The Spirit Lens

by Carol Berg

  The fever of the hunt rose in me then. “Was this why you warned me off today?”

  “I’m watched closer every hour,” he said. “Gaetana walks in at odd times, often without leave. Adepts and acolytes trot over with messages or requests for information. Orviene pesters me to collaborate on his puling little projects. Now I’ve this fool adept lurking about, thinking he’s the god’s own son, and he was once their lackey. I’m attempting to discourage visitors. We need to—”

  Dante broke off when Ilario returned with a tray of cold roast lamb, sugared oranges, and hot cider. While the mage dug in, and Ilario propped himself at the doorway in a sulk, I inspected the brocade wall. No enchantment, seam, or mechanism marked the secret entry.

  “Oh, here, Portier,” snapped Ilario, after I had fumbled about for a while. He marched across the carpet, tapped a brass gargoyle tucked into the corner beside his marble hearth, and slid the ugly little visage to the side. The panel in the wall swung open, revealing a gap that might have been a coal chute at middle-night.

  “How long have the two of you shared this little connection?” I said, recalling Ilario’s prattlings of hidden passages, trapdoors, and spelled closets that he and Eugenie had explored as children.

  “When I heard about Dante’s new assistant, it seemed reasonable that the two of you would be less free to talk together from now on in his rooms . . . which I know you do, though you never tell me half of what you discuss. So I found occasion to inform the mage about the route between here and there.” Ilario hooked a thumb in his belt and returned to his aloof stance by the door. “Never imagined he’d actually use it. Has not my fool’s wit exposed our every secret?”

  “It will be most useful, lord chevalier,” I said, fully sincere.

  A glare seemed enough to move Dante to speech, or perhaps the rapidly vanishing food and wine had soothed his brittle edge as well as his exhaustion. He cleared his throat with a growl. “You have shown . . . resources, Chevalier. And the food is welcome.”

  “Have you a response, my lord?” Truly I felt like one of the women who minded the youngest students at Seravain, settling their fights when they dropped mice into one another’s boots or dumped cold tea on one another’s sheets.

  Ilario fondled his lace and fluffed his ruffles while gazing at the ceiling. “Shall you provide an exhibit for my exposition, mage?”

  Dante swallowed the last bite of meat with a grateful sigh. “Aye. It’s another thing I’ve been working at. I aim to shock the twittering birds around this palace, including some murk-headed beginners not so far from here. Did you bring my other books and materials, student?”

  I took what peace I could and resisted falling prey to his taunt. “Most. And I learned a bit. . . .”

  As Dante devoured the last of the bread and oranges, I launched my tale of Lianelle, Ophelie, Michel de Vernase, and bodies in crates.

  “The Cazars are an old-fashioned lot,” said Ilario, who now sat on an exotic footstool, tapping his fingers thoughtfully on his chin. “They build on clifftops and keep close behind their walls, playing knife games and dancing until dawn. But something tweaks me about the name. One of Philippe’s envoys might be a Cazar or related to one. I’ll inquire about it . . . yes, discreetly, sir mage! But Damoselle Maura a villain? That seems unlikely. She is so . . . ordinary.”

  Ordinary. Unlikely. The very qualities I brought to Philippe’s clandestine service.

  No. I could not be so wrong about Maura.

  Dante’s demeanor had hardened as I spoke of Seravain. “This Kajetan,” he said, “your friend who asks you to spy on me . . . Should I be expecting visits from Camarilla inquisitors?”

  “Certainly not. The transference worries him, and the consequences should relations between the Camarilla and the king break down further. He’s the only surviving mage in his bloodline. I wish we dared ask his help.”

  “Keep your friends out of my business,” Dante snapped, wiping sticky fingers on his sleeve. “You’d do well to consider what kind of mentor locks his student in a tomb when he fails. If he can’t teach, he should find someone who can.”

  “You know nothing about him,” I riposted, anger flared all out of proportion to his jab. “Or me.”

  The green eyes burned. “I know what it is to believe life’s dropped you in a shaft you can’t crawl out of. And I know what the hand that reaches down to you looks like. I’d wager my eyes ’tis not the hand of this mentor of yours.”

