Shadow Raiders tdb-1

by Margaret Weis

  Sir Ander gave up trying to sleep. He felt the need to talk, yet he knew better than to wake Father Jacob. Sir Ander opened the hatch, located in the front of the Retribution, and peered out.

  “Would you mind if I join you, Brother?” he asked the monk.

  “I would like the company, sir,” said Brother Barnaby, pleased.

  The driver’s station on the Retribution was located in the front of the yacht and, of necessity, was partially open to the elements. The black-lacquered hull enclosed the cabin and storage rooms and supported a small mast and a ballast balloon. Wings swept back from the curve of the prow, running the length of the twenty-foot hull. Small airscrews were mounted at the rear of each wing, close to the hull. Polished brass rails ran along the roof of the cabin. Brass lanterns, mounted every four feet, and brass hardware for the doors and windows completed the yacht’s regal look. The symbol of the Arcanum: a crossed sword and a staff over which burns a flame set on a quartered black-and-gold shield, was painted on both sides of the hull.

  Brother Barnaby took pride in the yacht. He saw to it that the brass was always polished to a high sheen, though Father Jacob maintained caustically that polishing the brass every day was a waste of time.

  Sir Ander joined the monk at the driver’s seat and settled himself on the bench behind the windscreen.

  Brother Barnaby glanced at him. “Do you mind if we talk of what happened this night, sir?”

  The night air was refreshing, and Sir Ander breathed deeply. The two wyverns, barely seen in the darkness, moved their wings in tandem. Brother Barnaby held the reins loosely. The gentle monk had a way with animals. He had picked and trained the wyverns himself. Wyverns were notoriously illtempered and recalcitrant, but these wyverns, guided by Brother Barnaby, were submissive and eager to please.

  Sir Ander watched as the monk reached out to touch a small brass helm located to his right. The helm was set with magical constructs that glowed with a golden radiance. As his fingers touched a sigil within one particular construct, correcting a list to starboard, the color shifted red.

  “What would you like to talk about, Brother?” Sir Ander asked, though he already knew.

  “I do not like to talk so much as I feel the need,” said Brother Barnaby. He looked at the ballast balloon above them and frowned slightly. His fingers slid across the control panel and touched several sigils that adjusted the yacht’s trim to compensate for the slight cross breeze.

  Sir Ander regarded the young monk with concern. “I feared what you witnessed tonight would upset you, Brother. Father Jacob was remiss in allowing you to come with us.”

  “I needed to see, sir,” said Brother Barnaby. “As Father Jacob says, ‘if we are to fight evil, we must look it in the face, no matter how dreadful the aspect.’ ”

  Sir Ander shook his head. He knew he would see the mutilated corpses in his nightmares for the rest of his life. He would have spared any man that sight, but particularly Brother Barnaby.

  The young monk was a foundling. The monks of the Order of Saint Anton had discovered the babe wrapped in a blanket, left on the doorstep on a warm summer’s night. They had taken in the child and raised him.

  Brother Barnaby had grown up believing himself to be a child of God. He had been nurtured and loved by the monks, who had soon discovered the child had a talent for magical healing and a way with animals. They had taught him to read and write and cipher and how to use the magic that was God’s gift. When Barnaby was older, he had studied the lore of herbs and medicines and had become adept at tending to the ills and hurts of beasts and men.

  Then one day when he was sixteen years old, as he had been placing his offering of candles on the altar, Brother Barnaby’s patron saint-Saint Castigan, guardian of children and animals-had appeared to him in a vision.

  “Serve this man,” said the saint. He had held his hand over the head of a man dressed in a black cassock denoting him to be a member of the Order of the Arcanum.

  Brother Barnaby had never doubted that vision. He had told the abbot he was leaving to find the man revealed to him by Saint Castigan. The monks of the abbey had been upset and disturbed. The abbot had tried to dissuade the young man. He could hardly argue against Saint Castigan, however, and he had at last given Brother Barnaby permission to leave. The abbot had perhaps been well aware that if he had not given his permission, the determined young monk would have left anyway.

