Flesh and Spirit Page 11

  The wall of midnight shattered the Moriangi picket line as an ax breaks a dirt clod. Horses reared and screamed. Some riders fell; some slumped in the saddle as their mounts ran wild.

  Bayard’s defensive line broke and fled, only to be snagged from behind by the swift-moving legion of night. A few escaped by flailing their mounts to a gallop before the wall reached them. Max’s wine-colored cloak streamed alongside Prince Bayard’s blue and Sila Diaglou’s orange, as they rode helter-skelter into the night. Once at the top of a rise beyond the fray, Sila Diaglou drew rein and turned to watch as the monstrous cloud forms lost cohesion and the blackness settled over the battleground, extinguishing the bonfire and remaining torches. But after only a moment, she struck out again and galloped northward after the others.

  The black fog enveloped the field, hiding the huddled prisoners, the dead, the injured, and the laggards. Wails of terror rose in chorus. As the wall of night rolled over him, the abbot dropped to his knees, arms extended. “Stay thy hand, O Lord of Night!” he cried. “Have mercy on these that lie before you! Let them pass!”

  Suffocating with dread, I pressed my back to the parapet and slid downward to the wet stone walk, my arms flung over my head, praying the holy stones would hide me.

  Bells. A clear, measured cadence. Gray light penetrated the dark cave of my arms and dangling sleeves. Dawn—wet, cold, and dismal. I unfolded my stiff, aching limbs and peeled my sodden gown away from my sodden undergarments. Was it possible I had fallen asleep? I remembered vividly where I was and what had made me huddle in a quavering knot at the base of the chest-high parapet. But the wall of night had overtaken the abbey well before midnight, and I could remember nothing since.

  The bells changed from simple strikes to a pattern of changes: one-two-three-four, one-two, one-two-three-four, one-two. Prime—the dawn Hour.

  Grabbing my stick and the edge of a granite block, I eased upward. My first tentative peek over the parapet propelled me to my feet. One harder look and I hurried down the stair and back toward the gates, ignoring the cold night’s ache in my thigh. The dead had moved.

  I limped through the gates and into the churned-up ruins of a once-grassy field. Abandoned weapons, packs, ripped blankets, battered pots and cups lay scattered amid blood-tainted puddles and dead horses. Close beside the walls, a muddy, disheveled Brother Robierre sat weeping alongside five other monks, all of them drenched and trembling, several with hands clenched in prayer. Abbot Luviar, seemingly uninjured, moved from one to the other, crouching beside each man to offer words of comfort. But what comfort could there be?

  Save for the seven monks, no living man remained upon that field. But neither did the dead men rest where they had fallen. They had been separated into Ardrans and Moriangi, the two groups laid out in orderly rows six wide and stretching across the field. None of this was so dreadful, save when one gazed upon the ranks of fallen warriors and realized that beyond the usual grotesque battle injuries, their eyes had been plucked out, every one of them.

  The Karish claimed that stealing the eyes of the dead did not remove their souls and forever bar them from the afterlife. Yet of all the battlefields I had walked, many with far more victims than this one, none had so twisted my heart. The gaping bloody emptiness where joy or fear, knavery or kindness, intelligence or dull wit had once lived was worse than any death stare. And the careful placement of the corpses, the cold deliberation of the deed, was far more terrifying than any barbarian battle rite.

  At the head of this lifeless array, a lance had been plunged into the muddy earth and an ensign tied to it. The pennon hung limp and heavy, even its color indistinguishable in the gray morning. I stepped forward and lifted its edge. The tight woven fabric was the deep, rich green of holly and fir, and embroidered upon it in silver were the three-petaled trilliot and a howling wolf, the mark of Evanore—the mark of Eodward’s third son, Osriel the Bastard, who purportedly had uses for the souls of the dead.

  Chapter 8

  On the morning after the assault—already referred to as Black Night—we buried ninety-three soldiers and one monk. Every able hand in the abbey, including my own, set to the grisly task. The cold mud weighed my spirits beyond grief, and as we laid the chilled flesh in the earth, I found myself mumbling, “Sorry. Sorry. Forgive.” I could not have said why.

