The Daemon Prism, page 48
“This life,” he said, firmly. “Concentrate on this life. Portier de Savin-Duplais. Scholar. Investigator. The librarian who hid his light for so many years. My good friend.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Rhea!”
“I’m here, lord. Slow your breathing, Duplais. Think about it very hard. Slow your heart. You’re safe … and exactly where you’re supposed to be. Surrounded by friends.”
She was quiet but commanding. Tall, too. And so young. She acted plain, but hers was a deep and quiet beauty. Rhea. The big, quiet man in the corner saw it, too, his wondering eyes on her, not me.
I thought very hard. It was quite like putting on my spectacles when reading. The blurred, overlapping letters on the page settled into one orderly line of text. Portier de Savin-Duplais. Librarian. Investigator. Reborn … I refused to look back at the previous lines.
“Tell me I’m not mad or dreaming,” I said, my throat constricted. “Tell me”—the sky beyond the window was boiling tar—“Creator’s hand, tell me the hour is not day with a sky like that.”
“You’re not mad, unless we all are,” said Anne, sitting beside me on the bed, holding my hand. Her calm was soothing, though her flesh felt fevered beside my chill. “And it’s just past midday. The reading took two hours and you’ve taken a while waking up.”
Ilario sat on the other side of me, his eyes alight. “Seems you’ve been a very busy man through the years.”
“Did you learn what was needed?” I said, feeling naked again.
“You must look at the notes,” said Ilario. “The tetrarch dictated for three hours, and we made a sketch from what he saw in one of the last … memories.”
“Don’t know if I can. Lost my spectacles.” Though, indeed, scattered images lingered in my skull like tea leaves in the bottom of a cup.
Ilario unrolled a parchment on my lap. “We think you painted this on the wall of a cave, in some kind of prayer ritual.”
Memory filled in what faulty eyesight missed. Horses, bulls, goats, wolves, vanishing into a great blackness. A village left starving … mothers laying infants out to die for lack of milk … the fields barren, the sun darkened. So life had been in this land during the Daemon War. But here and there a dab of red or yellow—on a pipe that blessed a marriage with mystical music, or surrounding a fruitful field, protecting it from ravaging beasts, or on the potion pots of a healer who kept wounds from requiring amputation. Extraordinary skills? Magic? The line between was ever blurred.
He unrolled a second page. “But the hand that painted these other scenes, Anne judges to be different.”
I closed my eyes and flexed my fingers, which insisted they held a bundle of twigs. Tied together, chewed and beaten to separate the fibers at one end, twigs made a decent brush for painting. “It wasn’t the differing hand that was the marvel,” I said, softly. “It was the green pigment. We had no source for green.”
“Holy night,” whispered Ilario, “you truly remember.”
The right-hand side of the drawing displayed three panels. The first showed a great hand reaching down from the heavens to place a green crystal in the palm of a naked man, a very cold, hungry, bewildered man, surrounded by his joyful clan. The second panel showed the same man, holding the green gem high as he walked an endless road, scattering its beams across fields and vineyards and the beautiful, glorious herds. And in the last, the man, now ringed with six fiery green symbols, stood halfway between the ground and the heavens bearing a sullied gem. Blood drops trailed from his heart.
“The green ring means enchantment,” I said. Knowing. “Using the god’s fire. The symbols are enchanted objects that must be used for the rite. The person here”—I touched a lone figure outside the ring—“would be the modran—the shaman, the magus. The others outside the ring are members of the clan.”
“And the one inside the ring?” said Ilario.
“That, I believe, is me.”
“So I’ll need to work the world’s last magic,” said Anne, cracks appearing in her calm. “Enabling you to take the Seeing Stones back where you got them.”
“But not to that dreadful cave. Gods, that was cold. Yet I would choose it instead …” I glanced up at Anne and Ilario and wished I could say something to ease their pain. A calm certainty had settled over me. At last I knew. I—Ianne/Altheus/Os—had returned to the living world for the simple purpose of dying.
