by Carol Berg
The Rotunda, a remnant of a pre-Sabrian temple, was a gloomy space, encircled with alternating colonnades and bays. The central dome, some fifty metres above the floor, sat on a ring of arched windows that splashed daylight on its mosaic adornment. Below that circle of light, the thick walls were pierced with only a few small windows, shaped like four petaled flowers. As these were mostly tucked behind the east and west colonnades or in the two largest half-domed bays on the north and south, the space required lamplight even in the day. It would serve perfectly for the day’s culminating events.
On the dais installed in the southern bay, Lucan de Calabria, a puffy, tart-tongued little astronomer, screeched at four laborers shifting a painted screen onto its mark twenty metres from one of the four-lobed windows. In between the window and the screen, two assistants arranged a table on which Lucan’s partner, the lean, elegant Aya de Gerson, had set up an apparatus of prisms and lenses.
“Have you everything you need, gentlemen?” I said, one eye on the servants setting out rows of chairs, the other on the west doors where Philippe would arrive. Attendants plumped the cushions in an ornate chair set in the cordoned-off bay reserved for the royal party.
Despite de Calabria’s streaming oaths and insults, he asserted the optical display was in good order. Behind the dais, Mage Orviene knelt on the floor, pawing through a leather box. “Dear me,” he said in answer to my query, “I’m not sure I have the exact weight of silver for my new work.”
“Perhaps Master Dante could provide it,” I said, though I’d not seen Dante since dawn and was not about to risk his wrath for Orviene’s benefit.
“No, no, no need for that. Once the astronomers have had their fun, I’ll just lay out two enclosures. If the one doesn’t suffice, I can use the reserve.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Perhaps we’ll have rain here in the Rotunda instead of starshine!”
As caelomancy was his specialty, Orviene had lamented that we’d confined the Exposition indoors. But he’d promised to come up with something enjoyable, as long as he could offer his exhibition before Dante’s. “The fellow does some clever work. Especially if he’s in one of his testy moods. All fire and lightning, even if there’s no substance behind it. Anything that follows will seem dull, no matter if it’s restringing the Archer’s bow in the vault of Heaven!”
I was astonished that Orviene considered Dante’s work to lack substance. How could any trained practitioner fail to recognize such soul-stirring power? Perhaps the agreeable Orviene, who had never reached master’s rank, merely suffered a tot of jealousy. I certainly did.
As merchants, officers, minor officials, and guildsmen flowed out of the room in a noisy, sweaty stream, the glittering nobility and highest-ranking academics flowed in. The favored few occupied the rows of velvet chairs between the dais and the pendulum, while the rest stood round the sides of the cordoned-off pendulum circle and behind it. I stood back to the wall, a quarter way around from the dais, on line with the last row of chairs.
I should have been pleased. What commentary I’d heard on the day’s exhibition had been favorable. To direct such a complexity of people and movement, and to forward a joint venture of the Camarilla and the mundane branches of learning was no small accomplishment for a reclusive librarian. Philippe’s guards were on alert for every kind of physical attack we could anticipate, and despite his erratic behaviors, I believed Dante would hold to his word and guard against threatening spellwork. Please the god, Maura could be free by morning.
Yet my conviction that this was the day of reckoning only grew. Ophelie and Gruchin and the rest of the Aspirant’s victims cried out in my soul, hauntings as vivid as Calvino de Santo’s spectre. Where was Edmond de Roble? Where was Michel de Vernase, and what evidence of his discoveries might Edmond bring?
As if in answer to my worries, Dante strolled into the Rotunda from the Hall. Staff resting in the crook of his arm, expression composed, he did not deign to notice the guests vacating the space around him as he positioned himself along the wall opposite me.
The west doors swung open and five royal heralds marched forward. The assembly fell quiet. The piercing brilliance of trumpets brought everyone to their feet. Philippe strode into the Rotunda, his First Counselor, Lord Baldwin, just behind, and third . . . Ilario.
