by Anthony Ryan
The narrow face and magnified eyes swung back to me as I ploughed on without waiting for an answer, raising the sack in my hand. “I am in possession of the finest ever copy of the Scroll of Martyr Callin for whom this holy city is named. I also carry the Martyr’s only known relic, and…” I allowed a very brief pause for emphasis “… the last testament of Ascendant Sihlda Doisselle. As true adherents of the Covenant of Martyrs myself and my companions beseech the servants of this holy place for sanctuary.”
The eyes had remained free of emotion as I spoke, but narrowed at mention of the relic, then even more upon hearing Sihlda’s name. They continued to regard me after I fell silent, returning the scrutiny with a gaze filled by desperate entreaty. Sihlda had warned me not to beg, for those who held authority here were rarely moved by such things. Sanctuary was within the gift of the Covenant, but it was not a right and often afforded on a whim, if not a bribe, and I had just spent the only coin we had.
“That man is a liar and a murderer!” Lord Eldurm cried out, voice more shrill than ever. However, behind their lenses, the Ascendant’s eyes barely flickered.
“Petition for sanctuary is granted,” he proclaimed, lowering the framed lenses to reveal his face in full. He was not an impressive man at first glance, his features sallow and distinctive only in their ordinariness. But his squinting gaze told of much the same intelligence I had seen in Sihlda’s, but with none of the compassion. This, I knew instantly, to be a very calculating man.
“Make your way to the gate,” he told us, waving towards the east before glancing in the direction of Lord Eldurm’s party. “My lord, if you have objections you are free to submit them in writing to the Council of Luminants in Couravel. As for now, I remind you that I am witness to this event and any violence done in the precincts of this city carries both the penalty of excommunication from the Covenant and Crown sentence of death.”
I looked at Ascendant Hilbert’s outstretched hand, still too tired to muster the will to conceal my trepidation. Also, I found the sight of it macabrely fascinating, the knuckles swollen to the size of chestnuts and the flesh traced with a matrix of bulging veins. The ink that had stained the fingertips a permanent dark blue also left little doubt that this hand belonged to a man who had spent much of his days toiling over parchment with a quill. The stains on my own fingers were not so dark but, if I somehow contrived to continue as a scribe, would surely one day match his.
Whatever the state of Hilbert’s hands, they evidently retained a good deal of dexterity judging by the loud and impatient snap of his finger and thumb. It echoed long in the chamber I had been led to, a place of narrow confines but tall vaulted ceilings positioned to the rear of the Shrine to Martyr Callin. We were alone, Toria and Brewer waiting in the hallway outside in company with a half-dozen burly laymen wearing the black tunics of Covenant custodians.
Our journey through the gate had been surprisingly swift, the custodians who greeted us paying little heed to civility as they hustled us along an oddly straight avenue to the shrine. There were a few onlookers about but our arrival aroused no particular commotion, meaning I was able to hear Lord Eldurm’s pursuing diatribe with dispiriting clarity. He and his cohort had tracked us along the bank to the gate, every step we took dogged by the expectation that another crossbow bolt would come our way. Strangely, with deliverance at hand, his lordship’s anger no longer struck me as amusing.
“You impugned my honour, Scribe!” he raged as we hurried through the gate. “You cast your churl’s piss on my generosity. Don’t think this rathole will hide you for ever! One day I’ll make you a gift, Scribe! A necklace, fashioned from your own guts…”
“The relic.” The narrow-faced Ascendant snapped his fingers again. “And the testament. I’ll have no argument, unless you would like to walk back through the gate and beseech Lord Eldurm for mercy. Sanctuary can be denied as well as given.”
When the time comes, Sihlda had told me, you will know. And I did know. I knew that placing the full and unexpurgated version of her testament in this man’s hands would be a very large, possibly deadly, mistake. It’s the thinkers rather than the sadists you have to be wary of in life, and it was clear to me that Ascendant Hilbert was a man who did a great deal of thinking. I had imagined Sihlda’s revelations would be occasioned by meeting a soul of peerless wisdom and piety, some old, sage cleric or other luminary who would know best what to do with such dangerous knowledge. If so, this wasn’t it. Still, that didn’t mean I had no testament to give him.
