Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) (7 page)

Gikka signaled ahead again and moved forward. Renda saw that
her squire had already drawn a dagger. They were close; the smell was growing
more and more powerful.  Renda’s stomach churned against the horrible odor that
seemed to force all the air out of the upper floor of the manse. 

At last they came to the large double doorway that led to
the bishop’s chambers.  Gikka knelt beside it quickly and soundlessly drew back
the bolt inside the lock that held it closed.  Then she let the door open
degree by degree, slowly, excruciatingly slowly, until it stood open but a few
inches.

A great foul breath of blood and rot billowed over them from
the chamber, and both women fought down the bile in their throats.  Once the
odor thinned, Renda drew her sword and stood at the edge of the doorway
watching a man she recognized by his gouty walk to be Bishop Cilder moving back
and forth before a long table full of tallow candles and various dark vessels. 
At the sound of her blade leaving its scabbard, he had stood straight,
listening, and put down a bowl.  Then he turned his head to look back at the
open doorway where the two women had just moved out of his sight

“A blade? In my home and at my chamber door?”  He smiled,
the same gentle smile Renda had known for years, and for that moment he seemed
just as blameless as she had ever seen him before.  She drew herself back
against the wall beside the door and shut her eyes.  His was not the face of
evil, she saw, not dark and malignant like Kadak’s had been, and impossibly,
she found her resolve flagging.  How could so good a man have killed Pegrine? 
She opened her eyes and watched through the crack in the door.

The man’s step hesitated just inside the doorway, out of
Renda’s view, but Gikka signaled to her that he was warding, surely setting
some sort of protection on the door.  “Come, now, gentlemen, if you would speak
with me, then speak, but do not come creeping into my home brandishing
weapons.”  He listened a moment before he sighed and came toward the hallway. 
“It’s no use haggling,” he called, moving to the open door.  “I’ve already paid
you far more than she was worth.  She took entirely too long to die, even after
I took her viscera.  And her blood, most peculiar.  Half a day later, and I’ve
only now managed to suspend it...”

For several moments, he and Renda stood staring at each
other, she with her blade drawn and he with his hands and the front of his dull
white cassock—the cassock that should have blinded her with its brilliant
glow—dark and grisly with blood.  Pegrine’s blood, she was certain of it.  And
still, the same sweet smile.

Renda squinted her eyes slightly and saw what she feared
most, what she had somehow missed during the chapel consecration.  About his
head, instead of the brilliant white glow of B’radik’s power, she saw a wispy
blackness that poured over the benign features of her father’s priest in a
masque of evil.

This could not be!  Her mind could not reconcile her memory
of Bishop Cilder with what she saw before her.  She should have expected it,
after Bernold’s confession, but she supposed she had refused to accept it
fully.  Now, looking at him, seeing the evil about him, she could not escape
the truth.  He had abandoned the duke and the sheriff, abandoned his vows and
the disciplines of truth and enlightenment.

He had abandoned B’radik Herself.

Some part of her could not even begin to understand how that
was possible, and yet there she stood, a Knight of Brannagh sworn to B’radik’s
service, with verinara on her blade and Bernold’s tortured confession in her
ear.  How small the steps…

No, she could not think that way.  Cilder had taken no such
small step but had abandoned his goddess outright.  She would never abandon
B’radik.

“Lady Renda!” he said pleasantly, oblivious to the shock and
disgust in her eyes.  He ignored Gikka’s dagger and wiped his hands on his
cassock, but his eye lingered a bit worriedly over the knight’s sword.  “I was
not told you were here...”

“No,” snarled Gikka, who came in behind him and clapped her
dagger against his throat, “I imagine not.”  All at once, she jumped backward
with a scream of surprise and pain, and her dagger clattered to the floor
beside her.  She fell against the wall, clutching her insensate hand against
her, and fixed the back of the bishop’s head with an acid glare.

Without a thought, Renda’s sword was instantly at his gut,
just nigh of touching him but close enough that she could kill him before he
moved. He was no longer the priest of her consecration, she told herself, no
longer the priest of her First Rite.  He was now an enemy as surely as Kadak
had been.

