The black hand. Good God, is that what he had been about to say? If it had been the old Marqués of Málaga speaking, the lady would have guessed he was about to lay down his law on some poor spy’s head. Was that how he saw her now? A spy? Was he really the Pope’s “black hand”? Was there such a man, after all?
Myths within myths. Disguises within disguises.
“I am here,” she said carefully, “to enforce the Bull on behalf of Rey Carlos, and I’ll do everything in my power to make sure that the order is not resurrected in Spain. Don Manuel never mentioned these knights to me, but his destreza is—it’s a powerful fighting form and should give a Holy Roman Emperor pause. I know. I’m one of its best practitioners.” She took a deep breath and said, “And you, my lord?”
“I carry the blessing of the Holy See,” the inquisitor said, holding his hand out flat, palm down, so Doña Viray could see the Vatican signet ring on his index finger. She looked at the keys and crown upon the ring and realized her lord of old very well could be the “black hand,” her counterpart for the Vatican, for Pope Clement VIII himself. “And I have come for the Book of the Seven Hands too.”
His waxy brown eyes lifted to hers apologetically, and hers, a cunning hazel, met his in acceptance. Then both their gazes burned, and the unsaid conversation was completely understood between them. The Papal Bull must be enforced. We must capture Don Manuel’s book. We’ll decide later who actually rides home with it.
Both nodded in satisfaction.
“It’s not enough to take possession of the book,” the old inquisitor said. “To enforce the Bull, you must also kill Sifuentes’s two students, no?”
“Basilio and Alejo.” The thought of that had distressed her deeply, ruining more than a few nights of sleep. She had nothing against either one of them and didn’t relish facing the Great Basilio. “Yes, I assume I must.”
“I’m prepared to help. I’ve set forces in motion so that Basilio will be waylaid for us,” the inquisitor said. “An archbishop in Barcelona has now taken a personal interest concerning the matter of the Great Basilio.”
“Basilio taken by La Inquisición?” She supposed that was best, though it broke her heart to consider what the swordsman would face in such a trial. “When are they due to arrive?”
“Soon,” the inquisitor said, exuding an air of total confidence. “Sifuentes, Basilio, and Alejo are traveling here separately, and Sifuentes booked rooms at the Sow’s Purse. We will find them there. That is my precious piece of information, given freely to an old friend.”
She couldn’t deny that the information was most welcome. “Thank you. Here’s my advice, also given freely. We must watch carefully but not take action too soon.”
“Why not?”
“Because even the simplest of Don Manuel’s plans usually explodes into chaos.”
“Well, well. We seem to be working together,” the inquisitor said happily.
“As long as I get what I want, and by that, I mean,” Doña Viray said, “the death of Don Manuel.”
The inquisitor grinned a cagey, enigmatic grin at her, saying, “Consider it done.”
Inquisitor and assassin stared at one another again for a long, tense moment. Both seemed to be thinking, And the Book of the Seven Hands for me.
Doña Viray turned away, facing the ballroom doors, and said, “Lord Casal’s night watch will be making their rounds soon. We’d best take ourselves away to our apartments.”
“My man Gonzalos is at the city gate, watching for Sifuentes and the others. And remember my name now, for the love of Christ. I’m Zacarías.”
“Understood, Marqués,” she said with a wry smile. She straightened her spine and brought in her elbows for a more feminine stance. Like a shifting optical illusion the swordswoman was gone. The set of her shoulders and angle of her haughty chin had transformed her into a delicate noble lady taking a constitutional through castle hallways. “Vizcondessa Pabla Cardenas de Villadolid will call you Father Zacarías from now on, I promise,” she said with her skirts sweeping across the ballroom floor.
JULY 16, 1524
VACANANA, CATALUÑA
The town of Vacanana looked like a black fixture set into the side of this mountain, an iron-wrought candle holder glittering in the hot night. The gates were still shut, stalling the pilgrimage; everyone involved was irritable and red-faced about the delay, from the pages running torches and messages to and from the main gate, to the grape sellers waiting for customers uphill inside the walls. Angry discourse was passing between the caravan’s fore and the gate men, much of it misunderstanding, as the local emissaries tried to make their Catalan understood to the Castilian-speaking monks.
