The Spirit Lens (64 page)

As the party dissolved, I gripped Captain de Segur’s hand firmly. “Sir, you are a credit to the Guard Royale. As you witnessed but a few hours ago, this murderous Fedrigo’s infamy ranks second only to that of de Vernase himself in the king’s mind.” That was most certainly true.

“Then we’d best make sure this man’s the one we’re supposed to be hunting, hadn’t we, sonjeur?” said the captain, his syllables crisp.

“Certainly,” I said, then held my breath for a moment as a bright blue cloak vanished up Fish Lane.
Godspeed, sweet lady.
An iron yoke slipped from my spirit, leaving me with an odd certainty: Maura would be all right.

 

 

MY AWARENESS OF ENCHANTMENT GREW stronger the farther into the alley the young soldier led me. With every step, it galled my spirit worse, grinding, gnawing, making me want to retreat.

Never had my sense suggested a rightness or wrongness about spells it detected. It merely signaled that one existed and registered its relative strength. Dante’s door wards bit, but that was the
effect
of the spell, and had naught to do with my perception of its existence. In the same way, magical residues presented as more pleasurable or less, but I had never correlated a pleasurable sensation with a worthwhile end or vice versa. But this enchantment clamored evil. Whoever had created it, Fedrigo or other, was someone to be wary of.

The fugitive had been trapped at the blind end of the alley—the back of a ramshackle warehouse, flanked by a tall fence and a deserted house. Face down in the weedy corner, the large man bucked and thrashed, while two soldiers sat on his back, one of them attempting to bind the prisoner’s ankles. A young officer held a lantern.

“Captain de Segur sent me to identify the fugitive,” I said.

“He ought to have sent more hands to hold the toadeater,” said one of the soldiers, a burly man whose knees clamped the prisoner’s waist and whose fist snarled the prisoner’s hair. His own head looked to have been scraped on the splintered fence. “Or mayhap an iron to crush his skull.”

“Hold the light down here,” I said, and I crouched where I could see the captive’s face.

The prisoner growled at me fiercely, but I could see enough. His dark beard was trimmed closer than last time I’d seen him, and other men could have a neck the same width as their heads, but I would never mistake the nose that looked as if it had been broken ten times.

“I do believe you’ve earned your king’s favor, gentlemen. Please sit him up. And you”—I nodded to the young soldier who’d fetched me—“notify Captain de Segur that this is indeed the man we sought. Remind him that His Majesty wished to be notified the moment we found him.” The guide sped away.

“Sitting him up” was a violent business. In the end, the two guardsmen had to bind Fedrigo’s thick hands and truss knees, arms, and ankles before they could prop him against the warehouse wall.

“What vileness were you about tonight, Adept?” I said. “Bleeding more children? Or delivering another murdered soldier to your king?” In answer, he hawked bloody spittle in my face.

“We’ve not got a word out of him,” said the young officer, cradling his own left wrist to his chest.

I wrenched open the adept’s sleeves and shirt, but found no evidence of transference. “So, unlike Gruchin or Ophelie de Marangel, you are a willing conspirator,” I said. “Gaetana’s creature. The Aspirant’s creature.”

He grinned, fresh blood staining his teeth and leaking out the corners of his battered mouth.

“Where is Michel de Vernase? And what’s this spellwork hanging about you like a dead man’s stink?”

He widened his eyes like an innocent child accused. He was not afraid, though. True, Fedrigo did not know of Dante’s perimeter. And we could not use it at trial to link Fedrigo with Edmond’s body without revealing Dante’s role in the investigation. But we could surely roust the door guards who helped him carry in his “sickly kinsman” wrapped in purple. Why was he not worried?

I snapped my attention to the officer nursing his damaged wrist. “Your messenger implied the prisoner posed a danger to the king. In what way?”

The young greville flushed. “He was lurking on a balcony overlooking Market Way—the place where it gets narrow going round Sweeper’s Rock. Looked as if he were going to drop a rock right down on the king’s head. Turned out it was only this book.”

