The Gathering Storm (49 page)

They shuffled closer, clawed hands grasping and clicking at the air, seeking prey.

She scrambled up the final rungs, shoved the lamp safely onto the floor before her, flung herself over the lip of the hole, and dragged the ladder up behind her. God had not freed her only to allow her to fall into the hands of such creatures.

Panting, she sidled away from the hole. Could they leap? Fly? Dig? She hoped she had trapped them below, banished them within the depths of the rock.

Picking up the lamp, she hurried up a stairwell carved into the rock. Ahead she heard the faint voices and footfalls of the ones who had gone before her. Even had she been tempted to hurry, to catch them, she could not. Soon enough she had to stop, bent double as her sides heaved and she fought to catch her breath. Only after some time could she start up again, and each time she took fewer steps before she had to stop and rest—yet each time God gave her the will and the strength to continue.

She had keen hearing, honed during this time that sight had been denied her. Aided by a good sense of direction and a nose for misdirection, she followed the trail of her captors through winding passages, along the side of caverns that smelled of horses, past desiccated midden heaps and, at last, out under the blinding brilliance of a nearly full moon hanging
just above the horizon in a cloudless night sky. She could barely endure its light and had to rest, after extinguishing the lamp, to fight off nausea.

After a while she felt able to continue, although her eyes hurt. As she walked, the night air swirled against her with such a bewildering miasma of scents that she staggered sideways, halting at the brink of a cliff. The path cut up along the shoulder of the vast rock that housed the convent where she had journeyed so long ago. The moon sank behind dark hills.

Dawn was coming and, with it, the sun.

Sparks and threads of light winked into existence at the topmost crown of the great rock.

Sorcery! She recognized the handiwork of a mathematicus, weaving starlight into a stone crown. Only Anne and her minions knew these well-guarded secrets. Had they betrayed her twice?

Astonished and deeply dismayed, she limped onward as quickly as she could, although her feet ached and her back burned and her eyes still stung. Lamp, water pouch, and bundle she dropped behind her; they seemed of little account now, and they weighed so heavily as she grew tired.

The path led her through a grove of rock pinnacles before vanishing on a flat summit crowned by a stone circle. There they stood, the miscreants, the very ones who had cast her into the pit. Yet surely her eyes had suffered after so long in the dark, for it seemed to her that there were twice the number that had inhabited the convent when she had first come. Three of their number were certainly male. Two held between them a pallet, where lay the very woman Antonia had been sent to eliminate.

Was Mother Obligatia the one whose power had thwarted Antonia’s galla? Or had Anne betrayed Antonia by teaching the secrets of the mathematici to someone else?

Obligatia gestured to a woman who arranged small stones on a patch of oval sand the color of moonlight. Rising, that woman chanted in a clear, authoritative voice.

“Matthias guide me, Mark protect me, Johanna free me, Lucia aid me, Marian purify me, Peter heal me, Thecla be my witness always, that the Lady shall be my shield and the Lord shall be my sword.” Using a polished walking stick, she
traced lines between the stones, and with each line in the sand a line of light threaded down from the heavens to catch in the stones. “May the blessing of God be on our heads. God reign forever, world without end.”

The others were too intent on her sorcery to notice Antonia, and yet she was herself too exhausted from her climb to act. The woman worked quickly as the night sky lightened imperceptibly with the coming of day, weaving threads where Mother Obligatia directed her.

Shouts rang up from behind, startling Antonia so badly that she staggered back against rocks and sank down, too worn even to stand.

“Hurry!” cried one of the assembled clerics, a very young woman now breaking down into sobs, while another hushed the crying girl sharply.

The woman sang while using the staff to weave the threads into a new pattern woven in and out between the monoliths. The web of light thrummed, pulsing as to the dance of an unseen spider tangled in its own weaving. Light blossomed into an archway surmounting the nearest lintel.

“Now!” cried the woman. The light of the weaving limned her gaunt profile.

Antonia knew her: a noble cleric from the north country of Wendar, a notable counselor to King Henry. What was Sister Rosvita doing here? Why was she not in Darre with the king and his court? Why did she look so old?

