Hounds of God (35 page)

Such a death for a mortal man was a journey into singing
glory. Simon went into soft darkness. But at its edge glimmered light, and all
of it wrapped not in oblivion, not in the agonies of Hell, but in spreading
peace.

“I think,” Alf said in deep, wondering joy, “I
think—dear God in Heaven, I think that even we are granted souls.”

“You’re the only one who ever doubted it.”
Thea rose stiffly, catching Alf as he crumpled to the floor. Even unconscious,
his face was too bright for human eyes to bear.

She, who was not human, looked long at it. Her eyes when she
raised them were brighter still, blinding. Her voice was cool and quiet. “It
is over,” she said. “For a little while.”

Jehan turned slowly. It was
like a battlefield. The living and the dead lay tangled together, conscious and
unconscious and far beyond either; and Thea swayed above them, and for all her
courage she was perilously close to breaking.

Jehan sighed deeply. “How on God’s good earth am
I going to get us all out of this place?”

“My power will take us.”

“All of us?”

“Not Simon Magus.” She bent over him, her face
unreadable. With hands almost gentle, she straightened his limbs, folding his
hands upon his still breast, smoothing his ruffled hair. “This will be
his tomb.”

For a long count of breaths Jehan was silent. “It’s
fitting,” he conceded at last. He paused. After a moment, in a clear and
steady voice, he spoke the words that came to him. “Lamb of God who takes
away the sins of the world, grant him rest. Grant him rest; grant him eternal
rest.”

Oddone cried out in wonder as they appeared all about him;
and cried out again as he saw them clearly. Without another word he turned and
bolted.

Stefania would have liked to follow, but one of the two
slack bodies was Nikephoros’. His face was grey-green; one hand hung at
an unnatural angle.

She dropped beside him with a strangled cry. He was alive,
blessedly alive, breathing raggedly as if in a nightmare. His good hand
clenched and unclenched, his head tossed, his mouth opened, gulping air. But he
made no sound. That, more than anything he had shown her or told her, made it
real. He was a sorcerer. They were all sorcerers.

They were like warriors after Armageddon, scarred and
staggering, white with shock. And yet, even now, the slender woman’s
gold-bronze beauty cut like a sword. She raised Alf’s body as if it had
been a child’s and laid it on the bed, settling it, pausing with head bowed
as if she searched for strength.

Jehan touched her arm to comfort her, his own face stark,
frozen. She shook him off. “I can take care of myself and my beloved
idiot. Go see to Nikki.”

He wavered between them. “Go!” she snapped at
him. Numbly he went.

But he was self-possessed enough when he knelt beside Nikki,
a grim self-possession that cracked briefly but terribly when, stretching forth
his hand, he saw that it was gauntleted with blood. Drying blood, crusting in
cracks and hollows.

Jehan dragged his eyes away, back to Nikephoros. Stefania
had his head in her lap. The black eyes were open, shadowed with pain. They
seized Jehan with a fierce intensity; Nikki struggled to sit up. He must know—he
must—

“Simon is dead,” Jehan said without inflection. “I
finished what you started.”

It was all Nikki could do to hold himself erect, even with
Stefania to brace him.
Alf.
The word
came with great effort.
Alf—I can’t—power—

“Alf is alive. You’re the only casualty. Lie
down again, lad, before you fall down, and I’ll see about robbing the
infirmary.”

“No need for that,” said Prior Giacomo from the
door. Brother Rafaele advanced with his gangling, stork-legged gait, Oddone
trailing behind with an armful of bottles and bandages. Silently the
infirmarian set to work on Nikki’s arm.

The boy was well looked after, and well enough but for the
pain that had saved all of them. Jehan wandered back to Alf. Prior Giacomo was
there already, arms folded, scowling. Thea had laid her body beside her lover’s,
head pillowed on his breast, their children burrowed into his side. Jehan
started forward in alarm, and stopped short. They were breathing. They looked
as if they slept. But by the pricking in his nape he knew that they worked
witchery.

“So,” Giacomo said. “You found them.”

Jehan nodded. He still had not washed his hand. Giacomo was
staring at it, at him. His face was stiff. He had forgotten the blood there. He
forced himself to speak. “It was... a bit of a struggle.”

“So I see,” Giacomo said. He extended his hand.

“Don’t!” cried Jehan.

