15. Setting Fire
Chapter 15
Setting Fire
Walker unhanded my chair, bowed in deference to his professor, and seemed to disappear somewhere behind my back.
All of them disappeared: the footsteps and hushed voices of the other students faded, followed shortly by the closing creak and joining of the great Gothic doors, erasing the sound and sense of six men as if they had never been there at all.
Some unseen lock moved into place with a secure, dull thump, and the warm air of the cavernous hall closed in, familiar and stifling and dark, until I could no longer tell how much of it was the hearth and how much was Victor’s encircling shadow.
I could not think. I could not allow myself to think, wary that even my thoughts might betray me.
I could only watch the candle flame burn on the skull on the table, and stare into the blackness of the empty sockets where Friar Bacon once had eyes.
“Warming up for a repeat performance,” Victor’s low voice rumbled, a deep sound that ended in nearly a growl, “Elizabeth?”
“I—” I did not know what to say, caught up in the spell of the words I could speak not even to myself, the dark omen of restrained wrath in his voice, the return to the intimacy of my first name now that we were alone. I suppose I might have lied to him—claimed that I did not understand what he meant by his accusation—but I could not bear to diminish either him or myself with so tawdry a fabrication. “No, sir,” I replied at last. “I suppose I was at a momentary loss for where to look.” It was, after all, the truth.
I felt his tension as he exhaled. “And yet you so seldom demur to meet my eyes.”
Once again, I did not need to look to him to know what I would find: haloed in infernal light, enthroned somewhere between the waking world and the entrails of the earth, the man who had read subtly to me in my mind for a long afternoon beneath a winter oak seemed now some grand duke of Hell tensing to split and shed his human skin, to lunge over the table in beast-form for the heartbeat in my throat?—
No. Another foolish fantasy: he needed not trouble himself with such exertions. Not when his potent art could render me helpless before him with a word. A thought. A desire.
His shadow deepened around me. But I could not allow myself to shiver before him now.
I raised my gaze to meet his—this was what he wanted, clearly, and how could I not?—only to be arrested in place by an intensity beyond what even I had known of him, a hot fury that flashed in the black fire of his eyes.
He spoke plainly, forthrightly, his deep voice at once naked and utterly tyrannical: “Why did you aid Forsythe?”
“I did not mean to aid him, sir.” I did not look away, though my heart beat faster, and my palms began to dampen for the heat of the fire. “I did not, and I would not.”
“He is an admirer of yours.”
“I wish he would admire someone else.”
I wanted to think that I saw Victor’s powerful shoulders relax, if faintly, under his great black cloak—that it was more than merely the shifting firelight of the inferno burning in the monstrous mouth behind his throne.
“I promised you celibacy, sir, when you took me as your apprentice. I do not mean to break that oath, and least of all with him.”
A vague edge of newfound amusement began to ease the harsh command in his voice, the deadly fire in his eyes. “He offends you, does he?”
“I am sorry to say so—he is your student, after all—and I cannot rationally account for why. But I don’t mean to become a Walker to his Reinhardt.” I endeavored a small smile, wondering if he would mirror me, and whether I could ever know behind the mask. “One feud is more than enough, surely.”
He paused. “You did it to eclipse him, then? To prove, whether to me or to yourself alone, that you can do what he cannot?”
“I cannot say I am disappointed for it to have had such an effect,” I replied, realizing that to Victor there was no question of coincidence—I had done something, more than nothing; I had a hand in the extinguishing of the candle on Forsythe’s turn, or surely Victor would not pursue me so, “but it was not at the forefront of my mind when I began to?—”
When I began to —what? How was I now to explain what I had done? In my excitement over Victor’s apparent assumption as to the efficacy of my art, I had entrapped myself in my own words.
Victor knew it as well as did I. He leaned forward with the inexorable patience of a hunter approaching a tripped snare, deepening his hold on my gaze.
“When I began,” I repeated, “to experiment.”
“To experiment,” he echoed quietly, seeming to taste the words.
The certainty of victory must have eased his mind: unmoving, with his eyes still deep in mine, he allowed a long mutual silence to settle between us, colored only by the crackle of his infernal hearth and the distant drip of limestone.
