by D. P. Prior
***
The press of corpses was so great that Shader could no longer see the Grey Abbot. He continued to hack and thrust, arms weakening, breath burning in his lungs as he tried to break through. The creatures came on inexorably until, with a great surge, they slammed him against the wall, sending his swords clattering to the floor. A mouth rank with decay clamped over his own, fetid breath making him retch. Cold hands held him like iron, the corpse shuddering as it began to suck. Shader’s fists hammered pulpy flesh, splattering pus and gore. Ice crept through his veins, mist fell over his eyes, but just as despair took him the cadaver pulled back, flame erupting from its flesh. It thrashed about in a macabre parody of a dance before collapsing in a pile of smoking ash.
Shader scrabbled about for his swords, fingers stiff and numb. The undead were swaying to a gentle chant that came from somewhere behind them. A corridor opened through their ranks and the Grey Abbot walked towards Shader incanting Aeternam words of prayer.
‘…sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris ...’
Flame licked dead flesh, flared to the ceiling and left nothing but dust in its wake.
‘Et ne nos inducas in tentationem…’ The Grey Abbot stopped before Shader, placed a hand on his shoulder and sighed. ‘Thank you, Frater.’
He had aged alarmingly.
Shader rose to his feet; gripped his arm. He met the Grey Abbot’s gaze and recoiled. The face that had always been a well of peace and wisdom was now a haunted mask that told of nothing but loss and despair.
Shader sheathed his swords, feeling the brothers pressing in around him, looking at him like frightened children with nowhere else to turn. The Grey Abbot moaned, his knees buckling. Shader cradled him to the floor, heart hammering a frantic tattoo, mind a nest of angry hornets stinging with shameful thoughts—bloody thoughts; thoughts teeming with vengeance.
THE TEMPLUM OF THE KNOT
Elias drove the cart through the southern suburbs of Sarum, the scarf wrapped about his face offering scant protection from the plague. He was starting to wish he hadn’t used the statue to break through the cordon of Imperial troops quarantining the city. Just a gentle use, mind, enough to convince the guards to let them pass. Seemed he was already getting attuned to it, same as he did with any other instrument. Problem was, this time he’d felt a presence, a shadow squatting at the back of his mind. Thought he’d heard something, too: the cry of a bird—but not of any bird he recognized. Perhaps he should have listened. Huntsman had warned him never to use the statue all those centuries ago when Elias had gone searching for the stories of the Dreamers. How did the song go? He plucked a harmonica from his pocket, gave it a good blow to clear the holes. Tunes was the only way he could remember all the old stuff, put himself under the influence just like the punters. Lemons, the lot of them. He hit a lilting melody.
The shaman had been sitting beneath a lone gum tree, laughing as Elias dragged his way into view across the scorching red desert. He’d run out of water hours before and wandered aimlessly as delirium set in. He’d thought he was tripping. Finding someone in the bush was like finding sobriety in a pub. But the old man was real enough, plain as a daisy. Without the shaman’s help he would have snuffed it and his body would have joined the piles of bones bleached by the searing sun.
‘You come to Huntsman for songs, little white fellah?’ laughed the Dreamer under the gum tree. ‘Maybe first you drink.’
With that a fountain sprang up from the barren earth, pooling at Elias’s feet. He threw himself to the ground and drank thirstily.
‘Now food.’ The shaman clapped his hands.
Seemingly from out of the russet earth, a whole host of near naked brown-skinned Dreamers emerged bearing clay bowls and hemp bags. They set these down next to Elias and began to offer him all manner of roots, shrubs, and grubs (some still moving) that he just crammed into his mouth and swallowed, like it was high tea at granny’s. At last, stuffed to the brim, he sat down with the Dreamers and listened as the shaman told the tale of the Reckoning. Couldn’t get better than that—straight from the horse’s mouth.
The words droned and hummed around Elias, but their meaning escaped him. Strange images, violent, serene, always colourful, flashed before his eyes. At the end of what seemed an eternity, alone once again with the old Dreamer beneath the gum tree, Elias was aware that all the folklore of the Dreamers now resided within him. A library of songs, pictures, experiences—all waiting to be performed, begging to be remembered.
