Count Scar - SA (12 page)

"In certain respects," I answered, speaking more calmly now. "But the True Faith teaches that those men were seeking merely to be worthy to receive grace if the Lord so willed, not trying to win
it by their own human power. The True Faith also tells us the Lord sent his only Son to bring us grace through His earthly sacrifice. But the Perfected believe the Lord had two sons, and that the
elder was Lucifer. He rebelled against his Father, was cast out, and then created this flawed physical world to affront his Father and entrap humans, who were originally the entirely spiritual
creations of the Lord. They also believe that the Lord later sent his second son to teach us all how to overcome Lucifer's false creation by our own efforts and reattain the higher realm that is
humankind's rightful home."

"Most interesting. It sounds in this story as though the Lord's younger son did better for himself than I ever have, but then my older brother was anything but rebellious! Clearly there is more to
this heretical doctrine than we have ever heard in the north. You must tell me more of these Perfected one day soon. I see that I shall need to understand them better in case there may be some
lurking within my own domains."

The sun was setting far up the valley by the time we came clattering up the last steep track toward Peyrefkade. As we drew near the gates, I saw one of the knights who had been left on duty
trying to shoo away two ragged figures: a youth and a bent old woman. It was the cook's dismissed assistant and his mother.

As soon as they saw us they came running and threw themselves on their faces right in front of Count Galoran's horse, so close he had to make it rear to avoid trampling both of them. "Mercy,
m'lord Compte, mercy!" the old woman cried in the Royal Tongue, with a Auccitan accent even thicker than her son's. Bruno pushed his horse forward to whip them out of the way, but the count
stopped him.

"On what account do you ask for mercy from me, old woman?" he asked quietly. "Your son was caught at open theft in my house. You are quite lucky I did not hang him."

"I know, m'lord Compte, what 'a did was very wrong. But he's all I ha' lef, and he's ne'er been aught but a servant here i' the castle. Our food's run out and it's long yet 'til there'll be work i' the
fields. We'll starve, m'lord Compte!"

I cringed inside my cassock, peering covertly at Galoran's grim scarred face. The knights and even the servants along the wall were all watching now, and I expected the Count would feel it
necessary to have these two whipped away, if he didn't merely ride them down. Instead he paused for a long moment's thought, then reached down to his belt, took a small purse, and tossed it to
the old woman.

"This is for you," he growled. "I give it assuming you were quite innocent in this matter. If you freely choose to spend some of these coins to feed your miserable son as well as yourself, that is
your own affair. Now be gone, and don't come here again."

She tried to seize his knee, crying, "Oh bless you, m'lord Compte!" Without looking down again he pushed her away with his boot, not roughly, then jerked his head and led us on into the
courtyard.

When I came down from the chapel the following morning, after performing divine service, washing the holy chalice, and returning everything to the altar, I stumbled hard over a great heap of
stones near the side entrance to the great hall. I'd forgotten overnight how the place had been torn up by the masons the seneschal had brought in during our absence. A servant ran to help me, but
I waved him off with thanks and went to collect my breakfast. Then I took my bread and beer over to see how work on the new hearth was coming.

The progress was impressive, considering they'd only been at work three days. A great opening had been made in the cut-stone wall at the end of the hall behind Count Galoran's huge curtained
bed, exposing the rubble fill between the inner and outer walls of worked stones. A scaffold of timbers had been erected within this hole, and wiry men in rough blue smocks were already at work
inside, rapidly making the cavity bigger. Some stood up on the scaffold, heaving with bars and chisels as they pried chunks of rubble out of the fill. Others seized stones as fast as they came free
and passed them quickly down to muscular apprentices, who dragged them off on pallets to add them to the pile.

The seneschal stood at one side talking with the chief mason, while Bruno, Bouteillier Raymbaud, and several of the castle knights looked on. The seneschal seemed to be making his whole
breakfast on a crust and a cup of water, but the bouteillier and most of the knights held rough loaves with a smear of olive oil and tankards like mine. I decided to stand with them while I ate so I
could watch and listen. I needed to put more effort into getting acquainted with all of the souls under my care, and that included the masons as long as they were in Peyrefixade.

"It'll take at leas' four more days to tunnel clear up thro' this wall to the top, sir," the chief mason was telling the seneschal, showing a decent command of the Royal Tongue. "Wonderful well
built, these castles from the time o' the great war. It's easier goin' here than in some I've worked on, for there's been stones shifted within this wall before, but that must ha' been long ago and the
fill has settled firm since. And the lads ha' to go more and more careful the higher they get i' the rubble. Shouldna' want a collapse, with good lads killed or hurt and twice the work after putting
it all right again after."

"The count understands that," said Seneschal Guilhem in his dull voice. "Just see the work is done well and he won't mind the cost."

"Oh, it will be, sir! Once we've cut a shaft to the top o' the wall, we'll line the whole flue very pretty wi' a sill inside to make her draw smooth as butter and put in a hearth here at bottom broad
enough to roast an ox in't. Then we'll fit up the opening here with a grander carved fireplace than even a man such as the count what's served wi' the Allemann emperor has ever seen."

"Sounds like we're to have a bit more real style in our hall when this is done," one of the young knights said. "Maybe Duke Argave's pretty boys won't look down their long noses at us so much
then."

"Style is never amiss in a nobleman," agreed Raymbaud.

"Maybe," muttered an older knight. "But by my spurs, I can't fathom why Count Sc—Count Caloran wants to piss away his money having a fireplace put in his very first month in possession."

"Oh, you'd like to know that, would you?" said Bruno, turning to him. "Well then, I'll tell you. Captain Caloran — Count Caloran, I mean — is as brave a fellow as I ever knew in almost
everything you could name. I don't know that he'd fear to face any man living. But he does have a powerful dislike of fire. The Allemann winter is no soft season such as you boys have hereabouts.

