The Spirit Lens

by Carol Berg

  No one must see me in the next hour, at least not to remember, so I kept to Riverside’s back streets, well away from the Market Way that led from the heart of the upper city to the harbor. A golden haze swelled over the rooftops—torches blooming along the wide boulevard to light the way for the king. Rumors would be flying.

  A dull thud rattled the shutters along the lane and set the dogs howling. White fire blossomed over the river, a cascade of light as if the stars were melting. Not yet! I needed to be at the harbor, as near the main pier as I could get before the turn of middle-night.

  No further bursts occurred. The Lestarte brothers must only have been testing their launchers. I slipped into a darkened warehouse that smelled of new cut oak, char, and pitch. Inside, dangling his feet from a cooper’s wagon bed, waited Calvino de Santo.

  The disgraced guard captain had been more than willing to aid in this night’s work. I had warned him his actions would be viewed as conspiracy to treason, but he relished the chance to save another pawn from a fate so like his own.

  “So it is tonight,” he said, returning the brass token I’d left him in a palace alleyway.

  “He sent the release order.” I kept a wary eye out the doorway. “No one challenged your leaving?”

  “My night’s taskmaster believes something I ate gave me heaves. I offered him good proof. The gate guards are so accustomed to my skulking about all night, they never noticed me walk out. I’ll walk back in when we’re done. I’ve a thought where to take the lady. I know summat—”

  “No! You mustn’t tell me.” My skin popped out in gooseflesh. “If I’m arrested, I must not be able to reveal her destination. I’d take her myself and damn all, save I must be here to bring de Vernase to trial.”

  “Skin your worry, sonjeur. Under an hour and I’ll pass her to someone reliable. None’ll be able to get her destination from me, neither.”

  We confirmed positions and timing, and I left him. Riverside residents flooded the streets, pointing to the sky over the river. Some brought torches or lanterns to light their way home. Some paraded with pipes and tabors, as if this were the grape harvest festival or a frost fair on midwinter’s night.

  I pulled a black cloak from my bag and donned one of Ilario’s out-of-fashion hats, expensive enough to name me respectable, old enough to bear no connection to Ilario, and wide enough to shield my face from easy view. As I neared the river, I angled through the steep lanes toward the remote slip where Massimo Haile’s barge had been moored on the day of the Swan fire. No one had used it since that ill-omened day.

  The tower bells told the second quarter of eleventh hour, as I scrambled down the muddy bank, tucked in between the old planks and water’s edge, and drew the voluminous cloak over my entire self. When the Guard Royale set their protective perimeter around the harbor, I would already be inside it.

  The half hour stretched long and anxious in the pitch dark, my every sense twisted to extremity. Cold mud crept into boots and breeches. My mind worried at the earthenware vial and its telltale drop of blood, pawing through evidence—conversations, dates, and times. I longed for light to consult my journal. My conclusion did not change: Dante could not be the Aspirant. Even the thought, dismissed, appalled and terrified me. No matter passing doubts, no matter his erratic behavior, I refused to believe Dante was bent.

  When the tower bells rang middle-night, I poked my head from my shroud and gratefully shed every consideration but the present venture. White, gold, vermillion, and emerald fire seared the night sky all up and down the river. No kingdom in the world could produce the intense colors of Sabrian fireworks. Magic, some called it, though I knew our alchemists had found the secret in their minerals. I crept out from my hiding place and straightened my borrowed hat. Another burst of mixed yellow and green provided a springlike bower of light for the shallop emerging from the Spindle’s water gate.

  Boots squelching, I scuttered along the steep bank toward the central harbor. When the bank began to flatten and voices murmured nearby, I assumed a drunkard’s meandering gait.

  With a fierce satisfaction, I noted some two hundred courtiers gathered at the pier. Outside the ring of the Guard Royale, a thousand or more citizens of Merona trilled their pipes, thumped their tabors, and set up howls and cheers at each burst of colored fire.

  Wandering up the bank, I waved at no one in particular and fumbled with my breeches, as if I’d relieved myself at the riverside. Unnecessary playacting. The guards faced outward toward the common mob, and the eyes of the courtiers were fixed on the approaching shallop or on the wharfside street above the mudflats where blazing torchlight illumined the waiting King of Sabria.

