The Geomancer Read online

  Then Adele let her protection fade. All the vampires saw her suddenly appear in their midst. Some shouted in alarm. Caterina suppressed a startled shudder and glared with suspicion. Adele remained placid, trying not to smile at the childish prank.

  The queen asked her, “How do you do that?”

  “Magic,” Adele replied without cynicism.

  “Why can’t all humans do it? Why are you special?”

  Lothaire nervously cleared his throat. “My dear, don’t interrogate the Death Bringer. She need not answer to us. We’re here to answer her questions.”

  Caterina raised her eyebrows in challenge. “I’m sure the Death Bringer doesn’t mind. She is traveling with vampires after all.” She looked toward Gareth. “She obviously holds us in some minor esteem.”

  “I hold some of you in high esteem.” Adele was direct but not cold. “However, call me Adele. Death Bringer puts a damper on polite conversation, I think.”

  “Very well.” Caterina nodded in bemused acceptance. “What would you like to know?”

  “Tell us about the Witchfinder.”

  “I know very little,” Caterina said and paused, but when heads turned to Lothaire, she added, “He knows even less.”

  “True, I’m afraid.” The king grinned with embarrassment. “I’ve never even seen him. I only know he exists because I’ve been told he does.”

  “But you’ve seen him?” Gareth asked Caterina.

  “Only once or twice. He’s an older human with a long white beard. He seems quite at home among vampires. In fact, he acts as an equal.” She said the last line with natural haughtiness. She couldn’t keep herself from glancing at Adele, but there was a touching flash of shame. She wandered the room as she talked, pausing next to Nadzia and, with a remarkable hint of unconscious motherhood, she cupped the young female’s cheek with a hand and smiled down at her. “You’re the same age as my oldest daughter Isolde.” Caterina brushed hair from the surprised Nadzia’s face before turning back to Adele. “He came to Paris with Lady Hallow.”

  “Who’s this Lady Hallow you’ve been talking about?” Adele could tell immediately that the name was familiar to everyone, but she had never heard it, and that struck her as unusual.

  Lothaire and Caterina both glanced with silent amusement at Gareth, who said, “She is a member of my clan. She was one of Cesare’s chief advisors. Second only to Flay in importance at court.”

  Caterina gave Gareth a chiding glance over something unsaid. “Lady Hallow came to Paris where she offered the services of the Witchfinder as a token of goodwill.”

  “What services does he perform?” Adele let her curiosity about Lady Hallow drift away because of more important issues.

  “I’m not sure,” Caterina said calmly. “We were never privy to those discussions. I did see those blue stones handed about, but I have no idea what they’re supposed to be.”

  Adele didn’t want to accuse the queen of lying or holding back information. Certainly Gareth didn’t appear suspicious of her. “You’ll forgive me, but you are the king and queen. How is it that this man can operate without your full knowledge?”

  Caterina frosted over. “He is the tool of Lady Hallow, who is involved in the defense of Paris against your armies. She has given him liberty to pursue victory as he sees fit.”

  “I see.” Adele gave Caterina a hard stare. “Do you know where the Witchfinder is now?”

  “No. He left Paris days ago in a bloodman airship, with some of our packs. Honore says he was off somewhere far to the east, and was going to be gone for several months at least. He is supposed to return before your army tries to destroy us in the spring.”

  Lothaire blurted out, “Honore granted him an estate south of the city. That’s where he stays most of the time.”

  “Good.” Adele dropped her pack on the floor. “I’ll have something to eat and then we’ll have a look there.”

  Caterina continued to study Adele. “We wouldn’t be averse to this Witchfinder being removed. We consider him to be a vestige of Cesare’s reign, and therefore he belongs to Gareth. Do with him as you will.”

  Adele nodded with acceptance and offered a smile. She patted the hilt of her dagger. “That’s the plan.”

  Gareth’s face was partially covered, similar to his Greyfriar garb. It was an easy enough explanation to tell the wagon driver that his face had been disfigured by a vampire. The farmer hadn’t shown much interest in Gareth or Adele as he drove out of the city. He had taken them within a few miles of their destination before dropping the pair on the rutted path with the muttered words, “None who enter Versailles ever return.”

