Jerzy was actually surprised that the Guardian hadn’t been sent for him already.
He dropped his trou as Detta left the room and closed the door behind her, then stepped into the tub, sighing in relief as the hot water touched his skin, seeping into the aching muscles. If there had been room, he would have sunk his entire body under water and stayed there until his skin was as loose as the beast’s, falling off the bone. But the tub was too small. . ..Jerzy frowned. The tub hadn’t been too small before. Were they using a new one? He looked down. No, it was the same one as always. And yet, where once he could have stretched his legs out in front of him, now he had to bend them at the knees to sit comfortably, and the sides of the tub seemed to press in more than they had before.
He shrugged, and grabbed the soap. Sooner he was clean, the sooner Detta would feed him.
HE MET WITH Malech in the study, taking his usual place on the stool, now dressed in a clean shirt and trousers, barefoot for comfort. Self-conscious after the tub’s revelations, the seat suddenly felt uncomfortable, and he couldn’t quite get his legs to settle. His hair, still damp, flopped over into his eyes, and he shoved it back with a grimace. He would have to ask Lil if she could cut it for him again.
“So. You return with a cart and a donkey. . .and no coin.”
“Master.”
“Don’t ‘Master’ me, boy. I can’t see Ranulf cheating me, so whatever you did you must have had some reason to do. Don’t hesitate now.”
Malech sounded annoyed, but not angry. That allowed Jerzy to gather his heart up from where it had settled in his stomach, and try to explain.
“It was like nothing I had ever seen. Not a sea serpent as you described, not a familiar beast, but as though one such creature had mated with another, and then mated with a third, to create this thing. Body of a snake, yes, but the head was like a cow’s, and the teeth of a meat eater. . .and the skin, where it was not scaled, was rough like a. . .” He hesitated, trying to find the right description. “It was rough, like an old vine,” he said finally. That wasn’t a perfect description, but it was the best one he could come up with, and the more he thought about it, the better it worked.
“And. . .?”
“And it seemed to me that. . .” What had seemed so obvious at the time was less so, in the study, under Malech’s cool gaze. “It seemed to me that something new, something dangerous, was something that we should not leave to a warrior, but inquire into ourselves.”
He waited. After a half year and more, he no longer feared that the Vineart would send him back to the fields as a slave, exactly, but somehow not knowing the price of failure was worse than certainty.
“And you brought back a cart. Filled with this creature?”
“Parts of it.”
“Well.” Malech rose to his feet, and went over to the slender work-table, assembling an assortment of clear vials from a wooden box, and filling them out of the blown-glass flasks of various liquids. “Fetch my carry bag,” he ordered, but Jerzy was already across the room, taking down the battered leather case by its strap. It held ten vials snug in a block of softwood, snug and secure against breaking or jostling.
“Now,” Malech said, when the vials were filled, stoppered, and placed inside the case. “Come show me this treasure you’ve brought home.”
The icehouse was set off to the side, into the hill, and guarded against the sun’s direct rays; shadows were already gathering around the thick wooden doors.
The cart had been unloaded, and the contents placed, still wrapped in the canvas sail, on the planked floor. Surprisingly, cooled down, the remains did not smell bad at all, but rather something slightly familiar and not entirely unpleasant. He sniffed, the way he might to test a wine, and his nose reported back a combination of seawater, fish, and. . .mold?
Malech spit into his hand and held it up to the nearest wall. That was enough to trigger the mage-lights set there, and they flickered to life, pale blue lights cool enough not to disturb the blocks of ice shoved against the far wall.
“How did you do that?” Jerzy asked, fascinated.
“I hadn’t shown you that?” Malech shook his head in disgust. “No, other things crowding my mind. My apologies, boy. That’s the quiet-magic, what some call mage-blood. Remember I told you, the magic’s in the flesh, not the words? It gets into our flesh, too. All the years of crafting and tasting and working with magic, some of it gets under your skin, stays in your blood. Some get more, some less. Enough, at least, to trigger a prepared spell, like that one. The firespell-lights were set into the walls by my master when he took over this property; any one of our lineage can trigger them.”
