Flesh and Fire (22 page)

“That. . .is a tooth?”

“A fang. When I changed the spell—”

“When you did what?” Malech stopped and turned, his gaze piercing Jerzy even in the dim light. “You young idiot, what did you do?”

Jerzy leaned away from his master’s anger, all the confidence he had felt disappearing under that hard gaze. “I. . .we came on the creature, already attacking. I gave the healwine to Ranulf and taught him how to cast it, but. . .it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t going to be enough; I could tell that. It was too large, and. . .the spell wasn’t affecting the beast the way it should. It wasn’t slowing down enough. It was going to kill more people.”

“And so you. . .did what?” His master’s voice was too quiet, and Jerzy felt himself start to sweat even in the cool confines of the icehouse.

“I took some of the wine, and I changed the spell. Deepened it, so that it went deeper, into the flesh and joints, not just the muscles.” With all his worries about trading the flesh for gold, he hadn’t once thought he was doing anything wrong by enhancing the spell, once he’d felt the push to do so.

“And what happened?”

“The two spells . . . they wound together, acted together. My spell added to the first one, made the creature susceptible to physical attack.” He should tell Malech about the second decantation. He knew he should. Even if his master was angry at him, he should tell everything, confess all his actions, and await punishment.

He said nothing further.

Malech sighed and shook his head, his narrow face creasing in deeper lines of worry. “My error, again, not to warn you. A Vineart’s own quiet-magic interacts with spellwine, Jerzy. We are not. . .ah, no. No lectures, not here and now. Time enough tomorrow. Fortunately, you used the same spellwine, so the magics recognized each other. Had you used a different spellwine, without proper training . . . it could have been deadly to you, and those around you, not the beast.”

“But. . .spells have long been used in support of each other.” He had read accounts of such decantations in the books Malech had given him. “Wind and fire, weather and growth-of-crops. . .”

“Together, with two Vinearts of training, and only under great and dire need precisely because it is so dangerous. We take only a sip, use only one spell, for a
reason
.” He sighed again, and Jerzy felt something in his chest tighten and sink at the disappointment in that noise.

“Forgive me, Master.” He fell forward, face to the ground, and winced. His body was unaccustomed to such movements now.

“Ah, boy, get up. Up!”

Jerzy got back up on one knee, still averting his eyes, fearing not physical blows, but dismissal.

Instead, Malech’s hand reached out, hovered over his shoulder, then dropped to the Vineart’s side. “There is nothing to forgive. I sent you out into danger, without telling you what you needed to know. The fact that I did not know you would need it erases none of my responsibility. If need did not drive me so hard. . .But now you know. We have both learned, today. Now tell me what you brought back.”

Jerzy still wasn’t sure he could breathe, but he followed his master’s command. “Flesh. And some of the scales.” He reached into the box, held one up. It was the size of his palm, hard and yet flexible, glittering even in the low light like the inside of a seashell. “And one of the fangs.”

Malech bent down to take a better look at the long white curve. Up close it looked even more impressive than it had in the beast’s mouth, the length of a man’s arm and just as thick. The Vineart reached a finger to touch the tip, but withdrew before actually making contact. “How many were there, two or four?”

“Four.”

“Ah. Fetch my kit, and bring out the second vial from the left.”

As Jerzy did so, he watched his master carefully. Maybe, if he had paid more attention, he would have known not to combine the spells. . ..

But then would the beast have been defeated so easily? Wasn’t that worth the risk? Even if he had been wrong, had he been right?

The thought itched at his brain, but he forced it aside for later, and focused on what they were doing now. Malech had wrapped a scrap of cloth around his hand, and dragged a chunk of the flesh out, clear of the other items. Smaller than the others, the chunk was only about the size of a clump of grapes still on the vine, with smooth, almost slippery lines where it had come apart from the main body.

“It is all solid flesh,” Malech murmured. “Is that a result of the spells, or was the beast created as such, meat grafted onto bones? Where are the muscles? How is the blood carried from one location to another?”

Jerzy came and crouched beside Malech, trying to look over his arm without being obvious or crowding his master.

“Do you see this? Here?” Malech prodded the chunk with one cloth-wrapped finger. “How solid it is?”

