The Daemon Prism, page 30
Acid … fire … lacerated my back. I crashed forward into the table. A green arc was Orythmus flying. An orange blur was the candle toppling to douse itself on the scattered cushions. Darkness fell like a river of tar, as another blow creased the backs of my legs. Another on my shoulders. Invisible chains tightened about my arms and shoulders, drawing them outward. The racked joints cracked, no matter that intellect claimed my arms lay limp amid the litter of fish and cheese and bread. Gods, how had I crossed her this time?
Xanthe stood over me. “Naturally, you would know the proper word. Righteous sorcerer, who dast wrinkle his nose at my scheming. You would not have had to stoop to duplicity and murder to get what you want, like stupid Xanthe did. Save I know that you did.”
“Correct,” I croaked, stomach heaving. “I’ve done worse. Less reason. You don’t know—”
Another lash. “I know many things. I know why you wish to watch me bind myself to Rhymus. You think I’m empty-headed, too. You’ve not even thanked me for showing you, and already you scheme to get the Stones for yourself.”
Writhing, breathless, I could scarce answer. “Not empty-headed, Mistress. Never that. You’ve remembered these details for centuries. You outlived your king, his wizard, your mentors. Outwitted them. Taken what they desired. Your demonstration has only confounded me. A confusion I must work out, so I can teach you. I’ll—Aagh!”
Her invisible yoke tightened, drawing a grunt of agony through my clenched teeth. “I swear to you, Mistress. Honestly. Whatever I must do to learn of them, the power of the Stones is not for me. Nor will it ever be.” I spewed the words in desperation, yet their truth sank into my fiery flesh like a balm—the kind that only after contact begins to etch its own wound. Dangerous, the old shepherd had called me. Indeed I was no more trustworthy than Xanthe or Jacard.
“What man was ever honest? Not my king. Not my mentors. Not Iaccar. You lie to me at your peril, slave.”
The pain faded and she left me sprawled across her table, heaving. Her skirts brushed my face and I heard the distant bell. I could not hold thought enough to count the interval until Hosten burnt away the dark with a torch.
“Put the slave back in his hole,” said Xanthe. “Perhaps I’ll let him out again in the morning. Perhaps not.”
CHAPTER 23
MANCIBAR
She let me out. But not to work magic or anything else of use. Hosten and his five soldiers installed me in the corner of her grand apartment and shoved me to my knees. As Xanthe entertained a parade of seamstresses, jewelers, painters, and upholsterers, I was wholly ignored.
I neither moved nor spoke, and vowed to do absolutely nothing without her command. Certainly no magic, though to kneel there idle, knowing I could raise an enchantment to flatten them all or set the furnishings afire to mask an escape, near set me raving.
But I could not forfeit this chance. Nessia, Ilario, Denys … I recited the litany of the dead to remind me why I had to bide my time. The mystery of the Stones had scarce begun to open and already I could sense answers close.
The lady was indeed cleverer than Kajetan and his cronies had been. They, too, had wished to make use of my magic for their own schemes. They, too, had recognized my hungers. But they had never thought to test my resolve with utter boredom.
After a few hours, Xanthe summoned food. While I knelt, hands clasped behind my back, she doled out bread and fruit, a tidbit at a time, and gave me sips of sour ale. No meat. No fish. No conversation.
The day continued. In late afternoon, Jacard sent an invitation to go riding with him and several of Mancibar’s lords and ladies—of whom there seemed to be a great number. Xanthe had me taken back to the sorcerer’s hole. I remained there until the next morning, when it all began again.
She fed me and ignored me. Once she directed me to move a piece of furniture. No speech was required. When I completed the task, her finger pointed back to my corner. I went. And knelt.
That afternoon, she spoke with Hosten about finding me some unpleasant menial occupation about the palace. Nothing came of it. Perhaps she realized I would welcome hard labor.
Mancibar’s lords and ladies came calling. Their garb was that of the desert—scarves and light flowing fabrics, entirely unlike Xanthe’s replicas of Sabrian court gowns. No matter their politenesses as they shared tea and wine, their faces were wary and unsure of her. A few asked about me but turned away quickly when they heard I was a disobedient slave.
