The Heretic Kings: Book Two of The Monarchies of God

by Paul Kearney

  Behind the trio of desperate sailors the soldiers fought on with rammers and gunstocks and knives. But they had too many assailants. One by one they were enveloped, brought down and torn to pieces. The road was littered with gold coins and the fragments of bodies puddled with gore and entrails. Murad, Mensurado and a couple of others made a last effort, a combined charge. Hawkwood risked a glance back at them, but he could only see a crowd of monsters huddled together as if feeding at the same trough. They broke apart as Murad, his shirt torn from his back and his skin in strips, burst through them, wielding a shard of an arquebus’s wheel-lock. The nobleman sprinted away at unbelievable speed, a dozen shifters in pursuit, and disappeared into the night.

  Hawkwood’s group shuffled onwards, turning and spinning to keep their assailants at bay with lunges of their dirks. The wall of the volcano towered above them now and they were surrounded by trees and vegetation; they had left the main part of the city. The cleft in the crater wall could be seen as a wedge of stars ahead.

  Mihal was too slow. As his arm snaked out to stab at a shifter it caught his wrist. He was yanked off into a scrum of snarling shadows and could not even scream before they had finished him. One knocked Masudi down from behind. Bardolin went sprawling and Hawkwood staggered, his dagger flying out of his hand.

  He scrabbled off on hands and knees into the bushes, rolling and shoving himself forward into the vegetation like a fox intent on going to earth. Then he lay, utterly spent, the jungle teeming with howls, leaves brushing his face. He tried to summon a prayer, a last thought, something coherent out of the terror which washed across his brain, but his mind was blank. He lay there as dumb and senseless as a cornered animal, waiting for death to come ravening out of the darkness.

  It came. He heard the bushes crackling, and there was a sensation of heat beside him, the impression of a hulking presence.

  Nothing happened.

  He opened his eyes, his heartbeat a red light that went on and off in his head, soughing through his throat like the ebb and flow of an unquiet sea. And he saw the yellow eyes of the beast that lay beside him, its breath stirring his sweat-soaked forelock.

  “Sweet God, get it over with,” he croaked, fear swamping him, robbing him of any last defiance.

  The beast, an enormous werewolf, chuckled.

  The sound was human, rational despite its author.

  “Would I harm you, Captain, the navigator, the steerer of ships? I think not. I think not.”

  It was gone. The night was silent, the utter silence of the unquiet forest. Looking up, Hawkwood could see the stars shining in between the limbs of the trees.

  He waited for the beast to return and finish him, but it did not. The night had become as peaceful as if the carnage had been imagined, a fever dream vivid on waking. He sat up cautiously, heard a groan nearby and struggled drunkenly to his feet.

  Nothing was working. His mind was immobilized in shock, barely able to instruct the body which harboured it. He staggered out on to the roadway and the first thing he saw was the mocking sight of Masudi’s head planted on the paving like a fallen fruit, dark and shining.

  Hawkwood gagged and threw up a thin soup of scalding bile. Other things lay on the road, but he did not care to look at them. He heard the groan again and tottered over to its source.

  Bardolin, moving feebly in a pool of Masudi’s blood.

  Hawkwood bent down to the mage and slapped the old man’s face, hard. As if he were somehow to blame for the night’s slaughter.

  Bardolin opened his eyes.

  “Captain.”

  Hawkwood could not speak, and he was shaking as though bitterly cold. He tried to help Bardolin up and slipped in the slick blood so that they were both lying in it like twins spat forth from some ruptured womb.

  They lay there. Hawkwood felt that he had somehow lived through the end of the world. He could not be alive; he was in some manner of subtle hell.

  Bardolin sat up rubbing his face, then fell back again. It took some minutes before finally they were both on their feet, looking like two intoxicated revellers who had splashed through a slaughterhouse. Bardolin saw Masudi’s severed head and gaped.

  “What is happening?”

  But still Hawkwood could not speak. He dragged Bardolin away from the scene of the fighting, up the roadway to where the confining wall of the volcano reared up into the night cleft by its wedge of stars.

