Shroud of Shadow (34 page)

Harold held out for two weeks. Admittedly, he was not formally tortured during that time. But fourteen days and fourteen nights of incarceration in waist deep sewage at the bottommost level of the House of God, his only support the chains and shackles that held his nailless hands above his head, his only food bits of black bread mixed with the coarsest of beans, his only drink an occasional mouthful of water, his universe bounded by darkness and the screams of his fellow prisoners, his broken legs rotting away in the fetid water, his face bitten and gnawed by rats . . .

Harold told them everything.

He told them the truth.

“If we arrest Paul Drego,” Siegfried told Fra Giovanni over supper that night, “Jacob will be warned of the interest that Holy Church has taken in him.”

Fra Giovanni never recovered from his puzzlement over Siegfried's dismissal of the book of evidence about Paul, and his superior's words now did not aid his recuperation in the slightest. “But Paul Drego is guilty. Jacob Aldernacht is . . . is in Ypris. He's out of our reach.”

Siegfried felt the rankness of a second lie building up on his tongue, tainting the savor of his spiced quail. But was it a lie? Was it a lie when compared with the deception and fraud that, every day, was perpetrated in the name of Satan, that, every day, snared thousands of otherwise innocent souls in the coils of heresy and dragged them down into the eternity of hell?

Undeterred by logic or equivocation, the rankness persisted. Siegfried had not slept well since he had thrown away the book of evidence. And, despite his increasingly obsessive devotions to the Blessed Sacrament—
Adoro te devote
—he wondered whether his longed-for vision of divinity was not now farther away than ever.

What do you want, dear Lord? What do you want from me? Devotion? You have it. My life? You have it. My duty? You have it. O my Lord and my God, I will give You everything that is mine to give.

But despite his internal pleas and offers, the heavens refused to open.

I will give You everything.

And he was beginning to fear that they would refuse forever.

I will give You the fortune of Jacob Aldernacht.

Giovanni was staring, waiting. Siegfried roused himself from the bargaining table, spoke slowly. “Paul is guilty. That is true. And Jacob is in Ypris . . . out of our reach. But he will not remain so forever: this my heart tells me. One day he will return to Furze, and then . . .”

Will that be enough then, O my God?

“. . . and then he will find out what fate awaits heretics and enemies of the Church. Others, perhaps, have become lax in their prosecution of evil, but we have not.”

Enough for me to see?

“No, we have not.”

Please let it be enough.

Giovanni looked doubtful.

“Let us, though, at least make a start,” said Siegfried. “Let us at least prepare.” He looked meaningfully at Giovanni.

Giovanni understood . . . and was more bewildered than ever. “But that would be a grave irregularity before any formal examination of the accused.”

“There might not be time for an examination,” said Siegfried. “We already have a witness, though. Harold. And he is sufficient.”

“But . . .”

“Now, Fra Giovanni.”

And so, after the servant had soundlessly cleared away the remnants of dinner, Giovanni had parchment and pen brought in. He laid them out, dipped the quill.

In nomine Domini amen
, he wrote.
Hec est quedam condemnatio corporaalis lata, data et in hiis scriptis sententialiter pronumptiata et promulgata
. . .

Aside from names and dates, the form of such documents was unchanging. Even the list of crimes and the solemn declaration that torture had most certainly
not
been employed were customary, traditional, as fixed as the stars. It took Giovanni, therefore, but a few minutes to condemn Jacob Aldernacht. But when the friar started to write the date at the bottom of the page, Siegfried laid a hand on his arm.

“We will fill in the date later,” he said. “God will provide it for us.”

Still wondering, still worried, Giovanni rose, bowed, and departed. Siegfried, though, remained at the table. He read through the order twice to make sure that all was as it should be, and then he carefully rolled it up and slipped it into his sleeve. God would provide the date.

“Yes,” he murmured softly. “God will provide for us. And then we will provide for God.”

***

Albrecht sat with his feet dangling over the edge of the triforium gallery. The stars were clear in the night sky even though the moon was almost full, and darkness had engulfed the town, hiding it and all its affairs—venal and glorious—beneath a soft and comforting shroud of shadow.

