The Gathering Storm (101 page)

“So true, Your Excellency! So very true!”

“Do not forget the tale of Queen Salome, who feared that a usurper would supplant her and so went to the witches and begged them to spy into the future on her behalf by raising the ghost of the prophet.”

“Yes, indeed. So it came to pass that for her impiety, a worthy successor took her place.”

“Yet was Queen Salome not a worthy regnant? She was humble. God Themselves raised her up to her high state. It was disobedience, not impiety, that caused her downfall. The witches did as they were told, and were not punished for their act. But the queen had disobeyed God’s voice when God commanded her to kill the tribe of Melia.”

“She was a mother herself! She did not like to put children to death.”

“God may often call upon us to do things that may seem
distasteful to our imperfect understanding, but we must never hesitate. Obedience is righteousness.”

With such lessons Antonia strove to educate Lady Lavinia and her household: Hugh had hidden her in plain sight, installed her as a member of Lavinia’s schola, although in truth few visitors came and went from the lady’s palace and fewer still from the court in Darre and least of all any clerics from the palace of the skopos, who might have cause to recognize and betray Antonia.

“Very true, very true,” said the lady distractedly as she leaned on the casement and squinted out into the molten Setentre sun. “There! I see them.” She crossed to the door, paused, and turned. “Will you come to meet them, Your Excellency?”

“I am not walking well today, Lady Lavinia. Best if I bide here and have a tray brought up for my supper.”

“As you wish, Your Excellency.” She hurried out.

Better if Hugh comes to me, as a steward attends his mistress
. Perhaps the ploy was beneath her, but her position seemed weak and Hugh’s all the stronger, and she felt it necessary to do what she could to remind him of her lineage and stature and the respect he owed her. She heard only such news as had trickled northward in the months since Decial, when she had arrived here still reeling from her imprisonment. Little enough to feed on, but she had learned to survive on scraps, and she now possessed the entire library hauled out of St. Ekatarina’s Convent, most especially their chronicle, the work of many hands and many generations, a treasure-house of knowledge and observation.

She had read through the chronicle so many times that she had memorized entire passages, and as she shifted in her chair, she studied the map with immense satisfaction, knowing her work in deciphering the tangle of hints scattered throughout the manuscript like gems in a field of wheat had proved fruitful.

Sooner than she expected, Hugh came to wait on her. He, no less than she, knew they possessed information of incalculable value.

“This is it?” he asked, after a perfunctory greeting and after banishing his servants from the chamber. There remained
only one beardless, thin man who cowered at the door looking ready to flee and never spoke one word as Hugh set hands on the table and studied the map.

From this angle, examining him, she understood why Lady Lavinia had cause to be grateful to this man beyond his service to the lady by saving her young daughter from rape. God favored few souls with such exceptional beauty. Yet he did not overplay his hand; he dressed plainly, without unseemly flourishes. He wore clothing of such fine weave it seemed invisible, his over-tunic dyed to a muted wheat gold and beneath it a reddish-golden under-tunic shining with the intensity of hot coals, barely seen but startling, the kind of detail that made you look twice. He wore three simple rings—emerald, citrine, and lapis lazuli—and his gold presbyter’s chain and Circle of Unity. Only the gold chain, and his cleanshaven face, marked him as a churchman, although one might guess at his vocation because his hands were so remarkably clean, nails trimmed, and the skin smooth and unlined. No calluses or blisters marred his hands, but in truth they looked strong enough to throttle any soul who did not do his bidding. The mute manservant shifted nervously, took a step forward to get a look at the map, but when Hugh glanced at him, he slunk back to the door and quivered.

“This is the tale you gleaned from the convent’s chronicle,” said Hugh at last.

“It is.”

The sheepskin had arrived six months ago with the known lands inked in by a master cartographer, the hinterlands marked in cruder dimensions—a sheep’s head to represent the western island kingdom of Alba, the horns of a goat to suggest the northern reaches where the Eika barbarians nested, the blank emptiness of untracked deserts beyond the shore of the Middle Sea, and the geometric oblong marking the unknown reaches of the Heretic’s Sea that lay north and east of the Arethousan capital. Dragons lay to the east and beyond them grass and sand and the distant glories of Katai. By careful measurement and guesswork, she had marked on this map each stone circle mentioned in the nuns’ chronology.

