The Born Queen Part 2

But another part of him knew that was stupid. It was ritual. Any intelligent, attentive person-and certainly any initiate of Decma.n.u.s, for instance-would be able to find his way back here, blindfolded or not. Only initiates and sacrifices made this journey to the place beneath, to the real Caillo Vaillaimo.

He began picking out details in the guttering light of the torches that plenished two score wall sockets. The chamber was carved into the living stone the temple was built upon, its natural sandy hue made orange by the firelight. Rows of semicircular benches climbed before him, but all were empty save for three seats raised up at the back and the throne behind them. Two of the three were occupied by the other two tribiceri, and as Hespero watched, Mylton completed their number.

The Fratrex Prismo sat the throne, of course.

"Where are we?" Brother Helm asked.

"The Obfuscate Senaz of the Hierovasi," Hespero replied.

The Fratrex Prismo suddenly raised his voice:

CommenumusPispis post oraumusEhtrad ezois verus Taces est.

"Izic deivumus," the others chorused, and Hespero realized with faint surprise that he had responded along with everyone else. the others chorused, and Hespero realized with faint surprise that he had responded along with everyone else.

Well, he had been in the Church a long while. Much of what he did was reflex.

Niro Fabulo had been in the clergy longer than Hespero. The Fratrex Prismo was almost eighty. The hair streaming from beneath the black-and-gold crown was white, and his eyes, once blue, had been bleached to tinted ice. He had an arched Vitellian nose and a persistent tick in his sagging left cheek.

"Well," Fabulo said, almost sighing. "You surprise me, Hespero."

"How so, your grace?"

"You've delivered yourself here after all of your crimes. I thought I would have to have you brought in by the ear."

"You don't know me very well, then," Hespero said.

"Don't be impertinent," Fabulo snapped. He leaned back in his chair. "I'll never know what Niro Lucio saw in you, I really won't. I know you took your vows together, but that was more than thirty years ago."

"I don't understand what you're implying," Hespero said.

"When you left the college, you went off to some tiny attish in the Bairghs and distinguished yourself in no way whatever. But Lucio stayed here and rose in rank. When he was l.u.s.trated as praifec, he called for you. He swayed the senaz to make you amplulo of Crotheny and later praifec."

"I'm flattered you know so much about me."

"What I know does not flatter you," he snapped. "And yet I knew Lucio. He was loyal, above all loyal to the Church. He was not one who usually counted friends.h.i.+p toward a qualification. I wonder if something more than friends.h.i.+p did not prompt your rise in position."

"Does my record since that time suggest I was unqualified?"

Niro Fabulo shook his head. "No, indeed. You have been exemplary in every way, or at least that is what the record reflects. Until the last year or so, that is, and there things go very wrong. Shall I catalogue your major failures?"

"If it pleases you, your grace."

"It does not, but I shall do so." He leaned forward.

"You failed to stop William from naming his daughters as heirs. You promised to manage that mistake, yet again you failed. Not only is one of the daughters still alive, she now sits the throne. Now, that in itself is enough failure for a lifetime, Hespero. You failed to quicken the faneways of the shrouded lords in the King's Forest. And despite all of this"-he mopped his brow with his sleeve-"despite all of this, my predecessor, your dear friend Lucio, entrusted you with the arrow of Aitas in order to slay the Briar King. This also you failed to do, and now the arrow is lost to us."

Hespero started to retort to that last accusation, but thought better of it. What was the point? It was mostly true, especially as concerned Anne. He could only blame himself for choosing such unstable allies in the matter. The faneways were of little consequence, really, and Lucio had known that.

But Lucio was dead, most probably at the hand of the man now accusing him. Niro Fabulo didn't begin to understand Hespero's real failure.

"Finally," the prismo prismo concluded, "you took cowardly flight from your post in Eslen." concluded, "you took cowardly flight from your post in Eslen."

"Did I?"

"Yes."

"Interesting. In what month do your reports have that happening?

"Just after Yule."

"That was when King Robert was on the throne and months before Anne raised her army. What do you imagine I was fleeing?"

"You left no explanation of your whereabouts," Fabulo said. "What are we to a.s.sume?"

"Does it matter?" Hespero asked, his voice sounding eerily calm and uncustomarily blunt in his own ears. "You've murdered Lucio, and now you're purging his friends. I'm one of them. Why all this talk?"

"Lucio was a fool," Fabulo said. "Lucio never really understood the prophecies or what must be done now. He was too much of the past. But I think you and he were up to something. And I rather want to know what that was."

"A failure like me? What could I be up to?" Hespero asked.

"That's what we're going to find out," Fabulo said.

Hespero felt his throat go dry, and for an instant the words stuck in his throat, coming out as a sort of gasp.

"What?" the prismo prismo demanded. demanded.

Hespero took a deep breath and raised his head.

"You are are going to find out," he repeated, clearly this time. "But not the way you'd like." going to find out," he repeated, clearly this time. "But not the way you'd like."

Hespero saw Fabulo's brow descend and his mouth open to speak.

I am Hespero, he thought. He clenched his teeth, then relaxed and let the incantation come. he thought. He clenched his teeth, then relaxed and let the incantation come.

"Shadowed saints who walk all ways, know all fanes. Be with me."

