Witchfinder Chapter 9 and director’s commentary

UPDATE:  A SLIGHTLY EDITED AND PRETTIED UP COMPILATION OF ALL CHAPTERS UP TO A WEEK OLD IS HERE

*I’m posting this novel here, free, one chapter at a time.  This is being posted as I write it, so it’s in pre-earc (for those from Baen) or in close-to (but not quite) -first draft state. Once it’s finished it will undergo editing and then it will be published in some form. I’m going to put this up with its own category so you can find it.  For those interested in throwing something in the storytellers bowl, there is a donate button on the right hand side of the site.  Anyone contributing $6 or more will get an electronic (non DRM) version of the novel upon completion.  Of course, donating is not mandatory.  I hope you enjoy the chapters.  For Director’s Commentary of sorts, look at the bottom of the chapter. *

*Additional note — this is rushed, and I know it’s rushed.  Normally I would have given it another one or two go-overs, but there are several things I need to have in order for tomorrow, so I’m rushing around and only got to this late.  I promise to make it up to you next week.*

For first chapter, look here

For eighth chapter, look here

Two Attacks and an Alarm

Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater, woke up with a sense of foreboding.  For a moment, floating on the edge of consciousness, he thought he was a child, in the nursery in the attics of the house, with nanny hovering by, and that he’d been very ill.

Then he moved in the bed, and the feeling of his body belied the illusion.  Not nanny.  And yet there was someone nearby singing, singing in a high voice.  That was what had given him the impression that he was in the nursery.  Nanny used to sing to him, in a high but not unmelodious voice.  Only nanny had never used words that felt like fire distilled through his bones and woven through his nerves, raking his conscience like unsheathed claws.  Words he didn’t understand.  Words that felt wrong.

The scream of “stop” tore itself from his lips as he sat up.  The voice stopped, immediately, and in its place there was a scream, answering his, a voice much like his own, “Seraphim!”

He opened his eyes to Penny running towards him, and in less than a second, Penny’s hands were on his shoulders, Penny’s voice too loud in his ears, “Damn it, Seraphim.  You’re not well enough to sit.  You–”

He was in his room, his adult room, of course, and it was the middle of the night.  Or at least the window, directly in front of his bed, showed only darkness, which meant it was night.  Though both the bed and the window were equipped with heavy brocaded curtains – somewhat faded since the old duke’s profligate spending hadn’t allowed expenses such as replacing furnishings – Seraphim never let either set be closed.  He believed in the virtues of fresh air.  He also believed in keeping an eye on his surroundings, both within and without the house.  Perhaps if his father had done so–

And then he remembered what about his surrounding, just before waking, had caused such a violent start.

“Who was singing?” Seraphim asked.  “What were the words?”

“What?  There was no one singing.  You were dreaming.  It was a dream.”

Seraphim shook his head.  “No.  Someone was singing.  Working magic on me.  A woman.  Where’s the woman?”

“The– If you mean Miss Felix, the lady you brought back with you, she left,  presumably whence she’d come.  I have a feeling we’ll know all too soon.”  Gabriel Penn felt at Seraphim’s forehead with the back of his own, then did one of the minor passes that allowed one to evaluate the state of health of another, and frowned.  “You have no fever.”

“Of course I have no–” Seraphim would never be able to say how he had seen the attack, much less how he was able to react so fast.  One moment he was looking at Penny, trying to decide if it was possible at all that Penny was had been playing some sort of trick, and thinking to himself that if Penny had been singing in a woman’s voice and performing such unclean magic as those words felt like, then it was time to take him to an exorcist and find which entity had claimed his half brother’s soul.  The next moment he caught a reflection on the glass, behind Penny’s shoulder.  Something.  He could never say more than that he’d been aware of movement.  And he’d reacted.

Perhaps he would not have reacted so quickly, if he’d not wakened to unclean magic.  He couldn’t say.  What he could say and do was cast a protection spell so quick his fingers smarted as the power left them, even as he pulled at Penny’s arm, and made him fall, awkwardly across the bed.  At the same time Seraphim rolled, so he was in a different place.

