The Spirit Lens (39 page)

“Saints Awaiting, mage, you’ve no idea the dreadful frights we’ve encountered!” Ilario—the more familiar Ilario—stumbled out of the inky shadows, fumbling sword and dagger as he tried to sheathe them. “That wretched bridge was near the death of me. If Portier hadn’t got himself free of that chair and found me, I’d be a quivering—”

“Keep him on his feet, peacock. We
must
move.”

Ilario stowed his weapons, including the knife he’d loaned me. As I struggled to draw breath, he thrust a long arm under my shoulders. “How the devil are we to get him across the bridge? It’s nowhere wide enough for two. And there may be more villains than the ones Portier bashed with the lantern.”

Ilario could not have imagined how unlikely I was to remember these fabrications. Dante’s spell pressed me inevitably earthward.

“By all you name holy, keep silent, fool,” said Dante. “And hurry. This rock is riddled with unstable enchantments. We do
not
want to be here.”

The mage led us out of the village, the gleam of his staff reduced to a puddle of scarlet on the path. His urgency seemed reflected in the night air. The stars had vanished. Wind gusts threatened to knock us from our feet. A wing-spread owl swooped over our heads, shrieking.

Instead of venturing onto the worrisome bridge, we clambered down a rock shelf . . . and then another . . . and another . . . each shallower and narrower than the one before, until we were descending a crude, even-more-worrisome stair, hacked from the plateau’s rocky flank. Each step took shape in the scarlet pool of light that slopped underneath Dante’s billowing hem to settle about our feet.

I dared not take my eyes from the light. Some shallower steps could support only our heels. Some were but broken stubs, so that Ilario had to go before and help me down to the next. Some crumbled ominously beneath us. Jagged edges and sharp gravel tormented my feet, yet I was almost grateful for the lack of boots. Bare feet gave me better purchase.

The chevalier alone kept me upright. Knees like porridge, I could scarce move air in and out.

It was a madman’s descent into the abyss. Only the grazed evidence of my fumbling knuckles proved a solid wall existed on our left. On our right, the air churned like boiling tar.

Ilario jerked and waved his hand, as a shadowy shape, far too big for leaves or birds, flew in front of us. Revulsion fluttered my spirit. An icy whirlwind whipped another dark shape past and sent it howling into a gaping darkness vaster than the chasm below. My senses—who could imagine they reported faithfully?—insisted they scented dry cedar on the wind and tasted mouldering leaves of trees that had never grown on desert rock. Whisperings that were not quite words raised the hair on neck and arms, speaking hatred . . . anger . . . a gleeful fury. . . . I blessed Ilario for taking our exposed flank, and I thanked all gods that he was not the ninny he professed.

A great rumbling shivered the stair. Rocks and pebbles skittered around our feet. “Hurry!” shouted Dante above the din. “The dawn comes! Dawn is the danger.”

Though I could not understand his concern—I yearned for dawn and light—I clung to Ilario and stumbled downward. The cliff wall bulged and split. A hail of rocks bounced across the path. But no longer was it only my lungs needed forcing. My heart’s lumbering pace hobbled my feet.

When we reached a step so broad that Dante’s light did not drip off its edge, extra arms grabbed me, and the two men together dragged me through a tangle of trees—fragrant myrtle and prickling juniper, cracking limbs sticky with resin. Leafy wands slapped face and torso, as my bare feet squelched in mud and slipped on moss-slicked stones shuddering with the world’s upheaval.

“Here,” said Dante, even
his
substantial voice gone breathless. “Stow him here. We’re at the boundary. That will have to do.”

My back grazed earth and stone. I slid downward, near dissolution from the crushing weight of the world’s end. Everywhere in or on me hurt. I could not so much as twitch a finger.

In air lightened to charcoal, my bleared vision picked out the soaring bastions of Eltevire two hundred metres in front of me. “Boundary?” I wheezed, laboring to push air out as well as to draw it in. “What—?”

“Aagh!” Face twisted, Dante clapped his hands to his head. . . .

Eltevire’s heights erupted in orange, red, yellow, and green flame, a thundering, unnatural dawn that cast cliffs and weedy thicket into high relief, sounding a din of Dimios’s battle against Heaven. The earth before, beneath, and behind me heaved and bucked. Sharp reports of cracking rock heralded cascades of earth and stone. My stomach lurched. The lurid light illumined the impossible steps we had descended in the night, just in time for an avalanche to sweep them away.

