Launch Pad (11 page)

Drawing on that tradition to this day, justice, as untempered by mercy as the sea itself, was the purpose of the Thalassocretes.

“You’re a man of keen wit and insight,” said the pale Marine in a surprisingly soft tone, to Morgan’s surprise.

“I am likely blind to much in this life.” He felt as if he were uttering his last words. “Science is both my mistress and my muse. But even I can still see history.”

Like estranged lovers met on a sidewalk, the moment swiftly passed. A rough adversity resumed. Morgan found himself pushed within, toward the upper halls and the quiet, incense-reeking rooms of the Lesser and Greater Benches of the Thalassojustity.

O O O

The Most Revered Bilious F. Quinx; B.Th. Rhet.; M.Th. Hist. & Rit.; Th.D. Hist. & Rit.; 32nd degree Thalassocrete; and master of the Increate’s Consistitory Office for Preservation of the Faith Against Error and Heresy, watched carefully as His Holiness Lamboine XXII paged through one of the prohibitora from the Consistitory’s most confidential library.

The two of them were alone—unusually so, given His Holiness’ nigh everpresent retinue—in the aerie of the Matachin Tower of the Lateran Palace. This room was Quinx’ private study and retreat, and also where his most confidential meetings were held. The latter was due to the architecture of the tower walls that rendered the usual methods of ecclesiastical eavesdropping futile.

Quinx, in both his official capacity and from his well-developed personal sense of curiosity, worried about the possibility of spying via the new electricks. For that reason, he had thus far forbidden any lights or wires to be installed in the Matachin Tower. He preferred instead to rely on traditional oil lamps tended by traditional acolytes who damned well knew to keep their ears shut. And besides which who wore nubble-soled slippers so they could not sneak.

Privacy was both a commodity and a precious resource within these walls of the Increate’s highest house. Quinx made it his business to control the available privacy as much as possible.

Still, having His Holiness leaf so casually through a prohibitorum was enough to give a thoughtful man a galloping case of the hives.

Lamboine—who had once been called Ion when they were boys together in a mountain village plentifully far away from the Holy Precincts—raised his eyes from the page. “There is nothing in this world I am not entitled to know, Bili.”

“You understand me perfectly as always.”

Those words summoned a small, sad smile, one that Quinx also remembered far too well from a youth lost six decades past. “That is why I am the Gatekeeper and you are my hound,” Lamboine replied. As ever, his voice was preternaturally patient. “I have always wondered why our friends among the Thalassocretes have never sought to place a man on the Footstool of the Increate.”

Ion was one of the few remaining alive who could provoke Quinx to unthinking response. “Do you honestly suppose they never have done so? I am numbered among their rolls, after all.”

“They think you their spy in the house of the Increate.” Another small smile. “In any event, I should think I would know if one of them had ever held my throne. My opinion is that they have never felt a need to. Truth is a strange commodity.”

“Much like privacy,” Quinx almost whispered, echoing his own, earlier thoughts.

The Gatekeeper shook his head. “Privacy is just a special case of truth, or its withholding. This …” His hand, palsied with the infirmity of age that had yet to over come Quinx, swept over the open book. “This is truth of a different sort.”

“No, Your Holiness. It is not. It is only the Thalassocretes’ story. We have the Increate and the evidence on our side.”

“What makes you think there are sides, Bili?”

In that moment, Quinx saw Lamboine’s death. Flesh stretched tight and luminous across his face, the deep, natural brown of his skin paling to the color of milk in coffee, his eyes brittle as cracked opals. The man’s fires were guttering. “There are always sides, Ion. That has been my role these long years here, preserving and defending your side.” He paused a moment, then added: “Our side.”

The Gatekeeper waited several measures of silence too long for comfort before replying. “I am glad you did not claim a side for the Increate. They are all, and They are everything.”

“Of course.” Quinx bowed his head.

A trembling hand descended in surprising blessing. Quinx had not even realized that the Gatekeeper had set the book down. “Do not rely too much on evidence, my oldest friend. It has a way of turning against you in time. Proof can change with circumstance. Faith is the rock upon which we must always build.”

