Chapter 12 #2
Light. Not very much of it, but enough, welling up uncontrollably like blood from a wound. I saw Svangerd, from the waist up; there was something big at floor level between me and her. She was holding the hog knife in one hand, and something that looked like a sack in the other.
“Are you all right?” I said.
She looked at me as though it was the most stupid question ever asked. Quite possibly it was.
“Now what do I do?” she said.
The walls, I couldn’t help noticing, were cracked. I looked up. That splitting noise must’ve been the rafters.
“We need to get out of here,” I said. “Bring the head. Now.”
“We can’t just leave—” She couldn’t bring herself to be more specific. “What if it wakes up?”
“Not without the head. Bring it. Come on, move.”
I was on my feet, pushing past her, grabbing her elbow. She’d probably have hit me for that, but her hands were full. “Is it safe to—?”
I pulled her out into the corridor. The nearest way down was the spiral staircase. I started towards it, then stopped. There was a huge crack in the plaster just above the lintel that hadn’t been there before. “Other way,” I said. Then I realised there wasn’t one.
The groaning noise was woodwork under intolerable strain. She looked at me, then darted down the spiral stair. I followed; a dozen steps and then I slipped, pitched forward. Here we go again. I cannoned into her and knocked her off her feet. I hate spiral staircases.
I think I landed awkwardly at the bottom of the stairs, because she had to pull me to my feet, and then I fell over again. “Come on,” I remember her yelling, as she tugged on my arm. She got me up and we tumbled into the courtyard, just as the staircase began to give way.
First the staircase, then the building. It slumped and slid rather than fell down, almost like a very slow-moving liquid, and there was surprisingly little noise, just a soft grinding, and ever so much dust. The courtyard was full of people – they’d cleared out of their rooms in a hurry when the fight started – and they kept well back from us once they realised what the sack-like thing was.
When the building collapsed, they ran, and then it was just me, Svangerd, and the head of Mother Krimhild.
She was still holding it, by one ear. I don’t know what had happened to the knife; buried, probably, in the rubble.
The building appeared to have stopped collapsing, at least for the moment.
There was a big gap where a section of it had been but wasn’t any more, like the gap left by a pulled tooth, and a big sprawl of stone blocks, brick, tiles, shattered mortar, cracked and splintered beams and rafters, all gushed out onto the courtyard cobbles like vomit.
“Put it down,” I said. “You don’t have to keep holding on to it. It’s not going anywhere.”
It was too dark for me to see the look on her face, which was probably just as well.
Someone must’ve gone and fetched Vitimer, because he showed up quite quickly, with lanterns and soldiers. She showed him the head. He looked at it, then threw up all over his shoes.
Clerks appeared, and then more clerks. One of them said the whole complex should be evacuated, until the master mason had had a chance to assess the full extent of the damage.
So, shortly afterwards, there we all were in Foregate Street, on the other side of the main gates, a lot of us in bare feet and without hats or hoods, just as it began to rain.
Vitimer, who’d been busy with the clerks and the soldiers, came over to talk to me.
“I want to see you first thing in the morning,” he said.
He didn’t sound like he was pleased with me.
He made a point of not looking at the head.
“Can’t you put a bag over it or something?
” he said, and I pointed out that we hadn’t got a bag.
So someone was sent to fetch one. “What about the rest of it?” he asked me. “Is it safe?”
“Yes,” I said. “For the time being.”
He really hated me for that, and I can’t say I blamed him. But as he scowled at me, a tiny idea fluttered leaf-like through the branches of my mind. I caught it, considered it, and thought, Why not?
“What we need,” I told him, “is a goldsmith.”
*
The master mason made his inspection as soon as it was light enough to see.
It was no good, he said. The damage was too great.
To shore it up, you’d have to prop it with iron girders, not timber, and take down the side walls, then put in columns to take the weight.
Whoever originally built it would’ve known how to do that, but he didn’t.
The whole block was going to have to come down, and he just hoped the rest of the wing wouldn’t come down with it.
Maybe it wouldn’t but maybe it would. A great shame, but there was nothing anyone could do.
“I think it might work,” I told Vitimer. “It’s never been tried, of course.”