The officer held the lantern high. A splintered board protruded from the fence as if Fedrigo had been trying to rip an escape route through it. An open book lay over the tip of the board, as if a reader had marked his place. The large, tattered volume—seven or eight centimetres thick, its wide pages limp with the damp—drooped from the narrow slat.

“This was the
weapon
he held on the balcony?”

“Aye. Ready to drop it over the side, till Orin kicked open the door and took him down. He never got a chance. Though it’s not exactly a man’s weapon, is it, pig snout?” The biggest soldier slammed a boot into Fedrigo’s side.

Despite the blow that pumped more blood from his mouth and left him slumped awkwardly, Fedrigo grinned again, sly and wicked. Eager.

I sat on my haunches, at eye level with the book. Perhaps my perception of magic had been stripped and clarified back in the Rotunda, just like my other senses, for, as sure as my name, I knew this book held more death in it than any weapon I’d ever come near.

Thwarted at his game of magical chaos when we destroyed Eltevire and Gaetana, Michel de Vernase had retaliated by eliminating Philippe’s heir. But the king had surely not found time to scribe a new name on the tablet in the crypt. His death would ravage Sabria. This time Michel meant to kill.

“Has anyone touched it?” I said. “How did it get in this position?”

The three soldiers looked at one another. “None of us had aught to do with it.”

Fedrigo’s eyes flicked from me to the book and back again.

“In the fight on the balcony . . . did the book get dropped or juggled?”

Orin, the young greville with the broken wrist, had been puzzling at my questions, but this one triggered something. “It didn’t. I thought it was odd. When I came after him, I thought he’d drop it and run, but he curled up around the thing, then kicked me so hard I near took a dive off the balcony myself. By the time the others showed up, the villain had ducked out.”

And led them here. Cornered, he had tried to rip through the fence . . . then placed the book.

Carefully I lifted the worn leather cover, so thin a wind would wrinkle it like paper. Recalling the banners on the
Swan
, I shielded my eyes with my free arm, but no spits of fire leapt out. The title page read
Covenants of Civil Properties in the Demesne of Challyat
, which meant nothing to me. Naught seemed hidden between its pages. I lowered the cover gently. The board creaked.

The impact of the book itself wouldn’t kill, even with a square hit on someone’s head. But memories of the
Swan
would not leave me, nor would Ophelie’s family or Gruchin’s. “Have you a fondness for fire, Adept?”

Fedrigo shrugged, but the roused hunger on his bruised face answered all. A spark on the Market Way at its narrowest point—the oldest houses in Merona—would rage through Riverside like summer lightning in the maquis, and up the hill into the city proper.

Now his eyes were on the book, Fedrigo could not look away. A man who loved fire. A man unafraid, perhaps because he
intended
to die. Which meant we all would die . . . and Philippe, too. I had just sent him notice that one of his son’s murderers sat in this alley.
Saints defend us.

“One of you bring water,” I said, in focused urgency. “Enough to douse the book and more. Hurry!”

Fedrigo’s smug expression told me that would not be enough.

“Greville Orin, get you to the palace and find one of the mages—Dante, if you can find him, or Orviene—and get him to come here. Tell them that Duplais says there’s a challenge here that devil’s fire will not explain. And hurry. Whatever you do, make sure the king keeps away. He
must not
return to Riverside. Do you understand?”

“Understood. I’ll spread the word of more fireworks to come at the river, as well.” He set the lantern well away from Fedrigo’s feet. “Hagerd, be alert. The prisoner is your charge.”

“Good man.” Better than me to think of a way to empty Riverside without causing a riot.

I crouched near the book like a useless schoolboy, Fedrigo’s sly grin driving me to distraction. Had he some alternative trigger to ignite the book? Surely he’d not have perched it so precariously, if so. I dared not move it, but the torn plank could give way at any moment. The imagining had sweat beading my brow and the burn scars on my hands twinging.

“Did
you
work this nasty spell?” I mumbled, knowing full well Fedrigo would not answer.

But the answer came anyway. The magic that hung about the book was huge, not simple. Even I could sense so much. But Dante had called Fedrigo’s magic that darkened the Rotunda
infantile
. Darkening spell . . .
blanking spell
. . .

