Chapter 1
“Murdering princesses,” I said, “isn’t what I signed up for. I’m a priest, for crying out loud. Get someone else to do it.”
He gave me that look, which I guess I deserved.
I know I’m obnoxious when I’m being pompous.
“First,” he said, “you’ll do as you’re damn well told.
Second, you’re a monk, not a priest.” He picked up my dainty little ivory-handled penknife and used it to clean under the nail of his left index finger.
“Third,” he went on, “not all princesses are the same. Fourth,” he added, peering down at the manuscript I was copying, “there’s only one C in necessary. ”
He’s about twenty-two, so a good ten years younger than me, and he looks like what he is, a rich and powerful bureaucrat’s sister’s son.
He’s short and slight, with a squint, a receding hairline, a nose that looks like it was squashed in by his maker’s thumb while the clay was still wet, and an Adam’s apple the size of my fist. He’s also my head of department, and as sharp as a razor.
“Look,” I said, trying my dying-spaniel expression, “there’s got to be someone better qualified for this job than me. I’m a scriptorium clerk. I copy out books. I don’t know the first thing about court etiquette and diplomatic protocol.”
“Yes, you do,” he said. “And besides, you won’t need any of that stuff. This princess is also a nun. You know about nuns and convents and ecclesiastical councils.” He smiled at me. “Your partner’s up for it. I get the impression she can’t wait to get started.”
That I could believe. “Ecclesiastical council,” I repeated. “You don’t mean the—”
“Yes.” The smile broadened into a grin. “Thought that’d change your mind.”
The trouble is, he knows me too well. “I suppose if you order me to do it, I have no choice.”
I’d made him happy. “Yes, Brother Desiderius, you shall go to the ball,” he said, and left the room.
Every man has his price. Mine, as he’d correctly deduced, was a chance to attend the fifteenth ecumenical council, even if I had to murder some perfect stranger in order to get in.
Ecumenical councils are when all the heads of the worldwide church of the Invincible Sun, all the patriarchs and archbishops and abbots and archimandrites and all their many, many chaplains and advisers, get together in one place to hammer out some burning issue of doctrine.
It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and if you’re the slightest bit into heavy theology, you’d cheerfully strangle your grandmother, or a nun, for a chance to sit in on one of the big debates.
I’m not actually a believer – a lifetime studying the scriptures is a straight-line route to atheism, in my experience – but I’m one of those people who can’t resist a good old-fashioned intellectual slugfest over the minutiae of dogma.
And since this council, convened by the patriarch in far-away Choris Anthropou, was intended to sort out once and for all the eternally vexed question of the dual procession of the Holy Spirit – well, there you go. Be there or be square.
Besides, I told myself as I finished up the copy I was making of Momius’ Analects, it’s not like I had a choice.
I did, after all, swear a solemn vow when I became a monk, twenty years ago.
Of the three heads of that vow, circumstances and my physical appearance have dictated that two were never going to be a problem.
The third head, obedience, has always been my weakness.
But weaknesses, I told myself firmly, are just opportunities for self-improvement in disguise.
It would be good for me to obey a direct order which I found distasteful and morally repugnant.
Especially if it meant I got to go to the party.
“Oh, come on,” my partner said. “Lighten up a little. How often do you get a chance to guzzle a real live princess?”
Sister Svangerd and I have been a team for a while now.
We came together back in the old country, when we did special ecclesiastical operations for the archduke: the previous one, not the present incumbent, who dissolved all the monasteries in the duchy and had us driven out of the jurisdiction.
Luckily we’d already had a run-in with the young smart-arse we now work for, and in spite of the fact that he’d caught us red-handed trying to steal a politically sensitive book from the abbot’s library, he thought enough of us as operatives to take us on after the dissolution, doing basically the same sort of thing we’d done for the duke, only (he insisted) rather better.
Unlike me, Svangerd came to the cloister relatively late in life, after seven years in the hospitality and entertainment sector in Auxentia City.
One of those sudden epiphanies of faith turned her into a passionately sincere believer and she takes her vows desperately seriously, but you’d never think she was a nun in a million years.
Among the baggage carried over from her previous life is a fanatical hatred of the upper classes, with a particular emphasis on hereditary royalty.
