The Spirit Lens (36 page)

“I’ve no secrets,” I mumbled into the floor. “Blood’s sour. Can’t conjure a dewdrop.”

“We’ll see to that.” Somewhere behind my back a blade left a stinging track across my palm.

“Sante Marko, defend!” I bucked and twisted.

“Merle! Get off him!” The voice came from above my head. Heavy boots pounded the steps, skipping the last few to drop hard on the floor close by. “We want a body left to question.”

“Look at his mark, Quernay. See what’s fallen into our lap.”

The bigger man’s noisy breathing soon placed him close. Cool, hard hands forced my clenched fist open. Belying any implication that his object was mercy, he twisted my hand to expose its back, then gripped my bloody chin, and used it to wrench my face up into the lantern light. My tight-bound arms prevented my body following all the way.

“So, who is he?” Quernay’s broad face swam in the glare—wiry black hair, wide brow, chin like an anvil. He was none but the temple reader from the shrine, not so friendly anymore. Above him a rectangle of night marked the entry through the temple floor. No illusion masked the opening from below.

“Don’t know the mark exactly, but I’m sure I’ve seen it. It’s a good mark, I know. He’s blood, for certain, and we need—” A vicious thwack of flesh on bony flesh silenced Merle’s views.

“The Aspirant will decide what we need,” growled Quernay. “While I fetch the supplies, you get this one into the hole and yourself off to the bridge. Wouldn’t want that swordsman to lack a proper welcome should he come looking for his sorcerer.”

“Told you, I’m no confounded sorcerer,” I croaked. “And my master won’t come for me. He’s off to Abidaijar to vow himself to the Saints Awaiting. He’ll ne’er be back to Sabria.
I’ll
ne’er be back do you let me go. Please, I’d no intent to trespass or blaspheme. I didn’t know. . . .”

Quernay shoved me into an awkward heap. A better view did naught to soothe a rising panic. A few metres away, between me and a whitewashed wall lined with cluttered benches and shelves, a wooden armchair had been bolted to the floor. Leather straps were affixed to its flat arms and the thick, narrow plank that served as its back. Black splatters stained chair, straps, and floor, as well as a fire-glazed urn that stood next the thing. Old blood. Everywhere. Blessed saints . . .

The excitable Merle did not argue. He just watched and quivered as Quernay clambered up the stair and through the entry. Then, exposing his pointed teeth in a grin that made my skin creep, he lashed an arm-length truncheon to his wrist with a leather thong. “Need some practice,” he said, raising the club. “Need to make you tender for the blades.”

I thrashed and yelled, trying to dodge his precisely placed blows. I butted my head and shoulders against his ankles and slammed my bound legs into his, hoping to trip up his dancing steps. My antics only made him laugh the louder.

Logic screamed that Merle’s virulence made no sense. Such reasoned brutality arose from fanatical dispositions, as with the Kadr witchlords who viewed those without their particular power for magic as prey. Or it stemmed from personal bias, passion-wrought grudges over property or family, or overstretched fathers whose profound disappointments prompted them to slay their failed sons. Merle didn’t even know me.

Trussed as I was, defensive postures were futile. All too soon, I lay limp as a dead fish, logic as impossible as resistance. At one distinctive instant, my temple slammed against the bolted legs of the chair, and the world went dark. . . .

“I am no one,” I whispered as he slapped me awake again. Spittle and blood had pooled under my cheek. “Nothing. My blood is weak. Please—”

Merle didn’t seem to hear. Or perhaps he didn’t care. Sweating, roaring in high spirits, he took his brutal pleasure. To my sorrow he did not kill me.

Eventually he dragged me into a small, dark room, redolent with pungent scent, and shoved me to my knees. By the time he had fixed my wrist bindings to an overhead loop, drawing my cinched arms so high and tight behind my back as to bend my head near the floor, I could not have told him my true name, much less where I was or why I’d come.

 

 

ABSOLUTE DARKNESS. A PUNGENT SCENT that roiled my stomach. A shearing, lacerating agony in my skull. The viciously cramped rack of my upper body that left every breath a struggle. A paralyzing terror of what was to come.

As the lightless hours flowed one into the other, indistinguishable, a bitter litany beat in time with my stuttering heart.
Inexcusable to let them take you. Blind. Inattentive. Caught up in selfish dreams. Unworthy.
Eventually, inevitably, a warm flood soaked my breeches, firing my skin with shame and my soul with humiliation.

