“I wish I felt so,” Avila grated, “but I feel more like a wounded rat.”
They found the stairs and began to ascend them as gingerly as two old men, hissing and grimacing at every step. It seemed an age before they reached the library proper, and for the last time in his life Albrec walked among the tiers of books and scrolls and breathed in the dry parchment smell. The title page of the old document crackled in the breast of his robe like a grizzling babe.
The air of the passing night was bitterly cold as they left the library, locking it behind them, and trudged through the wind-smoked snowdrifts to the cloisters. There were a few other monks abroad, preparing for Matins. Charibon was wrapped in pre-dawn peace, dark buildings and pale drifts, the warm gleam of candlelight at a few windows. It was different now. It no longer felt like home. Albrec was weeping silently as he helped Avila to his own cell. He knew that tonight whatever peace and happiness his plain life had known had been lost. Ahead lay nothing but struggle and danger and disputation, and a death which would occur beyond the ministrations of the Church. Death on a pyre perhaps, or in the snows, or in a strange land beyond all that was familiar.
He prayed to Ramusio, to Honorius the mad saint, to God Himself, but no light appeared before him, no voice spoke in his mind. His supplications withered into empty stillness, and try as he might he could not stop his faith from following them into that pit of loss. All he was left with was his knowledge of the truth, and there grew in him a resolve to see that truth spread and grow like a painful disease. He would infect the world with it ere he was done, and if the faith tottered under that affliction, then so be it.
C HARIBON came to life before the sun broke the black sky into slate-grey cloud. Matins was sung, and the monks went to their breakfasts; Lauds, and then Terce followed. The accumulated snows of the night were swept away and the city stirred, as did the fisher-villages down on the frozen shore of the Sea of Tor.
After Terce a group of scholars went to one of the Justiciars and complained that the library was not yet open. The matter was investigated, and it was found that the doors were locked and there were no lights within. The Senior Librarian could not be found, nor could his assistant. The matter was pursued further, and despite the frigid air a crowd of monks gathered around the main doors of the Library of Saint Garaso when at Sext they were broken open by a deacon of the Knights Militant and his men using a wooden beam as a battering ram whilst Betanza, the Vicar-General himself, looked on. The library was searched by parties of senior monks. By that time the body of Columbar had been discovered, and despite searches of the dormitories and cloisters the two librarians were still nowhere to be found. Charibon began to buzz with speculation.
Commodius’ body was discovered just before Vespers, after the upper levels of the library had been turned upside down. Monks searching the lower levels had come upon a discarded oil lamp, and a pile of broken masonry built up against a wall of the catacombs. It fell apart as soon as they began to investigate it, and a monsignor entered the little temple along with two armed Knights to discover the corpse of the Senior Librarian stark and staring, the silver pentagram dagger buried in its spine.
The circumstances of the discovery were not bruited abroad, but the story made its way about the monastery-city that the Senior Librarian had been foully murdered in horrible surroundings somewhere deep in the foundations of his own library, and his assistant, along with a young Inceptine who was known to be his special friend, was missing.
Patrols of the Knights Militant and squads of the Almarkan garrison soldiers prowled the streets of Charibon, and the monks at Vespers whispered up and down the long pews when they were not singing to God’s glory. There was a murderer, or murderers, loose in Charibon. Heretics, perhaps, come spreading fear in the city at the behest of the heresiarch Macrobius who sat at the Devil’s right hand in Torunn. The senior Justiciars were forming an investigative body to get to the bottom of the affair, and the Pontiff himself was overseeing them.
But late that evening, in the white fury of yet another snow-storm, two events went unremarked by the patrols which were watching the perimeters of Charibon. One was the arrival of a small party of men on foot, struggling through the drifts with their black uniforms frosted white. The other was the departure of two bent and labouring monks bowed under heavy sacks, feeling their way through the blizzard with stout pilgrim’s staves and gasping in their pain and grief as they trudged along the frozen shores of the Sea of Tor, bypassing the bonfires of the sentry-posts by hiking far out on the frozen surface of the sea itself to where the pancake ice bunched and rippled under the wind like the unquiet contents of a white cauldron. Albrec and Avila struggled on with the ice gathering on their swollen faces and the blood in their hands and feet slowly solidifying in the intense depth of the raging cold. The snowstorm cloaked them entirely, so that they were not challenged once in their fumbling progress. But it also seemed to be fairly on the way to killing them before their flight had even got under way.
T HE party of black-clad men demanded admittance to the suites of the High Pontiff Himerius, and the startled guards and clerical attendants were spun into a frenzy by their unexpected appearance. Finally they were billeted in a warm, if austere, anteroom whilst the Pontiff was notified of their arrival. It was the first time in four centuries that Fimbrian soldiers had come to Charibon.
The Pontiff was being robed by two ageing monks in his private apartments when the Vicar-General of the Inceptine Order entered. The monks were dismissed and the two Churchmen stood looking at one another, Himerius still fastening his purple robe about his thickening middle.
“Well?” he asked.
Betanza took a seat and could not stifle a yawn: it was very late, and he had had a trying day.
“No luck. The two monks remain missing. They are either dead, if they are innocent, or fled if they are not.”
Himerius grunted, regarding his own reflection in the full-length mirror which graced the sombre opulence of his dressing chamber.
“They are guilty, Betanza: I feel it. Commodius was trying to stop them from committing heresy, and he died for it.” A spasm of indefinable emotion crossed the Pontiff’s aquiline features and then was gone. “May God have mercy on him, he was a loyal servant of the Church.”
“What makes you so sure that was the way of it, Holiness?” Betanza asked, obviously curious. His big soldier’s face was ruddy with the day he had spent, and scarlet lines intagliated the whites of his eyes.
“I know,” Himerius snapped. “You will send out search parties of the Knights to find these two runaways as soon as the weather permits. I want them brought back to Charibon to undergo inquisition.”
Betanza shrugged. “As you wish, Holiness. What of these Fimbrians closeted below? Will you see them tonight?”
“Yes. We must know if their arrival here at this time is a coincidence or part of a larger plan. I need not tell you, Betanza, that the events of today must not leave the city. No tales of murder in Charibon must trickle out to the kingdoms. This place must be unbesmirched, pure, unsullied by scandal or rumour.”
“Of course, Holiness,” Betanza said, at the same time wondering how he was supposed to muzzle a city of many thousands. Monks were worse than women for gossip. Still, the weather would help.
“A courier arrived here this afternoon, while you were occupied with other matters,” Himerius said lightly, and there was a different air about him suddenly, a glittering triumph that he could not keep out of his eyes. The Pontiff turned and faced the Vicar-General squarely, his hands clasped on his breast. It looked as though a wild grin was fighting to break out over his face. For an instant, Betanza thought, he looked slightly mad.