“Nevertheless—”
“Julius Caesar,” said Orléans, “by the gift of the gods, was a mage of great talent and exemplary skill, by which means he was able to wrest lands and peoples from lesser, undeserving gods, to bring them the gift of the Pax Romana, and so merited the title he bore in life and the godhood he was granted thereafter.”
Gray tried to look as though the connexion between his query and this unprompted and oddly tilted (not to say wildly inaccurate) lecture on Roman history were perfectly clear to him.
“Julius Caesar, Divus Iulius, died at the hands of a conspiracy of traitors”—as King Henry nearly did, at the hands of Callender and his friends, thought Gray—“and in time the empire he built passed into the hands of those whom the gods had not chosen, and thence into decline and irrelevance. But the Roman people—we citizens of the old empire, made worthy by our allegiance to the great gods of Rome—can build a new empire, can reconquer the lost lands, which now are throwing away the power of their prayers and offerings on small, unworthy gods, and create a new Pax Romana for their peoples.”
By killing those peoples’ own gods, or those who serve them? Not even the mad emperor Nero ever conceived such a monstrous idea.
Gray was too much appalled to speak (though not too much to wonder what in Hades this man was about, to be spouting these mad ideas to a perfect stranger of whose loyalties he knew almost nothing); fortunately, his companion swept on unheeding: “The histories tell us that Caesar’s sorcerer-centuries were the key to his success in the field; less well known is the key to the sorcerer-centuries themselves: that to every sorcerer in the field were linked two more behind the line of battle—his reserves—to strengthen him and replenish his magick. The barbarians thought them invincible, and often they had only to be seen to take the field in order to win their battles.”
He smiled in a manner that chilled Gray to his bones. “You wished to know what use I have for scholar-mages? I have built a new sorcerer-century, and am building another, and my sorcerers need reserves.”
“Linked,” said Gray, now fighting a strong urge to leap off the battlements, shift, and fly away—or, as was far more likely, shift and plummet to his death in a hail of arrows. “Linked, how?”
He could imagine it, he thought, far more easily than this man suspected—a bond like his link with Sophie, but drawing all one way.
“Oh, you understand well enough what I am speaking of, I think,” said Orléans, as though in reply.
Gray controlled a startled exclamation: a reader of thoughts, or a seer of magick? Either was dismaying, in the circumstances. Upon further thought, Gray decided that the latter was most likely; had Orléans truly been capable of hearing his thoughts, he should long since have been clapped in irons, at the very least.
“We need not go so far at present, however,” said Orléans, in what he perhaps imagined to be a reassuring tone. “Come—you shall see what we are building here.”
Gray could think of few things he desired less, but he had been given a task, and he meant to carry it out. What he had expected to be the most difficult aspect of this ill-advised operation—to persuade the men whom he had helped to convict of murder and attempted regicide that he had decided to throw in his lot with them—took on a rather different aspect, now that he understood what fate awaited them. How had Orléans persuaded them to consent to it? No—surely they have been tricked, misled, coerced.
And Amelia—what in Hades has Amelia to do with this mess?
“Certainly, sir,” he said.
* * *
The first surprise was that all of them appeared quite contented—even pleased—with their lot. What Orléans called the mages’ workroom was vast, bright, and warmly sunlit, and the dozens of men in it (they were all men) were engaged in perfectly ordinary pursuits, from the purely scholarly to the more practical—one fellow was distilling some disturbingly bright green solution in a series of alembics, many were reading, and several were debating good-naturedly the merits of several disparate spells of concealment. One or two appeared to have dozed off in their armchairs. Might any of these be Kergabet’s missing agents? Impossible to say.
Not one, so far as Gray could determine, was at present working any sort of magick. The atmosphere was busy and cheerful, like . . . like the nursery at Grosvenor Square, in fact. Strangest of all was the fact that not one of them took the slightest notice of their master or his companion.
