I dismissed the whim of calling on my friend. I’d not dare use the gift with Dante’s eyes on me and, saints protect the feebleminded, I was wretchedly curious as to what the mage wanted with me.
“To the right . . . and again . . . now left . . .”
Three turns, four. Torches set in wall brackets provided less and less light the deeper into the ruin we went, until the flames appeared to be little more than gray sputters.
At the base of a stone stair, the mage jarred the heel of his staff on the floor. White sparks spat and died. Another whack and the staff remained dark. At the fourth solid hit, a rill of livid flame oozed from the head and spilled down the shaft and across his gloved hand.
Something was dreadfully, horribly wrong in the ruins. Dante’s every attempt at spellworking laced my nerves with fire. Every step forward tainted my spirit as if we slogged through sewage.
Two flights of cracked steps took us up to some kind of intermediate level that overlooked a cavernous darkness. We picked our way over fallen balusters to the next level, a gallery of toppled statuary. There I first glimpsed the jagged outlines of broken walls against the stars. A whining wind roved freely through deserted hallways. We circumnavigated buckled flooring and angled roof beams by threading a warren of ruined apartments.
“Here we are.” The mage held his staff high. Only two and a half walls and half the ceiling remained of the long chamber. Beyond the broken walls gaped the inky night, hills and ridges and pits of blackness scattered with glimmering stars or lamps. The pricks of light were indistinguishable, as if the Pantokrator had drawn the mantle of the night sky across the body of the sleeping city.
The floor, tilted outward toward the yawning drop, creaked and groaned alarmingly as we entered. Dante’s livid light exposed the remnants of a sorcerer’s laboratorium, identifiable as such only because I had visited his own apartment in the palace. The explosion—or earthshaking or destructive hand of the Souleater or whatever it was—had smashed glassware, crates, and boxes, and scattered metal pans, brass instruments, and bits of unidentifiable materials about the chamber, along with the remains of toppled cabinets and shelves. The wind riffled papers and clothing spilled from an armoire. Amazingly, one table next to the interior wall remained untouched, glass canisters, boxes, and books stacked neatly and sorted by size.
“Do you recognize anything here?”
Mesmerized by the strangeness of the place, it took a moment for his question to make sense.
“How could I?” I whispered, unable to convince myself that too loud a word would not send us sliding down the wooden slope and plummeting into the pooled darkness below.
“I thought perhaps he had a place like this tucked away at Montclaire, as well. Well hidden, if so. I certainly didn’t detect it on my visit.” He stepped gingerly to the armoire and picked up an empty boot that he dangled in the light of his staff. Even as I stared at the boot—a horseman’s knee-high boot, well worn, well cared for—he dropped it back into the heap and drew out a cloak of dark wool banded with gold braid and bearing a red-and-gold badge: Sabria’s golden tree on a scarlet field.
My breath caught.
“Perhaps you’ve seen this.” From his leather-clad fingers the mage dangled a pendant, a great topaz set in a triangle of oddly cut bronze, each side fashioned in the shape of a key. “Or this?” He pulled out an old-fashioned dagger with a cruciform hilt and a broken blade.
“Papa . . .”
The pendant was unfamiliar. But my father had carried that broken stub of a weapon with him everywhere, a relic of the soldier who had raised him. The cloak, worn from one end of Sabria to the other, had marked him as King Philippe’s First Counselor. And I could not mistake his favorite boots, meticulously waxed and oiled and mended because he’d never found another pair to match their comfort.
I yanked my eyes from my father’s belongings and reassessed every article in the apartment. Maps and charts—astronomical charts, anatomical charts, and alchemical tables—were fixed to the walls. A mangled opticum lay on the floor. Shattered bell jars. A small pump. This was a scientist’s laboratorium, as well.
“Whose place is this?” I demanded, grief and hurt swollen to anger. Why were my father’s prized possessions here?