  The heavy night breeze flapped pennons and shifted cloaks. I forced myself to breathe as the rowers shipped oars and glided the last metres into the pier, tossing lines to those on shore.

  Liveried dockhands assisted the flock of ladies, fifteen or twenty of them indistinguishable in dark, hooded cloaks, onto the wide pier. The queen, regal in her pale cloak and gown, glittering with diamonds and rubies, stepped out of the shallop last. Every eye was drawn to her.

  A lanky man in emerald satin burst free of the waiting nobles and into the chattering cluster of gentlewomen as they walked up the pier. He embraced each of the brave attendants in turn, swinging her round in exuberance, as his great cloak filled like green wings. Ilario.

  Rebecs, shawms, and pipes spun a wild and merry gigue, and the crowd erupted in disbelieving laughter as Ilario danced with the ladies along the pier and muddy bank. When the chevalier bellowed at other men to join in the celebration, a goodly number did so.

  Reluctant to involve him in our risk, I had not asked Ilario to create such a distraction, but I blessed it. With all eyes at the center, no one noticed when another fellow—I—in black cloak and gray hat, embraced one of the queen’s dark-cloaked ladies and danced her away from the new arrivals and into the crowd of dignitaries.

  I’d never felt such an embrace—the softness I had imagined the first time I’d seen her, the desperate thanks, the radiant affection that her great eyes spoke with my name. “Dear, kind Portier.”

  I swept my voluminous cloak about her. “Switch cloaks with the one in my bag.” I whispered. “Quickly, as we dance.”

  In the press of the crowd, it was unlikely that anyone noted that the gray hat was swept from my head and trampled underfoot, or that when I released the lady from my enveloping embrace, she wore a hooded summer cloak of bright blue. On this night, the brighter color was the better disguise—Eugenie’s own suggestion. By the time Ilario released the laughing gentlewomen, and they strung out along the boardwalk laid across the mudflats from pier to wharfside, no one pointed out that there were fewer ladies by one than had been rowed out of the Spindle.

  Maura and I ambled up the boardwalk with the rest of the queen’s guests. Two sobering, solid lines of the Guard Royale flanked our path, holding back the raucous mob. Maura shook so violently that I feared someone would notice. But I gripped her tight and babbled noisily of kings and queens and the ridiculous Chevalier de Sylvae, and bent down to kiss her once—which was entirely foolish, but seemed to calm her at the least. Her lips were cold as Journian frost.

  At last Eugenie, too, stepped onto Sabria’s shore. Ilario bent his knee before her. She raised him into a long embrace, but sent him on and walked up the long path from the pier alone. At last, beneath the blazing torches, she knelt gracefully before her king. To the cheers and wonder of the citizens who’d come to the riverside thinking to see only fireworks, Philippe raised her up and bowed before her in turn, greeting her not as a prisoner indulged, but as Sabria’s rightful queen.

  Only as the royal couple strolled hand in hand down the wharfside toward Market Way did some sharp-eyed observer point out the orange flares spit up from Spindle Prison. Almost lost in the fireworks, the warning of a prisoner’s escape caused only murmurs at first. But the queen’s released . . . king’s come to fetch her . . . other prisoners? . . .
There, look, another flare!

  More serious shouts soon followed. As Maura and I mingled with the protected elite on the wharfside way, guardsmen spread quickly down the shoreline all the way to Massimo Haile’s slip.

  I blessed my guiding angels that I had not followed my first instinct to get Maura out of the crowd quickly and go back the way I’d come. Unfortunately, the second line of guardsmen constricted about our party of courtiers. Of a sudden, my plan to slip quietly into tiny, dark Fish Lane where Calvino de Santo waited seemed incredibly naive.

  The royal couple, oblivious to the rising disturbance, mounted their waiting horses, as did Lady Antonia and Ilario, who waved his feathered hat and blew kisses at every person wearing skirts and some who didn’t. Philippe’s bodyguards encircled the four and escorted them on a slow progress up the boulevard. The rest of us, including the queen’s ladies, were held back by the orders of Captain de Segur, the very captain I’d sworn to obedience beside Edmond’s body. Cursing fortune and my discarded hat, I ducked my head.

