The Spirit Lens (40 page)

“Honestly, I’ve no idea.” Only that something had near unraveled Dante. Whether he’d been protecting us or probing mystery, my mind balked at imagining what it might be. My bones yet quaked, and I flinched with every blink.

A careful survey of the bleak country spread out beyond the gorge revealed not the slightest movement, no stirred dust, no whinny, no glint of metal, no untoward scent of man or beast. Half a kilometre into the open country, Dante relented and let me be still for a while in the shelter of a turpentine tree. As Ilario and I shared a waterskin, the mage propped his back on the tree and stared into the wasteland. I wondered if he was afraid to blink, as well.

“These bandages should be tended,” said Ilario, dabbing a dainty finger at the blood- and dirt-encrusted rags bound to my chest. “My physician insists we cleanse wounds every day. A disgusting task . . .” Which he took up right away.

I resisted searching Ilario’s pruned expression for evidence of the swordsman or probing his babble for hints of the man I had met at Eltevire. I would honor my promise. Besides, I doubted any flaw was to be found.

As Ilario worked, Dante shook off his reverie and joined us. The mage was no longer shaking. He inspected the lacerated purple circles on my chest for several uncomfortable moments, then nudged my ruined shirt aside to expose several older scars—my father’s legacy. He reached out as if to touch them, then hesitated and glanced up.

“If you must.” I didn’t understand his interest.

His finger, firm, sure, and cold—thrumming with magical energies—traced the long scar that creased my left side and the short one just above my navel. The careful scrutiny recalled his inspection of Gruchin’s spyglass, and I wondered if he was building the ragged marks into one of his runelike patterns in his head. I shifted uneasily.

“Killing strikes, these,” he said, withdrawing his hand.

“Near enough.” So Kajetan had told me when I regained consciousness, weak, nauseated, and bathed in blood and cold sweat. “It was a long time ago.”

“Maybe nearer than you think. What happened to the one who did it?”

“He travels Ixtador, I suppose.”

“Your father. Gods, he bears a fearsome grudge.”

Cold iron lodged in my belly. He did not speak in the past. “How would you know that, mage?”

My demand bounced off his impenetrable stubbornness. “That bandage is filthy.” He stood and tossed a clean kerchief of cheap linen into Ilario’s lap. “Tell us about this Aspirant, student.”

After Ilario folded the kerchief and tied it up for me, he forced me to accept the meager supply of cheese and ale from Dante’s pack. Once begun eating, I couldn’t stop, despite the profoundly unsettling morning and my annoyance with Dante. Likely a good sign that I was ravenous. Mules lost their appetite as their blood was repeatedly drained. As I ate, I told them the story of Merle and Quernay and their master.

Dante sat cross-legged, as intent in his listening as in everything else. “So this Aspirant worked no enchantments as his assistant drew the blood. Did he inject it directly into himself or distill it?”

“I didn’t see. He took it back to where the other prisoner was kept. I was glad enough they didn’t try to fill their entire urn in that one hour. They took half a litre, more or less. That’s not enough to do much with, do you think?” I paused between bites. I hadn’t yet considered the part of me I’d left behind, now taken who knew where.

Dante’s long speculation gave me no reassurance. “If you start with odd dreams or unusual behaviors, you might want to tell me. To trigger what we saw this morn, destroying half a mountain in the hour Eltevire was compromised . . . The spellwork makes the doings on the
Swan
look like acolyte’s play. It means someone has a talent beyond—”

“Beyond the level of a minimally talented hod-carrier?” I could not resist the jab.

His head jerked in assent. “Aye. Even allowing for transference to enhance inborn skills. Even allowing that the worst of this day and night was worked two hundred years past. We’ve a foe I didn’t think existed.”

This trace of humility on Dante’s part frightened me more than anything we’d encountered.

“What was so mysterious about a cursed ruin?” asked Ilario, giving me a hand up. “They had a bleeding cell in the royal crypt and didn’t see it necessary to explode the temple to hide it. What
began
here?”

“The whole place was enchanted,” I said. “Objects in motion, light, fire, water . . . nothing behaved properly or consistently. At least nothing that originated in Eltevire. . . .”

