by Carol Berg
THE WEAK LITTLE CHARM DESIGNED to protect one’s doors and windows from thieves did little but make one’s palms itch, little to discourage a determined thief. But even a weak enchantment would give me a way to practice Dante’s technique for avoiding a spell’s compulsive working.
After an hour’s concentrated quiet, alone in a room, using every mental discipline I knew to clear my mind, I walked through the warded doorway, retrieved a cup set on the far side, and returned it to Ilario. My palms did not itch.
“Good,” he said. “Now try it again.”
Closing my eyes, I swept aside the sound of his voice, my moment’s satisfaction, and my fears that this charm was so minor a deterrent compared to the protection of the Seeing Stones that the exercise was ridiculous. Then I walked through the warded door again. By the time I retrieved the cup, I had to clamp my hands together to keep from scratching.
“Again,” said Ilario. A man who had spent a great deal of his life training in swordplay was no easy taskmaster.
Three more times I made it through—just barely. But then Ilario jumped out at me right when I moved into the charm’s influence. I had to back away before my palms bled. An hour we practiced, Ilario pelting me with nuts or yelling or breaking a plate behind me, until I was ready to strangle him. I succeeded no more than half the time. Wholly unacceptable. The Stones’ protections could kill me.
When Ilario advised I try harder, fear and frustration overflowed. “You do it if it’s so easy!”
“All right.”
A twitch rippled from the top of his dyed hair, down his length to his toes, as if a shower of fleas had bathed him. And then, blank-faced, he walked through the doorway, picked up the cup, and returned it to my hands. Four more times he did the same, without a blink, without a scratch.
As he began again, I picked up a handful of almonds from the basket on the table and threw them at him all at once. He didn’t flinch. Didn’t stop. Didn’t scratch.
The next time I yelled, the next I whacked his shoulder from behind with a fire iron. He grabbed the iron and yanked it from my hand but continued on his mission to replace the cup beyond the door.
“How do you do it?” I could scarce comprehend such focus. “Was the twitching some sort of charm?”
He grinned. “That was just for show. Think, dear lady, how have I spent my life? Do you imagine I could play Ilario de Sylvae, court jester of Castelle Escalon, for some seven-and-twenty years without a great deal of practice ignoring distractions, without training my reflexes to kick in when needed and only without breaking discipline?”
I sagged onto the stool. “Then why in the name of sense didn’t you tell me? Why waste an hour on my failures?”
“Because you believed the mission yours, and it was not my place to say you had too much to worry about already. I wanted your confidence, not your reluctant yielding. I cannot help you with the magic, but empty-headed thievery and killing, yes.”
When we returned to the library, Andero was regaling de Ferrau and Rhea with grim tales of the city. “…a riot at the gates. Some are trying to get inside the walls for fear of this storm coming. None’s ever seen the sky like this. More were trying to get out, though. Fires are springing up here and there. One’s burning in the Street of Beggars. Walls are weeping blood or collapsing. It’s astonishing half the people in the city aren’t dead. The water in the wells and the channels has turned dark. Everywhere you look there’s spiders. Every story’s wilder than the next. All blame the daemon mage.”
“But he can’t—” I stopped short. Dante had said he would fight the Souleater as long as he could. After that, if the Souleater could force him…
“We hold to our plan,” said Ilario. “We get in. We wait until Jacard and the lady are abed. While Anne and Portier prepare the spellwork down in the cellar, I’ll nick the Stones. Rhea and Andero will ensure I’m not interrupted.”
Portier believed that we had to work the rite in the heart of Sirpuhi.
“Jacard won’t be putting on entertainments tonight,” I said. “And even assuming the invisibility potion works on everyone else, it didn’t work for Portier. We’ll have to go in the way Portier and I came out. The drain.”
“Can’t,” said Andero. “It’s blocked. Saw an explosion on my way down yesternight. Thought it was going to bring the cliff down on my head. We could fight our way in and then vanish. None would believe—”
“I’ve a most certain way to open the Regent of Mancibar’s gates,” said de Ferrau from the doorway. “It risks drawing him from his bed, but I doubt he’ll don his magical Stones to meet a Temple tetrarch.”
Despair threatened. “Meet you?”
“I’ll knock on his door and tell him that I’ve the false Sante Ianne in my custody. My payment for turning him over will be the necromancer, whom I plan to gut and burn in Temple Square to make myself the youngest High Tetrarch in Sabria’s history. Do you think he’ll believe me?”
The idea revolted me. “Jacard would demand to see Portier,” I said. “He knows him. And your bailiffs can’t protect you from magic.”
“Ah, but I shall inform him that I’ve, first, given Duplais a poison that will surely kill him before any use can be made of him and, second, laid a Temple curse on him that will abort his saintly revenance—an ancient Temple secret. If the librarian’s immortality is the key to Iaccar’s desires, he’ll not pass up my bargain.”
“Once the bargain is struck, you’ll have to hand Portier over,” said Ilario. “Then you’re dead.”
