The Soul Mirror

by Carol Berg

  He did not wait for a response. “Jacard, prepare.”

  The night settled around us as Roussel and Jacard took their positions.

  You’re to translate the book?

  “Of cou—” For a moment I’d thought it was Kajetan. Yes. This is my fault. Stupid . . .

  I had offered the kindly physician my arm, allowing him to pull out the fibers, giving him free taking of my blood. Naive. Thick-headed. My blood had proved Dante false.

  We’re all fools. But now you must tell me what they do, every gesture, every pause. I’m holding Portier, for the moment, but to accomplish any other work, I have to see. The words first. And quickly.

  Dante’s impatient prodding taught me right away that I didn’t have to comprehend in order to show him the page. I skimmed through the words to the mark of the skull. Now everyone’s positions . . .

  I described Jacard beside my father and Kajetan looming over me. Roussel had returned to the principal’s pillar, where Dante’s fading staff yet cast a faint light. The physician pulled out a small brass tube, a syringe like those used to suck putrefaction from wounds. Yanking up his sleeve, he plunged the sharp end into his arm. But instead of drawing out the ivory plunger, he depressed it.

  My curiosity must have intruded on my description.

  Your father’s blood. The Aspirant told me he’d perfected the infuser, allowing him to deliver the blood, cleansed of imperfections that might sicken him, directly into his veins. I didn’t believe him. Dante’s colossal self-reproach was a reflection of my own.

  The syringe clattered to the stone. Roussel raised a hand. “Begin!”

  I read. “ ‘Within the hour of rending, tighten the lens, sealing with the hues of royal might, dual circles, one and then the other.’”

  My reading paused, but my narrative continued, describing how Roussel waved his hand twice in a circle, and gold-tipped flames of purple and indigo blazed from the tops of the pillars.

  But he’s not satisfied, I said. He’s halted my reading and tries the gesture again.

  He’s done it wrong. A fierce approval. It should be purple on the pillar circle. Indigo on the—

  Mountaintops, I said. Flames of indigo and gold blazed on the Ring Wall. All the world beyond that dual ring faded into insignificance.

  I read on. “ ‘Particulae settled in triune power . . . the embodiment of undeath holding the way. . . .’”

  I could not say what Dante did as I read. Unlike the rite of the First Circle, the three sorcerers faltered frequently. Never did any of them speak beyond the instruction of the book, but Roussel’s hand extended my pauses, giving me ample time to describe what Dante could not see or feel. Yet always we moved forward again.

  “‘. . . mediator conjoins the physical attractors for the one to be summoned with bulk matter to shape the physical manifestation.’ ”

  Another halt while Kajetan repeated some working with incense, earth, and water.

  Dante’s disruptions did not come without a price, for we’d not even finished the first page when he began to tire. Repeat, he would say, or Again. Eastward or toward the center? Which sorcerer? Or, Gods, I’m losing him . . . And his frantic grief told me he had slipped control of the spell that maintained Portier’s life. Slower . . . read slower. He had to split his attention and his power between the rite, sustaining Portier, and defending himself against the Gautier device.

  The assaults of the contrabalance came with the regularity of a cannonade. He would withdraw momentarily, then growl, Go on. The pain and visceral fear borne on the words shook me. The very fact that I could perceive it told me how harried he was. But he refused to acknowledge my concern, and we continued.

  Eventually, as the rite moved on to the second page, Dante stopped speaking at all. I sensed when he could not listen and would dawdle until Kajetan kicked me. The magic surged unimpeded. The night felt swollen. Huge.

  Of a sudden a great wind howled across the tableland, as if the windows of the world had been opened, sucking the air through the constricted enclosure of the two great rings. Colored lightnings split the sky above, and the earth below us shook.

  “‘. . . and with the dissolution of the sacrifice, so is the exchange accomplished and the passage readied.’”

  The final words remained meaningless until I looked up to describe the subsequent occurrences for Dante. That’s when I noticed Jacard watching, waiting for me to look at him. And then he smiled and slammed a knife blade into my father’s chest.

