by Paul Kearney
“Port your helm!” Abeleyn yelled to the tillermen. Dietl was unconscious in a pool of his own blood on the deck.
There was a grating noise, a deep, grinding shudder as the wind worked on the carrack and tore her free of the stricken galleass. She was sluggish, like a tired prizefighter who knows he has thrown his best punch, but finally she was free of the wrecked enemy vessel. There were half a dozen fires raging on board the corsairs’ craft and she was no longer under command. She drifted downwind, burning steadily as the carrack edged away.
The third galleass was already in flight, having picked up as many of the corsairs as she could. She spread her sails and set off to the south-east like a startled bird, leaving scores of helpless men struggling in the water behind her.
An explosion that sent timbers and yards a hundred feet into the air as the crippled galleass which remained burned unchecked. Abeleyn had to shout himself even hoarser as flaming wreckage fell among the carrack’s rigging and started minor fires. The exhausted crew climbed the shrouds and doused the flames. The carpenter, Burian, appeared on the quarterdeck looking like a dripping rat.
“Sire, where’s the master?”
“He’s indisposed,” Abeleyn told him in a croak. “Make your report to me.”
“We’ve six feet of water in the hold and it’s still gaining on us. She’ll settle in a watch or two; the breach the ram made is too big to plug.”
Abeleyn nodded. “Very well. Get back below and do what you can. I’ll set a course for the Hebrian coast. We might just make it.”
Suddenly Dietl was there, staggering like a drunk man but upright. Abeleyn helped him keep his feet.
“Set a course for the Habrir river. West-sou’-west. We’ll be there in half a watch. She’ll bring us to shore, by God. She’s not done yet, and neither am I.”
“Take him below,” Abeleyn said to the carpenter as the master’s eyes rolled back in his head. Burian threw Dietl over his shoulder as though he were a sack, and disappeared down the companionway to his task of keeping the ship afloat.
“Sire,” a voice said. Sergeant Orsini, looking like some bloody harbinger of war.
“Yes, Sergeant?”
“The nefs, sire—the bloody bastards sank them both.”
“What?” Abeleyn ran to the starboard rail. Up to the north he made out the smoke and cloud of the other action. He could see two galleasses and two burning hulks, one unrecognizable, the other definitely one of the wide-bellied nefs of his retinue. As he watched, a globe of flame rose from it and seconds later the boom of the explosion drifted down the wind.
“They’re lost then,” he said. The weariness and grief were slipping into place now. The battle joy had faded. Three hundred of his best men gone. Even if the carrack had been undamaged, they would take hours to beat up to windwards and look for survivors, and the two galleasses that remained would find her easy prey. It was time for flight. The monarch in Abeleyn accepted that, but the soldier loathed it.
“Someone will pay for this,” he said, his voice low and calm. But the tone of it set the hair crawling on Orsini’s head. Then the King turned back to the task in hand.
“Come,” he said in a more human voice. “We have a ship to get to shore.”
FIVE
B ROTHER Columbar coughed again and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his habit. “Saint’s blood, Albrec, to think you’ve been thirteen years down in these warrens. How can you bear it?”
Albrec ignored him and raised the dip higher so that it illuminated the rough stone of the wall. Columbar was an Antillian like himself, clad in brown. His usual station was with Brother Philip in the herb gardens, but a cold had laid him low this past week and he was on lighter duties in the scriptorium. He had come down here two days ago, hunting old manuscript or parchment that might serve as blotting for the scribes above. And had found the precious document which had been consuming most of Albrec’s time ever since.
“There have been shelves here at one time,” Albrec said, running his fingers across the deep grooves in the wall. “And the stonework is rough, as though built in haste or without regard for appearances.”
“Who’s going to see it down here?” Columbar asked. He had a pendulous nose that was red and dripping and his tonsure had left him with black feathers of hair about his ears and little else. He was a man of the soil, he was proud of saying, a farmer’s son from the little duchy of Touron. He could grow anything given the right plot, and thus had ended up in Charibon producing thyme and mint and parsley for the table of the Vicar-General and the poultices of the infirmary. Albrec had a suspicion that he was unable to read anything beyond a few well-worn phrases of the Clerical Catechism and his own name, but that was not uncommon among the lesser orders of the Church.
“And where’s the gap where you found it?” Albrec asked.
“Here—no, over here, with the mortar crumbling. A wonder the library hasn’t tumbled to the ground if the foundations are in this state.”
“We’re far below the library’s foundations,” Albrec said absently, poking into the crevice like a rabbit enlarging a burrow. “These chambers have been hewn from solid rock; those buttresses were left standing while the rest was cleared away. The place is all of a piece. So why do we have mortared blocks here?”
“It was the Fimbrians built Charibon, like they built everything else,” Columbar said, as if to prove that he was not entirely ignorant.
“Yes. And it was a secular fortress at first. These catacombs were most probably used for the stores of the garrison.”
“I wish you would not call them catacombs, Albrec. They’re grim enough as it is.” Columbar’s breath was a pale fog about his face as he spoke.
Albrec straightened. “What was that?”
“What? I heard nothing.”
They paused to listen in the little sanctuary of light maintained by the dip.
To call the chambers they were in catacombs was not such a bad description. The place was low, the roof uneven, the floor, walls and roof sculpted out of raw granite by some unimaginable labour of the long-ago empire. One stairway led down here from the lower levels of the library above, also hewn out of the living gutrock. Charibon had been built on the bones of the mountains, it was said.
These subterranean chambers seemed to have been used to house the accumulated junk of several centuries. Old furniture, mouldering drapes and tapestries, even the rusted remains of weapons and armour, quietly decayed in the dark peace. Few of the inhabitants of the monastery-city came down here; there were two levels of rooms above them and then the stolid magnificence of the Library of St. Garaso. The bottom levels of the monastery had not been fully explored since the days of the emperors; there might even be levels below the one on which the two men now stood.
“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,” Alb
rec 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?”