The Spirit Lens (19 page)

“Your king’s a fool if he goes to the docks,” said the mage. “Let the ship sail and make his prayers at home if he must.”

Dante had heeded my news of the
Destinne
’s new launch with only half his attention, clearly more interested in the artifacts of the first assassination attempt than in anything we might do to prevent a second. He had responded to my congratulations on his “salon debut” with a shrug. “I assumed you’d control Lord Fool’s reaction.”

Even my report of Ophelie’s death and her prisoning in the crypt had elicited few questions. My eager offering of her broken manacle had prompted a promise to “look into it” when he’d more time. Indeed, I had not pushed. Our first priority must be to protect Philippe.

“Kings are not so easily dissuaded,” I said. “Especially warrior kings turned natural philosophers, who have staked their kingdom’s prosperity on voyages such as this. Surely, if we can locate the threat, you can do something to protect him.”

He didn’t bother to answer, but yanked the thin rope loose from the dusty canvas. I needed to engage him. “I’ve a courret.”

That
caused him to look up even as the wrapping fell away to expose a flat leather case near as long as my arm. “Indeed? And how would a librarian come by such a rarity? Not a mage living knows how to make a wardstone.”

I squirmed under his stare, green as jade and hot as a smith’s furnace. “It’s borrowed.”

“Demonfire, you’ve stolen it!” Pure astonishment erased the wariness and suspicion he wore like a temple dancer’s mask. “
You
—that I thought might be the first honest man I’ve ever met.”

“I did
not
steal it,” I said, exasperated that we’d wandered so easily from the needs of the hour, confounded again that I could be so easily read. “I found it in a crate of texts we brought from a ruin in Xarles two years ago. The courret was likely the only decent thing to come out of that house. The Mondragoni were—”

No. Better not to speak of them, though they had been on my mind since the inception of this enterprise.

But Dante’s hand had fallen still. “
What
were they?”

Ixtador’s Gates, the man’s ears must be keener than a hawk’s to hear what lingered unspoken on a man’s tongue. “Necromancers,” I said. “Leeches. Demonists. Torturers. A blood family that was everything foul and unholy. Some say their overreaching fired the Blood Wars. The few of them not wiped out in the wars were beheaded after, and none have ever disputed the rightness of it.”

“Ah.” He twisted the brass key I’d given him to unlock the leather case. The latch clicked. “I’d give a deal to see those texts—if I’m to make a show of deadraising. Orviene and Gaetana may not have the talent they think, but they’ll not be easily deceived.”

I pulled out my journal, my hand itching for my pen. I’d only plummet to hand, but I could ink the reminder later:
Bring Dante the Mondragoni texts
.

Puzzled, I stared at the open page and the words already taking shape. I had no intention of fetching the Mondragoni books.

I glanced up. Dante’s eyes had fixed on the case, but his hand had stilled.

“Stop this immediately, Master.” I slammed my journal onto the worktable before fury—or fear—crumpled it.

Dante hungered for knowledge as the poor hunger for evidence of the god. And because providing access to the filthiest underside of our art was the last thing I would do for anyone, friend or foe, I knew for certain this time that the compulsion I felt was entirely unnatural. No one should be able to influence a man so . . . directly.

“I don’t know what spell you’ve worked on me, Master Dante, but you will stop it now. Tell me what you want. Tell me why. And when I make my own choice, yes or no, argue with me if you will, but with honest words, not sorcery. If you persist in this, our partnership is ended.”

“I’ve told you what I want and why. So will you bring me these Mondragoni texts or will we argue it?” Stubborn. Prideful. Contemptuous. The manners of a badger, as Ilario had said.

Streaming sunlight transformed the circumoccule’s glassy surface into a ring of amber encircling the mage. With a pair of locking forceps, he lifted the bloodstained arrow from its nest of Lady Susanna’s worn silks and laid it on the floor beside his staff. The spyglass remained snugged in its wrappings. He closed the case and set it outside the circle.

