I gambled. “Best take me back. Master Dante will flay you for deviating from his plan.”
“Wasn’t his plan! He’s not got the authority for—” His complexion faded to the color of whey. “You be quiet.”
Whose plan had been triggered too early, if not Dante’s? To
call sanction
to the Camarilla must mean to accuse a person of illicit sorcery in a way more serious than rumor or suspicion. And the Camarilla would likely investigate a serious accusation from any person, sorcerer or not.
I considered threatening or bribing the awkward young man to get a message to Eugenie, but this whole thing might be a trap aimed at her—her attendant, the traitor’s daughter, arrested. Better to stay calm and learn more. Never had I felt closer to the heart of this conspiracy.
Natti’s help arrived. Adept Vronsard was the gray-haired man who had stood in my bedchamber and issued the summons.
“You’ve no metal on your person, damoselle? ” said Vronsard, examining my neck and wrists. “It’s not allowed here.”
“None. Why?”
“Can’t have prisoners working magic, now, can we?”
I’d not considered the particular problems of imprisoning sorcerers. Metal was involved in most spellwork. I knew that much. But, of course, previously devised spells could be attached to artifacts of wood or stoneware, shell, liquid, or powder, creating charms and potions that anyone could use, as Lianelle had done for me. Mages attached their favorite worked spells to their ancilles—wands, rings, or staffs, like Dante’s. Lianelle had once shown me a drawing of the ancille she planned to create—five silver rings, each attached to a bronze bracelet with a delicate silver chain—a
gauntlet of magic
, she’d called it.
One man on each side of me, we paraded through a huge, windowless, whitewashed room, stuffed with a hodgepodge of tables and chairs piled in teetering towers, rolled carpets and tapestries, cobbled-together racks hung with robes, crates stacked upon crates and every other kind of container. It appeared like nothing so much as an attic or undercroft where unwanted household furnishings were stored.
Yet desks and worktables were tucked into every possible niche amid the jumble. Between two overloaded book cupboards, two women stirred the contents of a copper pan over a small burner that belched green flames. A gowned man sat writing at a desk tucked into a nook of half-charred casks. These things must have been rescued from the ruined wing of the Bastionne.
Once past the far door, a long passage stretched before us, evidencing the Bastionne’s more somber purposes. Cells, barred with stone latticework, lined the left side of the passage. Most were empty. A young woman with painted eyes and long greased curls hissed at us as we passed. Two old men in adjacent cells played cards by laying out their game outside the bars, though neither could see the other’s face. The inmates would likely be offenders dragged in from the marketplace and kept for a few hours for questioning.
“These are what you name day cells,” I said.
Natti jumped when I spoke, glancing at me suspiciously, as if I were using some magic to steal his knowledge.
“It’s so,” he said as we started down a flight of black granite steps.
Resident
cells were likely for longer-term prisoners of the Camarilla. My throat knotted.
The downward stair led us into a tangle of dim lower passages. And surely I recognized the moment our path took us into the lower reaches of the ruin on the Plas Royale. Natti opened an iron door that groaned and complained as it scraped the well-worn floor. Misery, horror, and despair whispered through the corridor, tickling my ears as if the voices inside me had escaped through my skin. Though torches had been mounted on the passage walls, the gloom sapped their luminance. And when I blinked, faint threads of purple light floated into view, hovering on the periphery of sight. Just as in the Rotunda.
The wide passage reeked of camphor. It was notched on one side by square nooks, empty and of a size matching that of the day cells. Wood latticework had been embedded in the stone walls, floors, and ceilings. Oddly, no bars closed them off. Odd, too, the nooks were spaced irregularly, as if the builder had forgotten to open the passage wall for some few . . . or as if those had been walled shut. Sealed.
“Don’t leave me down here,” I said. “For love of the holy saints, please don’t. . . .”
“Resident cell five,” said Adept Vronsard, halting at the corner of one empty niche. “You’ll work no illicit magic here. Step in, damoselle.”
