The Soul Mirror (47 page)

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Authors: Carol Berg

Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Fantasy, #Fantasy fiction

BOOK: The Soul Mirror
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“I didn’t want to believe your warning,” said Guerin, huffing a little at the climb. “Seravain has been my home since I was seven. The thought that such evil had taken root there . . . My head just wouldn’t accept it. Yet since the day your sister died, I’d noticed odd things. My room out of order. Notes disturbed. Eyes looking away too quickly. I told myself it was just students. Rumors spread like maggots in a collegia.”
We sat on a slab at the head of the steep rockfall and propped our backs on the foundation stones. On a finer morning the prospect—the sprawling city falling away to the broad river and its crescent harbor—would enrich the soul. But on this gray day the river had swollen into a sea of cloud. At the base of the rocky jumble below us the treeless waste we had just traversed sloped gently down to the sheep pens and the postern road.
Guerin offered me a biscuit, pulled from a shabby rucksack. I shook my head. The last bells had rung half past the hour.
He talked between ravenous bites. “I looked into the things you wrote me about Ophelie de Marangel: her years of failure, the abrupt change, her sudden isolation, her illness and disappearance. It was all there in the archives, as you said. Blessed light . . . blood transference, torture, murder happening right under everyone’s noses. I was only a student at the time, self-absorbed as we all were. But how many ignored the signs of her trouble ? If you’re even half attentive to your students, you’d notice something like that. And now Lianelle . . . I’ve tried to think what she might have been about that last morning.”
“In her letter, the one you gave me, she said she had set events in motion.”
He nodded. “The enchantment that killed her was her own; I told you that before. But there was no evidence she’d worked the spell in the
ravine
. So where had she done it? She frequently practiced spellwork outside supervision. I never reported it, because the mages did seem to be holding her back unfairly, and she swore to me the work was merely uncanonical magic—spells that fail to adhere to the
Encyclopaedia of Workable Formulae
—not illicit in the way of blood transference or such. Being a self-righteous ass, I never let her tell me where she did it. She’d never have worked on something dangerous in the dormitory or any of the student laboratoriums, where she might have harmed someone else.”
He rummaged in his rucksack, setting aside books and papers, a shirt, a scarf. His words flowed on, as if he’d held in his thoughts for much too long. “After a day wasted searching every laboratorium where she might have had some privacy, I remembered something she had told me about the day Savin-Duplais, the librarian, questioned her about Ophelie. She’d said her nerves had near fractured when he’d hauled her off to one of her favorite places for his interview—an overgrown pergola in the outer gardens. Sure enough, tucked away under a bench in that old pergola, I found nitre powder, oil of vitriol, and sulfur—which would certainly fuel an explosion—and I found this.”
He pulled out a grimy canvas bag and dumped its contents into my lap. Flint and steel, bound together with wire. A lock of hair, the sun-scalded brown curls unmistakably Lianelle’s. Five silver finger rings of various sizes. Three keys dangling from a loop of leather. The skull of a small rodent—a mouse or a vole. A jumble of nonsense, it appeared.
He picked out a tightly rolled bit of paper, tied with a ribbon, and gave it to me. Unrolling the scuffed little scrap revealed a neatly written message.
Unable to walk out with you this evening. It is wholly improper, no matter my “heart’s bidding,” as you so cheekily put it. No matter that we could talk solely of schoolwork. Pass your adept’s examination, milady, and you may spy a familiar face among the hordes of moonstruck swains at your feet. Until then, I must be your teacher only, and must—and shall—heed my duty to that office.
Grief aged Guerin’s face twenty years as he watched me read the message, leaving me no need to compare the handwriting to the note in my pocket, or to ask why my unsentimental little sister had cherished it. Plenty of other questions remained, however.
“Why would she keep something she treasured . . . or any of these oddments . . . alongside the makings for an explosion?”
Heed both mind and heart to understand
, she’d told me in her letter.
