The Complete Trilogy: The Books of Conjury #5 Page 8

  Yet everything he’d said, done, and told me—particularly about myself—terrified me beyond all measure. How could he not be mad? Crazy? Lying? I was no witch—I could think of nothing worse.

  So I stood there in the breathless afternoon, alone, no guidance forthcoming from the forest shading the road around me. I raised my hands and looked at them: solid, blood flowing through them. Averting my eyes from the gruesome remains in front of me, I glanced at the lane as it bent south, away from Salem.

  Tightening my jaw, I turned and ran back after Swaine.

  8

  A Radiant Ship Alight on a Dark Sea

  Summer passed into Autumn. Chores became routine, and my studies all-consuming. Swaine had me reading and practicing basic magic twelve hours each day, sometimes sixteen. One night in late October, when the air held a crisp bite and the stars glimmered, I hurried from the barn to the manse with a tome tucked beneath my arm. Ahead of me, the manse shone with candle and lantern, a radiant ship alight on a dark sea. From my vantage it looked as though I’d stumbled across a ball in mid-soirée. Silhouettes passed back and forth by the windows, casting shadows out onto the overgrown gardens. Yet no carriages lined up in the drive. No melodies from strings plucking out a waltz reached my ears. Clink of glass, laughter? No, only silence. This was what my life had become: an eerie dreamscape. I hurried in through the kitchen door, only to be greeted with a loud thud from the front of the house, and Swaine calling for me.

  “Coming!” I called out. I hurriedly stirred the pot of soup I’d hung in the hearth, then darted down the hallway to the entryway.

  “He always trips on it,” Swaine yelled from upstairs. “Help him. And you have the Girabaldi?”

  “Yes, sir.” The book was Incantus Magesterium by Antonio Girabaldi. Girabaldi was one of the few magicians from the Sixteenth Century Italian school of Magia Nera whom Swaine thought worthwhile—though he insisted that Girabaldi’s later works were in fact written by the magician’s scheming brother-in-law after his death, as evidenced by a marked downturn in quality, with many of the magical constructs being utter nonsense.

  “Try not to take all night, then.”

  Swaine had only told me to fetch the book three minutes earlier—but time was an unpredictable quantity when he was deep in his work. Before I ran it up the stairs to him, I put the book on a low chest by the stairs and tended to the revenant struggling on the floor. It was Mr. Flynn, always troublesome. I locked my arms beneath the revenant’s shoulder and heaved him upright. His legs kept walking, making the effort awkward. If it had been a ball, we’d have been the worst pair of dancers, by far. I got him to his feet, and he set off shuffling. I wiped my hands on the side of my skirt, detesting everything about his presence.

  All seven revenants circled the manse, demons mastering the mechanics of the flesh. Every few hours, Swaine had them reverse direction, taking the circuit of stairs, turns, obstacles, and uneven surfaces from a different approach. It was my job to rearrange the obstacles every hour. One of my jobs.

  “Name?” Swaine appeared at the top of the stairs. He wore a bandage around his brow, fashioned after an incident involving a demon who’d developed a fancy for hurling cutlery. Swaine had yet to apprehend the fiend, though he assured me he would catch it even more decisively than he’d caught the fork tines with his forehead. He’d assured me it was normal. For just as a blacksmith sometimes got burned, or a furniture maker sometimes found a splinter of wood driving into flesh or under nail, a sorcerer sometimes had trouble with a demon.

  I thought for a moment, watching the revenant Flynn shuffle off. “Attynbyrn—that’s the first part, sir.”

  “I didn’t ask for the first part, Finch. The whole name is what I’m after. Remember your mnemonic.”

  The names of demons held the key to binding them, so the ability to commit them to memory was crucial. Demon names contained power. Harnessing that power required precision. And a finely honed memory, as Swaine had told me on a dozen different occasions. I thought carefully.

  A gleaming dream of tomb and crypt.

  “Attynbyrnvescumintrypt,” I said.

  “Good. And the chief danger of this demon is what?”

  “I know it’s not the one that strangles.”

  “No, it’s not. That’s not, however, what I asked.”

