“Still a fucking celebrity.”
“I’m afraid so.”
They’d stopped briefly at a robe cupboard, and chose for him a traditional earth-toned design, with a hood. “You can put away your weapon. You won’t need it.”
Fist had looked down at the pistol in his hand and shrugged. “It’s not loaded anyway.”
“Indeed?”
“You might not believe it, but I was really hoping to make it through the day without killing anybody.”
“Of course I believe it,” the Reading Master said with an occulted tightness around his eyes that might have been a hint of smile. “Belief is my profession.”
In the kitchen, the Householding Master bustled about, boiling tea and checking ovens, scrubbing utensils, and generally keeping himself busy. Jonathan Fist sat with the Reading Master, the History between them, at a small round table that from its scars must double as a butcher’s block. “This is private?”
“The embassy has other guests, who may desire my attention. They’re unlikely to seek me here.”
“What about your chef, here?”
The Reading Master smiled. “You may speak freely in front of Master Ptolan.”
“Oh, you certainly may,” the Householding Master said. “Though I don’t know much, I do know how to keep my mouth shut.”
“And occasionally he proves it.”
“Oh, pooh. I have one more thing I would say to our guest, if Your Grumpiness permits.” He came close and lowered his voice. “Though I’d be the last friar in the world to speak ill of a Brother, I thought—and think—that the previous Ambassador treated you very badly.”
“Which is a pretty fucking mild way to say he tortured the shit out of me after he murdered my wife, but let it go.”
“Perfectly dreadful,” the Householding Master said dolefully. “I hope you understand that no one on the embassy staff here approved, or willingly cooperated.”
“Long ago and far away.” Felt like it, anyway. “I’m as close to over it as I’m ever gonna get.”
“Well, you’re very kind. Just between you and me, I never liked him. Not one bit.”
“I’m pretty sure nobody liked him.”
“And then he was promoted—Ambassador to the Infinite Court! On my heart, I wonder sometimes if the Council Brothers have five grains of sense between them.”
“Not their fault. I picked him for that job myself.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I picked him. All the Council did was confirm it.”
Master Ptolan blinked, then shook his head. “Would you be offended if I were to say that I don’t understand you at all?”
“I get that a lot.” He looked over to the Reading Master. “I need an hour or two in your Vault of Binding.”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible.”
“What, it’s broken? You locked it and lost the key?”
“It’s perfectly functional. You can’t go in.”
“The hell you say.”
“The Vault is in use by the guests I mentioned, who happen to be an Inquisition research team. You should avoid them.”
Fist scowled. “Did my name come up?”
“Not yet.”
“Yet.”
“They don’t know you’re here.”
Fist sighed. “That was kind of the point to how I came in. I don’t mind people knowing I’ve been here as long as I’m gone before they find out.”
“Then time presses.” He opened the book and turned it so that Fist could read. “This is about the horse-witch?”
“Shit, you are good.”
“Oh, he does that all the time,” Master Ptolan said. “It’s impressive right up until he tells you how he knows.”
The Reading master flipped a few pages in the History. “There are references to the horse-witch here going back more than four hundred years, since the founding of the closest abbey, which is Chanaz’taa, two days south of Faltane. The earliest Historians considered her to be a particularly well-established local myth, given the vast herds of wild horses roaming those plains. The first confirmed sighting was two hundred eighty-seven years ago, followed by another confirmed sighting one hundred thirty-five years ago. Though the descriptions match, the similarity was merely noted, as there was no way to determine if they were the same entity. Verification was apparently very difficult—the narrative is unclear on this—as she was not confirmed as a being-of-interest until about two and a half years ago.”
Fist’s face went hard. “After Assumption Day.”
“The True Assumption, as it is now known. Yes.”
“What about here? The witch-herd roams this far north. Farther. What do you have on her?”
“In our Vault? Two Bound copies of this same volume.”
This was bad. He had a feeling it was about to get worse. “Nothing else?”
The Reading Master sighed, and began paging through the History. “Of course, the primary Archive for her area is Chanaz’taa. This is where the matter becomes troubling.”
“We jumped troubling a while ago. This is the road to plain fucking scary.”
“The earliest Vault-bound confirmed reference to her in Chanaz’taa is also a copy of this same volume.”
“Same as in same?”
“Identical.”
“As in she didn’t actually fucking exist until after the war? Because when I met her—”
“I said earliest confirmed. There is one previously Vault-bound report that may reference her,” the Reading Master said with quiet precision. “Not by name. A woman answering her description seems to have perished in the Faltane County War. A slave, killed in an attempt to rescue horses from the manor’s stable fire.”
“Wait—see, that’s not right. Nobody died in that fire. I was there. All the horses were already gone. And how the fuck would Tanner know about it anyway? He was on the far side of the county—shit, he chased off the horses himself.”
“The Vault-bound Prior of the Faltane County War doesn’t mention anyone answering his description. Our analysis suggests that this report is of an event that has unhappened.”
