He made his way down into the valley, staying low in the bracken when he could, scampering across open ground when he had to. He got to the river, where there was better cover from the bushes that grew on the bank, and followed it up towards the hermitage. There was a lot of activity surrounding the newly arrived vessel. The Sentinels had all but abandoned their patrol duties to guard it. They stationed themselves along the path between the house and the landing pad.
You should leave it alone, he told himself. Take advantage of the distraction. Get inside the building. Do what you came here to do.
A minute later he was creeping through the bracken, edging his way closer to the landing pad to get a better look. He just wanted to know what all the fuss was about.
The craft rested on the tarmac, bathed in its own harsh light. Though the cargo ramp was down, it still had its thrusters running and the aerium engines fired up. Evidently it wasn’t staying for long.
When he’d got as close as he dared, Frey squatted down to watch. The wind rustled the bracken around him. The craft had a name painted on its underside: the Moment of Silence. He’d never heard of it.
The Sentinels had organised themselves as though they expected an attack, guarding the route between the craft and the door of the building, which stood open. They were dressed in grey, high-collared cassocks of the same cut that all the Awakeners wore. They carried rifles and wore twinned daggers at their waists. The Cipher was emblazoned in black on their breasts: a complex design of small, linked circles.
Sentinels, Crake had explained, were not true Awakeners. They lacked the skill or the intelligence to be ordained into the mysteries of the order. That was why they only wore the Cipher on their breast, not tattooed on their foreheads. They devoted themselves to the cause in other ways, as protectors of the faith. They were not known to be especially well trained or deadly, but they were disciplined. Frey resolved to treat them with the same respect he gave anyone carrying a weapon capable of putting a hole in him.
Everyone was on the alert. Something important was happening.
There was movement by the house, and several Sentinels emerged. They were carrying a large, iron-bound chest between them, straining under its weight. The chest was a work of art, lacquered in dark red and closed with a clasp fashioned in the shape of a wolf’s head. Frey was suddenly very keen to find out what was inside.
The Sentinels had hauled it up the path and had almost reached the craft when two figures came down the cargo ramp to meet them. Frey felt a chill jolt at the sight of them. Being so close to the craft didn’t seem like such a good idea any more.
They were dressed head to toe in close-fitting suits of black leather. Not an inch of their skin was showing. They wore gloves and boots, and cloaks with their hoods pulled up. Their faces were hidden behind smooth black masks, through which only the eyes could be seen.
Imperators. The Awakeners’ most dreaded operatives. Men who could suck the thoughts right out of your head, if the stories were to be believed. Men whose stare could send you mad.
Frey hunkered down further into the bracken.
The Sentinels put the chest down in front of the Imperators, then one of them knelt and opened it. Frey was too far away to see what was within.
One of the Imperators nodded, satisfied, and the chest was closed. The Sentinels lifted it and carried it up the Moment of Silence’s cargo ramp. They emerged seconds later, having left their burden inside. A few words were exchanged, and then one of the Imperators boarded the craft. The other turned to follow, but suddenly hesitated, his head tilted as if listening. Then he turned, and fixed his gaze on the spot where Frey hid in the bracken.
An awful sensation washed over him: foul, seething, corrupt. Frey’s heart thumped hard in terror. He ducked down, out of sight, burying himself among the stalks and leaves. The loamy smell of wet soil and the faintly acrid tang of bracken filled his nostrils. He willed himself to be a stone, a rabbit, some small and insignificant thing. Anything that would be beneath the Imperator’s notice. Some distant part of him was aware that such overwhelming fear wasn’t natural, that there was some power at work here; but reason and logic had fled.
Then, all at once, the feeling was gone. The fear left him. He stayed huddled, not daring to move, breathing hard, soaked in relief. It had passed, it had passed. He murmured desperate thanks, addressed to no one. Never again, he swore. Never again would he go through that. Those few seconds had been among the most horrible of his life.
He heard the whine of the hydraulics as the cargo ramp slid shut. Electromagnets throbbed as the aerium engines got to work. The Moment of Silence was taking off.
Frey gathered his courage and raised his head, peering out above the bracken. The Imperators were gone. All eyes were on the craft. Frey took advantage of the moment, and scampered away towards the hermitage.
By damn, what did that thing do to me?
He could only remember one event vaguely comparable to the ordeal he’d just suffered. He’d been young, perhaps seventeen, and he and some friends went out to some fields where some very ‘special’ mushrooms grew. The night had started off with hilarity and ended with Frey seized by a crushing paranoia, afraid that his heart was going to burst, and being mobbed by hallucinatory bats. That senseless, primal fear had turned a confident young man into a quivering wreck. Now he’d been brushed by it again.
His breathing had returned to normal by the time he got to the hermitage, and he had himself under control again. Shaken, but unharmed. He approached the building from behind, where there were no guards to be seen, and pressed himself against the cool stone of the wall. Security was lax here. He had that to be thankful for. The guards didn’t expect any trouble. They were only here for protection against pirates and other marauders, who might find the idea of a hermitage full of nubile, sex-starved young women somewhat alluring.
