The Blood Knight

by Greg Keyes

  Ehan chuckled. “Yah, that’s a mark against ’em. But in this case they ate the right people, so we weren’t complaining that much.

  “Since then, our own numbers have grown as the word had gotten around. We’ve been attacked a few more times by the Hierovasi, but they’ve got other things on their table at the moment—the resacaratum, for instance.”

  “I heard something about that in Dunmrogh, mostly rumors.”

  “If only it were just rumors. But it’s not; it’s torture, burning, hanging, drowning, and all the rest. Anyone they don’t like, anyone they think might be dangerous—”

  “By they, you mean these Hierovasi?”

  “Yah, but it’s them that controls what most people think of as the Church, you understand.”

  “No,” Stephen said. “I didn’t know any of this.”

  But he felt a sudden spark of hope. Ehan was suggesting it was only a faction in the Church that was bad, albeit the most powerful faction. That meant there was a chance, after all, that he might find a side worth fighting on.

  “Well, too few do,” Ehan replied. “Know about it, that is. Anyhow, that’s what we’ve been up to.”

  “Wait. These ‘Hierovasi’—they control the Caillo Vaillamo in z’Irbina?”

  “I should say so. Fratrex Prismo is one of ’em.”

  “Niro Lucio?”

  “Ah, no.” Ehan shook his head as they passed the high-arched doors of the front entrance and moved toward the yard of the sprawling west wing. “Lucio died of a peculiar and unexpected stomach disorder, if you catch my meaning. It’s Niro Fabulo now.”

  “So d’Ef is no longer obedient to the holy of holies?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then who is in charge here?”

  “Why, the fratrex is,” Ehan said.

  “Fratrex Pell? But I saw him die.”

  ‘No,” a familiar voice averred. “No, Brother Stephen, you saw me dying. You did not see me die.” Stephen’s gaze leapt directly to the source of the words.

  Fratrex Pell, the highest authority at d’Ef, was the first brother of that monastery whom Stephen had met. The fratrex had been posing as an old man, trying to lift a burden of firewood. Stephen had carried the burden, but he’d taken the opportunity to try to impress this person he’d imagined to be a simpleton. In fact, looking back on things, it was a bit painful to remember the condescension with which he had treated the fellow.

  But the fratrex had been the one having sport with him, and the fratrex soon had revealed Stephen’s foolishness.

  He was there, now, seated at a wooden table in a rather peculiar-looking armchair, his violet eyes twinkling beneath bushy gray brows. He wore a simple umber robe with the hood thrown back.

  “Fratrex,” Stephen breathed. “I don’t—I believed you dead. What I saw, and then the praifec’s investigations—”

  “Yes,” the fratrex drawled casually. “Think carefully about that last one, won’t you?”

  “Oh,” Stephen said. “Then you pretended to be dead to avoid the praifec.”

  “You always were a quick one, Brother Stephen,” the fratrex said drily. “Though it very nearly wasn’t a pretense. Once Desmond Spendlove showed his true colors, I knew who he was working for. I wouldn’t have guessed it, either. I trusted Hespero—I thought he was one of us. But everyone makes mistakes.”

  “Still,” Stephen said. “When you saved my life, you were stabbed, and then the wall collapsed.”

  “I wasn’t exactly left unscathed,” Pell said.

  That was when the details snapped into place: how sharp and thin the brother’s legs were as they pushed through his robes, how his upper body moved strangely.

  And the chair, of course, was wheeled.

  “I’m sorry,” Stephen said.

  “Well, consider the alternative. And as I understand it, this is a particularly unpleasant time to be dead.”

  “But you were helping me.”

  “That is true,” the fratrex allowed, “though I did it from more than personal regard. We need you, Brother Stephen. We need you alive. In fact, more than we need me, ultimately.”

  Somehow Stephen didn’t like the sound of that.

  “You keep referring to ‘we,’” Stephen said. “I have a feeling you don’t mean the Order of Saint Decmanus. Or the Church itself, for that matter, given what Brother Ehan has let on.”

