Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy and Other Stories (35 page)

It would be better if he held silent. And yet, how could he allow a man, a fellow soldier, to go to his grave for nothing more than speaking the truth. Oh, but the temptation was great indeed. Then he saw a tear roll down Nicander’s cheek, and he knew he could not hold tongue, not if he wished to live with himself.

“Your Holiness!” He stepped forward, and in a flash, two swords were pointing at him, arresting his progress. “May I speak?”

The Sanctiff regarded him with an air of curiousity, then nodded.

“I do not believe Marcus Longinus, the tribune there, bears any guilt in the matter. He spoke truly when he told them that I could see the spellcasters, so he did not perjure himself, as did the others. He has committed no crime.”

The white eyebrows of His Holiness, the Sanctified Castimonius II, seemed to rise of their own accord as a brief, disbelieving murmur swelled throughout the room, then hushed as quickly as it had arisen. The Sanctiff, staring hard at Quintus, pushed himself slowly from his throne, then made his way down the seven steps from the dais upon which it sat. He walked, somewhat stiffly, and approached Quintus; though his shoulders were hunched and his head barely came to Quintus’s chest, the young officer could feel power radiating from the man like the heat of the mountain sun. His eyes burned like flaming emeralds, seeming to see right through to the depths of a man’s soul.

“You are no sorcerer, my son?”

“No, your Holiness.”

“And yet you could see the works of the evil ones?”

“Yes, your Holiness.”

The Sanctiff peered into his face, but the green eyes no longer burned. Instead, they seemed to be unsettled. “You had only to keep your counsel, and yet you chose to speak to defend your accuser. Most interesting. Is it possible that you have an explanation for this … seeming dichotomy?”

“Yes, your Holiness.” Quintus swallowed hard. “I believe I could see them because we were being slaughtered and I … called out to the Immaculate One. In … in anger, your Holiness. I am sorry.”

He was surprised to see a flicker of amusment suddenly appear on the old man’s face. It was gone in a moment, but it had unmistakably been there, if only for a moment.

“The best prayers come from the heart, my son. It seems that yours was answered.”

Then the Sanctiff did the last thing that Quintus, or anyone else in the great chamber, expected. He clumsily kneeled down in front of the young officer and drew Quintus’s hand to his forehead.

“Bless me, your Holiness. Bless you me, my son.”

• • •

The young priest frowned as his elder finished the story he had been telling. “That’s it? But, I always thought Saint Oculatus was a mighty warrior?”

The older priest smiled. He was a big man, built like an oak, and his skin was nearly as wrinkled and sun-hardened as bark. “He was a mighty warrior, merely not in the sense that you are thinking. After Aldus Wald, Saint Oculatus never took the field again, Horatio. Nor did he join the priesthood, although his second son did join our order after it was founded by Gnaus Gallus with the blessing of His Holiness. And yet, are we not as surely his children as those who sprang from his loins? Now, are you ready to try again?”

“Yes, brother.”

The older man nodded to a small figure standing in the shadow of a tree. It was a goblin, and a small example of the type at that. But the young priest couldn’t help trembling a little as he stepped out and advanced toward it, holding his shield as if he was hoping to hide his entire body behind it. For the goblin was no ordinary ahomus, but a battlemage, a captured prisoner given special dispensation to practice his unholy magic here so that the Michaeline warrior-priests might learn how to defeat it with their immaculate faith.

“Remember, we are not given a spirit of fear, lad,” his instructor called, even as he raised a finger. The goblin pointed both hands at the armor-clad young man and said something in his guttural, inhuman tongue. They began to glow, and a moment later, two bolts of purple fire leaped from his hand toward his target.

As they did, the young man shouted something unintelligible, but there was a noticeable tremor in his voice. The bolts slammed into the shield and sent it flying into the air as the lad tumbled onto his back. His shield landed in front of the elder Michaeline, showing two more scorch marks on the much abused metal. The warrior-priest sighed, shook his head, and went to help the shaken youth back to his feet.

“I don’t know if you’re watching, Quintus Tullius,” he muttered to himself, “but if you are, I suspect this one may need your help.”

