The Spirit Lens

by Carol Berg

  “. . . everything.”

  After a moment of quiet, I felt the shift of limbs clothed in fabric and leather and a release as Dante dissolved the bond between us. The pattern vanished. Wood scraped softly on wood.

  When I opened my eyes, Dante sat cross-legged on the floor, the carved staff across his lap. He was staring puzzled at the arrow, which had changed neither its position nor its rusty tale of a dead horse and a lucky king and the twisting yank of whoever had withdrawn it from its victim.

  I waited, confident the mage would tell me what bothered him so, for I had a sudden inspiration that sharing this marvel had not been his original intent, but an apology for his brutish attempt to manipulate me, offered in the only coin he knew. He would always prefer to investigate magic’s mysteries alone.

  “They were overeager, our assassins,” he said at last. “That’s all I can calculate. So determined to cast blame on Her Gullible Majesty that they concocted this foolery of guard captains and wrestling matches. Or perhaps that whole complication was naught but coincidence, and your guard captain the unluckiest of men.”

  Penetrate everything. “You’re saying the arrow would have penetrated the king’s armor no matter what, so there was no point in getting him out of it.”

  In one startling motion, he picked up the arrow and slammed it to the mahogany plank beside him. The impact left the stained head buried in the wood and a magical residue stinging my eyes like blown sand.

  “This arrow would penetrate a marble slab,” he said. “An iron cliff.”

  Stunned, I could not budge my gaze from the quivering shaft protruding from the floor. Yet my mind raced. I did not believe in coincidence. “Perhaps casting blame on the queen was never the end, but a means—a confusion to embroil an investigator in domestic argument, masking the true perpetrators.”

  “Or perhaps the murderous wife did not trust her mages to do what they promised,” said Dante, dry as the deserts of Aroth. “The wrestling ploy marked the game as amateur.”

  “No amateur worked transference or enspelled an arrow to penetrate iron.” What was this protective instinct already so plain in Philippe and Ilario where Eugenie de Sylvae was concerned? I’d need to do better. Philippe was relying on me to be thorough and objective.

  The mage, distracted, acknowledged my point with head and hand. He closed his eyes and knotted his brow, not quiet this time, but tapping his fingers on his staff. After only a few moments, he launched the staff across the room, growling in frustration.

  “There’s something more here,” he said, as staff and a stack of boxes clattered on the floor. “Keirna tells a story, and the story of this arrow seems clear. Only the human conspiracy surrounding it tangles our minds. Yet I’ve this notion . . . Some piece of the pattern is missing. If I’d studied a hundred poisoned arrows launched at kings, I might know better what to look for.”

  “I’ll find out what more I can about that day,” I said, retrieving my courret and stepping quickly outside the circumoccule before the silver pebble set my pocket afire. “But the day after tomorrow looms much larger just now. You will come to the docks.”

  “If I must.” Dante dragged his horrid right hand out of his tunic and crossed his arms atop his knees, glaring at the arrow as if it had thwarted him apurpose. “I’ll need those texts, you know. With some work, I can likely break the ciphers. If I’m to tease death and wickedness . . .”

  He must work with them. My mind completed his assertion, as he knew it would. I pretended not to hear. I chose to go in search of Calvino de Santo, former captain of His Majesty’s personal guard, condemned to serve his former underlings for his failure in judgment. Perhaps he would answer my questions.

  MY FIRST STOP IN MY search for the disgraced soldier was a cluttered temple guardpost. Its sole occupant, a craggy-faced veteran with red hair and huge feet, was quite willing to recommend where a newcomer to Merona could get the best view of the king and the launch of the Destinne. Bored and alone in his watch, the soldier was easily coaxed into a lengthy discussion of the difficulties of protecting a monarch who insisted on mingling with his subjects.

  “Of course, I’ve heard the closest to death the king’s come in years occurred last year among his own guards,” I said, as if I didn’t know what Guardsman Veryl’s red livery signified. I perched on a stool, watching him light the lamps in the sooty corners of the guardroom. The place smelled of cleaning oil, musty boots, and the spreading lawn of the temple minor beyond the open door. “Heard a guardsman near killed him.”

