“Don’t overdo it, Nimmy,” said the cardinal in Churchspeak.
“Horse for horse!” said the bolder of the two. “You take this horse, Great Man. We even.”
Nimmy ignored him and spoke again to the man he recognized. “You! It was Holy Madness himself, now Lord of the Hordes, that stopped you from raping Ædrea last year near Shard’s place, not far from here.”
The outlaw shrugged but seemed suddenly meek.
Brownpony picked himself up out of the bedroll and went to inspect the scruffy mustang. Having walked around the little mare, he faced them and said sternly in Wilddog, “She belongs to the Høngin Fujæ Vurn. You dare to violate a mare of the Wild Horse Woman! Lord Ösle Høngan Chür would have you eviscerated and fed to the dogs. Wooshin, release the animal at once.”
The Axe flipped his sword twice, once to slice the hackamore that made her fast to the limb, the second time to swat her behind with the flat of the blade. The mustang snorted, kicked, and clattered away into the night. Since Gai-See had not taken an extra mount on his gallop through Scarecrow Alley, they still had an extra horse per man, but neither Brownpony nor his aides were ready to let the matter lie.
“Who is your master?” the cardinal asked.
“His name is Mounts-Everybody.”
“How far is his camp from here?”
“Almost a day’s ride, Great Man.”
“How many men in your band?”
The outlaw seemed to be counting on mental fingers for a moment. “Thirty-seven, I think.”
“And women? Children?”
“Yesterday there were five captives. Today maybe more, maybe less.”
“And how many bands like yours?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes we encounter other no-family people. Sometimes we fight, sometimes we join together. There are many bachelors along the fringes of the Wilddog range, and to the south along the Nady Ann.”
“Do you ever fight or rob farmers?”
“It is not a wise policy.”
“Does it happen?”
“Sometimes.”
“Would you like to be paid for fighting farmers?”
The captives looked at each other and shifted uncomfortably. Brownpony elaborated:
“There is a war between the Grasshopper and the Hannegan’s farmers.”
“We know, but we are at war with both.”
“But suppose the Grasshopper accepted you as allies?”
“That they would never do, Great Man.”
“Did the monk here tell you that I am the Christian shaman to all the hordes?”
“We don’t know what that means.”
“It means,” said Blacktooth, “that the word of His Eminence has power with all three hordes.”
“Would you fight against the Hannegan under Demon Light?”
“There is no possibility.”
“What about a Jackrabbit sharf?”
The idea of a Jackrabbit sharf brought roaring laughter from the bound men.
“Let the cowards go,” Brownpony ordered. “You whimpering wild puppies go tell your Mounts-Everybody to come and see me in Valana, unless he’s a coward, and bring back the horse you stole. Otherwise, you will be driven south of the Nady Ann and east of the Bay Ghost. The Hannegan will know what to do with you. Now go.”
Easter arrived before they reached Valana. Brownpony concelebrated the Mass of the Resurrection in a wayside Church with a circuit-riding mission priest who stumbled through the liturgy, too frightened by high rank to get anything quite right.
Some days later a fast rider from Pobla, where they had spent the night, brought word of their coming to Valana, and Sorely Cardinal Nauwhat and the SEEC guard Elkin were waiting for them at the Venison House Tavern, where the cardinal had entertained Kindly Light the previous year. It was close to sundown, so they ordered dinner. The two prelates with their assistants sat together, while Wooshin and the Yellow Guard took an adjacent table. Sorely Nauwhat was a fast talker, and he had a lot to explain.
Before submitting his resignation, which Nauwhat, like Brownpony, regarded as revocable if not wholly invalid, Pope Amen had broken with a recent tradition and created new cardinals, as many as forty-nine of them, and had been induced to take the almost unprecedented action of stripping forty-nine others of their cardinalates. This shocked Brownpony, but it made the attempt at a conclave understandable, if not legal.
Amen Specklebird, who insisted that his resignation had been duly submitted to the Curia, had retired to his former residence, the old building which seemed to grow out of the side of a mountain and which had been at one time a root cellar, and before that a cave whose deeper recesses had never been explored, and which the old man had reopened “to let the mountain spirits come and go.” Here the cardinals of the Curia came to consult him, to scold and beseech him, to no avail.
And there was news from Texark. Although the text of what purported to be Pope Amen’s resignation had appeared there, by telegraph, the original signed copy of the document, if it existed, could not be found in Valana or anywhere else. One enterprising forger in the Empire’s capital sold a clever counterfeit of the original to the Archdiocese of Texark for ten thousand pios, a sum paid after a police expert affirmed that the handwriting was that of Amen the Antipope. But afterward, another expert showed that the document contained egregious errors of the kind often occurring during transmission of text by a telegraph operator, including several pure operating codes, such as ZMF, meaning “break, more follows.” The forger escaped into Jackrabbit country and was never seen again.
“As I told you, the Pope refuses to live in the palace,” said Nauwhat, “and he has returned to his old home. He said Easter Mass at home, not at John-in-Exile. He will see anyone who comes to him, and cheerfully submits to any indignity. He has signed blank bulls, perhaps by the dozen. He will press his seal of approval into the wax of almost anything. I don’t know if he always reads it first. Did he really appoint all these new cardinals, or was it done for him? I should know, but I don’t Because he found out about some guns at SEEC, and he thinks I am responsible.”
“Well, I must confess to him on that—”
“No, don’t do it. I am responsible now. His actions are those of a man who has lost his bearings, if not his sanity, but not his good humor. You, Elia, he speaks of constantly, and he will rejoice that you have returned. You must go to see him tomorrow. You and Brother Blacktooth as well.”
“Of course. But what are the agenda, if not weapons?”
“It was he who placed your name in nomination as Pope. His only agendum, probably, will be to submit to you as Pontiff.”
“I must set him straight on that.”
“Well, you can try. But besides the new cardinals, the College is coming into town again in numbers. And some from the East are bringing the military officers and envoys you invited. They pass for bodyguards.”
“In response to the same summons I got? Who was it wrote that foul thing?”
“Domidomi Cardinal Hoydok.”
“Do I know him?”
“No. He’s one of the new ones. He’s from Texark, but Benefez excommunicated him for supporting Pope Amen, so the Pope created him cardinal. He is a civil lawyer, not a priest.”
“How are the Easterners getting here?” Brownpony asked.
“Mostly through the Iowa country. There, the farmers seem to get along better with the Grasshopper. They trade a lot. Only a few Texark patrols go north of the Misery River, and they wouldn’t stop a cardinal there, even if they knew he was coming to conclave.”