Camber the Heretic

by Katherine Kurtz

  With an oath, the wounded attacker sank to his knees and tried to snap off the arrow in his leg, but he had not reckoned on Javan, lurking behind his tree. The elder prince leaped onto the man’s back with a blood-curdling yell and held on like a limpet, one arm locked around the mailed head, drawing it back as he jerked his dagger across the upturned throat with a deftness which would have made the most exacting weapons master proud. As the two of them went down in a shower of blood, Davin glanced aside and then threw himself across Rhys Michael, just in time to intercept an arrow meant for the prince. The shaft buried itself in his lower back, the jagged hunting barb searing pain through his body.

  Gasping, legs no longer able to function, he clasped Rhys Michael to his breast even as he lashed out with his sword to hamstring an attacker who was harrying Jason. Someone screamed from the brush into which Robear had been continuing to shoot, and the enemy arrows stopped. A frantic rustling of leaves told of another bowman beating a judicious retreat. As Robear swung on the last two attackers still on their feet, one of whom had been trying to keep the squire Tomais from impaling him on a hunting spear, the men threw down their weapons and surrendered.

  “All right! It’s over!” Jason rasped, prodding the hamstrung man with his sword until the latter also surrendered.

  As Davin slowly raised up on one elbow, he could hear a horse galloping away—the retreating bowman making good his escape, no doubt. Corund lay dead where he had slept, the young squire Dorn did not move from where he had fallen, and four attackers likewise moved no more. As Robear and the remaining squire lashed the hands of their two captives behind them at wrist and elbow, Jason trussed up his own crippled captive, then went charging into the brush to look for the second bowman. Rhys Michael, hauling himself from under Davin’s protection, took one look at the wound across his thigh and began to wail.

  “My brother! He’s hurt!” Javan cried, scrambling so quickly to his brother’s side that his limp was scarcely noticeable. “Tavis, help him! He’s bleeding!”

  Davin had rolled onto his side as Javan approached, so the blood-stained prince did not notice the arrow protruding from his lower back. But as the Healer came to kneel beside the younger prince, Jason emerged from the brush dragging a gravely wounded bowman and turned him over to Robear. Jason blanched as he came up behind Davin and saw the arrow.

  “Eidiard! My God, man!”

  “It can wait,” Davin whispered, with a fierce shake of his head, though he did accept Jason’s support and help in easing further onto his left side.

  He was sore hurt—that much he knew. Too hurt, he expected, for even a Healer like Rhys to do much for him. He had no feeling below the burning shaft protruding from his back, and he had to reach back and brush its feathers with his fingertips to know that it had passed just beside the spine, leaving his lower body numb and lifeless. His heart sank with that realization, for he had never heard of a Healer being able to mend such a wound.

  He could sense Bishop Alister’s frantic inquiry, now that the fighting was done; and as he leaned against Jason’s knee, he closed his eyes and let the older man read his injuries through his own faculties, praying that his pain and fear had exaggerated the seriousness of his situation.

  But Alister’s assessment came back stark and stunned, with the soul-chilling addition that the barbed arrowhead, besides grazing the spine, had lodged hard against one of the great blood vessels which fed from the heart—had, in fact, already cut partway through the vessel’s wall. Any chance movement could complete the job. A really competent Healer, working very fast, might be able to Heal that damage before the pressure blew it wider and he bled to death internally, but it would require two good hands as well as skill, and Tavis O’Neill had only the latter.

  Nor dared he let Tavis even try. For Healer’s ease, a Deryni must lower almost all his shields, so that the Healer might draw from the resources of the patient’s body, as well as his own strength—and Davin could not go shieldless before Tavis. It was inevitable that the Healer would learn that he was Deryni, but Tavis must learn nothing more. The Council and their work must not be jeopardized because a chance arrow had rendered one of their number a dying cripple.

  Davin stifled a gasp as Jason jostled the arrow in trying to get a better look at his wound, knowing that the barbed head had moved him that much nearer to eternity, but he knew what he must do, and gave his decision to Bishop Alister. There was grief in the old man’s response, but he understood all the logic which Davin had pursued, and that there was no other choice.

