Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) (16 page)

“You cannot cure it.  Clearly.”

“No, my lady.” 

She could see his anger and frustration fighting with his
exhaustion.  “Alas.”

“B’radik stands too weak against it.  We have tried every
ointment, every oil, every possible way to enhance our energies, and still men
die.  We cannot stop it; we can only provide small comfort until they die.”  He
cleared his throat.  “The priests within are those who seem strongest against
it; otherwise, they should surely have died by now themselves. But in any case,
it can be no more than a matter of hours or days for any of us.”

She looked back toward the beds.  “The straw mattresses.” 
She turned to face him.  “You expect it to strike so many?”

He sighed and rubbed his eyes.  “I do,” he said finally,
leading her back toward the antechamber and the door leading out to the temple
yard. “Draben and Quenton’s farms as well as Sir Ralton’s own demesne lands all
border the temple grounds.”  He sighed.  “Perhaps the plague was meant to rest
upon the temple only, and these men found themselves too close.  Perhaps not. 
I cannot believe the god’s fury would die so lightly.  But one thing I fear
above all else.  I believe it will radiate outward from the temple and spread
like any true plague, from soul to soul, until it has cleared all Brannagh
land, and perhaps all Syon.”

Renda closed her eyes, considering strategies.  “I will
speak to the sheriff; perhaps if we were to contain the temple, send knights to
guard it, and…”

“Let the disease run its course?”  The priest smiled sadly.
“Understand.  So far, it strikes those of us who serve B’radik most quickly and
most fiercely.”  He looked up at her.  “Our priests, yes, but also yon knight
and the two farmers. You would be sending your knights to certain death, my
lady.” He glanced over his shoulder toward the hospice door.  “I do not know
what else I might say.”  He looked down.  “But I would have you know of it,
though I may well have condemned you to death.”

She nodded and squeezed his shoulder before she raised her
hood again.  “My father has petitioned for a cardinal,” she said, moving toward
the door.  “He should arrive within a score of days.”

“In a score of days,” the priest answered dully, “we shall
all be dead.”

*          *          *

Nara huddled her shawl up about her shoulders and shivered,
flexing her hands against the stiffness that threatened to creep into them. 
She stood at the altar of the north chapel, right under a cold draft that fell
from the high-domed ceiling, no doubt from where the artisans had been
restoring the mortar. Where the draft cooled the warmer air, a chill mist
poured down about the old woman’s feet, lit unnaturally by the light of her
habit.

Two knights knelt in full armor before the ancient nun with
their swords upraised to receive B’radik’s blessing.  Nara touched their blades
with the Oil of Truth.  Then she touched the oil to each shoulder of one,
intoning “Lord Daerwin, Sheriff of Brannagh,” and then the other, “Lady Renda,
Knight of Brannagh, Knight of the Crimson Lioness,” before she smeared it on
her own forehead and bowed her head in prayer.

Almost at once, the two knights’ armor and weapons took on a
brilliant white blaze that flared in the darkness of the sanctuary and boiled
away the mist on the floor.  Then the glow faded away and they bowed their
heads once more before the nun.

“Go,” wheezed Nara sadly as she finished the last gestures
of the blessing, “and may you find her poor clay in honest ruin.”  She turned
then and hobbled painfully from the chapel, stifling her sobs until she was
well down the corridor.  What B’radik Herself could not accomplish, these two
knights must, even if it meant destroying what was left of their Pegrine.  Her
Pegrine.

Nara shook her head and willed her tears away.  They had no
choice now; they must know the truth.  Renda had spent four nights inside
Pegrine’s chamber, the last unarmed, but on those nights alone of all the
nights since the child’s death, the spirit did not appear in the chamber.  Six
other nights, Renda had listened outside the chamber, shouting to the being
within, and last night, she had finally brought His Lordship to hear, as well. 
But Pegrine made no answer save the eerie rhyme.  The distorted rhyme.  A
perversion of B’radik’s part of the prophecy kept in secrecy by Nara’s order,
oddly enough the part they were certain had been fulfilled already—Lady Renda’s
defeat of Kadak.

Ano, ano, poison’s bane,

Sword of hemlock, godless stain,

In monstrous blood, to sovereign’s kell,

Sovereign’s child’s child’s nell.

