by Carol Berg
Ilario dived to the earth, arms flung over his head. But Dante stood between the both of us and the disintegrating cliff, his dark hair flying in a wild wind, staff upraised. Rocks and earth rained from the sky, causing silvery glints in the air before falling short or bouncing harmlessly away, as if the mage held out a silver shield visible only when it served.
The quake stemmed from naught of nature’s work in sky or earth. Deafening, ruinous, its violence pummeled, crumbled, shattered soul and spirit, earth and flesh and bone. Such frigid fury, such visceral hatred lashed about the peripheries of Dante’s trembling shield arm that I believed Merle’s truncheon pounded me again.
After a small eternity, the rumbling quieted. One last heave, and the earth shuddered and stilled, and the residue of sorcery began to settle, an invisible dusting that stank of scorched bones.
Dante yet held, his every muscle quivering, staff gripped in a bleeding hand. “Let it go, mage,” I whispered, dragging air into my starving lungs. My head felt like rubble. “You’ve done enough, both of you. I thank—”
My weary body could not force another breath. As the rising sun blazed through the dusty length of the abyss, my senses slid back into night.
CHAPTER TWENTY
32 QAT 29 DAYS UNTIL THE ANNIVERSARY
“... don’t know how he survived it. it. Besides all this lot, and the hatchwork of his chest where they bled him, I think his skull is broken. He has this lump on his head the size of an ostrich egg, and I tried to put wet compresses on it as my old nurse taught me, but there was blood everywhere, and I scarce knew where to start. Makes me queasy.”
“It was my quieting spell near killed him. Gods, why didn’t the damnable prig tell me he couldn’t breathe?”
Propped up by a boulder amid clumps of sage and nettle, I could not see the two behind me. But my ears were working well enough to hear this not-quite-whispered exchange. It sparked an extraordinary good humor. To hear Dante confess a mistake always raised a grin. Or perhaps it was merely that I was alive and in the company of exceptional friends.
We had descended into the abyssal ravine that separated Eltevire—or the broken heights where Eltevire once existed—from the highlands we’d traveled to get here. Plumes of smoke and dust drifted across the silvered sky, while fog and shadow hung thick in the bottomland. The stone bridge was gone. Not far beyond my toes, the rubble of the mountaintop had buried a forest of locust and juniper.
I carefully inflated my chest to its fullest capacity, ignoring the scabs that stretched and broke and stung under the scratchy remnants of someone’s scratchy cloak, and then sighed all that delicious air out again in thorough appreciation. My catalog of miseries had subsided. The exceptionally cold desert dawn had me shivering. A spring bubbling noisily through a tangle of marshwort roused thirst to a fever. And I had learned not to move in an untimely fashion. My head . . . gods . . . every twitch set off its hammering. But my heart paced an easy rhythm, and the cough had eased.
“You warned me you’d no healing skills, mage,” I croaked, teeth chattering. “I b-believe now.”
“You’re awake!” Ilario scrambled into view on hands and knees, bellowing his delight. “What a fright you gave us! The mage had to strip his spell away and blow into your lungs to start them up again. I feared you were dead and whatever would we tell the k—?”
“Hush, lord!” I said, flinching. Relief at living had not made me forget our circumstances.
Dante loomed over the both of us, his haggard mien little improved from my last view of him at Castelle Escalon. “None’s within hearing. And I doubt any’s coming back here.”
More evidence destroyed before we knew what it meant. But at least we had seen it.
Ilario, apparently none the worse for a night spent with the Earth-shaker, leapt to his feet and spread his arms like spindly wings. “Truly, I thought the Last Day had come and the earth would disgorge the Souleater. And you did something to save us, mage, for which I must profoundly thank you, but I’m not sure I can bear thinking of it again, as I’ve never been so frighted. I’ve thought since then that perhaps you caused the whole thing.”
“No, you blighted idiot, I did not cause it.” Dante’s ferocious gaze raked me stem to stern. “Portier, you must move as soon as you can. They’ve gone, but I cannot. We need to be away from here.” His agitation was profound, as was the tremor in his hands and the shadowed exhaustion that leached the life and color from his skin.
