by Carol Berg
One corner of his mouth twisted in what might pass for amusement. Far more satisfying was the spark of curiosity that flared in his green eyes. “What employment might that be? You do not sacrifice your pride before a forbidding and unpleasant man for a charm to calm your horse.”
Swallowing my discomfiture at his insight, I laid down my challenge. “If you are interested, clean yourself, dress as befits a master mage, and join us at Villa Margeroux, off the Tallemant Road, within three days. A hired mount will await your use in Bardeu. Be prepared to dazzle us with your demonstration of magical truth. If we are satisfied with your application, Master Exsanguin, we will explain our dangerous proposition.”
I bowed to the fop and motioned him back through the underbrush to the horses. Lord Ilario nodded in return and marched away, patting my shoulder as if he had given birth to me.
The green gaze scorched my back as I followed Ilario out of the garden. “Dante,” said the uncommon voice behind us. “My name is Dante.”
CHAPTER TWO
36 TRINE 61 DAYS UNTIL THE ANNIVERSARY
I had believed the mage intrigued. Something had induced him to yield his name. Dante. Exsanguin. Bloodless. By the holy Veil, even the memory of his stare set me glancing over my shoulder. But the third day had almost waned before the Contessa de Margeroux’s housekeeper announced a visitor.
“He will not step inside, Conte Olivier.” The comfortable gray woman of middling years huffed as if the report scalded her mouth. “He says he’s come to see—forgive me, lord, but he’s charged me to repeat his words exactly—the student and the dancepole and no . . . inbred aristos. Is it certain he’s the person expected? Such a dirty, crude ruffian?”
I doubted the housekeeper’s protective loyalty to the elderly Conte de Margeroux and his much younger Lady Susanna was much tested. Though valued friends of the king, the couple lived quietly in this remote demesne. The conte directed an inquiring scowl at Ilario.
“Your report but confirms his identity, good Hanea,” said Ilario, shuddering. “And you’d best obey. Cross him and he’ll likely change you into an ox. He is entirely yours, Portier. I’ve no wish to lay eyes on the creature.” He waggled his glittering, ringed fingers, his beloved lace cuffs dangling unchecked into his brandy—a measure of his disturbance. He had determinedly not spoken of Dante since we’d left the chestnut wood.
As I set out to meet our visitor, Conte Olivier retired. I wasn’t sure how much the elderly lord and his wife knew of Philippe’s personal troubles, but the king clearly trusted their discretion. Not only did they house the assassin’s implements, but for fifteen days they had treated Ilario and me as familiar guests, never inquiring of our business.
A bit of wilderness had been allowed to flourish amid the pristine cultivation of Lord Olivier’s sprawling demesne. Old joint-pines, creeping laurel, and budding strawberry trees created a fragrant and secluded haven. The footman reported that the visitor had made his way there straightaway.
“Have you an aversion to sunlight, Master Dante?” I said when he spun in his tracks at my approach.
His silver collar shone dully above the same shabby tunic he’d worn three days before, topped by a buff jerkin. Three days’ growth had left his chin bristling with black spikelets akin to fen sedge. His dreadful hand was tucked inside his garments. The other hand gripped a white walking stick.
“I’ve a need to stretch out the knots of beast riding,” he said, resuming his brisk pace as soon as I joined him. “Wasn’t born to it.”
Of all things, I’d never expected to smile in this man’s presence. No wonder it had taken him so long to get here.
“I’ve scorched thighs myself,” I said. “Tending a library gives one few opportunities to ride out, even did Seravain have mounts to lend. The chevalier must have a steel ass underneath his silk stockings.”
The mage glanced sidewise at me, flaring his nostrils as if an ill odor accompanied us. “How well do you know the pretty peacock?”
I saw no reason to dissemble. “Lord Ilario is harmless and good natured, saints bless his empty-headed ancestors. I did not choose him to partner in this task.”
“Perhaps.” He slowed to a walk. “So you expected to do the choosing . . . and you chose to approach me. Why?”
