The Quest for Saint Camber

  Indulging in a leisurely yawn, Duncan drew back one of the heavy velvet drapes covering the window and shaded his eyes against the leaded glass to peer outside, trying to gauge how hard it was actually coming down. The amber panes distorted, but not enough to change his original estimation that the weather was abysmal; and he could hear it battering the leaded roof as well.

  Making a face at the rain, Duncan let the curtain fall and rolled up his transcription in a leather scroll tube, rising to slip it under his cincture before putting on a fur-lined cap and gloves and throwing a heavy black cloak around his shoulders.

  At least he did not have to go all the way back to the archbishop’s palace in the rain—though getting to Nigel’s quarters even somewhat dry would be difficult enough. Since Dhugal’s departure with the king the previous week, and in light of his own supposed indisposition, Duncan had all but moved into Dhugal’s apartments in the castle. It was only natural that, during his “convalescence,” he might be expected to derive comfort from being near his son’s things; and, as he gradually resumed sedentary duties, it was far more convenient to sleep in the castle than to trek back and forth between there and his old quarters, especially on a night like tonight, or when he worked late in his study, or he and Nigel talked too late—an increasing occurrence, for he had taken to spending many of his evenings in the prince’s company, often dining with him and Meraude. All of them missed their sons—and with the mass exodus of nearly every Deryni from Rhemuth the week before, Nigel was the only one who could even begin to give Duncan the companionship he needed.

  Being Deryni offered no particular advantages tonight, however. As Duncan straightened a few last things on his desk and put out the candles, he briefly considered using the study Portal to go to the library Portal and thence to Nigel—but only briefly. One never knew who might be in the library to witness his arrival—and how could one explain being dry on a night like this?

  No, blatantly Deryni frivolity of that sort was unthinkable just now, when his position was so precarious vis-à-vis his future with the Church. However, he could use the secret passageway that connected Dhugal’s apartments to the basilica yard, rather than slogging through the muddy parade ground and stable yard to enter through the great hall. He generally avoided taking the secret route, because the stairs were steep and he disliked closed-in places, but it was better than getting soaked or sleeping in his chair in the study.

  He got wet enough, even in the short dash across the churchyard to the alcove where the entrance to the passageway was hidden. En route, he slipped and nearly took a nasty fall. And then, rain running down his face and inside his hood, he had to stand in a puddle until he could find the stud that opened the entryway.

  It was dry inside, though—and dark. From habit, and because the use of handfire could have been potentially fatal to a Deryni priest until very recently, Duncan struck flint to tinder to light a rushlight in a niche beside the closed door. The flame gave little actual warmth, but its fitful yellowish light was cheering in the damp and gloom and made him feel warmer.

  There were fifty-five steps to the first, straight flight of stairs, steep and irregular, and Duncan paused to catch his breath on the landing, just slightly winded, before starting doggedly up the winding treads of the next set. He was preoccupied, thinking about what he wanted to say to Nigel regarding the document he carried. But he had not gone more than two or three steps on the stairs before he became aware of a faint, sweetish odor tickling at his nostrils.

  He stopped and sniffed the air, instantly alert and casting out with his Deryni senses. Something was dead down here—something larger than the odd rat or other rodent one might expect in such a place.

  He turned and took another whiff, holding his rushlight higher as he concentrated on the smell, then briskly retraced his steps to the landing and looked around. The odor was stronger here. He wondered how he had missed it before. Something was definitely dead. He had smelled that smell before, more times than he cared to remember, in the aftermath of far too many battles. There was no mistaking it.

  He conjured handfire to augment his rushlight, flooding the landing with silvery light and then he saw the russet shadow crumpled against the far wall, a leather boot protruding at one end and an outstretched arm visible at the other.

  “I have no idea how long he’s been there,” Duncan said to Nigel, as he led the prince down the steep stair from Dhugal’s apartments, half an hour later. “Long enough to begin decomposition, though—probably a week or two, in this weather. It looks as if he fell coming down the stairs and broke his neck. What I can’t figure out is what a member of the Camberian Council was doing in this passageway. I thought they couldn’t get into the keep from the library Portal.”