  Adele and Gareth made their way through the deserted village. There was no sign of recent habitation. Tree roots broke and tumbled the cobblestone streets. Adele stumbled, hoping for an instant that it was only a loose stone, but knowing it was an attack of vertigo. She pressed her hand against a rough tree trunk, trying to keep from sinking to her knees.

  “Adele!” Gareth grabbed her.

  “It’s the same thing,” she gasped. “Like outside Bruges.”

  “Go back. I’ll search the area.”

  “No.” Adele straightened with a deep breath, focusing on a nearby window pane to calm the dizziness. “You won’t know what to look for. I’m fine now. It just hit me by surprise. It’s not as bad as before.”

  As they slipped quietly through the ivy-covered rows of gutted buildings, more waves of nausea washed over Adele. She took long wet breaths, willing herself to ignore her body and focus on the outside. Stone after stone underfoot. Noting each tree they passed. Every time she looked up, she saw the roof of the grand palace of Versailles that loomed over the squat buildings grow larger. She extended her mind into the putrid malaise that saturated the area, scouring for any sweet scents and clinging to faint hints of rhythm amidst the screaming cacophony.

  Adele felt Gareth’s worried gaze on her, even while he kept an eye on the skies for challenges. The wind shifted and she grew ill again, but not from the repulsive aura of twisted geomancy. Rather it was the sadly familiar stench of dead bodies.

  They worked their way to the rear of the palace where formerly precise arrangements of arbors were wild tangles of brush. The decrepit gardens fell away and engineered terracing was now just a rolling natural landscape recaptured by the forest.

  Adele stared up at the massive yellow stone edifice with row after row of high rectangular windows, most broken. Sections of the roof appeared to be caved in and the walls were strangled with vines. “Do you believe the queen when she tells you the Witchfinder isn’t here?”

  “I do.”

  “You trust both of them, don’t you?”

  “With my life. Those aren’t the true Lothaire and Caterina you saw. Lothaire ran a fairly enlightened regime. Enlightened by vampire standards, in any case. Other clan lords took that to mean Lothaire was soft, which he was. But he was thoughtful too. He was never satisfied with cruelty as a belief system.” Gareth grew quiet. “He has no idea what to do. Watching his son grow up under my brother’s specter must be horrible for him.”

  In the past, Adele had only seen Gareth express such deep emotions about two others, his father and his old retainer, Baudoin. He was a singular person, preferring his own company, with the exception of Adele. However, she had watched him with Lothaire and saw the way he interacted with the king. It was unlike the way he had interacted with anyone else. Gareth immediately fell into a posture and language of easy familiarity that Adele had never seen before. Even with the tension of the situation, he and Lothaire acted like old friends. She had never seen Gareth with a friend. That strange, new Gareth was fascinating and attractive. She would have liked to have seen Gareth as he was in those days, exploring Paris with Lothaire. Watching the grim figure before her, it was almost impossible to imagine him as an adventurous young man. She smirked cynically when she realized that he wouldn’t have been a young man, and his adventures would’ve included hunting humans for blood.<
br />
  Adele put a comforting hand on his back. “I trust them too then. But perhaps we should still go in through the roof to be a little unexpected.”

  Without question, Gareth slipped off through the heavy brush. Adele followed, keeping low. They reached the wall that towered above them and he stooped slightly as a sign for her to wrap her arms over him. She shifted the pack on her back and took hold of his strong shoulders. He leapt high, seizing the stones and ivy with powerful fingers, and scrambled up the side of the building like a lizard with Adele clinging to him. He swung from window embrasure to ledge, pushing upward, and kicked off a crumbling cornice. He snatched the low railing at the eaves and vaulted over it onto the flat grey roof. They crouched silently, waiting and searching.

  “Can you smell anything?” Adele whispered.

