The Quest for Saint Camber

by Katherine Kurtz

  “Be thy hands anointed with holy oil, that thou mayest achieve glory.”

  Dipping again, Arilan set the sacred sign on Conall’s breast.

  “Be thy breast anointed with holy oil, that valor and courage may be ever in thy heart.”

  And finally, on the crown of Conall’s bowed head.

  “Be thy head anointed with holy oil, as kings, priests, and prophets were anointed, that thou mayest receive knowledge.”

  Arilan closed Conall’s hands then, binding them lightly together with a strip of linen before carefully cleansing his own fingers. The oil was indeed holy oil, but it also contained a substance to lower resistance and induce mild relaxation. It had no observable effect on Arilan, whose exposure had been brief, but Conall continued to absorb the drug through hands, breast, and scalp, swaying a little on his knees. As Duncan exchanged the ampule of oil for the bowl containing the ashes of the burned document, Morgan steadied Conall with his right hand on a shoulder, while his left continued to press the flat of the Haldane blade against their subject’s spine.

  Morgan sensed a mellowing in Conall’s previously rigid shields as Duncan dipped his thumb into the ashes, signed the prince between the eyes, and read a gentle wash of warmth and faint disorientation as he briefly touched what lay beyond.

  “Conall Blaine Cluim Uthyr,” Duncan said, “I seal thee Haldane and confirm thee as Heir.”

  While Duncan took up a pinch of the ash between thumb and forefinger, Morgan slid his right hand under and around Conall’s jaw as cue for him to open his mouth. Conall complied without resistance.

  “Taste of the ashes of mingled Haldane blood,” Duncan murmured, sprinkling some of the ash onto Conall’s tongue, “thine own and thy father’s, in unbroken line. By blood art thou consecrated to the Haldane legacy and acknowledged as The Haldane, that the power may come upon thee in its fullness.”

  But the actual channeling of power would not come from the ash. Nor would it come from the Ring of Fire that Arilan slipped onto Conall’s left hand, after he had unbound Conall’s hands and cleansed them of the oil. As for Kelson’s ritual, hardly more than four years before, Morgan and Duncan had set the catalyst for the descent of power in a physical vessel associated before with Haldane magic—the heavy, fist-sized brooch that Duncan brought out from under a linen cloth, last seen at Kelson’s knighting—golden Haldane lion inlaid in a crimson enamel field.

  And on the back, which Duncan had carefully prepared during the afternoon, was the pin that normally clasped the brooch—three inches of gleaming gold, very sharp, which Conall, like Kelson before him, would be required to stab through his left hand. The golden shaft also carried a second, stronger drug that would further reinforce the lowering of any possible resistance to the forces about to be focused in Conall.

  Arilan stood to Conall’s right as Duncan put the opened brooch in Conall’s right hand, and Morgan prepared to step back—for none of them must touch Conall at the actual moment of his ordeal. In turn, each of the priest-bishops offered a prayer for the health and prosperity of this latest Haldane heir, Morgan leading Conall in the response of “Amen” at the appropriate moments—for Conall’s eyes were dilated now, and he was sinking deeper into thrall of the first drug.

  And then, as Morgan stepped back to kneel directly behind Conall, the Haldane sword held beneath the quillons like a cross between them, Arilan also knelt at Conall’s right and Duncan, still standing, placed both hands lightly on Conall’s head, careful not to touch the oil still glistening there.

  “Conall Blaine Cluim Uthyr Haldane. Though the cords of the nether world enmesh thee, though the snares of death surge about thee, thou shalt fear no evil. With His pinions the Lord will cover thee, and under His wings thou shalt take refuge.” He lifted his hands and made the sign of the cross over Conall’s bowed head. “In Nomine Patris et Fits et Spiritus Sancti, Amen.”

  And then, kneeling at Conall’s left, Duncan lifted his hands in final entreaty, as he had lifted them similarly for Kelson, what seemed a lifetime ago.

  “Domine, fiat voluntas tuas.” Lord, let it be done according to Thy will.

