“Well, aye, the sound of it,” he said a bit uncertainly. “But I don’t know what—”
“You don’t know the tongue,” she hissed, “that’s not to say I don’t. Now, speak what you heard.”
He nodded and closed his eyes to concentrate. “It went something like, Idri gai braniana ro—”
“—bana ka verere Anado?” Chul interrupted him in surprise.
Marigan’s eyes widened, but he shook his head. “—viana kai virara Xorden. I’m sure of it. And more of the same.”
“Aye, sounds like Dhanani,” murmured Gikka with a glance toward the boy. “But not like I’ve heard before.”
“It’s the Old Voice,” Chul said. “The Storykeepers tell the old stories in that voice, stories from the Before Time. But this is an Idri.” He turned to Gikka with a worried frown. “Aidan calls the Idri to ask Anado’s blessing over the hunt. But the priests, the Hadrians, call it with a different name.”
“Xorden, aye,” breathed Gikka. The name meant absolutely nothing to her; she was certain she had never heard it before. And that in itself was a strange thing. Her gaze grew distant.
“Could be they made it up,” offered Marigan weakly. “Could be some tribesman taught them the Old Voice—”
Chul shook his head. “No.”
“No, what do you mean, no?” Marigan glared at him. “I could teach what I heard to anyone as cared to listen.”
“Yes,” answered Chul, “but you could not say something new with it. Don’t you see? You could not make a new story with it.”
“Oh, but if I knew a thing about Dhanani, I could.” Marigan shifted and crossed his arms. “You could.”
Chul shook his head. “No.”
“No again! And why not?”
Chul tried to explain. “The Old Voice is…” He shrugged. “No one can tell a new thing in the Old Voice, not even the Storykeepers. Only the stories from the Before Time can be spoken in the Old Voice. New stories are told in Dhanani, Bremondine, Syonese. But not the Old Voice.”
Marigan cocked his head in thought. “Tradition, then.”
“No. The words do not come.” He saw the befuddlement in Marigan’s eyes and shook his head. “You do not understand.”
But Gikka did. This Idri was not some experiment on the part of these Hadrians, something pieced together from bits and snatches of Old Dhanani they’d somehow picked up along the way. This had to be a genuine prayer in Old Dhanani, a language unknown outside the Kharkara Plains, a language the Dhanani could not possibly have taught to anyone, much less to Hadrians. Which meant they had learned it intact from someone else.
But then, comes an old, forgotten god…
Unbidden, a memory of Cilder guzzling down the thick soup of Pegrine’s blood came into Gikka’s mind, and her heart quickened.
…a god who sees my pain, a god who grants me a tiny fragment, but the barest splinter of the gods’ own knowledge for my own!
Had she heard Cilder utter a single word of prayer, a single syllable of Old Dhanani? No, she was sure, not a sound. His offering had been blood. But if there was any chance the cardinal was in the service of the bishop’s god, if the nameless god now had a name, Renda and her father had to know. Even if the Idri was innocent, an idea she did not entertain for a moment, they had to know. In any case, she knew what she had to do, orders or no. She even had in mind how to do it.
But Marigan was still looking at her as if... “Is there more yet?”
He nodded slowly. “And this’ll be the part you’ll not believe, but I swear it, I speak it exact as it happened.” He paused to wipe sweat from his brow in spite of the chill air. “Back down the corridor, then, and down the stairs to the servants’ wing and back into my very chamber I gone then, all the while counting myself lucky as not to be caught and wondering only a bit at what I’d just seen.
“I swear, I know not how long she stood beside my bed as I slept, but presently as I looked up, I seen a child there, a girl child dressed in shining white, blue bows in the darkest black hair, and a vision she were, truly, save the wicked white glow at her eyes.” He shuddered visibly. “Then I . She what I seen, she’s the sheriff’s own grandchild, she who lays below on unhallowed ground, and revenant at that! Thin, she was, and pale. A sharp grin from her, then, and I nearly blacked out at the sight of it, there thinking to have met my death, but she touched my arm and whispered to me only that I must tell you this.” He opened his mouth to speak, but stopped. “Are you sure you’d hear?”
