“This is a little risky, using this Portal in the daytime,” Arilan said, “but we daren’t wait until tonight. I want a look at that body, before all trace of residual memory is gone—if it isn’t already.”
“It is,” Duncan said, “unless you’re that much better at reading than I am. I did my best to leave a stasis on the body to retard further decay, but I don’t know how well it will have held, without tending. The coffin’s warded, too, for whatever good that may have done.”
Arilan grimaced. “I suppose that means you’ve moved the body.”
“Well, we could hardly leave him down there in the damp, for the rats.”
“No, no, I’m not criticizing. You did everything else properly. Of course I’ll want to read you, after I’ve had a look at him, to pick up everything I can about the actual death site and the situation of the body, but that can wait a while. Who’s apt to be waiting at the other end, now?”
“Only Father Shandon,” Duncan replied, as Arilan indicated a circular design set into the floor tiles.
He did not relish the thought of having to open his mind to Arilan’s probe, but he could hardly refuse. At least he did not have to do it now. Palming across his eyes to reinforce the spell he had already worked, he drew a deep breath to collect himself, trying not to let it turn into a yawn.
“Give me a moment before you come through,” Duncan added, “and I’ll put him to sleep.”
“It looks like you could use the sleep. Are you sure you’re up to this? I can take us both through, you know.”
“And Shandon will see you,” Duncan replied. “Besides, it’s possible he isn’t alone. Don’t worry, I’ll sleep after you’ve gone to deal with your precious Council. See you in Rhemuth.”
He flashed Arilan a game smile as he stepped onto the circle, but he did not wait for any further objection. Closing his eyes, he reached his mind into the tangle of power he could already feel throbbing under his feet. The Portal was a potent one and required far less effort than he had anticipated to lock into its pattern. As he reached for the link in the study Portal, he wondered briefly whether active use reinforced Portals.
Then he drew the link closed with his mind and felt the pit of his stomach give a little wrench, and he was in close darkness, in the familiar confines of the Portal in his study.
He drew a deep breath to steady his balance and felt for the stud that would open the door. He thrust beyond the door with his mind, but only Shandon’s presence radiated, prayerfully immersed in supplications for the dead, as Duncan had expected. The priest was kneeling beside the pall-covered coffin, his back to Duncan. Even as the opening door stirred the tapestry covering it and Shandon turned in alarm, Duncan was slipping from behind to slide one arm around the man’s shoulders, his other forefinger going to his lips in a sign for silence as his mind seized Shandon’s.
“Relax, Father,” he whispered, just before shifting his further commands to a non-verbal level. “And when you’ve carried out my instructions, you’ll remember none of this.”
By the time Arilan came through, a few minutes later, Shandon had left on his errand and Duncan was folding back the pall to expose Tiercel’s shrouded body to the waist. He had already dispersed the wards. He backed off and sat down near the fire as Arilan approached, letting himself doze again while the other bishop spent long moments with his hands on the forehead of the corpse.
“Nothing,” Arilan finally said.
The word brought Duncan back to consciousness with a start.
“I told you there wouldn’t be.”
“Yes, so you did. Where is Shandon? Wasn’t he here?”
Duncan leaned his head wearily against the high back of his chair and smiled, knowing Arilan would see the intended second meaning behind what he was about to say.
“I sent him to fetch Nigel. It seemed like a good idea for someone to know we’re both here, especially since he thinks we’re still in Valoret. He is the regent in Kelson’s absence, after all.”
Chuckling, Arilan came to sit on the edge of the table next to Duncan. “You don’t quite trust me, do you?”
“Should I?”
“Well, if I were trying to deceive you, I should say yes, whether it were true or not, so what good is that question? But I give you my word, as a Deryni and as a priest, that our present dealings have nothing to do with our past differences regarding the Council or your status as a cleric. Read the truth of what I say. Go ahead. You’ve gone to a great deal of trouble to do me a personal favor, and I shan’t take advantage of the situation. I would like to see how you found Tiercel’s body, however.”
