The Last Four Things tlhogt-2

by Hoffman, Paul

  Few battles are truly decisive. Even the one fought at Golan Heights which seemed to define that term depended for any lasting significance on the events that took place in Chartres immediately following the victory over the Laconics. Bosco had first convened a Congress of the Sodalities of Perpetual Adoration with the intention, avowedly, of praying for the deliverance of Redeemers from the Laconics. If Cale lost they could pray away for all the good it would do them. If he won what would happen was very much the opposite of prayer.

  Once Bosco had heard of the defeat of the Laconics he had his own battle to fight. The members of the congress, which included most of Bosco’s supporters, reliable or otherwise, were sealed into the meeting house by his religious sentinel, Redeemer Francis Haldera. A senior member of the Sodalities, he had been of considerable use during Bosco’s years of trying to build support in Chartres from his distant power base in the Sanctuary. He was an endlessy biddable fixer and easer of things, smooth as butter to those who needed flattery, ruthless to those for whom blackmail was the most useful approach. The time was coming, one way or another, when these qualities would no longer be required and his essential lack of belief or courage was to be made a central part of Bosco’s delicately balanced plan. Haldera had been taken aside and isolated in a private room before the beginning of prayers and reassured with certain lies. Once news of Cale’s victory had been received he was confronted with evidence that he had pugnated four acolytes and burglarized another, which was true, and conspired with the Antagonist heresy along with numerous others, which was not. It was made clear to him he would be slowly grilled alive for the crimes he had committed, real and false, but that if he confessed and co-operated he would merely be exiled. It was unsurprising, therefore, that he agreed to denounce both himself and anyone else he was told to. He was given a document to read out and twenty minutes to rehearse it, while the unsuspecting Sodalities prayed on for a victory that had already been won.

  At the same time as Bosco was revenging himself against his friends, a group he could easily gather together in one place, he had also to commence eliminating his enemies, dispersed as they were over the entire city, and to achieve all of this at approximately the same time. It was vital to keep news of Cale’s victory out of the city for as long as possible. News of such an epic deliverance would lead to great celebratory chaos and any chance of destroying his opponents depended on most of them being where they were supposed to be.

  As a terrified and bewildered Haldera ascended one of the two great stone-staired lecterns at the congress eyed by a watchful Bosco already waiting thirty yards away in the other, the first assassinations were about to take place at the Bequinage. Redeemer Low and two of his confreres who merely had the misfortune to be in his company were approached as they prayed for victory by four of Gil’s assassins and were stabbed some six or seven times. Others could not be approached so easily. The Gonfalonier of the Hasselt, as he emerged into the street from a thirty-minute silence, was struck by a bolt from a nearby window the force of which was said to be so great that it passed through his body and wounded a monk standing guard behind him. This unlikely story was, in fact, true because the weapon of preference of Gil’s assassins was the over-strung Fell crossbow, so called because it was almost always fatal to its victims. It had one disadvantage, as its name suggests, that so powerfully tensioned was it that on occasions when the trigger was released the whole device disintegrated as explosively as if it had been filled, successfully, with Villainous Saltpetre. This was how Redeemer Breda, head of the Papal Bodyguard, the Beghards, survived. More attuned to the experience of assassination than most of the other intended victims, he realized the significance of the hideous ‘Twang!’ that resulted from the crossbow’s disintegration as it was fired by his would-be murderer and instantly made off down the nearest exit. There his luck and good judgement deserted him. The nearest escape route was called the Impasse Jean Roux and his ignorance of the local dialect cost him his life. As soon as he realized it was a dead end, he quickly made his way back to the main road but found the way barred by his assassin, bleeding heavily from a deep wound to the forehead caused by the exploding crossbow. He was so mortified by his failure that he was prepared to sacrifice his life to finish his task. The sacrifice was duly made as Breda’s guards, slow to react, finally came to attempt his rescue, but not before his killer had hacked off Breda’s hand and stabbed him through the lung.

