WHO MOURNS A
NECROMANCER

Brian Craig

 

 

The funeral cart made its slow and steady way up the hill towards the Colaincourt Cemetery. The day was grey and overcast, and a cold wind blew from the east. The man who drove the cart and the companion who sat beside him both bore sullen scowls upon their faces, and the two dappled black mares which pulled it held their heads very low, as if they too had lost all enthusiasm for the work which was their lot. Behind the cart walked a solitary mourner, incongruous in his isolation.

The lone mourner was Alpheus Kalispera, High Priest of Verena and Magister of the University of Gisoreux. When he went about his normal business he commanded respect and was treated with due deference, but in his present role he drew hostile glances from all those who watched the cart go by. There were not many; although Lanfranc Chazal had been an important and well-respected man in his prime, that prime was now long past, and Chazal’s reputation had been badly tarnished in his later years.

Kalispera walked rather painfully. He was old and his joints were very stiff. He kept his hands carefully within the folds of his cloak, for the cold made his gnarled fingers ache terribly.

When the cemetery gates finally came into sight a company of small boys ran from one of the side-streets, hurling mud and stones at the coffin which rested on the cart, crying: “Necromancer! Necromancer!”

Kalispera rounded on them, and would have spoken angrily, but they hared away as fast as their thin legs would carry them. To abuse an alleged necromancer was to them an act of great daring, even if the man be dead in his coffin, unable to answer the charge in any way at all.

A sallow-faced priest of Morr waited by a freshly-dug grave, quite alone. Even the sexton had taken care to absent himself from the ceremony of interment. Kalispera frowned—there should have been two priests, at least. He had been here many times before to see officers of the University laid to rest, and had been witness to occasions when scholars of far less status had been laid to rest by three officiating priests, attended by half a hundred mourners.

The magister took up a position opposite the priest, who stared at him while the two carriers manhandled the coffin down from the death-cart on to the ropes, then lowered it with indecent haste into the pit which had been made ready for it. It was all too obvious from the man’s manner that the priest was here under protest, bound by the vows he had taken—which would not let him refuse to conduct a funeral service if he were so instructed. Kalispera felt the man’s stare upon him, full of hostility, but he would not bow his head yet. Instead, he met the gaze as steadily as he could.

The priest took objection to this refusal to be ashamed. “Who mourns a necromancer?” he asked bitterly. “It would be best if I were left to do this sorry task alone.”

“I was his friend,” Kalispera said evenly. “I had known him since childhood.”

“Such a man forsakes all claims of friendship and amity when he delves into forbidden lore,” the priest answered him. “This man has sought to deal unnaturally with the dead, and should be shunned by the living—especially those who deem themselves priests of Verena.”

“He himself has joined the ranks of the dead now,” Kalispera observed, refusing to be stung by the insult. “He is but a memory to the living and, of all the memories which I have of him, by far the greater number are happy ones. I have come to say farewell to a man I have known all my life, and I will not permit the fact that he has lately been abused by foolish and malicious men to prevent me from doing so.”

“But you have come alone,” the priest replied sourly, gesturing about him. “It seems that all the others who knew him when they were young have a keener sense of duty to the cause of righteousness.”

Kalispera could not help but look around, though he did not expect to see any others hurrying to the place. He sighed, but very quietly, for he did not want the priest of Morr to know how disappointed he was. All but a few of the magisters of the university had known Lanfranc Chazal for many years, and had liked him well enough before the evil rumours had taken wing like a flock of Morr’s dark ravens. He had thought that a few might be prepared to set aside the vilifications and accusations, for the sake of remembrance of better times. But the university was, as ever, a fever-pit of jealousies and intrigues, in which reputations were considered very precious things, not to be risked on such a chance as this.

Kalispera felt a moment of paradoxical gratitude for the fact that he was old and far beyond the calls of ambition. It was all too probable that the next Magister of Gisoreux to ride up the hill on the creaking death-cart would be himself.

“Please proceed,” he said to the priest. “You will be glad to get it over, I know.”

