Hounds of God (33 page)

Brother Paul, who had once been a squire of the Lionheart,
smiled the smile Alf remembered. The years had done nothing to abate its
malice. “The wine and the women turned out not to be so forthcoming, and
I lost my taste for boys. Your fault too, sir sorcerer. A beautiful boy was
never quite so beautiful after I saw your face, and no man could ever come up
to the king you robbed me of. At last I had to conceive a new lust. I went in
search of power. What Saint Benedict had, seemed to me to lack spice. Saint
Paul, on the other hand, offered power of a very peculiar kind, power to judge men’s
souls; and he didn’t ask me to be a barefoot fanatic.”

“And he led you to another beautiful boy,” Thea
said.

The monk laughed softly. “He led me to a power I
hardly dared dream of. Imagine my thoughts when a vagabond stumbled into the
abbey where I lodged, hardly a fortnight past my acceptance into my new Order;
and that wandering madman was obviously, unmistakably an enchanter. A young one
with no will at all of his own. He thought I was God. He thinks so still, nor
can he be shaken.”

“You were a contemptible boy. You’ve become an
evil man.”

He regarded her as she stood there with defiance on her
face, holding to Alf as if she would be both protector and protected. “You
could argue that I’m the instrument of God’s will. Simon does so
incessantly. I’m content to do as I please. In the end, who knows? Saint
Peter’s throne may be beyond me, but the generalship of Saint Paul’s
brethren is not.”

“Unless,” Alf said gently, “yon beast of
burden flings you from his back.”

“Was I ever averse to a good gamble?”

“Your luck, as I recall, was never remarkably good.
The meek little monk you caught for your sport turned vicious and brought about
your downfall.”

“But now I have him again, and I don’t intend to
let him go. You made my fortune before, in your crooked way. You’ll do so
again.” Brother Paul raised the hand with which he had been petting
Liahan. “Simon. Take him.”

On guard though Alf had been, the force of Simon’s
power smote him to the ground. For all the strength of his resistance, he might
have been a child’s doll made of sticks and sent to battle against the
sea. His shields were useless, his defenses vain. He was utterly, hopelessly
outmatched.

Somewhere far away, Thea was speaking. Spitting words:
defiance, maledictions. As easily as a man separates two newborn kittens, Simon
held her apart from her lover.

Alf rolled onto his back. Simon gazed down, expressionless. “Get
up,” he said.

Alf obeyed by no will of his own. It was all he could do to
keep his head up, to speak without a tremor. “Is it thus you treat your
brother?”

“We are no kin,” Simon said. Did his voice break
a very little?

“We are brothers, if not in blood, then in kind. Look
at me, Simon. See that it is so.”

“I see that you cannot overcome me. You can only plead
with me.”

Alf spread his hands. “Destroy me, then. Am I not
entirely in your power?”

“Entirely.” Simon’s face contorted; he
shuddered. “You are so much—like—”

“So much like you. Slay me, my brother. Has not God
commanded it? Cast me into the everlasting fire.”

“Silence him,” Paul commanded swiftly. His voice
seemed to come from very far away. “He is ancient, my son, ancient in his
evil. Silence his serpent’s tongue lest it turn you from the very face of
God.”

Alf felt the closing of his throat, the freezing of his
tongue. But he could smile. He could set his hands on the other’s
shoulders. They were narrower than his own, although the man seemed sturdy
enough, lean rather than slender.
Brother
,
his will said.
Brother
.

Simon struck the hands away, struck Alf to his knees. “Like,”
he whispered. “So like.” He bent, searching the lifted face. His
fist caught it. It rocked, steadied, blinked away tears of pain. Fair though
the skin was, the bruise did not rise swiftly enough. His power uncoiled. It
reached, at once delicate and brutal. It wrenched; it twisted.

Alf gasped, more in surprise than in pain. He could not feel—he
felt—

His face itched. Small annoyance; it baffled him. Simon was
watching with terrible fascination. He raised a trembling hand. The skin had
roughened.

No. Had grown—was growing—

He laughed for pure mirth. After all these long years, after
all the taunts and all the doubts and all his hard-won acceptance, he was
sprouting a beard. A soft one as beards went, but thick and growing as sturdily
as Jehan’s had that night in Caer Gwent.