  Nigel only shook his head as they reached the landing and he bent to look as Duncan pointed things out.

  “I didn’t think they could,” he said. “That’s what Kelson told me. You say his name’s Tiercel de Claron?”

  Duncan nodded. “I’ve only seen him twice, and beginning stages of decomposition could have me fooled, but it sure looks like him. Arilan is the only one I can think of who would know for sure.”

  “And Arilan’s in Valoret, where you should be,” Nigel replied, straightening to stroke his mustache with a worried hand. “Sweet Jesu, if this is a member of the Council, they’re going to be livid.”

  “Well, not with us,” Duncan muttered, crouching down beside the body again. “We didn’t do it. Do you want to help me turn him over, so I can see whether it looks like anyone else did? I didn’t want to move anything too much before you saw him. I just turned his head enough to see his face—and to realize his neck was broken—and scanned to see if I could pick up any residual information from his mind. Of course I couldn’t, after this long. His brain is probably like pudding.”

  Making a face, Nigel swept the skirts of his night robe back, out of the way, and knelt down.

  “I’ll never make a surgeon,” he said, as the two of them gently turned the body on its back. “I’ve brought enough men to this state in my time, but I usually don’t have to deal with them after they’ve been dead this long. You have a stronger stomach than I do,” he concluded, rising to back off a few steps as Duncan bent to the grisly task of further examination. “Any wounds?”

  Duncan shook his head. Rats had been at the body, but there were no signs of any other trauma besides the broken neck and associated bruising one might expect if Tiercel truly had fallen down the steps to his death.

  “None that I can see offhand, though I’d like a closer look when the body’s stripped for burial. How do you want to handle that?”

  As Duncan stood, Nigel shook his head.

  “I don’t know. It isn’t really our place to bury him. He must have family—or perhaps the Council itself will wish to handle the arrangements. But our only link with the Council is through Arilan. So if you’re sure he’s theirs, I suppose you’d better have an official relapse, so you can go to Valoret and tell Arilan. I don’t suppose there’s a Portal there, to make things easier?”

  “I’ve heard vague rumor about one, but I don’t know where it is. And even if I did, it wouldn’t do me much good if I’ve never been there.” Duncan sighed. “I’ll plan to leave at dawn. You probably should draft a letter to Kelson as well, which I can forward from Valoret. He’ll probably have gone on to Caerrorie by the time I get there, but he ought to know.”

  Nigel’s sigh echoed Duncan’s.

  “Very well. There’s some additional correspondence that I can send as well. I would have sent a courier in a few days, in any case. In the meantime, I suppose the body ought to be coffined. It isn’t going to get any prettier, lying here in the damp. How are we going to get him out of here?”

  “We can rig a sling with his cloak and carry him down to the yard,” Duncan replied, suiting action to words as Nigel bent gingerly to assist. “We’ll put him on the basilica porch while I get some monks to take charge of him. Then
no one else need know about this passageway.”

  “No one except whomever de Claron may have told,” Nigel muttered. “Can you trust these monks of yours?”

  “For what they have to do, yes. I’ll put my chaplain over them while I’m gone—Father Shandon. He’s discreet and loyal—and I can make sure he doesn’t remember anything he oughtn’t. I don’t like to do that, but sometimes there’s no choice. Shall I send for him?”

  “Not until we’ve gotten our friend safely to the bottom,” Nigel said. He grunted as they picked up the cloak-sling between them. “I’ll wait with him on the basilica porch until you’ve done that and gotten the monks. Between us, we ought to be able to dissemble well enough to divert any untoward curiosity. We’ll say we found him in one of the cellars.”

  By dawn, Tiercel was decently coffined and lying in state in Duncan’s study, with Father Shandon set on watch there to pray by the body and ensure against intrusion. And Duncan was galloping through steady rain, already near to wearing out the first of several dozen horses that he would ride in relays to reach Valoret as quickly as possible.