Huntsman produced a package wrapped in paper-bark and opened it, revealing a rearing serpent carved from black rock. It was blind and without fangs. For an instant it was wreathed in amber light, but it faded as he passed it to Elias.
‘In return for our gift of song,’ the shaman said, fixing Elias with a soul-searching stare, ‘you keep this for me. Will give you big gifts. Keep it hidden, though. Others hunt its power. One day, many years maybe, I come for it.’
Rhiannon was sleeping fitfully once more, head rocking with each turn of the cartwheels. Hector clomped down streets of shabby single-storey houses and boarded-up shops with signs faded by the sun, paint all cracked and peeling. Rotting food clogged the gutters, where crows pecked voraciously and scavenging rats grew ever more daring. The few people Elias saw were furtive, heads wrapped in scarves. Some of them watched the passing cart with forlorn eyes and others tipped their hats or bowed their heads. A few even approached—too quickly for Elias’s liking—motioning for him to stop. Shifty looking ne’er do wells as far as he was concerned. There was as much chance of him stopping as there was of him taking a swim in shark-infested waters. The only other traffic he saw was the death-carts that made their way slowly from door to door.
Turning into Teledor, a couple of blocks from the city centre, Elias was surprised to find more activity. People bustled around a scrappy improvised market, haggling over meagre portions of food or the dubious wares of a mountebank in a death’s head mask and black robe. The people here had abandoned the vain protection of scarves over mouths and noses and went about their business with fatalistic indifference. Famine seemed their chief concern, a threat against which they still had the power to act.
Passing a row of two-storey buildings marked as the property of the Teledor Agriculturalists’ Guild, Elias could now see the immense spires and lofty towers of Sarum’s central district. There were a dozen such structures, each impossibly high and immeasurably ancient. Some were constructed of smallish, uniform red bricks, but the majority were of metal and glass that reflected the brilliant sky, but cast doleful shadows on the city beneath.
‘Sammy!’ Rhiannon cried out as they passed onto Wharf Way. ‘Elias, stop. We left Sammy!’
Elias kept his eyes on the road, shook his head gently. He’d been dreading her waking. All the while she was asleep he could bury his head in the sand, pretend that it hadn’t happened.
‘It was too late.’ He hated the snivelling tone, but it’s all he had. ‘Had to get you away. You know how it was. They’d have…you know…You saw what they did.’
He heard her clambering up from the back, felt her hand on his shoulder, and then she was beside him on the seat, face pressed up close—too close. ‘We can’t just leave him.’
‘I know. But what can we do?’ Should have done it already. Should have gone back soon as he realized. Nothing but a spineless chicken. It’s what he’d been all these centuries, why he never went anywhere. You’d have thought being ageless would have made you fearless, but he’d always found it had the opposite effect. It was odd how brave mortality made people. Everything hanging in the balance, death hiding around every corner, but you kind of got used to it. It had been so liberating, in a morbid sort of way.
‘Turn around. Take me back.’
Elias shook his head more vigorously now. ‘No, no, no. Can’t do that. There’s guards around the city. Imperial troops. No one gets in or out. I’m sorry, Rhiannon. There’s nothing we can do. Just pray—‘ Now there was a thoug
ht. ‘Just pray he’s all right. They won’t hurt a child.’ Well, he hoped not, anyway. ‘Someone will—‘
‘How’d we get in?’
‘What?’
‘How’d we get in if the city’s guarded? No one gets in or out, you said.’
Bugger. He couldn’t tell her about his use of the statue, how he’d made the guards turn a blind eye. She wouldn’t understand. She’d insist he used it again. But she hadn’t felt what he’d felt. If he wasn’t a coward before, he certainly was now, after feeling that presence, hearing that sound. Sammy would be all right. Made no sense for the knights to harm him.
‘I talked my way in. Told them a sob story about you being on your last legs and me—‘
‘Then talk our way out.’ She turned his face to look at her.
Elias blinked back the tears, pulled away. ‘Can’t. Said they’d let us in on condition we didn’t change our minds. We go back, they’ll fill us with arrows.’