Simon did not take kindly to his merriment. For that alone
he kept it up. His voice was deeper. His skin felt harsher. Were his bones
heavier? His hands were slender still, but not as slender as they had been.
They were becoming a man’s hands. Pale hair thickened on the backs of
them. He itched elsewhere, his belly, his deepening chest. He was a little
taller; a little broader. His beard was growing, curling, white-gold as the
hair of his head.

His laughter faded. His knees ached. His back twinged, not
scarred skin alone but the bones within. The skin on his hands coarsened. The
joints knotted. Veins and tendons rose into relief. A tooth began to throb. His
tongue, probing, found it loose. He was aging. Like a mortal man, but faster,
far faster, a whole lifetime in a moment. Eyes and ears were dulling. His head
was too heavy for his neck. Having grown, now he shrank and shriveled,
trembling with the palsy of age.

His vision spun, staggered, sharpened to a bitter clarity.
Simon had lent his own eyes. On the floor huddled an old, old man, a man who
had lived every one of Alfred’s many years.

And yet he was not pitiable. He was—yes, he was still
comely, and the eyes in the age-ravaged face, though faded, kept much of their
old brightness. There was no fear in them.

Again he dwelt behind them in the wreck of his body. Not an
ill body even yet, and not an utter ruin. He could stand, with great effort. He
could smile. He could wield a voice not thinned overmuch, not indeed much
higher than it had ever been.

“Alas, Brother Simon, you’ll never slay my
vanity until you slay me.”

Simon’s rage roared over him in blood-red fire. He
tumbled over and over, helpless, but not, by God, not ever afraid. The hand
that held him from the floor was his own again, smooth and long-fingered. His
cheeks bore only the merest downy suggestion of a beard. His teeth lay
quiescent in their places; his voice, though well broken, was a clear young
tenor. “My thanks, brother. In spite of its disadvantages, I do prefer
this semblance. And now,” he said, raising himself, hardening his tone, “and
now I think there has been enough of this entertainment. Simon of Montefalco,
monk of Saint Paul, kinsman of Rhiyana’s King, I call you to the
reckoning.”

He had taken Simon by surprise. “You have no power—”

“I have the right. The Church does not deny fair trial
to any, even to such as I. Let that trial, by my choice, be trial by combat.”

“You cannot help but lose.”

“If so,” Alf said, “then so be it. I would
far rather die in battle than at the stake.”

Thea flung herself to her knees beside him. No one hindered
her. Simon was motionless, unreadable; Paul frowned, searching transparently
for a trick, finding none. She gripped Alf’s shoulders with fierce
strength. Although she knew that Simon would hear, she spoke in Alf’s ear,
just above a hiss. “Have you forgotten the children? Have you forgotten
me?”

“Never,” he answered, equally low. “Thea,
we’re all dead, one way or another. But I won’t sell our lives
cheaply. I’m going to try at the very least to mark him, to give him a
wound that he will not forget.”

Her breath hissed between her teeth. She glared into his
eyes, her own as fiery dark as old bronze.

He tried to speak to her below thought, to the place in his
soul that was hers and hers alone. A hut of mud and wattle beset by a battering
ram; a woman’s hand upon a tapestry, embroidering the petals of a flower.
And, as clearly as he dared, a small furred creature gnawing away the roots of
an oak.

Despair shook him. She did not see. Her eyes and her mind held
only anger, outrage, frustration. “I’m fighting beside you,”
she said, biting off the words. “You can’t stop me.”

He lifted one shoulder. His finger brushed the stiff set of
her lips. They would not soften. “Whatever comes of this, know you well,
Thea Damaskena, I regret not one moment of all our years together.”

“Not one, Alfred of Saint Ruan’s?”

“After all,” he said, considering each word, “not
one.” He kissed her lightly, and then more deeply. When he rose she
remained upon her knees, her face rigid, white as bone.

He turned to Simon. “I am ready.”

For an eternal while, Simon simply stood. Perhaps he prayed.
Perhaps he hoped to lure Alf into attack.

Alf was not to be lured. His formal praying was long past,
the rest left to God. Fear had died to a steady roaring beneath the surface of
his brain. He simply waited as he had waited for so long, with watchful
patience. His shields were up, but lightly. His power gathered hard and bright
and pulsing behind them.