“I don’t want to,” I said. “Besides, I seem to remember reading something somewhere about Thou Shalt Not Kill.”
“Thou shalt do no murder,” she corrected me, “which is very different. You ought to know that, being a scholar.”
“Yes, but—”
“Murder,” she went on, plainly not having heard me, “is when you guzzle someone and it’s against the law. So if the people who make the law tell you it’s fine, it can’t be murder, can it?”
Svangerd’s attitude to questions of doctrine can best be described as refreshingly straightforward.
With her past, she had to fight like a wildcat before they’d let her be a nun.
But fighting is what she’s best at, so naturally they assigned her to the Mission Militant, which suited her just fine.
I got seconded to the mission because I’m six foot five of mostly muscle and can do majuscule cursive – which, if you’re not familiar with the term, is a type of lettering suited to copying manuscripts legibly and very fast. Svangerd and I work well together.
I like her a lot. She thinks I’m an idiot.
“Anyway,” she went on, wiping a spot of honing oil off her cheek, “it’s a direct order from a superior officer, so it’s not up to you. And you’ll have a chance to drool over a roomful of bishops. You’ll like that.”
The oil came from the whetstone, on which she was sharpening one of her many knives.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say she’s got a thing about weapons, or at least not in any unhealthy sense, because there’s a remote chance she may read this one day.
Let’s just say she takes a proper interest in the tools of her trade, and leave it at that.
“I’d quite like to attend the debates,” I said, “But maybe slaughtering the delegates is too high a price to pay.”
“Just one delegate,” she pointed out. “Tell you what. You can listen to her droning on about the essential unity of the Trinity and then scrag her. Can’t say fairer than that.”
“I’m surprised at you,” I said, passing her a rag to wipe the blade on. “She’s the nominal head of your order.”
“Nominal,” she said. “Actually, she didn’t want them to let me in. Said I was indelibly tainted. But I don’t hate her because of that. After all, she had a point.”
“No,” I said. “You hate her because she’s a princess.”
“I don’t hate anybody,” she said. “It says in the Book, thou shalt not hate. But if doing my job and obeying a legitimate order delivered through the proper chain of command means there’s one less blue-blood in the world, then hooray for obedience.
” She shrugged, nearly cutting herself. “I wish you’d sharpen your conscience on somebody else for a change,” she said.
“You can be really boring when you’re conflicted. ”
Which more or less settled that. “We’d better get started, then,” I said. “There’s a lot of homework to do.”
She smiled at me. She does, sometimes. “We can have a rummage through the Stack,” she said. “Oh go on, it’ll be fun.”
Oh, for crying out loud, I thought. “If you insist. Only this time—”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
The Stack is her term for the restricted artefact store, which lives in a converted charcoal cellar under the old refectory, which is now guest quarters for visiting dignitaries.
To get there, you go down a long and horrible spiral staircase, tight as a screw thread with no handrail, so you need both hands for clutching at the wall to keep from falling and therefore can’t hold a lamp or a candle to see your way in the pitch dark.
“Don’t be such a girl,” came her cheerful voice from a long way below me, as I edged my terrified way from step to step.
She can see in the dark like a cat, it goes without saying.
My questing toe identified the bottom step, and I groped my way along the corridor until my head connected with the edge of an open door, which meant I’d arrived. A moment later, I heard the scrape of a tinder-box, and she lit a lamp.
She likes the restricted artefact store.
I find it depressing. Every time I go there and see all the many and various gadgets stacked on the shelves, I can’t help but picture myself in a guardroom somewhere, trying to explain to a sceptical watch captain precisely why I was caught with something like that hidden up the sleeve of my habit.
Mind you, I’m prejudiced. Thanks to my size and bulk, I can generally subdue the opposition simply by thumping them.
Small and delicately built operatives like Svangerd need a bit of help from human ingenuity.
“This is new,” she said, lifting a complicated-looking brass thing off a shelf. “I wonder what it does.”
“That’s an astrolabe,” I said. “You use it for navigating at sea. No, don’t press—”
Something whirred past my ear and went chink! against the wall. “Neat,” she said, and put it back where she’d found it. “Oh look, they’ve still got this. I think it’s my favourite.”