“I’ve done nothing. I can’t work magic. I’ve been tested. I’m not responsible for my father’s opinions . . . my father’s crimes. . . .” I babbled shamelessly, all notions of truth or pride, honesty or loyalty vanquished by fear of being walled up down here with the purple lights and the burgeoning mindstorm.
Vronsard crammed a folded blanket and a stoppered clay flask into my arms.
“The Prefect Inquisitor will determine your innocence,” said Natti, as the two of them shoved me into the empty niche. “We’ll retrieve you when he’s ready.”
“A prefect?” I yelled, spinning in place, “or the Aspirant?” A fourth wall stood in place.
Throwing down the blanket and flask, I hammered my fists on the wood-latticed wall, and then all the way around the cell in a panicked hunt for a way out. Half a minute, and I could not have said which wall fronted the passage.
An ash gray gleam emanated from the stone, enough to reveal a thinly padded stone shelf fixed to one wall and a lidded commode in one corner. But no sooner had I lavished thanks on the Creator’s messengers than the gloom faded to black. The sole illumination emanated from the drifting threads of purple, green, and rose. The only sounds were the faint whispers, just this side of hearing. Even the mindstorm had fallen silent.
Wholly unnerved, I retreated into a barren corner and wrapped the scratchy wool blanket around my shoulders. I didn’t want to see what might take shape from the floating lights. This time it might be Lianelle, her chest caved in by explosive magic, or Lady Cecile, lips stained black with poison, her elegantly long neck twisted as she gazed on me with dead eyes.
Talk to me
, I said.
Friend, please.
With all the strength I could muster, recalling every nuance of his presence . . . the sound of him . . . the sense of his pleasure at our exchanges, the muted longing, I reached into the night. I dared not tell him where I was, but I was desperate to hear a friendly voice.
The aether felt dull and impenetrable. No voices. No friendly, curious intruder. No mindstorm. Nothing.
Shifting air riffled the enveloping blanket and my skirts. Warm, dry, the gusts bore a pungent, resinous scent—juniper or cedar—that mingled with the unpleasant camphor and musty stone. The colored threads floated past, their movements unaffected by the eerie breeze. Their touch tickled my skin, giving off bursts redolent of sickness and decay.
I waved them off. Blew on them. Whispered, yelled, clapped my hands. But no action affected their random wanderings. They passed straight through my hand, and through the walls and ceiling.
As the time ticked away, they gathered about me, their sighs and whispers a swelling canon of failure and loss, anger, avarice, and . . . hunger. . . .
I searched out the flask Adept Vronsard had given me, uncorked it, and sniffed. Water. After a welcome swallow, I poured some onto the floor. The threads flocked to the puddle until it glowed . . . and the whispered pain surged as if I dangled a crust of bread just beyond the reach of a starving prisoner.
I’m sorry. Sorry.
Hastily I splattered and smeared the water into smaller puddles and droplets, overcome with the feeling that I had committed some incalculable cruelty, though exactly what or against whom I could not guess. When the shifting air had dried the last of it, the whispers receded again. My trembling did not.
Bathed in cold sweat, I huddled in my corner, closed my eyes, and practiced the exercises Papa had used to banish my nightmares. I calculated the time it would take to ride a horse from Merona to Abidaijar. I reconstructed Ludaccio’s proof of the invariant ratios of squared triangles. . . .
A clatter and scrape of steel and stone shattered my concentration and sent me scrabbling to my feet. A narrow door stood open in the wall opposite the bench. Backlit by the torches in the outer passageway, Mage Dante stood watching me.
CHAPTER 19
19 OCET, MIDDLE-NIGHT
“
A
n ugly place to findan aristo lady.” Save for the band of silver about his sinewed neck, the mage might have been any ruffian out of Riverside. Worn canvas breeches, russet shirt, and buff jerkin could more likely suit a pikeman newly returned from campaign than the Queen of Sabria’s First Counselor.
