The Daemon Prism, page 2
I didn’t plead with her to stay. She knew my arguments.
Ten years previous, a natural philosopher named Arrange had formulated a theory that the energies of objects in motion are invariant, transferred from one to another as the objects interact in the physical world. The concept translated well into the sphere of enchantments. Magical energies, the stuff of life, thought, dream, and enchantment, every bit as observable to those who had the sense for it, could not simply evaporate, either. Drained from one place, they must end up somewhere else.
If Anne and Portier were right about their experiences at Mont Voilline, then our mystery was far greater than Ixtador. The energies created by stripping the essence from human souls must be inconceivably huge, and we had not the least idea where those drained from Ixtador had gone. The universe was unhealthy, very like the shell of a diseased hen’s egg, thin, brittle, and ready to shatter. Profound magic would be needed to solve the problem.
“Will you not bid me a safe journey?”
I jumped, grazing an elbow on the brick pillar behind me. Gnarled worries must have left me deaf. Unlike Finn and Ella, Anne was always careful to let me know she was near.
“Naturally. Yes.”
She waited for more. But words ever eluded me. I hated her leaving. She knew that already.
Threads of her unruly hair itched my cheek. “I’ll come back,” she said softly. “As I told you on the day I walked into this house, we are irrevocably bound. I know you. I value—”
I jumped up and slammed my stick against the front-door lintel so as to get through the opening without crashing my face into the wall. Anne was naive and sentimental, forever inviting me into places no uncouth, ill-tempered necromancer belonged.
I cannot ignore my family’s need. Her declaration, bound with apology, followed me indoors, voiced not in audible speech, but in the unspoken diction of the mind, a gift Anne and I shared. Dante, I will return.
Devilish perversity made me slam the door behind me. Moments later the cart clattered away, leaving me alone in the everlasting dark.
Words spoken in the aether testified clearly to the speaker’s truth or lies. But Anne’s present belief didn’t matter. She had acquired what she most needed from our arrangement. She wasn’t coming back.
Never had I imagined any person like Anne de Vernase, much less met one. Unbelievably disciplined, yet so … replete … with exuberant life. An exceptional mind. Determined as an avalanche. Her courage in the face of true horrors would put the king’s chevaliers to shame.
I had come to know her in the aether, the medium of souls, where the passions of the living are expressed in an unceasing torrent of “voices” only a few in the world can hear. From earliest childhood I had been gifted—cursed—with the ability to perceive them. But until encountering Anne, I’d never found anyone in that mad, noisy maelstrom who could hear my own directed speech, much less speak back to me in kind.
To discover that this exceptional person was the daughter of the man I believed a traitorous mastermind near overthrew me. Yet even that profound astonishment had been overmatched on the day Anne walked into this house and announced she intended to live with me, so I could teach her how to control the fearful power in her blood. Her mind raddled by an ordeal that would crush weaker spirits, she’d spoken a great deal of sentimental twaddle that day. But I had believed her serious about her magic.
Now King Philippe was engaged on Sabria’s northeastern borders with a gritty enemy whose longships threatened the kingdom’s precious shipping lanes, and he had summoned his demesne lords to bring reinforcements. Anne’s father, the king’s good friend and brother-in-arms, had survived his five-year ordeal as de Gautier’s prisoner, but his bones were like honeycomb and his mind fragile. He’d never again be fit enough to fight at his liege’s side. By law, the heir to his demesne, Anne’s brother, Ambrose, must go in his stead. Ambrose could likely have won royal exemption, but he had suffered his own torments during de Gautier’s conspiracy and had been chafing to kill someone ever since. I didn’t blame him, and I preferred the victim not be me—which had ever been in his mind. I had hoped Anne might persuade Ambrose to make other arrangements for minders at Montclaire. But she had made her choice.
34 OCET
Surprisingly enough the days passed rapidly. We had decided to fence in a paddock for the four horses Anne had acquired in the summer. Likely Finn could have done it as well alone as with me. Sightless assistants with only one good hand are rarely invaluable. But I craved physical labor, and Finn insisted he would welcome my help. I used no power of mine to probe the truth of his words.
