The Heretic Kings

SEVENTEEN

Charibon was a prisoner of winter.

The heavy snows had come at last, in a series of blizzards which roared down out of the heights of the Cimbric Mountains and engulfed the monastery-city in a storm of white. On the Narian Hills the snow drifted fathoms deep, burying roads and villages, isolating whole towns. The fishing boats which normally plied the Sea of Tor had been beached long since, and the margins of the sea itself were frozen for half a league from the shore, the ice thick enough to bear a marching army.

In Charibon a small army of labourers fought to keep the cloisters clear of snow. They were assisted by hundreds of novices who shovelled and dug until they were pink-cheeked and steaming, and yet had the energy for snowball fights and skating and other horseplay afterwards. Unlike the poor folk of the surrounding countryside, they did not have to worry whether they would have enough food to see them through the winter. It was one of the bonuses of the religious life, at least as Charibon’s clerics lived it.

The monastery-city went about its business regardless of the weather, its rituals as changeless and predictable as the seasons themselves. In the scriptoria and refectories the fires were lit, fed with the wood which had been chopped and piled through the summer and autumn. Salted and smoked meat made more of an appearance at table, as did the contents of the vast root cellars. Enterprising ice fishermen hacked holes in the frozen sea to provide the Pontiff and Vicar-General’s tables with fresh fish every now and again, but in the main Charibon was like a hibernating bear, living off what it had stored away throughout the preceding months and grumbling softly in its sleep. Except for the odd Pontifical courier determined (or well-paid) enough to brave the drifts and the blizzards, the city was cut off from the rest of Normannia, and would remain so for several weeks until the temperature dropped further and hardened the snow, making it into a crackling white highway for mule-drawn sledges.

The wolves came down out of the mountains, as they always did, and at night their melancholy moans could be heard echoing about the cathedral and the cloisters. In the worst of the weather they would sometimes even prowl the streets of Charibon itself, making it dangerous to walk them alone at night, and contingents of the Almarkan troops which garrisoned Charibon would periodically patrol the city to clear the beasts from its thoroughfares.

It was after Compline. Vespers had been sung two hours before, the monks had consumed their evening meal and most of them were in their cells preparing for bed. Charibon was settling down for the long midwinter night, and a bitter wind was hurling flurries of snow down from the Cimbrics, drowning out the howls of the wolves. The streets of the city were deserted and even the cathedral Justiciars were preparing for bed, having trimmed the votive lamps and shut the great doors of Charibon’s main place of worship.

Albrec’s door was rapped softly and he opened it, shivering in the cold wind which he admitted.

“Ready, Albrec?” Avila stood there, muffled in hood and scarf.

“No one saw you leave?”

“The whole dormitory have their heads under their blankets. It’s a bitter night.”

“You brought a lamp? We’ll need two.”

“A good one. It won’t be missed until Matins. Are you sure you want to go through with this?”

“Yes. Are you?”

Avila sighed. “No, but I’m in it up to my neck now. And besides, curiosity is a terrible thing to live with, like an itch which cannot be scratched.”

“Here’s hoping we can scratch your itch tonight, Avila. Here, take this.” The little monk handed his Inceptine friend something hard and angular and heavy.

“A mattock! Where did you pilfer this from?”

“Call it a loan, for the greater glory of God. I got it from the gardens. Come-it’s time we were on our way.”

The pair of them left Albrec’s cell and whispered along the wide corridors of the chapter-house where Albrec slept. Due to his position of Assistant Librarian, he had a cell to himself whereas Avila slept in a dormitory with a dozen other junior Inceptine clerics, for he had laid aside his novice’s hood only three years before.

They crossed an arctic courtyard, their habits billowing in the biting wind. Scant minutes later, they found themselves outside the tall double doors of the Library of Saint Garaso. But Albrec led his friend around the side of the rime-white building, kicking his frozen, sandalled feet through piled snow and halting at a half-buried postern door. He poked his key into the hole and twisted it with a snap, then pushed the door open.

“More discreet here,” he grunted, for the hinges were stiff. “No one will see us come and go.”

But Avila was staring at the snowy ground about them. “Blast it, Albrec, what about our tracks? We’ve left a trail for the world to see.”

“It can’t be helped. With luck they’ll be snowed over by morning. Come on, Avila.”

Shaking his head the tall Inceptine followed his diminutive friend into the musty, old-smelling darkness of the library. Albrec locked the door behind them and they stood silent for a second, alarmed by the quiet of massive masonry and waiting books, the wind a mere groaning in the rafters.

