DemonWars Saga Volume 2: Mortalis - Ascendance - Transcendence - Immortalis (The DemonWars Saga) (83 page)

B
rother Francis paced slowly before St.-Mere-Abelle’s tussie-mussie bed, feeling his legs weaken with every step.

He wanted them to see this.

He was exhausted now, beyond belief. He had the soul stone in his pocket, and he had considered spirit-walking, having his spirit violate the sanctuary of St.-Mere-Abelle.

Yes, like a ghost, he wanted to haunt them.

He wanted them to see this.

He rolled the stone in his fingers now, knowing that he had missed his chance, for Francis couldn’t possibly find the strength to enter its magic now, to separate
spirit from body.

He could hardly even find the strength to call out “Bou-raiy!” at the wall.

And his legs were tiring fast and his breath was becoming harder and harder to find.

They had to see this, had to bear witness to the end of Brother Francis, to learn that he faced that end courageously and with the conviction that he was right!

But now he was no longer walking, was, suddenly and without even realizing the movement, not even standing. He managed to roll over a bit, to see the wall, and he took some comfort in the forms he noted up there. He couldn’t make them out through his failing eyes, but he sensed that they were watching him, that they were pointing.

They knew, and they would tell Bou-raiy.

Taking comfort in that, Francis turned his attention to the tussie-mussie bed, bathing himself in the aromas, losing himself in the colorful sights and fragrances. He felt as if those very smells might lift him up, up, might separate his soul from his body as surely as would the hematite. He could float on a cloud of aromas to God, to a judgment that he no longer feared.

He hardly heard the horses gallop up to a stop a short distance behind him, hardly heard the gathering crowd—and surely they were gathering, led by Merry Cowsenfed, several hundred people coming to say farewell to Brother Francis of

St.-Mere-Abelle.

It would have made Francis happy, if he had known.

J
ilseponie knew before she ever moved beside the man that he—like several of those she had encountered in Palmaris, like one she had found on the road here to St.-Mere-Abelle—was beyond her help, that even if she went to him with all of her magical strength, she would buy him only a few minutes or hours, and those he would spend in pain.

She knew by his emaciated form, lying listlessly, that the plague had won this particular fight. She knew by the look in his eyes that he was seeing as much on the other side of death as in the material world.

Jilseponie would never have recognized the man had she not heard his name as she had crossed the field. When last she had seen Francis, he had been strong and stout, even a little portly, clean-shaven and with hair neatly cropped. Now he was a ragged thing! His hair and beard had grown wild, had thickened as his body had thinned.

She went to him and knelt beside him, and took up his hand in her own.

He stared at her for a long while, seeming not to recognize her.

“Greetings, Brother Francis,” she whispered. “I have heard of your work here, of your courage and compassion.”

Francis continued to stare at her curiously, and then a smile widened on his face, a light of recognition. “Jilseponie?” he asked.

She nodded and reached for her soul stone, though she doubted she could even
get into the magical energy in time for Francis.

Francis’ smile turned down suddenly. “Can you forgive me?” he asked, his voice a rasping thing, for a discernible rattle came from his chest with every word and every breath.

Jilseponie paused and looked back at him curiously.

“Your brother,” Francis remarked, “Grady Chilichunk. I was the one.”

Jilseponie moved close to him, trying to suppress a scowl.

“I killed him,” Francis admitted, “on the road from Palmaris. It was an accident … I did not mean …”

Jilseponie put her finger against Francis’ lips to quiet him. That battle seemed so far removed now, that hatred so irrelevant to the current situation.

“Forgive me,” Francis said again. “We were all so confused then, and all so wrong.”

“And now you see the truth?” she asked him.

Francis’ smile returned, but then he winced and closed his eyes. Jilseponie started to reach for her soul stone again, but, as if he had read her mind, Brother Francis reached over and held her arm. “I go without fear,” he whispered, and it seemed to Jilseponie as if he were speaking more to himself than to her.

“I do not fear justice,” he finished, never opening his eyes, and those were the last words that Brother Francis Dellacourt of St.-Mere-Abelle would ever utter.

