The Last Witchking

by Vox Day

  “Get off the road,” he ordered Umbrus and Guigues. “Take the mules into the trees.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Do it!” Bessarias hissed, and the young monk shrank before his fury.

  Bessarias ran up the road, and as he turned the corner, he saw the gates were unmarred but open. He knew a moment's relief before he passed through the walls and saw the first signs of the bloodshed he feared. Brother Sperarus, no longer young, lay dead in the snow, his face frozen in the rictus of violent death. Beside him lay his staff with dark green ice encasing one end of it.

  Goblins.

  There were dozens of bodies in the dormitory—torn, mutilated, and partly devoured. Most of the rest were in the refectory. Brother Rullus was in the kitchen, pierced by three short spears, but with his meat cleaver still in his hand. A pair of goblins, one beheaded, lay in a large pool of coagulated green blood. The three elderly brothers with whom Bessarias had been sharing the warmth of the guesthouse had died side by side in the common room, apparently unresisting. They lay face down. Were it not for the blood that had spilled out from their bodies, one might have thought they were praying.

  Dead. They were all dead. The entire brotherhood. Rage filled his heart as he realized what had been bothering him about this seemingly pointless massacre. Nothing was taken. Nothing was burned. Beyond the obvious signs of the struggle, everything was in order. This was no simple goblin raid. This was a cold and calculated mass murder where the death of the monks was the only objective. And Bessarias knew precisely who was responsible.

  Besides the two young brothers waiting in the woods outside the walls, there was only one more for whom he must account. Bessarias first checked the lord abbot’s chambers, but there was no sign of him there, except for a spoon and a wooden bowl with a little porridge encrusted inside it. Waleran was a very early riser, so the attack must have come in the pre-dawn hours, well before Lauds. Bessarias closed his eyes and shook his head. He knew where he would find the abbot. Or rather, he knew where he would find Waleran's body. Of all the brothers, the abbot was the one man Mastema would be certain not to spare.

  He walked slowly towards the catholicon, weighed down by a heavy heart and the certain knowledge of what he would find when he entered it. One of the two thick wooden doors was open, and he entered the vaulted room with its brightly painted ceiling that contrasted so incongruously with the stark grey stone of the floor below. Waleran lay crumpled beneath the dead god mounted on the wall, a terrible wound to the back of his head. Bessarias could tell by the position of the old man’s body that he had been praying. But for what? For the safe return of Bessarias and his two charges? For the salvation of Bessarias’s inhuman and possibly nonexistent soul?

  Bessarias looked up at the preternaturally calm face of the god suspended gracefully from the tree, his arms upraised as if he were an entertainer acknowledging the crowd. He glanced at his fallen friend, then back again at the carved simulacrum of a man dying.

  “He lived for you. What in your sanctified, sanctimonious name did you ever do for him? If you are the savior of Mankind, why did you not save him?”

  His magic, so long repressed, rose within him, lifted by the tide of his seething anger. He wanted to hurl all the fires of Hell at that simpering bastard who stared down at Waleran's body with such outrageous indifference. He wanted to turn this temple to a useless, ineffectual god into a lake of glowing crystal glass. He wanted to summon an army of evil spirits to him and bathe in the green stinking blood of goblins. He could do any of those things. He could do all of them.

  But Bessarias did nothing, even as his power swelled and flickered in the air around him.

  If there was such a thing as a soul, if the incorruptible not only had a beginning, but could begin with something so insignificant as a single human life, then somewhere, somehow, Waleran would know of it and the knowledge would grieve him. Bessarias was still within the walls of Saint Dioscurus and his vow still bound him. So instead, the sorcerer slowly lowered himself to one knee and did something he had never done before. He did not lower his head. He stared directly into the painted face of the pathetic wooden god as he addressed it in a voice full of scorn and fury.

  “I don’t know you. I don’t believe in you. I have no use for you, you sad wooden fraud. But my friend served you with all the loyalty you could ask of any Man. So, if you exist, if you have any power at all, I ask this one thing of you, one thing only, and then we are done. Let it be as he believed. Give him that promised life beyond the grave. Welcome him into your Heaven. Walk with him in your golden streets and give him the answers he could not find here.”

  The dead god didn’t answer. It stared impassively at him until at last Bessarias could no longer hold its blank, lifeless gaze. He turned his face to the side, raised a hand to his eyes, and wept.

  There were few more honest pleasures in life than seeing the awe in a young scholar’s face upon his first visit to the Libellian Archives, thought Aurelius as he turned around to witness the reaction of his young companion. Maintained by the order known colloquially as the Black-Finger Monks, it was the central archives of Holy Mother Church, charged by the Sanctified Father himself to be the primary repository of all Man’s knowledge.

  The great room that inspired such awe was the Cella Mundus, which stood at the heart of the large building and was very nearly the size of the nave in one of the great cathedrals. A massive fresco was painted on the ceiling, a vast blue sky populated with hundreds, perhaps thousands of angels. It depicted the ascent of the Immaculate Triumphant from Earth to Heaven.

  But the columns that rose up from the green-veined white marble floor were not decorated with frescoes or colorful tilework, as one normally found in a cathedral. They were giant bookshelves, each encircled by a spiral staircase that allowed the seeker to climb towards Heaven in the pursuit of knowledge. It was a crude and obvious metaphor, perhaps, but judging by the stunned, wide-eyed reaction of Marcus Valerius to the sight of more codices than existed anywhere else in all human Selenoth, it would almost surely be lost on the young man.

