Ars Magica (27 page)

He should have looked censorious, venerable prelate that he was. He looked more nearly mischievous. “Some of it is even making my Jinniyah blush.”

“I am incapable,” she said with dignity, “of any such thing.” She paused. “What I am is envious. Even at my most wanton, I was barely a match for the Empress Theodora.”

Richer's brows went up. “Am I supposed to be the voice of Christian chastity?”

“God forbid,” said the Jinniyah. “Here, master. Turn the page. I want to know what she did after she—”

“Nothing, apparently.” Gerbert had turned the page, which was blank. The next began a new heading. He puzzled it out for himself. “‘On the—On the Emperor Justinian's—Treasure'?”

“Treasure,” agreed the Jinniyah. “Symbolic, surely. A little closer, if you please.” Her lips moved as she read, but silently. Her brow raised. Richer had not known that she could do that. Probably she had learned it from Gerbert.

“Well?” they asked, both at once.

“Well.” She sounded richly satisfied. “Listen, my masters. Listen very well indeed.”

oOo

Richer did not know whether to feel furtive or absurd. Here he was at high noon as near the equinox as curiosity would let him come, trying to look like a portion of the ramparts of Ravenna. Behind him lay the grey and lonely marshes that stretched to the sea; in front and below, a tiny littered square like a cul-de-sac. It was not at all a logical place for either a square or a statue, but statue there was, so marred and scarred by age and human hands that he could not even tell whether it was wrought of bronze or of iron.

“Iron,” said the bulge under his cloak. She could see through it, she had told him. It was not magic, unless it was a magic of every veiled woman in Islam.

Now that she had spoken, his scattered wits came together; the throb in his power, not quite pain, that he had taken for a warning against the guards who walked the walls, centered on the image below. Its shape was that of a man with arm uplifted, finger pointing toward the wall on which Richer huddled. Someone had striven nobly to strike off the head, or perhaps only its crown or helmet, but the iron had withstood the blows.

The square was empty but for a lone stooped figure in black, doing something indistinguishable just beyond the statue's shadow. There was nothing in it to mark it as the spiritual lord of Ravenna.

Gerbert seemed unmoved by so much iron, so close. Just as the sun came to its zenith, he set his stake in the earth where the shadow's finger pointed, measuring a careful distance with plumbline and string. Richer felt the tug of the spell that both warded and concealed the mark. The iron twisted it, but Gerbert was its master. He sealed it with a sign of the cross and without ado, and made his cowled and anonymous way across the square.

Richer met him at the joining of alley and wider street, one monk meeting another for a slow progress toward the cathedral. “No one saw from above,” said Richer, “and none that I could detect from below.”

“Good,” said Gerbert. His voice was sharp. Richer, jostled against him as a troop of bravos swaggered past, felt his weariness.

“Damned iron,” Gerbert muttered. “They knew what they were doing, those old pagans.”

“Then should you even try to — ”

“How can I not?”

Indeed, thought Richer. It was not greed for treasure that moved Gerbert. It was another avarice altogether. Richer had his fair share of it. Simply to know what was worth hiding in such fashion, so subtly and yet so blatantly, with so much iron forged so clearly to twist magic into uselessness.

“The moon is full tonight,” said Gerbert. “The better for us. A transformation of the eye: iron into silver, power's converse into an illusion of power. I'll confuse the iron till it hardly knows what it is.”

Richer grinned in his cowl. Now there was sophistry. A mage was a perilous beast, but a mage who was also a logician and a theologian was deadly enough to outface the devil himself.

Who would not, Richer devoutly hoped, put in an appearance tonight. He was not in the mood for high magical heroics. He was simply and insatiably curious.

oOo

The stake was there, unmolested as far as Richer could tell. The moon was coy, now staring down, now veiling herself in cloud. Gerbert, refreshed by an hour's prayer and an hour's sleep after a day of ruling Ravenna, moved lightly in his mantle, like a shadow himself. The walls about the square were blank, blind. If anyone lived there, he slept deep, and kept no dogs to cry the alarm. A shadow flitted across Richer's feet, startling him nigh into a fit; it mewed its contempt round a mouthful of mouse and went to consume its prey in peace.