“So please you,” prompted Gikka.
“Very well, then,” he sighed, and drew a deep breath.
“Shadowrider, rest not in twain,
Futility calls vengeance thy name.
But turn thy heart from setting sun
And falling star to gather one,
The Guardian Last, thy finishing shard,
To close your ranks, the sea to ford.”
He blinked at the woman. “Means this aught to you?”
She waved to him to continue.
“Come to castle, come to Death,
Let daybreak steal thy very breath,
Fly instead to craggèd crest
And set thy split halves whole, at rest.
The Guardian Last, thy finishing shard,
To close your ranks, the sea to ford.”
When the squire only nodded slowly, he gasped. “Can’t you see? She calls you to die at the castle, that evil child, and me the messenger, is why I’d no mind to tell you.”
Finishing shard. To close your ranks. A dark smile curved over Gikka’s mouth. “Chul,” she said, and touched her hip with her thumb. At once and with no questions on his lips, the boy slung the bag over his shoulder and ran from the stall.
“No, please.” Marigan watched him go, then turned to her in amazement and fear. “But you’re—! Sure you’d not go against Lady Renda’s word.” He wrung his hands miserably.
Gikka laughed quietly. No, she would not go against Renda’s word. But neither would she wait around Farras. Her course was clear now. She drew a golpind from her boot and pressed it into the man’s hand. “For your trouble,” she said and turned to run from the house, “and your silence, aye?”
Twenty-Three
Castle Brannagh
For two hours Renda stood alone, motionless beside the sealed stone in the old chapel, thoughts reeling between the duty before her and the certain threat from the farmers without. She did not know whether Maddock and the rest had been watching when she and the cardinal left for Castle Damerien—she supposed they had—but when they’d returned, the villagers had lined their path to watch them pass, setting litters full of their dead and dying right in the road. The cardinal had turned his horse around them without comment, his punishment on the House of Brannagh for sheltering Pegrine. Behind her visor, Renda had wept.
Her helmet and swords lay upon B’radik’s altar awaiting the cardinal’s ritual blessing, and her lips moved with the ritual prayers, but her heart felt black and diseased with pain. Even as she stood in this hallowed place praying for B’radik to grant her courage to face the task ahead, part of her soul wished her breath would stop within her breast and grant her peace.
It was not until they had reached her father’s audience chamber that she saw the long weal along the cardinal’s right arm, a raised scratch from a child’s overgrown fingernail that ran from his wrist to his elbow. Even though it had not drawn blood, it festered under Renda’s eye with dark squirming wisps of evil.
This was their proof, the cardinal had shouted over her father’s protestations of Pegrine’s innocence, this evil that clung to her scratch. It was no longer a matter of a simple grave consecration. She was unquestionably an agent of the enemy and must be put down at once. The plague would not abate until she was destroyed.
Had Renda not borne witness to a good part of the cardinal’s story, her father had snarled, he might have thought Valmerous was playing the dramatic, driving up his price. The accusation had cut the
cardinal to the quick, but he was unrelenting in his insistence that they allow him to do them this service, for the good of all Syon. At last, her father bade the cardinal do as he felt necessary to save Syon before he had retreated into his chamber and slammed the door. But likewise he had made clear that he would have no part of it. Her mother, upon hearing the sheriff’s angry shouting, had likewise retreated into her drawing room with stoic calm and refused to hear more of it. Lady Glynnis was already at prayer to B’radik and would be so until dawn, if need be, to protect her granddaughter, the cardinal’s word against her or no. Either that or she was planning to join the child in death.
Which left only Renda to help him. She hated him for it and hated herself for her blasphemy and her lack of honor, that she would rather sell the whole of Syon to destruction than harm Pegrine.
“Oh, beg pardon, my lady.”
She looked up to see Nara’s soft white glow turning away from the chapel door. “Stay a moment, Nara,” she called to the old woman. “I pray you.”
