by H. G. Parry
“They’re gifts,” he had said. “I can’t hide them away. Besides, I like pictures and engravings.”
“But pictures of yourself?”
“I suppose it reminds me who I am,” he said, because it sounded well.
This didn’t fool her for a second. “But those aren’t who you are. This is who you are.” She touched his chest lightly—too lightly to be flirtation, but it had made his heart jump anyway. He never felt that anymore. “Right here. Maximilien Robespierre, who is kind and hardworking and ambitious, and forgets to come to dinner on time. You only need a looking glass for that. Those pictures are who the people out there think you are.”
He considered his answer properly this time. “Well,” he said, “I suppose it might be to remind me of that.”
“I think,” Éléonore said, “you just like to remember that people think well of you.”
He wondered now, as his own images in copper and paint frowned at him from the walls. They were images of a young radical, sharp-featured and proud. The face of a revolution. He didn’t recognize himself anymore. Perhaps he had changed, or the revolution had.
Madame Duplay had shown no signs of minding his necromancy, after all. She still wanted him to marry Éléonore. He wondered if Éléonore still wanted to marry him. She had been just as companionable as ever, but he thought something had changed. The door that had been between them had been locked—perhaps just for now, perhaps forever. He might have cared more once.
Camille’s thoughts were perhaps running on the same lines as his own; in any case, his eyebrows rose as he entered the room. “Éléonore wasn’t exaggerating.”
“About what?”
“You really do look dreadful.”
“You thought that could ever be an exaggeration?”
It was a weak joke—humor had never been his forte—but it raised a chuckle that was probably more relief than amusement. “I honestly thought that there could only be improvement. In seriousness, Maximilien, what is this doing to you?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Around him, the shadows whispered. “I intend to let it keep doing it, as long as it takes. We’re so close.”
“So close to what?”
“France. Our France. The army is growing every day.” He looked at him a few seconds longer before he spoke again, considering. Unusually, Camille shifted under his gaze. People were doing that now, more and more often, but not Camille. “I need you at the Place de la Révolution again tomorrow.”
“I might have things to do,” Camille said. His flippancy didn’t quite reach his face.
“What things? Whatever it is, it can wait. You’re still one of the best shadowmancers we have. And your magic entwines with mine better than anybody’s.”
“That sounds very romantic. But I do have a busy day tomorrow.”
“It’s going to be a busy day at the guillotine tomorrow as well.”
Camille closed his eyes for a long moment. When he opened them again, their playful light had died, and Robespierre’s heart sank. Here it was.
“I won’t do this anymore,” he said flatly.
Robespierre did his best to force calm into his voice. “What won’t you do?”
“You know what. I won’t call any more shadows. I won’t give my voice to your Committee. I won’t stand by and watch you do this to yourself, and to all of us.”
“Saint-Just is telling me you mean to oppose us. That you and Danton have set yourself up as my enemies. Are you telling me he’s right?”
“Oh, for God’s sake. Forget Saint-Just for a moment. Listen to me. I don’t know what this is doing to you either, but I’ve been reading all I can about armies of the dead. There’s no magical theory still extant, of course, but there is history, even though you need to read all the way back to the Vampire Wars. No necromancer behind such an army ever lived past the age of thirty-five. Not one.”
“It was the fifteenth century, Camille! Not many lived to eat solid food!”
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
“I know. And it wasn’t what I asked.”
Camille nodded. “I’m your friend. I would never oppose you. Nor am I opposing the Committee, particularly. I am opposing the Reign of Terror.”
“I am the Reign of Terror!”
“That’s not true—not yet. Maxime, I meant what I wrote; I don’t think I ever meant anything more. This has to end.”
“In the past, you wrote that the time had come for violence,” Robespierre said. “Now you’re saying that was wrong?”
“Perhaps. That doesn’t bother me either way. I don’t know whether we were wrong to call for violence in the past; perhaps the situation called for it; perhaps it didn’t. I wanted it, so I called for it; everyone else wanted it, so they listened. Part of me thinks it was needed; the other part can’t get the smell of burning bodies out of my dreams. I’m not like you: I never claimed to be incorruptible, and I certainly never claimed to be infallible. But here, now, we’re wrong. The time for violence is over. It’s time for mercy—for love, if you can remember what that is.”
“I’m doing this from love,” Robespierre said. “I love France. I love you too. But if you carry on in this way, I might not be able to save both of you.”
Camille’s face stilled. “What are you saying?”
“You know what I’m saying. Our country must come first. Right now, I’ve convinced the Committee that you’re a spoiled child fallen into bad company.”
“I am not a child. I know you all think I am, but I’m not.”
Robespierre ignored him. “I’ve told them we need to condemn your words, not you. You don’t know what you’re doing. You need our compassion, not our censure—”
“Which is exactly what I said about the last victims of the guillotine.”
“Camille!” He bit his words back; they tasted like ash and bile in his throat.
“Yes?”
Robespierre rubbed his brow, which throbbed under his fingers.