  The captain dispatched searchers into the dockside lanes, then climbed atop a cart to address the restive party. “Honorable ladies and noble gentlemen, one moment please,” he bellowed. “We’ve signs that a prisoner has taken advantage of this happy occasion to escape the Spindle. For your protection, we ask you to remain here. We’ll escort you to your conveyances a few at a time. . . .”

  “Portier, move away from me,” Maura whispered.

  I gripped her hand the harder and scoured our surroundings for a way out. My anxiety was not at all soothed by the sight of another boat lamp halfway across the strait between the Spindle and the shore. Once the boat landed, Captain de Segur would know exactly for whom he was looking.

  A soldier burst from one of the steep side lanes and ran to the captain for a hurried conference. My heart lurched as the captain’s sharp eyes roved our party of anxious nobility and lit on me. “Sonjeur de Duplais! Please join me here.”

  “Fish Lane,” I said softly, ducking my head in the captain’s direction. “Ten houses in. As soon as you’re free to go.” I squeezed her hand and dropped the bag containing her black cloak.

  Spirit aching at abandoning Maura, I pushed through the grumbling party. “What is it, Captain? I’ve duties.”

  He jumped down from his perch. “Fortunate you’re here. We’ve found the fugitive.”

  It required every bit of discipline I possessed to refrain from looking over my shoulder. “Indeed?”

  “The sorcerer was hiding on a balcony overlooking Market Way, exactly where the king was to pass. We need you to identify him.”

  “A sorcerer . . . Fedrigo!” I spluttered, relieved and astounded. “But I thought—”

  My racing mind shifted tactics. Captain de Segur surely realized that Adept Fedrigo was unlikely to be the prisoner escaped from the Spindle, but he couldn’t be certain until the boat landed. And without doubt the noblemen and ladies surrounding us were entirely unused to standing in the damp wind surrounded by soldiers. They were ready to mutiny.

  “Well, heavenly legions, that’s excellent, a fine job!” I shouted, slapping the captain on the shoulder. “Certainly, I’ll come with you. Now the fugitive is found, we can allow His Majesty’s friends to be on their way unhindered. Bravo! His Majesty will be delighted.”

  No more than that was required to stir the prickly aristocrats. They began to clamor as one and push through the ring of guards. Only a few hours had passed since I was issuing orders under the king’s authority. De Segur had little choice but to follow my lead. The captain ordered his men to release the guests to proceed home as they would.

  As the party dissolved, I gripped Captain de Segur’s hand firmly. “Sir, you are a credit to the Guard Royale. As you witnessed but a few hours ago, this murderous Fedrigo’s infamy ranks second only to that of de Vernase himself in the king’s mind.” That was most certainly true.

  “Then we’d best make sure this man’s the one we’re supposed to be hunting, hadn’t we, sonjeur?” said the captain, his syllables crisp.

  “Certainly,” I said, then held my breath for a moment as a bright blue cloak vanished up Fish Lane. Godspeed, sweet lady. An iron yoke slipped from my spirit, leaving me with an odd certainty: Maura would be all right.

  MY AWARENESS OF ENCHANTMENT GREW stronger the farther into the alley the young soldier led me. With every step, it galled my spirit worse, grinding, gnawing, making me want to retreat.

  Never had my sense suggested a rightness or wrongness about spells it detected. It merely signaled that one existed and registered its relative strength. Dante’s door wards bit, but that was the effect of the spell, and had naught to do with my perception of its existence. In the same way, magical residues presented as more pleasurable or less, but I had never correlated a pleasurable sensation with a worthwhile end or vice versa. But this enchantment clamored evil. Whoever had created it, Fedrigo or other, was someone to be wary of.

  The fugitive had been trapped at the blind end of the alley—the back of a ramshackle warehouse, flanked by a tall fence and a deserted house. Face down in the weedy corner, the large man bucked and thrashed, while two soldiers sat on his back, one of them attempting to bind the prisoner’s ankles. A young officer held a lantern.

  “Captain de Segur sent me to identify the fugitive,” I said.