  A S he walked, Hawkwood’s strength returned and he was able to support the rubber-legged Bardolin. The mage was totally bewildered and did not seem to know where he was. He rambled on about pyramids and sea crossings and had philosophical arguments with himself about the Dweomer, reiterating its Seven Disciplines again and again until Hawkwood paused and shook him violently. That quietened him, but he seemed no less confused.

  They reached the gorge which led outside the confining circle of the volcano’s crater. In the darkness it was like the entrance to a primitive tomb, a megalithic burial place. It was unguarded, deserted. In fact, the entire circle of the city was dead and lightless, as though everything they had seen there had been delusion, the hallucinations of tired minds.

  The pair stumbled through the cleft like sleepwalkers, tripping and rebounding off stone. They did not speak to one another, not even when they had finally come through to the other side and found themselves outside the hollow cone of Undabane with the barren slopes of the volcano stretching away below them in the moonlight, and beyond them the midnight sea of the jungle.

  A shade rose out of the rocks before them and crunched through the tufa and ash until it was close enough to touch.

  Murad.

  Raw flesh glimmered over his naked torso, and sluggish blood welled from his wounds, black as tar. He was half bald where something had ripped his scalp from forehead to ear.

  “Murad?” Hawkwood managed to ask. He could not believe that this human flotsam was the man he knew and detested.

  “The very same. So they let you loose, did they? The mariner and the mage.”

  “We escaped,” Hawkwood said, but knew that was a lie as the words passed his lips. The three of them stood as if they had not a care in the world, as if there were not a kingdom of monsters within the hollow mountain thirsting after their blood.

  “They let us go,” Murad said, his sneer still intact at least. “Or you, at any rate. Me I’m not so sure about. I may merely have been fortunate. How is the mage, anyway?”

  “Alive.”

  “Alive.” Suddenly Murad sagged. He had to squat down on his knees. “They killed them all,” he whispered, “every last one. And such gold! Such . . . blood.”

  Hawkwood dragged him upright. “Come. We can’t stay here. We’ve a long road ahead of us.”

  “We’re walking dead men, Captain.”

  “No—we’re alive. We were meant to stay alive, I believe, and at some point I want to find out why. Now take Bardolin’s other arm. Take it, Murad.”

  The nobleman did as he was told. Together, the three of them stumbled down the slopes of the mountain, the ash burning in their wounds like salt.

  By the time the dawn came lightening the sky they were almost at its foot, and the unchanging jungle whooped and wailed with weary familiarity before them. They plunged into it once more, becoming lost to the world of the dreaming trees, the shadowed twilight of the forest.

  The hidden beast watched them as they disappeared, three wrecked pilgrims pursuing some cracked vision known only to themselves. Then it rose up out of its hiding place and followed them, as silent as a breath of air.

  PART THREE

  THE WARS OF THE FAITH

  . . . Whensoever he made any ostyng, or inroad, into the enemies Countries, he killed manne, woman and child, and spoiled, wasted and burned, by the grounde, all that he might; leaving nothing of the enemies in saffetie, which he could possible waste or consume . . .

  Chronicle of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, 1570

  SEVENTEEN

  C HARIBON was a pris
oner of winter.

  The heavy snows had come at last, in a series of blizzards which roared down out of the heights of the Cimbric Mountains and engulfed the monastery-city in a storm of white. On the Narian Hills the snow drifted fathoms deep, burying roads and villages, isolating whole towns. The fishing boats which normally plied the Sea of Tor had been beached long since, and the margins of the sea itself were frozen for half a league from the shore, the ice thick enough to bear a marching army.

  In Charibon a small army of labourers fought to keep the cloisters clear of snow. They were assisted by hundreds of novices who shovelled and dug until they were pink-cheeked and steaming, and yet had the energy for snowball fights and skating and other horseplay afterwards. Unlike the poor folk of the surrounding countryside, they did not have to worry whether they would have enough food to see them through the winter. It was one of the bonuses of the religious life, at least as Charibon’s clerics lived it.

