Dave Duncan - When the Saints

“Does the pope hold orgies?” he asked, sitting down.

“Not this one. Or if he does, he just invites boys.” Justina handed him a large earthenware bowl, which he balanced on his lap.

“No! Not the pope!”

Smiling at his horror, she brought an ewer and poured water over his hands. “So they say, but Rome eats and breathes rumors. He does have a basketful of nephews and he heaps riches and offices on them. We all know the Church is corrupt, squire. Do you doubt that Bishop Ugne bought his diocese with gifts to the archbishop and Cardinal Zdenek? Probably to the pope, also. Bishop Starsi the same. That’s simony: it’s a major sin, and it goes on all the time. They all keep mistresses. Oh, there are some good holy men, but the others outnumber them.”

“Our chaplain at Dobkov was one of the good ones.”

“I think I could have guessed that. Lucky you.” She thumped a pot of soup on to the table, then clattered a pewter bowl and spoon down in front of him. “Eat all you want. Speakers never need go hungry.”

He ladled some of the soup into his bowl and peered at it suspiciously. Vegetables he recognized, but the bulk of it seemed to be little rings of something.

“This is Friday.”

“It’s fish,” she assured him. “A sort of fish, calamari.”

He was hungry and the calamari was tasty, if chewier than any fish he had ever tasted before, other than salt cod, of course.

Justina sat opposite and cut the bread. She gave him a slice, took one for herself, and dipped it in oil. But it was several minutes before she spoke, and he sensed a darkening of her mood since their earlier meeting. When she did speak, however, it was to praise him.

“That was good work you did this morning, squire. With the ladder, I mean.”

“Good for a haggard?”

“Good for a fledged Speaker with fifty years’ experience. Simple but effective. Most important, it went unnoticed, unless the Wends had Speakers watching the battle and saw you. You’re a very skilled Speaker already.”

The praise pleased and disgusted him at the same time. “What is the penance for killing a hundred men by witchcraft?”

She shrugged and dismissed that topic with a wave of her aged hand. “They were Orthodox, not Catholic. The pope will absolve you. The Dominican’s death is the real problem.”

“Not for me.” Azuolas had been a Speaker a kn a/dind a very unscrupulous one, in Wulf’s opinion.

“For others, though.” She chewed her lip for a moment, seeming much older than before. “I’m allowed to give you advice. I had to argue for even that much, and I’m not to give you any more help than that.”

He stared at her in shock. “The Spider?” What sort of betrayal was this?

“No, not Zdenek. He can’t know about the deaths yet, not unless he has one of his hirelings spying on us.”

“Hirelings?”

“His Speaker flunkies. I’m on loan to Zdenek, as a sort of mutual favor, but we don’t want to get mixed up in anything as messy as priest killings.”

“Who’s ‘we’ in this situation?”

She shook her head and dipped the last piece of crust in oil. Sybilla had said that Justina was in, or had been to, somewhere she had called Elysium.

He asked, “Did you spy on the parley also?”

She nodded.

“Is it honorable to use talent at a parley?”

“Of course not. That Alojz scares me. He doesn’t look old enough to have his talent under control. Mind you,” she conceded, munching bread, “he slipped a neat stroke by you when he tweaked the bishop. That was deft.”

“I wasn’t fast enough! How far can you twist a man’s mind?”

“Well, there’s a limit. If you try to make a man believe he’s a horse, you’ll drive him crazy. Tweaking only works properly if it’s used to make people change their minds when they already want to. If he wants to be brave, you could tweak him into thinking he was brave, at least for a day or two. Your Bishop Ugne would much rather believe he was deceived by an apparition than that he saw what he really saw. So young Alojz nudged him the way he secretly wanted to go.”

“Is that within the rules?”

“Not the Saints’ rules, but it gets done often enough. I’d say that if you meddle with a man’s free will, then God may lay all his future sins on your shoulders, not his. But yon Alojz boy would contend that he was striving to uphold the first commandment, concealing a public display of talent-which he was-and that excuses a lot. None of us want the workadays all upturned and shrieking about Satanism, and a sending is less threatening than a materialization. From what you tell me, that display that Havel and Vilhelmas put on in Gallant last night was shocking by any standard. I wish I knew why they did it.”

This was the sort of teaching he needed, and it confirmed much of what he had been thinking. She was stretching her orders to drop hints, and he mustn’t appear ungrateful. Yet questions whirled in his mind like midges. He forced himself to keep both his eating and his conversation slow and casual.

“Can you tell me what Havel really wants? Whose side he’s on?”

“His own, I’d ween. You’re sure you saw him with Wends at Long Valley last night?”

Wulf helped himself to more of the fish soup. “Absolutely certain.”

Justina shrugged and nibbled a dainty piece of cheese as if she were just eating to keep him company. “That I don’t understand. He’s definitely in the know. You said he had three Speakers, all related to him?”

“Vilhelmas was a distant cousin, the moronic Leonas is his son, and he presented Alojz as a nephew. His family seems to breed even more of them than mine does.”

“They breed more workadays, too. You think he had one of them murder the old count and his son?”

“Yes. I thought it was Vilhelmas, but it could have been Leonas.”

“Doesn’t matter now. Then he tried to take over the defense against the Wends, so he could claim the earldom as Castle Gallant’s savior? I can eat that. But it doesn’t explain what he was doing consorting with the Wends.”

“If they really were Wends,” Wulf said glumly. “I don’t know a Wend from a wood dove. Perhaps the whole war is a Havel invention, and he has men at both gates? Duke Wartislaw may not even know what’s being done in his name.”

“Huh?” Justina was surprised. “By Our Lady, you’re as sly as a fox, Squire Magnus! But how many men attacked the north gate this morning?”

“I was too busy to make an exact count. More than a thousand. And I think I saw that many camped down at High Meadows. Enough tents, anyway.”

“You think the bombard may be real enough, but still be back in Pomerania? I suppose it’s possible.” She sighed. Her age seemed to vary all the time, from motherly to ancient and back again. “But if Vranov’s really feinting at both gates, I don’t know how he can possibly hope to keep his treachery secret for very long. Faith, if there’s no real Wends peering over the hills at you, then I’m sure you can handle Havel Vranov and his family Speakers. When he got rid of the old count, he did not expect to run into you and your pack of brothers.”

Wulf ate in silence for a moment, relishing a sense of achievement and the old woman’s praise. He had certainly done his part. Withou k pae="-1"›Wult him Anton might have been tweaked into inviting the Pelrelmians in, or the Wends might have taken the north barbican and thrown open the gates. Terrified refugees fleeing south would have run into Havel Vranov and been slaughtered. Wulfgang Magnus had done well.

And if the “Wend” attack was a fake staged by the Hound of the Hills, then the war was over. Duke Wartislaw might absorb this morning’s losses, but a mere count certainly could not. His troops would melt away after such a mauling.