The Book of Seven Hands: A Foreworld SideQuest (The Foreworld Saga)

by Anderson, Barth

  Still on the ground, and with Imelda and Zacarías now occupied, Basilio crawled to the books.

  Thump.

  Alejo, Imelda, and Zacarías each looked at one other and then their heads swiveled to look about the church, at the heavy beams holding up the wide roof over their heads.

  Basilio seized the two books and rolled under a pew.

  Zacarías broke away first, then Imelda, each dashing for the cover of the pews. Alejo lingered, still watching Basilio crawl under the pew.

  The explosion was deafening. More plaster rained into the church; wooden beams and planks crashed to the floor. If it weren’t for the pews, a beam the length of a rowboat would have crushed Basilio and Alejo together.

  Basilio looked at his blood-brother and wheezed, “How did you come back to life?”

  “Oh, I was dead? That explains the mausoleum. I think Paracelsus’s potion saved me somehow.”

  “It didn’t save you, you Galician sheep-rapist. You took too much of it.”

  “Too much is always a good thing,” he grinned.

  Basilio was short of breath again. “We need to go.”

  Alejo scrambled on hands and feet away from Basilio into the suffocating, swirling dust. With books in hand, he stood and heard a voice from under another pew.

  “Basilio, I’m stuck.”

  It was Imelda. She was on the floor next to the four dead Red Spurs, who were lying with their arms akimbo.

  “I can’t move my leg, Basilio. Please don’t leave me here.”

  A fire had crept up a near wall from a downed torch. It was smoky as well as dusty in here now. Smothering.

  Without thinking about the consequences of saving this woman who’d just attacked Alejo, Basilio bent to get leverage under the beam that had Imelda pinned. A wave of nausea hit him deep in the gut. The thick dust in the air and the ball lodged in his stomach were making him feel as if he couldn’t hold his bowels.

  Shouts of surprise. A clash of steel from the altar. Basilio could see that Alejo was stepping into a ferocious attack.

  Then, throughout the building there was a great wooden moan like the creak of a ship at sea or the groan of tall trees swaying ever so slightly in wind.

  “Oh, no,” Basilio whispered.

  “Please help me, Basilio,” Imelda pleaded frantically.

  She was a love of Don Manuel’s. He’d wronged her, later admitting it to Basilio. Basilio again braced himself under the beam and this time heaved it off of Imelda’s leg.

  Basilio turned and saw Alejo and the inquisitor, misty silhouettes in the smoke and dust, sword points thrusting and chattering against each other.

  “Who the hell are you?” Alejo shouted. “Why are you and Imelda trying to kill me?”

  Basilio shouted to Alejo, “The building is about to collapse! One more cannonball and we’re dead.”

  “Go! I’ll keep this bastard priest away from you.”

  There was no time to argue. Basilio bent and helped Imelda to her feet. “Can you move?”

  “Yes. Lead the way. Just don’t go too fast.”

  He looked back at her. She was just a dark blob in the smoke and grit in the air. The two walked the slow walk of the wounded, with the building still moaning over its own wounds, and the deep sound of its groaning reverberated through Basilio’s body.

  “Alejo, come with us!” Basilio said with a loud cough. He felt like vomiting again.

  “No, go, Basilio!” Alejo shouted back.

  “Imelda!” The inquisitor was shouting too. “You must stop Basilio! Do it!”

  Basilio led Imelda to where he thought the purple curtain should be, the passage through which Don César and his two lieutenants had emerged. He found it on the other side of the altar and then slipped out into a back atrium filled with cracked statues of angels and broken benches. Marble stairs led down into the mausoleum, Basilio figured, judging by the fine banisters and polished steps. The air was easier to breathe back here and it was easier to see too. He opened the back door, which led out into a massive garden of green, red, and yellow. He turned to Imelda saying, “What a relief, I thought that we were—”

  An explosion. But not a cannonball, this time. It was like lightning in his brain. Something hit Basilio and he spun, fell to the floor.

  He shook his head to clear his senses. Imelda had struck him on the back of the head with the hilt of her sword. Sitting on his rump, he looked up at her in dazed bewilderment.

  “I’ve always liked you,” she said.