Unable to sit or recline, I tried once to ease the strain of my position by standing, but my wobbling knees refused to hold me. The resulting collapse dropped my entire weight on my overstrained shoulders, near wrenching my arms from their sockets. My cry reflected sharply from the enclosing walls, a knife blade prying at my cracked skull. Sobbing, desperate, I scrabbled aching knees back under me, and there I remained, vowing to every divine being never to move again.

Blackness swelled and flowed, puddled and pooled. Overwhelming. Enveloping. Cocooned in silence, my mind had difficulty holding to any sensible course. Incapable of sleep, I dreamed of faces: my dead father, whom I did not mourn; Kajetan, living, whom I did; Philippe, who had graced me with his confidence; kind, graceful, intelligent Maura, whom I had determined to trust. Ideas, imaginings, and a few small threads of logic floated past me in the dark, like coins and stones on Eltevire’s strange pond. And from time to time, a clearly formed conclusion would waggle its tail, troutlike, and attract my notice.

Materials native to this place refused obedience to the prescriptions of natural science; materials brought from elsewhere behaved themselves, the sole exception being Gruchin’s coin. Perhaps Gruchin, the not-assassin, the mule, had been bled here. Perhaps his lucky coin had been in his pocket or his boot when he was subjected to the torments of Eltevire. What kind of spellwork could ensorcel silver—the perfect amalgam of the five elements—beyond the bounds of nature, yet leave no residue?
The place where it all began.

These people were going to bleed me until my soul and body shriveled like a grape left too long in the sun. Another strained inhalation. Another deluge of cold sweats. I shivered uncontrollably.

A small victory when I identified the aroma exuded by the walls. Camphor bespoke the rare whitebud laurel. Whitebud laurel, and walls so close I could feel the reflections of my own breath, bespoke a sorcerer’s hole. Lined with cypress, inlaid with camphor laurel, the exterior locked and banded with iron, such windowless closets were the single enclosure ever discovered that could completely frustrate the use of magic. If my posture had allowed me a full breath, I might have laughed at the irony of such a space wasted on me.

Another fish twitched its tail: Perhaps Merle and Quernay were actually Goram and Vichkar, the blood-thirsty companions of holy legend who had blighted history by perpetrating its first joint and mutual murder. Perhaps demonic spirits could be reborn to do mischief, just as the saints sacrificed their heavenly sojourn to come back and aid sorry humankind.

I dismissed this fishy theory quickly. I could not imagine these two as bosom friends who loved their mothers, as legend bespoke.

Father Creator, how had I come to this? What fool’s illusions of purpose had led me so beyond my safe library? Not mother’s love. My mother doused herself with lavender scent and tormented her serving girl. Since my father’s death, she would dissolve into hysterics whenever she saw me.

A scraping noise heralded a thin, vertical band of gray light that split the wall in front of me. Despite its painful brilliance, I inhaled the light, longing to be a lumenfish, able to drink in the sun’s rays, only to release them again in the long dark of sea nights. “D-did you love your m-mother, Quernay?” I croaked through chattering teeth, feeling madly brave. “Are you a f-fish?”

When he failed to answer, I ventured a glance upward, and near pissed myself again. The black-gowned form was not Quernay. Taller, surely, but less bulky overall, the newcomer wore a leather mask formed to a male’s likeness. Severe in its perfectly proportioned beauty, serene in its superiority, the walnut-hued face might have been that of the Pantokrator himself or one of his warrior angels . . . or perhaps the Pantokrator’s chief adversary. The
Book of Creation
named the Souleater the most beautiful of the fallen. Ophelie’s leech had worn a mask.

“Demon get! Merle’s left him pulp!” So Quernay was here, too. “Best send the lackwit back to the city, lord, else he’ll have us all dead in our beds.”

Back to the city
. . . Visions of imprisonment in a crate near stilled my heart until I sorted out that he spoke of mad, wolfish Merle, not me.

The silent visitor squeezed through the slotlike doorway, built purposefully narrow to slow an imprisoned sorcerer’s escape.

“I’ve a guess this one will be too stubborn to die on us.” The throaty whisper crawled into my soul, quiet like a spider. Gloved fingers lifted my chin. With the light behind, the mask’s eye slits revealed naught but tarry voids. The thought came to me that a demon returned to the world might wear such a mask to hide his corruption. “How did you find me?”

