“We know all this,” the Archimandrite broke in. “What does this have to do with anything?”
“Cinnabran,” Doctor Catt said lightly, as though he had only heard a polite “Go on.” “She whom the gods loved. She whom They spoke to, the only mortal at whose feet the Guardians knelt. She who the Wanderer loved. She whose divine favour enraged the heart of the Kinslayer and set in motion so many terrible things. And yet, she was mortal, and all mortal things must die. But touched as she was by the divine, those things she left behind retain an echo of her nature. And so, I give you… the Skull of Cinnabran.” With a conjurer’s flourish he had reached into his robe, which surely had no space to contain anyone’s skull, and yet a moment later it was in his hands. Just a yellowed, jawless cranium, but the Archimandrite stood suddenly, eyes almost popping from his head.
“It is the skull,” he hissed.
“Doctor Catt is no purveyor of frauds,” Catt agreed proudly. “Now, I would be delighted to donate this relic to the Temple, if only you might see your way to—”
Adondra had opened her mouth and perhaps she would have agreed, but the priest spat, “No!”
Catt paused, weighing up the relic in his hands. “I’m sorry, but that sounded as though you said—”
“You dare haggle with those things the gods have touched?” the Archimandrite cried, the veins standing out on his forehead. “You bring before us the mortal remains of one whom the gods loved and would use them in some seedy trade to free monsters and their allies from just vengeance?” He slammed his hammer down on the high bench, splintering the top. “Templars!”
“Ah, well this is most unfortunate and I really must be leaving.” Doctor Catt pivoted on his heel but found his path to the door obscured by a pair of guards brandishing hammers of their own. “Ah,” he noted wanly. “Violence.”
“You are so very fond of our prisoners,” the Archimandrite growled. “Perhaps the Governor will permit me to add you to their number.”
Adondra looked as though matters had gone beyond comfort, but in the face of the priest’s wrath she just nodded.
“Well, fortunate it is that I dressed this morning with Tenet’s Warding Amulet!” Doctor Catt declared, a hand going to the broach at his throat. A moment later a sphere of purplish energy crackled into life about him, leaving him a hazy figure at its centre. “Now, as you’ll observe,” his muffled voice came from within, “I am herein proof against your buffets and malletings, and suggest you remove yourself from my path and consider in the future how you should treat an agent of commerce only seeking to enrich you.”
The Archimandrite’s expression did not falter. “To the cells with this desecrator,” he ordered, and the Templars cautiously closed in.
SOON AFTER THAT, Celestaine watched as a pale, stumbling Doctor Catt was shoved into a next door cell.
“What happened?” she demanded of him. “Are they just rounding up anybody now?”
“Anybody who is a familiar of the Slayers, perhaps,” came the shaky voice from the neighbouring door hatch. “Alas, I attempted to secure your release, and this is the reward I get for it.” There followed a bout of retching, and the air curdled with the sour reek of vomit.
“I’m sorry.” Celestaine was trying to work out how things could get worse, right now. Nedlam and Heno were in neighbouring cells, each secured with what looked like half a ton of chains. Amkulyah was across the corridor, sulking because all their doors had locks, rather than bars. “I need to talk to them again. I’ll explain you weren’t anything to do with us.”
“I appreciate your post facto candour,” Doctor Catt said. “Alas, I understand we are all to be burned as an example. I think the Ilkand Temple has a great deal of vengeance it feels it should be meting out and relatively few available targets, and so we have become something of a lightning rod for their ire. Ah, and here he is.”
Because a new figure had slipped in, wearing a drab Cheriveni robe and a military cap askew on his head. Doctor Fisher regarded his colleague dourly.
“So this is where you ended up. I’ve been looking all over,” he complained.
“Fishy, I’ve had a terrible time,” Catt told him. “They rolled me. I put up Tenet’s, and they just hit me with hammers and rolled me all about the room until I didn’t know which way was up. I was so dreadfully ill you wouldn’t credit it, and now apparently I’m to go on the fire with these reprobates. It’s not been one of my best days, Fishy.”
