Gold Throne in Shadow (14 page)

Oda shook her smiling head. “You are only fifth-rank.”

Apparently an army counted for less than a Cardinal.

“And,” she added, “you have the invitation of the King, do you not?”

The lady was better informed about Christopher's mission than he was. He decided it would be safe to level with her.

“I have his express orders. I also have instructions from the Saint, to—”

He stopped talking because she had put her finger on his lips.

“Say nothing you would not repeat in public,” she said.

He scratched his head and tried again. “I understand there is a Curate of the Gold Throne here. The Saint suggests that's not . . . helpful.”

“There is indeed,” she said, “and it is not particularly helpful. Although the summer season produces more fevers than I can cure, Lord Joadan only heals those who can pay his fee. If they paid me instead, I could build a bigger hospital to serve the ones who do not require magic.”

“You don't get paid?”

“I am paid what they can spare. But I choose my patients on the strength of their affliction, not their purse.”

Basic triage. Christopher could be certain that Oda was doing the right thing, just as he could be certain that there would be those who didn't like it.

“If I'm going to get Joadan out of the city, I need to know how he got in.”

“The gold proving, of course.”

“Um . . . pretend I don't know what that means.”

She raised her eyebrows. “The Cathedral is slack indeed if it does not teach the most basic elements of the other theologies. Who is Master of Novices these days?”

“I don't know. I mean, I didn't learn anything at the Cathedral.”

Oda sat back and clasped her hands together in her lap.

“I'm a special case,” he said weakly. Finishing his education was what they had given him Torme for. He was using the man as a supply clerk.

“It is a doctrine of the Gold Throne that its priests are worth their weight in gold. Thus Lord Joadan paid the Lord Wizard a hundred and forty-two pounds of gold for the privilege of the city. If you were to compete with him, no doubt the Lord Wizard would expect the same from you.”

Christopher couldn't raise that much gold. He paid his bills in paper, a currency he was certain the Lord Wizard would not even find amusing.

“I don't want to compete with him.”

“Good. Because you could not. Our faith will not allow you to make back such a huge sum from the pockets of the poor. Your commission from the King is as a regimental commander, not a healer. Perhaps you had best respect that distinction for now.”

Oda was all but telling him to keep his distance. He couldn't blame her. She would have to live with Joadan, and the Lord Wizard, and the Captain for decades; he would be free to leave in a few years. Whatever trouble he stirred up would be hers to settle. With a grim nod he conceded the point and took his leave.

But it seemed fate had other plans. He had barely turned the corner outside of the chapel, a little bit lost but intrigued by the sights and sounds of the city, when he caught a flash of yellow from across the street. A trim, handsome man in gold robes stepped out of a doorway, followed by a pair of servants in yellow livery. Instinctively Christopher shadowed him from his side of the street, pretending to look at the shop fronts while surreptitiously watching them.

Joadan—for it had to be Curate Joadan, wearing rich clothes and a long, straight sword with glittering jewels in the golden hilt—walked purposefully, but Christopher felt the man was also looking for something without wanting to be obvious about it. Apparently it wasn't enemy priests, since as far as Christopher could tell he hadn't been noticed. After half a block Joadan turned down a narrow alley. The servants, laden with packages, followed awkwardly.

Christopher hurried across the street to the mouth of the alley. Masked by the servant's package-bearing width and occasional stumble into a trash bin or puddle, he slipped far enough in to see Joadan's destination.

A small group of boys, wearing little more than loincloths, had been playing a game with balls and sticks. Joadan spoke to them sharply, and the boys, with the courage of the young, jeered at him, chattering some odd nonsense syllables like screeching monkeys.

Then the boy closest to Joadan collapsed, coughing. The rest fled in abject terror as Joadan reached down and caught the boy. He stood up, the lad in his arms, and looked around to see who was watching.

Christopher pressed himself into a doorway. Miraculously he appeared to have escaped detection; after a few seconds he peered out to see Joadan and his servants disappearing down the far end of the alley.

