Dust and Light

by Carol Berg

  Discipline, Lucian. You must hear what’s said.

  Gramphier struck his gavel again and rose from his chair to his imposing height. “Curators of the Pureblood Registry, we are charged with administering the gods’ holiest gift to humankind. We have heard damning testimony. We have heard the advocacy of Curator Pluvius and the recommendations of Curator Pons, who has observed him even longer. The time has come to render judgment. I determine that the man before us is responsible for the death of one of the gods’ chosen and five ordinaries, this crime explained, though not excused, by reason of a broken mind. Say, each of you, yea if you agree, nay if you dissent.”

  “Yea.” Pons settled back in her chair, arms crossed, after pronouncing her resounding verdict. Was she satisfied at last?

  Damon looked inscrutable. And voted yea.

  Master Pluvius looked aggrieved. And voted yea. I glared at him, horrified. My advocate.

  Yea. Yea. Each cold-eyed affirmation drove a nail into my coffin lid, and I could do naught but stand and hear it.

  Gramphier struck his gavel again. “It is our unanimous judgment that Lucian de Remeni-Masson is broken and must be held in close confinement so that his magic cannot be used to serve his madness. Until we find a suitable house and a guardian who will enforce the strictures of close confinement in more comfortable and dignified circumstances, he will be kept here in the Tower in conditions to ensure his health, his personal safety, and the safety of all. He is hereby forbidden to speak to any person without my personal consent, to marry, to sire children, to teach, to walk free, or to show his face to any person, pureblood or ordinary, unmasked, save those we set in custody over him. He shall pursue no activity, magical or other, save with my consent. . . .”

  I did not faint. Did not rage. Did not die, save inside where all was ash and ruin anyway. As one dire stricture after another fell from Gramphier’s thin lips, this tableau came to feel like an ancient play put on in a crumbling theater, where everyone knew the outcome before the first scena had even begun. There was no justice or right judgment here, not when the condemned was given no right to speak. Instinct . . . the study of history . . . years of observing faces and extracting their truth with my ink and my bent suggested that everyone here was an actor, and that no word of mine could have changed the course laid out for me since three days ago. Or was it five years past? Had my grandsire, too, believed me deviant? Mad? Was that why he had contracted me to the Registry, where I could be watched every moment of every day?

  Somewhere behind raging disbelief and heartsick certainty, First Curator Gramphier yet droned. “. . . swear to you upon your grandsire’s name that we shall help you overcome this illness that has riven you from our kind. Our hope is that with time, work, and proper care, you will heal and reclaim the gift the gods have granted you.”

  He nodded to someone behind me. I wrenched my arm from Nelek’s iron grip long enough to touch my forehead and bow to each of the six. With each rising my uncovered eye caught and locked a curator’s glance before I moved on to the next. Gramphier, Albin, Scrutari, and Pluvius dropped the gaze before I did. Only Damon’s stare of chilly curiosity held. And Pons’s, which spoke nothing at all.

  I would likely have many empty hours to contemplate that, along with the rest of my questions. These curators would be in no great hurry to find me a comfortable confinement; the idea of healing was laughable when there was no illness. But through whatever came, I must hold to the truth: I had not murdered my sister or our servants. I had done nothing to warrant this punishment. For the honor of all my beloved dead, I would endure.

  PART II

  THE KILLING SEASON

  CHAPTER 15

  YEAR 1292 OF THE ARDRAN PRINCIPALITY

  YEAR 215 FROM THE UNIFICATION OF ARDRA, MORIAN, AND EVANORE AS THE KINGDOM OF NAVRONNE

  YEAR 2, INTERREGNUM, MOURNING THE DEATH OF GOOD KING EODWARD

  LATE WINTER

  The door scraped and I squeezed my eyes shut. I no longer looked up when the light came. It pained my head too much and delayed every new accommodation to the dark. Eyes closed, I took my proper place, while my jailers inspected me for vermin or disease.

  It was always Nelek who inspected me or hacked off any growth of hair on my head or chin, while poor Virit had to shovel my foul mess from the corner and replace the litter with clean. Occasionally they replaced my bedding, too, in the corner opposite.

