The Scarlet Gospels (17 page)

 

6

The Hell Priest left the fortress and exited the city without a word, Felixson following close behind. Only when they finally reached the threshold of the monastery did the Hell Priest speak.

“Do you see that stand of trees a mile to our left?”

“Yes.”

“Go and wait. I will come for you.”

They separated once they were inside the gates. Under ideal circumstances the Hell Priest would have seen his duties accomplished at more leisurely a pace than he'd now been obliged to accept. But he was ready to move, for there had been many years of preparation and it was a relief to finally have the grim business before him under way. When he'd thanked the Unconsumed, he had been sincere.

All of what he was about to do depended on possessing much magic, of course. That had been the key to this endeavor from the beginning. And it was no small pleasure to him to discover that most of his fellow Cenobites, if the subject of magic and its efficacy were to be brought up in conversation, had nothing but contempt for it; that fact made what was about to happen all the more ironic.

He went directly to the row of anonymous buildings that ran along the wall on the far edge of the fortress where the slope on which it stood fell away. They were called the Channel Houses. To compensate for the gradient, the wall on that side was twice as high as at the front, the top of it crammed with iron spikes that pointed in, out, and up. These were in turn covered with barbs that had snared hundreds of birds, many of them caught in the process of picking at earlier victims. Here and there among the iron and the bones were a few recent captives, occasionally fluttering frantically for a few seconds and then settling again to gather their strength for another futile attempt at freedom.

The original purpose of the Channel Houses had long been forgotten. Many of them were completely empty. Some were repositories of chain-mail aprons and gloves that had been used for vivisections on the damned, the blood-gummed equipment tossed and left to the flies. Even they, having fed and bred several generations there, had exhausted the usefulness of the stuff and gone.

Nobody now came there, except the Hell Priest, and even he had only come twice: once to elect a hiding place for his own contribution to the Order's tradition of torment, the other to actually hide them away. In point of fact, it had been the sight of the birds on top of the wall that had inspired the simple but elegant solution of how he could bring the news—news he had spent many months of study refining—to its recipients. Using the lethal knowledge he had culled from his researches and the only book in his secret library that did not concern magic,
Senbazuru Orikata or How to Fold One Thousand Cranes
, the oldest known volume on the art of origami, he had gone about his secret work with an eagerness he had not remembered feeling for the better part of a human lifetime.

Now, as he entered the sixth Channel House, where his labors lay sleeping in a large birdcage, he felt that eagerness once again, chastened by the knowledge that there would be neither time nor opportunity to do this twice, so he could not afford error. Since he'd first brought his secret work here the Order had swelled in number, a circumstance he had planned for. He had to fold the new identities into his flock with a fine brush and an ink called Cindered Scale. This would take only a few more minutes. As he worked, he listened for any sounds besides those of the dying birds—a whisper, a footfall, any sign that he was being sought—but inscribing the Execution Writs on the extra papers he'd folded and left unmarked for this very situation was finished without interruption. He put the papers together in the cage with the others he had crafted, and as he did so a feeling almost utterly foreign to him insinuated itself into his thoughts. Puzzled, he struggled to name it. What was it?

He made a hushed grunt of recognition when the answer came. It was doubt. But as to its source, he was woefully ignorant. He wasn't doubting the efficacy of the working in which he was about to engage. He was certain it would more than suffice. Nor was he doubting its mode of delivery. So what was it that troubled him?

He stared down into a cage of folded paper birds while he puzzled over his unwanted emotion. And all at once it came clear. The doubt was rooted in certainty, certainty that once the magic he had labored over in this room was free to go about its business there was no turning back. The world he had known for almost as far back as his memory stretched was about to change out of all recognition. He was moments from unleashing utter chaos, and the doubt was simply reminding him of the fact. It was testing him. It was asking of him:
Are you ready for the apocalypse?

He heard the question in his head, but he answered it with his lips.

“Yes,” he said.

With the doubt defined and replied to, he went on with his work, picking up the cage and taking it to the door, which he opened as he set the cage down on its threshold.

For safety's sake he took a gutting knife from his belt, prepared for the unlikely event that he would be interrupted. Then he spoke the words, which were African in origin and had taken him some time to master, punctuated as they were with grunts and delicate expulsions of breath.

The Hell Priest watched the cage as he spoke. The incantation sometimes required a second and even a third repetition, so he was drawing breath to repeat the syllables when there was a slight shift in the heap of folded papers. It was followed almost immediately by another movement, and another, the urge to live spreading through the occupants of the cage. In less than a minute, nearly a hundred origami cranes came alive, flapping their paper wings. The only sound they were capable of making was the one they were making now: paper rubbing against paper, fold against fold. They knew what they'd been made to emulate and they fluttered against the door in their hunger for release.

The Hell Priest had no intention of releasing them all at once. That risked too much attention being drawn to their source. He opened the cage and let fewer than ten of them go. They hopped around on their folded feet, stretching their wings as they did so. Then, as though by mutual consent, they all beat their paper wings, took flight, and rose up above the Channel Houses. Three of them landed on the roof of Channel House Six, cocking their heads to stare back down at their caged brethren. The remainder, having circled the Channel House once to orient themselves, flew off, and the remaining three who came to perch on the gutters followed seconds later. The spectacle of the first few departing had driven the ninety or so that were still in the cage into a mad frenzy.

“Your turn will come,” the Hell Priest said to them.

