It was clearly someone else’s apartment, he noted, as he stood next to the window he had pried open. There was furniture, and clothing, and furnishing in great quantity. He had lived in a relatively threadbare version of the apartment, with a minimum of clutter.
A minute later he had the trim work loosened and his hand reached up into the wall cavity, where his fingers closed upon the ring. He pulled it out and stared at it. The ring in his hand was about to change his life, he suspected
He went back out through the window, then walked over to Falstaff’s shop. He looked along the way for any of his friends he might happen to see, but none were conveniently in sight.
“Jensen, may I use a work room for a bit?” he tried to sound nonchalant as he entered the front room of Falstaff’s shop.
“Great god Trinte!” Jensen exclaimed. “Who ever thought we’d see you back here again?”
The assistant to Falstaff stared for a moment, dumbfounded.
“I just want to examine the memory stone in this ring,” Theus explained as he walked to the counter. “Is Falstaff here? I’d like to see him,” he added.
“He’s running an errand. Are the guards still after you?” Jensen asked.
“No, that’s over,” Theus assured the man. “May I use one of the work rooms for a bit?”
“Yes, certainly, go right ahead,” Jensen agreed, primarily pleased that there would be no visit by the local guards.
Theus thanked his former co-worker as he walked back the familiar hallway, and turned to his right, into the mixing room, where he sat down at the bench in the place he had sat and blended ingredients so many times before.
“Voice, I can see the memories that are stored in this stone,” he told his invisible advisor as he sat and studied the jeweled memory stone in the ring. He was examining it intently, just as he had on the day the Coriae had brought it to him in the shop many months earlier. He remembered the day when she had said she needed to manipulate the ring to help protect Forgon. She had wanted to impose a layer of her own memories over Forgon’s as a way to hide his memories.
And she had hugged Theus, and kissed him, and given him hope that he might find a future with her.
Theus had listened to the voice on that day, and followed its directions on treating the stone to allow the new memories to be imposed by Coriae.
When he had studied the stone, he had looked so deeply and intently through its mass, he had been able to discern the mottled interior, the shadings and distinctions that the voice had told him were the physical locations where memories were stored. He saw that a small cluster of dark blotches resided near the surface of the stone, presumably showing the memories that Coriae had planted to make the ring seem to be her own.
“Can I read the memories?” he asked the voice.
“You have the power. You are of the old blood, and it has been passed down to you in the pure way, from daughter to son to daughter to son, renewing and strengthening the abilities with each generation. If you focus, you can unlock the memories,” the voice answered.
It would be an invasion of privacy, Theus knew. He should not look upon Coriae’s memories. But he was curious to know what she had planted, what she had stored as a deliberate means to hide Forgon’s memories. She had known that the ring might be opened through dark magics, so the memories had to be innocent
Perhaps, he might even find himself featured in one of them, he told himself.
He paused for one more moment, then held the jeweled ring to his forehead, and closed his eyes. He focused intently, trying to make his inner senses delve into the stone to find the memories there.
Suddenly, he was in the beginnings of a memory. He was Coriae, laughing and sitting in a restaurant with Caral and Laniae, talking about the material they would use to have new ball gowns sewn for each of them. The memory went on, but Theus found it boring, and he wrenched himself away.
He gave a sigh, then tried once again to find a memory to examine.
It was Coriae, seated at a small table, with a glass of wine sitting on the table in front of her. Monsant sat across the table, and the dark night sky was the backdrop behind him. It was night time, and the two of them were alone.
“Have you had a good evening?” Monsant asked.
“It’s been a wonderful evening,” Coriae replied. “I’m surprised, I’m embarrassed to admit. I didn’t know you could be so charming.”
“My private life is very different from the side I show to the public,” Monsant told her. “I have appearances to keep; the royal family needs to have at least one bully, to make the others look more lovable.”
“If you can be like this, you shouldn’t have to be the one who receives all the disapproval as a bully!” Coriae protested.
There was a knock at the door, and a servant appeared after a moment’s hesitation.
“Master Forgon is present,” the man said.
“Forgon? What’s he doing here? Is there some problem?” Monsant asked.
“Oh,” Coriae squeaked. “I forgot! Forgive me, my lord. I wasn’t sure how the evening would progress, so I arranged for my brother to come see me at ten bells to help extricate me if the situation was unsatisfactory.”
“You mean if I was a bore?” Monsant roared with laughter. “And it turns out you’ve found out that I am exactly that!” he laughed again. “Bring Forgon up,” he directed the servant.
“On the contrary,” Coriae answered. “I’m finding the evening to be anything but boring. I’m afraid I’ve taken my brother away from his friends for nothing, but he’ll be able to return to them for the rest of the evening; I see no reason to leave,” she spoke demurely.
Theus pulled the stone back from his head, stunned by what he experienced. He rubbed his eyes with his hand, and tried to reconcile the memory with what he had believed. The memory was one that had been placed in the stone days after the fact. Coriae had come to him only after the investigation had begun to focus on Forgon. She had put the memories in place afterwards.
