The Smoke-Scented Girl (27 page)

“Excuse me,” he called out to the waiter,
across the room. “Could you bring me a large bottle of grain
alcohol? Or gin, if you don’t have that.”

The waiter gave him a skeptical look, but
shrugged and left the room. Evon went back to his food and found
Piercy and Kerensa staring at him. “Dare I ask why you want to make
yourself very, very drunk at twelve-thirty in the afternoon?”
Piercy asked.

“It’s for the experiment,” Evon said. He took
a bite of chicken. It really was dry and unpleasant.

“That’s a relief,” Kerensa said. “I thought
you’d gone mad with frustration.”

“I have, but not enough to destroy my brain
with a 190-proof beverage.” Evon washed down the last of the
chicken with water. “Kerensa, will you come to my room before you
go back to the magicians? I need to copy something out from the
spell.”

“Evon, I think you need to have a rest,”
Kerensa said. “You have the strangest expression.”

“Have I?” He’d thought he was behaving
normally.

“You do, dear fellow. Your eyes are a little
glassy and you look paler than usual.”

“I feel fine.” Now that he thought about it,
he did not feel fine. He felt a little stiff from standing over the
table all morning, and the room seemed too cold.

“I think you might be coming down with
something,” Kerensa said. She laid the back of her hand on his
forehead and he flinched at how cold it was. “You have a
fever.”

“It can’t be very serious, because I don’t
feel unwell,” he lied. “But I promise I’ll rest once I’ve copied
out the spell. I have the runes, but I want to see them in
order.”

“All right,” Kerensa said, and her look of
concern forced him to turn away before he did or said something
stupid.

The waiter returned with a large bottle of
clear liquid and a small glass. “Thank you,” Evon said, pressing a
few coins into the man’s hand, and pushed back his chair, taking
the bottle and the glass with him.

“That man thinks you are going to your room
to drink yourself to death,” Piercy said. “I can see it in his
eyes.”

“He can think anything he likes now that I’ve
got this,” Evon said. “Kerensa, if you don’t mind?”

She followed him up the stairs and into the
room, where Evon soon had the spell-ribbons visible and stationary.
“What are you trying?” she asked.

“I’m creating a spell to prove the existence
of the entity,” he said, squatting to look at a curve of
spell-ribbon near her feet. “This is the hardest part because
there’s no real evidence that it
ever
existed, let alone
that it exists now. But I’ve worked out the material components, I
hope, and now I’m going to use the part of this spell that draws
you toward the next target as an identifier.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

Evon scratched out a rune and drew a
different one. “The spell...might as well say it ‘knows’ what it’s
looking for. It knows the identity of its ultimate target. I’m
treating ‘fathlon’ as the name of that target, which I think is
accurate, and using the spell—” He coughed briefly. “Excuse me. I’m
using the spell to tie that name to the identity of the target.
Then the glass there represents the concept of ‘no soul,’
emptiness. And all of those things together will say whether or not
a creature with all those characteristics exists.”

“Why does it matter? What if it’s just the
Despot that it’s targeting, a plain old ordinary person?”

Evon coughed again. “The spell was made far
too long ago for its makers to know about the Despot rising up in
this time. It’s targeting something more abstract, not just a
person. Maybe its target is just some quality the Despot has in
common with Murakot and all the other victims. But if your story is
correct, and it’s a creature separate from the Despot, then there’s
no reason it might not leave him for some other host. And if...if
the spell is sent after the Despot when it’s the entity it wants,
it won’t find the right target, and this cycle will just keep going
on.” He’d remembered, as he spoke, what would happen when Kerensa
reached that final target. He felt guilty, now, about keeping it
from her. She ought to know the truth. He coughed again. He’d tell
her about it tonight, after the magicians were through with her for
the day.

“You
are
sick,” Kerensa said. “You
should go to bed.”

“I will as soon as I finish copying these
out.”

“...You’re not going to bed, are you.”

“No. But I thought I sounded very
believable.”

“You did. I just know you well enough to
ignore anything you say when you sound that believable.”

Evon stood, stretching against the aches in
his knees and shoulders. “Thank you. That should be enough.”