Anne
CHAPTER 37
“So this mark is for the seasons, this one for the elements—”
“Earth, air, fire, and water,” said Portier. “Not the Camarilla’s five nor the alchemists’ thirteen.”
“The classical elements,” I said. “I’ll need an object to evoke each one.”
Portier, Ilario, and I sat on the floor at the low table where we had begun, the sketch spread out before us. I had to keep my mind fixed to the problems we faced and not to the end result. Nothing in the lengthy transcript of the tetrarch’s reading suggested an alternative to the simple solution. Portier had to die, and he believed this enchantment, painted on a cave wall millennia in the past, would enable him to take solid matter across the Veil.
When I suggested he had painted the cave wall himself in the throes of delirium, he reminded me about the green pigment and the crystal in his hand when he was dragged out of the cave. When I suggested that the enchantment might allow him to cross the Veil with the Seeing Stones and then return, he pointed to the blood drops on the figure in the drawing and wrinkled his nose, as if it were something only slightly distasteful. Why wasn’t he angry? He wasn’t even forty years old. He’d spent half his life in a library.
While my grief was tempered with rage, Ilario’s was all wonder. “Can you remember everything now?”
“Blessedly, no. Only for the bits of time de Ferrau selected. I can tell you what I smelled in that moment, what I heard, what I knew, what I was thinking. The man who dragged me from the cave was named”—Portier’s eyes shifted, losing their sharp focus—“Vit. He was a modran—a shaman. My uncle.” Information from so deep in his past took a noticeable moment to retrieve. “But I couldn’t tell you what I did the day before crawling into that cave or anything after that waking.”
“We need to move on,” I said. “I don’t know enough yet.” I’d no idea if I could even work such a spell. What if we’d missed some critical detail and Portier died for nothing? And time was racing by. Jacard wanted Portier for his own rite. He could be at our door at any moment.
I tapped the third mark, near hard enough to poke a hole in the paper. “The third you say is a shaman’s mark—so I need something sacred. Would a tessila do? I’ve carried Lianelle’s all this way.”
“Sanctified by a verger, by your love and belief, and by use, I should think so,” said Portier. “It could almost do for the fourth as well. The upward arrow with this knot on the bottom means something that belongs to one of the dead, yet remains here in the living world—an anchor, so to speak.” He nudged me with his elbow. “Ani, it will be all right. You’ll know what to do.”
“Not all of us have divine friends to instruct us,” I snapped, eyes fixed on the sketch.
“Dante is a masterful teacher.” When Portier’s hand touched mine, I felt like I’d whipped a child.
“Oh, gods, forgive me…. Something of yours, then.”
“I don’t seem to have anything of my own. So something belonging to someone else dead …”
I pulled Lianelle’s frog pendant from my shirt. “This was Lianelle’s.”
Ilario touched it. “Dante wore one very like this on our journey from Pradoverde.”
“He brought it with him?” My only light. The stabbing remembrance raised tears I had no time to shed. And now to lose Portier, too … “My sister made both of them.”
Lianelle was there in Ixtador. According to de Ferrau, she might be whole as yet. Every thought of her surrounded by a seething morass of human refuse, knowing such was her only future, had me swallowing stones. “Portier, is the Souleater destroyed once you’ve taken the Stones back? Can he still devour souls?”
“I don’t know. As long as Ixtador remains intact… Honestly, Ani, I’d say there’s risk. I’ll try, but I’ve no idea what … happens. One thing at a time. The fifth symbol is the means of death. The blood drops tell …”
Dante had not known how to destroy Ixtador. And we were to be left without magic.
“… and the sixth …”
“The snake has forever been the symbol of reversal.” De Ferrau had come up behind us. I’d swear the morning’s experience had aged him, grooving his brow and shrinking the flesh of his face from around its bones. He had slept for the past hour, exhausted from the reading and his frenzy to get everything recorded while it was fresh. “I’d say you need something that is the antithesis of death, as if to fool whoever minds the Veil. Agramonte has a cat here.”
“We’ll not want to carry a cat with us, no matter how we decide to get inside the palace,” I said. “Would flowers do? Roots?”