A spark leaped from Alf’s brow to the lifted palm.
Giacomo recoiled instinctively. His jaw set; his brows met. He tried again. A
hand’s breadth from flesh, the lightning crackled. It shocked but did not
burn. He recovered his hand; folded his arms again, tightly; drew a breath.

“Don’t touch them,” Jehan said softly.

Giacomo shivered. In the silence, Anna came with bowl and
cloth and chair. Mounting the last, she began to wash the blood from Jehan’s
face and hand. It was a mildly comical spectacle; Giacomo’s lips could
not help but twitch.

Jehan smiled openly, with relief close to hysteria. He was
in shock, he had come out of enough battles to know that, but at the moment he
could not care. They were all alive, the enemy was dead—at his hand—at—

He let the storm of shaking run its course. Anna finished
and rested her head briefly on his shoulder; she hugged him, rare concession. “Everything
will be well now,” she said.

Jehan swung her down from the chair. “It’s not
over yet.” His eye caught the last of them, the one who might have been a
bundle cast upon the floor. Brother Paul’s eyes were shut, his face
blotched livid and pallid, but the tension in his shoulders gave proof enough
that he was conscious and far from vanquished. Joscelin de Beaumarchais, like a
cat, had a habit of landing on his feet.

Maybe he already had. Giacomo, bending to examine him,
looked up at Jehan. “May I ask what you’ve been up to, casting down
and binding a secretary of the Pauline Father General?”

“An old enemy of ours. He’ll be dealt with when,
and as, we see fit.”

Giacomo’s brows went up. “Will he now?”

“A bishop,” Anna said clearly and coldly, “may
in certain circumstances exert full authority over a humble monk. Even though
this monk is not in fact under His Excellency’s jurisdiction, he has
subjected himself to it by his actions. To wit, ordering the abduction and
imprisonment of a noblewoman and her children; causing, albeit indirectly, the
murder of a royal prince; attempting to cause the murder of a high lord.”

“A sorcerer.” Paul had flung off his pretense of
unconsciousness. Sit up he could not, let alone stand, but he had a voice that
carried well. “Sorcerers all, good Brother: elvenfolk of Rhiyana,
condemned by papal decree.”

“Not yet, I think,” Anna said.

“Not yet,” Jehan agreed, “and maybe not
ever. Certainly not without a fair trial. Which I intend to get.”

“You and your tame witches. Sarum may never see its
Bishop, even if Rhiyana gets back its Lord Chancellor.” Paul shifted. No
one moved to make him more comfortable. “Meanwhile, Brother, it seems to
me that you’ve been keeping guests under false pretenses. Did you know
what august personages had taken shelter under your roof? Sinful too, alas: a
whore and her keeper and their tender little bastards.”

Jehan’s fist hammered him into silence. But the Bishop’s
voice was mild; lethally so. “Can you govern your tongue, Brother, or
shall I govern it for you?”

The man’s eyes glittered, but he did not speak again.
Nor did Giacomo give voice to his thoughts. Brother Rafaele, having finished
splinting and binding Nikki’s arm and dosed him with strong herbs mixed
in wine, wavered transparently between duty and curiosity. At last, with some
regret, he yielded to his duty. “The boy should do well now, Brother
Prior. The rest, I fear, are somewhat out of reach of my competence.”

“I suspected they might be,” Giacomo said dryly.
“Many thanks, Brother; if we need you later, we’ll send for you.”

“
We
, is it?”
Anna asked as the door closed with Rafaele on the other side of it.

Giacomo faced her. “
We
, Madonna. I’m afraid I’ve learned too much for my
good, though I hope not for yours. And I brought your kindred here; I feel
responsible. I want to be sure that they’ve come to no harm.”

“Or that San Girolamo has taken no harm from their
presence,” she said.

“That too,” he agreed unruffled.

oOo

Dawn, considered for itself, is a very great miracle. But it
is quiet. No trumpets herald it; no lightnings accompany it. It simply comes,
subtle and unstoppable. So they woke, all four sleepers, as if this were a
morning like a thousand others. Cynan was vocally and Liahan quietly ravenous.
Thea sat up yawning and stretching and shaking out the silken tangle of her
hair.

