by Carol Berg
My lips grew numb and refused to convey anything more of sense, and I slipped into that swirling glass as a sleek longboat into a current. Candles bloomed in the swelling grayness. Vague shapes came and went. My thoughts dissolved amid the scents of incense and burning herbs and whispered invocations. Names fled, and time and logic. I drifted. So pleasant merely to exist…until the world dropped out from under me.
I plummeted through a waterfall of smeared images: books, knives, fire, and blood, chains, drowning, and desert peace.…
A javelin of green flame tore through me in fiery agony, pinning me like a butterfly to a biologist’s display.…
“Go ’way,” I said to the man slitting my lost flesh with a silver knife. A green jewel was suspended on his breast.
He smiled and pressed the cup to the shallow cut to draw out my blood. “Sorry, no. We’re going to spend eternity together, you and me. You’ll make a fine slave.…”
As quickly as it had struck, the green javelin was withdrawn, and I plummeted downward again. Another pause…
A battle raged, as I stood atop a grassy hill of brilliant green, my wand held high.…
Another gut-hollowing descent. Then the fiery weapon pierced a green jewel on my own breast.…
The tent billowed in a dry breeze, the sweet promise of desert sunset. The tents of my soldiers spread across the rosy landscape like the santorillium that bloomed when the rains came. How I loved this land. But my bones were weary, my skin dry as the sand.
My dusty, scarred hand smoothed the polished facets of the holy jewel. How could I possibly destroy the Fire of Heaven? Tyregious warned my sons would fight over it and ruin everything we’d built. But how would they survive Aroth’s onslaught without divine aid, given for this purpose? Garif was everything I’d hoped for in an heir, but he would not exile the brothers he loved. Nor would I. I should never have sired children. The gods had warned me, but Kassima was so dear, so lovely.…The wizard had not gleaned how to destroy the Stone but said he could split it into three, give each their own power…protect them from one another.…
Another withdrawal. Another plunge into the abyss. Again and again, smeared voices, elation, fear, victory, defeat, love here and there, and with no constant save the green spear. A piercing agony…
Naked, purified, empty, my heart lodged in my throat, I crawled through the worm’s passage into the lightless cave. Eight, ten, perhaps twelve passages of the sun I lay there in the dark…faint with hunger…shivering with cold…every drip of moisture a thunder, every scurrying beetle trampling on my emptiness. A vain spirit I was to beg such a gift. But the war in Heaven raged. The shadow was growing as daemons’ blood damped the holy fire. Tales of wonder would sustain hope.
Only when reduced to nothing did I fumble for the pots. Feel the marks—circle for red, cross for yellow, two lines for black. Stir the ground pigment and the water. Dip the brush. Let the daemon guide my hand to paint the story of our need. Then I lay down again to wait, until the body grew numb and thoughts vanished.…
“Wake, Os!” Flame’s heat bathed my frail skin. The vault of stars filled my eyes and then the painted face of the modran who had sent me into the cave. “Have you brought an answer?”
My hand ached from clenching hard, sharp edges. When my fingers uncurled, the light of Heaven, the color of rich grass, spread over the gathered clan, drawing sighs and songs of joy.
In gratitude I closed my eyes and touched the mystery again. “I vow…yes, to learn always, to care always, to mind duty by sharing the light, and to return this gift should it be damaged by your kind or mine own.…
A plummeting descent; another skewering…
Another winter coming. The wind of year’s end carried a knife-edge as the sun settled beyond the white cliffs. I licked my dry lips and prayed the woman came tonight to bring me mead. Its heat would warm my belly against the coming storms. The daemon had chained me near the top of the mount so I could look on the lands of men beyond the Ring and see the life forbidden me: hunting and herding, coupling and birthing, walking vineyards and fields. He of the gold and gray hair and beauteous face said I had stolen what was meant for greater beings.
“Out there is your proper place, Ianne, groveling in the filth with other beasts.”
But I told him, “Celeres taught us the stories. The Creator holds us in his heart and wishes us raised up. If our daemons will not, then we must do it ourselves.”
Which did nothing to soothe his anger. And so was I chained and abandoned, allowed neither to cross the Veil nor to live as mortal man. But as the sun fell, I watched the green fires blossom against the night and knew I had done right. A stone house snug against the wind. A knife kept sharp enough to carve a vine on a shepherd’s staff. A frightened child soothed with a hero tale that took shape in the flames. Magic…
“PORTIER, SWALLOW THIS.” SWEET SYRUP seeped into my dry mouth. “Rhea says it will help you wake.”
“We need you to look at—”
“Hush, Tetrarch. Have you no shred of mercy?”
I smiled—inside, if not without. Only Anne de Vernase would hush a tetrarch.
The effort needed to open my eyelids suggested that someone had glued them shut. I could feel nothing, save the uneven warmth of a hearth and the hovering presence of those beside me. Anne and Tetrarch de Ferrau, the Reader.
