A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians--A Novel

by H. G. Parry

“Freedom,” Toussaint said, “sometimes requires terrible things.”

  Paris/London

  September 1793

  It was after midnight when Danton came to call on Robespierre. Robespierre had gone to bed less than twenty minutes before, but when Madame Duplay shook him gently awake to inform him of his visitor, he was on his feet at once. Danton had only recently returned from a mission to Belgium, where the French forces were being battered by the combined might of British, Dutch, and other Allied troops. He would have news that was desperately needed. But it was more than that. There had been a growing suspicion between the two of them lately, after Robespierre had supplanted Danton to become head of the Committee of Public Safety, and Robespierre longed to put it right.

  He himself, when he had found that Danton had been thrown out of the Committee and he had suddenly been elected in, had felt the ever-present coil of fear in his stomach stir. It was not the first time he suspected that his benefactor was arranging things without any help from him. But in the last month or so, he had ceased to trouble himself about what lay behind his ascent to his greatest height yet. He was too busy; he needed every scrap of power he could muster just to get things done. He rose every day in the dark hours before dawn, writing until Éléonore knocked softly on the door to see if he wanted breakfast. All day he argued in the Convention; all evening he presided in the Committee; late into the night he spoke at the Jacobins. His speeches grew steadily more hysterical: by the time he collapsed into bed, he felt as though only a thin veneer of flesh and conviction was keeping him from flying apart. The revolt in the provinces had spread. Paris was under siege, and so was the Revolution, and so was France.

  “I heard about your wife,” Robespierre said after he had greeted Danton and ushered him into his room. “I’m so sorry. Truly.”

  “I was watching men die,” Danton said. His usually powerful voice was dull. Perhaps he had found out the news himself only upon his arrival home, when he had stumbled into a cold, grief-stricken house. Certainly his gigantic form seemed shrunken, as if by sudden illness. “I saw our soldiers coming back from the fields broken and bloody. And as I watched, Gabrielle was dying as well, trying to bring our child into the world.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Robespierre repeated.

  Danton shook his head and sat down heavily. There was wine poured for him, but he did not drink; Robespierre, perching on the end of his bed, did not either. “Belgium is lost; there’s no question of that. I watched it fall. The Allies have taken Valenciennes, or as good as. And now they tell me that Toulon handed itself over to the British without a fight.”

  The shift from the personal to the political did not surprise him; it seemed perfectly natural. But the news made his heart sink, and his chest constrict around it.

  “I was hoping for better news,” he said, as calmly as he could. “I knew about Toulon, of course. And—I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the British navy has invaded Dunkirk. They landed last week. Obviously, we’ve sent men to reinforce it. But—”

  “We need more soldiers,” Danton said. “Our enemies are on our coast. There may still be a chance we can hold them there, or even push them off. But we won’t win either war—the war with Europe, or the civil war in the provinces—without them.”

  “It was the conscription of more soldiers that caused a civil war in the first place. The people will never agree.”

  “Then they must be made to.”

  “I know it. Of course I know it. I’ve gone over it again and again in my mind. The question is how. How to educate the people, so we may use the constitution for their benefit. How to make them rally behind us. How to make them see that we are their only hope. That’s the real trouble: they can’t see that. There are too many conspiracists and royalists and Aristocrats and criminals, and they all sound very much like us. It’s confused them.”

  Danton nodded. “And what answer did you come to?”

  Robespierre took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “What makes you think I’ve come to any answer?”

  “Because just at this minute, I have none myself. It’s why I came. You must have wondered. I’m not in the habit of dropping in on you in the small hours of the morning.”

  “I assumed you wanted to bring me word from Belgium. Or perhaps that you didn’t want to be at home. Not without—”

  Danton waved this aside. “I didn’t have to be alone at home; I didn’t have to be here not to be at home. I came because—” He stopped and shook his head with a short laugh. “I don’t know why I’ve come to you. Except that I’ve seen the war over the border, and we can’t win it with the troops we have. I need to know how the Revolution can produce more. And for better or worse, this has become your revolution, Robespierre, not mine or Camille’s or anyone else’s. You’re perhaps the only one left who understands it.”