I did not know how, or why, but it struck me again that I thought I could feel him breathe: the slow, even rise and fall of his broad back in the fiery darkness. But I could not allow it—I could not let that rhythm of his life be the comfort it threatened to become—my heart picked up pace, throbbing in my ears.
There was no escape. And I was too proud to struggle long.
Perhaps, each in our own fashion, we both trusted that I would speak.
“You said that magia intrinseca must be felt,” I began slowly, not letting myself falter, “and so I wondered… how it feels to you.” Was there anything to be gained, after all, by dissembling before a master sorcerer who had at least the power to communicate to me inside my mind, and therefore perhaps to read it? And even if there were some advantage to be won, I did not wish to treat him so, when for all the terror and disquiet of his presence he never yet had harmed me nor overruled my will.
Though I could not allow myself to exhume from my breast the reason why, buried so swiftly and so deep, the desire to be true before him haunted me. I wished for him to know me as I was.
I could not tell him all—not in a thousand years—but all that I could tell him would be true in itself.
“Continue,” he intoned, waiting.
I nodded, drawing a breath. “It was an idle fancy, at least at first. But the notion intrigued me enough that I thought to imagine it: to experiment with this caprice by creating it within my mind. And so I imagined myself—well—it’s strange to have done so, sir, and stranger still to tell. But I imagined that I was you.”
“You imagined that you were me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And,” he shrugged somewhat, the massive shoulders shifting, “how did I feel?”
“Very powerful, sir.” It suddenly seemed terribly awkward and absurd, and I wondered if I succeeded in forcing myself not to smile. “Quite more than a match for any candle you should encounter.”
Most likely I did not: something changed in his eyes, and as I heard him start to chuckle quietly behind the steel mask I let myself laugh with him, just a little, and for that stolen moment his blazing hearth looked a shade less hellish.
“Continue,” his voice rumbled, successfully mastered back to its familiarly saturnine pitch, “through the moment of extinguishment.”
“Yes, sir,” I nodded, allowing us both the fiction that nothing had ever changed. “I used the memory of your art—the bodily sensation of it—and I imagined it was my own: I imagined it coursing through me, and that rather than it entering into me I could will it from me and into the world. I thought how effortlessly you could put out that little flame—how certain you would be of your power. I thought of what it would look like when it went out.”
“And then it did.”
“And then it did.” I paused. “You must think me mad.”
“I should hope you are at least half-mad,” he replied calmly. “The utterly sane, as their condition is called, are often self-limiting in their art.”
“Ashcroft?”
He grunted, seemingly pleased. “I told you once, some days ago, that I care for your appraisal of my students. By now you have seen enough to develop some manner of impression of each.”
“I have, sir, but?—”
He waited, saying nothing.
“I should like to ask a question before I begin.”
“Very well. Ask.”
“How much of the extinguishing of the candle was mine, and how much was Forsythe’s?”
“Forsythe successfully reduced the flame nearly to nothing, but lost the stamina to finish. You began your experiment ,” he allowed a pause, as if to heft the weight of the word, “when the flame began to grow again, correct?”
“Correct.”
“Then most—if not all—of the rest was yours.”
“But how, sir?”
“How? I could ask the same of you again, though you have told me already—and nearly as much of it, I believe, as you presently have the means to articulate.”
Nearly as much , I repeated inwardly—what did he suspect me of holding back? But I allowed myself no further thought upon it. Not with him watching me, considering me so closely.
“I mean, sir, that I wonder at how it can be that I am able to achieve what the others largely cannot. It crossed my mind to consider whether you had assisted me—helped me to flicker the candle during my turn?—”
“Your extinguishing of Forsythe’s candle ought to have relieved you of that particular concern.”
“It did, sir.”
“Good. Yet, if you still cannot in honesty conceive of the reality of your talent—in honesty , as opposed to some self-diminishing falsehood of effacement—you will have your answer soon enough. That is one reason why,” he lowered his voice, as if to soften the command, “you will tell me, in brief, about each of my six students.”
“Ashcroft, then,” I began, watching Victor settle back into his throne. “He’s very by-the-book. Diligent, I wouldn’t doubt; and if the Order’s rites encourage recitation rather than originality then I won’t wonder if he advanced quickly to the Second Degree. But I sense a sort of—a dryness in him, I suppose. A distance from his sorcery. I cannot see him progressing far in an art which must be felt.”
