Camber the Heretic (65 page)

“The people will never stand for these insults to their king!” Murdoch snapped. “And those who continue to oppose his royal will could be construed as traitors!”

The word was a strong one. Murdoch had intended the shock value. As a murmur of outrage rippled through the assembled people, a few of the bishops exchanged uneasy glances, though Camber kept his head high and his eyes fixed unwaveringly on Murdoch—for it was Murdoch at whose word violence could erupt at any second. Behind the regent were mounted knights and men-at-arms for as far as he could see, almost blotting out the dingy, hoof-churned snow. These men, he knew, would have no qualms about riding into the cathedral itself, at the order of their leaders. And yet, for the sake of the Church which he now headed in Gwynedd, he could not accede to their wishes, even if it cost the lives of half the people in this place, as well as his own.

“My Lord Earl,” Camber responded, raising his hand and trying to temper his words with just the right balance of strength and acquiescence, “there are no traitors beneath this holy roof, and certainly none among my brother bishops. Every one of us swore at His Highness's coronation to uphold his lawful commands and to support his throne. None of us has forsworn his oath.”

“Then, obey this command!” Tammaron retorted.

“I cannot, for it is not lawful. Our oath pertained to temporal obedience. His Highness, in turn—and you, as his regents—swore to defend the spiritual well-being of his kingdom—which he does not do, if he tries to go against the lawful governance of the synod of bishops and their right freely to elect their primate.”

He had hit the crux of the matter, and Murdoch knew it. For a moment, the regent's jaw worked in silent rage, his face going almost purple in his anger. Nor were Tammaron and Hubert able to conceal their indignation, though Ewan, good soldier that he was, betrayed no sign of emotion.

For a moment, Camber thought he might have won the point—that the regents would back down, at least for the nonce.

But then Murdoch turned slightly in the saddle toward Alroy and mouthed something incomprehensible from where Camber stood. Alroy seemed to pale a little, but then he gave a tight little nod and raised his chin a trifle higher, his young face stiff and strained under the crosses and leaves he wore.

“Take them!” he said, in a voice which carried the full length of the cathedral.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-S
EVEN

As for the illusions of art magick, they were put down, and their vaunting in wisdom was reproved with disgrace
.

—Wisdom of Solomon 17:7

An instant of shock immobilized everyone within reach of his words, but only until Murdoch and Alroy eased their steeds to either side and the knights and mounted men-at-arms began pressing their big warhorses down the center aisle. Carpet had been laid for the ceremony, and it gave the chargers footing. The riders and following foot soldiers had penetrated perhaps a quarter of the way down the nave before the fact of their actions truly began to register. Then people began to scream and scatter before the hooves of the great horses and their riders.

“Sweet
Jesu
, I didn't think they'd dare to do it!” Dermot gasped to Camber, as all of the bishops began surging back into the choir. “Alister, you must get away. Don't let them take you!”

“Niallan?” Camber called. “Can you give us sanctuary?”

Niallan, pushing his way toward the sacristy door, gave a curt nod. “Aye, just let me go ahead. Dhassa's set as a Trap Portal just now, you know.”

“Let me come, too,” Dermot said. “Whatever happens, they've heard what I said today, and they count me as yours. They'll have Cashien away from me, in any case. Better that I'm free, if in exile.”

“Come, then,” Niallan nodded, pushing closer to the sacristy doorway.

The soldiers were more than halfway down the nave now, and the screams of the frightened and the inevitably injured echoed among the columns and arches of the great cathedral. In the sacristy, an appalled Tavis O'Neill cowered behind a garment press and watched as Bishops Niallan and Dermot scurried into the sacristy and stopped on the Portal square. Dermot spotted him as Niallan slipped into place behind him, and the human bishop turned his head to murmur something to the Deryni; but Niallan only shot Tavis a stern, forbidding look and then pulled Dermot closer. Then both men disappeared.

With a shudder, Tavis came out of his hiding place and scurried toward the Portal square himself. He had already stayed too long. He had to get out before someone else saw him.

