The Daemon Prism: A Novel of the Collegia Magica

by Carol Berg

  “I’ve no time for you. I’ve important work—”

  He might have been a dog yapping for all the note Andero took of his protests. “I’ve left my horse in the lee of your south wall. Lest you’ve a supply of hay, I’ll be off to fetch some from the town, soon as we’ve set-

  tled in.”

  My brother was an artist. He rattled on about my crimes and his noble liege in a verbal shower worthy of Ilario de Sylvae, leaving no opening for this Denys to speak, much less object. By the time he took a breath, our packs, Devil’s saddle, and I were ensconced in a corner next the adept’s grain casks. I was already sweating beneath my damp, heavy garments and had no way in the universe to get them off.

  “Good riddance to you, clodwit,” I murmured. “Just like you to dump your responsibilities on this good fellow. Be warned, adept, he’ll likely take his time in town. Drinking and whoring. Best make him swear he won’t run away altogether.”

  “Need to get a lay of the land, now, don’t I, and send my question to my captain?” Andero poked at me with his boot. “Prepare what you have for supper, adept, and I’ll see to the morrow’s provision. You must control this mage carefully. Being unmagical myself, I’ve found brute force effective. He’s a craven sort. And sly. Leave the blindfold; it keeps him off balance, so he can’t try any diddling. Lose him and I’ll report you negligent to these Temple folk.”

  My brother’s bulk bent over me. He tugged at my blindfold, belt, and bindings, though, indeed, my wrist bindings fell looser than before. When he moved away, my knife was tucked neatly up my right sleeve where I could reach it. “Now, behave, groveler, or I’ll beat you till your bones crack.”

  “You’ll wha—? Oh.” The adept must have grasped that Andero had addressed this last to me. “I don’t know, Sergeant. He has a brutish look. You will come back?”

  “Might have a stoup or two so’s I don’t presume on your ale barrel,” said my brother. “But sure and I’ll be back to see to the daemon. Good comrades died in that rift. He’s no better than a murderer, and I will see him punished.”

  A blast of cold wind—welcome in the stuffy room—ended the conversation. Andero had promised to stay close.

  I decided to let the adept take the lead. After a short stillness he began messing about with his hearth fire and his pots.

  “I suppose you expect something to drink.” He was as sullen as a lazy child.

  “Yes.” I was indeed parched from the climb and the wind. “And food. The brute refuses to feed me.”

  More clattering and banging brought him close, and he pushed a cup into my gloved hands. I swallowed the lukewarm ale in a single pull and held out the cup. He snatched it and scuttled backward. “So, what’s your name?”

  “Talon,” I said. “Mage Talon. Come get these off me.” I extended my bound hands.

  “I won’t.” His bravado sounded thin. “If you’ve not skill enough to get loose of a layman, it’s not my warrant to help.”

  “So says the white-livered milksop skulking about on Temple sufferance.” Cursing and mumbling, I wrestled with the length of rope between wrists and ankles. Andero had left them so I could slip out if needed. But I didn’t. Not yet.

  “What do you pay the holy drudges to keep you out of a cage, adept? Or is it your mentor’s coin holds them off?” I lifted my head sharply. “You do have a master mage supervising you, as the Camarilla requires, yes?”

  “Certainly. I’ve permission to stay here…and pursue my important work…and deal with the Temple as necessary.” His quivering hesitation revealed the lies better than any truth charm ever made.

  I didn’t call him out but decided to gouge a little deeper. “So you’re a housekeeper.”

  “I provide shelter for our brothers and sisters who come to study the ruins. What pompous, know-everything mage would be willing to be forever derided and spat upon in this vile town?” The adept was aggrieved. Petulant. Rebellious enough to do as he pleased, but frightened of his own boldness. “Few come here. That’s not my fault.”

  So he was in Castelivre unsupervised—either a rogue or considered not worth the effort to supervise. Or perhaps merely forgotten.

  Liquid sloshed into a pot. A series of sharp raps on wood charged the air with onion and garlic. Two blasts of cold air resulted in the clatter of firewood dumped on the floor. Another foray resulted in something solid dropped into his pot. And then he left a third time, only this time with no blast of winter. My enspelled hearing followed him down and down and down.…Gods, how deep was his cellar?

  When he returned, he settled. And worked magic, little more than a weak and muddled summoning of power. I’d not a clue as to his activity, until I heard the soft flutter of a page being turned. A soft click was followed by a dart of magic, bright as quicksilver as it pierced the aether, wholly different from what had come before.

  “I know what this place is,” I said, as if the dart had pricked me awake. “To hear your pages turning…It conjures images from history. I didn’t know anyone occupied the Gautier ruins.”

  “Be quiet. I don’t like company. I’ll speak to the Temple about a sorcerer’s hole for you. I oughtn’t have to mind a prisoner like an infant.”

  I settled back in my corner as much as my bindings would allow.

  “Excuse me for enjoying the prospect of company of my own kind after tramping about with soldiers for a year,” I said. “And this dullard sergeant…gah! I never claimed to be a war mage. The duc hired me because I was stupid enough to learn the Covergan dialect in my youth. I thought hiring out to a noble would give me living enough I could get back to my real work. A mage’s rightful work.”

