The Spirit Lens (26 page)

“Will you just—keep—silent?” he snapped through gritted teeth. “I’ve worked a theory.”

De Santo’s yoke and straps clattered as he threw them into the cart. He left it standing beside the black hill of coal that fed the guardpost braziers throughout the palace, then disappeared into the barracks doorway.

Annoyed at the wasted evening and Dante’s surly company, I stood, stretched out my aching legs and back, and cradled my throbbing hand. It was almost middle-night. “I’d like some sleep. I’m off to Seravain tomorrow early. We can test your theory when I get back.”

Dante’s cold grip encircled my ankle. De Santo had reappeared in a stream of yellow light spilling from the doorway, a blanket thrown over his shoulder and a pail in one hand. As the closing door shut off all but the pale watchlight, he turned away from us and trudged farther into the alley, where an iron fence barred the end, and the shadows were deep.

Metal clanked dully on stone. Water sloshed. The man coughed and spat. Silence fell, but Dante did not release his grip. Moments later, de Santo began to speak. “Holy angels, messengers of Father Creator”—the familiar prayer rose from the distant dark—“heed my petition for hearing and grace to ease the journey of Galtero de Santo, honored father, and Nicia, beloved mother, of Barela and Guilia, sisters fallen in their childhood, and Roland, son of my body. Let neither my dishonor nor my corruption taint their memorials or slow their steps. . . .”

His prayers were lengthier than those I dashed off each evening, and heartfelt as only a man who asked naught for himself could make them. I growled at Dante and dragged at his shoulder to come away. We had no right to hear this. But the mage would not budge. He gripped his staff and stared into the dark and whispered, “Discipline.”

I closed my eyes and crushed my rising temper, and in that fathomless darkness behind my eyes appeared a snarled tangle of scarlet threads and purple barbs, and disjointed blots of shaded gray crossed with livid stripes. How could a pattern of color writ on the inside of my eyelids turn my knees to jelly?

“And for one other lost traveler, unmourned”—de Santo’s voice quavered—“hear me, most gracious angels and holy saints. . . . No, no, no!”

Shifting air stirred the warm stink of piss and rot in the windless alleyway. The chill, dry intrusion spoke of earth and dusty leaves and cedar.

“By Heaven’s grace, leave me be!”

When de Santo’s panic wrenched my eyes open, I thought Dante’s magical seeing had seared through my head. Faint silver flashes and purple flickering outlined the captain’s kneeling form. Not lightning. Only the great bulk of the palace armory stood beyond the iron fence at de Santo’s back. My stomach rolled.

“What do you want of me?” de Santo cried. “I pray for you. I can do no more than that.”

The light crawled about de Santo, shooting out tendrils of livid green and purple, charging the air to bursting. De Santo’s pleas disintegrated into a despairing moan.

I pressed my back to the brick and sank down beside Dante. “By the Creator’s hand, what . . . ?”

The question died on my lips. The mage had pulled out the spyglass, propping the brass body in his clawed right hand while holding the eyepiece with his functioning fingers. When he tried to adjust the eyepiece, the wider end slipped out of his dead fingers. Swearing softly, he tried again, with the same result.

I slipped my shoulder underneath as a prop and steadied the glass with my unbandaged hand. Better to be the support than the one peering through that cursed lens.

Dante’s breath caught; then he exhaled, long and slow. After a moment, he eased his grip on the glass and pressed it urgently into my hands. No mistaking his intent.

A sickly, wavering light now cocooned the wailing Calvino de Santo. Dread shriveled my skin like old grapes. But I raised the glass.

Sainted bones!
I could not but recall Watt’s sketched light, the straight rays bending as they passed through curved glass and again as they penetrated the textured eye. But the artisan’s rendering had shown the object of vision clarified, unblurred, not wholly altered, not reshaped from green and purple lightning into a man’s starved likeness. Protruding teeth. Receding jaw, bony and stubbled. Scars and mouthlike wounds gaping everywhere on knobbed gray limbs. Small, close eyes, blacker than a nouré’s obsidian gaze, accusing and terrible.