As we plodded along a faint cart path that skirted the end of the ridge, I told them of my experiments—not of my attempts at magic, which proved naught but that “place” could not make an incapable sorcerer capable, but of the coins, Gruchin’s silver, and the pool, the crocodile charm, and the lantern. “. . . think of your tisane that was lukewarm one moment, boiling the next, and felt like glacial ice but a moment later. Nothing behaved.”

We retrieved Dante’s donkey, left tethered beside a shady spring where we could fill our waterskins. “I arrived early at Canfreg Spring,” said the mage, as we set out again, faster now with me astride. “When I heard the old man’s tales—” He shrugged, and I understood. His hunger for knowledge had driven him to Eltevire ahead of us. “I intended to rejoin you, but three men rode in behind me and I dared not counter the bridge ward or its trip signal.”

He slowed his steps and waved his staff at me. “You should have more care, student. You sense enchantments and residues. To disentangle a trip signal from a common ward is only one step more. It could have saved you this thrashing.”

“Then
teach
me, if magic is so damnably easy,” I mumbled. The donkey’s jarring gait had my head pounding too awfully to yell at him. Despite his air of hard-won wisdom, the mage’s brittle arrogance surely named him far younger than only six years my junior. Naturally, he didn’t answer.

“So you were in the village while Portier was tortured?” Ilario burst out. “Ill done, mage! Unkind!”

“I never crossed the bridge, never went up to the village until I came for you. I let them pass and came around here. The mendicant had told me of the chasm stair.”

“But if you kept away, how did you know they were going to explode the mountain?” spluttered Ilario. “Magework cannot predict the future, no matter what’s said, else I’d have never come on this nasty trek! And why didn’t the wards along
this
path bring them down on you?”

“I learned what I needed in the chasm. The destruction was writ in Eltevire’s bedrock. A very long time ago, I think. Last night the rock’s pattern shifted, and I could see a danger building. And just then, three men descended the stair in a hurry—though one was slow and weak—your prisoner, I’d say. Magic takes on extra potency at sunrise and sunset, so I expected the blow at dawn. Fortunately for you, peacock, I guessed right.”

Three men had arrived at Eltevire: Quernay, Merle, and the Aspirant. And three men departed: the Aspirant, the prisoner, and who? The prisoner’s guard, perhaps. Or perhaps “the adept” was not a prisoner, but another guard. I blotted the sweat from my bruised temples and squinted into midday.

“Over a day and a night I explored these physical anomalies,” Dante continued, “though not so systematically as with your coins and pebbles. But it’s the
mechanism
of Eltevire’s madness that bears most significance.” He halted the donkey for a moment and made sure I was listening. “To leave the gorge we had to travel along a boundary—a separation of two natural entities as distinctive as sea and land, or stem and leaf, or wing and air. Even as we walked that boundary, it was disintegrating, soon to be gone entirely. Until this morning, it completely encircled Eltevire’s plateau.”

“Separating
what
?” I said. “The two sides appear the same—land, vegetation, rock, wind. You’re saying these villains enchanted
everything
within this boundary, creating some new kind of natural separation.”

“No, Portier. Much more than that. Eltevire was not enchanted. Yes, the boundary was created with sorcery, but within the boundaries of that rock, nature itself was altered,
including
magic, for magic is
of
nature.” Dante might have been a once-blind man explaining the wonder of his first sunrise. “A stone behaves like a stone, or a sparrow like a sparrow, because the pattern of natural law is written into the pattern of its being—its keirna. If you toss your coins into the air in Castelle Escalon, they behave according to their keirna. When a Merona sparrow takes wing, its flight reflects the physical laws we know. I believe that when the natural laws of bounded Eltevire were altered, the pattern of natural law written into the keirna of every object within that boundary was revised, as well. Did you find any spelled object in Eltevire?”

“None,” I said, my mind racing to keep up with him.

“Aye, because your methods of detection are based upon the nature that you know, on the
magic
that you know. What if Gruchin’s coin were brought to Eltevire and enspelled with a locator charm so he couldn’t escape them? Its keirna, once solely of the world we know, would have been altered. But you or I would never detect the spell, because we don’t know how to detect
Eltevire’s
magic.”

