“My Lord Earl,” Camber responded, raising his hand and trying to temper his words with just the right balance of strength and acquiescence, “there are no traitors beneath this holy roof, and certainly none among my brother bishops. Every one of us swore at His Highness’s coronation to uphold his lawful commands and to support his throne. None of us has forsworn his oath.”
“Then, obey this command!” Tammaron retorted.
“I cannot, for it is not lawful. Our oath pertained to temporal obedience. His Highness, in turn—and you, as his regents—swore to defend the spiritual well-being of his kingdom—which he does not do, if he tries to go against the lawful governance of the synod of bishops and their right freely to elect their primate.”
He had hit the crux of the matter, and Murdoch knew it. For a moment, the regent’s jaw worked in silent rage, his face going almost purple in his anger. Nor were Tammaron and Hubert able to conceal their indignation, though Ewan, good soldier that he was, betrayed no sign of emotion.
For a moment, Camber thought he might have won the point—that the regents would back down, at least for the nonce.
But then Murdoch turned slightly in the saddle toward Alroy and mouthed something incomprehensible from where Camber stood. Alroy seemed to pale a little, but then he gave a tight little nod and raised his chin a trifle higher, his young face stiff and strained under the crosses and leaves he wore.
“Take them!” he said, in a voice which carried the full length of the cathedral.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
As for the illusions of art magick, they were put down, and their vaunting in wisdom was reproved with disgrace.
—Wisdom of Solomon 17:7
An instant of shock immobilized everyone within reach of his words, but only until Murdoch and Alroy eased their steeds to either side and the knights and mounted men-at-arms began pressing their big warhorses down the center aisle. Carpet had been laid for the ceremony, and it gave the chargers footing. The riders and following foot soldiers had penetrated perhaps a quarter of the way down the nave before the fact of their actions truly began to register. Then people began to scream and scatter before the hooves of the great horses and their riders.
“Sweet Jesu, I didn’t think they’d dare to do it!” Dermot gasped to Camber, as all of the bishops began surging back into the choir. “Alister, you must get away. Don’t let them take you!”
“Niallan?” Camber called. “Can you give us sanctuary?”
Niallan, pushing his way toward the sacristy door, gave a curt nod. “Aye, just let me go ahead. Dhassa’s set as a Trap Portal just now, you know.”
“Let me come, too,” Dermot said. “Whatever happens, they’ve heard what I said today, and they count me as yours. They’ll have Cashien away from me, in any case. Better that I’m free, if in exile.”
“Come, then,” Niallan nodded, pushing closer to the sacristy doorway.
The soldiers were more than halfway down the nave now, and the screams of the frightened and the inevitably injured echoed among the columns and arches of the great cathedral. In the sacristy, an appalled Tavis O’Neill cowered behind a garment press and watched as Bishops Niallan and Dermot scurried into the sacristy and stopped on the Portal square. Dermot spotted him as Niallan slipped into place behind him, and the human bishop turned his head to murmur something to the Deryni; but Niallan only shot Tavis a stern, forbidding look and then pulled Dermot closer. Then both men disappeared.
With a shudder, Tavis came out of his hiding place and scurried toward the Portal square himself. He had already stayed too long. He had to get out before someone else saw him.
He glanced out the sacristy door and almost collided with Jebediah. The Michaeline knight had his sword drawn and a murderous expression on his face, and he grabbed Tavis by the upper arm and shook him like a terrier.
“What the hell are you doing here? Get back to Javan!”
“I’m going now,” Tavis managed to mutter. “I—wanted to be able to report what had happened to Javan. Besides, you might need a Healer.”
“We have Rhys!” Jebediah retorted. “Now, will you go? If you should be taken, or even seen by one of the regents’ men, Javan will have no one!”
“But Rhys can’t Heal right now!” Tavis protested. “And it’s my fault!”
“And it will be your fault if you leave Javan stranded. Now go, or I’ll knock you senseless and take you out of here myself!”
Against that kind of determination, Tavis dared not protest further. With a little sob of fear, he gave a quick nod and drew himself up on the Portal square. Jebediah released him and stepped back, his attention already turning to the sanctuary, where foot soldiers and a few mounted men had now penetrated and were taking clerics into custody. A number of priests and three of the more timid bishops—Turlough and Davet and Ulliam—had surrendered, but those remaining were putting up a resistance.
