by Ben Blake
*
The track was narrow to begin with, and drew in even tighter as it wound through the forest. Trees pressed close against the low walls on either side, their branches reaching towards each other overhead, shutting out much of the sunshine. Bit by bit the hydrangeas gave way to gnarled clumps of brambles, and the grass underfoot was replaced by skulking weeds. Above, branches met and tangled, and the path fell into shadow.
“The four of us first met here,” Calesh began. He had reined close to her, so his leg brushed hers now and then as they rode. “Luthien, Baruch, Raigal and me. We were half-trained recruits, each of us taking instruction at a different estate. Four youths among many, getting ready to sail away to war and not sure whether to be excited or afraid. And then we were summoned to the Hidden House, suddenly and in total secrecy.”
“I was frightened out of my wits,” Raigal Tai said quietly.
The hunting bird cried again, somewhere deep within the forest. Farajalla thought it was a hawk of some kind, or a falcon, stooping to pluck its prey from the ground.
“The Lady spoke to us,” Calesh said quietly. “She said there was a part of the Dualist holy writings, an introduction to the Unfurling of Spirit, that had been lost centuries ago, when the Madai first came out of their deserts and kingdoms fell to them. Among all our holy writings – or anyone’s, for that matter – it’s the only script left that was written by a man who actually knew Adjai, the All-Church’s saviour. And it had been lost for years.”
“But she said it was in Elorium,” Baruch put in. “In the old tunnels where sewers had once run, a thousand years before the history of our time began.”
“How could she know that?” Farajalla asked.
Baruch made a weird coughing sound, almost a laugh. “That’s the question, right enough. How could she?”
“Magic,” Raigal Tai put in, nodding his great head. “The people of the old world mastered secrets we’ve forgotten even exist. The Gondoliers sailed across all the seas, but we know almost nothing of them, not even where they lived. And back home in Rheven we say that our forefathers won the land when they drove out a race of men who birthed their children under mounds in the forest, and could call shapes of the night to fight for them in battle.”
“Your people aren’t so wise,” Baruch said. “They still nail horseshoes over the door to keep the luck in.”
“Would you both please shut up?” Calesh demanded. “I don’t understand how the Lady knew, Fara, but she did. When we reached Elorium we looked in the sewers right where she had said, by the wall to the south of the Valley Gate. They were clogged with refuse, years’ worth of it just thrown in there, and we had to do a lot of digging, but we did it. We found the Book of Breathing almost under the wall, wrapped in a dirty cloth that had mostly disintegrated. But the book was intact. As she said it would be.”
“Magic,” Raigal Tai said again.
There was no sound, save for his voice, but the clopping of the horses’ hooves. The hunting bird Farajalla had heard earlier was silent, and any deer nearby stood still and waited for them to pass. She couldn’t see any. In fact she couldn’t see anything, no animals at all, and that made her skin prickle. Tura d’Madai had few forests, but those she’d seen were rich with life, crawling with it day and night and in any weather. This one was fecund, she could see that by the riot of greenery, but it seemed almost empty apart from the plants.
“You never told me this,” Farajalla said at length.
Calesh turned a little to look at her. “I know. It seemed… sacred. Among us all only Luthien even had the nerve to open it and read, let alone talk about it afterwards.”
“It was a dilemma for the little man,” Baruch said. He sounded amused. “On the one hand his piety, on the other his thirst to learn. He couldn’t help himself in the end, but I bet he prayed for forgiveness for weeks.”
“None of us wanted to think of it too much,” Raigal added.
Farajalla nodded, accepting that. “And the Book?”
“Luthien brought it back to Sarténe,” he told her. “He wrote me a letter in Tura d’Madai to say he’d delivered it safely. And that was the end of it.”
“Was it?” she asked. “I wonder. Why did she choose the four of you, when there were surely older, more capable men? Why you?”
Calesh turned in his saddle again, frowning slightly. She could usually see him following the track of her thought, on the occasions when he didn’t get there before her, and took pleasure in it. She liked to be reminded that her husband was a clever man. This time, though, she didn’t care for the expression she saw in his face. Calesh was disquieted by the idea she had planted in him. Either he had never considered it before – unlikely, with such a clever man – or else he had simply preferred not to think of it. She had made him do so now. She reached over to touch his hand, but the frown cleared only a little.
