“I’d never bite him! I like him, and I hate you.”
Feather Cloak studied the girl. In truth, thought Secha, her disinterest in her only grandchild was no more unnatural than the pale sun hair’s disavowal of his kin. “I thought you hated this one called ‘Lord Hugh.”’
“I hate him! He’s a very bad man. He’ll cheat you if he can. He’ll kill you.”
Feather Cloak smiled, amused, perhaps, by the piping voice and passionate expression of the girl. “A fair warning, Little Beast. He may try. He is not as strong or as clever as he thinks he is. What of the raid, Uncle?”
He indicated everything they had captured. “We walked between this crown and one that Sun Hair told us was far in the north. He called the place Thersa. We took the villagers by surprise. They could not fight us. It may be true that the Pale Dogs are many, that they have multitudes, and that we are few. But I tell you, it will be difficult for them to protect themselves against this manner of warfare.”
She raised both hands.
The wind came up just then, as though she had called it, and possibly she had. Or maybe it was just the night wind rising off the cooling ground. There was a hint of salt in that air, a fine hissing spray carried in from the sea. And another scent as well, a witching smell that made her ears itch.
The prisoners fell silent. The blood knives covered their faces and prayed. With a puzzled frown, Feather Cloak lowered her hands.
The Pale Sun Dog opened his eyes and, without letting his gaze rest even for an instant on the other Pale Dogs, he scanned the heavens and then the surrounding slopes, the tender grass in its pale splendor and the thorny shrubs that lay along the slopes as strands of darkness. A nightjar whirred. An owl who-whooed.
The night breeze was cool, teasing her hair, kissing her cheeks. That salt breath of the sea faded, and now after all it was only a common night, cloudy, cool, and filled with the crickling of nocturnal insects.
Feather Cloak spoke. “Among the Wendish there is a saying: ‘the luck of the king.’ If the king’s fortunes fail him, then no warrior will follow him. ‘A prince without a retinue is no prince,’ which means that without followers, he cannot rule. If we are not strong enough to defeat Sanglant and shatter his army, then we need only cause such devastation in his country that his people cry for a new feathered cloak—a new regnant—to save them. There are others who claim the right to lead. It matters not which one leads, or which one claims. Best if they fight among themselves, because that will weaken them. Destroy Sanglant’s support, destroy the trust his people have in him, and you have destroyed him even if you have not killed him.”
“He is your son,” said Zuangua, looking a little disgusted.
“He turned his back on his mother’s kinfolk. He swore allegiance to the Pale Dogs. He can’t be trusted.”
Zuangua shrugged. “No one distrusts the Pale Dogs more than I do. Yet if your son can’t be trusted, then neither can this one. For it seems to me that he has done worse by turning his back on his kin and his kind, all and together. At least your son keeps faith with those he has sworn community with. This one is no kind of trustworthy ally.”
“I did not say I trusted him. But what he offers, we can use. We will learn as much as we can from him, and after we are done, we will kill him. We will let the blood knives have him, if they can bind him. We will kill all of the human sorcerers, those who know the secret of the crowns. Then the sorcery of the looms can never again be used against us. For this reason, I will accept his alliance.”
The blood knives nodded eagerly. The mask warriors stamped their feet and barked and howled and shrieked approval. The prisoners huddled close to the priest-woman in her long robes, and even she with her words of power looked afraid. The flickering light made a golden mask of Feather Cloak’s face.
Zuangua nodded thoughtfully. “Yes. We must kill all the human sorcerers. They are the most dangerous of all.”
Feather Cloak raised both hands, palms facing heaven, to allow the gods a glimpse into her soul. “I accept his offer of alliance. I offer him in turn the woman called Liathano.”
“What of a powerful offering for the gods?” demanded the blood knives. “What of your promise to us?”
“You can have her afterward,” said Feather Cloak, and she smiled mockingly at them. “If you can bind her.”
“This is a bad thing,” muttered Secha.
“To protect ourselves is a bad thing?”
“To seal an agreement on a lie is a bad thing.”