  Dante, gifted with talent beyond imagining, could never understand. Kajetan’s library had saved my sanity. “Your interpretation of my life is irrelevant to our task, mage,” I said, “and I’ll thank you not to speculate on my personal situation. Kajetan will not have occasion to query you unless you do something to warrant it. On the other hand, I think this mystery of Eltevire must be followed without delay. The Marangels, the dead seamstress, the cell in the crypt . . . The murderers are cleaning up after themselves. They know someone’s after them.”

  “I agree,” said Dante, tapping his staff on the carpet. His head was cocked my way in a most annoying manner, as if his mouth were engaged with the present conversation while his mind yet dealt with the last. “We oughtn’t be seen leaving Merona together. I’ll meet the two of you at the shrine at Canfreg Spring, what . . . seven days hence?”

  “Both?” Ilario straightened his back. “Yes, I could possibly make the time to accompany you. You may have need of a knight. I’ll spread it about that I’ve gone back to the country for a cleanse, as I do every summer, but I’ll tell John Deune I’ve a liaison with a lady. He’s quite discreet for a valet, but none too clever, so someone will wheedle the news from him. I’m attentive to so many ladies, some will think it’s one and that one will think it’s another, until everyone is in a merry muddle and won’t know where I’ve gone.”

  Dante wiped his mouth and rolled his eyes.

  On another day I would have laughed, but on that morning, I felt only urgency. “Canfreg Spring,” I said. “Midday of the seventh from this. Then on to Eltevire.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  31 QAT 30 DAYS UNTIL THE ANNIVERSARY

  “He’ll come,” I murmured, dribbling wine onto the stained rock and passing the pewter cup to Ilario. “He’s a man of his word. We’ll finish our prayers, leave him some kind of token, then ride out. He’ll catch up. We cannot remain here.”

  I bowed to the tarnished ikon and moved toward the round door of the little stone shrine, one of a hundred such shrines that lined a pilgrim way stretching from the western sea to the city of Abidaijar in Aroth—the home of the Cult of the Reborn. We had arrived at this barren holy place well before midday of the seventh day out of Merona, and had lingered through a blistering afternoon and a devilishly cold night awaiting Dante. Now the sunlight had again begun its crawl up the jumbled crags to the east.

  Ilario made a quick oblation and hurried after me, the low ceiling forcing him to hunch as if his neck were broken. The soot from centuries of smoldering herbs had already soiled his soft gray hat and its soft gray cryte’s feather. “But what if his horse has pitched him in a ditch or he’s gotten himself sick again with his sorcery?”

  “We can’t help him by dawdling,” I said, pausing at the doorway. I felt exposed here. Every birdcall raised the hair on my neck. The dry breeze whispered of treachery. The chevalier and I were too conspicuous even for the small traffic that traveled this red-rock wasteland.

  I should never have brought Ilario. At my insistence he had traded his satin and lace for canvas breeches, plain shirts, and buff jerkin, and his horse for a pilgrim’s donkey. But Father Creator had surely designed the fop to fit in Castelle Escalon’s halls like the gilded caryatids and fluted columns. In places like this wayside shrine, where one met few but goat-herds, pilgrims, and scoundrels or adventurers bound overland for the exotic lands of Aroth and Syan, Ilario stood out like a magpie among sparrows.

  A nosy tinker had spent the night near our encampment. A trio of surly pi
lgrims—a balding, fleshy fellow of thrice Ilario’s girth, his gap-toothed brother, and a wan, flat-eyed woman—had ridden in at dawn to fill their waterskins at the muddy Canfreg Spring. For pilgrims they were exceedingly well armed. Dirks at belt and boot. The big man carried a war ax and a looped chain. They had stared at us for an hour before moving on east.

  A temple reader had arrived at midmorning in a heavily laden donkey cart. The reader, a thickset provincial with a profusion of black, wiry hair, and his red-haired manservant, a hungry-looking, agitated sort of man with a wolflike jutting nose and chin, set up a small booth and altar across the road from the shrine. Temple servitors disdained the Cult of the Reborn, yet the bluff, friendly reader invited Ilario and me to join him for devotions. He had exposed his left hand. A man of the blood, then. Though my own gesture was quick, his keen-eyed manservant took full note of my own family mark. The two settled in for the day.

