The Spirit Lens

by Carol Berg

  A sickly, wavering light now cocooned the wailing Calvino de Santo. Dread shriveled my skin like old grapes. But I raised the glass.

  Sainted bones! I could not but recall Watt’s sketched light, the straight rays bending as they passed through curved glass and again as they penetrated the textured eye. But the artisan’s rendering had shown the object of vision clarified, unblurred, not wholly altered, not reshaped from green and purple lightning into a man’s starved likeness. Protruding teeth. Receding jaw, bony and stubbled. Scars and mouthlike wounds gaping everywhere on knobbed gray limbs. Small, close eyes, blacker than a nouré’s obsidian gaze, accusing and terrible.

  You don’t believe in ghosts, Portier. Dead is dead. I snatched the glass from my eye. My throat near clogged when I picked out Dante’s dark shape creeping along the alley wall toward de Santo and the flickering light. Cursed idiot . . . as manic a fool as Ilario . . . to seek out horror . . .

  Responsibility dragged me along the wall behind the mage. Someone who cared for the weeping soldier ought to be alongside. Yet, with every step forward, mind and body escalated their war. My skull ached as if crushed in an iron clamp. Despite the night’s warmth, I could not stop shivering.

  De Santo remained oblivious to our presence. Poised a few paces behind him, Dante stretched his arms wide, as if to embrace the poisonous vision. Indeed, for a few moments the writhing fire flared brighter as if the mage were new kindling to feed on.

  Like a virulent outwash of the encounter, bitter anger settled in my bones. Purulent hatred clung to my spirit like sap from broken cedars. Prayers of unseemly gratitude bubbled from my soul as I huddled to the clammy brick. Gracious angels be thanked, this horror was not mine.

  When, after a fathomless time, the last purple wisps faded, Calvino de Santo slumped into a silent, shapeless blackness, and Dante withdrew. The mage nudged me down the passage and around a corner before sinking to the filthy cobbles, uncurling his broad back against the brick wall, and clutching his staff between drawn-up knees. His breath came in hard gasps, as if he’d run a footrace.

  “Some might call blood-born power a curse when it refuses the summons of will, as yours has done,” he said after a moment. “But I think it serves you.” He removed the forgotten spyglass from my paralyzed grasp and weighed it in his own wide palm. With a grimace, he stuffed the instrument into his shirt.

  “My blood serves me? How? Blessed saints, what did we just see?”

  “I believe that when you first looked into this glass, it played on a particular guilt and horror you carry with you about your father’s end. The same for your king, who saw friends and good servants he has led to their deaths. The factor you hold in common is your Savin blood, however ineffectual that may be in magical circles. When de Santo first looked through the glass, he glimpsed the mule at the moment he crossed the plane of death, and guilt left him vulnerable to the glass’s spell, as it did for you. But the captain is not of the blood, and for him the enchantment did not resolve fully, as if his own spirit became caught in a trap of wire and broken glass and cannot get free of the unresolved vision of the mule. Whenever the captain opens his spirit, when he prays, for example, as a devout man does every night, he brings the mule’s spectre to life again.”

  “The spyglass bound Gruchin’s spirit to de Santo? His soul cannot pass beyond the Veil?”

  Tales in every age spoke of sorrowful spirits who lingered after death, chained by vengeance, grief, or urgency to the earthly plane. Ghosts, shades, visible spirits . . . The implications of magic that could force a soul to such incomplete existence were beyond imagining.

  “What we saw was not Gruchin’s ghost, not anything you’d name a soul. Believe me, there was no intelligence, no person there.” Dante shook himself as if to be rid of the encounter. “A spectre is only a splash of energies . . . a phantasm or seeming . . . a vivid memory. A nasty, vicious one in this case, no argument there. The mule died committing a purposeful act of vengeance, filled with malice and rage, and this spectre encompasses and inflicts that pain every moment of its manifestation.”

  “There must be more to it,” I said. “Why guilt? De Santo didn’t even realize who Gruchin was until later.”

