Camber the Heretic

by Katherine Kurtz

  “But many do,” Evaine replied. “And what is more important, at least four of the five regents do. With the young king guided by such men as Murdoch and Rhun and that despicable Bishop Hubert for the next two years, who is to say what the official policy on Deryni will be in the future? Remember, when Imre was toppled, it was a Deryni regime which fell with him. Deryni have been tolerated in the new government only because Cinhil personally felt an attachment to such particular Deryni as gave him comfort and support. The regents have no such attachments, and long memories for what Deryni did to their kin during the Interregnum.”

  “Archbishop Jaffray still sits on the regency council, my lady, and he is Deryni,” Revan said.

  “Aye, but it is not by choice of the regents. Jaffray is tolerated, for the present, because he must be. It is the undeniable right of the Archbishop of Valoret and Primate of Gwynedd to sit on the council of Gwynedd, whether it be a regular council or a regency. But Jaffray could very easily meet with a convenient accident, and be replaced, too. And other Deryni, such as Bishop Cullen and Earl Jebediah and Rhys himself, have already lost their appointments at Court. By coronation, we must all be gone from Valoret. We fear that this may be just the beginning, that lost appointments may be only the prelude to lost lives. What if there is another Nyford?”

  Revan frowned, nodding slowly. “I see what you’re saying.” He paused. “But, what does all of this have to do with taking away Deryni powers? It seems to me that a Deryni would want even more power, to protect himself, if you truly fear that the regents will move against all Deryni.”

  “So one would think,” Evaine admitted, both pleased and heartsick that Revan should understand so well. “But we Deryni have limitations, too, you know. And when it comes to a contest between Deryni powers and a dozen swords, or arrows, or spears—well, magic takes time, and force breeds force. It isn’t always a very good defense.”

  “Is lack of magic a good defense, then?” Revan asked, almost to himself.

  “Well, no—not if it’s known and can be proved that the person is a Deryni. However, I ask you to consider this: if even another Deryni could not discover whether a person is or is not Deryni and if a Deryni himself cannot remember that he once was Deryni, then perhaps lack of magic would be a good defense.”

  While Revan pondered that, Evaine sat down again and willed her racing heart to slow. After a few moments, Revan raised his head and stared out across the meadow. Close by the oak grove which lay at the other side, they could see Rhys and his daughter leading their mounts, young Tieg now sitting proudly alone in his father’s deep saddle. Quickly Revan looked away, but not before Evaine realized that he suspected, in some as yet inarticulated way, that she was about to ask him to give up the children.

  “My lady, you haven’t yet said how this affects me or the children.”

  She sighed. “Aidan should be safe enough with his cousins for the present. Rhysel and Tieg would stay here, for the time being—we’d have to engage another tutor—but arrangements are being made for them to go to a Michaeline establishment with my brother, if that becomes necessary.”

  “I see.”

  “For yourself, we have an idea how you might aid us in using Rhys’s discovery to protect at least some of our people. You would become a prophet, in the style of John the Baptist, and a follower of Saint Willim. We would make it appear that you were removing the powers of Deryni, neutralizing their magic to save them from the evil against which the Willimites preach—though, in fact, you would be working with a Healer, who would be blocking those powers. You would do this to as many nonessential Deryni as possible, especially women and children, who are not likely to be well known in their own rights. Such folk could relocate in places of safety and make new lives, disassociated from the stigma of being Deryni, until times were safer and they could be restored.”

  Revan was shaking his head by the time she finished.

  “It’s incredible! It could never work! I’ve been in the service of Deryni all my life. Who would believe it? Who would believe me?”

  “We’ve thought of a way. Would you like me to tell you?”

  By the time she had outlined further details of their plan, Revan’s disbelief had been transformed to awed discipleship.

  “I think it could work, my lady,” he said, hardly daring to speak aloud. “And—you really think that I could do it?”

  “I do.”

  Revan swallowed noisily, his throat working with emotion, then awkwardly slipped to his knees at her feet, took her hand, and pressed it to his lips in homage.

  “Then, I am your man, my lady, as I have always been,” he whispered.