As a boy I would have scoffed at the idea that any but a king might hold a demesne so fine as Pradoverde. Yet the main house was actually only five rooms, the guesthouse two, and the rolling terrain comprised a mere fifteen hectares—cramped by the standards of royal holdings. We had pasture enough for the horses, and a few sheep should we choose to have them. The previous owners had planted a decent kitchen garden and a small orchard of apple, pear, and cherry. To the west lay a fair expanse of open woodland and the once-disputed stream. Despite its contentious history, it was a good place. Healthy. Quiet. But for this bit of land … and Anne … I’d have been a raving lunatic. Worse than I was already.
Three days saw us almost done with the fence. While Finn mounted the gate hinges we’d forged that day, I set some simple spells on the fence, ancient charms of ward and welcome to keep the horses in and thieves, moles, and whipsnakes out.
The weather was a confusion only a late autumn day could produce: hot sun, chill air, dry, dusty, and still. The silver mage collar that bound my neck itched with sweat and grime. By the time we had hung the gate, the angle of the sun signaled dusk, and I’d no thought for anything but the barrel of beer cooling in the cellar.
Finn sluiced his head at the courtyard font and bolted for the nearby village of Laurentine to pursue a budding rapport with the tavern keeper’s daughter. I carried my beer to the steps of the main house, leaned against the porch rail, and inhaled the night. The cooling breeze rustled the dying vines and grasses, stirring up scents of dust, horse, mice, and drying mint. Tree crickets trilled. The collared dove perched in the stable eaves whimpered. The horses whuffled. All that presented itself to my senses I tried to absorb. To remember. To see. Inevitably, my fingers drifted to my bracelet of thin copper.
“Oraste,” I whispered, triggering my newest version of an enchantment I hoped might counter the damage to my eyes. Magic poured out of me until my flesh near caved in.
The night remained entirely black. Spitting curses, I launched my cup into the garden.
The device de Gautier had used to blind me as punishment for my duplicity had been made two centuries past, when the knowledge and practice of sorcery had reached heights never recovered after a century of savagery. Even so, my skills should have been sufficient to disentangle the original spellwork and effect a counterspell. Unfortunately, trapped in an underground vault and near out of my mind with the fire in my eye sockets, I had destroyed the cursed device. Devising a counter without access to the original enchantment would likely take me longer than I had left.
Terror of destroying my eyes altogether prevented anything but the most cautious experimentation. I had only just begun to experience any success—an occasional shadow landscape, where objects appeared as darker blotches in the dark. I’d not even told Anne as yet. Unfortunately, even so primitive a reversal required every scrap of power I could muster. And the spell failed the moment I stopped feeding it. Nights like this when I was physically and magically depleted, I could not even begin.
A sirening disturbance in the aether interrupted my litany of invective. Hooves trod the lane from the village road. Though our boundary wards signaled but one intruder, I stood and reached for my staff. I needed no eyes to draw on its enchantments, ever ready to release fiery destruction. Half the population of Merona and the entire Camarilla Magica would gleefully slit my throat if allowed the idea it was possible.
“Sorcerer?” The horseman’s booming voice bounced firmly from the stone and brick. No telltales of magic accompanied him.
“Who asks?”
“Be ye the sorcerer called Dante?” No anger or hostility marred his query. Wariness, yes. If he knew aught of me, that spoke some rudimentary intelligence.
“Why should I yield my name to a stranger who refuses the same courtesy?”
Halted on the gravel, the horseman dismounted smoothly. He tethered his horse—no mountain pony or farm hack, but a large, spirited animal—to one of the oaks that shaded the lane. Firm, confident steps crossed the gravel yard. A heavy man with the slightest trace of a limp.
“Masson de Cuvier, Grenadier, First Legion of Sabria,” he announced. “Honorably retired.”