FINIS

THE SOUNDS OF BATTLE were getting louder, and the smell of smoke penetrated the chamber despite the heavy wooden door and the single shuttered window. Inside, a man and a woman lay sprawled on the bed, breathless and entangled, their long, white limbs unencumbered by clothing.

“Do it,” she murmured, her face pressed against his chest. “Do it now, my love.”

“How can you ask it of me?” His voice was filled with anguish. “Why did you not let me send you away with them?”

“He will be safer without me. They would know. They would break me.”

“They cannot break what they do not find.”

“They know I am yours. They would hunt me down. And besides, I will not live without you!”

He pulled away from her, looked down at her, stroked her long, pale hair. Tears filled his eyes as he smiled at her. “How fierce you are. How beautiful.”

She looked up at him and returned his smile. Her eyes were dry and fearless.

“Have courage, my lord. I regret nothing. Not a single moment.”

He wiped at his eyes. “The dream is dead, but it was glorious indeed.”

“Then you must give me a glorious pyre, my love. My body cannot be found. They must never learn I bore you a child.”

“Not a child, my love. A son. Our son.” The man nodded and caressed her cheek. “They will love him. They will raise him as their own. But he will learn the truth in time.”

“Blood will tell,” she agreed. “Blood will always tell.”

A clash of metal from just outside the chamber caused them both to start.

He met her eyes.

“I loved you from the moment I laid eyes upon you. From the beginning to the end.”

She laughed and shook her head.

“No, my lord, there is no end. You are mine and I am yours, from the beginning of time to the end of whatever lies waiting on the other side of the grave.”

“There will be no grave for you, my love. My wife. My life. I would burn all the earth and sky if it would save you now.”

“I know.” She closed her eyes. “Now, my love. They are coming for you, and there is no more time.”

He kissed her lips. Then he folded her to his breast again and held her tight as a single tear slowly made its way down his bloodless cheek. Softly, gently, he whispered the killing words. She did not move or make a sound, she merely seemed to relax against him, as if giving herself entirely to him once more.

She was gone.

He kissed her forehead, then gently laid her down, lifeless, on the bed. For a long moment he stared at her, drinking in her beauty one last time. Then there was a shriek outside the chamber, followed by a series of triumphant shouts. A moment later, something heavy crashed against the door.

He dressed without hurrying. By the time the wood began to splinter, he was fully attired in rich black velvet. He wore a cape, and his pantalons were tucked into the high leather boots of a cavalryman.

He pointed at the door, and it exploded outward, eliciting screams from those who had been striving to break it down. He raised his left hand, and the bed behind him erupted in white flames hotter than any blacksmith’s forge. He did not look back at it.

The first elves to enter the room could not have seen more than a tall shadow cast by the bright backdrop of the blazing fire. They would not be able to see a body already safely enshrouded by the raging flames. None of them were mages, he observed with the faintest hint of a contemptuous smile. Even in victory they feared him. The elven warriors stood before him uncertainly, each holding two swords drawn as if they were waiting for him to strike them down. But he merely stood there, in silence, until Silthalael, the High King’s Magister of War, finally entered the chamber.

“It is over, Ar Mauragh,” the elf told the tall man. “The other towers are taken. Your fellows have all been slain. You are alone.”

“It is over,” the witchking concurred.

“Will you consent to come with me to the Collegium Occludum? Your life remains forfeit—that cannot be changed. But before you die, my colleagues have many questions they would like to ask of you.”

“I will come with you,” Mauragh answered.

As he walked with Silthalael away from the tower, stepping carefully around the bodies of elves and the corpses of men, his servants, who had fallen in the last battle outside, he stopped abruptly and turned back toward his burning home.

The fire had already eaten its way through the wooden shutters that covered the window of his bedchamber, so with a single word, he caused blue and green flames to begin leaping and dancing from inside the stones themselves.

Cries of alarm filled the air as the victorious remnants of the elven army began to run away from the tower. There was a thunderous roar, and the earth began to shake. In a matter of moments, the mighty tower collapsed in a cataclysm of fire and stone as rapidly as water plunging down the side of a mountain.

