Duplais’ breath came in tight, shallow bursts. But he opened his eye to the beautiful and terrible leather mask.
“Nicely obedient,” said the Aspirant—Roussel. “Now, did I not tell you we had all the time in the world to learn your secrets? I know what you are.”
“You’re wrong.” Duplais’ hoarse words were scarce audible, each forced out with a growl. “Cannot . . . see . . . righteous—”
“Dante says failure and self-loathing leave you blind.” Roussel leaned forward and spoke softly. “Ironic, that.”
Water dribbled in the diversion troughs. A stone lip shaped like an angel barred it from spilling into the basin. Roussel scooped a handful of water. “Whatever you imagine your great destiny, Portier de Savin-Duplais, tonight changes it. Your service now belongs to me. Your life, your death, your sustenance rest in
my
hand.”
He dribbled the water on Duplais’ cracked and bleeding lips like a mother teasing her child to eat. Duplais clamped his mouth shut.
Roussel threw the water in his face. His Aspirant’s mask, naturally, remained serene. On the rim of the basin, he laid two hand-scribed pages. The oddly angled script mirrored that on the pages in Dante’s schoolmaster’s stool.
“Mage Dante has found a use for you, damoselle,” he said. “On his signal you will begin reading from beginning to end. You will speak loud enough that all can hear, pausing after each instruction, so that we three can do as the text requires or repeat words that must be woven into the spellwork. You’ve no need to distinguish between the instructions and the words of power. Beyond the skill of reading, your mind is irrelevant to this task.” His cloak snapped in my face as he rose.
“Are you mad?” I called after him. “Why would I do anything you tell me?”
“Prefect,” said Dante, before Roussel could answer, “demonstrate what happens if the woman fails to read correctly.”
Hissing in annoyance, Kajetan descended the steps into the basin and pressed his boot on Duplais’ left ankle.
Duplais screamed, a hoarse agony that was quickly dissipated in the settling night, as if he had screamed a great deal already that day. He wrapped his arms over his head, one hand clawing at his hair, the other forearm clamped over his mouth to smother his cries. His upper body rocked from side to side as if in some frantic attempt to distract himself.
I near broke my wrists in my desire to reach for him, to comfort, to apologize.
Glaring at me as if I had done it, Kajetan returned to his place.
“We’ve no reason to stop, you see,” said Dante, as if discussing the grape harvest. “Do as you’re told.” The basest and most basic of threats . . .
Or a reminder of my promise. What was changed, save my bound hands? These devils did not know of the tangle curse. Dante and I could still do what was needed.
The yellow flames hissing from Dante’s staff—our only light—took that moment to wink out, abandoning Ianne’s Bench in tarry darkness. He cursed and bellowed that some adept had cast a spell in error. He would have to rework it. A girl piped up with excuses, and Roussel snapped at them both to get it done, as the night was deepening.
This could not be coincidence. As Dante’s accusations roared, I lunged forward as far as I could over my bound hands and the rim of the basin, whispering, “You must not consent to die, Portier.
He
will keep you breathing. He says to tell you a
student
must trust and obey his master.”
The words made no sense. The last person Duplais should trust was Kajetan. But when Dante’s staff blazed high again, this time in a shower of purple and red, Duplais lay still, save for a quiet trembling. His hands were clenched together and pressed to his forehead as one did to acknowledge a divine gift. Evidently the words made sense to him.
“Read,” snapped Dante.
I began. “ ‘As the light of nature fails, seal the circle with phoenix hue.’”
I paused. Dante waved his staff around the first circle and purple-red flames tipped with gold burst into life atop each column, illuminating the circle with a wavering glow. A low thrum shivered my bones.
My mind fully open to the churning aether, I had to concentrate on each word to get it right, leaving it impossible to make sense of the whole. “ ‘Particulae settled in triune power . . . drawing forth what lives to join and bind . . .’”
At each pause I felt a new shiver, as if a different string were plucked on a monstrous violone. The tones did not fade, but blended and swelled and transformed one another, growing the magic.
“‘. . . to break and rend . . . subject, spelled weapon, primal element . . . as sigils marked upon the eternal Veil . . .’”
My father had described the hour before battle thus: The world, a trebuchet straining at its tether. The mind, a spear hand reared back. The gut, a crossbow cranked taut. So it was in the first circle at Voilline.
“ ‘Each of three grope for the crossing, the frayed and glissome warp and weft . . . as glass encircled to see beyond . . . infuse power into the three tethers. . . .’”
The water in the narrow trough began to burble, slopping over the angel’s wings that blocked its passage. The Aspirant touched a glazed bowl at his feet. When the water flared emerald green, he brought it to the dry pool and poured it over Portier’s chest. Kajetan laid living willow branches across a blood-smeared knife.
“ ‘Draw in the chosen element, touched in power, and enact the marriage of death and life.’”
The stars quivered through the veil of smoke. Roussel returned to his pillar, while Kajetan descended into the basin and wrapped Duplais’ wrists in a length of chain.
“Master,” rasped Duplais, “I am not what you think.”
Kajetan leaned down and laid his clean, long-fingered hand on Portier’s bruised forehead.
“You are everything I hoped you would be, my son: noble, generous, a mind for the ages. Never will I love another as I have loved you.” Then he pulled a length of chain from the tangled pile and laid it across Duplais’ chest. Another went across his thighs, and two more diagonally from each shoulder to the opposite hip.
I didn’t understand it. Duplais was too broken to move. They’d no need to put him through the agony of binding him. But then the prefect shifted the stone angel, allowing the rising water in the trough to spill into the basin. These chains were not bindings, but weights. God’s mercy, they were going to drown him.
“Savage!” I said, appalled, outraged. “Love does not murder!”
