hauling him up again. Eventually he was out of the water far enough that his sodden frame became too heavy to drag farther. Just as well. Another step and the exposed bone of his leg would scrape on the lowest step. Even if he was dead, I couldn’t do that to him.
The wind howled. One by one the flames atop the pillars winked out. Night had swallowed the floating lights. I’ve got him, I said through the raging mindstorm, but I’ve no idea if he’s alive.
Needs warmth. Make a fire. Use my staff.
I started laughing. Drenched, freezing, clinging to a corpse, for all I knew, and Dante was asking me to work magic again. I could scarcely pump breath in and out. I’ll need you for that. Let me get you out of there.
No time to play with locks. Just do as I say. Hurry . . . The last was pleading . . . strained . . . as if he were holding up the roof of the sky.
Perhaps he was. Above my head an inky blackness rippled, shivered, and bulged as if someone pushed on it from the other side.
Babbling apologies, I left Portier and retraced my steps through the wind-blasted dark. Dante’s staff had been left near the principal’s pillar in the second circle. I felt my way, one pillar and then another and another. I tripped on a discarded urn and barely missed crashing my head on the pillar. But wood clattered on the stone just in front of my nose. I hesitated . . .
Don’t be afraid. Patient. Controlled. A handspan—a bit more than your handspan—from the top, you’ll find a carved triangle with a smooth depression in its center. Touch it . . .
A cool, soft wave rippled through my center and through my finger into the stick. White flame popped from the staff. Only a touch was required to ignite the wood piled in the bonfire scar. And then it was a matter of hauling Duplais and my father close to it. With weeping apology, I used Kajetan’s cloak to drag them near and covered them both with its ragged remnants.
Now for you, my friend. And then poor Eugenie. Wearily I climbed the steps to the bronze trapdoor and shoved the metal plate aside, exposing the grate. I should have done that first thing. At least now he could get the reflected light from the bonfire. Take heart; it’s almost dawn.
Not a nice dawn. A livid glow now illuminated the pillar circles. Not enough to push back the inky void of the rift. Not enough to show me Dante through the bronze grate.
I doubt it’s dawn you see. We’ve work yet to do before dealing with locks. They’re coming.
Eyes bleared with weariness and wind tears, head bulging with voices and cries I could not begin to hold back, I glanced up. My mouth dropped open. Though I believed myself incapable of another emotion, pity and horror filled my heart.
A gaping hollow in the night was jammed with colorless shapes . . . men, women, children surging forward, crowding against an unseen barrier. Emaciated, eye sockets of solid gray, yearning, starving . . .
They don’t belong here, said Dante. They’re but spectres . . . phantasms . . . not souls. I need you to help me close the way.
How did he know? Was she there . . . my sister? I couldn’t just slam the door on her without a word. Wait!
My frozen fingers clasped her pendant still hung about my neck. We won, Nel. We followed your clues and found the shitheels who hounded you to death. I’ve found Papa.
The little nireal flared a brilliant silver, an echo of the fiery sunset over the pinnacles, and stung my enveloping palm with the winter frost. The scent of dead leaves flooded my nostrils. Cold dry air . . . desolation . . . threaded my skin and bone. Help us, Ani! Don’t leave us here. It’s all wrong. . . . Can you see? Trapped . . . souls leached away . . . Your friend can tell you.
“Nel?” I stared up at the surging mass of hunger. She was not one of them, but somewhere else . . . behind them . . . hidden.
Gods, hurry . . . can’t hold . . . Dante’s plea was a knife in my temple.
I had no choice. We had nothing left to help my sister, even if I knew how. This night had to end. I let go of the nireal, thinking of Roussel and his whims that had caused so much death and misery . . . and his ancestors and mine whose lust for knowledge had conspired to create this horror. Smoldering fury and hatred caught fire again, and I closed my eyes.
The shimmering structures of the Mondragon spells lay in ruins, the great spires and arcs collapsed or vanished altogether, the colors dulled. Only a great wheel remained, glittering like faceted glass, spinning. The lens, the opening to Ixtador.
Take it, I said. All I have . . .
And in a surge of destruction worthy of the world’s end, Dante harnessed the remnants of his cold, dark river and my fiery flood, and shattered the wheel, destroying the hole in the sky.
I sank to the stone, sobbing, as if we’d murdered Lianelle and all the others yet again.
Thunder rumbled in the distance. I needed to find the key to unlock Dante’s cell, and see to Eugenie and Portier and Papa . . .
“ANI. ARE YOU WOUNDED? SO much blood on you. Come, Ani. Wake up and tell me.”
The slap on my cheeks was going to get the soft-voiced man’s head removed. Half of me was freezing and half burning. All I wanted was to sleep, and he was shining blazing fire in my eyes and dribbling wine into my arid mouth.
“Ani, please. They need to ask you some questions.”
“We’ve settled with the villains in the caves,” said a different voice, filled with gravel. “Saved the king the trouble. Once he sees what was done to his men and that woman down there, he would have bricked up the lot of them and let them eat one another. If he ever gets a hint of what we found under that tree, he might do for us all. It’s good the chevalier got us here first.”
