She left and held the door for the next entrant; a clicking noise of counting-boards and scritch of pens came through from the open-plan spaces beyond, and the clatter and ring of typewriters and adding machines. Ignatius rose from behind his desk and advanced with a smile of relief. The man was in his sixties, twice Ignatius’ age, balding and white-haired with penetrating blue eyes under tufted brows, but likewise in the simple black Benedictine habit. Around his waist was a broad leather belt with a plain cross-hilted long sword, a dagger, a rosary and crucifix; the buckle bore a shield-and-raven badge that was the emblem of the Order of the Shield of St. Benedict that he had founded.
Don’t be excessive, Ignatius, he told himself. Yes, he is a very intelligent and holy man. But you are not the hero-worshipping novice Karl Bergfried anymore. You have your own tasks to do and cannot always run to the Reverend Father for reassurance.
Dmwoski had been thicker-set than the younger man but was growing gaunt, and stooped a very little now. Ignatius bowed and kissed his bishop’s ring.
“Are you well, Most Reverend Father in God?”
Dmwoski shrugged. “At my age and in this world of ours, a man is either well, or dead, my son,” he said. “At present I am consumed with curiosity at this task you have for me. Curiosity and eagerness.”
Ignatius indicated a chair and poured cool water before he resumed his seat behind the desk; the day was hot for Portland, probably over eighty. Dmwoski removed his sword belt and racked it beside Ignatius’ on the stand to the left of the door before he sat.
“I ask you only because, Reverend Father, you are one of the few able men I know who is not impossibly busy. Merely very busy.”
Dmwoski nodded. “The forces of the Order and of the lay militia of the Queen of Angels Commonwealth march even as we speak; the Abbey and its daughter-houses and the civil administration are functioning well.”
“I expected nothing else,” Ignatius said. “It’s not the first time we’ve marched north towards Portland.”
They both appreciated the irony of that; the last time it had been to fight the Association, at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, at the end of the War of the Eye.
“And now…”
He indicated his desk as he sat behind it. It wasn’t precisely cluttered; he was a man of painstaking neatness, the habits of a monk and a soldier and an engineer combined. But it was certainly crowded, and it also held a tray with the remains of a working lunch of bread, butter, cheese, sausage and a vegetable salad. The room was brightly lit by an overhead skylight, but the shabbiness of long disuse lingered in corners that had evaded a whirlwind of hasty patching and renovation.
“I am in the midst of trying to erect the skeleton of an administrative structure to coordinate our efforts while His Majesty fights a major war. All in the course of a month and without a legal or constitutional framework as yet. Not to mention no source of funds once what we brought from Iowa runs out.”
“I hope that is not self-pity I hear in your tone, my son. The reward for work well done…”
“Is more work, yes.”
“It seems the Association is providing generous assistance,” Dmwoski said, a slight dryness in his tone.
“As you see, rather too much so; that is why I picked this building, unused since the Change and obviously temporary. It would have been easier just to use the Lady Regent’s administrative apparatus…”
“… which would have meant a most unfortunate precedent, and all the other states would be justly terrified that the new kingdom is the Association in disguise, yes,” Dmwoski said.
“Your lecture to the novices on that curious old concept of initial path dependency suddenly seems much more relevant,” Ignatius said.
They shared a brief chuckle. The Order was a militant offshoot of the original Benedictine house at Mt. Angel; that mutation had been a necessity of survival in the terrible years, approved by the Church a decade later when contact had been restored with the new Pope and Curia in Badia. It had organized an enclave of survival, and it had played a significant role in the wars against the Association and Norman Arminger’s schismatic antipope Leo. In the years since the Order had helped bring civilization back to remote areas, spreading skills, teaching and guarding. That necessarily meant a fairly close acquaintance with politics, if only to protect their bailiwick around Mt. Angel and the daughter-houses.
In all that time since the War of the Eye, Sandra Arminger had played the part of a loyal daughter of the Faith with smooth skill and used the Church in the PPA lands as an instrument of her rule whenever she could. The arrangement wasn’t completely one-sided; it had kept up and consolidated in less violent form the momentum of conversion that had started with Norman Arminger’s motto of kiss the cross or kiss the sword. The dangers were still all too apparent.
They were both morally certain that she had had Leo assassinated, as well, during her housecleaning after Norman Arminger’s death. The timing of his mysterious collapse had simply been too convenient. That knowledge went silently between them in a glance, and Ignatius murmured: “When a man causes you a problem-”
“-remember, no man, no problem,” Dmwoski finished for him.
“Fortunately, our new High Queen will be quite a different type of ruler. And she is now very close indeed to her delayed majority. Early next year, in fact. That will make her Lady Protector of the Association as well as High Queen of Montival.”
“Yes,” Dmwoski said. “And she really is a loyal daughter of Holy Mother Church.”
“Which does not mean she will necessarily defer to a cleric’s political opinions, of course,” Ignatius said. “I know her, and believe me, that is the case.”
“Nor should she. However, she will not necessarily defer to her mother’s opinions, either, close as they are. Yet the Association’s apparatus is one designed by and loyal to her mother; even when Norman Arminger was Lord Protector she managed the detail work. It is a tool shaped and fitted to her hand. You do quite right to build anew, my son, even in these desperate circumstances. Institutional inertia is a very powerful force-which, as Catholic clerics and heirs to two thousand years of it, is something we should know down in our bones.”
Ignatius nodded. “I am improvising, and pulling in whatever personnel I can from wherever I can get them, but there is method in my madness. It keeps things fluid. And every power in our new Montival is of course fully occupied with mobilization for the campaign to come, down to the littlest autonomous village. If it were not for the fact that all the other powers were jealous of the Association-”
“And each other,” Dmwoski added.
“-and each other, and hence anxious to have their people involved, I could never have pried loose a single clerk.”
“And I am whatever you can get as well, my son?”
Ignatius flushed slightly, despite the detached amusement in the Abbot-Bishop’s voice.
“I am attending to political tasks His Majesty understandably cannot do in his own person yet recognizes are utterly essential. He must have the support of the realm, and what is that if not a political matter? And for that, I need your help.”
Dmwoski nodded slowly. “Which speaks well of him,” the older cleric said. “I knew he was a very able field commander, but a King requires far more than that. More than a charismatic presence, as well. He must be able to govern, or he is a disaster in the making. Especially in a new kingdom without a cushion of institutions and traditions.”
Ignatius spread his hands. “Even before the Sword, his grasp of detail was phenomenal. Since then… miraculous. And I mean that in a fairly literal manner, Reverend Father. Yet he can still only be in one place at a time.”
“I presume from the files you sent me that your request has something to do with the problem of the false Church Universal and Triumphant’s infiltrations here.”
Ignatius nodded. “Precisely. Most particularly, the matter of House Liu. This is not simply a political matter, either. Their mother’s machinations may have begun that way, as a plan to make their brother Odard Lord Protector, but her contacts with the Church Universal and Triumphant quickly became more than that… spiritual elements seem to have been involved.”
“Infernal elements, and there is no spoon long enough to sup safely in that company. She went from ally to unwitting tool to possessed rather quickly,” Dmwoski said grimly. “I understand that you had direct experience with agents of the CUT.”
Ignatius crossed himself and shivered slightly. “And only by the very great mercy of God and the Virgin was I