I had no wish to linger in a place where cliffs could be launched at my head. And if Dante was nervous, I most assuredly wished to be gone. “Now I can breathe, I feel like a new man,” I said, holding out my hands for assistance. “Or at least the better parts of the old one.”
My skull did not actually explode when they hauled me up. But its grinding bones seemed connected straight to my gut, which promptly revolted in humiliating fashion.
“More?” Ilario pointed at the blessed waterskin I had just drained.
“I could do with three more and a bath in yon spring,” I said, dumping the gritty dregs over my head. I smeared the droplets around my face and enjoyed the illusion of cleanliness.
“Do either of you understand what haste means?” Dante thrust a straight, slender branch into my hand. It was smoothed at the grip and cut to a reasonable length for a walking stick. “They must not see us.”
“You said they were gone!” I resisted the temptation to swing around to look back at Eltevire’s crumbled remains. Thoughts of the man in the leather mask roused a deep-rooted panic that the deep, cool shadows of the chasm did naught to soothe. “Whatever comes, he mustn’t find you with me.”
Dante’s quivering hand pushed back his hair, resting on his temple as if he suffered the same wretched head as I did. “You heard them? Were you able—did you recognize a voice?”
“He wore a mask and a knight’s boots. Called himself the Aspirant. But he knew Philippe had sent me.”
Dante shook his head dismissively. “Fool of a student. There are no men here. Now, move.”
Before I gathered his meaning, the mage was ten metres downstream. Tentatively, reluctantly, I reached out with the senses I used to detect enchantments. The much-too-cold ravine seemed to buckle and twist. The malevolent presence I had sensed on our descent the previous night was entwined with the mist, its hissing anger blended with the rill’s gurgling. Beyond the deep, cold crevices in rock and rubble yawned the deeper void I’d thought morning had dismissed. “Chevalier, please . . .”
Ilario lent me his strong shoulder again. His brow creased in question, but I devoted strength and concentration to movement. Silent, desperate, Dante swept us down the gorge like a springtime flood. I could not go as fast as he wished. The mage would race ahead, then double back to help Ilario hand me over fallen trees or boulders. Shamefully weak and wobbly at the knees, I had to fight off repeated bouts of nausea. My flesh felt riddled with maggots. The tumbled boulders seemed to crawl alongside us.
Once Ilario and I came upon Dante, shaking violently, forehead pressed to a rock, his arms flung around his head as if to block out the sights and sounds of battle. “Mage,” I whispered, not touching him, “can we help you?”
“Keep moving,” he rasped. A pocket of frigid air brushed my skin. Naught was visible, but when I blinked, a blur of color streaked through the haze like a darting fish. We moved. Eventually, Dante passed by us, leaning heavily on his staff.
By midday, Dante awaited Ilario and me in the glaring slot of sunlight that signaled the eastern end of the gorge. The shadows had paled, the fog dispersed. My senses no longer detected anything unnatural.
“Portier,” said Ilario quietly, while we were yet a goodly distance from the mage. A tortoise could have outrun me just then. “Our story. We need to agree.”
“You heard me call and blundered into the hole. Despite my injuries and bindings, I freed myself of the chair and felled Quernay with the lantern. Is that right?”
He nodded. “I merely hel
ped you up the steps and out. Simple enough.”
“I dislike lying to Dante,” I said. “My mind’s a sieve where he is concerned. Besides, he’s our partner. I believe him honorable.” He had saved our lives the previous night, and just now shielded us from . . . something.
For the five-hundredth time, I stumbled and Ilario’s strong hand kept me upright. “This is my life, Portier. I beg you honor my choice.”
“If the mage somehow got into that cellar and saw the chair, he’ll catch us out. He’ll know I could never have loosed the straps.”
“But certainly you managed it. By the time I had done for the hairy brute, checked the cells, and retrieved my crocodile charm, you had broken free of the straps. You were just out of your head.”
“All right, all right. I’ll play.” Naught could ever repay his help. But who’d have thought he could slip so effortlessly back into his idiot self after the journey we’d just experienced? “I owe you my life, lord. You needn’t fear my loose tongue.”
