Hawkwood and the Kings: The Collected Monarchies of God (Volume One) (96 page)

"You sleep in a dormitory, Avila. Won't your colleagues notice?"

"There is a bolster under my blankets doing service as a sleeping monk, and I stole out as quiet as a mouse. But I'll not be so quiet returning. Damnation!"

"You can't go back. You must come to my cell. We'll get some things together and hole up somewhere tomorrow - or today, as I suppose it must be - and leave tomorrow night."

Avila was gasping in short, agonizing pants. "I fear I will not be a swift traveller, my little Antillian comrade. Albrec, must we leave? Is there no way we can brazen it out?"

The decision had been made, but it terrified both of them. It would be so much easier to go on as if nothing had happened, to step back into the ancient routine of the monastery-city. Albrec might have done it, the inertia of fear tying him to the only life he had known. But Avila had painted things too clearly. The Antillian knew that their lives had changed without hope of recovery. They had stepped beyond the Church and were on the outside, looking in.

"Come," Albrec said, trying not to move his neck. "We've a lot to do before dawn. This thing has been thrust on us as Honorius's visions were thrust upon him, that poor, mad seeker after the truth, God has given us a burden as heavy as his to bear. We cannot shirk it."

He took Avila's arm and began leading him along the wall of the catacombs, touching its rough surface every now and then with his shaking palm.

"He died in the mountains, you know, died alone as a discredited hermit whom no one would listen to, a holy madman. I wonder now if it is not the Church which has been mad. Mad with pride, with the lust for power. Who is to say that it has not suppressed every holy truth-seeker who has arisen over the centuries? How many men have found out about Ramusio's true fate, and have paid for that knowledge with their lives? That is the pity of it. Take a lie and make it into belief, and it rots the rest of the faith like a bad apple in a barrel. No one knows what to believe any more. The Church totters on its foundations, no matter how much of its structure may be sound, and those good men who are in its service are tainted with its lies."

Avila groaned out a wrecked laugh. "You never change, Albrec. Still philosophizing, even at a time like this."

"Our fate has become as important as the downfall of nations," Albrec retorted humourlessly. "We carry our knowledge like a weapon of the Apocalypse, Avila. We are more potent than any army."

"I wish I felt so," Avila grated, "but I feel more like a wounded rat."

They found the stairs and began to ascend them as gingerly as old men, hissing and grimacing at every step. It seemed an age before they reached the library proper, and for the last time in his life Albrec walked among the tiers of books and scrolls and breathed in the dry parchment smell. The title page of the old document crackled in the breast of his robe like a grizzling babe.

The air of the passing night was bitterly cold as they left the library, locking it behind them, and trudged through the wind-smoked snowdrifts to the cloisters. There were a few other monks abroad, preparing for Matins. Charibon was wrapped in pre-dawn peace, dark buildings and pale drifts, the warm gleam of candlelight at a few windows. It was different now. It no longer felt like home. Albrec was weeping silently as he helped Avila to his own cell. He knew that tonight whatever peace and happiness his plain life had known had been lost. Ahead lay nothing but struggle and danger and disputation, and a death which would occur beyond the ministrations of the Church. Death on a pyre perhaps, or in the snows, or in a strange land beyond all that was familiar.

He prayed to Ramusio, to Honorius the mad saint, to God Himself, but no light appeared before him, no voice spoke in his mind. His supplications withered into empty stillness, and try as he might he could not stop his faith from following them into that pit of loss. All he was left with was his knowledge of the truth, and there grew in him a resolve to see that truth spread and grow like a painful disease. He would infect the world with it ere he was done, and if the faith tottered under that affliction, then so be it.

C
HARIBON CAME TO
life before the sun broke the black sky into slate-grey cloud. Matins was sung, and the monks went to their breakfasts; Lauds, and then Terce followed. The accumulated snows of the night were swept away and the city stirred, as did the fisher-villages down on the frozen shore of the Sea of Tor.

