The Invasion of the Tearling

by Erika Johansen

  Anders pointed to the shelves. “Remove the books and their holders to my private apartments.”

  The younger priests began to move immediately, but Wyde hesitated, staring at Tyler.

  “Problem, Father Wyde?” Anders asked.

  Wyde shook his head and held out his arms to accept a pile of books from the shelf. He didn’t look at Tyler again. While they worked, Anders continued to rip the pages from A Distant Mirror. One landed at Tyler’s feet, and when he looked down, he saw “Chapter 7” in bold print. Tears filled his eyes, and he had to bite his lip to keep them there. Looking up, he made the unpleasant discovery that Anders was enjoying himself enormously, his eyes sparkling with pleasure. The priests continued to march in and out of the room, until finally the shelves stood empty against the wall. The sight made Tyler want to break down and weep. Brother Jennings levered the bookshelves from the wall and tipped them horizontal, and Wyde snuck Tyler one last apologetic glance as he grabbed hold of a corner. Then they were gone. The wall was blank; only two whitened rectangles remained to show where Tyler’s books had been. He stared numbly at them, and now the tears came, beyond his power to hold back.

  “Tyler?”

  Tyler turned, his heart pounding, to face the Holy Father. For the first time in his adult life, he wanted to do violence to another person. His hands had clenched into fists inside the sleeves of his robe.

  Anders reached inside his own robes and came out with a small vial of clear, colorless liquid. He passed it thoughtfully from one hand to another before remarking, “The Queen is not protective of her person with you. I watched you pass her the bread at dinner. Does her drink ever pass through your hands?”

  Tyler nodded jerkily. His face had gone cold. “Tea.”

  “The Mace can’t consider you a threat, or he would never tolerate such an arrangement.” The Holy Father held out the vial. It looked smooth in his hand, almost oily, and Tyler stared numbly, unable to accept.

  “I won’t insult your intelligence, Tyler, by explaining what you’re to do with this. But I want it done within a month. If not, you will watch me douse every single one of your books in oil and strike a match. I will do it personally, on the front steps of the Arvath, and you will watch.”

  Tyler cast around for answers, but there was nothing, only the pile of torn pages on the ground.

  “Take it, Tyler.”

  He took the vial.

  “Come with me,” the Holy Father commanded, opening the door. Tyler grabbed his crutches and lurched forward to follow. Several brothers and fathers had their doors open, and they stared at Tyler as he went by, following the Holy Father down the hallway toward the staircase. Tyler sensed them, but did not see them, his mind utterly blank now. It seemed important not to think of his books, and that meant not thinking of anything at all.

  At the end of the corridor, they emerged onto the staircase landing. Tyler tried to keep his eyes on the ground, but at the last moment he couldn’t help looking up. Seth was there, sitting on his stool as he had done every day for the past two weeks, his legs spread wide to display the mangled area between them. The actual wound had been cauterized and stitched up somehow, but what remained was almost worse, a charred and seamed landscape of red flesh. Pink streaks radiated outward along Seth’s inner thighs, signifying the beginnings of infection. Hung around his neck was a placard with one scrawled word:

  ABOMINATION

  Seth stared blankly down the hallway, his gaze so fixed that Tyler wondered if they were keeping him dulled with some sort of narcotic. But no, what killed pain would also kill the point of the lesson, wouldn’t it? For the first week, Seth’s moans of agony had been audible all the way down the hall, and none of them had slept for days.

  Tyler closed his eyes and then, mercifully, they were past Seth and down the stairs. Anders began to speak again, his voice pitched low enough to reach Tyler, but not Brother Jennings, who trailed silently several feet behind. “I am not unaware, Tyler, that this must be an unpleasant errand for you. And every unpleasant errand requires not only punishment for failure, but reward for success.”

  Tyler followed mutely, still trying to push Seth’s image from his mind. The Holy Father’s talk of reward did not cheer him in the slightest; in his childhood, Tyler had seen village dogs trained in much the same way for the ring. When an animal was beaten hard enough, it would work just to not be beaten, and consider itself well rewarded. The status quo could shift at any time.