Through the confusion, and a sudden burning feather smell, he was aware that his protective shield spell had failed and the pillow was now on fire.  He was also aware of Penny across his legs, struggling to get up.  But neither took up his thought, and certainly neither got his attention because he was drawing all his power, all his reserves, and sending them after the spell that had just come in.

There was a moment – he remembered well from his studies at Cambridge – when right after a killing-magic-spell, the kind banned in all civilized countries, it was possible to follow it with one of the same kind and potency, even if you didn’t know from whence it came and certainly if you didn’t know how to cast such a spell, as no civilized man knew, such spells being forbidden in all right-thinking lands.  It was allowed too.  The only time it was allowed to loose a killing spell that was not contained in a mage stick.  It was right of self defense, secured to the English barons by the Magna Carta, and to all English citizens by the Land and Men act of Richard XII.

None of this occurred to Seraphim of course.  His reaction was instinctive, as he seized the feel and magic of what had been hurled at him, and hurled it back as fast as he could.

The power washed out of him in a great wave, and the room swam before his eyes.  He would have collapsed back onto his pillow, but the pillow was on fire, so he collapsed sideways, at the same time that Penny finally managed to rise, got hold of something from the bedside table, and flung it at the pillow, putting the fire out, but adding markedly to the smell of the room with an odd scent of cooked meat.

As Seraphim managed to draw himself up and catch his breath, something about his expression must have given Penny the idea that his action was disapproved of, as he said, “Broth.  For your dinner.  I’m afraid.”

Seraphim, though his mind was on everything but his dinner, managed a smile.  “Better that than the contents of the chamber pot!”

A quick smile flitted across Penny’s lips, then he frowned, as though coming to himself and realizing the import of all that had happened.  “Someone… Did someone send a killing bolt of magic through your window?”

“I’m afraid so,” Seraphim said, and, rolling off the side of the bed managed to hold onto it, though barely.  Confound it.  He was too weak.  The reason why came to him, in bits and disjointed pieces.  The damn pyramids; the woman; the boy.  How had he let himself be caught so off guard?  Perhaps he should have heeded Penny.  Perhaps he’d been too weak to go off world.

“And you sent a killing bolt after it!  Seraphim.  It’s illegal.”

“Not according to the law I studied at Cambridge.  Self defense, Penny.”  Seraphim tried to make his way to the window, by means of grabbing now onto a small occasional table, now onto the back of a sofa.  But before he reached there, Penny had guessed his intentions and stood in front of him.  “No, Seraphim!”

Seraphim took a deep breath, “Penny, we must find out who it was, and where the bolt hit.  You know such killing spells have to be line of sight, so he was line of sight when he loosed it.  Or she, if it was that infernal singer.”

“No one was singing!  And you can’t mean to show yourself at that window when someone just tried to kill you.”  He had Seraphim by the shoulders again, which was a deuced stupid habit for him to have acquired, and was trying by main force to push him down onto a rosewood-framed loveseat.  Unfortunately at the moment the force was in the main on Gabriel’s side, and Seraphim had to allow himself to be pushed down.

He was not, however, so lost to all reason that he would allow Penny himself to go to the window.  To prevent this, he held fast to Penny’s sleeve and said, “Not you either, then, you damnfool.  We don’t know which of us that bolt was aimed at.”

Penny looked exasperated.  “Seraphim?  Why would anyone try to kill me?  I am not the duke.  I am not–”

“You are your mother’s son,” Seraphim said, and suddenly something that had been bothering him connected in his mind.  “And I have a very good idea that the song I heard as I was waking was in the language of your mother’s people.”

Gabriel Penn went so still his features might very well be carved out of marble.  He stood straighter, and swallowed hard, so hard that it was audible in a room that seemed, of a sudden so quiet that even the crackle of wood in the fireplace sounded as loud as an explosion.  “My mother–” Gabriel said.  He shook his head, looked towards the window.   “Impossible.”  But all the same, Seraphim saw his hand move and from the very faint tracery of light visible only to mage sight, he could see Gabriel setting a protective spell in place.  Nothing like what Seraphim had done in the haste of the moment, but something stronger, harder.  Something odder, too, all angles and askew logic.  Something not human.  And Seraphim knew that despite that “impossible” Penny found the threat possible enough to guard against it.