“The rising star of the Order,” Victor nodded, “he therefore chose the specialization which supposedly afforded the greatest challenge: an academic self-fashioning, though that in itself is a mode of magic. Good. Continue to the next.”
“Walker has some commonality with Ashcroft, in a sense—he is, I think, quite book-learned as well, and fixed to certain notions about how things ought to be—but he is fierce in a way that Ashcroft is not. The principle for him is all, but he will put aside even principle to battle Reinhardt, who represents to him all that is impure and therefore abhorrent in a sorcerer.”
“Yes. Walker arrived with the popular fantasy of becoming enlisted in some secret war—some grand, hidden clash of good against evil. He would have made a fine knight, had there been such a battlefield. And so, finding none, he made his own.”
Little by little, as we spoke, I thought that Victor’s fury seemed to fade: slowly he leaned deeper into his great chair, propping his elbow on a carven armrest, allowing his strong right hand to curl into a loose fist and rest against the side of his metal mask.
“I see that you do not curb their feud, sir.”
“As your friend Iris Everly touched upon, the Order decided it would rather cast out two of its most interesting and promising sorcerers than abide the passions which made them all that they are. The Order saw only a chaos, unbefitting the prim alchemical mold of the so-called enlightened magus. I saw two sorcerers whose arts grow in power as they define themselves against each other. Yet, Walker is young, and in the dark fire of his new manhood forgets at times that he must be Walker , not merely the enemy of Reinhardt.”
“Reinhardt himself is something of a mystery to me, and I cannot say that my impression of him is particularly well-formed—nor of Lloyd, for that matter, who keeps so closely to himself. They both hide themselves, I think, Lloyd in his silence and Reinhardt, the showman, behind the mask of the Marvelous Manfredini.”
“Correct,” Victor replied, his manner now nearly conversational. “Lloyd is a rather private man who found himself visited by what he calls in his native tongue the Tylwyth Teg or Fair Folk, and in seeking to communicate with them was eventually led to me. As for Reinhardt, though the line at times is fine, at least half of the theatrical magic of his stage performances is true sorcery—not mere sleight of hand, but what would be called a faerie glamor if cast by a disprite: a change in the appearance or seeming of a thing, or of himself, effected by the imagination and will. A kind of interrupted magia intrinseca , halted at the hair’s breadth between illusion and true alteration of the world. Could he bridge that gap—as he has endeavored for many years—his art would be formidable.”
“Greycliff, then,” I continued, “I think, something like Lloyd, did not expect for his life to be touched by the supernatural—or else tried to put aside the matter, perhaps out of fear, until he could no longer. He is a practical man, or wishes to be, though impulsive when the mood strikes. And Forsythe, so far as I can discern, is here for the thrill: to try his bravery against a world he met first on the stage, though he overextends himself at times, or his endurance is naturally somewhat poor.”
“To greater or lesser degree,” Victor replied, “they are all here for the thrill , as you call it, and for what is commonly derided as the most forbidden of ambitions: the desire to do and to be more ; to transcend the bonds and boundaries to which convention would relegate mortal man. To know the unknown. See the unseen. Singe one’s finger, now and again, in touching the terrible spark of the sublime. In short,” his gaze deepened into mine, dark and heavy like the heat of his hall, “to feel alive.”
Had Victor overheard what I said to Forsythe as we entered through the iron-clad doors? When I denied the poor flirtation of Forsythe’s supposed death wish and told him that he, like all the others, had come to these catacombs not to die, but to live?
Or did Victor need to have heard me at all, and had I now my evidence at last that he was possessed of the power to observe my thoughts, and that my mind lay naked before his art?
Or was it only that our thoughts sometimes walked side by side, under no sorcery but their own natural accord?
Only , I repeated silently to myself—as if this last possibility were any less fantastical than the rest, or any less ominous in its implications. As if I could hide forever the unnamable horror that had crept so quietly into my heart.
“And you, Elizabeth, are no exception.”
The truth, again, despite it all: “No exception at all, sir.”
“Nor am I.” His scarred right fist idly flexed and relaxed again where it leaned against his mask. “It both satisfies and stimulates, does it not, one’s curiosity for the wide world? Like water in summer, it quenches and then leaves one to thirst again, and thirst makes the next taste of it all the sweeter. If there is one quality common to all sorcerers, it is that thirst. Desire. The great twin root of the imagination and the will.