The darkness grew heavier. Now the track was barely wide enough for two horses to move side by side, and brambles spilled down from the walls like falling rain. Here and there a ragged blue hydrangea still peeked defiantly. Beyond the wall the trees seemed stumpy and twisted, their bark green and grey with damp moss. Every time Farajalla moved her head she thought she saw something from the tail of her eye, a movement or a shape watching from the forest, but when she looked back there was never anything there. After a while she stopped trying, and kept her gaze fixed firmly ahead.
And then the track turned again, the branches overhead drew away and the brambles slunk back over the wall, and light began to reach the ground. A few yards ahead the path opened up into a meadow. As they rode out of the trees Farajalla turned to look back, hardly able to believe the suddenness of the transformation. From outside the forest looked normal, a huddle of trees with shrubs and nettles swarming around their feet, innocent as a picture. She frowned, not trusting that image at all.
Raigal let out a soft sigh.
The Hidden House sprawled along one whole side of the field, beyond a broad sweep of packed red rose bushes backed by a low, spiny hedge. It looked to have been built in stages, perhaps widely spaced, to judge by the style of different sections.
The centre of the mansion was all square doorways of grey stone, fronted by a pillared portico atop pale steps. To the right it became more baroque, with three small towers and one spire topped with a tulip dome in the Jaidi style. Several moss-covered arches led into what Farajalla thought might be enclosed courtyards, behind walls pierced with high narrow windows set into yellow stone. On the left several low brick structures stretched towards the encircling forest, and beyond them were walls that certainly shut in courtyards. Almost all the house was patched and hung with ivy, even the grey-tiled roofs. The impression was one of great age, and Farajalla wondered suddenly how many of the rooms within were occupied now only by memories, drifting like ghosts while the house waited for new occupants, and new stories to begin.
Well, one was beginning now. She turned to the three men. “Do you plan to sit your saddles and stare at it all day?”
They looked at her, and then at each other.
“Eleven years,” Raigal said. “Since we first came here. Did you ever think we’d live so long?”
“I thought we’d live forever,” Calesh said. “That’s how young I was. How young we all were.”
Baruch nodded, a smile flickering about his lips. “Warfare has a way of burning youth away. So does the desert, come to that. We’re not the same men we were back then.”
“Back then we weren’t really men,” Calesh said. “Just boys who thought they knew everything. As boys do.”
Raigal grinned. “And then Luthien showed us what it’s like to know everything, didn’t he?”
“What are you all chattering about?” Farajalla demanded.
They looked at her again, and after a moment Calesh smiled.
“Just reminiscing,” he said. “The way men do. Shall we go?”
She studied him, then nodded her head. There was a thre
ad of tension in his tone that spoke of something more than mere reminiscence, but she knew he would keep no secrets from her, even though he hadn’t told her of the book they’d found under the walls of Elorium. He’d had a trust to keep, where that was concerned. She had always put her faith in him, and there was no reason not to now. She turned her horse with her knees and started towards the Hidden House, the others trailing behind her as she went.
There were guards at the doors, she saw as she drew closer. Men of the Hand, one balding and the other running to fat, both of them grizzled with years. Calesh had once told her that such men were dangerous, because anyone who’d stayed alive long enough to grow old in uniform must be as sneaky as a rat in a grain barn. These two men watched the new arrivals with narrow, appraising eyes, and in that moment Farajalla believed it.
An inscription was carved into the stone above the doors, in an elaborate flowing script Farajalla didn’t recognise. She had been recognising similarities to her home ever since she stepped off the ship at Parrien, but here too much was strange, and it made her uncomfortable. For the first time this foreign land of her husband’s felt alien to her. She was adrift, grasping for something to cling to before the currents swept her away.
She glanced at Calesh, to find him looking at her as though waiting for that. He knew how this made her feel, somehow; knew and understood. It was unusual in a man. Something to be treasured. Farajalla smiled, and in response his whole face seemed to glow.
“Marshal Saissan,” the balding soldier said as the party swung out of their saddles. He spoke with a lisp that made his voice very soft. “Be welcome. We have been expecting you.”
Farajalla frowned at him. “You knew we were coming? How? And when did you find out?”
“Word reached the Lady some time ago that a message had been sent to the Hand of the Lord in Tura d’Madai,” the man said. “She was given the same information, you understand, and from the same source.” He gave Calesh a slight bow. “I’m pleased to see you here, sir, though in honesty I never thought you would return to Sarténe.”