Such, perhaps, were reasons enough for the bishop to feel particularly close to heaven tonight, but though the shroud could hide the affairs of Hypprux, it could not banish them, and therefore Albrecht was still fretting about Siegfried. In fact, since Paul Drego had made confession to him and received absolution for the few petty sins he had committed, he was fretting more than ever.

Paul was a good man. Paul was honest. In the privacy and sanctity of the confessional, Paul had professed his belief in and love of Christianity, and Albrecht had believed him. And Albrecht also believed the other matters of which Paul had spoken: of watchers and listeners, of a premonition that the Inquisition had already judged him guilty of heresy and was only staying its iron hand until it was satisfied that its case was beyond any challenge, sacred or secular.

So here was Albrecht, contemplating and clinging to the freedom of heavenly things because he was, on earth, inextricably caught. Caught between his Church and his conscience. Caught between the Inquisition and the wool cooperative. Caught between his suspicions and his trusts.

He bent his head. “Heavenly Father,” he murmured. “I don't know what to do. Even if Siegfried would see me, what Paul told me falls under the seal of confession. And I fear that going to Siegfried would do nothing more than jeopardize Paul and the other cooperative members in any case.”

He stared down between his fingers at the distant, moonlit floor. Siegfried was so . . . ambitious. Mattias thought so. And Albrecht, in his talk with Jacob Aldernacht, had all but admitted that he thought so, too. But what was one petty bishop against someone like Siegfried?

Vaguely, he recalled his clerk's words. The Wheel of Fortune. The Falling Tower. Just like that. Boom!

Pagan pictures. Heathen images. Albrecht shook his head. “I don't want anybody to go
boom
, Lord. I just want the people who deserve to be safe . . . to be safe.”

He shook his head helplessly. Over the years, the Church had become a very strange thing, a thing with branches where roots should have been and roots dry and waving in the air: a topsy-turvy affair in which ambitious men ruled over holy men . . . and wanted them to be ambitious, too.

Albrecht, alone in the gallery of his cathedral, blushed at his thoughts. He had all but claimed that he was a holy man. “No, God,” he said. “I didn't mean that. I meant . . . well, You know what I meant.”

Yes, God knew. And Albrecht took some comfort in that. God knew. God would provide. Albrecht reminded himself to have faith, and when he rose, and when his wobbly knee gave way suddenly, it was, doubtless, faith that kept him from toppling straight off the edge of the gallery. The strength of his leg certainly had nothing to do with it.

Boom
, he thought, crouched and sweating, his fingers still clawing for a hold on the slick marble.
It could all have been over. Boom. Such is the end that comes to ambitious men. Men who run Inquisitions. Men who want to build cathedrals. I'm no better than Siegfried. I'm no better than any of them. Dear God, forgive me.

Shaking his head, trembling, he descended the stairs and went to bed.

The road southwest from Ypris led across pastureland and fields of bracken that swept like a green wave from the Bergren River out towards the west. It threaded its way down towards Belroi among sheep and the men who tended sheep, and then continued on to Furze. But Natil did not take the road, for two women on foot could not hope to outpace pursuers on horseback. And she knew that there were pursuers.

She saw it in her dreams: Jacob's anger, the riding of horsemen from the Aldernacht courtyard, the glitter of weapons. But come morning, with the mists rising from the earth and the pre-dawn sky the color of a bowl of milk, she found rather comforting the fact that she saw it at all, for if her vision of the events in the Aldernacht household was true, then perhaps the same could be said of her dreams of the future awakening of the elven blood. There was hope in that, just as there was hope, albeit mysterious and incomprehensible, in her continuing dream of a forked tree from whose cleft came a golden light.

Maybe. It could be. There was, at least, hope. But for now she knew that she and Omelda were pursued, and so she led the young woman south toward the dark shadows that lay beneath the trees of Malvern Forest. It was only a few leagues, and by the afternoon of the first day, they had entered the wood.

Like everything else, Malvern had changed. The Elves were no more, and therefore something vital seemed to have passed out of the life of the forest. The hidden paths were gone, just like the Immortals who had once used them. The holy places—holy from use, holy from memory—were gone; and Natil feared that what had once been a living, thinking being like herself had dwindled, and was now just a forest.