  Straw would have been more satisfactory for both uses, but straw was considered too solid, too easy for a mad sorcerer to infuse with spellwork. So they gave me a litter of dead grass and dry leaves to sleep on. It lasted three sleeps on average before crumbling entirely to dust.

  Dust and light. They prescribed the rhythm of my hours in close confinement. The count of the days themselves had eluded me from the first night after my judgment, when Nelek had led me back to the iron cell and stripped off my clothes. The hateful mask, shackles, and hand bindings had remained in place. He said he would remove them when he was convinced I would obey his commands absolutely whenever he opened the iron door. I was not to speak so much as a word, nor touch either him or Virit, nor touch the food or drink or other things they might bring until he said. To any question, I was to respond appropriately. To submit, I assumed. To confess to madness and murder.

  I had howled that first night. Not in madness or despair, though I felt very near both, but in a determination to purge fear, hate, and anguish so as to make room for reason. I howled in mourning for Juli, for Soflet, Giaco, and the rest, for all of my dead, for the hurt of such loss as could never, ever be eased. I howled for the world, too, missing its noblest king, suffering an evil war that broke men’s bodies so cruelly and a disastrous winter that could cause humans to don orange scarves and descend into most inhuman savagery. I howled for the blight on men’s and women’s souls that could lead them to debauch and murder children. If such crazed corruption had somehow penetrated the Registry, too, then how would any of us survive this accursed season?

  Discipline, so my family had taught me. Reasoned behavior derived from custom, clarity, and conviction. I was six-and-twenty. I had a powerful bent for magic. I was not entirely stupid. As long as blood pulsed within me, and as long as reason guided my actions, there was a chance I would be free again to discover the truth of these horrors.

  So I howled. Hour upon hour upon hour until my soul felt empty, my throat felt like broken glass, and the cold and the hateful bindings, and even the lurking terror that there might be rats in this cellar, could not stave off sleep.

  When next I woke, when the door scraped and the light appeared for the first time of my close confinement, emptiness enabled me to do exactly as Nelek had prescribed. I stood in the center of the room with my back to the door and did not move. He inspected me, unfastened my mouth strap, and set out a bread bowl filled with ale. It had made for a hurried meal, and an awkward one when I had naught but bundled hands to manage it. When I was done they fastened the mouth strap again.

  “Have you any ills to confess, plebeiu?”

  I shook my head and they left. And so it had been every waking since.

  On the present occasion, as ever when they left me alone again, I tried to thread together the happenings of the days leading to my fall. Someone had been seen setting the fire apurpose, even preventing its spread beyond our house. A Harrower, perhaps. A skilled arsonist could limit a fire’s reach, especially in the snow and wet. Yet fanatics ran in frenzied packs and did not mime purebloods in cloaks and masks. To believe a pureblood had set out to murder my sister or me left me teetering at the brink of an abyss.

  My thoughts chased one another in widening circles, seeking some motive for such a crime. What could anyone hope to gain by our deaths? Our treasury was minuscule, our family properties blighted or burnt. Our influence had died at Pontia, and to think that Juli had somehow brought this down on us was ludicrous. Personal grievance led me nowhere but back to Pons. Her stone-gray eyes stared at me through the cold dark,
but told me nothing. Panic nibbled at my spirit. What was I missing?

  There was the matter of the altered portraits. Gilles had said two or three were being completed, when I knew very well they were already complete. Unfortunately it had been so long I could not call up the true images. And I knew none of the curators well enough to speculate about any flaw in character my portraits might have revealed. But it seemed unlikely that the petty offense of two or three could condemn me to this.

  They believed I was mad. In his judgment, Gramphier had mentioned aberrant behavior of certain purebloods. I hadn’t caught it at the time. Had he meant my dual bents?

  I dismissed the thought. Gramphier, at least, knew my second bent had been excised. I had shown no aberrant tendencies. I was not mad.