  Fratrex Pell smiled indulgently. “Brother Ehan,” he said. “I wonder if you would bring us some of the green cider. And maybe some of that bread I smell baking.”

  “It would be my honor, fratrex,” he said, and scurried off.

  “Can I help?” Stephen asked.

  “No, stay, have a seat. We have a lot to talk about, and I’m not of a mind to delay. Time has gotten too short to be mysterious. Just give me a moment to collect my thoughts. They seem rather scattered lately.”

  Ehan brought the cider, a round of roglaef that smelled like black walnuts, and a hard white cheese. The fratrex took a little of each, bending with some difficulty; his right arm seemed particularly impaired.

  The cider was cold, strong, and still a bit bubbly. The bread was warm and comforting, and the cheese sharp, with an aftertaste that reminded Stephen of oak.

  The fratrex sat back, clumsily gripping a goblet of cider.

  “How did our ancestors defeat the Skasloi, Brother Stephen?” the fratrex asked, sipping his cider.

  That seemed an odd digression, but Stephen obliged.

  “The Virgenyan captives started a revolt,” he answered.

  “Yes, of course,” the fratrex said rather impatiently. “But even from our sparse records we know that there had been other revolts before that. How did the slaves led by Virgenya Dare succeed where the others failed?”

  “The saints,” Stephen said. “The saints were on the side of the slaves.”

  “Again,” the fratrex asked, “why then and not before?”

  “Because those who rose before had not been sufficiently devout,” Stephen replied.

  “Ah. Was that the answer you learned in the college at Ralegh?” the fratrex asked.

  “Is there another?”

  Fratrex Pell smiled benevolently. “Given what you’ve learned since leaving the college, what do you think?”

  Stephen sighed and nodded. He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples, trying to think.

  “I’ve never read anything that said it, but it seems obvious that Virgenya Dare and her followers walked faneways. Their powers, their weapons…”

  “Yes,” the fratrex said. “But what’s beyond the obvious? The Skasloi had magery, as well—powerful magery. Did it come from the saints?”

  “No,” Stephen replied. “Of course not.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “The Skasloi worshipped the elder gods, whom the saints defeated,” Stephen said. He brightened. “I suppose the saints didn’t help any of the earlier uprisings because they hadn’t yet defeated the elder gods.”

  Fratrex Pell’s mouth widened a little farther. “Hasn’t it ever struck you as a little neat, a bit too tidy, that the elder gods and the Skasloi were defeated at the same time?”

  “I suppose it just makes sense.”

  “It might make even more sense if the Skasloi and the elder gods were one and the same,” the fratrex said.

  Stephen gave that a moment, then nodded slowly.

  “It’s not impossible,” he agreed. “I’ve never thought about it before because it’s sacrilege, and I still have a habit of avoiding that when I can, but it’s possible. The Skasloi had magicks that—” He frowned. “You aren’t saying that the Skasloi got their power from the saints?”

  “No, you lumphead. I’m suggesting that neither the elder gods nor the saints are real.”

  Stephen suddenly wondered if the fratrex might have gone mad. Pain, coma, loss of blood and air to the lungs, the shock of being crippled…

  He called back his fleeing wits. “But the—I’ve walked the faneways myse
lf. I’ve felt the power of the saints.”

  “No,” the fratrex said more gently, “you’ve felt power. And that is the only thing you or I know is real. The rest of it—where the power comes from, why it affects us as it does, how it differs from the power the Skasloi wielded—we know none of that.”

  “Again, when you say ‘we’—”

  “The Revesturi,” Fratrex Pell said.

  “Revesturi?” Stephen said. “I remember reading about them. A heretical movement within the Church, discredited a thousand years ago.”

  “Eleven hundred years ago,” the fratrex corrected. “During the Sacaratum.”

  “Right. It was one of many heresies.”