Ilario dived to the earth, arms flung over his head. But Dante stood between the both of us and the disintegrating cliff, his dark hair flying in a wild wind, staff upraised. Rocks and earth rained from the sky, causing silvery glints in the air before falling short or bouncing harmlessly away, as if the mage held out a silver shield visible only when it served.

The quake stemmed from naught of nature’s work in sky or earth. Deafening, ruinous, its violence pummeled, crumbled, shattered soul and spirit, earth and flesh and bone. Such frigid fury, such visceral hatred lashed about the peripheries of Dante’s trembling shield arm that I believed Merle’s truncheon pounded me again.

After a small eternity, the rumbling quieted. One last heave, and the earth shuddered and stilled, and the residue of sorcery began to settle, an invisible dusting that stank of scorched bones.

Dante yet held, his every muscle quivering, staff gripped in a bleeding hand. “Let it go, mage,” I whispered, dragging air into my starving lungs. My head felt like rubble. “You’ve done enough, both of you. I thank—”

My weary body could not force another breath. As the rising sun blazed through the dusty length of the abyss, my senses slid back into night.

CHAPTER TWENTY

32 QAT 29 DAYS UNTIL THE ANNIVERSARY

“...
d
on’t know how he survived it. it. Besides all this lot, and the hatchwork of his chest where they bled him, I think his skull is broken. He has this lump on his head the size of an ostrich egg, and I tried to put wet compresses on it as my old nurse taught me, but there was blood everywhere, and I scarce knew where to start. Makes me queasy.”

“It was my quieting spell near killed him. Gods, why didn’t the damnable prig tell me he couldn’t breathe?”

Propped up by a boulder amid clumps of sage and nettle, I could not see the two behind me. But my ears were working well enough to hear this not-quite-whispered exchange. It sparked an extraordinary good humor. To hear Dante confess a mistake always raised a grin. Or perhaps it was merely that I was alive and in the company of exceptional friends.

We had descended into the abyssal ravine that separated Eltevire—or the broken heights where Eltevire once existed—from the highlands we’d traveled to get here. Plumes of smoke and dust drifted across the silvered sky, while fog and shadow hung thick in the bottomland. The stone bridge was gone. Not far beyond my toes, the rubble of the mountaintop had buried a forest of locust and juniper.

I carefully inflated my chest to its fullest capacity, ignoring the scabs that stretched and broke and stung under the scratchy remnants of someone’s scratchy cloak, and then sighed all that delicious air out again in thorough appreciation. My catalog of miseries had subsided. The exceptionally cold desert dawn had me shivering. A spring bubbling noisily through a tangle of marshwort roused thirst to a fever. And I had learned not to move in an untimely fashion. My head . . . gods . . . every twitch set off its hammering. But my heart paced an easy rhythm, and the cough had eased.

“You warned me you’d no healing skills, mage,” I croaked, teeth chattering. “I b-believe now.”

“You’re awake!” Ilario scrambled into view on hands and knees, bellowing his delight. “What a fright you gave us! The mage had to strip his spell away and blow into your lungs to start them up again. I feared you were dead and whatever would we tell the k—?”

“Hush, lord!” I said, flinching. Relief at living had not made me forget our circumstances.

Dante loomed over the both of us, his haggard mien little improved from my last view of him at Castelle Escalon. “None’s within hearing. And I doubt any’s coming back here.”

More evidence destroyed before we knew what it meant. But at least we had seen it.

Ilario, apparently none the worse for a night spent with the Earth-shaker, leapt to his feet and spread his arms like spindly wings. “Truly, I thought the Last Day had come and the earth would disgorge the Souleater. And you did
something
to save us, mage, for which I must profoundly thank you, but I’m not sure I can bear thinking of it again, as I’ve never been so frighted. I’ve thought since then that perhaps you caused the whole thing.”

“No, you blighted idiot, I did not cause it.” Dante’s ferocious gaze raked me stem to stern. “Portier, you must move as soon as you can. They’ve gone, but I cannot. We need to be away from here.” His agitation was profound, as was the tremor in his hands and the shadowed exhaustion that leached the life and color from his skin.

