by Carol Berg
My appreciation for the lady had increased yet again after I had burst in upon her the previous night, begging her to release me from Dante’s service. I had not needed to feign awe at his magics, and my outrage at Ophelie’s fate had sufficed for trembling.
“But, Portier, encased in lead!” He stretched his long legs straight out and gawked at his elegant boots. “You would be crippled forever! Well, I suppose you might drag your feet one by one, unless”—a sharp inhale signaled a new imagining—“he might encase them both in one block. You would have to be hauled about in a barrow!”
“He never would have done it, lord,” I said, halfway between exasperation and amusement. “Dante wanted to make Conte Bianci’s men forget that he had not entered through the outer door. The story of his outburst has spread throughout the palace and everyone is terrified and in awe of his magic. Just as we wish.”
Certainly my spirit yet stung with the memory of Dante’s enchantment. The thrill of power had raged through the deadhouse foyer like untamed lightning, filling the emptiness that gaped inside me as the ocean fills a sea cave.
“Truly, he did well. I’ve been freed to serve you, yet I’ve a perfect excuse to come and go in his chambers.”
“Bless the Saints Awaiting, I did not see the poor girl.” Ilario shuddered dramatically. “I would surely dream of it over and again.”
After a sleepless night hearkening to Ophelie’s pleas for vengeance, I could not argue. “Dante needs the weapon that killed her. But I’ve no idea what might have been done with it and no excuse to inquire. You do understand the questions surrounding the girl’s death, Chevalier?”
“Certainly I understand,” he said, springing from the wall as gracefully as a dancer. “I have a mind, after all, Portier.”
“I didn’t mean to imply—”
“Indeed you did. I’m not wholly unaware of what’s said. No one credits that a gentleman who understands fashion and proper manners and refuses to dwell on upsetting matters in the presence of ladies can also be quite serious and scholarly.” He dabbed at his hands and dusted the grit from his white hose with a lace kerchief, before tucking it into his sleeve. “The orchard, you say? I suggest that if we wish to know about the weapon, we speak to Audric de Neville. Would the present moment suit, or must you hurry off to attend to my trivial concerns or your own more sober ones?”
He strutted across the flower-filled yard toward an open gate without waiting for my answer, waving one hand as if he were an orator in the public forum. “I believe I shall enjoy having a private secretary. I have decided to host an exposition. How I love that word! Exposition. It sounds delightfully modern and studious. I daresay such a display shall reverse this canard that has been spread about my sobriety. You shall make all the arrangements. . . .”
“But we’ve more pressing—?” As he vanished into the larger garden beyond the gate, my thoughts gummed like feathers in pine sap. I hurried after him.
Only after we had traversed the flower garden, innumerable courtyards and corridors, three kitchens and a vast kitchen garden, and descended a short slope toward a forested bend of the great palace wall did Ilario’s long legs slow enough to allow me to ask who was Audric de Neville. Yet by then the pungent scents of lemon and almond blossoms rising from ordered ranks of trees left the question unnecessary. A house knight had found Ophelie dead in an orchard.
The red-liveried chevalier was sleeping, back against the sun-drenched wall, jaw dropped in the way of the very old. His perfectly shined black boots stuck out in front of him as if he’d folded in the middle and sat straight down from standing guard. A pink almond blossom petal had settled on his white hair.
“He’s the only knight in Castelle Escalon posted in an orchard,” Ilario confided. “A noble spirit and proper chevalier. Philippe assigned him to guard this corner of the wall for as long as he chooses to serve. Lamentably, his attention doesn’t last so long as it once did.”
Ilario waved me forward and propped his knee on an empty crate left among the unbloomed pomegranate trees.
“Divine grace, Chevalier Audric,” I said as I crossed the grassy strip paralleling the wall.
The old knight jerked and snorted and struggled to his feet, watery yellow eyes blinking rapidly. “Who comes?”
I exposed my hand and bowed. “Portier de Duplais. I’ve come about the dead girl found here. The mule.”
“Demon hand! Souleater’s servant!” His rapier was in hand with a speed entirely unlikely for a man his age, and his face wore the wrath of the Pantokrator casting out Dimios at the founding of the world. “I’ll see you dead—I’ll—Ah!”