Despite all, I smiled. Well done, cousin. Few observers would attach any accolade to Ilario for the festival’s success. His day’s inanities could only reinforce the general opinion of him. But for Philippe to acknowledge him in such fashion honored the Sylvae family, especially Eugenie, whose fondness for her fool of a half brother was well-known. Ilario would be well satisfied.
The king strolled down the center aisle, the guests bowing or dipping a knee as he passed. He touched one or another on the shoulder or offered a word of greeting. He stopped for a moment to speak with his pendulum engineer, who had just started the shimmering bob swinging again. After so many hours, its arc had decayed.
The Camarilla prefects sat near the front. Kajetan, taller than his fellows, caught sight of me and raised a hand in greeting. Though I had spotted his silver hair in the Hall that the morning, I had determinedly avoided him. We had not spoken since my letter accusing Gaetana, which meant he would have questions I was not prepared to answer. Protocol would prevent him sharing anything he’d learned from the inquisitors—whether about Gaetana or Dante. I smiled and shrugged, waving helplessly at the mob separating us.
Philippe’s return to the dais took him past the seven prefects. They inclined their heads in guarded respect, and he spoke a cordial word to each. The king took his seat without addressing the assembly. That did not surprise me. He was likely stretched tight as his pendulum wire.
And so we began. The lamps in the Rotunda dimmed, leaving the gray air lit by a single window to the right of the dais. Without fanfare, de Gerson, the eloquent, aristocratic royal astronomer, began his presentation on the nature of light. He’d gotten through no more than a few sentences, when his partner, Lucan, objected vociferously, beginning a mock debate. Lucan assumed the role of Massilion, the classical philosopher who had asserted that white light was the purest of the Pantokrator’s creations and poured down like liquid from the sun, as it clearly leaked around corners and fell into holes shielded from the sun’s face.
De Gerson pronounced that light moved through the aether in straight lines and that colors hid inside it. To Lucan’s raucous disdain, he covered the four-lobed window behind their display, and a hole pierced in the screen focused a thin beam of afternoon sunlight through his faceted crystal. The crowd, caught up in their spirited performance, laughed and clapped as the white beam split into a rainbow.
As the two men bantered, my gaze swept the Rotunda. Archers roamed the gallery that circled above us. Guards flanked every door, and three swordsmen stood discreetly behind Philippe’s chair.
Lucan, with sly braggadocio, moved a second optical apparatus into place on the long table, while loudly proclaiming that a rainbow was itself one color of light, created by the prism. De Gerson, clever and patient, refuted Lucan’s assertion by sliding a slotted board across the spreading rainbow and opening one slot. As a solitary red beam struck the Rotunda wall, people clapped appreciatively. And when he moved the second prism into place and his beam remained red, rather than splitting into another rainbow, onlookers popped from their seats to join the cheers.
Across the Rotunda, Dante stiffened and slid his staff into one hand. The mage’s eyes did not rove. His attention, his stillness, his posture, focused entirely inward as they had on the Swan. What did he perceive? The optics exhibition involved no magic. I sensed nothing.
The audience murmured and applauded as Lucan, now convinced, closed one slot and opened the next, replacing the red beam with an orange one . . .
Deciding to join the mage, I slipped rearward past a shallow bay and a section of colonnade.
. . . then yellow . . .
I set out across the Rotunda’s center, squeezing between
the last row of chairs and the roped stanchions that enclosed the pendulum circle.
. . . then green . . .
I had reached some halfway across the row, when Dante’s chin came up sharply and his dark gaze met mine. He pushed through the standing courtiers, who paid him no mind. They were laughing as Lucan’s slots opened and closed and the beam shifted to blue and then to violet. The pendulum swung, stirring the air. Fouled air. Where? Where?
A man at my elbow snorted, as if he’d fallen asleep, and a woman laughed brashly. Beneath the clapping and laughter, a girl’s voice nearby admonished someone named Cato to sit properly.
I rotated slowly, craning my neck, desperate to see.