He let the cold waters beneath the world rush in through his feet, and they went numb, followed quickly by his legs, crotch, and belly. He felt his heart stop, and he knew he did not have long. Then the numbness reached his head, and the voices around him dropped away. He could still see, but the figures before him appeared tiny, the torches like little bra.s.s jewels. He felt hollowed and stretched by the power of the fane beneath him.

What was he doing? Who was he? Faces were fading in his mind. He glanced at the man beside him and could not remember his name. The place itself no longer seemed familiar.

Now he felt a current tug; the tide had come into him, and now it was going out. When it went, it would take him with it.

Unless...

There was an "unless," but he couldn't remember what it was. But he did see something across the unfamiliar s.p.a.ce, something his eye told him was the shape of a man but was also something else. It was a river, a stream, a swift bright current. It was beautiful, and he reached for it like a man dying of thirst.

Everything else was paling. The spring was too far away, and the pull inside him was so strong. strong. He realized he had stopped breathing, and suddenly he no longer cared. He could rest, forget, sleep. He realized he had stopped breathing, and suddenly he no longer cared. He could rest, forget, sleep.

No. I am still Marche Hespero. Son of...

He couldn't recall. With an inchoate cry, he flung himself at the effulgent waters, and something in him reached farther than his paralyzed body, and he felt the stream that wasn't a stream with fingers that weren't fingers, and he drew it into him as if drinking. The separation of his soul and corpse eased, and he drank deeper, opening himself completely as everything faded into black.

Impossible, someone seemed to say. someone seemed to say.

Hespero felt his grin, a grim crescent slicing through two worlds.

Impossible. You have not walked the faneway. Only I...

"You're right," Hespero said. "But I am attuned to it."

Not as I am.

Hespero suddenly felt the chill replaced by fever, and his body stiffened, then began to dissolve.

"No," he gritted.

Yes. You surprised me...

"Yes," Hespero gasped.

But I am the more powerful here.

Hespero clenched his fists, but the strain tore his fingers loose from his hands. An instant later his shoulders sagged, and both arms dropped off.

No.

His spine wobbled and then began to crumble, and his torso almost gently collapsed as his knees dissolved. His body broke apart, the black current towing the pieces away.

s.h.i.+vering with fear, Hespero renewed his grasp on the brightness even as he began to stretch thinner and thinner, becoming a stream himself.

"Here," a voice suddenly said. He couldn't see anything, but he suddenly felt something s.h.i.+very and hot. a voice suddenly said. He couldn't see anything, but he suddenly felt something s.h.i.+very and hot.

"I remember," he murmured. "I remember this."

"Then hurry. You will soon forget."

The voice was right, for even as Hespero struck with the thing, he was no longer sure what he was doing, or why, or- Something like a scream, and then, and then...

Revelation.

Images came first, fractured and whole. Scents, textures, pain and pleasure, the stuff of matter, the stuff of life but peeled off of life, adrift.

But no longer adrift. In him, now.

The first came from Fabulo: fear and exhilaration. Yes, it had been murder, Lucio's death, subtle poison, but then, it was all too fast, a life falling backward, flashes jumping out. The electric tingle of the faneway of Saint Diuvo, the stroke of a woman's fingers, running through a field of tall wheat, the tap of his head on the cold marble of a chapel in z'Espino, s.h.i.+vering, hot, confused in chaffing blankets, the softness of linen, wonder, a face that was the universe, the sweet scent of mother's milk, pain, light...

And then, for a long while, Hespero could not think at all as the well of knowledge opened, filled him, and-just as he thought he could endure no more-closed.

Something spasmed, and he felt his fingernails biting into his palms, a painful vise on each arm, and in his chest a terrible shuddering.

My heart, he thought. he thought. My heart. My heart.

It shuddered again, and his chest felt crushed.

Then a thump, pause, thump-thump, pause, thump.

And the agony eased to hurt, then relief. Gasping, he opened his eyes.

"You did it," Sir Eldon said. The knight was holding him up by his left arm. Brother Helm had the right.

He fought his gaze up the tiers of benches. Niro Fabulo slumped in his chair, eyes wide, skin already turning blue.

Mylton was just turning from the dead prismo, prismo, his jaw dropping. his jaw dropping.

"How?" he asked.

"The saints rejected him," Hespero wheezed. "They chose me."

"But you haven't walked the faneway," Mylton objected. "How could you use the holy source?"

"The saints make their will known through me directly," Hespero a.s.serted.

"That's impossible."

"It is a fact," Hespero managed. "You all saw. You must have felt."

"Yes," another of the tribiceri-L'Ossel-said. "Don't you see? Don't you remember? It's true. The prophecy says, 'and he will draw the power of Saint Diuvo, although he has not walked in his steps.'"

A general murmur went up from what had been a stunned silence.

"He is the real Fratrex Prismo," L'Ossel went on. "He is the one meant to lead us in the final days."

Hespero rallied what little remained of his strength and shook himself free of the supporting hands.

"I will not brook doubt," he said. "Time is short, and too much has to be done. If anyone else would challenge me, let it be now."

He lifted his chin. Against all odds, he had survived both the fane and Fabulo. He had nothing left now. If even the weakest of them challenged him, it was all over.

But instead, they all went to their knees.

And a few days later, he was t.i.tled Fratrex Prismo Niro Marco.

It had a nice ring to it.