It hurt Jilseponie more than she would ever have believed to watch this man die. She held little fondness for Francis, had once been his avowed enemy; and even in those last days when she had been with him in St. Precious after the fall of Markwart, even when he had declared that she should become the mother abbess of the Abellican Church, she had not been overfond of him.

And he had died peacefully, contentedly, it seemed; and yet, to her surprise, Jilseponie found that his passing had wounded her.

She gently removed his hand from her forearm and placed it over his chest, then slowly rose and turned, first to regard the teary gathering of plague sufferers and the one-eyed woman who led them, then to turn and face the dark and foreboding walls of St.-Mere-Abelle. It took her a while to steady herself, to get over the emotional shock of looking at this place.

The place that had served as prison for Bradwarden. The place where her adoptive parents had died horribly.

She took another steadying breath, reminding herself of her purpose and her need, and she forced her gaze to drift up, up, to the dark, cloaked forms standing along the wall. She took Dainsey’s hand and walked toward them.

“Francis is dead?” came a call down, a sharp voice she did not recognize.

“He is,” Jilseponie answered.

The snort that she heard next seemed to her one of derision.

“They never was likin’ him much for comin’ out to us,” came a voice from behind. Jilseponie turned to see the one-eyed woman standing there. Behind her, the others were gathering up the body of Francis, wrapping it lovingly in sheets.

“They put him out when he came down with plague?” Jilseponie reasoned.

The woman shook her head. “He came out of his own doin’,” she answered, “and not a sign o’ the plague in him. And he worked with them,” she added, turning back to motion to the crowd of the sick. “All of ’em. And he helped one or two afore the plague caught up to him. Ah, a good man was Brother Francis. A saint, I say! But them on the wall don’t know it.” She spat on the ground. “Bah, they’re not knowin’ anythin’ but their own scaredness. Won’t come out and will shoot us dead, any of us, if we walk across their precious flowers.”

Brother Francis, a saint
. The incongruous notion rolled around in Jilseponie’s mind as she stood there, staring at his body being borne away by the peasants. His last words, the proclamation that he did not fear justice, weighed more heavily on her, then. Had Francis truly found the light and the truth? Was his contentment at his death as real as it had seemed? Could he so understand that he had redeemed himself, and thus, need not fear the judgment of his God?

Jilseponie turned back to look at the monks on the wall, and many more had come up by then, no doubt to watch the last journey of their brother.

“I need to speak to the Father Abbot,” she called to them.

“You cannot come in,” came the reply from that same, sharp voice, and in a purely condescending tone.

Jilseponie looked at the great doors of the abbey, her hands going reflexively to the gemstones hanging at her belt. “Ah, but I could if I wanted to,” she muttered under her breath. She looked back up at the wall, at the harsh speaker, and only then did she note that one of the monk’s sleeves was tied off, as if he was missing an arm.

“I will speak to him in the gateway, from across the tussie-mussie bed,” she said.

The monk scoffed at her and started to turn away.

“Do you know who I am?” she cried out, stopping him in midturn. “I am Jilseponie Wyndon of Dundalis, friend to Avelyn Desbris, friend to Braumin Herde, wife of Nightbird! I am she who destroyed the demon of Father Abbot Markwart!”

The monk walked back to the edge of the wall and leaned out through the break in the battlement, peering at her intently.

“Tell Father Abbot Agronguerre that I have come bearing the most urgent news,” she went on. “The most urgent.”

“Tell me, then,” the monk replied.

“Bid him meet me by the tussie-mussie bed,” Jilseponie continued, ignoring the man’s command. “If you wish to hear my tale, then join him. I’ve not the time to tell it more than once.” Then she turned away, gathering the one-eyed woman and Dainsey in tow and walking toward the other peasants.

The monk called out several times to her then, mostly cries for her to stop and explain herself and a threat or two that he would not bring Agronguerre to meet with her.

But Jilseponie wasn’t playing that game with him. Not then. Not with so much obviously critical work right before her.

“Tell me your tale,” she bade the one-eyed woman, for she knew that this one had somehow survived the plague and had, subsequently, come to be the leader of this tent city.

