Before Corvany could speak, a sputtering archbishop from the delta of the Great River, now part of the Texark Empire, arose in a huff to defend the speaker’s thesis concerning the protective role of past Hannegans in the Midwest, and to deplore the interruptions. He pointed a finger toward the balcony and began to say something about Brownpony, but the Dean of the Sacred College arose and roared, “God’s peace! God’s peace!”
The seminar was about to become a verbal melee, and few in the audience noticed the student who wandered down the center aisle. He was staggering slightly. Aberlott suddenly clutched Blacktooth’s arm and pointed. The man in the aisle was Jæsis, uncombed and un-shaved, his face livid but with red blotches. He stopped in the middle of the cardinals’ section and pulled something out of his half-buttoned cassock. He croaked Yordin’s name and a curse. There was an explosion and a burst of smoke. Thon Yordin put his hand to his chest, looked down, but there was no blood. Instead, one of the men seated behind the podium fell from his chair. It was the Father General of the Order of Saint Ignatz himself who lay bleeding. The assailant in the aisle waved a Texark cavalry pistol aloft, yelled again at Thon Yordin, fired the other barrel toward the ceiling, and collapsed in the aisle. The audience was on its feet and roaring.
“Assassin! Texark assassin! Hannegan’s agents!”
Blacktooth looked around for the source of this irrational voice, but saw only a fist waving in the surging crowd.
Men swarmed over the fallen student, and from the platform came cries for a physician. Blacktooth and Aberlott were seized by police as they hurried out of the building.
There followed eight hours of questioning at the Valana police barracks, but Cardinal Brownpony quickly appeared on their behalf. There had been no brutality. The police learned from the college that Jæsis was from Texark, had attended Thon Yordin’s classes at the university there, had failed his tests and then transferred to Saint Ston’s. A physician stated that even now he was delirious with fever. The police released Blacktooth and Aberlott just past midnight; they walked home by the light of the Pascal moon. Jæsis died that night in custody.
While the city slept, the Reverend Urik Thon Yordin sent a rider galloping toward the telegraph terminal at the final outpost on the road to the Province. The message he carried was addressed to Urion Cardinal Benefez and, with a copy to the Emperor, would reach Hannegan City by Good Friday’s sunrise:
FATHER CORVANY WAS KILLED TODAY BY A STUDENT ROOMMATE OF BROWNPONY’S NOMAD SECRETARY. THE SECRETARY WAS QUESTIONED BUT RELEASED AFTER BROWNPONY INTERVENED. KILLER DIED IN POLICE CUSTODY. DETAILS FOLLOW. I AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.
CHAPTER 10
Let a man consider that God is
always looking at him from heaven,
that his actions are everywhere visible
to the divine eyes and are I constantly
being reported to God by the Angels.
IN VALANA ON SUNDAY THE 17TH OF APRIL 3244, Blacktooth arose before dawn and watched the moon, now past full, settle behind the mountains, then washed his teeth with ashes and boiled water, relieved himself in the outhouse, got dressed, and then spent in prayer the short time it took for the sun to come up. Without eating anything prior to receiving the Eucharist, he left the house. On the way to Mass in the early-morning chill, he sensed someone following him. Turning, he saw only a man talking to an open window a stone’s throw away, and someone wandering in the other direction. The window’s occupant, if any, was not visible. The man talking to the window was the same man Blacktooth had seen begging on the same street the day before Jæsis shot Corvany. Probably a denizen of the neighborhood. The feeling of being followed was an illusion caused by shame, the monk decided. He kept walking toward the Cathedral of Saint John-in-Exile. It was Easter morning.
With hundreds of cardinals participating, the Mass of the Resurrection was spectacular in the Pope’s own Church, even without a pope. Blacktooth had come early enough to be assigned a spot to stand with room enough to kneel, but most latecomers waited in crowds outside the nave and outside the cathedral itself. Getting out of the building after Mass was worse than getting in, because many of those pouring outside paused to talk to acquaintances and blocked the way. It was a perfect situation for murder. Blacktooth felt the dagger pierce his side as the arm holding it darted between two other worshipers, who immediately fell back in dismay. Blacktooth clutched his side and faced his attacker. It was the man who talked to empty windows, the beggar. Feeling people moving back, he looked around. There were three of them, dirty and shabbily dressed, two with knives, one with a chain. They fought there on the great ascent of cathedral steps which had no landings, and two of them were thrown sprawling to the bottom by a victim with unexpected skills. Someone was screaming for the constable, others for the Papal Guard. The original attacker, the beggar, now cut the monk’s face and might have gone on to kill him, but the blast of a constable’s horn sent the three of them fleeing.
His wounds were cleaned and dressed at the police station, and he was interrogated by an irritable lieutenant who insisted on believing that he, Jæsis, Aberlott, and Crumily were conspirators in some larger scheme. Blacktooth’s relationship with the cardinal provided him with a secure identity in which he dared feel immune to intimidation in the face of anything short of violence. He told the lieutenant what he needed to know and tried to ignore what he wanted to know, based on a wrong assumption.
“No common hoodlums would try to rob a poor monk.”
“They weren’t out to rob me, just kill me.”
“Exactly! and why? They must have some reason to hate you.”
“Well, they seemed to be common hoodlums, they had no reason to hate me, so they must have been hired.”
“By whom, do you think?” asked the officer.
“By some fool who thinks Jæsis planned on killing Father Corvany, and that I was involved.”
The lieutenant, who apparently thought the same thing, glowered at him and left the room for several minutes. Blacktooth prayed to Saint Leibowitz. When the lieutenant came back, his manner had changed.
“You will have to be on guard against another attempt. Stay with people you know. Stay home at night. Stay away from crowds like this morning’s. Come outside my office and sit on the bench here. Your employer will be here soon.”
“His Eminence? For me?”
“For himself. There was an attempt on his life too. Here, his own man can tell you.”
Wooshin had emerged from another interrogation room. He sat beside Blacktooth and briefly described the attack on Brownpony by two strangers armed with handguns. Brownpony was unharmed, and the attackers were dead. The police found one beheaded corpse on the scene, and a severed arm with a gun still in hand. The armless assassin had been found bleeding to death in an alley. If he said anything before he died to the constable who found him, the police were keeping it to themselves. There was no need to ask how they died. Soon an officer brought Wooshin his swords. They had been wiped, but were not quite clean of dried blood. The Axe frowned but sheathed them without complaint. Soon Brownpony emerged, and after an inquiry about Blacktooth’s wounds, they all walked together back to the Secretariat with two armed men following at a respectful distance.