The priest frowned again, but consented to let the magister have the last word. Sonorously, he began to intone the funeral rite, consigning the body of unlucky Lanfranc Chazal to the care of his stern master.

But Morr’s officer was barely half way through the ceremony when there was a sudden clatter of hooves in the gateway of the cemetery, and though propriety demanded that neither of them should look up, both priest and magister glanced sideways with astonishment.

A huge bay, liberally flecked with sweat, was reined in not thirty feet from the grave. A man leapt down, patting the trembling horse upon the neck to offer thanks for its unusual effort—it was obvious that it had ridden far and fast. The newcomer was a man in his late twenties, plainly dressed, without livery or ornament—but he strode to the graveside with the pride and grace of an aristocrat. He favoured the priest with a single glance of haughty disapproval, but looked at Kalispera longer and far more respectfully. In fact, he nodded to the magister as if he knew him and expected to be recognised in turn, but Kalispera could not immediately put a name to the face.

Who mourns a necromancer? Kalispera thought, echoing the priest’s words with a hint of ironic triumph. Two men at least, it seems, are not so cowardly that they dare not show their faces here. I thank you, young sir, with all my heart.

Before he bowed his head again, he favoured the younger man with a discreet smile. The priest of Morr saw, and disapproved, but there was nothing he could do save resume the ceremony with all due expedition.

As soon as it was all finished, though, the priest graced the newcomer with a scowl more hateful than any he had previously contrived. Then he hurried off, leaving the grave gaping like a fresh wound in the green hillside.

 

The sexton, who must have been almost as old as Alpheus Kalispera, and every bit as feeble in wind and limb, shuffled from his hiding place to begin the work of filling in the grave.

The need for a respectfully bowed head now gone, Kalispera looked long and hard at the second mourner—and suddenly found the name which had momentarily eluded him. “Cesar Barbier! As I live and breathe!” he said.

Barbier smiled, but thinly, as though he had not the heart for a proper greeting. “Aye, Magister Kalispera,” he said. “You did well to remember me at all, for it’s a fair while since I was a student here—and I have not been in Gisoreux for some years, though I have not been far away.”

“In Oisillon, perhaps?” Kalispera said. “I remember that we thought you destined to be a luminary of His Majesty’s court.”

Now the magister had the name, the rest was not too hard to remember. The Barbiers were one of the great families of the region, more celebrated for breeding soldiers than scholars. But Cesar had been a clever student, more attentive than many to what his teachers had to tell him. Young men of his class came to the university primarily to sow their wild oats at a safe distance from home, and in truth Barbier had certainly done his share of that, but his interests had eventually extended at least a little beyond wine, women and the dance.

Barbier shook his head. “I have been in Rondeau,” he said, naming a small town some miles to the south of the great city. Kalispera frowned, trying to remember whether Rondeau was part of the Barbier estate—and, for that matter, whether Cesar had yet succeeded to his father’s title. A good Bretonnian was supposed to know such things, even if he were a high priest of Verena and a magister of a university, devoted by vocation to more permanent kinds of wisdom. Cesar Barbier certainly did not look like a Tilean nobleman, for he wore no powder and no wig, and his clothes were honest leather—but if he had come to Gisoreux on horseback he might easily have consigned his finery to a saddlebag.

“I am glad to see you here, my lord,” Kalispera said guardedly. He dared not ask whether Barbier had really come to Gisoreux simply to attend the funeral—or, if so, why.

Barbier gave another slight smile when he heard the magister call him “my lord”—an appellation to which custom had not entitled him while he was a student. “And I am glad to see you, sir,” he replied in turn, “though I must confess to a little disappointment that I find you alone. I came as soon as I heard that Magister Chazal had died, but I fear that the news had made slow progress in arriving at Rondeau. Still, it seems that I came in time.”

As he spoke he looked at the ancient sexton, who was shovelling earth as fast as he possibly could, clearly no more anxious than any other to be too long in the company of a corpse of such evil repute.

