The Heretic Kings (36 page)

He was upside-down, he realized, dangling with his midriff being crushed by his own weight.

“Put me down,” he gasped, feeling as though he might throw up if he did not straighten.

Avila set him down carefully. The young Inceptine had been carrying him slung over one broad shoulder. The pair of them were breathing heavily. Albrec’s world dizzied and spun for a moment as the fluids of his body righted themselves. The lamp Avila had been carrying in his free hand guttered on the floor, almost out of oil.

“What are you doing?” Albrec managed at last. “Where are we?”

“In the catacombs. I couldn’t bring you round, Albrec. You were dead to the world. So I piled up stone in front of the hole and tried to find a way out for us.”

“Commodius!”

“Dead, and may his warped spirit howl the eons away in the pits of hell.”

“His body, Avila. We can’t just leave it down here.”

“Why not? He was a creature of the lightless dark, a shape-shifter, and he tried to kill us both to protect his precious version of the truth. Let his corpse rot here unburied.”

Albrec held his aching head in his hands. “Where are we?”

“I was following the north wall—the damp one, as you said—trying to find the stairs, but I must have missed them somehow.”

“An easy thing to do. I will find them, don’t worry. How long has it been since… ?”

“Maybe half an hour, not long.”

“Great God, Avila, what are we going to do?”

“Do? I—I don’t know, Albrec. I hadn’t been thinking beyond getting out of this dungeon.”

“We’ve killed the Senior Librarian.”

“We’ve slain a werewolf.”

“But he changed back into Commodius the librarian. It’s the last thing I remember. Who will believe us? What signs are there on his body to tell anyone what he was in life?”

“What are you saying, Albrec? That we are in trouble for saving our own lives, for putting an end to that foul beast?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know what to think. How could it happen, Avila? How could a priest be a thing like that, all these years, all the years I have worked with him? It was he who haunted the library; I see that now. It was his unclean presence which gave it its atmosphere. Oh, lord God, what has been going on here?”

The pair were silent, their eyes fixed on the tiny lamp flame which did not have too many minutes of life left to it. But it did not seem important that they might soon be left here in impenetrable darkness. The place seemed different somehow. They had seen the true face of evil, and nothing else could frighten them.

“They know,” Albrec went on in a rasping whisper. “Did you hear him? They know the truth of things, the real story of the Saint and the Prophet, and they have been suppressing it. The Church has been sitting on the truth for centuries, Avila, keeping it from the world to safeguard its own authority. Where is piety, where humility? They have behaved like princes determined to hold on to their power no matter what the cost.”

Avila fingered his black Inceptine robe thoughtfully.

“You have claw marks down the sides of your face,” he told Albrec, as though he had only just seen them.

“There’s blood on yours, too.”

“We can’t hide our hurts, Albrec. Think, man! What are we to do? Columbar is dead at Commodius’ hand and Commodius is dead at ours. How will it look? We cannot tell them we were trying to discover and preserve the truth of things. They’ll put us out of the way as quickly as Commodius intended to.”

“There are good men yet in the Church—there must be.”

“But we don’t know who they are. Who will listen to us or believe us? Sweet blood of the Blessed Saint, Albrec, we are finished.”

The lamp guttered, flared, and then went out. The dark swooped in on them and they were blind.

Avila’s voice came thick with grief through the lightlessness. “We must flee Charibon.”

“No! Where would we go? How would we travel in the depth of winter, in the snows? We would not last a day.”

“We’ll not last much longer than that here once this gets out. When Commodius is missed they’ll search the library. They’ll find him in the end. And who is the only other person who has the keys to the library? You, Albrec.”

The little monk touched the torn skin of his face and neck, the lump on his forehead where the werewolf had knocked him. Avila was right. They would question him first, for he was Commodius’ closest colleague, and when they saw his wounds the inquisition would begin.

“So what are we to do, Avila?” he asked, near to tears. He knew, but he had to let someone else say it.

“We’ll have a day of grace. We’ll stay out of sight and gather together what we can to help us on our journey.”

“Journey to where? Where in the world are we to go? The Church rules Normannia, her Knights and clerics are in every city and town of the west. Where shall we run to?”

“We are heretics once this gets out,” Avila said. “They will excommunicate us when they find the body in that unholy chapel and note our disappearance. But there are other heretics in the world, Albrec, and there is a heresiarch to lead them. The man some say is Macrobius has been set up as an anti-Pontiff in Torunn. Charibon’s writ has no authority in that kingdom, and anyone hostile to the Himerian Church will be welcome there. The Macrobian kings will listen to us. We would be a powerful weapon in their armoury. And besides, Charibon seems now to me like a sink of corruption. If Commodius was a werewolf, could there not be others like him within the ranks of my order?”

“It does not bear thinking about.”

“It must be thought about, Albrec, if we are to puzzle out a way to save our lives.”

They stood awhile, not speaking, listening to the drip of water and the enfolding silence of the gutrock, the bowels of the mountains. Finally Avila moved. Albrec heard him groan from the pain of his hurts.

“My robe is ripped to threads, and I think I have some ribs broken. It is like a knife thrust into my side every time I draw breath. We must get back to our beds before Matins.”

“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’ 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 two 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’ 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 snow-storm, 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.