Kajetan grabbed my hair and yanked my head back, forcing me to look into his heated gray eyes. “Silence,” he whispered. “You do not wish to know the forces you disturb. Read.”
Without releasing my hair or my gaze, he yanked another length of chain from the pile and dropped it across Duplais’ ankles. What small struggles Duplais had managed stopped abruptly. His head lolled. My punishment for disobedience.
Kajetan returned to his pillar. The water splashed cheerfully. Trembling with hate, I read all the way to the end of Dante’s transcription.
“‘. . . by will and intent and consent are subject and universe joined. And so will the rent remain forever unhealed.’” And that was the end.
Duplais’ hair was floating. He remained insensible as the rising water swirled away dirt and blood. The surface of the water would be forty centimetres above his face before the basin began to overflow.
When the cool water licked at his cheeks, Portier’s undamaged eye flicked open, widening as he tried to move. Even to inflate his chest against the weight of the chains must be a supreme effort. The movement sloshed water over his face. Panic overcame pain, and he writhed and struggled against the cold iron. “Master,” he croaked. “Please . . .”
The three sorcerers remained in their positions. The flames atop the ring of pillars thundered.
Molten fire in my veins, I strained forward again, whispering so none but Portier might hear. “Do
not
consent to their villainy. Your friend will sustain you as long as he has strength to give. A student must obey and trust. . . .”
The words stilled his terror. He fixed his gaze on me as if searching for some answer in my face. “Tell him—” But the water lapped the corners of his mouth. He nodded deliberately and closed his eye.
Five times more I repeated the message, the last through five centimetres of water. Bubbles floated idly to the surface. The flames atop the pillars died, and the dark water hid his face.
CHAPTER 41
27 OCET, NIGHT
T
he wind gusted fitfully across the tableland, damp and heavy, its skirling music eerie in the dark. Elsewise all was hushed movement and whispers, joined with the quiet dribble of water as it seeped out of the filled basin. The night smelled of cedar and juniper, dry grass and old leaves, touched with moisture and laced with a faint tinge of rot. The mindstorm had quieted as well, as if its riotous participants had been notified that the world was changing, and they were holding their lives in check to see what came of it.
It was only inside me that anger and hatred boiled like liquid fire. I wanted to slash something, to hit something, to fight, not sit here waiting for doom to fall. I needed to know how to wield it to some purpose.
Grinding my jaw, I yanked on my wrist chain, pulling this way and that as if I might worry the ring from the stone. When it failed to budge yet again, I wanted to scream. But I would not. Not here beside Duplais.
I rested my head on my hands, dreading the moment they would make me abandon him in his watery coffin. If he was dead, it would be sacrilege. If he lived, it would surely be torment for him, to be abandoned in the dark with only a relayed promise. Once they settled the basin lid in place, no pilgrim would ever know a man lay under the water.
Something brushed my cheek. A windblown hair, a leaf torn from the maquis? A world away, it seemed, that afternoon hour in the steamy, fragrant heat with Roussel.
Another brush, tickling. I rubbed my cheek on my forearm, but the sensation didn’t stop. The soft touches were cold, tainted.
I lifted my head. Purple and green threads floated in the air above the pool, their numbers in the hundreds, multiplied by their reflection in the dark water. A lens, Ilario had said. Just as Dante had created in the Rotunda, they had created the lens here, the symbol of concentric circles on the diagram. Were the floating lights a result of imperfection, Dante’s subtle work to keep the villains dependent on his magic? I should have insisted Dante teach me how to use my own magic.
Now. The second and third circles.
Dante’s unvoiced command was hard-edged against the quiet, like stars in a winter sky.
Relieved to be of use, I did not waste words, but sketched out the diagrams of passage and inversion—the skull, the three spirals, the concentric rings, the passing arrows, the dotted line that carried the alchemical symbol for air forward to the vessel and the tree of life. Already he was allocating places and positioning urns of earth and water within the shelter of the tree.
What’s our plan?
I said.
We must end this.
I wanted to spend this seething fury that threatened to split my skin.
Leash your rage. Focus it.
It was a warning, yet surely his matched my own.
Kajetan arrived to unfasten my wrists and deliver me to the second circle. I spat on him. It was not at all as satisfying as it should have been. He ignored me.
The platform I had seen from the mountain’s shoulder was raised above the level ground by four or five wide steps. A hinged trapdoor of thick bronze stood open in the center of the slab, a small circle of bronze grid-work set in the middle of it. The Aspirant emerged from the hole in the slab as Dante waited on the steps.
As Kajetan led me around the platform, someone behind me sighed wearily. I glanced backward and Dante’s warning became clear.
A man sat resting his head against the pillar. Or perhaps he was no man, but a scarecrow stolen from a barley field in Challyat. His garments were rags, his long limbs fleshless sticks, his unhealthy hair and beard tangled and filthy. A strap of leather circled his rooster’s neck and tethered him like a dog to the pillar.
I wrenched my hands from Kajetan’s grip and ran to him, my knees skidding on the hard stone. Though nothing on this person resembled the man who five years ago had twirled me in his powerful arms, thrown himself on his favored stallion, and galloped away from Montclaire, I would know my father anywhere.
Crosshatched cuts marked every centimetre of chest, belly, arms, legs, back—fresh wounds layered across older scars. Scarificators, the blockish instruments that popped ten blades at a time into the skin, were much more efficient than a single lancet for milking a mule’s blood.
“Papa,” I whispered, dashing aside murderous tears before touching his hair with my bound hands. “Papa, look at me. I know you’re innocent.”
He twisted his neck, as if his head was too heavy to lift. His mane of hair fell aside. Saints, they had scored his brow, cheeks, and neck, too. But his sunken eyes flared, and his colorless lips stretched in the ghost of his ebullient smile. “Ani, love,” he whispered. “You’ve come.”