  My books.

  The numbness broke slightly and Tyler felt agony there, waiting, like freezing water beneath thin ice. He focused on walking, feeling each step as an individual ache. The old Holy Father had always used the lift to transport him between floors, but Anders rarely did so. He seemed to enjoy demonstrating his own fitness, and now he was surely enjoying Tyler’s discomfort as well. The arthritis had woken up, causing Tyler’s hip to throb unhappily. His broken leg snarled with each step, even though Tyler was careful never to let it bump against the ground. He concentrated on each of these discomforts, almost relishing them, easy pains that were entirely physical.

  After endless flights of stairs, they passed the ground floor and continued down the steps into the Arvath’s basement. Tyler had never been to the basement, which was only a resting place for Holy Fathers deceased. No one came down here except for two unfortunate brothers who had drawn the duty to keep the crypts free of insects and rats. These two, men unfamiliar to Tyler, sprang to their feet and bowed as the Holy Father entered, Tyler following at his heels like a ghost.

  Anders took the torch that one of the young men offered and led Tyler into the tombs. It was bone-cold down here, and Tyler shivered in his thin robes. They passed the entrances to many crypts, decorated arches of stone that stretched high above them on both sides. The corpses of Holy Fathers were always embalmed before being laid to rest, but Tyler still thought that he could smell death in this place. Briefly, he wondered if Anders had brought him down here to kill him, and then he discarded that idea. He was needed.

  God, please show me the way out.

  The crypts were behind them now. Ahead was only a single large stone door, covered with a layer of dust. As they drew up in front of it, Anders produced a simple iron key.

  “Look at me, Tyler.”

  Tyler looked up, but found that he couldn’t meet the other man’s eyes. Instead, he fixed his gaze on the bridge of Anders’s nose.

  “I am the only person with a key to this door, Tyler. But if you succeed in your task, I will give this key to you.”

  He opened the door, though it required several twists of the key to do so. The door squealed miserably as the Holy Father shoved it open; no one had entered this room in a long time. The Holy Father beckoned him inside, but Tyler already knew, somehow, what would be there, and as light from the torch fell over the room, despair wrapped around Tyler’s heart.

  The room was full of books. Someone had constructed shelves for them, the sort of rough-hewn furniture that had predominated after the Landing, when even simple tools were difficult to come by. Tyler’s eyes roamed helplessly across the room: shelf after shelf of books, thousands of them, all the way down to the far wall.

  He stepped forward, drawn helplessly, reaching out to touch the books on their shelves. Some were leather-bound, some paper. No one had cared for them, or even bothered to organize them; titles and authors had been thrown together haphazardly, stacked horizontally on the shelves. Everything was covered with a thick layer of dust. The sight hurt Tyler’s heart.

  “Tyler.”

  He started. For a moment, he’d forgotten that the Holy Father was there.

  “If you succeed,” the Holy Father said softly, “not only will you have the key to this room, but you will become the Arvath’s first librarian. You will cease to be the Keep Priest, and I will relieve you of all other duties. No one will ever bother you again. Your only task will be to live down here and take care of these books.”

  Tyler turned
back to stare at the room, breathing in the smell of old paper. He could spend the rest of his life in here and not read the same book twice.

  “The poison is delayed,” the Holy Father continued. “It will take some two or three hours for the Queen to show the first symptoms. This is your window to return to the Arvath.”

  “They’ll come after me. The Mace will.”

  “Perhaps. But not even the Mace will dare to remove you from the Arvath without my permission. You saw how they had to lure Matthew to the Keep in order to take him. You may never be able to leave the Arvath again, but so long as you make it back, you will be safe from reprisal, and you may live your life out here, with these books.”

  Thinking of the Mace’s uncanny ability to appear and disappear from walls at will, Tyler almost smiled. The Mace would find him, no matter where he went, but Tyler didn’t bother to correct the Holy Father. He wondered what the Queen would say if she could see this room.

  “What happens after she dies?” he asked, startling himself.

  “There will be a bit of squabbling, certainly, but eventually the Tear will become a Mort protectorate.”

