The Conjurers

by David Waid

  “Knowledge, however, will always triumph. I have the means of siphoning the accidental power of a geistmage and the time to do so is soon upon us.” With that, the Maestro began picking up his scrolls. He paused at one point, his back to me, perhaps surveying the clutter of the chamber.

  “Ignacio,” he said.

  “Yes, Maestro?”

  He stood still, all the scrolls clasped in his arms. “One day I will see everything and live like a god.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  With that, he walked from the room and took the stairs to his private chamber.

  Teresa closed the door of the abandoned house behind her, but not all the way. In the sliver of morning light, she knelt and unrolled the cloth she carried. Within it nestled a hunting knife she’d taken from Ignacio’s room as well as a tinderbox and lamp. She took some time to light the lamp, folded the cloth into her belt alongside the knife and straightened to get her first good look at the building’s interior.

  The room she stood in was large, but contained not a stick of furniture and smelled of dust and neglect. Teresa walked across broken tiles that crunched under foot, pushing aside old doors and looking in rooms long empty. In one, she saw the dark streak where some chair back or table edge had rubbed pigments in the wall, but that was it. She didn’t bother to look upstairs. The place was abandoned, and anyway, her goal lay in the cellars below the house, not above it. This she knew from Ignacio’s journal.

  She opened several doors before finding the narrow, descending steps. They were old and abraded from years of use. Placing one foot on the first tread, she tested the wood briefly before giving it her full weight. With each step she did this, descending with slow caution until she reached cold dirt at the bottom. Straightening, she drew a deep, shaking breath and scanned the cellar.

  The air was damp and stunk of mildew. Piles of disassembled furniture collected dust on the floor or leaned against patched plaster walls. Empty barrels with rusted hoops rested by the stairs and against a far wall stood a looking glass almost as tall as Teresa herself. This was what she had been searching for.

  Ignacio had written of this mirror, there at the end, when his careful handwriting had become shaky and his entries more erratic. A dank, earthy smell came from behind it and, in the splinter of shadow between the wall and its wooden frame, lay the edge of deeper darkness. Teresa placed the lamp on the floor, put a shoulder to the mirror’s side and pushed.

  Inquiry.

  That is the Maestro’s byword. Inquiry above ignorance, without remorse and by any means. I have never seen anything like his collection of books and scrolls and he is free with the access he allows me, though I know there is knowledge he withholds. I greatly prefer the lore of the book to that of the corpse, but cannot let the Maestro see it; he seems most impassioned about the “inquiries” of anatomy he has been undertaking.

  We have dissected the bodies of the dead before and each has been long decayed. I was sickened by the smell at first, but have reached the point where I can at least hold the contents of my stomach. The Maestro was disgusted as well, though for different reasons. He was angry because it is the mystery of life and perhaps some residue of the psyche that interests him, not decrepitude. He rang his little hand bell over and over until Bezio’s footsteps sounded upon the stair. When the man appeared in the doorway, the Maestro said, “Please remove this corpse. It is so old, the tripes and giblets have changed size and color. They are of no use.”

  The Maestro spoke softly, yet Bezio cringed as though he’d been lashed. The little man glanced once sidewise at me, then back to his master. “Forgive me, Maestro. They are what…the authorities could find and even they were not easy. The city has suffered no recent famine or plague.”

  Dropping the instruments he’d been working with on the table, the Maestro wiped his hands on a cloth and removed his leather apron. He walked past Bezio without saying a word and descended the stairs.

  The next night, Bezio brought us a subject who had just been killed. He said the boy was an orphan, an un-baptized water carrier from the quarry who had been struck on the head by a falling stone. It is an unlikely coincidence. All the hours that we labored over the boy, I listened with dread to the sounds of the city drifting up from the street, expecting to hear the searching cries of the child’s lost family. The Maestro’s mood was lifted, however. He hummed to himself and extended his arm, asking for this or that implement without ever looking away from the work before him.

