The Pontiff's Gift

The Pontiff did not summon the Emperor to the Cathedral. He came to him.

He arrived on the last evening of the thirty days, in a plain closed litter without banners, carried by four silent bearers in gray, and he asked the porter at the east gate for nothing but a cup of hot water and a quiet room. The porter, who had been a soldier and had never been afraid of anything, sent a boy running to the Frost Chamber with his face the color of whey. By the time the boy arrived, the old man was already walking up the long staircase of the palace on his own two feet, leaning on a staff of white ash, with his silver mask catching the lamplight.

Kieran received him in the small council room, because it had no windows.

He had come straight from Solaia's bed, in yesterday's shirt, and had not had time to change. He found that he did not care. He sat at the head of the empty oak table with his hands loosely joined and the cold in him as steady as stone, and watched the Pontiff lower himself into the chair opposite with a faint wheeze, like a man who has climbed too many stairs.

"You will forgive an old man's intrusion," said the Pontiff.

"I will not."

"No." A dry breath of amusement. "I did not suppose that you would."

"The deadline is at midnight, Holy Father. I assumed you would send your Cardinals to count the hours."

"My Cardinals are fools. They would count them aloud." The silver mask tilted. "I preferred to come myself. There are things which cannot be done with a roll of vellum."

"Such as?"

"A conversation."

He folded his long white hands upon the head of the staff. Kieran noted, with the detached part of his mind that never stopped working, that they did not tremble, and that the knuckles were swollen like knotted rope. He wondered what a man of five thousand years looked like when he was tired. He wondered whether the Pontiff slept at all.

Five thousand years. He had not allowed himself to say it, even in his head. But he had read the Marshal's account to the last page, and he had stood in the mural gallery that morning for an hour, and he knew now whose name was whispered in the Cathedral crypts at the festival of the Cleansing: not a saint, not a god, but a man who had been waiting a very long time at the bottom of a very deep well.

"You are thinking," said the Pontiff, "that I look younger than I should."

"I was thinking of nothing."

"You were thinking of a ledger. A book stolen from my vault in the days of my third predecessor." The mask did not shift. "I had wondered where it went."

Kieran's fingers went still on the table.

"Please do not be alarmed," the old man went on, gently. "I am not here to take it. I should like you to keep it. It is a rather good account. Aldren had a gift for plain writing, which I always envied." A pause. "He was a lonely man. I was fond of him."

"You knew him."

"I knew him very well." The Pontiff's voice softened, almost wistfully. "He was my first convert."

…

It was extraordinary, Kieran thought later, how well it was done.

There was no menace in it. There was no raised voice, no threat, none of the cold theatrics of the council chamber. The Pontiff spoke as a man speaks to a son he has watched grow, with warmth, with regret, with a kind of weary affection. He did not deny what had been done. He did not apologize for it. He simply laid it before the Emperor, piece by piece, like a physician unwrapping a bandage.

Yes, the City had fallen. Yes, the dragons had been taken. Yes, the Holy Light was what Marenne had begun to suspect, the Queen's own fire, bled out of her in the night of the fall and fed ever since into the ten thousand lamps of the temple. Yes, he had known the girl would wake. He had been waiting for it for fifty centuries.

"Why?" said Kieran. His own voice sounded thin in his ears. "What is it you want?"

"The same thing I have always wanted."

"Which is?"

"To end it." The mask turned toward him. "You think of me as a conqueror. A thief. A man who wished to drink the blood of a world. It is quite natural. But I was a physician once, Your Majesty. In an age you have no name for. I saw what the beasts did to the sick, to the old, to the very young, in the days before the Plague. I saw the villages burn."

"The dragons did not burn villages."

"Not by choice. By the weight of their nature." The Pontiff's tone was almost kind. "They are not gentle things. They are storms with minds. They loved, and they fought, and they ravaged, as storms do. And the Queen, who loved them, believed that she could keep them from harming the world. She was wrong. And when she was wrong, she was so strong that no one could correct her."

"And so you took her power."

"I took the danger. And I have kept it, for five thousand years, in a safe place, where it harms no one. It is a heavy duty. I did not ask for it." The old voice cracked, very slightly. "I have been tired for a very long time."

Kieran said nothing.

He thought: he is lying. He thought it with great clearness, and then, a moment later, with a creeping, sick dismay: or he is not, entirely. That was the thing about the old man's voice. It carried no lie that Kieran could find. It carried grief, and weariness, and an unquestionable love for something. If he was a monster, he was a monster who believed.

"And what has this to do with me?" he said.

"Everything."

The Pontiff reached into his sleeve. He drew out a flat packet of black silk and laid it on the oak table between them. It was not large. It was tied with a cord of silver thread, and sealed with a blob of wax, and the seal was a plain circle, without a mark.

"I have heard," said the old man, "that you have been to the north."

"You have heard a great deal."

"A friend at court was kind enough to keep me informed." A faint, dry flicker in the voice. "You have seen the mountain. You have seen the paintings. You have, I think, read the Marshal's last page."

