Shroud of Shadow (22 page)

For now, though, Jacob had David's approval and his good will. This last, perhaps, was even more important at present than his approval, for now that the matter of wool was settled, Jacob wanted something else from David. The baron of Furze had been involved in the recent theft of some Aldernacht property: a serious affair indeed. Jacob had a private army, and he could well have forced the issue, but he did not want to jeopardize the cooperative. Therefore, he was content to continue his subtleties, to use David, his plans, approval, and good will, just as much as he could.

“But,” he said before David could relish his future income too much, “I think we've left something out.”

David's ox eyes flickered. “Left something out?”

“The Inquisition.”

“What—?”

“The Inquisition seems to step in everywhere,” said Jacob. “It seems to spoil . . . everything.” He nodded to Francis. “My son here could tell you about his tobacco plantations in Spain, about what the Inquisition did there.”

“Indeed,” started Francis. “I—”

“But . . .” Yet another kick. Francis fell silent. “. . . he won't.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Jacob caught a glimpse of movement at the door of the kitchen. Just a flicker: a shoulder, or perhaps a face, withdrawing suddenly. He knew what that meant. Like many people of Furze, one of David's servants was earning a little extra money on the side . . . by spying for the Inquisition.

“You know the law about confiscation, my good baron,” he went on. “No one is immune. And bigger men than either of us . . .” This was an outright fabrication, for Jacob arrogantly defied any celibate little cockroach of the Church to best him. “. . . have been implicated in heresy, and lost everything. Including their lives.”

“I don't see—”

“What happens if . . .” Jacob shrugged. “. . . if something happens?”

David was unwilling to part with the money that Jacob had dangled before him. Just as Jacob had planned. “Impossible.”

“Not impossible at all. One of my own men, I believe, was taken by the Inquisition two days ago.”

David abruptly fell silent.

Jacob picked up his knife, cut an apple in two, stuck the point in and flicked a seed to the floor. “I want him back.”

David squirmed, caught between money and the Inquisition. It was not a comfortable position in which to be. “I have no say in the affairs of the Inquisition.”

Jacob flicked another seed to the floor. “You're the secular arm in Furze. It had to be your men who picked him up and took him in.”

“If he's been arrested, then he's in the House of God,” said David. There was a touch of fear in his voice. “I can't do anything for him.”

Jacob frowned. “You're the Baron of Furze.”

“I'm a Christian, as are you,” said David. “The Church has the power to bind and to loose, in heaven and on earth, I carry out the orders of God. I don't ask questions: questions are what the Inquisition is for.”

Much as the ox had stumbled against a wall, so Jacob now found himself smacking into simple faith, and it occurred to him that faith, like everything else, had changed. Honor had been commuted to cash, nobility to trappings, and faith had turned into mere outward orthodoxy . . . and fear. But having seen Furze, its toadying burghers, its virulent Inquisition, its fool of a baron, he could not but wonder whether the faith that he remembered—a real faith, a real belief rooted in the mutual trust of God and His people—had ever really existed, or whether it was simply the delusion of an old man perched on the brink of senility and death.

Jacob regarded the ambitious, frightened, braggart, tremulous figure of the baron, saw too much of his own reflection, and was disgusted.

“So you won't help,” he said.

“I can't help,” said David. “If your man is guilty of heresy, he'll be sentenced. If he's innocent, then he'll go free.”

Jacob's disgust turned to anger. Damned, stupid ox.

He kept his conversation muted for the remainder of the meal, leaving David to wonder whether Furze would become wealthy or not. That was fine. Let him wonder. Jacob was examining his options. Despite his wealth, he had been thwarted by faith and fear. Strong thing, faith, and fear was stronger still. Siegfried of Madgeburg was going to suffer, one way or another.

“Well,” he said over a last glass of wine, “I assure you, baron, that I'll take all this under careful consideration.”

The baron heaved himself up. “I do hope you'll see it my way, Mister Jacob, and lend the cooperative what they need.”

His
way! A short time ago, he had been willing to tax his city into the ground!

“I think,” said Jacob, “that it might be arranged.” He could have been talking about Furze, he could have been talking about Siegfried's punishment. Both were related, to be sure, and the second depended upon the first.

David was beaming.
His
way!

