The Spirit Lens

by Carol Berg

  All right. Perhaps she didn’t want to subject any personal friends to the strange mage’s whims. That made sense. She was here because Dante had demanded an assistant in such terms that I was the glaringly obvious choice. He knew my plan and the reasoning behind it. I had to trust him.

  I rose to my stockinged feet and bowed. “Damoselle ney Billard, your honesty becomes you and honors your mistress. I hear naught to make a determined spirit quake. Indeed, this prospect, while daunting, saves me the difficulties of exploring other opportunities in the royal household that would likely result in situations far less suited to my experience. In short, I am humbly grateful and accept the position.”

  She popped up from the stool, as if the weight of the sky had lifted from her shoulders. “Consider me in your debt, Sonjeur de Duplais. If the situation becomes too burdensome, I insist you come to me and I shall seek remedy from Her Majesty. The mage has been brought in to do my lady service, and I’ve no doubt that any who aid him will also reap her deepest gratitude.”

  My skin crept at recalling the service Eugenie de Sylvae desired of Dante. Royal gratitude could certainly be useful, but the mage had better have a damned good reason for this.

  DAMOSELLE MAURA WAS NOTHING IF not efficient. Morning brought a plate of cold lamb and olives with her compliments. Still groggy from a night of empty dreams, I’d scarce dug in when the lady herself arrived.

  “Did you sleep well in this unfortunate place, sonjeur?” she asked, wrinkling her nose. The door remained open behind her, and the draft from the courtyard outside the barred window strengthened the miasma of mold and urine.

  “As well as could be expected, damoselle,” I said, scrambling off the bed while dabbing at my greasy mouth with the back of my hand. Few activities are less graceful than eating, especially when one lacks knife, spoon, or serviette. “I feel thoroughly chastised. My court protocol shall certainly not slip again.”

  She did not quite laugh, as if the bounds of her business kept such demonstrations inside her. Yet the heightened glow of her richly colored skin and the evidence of a slight dimple in one cheek made the prospects of the day immensely brighter.

  “The guard holds your release papers and personal belongings. As Master Dante insists you attend him right away, I’ve come to show you the way to his chambers myself.”

  “My deepest gratitude, damoselle. I cannot tell you—” But she was already out the door, leaving my tongue hanging out like a thirsty pup’s.

  I blotted my mouth again, wiped my hands quickly on the bed sheets, and followed, reciting to myself the unfortunate realities of family connection that had kept my life celibate. The lady, daughter of a blood family, would know the rules. The door guard returned boots, belt, journal, compass, and the silver phial my mentor had given me with his best potion for my recurrent headaches. The courret remained tucked away in my spall pouch.

  Once out of the cell, I felt as if I’d shed an excessively tight suit of clothes. But I could not forget I had a role to play, even if Dante had changed the playscript out from under me.

  “Damoselle, if you please,” I said, catching up to her. “Why would the mage need me so soon? I mean, I’m happy to go, but after a night confined, I feel unkempt. If this mage is very exacting . . . Are you certain he will accept me?”

  “Her Majesty is providing the assistant her servant has requested. He’ll not dare refuse.” A pleasant animation softened the blunt assertion. A bold young woman indeed.

  The open galleries and gardens of Castelle Escalon were built in the sprawling Fassid style. As Damoselle Maura briskly navigated the confusing route from my cell, housed in the cellar of an old barracks, I did my best to memorize landmarks. A long gray underground passage. A round crossing-room banded by lozenge-shaped window openings. A fragrance garden. An arcade where a Fassid love poem had been scribed in the tiled floor and its erotic images painted on panels in the vaulted ceiling.

  “You’re very kind to show me the way,” I said. “It would be easy to get lost here.”

  “Her Majesty’s household comprises the entire east wing,” she said, pointing beyond three wide steps of whorled rose marble flanked by sculpted oak trees. “Her ladies, her brother Lord Ilario, and her counselors, including her mages, all live here.”

  At the top of the steps a broad gallery swept a long curve, its open arches overlooking the slate rooftops of Merona and the wide band of the river Ley, shimmering in the morning light. Just before the gallery ended in a wide, upward stair, a passage branched off to the right.

