In the Eye of Heaven

by David Keck

  "Someone's being a fool," said Heremund. "Kings and the land. The Patriarchs used to take better care."

  "And that thing in the river," Durand added, probing.

  "The old knots still hold old Errest together. Nobles sworn to kings: oaths for land, oaths for swords. Ties and bindings. And all the thousand thousand Banished spirits knotted to the land and bound since the Cradle. And there's the king smack at the heart of it all, keeper of oaths, crowned heart of the realm. Seal of seals. Three days under stone, and the whole realm is tied."

  "Like the oaths that tore Hesperand from the world," Durand breathed.

  "Even when the old fools've got it right, you can hear the air alive while the old king dies and the marked heir waits his turn to head down into the crypt of his fathers. Like the whole realm is thrown in the Heavens, but neither caught nor fallen."

  "And a thing like that hag slips free," Durand concluded.

  But who had died? He remembered Baron Cassonel on the bridge at Bower Mead, with all his grim talk of royal debts coming due.

  "You heard Cassonel?" he asked.

  "Aye. Could be that Poor Ragnal. There ain't nothing's gone right for that one. Ever since his father fell off that horse—the old fool—there's been something. Now, it's the marches splitting. One year a drought, next a blight, then a famine. And always more taxes and more taxes, and there ain't been a penny in his strong room since they crowned him. Now, the Great Council has him, if they want him."

  "Heremund, what if they put a usurper on the throne?"

  "'As the king goes, so goes the kingdom.' So the wise women say. They are tied. That is the point."

  "And a usurper would suffer with his stolen kingdom."

  "Perhaps. What if the old rite doesn't hold? All those knots the Masters and the Patriarchs have woven. What if it all flies apart?"

  People moved in the firelight.

  "That explains why they've been sniffing around Radomor," Durand realized. "At least he's got the right blood."

  "Beoran and the others have been skulking behind the scenes," Heremund whispered. "There's been a thousand men like Cassonel on the roads these last moons, racing over the realm, testing knots. Just this summer, Yrlac and Gireth were bound. What's become of that? It'll be a near thing, but it takes a cold heart to vote down Heaven's anointed."

  Durand was lost. "Have they killed him, then?"

  "That's the question. But I ask you, where was the middle of that mess?" Heremund pointed into the sky. "Did you see them ripples spread?"

  Durand nodded. "From the south. Somewhere across the Glass from High Ashes." He could hardly forget.

  "South or southeast, aye. Maybe the Plain of Yrlac? Maybe south Gireth toward the Blackroots?"

  Durand didn't like to think of his father's Col right in the middle of that thing.

  Mostly to himself, he said, "But the king's in the Mount of Eagles at Eldinor. They're saying Ragnal must be in Tern Gyre in a week's time. All fifty leagues north, and nowhere near Yrlac or Gireth or the mountains."

  Gray-bearded Ailnor, Radomor, Radomor's child—Alwen's son. All were the children of Carondas, who set aside the crown. There was as much royal blood in Yrlac as flowed in the halls of Eldinor. Had Radomor done it, then?

  "Durand?" The skald peered darkly into Durand's face. "I should ask you about Radomor now, shouldn't I?"

  "Aye."

  A man on a mountaintop might have seen all of Heremund's messengers riding back and forth, but, from this riverbank, Durand was blind. The duke might have slain his son, or Radomor his father. Or both might have gone. Or the child. Forces were moving, and a man couldn't tell where.

  For a time, he had known.

  "Blood's been spilt in Yrlac," he concluded.

  'That's all you will say?" asked Heremund.

  "It's all I can say, for certain."

  The skald put a hand on Durand's arm. "Let's get away from the water."

  LAMORIC LIVED OUT the night and woke resolved to carry on. He would not cast aside what had cost them so much.

  They set off once more, riding north along the borders of Hesperand, leaving the forests of Mornaway as Agryn said his Noontide Lauds.

  Deorwen stole urgent glances Durand's way, but Durand quickly learned that crowds and the Eye of Heaven kept her off him.

  He did not wish to speak.

