At the same time as Bosco was revenging himself against his friends, a group he could easily gather together in one place, he had also to commence eliminating his enemies, dispersed as they were over the entire city, and to achieve all of this at approximately the same time. It was vital to keep news of Cale’s victory out of the city for as long as possible. News of such an epic deliverance would lead to great celebratory chaos and any chance of destroying his opponents depended on most of them being where they were supposed to be.
As a terrified and bewildered Haldera ascended one of the two great stone-staired lecterns at the congress eyed by a watchful Bosco already waiting thirty yards away in the other, the first assassinations were about to take place at the Bequinage. Redeemer Low and two of his confreres who merely had the misfortune to be in his company were approached as they prayed for victory by four of Gil’s assassins and were stabbed some six or seven times. Others could not be approached so easily. The Gonfalonier of the Hasselt, as he emerged into the street from a thirty-minute silence, was struck by a bolt from a nearby window the force of which was said to be so great that it passed through his body and wounded a monk standing guard behind him. This unlikely story was, in fact, true because the weapon of preference of Gil’s assassins was the over-strung Fell crossbow, so called because it was almost always fatal to its victims. It had one disadvantage, as its name suggests, that so powerfully tensioned was it that on occasions when the trigger was released the whole device disintegrated as explosively as if it had been filled, successfully, with Villainous Saltpetre. This was how Redeemer Breda, head of the Papal Bodyguard, the Beghards, survived. More attuned to the experience of assassination than most of the other intended victims, he realized the significance of the hideous ‘Twang!’ that resulted from the crossbow’s disintegration as it was fired by his would-be murderer and instantly made off down the nearest exit. There his luck and good judgement deserted him. The nearest escape route was called the Impasse Jean Roux and his ignorance of the local dialect cost him his life. As soon as he realized it was a dead end, he quickly made his way back to the main road but found the way barred by his assassin, bleeding heavily from a deep wound to the forehead caused by the exploding crossbow. He was so mortified by his failure that he was prepared to sacrifice his life to finish his task. The sacrifice was duly made as Breda’s guards, slow to react, finally came to attempt his rescue, but not before his killer had hacked off Breda’s hand and stabbed him through the lung.
Other assassinations by crossbow bolt were more successfuclass="underline" Pirenne died in the Rue de Châteaudun, along with Hardy and Nash; Padre Pete in the Auditorium; Redeemer ‘Loving’ Oliver – so called because of his unusual tenderness – in his manse on the Rue de Reverdy from a particularly fine shot. It was fired from well behind a window fifty yards away, through another window into the manse and then caught him in the chest as he passed the opening for the very first time that day. But there is a limit to the number of high-quality murderers just as there are wood carvers or plumbers. Gil was forced to rely, so extreme were the demands on his secret Sodalities’ homicidal skills, on the only quite good, then the merely competent, and then the erratic. These he had decided should do their work close up with weapons requiring less refined expertise. There were a satisfying number of successes by knife, half-sword and small pick but also inevitable failures, though fewer than he expected. Twice the wrong Redeemer was stabbed, or guards proved more alert than expected, or the assassin himself more incompetent. But for his two main targets, Gant and Parsi, Gil had, of course, reserved his very best men, which is to say Jonathon Brigade and himself. Which of them did the better job depends on your preference for ingenuity and quick thinking or enormous skill in the handling of weapons and leaving nothing to chance.
The problem with murdering Gant and Parsi was not that they treated the world with suspicion (Bosco’s murderous plan was unthinkable, after all) but that their grandiosity and self-importance completely isolated them from any casual contact. They went from the Holy Palace to basilica to shrine and back to palace again only in carriages entered into and exited from out of sight of the ordinary people and common Redeemers as a conscious way of elevating their status. That they were unapproachable by virtue of vanity and not fear was neither here nor there when you were trying to kill them.
Brigade had worked out his plan – but like a true artist who had produced a good work but not a great one, he knew it was inferior. He loved simplicity, sparseness, few moving parts – mostly because there was less to go wrong but also because it suited his taste for plainness. Bosco’s one sympathizer in the Holy Peculiar, Gant’s palace, ensured that he had been able to find a corridor used by Gant to enter his chapel to pray at noon during the canonical hour of sext. The entrance to the corridor had a door only five feet high, the irksome invention of a humbler predecessor, deliberately designed to force all who entered to bow meekly before they entered the chapel. Once Gant was through Brigade planned to shut the door, bar it, kill Gant and escape. It seemed simple but was not. Gant did not always attend sext here – prone to late-morning headaches he would sometimes, if infrequently, retire to his darkened rooms to recover. It took no great worrier to reckon that on a day of such great tension he might easily succumb to the migraine. There was also the difficulty of escape – the chapel was right in the middle of the gargantuan complex that made up the Holy Peculiar. The final weakness was that Brigade would have to trust the calmness and reliability of a traitor to get him in and out. So uneasy had he become that he decided on a hardly less dangerous strategy of walking the palace and looking for another opportunity. Changing plans at the last minute was something he had never countenanced before but he could not shake off the sense of unease. His original plan was plausible but he smelt disaster. After ten years as a holy assassin Brigade had learnt to dismiss instinct. Now after twenty-five he had learnt to value it once more. Perhaps, he thought, he was just getting old.
Meanwhile at the gathering of the Congress of the Sodalities those collected there were if not uneasy then certainly mystified at the size of the assembly. Bosco had worked hard over the years to build this group but just as hard to keep its size, and many of its members, secret. There were many present who were by no means natural allies or who believed themselves to be part of a quite different conspiracy or none at all. These differences had to be reconciled – but not by agreement. Both mild-mannered reformists who would have been horrified by Bosco’s larger plan and disagreeable zealots who had other ambitions for salvation would alike have to be dealt with and dealt with this afternoon.
Standing at one of the great lecterns at the Congress Haldera looked across at Bosco like a little boy who has angered his mother terribly. Although he was not shaking he seemed to be so, his face so white and shocked. And like a mother, a terrible and unforgiving one who no longer loved and protected the child across from her, Bosco impatiently signalled Haldera to get on with it. The dreadful unease spread at once through the assembly the way laughter does through an audience gathered to be entertained by a conjurer and his amusing dog. Haldera confessed to his terrible sins on behalf of the Antagonist heresy, the words emerging as pale as the man himself, and that he had, to his heartbreaking shame, conspired with others. (‘Don’t mention the numbers,’ Bosco had instructed. ‘I want everyone on their toes – I want them to feel the wind from the wings of the Angel of Death as he passes over them. Or not.’)