I had no wish to linger in a place where cliffs could be launched at my head. And if Dante was nervous, I most assuredly wished to be gone. “Now I can breathe, I feel like a new man,” I said, holding out my hands for assistance. “Or at least the better parts of the old one.”

My skull did not actually explode when they hauled me up. But its grinding bones seemed connected straight to my gut, which promptly revolted in humiliating fashion.

“More?” Ilario pointed at the blessed waterskin I had just drained.

“I could do with three more and a bath in yon spring,” I said, dumping the gritty dregs over my head. I smeared the droplets around my face and enjoyed the illusion of cleanliness.

“Do either of you understand what
haste
means?” Dante thrust a straight, slender branch into my hand. It was smoothed at the grip and cut to a reasonable length for a walking stick. “They
must not
see us.”

“You said they were gone!” I resisted the temptation to swing around to look back at Eltevire’s crumbled remains. Thoughts of the man in the leather mask roused a deep-rooted panic that the deep, cool shadows of the chasm did naught to soothe. “Whatever comes, he mustn’t find you with me.”

Dante’s quivering hand pushed back his hair, resting on his temple as if he suffered the same wretched head as I did. “You
heard
them? Were you able—did you recognize a voice?”

“He wore a mask and a knight’s boots. Called himself the Aspirant. But he knew Philippe had sent me.”

Dante shook his head dismissively. “Fool of a student. There are no
men
here. Now, move.”

Before I gathered his meaning, the mage was ten metres downstream. Tentatively, reluctantly, I reached out with the senses I used to detect enchantments. The much-too-cold ravine seemed to buckle and twist. The malevolent presence I had sensed on our descent the previous night was entwined with the mist, its hissing anger blended with the rill’s gurgling. Beyond the deep, cold crevices in rock and rubble yawned the deeper void I’d thought morning had dismissed. “Chevalier, please . . .”

Ilario lent me his strong shoulder again. His brow creased in question, but I devoted strength and concentration to movement. Silent, desperate, Dante swept us down the gorge like a springtime flood. I could not go as fast as he wished. The mage would race ahead, then double back to help Ilario hand me over fallen trees or boulders. Shamefully weak and wobbly at the knees, I had to fight off repeated bouts of nausea. My flesh felt riddled with maggots. The tumbled boulders seemed to crawl alongside us.

Once Ilario and I came upon Dante, shaking violently, forehead pressed to a rock, his arms flung around his head as if to block out the sights and sounds of battle. “Mage,” I whispered, not touching him, “can we help you?”

“Keep moving,” he rasped. A pocket of frigid air brushed my skin. Naught was visible, but when I blinked, a blur of color streaked through the haze like a darting fish. We moved. Eventually, Dante passed by us, leaning heavily on his staff.

By midday, Dante awaited Ilario and me in the glaring slot of sunlight that signaled the eastern end of the gorge. The shadows had paled, the fog dispersed. My senses no longer detected anything unnatural.

“Portier,” said Ilario quietly, while we were yet a goodly distance from the mage. A tortoise could have outrun me just then. “Our story. We need to agree.”

“You heard me call and blundered into the hole. Despite my injuries and bindings, I freed myself of the chair and felled Quernay with the lantern. Is that right?”

He nodded. “I merely helped you up the steps and out. Simple enough.”

“I dislike lying to Dante,” I said. “My mind’s a sieve where he is concerned. Besides, he’s our partner. I believe him honorable.” He had saved our lives the previous night, and just now shielded us from . . . something.

For the five-hundredth time, I stumbled and Ilario’s strong hand kept me upright. “This is my
life
, Portier. I beg you honor my choice.”

“If the mage somehow got into that cellar and saw the chair, he’ll catch us out. He’ll know I could never have loosed the straps.”

“But certainly you managed it. By the time I had done for the hairy brute, checked the cells, and retrieved my crocodile charm, you had broken free of the straps. You were just out of your head.”

“All right, all right. I’ll play.” Naught could ever repay his help. But who’d have thought he could slip so effortlessly back into his idiot self after the journey we’d just experienced? “I owe you my life, lord. You needn’t fear my loose tongue.”

Eyes fixed on the rocky path, he inclined his head. “Now will you tell me what in the name of Heaven just happened? I’ve a notion I just crawled out of a dung heap.”