She could save us, he thought stubbornly. She could.
Chapter 4
Matters of Conscience
Flee, we are in the hands of a wolf.
—Giovanni de’ Medici, upon the ascension of Rodrigo Borgia, POPE ALEXANDER VI
Father Tyler should have been at ease. He was reading, sitting in the comfortable chair at his desk, and reading usually calmed him, reminded him that there was a world beyond this one, a better world that seemed almost tangible. But this was the rare day when reading calmed nothing. Tyler had covered the same two pages several times before he finally put down his book and gave up. The candle on his desk was covered with dried drips of wax, and without thinking, Tyler began to peel them off. His fingers worked independently of his brain, peeling and peeling, as he stared out the window.
The Holy Father had died two weeks ago, on the last day of May. Cardinal Anders had succeeded him, in a conclave so short that a few of the more distant cardinals arrived to find him already in the Holy Father’s seat. The Holy Father, recognizing a political mind as sharp as his own, had handpicked Anders as his successor years ago, and everything had proceeded as it should.
But Tyler was afraid.
The new Holy Father had attended to many things since taking the robes. He immediately fired five cardinals, men with known reformist sympathies, men who’d spoken against Anders during his tenure. Their sees went to nobles’ sons for more than a thousand pounds each. The new Holy Father had also hired sixteen new bookkeepers for the Arvath, increasing the total to forty. Some of these new bookkeepers were not even ordained men; several of them looked and sounded as though the Holy Father had plucked them right off the streets of the Gut. Tyler and his brothers had heard nothing, but the conclusion was clear: more money would be coming in.
Then there was Tyler’s own position. The old Holy Father had been too preoccupied with fighting death to take Tyler to task, but Tyler knew that he would not escape the new Holy Father’s housecleaning attentions for long. Already, last Sunday, Tyler had found Anders’s eyes seeking him out in the crowd during the convocation. Anders wanted information on Queen Kelsea, damning information, and Tyler had given him nothing. The Queen had already made several moves that presaged trouble for the Church, beginning with a proscription on the use of underage clerical aides to satisfy tithing debts. Tyler, who had been one of these aides himself, had enjoyed his childhood, but he understood the argument; not all priests were Father Alan. Now parishes would have to hire real aides, aides whose salaries would be paid from money already earmarked for the Arvath treasury.
But worse had followed: the Queen had announced that the Church’s property tax exemption would end in the coming year. Starting in January, the Church would have to pay tax on all of its holdings up and down the Tearling, including the big prize: thousands of acres of high-producing farmland in the northern Almont. For the Arvath, this was a financial cataclysm. With the help of her foulmouthed but undeniably clever Treasurer, the Queen had also preempted the Holy Father’s protests by decreeing that the Crown’s private landholdings would no longer be exempt either. The Queen would pay property tax alongside the Church, and the money would be earmarked for public works and social services.
Without enforcement, these decrees would mean nothing. But from overheard conversation in the Keep, Tyler also knew that the Queen and Arliss had begun to quietly convert a large portion of the Census Bureau over to the business of tax assessment and collection. It was a clever move. Census men were already entrenched in every village of the Tearling, tracking the population, and it would not be a stretch for them to track income as well. Arlen Thorne would have screamed bloody murder, but Thorne was nowhere to be found, and without him, the Census was a far more malleable animal. There would be plenty of Crown employees to make sure that God’s Church forked over every last pound due.
This morning, word had gone like quicksilver through the halls of the dormitory level: they were all wanted in the chapel at nine this evening. No one knew what it was about, but the Holy Father required every priest in the Arvath to be there. Such a gathering was unlike Cardinal Anders, who always worked in the shadows, meeting one-on-one so that no one else knew his plans. Tyler sensed something terrible on the horizon. It was eight thirty.
“I know that you know, priest.”
Tyler jumped to his feet, knocking over the candle. He turned, and the Mace was there, leaning against the wall beside his bookshelves.
“You know that I can’t read.”
Tyler stared at him, speechless and frightened. He had known that he was treading on thin ice the other day, jumping into the Queen’s conversation, but he had been unable to watch the Mace wriggle there, like a hooked fish. And Tyler’s move had worked, for the Queen had forgotten about the note. It was only when Tyler met the Mace’s gaze afterward that he saw fire, hell, murder.
“How did you find out?” the Mace asked.
“I guessed.”
“Who have you told?”
“No one.”
The Mace straightened, and Tyler closed his eyes, trying to pray. The Mace would kill him, and Tyler’s last, odd thought was that the man had done him a great honor by coming in person.
“I want you to teach me.”
Tyler’s eyes popped open. “Teach you what?”
“How to read.”
Tyler glanced at the closed door of his room. “How did you get in here?”
“There’s always another door.”
Before Tyler could consider this idea, the Mace darted forward, catlike and silent. Tyler tensed, pressing backward against his chair, but the Mace only grabbed the other chair from beside the bookshelves, placed it facing Tyler, and sat down, his expression truculent.
“Will you teach me?”
