He straightened from the stiffened corpse to find that his escort, two soldiers of the Watch, had retreated to the mouth of this rat-run of an alley, where it met a slightly larger and less choked back way. Sighing, Bakune stepped over the rotting garbage and dumped nightsoil to join them.
‘A right reek,’ the moustached one offered — as close to an apology as any of patrolmen might offer him.
‘I want to talk to the Abbot.’
The two shared a flicked glance, and in that quick exchange Bakune was chagrined to read the true bankruptcy of his influence and reputation: babysitting the Assessor while he pottered among alleyways was one thing, allowing him to pester the Abbot of the Cloister of Our Lady was another altogether.
He was chagrined, yes, but not surprised. The City Watch valued action and quick results. To him, the blunt brutal truncheons at their sides were fitting weapons for the blunt and brutal instruments of state that carried them. ‘You need not accompany me.’
Again the flicked glance. ‘No, Assessor,’ the less dull-looking of the two drawled. ‘It’s our job.’
‘Very good. Let’s hope the Abbot is available on such short notice.’
The Cloister of the Blessed Lady was the third most revered holy site on the island of Fist, after the caves of the Ascetics near Thol, and the Tabernacle of Our Lady at Paliss. Neither Mare nor Skolati possessed any such sites worthy of pilgrimage. The Cloister was raised around the very bare rock where it was said the Lady herself shed blood on her holy mission to forestall the sea-borne enemy.
Bakune headed to the pilgrim route that twisted its way from the waterfront docks to the Cloister’s double copper doors. The cacophony reached him first. Touts and hawkers bawled to catch the attention of the penitents as they tramped the ancient path that climbed the hillside to those beaten-panelled doors. Bakune, followed by his guards, joined the file. Shop fronts, stalls, and modest laid carpets lined the narrow Way of Obtestation. Each displayed a seemingly infinite array of charms, blessed bracelets, healing stones, bones of this or that monk or nun or saint, swatches of cloth taken from the backs of noted devouts who passed away in frenzied rapture — anything and everything, in short, that might tempt pilgrims come to enhance their spiritual purification.
He brushed aside sticks thrust at him laced with charms like small forests of beading. ‘Cure the ague, rot, and the clouding blindness!’ a tout yelled. A flask hanging from a tall stave was swung at him. ‘Blessed waters from the Cloister’s fount! All-healing!’ He knew that to be truly efficacious such waters must be taken from their source, but first-time pilgrims knew no better.
A grimed street urchin yanked at his robes. ‘Inspect the holy virgins?’ The leer was startling on a face so young. One of the guards sent the boy on with a kick.
Bakune could only shake his head; it had been a long time since he’d made his own obligatory visitations, but he did not remember the whole thing being so, well, seamy. He paused to turn, and, brushed by the shoulders of those who passed, heads lowered in contemplation, looked back the length of this arc of the Way, taking in not only the hawkers and purveyors of religious goods, legitimate or not, but the food sellers, the inns, the stablers, all the many services the enterprising citizens of Banith provided the steady year-round stream of visitors. In this unimportant seaside town it was frankly the one and only going business. To threaten the flow would be to threaten the city’s very lifeblood, and Bakune felt a cold chill creep upon him in the face of so visceral a reaffirmation of what he’d always appreciated intellectually.
His escort drew up short, eyed him quizzically then exchanged bored glances. Turning back without comment, he waved them on.
Near the Cloister the press thinned. Here high-priced shops behind narrow doorways catered to the wealthier pilgrims — merchants themselves, perhaps, or the wives of highly ranked civil servants from Dourkan or Jourilan. Here also patrolled Guardians of the Faith in their dark severe robes, armed with iron-heeled staves. The order had begun as a militant cadre of the faith in response to the Malazan invasions. It was charged with the duty to protect the pilgrims, and the faith itself, from backsliding and corruption. In Bakune’s eyes it was the worst of the innovations brought about by the pressure of foreign occupation — perhaps because the order was a sort of rival religious police adjudicating what was permitted behaviour and what was not, and perhaps because it saw itself as above the earthly laws represented locally by none other than himself.