She had apparently chosen to place the memory scene for a reason; she wanted to show an amiable friendship with Monsant. She had made him seem to be a much better person that Theus believed he was. And she had shown that there was no violence between Monsant and Forgon.
It seemed, he concluded, that she had placed a memory on the stone that had been false, one that deliberately painted an untrue portrait of Monsant as gentle, and her relationship with the dead man as friendly. She had wanted to throw investigators off the trail, to turn away from her family as suspects in the murder.
“Is that possible, voice?” he asked aloud. “Can people place false memories on the stones?”
“The stones cast no judgement as to the truthfulness or dishonesty of the memories they receive,” the voice answered. “The stones accept what their possessors choose to place.
“It is rare that any person places false memories,” the voice added. “The purpose of storing memories is to teach and preserve in almost every case.
“But, the exception is possible – it is up to the owner of the stone.”
Theus arched his back to stretch it as he contemplated the words of the voice, and the meaning of the memory he had seen.
What would Forgon’s memories of the evening be, he wondered. Surely, Coriae could have simply let the practitioner of the dark arts open up Forgon’s own memories and see that he wasn’t the murderer.
Theus examined the stone again, looking for where Forgon’s own memories lay hidden beneath Coriae’s. He placed the stone against his own forehead once again, and focused his attention on guiding his awareness past Coriae’s memories, down into the stone towards the other memories that were there.
He pressed his soul against the deepest memory present, and as he did, he realized he had breached a barrier below Forgon, and entered a very small, extremely hidden bottom layer of memories, older than Forgon’s. Before he could begin to recoil, or analyze, his mind filled with a new reality.
&
nbsp; “If you have found your way here, to this hidden memory, you deserve to know more,” a man’s voice spoke. “You in all likelihood actually have a need to know more.”
The man was standing in a room, looking directly into a mirror. In the reflection of the mirror, Theus could see the background, the room behind the man. It was a wonderous place, a wild laboratory. It reminded him in part of the rooms in Falstaff’s own shop, though much larger, and more complex. And it reminded him to, in a small degree, of the frightening room that Donal had used to practice his dark magic. There were implements that defied description, whose purposes Theus could not even guess.
But Theus was mostly drawn to the face of the man in the mirror, the man who was speaking – it seemed to him – as the spectator who had found and was reliving the stored memory. The man had no face; only a blurred patch of flesh existed where the features of the face should have been. The identity of the ancient mage was unknown.
The man was still talking Theus realized, and he focused again on the words. “Beneath this stone is that smaller gem, the one that holds the key to understanding the white uses of the powers; it is a very unique and thoughtful gem. The white abilities are less encompassing than the black powers, it is true. But your soul will be in no danger for using them.”
Theus withdrew the ring from his forehead, stunned by the memory he had stumbled upon.
White uses of magic sounded startling. He’d never heard any reference to anything of the sort. He wished there was someone he could talk to, some older person who had wisdom, and could explain the concept. Of course, he told himself, he had never heard of black magic – dark magic – until he had arrived in Great Forks, only a few months earlier. That wasn’t to say that white magic didn’t exist.
“Theus, are you about done?” Jensen startled him by poking his head through the door frame.
“Almost. Just five minutes more, I think,” Theus stammered.
He needed to hurry. He pressed the stone against his head for a third time, and tried to focus clearly on breaching the first barrier, going through Coriae’s shallow section, into Forgon’s region, without going so far as he had accidentally done before.
And suddenly, he was living a memory. He was Forgon, on the night of the great festival. He was sitting in a box, looking out over a plaza filled with people and music and dancing and lights. Laniae and Caral were with him, sipping wine and wearing thin strips of black material that hardly counted as masks at all, at least in terms of hiding their identities. There was little disguising Laniae in any event, as she wore the plunging neckline of her elegant dress, the neckline that had so embarrassed Theus when he had ridden in the carriage with the young nobles; the neckline seemed to dip even further as she sat with Forgon, and to gap even more widely.
But as the church bells started to chime the hour, it made no impact on Forgon. He set his wine glass down. It was nearly full; he’d barely sipped from it.
“If you’ll excuse me, I promised someone I’d meet them at ten bells,” Forgon said as he stood. “I’ll probably be back in ten minutes…but maybe not.”
“Forgon,” Laniae leaned forward towards him, “you didn’t tell us there was someone else! Who is he? What are you two going to do?”
“He or she?” Forgon couldn’t prevent himself from taking the grinning jab at Laniae’s question.
He left without another word, and hurried downstairs, then past the guards who kept the nobles in their boxes secluded. A minute later he was at the stables and rode his horse through crowded streets to a secluded alley. He climbed a vine growing up the side of a tall wall, with a dexterity that impressed Theus.
On the far side of the wall was a sophisticated garden, and an elegant house. And from the house Forgon could hear a woman screaming.
He jumped down from the wall and ran across the garden to the doors of the house. The screaming had changed in that there were two voices screaming at one another, a man and a woman. And the woman’s voice was Coriae’s.