  All night and all morning, he'd heard the trees creaking in Hesperand, moaning and sobbing like voices. He was in no mood to tangle with Deorwen. He couldn't trust himself.

  Just as the forest gave way, Lamoric cut his rouncy from the line. The sudden halt nearly pitched Durand from his saddle. He would have landed right on Heremund's back.

  Lamoric sat leaning over his saddlebow, though he managed a grin.

  "All right, lads," he said. "Here's the game." He twisted, squinting a look across the wide plain of Hellebore behind him. "I am informed that somewhere out there is the Lawerin Way. The Lawerin Way will carry us through the city of Lawerin to Eldinor and Tern Gyre beyond. But that—" He twisted once more, pointing across the plain where Durand could just make out a gray lump on the northern horizon. "That is Cop Alder, the first good lodging we'll hit for ten leagues, and it's on the Lawerin Way. Heremund tells me it's maybe five or seven leagues, but I say we don't camp before then. It means we'll be riding in late, but I say we try it. I say we ride until we get a hot supper, beds, and a roof over our heads."

  Where once the men might have shouted "hoorah!" they only nodded. Murmurs passed among them.

  Lamoric tried for a rakish smile. "All right. Cop Alder then. For a warm bed."

  Durand gave Heremund a poke. "What's this Cop Alder?"

  "Healers. And a good place to be with all these strange happenings. Coensar's put him up to it, and Agryn."

  The cavalcade snaked north between the hamlets and hedges of southern Hellebore until it struck the Lawerin Way, a royal road some ten paces wide and clad in grooved stone. The racket of iron hooves on stone spooked some of the horses: Few had set foot on a proper paved road in their memory.

  By dusk, Guthred was riding double with Lamoric, just to keep the man in the saddle. And, by that time, they had been within sight of the hilltop town for half the hours of daylight.

  Now, looming over the Lawerin Way, the place seemed strangely still. Durand looked up at tall sandstone walls and steep roofs. From the sheer-sided look of the hill, he guessed that it had once been some chieftain's stronghold. Now, though, was anyone's guess.

  "Here's your Cop Alder," said Heremund.

  Beyond a forgotten ringwork, the town walls were oddly angular under their pitched roofs. No dogs barked. No children cried. Strange bastions jutted at the corners. Huge and squat and grim, Cop Alder looked all too regular and too strange.

  And there were bells ringing.

  "There," said Heremund. "There's your answer."

  A cowled line shuffled from the town's high gate. A few of the knights around him made the fist and spread-fingered Eye of Heaven. Feet slipped and stumbled on the track under the weight of four biers. The muffled shapes of dead men hung draped in pale linen. Durand spotted a hummocked graveyard under yew trees at the bottom of the hill. The dead men would pass close.

  Strangely then, the procession veered their way. The elderly monk at the head of the company tramped right up—sending uneasy horses shying back—and stopped before Coensar and Lamoric, halting the others with a thud of the heavy staff in his fist. There was a broad smear of yellow ochre on each man's forehead.

  The leader glanced up—despite the crowd and distance between them—at Durand. Then he turned his water blue gaze upon Lamoric, who sat like a dead man bound in his saddle.

  The captain interposed himself. "Father, I'm called Coensar, a retainer in the service of His Lordship, Sir Lamoric of Gireth." There was no sense playing Red Knight games here.

  "And I'm abbot here." Durand caught a trace of the south in his accent.

  "My apologies, Father Abbot. Had I kn
own your path, I would not have—"

  "—But you have." The old man seemed to be wincing, twisting his head as he listened. Spindles of white stubble stood on his jaw, and there were scratches—some like the stroke of a pen's nib, but a few welted gouges as well.

  Coensar nodded. "My men need beds, Father."

  "Fair enough," said the old man. "I've men must find their beds yet this evening as well." He shoved his staff toward the biers. "And we'll see them tucked in before Last Twilight. Take your horses up and wait."

  Coensar nodded sharply, and they wheeled from the procession to climb the flank of Cop Alder's hill.

  As they crested the green earthwork, Durand took a look back across the plain toward Hesperand and Mornaway, retracing the whole long afternoon in an instant. Then his eye stopped.

  Hard by the forest, he saw pavilions spread out against the darkness of the trees.