  The monastery-city went about its business regardless of the weather, its rituals as changeless and predictable as the seasons themselves. In the scriptoria and refectories the fires were lit, fed with the wood which had been chopped and piled through the summer and autumn. Salted and smoked meat made more of an appearance at table, as did the contents of the vast root cellars. Enterprising ice fishermen hacked holes in the frozen sea to provide the Pontiff and Vicar-General’s tables with fresh fish every now and again, but in the main Charibon was like a hibernating bear, living off what it had stored away throughout the preceding months and grumbling softly in its sleep. Except for the odd Pontifical courier determined (or well-paid) enough to brave the drifts and the blizzards, the city was cut off from the rest of Normannia, and would remain so for several weeks until the temperature dropped further and hardened the snow, making it into a crackling white highway for mule-drawn sledges.

  The wolves came down out of the mountains, as they always did, and at night their melancholy moans could be heard echoing about the cathedral and the cloisters. In the worst of the weather they would sometimes even prowl the streets of Charibon itself, making it dangerous to walk them alone at night, and contingents of the Almarkan troops which garrisoned Charibon would periodically patrol the city to clear the beasts from its thoroughfares.

  I T was after Compline. Vespers had been sung two hours before, the monks had consumed their evening meal and most of them were in their cells preparing for bed. Charibon was settling down for the long midwinter night, and a bitter wind was hurling flurries of snow down from the Cimbrics, drowning out the howls of the wolves. The streets of the city were deserted and even the cathedral Justiciars were preparing for bed, having trimmed the votive lamps and shut the great doors of Charibon’s main place of worship.

  Albrec’s door was rapped softly and he opened it, shivering in the cold wind which he admitted.

  “Ready, Albrec?” Avila stood there, muffled in hood and scarf.

  “No one saw you leave?”

  “The whole dormitory have their heads under their blankets. It’s a bitter night.”

  “You brought a lamp? We’ll need two.”

  “A good one. It won’t be missed until Matins. Are you sure you want to go through with this?”

  “Yes. Are you?”

  Avila sighed. “No, but I’m in it up to my neck now. And besides, curiosity is a terrible thing to live with, like an itch which cannot be scratched.”

  “Here’s hoping we can scratch your itch tonight, Avila. Here, take this.” The little monk handed his Inceptine friend something hard and angular and heavy.

  “A mattock! Where did you pilfer this from?”

  “Call it a loan, for the greater glory of God. I got it from the gardens. Come—it’s time we were on our way.”

  The pair of them left Albrec’s cell and whispered along the wide corridors of the chapter-house where Albrec slept. Due to his position of Assistant Librarian, he had a cell to himself whereas Avila slept in a dormitory with a dozen other junior Inceptine clerics, for he had laid aside his novice’s hood only three years before.

  They crossed an arctic courtyard, their habits billowing in the biting wind. Scant minutes later, they found themselves outside the tall double doors of the Library of Saint Garaso. But Albrec led his friend around the side of the rime-white building, kicking his frozen, sandalled feet through piled snow and halting at a half-buried postern door. He poked his key into the hole and twisted it with a snap, then pushed the door open.

  “More discreet here,” he grunted, for the hinges were stiff. “No one will see us come and go.”

  But Avila was staring at the snowy ground about them. “Blast it, Albrec, what about our tracks? We’ve left a trail for the world to see.”

  “It can’t be helped. With luck they’ll be snowed over by morning. Come on, Avila.”

  Shaking his head the tall Inceptine followed his diminutive friend into the musty, old-smelling darkness of the library. Albrec locked the door behind them and they stood silent for a second, alarmed by the quiet of massive masonry and waiting books, the wind a mere groaning in the rafters.

  Avila struck a light and their shadows leaped at them from the walls as the lamp caught. They threw back their hoods and shook snow from their shoulders.

  “We are alone,” Albrec said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I know this place, winter and summer. I can feel when the library is empty—or as empty as it ever becomes, with its memories.”

  “Don’t talk like that, Albrec. I’m as jumpy as a springtime hare already.”