  “When we first met, I had the impression you didn’t think so very much of me.” Robespierre wondered to hear himself say it. He had never spoken so candidly to Danton before; nor, he suspected, had Danton done so to him. They were always civil to each other, even affectionate; they were both close to Camille, which perhaps caused a degree of jealousy on Robespierre’s part but also gave their political alliance a ready-made personal touch. Yet they did not entirely trust each other. Certainly Danton, ever since the morning Camille’s child had been born, looked sideways at Robespierre. The night seemed to have burned inhibitions away.

  “In some ways I still don’t,” Danton said with equal bluntness. It stung, but not as much as it would have at other times. “As a politician, you have passion, intellect, and conviction, but no objectivity. You believe everything you say. It will destroy you one day. But until that day comes, you understand the Revolution. You believe in it like nobody I’ve ever seen, not even Camille. You live and breathe for it. You won’t let it die.”

  Soldiers dying. Citizens dying. Ideas dying. It all seemed one vast torrent of blood. As he’d lain in bed, exhausted yet fighting a return to the garden, he’d felt he was choking on it.

  And so he said the words he had promised he would never say. “There is a way.”

  Danton looked at him, eyes hollow and red-rimmed. “What is it?”

  “An army of the dead.”

  In the silence that followed, Robespierre had a brief flash of the two of them as if from the outside: two figures, haggard and worn in the light of a single candle, like ghosts haunting their own bodies in a world gone mad. We are dead, he thought with wonder. We are already dead.

  “You’re a necromancer,” Danton said slowly. “Like your mother. I see. And I see why you would want to keep that hidden, even now. But… the magic to create an army of the dead no longer exists. Nobody knows it.”

  “It exists. I know it. I need only corpses, and shadows.”

  “Camille can call shadows,” Danton said. “And I suspect he’d love to.”

  “I agree. It may be the corpses that prove the most difficult.”

  Danton laughed bitterly. “We have no shortages of corpses.”

  “It’s not so simple. It’s not ordinary necromancy. For them to be inhabited, they need to have died recently, and they need to have died in fear. We can’t simply unearth a mass grave and walk them out of it in the dead of night.”

  “In fear?”

  “It’s dark magic,” Robespierre said simply. “There’s a reason why the Knights Templar tried to destroy all knowledge of it.”

  Danton hesitated. It was the moment when he might have turned back; Robespierre knew, and waited. The moment passed.

  “Well,” he said briskly. “My point still stands. These are days of blood. Corpses are not difficult to come by. Nor is fear.”

  Robespierre felt something inside him give way, and refused to look at what lay beneath. “We made a corpse of France’s king,” he said. “We can make corpses of her enemies.”

  “Tell me,” Danton said.

  “You know what I’m about to say.”

  �
�I suspect so. But I want to hear you say it. You don’t mean the enemies outside our borders, do you?”

  “I’m never afraid of the enemies outside our borders. The ones I fear are always the ones in our midst. The traitors, the conspiracists, the royalists, the Girondin sympathizers—the ones who want to see the French Republic of Magicians fail. That’s who we need to punish if we want to end this civil war. And we need to punish them so badly that nobody will ever dare pick up their fallen banners.”

  “If they won’t fight for us in life,” Danton said slowly, “we make them fight for us in death.” He was trying out the idea rather than agreeing, but he wasn’t arguing. “We remove them from the streets, where they can do harm, and strengthen the army at the same time.”

  “More than that. We make an example of them. A terrible example of what happens to criminals who outrage liberty and spill the blood of patriots.”

  Danton was looking at him as if he’d never quite seen him before. “My God, Robespierre,” he said. “What is it like inside your head?”

  Dark, Robespierre could have said. And I’m never alone in there. Of course he didn’t. Even in the heightened register the conversation had taken, it would have sounded alarming.