With a lung-searing gasp, I sat bolt upright, head, body swelled to bursting with images, voices, names, faces, battles, dancing, horrors, grief, joy, mystery, magic. My heart galloped; my lungs pumped as if trying to breathe for a thousand lifetimes.…
No—nineteen. Nineteen lifetimes, and more than a hundred deaths shared among them. Impossible. Impossible. Impossible.
“Easy, my friend.” Hands grasped my arms, held me still lest the swelling propel me through the ceiling. A tall man, lithe and fair. Hair should be pale, not false black. Friend. Swordsman. I gawked at him, grappling with five thousand names. Panic set in.
“This life,” he said, firmly. “Concentrate on this life. Portier de Savin-Duplais. Scholar. Investigator. The librarian who hid his light for so many years. My good friend.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Rhea!”
“I’m here, lord. Slow your breathing, Duplais. Think about it very hard. Slow your heart. You’re safe…and exactly where you’re supposed to be. Surrounded by friends.”
She was quiet but commanding. Tall, too. And so young. She acted plain, but hers was a deep and quiet beauty. Rhea. The big, quiet man in the corner saw it, too, his wondering eyes on her, not me.
I thought very hard. It was quite like putting on my spectacles when reading. The blurred, overlapping letters on the page settled into one orderly line of text. Portier de Savin-Duplais. Librarian. Investigator. Reborn…I refused to look back at the previous lines.
“Tell me I’m not mad or dreaming,” I said, my throat constricted. “Tell me”—the sky beyond the window was boiling tar—“Creator’s hand, tell me the hour is not day with a sky like that.”
“You’re not mad, unless we all are,” said Anne, sitting beside me on the bed, holding my hand. Her calm was soothing, though her flesh felt fevered beside my chill. “And it’s just past midday. The reading took two hours and you’ve taken a while waking up.”
Ilario sat on the other side of me, his eyes alight. “Seems you’ve been a very busy man through the years.”
“Did you learn what was needed?” I said, feeling naked again.
“You must look at the notes,” said Ilario. “The tetrarch dictated for three hours, and we made a sketch from what he saw in one of the last…memories.”
“Don’t know if I can. Lost my spectacles.” Though, indeed, scattered images lingered in my skull like tea leaves in the bottom of a cup.
Ilario unrolled a parchment on my lap. “We think you painted this on the wall of a cave, in some kind of prayer ritual.”
Memory filled in what faulty eyesight missed. Horses, bulls, goats, wolves, vanishing into a great blackness. A village left
starving…mothers laying infants out to die for lack of milk…the fields barren, the sun darkened. So life had been in this land during the Daemon War. But here and there a dab of red or yellow—on a pipe that blessed a marriage with mystical music, or surrounding a fruitful field, protecting it from ravaging beasts, or on the potion pots of a healer who kept wounds from requiring amputation. Extraordinary skills? Magic? The line between was ever blurred.
He unrolled a second page. “But the hand that painted these other scenes, Anne judges to be different.”
I closed my eyes and flexed my fingers, which insisted they held a bundle of twigs. Tied together, chewed and beaten to separate the fibers at one end, twigs made a decent brush for painting. “It wasn’t the differing hand that was the marvel,” I said, softly. “It was the green pigment. We had no source for green.”
“Holy night,” whispered Ilario, “you truly remember.”
The right-hand side of the drawing displayed three panels. The first showed a great hand reaching down from the heavens to place a green crystal in the palm of a naked man, a very cold, hungry, bewildered man, surrounded by his joyful clan. The second panel showed the same man, holding the green gem high as he walked an endless road, scattering its beams across fields and vineyards and the beautiful, glorious herds. And in the last, the man, now ringed with six fiery green symbols, stood halfway between the ground and the heavens bearing a sullied gem. Blood drops trailed from his heart.
“The green ring means enchantment,” I said. Knowing. “Using the god’s fire. The symbols are enchanted objects that must be used for the rite. The person here”—I touched a lone figure outside the ring—“would be the modran—the shaman, the magus. The others outside the ring are members of the clan.”
“And the one inside the ring?” said Ilario.
“That, I believe, is me.”
“So I’ll need to work the world’s last magic,” said Anne, cracks appearing in her calm. “Enabling you to take the Seeing Stones back where you got them.”
“But not to that dreadful cave. Gods, that was cold. Yet I would choose it instead…” I glanced up at Anne and Ilario and wished I could say something to ease their pain. A calm certainty had settled over me. At last I knew. I—Ianne/Altheus/Os—had returned to the living world for the simple purpose of dying.
Anne
CHAPTER 37
“So this mark is for the seasons, this one for the elements—”
“Earth, air, fire, and water,” said Portier. “Not the Camarilla’s five nor the alchemists’ thirteen.”
“The classical elements,” I said. “I’ll need an object to evoke each one.”
Portier, Ilario, and I sat on the floor at the low table where we had begun, the sketch spread out before us. I had to keep my mind fixed to the problems we faced and not to the end result. Nothing in the lengthy transcript of the tetrarch’s reading suggested an alternative to the simple solution. Portier had to die, and he believed this enchantment, painted on a cave wall millennia in the past, would enable him to take solid matter across the Veil.