  “Thank you, Revan,” she breathed, touching her free hand lightly to his head and reaching with her mind. “Now, come and sit beside me again, and we shall talk further. We have many preparations to make.”

  His eyes took on a glassy look as he rose and moved back onto the bench, still clasping her hand.

  “That’s right,” she murmured. “Relax and let me hold your mind, as we have done before. And for your own safety, remember nothing consciously of what we shall discuss unless you are with Rhys or me.”

  Later that evening, Evaine and Rhys returned to Valoret, well pleased with what had been started at Sheele that afternoon with Revan, instrument of their plan, though their hearts ached for Revan the man. Their progress was duly reported to the Camberian Council, and further plans were set in motion as the days wheeled on.

  And at Sheele, young Revan almost overnight found himself violently enamored of a young woman of the village named Finella, who mysteriously sickened within weeks of when Revan first met her, and whose health steadily declined, even under the ministrations of Rhys, who came at Revan’s urgent call.

  Rhys tended the young woman diligently, aided by his wife and overseen anxiously by Revan, who had stated his intention to marry the girl at Pentecost; but despite all that Rhys could do, his efforts wrought little change in Finella. And on the day when poor Finella’s coffin was lowered into the ground—filled with rocks, the girl having been spirited away the night before with new memories and enough money to make a start in another village—something seemed to snap in Revan’s mind.

  “You could have saved her!” Revan screamed, in front of several dozen guests who had gathered at Sheele with Rhys and Evaine to celebrate the Feast of Easter. “You let her die, you Deryni monster! You could have saved her, but you let her die! You killed her!”

  Ripping off the badge of his service to the household of Rhys Thuryn, he trampled it on the floor at his master’s feet and ran weeping from the hall. Evaine tried lamely to explain to her dinner guests of mixed humans and Deryni that it had not been at all as Revan claimed; that he had become increasingly deranged as Finella’s illness progressed, despite Rhys’s efforts to effect a cure of either the girl or Revan himself—but the mood was ruined, and so was dinner. What had started out as a festive celebration ended very early, almost as the last course was removed from the table.

  By the following week, news of the incident had spread through all the Court—for Evaine had made certain to include among her Easter guests certain minor personages of the Court who could be counted upon to repeat what they had seen and heard. By Lady Day, the story had been embellished to the point that Rhys was now being rumored to have deliberately let Revan’s young lady die, perhaps for motives of jealousy. Rhys had feared that Revan would leave his service, if he married Finella and started a family of his own. No, Rhys had himself wanted Finella, but had been spurned by the girl in favor of Revan—and that was why Rhys had let her die. After all, was Rhys not Deryni, for all that he was a Healer? Had not Bishop Hubert preached in a sermon of only a few weeks ago that Deryni were treacherous, that eventually, even the truest-seeming of them would revert to type, like Imre?

  As the coronation approached, word began to trickle in of Revan. By mid-May, it was learned that he had surfaced with a band of neo-Willimite brethren in the hills east
of Valoret. Rumor had it that he was being viewed by his new colleagues as something of a madman; that he spent a great deal of time alone on a mountaintop conversing with a large bluestone boulder; that he ate but sparingly and spoke hardly at all, save in his meditations. No one seemed to have any doubt that Revan’s defection was anything other than the action of a man driven to dementia by the persecution of his Deryni masters.

  Bishop Hubert, on hearing the news, preached a sermon in the chapel royal on the conversion of Saul on the road to Damascus, and hinted very strongly that humans who still served Deryni should pray for a conversion such as Paul’s.

  And while Revan was establishing his cover with the Willimites, readying himself to become a new voice in the wilderness, his temporarily disremembered allies were continuing to develop the Deryni facets of this jewel of race salvation. To that end, Jaffray pursued the contacts for arranging the required meeting of Rhys with Emrys and Queron.