  I asked Brother Robierre and others who endured that night before the gates what they had seen. Those who could speak of the matter at all agreed on the vanguard of flame-breathing horses and cloud warriors the size of the church. None reported aught else visible in the fog. I did not mention the gray faces I’d seen or the mortal dread that had afflicted me. But I could not let go of the memory.

  On that same evening, everyone who could walk was summoned to church for a service of mourning and repentance. Brother Dispenser ladled ysomar, the oil used to anoint the sick and dying, into our clay calyxes—the expensive indulgence signifying the solemnity of the occasion. As we carried our votive gifts forward to empty into Iero’s fire, the texts read from the holy writs were all of Judgment Night and the end of the world. The prayers did not sound at all optimistic.

  Not allowed in the choir as yet, I stood in the nave with the lay brothers, wishing I could feel the same solace the brothers seemed to find in vague promises of a dull heaven. The music drew me through the hours like a strong current, and the scent of incense and burning ysomar evoked my childhood imaginings of divine mysteries. Candlelight reflected from jewel-colored windows, gleaming stone piers, and gold fittings, until the air in the vaults and domes of the church shimmered as if angels hovered there, the light and gossamer of their wings the evidence of their presence to us mortals below.

  So much praying in this place. I’d not spent so much time inside a church on a single day in my life, save perhaps the day of King Eodward’s funeral rites. For the first time since escaping my parents’ house, I had donned a pureblood’s mask and wine-colored cloak—both stolen—and haughty air—inbred. I had lied my way into the half-built cathedral in Palinur and promptly hid in the gallery, lest someone recognize me or attempt to unravel the family connections of an unknown pureblood. Only to honor King Eodward would I have risked discovery. His public glory had been but a part of what he was.

  Though I had been presented to the king at three years of age, as were all pureblood progeny, I had met him only once. I was seventeen and feeling slightly giddy, having just survived two fierce days of fighting the Hansker invasion at Cap Diavol. One of my comrades took out a tin whistle and played to lift our spirits. The song moved my feet, and I stepped through a jig, faster by the moment, the surge of life grown wild in me, having been so close to death.

  A man crouched by our fire for a moment to warm his hands and watch. When the song was done and I dropped breathless to the ground, drinking in the laughter and cheers of my comrades, I recognized the king. Though I’d heard he often wandered through the camp after a battle, I’d never believed it. But none could mistake the three trilliots blazoned on his breastplate—one lily the scarlet of Morian, one Ardran gold, and one the silver of Evanore. Despite deep creases about his eyes, his hair and beard yet flamed red-gold, scarce touched with gray.

  He spoke a few words of thanks and encouragement to each of us seven, all that remained of our cadre of twenty. When my tongue flapped loose, as has always been my worst failing, spewing some foolish comment comparing a soldier’s hardships and a king’s, he smiled as if my nonsense cheered him in the face of three thousand dead and a worse battle facing us at dawn. And when I chose to take the measure of the only king I was ever like to meet, staring boldly at him rather than dropping my eyes in deference, he did not avert his gaze.

  Before or since, I’d never known anyone who left his soul so exposed for another man, a stranger even, to view—and so I witnessed King Eodward’s devotion to all who followed him and his grief for the price they must pay for their loyalty. Though I had already decided that the soldier’s life was not for me, I vowed r
ight then to serve him until one or the other of us was dead—an easy promise, of course, as he was in his sixtieth year and had few battles left to fight.

  As he rose to leave our fire and move on to the next, the king cocked his head at me again, half smiling, half grieving. “Your quick feet and saucy mouth remind me strangely of some I knew in my own youth, lad. If you’ve happened here from Aeginea, tell them I don’t think I’ll get back. Tell them…askon geraitz.” The words, neither Navron nor Aurellian, made no sense to me.

  I scrambled to my knees and bowed my head. “Of course, anything you ask, Your Majesty, but I know not this place—”

  His hand raised my chin, silencing me. “No matter, then, lad. Just dance.”