“You need to stop this,” he said, slowly, deliberately. Mesmerism rolled from him in hot waves. It was the only time, these days, he felt any warmth at all. “For your own good, you need to stop this. And if Danton is to be saved, he needs to be persuaded to stop this too.”
Camille faltered; his eyes clouded, and his mouth opened silently. Then, with what must have been a supreme effort of will, he shook himself. His dark curls tumbled into his eyes; he brushed them away, and his jaw set.
“Oh, don’t you dare.” There was true fury in his voice. Flames danced about his fingertips, and Robespierre knew he would not hesitate to send them in his direction. “Don’t you bloody dare, Maximilien. Not to me.”
Robespierre broke off the mesmerism at once. Somewhere he felt surprise, but it was a long way beneath the surface. “You know, then.”
“That necromancy wasn’t the only skill you were keeping hidden? Of course I know. I’ve known for years. It may be almost impossible to detect mesmerism in action, but I know you. I can recognize your magic when I see it. I don’t care. You can do what you like to the Convention or the Committee or the crowds. Mesmerize all of France if you can. I would. But not me. Call it a personal preference. I’ve been silenced and subdued against my will for years, under the old regime. I won’t take it from you.”
“I haven’t been mesmerizing all of France,” Robespierre said. It seemed important, somehow. “I’ve only used it for speeches. Only to get my point across. I’ve never used it on an individual before.”
“I’m flattered.” The flames about his hands flickered and died. “Also rather dizzy. If you’re not going to take over my mind, do you mind if I sit down?”
“Since when have you asked if I mind?”
“You’re quite right. I don’t care.” His voice had regained almost its customary lightness, but it was deceptive. He sat on the edge of the bed cautiously, poised to get to his feet in a heartbeat. In another time, he would already have thrown himself on it full-length if he
had felt like it. Or he would pace the room, his hands in constant motion, his face alight as his tongue tripped and flew over his words. Times had changed. Robespierre’s home was enemy territory now. “God. You really are used to whole crowds, aren’t you? That was about as subtle as a hammer to the skull. Light touch, remember, if you’re going to be a proper tyrant.”
“Perhaps I shouldn’t have done that,” Robespierre said. It was the closest he had come to admitting he was wrong in a long time.
Camille did not seem to take the admission as the honor it was. “There are a lot of things that perhaps you shouldn’t have done.” He rubbed his eyes again and looked up. “I’ve had correspondence,” he said abruptly, “that I really don’t know whether or not to give credence to. At the end of last year, I came home one day to find a daemon-stone on my desk. A powerful one—the shadow anchored to it called to me the moment I entered the house. When I touched it, it had a message for me, and me alone. It said that you were in the grip of a dark magician, and had been since at least the year before the Bastille fell.”
Robespierre’s heart tightened in his chest; in his head, something stirred in alarm. “You need better reading material” was all he said, and he knew his face had shown nothing.
“I do, don’t I? I’m out of the classics. Somebody should write more. What do you say to this one?”
“People say things like that about me all the time,” he said. “It’s called treason. They tend to meet the guillotine for it these days.”
“People tend to meet the guillotine for saying they don’t like your waistcoat, these days. It’s a good thing I’m not people. I don’t like your waistcoat, by the way. Stripes don’t become you.”
“You are people, Camille,” Robespierre said. “Please don’t think otherwise.”
Camille nodded. “I don’t.”
But it wasn’t true, not really. Camille did not believe he was truly in danger. Not from Robespierre.
“I’m a necromancer,” Robespierre said carefully. “I raise the dead. I create undead. I don’t need a dark magician for that. I am a dark magician, if you like, though I hope in name only. Those powers are entirely my own.”
“I know. But there’s something about your undead that worries me. I can’t find out how to make them. As I told you, I’ve been reading about them a great deal; I read very quickly, and I’m very clever. And yet nowhere, in all the libraries in Paris, can I find anything that offers even a glimmer of the dark magic needed to raise an undead. That includes your own library, by the way. I had a good look through all your books one day, when you were out on business and I was waiting for you to get back. Plenty of books on law, on philosophy, that old copy of Rousseau you keep under your pillow as a talisman. Nothing on magic at all. Not only have you not found a spell to raise an undead; you apparently have never even looked for one.”
“My mother was a necromancer. Perhaps it was passed down to me.”
“Perhaps. But you were seven when she was taken, and she was taken unexpectedly. It’s unlikely she taught you a spell to raise the dead with your alphabet. And it’s not something somebody could stumble on by accident: there are very few acts of magic that work by combining the powers of two magicians. I think if anyone told you how to create an undead, it was someone with firsthand knowledge of it.”
“Firsthand knowledge.” His mouth tightened. “You’re not talking about a dark magician. You’re talking about an immortal.”
“A vampire. Yes. If not one from the fifteenth century, then one who has close personal knowledge of that particular time. That is what the message alleged. And it made me remember something.”
“What?”
“The first time we were at the guillotine together, I sent my shadow to you. You took it in. Our magic entwined, as you so romantically put it. I told you that I was inside your mind in glimpses.”
“I know,” Robespierre said. “You always are. It’s one reason I prefer you and Saint-Just over anyone else—I trust you not to take advantage of the fact.”