But Kansi-a-lari, The Impatient One, was Feather Cloak now.
“I have spoken,” she said irritably.
She beckoned to Sun Hair. She let him approach her. The prisoners watched in dread and anger, and her company watched with an intense excitement so palpable that it seemed to Secha that the ground trembled beneath the soles of her feet, shaken by their eagerness.
These were the tokens they exchanged: He gave to Feather Cloak an iron feather whose essence was so pure that it gleamed with a light all its own. She gave to him a folded mantle, a humble item, to be sure, but he pressed the cloth to his face as though it were the end of his desire.
Thus was the bargain sealed, and their path chosen.
9
MIDNIGHT—or as close to midnight as they could estimate, since no stars were visible to measure out time. They measured by psalms instead, and when they finished singing “Vindicate me, God, for I have walked without blame,” all quieted.
Because the church in Novomo had been built in the waning years of the Dariyan Empire, it boasted an impressive processional frieze worked into both walls of the nave above the twin rows of columns that separated the nave from the aisles on either side. In those shadowed aisles waited courtiers and servants, their faces unseen except as pale washes marked by the dark stones that were their eyes and the occasional flash of a ring or gold necklace catching candlelight. Above the waiting masses, the frieze marked the ascent of saints and martyrs toward the Hearth. Each held a saint’s crown to place before God. The colored stones in the mosaic shimmered to mark their holy robes and their holy crowns. Even their eyes shone; in this way the saints differ from the guilty who live and suffer on Earth, whose eyes are only pits in whose depths the righteous can discern the black stain of the Enemy.
Candlelight alone lit the church except for a single oil lamp placed on the Hearth itself and burning with the confidence and constancy of the just. By the smoky flames of threescore slender candles the ancient faces of the holy saints and martyrs watched and judged, their serene expressions caught forever in mosaics so cunningly worked that they almost appeared to be a painting. In the empty nave, threescore clerics lined up in two rows. Each cleric carried a taper in cupped hands. Back by the portico, Empress Adelheid and her consort waited under a mosaic rendering of the old palace that had once stood in Novomo; that structure was now half buried within the new palace, which had been erected about a hundred years ago and restored and remodeled several times since then.
So it was with the world: The skopos stood closest to God, beside the altar, and her clerics faced her with the light of truth in their hands. Secular power must wait at the doors of the church, because it could not enter fully. As for the rest, they must huddle in the shadows and pray.
Antonia raised her hands although she had already commanded silence. To her right Lord Berthold knelt on one knee, an arm braced against his thigh. His companion, Lord Jonas, stared at the ground, cowed and frightened, but Berthold studied the scene with the expression of a man who has seen the loveliest rose on Earth trampled and shredded before his eyes. He had grown up well loved and well protected by his father’s affection and by his high rank. No doubt the youth had never before understood how cruel and ugly the world was in truth. He did now. You could see it in the way he stared as if he wasn’t seeing, in the way he heard and saw without showing the least color of feeling, as if all emotion had been drained out of him with one sharp, deep cut. As it had been, because weeks ago he had woken to
find Lady Elene dead beside him and her blood coagulating around his fingers and sleeves and in the tips of his hair.
That was the truth of the world. It was long past time he discovered it for himself, although unfortunately it had not seemed to bring him to prayer service more often, as it should have. She had offered him a position in her schola—in time a youth of his lineage could hope to rise to become presbyter—but he had refused her so tonelessly that she had known at once that his soul had already fallen into the Pit and was spinning and tumbling in the darkness.
“It is written in the Holy Verses that we will love God, who are Mother and Father of Life for us all, at rest in the Circle of Unity which binds us. How then can the holy church recognize as regnant a man who murdered his own father? How can the holy church bless those who allow such a man to raise himself to power after such an unjust deed? To bless those who have turned against the church and the skopos?”
The halo of light scarcely brushed Adelheid, but Antonia knew her well enough to see by the cant of her shoulders and the tilt of her pale chin that the empress was smiling. The general shifted restlessly. He could speak Dariyan but not so well that he easily understood the words of clerics and scholars, the words of the church whose tenets his kinfolk rejected.