A tall man. His voice was almost on a level with my face. He smelled of good horse, good leather, and no spirits.
“I’m Dante,” I said. “What’s your business?”
“Peace.” His voice broke ever so slightly, a burden of desperation surely unaccustomed for such a strong, confident man. “A fellow in Bardeu told me ye can take a dream away. Is’t true?”
“It’s been more than six years since I left Bardeu.” That’s where Portier had found me and dragged me into his investigation of conspiracy and secrets.
“But they remember you. Around Bardeu, folk claimed ye were a healer of the mind, as well as a sorcerer. One said ye’d kept a dream from killing him. So is’t true or not?”
“Eradicating dreams is only possible if they’re visited upon you by enchantment. Some are just the natural stuff of the mind—”
“I’ve heard all that. But this dream is not natural. ’Tis a plague and an abomination, and if I cannot be rid of it, I will die by my own hand before the new year breaks.”
That, I understood.
“Well, then …” I stood aside and motioned him into the house.
CHAPTER 2
PRADOVERDE
“Dark as a tomb in here. Can’t see a wretched thing!”
“A moment,” I said. A twitch of my staff raised a steady warmth from a lamp Anne kept on a stool beside the stair. Pivot. Three paces. I laid a hand on the back of Anne’s chair.
“I heard ye don’t see. It’s true, is it?”
So he’d talked to someone of more recent knowledge than Bardeu. “Yes. But there’s no need for you to sit in the dark. Sit where you like.”
He sat himself in the large chair nearest the fire. I took Anne’s chair and waited for him to begin. He didn’t seem shy.
“Tell me, sorcerer, have ye sight in your dreams?”
I’d told no one of my dreams or my daily horror upon waking. My frights were no one’s business. But I answered Masson de Cuvier. His was no idle question.
“Yes. Every night. And every morning on waking, I lose it all over again. It’s like suffocation.”
“Aye. Just so.”
“Tell me of your dream.”
“I got to tell ye some history first. I’m a professional soldier, no conscript, no tenant summoned to service a king’s liegeman. Nor am I a chevalier. I’m a common grenadier, and a cracking good one, too. I’ve served on every border and in every campaign for fifty-three years under three kings. I’ve no family save my cadre. My men don’t love me, but they know what I drill into them keeps them alive. A paragon, ye might say, and so I have been.
“There’ve been things that troubled over the years, for certain. Men dyin’ from a commander’s foolishness. Enemies a man can’t fight face-to-face with honorable weapons. And the people in these far places … some of them good people, but enemies nonetheless, some wicked folk we must treat as allies. I’ve seen things, too, oddments a man can’t explain: some fair, some fearful. I’ve seen evil.”
His practiced delivery suggested he’d told this story many times. Yet at the mention of evil, his voice trembled again. I waited for him to go on.
“Near twenty years ago, young King Philippe chased the witchlords from their stronghold in Kadr. We run ’em to ground like rabbits in a place called Carabangor, an abandoned fortress city deep in the desert. That ruin was a labyrinth, made ten times larger by the witchlords’ illusions. But the king’s alchemists devised incendiaries that allowed us to sight the difference between their illusions and the true walls, and we soon took the gates. The night fell quiet, as if all were dead.
“’Twas too dangerous to move men into the city to clean the last of ’em out. Their wicked enchantments seemed to feed on the night. But we dared not give them time to slip away or rebuild their magics. So I took a party into the city to spy out where they were hid. Five of us were on the scout, Des de Roux, Unai Focault, Benat Toussaint, a boy called Hawk, and me. Soon as we were under the walls, we split up. Des and Unai headed for the old citadel. Benat went off to scout a barracks near the southern gate. Hawk and me combed the streets in front of the gates, working our way to meet up with the others.
“It was a terrible place. Mostly rubble. Ye didn’t know what ye was going to find around the next turn in the road or behind some ragged scrap of leather flapping in the wind. There was no moon, and ye dared not show a light. Ye crept along those twisty streets quiet as death, wishing ye’d left your boots behind so as to silence your steps the more. Ye’d think none but rats and fere-cats had walked there for a thousand years.