If they understood him they chose not to take notice. They flapped and fought and repeatedly flung themselves against the bars. Despite the weight of the iron cage and their own frailty, they still managed to make the cage shake. The Priest opened the door a couple of inches and let another dozen out, quickly latching the door again to watch what this second group would do. As he'd suspected, not one of them wasted time perching on the Channel House roof, as the three from the first group had done. Instead, they all flew up immediately, circling around to orient themselves before quickly going their various ways. The cold, hard wind was blowing again, and the Priest watched his folded birds that looked like scraps of paper billowing in from the chaotic sheets of the city, knowing that anything more than a cursory glance would break the illusion, for the scraps were not in thrall to any specific wind; they were obviously flying in very different, and very precise, directions.

With the gift of this illusory wind, he decided to throw caution to it and let all of the birds have their freedom. He tore the cage door off its simple hinges and the bars broke where they were welded to the framework of the cage. He pulled the front of it away, standing clear of it as the paper flock rose up in a chaotic tangle of folded wings and beaks.

None of them languished. They had work to do, and they were eager to do it. They rose up after a few seconds and hopped or fluttered to the doorway. From there they set off to do their work. The whole business, from his tearing open the cage to liberate the birds to the departure of the last of them, had taken perhaps three minutes.

He didn't have long now. As a result, he didn't wait in the Channel House but headed out at a brisk walk so as to be seen on the busier paths that ran between the blocks of cells. In doing so, however, he was not providing himself with an alibi. In point of fact, he had no need of one, because in a short time none of those who saw him there would be alive to testify. His only concern was that the presence of the birds would be discovered. But, to his satisfaction, their existence went unnoticed by his brothers and sisters. He was wonderfully alive in those glorious minutes of anticipation.

His senses quaking, he climbed the steps to the wall above the gate and looked across at the city. The usual fires were burning here and there, and on the second-closest bridge he saw a violent crash between the regime's guard, they in their black and silver uniforms, and an unruly mass of citizens who were forcing the guard's retreat by simple superiority of numbers.

Homemade fire bombs were lobbed among the guards and emptied in sprays of orange flame, the victims dowsing the fire by throwing themselves off the bridge into the water. But the fire was immune to its oldest enemy; the burning guards would dive deep to extinguish the flames only to surface and instantaneously reignite. He could hear the guards shrieking as they were consumed. It was business as usual.

But then came a cry from much nearer by. He heard a wail emanate from within the monastery behind him. Before it died away there were another two and almost immediately three or four more. None were cries of pain, of course. These were souls who had lived in a state of perpetual self-elected agony so as to earn a place within the Order, and the execution that the Hell Priest had composed was designed for efficiency, not indulgence.

When one of the Hell Priest's paper soldiers found an intended victim the Writ's baleful influence took effect, and when that happened they had only eight or nine heartbeats left to them, each one weaker than the one that preceded it. The shouts he heard were of disbelief and rage, and none of them lasted very long.

There was panic among those who worked for the dead and dying members of the Order, however, the damned who, like Felixson, had slavishly served their masters in any way they were called upon to do so. Now their masters were falling down, their mouths frothing, and the slaves were crying out for help only to find that the same thing was likely happening in every other chamber of the monastery.

The Hell Priest finally entered the monastery, walking the pathways between the cell blocks looking left and right but only fleetingly. His brothers and sisters were in their last death throes. Priests, priestesses, deacons, and bishops all lay where they had fallen, some at the threshold, as if all they'd needed were a breath of fresh air, others visible only as an outstretched limb seen through a half-closed door.

What they had in common, these many dead, was blood. It had been expelled from their bodies with convulsive force, just as the Hell Priest had planned in his drawing of the Writs. The death spasms he had willed upon them were a cruelty of his own invention and only plausible because the laws of magic were doing to the body what nature could not. Once the Writs reached their victims, they reconfigured in a matter of seconds the organization of their innards, so that their bodies became blood-filled pitchers disgorging everything in two or, at most, three convulsions.

Only two times as he walked around the cell blocks did he confront living victims. On the first occasion somebody caught at the hem of his vestments. He looked down to see a priestess with whom he had worked several times in the collecting of souls. She was in extremis, blood pouring forth from every pore in her body. He pulled his robes from her weakening grasp and moved along quickly.

On the second occasion, he heard someone call out from a cell he was passing. There he saw, leaning against the wall a foot or so from the door, an excessively corpulent brother in black spectacles whom he had never liked, nor been liked by in turn.

“This is your doing,” the cumbersome priest said from within his cell.

“You are mistaken,” the Hell Priest said.

“
Traitor!”

He was raising his voice as he became more certain of his accusations, and rather than encourage him to shout still louder by moving on, the Hell Priest stepped into the cell, fully prepared to dispatch the accusing Cenobite with hook and hand. Once inside, the Hell Priest saw the unfolded remains of his Execution Writ lying on the floor. For some reason, perhaps because of the great weight of his corpulent brother's body, it had not yet taken effect on him.

“… murderer…” the fat one said.

This time he didn't shout his accusation, though he clearly wished to, for his face had grown suddenly pale and loud noises stemmed from his innards. Death was seconds away.

The Hell Priest backed away from his dying brother. As he did so, two things happened simultaneously: the fat one reached out and caught hold of the front of the Hell Priest's vestments, and then he convulsed, his obese body disgorging a stream of hot blood that hit the Hell Priest's face with such force that it stung his flesh.

The Hell Priest took hold of the fat one's hand and, with a single squeeze, broke all of his fingers in a bid to free himself from the grip. Before he could liberate himself, there was a second convulsion, more powerful than the first. The contents washed over the Hell Priest like a tidal wave, and as the dying obese brother slid down the wall his grip on his murderer weakened, as his life finally gave out. The Hell Priest turned his back on his brother and left the cell, emerging into the tumultuous halls, his bloodied condition no bad disguise.