The Daemon Prism, page 36
Even magic was crumbling underneath me. What would I find when everything I believed had been stripped away?
I pulled out Anne’s nireal and pressed it to my brow. Another mystery. How rock headed I’d been to ignore it for so long. As ever, I cursed the sorcerer’s hole that prevented the use of magic, as well as its shaping. For now, its touch, the reminder of Anne, was all I had to soothe the cold, dead rage smoldering in my gut.
“You say you can see what lies within me, lady,” I whispered. Aloud, because I could not bear the silence on such a night. “Tell me I am not going to destroy the light. Not that.”
CHAPTER 28
27 DUON, ELEVENTH HOUR OF THE EVENING WATCH
“Out, magus.” The thrumming aether flooded my skull, and a faint light resolved itself into a shielded lamp. But the voice …
My head felt much as it had after the stoning at Hoven. Thick, dull, and wholly disoriented. Hosten sounded like a woman.
“Get up, hireling. Has someone put iron in your breeches?”
I blinked and her form took shape against the dark. “Mistress?”
“Again, your teaching has served me well. My new detection charm revealed that a serving man had hexed my balcony rail. I cut off his hands for it.”
“Hexed? Cut off his hands?”
Gods, had she even used the charm properly? Could she have misinterpreted its signal?
“I promised you a reward. So come. Leave your boots behind, as I’ve done. And hurry; Hosten’s seeing to the mess and taking the mewling boy to his parents. I’ve insisted the captain do these things himself, but be back at your door before middle-night or he’ll need to tend his own children next. Because, of course, none can suspect I took him away from guarding you. He looked quite like rancid butter.”
I pulled on my shirt and breeches, sickened by her smirk as she watched me. What reward would she give me for providing her another excuse to shed blood?
I padded down the passage after her. “Where are we bound, lady?”
“I decided to answer your curiosity. Iaccar says he works to appease the Spider God and contain Prince Damek’s spirit. On Blood Night, after a great feast, he performs some tedious chanting and gesturing in the public square. The spiders diminish and the dreams fade as the moon waxes. No more young men vanish. But spiders, dreams, and vanishings return as the moon wanes again.”
“Public rituals wouldn’t be the ones important to him,” I said. “His real work—”
“—takes place on other nights,” she said. “Tonight.”
My pulsing blood thoroughly cleared my head, and I needed no urging to keep up or to memorize the turnings. We descended a great stair into a gilt-trimmed rotunda, equally deserted, and then another that took us into a sprawl of dark and empty rooms. Down a long hallway that changed character halfway along … lower, narrower, older. And then down again. No servant, no aide, no dog or courtier was to be seen in the passages and galleries.
With every descent, the aether quieted, as if we traveled far from the peopled city and its cares. Yet a breathless weight pressed me to the earth, something different from my childish fear of the dark and suffocation. This was awe. Dread.
More turnings. Always left. Always downward. Pressure that made my teeth ache. Power so rich and deep my bones throbbed. And threading all, the burnt-iron taste of blood.
“Hsst.” Xanthe signaled for stealth. I ducked under a lintel to join her in a room crammed with rolled carpets. Dust layered them so deep, they mimed the dune seas beyond Carabangor.
Xanthe set down her lamp, shuttered it completely, and cracked open a low door. We slipped through onto a narrow gallery high up the wall of a vast natural cavern—deep inside the red cliffs, I surmised. A thousand candles blazed in niches on the cavern walls, yet they scarce pushed back the shadows. I doubted a bonfire in each niche could do that, so oppressive was the gloom. The roof rose at least six stories above us, and I could not yet see the floor, thanks to the iron grating that rimmed the gallery.
We ducked and scuttered left along the gallery, invisible to someone whose brisk footsteps bounced off the walls from below. Neither could we see the man babbling in distress … please tell me what I’ve done, Lord Regent. My catch is legal, not poached. I’m honest in my trade. Never cheat the weight. Never cut the eyes out to hide the rot. Always gift the tails to the poor. Pay my taxes. Honor my family, living and dead, and curse the old prince….”
The gallery ended in a wall of rock. Two uprights of the grating were rusted away in the dark, damp corner, and Xanthe motioned me toward the gap. Kneeling, I peered through.