“Make your probe, then,” Duncan said, smiling again as he closed his eyes. “I’ll help you all I can. I’m so tired, I don’t know whether I could resist if I had to, so I’m glad you promised not to make me fight you.”
As he slipped into trance, Arilan’s mind edging close behind him, he sensed the impression of gentle, even affectionate laughter, quickly overshadowed by a warm, comfortable greyness, reinforced by Arilan’s hand across his eyes, which carried him swiftly to depths so far from consciousness that he was only barely aware of his memory being sifted, carefully restrained to only the subject of Tiercel.
The next thing he knew, someone was knocking on the door, and he was bobbing back up to consciousness, curiously refreshed for the short time he knew he had been under, and Arilan’s hand was leaving him. He opened his eyes to see Nigel standing over him, Arilan to one side. Beyond them, Father Shandon was closing the door.
“Are you all right?” Nigel asked.
“I’m fine. Just tired. What time is it now?”
“Just past noon. How long have you been here?”
Duncan smiled. “Only long enough for Father Shandon to go and get you. But not quite three hours ago, I was just riding into Valoret. At least I know where another Portal is.”
Nigel nodded grimly. “Should Shandon be hearing all this?”
Shaking his head, Arilan took the priest’s arm and directed him, glassy-eyed, toward the prie-dieu in the far corner of the room, facing away from them.
“Go and pray awhile, Father,” he murmured, “and remember nothing of what you’ve heard and seen.” As the priest obeyed, Arilan turned back to Duncan and Nigel.
“You’ve been a great help. Now I’d like to take Tiercel to his brethren. Will you help me get him to the Portal? I can manage from there alone. Duncan, I don’t expect to need your direct testimony, but I’d appreciate it if you could stand by, just in case. Get some sleep, by all means, but do it here, if you don’t mind.”
When Arilan had gone with his grisly burden, Duncan did just that, curling up on the carpet and a pile of cloaks before the fire, with Nigel to watch and Shandon praying in the corner.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
We will return and build the desolate places.
—Malachi 1:4
Arilan, when he returned some hours later, was able to inform Duncan that he would not need to testify to the Camberian Council regarding his finding of Tiercel’s body, but the Council was interested in having Arilan query Dhugal as to how and why Tiercel might have happened to be in the passageway connecting with Dhugal’s quarters.
“Surely they don’t think Dhugal had anything to do with Tiercel’s death,” Duncan said, rubbing sleep from his eyes as Arilan crouched by the hearth to warm his hands.
Arilan shook his head. “Of course not. Everything points to an accident. It’s possible that Dhugal heard or saw something, however, if he was in his quarters when it happened—which is by no means certain, though we did narrow down the time of death somewhat.”
“Really? You can do that?”
“Oh, yes. We estimate a week to ten days ago, based on the absence of any psychic traces. That would place it right around the time Kelson and the others left, perhaps a little before.”
As Duncan propped himself up on his elbows, Nigel edged forward in the chair where he had been napping while he waited with Duncan,
awake now. They had moved Father Shandon to the hidden chapel, deep in forced sleep.
“Hmmm, I suppose Tiercel might have cried out when he fell,” Duncan agreed. “Most men would. What I can’t understand is what he was doing in there at all. And which end did he enter from? To come in from the yard is one thing, but—dear God, you don’t suppose he was going to do something to Dhugal, do you? Or that he did something?”
“Did something?” Arilan cocked his head. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Well, Dhugal is an unknown quantity to your Council folk. No one besides yourself has had any kind of look at his mind, and even you haven’t tried to read him since you’ve known he’s my son. You don’t suppose Tiercel would have taken that upon himself, do you?”
“You mean, to come into Dhugal’s room while he slept and try to do a probe without him being aware?”
“Well, yes.”