  “Just death. Again. We need to get under cover. I can see vampires in the distance, so they could see us.” Gareth gave Adele a sign to proceed with great caution on the creaking rooftop and slipped along the eaves until he reached a jagged hole in the slate. He knelt by the edge and quickly inspected the interior. He snatched Adele around the waist and dropped to the floor far below. All around them the flaking remnants of paintings covered the walls, showing only staring eyes or random lacy sleeves. Gold leaf peeled from ceilings to fall unheeded with dead leaves on the filthy floor.

  They moved cautiously through a series of chambers. Every room was a forgotten remnant of the old world, the failed hubris of the human north. They found no sign of life, only the occasional skeletons of long-dead vampire meals.

  Adele and Gareth came to a small room that joined the north wing with the main part of the old chateau. Pausing to listen and smell, Gareth glanced ahead. Adele felt a rush of nausea. She put a hand on Gareth’s shoulder to stop him moving forward until it passed as quickly as it had come. At her nod, they started off again.

  Before them a vast gallery stretched the length of the main chateau. Rows of windows looked out over the feral gardens. The space glittered in the late-day sun because of the remnants of endless mirrors. Light reflected off the walls and from shards swept into piles on the floor. The clearing of the glass here was the first sign of human attention to order.

  Something sparkled oddly and caught Adele’s eye. It wasn’t a sliver of mirror. It was a crystal lying on the floor in the center of the long gallery. Near it was another, and another. Numerous crystals were scattered throughout the mirrored corridor. No, not scattered. They were placed in a very specific pattern. It was a geomantic arrangement marking a complicated quincunx design on the floor.

  Adele ventured out into the great hall of mirrors. Gareth followed, tense to their surroundings. She studied the pattern of crystals. This sort of applied geomancy wasn’t her strong suit. Even so, she could sense the crystals before her were burned out of their power. Likely all their unique facets were shattered or melted. When she went to step inside the quincunx, Gareth grabbed her.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “These stones are spent. They’re harmless, like an exploded bomb.”

  Adele moved inside the geometry of crystals, but she felt nothing. She gazed out through a partially broken glass door that overlooked the vast piazza below. A new wave of nausea washed over her. An expansive gravel yard stretched out below her. Dark shapes dotted the pale stones, lying around stagnant pools.

  Dead bodies. Hundreds of cadavers littered the grounds near the palace and many more were barely visible farther out, collapsed amidst the brush of the overgrown gardens. They all lay in different positions, as if they had simply fallen dead while standing in formation. Most were partially decayed from exposure. Some had been half-eaten by predators, and there were marks in the gravel where some bodies had been dragged off by dogs or wolves.

  Adele saw more crystals down among the dead. She couldn’t see the full extent of their placement because of distance, failing sunlight, and the overgrowth. However, from what she could view, she knew those crystals were organized in the same geometric patterns as the ones in the gallery where she stood. She knelt and picked up one of the crystals on the floor. Its empty touch chilled her, but she could acquire enough of a sense to know it was local. It was a stone from here in Paris, from virtually under their feet. She tested the others and found the same thing. She realized she had been crouching in the center of the quincunx for some time when she looked up to see Gareth staring anxiously at her. She tossed the sad cold crystal down, and then swept the pattern out of existence with her arm.

  “He murdered all of them.” Her voice was rough with frustration and rage. “All those people out there.”

  “How?”

  “He seems to be drawing on the power of the rifts with his crystal arrangements.” Adele pointed to the field of the dead on the grounds of Versailles. “And then he is replicating this same pattern out there, on a larger scale.”

  “But those are humans.”

  “I know. He is doing the same thing to humans that I did to ­vampires.”

  “How is that possible? Is that something you could do?”

  “No,” Adele replied bitterly. “I have no idea how he’s doing it. Damn it. I can’t believe he is self-taught. He knows more about geomancy than I do, and I went to school for ages.”

  Gareth kicked a crystal aside and pulled Adele to her feet. “I smell traces of him. This way.” He led them out of the mirror gallery toward the front of the chateau. In these chambers they found evidence of cooking, and there were clothes strewn about.

