The Spirit Lens (47 page)

The adept held out his hand for Dante’s staff. Dante thumped his staff on the floor, and flame burped from its head. “My ancille goes where I do, Mage Inquisitor. If I’m forbid to carry it into the Bastionne, then you must do so yourself. ’Tis less stable than I would like. My finer skills remain imperfect.” No one would mistake his statement for either apology or humility.

“The inquisitor will carry it, Master,” said the adept. The inquisitor, naturally, did not speak.

Dante propped the staff against the wall and did not protest as the adept draped him in the shapeless gown of deepest blue, weighted with iron rings. Nor did he lash out as the adept dropped the heavy hood over his head. He wanted to, though. As clearly as blood pulsed in my veins, I experienced a smothered rage—a desire to break the cocky underling who led him, blind and suffocating, into the passage—and something else. . . .

I shook off the fancy. Dante would not fear the Camarilla.

The inquisitor spent a goodly time examining the markings on Dante’s staff, before laying a tentative finger on it. First one, then another; then he lifted it gingerly and departed. The door slammed behind him.

Not overeager to venture out of my hiding place, I pulled out the little book. Its binding of faded, brittle leather was crudely stitched, its lettering unreadable, the fore-edge of the pages ragged and stained. An oily residue of spent enchantment made me grip it fiercely. Yet it remained enspelled. I opened to the first thin page. Though scribed in familiar characters—Sabrian script of approximately two centuries earlier—the words formed no familiar language. Indeed, all characters but the few fixed at a time by my eyes’ focus shifted their order at random.

Magical encryption, then. But I needed no magic to unravel the book’s origin. Inked on the opening page was a pair of dueling scorpions, the blazon of the Mondragoni.

Of a sudden, Dante’s good humor and promises of revelation lost flavor, as will tender shoots and leaves left too long in summer sun. Always in my life, I had desired to know everything of magic. Yet for days after we first stored the Mondragoni texts in Seravain’s vault, squeamish sensibility had prevented me pulling them out. Eventually I had yielded to temptation. Finding the pages locked away by the Gautieri wards, I’d convinced myself I was relieved. Now I saw the truth. I wanted to learn everything, even from the decadent masters of Eltevire.

Stuffing the little volume back into my doublet, I crossed to the window, careful not to be seen. On the carriageway, Guillam, the stableman, had brought up four horses. The Camarilla adepts aided the three shrouded Witnesses to mount. Prefect Angloria rode the fourth beast, and the inquisitors and adepts formed up marching ranks behind her. A wave from Angloria, and the bizarre procession moved around the corner of the palace, out of view.

The Camarilla warrant named Dante as informant, not accused. A relief, that. Unless they provoked him to some revelation of his ideas or his true power, he should be held only a short time.

I had not asked Dante what I should do to avoid being killed were I to find him “in trance” again, nor why an interruption should cause such rage. Nor had I inquired how, in Heaven’s truth, he had summoned me to his side. . . .
barriers inside you . . . anger stiffens them.
Certainly I had been angry that morning, with Dante, with Philippe, with Michel de Vernase, with the world that used such people as Maura and Edmond de Roble-Margeroux as pawns in terrible, dangerous games. It had taken the mage more than an hour to fetch me to protect this little book.

But how had he done it? I stared at my hand, pocked with the burn scars he had soothed and dressed after the fire on the
Swan
, as if it had taken on a wholly unfamiliar shape
.
Never in all my studies had I come upon a formula to embed enchantment into a man’s very blood and flesh. Into his mind.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

6 CINQ 19 DAYS UNTIL THE ANNIVERSARY

“
Y
ou said twelve of fifteen elements.” Jacard frowned at my sketch of Dante’s circumoccule. We sat beside the tall case ments at the end of the mages’ passage on the morning after the Camarilla had taken the three away. “It’s none of my doing that Dante was hauled off before you could get him out. I risked my career.”

“Sorry. Ten are all I can remember. Truly I appreciate your help, Adept, and as soon as I’ve a chance to consult my journal pages, I’ll let you know the rest.” Not that better instructions would do him any good without Dante’s power to seal and charge the thing. So deeply shaken were my magical certainties, I could no longer assert that any particle embedded in the ring affected the mage’s enchantments in any fashion whatsoever.