“Neither did I,” Calesh said. “It’s good to see you too, soldier. This is my wife, Farajalla, if you don’t already know.”
The armsman bowed again. “I do know, but that in no way diminishes the honour, my lady.” His gaze shifted to the other two men. “Masters Tai and Caraman, be welcome. The Lady was almost certain you would come. I’m very glad to see she was right.”
“She usually is,” Baruch murmured.
Raigal Tai was leaning forward as though pulled by the nose. “Is that cooking I smell? I could eat a whole boar.”
“Some things never change,” the plump soldier said with a chuckle. Given his girth, he had no right to mock. “Go on in, all of you. You’re expected. Others will tend to your horses.”
Farajalla followed her husband under the arched doorway, flanked on either side by fluted pillars, and into a broad tiled hall. A vaulted ceiling curved over their heads. Four doors studded the walls, and to the right a staircase ran up to a balcony that covered the far end. A white-robed figure was walking across the floor with his hands hidden in the broad sleeves, a man of average build, and not especially tall. His dark hair was liberally shot through with grey. Farajalla thought he might be fifty, perhaps a little more.
“Gaudin,” Calesh said, sounding surprised. “My blood and bones, you haven’t aged a day in ten years.”
“I am blessed with good fortune,” the robed man replied solemnly. “As you are blessed with a good memory, it seems, to remember my name for so long after one brief meeting.” He looked Calesh up and down. “You look the same as well. Despite all the great things you have done.”
“Great things?” Baruch repeated. “Stop it before his head starts to swell. I can tell you a few things he’d rather keep secret, if you like.”
“Now, look,” Calesh began.
“Good idea,” Raigal interrupted. “We could start with that time he stabbed himself in the leg when we were training. Do you think that would make an impression?”
“It did on me,” Baruch conceded. “I wouldn’t go within twenty yards of him for a week in case he chopped my fingers off.”
“Thanks a lot,” Calesh said. “A fat lot of help you two are.”
They were joking in the slightly brittle way men do when they are trying not to think of something, but Farajalla couldn’t help chuckling. “Did you really stab your own leg?”
“Unfortunately yes,” Calesh said. He tugged at his breeches to reveal one shin. “There’s the scar, see?”
“I can’t imagine why he never told you before,” Baruch said innocently, and Raigal Tai roared laughter and slapped the other man on the back, making him stagger. Farajalla still didn’t understand why men had to hit each other all the time to show what good friends they were.
“Perhaps he can tell me the details another time,” Farajalla said. “But for now, I’d like to be shown to our rooms. I need to bathe quite badly. Gaudin, would you be so kind?”
“Of course,” the white-robed man said. “Your baggage will be brought to you. The Lady Ailiss will see you tomorrow, when you have rested.”
That stilled the jocularity in the men, all of them at once. They exchanged quick glances, which if Farajalla was any judge contained a hint of unease. By then Gaudin had turned and started towards the broad stairway, and it was Farajalla who was first to set off after him.
He led them up the stairs, while a knot of white-robed servants in one doorway turned like marionettes to watch them pass. Then they turned left along the balcony and into a corridor lined with paintings and tapestries. The passage was too narrow for a viewer to stand back and gain proper perspective, so Farajalla saw them only in glimpses, illuminated by the light that filtered through high windows to one side. Even that was enough to tell her the artwork was exquisite, all of it, from the delicately embroidered hangings to the patient strokes of a brush against canvas. She had seen enough of art in Harenc, backwater thought it was, to recognise real quality when she saw it.
One tapestry brought her memories back more abruptly, a work bordered with interlocking gold palm fronds the size of her finger. It was a detail that had been fashionable in Harenc a century ago. Farajalla felt a sudden ache of homesickness and shook it away. Harenc was gone. She would gain nothing by longing for what she could never have.
Several of the paintings wore faded colours, a legacy of long years exposed to the sun. They must have been brought to the Hidden House from less careful owners elsewhere, rescued from pillage perhaps, or purchased and wrapped for transport by clumsy hands. Here they were treasured, and the corridor was full of the faint scents of ancient paint and worn thread.
The party climbed a short flight of stone steps, walked a little way, and went down another stairway on which Raigal missed his footing. He stumbled, almost fell, and then caught himself by snatching a grip on one of the overhead beams. If he had tumbled he would have landed right on top of Farajalla, and likely suffocated her. He gave her a sheepish grin.