Avila struck a light and their shadows leaped at them from the walls as the lamp caught. They threw back their hoods and shook snow from their shoulders.

“We are alone,” Albrec said.

“How do you know?”

“I know this place, winter and summer. I can feel when the library is empty-or as empty as it ever becomes, with its memories.”

“Don’t talk like that, Albrec. I’m as jumpy as a springtime hare already.”

“Let’s go then, and stay close. And don’t touch anything.”

“All right, all right. Lead on, master librarian.”

They navigated the many rooms and halls and corridors of the library in silence, tall cases of books and scrolls looming over them like walls. Then they began to descend, taking to narrow staircases which to Avila seemed to have been built into the very walls of the building. Finally they hauled up a trapdoor of iron-bound wood which had been concealed by a mat of threadbare hessian. Steep steps going down into uttermost dark. The catacombs.

They started down, the weight and bulk of the library hanging over and around them like a cloud. The fact that it was a winter-dark and wolf-haunted night outside should have made no difference to the darkness in here, but somehow it did. A sense of isolation stole over the pair as they stumbled through the accumulated rubbish in the catacombs and coughed at the dust they raised. It was as if they were two explorers who had somehow chanced upon the ruins of a dead city, and were creeping through its bowels like maggots in the belly of a corpse.

“Which wall is the north one?” Avila asked.

“The one to your left. It’s damper than the others. Keep to the sides and don’t trip up.”

They felt their way along the walls, lifting the lamp to peer at the stonework. Chiselled granite, the very gutrock of the mountains hewn and sculpted as though it were clay.

“The Fimbrians must have been twenty years carving out this place,” Avila breathed. “Solid stone, and never a trace of mortar.”

“They were a strange people, the builders of empire,” Albrec said. “They seemed to feel the need to leave a mark on the world. Wherever they went, they built to last. Half the public buildings of the Five Kingdoms date from the Fimbrian Hegemony, and no one has ever built on the same scale since. Old Gambio reckons it was pride brought the empire down as much as anything else. God humbled them because they thought they could order the world as they saw fit.”

“And so they did, for three centuries or so,” Avila said dryly.

“Hush, Avila. Here we are.” Albrec ranged the lamp about the wall where there were mortared blocks instead of the solid stone of the rest of the place. The light showed the crevice in which Albrec’s precious document had been discovered.

“Light the other lamp,” the little Antillian said, and he reached into the crevice with a lack of hesitation which made Avila shudder. There might be anything in that hole.

“There’s a room on the other side of this, no doubt about it. A substantial space, at any rate.”

Avila found a staved-in cask amid the wreckage and rubbish. He set it on its end and placed the two lamps upon it. “What now? The mattock?”

“Yes. Give it here.”

“No, Albrec. Valiant though you are, you haven’t the build for it. Move aside, and keep a look out.”

Avila hefted the heavy tool, eyed the wall for a second, and then swung the mattock in a short, savage arc against the poorly mortared stonework.

A sharp crack which seemed incredibly loud in their ears. Avila paused.

“Are you sure no one will hear this?”

“The library is deserted, and there are five floors of it above us. Trust me.”

“Trust him,” Avila said in a long-suffering voice. Then he began to swing the mattock in earnest.

The old mortar cracked and fell away in a shower. Avila hacked at the wall until the stones it held began to shift. He picked them out with the flat blade of the mattock and soon had a cavity perhaps six inches deep and two feet wide. He stopped and wiped his brow.

“Albrec, you are the only person I know who could cause me to break sweat in midwinter.”

“Come on, Avila-you’re nearly through!”

“All right, all right. Taskmaster.”

A few more blows and then there was a sliding shower of stones and powder and dust which left them coughing in a cloud that swirled in the light of the lamps like a golden fog.

Albrec seized a lamp and got down on his knees, pushing the lamp into the hole which suddenly gaped there.

“Sweet Saints, Albrec!” Avila said in a horrified whisper. “Look what we’ve done. We’ll never block up that hole again.”

“We’ll pile rubbish in front of it,” Albrec said impatiently, and then, his voice suddenly hoarse: “Avila, we’re through the wall. I can see what’s on the other side.”

“What-what is it?”

But Albrec was already crawling out of sight, his shoulders dislodging more stones and grit. He looked like a rotund rabbit burrowing its way into a hole too small for it.