His heart stopped.

He did not move. He did not blink. He sat with his face composed, and let the knowledge settle through him like cold water into sand: he knows. He knows what I tore out of the book.

"I know what it says," said the Pontiff gently. "I wrote it."

"You—"

"Aldren was dying. He could not hold the pen. I took the dictation." The mask inclined. "I believe it is an accurate account of what I told him. It was, at the time, an accurate account of what I believed. I have since come to think that I was mistaken."

"Mistaken."

"About the price." He tapped the black silk packet with one finger. "I told him that the Debt could only be paid in blood. That your house would be taken, to the last child, and the Queen's Veil lifted by that sacrifice. I have spent the centuries since looking for a different way. I think, at last, that I have found one."

Kieran looked at the packet. It lay on the dark wood like a small black tombstone.

"What is it?"

"A gift."

…

The silk unrolled to reveal three sheets of heavy vellum, covered on both sides with a close, exact, beautiful draftsman's hand. At first Kieran took them for a plan of a building. A tower, perhaps: the elevations, the sections, the thousand fine strokes of ink. But as he looked, the lines began to arrange themselves differently in his mind, and he saw that what the pages described was not a tower at all.

It was a ring of tall, curved, pillar-like forms, thirty or forty of them, standing in a circle around a central column. Between them ran a lattice of fine lines, like a web. At the apex, a point had been marked, and beside it, in a small clear script: the Seat.

"A fortress," he said.

"Of a kind."

"For what purpose?"

"Healing."

"You will have to be plainer."

"I shall be as plain as I can." The old man leaned forward. His breath rustled behind the mask. "The Veil is a bandage. It holds her memory, and her power, in a state of suspension. The Debt can be paid only by tearing the bandage off. When it tears, she will remember everything, in a single moment, and the weight of it will kill her. Or she will survive, and she will burn the world, and your house will burn with it. Those are the only two ends the old books offer."

"And this?"

"This is a third." The long finger moved across the vellum. "A device. A circuit. Built on a particular mountain, to a particular design, from a particular material." The finger touched the pillars. "It draws the power out of a body, gently, over a period of hours. Not the memory. The fire. It takes the White Flame out of the woman and lays it down in the structure, where it can do no harm. She would feel some pain. Not much. She would wake the next day with nothing in her but her own clear mind, and her own heart, and her own love for you."

Kieran stared at him.

"She would be," said the Pontiff, "ordinary."

The word fell into the room like a stone into a still pond.

"There would be no Debt. No Veil to tear. No Queen to wake. There would be a young woman named Solaia who had once been a beggar, and had once been a prisoner, and was now, quite simply, a wife." The mask turned. "And you would have a wife who would live to be seventy. And a house that would not end."

"And the Hollow?"

"Would be quenched. The Gift of Night depends upon the Queen's fire to be paid. Take the fire from her, and it has nothing to claim. It would wither in your blood within a year." A soft pause. "You would be free, Your Majesty. Both of you. For the first time since the fall of the City."

Kieran did not answer.

He could not. He sat with his eyes on the vellum and a cold roaring in his head, and in the roaring, very small and distinct, a voice he knew. A low voice, warm and amused. If it's a gift with a silver face, don't take it.

"It is a trap," he said.

"Possibly."

"It is a trick. You wish to take the fire for yourself."

"I wish to see it end." The Pontiff sat back, with a faint creak of the chair. "I do not ask you to trust me. I do not ask you to answer tonight. I have come only to give you what you did not have: a choice. The Cardinals will tell you there are two paths, the Conclave or the war. I am telling you that there is a third." The staff tapped once on the floor. "I shall withdraw the ultimatum. I shall tell the Conclave that the Lady Solaia has been judged innocent of heresy, by the Emperor's own testimony, in return for a vow of cooperation on the matter of the Black Ridge. The whole of this business may be forgotten."

"And if I refuse?"

"Then we shall return to the Conclave. And the war." The mask was perfectly calm. "I should be sorry. But I am an old man, and I have seen many wars."

He rose. It took him some time. He stood by the table for a moment with his weight upon the staff, a tall, bent, white figure in the lamplight, and looked down at the Emperor.

"Keep the pages," he said. "Read them. Show them to your archivist, if you like. He is a clever man. He will tell you that I have not lied to you about a single stroke of the pen."

"And what will he not tell me?"

The silver slits glinted.

"That is the question I should ask," said the Pontiff, "in your place."

He went out. The door closed behind him with a soft click. Kieran sat in the windowless room for a long time, in the silence, with the three sheets of vellum spread under his hands.

At midnight, the bell in the Cathedral tower tolled, once, and then was still.

He did not tear the plans. He did not burn them. He folded them with great care, in their black silk, and put them in the inner pocket of his coat, beside the other thing.

And he sat there in the dark, like a man who has been offered a bridge across a river of fire, and has not yet found the courage to say that he will not cross.