  Other assassinations by crossbow bolt were more successful: Pirenne died in the Rue de Châteaudun, along with Hardy and Nash; Padre Pete in the Auditorium; Redeemer ‘Loving’ Oliver – so called because of his unusual tenderness – in his manse on the Rue de Reverdy from a particularly fine shot. It was fired from well behind a window fifty yards away, through another window into the manse and then caught him in the chest as he passed the opening for the very first time that day. But there is a limit to the number of high-quality murderers just as there are wood carvers or plumbers. Gil was forced to rely, so extreme were the demands on his secret Sodalities’ homicidal skills, on the only quite good, then the merely competent, and then the erratic. These he had decided should do their work close up with weapons requiring less refined expertise. There were a satisfying number of successes by knife, half-sword and small pick but also inevitable failures, though fewer than he expected. Twice the wrong Redeemer was stabbed, or guards proved more alert than expected, or the assassin himself more incompetent. But for his two main targets, Gant and Parsi, Gil had, of course, reserved his very best men, which is to say Jonathon Brigade and himself. Which of them did the better job depends on your preference for ingenuity and quick thinking or enormous skill in the handling of weapons and leaving nothing to chance.

  The problem with murdering Gant and Parsi was not that they treated the world with suspicion (Bosco’s murderous plan was unthinkable, after all) but that their grandiosity and self-importance completely isolated them from any casual contact. They went from the Holy Palace to basilica to shrine and back to palace again only in carriages entered into and exited from out of sight of the ordinary people and common Redeemers as a conscious way of elevating their status. That they were unapproachable by virtue of vanity and not fear was neither here nor there when you were trying to kill them.

  Brigade had worked out his plan – but like a true artist who had produced a good work but not a great one, he knew it was inferior. He loved simplicity, sparseness, few moving parts – mostly because there was less to go wrong but also because it suited his taste for plainness. Bosco’s one sympathizer in the Holy Peculiar, Gant’s palace, ensured that he had been able to find a corridor used by Gant to enter his chapel to pray at noon during the canonical hour of sext. The entrance to the corridor had a door only five feet high, the irksome invention of a humbler predecessor, deliberately designed to force all who entered to bow meekly before they entered the chapel. Once Gant was through Brigade planned to shut the door, bar it, kill Gant and escape. It seemed simple but was not. Gant did not always attend sext here – prone to late-morning headaches he would sometimes, if infrequently, retire to his darkened rooms to recover. It took no great worrier to reckon that on a day of such great tension he might easily succumb to the migraine. There was also the difficulty of escape – the chapel was right in the middle of the gargantuan complex that made up the Holy Peculiar. The final weakness was that Brigade would have to trust the calmness and reliability of a traitor to get him in and out. So uneasy had he become that he decided on a hardly less dangerous strategy of walking the palace and looking for another opportunity. Changing plans at the last minute was something he had never countenanced before but he could not shake off the sense of unease. His original plan was plausible but he smelt disaster. After ten years as a holy assassin Brigade had learnt to dismiss instinct. Now after twenty-five he had learnt to value it once more. Perhaps, he thought, he was just getting old.

  Meanwhile at the gathering of the Congress of the Sodalities those collected there we
re if not uneasy then certainly mystified at the size of the assembly. Bosco had worked hard over the years to build this group but just as hard to keep its size, and many of its members, secret. There were many present who were by no means natural allies or who believed themselves to be part of a quite different conspiracy or none at all. These differences had to be reconciled – but not by agreement. Both mild-mannered reformists who would have been horrified by Bosco’s larger plan and disagreeable zealots who had other ambitions for salvation would alike have to be dealt with and dealt with this afternoon.