  “Papa!” My scream should have ripped out Jacard’s heart, flattened Mont Voilline, toppled the pillar beside me, or at least torn out the bolt that bound me to it. Anger and hatred erupted from the molten pool waiting in my gut. Fire seared my lungs, scorched my limbs, and shriveled my heart. I wrenched at the chain and beat my bleeding fists on the pillar, ready to break the one and splinter the other.

  But a quiet, calm, desperate voice interrupted my fit: Gods, I thought you would never take hold of it! Yield me this power, Anne Sophia Madeleine. Grant me the fruit of your anger. We can only do this together . . . as I told you . . . I’ve an answer half wrought, but we’ve a way to go as yet, and I’ve nothing left.

  Take it! Kill them all! Shatter this mountain and end it.

  Tell me I can, he said, steady, though racked with pain and exhaustion and the storm at the end of the world. Invite me. Yield everything without condition. Think, and only then consent.

  His words gave me pause, as he meant they should. I summoned the ragged remnants of mental discipline. He did not lure me with the possibilities of vengeance or victory or salvation of those I loved. He merely asked for my trust. Anger had enabled the question, but anger could not—must not—give the answer. Yet my rage left no room for doubts. Have you other names? I asked.

  I felt the spasm of disbelief . . . and a despairing humor as only a man utterly without recourse might summon. No, just the one.

  Then hear this, Dante, my friend of the aether: Come into my house and take what you need of me. I place my magic, my soul’s life, and my hope of right in your hands.

  And in the moment I yielded, the molten chaos of my blood was reshaped into an artwork of reason and color, light and strength, I’d not known existed this side of the tales of angels.

  CHAPTER 42

  27 OCET, NIGHT

  “To the third circle,” yelled Roussel, as the wind of the universe whipped the fires of the second to a thundering blaze. The flames of the Ring Wall raked the starless sky in frenzy.

  The Aspirant left Kajetan and Jacard to bring me along. My head drooped; my arms were wrapped about my middle. But eyes and ears were ready. Listening. Searching. Black fire simmered just beneath my skin.

  “Where is the revenant?” whispered Jacard, as they detached my wrists from the pillar. The younger man’s gaze darted into the wavering lights and shadows. “We opened the way. Sent the dead man. Shouldn’t it be here now? You said Dante’s raised one ten times over.”

  All this Dante saw and heard through my senses. No longer did I need to relay what I perceived or recalled. My will released the impression or memory, and he knew.

  “In the past he’s forced the rising, yes,” said Kajetan, jerking on my bloody wrists to get me up. “With bulk matter and refined memory, he enticed spectres to shape bodies and become revenant. He even instilled a semblance of wholeness, but only for a few hours. No true life was renewed. He didn’t have Portier to seal the rent in the Veil. He didn’t provide the exchange. No, it is the lure of the woman in heat will incite this revenant to become complete.”

  And the nireals would infuse the revenant with a living soul, making him engasi—a true person with memories and history and emotions, a living being who could mate and create a child. I understood these things as if it were I who had studied and practiced for so many years. Dante and I had been bound together by will and intent and consent—the fundamental triad of spellmaking. I understood that, too.

  Kajetan and Jacard left my
father lying in the dark, ragged and exposed, as they had abandoned Portier in his watery tomb. But I felt the thready beat of Papa’s life pulse held in one of Dante’s spells, just as I felt the slow filtering of gaseous air into Duplais’ lungs maintained by another. Because of our bond of power, I could actually envision the spellwork as Dante did—intricate, ethereal structures of color and light, arcs and spirals, blocks and ramps and spires, each spell a virtual cityscape of magic. The hieroglyphs were only an abstraction, Dante’s way to comprehend and communicate the complex structure as he analyzed it, in the same way the Syan used a few brushstrokes to communicate complex ideas like love or thought or illness. Dante could manipulate the spells by manipulating the hieroglyph—altering colors or shifting or removing shapes. The whole was staggering.

  Kajetan bound my wrists to a pillar of the third circle. I did not resist and did not raise my head. Let him think me defeated.

  “Check the placement of the nireals, Prefect, and that the vessel is properly prepared.” The Aspirant threw aside another syringe and shoved down his sleeve. “If Dante has carried the true nireals into the oubliette, your nephew will fetch them.”

