to understand how in league these two truly were. 'And to take us there, so ye say.'
'But what else're ye for, Brother Dellman? ' Liam O'Blythe insisted.
Dellman, still groggy from the drink, looked at them both incredulously.
'Oh, tell us, ye fool, and be done with it,' Brother Haney prompted. 'Ye came to spy on Abbot Agronguerre, didn't ye? '
'Spy?'
'What're ye about, Brother Dellman?' Haney went on. 'Ye tell us or we'll put ye in the water.'
Dellman straightened and blinked the grogginess out of his bloodshot eyes. 'Indeed,' he said indignantly, eyeing the young Haney directly.
'Not to be hurtin' ye, just to cool ye off a bit,' the other monk replied.
'Ye came to see what he was about,' Liam O'Blythe reasoned. 'That's me thinkin', and me Prince's, too. So what're ye about, mysterious Brother Dellman? Why'd yer abbot send ye halfway around the kingdom? '
Dellman merely shrugged, and his lack of denial spoke volumes.
'And what will ye tell yer abbot?' Brother Haney demanded, coming forward, but he hesitated, for now Brother Dellman was grinning.
'I will tell Abbot Braumin that Abbot Agronguerre is as fine a man as his reputation makes him out to be,' Dellman explained. 'I will tell Abbot Braumin that his nomination of Abbot Agronguerre for the position of father abbot would be a great service to the Abellican Church.' There, he had said it, and he almost wondered if the dumstruck Brother Haney would simply fall over in the sand.
'Vanguard's loss'll be yer Church's gain, then,' an equally stunned Liam O'Blythe remarked.
'Does he know? ' Brother Haney asked.
'No, and you are not to tell him!' Dellman instructed. 'I believe that Abbot Agronguerre should be informed of the entirety of the plan to nominate him by one more worthy and knowledgeable than either you or me. Abbot Braumin, or oldJe'howith of St. Honce, perhaps.'
'Suren he's got his suspicions, as we had ours,' Liam reasoned. Dellman nodded. 'And he will know the truth of it, soon enough,' he said. 'Now promise me that you will say nothing to him.'
Both men nodded, Haney wearing a silly grin, and that led to a toast, and to another, and when they ran out of mead, Liam O'Blythe ran back to the tent to fetch more, that their private celebration could continue long into the night.
Chapter 19
Master Bou-raiy had offered to send several younger brothers with De'Unnero on his journey, but he had flatly refused, both because he didn't need any of Bou-raiy's lackeys reporting back on his every move, and because he desired speed.
And Master De'Unnero knew how to travel fast. He fell into the weretiger, became a great cat under the glow of Sheila, and covered the miles more quickly than he might have even if he had been riding a fine horse. All those traveling hours were a trial for the monk, though, as every scent of every type of prey, of conies and deer, of cattle and sheep-and mostly of humans-drifted his way. He knew that to give in, to feast even upon the flesh of a squirrel, would defeat him, would allow the great feline spirit that had found its way into his corporeal form to take over his sensibilities: he would hunt down and devour a squirrel, and before he awakened again would find himself covered in human blood. He knew it, and so he fought it. And De'Unnero, so strong of will, again conquered the spirit of the weretiger.
He used the form of the great cat for transportation only, and in that guise covered as much as seventy miles in a single night. His first destination, on order of the masters of St.-Mere-Abelle, was to be St. Gwendolyn by the Sea, an important abbey, the fifth largest of the Abellican Order and the one housing the only women in the Order, the Sisters of St. Gwendolyn, named for a relatively minor martyr of the third century. De'Unnero's plan was to remain at St. Gwendolyn for as short a time as possible, then to catch a sailing boat out of the abbey's docks along the Mantis Arm coast, sailing south for Entel and St. Bondabruce, the residence of powerful Abbot Olin. De'Unnero was confident that he could get more cooperation and alliance from the man than from anyone at St.-MereAbelle, and so he was anxious to get there before Olin sailed for the College of Abbots. He thought he could make it if he could find seaborne transport at St. Gwendolyn. After a week of hard travel, when he at last came in sight of St. Gwendolyn by the Sea, a white-walled abbey of soaring minarets, Master De'Unnero abandoned his plan, and knew from the scene about the abbey that all future plans would also be altered.
Inevitably.
For there, spread about St. Gwendolyn's grounds, De'Unnero saw the truth of Honce-the-Bear's future, saw the sickly masses huddled under torn tents in dirty robes, all the area about them full of waste and refuse and dead bodies.
That first image of the tarnished fields about St. Gwendolyn burned into the heart and soul of Master Marcalo De'Unnero, assaulted him as the worst, the very worst, sight he had ever witnessed, a prophecy of abject doom and despair, the proof positive that God had altogether abandoned his land and his Order.
No, the master thought. No, God had not deserted his Church, but his Church had surely deserted the ways of God. This foolishness with Avelyn, the murderer, the thief; this insistence-even by those who did not believe in Avelyn or Jojonah, or in the humanistic, sympathetic, and pathetically weak message that was being attributed to them-that the former, and perhaps the latter, as well, would be canonized! This ascension by Braumin and his cohorts to positions of almost dictatorial powers in the Ordervoices they earned only because they happened to be on the right side when the secular forces of the kingdom destroyed the figurehead of their opposition! This general belief that the Abellican Church had to become a great nursemaid to the populace!
Yes, that was it, De'Unnero understood. The new Church leaders wanted to become as nursemaids, and so God was now showing them the folly of their beliefs, the weakness of their softened hearts. De'Unnero knew the old songs and children's rhymes. Like every brother indoctrinated into the Abellican Order, he had learned of the efforts of previous generations to try to heal those afflicted with the rosy plague, knew that only one in twenty could be healed, and that monks seeking such miracles would contract the disease and die, on the average of about one in seven attempts.
'Would Avelyn Desbris be among those running out with soul stone in hand?' De'Unnero asked himself, and he knew the answer wellknew that Avelyn, if he were alive and at St. Gwendolyn, would be out in that field even then, working tirelessly to try to save someone, anyone. Avelyn would be too ill to continue his efforts within a week or two, and he would be dead soon after. 'Yes, Avelyn, and when you had died in such a manner, when they had thrown your body on the pyre so that your rotting flesh could not pass the disease to others, would they then call you a saint or a fool?'
In that moment, up on that bluff overlooking the field of wretches, Marcalo De'Unnero saw things very clearly, saw the foolishness that had invaded his beloved Order, the selfishness of Pride and Arrogance, among the most deadly of sins, that had come into the seemingly generous hearts of those brothers calling for humanistic reform.
That was not the Church that Markwart had envisioned or had striven toward as father abbot. And though, in truth, Marcalo De'Unnero had been no enthusiastic supporter of many of Dalebert Markwart's visions, thinking them limited in scope, he recognized that the man had at least attempted to keep the Church on its rightful and righteous course, a path toward leadership, not friendship, toward instruction and not hand-holding.
They were the brothers of Saint Abelle, the mouthpieces of God, those whose concerns had to be the souls and not the bodies, whose compassion had to focus on the afterlife, not the present life. People suffered and people died every day, and in every conceivable horrible way. But that was not important, in De'Unnero's vision. Preparation for inevitable death was a process of cleansing the soul while the body rotted away; and this new vision of the Church, these hints that the errors of Avelyn would be ignored, that the man might be made a saint, this notion that the sacred gemstones were not exclusively the province of the Abellican brothers, that they were meant to alleviate the suffering-the physical and not the spiritual suffering! — all of it, screamed at Marcalo De'Unnero that