The Spirit Lens (59 page)

I averted my eyes quickly that no one might follow their course and glean my understanding. No wonder then at Philippe’s ambivalence at Michel’s letter. His faith had compelled him to send Edmond as Michel required, while his every instinct warned him it was a deadly . . . and very personal . . . trap. The agony in my cousin’s posture was not the sorrow of a king for his young soldier.

“Cover him,” said Ilario, softly. “Angel’s comfort, there’s naught to be gained by this unseemly exposure.”

But what saint or angel could ever comfort the noble warrior king of golden Sabria? None. Not when his oldest friend had murdered his only son.

CHAPTER THIRTY

25 CINQ THE ANNIVERSARY

P
hilippe de Savin-Journia’s worst nightmare,
so the Aspirant had named himself at Eltevire. So he had proved. So he would prove again unless we made the correct moves in answer to this mortal taunt.

Philippe accepted the ring and the note with scarce a glance. “We continue with the exhibition.”

“My lord, surely not!” said First Counselor Baldwin, who had arrived just as I laid the purple wrap across Edmond’s face. “No matter who this is, we must—”

“We must do
nothing
,” snarled the king, low enough to keep the exchange at Edmond’s side. “I know who is responsible, and his vile act will not sully the honors being offered Prince Desmond. Not again. That is what he wants. Portier, see to this.” Philippe stepped out of the lamplight, but did not leave.

“Aye, Your Grace,” I said, swallowing hard at the responsibility my cousin had just laid in my lap.
Think, Portier.
First the crowd, their voices already risen in fearful speculation. Philippe wished to keep knowledge of this assault on his person—it could be termed naught else—contained.

“Lord Baldwin, if you would, announce that a young gentleman guest has suffered a spasm of the falling sickness and must be helped out of the venue. Say the ailing guest requests that the event proceed in due honor to the late prince. His Majesty has offered his own physician.”

A troubled Baldwin flicked his shrewd gaze from Philippe to me and back again. “Sire?”

“As he says.”

Philippe’s brittle response gave Baldwin direction enough. As if he were a much younger and slimmer man, the First Counselor sprang over the silk ropes and strode toward the dais, bellowing cheerfully. “Everyone, return to your seats and ease your concerns. All is well, though we’ve had a lamentable incident. . . .”

“Captain de Segur.” At my sharp enunciation, the mustachioed guard captain raised his eyes from Edmond’s corpus, where they had been fixed.

“On bond of life and honor, you will not speak of what you have seen here until His Majesty himself releases you with his word and hand. You will support Lord Baldwin’s report in every aspect. Do you understand that I speak with His Majesty’s voice?”

I exposed my marked hand on my shoulder, hoping the mark might intimidate him with the possibility that I might muster some magical reinforcement for my authority.

“Yes, certainly.” The captain squinted, as if not quite sure what I was. Neither was I, just then.

“Summon two of your most trusted men to carry this young man to”—I glanced around—“perhaps to Lord Ilario’s apartments? Chevalier?”

“Certainly. Such a terrible . . . Sante Ianne, so vile . . . wicked . . .”

“And, Captain, double the protection for His Majesty’s person, and double the watch on the outer gates and on the exits from the Great Hall, the Rotunda, and the Portrait Gallery. Search the alleyways, the courtyards, anywhere someone could hide. The one who’s delivered this victim must not slip out with the departing guests.”

De Segur slammed his fist to his chest and hurried away.

I had little hope that his search would be useful. Michel himself would not have risked carrying a corpse into the palace. If we could discover
how
the body had been brought here, we might have better fortune finding
who
had done it. Sorcery. I’d wager my eyes on it.

Dante examined Edmond’s lacerated skin, his feet, his back, his eyes, touching and not touching, in the meticulous way he examined everything. Philippe watched from the shadows.

“Someone’s carried him across Dante’s perimeter, sire,” I said. “With the god’s grace, Dante will divine who it was.”

“There can be no grace here,” murmured the king, barren as the wastes of Eltevire. “What in the cursed realm of Heaven will I tell his mother?”