Jerzy looked. Under the thick skin, now a blueish-tinged black, either due to the lighting or death, the skin was a solid dark red. “It shouldn’t be solid?” Slaves ate vegetables and grains, with the occasional hen stewed with
vin ordinaire,
or, as a treat, fish. Meat from a larger animal was still something new to him. This looked much like the pig Detta served, roasted off the spit.

“Not uncooked. Not even spell-cooked. There should be sinew and veins, and. . .blood. Jerzy, boy, was there blood when they hacked into this thing?”

It was so obvious, such a simple thing, that Jerzy felt like the idiot Malech called him, for not realizing it before. “Master. . .no. There was no blood.” He paused. “What. . .what does that mean?”

“It means what we suspected is true. This is no sea serpent, no creature born of nature. Someone created this creature intentionally, and undoubtedly the one before it as well—and perhaps more, yet to attack. Here, uncork that vial and pass it to me, carefully! You don’t want to spill that on yourself.”

The warning wasn’t needed; the moment Jerzy uncorked the vial, the repulsion was strong enough to make him want to fling it away. Forcing himself to control the instinct, he took a cautious nose of the aroma, the first step to identifying a spellvine.

A deep smell, like hipflowers in summer, dark purple and warm, with just a hint of spice. Nothing at all that should have repulsed. A deeper nose, still keeping the vial well away from his skin, brought the under notes, and he gagged, jerking his head away.

“Ah.” Malech had been watching him, his deep-set eyes approving for once. “There you have it.”

The smell—the
stench
—of death, corpses, and decay, hidden under the initial sweetness.

“What is it?” Jerzy asked, handing the vial over to Malech with a little more haste than was seemly.

“Nothing you ever want to tangle with,” Malech said. “And yet, a very useful
vin magica,
on occasion. It is grown in the southern islands, high in the mountains where the sun beats down and cooks the grapes at the moment of ripeness. The juice is taken from them in that instant, a slave in each row waiting to capture the essence, and bring it immediately to the vats.”

As he was instructing, Malech—rather than sipping the spellwine— sprinkled a few drops onto the flesh.

Nothing happened, and Jerzy felt breath leave his lungs in a disappointed sigh. Malech, on the other hand, seemed fascinated. “There. Did you see that?”

“I saw nothing.”

“Exactly. If I were to cut a part of you away, and run the same test, those drops would have sizzled and sparked as it consumed the life-spark in that flesh, burning you in its excitement. Here. . .nothing. It soaked in like water to soil, no twist of magic whatsoever.”

He sat back on his heels, careless of the dust and wood chips getting on his clothing, and looked expectantly at Jerzy. Clearly his student was supposed to say something to indicate his understanding of what had just happened. All Jerzy could think of was the way the top notes had smelled, the warm, living flavor of it. Living. Top notes. Underneath, death, decay. Lack-of-life. . .

“This flesh. . .it is dead.” He knew that already. He had watched the guards cut it apart, taken it home. So, something more . . . “It . . . never lived?”

A flash of something went across Malech’s face, too quick to be identified, and he handed the vial back to Jerzy, who stoppered it—care-fully—almost without noticing the action. “Perhaps,” Malech said. “Or if it lived, it was a very long time ago.”

“But how. . .” Jerzy stopped. This was another test. “If it did not live, and still moved, and ate—”

“Or killed, at least,” Malech said. “A thing without blood or life might not hunger, as we know it.”

“Magic. You think this was made by magic.” The thought of such a thing staggered Jerzy. Magic was for guiding the wind and rain, for healing bones and flesh and minds, for sharpening steel and hardening wood, for growing crops and strengthening vows. Giving life to things not living. . .

“I know that it was made by magic,” Malech said. “The three questions we must ask are how, who. . .and why. Give me the fourth vial, and step back. And watch, carefully.”

The fourth vial was filled with a thick white spellwine that smelled of resins and cold spices.

“Another gift of the southern islands,” Malech said. “They produce little, but what they do is deep and potent. And dear—this small dose cost me as much as two casks of basic healwine in a bad Harvest.”