He was able to stand. Hardly aware of Avila’s urgent enquiries on the other side of the wall, Albrec straightened and held up his lamp.

The room-for such it was-was high-ceilinged. Like the catacombs he had just left, its walls were solid rock. But this chamber had not been carved by the hand of man. There were stalactites spearing down from the roof and the walls were uneven, rough. It was not a room but a cave, Albrec realized with a shock. A subterranean cavern which had been discovered by men untold centuries ago and which at some time in more recent history had been blocked off.

The walls were covered with paintings.

Some were savage and primitive, depicting animals Albrec had heard of but never seen: marmorills with curving tusks and gimlet eyes, unicorns with squat horns and wolves, some of which ran on four legs, some on two.

The paintings were crude but powerful, the flowing lines which delineated the animals drawn with smooth confidence. There was a naturalism about them which was totally at odds with the stylized illustrations in most modern-day manuscripts. In the flickering lamplight one might almost think they were moving, coursing along the walls in packs and herds and following long-lost migrations.

All this Albrec took in at a glance. What claimed his attention almost at once, however, was something different. A shape jumped out of the shadows at him and he almost dropped his lamp, then made the Sign of the Saint at his breast.

A statue, man high, standing at the far wall.

It was of a wolf-headed man, his arms raised, his beast’s mouth agape. Behind him on the stone of the wall a pentagram within a circle had been etched and painted so that the lamplight threw it into vivid relief. Before the statue was a small altar, the surface of which had a deep groove cut in it. The stone of the altar was discoloured, stained as if by ancient, unforgivable sins.

There was a rattle of loose stone which made Albrec utter a squeak of fear, and then Avila was in the room brushing dust from his habit and looking both stern and amazed.

“Saint’s blood, Albrec, why wouldn’t you answer me?” And then: “Holy Father of us all! What is this?”

“A chapel,” Albrec said, his voice as hoarse as a frog’s.

“What?”

“A place of worship, Avila. Men paid homage here once, in some dark, lost time.”

Avila was studying the hideous statue, holding his lamp close to its snarling muzzle.

“Old stonework, this. Crude. Which of the old gods might this one be, Albrec? It’s not the Horned One, at any rate.”

“I’m not sure if it was meant to be a god, but sacrifices were made here. Look at the altar.”

“Blood, yes. Hell’s teeth, Albrec, what about this?” And Avila produced from his habit the pentagram dagger they had found in their last visit to the catacombs.

“A sacrificial knife, probably. What made you bring it with you?”

Avila made a wry face. “To tell the truth I intended to lose it down here again. I don’t want it anywhere near me.”

“It might be important.”

“It’s more likely to be mischievous. And can you imagine me trying to explain it to the house Justiciar if it were found?”

“All right then.” Albrec swung the lamp around to regard the other, darker corners of the cave. “We’re forgetting what we came here for. Help me look for more of the document, Avila, and throw that thing away if you have to.”

Avila tossed the dagger aside and helped Albrec sift through the rubbish which littered the floor of the cave. It seemed as if someone had tossed half the contents of a library down here a century ago and left it to rot. Their feet rested on the remains of manuscripts, and a jetsam of decaying vellum was piled against the walls like a tidemark. They knelt in it and brought the remnants to their noses, squinting at the faded and torn lettering in the light of the lamps.

“It’s dry in here, or these would have been mushrooms long since,” Avila said, discarding a page. “Strange-the wall beyond is damp, you said so yourself. What happened here, Albrec? What are these things, and why is this unholy chapel here in the bowels of Charibon?”

Albrec shrugged. “Men have lived on this site for thousands of years, rebuilding on the ruins of the settlements which went before them. It may be that this cave was nearer the surface once.”

They found sections of texts written in the Merduk tongue with its graceful lettering and lack of illuminations. One group of pages had diagrams upon them which seemed to outline the courses of the stars. Another bore a line drawing of a human body, flayed so that the muscles and veins below the skin might be seen. The two monks made the Sign of the Saint as they stared at it.

“Heretical texts,” Avila said. “Astrology, witchery. Now I know why they were walled up in here.”

But Albrec was shaking his head. “Knowledge, Avila. They sealed up knowledge in here. They decided on behalf of all men what they might and might not know, and they destroyed anything which they disagreed with.”

“Who are ‘they,’ Albrec?”

“Your brethren, my friend. The Inceptines.”

“Maybe they acted for the best.”