  “If you don’t agree—”

  “No,” Danton interrupted. “No, I’m not saying that. We’re killing them already, at the guillotine. I see no harm in putting the bodies to use. But you do realize something, don’t you? If this is to work at all, it needs to be open. You can’t hide anymore.”

  Robespierre’s thoughts had been racing too fast for feeling; at this, they slowed down enough to catch a trace of dread. “Not necessarily. We can carry out the executions at the Place de la Révolution. Then the bodies can be brought back to the Conciergerie. I—”

  Danton was shaking his head. “No. No smuggling them away. As I said, I understand why you hid your magic: you’ve clearly been doing so your whole life. Your whole life depended on it. But it needs to stop. If we are to create an army of the dead, then we need to do it with strength, with conviction, and with the belief that we are right. We need to do it in the open.”

  “In the open? Before everyone?”

  “On the scaffold itself. In the name of the Revolution.”

  Robespierre was silent.

  “We are the Republic of Magicians,” Danton said. “And you are a magician. If you can indeed create an army of the dead, you are one of the most powerful magicians we have. We need not be discreet.”

  One thing caught Robespierre’s attention. “We?”

  “I’ll support you in this.” The sense of security Danton could give an entire mob was in his voice. “And so will Camille, I’m sure. We will stand with you. We have nothing to fear.”

  They had so much to fear. Paradoxically, it made up Robespierre’s mind. He was so tired of being afraid. “Then let us do it without fear. It is our enemies who need to fear. No more massacres. No more mob justice. No more innocent blood on the streets. We will take control and lead the people to a new age, at whatever cost.”

  “We’ll address the Convention first thing tomorrow.” Danton stood; when Robespierre did the same, Danton embraced him quickly. Robespierre, who hated being touched except by people very dear to him, managed not to flinch away. “This is it, Maximilien. I was beginning to despair before I came here.”

  Robespierre wasn’t sure that he was not despairing now. He felt numb. Somewhere, inside his head, something other than him was laughing. Yet he was right. He really did believe he was right.

  “This is not it,” he said. “But it’s a path to it. And yes. We’ll both address the Convention tomorrow.”

  And they would agree. With the force of his benefactor burning behind his eyes, they would certainly agree.

  Before he left, into a cloudy night shading into a pale dawn, Danton turned once again to Robespierre.

  “My wife,” he said. “Can you—?”

  Robespierre shook his head quickly. “No. Don’t even think it, my friend. It wouldn’t be her. You’d see an echo, a shadow, and then you’d lose her all over again.”

  “That might almost be enough.”

  The hunger in his eyes was so achingly familiar that Robespierre felt tears come to his own. “It won’t be. It would drive you mad. I won’t do it.”

  “I loved her. I don’t even know if she knew that: I was never faithful to her, and she knew it. But I loved her. You couldn’t possibly understand—”

  “I do understand! For once, I understand you perfectly, Danton. I feel what you’re suffering. At this moment, I am you. And still I won’t do it. Necromancy isn’t an act of love. It’s an act of grief. Grief is all that ever comes of it.”

  Danton didn’t argue. Perhaps he had already known what Robespierre’s answer would be. “And undead magic? What is that an act of?”

  “Terror,” Robespierre said. “But we believe in our cause. We do it for France, and for liberty. That must sanctify it.”

  “Are you satisfied now?” he asked his benefactor.

  “Never,” his benefactor said. “That much we have in common. But I’m pleased. I think you will be too, when it’s done.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Perhaps not. I have never attached much importance to death.”

  “Your magic is born of fear. My magic is born of grief. For this to work, I will need to grieve for each and every one of my victims. I need to feel their deaths like the death of my own family.”

  “Fear not, Robespierre,” his benefactor said. It was one of those moments when his voice had an oddly archaic inflection. “I have no doubt in my mind that you will.”