Forgon entered the house and began to charge up the narrow back staircase used by the servants to move about, out of sight of the masters of the home. The source of the screams was beyond a doorway at the end of a hall. The man’s voice gave one last scream that was part anger and part pain, a bellow of sorts, but then there were no more screams, just as Forgon threw his shoulder against the doorway and splintered it open.
The scene inside was riveting – horrifying and riveting.
Coriae stood in a state of nearly total undress, shreds of her ripped gown still dripping in tangles from her body. And her body was mottled, clearly distressed from beatings and abuse.
She stood in the center of the room, at the side of a large bed. Sprawled upon the bed was Monsant. He was no longer a member of the royal family; he was only a dead body, and a bloody one. The hilt of a knife stood out from his chest, and several stab wounds were evident elsewhere in his torso. He’d died from a vicious attack.
“He was going to kill me after he used me,” Coriae sobbed. “He told me so. He said he’d done it to Janiae, and now he planned to do it to me.
“But he didn’t know that you’ve trained me to be tougher than Janiae, and even tougher than him,” she snarled. “I killed him. He deserved it; I’m glad I did it.”
And then she began to cry. Forgon crossed the room and wrapped her in a comforting embrace.
“We have to get you out of here,” he said. He looked around and saw a black curtain hanging from the canopy of the bed. With a powerful yank, he pulled it free and wrapped it around his sister.
“Follow me,” he told her, leading her by the hand. “And hide your face,” he added. He stopped to pull the edge of the black curtain up over her head like a hood, then continued to lead her away.
Theus pulled the stone away from his forehead.
Chapter 20
Theus stood in the room in Falstaff’s room in a state of shock. He mechanically lowered the ring with its mind-bending secret memories, and placed the bauble in his pocket. He walked out the hallway to the front room, where Jensen stood alone.
“How did it go in there? Everything okay?” the older man asked.
“It’s fine,” Theus answered in a daze. He rambled out of the shop without saying anything more, then began to walk down the street, oblivious to everything except the thoughts and memories that coursed through his consciousness.
Coriae was a murderer. She had acted in obvious self-defense, Theus told himself. But she was a murderer.
He understood the bruises and welts and contusions he had seen on her shoulders when he’d practiced staves with her in the family armory, the night after the festival and the murder. He’d seen those wounds back then, and taken his healing balm to her room as a result, and been removed from the Warrell household as a result of that.
He couldn’t blame her for the murder of Monsant, he knew. But the murder had been vicious – through Forgon’s memory he’d seen the multiple stab wounds on the body of her victim. Yet she had been provoked; he’d seen the wounds on her body, and he’d heard the report of the admission of the murder of Janiae, the friend Coriae had lost. It had been Janiae’s murder that had driven Coriae to go to Greenfalls, the place where Theus had first met her.
She hadn’t told him the truth, he thought. She hadn’t revealed her role in the murder to him. Even though they’d spent hours and hours together, two full days of continual contact on the trip to Great Falls alone, Coriae had kept her secret hidden from him. She had never tried to unburden her soul to him, he realized.
She was a deep mystery in many ways. Theus realized that in his musings he had already nearly reached the gates of the Warrell mansion. He’d be back with her in a matter of moments. She would be pleased by the retrieval of the ring, he knew, and she’d celebrate that. He would be able to watch the emotions of pleasure light up her beautiful face. But he wouldn’t truly know what was happening behind the face, and that lack of insight confused him.
He was tired; he hadn’t slept in days, it seemed. The exhaustion of the long ride from Stoke to Great Forks hung over him. It added to the confusion of his emotional state.
He waved at the guard as he walked up the drive. He took a deep breath and prepared himself. He would have to hide his concerns for the moment, he told himself. Ironically, he would have to play behind the same mask of dishonesty that Coriae wore, the mask that so confused him at the moment. He would reveal nothing.
When he entered the kitchen, he went and sat at his small table for a moment to take the last moments he needed to bring his emotions under control. “Blanche,” he asked, “would you go ask Lorinse or Coriae to come see me?”
“You don’t want to go to them?” the kitchen worker asked. “I hear you’ve been to her room before,” Blanche added archly.
“I’m not sure where you heard that, but I would like to talk to her parents, and not quibble over gossip,” he said flatly, his nerves too frayed to engage in banter.
She left him in a huff, and a minute later, Lorinse arrived.
“My boy,” he said excitedly, “did you have success?”
Theus silently pulled the jeweled ring from his pocket and held it aloft.
“We have to tell his lordship,” the steward said excitedly. “Let’s go to his office.”
Lorinse led Theus through the home to the office where Lord Warrell sat behind a desk. “I’ll fetch the others,” he said, and departed.
“You believe this will be all that’s needed to set my son free?” Warrell asked Theus as he took the ring in his own hand.
“I do not know my lord. I only know what Coriae says,” Theus answered.
Lady Warrell arrived and looked at the ring tearfully. “I pray that this ends our terrible nightmare,” she said.
Coriae arrived as well. She looked rumpled, awakened from much needed sleep.
The Deadly Magician (The Memory Stones Series Book 2) Page 25