Tyler wondered what would happen if he refused. The Mace had not come here to kill him, perhaps, but that could always change. The Mace had joined Queen Elyssa’s Guard at the age of fourteen, and now he was at least forty years old. Illiteracy was a difficult thing for anyone to hide, but it must have been nearly impossible for a Queen’s Guard. Still, the Mace had gotten away with it all of these years.
Tyler glanced down and saw something extraordinary: the Mace’s hand, resting on the arm of the chair, was trembling, a slight flutter that was almost imperceptible. As unbelievable as the idea seemed, Tyler realized that the Mace was afraid.
Of me?
Of course not, you old fool.
Then of what?
After another moment’s thought, he knew. The Mace couldn’t bear to ask for help, not from anyone. Tyler stared, marveling, at the terrifying man sitting across from him—the courage it must have taken him to come here!—and before he knew it, the words were out.
“I’ll teach you.”
“Good.” The Mace leaned forward, businesslike. “Let’s start now.”
“I can’t,” Tyler told him, lifting apologetic hands as the Mace’s expression darkened. “All of us are supposed to attend a meeting in the chapel at nine o’clock.” He checked his watch. It was a quarter to nine. “In fact, I should go now.”
“A meeting about what?”
“I don’t know. The Holy Father demands the presence of every priest in the Arvath.”
“Have there been many of these meetings?”
“This is the only one.”
The Mace’s eyes narrowed.
“Come back tomorrow, just after supper. Seven o’clock. We can start then.”
The Mace nodded. “Which chapel is this meeting in? The main, or the Holy Father’s private?”
“The main,” Tyler replied, raising his eyebrows. “You know the Arvath very well.”
“Of course I do.” A hint of contempt crept into the Mace’s voice. “It’s my business to know of danger to my mistress.”
“What does that mean?”
The Mace went to Tyler’s clothes rack and pulled a robe from its hook. “You are not a stupid man, priest. Pope and kings
make poor bedfellows.”
Tyler thought of the new appointees to the accounting office, men who looked more like criminal enforcers than priests of the Arvath. “I’m only a bookkeeper.”
“Not anymore.” The Mace put on his weekend robe. Priests’ robes were meant to fit loosely, but the material hung tight on the Mace’s huge frame. “You’re the Keep Priest, Father. You can’t avoid picking a side forever.”
Tyler stared at him, unable to reply, as the Mace ran his hand over the wall beside Tyler’s desk. His hand stilled, then pressed hard, and Tyler’s mouth dropped open as a door swung inward, a door whose edges had been cleverly concealed by the uneven mortar of the wall. The Mace stepped into the darkness, then leaned back into Tyler’s room, a twinkle of humor in his dark eyes.
“Seven o’clock tomorrow, Father. I will be here.”
A moment later, there was nothing facing Tyler but a blank stone wall.
The bell for convocation rang, and he jumped; he was going to be late. He grabbed one of his chapel robes and threw it over his head as he hurried down the hallway. The arthritis in his hip began clamoring, but Tyler ignored it, pushing himself harder. If he entered late, word would surely get back to the Holy Father.
Hurrying through the door of the chapel, Tyler found his brother priests already assembled in long, straight rows on either side of the central aisle. Up on the dais, the Holy Father stood behind the podium, his sharp eyes seeming to burn through Tyler as he stood frozen in the doorway.
“Ty.”
He looked down and saw that Wyde, sitting on the end of the last bench, had scooted over to make a space. Tyler gave him a grateful look as he squeezed in, bowing his head respectfully. But his unease persisted. The sight of Anders in the white robes was still a shock to Tyler; to him—and no doubt, many of the older priests—the Holy Father was, and always would be, the old, shrunken man who now lay entombed beneath the Arvath. Tyler didn’t grieve the old Holy Father, but he couldn’t deny that the man had left his mark on the place; he’d sat in the seat for too long.
Anders held up his hands for silence, and the shuffling stopped. The room was as still as stone.
“Brothers, we are not clean.”
Tyler looked up sharply. Anders gazed across the room with a benevolent smile, a smile that suited a Holy Father, but his eyes were deep and dark, filled with a righteous fury that made Tyler’s stomach tighten with anxiety.
“Disease begins with contagion. God has demanded that we root out the contagion and eradicate the disease. My predecessor tolerated it, turning a blind eye. I will not.”
Tyler and Wyde stared at each other, bewildered. The old Holy Father had tolerated many vices, certainly, but they seemed like the sort of vices that wouldn’t bother Anders at all. Anders kept two private servants, young women who had been turned over to the Arvath by their families in lieu of the tithe. When Anders had moved into the Holy Father’s lavish apartments in the pinnacle of the Arvath, the women had followed, even though the new residence came equipped with an army of acolytes ready to serve the Holy Father’s every whim. Anders might call his women servants, but everyone knew what they were. The new Holy Father was no stranger to vice, but now, as he turned and gestured to someone behind the dais, light glinted off the tiny golden hammer pinned to his white robes, and Tyler froze in sudden comprehension.
Two of the Holy Father’s aides emerged from the hallway behind the dais. Between them was Father Seth.
