The Heretic Kings (9 page)

“If you hate the dark so much, I’m blessed if I know what you were doing down here in the first place,” Albrec whispered, his head still cocked to listen.

“When Monsignor Gambio wants something you find it quick, no matter where you have to look,” Columbar said in the same low tone. “There wasn’t a scrap of blotting left in the whole scriptorium, and he told me not to poke my scarlet proboscis back round the door until I had found some.”

Albrec smiled. Monsignor Gambio was a Finnmarkan, a crusty, bearded old man who looked as though he would have been more at home on the deck of a longship than in the calm industry of a scriptorium. But he had been one of the finest scribes Charibon possessed until the lengthening years had made crooked mockeries of his hands.

“I should be grateful you put scholarly curiosity over the needs of the moment,” Albrec said.

“I suffered for it, believe me.”

“There! There it is again. Do you hear it?”

They paused again to listen. Somewhere off in the cluttered darkness there was a crash, the sound of things striking the stone floor, a clink of metal. Then they heard someone cursing in a low, irritated and very unclerical manner.

“Avila,” Albrec said with relief. He cupped a hand about his mouth. “Avila! We’re over here, by the north wall!”

“And which way is north in this lightless pit? I swear, Albrec…”

A light came into view, flickering and bobbing over the piles of rubbish. Gradually it neared their own until Brother Avila stood before them, his face smeared with dust, his black Inceptine habit grimed with mould.

“This had better be good, Albrec. I’m supposed to be face-down in the Penitential Chapel, as I was all yesterday. Never throw a roll at the Vicar-General if you’ve buttered it first. Hello, Columbar. Still running errands for Gambio?”

Avila was tall, slim and fair-haired, an aristocrat to his fingertips. Naturally, he was an Inceptine, and if he refrained from flinging too many more bread rolls he could be assured of a high place in the order ere he died. He was the best friend, perhaps the only one, that Albrec had ever known.

“Did anyone see you come down here?” Albrec asked him.

“What’s this? Are we a conspiracy then?”

“We are discreet. Think about that concept, Avila.”

“Discretion—there’s a novel quality. I’ll have to consider it. What have you dragged me down here for, my diminutive friend? Poor Columbar looks on the verge of a seizure. Have the ghosts been leaning over his shoulder?”

“Don’t say such things, Avila,” Columbar said with a shiver.

“We’re looking for more of the document that Columbar unearthed, as you know very well,” Albrec put in.

“Ah,
that
document: the precious papers you’ve been so secretive about.”

“I must be going,” Columbar said. He seemed more uneasy by the moment. “Gambio will be looking for me. Albrec, you know that if—”

“If the thing turns out to be heretical you had nothing to do with it, whereas if it is as rare and wonderful as Albrec hopes you’ll be clamouring for your sliver of fame. We know, Columbar.” Avila smiled sweetly.

Brother Columbar glared at him. “
Inceptines,”
he said, a wealth of comment in the word. Then he stomped away into the darkness taking one of the dips with him. They heard him blundering through the tumbled rubbish as his light grew ever fainter and then disappeared.

“You had no call to be so hard on him, Avila,” Albrec said.

“He’s an ignorant peasant who wouldn’t know the value of literature if it sat up and winked at him. I’m surprised he didn’t take your discovery to the latrines and wipe his arse with it.”

“He has a good heart. He ran a risk for my sake.”

“Indeed? So what is this thing that has got you so excited, Albrec?”

“I’ll tell you later. For now, I want to see if we can find any more of it down here.”

“A man might think you had discovered gold.”

“Perhaps I have. Hold the lamp.”

Albrec began to poke and pry at the crevice wherein Columbar had discovered the document. There were a few scraps of parchment left in it, as broken and brittle as dried autumn leaves. Almost as fragile was the mortar which held the rough stones surrounding it together. Albrec was able to lever some of them loose and widen the gap. He pushed his hand in farther, trying to feel for the back of the crevice. It seemed to run deep into the stonework. When he had pushed and scraped his arm in as far as his elbow, he found to his shock that his hand was in an empty space beyond. He flapped his fingers about, but the space seemed large. Another room?

“Avila!”

But Avila’s strong hand was across his mouth, silencing him, and the dip was blown out to leave them in utter night.