Darkness swallowed Aya de Gerson’s violet beam. Lucan must have shuttered the slot in the window screen at the same time, as the entire Rotunda went black as a tar pit. The fouled air shifted as the pendulum swung again, but my eyes refused to accommodate the darkness, no matter how much I blinked or gouged them. It was as if the world had been devoured by the Norgands’ Whale of the Beginnings, and I would have thought the guests had vanished with it, save I could yet hear them laughing, clapping, murmuring. In no wise should the room be so dark. Outdoors the sun was yet westering, and we’d left lamps by the doors.
A clatter and a curse, and I could see again. De Gerson was scratching his head, while Lucan straightened the prism apparatus, tumbled over on the table—both men far from their window screen. And Dante . . .
I spun. Dante had vaulted the silk ropes and was darting past the plane of the pendulum toward the center of the great circle and an object that hadn’t been there before the moment’s darkness.
In the span of an eye blink, I raced to join him. Purple cloth . . . wrapped . . . two metres in length, it lay near the center of the pendulum circle, parallel to the current plane of the swinging bob. In the soft light of his staff, a kneeling Dante was pulling the purple wrappings away.
“Halt the pendulum,” I snapped to the horrified engineer who was waving his hands for us to get out of the circle. “Keep everyone away. And fetch Captain de Segur!”
The astronomers’ debate halted. The seated guests turned to see what had drawn the astronomers’ attention. The chatter quieted, only to surge again in a wholly different note. Restive. Uncertain. What is it? Where? Who’s that? The mage . . .
“Let me pass!” Philippe pushed through the stirring assembly, Ilario and First Counselor Baldwin right behind him, Captain de Segur alongside bearing a lamp. As they stepped over the silken ropes, Dante pulled away the last of the wrappings, and Michel de Vernase’s message to his king lay exposed.
Edmond. Edmond. Edmond. Forlorn hope demanded to name this ravaged flesh something other—a fiend taken from the gallows, perhaps, or a young man consumed by wasting sickness and now relieved of mortal suffering. Heart and mind knew better.
They had wrapped him naked. The fine strong body predicted by Edmond’s handsome face and stalwart grace had been no lie. But what lay before us in Captain de Segur’s lamplight was but a bloodless husk. Every squared centimetre—face, torso, limbs, fingers, eyelids, genitalia—had been precisely incised, no single wound mortal nor scarce even painful of itself. But surely the young man must have believed himself aflame . . . for all the days of his dying.
I sank to my knees and opened his curled fingers. Twined about one lacerated hand was a purple ribbon looped through a signet ring. The ring’s device of an R circled by a twisted vine was unmistakable. Ruggiere. Michel. A sealed paper, bearing Philippe’s name, had been pinned to the back of Edmond’s left hand. I passed the paper and the ring to Ilario, who stood between me and my cousin.
The Rotunda, the muted, restive crowd, the displays and celebrations, receded. My eyes fixed on Edmond’s ravaged face, willing him to give testimony to a single critical question. Bleeding was a senseless form of murder, requiring a meticulous touch. Other torments were just as exquisitely cruel in pain and horror, while easier to manage. So why bleed Edmond, whose hand bore no blood family’s mark?
Terrible as was the sight and the knowledge of a young man’s mortal torment, more terrible yet were the conclusions of simple logic, as relentless in their progression as Philippe’s pendulum. A first, terrifying theory proposed that the Aspirant had devised some way to leech magic from unmagical blood. However, the practices of transference had been thoroughly explored during the Blood Wars, in days when sorcerers knew far more of spellwork. And Dante had sworn Gaetana—and the current practices of the Camarilla—incapable of such greater magic. Logic left but one alternative. Edmond’s blood was not as we assumed. . . .
My gaze shot to Philippe, whose face might be the Pantokrator’s first rough shaping of granite at the beginnings of the world, but whose fist, marked with the Savin seal as mine was and half hidden beneath his purple mantle, pressed to his breast as if to prevent his heart’s disintegration. And into my mind floated the image of the glorious Lady Susanna, retired to obscurity in the country with Philippe’s old commander forty years her senior. And alongside the image echoed the story of two men who had drunk each other’s wine and covered each other’s sins.