  "That'll be Moryn," said Heremund. Durand hissed an oath, though Heremund ignored him. "I reckon we're not done with him yet."

  Durand shook his head, and they rode through the open western gates of Cop Alder.

  IT WAS, OF course, a monastery.

  The men waited in the close chill of a narrow courtyard between inner and outer walls, their breath steaming in their hoods. Every man was uneasy, but, as Durand peered about himself, he saw traces of a pattern in the strange walls and tall roofs. The whole structure had been built in one piece, all of the same storm blue slate, layer on layer. A rich man's prayer book of carvings coiled over every doorpost and lintel.

  "We pushed all day to reach this?" Badan was griping. "This frigid bloody maze will make—"

  The nearest door squawked—loud as a crow—and the abbot stalked in with his somber brethren.

  The old man slapped his broad hands like a workman returning from the fields. Berchard raised the fist and fingers. "What are you lot doing standing here?" the abbot demanded.

  "Waiting," said Coensar. "Beds, and a meal if you have it."

  "The meal, you've missed. It'll soon be Last Twilight now, so beds will have to do you. Have your serving men follow my lads to the stables. The rest of you had better follow me to the lay dormitory."

  The abbot tramped off, for an instant setting a hand on Durand's chest to get past. The wide, water pale eyes met Durand's. Then he was gone, his staff ringing from the slate and off around a corner as the knights looked from man to man. Durand played crutch to his lord as they set off, following the echo of that knocking staff. Durand's memory returned to the forests of Gireth, as they wound their way through the strange building.

  Bertana and Deorwen, following, were uncomfortably near.

  The locking angles of rooftops turned above them as they walked what turned out to be a crabbed circle of narrow corridors taking them fully around the entire monastery before they could turn inward. Lamoric's pace allowed the others to move well ahead.

  Finally, Durand and his lord turned the corner onto an empty passageway and silence—alone. Durand spotted a low door standing open. As he ducked under, the abbot faced him. The scratches marking the old man's face and knuckles stood starkly against his skin.

  'This is where you'll be. And don't think I don't know what you are, you lot. You're no pilgrims, and you're no honest household guard. The Patriarchs don't hold with these orgies of extortion and butchery your kind has fallen into, and I don't care what you call them. You will mind where you go while you're here, and you'll keep silent."

  The abbot winced tightly, noticing Lamoric.

  "And him to the infirmary; two of you can take his arms. And those two." He gestured with the head of his staff to Deorwen and Bertana. "They'll go to the women's—"

  Deorwen protested, just a heartbeat late, "I must stay with my—"

  "They will go to the women's quarters and keep quiet." Two monks appeared to take the women out. Deorwen's eyes caught Durand's for the first time that day, and then she was gone.

  There was silence in the gloom while the abbot waited. The men had been caught off guard.

  The captain stood in the center of their group.

  "Agryn?" Coensar said. "You'll give Durand a hand with His Lordship?"

  Agryn nodded—after the briefest hesitation.

  "Come," said the abbot.

  "All right," said Coensar. "Everyone get comfortable. There are alcoves in here somewhere. And likely a candle."

  "Rushlight," the abbot corrected from the corridor.

  Durand and Agryn followed the old man into the passage, Lamoric between them.

  "Wait," the abbot said.

  Astonished, Durand watched as the old man pulled a black ring of keys from his belt, rattled the door shut, and turned the key on an armed conroi. Sigils had been painted over the door.

  "Right. Follow me," the old man said and tramped off between the sheer, dark walls at a pace that curled Durand's lip.

  THEIR SMALL PARTY walked another hitched circle round the maze, then turned inward once more where a vast well gaped at the heart of the monastery.

  Durand hesitated on the threshold of the shaft. It might have been a keep hollowed from the storerooms to the open Heavens, or a mine, opened to the air. They were at the bottom of an emptiness, thirty paces wide and nearly twenty fathoms deep.

  Beyond a screen of pillars, he heard shovels.

  Monks, bent in prayer, shuffled in an open square. None looked up. As Durand wavered, he understood what he was seeing: They had locked a turf maze at the bottom of the stone one, the scuff of countless sandals wearing knee-deep tracks in the earth.