  The fratrex shook his head. “It was more than that. History is often less about the past than it is about the present; history must be convenient to those who have power when it’s being told.

  “I’ll tell you something about the Sacaratum I doubt very much you know. It was more than a holy war, more than a wave of conversion and consecration. At its very root it was a civil war, Brother Stephen. Two factions, equally powerful, fought for the soul of the Church: the Revesturi and the Hierovasi. The beginning of the argument was academic; the end of it was not. There are pits full of Revesturi bones.”

  “A civil war within the Church?” Stephen said. “Surely I would have heard something about that.”

  “There have been two such conflicts, actually,” the fratrex continued. “In the first Church, the most high was always a woman, following the example of Virgenya Dare. The first Fratrex Prismo wrested his place by violence, and women were split from the hierarchy and thrust into their own temporally powerless and carefully controlled covens.”

  Again, the shift in perspective that changed the whole world. Why wasn’t there a word for that? Stephen wondered.

  “Then is all—is everything I know a lie?” he asked.

  “No,” the fratrex said. “It’s history. The question you have to ask about any version of history is, Who benefits from that version? Over the course of a thousand years—or two thousand—the interests of the powerful change often, and thus, so do the stories that hold up their thrones.”

  “Then shouldn’t I be asking who benefits from your version of events?” Stephen asked, feeling a bit sharp but not caring.

  “Absolutely,” the fratrex said. “But remember, there are absolute truths, things that actually happened. Genuine facts, actual bodies in the ground. Just because you’ve accepted some distortions, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing real in the world; it merely requires that you use some method to discover truth, wrestle it out of things.”

  “I’ve never been so naïve as to believe every opinion I hear,” Stephen said. “There are always debates within the Church, and I’ve been among those who argued them. It isn’t merely a matter of hearing and believing but of understanding how each proposition fits with the whole. And if I’m told that something doesn’t jibe with what I know, then I question it.”

  “But don’t you see? That’s just using one questionable source—or, worse, a body of them—to evaluate another. I asked you about the revolt against the Skasloi, the central fact of our history, and what did you have of substance to tell me? What sources could you refer me to? How do you know that what you’ve been told is true other than that it confirms other things you’ve been told? And what about the events of the last year? You know they happened; you witnessed some of them. Can you fit those things into what you’ve been taught?”

  “The original sources from the time of the revolt have been lost,” Stephen said, trying to wave aside the larger issue with the smaller one. “We trust the sources we have because that’s all we have.”

  “I see. So if you lock three people in a room with a knife and a bag of gold, and when you open the door again, two of them are dead, do you accept the witness of the third merely because his is the only testimony available?”

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  “It’s exactly the same thing.”

  “Not when the testimony is inspired by the saints.”

  “And if there are no saints?”

  “Now we come full circle,” Stephen said, becoming weary. “And you still leave me with the choice of supporting a faction that tortures and sacrifices children or one that cooperates with cannibals. Are you telling me there is no middle ground between the Hierovasi and the Revesturi?”

  “Yes, of course there is. There’s the largest faction of all: the ignorant.”

  “Which means me.”

  “Yes, until now. But you would have been approached, eventually, by one or both of the factions.”

  “First you tell me all the Revesturi were slaughtered in a civil war I’ve never heard of, and now you tell me they are a powerful cabal operating in the modern Church. Well, which is it?”

  “Both, of course. Most of us were slain or banished during the Sacaratum. But while you can slay men and women, it is much more difficult to slay an idea, Brother Stephen.”

  “And what idea is that?” Stephen countered.

  “Do you understand that name, Revesturi?”

  “I presume it comes from the verb revestum, ‘to inspect.’”

  “Just so. Our very simple belief is that our history, our notions, the very world around us are properly subject to our own observation. All accounts must be considered and weighed; all facts must be included in any debate.”

  “That’s a rather vague mandate to die for.”

  “Not when you consider the particular debates it inspires,” the fratrex said. “To debate, for instance, whether there are actually saints isn’t acceptable, is it?”