Eyes fixed on the rocky path, he inclined his head. “Now will you tell me what in the name of Heaven just happened? I’ve a notion I just crawled out of a dung heap.”
“Honestly, I’ve no idea.” Only that something had near unraveled Dante. Whether he’d been protecting us or probing mystery, my mind balked at imagining what it might be. My bones yet quaked, and I flinched with every blink.
A careful survey of the bleak country spread out beyond the gorge revealed not the slightest movement, no stirred dust, no whinny, no glint of metal, no untoward scent of man or beast. Half a kilometre into the open country, Dante relented and let me be still for a while in the shelter of a turpentine tree. As Ilario and I shared a waterskin, the mage propped his back on the tree and stared into the wasteland. I wondered if he was afraid to blink, as well.
“These bandages should be tended,” said Ilario, dabbing a dainty finger at the blood- and dirt-encrusted rags bound to my chest. “My physician insists we cleanse wounds every day. A disgusting task . . .” Which he took up right away.
I resisted searching Ilario’s pruned expression for evidence of the swordsman or probing his babble for hints of the man I had met at Eltevire. I would honor my promise. Besides, I doubted any flaw was to be found.
As Ilario worked, Dante shook off his reverie and joined us. The mage was no longer shaking. He inspected the lacerated purple circles on my chest for several uncomfortable moments, then nudged my ruined shirt aside to expose several older scars—my father’s legacy. He reached out as if to touch them, then hesitated and glanced up.
“If you must.” I didn’t understand his interest.
His finger, firm, sure, and cold—thrumming with magical energies—traced the long scar that creased my left side and the short one just above my navel. The careful scrutiny recalled his inspection of Gruchin’s spyglass, and I wondered if he was building the ragged marks into one of his runelike patterns in his head. I shifted uneasily.
“Killing strikes, these,” he said, withdrawing his hand.
“Near enough.” So Kajetan had told me when I regained consciousness, weak, nauseated, and bathed in blood and cold sweat. “It was a long time ago.”
“Maybe nearer than you think. What happened to the one who did it?”
“He travels Ixtador, I suppose.”
“Your father. Gods, he bears a fearsome grudge.”
Cold iron lodged in my belly. He did not speak in the past. “How would you know that, mage?”
My demand bounced off his impenetrable stubbornness. “That bandage is filthy.” He stood and tossed a clean kerchief of cheap linen into Ilario’s lap. “Tell us about this Aspirant, student.”
After Ilario folded the kerchief and tied it up for me, he forced me to accept the meager supply of cheese and ale from Dante’s pack. Once begun eating, I couldn’t stop, despite the profoundly unsettling morning and my annoyance with Dante. Likely a good sign that I was ravenous. Mules lost their appetite as their blood was repeatedly drained. As I ate, I told them the story of Merle and Quernay and their master.
Dante sat cross-legged, as intent in his listening as in everything else. “So this Aspirant worked no enchantments as his assistant drew the blood. Did he inject it directly into himself or distill it?”
“I didn’t see. He took it back to where the other prisoner was kept. I was glad enough they didn’t try to fill their entire urn in that one hour. They took half a litre, more or less. That’s not enough to do much with, do you think?” I paused between bites. I hadn’t yet considered the part of me I’d left behind, now taken who knew where.
Dante’s long speculation gave me no reassurance. “If you start with odd dreams or unusual behaviors, you might want to tell me. To trigger what we saw this morn, destroying half a mountain in the hour Eltevire was compromised . . . The spellwork makes the doings on the Swan look like acolyte’s play. It means someone has a talent beyond—”
“Beyond the level of a minimally talented hod-carrier?” I could not resist the jab.
His head jerked in assent. “Aye. Even allowing for transference to enhance inborn skills. Even allowing that the worst of this day and night was worked two hundred years past. We’ve a foe I didn’t think existed.”
This trace of humility on Dante’s part frightened me more than anything we’d encountered.
