Hounds of God (17 page)

“This is getting us nowhere.”

Jehan stalked from end to end of the room they all shared in
the guesthouse. They had it to themselves; it was spacious, the walls painted
with faded vistas, a brazier set in the center of it to ward off winter’s
chill.

Nikki sat crosslegged on the bed Jehan shared with Alf,
mending a rent in his mantle. Alf sat on a stool near the brazier, turning the
pages of a book he had found in the library. Both had glanced up as Jehan
spoke, a flash of black and one of silver.

He stopped just short of a peeling pomegranate tree and spun
about. “A full month we’ve been here. In a little while it will be
Lent. And what do we have to show for it? One copy of Silvestris’
Cosmographia
. Two pairs of blistered
feet.”

“Fifteen pages of the Gospels in a slightly antiquated
hand.” Alf’s irony was not clearly perceptible. He closed the book
and let it lie in his lap, regarding Jehan with a cool and steady stare.

The Bishop of Sarum raked his fingers through his beard.
Since its sudden, uncanny, and fiercely itching birth, it had done well enough
by itself, though he doubted that after all it was much of a disguise. That he
had seen few familiar faces in all his daily travels, and that none of those
had hailed him by name, was probably due more to Heaven’s good grace than
to any deception of his own.

“I know you’re doing all you can,” he said
to both the waiting gazes, “or at least, all you can think of. But it’s
not working.”

Nikki nodded. It was not. His mind was as sore as his feet,
and he had not found a trace of the enemy, let alone of the ones he searched
for. He had not even come across a memory of any of them, a hint in a human
brain that their quarry existed. Rome was large and sprawling, full of ruins
and of churches, with people crowded together round the foci of the river, the
Pope’s palace in the Lateran, the Leonine City beyond Sant’Angelo.
But no Anna, no Thea, no children; no mad and mighty power.

“And Rhiyana isn’t holding still for us,”
Jehan said. “The Cardinal’s investigation grinds as inexorably as
the mills of God, but a great deal faster. The King’s gone to the
Marches; the raiding’s begun, and men have been seen wearing the Cross
and crying death to the Witch-king.”

Nikki took up the litany.
The Heresiarch in Caer Gwent has been taken by the priests. The Greeks
and the Saracens are finding urgent business at home. A Jewish child has been
found dead outside of one of the churches in the city.
His eyes glittered;
he flung down his mended cloak.
There
must be something else we can do!

“We can go to the Pope,” said Jehan. “I
know how to reach him. We were friends before his elevation; he consecrated me
himself. He won’t keep us waiting for an audience.”

I should like to see
the Pope,
Nikki said.

“We should have gone to him as soon as we came. This
is an excellent monastery, and by a miracle there’s no one in it who
knows me, but we’re not finding anything by staying here.”

Alf’s eyes had followed the debate but had lost none
of their coolness. His voice was cooler still, almost cold. “We’ve
barely begun to hunt. Would you start the deer before you’ve even taken
the bow out of its case? That’s what you’ll do if you go to the
Pope now. Friend or no, he’s in the Hounds’ power; he’ll
certainly be watched by our enemy. If he learns of us and our troubles, even if
he’s disposed to be lenient, we’ll lose our kin in truth; for the
enemy will never relax his vigilance.”

Where I go,
Nikki
pointed out,
no one with power can
follow. What if he is on guard every instant? He’ll never know I’m
there to guard against.

“Nikki can shield His Holiness,” Jehan said, “just
as he’s shielding us now. The enemy need never know—and the Pope
may well know where the Hounds have their kennels.”

Alf shook his head once. “He won’t know of this
one. And if the enemy is on guard, invisibility is no use; a wall is
impenetrable whether or not the invader can be seen. He has to be at ease, to
think us all shut behind our own safe walls in Rhiyana. Then maybe he’ll
let slip the bolts on the postern gate.”

“He hasn’t done it yet.”

“He hasn’t had time.”

“God’s bones! It’s been a month. Wars have
been won and lost in far less time than that.”

“This war is still in its infancy.”