The king . . . the chevalier . . . I needed to wake up. I had important things to do. “I’m not injured,” I croaked.
I sat bolt upright, bumping heads with the man bent over me, the one who’d called me Ani. But when I glimpsed his grim face, every other thought left my muddled head. My hand flew to my mouth as my gaze encompassed the rangy young man, clean and unwounded, dressed in fine leathers, with a sword sheathed at his waist. I burst into tears.
“Spirits, Ani, what’s happened here?” His thin hand, marked with a zahkri and myriad scars, jerked away when I reached for it. “Don’t—”
But my arms flew around my brother. “I thought you were dead . . . that they’d bled you.”
He suffered my embrace, rigid as the stone column behind him until my arms dropped away.
“That was the intent. But your friends kept a watch on the Spindle. When I was dragged out, the chevalier came after us. Killed the lot of them. Convinced me he was your friend. He hid me at his house. Gave me a weapon and promised I’d get to use it. Swore not to tell anyone where I was until this was over. Or ever, if I wanted.”
The chevalier . . . my friends . . .
Anxious, I peered over his shoulder. A scarecrow huddled under a clean blanket beside the raging bonfire. As he slept, a mustached man, my brother’s gravel-voiced confidant, was dressing a wound on his arm. Beyond the two, a slender man with short, dark hair was propped up by one of Ianne’s pillars, looking very ill. At the sick man’s side knelt another swordsman, dressed all in black, tall and thin, hair like flax—the chevalier.
Never had I felt so depleted. Names rattled in my empty skull like dried peas. Anxiety tried to match them with bodies. Ambrose. Papa. Duplais. Captain de Santo. Ilario. Eugenie . . . Sweet angels! “The queen?”
“Naught but frightened and groggy, so says the chevalier. Here, lean back. The king wants to speak with you, Ani, to find out where the villains have got off to.”
I could scarce comprehend the question, much less an answer. “I need to be up. I’m not hurt.” An unnamed urgency drove me to the sick man. He ought to be dead. And others . . .
“Says she’s not hurt, lord,” said Ambrose, keeping me from tripping over my own feet. “But she won’t stay down.”
“Anne!” The flaxen-haired man beamed. “Saints’ grace to see you awake and whole, and basking in the embrace of this sturdy young cousin. That unidentified man there”—his widened eyes flicked to my sleeping father—“insists he will be perfectly well if he can but see the angel who holds him in her wings.”
Even in my empty state, his warnings were clear.
I touched Papa in passing, but sank to my knees beside the other sick man. I needed him to tell me what was missing.
He was coughing and shivering. No wonder that, as he was soaking wet. Pain had ground terrible lines in his thin face. Some deeper hurt had left its mark as well. His eyes were closed.
“We could use a physician’s skills just now,” whispered the swordsman in black . . . Ilario. “Alas, you surely know we found poor Roussel, what was left of him. And we know who did for him. Found this.” He picked up a leather mask and tossed it back to the ground.
Memories of the night trickled back . . . the blood on my hands and gown . . . Kajetan . . . the leather-faced Aspirant . . . “No! Roussel was the Aspirant.”
“Roussel!” I could not answer Ilario’s sputtering disbelief.
“Yes.” Why was it I wanted so much to weep? “We won. We stopped it.”
Though his chin rested heavy on his chest, the sick man’s hand—Duplais’ hand—reached for me.
I enfolded his thin, cold fingers. “You live,” I said softly.
He lifted his eyes, such an unfathomable gaze as to shiver my blood. “It would seem so.” A wan smile eased my disturbance. “Thanks to you and—”
Memory concussed head and heart. “Dante!”
“Where is the cursed villain?” called Ilario and de Santo, instantly alert.
But I was racing into the dark second circle and up the platform steps. I hammered on the trapdoor and wrenched at the recessed locking bolt.
“I’m here!” I called through the grate. “I passed out and they’ve come for us, and I’ve only just come out of it with a head like an empty wine vat. Portier lives. And my—the other victim lives . . . and, holy saints, why can I not get this open? Somebody help me! Tell me you’re all right.” I couldn’t hear him. Couldn’t feel him in the surging current of the aether.
It was Captain de Santo who located some kind of lever and snapped the bolt. I raced down the steep steps into the dank pit, Ambrose and Ilario on my heels, weapons drawn and calling for a light.
“Put those away,” I said, unable to see where to put my foot next. “It’s a friend down here.”
De Santo clattered down the steps behind us with a torch.
Dante was huddled in a corner of the cramped, filthy hole, shaking uncontrollably, his haggard face the color of ash. “I’m fine,” he said in a throaty whisper. “Just need my staff. Would appreciate them not puncturing me.”
He was not at all fine. Despite de Santo’s torchlight flooding the oubliette, Dante couldn’t name Ilario or Ambrose. Neither did he blink or squint or look directly at any of us, nor did he acknowledge my proffered hand as he struggled to his feet, his good hand groping the wall. A small, blackened pyramid sat in the center of the mud-grimed floor, spitting orange-red sparks. Veins of the same fiery hue floated in his dull, aimless eyes.
