The Spirit Lens (30 page)

I could speak none of these arguments, nor question him. Sure as I stood there, he would prod and poke for explanation. I rubbed my arm, where the ragged scar yet pricked from his touch, an indelicate reminder of debts unpaid.

“Certainly, Master. As you wish.” It was the only answer possible. “Though I fully intend to avoid the man, now I’ve satisfied his requirements. As ever, I am an abject coward at confrontation.”

“Nay, lad. Speak not so slighting of my best work.” His elegant hand touched my cheek, and with his usual wink and flourish, he hurried away.

Unsettled with these conflicts, propelled with a heightened urgency to complete my mission before Nidallo returned, I sped to the lectern and leafed quickly to the alphabetical listing of the
Catalog Geographia
. No entry corresponded with the name Ophelie had bled to discover.

The royal geographers who assembled the
Catalog
were known for their prejudices. They listed locales in Louvel, Aubine, Nivanne, and Tallemant in detail. But they frequently left out much from the less-prosperous demesnes-major, or places that lay in the demesne-minor of a personal or family rival. To find the most accurate information, of which the
Catalog
was but an organized extract, one had to look to the unwieldy volumes of the Survey, the census taken at the outset of each Sabrian king’s reign.

Hastening into the Survey Room, I pulled out the index volume of the
Survey Philippi
. Even more than before, the painful sense that I must not expose my purposes consumed me.

Altevierre
did not appear in the Survey’s summary list of great houses, nor anywhere in its sparse index. I removed my spectacles and pressed the heels of my hands into my gritty eyes, forcing myself to concentrate. I had no time to read the entire Survey. The spelling of
Altevierre
rooted the word in central Louvel, whose lexicon had become standard as printed books spread throughout the kingdom. But Ophelie might have mis spelled an overheard name. Perhaps the word drew from an older tradition. . . .

Altevierre
could be interpreted as
highest view.
I pulled out the Survey volume devoted to Grenville, the rugged demesne to the north, where local dialects had evolved from the same invaders who had populated Dante’s Coverge. I scoured every entry—every farmstead, house, village, and crossroads—and found nothing.

Growling in frustration, I tore through the slim collection of pages devoted to mountainous Coverge, but Sabria’s poorest demesne-major had no great houses, farms, or towns, only scattered mining settlements, none of which came anything close. I ran my fingers over the remaining volumes. As a fish hooked and drawn, my finger halted on the slender volume entitled
Demesnes-major: Arabasca
. I snatched the book from the stack.

A door slammed. Measured footsteps echoed on the library stair. I dared not stop. Who knew when I might get another chance?

My finger sped through the pages, pausing at any name remotely similar. And there it was.

A goat track to access a watchtower—a highest view. I shoved the Arabascan volume into the stack and slammed the book cupboard shut. Then I snatched up the lamp and turned to go. Nidallo loomed in the archway opposite.

“Your lists made no mention of Survey volumes,” he said, glaring at my hands, as if expecting evidence of theft. “They do not leave the library.”

Emboldened by discovery and fueled by an unfocused anger, I had no trouble with this play. “I’ve taken no Survey volumes. Count them, if you wish. You are not privy to every matter my mentor and I discuss. Now, I’ve closed Mage Dante’s crates with tamper seals. If you could provide rope . . .”

I oversaw the delivery of Dante’s crates to a local drayman and left Collegia Seravain without another word to anyone.

Altevierre
.
Eltevire
. I should have known to look to Arabasca first. Some two years before, I had retrieved a cache of books unearthed from the ruins of a once-fortified Arabascan town called Xarles. Before and during the Blood Wars, Xarles and that entire corner of Sabria’s eastern borderlands—crags and stony tablelands pocked with wildcat dens, hermits’ caves, and robbers’ lairs—had been the demesne of the Mondragoni necromancers.