“Maybe. We will never know because the knowledge they destroyed is lost for ever. We will never be able to judge for ourselves.”

“Not everyone is as learned as you, Albrec. Knowledge can be a dangerous thing in the hands of the ignorant.”

Albrec smiled. “You sound like one of the monsignors, Avila.”

Avila scowled. “You cannot change the way the world works, Albrec. No one man can. You can only do as you are told and make the best of it.”

“I wonder if Ramusio would have agreed with that.”

“And how many would-be Ramusios do you think they have sent to the pyre in the last five hundred years?” Avila said. “Striving to change the world seems to me to be a sure way of shortening one’s tenure of it.”

Albrec chuckled, then stiffened. “Avila! I think I have it!”

“Let me see.”

Albrec was holding a few ragged pages, bound together by the remains of their cloth backing.

“The writing is the same, and the layout. And here’s the title page!”

“Well? What does it say?”

Albrec paused, and finally spoke in a low, reverent voice. “ ‘A true and faithful account of the life of the Blessed Saint Ramusio, as told by one who was his companion and his disciple from the earliest of days.’ ”

“Quite a title,” Avila grunted. “But who wrote it?”

“It’s by Honorius of Neyr, Avila. Saint Honorius.”

“What? Like The Book of Honorius?”

“The very same. The man who inspired the Friar Mendicant Order, a founding father of the Church.”

“Founding father of hallucinations,” Avila muttered.

Albrec tucked the pages away in his habit. “Whatever. Let’s get out of here. We’ve got what we came for.”

They rose to their feet, brushing the detritus of the cave from their knees, and as they did there was a rattle of stone. They turned as one, the lamplight leaping in their hands, to find Brother Commodius appearing through the hole in the wall which led back to the catacombs.

The Senior Librarian dusted himself down much as Avila and Albrec had done whilst the pair stared at him in horror. The mattock they had left outside dangled from one of his huge hands. He smiled.

“We are well met, Albrec. And I see you have brought the beautiful Avila with you too. What joy.”

“Brother, we-we were just-”

“No need, Albrec. We are beyond explanations. You have overreached yourself.”

“We’ve done nothing wrong, Commodius,” Avila said hotly. “No one is forbidden to come down here. You can’t touch us.”

“Be quiet, you young fool,” Commodius snapped in return. “You understand nothing. Albrec does, though-don’t you, my friend?” Commodius’ face was hideous in its humour, the mien of a satisfied gargoyle, his ears seemingly too long to be real and his eyes reflecting the lamplight like those of a dog.

Albrec blinked as though trying to clear the dust from his eyes. Something in him seemed to calm, to accept the situation.

“You knew this was here,” he said. “You’ve always known.”

“Yes, I have always known, as have all the Senior Librarians, all the custodians of this place. We pass down the information as we do the keys of the doors. In time, Albrec, it might have been passed on to you.”

“Why would I want it?”

“Don’t be obtuse with me, Albrec. Do you think this is the only secret chamber in these levels? There are scores of them, and mouldering away in the dark and the silence is the vanished knowledge of a dead age, lost generations of accumulated lore deemed too harmful or heretical or dangerous for men to know. How would you like to have that at your fingertips, Albrec?”

The little monk wet his dry lips. “Why?” he asked.

“Why what?”

“Why are you so afraid of knowledge?”

The mattock twitched in Commodius’ fist. “Power, Brother. Power lies in knowledge, but also in ignorance. The Inceptines control the world with the information they know and that which they withhold. You cannot give mankind the freedom to know anything it wants; that is the merest anarchy. Take that document you found down here, the one you have hidden so inadequately in your cell along with the other heretical books you have been concealing: your pitiful attempt to save a kernel from the cleansing fire.”

Albrec was as white as a winding sheet. “You know of it too?”

“I have read others like it, all of which I have had destroyed. Why else do you think there are no contemporary accounts of the Saint’s life extant today? In that one document resides greater power than in any king. The old pages you discovered hold within them the ability to overturn our world. That will not happen. At least, not yet.”

“But it’s the truth,” Albrec cried, almost weeping. “We are men of God. It is our duty-”

“Our duty is to the Church and its shepherdship of mankind. What do you think men would do if they discovered that Ahrimuz and Ramusio were one and the same? Or that Ramusio was not assumed into heaven, but was last seen riding a mule into oblivion? The Church would be riven to its very foundations. The basic tenets of our belief would be questioned. Men might begin to doubt the existence of God Himself.”