  “These are Mage Gaetana’s apartments,” said the lady, pointing to the first doors along the soft-lit passage. “These Mage Orviene’s, and these”—we arrived at the single door closest to the far end of the passage—“Mage Dante’s.”

  The administrator’s brisk knock elicited a curt, “Enter.”

  The lady gasped as we stepped through the door. Gray smoke wafted from the hearth, stinging our eyes and offending our nostrils with a sulfurous stench. Despite the discomfort, I had to smother amusement, even while breathing a prayer the mage would not get himself booted out of the palace too quickly. Luxurious draperies of heavy, blood-colored satin had been tied up in ugly knots, spilling sunlight from the broad windows across a scene of destruction. Armchairs, cushions, ebony tables, and delicate statuary had been piled haphazardly on damask couches shoved against the walls. At least three crumpled rugs had been thrown atop the pile.

  A deep, narrow groove had been gouged into the rare mahogany floor, forming a circle some four metres in diameter. Clad in his old russet tunic, rather than one of the embroidered jackets Edmond de Roble had provided him before leaving Villa Margeroux, the mage knelt inside the circle, tracing the deep channel with the still smoking end of a charred stick.

  “Master Dante, what have you—?” The woman visibly choked back a reprimand. “I’ve brought your new assistant, Portier de Savin-Duplais.”

  “Good. He can finish this while I get on with the underlayment.” He glanced up and caught Damoselle Maura’s displeasure. “What? Do these other mages not work at Her Majesty’s business? Perhaps that’s why they achieve no results. To prepare a new circumoccule for every trial is inefficient and error-prone. Accuracy. Precision. Repeatability. Without them, you’ve naught but accidents and happenstance.”

  He popped to his feet, thrust the smoldering stick into my hand, and crouched beside the hearth. The offending stench and smoke rose from a crucible set upon a tripod over an unnaturally intense fire. “I need worktables,” he said as he dropped yellow clots from a paper packet into the crucible, causing rills of blue flame to flare across his stinking mixture. “Three of them, each exactly three metres long. One with a polished stone surface, the others planed oak. And cupboards with lockable doors. Two at the least. Four would be better.”

  “You didn’t inform the steward of these needs, when we spoke to him yesterday?”

  “How was I to expect that folk hiring a mage had no idea what a mage needs to do his work?” He poked at the belching contents of the crucible with a stirring rod, then glared at me over his shoulder. “Well, get on then, apprentice. The sooner you’ve done, the sooner we clear this damnable stink.”

  “Sonjeur de Duplais is King Philippe’s cousin, Master Dante,” stated the lady firmly, “engaged to acquire and catalog books. If you need manual labor, we can fetch a workman.”

  “He might be the Pantokrator’s maiden aunt for all I care. He does what I tell him in the manner I prescribe or he’s no good to me and might as well dive headfirst out the window right now. Is that understood?”

  Arrogant. Unyielding. Ungraceful. Even the cool Damoselle ney Billard fumed.

  “I serve at the queen’s pleasure, Master,” I said quickly. “To that end, I shall be honored to take on whatever tasks you assign and to learn whatever you might teach.” Especially why a man who disdained common sorcerous practice needed a circumoccule, a ring used to enclose particles arranged for traditional spellw
orking. And to learn why he had dragged me into a position that would make our investigation impossible. And to learn why this chamber thrummed as if a hundred musicians played at once, all of them different tunes.

  Raising my brows and venturing a grin to soothe the lady’s concerns, I shrugged out of my wrinkled doublet and bent to the work, first reheating the smoldering end of the stick—once a chair rung, I guessed—then shoving it through the gouge. Soot and char brought a minimal useful balance of spark, air, and wood to spells that focused heavily on the elements of base metal and water. A standard practitioner would embed other preferred particles into a permanent ring—fragments of colored glass, perhaps, or a few well-chosen herbs, and always nuggets or links of silver—the most perfect substance, encompassing all five of the divine elements. But who knew what Dante’s plan was? The sulfur bespoke unsavory complexities.