Something was moving on the other side of the subterranean chamber.

The two clerics froze, Albrec still with one arm disappearing into the gap in the wall.

A light flickered as it was held aloft and under its radiance the pair could see the grotesque shadow-etched features of Brother Commodius scanning the contents of the chamber. The knuckles which were wrapped about the lamp handle brushed the stone ceiling; the light and dark of its effulgence made his form seem distorted and huge, his ears almost pointed; and his eyes shone weirdly, almost as though they possessed a light of their own. Albrec had worked under Commodius for over a dozen years, but this night he was almost unrecognizable, and there was something about his appearance which filled Albrec with terror. He suddenly knew that it was vitally important he and Avila should not be seen.

The Senior Librarian glared around for a few moments more, then lowered his lamp. The pair of quaking clerics by the north wall heard his bare feet slapping on the stone, diminishing into silence. They were left in impenetrable pitch-blackness.

“Sweet Saint!” Avila breathed, and Albrec knew that he, too, had sensed the difference in Commodius, the menace which had been in the chamber with his presence.

“Did you see that? Did you feel it?” Albrec whispered to his companion.

“I—What was he doing here? Albrec, he looked like—”

“They say that great evil can be sensed, like the smell of death,” Albrec said in a rush.

“I don’t—I don’t know, Albrec. Commodius, he’s a
priest
, in the name of God! It was the lamplight. The shadows tricked us.”

“It was more than shadows,” Albrec said. He withdrew his hand from the wall crevice, and as he did something came out along with it and clinked as it struck the stone floor below.

“Can you rekindle the light, Avila? We’ll be here all night else, and he’s gone now. The place feels different.”

“I know. Hold on.”

There was a rustling of robes, and then the click and flare of sparks as Avila struck flint and steel on the floor. The spark caught the dry lichen of the tinder almost at once and with infinite care he transferred the minute leaf of flame to the lamp wick. He picked up the object that had fallen and straightened.

“What is this?”

It soaked up the light, black metal curiously wrought. Avila wiped the dust and dirt from it and suddenly it was shining silver.

“What in the world—?” the young Inceptine murmured, turning it over in his slender fingers.

A dagger of silver barely six inches long. The tiny hilt had at its base a wrought pentagram within a circle.

“God’s blood, Albrec, look at this thing!”

“Let me see.” The blade was covered in runes which meant nothing to Albrec. Within the pentagram was the likeness of a beast’s face, the ears filling two horns of the star, the long muzzle in the centre.

“This is an unholy thing,” Avila said quietly. “We should go to the Vicar-General with it.”

“What would it be doing down here?” Albrec asked.

Avila put the lamp against the black hole in the wall. “This has been blocked off. There’s a room beyond these stones, Albrec, and the Saint only knows what kind of horrors have been walled up in it.”

“Avila, the document I found.”

“What about it? Is it a treatise on witchery?”

“No, nothing like that.” Briefly Albrec told his friend about the precious manuscript, the only copy in the world perhaps of the Saint’s life, written by a contemporary.

“
That was here?”
Avila asked incredulously.

“Yes. And there may be more of it, perhaps other manuscripts—all behind this wall, Avila.”

“What was it doing lying hidden with this?” Avila held up the dagger by the blade. The beast’s face was uncannily lifelike, the dirt rubbed into the crevices in its features giving it an extra dimension.

“I don’t know, but I intend to find out. I can’t take this to the Vicar-General, Avila, not yet. I haven’t finished reading the document for one thing. What if they deem it heretical and have it burned?”

“Then it’s heretical, and for the best. Your curiosity is overcoming rationality, Albrec.”

“No! I have seen too many books burned. This one I intend to save, Avila, whatever it takes.”

“You’re a damn fool. You’ll get yourself burned along with it.”

“I’m asking you as a friend: say nothing to anyone of this.”

“What about Commodius? Obviously he suspects something, else he would not have been here.”

They were both silent, remembering the unnerving aspect of the Senior Librarian’s appearance a few minutes ago. Taken together with the artefact they had found, it seemed to shake their knowledge of the everyday ordinariness of things.

“Something is wrong,” Avila murmured. “Something is most definitely wrong in Charibon. I think you are right. We were not frightened by shadows alone, Albrec. I think Commodius was… different, somehow.”