  Drawing only a single, final breath to brace himself for what he was about to do, Conall shifted the lion brooch slightly in his right hand to steady his grip, poised the point of the clasp against the center of the left palm, and thrust the metal home.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  They have pierced my hand.

  —Psalms 22:16

  It hurt far more than Conall had expected. The impaling pin seared like molten metal as it slid between the bones of his hand. The pain took his breath away, doubling him up like a kick in the stomach, hardly even able to gasp, much less cry out.

  And yet, there was something besides the pain—something besides his awareness, gently blurred by medication, of the power that was already his. Through the burning that centered in his palm, he could feel it like the buzz of a trapped insect, beating to be released—only mildly distracting at first, but increasingly irritating, for his inability to focus on it. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he pressed the heel of his good hand harder against the cool sleekness of the brooch, as if the added pressure might capture whatever it was between his hands, might pinion it the same way the brooch pinioned his hand.

  The second medication was having its effects, too. He could feel the new drug reinforcing the first, but he knew them both from his times with Tiercel—and knew that he could ride their effects; that they would not force him into betrayal, but only facilitate his mastering of whatever else was stirring with increasing insistence inside him.

  That something else was rising like a gale within his mind, but it did not precisely threaten—though he was far from comfortable. Power there was—even more than had been within his grasp before, and that had not been inconsiderable—but this new and different sort of power was there for his using, not to be ordered by any other living soul. The clasp of the brooch burned in his hand, almost as if the very metal were growing hotter, but he knew that to be but a reaction of his physical body. The power was another thing, apart and alien, yet at the same time known and now completely controllable. He could feel it pulsing stronger with every heartbeat, filling up the empty spots, bringing new knowledge into being and casting old, only half-understood knowledge into sharper focus, so that even the jumbled material he had gained from Tiercel became accessible in its fullness, so far as it went.

  He reveled in it. He floated on the tide of the ecstacy of knowledge and let himself flow with it—though he kept his pressure on the brooch so that the pain in his hand would keep him firmly anchored in his body. For, though it would have been tempting to surrender wholly to the power coiling within him, he worried that if he opened himself too fully, his shielding might slip to the point that the others could read him and know that he was not what he had seemed.

  So he slumped even lower over his clasped hands, his breathing still a little ragged in response to the white heat concentrated in his left hand, and set his mind to assimilating all that had been brought to conscious levels and was still surfacing.

  Not all of it was pleasant. There was a brief, thorny moment when the ghosts of what he had done rose up to threaten him—first Tiercel’s face, frozen with horrified incomprehension as he went over backwards on the stair that claimed his life; and then his father, hands lifted in futile warding off as Conall’s flare of guilt-spurred anger, powered by forbidden magic, enfolded him in death within life and left only a slowly dying shell.

  That latter almost set Conall to sobbing, for he truly had not wanted to harm his own father. It simply had—happened—and he still was not sure how or why. Trembling, he tried to regain his equilibrium—but the newly stirred forces churning within were not yet finished with him.

  Any of the other three kneeling around him would have understood what happened next, but Conall did not. As he banished the accusing face of his father from his mind’s eye, another began slowly to take its place—and
this one also looked little pleased with what it saw.

  A pale, roundish face framed by a cap of quicksilver hair, sensitive mouth set in mute, stern contemplation, grey eyes like a Haldane’s, that seemed to have nothing behind them but the darker grey of the cowl pushed back slightly from the head. The eyes caught and held Conall, so that he felt they must draw his very soul out of his body. He whimpered once and cringed harder into a ball as hands joined the face, reaching toward him.

  But then, from somewhere, he was drawing the strength to resist that compulsion, raising a barrier of crimson light between himself and that other presence, banishing it at last from all contact. It was not easy, but he finally succeeded.

  He huddled motionless for a little while after that, gradually regaining equilibrium, and finally even his breathing steadied as the pain in his hand began to be controllable with his new-found mastery of his power. Tiercel’s memories, too, seemed to have settled into orderly stability, the knowledge gained now totally accessible.