Tavis craned his neck. He saw Joram lay about him with the heavy processional cross, and the new archbishop thrust his crozier under the nose of a startled warhorse, which immediately reared and slipped, falling and dislodging its rider.
But then he saw another mounted man urge his horse around behind Rhys, shouldering him aside with the heavy destrier and sending the Healer sprawling. Rhys slipped in blood and fell without being able to break his fall, the back of his head hitting the edge of one of the altar steps with a sickening, hollow crack.
Tavis cried out and started to go to him, but Jebediah’s face had gone white at the sound, and he now brandished his weapon as if he would enjoy using it on Tavis. With a sob, Tavis hugged his arms tightly around himself and closed his eyes, forcing himself to make the jump back to the safe Portal in the archbishop’s apartments.
And out in the sanctuary, close by the sacristy door, Camber saw and heard Rhys fall. Using his crozier like a pole weapon, he fought his way past the horseman who had been responsible and even managed to unhorse him before ducking under Joram’s guard to kneel by the fallen Healer. Joram continued to fend off wouldbe assailants with the processional cross, and Camber could see Jebediah fighting his way to them. Gently he touched the Healer’s forehead, trying to force himself not to acknowledge what he had felt as Rhys fell.
Throwing aside his crozier, he stripped off the rich cope of white and gold and wrapped it around the fallen Healer, gathered Rhys tenderly into his arms and staggered to his feet, to begin pushing his way to the sacristy, now guarded on both sides by Joram and the grim-faced Jebediah. His face was terrible in his grief as he eased his way through the doorway into the tiny corridor, then into the sacristy itself.
Half a dozen priests and deacons were already gathered there for safety, though all of them knew it was only a matter of time before the soldiers won through. They parted before him like water, none daring to ask his intention as he stumbled to a halt on the Portal square.
“All of you, out!” he managed to croak, Joram and Jebediah reinforcing his words as he swayed under the weight he carried. He lowered Rhys’s feet to the floor, then held the limp, cope-wrapped form hard against himself as the room cleared, reaching out with his mind across the miles to Dhassa.
Eager, caring hands were waiting at the other end, there in the little side chapel at Dhassa, but Camber shook his head and carried his burden a few steps outside the mosaic boundaries of the Portal, finally to drop to his knees before the altar and lay his burden on the soft carpet. Almost immediately he was aware of Joram and Jebediah dropping to their knees on either side of him, Jebediah already stripping off his grey mantle to make a pillow for Rhys’s head.
“It wasn’t even a weapon that did it,” Camber whispered plaintively, taking the slack head between his hands and probing with fingers and mind. “He fell and hit his head on the step.”
“He’s still breathing, but not very well,” Joram murmured, running his fingers through the thick red hair and closing his eyes for better concentration. “Damn! He’s got a depressed fracture here big en
ough to put an egg into!”
With an increasing sense of despair, Camber moved his hands to where Joram indicated and felt the awful indentation. The skin had not even been broken—there was no blood at all—but he could feel the irregular edges of bone beneath the scalp. All the life signs were depressed, along with the section of skull; and as he reached into the brilliant Healer’s mind, he found the Healing channels hopelessly obscured and drug-muddled. Now he knew just what the encounter with Tavis O’Neill had cost Rhys, besides the information he had been made to reveal. There was no way that even Camber could try to link into Rhys’s Healing resources. Another Healer was Rhys’s only hope, and soon.
“Niallan!” he called over his shoulder, the word almost a sob. “You haven’t got a Healer nearby, have you?”
The other Deryni bishop knelt beside him with a shake of his head. “I’ve already checked. My household Healer is out on a call. I’ve sent for him, but I don’t know whether it’s going to be in time, Alister.”
