Unbound (11 page)

“What are you doing?” I whispered. We were attracting some very odd looks.

Mahefa spread his arms in mockery of a crucifix. “This is my blood, which I give up for you.” He poured the contents of the tube over the frozen blood like a dessert topping. “Blood and saliva both, actually. They help release the magic. Relax, this isn’t the first time I’ve whipped up a mixed drink for a mundane.”

People had begun to move away from us. I hoped none of them called security.

“Don’t drink it all at once. You don’t want to overdose. I’d hate to have to put a stake in your heart after all this.”

I brought the canister to my lips, at which point I discovered another problem. The interior was cold as dry ice. Mahefa’s blood had frozen to the rest, and none of it was budging. I cupped the mouth and exhaled onto the blood, trying to warm it. When that failed, I whacked the bottom with one hand until a dark red cylinder began to slowly slide free.

An older couple stared in horror and disgust. I don’t know if they were more upset about the noise I was making in church or the contents of my thermos. I offered them a weak smile. “Cherry smoothie. I must have left it in the freezer too long.”

The woman said something in Italian, and they both turned back to the papal cenotaph. Mindful of Mahefa’s warning about overdosing, I brought the frozen bloodsicle to my mouth and bit down.

I don’t know what was worse: the metallic syrup that coated my mouth and tongue like paint as it melted, or the icy pain that started in my teeth and raced like electricity up my nerves, giving me the worst case of brain freeze I could remember. I hadn’t thought to bring anything to wash down the blood. I wondered if they had a font for holy water, and whether anyone would object to me using it as a drinking fountain. Though given that I was trying to absorb vampire magic, using holy water as a chaser probably wasn’t a great idea.

“How is it?” Mahefa whispered.

“Foul.” I forced myself to take another bite and did my best to keep from vomiting. “How much do I have to eat before it starts working?”

“Depends on body mass and sensitivity. You’ll need more than those two swallows, though.”

I had just finished my fourth bite of blood slushee when magic jolted my bones. My gasp drew more annoyed glares. I made my way to a wooden bench, sat down, and closed my eyes, concentrating on the whispers in my mind. They were too faint to understand, but they were
real
.

I chomped more blood, swallowing so quickly I started to gag. I covered my mouth with both hands until the coughing fit passed, then licked the melting droplets from my palm. The taste was no less repulsive, but the return of magic after a month of being unable to reach into a single book overwhelmed all other sensations.

“I think he likes it,” Mahefa said dryly.

With libriomancy, I needed to concentrate, to deliberately forge a connection between my will and the belief anchored within the books. But aside from an ashen aftertaste and what felt like the start of heartburn, the blood’s magic was
effortless
. It was like the blood had reawakened something dormant within me.

My coughs turned to giddy laughter. Through tear-blurred eyes, I saw a man approach, heard him ask if I was all right. Mahefa waved him off. By now, half the people here probably thought I was stoned out of my mind.

Reluctantly, I sealed the canister and tucked the rest of the blood away. I felt more awake and alert than I had for weeks.

“Good stuff, no?”

I nodded. Despicable he might be, but Mahefa had delivered exactly what he promised. He took my elbow and guided me back to the marker of Pope Sylvester II.

“Keep your eyes open,” I said. The whispers grew clearer as the blood continued to pump magic through my body. I heard multiple voices now, a veritable choir of dead popes and other ghosts. And not one of them spoke English.

“Dammit.” I didn’t realize I had spoken out loud until a new wave of glares turned my way. “Sorry. Mi dispiace.”

What language would d’Aurillac speak? Latin? French? I knew several romance languages well enough to get by, but the French of today was very different than that spoken a thousand years ago. “Gerbert d’Aurillac?”

The response was incomprehensible. I felt their disorientation, but the words were foreign. After so long, was anything of Gerbert d’Aurillac even left for me to contact?

My mouth had gone dry as cotton. I ran my tongue over my
teeth, tasting the faint traces of blood in the crevasses where tooth and gum met. My fingers tightened around the stolen blood. If I consumed it all, would I better understand the voices of the dead? Would I be able to distinguish d’Aurillac from the rest?

