“Surely, my lord, you’re not planning to run right down and pen your letter now,” she murmured, releasing him from her embrace. Her shawl slipped away from her shoulders. “Are you?”
Nine
Sir Saramore leaned over his saddle and surveyed the quiet field beyond the fence, stroking his graying mustache. “Looks like we missed the worst of it.”
“Aye, so it does,” breathed Renda. She squinted through the morning glare over the field ahead of her and drew her sword. “Keep your wits, just the same. We’ve yet to see who won.”
Black smoke boiled up in thick, black clouds from the windows of both the manse and the rectory, and by her estimate, a hundred white-robed bodies covered the grasses of B’radik’s temple grounds like an early snow.
They had not waited.
She swallowed her dread and reined Alandro in just outside the temple gate, careful to keep her hood low about her face even in the Gathering sun.
At her signal, her hand-picked knights drew themselves up behind her. Like her, they were all armored only in silk-muffled chain beneath their hooded woolen cloaks and riding unmarked mounts in unmarked tack. Deception, she frowned to herself, a bizarre bedfellow for the goddess of truth. But Arnard had been quite specific in this. If they were known to come from Brannagh, retribution would be swift and severe. He’d had no need to say by whom.
The rest of the knights followed her through the gate toward the temple, guiding their horses between the scattered broken bodies.
To Renda’s eyes, the temple still blazed white with tens of centuries of B’radik’s goodwill, but beneath it, the grounds were a fading tangle of wispy black tendrils and flickering white spatters of power from the battle. Her knights watched the priests’ faces, their eyes, their hands, for the slightest movement, a gesture or a prayer. But there was nothing, not even the faintest glow of power.
Sir Anton quietly closed the medicine pouch on his saddle and freed his sword.
Arnard’s message had been most urgent. After Cilder’s death, he’d said, those loyal to the other god had redoubled their zeal as if they felt some new urgency. They were recruiting B’radik’s priests to them with torture and threats of death, and he feared they had come to outnumber those loyal to B’radik.
His plan had been simple. Renda would slip a handful of knights into the rectory to join with his remaining priests, and together, they would surprise the others and either bring them back to B’radik’s grace or kill them. He was adamant that they needed to act quickly, so she had come to his aid at once, but it seemed she had not been fast enough.
Renda quickened her pace toward the temple. They would find their answer there, one way or the other.
Ahead, the temple’s side door opened and a single priest stumbled out, bloodied and exhausted. He leaned heavily against the temple wall, gasping and squinting in the bright sunlight. When he saw the horsemen riding toward him, he shouted to them and raised his hand.
Instantly Anton and Jadin had ridden between him and Renda, swords leveled.
“Arnard,” she murmured gratefully, “praise B’radik.” She sheathed her sword and dismounted at his approach, signaling her knights to stand down. “When I saw all the dead, I feared the worst.”
He bowed. “I greet you all,” he said quietly, looking at each of them, “in the name of B’radik, and sow your…your hearts with truth and light.”
“We came as soon as we could. But it seems we are too late.” His hands were so cold, and they shook when she took them in hers.
“I know.”
She looked into his weary eyes, but she saw there neither triumph nor defeat. How stood the day? Had they won or no?
“Come,” he said, “I’ve something to show you.” He led Renda toward the door. But then he stopped with a glance toward the rest of the knights who were dismounting to follow. “They’d be best served to remain out here.”
Saramore’s brows came together like storm clouds, and the anger in his eyes drove Arnard back a step. “If you think we will send her ladyship in there alone, Priest…”
“For their lives. Please, my lady.” Arnard looked around at the knights desperately. “We’ve not the strength to protect so many.”
Protect? From what? She looked around her at the dead priests. Wasn’t the battle over? What could threaten a Knight of Brannagh that would not answer to more Knights of Brannagh? But the terror in Arnard’s eyes was genuine. “It’s all right, Saramore.” She nodded toward the others.