Quinx remained bowed until the Gatekeeper had departed, shuffling far enough down the spiral stairs to summon his attendants, who bore him away on a wave of soft whispers and perfume. After a time, he rose and set some incense alight before kneeling on a bolster with a small ricepaper copy of Librum Vita in his grip. It had been made in distant Sind, something of a curiosity, copied out in a firm hand by a man wielding a brush comprised of only a single hair. Act of faith? Dedication to art?

It did not matter. The Increate’s words fit in the palm of Quinx’ hands. From there, he drew comfort as surely as he had from his mother’s grasp once so long ago.

Or Ion’s.

The relief of prayer drew him in then, toward the dim inner light that always filled Bilious Quinx when he sought the Increate in honest, faithful silence with open heart and empty thoughts.

O O O

Much later he trimmed the wicks in his office and lit the night lamp. Darkness had descended outside, the evening breeze bearing the itching scent of pollen and spring chill off the mountains to the east and south. Quinx opened his windows, their red glazing parted to let the tepid lamplight spill out and compete with the distant stars.

The Lateran Palace had its own observatories, of course. Someone must demarcate the lines of the world. Even the almighty Thalassojustity had in the past been willing to leave the skies to the Church. The irony of that was not lost on Quinx in these late days. He was certain it was no less lost on the Thalassocretes in Highpassage and elsewhere.

No matter his own initiation into their ranks; the Thalassojustity had always known who and what Quinx was, and whose creature he had been, body and soul. That Ion was dying now changed nothing of Quinx’ loyalties.

He considered the prohibitorum, lying so carelessly open where the Gatekeeper had left it on one of the round room’s several curve-backed writing desks. The book was open to a map of the Garden of Ganj, annotated only as the heretics of the Thalassojustity would bother to do. This particular volume was a first printing of the Revised Standard Survey, Th. 1907. Almost a hundred years old, and their color plates a century past were as good as anything the Lateran presses could manage even today.

Ion had left a scrap tucked in the center crease. Quinx plucked it out, his own hand trembling. It was a short note that must have been written before the Gatekeeper had come up to see him, in Ion’s lifelong careful copperplate hand, rendered edgy and strange by the exigencies of age.

O O O

Dearest—

Do not let them elect you to the Gatekeeper’s throne after me. And do not be afraid of what may be proven. Farewell. I regret that I must go before.

Always yours.

O O O

So he had seen truly into the Gatekeeper’s face. And Dearest. They had not used that word between them in over five decades. Quinx carefully burned the note, then stirred the ashes. After that he trimmed his night lamp back to darkness, closed and sealed the prohibitorum with a black ribbon, and took a chair by one of the open casements to watch the stars wheel slowly until just after midnight when the Lateran tower bells began to ring their death knells.

When the great, iron bell of the Algeficic Tower tolled last and slowest of all, his tears finally flowed.

O O O

Love is the sin that will not be denied.

—Librum Vita, Wisdoms 7:23;
being the Book of Life and word entire of the Increate

O O O

The funerary rites for His Holiness Lamboine XXII began at Matins as the first flickering sweep of dawn glowed like coals in the eastern sky. In his role as Preserver of the Faith, and therefore fourth-ranking priest in the Lateran hierarchy, Quinx could have insisted on being the celebrant. The two men above him were already closeted deep in the electoral politics of the Primacy, those same delegates from around the world having received the Gatekeeper’s death notice by telelocutor for the first time in Church history.

Quinx had a sick feeling that he would soon grow very weary of that last thought: the first time in history.

Instead of celebrating, he chose to attend as a congregant, a man, a priest, a mourner. The Deacon of the Lateran High Chapel led the first round of services. He was a young man with a perpetually surprised expression, now properly dressed in a sweeping black cassock embroidered in gold and silver thread, though he’d begun the services in a nightshirt before being rescued by an acolyte with the right set of chamber keys.

Incense, again, and the familiar tones of the chimes indicating the order of service.

As the deacon struck them in turn, Quinx tried to put the memory of the tower bells away. Not to forget, for nothing could be forgotten by a man in his office, but to be set aside.