Gray tucked these thoughts away for later contemplation.
He picked out Callender and the healer Lord Spencer almost at once, and he thought he could guess to what employment Orléans had put Taylor and Woodville, strong young men trained in offensive and defensive magicks. What had become of Lord Wrexham, Queen Edwina’s brother—the one member of the conspiracy, absent the late Viscount Carteret, entirely without magickal talent—was less easy to guess, but of course wherever he was he should not be in this room. More puzzling was the absence of Lord Merton, erstwhile Fellow of King’s College, Oxford, and certainly a mage of considerable power. Perhaps, despite his age, Orléans meant to put him in the field?
Orléans ushered Gray out of the workroom again. “A thing of beauty, is it not?” he said happily. “Nothing can disturb them when they are busy about their work. But you, I think, will wish to see the other side of the coin. You are young and strong, and if I do not mistake, you have hidden depths; should you choose to join us, your place will be in the field, not in the workroom.”
Did Gray imagine the sinister ring to that should you choose? He rolled his left shoulder, testing its range of motion, and was unspeakably relieved to feel no unusual twinge of pain. I can fly if I must, then. That is well.
They found the Emperor’s sorcerer-century—not quite a century, in fact, though more than a half-century—conducting manoeuvres in a large flagstoned courtyard. Behind them—in the midst of a group of other young ladies seated on a bench along the courtyard’s far wall, all watching the mages whilst hemming, or pretending to hem, some long strip of white linen—was Amelia Callender.
CHAPTER XXVII
In Which Sophie Receives a Deputation
The excavation of the library continued through the next several days. Ceana MacGregor ruthlessly organised her forces into salvage and triage parties, depending on their skill with letters and languages, as a result of which the work progressed more quickly than any of the rest had dared hope.
Lucia and Roland took charge of collating texts in Latin and Français, Sophie and Evans-Hughes of those in English and Cymric, and Master Alcuin, recruited for the cause over dinner at the Dragon and Lion, of those in Greek.
Joanna and Gwendolen, for their part, were charged with cataloguing the results of the work of everybody else. They pitched their camp in the library’s tiny map-room, whose contents were in comparatively pristine condition. In the intervals of receiving more-or-less complete codices to catalogue, they took out and examined the maps and charts; there were hundreds of them, of which, by the afternoon of the third day, they had examined perhaps five dozen.
“I do not suppose they are much good for any but a historian,” said Gwendolen. She was gazing thoughtfully at a large, intricately decorated map of the Iberian peninsula—at least four centuries out of date. “But how beautiful some of them are!”
“Not this one,” said Joanna, drawing out a small map of Britain and the adjacent Duchies, badly foxed, which had somehow adhered to the back of a larger one. “It cannot ever have been as beautiful as yours, there, but it has certainly nothing at all to recommend it now!”
They spread it out, nevertheless, and studied it, standing side by side at the sturdy table. This room was very nearly private, if, as now, one stood out of sight from the half-open door; Joanna dared to lean her shoulder into Gwendolen’s, and to tilt up her face to kiss her friend’s cheek. Gwendolen tamped down a smile, and nudged Joanna’s shoulder in return.
“What on earth is it?” she said, after a moment. “It looks very old—older even than that Iberian one.”
“Yes, I should think it may be,” Joanna agreed.
No well-supplied court cartographer had drawn this map. The rough and ready lines, the cramped script, suggested a military man working in the field, marking out rivers and roads and waggon-tracks, the ponds that might serve to water cavalry and pack-horses, the villages and farms where supplies might be replenished and officers quartered at need, the obstacles and fortifications that must be taken into account in planning and executing a military campaign. Borders had been drawn and then scratched out, till in some long-contested territories—along the river Loir, for example—the map was a palimpsest.
Joanna searched the map for a date, for the name of a king, for any indication of its age, and found none, but the borders of Britain shown upon it—those uppermost, and most recently drawn—were those of the time of Henry the Great, not vastly different from their own.