  Denys harrumphed. “You’re a fool to cast your lot with Covergans. A more ignorant, superstitious lot was never born.”

  “Aye. I doubt one in ten thousand can even read.”

  Another page turned. Another click. Another dart of true magic.

  De Gautier spellwork without doubt, though I’d no idea to what end. The hunger rose in me, as if I were a beggar glimpsing a royal feast through a crack in a door. A good thing my hands were bound, else I might choke answers from Adept Denys.

  “So you must be here to study the Gautier magic,” I said, “what’s left buried in the rocks and dirt, eh? Disentangle it?”

  “It’s none of your concern what I do here.”

  “No need to be snippy, adept. It’s just there are a thousand places to study and be left alone that are more hospitable than this town. So it must be some special work that draws you here. And there’s naught else but magic and spilt blood, is there? Every time I find a book to study about gemstones, it tells me that the true information was only to be found in the Gautier Library. That’s my own work—studying formulas that use spelled gemstones. The librarian at Collegia Seravain—a priggish sort of fellow who couldn’t even work a candle spell—he swore naught survived the destruction of the Gautier Library.”

  Soft, solid shuffling from the direction of the adept. Was it only desire and imagining that told me he was stacking books?

  “That would have been Librarian Duplais, no doubt. I heard he was intelligent.” The adept was insufferably deprecating. “Even he didn’t know all. Didn’t you hear anything about the doings at Mont Voilline two years ago? Seems a few books did survive the destruction here. Books of serious magic.”

  Adept Denys was as smug as a fat courtier. There’s naught like secret knowledge to make a fool prideful…and stupid. He was bursting to tell someone his secrets.

  “I heard rumors of fell magic.” Careful, Dante. Not too eager. “But Gautier books? I don’t believe it. The Camarilla’s rife with empty-headed gossips.”

  “Then you don’t know all, either, mage. Not by a long ways.”

  “Even if any books survived in this wasteland, they’d be no use. The Gautier encrypted every word in their library so that none but their blood kin could read them. Anyone who says different is a moron or a liar.” I squirmed in my restraints. “Excuse me
while I sleep and dream of spells that turn lead to gold and rope bindings into spiderwebs.”

  The silence drew out so long, I feared I had nudged Denys too hard. Pages turned with the same accompaniment. Unfortunately, the spikes of enchantment were too brief for me to disentangle, even if I’d known where to begin.

  “So listen to this, mage-who-knows-all.” Denys cleared his throat. “ ‘For afflictions of the blood, the most effis-efficacious remedies require amplify…no…applications of the basic periapt centered by a twelve-facet ruby of deep color. The pro-provid-provis-provenance of the gem, as well as the gem itself, must incorporate clarity, virtue, cleanliness, and immediacy, as afflictions of the blood spread quickly throughout the body.’ ”

  Denys’s uneven spurts of verbiage caught me off guard. But I recognized instantly what he was doing. “You’re translating from your book.”

  Did he have a Gautier device of some kind? That would explain the disparity between the weak expenditures of power—his own—and bits of glory such paltry skills could never produce.

  “Too bad you’re blindfolded. Too bad you’re an arrogant shitheel just like everyone from Collegia Seravain.”

  Provenance…the nature and history of the gem…its source, its cutting and the one who did it…Clarity and virtue. The passage implied that to produce healing magic, the gem cutter must have imbued his work with his own virtue. This was not the formulaic magic taught by the Camarilla Magica. Nor was it anything a dull-witted adept could contrive. This was magical heresy of a kind that could get a sorcerer’s tongue ripped out and his body burnt to cinders. Did this fool Denys understand? His book spoke truth that had been buried for two hundred years—truth a one-handed, rebellious son of Coverge had happened upon by purest chance fifteen years before. But never had I read anything to affirm what my bones had known and my hands had worked all these years, that true magic stemmed from the essence—the keirna—of objects in the natural world. No one save Portier and Anne had ever believed me, not even Salvator, whose motley collection of practitioner friends had provided me the evidence.

  I could scarce contain my rising fever. “It’s only in the past few years that the Collegia Medica has proposed that human blood actually moves through our veins carrying disease or health. To associate that with magical healing two centuries ago…what a leap of insight!”

  I dared not fright Denys with talk of heresy and flaying. Let him think me enthralled with the natural science. Indeed the short passage was a profound example of the immensity of nonmagical knowledge lost in the Blood Wars. But unlike alternative magical theories, new scientific ideas bloomed throughout Sabria in these days like the flowering of the maquis after a rain, welcomed and discussed and called a marvel of our generation.

  “Not so much a moron, am I?” he said, preening.

  “No! Certainly not. Forgive me.…How could I imagine?”

  “And there’s naught you can report to anyone, as you’re blindfolded. And none’s going to believe a conniving spy, anyway, and none’s going to find what I’ve got hid. I could as easily tell them you confessed your treason to me, couldn’t I? If I tell the Temple tetrarch you’ve blasphemed, they’ll muzzle you with an iron tongue and hang you up in a cage before they kill you.”