Beneath Camber’s hands, Rhys’s breathing was becoming shallower and more irregular, the pulse thinner and more thready. In desperation, Camber tried to reach out with his mind to ease the pressure on the brain, to lift the shattered portion of the skull. He could feel the depression lessening slightly under his fingertips, but he could also sense the fluid beneath the broken skull, building yet more pressure to quench the vital functions. Rhys’s breathing became more erratic still, and Joram began to blow his own breath into the failing man’s lungs as he once had done for Camber, while Jebediah laid his hands over the laboring heart and tried to regularize its pace.
Despite all their efforts, Camber finally had to admit that Rhys was dying. After a few minutes, he became aware that Niallan had left them and then returned to kneel beside him again; his brother bishop was unstoppering a vial of holy oil and preparing to perform the Last Rites, still in his full vestments, less miter. Camber could not bring himself to participate. He could only watch and listen numbly, still doing all he could to keep this man who was more than a son to him from slipping away.
While Niallan prayed, Camber himself assaulted the heavens with his petition, not for the first time resenting the fortune which had given some the Healing gift, but not himself, or even the man whose identity he wore. The thought of Alister brought him the image of another time, however—of Alister in death; and of Alister’s killer, the beautiful but treacherous Ariella, impaled on the sword flung by Alister with his dying strength, her fingers cupped in the attitude of a spell which might have saved her—a spell thought by most Deryni to be but legend.
For a moment, hope flared. He knew why Ariella had failed, at least in theory. As surely as he now despaired for Rhys’s life, he knew. Had Rhys been even remotely conscious, he could have fed the Healer the procedure and helped him work it, he was sure. The spell did not even depend on Healing function. He could have worried later about how to bring Rhys back from the spell’s stasis. Again, he knew the theory. With another Healer close at hand, he felt certain he could have muddled through it somehow.
But Rhys was not conscious and might not have agreed to try so desperate a measure, even if he had been. The Healer was not as conservative as Joram, but there was an ethical question, nonetheless. Did Camber have the right to answer that for even one so close as Rhys? Dared he be another’s conscience?
Almost, he decided to try it anyway. It was really little more than the stasis that could be put on bodies to prevent decay—well, perhaps a little more, to keep a soul bound to a suspended body.…
But while he argued with himself, and agonized, and even made a tentative probe to see whether he could work the spell on an unconscious subject, he realized that it was too late. Rhys was dead. As Niallan’s voice wrapped around him in the traditional prayers, joined by the responses of Dermot and a handful of priests in the white of the Gabrilite Order, Camber felt the bleak emptiness and knew that Rhys was gone.
He waited until Niallan had finished, his hands still resting on the thick red hair which hid the damage done to the skull beneath, then signalled minutely that Joram and Jebediah should cease their ministrations. As they sank back on their heels, drained and exhausted, he gently gathered Rhys into his arms again, cradling the red head close against his cheek.
“Dear God, why?” he whispered, his voice breaking as the tears began to come. “Forty years to make this man, and now—this! A fall! Death should be more difficult!”
The regents wasted no time in extending their vengeance, especially once they learned that their principal quarry had managed to elude them. In all, only five of the ten renegade bishops remained in custody by the end of the day, three having escaped by Portal and two by death. Davet Nevan was kicked in the chest by a warhorse and died before help could be obtained, and they found Kai Descantor sprawled in the center of the sacristy floor without a mark upon him. Oriel told them later that a Portal had previously been sited there beneath the carpet, and judged that Kai had died destroying it, after the escape of his colleagues.
But five of the ten bishops would be enough for the regents’ intentions. After chaining the captives in a dungeon overnight to let them contemplate the folly of their disobedience, the regents set in motion the mechanism for rounding up those who had escaped. Writs of attainder and outlawry were issued for Alister Cullen, sometime Bishop of Grecotha (suspended), Niallan Trey, sometime Bishop of Dhassa (also suspended), Father Joram MacRorie, Earl Jebediah of Alcara, Lord Rhys Thuryn, and also Bishop Dermot O’Beirne, suspended Bishop of Cashien, who was not Deryni but who had fled with them, and who had supported the illegal election of Alister Cullen as archbishop.
As an afterthought, the regents also ordered the apprehension of Rhys’s wife and children and any other of their kin who could be found, for the regents were beginning to suspect that the entire clan related to the so-called Saint Camber were probably involved in plots against the Crown and regents.
