Beneath Ceaseless Skies #234

by Michael J. DeLuca

  It had been three years since he had last received the same communion that he dispensed to others. He was an instrument of grace, but having it pass through him was not the same as receiving it himself. He felt sure that he would understand—that he would see once again the infinite intricacy of God’s plan, the rightness of all things—if he could only see her smile again. But he had no-one. He could not feel God with him any longer. He was only an old man, pudgy and beaten, murmuring useless words to the wind.

  “O holy Mirabina, mother of grace and stillness, forgive me for what I am about to do,” he said. Then he went back down into the village to find a mattock.

  * * *

  2. The Inquisitor

  At first light they struck camp and saddled the horses. Before they left, the inquisitor knelt down in the grass to make her devotions. The earth seemed to curve in a bow shape around her: the featureless steppe receding behind, the hills and mountains rising up ahead. In such a vertiginous landscape God did not seem far away. But when she closed her eyes she could only see the face of the herdsman she had put to the question.

  O Lord, she thought, let all this be part of your plan. I could not bear it if it were not.

  When it became necessary to acquire information by force, she always chose the oldest and most intransigent subjects—those who were most deeply lost to heresy. For the young ones, she still held out hope that they could be made to see the light.

  We are at war, they had taught her in the missionary school, but the people are not the enemy. The people are the battleground. Sometimes, some battlegrounds had to be given up so that the greater cause could flourish.

  She opened her eyes and saw the young soldier, Darien, praying beside her. He had a tiny folding eikon of Saint Humbert in his pack, which he brought out every morning. The sight made her smile, and she wondered if this itself was God’s answer to her prayer.

  Ahri was already on his horse. Not a religious bone in his body, though she had known him long enough to say that he was a good man. He waited while the other two mounted, and they began the day’s journey.

  They rode north. North was all the herdsmen had been able to tell her, no matter how she worked upon them. They had deliberately remained ignorant of the priest’s movements; what they didn’t know they couldn’t tell. But they had said he went with a muamin girl—a house-dweller, not a nomad like them. That meant he was headed for the mountains.

  She fingered the clasp of her scroll-case. She wished she could call upon Saint Eremas, the Huntsman. He would sniff out the apostate like a mongoose chasing a serpent from its burrow. But the new Imperial calendar did not give her Eremas again for another nine days.

  As they moved up into the hills, they saw smoke rising in the distance.

  “Soldier, what is that?” she asked Darien. “It looks like an army.”

  “It is the new road, Inquisitor.”

  Of course—the road through the Kharenian Pass had been all the people were talking about back in Hama. She studied the skyline: the wooded hills rising steeply to become the slopes of the mountains, whose granite faces passed in a seemingly endless procession from west to east. The muamin girl had come urgently, the herdsmen had said, and taken the priest away almost at once. Her heart began to beat faster.

  Ahri rode up beside her. “Are you thinking the same thing as me?”

  The inquisitor squinted into the glare. “A new road, passing through ancestral hill country. One of the old heartlands of the heresy. The priest, called back there in a hurry when the locals realize that the road is coming. I can’t help but wonder.”

  “Now wouldn’t that be something? After all these years, to find that one of their own priests has led us to the last anti-saint of the Theodorian Heresy?”

  “It shall be as God wills it,” the inquisitor replied; but as they rode on she could not keep from scanning the hills and ridges.

  * * *

  The village was small and old: a cluster of squat wattle-and-daub houses surrounding a narrow stream that ran down from the mountains. There was no one in sight. The doors of the cottages were closed and the windows shuttered as if against the rain.

  A child peered out of a side door to stare at the soldiers and the woman in her strange red cloak. For a moment their eyes met, and the inquisitor’s heart hurt. It was always the children that wounded her the most. Then the boy’s mother pulled him back inside and shut the door.

  The village had no church, only a little shrine in the town square with a collection of dusty eikones. There were fresh cherries and apricots laid at the saints’ feet. Very fresh; the inquisitor guessed they had been put there when the villagers had seen her coming.

  While they were looking at the shrine, a man came out from a large house on the other side of the square, wearing a heavy fur hat that marked him as the village’s headman. He prostrated himself stiffly before them, his forehead nearly touching the ground. When he was finished, he shouted, and a trio of elders came out of the same house, bringing sacred salt to cast at the visitors’ feet. Next there came seven girls, also bowing and scraping.

  The inquisitor had seen these kinds of displays before. The people said all the right words and went through all the motions of piety, but their faces remained closed to her. There was almost a sense of mockery in their exaggerated subservience, a bluster that precluded any chance of an honest connection. Part of her wanted to shout at them, to embrace them, to do anything that might break through that wall of denial. For how could the truth ever reach them if they would not even admit to their heresy?

  She looked at the villagers’ faces and saw cattle led blindly to the slaughter. They believed fervently that they had found their own path to salvation. They did not know that God had given mankind a single path only, and that was through the intercession of the true saints.

  When the welcoming was done, the headman called for the visitors’ horses to be cared for and begged them to eat dinner at his house. Weary from days of riding, the inquisitor accepted.

