The Spirit Lens (15 page)

“Where could these mages hold secret prisoners?” I demanded, once a swath of trees separated Ilario and me from the knight. “If Ophelie and Michel were held prisoner together, it must be somewhere close.”
Perhaps he is still there
, I dared not say aloud.
Perhaps he is in the same state as Ophelie
.

Ilario blotted his forehead, then wagged the knotted kerchief northward. An ancient blocklike keep squatted atop a low mound near the northern wall like a wart upon Castelle Escolan’s warm yellow face. “Eugenie and I used to play in the old dungeons. Yet watchmen wander in from time to time, so you couldn’t keep a secret prisoner.” He swiveled westward toward the river. “Then there’s the Spindle. . . .”

“Spindle Prison is outside the walls, and Ophelie didn’t row a boat to get away. She was held here at the palace. A place the mages could come and go unremarked, with thick walls or well out of the common way. They’d not want anyone to hear what was going on.” Cries for help. Pleading, as a child’s blood was drained away.
Father Creator, forgive.

Ilario pivoted full circle, mumbling the merits and demerits of various possibilities as his gaze traversed kitchen buildings, courtyard walls, guard towers; nurseries, toolsheds, and stables; deadhouse, swan garden, and the marble-columned temple minor. His brow lifted and smoothed. “There,” he declared with the certainty of a man choosing white bread over brown.

I summoned patience. “The temple? But there’s no—”

“The royal crypt lies underneath,” he said, setting off at a brisk pace. “The King’s Gate is kept locked until a sovereign dies, is crowned, or takes a notion to alter the name of his heir. But Eugenie found another way down.” He shuddered dramatically. “She wanted to explore the secret chambers. She forced me to go. Called me a ninny, but I kept imagining those fifty kings, sitting in their niches in the dark, rotting.”

As we crossed the sweltering gardens, his pace slowed and he lowered his voice. “Michel could not be used as a mule, you know. He’s as common as a barnyard—most certainly not of the blood. And he despises sorcery. Cursed preachy about it, too. Stubborn as the pox.”

“A perfect hostage, however,” I said, matching his quiet voice. “The king’s closest friend.”

“True enough.” Ilario shrugged and aimed his unfocused eyes in the direction of the sun-washed temple roof. “They served together for years. Drank one another’s wine and covered one another’s sins. Long before anyone knew Philippe was Soren’s heir, Michel took a sword strike for Philippe that near cost his arm. Philippe stood goodfather to Michel’s children, and Michel did the same for Prince Desmond, angels guide the poor dead mite.”

A white stone chip appeared in Ilario’s hand. He touched the spall to his heart, forehead, and lips, before returning it to the silk pouch at his waist, scarce interrupting his commentary.

“Philippe’s first act when crowned was to name Michel his First Counselor, displacing old Baldwin whose family had held the office since the Founding. Then he granted Michel the Ruggiere demesne that’s never been held by less than royal kin, and without so much as consulting its overlord. Neither move was at all fitting. Geni’s always felt the two of them were closer—” Ilario swallowed the sentiment, jerked the string closure on his spall pouch, and angled across the temple lawn.

It struck me as no surprise that a friendship founded on youth and war might bloom more intimate than a marriage founded on political necessity. But the tenor of Ilario’s words gave me pause, serious as they were, and threaded with such profound dislike. I observed him closely.

Eyeing me sidewise, he wrinkled his mouth like a dried currant. “Well, all right. You’ve caught me out. Michel de Vernase and I get along like cats and fish. He is a brute and a bully and has not the least sense of fashion or manners or respect. He usurps places that are not his. But I’d not wish that”—he jerked his head in the direction whence we’d just come—“on anyone.”

Nor would I. Nonetheless, I had been proceeding on the assumption that Michel de Vernase’s disappearance had resulted solely from his position as investigator, that the king’s regard for his friend had somehow made Michel’s own character unimportant.
A lesson, Portier: Judge each player objectively, individually, and entirely.

“Who is the overlord of the Ruggiere demesne?”