“What are those red . . . things?” said Gwendolen, leaning close and pointing with one forefinger. “Here, and along here, and there?”
“I have not the least idea.” Joanna bent closer, too, and peered at them. “Fortifications, perhaps—the way they are placed suggests it, there along the border of Breizh with Anjou.”
“Well, perhaps. But look there—”
Joanna did. That spit of land protruding from the Breizhek coastline, southwest of Gwened on the Gulf of Morbihan, was surely Kiberon; which, if she did not greatly err, put that oddly placed grouping of red marks—much the largest, for the rest were single or in pairs—square amongst the Stones of Karnag.
“How peculiar,” she said, almost to herself.
“Jo,” said Gwendolen then, fingertips gentle on Joanna’s wrist. “Jo, look at this.”
In one corner of the map, half obscured by a dark stain which might have been anything from strong tea to human blood, was drawn an aggressively straight-sided rectangle, filled to the edges, in an entirely different hand from that which had labelled the map’s cities and provinces, with Greek.
“Not Greek,” said Gwendolen. “At least, I think not.”
Greek but not Greek. That rings a bell . . .
Joanna fetched Master Alcuin away from his stacks of dismembered codices and stood shifting from foot to foot whilst he peered at the blotched letters through a magnifying-glass and hummed interestedly.
“Not Greek,” he confirmed at last, looking up. “We have seen this trick before, Miss Joanna, have we not? Some other tongue set down using Greek rather than Roman characters—”
“But, Master Alcuin, what does it say?”
He chuckled. “Patience, my dear,” he said. “I shall transcribe it for you, and then we shall see.”
Gwendolen fetched him pen and paper, and Joanna a four-legged stool, and they settled down to watch.
To Joanna’s chagrin, the message taking shape under Master Alcuin’s pen made no more sense in Roman characters than in Greek ones; till, several words along, she recognised that the unnamed annotator had disguised the message not only through the use of the Greek alphabet but also by writing it backwards. “Start at the end,” she said, and Master Alcuin said, “Ha!” and did so, tracking his progress through the final-or-first sentence with his left forefinger.
“Sophie!” Joanna bellowed, some two dozen words later. “Sophie, come here at once!”
The Brezhoneg words were sometimes oddly spelled, but the message was perfectly clear for all that. This map, the new transcription read,
shows the anchors of the magick of blood and stone, which Argentaela ar Breizh, wife of Nevenoe, devised and sealed with her blood to protect her husband’s kingdom, which Ahez daughter of Alan, King of Breizh, brought as dowry to her English husband, which the queens of Britain have preserved as once it preserved us from the longship raiders of the north, from the mage-warriors of the east, from the great golden ships of Iberia to the south. Look to the stones when danger threatens, and may the old gods preserve us all.
“‘Sealed with her blood,’” Sophie repeated. “‘The magick of blood and stone.’ This place is steeped in blood, it seems to me.”
Lucia, Roland, and Evans-Hughes, drawn presumably by Joanna’s calling to Sophie, had by now all crowded in at the map-room door.
“It is also steeped in persons who do not explain themselves,” Lucia remarked. “We may now be said to know what this magick of blood and stone was meant to accomplish, and where it originated; but we are no nearer understanding either what it does, or how.”
“It does sound very like Ailpín Drostan’s spell-net, however,” said Sophie—more thoughtful than revolted, now. “The blood of the rulers, the bones of the land. And its purpose must have been similar. One wonders how the Princesses Regent shaped it to their very different ends, for which it seems to me very ill suited, and what on the gods’ earth gave them the notion to attempt it.”
* * *
As the afternoon sun began to dip below the tops of the library windows, the party returned as usual to the Dragon and Lion, there to wash off the accumulated filth of their excavations, change their clothes, and eat their dinner. Ordinarily, they were left to their own devices until the first two of these proceedings had been completed; on this occasion, however, they had not even reached the staircase to the first floor before they were hailed by the innkeeper, who informed Sophie that there were some gentlemen from Merlin College waiting for you in the parlour, ma’am.