  Lamoric's weight hung on Durand's shoulder. Agryn shot a look over the lord's neck: come on. They were losing the ancient abbot, and Lamoric could not last much longer on his feet. As it was, he hardly moved his legs.

  Durand held his questions, and they passed two more shrouded bodies as they slipped through the deep garth. Fresh earth lay strewn on the flagstones.

  The abbot with his yellow-smeared forehead stood, his arms crossed round his staff like some Banished thing from a mountain cave.

  "Here," he said. "Bring him this way."

  And, with a nod, they did, hauling Lamoric into another dim chamber. This one, however, was not empty. Wounded men—the abbot's brother monks by their garb—occupied several pallets.

  Durand looked to Agryn. "What's happened?"

  But the abbot silenced him with a raised hand: Wait.

  "Leave him and go," the abbot said. "He'll be right again in no time. The warder will let you back." He gave Agryn another of his pointed looks. "I expect you can find your way, brother."

  "Yes, Father Abbot," said Agryn, and caught Durand by the arm and rushed him out to retrace their steps through the stone maze.

  "What's going on?" Durand demanded. He heard the bite of spades once more around some distant corner. "It is difficult to be sure," Agryn hedged. "He seems to know you."

  "Aye, he knows. A man must be hard to live this way. They are watchers here. Pacing the maze since the Cradle. I do not know the story of this hill, but some wild chieftain will have called up some fiend here. And, whatever it was, seventy generations have not tramped it down. The people of this land were desperate when Saerdan and his Sons of Atthi first came. Your Heremund will not tell you that, I fear, but here you can feel it, even under this sacred weight of masonry."

  The slap and rattle of their boots and scabbards followed them down the passageways.

  Durand suddenly had a glimpse of the hill in his mind's eye: packed with clawed things. He imagined the solemn men in the cloisters, overwhelmed in a moment, buried or hauled under.

  Agryn had truly begun to hurry.

  "And they've lost men just as we nearly lost His Lordship on the Barrow Isle. All across the kingdom, it will be the same. It is a dangerous business to spill the blood of kings. People do not understand."

  "That old man's stare," Durand said. "It's like a razor."

  "He's blind, Durand. Cataracts."

  Durand missed a s
tep, but Agryn's pace was insistent.

  "We must move," he said. "From what I can see of the Heavens, we are nearly at Last Twilight. I would not be abroad in this place after."

  He was almost running, taking turning after turning with speed enough that Durand's flat soles caught and slid to keep up. Finally, Sir Agryn pelted into a corridor Durand recognized. A monk waited by a low and painted door, a ring of keys rattling in his shaking fist.

  As the door shut them in darkness, the bells of the monastery's sanctuary rolled in their high towers, tolling for the last light of day.

  The rushlights fluttered on a dozen amber faces against the dark.

  "We're locked in," whispered Berchard, "but there's a half a wheel of sharp cheese, and a few pints of claret to wash it down."

  It was the only time Durand ever heard old Agryn laugh.

  A RUSHLIGHT'S RANCID flame is short-lived, and the old abbot had spared no more than they needed, so soon the men subsided into their stony niches. Beyond their dormitory, chilling sounds bounded down the dark passageways of Cop Alder. Monks chanted. Distant screams shot through the dark. Agryn muttered; the click of his tongue and teeth matched the monkish rumble. Durand could feel the air shivering in his clothing like a living thing.

  "Ah," said Berchard. "It's nights like this I see things with my Lost eye, you know."

  "For God's sake," hissed Badan from the blackness, "keep them to yourself. Talk of something else."

  "What of Moryn then? What do you think of him tracking us north, eh?" said Berchard.

  "Aye," Badan said. "What's that whoreson want now?"

  Coensar answered, "He's bound for Tern Gyre, just like us." There were oaths and groans. "He'll be carrying his father's vote to the Great Council. They must all be there."

  A yowl leapt through the passages beyond the door, the shock so strong the hinges clicked.

  Shadows twirled the thread of light under the door, while knights and shield-bearers stared, mute.

  Someone hissed, "Gods."