Rhiannon closed her eyes and seemed to be holding her breath. For a moment he thought she was going to explode, shove him off the cart and head back herself. But then her shoulders sagged and she looked at him with her good eye. ‘I don’t know what to do, Elias.’ She put her face in her hands. ‘I just don’t…’
‘I know,’ Elias said. He wanted to pat her on the knee, thought better of it. ‘Me neither. I’m so sorry.’
They headed towards the jetty and the glistening waters of the Soulsong River, which wound its way through the city before meeting the ocean to the west. Rhiannon leaned into Elias, let her head rest on his shoulder and was soon dozing once more.
Hector turned onto the Esplanade, right into Ishgar Terrace and then left into the cobblestoned Domus Tyalae, at the end of which sat the Templum of the Knot.
It was basically a squat rectangle of clay-brick construction, with a bowed roof and a crumbling transept of age-worn stone protruding from either side. To the rear of the templum, a narrow corridor ran off at an angle, connecting it to a long grey building that looked like it had been recently added on. Shrubs skirted the edges of the templum, and a manicured lawn of sickly brown grass fronted it like a badly frayed rug.
‘What you about?’ An old man in a mud-stained white habit reared up from behind a wheelbarrow, garden shears in hand. ‘We’re full to bursting with the sick, and Mater Ioana’s not in, if that’s what you’re thinking. Out tending folk in the streets, she is.’
Elias gently lowered Rhiannon’s sleepy head from his shoulder and cocked his finger like one of those things they had back before the Reckoning…Gun, that was the word. The man was hunched with age, but still stocky and strong. His oily grey hair was slicked back over a gnomic face, worn and ruddied, most likely from years of manual work outdoors.
‘A fine Nousian welcome to you, too, Frater…’
‘Hugues.’
‘Frater Hugues,’ Elias continued amiably. ‘I can see the Emperor has nothing to fear from your mission. With charm like yours, the Nousian menace will be extinct within a year or two.’
‘Now you just watch it,’ spluttered Hugues. ‘I’ve half a mind to call the militia.’
‘I suspect you have half a mind for a lot of things,’ Elias said, leaping lightly from the cart. ‘That’s the trouble with you religious types. Half a mind on the spirit, the other on the flesh. Know what I mean?’
‘You’re a very rude man,’ huffed Hugues, turning on his heel and trudging towards the templum.
Elias trotted beside him, hoping to sound insufferably cheerful. ‘It’s not that I’m saying religion is a bad thing. Far from it. It’s the application to real life that’s the problem. Take, as an example, the summing up of the Eleven Holy Admonishments by none other than Nous himself: number one, love Ain with all your heart and follow all his precepts—terminology’s a bit quaint, but what do you expect?; number two, and check out the paradox—or is it a mystery, aha!—do whatever you bloody well like so long as you’re always hospitable. OK, so I’m paraphrasing, but that’s it in a nutshell! The core of Nousian teaching and yet you can’t even get that right. Not so much as a “How you going, young geezer,” which would be stretching it in view of my age admittedly. Not so much as a “What can I do you for, me ol’ mate?” And not even the merest tad of concern for my friend here who’s just been beaten and raped by some holy bleeding twat not too dissimilar to—‘
Frater Hugues slapped him in the face. A heavy slap, quite jolting, actually.
‘More of a navvy than a Luminary,’ Elias said, putting his hands to his head and blinking away the stars. ‘Fair point, though.’
‘Forgive me, brother.’ Hugues fussed around him like a terrified mother who’d just dropped her baby on its head. ‘You went on so. Are you sure you’re all right?’
‘Leave him Hugues.’ A woman in white hurried from the templum doorway. A slim, very prim ol’ girl in her late fifties, by the looks of her. She wore enormous glasses that covered most of her face; peered through them with bulging fish eyes. ‘I’ll see to our guests.’
‘Right you are, Velda.’ Hugues looked warily one more time at Elias before shuffling off round the back of the building.
‘Thank you, Soror.’ Elias gave his most theatrical bow. ‘Your arrival was—‘
‘Oh, my poor dear, what has happened to you?’ Velda walked straight past him to the cart and climbed into the tray to examine Rhiannon.