  “Was that the debate that led to the civil war?”

  “Not exactly. The simple fact is that that particular debate was so well suppressed that we actually don’t know what it was about. But we do know the cause of it.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “The journal of Virgenya Dare.”

  For several seconds Stephen couldn’t think of anything to say at all. Virgenya Dare, the liberator, the savior of the human race, the woman who discovered the sedoi, the faneways, the paths to the saints. Her journal.

  He shook his head and tried to focus on the moment.

  “It would have been written in Old Virgenyan,” he murmured. “Or perhaps elder Cavari. Her journal?”

  The fratrex smiled.

  Stephen rubbed his chin. “Then they actually had it,” he mused in wonder, “her journal, as recently as the Sacaratum? Incredible. And yet they made no copies—oh. There’s something in the journal, something the Hierovasi didn’t like. Is that what you’re going to tell me?”

  “Indeed,” Fratrex Pell confirmed. “Actually, there were several copies. All were destroyed. The original, however, was not.”

  “What? It still exists?”

  “Indeed it does. One of our order fled with it and secreted it in a safe place. Unfortunately, the record of exactly where it was hidden was lost. That’s a shame, because I believe the only thing that can save us—save the world—is what is contained in that journal.”

  “Wait. What? How does that follow?”

  “Dreodh explained the doctrine of the wothen to you?”

  “You mean their belief that the world itself has become ill?”

  “Yes.”

  “He did.”

  “Did it make any sense to you?”

  Stephen nodded reluctantly. “Somewhat. The forest, at least, seems to be dying. The monsters that now stalk the earth seem almost incarnations of sickness and death.”

  “Exactly. And you will not be surprised, I think, when I tell you that this has happened before, that such beasts have existed before.”

  “Legend suggests it. But…”

  The fratrex raised a quieting hand. “There are no copies of Virgenya Dare’s journal, but there are a very few, very sacred scrifti that reference it. I will show you those, of course, but let me summarize them now. This sickness
comes to the world periodically. If it is not stopped, it will destroy all life. Virgenya Dare found a way to halt it once, but how she did so we do not know. If the secret exists anywhere, it will be in her journal.”

  “According to your own doctrine, however, lacking the journal, this story is just so much noise.”

  “Lacking the journal, yes,” the fratrex said. “But we haven’t been completely complacent. We have unearthed two clues as to its whereabouts; one is a very old reference to a mountain named Vhelnoryganuz, which we believe to be somewhere in the Bairghs. The other is this.”

  From his lap the fratrex produced a slender cedar box and pushed it toward Stephen. He reached for it gingerly and lifted off the top. Inside was a worn roll of lead foil.

  “We can’t read it,” the fratrex said. “We’re hoping you can.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we need you to find the journal of Virgenya Dare,” the fratrex said. “I repeat: Without it, I fear we are all of us doomed.”

  LEOFF WOKE to a faint rasping at his door.

  He did not move but instead opened his eyes a slit, trying to think his way through the mind-mist that had followed him back from sleep.

  His jailors never took so long at the door. They put their keys in, the keys turned, the door opened. And he had come to recognize the sound of a key in the lock. No, this was higher in pitch, a smaller piece of metal.

  Before he could decide exactly what that meant, the scratching stopped, the door swung open, and in the low-guttering light of his oil lamp, he saw a shadow pass through it.

  Leoff couldn’t think of any reason to continue with the pretense that he was asleep. Instead, he swung his legs down from the bed and placed his feet on the floor.

  “Have you come to kill me?” he asked the shadow softly.

  It really was a shadow, or at least something his eye had difficulty penetrating. It resisted even being categorized as a particular shape. More than anything, it felt like the blind spot in the corner of his eye—except that this spot stood directly in front of him.

  As he continued to stare, the umbra softened somehow, gaining definition, and figured into a human form clad in loose black breeches and a jerkin. Gloved hands reached up and brought down the hood.