  The soldier’s back stiffened, and his overlarge lower lip pooched out even farther from his red beard. “’ Tweren’t no fault of the guards. Nor even the cap’n’s, though he’s paid the price and will do till he passes the Veil.”

  “He’s still alive? After betraying the king? I’d have wagered a year’s pay the hangman had dropped him into the Souleater’s maw long since.” I was becoming well practiced at disingenuous surprise.

  Veryl pulled a cloth-wrapped bundle from a leather pocket and extracted a slab of coarse bread spread thickly with nettle cheese and olive paste. “Nawp, you’ll see the cap’n round all the posts here, wiping floors or hauling coal.” He nodded to the filled scuttle beside the brazier. “He’s forbid to speak to us, though we oft hear him crying out in the night. Pity. He was a decent officer got led down the path by—” He bit off a large chunk of the pasty bread and stuffed the rest back into its wrapping. “I’d best be off now. I’ve rounds to make.”

  “Sorry to delay you.” I jumped up, wishing I dared push harder. But I couldn’t afford to be remarked. “It’s just . . . I thought I’d feel safer inside Castelle Escalon’s walls than out in the countryside. But rumors of scarred assassins with no blood left in them get a man’s mind working, especially when his blood skills fall short.”

  Veryl’s gaze darted to my marked hand. As he hitched the leather pocket over his shoulder, he jutted his thick jaw toward the open door, as if it represented all of the wide world. “I was on the practice field that day, but never saw aught for myself. Just hunted the bowman and heard the rumors like everyone else. The fellow what took that shot was carried off and burnt so fast, naught but a few ever saw his body, and they wouldn’t talk about it. But if I wore such a mark on my hand as you do, I’d keep close to my lord, no matter he’s a fool, and not wander the palace nor city nor dockside at night. Just my thought on it.”

  That’s the way life had been during the Blood Wars. Hired rogues lurking in the dark places, ready to snatch those fool enough to walk out alone. Anyone remotely kin to a blood family stalked and whisked away at the first misstep, never to be seen again. And now we were marked.

  I laid fist to breast and inclined my back in respect. “Divine grace, guardsman, and angels companion all who protect Sabria and my lords and such poor accounts as me.”

  Veryl shouldered a halberd and grunted his own farewell blessing. As he marched into the night, I pulled out my journal and reviewed my sketches of Castelle Escalon’s geography. I would visit the guardposts one by one until I found Calvino de Santo.

  Left skitterish by the guardsman’s warning, I hurried through the darkening alleyways with an extra urgency in my steps.

  THE SEVENTH POST I VISITED, a brightly lit room off the wall walk near the postern, resounded with boisterous invocation of those saints and demons who chart the fall of dice. The middle-night watch bells had just rung. Uncertain at confronting more guardsmen with the same false story, wishing I’d brought my own lantern, and feeling an increasing burden of futility, I held back in the dark courtyard below, uncomfortable in a night that seemed to twine itself about my limbs like a sneaking cat.

  “Saint Calvino!” shouted a thick-tongued figure who appeared in the lit doorway. “This butt’s gone dry! Do we shrivel of thirst, our wives’ll take rakes to your traitorous hide.”

  I near cracked my head on the brick wall, startled when a dark figure darted from behind a pile of emptied crates and casks pile
d in a corner of the yard and vanished into the base of the tower. The man soon reappeared rolling an ale cask. As the heavy butt rumbled up the ramp to the wall walk and the tower room, all I could note was that he was a big, bearded man of dark complexion.

  The arrival of a full cask was greeted with cheers, whoops, and no few references to its handler’s “holiness” and “exemplary leadership.” The man soon reappeared, rolling an empty cask down the ramp. Each time the butt insisted upon wedging itself in the crooks of the wall, he jarred it loose with a violent kick. Though spared the traitor’s doom of headsman or hangman, a proud soldier and once-trusted captain could find such base servitude naught but torment. What kept such a man from slamming his head into a wall?

  He shoved the emptied cask into the corner, threatening to topple the entire stack, then retreated into the shadows whence he’d come. As I crossed the yard, I made sure he could see me in what light fell from the tower room. “Calvino de Santo?”