Soon after, while she tended yet another in the long line of plague sufferers that Merry Cowsenfed had ordered for her, the great gates of St.-Mere-Abelle swung open. In the archway across the tussie-mussie bed stood several brothers, flanked, Jilseponie noted, by monks armed with heavy crossbows. She motioned for Merry Cowsenfed to join her.

“Keep them quiet and in line,” she explained. “I will be back soon enough.”

“I seen them that ye healed,” Merry started to spout, so obviously thrilled.

“Not healed,” Jilseponie quickly corrected, “no, not that. That will come later, as I told you, and from one much greater than I.” She patted the woman on the shoulder, then motioned for Dainsey to follow her and strode over to her side of the tussie-mussie bed.

“We have heard much of your good work, Jilseponie Wyndon,” greeted the largest man there, an older monk who seemed to Jilseponie as if he could be Belster O’Comely’s father. “I am Father Abbot Agronguerre, formerly of St. Belfour. It pains my heart greatly to learn that you are with plague.”

“Not I,” Jilseponie replied immediately.

“But you tend to the victims,” the Father Abbot reasoned.

“And soon to find the same fate as Francis, no doubt,” the one-armed monk beside him remarked.

“The plague cannot touch me,” Jilseponie replied, “for I have tasted of the blood of Avelyn’s covenant. Thus I can tend them with the soul stone without fear that the plague demons will attack me, and thus am I more effective in the tending.”

“You will heal them all?” the one-armed monk asked, his tone half skeptical and half sarcastic.

“I will heal none, likely,” the woman replied, “but I will make many strong enough for the road, for the journey they must now undertake.” She paused, trying to measure the level of interest as it crossed all their faces. “To the Barbacan, to Avelyn,” she explained. “There they will be healed.”

The one-armed monk snorted and started to respond, but Agronguerre put his arm up before the man, silencing him.

“It is true, Father Abbot,” Jilseponie went on, staring at him. “This woman—” she pulled Dainsey forward “—is my living proof. I took her to the Barbacan. She was no better off than was Francis when I came upon him on the field. I thought her death imminent, but then—”

“But then I kissed the bleeding palm,” Dainsey interrupted, “and it was like all the angels o’ heaven came down and burned the plague from me body.”

“Francis is dead,” the one-armed monk remarked. “You did not save him.”

“He could not make the journey,” Jilseponie replied. She turned and looked back to the hundreds at the tent city. “Nor will many of them,” she admitted. “But many others will, and there they will find healing. And those who go though they
have not yet been touched by the plague will find armor against it.”

The monks didn’t immediately respond, and when Jilseponie turned back, she found the Father Abbot stroking his chin pensively.

“You wished to speak with me, and so I assume that you believe that we have a role to play in this,” he said. Again, the one-armed monk snorted.

“Preposterous,” he muttered. “No doubt you wish us to come out on the field beside you, to work our sacred stone magic to help the peasants, that we might all die of the plague together.”

“I wished to tell you of the miracle at Aida,” Jilseponie explained to Agronguerre, again trying very hard to ignore the unpleasant one-armed monk. “You and all of your brethren must make the pilgrimage there, and with all speed, to enter the covenant. Only then can you truly begin to help the plague sufferers. Before you make such a journey, I would not even want you to try to tend the sufferers, for your brethren will prove vital in the long battle we must wage against the plague.”

Agronguerre didn’t immediately reply, but Jilseponie saw his emotions clearly. He didn’t believe her, but how he wanted to!

“Take not my word for it,” she said sharply, even as the one-armed monk started to jump in with another negative remark. “Go out with your soul stones. To Palmaris, where you will learn that the whole city is on the march to the north, Duke Tetrafel’s soldiers and your brothers of St. Precious with them. Go out farther to the north, and see the lines of those living in the towns in and about the Timberlands, well on their way to that most holy of places.”

She paused, just to see if the monks would try to interject anything, but she saw from their dumbfounded expressions that she would not be interrupted.

“Go all the way to Mount Aida with your gemstones, Father Abbot,” she finished. “See that holy place for yourself, if you must. Go and be convinced, and then send your brethren, all of your brethren, there in body that they might taste the blood of Avelyn’s covenant and know the truth. Your aid will prove critical in healing the world.”