“You’ve told us why you are going to do what you are about to do, Commodius,” Avila said with the drawl of the nobleman. “Perhaps now you’ll be good enough to do it without wearying our ears further.”

Commodius gazed at the tall Inceptine, as haughty as a prince before him. “Ah, Avila, you are always the aristocrat, are you not? Whereas I am merely the son of a tanner, as humbly born as Albrec there despite my black robe. How you would have graced our order. But it was not to be.”

“What do you mean?” Albrec asked, and the tremor was back in his voice, fear rising over the grief.

“It’s plain to see what has been happening here. Two clerics become victims of the unnatural urges which sometimes beset those of our calling. One lures the other into black magic, occult ritual”-Commodius gestured to the wolf-headed statue with the mattock-“and there is a falling-out, a fight. The lovers kill each other, their bodies laid out before the unholy altar which poisoned their minds. Not that the bodies will be found for a long time. I mean, who ever comes down here, and who will think to look beyond the rubble of a sealed wall?”

“Columbar knows we have been coming here-” Avila began.

“Alas, Brother Columbar died in his sleep this night, peacefully and in God’s grace, his head resting on the pillow which stopped his breath.”

“I don’t believe you,” Avila said, but his haughtiness was leaking away.

“It is immaterial to me what you choose to believe. You are carrion already, Brother.”

“Take us both then,” Avila said, setting down his lamp as though preparing for battle. “Come, Commodius: are you so doughty that you can kill the pair of us?”

Commodius’ face widened into a grin which seemed to split it in twain and displayed every gleaming tooth in his head.

“I am doughty enough, I promise you.”

The mattock clanked to the floor.

“The world is a strange place, Brothers,” Commodius’ voice said, but it sounded different, as though he were speaking into a glass. “There is more lurking under God’s heaven than you have ever dreamed of, Albrec. I could have made you a glutton of knowledge. I could have sated your appetite and answered every question your mind ever had the wit to pose. It is your loss. And Avila-my sweet Avila-I could have enjoyed you and advanced you. Now it will have to be done a different way. Watch me, children, and experience the last and greatest revelation of all. .”

Commodius had gone. In his place there loomed the brooding darkness of a great lycanthrope, a bright-eyed werewolf standing in a puddle of Inceptine robes.

“Make your peace with He who made you,” the beast said. “I will show you the very face of God.”

It leapt.

Albrec was shoved out of the way and hit the floor face-first. Avila had thrown himself to one side, scrabbling for the mattock. But the beast was too fast. It caught him in midair, its claws ripping his robe to shreds. A twist of its powerful arms, and Avila was flung across the cave, to strike the wall with a sickening slap of flesh. The werewolf laughed, and turned on Albrec.

“It will be quick, my little colleague, my tireless bookworm.” It grasped Albrec by the neck and lifted him up as though he were made of straw. The vast jaws opened, bathing him in the stink of its breath.

But Avila was there again, his face a broken wound and something gleaming in his fist. He struck at the creature’s back, trying to pierce the thick fur and failing. The beast spun round, dropping Albrec.

The Antillian watched in a daze as the werewolf that was Commodius smashed his friend across the breadth of the chamber once more. His own lamp had been broken and extinguished, and only Avila’s light on the floor illuminated the struggle, making it seem a battle of shadowy titans amid the stalactites of the ceiling.

And kindling a glitter of something lying amid the detritus of the floor.

Albrec scrabbled over and grasped the pentagram dagger in his fist. He heard Avila give a last, despairing shout of defiance and hatred, and then he threw himself on the werewolf’s back.

The creature straightened and the claws came reaching over its shoulders, raking the side of Albrec’s neck. He felt no pain, no fear, only a clinical determination. He stabbed the pentagram dagger deep into the beast, the blade grating on the vertebrae as it shredded muscle and pierced the flesh up to its hilt.

The werewolf’s head snapped back, its skull cracking against Albrec’s own with a force to explode bloody lights in his head and make him release his hold and tumble to the floor like a stringless puppet.

The beast gave an odd, gargling moan. It was Commodius again, shrunken, naked, bewildered, the pentagram hilt of the dagger protruding obscenely from his back.

The Senior Librarian looked at Albrec in disbelief, shaking his head as though circumstances had baffled him, and then he crumpled on top of Albrec, a dead weight which crushed the air out of the little monk’s lungs. Albrec passed out.