Magic was all about seeing, and Dante, whose lifeblood was magic, who believed light the finest of the Creator’s gifts, was blind.
CHAPTER 43
AFTERWARD
“He’s not one of them! He saved us all! He’ll give his parole until we can explain!”
Ignoring my repeated protests, soldiers dragged Dante out of the filthy pit and shoved him to his knees. They bound his hands, eyes, and mouth, and tied separate ropes to his waist. In a gnat’s breath they had him stumbling up the path to Ianne’s Hand surrounded by nervous soldiers bristling with weapons.
“You fools, he can’t see!” I yelled. “He can scarce walk. Lord Ilario, please. He protected her!”
Ilario, Ambrose, and de Santo had withdrawn as my goodfather’s men took charge. But a lift of Ilario’s chin sent Calvino de Santo charging up the hill. The former guard captain bulled his way through the ring of soldiers and grabbed Dante’s arm, ensuring, none too gently, that the mage stayed on his feet.
Dante had spoken not a word as they bound him. Perhaps he was incapable of speech. The mindstorm dribbled through my skull unchecked as if I were a gutter spout on the palace roof, my silent calls washed away like stray leaves.
The king rode out soon after. He commanded his men to treat Portier, his gooddaughter, and “the abused stranger” with utmost care, but he did not stop to speak with me. He had emerged from the azinheira bower carrying Eugenie, wrapped in blankets. He relinquished her only long enough to swing into the saddle and take her back.
“Lord chevalier, they must not harm—”
“Oh, my dearest Damoselle Anne!” Ilario rode up, transformed into his other self. “His Majesty asked me to assure you that he will consider all pleas as soon as we are sheltered at Barone Crief’s house. Saints’ glory, everyone so damaged and no one knowing who did what or making sense of anything. They tell me the barone’s house—not the most comfortable of houses, but more suitable than inns or village houses—has a sorcerer’s hole, as most do in this region. They’ll stow Mage Dante there until the events of this night are sorted out. My aide and I”—he nodded toward Ambrose, also mounted—“will ride ahead and ensure that all proceeds fairly. You three will be brought along more gently.”
The assurances built into his foolery calmed me only slightly. “He must not harm Dante, lord,” I said softly, gripping his boot. “You must believe me. Because of him, Portier lives and the lady is inviolate.”
Yet how could anyone possibly understand? Only two days had passed since my own eyes were opened, and Dante and I had been through events no one could imagine.
Ilario bent down from the saddle. “There’s been death enough this night,” he said softly. “Tomorrow we’ll see.”
He and Ambrose galloped off after the king’s party. They didn’t believe me.
With tender care, the remaining guardsmen bore Portier and my father on litters over the mountain’s shoulder and down to the road. They treated me as if I were made of spun glass. They likely thought I was mad.
THREE DAYS WE SPENT AT Barone Crief’s fortress near Voilline. That first morning I slept like the gray stones of the barone’s walls. I woke unrested, frantic, ready to strangle anyone who stood between me and the king. Fortunately they’d posted Ambrose at my door. He showed me Papa, who had been washed and fed the kitchen’s best broth, and now slept safely in a clean bed for the first time in five years. Philippe’s own field surgeons were attending Portier. The sorcerer remained confined in the sorcerer’s hole. Explaining the events of the night to our goodfather would fall to me, my brother told me, but only when I was ready. Awake and sensible.
Ambrose r
eturned me to my room, the apartments of some favored daughter. Dolls of porcelain, straw, and cloth sat on every shelf and surface of the room, peeped out of trunks, and lay in heaps on the floor, where they’d been swept from the bed when I was laid there. The pervasive dust suggested the girl was long married off, far from home. Silly that the sight made me weep.
The baroness kindly did not press me with her society, but sent clothes, breakfast, and a quiet chambermaid who supplied a welcome bath. I ate and took care with my toilette. Though hating the thought of Dante confined, I did not rush. By the time I sent word that I would speak to the king, I had gathered my thoughts and as much dignified calm as I possessed.
A full day it took to persuade the king not to execute Dante. Three times I repeated the story of how I’d come to learn of the mage’s long, terrible service as Philippe’s agente confide, unable to tell anyone of his purpose without ruining all chance of its success. Unwilling to reveal the secret of the tangle curse without Dante’s consent, I attributed all to Dante’s unique magic and my Mondragon blood. Yet even after I’d convinced my goodfather that Dante and I had worked together to stop the rite before it touched Eugenie or caused catastrophe, it enraged Philippe to think of the terrible things Dante had done.
And so he dragged me into the bowels of the barone’s palace. A guard unbolted a slotlike opening in a thick door, then left us. The reek of camphor from the darkness beyond the slot revived dread memories of the Bastionne Camarilla.
“You are on trial, mage,” said my goodfather. “I am Philippe de Savin-Journia, and I am your only judge this side of Heaven.”
“As I am not allowed to step out of this hole and stand my defense, this seems a waste of our time.” The voice from the dark was cold and dry as the iron band on the door.
I hated that I could not see him, and I hated common speech that could tell me so little of his state. He did not respond to my overtures in the aether.
“My gooddaughter has made your defense.”