  For the site of their meeting, he chose Saint Neot’s, the Gabrilite monastery and school where Dom Emrys ruled as Abbot, famed for uncounted generations as a center for Deryni learning and Healer training. Since Saint Neot’s was part of the old ecclesiastical Portal network established by the Deryni clergy centuries before, it was easily accessible not only to Rhys and Camber, who would be coming from Grecotha, but to Jaffray, who must make the initial arrangements with Emrys and, through Emrys, with Queron. Most of the cathedrals and major religious houses with present or former Deryni connections had at least one Transfer Portal on the premises, even if their current communities did not always know of their existence or whereabouts.

  Jaffray took advantage of that network, winking across the Portal link from his own chapel at Valoret to the semi-public Portal which any Deryni clergyman might use, in the sacristy of Saint Neot’s abbey church, at an hour when he had a fair expectation of finding Emrys alone at meditations. The Gabrilites kept perpetual vigil before their famous shrine of Saint Gabriel and the Lady, in a rear chapel of the abbey church which was accessible to outside visitors as well as the brethren and students. Emrys had kept the midnight vigil as the week turned to the Sabbath for as long as Jaffray had known him, and he had not changed his routine in the intervening years, as Jaffray discovered.

  Their meeting was warm, if brief. Finding Emrys before the Lady’s shrine as he had hoped, Jaffray gave his old colleague fair greeting and then took several minutes to renew their friendship in mindlink before turning to the reason for his visit. The information passed was sparse, but Jaffray did reveal that it was important council business which Rhys felt need to bring to Emrys and Queron. He left it to Emrys to infer that the meeting might involve Healer’s business as well as that of the council.

  Emrys was given the responsibility for ensuring Queron’s participation in the meeting, for Jaffray feared that the visit of a Deryni Primate of Gwynedd to the principal shrine of a Deryni saint might raise unwelcome questions; Jaffray was already walking a precarious enough balance as the only Deryni member of the regency council, without giving the regents more cause for suspicion. Besides, Jaffray preferred not to reveal his Camberian Council connections to Queron yet.

  Several weeks were therefore required to arrange the actual meeting at Saint Neot’s, since there was no Portal at Dolban and ordinary messengers must be sent back and forth with Emrys’s written words. Queron was not particularly cooperative in the beginning, either, requiring several exchanges before he could be induced to come only on the strength of what Emrys had leave to tell him. Though he eventually agreed and arrived on the appointed day, he was suspicious and a little nervous that Alister Cullen, who was not a Healer, would also be there. Nor could Emrys reassure him on that point, for even Emrys did not know why Rhys wished to bring a non-Healer to the meeting; and he could not tell Queron of Alister’s Camberian Council connection. The abbot could speculate, but he knew little for certain. Jaffray had not disclosed the reason for Alister’s inclusion, and Emrys had not asked.

  The appointed day dawned brisk but clear in Grecotha, a brilliant mid-April morning marked by fresh-scoured skies and the heady perfume of a dozen different flowers in Camber’s episcopal gardens. After Mass and a light breakfast, he and Rhys climbed the one hundred twenty-seven steps of Queen Sinead’s Watch in silence. Rhys was as apprehensive as Camber had ever seen him at the prospect of presuming to instruct Emrys, his former master at Saint Neot’s, and the almost legendary Queron Kinevan.

  Both men squinted against the brightness as they emerged in the sunlight of the open rampart walk, pausing to let their eyes adjust again when they had ducked under the timbered roof of the tower chamber. Rhys fidgeted uneasily in the doorway, framed green-mantled against the April sky, as Camber knelt to trace out the perimeter of one of the floor tiles in the northeast corner.

  “I wish I knew how you keep track of that,” Rhys said, making nervous small talk as Camber stood and adjusted the white sash binding the waist of his bishop’s cassock. “Oh, I know the theory, but I can’t help being suspicious of a Portal that moves—and that I can’t feel.”

  Chuckling a little to put Rhys at his ease, Camber stepped onto the square he had traced and held out a hand for Rhys to join him.

  “Well, I can feel it—and that’s what matters this morning, isn’t it? I know what your problem is, though. You just don’t like the idea of having to relinquish control to use it.” He smiled as he laid his hands on the younger man’s shoulders and drew him onto the square in front of him. “You Healers are all alike. You always want to run things.”

