The Summon Stone

by Ian Irvine

  Behind her a series of iron racks contained dusty bottles and stoppered glass flasks, a dozen ten-gallon barrels of wine, and six small barrels of the raw spirit Shand used for making brandies and liqueurs. But there was no smell of old books.

  Until she sniffed along the wine barrels, and the one in the far corner had the faintest aroma of aged parchment. She hesitated. This was wrong; Shand would be apoplectic.

  She found a hidden catch at the back and opened the barrel. Inside, wrapped in canvas and then in layers of waxed paper, was a book, eleven inches square, with covers of pink polished rosewood inlaid with camphor laurel, sandalwood, incense cedar and other scented timbers. It contained several hundred pages of fine cream-coloured parchment, though many of the pages were stained, some smelled bad, and the combination of odours made her nose prickle. But it wasn’t Shand’s primer – the name on the cover was Radizer and the title was Scent Potions.

  Shivers crept up the outsides of Aviel’s thighs. This was the grimoire of Shand’s reckless master, who had blown himself to bits while trying to make one of the potions. It was a deadly book, one no apprentice would be allowed to open save under the supervision of her master. Yet she, who had never done anything really reckless in her life, was thinking about using it by herself.

  If she began there would be no going back. No regaining Shand’s trust either, and after all he had done for her she could not so betray him. She replaced the grimoire in the barrel and was splashing down through the puddles to her workshop when she heard the crack of huge wings and a furious shriek from the direction of the skeet house.

  Not again! She got a fist-sized piece of rabbit, headed to the skeet house and, with some difficulty, removed the red-cased message. Aviel opened it in the workshop, hunched up against her brazier.

  West of Tirthrax

  2 Pulin, 3111

  Shand,

  Our very existence is in peril and every second counts now.

  Find the summon stone, the source of the drumming, with the utmost haste. Destroy it by smashing it to pieces, burning every fragment in the hottest fire you can make – but NOT mage fire – then pounding the fragments to dust and scattering it far and wide. Do not use mancery near it. Under no circumstances attempt to draw upon the power of the source – this could be catastrophic.

  I am hurrying to Chanthed by aerial means and should arrive in three weeks, though at best that will only be a fortnight before the night of the triple moons. If you’re not there I will take charge of our defences – though I fear it may already be too late.

  Desperate times, old friend.

  Malien

  The brazier gave out no heat. Aviel’s feet and hands felt as though they had turned to ice.

  Our very existence is in peril… every second counts. Destroy the stone… not mage fire.

  Why not?

  Even if she could find someone who knew how to direct a skeet to Chanthed, Shand would not get there for the best part of a week. But the summon stone had to be found urgently and if seconds counted, a week was out of the question.

  Aviel was forced to a terrible conclusion. It was up to her to locate the summon stone right away so, when Shand got the message, he could destroy it.

  But to do that, she would need his grimoire.

  47

  WAS THAT THE DEATH CRY?

  When Aviel finished the first half of the grimoire it was five in the morning and her eyes were starting out of her head in horror. She blew the lantern out and collapsed on her bed, shaking as if she had a fever. The book was dreadful, dark and deadly.

  And she had to use it.

  The mancery of scent potions was nothing like she had imagined. She only ever used her scents for positive purposes: healing, enhancing moods, disguising bad smells and generally making people feel better in one way or another. She knew there were darker potions, though she’d had no idea just how depraved and terrible they could be.

  Now she did.

  The dark scent potions in the grimoire greatly outnumbered the good ones: potions to enfeeble, confuse or control a person; potions to make an enemy ill and potions to prevent a wound from healing; potions that would drive whoever smelled them insane; potions to utterly corrupt. Potions to poison an enemy in a dozen sickening ways.

  And potions to kill.

  Some were dangerous to make, as Radizer had discovered when he was blown to bits. All the dark potions were dangerous to test, and some were so perilous that they could only be tested on the intended victim.

