by Carol Berg
But the King of Sabria enveloped my left hand with his own—a broad, hard, warm hand, scribed with the myriad honorable scars of a warrior’s life, as well as the same Savin family device that marked mine—and hauled me to my feet. Eyes the deep blue of Sabria’s skies took my measure.
“I’ve a mystery needs solving, cousin. The matter is delicate, and certain aspects require me to seek counsel beyond my usual circles. Where better than with a member of my own family?”
“I’m honored you would think of me, sire.” Mystified, to be precise. Curious.
His well-proportioned face relaxed into a welcoming smile. “Good. I’ve heard decent reports of you over the years and was sure you were the man I needed. I’ve delayed this unconscionably, hoping—Ah, you’ll hear all the sordid complications soon enough. Come along.”
He led me on a brisk walk through a series of pleasant, sunny rooms to a deserted kitchen in the back of the house. Pausing only to light a lamp from the banked kitchen fire, which seemed odd in the bright midafternoon, he headed outdoors.
“Tell me, Portier,” he said, striding across a shady courtyard. “The methods of sorcerous practice have not changed in these years of my estrangement with the Camarilla, have they? No revelation of opticum or mechanica, no new-writ treatise on anatomy or mathematics or the composition of minerals has altered the teaching of spellwork?”
“Not at all, sire. Indeed some progressive mages believe that instruments such as the opticum will support our understanding of the physical melding of the five divine elements.” Not many. Most magical practitioners stubbornly maintained their posture that the mundane sciences offered nothing to sorcerers.
“And your brethren yet renounce superstition and demonology?”
“Mages of the Camarilla work entirely within the bounds of earth. They practice as methodically as do the scientists and natural philosophers you embrace.”
Had I ever imagined having the opportunity to seed the king’s mind with some good feeling for the art of sorcery, I would have prepared more refined arguments. Philippe was known as a man of lively intellect and devouring curiosity.
“Sire, it seems a sad waste that political disagreements with the Camarilla have so undermined your confidence in an art that has so much to offer your kingdom.”
He choked down a laugh. “I will not argue science and magic with you, Portier. My bodyguard reports that you yourself carry a compass rather than some ‘directional charm’ that might fail inexplicably at the dark of the moon and lead you off a cliff.”
We left the path and crossed a dark corner of the yard to a narrow downward stair. Wading through a litter of dead leaves, twigs, and walnut husks, we descended the stone steps to an iron grate that blocked the lower end.
Philippe twisted the latch and tugged a rusty handle, the grate rising more smoothly than its appearance and location would suggest. The low ceilinged passage beyond, much older than the house, smelled of stagnant water and old leaves. The king adjusted his lamp to shine more brightly. Once the grate slid closed behind us, a fierce sobriety wiped away my cousin’s affable demeanor.
“Last year, on the twenty-fifth day of Cinq, an arrow penetrated my mount’s saddle, not three millimetres from the great vein in my thigh. By the grace of the Pantokrator’s angels, the villain archer’s hand wavered, and he lies dead instead of me. Gross evidence implicates my wife.”
“Sainted ancestors! I never heard—” Well, perhaps a traveling mage had brought gleeful rumors of a foiled assassination plot, but I’d thought nothing of it. Few mages held excessive love for Philippe, who had set out to dismantle the Camarilla Magica’s pervasive influence in Sabrian society, scholarship, and business, and done exceeding well at it. But the queen . . . the shadow queen, rumor named her, or the lady of sorrows, who had lost one husband already, her parents in a fire, her firstborn to an infant fever, and three others miscarried . . .
We proceeded deliberately through a warren of dank passages. “Few know the complete story, in particular that the nature of the archer, and certain other aspects of the event, evidenced the collaboration of one from your magical fraternity. Somewhere a sorcerer has, for whatever reason, decided that his king ought to be dead. Though her two pet mages have no use for me, I utterly reject the idea that my wife could be involved.”
“Sorcery.”
“That’s why I chose you, cousin. I need a sorcerer to serve as my confidential agent in this matter.”
