The Gathering Storm

by Kate Elliott

  “They can’t climb at night,” said Hilaria. “We must hurry. If Sister Rosvita can do what she suggests, then tonight is our only chance. I pray Mother Obligatia is strong enough.”

  “What does she mean to do?” asked Hanna, climbing to her feet, but Hilaria had already hurried inside and Hanna could only follow, aching all over, as Hugh set in his siege.

  2

  AS they pressed forward into the interior rooms of the abandoned empty convent, a sense of serenity settled over Rosvita as might a cloak thrown over her shoulders. The dimness reminded her of the two years she had spent in the cell beneath the skopos’ palace, yet here, she knew, she was at last entirely free. She had chosen her path, for good or for ill, and she had taken responsibility for those who followed her and looked to her for leadership.

  King Henry remained a prisoner. She might never have the power to free him, but she had to try. If Hugh caught her and delivered her to Anne, all this would be in vain.

  As the light grew dim, Gerwita clutched Rosvita’s hand, whimpering. “I’m frightened,” she said in a low voice.

  They paused on a landing. Ahead lay the kitchens, but Sister Hilaria indicated the stairs that led down to the well.

  “This way.”

  “Do we not go on to that great cavern where Queen Adelheid and Princess Theophanu and their attendants sheltered?” Rosvita asked.

  “Not today.” Hilaria set down the lamp she carried and, striking flint to stone, caught a spark on a scrap of dried mushroom. This tiny flame, coaxed along, lit the wick.

  “Is everyone here?” she asked as she lifted the lamp to survey their party. “Follow me.”

  As they edged down the steep stairs, their path lit only by that one flame, Gerwita clung to the back of Rosvita’s robes. She had borne up bravely enough in the weeks after they had escaped from Darre, but the final push to the convent had drained her, and now the poor girl wept incessantly. The others shuffled along flat-footed, feeling their way down the steps. The ceiling entombed them, although for a mercy they could easily walk upright, nor had they to squeeze through any narrow passages. Ruoda coughed; she had succumbed to a stubborn grippe two weeks ago that had taken root in her lungs. Like the others, she needed to rest. They all needed to rest. They had been on the run for forty days, hounded and scared. It was no way to recover one’s strength. That they had held out this long amazed her.

  “Sister Rosvita!”

  A ghostly shape appeared at the edge of the flame’s halo. It took Rosvita two breaths to recognize Sister Diocletia, the weaver, standing below them on the steps. Like Hilaria, she had become emaciated, and her skin had a deadly pallor, as white as mushrooms. But her smile had the same patient warmth Rosvita remembered.

  “I pray you bring us good tidings, Sister Rosvita,” continued Diocletia. “We have been sorely tried. I fear we are on our last strength.”

  “I beg you, tell me what has happened to all of you. Why have you abandoned the convent? Where is Mother Obligatia?”

  Hilaria and Diocletia exchanged a glance. They had been the best natured and strongest of the nuns, and even now, as fragile and worn through as they looked, Rosvita sensed a powerful will shared between them.

  “We’re taking you to her now,” said Hilaria finally.

  They continued down, far down, until Rosvita lost count of the stairs and grew accustomed to stepping over the lip carved at the edge of each one, a fringe of stone that kept the foot from slipping on the descent. The stone was very cold to the touch but not wet. The footfalls of the others echoed around her, muffled by rock; she heard their breathing, but no one spoke. The light did little to dispel the darkness. She could touch solid stone on either side; otherwise they might as well have been descending into the Pit. Had the church mothers been mistaken all along, teaching that the sinful fell, bodiless and helpless, for eternity through a cloud of stinging aether? It was perhaps more reasonable to suggest that each erring soul carved her own path down the steep slope of the Abyss, trudging into eternal damnation. Sin itself was the punishment, turning away from what was right.

  She was about to throw herself into the camp of the Enemy, making her no different than Queen Adelheid, who had led them here the first time. Who could have guessed that Adelheid would prove so treacherous toward her husband? Yet fear, as much as treachery, might have impelled her. She might have succumbed to Hugh’s poisoned words or the skopos’ influence. She might only have done what she thought necessary to secure a throne for her infant child and surety for her own preeminent position among the princes of the land.