Ilario snapped his head around. “Dumont, of course. The Duc de Aubine.” He narrowed his eyes. “No, no, Portier, quiet your nefarious imaginings. Dumont is not at all your man. He cares for naught but his birds. Now, back when Philippe granted Ruggiere to Michel, the demesne was held by Dumont’s grandfather, who was as friendly as a rabid dog. He called the grant
theft
. If not for my foster mother, the old devil would have hauled Michel out of Ruggiere naked and bound in thorn ropes.”

Comprehension required some wrestling with bloodlines and inheritance. King Soren had married Eugenie de Sylvae when she was but a child, and his mother, Lady Antonia, had fostered Eugenie and her half brother, Ilario, after their parents died in a fire. “So Lady Antonia persuaded her father, the
old
duc of Aubine, not to fight Philippe’s grant to Michel?”

“Antonia is very persuasive. And she believes a king can grant what he wills. It helped that the slavering old hound doted on her until the day he died choking on an olive.” Ilario waved his hand dismissively. “As for the present duc—Dumont—I promise you he doesn’t care who holds his demesnes unless they’ve beaks and feathers. Michel de Vernase earned plenty of enemies elsewhere.”

A serving man was sweeping the wide, shallow steps of the temple portico as we approached. A few ladies stood in the breezy shade of the pediment, as triumphant angels, painted scarlet, emerald, and gold, bent down from the facade as if to eavesdrop on their gossip.

Ilario bowed gracefully to the women as he tripped lightly up the steps and crossed the portico. As I entered the dim vestibule, he was disappearing, not into the light-filled vastness of the temple nave, but through a lesser doorway on the left. “It’s far too long since I venerated my father’s tomb,” he was declaiming loudly. “I’ve been thinking it requires a new offering urn. You must arrange for it, secretary.”

Two veiled women trudged past us. We hurried down the broad passage between a wall of carved memorial stones and a rank of increasingly elaborate sarcophagi. Midway down the aisle, Ilario’s closed fingers touched his lips, then brushed a vault of rosy marble capped with the sculpted figure of a Knight of Sabria.

We halted in a memorial bay at the farthest end of the aisle. With a glance back down the aisle—now deserted—Ilario ducked under the bay’s gilded rail and dodged behind a massive carving of some saintly king. I followed.

The dark alcove stank of musty wine and ancient incense. “Make us a light,” Ilario said, from somewhere ahead of me. “Twiddle your fingers or whatever you sorcerers do.”

“Twiddle . . .” My cheeks heated. Any more and they’d provide flames enough to see by.

I retreated past the effigy and the rail, returning moments later with a votive lamp from some marquesa’s tomb hidden under my cloak. “This will have to do.”

In the first moment I uncovered the lamp, I caught Ilario frowning at me. “Well, I assumed you could do
something
magical.”

He dropped to his knees and probed the latch with a dainty knife more suited to picking teeth than breaking locks. Twice he fumbled and dropped the implement with a clatter. “Blast!” he said. “This used to be easier.”

“Let me try,” I said, trading him the lamp for the knife.

“This is the Tetrarch’s Gate,” Ilario whispered over my shoulder. “On coronation day, the new sovereign has to go down to the crypt to scribe the name of his heir. He uses the King’s Gate—behind the font in the temple nave. A tetrarch is supposed to greet the new king down below in the name of all the dead kings, but it appears rude if he bullies past to descend first. So, instead, he slips aside and goes down this way.”

In a moment’s whimsy, I attempted a simple spell I’d used with some success when a child—a marvel that had sparked my magical ambitions. I broke off a thread dangling from the hem of my doublet. Twisting the thread about the knife blade and touching the latch with the knife, I blew upon their intersection—adding air to the balance of wood and metal—and infused the simple spell with my will. Not the least trickle of power cooled my veins.
Idiot.

I twisted the handle and yanked on the door in frustration. To my astonishment, it flew open.

“Well done!” said Ilario, beaming.

“It was already unlocked,” I snapped, angered at my inability to let go of what was ended.

“Impossible. No one ever goes down here. And this gate is always latched from the inside.”

Impossible. Always.
Dangerous words for an investigator. “Perhaps Ophelie escaped this way,” I said.

Ilario blanched, blew a shaky breath, and motioned me through the opening. We closed the door softly and tiptoed down a spiraled stair. At the end of a downsloping passage lay a cavernous vault, hewn from the great rock underlying Castelle Escalon.