His heart racing, Christopher pondered his options. Faren would seem to have been tragically misinformed; apparently the Gold Throne was not above stooping so low in broad daylight after all. The imprudence of pursuing the matter at this immediate juncture was obvious to him, even as his feet quickly followed down the alley of their own accord. There would, after all, be no other juncture for the boy.

He began to hustle, and then run, reaching the end of the alley and looking around wildly. He only saw them because of the servant's livery; they were both clinging to the back of a coach that now bumped its way down the road. Christopher almost called out, but to whom? Even if there were a guardsman about, he would be just as likely to support Joadan, or at least look the other way. And involving ordinary townsmen would be irresponsibly dangerous, a fact that the townsmen no doubt already understood.

So, alone with his fear, he ran after the coach, which seemed to be in some haste. He struggled to keep it in sight for several blocks, gradually falling behind as exhaustion gained on him. But when the gap had opened up to a hundred yards, the coach stopped in front of a handsome building, and its occupants disembarked and hurried inside.

Brown and square and three stories tall, with thick oak double doors and bay windows on the upper floors, it looked surprisingly like a good New York brownstone. The thought of storming it to rescue a child about to be sacrificed to dark gods momentarily seemed absurd. Christopher stood in front of the steps, checked by sheer normalcy. It was a calm, sunny day on a busy city street; how could he single-handedly assault somebody's house?

“My lord,” called a voice from the nearest intersection. Torme and a squad of hard-breathing soldiers came jogging up. “You should not have gone out without an escort. You should not have come here alone.”

“But I'm not alone. You're here, and just in time. It's happening now, Torme. I saw the Gold Curate grab a kid off the street! They're in there,
right now
. We've got to do something.”

Torme frowned at the building, glanced over his squad, and looked up and down the street. “There,” he said, pointing at a wagon full of cabbages. The squad of soldiers descended on it, pushing it onto its side while Torme intimidated the driver into silence. The men knocked off the wheels and liberated an axle. Gathering around their newly acquired battering ram, they prepared to charge up the steps.

“We will necessarily lose the element of surprise,” Torme said.

“Or not,” Christopher said, and cast one of his new spells on the axle. He had memorized it as a joke, intending to use it on the bard the next time she lectured him on his many failings, which he assumed would be minutes after the next time he saw her. Now it would be put to serious use.

He touched the battering ram, and silence washed out from it, pooling around them. “. . . ,” Christopher said, intending to say
let's go
, but the silence was complete. The noise of the city was blanked out, along with the sound of his own breathing. He grabbed the front end of the axle instead.

Torme gestured, and the men surged forward. The axle slammed into the door, visibly shaking it. The men struggled a bit to get into rhythm without any verbal cues, falling into unison only on the third swing. After the fourth the door sagged. On the fifth the left side fell back into the hall, landing at the feet of a wide-eyed butler.

The butler tried to scream, but the men threw the log into the hall. His voice cut off, the butler turned to flight. Christopher sprinted after him, catching him by the back of the neck. He pulled the man back, handed him off to Torme, and ran down the hall. Torme passed the butler down the line, each soldier in turn passing him to the last and youngest, who pushed him up against the wall and threatened him with his rifle.

A few meters from the entrance the noise of the world broke over them like ocean spray. Their footsteps boomed in Christopher's ears, and he wondered how the household remained unaware.

Torme was still not speaking; he sent a man down each hall or door they passed with a wave of his hand. Christopher instinctively looked for a basement, and when he threw open a door and saw stairs down, he shouted, “Here!” Assuming he was followed, he went down three steps at a time, and now his footfalls truly rang out, accompanying the jingle of his mail and his scabbard knocking at the wall as he tried to draw the sword.

He burst into the bottom room and a terrible scene. The lad was hanging upside down from his knees, his shirt off, the Gold Curate striking him on the back barehanded. A servant knelt in front of the child with a bowl and rag; several others stood in the background, watching mournfully.