You don’t believe in ghosts, Portier. Dead is dead
. I snatched the glass from my eye. My throat near clogged when I picked out Dante’s dark shape creeping along the alley wall toward de Santo and the flickering light. Cursed idiot . . . as manic a fool as Ilario . . . to seek out horror . . .

Responsibility dragged me along the wall behind the mage. Someone who cared for the weeping soldier ought to be alongside. Yet, with every step forward, mind and body escalated their war. My skull ached as if crushed in an iron clamp. Despite the night’s warmth, I could not stop shivering.

De Santo remained oblivious to our presence. Poised a few paces behind him, Dante stretched his arms wide, as if to embrace the poisonous vision. Indeed, for a few moments the writhing fire flared brighter as if the mage were new kindling to feed on.

Like a virulent outwash of the encounter, bitter anger settled in my bones. Purulent hatred clung to my spirit like sap from broken cedars. Prayers of unseemly gratitude bubbled from my soul as I huddled to the clammy brick. Gracious angels be thanked, this horror was not mine.

When, after a fathomless time, the last purple wisps faded, Calvino de Santo slumped into a silent, shapeless blackness, and Dante withdrew. The mage nudged me down the passage and around a corner before sinking to the filthy cobbles, uncurling his broad back against the brick wall, and clutching his staff between drawn-up knees. His breath came in hard gasps, as if he’d run a footrace.

“Some might call blood-born power a curse when it refuses the summons of will, as yours has done,” he said after a moment. “But I think it serves you.” He removed the forgotten spyglass from my paralyzed grasp and weighed it in his own wide palm. With a grimace, he stuffed the instrument into his shirt.

“My blood serves me? How? Blessed saints, what did we just see?”

“I believe that when you first looked into this glass, it played on a particular guilt and horror you carry with you about your father’s end. The same for your king, who saw friends and good servants he has led to their deaths. The factor you hold in common is your Savin blood, however ineffectual that may be in magical circles. When de Santo first looked through the glass, he glimpsed the mule at the moment he crossed the plane of death, and guilt left him vulnerable to the glass’s spell, as it did for you. But the captain is not of the blood, and for him the enchantment did not resolve fully, as if his own spirit became caught in a trap of wire and broken glass and cannot get free of the unresolved vision of the mule. Whenever the captain opens his spirit, when he prays, for example, as a devout man does every night, he brings the mule’s spectre to life again.”

“The spyglass
bound
Gruchin’s spirit to de Santo? His soul cannot pass beyond the Veil?”

Tales in every age spoke of sorrowful spirits who lingered after death, chained by vengeance, grief, or urgency to the earthly plane. Ghosts, shades, visible spirits . . . The implications of magic that could force a soul to such incomplete existence were beyond imagining.

“What we saw was
not
Gruchin’s ghost, not anything you’d name a soul. Believe me, there was no intelligence, no person there.” Dante shook himself as if to be rid of the encounter. “A spectre is only a splash of energies . . . a phantasm or seeming . . . a vivid memory. A nasty, vicious one in this case, no argument there. The mule died committing a purposeful act of vengeance, filled with malice and rage, and this spectre encompasses and inflicts that pain every moment of its manifestation.”

“There must be more to it,” I said. “Why guilt? De Santo didn’t even realize who Gruchin was until later.”

Dante shrugged. “Guilt knows little of truth. As far as the guard captain knew, the mule was an assassin who’d come a hairsbreadth from slaying the king he’d sworn his life to protect. And the king was shed of his armor by de Santo’s act. Perhaps excitement or fear would do the same.”

“But
I
never glimpsed the man, living or dead, and I know as well as I know anything in this life that the face I just saw was Gruchin.”

“Aye. The consolidation of the spectre, the accuracy of the likeness, that’s a considerable wonder. But perhaps not so much as when one with a bent for magic spies through the glass. De Santo experiences a fragment. You and your king see something wholly real. We just don’t know what.”

“Reven Skye saw naught but a blur.”

“Perhaps the key to the spell had not been spoken. Perhaps the lens maker was never affected by anyone’s death. I don’t know. But the lenses seem to focus these overpowering emotions and metaphysical realities connected to death, fix the resulting energies to physical memory, and so create a phantasm. A considerable accomplishment. Yet—think about this—not at all what the
queen
has in mind.”

