by Carol Berg
I could not accept an entire reversal of my beliefs. Somewhere between his truth and mine must lie a connection I was too simple to recognize. But I could not deny him. Sainted ancestors, if all this were true, my mind could not encompass the possibilities of his talent.
I raised my head and sucked in the heaviness that weighed upon my spirit far more than the stone I had rolled off my knees. “If you agree to the terms of our partnership, I’ll show you what we face and what I propose for you to do about it.”
OF COURSE, DANTE ACCEPTED MY terms: absolute secrecy, loyalty to Sabria’s interests, and acknowledgment of my direction. These were not difficult oaths for him, I thought, a man who had secrets of his own. He clearly cared naught for the gold or political gain that could come from betrayal. More significant to my mind, this unpleasant and forbidding man had opened a small window into himself and shown me the one thing in the world he cared about—magic. What greater offering of trust exists than that? I liked him.
As night fell on Lady Susanna’s wild garden, I led Master Dante down the courtyard stair to the Conte Olivier’s iron-bound cell. “Fifteen days ago, I was brought down here, sworn to the same oath I asked of you, and told a strange story. One afternoon nigh on a year ago, the King of Sabria rode out to exercise with his household guard—the Guard Royale—as he does every tennight. He jousted, sparred with his favored partners, shot close targets with a pistol, and practiced with his longbow. His captain of the guard, a man who had stood at his back since he was crowned, challenged him to a wrestling match—a sport he much enjoyed in his youth. Though the king was soundly thumped, both he and the captain were laughing at the end of it.”
I unlocked the door with the key my royal cousin had entrusted to me. The arrow, the spyglass, and the coin lay on the stone table, exactly as the king and I had left them.
“As His Majesty rode from the field, this arrow struck his saddle, scarce missing the great vein in his thigh, to the peril of his life”—I locked the door behind us and hung the lamp from a wire loop above the table—“for, naturally, he had not donned his armor after the wrestling. The horse fell, but the king managed to leap free, unharmed.
“His guardsmen scoured the field, in a fury that so bold an attempt was made in their very midst. Two of them noted a man wearing their own livery drop his bow behind a tree. They attempted to question him, but discovered the man incapable of speech. Before they could alert their comrades, he hamstrung one of his captors and strangled the other. As he ran away, he dropped this spyglass. When he retrieved it, the hamstrung guardsman threw his ax, and fortunately or unfortunately as you may see it, felled the assailant before he himself died. The villain would have gone free if he’d kept running.”
Dante’s brow creased. He leaned his walking stick in the corner and squatted low to get a closer look. He did not touch the artifacts. “Go on.”
“The guard captain stripped the corpus in search of his identity, and instantly forbade any other to come near. The man’s arms and legs were scored and scabbed, bruising, scars, and cupping marks every centimetre. . . .”
“Transference,” said Dante softly, his two fingers tracing the line of the half-split arrow shaft without actually touching it. “The archer was a source—a mule. And the sorcerer who leeched the archer’s blood to grow his own power persuaded . . . induced . . . forced him to wield the nasty bit of weaponry. Did the arrow deliver poison?”
“The king assumes so, as the horse convulsed and died. Philippe immediately commanded his most loyal friend, Michel de Vernase, Conte Ruggiere, to investigate the assault. The conte ordered the horse and saddle burned in place as a precaution against a contaminating poison or a lingering spell-trap. With a mage implicated, Vernase-Ruggiere chose not to call in a practitioner to examine the arrow.”
“But you’ve looked at it.”
“I detect no extant enchantment, only a strong magical residue. But I’ve no skill to analyze it.”
He took no note of my admission. “I’d guess the aristo lackwit had the assassin-mule’s corpse burnt, as well.”
“They could not allow word to get out.” A hint that an unknown mage was practicing blood transference would send blood families running to their fortresses, unraveling two centuries of concord between factions. “The conte immediately arrested the guard captain, for on any other exercise day, the king would not have shed his armor before leaving the practice field. And there the problem becomes infinitely more complex.”
The mage glanced up at me, sharp-eyed. “Could it be the queen set the captain to propose the grapple?”