“More in the line of healing,” said Portier, raising a hand. “The modran used snake venoms in medicines and took small amounts throughout his life to induce visions. Rhea can give you a medicine to use.”
“But you said the objects themselves need to be enchanted?”
“This can’t be overly complicated, Ani; we were not a sophisticated people. And the spellwork … just think of how Dante would approach it. My uncle Vit would say choose sacred objects. Dante would say choose objects for their keirna—like the nireal and your sister’s tessila, or water from the fountain of this house, where the tetrarch and his shy friend Agramonte have given us refuge.”
“Perhaps the medicine Rhea used to heal Ilario. Something vital.”
“Exactly so.”
“Rhea’s just returned from the market,” said the tetrarch. “She and Andero found a charm—a door or fence ward that seems to work. We’ll set it up so you can practice snatching the Stones.”
“Good. That’s a grand idea,” I said. I had been so worried about the spellwork, I’d given little thought to getting the cursed Stones to begin with. How I was to empty myself of thought and desire so completely as to avoid the consequences of a spell, I had no idea.
Portier excused himself, mumbling about a latrine. Rhea took the nireal and the tessila and said she would see to collecting the other things on my list. When I explained how each object should bear as much meaning as possible in the context of our work, she understood immediately.
She scanned the list, biting her lip. “You’ve not put down anything for the killing weapon. I’ve medicines would do it.”
My heart was black as the day. How did one ask a friend how he wished to die?
“I’ll do it,” said Ilario. “I can make it quick and near painless. So, my dagger. Come, let’s practice snatching the damned Stones. Nothing matters if we can’t do that.”
The weak little charm designed to protect one’s doors and windows from thieves did little but make one’s palms itch, little to discourage a determined thief. But even a weak enchantment would give me a way to practice Dante’s technique for avoiding a spell’s compulsive working.
After an hour’s concentrated quiet, alone in a room, using every mental discipline I knew to clear my mind, I walked through the warded doorway, retrieved a cup set on the far side, and returned it to Ilario. My palms did not itch.
“Good,” he said. “Now try it again.”
Closing my eyes, I swept aside the sound of his voice, my moment’s satisfaction, and my fears that this charm was so minor a deterrent compared to the protection of the Seeing Stones that the exercise was ridiculous. Then I walked through the warded door again. By the time I retrieved the cup, I had to clamp my hands together to keep from scratching.
“Again,” said Ilario. A man who had spent a great deal of his life training in swordplay was no easy taskmaster.
Three more times I made it through—-just barely. But then Ilario jumped out at me right when I moved into the charm’s influence. I had to back away before my palms bled. An hour we practiced, Ilario pelting me with nuts or yelling or breaking a plate behind me, until I was ready to strangle him. I succeeded no more than half the time. Wholly unacceptable. The Stones’ protections could kill me.
When Ilario advised I try harder, fear and frustration overflowed. “You do it if it’s so easy!”
“All right.”
A twitch rippled from the top of his dyed hair, down his length to his toes, as if a shower of fleas had bathed him. And then, blank-faced, he walked through the doorway, picked up the cup, and returned it to my hands. Four more times he did the same, without a blink, without a scratch.
As he began again, I picked up a handful of almonds from the basket on the table and threw them at him all at once. He didn’t flinch. Didn’t stop. Didn’t scratch.
The next time I yelled, the next I whacked his shoulder from behind with a fire iron. He grabbed the iron and yanked it from my hand but continued on his mission to replace the cup beyond the door.
“How do you do it?” I could scarce comprehend such focus. “Was the twitching some sort of charm?”
He grinned. “That was just for show. Think, dear lady, how have I spent my life? Do you imagine I could play Ilario de Sylvae, court jester of Castelle Escalan, for some seven-and-twenty years without a great deal of practice ignoring distractions, without training my reflexes to kick in when needed and only without breaking discipline?”
I sagged onto the stool. “Then why in the name of sense didn’t you tell me? Why waste an hour on my failures?”
“Because you believed the mission yours, and it was not my place to say you had too much to worry about already. I wanted your confidence, not your reluctant yielding. I cannot help you with the magic, but empty-headed thievery and killing, yes.”