“I believe them to be particles,” he said, clearing a roughness in his throat, “objects we use to supply the appropriate proportions of the five divine elements needed for spellwork—air, water, spark, base metal, and wood. As to why this paper, I believe—you have to understand this is a heretical suggestion, and I’ve no idea how one might accomplish such a thing—influencing a person’s mind without using the senses. But I believe she wanted me to find her.” His fingers toyed with the paper, then rerolled it so tightly, it appeared no more than a straw. “Somehow, she wove
me
into her enchantment. Enough to draw me to her. She knew I would consent; a participant’s consent makes spellwork stronger. All that day, I knew she was in trouble. I just couldn’t leave my younger students unsupervised to hare off after her. Why didn’t she tell me what she was afraid of? Why didn’t she just ask me to help?”
He waved off his pain, contorting his face with the effort. “It makes no difference. I found her, as she wanted. Walked straight down to the ravine as if she’d left me a signpost. Only too late.”
But now he’d set me on the path, I caught a glimmer of my sister’s purpose. “She’d no intention of risking
your
life. She understood how honor and duty would shape your reaction to this . . . disturbance . . . she caused you. Your note says it all: You’d heed your responsibilities first. As certain as I can be of anything in this world, Guerin, she was deliberate about the events of that morning.”
The nireal’s vision had taught me that. Magic was not whimsy to my sister. Not a childish fancy to be outgrown. “So, what do these other things tell us?”
“The skull implies she was working a spell of mortal consequence. The particular mix of air and wood that makes up bone is said to bend a spell toward death, though I think it’s included as much to be a warning for the practitioner.”
“Or a telltale for an observer
,
” I murmured. “A
mortuis memore.
”
“Yes.” He touched the five little rings. “Silver contains all five of the divine elements—the wood, air, and spark needed for combustion, as well as base metal and water that might be needed to balance the spell’s formula to make it work. Though, truly, these particles don’t match any I know. Duplais could tell you more; no one knows the formulas for spellwork as he does. The flint and steel would supply additional base metal. The hair would bring water and wood to the balance—”
“No.” Once I had studied even a smattering of alchemistry, the business of particles and divine elements and formulaic magic had never made sense to me. Wood and air were
not
component parts of silver. One look at a hair through an opticum lens revealed no water or wood. These bits and pieces shaped my sister’s magic into a story, just as the encrypted characters on the Mondragon book had shaped themselves into its title.
“If your note designated the person she intended to find her,” I said, steeling myself against incipient dread, “then perhaps the lock of hair designated her intended victim.”
He looked up sharply. “But it’s
her
hair!”
“You told me there were no boot prints, no signs of anyone else around her. She made sure you would come and find her once she was dead.” I had thought that nothing about Lianelle’s passing could slash deeper than her loss, but this truth was laid out as stark as a grave stele. “You said it: Consent is everything. She worked this explosion apurpose.”
“But
why
?” His stricken cry gave voice to my own distress.
I’d been blind not to have seen it before now. Lianelle, who would squirm and wriggle and cheat to win a silly game. Lianelle, who adored living beyond reason. Lianelle, who would never, ever give up.
“She must have been dead already. Whether poisoned or wounded or trapped with no possible escape. Believe me,
nothing
else would have driven her to such a thing. She must have learned something so dangerous, her enemy could not allow her to live, not even long enough to whisk her away and leech her blood. But she made it happen on her own terms.”
She had needed to pass on what she’d learned from the
Book of Greater Rites
to people who could do something about it. Elsewise, she would have destroyed the book rather than sending it on to me. As to the hurry . . . She could not allow her enemy to discover what she’d deduced, or what she’d made, or who she’d told about it. Instead, she had left me this ciphered mess and trusted me to figure it out.
“Angels’ mercy, Lianelle.” Whether Guerin or I or both of us said this, I could not have told.
