A Season of Spells (A Noctis Magicae Novel)

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  “I think,” said Sophie, after a long moment, “I think that is the wrong question to ask.”

  “What is the right one, then?” said Joanna.

  “What I mean is—perhaps it is not a matter of his wanting Amelia, but of Amelia’s wishing to go to him. That is, to go to the Professor.” At Joanna’s sceptical look, she hurried on, her eyes brightening as she warmed to her theory: “Amelia was always devoted to the Professor, and he to her, insofar as he was capable of devotion. Certainly he valued her above either of us. She was mistress of Callender Hall, and now she has nothing—or at any rate, believes she has nothing—and she told us, in so many words, that she does not believe him guilty. She was in correspondence with Henry Taylor—perhaps secretly but certainly without Cousin Maëlle’s knowledge, for I cannot imagine her allowing it—and perhaps even thought herself in love with him, who can say? And he, or the Professor, or this agent of Orléans whom Taylor spoke of, or all three of them, will have filled her head with tales of what a great man her papa is, or will be, at the Emperor’s court. It is not impossible, is it, that she should consider the alternatives apparently on offer, and choose that one?”

  There was another long silence.

  “If that is so,” said Gwendolen at last, “then . . . ought we to be seeking to rescue her from herself?”

  “Perhaps not,” said Sophie. “Perhaps she is perfectly well and happy with the Professor at the court of Orléans. Or perhaps she has been robbed by highwaymen of all she was carrying, or kidnapped, or has fallen into a ditch and broken both her legs, or perhaps—”

  She stood up and began pacing about her bedroom.

  “You must not entertain such thoughts, Sophie,” said Joanna firmly.

  Her thumbs pricked—Sophie’s pacing had taken on a manic edge, her slim hands twisting and untwisting Gwen’s handkerchief, and her brow was furrowed in furious thought. I know that look, the gods help me.

  * * *

  Amelia! Gray’s lips had shaped the first syllable of her name by the time his mind caught up and stopped him from calling out to her. She had not seen him, or had seen him but was choosing to pretend otherwise; she appeared absorbed in her companions and her work.

  Orléans stood beside him, observing with satisfaction the, it must be said, admirably well-coordinated manoeuvres of the seventy-odd young mages as, in response to some signal from their leader, they wheeled leftward in unison, disposed themselves in a half circle about a massive straw-stuffed target mounted on a wooden cart, and let loose in a rippling wave with bolts of flame and lightning—and then, when the target was well aflame, drew water from the air to quench the fire.

  Orléans shifted slightly, turning from the blackened, sodden remains, and tilted his head to look up at Gray; he was a small man, no taller than Joanna, but by some alchymy of the mind made his own height seem the Platonic ideal, and Gray’s an unfortunate defect. It had been years, Gray reflected, discomfited, since he had been so tempted to stoop in an attempt to conceal his height.

  “A fine sight, are they not, my sorcerer-century?” he said, smiling faintly. “Though not, as you have justly remarked, quite a century as yet.”

  “Indeed,” Gray replied, somewhat at random; he had not said any such thing aloud—or had he?

  “I must just speak a moment with my centurion,” said Orléans, and turned away.

  Five, six, seven steps; then Orléans spun on his heel, suddenly, and with a minute flick of two fingers, drew a gout of flame out of the air and sent it streaking back towards Gray.

  Almost before the threat had registered in his conscious mind, Gray was throwing up a shielding-spell to block it. The flame struck; the shield dimpled slightly with the force of its impact, recovered, and sent it skittering harmlessly away in tiny showers of sparks.

  “That was very well done,” said Orléans. “For an itinerant scholar.”

  “The road has its dangers, from time to time,” Gray replied. “And I have had very good teachers.”

  His heart was pounding, not from exertion but from shock at the suddenness of the attack. With an effort, he slowed and deepened his breathing, until at last his pulse slowed too.

  “So I see.” Orléans stood with feet spread, hands clasped behind his back, and considered his . . . not guest, for there had been no rite of welcome; his experiment, perhaps? “And I see also that I was quite correct in my initial estimation: You, Monsieur Marais, would be altogether wasted in the reserves.”