No longer amazed at his quickness, I nodded. “There is a history of strain between our liege and his wife—their marriage when she was widowed so young, her failure to birth a living heir since their first boy died, disagreements over the role of sorcery in their aligned households, and more, I think, that he did not tell me. His own counselors have long pressured him to set her aside. Yet he holds determined faith in her innocence and would not . . . and will not . . . have her questioned.”
“So what is the coin?”
“Likely nothing,” I said, “though you’ll see it is a double strike. Some people consider a two-faced coin lucky. The conte found it in the mule’s jerkin, the sole item he carried. I sensed no enchantment on it, yet—” I could not explain the sensation that had come over me when I’d first held the coin. It was as if I’d been thrown into a plummeting waterfall and emerged to the nauseating certainty that my body had been turned wrong side out or hung up by my feet, and all the blood rushed to my head. “There is a strangeness about it.”
“The noble investigator has no theories?”
And so to the next element of the mystery. “A month after the attempt, Michel de Vernase wrote a letter to the king stating he’d found new evidence and hoped to have a solid case before too many more days passed. He said he planned ‘a second visit to Collegia Seravain.’ No one has seen or heard from him since.”
“Mayhap he found the villain he was hunting.” Dante’s attention shifted to the spyglass. “And this?”
I swallowed hard and glared at the instrument, its tarnished surface gleaming dully in the light. It seemed wrong that such a fine invention, a marvel not so many years ago, could so strike my heart with dread.
“Naught is known of its origin or purpose. But when you sight through it, you’ll understand why our dilemma is so much more than marital disaffection, more even than the revival of such evil practice as blood transference. And you’ll see why we need a talented mage to help unravel this mystery.” The memory of my own looking made me wish to creep into a cave and hide.
Dante drew his fingers along the artifact’s tarnished case and around each of its knurled grips. He brushed dust and damp from the lenses, and while bracing it awkwardly with his scarred right fingers, he examined its construction, expanding and collapsing its length and twisting the grips.
“This was not expertly made,” he said. “Its mechanisms are unbalanced, its material impure.” He glanced up. “This takes no magic to learn, if you’re wondering, but only the teaching of a skilled instrument maker. But the making shapes its keirna, and it’s nae possible to comprehend keirna without understanding function and composition.”
Stepping back from the light, he balanced the brass instrument in the claw of his ruined hand and peered through the eyepiece. The color drained from his cheeks as it surely had from mine. He set the instrument gingerly upon the stone table and snatched his hands away, breath rapid, lips compressed, his eyes squeezed tight as if a dagger had pierced his skull.
Dante did not tell me what he’d seen. But as we locked the cell door, I guessed that he, too, had glimpsed a scene beyond this life—a scene not even the most sophisticated enchantments should be able to show us.
“The Veil teachings have never made sense to me,” he said. “Why would a god who bothers to create living persons suddenly decide to ship them off someplace worse than this life when they’re de
ad, all in hopes of some heaven that no one can describe? If I have to depend on my kin or some benevolent stranger to get me through ten gates to a paradise that might or might not be better than this, I might as well give up right now. Dead is dead, or so I’ve claimed. . . .”
I disliked such bluntness. In my youth I had accepted what I’d been taught at the temple: that the Blood Wars had brought humankind to such a state of depravity that the Pantokrator had altered his creation, setting the bleak and treacherous Ixtador between the Veil and Heaven. Those souls who journeyed the trackless desolation and passed Ixtador’s Ten Gates would be well purified, worthy of the Pantokrator’s glory. Those who failed would be left for the Souleater to devour on the last day of the world.
Unfortunately the dead could do little to further their own cause. The honor and virtuous deeds of the family left behind must provide the strength and endurance for a soul’s journey. As I came to see that my weak family connections were unlikely to provide much support for Ixtador’s trials, and that my prospects for improving the situation were exceedingly poor, I had shoved such concerns to the back of my mind, unwilling to relinquish either hope or belief. The spyglass insisted I confront the issue.