A little further on the corridor walls changed from stone to brick, and then they emerged into an atrium shadowed by an overhanging roof that ran all the way around. Bushes and shrubs grew so thickly that it was impossible to see more than fifteen feet, or to pick out the scattered birds that sang to welcome the visitors. Three gravel paths twisted away into the foliage and were lost from view. Water burbled quietly, out of sight.
“This is beautiful,” Farajalla said. Across the atrium she could see the far roof, a good eighty yards away. “The house looked this big, but I never thought it might contain gardens like this.”
“The Hidden House is as big as it is,” Gaudin replied enigmatically. “Your chambers are here.” He indicated doors to their left, along a paved walkway that circled the garden. “If you wish something, pull the bell cord. One of the servants will come to you.”
“Tomorrow may be too long to wait to see the Lady,” Calesh said. His tone was so
ft, but there was a firmness to the words which brought Farajalla’s head around. “The matter is urgent, Gaudin.”
“It nearly always is,” the servant replied, unperturbed. “Only urgency brings people to the Hidden House, or earns them licence to enter. The Lady knows you are here, and why. She will send for you when she is ready. You have been here before, Master Saissan. You know this is true.”
He nodded. “I do. But still, it is urgent.”
“I will tell her,” Gaudin said. He bowed slightly once more, then turned and vanished back towards the corridor, hidden by a leaning shrub even before he reached the doorway. Farajalla took a half-step towards the garden, tempted to find the source of that murmur of water and dangle her feet in it until the ache went away. Her shoes crunched on gravel as she stopped.
“A bath’s what I need,” she said, and went to the nearest of the doors along the side of the atrium. She pushed it open and stepped into a small reception room, furnished with two armchairs and a divan set around a low table on which covered dishes and jugs waited. She smelled beef and spiced wine, and her stomach rumbled. Another pair of doors opened to her left and straight ahead, presumably leading to the bedchamber and bathroom. She found herself smiling. This was more comfort than she’d enjoyed since she left home.
She could hear Calesh talking outside, but she ignored him and went to the left hand door. Beyond it was a bathroom with blue and white tiles, and a mosaic of a leaping dolphin across one wall. Someone had already filled the tub and sprinkled rose petals over the steaming water. Four people could easily have shared the tub without touching each other.
“My heart and eyes, but I’m tired,” Calesh said behind her. He put his bundles down with a clatter of metal and flopped into one of the chairs, rubbing his face with one hand. “I was all right until we came into the Hall, and now I can hardly make myself breathe.”
“You’ve begun to relax,” she said. She went back to him and knelt to pull his boots off, studying him with some concern. Calesh was fading into somnolence almost as she watched. “You haven’t had the chance to put down your burdens since we set sail from Jedat, two months ago. But you can’t sleep until you’ve bathed, husband. You smell like an old shed.”
“Probably true,” he conceded. He pushed himself upright and stretched wearily. “A bath first, and then a quick snack before bed. I’ve never needed a bed more in my life.”
A few moments later they were sprawled in the hot water. Calesh soaped himself listlessly and then leaned back against the side with his eyes closed, too tired even to watch her through half-closed lids as he usually did. Almost at once his breathing slowed. Farajalla pulled herself over beside him. Her muscles loosened and eased in the water, but her concern didn’t recede.
He was a hard man, this husband of hers. The scars he bore were testament to that. There was a broad white mark on his left forearm, where a badly made shield ring had chafed again and again before he could repair it. A thick thread of warped skin ran over one collarbone, and there was a star-shaped white mark on his left bicep where a knife had gone through the flesh. A myriad of other nicks and scrapes were scattered across his body, too small to be worth comment but easy enough to notice in bed, or in the bath with him. And there was the ugly gnarl just above his right knee, of course, where the assassin’s crossbow bolt had poked its nose out after tearing through the flesh. Such things were the marks of fighting men, and part of the life they all lived. But most of Calesh’s hardness was inside, in the heart and courage he carried. She knew well that nothing daunted him, or made him turn aside even if it did. Her father had seen it too, immediately, with the precise perception that was so much part of him.
“What manner of man can drive himself so?,” Sevrey had asked, watching Calesh change horses and prepare to ride straight back out again, dusty and blood-smeared as he was. His tabard hung in tatters on one side. “Does he never sleep? Or rest at all?”
