Chapter 7
Gil drifted slowly to consciousness, with the puzzled awareness that she had been asleep. The smell of incense clogged her nostrils, choking after the things she had smelled in a dream - if it had been a dream. Soft chanting, strophe and antistrophe, mingled in her ears. She was aware that she sat in a kind of octagonal anteroom, shadowed, dark, and empty. Fishing in her clouded recollections, she thought she must have come here to rest after the other members of the procession had returned from the sunset execution.
Or maybe the execution had been only a dream.
She didn't think so. The mud and snow on her boots were fresh and dripping as they melted on the smooth black stone of the floor. She remembered stumbling in the wake of every man, woman, and child in the Keep across the road to the knoll that faced the gates, hearing the wailing of wolves and wind in the forest and the solitary weeping of the three or four women who would mourn Bendle Stooft and Parscino Pral.
Like a counterpoint to that melody, she'd heard the muttering in the crowds all around. 'Good time, too. When we refugeed from Gae to Karst, the old skinflint charged me a penny for a loaf of bread - a whole penny! And me with six kids starving and no place to lay our heads!' 'Penny for bread?' A man laughed bitterly. 'Him and Pral charged me six coppers for a bit of space on the floor of a wash-house, to spend the night in shelter. I lost my wife that night. For all of me, that Guard could have taken his hands and head, as well as his sodding foot.'
Support your local Guards, Gil thought, exhausted, and raised her head to look around her. Memory came dearer now. She'd been with Janus and Melantrys. Alwir had asked to speak with them up in the Royal Sector. She'd followed them, her vision
greying, as far as the Church and then had fallen behind. Let Janus deal with him, she'd thought. I'm not going to climb the goddam steps on his say-so.
She saw now that the anteroom had been built like a turret against the back wall of the Aisle long after the Keep's original construction as an entrance-hall to the sanctuary itself. To Gil's historian's eye, this type of excrescence denoted some period of overcrowding in the Keep's history, the same overcrowding that had caused the original passageways and cells to proliferate and tangle so alarmingly. The anteroom contained little but a few carved stone benches and an ikonlike painting of an unfamiliar saint being nibbled to death by snakes. On the far wall, a doorway led into the sanctuary itself.
Somewhere a door opened. Chanting drifted from the sanctuary, winding echoes of the monks' voices praising God in an archaic tongue. To Gil it was weirdly familiar, a confusing mirror of her medieval studies, a bizarre reminder of the Void that she had crossed to come here, as perhaps others had also done. The Scriptures Govannin had read in the place of execution had been familiar, oppressing her with the sense of dealing on two planes of reality.
The image of Govannin returned to her, silhouetted against the yellow sunset sky. Like a dark, hard heelstone between the massive pylons of the pillars, she had stood in her billowing cloak; the pillars lay like a gun-sight between the gates of the Keep and the dark notch of Sarda Pass, and Govannin's cruciform arms had formed bony crosshairs, sighting on the small, baleful eye of the sinking sun. Parscino Pral had hung limply in his chains on one pillar, half-dead already with shock and loss of blood. Bendle Stooft had cried and whimpered and pleaded throughout the Bishop's prayers. All around them, the men and women of the Keep had stood like a dark lake of watching eyes. On the other side of the knoll, that silent company had been joined by a second, smaller group of refugees, some two thousand ragged men, women, and hungry children come in silence to observe the justice of the Keep.
Snow winds had whipped across the Vale. The chains had clanked on the pillars, and the keys had rattled in Janus' hands. Alwir read out the charges in his trained, powerful voice, and Govannin spoke her prayers, formally requesting the Lord to forgive these men their sin, but implying by her tone of voice that it was all the same to her if He did not. Then, as the sun vanished into the bruised darkness of the banks of clouds, they had all turned their backs on the doomed men and returned to the Keep as the swift winter twilight enfolded the land.
Gil had a hazy memory of Maia of Thran, leaning on his staff as he limped up the Keep steps between Alwir, Govannin, and Minalde. She did not think she had seen anyone take the muddy downward road back to the Tall Gates.
But that, too, might have been a dream.
Restless with fever, Gil got to her feet and walked to the sanctuary door. From its shadows, she looked into the enormous cell, double the normal height, with a floor space, if cleared, of possibly ten thousand square feet, although Gil's judgement of such things had never been very good. That whole shadowy vastness was lighted by only three candles, burning on the bare stone slab of the central altar; by their spare, small light, the monstrous chamber dissolved itself into a chaos of climbing latticework. Pillars, galleries, and balconies hung suspended one above the other like stone lace, with miniature chapels balanced in fantastic hanging turrets and irregularly shaped platforms winding upward in stair-step spirals; over all of it brooded inanimate armies of demons, saints, angels, animals, and monsters peering from jungles of carved tracery. In the intense shadows, not a soul was visible, but Gil could hear them chanting, chapel answering chapel, throughout that eerie gloom.
She had heard it before, on the road down from Karst -blessings and requiems, vespers and matins. Where did the roots feed across the Void, she wondered, and in which direction? What was the evolution of ideas? Straight transfer or the doubled branches of an archetypical Platonic root? Or something else, something wholly inconceivable? She
wondered about that saint in the anteroom, whose curiously elipsoid eyes held an expression of startlement rather than pain. Was there a Christian saint who had ended his days to give pagan vipers their elevenses?
It was all scholars' games, she knew, and would not alter one whit the threat of the Dark, or the inevitable clash between Alwir, Govannin, and the Archmage. But Gil was a scholar, and no amount of training with the Guards, no matter how many men she killed or what she felt about it, would change that. It was what no one, with the exception of Ingold, had ever understood about her - her delight in knowledge for its own sake, in the Holmesian reconstruction of long-vanished events, and her nosing quest for the uttermost roots of the world.
'Gil- Shalos.'
She swung around, startled. Through the haze of her delirium, backed by the lights of the antechamber, Bishop Govannin appeared like an angel in a fever drearn, sexless and pitiless in the blood-scarlet of her episcopal robes, a creature of inhuman beauty, intelligence, and loyalty to her God. But her voice was a dry, woman's voice. 'You are not well?' she asked slowly. 'At the tribunal you seemed ill, and now it looks not to be going better.'
The wound's a little feverish, is all,' Gil excused herself. 'I'll get over it in a day or so.'
The long, bony fingers indicated, without touching, the slings and strapping that bound Gil's shoulder. 'More than that, I fear,' she said. 'Shoulders can be a bad business.'
Beyond them in the holy place, a fresh wave of chanting rose - for the soul, Gil presumed, of Bendle Stooft. Beside her, the Bishop raised her head, listening with a critical ear. In the golden fog of the lamplight, Gil considered that face, the high, intelligent brow shadowing a deep fanatic's eyes, the stubbornness that scarred cheeks and lips like dueling cuts. Fine, small ears, dainty as shells, ornamented the smoothness of the bald pate where it ran into the old, wrinkled power of the