Arilan sat back on the edge of the hearth and considered, his amethyst glittering in the firelight as he pleated an edge of his cloak between restless fingers.
“No, I shouldn’t think so. Nigel, I could possibly see him being interested in you, because of his preoccupation with the notion that the Haldane potential is not limited to the sovereign and his principal heir. For that matter, he might even have had an interest in Conall—though Conall’s such an arrogant little son of a bitch, I shouldn’t think Tiercel would bother. Sorry, Nigel, but your eldest son can be very tedious.”
Nigel sighed. “I know. I keep hoping maturity will temper him.”
“Hmmm, no doubt it will,” Arilan replied. “As for Dhugal, however—and no slight intended to your son, Duncan—he really isn’t anything that would particularly interest Tiercel: only part Deryni, and hardly trained at all. Given Tiercel’s snobbery about such things, it simply doesn’t make sense.”
But neither did any of the other half-dozen explanations they tried on one another in the next little while, before Arilan reluctantly prepared to make the jump back to Valoret.
“There is something else that may or may not mean anything,” Arilan said. “If Tiercel was intending any mischief with someone here in the castle complex—Dhugal or anyone else—he probably would have been carrying a set of ward cubes. There were none on him, and so far we’ve found none in any of the several houses we know he kept. Or he might have had them in a pouch or satchel, along with Deryni-specific drugs. He used to do a fair amount of training for us. But you didn’t find anything like that, did you, Duncan?”
Duncan had not found anything, but that proved nothing, either. So Nigel wrote the appropriate letters informing Kelson of Tiercel’s death and querying Dhugal further. These Arilan agreed to forward to the king’s party the next morning, along with the other, routine correspondence that Duncan already had taken as far as Valoret. When the bishop had gone, Father Shandon was roused and sent off to bed with suitable instructions to forget what he had seen and heard, and both Duncan and Nigel retired for much needed sleep, only mildly concerned for Dhugal. The next morning, life in Rhemuth resumed its usual routine when the king and court were not present.
And Arilan’s activities in Valoret settled back into routine as well, once he had written his own letters and sent an episcopal courier off to find Kelson. He had missed little the previous afternoon that could not be filled in by a quick perusal of the day’s transcripts and counted himself fortunate that he could fill in what gaps remained by means of a few minutes casual reading of a willing Cardiel, who knew what had happened back in Rhemuth and had covered Arilan’s absence quite handily. The synod was proceeding apace with the business of chastising and replacing many of its number.
The first major item on the bishops’ agenda had already been accomplished before Arilan was called back to Rhemuth—the election of a new incumbent to the vacant See of Meara, whose filling the previous year had so convoluted the Mearan political situation. The choice this time was one John FitzPadraic, an itinerant bishop considered somewhat prematurely before Henry Istelyn’s election, but whose levelheaded conduct in the Mearan outlands during the Mearan cirisis—always on the move to avoid contact with the Mearan rebels—had only enhanced his reputation as an even-tempered, moderate churchman of proven loyalty to his legitimate superiors as well as the crown, well suited to take command of the still volatile see that was junior only to Valoret and Rhemuth.
Bishop FitzPadraic’s election had raised the number of titled bishops not under suspension to nine—Valoret, Rhemuth, Meara, Grecotha, Dhassa, Coroth, Cardosa, Stavenham, Marbury—giving the synod the three-fourths quorum desirable for trying the remaining three. The trials of those three had proceeded pro forma, with unanimity uncertain only over the question of whether Creoda, the suspended Bishop of Culdi, should also be turned over to secular justice for trial on the charge of treason—and an almost certain capital sentence—in addition to being deprived of his office and imprisoned for the rest of his life, as was the decision regarding Belden of Erne and Lachlan de Quarles, the suspended bishops of Cashien and Ballymar, respectively.