  Basilio went for his sword but couldn’t draw it fast enough as Imelda took one step back and kicked him in the face.

  Again, that explosion of lightning in his skull.

  It was just a barefoot kick in those little slippers, but, suddenly, he was on all fours on top of the books, so Basilio decided it was a very good kick. “You like me?”

  “I always have,” Imelda said, snapping her espada into its sheath. “So I’m not going to kill you.”

  Then came a kick to the mouth. And another to the brow.

  “This is a special friendship,” Basilio said, panting on his back.

  Imelda bent down to whisper to him, her lips so close they brushed against Basilio’s ear. “Don Manuel told me. I’ve always known, and I never told anyone,” she said, yanking the two books from his grasp. “Remember that, Basilio.”

  He looked up, through swollen eyes. Aching face, mouth bleeding. He was sure he’d lost at least one tooth. “All right. Thank you.”

  Thump.

  Basilio looked up at Imelda, and Imelda looked down at Basilio. If she left him here, the chapel would crush him.

  “You just said…”

  Imelda spun away with the books, then stopped and whirled back to look at him.

  “You just said you wouldn’t kill me!” Basilio slurred.

  “Bloody fucking hell,” she shouted and hauled Basilio to his feet, dragging him through the back door of the chapel. Basilio managed to get his feet under him, and they feebly hauled themselves to the wide garden that ran up to the back door, with pretty lavender, sweet thyme, and a refreshing, trickling fountain.

  Basilio looked back. The chapel was aflame and its roof folded in like parchment in the rear of the building.

  “Come out, Alejo,” Basilio said quietly.

  A cannonball smashed into the roof, and the rickety, smoldering chapel rocked and swayed, another creaking groan rising up from the structure.

  Just then Alejo could be seen through the chapel’s back door. He was backing into the atrium from the altar where he’d been dueling, retreating before Zacarías. Alejo’s hands were in the air. He was unarmed.

  “You are finished,” Zacarías shouted from the altar.

  Imelda stood with her espada in hand.

  Basilio tried to get to his feet, but he was too beaten and bloody. He could only watch.

  “The only way I can let you live is if you forswear your master’s teaching, Toreador!” Zacarías shouted. “Help me take Basilio, and I will beseech the Vatican to let you live!”

  Alejo laughed. “Ask me to pull a bone from my body. No. I can’t do that.”

  Zacarías had now backed Alejo into the foyer at the top of the mausoleum stairs. They were both only a few feet away from the back door of the chapel.

  The roof over them was about to fall, Basilio could see. “Alejo.”

  “You don’t understand me! Swear that you will never teach la destreza or anything that Don Manuel taught you, and I’ll let you live.”

  Alejo shook his head. His voice was lively, painfully sincere. “Oh, no, I plan on rebuilding the master’s school with him. I plan on spreading la destreza across Europe with Basilio. Why shouldn’t everyone know the Seven Hands?”

  The Italians’ next cannonball hit with an enormous crash, and the entire front half of the church fell in on itself, with banners of dust unfurling through the remaining windows and up through the gaping, falling roof.

  “Go meet your master!” Zac
arías bellowed over the din of the dying church.

  The blade came shoving though Alejo’s back, poking out high between his shoulders and through the linen shift, staining it crimson.

  “No! Alejo, no!” Basilio shouted.

  Zacarías turned, aiming Alejo’s back to the mausoleum steps.

  “Run, Basilio!” Imelda shouted. “We have to get away from the church!”

  Basilio couldn’t. He staggered toward the back door. “Alejo!”

  Alejo’s hands were up, the sword was still in his chest, and his face was lit with that laugh.

  Then Zacarías kicked him down the marble stairs.

  A second later, the roof over the rear half of the church fell in place.

  Imelda grabbed Basilio and dragged him back from the church as flames and smoke leaped from the back door.

  Zacarías dashed from the fiery doorway and his robes caught as he fled. Smoke flowed from every crevice in the tottering structure, and the back half collapsed in a ball of smoke and soot pouring out after Zacarías as he ran into the garden.