“Je suis Isaac Vainio,”
I whispered. Modern French might be too different for d’Aurillac to understand, but maybe he would at least recognize the language.
“Oú est Gerbert d’Aurillac?”

Nothing but confusion and fear. Latin might be a better choice, assuming these were true ghosts. I couldn’t even be certain I was communing with the afterlife. This could just as easily be a hallucination brought on by bad blood.

I thought back to Nicholas, the ghost-talker who had communicated with a murdered Porter earlier this year. Nicholas hadn’t spoken in English. But when he first made contact, he had described not the Porter’s words, but his emotions.

Ever since my “session” with Euphemia, I had been trying to wall away my fear. But perhaps fear would work where words failed. I opened those walls to all who might be listening, remembering the terror of a woman in bronze dragging me down into a world ruled by the dead.
“Meridiana is here.”

One voice grew louder, honed by despair and grief. I concentrated, separating him from the noise.
“Gerbert d’Aurillac?”

Wariness supplanted fear. He neither recognized nor trusted me, but at least he heard me. From him, I felt the pain of betrayal. His emotions carried flashes of thought and memory. Hopelessness showed me a teacher and scientist who found himself thrust instead into a world of politics. He had watched so many allies die or turn against him. His fears stemmed from those memories of betrayal: was I a man, or the Devil sent to tempt him?

For a moment, I saw his dreams. I saw a world in which science and magic and religion were one and the same, tools to better understand the mind of God. I saw him happily sketching out a clever poetic puzzle, or working with a friend to find the formula for calculating the area of a circle.

“Pi times radius squared,”
I said automatically, visualizing the equation in my head.

Fear vanished, replaced by joy and disbelief. Gerbert d’Aurillac, the man who had helped bring Arabic numerals to Europe, who had designed an abacus capable of near-infinite calculations, had never uncovered the concept of pi.

“Volume equals four-thirds pi times radius cubed,”
I said, sensing his next question.

Silent laughter followed. I felt his delight that humanity had mastered such knowledge and understanding of God’s most perfect shape. He pulled the value for pi from my thoughts and marveled at its mysteries.

This
was who Gerbert d’Aurillac had been. Not a politician, nor a master of dark magic as legend once painted him, but a man of learning and dreams. A man who had lived to see those dreams broken.

Gerbert had hoped to bring about the renaissance of the Holy Roman Empire, an empire built upon knowledge and wisdom and faith. Like him, Meridiana dreamed of an empire, but her ambitions were grander than anything Gerbert could have imagined.

I showed him what I could of my encounters with Meridiana. How she had first become aware of Jeneta Aboderin when I asked for Jeneta’s help in fighting off an infestation within Lena’s tree. I remembered Jeneta screaming in fear as darkness and death reached through her e-reader, devouring her magic and seeking to do the same to her.

I was the one who had brought Jeneta and her power to Meridiana’s attention.
“What is she?”
I asked.
“Where is the mask, the bronze head?”

Confusion. He knew of no mask.

“Who was Meridiana?”

The name conjured the image of a child, a little girl named Anna, twin sister to the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III. Gerbert’s memories carried fear and regret, even love.

“I don’t understand.”
I had read only a single reference to Otto III’s twin, a girl who had died before her first birthday.

Gerbert’s memories gave lie to the history. When Anna was born, the navel cord had encircled her throat like a noose. Her tiny body lay blue and dying, despite Gerbert’s prayers. When God’s mercy failed to save the child, he turned to magic.

Millennium-old guilt and regret made me stagger. Gerbert
knew
God had chosen to let Anna die, but in his arrogance, he had ignored God’s will. He conjured spirits from the air—
jinn
—and sent them into Anna’s lungs, forcing her to breathe. His power warmed her blood and restored life to her body.

Her spirit was another matter, one Gerbert wouldn’t discover for years to come.

Anna grew to be a plain child, smaller than her brother, with slurred speech that fooled many into thinking her dimwitted. But she was oh so clever. She often spoke to the shadows, preferring her imagined companions to family and playmates. I could feel Gerbert’s fondness for the girl he had saved, his joy at her childlike questions and unexpected insights.

