by Ben Blake
*
For Irrian it had started thirty years before, when he was a young acolyte still learning the ways of the Old City.
There had never been any doubt he would be a priest. He was the third son of a minor baron in the south of Gallene, just inside Sarténe. An unneeded sprig of nobility, in a family barely able to afford him. The eldest brother was trained as heir, in knighthood and administration. The second joined a mercenary company, learning similar skills at greater risk, and most importantly at someone else’s expense. He was the spare, needed only if something fatal befell his elder brother. And the third? It was a choice between the clergy and the life of an itinerant, and really that was no choice at all. At fifteen he entered his name in the rolls of the cathedral at Rosiem, and was accepted as an unsworn acolyte.
He had thought sometimes, in the years since, that he might have done better to become a musician. Sarténi troubadours were spreading across the world now, playing to nobles in Caileve and Alinaur, even going north to Rheven to perform in great dank castles with the forest all around. There was an endless stream of rumours about singers who had found their way to the beds of the noble ladies who hired them, then slipped away before the husband could return from hunting. There must be young nobles in six countries who had been fathered by musicians, children growing up in nests once visited by a cuckoo.
Several players had retired to small villas by the sea, with servants of their own and much younger wives. It wasn’t a bad life, Irrian supposed, but it had never really been for him, despite the occasional regrets. He liked warm beds too much to spend his life walking the road.
Besides, he had wanted to serve God. It was easy, after all these years of suffering and forbearance, to forget that fact. The hardest thing about patience is the waiting, he thought again. It still wasn’t funny.
Among the unwanted and unloved who made up the unsworn acolytes, many boys were obviously not suited for the clergy. Those who preferred fighting to study, for the most part, bullies who scowled in ferocious puzzlement over simple sums and sweated when told to sign their names. They were winnowed out soon enough, the worst of them to be sent home, but most recruited instead by the Order of the Basilica to swell their gold and white ranks. They might not live long, but they could serve God and perhaps, just possibly, they might win a smattering of glory. Promotion to captain of a company in Tura d’Madai was better than going home in shame, even if it meant you never went home at all. Not alive.
Those who remained were the clever ones. Sometimes uneducated, as Irrian was, for his family had never wasted a tutor on him. All he knew were scraps gleaned from his brothers, when they deigned to notice him at all. But Irrian had found, somewhat to his surprise, that he was able to learn. He was even more surprised to find he wanted to.
By the time he was sixteen, Irrian had read all the books and scrolls in the cathedral. Fourteen of them, all told, including the Canons. One day when the bishop lectured the boys on the proper performance of devotions, Irrian stayed back afterwards to ask some questions. He had enough sense not to raise them in front of the class. The bishop blinked a little at first, then frowned, and finally peered at Irrian from under heavy brows, eyes glittering in calculation.
A month later Irrian was sent to study at the burgeoning Academy in Parrien, and his true journey began.
The All-Church had never really trusted any educational establishment it didn’t control itself, fearful of what might be taught without suitable guidance. Still, the days of book bonfires were over, and if you wanted the best education you went to the Academy. In those days there had been no talk of heresy. Or at least, it was whispered talk, spoken in corners to trusted friends, and not to an unknown youth in an acolyte’s robe. Certainly the rumours didn’t reach high in the ranks of the All-Church: if they had, Irrian would never have been sent to such a nest of unbelievers. But sent he was, and bit by slow bit he began to learn, everything from history to theology and apologetics. And bit by bit he began to hear the whispers, until his quick mind understood what was happening around him.
His reaction was one of interest, rather than shock. Perhaps his new-found education lay behind that: he thought of God now as an abstract, a concept, rather than a physical being. No less real for that, of course, and no less important to the lives of men either. He started to listen in earnest, if carefully, and to dig out scrolls and books from dusty library shelves. Sometimes he asked a question, when he could mask his true interest behind a screen of theological orthodoxy. Even then he was wary, careful not to ask too much, or of the wrong person. If people realised what he was doing they might start to question him, an All-Church acolyte nosing into things better left undisturbed. But he was sure this new form of worship couldn’t have sprung fully-formed from nothing, like a pagan goddess from the head of her father. There had to be a point of origin; more, there must be a reason why people found it attractive. All those whispers concealed a secret, and even at eighteen he knew people would kill to protect secrets.
He was struggling to translate a cartouche from an ancient desert tongue, very late at night, when a sound made him look up.
“The word you need is shrouded,” the woman before his tiny desk said. “Though that’s a literal translation, and rather misses the true meaning. The symbols within a cartouche should be taken together, you know. Perhaps hidden from prying eyes would be better.”
He stared at her in astonishment. “How did you –”
“Know which word you were puzzling over? Ah, now. That is a secret you shall not learn yet, I’m afraid.” She moved a little more into the light, and Irrian realised his midnight visitor was a beautiful woman indeed. He put her age at about forty, but there was no grey in her dark hair, and her skin bore few lines. Startling blue eyes studied him serenely. “You have been looking for me.”
“Looking for you?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Although you may not have realised it. That happens a lot, in fact. Still, you will know me, I think.” She sat gracefully down on a rickety stool, unconcerned by the dust that stirred around her fine green gown. “I am the Lady of the Hidden House.”
Irrian was aware he was staring. He knew that name, of course. It lay at the bottom of the mystery he tracked, and hidden from prying eyes described it perfectly. He’d ploughed through a dozen books without finding more than a mention of it, and even that oblique. Until now he had learned almost nothing of the Hidden House except that it existed. He might never have learned more, except that its mistress had come knocking in the night.
“I’m honoured,” he said.
That made her smile. “I hoped you were as clever as you seem. My weavings told me you would be, but I prefer to see for myself, if I can.”
“Weavings?” he asked, bewildered again.
She told him what she meant. Then she told him more: about himself, about her, about the world he had walked through in ignorance. It was one thing to realise, intellectually, that you knew nothing. It was quite another to be shown it in sharp, undeniable clarity. Being told so by a beautiful woman in a musty library as midnight passed away was something else again.
By the time she rose he was convinced. He was half in love with her too, though he wouldn’t realise that until he found her in his dreams, night after night in the months to come.
“I must go,” she said. “Talk to the history lecturer, a man named Cerain. He knows me, and can teach you.”
“Will I see you again?” he blurted.
“Undoubtedly,” she said. She moved away from his desk, out of the light of his lantern, and Irrian stumbled to his feet in a clatter of quills and fallen papers. By the time the rattling stopped he was two paces from the desk, and he could no longer hear the Lady’s footfalls on the flagstone floor.
He saw her again two months later, and a third time not long before he left Parrien for good. It would not be safe for him to return. His future lay among the cloisters and monasteries of Coristos, behind the towering wall of
the Old City, where – she told him with calm certainty – he would be counted among the great one day. And where, thirty years later, he still remembered the beauty of the woman who had come to him in that dusty room, and dreamed of what might have been if he had dared to kiss her in the light of the lamp.