What could it mean, that the child changed it?  Was it part
of the binding that kept Nara from being able to speak with her goddess, or was
it a deception?  Nara swallowed hard and quickened her wobbling pace, suddenly
anxious to throw the bolt of her chamber door and settle herself beside the
warmth of the fire.

The sheriff’s sword cut through the first seals and freed
the large flat stone that blocked the tunnel to the mausoleum.  After he and
Renda lifted it from its niche and set it aside, they took up two torches and
stepped down the stairway that led into the tunnel.  The way was dark and low,
but it was fully broad enough that a funeral procession could pass through
without crowding.  As they passed, they lit the sconced torches on the walls
from their own, that their way might not be dark coming out.

The tunnels.  She shivered in spite of herself, just as she
always did when she walked to the crypt.  Years ago, her father had told her of
the ten babes of ten months’ age who had been buried in the tunnel walls to
serve as the crypt’s guardians, and she had never been quite sure why.  Now,
with a few more years behind her, she supposed he might have meant to caution
her against thoughtless liaisons with his knights or bearing children out of
wedlock, although he likely had had no such thought in mind.  He probably
thought it an interesting bit of castle history and nothing more.  Either way,
the gruesome knowledge had haunted Renda for months afterward.

She had found herself staring at the farm wives in the
villages and along the roads, wondering, as she watched them coo and smile over
their pretty infants, which of these would be just as glad to let her child be
buried alive for a bit of gold, to live in guilty comfort ever after.

But the worst of her obsession had come by night, when she
was alone, and her brother, who had moved to his own chamber outside the
nursery, was no longer there to chide her out of her dark reveries.  If she but
closed her eyes, she could see the tiny bones within the tunnel walls, or the
innocent, trusting eyes of the children disappearing behind the last
bricks—bricks she herself was placing.  Then, while she still lay gasping in
cold sweat from the horror of it, then came the cries, the hysterical, hoarse
cries.  She could stifle her ears under a pillow, but still her heart sought
out their voices through the castle walls until she could stand it no longer. 
She would dash in her bare feet to the chapel and pound against the sealed
stone, but by then the only cries she heard were her own.

Now, walking through the silent stone tunnel toward the
sealed doors, she found herself shamefully grateful for their sacrifice, glad
of their presence behind the walls, feeling that somehow the ten were
protecting her Pegrine.  She despised herself for her weakness and fear in
those moments, that in the shadow of unknown terrors she should embrace the
cruelty and superstition she condemned in the safe light of day.

At last her father’s sword broke the seal on the crypt, and
together they pushed the stone doors open.  Renda drew a careful breath, hoping
to be able to end their worries there without having to witness the destruction
of Pegrine’s body, but to her sorrow she found only the faintest odor of
death.  Odor, no, just the closeness of the tomb itself, and she glanced at her
father.  His steel gauntlet clanked courageously against her own.  They readied
their swords.

The two knights descended into the main chamber of the tomb,
amid the dead of Brannagh for a hundred generations.  Scattered in the walls
nearest the entrance were some of the most ancient of the burial niches, many
of which had never been sealed, and inside were tiny bits of bone and cloth
dried and protected through the centuries by long forgotten prayers, with names
engraved in gold plaques below them.

In one, Renda saw two doll-sized skulls and some bits of
lace, just as she had every time she had come into this place, and as always,
she found her eye drawn to the plaque.  The script was so ornate as to be
nearly unreadable, but she had read it so many times:
Twinne dohters,
stilbourn of Ld Dilkon & Ly Cilva of Brannagh, 2667.
  Almost twelve hundred
years, and she could still feel the heartbreak and defeat in those words, the
long barbed tendrils of their anguish that yet lingered in the frontmost pews
of the chapel above.

As her father moved through the chambers of the crypt
lighting and sconcing several more torches, Renda made her way between the
great stone sarcophagi that held the remains of the sheriffs themselves, names
famous in Syon’s history: Remiar, Cardon, Borowain. Dilkon, a hundred others. 
And Lexius, the first sheriff, whose tomb lay farthest back in the crypt and
upon whose stones Pegrine’s unconsecrated bier rested on its black cloth.  As
Renda approached the bier, she glanced up at a single plaque on the wall behind
it, another she did not need to read to know what it said: 
Roquandor,
Knight of Brannagh, born of Ld Daerwin & Ly Glynnis of Brannagh 3836,
departed this life in honor 3858.