I gripped my convictions tightly. “Fortunately, in this matter, I’ve no choice. The Mondragoni scripts are locked in the Seravain vault. And do not
will
me to break the locks. The texts are encrypted and entirely unreadable. I kept them . . .” I could not say why I’d kept them, save that destroying works of such antiquity did not come easy to me. Kajetan, my mentor, the chancellor of the collegia, and a prefect of the Camarilla, had supported my judgment.

I wasn’t sure Dante heard me. Hunched over where he could see it closely, he nudged the arrow with the forceps once, then again and again, examining its length with each rotation.

The hour ticked away in silence. I waited as long as I could bear before curiosity trumped anger. “Dante, tell me what you’re—”

“Deeping fires!” Dante slammed his implement to the floor. “When did you transform into a babbling idiot like the peacock? Have you no discipline? No patience? No wonder you’re incapable of spellwork.”

I did not rise to the insult. “What do you see, Master?”

“What does your
borrowed
courret tell you?”

I’d not even thought of it. Which meant . . . The silver pebble I pulled from my waist pocket was as cold as the first day of Estar on Journia’s highest peak. A poisoned arrow less than two metres distant should have it scorching. “It’s telling me nothing.”

“Step inside the circumoccule.” He pulled a flask from his pocket and dribbled its contents in a small oval close around the arrow. “And bring a willow wand with you, one with a forked end. There’s a basket of them over there.” He gestured vaguely in the direction of the worktables.

By the time I found the basket and rummaged through the fifty or so slender branches to find what he wanted, the painted oval had dried to brown.

“Well come along. If you want to
know
.”

I stepped across the amber ring of the circumoccule and promptly dropped the courret. The wardstone clattered to the floor and rolled toward Dante. It had near burnt a hole in my palm. “Gates of Heaven!”

“One needs a secure enclosure to work on dangerous matters,” he said, nudging the silver pebble in my direction. “This circumoccule suffices. The painted boundary merely isolates the object of our study from other objects, enchanted or otherwise. As we’ve no idea of its dangers, you’d best use the branch to touch the arrow. Willow, simple and known, will disturb its keirna far less than a finger attached to a human person, especially one who disciplines his spirit no better than a bumpkin child.”

Leaving the courret where it lay, I knelt facing Dante, the arrow and its enclosing strip of paint between us, the forked end of the willow wand wedged snugly about the arrow shaft. The mage touched the joined arrow and wand with his staff and closed his eyes, visibly retreating into that state of profound stillness I had witnessed in his bedchamber two days before. I didn’t need him to tell me to close my eyes as well.

“Quiet your spirit,” he said after a moment. “Naught can reflect on a turbulent sea. Calm it.”

I tried. Fear—or excitement—at the revelations to come hollowed my belly. The day’s urgencies could not be dismissed by merely willing it so. I shifted position. Stretched my neck and shoulders. Breathed deep. Yet I saw naught but blackness.

Determined not to miss what he would teach me, I accepted Dante’s command as literal instruction. I imagined my internal landscape as the roiling ocean beyond the shores of Tallemant, and my will as the finger of the Creator at the dawn of the world. I calmed each wave, smoothed each ripple, stilled its unsettled surface until my mind’s slate gleamed black as obsidian.

Against the shining blackness, a font of deep, healthy green surged upward . . . quickly overlaid with wedges of brilliant yellow and blue, angled sharp as the arrow point itself, and a series of brown marks like the crosshatching motifs on old pottery, save for an unpleasing irregularity. From the base of the rune, as I thought of the display, pooled an inky black splotch that stretched into a long, straight line twined with bruised purple. A faint waved line appeared below it.

“The keirna—this pattern you see writ in shapes and colors—tells us that this is an implement of death, precisely made from living wood, steel, and poison.” Dante spoke softly, as if sharper words might jar our tenuous connection. “Splintered now—see the irregularity of the hatching—but made to fly . . . straight . . . to penetrate . . . ”

A very long while passed and I thought perhaps to see no more. But then, outside my head, the mage expelled a great sigh of effort, while inside, a sparkling net of white scored the darkness and enclosed the colored marks, binding, containing, masking its entirety.

“. . . everything.”

After a moment of quiet, I felt the shift of limbs clothed in fabric and leather and a release as Dante dissolved the bond between us. The pattern vanished. Wood scraped softly on wood.