No grave, my love. No tomb. None shall disturb your ashes.

“I had hoped you would view us as more than mere enemies,” Silthalael said, his face ashen, “that you would see us as worthy inheritors of your knowledge. There must have been over a thousand books and scrolls in that library!”

“Not all secrets may be shared,” Mauragh told the elf.

Six months later, having answered all of the questions he was willing to answer, his usefulness was deemed at an end. The great witchking died in front of the assembled magisters of the Collegium Occludum. Ar Mauragh died screaming, shrieking in agony, his white flesh tormented by earth, water, and fire, his soul ripped into a thousand pieces, his haughty pride humbled, perhaps even humiliated.

Even so, he embraced death like a long-awaited lover, for he knew that when the sorcerous elven flames finally turned his bones to char and ash, they would ensure that his most cherished secret was safely sealed.

• • •

In the eyes of the villagers of Pretigny, Speer Gnasor was a boy not terribly unlike any other. He was taller than the other boys his age, but someone has to be the tallest in every village, and no one ever appeared to think it odd that at nearly thirteen years of age, the top of his father’s head barely cleared his shoulder. Speer was quick-witted but not remarkably so, although he was both envied and mocked by the other boys for his ability to read.

He participated in their games, albeit in a desultory manner. He was not unpopular, and if he had exerted himself even a little, he might well have made himself a leader of one of the little packs that divided the children of the town on lines roughly conforming with their fathers’ occupations.

Per Gnasor, his father, raised bees and made candles, and his mother raised the small flock of geese and chickens that provided him with his daily egg, and on feast days, the fowl for their little family. His two passions were fishing and books, and it was said that he had read every one of the twenty-eight books in the village at least twice.

The Gnasors themselves were said to possess seven books. By Pretigny standards, this amounted to a family library of almost mythic proportions. He dutifully attended the small church of the Immaculate twice each week, and if he ate the wafer and drank the wine given to him by the priest with little thought for what it represented, in this he was no different than any other boy in the village.

He was not an unhappy lad, and he was entirely content with his life as he found it. He did not, like some of his youthful acquaintances, chafe at the smallness of their familiar surroundings or dream of one day seeking his fortune in what, from the perspective of Pretigny, was considered to be the great city of Niederholen. Even the rumors of the riches of distant Stalchwil on the banks of the Ghlêne more than a ten-day journey away held little fascination for him. He learned to tend his father’s bees, to twist wicks and shape wax, and slowly, but surely, he even began to take notice of the butcher’s daughter. She was a tall, slender girl with a wide mouth and pale blue eyes who was nearly of a height and an age with him.

Left to his own devices, allowed to pursue his homely dreams, it was likely that Speer Gnasor would have married the butcher’s daughter, learned the butcher’s trade, and eventually become a fine, upstanding pillar of the local church and community.

But on his thirteenth birthday, everything he knew about himself and the world around him was forever transformed by a letter from his father.

After a dinner that featured rare treats such as Valoyan sausages and the sweet cheese called Niederholt, Per Gnasor sent him into the forest armed with nothing more than his warmest coat and a small shovel and told him to unearth his birthday present one hundred paces north of his favorite tree.

Both excited and confused, he lost little time in finding the peculiar oak with a thick lower branch that twisted over its leftmost neighbor, and paced off the distance. He had to dig a hole that was deeper than his knees before he struck something hard. With a little more work he saw it was a small wooden chest. His heart beating faster, he extricated it from the ground and opened it.

The first thing he saw was a letter written in an unfamiliar hand. Despite the shadows cast by the looming trees, there was just enough light breaking through the leaves to permit him to read it.

To my son and my heir,

You are not what you think you are. You are more, so much more. Kings and princes would tremble and scour the earth in search of you were they to hear even a rumor of your existence. It was to save you from their wrath that your mother sacrificed herself. It was to protect you from their vengeance that you were hidden away even from yourself. The man and woman you believe to be your parents are my true and loyal servants, and they have raised you at my command, even as they release you now to your destiny as they have been instructed.