And there, just below her father’s plaque and resting in her
veiled bier, lay Pegrine. The smell of decay was thick about her, and the two
knights almost took comfort enough to turn away without lifting the veil.  But
the odor did not come from the child’s flesh. 

The gory wooden sword Renda had put into her hands at her
funeral looked nearly white at its point until the sheriff brought his torch
nearer and drew back the veil.  Suddenly, the hemlock of the blade was awrithe
with maggots and pale crypt beetles desperate to leave the alien light, and
once these had made their escapes, the swollen furred muck about its point
looked a foul black and gray, a sure sign of the corruption they should have
expected to see.  But worse, far worse.  Folded serenely about the hilt of the
gruesome thing were two plump, innocent little hands.

Pegrine’s little body was perfectly filled out to the form
of a seven-years child, and her cheeks glowed like miniature spring roses.  In
the torchlight, her lips looked moist enough to kiss.

Renda stepped closer, unsure if she could believe what she
saw.  But her foot kicked aside something on the ground beside the bier.  She
turned at once and lowered her torch, there to see the bandages the maids had
bound round the child’s torso beneath her gown. The knight looked up at her
father.  There could be no doubt.

The sheriff raised his visor and blinked at the child there
on her funeral bier.  His hand clenched and unclenched about the hilt of his
sword several times before it finally drooped to his side, useless. “Gods, why
can I not feel the evil here?” he sobbed, and with a great effort, drew out his
sword to raise it over the child. Then, faltering, he collapsed to his knees. 
“Have I no courage now to purge this thing from the world?  So help me, show me
some ugliness here to fight!  Show me some darkness here!”

Until her father spoke, she had thought only her own senses
confounded in this place.  The child was neither alive nor dead; in her
uncorrupted state, there could be no doubt that she had become an undead thing
who would feed upon the blood of men and keep to the dark and evil places of
the world.  But to their eyes, their beloved little girl showed not the
slightest hint of such a taint.

Renda narrowed her eyes once more over the child’s sweet
face, over her white First Rites gown, her hands.  She saw no trace of the
bishop’s touch on her, none of the darkness of the glade.  Renda’s eye was
accustomed to seeing evil as a wispy black veil falling about the features of
men, a darkening of the soul.  Such was the peculiar gift of her bloodline, a
gift from the goddess.  But here, she could see none of it, nothing to quicken
the blood and draw the two knights to fight.

She drew her father up from where he had fallen and hurried
him from beside the bier.  “Come away,” she whispered, grasping his arm and
leading him out of the crypt. “The sun sets soon, and we must speak together
ere we face this crypt again.”

Once the doors were closed, the sheriff drew out the wax to
seal the crypt and softened it over his torch.

“Father...” Renda breathed, tension building in her gut as
she stood guarding his back.

“Peace, child,” he whispered, fixing the wax across the
door.  “Else I shall have to start again.”  Then he set his mark into it, the
stylized form of a dragon’s claw.  Both knights held their breaths, expecting
the torches in the tunnels behind them to blow out and leave them in darkness. 
Somehow, they expected some grinning evil creature to have gotten past them to
trap them in the tunnel.  But the torches burned steadily until they had made
their way out of the tunnel and into the chapel above.  Then, much relieved,
Renda and her father sealed the stone in the floor of the north chapel.

An hour later, having seen to her armor, Renda met her
father in his audience chamber as they had agreed.  Before he had retired for
the evening, Sedrik had stoked the fire well and left a jug of warm toddy and
two mugs on the sideboard beside a plate of cold meats Greta had saved for
them, and now the sheriff stood pouring the toddy for them both.

Renda accepted her mug and sat beside him before the fire,
staring into the coal bed.  Their intention had been to discuss what they had
seen, to agree upon a plan, but here, in the warmth and rational light of the
fire, they found themselves sipping from their mugs and staring dumbly into the
fire.