Child of Flame (Crown of Stars 4)

while malice boils in their hearts.

Reward them according to their deeds.

Glorify those who trust in God.

Blessed are They, who listen to my plea for mercy.”

He waited a moment in silence after he had done. Was that flickering in the lamp’s flame the passage of angels, attracted by the sweetness of his voice? But if he were waiting for something, it did not come. He rose. Closing his book of secrets, he tied it shut with a red ribbon, tucked it under his arm, and walked away, passing under the archway and out through the doors. The lamp burned on. It was so silent she heard the hiss of the wick.

She lingered in the shadows in the gallery that ringed the inner sanctum. No need to risk being seen exiting the gallery so soon after Hugh’s departure. Anyway, she liked it here in St. Thecla’s Chapel. Emperor Taillefer had modeled the royal chapel at Autun on this very sanctuary, with its eight sides, double-vaulted walls, and domed roof. According to Heribert, St. Thecla’s Chapel was more perfectly proportioned than the copy at Autun, but certainly the royal chapel at Autun inspired awe and holy fervor because of its grandeur.

Liath was Taillefer’s great granddaughter, heir to his earthly glory and power. Just as she, once known as Biscop Antonia of Mainni but now called Sister Venia, understood the delicate balance of power at play within the skopos’ palace as a long and deadly winter turned the corner into the lean weeks of early spring. The Holy Mother Clementia lay dying. Soon, her soul would pass out of her body and ascend through the seven spheres to the Chamber of Light while, below, on Earth, some noblewoman of proper birth, rank, and holy stature would be elected to govern in her place.

“‘Our hearts have not gone astray,’” she murmured, “‘nor have our feet strayed from Your path.’”

3

LIATH dozed in comfort in the soft embrace of Somorhas. It was like luxuriating in a bath filled with rose petals with the water neither too hot nor too cold. She was so spectacularly comfortable that she simply did not want to move or even open her eyes. Nothing hurt; she had not a single nagging discomfort. No reason to hurry forward. She had been on the road for so long it seemed cruel not to rest here a while.

In the distance she heard faint singing, a vocal accompaniment to the chiming music of the spheres. A person could just lie here forever and bathe in the perfect counterpoint of the music, never ending, always melodious and in faultless harmony.

Wind brushed her face. A touch, as soft as a feather, tickled her lips. A cool rush flowed down her throat as though a breath of wind had insinuated itself into her very body.

“Pass through the horned gate of Somorhas, if you would see your heart’s desire.”

She opened her eyes, startled by those sweet-toned words, as fluid as water. Who had spoken? It almost sounded like her own voice. Without realizing she meant to, she rose. A featureless plain surrounded her. The pleasant bed on which she had been resting was simply the rosy-colored ground, boiling with a layer of mist. Alabaster towers bristled on the horizon, as numerous as the spears of a vast army. A vast domed building built entirely of marble stood between her and the forest of towers. She knew at once that in this building she would find a library complete with every scroll and book she had ever wished to read. The towers receded into the mist even as the dome rose before her, flanked by avenues of stone lined with oversized statues of every animal known on Earth and in the sky: ravens and peacocks, panthers and bears, ibex and serpents. Where the avenues met in the forecourt, they joined into a broad stair surmounted by an archway, two ivory pillars linked by a curving arbor of dog roses and belladonna.

As her feet led her forward under the arch, a tremor passed through her body rather as a pan of water, shaken, will run with ripples and wavelets and then quiet. She found herself in a vast hall where churchmen ornamented by scarlet cloaks and clerics robed in wine or forest-green silk hurried about on their errands. Tables lit by a profusion of ceramic lamps stood in rows throughout the hall. Here sat scholars bent over ancient scrolls or freshly copied tomes bound into codices. A pair of young clerics, scarcely more than girls, whispered as they searched through some old chronicle.

On a stand at the center of the hall rested a thick book. She crossed between the tables and halted here. No one glanced at her strangely. No one found her presence remarkable, although she wore only tunic and leggings, quiver with arrows and bow, the gold torque given to her by Sanglant, and the lapis lazuli ring. The stone floor remained pleasingly warm to her bare feet.

As at Quedlinhame, the stand held the library’s catalog: different scribes at many different periods had added to the list. As she leafed through the catalog, she saw where a square Dariyan script, all capitals, changed abruptly to the rounded Scripta Actuaria favored by the early church mothers and gradually picking up the minuscule letters that marked the ascendancy of Salian clerics under the influence of Taillefer’s court schola. These days, the simpler Scripta Gallica held sway, imperial yet elegant.

What riches the catalog laid bare before her eyes! Not only Ptolomaia’s Tetrabiblos but also her magisterial Mathematici’s Compilation, Virgilia’s Heleniad and also her Dialogues, various geographies of heaven and Earth by diverse ancient scholars, the Memoria of Alisa of Jarrow with its detailed instruction in the art of memory, and more volumes on natural history and astronomy than she had ever seen before in one place. She skipped over the massive inventories of the writings of the church mothers but closely examined those pages marked black for caution. The numerous condemnations and tracts against various heresies held no attraction but, as she had hoped, there were forbidden texts on sorcery, like Chaldeos’ The Acts of the Magicians and The Secret Book of Alexandros, Son of Thunder.

How amazing and odd that a library of this scope should exist in the sphere of Somorhas. But hadn’t the voice said that beyond the gateway she would find her heart’s desire?

A small voice niggled at her from deep inside, annoying as a thorn. The merest prick of pain throbbed lightly behind her right eye. Hadn’t she read somewhere that in Somorhas lay only dreams and delusions?

“It cannot be so,” her voice whispered, almost as if she were two people, one watching, one speaking. “In the city of memory a great library stands in the third sphere, where the Cup of Boundless Waters holds sway, the ocean of knowledge available to mortal kind.”

That was true, wasn’t it? Best to make use of the time while she had it. She found the notation listing the location of St. Peter of Aron’s The Eternal Geometry in one of the library chambers and, seeing that others waited patiently behind her to use the catalog, hurried away. At every moment, with every footfall, she expected one of the robed clerics to challenge her. What are you doing here? Who are you? Where have you come from?

No one ever did. It wasn’t that they didn’t see her. Gazes marked her before moving away as easily as if she were someone expected. No one unusual. Not a stranger at all.

The corridor she had thought would lead her to the room of astronomies led her instead, unexpectedly, to a chapel elaborately decorated with gilded lamps hanging from a beamed ceiling and frescoes depicting the life of St. Lucia, guardian of the light of God’s wisdom. Her knees bent as if of their own volition, and in this way she knelt behind a pair of clerics robed in white and cloaked with the scarlet, floor-length capes that in the world below distinguished presbyters in the service of the skopos.

Strange how her thoughts scattered every which way. Because she could not calm her mind enough to lift her thoughts to God, she listened. The two clerics kneeling right in front of her evidently did not have calm minds either, because they were gossiping in low voices while, at the front of the chapel, an elderly man led a chorus of sweet-voiced monks in the service of Sext.

“Didn’t you hear? He saved poor Brother Sylvestrius a lashing.” “Nay, how can Brother Sylvestrius possibly have given offense? He scarcely speaks a word as it is, and sometimes it seems impossible to me that he even knows the rest of us exist because he’s so busy with his books.”

“It was nothing he said, but what he wrote in the annals.”

“Nothing deliberately disparaging, surely? That’s more Biscop Liutprand’s style.”

“Of course not. Sylvestrius wrote a dispassionate account of the crowning, rather than a flattering one.”

“And Ironhead couldn’t abide it. He’d rather hear one of those noxious poets singing his praises as though he were the next Taillefer rather than what he really is.”