Dante raised his staff to illuminate a nest of brass rings behind an upended chair. As if the gleaming rings formed a great lodestone, I was drawn to drag the chair aside and kneel by the warped and bent planetary, touching the dusty marbles that represented the known moons and planets. Beside it lay a thick leather mask, one side of it crushed, and the other a sculpted male face, inhumanly beautiful. Beneath it lay a sheaf of papers, scribed in a bold hand so agonizingly familiar that when Dante spoke, I already knew what he would claim.
“Your father’s, of course.”
“That is not
possible
.” There were no chains here. No scourges. No barred iron doors. My father was not the daemon who wore that mask.
“And how are you so sure of that?”
It was a question I could not answer without speaking of aethereal voices that could not lie, a mystery of the mind that properly belonged to saints and angels. But, of course, all that could be deceit and illusion, as well.
“No answer? ” said the mage. “Like you, my master relishes his secrets, including his name. So I thank you for affirming my notion of his identity. ’Tis useful to know one’s friends as well as one’s enemies. One never knows when roles will . . . switch.” Arrogance and despite sheathed the mage’s every word.
His master . . . the Aspirant . . . the architect of murder and treason. Did I have the smallest faith anyone would believe me, I would have run to the chamber’s verge and screamed Dante’s sideways admission to the sleeping world. Yet none of this made sense.
“Even if my father is what you imply, why would he keep an apartment in the Bastionne Camarilla? And why would the mages here risk charges of conspiracy to hide him? Someone’s been living here.” The dust of its destruction could not disguise the feel of recent habitation. “And why would he require a sorcerer’s paraphernalia?”
“Matters of interest, to be sure. The Aspirant enjoys confounding observers. Come now. Before we’re interrupted, I’ve a mind to try a small exercise that might explain more.”
His black glove encircled my wrist like a shackle and drew me to a stool beside the door. “Sit.”
The mage drew a small book from inside his jerkin and pressed it into my hands. Bound in darkened leather, crudely stitched, the book sat more solid than such a slender volume warranted. Traces of gold gleamed from the worn edges of the pages.
“You’ve a talent for tongues, I hear. Can you read this? It might be of interest to us both.”
I paged through the flimsy leaves, hand-scribed in a language entirely unfamiliar. “No.”
As I peered at the odd script, the weak and shifting light caused the characters to blur and squirm. Was it encrypted?
A handspan square, more or less
, Bernard had written. Heaven’s gates, was this
Lianelle’s
book?
I dared not speak the word she had sent me on the torn scrap:
Andragossa.
Not in front of Dante. My hunger to know was so great, I could scarce keep my shaking fingers from scrabbling through the book, seeking the page with its corner torn off. Sure as my soul, I would find one.
Blinking and squinting, forcing myself to breathe normally, I riffled lightly through the pages. The book fell open to the title page. In its center, someone had inked a pair of dueling scorpions.
“The Mondragon mark!”
“Indeed so.” Surprise and satisfaction oozed from the mage like cooling tar. “But how does a young lady entirely unfamiliar with magic know anything of such evildoers? Since the Mondragons were exterminated two centuries ago, it has been forbidden to teach of them.”
“I read history,” I whispered, choking.
“Let’s see how well.” And before I could blink, he snatched the book away and gripped my right hand with his left. He yanked me to my feet, twisting until I faced his back, my right arm wrapped about his waist.
“Stop! What are you doing?” I hammered his back with my free hand, but he clamped my forearm between his ribs and his bicep like a plank in a vise. My thumb blazed with steel-cut fire.
“Curse you forever!” I yelled, the images of forced bleeding risen into present horror.
Relentless, he squeezed my pierced thumb and dragged a cold, smooth implement across the wound.
My heart thundered like stampeding horses. My head buzzed and spun. It was all I could do to keep rein on the mindstorm waiting to break loose. I grabbed Dante’s thick tail of dark hair and wrenched hard.
His implement clattered to the floor as he reached back and grabbed my hand, squeezing and twisting in a bone-crushing grip until I yelled and let go.
“Release her immediately!” Savin-Duplais snapped the command from the direction of the door. “Are you entirely mad?”