  “Let’s go then, and stay close. And don’t touch anything.”

  “All right, all right. Lead on, master librarian.”

  They navigated the many rooms and halls and corridors of the library in silence, tall cases of books and scrolls looming over them like walls. Then they began to descend, taking to narrow staircases which to Avila seemed to have been built into the very walls of the building. Finally they hauled up a trapdoor of iron-bound wood which had been concealed by a mat of threadbare hessian. Steep steps going down into uttermost dark. The catacombs.

  They started down, the weight and bulk of the library hanging over and around them like a cloud. The fact that it was a winter-dark and wolf-haunted night outside should have made no difference to the darkness in here, but somehow it did. A sense of isolation stole over the pair as they stumbled through the accumulated rubbish in the catacombs and coughed at the dust they raised. It was as if they were two explorers who had somehow chanced upon the ruins of a dead city, and were creeping through its bowels like maggots in the belly of a corpse.

  “Which wall is the north one?” Avila asked.

  “The one to your left. It’s damper than the others. Keep to the sides and don’t trip up.”

  They felt their way along the walls, lifting the lamp to peer at the stonework. Chiselled granite, the very gutrock of the mountains hewn and sculpted as though it were clay.

  “The Fimbrians must have been twenty years carving out this place,” Avila breathed. “Solid stone, and never a trace of mortar.”

  “They were a strange people, the builders of empire,” Albrec said. “They seemed to feel the need to leave a mark on the world. Wherever they went, they built to last. Half the public buildings of the Five Kingdoms date from the Fimbrian Hegemony, and no one has ever built on the same scale since. Old Gambio reckons it was pride brought the empire down as much as anything else. God humbled them because they thought they could order the world as they saw fit.”

  “And so they did, for three centuries or so,” Avila said dryly.

  “Hush, Avila. Here we are.” Albrec ranged the lamp about the wall where there were mortared blocks instead of the solid stone of the rest of the place. The light showed the crevice in which Albrec’s precious document had been discovered.

  “Light the other lamp,” the little Antillian said, and he reached into the crevice with a lack of hesitation which made Avila shudder. There might be
anything in that hole.

  “There’s a room on the other side of this, no doubt about it. A substantial space, at any rate.”

  Avila found a staved-in cask amid the wreckage and rubbish. He set it on its end and placed the two lamps upon it. “What now? The mattock?”

  “Yes. Give it here.”

  “No, Albrec. Valiant though you are, you haven’t the build for it. Move aside, and keep a look out.”

  Avila hefted the heavy tool, eyed the wall for a second, and then swung the mattock in a short, savage arc against the poorly mortared stonework.

  A sharp crack which seemed incredibly loud in their ears. Avila paused.

  “Are you sure no one will hear this?”

  “The library is deserted, and there are five floors of it above us. Trust me.”

  “Trust him,” Avila said in a long-suffering voice. Then he began to swing the mattock in earnest.

  The old mortar cracked and fell away in a shower. Avila hacked at the wall until the stones it held began to shift. He picked them out with the flat blade of the mattock and soon had a cavity perhaps six inches deep and two feet wide. He stopped and wiped his brow.

  “Albrec, you are the only person I know who could cause me to break sweat in midwinter.”

  “Come on, Avila—you’re nearly through!”

  “All right, all right. Taskmaster.”

  A few more blows and then there was a sliding shower of stones and powder and dust which left them coughing in a cloud that swirled in the light of the lamps like a golden fog.

  Albrec seized a lamp and got down on his knees, pushing the lamp into the hole which suddenly gaped there.

  “Sweet Saints, Albrec!” Avila said in a horrified whisper. “Look what we’ve done. We’ll never block up that hole again.”

  “We’ll pile rubbish in front of it,” Albrec said impatiently, and then, his voice suddenly hoarse: “Avila, we’re through the wall. I can see what’s on the other side.”

  “What—what is it?”

  But Albrec was already crawling out of sight, his shoulders dislodging more stones and grit. He looked like a rotund rabbit burrowing its way into a hole too small for it.