Double doors, raised panels with men and women carved on them. Pin-cushioned by arrows, beheadings, iron grids over fires, lions out of Medieval woodcut prints. Martyrs? Saint Sebastian on the upper right? Gruesome. Bugger it, omens again.
Long room, wide, flaring torches, ragged banners hanging from black hammer-beam trusses high overhead in the flickering gloom. Why couldn't they use electric lights like they had in the bloody dungeons? Bloody image games, just like Dougal and Fiona.
Great hall, probably. Long horseshoe table, with heavy chair set between the two arms, at the focus of nine black-hooded faces. Judges. Unanimous decision, or majority? Or sham? Dierdre settled him into the chair, the prisoner's dock, with a touch.
Hooded faces, but Brian could make some guesses. Central on the table facing him, obvious boss by everyone's body language, Captain-General Llewes. Left of him, long black hair showing beneath the hood and two bumps on the front of the purple uniform, that would likely be Amanda, mis-named "Worthy to be loved." Reported to be vicious in the tangled head-office politics of the Pendragons. Down halfway on the right, massive signet ring on the right hand, MacDonald, head of operations and never identified any further.
Brian might come up with more names when they spoke. Or if. Right now, they just stared at him in silence.
His brain settled back between his ears. Duncan and Dierdre stood behind him, Duncan's hand lightly on Brian's right shoulder as either support or restraint, Brian wasn't quite sure which. The guard settled cross-legged on the floor in front of Llewes, where his line of fire didn't include any of the judges. The neat 9mm hole in the muzzle of the Beretta's flat-black sound suppressor made it look like a tenth hooded judge. Maybe it was.
The silence dragged on.
Finally, the last hood on the left pushed himself to his feet and turned toward the head of the horseshoe. He bowed. "My lord." Then he faced Brian. "Prisoner at the bar, you stand accused of deliberate and premeditated murder of an agent of the Circle, desertion, betraying secrets of the Order, and entering a forbidden area. How do you plead?"
Murder. Agent. Circle.
Those three words hit him like another kick in the balls.
Brian couldn't move, couldn't think, couldn't speak. Forbidden area? He'd expected that. Plead ignorance, plead incompetence, plead that he hadn't had any bloody choice once his bloody bitch-sister had followed him to the bloody safe-house transit room. That covered the secrets, as well. And they probably expected pillow-talk with Maureen. As if he hadn't learned to avoid that trap long ago.
Desertion? Yeah, they might see it that way. He saw it more like resigning from an endless winless war. Like that guy in the Hemingway book.
The hood waited.
Now Dierdre's hand settled on Brian's other shoulder, right over the nerve-pinch that would drop him into writhing pain if he made any kind of move.
Murder. Agent. Circle.
Only way to make sense of it was, Liam had been a double rat, a mole. Only way to make sense of that was, this Circle had turned a blind eye to all the things Liam had done through the years.
Including Mulvaney. The thought made Brian sick.
Mulvaney had been a fellow Pendragon, sergeant major to Brian's captain in the SAS, old friend and solid trusted man-behind-me-back. Liam had tortured the old soldier to death, just for the pure hell of it. And Duncan had ordered Brian off the trail.
That hadn't made sense, so he'd marked it up to the garbled message, a mistake in coding or decoding, and pushed on. Killed Liam when he'd tried to take Maureen to the Summer Country.
"Let the record show that the accused stood mute." The hood sat down.
"Questioner," the signet ring spoke, with MacDonald's voice, "have you discovered how the accused reached this place?"
Dierdre stirred, her grip tightening on the nerve plexus in his shoulder. "You saw the video. Claimed he 'felt' the way and took it."
"Do you think he told the truth?"
"He beat me before, in training. The council cut my questioning short."
"Who guards the way from Joseph's Throne?"
Now Duncan stirred, his hand heavy with tension. "I do, my lord."
Silence, dragging on for a minute or more. Joseph's Throne, Joseph of Arimathea, myth tied him with Glastonbury and Arthur and the Grail. And Castle Corbin, also known as Carbonek. The signet ring lifted to form a cup under a hooded chin. "The prisoner was under your direct command?"