When I suggested he had painted the cave wall himself in the throes of delirium, he reminded me about the green pigment and the crystal in his hand when he was dragged out of the cave. When I suggested that the enchantment might allow him to cross the Veil with the Seeing Stones and then return, he pointed to the blood drops on the figure in the drawing and wrinkled his nose, as if it were something only slightly distasteful. Why wasn’t he angry? He wasn’t even forty years old. He’d spent half his life in a library.
While my grief was tempered with rage, Ilario’s was all wonder. “Can you remember everything now?”
“Blessedly, no. Only for the bits of time de Ferrau selected. I can tell you what I smelled in that moment, what I heard, what I knew, what I was thinking. The man who dragged me from the cave was named”—Portier’s eyes shifted, losing their sharp focus—“Vit. He was a modran—a shaman. My uncle.” Information from so deep in his past took a noticeable moment to retrieve. “But I couldn’t tell you what I did the day before crawling into that cave or anything after that waking.”
“We need to move on,” I said. “I don’t know enough yet.” I’d no idea if I could even work such a spell. What if we’d missed some critical detail and Portier died for nothing? And time was racing by. Jacard wanted Portier for his own rite. He could be at our door at any moment.
I tapped the third mark, near hard enough to poke a hole in the paper. “The third you say is a shaman’s mark—so I need something sacred. Would a tessila do? I’ve carried Lianelle’s all this way.”
“Sanctified by a verger, by your love and belief, and by use, I should think so,” said Portier. “It could almost do for the fourth as well. The upward arrow with this knot on the bottom means something that belongs to one of the dead, yet remains here in the living world—an anchor, so to speak.” He nudged me with his elbow. “Ani, it will be all right. You’ll know what to do.”
“Not all of us have divine friends to instruct us,” I snapped, eyes fixed on the sketch.
“Dante is a masterful teacher.” When Portier’s hand touched mine, I felt like I’d whipped a child.
“Oh, gods, forgive me.…Something of yours, then.”
“I don’t seem to have anything of my own. So something belonging to someone else dead…”
I pulled Lianelle’s frog pendant from my shirt. “This was Lianelle’s.”
Ilario touched it. “Dante wore one very like this on our journey from Pradoverde.”
“He brought it with him?” My only light. The stabbing remembrance raised tears I had no time to shed. And now to lose Portier, too…“My sister made both of them.”
Lianelle was there in Ixtador. According to de Ferrau, she might be whole as yet. Every thought of her surrounded by a seething morass of human refuse, knowing such was her only future, had me swallowing stones. “Portier, is the Souleater destroyed once you’ve taken the Stones back? Can he still devour souls?”
“I don’t know. As long as Ixtador remains intact…Honestly, Ani, I’d say there’s risk. I’ll try, but I’ve no idea what…happens. One thing at a time. The fifth symbol is the means of death. The blood drops tell…”
Dante had not known how to destroy Ixtador. And we were to be left without magic.
“…and the sixth…”
“The snake has forever been the symbol of reversal.” De Ferrau had come up behind us. I’d swear the morning’s experience had aged him, grooving his brow and shrinking the flesh of his face from around its bones. He had slept for the past hour, exhausted from the reading and his frenzy to get everything recorded while it was fresh. “I’d say you need something that is the antithesis of death, as if to fool whoever minds the Veil. Agramonte has a cat here.”
“We’ll not want to carry a cat with us, no matter how we decide to get inside the palace,” I said. “Would flowers do? Roots?”
“More in the line of healing,” said Portier, raising a hand. “The modran used snake venoms in medicines and took small amounts throughout his life to induce visions. Rhea can give you a medicine to use.”
“But you said the objects themselves need to be enchanted?”
“This can’t be overly complicated, Ani; we were not a sophisticated people. And the spellwork…just think of how Dante would approach it. My uncle Vit would say choose sacred objects. Dante would say choose objects for their keirna—like the nireal and your sister’s tessila, or water from the fountain of this house, where the tetrarch and his shy friend Agramonte have given us refuge.”
“Perhaps the medicine Rhea used to heal Ilario. Something vital.”
“Exactly so.”
“Rhea’s just returned from the market,” said the tetrarch. “She and Andero found a charm—a door or fence ward that seems to work. We’ll set it up so you can practice snatching the Stones.”
“Good. That’s a grand idea,” I said. I had been so worried about the spellwork, I’d gi
ven little thought to getting the cursed Stones to begin with. How I was to empty myself of thought and desire so completely as to avoid the consequences of a spell, I had no idea.
Portier excused himself, mumbling about a latrine. Rhea took the nireal and the tessila and said she would see to collecting the other things on my list. When I explained how each object should bear as much meaning as possible in the context of our work, she understood immediately.
She scanned the list, biting her lip. “You’ve not put down anything for the killing weapon. I’ve medicines would do it.”
My heart was black as the day. How did one ask a friend how he wished to die?
“I’ll do it,” said Ilario. “I can make it quick and near painless. So, my dagger. Come, let’s practice snatching the damned Stones. Nothing matters if we can’t do that.”
