by Carol Berg
“Holy,” I blurted, whirling on the lady. “Sirpuhi—Mancibar—is deemed a holy place. This is where Altheus, Maldivea’s Holy Imperator, was born.”
“And where he came to die.” Xanthe looped a string of copper disks about her veiled hair and examined the result in a gilt-framed mirror, a gift from Jacard. “The wizard said his master was yet a vigorous man after more than seventy summers. But one day he lay down in a coffin in the navel of the world, closed his eyes, and stopped breathing.”
Burial places, holy places, battlefields, ancient vineyards…no matter what one believed about gods or heavens, angels or saints, power dwelt in the land. As I had taught Anne, history and rumor and belief were as powerful as sensory truth or mineral deposits when it came to determining the essence of a stream…or a place. No wonder my first impression of the city, on a night I was in the throes of exhaustion, had nearly flattened me. The keirna of Sirpuhi must be tremendous.
And Portier believed he was Altheus reborn. Jacard’s uncle had believed it, too, and Jacard had secured Portier early on.
Jacard could not possibly think to duplicate the Voilline rite. No matter the innate power of the land and of the Seeing Stones, he was one man alone. And I certainly wasn’t going to help him this time. Even Orythmus could not force me to work magic, for spells were bound by the will of the practitioner. And before all, he would have to open the Veil to draw the dead soul.
Dread writhed in my gut. I had been so sure I’d repaired the rip in the Veil at Mont Voilline. Yet, both Anne and I had been exhausted beyond life that night on Mont Voilline, and my ruined eyes had felt like molten iron.…
I closed my eyes and pressed a fist against their incessant ache. Creeping doubt opened terrible possibilities. Did Jacard know that Portier had regained his ability to work magic? And if this was a reborn saint’s birthplace and deathplace…Gods, what would that mean?
“Altheus’s enemies feared him,” I said softly. “When Maldivea fell, they reduced it to dust and poisoned the land so that the Holy Imperator wouldn’t rise from it again.”
Xanthe twined a string of coral beads about her fingers. “I don’t know about his enemies, but Maldeon certainly feared his rising. His brothers came to Sirpuhi every year hoping to speak to their father, but Maldeon always made excuses. He said those who were dead should stay dead. Now he is dead!”
Xanthe beamed as she played with her treasures. She, of course, lived. There was something admirable about the way she so relished every morsel of her renewed life. She reminded me of a kitten. With very sharp claws.
Cultists believed saints could not die unless the work that had brought them back to humankind was done. But even for a Saint Reborn, was the work always successful? Answers, for better or worse, lay so near I could almost taste them.
“I must know what is this great making Iaccar attempts,” I blurted. “He’s worked elaborate schemes to lure the librarian, a man who is magically interesting, and me, a man who is magically capable, to this particular place. Clearly, Tychemus alone does not yield him the power he needs, and your strength and wit have foiled his attempts to woo the other two Stones from you. Why do the townspeople fear the dark of the moon? What happens on Blood Night?”
The whispers of missing sons and bleeding had struck my ears like poison-tipped arrows, raising festered guilts I did my best to bury. Surely owning Tychemus, Jacard found no need to bleed living victims to feed his power.
“Stop this fretting!” Xanthe wagged her bead-woven finger at me. “Iaccar’s games are none of your concern. I’ll not let him have you or my jewels. Now, teach me something new.”
I knelt to her and bowed my head to the carpet, masking the dread that weighed on my back like a cape of cold lead. “As always, Mistress, I am grateful for your mercy, your favor, and your protection. What shall I look for today?”
“Iaccar told me the Stones can detect enchantments. That’s what I want.”
Of all things I didn’t want her to notice when I worked magic. But she was adamant.
Thus I did as she wished. And I dared not exclude my own enchantments. As expected, she tested the thing on me repeatedly through the next few hours. She promised me a fine reward for the skill.
“And one more thing,” she said, dandling a sweet Jacard had sent her. “I know the Stones protect me from Iaccar’s knife and the knives of his hirelings, but…”
“…you would feel more comfortable with some additional protections against people like that woman at the market this morning?”
“Yes. That’s it.”
Rightly so. Jacard was straining to the breaking point. Anxious sorcerers are dangerous, especially with so much power and so little control as he had shown with Tychemus.
I worked her a few small charmed potions that would enhance her ability to fight off sepsis, insects, snakes, and poisons. With more time, I could have provided her a Gautier spell to warn her of many kinds of threats. Anne’s sister had worked such a marvel, but it would take days to reconstruct the spell. Xanthe hated me spending time on magic other than the Seeing Stones. She was young and inexperienced and believed her treasures would make her invincible, if I only taught her enough.
Nothing in the world made one invincible. For two-and-thirty years, I had tried.
27 DUON
Two evenings later, we burnt another house. Xanthe gave no reason but that she wished it. No argument of mine could change her mind.
The air was turgid, the falling darkness charged with dread, the voices of the aether disturbed as I had not perceived since Castelivre. Few townspeople even came out to watch as we dismounted and called out the lordling and his family. I could not tell if it was fear of our presence or something else that had the city and its residents awash in panic.