  “Indeed so. Tell me, adept, do you have more about gemstones? I could pay. If I could get an advantage on my rivals…especially in the matter of healing diseases of the mind, ill dreams…I’ve coin banked in Fadrici.”

  “I’ve learned a deal about gemstones that I could share.” Despite a vivid lust, he blew an unhappy note. “But then, you might not live long enough to fetch my pay.”

  “A spell, then. What would you like—a grand illusion to confound these Temple folk? A charm to keep your water clean? Something better than a bell to warn you when someone’s coming?”

  “The soldier claims you’re inept at magic.”

  “Ordinary folk have no idea what we can do, eh? I’m just biding my time.”

  Hesitating, he tongued his mouth as noisily as a dog. “I want to kill someone undetected.”

  “No, I won’t—” Surprise made me blurt the denial harsher than I would have liked. “That is, I can’t do that. I wouldn’t be in this much trouble if I could, now, would I?”

  “That makes sense, I suppose.”

  His disappointment nauseated me. Nasty little weasel.

  “The warning, then. I don’t want anyone sneaking up on me. Gautier books are forbidden, you know. And I’ve more secrets than that.…”

  My mind raced, fully committed to the chase. “Did the soldier bring in a white walking stick?”

  “Aye. Stood it by the door.”

  “It’s my ancille. Touch the anthera sigil. One finger only and quickly.” That’s where I’d linked the warning key to my warding—a spell bound to my own keirna, not any formula.

  His scream bounced off the walls. The clattering of the dropped ancille, the solid thump of a hind end on the floor, and some very hard breathing, as he discovered his hand was not immersed in molten silver, brought a smile to my face. I knew he’d hold it too long.

  “Night’s daemons!”

  “I told you to use only one finger. Now, read me what your books tell you about gems—emeralds in particular—before the damnable soldier comes back, and I’ll teach you to make such a ward for your front door.”

  “Teach me the spell formula first.”

  “And let you choose not to read? Indeed not! You’ve got all the advantage here. I’m trussed like a goose. Leave the blindfold in place, so I’ll have no way to know what books you have or where you keep them.…”

  Lies had come easy during my years as king’s agente confide, and I’d not lost the knack. It was a measure of Denys’s dullness that he could read passages like the one he’d just recited and still believe magic was worked with rote formulas.

  “All right, then. I’ve got two here with mention of gemstones.”

  And he read. Slow, halting. Using his clicking device. Marvelous, detailed explorations of spellwork that could be worked with emeralds. I could have spent years and not learned so much as in that half an hour. But none of the passages referred to speaking in dreams or trapping the souls of the dead, or any of the other properties referred to by the history Finn had read to me. My mundane text could be entirely wrong, of course. Denys’s information was more substantial. And yet…

  “Have you seen any mention of the Maldivean Hegemony? My rival is obsessed with some emerald mentioned alongside Maldivean healing.”

  “Maldivea? Mother of mayhem, you’re after the Seeing Stones!”

  His laughter spewed in chortles and snorts, as grating and cheerless as a donkey’s bray. More unsettling, he swallowed it whole as suddenly as it began. “Aye, I can tell you what was known about those,” he said, more smug than ever. “Don’t even have to fetch the books. A master mage came here a few years back. Thought the Stones might be hidden among the ruins. But, of course, I told him there was naught left here to search. Lucky for you, I looked them up once he was gone. Searched for ’em, too, but they weren’t in my vault. So we’ll trade, as I agreed, but for this you might have to pay more than just the one spell.”

  “Let me judge if you’ve aught worth the barter.” It could easily have been Kajetan or de Gautier himself hunting the information. Neither had power enough to work the rites at Mont Voilline—which was why they had needed me. But for the moment, knowledge of the Stones was far more compelling than the identity of the seeker. “We’d best get on with it before the soldier comes back.”

  Denys didn’t rush. He rose from his seat and clattered about his pots at the hearth. He was enjoying this very much. I reined my temper and rubbed my throbbing forehead.

  “First off,” he said at last, as he poked at his fire, sending new billows of heat and smoke my way. “The Seeing Stones weren’t emeralds at all. They began as a single crystal, not quite so hard or so clear as a gem. More like to glass. But it was possessed o
f such strangeness that the ancients called it a godstone and said it was gifted to us by the gods, who would take it back one day. When you looked through the crystal, you saw things that were other. Double images or skewed images or things that were round the corner or not there at all. Don’t know what the ancients used it for. Soothsaying, maybe. But at some time, their god deserted them. The Arothi Empire swallowed up half the world and no one knows what became of the stone for a thousand years.”

  The adept passed by me again, and wood creaked, as if he settled into a chair.

  “But then a man named Altheus of Sirpuhi followed the legends into the desert and found the crystal in a ruined Cinnear temple. He commanded his favored wizard to cut it into three and polish the crystal faces, so as to allow the Creator’s light to pass through. Seems this Altheus, too, believed them holy.”