Down the winding mountain road, the nuns at the rear of the line were growing impatient. Sister Fiona, an apple-cheeked, elderly Mother Instructor from Our Lady of Eternal Sorrows in Barcelona, rubbed her eyes with an index finger each. Torch soot swirling down from the gate and sheer exhaustion were getting the better of her. “We paid for this visit months ago. Lord Casal knew in May we were making pilgrimage. This delay is disgraceful!”
One of the brothers walking just ahead of her turned and said ominously, “There is an inquisitor at the gate.” He was hooded and leaned upon a thick wooden staff.
A sister in the back said something in a cheeky tone, bringing a small shower of nervous twittering from the other nuns. It was that middle-aged nun from Barcelona who had joined their caravan this morning. The laughing and joking had gone on for miles.
“Sor Barbara,” Fiona pronounced, as if speaking the nun’s name hurt her mouth. “I will be glad to part ways with her. Such a bad influence on the others.” She said a small prayer to help guide that insolent, despicable nun.
At that moment, a crier stood up on the back of a mule positioned in the open gateway and addressed the caravan. “Oye! Good Christians! Oye! I bid you welcome to Vacanana from his esteemed and most noble lord Señor Anton Casal de Hernan y Parrella, royal knight of…”
Over the rest of the crier’s introduction came sighs of relief from the clergy, wagoneers, and teamsters.
“Bueno! Quiet, please! Quiet! Oye! Thank you, holy visitors! Your caravan will now proceed to the Cloister of Montfellade. The Sow’s Purse is the one inn in Vacanana but—”
A rousing chant for the wine served at the Sow’s Purse rose from a few soldiers at the gate.
“But—quiet!—sadly, it suffered a fire tonight, so we ask that you all proceed to the cloister. God keep and protect this holy company on its way to the Cathedral of Montfellade and in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen!”
After a cry of “amen,” the caravan began to roll forward, inching its way into Vacanana.
Before she could wish blessings to the hooded monk, Fiona noticed that he and the loudmouthed Sor Barbara had broken away from the company and were hustling off down a narrow street angling off into the cramped mountain town. Fiona wondered how they knew each other. Hadn’t the lame, hooded brother joined the pilgrimage just south of Barcelona, and she north of the city? She stopped to watch them. The monk’s limp was now more pronounced. And wasn’t it odd that Sor Barbara’s horse was weighed down with so many packs and so much gear? The long, rolled blankets? It became a pilgrim to travel lightly and modestly, on a mule perhaps. That stout little Gypsy dray of Sor Barbara’s was sturdy enough to carry a house.
When she finally passed through the gate with the other nuns from her cloister, Sor Fiona steered her mule to the crier and called him close, asking him to speak to the inquisitor.
A moment later, a priest in the crisp, perfect red of La Inquisición broke away from his roadside prayer with three richly dressed pilgrims and approached Sor Fiona’s donkey. He lifted his kind face, his black chin beard pointing at her.
“I am Father Gonzalos of La Inquisición in Valencia. Sister, please, how may I serve you?”
The monk’s hooded head was bowed, and his left leg dragged in agony with every step as he led t
he piebald draft horse by the reins.
“Just a little bit further,” the nun said. “I think.”
The inn would be marked with nothing but a hanging sign or maybe a brightly painted door, they had decided, easy to miss in a cramped mountain town. Though the inn had suffered a fire, the proprietors of the Sow’s Purse might have made arrangements for other accommodations. They hoped. No doubt Don Manuel and this “Italian sorcerer” he’d hired to translate the Book of the Seven Hands were there already, wherever it was. Vacanana was a maze of right-angle streets, cramped as hallways, and whichever way they chose narrowed into boxes within boxes or trailed into dark, high-walled dead-ends.
“Jesus Christ,” Alejo growled after stepping on his friar’s hem for the third time.
“Quiet! What is it now?”
“This cursed robe is going to break my leg again.”
“The robe or I will, if you don’t keep your voice down.”
