DemonWars Saga Volume 2: Mortalis - Ascendance - Transcendence - Immortalis (The DemonWars Saga) (126 page)

Constance stared at him hard, but she did nod.

“None,” he said definitively. “And when he returns, you must return to the normal, and safe, dosage. No more than that. Do you hear?”

Constance’s lips grew very thin again, but she grudgingly nodded her agreement.

She left St. Honce then, her mind whirling with plans and plots and—mostly—with anger. For it was no longer simply a matter of keeping Jilseponie barren, as she claimed to Abbot Ohwan. No, Constance had come to enjoy seeing the woman wince in pain, had enjoyed hearing the reports that King Danube wasn’t sharing her bed of late—wasn’t even sleeping in the same room. She had allowed herself to entertain fantasies that her plan would drive Danube and Jilseponie apart, that the lustful King, after too long without the softness of a woman, would come back to her.

And if Jilseponie died in this process, then all the better.

“But no,” she whispered to herself as she crossed the small courtyard that led to the castle. “I mustn’t be impatient. No, I must follow Abbot Ohwan’s rules. Yes, I will.”

Nodding and grinning, Constance passed between the two lurking, expressionless guardsmen.

As she entered the castle behind them, they glanced at each other and grinned knowingly—for Constance Pemblebury’s behavior of late had elicited more than a few smiles—each shaking his head as they resumed their stoic expressions.

Chapter 21
 

“Y
OU ARE CERTAIN OF THIS
?” M
ARCALO
D
E
’U
NNERO ASKED
,
TRYING HARD AND
futilely to keep the excitement from showing on his weathered face.

Sadye’s brown eyes twinkled mischievously.

“How do you confirm …” De’Unnero started to ask, but he stopped short and waved his hand, knowing better than to doubt his clever companion. If Sadye said that the sword and bow of Nightbird, the great Tempest and Hawkwing, were buried side by side in cairns just outside Dundalis, then Marcalo De’Unnero would accept her claim as fact.

“It may be guarded,” the former monk reasoned.

“The grove is outside the village, and few travel there—particularly now, since Jilseponie sits on her throne, and Roger Lockless haunts Palmaris,” Sadye replied. “Beyond those two, few care enough to bother, I would guess. We are far removed from the days of heroics.”

De’Unnero smiled, but there was a sadness in that smile, a regret that all the momentous events of just a dozen or so years before, including those heroics of Elbryan the Nightbird, could be so readily and easily forgotten. Sadye spoke the truth, though, he had to admit. Those years of turmoil before the plague had all but been erased, aside from ceremonial tributes—De’Unnero had heard of the impending canonization of Avelyn Desbris—and the resulting gains for the victors, as evidenced by the mantles of bishop on Braumin Herde and queen upon the shoulders of Jilseponie.

So much had happened in the years he had been running wild along the frontier of Wester-Honce! In truth, De’Unnero didn’t really care about Jilseponie’s ascension, other than the implications it might hold for his young companion; nor was he much bothered by Braumin Herde’s ascent. Herde was a good, if misguided, man, De’Unnero knew; and while, in De’Unnero’s eyes, he was nowhere near possessed of the willpower and charisma of a proper bishop—his demeanor more suited to leading a small chapel somewhere—his rise to bishop of Palmaris was of little concern to the former monk.

Of most concern was the general direction of the Church, the news that Jilseponie was serving as a sovereign sister as well as queen, and the news that Fio Bou-raiy, a man Marcalo De’Unnero hated profoundly, was now the father abbot of the Abellican Church. These were truths that now gnawed at Marcalo De’Unnero. But in reality, even being able to care about such things again had come as a breath of fresh air to the beleaguered man. For so many years, he had been compelled to think about the basic needs of existence, of how he would eat and where he would sleep. But now he had Sadye, dear Sadye, and Aydrian, who could not only
divert the weretiger, as Sadye could do, who could not only bring forth the weretiger, as Sadye could do, but who could also find the spark of humanity beneath the feline exterior, reaching Marcalo De’Unnero and helping him to dismiss the beast. Because of Aydrian, Marcalo De’Unnero could live in Palmaris again, could walk right by the oblivious Roger Lockless on the street, as had happened several times, without fear that the beast would come forth. Because of Aydrian, Marcalo De’Unnero could stop worrying about the basic needs of life and could start concentrating on the more important aspects of truly living. The world was again full of possibilities for him.