The snaky uneasiness in my belly quickly tangled itself into a familiar knot of disappointment. Though I held no grievance against Philippe, man or king, or his predecessor, King Soren, I forever cursed their presence in my family tree. As early as age ten, I had realized that our royal connection and its excess of expectations had ruined my father, leaving him with no true friends, no money, no useful purpose to his life, and a marital contract sufficient to produce me, but naught else.
At fourteen, I learned that no girl with a wit larger than an acorn would touch a male who wore the interlaced S and V on the back of his hand. The Camarilla mandated severe penalties for promiscuity, and when one of the parties hailed from the most notable, if not the most vigorous, of Sabria’s seventeen remaining magical bloodlines, inquisitorial scrutiny was assured.
In the very year I turned sixteen and began my studies at Seravain, the coolness between the young King Philippe and the Camarilla broke into an open struggle for dominance. Determined to make my way in the society of mages, I had quickly dropped the Savin from my name. Seven years later, my ambition had died its humiliating death, my Savin bloodline too weak to carry me farther in a life of sorcery.
“My lord . . .”
At the end of a branched passage, Philippe touched a most ordinary-seeming door of thick oak. The door swung open all of itself. Cool air rushed out, bristling with enchantment. For one moment I allowed the mystical wave to engulf me, a sensory pleasure as deeply human as the smell of damp earth in spring. But nine years of practiced honesty required I speak nature’s inescapable verdict.
“My lord, I must confess: I am no sorcerer, nor will I ever be.”
He swung around to face me.
“I am failed, sire,” I said, lest he had not heard enough. “Incapable of spellwork.”
“I see. Yet you excelled in your studies. Reports say you are as intimately familiar with the history and practice of magic as anyone in Sabria—including those who wear the collar of a Camarilla mage. Is that true? Answer squarely, cousin. False modesty has no place here.”
The truth was not so simple. Yes, I had read widely. But who would ever separate knowledge of sorcery from its practice? “I suppose one could say that, but—”
“Skills can be bought. Knowledge takes much longer to acquire, and the ability to question, analyze, interpret, and deduce longer still. The capacity for loyalty is born in a man, reinforced, I believe, with family connection. I believe you the fit person to pursue a confidential, objective inquiry into a matter of sorcery. The burden of judgment is my duty and my prerogative. But if you take on this task, I shall give you freedom and resources to pursue matters as you think best. If you deem yourself unfit, turn right around and be on your way. My time is exceeding short.”
Royal assassination. Magic bent to murder. The queen suspected. Were my eyes wholly dazzled with royal flattery that I would consider treading such dangerous ground? Did unseemly curiosity cloud my judgment? Or was I clinging to the improbable certainty that my life had meaning beyond breathing and dying?
Perhaps reasons didn’t matter. My mentor, Kajetan, had instilled in me a determination to honesty, and I allowed that to be my guide. “Beyond the practice of sorcery itself, sire,” I said, “I do believe myself fit for such a task.”
“Good. Because now I must unnerve you a bit more.” Philippe moved through the open door, his boots rapping sharply on the uneven paving of yet another passage. “The last man I set to this investigation, a skilled warrior and experienced diplomat, vanished ni
ne months ago and is not found. For private reasons, I’ve allowed the public inquiry to lapse. Yet conscience nags that we speak not only of my personal safety, but of the security of Sabria herself.”
We halted beside an iron door. Philippe hung his lamp from a bracket and unlocked the door with a plain bronze key, but he did not open it right away. The lamplight ringed his pale eyes with shadow and carved false hollows in his firm-fleshed cheeks.
“I don’t believe in magic, Portier. For most of my eight-and-thirty years, I have judged its practice entirely illusion, trickery, or coincidence. Alchemists demonstrate every day that matter is not limited to sorcery’s five divine elements. An opticum lens reveals that wood is not homogeneous, but is itself made up of water, air, and fibers. Water contains unsee able creatures and can be fractured into gaseous matter. Spark is but an explosive instance of heat and light and tinder. Similarly with air and base metal. Natural science brings logic and reason to a chaotic universe. We have discovered more of truth in the past twenty years than in the past twenty centuries, stimulating our minds, benefiting Sabria and her citizens in innumerable ways. However, in this room, it pains me to confess, we find something else again.”