Jehan’s hands knotted into fists; he loomed over Alf,
who merely looked up at him, unmoved. “Thirty days ago—even seven
days ago—I’d have said you were keeping up your courage by seeming
not to care. But there’s a limit to that kind of courage. I think you’ve
passed it.” Alf stirred by not a hair’s breadth. “Oh, you
still care whether your family lives or dies. That’s a torment in the
heart of you. You don’t care to hunt any more. You’ve given up. You’ve
surrendered. You’ve let the enemy have his victory.”

“You have not been listening,” Alf said with icy
precision. “For the third time, we have only begun to—”

“We haven’t! We’ve failed in the first
sally. We have no new tactics. And you won’t exert that famous brain of
yours to find any.”

“We need none. We have only to hunt; to keep our minds
open and invisible; and to wait.”

“Nikki hunts. Nikki keeps us invisible. You do nothing
but wait.”

Alf rose. He had never had much flesh to spare, and that was
very nearly gone. Yet to Nikki’s eyes he seemed not more frail but less,
like a blade of steel. “That,” he said, “is known as wisdom.”

I
call it passivity. I
don’t mind your cloistering yourself here; you’ve never been
skilled at walking in a trance. But you can’t lie back and trust to fate.
Time doesn’t wait. War won’t hold off till your opening presents
itself to you. And,
Nikki added grimly,
while
we stumble about in the dark, God alone knows what that madman is doing to his
captives.

“They’re alive,” Alf said in a flat voice.

“You hope.” Jehan struggled to master his temper,
to speak reasonably. “Alf, we can’t continue the way we’ve
been going, following our noses and hoping we catch wind of something useful.
We need to try another tack. Not the Pope, if you insist, but there must be
some other way to bring this quarry to earth. Can’t you help us find it?”

“There is no need.”

“Alf—”

And the silent voice:
Alf,
for the love of Heaven—

He cut them both off. “If you are tired of this
seeming futility, you need not pursue it. I can hunt alone. My lord Bishop, you
have but to say the word and I can transport you wherever you will, even to
your own see of Sarum. Nikephoros, the King will be glad of your aid in the
war; or you may serve the Queen or defend the Wood. No compulsion holds you
here.”

They stared at him, speechless. He sounded like a stranger;
he looked like one.

Yes, Nikki thought. Ever since Thea vanished with the children
she had borne him, he had been changing. His body had passed from thin to
gaunt; his mind had retreated, turning inward upon itself. Above the hollowed
cheeks his eyes were pale, remote; not hostile, indeed not unfriendly, but not
at all the eyes of the one who had loved them both as brothers.

“You may go,” he said to them, “without
guilt. I’ll be well enough here.”

They glanced at one another. Jehan’s eyes were a
little wild. Nikki supposed his own were the same.

He knew he wanted to hit something, but Alf was not a wise
target. Even in this new mood of his, he was still one of the Kindred, with
strength and swiftness far more of the beast than of the human.

Nikki watched Jehan’s mind turn over alternatives. It
was a very pleasant mind to watch, quick and clear, honest yet subtle, able at
will to relinquish control to the trained fighter’s body. That body urged
him to knock Alf unconscious, to hope that such a blow would return him to his
proper senses.

But the mind, wiser, held it back. Considered logic,
persuasion, pleading, anger. Settled at last. Unclenched the heavy fists; drew
a deep sigh. “Don’t be an idiot,” Jehan said with weary annoyance.
“I got myself into this; I’ll see it through to its end. With your
help or without it.”

Alf did not say what he could have said of Jehan’s
efficacy as a hunter of shadows. That was mercy enough for the moment. He
returned to his seat and opened the book again.

Jehan drew back, stood briefly silent, turned away.

Without him the room seemed much larger yet somehow more
confining. Alf was losing himself, quite deliberately one might have thought,
in the mysteries of the world’s creation. In his drab pilgrim’s
robe he seemed much more a monk than the man he had just put to flight.

Nikki could stand it no better than Jehan had. He sought the
same refuge with somewhat more haste.

oOo

The sun was still high. He blinked in the light of it,
faintly shocked. He had half expected the sky to be as grim as his mood, not
blue as the Middle Sea with here and there a fleece of cloud. The air was as
warm as Rhiyanan spring; grass grew green around the grey walls, sprinkled with
small white flowers like a new fall of snow.