  Teresa succeeded in pushing the mirror by slow measures, its gravelly scrape reverberating against the cellar walls, the smell of dust in her nostrils. When she stood back, wiping her hands on her trousers, Teresa released a long breath. A crawlway had been revealed, perhaps three or four feet in height. The tunnel’s ceiling was arched and low enough that she would need to shuffle forward, bent double at the waist, while a full-grown man would crawl like a four-legged animal. It extended up into the hill, beyond the limits of her lamplight.

  The urge to hesitate once more was strong, but she was through with pausing and loitering. No terror grew less by staring at it longer. She bit her lip, took a deep breath and entered. In the tight confines of the tunnel, even the smallest of sounds seemed loud. Her own breath sounded like someone else wheezing in her ear. At one point, Teresa looked back the way she had come, but could no longer see the tunnel opening; it was lost in the wash of blackness.

  When she came at last to the end, Teresa panicked. The way forward was sealed with an arched iron door. She shoved at it, but the portal was unyielding. Her hands shook and her heart had begun to race when at last she spotted the shadow of a keyhole against the black, greasy shine of metal.

  Drawing out her two keys, she stared at them, praying one would work. The house key, most likely. Hopefully. When she tried the key, though, it accomplished nothing, just rattling around. She tried the second, the one from the metal gate. It fit. The key slid in without effort, turned with ease; the door sprang open a crack without Teresa even touching it. And in the gloom beyond lay a room.

  The corpses, I had been told, were the un-baptized and un-shriven, penniless foreigners mostly, buried in pits outside the city walls. Of these, the church and city guard had no care, though the Maestro loudly insisted on a proper burial for each subject after our work was complete. I am ashamed at how easily I was misled. In the wake of our inquiry with the child, however, I determined to establish the truth. On the night the Maestro called Bezio to remove this latest corpse, I determined to follow.

  “The last time you carried away the remains of a subject, you once again did so through the front door of my home. No more, Bezio. You may find it easier, but it is imprudent. Your laziness will excite trouble.”

  “Yes, Maestro.”

  Bezio took the boy’s red ruin in his arms, wrapped in a piece of sailcloth like swaddling. He carried the body from the room and down the stairs. The Maestro was furiously scribbling notes and it was easy to slip unnoticed through the door in pursuit.

  I could almost follow the reek of wine from Bezio’s breath like a trail of breadcrumbs. “Casa di puttane!” I heard him say. “Bezio, do this and that. Let the boy sit on his royal ass. He is special. Never mind you’re an old man whose knees are sore.”

  Rather than exit the doors at the front or back of the house, he walked through the kitchen, stopped to light a candle and took a flight of circling steps into the cellar. With his hands full, he could not be bothered to shut the door from the kitchen, so I was able to creep up, peer around and see the light of his candle playing against the wall. From my vantage, Bezio was out of sight, but I could hear more of his angry muttering. Shortly, however, the light dimmed and went out altogether.

  I followed. Darkness reigned in the cellar, except for the faintest trace of illumination coming from behind some shelving on the far wall. Moved by a powerful sense of unease, I ran back to the kitchen, lit a candle and returned, crossing the room with great care of my open flame. The cellar
was home to mundane things such as meats and herbs hanging in bunches from the ceiling, yet this was also where the Maestro kept the most dangerous elements of his trade.

  He occasionally sent me here at the run to fetch him some ingredient, so I knew the place. Old furnishings shrouded in bedsheets jammed the space, leaving thin aisles. Ceramic jars and colored glass bottles were set out and lined the tall shelving where I had last seen Bezio’s light. Two wax-stoppered amphorae, in particular, I gave wide berth. They looked harmless enough, but contained Ignis Volatilis, winged fire. It was, I knew, a powder that would be my death were even the slightest spark to touch its surface.

  To the left of the shelves were several chests stacked high. A space existed between them and the wall that I had never noticed, much less explored. Lifting the candle, I peered into what was, in effect, a thin passageway behind the shelves. The bare cellar wall was cut with a little tunnel whose existence I had never suspected. Its arched metal door stood open. Two flat, wheeled pallets leaned against the wall beside it. When I peered in the tunnel, its smooth floor sloped downward into darkness with what looked like wheel ruts on either side. Pulling my head out, I looked again at the pallets. There was no light other than my own, yet coming up from the depths, I caught a dim, distorted rattle, as if Bezio rode one of the trolleys, carrying our quarry child deeper into the earth.