He did, of course, but not until what needed to be done, had been done. He made a judgement in his own mind and acted on it, without regard for the favour of his peers or the dangers that might come from the choice. Exactly the kind of man the stories said a woman was always meant to marry, and who they very seldom did, because such men were not easy to find. Farajalla sometimes half-believed that he could write a treatise on the art of command while battling three hostile soldiers with his other hand.
So why was he overcome by weariness now, when she and the other two men were not? All of them had been on the road for several days, but while that was arduous, it wasn’t killingly tough. During the hurried departure from Tura d’Madai she and Calesh had faced hardships just as strenuous. He’d come through those tired but unbowed, so why now this torpor, at the first mention of a warm bath and a warmer bed?
“Calesh,” she said. He didn’t stir, so she put a hand on his shoulder and shook him gently. “Husband.”
He lifted heavy eyelids. “What?”
“Go to bed.” She wanted to breathe on his throat, stroke the inside of his thigh with her fingertips, the way he liked her to touch him. For days she’d been looking forward to the chance to rumple the bed linen; ever since they left Kissing the Moon, in fact. Frustration settled in a sour ball behind her heart. “You’re not in any condition to do anything, even eat. Get some rest.”
He pushed himself higher in the water with a sigh. “Maybe you’re right.” There was no sparkle in his eyes: he might have been asleep already. “I must be more tired than I thought. The stress of coming home, probably, and seeing my friends again.”
She hid her concern behind a nod. “Whatever it is, you need to sleep. Dry yourself off and go to bed.”
He nodded and hauled himself out of the bath. He didn’t even kiss her, which was more than merely unusual. Farajalla watched him towel his hair, then pad noiselessly back into the receiving room. The door opened and closed again, and there was silence.
She rested her back against the side of the bath with a frown. Something was wrong here, beyond her ability to identify. Calesh had always spoken of the Hidden House as a haven, the spiritual home of his people and his own soul, but Farajalla couldn’t rid herself of a sense of unease.
Eight
Custodian
“What do you think?” Raigal asked.
“About what?”
“Calesh,” Raigal said, and then added, “Both of them.” He paused for a moment, thinking. “All of it. The army by the Rielle, and being here at the Hidden House again. Everything.”
“There hasn’t been much time for thinking,” Baruch said. His back was to Raigal, so his friend’s expression showed only when he caught a glimpse in the mirror above the sink. Baruch laid his razor down and surveyed his chin critically. “I swear my beard’s getting thicker, and coarser too. How can that be, when my hairline is receding every year?”
“Sunlight,” Raigal said. When Baruch turned to face him he shrugged. “Sunlight falls on the top of your head, right? Not so much on your chin. Sunshine makes you go bald.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
Another shrug. “It’s what my dad told me.”
“But then women would go bald as well,” Baruch said. “And horses and dogs too, for that matter.”
“I only told you what my dad said. Back home we rub squirrel droppings in our hair to make it grow back.”
Baruch made a face. “That’s disgusting.”
“Well,” Raigal said, “we’re still half barbarian, remember? We worship God the same as you do, but we also rub bear grease in our skin to keep out the cold. And in Sarténe you can’t even buy bear grease. Now stop changing the subject. What do you think?”
“I think we can talk about this over a bottle of wine,” Baruch said. “Let’s go make ourselves comfortable.”
Presently the two men were seated in the receiving room, Baruch in a chair and Raigal sprawled hugely over the whole of the divan. The big man piled a plate with cold cuts of meat and fruit, and used
the wine to wash down great bites without seeming to chew. He always ate as though afraid tomorrow would bring a famine. The way he went at food, it probably would.
Baruch drained half his glass, a good dry white wine from the vineyards east of Parrien, and leaned forward to refill it. “Ah, that’s better. I ache in places I’d forgotten I had muscles.”
“Mmph,” Raigal said around a mouthful of beef.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Baruch said. He reached down to adjust the cushion and then relaxed into his chair. “I think we’re in the middle of something very ugly indeed. I think that army by the Rielle is going to come at us as soon as the spring rains are over, which they pretty much already are. And I think the All-Church will know everything we do as soon as we do it. I could name you two dozen of the Basilica’s informants in Mayence alone, and for each one I know of you can bet I missed three. If something important happens here they know it in less than two days.”
