Of Deeds Most Valiant: A Poisoned Saints Novel

I take a long breath and force my vision to clear. Hefertus’s massive arm curls around my shoulder in an unlikely vulnerability. I can smell the rare spices he anoints himself with every morning. Frankincense and something else.

The spasms I took from Hefertus leave my hands trembling and my limbs weak, but the curse I took when I went through the door is worse. It burns in my veins and runs through my mind, opening all the locks, throwing all the bolts, swinging wide every door — not a physical mark, but a mark all the same.

Without meaning to, I have invited something inside that should have been kept out. An enemy has breached my walls and I lifted the portcullis with my own hands. It leaves me with an oily feeling of dread and a terrible inability to govern my own thoughts. All my tight control falls suddenly slack.

I don’t know what penalty the others took, beyond Hefertus. I’ve taken half his penalty, and I can feel it clearly enough. His was a simple punishment, though not an easy one. Death — even a quick one — is not easy.

Now, answer me this. What sort of door to a monastery demands so high a toll? Is it to purge the soul of sin? Or is it to hide something beyond this door?

I rather think it might be the latter. I do not trust this place.

I have read of attempts to make people holy by force. They never end well. Not for those being made or those doing the making. I have the creeping feeling that this may be one of those places. I have no desire to be made or unmade by it.

I force myself out of my own thoughts. The floor beneath me is polished rock— light but shot through with dark veins. I focus on the strength of it beneath my feet, remove Hefertus’s arm from my shoulder, and pull myself to my feet.

When the Majester General steps through the door, he has a tic in the corner of his eye and is masking something at his left side. He looks ten years older. I open my hands to offer healing but he waves them roughly away. He wants nothing I might offer him. Well and good. I’m not sure I have strength left to give.

“I propose we do this systematically. I shall lead the search,” he barks. I see in him an echo of my own determination not to bend to the toll of this place.

He doesn’t bother waiting for the Vagabond Paladin. It seems the others are willing to disrespect her without thought. I wonder what it’s like to live your whole life like that — as an afterthought. Is it freeing, or painful … or both?

The Majester has his parchment out and ready, charcoal poised over it, but he’s too late with his commands and his authority has been shaken off already, like a light dusting of snow on a crisp morning. I’m the only one waiting with him and it’s not for him that I wait.

“This will be madness,” he mutters, pushing past me to rush after the others as if he can chivvy them back under his wing.

I wish him well with that, though I smirk at his back. After all, what is a general without his army?

My father had generals. They were not his, but they pretended to be and he pretended with them. I recall them distinctly. They did not make lists. They did not try to manage those who did not salute them. They lazed about like fat cats, eating, drinking, and then studying a map for an hour, ordering the deaths of thousands, and going off for a nap. This Majester is as much a general as I am a Saint.

I draw in a deep breath, forget the Majester, and instead, try to look as if I am not waiting as I study my surroundings. This monastery — or the foundation of one, I suppose — has all the welcome of an open tomb, and while the door back remains open, who knows how exacting the price to return might be? It would be best for all if we did what we came to do and then left without returning. One trip. One risk.

My eyes flick over the stark polished stone. The faint light that seeps through the door is all the light in this place but it is enough to see dimly. It may seem bare, but where there is one trap there will be others.

The snuffle of a dog makes me turn, and there’s the brindled hound and his mistress. Through the door behind them, the world looks as if I am peering through water. I faintly see the gleam of a golem eye and then nothing but ripples and shadows.

The Vagabond Paladin carries all her worldly possessions in a sack over her shoulder, her hair wild and falling from the braid she wove to crown her head. She has cleaned it since yesterday. I barely swallow down the desire that swells up within me at the sight of that mass of clean hair. I’ve always had a fondness for long, tumbling locks but this is beyond the usual temptation.

It’s my payment. I felt it the moment I went through the door and confessed my inability to keep my heart’s longing to myself, and now here it is laughing at me as it twists my heart and body against my best interests.

“Lust,” I told the door, and the ability to control it is what has been stripped from me.

And now, when I should be looking away, instead, I let my eyes feast. Now, when I should be moving away, my feet are rooted in place. Now, when I should keep my tongue silent and my thoughts on pure things, my tongue speaks in greeting and my thoughts tangle round and round, feeding me a steady stream of possibilities.