Escorted by a'Freux attendants and guards in the very best debt-ridden style, Jacob returned to his house with his son and his harper. Natil, having played for five straight hours, was tired, and Jacob sent her to supper and bed without asking for further music. Francis, though, was still inwardly raging, and he hardly waited until they had climbed to their upstairs room before his anger put his studied pomposity to flight.

“You never let me say anything, dammit! You treat me like a child! Why do you even bother taking me anywhere? Do you simply want to humiliate me?”

Jacob stood in the middle of his bedroom, wanting nothing so much as to go to bed, and he even admitted to himself that he wanted to go to bed with someone. A girl. A woman. Someone who would make the mattress reek more of scent than of gold, someone who would make the coverlets and throws seem a little less lonely.

He found himself wishing again for Marjorie. But he had driven her away. And constant humiliation was probably what had done it.

“I don't let you say anything,” he said, “because you wouldn't say anything I'd want anyone to hear.”

“I can bargain as well as you can.”

“Maybe.” Jacob looked at his bed. He did not even want sex anymore. The old withered thing between his legs was too dried up to do anything more than put a bullet of sperm through his heart. He just wanted company. He just wanted . . .

Tired, he passed a hand over his face. Everything was gone. Money was all he had left. Money . . . and children like Francis.

“You can bargain,” he said, “but you'd bargain your way right out of Furze. And I want Furze. I want it enough that I'm even willing to let Harold suffer for his own idiocy and—” He broke off, suddenly wondering about Harold. The shawm player's arrest, smack in the middle of negotiations with the cooperative, had been too perfectly timed to be a coincidence. And then there was Fredrick: an Aldernacht man to the core. Disappeared. Probably the Inquisition. Doubtlessly the Inquisition. And then that servant at David's house. Listening.

Did Siegfried want to scuttle the wool cooperative loan?

Jacob went to the window, leaned out, looked up the street toward the House of God. His jaw clenched. Siegfried was in trouble. Siegfried had just run into Jacob Aldernacht. “I want it,” he said. “Now more than ever.”

In Natil's dreams, Hadden and Wheat were going home, taking I-70 westward, crossing the beautiful, tortured plains that had so tried Brigham Young and his followers, then turning south toward Arizona. They meandered through the land, touching desert and lake and ridge as one might try the light switches in a new house, peering at sunrise and moonrise and even pieces of gravel as though into new cupboards:
Look at that! I've never seen anything like that! I never knew that was here!

No, Hadden and Wheat were no longer man and woman. They were, distinctly, something else. Buying hamburgers at a roadside steakhouse, using public toilets along a lonely stretch of I-15, clambering along steep escarpments in the Four Corners area, marveling along with the camera-toting tourists at the kivas and ancient ruins of Mesa Verde—they did all these things, but they did them as though they were strangers who passed this way in disguise.

But though any semblance of humanity had become for them a mere mask, something presented only for the benefit of others, they did not feel alien or separate. Rather, they maintained an unshakable conviction that they belonged here, that hamburgers, toilets, escarpments, and, yes, even tourists were all part of this world into which they had, suddenly and totally, come. This was what they had hungered for. This was real. This was home.

And Natil envied them, for she herself no longer had any sense of home or of belonging. She moved through the world at arm's length, and the unity of soul and substance that had once made her deathlessness not a burden but instead a simple, joyful being was broken now. Natil was a woman who happened to play the harp, and her footsteps, increasingly audible, sounded alien and trespassing on the packed dirt of the streets of Furze as she made her way towards the House of God.

The tower stood up above the rooftops of Furze like a stubby finger, but the surrounding building was broad and low. A complex of offices, archives, tribunal rooms, prison cells, and, below ground, torture chambers and dank holes for confirmed and recalcitrant heretics, it had grown up over the twenty years that Siegfried had been Inquisitor, and now took up as much ground as a good-sized manor house. Its facade was plain: an unadorned wall set with windows, a flight of steps leading up to a doorway beneath three pointed arches. Its message was plain, too.

Natil climbed the steps and was immediately accosted by a guard in the livery of the a'Freux household. “I am here to see Siegfried of Madgeburg,” she explained.

“Are you here to accuse sa'one?”