Edmond’s mother. A young warrior’s beloved mistress sacrificed to political necessity, married off to an elderly friend to shield mother and child from disgrace, and to save Philippe, the scion of a blood family, the unexpected king, from Camarilla penalties for promiscuity. The story would explain a great many things.

“He’s been dead more than a day,” said Dante, kneeling up. “There’s no rigor. What blood he had left is well settled in his legs—he was standing or, more likely, hanging.” Raw wounding encircled Edmond’s wrists.

“No bound enchantments cling to the corpus. Given more time, I might be able to determine where he was kept.”

“Can you learn how he was brought here?” I asked.

“I doubt that.” Dante shrugged, rising.

Restive murmurs among the guests had yielded to excited babbling and pointing fingers. I excused myself and hurried to the back of the pendulum circle where people pressed against the silken ropes, craning to catch a glimpse of the fallen man. Surely someone had noticed the bundle carried in.

“Scholar,” I said to a young academician. “A word with you . . .” Two sharp-eyed ladies and a gentleman with a shock of red hair pressed close behind the young man. “Did you—or any of the rest of you—happen to notice our ailing gentleman stumble into the circle? We’re seeking the rest of his party. But his tongue is a bit thick, as happens with the falling sickness, so we could not understand the names. He’s wearing a purple mantle. . . .”

Though everyone behind the stanchions wished to speak, none had anything useful to report. They had been watching the light beams or the pendulum or had looked away just then. Several mentioned the lights going dark, but no one had observed anything odd or anyone looking ill.

When I returned, frustrated, to the pendulum, two guardsmen with a litter had joined Ilario and Philippe. Dante had vanished. “Where’s the mage?”

“Says he’s gone to ‘check the perimeter.’” Ilario knelt at Edmond’s side, tucking the purple wrappings about the young man’s long limbs.

“Bear the poor gentleman carefully, lest he suffer another spasm,” I whispered to the guards. “Keep gawkers away. As you can see, his sickness shames him. Chevalier, will you show them where to lay him?”

The soldiers lifted Edmond’s enshrouded form gently and followed Ilario through the parting crowd. Once they had gone, Philippe crooked a finger at the lamp. I held it close as he broke the seal on the letter.

After only a moment he refolded the paper and passed it to me. “You need not fear you’ve erred in your conclusion, cousin.”

Curiosity begged me to probe Philippe’s understanding of this message. But the man had receded to an untouchable distance, as if Discord’s Worm, lurking beyond the horizon, had sucked down the roiling ocean. Only the king remained. He pulled a slender scroll from his brocade waistcoat. “Dispatch this to the warder at the Spindle. At middle-night I will come down to the docks to welcome my wife home.”

An unseemly rush of relief and excitement engulfed me. Father Creator, by morning, Maura could be free. I needed to notify an accomplice that our game was on. I needed to get to the harbor before the cordon of guards tightened around it to protect Philippe. Yet the Aspirant’s accomplice, and all the answers he could provide, might be lurking in the Rotunda.

As I wrestled with the conflicting demands of duty and desire, Philippe strode back down the aisle to the dais, his authority like a gale wind sweeping away his guests’ doubts and fears. “We have done for our ailing gentleman what can be done,” he announced. “So let us declare this an interlude to savor the wine and delicacies in the Portrait Gallery, then return and proceed with this extraordinary event. I would see what these mages have to offer that can match our astronomers’ exceptional presentation.” The king bowed to his two astronomers as would his own most gallant chevalier.

The assembly applauded and cheered. Conversation burgeoned as children were released from their seats, and ladies called to friends, and gentlemen expounded on the afternoon’s events to any who would listen. Philippe and Baldwin led the way through the wide doors. The glittering guests pooled behind them and flowed like a mighty river into the gallery.

I had never imagined a king’s life to be so like a player’s, or a spy’s, forced to live masked and walk through scenes no matter the state of his health or his heart. As with so many of the grand destinies explored on my boyhood nights, truth was altogether different from the dreaming. I could not run off to play rescuer. Not yet. I had a murderer to catch.

