Now Renda’s hand rested gently over the sword’s wooden hilt as she rode southeastward toward the temple grounds. Afterward, after she had taken revenge against Pegrine’s killer, she would place it in the little girl’s hand again—this time in the crypt, while the toy weapon dripped with the blood of the one who had murdered her, so that her spirit might be granted rest.
The one who had murdered her.
Cilder. It was Cilder.
With his dying breath, Sir Bernold of Avondale had sworn it upon the asp guardant and the fillet d’or of the House of Wirthing, even upon the tomb of the first earl, and yet the idea that she should accept a dishonored knight’s impeachment of a Bishop of B’radik struck her as somehow preposterous.
Avondale and his comrade had kidnapped and sold a seven-years child to a priest—Renda could think of no wholesome purpose to be met thus—and surely this was a deed unworthy of knights. The act spoke ill of Avondale’s honor, as did his cowardice, and she should trust no oath of his. He might have accused anyone in vanishing hopes of gaining his freedom, even the duke himself, had the thought occurred to him.
Instead, he had accused a Bishop of B’radik. Sir Bernold had seemed to Renda a man of little imagination, but he had described the bishop quite exactly, mimicking his pebbly voice and quiet, sensible manner far too well, far too disconcertingly, for someone who had never had reason to have met him.
Still, she could not imagine such driving evil coming from as true a man as Bishop Cilder. In her mind’s eye Cilder was still the gentle old priest who had given her and her brother their First Rites as children—who had given Pegrine her First Rite just this year—not the all important Bishop of B’radik he had become since. When he was a high priest in the temple, he had been the one to pour the consecrated Oil of Truth over her sword at her knighting, and his first act as Bishop had been to bless her new order upon their return from the war, the Knights of the Crimson Lioness, and to swear them to B’radik’s service.
Only five days past, Cilder had come to consecrate the new chapel in the east wing, and Renda had seen him in bishop’s robes for only the second time since the war’s end. His radiant white cassock was concealed as always beneath the Damping Mantle to keep the brightness of Bradik’s power from blinding the faithful, and he looked much the same as she remembered him, hale enough but with perhaps a few more wrinkles. Cilder’s appearance at the consecration had come as a surprise to all the House since his outings had become increasingly rare during the last several months.
After the consecration, she had spoken with him for only a few moments before her duties called her elsewhere, but she had heard that her father spoke with him at length. Surely if the bishop had been harboring some plan against the House, Renda, or at least her father, would have known it. The goddess would have made such a thing plain.
But then her thoughts turned uneasily to Nara and to B’radik’s refusal to grant her protection—against what?—and to the darkness the nun had seen when she was searching for Pegrine. The knight shuddered and pulled her mantle up even in the sun’s warmth. To confound Nara’s formidable rapport with her goddess enough to hide Pegrine from her, especially while the child was being killed, took considerable power. Compared to such an act, fooling Renda and her father for a few hours during the chapel consecration would have been insignificant.
Now Renda looked ahead to where Gikka reined in her fresh mount out of a thin stand of trees and dropped back the hood of her cloak. The late morning sun drew a faint outline around the Bremondine woman and her wiry young mare where they stood looking across the temple grounds to the priests’ rectory and to the bishop’s manse beyond.
Gikka had accepted Sir Bernold’s word at once, as if he were merely confirming what she already . No one without true magic or divine intervention could have hoped to clean a trail so fast or so well, not even Gikka herself, and a sorcerer like Dith would more likely burn the clearing to the ground, body and all. But then, no mage ever offered blood sacrifice—at least, not since before the Liberation.
A priest, then. But for a priest to invoke a god’s intervention to clean up a trail was a very visible and physical manifestation of power—a terrible extravagance and not the sort of feat a young priest would consider. To build that sort of spiritual discipline and that strong a relationship with the god would take many, many years.
