Myca had absolutely no desire to move and Ilias’ arms wrapped around him, Ilias’ legs cupping his own, further discouraged him. “I should…”
“Should what?” Ilias pressed the last of the space from between their bodies. The warmth that he was so fond of had bled away some hours before, but tonight it hardly seemed to matter to him. Tonight there were better things than borrowed heat to make him feel less like a corpse on waking.
“Rise. We have guests. I should at least pretend to care about their welfare.” Inwardly he admitted that seemed a distant concern.
“Nnn. Teutons. Invaders.” Ilias perked up slightly. “Let the servants take care of them. That is why we have servants, after all.”
“We have servants to take care of us, my heart.” Myca began the protracted process of extracting himself from both Ilias’ embrace and the bed-covers.
Promptly, a quiet scratch sounded at the door and two of those servants entered, one bearing a lit lamp and towels, the other carrying a basin and warmed wash-water. They laid their offerings out on the low table, retrieved clothing from the presses for both of their masters, and silently excused themselves, graceful, elegant, and swift in their competence. Myca completed the process of escaping and made use of the water while Ilias continued lounging in the nest of cushions, furs, and mingled earths that constituted their bed. “I am almost jealous.”
“Jealous?” The servants had chosen well. The tunica and hose they brought out were a deep and flattering shade of Tyrian purple bordered in thickly pearled golden embroidery, and the dalmatic itself was of purple and golden silk brocade. He suspected strongly that he would have Lady Rosamund’s undivided attention.
“Yes, jealous. You are going to spend the evening entombed in the convivial company of the Lady Rosamund, while I will be preventing her bodyguards from making floor plans of the haven.” Ilias sat up and stretched, and Myca paused to enjoy the sight. “Perhaps I should demand some form of recompense for my sacrifice.”
“Perhaps you shall receive recompense, with or without a demand.” Myca crossed the room, bent and kissed him quickly. “Have a care, my heart. I know you enjoy taunting them, but I suspect our knightly guests will endure such games poorly, and I mistrust their ability to control themselves in the face of… provocation.”
“You and I are of one mind in this, I assure you,” Ilias replied, wryly. “I think I will wear red. And confine my taunts to the game-table.”
“Good.” Myca turned to go.
“I have also decided what I desire for my reward, since I am to have one.” The laziness in Ilias’ tone was both tease and warning.
Myca paused at the door and glanced back over his shoulder. The cat-smile was still in place, and he was very much reminded of a great golden cat preparing to toy with its dinner. “And what might that be, my teacher?”
“Ah. An excellent choice of words.” An indolent, fangs-baring smile. “A rite, I think. A girl resides in the larder, who I have been keeping for such an occasion. I selected her for her hair, which is a most unusual shade of red, and her age. Her family had one too many daughters.” A pause, then, softly, “The Lady Rosamund is quite a lovely creature, do you not think?”
Myca closed his eyes for a moment, and contemplated the possibilities.
Chapter Four
“I was not, of course, present when my Lord Jürgen raided the monastery and only visited it well after the fact,” Lady Rosamund informed him as they descended the staircase that led to the lowest levels of the monastery, beneath even the storage rooms and the windowless sleeping chambers of the resident Cainites. “From what I saw, there was very little damage though my lord’s men were… a bit less than wholly respectful, I must admit.”
“Conquerors are generally not respectful of the conquered.” Myca replied, offering no reassurance and, in truth, feeling no need to make that offer.
Lady Rosamund was, for a moment, visibly uncomfortable before her diplomatic mask reasserted itself. “I would hardly define my Lord Jürgen as—“
“My Lady Rosamund, with all due respect, your Lord Jürgen has offended against the Obertus Order, the house of my blood, and the honor of myself and my sire. He has seized our territory on the thinnest pretext and murdered our chattels. He breached a treaty that he swore upon his own honor to uphold, for no logical reason that I can perceive beyond the satisfaction of his own relentless ambition.” They came to the bottom of the stair, and he brought out a heavy iron ring of keys, one of which fit the lock of the door they faced. It swung open with a screeching complaint of rusty hinges. “Your Lord Jürgen has much to answer for, but it is not to me that he will answer. My lord sire Symeon will no doubt take a great interest in these events, for it is his honor as the ultimate guarantor of the treaty that Lord Jürgen chooses to defame, and he does not endure such insults kindly.”