  When Robespierre was a child, he had held a dead bird in his hands. His grief had filled his heart like salt water, drenched it, and drowned it.

  I will never see it fly, he had thought, and it was too much to bear.

  And then, inexplicably, he had felt his grief overflow his heart and spill through his fingers. He had felt it pool in the fragile body he held: through the bones, the organs, the blood vessels, the delicate wing feathers, and the glinting orb of its eyes. Without knowing what he was doing, he had pushed.

  Its eyes had opened. Its wings had unfurled. It had taken off from his hands with the lightest tickle of pressure, and as he had watched it soar away for the last time, he had felt a joy so profound that it was almost pain.

  Now he was hundreds of miles from that garden. He stood on a scaffold, high above a roaring crowd. Camille stood beside him: with his dark curls and fine-boned face, he looked something between a poet and a choirboy. Between Danton’s powerful ugliness and his school friend’s firefly charm, Robespierre sometimes felt painfully ordinary. Now he was glad of Camille’s distracting presence. It was the first time he had appeared in public as a necromancer. There were eyes enough on him already.

  It was a clear, beautiful autumn day. Behind him were the looming frame of the guillotine, and seven men waiting to die. He didn’t turn, but the sun was at his back, and it projected the guillotine’s thin shadow on the ground at his feet.

  “Are you ready?” he asked Camille beneath the noise.

  In answer, Camille closed his eyes and drew the shadows about him.

  Commoner magic was not the spectacle nowadays that it had been even a year ago. By now, Robespierre had seen fellow magicians call shadows before, and so had most others. Still, Camille’s magic had associations with the storming of the Bastille that moved hearts: it was one of the reasons the Committee of Public Safety had chosen him for this first display of power. The crowd cheered as the darkness crept from corners to form a ghostly figure. Robespierre let the applause go on for a few minutes before he nodded to the executioner.

  The first prisoner to be brought forward was a stocky man, with ears that stuck out beneath his newly cropped hair. He struggled against the soldiers, shouting something that was lost in the tumult. It was a cry of fear, perhaps, but also of anger. Even in these circumstances, even know
ing the man was a traitor, Robespierre recognized the anger as an echo of his own.

  I’m sorry, he thought at the man, too secretly for it to reach his eyes. His face was still stone. You’re like me. You won’t forgive me, any more than I’ve ever forgiven an enemy. But I’m sorry.

  It took three men to place him in the guillotine. The screams ceased only when the blade came down and his head dropped from his shoulders.

  There was a corresponding roar from the onlookers, of course, but not of the strength executions usually provoked. Even when the executioner held the head above the crowd, scattering the closest with blood, the laughter was more polite than otherwise. They were waiting. And as the last heartbeat died in the man’s chest, Robespierre’s magic stirred.

  This time, he did not push it out—not yet. He did as he had been instructed in a dark alley five years ago, by a voice in his dreams promising him a new France. Camille’s shadow was standing beside them. Robespierre turned to it and, without words, let his hands fall to his sides and closed his eyes.

  Come to me, he thought.

  The shadow needed only that opening. At once, the faint, clammy smoke was on his skin, in his nose and in his throat, and then it was inside him. He shuddered and gagged as it rushed into his chest. It was like swallowing an acrid fog—worse, because mingled with the sensation were flashes of thoughts and images that were not his own. Some of them belonged to Camille, he thought—at least, he thought he recognized the bright joys and darknesses of his friend’s mind. Others were darker yet, and set the hair rising on the back of his neck. Yet he held it as it mingled with his blood and curled around his heart. Only when he felt it was becoming part of him did he let it go.

  The shadow passed through him with the tide of his necromancy. It poured from his fingers, magic and shadow and grief combined, and it poured into the corpse.

  The corpse stood.

  Robespierre had realized that it would have no head; he had almost preferred that, remembering the horrible glassy stare of the last one. He had not realized that the head of the shadow, without a skull to contain it, would be visible in its place. It looked at him, in the way shadows do, without eyes.