He dragged open the door and gestured me in, and though I held ready arguments against his inaccurate understanding of the divine elements, an eager excitement drew me into the small, bare chamber. Swept and brushed, the close room smelled of naught but damp stone and lamp oil. On a stone table at its center lay an arrow, its point, splintered shaft, and ragged fletching stained deep rusty red; a brass spyglass, as a military commander or shipboard officer might use; and an untarnished silver coin. Simple evidence, an observer might say, unless he could sense the enchantment that belched from them in a volcanic spew.
“Sight through the glass, Portier. Then I’ll tell you my story of magic and murder.”
Magic, as I had told the king, was entirely of the human world and subject to its laws. So it was bad enough that I peered through the enchanted glass and saw a man staggering through a tangle of leafless thorn trees toward a barred iron gate—a view nothing related to the place where I stood. Far worse was my eerie certainty of the land he traveled. To glimpse the Souleater’s ice-bound caverns or spy on the surpassing mystery of the Creator’s Heaven could be no more fearsome, for every passing soul must first endure the Perilous Demesne of Trial and Journey—Ixtador of the Ten Gates, the desolation that lies just beyond the Veil separating this life from the next. Most unsettling of all was the reason for my certainty. The wailing, exhausted traveler was my father, a man nine years dead.
ONE SHORT HOUR LATER, DREAD, like Discord’s Worm, had taken up permanent residence in my bowels. I would have yielded my two legs to return to my dull library.
Less than two hundred years had passed since Sabria had retreated from near dissolution. A century of savagery, fueled by rivalries between the great magical families and between those blood families and the civil authorities, had left our cities in ruins, half of our villages empty or burnt, and more than two-thirds of Sabria’s nobles, scholars, and sorcerers dead. Entire magical bloodlines had been wiped out. Even a whisper of those times yet caused cold sweats and shudders in every Sabrian.
Now someone had dredged up the foulest magic of those days to create an assassin and had dispatched him to murder Sabria’s golden king. Philippe was convinced that his mysterious enemy, who might or might not be his wife, would make a second attempt on the anniversary of the first, some two months hence. The king’s death by unholy sorcery must surely relight the smoldering embers of the Blood Wars, and the mysterious spyglass hinted that this time the conflagration might drive us into realms uncharted. I, Portier de Savin-Duplais, librarian and failed student of magic, was charged to stop it.
“As the secrecy of your investigation must preclude our public relationship, I’ve engaged you a partner agente confide.” Philippe led me, still speechless, back into the sunny, peaceful house. I felt out of time, as if I’d just returned from the Souleater’s frozen demesne. “Cousin Portier, meet Chevalier Ilario de Sylvae.”
A tall, fair, long-nosed young man, garbed in an eye-searing ensemble of red silk sleeves, green satin waistcoat, gold link belt and bracelets, and lace—god’s finger, ruffled lace everywhere—swept off a feathered hat and dropped to one knee as we entered the reception room. “Gracious lord. Such a delight to attend you on this glorious spring day—though ’tis a bit warmish for the season—and I am so forever humbled and ennobled to serve you, though my spirit trembles at the requirement for discretion. . . .”
Another hour and I was truly flummoxed. After charging me to halt the revival of the Blood Wars in the span of two short months, the king had paired me with an imbecile.
But I had sworn him my service. Indeed, the implications of the spyglass could not be ignored, and left my first move clear. I needed a sorcerer.
CHAPTER ONE
33 TRINE 64 DAYS UNTIL THE ANNIVERSARY
“Tell me again, good Portier,” called my lanky companion over his shoulder, the plumes of his velvet toque bouncing despite the oppressive woodland damp. “Right or left at the chestnut tree? By my sacred mater’s nose, headings and inclinations slip through my ears like sand through a sieve. I could lose my way in a bath!”