  He spent a few minutes confirming and testing, aware that the drugs in his body had reached maximum effect and he was still able to exercise his own will. Then he drew a deep, careful breath and slowly straightened, sitting back on his heels and cradling what was now just a brooch in his left hand.

  “Conall?” he heard Morgan murmur, just barely audible.

  Though he tried to be careful, Conall jarred the end of the clasp protruding from the back of his hand and he sucked in breath between his teeth at the new pain. But Duncan was already scrambling closer, Morgan gently prising loose his right hand while Duncan uncurled the left fingers so he could remove the brooch. Even though the metal pin was polished smooth, it hurt coming out, and Conall let the pain show, rather than damping it down, for it had occurred to him that perhaps he was not reacting enough to account for what supposedly had happened. His father had reported losing consciousness after even the abbreviated working to set the Haldane potential, and Conall had the impression that Kelson, too, had swooned away at the collective effect of his assumption of power. Perhaps Conall should pretend to faint.

  But Arilan was kneeling eagerly before him and watching with keen interest, apparently well pleased with his reaction. And Duncan, though he cleaned the wounds in Conall’s hand with something that stung ferociously, back and palm, soon took away pain and wound and all with a firm healer’s touch, with nothing apparently amiss in his assessment of Conall’s reaction. Conall flexed the hand in wonder when Duncan had done, for there was not even a drop of blood to show for his ordeal, though blood still stained the pin of the brooch Morgan held.

  “How do you feel?” Morgan asked, searching the grey Haldane eyes.

  Cautiously Conall nodded, allowing a faint hint of dazedness to color his movement.

  “All right, I think. It—”

  He swallowed and shook his head, truly unable to articulate what had just happened to him, even if he had dared, with what was on his conscience. And he did not want to talk about that unfamiliar face he had seen.

  “I’m very tired,” he whispered, instinctively knowing that to be the safest response.

  “It’s amazing that you’re even conscious,” Arilan murmured, wiping the oil from Conall’s breast and then scrubbing at what remained on his head. “In fact, I don’t think you ever really lost consciousness, did you?”

  Conall decided immediately that a slightly embellished truth was safer than an outright lie.

  “Well, I—think I did,” he whispered. “It was sort of like—drifting in and out. I don’t remember much, though.”

  “Well, that’s standard enough,” Duncan murmured. “I don’t think Kelson was ever able to tell us much about what he experienced, though he did report seeming to see his father.”

  Arilan snorted. “Hardly to be expected in this instance, since Nigel’s still alive. It seems certain something happened, though. Conall, do you feel up to flexing your Haldane powers yet? Maybe making some demonstration, since you’re in pretty good shape?”

  Conall swallowed uneasily, considering what harmless thing he might do that would not seem too pretentious after so short a time, from someone previously unschooled. Then, pretending to concentrate very hard, he held out his right hand and cupped it, summoning handfire. He feigned awe as it appeared, flickering crimson in his palm, but Arilan only smiled, and Duncan and then Morgan nodded slowly.

  “Handfire,” Arilan said. “Well, that’s certainly a start.” He glanced at the other two Deryni. “Will you need my help dismantling, or shall I take him back to his room?”

  “We can manage,” Duncan said, as Morgan got slowly to his feet with the Haldane sword.

  Later, when they had dismissed the wards and Arilan had gone with Conall, and the two of them had gathered up most of the paraphernalia of the night’s work, Morgan, with a weary sigh, sank down on the floor with his back to the side of Nigel’s bed, still toying restlessly with the hilt of the now-sheathed sword.

  “I suppose we—have to accept that Kelson is dead, then,” he whispered, as Duncan knelt beside him in question. “I didn’t want to believe it before, but—”

  His voice broke, and he bowed his head in one hand as the grief, held back for so many days, became a force no longer to be denied. He indulged it for a little while, taking comfort from the circle of Duncan’s arms and the gentle brush of his mind as the other drew him into soothing rapport, though Duncan’s grief was surely no less than his own, for having lost a son as well as a king. But oddly, the hard, despairing grief abated fairly quickly, gradually being replaced by a growing certainty that they must somehow confirm for themselves that Kelson and Dhugal were, indeed, dead.