My skin buzzed with lack of sleep. I had not dared return to my apartments or be seen in public lest someone decide to enshroud me in dark wool and iron and haul me off to the Bastionne. I’d spent the entire previous day in a rose arbor, watching the carriageway for Dante’s return. The night I’d spent huddled in the summerhouse, hoping to see a light in his window and trying to decide if the thoughts and fears and urgencies in my head were my own or a product of his enchantment. No enlightenment had been forthcoming. At dawn, rabid for news, I had given up and set out for the east wing. On my way to Dante’s apartments, I had run straight into Jacard.

He folded the page and slipped it into his sleeve. “Acolyte Nadine’s uncle is a house mage at the Bastionne. He hasn’t been home since yesterday, but he sent her father a message that Gaetana’s assistants are not to be summoned. And if hers aren’t, the rest of us aren’t likely. You’re something of a special case I suppose, with this ‘holy mission’ to root out treachery, but I’ve not heard your name mentioned. They’d surely have come for you already if they thought you had something useful to say.”

“That seems good news,” I said. “Perhaps none of this is as serious as it seems.” But it was, of course. Too many hours had passed. Camarilla inquisitors did not indulge in drawing room chatter with their held Witnesses.

“Head up,” whispered Jacard. “Someone’s coming.”

“Let me pass. Let me pass.” A disheveled Mage Orviene swept down the passage toward his grandly carved door, drawing acolytes and adepts behind him as a comet leads its tail of stars. “I must sit in my own chair. But follow me in, all of you. You must hear what I’ve to report. And by your hope of Heaven, recall that your lips are sealed by the oaths you have sworn to the Camarilla.”

“I’ll find you later.” Jacard jumped up and joined his fellows, eight or nine of them crowding through the doorway after Orviene.

I slipped onto the back of the group as if I belonged, remaining nearest the door.

Orviene’s expansive great chamber vied with Ilario’s in overblown elegance, if not so obviously in cost. The mage sagged into a cushioned chair, carved in the shape of a rampant lion, motioning for one of his acolytes to light a man-high lamp of fluted brass. Though the hour was early on a bright day, thick draperies covered the chamber’s sole window.

The lamplight only clarified the mage’s out-of-character turnout. His chin-length hair, customarily pomaded and combed, straggled on a soiled collar. His skirted doublet hung unbuttoned; his meticulously tailored sleeves flapped about his wrists. But his round face carried worse news, his complexion gray, his eyes dull and uncertain.

“Mage Gaetana was beheaded by the Camarilla Magica at the first hour of morning watch . . .”

The news slammed my chest like a battering ram. Warning, denial, horror, guilt exploded in my head and heart. Only with difficulty could I follow the rest of his words.

“. . . unholy practice . . . transference . . . a former adept in her charge . . . and an innocent girl . . . murder . . . confession after intensive questioning . . .”

I had killed her, as clearly as day followed night. As coldly heedless as a child who burns an insect to see how it reacts, I had set the Camarilla on her.
Intensive questioning.
Holy angels, Father Creator . . . I’d never have written the letter had I truly doubted the woman’s involvement in terrible crimes. I’d wanted her out of play, prevented from tormenting anyone else. Yet I had expected a prolonged investigation, time to be certain. And what of Dante? Saints defend him.

“. . . shock . . . dismay . . . private quest for arcane knowledge . . . thankfully, no evidence of collaboration . . .”

No sense. No sense. No sense.
Even amid this nauseating self-reproach, the
agente confide
in my head bullied me with reason. Why had they not come for the lunatic who had written the accusing letter? Great gods, I had signed my name. And these young colleagues were inexperienced, yes, most of them new to court, overawed at their privilege to study with the queen’s own. Those I recognized were not Seravain’s elite, to be sure, but capable. Yet they had not been asked for their own observations. That must mean the Camarilla possessed other evidence implicating Gaetana.

“. . . who worked for her are dismissed without prejudice. I shall personally write recommendations. For my own self and my staff, we must wait to see how Her Majesty reacts to the news as the prefects present it to her. Information may be curtailed or held entirely in confidence. Such scandal so near her royal person! Truth be told, I am tempted to resign.”

