“Here.”
Wooshin tried to hand him the papal tiara, but Brownpony shook his head, so the Yellow Warrior placed it in the ashes at the foot of the throne. It was getting dark. Blacktooth had no difficulty finding a live ember with which to light a few candles. Set behind the throne, they hardly illuminated anything except the face of the Virgin, and that only barely.
Brownpony’s eyes were shut as if in prayer, and Blacktooth was glad. Looking into them had been like looking in the window of a burning house.
Wooshin squatted beside the throne of Saint Peter, kneeling back on his heels, balanced on the scabbard of his long sword he still wore at his side. Though limber, he was also, Blacktooth saw, an old man. He moved without joy or ease.
The truce the fire had created was ended. Outside in the street Blacktooth saw a dog chase away a buzzard, to pull at a blackened body; then it was chased away in turn by a pig. His old friend? Another dog stopped at the huge open door and looked into the basilica in the dying light. It sniffed the smoky air, pissed on the bronze door, and trotted off into the gathering darkness.
A riderless horse wandered past, part of a severed human leg hanging from the stirrup.
“Glory to God in the highest.” It was the weak, tired voice of Elia Amen II Papa Brownpony, speaking as if Job’s wife had told him to curse God and die, and he was wearily complying. “I think I hear the Texark cavalry coming. Blacktooth, do be sensible and run for your life.”
“It was only a riderless horse,” Blacktooth said. But he cocked his ears and heard something in the distance. He could feel it as much as hear it: a low, indistinct rumbling that might have been faraway thunder.
“There’s nothing to keep them out of the city now,” Wooshin said.
“But you, m’Lord—” Blacktooth was confused. “Where will you go?”
If Brownpony heard him he gave no sign. Blacktooth looked at the statue of the Holy Virgin behind the throne of Saint Peter’s. She stuck out her tongue. It was black, and forked.
The fever’s coming back, Blacktooth thought. He looked around for Specklebird and Ædrea, the companions of his delirium, but they were nowhere to be seen.
Brownpony turned and looked up at the Virgin. His eyes grew bright. “So it’s you, after all.”
“Huh?” Blacktooth and Wooshin both asked at once.
“Mother, Mother of the night and the mares of night, the dreams.”
“M’Lord?” Blacktooth took the Pope’s arm.
“Look! Look at her!” Brownpony jerked his arm loose and pointed at the Virgin. The dark spot crawled out of her lower lip.
“A-a w-worm,” Blacktooth stuttered.
“The Night Hag! My real Mother!” Brownpony said. “Blacktooth, escape while there’s time. Loyalty to me stops here. Obey me: go!”
Blacktooth stepped back. “Why should I start keeping my vows by obeying you now?”
Brownpony laughed weakly, but repeated: “Go. Go be a hermit and teach those who come to you about God. Be yourself. That is His calling to you.”
Faintly Blacktooth could hear distant hoofbeats, getting louder.
“Go!”
Wooshin was still hunkered down beside the throne, his narrow eyes closed as if in prayer. Behind the throne the Virgin’s face glowed in the flickering candlelight. Blacktooth walked under her, circling slowly toward the still-standing back wall of the cathedral. There was definitely a worm on her lip. Or a tongue that moved. Forked, black. Maybe it was a shadow from a candle. Ora pro nobis nunc et in hora mortis nostrae!
There was a door in the back. Halfway there, Blacktooth heard a sharp hissssss like an intake of breath. He recognized the sound of Wooshin’s sword being drawn from its scabbard. Then he heard the murmur of Latin. To Blacktooth’s surprise, this least orthodox of Popes was reciting the creed. In spite of himself, Blacktooth stopped and listened. It began as the creed of Nicaea: “I believe in one God, the almighty Father, maker of the earth and the sky, and of all things seen and unseen, and in one Lord Christ Jesus…” but before Brownpony was done, the creed of Athanasius crept in and took over, saying, “and in One Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church outside of which there is neither salvation nor remission of sins—unam sanctam Ecclesiam Romanum etiam Apostolicam, extra quam neque salus est neque remissio peccatorum—”
“Now?” It was the voice of the Axe.
Blacktooth paused, afraid to look around, and heard the rustle of silk. There was a faint affirmative grunt as Elia Brownpony, Amen II, fell to his knees at the foot of the throne. The whisper of the sword cutting the air ended in the chunk of flesh and bone, and the thump of the head, and the splashing of gushing fluid on the littered floor.
Blacktooth ran toward the exit as fast as he could. He had almost reached the doorway when Wooshin’s quavering voice called after him. “Help me, before you go, please!”
He stopped again, and turned this time. He saw Axe sitting on the floor beside the corpse. Wooshin had taken out his other sword, the short one, and held it pressed against his belly. While he pressed slowly with one hand, with the other he picked up the bloodstained long sword from the floor, and tossed it toward the monk. It fell short, ringing like a bell on the stone floor.
Blacktooth stepped over it, shaking his head. With long steps he strode to the warrior’s side. “No!” he said fiercely. “Would you now abandon your master?”
Wooshin looked at the heap of bloody silk beside him, glared up at Blacktooth, and pressed the blade into his belly until the blood came. He groaned and stopped and looked up at Blacktooth again, pleading.
Nimmy picked up the long sword. But instead of lifting it for a strike, he leaned on it as if it were a cane. “Your master’s enemy still lives,” he said. “Cut open your belly if you want to, Wooshin, but I want to hear you say ‘Long live Filpeo Harq!’ before I help you die.”
Wooshin removed the blade from his flesh, and said something in a strange tongue, clearly a curse. Blacktooth knelt down and looked at the wound. It was bleeding profusely, but it seemed not to have penetrated far, if at all, into the abdominal cavity. He helped the aged warrior to his feet, then knelt down and tore off a piece of the Pope’s white silk cassock. He gave it to Axe to hold against his wound.
Wooshin picked up Brownpony’s head and placed it next to his body; then he covered both with the jail blanket, perhaps forgetting that it was Blacktooth’s.
“Shouldn’t we bury him?”
Wooshin shook his head. “This was the way he wanted it. ‘Leave me for the Burregan, the Buzzard of Battle.’”
“His bride,” said Blacktooth. He looked for the Night Hag, but she was gone. The Virgin was back, with her glowing baby and gentle smile. Looking down at Brownpony, dead under the blanket, a still form, Blacktooth felt strangely unmoved. So much of his life since leaving the abbey had been in service to this worldly man. But who or what was Brownpony in service to? Do any of us know, ultimately, what it is we serve? Blacktooth wondered. Then he felt immediately ashamed. Was he not a brother of the Albertian Order of Saint Leibowitz? Why had he wanted so long to be released from his vows, if the vows meant nothing?
The hoofbeats were closer now, rattling in the square outside the front of the cathedral, then on the low, wide steps. For a moment Blacktooth thought of stepping out into the street and offering himself up for capture. Then would he be given the pills he needed; and perhaps the death.
But no. Wooshin recovered and sheathed his long sword. Blacktooth followed him out the back door of the cathedral. There was nothing more in Saint Peter’s to do. The dogs were wandering back into the city, smelling new blood and death. Where was it written? And the dogs ate Jezebel in the field of Jezrahel…