“Gods give me strength,” Doctor Fisher said, unimpressed. “I have to sort this out, do I?”
“It may be beyond even your capabilities,” Catt lamented.
Fisher looked sour. “Where’s your faith?” he asked, and abstracted from his satchel a jawless skull.
“It won’t work, Fishy, I’ve already tried that—and for that matter, where did you even recover it from? That bald ecclesiastical fellow took it from me.”
“Explains why it was in his rooms, then,” Fisher said pragmatically. He shook his head. “I’ll sort something, though why I bother, I don’t know.” Two sidelong steps brought him to the hatch at Celestaine’s door. “Heroes,” he said dismissively. “Heroes and monsters. Woman, how do you end up friends of your enemies and enemies of your friends so much?”
Celestaine just stared at him, and he shrugged and sighed and shuffled off.
Chapter Sixteen
DON’T KNOW WHY I bother, could be Doctor Fisher’s family motto. It wasn’t as though he would get any great outpouring of gratitude from Doctor Catt if he was able to spring the man from prison, even if whisked him from the very flames. Catt’s nimble mind only moved on to the next scheme. Hindsight was alien to him.
“And yet…” Fisher shook himself, thinking wistfully of his comfortable bed back in Cinquetann. “I should keep birds or something.” Because then he would have to make a choice: save Doctor Catt from an incendiary death or go back and feed his birds, and surely the birds would give him the excuse to walk away. Instead of which he had to look after a Catt instead.
Once in sight of his destination, he got the skull out again and peered into its vacant sockets. No doubt of its provenance, to the trained eye. Relics of power could be made, like the very crown everyone was scrabbling over, but they could just happen, too. Cinnabran had been a wonder, not to be repeated, and Fisher tried to think what it had been about her that had drawn the eye of the actual gods. And where were They now, those gods? What had the Kinslayer done, to cut Them from Their precious mortals? His greatest and worst act, the one no amount of armies or vengeance or magic could undo.
“And what if They’re dead, then, eh? What then?” Fisher asked the skull. He put it to his ear as one might a seashell, but answer came there none. Everyone said the Kinslayer had silenced the voices of the divine. The gods had very seldom spoken to mortals anyway, nor even to the Guardians as time had gone by. Certain prophecies, guidance in dreams to particularly devout priests, oracular pronouncements ringing in the temple air from carven lips, all that sort of thing. And some of the Guardians had still gone, from time to time, into that hard-to-find contemplative state where they felt the gods close and could be reassured that their path was just.
And other Guardians had given up even on that a long time ago, trusting to their own judgment and carving a place among the mortals. The Ilkand Temple itself was the result of just such an accommodation, five immortals deciding that they would set some ground rules for the rest. Others had travelled, like the Wanderer. Still more had found that self interest and pushing the divine message were not so very incompatible after all.
Cinnabran had been dead before the Kinslayer arose, of course. Probably even he would have kept his head down when she was around, chatting with the gods as though they were dolls at a child’s imagined party. Infuriating, of course, to those agents sent down by the divine to guide mortals, to find a mortal who didn’t need them, who presumed to tell them of the gods’ wishes. And yet most of the Guardians had loved her in the end, or p
retended to. And only the Reckoner had been unable to live with the implications of her existence. Her blessed presence had sown the seeds of treachery and war.
“Bet you didn’t see that one coming,” Fisher told the skull. Even in death, even with nothing but bone there, polished to a shine by the hands of a thousand hopefuls seeking her posthumous blessing, Cinnabran contrived to look smug. He was only glad her jaw had parted company with the rest of her, because he didn’t think he could live with that grin.
“Right, now.” And he stowed the skull again and looked up at the Silver Tower. It was time to pay a call on his old friend Roherich, if, by ‘old friend’ you meant distant and frequently antagonistic acquaintance.