His fingers and face went numb. Most of the rest of him too. All he could really feel was the pile of broken bricks where his guts should have been. “An Intervention?”
“It’s difficult to formulate a plausible alternative.”
Tanner had told the truth after all. Fist closed his eyes. “It really is the end of the world.”
“Was the end of the world. Yes.”
“Was?”
“Our analysis suggests that our world—the world as we knew it—ended on Assumption Day. The world we’re in now is … different.”
“How different? And different how?”
“That we are still trying to determine.”
“What are we—you—doing about it? Anything?”
The Reading Master turned up his hands. “We’re open to suggestions.”
Resting his spinning head on his hands did not seem to slow its whirl. “So … wait. Okay. So if Tanner wasn’t there in Faltane the first time, who was? Who wrote the Vault-bound Prior?”
The Reading Master tilted his head a millimeter or two. “You did.”
“You did not just say that.”
The Reading Master replied only with a sympathetic sigh.
Jonathan Fist tried massaging his eyes. It didn’t help. “Please say you’re kidding.”
“Oh, his sense of humor is legendary,” Master Ptolan said dryly. “He’s the life of the funeral.”
“This slave woman made a considerable impression; you confessed candid admiration of her ferocity. Apparently she stabbed one man-at-arms in the throat and slashed the femoral artery of another, killing them both. With a table knife that seems to have been crudely sharpened, possibly on a flagstone. You intercepted and disarmed her, and attempted to prevent her from entering the stable. She responded by biting you on the face, near your left eye—inflicting what you wrote may be a p
ermanently disfiguring wound—then managed to struggle free. Several horses were rescued from the fire, due partly to your assistance, before the stable collapsed.”
“So when you couldn’t stop her, you helped her?” Master Ptolan said. “Even though she hurt you? That doesn’t sound like you.”
“I get that a lot too.”
The Householding Master’s eyes clouded with tears. “Those poor horses …”
“Horses, Master Ptolan, who are currently safe and whole.”
“No.” Jonathan Fist lifted his left hand, and laid his fingers lightly on his cheekbone below his left eye. He could feel it. The wound. Her teeth. A sense-memory of something he’d never experience. Echoes of words unsaid. “It doesn’t work like that. They’re still dead. She’s still dead.”
“I’m sorry?”
“They burned to death screaming. Screaming that they were sorry. That they knew they were bad but if someone would only come and set them free they’d never be bad again.”
The Reading Master leaned toward him. “You remember?”
“She died because she stayed with them. The ones she couldn’t save. Burning with them was the only way she could think of to show them it wasn’t their fault.”
Master Ptolan looked worried. “Are you all right?”
“No. It’s … shit, I don’t know. I know it happened. Because she knows me, and I’m getting to know her. She says … the horse-witch says that nothing in creation loves like a horse loves.”
The Reading Master frowned like he’d gone somewhere other than his planned destination, and he didn’t yet know how dangerous this undiscovered country might prove. “Brother Jonathan—”
“It makes sense, you know? The other animals people have—dogs, cats, cattle, hawks and falcons and whatever else—we use them in ways that work with their natural instincts, right? Hunt or chase or breed or eat—we don’t force them to violate their essential nature. But horses are prey animals. Eyes placed for maximum field of vision. To watch for predators. You know how a horse knows a predator? One of the first things she said to me: eyes on the front. Binocular vision. Dogs and humans are natural partners. Horses and humans are natural enemies. For a horse, a predator on its back is death. Every time a horse lets you up onto its back, it’s giving you its life. Every time.”
The two Masters exchanged wary looks. “May I get you something?” Ptolan said. “Mug of wine. Cup of tea. Anything.”
“A horse can weigh more than a thousand pounds. Some a lot more. Horses have reflexes half a dozen times faster than a man’s. They can kill you before you can blink. But they don’t. They give their lives to us. Because they love us.”
He looked down. He saw only what was inside his head. “We whip them. Starve them. Chain them. Break their spirits. Break their minds. Still they love us. Still they offer up their lives without hesitation. Because when a horse loves you, it’s fucking absolute. And all they ask is that you love them back. Most of them never get even that.”
He lowered his head. “That’s what she did. Does. She loves them back.”
The Reading Master reached toward him hesitantly, as if he did not quite dare to touch him.
“If you knew her, you’d understand,” Jonathan Fist said. “She’d do it. She’d give her life just to show them they’re not wrong about us.”
“Please, Brother Jonathan,” Master Ptolan said. “Is there anything at all we might do for you?”
“Why do you keep asking me that?”
The Reading Master laid that tentative hand flat upon the tabletop, and said with gentle precision, “Because you’re crying.”
“The hell you say.” But the hand he lifted to his cheek came away wet. “Son of a bitch.”
“You began to weep when you spoke of the fire; horses and love seem to be unexpectedly emotional subjects.”
He’d known it would end in tears. But it had barely even started and the tears were already here, and already his. Couldn’t be a good sign.
He wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his robe. “Doesn’t mean anything.”