As he came to the tall double doors of the Cloister grounds, the sight of so many of the Guardians loitering about brought to Bakune’s mind that during his entire approach he had not seen one trooper of their erstwhile occupiers, the Malazans. Politic, that: keeping away from the pilgrimage route where tempers might flare.
Two Guardians stepped forward to bar the open doorway. ‘What business in the Cloister?’ one demanded.
He cocked a brow; since when had they begun interrogating visitors? ‘My business is my own. By what right do you ask?’
The man bristled, clenching his stave tight. ‘By right of faith.’ He eyed Bakune up and down, taking in his dark cloak, cloth trousers, brocaded satin vest, and clean linen shirt. ‘You are no pilgrim. What is your business?’
‘I’m dying of the bloody-lung.’
The Guardian flinched, but recovered, raising his chin. ‘That is not a matter for jest. Men and women are dying of that very affliction in the Hospice, praying for Our Lady’s blessing and her healing waters even as you make light of it.’
Bakune was impressed by the speed with which the man had charged the high moral summit, though the move was by far too naked and bold. Bludgeons. Like his own guards, even now dragging themselves up the cobbled way, these too were yet mere blunt instruments.
Sighing his irritation, he pulled off one moleskin glove and extended his hand. ‘Assessor Bakune. I am come to see the Abbot.’
The Guardian frowned over the ring of office. Belatedly, Bakune realized that he might as well have thrust a live polecat at the man for all he understood of the significance of the seal of a magistrate of the state. Yet a survivor’s instinct told the man that perhaps there may be something to all this and he nodded, grudgingly, and stepped aside. That, or the overdue arrival of Bakune’s two guards of the Watch, both licking grease from their fingers.
Bakune entered beneath the wooden vaulted ceiling of the tunnel that led to the grounds. The other Guardian, perhaps the brighter of the two, had run ahead to bring word of his arrival. Past the tunnel, shaded colonnaded walks beckoned to the right and left, while ahead lay the gravel paths of the manicured gardens and walks of Blessed Contemplation. Beyond, to the right, rose the three storeys of the wooden Hospice of Our Lady, largest of such installations in all Fist, eclipsed only by that servicing the veteran Chosen of Korel. To the left, over the tops of the hedges and ornamental trees, reared the tall spires of the rambling Cloister itself. A city within a city, complete with its own schools, administration, kitchens and bakery, nunnery, library, orphanage, even the Hospice to shelter its aged and dying brothers and sisters.
Bakune chose to wait outside. He drew off his other glove to better appreciate the blossoms of the late- blooming winter-lace, whose tiny white flowers were considered melancholy as their appearance signalled the coming of winter. He appreciated their delicate scent. His guards sprawled on a bench and eyed the more hale inmates of the Hospice shuffling back and forth on their constitutional walks. Eventually, as Bakune knew he must, if only for the sake of form, came Abbot Starvann Arl, trailed by a gaggle of his higher functionaries and staff.
They embraced as the equals they were — at least in principle. Starvann, head of the Cloister, with authority over all matters of faith locally, answerable only to the Prioress herself at the capital, Paliss. And Bakune, Assessor and magistrate, the highest local legal authority, answerable only to the High Assessor at the same city. Yet what a difference; Bakune was rendered a bare grudging sort of assistance from the City Watch while Starvann commanded all the staff of the Cloister, numbering perhaps more than a thousand — plus the authority of the order of the Guardians of the Faith themselves. Yes, Bakune reflected tartly, equal in principle only.
‘Bakune! Good to see you. We meet too rarely. How gracious of you to visit us.’ The Abbot captured Bakune’s hands in a surprisingly bone-hard grip. Then the smile behind his thick beard faded and his startling pale eyes clouded over. ‘I know why you have come,’ he said sadly.
Bakune raised a quizzical brow. ‘You do?’
Starvann gave the Assessor’s hands one last painful squeeze before releasing them. ‘Sister Prudence. Word came to me only this morning.’ He pressed a hand to Bakune’s back and gently but firmly urged him on. ‘Come, let us walk the grounds… forgive me, but I find it refreshing.’
‘Certainly.’ Bakune allowed himself to be steered on to a path between low evergreen shrubs. The Abbot
