Book 2, Chapter 39: Vis Maior

The Cardinal Primate’s papers had been scattered to the winds, along with her books, her pens, and pieces of her ceiling. Clara scrambled to the heavy desk for shelter, shielding her face from the debris whipping through the office. With a solid slab of mahogany between herself and Helena, Clara was spared the worst of the whirlwind, which gave her peace to process things. Though peace seems too generous a word for it.

She breathed.

Think, Casewell.

More cracks of white light appeared across the Pope’s containment sphere with every passing second.

There’s a massive ball of energy called Helena Rosewood being squeezed from all sides, and it’s going to explode.

Huh. Isn’t that just a pressure cooker, like the one in the reliquary? The Pope’s sphere is the lid keeping the pressure in, but there’s no valve that lets steam out.

Is there a way to engineer a controlled release? Maybe, but I’d need my—

Hang on.

Her gaze dropped to the debris beside her knee.

A broken arm of the chandelier—a curved length of solid gold, snapped at one end, with a sapphire at the other.

Since we’re going so hard on the technicalities today, this counts as a wand, right?

Clara took it. It was cold and much heftier than her wand, but she felt a familiar pull as soon as her fingers closed around the metal. I can do magic.

First things first, I’d rather not be thrown into a wall again. Bel had used something at the duel. What was it?

Clara pointed the golden arm at her feet, willing metaphorical roots to connect her soles to the floorboards.

“Stabili,” she chanted.

The sapphire responded, taking a sip of her energy, and the difference was instant. When she rose, her knees held firm, the world steady before her.

The Pope lifted her right eyebrow. “If you can cast, you can withdraw. You are of no use here.”

“With all due respect, Your Holiness, no.” Clara pushed forward one anchored step at a time. “You’re approaching this the wrong way. You’re trying to hold it in, right? Your chant was nihil egrediatur, nothing may leave, and that’s trapping the pressure and making it rise. You need to let it out somewhere.”

“And just where do you propose to pour a Saintess’s power?” The Pope’s ethereal face had begun to show the strain. “Mont Sainte-Michelle’s walls are impressive, but even they are not sturdy enough to withstand that.”

“The lake,” Clara answered. “Water is great at absorbing energy. Even a blast strong enough to bring down the abbey would do practically nothing to that much water.”

“The lake? You would have me attempt to aim it at such distances, when we are surrounded by the causeway and the village on the shore?”

“Not you, Your Holiness. Both of us, together.”

“Even if that were possible in principle, it is impossible tonight,” said the Pope. “It would take a multi-stage rite devised carefully by the Sacred Ministry and cast by a group of—”

“Why?”

The Pope looked at her. “That is the nature of the Sacred Tongue. One speaks the chant, and the world obeys, in the shape of the speaker’s will. Precision derives from power and visualization, and even mine has limits. To transfer this much energy, you would need a separate command for every step of the way from here to the lake, to make sure it does not disperse somewhere unintended or slip out of control.”

She’s thinking of it as a set of instructions. The first spell says go straight, then the next one says turn right, then turn left, and so on. But we could just give the address.

“What if there was a way to tell the spell exactly what it’s meant to do?” Clara asked.

“Your lack of magical education betrays you. The Sacred Tongue has no will of its own—it has no when, no if. Desine. Fiat lux. Sileant omnes. They are statements of action, not of purpose. To do what you describe, the magic would need to know not just its form but its own purpose, and that is not something we can convey. Scholars have been trying for centuries.”

The sphere in front of them cracked further. Helena’s light had grown so fierce that Clara could no longer see the girl’s face.

“You’re wrong, Your Holiness. The Sacred Tongue understands intent.”

“You—you would lecture me on the Sacred Tongue?”

“Not so much a lecture, just sharing aprecedent. It’s an advocate thing.” Clara smiled. “You must have seen Professor Morris’s transcription of Helena’s miracle. A part of the chant was ‘corruptio quae intravit, sicut,’ then later there was ‘ab initio fuerunt.’ Lady Helena said the chant came from the Goddess, so that proves She speaks with conditions and purpose. There’s no reason why we can’t, too.”