“And so, as you understand, if I sought an apprentice who exhibited in his own fashion a sorcerer’s desire, a longing to feel alive—qualities sorely lacking, incidentally, in the general population—I would have my pick of six men. And some of those men harbor certain expectations, and are not fond of being passed over: that is befitting of such desire, after all. But as you also understand, having interpreted those six to me with a commendable degree of insight, you have, as I stated before, an additional and yet rarer quality which they do not.”
“You said that I have talent, sir.”
“Enough with the humility,” he grumbled, laying his hand down heavily on the armrest and straightening himself in his throne. “Do you mistrust my assessment of your art? Or, far worse, do you question your own art and thereby sap its power? Again.”
“I have talent.”
“Precisely,” he breathed, and I watched the reflection of the candlelight in his dark eyes. “Never forget it, Elizabeth. Never deny it. There is only so much that can be taught, of this art or any other. This is not to say that good instruction serves no purpose—in matters of the external arts, I have on several occasions raised a poor sorcerer to an adequate one—yet the spinning of straw into gold remains a fable. Until I find evidence of an academy that has transmuted but one crude scribbler into a Da Vinci,” he moved his hand in a vague gesture of dismissal, “I shall remain convinced of my valuation of talent.”
“But then you limit yourself, sir,” I whispered, my gaze falling to Friar Bacon’s skull. “To be so certain of what you cannot do.”
“No,” he replied quietly, evenly, “no, do not look away. Speak, and stand by your words. Again.”
“But then you limit yourself, sir,” I repeated, my eyes rising to his. “As a professor, I mean. If such a thing has never been done, who knows but that you might become the first?” I meant no disrespect, but how could I not speak my mind to him, when he claimed to value it so?
I heard his measured sigh, watched his eyes briefly close, and more perhaps than ever I wished that mine could pierce that merciless steel mask that concealed his nose and mouth: he was exasperated, or delighted, or relieved; surrendered to some strange reassurance or constraining himself from another flare of fury.
“Perhaps I do. Perhaps I might,” he replied, and I wondered if I heard something like the flicker of a distant smile in his voice before it dimmed into a new darkness. “Yet time now limits me all the more.”
“There’s something I must learn, isn’t there,” I said, matching his gravity. “Before the time comes for the spell you can’t perform alone. The one you mentioned when I asked you why you need an apprentice.”
“More than you know,” he nodded grimly, “and in less time than once I had imagined. But to seize such hours we have today: will you pursue magia intrinseca , or magia evocatoria ? I leave you the choice, though you must become proficient in both—and, regrettably, with Time’s chariot of the sun rattling at our heels all the while.”
“ Magia intrinseca , sir. The same candle is still here, after all. Though I should like to learn to summon disprites soon.”
“Very well. More magia intrinseca , for now. Tomorrow, perhaps, we reserve for evocatoria , if your condition remains suitable.”
“Should I try to extinguish the candle again?”
“No,” he replied, pinching the flame into smoke and rising slowly from his throne, “you will light it: a rather more advanced operation, as in all things it is generally easier to destroy than to create. Ordinarily, I teach lighting much as I teach extinguishment: create the lighted candle with the totality of your senses, and enforce your will upon the world. Entirely effective, though it requires a depth of sensory recall and intensity of focus which exhausts most sorcerers before they finish. Yet, if all that you have described to me of your method on Forsythe’s turn is genuine,” he stalked toward me around the side of the great table, the cavernous hall echoing with each slow, decisive step of his long stride, “I suspect that an alternate process may expedite our success.”
“I confirm, sir, that all that I told you of my method is true and correct.”
“And do you care still to know how my art feels to me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“My will is for you to know only success in this endeavor, that you may remember the exultation of triumph and thus replicate it, and never know the distraction of how it feels to fail. And, in doing so, you will feel also what it is to light the candle with my magic. This is an untried process—a mutual experiment—and I advise you that for both efficacy and safety you must remain in close contact with me at all times. Yet the rewards will be considerable, if all goes as I intend.” He stood now behind me and to my side, one hand on the back of Reinhardt’s empty chair: a looming darkness, like a black void in the air of the hall which even the infernal firelight could not entirely touch. “Is it your will, Elizabeth, to proceed thus?”
