The Spirit Lens Read Free Page B

its practice entirely illusion, trickery, or coincidence. Alchemists demonstrate every day that matter is not limited to sorcery’s five divine elements. An opticum lens reveals that wood is not homogeneous, but is itself made up of water, air, and fibers. Water contains unsee able creatures and can be fractured into gaseous matter. Spark is but an explosive instance of heat and light and tinder. Similarly with air and base metal . Natural science brings logic and reason to a chaotic universe. We have discovered more of truth in the past twenty years than in the past twenty centuries, stimulating our minds, benefiting Sabria and her citizens in innumerable ways. However, in this room, it pains me to confess, we find something else again.”
    He dragged open the door and gestured me in, and though I held ready arguments against his inaccurate understanding of the divine elements, an eager excitement drew me into the small, bare chamber. Swept and brushed, the close room smelled of naught but damp stone and lamp oil. On a stone table at its center lay an arrow, its point, splintered shaft, and ragged fletching stained deep rusty red; a brass spyglass, as a military commander or shipboard officer might use; and an untarnished silver coin. Simple evidence, an observer might say, unless he could sense the enchantment that belched from them in a volcanic spew.
    “Sight through the glass, Portier. Then I’ll tell you my story of magic and murder.”
    Magic, as I had told the king, was entirely of the human world and subject to its laws. So it was bad enough that I peered through the enchanted glass and saw a man staggering through a tangle of leafless thorn trees toward a barred iron gate—a view nothing related to the place where I stood. Far worse was my eerie certainty of the land he traveled. To glimpse the Souleater’s ice-bound caverns or spy on the surpassing mystery of the Creator’s Heaven could be no more fearsome, for every passing soul must first endure the Perilous Demesne of Trial and Journey—Ixtador of the Ten Gates, the desolation that lies just beyond the Veil separating this life from the next. Most unsettling of all was the reason for my certainty. The wailing, exhausted traveler was my father, a man nine years dead.
     
     
    ONE SHORT HOUR LATER, DREAD, like Discord’s Worm, had taken up permanent residence in my bowels. I would have yielded my two legs to return to my dull library.
    Less than two hundred years had passed since Sabria had retreated from near dissolution. A century of savagery, fueled by rivalries between the great magical families and between those blood families and the civil authorities, had left our cities in ruins, half of our villages empty or burnt, and more than two-thirds of Sabria’s nobles, scholars, and sorcerers dead. Entire magical bloodlines had been wiped out. Even a whisper of those times yet caused cold sweats and shudders in every Sabrian.
    Now someone had dredged up the foulest magic of those days to create an assassin and had dispatched him to murder Sabria’s golden king. Philippe was convinced that his mysterious enemy, who might or might not be his wife, would make a second attempt on the anniversary of the first, some two months hence. The king’s death by unholy sorcery must surely relight the smoldering embers of the Blood Wars, and the mysterious spyglass hinted that this time the conflagration might drive us into realms uncharted. I, Portier de Savin-Duplais, librarian and failed student of magic, was charged to stop it.
    “As the secrecy of your investigation must preclude our public relationship, I’ve engaged you a partner agente confide .” Philippe led me, still speechless, back into the sunny, peaceful house. I felt out of time, as if I’d just returned from the Souleater’s frozen demesne. “Cousin Portier, meet Chevalier Ilario de Sylvae.”
    A tall, fair, long-nosed young man, garbed in an eye-searing ensemble of red silk sleeves, green satin