Afterward, as the various processions and choirs retired and the cathedral began to empty, the new archbishop paused on the cathedral steps to give his blessing to the cheering crowd. The king and his party lingered near the sanctuary to meet a few of the lesser participants whose efforts normally went unrecognized. In the aftermath of a religious ceremony, the risk seemed slight. Brion found that he enjoyed meeting his subjects, who warmed immediately to the gracious and personable youth who had become their king. As the royal party began moving toward the nave, Duke Richard dispatched Jamyl into the galleries to fetch Kenneth down, for they were expected back in the refectory momentarily for a meal with the new archbishop and his clergy.
«You can also tell him to stand down the lancers», Richard told him. «I’m sure they’re ready for a hot meal».
Crossing into the north transept, where he had last caught sight of Kenneth lurking in the gallery above, Jamyl took a shortcut he had learned the night before, worming his way up one of the intramural turnpike stairs, then sidling along a narrow passage that a full-grown man would have found difficult to navigate, especially if he were armed; but Jamyl bore only a dagger on his belt. As he came out on one of the clerestory walks, he spotted Kenneth not far ahead and hailed him.
Kenneth had already anticipated the order to dismiss the lancers, so Jamyl joined him as they headed back toward the semicircular walkway that skirted the apse, still high above the cathedral floor, intending to pick up men as they went. Jamyl was in the lead, and it was he who literally stumbled over the first sign that all was not as placid as it seemed: the dead body of one of Brion’s lancer archers.
«Dear God, he is here!» he breathed, one hand flying to the hilt of his squire’s dagger even as he recovered his footing and crouched lower, his other hand briefly brushing the dead man’s forehead, probing with his powers as his eyes scanned frantically ahead and all around. Behind him, Kenneth’s sharp exclamation of query focused the imperative to take immediate action. But though he was still weeks shy of his sixteenth birthday, Jamyl Arilan rose to the challenge, making the split-second decision of a man and a Deryni, to take a massive gamble with Lord Kenneth Morgan and compel his cooperation by the force of his will, because there was no time to ask permission.
Kenneth!
Jamyl’s mental shout had its intended effect. Kenneth, in the process of crouching and craning to peer past Jamyl, immediately looked at Jamyl instead — and was brought up short by the squire’s sharp, blue-violet gaze. He overbalanced and sat down hard, hitting the back of his head against the side of the wall. The pain was sufficient to distract him just enough that he did not think to avoid the hand that darted out to grasp the side of his neck. Nor was he able to evade the accompanying probe that surged across the link of flesh to thrust into his mind.
For Kenneth, whose previous experience of Deryni powers had been limited to the tender ministrations of his wife, and a few very specific and largely superficial interactions with the late king, Jamyl’s touch was surgical and not altogether gentle, clashing against primitive shields that Kenneth had not known he possessed, and which Jamyl certainly had not expected.
Nor had he expected that Kenneth would be able to resist at all, though he knew that, if he chose, he could simply rip through the human lord’s puny defenses and do what he liked. But that stark realization brought Jamyl immediately to his senses, for mind-ripping the loyal Kenneth Morgan, betraying his trust, was unthinkable.
At once he moderated his probe, though still he pressed for compliance, this time calming and reassuring, at once explaining and begging forgiveness, all in an instant.
Do not resist me, I beg of you! This is part of a plot to kill the king, Jamyl sent, the work of a man called Zachris Pomeroy. He sent the image of a dark-haired man with dark eyes into Kenneth’s mind. He serves the cause of Prince Hogan, the Festillic Pretender! He shifted to verbal speech as it became clear that he was causing hurt to the one man whose assistance he most needed at this moment.
«Please! I do not mean to hurt you, but hear me out!» he gasped. «You must help me! He has come to kill the king if he can, but I may not tell you how I know this! I am loyal, I swear to you! Trust me! Help me! Even now, the king may be in mortal danger!»
Kenneth staggered as Jamyl released him, breath rasping ragged in his throat, but it never occurred to him to refuse what the young Deryni begged, implored — for Deryni, Jamyl surely was, and no less bound to the king’s service than Kenneth himself. Of that, he was certain! Had he taken time to analyze, stark reason would have shrieked that it was folly to accept such revelation and direction at face-value, forced upon him by a Deryni, but his heart sensed that Jamyl Arilan was true, and that the king’s life might very well depend upon their swift action.
Scrambling to his feet, eyes anxiously searching the shadows ahead — and already refining Jamyl’s plan — Kenneth gestured urgently for Jamyl to go back the way they had come, himself snatching up the bow and an arrow from the dead lancer’s hands and taking off in the direction he and Jamyl had been headed. He fumbled to nock the arrow by feel as he ran, for Jamyl had given him the face of the man he was now seeking — a man who would surely kill the king if he could — and he knew he would have but an instant to act, if he found him.
He nearly ran full-tilt into the next pair, sheltering in the shadow of a galleried walkway at the angle of the transept crossing. They were Brion’s own lancers, but they had arrows nocked to bowstrings as they peered down dispassionately at the king and Duke Richard, who were deep in conversation with Bishop Faxon Howard, paying no mind as they strolled into the transept crossing far below.
One of the men was already in mid-draw; Kenneth stopped him with an arrow in his heart, before he could let fly, then launched himself at the other man, wildly flailing with the bow before him, shouldering him hard enough to send him over the low parapet that ran along the clerestory walk. Oddly, the man let out nary a sound as he fell to his death, only narrowly missing a startled monk, whose tray of empty cruets clattered to the floor with a discordant crash of chiming metal and shattering glass as he stumbled backward in alarm and looked up.
«What the devil?» Richard cried out, instinctively yanking Brion back from the crumpled form as he and the king also looked up.
Discarding his now-useless bow, Kenneth peered over the parapet only long enough to be certain that neither prince had been hit, then gestured urgently for them to be away.
«There’s treachery afoot! Some of our men are compromised! Get him to safety!»
He did not wait to see what they did; only pelted onward to the end of the gallery — he could see no one there — then tried to squeeze through the narrow doorway of a tight turnpike stair that spiraled downward within one of the columns that supported the transept crossing. He had to detach his sheathed sword from its hangers and hug it close along his body to get through, and it hampered him on the way down, but he knew he had to get to the king, to protect him from his own men as well as Zachris Pomeroy; for the Deryni assassin had managed to infiltrate the cathedral, probably inserting some of his own men into the ranks of Brion’s lancers, and he was able to seize men’s minds, was subverting more of the lancers, one by one. Any one of them could be potential regicides.
Emerging to sounds of a vigorous scuffle at the bottom of the stair, he found Richard grappling with another of the lancers, who was struggling violently to wrench free — almost certainly, another of Pomeroy’s unwilling conquests, for Kenneth knew the man to be loyal.