  Jacard huffed, the image of wounded pride.

  Kajetan darted through the leafy veils, returning almost immediately. “The nireals are positioned as you and the mage agreed—one at each corner of the bed, and one embedded in heaped earth and pooled water at the base of the tree. The vessel is secured and writhes in lust.”

  The vessel. Holy angels, sweet Eugenie. I’d hardly given her a thought. They spoke of her as if she were a dog. Darkness choked my soul.

  Attend! Her hope is in our deeds. The words you read must convince the Aspirant to hold the fifth nireal in his hand, no matter what his index has taught him. Everything hinges on that. And be ready . . . He hesitated. Even together, we’ll have only one chance to finish this.

  I’ll do what’s needed. Though his pause had been slight, I wondered what he was withholding.

  “Begin, reader,” said the Aspirant, the physician who had prepared kind, loving Eugenie for abomination. “Pausing, as before, and all the way to the last sentence.”

  And so I began. “ ‘Within the hour of summoning, raise the Circle of Inversion, sealing with the hues of life’s bounty . . .’”

  With a sweeping gesture, Roussel lit the third circle with emerald fire. It was only just possible to glimpse Roussel and Jacard. The azinheira branches obscured the lines of sight.

  As before, I read and paused, read and paused. From behind the rustling branches came small, swallowed cries of hunger . . . of heat . . . of need. Outrage torched my heart.

  “‘. . . draws the revenant with the craving for breath . . . subject to the hunger for human touch . . . lust of long deprivation . . . to ravish the vessel and deposit his seed . . .’” Between every word I watched for Soren.

  Close your eyes.

  The largest of Dante’s spell structures gleamed in my mind’s darkness, a new spire geysering upward as we observed. As if drawing me alongside him by the hand, Dante explored its lines and curves. The shimmering edges sliced my spirit like well-honed steel or the brittle beauty of thinnest glass. Here, he said, directing my attention to a grand arc of rose and silver that supported the entire structure. This is where we destroy them.

  In moments he’d sketched the hieroglyph . . . blocks of color, chevrons, spirals. These blue and brown chevrons represent that supporting arc, he said, the earth and water we provide the chosen spirit to shape a body. The silver circles are the nireals, the promise of a soul, memories, thought, and choice. Each description was accompanied by a surge of effort, as he linked the true spellwork to its abstraction.

  “Reader!” Kajetan kicked me.

  “‘. . . setting the four soul mirrors opposing to reflect the new life to come, one for Heaven, one for the netherworld, one for the living world, one for Ixtador, each to be home for the Holy One, the child who shall bridge all realms. And the fifth nireal, positioned at the root of life to be . . .’”

  I paused. The Aspirant’s hand waved me onward. Here. This was the place. “ ‘And the fifth nireal to be brought to the hand of the principal to match soul and spirit with intent and will,’” I said, crafting words that might have been written in the cursed book.

  For a single moment, Roussel hesitated.

  My chin drooped to my breast. I sobbed softly—not difficult when body and mind felt as if they were disintegrating.

  Then he gestured to Jacard, who scurried underneath the azinheira branches. In moments, the adept placed the silver sphere in the Aspirant’s hand.

  In a surge of power that seemed to draw my entrails out through my head, Dante erased the two chevrons from the hieroglyph and shoved a red spiral into its place beside the silver circle, altering the underlying spell structure. The red spiral, I knew, represented Roussel.

  Dante’s furious will left no time to assess what that meant.

  I read, “ ‘Principal, mediator, guide, together summon the revenant to true life, to plant the seed in the vessel prepared creating the Holy One—’ ”

  I flipped the page forward and back again, squeezed my pierced finger, and pressed one more drop of blood to the thin paper. But the text ended in midsentence.

  “ ‘—who straddles life and death.’” The Aspirant took up where I had left off, reciting words cached in his index or his family’s memory. “ ‘And so shall the rent in the voile aeterna be made permanent, and Ixtador Beyond the Veil nevermore be dissolved nor shaken nor altered in its composition.’”

  The three chanted, “Revienne, vitae, aeterna.” Return, live, eternally.