You could buy five slaves for that sort of coin. Jerzy was pleased to see that his hands were steady as he unstoppered the vial, placing the wax cork carefully in the case and handing the vial to his master. Then, heeding the earlier warning, he scooted backward, putting more distance between himself and whatever Malech was about to do.

This time Malech did sip from the vial, barely a drop landing on his tongue. A hiss and a spark came from his open mouth, green and gold in the dusky air, and Jerzy could smell the magic, thicker than must and heavier, like burned spice bark and thunder after a storm.

Malech didn’t seem to notice. “Taste deep,” he directed the magic in that drop, then pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth with an almost inaudible clicking noise. “Unto me, the seeing. Go.”

Thanks to his lessons with Cai and an old skull his tutor had used as a teaching tool during their fighting lessons, Jerzy could almost track the liquid’s path as it touched the upper palate, rising through the nose and into the eyes, so that Malech could
see
whatever he was looking for.

There was quiet in the icehouse, only the occasional drip-drip-drip of water melting off the blocks, and a distant hum of noise coming from outside through the thick wooden door and walls. Jerzy strained uselessly, anxious to know what Malech was looking for, what he was seeing in the dead flesh.

He moved his left hand over the flesh, then reached to take hold of the fang, grasping it carefully below the tip. He held his hand there, then reached down and picked up one of the scales, balancing it between thumb and index finger, grasping it loosely, as though it was fragile enough to shatter.

“Ah. . .”

“What do you see?” Curiosity trumped patience and manners, and Jerzy didn’t flinch from the right-handed smack that landed on the side of his head. Even kneeling, distracted, and spell-casting, his master had a steady hand and almost perfect aim. “But what do you see?”

“Nothing.” Malech put the scale back down on the sail and sat back on his heels. He took a sip from the hand-sized water flask at the belt that was always clapped around his hips, rinsing his mouth and spitting to the side, away from Jerzy. “I see nothing.” He turned to stare thoughtfully at the remaining flasks, half hidden inside the case. His long, narrow face, the skin drawn roughly over the cheekbones, seemed faded somehow, scraped thin like thrice-used parchment. For a moment, his master seemed
ancient
.

“What . . . what was that, that you used?” Malech said he should question, and maybe if he had asked before, he would have known. . ..

“Magewine, boy.” His face was old, but his voice sounded the same as ever, and Jerzy grasped onto that, looking down at his own hands and concentrating on that steady voice instead. “Magewine. Rare and potent, the only spellwine only Vinearts may use, kept secret and hidden from the outside world. It is crafted for one purpose only: to see into the heart of another spell, identify the legacy it came from.”

That was enough to make Jerzy do a double take. “Master. . .there must be a hundred different legacies.” Legend claimed that Sin Washer’s blood dripped five and seven times into the soil, and five and seven times that it separated, one drop for each of the lands where the
vin
grew, to touch their roots and change them into something new, something less than what they had been before. From the First Growth had come the five elemental wines: healing, fire, aether, earth, and water—all potent, but none as powerful as the First Growth, the original flesh of magic. A single decantation that could identify all those second-growth vines. . .

“Not nearly so many changes boy, at least not at first. But as each new vine grew, it took on the characteristics of its surroundings, and each Vineart crafted his own style, and so now we have far more legacies than even Sin Washer might have dreamed. And yet,” Malech said, “if this were crafted of magic, the magewine would tell me what soil it grew from.”

Jerzy, drawn unwillingly, looked up into his master’s face and saw there something he had never expected, something that mirrored his own emotion: confusion.

“The magewine did not know the legacy,” Malech said. “The creature is made by magic—yet it is no spell we know.”

JERZY WAS LEFT to rewrap the bits—“and tie them well, boy. I want nothing sniffing around, burrowing in, and taking bites from our beast”—while Malech went outside to the well-pump and washed his hands. Jerzy came out, blinking in the much-brighter air, and carried the case to where Malech stood, looking out across the road, into the hills. Jerzy followed his gaze, realizing slowly that the Vineart was watching, not the vines, but the tree line marching against the top of the ridge.

“Do we have pigeons in the hutch?”

Whatever he had been expecting Master Malech to say, it wasn’t that. “I don’t know. Probably.”