The knight scowled at the priest, then bowed his head to her. “Understood.” He turned to the rest of the knights and gestured toward the field of dead. “Come, let us see to them.”
Renda followed Arnard through the door and stood a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness of the antechamber. Thick smoke filled the air, smoke and some other odor she could not place. Somewhere above was the chamber where she had killed Cilder. She wondered if it was yet sealed shut or if somehow Cilder’s evil had survived and escaped.
Once the door was safely closed behind them, she lowered her hood. “We left as soon as we received your message.” She gestured toward the field outside. “Why did you not wait for us? Did you think the House of Brannagh would abandon you?”
“Nay, not so.” He rubbed his temples. “At least, I prayed you would not.”
“Yet now you bid me leave my knights outside like so many mudfooted hounds!”
“Please, my lady, hear me out.” He brushed a thick spatter of blood from his cheek, apparently not his own. “We were forced to act sooner than we had hoped. As I said in my message, they’d come to outnumber us, but certain events…” He looked away from her. “To our disgrace, we were forced to skulk about like so many outlaws, cutting throats and so forth. It was unspeakable.”
Renda said nothing. She understood Arnard’s shame, but she could not feel it herself. She had seen, done and ordered far worse than that in service to B’radik. And Rjeinar, she admitted, feeling a guilty heat in her face.
Then again, these were priests, not soldiers, and in their sheltered lives, even during the war, they rarely came face to face with the conflict between sheer, brutal pragmatism of survival and the idealized philosophies of their faith. Battle, even battle on behalf of B’radik, was necessarily a bloody, unapologetic business. They could not have defeated Kadak with words. They could not have defeated Cilder with pious sentiment. This was the difference between a priest’s oath to serve B’radik and hers.
“We dared not invoke the goddess’s intervention in such a dark enterprise,” Arnard continued, “not even by way of enhancing our energies against the others with powders and unguents. Yet they were free to bring their god’s power against us, such as it was.”
What Arnard did not say, could not say, was that B’radik might not have been able to help even if they had asked. She remembered the sluggish feel of the priests’ healing in her wrist the night Pegrine died.
He stretched his neck wearily. “As it fell, it was a near thing. And if they’d destroyed us,” he said, “they could not have known I’d sent for you. So you see, it was my hope, in that case, that you and your knights would…”
“We would have avenged this, to B’radik’s greater glory,” she smiled bravely, “All the better that we’ve no need.”
He raised a brow. “My lady, that remains to be seen.” Arnard touched the tips of his fingers together and bowed his head. “Our victory here may well prove our undoing.”
Undoing? But as she drew breath to ask what he meant, he raised a hand to silence her. He cocked his head as if listening to a distant sound. “Yes, I believe it is safe now, but we have little time.” He gestured for her to follow him and moved along the corridor that led out of the temple’s main sanctuary toward the hospice.
“Apart from myself,” he called back to her, “we’ve but four priests left of any season, ten younger priests, some eight novices and six postulants.” He paused, waiting for her. “But nine and twenty al
l told.”
She could not believe it. The rectory had been built to house between three and four hundred priests. “And how many of the enemy remain?”
Arnard laughed bitterly. “Just one.” Then he opened the door.
The hospice was no more than a single open chamber that filled the whole of a structure the size of the Brannagh stables. Most of the hospice windows were cracked or broken out completely in the fighting, and under these, a single rank of thinly curtained beds lined the walls. The rest of the beds had no curtains and lay head to foot to create quite a maze through the center of the floor. Curiously, between the beds lay countless burlap sacks filled with straw which she supposed to be left over from the war, along with the blue and white striped hospital tents, neatly folded in several stacks. She wondered as she passed them why the priests had not stored all this away. Left out, they made a perfect breeding ground for vermin.
For now, the beds looked empty save four against the far back wall, and she saw at once that Arnard was leading her toward them.