“Aye,” Kalispera said, “you came in time. But I doubt that you would have come at all, had rumour of Lanfranc’s last years reached Rondeau before the news of his death. I am alone because no other would come. It has been rumoured of late that my friend was… was a necromancer, and I dare say that you know as well as any other what damage such rumours can do. I am glad to see you, as I said—but perhaps I should rather be sorry that you have taken the trouble, if you came in ignorance.”

“I did not come in ignorance, I assure you,” Barbier said solemnly. “I came because I knew, far better than any other, what kind of man he really was.”

Kalispera felt tears rising to his eyes, and he bowed his head. “Thank you for that,” he said.

“Oh no,” replied the other, reaching out to take the older and frailer man by the arm. “It is for me to thank you on his behalf—for you stood by him when no one else would.”

They stood together, silently, for two or three minutes more. When the sexton was finished, Barbier gave him a suitable coin, which the old man accepted without any word or gesture of thanks.

“Is there somewhere we can go?” the young nobleman asked gently. “I think we both stand in need of the warmth of a fire and a cup of good wine.”

“Of course,” Kalispera said quietly. “I would be most honoured if you would be my guest, and would share with me in the remembrance of my friend.”

“I will do it gladly,” Barbier assured him. The two went down the hill together, quite oblivious to any inquisitive eyes which may have stared after them.

 

Alpheus Kalispera took Cesar Barbier to the room where he worked and taught. The sun had set by the time they arrived there, but the autumn twilight always lingered in the room, because its latticed window faced the south-west. Kalispera had always found it to be a good room for reading—and an excellent place for deeper contemplation.

At Barbier’s request, Kalispera told him about the shadow which had been cast over Lanfranc Chazal during the last years of his tenure at the university.

“No charge was brought against him in any court, sacred or secular,” he was at pains to explain. “He was condemned exclusively by scurrilous gossip and clandestine vilification. I have even heard it said that his death was a manifestation of the wrath of Verena, delayed for so long only because Verena was a calm and patient deity who loved her followers of wisdom just a little too well. That was terrible, truly terrible.

“Alas for poor Lanfranc, he had the misfortune to age less gracefully than he might, and he came to suffer from a certain disfiguration of the features which his enemies took to be evident proof of his dabbling with forbidden knowledge. One expects to hear such folderol from common peasants, of course, but I had thought better of Gisoreux and the university. If the men who call themselves the wisest in the world can so easily fall prey to such silly suspicions, what hope is there for the future of reason?

“Long before he was consigned to the grave where we saw him laid today, Lanfranc had begun to take on the appearance of a dead man, with whited skin and sunken eyes. I tried in vain to persuade our colleagues that it was merely an illness of old age, with no dire implication, but my ideas on the subject had always been considered unorthodox, and no one would listen to me. Even his friends were content to accept his disfigurement as evidence of a secret interest in the practice of necromancy. ‘All illness comes from the gods,’ they said, ‘and is sent to educate us.’ Lanfranc Chazal never believed any such thing, and neither do I, for we had seen too many sick men and women in our time. Alas, we were the only two remaining who remembered the great plague of forty years ago, and how dreadfully it used the magisters of the day. Now there is only me.”

Kalispera realized that his tone had become very bitter, and stopped in embarrassment. The twilight had faded while he spoke and the room was now as gloomy as his mood, so he covered his embarrassment by looking about for the tinderbox in order that he might light a candle. He had mislaid it, and was forced to get up in order to conduct a scrupulous search.

Cesar Barbier did not say anything to him while he searched for the box, found it and struck a light. But when the candle finally flared up, he saw that the younger man was watching him very quizzically from his place by the fireside.

Kalispera resumed his own seat, then smoothed his white beard with his right hand as if to settle himself completely. “You are probably astonished to hear all this,” he said.

“On the contrary,” Barbier replied with a guarded look. “There is nothing in it which is news to me, but I am glad to hear your account of it. He would have been very pleased and proud to know that his truest friend did not desert him, even at the end.”

“You knew!” Kalispera exclaimed. “But you said that you have not been in Gisoreux for some time. How could you know about Lanfranc’s illness, the changes in his appearance?”