Along those lines of thinking, he had planned to leave Palmaris with his two friends to begin the boldest move yet, a journey that would take him all across the southern reaches of the kingdom to distant Entel and, if everything went well there, far, far beyond.

But now this information concerning the sword and bow of Nightbird …

“It is two weeks to Caer Tinella, and two to Dundalis beyond that,” he said, as much thinking out loud as informing Sadye of anything. “And if we dare to travel to the north and get stuck there when the first snows fall, we’ll not be able to head for the southern reaches until late next spring. We could lose a year on this chase.”

“Worth it?” Sadye asked, her tone showing that she considered these prizes well worth the journey.

De’Unnero smiled. “Let the boy find his father’s toys. We may find a way to put them to good use.”

He could only hope that no grave robbers had garnered the information. How angry he would be to travel all the way to that frontier town to find the graves already emptied!

D
e’Unnero, Sadye, and Aydrian came to a hillock outside Caer Tinella on a cold and windy autumn day, a day much like the one that had seen the dedication of the chapel that now dominated Marcalo De’Unnero’s line of sight and line of thinking.

That whitewashed building—small by the standards of the Abellican abbeys but huge compared to the other buildings of the small town—sat on a hill, making it appear all the larger. Rising above it, atop the small steeple, was a statue of an arm, an upraised fist—one that Marcalo De’Unnero recognized. He had seen the original arm, the arm of Avelyn, petrified on a plateau hundreds of miles to the north. How he remembered that man! The fallen brother; the murderer of Siherton the monk; in effect, the man who had brought about the disaster that was now the Abellican Church. When people thought of Marcalo De’Unnero, they usually spoke of him as a rival of Nightbird and of Jilseponie, but, in truth, De’Unnero held some respect for both of those two. They were worthy. Not Avelyn, though. Avelyn was the man Marcalo De’Unnero had truly hated. In De’Unnero’s eyes, the drunken wretch was undeserving of the legend surrounding him, and to see a chapel dedicated to the man standing so prominently on a hill in the growing
community of Caer Tinella was nearly more than De’Unnero could tolerate.

“You knew that they would acclaim him as a hero,” Sadye said to him, easily seeing the disdain and despair on his face. “They name him as the one who saved the world from the rosy plague, as well as the man who destroyed the physical manifestation of Bestesbulzibar. You know they are beatifying him; we have even heard that he will be named saint by the end of the year. Is this chapel such a surprise to you, truly?”

“Whether or not it is a surprise has little bearing on my hatred of the place,” De’Unnero retorted.

“Why would you care?” Aydrian dared to put in. “You have divorced yourself from the Church, so you say. Take this as just another example of why you felt compelled to leave. Let it prove the point you constantly make of their endless string of errors.”

De’Unnero’s hand snapped out to grab the young man by the front of his tunic. “So I say?” he asked angrily. “Are you questioning me?”

Sadye was there in an instant, easing De’Unnero’s hand away, staring at De’Unnero and forcing him to look back at her rather than continue to foolishly challenge Aydrian. “I know why you care, but he does not,” she reminded. “You have told him little of your—of our—plans.”

De’Unnero relaxed and nodded. “The sight of that place offends me,” he said calmly to Aydrian. “It is a symbol of all that is wrong with the formerly great Abellican Church. It is a testament to the man who destroyed all that once was.”

“Obviously, the current leaders of the Church do not agree,” Aydrian said, showing no signs of backing down.