  Basilio and Imelda fell into another bed of flowers and herbs. He stared at the rising column of smoke over the chapel. Basilio felt not like his life had been crushed, but that all of reality had caved in. A Paracelsian collapse. His master was dead, the man he’d loved more than any other soul. And his blood-brother had died twice in a day. It seemed almost comic in its cosmic proportions as he watched Zacarías tearing his burning cape from his body and flapping about the garden like a burning stork. The chapel fumed and smoked.

  When he’d stomped out the fire, Zacarías looked across the garden and called to Imelda. “You have the book? Ah, excellent.”

  “Leave this to me,” Imelda said, standing and setting the Book of the Seven Hands and its translation in the nasturtium. “That’s the Marqués. The Marqués of Málaga.”

  Basilio could barely move or think, but he figured she was delirious from the smoke. “The Marqués died in the Levant years ago,” he said.

  She stood looking down at Basilio, her back to the inquisitor, and spoke with her eyes cranked sidelong to watch him. “No. He is alive. He’s the Black Hand of the Vatican now, their assassin. Do you understand me?” Imelda said, eyes on Basilio’s now. “He apparently killed Don Manuel, he killed Alejo, and now he’s coming to kill you, Basilio.”

  Alejo had stolen the book from the Marqués, years and years ago, and now here he was to retrieve it. It all made sense in a horrible sort of way.

  Zacarías came striding toward Basilio and Imelda, espada drawn.

  Imelda bided her time, and when the inquisitor was close enough, she whirled and lunged in one swift action.

  But Zacarías parried as if he’d expected it. He chambered the force of Imelda’s lunge, and then, as if pointing out a spot on her shirt, he easily stabbed her in the chest. She fell backward onto a flower bed, clutching her wound, grimacing at the sky.

  Zacarías bent down and grabbed the two books. He looked at both of them in admiration, and then dropped the mere copy onto the ground. Then he strode toward the burning chapel, as if out for a little stroll.

  Over his shoulder, he said to Basilio, “Is this era a ‘rebirth,’ as some are calling it? A reawakening of ancient, superior knowledge?”

  The threshold of the back door was just a couple of flaming and charred posts with fire still licking the walls on either side. The inquisitor came as close to the doorway as he dared.

  “Alejo and you wanted to reawaken a heretical fighting force. One that can be learned by rabble and nobleman alike?” He called to Basilio over the roar of the chapel fire. “No, a martial art for the common man will not be allowed to take root in Spain—and the Vatican will especially not allow it anywhere near New Spain.”

  Zacarías threw the ancient Book of the Seven Hands into the fire.

  Basilio looked down at Paracelsus’s copy. It looked so meager and fake compared with the ancient stateliness of the original, and with a surge of will and adrenaline, he got to his feet, ready to go for his sword.

  But Zacarías came forward, nearly running, and stopped Basilio easily, the point of his sword hovering before Basilio’s throat.

  “So ends the story of the Knight with a Thousand Enemies,” he said, the point of his espada now pressing into Basilio’s throat. “And so it ends for the Great Basilio too.”

  Basilio looked down at Imelda, who was holding her chest wound and lying in red carnations. Spain’s flower. Her bright eyes had drifted to Basilio and Zacarías, and her breathing was rapid and shallow.

  Basilio said with weariness, “Give me the same chance that you gave Alejo?”

  Zacarías’s eyes flashed with curiosity. “To forswear your loyalty to Don Manuel?”

  Basilio nodded. “I don’t care about reawakening anything. I never did,” he slurred. “Alejo wanted that, but I didn’t. Now he and Don Manuel are gone and I have no desire to dream their dreams.” He took a step to the side, turning Zacarías’s back to Imelda, just as he had turned Alejo’s back to the mausoleum steps. Basilio hoped she had something left. “Look at me. My arm. If I survive these wounds, I’ll be crippled for life. How could I teach a martial art?”

  “You haven’t convinced me yet,” Zacarías said. “But I am listening. What will you do, if not teach?”

  “What can I do? The truth is out about me,” Basilio said flatly. “I suppose I’ll go back to León. Let my father decide what’s to be done.”

  “Swear it then. Swear you will never teach la destreza,” Zacarías said.

  “I swear it,” Basilio said. And that was that.

  “And,” Zacarías said, stepping forward until his sword point touched Basilio’s throat. “Swear that you are the Duchess Constanza.”