  Gray’s thoughts scrambled for purchase on this new cliff’s-edge. He had thought the possibility of being yoked to one of Orléans’s battle-mages a credible threat; this, now, was a far worse fate which until this moment he had not even thought to dread.

  “I . . . do not take your meaning, my lord.”

  Another faint smile. “On the contrary, I am quite certain that you do.”

  I cannot aid this man in his misguided war against the old gods, who made these lands, and those who serve them. Not even to speak of the notion of forging a link between his magick and some other person’s who was not Sophie, which made his stomach churn. But if I refuse outright to give him what he wants, I shall have learnt almost nothing of use, and I shall lose all possibility of rescuing Amelia.

  Always supposing, of course, that Amelia was willing to be rescued.

  The mages finished their drilling and were dismissed; they dispersed, some sloping away across the courtyard, others lingering to exchange flirtations with the ladies. Several of the younger men paused before Amelia, but she only glanced up at them and smiled briefly—the barest curve of her rosy lips—before returning to her work.

  Perhaps it was a matter of rescue, after all. Time will tell, if I can contrive to gain some.

  Gray turned back to Orléans, plastering a smile over his deep unease, and said, “I should like to hear more of your sorcerer-century, my lord.”

  “Should you, indeed?” said Orléans, with a tolerant smile. “I regret I have no more leisure to attend you this afternoon, but I shall appoint you a guide. Decurion Rousseau!” he called, fortunately turning away in time to miss Gray’s startled expression. Decurion?

  One of the young mages raised his head, turned; bent again to murmur something to Amelia, then strode towards his . . . master, in fact, if the expression of slavish devotion upon his face were any sign.

  “My lord,” he said, bracing before the imperial presence.

  “I have brought you a new recruit, Decurion.” Orléans opened his hand in Gray’s direction, and Rousseau’s gaze followed the gesture—left, then . . . up.

  “Monsieur Guy Marais of Poitiers,” said Orléans. “Monsieur Marais, Decurion Auguste Rousseau, of the second sorcerer-century.”

  Gray bowed; Rousseau returned the gesture. Orléans, favouring them both with a benignant smile, said, “Rousseau will show you about the place, and you shall dine in the officers’ mess. À la prochaine, Monsieur Marais; on se reverra ce soir.”

  Shall we, indeed.

  Gray and Rousseau stood side by side, unspeaking, until Orléans had vanished through an archway on the far side of the courtyard. Then Rousseau turned to Gray and said, in a not unfriendly tone, “What brings you to the Emperor’s service, Monsieur Marais?”

  Go carefully! This man is a true believer in Orléans’s idée fixe, or at any rate in Orléans himself.

  “I have sworn no oath of service as yet,” said Gray cautiously. “I am a scholar of magick; I have been travelling in search of some useful employment, and hope to find it here. And yourself?”

  “The Emperor is a great man,” Rousseau declared, with a proud smile. “I am honoured to serve him in advancing his great vision.”

  “I should like to hear more of it,” said Gray. “He is a spell-seer, I think, the Emperor?”

  Rousseau perceived some insult in this query, it appeared, for he drew himself up a littl
e and said, “The Emperor is a master of all kinds of spell-work, and sees many things which ordinary mages cannot. His talents come from the gods themselves.”

  “All magick is a gift from the gods,” Gray countered reflexively; and then, seeking to soften what might be heard as a further insult, “So we are taught. As Gaius Sejanus Domitianus had it, Magick is the gods’ gift to mankind, and their curse.”

  “Ordinary magickal talents are only an accident of birth,” said Rousseau, with the assurance of one reciting a well-learnt lesson. “The Emperor has been elected by the gods to a great destiny, like Julius Caesar before him, and thus they have granted him extraordinary gifts with which to fulfil it. Naturally one of these gifts is that of discerning those who may best serve him in establishing his great empire and respect for the true gods.”