  Dawn brought a break in the rain in Valoret, however, and Kelson’s cold was much improved as well—so much that by early afternoon, after a brief inspection of the chapel where Saint Camber once had been venerated and where his body had lain before being transported to the ancestral home in Caerrorie for burial, the king had decided to press on toward Dolban, much to the dismay of some of his entourage, for many of them had looked forward to dining again in the archbishop’s refectory. Sparse though the Lenten fare was by the standards of the court at Rhemuth, it still was far more than they were likely to be served in the more austere surrounds of Dolban—or at Saint Mark’s Abbey, en route to Dolban, where they must surely spend the night in pilgrim’s lodgings, because of leaving so late from Valoret, and sup on pilgrim’s fare.

  But Kelson was adamant that they must be on their way. Having delivered his speech to the bishops, he felt it best to let them conduct their business in peace, without the specter of the king’s presence hanging over them and possibly making them balky, where they might otherwise move ahead. Besides that, the weather was clearing to the north and east. If they could make it to Dolban before another storm hit, they could rest there for a few days while he and Dhugal queried the monks about the former patron of their house. For Dolban, though currently the home of an order dedicated to teaching, once had housed the first Camberian religious community, the Servants of Saint Camber. And though the shrine to the former Deryni saint had been destroyed at about the time of the Council of Ramos, Kelson hoped to find some further hints there that would help him understand Camber better.

  Consequently, Kelson was long gone from Valoret by the time Duncan arrived there, three days later. With Nigel’s concurrence, Duncan had decided to travel anonymously as an ordinary royal courier, using the badge of his office to procure the fresh horses he needed at relay stations along the way. Two of Nigel’s Haldane archers rode with him as escort, but even they were unaware who he really was.

  Thus it was that Duncan drew rein before All Saints’ Cathedral of a Wednesday morning, just after Terce, exhausted and mud-stained, to leave his spent mount in the charge of his escort while he dashed up the steps, praying that the bishops were not already in conclave for the morning. Fortunately, Mass was still in progress, and his royal courier’s badge admitted him without question to work his way quietly down a side aisle, there to wait until Mass should end and he could approach Arilan. A bishop named de Torigny was the celebrant.

  He longed to go forward for Communion, for it had been several days, but it was clear that this Mass was for the bishops and their attendant clergy only, and he dared not risk being recognized, anonymous though he was in black riding leathers and dark, hooded cloak. He kept all trace of his Deryniness tightly shielded, lest Arilan somehow detect his presence while transported in that peculiar psychic ecstacy and extension of senses that he was sure Arilan, like himself and every other religious Deryni he had met, often experienced at the peak of the Mass. But when Mass had ended, he was waiting with his courier’s badge by the south processional door to accost Arilan before he could file past with the other bishops.

  “In the King’s service, Excellency,” he murmured, thrusting the badge in Arilan’s face but letting his shields slip to identify himself, though he kept his face averted from the others. “I have urgent dispatches. May I deliver them in private?”

  Duncan! What—

  Arilan’s surprise and consternation reverberated in Duncan’s mind, but the other bishop did not betray even a hint of his reaction outwardly as he shut down again and nodded, leading Duncan wordlessly into the shadow of the night stairs so the other clerics could pass into the sunlit cloister yard beyond.

  “So, what ‘dispatches,’ courier?” he said coolly, as he turned to face Duncan again. “Am I to take it that a certain bishop has suffered a relapse?”

  “He has, so far as anyone in Rhemuth knows,” Duncan said softly. “And I do have dispatches to be forwarded to the king. But what I had to tell you in person is that Tiercel de Claron is dead.”

  He winced at the intensity of Arilan’s recoil.

  “That’s impossible. Who told you that?”

  “I saw the body, Denis,” Duncan whispered. “At least I’m fairly certain it’s Tiercel, but you’re the only one I know who could verify that. I hope you’re not angry that I left Rhemuth without permission, but there was no one else to send, under the circumstances.”