“Do you deny, then, that the Obertus Order had aught to do with the knowledge displayed by the kunigaikstis Geidas?” Lady Rosamund asked, with deliberate formality. He had no doubt that her temper was roused.
“That claim is, indeed, denied and, moreover, you have presented no evidence of its truth, Lady Rosamund.” And, so saying, he stepped across the threshold and went about lighting the handful of lamps and candles that provided the illumination for Nikita’s prison.
“Nikita…”
“Nikita is not a member of the Obertus Order. Nor, to my knowledge, does he serve Vladimir Rustovitch. The voivode of voivodes may be no Christian, but he is most assuredly no Heretic, either.” A pause. “And Lord Jürgen was not hunting Heretics when he saw fit to violate the Obertus demesne.”
The room was originally constructed as an adjunct to Myca’s own private study, a storage room for the overflowing contents of his library, perfectly square and lined in bookshelves, several of which were as-yet empty. The small worktable was pushed back against one of them and the heavy wooden casket Nikita traveled in occupied the center of the room. Lady Rosamund stepped inside and looked curiously about; the three servants they had brought with them for protection, appropriate chaperonage, and heavy lifting entered behind her. They were all Obertus brothers, tonsured and simply clad in brown wool robes, and each was quite capable of protecting himself and the Lady Rosamund against most normal dangers. One of them carried an iron pole to open the casket, and the others carried a selection of stakes, most of them carefully carved of rowan, the wood deeply incised with pictorial symbols that Myca himself did not know how to decode. Ilias had made them earlier in the winter during an apparent fit of constructive boredom; Myca sensed the power invested in them, could not define its providence personally, but trusted the wisdom of their creator.
Myca motioned to the monk carrying the prybar. “Open it.”
“My Lord Vykos, I do not think it entirely wise to free the… Archbishop.” Lady Rosamund used the term with considerable distaste.
“I have no intention of freeing him. I wish to look on him and I wish you to confirm that he has, in fact, been delivered and received unharmed.” Myca opened a drawer set in the edge of the table and extracted a half-filled workbook, flipping to a blank page. A handful of decent quills and a tiny blown-glass bottle of ink came out, as well. “Did Lord Jürgen locate any of the Archbishop’s personal effects?”
“Yes.” Lady Rosamund crossed the room and stood, somewhat uneasily, at his side as the monks went to work with the pry-bar. “He was, evidently, carrying a small correspondence chest, and a somewhat larger box with a rather complicated lock. No one managed to puzzle it out, and my lord thought it unwise to break it open. I brought them both in my own baggage.”
“I will, of course, wish to see them.” The iron spikes used to hold the casket’s lid in place began giving with a screech that put his teeth on edge.
“If you wish, we can retrieve them now.” Something in Lady Rosamund’s tone suggested she would be glad to rid herself of those particular artifacts. Myca nodded, and one of the monks hurried out to accomplish that
task. “My Lord Jürgen made certain to review the Archbishop’s documents before we departed. It is his personal opinion, I know, that they will be of little use. Unless a very subtle and well-hidden cipher is involved, most of it was of relatively mundane nature, and much of it was also unfinished.”
“No journal?” Myca inked his quill and began taking notes in his fine, careful hand.
“None that was found. No clothing, either, oddly enough—no vestments of office or anything of the sort.” He cast a glance at her, and found her expression distant with recollection. “It is very odd. He dressed plainly when he passed through Chartres, more plainly than the Bishop St. Lys, at least, but he wore a cassock, and a ring. It is passing strange that he would travel without the symbols of his office.”
“Unless he was making some attempt at secrecy, but, even so, you are correct. The ring, at least, he should have kept in his possession, even if he traveled otherwise incognito.” Myca noted that point. “Could you describe the ring?”