He glanced out the sacristy door and almost collided with Jebediah. The Michaeline knight had his sword drawn and a murderous expression on his face, and he grabbed Tavis by the upper arm and shook him like a terrier.

“What the hell are you doing here? Get back to Javan!”

“I'm going now,” Tavis managed to mutter. “I—wanted to be able to report what had happened to Javan. Besides, you might need a Healer.”

“We have Rhys!” Jebediah retorted. “Now, will you go? If you should be taken, or even seen by one of the regents' men, Javan will have no one!”

“But Rhys can't Heal right now!” Tavis protested. “And it's my fault!”

“And it will be your fault if you leave Javan stranded. Now go, or I'll knock you senseless and take you out of here myself!”

Against that kind of determination, Tavis dared not protest further. With a little sob of fear, he gave a quick nod and drew himself up on the Portal square. Jebediah released him and stepped back, his attention already turning to the sanctuary, where foot soldiers and a few mounted men had now penetrated and were taking clerics into custody. A number of priests and three of the more timid bishops—Turlough and Davet and Ulliam—had surrendered, but those remaining were putting up a resistance.

Tavis craned his neck. He saw Joram lay about him with the heavy processional cross, and the new archbishop thrust his crozier under the nose of a startled warhorse, which immediately reared and slipped, falling and dislodging its rider.

But then he saw another mounted man urge his horse around behind Rhys, shouldering him aside with the heavy destrier and sending the Healer sprawling. Rhys slipped in blood and fell without being able to break his fall, the back of his head hitting the edge of one of the altar steps with a sickening, hollow crack.

Tavis cried out and started to go to him, but Jebediah's face had gone white at the sound, and he now brandished his weapon as if he would enjoy using it on Tavis. With a sob, Tavis hugged his arms tightly around himself and closed his eyes, forcing himself to make the jump back to the safe Portal in the archbishop's apartments.

And out in the sanctuary, close by the sacristy door, Camber saw and heard Rhys fall. Using his crozier like a pole weapon, he fought his way past the horseman who had been responsible and even managed to unhorse him before ducking under Joram's guard to kneel by the fallen Healer. Joram continued to fend off wouldbe assailants with the processional cross, and Camber could see Jebediah fighting his way to them. Gently he touched the Healer's forehead, trying to force himself not to acknowledge what he had felt as Rhys fell.

Throwing aside his crozier, he stripped off the rich cope of white and gold and wrapped it around the fallen Healer, gathered Rhys tenderly into his arms and staggered to his feet, to begin pushing his way to the sacristy, now guarded on both sides by Joram and the grim-faced Jebediah. His face was terrible in his grief as he eased his way through the doorway into the tiny corridor, then into the sacristy itself.

Half a dozen priests and deacons were already gathered there for safety, though all of them knew it was only a matter of time before the soldiers won through. They parted before him like water, none daring to ask his intention as he stumbled to a halt on the Portal square.

“All of you, out!” he managed to croak, Joram and Jebediah reinforcing his words as he swayed under the weight he carried. He lowered Rhys's feet to the floor, then held the limp, cope-wrapped form hard against himself as the room cleared, reaching out with his mind across the miles to Dhassa.

Eager, caring hands were waiting at the other end, there in the little side chapel at Dhassa, but Camber shook his head and carried his burden a few steps outside the mosaic boundaries of the Portal, finally to drop to his knees before the altar and lay his burden on the soft carpet. Almost immediately he was aware of Joram and Jebediah dropping to their knees on either side of him, Jebediah already stripping off his grey mantle to make a pillow for Rhys's head.

“It wasn't even a weapon that did it,” Camber whispered plaintively, taking the slack head between his hands and probing with fingers and mind. “He fell and hit his head on the step.”

“He's still breathing, but not very well,” Joram murmured, running his fingers through the thick red hair and closing his eyes for better concentration. “Damn! He's got a depressed fracture here big enough to put an egg into!”