  “Now, that’s a perverse thing to say!” Rhys replied, with a hearty indignation which gave lie to the pulse racing wildly in his throat. “On the other hand,” he added with a deep breath, “it’s occasionally good to let someone else take over.” He turned to look at Camber squarely, took another deep breath and let it out with a sigh.

  “Listen, this is going to be very difficult, and not just for me,” he said softly. “You’re not a Healer, and they’re the best. Are you sure you want to risk—”

  Camber shook his head. “No, I’m not sure at all. But I won’t send you into that one alone, Rhys. I’ll take the risk. It won’t be the first time.”

  “No, it won’t.”

  “Then, stop worrying. They’re not your teachers anymore. You know something that they don’t know how to do, no matter how good they are at anything else. Remember that.”

  “I’ll try.”

  With a smile, Camber laid his arm around the Healer’s shoulder once more and took a deep, relaxing breath, let it out, gathering the energies close about the two of them as he felt Rhys slipping into familiar rapport to be carried through. Visualizing their destination, he made the proper mental shift and warped the energies just—so.

  Instantly they were standing almost in darkness before a small but incredibly detailed vesting altar of ivory, the shadows relieved only by the flicker of a lone vigil light on the wall above. As they turned, Emrys and then Queron stepped from the shadows.

  “Ah, Dom Emrys, Dom Queron,” Camber murmured, taking his cue from Emrys’s calm expression and inclining his head slightly in greeting.

  “Welcome to Saint Neot’s, Your Grace,” Emrys said softly, cool hand taking Camber’s to kiss the bishop’s amethyst. “And, Lord Rhys, I am pleased to see you again, after so many years. I hear that you have done well in the world.”

  The old Healer appeared fragile and almost ghostlike in the dim light, skinny Gabrilite braid all but invisible against the bright white of his robes. The eyes, too, were almost colorless, glinting like shards of sunset frost in the thin, ascetic face. Only the Healer’s badge on the left side of his chest interrupted the stark play of white on white.

  Queron, as the last time Camber had seen him, wore the grey habit of the Servants of Saint Camber, though he had donned a Healer’s mantle for the occasion, of a more subdued green than the one Rhys wore. As Rhys exchanged nervous bows with the two men, Camber suddenly realized that Q
ueron looked almost as tense as Rhys; this was going to be far from easy for any of them. He was glad for the calming refuge of Emrys’s mental presence as the old man smiled gently and beckoned them toward the sacristy door.

  “Come, my lords. I’ve provided a warded and secure room for our discussion,” he said, unlatching the door and pushing it back with an almost transparent hand. “And since I believe Bishop Cullen has not been to Saint Neot’s before, I thought we might guide him through a short tour of the abbey before settling down to work. Is something wrong, Rhys?” he finished, turning to cock his head at the obviously dismayed Rhys.

  “Well, it’s just that we have important business to dis—”

  “And you think that you are in a suitable frame of mind to do so?” Emrys returned, brushing one of Rhys’s hands with a gentle feathertouch. “You’re tied in knots, son. Where is the discipline I taught you? Granted, it has been many years, but you cannot have forgotten everything you learned. By your reputation alone, I know better than that.”

  Suitably chastened, and more than a little embarrassed to have been corrected in front of Queron, Rhys managed to murmur an appropriate apology. Camber, sympathetic but not too sympathetic, merely allowed himself a small, gruff Alister smile as he turned his attention on the abbot. He had noted, during Rhys’s outburst, that Queron had used the time to make a concerted effort to reduce his own uneasiness. Queron, too, was feeling the pressure of the unknown. Perhaps he was not as formidable an opponent as they had feared.

  “Thank you for saying that, Dom Emrys,” Camber said with a dry chuckle. “I’ve been trying to get him to relax since he came to me last night—though with little more success than you seem to have had with Dom Queron.”

  He ignored the sharp look which the other Healer gave him and went blithely on, as if he had noticed nothing.

  “As you are aware, I have little knowledge of Healer’s training, though I have heard much about it from Rhys. I should be quite interested in seeing a little of it while I am here. In fact, should your brethren think that the true reason for my visit, so much the better.”