“Stop them!”

A man’s voice rang out from within the forest of rock pinnacles behind her.

“Go!” shouted one among the clerics, a young woman with the pale hair common to the northern barbarians only recently come into the Circle of Unity. She wore an Eagle’s cloak; her face, glimpsed briefly, seemed vaguely familiar. Antonia set her jaw and with an effort clambered to her feet, but it was too late. Behind, she heard the shouts of men rushing across rocky ground, feet crackling on stone. Ahead, the clerics hurried through the gleaming archway, the first two carrying Mother Obligatia. One by one the rest vanished.

“Rosvita!”

To Antonia’s amazement, Hugh of Austra emerged from
the pinnacles, furious, disheveled, and outwitted, a score of soldiers crowding up behind him and exclaiming aloud in terror and wonder.

Rosvita glanced back last of all, pausing on the threshold of the glittering archway. She marked the man who, out of breath and flushed with anger, now stood beside Antonia, but she neither smiled nor frowned; she simply looked, measuring him, noting Antonia for the first time without any outward evidence of surprise.

The crown of light faded.

Sister Rosvita turned, stepped through, and was gone.

The crown disintegrated into a thousand spitting sparks that drifted to the ground like so many fireflies winking on and off.

“Damn!” swore Hugh. His hands were dirty, his golden hair wild in disarray; he wore a layman’s tunic and hose, and these were scuffed and even ripped at one knee, as though he had been climbing, no better than the common soldiers massed behind him. Yet despite this he remained beautiful, almost radiant in his fury as the sun rose in pitiless splendor behind him.

She lifted a ragged sleeve to cover her eyes. The light gave her a vile headache, and spots of shadow and light flashed and whirled in her vision.

“I pray you, Presbyter Hugh,” she said, pleased to discover that her voice worked, calm and in command, “I have been a prisoner here, cast into a pit of darkness. I would be most grateful if you would escort me back to my rightful place.”

Her words like a hook yanked him back to himself. He brushed away a smudge of dirt on his cheek.

After a pause he spoke, now completely in control of himself, all that blazing emotion tucked away. “You must be Sister Venia. Holy Mother Anne thought you irretrievably lost, Sister, but I am heartened to find you whole and safe.” He glanced heavenward before offering her the support of his arm. “Come. Let us retreat to the shade. I pray you tell me what happened, and why you did not return to Darre.”

He found her a decent place to sit and made sure that a soldier padded the rock with several tunics to make a comfortable
seat. He sent soldiers to reconnoiter. Meanwhile, wine was offered to her, a subtle vintage that cleansed her palate.

With these assurances to strengthen her, she was able to tell her story, careful to let no hint of her anger at Anne color her words. Hugh was surely well placed in Anne’s councils by now; she could only guess at his loyalties.

“So you are free, after two years in captivity,” he said wonderingly, laughing. “In exchange for Sister Rosvita, it seems. A clever irony.”

“Was Rosvita also a captive?”

“She was. She …” He frowned as he glanced toward the stone circle, mostly hidden by the pinnacles that surrounded them. “She discovered things too dangerous for her to know. Holy Mother Anne, Queen Adelheid, and myself had to take action to help King Henry, who came under the influence of bad advisers, Rosvita among them.”

The comment surprised her. Antonia had never hesitated to dispose of those who threatened her. “You did not simply eliminate her?”

His smile would have broken the heart of any maid, soft and sad as that of a gentle lover thwarted in his plans by the arrival of a nobler suitor. “You are a woman, Sister Venia, and thereby fashioned out of stronger metal. I am sentimental, as men are. I admire Sister Rosvita too much to deal so arbitrarily with her. I had hoped for another solution.”

She did not believe him, but the words sounded nice. He knew how to evoke sympathy while hiding his true motives.

“A solution may yet be offered to those who are both patient and pure of heart, Father Hugh.”

He laughed again, sweetly this time. “I fear I am not pure of heart, Sister Venia. I struggle with temptation as does every human soul.”

No need to remind him of her own virtue; it usually irritated people, none of whom liked to be reminded of the select few upon whom God had showered Their favor.

