Sword of the Bright Lady (17 page)

“Put it at the end of the hall, where it will stay cool,” he told them.

When they had dumped the body, Fenwick pulled out his knife.

“Just a moment, Pater.” He grimaced and then plunged the blade into the body. Nothing happened, except that Christopher's stomach wrenched at the sound of metal cutting flesh. “Sometimes they fake it,” Fenwick said. “Just one of the tricks of the Invisibles.”

“The who?”

“The Invisible Guild,” Fenwick said, and then recited a bit of doggerel as they walked back to the kitchen, apparently considering it a sufficient explanation.

Knight reigns from his castle,

priest from his holy chapel;

wizard rules from his tower,

but we rule the midnight hour.

Fargo had already returned with news. A handful of women and children had been found only a short way out down the road to Knockford, on the verge of freezing to death.

“I'll come and see them,” Svengusta said. “No, you're staying here,” he said when Christopher turned to follow him. “If you were their target, blundering around in the dark will only make their job easier. We'll sit tight and wait for light. In the morning we will send for the Vicar.”

Fenwick and another man stayed behind as guards, while Helga made them a pot of tea.

The other villager, Jawen, a morose-looking fellow, was all for killing the prisoner. “Who knows what kind of magic he might use when he wakes?”

“If he had magic, he would have used it while were beating him to a pulp,” Fenwick said. “He's just a pawn. The masters slipped away, like they always do.”

“And if they come back?”

“We'll give them more of this.” Fenwick hefted his cudgel. “Plus the Pater's awake now, and properly armed. They'll not strike a man on his guard.”

“Pawn or no, the Saint will stretch his neck. He's done murder.”

“That's for the Saint to decide,” Fenwick said.

“What about the women and children?” Christopher asked with some trepidation.

“No,” Jawen sighed with disappointment, misinterpreting Christopher's concern. “Our lord's as soft as a jelly roll. Ought to put the whelps in a sack and drop them in the river, but he won't likely go for that.”

“They have the Taint on them,” Fenwick said. “Not like our Helga here, she was an honest orphan,” he added defensively. “But you can't harvest wheat planted in the Dark. Best that they burn so they can't come back to haunt you.”

“Drowning is better. The water confuses their spirits so they can't find you from the other side.”

Christopher found the topic disturbing, so he stopped listening, gazing into the fire with his sword comfortably close.

He awoke in panic, until the logical part of his mind noted that the Invisibles would not knock to be let in.

Fenwick was already unbarring the door. Jawen looked around guiltily, still groggy from sleep.

Svengusta came in, stamping snow off his boots.

“You lads go on home now. There'll be no more excitement tonight.”

“And this one?” Jawen said, pointing to the body in the bed.

“I stopped him at death's door, but only by an inch. He's no danger to anyone. Now unless you want to further comment on my healing expertise, take yourselves home.”

The men left, and Svengusta set himself to heating up more tea. Helga was asleep in the bunk room, so Christopher busied himself with balancing a stone mug on the door's crossbar.

“Don't worry about that. Dawn is only an hour away; we'll keep till then.”

“Did you find out why they're trying kill me?”

“The women know nothing. They only took up with this lot a few days ago, recruited as part of a disguise, and abandoned when no longer useful. All they are guilty of is going out a window rather than paying an innkeeper's bill.”

“Is this some kind of revenge of Hobilar's?”

“He could not pay his own ransom. How could he pay for an assassination? Speaking of paying, you made a generous offer earlier tonight,” the old man said softly. “But what if more had died? Would you have revived Charles and left the others to the ground?”

“I didn't think of that.” Christopher blushed, feeling stupid.

“We are lucky. We have one to revive but two to bury.” Svengusta nodded toward the bed. “Their tael will go to reviving the boy, so that will offset the cost considerably. But if it had been the other way round, not even your generosity would have sufficed. The Church can't afford to revive every peasant that dies, Brother. You understand that, right?” Svengusta looked at him carefully.

“Not really, no,” Christopher answered. Insurance companies back home had figured out how to spread the cost of health care so working people could afford it.

“What do you think happens when good Saint Krellyan finally shuffles off this mortal coil?”

The answer was obvious. “You promote a new Saint.”

Svengusta nodded. “And how do you suppose we do that?”

Of course. Tael. Christopher thought about that for a long moment.

“How long do you have to save to replace him?” he finally asked.

“I'm not privy to the Church accounts,” Svengusta said quietly, “but I've heard it said that if we don't get fifty years of service out of Krellyan, the Church will be short. And that's scraping every penny from the barrel.”

“Just how much tael does it take to make a Saint?”

Svengusta looked at him sadly. “You don't want to know. The cost doubles every rank. That doesn't seem like a lot, at first, but it adds up to terrible numbers.”

Christopher was well aware of how fast a power sequence climbed. “What rank is Krellyan?” he pressed.