“As I said, your history speaks of exceptional talents—which you have yet to demonstrate—and a certain independence of thought—which you most clearly possess. And even after our short meeting, I cannot imagine a danger that would deter you, did you find your work intriguing.” Until that moment I had not articulated, even to myself, this certainty that he was the partner we needed. “I cannot and will not say more until I have your assurances—”
“I am no courtier who barters trust like paper words that can be burnt, or ink-drowned, or swept aside by any wind,” he snapped. “I speak plain and expect the same respect. You’ll get no assurances until I understand the whole of what you want. I don’t know why I’ve wasted my time with you.”
I hoped my satisfaction did not show. He did not understand his own hunger. “Clearly a man hiring a mage for a secret and dangerous task cannot reveal everything at once,” I said. “So let us proceed step by step. But I’ll promise you this: If I decide you are the right person, you will know everything I know before we begin.”
He considered that as we strolled deeper into the woodland. “If I agree to the work,” he said at last, “I deal with you and not the lordling. I’ll not abide deceivers.”
“Agreed.” My spine relaxed at such easy negotiation. “Now before we proceed, I must inquire about your parentage.”
No porcupine could bristle so vividly. “That is not your business.”
“Bloodlines often hint at areas of expertise. I have been tasked to solve a mystery, and your expertise is your qualification.”
“Bloodlines are irrelevant. I’ve queried witnesses who vouch this body burst from my common mother’s womb thanks to my common father’s seed. The two of them bequeathed me naught but this.” He yanked out his ruined hand. “Speak not to me of blessed ancestors or blood-born magic. I’ve neither worth the telling.”
“But your talents . . .”
“Everything I possess of spellmaking is learnt or discovered.” He thrust his maimed hand back into hiding, planted the walking stick, and moved on, visibly quenching his flared temper. “Does that intrigue you, Portier de Duplais, failed student?”
He sped his steps, and I could not read his back. What kind of agente confide could I be if a new acquaintance could deduce my own history so easily?
“Show me, Master,” I said, more forcefully than I intended. “You boast and scoff, and I hear naught but a marketplace shill, luring me into a diviner’s tent where I’ll be told the name of my true love for a mere two kivrae. Teach me your discovered truth of magic. I may be only a student who has discerned his natural limits, but I am a very good student.”
He halted, waiting for me, his folded arms resting on his chest, the staff tight in the crook of his arm. His mouth twisted oddly, narrowed eyes gleaming fierce in the failing light. Assessing me. I did my best not to squirm.
“All right, then. I presume you have memorized the formulas for many spells. You’ve learnt to balance the five divine elements—water, wood, air, spark, and base metal—by choosing appropriate particles to embody each formula and adjusting those particles according to the spell’s particular requirements: selecting a smaller shard of limestone to make a gate ward less rigid, or choosing three spoons of dust to increase the proportion of air and wood, allowing a sleeping fog to be easily dispersed, or adding a lock of hair from the person to be healed or warded or glamoured so that your enchantment will be tight bound to its focus. But tell me, are the particles themselves—or any other natural object—ever altered by your spellworking?”
“Certainly not.” Certainly not in my case—but not in anyone else’s case, either. “A particle can be glamoured—disguised with light to fool the eye—but the other se
nses would reveal its unchanged state. Or the particle, as any other object, can be used as a receptacle, linked to the spell so the enchantment can be transported. But magic itself is ephemera. Dust is naught but dust. Stone is stone. A thistle is a thistle. The Pantokrator has rendered nature immutable.”
We rounded a corner and came to an open glade. At one end of the clearing, stones had been stacked and fitted and a flow of water channeled to imitate a rocky waterfall. A stone bench sat to one side of the burbling font.
“Yet we melt silver and shape it,” said Dante, motioning me not to the bench, but to the ground in front of the font. “We alloy zinc and copper to make brass. We steep leaves in water to make tea.”