I wondered at his mention of close contact—not for common propriety’s sake, nor even so much for the primal fear of his intentions, the enduring animal instinct when one is alone at the mercy of a creature of such insurmountable power. No, more even than I feared his strength and his art, more tangible than the chill that slipped down my spine at the unsettling memory of his shadow’s touch, I feared now myself , and what terrible truth I had buried in my breast.
There was an escape, and I considered this as the sound of his voice dissipated into the close air. In my heart of hearts I believed that he would allow me my will, whatever it may be. That even then I could have refused his experiment, had I wished.
But I had not once turned back, and I did not wish to begin.
“It is my will, sir.”
“Good. Move the chairs out of the way, as you prefer, and stand before me. Face the candle.”
I did as he instructed, pulling my chair out from the table and pushing Reinhardt’s and Walker’s to each side to clear an unobstructed view of the quiet candle on Friar Bacon’s skull. And then, as I sensed Victor’s approach from behind, I realized that I held my breath as I took a single step backward. The space between us closed. Against my back and the bare nape of my neck I felt the warmth of him; the black skirts of my dress brushed against his black cloak, and as I forced myself to slowly exhale—as I felt his shadow enfold around me—it occurred to me to wonder whether the next breath I drew would breathe his darkness into my very breast.
I held my spine straight—I should not have shuddered as I did.
“Wrist to wrist,” he said in his familiarly grim professorial tone, softened only slightly for proximity, sparing me the indignity of overt reassurance. “The purpose is to align the pulse, so much as is practical. Take my hands.”
The position was not entirely comfortable, nor could it have been: with my arms resting at my sides he pressed his hands into mine until we stood palm to palm, his forward toward the table and mine back toward him, my fingers curling into the warm spaces between his knuckles (as well as I could reach) as he locked my hands in the iron grip I remembered so well.
“Relax.” His voice was a low rumble behind my ear, a whisper in the back of my mind. I could feel my heart in my chest; I imagined the throb of the pulse in my wrist quivering against his skin. “Does my presence still so deeply unnerve you?”
I closed my eyes for a moment, attempting to force my surging pulse to settle before my very heart betrayed me.
“You, who in so few days can endure already what Forsythe cannot?”
“It shouldn’t, sir. This is not so different,” I felt as much as heard my voice slow, “from the oak tree.”
“Correct.”
“Part of your plan. Isn’t it?”
I thought that I heard a sardonic chuckle behind the steel mask. “I would be pleased to say that I had planned it thus. But it was not until after that success, and after you told me today of your method with the candle, that I determined this endeavor to be worth the attempt.”
“Worth the risk?”
“Yes.”
“Victor,” I whispered; above and behind my shoulder, I felt him bend his head down closer. “I know very well that I should not entertain the thought, but—if this doesn’t work,” I paused, “what’s the worst that could happen?”
“You become overwhelmed before the wick lights, and I revive you beside a dark candle. Your confidence ebbs, eroding your presumption and will. We waste time.”
“And then we try again?”
“If you wish.”
I nodded, released a deep breath, and tightened my hold on his strong, warm hands, my fingertips gripping at the ridges of his scars.
“Relax,” he said again in the same low monotone, somewhere between comfort and command. “Lean back against me. Think of the oak for a while, if you prefer.”
Surely he could feel my hands sweat, the throb in my arteries stutter.
“Your breathing will obey your will,” he continued. “Match it to mine, and wait for your pulse to follow.”
Slowly I stepped backward and closer, shifting my weight, settling my back against his broad chest. He did not move at all. Even through his black robes and my dress and underclothes, I could feel the solid strength of his body against mine, and the thought passed through my racing mind that he may as well have been an oak: he seemed to me in that moment as massive and immovable, as rooted in the enduring earth: a force of nature, unyielding and inhuman, the heat of his body and the steady swell and fall of his chest against my spine the last vestigial remainders of mortal flesh.
I could no longer afford not to master my own body—the tautness of my nerves and sinews, the pounding of my heart. He knew too well how unlike me it was to fail in so simple a practice.
I could not fail in this. Every second that passed increased the terrible chance that he would ask me why I was so changed—taunt me a little, perhaps, in the way he did with his students—and what would I say?