Beads of sweat gathered along the Pope’s hairline. For a few seconds, amidst the howling silver gale holding back the white flood, the most powerful woman in the world simply stared at Clara Casewell.

“How could you know what the Goddess’s words mean? If you are wrong, we will die.”

“If we die, we’ll die taking a leap of faith to save the first Saintess in hundreds of years. Isn’t that what the Goddess would want?”

“Hah. How strange to hear that argued at me.” The Pope smiled back. “Speak plainly, then. What sort of spell do you envision?”

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Clara’s heart was pounding, but she felt calm, like she did when it was Friday night and there was a multimillion-dollar deal hanging on her deliverable. If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s drafting under pressure.

“We’ll each chant a part of it. You’ll have to do the heavy lifting, since you’re much stronger than me. Start by opening a passage in the sphere and driving the flood through it.” Clara was already assembling clauses in her head, weighing the impact of different verbs. “Then I’ll do the fine print, guiding the release from the passage so that it can’t go anywhere else, out through the window slit and—”

“The slit? That is not wide enough for a Saintess’s flood, no matter how finely we thread it.” The Pope adjusted her hand to the left, and her diamond flared brighter. “Frangatur paries.”

The back wall of the Cardinal Primate’s office burst open, its stones sent flying high over the rooftops.

Well, that does make it easier to aim.

“Right. Then the next part is opening the sphere. Something like ‘Aperiatur sphaera’.”

“That is imprecise,” said the Pope, breathing hard between words. “A passage and an opening are not the same thing. ‘Aperiatur sphaera in unicam viam’.”

“That’s good,” Clara agreed. “And with the passage open, we can push the energy: ‘Fluat vis per viam’. Let the force flow through the path. And we give it a purpose by using ‘ut’. ‘Ut in lacum effundatur’. ‘So that it pours into the lake’.”

“‘Ut’. I have never heard that term in any incantation. What does it do?”

“You have heard it, Your Holiness. The Goddess used sicut, which is sic and ut joined together. All we’re doing is isolating the relevant conjunction. Ut doesn’t do anything by itself, it’s not a verb, but it conveys intent to the clause that comes after. That’s why it takes the subjunctive, and we use effundatur instead of effunditur, because otherwise we’d be describing something that is already pouring into the lake, instead of instructing it to, and the same reasoning goes the other way for the indicative, because—”

The Pope’s arm wavered, and Clara cut herself off.

“Sorry. My point is, we can use ‘ut in lacum effundatur’ to guide the force where we want it to go.”

The Pope hesitated, then nodded. “You may explain the rest to me afterward, should there be an afterward.” Then she repeated the words, testing them. “‘Fluat vis per viam, ut in lacum effundatur’. You use vis to pull a force, but there are two forces raging in this room: the child’s and mine. How will you ensure it does not target my sphere instead of the Saintess’s power?”

“Good point, we’ll need to specify it.” Clara scoured the back of her mind for Latin lectures, her Cicero and her De Bello Gallico. “We can use a relative clause for that. ‘Fluat per viam vis quae intus furit,’ ‘the force which rages within’.”

The gale screamed as the cracks across the sphere spread. We’re running out of time.

“There’s something else,” Clara added. “We’re binding the force and aiming at the lake, but there’s nothing saying what it may not touch on the way down. If even a fraction of it scatters to the village, we could end up hurting innocents.”

“Then fix that. That is what your conditions are for, are they not?” Sweat ran freely down the Pope’s forehead now, the silver light of her sphere dimming against the sun it contained.

Clara nodded. “We can try ‘Et nihil nisi lacum tangat’. ‘And let it touch nothing but the lake’.” She paused, thinking through it carefully to make sure she didn’t miss anything. “But that only covers the way down, not the landing. If we drop that much force into the water at once, it could throw up a wave and drown the village and the people who are trying to evacuate across the causeway.”