“Every one you have marked here?” he asked.

“Every one, to the best of my knowledge of the land and
as well as it is described within the text. The nuns of St. Ekatarina’s recorded all things precisely. No fables and superstitions marred their pages. They set down what they heard as accurately as possible. I did the same.”

“Here.” He placed a finger on the map east of the Wendish marchlands and a little north of the kingdom of Ungria, although the borderlands of such places could not be marked with any precision, since they fluctuated with the season and the year.

She waited.

“Here,” he repeated. His finger covered a circle representing a known crown, with the number of stones inked inside. Seven. “The Holy Mother has commanded me to journey east. I will oversee the crown discovered by Brother Marcus during his travels through the wilderness lands that lie north of Ungria and south and east of Polenie. Seven stones. One of the original crowns, so Mother Anne has decided.”

“How will you get there? That is a journey of many months’ undertaking, through perilous country.”

He removed his finger. The servingman moved a foot, and a plank creaked; and the poor man winced, as startled as if a lion had burst out of the woodwork. “I will travel by means of the crowns. Now that we have a better idea of the placement of each of the crowns, it is apparent—” He brushed a hand over
The Eternal Geometry
. “—that by using geometry the threads can be woven to open a passage from one specific crown to another. Depending on the rising and setting of the stars and their altitude at the time of passage, and allowing for angle and distance, I must reach east and north from Novomo using the threads from stars in those quadrants.”

“Other crowns stand between Novomo and this distant place. Might these not confuse your passage?”

“It is possible. If I can move swiftly enough, then I can correct for my mistakes and try again. I am confident that my calculations are correct. They have been double-checked by the Holy Mother herself. Her skills as a mathematicus are unequaled.”

“Except perhaps by her daughter.”

The felicity of his expression stilled and became rigid. He
drew his finger south from the Ungrian border to the Heretic’s Sea and farther south yet into desert wilderness surrounding the holy city of Says, west to the ruins of Kartiako, then west and northwest to the disputed lands lying between southern Salia and the Jinna kingdom of Aquila, yet north and west again to the sheep’s head that marked Alba, and farther north yet to Eika country, inscribing a vast circle—a crown of sorts—across the continent of Novaria. By the time this was done he had recovered the mobility of his smile.

He beckoned. The servingman shuffled forward and handed him a brass disk engraved with marks and adorned with a bar on one side and a curling nest of circles, a smaller one superimposed on a larger, on the other.

“Except perhaps by her daughter,” he echoed. “Do you know what this is?”

“I do not,” she admitted.

He did not offer to let her hold it. “It is an astrolabe, which the Jinna use both as an observational instrument and a calculating device. It offers precision, and foreknowledge. I need only determine the altitude of a single star and with that information can tell which stars are about to rise and which have just set. You see there are several disks nestled here, each one a climate for a different latitude. If I am pulled off course, it will be quick work to forge a new path. I will get there.”

“Geometry holds many mysteries for me still, Father Hugh. Now that you must journey east, what thought have you given to my role here in Darre?”

After a measure of silence, during which the servingman shifted twice onto the creaking board before moving to avoid it, Hugh sat on the bench opposite Antonia and set his fine hands flat on the map, covering Wendar and Varre. “The Holy Mother Anne has departed Darre for the east with the emperor and the army.”

“To the old imperial lands of Dalmiaka, so I have heard.”

“What you have heard is true. For many years Anne supposed the central crown of the great crown lay at Verna, but now she realizes she is mistaken. This crown—” He pointed to a mark lying on the shore of the Middle Sea about halfway between Aosta and Arethousa. “—must come into our control.
Therefore, a conquest. Empress Adelheid is pregnant again—”

“Again!”

“—so she remains in Darre. I have encouraged her to bring you into her schola. Go there now. Prepare the ground.”

“Prepare the ground?”

“We have spoken of this before. The cauda draconis has a particular role to play when a great spell is cast.”

The cauda draconis died, but since he did not say so out loud, neither did she. She waited. Let him show his strengths and weaknesses first; then she would know how much to conceal and reveal.

“Yet we need not stand passively.”

“God’s will must be accomplished,” she agreed.

“So it will be, Sister Antonia. But in order to accomplish God’s will the righteous ones must wield power.”