  Tyler blinked. “The Red Queen is a noted unbeliever. Will that not be worse for the Church?”

  “No.” A smile played at the corners of Anders’s mouth. “Everything has already been arranged.”

  Poor bedfellows, Tyler thought sickly, recalling the Mace’s words. “My leg is still weak, Your Holiness. I would like to go back upstairs.”

  “Of course,” Anders replied, his tone solicitous now. “We will go at once.”

  Anders locked the door behind them and they moved slowly back between the tombs. Tyler’s leg had gotten so bad that he was now forced to hobble.

  “We will take the lift, Tyler, to spare your leg.”

  Together, they crowded onto the thick platform of wood that stood beside the staircase, and Anders nodded to the two priests who waited there.

  “Brothers’ quarters.”

  Tyler grabbed the railing, slightly sick again, as the lift began to rise.

  “This is a test, Tyler,” the Holy Father told him. “God is testing your faith, your loyalty.”

  Tyler nodded, but he felt lost and bewildered. He had lived in the Arvath for his entire adult life, considered it home. But now it seemed a strange landscape, pitted with unknown dangers. When the lift reached the quarters, he wandered away from the Holy Father without a word, past Seth and down the hallway, past the staring eyes of his brothers, past Wyde, who waited beside Tyler’s doorway, his eyes downcast.

  “I’m sorry,” Wyde murmured. “I didn’t want to, Tyler, but—”

  Tyler closed the door in his face and went to sit on the bed. The bare walls seemed to glare at him, and he tried to ignore them, tried to pray. But he couldn’t escape the feeling that no one was listening, that God’s attention was elsewhere. Finally he gave up and pulled the small vial out of his robes, rolling it in both hands, running one thumb over the wax stopper. The liquid inside was perfectly clear; Tyler could look straight through and see a distorted image of the tiny room around him, the room where, not so long ago, he had expected to live contentedly for the rest of his life. He thought of the Queen’s library, the way time seemed to disappear as Tyler sat there, everything melting away until he felt that he was part of some better world. He could not do this thing, but he could not leave his books either. There seemed no way out.

  Tyler got up and placed his hand on the wall, smoothing a palm across the white stone. There was no help for him in prayer, he saw now, nor could he afford to wait for miracles. God would not single Tyler out. If he wanted salvation, he would have to save himself.

  This is a fool’s errand,” Mace grumbled.

  “You think all of my errands are foolish, Lazarus. I’m not impressed.”

  They were traveling in near darkness, through one of Mace’s many tunnels that seemed to beehive the Keep. The only illumination came from a torch carried by Father Tyler, who limped alongside Pen. In the dim amber light, the priest’s face looked paler than ever. Kelsea had asked Mace what was going on in the Arvath, to make Father Tyler so miserable, but Mace, being Mace, had refused to say, remarking only that the new Holy Father was even worse than the old.

  It was Father Tyler who had sent Kelsea on this little jaunt. The vision of William Tear had sent her into a kind of frenzy, and in the past week she had torn Carlin’s library apart, determined to find some information about Lily Mayhew, about Greg Mayhew, about Dorian Rice, about any of them. When Father Tyler had arrived this morning, Kelsea had been sitting there on the library floor, in a rut of sleeplessness and failure, surrounded by Carlin’s books, and she seized on the priest as a last resort. Were there any written histories about the years surrounding the Crossing, the life of William Tear? There had been no actual publishing after the Crossing, of course, but perhaps there was a handwritten history? Someone should have kept a journal, at least.

  Father Tyler shook his head regretfully. Many of the original generation of utopians had indeed kept journals, but in the dark period after the Tear assassination, most of them had disappeared. Several fragments had been preserved in the Arvath, and Father Tyler had seen them, but they discussed everyday problems of survival: the scarcity of food, the labor of constructing the fledgling village that would one day become New London. Most of Father Tyler’s own knowledge of the Crossing was based on oral history, the same folklore that pervaded the rest of the Tearling. No real writings had survived.