I averted my eyes quickly that no one might follow their course and glean my understanding. No wonder then at Philippe’s ambivalence at Michel’s letter. His faith had compelled him to send Edmond as Michel required, while his every instinct warned him it was a deadly . . . and very personal . . . trap. The agony in my cousin’s posture was not the sorrow of a king for his young soldier.
“Cover him,” said Ilario, softly. “Angel’s comfort, there’s naught to be gained by this unseemly exposure.”
But what saint or angel could ever comfort the noble warrior king of golden Sabria? None. Not when his oldest friend had murdered his only son.
CHAPTER THIRTY
25 CINQ THE ANNIVERSARY
Philippe de Savin-Journia’s worst nightmare, so the Aspirant had named himself at Eltevire. So he had proved. So he would prove again unless we made the correct moves in answer to this mortal taunt.
Philippe accepted the ring and the note with scarce a glance. “We continue with the exhibition.”
“My lord, surely not!” said First Counselor Baldwin, who had arrived just as I laid the purple wrap across Edmond’s face. “No matter who this is, we must—”
“We must do nothing,” snarled the king, low enough to keep the exchange at Edmond’s side. “I know who is responsible, and his vile act will not sully the honors being offered Prince Desmond. Not again. That is what he wants. Portier, see to this.” Philippe stepped out of the lamplight, but did not leave.
“Aye, Your Grace,” I said, swallowing hard at the responsibility my cousin had just laid in my lap. Think, Portier. First the crowd, their voices already risen in fearful speculation. Philippe wished to keep knowledge of this assault on his person—it could be termed naught else—contained.
“Lord Baldwin, if you would, announce that a young gentleman guest has suffered a spasm of the falling sickness and must be helped out of the venue. Say the ailing guest requests that the event proceed in due honor to the late prince. His Majesty has offered his own physician.”
A troubled Baldwin flicked his shrewd gaze from Philippe to me and back again. “Sire?”
“As he says.”
Philippe’s brittle response gave Baldwin direction enough. As if he were a much younger and slimmer man, the First Counselor sprang over the silk ropes and strode toward the dais, bellowing cheerfully. “Everyone, return to your seats and ease your concerns. All is well, though we’ve had a lamentable incident. . . .”
“Captain de Segur.” At my sharp enunciation, the mustachioed guard captain raised his eyes from Edmond’s corpus, where they had been fixed.
“On bond of life and honor, you will not speak of what you have seen here until His Majesty himself releases you with his word and hand. You will support Lord Baldwin’s report in every aspect. Do you understand that I speak with His Majesty’s voice?”
“Yes, certainly.” The captain squinted, as if not quite sure what I was. Neither was I, just then.
“Summon two of your most trusted men to carry this young man to”—I glanced around—“perhaps to Lord Ilario’s apartments? Chevalier?”
“Certainly. Such a terrible . . . Sante Ianne, so vile . . . wicked . . .”
“And, Captain, double the protection for His Majesty’s person, and double the watch on the outer gates and on the exits from the Great Hall, the Rotunda, and the Portrait Gallery. Search the alleyways, the courtyards, anywhere someone could hide. The one who’s delivered this victim must not slip out with the departing guests.”
De Segur slammed his fist to his chest and hurried away.
I had little hope that his search would be useful. Michel himself would not have risked carrying a corpse into the palace. If we could discover how the body had been brought here, we might have better fortune finding who had done it. Sorcery. I’d wager my eyes on it.
Dante examined Edmond’s lacerated skin, his feet, his back, his eyes, touching and not touching, in the meticulous way he examined everything. Philippe watched from the shadows.
“Someone’s carried him across Dante’s perimeter, sire,” I said. “With the god’s grace, Dante will divine who it was.”
“There can be no grace here,” murmured the king, barren as the wastes of Eltevire. “What in the cursed realm of Heaven will I tell his mother?”
Edmond’s mother. A young warrior’s beloved mistress sacrificed to political necessity, married off to an elderly friend to shield mother and child from disgrace, and to save Philippe, the scion of a blood family, the unexpected king, from Camarilla penalties for promiscuity. The story would explain a great many things.