The tetrarch shrugged. “Naturally we must adapt to the circumstances of the meeting. But with a clever use of Temple regalia—hooded robes, to be precise—as well as my usual insistence on proper protocol, and plenty of distraction from you four, you will spirit Duplais away long before the bargain is consummated. Win or lose, our forces shall be in place inside the palace. My bailiffs and I are not wandering minstrels, but warriors sworn to combat the Souleater and his works in all ways. And if the worst comes to pass, then in some small measure our deeds might make reparation for Captain de Santo.”
De Ferrau’s clear gaze lay square on Ilario. When the chevalier’s visage hardened, the tetrarch did not avert his eyes; nor did he offer any excuses to give himself quarter.
Ilario nodded slowly. “It might work.…”
An hour’s argument found us no better alternative, and we adjusted our plans to suit the new arrangements. The city bells rang tenth hour of the evening watch. “So be it,” I said. “Let’s go.”
THE UNDERSTEWARD SWEPT OUT OF the palace waiting room to fetch Jacard’s steward, leaving Tetrarch de Ferrau, his four bailiffs, Andero, and Portier, all of them draped in hooded green robes. The man hadn’t noticed that Rhea, Ilario, and I were there as well. I had mixed the last of Lianelle’s invisibility powder and divided the potion between us to give us the time we needed. We would have no second chances.
Rhea had supplied one of the smaller bailiffs with a mild sweating potion. Shortly after Jacard arrived and verified Portier’s identity, the young bailiff would feign a collapse. Under cover of the illness, Andero’s guardianship, and enough ghostly distractions to allow it, Andero and unseen partners would get a hooded Portier out of the room while the negotiations for de Ferrau’s bargain proceeded.
It had taken us almost two hours to get to the palace, avoiding crowds trying to quench the raging fires and gangs of rioters tearing into homes and shops. But de Ferrau had gathered his own followers as he proceeded up the palace road, announcing that he had caught the Regent’s missing prisoner and was planning to trade him for the fiendish necromancer, who would burn at dawn in the heart of Mancibar. Trust came very hard amid such rhetoric—and the cheers that followed.
The tetrarch’s most arrogant manner, plus a great deal of persuasion and perhaps some gold coins, had been required to gain us entry. And once we were ensconced in the palace waiting room, the understeward warned of a long wait.
The moonless, starless he
avens boiled. The aether was a wordless tumult. My nerves quivered like plucked lute strings.
I tapped twice on the back of Rhea’s hand—the signal that Ilario and I were off to retrieve the Stones. Holding hands so as not to get separated, the two of us slipped out of the room and up the stair. Rhea and Andero would bring Portier to the cavern, Rhea invisible, Andero posing as a guard taking a prisoner down. I’d sketched them a map of the way.
Lamp boys and sweepers hurried through the corridors, eyes to the floor. Footmen stood at the bottom of the stair and at the intersection of the larger passages, looking as if they’d take off running if someone blinked at them.
The Regent of Mancibar was not in his chambers. The polished wood box in the base of the man-goat statue was empty. Gods save us.…Paralyzed, I stared at the evidence of our ruin. Wherever Jacard was, he had Tychemus with him.
Ilario tugged at my sleeve. “So we try for the woman’s.”
Despair predicted what we would find. A lamp burnt in the lady’s sitting room, but, indeed, no one was there or in the bed, bath, or wardrobe chambers. No green Stones lay in the velvet box.
“So we hunt,” said Ilario, turning down the passage, back the way we’d come.
But I dragged him the opposite direction. “No, we have to see—”
He gathered me close and whispered in my ear. “Ani, Dante is not part of this plan. I’ll come back with you after. I swear it.”
“We have to know if he’s destroying the city.” Dante had warned us to beware of him.
No guard stood outside the doorway. No lamps burnt. My hands bade Ilario wait, and I crept across the room toward the balcony. My knee whacked an obstacle—a straight-backed chair on its side. The balcony was deserted.
“Over here,” whispered Ilario. “There’s been quite a row, and not so long ago. Careful where you step. Everything’s upended. There’s glass.…”
The rug was cold and wet under my bare feet. The armchair where Dante had been sitting when I spoke to him was overturned. The mahogany cabinet with its carafes and glasses lay in splinters. And the night breeze wafted through a dark section of wall where no openings had existed the previous day, stirring the scents of char and ash. Andero’s images of Castelivre were ever vivid.
Something hard gouged my foot. Not glass. Metal…
I retrieved a thin chain—a neck chain, broken, as the clasp was still hooked.
My breath caught. I patted the damp rug. No mistaking the enchantment that prickled my fingers when I found the gleaming oval. A few centimetres away lay a torn scrap of paper and a ring, also bristling with familiar enchantment. Portier’s ring.
“This isn’t Dante’s doing,” I said. “Someone’s torn my pendant from his neck. We may already be too late!”
Lightning split the oppressive sky outside the windows. Not two instants later, thunder trembled the palace foundations. A wind gust banged the balcony doors open. I slapped my hands to my ears to shut out a growing polyphony of terror. It did no good. The storm was inside me.
We streaked from the room and down the passage. As we reached Xanthe’s door, I pulled up. “Wait.”