  At only sixteen, the Valerian was too young to take vows, but given the lad’s love for learning, Aurelius would not be surprised in the slightest if he was drawn to the Ordo Sancti Libelli. It would not be permitted to him, of course. As a scion of a House Martial, the boy would be made an archbishop as soon as he declared his vocation. But until then, his father and uncle were content to let him indulge in his theological studies to his heart’s content.

  “Is it true the Sacra Chryseae is here, Father? Can we see it?”

  The monk chuckled. Everyone who visited the archives wanted to see the famous Script, which was bound in solid gold and inscribed in letters of pure silver, commissioned by the Senate at the end of the Unholy War in order to give thanks for the defeat of the Black Sanctiff, Gnaeus Avidius Libanius.

  He pointed to a mass of nearly one hundred men, half of them wearing cowls in the black, brown, blue, or in one case, purple, that signified their orders, all gathered round an elaborately carved stand on an elevated platform. There were several bishops, and even one archbishop, who were waiting, with varying degrees of patience, for their turn to view the sacred object.

  “It’s right there. But I suggest we save that for another time. I can show you something I find even more remarkable, even more beautiful, and we won’t have to miss our dinner to see it.”

  The young Valerian tore his eyes away from the crowd of ecclesiasticals with some reluctance, but he grinned as he nodded his acquiescence. He chattered happily away as Aurelius took him by the hand and led him toward the northeast corner of the room. They walked past various Scripts on stands, most of which were large, leather-bound volumes that had one or two priests poring over them, marveling at the careful artistry that had gone into glorifying the eternal word of the Almighty God Himself. Aurelius stopped before a vacant stand, upon which lay open a short, but exceedingly fat codex. It was open to Liber I Par
alipomenon.

  “Behold the Sacra Incognita.” Aurelius gestured grandly towards the little Script. “It appeared mysteriously in the Ninth Century, although some claim it is older than that. No one knows the identity of the monk who inscribed it, and you will note the singular term, monk, as it is remarkable for having been penned by a single hand.”

  “A single hand?” Marcus exclaimed. “But that must have taken the copyist nearly his entire life!”

  “A life well spent, in that case. Come, what is even more unusual is the small illuminations that head each and every chapter. Look at the figure that is etched in the gold leaf. Do you see it?”

  “It is a face!”

  “Exactly. It is believed that they may represent the illuminator’s fellow monks whose names begin with the letter upon which they are etched. There are thirty-six of them in all, and no two faces are alike. One of them is very likely the copyist himself.”

  “Do we know which of the thirty-six it might be? Did the illuminator leave any clues?”

  “Sadly, no.” Aurelius raised a hand to forestall any expressions of disappointment. “However, there is one theory which I suspect you will find very interesting and to which I myself am tempted to subscribe. You see, the Sacra Incognita was discovered in the same cloister in which a certain theological treatise is known to have been written.”

  He was pleased to see recognition dawning on Marcus’s face. The boy had always been quick, and Aurelius always enjoyed seeing how rapidly he put the clues together to reach, if not the correct conclusion, at least a credible one.

  “Oxonus was a Tertullian… You think Oxonus might have illuminated this codex?”

  “Very good, but not exactly.” Aurelius held up a finger. “There are seven major personas in the Summa, if we exclude Oxonus himself. And recall that we don’t truly know who Oxonus was. It is merely the scholarly convention to call him after Oxonia, the town nearest the chapter house. We know the identity of the Philosopher—”

  “Aristoteles.”

  “The Theologian.”

  “Augustinus.”

  “The Poet and the Master.”

  “Vergilius Maro and Petrus Lombardus.”

  “The Doctor and the Expert.”

  “Aelius Galenus and Domitius Annius Ulpianus.”

  Aurelius looked expectantly at the boy, whose eyes went vacant for a moment as he searched his memory. Then they came to life again, and the priest knew his student had the answer.

  “The Wayfarer!” he exclaimed triumphantly, disturbing a pair of nearby monks, one of whom loudly sniffed his disapproval. “We don’t know who the Wayfarer was!”

  “No, we do not.” He ran his hand along the faded bindings of the Sacra Incognita as sensuously as a man ever caressed a woman. “We do not know his name. We do not know when he lived or when he died. We know absolutely nothing about him except the statements that Oxonus attributes to him in the Summa. But does it not strike you as a little strange that two such exceptional, even timeless, works should spring from the same cloister at virtually the same time? It may be nothing more than a coincidence, to be sure, one of those cosmic jests that only the Creator can truly appreciate, but I imagine that in the Summa, the keen and agile mind of the illuminator is preserved, while somewhere in the Sacra Incognita, the true face of the Angelic Doctor is revealed.”

  Marcus Valerius nodded appreciatively, his eyes alight with the fire of intellectual ambition. He looked up at the great pillars and the thousands of codices they contained, then reached out and ran a finger lightly over the gold leaf and the grey-black ink, faded with age. His brow was furrowed and his face was grave beyond his years as he tapped the gilded letter.

  “This is immortality, Father. The body dies, the soul ascends, but the mind lives on forever through these words. Thank you for bringing me here. I shall never forget it, not if I live one hundred years.”

  “You are most welcome, Marcus Valerius.” Aurelius smiled affectionately and ruffled the boy's hair. “It gratifies me to see you recognize the import in these dusty relics. Now, let us see if we can find a copy of the Summa. I shall be very interested to see if you can come up with a more convincing response to the third objection of question six, article five than the Philosopher managed.”

  The two men departed on their manuscript hunt, leaving the codex unattended. Unbeknownst to them both, the face of Abbot Waleran, gone to his eternal reward some three hundred years ago, stared up at the triumphant Son of God from inside the golden boundaries of the lovingly detailed letter that headed the twelfth chapter of Liber I Paralipomenon.

  Closing Time

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&nbs
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