  “No, you did right to come,” Arilan breathed. “Jesu-Maria, so that’s why he didn’t show at the last Council meeting. How did it happen?”

  “An accident, we think.”

  “Who is we?”

  “Nigel and I,” Duncan replied. “I had to tell someone. I found the body in the hidden passageway that connects Dhugal’s apartments with the basilica yard. It looks as if he fell down the stairs and broke his neck. He’d been there for a while.”

  “How long, do you know?”

  Duncan shook his head. “It’s hard to say. A week? Two weeks? More?”

  “Not as long as that. I saw him the morning after Kelson’s knighting. That was Ash Wednesday—what, two weeks ago? And you found the body when?”

  “Sunday.”

  “But what was Tiercel doing in that passageway?” Arilan went on. “I didn’t think he knew about it.”

  “Did he know about the Portal in my study?” Duncan asked, looking the other bishop in the eyes.

  Arilan went close-shuttered, as if he were considering whether or not to answer, and Duncan wished he dared try to Truth-Read whatever response the bishop made. But he knew Arilan would resist him, and there were still other clerics milling outside the processional door, some of them growing curious about the prolonged exchange between the Bishop of Dhassa and a royal courier. Duncan dared not put them both at risk, just to satisfy his own pique.

  “Yes, he knew,” Arilan said carefully. “I informed the Council of its location last spring, after you showed me where it was. I felt they ought to know, in case it was ever necessary for one of our number to reach one of you in an emergency. It would have been far more convenient than the ones in the cathedral sacristy or the library.”

  Duncan sighed. He supposed Arilan was telling the truth, but it made little difference just now. Somehow, Tiercel had learned of the passageway and met his death there. Odds were that he had come through the study Portal and entered the secret passage from the basilica yard, bound for some unknown destination in the castle, but equally possible—and a concern that had been bothering Duncan through most of the ride from Rhemuth—was that Tiercel had entered through Dhugal’s apartments, after somehow getting past the wards on the library Portal. Duncan was sure his son could have had nothing to do with Tiercel’s death, but that possibility would occur to someone else, eventually.

  “I’ll want to see the body immediately, of course,” Arilan suddenly said, breaking
into Duncan’s flight of speculation. “And then I’ll need to summon the Council. As you may have surmised, there’s a Portal here in Valoret. We’ll use it. Are you alone?”

  “I have two men waiting in the yard,” Duncan murmured, “but they only know me as a courier named John. Shall I dismiss them?”

  “No, I’ll see to that. Wait in there.” With a nod of his head, Arilan indicated a chapel opening off the south transept. “You shouldn’t be disturbed. And if you can think of any good prayers appropriate to the situation, this is the time to say them. I have to manufacture a good excuse to explain my absence for the next few hours.”

  Duncan obeyed without demur, kneeling unobtrusively at the altar rail in a far corner of the little chapel and keeping his face well in the shadow of his hood, but his mind was racing too busily for him to pray. A fatigue-banishing spell was in order, too—for the third time in as many days, though he could not keep this up indefinitely. But the jump back to the Portal in his study was a long one. He had gone farther before, but never as physically exhausted as he was now. He wondered where the Portal was at this end.

  And poor Father Shandon, Duncan thought, when he had run through the spell twice to reinforce it, and recentered his remaining energy as best he could. Without doubt, the loyal priest would be dutifully reciting prayers for the dead man in his care; but Duncan’s precipitous arrival with Arilan would necessitate yet another tampering with the poor fellow’s memory.

  Duncan dozed a little in the more than half hour it took Arilan to return, though he came to attention immediately when the elder bishop beckoned from the chapel doorway. Arilan had exchanged his episcopal purple for the caped black cloak Duncan had last seen him wear in Rhemuth, and he wore a plain black cassock underneath. They were twin black shadows as they silently moved back through the south transept and right, toward the sacristy. The door was standing open, the room empty, and Arilan closed the door softly behind them, after glancing back the way they had come. No one appeared to have noticed their entry.