  I have heard that line of argument before. In very similar words, though in a quite different tongue, had the late Cormac MacAlpine justified his forcible kidnapping and enslavement of foreign mages—Gray and Sophie among them—to feed their magick into his distant ancestor’s great spell-web. And talking of spell-seers . . .

  “Then,” said Gray, “I should imagine he has seen something in me which he believes he can turn to good account.” As Cormac MacAlpine did before him.

  “I saw the scholar-mages in your master’s workroom, earlier,” he went on, hoping to steer the conversation in a more productive (and less hazardous) direction. “They seemed . . . very much immersed in their pursuits—indeed, I do not think they at all remarked our presence.”

  “Well, we have been drilling all this time,” said Rousseau, as though this explained everything. “The sorcerer-century, that is. So naturally the fellows in the workroom would have no notice to spare for the outside world.”

  Gray considered that naturally, and found he did not at all like its implications.

  * * *

  Rousseau’s tour of the makeshift palais imperial—the Château d’Orléans—culminated in a second stroll along the battlements.

  “We are just in time,” said Rousseau cryptically, peering over the chest-high battlement wall.

  Gray stepped up beside him, rested both palms on the top of the wall, and followed his gaze. Down in one of the camps below, a crowd of men, moving in as graceful a unison as Rousseau and his companions had earlier done, were carrying out some sort of exercise with a dozen saltpetre-cannon, aimed apparently at nothing, in what might once have been a turnip-field.

  “What are they—”

  His query was cut off by a bludgeoning roar as all twelve cannon erupted into smoke and flying . . . what?

  “Horns of Herne!” said Gray reflexively. He rubbed at his ringing ears.

  Rousseau glared up at him. “We do not call upon the lesser gods here,” he said.

  Gray blinked, then nodded. “Your pardon,” he said. “I was taken by surprise.”

  For reasons which Gray could not entirely fathom, this drew a broad grin from his companion. “Chain-shot,” he said, gesturing down at the cannon-crews, now spread across the field like reapers. “To slice through enemy cavalry.”

  By which he means, in fact, my brother-in-law Ned. Gray repressed a shudder. Below, strings of men, their hands oddly overlarge in thick gloves, were gathering up lengths of heavy chain and neatly coiling them.

  In the air with Ollivier and Lécuyer, in conversation with Colonel Dubois or Mage-Captain Tremblay, Gray had begun to think that perhaps the military life might have something to recommend it. The mental image of iron round-shot or those heavy chains falling amidst the ranks of men and horses superimposed itself on these memories of camaraderie and mutual assistance like night-soil emptied onto the spread pages of an illuminated codex.

  And I am all alone here, he reflected, fixing his gaze determinedly on the activity below so that he should be in no danger of meeting Rousseau’s eye. The mages of Captain Tremblay’s company might yet be capable of finding him—impossible to say—but there existed no possibility of his communicating with them, except by returning to Ivry.

  Orléans might be a spell-seer, but Rousseau certainly was not, and Orléans, at present, was not by. Gray shut his eyes and reached for the thread of Sophie’s magick; finding it as bright and strong as ever, he opened his eyes, swallowed hard, and turned to Rousseau with a bright but unfelt smile.

  “Impressive, indeed,” he said.

  “Impressively noisy,” said Rousseau, “and useful in its way, but the Emperor’s war will be won by the sorcerer-centuries.”

  And what is it they do, then, which is worse than this?

  “I can well imagine,” said Gray; the lie coming easily now, he added, “King Henry’s army has nothing to match either one, I believe.”

  * * *

  Dinner in the officers’ mess was a more formal affair by far than the equivalent in Captain Tremblay’s company. Gray made the acquaintance of the Centurion of the second sorcerer-century—an Orléanais man of about Sieur Germain de Kergabet’s age, whose dark eyes assessed him with swift calculation—and at least half a dozen more decurions, Rousseau’s fellows, as well as a string of officers of the infantry, cavalry, and artillery, also denominated in the Roman style; they dined upon elegantly dressed joints of meat which were, nevertheless, so tough and stringy that Gray shuddered to think what the Emperor of Gaul was feeding his common soldiers, and drank (all but Gray) a very great deal of not very good wine, which led to some disintegration of the aforesaid formality. Gray nursed his first glass until the last bottle ran dry, the better to keep his wits about him.