“Calesh hasn’t been near Mayence,” Raigal said.
“Parrien was enough, believe me. How often were our patrols ambushed in Tura d’Madai? Sometimes it seemed every bush hid a shepherd ready to run tell the warriors where we were – and that was if the bush didn’t hide an assassin with a slingshot or a bow. Any time we went more than ten miles from the barracks we were in trouble.”
“That’s true,” the big man agreed. “We used to ride hell for leather from one fort to another, or else find fifty bowmen shooting at us from the rocks. Always annoyed me no end.”
It had more than annoyed Baruch. The Madai didn’t fight the way soldiers and knights did in Gallene or Rheven. Here, two armies manoeuvred their way towards each other, found a flattish area, and went at it until one side or the other broke and ran away. Only cowards fled in the face of a charge, or hid behind makeshift barricades when the numbers were close to even.
The desert warriors wouldn’t fight like that unless they were certain they were going to win. Faced with a bigger force, or better trained soldiers, they melted into the sand and rock and waited for another day. They never came to battle at all without preparing an escape route first, into rocky hills or the sand-blown deserts where only they knew the trails. Between times they popped up sporadically to rain arrows down on unprepared men and then scatter. That was dishonourable behaviour, according to the Crusade’s commanders. Decent men ought to stand and fight, shoulder to shoulder and facing the foe.
It had been Luthien, inevitably, who pointed out the flaw in that claim. What was honourable behaviour to the Crusaders was plain foolishness to the Madai. They had their own ways, born out of their own culture and way of life, of which their style of warfare was only one facet. This was the open desert, not the rain-drenched fields of Gallene or Rheven, where room to manoeuvre was limited and tactics had evolved differently. The All-Church army couldn’t expect their enemies to change those tactics for their convenience. To win, it was the Crusade which would have to change.
Slowly, the commanders came to agree. It took time, and there were still some who refused to adapt, but since those men tended not to live very long their stubbornness hardly mattered. Soon patrols began to take with them a contingent of mounted archers, ready to cover a retreat or answer a sudden volley of fire. Infantry abandoned their steel armour and replaced it with toughened leather, which allowed them to move more quickly away from an exposed position. Foot and horse troops alike learned to move in looser formations, offering a dispersed target to bowmen while still being close enough to support one another. It was a strange way to fight, but when the old approach no longer worked, the only way to survive was to develop a new one.
The changes had helped, but probably not enough, in the long run. Even today, if Baruch could believe what he heard, the Crusade army was restricted to the captured cities and a handful of forts, and a few miles of land around them. Go outside those areas and you were not very likely to come back, unless you went in numbers. Or could run very fast. Perhaps a goatherd would catch sight of the patrol, or a passing merchant would smile and nod as he passed and then hurry to tell the nearest warrior that the hated invaders had emerged again. The nearest warrior was never very far away. And the devil of it was that while the soldiers never knew who was an informer, or a warrior, they could be almost certain that someone nearby would be.
The army by the Rielle had been intended to change things, enable the All-Church’s soldiers to push out from its bases for the first time in years. Instead it would come west, into Sarténe, and the mere rumour of that had brought Calesh home with all the Hand of the Lord, perhaps a tithe of the total strength of the Crusade in Tura d’Madai. Baruch didn’t like to think of how the men who remained must be struggling now.
“The Basilica will know Calesh is here very soon,” he said, shaking the thought away. “They’ll also know he left Tura d’Madai with all five thousand men of the Hand who were still there. The other Orders will have sent messages while our men were still loading cargo at the docks. And since there’s only one reason for them all to have come home, my large and extremely hungry friend, the All-Church won’t need long to find them here.”
“What do you think they’ll do? Send assassins?”
“Almost certainly. As a first move.” He chewed his lip. “I can’t help wondering about that priest who was murdered three months ago. Rabast, his name was. He was sent to gather information on what the Basilica calls heresy. The Dualism, Raigal. Everywhere you look in Sarténe there are round temples and Elite in dark green robes. Most of the churches are empty, and so are the collection plates. All this has happened right under the nose of the Margrave, and dear old Riyand hasn’t done a thing to stop it, which is bad enough. But then the killer, whoever he was, made the crassly stupid decision to name the Margrave to his victim, and was overheard. So now the All-Church has an excuse to bring Riyand to book.”
“What’s your point?” Raigal asked. He took another slice of beef.