The mage rubbed the back of his neck tiredly and tugged at his silver collar again. “But then we must ask what is this devilish glass? Gods, if you think I can answer that for you, you’ve less wit than that rock in the garden. It would take a deal of study. Experimentation. So that’s the job, is it? To find out the use of these things. Or, I suppose, it’s truly to tell your employer, who is the king, I’m guessing, and not his treacherous wife”—he paused and waited; I nodded and shoved open the outer cell block door—“what sorcerer in this blighted kingdom could create such enchantments and why an assassin—a voiceless mule—would carry them.” He ground the heel of his staff into the stone. “Did anyone see the mule use the glass?”
“Not that we know.”
“His Dimwit Majesty ought to question his queen. I could do that for him.”
I had no doubt he could. His rumbling undertone shook me like the earth tremors I’d felt when I was a boy, on the day a godshaking had razed the city of Catram eight hundred kilometres away.
“Yes, the king wants to know who’s responsible for transference and attempted murder,” I said. “He wants his queen exonerated. He wants to know how this instrument can show him a sixteen-year-old battlefield disgorging its dead men, many of whom he knows, into a wilderness that perfectly fits every description of Ixtador Beyond the Veil. And he very much desires to know what’s become of Michel de Vernase. Though he’s received no demand for ransom or favor in exchange for Michel’s life, he refuses to accept that his friend is dead.”
We started up the dungeon stair.
“Beyond all that lies his duty to Sabria. The king believes magic is dying, and he bids it good riddance. He sees it as a chain that binds us to superstition and causes us to descend into myth-fed savagery such as the Blood Wars. This event tells him that someone is attempting exactly that, seeking power of such magnitude as to touch the demesne of the dead. But for what purpose? As Sabria’s protector, he must understand what’s being done and by whom and why. He doesn’t trust the Camarilla . . . the prefects . . . any mage . . . knowing how they resent him.”
“But for some reason he trusts you, who lives and works among them. You’re his spy.”
“I prefer the title agente confide.” It bore a certain gentility; less resonances of ugly execution. “As it happens, I am His Majesty’s distant kinsman—fortunately for you, very distant, so I’ll not take exception to your loose-tongued name calling. Though we’d never met until a half month ago, my cousin subscribes to the old virtues in the matter of family, thus has charged me to protect his life and search out the answers he needs. He believed I was—”
Again came the uncomfortable confession. Nine years previous, Master Kajetan had first forced me to admit failure aloud. As my mentor, he had insisted I speak the verdict to my parents, else I would be tempted to live forever with a delusion. My father, who had ever lived in his own delusions, had taken umbrage. I still wore the scars—within and without. The ugly episode had left me shy of discussing my paucity of talent.
Dante waited. I inhaled deeply. “As you judge correctly, Master, I cannot even begin to unravel such magic. Though I have informed the king of my lacks, he insists he trusts me to solve his mystery. As for the spying—well, for that we must include the chevalier in our conversation. Are you willing to go on, Master Dante? It is time for yea or nay, in or out.”
The lamplight scarce touched the bottomless well of the descending stair, and the sinewy, black-haired mage with the unsettling gaze might have been Dimios himself, returning to the world of light for his annual visit, the blighted hand the manifest evidence of his corruption. He halted just below me.
“I doubted you could present me a mystery that I would take on—a librarian with self-loathing so exposed as to make him bold. But I don’t like events that contradict my view of the world. So, go on, tell me the rest.”
I took that as a yea.
CHAPTER THREE
36 TRINE 61 DAYS UNTIL THE ANNIVERSARY
I lario’s lanky frame sprawled like a creeping vine over an armchair at Lady Susanna’s card table. He was spinning his crocodile charm above his head like a pinwheel, occasionally rattling a crystal-globed lamp or clinking his wineglass. The lady herself, a serene, intelligent beauty with the most luxuriant black hair I had ever seen, laid down her fan of cards when I tapped on the open door. She was a gracious hostess indeed to tolerate Ilario for more than a tennight without the least ripple of aggravation.
“Pardon, my lady,” I said, bowing. “I’m sorry to steal your company. Chevalier, you wished to speak to our visitor. . . .”
