by Carol Berg
I will. What else? I hungered to get on with this. At the same time, I felt a pleasing ripple of ferocity that was not my own. His melded with mine, strengthening it as braided rope becomes stronger than the sum of each strand.
Stay open to the mindstorm, no matter what. It wears, but you’ve reserves you’ve never tapped. Believe that. When I tell you, think of that page you read. Draw it on the canvas of your mind—every detail you can remember. I’ll see it, and it will be much faster than trying to explain it in words. I must stay ahead of them. Anything you can do to that end is good. And be prepared for anything. Despite the news of the witch’s betrayal, Kajetan wears an unhealthy smirk. Gods . . . must leave off—
He broke off abruptly, before I could tell him that Eugenie would not arrive. He would likely be furious at my changing the plan, but I still believed it the right choice. As for the king . . .
The wind seemed to urge the encroaching shadows more swiftly now. Why had my goodfather left the palace early? Had he changed his mind about letting this move forward?
I scanned the hillside behind me. Where was Roussel? Maybe he had found better grazing for the horses. Exposed grass was sparse in the maquis, only a few little patches between the rocks.
I tried to assuage my guilt at drawing Roussel into this. The Aspirant wouldn’t care about him. He had no blood mark on his hand. But if the physician insisted on staying close to help once I was in the Aspirant’s hands, he needed to know about the king and our signal. Perhaps I should give him my knife, still strapped to my thigh beneath the vile Gurmedd gown. Perhaps I should give him some of Lianelle’s potion and tell him how to use it.
I reached under my jacket to make sure the vials remained secure and undetectable to anyone searching me. One was bound with my breasts, one in the rolled waist of my underskirt. In my fumbling, my fingers came across a thin packet of folded papers, limp with old sweat.
Stars of night, Duplais’ letters. The abrupt departure with Dagobert had completely erased them from my mind. I stuffed the notes from tailors and merchants under a thornbush and devoured the others. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Until I opened one addressed to Libarean Duplais and smoothed it on my knee to read . . .
Germond de Vouger the amoral Aspirant? A Gautieri sorcerer?
Bursting to my feet, I stared at the awkward script as if it created some daemonic cipher my mind was incapable of decoding. The man who had brought reason and good order to the ever-mystical heavens was the man who conspired, murdered, tortured, ruined all, in order to destroy the very order he championed? Impossible. Wholly, entirely impossible.
I crushed the page into a ball and threw it to the ground. My chain of reasoning must be faulty. Kajetan and de Vouger, two men so powerful and passionate in their chosen disciplines, could certainly find intellectual challenge in an acquaintance. Each would relish a friend worthy of debating. It didn’t mean they conspired to alter nature—the very platform of their conflict.
Yet the man in Delourre colors had been at Kajetan’s house when Lianelle died. He had been closeted with Kajetan, so Guerin had told me. He had visited Duplais often when he was ill, but not before or after, when Duplais might note his face. And neither Duplais nor Dante could recall so much as his existence without prompting—a mental lapse of such coincidence, it must defy credulity. And the Aspirant’s ruined chamber in the Bastionne Camarilla had contained star charts and a planetary . . . but not my father’s . . .
Once the door to belief was cracked open, the deluge came. My father’s letters—the nagging evidence I had not been able to reconcile with innocence. Who better than Germond de Vouger—my father’s correspondent for more than twenty years—to create a perfect facsimile of both Papa’s prose and his script? Every phrase in those damning letters could have appeared in Papa’s correspondence at one time or another, available to be copied, practiced, perfected. Which explained perfectly why the thieves at Montclaire had stolen de Vouger’s own letters from my father’s desk.
But what could explain why a man who could predict, and devise experiments to prove, the very phenomena that Roussel and I had just marveled at would conspire to unravel those phenomena? Though he might be a Gautier, brought up in common circumstances and nourished on the bitter stories of his family’s fall, he had reached the pinnacle of respect in a world that embraced his talents more every day. Scholars revered him; kings sent him laurel wreaths; brokers bought and sold his papers and his signature. Surely petty vengeance rang hollow when you had already regained what your family had lost.