The Pope’s laugh was little more than an exhale. “That is not a concern. The causeway has been kept dry twice a day for centuries. Whatever the lake sends back at us, the tide priests will hold. That much you need not worry about.”

“In that case, we should have everything we need. You’ll chant first, going all the way to furit, and I will start at ut when you finish, so that our two spells—”

“Do not view them as two spells,” the Pope cut in. “You are thinking like a mage, a solitary caster who bends magic as power. But the Church does not sing alone. Our liturgy, our versicles and responses, they are not mere ceremony—there is power in rites. The Tongue was first wielded by twelve women, not one.”

The Pope caught her breath before continuing.

“You must think of it as one incantation in two voices, a harmonious chorus. Where my verse ends, yours begins, but the melody is one. Do not hesitate—if our chants do not weave together, the child’s power will break free. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Your Holiness.” Clara tightened her grip on the chandelier’s arm, and a splinter from the wreckage, caught between her hand and the metal, went deep into her palm. She bit down on her tongue and pushed through. “One last thing. What do you think we should visualize? I’ve only ever pictured a command. I’m not sure what a purpose looks like.”

“You are asking me? You invented it.” The Pope’s half-smile turned into a smirk. “If I were to speculate, I would suggest we hold the image the same way we structured the chant. Do not see the path, only the destination.”

Clara crossed the room, planting her feet between Helena and the blown-out wall. Close as she was to the precipice, if she dropped the stabili for even a second, she’d be flung into the sky. There was a knot in her stomach as she reinforced the spell.

“I’m ready when you are, Your Holiness.”

The Pope didn’t answer immediately. Her raised hand was shaking harder now, and she brought her other hand to her wrist to hold it still.

“Aperiatur sphaera in unicam viam,” the Pope began.

Clara echoed it in her mind. One incantation, two voices.

Across the blazing surface of the sphere, the web of white cracks moved, converging on a single point that faced the night sky.

“Fluat per viam vis quae intus furit—”

“—ut in lacum effundatur,” Clara followed, riding the tail of the Pope’s words, “et nihil nisi lacum tangat!”

Let the sphere be opened into a single path. Let the force which rages within flow through the path, so that it pours into the lake, and let it touch nothing but the lake!

Clara shut her eyes. In the darkness, she built Lake Elowen, the massive body of water created by the first Saintess. Clara instantly understood why the Pope had suggested doing it like this—if she allowed herself to even glimpse the causeway or the village, she might accidentally direct the spell there.

Instead, Clara pictured the lake’s boundaries from a bird’s-eye view, from the shores of Mont Sainte-Michelle to Leofric’s cottage to the mouth of the river connecting it to Elowensport. She held the deep black water at full tide, the mighty mass that had quenched the fires of the Cataclysm once, if Anchieta’s stories were true.

Water that could swallow anything.

Everything into the water.

Nothing but the water.

The office fell silent.

Helena’s flood entered the path, and Clara reached out for it. It rushed into her as if she were a conduit, and she held the shaking chandelier arm with both hands, the sapphire at its end shining pure white.

The pressure that had been crushing the room surged through, letting out a sharp whistle.

Clara opened her eyes.

A radiant column arced out of the Cardinal Primate’s office, climbing high past the towers of Mont Sainte-Michelle into the night sky.

Out in the open air, Helena’s light didn’t seem like the harsh blaze that had nearly devoured the office. It was a tranquil stream, dazzling white at its core, fading at the seams like the luminous tail of a comet.

The abbey below turned silver as the comet crested above the tallest spire. The lake’s mist drank the glow, and the whole island seemed to float on a glimmering sea.

It was like nothing Clara had ever seen.

The comet cleared the abbey’s walls, flowing far from the causeway and the village, where all of Mont Sainte-Michelle’s clergy stood with their faces turned up. In a ripple that ran outward from the shore, hundreds of men and women fell to their knees in prayer, illuminated by the celestial bloom.

Then the comet descended into the tide, falling in a long bow until it met its own reflection.