“It’s a remarkable story.” I swallowed, fighting a well of emotion that was only partially faked as I handed him the coin from my pocket before extracting the testament from the sack. “Sure to move the hearts of all who hear it.”
Hilbert took a second to turn the coin over, holding it close to his evidently weak eyes then grunting in satisfaction upon confirming its age. However, his principal interest clearly lay with the bundle of bound parchment.
“You have read this?” he asked, making no move to undo the binding, instead tapping one of his ink-stained fingers on it. The movement was tentative, like one testing the heat of a pot.
“She dictated to me.” I wiped moisture from my eyes and attempted a smile. I held my pack at my side, hoping his interest in the document in hand would prevent him insisting I empty the entire contents. Had he done so he would have discovered another, longer version of Sihlda’s testament, albeit one he would have had difficulty reading. “I am a scribe, you see.”
Ascendant Hilbert gave a vague nod at this, his attention still fixed on the testament. “It is, you would say, a fulsome account?”
“To the best of my knowledge.” I put a frown on my brow that combined puzzlement with a small impression of offence. “She was not a woman to tolerate dishonesty, in herself or others.”
“No,” he agreed with a faint shrug. “At least not when I knew her, although our acquaintance was brief. When did she die?”
I saw no utility in lying at this juncture. Hilbert was fully aware of my outlaw status and my most recent crime. However, I felt it best not to enlighten him as to Sihlda’s role in her own demise. The Covenant had no official strictures against suicide, but it was still frowned upon by clergy. “Two days ago, Ascendant. We dug a tunnel to escape the Pit. It collapsed before she could get out. They all died, all her congregation, save for myself and my companions.”
His gaze finally slid towards me. “She formed a congregation in the Pit Mines?”
“Indeed, Ascendant, and much loved she was.”
“Meaning the unlawful escape was her idea.”
“It was. But I believe her intent was to place this testament in Covenant hands, along with the copy of Martyr Callin’s scroll.”
Without waiting for his leave I pulled the scroll from the sack, freeing it from the sealed leather tube that had protected it throughout our flight from the Pit. The Ascendant regarded the proffered scroll without particular interest before consenting to take it. Unfurling the first few inches, his brows rose in surprised interest.
“This is your work?” he asked, not making any attempt to keep the doubt from his voice.
“It is. Ascendant Sihlda was the finest of teachers.”
His face clouded a little and he turned away, moving to a large oak writing desk where he set down both documents. “You shouldn’t use her title,” he told me. “Not within the hearing of other clergy, at least. She was stripped of it when King Mathis pronounced her sentence. You know the nature of her crime, I assume? Since you took down her testament.”
“I do, Ascendant.” I hesitated and he turned back to me, holding my gaze until I provided the answer. “Murder.”
“Yes.” He shifted his attention back to the scroll, unfurling more of it on the tilted surface of the desk. “Murder of a fellow cleric, in fact. Some might say the worst crime a servant of the Covenant can commit.” He peered closely at the scroll, lips pursed in what I hoped was admiration. “It’s a pity this wasn’t se
t down on vellum,” he mused. “Parchment is an irksomely short-lived material. Still, I suspect you’ll be with us a while, will you not, Alwyn Scribe?”
I bowed, swallowing a sigh of relief. “I should be happy to make another copy, Ascendant.”
“Yes.” For the first time some animation came into his face, just a very small curling of lips I doubted smiled much at all. “You will. All who receive sanctuary within our walls are required to earn their keep. Housing and food will be provided as long as you work for it. Money is not used in Callintor and none of the vices that arise from it are tolerated. Games, drink, profanity, indulgence in the base lusts of the flesh and any form of criminality large or small are forbidden here. Transgression has but one punishment: expulsion. Supplications take place at first light and sunset and are obligatory. The choice of shrine is left to you but—” he gestured to the scroll “—since you are so well acquainted with the story of our own Martyr, I can’t imagine why you would wish to worship anywhere else.”
