“Maybe. We will never know because the knowledge they destroyed is lost for ever. We will never be able to judge for ourselves.”
“Not everyone is as learned as you, Albrec. Knowledge can be a dangerous thing in the hands of the ignorant.”
Albrec smiled. “You sound like one of the monsignors, Avila.”
Avila scowled. “You cannot change the way the world works, Albrec. No one man can. You can only do as you are told and make the best of it.”
“I wonder if Ramusio would have agreed with that.”
“And how many would-be Ramusios do you think they have sent to the pyre in the last five hundred years?” Avila said. “Striving to change the world seems to me to be a sure way of shortening one’s tenure of it.”
Albrec chuckled, then stiffened. “Avila! I think I have it!”
“Let me see.”
Albrec was holding a few ragged pages, bound together by the remains of their cloth backing.
“The writing is the same, and the layout. And here’s the title page!”
“Well? What does it say?”
Albrec paused, and finally spoke in a low, reverent voice. “ ‘A true and faithful account of the life of the Blessed Saint Ramusio, as told by one who was his companion and his disciple from the earliest of days.’ ”
“Quite a title,” Avila grunted. “But who wrote it?”
“It’s by Honorius of Neyr, Avila. Saint Honorius.”
“What? Like The Book of Honorius?”
“The very same. The man who inspired the Friar Mendicant Order, a founding father of the Church.”
“Founding father of hallucinations,” Avila muttered.
Albrec tucked the pages away in his habit. “Whatever. Let’s get out of here. We’ve got what we came for.”
They rose to their feet, brushing the detritus of the cave from their knees, and as they did there was a rattle of stone. They turned as one, the lamplight leaping in their hands, to find Brother Commodius appearing through the hole in the wall which led back to the catacombs.
The Senior Librarian dusted himself down much as Avila and Albrec had done whilst the pair stared at him in horror. The mattock they had left outside dangled from one of his huge hands. He smiled.
“We are well met, Albrec. And I see you have brought the beautiful Avila with you too. What joy.”
“Brother, we—we were just—”
“No need, Albrec. We are beyond explanations. You have overreached yourself.”
“We’ve done nothing wrong, Commodius,” Avila said hotly. “No one is forbidden to come down here. You can’t touch us.”
“Be quiet, you young fool,” Commodius snapped in return. “You understand nothing. Albrec does, though—don’t you, my friend?” Commodius’ face was hideous in its humour, the mien of a satisfied gargoyle, his ears seemingly too long to be real and his eyes reflecting the lamplight like those of a dog.
Albrec blinked as though trying to clear the dust from his eyes. Something in him seemed to calm, to accept the situation.
“You knew this was here,” he said. “You’ve always known.”
“Yes, I have always known, as have all the Senior Librarians, all the custodians of this place. We pass down the information as we do the keys of the doors. In time, Albrec, it might have been passed on to you.”
“Why would I want it?”
“Don’t be obtuse with me, Albrec. Do you think this is the only secret chamber in these levels? There are scores of them, and mouldering away in the dark and the silence is the vanished knowledge of a dead age, lost generations of accumulated lore deemed too harmful or heretical or dangerous for men to know. How would you like to have that at your fingertips, Albrec?”
The little monk wet his dry lips. “Why?” he asked.
“Why what?”
“Why are you so afraid of knowledge?”
The mattock twitched in Commodius’ fist. “Power, Brother. Power lies in knowledge, but also in ignorance. The Inceptines control the world with the information they know and that which they withhold. You cannot give mankind the freedom to know anything it wants; that is the merest anarchy. Take that document you found down here, the one you have hidden so inadequately in your cell along with the other heretical books you have been concealing: your pitiful attempt to save a kernel from the cleansing fire.”
Albrec was as white as a winding sheet. “You know of it too?”
“I have read others like it, all of which I have had destroyed. Why else do you think there are no contemporary accounts of the Saint’s life extant today? In that one document resides greater power than in any king. The old pages you discovered hold within them the ability to overturn our world. That will not happen. At least, not yet.”
“But it’s the truth,” Albrec cried, almost weeping. “We are men of God. It is our duty—”
“Our duty is to the Church and its shepherdship of mankind. What do you think men would do if they discovered that Ahrimuz and Ramusio were one and the same? Or that Ramusio was not assumed into heaven, but was last seen riding a mule into oblivion? The Church would be riven to its very foundations. The basic tenets of our belief would be questioned. Men might begin to doubt the existence of God Himself.”
“You’ve told us why you are going to do what you are about to do, Commodius,” Avila said with the drawl of the nobleman. “Perhaps now you’ll be good enough to do it without wearying our ears further.”
Commodius gazed at the tall Inceptine, as haughty as a prince before him. “Ah, Avila, you are always the aristocrat, are you not? Whereas I am merely the son of a tanner, as humbly born as Albrec there despite my black robe. How you would have graced our order. But it was not to be.”
“What do you mean?” Albrec asked, and the tremor was back in his voice, fear rising over the grief.
“It’s plain to see what has been happening here. Two clerics become victims of the unnatural urges which sometimes beset those of our calling. One lures the other into black magic, occult ritual”—Commodius gestured to the wolf-headed statue with the mattock—“and there is a falling-out, a fight. The lovers kill each other, their bodies laid out before the unholy altar which poisoned their minds. Not that the bodies will be found for a long time. I mean, who ever comes down here, and who will think to look beyond the rubble of a sealed wall?”
“Columbar knows we have been coming here—” Avila began.
“Alas, Brother Columbar died in his sleep this night, peacefully and in God’s grace, his head resting on the pillow which stopped his breath.”
“I don’t believe you,” Avila said, but his haughtiness was leaking away.
“It is immaterial to me what you choose to believe. You are carrion already, Brother.”
“Take us both then,” Avila said, setting down his lamp as though preparing for battle. “Come, Commodius: are you so doughty that you can kill the pair of us?”
Commodius’ face widened into a grin which seemed to split it in twain and displayed every gleaming tooth in his head.
“I am doughty enough, I promise you.”
The mattock clanked to the floor.
“The world is a strange place, Brothers,” Commodius’ voice said, but it sounded different, as though he were speaking into a glass. “There is more lurking under God’s heaven than you have ever dreamed of, Albrec. I could have made you a glutton of knowledge. I could have sated your appetite and answered every question your mind ever had the wit to pose. It is your loss. And Avila—my sweet Avila—I could have enjoyed you and advanced you. Now it will have to be done a different way. Watch me, children, and experience the last and greatest revelation of all . . .”
Commodius had gone. In his place there loomed the brooding darkness of a great lycanthrope, a bright-eyed werewolf standing in a puddle of Inceptine robes.
“Make your peace with He who made you,” the beast said. “I will show you the very face of God.”