When we returned to the library, Andero was regaling de Ferrau and Rhea with grim tales of the city. “… a riot at the gates. Some are trying to get inside the walls for fear of this storm coming. None’s ever seen the sky like this. More were trying to get out, though. Fires are springing up here and there. One’s burning in the Street of Beggars. Walls are weeping blood or collapsing. It’s astonishing half the people in the city aren’t dead. The water in the wells and the channels has turned dark. Everywhere you look there’s spiders. Every story’s wilder than the next. All blame the daemon mage.”
“But he can’t—” I stopped short. Dante had said he would fight the Souleater as long as he could. After that, if the Souleater could force him …
“We hold to our plan,” said Ilario. “We get in. We wait until Jacard and the lady are abed. While Anne and Portier prepare the spellwork down in the cellar, I’ll nick the Stones. Rhea and Andero will ensure I’m not interrupted.”
Portier believed that we had to work the rite in the heart of Sirpuhi.
“Jacard won’t be putting on entertainments tonight,” I said. “And even assuming the invisibility potion works on everyone else, it didn’t work for Portier. We’ll have to go in the way Portier and I came out. The drain.”
“Can’t,” said Andero. “It’s blocked. Saw an explosion on my way down yesternight. Thought it was going to bring the cliff down on my head. We could fight our way in and then vanish. None would believe—”
“I’ve a most certain way to open the Regent of Mancibar’s gates,” said de Ferrau from the doorway. “It risks drawing him from his bed, but I doubt he’ll don his magical Stones to meet a Temple tetrarch.”
Despair threatened. “Meet you?”
“I’ll knock on his door and tell him that I’ve the false Sante Ianne in my custody. My payment for turning him over will be the necromancer, whom I plan to gut and burn in Temple Square to make myself the youngest High Tetrarch in Sabria’s history. Do you think he’ll believe me?”
The idea revolted me. “Jacard would demand to see Portier,” I said. “He knows him. And your bailiffs can’t protect you from magic.”
“Ah, but I shall inform him that I’ve, first, given Duplais a poison that will surely kill him before any use can be made of him and, second, laid a Temple curse on him that will abort his saintly revenance—an ancient Temple secret. If the librarian’s immortality is the key to Iaccar’s desires, he’ll not pass up my bargain.”
“Once the bargain is struck, you’ll have to hand Portier over,” said Ilario. “Then you’re dead.”
The tetrarch shrugged. “Naturally we must adapt to the circumstances of the meeting. But with a clever use of Temple regalia—hooded robes, to be precise—as well as my usual insistence on proper protocol, and plenty of distraction from you four, you will spirit Duplais away long before the bargain is consummated. Win or lose, our forces shall be in place inside the palace. My bailiffs and I are not wandering minstrels, but warriors sworn to combat the Souleater and his works in all ways. And if the worst comes to pass, then in some small measure our deeds might make reparation for Captain de Santo.”
De Ferrau’s clear gaze lay square on Ilario. When the chevalier’s visage hardened, the tetrarch did not avert his eyes; nor did he offer any excuses to give himself quarter.
Ilario nodded slowly. “It might work….”
An hour’s argument found us no better alternative, and we adjusted our plans to suit the new arrangements. The city bells rang tenth hour of the evening watch. “So be it,” I said. “Let’s go.”
The understeward swept out of the palace waiting room to fetch Jacard’s steward, leaving Tetrarch de Ferrau, his four bailiffs, Andero, and Portier, all of them draped in hooded green robes. The man hadn’t noticed that Rhea, Ilario, and I were there as well. I had mixed the last of Lianelle’s invisibility powder and divided the potion between us to give us the time we needed. We would have no second chances.
Rhea had supplied one of the smaller bailiffs with a mild sweating potion. Shortly after Jacard arrived and verified Portier’s identity, the young bailiff would feign a collapse. Under cover of the illness, Andero’s guardianship, and enough ghostly distractions to allow it, Andero and unseen partners would get a hooded Portier out of the room while the negotiations for de Ferrau’s bargain proceeded.
