Candlelight alone lit the church except for a single oil lamp placed on the Hearth itself and burning with the confidence and constancy of the just. By the smoky flames of threescore slender candles the ancient faces of the holy saints and martyrs watched and judged, their serene expressions caught forever in mosaics so cunningly worked that they almost appeared to be a painting. In the empty nave, threescore clerics lined up in two rows. Each cleric carried a taper in cupped hands. Back by the portico, Empress Adelheid and her consort waited under a mosaic rendering of the old palace that had once stood in Novomo; that structure was now half buried within the new palace, which had been erected about a hundred years ago and restored and remodeled several times since then.
So it was with the world: The skopos stood closest to God, beside the altar, and her clerics faced her with the light of truth in their hands. Secular power must wait at the doors of the church, because it could not enter fully. As for the rest, they must huddle in the shadows and pray.
Antonia raised her hands although she had already commanded silence. To her right Lord Berthold knelt on one knee, an arm braced against his thigh. His companion, Lord Jonas, stared at the ground, cowed and frightened, but Berthold studied the scene with the expression of a man who has seen the loveliest rose on Earth trampled and shredded before his eyes. He had grown up well loved and well protected by his father’s affection and by his high rank. No doubt the youth had never before understood how cruel and ugly the world was in truth. He did now. You could see it in the way he stared as if he wasn’t seeing, in the way he heard and saw without showing the least color of feeling, as if all emotion had been drained out of him with one sharp, deep cut. As it had been, because weeks ago he had woken to find Lady Elene dead beside him and her blood coagulating around his fingers and sleeves and in the tips of his hair.
That was the truth of the world. It was long past time he discovered it for himself, although unfortunately it had not seemed to bring him to prayer service more often, as it should have. She had offered him a position in her schola—in time a youth of his lineage could hope to rise to become presbyter—but he had refused her so tonelessly that she had known at once that his soul had already fallen into the Pit and was spinning and tumbling in the darkness.
“It is written in the Holy Verses that we will love God, who are Mother and Father of Life for us all, at rest in the Circle of Unity which binds us. How then can the holy church recognize as regnant a man who murdered his own father? How can the holy church bless those who allow such a man to raise himself to power after such an unjust deed? To bless those who have turned against the church and the skopos?”
The halo of light scarcely brushed Adelheid, but Antonia knew her well enough to see by the cant of her shoulders and the tilt of her pale chin that the empress was smiling. The general shifted restlessly. He could speak Dariyan but not so well that he easily understood the words of clerics and scholars, the words of the church whose tenets his kinfolk rejected.
It still galled her, but she knew that even a crude tool may suffice. Must suffice. General Lord Alexandros was, in fact, correct: if Arethousa and Aosta were to survive, they must protect each other against attacks from all sides.
Therefore.
“Let those who aid this patricide be cursed. May they be cursed in their towns and in their fields. May they be cursed in their cattle and in their flocks. May they be cursed in their children and in their graveyards, in their granaries and in the work of their hands. Those who do not obey this decree, those who offer aid and comfort, will disappear from the Earth. They will be swallowed by fire and swept away by the sea. In waking and sleeping, in eating and drinking, in both bread and wine will they be cursed. They are bound by the chains of anathema. They are exiled from the Circle of Unity.”
She extended a hand. Brother Petrus, standing at her left, handed her the trio of scrolls on each one of which the ban was recorded. These she offered to Lord Berthold, who took them without a word of comment and without any change in his mask of stone.
“As these tapers are extinguished, so shall the light of those who disobey us be extinguished and cast into the darkness.”
Each cleric knelt and ground out the flame against the floor. The church drowned in darkness, but for the single lamp burning behind the holy mother who rules over all, skopos and guardian of God’s Truth.
The Abyss must be dark like this. Black and empty to the eye but swarming with the pitiful breath of souls who wonder, hopelessly, what will come next. Because, of course, nothing will come next. They are doomed to fall forever. That is the true meaning of the curse.