“He visited me in Rondeau,” the young nobleman said. “We have seen one another frequently over the years. I always regarded him as my mentor—he was ever the man to whom I turned for advice and help, and he never failed me. He told me more than once how grateful he was for your amity, and I know that it weighed upon his conscience that his claim upon your good opinion was not as honest as he would have wished.”

Alpheus Kalispera started in his seat and his eyes grew suddenly wide. “What are you saying?” he cried, angrily. “Do you mean to insult my grief?”

Barbier sat upright as well, but then leaned forward to reach out a soothing hand. “No, magister!” he said. “Anything but! Lanfranc Chazal was the best and noblest man I ever knew. I came here to share my grief, not to insult yours.”

Kalispera stared at him angrily for a moment, but then relaxed with a sigh. “I do not know what you mean,” he said. “Lanfranc said nothing to me about visiting you in Rondeau—nothing at all. And I cannot believe that he deceived me, even in a matter as small as that.”

“Alas, sir,” Barbier said, “he did deceive you, even in matters much weightier. I can assure you, though, that it was not because he doubted you that he kept his darkest secrets from you, but only because he doubted himself.”

There was a long moment’s silence before Kalispera said in a horrified whisper, “Do you mean to tell me that Lanfranc Chazal was a necromancer, after all—and that you were party to his experiments?”

“That is what I mean to tell you,” the other confirmed, in a low voice. “But I beg you not to condemn me—and certainly not to condemn Magister Chazal—until you have heard me out.”

Alpheus Kalispera felt that the features of his face were firmly set in a mask of pain, and that his heart was unnaturally heavy in his breast. Nevertheless, he made every effort to speak boldly. “Explain yourself, my lord,” he said. Despite the title, it was the patronising command of the instructor, not the humble request of the commoner.

“I intend to explain, magister,” said the young man, quietly, “and I beg you to forgive my clumsiness in going about it. You will remember, I am sure, that I was not the best of students. I was, after all, one of those sent by a pretentious father to acquire the merest veneer of culture and learning, not one intended to learn the skills of a scrivener or the training of a priest. I was something of a noble fool in my early days, and although Magister Chazal taught me in the end to be less of a fool than I was, still my wisdom is of a very narrow kind. Let me tell you my story in my own way, so that we may mourn together the passing of a great and generous man.”

Kalispera had to admit that this was a pretty speech, and he believed that he could hear within its phrases the influence of his friend Lanfranc Chazal. But there was another thought echoing its derision inside his head: Who mourns a necromancer?

Could it be, he wondered, that the world had been right after all, and he the lone fool?

“I am sorry, my lord,” he said, however, with honest but troubled humility. “Please say what you have come to say. I will listen patiently.”

“Thank you, sir,” Cesar Barbier said, relaxing again in his turn. He paused for a moment, collecting his thoughts, and then he proceeded to tell his story.

 

“You know my name,” Barbier began, “and I assume that you know whose son I am. Perhaps you remember my father from his own student days, when I am sure he impressed you with his command of those aristocratic virtues befitting a man whose service to our king has been of the military kind. He is now as he undoubtedly was then: bold in word and deed, with a will and stomach of iron. Neither wine nor passion has the power to disturb his firmness of mind, and I dare say that you found his head quite impregnable to wisdom or sophistication.

“When I first became a student here I set out to do my best to be like my father, and I think that for a while I succeeded well enough to convince almost everyone that I was a perfect example of that kind, save only for Magister Chazal. He saw through my facade of reckless intolerance to the, well, the gentler soul within. He knew what a creature of dishonesty I was, and helped me to use my years here to become a better man.

“In public he never gave evidence by word or gesture that he knew what a poseur I was, but in private he talked to me in a different way. He taught me to trust him, and be honest in what I said to him. With him and him alone I was my true self: full of doubt, full of passion and tender of sentiment—all traits which my father despised, and despises still. Magister Chazal never advised me to break down my public pretence, but was content to give me an opportunity to lay it aside. I cannot tell you how much it meant to me to have that relief.