She nodded. “You are ambitious.”

He bowed his head. “I serve God, and the regnant. That is all.”

He was lying, of course. Yet what difference did it make? In all the years of the church, no man had been skopos. Hugh had risen as high as he could. He needed her. For the time being, she needed him.

“I will journey to Darre and join Empress Adelheid’s schola.”

“She will welcome you, Sister. You will be satisfied with the arrangements. You will be shown the respect due to you.” He picked up the astrolabe and rose. “We must be patient, and cautious. Now we walk on the knife’s edge. Now is the most dangerous time. It would have been best if I had remained with the emperor, but the Holy Mother has given me a different part to play. Be wary. Be strong.”

“You will not find me lacking, Father Hugh. I am aware that the hour of need draws close.”

“‘All that is lost will be reborn on this Earth because of a Great Unveiling like to that Great Sundering in which vanished the Lost Ones.’ As it was said: ‘There will come a furious storm.’”

“To overset the wicked.”

He shrugged. “The innocent may drown in the same tide that sweeps away the wicked.”

“Then they were not innocent, if God did not choose to protect them!”

Because she was seated, he had the height to loom over her, and because he was beautiful, she felt, briefly, diminished, as though visited by the messenger of God, who stood in judgment upon her in all its glory and found her wanting.

Antonia did not like to feel diminished.

But his lips twisted up in an ironic smile, which betrayed his mortality and imperfection. “I have never been sure of God’s intentions,” he said softly. “Much has been hidden from our eyes, and more than that is twisted and confused. Where we have seen a horse, perhaps we have mistakenly called it a cow.”

“Without conviction, there cannot be righteous behavior, Father Hugh. Be warned. Doubt is the tool of the Enemy.” She indicated the map. “I know the shape of the world, and its place in God’s plan. Do you?”

“I know what I want,” he said, and with that he made his farewells and departed.

THE madman died soon after, leaving his corpse on the stone where he had slept. It was peace of a kind.

There came a string of screaming prisoners dragged down into the depths to walk the wheel, but none of them lasted more than a score of turnings. He discovered by searching with his hands several who died in their sleep, worn to nothing, so emaciated it was a miracle they had been able to walk. Another lay in agony with the flux for hours or days until at last he voided his soul as well as his guts. The sleeping hollow stank so badly afterward that the next four prisoners refused to sleep there, preferring the noisy ledge beside the wheel. Even the miners complained that the smell made them
sick, so eventually a pair of workers dumped chalk in the hollow and after a few turnings swept it up again, but for many turnings afterward he shed chalk dust like skin and traced it into the creases of his body and rubbed it out of his hair, although in truth any substance in his hair was a relief against the crawling lice and the endless scratching.

One man slipped and broke his arm, and he died, too, for there was nothing to set it with and none of the guards cared to take the poor man back up, so the sweet sick smell of poison set in and the prisoner died suffering and babbling of nightmare visions. The next one leaped gibbering into the depths because he could not endure the darkness, and as the wheel rumbled on, strange noises echoed up from the pit where no miner walked—scraping and cracking, like dogs gnawing on bones.

Maybe it was better to be dead than living in this purgatory, which wasn’t life or death but a state of abandonment in which neither the angels nor the demons could get their claws sunk into the flesh. He dreamed of sun and wind and the wide seas; he dreamed of the prows of dragon ships slicing through the swells as salt spray streamed against his face and wind snapped in his hair. But down here neither sun nor wind reached; he was buried, already entombed and awaiting only the final sentence.

The miners dug a transverse gallery and found, unexpectedly, a vein of silver-lead ore so rich that the levels sounded at all hours with the uneven staccato of picks and hammers at work and the rattle of four-wheeled barrows and the squinch of the windlasses hauling up filled buckets and the murmur of miners coming and going. They spoke of new shafts to be sunk and fortunes to be made, and yet always they whispered of the creatures that lurked in the pit where the richest deposits lay ripe for the pickings except for the danger of unstable tunnels and the fear of what waited below. Every day a bucket of purest silver was hauled up from the pit, and every day some dead creature or another pitched down into the darkness. Most of the dead men from the workings met their final resting place in this way although the overseer pretended that any prisoner who died while condemned
to labor in the workings received a respectable burial and the blessing of a deacon.