“Saint Krellyan is the twelfth rank, that's no secret. But I remember how tight the Church pinched its purse to promote him. Ah, what a fine young man he was, only twenty-five and barely out of his first rank. The Cardinal—not our Cardinal Faren, but his predecessor—picked him out, called him a gift from the Lady. He was wise and good and strong and pure. Krellyan, I mean.”

Svengusta paused, lost in memory. “A paragon of piety. Even the passed-overs like me didn't begrudge him the fine career everyone expected him to have. And then Cardinal Merrian quaked the earth. He revealed the gigantic hoard the Church had amassed over his tenure and gave it all to young Krellyan. He made him a Saint. Our first Saint.

“All those years of saving, skimping, restraint, even on his own promotion. Merrian stayed a Cardinal when he could have been a Prophet. Other churches had Prophets. We had to hang our heads and step aside when their priests walked by, because we were just healers without a Prophet to call our own. But in the end it was worth it, because now we had a Saint, and they had nothing to compare. Krel­lyan's the only Saint the Kingdom's ever had, except for ancient legends that are told to children.”

“Why is a Saint so important?” Christopher already knew that mere Cardinals could raise the dead. He'd gotten that much from the books.

“Weren't you listening, Brother? Krellyan's the only one in the Kingdom who can grow back Hobilar's arm. He can make your body as good as new. Not young, of course, but it looks the same. I've heard it said the King is regenerated once a year, just on general principle. And welcome to it, as long as he pays the fee. We need both his favor and his money.

“Hobilar's not the first man to lose a limb, you know. Out there over the border, all sorts of beasties can deprive you of loose body parts.” The old man twinkled, his usual good nature creeping back. “Under Krellyan's leadership, and with his stature, we've grown. We're now the biggest Church in the Kingdom. But if we lose our Saint, then we'll lose our rein on the high ranks. And that's why we let peasants die. Better a Charles here and there than Hobilars everywhere.”

Christopher thought about the thug who had fled in the night, driven out by his spell. “One got away.”

“Pray that we never see him again. When next we do, it will be with a dozen thugs instead of three.”

Uncharacteristically, Svengusta turned out to be wrong. In the morning, when they opened the door again to Fenwick's knock, he beckoned them outside.

“You'll want to see this, Paters.”

Svengusta and Christopher threw on cloaks and followed Fenwick out into the freezing snow.

The peasant led them along tracks that led from the chapel into the woods. “We didn't see them last night,” he explained, “since it was dark and all. But this morning we saw them, and, well, see for yourself.”

Only a few feet into the trees the tracks ended at a body, quiet and still. The snow spelled out the story in plain detail. The mummer, running in panic-stricken haste, had plowed into a low-hanging branch and knocked himself out. He'd lain there, unconscious in the bitter cold, and never woken up.

So I have killed a man
, Christopher thought sadly.

They carried the frozen corpse back to the chapel and stacked it on the other one.

“Your fortune is safe,” Svengusta said.

“What about my life?”

The old man shrugged. “For now, at least.”

So Christopher was sent to summon the Vicar. The tension in his stomach was incongruous with the soft white fields and blanketed trees. He kept expecting to be ambushed at every turn, and Royal reacted to his mood by becoming prickly. If he was attacked, his best bet would be to flee, but he doubted he could convince the stallion of that. In any case the only assault he suffered was the weather, which was really too cold for his cast-offs.

By the time he reached the church he was shivering. This sign of weakness pricked his pride, so after dispatching a novice to request an appointment with the Vicar he eschewed curling up next to a fire and instead forced himself to do kata in the empty main hall until sweat dispelled the chill.

He was interrupted by a sour, heavy voice from the door.

“That's not a sight I ever thought to see in my church,” Rana said, unsmiling.

He blushed. “I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking.” He sheathed the naked blade.

“Again with the spurious apologies? You are a servant of the Lady, in your own fashion, and your worship will not profane Her church. It is only my sensibilities that are abused, and it is your Patron that is responsible.”

“Then I apologize on behalf of my Patron,” he responded formally. “He deserves a more astute disciple.”

Rana laughed. “Pretty words from a war priest. I keep forgetting you are not a heathen warmonger, bent on Red blood and Yellow gold. But then, when I think of you as a Brother, I forget your Patron. You are something I must accommodate, and I am past the age of accommodation.”

Christopher winced a little. He hadn't even started making things difficult for people to adapt to.

“But you are here on grave business, I am told, so I must prepare for more unpleasant tidings.”

“Yes, my Lady,” he replied, “I have to report an attack.”

By the end of his tale she was back to not smiling.

“Let us go and see, then,” she said. “Though if he really is an Invisible, there is little we can learn. At most we can prevent him from lying; we cannot make him talk.”

Christopher hadn't considered there might be Fifth Amendment rights to worry about.

“I didn't realize you extended legal protection to their guild.”

Rana looked at him quizzically. “No magic can force an Invisible to reveal his client. It is a privilege of their rank, not a courtesy. Shouldn't you have learned this by now?”

Christopher bit his lip before he got himself into more trouble.

She had already moved on to other topics, however. “We depart in half an hour. Make yourself ready.”