“When the time came for me to leave Gisoreux and take up the business of accepting the responsibilities of my position, I quickly began to use the gift of lettering—which was one of the valuable things which I had learned within these walls—in the writing of letters to Magister Chazal. I was his guest here in Gisoreux on numerous occasions. He was the one and only person to whom I confided my true feelings, and by degrees I won his confidence too, so that he began to say to me those things which he dared not say to people of his own kind.

“It was from Magister Chazal that I learned about your beliefs, Magister Kalispera. He told me that you had drawn conclusions about the nature of disease which were, if not openly heretical, at least unorthodox. He told me about your sceptical attitude to the medicines and treatments established by custom. He told me too about your insistence that disease and suffering make no discrimination between the guilty and the innocent, and are far less often the result of magic or divine intervention than we are prone to believe. He respected you for holding those beliefs, and for setting what you believed to be the truth over the advantages to be gained by conformity. He thought that you might respect his own opinions, but hesitated to burden you with anymore unorthodoxy than you had already accepted.”

Alpheus Kalispera had begun to see where this account was leading, but he kept silent while Barbier paused, and looked at him very gravely.

“It is the common belief,” the younger man continued, “that any magic but the pettiest is inherently good or evil. Any magic which involves trafficking with the dead or the undead is held to be supremely wicked. Magister Chazal was prepared to doubt that. His view was that although any knowledge might be used for evil ends by evil men, knowledge as such is always good. Ignorance, he used to say, is the greatest evil of all.”

Kalispera nodded his head then, for he had certainly heard Chazal say that on many an occasion.

“For that reason,” Barbier went on, “Magister Chazal had studied the arcane language of necromancy and had read books written in that language. His intention in so doing was not to become a master of necromantic magic, but to learn more about the mysteries of death—to enhance his understanding. He was not a man to play with the conjuration of ghosts or the reanimation of corpses; for him, the written word was enough. He valued enlightenment far more than power.

“The story of these researches he confided to me by degrees, over a period of more than a year. In return, I talked to him about my own very different problems, which arose from friction between myself and my father as to the managements of our estates and our lives.

“I found myself in disagreement with my father on many matters of principle—on the matter of the unhappiness which he caused my mother and my sisters, for instance, and on the matter of the relentless tyranny which he exerted over his tenants and his bondsmen. But I could not successfully oppose him because I was still forced by convention and circumstance to pretend to be like him. I had begun to hate my father, and in so doing had begun to hate myself too, for being so obviously his son.

“Then, quite out of the blue, disaster struck me. I fell in love.

“Love was not a factor in my father’s calculations of advantage, and he had already contracted marriages for my two sisters on the basis of his commercial interests. It would have been bad enough had I fallen in love with a woman of my own class, had it not been the one which he considered most useful to the family interest, but in fact I fell in love with a commoner, who was very beautiful but of no account whatsoever in my father’s scheme of things.

“To my father, the very idea of love is bizarre. He has not an atom of affection in his being. I, by virtue of some silly jest of the gods who determine such things, am very differently made, and my honest passion for the girl—whose name was Siri—was quite boundless. I could not envision life without her, and life itself came to depend in my estimation upon my possession of her. By possession I do not mean mere physical possession—my father would have raised no word of objection had I been able simply to rape and then discard the girl—but authentic union. That, of course, my father would never tolerate, and yet it was what I had to have.

“When I said all this to Magister Chazal, he did not presume to tell me what to do, but he gave me every assistance in dissolving my confusion and seeing clearly what kind of choice I had to make. He helped me to understand that the time had come when I must either break completely with my father or utterly destroy the secret self which I had so carefully preserved for many years. I could not cut out and burn my own heart. And so I eloped and married Siri in secret, resolving never to see my father again.

“I anticipated that my father would disown me and forbid my name ever to be mentioned again in his house or his estates. That was what I expected, and was prepared to accept. But I had underestimated him. Perhaps it would have been different had he had another heir to put in my place, but I had no brother and nor had he. He could not face the thought of allowing his lands and his titles to become subservient to another name in being diverted to one of my sisters.

“He sent his servants to search me out, and then to bring me home by force, my… my young wife with me.”