  And now, friend, said Dante, as gently as his driving urgency would allow, someone must die. We must provide the exchange to enable passage through this rent in the Veil. You have to let your father go.

  Let Papa go? No! I could feel his blood-pulse. I promised him here in the aether that I’d save him. As Dante had promised Portier to keep air in his lungs. He will not die here.

  To make my scheme work, to end it, we must go on. We hold Portier and your father in our hands and have no other weapons. I know Portier would agree if we asked. But your father will welcome it. How else do we choose?

  You know nothing about my father! Logic, reason, love, friendship . . . It was not fair, not after all they had endured. How dare he make me choose! I would not.

  The droning chant continued, higher pitched, more insistent than ever. The Gautier device struck Dante again—flaying fire he could no longer shield from me.

  Choose, he said, pain stretching his beleaguered patience. It must be now. I cannot—

  I won’t! Desire, consent, will . . . The molten darkness inside me reived the barrier of my flesh, a geyser of flame the color of night.

  The chains about my wrists shattered and fell to the ground.

  For my father’s fragile life, for faithful Portier, for Eugenie and Lianelle and my mad mother and my vanished, tormented brother, for Dante, balancing the world’s fate in his incomparable mind, I reached through the ripped seam of my filthy gown and drew out the Cazar dagger, lunged upward, and slammed the blade beneath Kajetan’s ribs. My hatred held him up and crushed him into the pillar, and I watched his scornful disbelief bloom and curl and fade all in one moment. In that same instant Dante claimed our joined magic and spoke the word that bound the Mondragon spell.

  Fire and storm and winter raged through flesh and bone as one, scouring, dizzying, as if I’d drunk an entire harvest’s wine, as if the howling wind of the universe blew straight through me. My bones felt hollowed like a bird’s, my flesh dried and crumbled, as if the next wind gust might tumble me across the tableland and into the chasm. In the dark behind my eyes, fountains of scarlet and indigo burst from one massive structure of light, collapsing its arc and spires.

  It was done. The night within the rings of fire yawned. The wind blustered across the mountain’s face, its throaty howl creasing the silence.

&
nbsp; Kajetan’s weight slumped sideways. Unable to hold, I let him fall.

  “Uncle!” squawked Jacard, abandoning his pillar. It needed no finger to throat or mirror to mouth to know Kajetan was dead.

  “You’ve killed him, you cursed witch! I’ll have your heart out of you.”

  But the bloody knife in my shaking hand held him away. With a glare of searing hate, he snatched up the Book of Greater Rites and ran.

  Gautier/de Vouger/Roussel could not attend. As fog creeping down from the highlands in winter, so cloudy fingers embraced the masked Aspirant as he held the nireal high. A faint outline of a man appeared within the fog, not Soren, but a man even larger than Roussel. His ankle-length tunic and sleeveless surcoat, garments of centuries past, were emblazoned with three gold keys.

  “What’s this?” Roussel tried to brush away the solidifying presence. “Prefect, examine the text. Did the reader err? Water and earth await at the root of the tree. Not here!”

  He tried to step away, but the wind whined and fog swirled and pressed him to the pillar at his back, splaying his arms above his head. “Lord Grandsire . . . Master . . . the vessel awaits your rightful flesh, not mine. This body is not yours. No! No!”

  Roussel’s cries became increasingly strident as the manifesting spectre enfolded him, licking at his face, at his neck, fondling his groin, his mouth . . . craving flesh, craving life.

  “Earth and water be your shaping. This flesh is mine!” Only there was no earth or water at hand. The nireal, woven into the summoning, the promise of a living soul, lay in Roussel’s hand.

  The Gautier revenant peeled Roussel’s mask and clothes away and began to reshape the bulk matter of his great-grandson’s body into a body of his own. That’s when Roussel/de Vouger/Gautier began to scream.

  I sank to the ground, hands over my ears.

  So we stop it, said Dante, and he drained the molten murder from my veins into the nireal, melting the silver sphere with its work only half done.

  When the screaming stopped, the Aspirant lay still—the shape of his body entirely wrong. I averted my eyes.