Chilled and sick, I could summon no mettle to control my shaking. I clung to my tale. “I am nothing,” I mumbled through swollen lips. “No one. Failed. A pilgrim.”

“Let me be more specific,” said the Aspirant, low and harsh. “I believe I am addressing a very particular
no one
. Did your royal kinsman send you here, librarian?”

I had thought I could get no colder or sicker. “R-royal? N-not even my m-master—”

He allowed my head to drop, launching new bolts of lightning through my neck and shoulders and catapulting my head into such throbbing agony as could obliterate reason.

“Hear me, failure.” He ground the whispers into my ear, into my skull, into my soul. “I am Philippe de Savin-Journia’s worst nightmare, and I
will
know his purposes. And lest you maintain some hope that you’ll not be required to answer, know that we have eliminated your lordly companion—not much of a swordsman after all.”

Eliminated?
Dead? Ilario?

“Alas, our eager Merle dispatched him before he could tell us all we wished to know.”

He might have been telling me the Souleater had launched his legions against a dragonfly, a mosquito, or a luminous moth flitting about a lamp. For one eternal instant I teetered on the precipice, refusing to believe it.

A sodden lump dropped to the floor beneath my drooping head—a fine leather glove, stained with soot and blood. Unmistakably Ilario’s glove. Unmistakable, too, that a severed hand remained inside it. My spirit plummeted into the vastness of horror.

“You are quite alone, Portier de Savin-Duplais. You are nothing. Failed. And we have all the time in the world to learn your secrets.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

31 QAT 30 DAYS UNTIL THE ANNIVERSARY

T
he Aspirant and his henchman left me alone, suspended in the silent dark, to contemplate their promises. The walls of a sor cerer’s hole were purposely built thick, lest magical keywords penetrate and quicken a prisoner’s balked spellwork. And the hole was purposely left dark. Spark was the single element required for every spell; thus a prisoned sorcerer was stripped of anything that carried spark and was allowed no glimmer of light.

Yet even the painful void in which I existed could not compare to that within—guilt and anger and a sadness that left my spirit aching beyond any physical hurt. Ilario: illogical, foolish, preening, silly, but clever in his way, and generous and honorable, and so earnestly devoted. A man of scarlet finery, ruffled lace, and silly charms and elixirs, of incessant babbling, now forever stilled, leaving a sorry, sober vacancy in the converse of the world. Even the dread of bleeding could not divert my grieving.

Hours passed. My extremities lost all sensation. Back, neck, shoulders, and head felt riven by hot irons. Pain and grief festered, and as the press bears down on the vineyard’s harvest, so did the waste and wrongness of Ilario’s death render a familiar liquor—disappointment, failure, guilt, and self-loathing—as if my father had taken his knife to me again. Back then, despair had flavored death with sweetness, and at three-and-twenty, with half my blood left puddled on my parents’ floor beside my father’s corpse and my dreams of magic, its intoxication had near made an end of me. Now, as then, its seductive aroma promised release.

But this time, the stakes were higher than my incapable self.
Focus, Portier, or you’re going to betray them all—Ophelie, Lianelle, Calvino de Santo, Gruchin, Michel de Vernase, Philippe and his vision for Sabria’s glory, Ilario and his determination to seek truth. You have no leave to despair. The first lesson of your schooling: Put aside distraction. Make a plan. . . .

Escape. I had to persuade them to unbind me. That was the extent of my strategizing. Quernay arrived. Agony obliterated thought as he unhitched my arms and dragged me out.

They had lit torches in the great chamber. Firelight danced on the stone floor. I could not lift my forehead from the gritty stone. It felt as if nails had pierced my temples. I could not stop shivering. “P-please. M-my hands are numb. D-damaged, they’ll be useless. My livelihood . . .”

“Who told you how to find me?” Leather muted and distorted the soft words spoken so high above me.

“No one. I came here to test my—”

A boot, not Merle’s, nudged my bruised groin. Lightning speared my gut. The floor squirmed underneath my face, as I drew up my knees. Summoning my last modicum of pride, I did not vomit on the Aspirant’s boot.

“Who told you?” His toe tapped not five centimetres from my nose. “You are not clever enough to discover us on your own.”