“Even me?” Jerzy’s eyes widened at the thought.
“Eventually. Now, show me what you bought with my gold.”
Jerzy dropped to one knee and pulled back the edge of the canvas, tugging the heavy material until the entire load was displayed. Malech placed the leather case on the ground, and came closer.
“That. . .is a tooth?”
“A fang. When I changed the spell—”
“When you did what?” Malech stopped and turned, his gaze piercing Jerzy even in the dim light. “You young idiot, what did you do?”
Jerzy leaned away from his master’s anger, all the confidence he had felt disappearing under that hard gaze. “I. . .we came on the creature, already attacking. I gave the healwine to Ranulf and taught him how to cast it, but. . .it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t going to be enough; I could tell that. It was too large, and. . .the spell wasn’t affecting the beast the way it should. It wasn’t slowing down enough. It was going to kill more people.”
“And so you. . .did what?” His master’s voice was too quiet, and Jerzy felt himself start to sweat even in the cool confines of the icehouse.
“I took some of the wine, and I changed the spell. Deepened it, so that it went deeper, into the flesh and joints, not just the muscles.” With all his worries about trading the flesh for gold, he hadn’t once thought he was doing anything wrong by enhancing the spell, once he’d felt the push to do so.
“And what happened?”
“The two spells . . . they wound together, acted together. My spell added to the first one, made the creature susceptible to physical attack.” He should tell Malech about the second decantation. He knew he should. Even if his master was angry at him, he should tell everything, confess all his actions, and await punishment.
He said nothing further.
Malech sighed and shook his head, his narrow face creasing in deeper lines of worry. “My error, again, not to warn you. A Vineart’s own quiet-magic interacts with spellwine, Jerzy. We are not. . .ah, no. No lectures, not here and now. Time enough tomorrow. Fortunately, you used the same spellwine, so the magics recognized each other. Had you used a different spellwine, without proper training . . . it could have been deadly to you, and those around you, not the beast.”
“But. . .spells have long been used in support of each other.” He had read accounts of such decantations in the books Malech had given him. “Wind and fire, weather and growth-of-crops. . .”
“Together, with two Vinearts of training, and only under great and dire need precisely because it is so dangerous. We take only a sip, use only one spell, for a reason.” He sighed again, and Jerzy felt something in his chest tighten and sink at the disappointment in that noise.
“Forgive me, Master.” He fell forward, face to the ground, and winced. His body was unaccustomed to such movements now.
“Ah, boy, get up. Up!”
Jerzy got back up on one knee, still averting his eyes, fearing not physical blows, but dismissal.
Instead, Malech’s hand reached out, hovered over his shoulder, then dropped to the Vineart’s side. “There is nothing to forgive. I sent you out into danger, without telling you what you needed to know. The fact that I did not know you would need it erases none of my responsibility. If need did not drive me so hard. . .But now you know. We have both learned, today. Now tell m
e what you brought back.”
Jerzy still wasn’t sure he could breathe, but he followed his master’s command. “Flesh. And some of the scales.” He reached into the box, held one up. It was the size of his palm, hard and yet flexible, glittering even in the low light like the inside of a seashell. “And one of the fangs.”
Malech bent down to take a better look at the long white curve. Up close it looked even more impressive than it had in the beast’s mouth, the length of a man’s arm and just as thick. The Vineart reached a finger to touch the tip, but withdrew before actually making contact. “How many were there, two or four?”
“Four.”
“Ah. Fetch my kit, and bring out the second vial from the left.”
As Jerzy did so, he watched his master carefully. Maybe, if he had paid more attention, he would have known not to combine the spells. . ..
But then would the beast have been defeated so easily? Wasn’t that worth the risk? Even if he had been wrong, had he been right?
The thought itched at his brain, but he forced it aside for later, and focused on what they were doing now. Malech had wrapped a scrap of cloth around his hand, and dragged a chunk of the flesh out, clear of the other items. Smaller than the others, the chunk was only about the size of a clump of grapes still on the vine, with smooth, almost slippery lines where it had come apart from the main body.