I bowed again, knowing an instruction when I heard it. “Of course, Ascendant.”
His impassive expression returned as he looked again at the testament sitting alongside the scroll. “How many copies of this have you made?”
“None, as instructed by Asc—” I choked off the honorific, finding to my surprise it annoyed me more than I expected. If any soul deserved the title it was surely her. “Mistress Sihlda,” I finished.
“Good. Keep it that way.” He glanced at me once more, the calculation behind his gaze plain to see although I suspected it might not be so obvious to eyes less attuned to reading the moods of others. His offhand tone also indicated an attempt to conceal a deeper interest in the answer to his next question. “What was your crime, incidentally? The one that consigned you to the Pit.”
I replied with uninflected candour, once again seeing no reason to lie. “Thievery, trespass and taking of game within the duke’s forest, and association with the outlaw Deckin Scarl.”
“The Outlaw King himself, eh?” His lips betrayed another almost imperceptible curve. “Tell me, was he really seven feet tall and capable of strangling a man with just one hand?”
“He was a big fellow, Ascendant, but not that big. And I only saw him use two hands whenever he strangled a man.”
The Ascendant’s lips straightened and a shadow passed across his calculating brow before he turned his attention back to the scroll. “The custodians will show you and your fellow congregants to suitable quarters,” he said, waving me to the door. “We expelled a few miscreants for running a dice and drink den last week so there should be a house free. Be sure to return for evening supplications. After supplication tomorrow morning you will report here for duties in the scriptorium. Unless your friends share your skills, they can find honest work in the gardens or the pens.”
I gave him a final bow, far lower than before to indicate the depth of my gratitude. Ascendant Hilbert, however, failed to notice, his attention now fully fixed on the testament, one hand caressing the binding in a manner that told me it would be ripped away as soon as the door closed behind me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
As you will have discerned by now, cherished reader, I have had plentiful acquaintance with prisons. In so doing, I have often found occasion to reflect on the curious fact that a state of imprisonment, regardless of how genteel it may be, will inevitably become intolerable. It had taken four years of hard yet surreptitious toil to escape the hardships of the Pit, but after only three months within the walls of Callintor, I found my thoughts turning once again to liberation.
But why? you may well wonder. Were you not fed? Were you not sheltered? Were your days not filled with fruitful and important labour? Did you not learn a great deal from your fellow scribes in the scriptorium? In answer to all, I say a firm yes, and yet by the dawning of the Feast Day of Martyr Ahlianna, I yearned to be free of Callintor with as much fervour as I ever longed to claw my way out of the Pit. The reason was not mysterious, or difficult to articulate, although I feel Toria put it most eloquently.
“I am so fucking bored!”
Her knife sank into the central beam of our dwelling with a loud thunk, the timber splintering as she worked it free and stalked back to the far side of the room. The beam was marked all over with the evidence of her unending practice. Weapons were, of course, forbidden within the confines of the city but she had procured herself a blade via some careful thievery during her regular stint at the butcher’s yard. A small triangular blade kept wickedly sharp and, it turned out, perfectly balanced for throwing. The broad, mostly unfurnished space that comprised the lower floor of our house gave her plenty of room for practice.
The capacious size of our new home was one of several comfortable aspects to this novel form of incarceration. The house we shared with Brewer would have been considered luxurious in comparison to the hovels of my childhood village. We each had our own room on the upper floor and Toria would often bring home a portion of meat at the end of the day to roast in front of the large fireplace. Brewer had found himself a place at the orchard, so the fireplace was often stocked with sweet-smelling apple wood and evening meals washed down with a cup or two of cider. Strong liquor was strictly forbidden in Callintor but cider and ale were allowed due to the flux that invariably arose from drinking plain water, provided one didn’t become too obviously intoxicated.