But I was not fooled. Every nerve, every sense quivered with danger. I chose my words precisely. “I’ve been brought here in error, Master. I am no sorceress, thus I do not fall under the authority—”
“Hold your arguments. I know naught of Camarilla rules.” He leaned against the doorframe, half in, half out of the cell, as one of Montclaire’s neighbors might when stopping in for a taste of the new vintage. “I was waked from a sound sleep and told a Witness had been brought to the Bastionne to be questioned. As this was a very special Witness, and the designated inquisitor was not available to record a preliminary interrogation, I was to do it. Yet no one bothered to inform me as to what this person was witness to, so I’m at a loss to know what to ask. Perhaps you could tell me. Have you been misbehaving? Following in your wicked father’s footsteps?”
I refused to let his barbs prick me to anger or his easy posture lull me to carelessness. “No one’s informed me of my offenses. Take me to this designated inquisitor, and we can inquire together.”
“None’s going to tell
you
anything. And I’d have to spook it out of him. I’ve no yen to play games so late of an evening.”
Yet he was so clearly playing games. The beams from his staff glinted in eyes of green adamant. I drew the blanket around me, hoping he would not notice my shaking.
“Then perhaps you could educate me as to your own designs,” I said. “Every despicable place I find myself, you seem to have left your vile handprint already.”
“Brave talk. Especially for one who’s lagged her first stay in a sorcerer’s hole.” He cocked his head. “Does the lady ween the like of a sorcerer’s hole? ”
The unfamiliar term was not so hard to interpret. “Detention impervious to magic working, I’d think. Iron locks? Magical barriers?”
“More than that.” He stepped inside, poking his staff idly at the strips of wood in the wall and the floor. “Whitebud laurel—the camphor laurel. If you chipped your way through the stone facing, you’d find a layer of cypress wood, banded with iron. An enclosure comprised of these materials and kept entirely free of the divine element of spark inhibits a true sorcerer’s use of magic.”
I poked my finger at one of the green light threads, refusing to shudder at the stink. “Then surely the prefects realize these cells are already breached.”
“Ah, this little problem. But you see”—he jarred the heel of his staff lightly on the floor and white flames blossomed from its tip, highlighting his prominent cheekbones and brow ridge, now stretched in a moment’s ferocity—“all is not as we might assume.” Over his shoulder, he snapped, “Now!”
The door’s outline merged instantly with the solid wall. The flames of his staff blinked out in that same moment, leaving the fading gray gleam from the stone as our sole illumination. “There. Magic quenched. Speaking as a sorcerer of some capability and a man of ungenteel origins, I can tell you that felt as if someone yanked my entrails out through my nose.”
I cared naught for his discomfort, only for the implication. “So these threads are not of magical origin.”
“Not as
I
know magic. But you . . . likely you know more than you claim about the matter.”
“That’s preposterous.”
Was he saying natural philosophy—science—could explain the light threads? An alchemical reaction? An optical device? The idea of an explanation based in reason gave me some comfort.
Dante rapped three quick bursts and two slow on the wall behind him. The door slid open again.
“Come, Witness. I’ve a notion to pursue your questioning in a more interesting locale.” The mage was out the door faster than an arrow from a longbow. I darted after him, breathing much harder than ten quick steps should warrant.
“Betake your knocking knees back to the south wing,” he said to the whey-faced Natti. “You’ve served your use, and this woman’s less like than you to puke up supper.”
“But I was commanded—”
Scarlet fire leapt from the mage’s staff to Natti’s arms. “I said depart, worm-prick.”
Slapping his arms and moaning, the bony “inquisitor” bolted.
Dante waved me deeper into the bowels of the ruined Bastionne. “Best keep a good pace. You’d not like me to aim my stick at you.”
I’d no wish to linger. The floating lights swarmed in the passage. Now we had left the cell, the mindstorm built like thunderheads behind the walls I held against it. So a sorcerer’s hole broke the connection with the tangle curse, as well.