“What was so mysterious about a cursed ruin?” asked Ilario, giving me a hand up. “They had a bleeding cell in the royal crypt and didn’t see it necessary to explode the temple to hide it. What began here?”
“The whole place was enchanted,” I said. “Objects in motion, light, fire, water . . . nothing behaved properly or consistently. At least nothing that originated in Eltevire. . . .”
As we plodded along a faint cart path that skirted the end of the ridge, I told them of my experiments—not of my attempts at magic, which proved naught but that “place” could not make an incapable sorcerer capable, but of the coins, Gruchin’s silver, and the pool, the crocodile charm, and the lantern. “. . . think of your tisane that was lukewarm one moment, boiling the next, and felt like glacial ice but a moment later. Nothing behaved.”
We retrieved Dante’s donkey, left tethered beside a shady spring where we could fill our waterskins. “I arrived early at Canfreg Spring,” said the mage, as we set out again, faster now with me astride. “When I heard the old man’s tales—” He shrugged, and I understood. His hunger for knowledge had driven him to Eltevire ahead of us. “I intended to rejoin you, but three men rode in behind me and I dared not counter the bridge ward or its trip signal.”
He slowed his steps and waved his staff at me. “You should have more care, student. You sense enchantments and residues. To disentangle a trip signal from a common ward is only one step more. It could have saved you this thrashing.”
“Then teach me, if magic is so damnably easy,” I mumbled. The donkey’s jarring gait had my head pounding too awfully to yell at him. Despite his air of hard-won wisdom, the mage’s brittle arrogance surely named him far younger than only six years my junior. Naturally, he didn’t answer.
“So you were in the village while Portier was tortured?” Ilario burst out. “Ill done, mage! Unkind!”
“I never crossed the bridge, never went up to the village until I came for you. I let them pass and came around here. The mendicant had told me of the chasm stair.”
“But if you kept away, how did you know they were going to explode the mountain?” spluttered Ilario. “Magework cannot predict the future, no matter what’s said, else I’d have never come on this nasty trek! And why didn’t the wards along this path bring them down on you?”
“I learned what I needed in the chasm. The destruction was writ in Eltevire’s bedrock. A very long time ago, I think. Last night the rock’s pattern shifted, and I could see a danger building. And just then, three men descended the stair in a hurry—though one was slow and weak—your prisoner, I’d say. Magic takes on extra potency at sunrise and sunset, so I
expected the blow at dawn. Fortunately for you, peacock, I guessed right.”
Three men had arrived at Eltevire: Quernay, Merle, and the Aspirant. And three men departed: the Aspirant, the prisoner, and who? The prisoner’s guard, perhaps. Or perhaps “the adept” was not a prisoner, but another guard. I blotted the sweat from my bruised temples and squinted into midday.
“Over a day and a night I explored these physical anomalies,” Dante continued, “though not so systematically as with your coins and pebbles. But it’s the mechanism of Eltevire’s madness that bears most significance.” He halted the donkey for a moment and made sure I was listening. “To leave the gorge we had to travel along a boundary—a separation of two natural entities as distinctive as sea and land, or stem and leaf, or wing and air. Even as we walked that boundary, it was disintegrating, soon to be gone entirely. Until this morning, it completely encircled Eltevire’s plateau.”
“Separating what?” I said. “The two sides appear the same—land, vegetation, rock, wind. You’re saying these villains enchanted everything within this boundary, creating some new kind of natural separation.”
“No, Portier. Much more than that. Eltevire was not enchanted. Yes, the boundary was created with sorcery, but within the boundaries of that rock, nature itself was altered, including magic, for magic is of nature.” Dante might have been a once-blind man explaining the wonder of his first sunrise. “A stone behaves like a stone, or a sparrow like a sparrow, because the pattern of natural law is written into the pattern of its being—its keirna. If you toss your coins into the air in Castelle Escalon, they behave according to their keirna. When a Merona sparrow takes wing, its flight reflects the physical laws we know. I believe that when the natural laws of bounded Eltevire were altered, the pattern of natural law written into the keirna of every object within that boundary was revised, as well. Did you find any spelled object in Eltevire?”