 

Cesar Barbier paused again in his account—but not, this time, to measure the attitude of his listener. Until now he had been quite calm and very scrupulous in his speech, as befitted a nobleman of Bretonnia, but now his breathing was clotted by emotion, and there were tears in his eyes: tears of anguish, and of rage.

When it seemed that the young noble could not go on, Alpheus Kalispera said, very quietly: “He had her killed?”

“Had her killed?” answered Barbier, as though the words had been forced out of him with a hot iron. “Oh no, he did not have her killed! You do not know what manner of man my father is! He killed her with his own hands, while his servants forced me to watch.

“He destroyed her, and the unborn child she carried within her, without any trace of feeling—not because he hated her, but simply because she stood in the way of his calculations. He felt no guilt, nor any fear of retribution. Had she killed him it would have been a fearful crime, for which she would have been burned alive as a petty traitor, but for him to kill her was merely a matter of business, for her father was his bondsman, and she an item of inconvenient property. I saw her die, Magister Kalispera—I saw her die!”

Kalispera did not know what to say. He could not imagine that Lanfranc Chazal had known what to say, when the poor man had run to him with the same dreadful tale, four or five years earlier.

“I wanted to kill him,” Cesar Barbier said, when he was capable of continuing his tale. “And the folly of it all is that if I had been what he wanted me to be, I would have killed him. With a sword or a cudgel or a poisoned cup I would have snuffed out his vile existence, and sent our title to oblivion by surrendering myself to the law and going gladly to the gallows. If his way had been the right way, I would have taken my revenge, and happily so.

“Perhaps I would have done it, had it not been for Magister Chazal—for he it was who persuaded me that I must not waste my own being in destroying my father’s, on the two accounts that it would be both futile and false to my own true nature. He implored me to find a better way—and in my turn, I implored him to show me one.”

Kalispera drew in his breath, deeply and painfully. It was all too obvious to him what the result of this mutual imploring must have been. Barbier saw that he had guessed.

“Would you tell me that it was unlawful?” said the young man angrily. “Would you tell me that it was lawful and just for my father to murder my wife and unborn child because they did not suit him, and a horrid crime to undo the act, as far it could be undone? Will you tell me that Magister Chazal was evil, and my father’s soul quite stainless? Tell me then, Magister Kalispera. Tell me, in so many words, where the right of it lies.”

Kalispera shook his head. The darkness in the corners of the room seemed to close in around them. “Tell me,” he countered in a steely voice, “what it was that Lanfranc did, and what its consequence has been.”

“I had not dared to bring the body of my wife into the precincts of the university,” Barbier said, “nor even through the gates of Gisoreux. I had taken her instead to the house in Rondeau which I had bought, intending that we should live there when we returned from the Empire—for we did not expect to spend our whole lives in exile from our homeland. Magister Chazal accompanied me there and begun his work.

“He had told me that he could not bring my Siri back to life, for if such a thing could be done at all it was beyond his skill. He could not restore her flesh to me, but her spirit was a different matter; he believed that he had knowledge enough to bring back her ghost from the realm of the dead, and protect it from the dissolution which ordinarily overtakes such beings.

“Spectres, he told me, are often bound to our world in consequence of curses, doomed to haunt the spot where they died. What he intended to do was to summon Siri as a ghost, and ask her whether she would be bound of her own free will, not to the place where she had died but to the place where she had hoped to live. If she consented, he said, then he would try to bind her to the house in Rondeau.

“He was not sure that he had knowledge enough to accomplish more, but he promised that he would try firstly to give her a voice that she might speak to me, and secondly to allow her to take on at intervals a certain frail substance which would allow us to touch. For this latter purpose he required to combine together something of her substance and something of mine, and I allowed him to remove from my left hand that finger upon which I had placed my wedding ring.”

Barbier held up his left hand, and Kalispera saw for the first time that the finger next to the smallest had been neatly cut away.