Breathing hard as if he’d run the length and breadth of his orchard post, the old man choked back the sentiments that sudden waking had startled out of him.
“I am the girl’s friend,” I said, “her mourner, rather. My employer, a kindly man horrified by this tale, has ordered me to identify the girl and contact her family.”
“Don’t know aught. How could I? Found her dead.” His hands trembled so violently, his blade hummed. As the emotion trying to escape him so belied this mumbled answer, I did not believe him in the least.
“We must tell her family how she died, what weapon finished her, so they might speed her way through Ixtador’s gates.” My bare hand stilled his blade. “ ’Twill be a mercy to all. Tell us, Chevalier.”
As quickly as he’d drawn his weapon, the old man sagged to his knees. Sword dropped to the emerald grass, he crossed his arms and gripped his shoulders as if to keep his heart from flying out of his breast. “She begged me. Soon as she found the wall too steep to climb. Wild, she was. Could scarce speak and most of it babbling nonsense. But she shed no tears. Not a one. I’m damned forever to have done it, though she promised to carry word to the saints to defend me.”
“Damned? But you didn’t—” I shook off a grotesque image of the old man leeching her. It wasn’t leeching he spoke of. “You found her alive. What did she tell you?”
“Claimed a devil woman bled her. Claimed the two forced her to terrible sin. To treason and murder. To the betrayal of a good man. Yet she’d no strength to save herself. She pawed at me. Tore at me. Begged on her knees and pressed the tip to her breast. Mad, as if the Souleater himself had gnawed her reason. I couldna refuse her. Do ye see that? I had to save her.”
Dread truth stared me in the face yet again, as Audric uncrossed his arms and lifted his rapier on open palms.
Suicide. The old chevalier’s rapier might have pierced her breast, but the Pantokrator, the all-seeing Judge, would know she had driven him to it. What sin could frighten her more than traversing the Veil corrupt—a mule who had sought her own death? Ixtador’s gates would be barred to her.
I swallowed bile and accusation. “A name, Chevalier. In all this, did she speak a name?”
“Only near the end. She held my hand and spake it over and over in the midst of her weeping, so’s I didn’t know what to make of it. Michel . . . captured . . . betrayed . . . Altevierre . . . save me . . . Over and over. Michel . . . captured . . . betrayed . . . Altevierre . . . save me . . . Michel . . .”
Michel de Vernase . . . Our first word of Philippe’s lost investigator. My blood raced.
Half-crazed with shame and guilt too long suppressed, the old knight poured out his story. It illumined little. He could provide no clue to assassination plots; no hint as to Michel de Vernase’s fate; no identification of Ophelie’s captors beyond the devil woman and the vague two; no idea what the word Altevierre referred to, and yes, it might have been something other, but his hearing was so cursed feeble. . . .
The Guard Royale had not questioned the bloodied poniard Audric had left with the girl as if she’d fallen on it. Audric had told no one that he’d found Ophelie living. The deception had likely saved his life.
We plied the old knight with valerian tea from the opaline flask Ilario carried for his digestion. Now that the boil of his shame had been lanced, Audric vowed to perpetuate his
silence. To soothe his conscience, I suggested he sanctify a tessila for the mysterious girl. “If she sought to avoid forced sin, then perhaps her soul was not entirely expended in unholy magic. Though you’re not blood kin, your deed, for good or ill, has surely bound you to her fate.”
Audric, eased by that consideration or the valerian or both, insisted on remaining at his post.
I was near dancing with urgency. We were closing on information of importance. Michel de Vernase had vanished nigh a year ago and nothing had been heard of him, so Philippe had told me. No sightings. No demands. Everything had pointed to his death. And Ophelie had come to Audric from inside the castle walls, as Dante had surmised.
“Where could these mages hold secret prisoners?” I demanded, once a swath of trees separated Ilario and me from the knight. “If Ophelie and Michel were held prisoner together, it must be somewhere close.” Perhaps he is still there, I dared not say aloud. Perhaps he is in the same state as Ophelie.
