Flesh and Spirit (25 page)

Everything took too long. The seeds were old and tough; I chipped another shard from my precious mirror fragment, using it to crush them on the stone. My fingers were cold and clumsy. I dropped the needle and had to scrabble on the stone floor to find it. It was near impossible to grasp the linen thread, and when at last the mixture of blood and nivat sizzled, I had to fumble with the glass to find an angle where I could see the vapors.

As soon as I released magic into the brew, I knew I hadn't enough. Holy gods, what a fool I'd been. To spend my magic so recklessly on Luviar's game. To lose count of the days. Bent over the trough to hold the mirror and the thread steady, my back, leg, and shoulders cramping until I was near weeping, I squeezed the last magic from my body and let it flow down the linen thread. And still the vapors would not cease their rising and signal the doulon ready.

As if taking voice from my fears, the bell pealed. I held my breath with the first tone, yet my weariness told the lateness of the hour. The next strike came and the next, until the ten measured strikes that signaled the call to services had been completed. The noise threatened to burst my ears, as if I stood in the bell chamber itself. Then rang the triple change, double, and triple that announced the beginning of a new day. The yawning monks would be donning gowns and cowls and sandals and starting their procession through the passage to the nightstair. And still the pungent vapors rose from the boiling nivat. The finished paste should hold no scent.

In the dorter passage above my head, the monks began to sing, tugging at my spirit with their music.
Their
music. Not mine.

I could wait no longer. I scooped the red-black droplets onto my tongue. As I braced my hands on the trough, my head dropped to hang between my shoulders. The first shuddering pain rolled through me…

Not enough. Not enough.
Sobbing, I slammed my elbow into the stone trough, hoping more pain might jolt the spell into completion. Nothing. Again. Again…

As in famine times, when the crust of bread or sip of ale blunts the most acute hunger, but leaves the want and sickness, such was the incomplete doulon. The fire cooled; the cramps eased; the storm of my senses quieted. But I gained no release. No rapture. Every muscle and sinew ached. My veins felt clogged with clay. Only a few days—a fortnight at most—and I would have to do this all again, spend my reserve of nivat because I'd been shamed at my ignorance and determined to prove that I, the most useless of men, could accomplish what some proud lord could not. Now I would pay.

Exhausted and sick, I splashed the cold water onto my face and head, scrubbed at my hands and arms.
Hurry!
I packed away the needle, the mirror, and linen thread and tied the bag's drawstring to the waist string of my trews. Then I threw on my cowl and ran for the church, brushing at the caked mud and dirt as I ran. As the procession descended the nightstair and entered the church, filling the vaults with songs of the Creator's glory, I flew down the aisle and through the choir screen, and threw myself prostrate on the cold marble. Brother Victor had not moved.

A
storm rolled through the valley sometime between Lauds and Prime, bringing sleet and bitter cold—a miserable morning, highly appropriate for a day that had begun so wretchedly and got only worse. A few hours' sleep had healed my bruises and blisters and soothed my torn and battered elbow, but done nothing for the doulon sickness. Plagued by both the indolence the spell always caused and the blood fever it had only dulled, I fell asleep in choir during both morning Hours.

Brother Sebastian pulled me aside after Prime to scold me for inattention, expressing shock at my bedraggled clothes. He dragged me to the lavatorium to clean them as best I could, and then sentenced me to kneel in the center aisle of the dorter clad only in shirt and trews. I was to pray and contemplate Iero's gift of clothing while the rest of the brothers ate their bread and cheese and attended morning services. By the time he permitted me to don my damp gown and cowl for chapter, my blood felt like slush.

Matters worsened. Once my mentor had chastised me in front of the entire brotherhood, Prior Nemesio offered his own scathing reprimand and decided that my punishment should continue until the day's end bell. No church services. No meals. No work or study. No gown or cowl. That this also meant no testing on the great virtues and no Compline reading was scarcely a comfort.

A somber Abbot Luviar approved the sentence. Brother Gildas raised his brows and shrugged ever so slightly. Jullian, sitting on his low stool by the door, would not look at me. I longed to strangle them all, though, in truth, anger was as difficult to muster as anything else.

The hours in the dorter passed in frigid misery. I tried to think, to make some sense of my experiences of the previous day, to sing under my breath, to plan where I would go when spring released me from this tomb. Sleep was impossible, but neither would my blood run anywhere useful like my head or my knees. So much for trust. Perhaps Luviar wanted me dead of frostbite so I could not betray his friends.

How stupid could a man get when his balls ruled his head? Why hadn't I just grabbed the book when it was in my hands and set out for Elanus? But instead I'd had to strut my manhood like a gamecock.