  “He ought to have sent more hands to hold the toadeater,” said one of the soldiers, a burly man whose knees clamped the prisoner’s waist and whose fist snarled the prisoner’s hair. His own head looked to have been scraped on the splintered fence. “Or mayhap an iron to crush his skull.”

  “Hold the light down here,” I said, and I crouched where I could see the captive’s face.

  The prisoner growled at me fiercely, but I could see enough. His dark beard was trimmed closer than last time I’d seen him, and other men could have a neck the same width as their heads, but I would never mistake the nose that looked as if it had been broken ten times.

  “I do believe you’ve earned your king’s favor, gentlemen. Please sit him up. And you”—I nodded to the young soldier who’d fetched me—“notify Captain de Segur that this is indeed the man we sought. Remind him that His Majesty wished to be notified the moment we found him.” The guide sped away.

  “Sitting him up” was a violent business. In the end, the two guardsmen had to bind Fedrigo’s thick hands and truss knees, arms, and ankles before they could prop him against the warehouse wall.

  “What vileness were you about tonight, Adept?” I said. “Bleeding more children? Or delivering another murdered soldier to your king?” In answer, he hawked bloody spittle in my face.

  “We’ve not got a word out of him,” said the young officer, cradling his own left wrist to his chest.

  I wrenched open the adept’s sleeves and shirt, but found no evidence of transference. “So, unlike Gruchin or Ophelie de Marangel, you are a willing conspirator,” I said. “Gaetana’s creature. The Aspirant’s creature.”

  He grinned, fresh blood staining his teeth and leaking out the corners of his battered mouth.

  “Where is Michel de Vernase? And what’s this spellwork hanging about you like a dead man’s stink?”

  He widened his eyes like an innocent child accused. He was not afraid, though. True, Fedrigo did not know of Dante’s perimeter. And we could not use it at trial to link Fedrigo with Edmond’s body without revealing Dante’s role in the investigation. But we could surely roust the door guards who helped him carry in his “sickly kinsman” wrapped in purple. Why was he not worried?

  I snapped my attention to the officer nursing his damaged wrist. “Your messenger implied the prisoner posed a danger to the king. In what way?”

  The young greville flushed. “He was lurking on a balcony overlooking Market Way—the place where it gets narrow going round Sweeper’s Rock. Looked as if he were going to drop a rock right down on the king’s head. Turned out it was only this book.”

  The officer held the lan
tern high. A splintered board protruded from the fence as if Fedrigo had been trying to rip an escape route through it. An open book lay over the tip of the board, as if a reader had marked his place. The large, tattered volume—seven or eight centimetres thick, its wide pages limp with the damp—drooped from the narrow slat.

  “This was the weapon he held on the balcony?”

  “Aye. Ready to drop it over the side, till Orin kicked open the door and took him down. He never got a chance. Though it’s not exactly a man’s weapon, is it, pig snout?” The biggest soldier slammed a boot into Fedrigo’s side.

  Despite the blow that pumped more blood from his mouth and left him slumped awkwardly, Fedrigo grinned again, sly and wicked. Eager.

  I sat on my haunches, at eye level with the book. Perhaps my perception of magic had been stripped and clarified back in the Rotunda, just like my other senses, for, as sure as my name, I knew this book held more death in it than any weapon I’d ever come near.

  Thwarted at his game of magical chaos when we destroyed Eltevire and Gaetana, Michel de Vernase had retaliated by eliminating Philippe’s heir. But the king had surely not found time to scribe a new name on the tablet in the crypt. His death would ravage Sabria. This time Michel meant to kill.

  “Has anyone touched it?” I said. “How did it get in this position?”

  The three soldiers looked at one another. “None of us had aught to do with it.”

  Fedrigo’s eyes flicked from me to the book and back again.

  “In the fight on the balcony . . . did the book get dropped or juggled?”

  Orin, the young greville with the broken wrist, had been puzzling at my questions, but this one triggered something. “It didn’t. I thought it was odd. When I came after him, I thought he’d drop it and run, but he curled up around the thing, then kicked me so hard I near took a dive off the balcony myself. By the time the others showed up, the villain had ducked out.”