Ilario blotted his forehead, then wagged the knotted kerchief northward. An ancient blocklike keep squatted atop a low mound near the northern wall like a wart upon Castelle Escolan’s warm yellow face. “Eugenie and I used to play in the old dungeons. Yet watchmen wander in from time to time, so you couldn’t keep a secret prisoner.” He swiveled westward toward the river. “Then there’s the Spindle. . . .”
“Spindle Prison is outside the walls, and Ophelie didn’t row a boat to get away. She was held here at the palace. A place the mages could come and go unremarked, with thick walls or well out of the common way. They’d not want anyone to hear what was going on.” Cries for help. Pleading, as a child’s blood was drained away. Father Creator, forgive.
Ilario pivoted full circle, mumbling the merits and demerits of various possibilities as his gaze traversed kitchen buildings, courtyard walls, guard towers; nurseries, toolsheds, and stables; deadhouse, swan garden, and the marble-columned temple minor. His brow lifted and smoothed. “There,” he declared with the certainty of a man choosing white bread over brown.
I summoned patience. “The temple? But there’s no—”
“The royal crypt lies underneath,” he said, setting off at a brisk pace. “The King’s Gate is kept locked until a sovereign dies, is crowned, or takes a notion to alter the name of his heir. But Eugenie found another way down.” He shuddered dramatically. “She wanted to explore the secret chambers. She forced me to go. Called me a ninny, but I kept imagining those fifty kings, sitting in their niches in the dark, rotting.”
As we crossed the sweltering gardens, his pace slowed and he lowered his voice. “Michel could not be used as a mule, you know. He’s as common as a barnyard—most certainly not of the blood. And he despises sorcery. Cursed preachy about it, too. Stubborn as the pox.”
“A perfect hostage, however,” I said, matching his quiet voice. “The king’s closest friend.”
“True enough.” Ilario shrugged and aimed his unfocused eyes in the direction of the sun-washed temple roof. “They served together for years. Drank one another’s wine and covered one another’s sins. Long before anyone knew Philippe was Soren’s heir, Michel took a sword strike for Philippe that near cost his arm. Philippe stood goodfather to Michel’s children, and Michel did the same for Prince Desmond, angels guide the poor dead mite.”
A white stone chip appeared in Ilario’s hand. He touched the spall to his heart, forehead, and lips, before returning it to the silk pouch at his waist, scarce interrupting his commentary.
“Philippe’s first act when crowned was to name Michel his First Counselor, displacing old Baldwin whose family had held the office since the Founding. Then he granted Michel the Ruggiere demesne that’s never been held by less than royal kin, and without so much as consulting its overlord. Neither move was at all fitting. Geni’s always felt the two of them were closer—” Ilario swallowed the sentiment, jerked the string closure on his spall pouch, and angled across the temple lawn.
It struck me as no surprise that a friendship founded on youth and war might bloom more intimate than a marriage founded on political necessity. But the tenor of Ilario’s words gave me pause, serious as they were, and threaded with such profound dislike. I observed him closely.
Eyeing me sidewise, he wrinkled his mouth like a dried currant. “Well, all right. You’ve caught me out. Michel de Vernase and I get along like cats and fish. He is a brute and a bully and has not the least sense of fashion or manners or respect. He usurps places that are not his. But I’d not wish that”—he jerked his head in the direction whence we’d just come—“on anyone.”
Nor would I. Nonetheless, I had been proceeding on the assumption that Michel de Vernase’s disappearance had resulted solely from his position as investigator, that the king’s regard for his friend had somehow made Michel’s own character unimportant. A lesson, Portier: Judge each player objectively, individually, and entirely.
“Who is the overlord of the Ruggiere demesne?”
Ilario snapped his head around. “Dumont, of course. The Duc de Aubine.” He narrowed his eyes. “No, no, Portier, quiet your nefarious imaginings. Dumont is not at all your man. He cares for naught but his birds. Now, back when Philippe granted Ruggiere to Michel, the demesne was held by Dumont’s grandfather, who was as friendly as a rabid dog. He called the grant theft. If not for my foster mother, the old devil would have hauled Michel out of Ruggiere naked and bound in thorn ropes.”