  Perhaps Adelheid had stepped into the Pit while doing what she thought was right.

  As I must.

  Rosvita knew what she had to do to save her companions from their pursuers. But that didn’t make it right.

  Her feet slipped on loose pebbles. She grabbed Gerwita’s hand to balance herself, heard Fortunatus, toward the back of the party, murmur a warning to the one who walked behind him.

  They came to the bottom of the stairs where curving walls rose on every side into blackness. The well was dry except for a sheen of water caught in a hollow beyond Hilaria, but it wasn’t empty. At the center of the space a hole pierced the rock; a sturdy wooden ladder poked up out of the depths.

  “How much farther?” gasped Gerwita.

  “Not far,” said Diocletia kindly. She turned to take hold of the ladder, easing herself onto the rungs. “Follow me. Sister Hilaria will come last.”

  Rosvita went second. The rungs were worn smooth by much use. At first, rock scraped against her back, but after six rungs the space opened up and after another seven she set foot on stone. A hand grasped her elbow.

  “Stand aside,” said Diocletia. “We must all stand here together before we go on.”

  One by one the others descended the ladder, rungs creaking beneath their weight, feet scuffing on stone when they reached the bottom. One by one, they edged cautiously past Rosvita into the blackness. It was so profoundly silent that she could distinguish each person’s breathing: Gerwita’s shallow and moist with tears; Jerome’s quick and nervous; Heriburg’s steady and even. Ruoda coughed wetly, echoed by Jehan’s dry cough. The Eagle shifted, rattling the arrows remaining in her quiver. Aurea probed the floor by tapping it with the staff: rap rap rap.

  “Ai!” cursed Fortunatus. “You hit my toe.”

  Everyone chuckled anxiously.

  Above, Hilaria doused the lamp, so even that whisper of light was lost to them. The rungs creaked again; feet scuffed the ground.

  “Are we all here?” It was impossible to mistake Diocletia’s high, raspy voice for the lower tones of her companion. “We are all here,” answered Hilaria.

  It was too dark for Rosvita to see her hand in front of her nose. The earth had swallowed them.

  “Where are we going?” whispered the Eagle from the right.

  “Deeper,” said Hilaria.

  “How can we go deeper?” asked Gerwita in a trembling voice. Her fingers brushed Rosvita’s hand and fixed on it, forefinger and thumb wrapping tightly around the older woman’s wrist as a child might cling to its mother.

  A scraping rumble shuddered through the room. A kiss of dry air, faintly sulfurous, brushed Rosvita’s face.

  “Take hold each to another’s hand,” said Diocletia, “and speak your name, so that we know that we have not left anyone behind.”

  Someone giggled nervously, but Rosvita did not recognize the laugh. After some fumbling, each person spoke, some softly, others with more strength. When Hilaria spoke last of all, Rosvita felt a tug on her hand and she followed Diocletia grimly into such blackness as seemed impossible to fathom or endure. Behind her, Gerwita choked back sobs.

  “Hush, Daughter,” murmured Rosvita, squeezing her hand. “We are in good company. They will not let us come to harm.”

  For an eternity they moved through a darkness that had direction and space only because now and again the flow of air would shift and faint scents or stinks
touch them before fading away: rotten eggs, yeast, the sting of an iron forge, lichen and, strangely, salt water. Mercifully the floor remained level. No one tripped or ran into anything, although they could not see their own feet much less any landmark around them.

  Soon, a steady, labored wheezing drifted into audibility, like a blacksmith’s bellows or a man stricken by lung fever struggling to breathe.

  “So might a sleeping dragon sound,” said Fortunatus out of the darkness, “as some poor deluded treasure hunter crept up on it.”

  Hilaria laughed. “So might it, indeed, had we such a creature hidden in this labyrinth. It is no dragon, Brother, but something stranger and more unexpected.”

  The faintest brush of color limned the walls, shading blackness into a rainbow of subtle grays. The tunnel down which they walked split at a crossroads, branching off in five directions, but Diocletia led them toward the light, toward the whistling wheeze.

