The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [150]
“I don’t know,” Stephen said dubiously. “The one thing I do know, I don’t like.”
“What’s that?”
“That we’re here. And Hespero is here. Do you really think that’s a coincidence?”
Ehan scratched his head. “I suppose I thought it was just bad luck.”
“It’s impossible,” Stephen asserted. “He’s either following us or he’s after the same thing we are. I can’t think of any other explanation. Can you?”
Ehan was still mulling that over when Brother Dhomush reappeared with bread and mutton broth.
Dhomush and two other monks slept in the dormitory with them, but by the time the night had half turned above their heads, their breathing indicated to Stephen that they were asleep. He quietly reached his feet down from the hard wooden cot and padded to the door, fearing it would be locked or would squeak loudly if it wasn’t.
Neither was true.
Padding lightly on marble was as close to absolutely silent as anyone could be. Another initiate of Saint Decmanus might hear him, but as they had passed, he’d noticed that the church’s altar was dedicated to Saint Froa, whose gifts usually didn’t involve acute senses.
It wasn’t difficult to find his way back to the library. He approached it tentatively, fearing Hespero would still be there, but found it dark. A moment’s listening disclosed no breath or heartbeat, but he still didn’t feel as if he could trust his ears. Henne had regained more or less normal hearing, as had Ehan and Themes, but none of them had begun with the ability to hear a butterfly’s wing.
Knowing he had to take the risk eventually, he entered the room and felt along the wall for the window ledge where he’d earlier seen a tinderbox. He found it and managed to light a small candle. In its friendly light he began his search.
It didn’t take long to find the first item he sought: a volume detailing the history of the temple itself. It was large, massively thick, and prominently displayed on a lectern. He loved it immediately because he could see that it had been rebound many times to accommodate new pages. All the layers of time were there in the type and the condition of the scrifti bound into it.
The most recent pages were smooth and white, crafted in Vitellia of linen rag, using a secret Church process. The next layer back was more brittle and yellowed, rough at the edges; it was Lierish bond made mostly of pulped mulberry fibers.
The oldest sheets were vellum, thin and flexible. The writing was worn in some places, but the scrift itself would outlast its younger neighbors.
Smiling despite himself, he flipped through the first few pages, hoping to discover when the temple was founded.
The first page was of no use, a dedication to Praifec Tysgaf of Crotheny for his vision in establishing the church in Demsted. Tysgaf had been praifec a bare three hundred years ago; that meant that despite the seeming age of the building, it had not been established in Hegemonic or pre-Hegemonic times.
That meant he wasn’t going to find anything useful here.
Or so he thought, until he reached the last paragraph of the introduction.
It is also fitting that we laud the good sense and basic decency of those who kept this place before us. Though lacking the inspired teachings of the true Church, they preserved for many generations a light of knowledge in what is otherwise a dark wilderness. The legend among them is that in ancient times, before the coming of the Hegemony, they lived in a most pagan state, sacrificing to stones and trees and pools of water. During that time, a holy man came from the south who taught them medicine, writing, and the basic tenets of true religion, then departed, never to be seen again. Dark days followed as the armies of the Black Jester came to control the region, yet they kept faith with their teacher. Without guidance, the centuries have corrupted their doctrine, but rather than resisting our coming, they have embraced us with open arms as the bearers of the faith of their revered one, Kauron.
Stephen almost laughed out loud.