Prayer was a valve opened to the comfort of the Increate, from Whom all things sprang and to Whom all things flowed. There were times when he could understand the attraction of the Aquatist Heresies, for all that their pernicious metaphors had nearly fatally tangled the Lateran Church in its own liturgies. There were times when he wondered what the Increate truly intended, as if They would speak directly to him in response. There were times when quiet refuge was the greatest gift They could give him. Quinx let the deacon’s droning voice lead him from grief to some other place where his cares could wait on the attentions of his heart.

Somewhere in memory, two young men on a hillside scattered with sheep, goats, and bright blue flowers laughed under a summer sky and spoke together of all things great and small.

O O O

When fingers touched his shoulder, Quinx was briefly startled. He’d gone so far into meditation that he’d lost himself in the well-worn rituals of the service. Become the liturgy, as they used to say in seminary.

He looked around. Brother Kurts, his lead investigator, stood as always just a bit too close.

“Sir,” the monk growled. A big man, one of those pale northerners who somehow never seemed to advance far in the Church hierarchy, Kurts carried far more than his own weight. The man was a boulder in a snowfield. Here, in the midst of service, his blocky frame and the dark brown rough-spun habit of his Sibellian Order made him a brutal shout against the soaring of the silk-robed choir who must have filed in to the loft while Quinx had been meditating.

“Kurts?”

“You must come, sir. We have an urgent dispatch from Highpassage. By air.”

“By air?” Briefly, Quinx felt stupid—an unusual sensation for him. Of late, matters of great urgency were transmitted via telelocutor. His own office had approved such innovation only three years earlier, well after the undersea cable had been laid between Highpassage and the Lateran, crossing beneath the Attik Main. Matters of great secrecy were handled quite differently, and always with utmost discretion.

Sending an airship across the sea the night of His Holiness’ death was tantamount to lighting a flare.

“By air, sir,” Kurts confirmed. “Matroit dispatched the messenger.”

Matroit. The man was the very model of probity, and no more likely to panic than he was to fly to the moon. But the timing of the thing … It stank of politics. Quinx felt briefly ill. “Was the vessel a Thalassojustity airship?”

The monk shook his head. “A racing yacht. I understand it was put about to have been sent on a dare by some of the young wastrels of the city.”

Not an utterly unreasonable cover story, Quinx had to admit, for all that such defiance of the Thalassojustity was outrageous. Outrageous served as the stock in trade of a certain set in Highpassage. He set aside for later consideration the issue of how Lucan Matroit was connected to that set in the first place. For now, a dispatch this urgent would be a distraction to his grieving heart.

How welcome or unwelcome remained to be seen.

He did not bother to ask if Kurts had read it. The man would not have done so. In his entire life, Quinx had only ever trusted two men utterly. The first of those had passed on into the hands of the Increate last night. The other was here before him. Whatever Kurts’ many flaws, the monk was loyal to the bone. Blood and vows, vows and blood, as they used to say.

Quinx gathered the skirts of his cassock and rose from the prayer bench. He gave an approving nod to the deacon, now well into the third iteration of the funerary mass and looking distinctly tired, before withdrawing from the High Chapel in the wake of his man.

O O O

They closeted themselves in a tiny dining room from which Quinx had by virtue of his office ruthlessly evicted four hungry priests. Plates of plain eggs and blackbread toast still steamed. He considered the contents of the envelope presented by Kurts. The seal had been genuine enough, to the best of Quinx’ rather well sharpened ability to determine. For something that had come rushing over hundreds of miles of open water, the letter within was sufficiently sparse as to seem laughable. A single sheet of creme-colored Planetary Society paper, with that slick finish favored by the very wealthy, though it would take few inks. A rushed hand, script rather than copperplate, the pigments a curious green that was one of Matroit’s affectations. And only a very few words indeed.

But such dangerous ones.

It was dated the previous day though no time was given. He realized on reflection that this missive must have been written before Ion’s death could have been known, just by judging the miles the message had flown even at the speed of the fastest air racing yacht.

O O O

Revered—