  “God save us,” said Gerwita faintly, pressing up behind Rosvita as the tunnel opened into a cavern no larger than a village church, the rock walls marked with odd striations, ribbons of color painted onto the rock.

  Here, the nuns had constructed a crude living quarters. Four pallets lay along one wall, three neatly made with feather bedding and one heaped up untidily. At the single table and bench a thin woman wearing tattered nun’s robes sat fretfully twisting her hands; she did not look up as they entered. Three medium-sized chests, enough to store clothing or a small library of scrolls, sat beneath the table. A dozen assorted pots and amphorae lined the far wall, half lost in shadow, although Rosvita found it remarkable that she could see at all. Two oil lamps rested on a rock shelf in the cavern wall, but neither one was lit.

  “What is making the light?” Hanna murmured.

  “What is making that noise?” asked Fortunatus.

  The untidy pallet stirred, like a beast coming alive. “Have they come safely?”

  “God be praised!” Rosvita rushed heedlessly across the cavern to kneel beside the pallet. “Mother Obligatia! God is merciful! You are still alive.”

  “Sister Rosvita!” A painfully thin hand emerged, shaking, from under a blanket. Rosvita grasped it, careful to hold lightly so that she might not crush those ancient bones. “I had prayed to see you again, but I confess I did not hope that God would bless us so. We are prisoners here, but against what enemy we do not know. Have you come to rescue us?”

  Rosvita laughed bitterly. Obligatia looked so ill that it was impossible to understand how someone so frail could still live except through stubbornness, a sense of duty, or the simple inability to give up hope. Age had worn her skin to a dry fragility; a touch might crumble it to dust.

  The others ventured cautiously into the cavern, spreading out so they wouldn’t feel cramped, glancing around nervously, looking for the source of the light and that constant wheezing whistle. Sister Diocletia leaned down beside the seated woman and spoke to her in an undertone. It was Sister Petra, the librarian and scribe. She looked so changed, as though half of her soul had fled, leaving the rest behind in a broken vessel.

  “Pray tell me what has transpired, Mother Obligatia. Why have you fled the convent? Where are the others?”

  “There are things we never dreamed of that still walk the Earth although they are mercifully hidden to our sight most of the time. Pray that it remain so. We have seen—” That strong voice faltered. Her body was weak, but her gaze remained sharp and solid, fixed on Rosvita. “We have seen terrible things, Sister.”

  “Look!” said Hanna from the other side of the cavern. “It’s the lichen that gives off a glow.”

  “I have gone over the events so many times that I begin to feel as though I have lived through them a hundred times or more. Yet first, Sister Rosvita, tell me. We sent poor Paloma, that good girl, to Darre to seek you. Did she ever find you there?”

  “God have mercy on her. She found us, but she was murdered. We had no way to send word to you. Nor do we know who killed her, or why. We can only guess.”

  The sigh that escaped Mother Obligatia’s lips whispered out like an echo to the rhythmic wheeze that serenaded them: schwoo schwhaa schwoo schwhaa. “I feared as much. I knew she would not abandon us. I pray she rests at peace in the Chamber of Light with Our Mother and Father of Life.” She murmured a prayer, and Rosvita joined her, the words falling easily from her tongue. How many times had she said the prayer over the dead?

  Too many.

  “After that a cleric came. She sought access to our library, saying she came from the schola in Darre to examine old chronicles. We had no reason to distrust her.”

  “You do not think she came to study old chronicles in the library?” Rosvita asked, rearranging the bolster that allowed the old woman to lie somewhat propped up. Obligatia grunted in pain as Rosvita helped her sit up.

  “The good sisters move me frequently,” she said, “yet still I have sores from being bedridden. Yet is it not a just punishment for my blindness?”

  “Your blindness?”

  “She called herself Sister Venia.”

  Heriburg and Fortunatus had crept forward to listen.

  “I recall no such cleric,” said Heriburg.

  “The name seems passing familiar,” said Fortunatus. “There are so many clerics in the palace schola, but I believe a woman who went by that name served the skopos.”