  An old memory surfaced in my mind like a rising bubble and I steadied myself against the wall. When I was little, my brother Sando tore the tapestry of dreams the doting kitchen girls used to weave me from stories of princes, witches, talking snakes and goat-headed girls. The tales were lies, he said. I clenched my fists and defended them, but my brother’s words were gangrenous, taking root, spreading. Later on in my room, the worm of doubt turned and I knew it was my brother who told the truth. I stopped going to the kitchen after that, even when the girls waved to me, offering treats and calling my name.

  Kneeling by the tunnel in the Maestro’s cellar I experienced a similar, aching realization. No proper burial could possibly begin with this secretive descent. However Bezio obtained the subjects of our study, it was not honestly. In my mind, the implications clicked together like stones. Now as I write this, the world is frayed. I don’t know what to do.

  Teresa crouched in the mouth of the tunnel, ready to fly back down its length if she saw some sudden leering face. Opposite the low arch stood a wooden wall she knew must be the back of the Maestro’s shelves. To the side leaned the wooden pallets Ignacio had seen, set with wheels. Teresa shivered, imagining Lodovicetti’s attendant, hellishly lit by lamplight, ferrying corpses in and out during the dead hours of the night.

  The cellar wall and the back of the shelves formed a thin, roofless passage. She followed its course, creeping forward to where the room opened up, every muscle tense, alert for the slightest noise. Stone walls surrounded a chamber perhaps thirty feet across, paved with limestone slabs. Tables and chairs seemed placed without a care, some upright, others on their sides. The covered furniture Ignacio had written about looked like giants, hunched or squatting in the cellar’s murk. Tall mirrors stood in the pile, too, angled to the far side of the room. She pictured the Maestro descending to study his reflection in secret and imagine himself a god. Every flat surface seemed home to a profusion of bottles and jars. The air swam with scents of herbs, curing meats and sharp, unpleasant eddies impossible to identify.

  “Per Dio!” she said.

  Trails wound through the clutter, radiating out from the center. At the farthest reach of her lamp’s light, Teresa made out the shape of an archway and a spiral stair twisting its way up into darkness. She slipped across the floor, the only sound the dry whisper of her sandals. The spiral stairs wrapped round the central pillar like a maypole and she followed them, the next steps perpetually out of sight and her lamplight ahead, always ahead, announcing her approach. When the steps at last ended, she stood before a wooden door, surprised and blinking.

  The Maestro conceived the notion of dissecting a living animal and executed that vision on this very day. Nothing we have done before could have prepared me for the experience: a mongrel stray laid out upon the table where the Maestro prefers to work, the windows closed, the Maestro setting out his utensils with a shivering eagerness I had not seen before.

  Entering the room, I assumed the dog must be dead. The Maestro assured me it was not and showed where an incision had been made on its spine that rendered the animal forever broken and limp. Anticipating its howls, the Maestro had engineered a muzzle of rope. Some valuable observations might be lost through this, he said, but we must forever bow to the squeamish rectitude of his neighbors.

  I will not describe the work, save to say it lasted hours. Occasionally, I felt the Maestro’s eyes upon me, like I was a secondary subject of inquiry. Over and over, salt tears stung my eyes, but I shed none. I kept my head down and applied the tourniquets with a shaking hand.

  I am sorry I ever heard the Maestro’s name. The madman, Guillio Sclavo, I curse. He was a tool of the Devil, guiding my path to damnation. The Maestro’s influence is too great for me to leave without bringing ruin on my family. It is fact that I saw him in hushed congress with the Duke of Genoa not two days prior. I am trapped.