“I agree. So give me a chance to see if I can get to the bottom of this. If there is indeed something wrong, and Commodius has something to do with it, then part of it is here, behind this wall.”

“What are you going to do, knock it down?”

“If I have to.”

“And to think I likened you to a mouse when first I met you. You have the heart of a lion, Albrec. And the stubbornness of a goat. And I am a fool for listening to you.”

“Come, Avila, you are not an Inceptine completely—at least not yet.”

“I am starting to share the Inceptine fear of the unknown, though. If we’re caught there will be a host of questions asked, and the wrong answers could send us both to the pyre.”

“Give me the dagger, then. I have no wish to see you embroiled in my mischief.”

“Mischief! Mischief is throwing rolls at the Vicar-General’s table. You are flirting with heresy, Albrec. And worse, perhaps.”

“I am only preserving knowledge, and seeking after more.”

“Whatever. In any case, I am loath to let an ugly misshapen little Antillian upstage me, an Inceptine of noble birth. I’ll join you in your private crusade, Brother Conspiracy. But what of Columbar?”

“He knows only that he found a manuscript of interest to me. I’ll have a talk with him and secure his discretion.”

“There are more brains in the turnips he raises. I hope he knows the value of the word.”

“I’ll impress it upon him.”

They paused as if by common consent to listen again. Nothing but the soundlessness of the deep earth, the drip of water from ancient bedrock.

“This place predates the faith,” Avila said in an undertone. “The Horned One had a shrine on the site of Charibon until the Fimbrians tore it down, it is said.”

“Time to go,” Albrec told him. “We’ll be missed. You have your penance to finish. We’ll come back some other time, and we’ll have that wall down if I have to scrape it away with a spoon.”

Avila tucked the pentagram dagger into the pocket of his habit without a word. They set off through the dark together towards the stairs beyond, the tall Inceptine and the squat Antillian. In a few short minutes it seemed that their world had become less knowable, full of sudden shadows.

The lightless spaces of the catacombs watched them go in silence.

T WELVE thousand of the Knights Militant had died fighting at Aekir, almost half of their total strength throughout Normannia. Their institution was a strange one; some said a sinister, anachronistic one also. They were the secular arm of the Church, at least in theory, but their senior officers were clerics, Inceptines to a man. The “Ravens’ Beaks” they were sometimes called.

They were feared across the continent by the commoners of every kingdom, their actions sanctioned by the Pontiff, their authority vaguely defined but indisputable. Kings disliked them for what they represented: the all-pervading power and influence of the Church. The nobility saw in them a threat to their own authority, for the word of a Knight Presbyter might not be gainsaid by any man of lower rank than a duke. Across the breadth of the continent, men with their noses in their beer might jocularly lament the fact that Macrobius had gathered only half of the Knights in Aekir before its fall, but they did so with one eye cocked at the door, and in undertones.

Golophin hated them. He loathed the very sight of their sombre cavalcades as they trooped through the streets of Abrusio on their destriers. They wore three-quarter armour, and over it the long sable surcoats with the triangular Saint’s symbol worked in malachite green at breast and back. They bore poniards, longswords and lances, having disdained the new technology of gunpowder. More often than not, folk muttered, the only weapon they needed or utilized was the torch.

The pyres were still ablaze up on the hill. Two hundred today for the Knights were beginning to run short of victims. All the Dweomer-folk of the city and the surrounding districts had fled—those who survived. Most of them were freezing in the snowbound heights of the Hebros. Some Golophin and his friends had procured berths for on outbound ships. The Thaumaturgists’ Guild had been decimated by the purges; most of its members were too prominent, too well known in the city to have had any chance of escaping. But a few, including Golophin, survived, scuttling like vermin in the underbelly of Abrusio, doing what they could for their people.

His face was a blurred shadow under his wide-brimmed hat. Anyone who looked at him would find it strangely difficult to remember any of its features. A simple spell, but one hard to maintain in the bustle of the Lower City. Speech negated it, and anyone who looked long and hard enough might just see through it. So Golophin moved quickly, a tall, incredibly lean figure of economic movements in a long winter mantle with a bag slung over one bony shoulder. He looked like a pilgrim journeying in haste to the site of a shrine.