  Dark potion-making began with the collection and purification of a variety of scents, fumes, stenches, miasmas and reeks. Some were foul, acrid, corrosive or poisonous, and some had to be sourced from graveyards, charnel houses, cesspits and other terrible places.

  She wondered how the summon stone had ended up where it was. Was it lost, or had it been deliberately hidden? The answer mattered – a scent potion for finding something lost could not be used to locate a deliberately hidden object, or one concealed by spell or illusion.

  Every second counts now.

  Such a powerful enchanted object was unlikely to have been lost. It had probably been carefully hidden long ago. A guess, but it gave Aviel something to work with.

  The grimoire contained three scent potions for finding hidden objects, though the Wild Goose Exhalation, the easiest of them, hardly seemed appropriate, and the Revelatory Reek could not see through spells of hiding, illusion or misdirection. That only left the Eureka Graveolence, which began here. Aviel had no idea what graveolence meant, though it suggested both grave and violence. It was one of the scent potions in the final and most difficult section of the grimoire – the “Great Potions”.

  The section began with three pages of warnings about making the potions and a further two pages of warnings about their use. Their effects were liable to be stronger, less predictable and more dangerous each succeeding time they were used.

  She turned the pages, reluctantly. Even the names were unpleasant – the Revelatory Reek, Murderer’s Mephitis, An Essence of Ague, the Putrid Potion – and she wondered why Shand had been apprenticed to a mancer who was clearly attracted to the dark side. There was a dark side to Shand too, though it had never been turned on her.

  It would be once he discovered what she was up to.

  Aviel reached here and went to turn to the next page, but it was stuck to the one after and she had to ease them apart with a knife blade. As soon as she opened the pages, her nostrils were attacked by a repulsive stench. She dropped the book and hurled herself back.

  The grimoire appeared to be smoking. No, a red-brown fume was oozing from the pages of the Eureka Graveolence, though it hung above the surface as if trying to get back into the parchment. She tried to waft it away with her fingers but the fume spun into a trio of whorls, spinning sluggishly, that coiled away from one another. The pages, Aviel now saw, were spattered with thick greenish-brown muck, long congealed.

  The whorls rotated around the edges of the pages, approached one another, combined and were drawn back into the largest of the spatters with a faint squelching sound, like muck gurgling down a plughole.

  But the smell was even worse, and it was coming from the three middle fingers of her right hand, where they had passed through the fume. Her fingertips had gone the greenish-brown colour, and it was spreading. She scrambled across to the washbasin, poured some water in and scrubbed her fingers with the strong yellow soap she had made last week. It had no effect; the stain was creeping down past the first joint of her three fingers, staining the skin and turning it thick and lumpy, like – she imagined – the skin of a troll. Aviel tried sandsoap, scrubbing until her fingers throbbed, but that did not stop the stain either.

  What if it kept spreading until it turned her into a fifteen-year-old monstrosity? How her sisters would gloat. The thought stopped her heart for several beats.

  She tossed the water out the door, took a flask of aqua vitae distilled from fermented fruit, which she had planned to
use for tincture making, and poured a cupful into the basin. Aviel jammed her fingers into it and yelped as the pure spirit stung and burned. The liquid went the same foul brown as the fume, but when she withdrew her hand the stain was still spreading slowly down her fingers. What if it got into a cut and started to grow inside her?

  Apart from cutting the affected fingers off, Aviel could only think of one remedy. Last year she had extracted a flask of fruit acid from a case of bitter oranges. It had lifted the skin off her hands and left them red and flaking for weeks afterwards. She had labelled it with a warning, put it on a high shelf and forgotten about it.

  She tossed out the reeking spirits, wiped the basin with a rag and measured a small quantity of the fruit acid into the basin. After taking a deep breath she plunged her fingers in. Her eyes wandered to the cleaver hanging on the wall behind her chopping bench. She used it for cutting up woody herbs. If the fruit acid did not work she would have to take desperate measures.

