they had found in their last visit to the catacombs.
“A sacrificial knife, probably. What made you bring it with you?”
Avila made a wry face. “To tell the truth I intended to lose it down here again. I don’t want it anywhere near me.”
“It might be important.”
“It’s more likely to be mischievous. And can you imagine me trying to explain it to the house Justiciar if it were found?”
“All right then.” Albrec swung the lamp around to regard the other, darker corners of the cave. “We’re forgetting what we came here for. Help me look for more of the document, Avila, and throw that thing away if you have to.”
Avila tossed the dagger aside and helped Albrec sift through the rubbish which littered the floor of the cave. It seemed as if someone had tossed half the contents of a library down here a century ago and left it to rot. Their feet rested on the remains of manuscripts, and a jetsam of decaying vellum was piled against the walls like a tidemark. They knelt in it and brought the remnants to their noses, squinting at the faded and torn lettering in the light of the lamps.
“It’s dry in here, or these would have been mushrooms long since,” Avila said, discarding a page. “Strange— the wall beyond is damp, you said so yourself. What happened here, Albrec? What are these things, and why is this unholy chapel here in the bowels of Charibon?”
Albrec shrugged. “Men have lived on this site for thousands of years, rebuilding on the ruins of the settlements which went before them. It may be that this cave was nearer the surface once.”
They found sections of texts written in the Merduk tongue with its graceful lettering and lack of illuminations. One group of pages had diagrams upon them which seemed to outline the courses of the stars. Another bore a line drawing of a human body, flayed so that the muscles and veins below the skin might be seen. The two monks made the Sign of the Saint as they stared at it.
“Heretical texts,” Avila said. “Astrology, witchery. Now I know why they were walled up in here.”
But Albrec was shaking his head. “Knowledge, Avila. They sealed up knowledge in here. They decided on behalf of all men what they might and might not know, and they destroyed anything which they disagreed with.”
“Who are ‘they,’ Albrec?”
“Your brethren, my friend. The Inceptines.”
“Maybe they acted for the best.”
“Maybe. We will never know because the knowledge they destroyed is lost for ever. We will never be able to judge for ourselves.”
“Not everyone is as learned as you, Albrec. Knowledge can be a dangerous thing in the hands of the ignorant.”
Albrec smiled. “You sound like one of the monsignors, Avila.”
Avila scowled. “You cannot change the way the world works, Albrec. No one man can. You can only do as you are told and make the best of it.”
“I wonder if Ramusio would have agreed with that.”
“And how many would-be Ramusios do you think they have sent to the pyre in the last five hundred years?” Avila said. “Striving to change the world seems to me to be a sure way of shortening one’s tenure of it.”
Albrec chuckled, then stiffened. “Avila! I think I have it!”
“Let me see.”
Albrec was holding a few ragged pages, bound together by the remains of their cloth backing.
“The writing is the same, and the layout. And here’s the title page!”
“Well? What does it say?”
Albrec paused, and finally spoke in a low, reverent voice. “ ‘A true and faithful account of the life of the Blessed Saint Ramusio, as told by one who was his companion and his disciple from the earliest of days.’ ”
“Quite a title,” Avila grunted. “But who wrote it?”
“It’s by Honorius of Neyr, Avila. Saint Honorius.”
“What? Like
“The very same. The man who inspired the Friar Mendicant Order, a founding father of the Church.”
“Founding father of hallucinations,” Avila muttered.
Albrec tucked the pages away in his habit. “Whatever. Let’s get out of here. We’ve got what we came for.”
They rose to their feet, brushing the detritus of the cave from their knees, and as they did there was a rattle of stone. They turned as one, the lamplight leaping in their hands, to find Brother Commodius appearing through the hole in the wall which led back to the catacombs.
The Senior Librarian dusted himself down much as Avila and Albrec had done whilst the pair stared at him in horror. The mattock they had left outside dangled from one of his huge hands. He smiled.
“We are well met, Albrec. And I see you have brought the beautiful Avila with you too. What joy.”
“Brother, we—we were just—”
“No need, Albrec. We are beyond explanations. You have overreached yourself.”
“We’ve done nothing wrong, Commodius,” Avila said hotly. “No one is forbidden to come down here. You can’t touch us.”
“Be quiet, you young fool,” Commodius snapped in return. “You understand nothing. Albrec does, though— don’t you, my friend?” Commodius’ face was hideous in its humour, the mien of a satisfied gargoyle, his ears seemingly too long to be real and his eyes reflecting the lamplight like those of a dog.
Albrec blinked as though trying to clear the dust from his eyes. Something in him seemed to calm, to accept the situation.
“You knew this was here,” he said. “You’ve always known.”
“Yes, I have always known, as have all the Senior Librarians, all the custodians of this place. We pass down the information as we do the keys of the doors. In time, Albrec, it might have been passed on to you.”
“Why would I want it?”
“Don’t be obtuse with me, Albrec. Do you think this is the only secret chamber in these levels? There are scores of them, and mouldering away in the dark and the silence is the vanished knowledge of a dead age, lost generations of accumulated lore deemed too harmful or heretical or dangerous for men to know. How would you like to have that at your fingertips, Albrec?”
The little monk wet his dry lips. “Why?” he asked.
“Why what?”
“Why are you so afraid of knowledge?”
The mattock twitched in Commodius’ fist. “Power, Brother. Power lies in knowledge, but also in ignorance. The Inceptines control the world with the information they know and that which they withhold. You cannot give mankind the freedom to know anything it wants; that is the merest anarchy. Take that document you found down here, the one you have hidden so inadequately in your cell along with the other heretical books you have been concealing: your pitiful attempt to save a kernel from the cleansing fire.”
Albrec was as white as a winding sheet. “You know of it too?”
“I have read others like it, all of which I have had destroyed. Why else do you think there are no contemporary accounts of the Saint’s life extant today? In that one document resides greater power than in any king. The old pages you discovered hold within them the ability to overturn our world. That will not happen. At least, not yet.”
“But it’s the
“Our duty is to the Church and its shepherdship of mankind. What do you think men would do if they discovered that Ahrimuz and Ramusio were one and the same? Or that Ramusio was not assumed into heaven, but was last seen riding a mule into oblivion? The Church would be riven to its very foundations. The basic tenets of our belief would be questioned. Men might begin to doubt the existence of God Himself.”
“You’ve told us why you are going to do what you are about to do, Commodius,” Avila said with the drawl of