  11. La Raccolta dei Maghi

  Florence

  In a Florentine garden, Benedetta Tummia sat wrapped in a thick mantle of blue wool, surrounded on all sides by colonnaded galleries. Sloping roofs with terracotta tiles provided shade in these walkways, but she had chosen to sit in the warmth of the sun.

  She was not beautiful, perhaps, and a trifle overweight, but handsome, she thought, with a strong nose and mouth. In the court fashion, her blonde hair had been shaved along the hairline to give the illusion of a tall forehead. Time had sent shoots of gray through her hair, etched the finest of lines beneath her eyes and at their corners. Yet time, Lady Tummia knew, would soon lose its hold on her. Earlier, she had used a pair of prongs to hold a sheet of brass over an open flame. In the arcane, multi-colored heat patterns that warped across the sheet’s surface, she’d read the annunciation of Maestro Lodovicetti.

  La raccolta dei maghi è iniziata. The gathering of great wizards has begun.

  For the others, this would be news, though not for her. It appeared she had information Maestro Lodovicetti did not, eyes and ears placed where he had none. She smiled. It was best to keep things that way.

  The perpetually frightened servants prepared for her journey as she sat on the courtyard bench, lost in thought. The Maleficarum would come together in the north. They would be forever changed and the world would change with them.

  A cold breeze rustled through the leaves of blossomless bushes encircling a dry pedestal fountain. The sun had begun its descent and from one of the covered galleries a line of shadow began its advance into the garden.

  12. Three Brigands

  Leinster

  After his vision of the attack on Eniskeegan and Father Rhys’ murder, Eamon couldn’t sleep. The vision had come upon him while he was awake, but he feared its return in dreams. He lay on his back under stinking wool, waiting for the taste of blood, the spasm of muscles, or the tell-tale buzz in his head. If not that, then the first gray streaks of dawn light, pray God. He remembered every detail of the visions. And when his mind jittered away from them, it was Mother’s death he remembered, sadness and anger tightening his chest. Knuckling away tears, he stared at a knot in one of the roof beams until the tightness eased.

  Dangerous thoughts nipped from every angle. Turning from the dreams and his mother only took Eamon to the wolf. He thought he might be going mad, recalling the smells and sounds of the forest, seeing it through the wolf’s eyes. Sitting in the spill of blankets, Eamon rubbed his own eyes with the heels of his palms and tried to think of something else.

  He was angry at the wolves. Angry with his mother for falling from the wagon, for dying. Laying there listening to Caitlin’s sniffles, he’d found he was angry at her, too. Rolling on his
side, back turned on his sister, Eamon had covered his ears until she finally fell asleep.

  Looking at her now, his throat constricted. She clutched her St. Christopher medal, mouth open, eyelids a purple, bruised color.

  “I’m sorry, Caitie,” he whispered.

  Tears came up and out, fast and unstoppable. Wrapping both arms around himself, Eamon’s shoulders bent forward and he opened his mouth in a silent scream. His body clenched and it was a long time before he could breathe. Clutching his head, he rocked back and forth, tears running on until they didn’t. Numb and tired then, he stopped his rocking and stared at nothing.

  What little remained of the fire he’d built had become coals, brightening and fading with currents of the air. His head was nodding when he heard a sound in the snow outside, muffled by the wall. It didn’t register as a footstep until he heard it a second time.

  Even then he believed he had only imagined the noise until it came again: a foot in the deep drifts beneath the eaves. His heart stopped. He listened to what could have been the cadence of low voices or maybe just the wind. By his side, Caitlin slept on. Leaning over her, he reached for his stepfather, pushing his shoulder. “Duff,” he whispered. The man smacked his lips and turned away.

  From across the room came the quiet jingle of a hound’s chain collar. Two lightless doorways yawned on Nairne’s and Baodan’s rooms. From the room where Eamon’s mother lay, the great hound, Bran, moved partially into the light. The dog’s eyes were on him, reflecting red from the hearth. Its head snapped to the front door.

  “Duff,” Eamon repeated.

  A low rumble started in the dog’s chest.

  “Duff.” Eamon pushed the man’s shoulder hard. Duff just mumbled, one hand waving him away.