But then I recalled what Dante had told me about the Aspirant: Because it amuses him . . . he finds the exercise stimulating. Where would a man of science who believed he had unraveled the fundamental mysteries of the physical universe find a greater challenge? De Vouger could demonstrate that he was not only the unraveler of scientific mysteries, but their master, and then he could move on to challenge the mysteries of the divine. Kajetan, believing Duplais a reborn soul, had given his student over to the Aspirant to do experiments on him. Opening a new adventure.
Adventure . . .
The sun settled toward the pinnacles, distorted, flaring silver as if to outshine the stars and moon that would follow . . . as night ever follows day . . . as insight both follows revelation and spawns it anew . . .
I needed a challenge . . . not had such an adventure since I was fi fteen. I stared at the back of my hand and felt ghostly kisses . . . heard charming laughter . . . shy questions . . . and felt the sun slipping away.
Where else had Germond de Vouger’s name surfaced in this mystery? At the Collegia Medica when he recommended a cobbler’s son who had come late to medicine because he needed a new challenge. At Castelle Escalon when he recommended a man of science for the queen’s household . . . a man of science who had access to Eugenie de Sylvae’s smelling salts, who brewed her tisanes, who lurked in the background, listening . . . always listening and watching . . . who might whisper tidbits of information in Antonia’s ear like a little bird . . . who could poison Antonia’s tea when she was of no more use, and poison a couchine to fake his own illness and persuade a naive woman to trust him. A subservient man who might confess minor magical skills that could assist the dowager queen with untidy ventures like murder. A big man who would be recognized did he appear in the Rotunda unmasked, but who could vanish into the household in a moment because no one paid attention to a cobbler’s son who stammered and dealt with the unwholesome business of sick bodies. Father Creator, everything explained . . .
Footsteps crunched on the pilgrim path, and I took off running, down toward Ianne’s Bench, because there was nowhere else to run. But his legs were longer and the chains were in his hand. He had changed into his gown of green and black stripes and wore the topaz pendant made from three keys, and he led me to the first circle, shoved me to my knees, and linked my chained wrists to an iron ring seated in the rim of the empty pool. To his credit, he did not gloat or smirk or threaten. I felt transformed from a person into an instrument.
“Anne de Mondragon ney Cazar, you have consented to put yourself in the hands of Germond de Gautier ney Roussel,” he said, without a trace of a stammer. “Now we can begin.”
CHAPTER 40
27 OCET, SUNSET
I had no leisure to contemplate the magnitude of my errors. Moments after Roussel . . . de Vouger . . . Gautier vanished beyond some hidden entry in the cliff face, Mage Kajetan and several men and women in adept’s gray emerged from it. While the adepts wheeled barrows of wood to the middle circle and stacked glazed urns and clay bricks outside the first, Kajetan came to me. He was barefoot.
“I wish I could comfort you,” he said. “The moon will rise on a new world, glorious in possibility.”
Hands close tethered to the dressed stone rim of the basin, I had to twist my neck to see his face, towering two metres above me. “A world birthed in my sister’s blood? In Ophelie de Marangel’s blood? In my father’s torment, my mother’s mad tears, and my brot
her’s degradation? I want no part of it. Tell me, Prefect, will you kill Portier yourself? Or will you have someone else do it and continue to pretend your hands unsoiled?”
The words flew, though I knew better than to engage him. Whatever advantage remained to Dante, Duplais, and me could only be jeopardized by careless flailing.
He tilted his head as if I were a curiosity. “The Aspirant suspects you’ve read the missing page. Describe what you saw there, and the night will go easier for all.”
His patronizing grated worse than Derwin’s obscenities. “Shall any of us be less dead? Will the world be less broken? You and Gautier and your daemon mage may leap headfirst into the rift.”
“Do not demean yourself with childishness. This was not an easy choice. . . .”
I refused to listen. Bending forward, I touched my forehead to the sun-warmed stone, wishing I could cover my ears as well.
