The Mongoliad: Book Three

“I hadn’t really thought about it,” Cnan admitted. “But why do you want to understand it? So that you can become a god too?”

Yasper shook his head. “That would be heresy,” he clucked his tongue at her, a grin stretching his mouth. “No, we seek to understand who we truly are, and what our true purpose is. If we can comprehend how the world was made, and learn the power of transmutation-the art of changing one thing into another-could we not give ourselves that same gift?”

“Which gift?”

“Transmutation.”

“Trans-what?”

“Becoming something new.”

Cnan scratched her nose. “What’s wrong with what we are?”

Yasper closed one eye and stared critically at her. “What’s right about what we are?” he asked.

Cnan, now somewhat sorry she had even asked her initial question, shook her head and stared out at the horizon in the vain hope of finding something to distract the alchemist. He was warming to this one-sided conversation, and she feared it was only going to get more confusing. “Look,” she said, sitting up in her saddle and pointing. She was not embarrassed to hear a note of elation in her voice. “There!”

Ahead of them, a thin black shape reached up from the flat ground, a finger stretching to poke the empty dome of the heavens. It wiggled, like a worm struggling to pull itself from rain-softened mud.

“Rider!” Cnan called out to the others while Yasper stood in his saddle, shading his eyes. After peering through the heat haze for a moment, he sank back down into his saddle, and the slope of his shoulders told her everything.

“It’s Istvan,” he said bitterly.

As the Hungarian drew closer, she could confirm what the alchemist had noticed as well. The Hungarian was alone.

But what chilled her was the fact that he was in front of them.

Where had Graymane gone?

CHAPTER TWO

Factus Sum Tamquam Vas Perditum

He needed to make a dramatic entrance.

Not far from the secret door he used to come and go from the Septizodium, there was a crack in the wall that opened into a narrow slot. Previously, Fieschi had used it as a makeshift dressing room, exchanging the vestments of his station for a plain wool robe. Now, as the tunnels beneath the Septizodium began to fill with smoke and the cries of the panicked Cardinals, he waited patiently in his hiding spot.

Before squeezing into his secret sanctum, he had gone ahead to the secret door and released the hidden latch. He had pushed it open slightly, just enough for a little air to get in, and for a little smoke to get out. The young messengers had used the door, and while he suspected the two jesters-Colonna and Capocci-had known of its existence prior to the arrival of the intruders, he didn’t want to leave it to Providence that it would be found: he needed witnesses, an audience that would flock to his miraculous appearance.

Fieschi set his shoulders against the back of his niche to get more comfortable. He opened and closed his right hand slowly, keeping the aching paralysis of his recent exertion at bay. Quoniam fortitudo mea et refugium meum es tu, he prayed, et propter nomen tuum deduces me et enutries me.

Fieschi recalled a sermon St. Augustine had delivered on the thirty-first Psalm-in particular, a portion of the homily concerning Abraham. The patriarch was justified by the virtue of his faith; his good works came second. God is my rock and my fortress, and I am unshakeable in my faith. “Exsultabo, et laetabor in misericordia tua,” he whispered, knowing that God would hear him, “quoniam respexisti humilitatem meam; salvasti de necessitatibus animam meum.”

By destroying Somercotes, he had saved the Church. Were such trials not part of God’s love and kindness? Surely God would forgive him of his transgression.

The fire, incendiary agent of Satan, eagerly devoured the combustibles in the narrow room. It had licked the walls and found them wanting, and so it had fallen upon the dead body. Fueled by the cloth and the flesh, it had grown larger, sending out creeping tendrils of fire that wormed their way through the cracks in the walls. It was no longer a single blaze by the time Capocci approached Somercotes’s room but a string of fires, prancing with unholy glee, in a number of the tiny rooms the Cardinals had been using.

Most of the smoke came from Somercotes’s room, rolling off the huddled mass that popped and crackled as the fire joyfully burned fat and flesh off bone. Capocci ducked his head, breathing through his mouth; he knew that smell. Years ago, when he still believed in Gregory IX, he had led papal troops into Viterbo and besieged the citadel of Rispampano. The Roman troops resisted for a few days, hurling everything they could haul up to the battlements down upon his troops, including burning pitch. The screams of dying men and the smell of their burning flesh had only hardened the resolve of his soldiers.

Somercotes’s body lay curled near the center of his room. Not on his bed and not near the door-two places that Capocci would have expected to find the body had the fire been an accident. He pushed aside the inquisitive thoughts that crowed his brain, and waddled slowly into the hot room. His beard crackled as strands of his capacious whiskers began to curl and burn from the heat. Blinking heavily to clear the smoke from his eyes, he reached out with his gloved hand.

Somercotes couldn’t still be alive. The fire danced too merrily along his frame, and the crackling, sizzling sound of burning meat was so loud. And the smell… Capocci grabbed something-an elbow, perhaps-and clenched his teeth as the fire gnawed through the heavy leather of his gloves. He pulled, intending to drag the body out of the inferno, but there was no resistance and he fell back on the floor.

Clutched in his hand, covered in writhing tendrils of fire, was a spitting piece of charred meat. The entire arm.

Spitting out an oath that he would have to beg forgiveness for later, Capocci tried to hurl Somercotes’s arm away, but the fire had fused the meat to the leather of his glove. Orange tongues of flame licked at the cuff of his sleeve. Using his other hand, he stripped the glove off-both of them, in the end-and scrambling backward, he fled from the room and its grisly pyre.

Capocci leaned against the hallway wall, coughing and choking as he tried to catch his breath without inhaling the fouled air. He knew he should check the other rooms. Hopefully they were empty, but what if they weren’t? Would their occupants be any more alive than Somercotes?

He wanted to run away. He wasn’t such a prideful man that he couldn’t admit when he was afraid. Fear was a powerful emotion, and giving himself up to God meant letting go of the fear. But such a sacrifice did not make him invulnerable or fireproof.

It made him cautious.

He had to be sure, though. He had to be sure there was no one else. Only then could he listen to the voice in his head-the one that telling him that Somercotes’s death was not an accident.

Rodrigo had dreamed of a dragon once. It was sinuous and long, and covered in red and brown scales. When it roared, a great billow of black smoke issued from its mouth. There were great furnaces in its belly, stoked by infernal spirits, and in the wake of that smoke came the fire. The brilliant, burning fire.

He ran from that fire. To stand his ground would be to be burned, and while he had faith in God-while he believed that God watched over him and that God’s love was enough to protect him from