“He bound that finger to hers before we laid her in a tomb beneath the house,” continued Barbier, his voice hushed. “And he used my blood to write the symbols which he used in his conjuration. When I first saw her ghost I was overtaken by such a terror that I nearly cried out to him to stop, to send her back where she belonged, but I bit my tongue. And when he asked her whether she would rather go to her appointed place, or be bound to this world with me, I felt a tremendous surge of joy which overwhelmed my terror on the instant—for her answer was yes.

“Her answer was yes.

“I could not tell what powers Magister Chazal drew upon in order to complete what he had begun. I know that he sacrificed more than I, for I only lost a finger and a little blood, while he seemed to draw upon his own inner life and strength in such a way as to leave them forever depleted.

“What words he spoke, or what dark daemons may have moved to do his bidding, I cannot begin to understand. But his work was successful, and the ghost of my wife now lives in my house, carrying within her the ghost of my unborn child. And whenever Morrslieb is at its brightest in the night sky, she takes on substance sufficient to allow her to caress me, and receive caresses in return.”

 

* * *

 

Alpheus Kalispera bowed his head slightly, and said: “I had thought the change in him was the effect of an affliction which he had in no way invited. I was sure of it.”

“And are you sure now that it was not?” Barbier demanded, with sudden passion. “Are you so certain, now that you know what you had not guessed before, that he was marked by the evil of his deeds? I tell you that he worked no evil, but exercised his knowledge only to help his friend. If it was judgment on his necromancy which engraved the death-mask on his features, then it was a cruel and stupid judgment, for he did not deserve it. If there was a debt to be paid, then I should have paid it, and would have done so willingly!

“Have you no faith in your own beliefs, that you would lose them now because of what I have told you? If that is so, I cry shame on you, Magister Kalispera! The man you saw buried today was a man as good as any in the world, and whatever disfigured him was no fault of his, but an undeserved misfortune.”

Kalispera laid his head back and stared off into infinity, before he finally said: “I do not know what to believe.”

Barbier rose to his feet and looked down at the older man. “You had best make up your mind,” he said harshly. “If you will not understand, you must at least keep silent about what I have told you.”

The magister met his visitor’s gaze then, and felt a slight shock of fear—but then he remembered that this had once been his pupil, and Lanfranc’s friend, and that there was no need to be afraid of him.

“Sit down, my lord,” he said tiredly. “This is no one’s business but our own. I would not denounce you for what you have done, nor would I ever have denounced my friend for helping you. But I cannot say that it was a good thing to do, for it is the most unnatural thing of which I have ever heard.”

Barbier took his seat again, but did not relax. “Oh yes!” he said. “Unnatural, to be sure. When a father is utterly without love or compassion—that is natural! When a father murders his son’s innocent bride—that is natural! But when a son opposes his father’s will and undoes his father’s evil—why, that is surely repulsive in its defiance of the laws which the gods have made!

“Tell me, my white-haired philosopher, is it natural for the fops and philanderers of our good King’s court to parade themselves in silk and velvet? Is it natural that they should live in gaudy luxury while the peasants who work the soil to produce their wealth go hungry? Are their measured dances natural, or the games which they play with quoits and skittles? Are their manners and hypocrisies natural—or are these noblemen natural only when they ache and bleed like common folk?

“Instruct me, magister, I implore you. Tell me, I pray, why men like you and I should respect and revere what is natural, when everything we are and do is artifice? Your own belief is that disease and illness are but natural shocks to which our fragile flesh is heir, not supernatural punishments sent by the gods or inflicted by the ill-wishing of witches. Lanfranc Chazal’s belief was that knowledge of life and death is only knowledge of nature, and that magic is merely control of nature, like other arts and crafts. You could not see a difference between yourself and your lifelong friend this morning—can you really see one now?”

For fully half a minute, Kalispera did not reply. And when he did, it was not with an answer but with a question. “What will happen,” he asked, “when you die in your turn, and go to the realm of the dead?”

Barbier laughed, very briefly. “I cannot tell,” he said. “If I have the power to curse myself to be a spectre, then I will exert that power with my dying breath, and will be all the closer to my love for sharing her insubstantiality whenever Morrslieb is pale in the sky. And if I have not… then I must wait for her release, as she would have waited for mine, had I not found a necromancer to cast off the chains of nature!”

