The Spirit Lens by Carol Berg Page A

Maura had gone, but in fact his focus narrowed, his capable left hand dribbling an almost perfect thread of molten lead in the grooved circle. It was easy to overlook his doing almost everything one-handed. His ruined appendage had remained out of sight the entire time the lady was in the room. A touch of vanity, perhaps.
    When he had closed the circle of lead, he returned his ladle to the empty crucible and used his staff to disperse the pile of white-hot coals across the floor of the hearth. If I hadn’t been watching so carefully, I might have missed the moment when he pressed his narrow lips together as if muting a word they were intending to shape. The coals dulled instantly and fell to ash. For that one moment, I would have sworn I’d gone naked and feathers stroked my skin.
    Dante rose, hurried to the windows, and threw open the casements, clinging to the iron frames as he heaved great breaths of the morning air. “Discord’s realm . . . This place is going to drive me mad.” Then he spun in place, his gaunt face hungry, his green eyes snapping and sparking like the fires of midsummer. “But it will be a fine madness, student. We’ve so much nastiness afoot in Castelle Escalon, it will take us a year to sort it out. They’ve found another corpse—another mule.”

CHAPTER FIVE
    11 QAT 50 DAYS UNTIL THE ANNIVERSARY
    I t was an unfortunate fact that the actual blood of someone like me could so dramatically enhance another sorcerer’s spellmaking, when it could not provide me enough power to work magic of my own. Transference, the direct infusion of magical blood into a sorcerer’s veins, had been practiced since the awakening of magic. A few practitioners bled themselves, distilled the product, and reinfused their own strengthened ichor. But as this led determinedly to self-destruction, most incidents of transference involved an unwilling victim, leeched to provide magical sustenance for the unscrupulous. Some blood family’s bastard, feeble-minded brother, or demented aunt might “wander off” or “take a sudden fever,” perhaps to reappear bruised, pale, and scarred, perhaps never to be seen again.
    Until the practice had exploded into a plague of abduction, torture, and murder in service of the grand power rivalries that came to be called the Blood Wars, no one had acknowledged its use among otherwise respectable members of the Camarilla Magica. And only then did ordinary Sabrians learn of mules—victims repeatedly bled until their veins collapsed and their minds disintegrated. The Temple tetrarchs declared that the mules’ souls bled away as well, an irretrievable corruption.
    The Concord de Praesta, the accord that ended the Blood Wars, required every mage to wear the permanent silver collar that supposedly kept his or her workings well scrutinized. And all children born to the blood were permanently marked on the back of the left hand and required to display that mark at every encounter, warning others that we might be purveyors of illicit magic. Abductions were punishable by death, and promiscuity among blood families by public penance and heavy fines, lest unrecorded bastards provide temptation for evildoers—or provide more evildoers. Despite all such precautions, it appeared that someone was bleeding poor sods into mindless idiots right under the nose of the Camarilla, the Temple, the king, and the educated citizenry of Merona. Two mules discovered within a tenmonth would strike fear in any heart. It could not be coincidence.
    “A mule, are you sure?”
    “Yestermorn the queen’s chief panderer summoned me to his chambers.” Dante perched on the broad window seat, the sunlight at his back. His white staff lay across his lap. “This Orviene, as sweet a talker as any marketplace barker, was wheedling at me to tell where I’d trained, and dancing about talk of necromancy. He even offered to lend books and materials, though revealing naught of his own skills or current work, to be sure. Yon