  Standing at one of the great lecterns at the Congress Haldera looked across at Bosco like a little boy who has angered his mother terribly. Although he was not shaking he seemed to be so, his face so white and shocked. And like a mother, a terrible and unforgiving one who no longer loved and protected the child across from her, Bosco impatiently signalled Haldera to get on with it. The dreadful unease spread at once through the assembly the way laughter does through an audience gathered to be entertained by a conjurer and his amusing dog. Haldera confessed to his terrible sins on behalf of the Antagonist heresy, the words emerging as pale as the man himself, and that he had, to his heartbreaking shame, conspired with others. (‘Don’t mention the numbers,’ Bosco had instructed. ‘I want everyone on their toes – I want them to feel the wind from the wings of the Angel of Death as he passes over them. Or not.’)

  One by one, with many fearful glances at Bosco, who looked now deeply saddened, betrayed and even tearful, Haldera went through the stumbling list of names of those whose breaths in life could now be counted: Vert, Stone, Debau, Harwood, Jones, Porter, Masson, Finistaire. As each was called the blood drained from his face. Most stood without protest and made their way out of their seats as if mild obedience might placate the dreadful judgement. The lucky watchers next to them shrank back from their touch as they brushed past as if their fate might be catching. In the aisles stern religious police led them to the back and outside. Then before they were gone another name was called. And so it went on – the shocked compliance, the occasional confusion. ‘No, not him. We know Frederick Taverner well and he is not a traitor.’ ‘My apologies, Redeemers. Please sit down.’ The condemned and then instantly reprieved Taverner taking a shock from which he would never completely recover. The rest of the audience aghast at the error and what it might mean for them.

  In a large room some fifty yards away the fingered were held, then taken to a smaller room and stripped to the waist. Brzica had been brought from the Sanctuary to supervise the large number of executions required. But there were too many for one man to carry out and he had been assigned numerous helpers. Touchy as always about any slight concerning the rareness of his art he complained that they could not possibly possess sufficient skill.

  ‘They are a discredit to my mystery,’ he said to Gil with the egoism of any prodigy.

  Less vain of his talents, Jonathon Brigade was as excited by the inspiration of his new plan as any author wracked by a failure in his art who finds the sudden revelation or the clue that sets it right and leads him out of the confusing maze of the not quite good enough. The son of a master builder, Brigade could not help noticing with disapproval scaffolding three storeys high loaded with bricks for work the builders had been told to stop so that they could go and pray for victory. Having spent hours loading the bricks upon the scaffold the labourers had been faced with a problem: spend another hour or more lowering them back to store them on the ground and miss the call to prayer or take a minor risk and leave them where they were. And they were right to judge the bricks were safe, the scaffold would hold – why would they take into account the possibility that up-to-no-good Jonathon Brigade would happen by? How could they have guessed that such a malign presence would know how to weaken the reverts holding the scaffolding together and at which point to tie a rope to them so that when Gant and five of his holy brethren passed, as they must in order to enter the chapel, a hefty pull would cause more than a ton of bricks to collapse on top of them? It was simple and it was not far from an external wall where additions to the kitchen would make it easy for Brigade to escape. Perfect, except for the return of the builders, whose foreman had seen them leaving and demanded they return and move the stone blocks from the scaffolding back to the ground. Brigade, a man whose temperament was such that he always tried to make the best of things, chose to take this as a sign that he was being advised from the heavens to find another way and duly went in search of it.