His eyes were bright, grasping. How much money, Natil wondered, did he receive from the Inquisition? Enough to make him eager. Enough to make any inhabitant of this impoverished town eager. “What is that to you, sir?” she said politely.

But she was a woman, and the guard was dismissive. “He's a busy man. He wan't see you.”

“I am from the house of Jacob Aldernacht,” said the harper. “He will see me.”

Inquisitors summoned others: they were not themselves summoned. But the name of the rich man from Ypris was a charm that turned custom on its head. A quick message to Siegfried presented a quick reply: the Inquisitor would be in his office presently.

The corridors of the House of God were like tunnels, oppressively barrel-vaulted and lighted by hanging lamps. A second guard conducted Natil down a long passage that led into distance and darkness. Open doors allowed her brief glimpses of side rooms, branching halls. Here two Dominicans with raised cowls discussed something in undertones. Here a man who looked to be a common laborer passed Natil, gave her a look of inquiry: Damned? Condemned? Arrested?

Natil bettered her grip on her harp, held her head high. Many of her race had been brought through corridors much like this one, some in chains, some half dead, some staggering along and strengthened only by the vision of immanent divinity that was the birthright of the Elves . . .

. . . or had been, once.

And now Natil was here, but as she had fallen away from her race, so she had come to the House of God as a mortal, as the head musician of a wealthy household who was looking for one of her charges. Human, frail, limited, she was shown to a small office with a window and a desk. A crucifix in the Spanish style stared down from the wall with hollow, pain-racked eyes.

Natil bent her head.

The man who entered a minute later was dark: dark eyes, dark hair, dark beard . . . and a sense of darkness that hung about him, as though he wore some inner doubt or sadness as closely as his black mantle. But his eyes, when they fixed upon Natil, turned narrow and examining.

“You wished to see me,” he said. His voice was noncommittal, severe, as though a lifetime of self-denial touched even the air that passed through his throat.

“God bless you, Brother Inquisitor,” said Natil politely. “I am Natil. I am here to inquire about a man I fear is your prisoner.”

Siegfried sat down. His eyes changed their look not in the slightest. “I will not discuss what prisoners we have,” he said. “But no one has anything to fear from the Inquisitor save heretics. Why do you say, then, that you
fear
that he has been taken.”

“I do not fear for his soul,” said Natil, “since I believe that is in the hands of those who wish only the best for it.” Absolutely true, and unchallengeable even by old Berard Gui. But Siegfried was canny, subtle, and—in that there were indications that he was attempting to destroy the wool cooperative—extremely hostile to anyone who wore the Aldernacht livery. Had the stars been with her, Natil would have faced him with perfect equanimity. But the stars were gone: she could only speak from her heart, and with caution.

She made herself look into Siegfried's eyes. She saw pain there, pain and self doubt. She tried to keep her mind on compassion. But she could not help but wonder whether compassion did any good any more.

“But he has a body,” she continued, “and I fear for his body, as do his friends.”

“The body is worthless.” Siegfried's eyes turned calculating. “It is dung. But you say that he has friends . . .”

Siegfried, fishing, had revealed that he did indeed have Harold. That, at least, was something, and many would have considered themselves fortunate to escape with such a prize. But Natil had given her word to the Aldernachts: she was their head musician, and therefore she had responsibilities. To Harold.

The sudden pang caught her off guard. She had had responsibilities to Omelda, too, and she had failed in them, was failing even now.

“Friends,” said Natil. “As do you, brother.”

He was plainly annoyed. “Speak simply. I want to know about Harold's friends.”

Natil folded her hands on her harp, which lay across her knees. “You know his name. So you do indeed have Harold in custody.”

“I will not say whether I have anybody or not.” He stood up, fixed Natil with a stare that would have chilled someone who had any hope of surviving the interview. But Natil was not chilled, for she had no such hope. Nor did she particularly expect to be taken: she existed in openness and neutrality. “My office,” said Siegfried, “is free of all impediments, for before the Inquisition, all impediments are swept away. I have no impediment from my superiors, none from my inferiors, none from the officials or ministers through whose offices I act, none from any witnesses whom I hear. And certainly none from you. If you have come to tell me about heresy, I will listen. If you have come to ask foolish questions about foolish men, I have no time for you.”