Xanthe noticed me watching. She pointed to my eyes and the floor. I fixed my gaze on the pocked wood.
At the end of the fourth day of this ridiculous posturing, when the door to the sorcerer’s hole closed off the light behind me, I beat my hands and head on the wall and bellowed like a maddened bull. My rage bounced off the close walls, as it had in the cellar of the Gautier ruins.
Fear slapped me to my senses like a rain of cold mud. I shrank into the corner and fought to regain equanimity. This was but a game. The work yet waited if I could just hold patience and endure. Xanthe coveted the life the Stones could give her, but she was too clever to allow Jacard to hold her Stones with promises he had no intention of keeping. I just had to stay sane until her own patience ran out.
Think. Plan. For the hundredth time I pondered the vision of Portier and the passage he’d been writing. As did everyone in the world, I swore by the Souleater. But when had I ever considered what the name meant?
I did not believe in divine beings, whether angels or daemons, creators or saints. But then there was Portier and his unexplainable life. No matter what faith I had in my own magic, I had lost him three times on that terrible night when he was submerged in a pool for hours. Three times I had retaken my hold on his keirna. Three times I had found him still alive.
I did not believe in the Souleater. But then there was Anne’s assertion that she’d heard her sister’s voice among the spectres in Mont Voilline’s pregnant sky, claiming that the souls of the dead were being leached away.
Now this vision had laid the question of belief square in my lap again. My glimpse of Portier in Orythmus had rung of truth, and I could ignore Portier’s witness no more than I could ignore Anne’s. Had Portier concluded that the energies drained from the spectral dead were feeding some single being … mortal or divine?
I pulled Portier’s ring out from the tiny rip in my straw mattress and slipped it onto my finger. Thanks to the sorcerer’s hole, its annoyingly cheerful pipe music played only in memory. A pure, perfect little bit of magic had created the music and attached it to the ring—Portier’s magic, worked purposely to irritate me, who made no secret of how I detested piping. Yet I weened he had also made it to thank me for shattering his barriers to magic—a foolhardy risk at the time. Four years he’d kept my success secret because he believed me Fallen, yet it had taken only a word from Anne for him to place his life in my hands at Mont Voilline.
Gods … what was the measure of such trust? And here I sat idle, believing that somehow this submission to a half-mad child-woman was my best hope to save his life. What if I had gambled away the chance for naught?
I pressed quivering fists to my temples. Hold on, student. I will come. If I have to wear her chains until death or grovel to Jacard himself, I will.
The days ran one into the other. Five, then six, then ten. Despair nipped at my shoulders. What if Xanthe had truly given up on me and thrown herself into Jacard’s hands? My body hungered to release fire and destruction; my soul craved the energies of spellwork to give it direction and purpose.
On one morning as I was released from the hole, one of Hosten’s soldiers—a young fellow, freckled, a shock of light brown hair sticking out from his steel cap—winked at me. Without a clue as to his meaning, I ignored him. It was burden enough to discipline myself to kneel quietly another day.
Midafternoon arrived without Xanthe feeding me. To avoid the gnawing of my belly, I spent my time stretching my senses through the palace, trying to detect signs of unusual magic. Xanthe was engaged with one of Jacard’s cooks, insisting the woman produce some concoction of sheep entrails and barley that she had relished when a child in Maldivea. They couldn’t even agree on the names of herbs.
Without my staff’s embedded spell or a larger infusion of power, my range of hearing was limited, but the palace seemed a subdued and argumentative place. Quiet disputes touched on horse exercise and grooming. Wordless yelling accompanied the shuffling of pots and kettles and whacking of knives in the kitchens. Murmurs traversed the intricate passageways along with the hurried footsteps of servants and guards, late to their posts. No screams today.
Closer footsteps brought an abrupt end to the exercise. A soldier—the freckle-faced one—carried in a tray.
“Set it on the table,” said Xanthe and returned to her argument with the cook.
As the young man removed the linen covering, he glanced over his shoulder at Xanthe’s back, and then stared directly at me. Raising one clenched fist in front of him, he nodded slightly.