"Yes, my lord."
"You ordered him to leave Liam alone?"
"Yes, my lord."
So much for Duncan serving as barrister for the defense. Direct conflict of interest. Time to talk to the solicitor about engaging new counsel.
The one he'd guessed was Amanda stirred and turned to Llewes at the center of the horseshoe. Rumor had it that she wanted his chair. Badly enough to not mind bloodstains on it. "Is the prisoner prepared to give up his lover to stay with us?"
Llewes turned back to Brian and raised his hand, palm up, to pass the question on.
Maureen.
Time played strange games in the Summer Country. Between worlds, it was even worse. He'd been here for a few hours, a day at most. He wondered how many hours or days or weeks had passed for Maureen. Or if he'd been gone any time at all.
Most likely, though, she'd know that he had left. Left without any parting, with harsh words between them. What would she think and do?
She'd think he'd said to hell with her, packed up and left.
But she was Maureen. She'd wound herself around his heart so tightly, he couldn't cut her out and live without her. In spite of all her flaws. Funny that he should realize that now, when it was too late.
Llewes still waited.
Brian slowly shook his head, dazed by his thoughts and the hours just past. "No. Maureen is more important to me than the Pendragons."
Those words were probably his death-warrant. But he'd sensed that this hearing wasn't about Liam, or leading Fiona to the safe-house, or even about Maureen. This was about him knowing things he wasn't supposed to know. And that was beyond all help.
Dierdre's hand tightened on Brian's shoulder, silencing him and forcing him back into his chair. He accepted because he couldn't think of any way to save his ass. And he wasn't sure he wanted to defend himself. He might be slow, but they'd lined up enough ducks that he could finally see them make a line. Mulvaney had been Liam's price of admission, his way to prove to the Old Ones which side he was on. Duncan had known about it. Brian's stomach surged, and he swallowed bile.
Duncan and this whole bloody inner Circle. Bastards probably ordered it. Mulvaney was old, old enough he'd known Kipling out in India. He was retiring. Get one last mission out of the old soldier and save a few quid on the pension fund, all at one go.
And this Circle kept slaves. He'd seen them, in the castle fields and the halls when Dierdre first hauled him through that labyrinth into whatever world this was. Human slaves. No mistaking that body language. They crept around the edges of life, cringing whenever one of the Old Ones glanced their way.
Corrupt. Deep down at its heart, its hidden ruling Circle, the Pendragon order was corrupt. Brian mourned.
Amanda was speaking. ". . . Mac, you see conspiracies under every rock. Do you have any proof our boy wasn't acting on his own?"
The signet ring shrugged and waved in Brian's direction. "Do ye think he's smart enough? Fifty years in the British army and nobody's ever put him in for major? Albion has his faults, but being brainy isn't one of them. He had to have help to have even found this place."
Prosecutor-hood pushed himself to his feet, bowed to the Llewes-hood again, Queen's Counsel in purple instead of black silk. "Prisoner at the bar, do you have anything to say in your defense?" He was cutting the debate short, probably on a cue from Llewes.
Brian stood, and Dierdre let him. She kept the nerve hold, though. "I came here by accident, just the way I said. No one helped me. I killed Liam because he was a murderer. I don't think love
means betrayal, and if you think that it does, then you've betrayed your own souls." He slumped back into his chair, drained and shaking, pleased that he'd managed to string four coherent sentences together. Even if those sentences should mean his death.
QC-hood nodded to Dierdre, waiting like the unsheathed sword of justice behind Brian. "Questioner, do you think you can get him to tell us more?"
Silence behind Brian. He couldn't see her face and didn't really want to.
He felt her shake her head, through that lover's-touch on his shoulder. "I doubt that he'll change his story. You've seen his records. He beat the training test."
QC-hood nodded. He bowed to Llewes-hood and sat down. Brian had finally tied a face to the prosecutor's voice, a thin-faced weasel named Rupert. Seemed to be somebody in the paymaster's office. Always chasing expense accounts and harassing field operatives.