“Who
is
this enemy? Who was she so afraid of?” The young man spoke through gritted teeth, pressing clenched fists to his forehead. “If it’s the last thing I do in this life . . .”
“You’ll help us expose and defeat him,” I said, clutching at my own murderous desires. “Tell me, was Dante, the queen’s mage, at Seravain on that day?”
“He arrived a day later. Chancellor Kajetan believed someone from outside the school should investigate her death; elsewise we might be accused of hiding illicit practices again, reviving the scandal. We—my friends among the faculty members—were surprised when this Dante came. We expected a prefect.”
“And did Dante investigate her death?” I needed to understand loyalties. Were Kajetan and Dante allies or rivals?
“If you mean did he look at her and the place where she died . . . yes, certainly. If you mean did he question people, check the logbooks, and so forth, the answer is no. Chancellor Kajetan had gathered up your sister’s things, as I told you, and Vice Chancellor Charlot confiscated whatever papers, reports, or magical artifacts her tutors held. This Dante scarce spoke a word to anyone save the two of them and, I suppose, Master Kajetan’s friend who was staying over in his house. The chancellor—”
“Is the vice chancellor a big man? Tall? Broad?”
Guerin, frowning, studied me as if my reasoning might be written on my skin. “He’s broad abeam, but scarce taller than you.”
Not the Aspirant, then. “And the chancellor’s friend?”
“He was a good-sized fellow, near Kajetan’s height and sturdily built. Not that I saw him for more than an eyeblink for all the days he was there, as the chancellor bundled him off to the residence like a long-lost brother. I’m not sure when he left.”
A fierce excitement brimmed. “So who was he? A mage?”
Guerin stuffed his belongings back into his rucksack as he scoured his memory. “I’ve no idea. He wore no collar; I’m sure of that. But I never saw his hand. I judged him a scholar right off, or maybe a nobleman down at heels, but I’m trying to think why. It wasn’t just because he was close with the chancellor. His dress was fine enough, but plain. And his horse—a fine beast—was caparisoned in huntsman’s green and black, as if the man were a nobleman or his emissary come on a formal visit. But his regalia bore no device, and he’d no retainers or servants with him. I guess the green and black made me think he was from Delourre, as those are the colors of the Delourre demesne, and they’re forever short of coin up there. I just assumed the three of them were huddled up together. But as I think of it . . . I’ve no good reason for that. I’m not so good at logic or puzzles. Not with this, at least.”
The bells rang another quarter. The mist had swallowed the city. Now its tendrils were claiming the downslope, reaching almost to the base of the rockfall.
“You’ve done well, Adept.” Duplais might know of his mentor’s friends who wore the colors of Delourre. “Did they question you?”
“Charlot asked me what Lianelle studied in my tutorial, but neither he nor Master Dante nor anyone else asked me what else she might be working on or why she might have been in the ravine that morning. As if they already knew.” His skin blazed. “For certain my own inquiries have left a trail a kilometre wide. I feel like a fool and a coward.”
“No, you’re right to go. One hint from a student that you were fond of Lianelle, one suspicion that she confided in you or asked your help to decipher some encryption, and they’d have you on a rack or worse. You’ll do my sister no honor dead.”
I fiddled with the oddments in my lap, begging them to tell me more as I dropped them one by one into the canvas bag. Eventually I was left with the one we had not fit into the deadly enchantment. “What could the keys signify?”
“Base metal—”
“Not as part of a formula, but as if she had chosen them particularly to weave something into the spellmaking, as you felt she did with your note.”
A sun glint shot from the hills behind us, only to die a quick death in the encroaching gloom. Guerin removed his broad-brimmed hat and scraped fingers through damp, matted hair. “Unlocking, I suppose. Something to do with spellwork itself, perhaps, as any spell that’s not made active at the time of binding requires a verbal key. Honestly, damoselle, in a spell meant for self-murder, I can’t even guess. I’m sorry. I should have tried the keys around the collegia.”

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