Gerbert approached the statue and the stake, silent, his power drawn close about him. It was he now who carried the Jinniyah; Richer had a lantern, unlit, and an empty bag. Gerbert only wanted to see what was there. Richer's ambitions were slightly more solid. Maybe there would be books; or a relic; or something magical.

The statue loomed much larger from below than from above. Its pedestal was carved with a word: either the Greek for
Strike here
, as the Jinniyah said and the book agreed, or — she allowed and Gerbert believed more likely —
 
the name of some forgotten emperor or nobleman. Richer could not tell, blurred as it was, and hacked apparently with axes. The upraised hand pointed pointlessly wallward.

Not so pointless if the Secret History told the truth. Richer followed Gerbert to the stake, which pierced a crack in the paving. The wards blurred and frayed with the master's coming, and melted away. The moon was suddenly very bright; the image's shadow stretched, groping toward the interlopers. Gerbert bent as if in homage, laying his palms flat on the stone. Just as the shadow-finger seemed to touch him, he spoke a single word.

After the word was silence absolute. Even the wind had stilled.

Under his hands the stone shifted and sank. The world moved again; the wind resumed its restless wandering. Monk and archbishop regarded the mouth that had opened in the earth. Richer's hands were astonishingly steady as he lit the lantern and directed its thin beam downward. The shaft seemed as deep as a well, but behind his fear, where power was, he sensed that it was not so formidable. He set the lantern on the rim, and before Gerbert could stop him, slid over and down.

For an appalling instant he knew that he would fall without end or hope. Then he struck bottom. His hands, stretched to their fullest, could almost have touched the rim. “It's not far,” he called up, his voice echoing in the shaft. “Here, master. Lower yourself down; I'll catch you.”

It was done almost before he finished speaking. Gerbert was more solid than he looked, and stronger. He hardly needed Richer's hands, dropping down almost with a young man's lightness, one arm about his middle to protect the Jinniyah. When he was firm on his feet, he freed her from her wrappings and held her facing forward. “Come,” she said with barely suppressed impatience. “What are we waiting for?”

The shaft opened on a passage just high enough for Gerbert, uncomfortably low for Richer. An overpowering odor of damp wafted out of it.

“Well?” the Jinniyah demanded. Well enough for her: bronze and not fastidious flesh, and protected in the fold of her master's cloak.

Richer could not even sigh: he would have gagged. He raised his lantern, bent his back, and braved the damp and the stink. It was revenge of a sort. Whatever there was to see, he would see it first. Even if it were nothing. He had already lost his hope of books. They would have rotted away long ago.

Before he had gone a furlong, he knew that he should never have begun. But Gerbert was close behind him, uncomplaining; and he had his own store of stubbornness. He set his jaw and went on. Step and step and aching, crouching step. Dark beyond the lantern's beam, foul-sheened walls, air which he breathed as shallowly as his body could bear. He began to think of going on all fours, though the floor was no more savory than the walls.

It began to slope downward; or perhaps he had merely noticed what had been so from the first. As soon as he noticed it, as if to mock him, it leveled. Richer nearly collided with a wall, swayed, stumbled, all but fell down a flight of steps into sudden, dizzying space.

The lantern had fallen from his hand and rolled clanking away. He neither needed nor heeded it. Light flared blindingly bright, so sudden that he tripped and fell, and lay on his face, trying to breathe.

First he was startled that he could. Then he was startled that he lay on dry stone. No damp here. No stink, perhaps, beyond his much-befuddled nose. His skin prickled with what he recognized as magic, though nothing like it had ever touched him.

Gerbert helped him up. The light was the color of blood; it gave the master's face a demonic cast. He had no eyes for Richer; they were all for this that must be the Treasure of Justinian.

“Not his Christian and orthodox majesty, I don't think,” mused Gerbert. He was still holding Richer's arm, his Jinniyah set on the floor to stare her fill.