“It is all solid flesh,” Malech murmured. “Is that a result of the spells, or was the beast created as such, meat grafted onto bones? Where are the muscles? How is the blood carried from one location to another?”
Jerzy came and crouched beside Malech, trying to look over his arm without being obvious or crowding his master.
“Do you see this? Here?” Malech prodded the chunk with one cloth-wrapped finger. “How solid it is?”
Jerzy looked. Under the thick skin, now a blueish-tinged black, either due to the lighting or death, the skin was a solid dark red. “It shouldn’t be solid?” Slaves ate vegetables and grains, with the occasional hen stewed with vin ordinaire, or, as a treat, fish. Meat from a larger animal was still something new to him. This looked much like the pig Detta served, roasted off the spit.
“Not uncooked. Not even spell-cooked. There should be sinew and veins, and. . .blood. Jerzy, boy, was there blood when they hacked into this thing?”
It was so obvious, such a simple thing, that Jerzy felt like the idiot Malech called him, for not realizing it before. “Master. . .no. There was no blood.” He paused. “What. . .what does that mean?”
“It means what we suspected is true. This is no sea serpent, no creature born of nature. Someone created this creature intentionally, and undoubtedly the one before it as well—and perhaps more, yet to attack. Here, uncork that vial and pass it to me, carefully! You don’t want to spill that on yourself.”
The warning wasn’t needed; the moment Jerzy uncorked the vial, the repulsion was strong enough to make him want to fling it away. Forcing himself to control the instinct, he took a cautious nose of the aroma, the first step to identifying a spellvine.
A deep smell, like hipflowers in summer, dark purple and warm, with just a hint of spice. Nothing at all that should have repulsed. A deeper nose, still keeping the vial well away from his skin, brought the under notes, and he gagged, jerking his head away.
“Ah.” Malech had been watching him, his deep-set eyes approving for once. “There you have it.”
The smell—the stench—of death, corpses, and decay, hidden under the initial sweetness.
“What is it?” Jerzy asked, handing the vial over to Malech with a little more haste than was seemly.
“Nothing you ever want to tangle with,” Malech said. “And yet, a very useful vin magica, on occasion. It is grown in the southern islands, high in the mountains where the sun beats down and cooks the grapes at the moment of ripeness. The juice is taken from them in that instant, a slave in each row waiting to capture the essence, and bring it immediately to the vats.”
As he was instructing, Malech—rather than sipping the spellwine— sprinkled a few drops onto the flesh.
Nothing happened, and Jerzy felt breath leave his lungs in a disappointed sigh. Malech, on the other hand, seemed fascinated. “There. Did you see that?”
“I saw nothing.”
“Exactly. If I were to cut a part of you away, and run the same test, those drops would have sizzled and sparked as it consumed the life-spark in that flesh, burning you in its excitement. Here. . .nothing. It soaked in like water to soil, no twist of magic whatsoever.”
He sat back on his heels, careless of the dust and wood chips getting on his clothing, and looked expectantly at Jerzy. Clearly his student was supposed to say something to indicate his understanding of what had just happened. All Jerzy could think of was the way the top notes had smelled, the warm, living flavor of it. Living. Top notes. Underneath, death, decay. Lack-of-life. . .
“This flesh. . .it is dead.” He knew that already. He had watched the guards cut it apart, taken it home. So, something more . . . “It . . . never lived?”
A flash of something went across Malech’s face, too quick to be identified, and he handed the vial back to Jerzy, who stoppered it—care-fully—almost without noticing the action. “Perhaps,” Malech said. “Or if it lived, it was a very long time ago.”
“But how. . .” Jerzy stopped. This was another test. “If it did not live, and still moved, and ate—”
“Or killed, at least,” Malech said. “A thing without blood or life might not hunger, as we know it.”