Alf simply opened his eyes and lay, feeling out the borders
of mind and body. For the first time in an age beyond reckoning, he was whole.
It was pleasure close to pain, hollows filled that that had gaped like wounds,
powers lost and found again, ready to his hand.

He reached with flesh and spirit, and she was there, their
children no longer within her but close against her, nursing each at a breast.
She smiled over their heads. “Great man and woman that they’ve made
themselves, they should get the back of my hand and a bowl apiece of gruel.”

He laughed, knowing as well as she that she would do no such
thing. His mirth caught for an instant upon memory—Simon’s face,
the ruin he had wrought before he died, the mighty atonement he had made—and
shook free, fixing upon this blessed moment. With some care he sat up.
Dizziness swelled, passed. He realized that he was at least as ravenous as the
little witches. He could not remember when he had ever been so hungry.

But first, pain cried out for healing. He passed faces glad,
troubled, carefully expressionless. He set his hands on Jehan’s shoulders.

Jehan wrenched away. “Stop it,” he said roughly.
“Stop it!”

“You hurt,” Alf said, simple as a child. But he
lowered his hands to his sides.

“Nikki hurts. I have a matter to settle with my
confessor. Leave it at that.”

Alf was not disposed to. There might have been a battle, for
Jehan was adamant, had not Nikki come between them. Even light-headed with
Rafaele’s potion, he was well able to shield his own pain, what the drug
had left of it.
Brother
, he said to
Alf,
go and eat. Oddone’s raided
the Abbot’s kitchen for you. You too, Father Jehan. You can have your
fight later.

They glared with equal hauteur, equal intransigence. Nikki
laughed at the likeness. Which brought their anger upon his head, but he only laughed
the harder. Collapsed, in truth, giggling helplessly, until Stefania shook him
to make him stop.

Bishop and Chancellor bent over him. He grinned,
unrepentant.

Alf sighed. Jehan’s lips twitched. Alf said, “You
too, infant. Don’t you know it’s deadly to balk power?”

We humans can take
care of ourselves.
Nikki said it with newborn pride.
Go and quiet your stomach, Alfred. It’s growling like a starving
wolf.

It was a starving wolf, and it needed firm restraint lest it
gorge itself into sickness. Alf took some small comfort in seeing that no one
else went hungry, Nikki in particular, who would have settled for a cup of
wine. Even Paul had his fill; Alf fed him calmly as one feeds a young child,
although his glare was baleful.

Nikki ate as little as his brother’s tyranny would
allow, and outdrank them all. His temper had taken a turn for the worse. When
Stefania stoppered the wine bottle and set it out of his reach, he scowled,
flung his cup down, flashed his eyes over the gathering.
Simon Magus is dead. Rhiyana is free of his power. What now?

“Rhiyana is free of little.” Though fed and
rested, Alf looked weary still. He had reclaimed his chair by the brazier, and
Liahan was with him, half asleep. Her profile against his robe was his own,
blurred and fined by her youth and her sex. He laid his cheek upon the kitten-softness
of her hair. His voice, though quiet, was stern. “The Crusade rages. The
Interdict has fallen. The King may be past any hope of healing.

“And yet,” he said. “And yet I refuse to
despair. Listen now, and hear what we shall do.”

oOo

Nikki drew his hood closer about his face, and wished that
Thea would. Or at least that she would bow her head in proper humble fashion.
If she insisted on walking into the Mother House of Saint Paul rather than willing
herself into it, for no other reason than a love for the dramatic and an hour
to spare, she could at least forbear to invite curiosity. Particularly since
she had done nothing to disguise herself save to swathe her body in mantle and
hood, dark enough but to his eyes not particularly deceptive. She was still a
graceful witch-woman with the bearing of a queen.

Stop fretting, child,
she chided him silently.
Nothing human
can see anything when it’s as dark as this.

I can,
he
muttered. But he eased a little, enough to raise his head and walk more
steadily. They were close now to the place they sought, a fortress crowned with
a cross, standing just out of the shadow of Castel Sant’Angelo. No shadow
now, to be sure, with the sun long since set and Compline rung, and neither moon
nor stars to lighten the sky.

Thea walked coolly to the barred gate and set hand and power
upon it; it opened in silence upon darkness and a scent of cold stone. Cold
hearts, Nikki thought as Thea led him beneath the arch. As soundlessly as it
had opened, the gate closed behind them.