  Her skin stung, burned, throbbed. She stared at the wall as she rubbed her fingers together, working the liquid into every pore. Aviel did not look down; she did not want to get her hopes up prematurely. Only when she could bear the pain no longer did she lift her fingers from the fruit acid.

  The stain had stopped moving at the second joints of her fingers. But would the acid kill the stain? She might not know for hours so she put a glove on her wet fingers and tried to put it out of mind.

  The grimoire lay open on her bedcovers. It was a malevolent book, dangerous even to a careful master and deadly to an apprentice. Since she was the greenest novice, the sensible thing was to put it back where she had found it and never think of it again. After all, it wasn’t up to her to carry out Malien’s orders.

  How could she have read the grimoire in bed? The thought of it lying on the covers where she slept sent tingles of horror through her. She took it to the little scrubbed table where she ate her meals, but reading it there felt just as bad. Aviel put it on the scarred, zinc-covered workbench that old Quintius the alchemist, whose workshop this had been, had used for his unsuccessful experiments, and felt the tension ease.

  She went to close the book, then stopped. Would the fume rise again if she reopened it at the Eureka Graveolence? Was the book safer closed or open? She pulled up a stool and scanned the instructions for making the scent potion.

  It was the most complicated recipe she had ever seen – it used twenty-eight ingredients and had fifteen steps, some involving processes she had never used before. Some of the ingredients she already had or could find without too much trouble, such as the pong extracted from a rotten crow’s egg and the distilled essence captured from a pile of aged horse manure, but others would be difficult. And at least two would be dangerous, both to obtain and to use.

  Thrice-warmed sludge from the base of the de-hairing pits of a leather tannery.

  The de-hairing pits had the foulest and most disgusting stench Aviel had ever smelled, and getting some of the sludge would be tricky because there was only one tannery in Casyme and it belonged to Magsie Murg, a rich and nasty old lady who would have owned Aviel’s indenture for seven years had Shand not intervened. Magsie was a law unto herself and she had most been unhappy about losing Aviel to Shand. If she was caught in the tannery while he was away, she could end up enslaved there.

  The stench from the burning skull bone from a hundred-year-old grave.

  Grave robbing was an offence against the dead, not to mention a serious crime, and it brought shockingly bad luck.

  Aviel sniffed the glove. The reek was gone; she could only smell bitter orange now. She peeled off the glove and the lumpy skin came off her fingers, leaving them red, wrinkled and very tender.

  She went back to the recipe. Some of the weights and measurements were indecipherable because of the noxious muck spattered across the pages, and two of the ingredients were illegible. She took a fine-bladed silver knife and worked it under the largest of the spatters, hoping to lift it off.

  Aaarrghhhh!

  A dying shriek echoed back and forth in her inner ear. Aviel whipped the knife away as more stinking fumes oozed out. She threw herself backwards, her hair streaming all around her head and crackling with sparks. Her heart was thundering and sweat prickled on the backs of her hands.

  Was that the death cry of Master Radizer? Had he been making the Eureka Graveolence before he died? Could the stains be the residue of his failed scent potion? Or his own decayed remains? Or both?

  And if she were so extraordinarily foolish as to attempt the potion untutored, would her exploded innards end up beside his?

  48

  A PERFECT BRUTE

  Llian was slumped in a chair, his head still echoing from the drumming, which had gone on half the night, when Ifoli burst into Snoat’s salon. Her breathing was ragged, her ivory cheeks tinged with pink, and she stumbled as she entered. Her left hand was pressed to her stomach as if she were in pain.

  “Ifoli!” snapped Snoat, clearly irritated that she had strayed so far from the perfection he demanded.

  “Gurg—” Her voice was higher than usual, almost shrill.

  Snoat scowled.

  With a visible effort of will she calmed herself, regularised her breathing and pressed her left hand down by her side. Llian could not remember seeing anyone so young – she could not have been twenty-five – having such extraordinary self-control.