After Terce a group of scholars went to one of the Justiciars and complained that the library was not yet open. The matter was investigated, and it was found that the doors were locked and there were no lights within. The Senior Librarian could not be found, nor could his assistant. The matter was pursued further, and despite the frigid air a crowd of monks gathered around the main doors of the Library of Saint Garaso when at Sext they were broken open by a deacon of the Knights Militant and his men using a wooden beam as a battering ram whilst Betanza, the Vicar-General himself, looked on. The library was searched by parties of senior monks. By that time the body of Columbar had been discovered, and despite searches of the dormitories and cloisters the two librarians were still nowhere to be found. Charibon began to buzz with speculation.

Commodius's body was discovered just before Vespers, after the upper levels of the library had been turned upside down. Monks searching the lower levels had come upon a discarded oil lamp, and a pile of broken masonry built up against a wall of the catacombs. It fell apart as soon as they began to investigate it, and a monsignor entered the little temple along with two armed Knights to discover the corpse of the Senior Librarian stark and staring, the silver pentagram dagger buried in its spine.

The circumstances of the discovery were not bruited abroad, but the story made its way about the monastery-city that the Senior Librarian had been foully murdered in horrible surroundings somewhere deep in the foundations of his own library, and his assistant, along with a young Inceptine who was known to be his special friend, was missing.

Patrols of the Knights Militant and squads of the Almarkan garrison soldiers prowled the streets of Charibon, and the monks at Vespers whispered up and down the long pews when they were not singing to God's glory. There was a murderer, or murderers, loose in Charibon. Heretics, perhaps, come spreading fear in the city at the behest of the heresiarch Macrobius who sat at the Devil's right hand in Torunn. The senior Justiciars were forming an investigative body to get to the bottom of the affair, and the Pontiff himself was overseeing them.

But late that evening, in the white fury of yet another snowstorm, two events went unremarked by the patrols which were watching the perimeters of Charibon. One was the arrival of a small party of men on foot, struggling through the drifts with their black uniforms frosted white. The other was the departure of two bent and labouring monks bowed under heavy sacks, feeling their way through the blizzard with stout pilgrim's staves and gasping in their pain and grief as they trudged along the frozen shores of the Sea of Tor, bypassing the bonfires of the sentry posts by hiking far out on the frozen surface of the sea itself to where the pancake ice bunched and rippled under the wind like the unquiet contents of a white cauldron. Albrec and Avila struggled on with the ice gathering on their swollen faces and the blood in their hands and feet slowly solidifying in the intense depth of the raging cold. The snowstorm cloaked them entirely, so that they were not challenged once in their fumbling progress. But it also seemed to be fairly on the way to killing them before their flight had even got under way.

T
HE PARTY OF
black-clad men demanded admittance to the suites of the High Pontiff Himerius, and the startled guards and clerical attendants were spun into a frenzy by their unexpected appearance. Finally they were billeted in a warm, if austere, anteroom whilst the Pontiff was notified of their arrival. It was the first time in four centuries that Fimbrian soldiers had come to Charibon.

The Pontiff was being robed by two ageing monks in his private apartments when the Vicar-General of the Inceptine Order entered. The monks were dismissed and the two Churchmen stood looking at one another, Himerius still fastening his purple robe about his thickening middle.

"Well?" he asked.

Betanza took a seat and could not stifle a yawn: it was very late, and he had had a trying day.

"No luck. The two monks remain missing. They are either dead, if they are innocent, or fled if they are not."

Himerius grunted, regarding his own reflection in the full-length mirror which graced the sombre opulence of his dressing chamber.

"They are guilty, Betanza: I feel it. Commodius was trying to stop them from committing heresy, and he died for it." A spasm of indefinable emotion crossed the Pontiff's aquiline features and then was gone. "May God have mercy on him, he was a loyal servant of the Church."