  In a breath, though there was no outward sign, Davin opened all his soul to the bishop, sensing the answering absolution and blessing like a whisper of a caress flowing across the link which bound them. Almost he could feel the touch of the anointing oil as the last sacrament was projected through the link as real as if the bishop had knelt by his side and physically touched him with the holy balm.

  He was at peace as Tavis finished healing Rhys Michael’s leg, at peace as the Healer shifted on his knees to move to Davin’s side.

  “He’s got an arrow in his back, m’lord,” Jason said urgently, before Tavis could even touch him.

  Davin’s eyes fluttered open in time to see Javan’s white-faced horror as he scrambled nearer.

  “My God, Jason, why didn’t you say something?” the prince gasped, staring at the reddened hand which the knight displayed for Tavis’s inspection. “Rhys Michael could have waited. Tavis, do something!”

  But as Tavis reached out, Davin grabbed the handless wrist with his good right hand.

  “No! Lord Tavis, if you try to remove the barb, I will die immediately. There’s nothing you can do. My legs are gone already.”

  Steadily Tavis reached out and released his stump from Davin’s grip.

  “Suppose you let me make the medical judgments around here, Eidiard. You’re neither Healer nor D—you are Deryni!”

  His hand jumped back from Davin’s like one stung, his psychic shock reverberating. Javan’s face was pinched and drawn so tight that Davin could not help wondering whether he had felt it too. Jason had simply frozen behind him in shock, and Davin extended just the slightest amount of control to make certain the knight did not leave him prematurely.

  “Yes, I am Deryni,” he whispered. “But I swear, it was not to do any of you harm that I came here—and I was not of those pigs who tried to kill us all just now. You must believe that.”

  “Who are you? How can you be Deryni?” Tavis managed to whisper. “I probed you! Right after you came, when that horse kicked you, I Healed you! I would have sworn you were not Deryni!”

  “I was sent to guard the princes, and to keep watch over you,” Davin murmured, sensing Tavis’s growing intent to try to read him further and knowing he could not permit that. With a part of his mind, he reached out to Jason again and urged one of the man’s supporting hands to move closer to the arrow in his back. “Believe me, Tavis, I am neither of these pigs nor of the butchers who took your hand. I am a friend.”

  “You deceived us—”

  “It was necessary,” Davin responded, playing for time as he set triggers in his mind to ensure that there would be nothing there to read, when his shields failed. “Had I not been here, you would have had that much less warning of the attack today. And this shaft which now sends me to my grave would have taken Rhys Michael instead.”

  “You’re lying,” Tavis whispered. “You must be lying. Who sent you? Why did you really come?”

  His probe lashed out, clashing against Davin’s shields even as the Healer’s hand and stump pressed against his temples. The shields held, but Davin knew he could not hold them for long.

  Into Thy Hands, Lord, he sent his final prayer, at the same time nudging Jason’s mind just enough to move the man’s hand awkwardly against the arrow shaft.

  The barb shifted within him, but there was no pain. He felt only a warmth flood through his gut as blood began pumping where blood was never meant to go.

&nb
sp; He gave a little gasp as his vision began to dim, and he knew from the look on Tavis’s face that the Healer realized he was hemorrhaging internally, but the Healing energy which Tavis tried to divert to him was too late now. As he closed his eyes and sagged more heavily against Jason’s supporting knee, he reached out a final time to the one who anguished in the Council chamber and tried to force his own strength across the fading link.

  He had time only to sense that last futile caress, and to wonder again at how Bishop Alister reminded him of his grandfather Camber; and then, for just an instant, the old Camber presence that he remembered from childhood flooded through him and enveloped him in love.

  His last image, as the final darkness descended, was of the face of his grandfather, weeping, and of the strong hands reaching out to buoy him up—and then a nothingness which was pervaded by a blinding, incredibly beautiful light of all the colors of time.