“Perhaps not to you.”
“There is a tradition in the oldest oral histories,” Master Ptolan said, “that in the Quiet Land, from which we were taken by the First Folk, horses and humans had been together since the beginning of time. That it was the horses who gave humanity the gift of civilization. And that in the end of time, when the gates of Hell are broken and stars fall to set the world on fire, it is the horses who will come for us. All of us. They’ll come to take us home.”
“Can we move on to something else?” Jonathan Fist had to look away. “Keep that shit up and I’ll be crying again.”
“Ahh, I’m sorry,” Master Ptolan said. “It’s only that I find it a lovely conceit. The vast bulk of tales and traditions that survive from humanity’s youth are filled with war and slaughter and horrors that beggar the imagination. But the return of the horses seems so lovely—almost not human at all. As if it could be the lullaby horses whisper to us when they nuzzle our ears.”
“You’re pretty fucking well read for a Householding Master.”
“Ptolan is also the embassy’s Keeping Master.” The other Master tilted his head and righted it again. “We are a small post. Masters are needed more urgently elsewhere.”
“Yeah? What’s your other job?”
“As perhaps you surmise, I am the embassy’s Warding Master,” he replied blandly. “If I may revisit the story of the slave, Brother Jonathan, I do find it curious that you didn’t find a way to restrain her.”
“Me too.”
“Even speculation would be a welcome addition to my commentary. Does your unexpected … insight … offer any clue?”
“I can’t even guess.”
“You might have rendered her unconscious, mightn’t you?”
“I don’t carry sedatives or paralytics, which pretty much leaves tying her up—bad idea when the manor house is burning down around you—or breaking her leg. Also a bad idea. And I don’t like to hit women.”
“Really? Because in your personal History—”
“I’ve hit women. I’ve killed women.” He shrugged again and looked away. “My father hit my mother. She died. I don’t like it.”
“This is your Artan family, yes? That is, Duncan Michaelson and Davia Khapur, as opposed to the blacksmith and his wife in Pathqua?”
“I’m not Pathquan. That was just my cover narrative when I began training at Garthan Hold. The blacksmith never existed. Even if he did, he sure as hell wasn’t related to me.”
“That,” the Reading Master sighed, “depends upon whom one asks.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Our Vault-bound archive is extensive.”
“It’d have to be, if it’s full of shit that never happened.”
“Never is a word that, in this instance, may not usefully apply.”
“You’re telling me the story I made up about my background was, what, somehow true? Previously true?”
“Possibly. True is a word very like never. Perhaps the easiest way to think about it is as a truth that has been unmade. Some of our theoretical thaumatologists have speculated that unhappened events cast a shadow on reality—an echo—that might be expressed as fiction, or legend, or myth.”
“Maybe I should come back some time when I can get in that Vault. Sounds like I could learn all kinds of shit about myself.”
“I’m afraid that can’t be allowed.”
“Huh?”
“The edict has gone out worldwide, via Artan Mirror. You will not at any time be admitted to any Vault of Binding. Ever. Your entry is to be opposed by all available means, including lethal force. Including, if necessary, the destruction of the Vault and the Abbey where it resides.”
“Son of a bitch.” He could barely get his mind around it. “So the extra security out front was about me.”
“I proposed the ban myself over a year ago; it was confirmed by the Council of Brothers as soon as the Vaul
t-bound Prior of the Faltane County War was discovered.”
“You proposed it. You. For what fucking reason?”
“You can never be allowed to enter a Vault of Binding because, quite simply, no one on Home has any way to predict what might happen if you do.”
Fist stared.
For a long time.
Eventually he said, “I used to think my own personal permanent shit-storm wasn’t really about me. I thought the shitstorms were already wherever they were, and I’d get dropped into the middle of them all the time because that’s how my masters got their jollies.”
“There may be,” the Reading Master said carefully, “more to it than that.”
“Oh, you think?”
“I recommended the ban after spending more than a year researching the True Assumption. Something didn’t feel right.”
“A hunch?”
“I felt considerable unease, both concerning the account of the Assumption itself, and concerning the accounts of the various investigations we have performed. It was only after your Vault-bound Prior surfaced that I was able to formulate exactly what was so disturbing. There was a question left unaddressed—not even acknowledged—in any account or investigation.”
“What, one unanswered question? That’s all?”
The Reading Master came close to having an actual expression on his face: a compression around his mouth, a tightening of the skin around his eyes, a blotch of flush at his temples. “Not answered—yet—but that isn’t the issue. Unasked. Unasked by everyone, including me. A question that is central to the True Assumption, and central to the peril the universe faces as we speak. A question so plainly essential to understanding the event that our failure to ask it may itself arise of an Intervention.”
“Holy crap.”
“Here we have the single most significant event since the Deomachy; Monasteries all over the world investigating; thousands of reports, millions of words, written, reviewed, criticized, revised and edited, and in the nearly three years since the True Assumption, no one seemed capable of realizing it was a question, and now it’s too late.”
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