Quinn was prepared for the spiritual assault of Nossa Senhora da Varzea, yet his attuned, attenuated senses reeled as if from a physical blow. He walked down the center of the nave, heaven on his left hand, damnation on his right, judgment all around. Christ spread his arms wide across the titanic choir screen. His thorn-pierced heart stood open. Quinn freed his sword. Beyond the choir stalls a shaft of light fell on the altar, the crucified Amazonian Christ’s head crowned with strange sufferings. Before the stellar glow of the Lady of the Flood Forest a figure in simple black knelt. The thunder of mortars beat the basilica like a drum. The Lady’s dress of lights quivered; debris shook loose from the ceiling and fell in a snow of gold and Marian blue. Quinn strode up the choir, sword held low by his side.
“Would you murder me in my own cathedral, like St. Thomas à Becket?”
“I am the admonitory of Father de Magalhães, and I command you in the name of Christ to submit to my authority.”
“I recall I refused you, as I refuse you again now.”
“Silence. Enough of this. You will return with me to our Order in Salvador.”
“The Order in Salvador. Yes. Some of us, however, are called to a higher service.”
Gonçalves rose to his feet and turned to his admonisher. The Lady of the Flood Forest seemed to embrace him in her cope of verdure. “Still you persist in this, you ridiculous little man.”
“Then I must compel you,” Quinn said, and lifted his sword to let its blade catch the many lights of the reredos.
“You will not find me unprepared.” Father Diego swept back his surplice to show the basket-hilted Spanish sword buckled at his side.
“In God’s house,” Quinn said, backing away from the treacheries of altar and choir stalls to the open nave.
“Come now, everywhere is God’s house. If it is meet and right in that pigsty you call a city, that Capitan de Araujo is reducing to dust, then it is equally so here.” Gonçalvescocked his headáthat strange, infuriating bird-motion — at a sudden clamor of voices, shots, and steel from outside. His eyes widened with rage.
“Your former slaves, spiking your artillery,” Quinn said. “Come now, no more delay. Let us try it here, your master against mine, Leon against Toledo.”
He ran into the open nave. With a cry like a hunting bird, Gonçalvescast off his confining surplice and drew his sword. He flew at Quinn, blade dancing in a flickering flurry of cuts that caught the Mair off guard and drove him back across the floor, halfway to the narthex. Grunting with exertion Quinn formed a defense and beat Gonçalvesback almost to the choir screen. The two men parted, saluted, circled each other, blinded with sweat in the stifling heat of the basilica.
And to it again. A crashing rally across the front of the roodscreen, Quinn driving, scoring a tear on Gonçalves’s side, Gonçalvesrecovering and pressing Quinn back, trading the nick for a cut along Quinn’s hairline — an unseen, unstoppable cut he had just managed to roll beneath, that would surely have taken the top of his skull. Quinn felt the floor move under him, saw the uncertainty reflected in Father Diego’s thin, boyish face.
“The mooring lines are cut,” he panted. “We are adrift.” They both felt the basilica turn in the stream, captive of the ebbing waters. With a cry in Irish Quinn launched himself at Gonçalves; a jetée with mass and brute power behind it. Gonçalves slapped his spearing sword away; Quinn went sprawling and the Spaniard was on him, Quinn saving himself only by an instinctual block that struck sparks from both blades. He regained his feet but was at once driven hard against the base of the pulpit. Again Quinn rallied, and the two Jesuits dueled back and forth along the line of the side chapels. But it was clear to Quinn, with a chill clench in his testicles, that he had exerted himself too far on the destruction of the dam and the pursuit of Nossa Senhora da Varzea. His advantage in size and strength was used up, and in the pure way of the sword Diego Gonçalves was master.
The counterattack was immediate. Quinn retreated back through the open heart of Christ into the choir; his intention that the narrow files of box pews would constrain Gonçalves’s balletic style. They battled up and down the choir stalls scattering psalteries and missals until Quinn was backed to the very altar. He could not get away. He could not escape. Fury swelled inside him; that he would die in this stupid vain place, this pagan altar, at the hands of this slight, effeminate Spaniard, that all he had wrought would be strewn to the winds and the waters in this desolate, wordless forest. He summoned the rage, his old demon, his old ally. It blazed hot and delicious inside him. And with a thought he pushed it down. Gonçalvesknew of his old thorn; he would have tactics prepared for the rush of brute anger and unstoppable passion. Quinn opened his inner sight to the worlds. A blink, a flicker, but in that vision he saw all that Gonçalveswould do. He saw the expression of anger and bafflement on Father Diego’s face as he drove him back from the altar, his sword-point always ahead of the Spaniard’s, back down the choir and through the gaping heart of Christ into the nave. Beneath the Christ of the Varzea, his outstretched hands blossoming into the twin apocalypses of the just and the lost, Quinn caught Gonçalves’ sword and sent it across the floor.
“Kneel and submit,” Quinn panted, sword-point at Gonçalves’s eye. “Kneel and submit to the authority of the Society of Jesus.”
Gonçalveswent to his knees. Never once removing his eyes from Quinn, he reached into the open neck of his cassock; a rosary, to kiss and yield. Quinn saw a flash of light, and half his sword fell to the ground. Gonçalvesheld up the blade.
“Do you imagine they would have called us to defend the Kingdom without ensuring we are properly armed?” He came up in a sweeping blow that sheared Quinn’s sword down to a useless stump and cut cleanly in two a stand of a tray of votives before the statue of Nossa Senhora Aparaçida. The lamps fell and rolled, spilling burning oil behind them. Tongues of fire licked toward the choir screen. Gonçalvesleaned into a knife-fighter’s crouch. Quinn hastily ripped the sleeve from his robe and opened it into a cape, which he held like a bullfighter’s cloak.
“A cunning idea,” Gonçalvessaid, with a lunging cut that left an arc of smoking blue in the air. “But quite ineffectual.”
But Quinn had seen the fire leap up the open fretwork of the choir screen, a Christ wreathed in flame. He circled away from the blade, all the while keeping Gonçalves’s back to the growing blaze.
“When did the Enemy seduce you?”
“You mistake. I am not the enemy. I am the Order. They have engines and energies beyond your imagining; did you think I built that dam unaided?”
Feint, slash, the tip of the blade cut a slit in the fabric. Quinn permitted himself a flicker of multiversal vision. In too many he saw himself kneel, gutted, on the floor, his entrails around his knees. Out there in the cornucopia of universes was the answer to Father Diego Gonçalves. The Spaniard lunged, the blade from beyond the world shrieking down to cut Quinn shoulder to waist. Quinn leaped back and saw the moment, the single true searing instant. He flung the cloth over Gonçalves’shead, blinding him, seized the loose end and swung him around. Gonçalves reeled backward into the burning altar screen. The fragile screen swayed. Gonçalves ripped the cloth from his face, fled from the fire. Too slow, too late; the huge burning Christ, haloed in flames, heart ablaze, fire streaming from his outstretched fingers to turn both heaven and hell into purgatory, crashed down and drove Diego Gonçalves to the floor.