It still galled her, but she knew that even a crude tool may suffice. Must suffice. General Lord Alexandros was, in fact, correct: if Arethousa and Aosta were to survive, they must protect each other against attacks from all sides.
Therefore.
“Let those who aid this patricide be cursed. May they be cursed in their towns and in their fields. May they be cursed in their cattle and in their flocks. May they be cursed in their children and in their graveyards, in their granaries and in the work of their hands. Those who do not obey this decree, those who offer aid and comfort, will disappear from the Earth. They will be swallowed by fire and swept away by the sea. In waking and sleeping, in eating and drinking, in both bread and wine will they be cursed. They are bound by the chains of anathema. They are exiled from the Circle of Unity.”
She extended a hand. Brother Petrus, standing at her left, handed her the trio of scrolls on each one of which the ban was recorded. These she offered to Lord Berthold, who took them without a word of comment and without any change in his mask of stone.
“As these tapers are extinguished, so shall the light of those who disobey us be extinguished and cast into the darkness.”
Each cleric knelt and ground out the flame against the floor. The church drowned in darkness, but for the single lamp burning behind the holy mother who rules over all, skopos and guardian of God’s Truth.
The Abyss must be dark like this. Black and empty to the eye but swarming with the pitiful breath of souls who wonder, hopelessly, what will come next. Because, of course, nothing will come next. They are doomed to fall forever. That is the true meaning of the curse.
She savored the silence. Every soul there was cowed, as they should be, wondering what power she had that she might raise. The skopos was most powerful of all, and it was necessary for them to remember that.
“Come, Jonas,” said Berthold quietly behind her. “Wolfhere and the others should have come now with the horses from the stable. Let’s go.”
Something about the tone of his voice bothered her. “You will deliver the decree, Lord Berthold,” she said in a low voice, not wanting her words to carry. “Others will follow on your trail, in case you do not survive the journey. Lest you think to shirk your duty to the skopos.”
Out in the nave and aisles, no one had yet gained enough nerve to act or speak.
“I will survive the journey. The Eagle will guide us.”
“So he will. He was spared for that purpose. As were you.”
“Think you so?” he asked defiantly, and she would have had him scourged for his disrespect, but then it would be all to do over again. No one else had heard. This one time, she would have to let it go.
He rose and, with Jonas following at his heels like a dog, walked down the center of the nave until he and his companion faded into the gloom between the ranks of clerics. She heard the door open, but not close. As they waited they all of them heard a few distant comments, the cheerful ring of harness, and caught a glimpse of a lantern raised high and moving out of sight as the riders left the courtyard on the first stage of their long journey.
All the foreigners were, at long last, gone. Even the cremated remains and pickled heart of Lady Elene had been packed into a box and sent with Berthold. The skulls of Hugh’s party, though, had long since been cast out onto the trash heap.
After a long silence came the snick of flint on metal and the flare of a wick catching a spark as one of Adelheid’s servants lit a lamp. Down the nave Antonia faced that other flame, placed behind the empress and her consort. What is holy and what is profane must ever be at odds, and yet they must work together as well, because the world is imperfect, stained by darkness.
“Come, Holy Mother,” said the empress. “We have rid ourselves of the Wendish at last. In the morning, we will rise free of the taint of northerners. Let them rot without God’s blessing, so I pray.”
With so many soldiers accompanying the general, Antonia could not mention that the easterners plagued them still.
And yet.
At least the Arethousans knew civilization of a kind, unlike the raw barbarians out of the north who had learned only a hundred years ago to dress in decent clothing instead of a patchwork of skins. The Arethousans were heretics, of course, but at least they had known the name of the blessed Daisan for as many centuries as had the noble Aostans. The northerners had worshiped hills and stones and graves and trees until a generation ago, and some still did in secret, hoarding their heathen ways despite knowing that such falsehoods would bring disaster down on their heads.