Directly in front of my eyes dangled four large silver eggs, suspended from the ceiling on fine cords—my nireals, a hugely complex variant of the pendant magic Anne’s sister had worked. These were the soul mirrors I had spent more than a year devising for the rite at Mont Voilline—the promise of a living soul we had used to lure a dead man back to life.
Below the hanging nireals, four carved angels at least five metres high marked the corners of a rectangular depression in the cavern floor. Simple, elongated, perfect in form and grace, even wingless they would never be mistaken for awkward humans. Two serene faces gazed upward, two down.
The shallow depression was but three steps below the cavern floor. In the center of the space a catafalque supported a simple stone coffin. Altheus’s? What would one find inside? Bones and dust? Emptiness? If any being heeds mortal prayers, let it not be Portier.
Beside the sarcophagus sat a small square bowl filled with fresh blood, as if someone had sacrificed to Duonna the Mother within the past hour. The blood’s use was clear. Two brushes lay next the bowl amid brownish spatters, and hundreds of Aljyssian words covered the floor of the rectangular pit, the steps that bounded three sides, and the wall backing the fourth side.
And there was the gibbering man. Young, well formed, and naked, he was bound to the wall of words at wrists, ankles, chest, and neck by loops of leather affixed to pegs. The sobbing wretch stood on a jutting step as if he were another statue. Jacard was painting a few more words on the wall beside him.
Tossing his brush beside its fellows, Jacard picked up a sponge and water bowl from a cluttered table outside the enclosure and began to wash the squirming man. Oh, gods, gods, gods, what was happening here?
“Be still and stop your sniveling.” Jacard’s reprimand echoed from every side, as he dipped the sponge and swabbed the man’s legs where he had fouled himself. “This is a holy rite and we cannot have you filthy. Would you not offer whatever help is necessary to protect your wife and children from daemon ravaging? If we are successful tonight, you shall be worthy to walk with divinity, no matter your fleshly sins. If only for a moment …”
Pouring the remaining wash water over the man’s feet and the step, he sluiced the filth into a drain.
“Please, Lord, please.” The victim could not produce any other response.
Stepping up again, Jacard blotted the man dry and slathered him with oil from a gold-banded vial, focusing intently on the man’s privates. Only when the poor panting, whimpering devil was roused to full heat did he stop and wipe his hand on the towel.
Jacard unbuckled the second set of leather bindings fixed to the wall, currently empty, then jumped down from the step and consulted a book lying open on the table.
I wanted to stop this. But the prisoner displayed no wounds but terror. The blood was not his … not yet, at least.
Jacard, the greedy fool, was planning something huge. Though he had no partner practitioners or assistants to enunciate ritual words with a living voice—a fundamental part of a magical rite—he had scribed the words in fresh blood, which carried a gruesome taint but similar magical significance. If the blood was taken from someone involved in the rite, all the better. A screaming victim purposely roused to heat provided a potent energy to add to the nireals, the febrile atmosphere of the cavern, the Stone Tychemus….
Xanthe tapped me on the shoulder and jerked her head back the way we’d come.
I shook my head vigorously. It was much too soon to leave. She pinched my ear.
I grabbed her hand and drew her down beside me. “I need to see this,” I said, scarce breathing the words. Gray smoke billowed from the pit below us.
“Hosten,” she mouthed, glaring in warning.
Yes, we were ended if I was discovered outside my cell. But to be so close …
I peered through the gap, trying to register everything at once: shapes, materials, doorways, the stair that led from the cavern floor to our gallery, the empty bindings, anything that might help me understand what Jacard was about. A ritual enclosure, formed by the four angels and the pit. The nireals. The overpowering scent of incense from a small brazier, the apparent source of the thickening smoke. Green shafts of light streaming from Jacard’s Seeing Stone.
The adept had left the enclosure and was unlocking a grate in the far cavern wall. If only I had time to read the words—
Xanthe yanked on my ear yet again, and the sticking pain in my back felt very like a dagger’s point. I restrained my impulse to throttle her and ducked my head in submission. Like rats we scurried back the way we’d come.