  We needed to move on.

  As we stepped into the heat-blasted afternoon, Ilario returned the offering cup to a niche above the doorway. I clutched our wine flask.

  “Your lengthy devotions send a fair odor to Sante Marko,” said the leather-skulled mendicant brother squatting just outside the shrine. “The sweet smokes will lure our beloved saint back through the Veil to stand stalwart in our earthly battles.”

  “We await the day,” said Ilario, crossing his arms over his heart in pious fashion. Ilario’s familiarity with Cult customs made me suspect him a believer.

  Relentless sun and wind and the incessant inhalation of “sweet smokes” had withered the mendicant brother to a husk and left his mind adrift somewhere between the barren landscape and Heaven. His ragged garments—the cast-off donations of myriad travelers—flapped in the dry breeze. Dangling from his neck was the same green pilgrim badge Ilario and I wore, marked with the red phoenix insignia of the Cult.

  As if of their own accord, the mendicant’s bony fingers tapped the side of his rusted cup, reminding us of our obligation to make a more solid offering to keep his herb basket full. Ilario dropped a silver kivra in the cup and one of our bread rolls in the old man’s lap, then strolled across the dusty ground toward our tethered donkeys.

  I tossed a few coins after Ilario’s and followed, studying the rock-lined path, the hivelike shrine, and the rubble walls of the sacred enclosure for some way to leave a sign, so Dante would know we’d come and gone. Gruchin’s silver coin, tucked into my boot since Tigano, would be too tempting to any passerby. We’d need my compass to locate Eltevire. I had no scarf or gloves. . . .

  “Sweet Heaven, it’s a ruin,” Ilario grumbled, brushing at his hat. His efforts had succeeded only in spreading the thick soot from his hat to his favorite leather riding gloves.

  Inspired, I snatched the modestly feathered hat from Ilario’s grasp and returned to the mendicant brother. “My master especially reveres Sante Marko,” I said, dropping my voice. “He holds a belief that he once met Sante Marko Reborn, the elderly swordmaster who taught him all his knightly skills. But in the shrine yestereve, he experienced a revelation that he should bare himself to the elements to mellow his pride in that encounter. It’s why we’ve stayed to proffer additional devotions. As his prayers provided no relief from the saint’s geas, he offers you this fine hat.”

  The mendicant brother spread his arms as if to embrace the sky, then reverently brought his fingertips to heart, forehead, and lips. “Sante Marko ever fills our needs,” he said, his voice as arid as the wind across the stony landscape. “Warn your master to heed the letter of the saint’s instruction. Where the Veil is thin, the Saints Awaiting view us clearly.”

  “Where the Veil is thin, brother? What does that mean?”

  “ ’Twas in these lands first blood was shed in anger between human and human.”

  “The Lay of Goram and Vichkar?” I said. The tale of two friends who battled to the death over a bronze knife had been told since long before the rise of the Sabrian kingdom, before cities, before vineyards, before writing. “You believe it occurred near here.”

  “Aye. Their battle is our blessing and curse, as is all of creation save Heaven. The saints draw back the Veil to witness such terrible deeds.”

  Certain places on the earth provided a potent venue for spellwork: deep caves where ancients had painted beast images on the walls, an ancient vineyard in Louvel, a desolate plain in the heart of verdant Challyat. Devout Sabrians claimed such extraordinary magical places to be the actual venues for the creation stories—the cave where humankind first mastered fire, the plain where we first shaped a wheel, or the field where the Pantokrator planted the first grapevine—inevitably linking magic and holiness. They believed the tales collected in the Book of Creation to be history as true as the founding of our kingdom, their lessons a message from the divine.

  The Camarilla deprecated such factual interpretation, insisting that each “location of magical significance” exemplified but a fortuitous confluence of the five divine elements. Such a site would inevitably attract those who practiced sorcery, imbuing the places with history alongside the layered residue of their magics. This position made more sense to me.