Never had I been so happy to hear another’s voice.
“Librarian!” The mage’s cool baritone resonated through his broad back. “I should have expected insects to scuttle out of the corners as the storm approaches. Do your hairdressers and seamstresses not keep you busy enough?” The mage dragged me, stumbling, to his side. “Or have you gone sleuthing again? Is the girl your quarry or your partner?”
Duplais, out of breath, doublet unbuttoned, cloak askew, looked as if he’d crawled from his bed and into a hurricane. Yet he did not flinch under the mage’s eye. “The queen has filed a grievance with Prefect Angloria. This woman is her servant and her husband’s gooddaughter, and has performed no act that subjects her to Camarilla jurisdiction.”
“Yet
I
am the queen’s First Counselor,” said Dante.
“Civil rank matters nothing in the Bastionne,” snapped Duplais. “Here you serve the Camarilla, and the Camarilla has no authority to place Damoselle Anne in the hands of a rogue mage they do not and cannot control. Or have you chosen to swear false allegiance to those you despise? Have the prefects learned your true opinions of their magics?”
“Do you
threaten
me? Do you imagine anyone in this city would heed a talentless clerk whose sole accomplishment in life is to link a chain of flimsy conclusions to convict a man he has never met and cannot find of a crime he cannot fathom? Damoselle Anne, view your brave defender who hides his inadequate intellect and dreams of talent behind aristo ladies’ hairpins, one who dares not examine his own mind for fear of what he might find there.”
Dante shoved me back to the stool and retrieved his staff, propped in the nearby corner. The Mondragon book lay facedown at my feet.
“It is not I who have become the performing monkey in an aristo menagerie, mage,” said Duplais.
Dante did not bite. His demeanor could hardly be icier. “If I have found enticing opportunities in the palace and the Bastionne, the responsibility lies with you, does it not? Who was it arranged my introduction here?”
“You extracted the price for that misjudgment long ago.” Heated bitterness welled from Duplais’ depths. “Corruption requires an act of will. Do not lay yours at
my
feet.”
Dante tutted, as if to a child. “Still so righteous. Consider well the value you place on your righteous wits, librarian. I’ve learned a great deal since we played our wicked games—”
All my imagining of a secret confederacy between these two was erased by their exchange, not only in the insults spoken, but in those left unvoiced—the vitriol of broken trust and festered grievance. As they spat and hissed like feral cats, I draped my skirt over the dropped book. When convinced both men had forgotten me, I slid the little volume into my pocket. That book was my sister’s death price. It was everything. Even an hour’s examination might reveal some truth.
“Master Dante!” An iron gray woman in a scarlet mantle swooped in from the corridor, edging Duplais aside. “Explain yourself. Why ever have you chosen such a dangerously unstable chamber for an interrogation? And why in the name of the Everlasting Fire were you summoned to this task?”
“Prefect Angloria.” Unfazed, as if he had been expecting her all along, Dante executed a curt bow. “I maintain good reasons for all. But first I might ask you how it is a failed acolyte is allowed to wander the inner chambers of the Bastionne Camarilla.”
“Sonjeur de Duplais claims the Witness was brought here in error. Queen Eugenie supports his view.”
“Then accept my apologies,” said the mage, entirely unapologetic. “I believed the Camarilla Magica empowered to act as it saw fit in matters of sorcery. I had no idea that whining from a witless aristo and her sweeping boy were sufficient to interrupt an interrogation.”
He did not cow Prefect Angloria, whose steady presence brought a brick wall to mind. “Be sure I yield no jurisdiction to the crown. But we deem it intelligent to
consider
royal opinion before flouting it. And
I
shall judge the strength of Sonjeur de Duplais’ allegations, not you.”
“As you wish. Then perhaps someone should attend to the Witness. She acquired a splinter from the wreckage—bound with a nasty little enchantment that could not be allowed to fester for an instant. I’m afraid I quite shocked her with my abrupt attentions.”