  And Tavis, pressing relentlessly at those last vestiges of consciousness as he realized his subject was dying, gasped and pulled back in awe and momentary panic. Of all the things he had expected to encounter, the presence of Saint Camber had been the last! Almost immediately, he re-engaged; but it was too late by then. Davin was dead, and all his memories fled away, the erasing triggers having done their work.

  Suppressing unbidden tears whose source he could not trace, Tavis withdrew, slamming his fist against the ground in sheer frustration—then catching his breath in awe as the still, handsome face seemed to shimmer. Slowly the curly blond hair went straight and fairer, the chin became more pronounced, the face changed shape just enough so that it was no longer Eidiard’s. The eyes, when Tavis peered hesitantly under one slack lid, had gone from brown to palest grey.

  “Jesus Christ!” Jason murmured, letting the body slip to the ground and edging back a little on his knees as he wiped his palms against his thighs. “That isn’t Eidiard!”

  “I know him!” Tavis whispered, hugging his arms across his chest to keep them from shaking. “I’ve seen him before, but I can’t remember—”

  “Good Lord, it’s the Earl of Culdi!” said Robear, joining them from his task of binding the prisoners. “But—that’s Eidiard’s harness, and—”

  Javan, kneeling dazed on the other side of his sleeping brother, could only shake his head in stunned disbelief and whisper, “Why, Tavis? Why?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Let us see if his words be true: and let us prove what shall happen in the end of him.

  —Wisdom of Solomon 2:17

  “I’ll tell you why!” Bishop Hubert raged, when the party with its prisoners had returned to Rhemuth Castle. “He was one of them!” He gestured toward the four kneeling prisoners with an angry chop of his hand. “Are they not all Deryni?”

  Court had been convened in the great hall as soon as the king and regents could be summoned. The princes had been allowed time to wash and change their bloodstained tunics, but now they sat tensely on stools to either side of their brother, who nominally presided from the formal throne. A tense-looking Tavis crouched beside Javan’s stool to the far right.

  The three regents resident in Rhemuth were ranged in rigid fury around the throne: Bishop Hubert, coped and mitered between Alroy and Javan, crozier clutched like a talisman against the prisoners; Earls Murdoch and Tammaron on Alroy’s other side, wearing their coronets and long court mantles of rich, dark stuff lined with fur.

  Archbishops Jaffray and Oriss were also present, and Earl Udaut, the constable, and several other lesser lords, but they had been relegated to places at the right of and perpendicular to the throne, with several clarks who were scribbling notes intently. Jaffray, the sole functioning Deryni in the hall besides Tavis—for the prisoners had been drugged before they ever left the campsite to prevent Deryni tricks—only wished he could be even farther from the center of attention. Deryniness would be a key issue this afternoon, as well it had to be.

  He wished he knew more precisely what had happened. From what snatches of information he had been able to pick up from those around him, it appeared that there had been an attack on the royal hunting party by, among others, those now kneeling before the court, and that Davin had been among those killed, his true form returning at his death. The logical inference seemed to be that Davin had been a key part of a Deryni assassination plot—for why else would a Deryni of Davin’s high rank join the royal household disguised as a common guard?

  That Davin was dead, there was certainly no doubt, even if his psychic absence were not poignant enough reminder. His lifeless body lay on a litter before all the court, alongside those of the other four attackers who had been killed, plus the dead guard and squire. Beside them knelt the four bound and drugged prisoners who had been taken alive, each with a guard standing behind. They were Deryni—Jaffray had sent out a swift probe as they were brought in, though the shields he had encountered were hazy and confused from the drugs—but he did not recognize any of them except Davin.

  “I therefore think it clear,” Murdoch was saying, “that these—Deryni,” he spoke the name with purest contempt, “did conspire to murder Your Highness’s royal brothers—and would have threatened Your Highness’s life, as well, had you not been called to your royal duties at the last moment and stayed in Rhemuth this morning. Nor is this the first instance of Deryni plots against the House of Haldane, as Your Highness will recall. Now, one of the loyal guards has been most foully slain, and another guard, who was trusted with the very safety of the Crown, has betrayed you.”

  He moved down a step and gestured angrily toward the body of Davin.