The nun paused in midstep and looked down at Renda. “Aye, madam,” she wheezed presently and shambled into the chapel. Her rheumy eyes missed nothing, stopping a moment upon the helmet and weapons on the altar, and then upon her young mistress’s teary eyes. But instead of stopping at her usual place near the door, Nara made her slow but bold way forward until she stood beside Renda, until the brightness of her habit touched the knight’s armor.
“You are come once more to set Peg to rest, then, madam?” Her words were uncommonly calm and flat, betraying no accusation nor any pleadings on Pegrine’s behalf. She might have been asking the time of day.
Renda stared blindly at the stone sealing the crypt. “Aye,” she said finally. “Upon the cardinal’s word.”
Nara nodded. She glanced at the altar briefly before she turned her eyes upon Renda again. “My lady,” she whispered softly, as if the walls themselves might be listening, “I wonder if I should appear presumptuous—”
Renda turned to her.
“—were I to give my own blessings over you, the blessings of B’radik.” She smiled reassuringly and looked back toward the door. “I mean no disrespect to his Eminence; it would but ease my heart, to set Her hand over you.”
Renda looked into the old woman’s eyes, and, without a word, she picked up her helmet and her swords. Then, armor complete, she knelt before Nara, curious at the strange sense of danger that crept into her heart. Surely the cardinal could not take offense that she had accepted B’radik’s blessing, but even so, she hoped Nara would finish before he arrived.
Nara must have felt it, too, because she used a different ritual, one that Renda had not seen before. She used none of the sacred oil and spoke but half the prayers.
But the knight’s armor flared brilliantly against the darkness of the chapel, and the nun seemed to greet the glow with relief. “Yet our goddess favors us, my lady,” she breathed as she turned and ambled out of the sanctuary.
But by the time Nara passed through the doors of the chapel, Renda’s spirits had fallen again. Nara’s blessing—B’radik’s blessing—was welcome, naturally, but Renda found her strange stoicism disturbing, especially if the old nun understood what the cardinal was about. But then, perhaps she understood better than the rest of the house. After all, Pegrine could only be the worst order of evil for Verilion to reject her.
Except that she had not been rejected by Verilion; she had been hidden from him by the bishop.
For evil purposes.
Then again, she had been rescued by B’radik.
Or so she claimed.
Renda sighed in frustration, hopelessly lost in the tangle of contradictions.
She heard footsteps climbing the stairway to the chapel, and frowned. Valmerous was barefooted; she would not hear his step on the stairs. Yet the footfalls approached the chapel as surely as they sounded within the stairway, the footfalls of ten men.
“Lady Renda.” The cardinal entered the chapel followed by all ten of his priests, and his voice held a note of surprise.
“Eminence,” she returned with a bow. “Gentlemen.”
“I confess, I had not thought you would join us.” The cardinal strode past the altar and knelt beside the sealed stone.
“Eminence,” she began abruptly, “on the way back from Castle Damerien, I told you what Pegrine said to me of her transformation.” She steeled herself for another battle of wills, but he only blinked at her, uncomprehending, so she went on. “What if Peg speaks the truth? What if B’radik bargained with Verilion, that She might somehow—”
“To what end?” The cardinal smiled kindly. “Recall, if you will, that this child, this vampire, attacked his Grace, and before my very eyes, at that! Not to mention the destruction of B’radik’s temple. No, madam,” he said, shaking his head and turning away, “make no excuses for her. An her soul was bought from Verilion, evil was the coin, and no other.” He looked up at her with a sympathetic smile. “I know you would not have it so; indeed, that the sheriff should deny it so completely is none too surprising—she was his only grandchild—but do not let your love for the child she once was stay you from your duty, Dame Knight.”
Renda’s lips thinned behind her visor, but she said nothing. She cut through the wax seal with her sword and with the help of three of the clerics, lifted the stone out of its place. Taking up a torch, she led them down into the crypt tunnel and carefully lit the sconced torches from her own. Once there, she raised her sword and struck through the seal of the mausoleum and pulled open the great doors.
She moved to enter the crypt, but Valmerous touched her arm. “My lady,” spoke the cardinal quietly. “I would spare your sensibilities in this matter; I know how much the child meant to you.”
