The Palace (Bell Mountain Series #6) (29 page)

That night Ryons had need of Obst: no one else would do. No one else would understand.

“All these men!” he cried, when he was alone with his teacher, a little distance from the camp. “All these men from all over, from countries that I never heard of—how can I be king of all these men? Chiefs and great warriors, and men who’ve been everywhere and seen everything—and I’m just a stupid boy. When the Hosa clashed their shields for me today, it made me want to run away and hide. And the Ghols call me their father!”

Obst drew him into a gentle embrace and stroked his hair. Ryons had grown a little, but his head still didn’t come up to Obst’s chest.

“Shush, shush!” he whispered. “All’s well, my boy. All’s well. It’s not always easy to be what God wants you to be. And there’s no doubt He wants you to be king.

“Your chiefs and your warriors know you’re just a boy, but they love you, and they know you’ll be a man someday. Sooner than you think! Yes … They’re wise; they see the man in you already. Wise to obey the Word of God, whose prophets named you king. No, there’s no doubt of it at all, my son.” Obst patted him between the shoulders. “But if there is, remember this. In all the army, my king, the only one who cannot see the red streak of King Ozias in your hair, is you.”

CHAPTER 31

A New First Prester

Lord Orth prayed for the peace of Obann, prayed for the advancement of God’s word and for the protection of God’s servants. He had little else to do in his secret rooms above the palace. The view from his window was of a vast expanse of rooftops, the great dome of the Great Hall of the Oligarchs, and chimneys everywhere. Beyond the rooftops of the palace stretched the city, the walls, and the green fields by the river.

Gallgoid brought him his meals. He saw no one else.

“Goryk Gillow’s in the city, my lord,” he reported one day. “The council has put out the story that you’ve gone mad again and wandered off alone. It’s possible they believe it. They’ve mounted a thorough search for you, and they’re amazed they haven’t found you.”

“Haven’t they searched the palace?”

“Of course—but no one has used these rooms in a hundred years. I had quite a job getting rid of all the dust.”

“Does Preceptor Constan know I’m here?”

“It’s safer for him if he doesn’t, my lord. He understands that.”

The day after Goryk’s arrival at the palace, Gallgoid came to Orth with a new proposal.

“I’ve decided it would be best, First Prester, to send you secretly to Lintum Forest, where King Ryons is. You’ll be safe there. Besides, a prophet said Ozias’ throne is to be set in Lintum Forest, not here in Obann City.”

“Who spoke that prophecy?”

“A three-year-old girl,” said Gallgoid. “I’ve seen her. She truly is a prophet, if anyone is.”

Outside the city, the search for Orth had been called off. It wouldn’t be too hard, now, to get him out of the city and on his way to Lintum Forest, Gallgoid thought. He wanted Orth to be far from the city before the coronation.

“Sir, I trust in God and I will not resist you,” Orth said. “But I confess I’d be easier in my mind if Constan and his scribes and students could be moved to Durmurot. If I’m in danger here, then surely he is, too.”

Gallgoid shrugged. “I can’t persuade him to abandon the seminary library,” he said. “Goryk Gillow as First Prester will put a stop to Constan’s work. I’m hoping it will serve as a kind of leash on him when you turn up alive and well in Lintum Forest.”

“The work must not be stopped,” said Orth. “It’s much more important than my life or Constan’s. The Scriptures must be read in every chamber house and preached from the mountains to the sea, wherever there are ears to hear it.”

“I could stop Goryk tomorrow,” Gallgoid thought. “A little poison in his dinner, and there’s an end to him.” But Jandra the prophetess, speaking God’s own message to him, had commanded him to sin no more. Gallgoid wasn’t sure what he believed in anymore, but he did believe that God had spoken to him. And yet removing Goryk Gillow would be so easy! “It may yet come to that,” he thought. “The one commandment God has ever given me—and I break it. For the good of all Obann, of course: but a broken commandment none the less.”

“Ah, well!” Orth sighed. “If the work is truly of God, then no man will be able to stop it.”

Gallgoid remembered those words.

Along with rats and mice and spiders, and a black-and-white cat who had to be taught a lesson at the sharp point of a stick, Wytt took up residence in the palace stables. The mice ignored him. The rats accepted him when they understood he wasn’t there to steal their babies. Wytt had been there before, and a few of the horses remembered him.

He would know Goryk Gillow’s horses when he saw them, and they weren’t here. Wytt had no word for “palace,” but he knew that when Goryk came to the city, he would stay at the palace. This was the nest where important people stayed. Whiteface and the Boy would be brought here, too. And then Wytt would see what he could do.

Ellayne and Kadmel were in the crowd that welcomed the king and the queen to the city. Kadmel kept a firm grip on Ellayne’s hand. With the other hand she waved to Gurun, but Gurun didn’t see her.

She knew that by now Jack and Martis had been lodged in the palace, along with Goryk Gillow. Kadmel’s men had heard that in an alehouse near the palace. One of the councilors had told her father not to bother trying to pay his respects to the First Prester. “He’s out of his head again and has been missing for days on end.” And then the man had bragged, “But we’ll have a new First Prester in time for Coronation Day!”