“And what if you fall in love again?” said the magister, in a low whisper. “What if you should one day hope for a better child than the ghost of one unborn?”

Barbier shook his head as though to rule the questions impertinent, but Kalispera could see that the man was not untroubled by them. He was a man, after all, and he knew that love is not always eternal, nor the call of duty entirely impotent.

“What will happen when your father dies?” Kalispera said, speaking now as the High Priest of Verena which he also was. “Will you inherit his title and his estate? And if you do, will you be content to stay in Rondeau, or will you want to show the world how a demesne’s affairs could be managed by a better man than your father was? Ten years have passed since you came here as a student, I think, fully seven of them since you left these cloisters—but what did you truly learn, in the three years or the seven, which makes you sure that you are finished and complete, as changeless as your love-deluded wife? What right did you really have to demand of Lanfranc Chazal that which he did for you?”

Barbier was confused now, and taken aback. Whatever he had expected of the old magister, it was not this. “He was my friend,” he said. “And a far better father to me than my own parent ever was.”

“Aye,” Kalispera said sadly, “no doubt that was what he wanted to be. He was my friend, too, but I did not need him as a father. When you combined your catalogue of challenges, you might have asked whether it is natural for priests and magisters to be celibate, so that the only sons they have are those of other men.”

The younger man said nothing.

“Do you love your ghostly wife?” Kalispera asked abruptly.

“I do,” said Barbier boldly. “With all my heart.”

“And do you think that you can love her forever?”

“I do.”

Alpheus Kalispera shrugged his shoulders, and said: “Let us hope that your boldness will not let you down, and that your heart is as constant as your father’s, after its own very different fashion.”

Barbier bowed his head, and said: “Thank you for that, magister.” Then he looked up again, and said: “I hope that you will not think any worse of your friend, because of what I have told you. I did not mean to injure him in your estimation.”

“You have not done that,” Kalispera assured him. “And I am grateful to know that I am not the only man who will mourn him. If the only epitaph he will have is that which is graven in the memories of other men, I am glad that there are two of us to share the burden of the truth.”

“So am I,” Cesar Barbier said. “So am I.”

Kalispera got up from his seat and went to the window. He unlatched the glazed lattice, and pushed it back to let in the cool night air. It was not so very dark, for Mannslieb was full and Morrslieb, though by no means at its brightest, was shining from another sector of the vault of heaven. The stars, as always, were too many to be counted. The streets of the city were lit by tiny flames which were similarly numberless, for in a city as munificent as Gisoreux even the poor could afford candles to keep the dark at bay.

“Where is his spirit, do you think?” he asked of the younger man.

“Close at hand,” said Barbier softly, “or far away. Does it matter which?”

“It is said that the spirit of a necromancer is bound to its rotting hull,” the magister said. “It is said that such a spirit cannot escape from the hell of that decay, but can sometimes animate the body as a liche with glowing eyes, which spreads terror wherever it goes, and leaves suffering in its train.”

“Do you think that he feared such an end?” Barbier asked, with such faint anxiety that it seemed a mere politeness.

“No man truly knows what he has to fear when he dies,” Kalispera replied. “Even a man like you, who has brought another back from the life beyond life. No man truly knows.”

Alpheus Kalispera looked at his hands, then. They were gnarled and stiff, and the pain in their swollen joints gave him little rest nowadays. Might it reduce his pain, he wondered, to cut off those fingers which he did not really need? Or was the pain a divine punishment after all, and not—as he had always believed—a mere accident of happenstance?

He had, after all, given succour and sustenance to a secret necromancer!

“He was a good man,” Kalispera murmured, not for the first time. “He was a good friend.”

“In truth he was,” Cesar Barbier said.

And though neither man could know the other’s thoughts, both shared at that particular moment in time an identical hope. Each of them was praying, silently and fervently, that whatever god or daemon now had charge of the spirit of Lanfranc Chazal would hear their words, and echo their merciful disposition.