  “Do you mean, go to the place where they were lost and keep looking for bodies?” Duncan asked aloud, when either of them could speak again.

  Morgan nodded woodenly. “We have to, Duncan. Until we can see the evidence for ourselves and accept that they’re gone, we’ll be little use to anyone. I’m not even certain how much we had to do with what happened here tonight.”

  “Odd that you should mention that,” Duncan said. “I was thinking myself how different tonight was from what I’d expected. Almost a little hollow, as if we were only going through the motions. It certainly wasn’t anything like Kelson’s.”

  “Well, I’ll grant you that the sequence was jumbled by the standards of what we’ve seen before,” Morgan said, jarred more deeply than he wanted to admit by Duncan’s confirmation of the—oddness of the night’s experience. “That alone would have made it seem different. And maybe other things felt different because we didn’t have the Eye of Rom—though I’d certainly have to say that the end result was successful. Something certainly happened when he impaled his hand on that brooch—though I’ll grant you, everything felt very different from when Kelson did the same thing.”

  Sighing, Duncan sat back against the side of the bed beside Morgan and ran a hand over his face, off in his own thoughts for a few seconds, before shaking his head.

  “We’re tilting at shadows, Alaric,” he murmured, “and unfortunately, the source of those shadows is far more likely to be our own unresolved grief than anything truly odd that happened here tonight—not that Haldane magic can ever really be considered other than odd by Deryni standards, I suppose.”

  “Aye, that’s true.”

  “Which brings us to another interesting point,” Duncan went on. “Conall is only Haldane. He doesn’t have Jehana for a mother—which will make for a far duller sort of power exercise than we’ve become accustomed to with Kelson, I’m afraid.”

  “Unless there’s Deryni blood in the Haldanes already, even before Jehana,” Morgan said. “There has been, in the past—though I daresay it’s pretty well diluted by now.” He sighed. “But you’re right. Conall is not going to be the king that Kelson was—or Brion. Which is a pity, for its own sake.”

  He dragged himself slowly to his knees to turn and gaze at Nigel, now divested of his Haldane regalia, even paler aga
inst the stark white of the sheets than he had been when swathed in Haldane crimson.

  “And what a pity that Nigel will never get to reign,” he went on, laying a hand regretfully on one of Nigel’s still ones. “God, he would have made a wonderful king, Duncan! He isn’t a Kelson, I’ll grant you, but in many ways, he had all the best attributes of Brion—without the weaknesses. Poor, dear Nigel. He wouldn’t have wanted to go this way, either. Why couldn’t he have had a clean, honest death in battle?”

  Duncan looked away, fighting for composure. “We aren’t doing ourselves any service by dwelling on this, Alaric. You know that.”

  “I know.”

  With a sigh, Morgan rose and laid the sheathed Haldane sword across a pair of pegs above the head of the bed.

  “Duncan, let’s go tonight, shall we?” he said then, turning to face his cousin squarely. “I know it’s ridiculous to suppose that they could be alive after so long, and with Conall now in possession of the Haldane powers, but even if all we ever find is battered, waterlogged bodies, at least we’ll know.”

  Duncan kept his eyes averted as he, too, rose, head bowed, restless fingertips twisting at a fold of blanket he had started to pull over Nigel.

  “Do you really think we ought to go so soon? What if Conall needs us?”

  “Why should he need us?” Morgan replied. “He’s never needed us before. And if he does need a Deryni, Arilan will be here. We can check in at regular intervals, if that will make you feel any better. Besides, Conall’s The Haldane now and king in everything but name.” He glanced sadly at Nigel. “And I don’t know that I necessarily want to be here to see this wind to its end. I said all my good-byes while we were waiting for Conall to arrive.”

  Duncan nodded slowly. “I think I told you that Ciard and Jass and a few of Dhugal’s other men stayed at the campsite to continue looking. If we take the Portal as far as Valoret, I’m told one can get from there to the Saint Bearand campsite in just under two days, given reasonable weather and adequate changes of horses.”