So Sir Bernold’s answer had struck Gikka as true in spite of Renda’s objections that he was not to be trusted. As she had told Renda on the way back to the castle, “Comes it from the mouth of honor or no, truth is truth and has a bite about it as leaves no doubt.” The bite was there. For all that she wished it were not, the bite of B’radik’s truth was there.
B’radik did not accept blood sacrifice—that was certain. And what of Nara’s terror at the sight of Pegrine’s body? Darkness rises to smother light... Why would B’radik tolerate Her bishop offering blood sacrifice at all?
Darkness. No light...
Renda’s breath quickened. She recalled how Nara’s frantic invocations in the courtyard had gone unanswered, and she remembered the sluggish feeling of the priests’ healing in her wrist, even with their oils. The quiet glance that had passed between the two clerics, she saw now, was a look of resignation. They had not been surprised.
I call upon B’radik and I see only darkness.
Perhaps Pegrine’s murder, horror that it was, had been the least of the atrocities committed. But Renda’s mind would not let her deepest fears come to light.
No light.
Surely it was not possible to destroy a god. Was it? Renda swallowed hard and nudged Hero forward to where Gikka had already dismounted and settled her horse beside a row of hedges, not daring to let herself consider the possibilities.
The lock on the side door was old and well worn, and its tumblers moved aside willingly for Gikka. Within a few moments, the two women were inside. The outside of the bishop’s manse was freshly whitewashed and well kept, and the door opened without a creak, admitting them into the mudroom where some white cloaks hung from wooden pegs and where many white leather boots were stored against the snow and mud of the coming cold. As Gikka had promised, the room was empty, although beyond it stood a corridor with a doorway leading into a loud and bustling kitchen preparing the midday meal.
Across from the kitchen doorway stood a plain servants’ stairway that spiraled up through a small corner space. Without a second thought, Gikka sprinted for it and fairly flew up the flight of stairs, her feet barely touching the wooden plank steps. Renda followed, her steps a bit heavier over the creaking boards but still unheard above the din in the kitchen.
The stairs came out at the end of one wing of the manse, a broad hallway with pristine white walls and white furs along the floors. A great tall window stood at the far end, undressed to let in the full light of day, and tiny candles of the purest white burned with hot blue-white flame in simple candelabrum along the sideboards between the evenly spaced chamber doors.
Renda looked through one open doorway to a vacant white guest chamber, but Gikka shook her head and moved toward the landing of the huge central stairway that joined the other wings to this. Then Gikka stopped short.
“Do you smell it?”
Renda sniffed quickly at the air, but between the smells of oil soaps and the luncheon being served in the dining hall, she took a moment to place the other odor. Blood, certainly, though it smelled a bit tainted to her, like stale kidney pie. The vile smell had about it the same sense of darkness, of something being badly out of place, as the feeling she had had in the clearing, and now the white purity of the halls which had struck her as clean and perfect seemed almost to swell and boil, ready to burst with the evil that they concealed. Please, she prayed, please, let it not be Pegrine’s blood that I smell.
Gikka signaled ahead again and moved forward. Renda saw that her squire had already drawn a dagger. They were close; the smell was growing more and more powerful. Renda’s stomach churned agai
nst the horrible odor that seemed to force all the air out of the upper floor of the manse.
At last they came to the large double doorway that led to the bishop’s chambers. Gikka knelt beside it quickly and soundlessly drew back the bolt inside the lock that held it closed. Then she let the door open degree by degree, slowly, excruciatingly slowly, until it stood open but a few inches.
A great foul breath of blood and rot billowed over them from the chamber, and both women fought down the bile in their throats. Once the odor thinned, Renda drew her sword and stood at the edge of the doorway watching a man she recognized by his gouty walk to be Bishop Cilder moving back and forth before a long table full of tallow candles and various dark vessels. At the sound of her blade leaving its scabbard, he had stood straight, listening, and put down a bowl. Then he turned his head to look back at the open doorway where the two women had just moved out of his sight
“A blade? In my home and at my chamber door?” He smiled, the same gentle smile Renda had known for years, and for that moment he seemed just as blameless as she had ever seen him before. She drew herself back against the wall beside the door and shut her eyes. His was not the face of evil, she saw, not dark and malignant like Kadak’s had been, and impossibly, she found her resolve flagging. How could so good a man have killed Pegrine? She opened her eyes and watched through the crack in the door.
