by Carol Berg
Let go, then. Strike at his throat. You’ve one chance. . . .
Released, the madman staggers backward. My weakened hand scarce grazes his throat.
The floor rushes upward. Breath will not come. A cold black glove envelopes limbs, belly, back, squeezing the heart . . . inexorably . . . stilling its struggle . . . then brushes lips and tongue with numbing frost . . . and, with two black-clad fingers, closes my eyelids.
No! Please, give back the light! I am not finished. Father Creator, this is wrong! I am destined . . . meant . . .
Smell is the last of the senses to fade, so it’s said, and the first to return. Thus the aroma of cedar and juniper, old leaves and dry grass, dampened by mist, should be a reassuring replacement for the odor of evacuated bowels and blood-soaked wool. But I know where I am, and I will not look upon it. And so I shutter thought and belief and the eyes I cannot feel.
Sweet angels carry this plea to the One Who Judges. Was I not born for more than failure? For more than petty striving? I cannot . . . will not . . . accept this.
A soughing wind rattles twigs and grasses—my only answer. Despair replaces breath. Cold stone replaces heart. And two lumps of unfeeling wood shove me upright and set themselves one before the other. I am terrified to look, lest seeing make it real, lest I spy the First Gate barred and know I will wander in this cold, lifeless place for the duration of the world.
Please, I don’t belong here! I am Other! Destined! Hear me. . . .
A hammer falls upon anvil, and I am falling . . . falling . . . seared, crushed, starved, burnt. Bursting agony in my lungs sparks streaks of acid on skin, through flesh. My nostrils clog with choking lavender.
“Onfroi went mad and killed my boy. My child.” Her sobbing whispers blare through skull bones like trumpet blasts. “I had to stop him.”
“Give me the fire iron, Dame Duplais. No one will blame your son for defending himself. If he lives, he’ll not remember elsewise.”
THE HOLOCAUST RETREATED AS SWIFTLY as it had come. My backside was planted on the Rotunda floor as boots and slippers, skirts and ruffles, breeches, leggings, and old-fashioned puffed pantaloons brushed past me. Murmurs filled my ears—sobs, fear, muted curses. Occasional outbursts of anger or wonder: “The man’s a devil . . . My grandfather . . . cruel . . . So cold . . . So real. What pleasure is this? . . . I smelled his stink . . . her scent . . . our garden . . . real . . . So perfect, I could almost touch it . . . Marvelous . . . Demonic . . . Real . . . What kind of Souleater’s servant is he? I saw.”
“Are you well, sonjeur?” An elderly man wearing the sky blue gown of a mathematician held out a hand to me. “I’m not sure what this cruel mage just showed us, but you’re not the only person it’s struck low.”
Wrung out as old rags, I let him draw me up and prop me against the pillar. But I could only shake my head in answer to his queries, and he soon moved on, as the Rotunda emptied of its unsettled population.
Words could not describe what had just happened. Nor could I shudder or weep or rejoice or rage, though reason swore I had justification for all those things. I could not feel anything save the same conviction that had accompanied every enchantment Dante had worked: What I had seen was truth. Three truths, to be precise, and when was Portier de Savin-Duplais anything but precise?
I had not killed my father.
My hysterical mother, she of the too-strong lavender scent and ever-fractured emotions, had slammed a fire iron into his neck, attempting to save my life.
And on that same night, I had died.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
25 CINQ THE ANNIVERSARY
My head felt hollow as a burnt-out log. Come another magical wind, it could surely blow through one ear and emerge from the other.
I had died. I had felt the Veil’s chill finality on my cheek, smelled the sere and lifeless grasses of Ixtador. And then I had come back. Not as an infant, like a Saint Reborn, and probably not because I had pleaded with a distant god that I had died too early. Surely Ophelie had pleaded the same. And yet, I had screamed: “I am Other . . . destined . . . meant. . . .”
The arid wash of sanity smothered my creeping shivers. Idiot. Saints wield true magic. The pleas had been but a recurrence of childish dreams, my hope to serve some purpose in this world.