  Gareth put objects to his nose and smelled deeply. He tasted the handles of spoons and pencils that he found scattered about. “It’s been a week or so since he’s been here.”

  They stepped into a small room off the bedchamber and Adele’s eyes immediately went to a table covered in crystals. Some of them had been smashed by a hammer and chisel that sat nearby. A strong hand lens rested on the table too.

  She took one crystal in her hand and it pulsed with life. Even the revolting pall over the area couldn’t completely block her out from the stone’s essence. She tasted bright sun and a hint of lemon. She squeezed that crystal in fury. “Alexandria. This stone is from home. Why would he have it?”

  Adele put a trembling finger into the coarse dust of one of the shattered crystals. This stone was as dead as those in the mirror gallery. Only the faintest hint of place slipped across her tongue.

  “Bruges.” Adele brushed the cold dust from her hands. “This crystal is from Bruges where that death camp was located.”

  She turned away from the table and noticed a stack of large, thick paper lying on the floor. When she approached, she saw it wasn’t paper; it was canvas. Paintings. Portraits of kings and queens. Still lifes of fruit and wild game. Battle scenes. Most of them were heavy oils painted hundreds of years ago, long before the Great Killing. The paints were faded and the canvases ill-used from age and lack of care. They all had been cut or torn from frames and now lay on the floor of the Witchfinder’s room. How odd that he had a penchant for old art.

  Adele sorted through the paintings. Then she noticed something odd. There were marks on the backs of each canvas. They were strangely familiar lines and symbols, seemingly chaotic and random.

  “Damn!” Adele shouted with recognition, as she flipped over canvas after canvas. “No. No.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Look at this.” She held up one of the canvases so he could see the scribbles on the back.

  “What is it?”

  “Ley lines. The Witchfinder is mapping the lines.” Adele continued to shift the thick sheets. “Look at these labels. Carnac, in Normandy. Incredible. I’ve never seen the rifts so thick. And here’s what looks to be a complete map of Britain. And here’s Paris and southern France.” She went rigid with shock and gripped one of the canvases so tight it tore under her fingers. “Alexandria.”

  “Are they accurate?”

  Adele made a quick study of the Alexandria map, trying to orient her knowledge with the
peculiar style the Witchfinder used. “I think so. It’s hard to read this, but I think he has the gist of it. I can’t believe it.”

  “What does that mean?” Gareth joined her to look at the canvas.

  Adele caught a glimpse of the book he was holding. “Where did you get that?”

  He pointed to a small shelf in the corner, where three old tomes rested. He held it out to her. It was well-worn and roughly used. The spine read On Concentrative Reflexes.

  “It’s a seminal geomancy treatise by the great scholar al-Khuri. It’s very rare. I’ve never seen one; only read excerpts.” Adele opened the volume. “Oh God!”

  “What?”

  She placed a finger on a bookplate pasted on the inside cover. “This book belonged to Sir Godfrey Randolph.”

  “The surgeon?”

  “Yes. The very one who saved my life when I was stabbed in Alexandria.” She opened the three other books and found the same plates inside them. “He also has one of the greatest libraries of the esoteric in the known world. He was a close ally of Mamoru’s, until Mamoru went insane.”

  “How did his book get to vampire Paris? Is Sir Godfrey a traitor?”

  “No, I can’t imagine. Sir Godfrey told me that a number of his books had disappeared from his home in Giza over the last few years. We know his brother, Lord Aden, collaborated with your brother, Cesare. I’ll bet Lord Aden stole the books and sent them to Cesare to deliver to the Witchfinder. Sir Godfrey had a complete set of Mamoru’s ley line maps; it’s possible Aden copied those as well.” Adele sighed and flipped through the tome. She drew in a sharp breath.

  Gareth looked at her expectantly.

  “Look at these notes in the margins,” Adele said. “I assume they’re written by the Witchfinder, and it looks as if he had conversations with another man, a skilled geomancer.”

  “So he did have a teacher. His skill isn’t so mysterious now.”