In the end, Creoda was spared secular trial, but only by the narrowest of margins. And disposition on the three being agreed, the nine wasted no time filling the newly vacant sees with three of the most promising from among the itinerant bishops: the loyal Hugh de Berry for Ballymar, in Kierney, as further reward for his continued service to the crown after leaving Loris’ employ four years before; for Culdi, one Bevan de Torigny, a former abbot of the respected Ordo Vox Dei in Grecotha and a master lecturer at the university there, young and flexible regarding the Deryni question, who had long ago stated his support of the move to restore Culdi’s most notorious son to his status as a saint; and another scholar, James MacKenzie, for the border See of Cashien. Since the elections exactly paralleled the recommendations Kelson had made to Cardiel, and the three were already bishops, they had been seated immediately in their new capacities, thus filling all twelve titled sees. Arilan had no doubt that the king would approve the actual elections.
And that had brought the synod to its next phase—an intermediate process to interview candidates for the five itinerant bishoprics subsequently vacant or vacant before—the task in which they had been engaged the day before, when Duncan’s arrival pulled Arilan temporarily from the evaluations. A second such set of deliberations would follow after the disposition of five more itinerant bishops under suspension, whose fate had yet to be decided, but who certainly would be deprived of office, even if allowed to return to parish work as simple priests on a probationary basis. At least the first phase of the selection process promised to go moderately quickly, for the findings of a similar set of interviews not two years past had already been refined and studied during the past winter.
Thus it was that Arilan was able to daydream a little as Bishop Siward of Cardosa questioned a priest named Jodoc d’Armaine, wondering what reaction his letters would bring when they reached Dhugal and the king in the next day or so.
The king, meanwhile, was happily engrossed in one of the more whimsical aspects of his quest for Saint Camber. The royal party had slept at Saint Bearand’s Abbey the previous night, and would sleep there again before heading out, for the next day promised an arduous climb to the pass leading out to the plain of Iomaire, and Saer wanted the pack animals, in particular, well rested.
The day was sunny and fine, however, far too beautiful for young knights to remain cooped up indoors, so Sir Jatham and Jass MacArdry organized a hunting expedition on the abbey lands, while a few, like Conall, preferred merely to sleep late and relax. Kelson declined both options, he and Dhugal choosing to ride ahead shortly after dawn with Saer de Traherne, Dolfin, and a man-at-arms to inspect the ruins of Caerrorie.
It was a place once intimately associated with Saint Camber. Until confiscated by the Crown, after the institution of the Statutes of Ramos, Caerrorie had been the favored seat of the MacRorie family outside the titular lands of Culdi, convenient to the then-capital of Valoret. Unfortunately,
anti-Deryni reaction following in the wake of Camber’s demotion from saintly status had led to the wholesale demolition of the old castle, with a new manor house being constructed elsewhere on the estate for the new master of Caerrorie. The land had passed through two families since then, and was now held of the Crown by Thomas, Earl of Carcashale, though said earl had his principal seat farther west, near Dolban. Kelson had dined with him earlier in the week, and had been assured that little remained of the old demesne buildings.
The allure of Caerrorie, however, was not necessarily that Camber had lived there, but that it had been Camber’s original burial place. Though most of the vast pile of the earlier castle had been dismantled to build the new manor house, the cellars and family burial vaults were said to remain, though in deplorable condition. Kelson did not tell Earl Thomas, of course, but he hoped that Haldane or Deryni powers still might sift some information of import from the ruins, despite the ravages of time and the destroyers.
Thus noon found Kelson quite happily immersed in Camberiana as he, Dhugal, Saer, and the squire Dolfin clambered over the ruins of old Caerrorie keep, working their way down to the lower levels to gain access to the MacRorie burial vaults—for, in the decade immediately following Camber’s canonization, an active cult of Saint Camber was said to have flourished around a now-ruined shrine there. A monk from the local village church, one Brother Arnold, had kilted up his habit to guide them, but he clearly was dubious as Dhugal, Dolfin, and the king tried to shift a fallen beam that blocked the way.