"Vote." That was Llewes, barely moving the hood's fabric with his voice.
This kangaroo court rolled along on well-greased wheels as if everyone except Brian had been through it a hundred times before. That thought sickened him almost as much as Mulvaney and Liam and the slaves.
"Death." Lower right corner hood.
"Further interrogation, then death." Signet ring.
"Exile. He knows how to keep his mouth shut, and I agree with him about Liam. As you know." Third hood on the right, first time it had spoken, a voice Brian didn't recognize.
Across the head table. "Death."
Nothing from Llewes.
"Death." Amanda.
Down the left side. "Death." "Exile." "Death."
The words didn't matter to Brian. His past was dead already. He didn't want any part of this present. He couldn't see a future. He just wished he'd said goodbye to Maureen.
The hoods all turned toward Llewes, where he sat centered at the head of the horseshoe. Group dynamics told Brian that they were just advisors, and the only vote that counted was the Captain-General's. And that this proceeding was marching a pre-determined route.
"Death. Firing squad, in the courtyard, at dawn. Cremation with full military honors." He spread his hand flat, about six inches above the table, a king dismissing his Star Chamber court. Dismissing any further interrogation.
And that was that. Dierdre's hand told him to rise, to turn, to walk through the door. She guided him like a show horse with her eloquent touch.
He walked where she pointed him, numb to the core. He didn't even ache anymore. She hummed behind him, a tune that chased through his brain in search of words from memory. It finally connected.
"For young Roddy McCorley goes to die on the bridge of Toome today."
Chapter Seventeen
Brian mourned.
He felt Dierdre's fingers poised over nerve holds, guiding, controlling, firm and yet just the promise of pain rather than the fact. The touch of a virtuoso, who understood that constant pressure would deaden the effect and she'd lose the threat by using it. He walked where the warning sent him, moving in a fog.
Fifty years of his life. Fifty bloody years he'd dedicated to the Pendragons, training and fighting and bleeding and doing ugly things in dark piss-stinking alleys, just to find out that something like Liam had been an agent of the same side. His allies were as filthy as his enemies.
Worse, even. The Old Ones made no pretense. They were what they were, right out front.
Talk about stupid. MacDonald was right. For all the anagrams might say, brains had never been Brian's strong point. He knew that. He made up for it with persistence. Once he started in on a task or a thought, he saw it through to the end however long it took, however much it hurt. That was how he'd finally gotten Liam.
He had just never started thinking about the Pendragons. He took them at face value. He'd been a good soldier, doing everything they told him to the best of his abilities. Sometimes they told him to do hideous things, but there'd always been a reason. There'd been a reason for Dierdre, a need he could recognize that she filled, nasty though it might be.
He'd have obeyed even that order about Liam, if the coding hadn't garbled it. And then he never would have met Maureen.
Dierdre guided him through the door and into the empty corridor. They turned back the way they'd come, the way back to the interrogation cell. Dance the night away with Dierdre, such a lovely thought. See the dawn, and die.
Well, that put a limit on the pain. He'd found out long ago, you could take almost anything if you had an end in sight. That was how he'd beaten her before. He'd known she had a week to break him, not endless minutes that blurred out into forever. Last out that week and win.
Now he just had to make it through the night. His memories would probably hurt more than whatever she had planned for him. Hints he should have read and understood, the inner circle's choices that hid in the shadows within shadows. Things that should have looked wrong, smelled wrong, things like that garbled message that hadn't made sense unless you changed the way you read them. He'd been using the wrong key to decode all the messages. Now it fell into place.
Rotten. The Pendragons were rotten at their heart and head. The foundation of his world had vanished. This was the way Maureen would feel if she found her Father Oak split open and felled by a wind that should never have troubled his top-most leaves -- not just clean wood-rot but some kind of oozing stinking putrescence. This was how a priest would feel if he found out God was evil. Rot at the core of his soul.
The Pendragons were supposed to protect humans. Here at their heart, they kept human slaves. To fight the Old Ones, they'd recruited Liam.
