The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [71]
“Jumpy, aren’t you?” Ehan said as Stephen belatedly took the proffered hand.
“Well, it’s just that you began by calling me a traitor, Brother Ehan.”
“Well, it’s true,” Ehan replied. “There’s some in the Church would consider you a traitor, but I’m not one of ’em. Nor will you find anyone in d’Ef that thinks that way. Not at the moment, anyway.”
“How did you know I was going to be there?”
“Them below told me they was sending you up,” Ehan said.
“Then you’re allied with slinders?”
Ehan scratched his head. “The wothen? Yah, I reckon.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, I’m not to explain it to you,” Ehan replied, “for fear I’ll get it wrong. I’m just here to take you to the fellow who will explain it to you, and to assure you that you’re among friends—or at least not among enemies. No allies of the praifec here.”
“So you know about that?” Stephen said.
“Oh, sure,” Ehan replied. “Look, do you mind if we start walking? We’re likely to miss the praicersnu if we don’t hurry.”
Stephen took a deep breath. He and Ehan had been friends, or at least he once thought they were. They had helped each other against Desmond Spendlove and the other corrupt monks of the monastery d’Ef. But Stephen had since undertaken a series of studies whose lesson was essentially that no one was what he seemed, especially in the Church.
Ehan had never given Stephen any reason to distrust him. He could as easily have stabbed him in the back as said hello.
But maybe what he wanted was subtler than murder.
“Let’s go, then,” Stephen said.
“This way.”
Ehan motioned him along a trail that switched back through forest fringe and pasture, down across a little stream bridged by a log, out through the vast apple orchard, and up the next hill toward the sprawling monastery. Despite his bad memories of the place, he had to admit it was still a beautiful building. The high-steepled nave thrust up a double-arched clock tower of rose granite to catch the morning sun like pale fire, a prayer made architecture.
“What’s happened since I’ve been gone?” Stephen asked as they climbed the last, steepest part of the approach.
“Ah, well, I reckon I can tell you some of it. After you saved the holter from Brother Desmond and his bunch, they went out after you. We learned later how that turned out, of course. In the meantime, we got word that the praifec had sent a new fratrex to carry on here at the monastery. Now, we knew Desmond was mean, but we didn’t know he was working for the Hierovasi.”
“Hierovasi?”
“I—right, supposed to let him explain. Don’t worry about that just yet. The bad fellows, let’s say. In fact, like you, most of us didn’t even know about the Hierovasi until recently. But we did manage to work out that Hespero was one of ’em, which meant the fratrex he was sending would most likely be one, as well.
“He was, and we had a bit of a fight. We would have lost, but we had some allies.”
“The slinders?”
“The dreothen, and yah, the wothen through them. You don’t approve?”
“They eat people,” Stephen pointed out.
Ehan chuckled. “Yah, that’s a mark against ’em. But in this case they ate the right people, so we weren’t complaining that much.
“Since then, our own numbers have grown as the word had gotten around. We’ve been attacked a few more times by the Hierovasi, but they’ve got other things on their table at the moment—the resacaratum, for instance.”
“I heard something about that in Dunmrogh, mostly rumors.”
“If only it were just rumors. But it’s not; it’s torture, burning, hanging, drowning, and all the rest. Anyone they don’t like, anyone they think might be dangerous—”
“By they, you mean these Hierovasi?”
“Yah, but it’s them that controls what most people think of as the Church, you understand.”
“No,” Stephen said. “I didn’t know any of this.”
But he felt a sudden spark of hope. Ehan was suggesting it was only a faction in the Church that was bad, albeit the most powerful