  Dante shrugged. “Guilt knows little of truth. As far as the guard captain knew, the mule was an assassin who’d come a hairsbreadth from slaying the king he’d sworn his life to protect. And the king was shed of his armor by de Santo’s act. Perhaps excitement or fear would do the same.”

  “But I never glimpsed the man, living or dead, and I know as well as I know anything in this life that the face I just saw was Gruchin.”

  “Aye. The consolidation of the spectre, the accuracy of the likeness, that’s a considerable wonder. But perhaps not so much as when one with a bent for magic spies through the glass. De Santo experiences a fragment. You and your king see something wholly real. We just don’t know what.”

  “Reven Skye saw naught but a blur.”

  “Perhaps the key to the spell had not been spoken. Perhaps the lens maker was never affected by anyone’s death. I don’t know. But the lenses seem to focus these overpowering emotions and metaphysical realities connected to death, fix the resulting energies to physical memory, and so create a phantasm. A considerable accomplishment. Yet—think about this—not at all what the queen has in mind.”

  Of course. It was so easy to get caught up in the moment’s wonders and forget the driving force behind Dante’s investigation. The queen did not desire phantasms.

  My grateful fingers clung to the rough edges of the solid, mundane brick behind my back. “Then the spyglass enchantment was a failed experiment,” I said.

  Dante sighed and hauled himself up with his staff. “That’s my belief. As the fop told us—as the lady herself expressed to me at my interview—the queen wishes to speak to her mother and have the dead lady answer back. She desires neither spectres nor ghosts, but engasi—embodied spirits, returned from the dead to walk the earth. An entirely different matter.”

  “True necromancy.”

  “I’ve never seen it done,” he said, almost speaking to himself. “Of all my teachers—I don’t know if it’s even possible. That’s why I need the books. All of them I asked for.”

  Teachers—it was Dante’s first mention of his schooling, and curiosity near overwhelmed my sense. But it came to me that I might be more likely to get an answer if I didn’t pounce this time. Odd and testy as Dante was, I liked him. And I respected him beyond my wonder at his considerable gifts, and I believed he must have good reason for the bitterness that drove him, as my own peculiar history drove me. That’s why I’d been so angry at what I’d seen as his failure in compassion. I’d been angry at myself for failure in judgment. Someday I would learn.

  I sighed and rubbed my tired eyes. “I still don’t see what necromancy has to do with Philippe. He has long turned a blind eye to the queen’s illicit desires. The Temple is too weak to contradict his judgment. The Camarilla won’t; they’ve never condemned necromancy, only its abuse, bending to the Temple’s rule in the matter only to ensure their own survival after the Blood Wars. Philippe’s subjects love him well enough that they’ll not be prompted to rebellion by rumors of his unlucky wife’s grieving. So these distractions of feigned assassinations, mules, and transference are hiding . . . what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He offered me a hand, dragging me to my feet as if I were but a stripling. We set out through the warm night, neither of us able to answer this most critical question. A dog barked in the distance. A flurry of invisible wings greeted us as we passed through a deserted garden. A fountain rippled and gurgled. Peaceable sounds to contrast with what we’d seen.

  “Michel de Vernase must have trod close to the answer,” said Dante after a while. “The king has received no ransom demands? No encouragement to change . . . anything . . . in exchange for the conte’s life?”

  “No. I hope to pick up Michel’s trail at Seravain.”

  Dan
te paused between the two arched gates that led into the more traveled pathways of the palace. He was little more than an angular shape in the dark. “This morning Gaetana asked if I could translate a treatise on the divine elements, written in her family’s private cipher. They seem to have lost the spellkey to the code. I accepted the task.”

  Heat rushed through my limbs and fluttered my belly. After a day that seemed to have wrung every possible emotion out of me, it took me a moment to recognize sheer excitement. My eyes met Dante’s. Their feral brightness near blinded me.

  “Good,” I said, matching his ferocity. “Excellent.”

  He nodded. “I should make my own way from here. You’re off tomorrow, you said?”

  “Yes. I’ll be gone three days. Four at most. If you need something right away, Ilario returns to Merona in the morning.”

