The Devil in the Dust by Chaz Brenchley

Author:Chaz Brenchley [Brenchley, Chaz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, General
ISBN: 9780441010714
Google: kgAdj6658AsC
Amazon: 0441010717
Goodreads: 870031
Publisher: Ace
Published: 1998-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

What They Carried

A HARD HAND gripping his shoulder, a dizzy exhaustion in his head: Marron struggled against both, mumbled something unclear even to himself around a tongue too thick to shape words, gave it up willingly and rolled back towards the insistent suck of sleep—

—and hit his nose sharply on stone. Stinging pain jerked his eyes open; he found himself trying to outstare a wall. What wall, he couldn’t think.

The hand was back on his shoulder, shaking him vigorously. There was a voice too, a voice he knew. “Marron, wake. Wake now, it’s midnight. Can’t you hear the bell?”

Hear it, no. He could hear the voice, hard by his ear, and he could hear his own thudding heartbeat, and a groaning that he thought was coming from his own dry throat; he couldn’t hear Frater Susurrus. Him he could feel, though, thudding into his bones.

He twisted himself away from the wall, fell onto his back and lay staring up at Sieur Anton. The knight was wearing a simple white sleeping-robe, and holding a candle.

“Sieur…? Where—?”

“You’re in my room, Marron. Never mind why. Up you get now, it’s time for prayers.”

Midnight prayers. And his brothers, his troop half the castle’s width away, perhaps filing out of the dormitory already behind Fra’ Piet’s torch; and him not there, which Fra’ Piet was sure to notice, he noticed everything …

Marron struggled to his feet under an overmastering feeling of doom, of calamity. The last he remembered was drinking wine with the Order’s lady guests, and arguing with Sieur Anton. He’d been promised a beating for doing so, he remembered that also; but it hadn’t seemed to matter then, and really didn’t matter now.

“Sieur, I must, I must go …”

His feet felt the unfamiliar textures of Sieur Anton’s rugs, his toes curled around a rumple; he was barefoot. He cast about for his sandals, and couldn’t see them among the furs that had made his bed. Never mind. A pair of sandals lost would no doubt bring its own penance, but that was nothing, nothing …

“No.” Sieur Anton’s hand was on his shoulder again, holding him fast. “It’s too late for you to join your brothers. We will say the prayers together, here. Tell your confessor that I kept you late; the fault is mine, not yours. Forget that now. Our duty is to the God.”

Perhaps so, but it was not the God’s anger that Marron must face in the morning. ,

Still, he had neither strength nor wit to argue, with Brother Whisperer tolling his final stroke. In the hall the preceptor would be calling light from darkness, in his nightly miracle; here there was only that solitary candle to speak of balance, of two paths and one promise.

They knelt by the bed as they did each noon, and said the words together; but Marron’s tongue stumbled and he couldn’t concentrate his thoughts, they kept turning from midnight to dawn, from Sieur Anton’s shadowed face to Fra’ Piet’s hooded eyes and his cold, disfigured hands.

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