  But of course, I also knew the excision had not worked, which left a lingering uneasiness in my soul—a simple blot, like the bruise on a leper’s finger that left her with no hands, or the freckle on a man’s forehead that consumed his eye and cheekbone and, eventually, the rest of him from the inside out.

  * * *

  The next time my jailers came—I had no way to judge the span of hours between their visits, but only that I was hungry—they brought a fresh pile of litter for my waste and a bread bowl filled with stewed parsnips. I hated parsnips, but I ate every morsel. As ever, I moved the litter to the corner where I could find it easily in the dark.

  Never facile at pure abstraction, I was accustomed to developing ideas with pen in hand. Without that aid, I had to grasp random threads of memory and follow where they led, hoping to discern the moment when something felt awry. But magical ball games with my lost brothers, exuberant family dinners, and history tutorials were much clearer than any hints of grievance or conspiracy. Five years working in the Tower and I could scarce recall any difference from one day to another. Had I been asleep the whole time? Enchanted?

  Frustration set my bound hands to pounding my half-leather skull. My restraints seemed particularly crafted to inhibit clear thinking. If I tried to pace, the shackles rubbed my ankles raw. My burns seeped and stung beneath the hand bindings. And the leather mask forced me to consider every swallow, every cough, every sneeze, lest I choke or drown. Its weight and stiffness left my neck aching, the corners of my mouth bleeding, and sleep unsatisfying.

  Persistent dreams had me chained while wearing the mask, unable to run or cry out as flames consumed me, and a man with an orange scarf and long pale fingers banded in copper laughed and watched. I bit my lips in my sleep and clawed at the sores in my mouth until they bled. Someday I would know that man’s name, and why a man who had worn a Harrower’s colors in my burning courtyard was allowed to see the unmasked faces of the Registry curators.

  * * *

  A few more visits and Nelek removed the shackles. Eventually my hands were unbound. The burn on the back of my right hand had grown septic, and my jailers fetched ointments. Over the next span of endless inspections, eating, and sleeping, the wound healed—bless the gods—with no damage to my favored hand. Sitting in the dark, I felt shamed that I fretted so about that possibility, when Juli would never use her gifts at all. The image of her took shape in my head, sharp and sudden, as if someone had sliced open the walls of Idrium to taunt those of us left behind. Her dark eyes sparked; her agile body spun in exuberance; her fingers, laden with magic, touched a block of marble, ready to waken it to good use.

  Forgive me, serena. The knife twisted in my heart. I should have taken better care. . . . And I told her how empty was a world where no one recalled our mother’s weakness for lavender or our brother Germaine’s for sour plums, where none could sit admiring the Cartamandua map hanging in our library for the sheer beauty of its illumination, or where no sister shared one’s scorn of women who thought lisping made them alluring. Small things. Trivial things. But important because they spoke of family. How would I remember it all without her to help? Already details were slipping away into the dark.

  I apologized to the dead girl child, Fleure, as well. What had Bastien been told of my disappearance? His luck charm, he’d called me. My brief career at the necropolis already seemed so remote as to blend with tales of myth. Please, gods, let no one at Caton be dead because of me.

  Tales of myth . . . For one brief moment, I thought back to that night of the blizzard—of naked forms etched with exquisite fire, of warnings that made no sense and a voice that roused forbidden memory when speaking my name. It was the voice that convinced me the incident must have been the result of exhaustion and magical depletion. I had seen Morgan naked, and she was no Dané.

  Of course, the contrast of the sharp-edged memory and the certainty of its impossibility fed the uneasy blot on my soul. I had to push it all away. I was not mad. I was not.

  Never did Nelek and Virit take me out of the cell. Never did they speak to me of my crimes. I could not fathom why the curators kept me alive. If this was supposed to heal my madness, I had no idea how. Truly, I feared the reverse. The more I tried to think, the more I slipped into confusion. Soon I could no longer put two ideas together in a logical sequence, each one scarce a whisper in the dark, flitting away on silent wings.

  A longer span of repeated warnings that I must never speak, and Nelek removed the vile mask. I wept that night. It was the first time since my howling night. My sobs made no sound at all.