  Brother Barnaby had walked the three hundred miles to the Citadel of the Voice, where the select few priests admitted into the Arcanum lived and worked. He had arrived at the gates barefoot and in rags, half-starved, thin and weary, but joyful. He had said simply he was here on orders from Saint Castigan to serve a man whose name he did not know. The young monk then provided them with the description of the man in his vision.

  The Provost of the Arcanum had immediately recognized Father Jacob Northrup and summoned him at once. When Father Jacob had entered the office, Brother Barnaby smiled in recognition, though they had never before met.

  “Saint Castigan sent me to serve you, Father. He said you needed me.”

  “Why would the saint say that?” Father Jacob had asked, regarding the young man with interest.

  “I have no idea, Father,” Brother Barnaby had replied humbly. “All I know is that I am here and I will serve you and the saint most faithfully.”

  The Provost had been dubious about accepting this obviously cloistered and naive young man into the Arcanum and would have sent the young monk back to his abbey, but Father Jacob had found Brother Barnaby “fascinating” and insisted on keeping him, much to the dismay of Sir Ander.

  “I need a scribe, after all,” Father Jacob had argued. “This Barnaby is a true innocent.”

  “He is, indeed,” Sir Ander had said sternly. “You cannot take on this young man because you want to study his brain, Jacob. Such an innocent young person should not be exposed to the evil you and I see on a daily basis.”

  “Brother Barnaby is stronger than you think, my friend,” Father Jacob had said. “And he has a mission to fulfill in this life. I do not know what that mission is, nor does he. But Saint Castigan knows and the saint and I both believe Barnaby will find his purpose traveling with us, not sheltered behind the walls of some reclusive monastery.”

  And so, here was Brother Barnaby, driving the wyverns and trying to make sense of the senseless.

  “This young man led his followers to their deaths. He drove them to commit terrible acts and then urged them to sacrifice themselves, while he himself escaped. What horrible force drives him, Sir Ander? Why did he do it?”

  “That is not an easy question to answer,” said Sir Ander. “I’m not sure I want to try to understand. Father Jacob believes the Warlock obeys a master, or rather a mistress, an older woman who schooled him.”

  “The one known as the Sorceress.”

  “Yes. We know very little about her or this so-called Warlock except that he preys on young people. He lures sons and daughters of peasants and of nobles to his cult. Any youth who is lonely, unhappy, and desperate falls easy victim to the Warlock’s charms and blandishments. Once he has them in his clutches, he uses opiates and the lusts of the body (I beg your pardon for speaking of such things, Brother) to keep them.”

  “I find myself at odds…” Brother Barnaby gazed into the darkness, fumbling for the right words. “If you and Father Jacob had found this young man, Sir Ander, you would have killed him, wouldn’t you?”

  “As God is my witness, yes,” said Sir Ander in grim tones. “I would have put a bullet in his skull without hesitation.”

  “But he is only seventeen. Just a boy!”

  “He stopped being a boy when he stabbed his first victim,” said Sir Ander. “This ‘boy’ deliberately placed that viper on the breast of a young girl, knowing she would die.”

  “He has turned to evil,” said Brother Barnaby sadly. “But perhaps that was not his fault. Perhaps he is also a victim of this sorceress. He might be counse
led, reclaimed…”

  “You feel pangs of conscience when I swat a fly, Brother,” said Sir Ander, placing his hand on the monk’s arm. “Take comfort in the fact that we are not likely to confront him again, either him or his dark mistress. We now have more important matters to consider it seems.”

  “The summons from the grand bishop about the poor nuns of Saint Agnes,” said Brother Barnaby somberly. “I have prayed for them this night.”

  The guardsman on griffin-back had delivered a letter from the grand bishop that told of the massacre at the Abbey of Saint Agnes, ordering Father Jacob to drop whatever he was doing and report to the Bishop’s Palace at once.

  Father Jacob had planned to spend the next day searching for clues, hoping to pick up the trail of the young Warlock. A man of single-minded purpose, Father Jacob was not happy to receive the bishop’s summons.

  “Some other member of my Order must go,” Father Jacob had said brusquely.