Frey cheered at the thought. He’d forgotten about the nubile, sex-starved part. It made his mistake back in Aulenfay twinge a little less, although his cheeks still burned at the memory.
He’d studied the Awakeners in Olden Square and picked Crake’s brains about their faith for a purpose. His idea was to disguise himself as a Speaker, to blend in seamlessly, and thereby move about the hermitage unopposed. Congratulating himself on his unusually thorough preparations, he’d surprised Crake by appearing in full Speaker dress: the high-collared white cassock with red piping, the sandals, the Cipher painted on his forehead in a passable impression of a tattoo.
‘What do you think?’ he asked proudly.
Crake burst out laughing, before explaining to the rather miffed captain that Awakener hermitages were always single sex institutions. Acolytes were allowed no contact with the opposite gender. In Amalicia’s hermitage, all the tutors and students would be female. The male guards would be forbidden to go inside except under special circumstances, and even then the female acolytes would be kept to their rooms. Lust interfered with the meditation necessary to communicate with the Allsoul.
‘So you’re telling me that there’s a building full of women who haven’t even seen a man in years?’ Frey had demanded to know.
‘What I’m telling you is that your cunning disguise is going to be pretty useless in there, since there shouldn’t be a male Speaker within twenty kloms of that hermitage,’ said Crake. ‘However, it’s interesting that you jumped to the other conclusion first. I never pegged you as a glass-half-full kind of person.’
‘Well, a man must make the best of things,’ Frey replied, already envisioning a pleasant death by sexual exhaustion, after being brutally abused by dozens of rampant adolescent beauties.
So Frey had discarded the uniform. Pinn found it later and had been wearing it ever since, for a joke, pretending to be an Awakener. It was funny for the first few hours, but Pinn, encouraged, had carried the joke far past its natural end and now it was just annoying. Frey wouldn’t be surprised if Malvery had beaten him up and burned the robe by the time he got back. He
rather hoped so.
He found two small doors, recessed in alcoves, but the Awakeners who ran the hermitage were sensible enough to keep them locked. He considered breaking a window, but they were set high up in the wall and were very narrow. He wouldn’t want to get stuck in one. Finally he found the entrance to a storm cellar which looked as if it led under the house. Hurricanes were frequent in these parts. A padlock secured a thick chain, locking the doors to the cellar. Both were stout and new. It looked like it would take a lot of sawing and hammering to get through that. An intruder would certainly be caught before they gained access.
Frey drew his cutlass and touched its tip to the lock.
‘Think you can?’ he asked it. He didn’t really believe it could understand him, but as ever, it seemed to know his intention. He felt it begin to vibrate in his hands. A thin, quiet whine came from the metal. Soon it was joined by another note, setting up a weird, off-key harmonic that set Frey’s teeth on edge. The lock began to jitter and shake.
Suddenly, by its own accord, the cutlass swept up and down, smashing into the lock. The shackle broke away from the padlock and the chain slithered free. The blade itself was unmarked by the impact. Frey hadn’t even felt the jolt up his sword arm.
He regarded the daemon-thralled cutlass that Crake had given him as the price of his passage. Best deal he ever made, he reckoned, as he sheathed it again.
He climbed into the storm cellar before anyone came to investigate the noise. Steps led down to a lit room, from which he could hear the growl and rattle of machinery. He slipped inside, shut the cellar door behind him, and crept onward into the hermitage.
Fourteen
A Ghastly Encounter - Intruder In The Hermitage - A Heartfelt Letter - Reunion
Frey stepped warily into the dim electric glow of smoke-grimed bulbs. The room at the bottom of the stairs was the powerhouse of the hermitage, dominated by a huge old generator that whined and screeched and shook. It took Frey a while to persuade himself that the ancient machine wasn’t in imminent danger of detonation, but in the end logic triumphed over instinct. Since it had obviously been running for fifty years or more, the idea that it would explode just as he was passing would be such incredible bad luck that even Frey couldn’t believe it would happen.
Pipes ran from the generator to several water boilers and storage batteries, linking them to the central mass like the legs of some bloated mechanical spider. The air pounded with the unsteady rhythm of the generator and everything stank of prothane fumes. Frey’s head began to swim unpleasantly.
He crept forward, his cutlass held ready. He always preferred blades in close quarters. The powerhouse was shadowy and full of dark corners and aisles from which someone could emerge and surprise him. He hadn’t discounted the possibility that he might run into a mechanic down here, or maybe even a guard, although they’d need lungs like engines to breathe these fumes for long.
The generator banged noisily and he shied away, threatening it with the tip of his cutlass. When nothing calamitous happened, he relaxed again, feeling a little stupid.
Just get out of here, he told himself. Abandoning caution, he hurried through the room with his arm over his face, breathing through the sleeve of his coat.