Lady Rosamund shook her head. “I never saw it closely enough to make out details, but it was a heavy gold signet, and large. It took up most of the last knuckle on his ring-finger, and his hands were long.”
“I should hate to imagine what you would notice if you were observing for detail, ambassador.” He made a quick sketch and, as he finished, the last of the nails came free and the casket lid came off. “Come, my lady… let us see.”
The Obertus brothers backed away, crossing themselves and murmuring quietly to each other in Greek. Myca offered Lady Rosamund his hand to clasp, if she wished, an honor she declined, and they stepped closer to view their prisoner. Nikita of Sredetz, Myca reflected distantly, had clearly not gone down without a fight. The Archbishop of Nod was not a tall man, but every inch of his body was rigid with tension, his hands hooked into rending claws, his face twisted in a rictus of emotion. A cascade of dark hair wound beneath his head. The robes he “wore” were wholly organic, the product of his own blood, flesh, and bone, and Myca recognized the work of a master flesh-sculptor in the elegant functionality of their lines despite the rents and tears of the violence done him. “My Lady Rosamund, is this the same man you saw in Chartres?”
“It appears so, yes. But appearances, as we both know well, can be deceptive.” She hesitated fractionally, then drew closer, her expression becoming somewhat abstracted as she studied him closely. “I thought he might be wearing the ring, if it was not among his possessions, though my lord made no mention of it.”
Myca let his own vision expand and refine, examining Nikita’s physical shell closely, the shape of the bones in his face and his hands, the tension of the skin across his cheeks, brow, and throat. “He has been shaped but… the markings are very fine, almost invisible. I do not think he alters his form very often, or his flesh would show more obvious signs. Perhaps he chooses not to confuse his congregation on a nightly basis.”
“Perhaps.” The ambassador echoed. “My Lord Vykos, if there is nothing more you desire of me I fear I am finding this quite unsettling.”
“No, my lady, I have no further questions of you, for now.” He caught her hand and kissed it, properly, and bowed low to her, as well. “Brother Milos and Brother Antol will escort you to the oriel.”
She curtseyed deeply, and departed, one monk leading and one monk following, with the perfect obedience to which they had been bred. Myca himself remained, alone and thoughtful, contemplating the man lying helpless before him. He did not, in fact, have any intention whatsoever of setting Nikita free, despite Lady Rosamund’s fears to the contrary. Honoring the ties of blood kinship was a wonderful idea in theory but, in practice, it was substantially more convenient simply to keep the man as he was until some decision was made about what to do with him. Word had come to him from nearly all points west and east where he had colleagues and correspondents that the Cainite Heresy had fallen on hard times since the final destruction of Narses and Nikita’s assumption of the Archbishopric of Nod. Heretical temples looted and burnt, heretical congregations put to the sword, heretical officials stumbling fatally in their efforts to win the hearts and minds of their fellow Cainites. The Archbishop of Nod himself apparently felt the situation dire enough to risk traveling from one end of Europe to the other in order to show his support for his struggling faith.
“When did you leave Sredetz, Nikita?” Myca murmured aloud, noting the question in his book, beneath a swiftly detailed sketch of the man’s twisted face. “What induced you to leave the very bosom of your little nest of serpents? What is to be gained from keeping you safe?”
He refined his vision still further, pushing his sight past the bounds of the purely physical, until the concrete objects of the room became flat and lifeless, and only the torpid body of Nikita retained any reality, that reality defined by his soul. He was deeply withdrawn into himself, the essence of his being concentrated into a tiny, egg-shaped pool of radiance, shining faintly from deep within. His halo was so pale and weak, so devoid of emotion, that Myca nearly thought he imagined its existence. He absently laid aside his notebook and came closer, gaze drifting from Nikita’s contorted face down the length of his body—and it was real. The Archbishop’s halo was there, just impossibly faint, and deeply scarred in black. Relief welled up inside him, for some reason he could not adequately name, even to himself and, almost involuntarily, entirely impulsively, he rested his hand on the Archbishop of Nod’s pale brow.