  “Get it hotter and move faster,” snapped Dante. “The wood must be well seared as I lay down the lead.”

  “Very well then,” said the administrator, equanimity recovered, though the toe of her elegantly small foot tapped rapidly on the ruined floor. “Have Sonjeur de Duplais bring a list of your additional requirements to my office this afternoon. Shall I have these excess furnishings removed?”

  “Aye,” said Dante, carefully ladling the first dipper of molten lead into a charred segment of the groove. “And the window rags as well. They’re useless and ugly. I’ll keep yon bed and the eating table and such.” He jerked his head toward an open doorway in the end wall. “And you can leash your simpering maidservants and prancing footmen. None sets foot in my chambers unless I give them leave. The assistant will clean what needs cleaning. Now out with you, and let us to our work.”

  “Certainly, Master. Divine grace, and to you also, Sonjeur de Duplais. As I mentioned earlier, I am at your service.” The lady gazed at me intently, communicating a sincere concern and intent to help, which pleased me considerably. I acknowledged her kindness as well as I could from my ungraceful posture on the floor.

  My task completed, I sat back on my heels. I expected Dante would stop once Maura had gone, but in fact his focus narrowed, his capable left hand dribbling an almost perfect thread of molten lead in the grooved circle. It was easy to overlook his doing almost everything one-handed. His ruined appendage had remained out of sight the entire time the lady was in the room. A touch of vanity, perhaps.

  When he had closed the circle of lead, he returned his ladle to the empty crucible and used his staff to disperse the pile of white-hot coals across the floor of the hearth. If I hadn’t been watching so carefully, I might have missed the moment when he pressed his narrow lips together as if muting a word they were intending to shape. The coals dulled instantly and fell to ash. For that one moment, I would have sworn I’d gone naked and feathers stroked my skin.

  Dante rose, hurried to the windows, and threw open the casements, clinging to the iron frames as he heaved great breaths of the morning air. “Discord’s realm . . . This place is going to drive me mad.” Then he spun in place, his gaunt face hungry, his green eyes snapping and sparking like the fires of midsummer. “But it will be a fine madness, student. We’ve so much nastiness afoot in Castelle Escalon, it will take us a year to sort it out. They’ve found another corpse—another mule.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  11 QAT 50 DAYS UNTIL THE ANNIVERSARY

  It was an unfortunate fact that the actual blood of someone like me could so dramatically enhance another sorcerer’s spellmaking, when it could not provide me enough power to work magic of my own. Transference, the direct infusion of magical blood into a sorcerer’s veins, had been practiced since the awakening of magic. A few practitioners bled themselves, distilled the product, and reinfused their own strengthened ichor. But as this led determinedly to self-destruction, most incidents of transference involved an unwilling victim, leeched to provide magical sustenance for the unscrupulous. Some blood family’s bastard, feeble-minded brother, or demented aunt might “wander off” or “take a sudden fever,” perhaps to reappear bruised, pale, and scarred, perhaps never to be seen again.

  Until the practice had exploded into a plague of abduction, torture, and murder in service of the grand power rivalries that came to be called the Blood Wars, no one had acknowledged its use among otherwise respectable members of the Camarilla Magica. And only then did ordinary Sabrians learn of mules—victims repeatedly bled until their veins collapsed and their minds disintegrated. The Temple tetrarchs declared that the mules’ souls bled away as well, an irretrievable corruption.

  The Concord de Praesta, the accord that ended the Blood Wars, required every mage to wear the permanent silver collar that supposedly kept his or her workings well scrutinized. And all children born to the blood were permanently marked on the back of the left hand and required to display that mark at every encounter, warning others that we might be purveyors of illicit magic. Abductions were punishable by death, and promiscuity among blood families by public penance and heavy fines, lest unrecorded bastards provide temptation for evildoers—or provide more evildoers. Despite all such precautions, it appeared that someone was bleeding poor sods into mindless idiots right under the nose of the Camarilla, the Temple, the king, and the educated citizenry of Merona. Two mules discovered within a tenmonth would strike fear in any heart. It could not be coincidence.

  “A mule, are you sure?”