There were Templars about the tower base now, after Celestaine’s exploits, but by a combination of shrouding magic and soft shoes, Fisher stole past them. He might look like a lanky old man, but he and Catt had accumulated a surprising grab-bag of skills while indulging themselves as collectors of the strange. Still, hollering up at the tower-top was likely to draw the notice of even the Temple’s least perceptive servants, and Roherich had obviously retained his aversion to just having a door like normal people.
“All right, you snooty bastard,” Fisher whispered to the shimmering opalescence of the tower’s exterior. “You know me, don’t pretend you don’t. Now let me in before I get persecuted.”
If Roherich was listening, he obviously didn’t think much of the request. The tower wall remained unpierced by any entrances. Fisher wondered if he could magically strongarm his way in, either by his own powers or with one of the trinkets he was carrying. The answer was probably ‘no.’ Roherich knew his stuff, all right.
“Listen, you owe me, from way back,” he tried. Possibly it was true; they’d crossed paths quite a bit, given their combined years. Or possibly the scales were tilted the other way and Fisher had contrived to forget. He did that, on occasion, but in that case Roherich would certainly remember.
As no door had manifested, Fisher tried that tack. “Or maybe I’m here to settle up. I’ve got some goodies in the bag. Come on. A man could catch his death, out here. Bloody north coast.”
Roherich, if he was even listening, remained obstinate, and Fisher bowed his head, aware he was about to make the ultimate sacrifice, something that went so deeply against his nature that he might as well be driving a knife into his own face.
“Please,” he hissed. “All right? I am saying ‘please,’ this one time, like I always said I never would. But things are screwed all over and backwards right now, so please let me in.”
A voice came to his ear, Roherich from earlier eons. “A condition has been fulfilled,” it said to him, and then, “I am permitted to grant access.”
At last the doorway, and Fisher regarded the stairs with the same look Ralas had not long before. Of course Roherich could just open a door to his private chambers, but the man valued his privacy and had no respect for old, old bones.
“Bastard,” Doctor Fisher spat, setting off up the spiralling steps, his staff clacking on the not-quite-stone.
As he neared the top, infuriated by the wasted time and effort, he started shouting at his unseen host, “All right, very funny. You see what hospitality you get, you ever come and visit me. Spiders in the tea, and I’ll let the toast get cold before I serve it. Though Catt’d say ‘Who’d notice the change?’ Oh, yes. Bloody unappreciated, me, always. You better be ready to listen, Roherich. More than your damn priests and bureaucrats.” He was practically rolling up his sleeves for a fight, when he reached the top and marched into the magician’s study. And then he saw the portal.
“You…” Fisher’s voice trailed away as he came to the same understanding Celestaine had. “You… utter turd.” He walked round the vine arch and stared into Roherich’s final, eternal expression. “I needed you, you stretched-out fraud. Just this once. I said please.”
“That condition has already been fulfilled,” said the voice from the air.
“And what did he expect to happen next, now I’ve crawled here on my knees to beg?” Fisher demanded of it.
“I had forgotten that I had put such a challenge to you,” Roherich the Younger said uncertainly. “I believe I forgot to remove the condition from the tower before I… before I…”
“Before you did,” Fisher finished for it. He regarded the final resting place of Roherich grimly, and then just stared down at his feet, fighting a familiar wave of feeling as the silence stretched around him.
At last the disembodied voice broke in. “You should probably go.”
“No.” Fisher looked up, and Doctor Catt would not have recognised him, with the fury riding his face. “No,” he spat again. “Is this it, then? Live long enough and you just can’t be bothered to take part any more? I thought that was the great sin of the Guardians, that they strayed, that they lost the point of it all. After all, name me one Guardian who actually did a proper job of it, all the way through? Wanderer? Oh, but where’s he these days, now the war’s over? Too damn mystical to help anyone put things back together. Wall? Probably still refusing to admit the war ended without him. Lightbearer? Dead. Dead! Is that any way to get a job done?” He swept his staff around, smashing a ceramic statuette of a dragon and releasing a scatter of magical energies. “And now what? What’s supposed to happen now?” Another sweep smashed a bookshelf from the wall, scattering its contents and raising another swirl of angry magic. “Ask the gods, of course! But no, we can’t do that!” With a roar of rage and a sudden access of strength, he upended Roherich’s desk and kicked it apart as the tower shuddered around him. “And who might have been able to work out why? Why, Roherich the Silver Mage, except he’s fucked off because it was all a bit much!” And Fisher took his staff, the Staff of Ways, by one end with both hands and slammed it against the argent wall with such force that it snapped in half.