“What I didn’t tell you was that there was something else in there as well. Something watching, and waiting.”
Dear God. “It was your imagination. It must have been.”
“That’s what I thought, when there was no trace of it ever again. I spoke to other shadowmancers who worked with you afterward; none of them noticed anything. But now I think it simply hid itself better after that first time. It felt me notice it, and withdrew.”
“It’s possible,” Robespierre said flatly. “It’s far more likely that you really were just imagining it. That it’s all in your head.”
“It’s interesting you should put it like that.” There was no trace of play in Camille’s voice now. “In my head. It reminds me of something else I read about vampires. They’re very mesmeric, you know, just as you appear to be, though I could have sworn you weren’t when we were at school together. They have mesmeric control over their entire territories. Not absolute control, not over everyone at once, like slaves in a field. But they can nudge and suggest; usually their touch is so light and subtle that the subject doesn’t even distinguish the suggestion from their own thoughts. Most easily, they can stir up violence.”
“Are you suggesting the Revolution is a product of a vampire trying to take what is theirs?”
“The Revolution? No. The Revolution has been almost the whole of my life. But it hasn’t gone right, has it? We can’t get it to work—at least, not the way we want it to work. And I just keep thinking…” He drew a deep breath. “I’ve written a lot of things over the last few years. Some of them I meant, some of them I half meant, some of them I thought it would be clever to pretend to mean… and how do I know, really, how much of it came from me, trying to stir a revolution, and how much came from someone else, trying to stir something darker? When those crowds stormed the Bastille, what if there was something already among them, directing their rage into channels we haven’t seen the end of yet? Why do we have armies of the undead rampaging across Europe? Why has the Republic become Saturn devouring its own children?”
“You can’t think like that,” Robespierre said. The cold inside him had reached a new low. “Really, Camille, you can’t.”
“I can’t,” Camille agreed. “And that’s what scares me the most of all. It’s what tells me that all of this might be true. Because when I try to think this through, I find I can’t, not without effort. It’s like trying to fight through a stammer, but in my brain rather than my tongue. My ideas stick, and search for new tracks. I can barely get this out to you now. And why should that be? We both know that if there’s one thing I’ve never been afraid of, it’s ideas.”
Robespierre was silent for a long time. “All this, based on a daemon-stone,” he said at last. “Who did it come from, by the way? Where is it?”
Camille laughed. “So those who sent it can lose their heads? You really do need to master the art of subtlety. They’re not in the country, I’m afraid. They’re in England.”
“So you’re communicating with enemies of the state.”
“No. I threw the stone away as soon as I’d held it once—I imagine it’s at the bottom of the Seine. You must know this—your National Guard would have found it otherwise. I know they’ve searched my house, and Danton’s. Enemies of the state have communicated with me. Can I help it?”
“Can you? What did they ask you to do?”
Camille shook his head impatiently. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t care about them. I came to warn you, can you get that in your head? Whatever you’re doing, England knows about it. If they choose to expose you to your enemies in the Committee, that would probably be enough to end you. I’m not sure why they haven’t, one way or another. Instead, they spoke to me, as one of the increasingly few people close to you. They told me what you’re doing will destroy you. I didn’t need them to tell me that. I can see it right now, looking at you.”
“What are you asking me to do?”
“Wha
t I’ve been asking you to do for weeks! Stop this. If something is talking to you, stop listening to it. Make us all stop listening to it. Stop the Terror, and the dark magic, and the Committee of Public Safety. We don’t need it anymore. We’re winning the war; we don’t need to keep growing the army of the dead. The country doesn’t need an executioner’s blade hanging over it. Or if it does, then the cost is too high.”
“The cost of the French Republic of Magicians is too high?”
“Yes! Why can’t you see that?” Camille shot to his feet. “How can you be like this? How can everyone be like this? I’ve given everything I have to this revolution. How can people now be talking about how close I am to the guillotine? They’ve denounced me at the Jacobins, you know.”
“Of course. What did you expect?”
“I expected to save France! I skewered people on paper for years. I’ve caused the deaths of hundreds. I said terrible things, and I meant them with all my heart. I let you and Danton use me as you saw fit, because I believed in you both. I was the voice of your revolution. I told you to tear the world apart, and you all listened. And when I start to talk about mercy—about not killing people—all at once I’m a monster. I never thought that people could be so ferocious and unjust.”
Suddenly, Robespierre saw the Camille who had, not five years ago, stood on a table and set a revolution on fire. It should perhaps have worried him; curiously, though, he felt more secure with this Camille than with the quick-witted, clever, worldly one he had been dealing with before. This one was indeed a child, buffeted by his emotions on strange and dangerous seas. Robespierre, cool and superior, could handle that. Something in him could even feel contempt for it.
“I won’t talk to you about this anymore,” Robespierre said, very carefully. “You’re clearly upset. I’ll see that you’re not asked to serve at any further executions. I wanted to give you an opportunity to show your loyalty, but if you won’t… We don’t need you. There are thousands of magicians with your skills who will be honored to do what needs to be done.”