All I could do was keep my promises. Dante had said I needed to hold myself open to the mindstorm. Thus I lowered the walls inside and delved into the maelstrom to warn him of my ruinous error.
He didn’t respond.
He’d know what I had done soon enough. How I had allowed Roussel to manipulate me. How I had delivered Eugenie into Roussel’s hands with her nearest blood relative’s consent. As for the king himself, he wasn’t going to be here. Only the news of Eugenie’s abduction would have caused my goodfather to ride out early. An easy misdirection. Even Ilario, our most secret reserve, would have been lured away by such a report. They could be on their way west to Arabasca or north to Delourre itself for all I knew. Roussel likely even knew I was a Mondragon. He had been waiting outside the Rose Room on the day Lady Eleanor had shown me the truth. How blind I’d been. How naive.
“I need the book.” Dante’s voice, cold as my spirit, lashed the twilight outside my skull. “As you’ve gone to this ridiculous trouble to get her here, the Vernase girl can read my transcript and release the rest of you to the work itself. But if something goes awry, I’ll have to refer to the book as we go.”
“In time. Our expectations for the night have shifted slightly,” said Roussel. Though he was more truly Gautier, for the Aspirant had sloughed off the gentlemanly, good-humored physician as a snake sheds its skin.
“As you will,” said Dante. “I presumed you wished this to succeed. So, am I to continue designating you as the Aspirant, or do you prefer one of this sudden excess of names?”
“Names are but masks upon the intellect. Perhaps we shall outlaw names in the future we build, and designate persons by their defining urge. What would yours be, mage?”
“Impatience. The sunset power is wasting.” Dante walked away. “Here, adept, empty that bag just there. . . .”
Had Roussel planned to tell the others his identity tonight? It committed him to finish what he started. There could be no going back to either of his lives—not if any one of us survived. Yet he had donned the Aspirant’s leather mask. Perhaps he preferred that none could read his expressions.
A clanking crash yanked my attention to the opposite side of the basin. From a gray canvas bag, an adept had emptied the chains I’d seen in Dante’s chamber. For Portier.
Dante, Portier, and I were committed to this night as well. The only way to free Sabria from this threat—and to rescue those held captive here—was to turn Gautier’s great rite against him, making sure he could not try this again.
Now. The page. Dante’s silent instruction came so quickly, I almost missed it. But it was accompanied by a determination and reassurance that spurred me to action.
I visualized the opening circle on Cecile’s page—the labels, the symbols of plumed bird, water, and chain links, the concentric circles, and the dotted line that connected them to the second circle. Dante touched the image I gave him, binding us together as securely as the chain on my wrists attached me to Mont Voilline.
“As your partners failed to locate the missing chart, I must assume we set up the usual triangular configuration,” said Dante. “The principal practitioner easterly; the mediator north; the guide south.”
Incomparably strange to hear him speak with tongue and voice at the same time we were linked in the mindstorm. My head felt like to split with it, in the same way it had when I spoke to Ambrose of birds while writing him the story of treachery.
“The reader can remain beside the subject as long as she speaks loud enough for all to hear,” Dante continued. “Does your index indicate otherwise?”
“Nothing in the index contradicts your configuration, Master. Proceed. Ceynaud”—Roussel’s call drew one of the adepts—“bring the librarian. Set Master Dante’s other materials as he prescribes.”
Dante marshaled the adepts. “Place water bowl beside our master, branches beside Master Kajetan, chains next the subject . . .” Exactly as the diagram showed. He was proceeding with this abomination.
A glance revealed only his back, the indigo gown, the half-unraveled braid, the head of the white staff taller than his own. Doubts swept in with the onrushing night. Dante . . .
Hear this and tell me which is truth. The intrusion blazed through my skull. My right hand was burnt in my father’s forge. I have revealed this fact to another person now living.
Both statements stung. The first like fire—a hated, painful truth; the other like frost—a nerve-scraping, ephemeral lie. Together an avowal of trust from one who rarely trusted.