Once I had dispatched a messenger with Philippe’s orders to the Spindle, another to the Lestarte brothers that they should delay the fireworks display until middle-night, and left a brass token in a palace alleyway to alert my evening’s accomplice, I hurried into the Great Hall. The exhibits had been dismantled. A few, like the virginal, sat atop wheeled carts, waiting to be hauled out.

A sheen of silver flickered beyond the colonnade at the far end of the hall. Even at so great a distance, Dante’s magic shimmered in my veins, as unlike the sorry residues of the day’s magical displays as this palace was to a bondsman’s hovel. I stayed away from him, though, not wanting to associate our activities.

Each of the twelve entrances to the Great Hall remained manned and guarded. I interviewed the registrars and scanned their lists, paying particular attention to persons who had arrived in the last hour. Most names were familiar, though oddly . . .

“No one at all passed the door between the quarter hour and the half hour?” I asked the registrar at the southwest door. The gap only struck me because the registry for the southeast door had shown the same quarter hour with no entries.

The young woman peered at her page full of time notations and signatures. “None. We don’t have the servants sign each time they come through. We just tally them on their own list as you told us. But . . . I suppose not.”

I returned to the registries I’d already examined. Every entry register exhibited the same quarter-hour gap. The tower bells had struck sixth hour as Edmond was carried away, which meant the Rotunda would have gone dark no less than a half-hour previous—approximately the same time interval, which meant . . . what? That everyone in Castelle Escalon had gone blind for a quarter hour?

Magic, surely, yielding just time enough for someone to carry a body in and leave again. Perhaps Dante’s perimeter could tell us whose magic had left us blind.

Unfortunately, Dante had left the Exposition. Indeed, no one had seen the mage since he’d been “working his devilry” in the Portrait Gallery. Damn the man! Where had he gone?

I raced up the stair and around the long route to the east wing, calculating the time I had to get questions answered. The supper interlude would consume at least another hour and a half. Once the king returned to the Rotunda, Orviene would begin his demonstration. And then Dante would be needed on the dais. And he wanted me in the Rotunda. Saints knew why.

Jacard’s chair outside Dante’s apartments sat empty. I barged in without knocking. The mage was not at home. I was not tempted to linger. The air in his great chamber squirmed and wriggled as if I were immersed in one of the royal fishponds. He had wanted more time with Edmond’s corpus, so I took off for Ilario’s apartments.

Michel had surely intended Edmond’s murder to demonstrate his own superior strength and cleverness, as well as a serious vulnerability in Philippe’s household. Vulnerability to sorcery, to intrusion, instilling fear, uncertainty, and suspicion in the court, and in Philippe himself. The Conte Ruggiere had proclaimed himself an enemy so bold as to murder the son of Philippe’s friends and perhaps . . .

My suspicion of Edmond’s parentage would explain Philippe’s confidence in his choice of heir. How much better than some random courtier would be a son of his own body, a well-educated, well-trained young noble of intelligence and modesty. Though a bastard could not inherit directly, anyone’s name could be scribed on the Heir’s Tablet in the royal crypt. Perhaps that was when Michel’s rebellion had begun.
Never again in your shadow.
Perhaps the common soldier raised so far above his station, for twenty years the king’s closest friend, had expected his own name to be etched in stone.

Captain de Segur’s two men stood watch outside Ilario’s door. “Sorry, sonjeur,” one said, barring me from approaching. “Chevalier de Sylvae commanded none is to enter.”

“I am the chevalier’s secretary, Savin-Duplais,” I said. “Inquire.”

Moments later, Ilario was dragging me toward his small sitting room. “Blessed saints, Portier, the lad was so hurt, so . . . damaged.”

Edmond was laid out on the divan. Dante was bent over him, scraping at the lacerations.

“There you are!” I said, relieved. “What have you learned?”

The mage corked a glass vial and tossed it into a cloth bag that rattled as if it held more such vials. “I’m trying to understand what was done here. The spells used on him are the same used when they took your blood—which means only that they used the same implements. It is likely his injuries were inflicted by the same who inflicted the first of your leeching marks—this Aspirant. Not surprising. Clearly they planned from the first to kill him. One-and-twenty days since he left here, and he was dying for most of that time. But whyever would they leech a man with no blood family connection?”