The smell of smoke was completely gone in the hospice, chased out through the open windows, but what replaced it was worse than the smell of honest death and decay, and it grew stronger near the beds. Was he bringing her to see the bodies of the dead? But she’d seen the dead already, outdoors. This was something else, something worse. Something against which a Knight of Brannagh would need their protection.
The air swirled with the aromas of rotting flowers and stale perfumes, spices to cover the odor of death, but under all these, the burning smells of urine, sickly excrement and vomit, living odors that only deepened the stench of corruption in the air. She breathed deeply, chasing her fear to its familiar prison at the deepest level of her soul and steeled herself against whatever she might see, just as she had in the glade. Then she approached the beds.
Two of the patients were farmers. They had served under her banner during the war, and since then, she had seen them come to the castle occasionally with their lord to speak with her father. She smiled bravely, comfortingly over them, just as she had over the wounded in battle. “Draben,” she said quietly. “Quenton.” They were so very pale. “How fare you, good gentlemen?”
While both were apparently conscious, neither man answered her nor acknowledged her presence, and she turned quizzically to Arnard, but he only directed her attention to the next bed. There lay one of her father’s veteran knights, Sir Ralton, the lord of these two farmers, and to her shock, she saw that half the flesh of his face was gone, burned and blackened. The rest looked mealy and sandy, ready to fall away. He writhed with the pain, but when he moved, more of his flesh burned away from him, sloughing away as ash and dust to his bed where one of the postulants calmly swept it into a little pan and carried it away. At a glance from Renda, Arnard waved his hand over the man, and the knight fell into unconsciousness.
Then Arnard pulled aside the curtain of the last bed, where more ash than man remained.
Renda drew a sharp breath and turned away. “Arnard, please. I would have some answers.”
“Aye,” he whispered, taking her arm, “but not here. All my priests are at prayer to keep your presence secret and to protect you from this,” he gestured toward the four beds. “This plague.”
“Plague!” She gasped. “Surely you cannot call it so. It is ghastly, but four ill men—”
“—do not a plague make?” Arnard drew her back between the beds and stacked straw sacks, back into the corridor where he closed the door behind him. “How think you that I have lost so many of my priests, Lady?” He paced away from her, rubbing his forehead. “The first fell ill yesterday with an odd cough, stiff joints, fever. He was an old priest, not so powerful but true to B’radik to his last breath. What with his age, we thought little of it. But by the time he died, two more had fallen ill, younger men, and then another two, then four, all faithful to B’radik. Don’t you see? It came from the others! They were killing us by ones and twos.”
Her mind raced. The priests outside. How many had she seen, as many as a hundred? She had assumed all the rest were yet within. But Arnard had said there were only nine and twenty left. So many had fallen, and so quickly. Perhaps plague was not too strong a word after all.
“Now you see why we could not wait to strike.”
She hated the desperation in her voice. “But you’ve defeated them, now. Surely this…plague will abate.”
Arnard shook his head. “The last of the false priests fell soon after dawn, but instead of weakening, somehow the disease seemed to redouble its strength. At that time, I still had three score and some.” He paced away from her. “Nine of my priests began the strange coughing almost at once—it is a sound you cannot mistake, like the barking of a dog—and two more since.” He gestured back toward the door. “That one in the last bed, he is the last to fall ill, and he will be dead within the clock, more’s the mercy. The knight by sunset tonight, and the two farmers by sunset tomorrow or dawn the next day. As for the rest of us…so far, we have not caught it, but I cannot believe our luck will hold.”
“The patients do not see me.” Renda hugged herself and paced across the corridor, looking back anxiously toward the hospice door. “Does this plague steal their minds as well?”
Arnard shook his head. “That is our doing, and with what is left of our strength. You see, we know so little of this plague. We could not risk letting the other god know you were here, not even through their eyes.” He looked away. “Their senses will return all too soon, I’m afraid.”
“You cannot cure it. Clearly.”
“No, my lady.”