She drew herself up. “I am a Knight of Brannagh, Eminence; you need not spare my sensibilities.”
“Yes, yes,” he said, and she could hear the barest hint of a chuckle in his voice. “But this is no matter of swordplay and honor and knightly nonsense; this is a grave consecration, the work of priests, and I would not have it sullied, pray pardon me, by the presence of...nonclergy.”
“But—”
He raised his hand to silence her. “I pray you, wait without. When all is accomplished, you may enter and assure yourself of our success.”
Renda sheathed her sword and stepped aside helplessly while the priests filed into the crypt.
“Once we are within, my lady,” the cardinal called to her, “seal the crypt tight, lest the evil escape.” With that, he bade her push the doors closed behind him.
Renda looked at the small lump of wax she had brought to reseal the tomb. She had only enough to seal both the door and the outer stone once, so she pushed gently against the doors to see that they were well closed before she settled herself upon the ground to wait.
Inside the chapel, she heard the priests’ voices rising together in a chant that raised the hair on the back of her neck. The words were muffled through the stone doors, and try as she might, she could not make out the words. The sounds of the chant were unlike any she had heard in the temples, but she knew so little of the Hadrian traditions. Like as not, Cardinal Valmerous would use chants from his own temple and his own god.
Except that the words did not carry the brusque timbre of Hadric, not even through the stone. If anything, they sounded vaguely Dhanani to her. But the likelihood that Hadrians would speak Dhanani…
Then she heard a kind of quiet keening, as of children far away, quiet enough that the least sound overwhelmed it in her ear, quiet enough that it might only have been her imagination. The same sound had brought her running from her bed years ago.
It was the sound of the crypt’s guardians, the babies in the walls, and as she moved back and forth through the tunnel, the keening became crying, and the crying became screams, unbearable screams in her brain. Then, all at once, they stopped.
She turned, off balance in the sudden silence. Even the chanting had stopped, and now her
ears made up sounds to fill the emptiness. She almost laughed behind her visor. Her exhaustion was wearing upon her, and now she was dreaming awake. She stood then, feeling strangely alone in the tunnel.
A moment later, the chanting resumed within the crypt where her kinsmen’s bones lay upon hallowed ground, and where little Pegrine...
Pegrine.
Come, tell me you’ve missed me, too.
Renda’s eyes brimmed with tears. Every vision, every memory of Pegrine was full of light. She glanced at the crypt door. Try as she might to blanket the child’s image in her mind with darkness, she could not. The bishop, yes. The bodies of the wicked priests in the temple fields, yes. But Pegrine glowed as pure in her memory as Nara, white, pristine, perfect. No taint marked her.
If only until she could speak to her, ask her why she had attacked the duke. What harm, to stay her execution a few moments? Renda rose and drew her sword, but then she stopped at the crypt door, uncertain.
Was she once again letting her attachment to Pegrine sway her from her duty, as the cardinal had said? Was this the very reaction he had feared when he had asked her to wait outside the crypt?
I would not have it sullied, pray pardon me, by the presence of...nonclergy.
Renda’s brow furrowed. Since when did the presence of a knight sully a grave consecration?
Then again, the cardinal had overlooked the blessing of her armor and swords—a reasonable oversight. Perhaps.
Hadrians chanting in Dhanani.
She listened tentatively against the door and heard only a low mumble deep within the crypt, near the tomb of Lexius, near Pegrine’s bier. She must see for herself; she must know for certain whether Pegrine was indeed the evil of the house. Quietly, she pushed open the door.
She had given her only torch to the cardinal, and he had neglected to light the sconced torches inside the crypt, so her way was dark but for the torchlight that came from the rear chamber where the priests worked. It was just as well; she would rather they not know she was there, anyway. Gikka would be proud.
She made her way between the large sarcophagi, past Dilkon’s baby daughters, past Dilkon himself and Remiar, past the Peacekeeper. Her hand brushed over the stone of Cardon’s tomb, only vaguely aware of its warmth. She frowned into the darkness ahead and drew her sword. Then she made her way toward the rear chamber.
Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) Page 35