I pulled out the wadded loop of silk-threaded string Dante had given me and dangled it in the air. “Perhaps the one who taught you to work blanking spells is the same who ensorcelled this vile book. We’re going to discover who it is whether you speak or not. Whether you die or not.”

Fedrigo’s smirk faded. His thick neck reddened and spittle dribbled from his mouth. Perhaps his voice had been muted like Gruchin’s.

“Not a twitch,” growled Hagerd, pressing his sword tip to Fedrigo’s belly.

Gaetana hadn’t bound this spell; Michel’s vengeance had flared to murder only after Eltevire was destroyed and Gaetana dead. Nor had Fedrigo; if Fedrigo was capable of sophisticated spellwork, why would he have used something
infantile
as he deposited Edmond’s body? Certainly an experienced spellworker could bind his spells poorly if he wanted. If he had reason. If he wished to make investigators think him incapable. . . .

I twined the looped string about my fingers. And I recalled an impatient Dante poking his staff into an enclosure loop before it could be picked up—one of two loops laid side by side behind the dais in the Rotunda.

“Souleater’s bones,” I whispered. “
Orviene
taught you spellwork.” The incapable Orviene, who had somehow earned a mage’s collar. So kind he was . . . so concerned for his poor missing adept. Orviene had asked me if Ilario might know why Fedrigo had gone to the docks on the day the adept was supposedly knifed, yet, when questioned, he had reported Fedrigo perpetually short of money and in the habit of gambling. Indeed, Orviene had pointed me repeatedly at Gaetana, and I, like a dotard, had followed his accusing finger. Of all men, I should have known to look harder at a fool.

Narrowing his eyes and curling his lip, the adept squirmed, and the swordsman shifted his blade to Fedrigo’s throat. The magic grated at my spirit, growing like a canker, like raw poison. Gods, where was the man with water? What if Dante refused to come?

I glared at the damnable book and imagined how Dante would proceed. He would see an overused book, smudged and worn. My enlivened senses could smell the dusty shelves where it had lain, the smoky lamps that had illuminated it, could hear the voices reading it, discussing, arguing over it.
Covenants
meant lawyers and magistrates and registrars and property disputes. Angry people had used this book. Maybe that’s why it was so tattered. None were so angry as Fedrigo, a man who burned innocents for pleasure, who would burn himself to keep his master’s secrets.

Yet those who had made the book’s pages—those who shredded the old linen, soaked and washed and pulped it, spread it in its frame, pressed and dried it—had no clue as to what might be written upon them. Paper could hold poems or stories, accounts or covenants—endless possibilities. And those who brewed the ink, and the binders and printers, for this was a printed book . . . all their labor and invention had gone into a volume destined to hold a cruel and evil spell to murder a king and fire his city. I inhaled deeply of the Riverside stench, of the fishy harbor and the dry wood of the warehouses—every sensation crisp and hard-edged and alive.

Fedrigo, scarlet-faced, growled and rocked his massive body, as I pulled off the link belt I wore over my tunic, clipped the ends together, and laid it gently around the book. He roared, even as Hagerd’s rapier bit his fleshy neck.

I grabbed a fistful of dirt and laid it atop the book, evenly so as not to upset its balance, and sat down near the warehouse wall. Closing my eyes, I built the rune in my imagining, encircling the book as it lay on the plank, incorporating everything I’d considered. Dark curling lines for the inked words, ragged white strips for the paper, rectangle for the presses . . . and before I knew it, I was painting the rune with red blotches for anger, and orange, blue, and white arrows for flame, black claws for evil intent. . . .

Fedrigo began to slam his bound feet to the ground. The soldier kicked him, and I wanted to scream at them to stop, for I felt the heat rising. Not in my flesh, but in my bones. In the part of me that understood these things, a part of me I had not visited since I was a child and felt the stir-rings of power that made me dream of magic.

I considered
coolness
,
damp
, and
stillness
, and the heaviness of dirt that could smother a fire.

Fedrigo yelled, wordless, guttural, gurgling yells. The swordsman grunted and crashed to the ground, his legs kicked out from under him. But I did not see the plank give way and the book fall, because my eyes were focused inward, where walls and barriers toppled like paper standards struck by the pendulum.