  * * *

  The hours blurred until I could not judge one from the next. Worsening headaches kept my thoughts muddled. My eyes began playing tricks on me, as well. How could shadows exist where there was no light? Human-sized shadows. Hovering. Watching. Vapors, no more than that, yet their pervasive malevolence terrified me.

  I brushed at them. Turned away. Hid my eyes. Lay naked in the cold, praying the pain in my head would ease, praying I was not going mad.

  No god answered my prayers. The shadows commanded me to draw a corpus sitting in a chair. But when I touched the pale, still face to spark my magic, the flesh was warm, and thready breath tickled my hand.

  No! I would not. Someone had once said my art could steal a man’s soul. To snatch a soul from a living being would be a crime beyond redemption.

  Again and again the dream shadows presented me corpses. One and all their chests rose and fell like shallow, quiet seas. Dream or waking, I fought the shadows’ will until my head felt as if they drove nails into it. Magic was an act of will. No one could force a sorcerer to work magic.

  The dreams persisted. Came an hour I considered yielding. Perhaps if I did what the shadows wanted, they would stop. Nelek’s braying arrival woke me. I stumbled to my feet, weeping. Tears came more often now.

  The degrading inspection. Yet another inexpert scraping of head and chin. Boiled fish, olives, and bread, spread with pasty beans that tasted of wormwood. As I ate, I smelled ink on my hands. Madness.

  When they left me alone again, the blackness within me was as profound as that without. I dared not sleep.

  You need occupation, Lucian. To despair was to repudiate the gods’ grace. Magic . . . Everything purebloods did, everything we were, centered on the gift we held in trust. If I could just work something small . . .

  No one knew a sure way to prevent a skilled sorcerer from conjuring, save to silkbind his hands and allow him nothing for his spellmaking to affect. Sheets of iron, as enclosed my cell, did not preclude magic, but had a way of causing spells to work erratically, dangerously so. To touch the walls or door with magic would risk mind-destroying backlash, thus escape by brute force was impossibly risky. But if the spellwork was wholly contained inside the walls and sufficiently small, no harm should come of it.

  The first enchantment my mother had taught me was an aerogen—a simple wind spell, scarce a ripple in the sea of life and magic. It should leave little or no residue for Nelek to find.

  I sat cross-legged in the approximate center of my cell and began.

  Difficult. Extraordinarily difficult to consider structure, magnitude, and effects in the formless dark. My brow bro
ke out in sweat. My fingernails dug into my palms. But with care and labor I created the pattern to reflect my desire—little more than the promise of movement—and bound it with my will. Fingers spread, I let the magic flow into the air.

  Ah, glory . . . the essence of all that was beautiful in the wide world filled both the great emptiness inside me and the waiting pattern. Little more than a puff stirred the fetid air, but it was magic, it was new, and it was my own.

  Starving, greedy, I wanted more. I gathered a handful of dust left from the repeated deterioration of my litter bed. Dust, like smoke, ash, and fog, existed on that borderline between the physical and the ephemeral. If I could make air move, why not dust? And though the individual particles were too insubstantial to support a full-blown light spell, something smaller for each might yield an interesting result.

  The task would be tedious and time-consuming, but it wasn’t as if I had something more important to do. Thinking . . . solving unsolvable mysteries . . . was impossibly difficult locked in the dark with a head like a smith’s forge. But magic was muscle and bone. Exciting, ever and always.

  First, I worked at modifying the aerogen to move the dust, not at random, but in very particular directions. When my spread fingers at last felt the spinning dust cloud above my head, the resulting shower set me sneezing . . . and laughing. Unnerving that I couldn’t stop either one for a very long while.

  I reduced the spell pattern for magelight to a pinpoint. Then I made four more patterns exactly the same and bound them together. I replicated that construct and bound the two together. Ten such pinpoint spells. Thus and so until I had built thousands of constructs, each holding thousands of pinpoint spells.

  Already, I felt stronger of mind, more lucid, more in control of myself.