Dante’s staff stood inside the door, exactly where I’d seen it last. I wrapped my cloak about its middle, which seemed enough to make it unseeable. And in the lamplight I examined the scrap of paper. Two short sentences in Dante’s left-handed script.
Wear it always.
Fight.
A message to himself, perhaps, scattered in the wreckage as it was. Stuffing the scraps in my pocket with the other things, I returned to Ilario. “Now we go.”
Hands clasped tight, we ran. We reached the waiting room just as Jacard barged in, a green prism gleaming at his breast.
I drew Ilario back around the corner. “I’m going on down,” I said. “We’re going to have very little time.”
“Godspeed, Ani.” Ilario kissed the top of my head. “We’ll be there with Stones and saint as soon as may be.”
I hated to leave them. But Portier could wield enchantment, Ilario and Andero could fight, and Rhea was strong, intelligent, and invisible. I had to trust them. Only I could prepare the spell.
Gripping the staff and canvas bag that held the elements for the spellwork, I raced down the stairs and passages I’d followed the previous night. Dante’s magic had guided my steps to find Portier. I was sure of it now. An unlikely animal fervor rose from my toes. We partner well, my friend of the mind and heart. And our friends are exceptional. We’ll win this night yet.
CHAPTER 38
Smoke, yellow light, and the eye-watering scent of incense pouring through the brick arch from Sirpuhi’s heart had warned me the cavern was not deserted. A man’s thready wail but confirmed it. Yet nothing could have prepared me for the sight awaiting.
The air trembled with candlelight; the blood-painted words on floor and walls shivered. Across the cavern, beyond Altheus’s bier and the four angels, two naked men were suspended by their wrists from pegs fixed in the stone wall. The one moaning in terror was a sturdy, healthy young man, very like the prisoner I’d set free. The other was Dante.
Did Jacard think to use Dante instead of Portier? It made no sense. Dante could not provide rebirth.
He was so still.…Only after a moment did a violent shudder declare him living. I breathed again.
The woman, his mistress, this Xanthe who teased Jacard so unmercifully, paced the length and breadth of the rectangular pit bounded by the wall and the towering angels. She fondled the green Stones at her breast.
“…no notion what to do,” she said. “You’ve ever advised me not to trust Iaccar. But I won’t run away, either. I waited seven centurias to wield the Maldeona. This could all be your trick to steal them. You detest Iaccar. You think us both stupid.”
Dante lifted his head. His eyes were sunk into his gaunt face, his lips bloody. Rivulets of sweat coursed down his flanks, pain stretching his skin across his bones. Though he, like the other man, was strapped tight to the wall at ankles, chest, and neck, I could see no mark on him. He jerked again, his every corded sinew twisting and knotting.
“Kill me,” he said, harsh and low. “Please, lady—must fight—” He clamped his mouth shut as he spasmed yet again. Harder.
“No,” she said, half angry, half grieving. “Tell her to save you, whoever she is.”
Her? Saints, did they know I was here?
She climbed to the low step beneath his feet. “I don’t want you dead. But you’re no good to me like this. The market burns. The roads and riding paths crack. What pleasure in being queen of ruin? The ghoul says it’s your doing.”
“Need to die—” He slammed the back of his head against the wall.
The stone beneath my feet quivered. Great gods, what was happening to him?
“You told me that none can command a magus to work magic.” The woman’s rising desperation made her shrill. “Or was that just another lie?”
Dante snarled as he shuddered yet again.
Thick gray smoke hung in the vastness above the shallow pit. Cloudy tendrils brushed the flesh of the bound men, drawing wordless whimpers from the prisoner. Dante didn’t seem to notice.
A gray finger of smoke twisted through the tremulous air exactly in my direction. I retreated, slamming my back to the wall of the prison passage, heart hammering, the taste of vomit in my mouth.
I’d thought Portier’s absence would halt this business. Yet Jacard had clearly been interrupted. However hateful it was to leave Dante as he was, our plans were already askew. If the others brought Portier, and if we could somehow snatch the Seeing Stones, we’d have very little time to destroy the Stones. By Dante’s own judgment, that came before all. I had to be ready.
The cells in the dark little passage were empty. The blue-limned light of the potion enchantment guided my eyes, but Dante’s teaching guided my hands. Using his staff, I traced the boundaries of one cell for my spell enclosure, giving me the largest possible field. Circularity was unimportant,
but closure was critical. I used the order of the symbols in the cave drawing to lay out the objects from the canvas bag: representations of the four seasons and the four elements, the sacred tessila, the anchor…Ah, I now possessed something belonging to Portier. I returned Lianelle’s pendant to my neck and pulled out the ring I’d found in Dante’s chambers. Leaving an empty place for the weapon, I placed the vial of Ilario’s stomach medicine—our representation of the healing snake.
The arrangement felt awkward. Selection of the objects is primary, Dante had instructed, but never underestimate the importance of balance and positioning. The piled branches, flasks, fan, and candle for the seasons and elements weighed heavy against Portier’s ring and the small chunk of rosy marble that was the tessila. So I placed the four elemental objects at the corners, the four reminders of the seasons halfway down each boundary of the rectangular space. The weapon, the medicine vial, the tessila, and the ring would define a second rectangle inside the first. Better.
