Sword of the Lamb

by M. K. Wren

  “No one does. Ease your mind on that.”

  “I . . . don’t understand.”

  Rich reached into an inner pocket of his cloak. “I won’t fence with you, Fenn. I think you’re afraid you do understand.” He opened his hand, and on the palm was a thin, nearly transparent disk no larger than his thumbnail. “Is this what you were looking for yesterday when you came to my suite with Alex?”

  Lacroy stared at the disk, and the color drained from his face, his eyes flashing up to meet Rich’s. Then he turned away.

  “What makes you think I was looking for something?”

  Rich sighed and returned the disk to his pocket. “I can’t expect you to answer my questions. I was hoping you would. And you needn’t be concerned for yourself at the moment. I haven’t told anyone about this. I assume we’re free of monitors here?”

  Lacroy replied noncommittally, “Why wouldn’t we be?”

  Rich nodded, ignoring the question. “I’d suggest a stronger adhesive be used on these devices. This might’ve fallen from Alex’s cloak at a far more inopportune time.” He paused, but Lacroy didn’t respond. “Fenn, I checked the House memfiles. DeKoven Woolf has never manufactured a minicorder like this, and if it isn’t a Woolf product, it isn’t Concord. Fortunately, it does function in Woolf headsets. It’s quite a clear recording. The entire strategy for the Galinin-Woolf-Ivanoi counteroffensive against Selasis is on this tape.”

  Lacroy sagged forward, his elbows on his knees, big hands hanging limp. Rich had never seen anything like defeat in his face, but it was in every line now.

  “What are you going to do, Rich?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There’s only one thing you can do. You know that.”

  “Perhaps there’s only one thing I should do, but there are many things I can do. I should tell my father, and I might. That isn’t a threat; I’m only being honest with you.”

  Lacroy’s hands tightened into fists, his features contracted, then both went lax as he asked, “What are you asking of me? What do you want?”

  “I want some answers. That’s all. As for the tape, I’ll return it to you if you can assure me it won’t be used against Woolf or Galinin. Of course, the information on it would be of little use to anyone now.” He smiled faintly. “Although I’m sure Lord Orin would’ve paid a high price to have it yesterday—before this morning’s Directorate meeting.”

  Lacroy straightened, staring at him reproachfully.

  “Rich, not Selasis. Whatever you think of me—”

  “I wasn’t suggesting it was intended for Selasis. That assumption would be absurd. You’ve been allieged to DeKoven Woolf for what? Twenty years?”

  “Nearly eighteen.”

  “An allegiance shift from Hamid, wasn’t it? At any rate, your relationship with Father is very close; a man in your position could wreak havoc. If you were a Selasid agent, Woolf would be in a far weaker position by now, and Selasis in a stronger one. Besides, I doubt a Selasid agent would survive Father’s security system for eighteen years.”

  “No,” Lacroy said dully, “the tenure of most House agents is rather short.”

  “I have other reasons for assuming you aren’t a Selasid agent. The origin of the device, for instance. Lord Orin wouldn’t manufacture his own monitoring equipment. The manufacturing process couldn’t be kept secret, and he doesn’t think in technical terms, nor does Bruno Hawkwood. They’d use Woolf products because they’re easily available, and the refinements of this device wouldn’t be worth the risk.” Rich paused, then, “And there’s another reason: it isn’t your style, Fenn. You aren’t Orin’s—or Hawkwood’s—type.”

  Lacroy stared miserably at the floor. “But obviously I’m an agent of some sort. In the face of that, can you be so sure what . . . type I am?”

  Rich smiled. “Yes, I can. As to what sort of agent you are—well, I have a great deal of time on my hands and access to high-priority Concord ’files. For the last year I’ve been doing some private research. The information available on this particular subject is scant, once you eliminate rumors and hearsay evidence, but I’ve sifted out a few nuggets of fact.”

  Rich could feel Lacroy’s tension as he looked around at him.

  “And what’s the subject of your research, Rich?”