They looked at one another in consternation.
“Who can it be?” said Gareth. “Alcuin and I are here already, and none of your other acquaintance, I am quite sure, are in college at present.”
“What does it matter?” said Sophie, gesturing comprehensively at her filthy boots, the streaks of grime down the front of her gown, the hand-shaped smudges where she had tucked up her skirts to climb a ladder. “I cannot possibly meet anyone at all, looking as I do at present. I was ashamed to be seen in the street.”
The gentlemen in the parlour, having presumably heard the telltale sounds of a large party trooping in at the front door and starting up the stairs, emerged into the corridor. Gareth had been mistaken; with Professor de Guivrée and Professor Langsdale, alas, she was very well acquainted, to their mutual irritation.
“Evans-Hughes!” exclaimed the latter, taking in the filthy canvas overall which Gareth, with his usual foresight, had put on over his own clothes that morning, and was now taking off and folding inside-out over one arm. “Whatever can you be doing here?”
“He is just going,” said Sophie firmly, giving Gareth’s broad back a purposeful shove in the direction of the front door. He attempted to resist; she stared hard at him, and after a moment he relented and, Thank all the gods!, went away.
“Professor Langsdale,” said Sophie, turning to her visitors with an unfelt smile and motioning them back into the public parlour. “Professor de Guivrée. To what do I owe this unexpected honour?”
They eyed her with more than usual distaste—some of it for herself, she supposed, and the rest for the appalling state of her clothes, her hair, and very likely her face. She stared back, unblinking, as she drew out her magick to tame her hair and smooth both dust and dismay from her face, for the brief perverse satisfaction of seeing them goggle at the change. She did not invite them to sit down; perhaps they might take the hint and refrain from lingering.
Professor Langsdale cleared his throat. “We are come on behalf of the Senior Fellows of Merlin College, er, Mrs. Marshall, for the purpose of—”
“Magistra,” Sophie corrected him.
“I beg your pardon?”
“As I hold a master’s degree in practical magick from the University in Din Edin,” said Sophie, “I am correctly addressed as Magistra Marshall.” The honorific did not much matter to her in the ordinary w
ay, but it seemed necessary to remind these men of her right to it.
“Er.” It is sticking in his craw, right enough, the old goat. “Magistra Marshall. Am I correct in supposing that you have elected, despite advice to the contrary, to proceed with this business of a college for young ladies?”
Sophie gave him an edged smile. “You are correct in supposing that you have failed to warn me off, yes.”
“And, er. What is your husband’s view of this, er, venture?”
“My husband’s view?” Sophie repeated, surprised. “He supports it entirely. Why should you imagine otherwise?”
“And yet he has, er, has not accompanied you to Oxford.”
“My husband,” said Sophie, her tone as chilly as she could make it, “has duties of his own.” She paused, and added conversationally, “Before you continue your representations, Professors, it may interest you to know that this venture, as you put it, is under the personal patronage not only of the Princess Royal”—she smiled demurely—“but also of His Majesty the King.”
As she had surmised, this flummoxed them; to harass and browbeat her was one thing, to attempt the same upon their sovereign quite another.
They were not entirely deterred, however, and did not take themselves off until Sophie had pretended to listen to a quarter-hour’s worth of variations on the theme Lady Morgan College was an experiment that failed and need not be repeated—throughout which she was continually thinking, If only you knew!—and allowed them to hand her a petition signed by some number of Fellows of Merlin and other Colleges, which she had no intention of reading. As a result of this visit, or visitation, she arrived at the dinner-table late, wearing mismatched ear-drops, and so cross that Joanna and Lucia began making cautious inquiries as to her well-being.
A Season of Spells (A Noctis Magicae Novel) Page 35