“Magic. You think this was made by magic.” The thought of such a thing staggered Jerzy. Magic was for guiding the wind and rain, for healing bones and flesh and minds, for sharpening steel and hardening wood, for growing crops and strengthening vows. Giving life to things not living. . .
“I know that it was made by magic,” Malech said. “The three questions we must ask are how, who. . .and why. Give me the fourth vial, and step back. And watch, carefully.”
The fourth vial was filled with a thick white spellwine that smelled of resins and cold spices.
“Another gift of the southern islands,” Malech said. “They produce little, but what they do is deep and potent. And dear—this small dose cost me as much as two casks of basic healwine in a bad Harvest.”
You could buy five slaves for that sort of coin. Jerzy was pleased to see that his hands were steady as he unstoppered the vial, placing the wax cork carefully in the case and handing the vial to his master. Then, heeding the earlier warning, he scooted backward, putting more distance between himself and whatever Malech was about to do.
This time Malech did sip from the vial, barely a drop landing on his tongue. A hiss and a spark came from his open mouth, green and gold in the dusky air, and Jerzy could smell the magic, thicker than must and heavier, like burned spice bark and thunder after a storm.
Malech didn’t seem to notice. “Taste deep,” he directed the magic in that drop, then pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth with an almost inaudible clicking noise. “Unto me, the seeing. Go.”
Thanks to his lessons with Cai and an old skull his tutor had used as a teaching tool during their fighting lessons, Jerzy could almost track the liquid’s path as it touched the upper palate, rising through the nose and into the eyes, so that Malech could see whatever he was looking for.
There was quiet in the icehouse, only the occasional drip-drip-drip of water melting off the blocks, and a distant hum of noise coming from outside through the thick wooden door and walls. Jerzy strained uselessly, anxious to know what Malech was looking for, what he was seeing in the dead flesh.
He moved his left hand over the flesh, then reached to take hold of the fang, grasping it carefully below the tip. He held his hand there, then reached down and picked up one of the scales, balancing it between thumb and index finger, grasping it loosely, as though it was fragile enough to shatter.
“Ah. . .”
“What do you see?” Curi
osity trumped patience and manners, and Jerzy didn’t flinch from the right-handed smack that landed on the side of his head. Even kneeling, distracted, and spell-casting, his master had a steady hand and almost perfect aim. “But what do you see?”
“Nothing.” Malech put the scale back down on the sail and sat back on his heels. He took a sip from the hand-sized water flask at the belt that was always clapped around his hips, rinsing his mouth and spitting to the side, away from Jerzy. “I see nothing.” He turned to stare thoughtfully at the remaining flasks, half hidden inside the case. His long, narrow face, the skin drawn roughly over the cheekbones, seemed faded somehow, scraped thin like thrice-used parchment. For a moment, his master seemed ancient.
“What . . . what was that, that you used?” Malech said he should question, and maybe if he had asked before, he would have known. . ..
“Magewine, boy.” His face was old, but his voice sounded the same as ever, and Jerzy grasped onto that, looking down at his own hands and concentrating on that steady voice instead. “Magewine. Rare and potent, the only spellwine only Vinearts may use, kept secret and hidden from the outside world. It is crafted for one purpose only: to see into the heart of another spell, identify the legacy it came from.”
That was enough to make Jerzy do a double take. “Master. . .there must be a hundred different legacies.” Legend claimed that Sin Washer’s blood dripped five and seven times into the soil, and five and seven times that it separated, one drop for each of the lands where the vin grew, to touch their roots and change them into something new, something less than what they had been before. From the First Growth had come the five elemental wines: healing, fire, aether, earth, and water—all potent, but none as powerful as the First Growth, the original flesh of magic. A single decantation that could identify all those second-growth vines. . .
“Not nearly so many changes boy, at least not at first. But as each new vine grew, it took on the characteristics of its surroundings, and each Vineart crafted his own style, and so now we have far more legacies than even Sin Washer might have dreamed. And yet,” Malech said, “if this were crafted of magic, the magewine would tell me what soil it grew from.”
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