  “I’m bound by law to warn thee: Royal judgment forbids me speak to any man of arms, any squire, any woman, child, or servant, or any who’s weak-minded or foolish.” Bitterness as thick as old honey flowed from the shadows.

  “I am none of those. Nor am I here to shame you, nor to condemn or defend your past actions. Rather, I am a servant of Sabria tasked to find answers to certain questions about the very incident that resulted in this heavy judgment. To fulfill my charge, I call upon what core of honor caused you to devote your life’s service to the Guard Royale, and what desire you might harbor to expose the deeper truth of that terrible event.”

  A harsh laugh accompanied the big man to the edge of the shadow. What tale his filthy slops, unwashed skin, ragged hair, and bleak eyes began, his half-cropped ears must complete. The hideous scars named him a convicted dupe to an unconvicted treacher, condemned to unending humiliation in the only employment that would ever be open to him.

  “What gives you to think honor or truth mean aught to me, servant of Sabria?”

  To avoid a glib answer required careful consideration. “You are alive. That fact speaks of inner strength. It speaks of a history and character that convinced your king your failings were in judgment, not loyalty, at a time when no other witness would speak for you.”

  His glare weighed on my shoulders like an iron yoke. When he retreated into shadow again, I followed, but assumed I’d lost my gamble that honesty might outweigh contrivance. I was wrong.

  “I told Vernase-Ruggiere everything I knew,” he said, in earnest pain. “Fifty times, I told him. I answered everything he asked me, and never did I waver from my story, not when he showed me the headsman’s ax and told me it was too good for me, not when he let me hear him order gallows built. Not during that ruination of a trial, nor after, when he brought in the butcher . . . Shite!”

  “But you were terrified and angry, disbelieving and confused—as any man would be. Now, months have passed, and you’ve had time to think. You’ve gone over it all a thousand times. Surely something has revealed itself to you—a word . . . a look . . . a detail.”

  When he did not deny it right away, I knew I’d lanced the proper vein.

  My eyes could pick out his shape now. He had slumped to the ground, his back to the wall. I crouched low and dropped my voice. “The events set in motion that day have not yet been graven in history, despite what hard experience tells you. I cannot—will not—drive you with unsubstantial hopes, but surely truth cannot hurt you more than this.”

  “You know naught of hard experience. Why do you roust a dogsbody when those as might tell all remain unquestioned? I’m forbid to speak, forbid to say who it was suggested I wrestle the king that day. But I hear enough to know who sits on silk cushions and eats fresh figs and who hides protected behind her skirts. Not my wife, who’s disowned me and gone back to her parents. Not my children, who will ne’er again in this world hear my name nor speak it. Not the poor stupid wretch whose blood got stolen by devils, nor any of those he cared for.”

  His fury might be justifiable indignation or the sour dregs of failed conspiracy, but his meaning lay clear. “You knew him! The mule who lofted that cursed arrow. By the Ten Gates, man, who was he? I’ll swear—” What could I offer for such a prize? My cousin had granted me no power of pardon and no purse full enough to salve the wounds of this man’s disgrace. But perhaps I could ease his fears.

  “I am partnered with a very powerful man, Captain. He bears no loyalty to those you blame and is joined with me to see this truth uncovered. We can do naught for the dead man, save name him with pity in our prayers. But I promise you, the two of us shall stand between those you would protect and those whose wrath you fear.”

  I left it there and waited while he sounded my words as I had sounded his.

  “You trust this other?”

  If I hoped to gain de Santo’s trust, I must not delay an answer. Thus I spilled the first words that flitted into mind. “He has trusted me with what he values most, and he knows my own shame, yet treats me as an honest man. Our safety and our pride are bound up with each other’s secrets.”

  “Naught of evil will come down on the mule’s family or mine?”

  “No sorcerer of the Camarilla, no adept, no acolyte, no blood-marked man or woman will learn that you spoke this name unless you give me leave. With every resource I can muster, I will see to his family’s sustenance and your family’s as well. I give you my hand on it.”

