One by one, with many fearful glances at Bosco, who looked now deeply saddened, betrayed and even tearful, Haldera went through the stumbling list of names of those whose breaths in life could now be counted: Vert, Stone, Debau, Harwood, Jones, Porter, Masson, Finistaire. As each was called the blood drained from his face. Most stood without protest and made their way out of their seats as if mild obedience might placate the dreadful judgement. The lucky watchers next to them shrank back from their touch as they brushed past as if their fate might be catching. In the aisles stern religious police led them to the back and outside. Then before they were gone another name was called. And so it went on – the shocked compliance, the occasional confusion. ‘No, not him. We know Frederick Taverner well and he is not a traitor.’ ‘My apologies, Redeemers. Please sit down.’ The condemned and then instantly reprieved Taverner taking a shock from which he would never completely recover. The rest of the audience aghast at the error and what it might mean for them.
In a large room some fifty yards away the fingered were held, then taken to a smaller room and stripped to the waist. Brzica had been brought from the Sanctuary to supervise the large number of executions required. But there were too many for one man to carry out and he had been assigned numerous helpers. Touchy as always about any slight concerning the rareness of his art he complained that they could not possibly possess sufficient skill.
‘They are a discredit to my mystery,’ he said to Gil with the egoism of any prodigy.
Less vain of his talents, Jonathon Brigade was as excited by the inspiration of his new plan as any author wracked by a failure in his art who finds the sudden revelation or the clue that sets it right and leads him out of the confusing maze of the not quite good enough. The son of a master builder, Brigade could not help noticing with disapproval scaffolding three storeys high loaded with bricks for work the builders had been told to stop so that they could go and pray for victory. Having spent hours loading the bricks upon the scaffold the labourers had been faced with a problem: spend another hour or more lowering them back to store them on the ground and miss the call to prayer or take a minor risk and leave them where they were. And they were right to judge the bricks were safe, the scaffold would hold – why would they take into account the possibility that up-to-no-good Jonathon Brigade would happen by? How could they have guessed that such a malign presence would know how to weaken the reverts holding the scaffolding together and at which point to tie a rope to them so that when Gant and five of his holy brethren passed, as they must in order to enter the chapel, a hefty pull would cause more than a ton of bricks to collapse on top of them? It was simple and it was not far from an external wall where additions to the kitchen would make it easy for Brigade to escape. Perfect, except for the return of the builders, whose foreman had seen them leaving and demanded they return and move the stone blocks from the scaffolding back to the ground. Brigade, a man whose temperament was such that he always tried to make the best of things, chose to take this as a sign that he was being advised from the heavens to find another way and duly went in search of it.
Gil on the other hand had planned the murder of Parsi to take account of chance. It was increasingly in Parsi’s nature not to be seen at all. What had once been an unease concerning open spaces had grown in recent years to become almost fear of them. Even his audiences in the Pontiff’s Palace took place by means of a tunnel underground. He did emerge into the light for twenty minutes every day walking around his covered cloisters exposed to the open on only one side to read the versicles of the Didache from his breviary (‘Scour me of desire, O Lord, batter my soul’, and so on). Information about his comings and goings was scant. But he had followed up a casual reference to one of Parsi’s daily rituals by going to the top of Carfax tower and, after a long wait, observing it for himself. The timing of his daily prayer circuit was always the same, the pace he took was pretty much exact as he went round and round. Only part of the holy garden was cloistered; unluckily for Gil the only part that could be overlooked from his hidden eyrie in Carfax tower looked onto the side that was covered by a deep roof and left Parsi in dark shadow and hence unseeable from the tower except for the lower quarter of his cassock-covered extremities. It was impossible to get in a killing shot from the tower, in other words. But Parsi walked at an almost constant speed, a monotonously rhythmic rolling gait, and Gil knew that out of his sight in the tower but at the other end of the garden he was in the open for perhaps as long as twenty seconds. He was not in his eagle’s nest to take a shot himself but to measure the walk and calculate when Parsi was in the open but out of his sight, then signal to a group of forty archers in a courtyard three hundred yards away to fire their arrows over the wall of their own yard, arch over two streets then down into the end of the cloisters where Parsi was in the open praying to be punished for his sins – concerning which Gil, with enormous contrivance, was hoping to oblige him.
There was a witness, as it turned out, to what happened next, saved from execution by Gil because he was curious about the precise details of what happened to Parsi.
Gil gasped himself as the archers loosened their sharps, the terrible and beautiful curve flocking towards the unseen mumbling prelate on the ground, the graceful whoosh as they passed towards their mark and then the mixing of the thwack and ping and thud as they struck wall and earth and man. Gil, as it turned out, got the numbers right but only just. Parsi was hit by three arrows but only from the extreme edge of the cloud; one in the foot, another in the groin, a third in the belly. The shocked cry and the scream of agony reached Gil in his tower just as he made to leave. But such pain can come from any wound. He was not satisfied for sure until he saved the witness, a novice who had been sitting down in the cloisters while his master said his prayers, more than four hours later.
Four hundred yards away an irritable Moseby, unused to being kept in the dark and ready to give Bosco a bad-tempered reminder of who he was dealing with, waited in the nearest room that Bosco had to an oubliette. It was small with a window high up so that no one could see out, and as far away from the arrests and slaughter as was possible. Moseby politely asked a servant for a drink (he regarded it as a sign of inadequacy to be rude to servants) and Brzica came in with a jug to see it done, moving behind him and tinkering with a mug and cup and pouring the requested water. Then someone with a resemblance to Bosco entered and Moseby looked up. ‘I must -‘ but what he must was lost in eternity as Brzica took him by the hair and cut his throat.
Meanwhile Jonathon Brigade was beginning to feel that he must stop looking for some ideal site for his murder and yet he was sure that if he only looked on a little further there it would be. All the time a voice, not his conscience to be sure, nagged at him to revert to his first plan however unsatisfactory and risky it was. Something is better than nothing. This is going to get you killed. Stop. But he could not – always he felt that just a little further on would be the answer. And then a door opened in front of him and he was face to face with Redeemer Gant and behind him half a dozen priests. They stared at each other as Gant tried to place him and failed. Brigade’s mind went blank for a second but every cell of his body was that of the instinctive murderer. He stepped forward gently so that Gant was forced to stay in the doorway blocking the priests behind. Then an idea – a truth that’s told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.