  He turned to go, but hesitated halfway round. “You oughtn’t trust the peacock. His untruth is seated so deep, it is scarce detectable. Your king trusts him at his peril.”

  “Lies about what?”

  “If I knew, I’d hardly keep it secret, now would I?”

  “I’ve questioned Ilario,” I said. “I’ve had my own reservations about him, especially after the Swan. But I see naught but a good-hearted, ridiculous man, who loves his half sister inordinately. He’s made a place for himself in this world—not one you or I would want, but one that seems to suit him. Give me evidence of something else, and I’ll take it to the king.”

  Dante shrugged. “I’ve no source you’d credit.”

  “Tell me when you do. And by the bye”—I raised my bandaged hand, ignoring the barbed spikes that shot up my arm with every movement—“thank you for this. It feels better already.”

  He snorted rudely. “Lies do not become you, student. Tend the hand. Use it. You’ll be glad.”

  He started for the gate, a strange, lonely figure, his white staff marking his passage. Where, in the Father’s creation, had he come from? “Master,” I called after him. “Does your blood shield you from the spectres of the spyglass?”

  His answer drifted backward as his shape merged into the dark of the garden arch. “I don’t pray.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  21 QAT 40 DAYS UNTIL THE ANNIVERSARY

  The sultry breeze ruffled the pages of five years’ worth of log books heaped on the library table. Nidallo, the soft-bodied adept temporarily assigned to my position as Collegia Seravain’s curator of archives, hovered at my shoulder, disapproving. “You must allow me to close the casement, Acolyte Duplais. Constant temperature and gentle handling are critical to preservation. And I don’t understand why you need so many logbooks out at once.”

  The sun-sweetened airs of Seravain’s rocky vale had cleansed the musty odors of deadhouses, royal crypts, and haunted alleyways from my head. I wasn’t about to shut them out. How had I borne fifteen years in these stifling precincts—nine of them closeted in this dusty labyrinth of book cupboards, lamp-grimed walls, and age-darkened study tables?

  “Note the dryness of the parchments in the older journals,” I said. “Experience informs us that more water would improve the balance of elements in the preservation spells. The moisture in the air will suffice. Surely you don’t suggest immersing the books in water, Nidallo?” My recent practice at fabricating lies served many circumstances on this journey.

  “Certainly not!” He shook his head sharply, as if trying to extract sense from my logic.

  “Then keep the windows open. And if you could give me a better idea who might have borrowed A Treatise on Heaven and Earth, I would not need so many volumes. Visiting scholars borrow books every week. You must keep a running tally, compiled monthly at the very least. I’ve a notion it was Ydraga de Farnese who last requested this work, but have no idea when the good woman last visited. If you had to deal with this new mage at Castelle Escalon, you would understand my determination! He is the most unreasonable, crude, demanding . . .”

  Angels protect me, I babbled like Ilario. The torrent of words poured from my mouth, each whorl and eddy leading poor Nidallo farther from espying my purpose—or so I hoped.

  The adept retreated to his search for the missing treatise. He had not seen me slip the exquisite little volume into my pocket within a half hour of my arrival at my old haunts.

  I stretched out my newly unbandaged fingers and settled back to work in the quiet niche. Nidallo’s irritated mumbling at the disappearance of a valuable text kept me apprised of his location.

  Switching logbooks frequently enough to prevent anyone from noting which most interested me, I jotted more entries in my journal. The gate warden’s log confirmed that Michel de Vernase had indeed visited Seravain twice the previous year, the first time shortly after the assassination attempt, the second a tenday after his letter to the king hinting at new information and an extended journey. He had met with six senior mages on the first occasion, and only two on the second. Both times he had spoken with Kajetan, as well. That was only to be expected. Seravain’s chancellor received every high-ranking visitor.

  As I recorded Michel de Vernase’s visits and appointments, I encoded them with shifted notation, even within my usual cipher. I shifted times, dates, and other names in a similar fashion. The need to mask my inquiries wrenched my soul. Collegia Seravain had been my haven from family upsets and an unwelcoming world, a serene community of the mind where I could explore and contemplate the wonders of a mystical universe. Yet its genteelly crumbling walls enfolded ugly secrets, tainting my memories as if mold had crept out of its corners. A sorcerer associated with the collegia had vilely abused Ophelie de Marangel right under our noses for months. How could those of us entrusted with children’s minds—myself included—have been so inexcusably blind?