  “But there is something, Majesty,” Tyler remarked, after a moment’s thought. “Father Timpany used to tell stories about a portrait gallery somewhere in the lower floors of the Keep. The Regent would visit the gallery from time to time, and Timpany said there’s a portrait of William Tear down there.”

  “Why on earth would my uncle visit a portrait gallery?”

  “It’s a gallery of your ancestors, Majesty. Timpany said that when the Regent was drunk, he liked to go down and scream at your grandmother’s portrait.”

  It turned out that Mace knew exactly where the gallery was: two floors down, on the laundry level. As they descended a twisting staircase, Kelsea could hear many people speaking through the walls. Although she had her own private laundry—Mace, who worried about contact poisons, had insisted on it—Kelsea had kept the Keep laundry open, sending the rest of the Queen’s Wing’s linen down there. Her uncle’s Keep had been stuffed with unnecessary services, but Kelsea couldn’t bring herself to put so many people out of work. She had fired the worst of the Keep servants, the masseuses and escorts, those she simply wouldn’t have on her payroll. But she tried to make use of everyone else. At the bottom of the staircase, she could see no farther than the tiny, dim circle of torchlight that surrounded them, but she had the sense of a vast, hollow space above her head.

  “Who built all these tunnels?”

  “They’re part of the original architecture, Lady. There are hidden ways all the way from the top of the Keep down to the dungeons. Several passages extend out into the city as well.”

  Mention of dungeons made Kelsea think of Thorne, who now sat in his own specially constructed cell several floors up. Kelsea didn’t trust him in the Keep’s dungeons, not even with Elston standing guard over him at all times. She also had a vague idea that Thorne should remain separated from the albino, Brenna. So he remained in isolation, save for a gloating Elston just outside the bars of his cell. Kelsea didn’t know what to do about Thorne. Should she put him to trial? For the past six weeks Kelsea and Arliss had been quietly converting the Census Bureau into a tax collection agency, but they had also been pulling the honest men from the Bureau and moving them back into the judiciary. Creation of a justice system was slow going; the Tearling had few laws, and none of them were codified anywhere. Since the Mort had reached the border, Kelsea had found little time to devote to this endeavor, but at her request, Arliss had kept at it, and now New London had five public courts, where anyone could petition
a judge for redress of grievances. The Crown could try Arlen Thorne in a public court, but what if he was acquitted? Judge or jury, either one could be bought. Conversely, even if Thorne’s guilt was not beyond question, many jurors would condemn him regardless of the evidence. After the Regent, Thorne was the most hated figure in the Tear. There was no real purpose to a trial, and yet Kelsea felt there should be one, all the same.

  Mace wanted to simply put Thorne to death. The man was so universally hated that no one would protest a quick execution, particularly not if Kelsea made the execution public. She saw the wisdom of Mace’s advice; such a move would gain her throne the diehard support of anyone who had ever watched a loved one put into the cage. Even the Arvath didn’t protest against capital punishment these days, and Kelsea certainly had no problem with it. Yet something in her demanded a trial, even a show trial, something to legitimize the act. But there was legal precedent for summary executions: if Father Tyler’s folklore was to be believed, William Tear had practiced them, had even carried one out with his own hands.

  And so have I, Kelsea thought, suddenly cold. In her mind she saw blood, thick and warm, spurting over her right hand and dripping down her forearm. The outside world assumed that Mhurn had simply been a casualty of the Battle of the Argive. Mace had allowed that belief to flourish, but Kelsea and the rest of her Guard knew better, and no matter how she tried to dismiss the matter from her mind, the image kept recurring to her: her knife hand, bathed in blood. It seemed so important for Thorne to have a trial.

  “Cover your eyes, Lady.”

  Kelsea shielded her eyes as daylight bloomed in the darkness ahead. She passed through one of Mace’s hidden doors and found herself in a long, narrow room with a high ceiling. The light came from a bank of windows on the far wall. Looking out these windows, Kelsea saw that they were at the extreme western end of the Keep; outside, she saw first the rolling foothills of the city and then the tan backdrop of the Clayton Mountains.