  “There lies the Earl of Culdi, who, by some magic surely profane in the eyes of God, took the form of another and did deceive Your Grace and your royal brothers—and was revealed as the deceiver he is only when death forced him from his evil ways.”

  “He saved Rhys Michael’s life,” Javan protested. “He took an arrow meant for my brother.”

  Murdoch threw up his hands in disgust. “Oh, Your Highness, how can you be so deceived? It was merest chance that the arrow struck—that!” Again he gestured roughly toward the body. “His confederates miscalculated—that is all! There is another who was so wounded. It is not always possible to choose one’s targets with great precision in the heat of battle, especially when the bowman shoots from a cowardly shelter in brush.”

  He stabbed a beringed forefinger at the body of the man Javan had finished, with the arrow still projecting from its leg.

  “These Deryni are all in league,” he concluded. “It is quite clear what dark Master of destruction and damnation they serve!”

  It was all Jaffray could do to keep his seat, but he knew he dared not rise to Murdoch’s bait and draw the regents’ scrutiny on himself. Tavis had likewise blanched at Murdoch’s statement, but with tight-lipped forbearance he merely dropped his hot gaze to the floor by Javan’s feet.

  Alroy, who had grown progressively paler as Murdoch spoke, gripped the gold-mounted ivory of his scepter as if it were his only link to sanity as he stared at the four battered captives.

  “Have you anything to say to us?” he said, in a thin but steady voice.

  The captives stared back sullenly, eyes a little glazed from the drugs they had been given, but none of them showed any inclination to speak.

  “We do not wish it said that our justice is arbitrary,” Alroy continued, almost a little pleading. “Your crime is irrefutable. We have done nothing to provoke such an attack upon us. Yet, if you had some quarrel—”

  Bishop Hubert rapped twice with his crozier on the wooden floor of the dais, the sound an echo of doom for those who knelt before him.

  “No quarrel may justify raising hand against one’s lawfully anointed king, Your Grace!” he thundered in red-faced outrage. “And to strike against the king’s heirs is to strike against the king! These Deryni were engaged in sacrilegious murder and treason. They must be made an example, that none may ever again raise hand against your royal house!”

  Al
roy, who had shrunk down in his throne a little as Hubert made his pronouncement, gripped his scepter even tighter, and Javan looked as if he might faint. Only Rhys Michael continued to stare evenly at the prisoners, his face a chiseled mask of ice. After a few tense heartbeats, Alroy turned his face slightly toward Tavis, crouching at Javan’s side.

  “Lord Tavis, perhaps a Deryni can shed some light on the motives of other Deryni.”

  Tavis, with an uncertain glance at the king, then at the prisoners, rose stiffly and crossed his arms so that his missing hand was shielded behind his other elbow.

  “I would gather from Your Highness’s request that my own loyalty is not in question, even though I am Deryni,” he said softly. “If this is so, do I also assume that Your Highness is asking me to Truth-Read the prisoners?”

  “If you can.”

  “With all due respect, Your Highness, I would rather not.”

  “Your own attackers could be among them,” Murdoch offered smoothly. “Will you not serve yourself and your king in this small way, Tavis?”

  Tavis returned Murdoch’s gaze implacably, then drew careful breath, clearly about to refuse.

  “Do not force me to command you, Tavis,” Murdoch whispered.

  For a moment, Jaffray thought the Healer might continue to defy Murdoch. Tight-jawed, he glanced at Javan, at Alroy, then gave a brisk nod, not quite a bow, before moving down the dais steps. The prisoners, even in their drugged lethargy, shrank against the guards who stood at their backs, but they could not escape his touch as he passed along their line, pausing before each man to lay his hand briefly on forehead and probe as well as he might. When he had read each one, he returned up the steps and made Alroy another almost-bow.

  “I believe no useful purpose would be served by deeper probing, Your Highness. They appear to be only disgruntled younger nobility—the same breed of bully boys whose bands have plagued us for some time now. They are more young and foolish than conspiratorial, and seem as astonished as we that Earl Davin was among us.”