Her Majesty. When the world learned the queen’s mage had been executed for illicit magic, Philippe would be forced to act—to declare his support or arrest her. And if he declared his wife innocent of murder and corruption, he must have the truth to offer his people instead.

The Concord de Praesta had been wrought to prevent civil and magical life from swallowing each other. It ensured that magical practitioners were subject to a law that took into account the particular demands, requirements, and possibilities of their deeds, and it ensured that those lacking magical talents would never be judged by those with talents so alien to their own. Only the Camarilla could judge matters of magical practice. Only the crown could judge civil matters. On the day I had been admitted to the study of magic’s secrets, I had sworn the oath to uphold the Camarilla’s prerogatives as set by the Concord, believing fully in their value. No argument had yet convinced me otherwise. I had to pursue my own part of this investigation, trusting Philippe to give me time to bring him the truth.

Shaken to the marrow, bursting with questions to which I had no answers, I slid round the door frame into the passage before anyone noticed me. With such alarm and upheaval, none present were looking beyond their own futures. I sped lightly to Dante’s door and slipped inside, only to receive another jolt. One might imagine a herd of elephants had arrived before me.

The contents of the worktables had been scattered from one end of the room to the other. Every box had been opened. Every bottle emptied. Every book unstacked. Every paper . . . I spun in place. Not a paper was to be seen. Dante had predicted the Camarilla would come looking for the book. Better they than Michel de Vernase.

It was tempting to run to Ilario. More than four-and-twenty hours Dante had been held. Yet even were we willing to risk our partnership, Ilario, a man outside the magical community, could not intervene with Camarilla business, even to ask for news, nor could his half sister or the king. And I was oath-sworn not to speak of Camarilla business to an outsider.

And so I sat for a while in the midst of the destruction, worried, guilty, and wholly unsure what to do next. I did not so much doubt Gaetana’s guilt, as wonder at the circumstances of her “confession.” Haste implied a wish to avoid probing too deep, a wish to hide unpleasant truth, a wish to contain and conceal. What if someone in the Camarilla itself wanted Gaetana’s testimony cut short? How likely was it that Gaetana and Michel de Vernase worked alone? And why, why, why did they keep Dante so long?

Near midday, unable to sit still any longer, I began to tidy up the mess, blotting oils and inks, stacking books, and gathering the scattered leaves and scraps, the beads of coral, jade, and lapis, and slips of varied metals onto a sheet. As the afternoon waned, I collected the emptied bottles and jars, settled on the floor beside the heaped sheet, and began to sort the materials into their proper containers. The sun slid westward. . . .

 

 

“SO WHEN DO WE RIDE?”

I jerked upright to the chinking clatter of glass and stone. The world had gone black, save for the soft glow of a white staff.

“Dante! God’s teeth!” I jumped to my feet, the sorting debris showering to the floor. “Are you all right? Is it true about Gaetana? What, in the god’s creation, did they do to you? What did they ask? So many hours . . .”

I could not slow the spill of questions, even as he moved away, raising his staff high enough to cast its soft light on the jumbled cupboards and filthy floor.

“A blighted mess here. I presume you did not cause it.”

“Certainly not.” How could he speak of such trivialities? “Dante, tell me about Gaetana.”

“The Camarilla killed her for bleeding the girl. She confessed to it.”

A statement of fact, entirely dispassionate. I expected rage—or gloating, perhaps—anything but glassy calm.

“And what of you, Master? What did they ask? Did they use . . . extraordinary methods?”

“I am neither dead nor accused.” He nudged the broken night jar with his toe, then strolled across the room and touched his staff to the wall. A spike of red light split the dark, and the bedchamber doorway stood revealed. He picked up an emptied rucksack from a worktable and carried it into the bedchamber.

“Shall we get a start on the morning?” he called through the opened doorway. “I’ve no wish to field idiot questions from slobbering ladies-in-waiting or devious assistants. The moon’s just past full, and I’ve been told the road to Vernase is a good one.”

The suggestion surprised me. Dante hated riding, and night travel could be slow and unsettling. But, then, perhaps he was as anxious to be away as I was. Perhaps he dared not speak of the Bastionne inside the palace, where listening ears were everywhere.