Ignoring Basilio, Alejo launched into another description of the cold bath he intended to take, the pillow on which he would rest his left foot, and the brandy he would drink when they found lodging. “There must be another inn, mustn’t there?”
For inveterate travelers like Basilio and Alejo, finding a public house with rooms at the end of a long journey was paradise—not only for its creature comforts but also for its complete rarity in Spain. In Italy and France, where they’d both served at war with the well-connected Don Manuel, travelers’ inns were everywhere. Over the past decade, the custom of taverns had coursed quickly south from Brussels, as Flemish, German, and Swiss merchants instilled a love of negotiating at the business table with good food and drink, and soft, goose-feather mattresses warmed with bed irons at the end of the day.
But not so in Spain. Here in the wind-scarred plains and bleak ranges of Iberia, inns were viewed with fixed suspicion. Built for sustaining the faithful during seven centuries of bloody holy war, Spain’s towns were huddled around little wilderness chapels that still rang the devout to prayer with sacred terces, sexts, and nones. To city fathers across Spain, inns were sites of secular lounging and impure miscegenation, and they discouraged them from being built.
“I doubt there is another tavern in a pig town like this,” Basilio said to Alejo. “But if we’re lucky, we’ll find a St. Francis hostel. Or a quiet graveyard to sleep in.”
“That much is inevitable,” Alejo muttered.
Finally the pilgrimage’s caravan was no longer in sight behind them. “We’re in the clear,” Basilio said and slid off Padrona’s back next to Alejo.
“This all would have been easier if we’d done it my way and let the gitanos help us.”
“That would have been subtle. Look, we’re here; the inquisitor didn’t look twice at either one of us. Now get up on Padrona, and let’s go.”
“No, no, I’m walking,” Alejo said.
“Spartan,” Basilio said. “We made excellent time. In fact, we probably beat Don Manuel here. Now get on the horse.”
Alejo was ready to relent when he suddenly went stone still, fist bunched in his robe at the thigh, hiking it up ever so slightly. His feet were in the L-shaped fighting stance of la destreza.
Basilio saw Alejo’s feet, and his hand went to his espada, which was rolled into a blanket on Padrona’s side.
From the opaque shadows of the narrow way ahead, a cruel bear of a man emerged, so big that he seemed stuffed into his leather doublet, and his brows were lumpen, part of a face that endured regular abuse. A decent espada corta hung at his belt—a “scratcher,” as street thugs called such thin swords that were just for stabbing. The giant was too fashionable for outback Cataluña. Basilio could tell at once this was a matón, a hired man, probably from Valencia, judging by the stylish left-hand roll of his hat’s wide brim.
“Good evening, uncle,” the giant said, bowing to Alejo. He straightened, and his large eyes angled to the Carmelite nun. “Aunt.”
A vine-covered stone span connected the walls on either side of this narrow way, and, overhead, five men walked slowly into position atop the left-hand wall, the very stones of which seemed to perspire in the July heat.
Alejo shifted his weight. He let his robes sway into place, hiding his wounded leg, and then unleashed his booming voice. “I am Brother Alfonso of the Carmelite monastery in Barcelona, my son. By the grace of He Who Was Crucified For Your Sins, go you with God tonight and do let us pass.”
The giant glowered. The great mass of him seemed to grow, to root him into the cobblestones.
The nun squinted up at the monk skeptically. Alejo had disguised himself as a priest so many times that he actually could command the crowds of a holy pilgrimage, as he’d done today at morning vespers. Good Christians always wanted to hear goodness and to be associated with it, even if it was just the appearance of goodness, and Alejo played them like a flute. But these men looked like professional sinners.
“By whose authority,” Alejo intoned, doubling his bet that he could win the giant, “do you waylay holy people in the obscurity of night on public streets of this good town?”
The huge man thundered back, “Our castellano is a great knight, favored by the Comte de Urgell, who in turn gave us our authority, uncle.”
Liar. You speak Castilian instead of the local Catalan, Basilio thought.
Alejo took a great breath and ducked his chin, forcing his voice deeper. “Your gate man assured us safe passage through your streets!”
“We are sailors leaving tomorrow for Milan, but we have no funds for the expedition. Can you help us?”