She touched an oak in passing, drew her hand across the smooth gray bark of an ancient beech. Farther south, the trees were all new, hardly a century old: the legacy of the fire set by the free companies. But here in the northern marches were still the patriarchs and matriarchs of the forest, tall trees and thick trunks that, she was sure, surely preserved some remembrance of the old Malvern, the Elvenhome.

She called for a rest. Omelda flopped down on a bed of soft grass, covered her face with her hands, and moaned softly, but Natil took a moment to set her harp aside, put her arms about a trunk, and lay her forehead softly against the bark.
Are you there, my friend? Is anybody there? Is there hope? Does the world really work as the trees grow: summer into winter . . . and then back into summer once more?

But where once she would have heard a faraway voice—grumpy but good-natured, perhaps, or laughing like a child—now she felt only a stirring.
Growth, it seemed to say, growth and being. Do not strive. The tree that strives fails and breaks. Only be.

Her former life of healing and helping, of stellar potencies and comfort poured out upon the earth seemed so far away now. But it could come back. She told herself that it would come back, clenched the tree with the will and determination that it
must
come back.

Be an Elf.

A soft moan from Omelda made her turn. The young woman's hands were still pressed to her face, but now she was doubled over. It would take her body a long time simply to undo the physical damage accumulated over weeks of abuse and torture; but there was more to her pain than wounds and bites and bleeding, and when Natil knelt and examined her, the facts were obvious. Infection had set in. Faced with prods, filth, and neglect, Omelda's womb was beginning to suppurate. She was fevered, weak, disoriented.

“I can't go on,” Omelda mumbled. Her face was flushed and hot, her hands cold; and when Natil, calling her name and shaking her repeatedly, managed to get her eyes open, she saw that they were glassy.

“You must go on,” said the harper. She tried to keep her voice gentle, but it shook. “You must.”

“Why?”

Natil passed a hand over her face. “Because . . .” It seemed hopeless. But her own words came back to her, her words and the words of the people she had, by act of will, reclaimed:
Nothing is impossible. There are merely differing levels of probability.
“Because,” she stumbled, “if you do not, the Aldernachts will find us and take us back.”

She did not state the obvious. She did not have to. What would Jacob do to the murderer of the Aldernacht heirs? But though her healer's hands still felt the unclean touch of death, she could find in her heart no objection to the killings. Indeed, had any arisen, she had only to look at Omelda's flushed face, examine, perhaps, the caked blood and pus on her thighs in order to lay them.

“Who cares?” murmured Omelda, sagging.

Gritting her teeth, wincing with the action, Natil shook her again. “
You
care, woman,” said the harper. “I know you care.”

The nun's eyelids fluttered. Fever.

Natil searched her memory, trying to recall the forest as it had been when she and her people had dwelt beneath its branches and leaves, sung in its meadows. “There is . . . there is a stream nearby,” she said. “It comes down from the glaciers in the Aleser Mountains. It is cold. You will bathe in it.”

Omelda moaned softly.

“It will bring your fever down,” said the harper. “For a time. There will be other streams. And I know of herbs that will help. With the grace of the Lady, we will return you to your convent, and you can rest and heal there.”

“No one can heal me,” said Omelda, her tongue clumsy with sickness. “No one. They'll toss me on the dung heap at the abbey. They don't care. And I'll go mad anyway . . .”

“You do not know that.”

Omelda pried her eyes open, and the glassiness of her stare fled for a moment before a flash of anger. “How the hell do
you
know any different, Natil? You haven't known anything since I found you up in Maris. What the hell makes you so sure they'll take me back?”

The harper sat back, wilted. “There is healing in the world.” Her words tasted thick and sour, tasted like a lie. “I know.”

Omelda glared at her. Natil saw it in her eyes: the child who had been abandoned, the intrusive plainchant that had threatened her with madness, the world that had exploited her and abused her, the promises that had been made to her only to be broken, the fever that would probably kill her. “Healing,” she said. “Sure. Can
you
heal me?”