  He shut his eyes. He did not retreat. He let the inquisitor’s sword point press. Basilio couldn’t say it. At least, the end will be quick, he thought. If this was the Marqués, he was always a greedy and impatient man.

  But instead of a slice through his throat, there was a clang of steel in front of Basilio’s face.

  He opened his eyes and there was Imelda, her sword crossed with Zacarías’s, a great splash of blood down the front of her white shirt.

  “You have taken my quarry twice now, the English spy and the book itself,” she said, and the ice and iron in her voice made Basilio and Zacarías both step back. “Now I am taking your prize away from you.”

  Imelda and Zacarías fell into dueling poses, testing one another, trading the tapping of espadas, feeling out the remaining strength and will to fight.

  “If you want the glory of killing the Great Basilio,” Zacarías said, grinning his canine grin, “I offer him to you now.”

  “Oh, if anyone kills Basilio,” Imelda said, “it will be me. But you first, liar. You told me revenge on Don Manuel was mine. You used me during this collaboration, just as you used me long, long ago.”

  Zacarías pressed the fight. He was nervous and overeager, wanting to take what advantages he imagined that he had, Basilio saw. The exchange between them was more like an angry, nasty knife fight. The inquisitor tried to keep Imelda at bay with little slashes of ex and zed before her sword tip, but Imelda was better. She waited, hanging back and baiting him.

  But she waited too long. Zacarías saw her attention turn to Basilio for just one little breath, and he rattled her blade with a ringing blow, knocking her espada from her hand.

  She did not retreat. Indeed, she smiled a little smile that dented her cheek.

  Zacarías cried out in anger and his sword thrust straight forward into Imelda’s face.

  With what strength he had left, Basilio stepped forward and blocked the thrust. But Zacarías simply laughed at him and grabbed Basilio’s wrist, twisting it viciously.

  Imelda shot forward and grabbed Zacarías by the sword arm at the wrist. For a moment, they were a cruel tableau, each on the verge of killing another.

  Then Imelda’s left hand flashed up. It was empty, and her
bare white palm made a curious gesture in the air like a benediction.

  Before Basilio could make sense of what had happened, Zacarías fell backward, his throat opened in a long, fleshy slit. His hands were clutching at his neck, and blood shot through his fingers onto his inquisitor’s robe. Red upon red.

  Basilio glanced at Imelda’s shirtsleeve and saw the glint of steel in the hem.

  “Bravo,” he said, exhausted, relieved. But then he caught himself and leaped back from Imelda, espada ready.

  Seeing his sword up, Imelda turned with hers ready too.

  “You don’t trust me?” she said. “I’ve saved your life twice now.”

  “You kicked me in the face a lot more than twice.”

  “You are alive? Santa Sofia!” someone was shouting.

  Basilio backed away from Imelda and raised his sword as Paracelsus came riding into the wide garden from a side street. With a bedroll on the back of its saddle and his leather bag lashed there too, Paracelsus’s horse was leading the black-and-white dray Padrona, who tossed her long shaggy mane and bridled at the tether in annoyance.

  “Many people are coming!” Paracelsus called, his horse galloping straight across the garden beds. “The whole town now that the bombing has stopped! And Lord Casal! You must leave immediately! Wait!” He executed an impressive trotting dismount—a move worthy of a cavalryman, Basilio thought. “Let me look at you.”

  Paracelsus ran to Basilio and quickly examined his stomach and arm sling, then clasped his hands in gratitude.

  “My dressing held! I am utterly amazing. Now look, here is Padrona. I was hoping you could save her, and you are alive, so you must take her,” he said, unlashing her from his saddle. “This is no way to end our blessed association, but, for the love of God, Basilio, I must ride to the Port of Barcelona at once.”

  “You’re leaving?” Basilio took Padrona’s reins. “What’s wrong?”

  “An Englishman has spotted me,” he said, looking back the way he’d ridden. “We saw each other as the Red Spur knight ran me to Don Porfirio’s mansion. And with Lord Casal on his way here, you are again in great danger. Who is that woman? Hello,” he said to Imelda, scanning her bloody white shirt and the burns across her brow. “Superficial sword wound. That will heal. Now I must go!”