  “The semimythical Society of the Phoenix.”

  Lacroy commented warily, “An interesting subject.”

  “Very. Fenn, what did you intend to do with the tape?”

  He blinked, looking peculiarly blank for a moment.

  “I . . . I can’t tell you.”

  “I only want to know in general terms.”

  Again, he blinked with that same vacant expression. He frowned and shook his head.

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Oh. The ‘conditioning.’ You literally can’t tell me. Who can?” Again, that curious, fleeting confusion. Rich went on before Lacroy attempted to reply, “All right, you can’t answer that, either.”

  “No, I can’t, even if I would.”

  Rich looked up at the high ceiling. The room seemed very large now and somehow lonely. Loneliness is like pain; one never grows accustomed to it.

  “Fenn, please—I must have some answers.”

  “Answers to what, Rich?”

  “To my questions. At least a few of them before I—” He stopped, surprised to find his hands tensely clenched. He let them relax. “Certainly I must have some answers about the tape, and I came here hoping for . . . for hope, perhaps; for answers to the questions behind this tape. I won’t use them against you or the Phoenix. At least . . . no, I shouldn’t say that. If I’m not satisfied with your motives, I can’t promise my silence. I suppose that makes it impossible for you to give me any answers.”

  When Lacroy replied, it was with some hesitancy. “I don’t know whether it’s possible or not. I can find out if an exception can be made for you.”

  Rich focused intently on his face. “Will you? Will you at least ask if—whoever must make that decision? Fenn, please, if you care for me.” Then he felt the heat in his cheeks and turned away; he hadn’t intended to beg.

  “I’ll find out, Rich.” His tone was unexpectedly gentle. “But it’ll take a few days.”

  Rich sighed; that was all he could ask now. He reached for his crutches and levered himself to his feet.

  “Thank you. I’ll keep the tape.” He studied Lacroy’s reaction, but there was only a faint frown. “If you can satisfy me that it won’t harm the House, you can have it. Of course, at this point it will be of interest only from a historical or sociological point of view.”

  Lacroy said absently, “That’s our main line of work.”

  “Then we have that in common.” Rich pressed the controls on the handgrips of his crutches and turned. “I must get back to my suite. Alex will worry if he wakes and finds me gone.”

  Lacroy came to his feet, gazing at him in frank bewilderment.

  “Rich, you . . . I don’t understand you. I mean, you came here tonight alone, without telling Ser Alex or anyone else, and even though it goes against all reason, I believe you. You came here with that tape, and you—you act as if it never occurred to you that . . .” He faltered, staring at Rich hopelessly.

  “That you might recover the tape and remove any evidence of your guilt by the simple expedient of killing me?”

  He flinched as if Rich had struck him.

  “That’s . . . what I mean.”

  “Of course it occurred to me. You’d have no trouble overcoming me, and I’m sure you could arrange an ‘accident.’ if you felt any qualms of conscience, you could salve that with the knowledge that you’d only be hurrying the inevitable by a few years.”

  Lacroy went white. “Rich, don’t say that!”

  “Why not?
You know my illness is terminal, don’t you?”

  The brief response seemed an overwhelming effort.

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so.”

  “I’ve known about it for several years.”

  “And the Phoenix knows?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yet the secret hasn’t leaked out. Remarkable.”

  Lacroy averted his eyes, and when at length he looked up at Rich again, he was met with a gentle, ironic smile.

  “Rich, you came here to test me—with your life.”

  “Yes, Fenn, I did.”

  “But, I might’ve, I . . .”

  “You might have done a number of things, but I couldn’t believe you’d kill me, and if I misjudged you to that extent, I don’t think I’d have cared much whether I lived or not.”

  “Oh, Rich, please—you cut to my heart.”

  “I don’t mean to cause you pain, but I was counting on your susceptibility to it. If you—and the Phoenix—are not such that you’d find it expedient to kill me, then I doubt I’ll find it necessary to betray you. We may even be allies of sorts. Now, I must go.” He began moving with his halting, sliding steps toward the door.