Massive columns incised with Fassid symbols, centuries older than the temple they supported, crowded the vast chamber. Censers of tarnished silver and brass dangled from the damp-stained ceiling like old moss, glittering and fading in our lamplight as we threaded a path between them. Every breath reeked of old incense, old stone, and old earth.

Not a step, not a breath, disturbed the stillness. What prisoner might have been held down here was no longer.

A single red lamp beamed brightly through the forest of columns, marking a great black stone bowl set atop a stepped pyramid some eight or ten metres across. Disproportionately elongated figures of men and women, hacked roughly from the gray stone, supported the bowl.

“The Coronation Font,” said Ilario quietly. “Step up and take a look. It’s a marvel.”

The rounded lip felt cold to my hands as I peered into the font. Five half-height pillars protruded a few centimetres above the dark, still surface of the water, providing stepping stones to the center, where the watch lamp’s ruby glow illumined a marble pedestal. A stone tablet lay on the pedestal. “Is that the Heir’s Tablet?”

“The thing itself.”

It behooved a sovereign to be specific when he scribed the name of the one who would succeed him, should he die without issue. Soren had written the
Duc de Journia
, who at the time was Armand de Savin, the white-haired Chancellor of Sabria. By the time Soren died, the Duc de Journia was the late chancellor’s twenty-one-year-old son, Philippe, whom Soren detested.

“I thought it would be locked away,” I said, astonished, “so no one could tamper with it.”

“No need,” said Ilario, from below me. “Stretch your hand out over the water.”

When I did so, the water began to churn. Swirling, burbling, the dark flood quickly swelled upward toward the lip of the font, swamping the half columns.

I snatched my hand away, and the heaving water calmed. The residue of massive enchantment settled on my skin like spiderwebs, smelling of musty leaves and mildew.

“Happens it requires a few drops of an anointed king’s blood to prevent all that folderol,” said my companion. “And if a person gets swept off the stepping stones into the water, a hellacious clamor breaks out in the temple, and people come running and pull you out half drowned, and you think some pompous temple aide is going to slap you into one of these cells for the rest of your life, though you just wanted to get a look. . . .”

Ilario’s rueful expression—and the image of a lanky young boy’s dripping humiliation—elicited an unexpected laugh. But I was quickly sobered by a serious question that should have been the first out of my mouth when my royal cousin handed me this mess.

“Lord Ilario, whose name is scribed on that tablet? Since the boy died . . .”

Prince Desmond had died seven long years previous, and three more babes had failed since. Even as the distraught queen grew more reclusive, the suspicion grew that the sad lady was cursed and Philippe should be rid of her. No matter how devotedly my cousin believed his wife would yet produce a living heir, I could not imagine Philippe abandoning his beloved Sabria to the closest male of the Savin line, the near-illiterate Conte Parnasse.

“No one can pry it out of him,” said Ilario. “After Catalin was stillborn, he came down here and scribed a new name, but he told no one
whose
name. Not even Eugenie. He said only that she didn’t need to fret; that if the worst befell, his heir would be a person of strong and noble heart, who would care for her as his own sister . . .”

He tapped one elegant toe. Then he huffed, sighed deeply, and climbed the black stone steps to stand at my side. I waited, grasping that his thought was not quite ended.

“And then, a month later, on the anniversary of Desmond’s death—that would be not quite two years ago now—Philippe’s horse went mad and threw him. Broke his leg and three ribs. Damned bad luck. I offered to fetch him a charm from Fedrigo, but, as always, he scoffed.”

I gaped at Ilario, who in turn stared at the tablet, its secret barricaded with enchantments I doubted any mage of our day could duplicate. And I wondered about luck and coincidence and if, perhaps, my royal cousin’s certainty that his son’s deathday would bring him mortal danger was based on more than a single incident. “Have there been other unfortunate occurrences on Prince Desmond’s deathday?”

“The year prior to the mad horse, their daughter, Catalin Jolie, was stillborn.”

Holy saints! When Philippe named a new heir, had the queen been relieved that the burden of Sabria’s future did not rest in her womb, or had she been angry that her husband’s throne would pass to someone she did not know, as if he had lost faith in her? Or perhaps . . . Rumor said Queen Eugenie had first brought mages to Castelle Escalon when the little prince lay dying.