The Spirit Lens (68 page)

Until Ilario’s Grand Exposition, and excepting the occasional coronation or royal wedding, the Rotunda and Great Hall had stood quiet and empty for more than three centuries. No longer.

Sitting on a bench placed for viewing the great pendulum, I watch wisps of light dance over my head. The glimmers are not sunbeams, for the sun failed more than an hour since. Nor are they some reflection of the passage lamps kept lit for the pendulum engineer and guards making rounds. Those lamps are few and hooded so that their weak, steady light falls on the floor.

No, these floating threads of blue, purple, and green can be seen everywhere in the Great Hall and Rotunda, though chiefly in the dome, occasionally illuminating a saintly hand or angel wing or dark-rimmed eye. Staring will not capture them, as they manifest themselves just as the eye gives in and blinks.

The whispers are just as elusive. I’m not sure anyone else has heard them, though every palace conversation since Prince Desmond’s deathday speaks of palace hauntings. No one comes here alone anymore except for me, and even a companion’s breathing would drown them out. But after so many nights, I know they are getting louder. I dread the day I’ll be able to distinguish words.

What disturbs me more is the smell: cedar and juniper, dry grass and old leaves, touched with moisture and laced with a faint tinge of rot. I cannot find a source for it save in my memories of Eltevire and dying.

Dante has caused this.

One evening as I sat here, sensing these changes, watching the lights dance in the vault and spread into the Great Hall, I recalled something he had said just after the Exposition: “I’ve always considered lenses more fascinating than prisms.”

And so I considered lenses. Which led me to think of spyglasses. And of spectres and of perimeters that might identify those who crossed. But magical perimeters could also serve as an enclosure for spellwork—a great circumoccule—a boundary. And if magic rose from every aspect of nature and not solely from the blood of a practitioner, then how much power could be derived from the keirna of seven hundred onlookers opening themselves to magic in a temple that had witnessed a thousand years of the human and divine?

Thus I began to think of the Rotunda as a great lens, and all of us who’d sat here on that night as peering through to see . . . what? Splinters fractured from the world we knew, as the rainbow colors of the Royal Astronomers were fractured from white light? Or had we been given a view into another place altogether?

These ruminations but affirm my decision to remain at Castelle Escalon and discover the truth. To keep watch on the one who made this happen. In the queen’s service I can stand close by her mage. And if Dante and his allies are lulled into believing my uncomfortable service to the king finished, all the better. No matter that my inerrant perception of righteousness is flawed, I see now what I am. I believe I am destined . . . meant . . . to stand against those who seek chaos. Against him.

Reaching into my boot, I pull out a heavy disk of silver and flip it high overhead. The coin catches the light of the lamp as it spins, twirling, glinting, displaying its two faces. For the span of a few heartbeats it hangs in the air, then drifts slowly to the floor.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carol Berg
is a former software engineer with degrees in mathematics from Rice University and computer science from the University of Colorado. Since her 2000 debut, her epic fantasy novels have won multiple Colorado Book Awards, the Geffen Award, the Prism Award, and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature. Carol lives in the foot-hills of the Colorado Rockies with her Exceptional Spouse, and on the Web at
www.carolberg.com
.