  “Ser Rich . . .”

  He paused and turned. “Yes?”

  “I’ll get those answers for you somehow.”

  “Thank you, Fenn. Thank you.”

  Lacroy wasn’t aware of the tears on his cheeks until after the doorscreens went on behind that frail, wistful figure.

  PHOENIX MEMFILES; DEPT HUMAN SCIENCES:

  BASIC SCHOOL (HS/BS)

  SUBFILE: LECTURE, BASIC SCHOOL 2 JANUAR 3252

  GUEST LECTURER: RICHARD LAMB

  SUBJECT: POST-DISASTERS HISTORY:

  THE HOLY CONFEDERATION (2585–2903)

  DOC LOC #819/219–1253/1812–1648–213252

  At the beginning of his career of conquest and consolidation, Even Pilgram did not call himself a Lord, nor his domain a House, but he is credited with being the first to employ those terms—at least, in their modem usage. Originally, he called himself HoldMaster and his domain a Station, a term whose use in this context isn’t clear. His Station was an area of indefinite boundaries covering at least ten thousand square kilometers in central western Conta Austrail, and an estimated twenty thousand people were Bonded to him. He is also credited—probably erroneously—with originating that term, but it should be noted that his “Bonds” included not only slave/serfs, but the middle class as it existed at the time, and even some elements of the upper class, such as the knight-warrior class.

  Pilgram’s village-fortress of Pilgramhold has been beautifully restored by the House of Kalister with the assistance of the University’s department of archeology, and is considered a classic of late Second Dark Age parabolic-vault masonry. Bishop Colona’s monastery and cathedron in Pilgramhold have also been restored, but they aren’t the buildings in which Colona lived and worshiped before The Revelations; those were both razed before the end of his life to make way for the more grandiose structures we see now. The original Order of Renunciation monastery was a cluster of wood and stone buildings that could house no more than twenty monks, and its cathedron could honestly be called only a chapel.

  The alliance between Colona and Pilgram was perhaps inevitable; they were both men of monumental ambition and served each other’s purposes well. We might wonder what would have happened if Colona hadn’t been sent by his Order to the remote monastery in Pilgramhold immediately after his novitiate in Perthhold, but it’s probable that this political-religious alliance would have occurred eventually somewhere in Conta Austrail during the late medieval period. Historically, the time was right for the isolated feudal holds that dotted the continent to be united in a larger political entity to provide the stable basis for further social and cultural evolution. That consolidation needed both the impetus of a politically ambitious man like Pilgram and the unifying philosophic impetus of the new religion Colona offered.

  There was, of course, little in Colona’s Revelations that was really new; Mezionism is a peculiarly eclectic amalgam of existing faiths and dogmas. What was new was its unity. During the preceding five hundred years, religion in Conta Austrail had devolved into hundreds of splintered sects as a result of the isolation of individual centers of population, and although most of these sects, like the Order of Renunciation, which dominated the holds of southwestern Conta Austrail at that time, were still recognizable as variations on Pre-Disasters Christianity, there was great divergence between them, and that in itself contributed to the continuing isolation of the enclaves.

  Colona offered the True Way under the sanctifying cloak of divine revelation. There is little doubt that he did consider the doctrines codified in The Revelations divinely inspired, and if contemporary accounts are true, he suffered great tribulation in pursuit of that inspiration. A fellow monk (in The Pilgramhold Codex, ca. 2560) describes Colona in one of his ecstatic trances sitting naked in the desert under the sparse shade of a coolabah tree for “three and seven days, his each bone to be counted under his flesh, his eyes burned blind by the sun so that he might see inward to the true vision of the All-God.”

  That vision won him no favor in the Order of Renunciation hierarchy, and he was promptly ejected from the monastery as a heretic. He had, however, made something of a name for himself locally and aroused the interest of the HoldMaster, Even Pilgram, who took him into his hold and asked his instruction in his new religion. Pilgram was apparently subjected to some tribulation, too, during this process, but he came out of the experience a convert and with a powerful tool that insured the success of his subsequent campaign to unite the scattered holds of Conta Austrail into one political entity.