“No matter,” said Susanna, shifting a richly colored shawl to her shoulders as she rose. Her smile illumined her large eyes and the deep cinnamon glow of her complexion. “I am a hopeless night bird. My husband is long to bed, and I have teased poor Ilario into one game too many in search of evening’s amusement. Though he carries the most perfect tenor, he will sing only when we play at cards. Alas, he seems to have run out of cheerful ditties.”
Indolence abandoned, Ilario contracted his spread limbs and slithered to the edge of his chair, peering curiously through the empty doorway behind me. “Your exceptional loveliness demands excellence, dear lady, a responsibility that weighs heavy on my bardic soul. My supply of drivel is endless; my supply of poetry not so, especially when awaiting a visit from a fiend. My companion Portier, as you see, is of a depressive cast of mind, but this fellow who’s come to visit us makes Portier appear but a frippery. Where is the devilish visitor, good curator?”
“He awaits us in the wild garden,” I said.
“You must persuade him to come inside,” said the lady. “The night closes very dark. If he prefers more privacy, Hanea will open the guesthouse.”
Ilario got out an answer more quickly than I. “Lovely Susanna, I fear indelible bruises on your innocent soul must result were his company forced upon you.”
Lady Susanna laughed, a throaty ripple that issued from a deep center, and then kissed the fop on his flaxen head. “Sweet Ilario, innocent? Me? You must quit all indulgence in wine. I’ll leave you to your fiendish visitor, but rest assured, naught can bruise my soul. I am well hardened.”
She had scarce vanished, when she poked her head back around the doorjamb, her eyes glimmering with pleasure. “One matter of interest, Sonjeur de Duplais. Our son, Edmond, returns home tomorrow on leave from his posting in the south. You needn’t fear; he is reliable and discreet. Yet I would not have him . . . compromised . . . by awkward situations. You understand.”
She didn’t wait for confirmation, but glided out of sight in a whisper of silk. Ilario gazed after her, as if admiring the afterglow such a luminary must leave behind. “Is any woman so much a vision of Heaven’s angels? How fortune leads us. . . .” Th
en he lifted his head abruptly. “I could have had her, you know. She wasn’t highborn. Even an offside pedigree such as mine would have raised her up. Yes, she’s a few years older, but egad . . . this fossil she’s got instead! Eugenie says Conte Olivier was His Majesty’s first commander. Taught him everything about leading troops and bedding down in muck and staying on his feet in a battle. He was Soren’s first commander, too, but I doubt he taught the shitheel much. Soren believed he knew everything already.”
Eugenie de Sylvae—Ilario’s half sister—had been but a child when wed to King Soren, Philippe’s predecessor and an even more distant cousin of mine. When Soren fell in a miscalculated raid on the witchlords of Kadr, he had not yet bedded the girl, much less begat an heir. Through a happenstance of Sabrian custom, my fifteenth cousin, a wild young duc entirely unprepared for the throne, had inherited the demesne of Sabria. To preclude any dispute of his position, Philippe had immediately wed Soren’s child widow, inheriting her virginity, the support of her powerful relatives, and her bastard half brother, Ilario. My overly sentimental mother had insisted that political necessity had grown into a true love match between Philippe and Eugenie—despite the burden of the ridiculous half brother. But who could say what love meant, especially in such rarified circles? I doubted my mother knew.
“Thanks be, young Edmond got his mother’s wit as well as her looks,” mused Ilario. “Old Olivier has the cleverness of a turnip in anything but war making and wife picking.”
Feeling the press of time, I dropped my voice. “I’ve judged that Mage Dante’s talents will . . . suffice. And he agrees that the level of magic the glass signifies is extraordinary.”
Ilario bobbed his fair head and clapped his hands. “Excellent, Portier. I knew he would work out.” As if he’d thought of it. “Go to it.”
“If we are to be partner agentes, the three of us must agree on our next steps.”
He flared his straight nose and stretched his long saffron-colored legs in front of him. “Heaven’s messengers, I near piss myself when he glares at me, and these are my favorite hose.”