“And what of the crocodile charm?” I said. “It was enspelled in Merona, not Eltevire, yet its behavior changed when I invoked it in there.”

A ruddy heat suffused Dante as from a lathered horse nearing its home ground. “The light charm worked exactly as its keirna was laid down. When the keyword is spoken, the spell is triggered and the charm emits blue light. But in Eltevire, the properties of
light
are not immutable as our natural philosophers demonstrate. Use the charm fifty times in Merona, and it will always trigger blue light of a certain quality, but do the same in Eltevire and the manifestation could vary every time.”

Ilario pulled his spyglass from his shirt and stared at it as if it were a demon’s trinket. “I don’t understand half of what you say. But I’m thinking perhaps my lady’s glass is not broken after all. In Eltevire, sometimes it would show me my own feet, sometimes the stars, sometimes nothing.”

Dante extended a hand, and Ilario passed him the glass. The mage’s long fingers caressed the engraved case. He sighted through it up the slope we had to climb to retrieve our mounts, then passed it back to Ilario.

“It’s not spelled. And it functions as it should. Light passes through its lenses and is bent, allowing our eyes to see what is directly in front of us, only drawn close. But in Eltevire, light beams do not always follow the rules. Our glass lenses would never work reliably there. Nor our eyes, I’d guess. Nor our magic.”

“Father Creator,” I said, as my own mind grasped his conclusions: a land where nature itself was altered, where neither physics nor magic could be predicted.
Guess you’re fuddled
, Merle had said.
We’ll fuddle you all.
“Such a place would be chaos.”

“Aye,” said Dante. “Chaos. Especially when you add in that there was more inside that boundary than the land you walked. Voices that had no right to be there. Sights you couldn’t quite see. More than you know. Naught that I can explain . . . yet. But it’s no mystery why they’re wanting a handy necromancer.”

Father Creator, send your angels.
I could not speak. I could not think in aught but prayer, though instinct had whispered it all morning, and Dante had told me,
Your father . . . bears a fearsome grudge
.

The day was heating rapidly. Dante threw his dark cloak back over his wide shoulders, clicked his tongue at the donkey, and planted his white staff on an upward path. “I’ll tell you one more thing, my partner
agentes
. The keirna of that boundary was far older than our conspiracy. Think about it: The cult brother’s stories of this region have existed for centuries; the Mondragoni settled here well before the Blood Wars. Neither your Aspirant, whoever he is, nor Gaetana nor Orviene
worked
the enchantments that created Eltevire’s aberrant nature. They don’t know how.”

He glanced over his shoulder at me, his green eyes flashing. The beginnings of a smile transformed his gaunt face into something younger and less haunted. “So now I know what they want me for.”

WE DIDN’T TALK MUCH THROUGH that long afternoon. Even Ilario’s determined idiocy found little outlet. The path was too steep, the day too hot. We moved carefully, scanning the landscape in every direction, but we saw no sign of human or beast . . . or anything else. The lump on my head belonged in a smithy.

Dante had implied that some connection with Ixtador lay beyond Eltevire’s boundary. I tried to comprehend what that meant, but exhaustion had its way, and for the first time in nine years, I slipped into my vivid dreaming. I was wielding lightning to hold a mountain pass against a barbarian horde, while a fleeing populace reached safety. Fire threaded my arms and the heated charge of sorcery stank like seared stone. When my magic failed and the enemy bludgeons began to crack my bones, I blinked awake to the wastes of Arabasca and honest bruises and mysteries too deep for comprehension. Then the cursed donkey missed its footing, and in my distraction, I failed to brace. The pain in my head caused me to waste everything I’d eaten.

Vowing not to sleep again, I spent the next miserable hours contemplating everything we had learned from the day Philippe led me into Lady Susanna’s dungeon until Dante’s fierce conclusion. Perhaps the feigned assassination of Sabria’s king had not been a mere distraction, but a first skirmish in a new war, a feint designed to test their plan. The conspirators were gathering power through transference, and if Dante was correct, exploring ways to upend the rule of reason. Chaos. Discord. Fear. So who would benefit from chaos?

Some two hours later, we stopped to drink and rest on the stepped tableland above Sante Marko’s shrine. Only then did I speak to a disturbing possibility that had presented itself.