‘She was beaten and raped by…’
‘Hush, young man.’
Elias was a little gobsmacked. He hadn’t been called “young man” for…for…Well, since…Not for a long time, in any case. He ran his fingers through his hair and stood by like a naughty child who’d been told off for picking his nose.
Velda held Rhiannon’s head against her breast and cradled her like a mother. Rhiannon stirred and opened her eyes. She let out a sigh and sat up.
‘Soror? We’re at the templum, then?’
‘You are indeed,’ Velda said. ‘Fret no longer.’ She cast a swift glance at Elias. ‘You will be safe here.’
‘This is Elias Wolf…’
‘Who, this?’ Velda’s fish eyes grew as big as her lenses. ‘Isn’t that a lovely name? What is it you do, Elias?’
This was the point Elias would normally do a little jig and then give his deepest bow. If he had a hat on he’d invariably roll it up his arm and flip it back into place. ‘Bard,’ he mumbled, without even a shuffle of his shoes.
‘A bard? How splendid. Perhaps you’ll sing for us later. Ah, Pater Cadris.’
An immensely fat priest emerged from the templum, fussing at the strands of hair meticulously combed across his barren pate.
‘Hugues said there was trouble,’ he declaimed with the pomposity of a bad orator.
‘Not trouble, Cadris, just friends in need. Make yourself useful and tether this gentleman’s horse, if you please.’
Cadris paused a moment, as if he were going to protest, but then straightened his robe and waddled over to take Hector’s reins. As he led the horse and cart off towards a lean-to at the edge of the templum grounds, he appeared to be muttering under his breath.
‘Pater Cadris is our scholar,’ Velda explained as the trio made their way into the templum. ‘Such a gifted writer.’
The interior would have been very difficult to reconcile with the usual idea of a templum, although Elias had only ever seen the shells of ancient ecclesial buildings until now. The nave was a makeshift infirmary, with coughing, sweating, blood-soaked people lying on pews or palettes on the floor. Whole place stank like an abattoir.
‘There are fifty-six patients,’ Velda pointed out as she led Rhiannon and Elias down the centre aisle. ‘A small token of the plague’s victims, but it’s the best we can do.’
They looked like writhing hunks of bad meat, bodies weeping putrescence, the air thick with the stench of decay. Elias found his hand covering his nose and pulled it away. Could have been construed as a bit rude, that, so he held his breath instead.
; An elderly priestess with a head like a mottled skull tufted with grey, and twisted spectacles low on her nose, was hobbling about ministering to the sick and dying.
‘Soror Agna!’ Rhiannon cried, rushing to embrace the woman.
Elias wagged his fingers in greeting, having met Agna on a couple of occasions when she’d visited Rhiannon in Oakendale.
Agna held Rhiannon out at arm’s length and examined her bruising.
‘Oh, my sweet girl, what’s happened?’
Rhiannon lowered her head and began to shake. Agna looked up at Velda who merely nodded her assent. Agna then led Rhiannon off over the sanctuary and through the sacristy door.
‘Do you know,’ Velda said, ‘it never occurred to me that this could be Agna’s Rhiannon. I must be getting soft in the head.’
‘Rhiannon’s had this thing about joining the Templum since she was a teenager,’ Elias said. ‘Soror Agna used to make the journey to Oakendale every couple of months to speak with her.’
‘Yes, yes, the pre-noviciate. Agna spoke of her often. There have been no other candidates, mind.’
‘The Emperor’s none too keen on Nousians. I imagine the people either share his views or are too scared to go against them. You must be feeling a bit isolated these days. Since the missionaries at Jorakum packed up and scurried on back to Aeterna, and that nasty business at Delta’s Bluff, there’s been just you and the Pardes community.’
‘And Gladelvi.’ Velda puckered her lips. ‘I must see to the sick. If you pop outside, Pater Cadris will find you a room.’
Elias gratefully left the mephitic stench of the templum, passing the skulking Frater Hugues in the narthex. He found fat Cadris just leaving Hector under the lean-to, the cart parked in the shade of a copse of black wattles.