I breathed deep and felt only a slight bruising. “Now my lungs recall their duties, I seem quite well. I’m happy to help. Please indulge me.” I held out my arms.
With mumbled doubts and repeated solicitations, he transferred an armload of books and bundled scrolls to me. The collection was more awkward than heavy.
I didn’t swallow the purity of Jacard’s motives—his willingness to risk proximity to a such a dangerous man because someone needed to “keep watch” on him. Jacard wanted Dante’s knowledge to elevate his own position. But that was a very human aim, ordinary and understandable. One thing certain: He despised Dante as much as I did. The adept could be a most useful acquaintance.
“Do take care, Adept. You’re a braver soul than I.”
He bowed, momentarily sobered. “And you, damoselle. I’d be pleased to encounter you under circumstances involving no violence. Slow your steps, perhaps?”
Vowing to do just that, I returned to the window gallery at a more deliberate pace, and with one suspicion confirmed. The laboratorium with the grand windows, the apartment where Lady Antonia had gone to meet her partner in murder, belonged to Master Dante.
I reversed my earlier course and headed for my bedchamber. Running away would accomplish nothing for the dead girl or the physician or any of those who awaited justice.
Jacard’s estimate of Dante’s work intrigued me.
Complexities of magic unknown in current practice . . .
There it was again, the hint of some internal dispute fueling these events. Had Lianelle and Lady Cecile stumbled on something deeper—a war
already
being waged between factions of the Camarilla? Dante might have been summoned to Seravain to uncover why a rival had killed Lianelle or to mask the circumstances of her death. His destruction of the Bastionne could be a remnant of such an internecine battle.
Duplais could be a participant in the war, too, proclaiming himself a failure at magic to deceive some rival faction. For I had seen his empty fingers create a barrier to turn away the attacking birds . . . and the brilliant light he’d shot at swarming rats. What could I call it but magic?
Magic
. Like a mighty fortress wall undercut by sappers with picks and knives, my long-held denial was on the verge of collapse. Twisting the possibilities of mechanisms or alchemistry to explain Duplais’ deeds or how Ella and Antonia had looked straight through me had become more difficult than the admission: Some spells worked. And if so, then, like any objects of value, they could cause a war.
Magical rivalries did not explain
Antonia’s
interest in the matter or the vile manipulation of Eugenie’s dreams. Perhaps these were but distractions from the villains’ real purposes. And none of this explained why my father remained alive. He had been convicted as the daemonic Aspirant, the perpetrator of the grand conspiracy to overturn my goodfather’s reign. What further use had his captors for him? Or for my brother?
The answer must be found in Lady Cecile’s scribbled diagrams, and in the books Lianelle had read, the magic she had worked from them, and the magical key she had sent me. The key to what?
A serving lad halted in midstride, gawking as I topped the stair. Oddly, he didn’t offer to take my armload of books. Two kitchen girls sped past, but not without a glare.
The encounter with Jacard had set me on course again. Once returned to my bedchamber, I took up my pen to compose the letter to my goodfather. While acknowledging a sovereign’s historic right to constrain the grown son of his avowed enemy, I protested the particular restrictions imposed in the name of prison discipline. I did not mention Pognole by name, nor detail the most shameful abuses I only suspected. But mentions of hooks and scars and the particular deprivations and degradations I had witnessed could not but lead any intelligent man to certain conclusions.
The letter signed and sealed, I rang for Ella. As I waited for her, I examined Dante’s books. They might give me some insight regarding his areas of interest. The collection included an herbal, a genealogy of the kings of Sabria, and several general histories of Sabria, including a basic treatise on the Blood Wars that I had read years ago in my own studies. I was surprised to discover one of the books to be a brand-new scientific text on the eye, based on the most modern theories of the transmission of light through the air, glass, and water. Another, more appropriate to my ideas of a mage’s studies, was titled
The Proven Magicks of Gemstones.
Though the crudely stitched codex had innumerable colored sketches of gems and settings, the text was little more than an agglomeration of folklore and outlandish superstitions. I doubted even a sorcerer would find it useful.