Anna was raised in the background of her brother, all but invisible. By the time Otto III was crowned king of Germany at the age of three, Anna had begun to recite lines of age-old poetry or repeat seemingly-random phrases in Latin or Greek. Gerbert dismissed these things as signs of Anna’s eager mind and brilliant memory. He assumed she was merely mimicking what she had heard.

As the twins grew, Anna remained close to their mother Theophanu, who served as regent. Anna watched and whispered, sharing advice both keen and ruthless. In time, her quiet intensity and unnatural knowledge came to disturb even her mother. Anna’s demeanor was more that of an aged empress and scholar than a young girl. Knowing Gerbert’s skill in things magical, Theophanu begged him to help her daughter.

He began by preparing a detailed horoscope. Initially, he assumed he had made a mistake. He had misread a chart, or perhaps his algebra contained an error. Gerbert repeated his
calculations. When they returned the same results, he consulted with a former instructor in Spain, who confirmed his reading several months later.

Anna had been born a medium, able to commune with the dead. With her strength, she could have heard their voices alongside her mother’s while still in the womb.

Gerbert had brought Anna back from the dead on the day of her birth, but she hadn’t returned alone. She had clung instinctively to those that comforted her: not her living parents, but the spirits of her ancestors. Her horoscope revealed fragmented lives and histories, all of which Anna had incorporated into her own being. Her mind was a monstrous patchwork of life and death and power.

Gerbert tried to save her, to heal her scarred soul and pacify the dead. For a time, he thought he was succeeding.

Anna had absorbed the lessons of politics and empire. Watching her brother struggle to expand his kingdom, she came to believe herself better suited to rule. She had the power of her magic and the experience of the dead.

At the age of twelve, Otto led a campaign to retake the city of Brandenburg. Gerbert couldn’t be certain, but he thought it was this defeat that pushed Anna to begin laying the groundwork for the murder of her brother and her own ascension to power.

She began with Gerbert. In all of Rome, his magic was second only to Anna’s own. But to truly take advantage of Gerbert’s potential, he needed to be moved into a new role.

She began by stirring instability in the papacy, encouraging the tensions that resulted in the torture and removal of Pope John XVI, who later came to be known as antipope. His successor was Anna’s cousin Bruno of Carinthia, who sat as pope for only a year before disease—or poison—took him. With his death, young Anna cleared the way for her mentor to ascend to the papal throne.

But Gerbert had taken notice of her machinations. When confronted, she confided her plans to Gerbert, whom she had come to love as a father. She planned to make him the spiritual
leader of her empire. With Gerbert’s help, she would succeed where her brother and her ancestors had failed. Not only would she restore the Holy Roman Empire, she would unite Heaven and Earth, the living and the dead, and rule over both worlds as Empress Meridiana I.

I caught Gerbert’s bitter appreciation for the wordplay. “Meridiana,” from the Latin for midday, that moment when morning was left behind and the world began its journey toward nightfall. The beginning of the end.

“How did you stop her?”
I whispered.

When I saw what Gerbert had built, I could have wept. I had seen armillary spheres before, series of metal rings and bands designed to show the orbits of the planets and the positions of the stars, but this was a masterpiece.

A bronze model of the Earth sat at the center, affixed to a slender rod through the poles. A series of vertical and horizontal rings and bands gave the impression of a spherical cage. Curved rods held polished metal marbles representing the moon and five other planets.

Through his memories, I saw the working of the sphere, though I didn’t understand it all. I recognized the horizontal rings that represented circles of latitude. The flat band intersecting the equatorial ring was broken into the twelve signs of the zodiac. The armillary sphere could be adjusted to show the motion of the Earth and moon, the movement of the stars, or both.

He must have used magic to achieve that level of detail: etchings of the constellations so precise they appeared alive, fittings with less than a hair’s width between them. The whole thing was perhaps eighteen inches in diameter, and rested within a plain wooden cradle. A brass sighting tube jutted from the sphere like a drinking straw.

Gerbert lured Anna with news of an armillary sphere so perfect it could be enchanted to reveal the mind of God. They ventured outside, where he had aligned the sighting tube and brought his metal stars into symmetry with the Heavens.