“It’s not about Ædrea. Who do you see here besides your eminent brethren?”
“Why, I see an unhappy monk, and three of my personal guards.”
“Why not four of your personal guards, Holy Father?”
“Oh. I did not know that you and Gai-See were close. It is unfortunate.”
“We were not close at all, and your betrayal is worse than unfortunate.”
Brownpony frowned as if not quite believing his ears.
“I see it is possible for a Pope to do evil.”
Against these insulting words to the master, swords were drawn.
Nimmy turned his back on the Pope and faced his companions. “If your master wills my death, cowards, why do you hesitate? Hit!”
Immediately he turned to Brownpony again. “Can’t you see what you’ve done? Right here before you, they’re ready to do what Gai-See did. Except that Gai-See thought he was right and they know they are wrong. And Your Holiness accepts this kind of loyalty in good conscience?”
Brownpony was watching his former Nomadic secretary in apparent fascination. Blacktooth heard one sword return to its sheath. That would be Foreman Jing, he guessed. Wooshin would kill him without the Pope’s nod if he thought the Pope’s best interest would be served by the killing.
“Blacktooth, you were always a quick study, but this is a new role, isn’t it?”
“Holy Father, as a Catholic, I have to believe that what you bind on Earth is bound also in Heaven, and I have to believe that when you are speaking about faith and morals, the Holy Ghost prevents you from speaking any error.”
“You have to believe, but do you?”
“I have a question. Is a declaration of war an assertion about faith and morals? Ever? Even if you call it a holy war? Father Suarez taught—and he was extending Saint Augustine’s teaching—that a war to convert the heathen can never be just. Can a war against heretical Christians be holy, if a war against the heathen is unjust?”
“The war is against neither heathens nor heretical Christians. It is against a tyrant who usurps the apostolic power and oppresses the whole world.”
“But it’s heathens and Christians who are killed, while the tyrant still lives and the apostle is still in power.”
Brownpony seemed to swear under his breath for a moment, then recovered. “You wrote me that you killed a man in battle, Nimmy. Is that what’s wrong with you now?”
Blacktooth nodded and spoke slowly. “The man in a Texark uniform was a child of yours, Holiness: a glep from the Valley. I meant to miss him. My aim was bad, and I hit him in the belly. What he wanted from me then was a bullet in the brain, but I cut his throat instead, because a sergeant was watching. Yes, I think that is what’s wrong with me, Holy Father. Eltür Bråm, because I had already killed, would have made me a Nomad warrior with only the initiation, without the ordeal of battle. Then they would stop calling me ‘Nimmy,’ he said, and stop laughing about it. I don’t mind the name or the laughter. I want never to kill again. But I don’t want to see Gai-See punished. He saw Hadala as a fugitive from your commands. He couldn’t arrest him or Gleaver; he did what he thought was necessary.”
“He had no license from me.”
“You accepted his services as a warrior. Did you really withhold from him the license that he assumed was his?”
Pope Amen frowned and called out for everyone but Blacktooth and one guard to leave the room. It was the guard with the sore stomach who stayed, and who sealed the doors after the others were outside.
“Go on, finish what you have to say.”
Blacktooth looked around to make sure Cardinal Linkono was gone. “For one thing, Gai-See is a member of a religious order, and—”
“I see,” Brownpony interrupted. “I claimed jurisdiction in Ædrea’s case, why not in Gai-See’s? Because no pope has yet recognized the Order to which Ri’s men say they belong, that’s why. I meant to do it sooner or later, but I can’t do it just to free Gai-See. It’s too transparent. But go on, if you have more to say.”
“I cannot, Your Holiness, speak to the Vicar of Christ on Earth as freely as I did to my former employer, the Secretary for Extraordinary Ecclesiastic Concerns. I don’t know the Vicar of Christ.”
“It seems to me you’ve been speaking freely enough. But suppose I just take off my zucchetto and tell you that the Vicar of Christ has taken the day off. I am still Elia Brownpony—the bastard son of a lesbian nomad and a Texark rapist. So, Nyinden, farmboy Nomad, sometime monk, sometime lover, speak your mind. I may throw you out, but I won’t throw you in a dungeon.”
“Then release Gai-See from a dungeon.”
“I didn’t imprison Gai-See. Cardinal Linkono did.”
“Without your permission?”
“You don’t understand the situation here, Blacktooth. We are the guests of the city. I won’t say we’re captives here—until I try to return to Valana and see if they let me go. Cardinal Linkono informed me of Gai-See’s arrest. Chuntar Hadala played bishop to these people, because he was bishop to the Valley whence they came. Slojon and everybody here knows that I sent men to arrest Hadala, and, well—”
“Oh. So when Gai-See killed him, they thought you ordered the execution.”
“Not yet, but they will certainly suspect it if I secure his release now. He killed a bishop, and prince of the Church. Cardinal Hadala was popular here.”
“I was there when it happened, Holy Father. All along, Gleaver and his officers had been shooting those of us who wavered or held back. In that light, Gai-See shot in self-defense and the defense of us all. But first he crawled up to me under fire. He asked if it was true that Cardinal Hadala was defying your orders, and betraying you. I told him it was so. I knew what he might do when I told him that, and I hoped he would do it. So I am the one who sentenced the cardinal to death. Have them arrest me too, Holy Father.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Brownpony said darkly, and beckoned to the guard and breathed a quiet order. The guard with the sore stomach seized Blacktooth’s arm, led him straight to jail, and put him in Gai-See’s cell. Gai-See embraced him. During the embrace, the guard reached through the bars and punched Blacktooth hard in the kidney with the butt of the halberd.
“I’ll be back for you soon,” he said with a sweet grin.
Gai-See was not alone in jail. Two men who claimed to be political refugees from the Empire and who now sought asylum in New Jerusalem were imprisoned there until their claims were thoroughly investigated. One was Urik Thon Yordin, S.I., the Ignatzian who was also a professor of history at the secular university at Texark, and whom Brownpony had suspected of hiring the thugs who tried to kill them on Easter before the last conclave. How desperate the man must be to escape Texark, that he should come here for asylum! He glanced at Blacktooth once, but neglected to recognize him.
The other man was Torrildo.
“Blacktooth, my God! You can’t imagine what that beast Benefez did to me!”
Nimmy sat down on Gai-See’s bed and fell to questioning the warrior. He tried to ignore Torrildo’s confession of the intimately brutal sins the Archbishop of Texark had perpetrated upon his person.
According to Gai-See, Yordin and Torrildo were refugees, not from a terrible Emperor, but from a furious Archbishop who had suddenly been made to realize that he could never be Pope, even if his nephew conquered all of his enemies. At the university, Yordin had made the mistake of saying openly that Benefez was now non papabilis, and Torrildo himself was part of the Archbishop’s problem which insured that he would never wear the tiara. In each fugitive’s case, it was his own confessor who, after hearing the rumbles from the top of the mountain, advised his penitent to do his penance in some land far from the reach of the Imperium and the Diocesan Ordinary. So there they sat in a New Jerusalem jail, hoping to be of some value to a Pope who had the power to set them free. Blacktooth found this interesting and ironic, but decided not to concern himself with their fate.