“I met Rabast when he came to Mayence,” Baruch said. “I was on duty when he spoke with the Margrave one time, and a more arrogant and supercilious priest would be very hard to find. So my point is: why send him, of all people? Why pick the most unsuitable emissary imaginable to conduct the most delicate negotiation the Basilica has faced in years?”
The big northerner stared at him. “You think they did it deliberately? They provoked Riyand into murder?”
“I think it’s possible. God knows Riyand is easily fool enough to fall for it.” Baruch pushed his plate away with a sigh. “I wish his father had lived. There was a man with guile.”
“His brother was all right too,” Raigal put in. “Bohend. He wasn’t the match of his father, but still, he was no idiot.”
“I can’t think of many men,” Baruch said, “who were the match of the old Margrave. Not many at all.”
“All right,” Raigal said, after a brief silence. “We’re in trouble, then. We’ve been in trouble before.”
“So we have. But you asked what I think, my friend, and I’m telling you.” Baruch poured himself another glass of wine. “I think we need every one of those men Calesh brought back, and as many again, and it will still probably not be enough.”
“Ah,” Raigal said around a mouthful of turnip, “but you and I are here, and Calesh too. We showed the Madai how to fight, didn’t we?”
“We did. And won a few acres of dust for our trouble, only to lose most of it again the moment we turned our backs.” He stared morosely into his glass. “We could really use Luthien’s help.”
Raigal smiled. “What do you think? That he’ll abandon the oath he swore when the need is great enough?”
“No,” Baruch admitted heavily. “No, I don’t.”
“But you and I will stay with Calesh no matter what,” Raigal said. “For friendship. For the first time we were here, in the Hidden House, and for everything that’s happened since.”
“And by God, a lot has happened,” Baruch said. “You know, I envy you. You’ve a
wife, and a business of your own, and a son to pass it to when you die. I’ve never seemed to find the time for that.”
“You still have time. You’re only thirty.”
“I’m married to the Hand,” he said, and then suddenly he was too weary to argue it. “Oh, maybe you’re right. Perhaps in five years I’ll be dandling children on my knee.”
“I’m damned sure I will be,” the big man said. “Though I’d have preferred never to go into battle to defend my boy. I did my fighting so I could gather enough plunder to start my inn. When I came home I thought I was done with it, except for telling my stories by the fire.” He settled back on the divan with a grunt. “You’re right about Luthien, you know. We could really use his help. Can you believe he took the Consolation?”
Baruch could, actually. Luthien had been a scholarly, devout man even before the Crusade left for Tura d’Madai, always eager to bury his nose in some barely comprehensible treatise on apologetics, and prone when he did so to forget about basic things like dinner. The difficult thing was always to reconcile that bookish man with the Luthien they lived and laughed with, a wine glass in one hand and a thick cut of mutton in the other. It was the latter who became a cold-eyed killer on the battlefield, the most brilliant swordsman Baruch had ever seen. He was surprised when someone told him Luthien was Elite, but only for a moment. Once he thought about it, he found it made perfect sense.
The strange thing was that none of the other three had really changed. Oh, Calesh and Raigal were married men now, and Raigal was a father, but they were still the same inside. It was as though what happened here at the Hidden House eleven years ago had marked them for life. Entangled us, he thought with a wry smile. All Luthien had done was find a way out of that net, and good luck to him. It was what he wanted. There was even a chance the All-Church would let him alone, as long as he didn’t fight.
It was, Baruch thought, only a small chance. Calesh said he expected the All-Church to smash its way across Sarténe and burn what it left behind, and that seemed likely. There were a lot of men in the army by the Rielle who had fought alongside the Hand of the Lord, or else had expected to. In order to bring them to fight against it they would need to be made to see the Hand as monsters, revealed to them now by the mother church as heretics whose existence put souls at risk and made angels weep in Heaven.
The Elite would not escape. Perhaps if they recanted, threw aside their green robes and accepted forgiveness from the All-Church, they might be spared. But those who refused to back down would be killed, probably crucified or burned alive… and Luthien would not back down. Not ever, any more than he would abandon his oaths to take up a sword again. Which meant the All-Church would never give up hunting him, and men like him, until the last of them was dead.
“It will be a cleansing,” he said into his wine glass, “when they come. And I’m afraid, my friend, because they will leave nothing behind but bones.”