Kajetan had summoned a physician, so he’d told me after. The man must have been blessedly skilled to induce my heart to beat again before my last tether to life was severed. For all these years I’d thanked Kajetan for saving my life, but only now did I understand how near a thing it had been. He’d saved my mother’s life as well, for to slay a noble husband was, as yet, a crime indefensible, according to Sabrian law. How could I not have remembered any of this?
Could simple knowledge of the truth leave the quality of the world so different? The air of the Rotunda sparked and shivered, as with Scholar Rulf’s virtu electrik. Footmen’s boots struck the marble with a brittle snap. Light, color, and space existed in their own right, no longer subordinate to the physical objects that produced, displayed, or shaped them. I inhaled the emerald of the floor medallions and the petal-shaped voids of the windows. The cool curvature of the column at my back inverted, enfolding me as a mantle. Every perception seemed richer, sharper, more intricate in detail, as if my body, knowing it had once been dead, devoured every sensation of life three times over.
None of this was inherently terrifying. I should relish the taste of the human world. I should rejoice at the weight of murder lifted from my soul. I should grieve for my mother’s fractured mind, and marvel at an act of maternal feeling from a person I had deemed incapable of such. So why did chill fingers crawl down my back, and my stomach insist it housed naught but writhing snakes? Why did my hands tremble?
Across the Rotunda a clog of courtiers on their way to the refreshment tables blocked the doorway to the Portrait Gallery. The volume of their conversation was rising by the moment, its tenor angry, tense, and fearful. Men glanced over their shoulders uneasily and spoke too loud; couples clung to each other. Some children clutched parents’ necks. But a few little ones dragged along behind, facing backward, glowing as if anticipating more . . . More what?
The tower bells rang tenth hour of the evening watch, giving me fair warning. Two hours remained until the queen would be brought from the Spindle, when I had to be in Riverside to steer the future course of my life.
I walked briskly toward the Portrait Gallery. Something brushed my cheek—a moth?—and I near leapt out of my skin. No one stood within ten metres of me. The chairs were empty, shoved out of their orderly ranks. Soon I would be left alone with the servants come to sweep and the curious footmen come to haul out the chairs.
“Portier!” The steward’s third secretary hailed me as he emerged from the crowded Portrait Gallery doorway.
“Divine grace, Henri. Do you need help with those?” De Sain’s long fingers clenched three wine cups. The soft slurp of wine against metal carried across the distance between us.
“No, I’m off to relieve Gufee at the west door registry,” he said as I joined him.
Our steps echoed in the increasingly empty Rotunda. “You and Gufee can pass along word that the tallies can stop as soon as the king retires to Riverside. I’ll be off writing my report.” A flimsy cover for my absence, but enough, I hoped.
“Can’t say I’m happy to loll about this place another hour,” he said. “Now I understand your fear of that mage. I’ll have nightmares till I’m gray-headed.” His voice had quieted noticeably at that mage.
“What did you actually see, Henri? I couldn’t get a good look from the back, and I’ve heard so many different things.”
“Ask someone other.” He raised his wine cups. “You’ll be sure I’ve drunk fifty of these already.”
“Tell me,” I said. “For a while, I was thinking the angels were going to fly right out of the vault. Or that Sante Marko and Santa Claire thought to raise me up to the dome and throw me down again. Can’t seem to shed it.�
�� Which must explain the tremors in my hands.
Though Henri ducked his head as we strolled through the pooled lamplight and past the silently swinging pendulum, his gaze flicked repeatedly about the gloomy Rotunda, as if he did not wish to see anything, but couldn’t resist the looking. “When the mage drew the darkness from his ring of fire, I saw my da, who’s been dead since the war in Kadr. Only—”
“Only what?”
“Only he didn’t look as he did when I saw him last . . . or ever.” The secretary dropped his voice even more. “He was wearing a ragged coat covered with sand. In fact he was climbing a great dune, the sand flowing over him and under him like water. And his face was hollow as if he’d starved and scared as he’d never been in life. Portier, I could near touch him, he seemed so real.”