I shifted my knees, wincing with the ache.
Damnable baldpates
. Boreas had been right about them.
Boreas…by the dark spirits…

Once the gruesome image of his end took hold of my head, I could not shake it. What kind of woman could do such work? What kind of perverse soul could name it holy? As the memory churned inside my head alongside the night's mad adventure and the bizarre sensations I had experienced at the pool, I could not but recall Brother Horach's equally savage murder. Could a Harrower have decided that innocents should die as well as sinners and sneaked into the abbey to work their deviltry? With orange-heads roaming the neighborhood, it could happen again.

Brother Sebastian visited me at least once an hour to counsel and preach. On the next occasion, I interrupted a sermon on rooting out the vice of carelessness and tried to explain about Boreas and Harrower rites and Brother Horach. I had scarce begun when he stopped me, insisting I must refrain from worldly thoughts for the duration of my penance. As he left me alone again, I damned him and the rest of his fraternity to their fate.

By the time the bells rang Vespers, wind raked and rattled the dorter shutters and raced through the long room. Three more hours. I feared I would be unable to move when day's end came, either from hunger or freezing. On his last visit Brother Sebastian had left a rushlight to hold off the dark. With aching knees and back, and incipient chilblains, I had no gratitude in me.

A quiet rustling at my back did not even prompt me to turn around. Probably Brother Sebastian again to tell me how sorry he was that I needed this kind of lesson. But to my surprise a mug appeared in front of my face, wreathed in steam and cupped in the small dry hand of Brother Victor. “Quickly, Brother Valen, you are wanted elsewhere for a little while.”

I would like to have said that, although hell would be a pleasant change, I would prefer to freeze than dance to his abbot's command, but my lips were so numb I was saved from such an indiscretion. My trembling hands wrapped around the deliciously warm cup, and I drained the thing without taking a breath. “I don't think I can do anything quickly, Brother Chancellor.”

He offered me the pile of black wool he carried over one arm. “I would suggest you try. We've only until the end of Vespers.”

The still-damp wool felt marvelous. And blessed hose to cover my legs. My numb fingers fumbled with ties and laces. Soon I was following Brother Victor down the passage, shaking out my legs to get the blood flowing.

Our sandals echoed in the deserted library. I could not imagine why we'd come. “Wait here,” said Brother Victor, and he disappeared into the corner beyond the last book press. The wind drove sleet against the window mullions. Ardran autumn usually waxed dry and golden. Landlords and villeins alike would be frantic to gather in what crops had ripened in this perverse season. Perhaps the bowl of the sky had slipped farther out of place.

A brief explosion of yellow light, brighter than ten lamps together, assaulted my eyes. A hiss and a snap, and the chancellor stepped into view again, little more than a shadow in my flash blindness. He beckoned me to join him. In the corner where I had ever seen blank walls—the same corner where Abbot Luviar had appeared so suddenly on my first visit—a doorway now opened onto a descending stair. From a hook on the wall, just inside it, the chancellor took a burning lamp. Or rather the implement he held appeared to be a lamp, and it appeared to be burning, though only cream-colored light, no flame, shone through its clear panes.
Blessed saints and angels…
Sorcery. In a house where magic working was forbidden. My feet dragged.

“Come on,” said the chancellor as I hesitated, beset by visions of dungeons and flaming depths.

“This isn't where the hierarch sent you? To be punished?”

He puzzled for a moment. “Oh. The prison cell? Certainly not. Why would I take you there?”

“To improve my character?” I mumbled.

He didn't smile.

We descended two long flights of steps, which by my reckoning left us deep in the earth under the scriptorium. My throat tightened. I reminded myself of Brother Victor's
only until the end of Vespers
to convince myself that I could breathe in such a confined space. So deep.

Brother Victor halted when we reached a wide door at the bottom of the steps. Intelligent, inscrutable, he peered up at my face. “Father Abbot says he trusts you. That must certainly be true, as he commanded me to show you this without informing others of our party who have less confidence in your usefulness and character. I take no sides in that dispute as I've so little personal experience of you. I obey my abbot. But I'll warn you that no one will find the doorway or this stair were you to tell of them.”

“I understand.” Perhaps the opening was hidden by an illusion spell, but I'd wager that an ax applied to the library wall would find the stair.

He pushed open the door and held it to let me enter.

“Blessed saints and angels!” My feet propelled me to the center of a chamber half the size of the church. There I spun like the axis of a wheel, my neck craned so I could view the dome of light above my head. Great ribbed arches of gray stone supported curved wedges of colored mosaic—brilliant, though, as if the bits were glass. Yet I had never seen glass laid in such a shape. And though I stood deep below the earth, the mosaic of light shone as bright as if the sun lay tucked between the dome and the scriptorium floor above it, casting a gentle clarity on the marvels that lay below. For the dome was but the magical capstone on more earthly wonders.