  My hand by my side, I tapped my forefinger and thumb together, a habit I’d developed in studying with Swaine. “Attynbyrnvescumintrypt. Attynbyrnvescumintrypt.” I wracked my mind—and then had it. “Stairs, sir. Stairs and ledges. He lures people.”

  “It.”

  I cringed. “Yes, sorry—it. It lures people.” Demons are, strictly speaking, neither female nor male. They are, however, quite capable of mimicking either or both genders to suit their needs when interacting with humans. I found it impossible to separate what my eyes saw from what my mind knew, however. “Lures them and then shoves them.”

  “Which means what?”

  “Which means that I must never let myself be near Mr. Flynn—er, Attynbyrnvescumintrypt—near the tops of the stairs, the well, or any of the upstairs windows if they’re open.”

  “Probably best even if they’re not. The demon once hurled the wife of a Hanoverian glassmaker through the window of the Town Hall overlooking the Schmiedestrasse. The window was closed by all accounts.”

  As if Flynn—demon or not, it was hard to think of him any other way—couldn’t get more horrifying.

  “And let’s have no more confusion about these demons,” Swaine said. “Their fatal predilections must be iron-firm in your mind at all times. Now, the book.”

  I grabbed the Girabaldi and hurried up the stairs, placing it in Swaine’s outstretched hand.

  “Attento,” he said. He opened the book and flipped chunks of pages. He found the passage he sought within a quarter of a minute, no more.

  Not lifting his gaze from the text, Swaine stepped aside as a young woman approached the stairs. I’d been trapped beneath her when I’d first arrived in Salem. Holding the hem of her dress a hand span above the creaking floorboards, she walked with a smooth grace that Swaine assured me she’d never achieved in life. As she passed me, I remembered that she was the corpse inhabited by the strangler demon with the long name I couldn’t for the life of me master. The mnemonic had something to do with tracing rivers unheard shivers until the light of day delays the crying of the jays and something about a forest. At the stairs, the revenant glanced down and descended, not missing a step.

  “The eyes look better, sir,” I said. Swaine’s earlier attempts with the eyes failed: the bound demons, allowed actual sight through the eyeballs, displayed their madness and malice plain to see, the violence driving the eyes, jittery and cruel, to circle and spin and twitch so much that even Swaine found the effect disquieting. Refining the process over the summer, he’d settled on a method that left the tracking of the eyes a bit slow, but altogether less frightful. Anyone farther than a yard away might think the revenant needed nothing more than a strong cup of tea.

  “Still work to be done, but at least they’re not tumbling headlong down the stairs every three minutes,” he said, having found the page he sought.

  I wrinkled my nose at the waft of decay that trailed the young woman.

  Swaine noticed as well. “Wait.” She stopped at the bottom. “Let’s see if we can’t find her a more beguiling perfume, shall we?”

  Part of his technique had been designed to staunch the onset of decomposition. The results had been mixed. Swaine closed the book and set it aside. I followed him down the stairs. At the bottom, he held out his elbow for the young woman and said “Arm.” She slid her arm around the crook of his and they walked thus, a man and wife, or a gentleman scholar and his young admirer. Myself, I hated to touch the revenants.

  We passed through the entryway to his study. A fire in the hearth set shadows huddling in the corners. Swaine slid his arm out and commanded her to stay still. He shuffled through the papers on his writing desk.

  “Ignis,” he said. The candles before him sprang to flame. He lifted a sheet. “Here we are. I’ve had thoughts on a better mode of preservation.”

  “The others don’t smell as bad, sir,” I offered. While the other six revenants had a musty smell that reminded me of a damp basement, the woman before us was notably worse.

  Swaine scanned the leather spines along one of his bookshelves. “I’m not surprised—nothing about the demon within her is normal. Quite a treacherous reputation, the demon: a kelverring spirit, known additionally as dream-poisoners or taxique nocentes carnificem. They’ve rarely been documented in the literature, as most attempts to bind and control them proved fatal to the sorcerer in question.”

  I frowned. The revenant stared at me. As a witch, I drew the demons’ ire, even if their ability to act on it was circumscribed. My hand drifted up to the pendant around my neck: no demon could harm me as long as I bore it. Aside from being stared at by living corpses, being a witch had little to recommend it, I’m afraid—yet by then, I’d grown weary of wondering how it had all become my lot in life. Swaine thought my nature allowed me faster progress in my studies of magic, but it all felt difficult to me.