Irritated at his condescending tone, I cleared away a litter of thorny branches and last year’s leaves and sat cross-legged on the cool ground like a child in village school. A rabbit scuttered through the underbrush to find a new hiding place. “I am not an idiot, mage. Such are blendings or reshaping, not fundamental alterations. Brass is but a variant formulation of the divine elements. The metalsmith has added spark, and the new metal’s properties—weight, mass, hardness, malleability—remain appropriate to the combined elements. It is not magic.”
“Just what I’d expect a squawking parrot to report. Sit knees together, close your eyes, and quiet your thoughts.”
Curiosity—and a determination to see through whatever conjury he planned—goaded me to obey. From beyond my eyelids came a shifting and scraping and a grunt of effort. Whatever I expected, it had naught to do with an anvil being set in my lap. No, not an anvil, but one of the stones from the font. The cool solidity weighed heavy on my knees.
“Your masters at Collegia Seravain would have you believe they can recreate a memorized formula and bind a potion to smooth the skin of an old woman or generate a finger of holy fire to ensure a royal counselor’s honesty. They preen when they succeed and provide a litany of excuses when the crone dies wrinkled and the counselor is caught embezzling from the treasury. They fail to inform their patrons that a common laborer could hold the lenses they’ve used to focus beams of light or that any decent herbalist can provide a salve of apricots and olive oil to improve the skin as long as the woman is not too old and eats well and stays out of the sun.”
The mage’s warm fingers arranged my hands side by side on the cool flattish stone in my lap. His hardened palm remained atop my hands. “True sorcery begins with small things,” he said, his ever-present scorn yielding to something more kin to reverence. “Every natural object in this world—tree, stone, person, honeybee—carries with it a pattern of sound and light that our eyes and ears cannot perceive. Some call it the object’s cast. . . . ”
I released my held breath. What a hypocrite! Cast was naught but old-wife twaddle—the trickster’s love philtres, ghekets, and fairy rings this man purported to disdain. Yet before I could protest, the space behind my eyes—the center of my thinking self—began to heat like a glowing ember.
“. . . but it is more accurately called keirna, for this patterning lies beyond our natural senses. A properly disciplined mind can perceive these patterns, just as refined lenses can perceive stars invisible to our eyes. Consider this particular object you hold. . . .”
Against the dark background inside my eyelids appeared lines of shimmering gray light, some lighter, some darker, stacked one atop the other like some arcane glyph, the line at the bottom thicker than the one at the top. I’d never experienced the like.
“The pattern reflects the solidity and strength that is the stone’s nature. . . .”
As the mage spoke, another line appeared at the top of the stack curving gracefully around to connect at the bottom, touching every other line in the array.
“. . . as are its continuity, enclosure, boundedness. Now consider the specifics of this rock, the minerals it contains, the shape and weight and source and history that make it like no other.”
And woven in and out of the gray lines appeared slender threads of bright red, dull gold, and other colors I could not name. Permeating all was a low thrum, a sound so precise it was almost visible, a pulse that gave the pattern life.
“Were I to strike the rock with a chisel, I would alter this pattern—its keirna—but only in small ways. Because I study the language of keirna, the pattern would yet speak to me of stone, cut from yonder crags, formed in fire in the recesses of history and shaped apurpose to build this font.”
Ridiculous. Stone was stone—an amalgam of the divine elements of wood, water, and base metal. Stone was softer or harder—more or less of the wood that made it firm and the base metal that made it impermeable. It was black or red or white, grainy or smooth. Such properties helped us judge the concentration of the elements in a particle and create the proper balance to bind spells. No magical essence hung about it.
“Human thoughts have patterns, as well.” The mage’s rich and resonant voice seemed strained, as if he balanced fifty such stones high above his head, demonstrating their shapes and sizes to the world. “Those of true talent—and though there are more of them in this world than you might suspect, few wear mage’s collars or reside in palaces—are capable of extending their patterns of thought and will to touch keirna, to link and bind and manipulate the keirna of various objects . . . creating . . . magic.”