Books, first. The walls of the rectangular chamber, three or four times my height, were lined with shelves, not full, but holding more books and scrolls than I would have believed existed in all the world. Yet this library held much more than books. Ranks of tall cabinets lined the floor with only narrow aisles between. These cabinets, faced with grillwork doors very like the cupboards in the library, held tools—here the needles, spools, thimble, and scissors of a seamstress, there the common hammers, chisels, augers, and gouges of a stonemason. An entire cabinet was filled with a carpenter's tools, another with a physician's instruments. None of the individual items seemed extraordinary. Most appeared well used, though clean or oiled and generally well cared for.

I moved faster through the array, fascinated more by the breadth of the collection than the items themselves. Two doorways opened off the great chamber, one a mere closet, lit by the spilled light of the glass dome. A rope bed, piled with a rolled palliasse and folded blankets, and an old writing desk had been shoved up against stacked barrels and crates.

But the other, much wider doorway opened into a second domed chamber as large and beautiful as the first. By this time I was scarcely surprised to see a plow, a wheel and axle from a cart, millstones, a lathe, a loom, a potter's wheel, and other, larger artifacts standing in neat rows on the floor. On the shelves that lined the walls from floor to ceiling, sat row after row of labeled sacks, earthenware pots, and glass jars. What would they hold? Food? Herbs? Potions?

No…the tools were for building and making and creating. The books would be for knowledge and understanding. For remembering. For beginning. The pots would hold seeds.

I turned back. From across the chamber by the outer door, Brother Victor watched with sober interest, his hands loosely folded at his waist.

Some of the pieces came together then. Luviar's grand mosaic of war and famine and storm. The books on glassmaking, and drawings of millworks, and records of vineyards that no longer produced grapes. Were cuttings of grapevines preserved in these bags or jars? Surely those who could create domes of light and a door that opened with magic so powerful it stood my hair on end could preserve a living vine.
Teneamus—
we preserve. For the dark times. For the long night.

I gazed up at the shining dome, majestic in its beauty and magic. A promise of hope. “You call this the lighthouse,” I said.

The chancellor dipped his head in acknowledgment.

What was happening to the world? How did they know? What was the connection with my book of maps? I could not even choose where to begin.

“Come. Vespers will be ending soon.”

“But I've so much to ask.”

“In time, Brother Novice. Should you prove faithful, you'll be told all. For now, I pray you be worthy of Father Abbot's trust.”

“Of course. Certainly. I won't say anything. Not to a soul.” Who would believe me?

Before I knew it, I was kneeling in the dorter again, shivering in shirt and trews. Save for the taste of leek broth in my mouth and the vision of light in my head, I might have thought the grand library a dream brought on by hunger and cold and a broken doulon. Nothing in my experience or imagination could have conjured such a place.

I dismissed my pique at the monks' annoying discipline and spent the next two hours formulating questions to ask were I given the opportunity. I speculated on how the magic of the lighthouse was done and who in this place might have done it—the mysterious pureblood monk?—and I considered what I would have chosen to preserve were I stocking a magical lighthouse to sustain me beyond the end of the world.

I was almost sorry when the day's end bell rang and good Brother Sebastian laid a blessing of forgiveness on my head and a blanket on my shoulders. Almost. As I hobbled off to bed, I thought my knees might gleam blue and purple in the dark—as tales described the enchanted sigils of the Danae when they walked the wild places of the world.

“All right, it was
Father Abbot's
little surprise got me near dead from suffocation, not yours. But my skull will surely crack if you don't relieve some of my curiosity.”

Jullian and I had met in the hedge garden after supper on the day following my long punishment. Though the maze still had me twitching at every noise, expecting grain sacks to be dropped on my head, it was the only place we could talk for any length of time. My Compline reading had been reset for this night, and gods bless the boy forever, he had fulfilled his promise to read it to me. Now, as we lingered in the gathering dark, I was trying to nudge the boy into some further revelation of Luviar's conspiracy without breaking my promise. My immortal soul could not afford the burden of an abbot's wrath. Sadly, I was having no luck at all.

“I'm sworn, Brother. Please, don't ask me. I can say only that the abbey is neutral ground.”

So earnest in his honor. If he knew that I'd spent the time before his arrival stuffing my last supply of nivat into the parcel under Karus's statue, he would run from me like one of these plaguey rabbits. Had these conspirators stored nivat in their lighthouse? The sudden thought cheered me past the point of sense. If I could only ensure a supply, I could stop thinking about this damnable curse altogether. I'd just have to discover how to get into the place.

“Tell me more of Palinur,” said Jullian, reverting to his favorite topic of conversation. “I can't imagine such a grand city. Are there truly statues of every one of the Hundred Heroes set before the king's palace? Though I know Grossartius is but legend, because Iero sends our souls to heaven or hell and not back to mortal bodies, he is my favorite of the Hundred. Is he quite large and well muscled? I've always imagined him bigger than Brother Robierre and taller even than you.”