But before stepping through the door to the carpet room, I slipped over to the rail and took one last look. Every time a coil of smoke touched the naked man, he shrieked and shrank away, as if it carried the heat of its source. Or perhaps it was not pain but sheerest terror, for a giant figure was taking shape in the billowing fog: torso, limbs, head limned in emerald green. Its smoky hand was stretched to the prisoner’s naked flesh, stroking, fondling, caressing. Hungry.
Gods! My hair stood on end. This was no illusion.
Features began to take shape on the face in the smoke. A clanking gate and green fire signaled Jacard’s return and someone else with him, invisible in the murk. I raised my hand. I could snuff the candles and slip down the stair, fetch the prisoner before something horrid happened….
But of their own insistence my feet retreated through the door. Orythmus, the Stone of Command, gleamed in the dark.
“Are you mad?” Xanthe growled through her teeth as she shut the door behind me. “I’ll not suffer for giving you a favor. There are many things short of murder Iaccar can do to me.”
“Please,” I said, breathless, furious, frustrated. My body followed her without my doing. “The answer is so close. And, great gods, we cannot leave the prisoner to whatever—”
“The prisoner might die or might not. I will not.”
Xanthe ran. Which meant I ran, retracing our long path, up and right, up and right.
A guttural scream tore through the darkness behind us, long and throaty, shriveling into mindless bleats before falling silent. And beyond it came another man’s cry of such pain and despair as set my spirit bleeding. The second set of bindings … a second victim?
We’d not yet reached the grand rotunda, when a concussion of power through the aether near popped my eyes from my skull and the rising tension of massive spellwork ended. No gradual release. No sigh of completion. Jacard’s great working had aborted before it was done.
My soul felt laden with grease, as if someone had smoked a pig inside a closed house. We’d scarce climbed the grand stair when Hosten bellowed at one of his men to relieve the watch. “I’m off to the magus gallery by the back stair. Report as soon as you’ve done.”
The middle-night bells were already pealing. Hosten was going to arrive before we did. If he checked on me …
“Set me loose, lady,” I said, breathless, matching her every step. “I can delay him.” Raw power could bring down a wall of plaster on his head or shatter a lamp. Hands quivering with pent rage, I’d just need a touch.
A grinning Xanthe paused, fingered Orythmus, and spoke a word I’d given her. “He’ll have to take the long way around unless he’s a much more stalwart fellow than any I’ve ever met.”
Thunder rumbled from the distant corridors. Wind howled, and hailstones clattered. No guard captain greeted us in the magus gallery. As the middle-night bells fell silent, I dashed into the sorcerer’s hole. Xanthe slammed the door behind me and shot the bolt.
My heart had scarce slowed when a haggard Captain Hosten dragged me off my pallet and with his men and their spears marched me to Xanthe’s rooms. Though his leathers were soaked with sweat, he said naught of his night’s activities. “You’re to examine her balcony railing,” he said, shoving me into Xanthe’s chamber. “Don’t think to take advantage. We stay till she returns.”
Fighting for composure, I stepped into the cool night. The air smelled deliciously of rain and dust. Though my spirit yet felt tainted with death and torment, the oppression of the night had eased. I dragged my hand idly along the half-painted wooden balustrade. To my astonishment, I encountered a barb in its smoothness—a plain, simple, nasty little spell attached to a small carving. Lean on the rail at that spot with even a slight pressure and the solid wood would splinter, catapulting the unfortunate leaner three stories onto a garden walk. Someone was trying to kill the lady.
“I was right, wasn’t I, magus? You didn’t believe. I saw it on your face.” Xanthe stood in the doorway, her long hair damp, a gown of sheer silk sticking here and there to damp, bare skin. Any man in the world who wasn’t holding images of mutilated prisoners and manifesting revenants in his mind would think her a girl of seventeen, willing and ripe for the plucking.
“Certainly, you were right.” Though who knew if her unfortunate servant was responsible. “I can destroy the spell tonight if you wish.”
“Tomorrow. I’ve other plans for tonight.” She glanced behind her. “Hosten and his minions are gone. So did you enjoy your reward?”
“Iaccar’s raised a revenant,” I said. “He’s trying to give it a body. I didn’t believe … Well, Tychemus and the … virtue … of this holy place lend him a great deal of power.”