The squire rose to her feet cursing and working the tingle
out of her fingers. She picked up her dagger as she moved.  As soon as she was
standing, Renda saw she was moving toward the bishop again, and this time,
nothing was going to stop her.  Just one nick with her blade, just the touch of
the verinara in his blood, and they would have their vengeance.

But he turned to put his back to the door, at once putting
the two women at either side of him.  With Renda’s blade at his belly and Gikka
looming closer, he looked behind him then stepped backward through the
doorway—the doorway he had just fixed with protections. 

Renda frowned, seeing his plan.  Either he would close them
out or she would be trapped inside with him, and her only hope of victory lay
in following him and surviving against the door’s defenses and his own
formidable power long enough to defeat him.   She had no choice.  Steeling
herself against the protective attack, she leaped through behind him.  At once,
the door slammed closed behind her, but not before Gikka dove inside after her
and jammed one of her daggers in at the lock. 

The bolt of the lock clanged angrily against her dagger’s
blade again and again and raised a terrible din inside the chamber, but it
could not break through.  Renda continued to press toward him while Cilder
backed steadily away.  He smiled again and looked down at her sword.  “Come,
you would not kill the Bishop of B’radik.  What would your father say?”

“Were you truly the Bishop of B’radik,” Renda said, stepping
closer, “I would not.  But you are none.  You have performed blasphemous,
murderous rituals of blood and lechery.  For that I will have your head, and my
father will rejoice.”

“Rituals of blood and lechery?”  He looked shocked. 
“Murderous?  Not at all.  This,” he said, indicating the bloodied table behind
him with a dismissive laugh, “this is but idle dalliance, a lesson in animal
alchemy! Hardly—”

“Dalliance!”  Gikka spat and drew closer to him, brandishing
her second dagger.  “What dalliance is this?  You killed a child, Cilder.  Her
very blood stains your shirtfront, deny it!”  She shook her head and growled,
bringing the dagger up.  “Animal alchemy, I’ll give you animal alchemy...”

“A child!”  To Renda’s ear, his laugh sounded thin, and she
watched him back himself toward the table yet again, looking nervously between
her and Gikka.  He shook his head, as if the notion were absurd.  “No child.  A
goat—”

Renda’s eyes narrowed at the lie.  “The knights told us,
Cilder.  The Wirthing knights.  Estrella.  Avondale.”  She saw his eyes widen
in recognition and fear.  “They took the girl, a virgin, such as you requested
of them, and they sold her into your hands.”

“Surely they lie.”

“Nay,” seethed Gikka, creeping toward him.  “They spoke true
ere they met their deaths.”

Renda watched him realize Gikka’s meaning, watched his mind
turning over several lies, several gambits.  By the gods, he was transparent to
her now.  How could she not have seen…?

“Well,” he said quietly, “yes, all right, yes.  I did buy a
child from them, I suppose that much is true, but it was not what you think—”

Gikka’s dagger point was in the hollow of his throat in a
blur of movement, not quite touching, her face inches from his.  “We found her
last night, tied to the stump in that glade and cut all apart, just as you left
her.”

Cilder opened his mouth as if to speak a denial, but then
closed it again.  Then, as if unbalanced by Gikka’s sudden attack, he stumbled
backward, reaching for the table to support himself.

“Deny it, go on,” hissed the squire, advancing on him. 
“Give me one more reason to kill you.”

Caught between the dagger and the table, he drew a deep
breath and spoke.  “It is this simple, children.  I grow old and tired, and
this body of mine pains me.”  He held up his thin old hands and smiled sadly at
Renda.  “Can you know how it feels, to have your flesh rotting away while you
live, to watch your hair, your teeth, every young part of yourself die or fall
out?  No, of course not.  You’re still but a child, for all your fame and
glory.  But I am grown quite ancient in the goddess’s service.  Ancient and
decrepit.  For years I’ve longed for my death, but,” he said looking up at the
ceiling with a bitter smile, “such was not the will of B’radik.”  The contempt
in his voice as he spoke the goddess’s name was clear.  The old priest glanced
back in embarrassment toward the table like one who has just been caught in the
midst of a messy meal.  “But then, comes an old, forgotten god, a god who
knows, who sees my pain, a god who grants me a tiny fragment, but the barest
splinter of the gods’ own knowledge!”

“At what price?” growled Gikka.