The last volume puzzled me the most.
Divine Harmonies and Discords of the Air
seemed to record a dry, philosophical dispute on whether music was a specific gift of the Creator to humankind, provided whole and entire as a means to guide us through Ixtador’s gates, or whether it was entirely man-made, a bold insolence that created a breach in the wall of Heaven. I could not envision Mage Dante caring for such pedantry.
A tap at the door announced Ella. “Damoselle?”
“I’ve a letter to post,” I said, jumping up from my chair. “I was hoping you might prevail upon your brother again, as I’d like it sent outside the common way.”
“Don’t know,” she said. “It’s a risk for him.” The girl’s freckled face was composed as always. But her back was stiff, her eyes averted. Something was wrong.
“Is there bad news?” I said. “Is it the physician? Have more fallen ill?”
“No more’ve sickened, damoselle. And I’ve heard the physician recovers, which is a relief to all but poor Naina and her mam. Is there any other service you need of me?”
After a whispered thanksgiving, I raised Ella’s dropped chin. Suspicion had turned her gray eyes to stone and plump lips to a hard line.
“This Naina brought me a couchine,” I said. “She told me a gentleman sent it. I believed that gentleman to be the physician, and the thought . . . gladdened . . . me, as he has treated me kindly, and I’ve not had a gentleman friend for a very long time. But I’d had a fright that morning and couldn’t eat, so I told her she could take it back to the physician and taste it herself, if he didn’t want it. She was obedient, and I never imagined that the sweet might have come from a person who might wish me harm. You must believe me, Ella. Never, ever would I do something to harm an innocent girl. Never.”
“Didn’t think it,” she said softly. “Didn’t want to think it. But Eune the footman said he saw you give her the plate, and she carried it straight to the physician. And she was such a good girl. She’d never have took it to eat on her own.” Ella swallowed a sob, the first chink I’d ever seen in her servant’s armor.
I threw my arms around her, drawing her sturdy warmth to my breast. I had relied on her so much, and she was so young. “Her death is vile and unjust,” I said. “Creation’s balance seems wholly askew, and you just want to scream at Heaven.”
Ella’s stiffness melted away in my arms. When her sobs quieted, I nudged her to arm’s length. “Tell me, is someone collecting a handsel for Naina’s family? I’d like to offer something for it.”
“Aye. Her mam’s sickly and there’s none else to earn for her. We’ve hopes summat will take her in if we can give a bit to help out.”
“I’m going to find out who’s responsible for this crime, Ella. I promise. But for now, I really need this letter sent—in hopes of saving another innocent.”
“Alonso’ll see to it. He’s my brother’s coachman friend, and he’ll—” Her eyes widened as she recognized the name of the addressee. “He’ll do it most careful, damoselle.”
After another embrace, I sent her off with a silver piece for the coachman and another for Naina’s handsel. The donation could not soothe my conscience. Only discovering the perpetrator could do that, for sure as I was born, the girl had died instead of me. Murdered for what?
I pulled out Lady Cecile’s history book.
Gautier
. That name linked all of this: my father, my sister, and her encrypted books, the sorcery Duplais had called a kind
not seen in ages of the world.
Clearly the writer was an admirer of the Gautier. Gautieri architecture had been
elegant and innovative
. Gautieri students were
the most diligent at any collegia magica
. The family’s pursuit of knowledge had probed the farthest reaches of mysticism and magical practice, and the library at Collegia Gautier—twenty thousand scrolls and codices, an extraordinary number even by modern standards—had been the most complete literature ever recorded of any academic discipline.
One footnote caught my particular interest because of its mention of encryption and blood transference:
Historian Georg de Veon-Failleu posits that jealousy of the Collegia Gautier library and its restrictions on access, implemented by extensive encryption, lay at the root of the Mondragon-Gautier rivalry. The Mondragons were historically weak in their practice of the mystic arts and regularly enhanced their skills through the extensive use of blood transference. Their scholarship and investigative skills were substantially weaker even than their practical skills. Few Mondragon practitioners were literate.