Of course. It was so easy to get caught up in the moment’s wonders and forget the driving force behind Dante’s investigation. The queen did not desire phantasms.

My grateful fingers clung to the rough edges of the solid, mundane brick behind my back. “Then the spyglass enchantment was a failed experiment,” I said.

Dante sighed and hauled himself up with his staff. “That’s my belief. As the fop told us—as the lady herself expressed to me at my interview—the queen wishes to speak to her mother and have the dead lady answer back. She desires neither spectres nor ghosts, but
engasi
—embodied spirits, returned from the dead to walk the earth. An entirely different matter.”

“True necromancy.”

“I’ve never seen it done,” he said, almost speaking to himself. “Of all my teachers—I don’t know if it’s even possible. That’s why I need the books.
All
of them I asked for.”

Teachers
—it was Dante’s first mention of his schooling, and curiosity near overwhelmed my sense. But it came to me that I might be more likely to get an answer if I
didn’t
pounce this time. Odd and testy as Dante was, I liked him. And I respected him beyond my wonder at his considerable gifts, and I believed he must have good reason for the bitterness that drove him, as my own peculiar history drove me. That’s why I’d been so angry at what I’d seen as his failure in compassion. I’d been angry at myself for failure in judgment. Someday I would learn.

I sighed and rubbed my tired eyes. “I still don’t see what necromancy has to do with Philippe. He has long turned a blind eye to the queen’s illicit desires. The Temple is too weak to contradict his judgment. The Camarilla won’t; they’ve never condemned necromancy, only its abuse, bending to the Temple’s rule in the matter only to ensure their own survival after the Blood Wars. Philippe’s subjects love him well enough that
they’ll
not be prompted to rebellion by rumors of his unlucky wife’s grieving. So these distractions of feigned assassinations, mules, and transference are hiding . . . what?”

“I don’t know.”

He offered me a hand, dragging me to my feet as if I were but a stripling. We set out through the warm night, neither of us able to answer this most critical question. A dog barked in the distance. A flurry of invisible wings greeted us as we passed through a deserted garden. A fountain rippled and gurgled. Peaceable sounds to contrast with what we’d seen.

“Michel de Vernase must have trod close to the answer,” said Dante after a while. “The king has received no ransom demands? No encouragement to change . . . anything . . . in exchange for the conte’s life?”

“No. I hope to pick up Michel’s trail at Seravain.”

Dante paused between the two arched gates that led into the more traveled pathways of the palace. He was little more than an angular shape in the dark. “This morning Gaetana asked if I could translate a treatise on the divine elements, written in her family’s private cipher. They seem to have lost the spellkey to the code. I accepted the task.”

Heat rushed through my limbs and fluttered my belly. After a day that seemed to have wrung every possible emotion out of me, it took me a moment to recognize sheer excitement. My eyes met Dante’s. Their feral brightness near blinded me.

“Good,” I said, matching his ferocity. “Excellent.”

He nodded. “I should make my own way from here. You’re off tomorrow, you said?”

“Yes. I’ll be gone three days. Four at most. If you need something right away, Ilario returns to Merona in the morning.”

He turned to go, but hesitated halfway round. “You oughtn’t trust the peacock. His untruth is seated so deep, it is scarce detectable. Your king trusts him at his peril.”

“Lies about what?”

“If I knew, I’d hardly keep it secret, now would I?”

“I’ve questioned Ilario,” I said. “I’ve had my own reservations about him, especially after the
Swan
. But I see naught but a good-hearted, ridiculous man, who loves his half sister inordinately. He’s made a place for himself in this world—not one you or I would want, but one that seems to suit him. Give me evidence of something else, and I’ll take it to the king.”

Dante shrugged. “I’ve no source you’d credit.”

“Tell me when you do. And by the bye”—I raised my bandaged hand, ignoring the barbed spikes that shot up my arm with every movement—“thank you for this. It feels better already.”

He snorted rudely. “Lies do not become you, student. Tend the hand. Use it. You’ll be glad.”

He started for the gate, a strange, lonely figure, his white staff marking his passage. Where, in the Father’s creation, had he come from? “Master,” I called after him. “Does
your
blood shield you from the spectres of the spyglass?”