The man’s step hesitated just inside the doorway, out of Renda’s view, but Gikka signaled to her that he was warding, surely setting some sort of protection on the door. “Come, now, gentlemen, if you would speak with me, then speak, but do not come creeping into my home brandishing weapons.” He listened a moment before he sighed and came toward the hallway. “It’s no use haggling,” he called, moving to the open door. “I’ve already paid you far more than she was worth. She took entirely too long to die, even after I took her viscera. And her blood, most peculiar. Half a day later, and I’ve only now managed to suspend it...”
For several moments, he and Renda stood staring at each other, she with her blade drawn and he with his hands and the front of his dull white cassock—the cassock that should have blinded her with its brilliant glow—dark and grisly with blood. Pegrine’s blood, she was certain of it. And still, the same sweet smile.
Renda squinted her eyes slightly and saw what she feared most, what she had somehow missed during the chapel consecration. About his head, instead of the brilliant white glow of B’radik’s power, she saw a wispy blackness that poured over the benign features of her father’s priest in a masque of evil.
This could not be! Her mind could not reconcile her memory of Bishop Cilder with what she saw before her. She should have expected it, after Bernold’s confession, but she supposed she had refused to accept it fully. Now, looking at him, seeing the evil about him, she could not escape the truth. He had abandoned the duke and the sheriff, abandoned his vows and the disciplines of truth and enlightenment.
He had abandoned B’radik Herself.
Some part of her could not even begin to understand how that was possible, and yet there she stood, a Knight of Brannagh sworn to B’radik’s service, with verinara on her blade and Bernold’s tortured confession in her ear. How small the steps…
No, she could not think that way. Cilder had taken no such small step but had abandoned his goddess outright. She would never abandon B’radik.
“Lady Renda!” he said pleasantly, oblivious to the shock and disgust in her eyes. He ignored Gikka’s dagger and wiped his hands on his cassock, but his eye lingered a bit worriedly over the knight’s sword. “I was not told you were here...”
“No,” snarled Gikka, who came in behind him and clapped her dagger against his throat, “I imagine not.” All at once, she jumped backward with a scream of surprise and pain, and her dagger clattered to the floor beside her. She fell against the wall, clutching her insensate hand against her, and fixed the back of the bishop’s head with an acid glare.
Without a thought, Renda’s sword was instantly at his gut, just nigh of touching him but close enough that she could kill him before he moved. He was no longer the priest of her consecration, she told herself, no longer the priest of her First Rite. He was now an enemy as surely as Kadak had been.
The squire rose to her feet cursing and working the tingle out of her fingers. She picked up her dagger as she moved. As soon as she was standing, Renda saw she was moving toward the bishop again, and this time, nothing was going to stop her. Just one nick with her blade, just the touch of the verinara in his blood, and they would have their vengeance.
But he turned to put his back to the door, at once putting the two women at either side of him. With Renda’s blade at his belly and Gikka looming closer, he looked behind him then stepped backward through the doorway—the doorway he had just fixed with protections.
Renda frowned, seeing his plan. Either he would close them out or she would be trapped inside with him, and her only hope of victory lay in following him and surviving against the door’s defenses and his own formidable power long enough to defeat him. She had no choice. Steeling herself against the protective attack, she leaped through behind him. At once, the door slammed closed behind her, but not before Gikka dove inside after her and jammed one of her daggers in at the lock.
The bolt of the lock clanged angrily against her dagger’s blade again and again and raised a terrible din inside the chamber, but it could not break through. Renda continued to press toward him while Cilder backed steadily away. He smiled again and looked down at her sword. “Come, you would not kill the Bishop of B’radik. What would your father say?”