She could see his anger and frustration fighting with his exhaustion. “Alas.”
“B’radik stands too weak against it. We have tried every ointment, every oil, every possible way to enhance our energies, and still men die. We cannot stop it; we can only provide small comfort until they die.” He cleared his throat. “The priests within are those who seem strongest against it; otherwise, they should surely have died by now themselves. But in any case, it can be no more than a matter of hours or days for any of us.”
She looked back toward the beds. “The straw mattresses.” She turned to face him. “You expect it to strike so many?”
He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “I do,” he said finally, leading her back toward the antechamber and the door leading out to the temple yard. “Draben and Quenton’s farms as well as Sir Ralton’s own demesne lands all border the temple grounds.” He sighed. “Perhaps the plague was meant to rest upon the temple only, and these men found themselves too close. Perhaps not. I cannot believe the god’s fury would die so lightly. But one thing I fear above all else. I believe it will radiate outward from the temple and spread like any true plague, from soul to soul, until it has cleared all Brannagh land, and perhaps all Syon.”
Renda closed her eyes, considering strategies. “I will speak to the sheriff; perhaps if we were to contain the temple, send knights to guard it, and…”
“Let the disease run its course?” The priest smiled sadly. “Understand. So far, it strikes those of us who serve B’radik most quickly and most fiercely.” He looked up at her. “Our priests, yes, but also yon knight and the two farmers. You would be sending your knights to certain death, my lady.” He glanced over his shoulder toward the hospice door. “I do not know what else I might say.” He looked down. “But I would have you know of it, though I may well have condemned you to death.”
She nodded and squeezed his shoulder before she raised her hood again. “My father has petitioned for a cardinal,” she said, moving toward the door. “He should arrive within a score of days.”
“In a score of days,” the priest answered dully, “we shall all be dead.”
* * *
Nara huddled her shawl up about her shoulders and shivered, flexing her hands against the stiffness that threatened to creep into them. She stood at the altar of the north chapel, right under a cold draft that fell from the high-domed ceiling, no dou
bt from where the artisans had been restoring the mortar. Where the draft cooled the warmer air, a chill mist poured down about the old woman’s feet, lit unnaturally by the light of her habit.
Two knights knelt in full armor before the ancient nun with their swords upraised to receive B’radik’s blessing. Nara touched their blades with the Oil of Truth. Then she touched the oil to each shoulder of one, intoning “Lord Daerwin, Sheriff of Brannagh,” and then the other, “Lady Renda, Knight of Brannagh, Knight of the Crimson Lioness,” before she smeared it on her own forehead and bowed her head in prayer.
Almost at once, the two knights’ armor and weapons took on a brilliant white blaze that flared in the darkness of the sanctuary and boiled away the mist on the floor. Then the glow faded away and they bowed their heads once more before the nun.
“Go,” wheezed Nara sadly as she finished the last gestures of the blessing, “and may you find her poor clay in honest ruin.” She turned then and hobbled painfully from the chapel, stifling her sobs until she was well down the corridor. What B’radik Herself could not accomplish, these two knights must, even if it meant destroying what was left of their Pegrine. Her Pegrine.
Nara shook her head and willed her tears away. They had no choice now; they must know the truth. Renda had spent four nights inside Pegrine’s chamber, the last unarmed, but on those nights alone of all the nights since the child’s death, the spirit did not appear in the chamber. Six other nights, Renda had listened outside the chamber, shouting to the being within, and last night, she had finally brought His Lordship to hear, as well. But Pegrine made no answer save the eerie rhyme. The distorted rhyme. A perversion of B’radik’s part of the prophecy kept in secrecy by Nara’s order, oddly enough the part they were certain had been fulfilled already—Lady Renda’s defeat of Kadak.
Ano, ano, poison’s bane,
Sword of hemlock, godless stain,
In monstrous blood, to sovereign’s kell,
Sovereign’s child’s child’s nell.
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