Xanthe’s expression was lustful as always, yet furtive, too. She used Orythmus to command the lordling’s own wife to pour oil through every room of their townhouse and set it afire. The lordling tried to stop his wife, not understanding it was impossible, and the maddened woman bit a hole in his cheek. Afterward, as city magistrates dragged her away, she wept and screamed that she loved her husband and why did the Regent not banish these daemons.
As before, I provided the public face for the unpleasantness. Cruel deeds were the necessities of a double life. Experience had made me expert at twisting my conscience into submission. Only…not this time. I despised myself.
Xanthe didn’t giggle that night. As we walked away, she hugged her cloak tight and murmured that she might have gone too far. Once back in her apartments, she rang for Hosten straightaway.
“Damoselle Xanthe!” A snarling Jacard, draped in purple and crowned with a modestly imperial diadem of gold leaves, shouldered his way past the captain into her salon.
“You and your daemon burnt out Rodrigo de Cerne.” Fury twisted and darkened his flesh. “How dare you attack my steward? And how dare you have this skulking wretch out of his hole on this of all nights? You and I made an agreement!”
The devil in her rose to full height. “Do you fear he’ll laugh at your ghouls, Regent? Or do you think he might point out what you do wrong that makes your ghost rites so dreadfully bloody?”
Jacard’s pointing finger shook with rage. “You will stop these burnings, damoselle. And if this daemon is not locked away in a quarter of an hour, he will be dead. I don’t need him. I never needed him.”
Xanthe curled her lip. “You’ve not power enough—”
“Good Mistress,” I interrupted. Jacard meant what he said. No doubt at all. “The heat and smoke have left me ill, and I’d not like to foul your apartments. Perhaps it would serve you best if I retired, unless you’ve chosen such public humiliation as fit punishment for my faults.”
Left with the prospect of challenging Jacard before she was ready and my vomiting on her beloved carpets, the lady retreated, motioning Hosten to take me. She had, indeed, gone too far.
For once I was pleased to leave the tumultuous aether behind. I la
y on my pallet in the dark and the lingering heat, unable to sleep, worrying at Xanthe’s increasing wildness. I ought to have an escape plan. The spells attached to the Seeing Stone would make it easy.
Tyregious had been a master of spellcraft and had left a wealth of spells attached to the Seeing Stones. I ought to be able to replicate them for myself. Unfortunately, Tyregious’s work was very different from my own.
When I created a spell, its structure—the bones of logic that gave it the shape of my desire—contained the keirna, the intrinsic power, of the natural objects I used in its creation—the muscle and flesh. When I infused it with what power that lived in my blood and bound it with my will, the spell took on life.
Tyregious had created incredibly intricate structures, connections and logic I had never conceived of. But his spell threads were merely the bones. I could detect no intrinsic power bound into them at all—no keirna from any object. The Stones lacked keirna of their own. Without keirna to provide muscle and flesh, even my own considerable gift was not enough to make the spells work. They seemed to depend entirely upon the fonts of magical energies that flowed not from, but through the Seeing Stones, empowering magic far beyond my skills. Impossible, I would have said. Most definitely humbling.
Even magic was crumbling underneath me. What would I find when everything I believed had been stripped away?
I pulled out Anne’s nireal and pressed it to my brow. Another mystery. How rock headed I’d been to ignore it for so long. As ever, I cursed the sorcerer’s hole that prevented the use of magic, as well as its shaping. For now, its touch, the reminder of Anne, was all I had to soothe the cold, dead rage smoldering in my gut.
“You say you can see what lies within me, lady,” I whispered. Aloud, because I could not bear the silence on such a night. “Tell me I am not going to destroy the light. Not that.”
CHAPTER 28
27 DUON, ELEVENTH HOUR OF
THE EVENING WATCH
“Out, magus.” The thrumming aether flooded my skull, and a faint light resolved itself into a shielded lamp. But the voice…
My head felt much as it had after the stoning at Hoven. Thick, dull, and wholly disoriented. Hosten sounded like a woman.
“Get up, hireling. Has someone put iron in your breeches?”
I blinked and her form took shape against the dark. “Mistress?”
“Again, your teaching has served me well. My new detection charm revealed that a serving man had hexed my balcony rail. I cut off his hands for it.”
“Hexed? Cut off his hands?”
Gods, had she even used the charm properly? Could she have misinterpreted its signal?
“I promised you a reward. So come. Leave your boots behind, as I’ve done. And hurry; Hosten’s seeing to the mess and taking the mewling boy to his parents. I’ve insisted the captain do these things himself, but be back at your door before middle-night or he’ll need to tend his own children next. Because, of course, none can suspect I took him away from guarding you. He looked quite like rancid butter.”
I pulled on my shirt and breeches, sickened by her smirk as she watched me. What reward would she give me for providing her another excuse to shed blood?
I padded down the passage after her. “Where are we bound, lady?”
“I decided to answer your curiosity. Iaccar says he works to appease the Spider God and contain Prince Damek’s spirit. On Blood Night, after a great feast, he performs some tedious chanting and gesturing in the public square. The spiders diminish and the dreams fade as the moon waxes. No more young men vanish. But spiders, dreams, and vanishings return as the moon wanes again.”