"What makes you so sure that was the way of it, Holiness?" Betanza asked, obviously curious. His big soldier's face was ruddy with the day he had spent, and scarlet lines intagliated the whites of his eyes.

"I know," Himerius snapped. "You will send out search parties of the Knights to find these two runaways as soon as the weather permits. I want them brought back to Charibon to undergo inquisition."

Betanza shrugged. "As you wish, Holiness. What of these Fimbrians closeted below? Will you see them tonight?"

"Yes. We must know if their arrival here at this time is a coincidence or part of a larger plan. I need not tell you, Betanza, that the events of today must not leave the city. No tales of murder in Charibon must trickle out to the kingdoms. This place must be unbesmirched, pure, unsullied by scandal or rumour."

"Of course, Holiness," Betanza said, at the same time wondering how he was supposed to muzzle a city of many thousands. Monks were worse than women for gossip. Still, the weather would help.

"A courier arrived here this afternoon, while you were occupied with other matters," Himerius said lightly, and there was a different air about him suddenly, a glittering triumph that he could not keep out of his eyes. The Pontiff turned and faced the Vicar-General squarely, his hands clasped on his breast. It looked as though a wild grin was fighting to break out over his face. For an instant, Betanza thought, he looked slightly mad.

"Good news, my friend," Himerius said, mastering himself. He was once more the sober cleric, weighed down with dignity and
gravitas
. "The courier came from Alstadt. It would seem that our devoted son of the Church, King Haukir of Almark, has died at last, may the Saints receive his flitting soul into their bosoms. This pious king, this paragon of dutiful faith, has left his kingdom to the Church."

Betanza gaped. "You're sure?"

"The courier carried a missive from Prelate Marat of Almark. He has been named regent of the kingdom until such time as I see fit to organize its governance. Almark is ours, Betanza."

"What of the nobles? Have they aught to say about it?"

"They will acquiesce. They must. Almark has a strong contingent of the Knights Militant in its capital, and the Royal armies are for the most part billeted further east, along the line of the Saeroth river. Almark is ours, truly."

"They say that events of moment are like nodes of history," Betanza mused. "Where one occurs, others are likely to happen at the same time, sometimes in the same place. You may face these Fimbrians with new confidence, Holiness. The timing could not have been more opportune."

"Precisely. It is why I will receive them now, though it is so late. I want the news to be a shock to them."

"What do you think they want?"

"What does anyone these days? The Church owns Almark, it controls Hebrion. It has become an empire. Accommodation must be sought with it. I have no doubt that these Fimbrians are come to test the waters of diplomatic exchange. The old imperial power is bending in the new wind. Come: we will go down and meet them together."

The Pontifical reception hall was full of shadows. Torches burned in cressets along the walls, and glowing braziers had been brought in to stand around the dais whereon rested the Pontiff's throne. Knights Militant stood like graven monuments every ten paces along the walls, blinking themselves awake and stiffening the moment the Pontiff entered and sat himself down. Betanza remained standing at his right hand, and a pair of scribes huddled in their dark robes like puddles of ebony ink at the foot of the dais, quills erect. To one side Rogien, the old Inceptine who was also the manager of the Pontifical court, stood ready, his bare scalp gleaming in the torchlight.

The Fimbrians had to walk the length of the flame-and-shadowed hall, their boots clumping on the basalt floor. Four of them, all in black, except for the scarlet sash that one wore about his waist.

Hard-faced men, wind-burn rouging their cheeks and foreheads, their hair cropped as short as the mane of a hogged horse. They bore no weapons, but the Knights who lined the walls on either side of them watched them intently and warily with fists clenched on sword hilts.

"Barbius of Neyr, marshal and commander in the Fimbrian army," Rogien announced in a voice of brass.

Barbius inclined his head to Himerius. Fimbrians did not bend the knee to anyone save their emperor. Himerius knew this, yet the slight bow had so much of contempt in it that he shifted in his throne, his liver-spotted hands tightening on the armrests.