What could I say, that was not an outright lie? That was not a revelation of the terror I could not name, not even to myself?
As his breast rose into me again, I filled my lungs with the stifling air of the hall: the waxen smell of candles, the dry and acrid tinge of the Hellmouth hearth—and the dark, earthy warmth of his scent, as inescapable as his shadow that surrounded and enveloped me, sinking me deeper into him with every breath. We exhaled together, steadily and slowly, and breathed in again: it felt easy, almost comforting to fall into his rhythm; a more natural expression of my unaccountable sense that I had felt during class the rise and fall of his shoulders as he breathed.
“My spell must pass through you to the candle wick, unimpeded and unobstructed,” I heard him say, quietly yet firmly, or felt him in the back of my mind—I could no longer be sure of which. “This is the matter of efficacy and safety I mentioned before. Efficacy, because my purpose is for you to feel my art as I feel it, in its purest practicable form, to establish a sensory memory of your triumph. This is the sensation you will reference and replicate when lighting the candle on your own. But resist, whether intentionally or not, and you both alter the character of the sensation and entrap an excess of my art within you—reputedly a rather overpowering experience.”
“I understand.” I nodded in acknowledgement. He pressed his wrists closer against mine.
Could he have sensed that already I struggled to resist? That my desperation to conceal this impossible haunting of my heart was the tension that inflamed my pulse? But in his words, whether or not he meant for it to be, was my solution: I must let my resistance rest. Paradoxically, it was not by restraining this thing within my breast that I would evade his suspicion, but by—for now—relenting to its force.
I needed not yet admit to myself—not yet, nor ever—that it was what I had wanted after all. I needed now only to do what I wished that I dared: to lean deeper into the warmth of his body, to memorize the feeling and the scent and the sense of his sorcery. To indulge in his power and his darkness. To let his shadow in.
Watching the fire in the devil’s mouth behind Victor’s empty throne, I felt myself slowly calm. One last, light tremor in my hand, and I allowed my grip on his to relax. We breathed as one. I let my head tilt back, the neat bun of my hair loosening a little as it rested against the front of his broad shoulder.
“Soon now,” he said, little more than his mask to separate his deep voice from my ear. “Focus on the candle when you feel my art. But feel it, most of all.”
I needed not understand the words he murmured next to know that he had begun. I could not yet feel his sorcery—no more, at least, than the sense of disquiet that always seeped in with his shadow—but I felt the resonance of his voice through his body and mine, a profound power of command that seemed to shake and shape the very air. My mind flashed to the compass points of the circle around Greycliff—the cauldron and the naming of the four winds—and dimly but surely I sensed, as sensation began to saturate my rational mind, that where we now stood became by his art the center of the world, the point at which all ways and all winds meet, drawn and enforced by the gravity of his will.
And in that moment, as his voice vibrated through our flesh and bone, the world fell out of all limit and time: tempests lashed against the indomitable cliffs of the earth, hellfire smoked against a roiling sea; the vast powers of nature arose in him and coursed through him into me, the force of each with no harness but the force of the other—but he was in them, all of them, and at the same time he commanded them all.
I felt rising in myself a furious pride, vital and impetuous, potent with desire, and I fixed my gaze on the dark wick of the candle that crowned Friar Bacon’s skull. My nerves were alive, my marrow burning, my senses alight as if the world were new; nothing now was uncertain, nothing was beyond my power, and this trivial impediment least of all: before the surging immensity of a will to move the very earth, what obstacle was a burnt twist of string?
And then, as if a dam had burst, his shadow rushed in: a black tide driven by a black sea-storm, drawn on by the inexorable pull of the moon. I had no circle now, as I had when I summoned him in my room, to break the midnight tide like a standing stone in the surf—no protection—no defense. And in truth, I wanted none at all.
I wanted only this feeling, this moment, this power.
The dark vertigo of his art flooded me, pulsing through my veins, threatening to buckle my knees and drown me in its undertow; I kept my eyes fixed on the candle, watching as the wick burst into streaming blue fire, but the exultation of my victory lightened my head—the earth began to slip beneath my feet, and I grasped Victor’s hands with all my ebbing strength as the candle and the Hellmouth hearth went dark.