She crinkled her brow and leaned against the door arch. “I told you—a ghost. He brags that he plays with souls better than you ever did. You told me Iaccar was incapable of great magic and that ghosts are but memories. So I assumed the ones I’ve seen were illusions made to frighten me. Was I wrong?”
But I hadn’t known about screaming victims and words written in blood and the potent keirna of Sirpuhi of the Red Cliffs that seemed to have left its weighty imprint in my body. “I confess to foolish arrogance, lady. What else would I have seen if we’d had more time? Please, we must know … to protect you from such wickedness.”
She sighed and rolled her eyes, vanishing inside. Settling herself on her favored couch, she pointed me to the carpet at her feet.
“I saw the face and figure of an old man in the cloud, little more than we saw tonight. Iaccar lifted Tychemus high, as if to offer it to the ghost, turning it this way and that. The face mumbled things I couldn’t hear. This went on interminably until they were yelling at each other.”
Kajetan, almost certainly. Jacard had raised a revenant who could speak. I didn’t want to believe him capable of such. The abrupt discharge I’d felt signaled that Jacard had exhausted his power. But he had only one Seeing Stone as yet.
I scrubbed at my face, trying to decipher what I’d seen. Why was he bringing a second victim to the wall?
“Did you hear anything Iaccar said to the revenant? What were they arguing about? Was anyone else present?”
Xanthe clutched the green Stones suspended from her neck. “I couldn’t hear anything. The prisoner would not stop screaming, though there were no hot irons or pincers or knives or anything but the ghost. It was a different prisoner than tonight’s, a beautiful young man. Iaccar bound the librarian up beside him and began to invoke Tychemus—”
“The librarian!” I leapt from the floor as if struck by a pistol shot.
“Yes, though he’s so scrawny and damaged he’s not at all pleasant to look on. When Iaccar began chanting his lists of words, the other prisoner’s skin just swelled and … cracked. He started bleeding from his fingernails and from his mouth and nose. And his knees. And elbows.”
“Not the librarian,” I said, “but the … beautiful man.”
“Yes. All the bottles and jars exploded and the table collapsed. The ghost vanished as if Duonna the Mother’s great mouth had swallowed it. Iaccar screamed and cursed and kicked over the bowl of blood. The tomb was shuddering and the walls bleeding … so I ran.”
Truth burnt in my soul, a stain no washing could remove. The damnable, arrogant lunatic was not just trying to raise his uncle’s dead spirit for an hour, but to instill it into one of the bodies he’d stolen from Mancibar. He wanted Kajetan to live again, in a strong young male body that would endure many years, a face unrecognizable to those who had known the vile mage. And I had given him the idea. That’s how I’d put an end to Germond de Gautier. To keep the vessel living was much more difficult, requiring practice and many young men.
But far worse than such grotesque murder of an innocent … If Jacard had gotten so far as to destroy the hapless victim, that meant his uncle’s spirit had actually existed this side of the Veil, in such solid presence that it was crowding into a physical body. That meant that the tear in the Veil—the rent I had worked as I strove to disentangle de Gautier’s conspiracy—remained open.
I paced to the windows and stared out at the night. My fingers dragged through my shorn hair, digging into my scalp as if the truth lay just beneath.
“What is it, magus?”
“I’ve got to think.” Eyes closed, I combined the gruesome scene I had witnessed and that Xanthe had described. Candles, nireals, Portier, the doomed victim, the looming phantasm …
No. This was not the same rite we had worked on Voilline. Elements were missing, the positioning wrong. Yet neither was it so simple as retrieving one dead soul. To keep a balance in the cosmos, those who had written the Mondragon’s Book of Greater Rites had said an exchange must be provided to accomplish true necromancy—one living man killed just before the dead was transferred, not as a result of the transfer. But any death would suffice, and I could not believe Portier had been captured for that. If their object was simply Kajetan’s retrieval, they’d not need Portier to keep the passage through the Veil open permanently. So, then, what was my friend’s function in this rite? Was it his blood on the wall? If so, why? And why had Jacard held Tychemus up to the spectre, turning it, arguing…?