  “This is the one,” Swaine said, pulling out a thick book. “A French translation, the best I’ve found. Les Vie des Cadavres. It means: The Lives of Corpses. The time of the plagues was an impressively fertile era for the art of necromancy, as you might imagine. This volume was one of a dozen locked away by the Catholic Church underneath piles of inhumed bones in the catacombs below Paris. It wasn’t inexpensive.”

  He brought the book to his workbench, turning the fragile pages open to a silk marker. He read for a moment.

  “Ah, yes,” he said. “Four drops of ahyddon.” He moved to
his workbench and opened a drawer. He lifted out a small brass box and handed it to me. “Open, don’t spill. Observe.”

  I slid the cover aside to expose a blackish, rust-smelling powder.

  “Ahyddon, also known as sepulcher ink,” he said. “Dried marrow, ox blood, and ground human teeth. Along with a particular spell, it’s used in sealing crypts.”

  Consulting both his notes and the faded French text, he assembled the other articles: essence of violet, rainwater, a gray ash made from burned sage, and a curious silvery liquid that danced and shimmered. He weighed and checked each ingredient for impurities, explaining their origin and the role they would play in the spell as he went. Studies never stopped. When satisfied, he handed me a steel measuring knife.

  “When I name the ingredient,” he said, “repeat back to me where it comes from and what its role is. Then add it to the mortar.”

  I took the knife. As Swaine called out the materials, I recited what he’d taught me, and added them to the mixture. He explained the various ways in which the specific order could alter the effects of the spell. When I’d gotten through them all, grinding the resulting paste with a pestle, he nodded.

  “Excellent.” He pointed to a brass crucible. “Mix thoroughly and put it into that.”

  “It’s safe, sir?”

  “Well I wouldn’t eat it.”

  I scraped the mixture into the crucible, and then, at Swaine’s direction, held it over a flame until the concoction bubbled. “Set it there to cool,” he said, pointing to a stained marble slab. He turned to the revenant. “Now we shall make her gentler on the nose. Clothes off.”

  The revenant began a rough approximation of disrobing that failed when she couldn’t manipulate any of the ties along the front of her dress. When she yanked it over her head, the material at the shoulder tore.

  “Stop,” Swaine said, holding up a hand. She froze as she was. “Help her, Finch. We have miles to go with their fine motor skills—which reminds me: we need buttons, and lots of them. Sorting them will help.”

  I approached the revenant and undid the ties of her dress, helping her slide out of it and her under-clothing, until she wore nothing but the ring on her left hand. The glyphs drawn on her had faded. I guessed her age before death to have been only mid-twenties, and her body said they’d been hard years, leaving her with scars, broken ribs that had healed poorly, stretch marks along her belly, burn marks on her legs, and sagging breasts. With her clothing off, the reek of decomposition was profound, and I put my sleeve to my nose.

  Swaine touched her distended belly. “Bloated with gasses. We’ll deal with that later—and certainly not here in the study.”

  I put her clothes in a neat pile at the foot of the workbench.

  “Once I refine the revenation technique,” he continued, “the process of putrefaction will not only cease, but reverse, bringing fluids, organs, and veins back into a life-like stasis. Unfortunately for her, we’re too late. This is the best we can do.”

  He pointed me to a glamour of protection he’d created around his desk and bench. Charcoal formed the hex, outlining a precise shape on the floorboards, traced with copper filings shining with magic. Over the past two months, Swaine had increased the number of such stations around the manse and property, locations where demons had no power and couldn’t penetrate, either to harm or to attempt possession. I stepped inside the markings.

  Swaine spoke the incantation and repeated it three times. He appeared to shut all other considerations out of his mind—body still, eyes closed, breathing slowly. A warm wind rose from the brass crucible, fluttering the candle flames on the workbench as he finished the final septet of phrases. My eye widened as I saw the mixture’s surface change from dark maroon to ice blue. A sharp pop sounded as the surrounding air changed. Swaine opened his eyes.