Into my vision intruded a finger of light, a pinpoint of dark blue brilliance with a tail of silver and crimson. The finger shredded the thick lower line and picked out some of the thinner weavings. In that same moment, as the surety of enchantment settled over me like a garment, I would have wagered my life that someone lifted the stone from my knees, though my hands told me it had not moved and had not changed in length or breadth or thickness. And when I opened my eyes, unable to contain myself longer, indeed nothing had changed but the weight of the massive stone. A burden little heavier than a pebble rested on my lap.
No, no, you cannot alter the fundamental properties of a particle—an object of the Pantokrator’s creation. I lifted my hands, shoving his away, and shifted my knees, expecting to disrupt his illusion. Nothing changed. I inserted my fingers between the stone and my thighs and hefted it. Turned it over. Shook it. Held it in one hand and raised it higher than my head, before resting it in my lap again and staring at it. A child could have tossed the thing into the air or skipped it on a pond. Illusions deposited a faint magical residue the texture of dry meal. Dante’s left the air crackling like summer lightning.
The green eyes bored into mine, watching, waiting, judging me. I stared into their fiery depths and felt the foundations of my world crack.
The mage did not smile, but nodded as if a conversation had been concluded. “That, student, is the truth of sorcery.”
His clawed hand gripped his walking stick, and he rested his head on it. A sighed word and the stone’s full weight pressed down on my knees again.
I could not ask him how he’d learned it. To do so would have been to admit that I had failed not only in my aspiration, but in my striving. That I had wasted sixteen years. That my chosen masters, the priests of my mind’s temple, the most honored mages of history—By the Ten Gates to Heaven, I had read their teachings hunting answers to my failure, and none gave a moment’s credence to cast—the idea that magic lived not solely in the blood and will of a practitioner, but in all of nature, waiting to be drawn out. How could they all be wrong about the fundamental truths of the world?
I wanted to scream at Dante that he was the Souleater’s servant, a trickster demon. Yet I knew better. Illusions deceived the external senses, but this strange patterning of light and sound had appeared inside my mind where only I could render judgment. Unless I was myself a madman, he had shown me truth.
Perhaps he understood the lump the size of his rock that had lodged itself in my throat, for he spoke quietly and without rancor or hubris. “The mages at Seravain proclaim that only those they choose, only those born of proven bloodlines, only those who memorize their lists and follow their formula
s, can work magic. Sorcery acknowledges no such limits. Most of the truly gifted work their small magics by rote, imitating what their grannies told them, or by instinct, because they have not separated themselves from nature by dividing all things into five divine boxes. Some of these people actually sense keirna and are able to manipulate a pattern as I did.”
“Why don’t we hear of this?” I said, grasping at arguments that evaporated with my touch. Fools and tricksters everywhere swore by their charms, philtres, wards, by their mother’s healing power or their uncle’s virility potion. What few claims ever proved true had been traced to a blood family’s bastard or some true practitioner’s deception.
“All those I’ve met work blind,” said Dante, scritching the end of his staff in the dirt. “None claim to see the actual structure of keirna or attempt to display it for another as I did with you. Yet even if they did, who would believe? The Camarilla would name them cheats and deceivers and fine them into starvation, or torture them until they recant and brand them on the forehead, all to prove that collared mages alone hold the mighty reins of power. Cursed be their blackguard souls—”
He bit off a snarl, and his good hand tugged at his silver collar, as if it chafed; as if the masters at Seravain, jealous of his talent and despising his rude manner, had left a burr inside its enchanted circle or unbalanced its elements so that it would not accommodate the play of his muscles. No wonder they had been happy to forget him. His results and the lack of a blood mark on his hand must have confounded them. And he was correct; if the Camarilla had any idea of the magical heresies he propounded, they would bury him so far below Sabria’s deepest dungeon, he would never see light again.
The mage had leaned his back against the fountain and closed his eyes as if to sleep. Not a peaceful sleep, but that of a wary traveler on an unknown road. “So, do I pass your test?”