The theory struck me as illogical. Why would anyone start a war over access to books they could not read? But then, history was often distorted. Papa had always said the first task of victors in any war was to rewrite its history in their own favor. But both families were exterminated by the end. No one had won the Blood Wars.
Duplais could likely explain more. Of all things, I had granted him the virtues of intelligence and intellectual honesty. Yet now that I believed my father innocent, even that was suspect. Had Duplais even a notion that his conclusions were wrong? The man was a cipher, and his hateful disregard for my family stung bitterly. Yet if I could learn what I needed no other way, I must learn from him, even if I had to take Lianelle’s potion and follow him around.
I opened the treatise on the Blood Wars. Names leapt out from the page.
Germond de Gautier, lamed by a Mondragon potion in retaliation for his sending a spy into the Mondragons’ desert fortress, labored for thirty years to develop a magical defense wall that could shield innocents from Mondragon spellwork. The Ring Wall was under constant siege by Mondragon raiders who called up daemonic spirits to burn every hovel and household in the district. The daemons ravished maidens and boys, bringing evil magics to bear upon the Gautieri works until they crumbled.
In 693, Reviell, the last Conte Mondragon, wearing a horned helm, left a path of spectres, ravaged souls, and charred villages in his wake as he pursued the weakened Gautieri to their doom.
Abandoning the broken Ring Wall, the Gautieri retreated into the Voilline Rift at the base of the holy mount. Backed deep against the foot of the crags where Ianne, the first of the Reborn, brought humankind the gift of fire, the valiant Gautieri mage line unleashed the fires of Creation against the Mondragon legion. Whereupon the Mondragons called upon the Souleater and his earth-bound daemons, wrenching the sun from the sky and thrusting it into a pit to swallow their sworn enemies.
It was said that the dead walked on that foul day, and trees curled back into the earth, and arrows reversed upon the archers. Frost blighted the vineyards though it was the midst of summer, and throughout Sabria, infants crawled back into their mothers’ wombs. For ten days and nights the battle raged, until both sides lay bloodied and exhausted.
The remnants of the two families had fled, but the Sabrian king and his subjects had declared them pariah and exterminated the lot of them.
The other histories sounded the same notes. The collegia and its library had been wonders of the world. Yet scholarly achievements had not saved the Gautieri. Whatever the level of their magical or academic skills, the Mondragons were acknowledged as capable strategists who pushed their hated rivals to the brink of destruction. A length of string marked a page in one of the volumes.
Reviell de Mondragon’s incineration of Collegia Gautier and its library in 693 threatened to send all of the known world back to the age of pictographs and stone tools. For this depredation, even more than the blood-leeching wreaked on hapless victims, even more than the systematic extermination of the noble Gautieri line, did the Camarilla Magica break its long tradition and execute the savage conte in public. On the day the Concord de Praesta was ratified by King Pascal and Camarilla, Reviell, the last Mondragon, was bound on the Plas Royale and flayed by Fassid knives. Scyllid scorpions, gathered from the deserts of Kadr, were unleashed upon his skinless flesh before his entrails were drawn and burnt. Defiant to the end, the devil conte warned the watchers that their beloved dead would “pay the price of Gautieri greed.” From that day forward, the family mark of the Mondragons was altered to dueling scorpions, reflecting the stinging poison of depraved sorcery. . . .
The lurid descriptions nauseated me. And I marveled at yet more skewed logic. If the Mondragons were jealous of Gautieri spellwork, why would they destroy the very library where they might have learned how to imitate it? If my young sister could decrypt the Gautieri books, then surely the Mondragons could have found someone to do so. Fools, then. Perhaps the Creator’s saints did protect the world from its worst evils, ensuring our worst villains were either too stupid or too clumsy to carry their plans to completion. That did little to ease the pain they caused along the way. Pain and chaos . . . the Aspirant’s aim, so Duplais had said at Papa’s trial.