  “There we are,” he said. He lifted the crucible and examined it, then looked at me. “What do you think—should I touch it?”

  “I wouldn’t—no, sir.”

  He reached in and lifted out a smidgen. “Incorrect. As the incantor, I’m entirely immune to any effects of such a spell. It would be a different story with you, however—so stay well clear of any of this.” He smeared a dab behind each ear of the corpse, moving her hair aside to do so. He then hand-painted markings in several spots: the collarbone indentation, beneath each breast, on her sides at the level of the third rib, three fingers below the navel, the sacrum, and one final swipe between the legs. He stood back. A quiet crackling sound rose from the revenant as a pale blue light limned her skin, tracing whorls and arcs. As quickly as it began, it ended.

  “There,” he said. “Come, observe.”

  With a tinge of unease, I stepped out from the glamour and approached the woman. Ice crystals gathered in her eye lashes and frosted her pubic hair.

  “Touch her arm, and tell me what you feel,” he said.

  I reached out and rested the back sides of my fingers along her arm—she was cold to the touch. I leaned in and sniffed. The stink of the grave had vanished. In its place hung the scent of a frozen lake: winter air, thick ice, a landscape buried in snow.

  “Her eyes, sir,” I said. Earlier a dull brown, her eyes were now a shocking blue, the blue of a clear sky.

  Swaine tilted her head. “Interesting. The patterns of her irises have changed. I shall make a note of it. Put her clothes back on if you will.”

  I gathered up her clothes. Swaine turned to his notes, dipping a quill to document the detail. “I’m not surprised that such a key feature might be unmentioned in the literature, given the inexcusable lack of precision that plagued the evolution of incantation-based thaumaturgy. And such practitioners have the temerity to call themselves magicians—disgraceful.”

  He shook his head and wrote. The quill scratched across the paper. As I settled the dress over her, I stopped—the air grew rank with the repellent odor of decay. Swaine stopped writing.

  “Into the protection, Finch—now.”

  I let go of the dress and darted back within the lines of filed copper and charcoal. A rush of foul wind swept up out of nowhere. Candle flames slanted then extinguished. The fire in the hearth flared into brilliance, then huffed out, leaving the study lit by the faint red glow of embers. Papers spun from the writing desk and scattered across the floor.

  Swaine joined me within the circle of protection. The blue gaze of the revenant followed him. The stink in the air was nigh unbearable. Silver cracks spread in the panes of the nearest window, accompanied by a delicate tinkling sound as dozens of wicked shards formed. The rotted wooden muntins between the panes bent. I lifted my hands in front of my face.

  “Hold still,” Swaine whispered. The window burst into two score glass knives just as Swaine’s right hand moved. Wind came from all directions and the shards of glass stopped six inches from us, hung in mid-air. Before I could exhale, the shards moved forward again. One hung less than an inch from my eye, another pointed at the middle of my throat, and the third pierced my clothing, the tip pressing against the pendant I wore.

  Swaine reached over and grabbed the shard at my chest between his index finger and thumb and pulled it back. The glass gave, then slid back. My pulse thrummed in my ears.

  Night air swept in through the missing window, rattling the paper strewn across the floor. A shadow slipped from the darkness of the corner by the window. The shard of glass slid the pendant up toward my throat.

  “Ignis,” Swaine commanded, motioning at the hearth. Flames blazed. In the sudden light, a woman stood before us—not tall, homespun skirts faded and tattered, her face on the fair side of plain. Her skin shimmered as though lit by moonlight falling through shifting trees.

  “Sir,” I whispered.

  “Something’s here,” Swaine said. “A presence.”

  “A woman, sir. Right there.” As I spoke, she lifted a hand and the shards in front of me swept sideways—I stepped back just in time to avoid being sliced. The glass flew around the room like a sextet of sparrows, glinting with the firelight, once, twice, then slamming into the revenant, piercing inches deep into her right cheek, her throat, her right breast, two into the side of her hip, and a final one into her thigh. The revenant’s newly-blue eyes didn’t register a thing, but after a moment, she crumpled to the floor. Swaine put both hands to his head, his face twisted in a blaze of pain.