If there was anyone else down there, he neither saw nor heard them. A few stone steps led up to a heavy door, which was unlocked. He peered in, and found himself in an untidy antechamber full of tools. Dirty gloves and rubber masks with gas filters hung on pegs. Frey shut the door behind him, muffling the sound of the generator. There was another door leading to a room beyond, and now he could hear loud snoring from the other side.
Snoring was good. Unless it was a particularly cunning decoy - Frey briefly imagined a sharp-eyed assassin waiting behind the door, dagger raised, snoring loudly - then it suggested the enemy was unaware, unarmed and at a massive disadvantage, which was the only way Frey would fight anyone if he could help it.
He lifted the door on its hinges to minimise the squeak, pushed it open, and immediately recoiled. The room beyond reeked overwhelmingly of cheesy feet and stale flatulence, strong enough that Frey had to fight down the urge to gag. He glanced briefly at one of the gas masks hanging on the wall, then took a deep breath and slipped inside.
The place was a wreck. Every surface was covered in discarded plates of food, half-drunk bottles of milk that had long gone bad, and pornographic ferrotypes from certain seedy publications (Frey saw several women he recognised). In the corner, on a pallet bed surrounded by discarded chicken bones and bottles of grog, lay a mound of hairy white flesh entangled in a filthy blanket. It took Frey a few moments to work out where the head was. He only found it when a gaping wet hole appeared in the crumb-strewn black thatch of a face, and there emerged a terrible snore like the death-rattle of a congested warthog.
Frey kept his sword pointed at the quivering mass of the caretaker’s naked belly, and edged through the room towards the door at the far end. Finding it locked, he cast around the room and located a key under a scattering of toenail clippings. He extracted it gingerly, slipped it in the lock and went through. The caretaker, deep in his drunken slumber, never stirred.
It took him some time to find his way to the dormitories. A quick search established that the basement level of the building was a maze of gloomy corridors and pipes, sealed off from the hermitage proper, presumably to stop the caretaker getting in and giving the acolytes a nasty shock. There must have been another entrance for the caretaker, since the storm doors had been locked on the outside, but Frey never found it. What he did find was a chimney flue, which he climbed with considerable difficulty and much discomfort.
When he emerged, sooty and dishevelled, from the fireplace, he found himself in a small hall. Doors led off to other rooms, and a wide staircase went up to the floor above. The place had a clean, quiet, country feel: the cool, pensive atmosphere of an old house at night. Bulbs shone from simple iron sconces; decoration was understated and minimal. There were no idols of worship or shrines, such as the old gods might have demanded. The only evidence of this building’s purpose was a shadowy, gold-framed portrait of King Andreal of Glane, father of the Awakeners and the last ever King. He’d been painted in his most regal pose. It betrayed none of the madness that later took him, and set him to burbling prophecies which ended up having far more influence over the country than he ever did while he ruled it.
There was little here to distract the mind from its devotions. Instead, there were only panelled doors, strong beams, smooth banisters, and the frowning sensation of trespass that settled heavier on Frey with every passing moment.
There are no guards. Only women inside, he reminded himself. Since when have you been scared of women?
Then he remembered Trinica Dracken, and he felt a little nauseous. Of all the people in the world he never wanted to see again, she was top of the list.
Forget her for now, he thought. You’ve a job to do.
He dusted himself down as best he could, though he was still covered in sooty smears when he finished. Having made himself as presentable as possible, he looked through the nearest doorway. A short corridor led to an empty wooden room, with only a small brazier in the centre. Mats were laid out in a circle around it. A skylight let in the glow of the moon.
A meditation chamber, Frey guessed, backtracking. The Awakeners were very keen on meditation, Crake had told him. Sitting around doing nothing took many years of practice, he’d added with a sneer.
Other doorways let out on to other corridors, which took him to a small study, a filing room full of cabinets and paper, and a classroom with desks in rows of three. Any windows he saw were set high up on the wall, too high to look through without using a stepladder. Obviously interest in the outside world was discouraged.
He soon came upon a room with a stone table, red-stained blood-gutters running down it. Frey’s alarming visions of human sacrifice faded when he remembered that many Awakeners used the reading of entrails to understand the Allsoul.
As he was wondering how it all might work, he heard the distant whisper of footsteps and female voices in conversation. Someone was up, even at this hour. It was difficult to tell if they were heading his way or not, but he returned to the hall to be safe, and then went up the stairs.
The problem of actually finding Amalicia once he was inside the hermitage hadn’t greatly troubled Frey during the planning of his daring infiltration. He’d been sidetracked by delicious visions of what an army of cloistered girls might do when a man turned up in their midst. In the face of that, the details seemed rather unimportant. But now he realised that he hadn’t the faintest idea where his target was, and his only option was to keep nosing around until something presented itself.
There was another small concern that had been nagging him. It had been two years, more or less, since Amalicia’s father sent her to the hermitage. Granted, the point of a hermitage was to keep acolytes in isolation for twice that, but still, two years was a long time. He wasn’t even certain she was here at all. Maybe her father had forgiven her and let her out?