“Please promise me you’ll rest,” Kerensa
said, and the look in her eyes made his heart thump harder.
If
only you would see me the way I see you.

“We can compromise,” he said. “I’m going to
try one more experiment and then I’ll take myself off to bed. Will
that satisfy you?”

“I suppose,” she said dubiously. “Don’t
forget you promised me.”

“I won’t. Go on. I’m sorry you have to put up
with the magicians all afternoon.”

“It would be easier if I thought they’d be at
all effective. I know they’re good, but you’re better.”

Evon’s face warmed. “Thank you. I hope your
faith in me isn’t unfounded.”

“It isn’t,” she said, smiling, “because you
didn’t burn.” He watched her leave the room, his body aching from
more than just illness. He could just say it. He could say
Kerensa, you are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, and I
love you, my heart lifts every time you enter the room, and I want
to make you happy
. And she could look at him with pity, and
then everything would be awkward between them, and he would feel
like even more of a fool than he already was.

He opened the bottle of alcohol and poured a
splash into the bottom of the glass, thought about drinking it,
then set it on the floor. With his coppery chalk, he began to copy
the runes onto the table top exactly as they’d appeared on the
spell-ribbons, scattered rather than in a straight line or a
circle. He set the glass in the center of the table, snapped his
fingers and said, “
Forva
,” and the alcohol burned with a
pure white-blue fire. Quickly, before the alcohol was consumed, he
spread his left hand palm-down above the fire, feeling its heat on
his hand, and said,
“Solto epiria
.”

Nothing happened. The fire burned a little
longer and went out. Evon stepped back and surveyed the tableau.
He’d gotten something right, but he wasn’t sure what. The fire and
the glass, that felt right to him, and besides, if he’d gotten that
part wrong, the glass would probably have shattered as the magic
tried to force its way through the wrong vessel. He cleared away
the glass, juggling it a little because it was hot, and looked at
the runes. This was the spell, he was certain, he knew exactly what
it did, so why wasn’t it working?

He looked again at his paper copy, then went
for his notes. The magician who’d created this spell was sloppy.
There were redundancies, not in places where they might have been
actual safeguards, but in places where they looked as though they’d
just been copied over twice. Evon got some paper and made a fresh
copy of the spell he’d just read off Kerensa—if he was wrong, he
didn’t want to have to go in there to recopy it and take her away
from the magicians, who would make a fuss he didn’t want to deal
with. Then he started crossing pieces off. Here, a rune that didn’t
do anything; there, a complicated sentence that could be written so
much more simply. After a while, he had a slimmed-down version of
the spell that he was sure would still work. Too bad for those
long-dead magicians that he hadn’t been around back then. Of
course, if he had been, he wouldn’t have known any better than they
did, so it was just as well. He coughed again, harder this time,
then scrubbed off the table and wrote out his new version of the
spell.

He set the glass in the center of the table,
poured in more alcohol and lit it, then again said,
“Solto
epiria
.”

Something grabbed him by his sternum—he could
feel the cold fingers wrapping around it, digging into his flesh,
and he cried out in pain. He was somewhere dark and cold, suspended
in air by the hand that gripped him. No, it was more like talons
than a hand, sharp talons that felt as if they might rip his
breastbone out of his body with no more effort than tearing a piece
of paper. Evon cried out again, and suddenly black became red and
he found himself inside something that pulsed unpleasantly and
dripped fluids onto a floor made of glistening, puffy pillows of
flesh. He continued to dangle, feeling paralyzed by shock rather
than
desini cucurri
.

Something was there with him, something other
than whatever had him by the chest. It didn’t seem aware of his
presence; its attention was elsewhere. Evon could hear distant
whisperings he couldn’t quite make out, however he strained.
The...thing...radiated cold the way a fire radiated heat, in waves
that varied in intensity and burned his face and hands. If he
looked at it from the corner of his eye, he could almost see it, or
pieces of it, the flash of an eye, the twitch of a limb. It looked
and felt wrong, unnatural, like something that didn’t belong in the
world.

