Eric Lustbader - The Testament

"And how is the Holy Father?" Jordan said.

"The pontiff is on oxygen. His heart is laboring, his lungs are slowly filling with fluid. I can feel his death, Jordan. It creeps along my own flesh on its way to take him."

Jordan's eyes blazed. "Death will not take him, this I swear, your eminence! We are making progress, the Quintessence will be in your hands within days."

"I am pleased by your faith and by your unswerving commitment, Jordan. I could not have hoped for a better ally." Cardinal Canesi was a homely man. His legs were bandy, his head was oversized; it sat on his rounded shoulders seemingly without benefit of a neck. "It is most gracious of you to take the time to come, to pay your respects in person. Your presence has lifted his spirits considerably."

"For him I would travel twice around the circumference of the world," Jordan said with a reverence that privately disgusted him.

"Before you enter, you must be gowned and your feet and hands covered." Canesi guided him across the hall and into a dressing room. It was small and windowless. A line of pale green gowns hung on pegs. The cardinal took two down, handed one to Jordan, and slipped the other on.

Out the small window, enormous crowds of the faithful came and went across the acres of marble, their foolish placards held high for the news cameras, their eyes lifted as their lips moved in prayer. Here was the power in faith, Jordan thought, the manifestation of Canesi's power. But it was a power from another, an antique age. It was cracked, worn, hollowed out. There was nothing left of it but the facade. The crippled girl guided by her mother, the emaciated man in a wheelchair pushed by his son, they had come here along with all the others to be healed, to be saved, but Jordan knew the truth: they were doomed, just like Canesi.

Jordan turned away from the window and its view on the chamber of horrors, his heart cold as a stone. He had his own problems, and they had nothing to do with God, or even faith.

Canesi said in a low, quavery voice, "How many are dead?"

And then, almost immediately, "No, no, for the love of God don't tell me, I don't want to know."

Jordan felt the contempt burst like a grenade inside him, and all at once he saw the cardinal for what he was: an old man, grappling with the vexing problem of how to keep his power as his world changed. "Suffice it to say, then, that the Haute Cour has been almost fully compromised," he said.

"Almost!" Cardinal Canesi exclaimed.

"We are moving with all due speed." Jordan ground his teeth to be in the presence of such hypocrisy. "You understand, of course, that there is the matter of the puzzle Dexter Shaw created."

"Ah, now we come to the crux of the matter!"

Jordan realized just how much he despised this man. He stood for Rome-a city that was too chaotic, too crowded, too dirty for Jordan's refined tastes, and he despised Vatican City's hothouse atmosphere most of all. The entire might and power of the Catholic Church was focused here like sunlight through a magnifying glass, but so was its essential weakness. A city-state unto itself, it had willfully kept itself at arm's length from the rest of the world. As a result, it existed in a reality of its own, out of touch with its far-flung constituents, painfully slow to react to change of any kind.

"Dexter Shaw had been a thorn in our side for years," Cardinal Canesi said. "As he consolidated his position inside the Order, as he gathered power to him, he created more and more problems for us."

"And for us, he wanted to be Magister Regens," Jordan said. "Which is one of the reasons we took him out."

"I do not want to hear those things!" Cardinal Canesi's face went chalk white. "Have I not made myself clear on this issue?"

"You have, your eminence, but as we both know, these are extraordinary times. So I trust that you will forgive me my small transgressions."

Canesi made a gesture, as if to absolve Jordan of the onus of small transgressions, but still Jordan's keen eyes saw his body betray him. The cardinal moved uneasily, like a bird who has Puffed up his feathers in alarm.

"You know how I rely on you, Jordan."

"Of course, your excellency. And you know how I am relying on your contacts in this time of ultimate crisis. You won't hold back, will you?"

"Of course not!" Cardinal Canesi said hotly. "The pope has three days, perhaps four, the doctors tell me. They are working hard to stabilize him, but even if they do, without the Quintessence he will not recover."

When it came to Cardinal Felix Canesi, Jordan held no illusions. If for some reason events didn't work out as he wished, Canesi would require a scapegoat, and Jordan knew full well who that would be.

Having had more than enough of Canesi, he went back out into the hallway and crossed into the pope's suite. Like all hospital rooms, it smelled of sweet sickness and acrid disinfectant. He stayed for ten minutes, which was all the pontiff had strength for. The Holy Father's face was gray and terribly drawn, but there was still plenty of life left in those pale blue eyes. He had ascended to the apex of the Catholic church more than twenty years ago, and it was clear he was not yet ready to relinquish his power.

"I am Arcangela, the Abbess of Santa Marina Maggiore."

The Anchorite stared up at Jenny with piercing gray eyes that bulged slightly from their sockets. "So you are the Plumber's woman. A handsome one, you are, but so sad!" Her eyes seemed fixed, like an owl's, so that she was obliged to turn her head to look this way and that. She was old and very thin, her skin translucent as rice paper, the blue of the veins in her temples and the backs of her hands startlingly vivid. She had a face the shape of an inverted teardrop, with a wide forehead and a crooked nose. One side of her mouth drooped slightly, and Jenny wondered whether she'd suffered a minor stroke until Arcangela shuffled forward on one lame leg.

"An ancient injury," Arcangela said. "I was nine when I was caught in the acqua aha. I slid and fell and was crushed between a piling and the hull of a boat. My parents said I was careless and, worse, stupid, to be standing at the edge of the fondamenta during the flood, but I loved to watch the water rising because at those times it takes on the color of wine… or blood."

She had a wide mouth with expressive lips that moved seemingly of their own accord. "You have asked to see me?"

"Yes," Jenny said. "May I come in so that I may speak with you in private?"

"You may not," Arcangela said, "principally because there is no way in or out of my cell."

"What?" Jenny was taken aback. "Surely you aren't a prisoner, as Anchorites were in medieval times?"

The abbess smiled, a slow, sly, wonderful grin that served to lessen Jenny's unease. "It is so. I have been walled in of my own volition because, like all Anchorites, the depth of my faith in Jesus Christ has compelled me to reject the world, and live here in isolation. So far as the world outside this convent is concerned, I am already dead. Father Mosto said the last rites over me just before I was bricked in. That was thirty years ago." She turned and pointed. "Look there, the other two windows in my cell. This one, to the left, looks out onto the altar of the Church of l'Angelo Nicolo`, and this one to the right is where I'm fed and where I put the chamber pot when it is filled."

Jenny was somehow terrified by this description. "You mean you haven't seen the sky in thirty years?"

"Why would I do such a thing, you're asking yourself. It sounds like hell, you're thinking." Arcangela's pale eyes were alight with an inner fire. "Am I right?"

"Yes." Jenny, on the verge of being overwhelmed, could only whisper the word.

"Well, it's not faith alone, I can tell you," the Anchorite said. "Such faith is indistinguishable from madness."