Well. Her knees hurt, and her back had a twinge. The robes weighed on her shoulders, and she would be sore tomorrow from standing for so long. She signaled, and folk hustled out of the church in unseemly haste, as if the ceremony had disturbed them when it should have bolstered their determination. Her attendants rushed to help her, bringing a chair. They carried her under the dome decorated with stars and heavenly creatures: a dragon, a griffin, a serpent with a woman’s body and face, and a sphinx. A private door was nestled behind a curtain, concealing a small room to one side of the apse. Here, in private, they helped her out of the mantle and vestments. They offered her a couch and wine to rest on. Here, empress and general settled side by side on a second couch, then sipped wine out of golden cups.
“Is there more we can do?” Adelheid asked. “What of the galla, Holy Mother? Surely they could be sent hunting. A Wendish biscop here, a Varren lord there. That would frighten them, would it not?”
“And might rebound against us, if we are accused of harboring malefici, Your Majesty.”
“Sorcery is a weapon, like a sword is a weapon,” said Alexandros. “If you can thrust, then thrust.”
“The ruling of the Council of Narvone has never been superseded,” said Antonia patiently. “In western lands it is specifically forbidden to use black sorcery.”
“What is this Council of Narvone?” the general asked. “In the east there is only one council that speaks on sorcery. In the holy year of The Word, the year 327, the Council at Kellai did not prohibit magic. Magic is allowed if it is supervised by the church. This ruling we follow in Arethousa. When is—was—this Council at Narvone?”
Antonia examined him thoughtfully. “I did not know you followed church affairs so closely, Lord Alexandros. The Council of Narvone did not take place until after the death of the Emperor Taillefer. In the kingdom of Salia, women are not allowed to take the throne. Since Taillefer died leaving no sons but only daughters, the lords and church folk feared that one of his daughters would usurp power where she had no right to take any. Specifically, they feared his daughter Tallia, who was biscop of Autun. They confirmed the ruling of Kellai, but they condemned the arts of th
e mathematici, tempestari, augures, haroli, sortelegi, and the malefici, as well as any sorcery performed outside the auspices of the church.”
“You rule the church, Holy Mother.” Adelheid set down her cup. She had barely touched her wine, although the general called for a second cup for himself. Brother Petrus poured, then retreated to stand by the other servants. Lady Lavinia directed a servant to light a third lamp.
“God rule the church, Your Majesty. Do not forget this, I pray. If we choose to use sorcery, we must tread carefully. Anne did not, and she is dead. My powers are not as great as hers were.”
Adelheid shrugged. “So you say, but I never saw her perform more than illusion. It was Hugh’s magic that bound the daimone into Henry. Everyone says she was powerful, but in that case, why is she dead, and why did she fail?”
“I have no skill in the arts of the tempestari,” said Antonia. “I cannot read the future out of the movements of birds and the placement of entrails, a power some claim. I am no mathematicus, to weave within the crowns. That skill remains beyond me.”
“Then what can you do?” Adelheid demanded.
“I know the art of bindings and workings.”
“‘Bindings and workings,”’ repeated Alexandros, each syllable precise because he did not, quite, understand what she meant by the phrase. “This ‘bindings and workings’ is not mentioned at your Council of Taillefer, is it?”
“No, indeed, it is not.”
They sat in a simple room at odds with the elaborate decoration in the church beyond. Here were only whitewashed bricks but no mosaic work. A pair of couches, covered with wine-colored fabric and stitched with gold thread, faced each other in the middle of the room. An unexceptional table was pushed up against one wall; it held a burning lamp, a vase filled with dried stalks of lavender and a single red rose, a pair of lectionaries, and a forgotten goose quill caught in that slight groove between the curved edge of the table and the wall. Not one tapestry adorned the walls. These walls were as blameless as an unblemished calf being led to the slaughter. A lamp molded in the shape of a griffin hung from a hook sunk into a dark beam overhead. A brass lamp molded in the shape of a dragon remained unlit. A lamp burned over the door, flame twisting behind glass like the soul of a daimone bound into the body of a mortal man. Just so had Henry lived and died.