  The inside of the headman’s house was dark. The shutters were closed and the only light came from the fireplace, where an old woman stirred a pot of stew.

  “Food will be ready for you soon,” said the headman. “Please, sit.”

  Darien looked suspicious, but Ahri just shrugged, claimed a hide-covered divan in the corner of the room and began polishing his talwar.

  “We are here pursuing a heretic priest,” said the inquisitor. “Has anyone come here in the past two days?”

  “Nobody has come. There are no heretics here. If there were we would not let them in, but drive them away. We are pious people.” The headman was sharp; he had not hesitated at all. But from the corner of her eye she had seen the old woman pause stirring the pot for just a moment.

  “I will go to make sure that soft beds are prepared for you,” said the headman. He left.

  “Do not believe anything these people tell you,” Darien murmured. “The suzerain has had much trouble with them. When missionaries come they pretend to be converted, but out of sight they are all still Theodorians. There have been purges in the hill country, many times, but they never learn.” His eyes flashed with righteous fervor. “In Hama we all hate these people, you can be sure. They are no better than devil worshippers.”

  “Hate is not the way, soldier. Hate not the darkness, but shine a light upon it.”

  He frowned. “What shall I do, then?”

  “Pity them. They are outside God’s grace and they do not even know it. Most especially I pity the children. It is said the anti-saint is called to give her blessing to the babes as soon as they are born. Their lives have barely begun and already they are condemned.”

  Darien nodded and fell silent. She could see he was considering her words seriously. After some time he took out his eikon and made his devotions. The old woman ladled out the stew and gave some to each of them. The headman did not return.

  “I’ll go and check on the horses,” said Darien, obvio
usly restless. “I doubt these people will have bothered to pick out the hooves.”

  He went out.

  Quietly, Ahri said: “What do you think are the chances, Inquisitor?”

  “That she is buried here? I don’t know. There aren’t many places left that we haven’t already searched.”

  “It would be the making of your career if you found her. You could return to the Capital.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve been out here too long now, Ahri. The steppe is my home now. The people need me.”

  “Even these people?”

  “Especially these people.”

  Ahri frowned, looking over her shoulder. She turned and saw that the old woman had gone. They were alone.

  “Did she leave before or after you said—”

  There was a hoarse shout from somewhere outside.

  Ahri’s hand went to his sword. “Stay here.”

  “No,” the inquisitor said. “Both of us will go.”

  The night was dark and moonless. A cold wind crawled down from the mountains and black clouds hung heavy in the sky. There was no sign of anyone in the town square, but a light was shining from behind a wall some way down the street. As they crept closer they saw it: an oil lantern, hung halfway up a sloping alley of rough-cut steps. Ahri hissed when he spotted it, like a wildcat hissed when it scented a hunter waiting in ambush. But they went in all the same.

  Darien was lying on the steps below the lantern. A pool of darkness spread underneath him and glimmered in the light. His throat was cut nearly all the way through, leaving his neck bent at an unnatural angle.

  Somewhere in the dark, a drum began to beat.

  The villagers closed in from both sides of the alley. They were carrying knives or spears, and wearing masks: images of grotesque devils with pointed tusks and bronze rings through their cheeks. Their garments were relics of a heathen past but blasphemously embellished with symbols of the true faith. One wore a robe embroidered with the Name of God, while another had a jangling necklace of six crucifixes.

  Whatever sympathy the inquisitor had had for these people, it was gone. In its place was a cool, white fury that sat in her chest like a stone.

  “We need a saint, right now,” said Ahri. “You start the ritual and I’ll try to hold them off.”

  “The ritual won’t be necessary,” she said, taking a clay phial from a pocket in her sleeve. “Soldier, what you are about to see is an Imperial secret. You are not to reveal it to anyone, on pain of excommunication.”

  She unstoppered the phial and drank it down. She felt the jerk of her spirit leaving her body before the taste had left her lips.

  With the fluid it was never an easy transition. It felt dirty, crude, like a spike thrust through her mind. She was in the saint’s body, in the sepulcher at Ramos a thousand miles away. She was trapped and panicking inside an embalmed corpse, staring out at the others hanging in row after row, crucifixion after crucifixion.

  Then it was done. Saint Androminus shuddered as he took over her body and mind. The first thing he saw was a masked man lunging toward him with a curved knife. He took the man by the wrist and bent his arm back until it snapped at the elbow, then let him fall to the ground.

  The other villagers stared at the saint, all rooted to the spot. His presence alone was enough to bring about the Holy Fear in them; their limbs trembled, and their hands struggled to hold their spears. They already knew in their hearts that they could not stand against him.

  “My God is a gentle God to his servants,” said the saint, “but to those who scorn him he is vengeful, and he will deliver swift and dreadful retribution upon them.”

  He drew his sword, and a shudder ran through the crowd like the wind passing over a field of grain.

  * * *

  In the morning, Ahri and the inquisitor took Darien’s body and buried him out of sight of the village. The bodies of the villagers they left where they had fallen. The hills were quiet; the inquisitor didn’t know where the children had run to, but there was no sign of them now.