“Leaders,” De’Unnero echoed with obvious scorn. “They are Falidean rats, all,” he scoffed, referring to a rodent indigenous to the southern reaches of the Mantis Arm, notable because thousands often followed a single misguided individual onto the mud of Falidean Bay, where the sudden and devastating tide, the greatest tide in all the world, inevitably washed them out to sea and drowned them.

“And there,” De’Unnero continued, dramatically sweeping his arm out toward the chapel, “there, young Aydrian, is your proof!”

He grumbled and growled and swept his hand down, balling it into a fist and smacking it hard against the side of his leg, seeming on the verge of an explosion.

“It will not stand,” De’Unnero declared.

Lute in hand, Sadye put her free hand on De’Unnero’s shoulder, and she relaxed visibly as the tension flowed out of De’Unnero’s body.

“It will not stand,” the former monk said again, this time quietly and in complete control.

Sadye wore a concerned expression, but Aydrian merely smiled.

I
t wasn’t hard for Aydrian to figure out where his monk companion was, when he awoke in the middle of the night to find De’Unnero gone from their encampment in the forest outside Caer Tinella. He grabbed his sword and his pouch of
gemstones and, after checking on Sadye, who was sound asleep, slipped out into the night.

He entered Caer Tinella quietly, moving from shadow to shadow, though there seemed to be no one about. When he reached the base of the hill, he noted a small candle burning inside the chapel.

He crept up and peered in through a window. There stood Marcalo De’Unnero, across from a large man who seemed to be in his late twenties or early thirties. Seeing the stranger with De’Unnero again reminded Aydrian of how young his companion seemed compared to his professed age of a half century, for in looking at the pair, Aydrian could envision them as peers.

It occurred to Aydrian, and not for the first time, that there may be a secret of immortality buried within the weretiger.

The two were talking calmly, though Aydrian couldn’t make out the words from his vantage point. He crept around the building and was relieved to find the door slightly ajar, so he slipped in and moved behind a column, listening curiously.

“Are you then the same Brother Anders Castinagis who was taken prisoner at the Barbacan and dragged to Palmaris to stand trial beside the one called Nightbird?” De’Unnero asked, and Aydrian noted the disdain in his tone, a clear tip-off to the other man.

“I am indeed,” the other man said, a bit of suspicion evident. Aydrian peeked around and could see the monk’s face, and noted that he was studying De’Unnero intently, as if trying to figure out where he might have seen the man before. De’Unnero had remarked to Aydrian how much the years on the road had changed his appearance, and this, combined with the fact that he and the former monk had walked right past several of De’Unnero’s old enemies in Palmaris without any hint of recognition, confirmed the man’s claims. “I am Parson Castinagis now, for Bishop Braumin has seen fit to bestow upon me the responsibilities of this chapel.”

“Ah,” said De’Unnero, and then in a casual tone, he added, “Bishop Braumin was ever the fool.”

That set the parson back on his heels, a confused expression coming over him.

“Did you believe that I would suddenly embrace Bishop—” De’Unnero snorted and shook his head, as if he thought the title ridiculous, then continued. “Did you believe that I would suddenly embrace Braumin Herde at all, after all these years? Will the passage of time alone change the truths?”

“Who are you?” Castinagis asked, his hesitance telling Aydrian that he was starting to catch on here.

“Why did you not stand trial those years ago?” De’Unnero asked him. “Do you believe that the simple fact that because Nightbird and Jilseponie proved the stronger exonerates you from the crimes you committed against the Abellican Church?”

“What foolishness is this?” the man asked, his voice rising with his outrage.

“Foolishness?” De’Unnero echoed incredulously. “Do you not recall your secret meetings in the bowels of St.-Mere-Abelle, where you and the others plotted treason against the Church? Do you not remember the illicit readings of the old
books—tomes banned, all!—that Braumin would lead?”

“De’Unnero,” Castinagis breathed, and he fell back a step.

“Yes, De’Unnero,” the former monk answered. “Master De’Unnero, come to complete the trial that was wrongfully aborted in Palmaris those years ago.”

“You are d-discredited,” Castinagis stammered. “The Church has seen the truth—”