“Oh, ho. So that’s it, is it?”
“A tithe. We know you can spare that much.”
Basilio bowed his black nun’s habit and fired off a rapid rosary, while stepping closer to Alejo and covering his flank. From under his lashes, Basilio could see that three of the five men above them had slid into place across the little stone bridge. Two had remained poised on the wall at left, flinging back capes and crouching now. Masked. Slippers on their feet. Grumetes, burglars who plied their trade through open windows—well accomplished too, if the leather of their slippers was as fine as it looked from the street. These weren’t poor sailors.
Alejo slid an arm around Basilio as though to comfort and protect the nun. “You’d speak of robbery in front of a lady?”
“You’re smugglers. Or maybe you don’t even know you are smugglers, eh, uncle? Did a couple swordsmen pay you to bring that chest into town?” the giant asked. “That’s a cask for a Bible, and an expensive one, I’ll wager. Let’s start with that. Sister, fetch it for me.”
It was too specific a thing for a common matón to spot from afar in the dark. These men have been told to look for a Bible cask, Basilio thought, his sword hand starting to itch. Someone in Vacanana knew about the Book of the Seven Hands.
Just then, Alejo turned and whispered in his ear. “Basilio, I need a surgeon.”
Basilio clenched his teeth, tried to pretend he hadn’t heard that.
“Leg’s bleeding bad. I’m not going to be standing much longer.”
Basilio grunted, furious with his old friend. “You couldn’t have told me that five minutes ago?” He quickly took in the terrain. No windows, doorways, porticos, grates, or even culverts in this dark street. These hounds had chosen the right place for a pinch. Basilio’s sword was behind him, under wraps on the horse. No way to get to it in time. If he was going to get rid of them and keep his and Alejo’s presence in town secret, Basilio needed all these brigands down on the cobblestones, close, rushing at him.
“Just stay on your feet as long as you can,” he whispered. Then, pitching his voice frightened and high, Basilio clutched at Alejo and shouted, “They can’t possibly mean what I think they mean—do they, brother?”
The giant’s misshapen eyebrows lumped together in confusion.
But the men on the wall understood. They turned to the nun like a school of fish aiming themselves at bait. Basilio could now feel their eyes and lusts b
urning. As planned.
Don’t toy with subjugation, Basilio. Ever, Don Manuel had warned him long ago. Don’t take even the slightest taste of rape inside your sacred circle.
“Am I nothing but a ‘tithe’?” Basilio shrieked in mock fright. His voice was a convincing tenor, perfect for disguising himself as a nun or a fine lady. “A price to be paid? A treasure to be…taken by these men?”
“What? No. No, sister, we’re followers of the one true Christ,” the giant said, confused. “We’re merely looking for—”
A man upon the wall said something sharp and low to the giant. A rude chuckle flickered through the five men up there.
The giant kept his gaze on the two clergy, but it looked like he was resisting the urge to drag his confederate from the wall and thrash him for what he’d said. “May the Savior take pity on your miserable soul, Joto. You don’t know what you’re doing,” the giant said to him.
Joto, the fellow who’d spoken, dropped next to the giant. “Oh, we know what we’re doing,” he said. “We’ve cuckolded the Savior before.”
Basilio suppressed a grin as two more from the bridge dropped to the street, hooting and shouting. When they landed, Basilio feigned a small scream of surprise, shifted expertly inside his nun’s robes, and took his stance—ready.
“We’re not here for that!” the giant shouted. “Zacarías wants—”
But the fire was lit, and the two men and Joto charged at Basilio, arms wide to gather up the nun like laundry. Basilio spun in place, twisting away from their charge, and at the last moment, flung his right arm up with a loud snap of sleeve.
An intake of breath like a lover’s gasp, and then another. The sound of wetness spattered upon the stone wall. All three brigands fell hard upon their backs with sharp barks of agony.
Basilio raised his empty, ungloved hands, displaying them in a show of shock. A rosary dangled from one delicate wrist. “Madonna preserve me! What are they doing?”
The Book of Seven Hands: A Foreworld SideQuest (The Foreworld Saga) Page 5