He leveled his gaze at hers while he directed his words to
Renda.  “Look you, for the life of one child, one unmissed child of the
streets,” he turned his eyes away from Gikka’s glare, “I can stop this pain and
regain some semblance of my youth. For a time.”  He glanced pitifully, wretchedly
at Renda for a moment.  “Surely you understand, my lady.”

To her shock and disgust, she did.  In his words she heard
her own voice, her own heart, and she loathed herself for it. He had traded a
single life for a small return to glory.  Yesterday, she would have traded the
lives of thousands for hers.

Her blade lowered ever so slightly.

He continued to back away from Gikka, moving steadily toward
the table, twisting and flexing his hands nervously.  “My lady, I have been
entrusted with the... dearest secrets of Damerien and Brannagh for decades,” he
said, meeting Renda’s gaze with his own, silently offering some sort of guilty
trade. “Since before I became bishop.  Since before you—no, before your father
was born. And faithful.  Ever so faithful.  This,” he said, once more looking
back toward the table, “This was a—a superstitious...mistake, the work of a
desperate old man.  But I assure you there was no lechery, nothing untoward,
about it.”

“Nothing untoward!”  Gikka hissed.

“Upon my word,” he said in tones of embarrassment and
humility, “you will hear no more of this.”  But his words rang false against
the whitewashed walls of the manse, and now the knight and her squire advanced
on him again.  “Please!  Have you no pity for an old man?  In B’radik’s name,
spare me!”

“In B’radik’s name?” Renda repeated incredulously.  “You
dare claim loyalty to the Houses of Damerien and Brannagh?  To B’radik?  In the
very midst of your sin?” Renda moved toward him, sword still leveled at his
heart.  She looked at the table full of bowls and vessels and felt any pity she
had for him drain from her.  There, in the bowls, were Pegrine’s missing
organs, darkened and reeking with the passage of time.  Heart, kidneys, liver,
a few others Renda did not look upon for long, mostly cut apart now with
strangely shaped gouges and chunks cut from them.  She turned her attention
back to the priest.  “Know you, Cilder, what child you have slain?”

But for the brief moment while her attention had left him,
he had turned and gulped something from one bowl, something dark and bloody and
thick.  Now he cast both women a sinister grin and wiped the blood from his
mouth with the sleeve of his cassock.  “I do not, nor do I care.  It is done!”

In desperation, Gikka lunged and jabbed at him with the
dagger, and again she was thrown back, but this time, she left a deep cut on
his throat.

“Verinara,” he said calmly, dabbing at the cut with his
sleeve until it stopped bleeding.  In only a moment, the wound closed.  “That
might have been unpleasant.”  Finally he looked up into their shocked faces,
and his expression was puzzled.  “But why verinara?”

Gikka rose and moved toward him again, but as she came
closer, his gesturing broadened:  He was invoking the protection of his god
against Gikka.  Not B’radik’s protection—sure and inescapable proof of his
betrayal—but that of some other, unknown to her.  The one who had granted him
the gods’ own knowledge.

With all speed, Renda shoved Gikka aside and threw the
cleric to the ground just as he finished his invocation, steeling herself
against the attack that somehow never came.  She knelt over him to hold him
down and, instead of her own swords, she drew Pegrine’s absurdly small wooden
sword.  She raised it above Cilder’s chest while he lay grinning at her in full
anticipation of his god’s protection.

“Cilder!”  A voice as smooth and sinuous as a viper’s skin
uncoiled in the air around them, a hideously beautiful voice that could have
been male or female.  Or neither.

A swirl of cold, dark, something badly out of place, whirled
around Renda’s sensibilities.  She rose to her feet, drawing her own sword with
her left hand while Gikka circled the room with her daggers raised, both
looking for the one who spoke.  The knight whispered a prayer to B’radik under
her breath, and the squire cursed roundly under hers. 

“Ha!” choked the bishop.  He looked into the air and smiled
like an obedient hound before its master.  “I knew You would not fail me!  I
have fulfilled Your command!”

The voice growled, dark and terrifying, but not, as it
seemed, toward the two women.  When Renda ventured to look toward the bishop,
she saw dark swirls of fury circling the bishop wildly under the raging howl of
his god.