That done, he felt terribly tired by it all, and mostly because his true ire wasn’t really at Roherich after all. “It’s fine for Guardians to just piss off and leave people in the lurch,” he told the vine arch and its contents, “but you were supposed to be better than that.”
In the echo of his words, the air fizzed and twisted with magic, all the power he had let loose that could not escape the tower’s confines. It made his hair stand on end and his teeth ache.
“What have you done?” whispered the figment.
“You still here, then?” Fisher demanded of it.
“Of course. Where could I go?”
“Another loose end he never thought of,” Fisher grumbled and, with a magical precision Catt would not have believed of him, undid the magical tensions holding the figment in existence so that it was instantly undone. A mercy, he decided, rather than having to spend eternity alive in its own tomb.
That done, and feeling sheepish about giving vent to all of it, he took Cinnabran’s skull from his satchel once more. No doubt as to its provenance, as he knew, but it wasn’t as though it did anything. There were toe bones and vertebrae and even loose teeth in his and Catt’s collection that had more practical value, but this was her skull, the first mortal the gods ever directly addressed.
He held it up, picturing the vacancy within it, that great hungry absence left over when what made her Cinnabran had flown free. The loose power about him began to channel into it like water into a bottle.
“Cinnabran, if there’s anything of you, give me something. Just a shadow of you, just an echo rattling around in that braincase will do. Come on, just open up. If there was anything to you that wasn’t just a great big showboater, eh? ‘Oh, look at me, I’m so precious, all the gods talk to me!’ Was it just that, or did you mean it? Come on, you fake, you fraud. I’m shoving so much power up your non-existent arse you can taste it in your tonsils. Come on!”
He felt the anger rising in him, that he always kept at the stave’s end, but that never really went away. He would need to practice again, so that he didn’t break his calm with Catty, because his partner in misadve
nture could be so infuriating sometimes.
All that spare power had gone into the skull now, but it wasn’t just sitting there, swirling about the cavity within, nor infusing the bone itself. It had gone somewhere. Tentatively, Fisher lifted the relic to his ear again, perhaps hoping for the wash of distant waves.
THAT NIGHT, CELESTAINE woke in her cell to a quiet tapping at her door. She was reaching for her sword, which of course they had taken off her; its absence brought back sufficient reminders of her situation and she sat up on the hard bed.
Someone was at her hatch. She went over and squinted in the gloom, seeing a stout man in a Templar’s uniform. Is it time, then? But no, it was the middle of the night, no time to make a public statement. Her heart leapt with hope. Surely she would be taken to the Governor or someone else of influence, and get the chance to talk them round. Perhaps there was some resistance to the Temple’s fundamentalism, and they wanted her as a figurehead. Perhaps, perhaps…
Her visitor grinned at her and she sighed, resting her forehead against the door. “Oh, it’s you.”
“I figured you’d be wanting to make a deal about now,” said the figure who looked like a Templar.
“Did you?”
“I can get you out of here. But you’ve got to do the thing for me.” From behind that solid guard’s face, the Undefeated’s weasel cunning showed through. “Come on, Celest, what’ll it cost you?”
“My good name.”
“I’m a Guardian,” he insisted. “I did things, good things, back before you were born. And who knows what I did in the war? Would it hurt so very much, a little white lie in exchange for not going to the fire?”
Celestaine opened her mouth to turn him down, then stopped herself. Was her pride worth so much? Why not tell the story of the Undefeated standing against the Kinslayer, as he wanted? As he said, who would it hurt?
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