The Spirit Lens by Carol Berg

precaution against a contaminating poison or a lingering spell-trap. With a mage implicated, Vernase-Ruggiere chose not to call in a practitioner to examine the arrow.”
    “But you’ve looked at it.”
    “I detect no extant enchantment, only a strong magical residue. But I’ve no skill to analyze it.”
    He took no note of my admission. “I’d guess the aristo lackwit had the assassin-mule’s corpse burnt, as well.”
    “They could not allow word to get out.” A hint that an unknown mage was practicing blood transference would send blood families running to their fortresses, unraveling two centuries of concord between factions. “The conte immediately arrested the guard captain, for on any other exercise day, the king would not have shed his armor before leaving the practice field. And there the problem becomes infinitely more complex.”
    The mage glanced up at me, sharp-eyed. “Could it be the queen set the captain to propose the grapple?”
    No longer amazed at his quickness, I nodded. “There is a history of strain between our liege and his wife—their marriage when she was widowed so young, her failure to birth a living heir since their first boy died, disagreements over the role of sorcery in their aligned households, and more, I think, that he did not tell me. His own counselors have long pressured him to set her aside. Yet he holds determined faith in her innocence and would not . . . and will not . . . have her questioned.”
    “So what is the coin?”
    “Likely nothing,” I said, “though you’ll see it is a double strike. Some people consider a two-faced coin lucky. The conte found it in the mule’s jerkin, the sole item he carried. I sensed no enchantment on it, yet—” I could not explain the sensation that had come over me when I’d first held the coin. It was as if I’d been thrown into a plummeting waterfall and emerged to the nauseating certainty that my body had been turned wrong side out or hung up by my feet, and all the blood rushed to my head. “There is a strangeness about it.”
    “The noble investigator has no theories?”
    And so to the next element of the mystery. “A month after the attempt, Michel de Vernase wrote a letter to the king stating he’d found new evidence and hoped to have a solid case before too many more days passed. He said he planned ‘a second visit to Collegia Seravain.’ No one has seen or heard from him since.”
    “Mayhap he found the villain he was hunting.” Dante’s attention shifted to the spyglass. “And this?”
    I swallowed hard and glared at the instrument, its tarnished surface gleaming dully in the light. It seemed wrong that such a fine invention, a marvel not so many years ago, could so strike my heart with dread.
    “Naught is known of its origin or purpose. But when you sight through it, you’ll understand why our dilemma is so much more than marital disaffection, more even than the revival of such evil practice as blood transference. And you’ll see why we need a talented mage to help unravel this mystery.” The memory of my own looking made me wish to creep into a cave and hide.
    Dante drew his fingers along the artifact’s tarnished case and around each of its knurled grips. He brushed dust and damp from the lenses, and while bracing it awkwardly with his scarred right fingers, he examined its construction, expanding and collapsing its length and twisting the grips.
    “This was not expertly made,” he said. “Its mechanisms are unbalanced, its material impure.” He glanced up. “This takes no magic to learn, if you’re wondering, but only the teaching of a skilled instrument maker. But the making shapes its keirna, and it’s nae possible to comprehend keirna without understanding function and composition.”
    Stepping back from the light, he balanced the brass instrument in the claw of his ruined hand and peered through the eyepiece. The color drained from his cheeks as it surely had from mine. He set the instrument