The Knave of Souls - Fantasy - Sequel to The Jack of Souls

Chapter 14

Even the Iberg do not embrace all magic unequivocally...even they forbid traffic with the Unseen Moon, damning to death those who carry its dark stone to drowning...

—From "Notes From Abroad," by Sir Martis Wise

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RED MOON INTERLUDE

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Don Viero Meritosi sat beneath the high window of his apartment's western wall, fully bathed in the silver-white light of the Bright Mother. She was just before her first quarter, a white scythe in the late summer sky. The Mad Moon stalked her across the heavens. He was in his blind quarter, his fiery light purpling the Mother's her silver and staining her shadows red. All other windows in his apartment were carefully curtained to avoid the spying eyes of the Arkendian Purist faction, as they were called, who were powerful, and watched him relentlessly.

Beads of sweat ran down his forehead onto the table before him. His attention was bent entirely upon a volume of gilded parchment to one side, and a glittering brooch of witch-silver in the shape of a coiled serpent. The volume bore many scars and burns as if it had been salvaged from a fire in some distant past. The brooch was of obvious Kwendi make: immaculate jewelry, and latent magic.

"Now I've got you, you slippery devil..."

He pronounced a series of syllables, and the white nexus pulsed brightly in his hand, with a silver-white light, a little version of Bright Mother. In his other hand he clutched a blood-orange Changeling nexus, which glowed hotly like crystallized fire. He held their powers carefully apart—a very dangerous game that could fry his mind like a roasted apple in a potter's kiln if his concentration failed. Yet he was fiercely insistent that it was possible. The Council said it could not be done, but they had never tried. None but he had ever felt the possibilities that emerged when holding the two together. It was dangerous, yes. He had burned himself when he first attempted it. But the two were as similar as they were opposed. Indeed, they were as two halves of the same penny. As a master of the Changeling powers he had found it easy to plumb the mysteries of the Bright Mother with only minimal training. And by controlling them side by side any magus of credible standing would be unable to deny its rightness.

He fixed this bifocal gaze upon the brooch, and held this posture for several long moments. He pried first into the intricacies of the Changeling traces he found there, outlining their impossible coexistence with Bright Mother life patterns. It was magnificent. The very proof of his thesis of the mutual compatibility of the moons. But how was it orchestrated? How could fire and water inhabit the same space without catastrophe or cancellation? He held the mystery open, unwilling to let it go, though the task drained him, and retraced his analysis with great care. Neither the Bright Mother nor the Changeling spells were complicated. The patterns of life were clear and simple, as were the interwoven seeds of destruction. But between them he could see nothing that mitigated their differences—nothing whatsoever to explain the apparent truce between their opposite natures.

Pat.

Pat.

Pat.

Sweat dripped to the brittle parchment, marking the long moments of sustained effort. Then his vision blurred with pooling salt, and he sensed he could no longer safely hold the two nexi apart. Unwillingly, he surrendered, and starved the stones of his energy. The Bright Mother nexus faded to clear crystal in his trembling hand. The Changeling jaggate still smoldered dimly as he slipped it into the lining of his robe.

"Nothing," he panted. He slumped back in his chair, his white robes sticking to his flesh. "Impossible. How did they do it? There is no trace of any third element, any catalyst that would explain this symbiosis."