“Bear right, Lord Ilario,” I said, biting back the oh-so-sweet temptation to send the pretty-faced moron the wrong way. “The plowman was most specific. Are you certain you’d not prefer to wait back in Bardeu? There’s no need to discomfort—”
“La, brave comrade! How could I, a Knight of Sabria, leave you alone to beard this fearsome mage in his woody den—our first foray into the world as partner agentes?” My companion reversed the course of his palfrey with effortless grace, his idiot grin blazing like unwelcome sunrise in a drunkard’s eye. “Surely I must collapse in shame, never again able to face our noble king or my fellow knights. Though, naturally, I could not discuss our business with my fellow knights until released from my vow of silence. I don’t know that I’ve taken a vow of silence before. . . .”
With a sigh I checked my compass heading against the map I’d sketched in my journal that morning. All seemed correct. I waved the mewling popinjay onward, hoping to still his prattle with movement if I could neither send him away nor throttle him. Knight of Sabria, indeed. Ilario de Sylvae had been fostered since babyhood with his half sister, Queen Eugenie. If he had ever drawn his fine sword outside Merona’s fencing halls, I’d eat my boots.
Philippe had claimed that Ilario’s rank could gain me access to information none other could manage and that the young lord’s determination to prove his half sister’s innocence would provide me a trustworthy ally. Fifteen days together had eliminated my concerns that the fop’s motives might be more complicated. Philippe’s were yet in question. Even the humiliating need to hire a better sorcerer was easier to bear than the implication that, in my sovereign’s eyes, my service ranked on par with an idiot’s.
As the spreading canopy of oak and chestnut dimmed the feeble daylight, I spurred my mount past Ilario’s. Turn right from the Carvalho road at the point where it leaves the village, so the Bardeu plowman had directed me. Proceed through a beynt of wheat fields and cow pasture (closing the hedge-gate behind you, if you please, sonjeur) and across the weedy bog. Then keep right of the great chestnut and pray the Pantokrator’s angels the sorcerer’s not bound a confusion spell to lose you in the groves. A well-trod path, he’d said, his great shoulders shuddering.
Both the obscurity and the local popularity . . . and the shudder . . . had encouraged my decision to seek out this man. Only a skilled mage would be able to explain the spyglass and untangle the workings of complex and illicit sorcery. And every other mage I knew of lived under the inquisitive eye of the Camarilla Magica, scarce an objective position, considering the eighteen years’ hostility between the king and Camarilla.
“Halloo! Most fearsome mage, are you to home?” Lord Ilario’s cheerful trumpeting caromed of
f the crowding trees, only to die a quick death in the breathless stillness.
“Chevalier, I must ask again that you adhere to our plan,” I said through clenched teeth. “We agreed to be oblique in our approach until we’re sure of him. And please, sir, curb your . . . good humor. Rumor names this mage easily offended and unaccustomed to courtly manners.”
“Nonsense. Any man of the blood will have had a proper upbringing, whether in the bosom of his family or at Collegia Seravain.”
“This mage is unusual, Chevalier. His hand bears no blood family’s mark. Nor did he study at Seravain.”
That a man not kin to one of the noble families who carried the trait of magical talent, and not formally schooled in the accumulated knowledge of sorcery, much of which was secret, could earn a mage’s collar was as likely as a rabbit writing a treatise on the movement of the planets. But so this fellow had done.
Three years previous, he had arrived at Seravain and demanded to sit for examination, naming himself Exsanguin—Bloodless. After five rigorous days, he had won through to the rank of master, leaving the collegia faculty in an uproar. Not only had he earned the right to practice sorcery without supervision, and to oversee and instruct other mages, but he was eligible to be named to the Camarilla Prefecture—those who ruled on the accuracy of teachings and charted the course of sorcery in the world. But to the amazement of all, in the same hour his silver collar was sealed about his neck, he had walked away, vanishing into the obscurity from which he’d come.
I had never met Exsanguin, but as Seravain’s archivist, I had duly recorded his collaring and the demesne he’d claimed as residence. Twelve days traveling on the back roads of Louvel and much cajoling of reticent villagers had brought Ilario and me to Bardeu. The villagers did not know the sorcerer’s true name, either.
