this time in the morning Charibon was a city of voices, it was said, and fishermen in their boats out on the Sea of Tor would hear the ghostly plainchant drifting out from shore, a massed prayer which was rumoured to still the waves and bring the fish to the surface to listen.
Matins ended, and there was a clamour of scraping benches and shuffling feet as the singers rose to their feet row by row. The High Pontiff left the cathedral first in the company of the Inceptine Vicar-General, Betanza. Then the senior churchmen filed out, and then the Inceptines. Last in the orderly throng to leave would be the novices, their stomachs rumbling, their noses red with early morning chill. The crowds would splinter as the clerics made their way to the various refectories of the orders for bread and buttermilk, the unchanging breakfast of Charibon’s inhabitants.
H IMERIUS and Betanza had not far to go to the Pontifical apartments, but they took a turn around the cloisters first, their hands tucked in their habits, their hoods pulled up over their heads. The cloisters were deserted at this time of the morning as everyone trooped into the refectories for breakfast.
It was dark, the winter morning some time away as yet. The moon had set, though, and the predawn stars were bright as pins in a sky of unsullied aquamarine. The breath of the two senior clerics was a white mist about their hoods as they walked the serene, arched circuit of the cloisters. There was snow in the air; it was thick in the mountains but Charibon had as yet received only a tithe of its usual share. The heavy falls would come within days, and the shores of the Sea of Tor would grow beards of ice upon which the novices would skate and skylark in the little free time they had. It was a ritual, a routine as old as the monastery-city itself, and absurdly comforting to both the men who now walked in slow silence about the empty cloisters.
Betanza, the bluff ex-duke from Astarac, threw back his hood and paused to stare out across the starlit gardens within the cloisters. Trees there, ungainly oaks purportedly planted before the empire fell. In the spring the brown grass would explode with snowdrops, then daffodils and primroses as the year turned. They were dormant now, sleeping out the winter under the frozen earth.
“The purges have begun across the continent,” he said quietly. “In Almark and Perigraine and Finnmark. In the duchies and the principalities they are herding them by the thousand.”
“A new beginning,” the High Pontiff said, his nose protruding like a raptor’s beak from his hood. “The faith has been in need of this. A rejuvenation. Sometimes it takes an upheaval, a crisis, to breathe new life into our beliefs. We are never so sure of them as we are when they are threatened.”
Betanza smiled sourly. “We have our crisis. Religious schism on a vast scale, and a war with the unbelievers of the east which threatens the very existence of the Ramusian kingdoms.”
“Torunna is no longer Ramusian,” Himerius corrected him quickly. “Nor is Astarac. They have heretics on their thrones. Hebrion, thank God, is coming under the sway of the true Church once more. The bull will have reached Abrusio by now—unlike its heretical king. Abeleyn is finished. Hebrion is ours.”
“And Fimbria?” Betanza asked.
“What of it?”
“More rumours. It is said that a Fimbrian army is on the march eastwards to the relief of Ormann Dyke.”
Himerius waved a hand. “Talk is a farthing a yard. Have we any more word of the Almarkan king’s condition?”
Haukir, the aged and irascible monarch of Almark, was laid low by a fever. The winter journey homewards from the Conclave of Kings had started it. He was bedridden, without issue, and more foul-tempered than ever.
“The commander of the Almarkan garrisons here received word yesterday. He is dying. By now he may even be dead.”
“We have people on hand?”
“Prelate Marat is at his bedside; the two are said to be natural brothers on the father’s side.”
“Whatever. Marat must be present at the end, and the will with him.”
“You truly believe that Haukir may leave his kingdom to the Church?”
“He has no one else save a clutch of sister-sons who amount to nothing. And he has always been a staunch ally of the Inceptine Order. He would have entered it himself had he not been born Royal; he said as much to Marat before the conclave.”
Betanza was silent, thoughtful. Were the Church to inherit the resources of Almark, one of the most powerful kingdoms in the west, it would be unassailable. The anti-Pontiff, or imposter rather, Macrobius, and those monarchs who had recognized him, would face a Church which had become overnight a great secular state.
“Quite an empire we are building up for ourselves,” Betanza said mildly.
“The empire of Ramusio on earth. We are witnessing the symmetry of history, Betanza. The Fimbrian empire was secular, and was brought down by religious wars which established the True Faith across the continent. Now is the time of the second empire, a religious hegemony which will rear up the Kingdom of God on earth. That is my mission. It is why I became Pontiff.”
Himerius’ eyes were shining in the depths of his hood. Betanza remembered the wheeling and dealing which had secured Himerius the Pontiffship, the bargaining. Perhaps he was na?ve. Though head of the Inceptine Order, he had been a lay nobleman until quite late in life. It gave him a different outlook on things which at times made him oddly uncomfortable.
“Dawn comes,” he said, watching the glow of the approaching sun in the east. He felt an obscure urge to throw himself face down on the ground and pray; a dread and apprehension the like of which he had never experienced before rose in him like a breeding darkness.
“Do you recall
“ ‘And the Beast shall come upon the earth in the days of the second empire of the world. And he shall rise up out of the west, the light in his eyes terrible to behold. With him shall come the Age of the Wolf, when brother will slay brother. And all men shall fall down and worship him.’ ”
“Honorius was a crazed hermit, a Friar Mendicant. His ravings verge on the heretical.”
“And yet he knew Ramusio, and was one of his closest followers.”
“The Blessed Saint had many followers, Betanza, among them a proportion of lunatics and mystics. Keep your mind on the present. We go to meet the Arch-Presbyter of the Knights Militant this morning to talk to him about recruiting. The Church needs a strong right arm, not a perusal of ancient apocalyptic hallucinations.”
“Yes, Holy Father,” Betanza said.
The two resumed their walk around the quiet cloisters of Charibon while the silent dawn broke open the sky above them.
A LBREC had missed Matins, and he did not go down to breakfast. His stomach was as closed as a stone and he was kneeling in prayer on the hard stone floor of his frigid little cell. The dawn light was slanting in through the narrow window making the lit candle he had been reading by seem dim and yellow. On the table before him the pages of the old document had been laid out in orderly piles.
He rose at last, his pointed face deeply troubled, and sat before the table where he had spent most of the night. One hand snuffed out the candle as the rising sunlight stole into the room, and the smoke from the extinguished wick writhed back and forth in front of his eyes in grey wires and strings. The eyes were rimmed in scarlet.
He turned over the leaves of the document yet again, and his movement was as gingerly as if he expected them to explode into flame at any second.
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