“Were you truly the Bishop of B’radik,” Renda said, stepping closer, “I would not. But you are none. You have performed blasphemous, murderous rituals of blood and lechery. For that I will have your head, and my father will rejoice.”
“Rituals of blood and lechery?” He looked shocked. “Murderous? Not at all. This,” he said, indicating the bloodied table behind him with a dismissive laugh, “this is but idle dalliance, a lesson in animal alchemy! Hardly—”
“Dalliance!” Gikka spat and drew closer to him, brandishing her second dagger. “What dalliance is this? You killed a child, Cilder. Her very blood stains your shirtfront, deny it!” She shook her head and growled, bringing the dagger up. “Animal alchemy, I’ll give you animal alchemy...”
“A child!” To Renda’s ear, his laugh sounded thin, and she watched him back himself toward the table yet again, looking nervously between her and Gikka. He shook his head, as if the notion were absurd. “No child. A goat—”
Renda’s eyes narrowed at the lie. “The knights told us, Cilder. The Wirthing knights. Estrella. Avondale.” She saw his eyes widen in recognition and fear. “They took the girl, a virgin, such as you requested of them, and they sold her into your hands.”
“Surely they lie.”
“Nay,” seethed Gikka, creeping toward him. “They spoke true ere they met their deaths.”
Renda watched him realize Gikka’s meaning, watched his mind turning over several lies, several gambits. By the gods, he was transparent to her now. How could she not have seen…?
“Well,” he said quietly, “yes, all right, yes. I did buy a child from them, I suppose that much is true, but it was not what you think—”
Gikka’s dagger point was in the hollow of his throat in a blur of movement, not quite touching, her face inches from his. “We found her last night, tied to the stump in that glade and cut all apart, just as you left her.”
Cilder opened his mouth as if to speak a denial, but then closed it again. Then, as if unbalanced by Gikka’s sudden attack, he stumbled backward, reaching for the table to support himself.
“Deny it, go on,” hissed the squire, advancing on him. “Give me one more reason to kill you.”
Caught between the dagger and the table, he drew a deep breath and spoke. “It is this simple, children. I grow old and tired, and this body of mine pains me.” He held up his thin old hands an
d smiled sadly at Renda. “Can you know how it feels, to have your flesh rotting away while you live, to watch your hair, your teeth, every young part of yourself die or fall out? No, of course not. You’re still but a child, for all your fame and glory. But I am grown quite ancient in the goddess’s service. Ancient and decrepit. For years I’ve longed for my death, but,” he said looking up at the ceiling with a bitter smile, “such was not the will of B’radik.” The contempt in his voice as he spoke the goddess’s name was clear. The old priest glanced back in embarrassment toward the table like one who has just been caught in the midst of a messy meal. “But then, comes an old, forgotten god, a god who knows, who sees my pain, a god who grants me a tiny fragment, but the barest splinter of the gods’ own knowledge!”
“At what price?” growled Gikka.
He leveled his gaze at hers while he directed his words to Renda. “Look you, for the life of one child, one unmissed child of the streets,” he turned his eyes away from Gikka’s glare, “I can stop this pain and regain some semblance of my youth. For a time.” He glanced pitifully, wretchedly at Renda for a moment. “Surely you understand, my lady.”
To her shock and disgust, she did. In his words she heard her own voice, her own heart, and she loathed herself for it. He had traded a single life for a small return to glory. Yesterday, she would have traded the lives of thousands for hers.
Her blade lowered ever so slightly.
He continued to back away from Gikka, moving steadily toward the table, twisting and flexing his hands nervously. “My lady, I have been entrusted with the... dearest secrets of Damerien and Brannagh for decades,” he said, meeting Renda’s gaze with his own, silently offering some sort of guilty trade. “Since before I became bishop. Since before you—no, before your father was born. And faithful. Ever so faithful. This,” he said, once more looking back toward the table, “This was a—a superstitious...mistake, the work of a desperate old man. But I assure you there was no lechery, nothing untoward, about it.”
Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) Page 7