Dierdre stopped them in the hall. "The prisoner will want to pray."
Pray for what? Absolution? No one here could offer that. And he'd long passed beyond hoping for eternal life. That sounded more like punishment to him. Hell was what happened after the first thousand years of heaven, when eternal bliss turned into eternal boredom. He couldn't think of anything he'd want to do forever, not even making love to Maureen.
They'd stopped in front of that door with the Cellini crucifix. Dierdre and Duncan flanked him, with that Beretta-toting guard at a measured distance and a clear lane of fire. Brian felt anger through Dierdre's touch, tension that translated into needles where her fingers pressed his nerves.
"You think I can't handle this alone?" And one hand moved faster than he could think, and pain slammed into his kidney. He bounced forward, smashed his cheek against the wood carving of the door, and slid to his knees. Fingers yanked his hair back, and he stared up into Dierdre's face through blurry tears.
She shook her head, disgust wrinkling her nose. "Bleedin' British army ain't what it used to be. This is the cream of the SAS?"
His head jerked forward, smashing into the lever of the latch and opening the door. He felt blood hot on his forehead as she heaved him to his feet, one-handed. Who ever said women were the weaker sex? And then he stumbled forward from another blow and the door boomed shut behind them and they were in a mysterious gloom of incense and flickering votive lights.
She let him stand, free, shaking his head to clear the daze and tears from his eyes. A chapel, yes, ancient, with carved crucifix and high altar and rood screen, with dark gothic-arched panels that might be more carving or might show stained glass when there was light beyond them. Gallery and choir and two side boxes thrusting out between the arches overhead. Two lines of backless pews flanking a central aisle. Room to seat maybe a hundred.
She pushed him forward again, punching gently this time, almost a love-tap. "Brian, mo croí, you've walked one of those labyrinths before. I saw it in your face, when you stepped through the wall. I'm guessing the deepest cellars of Castle Perilous, yes? So now we have a secret between us, you and I. Everyone else thinks there's just the one." Her words hit him as a colossal non sequitur.
He shook his head, still dazed. "And two can keep a secret, if one of them is dead? Is that your point?"
"No. I believe more people should know our history. Our true history. There are so many
layers to it, just like archaeology. And so strange.
"Llewes serves admirably as a Captain General. I have to admit, though, that as a research librarian he couldn't find his bleedin' arse with both hands and a color plate from Gray's Anatomy as a road map. There were six of them, one for each point on that Solomon's Seal."
And with that, she dropped to one knee in front of the cross and genuflected. She had her back to him, but her words still roared in his ears and he was too stunned to move.
"Don't bother trying. You need to be able to climb stairs if we're going to pay a call on old Giuseppe." She talked the way she fought, spins and jabs and feints and always forcing him off balance, forcing him to react instead of acting.
"Six what?" His jaw ached and moved funny, and she'd loosened at least three of his teeth.
"Six gates to the city, you impious bastard. Six labyrinths, six stones connected to the one stone. Six fairy rings hiding in the forest around Corbin."
Taking her hint, he knelt and crossed himself. His head stayed straighter, closer to the ground. "And I could have told Llewes this and saved my life?"
"They'd have shot you anyway, just for the knowing. A recent scientific survey reveals that only two respondents out of nine believe that a man can know something and not use it for his gain."
She turned and grinned at him, alert and the candles glinting in her eyes. "You think I'm a sadistic bitch, don't you? Too right. But you're too much a masochist to be any fun. I'm gonna bust you out of here, see?"
Her words rocked him back on his heels. He caught his balance, lowered his head, and slogged forward. "Why the hell would you help me escape?"
"Help's help. Don't waste your time on equine dental records when the nag is free." She bounced to her feet and made a show of studying the rood screen carvings, medieval but in fine condition. She never let him out of the corner of her eye, though, and stayed balanced on the balls of her feet. He couldn't take her.
Grab her metaphor if he couldn't grab her throat. "Maybe I want to know if the horse is fit enough to get me out of town?"
The Winter Oak Page 16