  After it was done, they returned to the outskirts of the village so they could find the stone line. The directions Androminus had extracted from the headman were simple and precise. They faced north along the line and began to walk. After an hour they came to the hilltop with the cairn, just as he had said. They went on down into the valley beyond and found the barrow.

  The mound was large but unmarked. Covered as it was with a century’s worth of vegetation, it almost looked like a natural part of the landscape. The inquisitor might have walked right past it were it not for the fact that the tomb had been opened. A ragged hole was torn in its side, with loose earth heaped up around the threshold. The darkness within was framed by dangling roots.

  The inquisitor and Ahri looked at each other. They bent their heads and stepped inside. The chamber was small and rudimentary, with no adornment to show that it served a religious purpose. It might as easily have been a storehouse for food or grain. A little sunlight filtered in to touch the back wall.

  Ahri folded his arms. “Those people were going to kill you—an imperial inquisitor. Even out here, that would mean death to them when they were caught. They wouldn’t have done that for an empty tomb.”

  The inquisitor shook her head. “They did it for the one who emptied it.” She ran her hand along the broken seal. “This work is fresh. We could be less than a day behind him.”

  The cold fury rose up in her again. Even yesterday, he had been here—the serpent she had been hunting for the past three months. He had been spreading his poison in the villages, in the ears of children. If she had been there a day faster, she would have caught him. If she had been faster, then the villagers—

  She slipped her fingers around the phial in her sleeve.

  “Go look for the trail,” she said. “It should be easy to find. He will be carrying something heavy.”

  * * *

  They climbed through the hills all day and camped that night on the southern slope of Mount Damash. God willed that there would be neither rain nor snowfall, and the priest’s trail was still visible the next day. Once they crossed the snowline it was even easier to track him. Frequently they saw depressions where he had stumbled, and sometimes there were angular shapes in the snow where he had set down the cross to rest.

  “He can’t be far ahead of us now,” she said at midday.

  Ahri nodded but glanced at the sky: clouds were coming in across the plain, promising snowfall. They went on.

  Her world narrowed down to only three things: the glare of the snow, the blue shapes of the footprints, and the cold biting at her bones. Ahri lagged behind—she knew he would have liked to rest, but she would not stop. The fury of the Lord warmed her from within.

  By the late afternoon they were drawing close to the peaks of Mount Damash and her sister, Mount Erub. The priest had taken a harsh route, far from any of the commonly used paths. As they came up to the grand saddle between the two peaks, the smoky clouds overhead finally began to let forth snow. The inquisitor marched on grimly, as though she could outpace even the processes of nature. But the trail began to fade. She stared hard into the gloom, trying to keep it in sight.

  “I’ve lost it,” she said at last.

  “We need to go back. This weather looks like it’s settling in for the night.”

  “He can’t be far. We’ll spread out and keep looking. Shout if you see any sign of the trail.”

  Ahri hesitated. But he was a soldier at heart, and she was his commanding officer. He did as he was ordered.

  The wind blowing over the ridge made the inquisitor’s eyes stream with tears. She stared into the snow, willing it to give up its secrets. In the end it was Ahri who found it, though. When she heard his shout she hurried back towards him. He shouted again, but his voice was snatched by the wind. She looked where he was pointing. A hundred feet down the far side of the saddle, a still shape was silhouetted against the snow.

  Without waiting for Ahri,
the inquisitor started to make her way down the slope. From a long way off she could see that the priest was dead. From a little closer she could see that the anti-saint and the crucifix were nowhere in sight.

  “No,” she said. “No!” She skidded through the snow toward the body. He looked small and sad, lying there with his thin woolen cloak wrapped around him. He was old and slightly overweight, and his chin was hairless from years of taking the spirit of a woman into himself.

  The inquisitor could not remember hating anyone so much.

  “You bastard,” she shouted. “Where is she?” She pulled out her sword and raised it over her head, but it wouldn’t come down—Ahri was there, grabbing her wrist.

  “Enough, inquisitor. He’s gone.”

  She shrugged him off. “We have to keep moving. We have to find the anti-saint.”

  “No. We need to head back, now.”

  She stared into the thickening air. Every indent in the snow might have been a footprint, rapidly filling in and about to vanish forever. She felt her anger guttering, and a dull emptiness rising to take its place.

  “Wherever she is,” said Ahri, “she’s not in her tomb any more. The old maps won’t work. The others won’t be able to call on her.”

  The inquisitor gave a hoarse bark. “There are no others,” she said. “He was the last.”

  She let Ahri take her arm and help her back up the slope. When they reached the top of the saddle she looked back once. The body was already being covered by the snow.

  * * *

  3. The Saint

  It was said that no one who became a saint had ever had the ambition to be one. So it was with her. She had never really wished to be anything other than what she was, which was not very much. But she was old, and she would be fading soon one way or another, so she had agreed to it.

  Of course there was pain—not only when they set her on the cross, but also from the bandages they wrapped around her, dripping with embalming oil that burned her skin. But she had never expected that death would come without pain. She had been preparing for it for many years; indeed, perhaps her whole life’s work was learning how to die.