In keeping with the writs, the regents also sent new orders to Rhun of Horthness, who henceforth was to be Earl of Sheele for his brilliant work of Christmas Eve. Dhassa, which the regents immediately guessed as being the renegade archbishop’s place of refuge, was to be besieged by Rhun’s forces. The siege of Dhassa, however, would be a long and weary business, for the worst of the winter was just beginning. Unless the Dhassa Portal was still operational, and at least one other open to supply it, no one would be going in or out of Dhassa until the spring.
Meanwhile, the regents continued to cement their ecclesiastical power in Valoret. On the day after Christmas, a little way outside Valoret in a town called Ramos, the remaining bishops, five of them in chains, convened to reconsider their actions of two days previously. It soon became clear, however, that most of the five captured bishops were going to remain obdurate—one, Turlough, was won over with the promise of a new see to be created at Marbury—so Hubert and his faction took the opportunity to nominate six new itinerant bishops to the council, one of them Edward, the twenty-year-old bachelor son of Hubert’s brother Manfred, who had already received the rich earldom of Culdi. Since confirmation of the nominations required only a simple majority, the six nominees were approved without difficulty.
Consequently, when the first ballot for archbishop was taken that afternoon, after Ulliam also went over to Hubert, thirteen of the sixteen possible votes went to Hubert. The three abstentions, not surprisingly, were Robert Oriss, Archbishop of Rhemuth, Ailin MacGregor, Auxiliary Bishop of Valoret, and the only remaining itinerant bishop who had not just been elected at the synod itself, Eustace of Fairleigh.
Hubert was enthroned the day after he was elected, but in a much more private ceremony than Alister Cullen’s had been, for Hubert had work to do. That very afternoon, the Council of Ramos convened and began taking measures to stop the further incursions of Deryni into the control of Gwynedd. Hubert, with this much power in his hands, could not be restrained.
They began by suspending and laicizing all Deryni priests and
other clergy, that the Church might be purged of their magical influence and evil taint. No Deryni might ever again enter holy orders of any kind, even as a layman. There was even some talk regarding whether Deryni might continue to receive the other six sacraments, but fortunately more prudent heads prevailed. Barring Deryni from normally sanctioned religious functions might lead to even more monstrous practices than those of which they were already suspected. Better to keep the average Deryni in the fold of the Church as a wayward child than to cast him out altogether, where one would never know what he was up to.
Alister and Niallan, of course, were included in the general suspension and laicization, and stripped of their offices. Joram, son of the infamous “Saint” Camber, was also declared to be a priest no longer. Dermot O’Beirne they likewise suspended and stripped of office, as a Deryni sympathizer, but they did not strip him of his priesthood altogether, since he was not Deryni. His see of Cashien they gave to Zephram of Lorda. Alister’s old see of Grecotha went to the new Bishop Edward MacInnis, and Niallan’s to Archer of Arrand—though Bishop Archer would have a difficult time taking possession of his new diocese until the siege of Dhassa was over.
Joram’s specific naming in the suspensions and laicizations brought up the subject of Camber’s sainthood again, and this time it did not survive. The canonization of twelve years before was repudiated. Camber’s name was forbidden even to be spoken, on pain of flogging for a first offense and having one’s tongue cut out the next time. The order was issued to destroy all written records of his name and family. Anyone tempted to write anew of the quondam saint risked the loss of the hand which wrote it.
Nor was that sufficient for the regents’ retribution. Declaring all magic anathema, with Deryni sorcery the chiefest among the heresies, they proclaimed Camber a heretic besides. Had they been able to find his body, they would have burned it at the stake, but unfortunately it had been established at his canonization that the body had been miraculously assumed into heaven. Now Bishop Zephram was led to suggest that perhaps the body had, indeed, been spirited away by Camber’s son; but he and the others doubted whether anyone would have any luck finding it now. In any case, since punishment for heresy could not be meted out to Camber in person at this late date, the bishops decided that it would be a fitting penalty to exact on his adherents instead. On Childermas, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, they made an example at Dolban, the mother house of the Servants of Saint Camber, burning more than three-score men and women to death at stakes set row on row in the abbey yard. Only a few of them were even Deryni.
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