  Obligatia’s lips pulled up, but not in a smile. “I know she did not. She came to kill us. She murdered poor Sister Lucida and used her warm blood to summon a creature that had no earthly form or substance and a stench like iron. This thing she sent to kill us, or to kill me, I suppose, although the only one it killed was Sister Sindula. It consumed Sindula as though it were fire, leaving only her scorched bones. May God have mercy on her.” A frail hand sketched the Circle of Unity in the air. “Yet I believe I was Sister Venia’s target all along. They know who I am, and they will stop at nothing to murder me.”

  “So be it. I have no kind words in which to tell you this, Mother Obligatia. I found out what happened to your daughter.”

  Obligatia shut her eyes. A tear squeezed out from the closed lids, sliding down to dissolve in the whorl of one ear. “My daughter,” she said softly. “Even after so many years, I still grieve for what I lost.”

  How did one speak, in the face of such sorrow, knowing that the next words would only compound sadness? She had to go on. Without the truth being laid bare, they had no hope of winning free.

  “Your daughter is now the skopos. She is called Anne, and she is a mathematici, a powerful sorcerer.”

  “My daughter.” The words brushed the air as might a feather, a tickle, ephemeral. Obligatia was silent for a long time, but she wept no more tears. “Then it is my daughter who wishes to make sure I am dead.”

  Rosvita looked up to see Fortunatus’ dear face close by, pale with concern. “We should have listened to Prince Sanglant. He warned us against Anne and her cabal of sorcerers before we traveled south to Aosta. We did not heed him.”

  “How could we have guessed?” said Fortunatus. “Do not blame yourself, Sister.”

  “Now that they have raised Taillefer’s granddaughter to a position worthy of her eminence, she fears what I know,” said Obligatia. “What I am.”

  “Perhaps,” said Rosvita. “But do not think others elevated Anne. She raised herself. When Holy Mother Clementia died, may she rest at peace in the Chamber of Light, Anne came before the king and queen and displayed her power to them. In this way, she seduced them into supporting her election as skopos. She told him—” She recalled the words as clearly as if they had been spoken an hour ago. That was the price she paid for her prodigious memory: that every painful moment she had ever endured might be relived with awful clarity at unlooked for and unwelcome intervals. “She said, ‘Without my aid, you will have no empire to rule.’”

  “You have a powerful memory, Sister.”

  “I spent two years in the dungeon of the skopos. I had time to meditate,
to pray, and to read back through my book of memory.”

  Yet this time had allowed her to complete, in her mind, her long neglected History. It had allowed her to master the skill that might allow them to escape their current predicament.

  The wheeze sucked in and out, and by now she recognized on her skin the slight pressure in and suction out of air that accompanied the sound, not a breeze but more like the action of a bellows shifting the air. The temperature within this cavern remained cool, yet not as cold as the chill night would be outside. Fearing for their lives, they remained in more comfort than Hugh’s men. The irony made her smile.

  “I had another child,” said Obligatia into their silence. “Another child.” She faltered, her voice trembling as badly as her hands. She groped down the blanket that covered her slight body until she found Rosvita’s hand and clutched it tightly. “What became of Bernard? I saw him—”

  “You saw him?”

  “Nay, nay, I saw him in his child.”

  “You saw his child?”

  Sister Hilaria returned with a bucket of water, which she set down beside the abbess. Kneeling next to the pallet, she dipped a linen cloth into the water and bathed the old woman’s forehead and throat. “You are tiring her, Sister Rosvita,” she scolded.

  “So I must, if we are to survive this. What do you mean, Mother? How could you have seen his child? If this man is the one I think he is, he had no child.”

  Hilaria looked up sharply. “She does not lie.”

  “Nor do I mean to say she does—”

  “Hear me first,” said Mother Obligatia gently. “When the demon came for us, we knew we would all die. It consumed Sister Sindula as easily as we breathe, and nothing we could do would stop it from devouring us as well. But there appeared out of the air a daimone. I do not believe it was an angel. It was a woman with wings of flame, yet one who bore an earthly bow and arrow. It was she who pierced the creature with her dart and banished it from Earth. It was she who warned us to bind the sorcerer who had attacked us. It was she—”