If anything, he hated me more for saying that than he had the previous night. “Fine,” he said. “We’ll do it.”
My idea was basically quite simple. Where we’d been going wrong all these years, I told him, back in the Mesoge, was burning the decapitated bodies.
When you burn something, it turns to smoke and ashes.
The smoke drifts away, the ashes crumble into dust; in other words, they disappear, and you have no idea where they go.
At some point, some power or influence draws them back together, they reform or condense or crystallise or whatever the hell it is they do, and pretty soon you’re back to square one, which is the last place you want to be.
An approach, I told him, with a proven track record of failure. So instead, let’s try something else.
The head, I argued, was the key. I knew all the Mesoge walker stories, and in none of them was there any mention of a headless walker.
So, if you kept the head separate from the body, it stood to reason it couldn’t get itself back together again.
But that was where we’d gone wrong, from generation unto generation.
We’d buried the head under a cairn of stones, or dropped it down a well, or pitched it into a bog; in other words, we’d taken our eyes off it for five minutes, or even longer, and as a result we had no idea where it ended up or how it got there; not until we came across it again, back on the walker’s shoulders and itching to do mischief.
So, I said, how about this? Get a really good goldsmith to make a reliquary shrine.
You know the sort of thing I mean, I said to him (he knew): big and gaudy and encrusted with pearls and gemstones, the triumph of piety and conspicuous display over good taste.
Put the head in the shrine, fixed in real good so it won’t fall out, then put the shrine in the Rose Chapel and have teams of monks in there with it, twenty-four hours every day of the year, singing masses for Mother Krimhild’s soul and never taking their eyes off the head for one second.
Before you know what’s hit you, I added, you’ll be getting pilgrims and miracles and more pilgrims; very much a secondary consideration, obviously, but relics are really good business; just think for a moment about the Hand of St Vespaluus at Stennvik – ten thousand pilgrims a year, minimum; each pilgrim bringing in ten deniers, conservative estimate, that’s a hundred thousand deniers a year for doing practically nothing, not to mention the miracles and the prestige and the political leverage –
He looked at me. He hated me so much he could hardly breathe, but maybe I’d got something there.
Later that day, he addressed the council.
He’d had a vision, he said. Mother Krimhild had come to him in his vision and told him to build a shrine to house her horribly abused remains.
The shrine, she’d told him, would be a perpetual symbol of forgiveness, purification, redemption, reconciliation and the unlimited power of faithful prayer, and of the unshakeable and fundamental unity of Holy Mother Church.
For as long as it stood, he said, Saint Krimhild’s shrine would be a fortress of light against the power of darkness, an imperishable reminder of the eternal covenant, the resurrection of the flesh and the life everlasting.
Proposed, seconded, passed unanimously. Lots of cheering. Job done.
There was still, of course, another walker to get rid of: my father.
They’d put his body in a coach-house, covered over with old oilskins, and his head in a vinegar barrel in the charcoal cellar under the porter’s lodge.
There were terrified soldiers watching both locations, night and day.
Some halfwit lawyer told Vitimer that it was up to me to get rid of him, as legal next of kin.
No problem, I said, but my suggestion as to how to go about it wasn’t well received.
“Simple logic,” I told Vitimer. “If it works, it works. So why not my dad as well?”
“Yes,” he growled in pain, “but there’s a limit to the blasphemies I’m prepared to commit in the name of convenience. Mother Krimhild was a saint. She was one of us. This other monster—”
“Will probably be back again in a week or so,” I told him, “unless you do what needs to be done. If you can live with that, fine. If not—”
He groaned, out loud. “An abomination,” he said. “Conjured and controlled by Evil.”
There are times in a negotiation when it’s best to shut up and let the other guy do it all for you. I wiped my face neutral and sat still and quiet, while he thought about it. “I can’t see how we’d get away with it,” he said. “Everybody here knows what happened.”
“Everybody here,” I said, “that’s the point. But Permia’s a very long way away.”
“I can’t tell a deliberate lie.”
“Of course not,” I said. “But you can repeat what I tell you. And I’m telling you that the Blessed Krimhild came to me in a vision—”
He gave me a really nasty look.