  “His name was Gruchin.” Though he ignored my proffered hand, he sounded relieved to share what he knew. “At first I didn’t recognize him; he was so changed. When I saw the assassin was a mule, I kept everyone away, so none could be harmed by whatever spells or corruption might linger on him. Thus no one else saw him to recognize.” De Santo leaned forward, knees drawn up, hands covering his mutilated ears. “I’ve quarters in the barracks, but I’ve no peace when I’m with other men. I’d rather stay out here. But the nights get long, and I don’t sleep well . . . and I see him every night.”

  “In your dreams.”

  He near choked on a barbed laugh. “Dreaming, I see him. Waking, I see him. I see him in alleys, in courtyards, on the walls, in the trees, inside my eyelids. That bloodless, battered wreck of a face was the last I saw that wasn’t calling me traitor, and now he’ll not leave me be. Gruchin was an expert bowman, but a sniveling sort of fellow. Always complaining. Always insisting I promote him. It was well after I took him on that I discovered he was of the blood—some laggard of a family mostly died out. One night he was in his cups and starts whining about his ill luck and how he had tried to be a mage, but got booted out of Seravain. Claimed he’d played adept to the queen’s mage, but only—”

  “To Orviene?”

  “Nay, the woman mage. But she’d dismissed him. Accused him of leeching. Him.” Another despairing laugh. “Not a day after Gruchin told me this, he started with the shakes. Soon he couldn’t hit a cliff from ten paces. Within a month I had dismissed him, too, and never gave him another thought. It’s only fit we spend our nights together now.”

  “And his family?”

  “He’d a wife in Riverside and a girl child same age as mine. I think of her . . . the little one . . . and wonder . . . Great Kingfather of us all, what if the devil took her, too?”

  His voice broke, and I rose to go, thankful for the night and shadows that gave him a measure of privacy, if not comfort. Yet I needed an answer to one more question. “You told Michel de Vernase that the mule—Gruchin—ran away, then came back to retrieve a dropped spyglass, and one of your men killed him as he ran off again. Did Gruchin do anything else with the glass? Work magic . . . ?”

  “He never ran. Hrogar said Gruchin walked away to pick up the glass, then came back and stood there. Hrogar flung his ax and hit the vein in his thigh. As if—Souleater’s fire, he wasn’t two metres away and just stood there. Hrogar, poor sod, mostly dead himself, couldn’t have hit anyone running.”

  Such a difference to hear the exact story, knowing o
f Ophelie. Had Gruchin, too, preferred death to infamy? But then . . . he’d already lofted the spelled arrow. What further infamy awaited? Was it more bleeding he feared? Or the glass? “Where did you find the spyglass?”

  “Had to pry it from Gruchin’s hand.”

  So Gruchin hadn’t intended to hide it or dispose of it or even to use it. That made no sense. “Tell me, did you look through it?”

  “Aye,” he said harshly. “A man does, doesn’t he? As if it might tell him something.”

  “But you didn’t see anything . . . unusual?”

  “Naught but Gruchin laying there dead, and he’s naught but bones and skin, looking back at me with eyes sunk into his skull. In the two years since I’d sacked him, I’d never asked what became of him. My own soldier. I’d never asked if his family was eating. The king sent Michel de Vernase to clean up the mess, and I gave him the glass along with everything else and told him all I learned from them as saw anything. Then the whoreson arrested me.”

  “And no one’s ever come asking you about it since then?”

  “None. By every saint and demon, I’d see them all strung up and bled like pigs.” He buried his head in his arms, muffling a roar of anguish.

  “Divine grace, Calvino,” I said softly, leaving him to his misery. “I’ll do what I can for you.”

  Mind reeling with thoughts of desperate mules and unfathomable motives, I retraced my route, too far from any familiar venue to risk a shortcut. My boots rang on the cobbled paths and bounced off the courtyard walls, far too loud. The deserted storehouses and bakehouses looked different from this direction. Bigger. Darker. And the air in the cramped alleys felt dank and chill as if Desen’s month yet lingered there from wintertide.

  I did not believe in ghost hauntings. No spirit, no incorporeal being swathed in mist, wandered the demesne of the living after the heart ceased its beating. I believed the Veil a barrier of iron, not silk. Whatever happened after a person’s final breath was beyond our knowing, unless the spyglass could penetrate that barrier to show us truth. . . .