Nikita’s hair was soft beneath his fingertips and the skin beneath his palm had the cool dryness of one who had spent freely of his strength without a chance to replenish himself. As Myca stood contemplating this, something leapt between them, a spark, a shock that sent itself all the way up his arm, and, in the instant, he knew precisely what he should do. He ran his hand over Nikita’s face and throat, across his chest and the length of his body to his pale, unclad feet. When he finished, a shudder passed through him, nearly as strong as the sudden burst of understanding that possessed him, and he jerked his hand away, startled and disturbed. His grip on his sight shattered and his vision dissolved into normal realms of sensory perception.
Nikita’s face, when he looked, was still and peaceful, emptied of its welter of emotions, and his body was eased of its painful tension, his hands lying open and empty at his sides. He looked as though he slept nestled in the earth of his own grave, beyond pain or fear, wholly at rest in body and spirit. Myca slowly backed away, his fingers working into his palms, feeling, for a moment, as though his hands belonged to someone else, the blood still stirring in his veins with the echo of what had passed between them. A silent communion.
He turned, and fled.
The oriel room was not really an oriel, but the residents of the monastery haven called it that for the touch of the exotic the term lent. It was not part of a tower, nor did it extend anywhere above ground. It was, however, perfectly round and the product of the architectural genius of the engineer-monk who designed the private dining chamber, and who had a passion for oddly shaped rooms. It consisted of two stories, the main floor and an upper gallery that connected to both the guest chambers and the private suites of the monastery’s Cainite residents by means of a single corridor. The main floor was lit by lamps burning gently perfumed oil and warmed by strategically placed braziers, and its walls were draped in panels of heavy fabric that fell from the edge of the deeply vaulted roof to the floor. A gaming table and chairs occupied the center of the room, while large, flat floor pillows occupied the periphery for spectators and idle conversation. The second floor gallery doubled as a stage for the monastery’s resident musicians.
Nicolaus, Ilias knew, would be completely useless for any task more arduous than lounging about and looking pretty given his exertions of the previous evening, and so that was the task he was given. Bathed and oiled, painted and perfumed, clad in red silk and gold, he was the very picture of beautiful indolence among the cushions of the musicians’ loft where he sat, coaxing a sweet tune from a long wooden flute. His
lover, fair silver Sergiusz, sat with him, a harp imported from the west in his lap, teasing accompaniment from its strings. They were both, Ilias admitted to himself, pale from the evening before but musical entertainment was well within their capabilities, and they rose skillfully to the challenge. He was quite pleased with both of them, and showed his pleasure by granting them both an extra taste of him. It put the bloom back in their cheeks. The oriel itself was constantly attended by four of the comeliest youths in the monastery’s service, two male and two female, all of whom had also been freshly bathed and scented, were flawless in their comportment and excellent in their service, and under strict orders to give the masters’ guests anything they required.
It was obvious from the start of the evening that Sir Gilbrecht had no particular interest in actually enjoying any of the many pleasures—or, for that matter, basically pleasant services—available to him. He lingered in the oriel only long enough to play a single round of draughts with Sir Landric, eye the servants with naked distaste, and request, somewhat brusquely, that he be permitted to speak with his mortal lieutenant. Ilias granted that request, but required a brace of Obertus brothers to accompany him at all times, a stipulation that irritated the man’s already choleric temperament even further. Ilias failed to care, having little love of Teutons in general and even less for most of the minions of the Black Cross. Sir Landric, at his superior’s gesture, remained behind and proved to be much more congenial company out from under the eye of Sir Gilbrecht, curious and talkative, while discussing nothing of substance. Ilias returned that favor, thinking it all to the best. They played two quick games of draughts, Sir Landric besting him soundly both times, and Ilias had just suggested backgammon when Lady Rosamund entered in the company of her Obertus escorts.
Dark Ages Clan Novel Tzimisce: Book 13 of the Dark Ages Clan Novel Saga Page 4