Remember it through all. Tell Portier what I said. I will sustain him through this.
“All is in place, Master,” said a breathless assistant.
No position was going to provide me any degree of comfort, but I scooted closer to the dressed blocks that rimmed the dry pool. That way I could sit up a little and see.
Two adepts guided a dark-haired man into the circle of pillars. He hobbled—or, rather, hopped slowly on one leg, the other scarce touching the ground.
“Creator’s mercy, Portier.”
He lifted his narrow chin as I murmured his name. A deep laceration creased one of his slender cheekbones. Split, swollen lips clamped tight to smother a choking agony at every jarring hop. One eye was scabbed shut; the other glazed with pain. I could not tell if he recognized me.
Of his myriad wounds, it was certainly the leg that wrecked him. The shreds of his hose revealed a limb that was just . . . wrong, knee and ankle twisted wholly out of alignment with his hip. A bloody shard, bone perhaps, protruded from his ankle.
At Roussel’s direction, the adepts carried him down the steps at one end of the dry pool and dumped him on his back. Portier lay gasping through clenched teeth, arm flung across his eyes.
The deep basin looked very like a wide coffin. It was only a slight comfort to note the carved openings in the lid that lay only a few steps away. Should they replace it, he wouldn’t suffocate.
“Take your position as principal, Dante,” snapped the Aspirant. “Prefect, you are guide.”
Kajetan burst out, indignant, “But I should be—”
“You will obey, Prefect.”
Huffing in offense, Kajetan moved to a pillar on my left. Dante, flames flicking from the head of his staff, took the position at the apex of the circle’s eastern arc. Roussel, cloaked and masked as I had seen him in the Rotunda, joined me beside the basin, bending onto one knee as if in genuflection. He reached down and gently removed Duplais’ arm from his face. “Open your eyes, librarian. I wish you to look on me.”
Duplais’ breath came in tight, shallow bursts. But he opened his eye to the beautiful and terrible leather mask.
“Nicely obedient,” said the Aspirant—Roussel. “Now, did I not tell you we had all the time in the world to learn your secrets? I know what you are.”
“You’re wrong.” Duplais’ hoarse words were scarce audible, each forced out with a growl. “Cannot . . . see . . . righteous—”
“Dante says failure and self-loathing leave you blind.” Roussel leaned forward and spoke softly. “Ironic, that.”
Wate
r dribbled in the diversion troughs. A stone lip shaped like an angel barred it from spilling into the basin. Roussel scooped a handful of water. “Whatever you imagine your great destiny, Portier de Savin-Duplais, tonight changes it. Your service now belongs to me. Your life, your death, your sustenance rest in my hand.”
He dribbled the water on Duplais’ cracked and bleeding lips like a mother teasing her child to eat. Duplais clamped his mouth shut.
Roussel threw the water in his face. His Aspirant’s mask, naturally, remained serene. On the rim of the basin, he laid two hand-scribed pages. The oddly angled script mirrored that on the pages in Dante’s schoolmaster’s stool.
“Mage Dante has found a use for you, damoselle,” he said. “On his signal you will begin reading from beginning to end. You will speak loud enough that all can hear, pausing after each instruction, so that we three can do as the text requires or repeat words that must be woven into the spellwork. You’ve no need to distinguish between the instructions and the words of power. Beyond the skill of reading, your mind is irrelevant to this task.” His cloak snapped in my face as he rose.
“Are you mad?” I called after him. “Why would I do anything you tell me?”
“Prefect,” said Dante, before Roussel could answer, “demonstrate what happens if the woman fails to read correctly.”
Hissing in annoyance, Kajetan descended the steps into the basin and pressed his boot on Duplais’ left ankle.
Duplais screamed, a hoarse agony that was quickly dissipated in the settling night, as if he had screamed a great deal already that day. He wrapped his arms over his head, one hand clawing at his hair, the other forearm clamped over his mouth to smother his cries. His upper body rocked from side to side as if in some frantic attempt to distract himself.