Strength? Brotherhood? What was he trying to say? And who was he?
All sorts of notions raced through me as he left the room. But all came down to one … Andero. Hope and dismay battled feverishly. I was nowhere near accomplishing my purpose. To leave here without understanding … without Portier …
Xanthe spun sharply enough that her scarlet gown fetched eye and mind from my thoughts. Heart thumping at the idea I might have missed a signal from her, I inclined my head respectfully.
As the cook marched out of the room, Jacard arrived, garbed in rich black, trimmed in silver.
“How lovely you look, lady! Stars and Stones, has your mentor retreated to the corner to pout or is he hatching some treacherous magic to upend our harmonious household?” The sniveling fool played every nuance of royal host and magical advisor. “Best watch him carefully. He is an expert sneak.”
“On the contrary,” said Xanthe, “my slave’s mind is constantly on me. I’ll rip out his eyes and throw him in your kennels does he let his mind wander.”
Her objective was assuredly accomplished.
This was the first time I had seen the sharp-chinned weasel since my arrival. He’d changed little in two years, save in the self-control I had noted before. Was it the Seeing Stone made him confident? Power for magic could do that, especially if one was too thickheaded to assess the consequences of its use. A dangerous combination. And these two together … gods save us.
They sat on her balcony for a while, gossiping of this lord who had come in from the country, or that one who had put his wife aside. Jacard had brought her a gift of a purple silk mantle, beaded in silver—which delighted her. Before very long, heads together, my mistress and my enemy departed. Neither looked at me, much less addressed me on the way out. I felt very like a ghost.
Late in the night watches, suffering from a surfeit of sleep for the first time in seven years, I sat in the dark fingering Anne’s pendant. I wished I could speak with her about these things I had learned, my birth in the dark, the old shepherd’s warnings about the way of the dead and my unhappy destiny, my vision of Portier, even the cold dark that so frightened me. Pervasive sadness … Was that what I had felt when looking on the Uravani bridge—on the images of the Righteous Defender and the Daemon of the Dead, locked in their divine grappling?
Anne did not get overwrought or blithering when speaking of difficult matters, even if they had great meaning for her. Her passions ran deep, but gloriously quiet. Perhaps she could help me sort out my fear and guilt and, yes, jealousy of her secrets with Ilario and Portier.
Yet, I’d hate for her to know about Denys and Nessia. She had told me more than once that she could not and would not judge me for the terrible things I’d done as agente confide. But these new crimes …
Fortune grant she was safe in the care of her friends and need never come to this dark place.
The muffled snap of the door latch brought me to my feet. I crammed the locket into my glove, chilled at imagining that somehow Xanthe had detected my straying thoughts.
A faint glow leaked from a shielded lamp. One pair of booted feet accompanied the lamp.
“Are we playing night games now, Captain?” Night summonings were ever dangerous.
“Sshh. Hurry!” A shadow much too small to be Hosten took my arm and drew me toward the gray rectangle of the door.
I yanked my arm from his grasp, startlingly easy. “Who are you?”
“Come, if you wish to see him alive. He’ll be buried before morning.”
My breath caught. Yet, I dared not trust. “Buried? Who? Has my mistress commanded my attendance?”
“Your friend, the scholar. If we hurry, we might prevent what they plan.” The clipped words dripped urgency and secrecy.
“Tell me who you are and who’s sent you.” I injected as much menace as I could into a whisper. I could not risk my work with the Stones for a game.
“One who’ll not see a holy man murdered for no reason. No saints’ litany will erase such a crime.”
Saints’ litany … “You’re a Cultist?”
“If you can free him, I can get him out of Mancibar and into Cult hands. Everyone says—he says—you have power for magic beyond telling. So will you use it for good or not?” He lifted the lamp and showed his face. Sprinkled with freckles. Very young. Worried. Frightened. “It has to be now.”
What certainty could he offer that I would believe? But he spoke of Portier. He spoke of living death. No matter doubts, I had to go. “Show me.”