If I had any sense, I’d run faster than the Majester General to escape this woman.

Be still, I warn myself. Be wary.

But wariness is a citizen of another land.

“Walk with me?” my traitor tongue asks on my behalf.

“That might be best,” the Vagabond says, gripping her tattered sack in an arm so laced with feminine muscle that I see little glimmers of it under her wristguard and the threadbare fabric that swaths her shoulder.

Unbidden, my mind reminds me of what an arm like that would feel like slipping through the caressing grip of my palm and fingers. I bite my lip so hard that it bleeds, and that is enough to put my mind back on the task.

I have counseled others on how to remain steadfast. Surely, my temptation is no worse than theirs have been. I remember one brother dolefully telling me he had been assigned as an advisor to the Princess Surina, who had already killed five lovers and still had more lined up merely on the rumor of her charms and great beauty.

“Just don’t think of it,” I had told him. “Discipline your mind.”

I wonder if he found that advice as impossible as I do now.

“There will be other traps,” I say calmly, beginning my descent. The bite in my leg twinges with every step. “We must be vigilant.”

The dog slides by me, nose close to the steps. I breathe in his wet-dog scent with gratitude. It’s hard to be too taken up with love when you’re smelling wet dog and feeling the pain of his bite in your flesh.

“Of course,” she says.

Her eyes are everywhere, noting our surroundings, keeping track of things. If you travel from place to place all your life you must be good at that — quick judgments, lightning assessments. She’s a good choice for an ally. Or so I try to convince myself.

“With two of us, perhaps one can help free the other.”

I know that I mock myself with such weak arguments. Were I truly in need of a partner, I could have asked Hefertus to stay with me.

We descend into the darkness through a precisely cut cavern. The ceiling and walls — hewn from white rock any church would envy — are thickly embossed with cunning images of animals, beasts, and angels with five tongues. I find that troubling. Why five tongues? Why not two — or one?

This is not like any monastery I’ve ever seen. But then, again, this is ancient. Perhaps ancient monks did not yet embrace the clean lines of the holy. Perhaps they found holiness in the wild and untamed things.

A few steps down and the ceiling vanishes upward, the stairs widen to three times their expanse, and a hall opens up below us. My tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth.

Even within Saint Rauche’s Citadel, I have not seen grandeur to this scale. Nor will I, I think.

We’ll be walking a hundred more stairs to descend to the shining floor below. And when we do, we’ll be in a room bathed in white light from several dozen long, narrow windows, cut like massive arrow slits in the rock on one side of the hall. Between them, at the very center, is a larger triptych window of stained glass. It is tall and narrow, too, and sections are missing, shattered on the ground like fallen leaves in autumn. I can almost make out what the depicted scene the window once bore might have been, but the missing pieces make it too difficult to be definitive. Through the windows — both the slit windows and the triptych — I can easily see the sea as she reflects the face of the sun back to him. She is a dark pewter laced with my favorite color — rich marigold, like my Marigold’s eyes.

The same color spills across the floor below, where someone has taken the time to intricately lay a mosaic of rock shards into what I can tell is a map, and yet, it looks like no map of ours, nor any I studied from ages past. It’s breathtaking in the loving detail paid to every nuance of land and sea. Even the scrollwork around it is a work of art.

“Look!” I hear Sir Kodelai call from twenty stairs below. “I can see Cantora on that map. She sank beneath the sea a thousand years ago with her great ships and their purple dyes.”

“And are those the Sephorus Islands?” I hear another paladin reply. “Before the mouth of the God opened and spewed out fire upon them?”

Strangest of all is how the artist has laid out the circle of the earth, dividing it out as if he had unraveled the peel of an orange and tried to reassemble it flat, rather than simply portraying the disk of the known earth.

I trace the edges of the mosaic with my gaze and follow them to the edges of the room, where white marble statues line the walls. They are so large that at first, I think there are cupboards carved in their bases, surrounded by sculpted roses. I realize, after a heartbeat, that they are doors to other rooms. Doors for men — but the nearest one is smaller than the foot of the statue towering over it. The roses clustered around it are large enough for me to curl up inside one and sleep like a honeybee.

