Prospero Lost: Prospero's Daughter, Book I (16 page)

THEO
poured a circle of rock salt around the bonfire where the farmhands were burning the bear, and then led the way across the hillside. Twilight was falling. We walked through gnarled trees and swirling snow. The air was crisp and cold. In the distance, a cow lowed. A stone wall loomed into view, and Theo guided us through a rickety gate. Beyond lay rolling hills and row after row of leafless trees.

As we walked, Mab came up beside me and muttered, “Shouldn’t we be hurrying on to your next sibling, Ma’am? And what are these questions I’m supposed to ask Mr. Theo?”

“Anything you can think of!” I whispered back.

“I need something to work with, Ma’am,” Mab hissed. “He’ll get mighty suspicious if I start asking him about his favorite baseball team.”

“Did you notice he recognized our shapechanger? Called him by name,” I whispered back. “Ask him about that. Maybe it had some connection to the Three Shadowed Ones . . . and take as long a time about asking him as possible.”

“Right,” Mab drawled reluctantly. “Bet he’ll love that. . . .”

AT
the first clearing, Theo stopped. He was puffing from the weight of the shotgun and the bag of road salt he carried. He threw down the bag and wiped his brow.

“I guess this is as good a place as anywhere.” He leaned on his shotgun while he caught his breath.

Mab turned up the collar of his coat and approached Theo, who eyed him warily.

“If you don’t want to get your hands dirty, I’ll do the ritual,” Mab offered gruffly.

“You?” Theo asked. He cocked a bushy white eyebrow. “I thought, as a spirit, you would object to a disenchanting.”

“Can’t help what you are,” Mab spat back. “Doesn’t mean it has to
color your opinions. Mortals weren’t meant for magic. Anything I can do to separate the two is good by me. Oh, and just for the record—I haven’t come out of my body but two times in the last sixty-five years. Don’t take to that sort of thing myself. It’s just a rhino had landed on my chest, and Miss Miranda was in trouble. So, you don’t have to worry about me summoning spirits from the vasty deep or contaminating your petunias with fairies.”

“Very well,” Theo replied slowly. He was clearly uncertain what to make of Mab. “You do the ritual, then. I don’t know anything about magic, anyway.”

He shot me an accusing look, but I feigned innocence. This issue, whether or not Theo was a magician, had been a common theme in family arguments for centuries. Years of fighting warlocks, necromancers, and sorcerers had taught him a great deal about the arcane; however, he refused to admit any knowledge of this kind and reacted with anger when reminded of it.

“This sort of business could stir up trouble,” Theo finished. “I’ll take the gun and keep a lookout.”

He filled a pocket with rock salt, hefted his shotgun, and began pacing out a wide circle around the clearing, peering off into the snowy countryside as he went. Meanwhile, Mab broke off a straight length from a fallen branch and began tracing a series of triangles and circles on the ground.

“Wish I hadn’t left my chalk at the thrift shop, but I was a bit distracted by the killer grizzly. You sure this stuff will work?” he muttered aloud, stopping to kick the bag of rock salt.

Theo stood at the far side of the clearing with his foot on a low stone wall, staring off down the hill. He spoke without turning around.

“It works better than chalk or sea salt. Kills any spirit who tries to cross it the same way it kills water: absorbs the life right out of them. The only substances that make stronger wards are certain herbicides.”

Mab adjusted his hat and gave Theo’s back a long look. Turning to me, he said in a low voice, “Thought he said he didn’t know anything about magic?”

I just smiled.

MAB
surveyed the hillside. “Where are you planning to stand, Miss Miranda? I want to put you in a protective circle before I start anything else.”

I found a rock to sit on near the edge of the clearing. Mab traced a circle
around me, filling it in with the crystalline rock salt. Then, dropping the bag of salt beside the newly drawn circle, he began tracing out the rest of his wards, scratching the dirt with his stick.