The shuttered lamp led me through passages I had not yet traversed. Down a wide stair, deserted on this night save by statues of angels in every posture—contemplative, engaged, wings spread or furled, bearing books, messages, or lyres. Even in combat. A narrow, older stair led into a warren of musty passages and gaping rooms. Old stone peeked out from crumbled lath and plaster. Vermin feet skittered and whispered beyond the pool of lamplight. The dark closed in behind us. I refused to quail.
“So tell me who you are,” I said again as my companion unlocked an iron-bound door.
“I guard him, yet he’s done naught but bless me and join me in the litanies.”
The comment struck a note as dissonant as a duck playing a harp.
Portier was quiet, sober, a gentleman born. But none would call him a pious man or one who doled out blessings beyond the politenesses his birth had instilled. I wasn’t sure he believed in the divine any more than I did. He had deliberately sought out a Cult mentor with a scholar’s credentials, not a priest’s. And in his sparse correspondence, I’d heard no evidence of sudden or miraculous conversion to Cult devotions.
What small trust I had in my guide dissipated rapidly. I redoubled caution. No footsteps followed.
The young man drew open the narrow door. The iron bands in the thick wood and the scents of camphor and heated iron bespoke a cell unfriendly to spellwork. I made sure he left the door open, lest my own magic be fatally crippled.
The large chamber was mostly empty. But the scene in its center near took my breath. All appeared as I had seen in Rhymus’s vision—the black hearth, the blazing fire, the iron rod protruding from white-hot coals.
I blinked. Inhaled the stink of fear and heated iron. Folded my arms across my chest, pinching and poking. I was awake.
A few steps farther. What appeared to be a simple grave incised the floor. A pit scarce big enough to contain a man had been hacked from the slick, dark stone and lined with iron. Beside it lay a slab of iron exactly the size of the opening. Dirt had been heaped at its foot.
Portier, the King of Sabria’s cousin, the man who had given my magic a purpose and honored it even when he believed me Fallen, was bound to the floor of the pit with leather straps. Someone had scattered a handful of dirt over him. Unwashed skin streaked and smeared with blood, he writhed and strained within his bonds, exactly as I had seen him in Xanthe’s vision. It was the exactitude of that scene, its perfect horror, that screamed warnings. And I’d swear that others in this labyrinth were breathing….
I hated what I was about to do more than I hated any of the vileness I had wreaked in my life. Even after so brief an exposure, I knew the Seeing Stones were my puzzle to solve. Any chance of preserving my deception and discovering the truth, and likely any hope of rescuing Portier, depended on my actions here. This was my trial. Somewhere, I believed, Xanthe watched and waited.
I stepped into the soldier’s pool of light. “Ah, Portier, you do get yourself into wretched fixes.”
“Dante!” His croaking greeting wavered. His deep exhale shook. “Knew you’d come … heard your promises …” His heavy eyelids drooped with sleep or drugs.
My foot nudged a loose fragment of paving stone. It bounced and clattered into the pit and against his bound leg. “Do you learn nothing, librarian? You’ve let them take you again.”
“Woman made a fool of me. But had to come. They mentioned Sirpuhi of the Red Cliffs….” The words slurred, tumbling out one atop the other. “Been here ’fore … recognize it. Afraid to believe. You won’t, but must. Must.” He grasped the word, as if dragging himself up a well. “Scroll explains about the fire … about me … about you…
Explained his dreams of multiple lives? What did I have to do with his delusions? Gods, I dared not ask.
“I helped you out of similar trouble once. I could likely do so again.”
“No. Must listen. Was coming home to tell you. The Seeing Stones, the temptation … The danger is yours, not mine.”
I crouched beside him and tweaked the strap at his ankle. “I disagree. Which of us is in the pit?”
He dropped his voice even lower and tugged fitfully at his bindings, fighting for the words even as his eyelids sagged. “Your strength. Gifts. You are born to do the unthinkable.” Fear beyond mortal comprehension was bundled in those whispered words, all courage, all pretense drained away. “Must not fall. Must not yield …”
His words trailed off as I bent closer where I could view the perfect horror in his eyes and he could see my own, void of sympathy or hidden meaning. Though more than anything I wanted to comfort him, to ask what in the name of sense he was talking about, I dared not waver or misstep.