  After dinner Rousseau walked with him back to his tiny cubicle in the mages’ barracks and left him there.

  Gray sat down rather heavily on the bed (for lack of any other seat) to think things through. Have I, or have I not, become a soldier in Orléans’s army? He had taken no oaths, made no promises—indeed, had not so much as answered a relevant question in the affirmative—yet here he was, and it was anyone’s guess what might be coming on the morrow.

  The correct course of action seemed self-evident: to abandon his saddle-bags and the clothes on his back and fly for his life, the moment he could safely do so. He had already collected valuable intelligence on the situation, of which Colonel Dubois (and, through him, Lord Kergabet and the King) ought to be apprised without delay; that done, the next stage of operations would be in capable hands, and Gray might either be of practical use in carrying it out, or, if his assistance was no longer needed, be permitted to return to London, and Sophie.

  He rolled his left shoulder once more, experimentally—reached for his magick, to gauge what remained to him following his displays for Orléans—gave sober thought to the matter, and judged it possible. The difficulties lay elsewhere: Here, as in the British garrison, one was almost literally never alone. If he were to depart, it must be by night, whilst the greater part of the place was asleep, and the men standing sentry duty presumably focused on threats from without.

  Well, at any rate I should do well to catch some sleep whilst I can.

  * * *

  When Gray woke, the barracks were silent around him—or, at any rate, the only sounds to be heard were those of sleeping men. He rose from his bed; disrobed quickly and methodically, folding away his clothes as he went so that he should not appear to have departed in haste; wrapped himself togalike in the darker of the two woollen blankets provided along with the bed-linens; and stepped out through the doorway of his cubicle (it had no door, and only three-quarters of a wall) into the long, narrow corridor.

  There was, he had noted earlier, a window at the far end of it, and he made for this on cautious feet, reminding himself that until the moment of the shift, there was nothing for anyone to see which he could not explain away. Nevertheless his heart was hammering in his throat by the time he reached the window, having safely passed two dozen doorways and as many slumbering mages, and discovered it to be shut
and locked.

  The lock was not a difficult one—no more than a latch, in truth—but it was stiff and recalcitrant, and oh, gods, the noise! O Janus, master of openings and closings, guide my hand . . .

  It was done at last, however, and with no worse effect than a bass-baritone growl of Great Mithras, not rats again! and a heavy boot tossed in his general direction, which he easily dodged. The window fortunately was just large enough for his human body to squeeze through, so that he might perch on the roof-peak and nudge the two heavy panels inwards with his heels. Of course he could not do much about the latch without magick, and if he were to fly all the way to Ivry-sur-Eure he would need every last iota for that task.

  Gray untied his blanket-toga, crouched low along the roof-peak, and draped the blanket over himself once more. Beneath its concealing darkness, the shift went swiftly—he had done almost nothing else for most of a se’nnight, after all—and after a brief struggle with the suffocating folds of wool, he was aloft, setting his face to the north, and home.

  * * *

  “Do I understand correctly, sir,” said Gray incredulously, around a large mouthful of bread and ham, “that you are ordering me back to Orléans?”

  Colonel Dubois regarded his civilian attaché—tousle-haired and heavy-eyed, wrapped in several rough woollen blankets and eating as though he had not seen food for months—with steady patience. “I have not the power to order you anywhere,” he said. “I am asking you to return to Orléans, observe what the Duc is about with his saltpetre-cannon and his sorcerer-century, and learn what more you can. You are not under my command, Mr. Marshall; you are of course entirely free to refuse my request.”

  “How should I convey to you whatever else I might discover?” Gray inquired. “Supposing that I did consent to return?”

  If he were honest, half of him wished very much to do just that. The self-styled Emperor both unsettled and intrigued him, and those brief glimpses of Appius Callender, looking contented but strangely oblivious, and of Amelia . . .