 

 

HAD IT NOT BEEN MIDDLE-NIGHT at the dark of the moon, I would have set out for Arabasca immediately; yet simple wisdom insisted that investigating Eltevire on my own would be a fool’s gambit. Despite my youthful dreams that had repeatedly anointed me the boldest of knights, I lacked the weapons to dispatch even a single despicable mage. Trained awareness of enchantments, paper knowledge, and a borrowed courret could scarce stand against magic bolstered by transference. And the manly art of righteous combat was as alien to me as the practices of sculpture or painting. The only “gentleman’s swordmaster” my father could afford had been a drunken tavern brawler. I needed Dante.

A dreadful night in the local hostelry affirmed the sensible course. In the dark wakings between my own nightmares of glaring spectres and fleshless mules, and the mumbling, snoring, wind-ridden sleep of my companions in the bachelor’s loft, I resolved to save Lianelle ney Cazar. I would not force myself on the girl, but neither would I follow Michel’s example and abandon her. Ilario would know her family. Somehow, in his odd way, he could devise a scheme to remove the girl from Seravain. Once that was settled, I’d devise some ruse to roust Dante and ride for Eltevire.

Even such resolution did not ease me into sleep. I spent the last hours of darkness huddled over a corner table in the inn’s common room. Meg, the yawning, drop-shouldered woman who kept the shabby establishment, brought me ale and cold steamed buns left from the previous day.

“Yer back to Merona with first light, then,” she said as she spitted a slab of bacon over her newly stoked fire.

“Aye. The great wicked city, all fish and sour wine, with evils round every corner.” My mirthless humor echoed the common local opinions.

Meg bobbed her head, knowingly. “There was a lad from out near Oncet what went to Merona and near got hisself starved. . . .”

Citizens of Tigano prided themselves on exchanging lurid tales. Living in the shadow of the collegia magica seemed to expand everyone’s imagination into the realms of the fantastic. This common room witnessed many a night of competitive tale-spinning. Yet made-up stories paled beside a plotted web that linked royal assassination and transference, Merona and Collegia Seravain, the living and the dead.

Of a sudden, my sluggish curiosity woke. What had people seen roundabout Seravain and Tigano? One sure way to prompt more stories . . .

“Your Oncet boy fared lucky even so,” I said, issuing my challenge as soon as the woman’s story wound to a bittersweet end. “Fellow in my lodging house at Merona was found murdered not long since. Ears, nose, and fingers cut off. Corpus dropped in an alley near the docks, emptied entire of his blood. The whore who lives upstairs says the man’s ghost lingers in the lane. Scared three customers away. Dreadful things like
that
don’t happen in Tigano.”

Meg, dusted with flour and smelling of smoke, scooped up my emptied mug and refilled it from the tap. “Nah, boy. ’Tis not only in the city ghosts are walking. Every morn Bets the Seamer spies her gammy what was hanged a’dangling beside her washing line, and Dame Fanny herself says her dead sons creep about their old rooms in the manse. None dares go to our deadhouse save in best daylight. But it’s true, we’ve seen no grueish murders such as you’re telling of.”

“Be thankful,” I said.

When she issued no new attack in our lurid joust, I drained my cup and gathered my traveling case to go. Too much to hope that evidence lay about the countryside awaiting my eye. I’d had a moment’s thought that if Gaetana or someone else was practicing transference at the collegia, some evidence of a mule might have turned up here. They’d not dare use a second student.

“But then . . .” The woman’s hand slowly turned her bacon. “I’ve not seen a man so staggered as Adept Coperno when Constable called him down from Seravain and he declared Grafer Wheelwright three times dead. Emptied half my tun afore he spake a word.”

Meg blotted her sweaty brow with her sleeve, and she did not look up to make sure her tale had created the proper state of horrified amazement on my face. This tale frightened
her
, as well.

I lowered myself to the stool. For a constable to call in aid from Seravain was not uncommon. For an adept to be frightened by a corpse was something else again. And for that adept to be a cocky former classmate who had left Seravain abruptly a few years previous mandated a hearing. “Three times dead? I never heard such.”

Though her complexion took on the color of soured milk, she could not resist the telling. “Grafer got drunk and beat his wife. As was his common way, he run ’ta the wood to sleep it out. But a trimonth passed and he never come home.”