He shifted his sight. The flawed hemisphere of his eyes’
vision grew and rounded. But he saw no more and no better. Simon filled the
world like the sun unbound, raging from pole to pole. It had consumed its own
center, the mastering will. It was consuming the body that bore it. Unchecked,
it could consume all that was. Could, although in the doing it would destroy
itself.

Alf’s fear howled within its chains, swelling into
terror. He had never stood so close to death. Had never dreamed, even when he
faced the stake, that dissolution could come so close.

He had never met a power greater than his own. He let wonder
rise above the fear, riding on it, arming himself with it. If that mighty
strength could be tamed, what a marvel it would be; what splendors it would
engender.

He shaped the wonder and the vision. He made them into a
spear hafted and tipped with light. He cast them forth with all the strength of
his compassion.

Simon struck as a man strikes at an insect, with casualness
close to contempt. Alf’s shields locked; he staggered but kept his feet.
His dart had pierced its target. The sun-flare dimmed. A flicker only, scarcely
to be seen.

The power lashed out in sudden rage. Alf dropped shields and
fled. Wherever he turned, the power waited. He flung himself at it. Not as a
spear, not as a sword, but as a rush of gentleness: a soft wind, a fall of
water. He whispered through the walls. He flowed round the striking hand. He
took shape in a zone of stillness within walls of fire.

Simon waited there as he waited in the world that men called
real. “Wherever you go,” he said, “I am.”

Alf stepped forward. Simon drew no closer. Alf’s body,
illusion that it was, shaped and firmed by his will, had begun to fray. Just so
had it been when he had lost the key to the change, when his form stretched and
quivered and all his being wavered, poised on the border of formlessness. The
same dread; the same black panic rising to master him, to fling him back, to
set both body and soul in immutable stone.

Stone itself flowed like water, water dissolved into air,
air sublimed into fire. He was trapped, caught in the center of Simon’s
power. There was no anchor, nothing solid or stable, no shape or focus or
center. Death—not the death the Church foretold, the soul freed whole and
glorious from the encumbering body. This was the death of the soulless. Decay;
dissolution. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and a wind of fire sweeping away the
last feeble fragments. But not into oblivion, nothing so simple or so merciful.
He was aware. Lost, scattered, millionfold, he knew that he was, he knew that
he suffered, he knew that he knew.

Of the myriad motes that had been the self called Alfred,
one lone speck clung to light and will. It was no more than a thought, a
wordless awareness. Not for his kind could there be any hope of Heaven, but
Hell, it seemed, waited for them as for mortal men. If the wordless could have
encompassed itself in words, it would have protested like a child.
It’s not fair!

A second mote drifted toward the first.
Fair
, it keened,
not
. A
third. A fourth.
Not
. A fifth. Ten,
twenty, a hundred.
Just.
Half a
thousand.
Unjust
. A thousand.
Why for us only Hell? Why are we granted no
entry into Heaven?

Thought spawned thought. Raw protest transmuted into logic.
Logic begot reason, and reason remembrance. Remembrance, and pain renewed. He
had found form, and that form was a scream.

Pain was real. Pain was a center. Dissolution, dissolved,
wrought stability. He clung, and clinging, grew; and the pain grew, waking into
agony, and from agony into piercing pleasure.

He must endure. He knew not why. He knew only
must
. Though it wracked his newborn
self, though it tore with claws of iron, though it cried to him to let go, he
only clasped it closer.

He was mind amid pain. He was body. He was flesh flayed raw;
and a hand closed about it, waking agony beyond even pleasure—ineffable,
unendurable. And he could not lose consciousness; he had none to lose. He could
not even go mad.

The hand tightened. Caught writhing on the very pinnacle of
torment, he did the simplest of things. He wished himself gone.

Absence of pain was more terrible by far than its eternal
presence. He had a body; it lay gasping. It opened aching eyes.

The hands upon him eased but did not let go. Thea’s.
He was englobed in power still, and she with him, and even as their eyes met
they mingled. Yet without fear, with full and joyous will, mind to mind and
body to body, he and she, they, one mind and one power. One body likewise, he
and she, shifting, steadying, she. But the eyes were his; the hand also, for a
moment, exploring the strange-familiar shape, familiar from his long loving,
strange for that now he dwelt in it. He felt his lips—her lips—curve
in a smile. Her smile. They called forth their power.