Tyler bit back a groan. Seth and Tyler had received their ordinations in the same year, but Tyler hadn’t seen him in a long time. Ever since Seth had been given his own parish in Burnham, out in the southern Reddick, he rarely visited the Arvath. He was a good man and a good priest, so no one ever spoke of it, but all the same, everyone knew about Seth. Even back when they were all novices, Seth had always liked men. Due to Tyler’s position as a bookkeeper, he knew that Father Seth kept a companion out in the Reddick, a man far too old to be a clerical aide, although Seth’s records listed him as such. When the clerical aide had appeared, Seth’s board expenditures had increased significantly, but Tyler had never called attention to this; priests and cardinals all over the Tear kept questionable companions and paid for them with the same contortionist’s accounting. But Seth’s aide was the wrong gender, and Anders must have found out.
“I will go through the Church and root out the backsliders!” Anders thundered. Tyler had never heard Anders preach before, and a distant part of his mind noted that the man had a wonderful speaking voice, deep and booming, reaching the farthest corners of the chapel and echoing back. “We will purge and cleanse! And we will start with this creature, a priest who has not only violated God’s law, but used Church funds to subsidize his sickness! Supporting his foul lifestyle with his parish’s tithe!”
Tyler bit his lip, wishing that he had the courage to speak. It was wrong, what was happening here, and Wyde, beside him, knew it too; he looked at Tyler with helpless, gleaming eyes. Wyde and Seth had been good friends too, all those years ago, when they had all been young together.
“God has been wronged! And for every wrong, God demands vengeance!”
At this, Wyde closed his eyes and bowed his head. Tyler wanted to shout, loud echoes that would bring the vaulted ceiling down over their heads. But he remained silent.
“Seth has forgotten his duty to God! We will remind him!” Anders’s voice dropped suddenly; he had ducked behind the table. When he straightened, he was holding a knife.
“Dear God,” Wyde muttered. Tyler merely blinked in surprise, wondering if this entire evening was a dream that had suddenly veered into nightmare . . . the Mace’s strange visit, the disturbing sight of the guard captain in clerical robes, and now this horrible torchlit scene: Seth’s pale face, alarm dawning in his eyes as he spotted the knife in Anders’s hand.
“Strip him.”
The two aides laid hold of Seth, who began to struggle. But Seth, like Tyler and Wyde, was in his seventies now, and the two younger men overpowered him easily. One pinned Seth’s arms behind his back while the other ripped his robe down the front and tore off the remains. Tyler averted his eyes, but not before he’d seen the evidence of time on Seth’s body: a narrow, sunken white chest; arms and legs that had lost all of their taut muscle and now hung with loose skin. Tyler saw much the same thing when he looked down at his own body, a body that had grown pale and slack. He recalled a summer, half a lifetime ago, when their ecclesiastical class had journeyed all the way to the coast, to New Dover, for a look at God’s Ocean. The water was a miraculous thing, vast and sparkling and endless, and when Wyde had thrown off his robes and dashed for the cliff edge, they had all followed him without thinking, leaping off the rocks and hurtling thirty feet down. The water had been brutally cold, agonizing, but the sun had been shining, a bright golden face above the limitless blue ocean, and in that moment Tyler was certain that God was looking directly at them, that He was infinitely pleased with what they were becoming.
“Our belief has grown slack,” Anders announced. His eyes glowed with a terrible fervor, and Tyler recalled a rumor he had once heard: that during his years with the Regent’s antisodomy squads, Anders had nearly killed a young homosexual, beating him with a plank of lumber until the boy was unconscious and covered in blood. The Regent’s other thugs had to haul Anders off, or he would undoubtedly have murdered the young man right there in the street. Panic slowly dawned as Tyler realized that this was no mere shaming exercise; Seth could be in real danger. Looking heavenward, he caught sight of a hulking, white-robed figure concealed in the shadows of the gallery: the Mace, his grim visage inscrutable beneath the cover of his hood, his eyes pinned on Anders, a hundred feet below.
Good, Tyler thought, almost angrily. It’s right that an outsider should see.
“Hold him.”
Anders moved in swiftly and his hands worked with almost surgical precision, so fast that Seth barely had time to make a sound before the deed was done. But Tyler an
d Wyde screamed together, their voices joining a chorus of cries that echoed back and forth between the stone walls of the chapel. Tyler looked down, unable to watch, and found Wyde’s hand in his, their fingers clasped in the unconscious manner of children.
When Anders straightened, his face was splattered with bright crimson. In his hand was a dripping red mass, which he flung into the corner of the chapel. Seth had gotten his breath back now, and his first scream was a mad cacophony of sound that seemed to bounce off the highest rafters of the chapel.
“Make sure he survives,” Anders ordered the aides. “His work isn’t done.”
The two acolytes took Seth between them and dragged him forward, down the stairs and then up the aisle between the rows of priests. Tyler didn’t want to look, but he had to. Red sheeted down Seth’s thighs and calves, and a crimson trail followed him up the aisle. Mercifully, Seth appeared to have lost consciousness; his eyes were closed and his head lolled against his shoulder. The acolytes staggered under his deadweight.
“Look and remember, brothers!” Anders thundered from the dais. “God’s Church has no room for panderers and sodomites! Your sin will be discovered, and God’s vengeance is swift!”