“We was a half hour in when we heard the crying—a woman or child sobbing as if the world had ended. Hawk was of a mind to ignore it. He was a hard boy, no family, no close friends among the men. Fine tracker, though. Best we had. But I’d never left woman or child crying that I could help, and said we had to look. It could’ve been a witchlord woman, after all.
“So Hawk and me tracked the sound to a grand place, more a temple than a house, with six great eagles stood in the front of it. A deal of the roof had caved in, so we’d starlight to navigate by. We followed that crying down and down a curved stair, past more great birds and beasts standing in the dark, till we thought we must come to the heart of the earth itself.”
The grenadier paused and cleared his throat.
“We’d come to a lake down there, the water milk white, and a fog hanging over it. Stars shone so bright through the broken roof, the fog glowed like pearls. Stone paving, slick with mold, ran right up to the edge of the water, so that ye might call it a pool more than a lake, save it was so big. Some fifty metres from the bank lay an island, naught but a rock in the center of the pool. And there stood the comeliest woman I ever looked on.
“Like a willow withe she was, with ghost-pale hair, though her skin was the color of good earth and eyes black as ebony. Her hair and her white robes floated out from her in the white fog so ye couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. She called out, weeping, begging us to set her free.
“A shell boat lay moored by the bank, and Hawk moved to jump in, but I stopped him.
“‘Wait,’ I told him. ‘This be no ordinary maiden to be rescued. Consider if it be some phantom, planted here by the witchlords to lure us to our destruction—and mayhap our king and comrades with us.’
“Hawk glared at me in his cold way, and said I’d led us on this merry chase instead of doing what we’d come to do, so how was I to have it both ways?
“Whilst I stood there, undecided, the woman held out her hand to show a green gem the size of a plum. ‘Take it!’ she says to me. Though her voice had dropped and she was so far away, it sounded as if she whispered right in my ear. ‘It is beyond price. Transport me across the lake and it’s yours evermore. ’Twill bring you what you most desire.’”
“Hawk moved again to fetch her, but I said no. ’Twould take precious time and our duty was to king and comrades. But indeed, I feared that place more than any weapon I’d ever faced. Already the jewel plucked at my yearnings.
“Hawk shrugged it off and ran back up the stair. I called to the woman that we’d duties but would come back for her quick as might be. She wailed till my blood curdled. When we came out ofthat temple, we found the dawn wind blowing, the whole night gone, though it seemed less than an hour.
“We worked our way quick to the citadel. Des reported Benat had found the sorcerers’ lair in the old barracks. He and Unai had gone back two hours since to bring on the assault. They feared we’d been caught in a witchlord spelltrap, as I believed we had been.
“So came the final assault, and on that terrible morn King Philippe and his friend Ruggiere, the Great Traitor who’s now redeemed, wiped the plague of Kadr from the earth.”
The old man stopped, breathing hard, as if he had come straightaway from that battlefield to tell his tale. Half the night could have passed, I was so caught up in it. “So did you go back?”
“Nay. Unai, Hawk, and I were dispatched right off to the occupation of Kadr. I told Des and Benat about it, quick before we marched out. Told them to have a care and take a mage if they could, to see if the woman was real or no. Years later when I saw them again, they said they’d gone no farther than the beast statues. Her wailing had spooked ’em, and they’d run away.”
“Likely she was only a phantom,” I said. “A Kadrian spelltrap after all.”
“Ah, nay. For there’s the dream, ye see. And the witchlords of Kadr be all dead and their stronghold burnt. I saw it all.”
“Tell me about the dream.”
“When the dream came in those first days, Hawk said ’twas ’cause we left the woman. Yet I didn’t and don’t feel guilty. I was right to choose as I did. But each time I see her face, she weeps and cries, and begs me come and save her. And in the dream, I row out there and fetch her away.”
His growing terror near lifted me from my chair.
