The Light That Dims

The meeting took place where no one would think to look, in the one room of the palace that smelled of mice.

Osric had arranged it. He had not asked permission, and he had not asked questions. He had simply sent word, in his rambling way, that a certain scholar of the old rites would very much like to consult a certain rare manuscript in the Lower Archive, and that the archivist had a kettle on. Solaia came down the three narrow flights at dusk with Berylla at her back, and found the Cardinal already seated at the long table under the sheet-draped lamps, with his hands in his lap and a cup of cold tea in front of him that he had not touched.

He stood when she entered. It was the first time in her life a man in robes had done so.

"Lady Solaia." Marenne's voice was dry and careful, like a man walking on thin ice. "Thank you for coming. I will be as plain as I can."

"Please."

"I have served the Church for forty-one years. I was a boy when I took the vow. I have been a deacon, a confessor, a reader of the rolls, and, for the last fifteen, a member of the Conclave." He paused. "I have never in all that time doubted that the Holy Light was what we say it is."

"And now?"

"And now I have begun to look at my hands."

He laid them on the table, palms up.

They were old hands, spotted, trembling very slightly. In each palm, at the center, was a small round scar, white and puckered, the size of a coin. And around each scar the skin had blistered red.

"Every Cardinal bears the Mark," he said. "It is how we call the Light. A little of it, kept in the flesh, for ritual and healing. When I was ordained it burned like a candle. I could read by it in a dark room." He closed one hand slowly. "Since the Festival, I can hardly see my own fingers. And it is worse when I am near the Pontiff's chambers. And it is worst of all..."

He stopped.

"When you're near me," Solaia said.

"I did not know." He looked up. "That is why I came to ask. I was in the Cathedral gallery on that night, my lady. I saw you on the terrace. And I felt the Light in my hands go out, as if a great wind had passed over it, and then flare back, and then kneel." His voice cracked. "I do not have another word. It knelt."

She was silent for a moment.

"Show me," she said.

"My lady?"

"Call it. Call your flame."

He hesitated. Then he raised his right hand, palm outward, and closed his eyes, and murmured something low and fluid in the old liturgical tongue. For a moment, nothing. Then the white scar in the center of his palm began, slowly, to glow. A thread of pale gold, thin as a wick, rising in the air above the hand and wavering in the draft.

It was a small and unremarkable flame. She had seen the like on a hundred altars.

But as she looked at it, something stirred in her, behind her ribs. A recognition. A soft deep pull, like a note struck on an instrument in a distant room.

"May I?" said Solaia.

He nodded, very slightly.

She took a step closer. Two. The flame leaned toward her, the way a plant leans toward a window. She lifted her hand, hesitantly, and held it a handsbreadth from his.

The flame trembled.

And then, very gently, it went out.

Not as if it had been blown. As if it had lain down. A little curl of gold smoke, rising, folding, subsiding into the skin of his palm like a child tucked into bed.

"Dear God," whispered Marenne.

"What did it say?" said Solaia, to no one in particular.

"I beg your pardon?"

"It said something." She frowned at her fingers, wonderingly. "It's not a word. But there was a feeling in it. As if it were saying—" She searched. "Mother. I'm so tired."

The old man made a sound like a sob. He sat down, heavily, in the nearest chair and pressed his scarred hand against his mouth.

…

It took an hour to say everything.

Marenne talked, and Osric fetched tea, and Berylla stood at the door with her arms folded and her face stern. By the end of it the sheet-draped lamps had burned low and the cold of the archive had crept up through their feet. Solaia sat in the high-backed chair with her knees drawn up, listening, and felt a slow ugly certainty settle in her stomach like a stone.

The Holy Light was not a gift.

It had been a gift once, perhaps. A blessing taken from the dragons by the first Saint-General, in the days of the Plague. Marenne had found the record in the Conclave's oldest vault, a single page cut out of the chronicle and hidden behind a wall of false stone. We have taken their fire, and it burns for us. It is a righteous theft, for the beasts were wicked. And then, further down, in a different hand: The fire is not diminishing. It is asking.

"Asking?" said Solaia.

"For its mother." Marenne's face was gray. "The whole of the Light is her. Her fire. Her blood. Taken from her sleeping body after the... after the end. We have been burning her for five thousand years, my lady. Every candle in every shrine. Every blessing. Every sword the Church ever lit against the dark."

The silence was enormous.

"And the Pontiff knows," said Osric softly.

"The Pontiff is the one who keeps it." Marenne looked down at his hands. "I had not understood. I thought I was serving something holy. I thought the Church was the wall that stood between the world and the Dragon. And all this time, we have been the fire in a thing that wished only to come home."

"Then why does it dim near me?"

"Because you are the only one who can call it back."

Solaia stared at him.

"It is not weakening. That is what I did not see. It is turning. Every flame in the realm that is bound to the Cathedral is still burning for the Pontiff. But when you are close, they remember what they were before. They are not his. They never were." A faint wild gleam had come into the old man's eyes. "If you stood in the Cathedral itself, my lady, with the great tank beneath it, I believe the whole thing would go dark."

"That would kill the Church."

"It would kill the lie."

Berylla spoke for the first time. "And everyone who depends on it. Every hospital. Every lamp. Every garrison fort north of the river."

"Yes."

"A great many innocent people."

"Yes." Marenne's mouth worked. "I know. I have spent six nights not sleeping, thinking of it. I do not say we should do it tomorrow. I say only that someone must know the truth, and be ready, and not be a coward at the moment it matters." He rose. "I came to ask one thing of you. When the day comes, will you tell me? So that I may warn the faithful, before the lamps go out?"

Solaia looked at him.

He was so old, and so frightened, and so thoroughly decent. She thought of the Pontiff's silver mask, and the little gray scrap of ash that Berylla kept behind the sugar. She thought of four hundred and twelve people who had been standing in a square with their wishes in their hands.

"Yes," she said. "I promise."

"Thank you." He bowed, deeply. At the door he turned. "My lady. One more thing. Someone in the palace is already betraying you."

She went still. "Who?"

"I do not know. It was in the whispers. A name on a list, delivered to the Pontiff through a servant." His voice was low. "Someone close to the Emperor. Someone who loves him."

He went out into the dark passage, and the door closed softly behind him, and a draft lifted the sheet from the nearest lamp and let it fall.