She filled herself a mug and dragged a stool up to my table. “Then it happ’d one night a crate was left in my own yard to be shipped off to Merona. No one spake me, but only left the proper coin with it. Come daylight, the drayman and his helper, loading their wain, dropped the crate”—she leaned close until I smelled the ale and garlic on her breath—“and ’twas Grafer curled up inside—dead. Constable called the coroner. But the coroner couldn’t say what killed Grafer, as the lad had marks of strangling on his neck, and yet had green scum lodged in his throat as though he were breathing and fell into Breek’s Ditch.”

She drank deep of her ale. “Adept Coperno come down from Seravain and worked his magic to seek which way Grafer died, so they could name the murderer. Three . . . four . . . five times over he worked it, till he puked all over the deadhouse floor, for he’d no magic left in his blood to fire his spellmaking. Once he drunk up my ale, all Coperno said was, ‘Three times dead. Strangled and died. Stabbed and died. Drowned at the last. And maybe more besides, but my seeing failed me.’ And then he stumbled out and’s ne’er again come down the hill.”

A story to make anyone blanch. A story that teased and nagged and roused a certainty that this was no exaggeration, but very much a part of the exact same story I lived. “That’s a cruel, wicked tale, mistress. This happened when? Six . . . seven . . . years ago?”

“ ’Twas exactly three years past, come midsummer, as it happened when my daughter was confined with her youngest, and we had a charm-singer in to ward her house from—” The innkeeper flushed and jumped up, as if she’d just recalled that I, too, was a follower of the Camarilla, who lashed or fined such unsanctioned practitioners as charm-singers. “Best get to my baking. Everyone will be up soon.”

She stuck out her hand for payment. I rummaged in my belt purse, and the first coin I pulled out was the double-strike silver—Gruchin’s luck charm. I’d never returned it to Dante. No reason not to spend it; silver was silver. But I slid the coin into my boot, then pulled out twenty copper kivrae and tossed them on the table.

“One more thing, Mistress Meg,” I said, snagging her apron as she scooped up the coins. “Did the constable send after the one who was to receive the crate? Surely that person would have knowledge of the crime. I’d like to think such mystery simply explained—and well punished.”

She downed her ale and shook color back into her sagging cheeks. “Constable thought same as you, but my lads had already broke up the crate and thrown it in their morning fire, and none recalled what was writ. Some say Grafer haunts Breek’s Ditch. I’ve not seen him, but I don’t go down there no more. ’Tis a wicked age we live in. Temples deserted. Disbelievers growing bold. Folk forget their ancestors and make demonish devices that steal the stars from the heavens, and prison time itself in jewel cases. My mam said the dead rise to give us warning of evil times, and so I believe.” She jerked her apron from my hand.

I rousted the stable lad, preferring to lead my mount until the light grew than to remain in Tigano one more moment. As I trudged along the rutted road, I could not shake the notion that Adept Coperno had met a fate no fairer than Grafer Wheelwright. Had the frightened adept gone back to Seravain and asked one question too many? For I would swear on my hope of Heaven that he had left the collegia exactly three years ago at midsummer without a word to anyone.

The rare physician could retrieve a life whose spark had dimmed past common detection. But only a sorcerer of uncommon power—only three I’d read of—had ever reclaimed a dying person from the very folds of the Veil. Only a sorcerer exploring the unholy might see use in repeatedly driving a man to that brink and snatching him back again.

The light grew, tinting the scant clouds with vermillion and rose. Old Meg’s story had raised such dread in me that I felt near drowning in it. I retrieved a flask from a saddlebag and drew down a long pull of ale, then pressed my face against my horse’s flank. And in that moment of warm, living darkness, memory raised an image of freshly splintered wood . . . not Grafer Wheelwright’s crate, broken and thrown in a fire, but long strips scattered in Ophelie’s cell in the royal crypt. Great Heaven, had someone transported
her
to Castelle Escalon in a crate? And Michel—

My heart near stopped its beating. I had
seen
such a crate as could hold a tightly bound man, not two days after Ophelie de Marangel had escaped her prison. A crate exuding the stink of “mushrooms growing in dirt and dung” had sat in Castelle Escalon’s steward’s office. Had it held a dead man or . . . the god save us all . . . a living one?