  A few mages who lived before the Blood Wars had proposed a truth somewhere in between—that stories of such longevity must hold some secrets of gods or nature that we ought to be able to decipher. However, even they had never hinted that the tales might witness to a physical proximity of the human and divine worlds.

  “What have you seen, brother?” I said, crouching beside him, my hands flexing as if to wrest his knowledge from inside his bald head. “What witness do you bear of Goram and Vichkar’s blood in this land? Or the thinning of the Veil?” It was easy to believe this dry, red wasteland had witnessed humankind’s first murder.

  The mendicant brother clasped his hands before his breast. “I have witnessed marvels and terrors: the Stone That Does Not Fall, the Stream That Runs Uphill, the Shadow That Burns. The Pantokrator’s Aurora shines through the Veil from time to time, and I’ve seen the Souleater’s servants fly from the god in terror, drenched in blood, passing so close as to freeze my soul.”

  These marvels he spoke of came from no lore I knew. But what if the conspirators had heeded such rumor and had chosen to pursue their magics here, thinking to find the area a potent field for spellwork? Perhaps, the Mondragoni, preoccupied with necromancy and demonology, had claimed this region for their demesne based on such stories.

  I pressed the brother to tell me how and where these strange things manifested themselves, but he rambled on of holy mystery and Sante Marko’s blessings. My questions made no more sense to him than asking how did the earth manifest its solidity or the Arch of Heaven—the Tenth Gate—position itself in the night sky. Some things just were. The perpetual smokes of Sante Marko’s shrine took him wandering the land. Whether in his mind or in his body, today or twenty years past, it was all one to him.

  Jittery and frustrated, I bowed and bade him farewell. “Until Sante Marko comes.”

  “We await the day.” His lips widened over broken teeth, and he plopped Ilario’s smudged hat atop his sun-scalded head. Dante could not miss it.

  “NO MATTER MY POOR LOST hat, the mage will never find us.” Ilario planted his backside on a boulder and blotted his forehead, as I examined another thread of hard-packed dirt and gravel in search of tracks, hair, or droppings. “And we’ll never find the way back to our beasts. Holy saints, Portier, we’ll languish on this wretched rock forever—starving, filthy, mad like that cult brother. Were there ever any two more useless wilderness travelers?”

  A chukar, flushed from the scattered rocks, clucked and squawked, mocking us.

  We had ridden eastward from the shrine on the pilgrim road until well out of sight of the mendicant brother and curious travelers. Tethering our donkeys where clumps of blue-green wheatgrass sprouted thickly in the shade of an overhang, we had scrabbled up the tilted slabs and scree as best we could to reach the higher ground. Once above the scarp, we c
ircled back westward across a stony tableland, hunting the elusive goat track that should lead us up the jagged ridge where the Survey said Eltevire must lie, straight north of Canfreg Spring.

  “My compass keeps our heading true, lord. Besides, a simple snare could take yon partridge; I’ve read how to make them. And your sword could skewer it. We’d not starve.”

  Ilario scowled and stripped off his jerkin, stuffing it into his already crammed rucksack. “ ’Tis ungentle to patronize me, Portier. I already feel like a sheep being driven to the slaughterhouse.”

  My search futile, I waved him onward. “Consider yourself fortunate,” I said, as we struggled up the mountain of stone shards that pulsed with afternoon heat. “The cult brother would have you shed all your garments on this journey as an offering of humility.”

  “All? What saint could see merit in fried bones? I’ve scarce meat enough to cover them all as it is, and surely even . . . everything would shrivel away. Sweet patroness of love, defend me!”

  My deeper coloring prevented much scalding from the incessant barrage of sun and wind. Fair-skinned Ilario’s forehead, ears, and long nose were going to pain him fiercely.

  Despite a monologue of complaints and fervid intercessions over the eight days since we’d left Merona, Ilario had shown himself more resilient than I could have imagined. Better than me in the rough. Able to sleep on rock, and as nimble as a goat on these treacherous slopes. More than once his hand had hauled me up steps where my cheaply made boots found no purchase. I was glad he’d come.