For an instant his yearning for Rhiyana was as strong as
pain. But that passed; he drew a careful breath, finding to his surprise that
his eyes had blurred. Was he as tired as that?

He shook himself. It was not only the endless futility of
the search, and not even the bitterness of the quarrel. He was not made to shut
himself up in the walls of an abbey.

Father Jehan had a talent: wherever he found himself, there
for the moment was his element. Alf was abbey-bred, more visibly so with each
day he spent in San Girolamo. But Nikephoros Akestas was completely a creature
of the world. Bells and candles and chanting and incense forged each the links
of a chain; they dragged at him, they sapped his strength.

He found that he was walking very fast, almost running. It
was not fear; it was the swiftness of the hawk cut loose from its jesses. No one
was pursuing him. No one was setting him to hunt or do squire service or
pretend to pray. He was free.

He laughed and danced, stalked a cloud shadow down the empty
street, put to flight a flock of sparrows. But then, contrite, he called them
all back again, making amends with a bit of bread he found in his scrip.

When the Via di San Girolamo had given way to the broader,
brighter, and far busier stretch of the Corso, Nikki had relegated all his ill
humor to oblivion. He let his feet carry him where they would, and let his eyes
for once take in the wonders of this strange half-ruined half-thriving city.

Some of it was new, and raw with it, a bristle of armed
towers, a crowding of churches and houses and palaces. Most of it was ancient,
much of that built anew with the brick and marble of old Rome, some even built
into the ancient monuments, people nesting like birds in the caverns of giants.

Yet just such people, Alf said, had raised those very
monuments. Small dark keen-faced men and women who reeked of olive oil and
garlic, who chattered incessantly and burst into song at will, and seemed to
live and love and fight and even die in the streets outside their patchwork
houses.

Nikki, wandering among them, felt as always a little odd. In
Rhiyana he had been branded a foreigner from the first for his small stature,
his dark skin, his big-eyed Byzantine face. In Rome he was completely unremarkable.

Why, he thought with a shiver of amazement, he was not even
particularly small. In fact, judging from the people he passed and the ones he
knew in San Girolamo, he was somewhat above the middle height. It was
distinctly pleasant to find himself looking over the heads of grown men.

He bought a hot and savory pie from a vendor and sat on a
step to eat it. The stair was attached to a very Roman house, a sprawling
affair with a faÁade of ancient columns, no two alike, and under and behind
them an odd mixture of shops. The one nearest appeared to be a purveyor of ink
and parchment and a book or two; the next was patently a wineshop.

The pie was wonderful, eel well spiced with onion and
precious pepper. As he nibbled at it, he gained a companion, a handsome
particolored cat that wove about his ankles, beseeching him with feline
politeness to share his pleasure. In return she offered him her own sleek
presence, curling in his lap and purring thunderously.

That was a fair bargain, he agreed, dividing the remains of
the pasty. If it surprised his new companion to be addressed so clearly by a
mortal man, she was far too much a cat to show it; she merely accepted her
purchase and consumed it with dispatch. And having done so, washed with care
while he licked his own fingers clean.

What made him look up, he never knew. His senses were drawn
in upon himself and his contented belly and his sudden friend; his only further
thought had been for a cup of wine to wash down the eel pie. As he raised his
eyes, even that small bit of sense fled him utterly.

He was used to beauty. Sated with it, maybe. He had grown up
with the Fair Folk; nor were the mortal women of Rhiyana far behind when all
was considered. He had seen nothing in Rome to compare with either.

The girl on the step below him was not outstandingly
beautiful. She had lovely hair, even in a braid and under a veil. Her face was
pleasing, fine-featured, with eyes the deep and dreaming blue of the sky at
evening. She was very pretty; she was nothing beside Thea or the Queen, or
almond-eyed Tao-Lin with her flawless gold-white skin.

And yet she stunned him where he sat. It was not the quantity
of her beauty; it was the quality.

The way she stood, the way she tilted her chin, the way she
looked at him under her strong dark brows, all struck with him with their exact
and perfect rightness. Not too bold, not too demure; clear and level and keenly
intelligent.