With an increasing sense of despair, Camber moved his hands to where Joram indicated and felt the awful indentation. The skin had not even been broken—there was no blood at all—but he could feel the irregular edges of bone beneath the scalp. All the life signs were depressed, along with the section of skull; and as he reached into the brilliant Healer's mind, he found the Healing channels hopelessly obscured and drug-muddled. Now he knew just what the encounter with Tavis O'Neill had cost Rhys, besides the information he had been made to reveal. There was no way that even Camber could try to link into Rhys's Healing resources. Another Healer was Rhys's only hope, and soon.

“Niallan!” he called over his shoulder, the word almost a sob. “You haven't got a Healer nearby, have you?”

The other Deryni bishop knelt beside him with a shake of his head. “I've already checked. My household Healer is out on a call. I've sent for him, but I don't know whether it's going to be in time, Alister.”

Beneath Camber's hands, Rhys's breathing was becoming shallower and more irregular, the pulse thinner and more thready. In desperation, Camber tried to reach out with his mind to ease the pressure on the brain, to lift the shattered portion of the skull. He could feel the depression lessening slightly under his fingertips, but he could also sense the fluid beneath the broken skull, building yet more pressure to quench the vital functions. Rhys's breathing became more erratic still, and Joram began to blow his own breath into the failing man's lungs as he once had done for Camber, while Jebediah laid his hands over the laboring heart and tried to regularize its pace.

Despite all their efforts, Camber finally had to admit that Rhys was dying. After a few minutes, he became aware that Niallan had left them and then returned to kneel beside him again; his brother bishop was unstoppering a vial of holy oil and preparing to perform the Last Rites, still in his full vestments, less miter. Camber could not bring himself to participate. He could only watch and listen numbly, still doing all he could to keep this man who was more than a son to him from slipping away.

While Niallan prayed, Camber himself assaulted the heavens with his petition, not for the first time resenting the fortune which had given some the Healing gift, but not himself, or even the man whose identity he wore. The thought of Alister brought him the image of another time, however—of Alister in death; and of Alister's killer, the beautiful but treacherous Ariella, impaled on the sword flung by Alister with his dying strength, her fingers cupped in the attitude of a spell which might have saved her—a spell thought by most Deryni to be but legend.

For a moment, hope flared. He knew why Ariella had failed, at least in theory. As surely as he now despaired for Rhys's life, he
knew
. Had Rhys been even remotely conscious, he could have fed the Healer the procedure and helped him work it, he was sure. The spell did not even depend on Healing function. He could have worried later about how to bring Rhys back from the spell's stasis. Again, he knew the theory. With another Healer close at hand, he felt certain he could have muddled through it somehow.

But Rhys was not conscious and might not have agreed to try so desperate a measure, even if he had been. The Healer was not as conservative as Joram, but there was an ethical question, nonetheless. Did Camber have the right to answer that for even one so close as Rhys? Dared he be another's conscience?

Almost, he decided to try it anyway. It was really little more than the stasis that could be put on bodies to prevent decay—well, perhaps a
little
more, to keep a soul bound to a suspended body.…

But while he argued with himself, and agonized, and even made a tentative probe to see whether he could work the spell on an unconscious subject, he realized that it was too late. Rhys was dead. As Niallan's voice wrapped around him in the traditional prayers, joined by the responses of Dermot and a handful of priests in the white of the Gabrilite Order, Camber felt the bleak emptiness and knew that Rhys was gone.

He waited until Niallan had finished, his hands still resting on the thick red hair which hid the damage done to the skull beneath, then signalled minutely that Joram and Jebediah should cease their ministrations. As they sank back on their heels, drained and exhausted, he gently gathered Rhys into his arms again, cradling the red head close against his cheek.

“Dear God,
why?
” he whispered, his voice breaking as the tears began to come. “Forty years to make this man, and now—this! A fall! Death should be more difficult!”

The regents wasted no time in extending their vengeance, especially once they learned that their principal quarry had managed to elude them. In all, only five of the ten renegade bishops remained in custody by the end of the day, three having escaped by Portal and two by death. Davet Nevan was kicked in the chest by a warhorse and died before help could be obtained, and they found Kai Descantor sprawled in the center of the sacristy floor without a mark upon him. Oriel told them later that a Portal had previously been sited there beneath the carpet, and judged that Kai had died destroying it, after the escape of his colleagues.