I inspect the nearest statue — carved from white marble laced with gold veins. I’m not sure we could replicate it today, so intricate is the detail, so large is the scale. It depicts a bearded, half-naked man. A sword hangs from his scabbard; another is buried in his chest. Flowering vines twist up his legs. A chain wraps around his knees, binding them together, and each link of it is carved separately and interwoven. How long would that chain alone have taken to craft? A pair of wings fold tightly against his back and his mouth is an open cavern, his head tilted back unnaturally as if his jaw were broken. The whole of his head is levered up and back so that he looks as if he is swallowing a terrible brew. I feel my own lip curling in sympathy. The artist’s attention to detail only makes the result resonate that much more in the heart. The statue’s hands are lifted upward, each finger sculpted in loving detail to show the strain it takes for him to hold up the edge of the ceiling. I feel it, too.

I can barely snatch my eyes away to look at the next statue but when I do, he looks just like his fellow — if his fellow were dressed exactly like me. Beardless, like me. Haunted expression like —

“Like you,” the Vagabond Paladin breathes, breaking into my thoughts.

I look back at the first man. Mayhap if my angle were different, I would see Hefertus in the set of that jaw.

“And there’s me,” she says, her voice like the sound of someone who has just discovered they’ve been sealed into a jar of wriggling maggots.

I follow her pointed finger and there is her doppelganger. Her stone hair is tangled all around her in taunting deshabille, a single gauntlet and pauldron on one arm her only armor. The rest of her is hidden beneath artfully draped rags. There are butterflies in her hair and on her wrists, and her gauntleted hand grips the hilt of a sword that has been buried straight through her shapely thigh.

I feel my face grow hot as sunrise, as if — fool that I am — I think a marble statue formed thousands of years ago is somehow a representation of the flesh and blood woman beside me.

Oh, the payment the door took is hard indeed. I would have chosen differently.

I look back at my own semblance. I see now that his open mouth is full of something. It gushes down his chin and falls in cloying strands as far as his belt.

Were I a weaker man, I would flee this place right now. And, perhaps, I would return to my aspect and my story would simply be of how I saw terrors and left others to die. Or we might be at war with whichever aspect found the cup. Or, perhaps, I might be called mad.

Instead, I swallow and take another step, nearly colliding with the cursed dog, who looks almost as if he is laughing at me, though I know full well that dogs do not laugh. The bite wound in my thigh twinges in a reminder not to get too close to this one. He is no jester but a deadly threat. I almost think I see a red gleam in one of his eyes — a trick of the light, no doubt.

“Is …” The Beggar Paladin pauses to clear her throat. “Did it move, just now?”

I glance backward at her and regret it immediately. Her face is lit with the marigold of the sea and with equal parts horror and wonder. She has a little of the divine about her — enough of it that, were I not a holy paladin, I might be tempted to worship at her altar instead.

I have to clear my throat, too, but for other reasons. Even then, the end of my sentence takes a higher note than I’d meant it to.

“Did what move?”

“The demon trapped on the ceiling,” she says. And I follow her hand to where it grips the hilt of her sword and then follow her eyes up, up, up. “Did it move?”

On the ceiling of the great hall is a strange relief sculpture, but unlike the pure white of the ones below, this one is part gild and part jet black. The gilding follows the edges of what looks like a cutout of leaves and flowers, vines and branches, and scrollwork edged with rats and sharks, trumpets and daggers. But between the cutouts and under all that gilding is a mass of glossy black. I would have thought it was lacquer meant to enhance the gold. But my eye has trouble following its surface. It seems to twist beneath my eye as if my gaze is oil, slipping off the hidden form.

It is from this dark relief sculpture that I feel the pull I felt before. Something sings a single note to my heart, bids it come, bids it die. I feel the pull worse than hunger, worse than thirst.

And it is at the very peak of that culminating desire that I see the twitch.

Something in the inky darkness — something gleaming with just the barest edge of marigold — something has moved.

I feel my muscles go rigid and my bones nearly leap from my flesh when she sets a hand on my arm.

“Let’s go below,” she says in a tone slick with caution. “Look no more at the monster.”

My voice leaves me sounding hollow. “Monster? Is that what it is?”

“I hardly know. But I know evil. To look is to see. To see is to understand. To understand is to become. And to become is everything. Do not become evil, Sir Saint.”