When he had traced all the wards, Mab hefted the bag of rock salt and began pouring its contents into the grooves he had prepared in the dirt. First, he filled the two larger circles Theo had paced out around the entire clearing. Then, he continued inward, filling in his designs. Meanwhile, Theo continued to patrol the clearing, walking always between the concentric white lines.

I sat on my rock patiently, waiting. The wind rustled the few dead leaves still hanging from the denuded apple trees. Snow continued to fall, though more lightly. The crisp fresh scent of newly fallen snow hung in the air. Seated there, watching my brother pace and Mab draw circles in the snowy leaves with his boot, I was reminded of the day we lost Milan—not so much of the actual loss as of the morning before the battle, when we still harbored delusions of victory.

That morning, we had cast a spell laid out much like this one. Funny to recall Mephisto carefully drawing wards while Erasmus lounged lazily against one of the walls of brown stone, eating an apple. It was such a reverse of the way things were now.

Nowadays, Erasmus was the studious magician in the family. Back then, he had been a gangly seventeen-year-old with no more interest in sorcery than he had in what we then called the womanly arts. Enamored of the scintillating court of my Uncle Ludovico, my father’s youngest brother, Erasmus hoped to follow in the footsteps of Uncle’s favorite artist, Leonardo da Vinci. He spent his time painting or designing ridiculous contraptions that never functioned as predicted—even though Mephisto’s paintings were always more attractive and his contraptions always worked. Nonetheless, Erasmus continued undaunted.

Eventually, he did improve. His portraits of such worthies as Queen Elizabeth and Sir Francis Drake, painted nearly a century later, hang today in museums around the world. I searched the haze of my memory but could not recall what had prompted Erasmus to abandon art for sorcery.

Theo at twenty-two, on the other hand, had already developed a dislike of magic. Being a good second son, he expected to be a soldier or perhaps to join the church. Soldiers did not care for sorcery, as it interfered with their work, and the churchmen thought it unholy. On that fateful day, he had
stood to one side, his arms crossed, glowering his disapproval, much as he was doing now.

MAB
straightened and brushed the snow off his fedora. “I’m about to begin, so no one had better say anything until we’re done, or all Hell could break loose—perhaps literally. Remember, wards only protect you from uninvited spirits. You invite ’em in, or just speak to ’em, and the ward goes down. At that point, you’re on your own. Everybody ready?” Theo and I nodded. “Okay, here goes.”

Onto the large rock at the center of Theo’s circle, Mab placed a pocketknife, a stick of applewood, a penny, and the blue Garfield mug in which I had mixed the unicorn horn. Next, he took out my tiny crystal vial from his trench coat and let a drop of the liquid within fall onto the rock. I wanted to cry out and stop him—replenishing my supply of Water of Life requires a journey of a year and a day, not to mention the other dangers that might be attracted by the exposed Water—but I bit my tongue. Once, I had seen a man carried off screaming into the air after he spoke out of turn during a magic ritual. That was the last I—or anyone—ever saw of that man.

Each of the four objects Mab touched to the place on the rock where the drop of the Water of Life had fallen. He then placed each item within pre-drawn triangles and poured crystalline salt into the lines, careful never to step across a line of salt himself.

Next, Mab pulled the chameleon cloak out of the bag and dropped it into a previously prepared triangle within the central circle. The material shimmered. It turned gray and snow-flecked, then brown as the earth with touches of dead grass. He poured rock salt into the lines of the triangle, sealing the chameleon cloak within.

Lastly, he poured the salt into the center circle in which he himself stood. By now, he was sweating. He took off his hat and laid it on top of the bag from which the salt came.

“Spirits of the world attend me!” he called. “Behold my works and obey my commands. I am one of your number and know all your tricks. Don’t try ’em.”

Mab took two steps and stood at the edge of his central circle facing the northward circle and the triangle within which contained the knife.

He spoke again, “The heavens of men are orderly heavens. To enforce this order, I call upon the spirit of Copernicus.”

Moving around to the east, where the mug lay, he chanted, “The waters
of man are orderly waters. To enforce this order, I call upon the spirit of Lavoisier.”