  “The bishop asked for you specifically, Father,” the rider had said. “He said you were the best.”

  Sir Ander had waited confidently for Father Jacob to say no, he wasn’t leaving his investigation until it was finished. Father Jacob never had difficulty saying “no” to anyone, be it king or commoner or grand bishop.

  Father Jacob had startled his friend. “Tell the bishop we will make all haste.”

  Father Jacob was, in Sir Ander’s opinion, the wisest, most intelligent man the knight had ever known. Among all the priests of the Order of the Arcanum, Father Jacob was the best. The trouble was-he knew it, which often made him very difficult to live with.

  Sir Ander and Brother Barnaby were startled by a sudden shout coming from inside the yacht.

  “What a fool I have been! What a bloody, stupid fool! Where is that letter?” Father Jacob yelled.

  “What is the matter, Father?” Brother Barnaby called out anxiously, trying to divide his attention between the control panel and the wyverns and the priest. “Do you need me?”

  “He’s fine,” Sir Ander said irritably. “After all, he had a good night’s sleep.”

  “Where is that letter?” Father Jacob demanded again.

  “On the table,” Sir Ander returned, opening the hatch and pointing. “You’re looking straight at it!”

  “You moved it,” Father Jacob said, grumbling. He dragged out a chair, sat down, and picked up the letter.

  “Must be an odd sort of letter,” said Sir Ander to Brother Barnaby. “He’s casting a magical spell on it.”

  As Rodrigo had cast a spell on the ashes of the letter in Alcazar’s fireplace, Father Jacob was casting a similar spell on this letter. But whereas Rodrigo had drawn sigils and lines connecting them and then physically connected the sigils and lines, using the magical energy within his own body to produce the magic, Father Jacob merely passed his hand over the letter. A shimmering light began to shine from the page.

  Father Jacob Northrop was a savant: one of those rare persons who, as the saying went, “was born of magic.” As there are some people who can arrive at the answer of a complicated mathematical equation without going through the steps of adding, subtracting, multiplying, or dividing, Father Jacob could work magic without the need for all the intervening steps leading to the end result.

  Father Jacob looked up from the letter.

  “What was the name of that abbey where all those nuns were killed?”

  “Saint Agnes, Father.”

  “That’s what I thought. Come in here for a moment. I need to speak to you.”

  Sir Ander left Brother Barnaby and climbed back through the hatch, inside the yacht. Father Jacob was sitting at the table, the letter in his hand. The magic he had cast on it still glowed faintly.

  “This letter is from our friend, Master Albert Savoraun. You remember him? He worked with us on the affair of the naval cutter, Defiant. Master Albert has recently been made head of the Maritime Guild chapter in Westfirth.”

  “Good for him,” said Ander heartily.

  “That is not what is important,” Father Jacob said impatiently. “What is important is that he needed to review the records of the guild and discovered that they were not in the guildhall. Following a great fire that had destroyed parts of the city, the records were moved for safekeeping to a nearby abbey. The Abbey of Saint Agnes.. .”

  “I’ll be damned!” said Sir Ander, startled into alertness. “That’s a strange coincidence.”

  “You know I do not believe in coincidence,” said Father Jacob. He referred again to the letter. “Master Albert writes: ‘I found the information in the abbey to be of the utmost importance. I cannot stress its value. So important I dare not write it.’ ”

  “Not even in a letter that requires a knowledge of magic to read?” Sir Ander asked with a smile.

  The letter was seven pages long and, on the surface, contained mostly news of the antics of Master Albert’s ten children. The true contents of the letter had been written with a magical cipher that required a magical counter cipher to read.

  “Apparently not,” said Father Jacob. He indicated the date on the top of the letter. “Master Albert wrote this letter a fortnight ago. The letter was addressed to the Arcanum, the Citadel of the Voice where we normally reside. The Provost received it there and forwarded it to me in Capione, which is why it took so long to reach me. And now we hear from the grand bishop that this very abbey has been attacked and the nuns who lived there murdered.”

  Father Jacob sat pondering. “How far are we from the Bishop’s Palace in Evreux?”