  In the ten years since, I’d asked a number of people where a place called Aeginea might be, but no comrade or acquaintance had ever heard of it. Another of Serena Fortuna’s jests—of anyone in the wide world, my grandfather the cartographer would surely know.

  Not that I would ever ask the mad old man. He had appeared at our house at random intervals throughout my childhood, pawing at me with ink-stained fingers and babbling meaningless words in my ear, pretending we were allies in the household warfare. Then he’d disappear again without changing anything, abandoning me to my enraged father and hysterical mother. If a bleeding child’s curses carried the weight of the gods, as some said, then the old gatzé had long since fallen off a cliff and taken a year to die.

  Family. Not a topic to consider in a house devoted to the spirit’s health. It was a marvel any of my bodily wounds ever healed with such poison in my blood. Family was long over and done with. I kneaded my scalp and tried again to lose myself in the monks’ mournful music. Without result.

  Max was the first member of the Cartamandua-Celestine household I’d glimpsed in twelve years. Contracted as Bayard of Morian’s hound. Walking straight into my refuge. Gods… My urge to run blazed like a new-stoked furnace, even as I argued how unlikely he was to return here.

  Truly, Abbot Luviar’s role in this royal brawl ought to fright me more. Now there was a mystery worth the deciphering. If I, a man of thick skull and paltry skills, had come to see that the Duc of Ardra was an arrogant sham who would as soon sell the crown of Eodward as wear it, then why would the Abbot of Gillarine claim that prince’s rescue to be the salvation of Navronne? Had Luviar fallen into the same magical stupor as his monks and I had done, or had he watched as the Bastard of Evanore stole the eyes of the dead?

  Gillarine’s safety seemed more ephemeral than I had hoped. Though not yet ready to abandon the place, I dared not relax the caution that had kept me free.

  “Tell me, Brother Artur, do the Evanori warrior and his sickly secretary yet reside in the guesthouse?” I asked one of Brother Jerome’s assistants when he brought supper from the kitchen two days after Black Night. The unsavory thought had crossed my mind that the abbot was brokering some alliance between Perryn and Osriel through this Evanori “benefactor.”

  “Nay, Thane Stearc and his party departed the day before Black Night,” said the grizzled lay brother, uncovering the bowl of carrot and leek chowder he’d brought me.

  A thane! Not just some landed knight, but an Evanori warlord—descendant of a family who centuries past, along with the gravs of Morian, had bound their lives and fortunes to Caedmon, King of Ardra, thus creating the kingdom of Navronne. I dropped my voice to a confidential whisper. “It seems a scandal to find Evanori in a holy place. I was taught they served the Adversary in their heathenish fortresses.”

  The monk’s broad brow crumpled. “No, no! The thane’s a scholarly man and Gillarine’s greatest benefactor since King Eodward passed to heaven. Thane Stearc studied here as a boy and has visited the abbey every month for all these years, bringing us new books and casks of wine, and donating generously to our sustenance.”

  “But he serves the Bastard Prince…”

  “Indeed not!” Brother Artur blanched at the suggestion. “Though he wears the wolf of Evanore while in Ardra to proclaim his neutral state, his house is Erasku, which straddles the border. The thane claims both provinces or neither as he chooses.”

  Convenient, if one could get away with such juggling. The thane must be quite a diplomat or quite a warrior…or quite a liar. I hoped these monks were not so naive as to accept the lord’s word without solid proof.

  The lay brother carried his soup to the other patients—monks wounded on Black Night. I ate slowly, so that when he brought his tray around to gather up my bowl and spoon, he had to wait for me. “So, Brother Artur,” I said quietly between bites, “I suppose you must carry a good lot of food to the guesthouse now.”

  He shook his head, puzzled. “None at all. We’ve few visitors in the best times. I doubt we’ll see another till Lord Stearc returns.”

  I dropped my bowl on his tray and slumped back in the bed, disappointed and mystified. No infirmary visitor had dropped the least hint of Prince Perryn’s presence.