Whatever had hold of his chest wrenched at it
again, and Evon screamed in pain. Instantly the thing moved, its
awareness focused on him. He felt himself at the center of a
scrutiny so intense it bore down on him like a boulder, pinning him
to the wall, or the floor, he’d lost track of where he was, and he
tried to scream again but there was no air in his lungs—

—and he was lying on the floor in his room,
Kerensa pounding on his chest and shouting at him, and people
crowding in at the door. He breathed in deeply and said, “That
hurts.”

“I should hope it hurts, what with you
scaring me like that!” she shouted. “I came back here to make sure
you had gone to bed, because I knew you wouldn’t, and I heard you
fall and you were lying on the floor, and your lips were blue and
you weren’t breathing. What in
hell
did you do to
yourself?”

He sat up, supporting himself with his hands.
He was freezing and his head hurt. “I found it,” he said. “It
exists. I didn’t know the spell would do that.”

Kerensa stood and glared at the people in the
doorway. “He’s fine,” she said. “He’s just stupid. Go on back to
whatever you were doing. Go.” She shut the door and turned her
glare on Evon. “Into bed,” she told him. “Right now.”

“I have to do the location spell while the
thing’s identity is still fresh in my mind,” he said. He wearily
got to his feet, every joint in his body aching, and took a large
roll of paper from beside the wardrobe. “Would you move that
table?”

“I don’t want anything to do with your mad
desire to drive yourself into an early grave.”

“If I have to move it, I might overexert
myself and get sicker. You wouldn’t want that.”

Kerensa threw up her hands and dragged the
table under the window, rattling the glass still resting at its
center. “Piercy was right. You use guilt like a weapon.”

“Only because Piercy doesn’t respond to other
forms of persuasion.” He stood at one side of the room and unrolled
the paper, revealing a map of the continent with country borders
and cities marked out. “Stand on that end so it doesn’t roll back
up.” He lifted Piercy’s bed a few painful inches and slid it to
rest atop one corner of the map, then did the same with his bed on
the other side. He needed ink. There was an inkwell in the drawer
of the dressing table; he had to walk around Kerensa to reach it,
and she folded her arms across her chest and continued to glare at
him. He smiled pleasantly at her, then coughed long and hard and
had to wave away her concern. “I’m fine,” he said, “just had
something caught in my throat.”

“Of course you did,” Kerensa said
sarcastically.

The door opened. “I heard you were dead,
Lore,” Piercy said. “I knew it was impossible, because you are too
stubborn to allow death to take you in the middle of an
experiment.”

“He found the entity and it nearly killed
him,” said Kerensa, “and now he refuses to admit he’s sick and he
won’t listen to me.”

“Well, he won’t listen to me either, if you
were hoping for some sort of support. Sympathy, I have in large
buckets.”

“Both of you be still and watch this,” Evon
said. “It’s fascinating. Unless it doesn’t work, in which case it’s
just messy.” He stood on the map over a dot marked OSTRADON with
the inkwell in hand. He swung his left hand across the map, rubbing
his fingers together as if sprinkling salt over it, and said
“Epiria sepera.
” Nothing happened.

“I’m so glad you risked your health for that
outstanding display,” Kerensa said.

“You have such a negative attitude sometimes,
do you realize that?” Evon paused to cough, wiped his mouth, and
added, “The interesting part comes next.” He crouched above the map
and tipped the inkwell so a thin stream of ink spilled out of it to
fall on Ostradon. Just as the ink touched the page, Evon said,
“
Reperto
Fathlon.”

Instead of soaking into the paper, the ink
gathered into a large bead about half an inch across and quivered
like quicksilver atop the map. Its quivering sent out tiny tendrils
in all directions like tentative fingers. After about thirty
seconds of this, it appeared to come to a decision and began
rolling across the map, slowly, leaving no trail.

“It’s going south,” Piercy said. Evon nodded.
The ink continued rolling until it reached a point south of the
Dalanine border, where it stopped moving and began quivering again.
Suddenly, as if it were a bubble someone had just stuck with a pin,
the bead of ink collapsed and soaked into the map, making not an
irregular blotch but an intricate design of curves and circles
centered on a single point.