Comprehension required some wrestling with bloodlines and inheritance. King Soren had married Eugenie de Sylvae when she was but a child, and his mother, Lady Antonia, had fostered Eugenie and her half brother, Ilario, after their parents died in a fire. “So Lady Antonia persuaded her father, the old duc of Aubine, not to fight Philippe’s grant to Michel?”
“Antonia is very persuasive. And she believes a king can grant what he wills. It helped that the slavering old hound doted on her until the day he died choking on an olive.” Ilario waved his hand dismissively. “As for the present duc—Dumont—I promise you he doesn’t care who holds his demesnes unless they’ve beaks and feathers. Michel de Vernase earned plenty of enemies elsewhere.”
A serving man was sweeping the wide, shallow steps of the temple portico as we approached. A few ladies stood in the breezy shade of the pediment, as triumphant angels, painted scarlet, emerald, and gold, bent down from the facade as if to eavesdrop on their gossip.
Ilario bowed gracefully to the women as he tripped lightly up the steps and crossed the portico. As I entered the dim vestibule, he was disappearing, not into the light-filled vastness of the temple nave, but through a lesser doorway on the left. “It’s far too long since I venerated my father’s tomb,” he was declaiming loudly. “I’ve been thinking it requires a new offering urn. You must arrange for it, secretary.”
Two veiled women trudged past us. We hurried down the broad passage between a wall of carved memorial stones and a rank of increasingly elaborate sarcophagi. Midway down the aisle, Ilario’s closed fingers touched his lips, then brushed a vault of rosy marble capped with the sculpted figure of a Knight of Sabria.
We halted in a memorial bay at the farthest end of the aisle. With a glance back down the aisle—now deserted—Ilario ducked under the bay’s gilded rail and dodged behind a massive carving of some saintly king. I followed.
The dark alcove stank of musty wine and ancient incense. “Make us a light,” Ilario said, from somewhere ahead of me. “Twiddle your fingers or whatever you sorcerers do.”
“Twiddle . . .” My cheeks heated. Any more and they’d provide flames enough to see by.
I retreated past the effigy and the rail, returning moments later with a votive lamp from some marquesa’s tomb hidden under my cloak. “This will have to do.”
In the first moment I uncovered the lamp, I caught Ilario frowning at me. “Well, I assumed you could do something magical.”
He dropped to his knees and probed the latch with a dainty knife more suited to picking teeth than breaking locks. Twice
he fumbled and dropped the implement with a clatter. “Blast!” he said. “This used to be easier.”
“Let me try,” I said, trading him the lamp for the knife.
“This is the Tetrarch’s Gate,” Ilario whispered over my shoulder. “On coronation day, the new sovereign has to go down to the crypt to scribe the name of his heir. He uses the King’s Gate—behind the font in the temple nave. A tetrarch is supposed to greet the new king down below in the name of all the dead kings, but it appears rude if he bullies past to descend first. So, instead, he slips aside and goes down this way.”
In a moment’s whimsy, I attempted a simple spell I’d used with some success when a child—a marvel that had sparked my magical ambitions. I broke off a thread dangling from the hem of my doublet. Twisting the thread about the knife blade and touching the latch with the knife, I blew upon their intersection—adding air to the balance of wood and metal—and infused the simple spell with my will. Not the least trickle of power cooled my veins. Idiot.
I twisted the handle and yanked on the door in frustration. To my astonishment, it flew open.
“Well done!” said Ilario, beaming.
“It was already unlocked,” I snapped, angered at my inability to let go of what was ended.
“Impossible. No one ever goes down here. And this gate is always latched from the inside.”
Impossible. Always. Dangerous words for an investigator. “Perhaps Ophelie escaped this way,” I said.
Ilario blanched, blew a shaky breath, and motioned me through the opening. We closed the door softly and tiptoed down a spiraled stair. At the end of a downsloping passage lay a cavernous vault, hewn from the great rock underlying Castelle Escalon.
Massive columns incised with Fassid symbols, centuries older than the temple they supported, crowded the vast chamber. Censers of tarnished silver and brass dangled from the damp-stained ceiling like old moss, glittering and fading in our lamplight as we threaded a path between them. Every breath reeked of old incense, old stone, and old earth.