To the south, where the penny sat, he said, “The earth of man is an orderly earth. To enforce this order, I call upon the spirit of Newton.”

To the west, where the sun sets, he said over the apple twig, “The fire of man is an all-consuming fire. To enforce this, I call upon the spirit of Oppenheimer.

“Here before me, I have a cloak. It dwells in the world of men. Let it be bound by the laws of the world of men. Let its air be an orderly air. Let its water be an orderly water. Let its earth be an orderly earth. Copernicus, Lavoisier, Newton: I summon and compel you. Let any spirit who disobeys be burned in the fires of Oppenheimer and let its name and nature be consumed forever.”

As Mab spoke, Theo squinted at him in stark disbelief, clearly expecting Mab’s unorthodox methods to fail. Having watched Mab work before, I knew better. Mab held that if human wizards called upon spirits, it only followed that spirits who performed magic should call upon humans. To the best of my knowledge, the shades of dead men did not rise to perform tasks at Mab’s bidding, yet he achieved his desired results. Erasmus, the true magician in the family, could probably have explained the phenomenon, but I was hardly about to ask him and voluntarily give my arrogant, obnoxious brother yet another opportunity to insult me.

Mab stood silently now, head cocked. A wind blew through the orchard, swaying the leafless branches. Leaves rustled and skirled across the ground. In the center circle, the chameleon cloak shivered under the caress of the passing wind. Its weave was a putty gray now, like the sky. Oddly, not a single scurrying leaf crossed one of Mab’s white salt wards.

In the west triangle, the apple twig suddenly burst into flames.

Out of the air above the burning twig, a voice of inhuman beauty spoke. “Foolish fayling, by what authority do you challenge my lord, a Prince of Hell?”

When the stick burst into flames, Mab had gone entirely still. The hair on the nape of his neck had risen like that on the neck of a wolf. His hand had shot to his coat, and his fingers had curled about the haft of his trusty lead pipe. Now he bent, took up a handful of the crystalline salt and held it ready in his closed fist.

“By the authority of the magician Prospero, in whose house I dwell,” Mab growled back.

“Prospero’s blood has already condoned our work. He is our prisoner now, a living man held captive in the fiery bowels of Hell. His wards and charms will not stand before the might of my lord. By what authority?”

Above, on the hill, Theo tensed, alarmed, but then he scowled and turned away. He clearly did not believe the dark angel—such spirits often lie—but then he did not know about Father’s message and the Three Shadowed Ones.

A terrible chill touched my heart. Could this infernal spirit be speaking the truth? Had the Three Shadowed Ones captured Father? It would explain how the incubus passed through the wards protecting Father’s mansion.

Suddenly, I feared for my Father. Demons were tremendously cunning when it came to torture. Could any man survive such an experience without losing his immortal soul? I hugged my knees to my chest and sat silently on my rock, trembling.

Mab had drawn back in distress at the dark angel’s words, but he knew better than to let a denizen of Hell distract him from his goal. He stood now, scratching his stubble and glancing around. In the outer circle, Theo’s gaze was focused above the west circle. His weapon stood ready in his hand.

Mab turned back to the fiery twig. “By the Lady Miranda, whom I serve, I compel you go, and by her Lady, the Holy Eurynome!”

When Mab spoke my Lady’s name, lightning snaked across the snowy sky. The branches of the surrounding apple trees trembled. And the knife in the north triangle spun in a circle, then lay rattling on the stony earth. In the west triangle, the flame from the apple twig sputtered and died down. Then, it leapt back, brighter than before.

“Twice wrong, spiritling. Of all powers and places, she-whom-we-dare-not-name is weakest when brought near that over which you wish dominion. Thrice we ask, but thrice only. Three times unanswered, and, by ancient law, we may exact what price we please.”

Mab gazed warily about him, weighing his options. I wondered if he would call upon one of his deities, perhaps Setebos or Titania. If he chose a power with insufficient authority, something dreadful would happen.

That the authority of the Unicorn was insufficient to drive off the guardian of the chameleon cloak did not surprise me. It had been created to confound Her.