But I've seen him stand shivering in his cloak in camp after a day's march because he didn't like to get as close to the watchfire as the rest of us. He was burned terrible bad in a fire as a boy, you
see; that's how he came by those scars. Why, I once saw him ride straight into a breech to fight three men when everyone else was minded to retreat — rallied the assault and saved the day, was
commended and rewarded by the emperor himself — and afterwards he confessed to me private-like that he'd ten times rather go forward against such odds than try to ride back over the mess of
blazing oil the defenders had thrown down behind us from the battlements! He'll sleep a sight better once the fire burns in this nice hearth instead of out in the middle of the hall, my boys, believe
me."

"Well, you can't blame a burned man for not liking fire," said the older knight with a slow nod. "I'd rather an honest sword cut any day myself than a burn. I was in a siege once myself, a little
walled heretic settlement that turned up back in the foothills, and — "

But I heard no more. My attention had been drawn by something imperceptible to everyone else in the hall but like a thunderclap to me: the unmistakable resonance of magic nearby. Not magic
being worked, but latent magic, lines of it embedded in some object. I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck at its power. I'd tried several divinations during my first days in the castle but
without success, scarcely surprising considering I'd had nothing to use as an indicator to seek out long-latent magic. But even latent magic will resonate when suddenly disturbed, and a novice in
his first year would have detected this! Then I heard rubble falling and the workmen talking excitedly in Auccitan. "In there—a cavity—something in a box!"

Striding to the base of the scaffold, I called to them in the same language, "What is it? What have you found?"

The chief mason had already climbed up there. He spoke down at me over one shoulder. "We're not sure, Father. The lads will have it out in a moment—there. Here it is, Father."

I seized the lead box he passed down to me with shaking fingers. It was gray, misshapen, and covered with grit, but I could feel waves of magic emanating from inside as I pried at the lid.

Suddenly the box popped open and a surge of power came out that staggered me. Inside lay a golden medallion: old, over four inches across, on a massive chain. The medallion was extremely plain
with only a single device worked in its exact center. It was a circle—the symbol of Perfection. And the gold of the pendant resonated powerfully with the unmistakable vibrations of old, potent
magic: complex lines and knotted patterns as beautiful and frightening as the diamond eye of a serpent, laid into it by a truly formidable Magian long ago.

"And what have you there, Father?" came Count Galoran's voice just behind me.

I froze, my fingers clenching tightly about the medallion without conscious thought. I felt a brief impulse to run, to try and get away with the thing somehow, anyhow. Then my mind cleared
again, and I recalled I was both a sworn canon of the Order and the count's own capellanus. I turned and handed the amulet to him.

"I am not sure, Count Caloran. It is something that was hidden here long ago. I think it once belonged to a Magian. Not of my Order, or even of the True Faith, but one of the Perfected."

Chapter Five ~ Caloran

Chapter Five ~ Caloran

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1

"I have an aunt?" I was so surprised I almost dropped my mug of morning beer.

In an effort to learn Auccitan, I had been practicing it with Brother Melchior for the last week, every morning after divine service. It was close enough to the Royal Tongue that, once I got used to
the differences in how words were pronounced, I could almost follow a conversation in it—or at least grasp the gist of what the masons were yelling at each other. Producing the words and syntax
myself was harder. I had just tried to say, "I wish I knew more about the history of this county," though it came out more like, "Me want county many know."

And the priest had answered, in the fluent Auccitan he told me he had learned in the cradle, "Why don't you ask your great-aunt?"

Now, as we stood together on the little terrace outside the great tower, he looked at me quizzically over the rim of his mug and asked in the Royal Tongue, "You mean you don't kmow your
Great-aunt Richildis? The abbess of the convent of the Holy Family?"

"No, I don't," I said in exasperation. This was supposed to be my castle and my county, and it kept seeming as though everyone else knew much more about it than I did, but neglected to tell me.

"I never heard more than a few stories about this region from my grandfather before

he died, and my own father and older brother were even less interested than I was — then."

"She was the younger sister of old Count Bernhard and of your own grandfather," said Melchior. "She must be very old by now, but I hear she still carries out the governance of her convent
herself." He paused, frowning. "I wonder if you ought to make a gift to the house of the Holy Family for the soul of the late countess, your cousin."

I shrugged, again in exasperation. "Probably." As I moved I could feel the medallion, hung around my neck under my shirt.

At first, when the masons had found it in the wall and the priest had given it to me, I had locked it up in the treasure chest under the bed, along with my money and the records of my
predecessors' pious generosity. An artifact of the Perfected, Melchior had called it, and therefore I thought something that should not be left out in the open. Perhaps I would turn it over to the
duke, I decided vaguely, or possibly the Mother House of Melchior's Order.

But over the next few days I had found my thoughts drawn to the medallion again and again, and several times at night I had awakened in my great canopied bed, seeing the faint light from the
fire in the middle of the room through the curtains and hearing the snores of the men all around me, and almost wondered if I also heard the medallion's voice. Something that once belonged to a
Magian, Melchior had said, but as I was no magic-worker I told myself that no magic that might still linger in it could possibly affect me. Then one day I had slipped it on under my shirt, for no
particular reason, and had not taken it off since.

"I had been going to visit the convent of the Holy Family anyway," I continued. The sun was well up now, shining on hills that seemed greener every day. The high mountains beyond them,
however, were still white with snow. "Did you know that half of the rents from one of my villages go to the nuns? The nuns' own bailiffs collect all the money, and according to the seneschal he
has to go every year to collect the count's share from the convent."