“I’d swear to it, Penny.  I don’t know the language, as you … Curse it, I never thought of it, but you must know the language.  You were not an infant when…”

“I know the language,” Penny said.  He looked wary and tired.  Very tired.  So tired that ten years at least appeared to have fallen on his features.  He dropped to the rosewood seat, next to Seraphim.  “Blast it all, Seraphim.  It is impossible.  The treaties and the binds are unbreakable.”

Seraphim cleared his throat.  “I don’t know the language as you do,” he said slowly, deliberately.  “But I know the sound and feel of it.  When your mother’s people came, shortly after you came to live here, remember?  When they came to the door–” He stopped.

“Yes,” Gabriel said.  And how was it possible Seraphim thought, that Gabriel seemed to be quieter than silence and more still than stone, and with it convey a sense of urgency so great that it could not be expressed in word or movement?  A sense of urgency that pressed on Seraphim like the knowledge of a life and death race?

Seraphim took a breath.  “Well, this language had the same feel, and I can’t very well imagine any other language, anything at all else in the world that would sound like that.”

“No,” Gabriel said, and then, as though recruiting strength, “But perhaps you remembered and dream–”

“It wasn’t exactly the same words, Penny.  This time there was a spell being said.  And unclean spell.”

“Imp–”

Seraphim said two words he remembered from what he had heard, two words so odd and so powerful they seemed to burn his tongue with saying them.

“Stop,” Penny said.  His hand shot out and covered Seraphim’s mouth.  “Stop.  No more.”

“What are the words?”

Penny shook his head.  “Unclean.  And dangerous.”  He waved a hand, again, setting some form of cleansing in place.  A form that Seraphim had never seen.  Then he took a deep breath, loud in the room.  “Two attacks then,” he said, in the same tone as he might inform Seraphim that his carriage was ready or that, alas, the boot boy had ruined Seraphim’s best boots.  “Because that kill spell through the window was all human magic and none of ou– Theirs.  Two attacks.  Aren’t we the lucky ones.  And they are after you, not me.  For two days, Seraphim, you’ve been not only unconscious, but shielded under so many healing spells not one would be able to get a spell on you.  Or to find you with one.  But today, as the healing spells slid off two enemies found you.  It was you they were aiming for.”

Seraphim shrugged.  “Or perhaps you were close enough to me while I was under healing spells, to make you less noticeable also.”

Gabriel rose, “I shall send some footmen down to see who you killed.  There will be trouble over that, mind, self-defense or not.  Death must stand examination and trial.  And the King’s court, because of your damned rank.”

“Tell them to go armed,” Seraphim said.  There might be more than one out there.”

Gabriel nodded, as a matter of course, then returned to the room.  “As for the other matter, duke, those words you overheard, if they were part of an attack aimed at you would indicate that they think you too have my mother’s blood.  And if they were aimed at me…”  He shook his head.  “Did you ever tell anyone?  About me, I mean?”

“Which of the many things about you?” Seraphim asked suddenly cautious.

“Any of them.”

“My dear Penny, I don’t tell your secrets to anyone.  Oftentimes not even to myself.”

Chapter 10 is here

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Director’s commentary — I’d like to keep secret, at least a little longer, the identity of Gabriel’s mother and people.  Part of this is because neither of them is, frankly, going to name it.  However, let’s just say that I knew about that attack before I wrote this chapter, though I have only the vaguest of ideas as to why or what the heck they have against the guys — though I have some idea of the effect of that spell, had it finished.

On the other hand, the other attack took me completely by surprise.  Neither of these were in the outline.  They both feel needed and unavoidable, though.

And where the heck is Nell?  Two and a half days?  I thought she was going to see them right right away.  I’m not a pantser, but books do escape the leash now and then.  This one doesn’t feel wrong, just as though my subconscious has been up to something and not told me.

We shall see.

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Unrelated note – I have put up another collection of five shorts Five Far Futures — for $2.99.  Two of the stories, Learn To Forget and Touch are rather more sombre, though it would be hard to say they have bad endings, at least compared to what they could have.  The other three have happy endings, though one is perhaps qualified.  Anyway, they’re available wherever fine electrons are sold. :)