The Gathering Storm

Page 140

Snick.
The sound startled her. She looked down.
Pale shapes scuttled into the chamber below. As ghastly white as lepers afflicted with a rash of silvery-white scales, the creatures balked as if the light hurt them. They had no eyes, only bulges on their faces like giant, moist egg sacs, but it was not only this deformity that made them grotesque and misshapen, wrong, the broken vessels from which the Enemy had attempted to create a mockery of angels. Their heads were too big for their bodies. Scabrous pustules grew on their twisted limbs. Some wore charms and amulets dangling at their necks; these ornaments chimed softly as they clamored each against the others in a wordless music as incomprehensible as their animal muttering.
They shuffled closer, clawed hands grasping and clicking at the air, seeking prey.
She scrambled up the final rungs, shoved the lamp safely onto the floor before her, flung herself over the lip of the hole, and dragged the ladder up behind her. God had not freed her only to allow her to fall into the hands of such creatures.
Panting, she sidled away from the hole. Could they leap? Fly? Dig? She hoped she had trapped them below, banished them within the depths of the rock.
Picking up the lamp, she hurried up a stairwell carved into the rock. Ahead she heard the faint voices and footfalls of the ones who had gone before her. Even had she been tempted to hurry, to catch them, she could not. Soon enough she had to stop, bent double as her sides heaved and she fought to catch her breath. Only after some time could she start up again, and each time she took fewer steps before she had to stop and rest—yet each time God gave her the will and the strength to continue.
She had keen hearing, honed during this time that sight had been denied her. Aided by a good sense of direction and a nose for misdirection, she followed the trail of her captors through winding passages, along the side of caverns that smelled of horses, past desiccated midden heaps and, at last, out under the blinding brilliance of a nearly full moon hanging just above the horizon in a cloudless night sky. She could barely endure its light and had to rest, after extinguishing the lamp, to fight off nausea.
After a while she felt able to continue, although her eyes hurt. As she walked, the night air swirled against her with such a bewildering miasma of scents that she staggered sideways, halting at the brink of a cliff. The path cut up along the shoulder of the vast rock that housed the convent where she had journeyed so long ago. The moon sank behind dark hills.
Dawn was coming and, with it, the sun.
Sparks and threads of light winked into existence at the topmost crown of the great rock.
Sorcery! She recognized the handiwork of a mathematicus, weaving starlight into a stone crown. Only Anne and her minions knew these well-guarded secrets. Had they betrayed her twice?
Astonished and deeply dismayed, she limped onward as quickly as she could, although her feet ached and her back burned and her eyes still stung. Lamp, water pouch, and bundle she dropped behind her; they seemed of little account now, and they weighed so heavily as she grew tired.
The path led her through a grove of rock pinnacles before vanishing on a flat summit crowned by a stone circle. There they stood, the miscreants, the very ones who had cast her into the pit. Yet surely her eyes had suffered after so long in the dark, for it seemed to her that there were twice the number that had inhabited the convent when she had first come. Three of their number were certainly male. Two held between them a pallet, where lay the very woman Antonia had been sent to eliminate.
Was Mother Obligatia the one whose power had thwarted Antonia’s galla? Or had Anne betrayed Antonia by teaching the secrets of the mathematici to someone else?
Obligatia gestured to a woman who arranged small stones on a patch of oval sand the color of moonlight. Rising, that woman chanted in a clear, authoritative voice.
“Matthias guide me, Mark protect me, Johanna free me, Lucia aid me, Marian purify me, Peter heal me, Thecla be my witness always, that the Lady shall be my shield and the Lord shall be my sword.” Using a polished walking stick, she traced lines between the stones, and with each line in the sand a line of light threaded down from the heavens to catch in the stones. “May the blessing of God be on our heads. God reign forever, world without end.”
The others were too intent on her sorcery to notice Antonia, and yet she was herself too exhausted from her climb to act. The woman worked quickly as the night sky lightened imperceptibly with the coming of day, weaving threads where Mother Obligatia directed her.
Shouts rang up from behind, startling Antonia so badly that she staggered back against rocks and sank down, too worn even to stand.
“Hurry!” cried one of the assembled clerics, a very young woman now breaking down into sobs, while another hushed the crying girl sharply.