Chapter Thirteen A Spy in the House of God
Thirteen
A Spy in the House of God
Glenys Godwin knew about what was happening in Geneva because Oakley Street had an agent in the Magisterium.
His name was Leenart Karpelin, and he worked in the cathedral archives.
He was known to his employers and his few friends as a diligent scholar and a quietly pious individual whose only interest outside his work was choral music; his tenor voice was not powerful, but it was always secure.
The conference on the regulation of doctrine was not exactly held in secret, but it was clearly understood to be a clerical matter, a professional examination of technical and philosophical questions not likely to be of great interest to the simple believer.
For example, Marcel Delamare had been working on his notes about the deceptive and baleful nature of the imagination, and was intending to deliver a speech on that subject in a closed symposium.
However, there were a few sessions open to the general public, and one of those was the lecture to be given by the celebrated novelist Gottfried Brande.
The President’s secretariat had arranged it with immaculate skill.
It was scheduled at a time of the day and the week when most delegates and other attendees would be tiring somewhat, and more likely to relish a nap than a lecture.
It was untitled, because the title Brande had given it (a quotation from the philosopher Hegel) was unfortunately too long to fit in the program, so no one could tell what it was likely to be about.
Furthermore, the speaker’s late announcement of his intention to appear had made it difficult to advertise the event with the full effectiveness it no doubt deserved; and finally, in the biographical note, Brande’s famous novel The Hyperchorasmians was mistitled The Hyperboreans.
Leenart Karpelin noted all this, and wrote it down to tell Oakley Street.
He turned up in good time for Brande’s lecture, and took his seat in the narrow and badly lit Chapel of the Sacred Presence and watched patiently as the twenty or so other audience members arrived.
The chapel could hold nearly a hundred, and the empty seats would, Karpelin knew, carry the Magisterium’s message clearly to the speaker.
When it was obvious that no more members of the public were going to turn up, a cleric Karpelin didn’t recognize came to the lectern and tapped it for silence.
“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,” he said.
His words were almost lost in the lamentable acoustics, and either he didn’t realize, or he didn’t know how to do anything about it, because he made no effort to adjust his voice.
“We are very privileged today to welcome a most distinguished speaker, a philosopher and, er, novelist known to countless readers in Europe and beyond. Professor Gottfried Brande’s work has, ah, been praised for its originality and force both in the academy and in the world of, er, popular fiction… ”
Karpelin was watching Brande, who was sitting just behind the speaker.
At the words “popular fiction” the philosopher clenched his fists and ground his teeth almost audibly.
Karpelin could see the daemon lying at his feet, a large dog of some kind, try to tuck her head further under a paw than it was already.
There was something strange about her, but Karpelin couldn’t work out what it was, and meanwhile, the speaker was concluding his introduction:
“We are, as I say, deeply privileged in this conference on the regulation of doctrine to hear the thoughts of such an eminent and internationally renowned speaker. Please welcome Professor Gottfried Brande.”
He stood aside as the audience clapped politely.
Brande stood up and came to the lectern, tall, gaunt, grim-faced, in a faded black academic robe.
Karpelin saw and only just heard him snap his fingers, and saw the German shepherd daemon slink forward after him, belly to the floor, almost timorous.
Karpelin thought that they were the unhappiest creatures he had ever seen.
Brande watched the daemon lie down again and close her eyes. Then he turned to the audience.
“I have tried all my life to speak and write plainly. I deplore the human tendency, from which I myself have long struggled to break free, to express its thought in metaphor or figurative language generally. To that end I have made a practice of expunging any examples of such loose thinking when I correct the first draft of a piece of writing. I begin by saying this merely because I want you to remember that what I say this afternoon is to be taken literally. It is not an exercise in florid rhetoric. It is far too important to be weakened with imagery. I have come here because a great and convulsive change in human life is about to take place, and I want to describe it with cold and simple accuracy.”
His voice was so much clearer than that of the cleric who had introduced him that Karpelin at first thought that Brande was simply speaking more loudly.
But it was more than that; everything about him was intensely present to the senses of sight and hearing.
Perhaps because the whites of his eyes were very white, his facial expressions could be read easily even in the poor light of the chapel, and his voice cut through the heavy air like that of a powerful singer; he was simply more in focus than anyone Karpelin had seen for a long time.
“There’s something wrong,” his mouse daemon whispered.
“Shh. Just listen.”
Brande was standing absolutely still as he spoke. His hands grasped the sides of the lectern, his feet were firmly set on the stone floor. His voice continued steadily, a resonant baritone, clear in every syllable:
“This gathering, we have been told, has been summoned to discuss the regulation of doctrine. Never has there been a time when such a project was both so necessary and so superfluous. Necessary, because we are not brutes, and we cannot live without a common understanding about fact and reason. Superfluous, because all the elements for such a common understanding are already in place, and have been for some—for sunin front of him—have been for—”
He stopped as if he was out of breath. Then he cleared his throat and tried again:
“The elements of common understanding have been in plate—ah—ah—no, not now, no—”
He clutched both hands to his chest and fell down heavily, striking his head on the lectern before hitting the floor.
Karpelin could see everything clearly, because the seat in front of him was empty.
He saw the cleric who had introduced the event rise from his chair uncertainly and look around before moving towards the stricken Brande; he saw the shepherd daemon half rise and then stumble away, tail between her legs; he saw some other members of the audience, half a dozen or so, stand up involuntarily, but then pause, because there was clearly nothing anyone could do: Brande was dead, still as marble, eyes wide open.
But his daemon—
She was loping from one side of the chapel to the other, in abject fear, whining, yelping a little, belly almost on the ground, wild-eyed.
The cleric, bending over Brande with one hand extended as if to stroke his head, became aware of the daemon with a start of terror and almost leapt over the body to get away from her. He stumbled off the dais and nearly fell full-length himself, but was caught by a man in the front row.
And now everyone was watching the daemon, who should have vanished, whose continuing existence was contrary to nature, who was as horrifying as a decapitated corpse getting up and stumbling about sightless.
Karpelin felt a surge of horror so profound he almost fainted.
Everyone was on their feet now, all pressing back and away from her, some uttering cries of fear.
Their daemons were the most fearful of all, clinging to their people, hiding their faces, yelping or whining or shrieking—
And the daemon herself was running, loping, scuttling, pawing at the door, howling. Karpelin and his daemon felt a profound compassion mingled with nausea at the utter wrongness of what was happening.
“Open the doors!” someone shouted.
“Let it out—quick—”
It, who a minute before would have been she, must have been a creature of the darkness, an evil spirit, a night-ghast. Behind Karpelin someone was being sick.
A man more desperate than the rest dashed for the chapel door, but before he reached it the daemon in her panic and misery sprang up at the handle, and the man cried out and pulled back.
The sounds the daemon was making were almost like language, but not German or French or indeed any European tongue. Karpelin found himself imagining the survivor of some appalling catastrophe howling in the ruins of her village, her children lying dead around her.
Then the man at the door tried the handle again and this time pulled it open, and at once most of the audience rushed towards it and jostled and shoved to get through.
The cleric who had introduced the speaker was among the first of them.
The daemon fled to a dark corner of the communion table and huddled beneath it, thrusting her head down hard, as if to bury her face under the stone floor.
Karpelin, curious as a human being as well as a spy, was last to leave the chapel.
His mouse daemon whispered, “Why isn’t she looking at him? Why isn’t she clinging to him? She’s afraid of him more than of anyone.”
Karpelin knew what she meant. “She was afraid when he was alive,” he murmured in reply.
“There was something wrong with them,” his daemon whispered back.