  The assault had left the abbey a dreary place. Brother Gildas did not show his face. Jullian spent a great deal of time in the infirmary, doing whatever small tasks the infirmarian assigned him, but scurried away whenever I so much as looked at him. Even genial Brother Badger wore a cloak of grief that lightened only slowly as the sun set and rose and set again, the life of the abbey taking up its plodding rhythm.

  Though I had every reason to be satisfied with my prospects, Black Night and my odd experiences in the cloisters had left me on edge. I forever imagined dark shapes lurking in the shadowed corners of the infirmary. One night I broke into a nonsensical sweat when someone paused outside the horn windows with a blue-paned lamp and remained there for an hour.

  To distract myself, I took to telling stories and reciting bardic rhymes in the hours between the monks’ prayers, though indeed I had to search through my store of experiences and fables for those that would not shock celibate ears. I also began taking regular exercise around the infirmary garth. My leg felt well healed, giving only a bit of soreness and stretching when I took long strides. Though happy to be up and about—activity suited me better than indolence now I’d made up for half a lifetime’s missed sleep—I was not yet ready to give up such a perfectly useful circumstance. I made sure to limp and grimace a great deal. I had a better chance of doing as I pleased if no one knew my true condition.

  A tarnished silver medicine spoon I’d found in Brother Robierre’s chest of instruments and a blood-crusted gold button he’d gouged out of a soldier’s chest wound went into the packet under my palliasse—a pitiful lot of nothing. Memories of demon horses and gray-faced warriors left me chary of pilfering valuables from the church. Which meant, should I leave Gillarine, I’d surely need my book.

  On one night in the quiet hours between Matins and Lauds, when my companions in the infirmary slept soundly, I tugged on boots and gown and crept through the darkened abbey. Three times I dodged around a corner and peered into the night behind me, imagining I’d catch someone following. But the only sign of life was a flare of light from the church. Someone’s lamp illuminated a sapphire outline from one of the colored windows. The wavering light set the blue-limned figure moving. I signed Iero’s seal upon my breast and took a long way around the cloister walk, offering a prayer for Brother Horach’s spirit.

  The small, many-windowed library building nestled in between the domed chapter house and the long, blockish monks’ dorter in the east reach of the cloister garth. The scriptorium occupied the ground floor. One reached the actual library by way of an exterior stair.

  A rushlight borrowed from the infirmary revealed the upper chamber to be unimposing. The white-plastered walls were unadorned, save for two tiers of deep window niches that overlooked the cloister garth. On the opposite wall, an arched doorway opened onto a passage linking the library with the adjoining chapter house and dorter. Backless stools of dark wood stood alongside five long tables, and deep, sturdy book presses with solid doors and sliding latches lined the side walls.

/>   I opened the cupboard farthest from the door. A locked inner grate of scrolled brasswork revealed shelves crammed with scrolls and books. A careful examination through the grate indicated that the book of maps was not among them. I moved on to the next.

  In the third book press, near the bottom of a stack of large volumes, I spied a leather binding of the correct color, quality, and thickness. No gryphon lurked amid the gold elaboration of grape leaves and indecipherable lettering on its spine, but then I’d never actually examined the thing edge on.

  In hopes my search had ended, I assembled the spell components for manipulating locks: the feel of old brass tarnished by greasy fingers, the image of the bronze pins and levers that might be inside this type of lock, my intent in the rough shape of a key, ready to be filled with magic and applied to the lock. Then I began to step through the rules for binding these elements together to create an unlocking spell.

  With lessons and practice the pureblood bent for sorcery could be used to shape spells that had naught to do with familial talents. Though my childhood indiscipline had prevented me learning the rules for many spells, I’d had a great deal of experience breaking locks as a boy and become fairly accomplished at it. Yet years had gone since I’d done much of any spellworking. Beyond my vow to forgo magic and thus avoid the fatal weakness of most recondeurs, I’d needed to hoard my power. Without sufficient time for the well of magic inside me to be replenished, I could find myself lacking enough to empower the doulon, and my nasty habit used almost everything my particular well could produce. But surely I could scrape together enough to break a lock.