“That was a slip of the tongue,” Roshay said, “and the other councilors glared daggers at him. I said I didn’t concern myself with Temple business and was only here to see the coronation and to ask the crowned king to confirm me in my office. They were satisfied with that, but we’ll take care not to seem too curious. If we’re too curious about them, they’ll grow curious about us.”

Her father had explained the situation to her as if she were grown up, and it made Ellayne proud. “I’m not a silly little girl anymore!” she thought.

The day after the king’s return to the city, presters, reciters, preceptors, and seminarians assembled in the Great Hall of the Oligarchs to decide who should be First Prester of the Temple. As expected, Prester Jod opposed the election of a new one—argued, indeed, that this was not a proper conclave, that only a fraction of the clergy had been notified, and that the whole procedure was unlawful. But he’d only been in the city for a day and had had no time to organize a campaign.

“Dear brothers!” he pleaded from the podium. “I can’t imagine a more irregular procedure than this. It’s monstrous! To replace Lord Orth with a man who has never been ordained, never served the Temple in any capacity at all—and who, moreover, is a traitor to Obann and a creature of our enemy, the Thunder King—what can you be thinking? This is an abomination.”

Yes, he had his supporters in the hall. That was only to be expected, Merffin said. “But when the votes are counted,” he told Goryk, “he’ll find himself the loser. He doesn’t know the votes have already been counted!”

The councilors weren’t clergy, and so could not address the conclave. Nor did it seem wise for Goryk to speak for himself until the last. But Merffin had had ample time to find mouthpieces aplenty, and one by one they went up to the podium to urge the election of the Thunder King’s candidate.

“My friends, be reasonable!” said the loudest of those mouthpieces, a prester from the north named Iza. Merffin had promised to make him a very rich man. “We’re about to crown a king. We need a First Prester for that; and Lord Orth, without a word of explanation to anyone, has fled from his responsibility.

“Electing Goryk Gillow means peace between our country and the Thunder King. Peace! This war has nearly ruined us. Today the Temple itself is nothing but a heap of broken stone. Who wants to see what further war might bring?

“At his own considerable expense, our former enemy has built a New Temple for our God, in the very heart of Heathendom. I call that a miracle! All the world will come to the New Temple to worship the God of Obann. Some of us will be fortunate enough to serve Him there. So it’s not only peace we’re offered, and reconciliation, but the rebirth of the Temple. Not just for Obann, but for all the world! And a man of Obann to be First Prester. What more could we ask?”

There were many others who spoke in the same vein, until at last Goryk himself advanced to the podium. He wore a prester’s robes, but no chain of office.

“My countrymen,” he said, “we’ve all seen the horrors of this war. We all desire peace.

“It’s true I’m not ordained. But many of you will be chosen to help me and advise me. Someday, when the New Temple is firmly established in men’s hearts, you may choose a new First Prester more to your liking: maybe someone who is among us today. But in the meantime King Thunder has chosen me to be your servant, in his name, because he sees me as a bridge between you and himself. I am ready to be that bridge.

“I came here to make peace and to crown your king and to begin the work of the New Temple. I have no other purpose. Choose, then—the old Temple, which lies in ruins, or the new, which opens up the whole world to the clergy of Obann and waits only for you to come to her and preach the Scriptures.”

Prester Jod and Preceptor Constan sat together, their faces set like stone. “They know they’ve lost,” thought Merffin. “They know they can’t stand in the way of our only hope for peace.”

They did stand in the way, and two or three dozen other voters with them. But Merffin and Aggo had done their work well; and at the end of the day, when the moderator put the gold chain around Goryk Gillow’s neck, Obann had a new First Prester.

CHAPTER 32

Concerning the Crown

Wytt was in the stables when Goryk Gillow’s horses were brought in and given stalls. That meant the Boy and Whiteface were somewhere nearby. He’d been in the palace before and knew how vast it was. Finding the two he sought would not be easy. A human being might think such a search would take forever, but time was not something that loomed large in any Omah’s mind. Wytt would just keep sniffing up and down hallways at night until he picked up the scent.

But there was another presence in that mountain of hewn stone and polished wood: not an odor, not a glimpse of anything, not even the faintest whisper of noise. It clung to the two horses that had drawn Goryk’s coach and made the other horses in the stables shy away from them. Wytt could not give it a name, but he knew what it was.

It was that something that the men from Silvertown had transported in their carriage in the covered box. Its presence was everywhere in the palace, unperceived by the countless human beings who trod the corridors, worked in the kitchens, occupied the rooms. They went about their business oblivious to the presence among them that meant death—thinly diffused, but still felt by the mice that quietly inhabited the building. Their scent was tinged with fear, and they fled when Wytt approached them. Had he made his way up to the hundred rooftops of the palace, or to any of the unused attics, he would have noticed that the pigeons had stopped roosting there.

But he did notice, when he returned to the stables before dawn, that the spiders in the stables were spinning misshapen webs and failing to wrap up the flies that blundered into them. The orbs they spun were crooked, incomplete. The spiders couldn’t have told him why they were behaving so erratically. But Wytt didn’t need to be told. He knew.