  Sir Ander consulted his pocket watch. “We have been flying for about ten hours now. I would say we were within an hour of arrival.”

  “You and Brother Barnaby have been awake all night. You should both try to get some sleep,” said Father Jacob. He stood up, walked to the hatch, and flung it open. “I will drive, Brother Barnaby.”

  Brother Barnaby looked at the priest in alarm.

  “Uh, no, Father, that’s not necessary. I’m not at all tired.”

  The monk cast a pleading gaze at Sir Ander, begging him not to let Father Jacob drive. The wyverns did not like Father Jacob. There was no telling what the beasts might do if the priest took the reins.

  “I’m not sleepy,” said Sir Ander, stifling another yawn. “Come, Father Jacob. I will let you beat me in a game of dominoes.”

  Father Jacob’s eyes brightened. His one weakness was an avid passion for dominoes. He drew a magical sigil on the letter from Master Albert, spoke a word and the letter was instantly consumed in a flash of blue fire. Not a trace of the letter remained, not even the ashes.

  Sir Ander sneezed and irritably waved away the smoke. Father Jacob brought out his cherished set of ivory dominoes in their hand-carved rosewood case. The two sat down to their game. On the driver’s seat, Brother Barnaby closed the hatch and sighed in relief.

  Sir Ander dumped out the dominoes. Father Jacob turned them upside down to hide the pips. Sir Ander began to stir them around.

  “Too bad you didn’t receive this letter earlier,” said Sir Ander.

  “I was meant not to receive it,” said Father Jacob.

  Sir Ander stopped stirring to stare. “What?”

  “As I suspected, the Warlock was a diversion, my friend,” said Father Jacob. He picked up a domino, but he did not play it. He tapped it on the table. “Poor Lady Elaina. The viscount was frantic to recover his child. Of course, he would insist on having me investigate. I went. Master Albert’s letter missed me. And now the nuns of Saint Agnes are dead.”

  “But why?” Sir Ander asked. “What has one to do with the other?”

  He turned over the domino.

  “You’ve drawn a blank. How very fitting,” said Father Jacob. “Until I know more, that is your answer.”

  Chapter Twelve

  The laws of kings exist to judge and punish those who sin against man. The priests of the Arcanum, God’s warriors on Aeronne, are responsible for protecting the faith from those who would c
orrupt or destroy it. We carry the light into the dark places, ever vigilant, searching out Aertheum and his foul servants.

  – Mandate of the Arcanum

  Saint Marie Elizabeth

  First Provost of the Arcanum

  BROTHER BARNABY CAREFULLY GUIDED THE WYVERNS into the mists that drifted serenely above the extensive grounds of the Conclave of the Divine-the official residence of the grand bishop and the administrative center of the Church of the Breath in Rosia. Although his majesty’s palace was far more beautiful, floating high above the Conclave, the grand bishop could take comfort in the fact that the Church owned more buildings and took up considerably more land. The Conclave of the Divine was larger than many small cities.

  The grounds housed three cathedrals, each dedicated to a different saint; motherhouses for four orders of monks, two orders of nuns, and three military orders; an elementary school for children skilled in magic, and a University with dormitories to house the students.

  The Grand Bishop’s Palace was the largest structure and the oldest in the Conclave. All the other buildings had been erected down through the centuries, radiating out from the Grand Bishop’s Palace, which stood in the center as the sun of the small world-as was right and proper in the eyes of God and the grand bishop.

  The cathedrals and other structures had been built at different periods of time with each architect attempting to outdo his predecessors and thus there was no consistency of style. One cathedral had graceful spires. Another featured a vast dome. The third was adorned with minarets, while the University had tried to outdo them all by erecting spires and minarets above a vast dome.

  The Conclave’s sacred grounds were always busy. By day, the gates were thrown open so that people could attend services in one of the grand cathedrals. University students played croquet on the green lawns or studied in the gardens. Monks and nuns and priests, abbots and abbesses, answered the bells that called them to their prayers. At night, the common people were shooed out, the gates closed. Those who required admittance had to enter through a single gate where they came under the scrutiny of a porter and the Grand Bishop’s Own, as his soldiers were called.