“Public rituals wouldn’t be the ones important to him,” I said. “His real work—”
“—takes place on other nights,” she said. “Tonight.”
My pulsing blood thoroughly cleared my head, and I needed no urging to keep up or to memorize the turnings. We descended a great stair into a gilt-trimmed rotunda, equally deserted, and then another that took us into a sprawl of dark and empty rooms. Down a long hallway that changed character halfway along…lower, narrower, older. And then down again. No servant, no aide, no dog or courtier was to be seen in the passages and galleries.
With every descent, the aether quieted, as if we traveled far from the peopled city and its cares. Yet a breathless weight pressed me to the earth, something different from my childish fear of the dark and suffocation. This was awe. Dread.
More turnings. Always left. Always downward. Pressure that made my teeth ache. Power so rich and deep my bones throbbed. And threading all, the burnt-iron taste of blood.
“Hsst.” Xanthe signaled for stealth. I ducked under a lintel to join her in a room crammed with rolled carpets. Dust layered them so deep, they mimed the dune seas beyond Carabangor.
Xanthe set down her lamp, shuttered it completely, and cracked open a low door. We slipped through onto a narrow gallery high up the wall of a vast natural cavern—deep inside the red cliffs, I surmised. A thousand candles blazed in niches on the cavern walls, yet they scarce pushed back the shadows. I doubted a bonfire in each niche could do that, so oppressive was the gloom. The roof rose at least six stories above us, and I could not yet see the floor, thanks to the iron grating that rimmed the gallery.
We ducked and scuttered left along the gallery, invisible to someone whose brisk footsteps bounced off the walls from below. Neither could we see the man babbling in distress. “…please tell me what I’ve done, Lord Regent. My catch is legal, not poached. I’m honest in my trade. Never cheat the weight. Never cut the eyes out to hide the rot. Always gift the tails to the poor. Pay my taxes. Honor my family, living and dead, and curse the old prince.…”
The gallery ended in a wall of rock. Two uprights of the grating were rusted away in the dark, damp corner, and Xanthe motioned me toward the gap. Kneeling, I peered through.
Directly in front of my eyes dangled four large silver eggs, suspended from the ceiling on fine cords—my nireals, a hugely complex variant of the pendant magic Anne’s sister had worked. These were the soul mirrors I had spent more than a year devising for the rite at Mont Voilline—the promise of a living soul we had used to lure a dead man back to life.
Below the hanging nireals, four carved angels at least five metres high marked the corners of a rectangular depression in the cavern floor. Simple, elongated, perfect in form and grace, even wingless they would never be mistaken for awkward humans. Two serene faces gazed upward, two down.
The shallow depression was but three steps below the cavern floor. In the center of the space a catafalque supported a simple stone coffin. Altheus’s? What would one find inside? Bones and dust? Emptiness? If any being heeds mortal prayers, let it not be Portier.
Beside the sarcophagus sat a small square bowl filled with fresh blood, as if someone had sacrificed to Duonna the Mother within the past hour. The blood’s use was clear. Two brushes lay next the bowl amid brownish spatters, and hundreds of Aljyssian words covered the floor of the rectangular pit, the steps that bounded three sides, and the wall backing the fourth side.
And there was the gibbering man. Young, well formed, and naked, he was bound to the wall of words at wrists, ankles, chest, and neck by loops of leather affixed to pegs. The sobbing wretch stood on a jutting step as if he were another statue. Jacard was painting a few more words on the wall beside him.
Tossing his brush beside its fellows, Jacard picked up a sponge and water bowl from a cluttered table outside the enclosure and began to wash the squirming man. Oh, gods, gods, gods, what was happening here?
“Be still and stop your sniveling.” Jacard’s reprimand echoed from every side, as he dipped the sponge and swabbed the man’s legs where he had fouled himself. “This is a holy rite and we cannot have you filthy. Would you not offer whatever help is necessary to protect your wife and children from daemon ravaging? If we are successful tonight, you shall be worthy to walk with divinity, no matter your fleshly sins. If only for a moment…”
Pouring the remaining wash water over the man’s feet and the step, he sluiced the filth into a drain.
“Please, Lord, please.” The victim could not produce any other response.
Stepping up again, Jacard blotted the man dry and slathered him with oil from a gold-banded vial, focusing intently on the man’s privates. Only when the poor panting, whimpering devil was roused to full heat did he stop and wipe his hand on the towel.
Jacard unbuckled the second set of leather bindings fixed to the wall, currently empty, then jumped down from the step and consulted a book lying open on the table.
I wanted to stop this. But the prisoner displayed no wounds but terror. The blood was not his…not yet, at least.
Jacard, the greedy fool, was planning something huge. Though he had no partner practitioners or assistants to enunciate ritual words with a living voice—a fundamental part of a magical rite—he had scribed the words in fresh blood, which carried a gruesome taint but similar magical significance. If the blood was taken from someone involved in the rite, all the better. A screaming victim purposely roused to heat provided a potent energy to add to the nireals, the febrile atmosphere of the cavern, the Stone Tychemus.…