When I opened my eyes, Dante sat cross-legged on the floor, the carved staff across his lap. He was staring puzzled at the arrow, which had changed neither its position nor its rusty tale of a dead horse and a lucky king and the twisting yank of whoever had withdrawn it from its victim.

I waited, confident the mage would tell me what bothered him so, for I had a sudden inspiration that sharing this marvel had not been his original intent, but an apology for his brutish attempt to manipulate me, offered in the only coin he knew. He would always prefer to investigate magic’s mysteries alone.

“They were overeager, our assassins,” he said at last. “That’s all I can calculate. So determined to cast blame on Her Gullible Majesty that they concocted this foolery of guard captains and wrestling matches. Or perhaps that whole complication was naught but coincidence, and your guard captain the unluckiest of men.”

Penetrate everything.
“You’re saying the arrow would have penetrated the king’s armor no matter what, so there was no point in getting him out of it.”

In one startling motion, he picked up the arrow and slammed it to the mahogany plank beside him. The impact left the stained head buried in the wood and a magical residue stinging my eyes like blown sand.

“This arrow would penetrate a marble slab,” he said. “An iron cliff.”

Stunned, I could not budge my gaze from the quivering shaft protruding from the floor. Yet my mind raced. I did not believe in coincidence. “Perhaps casting blame on the queen was never the end, but a means—a confusion to embroil an investigator in domestic argument, masking the true perpetrators.”

“Or perhaps the murderous wife did not trust her mages to do what they promised,” said Dante, dry as the deserts of Aroth. “The wrestling ploy marked the game as amateur.”

“No amateur worked transference or enspelled an arrow to penetrate iron.” What was this protective instinct already so plain in Philippe and Ilario where Eugenie de Sylvae was concerned? I’d need to do better. Philippe was relying on me to be thorough and objective.

The mage, distracted, acknowledged my point with head and hand. He closed his eyes and knotted his brow, not quiet this time, but tapping his fingers on his staff. After only a few moments, he launched the staff across the room, growling in frustration.

“There’s something more here,” he said, as staff and a stack of boxes clattered on the floor. “Keirna tells a story, and the story of this arrow seems clear. Only the human conspiracy surrounding it tangles our minds. Yet I’ve this notion . . . Some piece of the pattern is missing. If I’d studied a hundred poisoned arrows launched at kings, I might know better what to look for.”

“I’ll find out what more I can about that day,” I said, retrieving my courret and stepping quickly outside the circumoccule before the silver pebble set my pocket afire. “But the day after tomorrow looms much larger just now. You
will
come to the docks.”

“If I must.” Dante dragged his horrid right hand out of his tunic and crossed his arms atop his knees, glaring at the arrow as if it had thwarted him apurpose. “I’ll need those texts, you know. With some work, I can likely break the ciphers. If I’m to tease death and wickedness . . .”

He must work with them. My mind completed his assertion, as he knew it would. I pretended not to hear. I chose to go in search of Calvino de Santo, former captain of His Majesty’s personal guard, condemned to serve his former underlings for his failure in judgment. Perhaps
he
would answer my questions.

 

 

MY FIRST STOP IN MY search for the disgraced soldier was a cluttered temple guardpost. Its sole occupant, a craggy-faced veteran with red hair and huge feet, was quite willing to recommend where a newcomer to Merona could get the best view of the king and the launch of the
Destinne
. Bored and alone in his watch, the soldier was easily coaxed into a lengthy discussion of the difficulties of protecting a monarch who insisted on mingling with his subjects.

“Of course, I’ve heard the closest to death the king’s come in years occurred last year among his own guards,” I said, as if I didn’t know what Guardsman Veryl’s red livery signified. I perched on a stool, watching him light the lamps in the sooty corners of the guardroom. The place smelled of cleaning oil, musty boots, and the spreading lawn of the temple minor beyond the open door. “Heard a guardsman near killed him.”

The soldier’s back stiffened, and his overlarge lower lip pooched out even farther from his red beard. “’ Tweren’t no fault of the guards. Nor even the cap’n’s, though he’s paid the price and will do till he passes the Veil.”