Toria’s knife thunked into the beam once more and I resisted the urge to shoot her an annoyed glare. Although I spent at least ten hours of every day writing, I always found time after returning from the scriptorium to decode at least a few lines of Sihlda’s original testament. On her instruction I had encrypted the text in a code it had taken me a year to learn, a complex double-substitution cypher that required as much knowledge of numbers as it did letters. It was a code known only to Sihlda and myself, rendering her account into a facsimile of ancient Danehric, the language of the Sacred Lands as spoken a thousand years ago. As such it was unreadable by anyone save the most learned scholars and even they would have pronounced it as gibberish.
I had been tempted to leave it alone and negate the risk of discovery by the custodians. These devout ruffians were typically men of little brain but considerable brawn whose favourite entertainment consisted of randomly searching dwellings in hopes of finding evidence for expulsion. The list of proscribed items that would see an unfortunate pushed through the gates was long and often nonsensical. Last month I had watched them expel an aged woman who spent the better part of a decade evading the noose after murdering her punch-happy husband. Her crime consisted of weaving a tapestry that depicted Martyr Melliah with a half-exposed breast.
The custodians’ zeal in pursuing miscreants made me wonder if they weren’t paid some form of bounty for every unfortunate they forced through the gates. But still, as my thoughts turned ever more towards departing this place, the prospect of Sihlda’s precious words being lost for ever if some misfortune befell me was unbearable.
“Don’t tell me you’re not bored, either.” Toria’s knife thudded into the beam again. “You hate this place. I can tell. You’re not so good an actor as you think you are.”
“Yes I am,” I replied, my focus still on the part-decoded testament. “You’re just more practised at sniffing out lies than most.”
A sigh then the scrape of a stool on the hay-covered floor as she took a place at the table. When she spoke her tone was serious and insistent. “I’m tired of circling around this. When are we leaving?”
“When the time is right.”
“When you’ve finished that, you mean.” Toria shifted closer, angling her head to view the words inscribed on the sheet of vellum I had stolen from the scriptorium’s stores. “What’s it say that’s so important anyway?”
I didn’t bother to conceal the deciphered words. Despite numerous offers, Toria had never consented to allow Sihlda to teach her letters. “The formula for turning base metal into gold,” I muttered.
“Oh, pis
s off.” She gave an annoyed huff and planted her elbows on the table, chin resting on the upraised palms. “She’s dead yet you and that bear-sized fool are as much her slaves as you ever were.”
“Debt is owed, by all of us. I thought you understood such things.”
“I understand I’m going to go mad if I have to stick this place for one more week.”
“If four years in the Pit didn’t kill you, a few more months here won’t either.”
“It’s not my body I worry over.” Her voice lowered a notch or two. “It’s my soul. This place sullies it.”
This was enough to bring my pen to a halt. She didn’t speak much of the southern brand of devotion to the Covenant and I had scant knowledge of the details. I knew that it featured what seemed to me only a few minor differences to the orthodox faith. However, just because she rarely spoke of her beliefs, the weight of misery I saw in her bunched features told me she still held to it with all the fervour Brewer held to his.
“Sullies it how?” I asked, making her shift a little in discomfort.
“The supplications,” she muttered.
“Your people don’t have supplications?”
“Not like these. At home, we gather to pay homage to the Martyrs but all are allowed to speak our devotion. Our supplications mean more than just clerics gabbling out scripture they learned by rote. In the south there is but one rank of cleric; all are humble Supplicants who stand as a link to the Seraphile’s grace, not a barrier, not gatekeepers demanding payment for salvation.”
Her voice had risen to an unusually loud pitch, causing me to press a finger to her lips while casting a worried glance at the shuttered window. There were few misdeeds more certain to see us expelled than voicing heresy. She jerked her face away from my hand with a scowl, folding her arms tight. At times like these I wondered if her true age might not be what she claimed, so like a sulky child did she appear.