It was not so large a space except in the wake of the passage. As large perhaps as a side chapel in a great cathedral, round, with a domed roof. It was empty, its floor plain, paved with smooth pale stone. The walls were its treasure.

At first Richer took them for paintings. Then he decided that they were mosaics of wondrous subtlety. But no; were they carved in relief, painted and gilded, or — ?

It was another chamber all about them, a dozen chambers, a hundred, a palace all of gold. Walls of gold, ceilings paneled with gold, everything all gold; golden guardsmen dicing with golden dice; a king of gold at table with his queen, food set beside them, servants standing about, all gold; and in the heart, in the center of them all, a great blood-red carbuncle that put the dark to flight. Across from it, facing it, stood a youth of gold, an archer with strung bow, arrow nocked, poised to loose. His eyes glittered in the stonelight.

“Illusion.” Richer's voice was appallingly loud.

“Magic,” Gerbert agreed, calm, but under it a swelling delight. “He was a great mage who did this, simply for the sake of doing it.”

“Or she,” said the Jinniyah. The ruddy light worked strangely on her, so that she seemed made not of bronze or gold but of living flesh. “You see the truth, master. This is no Christian thing. Justinian, says our historian? Not even Octavian, say I. This is older by far.”

Truly, thought Richer, insofar as he could think at all. The guards wore strange armor; the courtiers and the servants observed no fashion that he had ever heard of. It was, now that he looked at it, shockingly immodest, men and women both wasp-waisted, kilted or skirted below, brazenly bare above.

There were beasts. Dogs; slender haughty cats; serpents wound like ornaments about wrists, arms, necks; a great looming bull with which a company of youths and maidens seemed to dance, leaping over its horns.

“This is old,” said the Jinniyah, and in her voice was awe and even, perhaps, a flicker of fear. “Can you feel it? Pride; joy.
See
, it sings.
See what my magic can do
. And yet...sadness, too.
Gone
, it laments.
All gone. All lost. All dead, forgotten, forsaken, sunk beneath the sea. Only I remember. Only I
.”

“And we, now,” said Gerbert softly.

The light was changing. Not dimming, not brightening, but paling to earthly gold. Unearthly gold altered with it. Colors flickered into clarity. Metal warmed to flesh, cloth, wood painted and unpainted, food such as mortal man might think of tasting. Only the plates and bowls remained gold, and the ornaments of the king and his white-breasted queen. They smiled at one another, she fondling a jeweled serpent at her throat, he reaching for a cup.

Terror reared over Richer and fell, drowning him. Alive — they were alive. And if they moved, if they spoke, if they turned their great kohl-darkened eyes on him, oh, surely, he would go mad.

He turned about, stumbling. Gerbert was rapt in wonder. Beyond him was a garden, a green hill, a sea so blue it hurt the eyes. No stair, no reeking, blessed, mortal passage. No escape. They were trapped. The magic had taken them. The air was warmer than March in Ravenna could ever have been. He scented grass, thyme, the sea.

“Mary, Mother of God!” he wailed, and bolted.

He hardly cared where he went. Out, only. Out. The table, the king, the lovely, wanton queen, loomed before him. His hands flailed. Cold stone. Warm air. Painted wall. Real and solid table, plates that scattered, a knife in his hand, cool hilt, white flame of magic.

The earth rumbled. The air shrieked like a woman. The archer bared white teeth in his sun-bronzed face, and loosed. The arrow flew as swift as sight; pierced the carbuncle; shattered it.

Darkness fell, abrupt and absolute. The world was a drum, and God's hand beating on it. Hands seized Richer, dragging him. His body yielded. His mind gibbered. Someone was shouting. It might have been himself. It might have been Gerbert, or the Jinniyah, or the outraged, violated magic.

He had no memory of the passage. Only of scrambling into blessed, mortal moonlight, and falling, and rising again, and being dragged anew. Behind him, in the rocking of the earth, the statue fell and shattered. Richer, who had quite lost his wits, laughed and clapped his hands like a child. Iron, oh, yes, indeed, but within it, pallid under the moon, the gleam of lovely, deadly, pagan gold.