  It was a holy war, of course, to which Pilgram. with Colona ever at his side, devoted the remaining fifteen years of his life. When he died at the Battle of Darwin, the Charter of the Holy Confederation of Conta Austrail had already been signed (literally in blood) by all but a handful of the nearly four hundred Lords or HoldMasters in Conta Austrial, and the white-and-gold circled-cross banner of the Church of the Holy Mezion was firmly planted in every inhabited area across the wide breadth of the continent.

  Pilgram was a master of the difficult art of consolidation, and he produced three sons with the wisdom and vision to finish his campaign and make of the Holy Confederation a viable social and political organization. In this it has been suggested that they had good advice from Colona, who demonstrated a high degree of pragmatism in the consolidation of his spiritual empire. He survived Pilgram by thirty years, spending most of the last twenty in the cathedron built for him in Pilgramhold. We don’t know the cause of his death, but descriptions of his funeral have come down to us, and we know that the ascetic who endured naked the blistering sun of the western deserts was buried in silk and brocade in a jewel-encrusted casket, attended by an estimated fifty thousand devout followers.

  CHAPTER III

  Avril 3250

  1.

  Alexand touched the control and the cabinet door slid back silently. And he almost laughed. Ser Alton Robek was a considerate host indeed. He provided his young guests—all 150 of them—with attentive servants, well appointed and very private quarters, food and drink in lush variety, and entertainment equally lush and various, including psychomaxic capsules or masks for those who wished to indulge in that illegal, but acceptable, form of self-entertainment.

  And Ser Alton also provided for the morning after.

  The spacious bath was walled in amber-tinted mirrors, softly lighted and pleasantly warm; there were stacks of heated towels, racks of cosmetic aids, and a ’com for calling the servants, the panel prominently placed by the marble basin and emphasized by a yellow light so that blurred eyes could find it.

  And this last touch: a small cabinet offering remedies for headache, dizziness, nau
sea, and any other aftereffects of the night’s festivities, each bottle marked in large, glowing letters as to contents and purpose.

  The headache remedy was all Alexand needed. He downed one of the tablets and returned to the bedroom, wondering what Ser Alton could offer to remedy—what was it? Not depression. Ennui, perhaps.

  He should have stayed home. His week’s leave had been crowded enough with social and House obligations, and there was more remedy for ennui in an hour with Rich than a night of Alton Robek’s revelries.

  He walked to the open window, his passage silent, bare feet sinking into the thermcarpet. The room was still dark, but the eastern sky was coloring with fragile pinks that reflected on the calm sea and tinged the breakers at the foot of the sheer cliffs below him with lavender. The clean scent of the sea was borne on a light breeze cool on his naked skin. There was no evidence of the season visible from this window; still, the chill of the wind hinted of autumn and of winter to come. He looked down at the whispering surf and in this dawn solitude felt a curious sense of nonexistence, as if he displaced no space. It was not an uncomfortable sensation.

  He turned and let his gaze rest on the fancifully canopied and curtained bed, an irony-weighted smile pulling at his lips. A remedy for ennui . . .

  Ser Alton did his best.

  Not that Alton had ever actually “provided” his cousin Elianne. The Lady Elianne Robek provided herself to whom she pleased, and Alexand pleased her.

  He went to the bed and pushed back the filmy curtain. A remedy. At least a transitory one; that was something.

  The Lady Elianne also pleased Alexand, but in the sense that he was pleased by an exquisite piece of sculpture, a work of art given the dimension of life. She lay on her side, blithely asleep, one arm crossing her breasts at an oblique angle, golden hair fanning across the pillow, her skin as silky as the sheet that crumpled in soft folds at her waist, clinging to the long, complex curve of hip melding into thigh. The night’s revelry hadn’t diminished her beauty in the least. The time would come when it would begin to tell, but she still held the bloom of youth in her fine, childlike features.