“Get away from him!” Christopher shouted, which he realized was a singular waste of words when Joadan answered by casting a spell. There were better things to do with speech than threaten people; you could use it to kill in this world. Christopher's self-recriminations were cut short when a huge black panther leapt out of the shadows on the floor—not that there had been shadows on the floor an instant ago—and tried to bite his face off.

He went down on his back, both hands locked around the beast's throat to hold it off. The animal had unnaturally glowing yellow eyes, but its hot, fetid breath in his face felt terrifyingly real. He could see its fangs, yellowed and fearsome. Once it realized it could not bite him, it latched onto his shoulders with its front paws and proceeded to rake his belly, trying to scoop him out like a melon baller.

He could feel its claws scrabbling on his chain-mail, links catching and bursting off to tinkle across the room. In another few seconds the dribble would become a deluge and his mail would cease to exist. Even now claws raked through rents, burning lines of fire down his torso. His tael, though vastly greater than when he had been first-rank and thus only twice as hard to kill as a mortal man, would still only last seconds under this sustained assault.

Torme leapt into action, straddling the beast and grappling its head with both hands. At that precise moment Christopher truly felt the sting of his penury; he still had not bought the priest a blade, which would have spared him the sight of a man wrestling a panther barehanded. The two of them were strong enough to immobilize the cat's head, though they could not dislodge its grasp on Christopher or stop its raking attack. Then a soldier stepped up, put his rifle into the cat's mouth, and pulled the trigger.

The animal burst like a pillow into a thousand gold rose petals, which slowly faded into gray and then nothingness after landing on the ground. Christopher was lifted to his feet by his men, who faced him in the right direction and put his sword in his hand. He ignored the steel rings still dropping from his armor and pointed his blade across the room.

Joadan's servants were readying themselves for a desperate defense, several with daggers and one wielding a footstool. Joadan was pushing a servant toward the back of the room, uttering harsh commands, his sword drawn and already softly glowing. The servant was carrying the boy, and the boy was reaching out to the Curate, with both hands, crying out. Once Christopher's hearing recovered from the rifle shot, he understood the boy's plea.

“Daddy!”

Christopher opened his mouth and closed it. There were no words appropriate to the situation. Instead, he dropped his sword and raised his hands in surrender.

“My lord?” Torme asked, clearly astounded.

“Drop your weapons,” Christopher said. “Everybody drop your weapons.”

“He was attacking the child,” Torme argued.

“No,” Christopher said, “he was saving his son's life.”

At that Torme threw down his wooden sword and raised his hands. The other soldiers looked around nervously before setting down their guns and imitating their officer.

“Pick up your sword,” Joadan said. His voice was tightly controlled, like he paid for every word and meant to get his money's worth. “I would not have it said I killed an unarmed man.”

“No,” Christopher answered. “We were wrong.
I
was wrong.”

“You burst into my house, assault my servants, terrify my child, and you think
I was wrong
suffices? Pick up your sword and prepare to die.”

“You're a priest,” Christopher said. “Why don't you just heal him?”

“Oh,” said Joadan, clapping his free hand to the side of his face in comic surprise. “Why didn't I think of that? Why did it never occur to me to use the power of the gods to undo the fate the gods had bestowed upon my child? All my life I have stumbled in confusion, needing only your brilliant insight to set me free.”

Christopher felt his facing turning red, but he did not let it distract him from Joadan's words.

“If you can't, then let me.”

Joadan put his hand down and stared at Christopher with incredulity. This was a comforting development, as it was by now a response Christopher was used to.

“Do you truly take me for a lackwit?” Joadan said, when it became clear Christopher wasn't going to say anything more. “Would you trap me so easily?”

“I don't understand?”

“What price would you have me pay?” Joadan said. He didn't seem to think it was funny anymore. “The Gold Throne has forbidden commerce between our Churches. Should a single coin pass between us, the Apostle would have my head.”