He hesitated before speaking again, this time with an odd tremor in his voice. “Tell me what else you recall of this fiery daimone borne up on wings of flame. How is it she banished the galla? By what signs were you sure it was a woman?”

She had not forgotten what drove him. A man’s weaknesses were the harness under which he could be put to work.

“I saw her only through what senses are granted to the galla, who come from another plane of existence. She was bright and powerful, most certainly a woman. You must not doubt me.”

“I do not. Yet did she speak?”

“If she spoke, I could not hear her. Yet Mother Obligatia spoke, when she saw her.”

“The abbess also saw this apparition?”

“Indeed she did. She recognized her.” “Recognized her?”

“She called her ‘Bernard’ before realizing her mistake, that it was no man who stood before her but rather a creature with a woman’s form.”

“Bernard,” he mused. “But of course there was a striking resemblance between father and daughter. Yet if that is true, then how—?”

“You are puzzled by something, Brother Hugh.”

He started as might a child who looks up to find himself discovered in the midst of secret mischief. “Nay, Sister. I am only wondering whether I seek a mule or a hinny.”

She chuckled. “You are speaking of Liath. Do you suspect that she is not in truth Anne’s child?”

Turning, he looked away as though to hide his face and what it might reveal, but when he turned back his expression remained bland, veiled. Only a certain tightening of the skin about his eyes betrayed his intense interest. “It is difficult to know what to think.”

“The world is full of mysteries,” she agreed, watching him closely. “I trust that Anne will reward her supporters with that which they desire most, whatever my own feelings. Or at least, were I in her position, it is what I would do.”

“Would you?”

“Oh,
I
would. God reward us all in the end with that we desire most. It is the fate of most people not to understand their desire until they have been swept into the Abyss—but upon reflection they can see that their entire lives were simply one long dialogue with the evil inclination. Yet there are a few
who remain clear-sighted and who serve God and receive what they deserve in the end.”

“We must all hope to ascend to the Chamber of Light,” he said with a pious nod, “else we will suffer eternity with God’s face turned away from us.”

“Is that what you wish, Father Hugh?”

He trembled. The movement was slight but noticeable to a woman so long immured in the pit that she had come to rely on hearing, touch, and breath to capture any nuance of life and being around her.

“Or would you risk everything only to possess
her
?”

He could not answer.

She smiled and rested a comforting hand on his fists where they were clenched in his lap. With his gaze lowered humbly, he displayed his profile to advantage; even in the shade his hair shone as though the sunlight were caught in it. It was difficult to imagine how any young woman could resist him.

“Anne will never give her to you. But I will.”

He flushed, but he did not look up at her. “That is a bold promise. How do you capture a woman who is only half humankind? How do you intend to defy Anne?”

“Anne need not know that I still live. If she believes that I died here, then she has no reason to guard herself against me. I mean no harm to Anne. She has set herself a great and worthy task. There is no one else who can accomplish it except her—”

“And those who aid her, the Seven Sleepers. Of whom you are, or were, once a part.”

“It is true I learned much during my time among the Seven Sleepers. I also learned that when they weave a powerful spell, the weakest among them dies. The spell exacts its price for the power they draw down.”

That she had startled him was obvious from the way he looked at her, leaned forward with hands pressing on the rock. Evidently he had never considered this striking and unfortunate possibility. “Is this true? The cauda draconis is struck dead?”

“I have suffered in the pit for two years, Father Hugh, but those two years have given me time to ponder much that mystified me before. Surely I will be accounted weakest among
the Seven Sleepers now. Anne gathers and manipulates the power of the sorceries we weave, but she does not risk herself. That is why she needs a cauda draconis, although in truth I proved stronger than she expected, I suppose, since it was poor foolish Zoë who died.”

“Are you not willing to die in order to enact God’s will on Earth?”

“Certainly I am. But I am not convinced that Holy Mother Anne knows everything, that she knows or understands all of God’s will. I come of royal stock in my own right. I served faithfully as biscop in the north before I was myself betrayed and cast aside. I have certain magics of my own and, as I said, I have been granted a very long time to meditate, pray, and think.”