Chapter Seventeen
The trestles had been folded and laid against the wall, and the tabletops had been stacked. The refectory in the Runnymede chapter house had been converted into a dormitory, each monk rolling out a pallet that wasn't much harder than the cot he'd been sleeping on in the monastery. It was midnight, and the friars slept the deep, dreamless sleep of men exhausted by physical labor. Only the moonbeams through the windows lent a touch of life to the great room.
In the center of the room a ghost appeared, a smokelike form of a man. The smoke thickened, growing more and more substantial, until it began to gain the brown of a monk's robe with the pink of a tonsure atop a lean, lantern-jawed face. The fiery eyes finally became clear, and the monk dropped the few inches to the hard-packed dirt floor with a soft thud. He looked around at the sleeping forms, and a tear rolled from his eye as he lifted a dagger. He stepped up to the nearest monk, gasping, "Fools, poor weak fools, to be so led astray! Yet thou art nonetheless apostates, and must needs die! Eh, Brother Alfonso is right in this!"
The knife stabbed down in a short, vicious arc.
Brother Lurgan convulsed into a ball, coming awake for one searing instant of agony. He made no sound, but his mind let out a tearing shriek of pain and fear before it ceased utterly, and every monk sat bolt upright, staring and crying out in panic as they felt the insubstantial essence of the man lift away from them.
The assassin yanked his knife free and spun, swinging it down at Father Boquilva.
Boquilva shouted, blocking the attacker's forearm with his own and driving a fist into his belly. The lean monk doubled over in breathless pain, and Father Boquilva caught the wrist, slamming the knife hand against his knee. The blade clattered on the floor as Boquilva shouted, "Brother Somnel! Hasten!"
A short, fat monk hurried up, glaring at the lean attacker who was struggling for breath. His glare softened into a brooding gaze, and all at once the assassin's body went slack. He crumpled to the floor. All the monks were silent for a moment of horror; then the assassin's chest rose and fell, and they felt the surge of a sleeping mind. They relaxed with sighs of relief. "Light!" Father Boquilva called, and the tallow lamps flickered into life. Then the monks saw who lay unconscious on the floor and cried out in horror. " 'Tis Brother Janos!"
"Gentle Brother Janos!"
"How can this be?" Brother Axel knelt beside the assassin, tears in his eyes. "He is a true scholar! 'Twas he who did come to know the means by which we appear and disappear!"
"Aye, and did learn thereby to control it more shrewdly, so that he might appear as slowly as he wished, and thereby with as little noise." Father Boquilva frowned. "Nay, certes he would be chosen as assassin!"
"And what hath he done?" moaned Brother Clyde. The monks all turned to stare at Brother Lurgan's dead body curled up in the flickering glow, and caught their breath in sorrow.
Father Boquilva fell on his knees beside the unconscious assassin and caught up his head, holding it between his two hands and staring.
"Brother Janos! That he could do such a deed!" Brother Clyde cried. "He, who was ever a wise and gentle man!"
"Yet he burned with zeal, Brother," Father Hector reminded him, "and was intensely devoted to the Order."
"And therefore to the Abbot." Brother Clyde nodded heavily. "Aye, he might view us as traitors. Yet surely he would not think to slay!"
"He did not." Father Boquilva's voice was weighted with grimness. "Another did put the thought into his mind, nay, did harangue him and accuse him till he was convinced of our wrongness and the need for our slaying—for he was ever great of mind, yet was ever simple of soul. As much as he understood of the cosmos, so little did he understand of human nature. Nay, he was manipulated as surely as a marionette in a Christmas play."
"And who pulled his strings, Father?" Brother Clyde demanded, his face somber.
"Why dost thou ask?" said Father Hector, with a grimace. "Who but Brother Alfonso?"
Father Boquilva looked up and nodded.
Brother Clyde's face darkened, and his fists clenched into cannon balls. "I shall be revenged upon him1."
" Tis for God to revenge!" Father Boquilva snapped, coming to his feet. "Nay, Brother, be not misled by Satan!"
"Yet may I not be God's instrument in this?" Brother Clyde implored.
"Mayhap, yet I misdoubt me of it."
"Who shall be, then?"
"One who, praise Heaven, hath come!" Father Boquilva turned to Brother Somnel. "Do thou stay by Brother Janos and keep his sleep deep, aye, and dreamless."
Brother Somnel only nodded, his gaze on the sleeping assassin.
"Come with me now, and call." Father Boquilva beckoned Brother Clyde and turned away to heft the bar out of its staples and open the door. He stepped out into the night with the friar hot on his heels, crying, "Wee Folk, hear me!"
"Wee Folk, hear!" Brother Clyde called.
"I beg thee, call the High Warlock! Bid him bring our Father-General to us as soon as he may, for we have grievous, woeful tasks laid upon us now! Call him, I beg thee!"
"Call him, call him," Brother Clyde echoed with tears in his eyes.
Moonlight striped the middle of the bed, enough to show Rod and Gwen, loosely embraced, deeply asleep.
A small figure approached their bed slowly, then climbed the headboard to call softly, "Lord Warlock."
Rod lay absolutely still, but his eyes opened wide. He glanced about until he saw Puck. The elf laid a finger across his lips, then sprang silently to the floor, beckoning.
Rod slid out of bed, stepped to the closet, and pulled on his doublet and hose. He stepped out into the main room, buckling his sword belt. "Speak softly; we have a guest."
"I am awake," Father McGee's voice said in the dark. "May I light the lamp?"
"No need." Rod frowned at a candle and its wick glowed to life.
Father McGee stared at the foot-and-a-half-tall humanoid before him.
Puck glared up at him, arms akimbo. "At what dost thou stare?"
"Oh! Pardon my rudeness." Father McGee pushed himself to a sitting position and looked up at Rod. "It's reassuring to know how accurate Father Uwell's report is."
"That may be the only thing that's reassuring about seeing Puck in the middle of the night." Rod turned to the elf. "What moves, hobgoblin?"
"Bloody murder," the elf answered with a scowl. "Thou must needs come to the friars. Lord Warlock, and be not anxious for the harmony of thy garb."
Somewhere the monks had found some black cloth to drape on the wall in a makeshift archway. The dead monk lay under it, hands folded over his breast, his robe neatly patched where the knife had entered.
McGee stood over him, burning with suppressed rage. "An abbot! That an abbot could so forget morality as to command the murder of one of his own monks!"
"He wasn't one of the Abbot's own any more," Rod pointed out. "Widdecombe thought of him as a traitor."
"As Christ, thought of Judas, Lord Warlock! Yet He did not slay His betrayer, and neither should have Abbot Widdecombe!"
Rod wondered why he was taking the Archbishop's side. Pure cussedness, probably. "But the Abbot thought of him as a heretic."
"The unity of the Faith is not worth men's lives, Lord Warlock, as Rome has learned to its sorrow."
"Just because they lost the Beta Crucis Crusade—"
"Yet we did learn! When faith is used as an excuse for war, the warriors have lost faith, and morality has been corrupted into immorality!"
Rod felt the impulse to continue the argument, but recog-nized McGee's wrath from his own paternal instincts—the Father-General was filled with grief and guilt because one of his spiritual sons had died. For a brief, dizzying moment, Rod had a glimpse of what it must feel like to be responsible for hundreds of thousands of monks on fifty different planets, and shuddered. McGee didn't have to take his title so seriously.