  I recorded and encoded every reference to Ophelie, as well. In the early days of her residency, the girl had made occasional day visits to Seravain village, usually in company with the same few students—names duly noted. She had spent short holidays with the families of these same girls, only returning to her home in Challyat for the month-long harvest recess.

  Library records scribed in my own hand indicated that three years ago, against all earlier indications, Ophelie had advanced to the rank of adept. That is, she had demonstrated sufficient talent and skill to study serious magic. The timing jibed with Dante’s estimate of when she had begun bleeding herself. Only lunatics and desperate children could find logic in bleeding away one’s soul to unblock the wellsprings of magic. Ironically, only an innately talented child could derive benefit from the attempt.

  Sometime in the next year—long before she had been moved to the crypt at Castelle Escalon—a more experienced hand had begun taking her blood. Certainly in the months after her advancement, Ophelie’s habits had changed dramatically. She left the school only rarely, at first alone, later in company with a different girl, a younger student named Lianelle ney Cazar.

  Everyone knew the Cazar girl. Tutors considered her talented but erratic, and were forever chastising her lack of discipline. I recalled her as unremittingly annoying. She would demand to read every work in the library, even the most advanced texts, on obscure topics such as animal summoning or bone reading, rather than choosing a broader selection of materials suited to her age and level. And she had plagued me with endless questions about impossibilities, such as invisibility or altering time. I had never realized she and Ophelie were friends.

  I jotted another date . . . then jerked my pen from the page. “But that’s the same—” The words slipped out before I knew it.

  “Is something wrong, Portier?” Nidallo imposed his beaky face into my light again as I flapped a page of my journal back and forth and back again to verify what I had just noticed.

  “No, no. I just thought I had found Ydraga’s name in Mage Gadevron’s appointment list for the thirty-first of last Ocet, but my eyes played tricks on me. I’m not yet accustomed to these spectacles.”

  But the surprise had nothing to do with Ydraga,
and there was no mistake. As I had encoded the last instance of Ophelie and Lianelle visiting the village, it struck me that I had encoded the same date on a previous page. It was the exact day of Michel de Vernase’s first visit to Collegia Seravain.

  I quickly scanned the gate log for additional references to Lianelle ney Cazar. The younger girl had gone out on her own early that same morning of Michel’s visit, noting her intended destination as the fields, and her purpose as to collect fresh herbs for a formulary project. She had returned an hour later.

  Flipping through the wide pages, I skipped to the occasion of Michel’s second visit. A scrawled notation glared up at me. Lianelle had left the school on that morning, as well, with destination Tigano and purpose to return a stray dog. She had returned to the collegia less than an hour before Michel de Vernase’s arrival. I gave no credence to coincidence.

  Not daring to feel excitement, I spent the next hour retrieving all the information I could glean about the Cazar girl from the archives. She returned to the Cazar demesne for school recesses, but otherwise left the collegia only on class outings. She took no more of the “village market” excursions she had taken with Ophelie. She had appeared before disciplinary boards at least twelve times in three years, and had been placed on probation twice.

  It would be awkward to find the girl. Classes were already completed for the day. Only specialized tutorials went on in the hour before supper. For students not involved, it would be free time. . . .

  I pushed away from the desk enough to spy around a corner to Nidallo’s desk. The handwritten paper posted on a nail beside it provided a possibility.

  “Adept Nidallo!” I called. “I need assistance retrieving some additional materials for Master Dante. Have you this month’s restriction list?” Lianelle ney Cazar had spent half her time on the restriction list since she had arrived at Seravain.

  I smothered a smile as I perused the notice. Indeed the girl’s name appeared along with those of six other students available for extra work during their free hours due to disciplinary infractions. Nidallo roused a student from a corner table to fetch the two malefactors I selected.