  Gil on the other hand had planned the murder of Parsi to take account of chance. It was increasingly in Parsi’s nature not to be seen at all. What had once been an unease concerning open spaces had grown in recent years to become almost fear of them. Even his audiences in the Pontiff’s Palace took place by means of a tunnel underground. He did emerge into the light for twenty minutes every day walking around his covered cloisters exposed to the open on only one side to read the versicles of the Didache from his breviary (‘Scour me of desire, O Lord, batter my soul’, and so on). Information about his comings and goings was scant. But he had followed up a casual reference to one of Parsi’s daily rituals by going to the top of Carfax tower and, after a long wait, observing it for himself. The timing of his daily prayer circuit was always the same, the pace he took was pretty much exact as he went round and round. Only part of the holy garden was cloistered; unluckily for Gil the only part that could be overlooked from his hidden eyrie in Carfax tower looked onto the side that was covered by a deep roof and left Parsi in dark shadow and hence unseeable from the tower except for the lower quarter of his cassock-covered extremities. It was impossible to get in a killing shot from the tower, in other words. But Parsi walked at an almost constant speed, a monotonously rhythmic rolling gait, and Gil knew that out of his sight in the tower but at the other end of the garden he was in the open for perhaps as long as twenty seconds. He was not in his eagle’s nest to take a shot himself but to measure the walk and calculate when Parsi was in the open but out of his sight, then signal to a group of forty archers in a courtyard three hundred yards away to fire their arrows over the wall of their own yard, arch over two streets then down into the end of the cloisters where Parsi was in the open praying to be punished for his sins – concerning which Gil, with enormous contrivance, was hoping to oblige him.

  There was a witness, as it turned out, to what happened next, saved from execution by Gil because he was curious about the precise details of what happened to Parsi.

  Gil gasped himself as the archers loosened their sharps, the terrible and beautiful curve flocking towards the unseen mumbling prelate on the ground, the graceful whoosh as they passed towards their mark and then the mixing of the thwack and ping and thud as they struck wall and earth and man. Gil, as it turned out, got the numbers right but only just. Parsi was hit by three arrows but only from the extreme edge of the cloud; one in the foot, another in the groin, a third in the belly. The shocked cry and the scream of agony reached Gil in his tower just as he made to leave. But such pain can come from any wound. He was not satisfied for sure until he saved the witness, a novice who had been sitting down in the cloisters while his master said his prayers, more than four hours later.

  Four hundred yards away an irritable Moseby, unused to being kept in the dark and ready to give Bosco a bad-tempered reminder of who he was dealing with, waited in the nearest room that Bosco had to an oubliette. It was small with a window high up so that no one could see out, and as far away from the arrests and slaughter as was possible. Moseby politely asked a servant for a drink (he regarded it as a sign of inadequacy to be rude to servants) and Brzica came in with a jug to see it done, moving behind him and tinkering with a mug and cup and pouring the requested water. Then someone with a resemblance to Bosco entered and Moseby looked up. ‘I must -‘ but what he must was lost in eternity as Brzica took him by the hair and cut his throat.

  Meanwhile Jonathon Brigade was beginning to feel that he must stop looking for some ideal site for his mu
rder and yet he was sure that if he only looked on a little further there it would be. All the time a voice, not his conscience to be sure, nagged at him to revert to his first plan however unsatisfactory and risky it was. Something is better than nothing. This is going to get you killed. Stop. But he could not – always he felt that just a little further on would be the answer. And then a door opened in front of him and he was face to face with Redeemer Gant and behind him half a dozen priests. They stared at each other as Gant tried to place him and failed. Brigade’s mind went blank for a second but every cell of his body was that of the instinctive murderer. He stepped forward gently so that Gant was forced to stay in the doorway blocking the priests behind. Then an idea – a truth that’s told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.

  ‘My Lord Redeemer,’ said Brigade, ‘an assassin has been sent to kill you. Come with me.’ He took him gently by the arm and smiled at the priests. ‘Please wait here until Redeemer Gant sends for you. Protect this doorway with your life.’ He then shut the door and gripping Gant by the arm pulled him swiftly down the stairs, building up speed as they reached a spacious landing on which he grasped Gant by the shoulders and, pushing the protesting Redeemer at ever greater speed, launched him out of a large window which splintered into a thousand pieces as the great prelate fell screaming to his death on the cobbles fifty feet below. A brief look and Brigade was on his way to find his escape, haring down the stairs and shouting: ‘Fire! Fire!’