  “Gurgito said he’ll come when he’s damn well ready.” She bowed and stood back, trembling a little.

  “Did he now?” A muscle jumped in Snoat’s jaw, then he laughed. “What a fellow he is.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean, Cumulus.”

  “In his way, Gurgito Unick is as perfect as you are. You are perfectly lovely, perfectly competent and, almost always, perfectly composed. Unick is a perfect brute who lacks all impulse control. He’s as vicious a mongrel as you will ever see, and one of the prizes in my collection.”

  “He’s worse now! The Origin device has corrupted him.”

  “Come now. He only finished it at midnight.”

  “And it’s utterly transformed him. He’s a danger to you, Cumulus.”

  Llian sat up. The drumming had began suddenly at midnight, louder than he had ever heard it. He had lain in bed for an hour, fighting an almost overwhelming urge to sneak down the hall to Thandiwe’s room. He had tried everything to defeat it, though in the end only one thing could hold him back – the thought of Sulien’s crushing disappointment in him.

  “He hates men like me,” said Snoat. “But he hates clever women even more.”

  Ifoli’s hand slipped to her stomach again. “He hates all women.”

  Snoat frowned. “He struck you?”

  Ifoli unfastened the central buttons of her gown. Her midriff bore a fist-sized red mark. She fastened the buttons. The flush reappeared on her cheeks but faded at once.

  “Have him brought here. By the tetrad.”

  “Sir!” cried Ifoli. “I implore you—”

  “At once! And never call me sir again, or the tetrad may pay a visit on you.”

  She bowed and went out.

  Snoat, now agitated, dismissed the secretaries and Thandiwe. He turned to Llian, who had no idea what was going on or what the tetrad was.

  “Unick is the most brilliant maker of enchanted devices in the world,” said Snoat. “There’s no one else like him. But I can’t allow him to damage my possessions, can I?”

  “Am I your possession?” Llian had begun to think he was.

  “You’re a unique and precious part of my collection, the teller of the first new Great Tale in hundreds of years. Though I’m not sure you’re going to be a permanent part…”

  Chills formed on the back of Llian’s neck. Snoat’s words could be interpreted in a number of ways but he could only focus on the obvious meaning. Snoat planned to have him killed, and, trapped in this walled and heavily guarded estate, how could he hope to escape?

  The drumming sounded, very fa
intly this time. Some distance away a man roared like a mad beast, then let out a stream of obscenities fouler than anything Llian had heard since his reckless student days. Then came an almighty crash, as if one of the exquisite vases that lined the corridors had been smashed to pieces, followed by another series of berserk roars, obscenities and crashes.

  Ifoli burst through the doorway, skidded on the polished floor, recovered and said redundantly, “They’re bringing him now, Cumulus. He’s… reluctant.”

  “The Oolian vases?” said Snoat.

  “Three of the four.”

  “Bring the last.”

  She went out. The roars grew louder until they rattled the windows, then Gurgito Unick was dragged in. He was a very big man, but the tetrad who had tamed him were bigger. They were giants, as muscular as weightlifters, yet it took three of them to hold him, and his wild lurches and furious lunges were dragging them several feet one way and then the other.

  It was hard to comprehend how anyone could have changed so radically, so quickly. Unick’s face was as bloated as that of a five-day corpse, his tiny eyes were so red they seemed to be dripping blood, and he stank as if he had slept in the same clothes for a month. Had his Origin device focused the drumming on him?

  His ruddy eyes touched on Ifoli, who had returned with the last of the Oolian vases, a lovely piece almost three feet tall. He leered at her. Then Unick noticed Llian staring at him and rage overwhelmed him.

  “Stinking teller!” he roared.

  In an explosion of violence he tore free of the tetrad and ran at Llian, who was in a corner and had nowhere to go. The tetrad lumbered after Unick but he was too quick. Llian was sure he was going to die – one blow from those mighty fists would drive his nose out the back of his head.