  “Yestermorn the queen’s chief panderer summoned me to his chambers.” Dante perched on the broad window seat, the sunlight at his back. His white staff lay across his lap. “This Orviene, as sweet a talker as any marketplace barker, was wheedling at me to tell where I’d trained, and dancing about talk of necromancy. He even offered to lend books and materials, though revealing naught of his own skills or current work, to be sure. Yon crucible and such came from his stock, so I decided to make good use of them while I waited for you to arrive. Never thought to hear you’d got yourself thrown in jail. You were to be the hidden partner.”

  “Exactly so,” I said. “So Orviene told you of the mule?”

  “No. The woman Gaetana’s chambers are right across the passage from Orviene’s. While I was with Orviene, one of her adepts brought her a message that ‘the verger would not release the dead mule.’ ”

  “Are you sure you heard the report accurately from such a distance?” Across a passage?

  “I’ve a spell . . . my staff . . . it’s not important.”

  “Not important?” Sorcery could trick the senses; it could not alter their quality, any more than it could enable a man to eat poison without consequence.

  “Gaetana was furious. Agitated. She felt”—he closed his eyes and waved his hands about his head as if grasping for the right word—“betrayed. This . . . this mule’s death . . . this risk of their exposure . . . isn’t supposed to be happening, which means we must take advantage before they seal whatever wall of secrets has been breached.”

  “Without thinking hard, I can devise fifty possibilities that would bring an agitating message to Gaetana. The last thing we need is to fly off on imaginings.”

  “I must see that corpse,” he said. “You are the planner, the leader, so make it happen before they burn the creature.”

  Impossible that he could have surmised so much from a message muffled by two walls and a passageway. Yet his belief was as undeniable as a hurricane.

  “All right. I’ll do what I can. Find the deadhouse. Get you in there today.” And then find a way to renege on my agreement with Damoselle Maura without jeopardizing my chances for Ilario’s position. “Surely you could have come up with a simpler scheme to see the body than to engage me as your assistant. Something to do with Orviene’s questions, the deadraising . . .”

  “But they’ve no idea I know about the mule. Don’t you see? If they suspect I can hear beyond walls, they’ll never trust me near them.”

  Unreasonably reasonable. “All right. But I cannot work with you beyond this. I must have the freedom of opportuni
ty Lord Ilario’s employ can give me.”

  “Do what you must, but get me in to see this new corpse. What use is a plan if it hides the very truth we need to examine?”

  That was inarguable.

  I hadn’t even poked my arms into my discarded doublet when the mage dragged a crate of jumbled metal strips, spools, and packets into the center of his circumoccule. “Hold on. We’ve work to do while you consider your course. Lay the strips of tin to either side of the lead. The bronze links should lie at the sixteen compass points. You are capable of determining true compass headings, are you not?”

  My bewildered fumbling for my compass must have impressed him as a no, for he snatched up his staff, rubbed his thumb on some particular bit of carving, and used the soot stick to place sixteen marks on the scarred mahogany rim of his circle.

  “Braid the linen, cotton, and silk thread together and lay it around the outer edge. Then fill in all the gaps and holes with wood shavings; there’s a rasp in the box, and I don’t care which wood you use. Spread a thin layer of sand over all. When you’ve done, I’ll seal the ring with fire.”

  Exasperated, I shook my head. “Master, I’m not going to—”

  “I might as well have use of you while you’re in my service. Meanwhile I’ll write the list of materials I need from that housekeeper or whatever she is. She pities you, so you should be able to get whatever I want. I doubt she’ll be so generous when I’m on my own again.” He vanished into the other room.

  Mumbling unseemly responses at his vanished back, I snatched up the spall pouch I had laid aside with my doublet. I had no intention of continuing his humiliating little game of master and servant now Maura had gone. But as my thumb traced the outline of the red jasper tessila inside the heavy little bag, the glimmering of a plan took shape. A Damoselle Maura who pitied me could surely tell me where to find the palace deadhouse, and Dante’s list would give me a perfect excuse to seek her out right away. Grumbling, I threw my doublet aside, knelt inside the circumoccule, and bent to the mage’s work.