“Surely it was only your imaginings taken shape. Knowing he died in a desert war. Recalling the last time you spoke . . .”
“Angels preserve, he didn’t speak! My heart would seize if a voice had come from such a haunting. But I could smell . . . When he was off at the war, Da would chew areca nuts till his tongue was red. To keep him square, you know, relaxed, and ready.”
“So you imagined you smelled areca?” My mother was forever in debt to a local spice merchant who imported the odd fruits from the south.
“Take a whiff of my sleeve, Portier. I’ve not been near an areca nut in seven years.” He poked his elbow out.
Feeling a bit foolish, I bent close to the dark blue satin and sniffed. Permeating Henri de Sain’s sleeve was a rich aroma something kin to spiced olives. Unmistakably areca.
“It doesn’t seem likely,” I said, trapping my tremulous hands under my elbows. “Yet powerful sorcery did take place here. It lingers.”
“Lots saw phantoms tonight, I hear,” said Henri. “Lots felt things . . . movements . . . they couldn’t see. Lots won’t speak of what they experienced. Myself, I’ve got to get out of these clothes. The stink makes me think he’s going to step out from around the next corner.”
The bell rang the quarter hour. My steps slowed. “We’ll talk again, Henri. Angels’ peace this night.”
“Aye, and to you, Portier. And all of us.” He sped toward the west doors, juggling wine cups.
I needed to go, to make ready for Maura’s escape. Yet magic held me in the Rotunda, drawing me to the center of the night’s mystery.
Dante’s fire had seared a grooved ring some four metres across into the wide, fitted planks of the dais. I almost laughed. The mage had made himself another circumoccule. And he had spilled—splashed—something inside the circle to stain the pale wood dark. So what had he done?
I stepped across the sooty boundary to examine the stain. But before I could take a second step, my chest tried to fly apart. Unseen fingers probed, tweaked, and pinched as if plucking out my body’s every hair one by one. Knees, elbows, and hip joints cracked and splintered, scraped like glass on steel, ground bone on bone.
I backed out hurriedly, and the sensations ceased. Was Dante’s spellwork still active inside the circumoccule? This could not be residue; never had I experienced such a complex, physically painful reaction to spent magic. It would not have surprised me to find my bones reattached in some altogether new alignment.
A sweeping lad with a flat face and angled eyes ambled across the dais, pushing his scant litter of sand, soot, crumbled leaves, bits of straw, and broken glass. He touched his forehead politely as he passed me. His path took him straight through Dante’s circle and all the way to the edge of the dais until his sweepings cascaded from the edge onto the floor below. Then he reversed course and slogged by again, his broom gathering a new pile of debris, mostly dust.
That he crossed the circle a second time without so much as a start answered the very question I would ask him. He felt nothing. What I had experienced must be residue detected by my trained senses, and not some unfolding enchantment that anyone might experience.
Staring at the circle, I considered whether the effects would be so severe if I breached it with only one hand. As I debated, the sweeping boy passed by again, pushing another pile of debris. Amid the sweepings was an object very like one of the astronomers’ prisms. Once the youth had shoved the mess off the end of the dais and started another round, I stepped down and poked a finger into the piled sweepings. What I had thought a valuable prism was but a chunk of broken glass.
However, as I turned away, I noticed a corked vial amid the detritus, which would not have been so remarkable, save that it was clearly labeled EXPOSITION in Dante’s distinctive, left-handed script.
Three short strikes of the tower bell reported another half hour lapsed. Time to move. The earthenware vial, painted dark blue or purple, felt empty. Stuffing it into my doublet, I turned to go.
I’d gone only a few steps when a muffled argument back under the colonnade behind the dais rose to a yell. “. . . find it or I’ll conjure a hound that rips flesh from idiot slaveys and set him on you!”
Dante burst out of the dark colonnade, robes flying, hesitating only briefly when he caught sight of me. “Have you naught better to do than idle in this empty cavern, secretary?”
“Alas, I’m assigned to all aspects of the Exposition,” I said, tagging after him. “The displays, the program, and the cleaning. Though I’ve hardly a head for business just now, thanks to you.”
His determined course took him onto the dais. I followed, stopping at the circumoccule. He kept going until he reached the back of the platform. “I chose not to clean up my mess immediately after my demonstration,” he said, reaching behind the dais and pulling out his bag, which contained the vials with the scrapings from Edmond’s wounds. “I greatly dislike questions from the ignorant.”
“But, as always, I am willing to risk your annoyance in the cause of learning.” I stared up into the dome, where the mosaics were scarcely visible in the gloom. “What, in the name of Heaven, did you do here tonight, Dante?”
“The birds are atwitter, are they not? I’ve always considered lenses more fascinating than prisms, especially for those of limited vision.”
“Indeed. What I saw . . .”
“We are finished at middle-night. Did you forget?” He stepped up to the dais, dropped a plug of lead into the charred groove, and set the heel of his staff atop it. A sputter of white fire, and the plug softened just enough to settle solidly into the trough like a well-constructed dam. “There. I’d recommend these planks be burned. You’ll see to it?”
“Certainly,” I said, stepping into the circumoccule. Naught but heat bothered me this time, a billowing stink of hot lead from the plug, and a waning prickle of fire from the rest of the broken circle. This was residue. I could not say what the other had been. “But I need to know—”
“I’ll offer you one more thing, student. If you should catch this charm-peddler Fedrigo, ask who taught him blanking spells.” From the bag Dante pulled a length of white string, threaded with black silk, and crushed it in my hand. “Now get out of my way. We are quit.”
As he strode down the length of the dais, his gaze scanning the platform, I inspected the string. It yielded naught but a magical residue the texture of stonedust. Entirely confused, I crammed it into my pocket.
When Dante stepped off the dais, he paused and poked his staff at the sweepings pile. Then he kicked the large chunk of glass so hard it shattered against a column, spraying shards all over the newly swept floor. He walked away, quickly swallowed by the gloom under the colonnade.
His anger over something missing . . . something dropped, perhaps . . . I pulled out the vial, uncorked it, and sniffed. Cedar, henbane perhaps, and—I upended the vial over my hand, shook it, slammed it into my palm until a single droplet rolled out. Blood.
I stared at the telling bead and again at the dark stain in the center of Dante’s ring. So he had worked a vitet, a vital spell, an enchantment that incorporated blood as a particle—or in Dante’s case, one that incorporated the blood’s keirna in the pattern he wo
ve. Vitets were not illicit, as long as the blood was freely given to the practitioner, but they were as complex and unstable as human souls. Theory suggested this particularly affected the one whose blood was used.
A void yawned in my belly. My fingers rubbed my chest, where crosshatched scars reminded me of pain, blood, and smoke. The Aspirant still had the half litre of blood he had taken from me. This blood could not be mine . . . surely . . . else Dante . . .
The tower bell pealed the quarter before eleventh hour, shaking me out of my paralysis. Father Creator! I sped through the Great Hall and snatched up the bundle of clothes I had stashed at my desk early that morning. Shedding my agente confide’s responsibilities and my disturbing memories for a task that supported no delay, I charged out into the night.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
25 CINQ THE ANNIVERSARY
As I traversed the open arcades, courtyards, and broad stairs of the palace and the upper city, the Rotunda’s oppressive anxiety faded. No longer did I have the sense that at any moment I would bump into something I couldn’t see. Yet my perceptions remained in their altered state—as if all my senses had been given spectacles to remove the world’s blurred edges.
Lamplight glinted through the seams of doors and shutters and winked like fireflies. Laughter and music from taverns shimmered on the air like bronze bells. The darkest, quietest alleyways were redolent with scent—yesterday’s fish, smoked pork fat, wood shavings, forged iron, an overflowing midden, tansy growing in the seams of old walls—not a hodgepodge “stench of the city,” but each scent distinct in itself, pleasant or not as its nature and my appreciation prescribed. My perceptions gave me an extraordinary confidence. By the Souleater’s Worm, the villains would not count Maura among their victims.